Posts made by brad

@jens That's it! Wow, really glad it was a real quote and I wasn't misremembering.

I have been sent previously unpublished email correspondence with Ray. These are wonderful, unique emails in my perspective. Perhaps if others have previously unpublished email correspondence with Ray, they can post them in this thread as well.

Q: I was just wondering if you read things unrelated to science at all, for pleasure? Do you have any pieces of Literature or authors other than Blake that have influenced you a lot, or your ways of thinking?

RP: I read sporadically in 18th,19th, 20th century things, often when I’m trying to get a better perspective on events. When I was studying English and American lit I was aware of the contemporary (1950-'65) forces that were shaping it, along with the rest of culture, and so have tended to see it as a mostly toxic artifact.

This is all one email chain:

Q: I was just wondering your thoughts on things other than nutrition/health, as I'm sure you get asked these for the majority of questions.
Also, how do you work against writers block?

RP: People occasionally ask me about philosophy, politics, and the nature of consciousness, and those interests preceded my interest in health issues. I think writer’s block is a sign that you need a different form of activity, and different thoughts about the people you are writing for, i.e., a general renewal of perspective. Those topics are all deeply interrelated. For example, I like the “process philosophy” of A.N. Whitehead and the “process theology” of David Ray Griffin, who has in recent years been doing important work in politics, recognizing that engaging with current issues is part of his theology.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3caIG0SMHXE

[Editor's note: The video is David Ray Griffin 2011 "911 Miracles", I believe this is the same version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7fE7hphVI]

Q: Interesting video and it agrees with similar things I have watched and agree with. Are you familiar with the documentary called Zeitgeist? It has a section dedicated to 9/11 here, if you are interested:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hZUBR3mg_OQ
I am wondering what your thoughts are about this "manufacturing of consent" as Chomsky puts it, how the general public can avoid being convinced by a false flags such as 9/11 and the media portrayal? I have done previous research years ago on the Kosovo war as well as other periods of history which show this creation of events and inaccurate portrayals are not isolated to 9/11. I've yet to find a case of the media portraying something of this scale and the general public realising before many years have passed. Perhaps things will change with the increasing access to the internet across the world

RP: I’ve been concerned since childhood with the imposition of the official view of reality. With no source of information except the mass media, I still couldn’t see how people could think that the official version of the Korean war was plausible. In 1954, when the Sunday supplement This Week announced a contest to name the anticolonialist movement in Vietnam (which came to be called the VietCong), I understood that the public was being manipulated. By then the government had been refining its methods for over 50 years, and I understood that the reason my teachers seemed so gullible was that politically perceptive people couldn’t keep a teaching job.
I think the internet will stay open only as long as it doesn’t affect the system’s control; as it is, it’s very useful to the system, for watching what people are doing, and for inserting their information where it’s needed. They have robot personalities expressing their opinion on many of the political forums.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/28/who-really-started-the-korean-war/
http://brianwillson.com/the-unknown-truth-about-korea-u-s-sanctioned-death-squads-and-war-crimes-1945-1953/

Q. Are you saying a newspaper supplement was responsible for naming the "enemy" Vietnam national liberation front? I can't find any information about that online at all, but that is completely surreal.

You mentioned you were thinking about the official view of reality from an early age. Did you ever experience any level of existential crisis? How do you/did you deal with them?

RP: Since I was away at college I wasn’t seeing that publication regularly, and I didn’t see how the contest ended, but I had heard of the Committee on Public Information in the first world war, and knew that government propaganda was everywhere; the schools passed out Weekly Reader, guiding cold war consciousness, newspapers and radio were obsessed with it.

When I was 3 or 4 I saw newspaper pictures of the Italians bombing in Africa, heard about Japanese atrocities in China, rigged elections in Los Angeles, and capital punishment in the US, and then the draft started; I was quietly forming opinions on how to handle such situations when I was older. Around that time a 92-year old man was staying at our house, and I would look at him and imagine the knowledge he represented; then he died, and it started me thinking about the meaning of knowledge, life and aging.

I recently saw a good youtube video, Why Kerala, Grampa?

