God Hates Pomo

The word "God" means something. There is a dictionary definition: creator, ruler, supreme moral authority. When people - using the English language as it is used after the year 2000 - start to say "Muslims, Christians and Jews worship different Gods" - or in fact when they say ANY religion is worshiping a different God, they are playing a rancid game of pomo. Unless a religion is worshiping some form of anti-God - like perhaps the (openly not-necessarily-theist and highly-critical-of-typical-belief-in-God) Church of Satan - it is not fair to say they worship a different God, regardless of how pagan or polytheistic they are.

Playing the "my Asherah statue is better than your Baal statue" game of "your God is not my God" abuses the English language, it is screwing around with the definition of the word God. God always refers to the highest being in your supernatural cosmology. If my word for that is Asherah and your word for that is Baal, then we are talking about the same entity, even if our beliefs about that entity differ.

Accusations of polytheism are used to justify this game of "your God is not my God." The problem here is all versions of God have pantheons. Allah of Islam has both angels and gins. The Father of Christianity has arch angels and lesser angels and fallen angels. As proudly polytheistic as worshipers of the Norse Gods may be, a worshiper of Thor still admits Thor is subordinate to Odin. Athena is subordinate to Zues. The key here to understand that arguing over weather or not this or that entity in a pantheon is a "lesser God" or an "Angel" is a matter of semantics. Michael the Arch Angel in Christianity would be considered a lesser God when viewed from the lens of Polytheism, and Thor would be considered an Arch Angel through the lens of Monotheism.

The real difference between Polythesim and Monotheism in practice is can different deities be called upon for different purposes. Do I only pray to God the Father in the name of Jesus for any blessings I may need, or do I should I pursue Athena specifically when I need technological insight, instead of always praying to Zeus for everything? Now the biggest organization on Earth promoting Monotheism is the Catholic Church, and they more so than anyone else with their pantheon of Saints advocate praying to lesser beings than God the Father. All of this Monotheism vs. Polytheism in practice is pure semantics.

Instead of playing the "your God is not my God" pomo game, we should instead say "we have major differences in our beliefs about God." Because words matter. Because words have definitions. The most important English speaking country in the world, culturally and historically from a global perspective, is the United States of America. Our founding fathers used Free Masonry to have a neutral definition of God that everyone could agree on, and this is indeed the overt definition used on our money: "In God We Trust" with an all seeing eye and an Egyptian Pyramid but no sign of a cross to be seen.

Pretending like the word God means something more exclusive is postmodern deconstructionism, and is dangerously nihilistic and irresponsible. It's a great example of what I call pomo unibomber bulls***, and attempts to undo centuries of dialogue and understanding between different faiths, seeking to take us back to a time when we would kill each other over semantics:

Salvation From Sitting

Word is out, sitting is the new smoking when it comes to health, though standing in place of sitting doesn't help much. However, the researchers who did the latest study on this don't strike me as physical rehabilitation experts. My favorite fitness guru on Youtube however has something to say about exactly what sitting does to decrease your mobility (and thus kill you):

"Anterior pelvic tilt" explains a lot. His remedy is building the glutes (butt) and abs (stomach.) How should we do that? I choose my exercises based on the following principles:

1. Ergonomics: low risk of injury. I especially like exercises that give good results with less reps, as I am concerned about repetitive stress injury on a number of my major joints.
2. Fool proof: the exercise should give good results even when not executed at the full range the fitness instructor on the video demonstrates.
3. Self-defense application: if it doesn't help me in sparring, I don't have time for it.
4. Efficiency: I want to work the maximum number of muscle groups with the least number of exercises, because exercises take away from sparring time.

