Cornelius Tacitus Redux

Lounge
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The briefest of notes from the borderlands of consciousness:

Tacitus has had the gears switched out on him, and for some longish time has been adapting to the new thing.

Middle age caught up… although the years leading up to middle age proper were…ah… sort of a personal 18th century that could not conceive of a Victorian reaction…

With middle age, as I’m sure many of you who’ve crossed the threshold and lived to tell the tale will report to the young 'uns who think they’ll never get old, come many disequilibria of the bodily and mental processes, including a steadily encroaching hypertension that can be deadly if ignored.

Tacitus could no longer scoff at the combined increades in systolic and diastolic pressures, and was prescribed a potent combination of ACE inhibitors, Beta blockers, and diuretics… tragically these have the combined effect of completely eliminating the last traces of a once formidable libido and accelerating the internal shift from a philosopher of the flesh toward a philosopher minus the flesh…

All was not lost, what was taken from the root chakra was repaid with interest to the mind chakra… and Cornelius Tacitus, in his dotage, like Michael Montaigne with his hemmorhoids, found a deep world of thought to engage him as he had never been engaged before.

The more he read the more curious he became, the same libido that drove his physicality was now driving his curiosity for knowledge. Holy Shit! he thought as he bought Fundamental Neuroscience and other equally ponderous studies… neuroscience has gotten bogglingly complex, yet somehow soul satisfying in its sheer intensity, since a much younger Tacitus was actively studing the field 35 years ago…

Not unlike an Old Kingdom Eqyptian scribe teleporting into Google’s headquarters and muttering oaths to Thoth… an indescribable explosion of knowledge, a massive radiation of understanding between and into other disciplines… Neuroeconomics, Neurophilosophy, Neurolaw, Neuropolitics, Philosophy of Mind, Neo-Phenomenology… things were getting complicated, exceedingly complicated…

Tacitus sat before his papyrus and tried to make note of the interrelations, the premises, the mental apparatus, the way human culture was restructuring itself, the kinds of humans humans were rapidly evolving into… it was thrilling and terrifying…

Tacitus has been reading, 3-4 hours every night if he can, how to make sense of all this ? How to build governing theories and frameworks to take it all into account ? All very Blade Runner on some level…

Not that Tacitus hasn’t been experimenting… he has… he has brewed up outlandish stuff… Pherodelic concotions that expand the mind in multiple dimensions then vanish like a djinn who has cast his spell and gone off in a spinning cloud…

Our Friend tacitus - RIP 12/2010 - A compilation of brilliant and exhilarating posts
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It is utterly outstanding to see you posting! You have my deepest sympathy regarding the hypertension medication. I’ve often wondered if hypertension medication was all a plot concocted by the antisexual leftists. Welcome back, your mind chakra has been missed around here.

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Welcome back, Tacitus. Good to see you again. :slight_smile: A lot has changed while you’ve been gone.

Musk

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Welcome back, as a new user I am glad to see someone like you post again as I’ve heard a lot of great things about you. Looking forward to your words of wisdom.

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First, Tacitus, welcome back. It has been a couple of years. Has it not?

ACE inhibitors, Beta blockers, and diuretics? They really went medieval on your libido. Didn’t they?

ACE inhibitors were popular in the state hospital where I worked in the seventies. I think it’s damn near malpractice that they’d still be prescribing these poisons. The blood pressure goes down, but the mortality rate doesn’t. What’s wrong with that picture? Demand that they upgrade you to an angiotensin II receptor antagonist (sartan). This class of drugs actually seems to have healing effects on the endothelium and a relatively long half-life. From my own experience, I recommend, in this order, Avapro (Irbesartan), Benecar or Cozaar (Losartan).

The most popular beta blockers triple your chances of diabetes. That’s why the British National Health Service quit using them as a frontline drug. They’re old and cheap, but even a stupid, penny pinching bureaucrat can tell they’re not worth it. And then there are the unnecessary sexual effects.

Go with alpha blockers, also old and cheap, and EXTREMELY effective. They WILL bring down the blood pressure. One of the possible side effects is “painful lasting erection”. I’m willing to risk that! They’ll also make you so dizzy you can’t stand up, until you find the proper dosage, but it’s worth the effort to fine tune the dosage to avoid the death sentence that beta blockers are now known to be. Typically, doctors will prescribe alpha blockers if you also have BPH, as it relieves those symptoms. I don’t have prostate problems, and the alpha blockers still work just fine on my blood pressure. Get the doctor to put on a rubber glove and check your prostate before you start taking the drug so you have a baseline knowledge of exactly where you stand on that issue. The brand name is Hytrin (terazosin).

I always wear a suit and tie and plenty of A314 and P106 when I go to the doctor. My doctor refuses to give me diuretics, because I might be in an important meeting and I cannot be getting up to go to the bathroom all the time. This is the doctor’s rational, not mine! My third drug is a calcium channel blocker (amlodipine) which is pretty low on side effects. It’s the twenty first century. You shouldn’t have to take piss pills!