Q. Do you listen to music much? Do you have any favourite artists?

RP: I don’t listen much, but I really enjoy certain kinds of music, certain instruments, certain people. Wynton Marsalis, Stan Getz, Rafael Mendez, Yehudi Menuhin, Pablo Casals, Herb Alpert, Paul Robeson, french horn, glass harmonica, tuba

Q. Thoughts on Novichok poisonings in England 2018

RP: The timing of all of the recent poisoning episodes, in Syria and UK, has been favorable to the US empire, and unfavorable for Syria and Russia. The UK government failed to follow the OPCW rules, without explanation. I suspect that they know private criminal organizations were responsible, but prefer to blame Russia.

“In not giving a sample to whichever state is accused of a chemical weapons misuse, an accusing OPCW member country is in violation of its requirements under OPCW rules.”
Germany defends Russia’s responses to the Skripal case while criticizing the UK’s handling of the UK’s case, and repeats that the UK has yet to show any evidence of its claims against Russia:
Berlin still has ‘no evidence’ from UK that Moscow is behind Skripal poisoning – reports
Published time: 7 Jun, 2018 16:23
Edited time: 8 Jun, 2018 08:20
The German government has zero evidence from the British authorities that could back London’s claims that Moscow was behind the poisoning of the Skripals, German media reports.
More than three months since the start of the probe into the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the UK is still conspicuously tight-lipped when it comes to any real evidence that could prove its accusations against Russia.
Still multiple leads in Skripal poisoning case, says Scotland Yard
On Wednesday, the German government informed a parliamentary oversight committee during a closed hearing that it still has not received any evidence suggesting that Russia might well be behind the incident that took place in early March, German TV station RBB reports.
“It is [still] only known that the poison used in the attack was a nerve agent called Novichok, which was once produced in the Soviet Union,” Michael Goetschenberg, a correspondent of German ARD and an expert on security services, told RBB, commenting on the results of the hearing, which he is familiar with. Apart from this information, which was released by the British authorities soon after the incident, no new data on Russia’s alleged implication in this case was provided to Germany so far, he added.
German intelligence has also found no Russian trace in this case so far, Goetschenberg said. “The BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence… has also contacted its own sources and tried to verify the information [about Russia’s potential involvement] in some way,” he told RBB, adding that it eventually failed to find any evidence pointing to Moscow as well.
https://rt.com/news/429057-germany-uk-no-evidence-skrpial/

British chemical warfare base within 10km radius of both Novichok crime scenes
ALL four people poisoned by a Russian nerve agent live within 15km of a chemical warfare base. Coincidence or something more? The theorists are in overdrive.
Marnie O’Neill@marnieoneill7http://news.com.auJULY 6, 20186:34AM
Amesbury pair exposed to novichok, police confirm
THE news that two more people have been exposed to the same nerve agent that poisoned a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury four months ago raises some uncomfortable questions.

Both crime scenes are less than 15 kilometres from the secretive Porton Down defence laboratory — where samples from both cases were sent for analysis and subsequently identified as Novichok, a Cold War era nerve agent authorities insist has only ever been produced in Russia.

But the proximity of the lab to both attacks — the three sites form a small, neat triangle on a map — has people wondering whether it’s a coincidence or something more sinister.

Porton Down and the chemical weapons experiments allegedly carried out there have been the focus of conspiracy theories for decades, with stories of horrible experiments carried out on human and animal subjects alike.

Q. I noticed you linked an article from Russia Today, do you trust them as a source?
What makes you think it was a criminal organisation responsible, rather than for example, the UK government?

RP: I think governments use criminal organizations for many of their routine assassinations. They can find very indirect routes to deliver radioactive isotopes or rare toxins. I’ve always looked at a broad range of information sources, to decide what stories seem most likely. The big world media have been tightly controlled, mainly by the CIA, for generations, so their stories are reliably intended to misinform and distract.

Q. I wondered your thoughts on lucid dreaming, and whether it is beneficial at all, or maybe even stressful? Have you tried to learn to do this at all, or have any opinions on it?

RP: I have done it sometimes when trying to solve chemical or biological quetions, and found it very productive, but I think it's more likely to happen when you are working under pressure.