Let's start from the ground up, with the glutes. I like squats for these because it is pretty easy to follow the instructions and not hurt yourself (1,) and squats give good results even when your squat depth is not great (2.) It's always helpful in a fight to be able to suddenly get lower than your opponent (in knife fighting it helps you target the back and inside of the legs, 3,) and squats also work most of the other muscle mass in your legs (4):

Abs are the other part of the solution to the Anterior Pelvic Tilt problem. I have a problem with most of the ab exercises out there (sit-up variations) because they violate all 4 of my exercise principles. But then comes the plank. A good basic front plank is simple to get right (1,) and is time based so adapts to the challenge level of where your abs are at (2.) It is a great exercise for practicing keeping your hands up while your body is under stress (3,) and unlike most ab exercises it works your entire abdominal wall (plus a bunch of other important muscles, 4):

The other problem caused by a sedentary lifestyle is a general weakness of the upper body, which limits our mobility as we get older. Good old-fashioned (Word War 2 era, probably done by Yoga Gurus for millennia, staple of traditional martial arts) Dive Bombers meet my criteria. Dive Bombers are pretty hard to hurt yourself doing (1) and give results even when done with less than ideal range of motion (2.) They have direct applications to grappling (sprawling and side control, 3,) and work most of the big muscle groups in your upper body (4):

To be clear I am no expert on fitness or medicine. It is my uneducated hypothesis that these are the exercises that will most efficiently save you from sitting on your ass 12+ hours a day. (I recently added these to my daily Tai Chi workouts and few visits a week to the MMA gym.)

Pomo Is Racist

Before you go judging my credentials on postmodernism or on racism, check out my two most important posts on these subjects:

1. A Diversity Of Whiteness
2. LA Pomophobic

The ultimate conclusion of Post Modernism (pomo) is that because all rational argument can be deconstructed, the only meaningful source of information is personal experience. This is far more destructive than being rebelliously narcissistic. Pomo is inherently and irredeemably racist.

One pomo platitude is "patriarchy for me may mean something different than patriarchy does for her." In other words "dictionary definitions don't matter, only our personal perspectives." This means that the ONLY value of any idea is the IDENTITY of the person who originated the idea. All ideas from white people are then white ideas, all ideas originating from gay people are gay ideas, and so on.

This means that every idea coming out of the brain of a person who happens to be black is a black idea. No matter how ingenious or earth shattering the concept, we must first consider and evaluate the idea's author's identity. That is just about as racist as you can possibly be.

As I described in A Diversity of Whiteness, I ran into grad school students who wanted to work on projects that were not associated with their ethnic identity. They expressed this concern with me on many occasions: "I am Mexican, so does that mean every time I come up with a new idea, we have to talk about how Mexican I am? When do I get to just be a student, and have my ideas evaluated on their own merits?" Pomo idealism was the most racist threat to their well being in grad school.

If you have ever argued with a conservative in social media, backing up your facts with links to credible sources, you very probably have heard the following comment: "Why don't you think for yourself and do your own research?" Stunned that they weren't going to take any links to Snopes, Wikipedia, University websites or even peer reviewed articles seriously, you begin to realize that what they are literally saying is "I was on food stamps once. I saw some ethnic people in the office who I think were acting very lazy and looked like they used drugs. So in my personal experience, I myself as a concrete witness know for sure that most ethnic people on food stamps are lazy drug users." Notice how extraordinarily pomo this racism is: your facts don't matter in the face of their personal experience.

And again, as I mentioned in A Diversity of Whiteness, this pomo discrimination alienates the oppressors in society from enlightening conversations that could help the oppressors not oppress. When the rich have to be excluded from conversations on poverty because all their ideas are rich people ideas, then the main power holders in that situation have been invited to never give poverty serious thought. In this way pomo perpetuates racism by excluding whites from conversations on ethnic diversity.

Racism in our world today may be completely dependent on pomo. Pomo is racist. 

