The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty

Here are some highlights from this hilarious 2023 book by Michael Wolff:

* Someone was gay, Murdoch was saying to a few friends — really, his wife’s friends — who had joined him at the patio table in St. Barts. Someone at Fox News, it seemed. But then with an abrupt segue it might seem that it was Ron DeSantis, who Murdoch was increasingly seeing as a powerful alternative to Trump, who was gay, or that someone was accusing the Florida governor of being gay. Someone at Fox — possibly Tucker Carlson — was saying that Trump was saying that DeSantis was gay. The connections here, even making a supreme effort to follow the low voice and interior mumble, were not necessarily clear.
“Rupert, why are you such a homophobe?” his wife interjected with something more than annoyance. Then she directly accused him: “You’re such a homophobe.” Then to her friends: “He’s such an old man.”

* Despite having alienated half the nation, Tucker was an adroit politician. His varied circle included the casino billionaire Steve Wynn, the actress and Harvey Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan, the former New Yorker editor and chattering class doyenne Tina Brown, and the Nevada brothel owner Dennis Hof — at whose establishment he lost his virginity at the age of fourteen (taken there, along with his brother, by the family nanny at his father’s direction) and at whose funeral he delivered the eulogy (along with porn star Ron Jeremy). It included, too, every journalist on the hunt for Trump gossip, which Carlson was almost always willing to supply with verve and finely calculated indiscretion. He was liked by almost everyone who had spent time with him. Carlson had devoted great effort to his relationship with the mogul son. Over the resentment of Fox managers, he had come to report directly to the largely absent CEO, meaning, in effect, he had no day – to – day boss and had achieved carte blanche to do with his show what he wanted.

* But for Carlson, sitting with boss and friend in the warm Boca Grande night, the breeze coming off the Gulf, there was another equally obvious side to this. If James did succeed, Carlson’s transformative, cometlike success, would abruptly, and ignominiously, end. That had always been part of the strange alchemy of Fox News. It made you — gave you a singular name: Tucker, Hannity, O’Reilly, Megyn — but somehow did not give you a star’s independent life. Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Paula Zahn, Fox superstars, had tried to go somewhere else and quickly faded away. It was a fate that weighed heavily on Carlson — that, in the blink of an eye, he might not be the second – most – famous and – hated person in the country.
His only alternative might be … to run for president.

* But Hemmer was probably gay — at least Ailes thought he was gay.

* [Roger Ailes thought Lachlan and James Murdoch were gay.]

* The Murdochs hated Hannity. Murdoch was an elitist.

* Laura Ingraham, staggering, reeling, her actual drunkenness a superb rendition of exaggerated drunkenness, latched onto Hannity’s sleeve, imploring: “I needja help, Sean, needja help. Needja plane. You gotta plane, doncha? A plaannne.”
Hannity hardly missed a beat, not hesitating, plowing forward, practically dragging her along until he pulled free, and continuing his commentary: “God, gross, her head in the john. Oh, man. These planes are too small for that!”

* Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, was largely barred from instructing or even talking to the network’s leading prime – time anchors and major moneymakers, Carlson and Hannity — what could she tell them, after all, that their ratings did not already say? It was Scott’s management mantra: don’t fix what isn’t broken. Truly, what else could you say in the face of all that cash flow?

* In the variegated ecosystem of Fox misogyny, Ingraham was derided as a hopeless drunk, a bad drunk, a puke – spewing drunk (Hannity’s account of barring her from his plane had gone far and wide). And, too, that she had thrown herself, drunk or not, at every man in the conservative movement — this since her undergraduate years at Dartmouth, that particular hotbed of conservatism, in the 1980s, where she had first made her reputation. And yet never sealed the deal. (In a story that has long haunted her, she used a garden hose to flood the basement of a boyfriend who jilted her.) She had three adopted children now. She was, in the telling of many men at Fox and throughout a socially unreconstructed conservative movement, gross, pathetic, drunk, and a skank — cue the huge peal of laughter.

* Every on – air woman at Fox was selected for the feminine role she could fill. Ailes was very precise about who he was casting and for what role. Beyond that each woman needed to be not just white, but not ethnic — not to look Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Greek, or too far from an Anglo – Saxon, Irish, Nordic standard — well – proportioned, long – legged, usually blond and in a hair style that said somewhere other than New York, and generally, to Ailes’s specification, “a former beauty pageant type.”
Each needed to have a more particular sexual – role function. The girl next door. The vixen. The disciplinarian. It was casting.
Perhaps most importantly, all had to rise to what Ailes called “the American blow – job test.” This was a homegrown Ailes theory, which he was pleased to frequently expand upon, about every man’s evaluation of whether or not a woman would give head and with what verve and style (one of his favorite formulations: “To get ahead, you have to give some head”).

…This was part of his belief that his particular news specialty was picking the talent. “News is a variety show,” he offered, harkening back to that favorite form of television programming from the 1960s. “It’s sexy girls and outrageous men. It has to be clear what role everybody is playing — everybody needs to play broad, big, to character. Don’t try to be subtle. This is America.”