I have been looking for years to find the right nutrients to control my blood pressure and only just recently went on the hard drugs. The nutrients I still think might help include Vitamin D (5,000 IU), grape seed extract, green tea extract (but megadoses can raise SHBG) and a Life Extension product called “Endothelial Defense” with GliSODin and pomegranate. I also strongly recommend Acetyl L-Carnitine (1500mg) and Glycine Propionyl-L-Carnitne (GPLC, 2500mg).

You might want to consider supplementary testosterone, if you can afford it. I recommend the cream over the injections. Be sure to monitor your estradiol as well as DHT. In lieu of testosterone, the Acetyl L-Carnitine and GPLC mentioned above have been demonstrated in clinical studies as well as my own experience to be quite beneficial. Either way, be taking a healthy dose of DHEA. And on a PRN (or a daily) basis L-Citrulline (1700mg) and Korean Ginseng (1300mg) are as effective as sildenafil.

Tacitus, I was just reading your old post, last week, on PQQ and its potential for skin rejuvenation. I cannot find it as a supplement, nor can I find natto. I’m going to try getting a relatively low concentration Green Tea extract, hoping that it wll have PQQ along with the 15-50% advertised polyphenyls.

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Thx, warren… that’s great stuff to know… esp. about the ACE inhibitors…

Actually, I’d been meaning to write up a multitude of nutritional discoveries, or maybe more accurately, insights into how a series of discoveries interact…

Fortunately, my B/P is now a very respectable 120/80 and other functions that we can blood test for are in healthy ranges… I don’t know the why of it, but there does seem to be a point males cross somewhere in the 45-55 years of age range where blood pressure ceases to self regulate, which also seems to correlate with a serious mortality cluster in men in their early 50s…

Meanwhile , my investigations into the nutritional side have turned up a few absolutely fascinating things I think we would all benefit from… my guess is that, had I known the full implication of what we are beginning to grasp about nutrition, and I had started in my late teens or early 20s, many of these problems wouln’t have surfaced now.

The most significant, IMHO, is the dynamic interaction between the Vitamin K family (generally known as the benzoquinones) and Vitamin D.
My understanding is that the Ks and D work together to mobilize calcium throughout the body. The simplest way to put it is that D increases calcium transport, esp. ascross the intestinal wall and K makes sure the calcium moves out of the soft tissues, like arterial walls, and firmly back into the bones. Some theory now thinks that Vitamin D oversose is functionally a comparitive Vitamin K deficiency… too much D can over-mobilize the movement of calcium into the soft tissues, if you add equivalent increases of vitamin K the calcium is efficiently returned to the bone and removed from the arterial walls.

If that were the whole story it would be useful enough, however it appears that BOTH vitamin D and vitamin K have considerable pleuripotency… in clinical language they both have extensive non-calcemic functions that are only beginning to be understood.

Vitamin D appears to have essential immune system modulating effects, IME 2,000 units of Vitamin D in two equally divided doses has dramatically improved my resistance to respiratory infections, nowI rarely get the bronchitis that circulates this time of year.

Another very useful discovery I made, purely by accident, is that vitamin D when applied directly to the gums has a pronounced benefit to general gingival health. I was chewing a v. small microdot sized vitamin D tablet, 1000 mcg, and swishing the D charged saliva around my mouth… I quickly noticed my gums feeling exceptionally vibrant and healthy, and it seemed like the gum bound v. tightly to the tooth body, with no little gap in the sulcus for food particles to be trapped.

Vitamin K’s non-calcemic benefits seem equally, if not more striking… in that some (but not all) forms of Vitamin K have directly beneficial effects on the structural health of the brain… the form most beneficial, insofar as we now know, is menatatranone, or vitamin K-4. There is a surprising concentration of K-4 in the white matter of the brain, and it seems intimately involved in the production of myelin.

That’s very significant information, because brain maturation involved the progressive myelination of the adolescent brain… and now a multitude of seemingly unrelated mental impairments from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder have a comoon factor of under-myelination. If the aging brain IS aging, in part, due to the loss of myelin (resulting in slower, blurrier thought as the myelin insulation becomes leaky and the nerve pulses are weaker) then Vit. K-4 may be a major repair agent that helps maintain a youthful brain with youthful though processes…

There’s more to say… but that’s prob. a big enough bite of information for this post.

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There definitely seem to be some significant changes going on in this age range. One part of it is that testosterone levels drop off. Why is that? Is it because LH levels drop? Does the hypothalamus lose sensitivity to hormone levels and become unable to regulate sex hormones in much the same way blood pressure regulation goes astray? Can this regulatory sensitivity somehow be fixed, like we take metformin for insulin sensitivity? I got a lipoma on my face. From what I read this is most common in men from the ages of 40-60, but nobody can give me a reason why. Hormonal or what? No understanding; no interesting speculation even from the “lunatic fringe”. The other thing I notice is my skin. I wonder if the increased wrinkling is growth hormone related.

