A Deep and Sweet Way To End America’s Cold Civil War
Introduction
Today, we’re going to take a break from our captivating serialized political Self-Help book DEEP SOCKS and bring you something absolutely fresh and tasty: a solution to America’s ongoing “cold civil war.”
The Two Sides of the Cold Civil War
Red America is conservative, suburban or rural, inland, supports the Republican party. Blue America is liberal, urban, coastal, and supports the Democratic party. Each side has extremist factions which clash, violently, with each other, but most of the struggle is symbolic, cultural. This is what makes it a “cold” civil war: the battles are fought mostly in minds and hearts with symbols and images, not in the streets and country with bombs and drones, and in fact the anxiety of the escalation to hot war conditions and tempers the conflict’s intensity quite efficiently. America without its corrupt, decadent cities would be a more outwardly violent, religious, white Brazil, and America without its obese, unhealthy, agrarian breadbasket would have no army and no food, two coastal chains of little Hong Kongs unable to survive, reproduce, or fend for themselves.
The Problems With Having A Cold Civil War
As one of America’s three great, monarchical presidents put it: a house divided against itself cannot stand. While Abraham Lincoln wasn’t officially king, the man had the kind of tightly-central authority we associate with monarchs. What he wanted, happened. Lincoln, at the head of a new political party, suspended habeas corpus, willed an industrial war economy into life, signed the Homestead Act, blockaded half the country, and died being called a king by his own assassin. Lincoln prosecuted a hot civil war, but hot violence is now, (mostly) unthinkable, undesirable, and unlikely. But how could our civil war end? How could a “purple” America emerge?
Curtis Yarvin suggests that ending the cold civil war will be the first, and most important task of United State’s next monarch. This is in fact the purpose of the monarch, to transcend social division and act as an avatar of the people against the oligarchy. He suggests that this monarch will be elected, like FDR, and will, like FDR, create an administrative shock force to assume tightly-central, one-point authority. But what kind of issue could unite America? What is the big idea of the monarch?
We have an answer: Stop the Cartel Secretly Poisoning America.
HFCS: FOUR LETTERS TO UNDERSTAND HOW AMERICA IS BEING POISONED BY A CARTEL
HFCS stands for a drug called High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is an industrial byproduct from the production of unpalatable animal feedstock and corn oil. Corn starch, a byproduct of this production process, has many culinary uses—but its industrial use here is the treatment of this starch by a combination of acids and enzymes to produce a syrup that has a similar sweetness profile to sucrose. While many sweeteners exist, the most revolutionary aspect of this chemical is that it is exceedingly, mouth-wateringly cheap. Like crack and cocaine before it, we’re looking at the same drug—but it’s all about the price.
When you put this liquid into carbonated water and flavor it with the correct chemicals, the result is an addictive and destructive product called “soda,” “pop,” “coke,” and many other street names. It is chugged by the gallon by millions of Americans. As a result of the availability of this drug, introduced in the 1970s, there has been an incredible and unsustainable trend of addiction and obesity in America. Now, approximately 42 percent of the US population is classified as obese. 96 million Americans have prediabetes, and 37.3 million have diabetes. This is a direct result of the artificial, government-supported pricing of cheap, addictive carbohydrates.
There are hyperaddicts, kept alive through strenuous intervention by doctors and the mass availability of insulin. It is added to many foods, used to both increase palatability and adulterate or substitute sweeteners that would be higher cost otherwise. There are many Americans alive today, though for how much longer is only known to Allah, who will not drink water due to its disgusting lack of industrially produced sweetener.
A large and powerful cartel controls and massively benefits from the sale of this drug. This cartel has captured significant parts of the United States government. It represents most of the food production in America. A combination of production quotas for sugar, cash incentives to grow corn for its many industrial uses, has created a situation where this extremely addictive substance with obvious poor health outcomes is used to manufacture and distribute ‘hyperpalatable food,’ mostly to poor and weak-willed people.
Not only is the extremely damaging drug HFCS allowed to be sold, the growth of raw materials (corn) for this drug is also sponsored. Yes, American tax dollars are paying to poison themselves.
We do not think of Americans who die of diabetes or obesity as victims of a cartel, but they surely are.
STOP THE CARTEL: A PURPLE ISSUE
Red and Blue America both suffer greatly from the HFCS cartel. The suffering is worse because it is individualized, medicalized, and there is no solution in sight. But HFCS is a political issue. The cartel that sells HFCS is an enemy of the American people, and the American people have a right to organize politically to defeat their enemies and guarantee their collective health.
We don’t have to agree about gun control or abortion or gay marriage or taxes to agree about HFCS. Sugar makes you fat, and it’s in goddamned fucking everything. We all know how shitty the food system in this country is, and we all can be educated about who benefits from this shitty system.