* “The look of cable news,” at the time when he launched Fox News in 1996, “was for somebody else. It was classroom stuff. I wanted Fox to look more like daytime television — or like daytime television used to look,” he explained years later. Stubbornly unmindful of the new requirements for how to discuss gender in American culture, he went on, “So the women were important. Their job was to be familiar to other women in a nonthreatening way and yet still to have men want to fuck them — accomplishing both of those things was the vital part. Fox women are not yuppie women or aspirational women or professional women — they’re television women. Game show girls. They come out of the American imagination. Television put them there.”

* “You know, I am not anti – Semitic, and I am not anti – Black, that’s a complete misunderstanding of what I am,” [Tucker] would explain this side of the edge of irony. “I am anti – Catholic.”

…his atavism was a purer kind than that of Fox or Trump. His reached back further, recalling an even more absolute America. The tumble into a diverse, immigrant society began with the Catholics. Yes, take this fight back to the 1920s, when the sides were clear. The great mishmash in which anyone who even on occasion visited a church was broadly subsumed into being a “Christian,” as though this was an uncomplicated designation, was very much, for Carlson, ewww thinking.
This was also taking the fight quite specifically and personally to Fox. While Ailes might have pity – hired Carlson, he was also straightforward in telling him that his future was limited at Fox — not just because he was a conservative who liberals could like instead of inspiring the reflexive hatred on which Fox thrived, but because, simply, he wasn’t Irish Catholic.

* Carlson’s snobbish Protestant conservatism, once the identity of the entire conservative establishment, had been upended by Ailes’s protean right – wing Irish Catholic garrulousness. (Ailes had the furor of a convert — his own moral lapses had been balanced by acceding to his wife, Beth’s, dedicated Catholicism, her uncle the priest often in residence in their guest room.) Fox and Ailes had helped unite Catholics and evangelicals in their crusade against abortion into a shorthand undifferentiated “Christianity.” Carlson was sniffy toward both down – market versions of Christian faith.

* Murdoch, not unlike Carlson, saw the world in ethnicities far more nuanced than the modern brown – white divides. In their world, there was a whole range of white distinctions involving ever finer meaning and standing.

* Liz [Murdoch] went to Vassar, then at the forefront of becoming an unconstrained gay campus (years later Murdoch would still be grumbling about having to pay for a “poofter” school), and emerged in 1990 living with a Black man, Elkin Pianim, the son of a Ghanaian businessman and white Dutch mother, and intending to marry him.

* And then, while pregnant with her and her husband’s second child, she ran off with another man [Matthew Freud].

* Murdoch was increasingly agitated by reports about Carlson’s possible presidential ambition — and the presumption of it. Whatever he might believe about politics, he thought politicians should be politicians.

* Carlson’s opening page is always the sorry state of the nation. For an outwardly jovial person, his is an unrelenting bleak vision, even a dystopian one. There was no happiness in the American soul, neither liberal ones nor conservative ones, he said, beginning to work himself up in the coffee shop. There was psychic misery everywhere. There were no possibilities of fulfillment or contentment because the culture had delegitimized all those things that had once brought fulfillment and contentment. There was a collapse of morality. A topline point that might appeal to the Christian right. But what he specifically meant was honesty, and personal courage, and individual ethos (that is, not sexual or religious propriety) — not too dissimilar from the Ayn Rand – ish right – wing line. But on top of this was a catchall of moral compasses that included novels, poetry, art, Hunter Thompson — this is where you found truth (his wife, he noted, was a great reader). Along with truth, beauty was the issue here. Beauty had been lost — sacrificed. He had always refused to take his children to Disney World, not because, in the manner of Ron DeSantis, it had increasingly liberal values, but because it was … ugly. Disgusting. Disconnected from nature. Plastic. (Of course, Disney’s LGBTQ – positive stand was another break from nature.) His villains were not so much atheists and liberals, but bureaucrats, apparatchiks, the cogs in the machine, and the collaborators with it. That is to say, the establishment: most politicians, corporate anything, the academy, the New York Times , the networks, and even, yes, the Murdochs. The problem with all the above was not their views or politics, but that they were inherently corrupt. Dishonest, unprincipled, bent, with an allegiance to no one and nothing except the expedient and themselves. They stood for nothing. Weak, lily – livered, gutless, craven, grotesque.

* Anyway, this all set the scene and cleared the way, of course, for Tucker himself — the last honest man standing.