Martial Morals

Many a famous martial arts master took on criminals as students - especially Triad gangsters in China being trained by Kung Fu masters, and Yakusa gangsters in Japan being trained by Karate masters. The most famous of these masters, Oyama, founder of the most influential of these traditional Japanese & Chinese boxing systems in today's sports world (Kyokushin Karate,) was known to believe that training in martial arts improved the character and morality of the trainee. These martial arts masters were essentially ministering to those who needed character and morality development the most - the criminal element. Professor Kano, the founder of Judo, was a leader in physical education and had similar beliefs about martial arts training, that it led to not only increased health, but increased morality:

Why would training to become better at hurting other people make you a better person? Why risk teaching delinquent elements in our society how to become more effective fighters? My hypothesis is that they witnessed first hand this moral development, and that this is a natural side effect of full contact martial arts training (as well as other certain types of athletic activities.)

In the documentary "A Mind to Crime: A Dangerous Few" explains that chronic criminal behavior is largely associated with an under stimulated prefrontal cortex, so that a recidivist has problems empathizing and forming long term strategies based on obvious consequences. Treatments that stimulate the prefrontal cortex - basically turning the life of a child into one big game of good behavior, or getting an adult to use a computer game to intensely focus their ability to concentrate their prefrontal cortex for extended periods of time - have shown to be effective treatments, stimulating the prefrontal cortex and leading to drastically less criminality.

In the classic Frontline documentary "Inside the Teenage Brain" explains that another part of the brain, the cerebellum, builds both coordination of ideas and coordination of the physical body. (I can't emphasize this enough: learning to coordinate your thought helps you coordinate your body, and learning to coordinate your body helps you coordinate your thoughts!) Teenagers mature not only as their cerebellum and prefrontal cortex grow and mature, but as the connections between those two parts of the brain solidify and strengthen.

Full contact martial arts demands your concentration. A brief laps in concentration while sparring leads to almost guaranteed physical pain, stimulating your prefrontal cortex. It also forces you to develop your physical coordination as it is an athletically demanding activity. No wonder boxing in the inner city of the USA and Mexico has been used to lead many wayward youth into a law abiding lifestyles as adults. No doubt wrestling has helped numerous middle class youth abate their own narcissistic tendencies, not only as the wrestlers learn to develop sympathy so that their sparring partners can avoid injury and continue to train with them, but also simply because of the stimulation of their prefrontal cortex and cerebellum!

We have assumed the YMCA created basketball primarily for fitness, but this achieved their over all goal of improved moral behavior, and basketball continues to be used throughout education systems today, partially because it is known to improve behavior of athletes long term. Fail to concentrate for even a moment in basket ball, and the consequences will be obvious - "keep your eye on the ball!" - prefrontal cortex stimulated, and all the while physical coordination is being developed.

I believe that full contact martial arts develops the brain's ability to coordinate and concentrate much more intensely than other athletics like basketball, because of the psychological and physical intensity of martial arts training. This is part of why martial arts masters have found martial arts to be an effective way of growing people into better human beings.

LA Pomophobic

This summer I have been up and down the I-5 corridor, visiting friends from as far north as Bellingham WA to as far south as Oceanside CA. All of the people I have met in these travels, especially the people in SoCal, have been very pleasant and competent people who's company I have enjoyed, and this post has nothing to do with them.

If you fly into LA, visit Disney Land, and fly out, you have no idea how densely populated and geologically vast southern California is. You would think that say San Diego is a geographically unique place from Los Angeles, but you would be wrong - it is one massive interconnected urban sprawl, incomprehensibly large. You can get on a 6 lane highway (12 counting both directions) and drive for 45 minutes, and get off only to find yourself in almost exactly the same neighborhood. People frequently drive two hours one way to attend common social events without really going to a different new place. Traffic (not as bad as Las Vegas, about like Seattle's) does increase travel time, but the absolute vastness of this place escapes our collective understanding.