A MODERATE SOLUTION
A true, radical solution to the problem would be to treat the HFCS cartel like a Mexican drug cartel: declare war on it, incarcerate and-or assassinate its leaders, as well as their collaborators in the government—of which there are many—and to criminalize the product completely. This may work better with HFCS than cocaine. HFCS, like cocaine, is expensive to produce, requiring industrial bases and a subsidized or cheap precursor for the process. HFCS addiction is easier to shake than cocaine addiction, and legitimate alternatives are too expensive to distribute at existing margins. In fact, the removal and destruction of all existing plants, and the banning of it would simultaneously destroy a primary market and production center, causing price to increase dramatically internationally—an escalating price war on sweeteners would dramatically improve the health outcomes of many.
However, moderation will always eventually win in politics. Therefore we should consider HFCS like tobacco, a dangerous but legal and highly taxed product. Aggressive taxation of HFCS producers and aggressive lawsuits and criminal prosecutions will produce a powerful and growing revenue stream to support recovering HFCS addicts: public exercise facilities, free dietary consultation clinics with starter packages of food that is less dangerous to health.
AN ATTENDANT REVOLUTION IN MEDICINE
Obesity became a problem affecting more than 4 in 10 Americans because the medical industry in America is as corrupt and dysfunctional as its food production system. Obesity is in part an iatrogenic condition. As long as obesity is considered a chronic condition with an entirely optional treatment, and remains unpenalized by health insurance and educational institutions, obesity will continue to be a problem growing in both size and numbers.
Medicine requires a radical new health concept above and beyond the mere absence of disease. Adaptability is a strong measure of an organism’s survivability and overall fitness. It is the ability to respond favorably to adversity as well as positive conditions. Setting the benchmark for health here is to begin to see a positive program of medicine, education, and food production.
THE OTHER FRONT IN THE COLD CIVIL WAR
The opioid crisis, the American Opium Civil War, is linked inextricably with the overall declining of the health of Americans. While the cartels are different in membership and structure, the root cause that enables the government to wage such an insane and destructive war against its own people is the same. It is a decline in adaptability, paired with an attendant despair in life. Obesity is a fair proxy for low-adaptability, as the obese are generally weak, physically inflexible, suffer from hormonal imbalances, and routinely make decisions about activity, food, and consumption with negative consequences that are empirically and intuitively demonstrable. Obesity, quite like other drug addictions and suicides are health events commonly motivated by despair. The obese are not necessarily polyaddicts, but they are most certainly addicts. Addiction is a compulsive behavior motivated by a hijacked pleasure-seeking circuit in the mind.
Addiction is treated as a chronic and treatable illness—it is certainly real and in front of us. The proportions of the obesity crisis exceed that of China during its opium crisis. The criminality of the food-production cartel and its friends in government is correspondingly much greater.
AT LAST, SWEET WAR
Americans, like all imperial peoples, are fond of concepts like law and order, justice, and war. They love to vote for those that promise them conflict, blood and carnage. It is their nature, their heritage, and the source of their pride. For the carnage to make sense, to seem noble and unlike the demonic reality within their hearts, they require, of course, a scapegoat, a foe that is everywhere and nowhere. One that accepts the blame for all wrongs, and in a perfect world is quite deserving of a lot of this blame.
The beauty of this scapegoat, the HFCS Cartel, is that is international in structure and eradicable at home through seemingly sensible, moderate policy. Yes, it has dangerous collaborators in government. And yes, its victims are extremely visible, and pitiable—but they are also changeable, through virtuous and strenuous action. The domestic enemy can be treated, as said before, with kid gloves, in a moderate way. But there is no empathy in the heart of Americans for those outside their borders, and they have never, nor will they ever, receive moderation and humanity from the US government and its colossal war machine. What is done to American cocaine dealers is not what is done to Pablo Escobar.
Like the communist menace in the 50s, or the terror of black nationalism in the 70s, a war against the HFCS Cartel is something that the police state, the military, its leading partners in the intelligence complex, and their slavish, obedient water carriers in the media can all line up behind and prosecute with vigor, if someone rises to give the command. It is a campaign against an enemy at home that ends with the visibly unelect in jail, paying fines and funding new social programs to keep bureaucrats occupied and reduce the cost of health care. It is a campaign that lets the Air Force justify F35s and drones raining death and fire on targets hard and soft. The end result of this war is the complete transformation of food production and the health of billions, controlling the fate of client states in accordance with America’s true interests. It will require the mobilization and printing and lending of billions of dollars to captive, besieged peoples, this credit backed only by naked force, and there’s a policy winner for the oligarchs.
And, unlike the war on terror, the war in Vietnam, the war in Korea, the war on Cuba, the war on Russia, the war on China, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and the cold civil war, this war is winnable.