I started megadosing vitamins in my late twenties. I have been doing 400 I.U. vitamin E, several grams of vitamin C, deprenyl, melatonin, etc for decades. I’m sure it helps. We know a lot more now than we did in the seventies. Still, in my fifties, I hit these problems that I have no natural answer to. I should ask Shen (Daoist deity); I’m just damn poor at channeling.

Interesting you should bring up vitamin K. Benzoquinones? Are they related to Pyrroloquinoline Quinone (PQQ)? I am no biochemist. Life Extension seems to be the only place I can find a significant vitamin K supplement. Right now I get (copying the label) 1000mcg K1, 1000mcg K2 as menaquinone-4 and 100mcg K2 as menaquinone-7. The Weston A. Price Foundation is high on vitamin K. I have been doing the vitamin K for several years. I cannot say I’ve noticed anything overt. My lipoma was very calcified. Doctors were always shocked when they touched it. They were expecting soft fatty tissue, but it felt like bone. Vitamin K supplements did not change this. But several thousand I.U. vitamin D did soften it, abruptly. I hope it did the same thing to my arteries! I don’t know if the vitamin D would have worked if I hadn’t also been doing vitamin K. I was already on the BP meds when I started taking 6000iu vitamin D3, per day, to protect me from weaponized swine flu virus in the chemtrails. Have you seen any of those really paranoid stories out of Ukrane? I don’t know what to think!

Some years ago, before I began vitamin K and D, I stated getting bronchitis every winter. I found that N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) solved that. I do have some bipolars in my family. To be safe, I take a lithium orotate supplement from VRP. Where do I get vitamin K4?

At one time, apparently briefly, there was a PQQ supplement available, but not anymore. I haven’t been able to get any answers on that. Apparently natto, parsley, green tea, green pepper, kiwi fruit and papaya are good sources. I can’t find any natto around here. Eating fruit fruits and vegetables is ideal, but, realistically, there is a limit to how much parsley salad I’m gonna consume each day, and keeping fresh papayas in the house is not going to happen consistently. How chemically stable is pyrroloquinoline quinone? Would green tea extract capsules likely be a good source? Dried papaya? Jars of parsley flakes from the spice rack?

My gums are good, but my teeth are bad. I seem to get fewer cavities since I started vitamin K. For years I did Phos-Flur mouthwash, after reading about it in Durk Pearson’s book. It made a miraculous difference! Of course, there is the whole fluoride issue, but it helped! I’ve finally stopped using it in favor of the vitamin K.

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The most potent k-4 I can get my hands on is the Super K from Life Extension Foundation… subjectively I experienced my arteries/aorta feeling more elastic after about a year of 3 doses per day, 1 Super K w/1000 mcg vitamin D in the morning, 1 MK-7 @ 900 micrograms K-7 in the middle of the day, and another Super K w/1000 mcg. in the evening…

Does appear that regulating calcium metabolism is a MAJOR factor is the aging process… oddly, as we age “normally”… calcium drifts out of the bones and into the soft tissues… so tissues harden and bones soften…

the D/K combination w/ supplemental calcium:magnesium is a great help…

I think most especially for fine boned women but now there are increasing concerns about osteoporosis in men too… particularly if there is a high protein/low carbohydrate diet,

The neurologic effects are also of striking interest… there is another not so well known supplement I take to control calcium movement within the brain cells… the molecule is apoaequorin which is in the ancient family of the LH Hand proteins… by ancient I mean REALLY ancient, like Cambrain Era, 600 million years old… some brilliant gene splicers took the Aequorin DNA out of the Japanese jellyfish and inserted it into a yeast, then brewed “brain beer” that contains the aequorin… here’s this fantastically old protein that exists almost unchanged in the human brain… and voila! The protein seems to travel intact from the stomach to the brain and incorporate into human brain cells… its amazing stuff too… nothing like it anywhere… I’ve been taking it for about a year, feels like the brain has its youthful shock absorbers renewed… much better sleep, lower anxiety, significantly better memory and general sharpness, like a grimy scrim of grey blur was wiped clean… I’m taking 80 mg. (i.e. 4 capsules of Prevagen Pro) per day… the only thing is NOT to take it with calcium rich foods or supplements… Had some young aquaintances try it, they said it made their brains feel “warm”… Quincy Biosciences says it is for those over 40… I’d bet though that it comes in handy much younger as it seems to significantly reduce the rate of brain cell death… can’t argue with that…

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P.S. as for PQQ… there were some concerns that it might have unexpected toxicity in higher doses… the chocolate industries were privately researching the hell out of it b/c cacao is very high, relatively, in PQQ… if PQQ had panned out as hoped, they would have been sitting on a major new marketing claim… I think their silence is some indication that PQQ might be problematic, at least so far..