Better in their words…

Times prescribes selfish psychedelic death treatment; ironic science supporting a life of giving; Ukraine blame-game starting [not sure what happened to “The best money we have ever spent?] ; Trump effect saves the world; Dem meltdown worsens.

Source: EXISTENTIAL ☙ Sunday, December 29, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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The New York Times offered a pair of articles over the last two weeks providing the kind of life advice you’d normally seek from a priest or pastor. The first was a profoundly disturbing, magazine-style feature run under the darkly chipper and subversively contradictory headline, “‘Life-Changing’ Psychedelics, for When Life Is Ending.” Have turbo cancer and shock shower strokes got you feeling anxious that time is getting short? The Times has a pill for that. Well, technically, a mushroom. Aldous Huxley would be shaking his head and saying, I tried to tell you.

The article began and ended with ironically named Barry Blechman, 81, whose metastatic bladder cancer returned during the pandemic after 40 years in remission. Blech. Anyway, Blechman had a successful, hard-charging career and made lots of money, but the thought of his imminent death gave him panic attacks. So he decamped from his spacious home in Washington, DC, and flew cross-country to Bend, Oregon, to drop mushrooms for the first time in his life at his daughter Jenny’s new “psilocybin clinic.”

Barry and Jenny’s home cities and her career choice suggest they are both politically progressive. Since the article never once mentioned Blechman’s religious perspective about his existential crisis, we can safely assume he prefers to believe in capital-S Science and not Sky Santa.

But since Science offered no answers for what happens when his cognitive lights finally go out, Barry sought solace in an Oregonian shroom clinic.

His therapy was overseen by an Oregon social worker named Betty Warden (also ironically named), with the fancy title of “state-certified psilocybin facilitator.” It’s true; I looked it up. Oregon’s Health Authority began accepting applications for Psilocybin Service Facilitator licenses in January, 2023.

After munching the mushrooms Warden gave him, Blechman started having “vivid and fantastical visions” including “ominous clouds, an angry confrontation with the surgeon he blames for his disfigurement and a convulsive moment of grief for the sister whose death two years earlier he had never truly mourned.”

In other words, instead of actually grieving for his sister, or actuallyconfronting his surgeon, Blechman hallucinated both cathartic events under the influence of powerful mind-altering drugs just like the ones the CIA loves playing with. Blechman didn’t actually have to grieve or have a difficult conversation; the mushrooms did all the work.

Good news! The treatment worked. It made all the sads go away! Jenny, who owns the clinic and was probably the one who aimed the Times at her father for the interview, said she was thrilled with how things turned out. “He has a sense of peace about him now,” she gushed. As for Blechman, he reported that the unbearable angst and black depression triggered by his cancer diagnosis no longer hound him. In fact, Blechman decided to travel as much as possible in his remaining time. So far, he’s racked up frequent flier miles visiting London, the Paris Olympics, and Alaska. Next, he plans vacations in South Africa and Chile.

“I understand death in a more positive way,” Blechman told the Times. “I’m less fearful of it. Yeah, it’s going to happen, but until then, I’m going to have a heck of a good time.”

In other words, the mushrooms helped Blechman find spiritual relief in even more materialism.

For her part, Social Worker Warden describes “awe” at the benefits she claims psychedelic therapy provided her paying patients ever since she started her lucrative new career two years ago. But at the same time, the article also noted, slightly less promisingly, that Ms. Warden has no idea how the treatment works.

Is it the placebo effect? Is it magical? Is it demons, or evil spirits? Nobody knows! “Researchers,” the Times admitted, “are still trying to understand how psychedelics help alleviate existential distress.” Doctors are, as usual whenever it matters, baffled. But let’s do it anyway. Whee!

Remember, these are the exact same people who sneeringly called you a science-denying cave woman for taking ivermectin.

Dr. Stephen Ross, an NYU Health addiction psychiatrist interviewed for the story, said psilocybin’s existentially palliative purposes initially surprised him. “I was shocked because a huge part of psychiatry was hidden in plain sight,” the doctor explained. “It taught me something I had not learned in my medical training, which was to help people have a good death.” Dr. Ross wryly complained, “In medicine, we were trained to fight disease and never give up.”

In other words, Dr. Ross has thrown in the towel trying to prevent death; that is way too hard. Nowadays he’s just trying to make atheistic deaths as clinically comfortable as possible, to make them good deaths.

The notion that some deaths are good and some deaths are bad is clever bit of philosophical sleight-of-hand. The article never said so but it was clear the Times meant a ‘good death’ is fast and pain-free.

But good deaths and bad deaths both end exactly the same way: in a dirt nap. Six feet under. Lights out.

The unstated argument is that people should do whatever they can to “be comfortable” and to avoid suffering as they approach the Final Destination. But why should atheists focus on a short period of suffering more than the infinite, meaningless nothingness of non-existence?

They need a distraction.

This Times article a souped-up version of “one weird trick” to improve “a good death” for progressive atheists like Blechman, who need distraction from the fact of their imminent mortality. Taking mushrooms helps them not think about it so much.

Astonishingly, religion isn’t mentioned anywhere in this article about end-of-life existential crises. Not Christianity, obviously, but also not Islam, Hinduism, Wicca, Cargo Cultism, or even the revived Nordic gods. Why is the Times offering self-centered, secular medico-spiritual advice to its elderly and sick readers? And why now?

🔥 On the other hand, to its younger, living readers, the Times provided the exact opposite prescription, headlined “For a Happier New Year, Focus on Your Loved Ones.” In short, while still clinically secular, this article explicitly eschewed materialism, in favor of improving relationships with friends and family. “Ask how (and whom) you can help,” the article somberly advised.