Now imagine you are from a middle class family in the North East USA, raised on some moderate form of protestant religion, and have 1.5 siblings, each of you proving your uniqueness by playing different sports and musical instruments and getting into different liberal arts colleges. After amassing impressive debt, you manage to graduate from college with a bachelor's in English, and your main ideology is a post structuralist critique of the moderate Christianity you were raised on. Still basically a child, you must pay off this debt, and soon find yourself in LA working in a marketing firm or in Hollywood in movies or TV.

Now you see the world for what it is: incredibly diverse, people from all over the world, all kinds of families, all kinds of politics, all kinds of religion, all kinds of suburbs and inner city ghettos. Whenever you need to study a group you are portraying in the media you are writing scripts for, to get real life experience with that group (Jews, first generation immigrants from any location in the world, millionaires, homeless, Italians, red necks, or whomever,) you only have to call an Uber and you will be seeing this group inside of a few hours. In LA (or some other indistinguishably not-LA part of SoCal.)

Now you portray to the rest of the USA what that group is like based on two things: 1) your post-modern critique of Christianity, and 2) your limited life experience in SoCal. This naive superficial representation is now published all around the world as the most recognized version of that group. This is the mechanism by which post modernism has become ubiquitous in media and politics.

But you can't help it any more than the gang members in Crips and Bloods: Made in America, LA (SoCal) is so vast, that you have never, ever seen the way out. No one you live near or work near know of any way out besides LAX. You live in the economic and cultural center of the universe, all gravitates towards you, and what you would face to get out would be more like an impossible climb than simply a several hour drive as fast as you can go down the freeway. But even when you get north of the Bay Area, outside of San Fransico's orbit you are still essentially on SoCal culture, surrounded by In-and-Out Burger and Del Taco, until you are multiple days drive from downtown LA proper. It would be faster to drive south through Tijuana into Baja California to escape the endless SoCal sprawl. Go east? You hit the Las Vegas vortex, which in the context of SoCal just feels like a SoCal suburb with legalized gambling and prostitution.

But in the end, because of Hollywood's ubiquity, we are all in LA's orbit, with it's incestuous postmodernist tendrils contaminating our perception. Before I left for LA I watched indy vampire film The Transfiguration. We struggled to figure out what city it had been filmed in, and concluded it must have been made in Toronto in spite of the land marks seeming to be from NYC. Because it didn't look like NYC. It didn't look like the NYC we had been served through the post modernist media, through the lens of LA. It turns out that NYC filmed in NYC presenting characters that would live in the real NYC would look almost nothing like what most of us think of as NYC, because our world perception has been warped through the post modernist LA lens.

It isn't a conspiracy of naive and opinionated well-intentioned feminists. No one is trying to poison our minds with eco-primitive nonsense. It is a simple problem of geography: the absolute vastness of LA/SoCal isolates English majors which for generations have used post modernism as their moral compass.

Constitution

This is the flag the USA's flag is based on. It is the flag of the East India Trading Company, most well known for the British invasions of India and China, and for helping to bring slavery to the 13 Colonies. The constitution's definition of "men," as in "all men are created equal," excluded:

• Blacks
• American Indians
• Women
• Poor white men who didn't own enough land

In other words, if you didn't have enough money to hold stake in a corporation, you didn't vote. The USA was founded on all the worst values of imperialism, corporatism, Victorian sexism and genocidal expansion. In a monarchy the monarch is the one who collects taxes from the rich to make sure life is still possible for the poor, and the USA's constitution was based on the concept of rejecting that institution.

The 12th amendment to the Constitution preserved the Electoral College precisely so that it could give slave owning states disproportionately more voting power than they would have had based on their voters. That same Electoral College has resulted in the election of the most reckless and openly racist president since the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Just a decade before it got us a president who divided our nation politically, wrecked our international reputation, and plunged us into the longest and most expensive war in the history of the USA.