Q. Interesting, how do you think dreaming relates to the world? Do you think you already knew the answers to the questions and dreaming allowed you to realise them, or do you think dreaming allowed you to connect to something else to give you the answers?

RP: It’s a kind of thinking based on wholes and images, rather than words and logic. It sometimes gives the impression that it’s drawing in new information from outside sources. Andrija Puharich discussed that quality of dreams.

August 2019

Q: This is going to sound incredibly surreal, but thought you should know you have been mentioned in a guys political manifesto he calls himself "bronze age mantis" who has a small following of about 20,000 on Twitter. I dont really know anything about him or it to be honest, but thought I should give you a heads up incase you start getting weirder messages than usual.

RP: Thanks, they are getting weirder at an increasing rate.

Q. I was wondering about your mental ability, and how much you think is "natural." Did you always possess the memory recall you have now when you were younger? What do you think is responsible? How would you recommend someone improve their general mental abilities?

RP: When you do something regularly, you keep getting more proficient at it. My memory for images has always been good, but I think never nearly as good as a dog’s, and my memory for names has always been fairly poor. Raising the brain to its proper temperature can immediately improve all of its functions.

Hello, someone sent me this previously unpublished email exchange where Ray discusses forum moderation. I thought I would repost it here for everyone to see.

@Peatly Many people have contacted the Ray Peat Publishing email address without a response.

@banquos-ghost Makes sense. No problem. Looking forward to hearing about your progress.

@IkeIkeforever Canned oysters are relatively inexpensive and easier to find in grocery stores and online. Just make sure they're not in seed oil (olive oil is ok, but drain it first).

@IkeIkeforever It depends on the vitamin and your current levels. The best way to get Vitamin D is to get proper sunlight exposure (or to use a reptile lamp). The second best way would be to supplement with a clean brand like NOW. Taking vitamin k along with vitamin D is also helpful. I would also be concerned about most vitamin C, as it's made with black-mold derived citric acid rather than natural sources.

If you're drinking plenty of milk, orange juice, fruit, dairy, beef, etc, I doubt you're particularly vitamin deficient. Eating oysters or liver 1-2x a week can help. One way to determine if your problems are the result of a vitamin deficiency is to eat oysters on consecutive days and see if your problem gets better or worse.

@banquos-ghost Seems like a great plan. I'd bet my paycheck you're hypothyroid to some degree. Have you checked your pulse and temperature?

@zoro @IkeIkeforever The recommendations here for cod liver oil and black seed oil are NOT in line with Ray's advice. They're both high in PUFA and so if you're concerned about that I would not supplement with them at all.

On fish oil, Ray says:

In declaring EPA and DHA to be safe, the FDA neglected to evaluate their antithyroid, immunosuppressive, lipid peroxidative (Song et al., 2000), light sensitizing, and antimitochondrial effects, their depression of glucose oxidation (Delarue et al., 2003), and their contribution to metastatic cancer (Klieveri, et al., 2000), lipofuscinosis and liver damage, among other problems.

Black seed oil is >55% PUFA (polyunsaturated) and Ray says, on polyunsaturated oils:

Unsaturated oils, especially polyunsaturates, weaken the immune system's function in ways that are similar to the damage caused by radiation, hormone imbalance, cancer, aging, or viral infections. The media discuss sexually transmitted and drug-induced immunodeficiency, but it isn't yet considered polite to discuss vegetable oil-induced immunodeficiency.

In terms of skin issues, I've noticed that improving thyroid function, cutting out any estrogenic environmental exposures, including PUFA/seed oils (which includes chicken and turkey), and mitigating vitamin deficiencies have been the most effective interventions.

@annis @AkJono Thanks for joining! Happy to have you both here.

@Ivy If someone is willing to write a plugin that works I'll happily install it. Meanwhile, have you looked into the Ray Peat Podcast or Bioenergetic.live?

@C-Mex raypeat2.com is another one

@Peatly No reason, it was just the default setting. I've made it possible for guests to search the forum now.

Also - the formatting isn't great yet, I'm aware, and I'm working on a fix.

At @haidut's request, I've added a plugin that automatically pulls in his blog posts and creates a new forum thread. Just posting here for transparency.

@Lovesickhs18 I deleted that very long url, no problem.

@DavidPS thanks for joining!