Unlike the shroom article, this ‘loved ones’ article quoted established science:

That was just the beginning of the evidence. “There is ample research,” the Times crowed, “including one of the longest-running studies on human happiness — to show that our interpersonal relationships are crucial to our well-being, protecting against depression, bolstering our physical health, and making our lives more meaningful.”

Protection from depression, happiness, health improvement, and meaning for his life sounded exactly like what Barry Blechman needed, except all he got was weird hallucinations and an expensive travel itinerary.

The second article prescribed investing limited time in serving others. “If you are thinking about how to spend your precious time, energy and money in the new year,” one of the happiness experts explained, “anything that is going to deepen your relationships or broaden your relationships is probably something that’s going to make you happier.”

Why not offer this science-based, relationship-based happiness prescription to folks who are dying, like Blechman? Why did the Times offer dying folks only clinical hallucinogenics and more materialism?

Choose life, not mushrooms. As for me, while I’m not super keen on the dyingpart, I don’t fear death at all. If you want my opinion, choose a Savior.

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a narrative-bending Proxy War story with the deceptively banal headline, “Ukraine Slows Missile Fire Into Russia as Trump Prepares to Take Office. Welcome to the new narrative; the neocon rats are officially evacuating the SS Biden.

The deeply cynical article was camouflaged with that boring headline and a bunch of mind-numbing detail about the timeline of tit-for-tat strikes between Ukraine and Russia ever since Biden authorized deep missile strikes in November. But it also snuck in some significant admissions.

For instance, the article basically admitted that Russia has been the adult in the war room and that the Trump effect was probably what saved the planet from global thermonuclear war:

But even more grim for Ukraine, glints of steel from the long knives of blame being quietly drawn flashed metallically in the political moonlight. In short, it’s Ukraine’s fault for, get this, relying too much on the West:

You have to hand it to them. Neocons might be unable to win a kinetic war anyplace but they are masters at blame-shifting. That wasn’t all. The next complaint against Ukraine was inevitable, and arrives late, but it finally appeared. To wit: Ukraine squandered the weapons we provided:

They just shoot at anything that moves! So wasteful.

As for the now-infamous ATACMS missiles used to strike deep in Russia, the Times quoted the same two anonymous U.S. officials saying that Ukraine has “no likelihood of getting more,” since the remaining inventory is earmarked for the Middle East and Asia. We’d love to help but it’s on backorder. And the Times, this time quoting anonymous British officials, said Great Britain “didn’t have many more long-range missiles to provide” either.

We can’t give you what we don’t have. Womp womp.

In sum, sprinkled like raisins amidst the article’s dry loaf of dates and unpronounceable names attached to each country’s attack or counterattack, were the following narrative-bending facts: Despite Biden’s best efforts, Russia refrained from escalating because Americans elected Trump. And, since Ukraine relied on the West too much, and because Ukraine frittered away the weapons it did get, Ukraine won’t get any more deep-strike missiles.

Without deep-strike missiles, and because it lacks an air force (never mind the “game-changing” F-16s), Ukraine has no offensive military capability. Without any offensive capability, Ukraine has zero chance of winning the war. It is now only a matter of time.

And that —that the Ukrainians are out of options— is what this article was really saying.

But don’t blame the neocons! It was all Ukraine’s fault.

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Earlier this week, mega-fundraiser Lindy Li left the Democrats. And now it has come to this. This morning, Politico ran an unintentionally hilarious story headlined, “Is the Democratic brand toxic? A growing number of Dems wonder if going ‘independent’ will help them win.” The sub-headline piled on, “After devastating losses across the map, some Democrats are thinking about a serious rebrand.” The cover picture featured former Democrat and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who just became an “independent.”

The article described Democrats as adrift and “unsure of what to do next.” So it is no surprise that party planners are looking hungrily at the successful Senate campaign of Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who overthrew a popular GOP incumbent by +14 percent running as an independent. He may have run as an independent, but most of his funding came surreptitiously from Democrat PACs.

The problem with this strategy, what’s holding even more Democrats back, is that independents can’t get any direct help from the DNC’s coffers or machinery. So Politico reported that “a group of operatives at major Democratic media firms are creating a company to help elect left-leaning independents.”

In other words, they’re talking about forming an un-named third party controlled and funded by Democrats but which appears ‘independent.’ The label “Democrat” is starting to stink. Behold the fruition of woke progressivism, which has not yet fully ripened, yet has hollowed out one of the nation’s two major political parties.

Politico may be overstating the case, but in essence it said the Democrat ship is sinking and smart progressives are looking for another cruise line. Shifting into a fake independent party to hide Democrats may be a short-term survival strategy but it is not a viable long-term success strategy. The reason it won’t work in the long term is because, as ‘moderate’ Democrats leave to become independents, the Democrat party will distill down into an even more concentrated progressive but less viable party.

Last month, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the Democrat party’s existential crisis caused by Trump’s landslide victory would be short-lived, or if it evidenced something more serious. More and more, it appears the latter is true and the Democrats have a real, long-term problem, which is what Politico picked up on.

As we head into the New Year, the Democrats —ascendant only a few short months ago— now lie in deep disarray, leaderless and rudderless.

Maybe Democrats need treatment at Jenny Blechman’s clinic in Bend, Oregon? If the GOP can just hold together and avoid fighting itself, we are about to witness something unique and terrific.

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you, deeply and profoundly, for your continuing loyal support. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, right back here, as together we close out the last two days of 2024.

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