Don't talk to me about the founding fathers. What makes the American people great is the American people, and our ability to recontextualize the intentions of ancient documents in today's reality. Some esteem the constitution as scripture, but all scripture must be seen in the new light of the next day, or else you will find yourself in the middle east, living in a tent, riding around on a camel, and defending yourself primarily with archery, since that is original context of most Judeo-Christian scripture.

The strength of our constitution is the very fact that we can literally amend it, and we often reinterpret it, to our credit, and as we should. Our loyalty to that document is exactly what makes it possible to have revolutions in this country without massive bloodshed. This attribute allows us to endure the change and adaptation that makes our nation great.

Medicaid For All

Medicaid For All is the MOST fiscally responsible health care policy in the USA political world right now. When I recently demanded my congressman Derek Kilmer explain why he was not more enthusiastically supporting a single-payer system, he responded with a thoughtful explanation of his policy, which included this comment in regards to "Medicare For All":

 "...health providers have raised the concern that putting everyone on Medicare without improving Medicare reimbursement rates would be problematic. Currently, most hospitals lose money on Medicare patients..."

That's EXACTLY why MediCARE For All is better than Obamacare or any privately-held health-insurance, is because it is the only system that actively pushes back against the exponential out of control increases in medical costs. But that's not what I am advocating for here... what I am advocating for here is MediCAID for all.

Why Medicaid instead of Medicare? Because:

1. Medicaid pays even lower rates to health providers than Medicare, pushing back against costs even more!
2. States have more control over their Medicaid policy than their Medicare policy, so that this is far easier to implement on a state by state level.
3. A senior friend of mine was recently forced to transition from Medicaid to Medicare. At least in his case Medicaid was a much better customer experience, with far less paperwork, more comprehensive coverage, and less over all stress in general. 

Some of my thoughtful Libertarian friends have pointed out the real problem here is that private health insurance uses our employers to shield them from our consumer wrath as our health care fees are raised. They point out that making employer-provided health insurance - a victory of organized labor - illegal (probably resulting in a Libertarian-celebrated collapse of private health insurance generally in favor of a pay-in-cash system,) could almost by itself solve the problem of skyrocketing health care costs.

Unfortunately, like so many other Libertarian truisms, this amounts to quaint platitude. Until serious Libertarian politicians make serious health care proposals, this is pure fantasy. Medicaid on the other hand is real:

Medicaid For All is very actionable:

1. Nevada is doing it.
2. California has started a political process that will (for the above mentioned reasons) likely result in it.
3. Vice President Mike Pence (one of my least favorite people) pioneered a conservative version of this in Indiana, where everyone pays an income-adjusted amount to support their medicaid coverage, when other health insurance options won't work for them ("Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0".)

As to just how possible and likely Medicaid For All is, consider this quote from my "Trump Card" post that demonstrates how much leaders of industry are looking to shed the burden of their employee's health care costs:

First, let's take what Trump himself has said on health care in a 1998 NBC interview: 

"...I am a liberal on health care, we have to take care of people that are sick... I like Universal health care, we have to take care, there is nothing else. What is the country all about if we are not going to take care of our sick?" 

Second, let's take the ultimate "evil corporation" by liberal standards, WalMart. In  2007 WalMart actually sided with the notoriously progressive SEIU in calling not for Obamacare, but full blown universal "socialist" health care, just like what Trump was praising in 1998.

Third, even GM Motors CEO Richard Wagoner testified on December 5th, 2008 before the House Financial Services Committee said something along the lines of "universal health care coverage would help us against foreign competition where health care is provided by their governments instead of by our competitors."

And if you are a small business entrepreneur or owner, worrying about the impacts of health care on you, your partners, and or employees doesn't help your bottom line by any stretch of the imagination. Under the Californian proposal mentioned above, studies show small businesses would end up saving more than 10% even with any required tax increases taken into consideration. 

Watch this carefully. Take notes. Watch it a second time to make sure you understand all of its political implications in 2018 and 2020 (because you do NOT want to be a Democrat in 2020 who has failed to make progress on Medicaid For All):