* You see, the issue wasn’t merely abortion. It was so much beyond that — meaning he could skip over the prosaic debate and therefore, he, a relativist not to mention wan Episcopalian, avoid the absolutist demands of the argument. No, the true issue was … corporations . (He could easily snatch that liberal issue!) It was the insidious corporate state, with its shadowy means and motives and intentions, that wanted abortions, that advocated such ugliness, that could accept such soul – killing solutions — such final solutions. Corporations were trying to sell lives of anomie, loneliness, lack of meaning, torpor, conformity, Stepfordism — hence, abortion.
Abortion, a life without family, lives without the stability of true roles and true identities — to be precluded from calling a woman a woman! — was all a terrible break with … nature . And, indeed — of course! — it was the liberals, the bureaucrats, the corporate interests, modernity itself that had broken us from our vital connection to all things nurturing and good. The Democrats, and their corporate allies, were making a case against having children (not, mind you, a case about when life begins, or women’s rights, or bodily autonomy), “making a case for devoting your life to some soulless multinational corporation,” making a case against fulfillment and human destiny. “When I hear people say abortion is the most important right we have, I ask myself what are they really saying?” (He swallows here, “I am a pro – lifer just to be completely clear,” because it is not necessarily clear, and rushes on.) “We can debate the issue, and what limits should be put on it” — as though acknowledging at the very least a middle ground, otherwise anathema to most of the people here — “but that’s not really the issue.” He pivots: “We need to take three steps back and ask what they are really saying. The corporations — Citibank, Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods — these huge companies that are affirmatively promoting abortions — are really saying, ‘it is more important to serve us than to have a family. You’ll be happier as you rise within our company than you would be by having your own children.’”
And nobody among the two thousand Family Leadership Summit attendees seemed to be scratching their heads. Nobody seemed to be aware that this was a bit of bait and switch on their most fundamental issue. That Carlson was expressly not arguing about murdering babies but, rather, was confirming that there was a choice that you could make — family or career — and arguing that he thought family was a better choice. Such was the power of the rhetorician. Everybody was rapt. His story was simply more interesting, more embracing, more modern — and, yes, smarter — than the street soldiers of the pro – life movement and their political yes – men. (Of course, everybody here might leave this hall and ten minutes later say, hey, whatever happened to the bloody cut – up fetus.)
And Ukraine. But the issue was not Ukraine, no way, that was just pure sideshow — the issue was … social media and its manipulation of what was important, urgent, and true . (“Twitter isn’t real. It’s the domain of super unhappy people with empty personal lives and creepy political agendas.”) He absolved himself of any allegiance to Vladimir Putin (“despite what you may have heard”) and instead made his position a resistance to the false flags of social media and its pernicious and creepy hold over the political system and indeed daily life. Ukraine, he declared, in his personal estimation, was on the top of no American’s list of the most important issues facing them. Hence … to resist the rush to support and arm Ukraine was to resist the evils of social media that had put Ukraine on the top of that list. (No head – scratching evident.)
Here was the rhetorical strategy. You might think the issue is this, but in that you have been misled — by politicians, by social media, by corporations, by special interests — and the true story is really this , so much more important, and dramatic, and meaningful, and threatening, and represented by Carlson. And he veered: “The rising price of fossil fuel is not an inconvenience, it is the whole story … Cheap energy, cheap fossil fuel, make the difference between living in the Central African Republic and Des Moines.… If you were to isolate the single largest factor contributing to prosperity, life expectancy, politically placid systems, it would be cheap fossil fuels … Gasoline is autonomy. I get my truck and drive anywhere I want. It’s freedom…

Every issue was elevated to metaphor. If the usual politician’s strategy — indeed, a middle of the road politician — was to avoid commitment, and to preserve wiggle room, with a cotton – mouthed, policy – oriented, as opaque as possible response, Carlson had found a much defter, more enticing way. You made the human condition your true issue and then threw everything into a unified field theory of happiness and unhappiness, of righteousness and corruption.
It seemed startlingly likely that his source material, his ur – text, was from Norman Mailer, of whom Carlson was an avid fan, and who in the 1950s and 1960s, at his most soaring moments of drug and alcohol inspiration, bundled technology, bureaucracy, corporations, the break from nature, the threat to masculinity, and rotten architecture (“bad men make bad buildings, and bad buildings make bad men”) into the prime cause of cancer and left – wing worldview. Indeed, there were many counterintuitive connections between Carlson and the literature of the 1960s — Mailer, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, and of course J. D. Salinger. Carlson might very well, in his prep – school dorm room in the 1980s, found himself in a heady weekend transformed by these writers.
The fact that he was now serving this 1960s lefty, drug and psychiatric culture point of view to the Iowa Christians was both topsy – turvy and for Carlson part of the logic of how far liberal America had spun away from the good. These were all writers whose dubious status, if not formal cancellation, among liberals now, only supported — at least in Carlson’s own mind — his detestation of the modern left and its snobberies, hypocrisies, and certainties. It was, too, it was possible to suspect, on Carlson’s part his own private joke.
Or truly messianic.

* So why would he want to be president?
Because everybody does. That is, every deeply ambitious man (yes, man), still of a certain general mode and vanity and generation, drawn to the promises and interactions of power, impatient with everyone else’s claims that they might know the answers and be better at being president.
Still. Carlson also thought you needed to be “called.” And he was still waiting for the voice to be absolutely clear.
At the same time, he acknowledged that Trump’s 2016 calling — idle gesture, business opportunity, branding exercise, just the obvious contrast to everyone else — changed the spiritual nature of this. Politics and media were the same job, the same life. Running for president was no different than being on television — votes, with only a slight critical adjustment, were the same as ratings. If the Democrats yet maintained some treacly pretense about political process and civil society, the Republicans — part of their new character trait — had wholly thrown pretense away. It was all performance; it was all media — it was all attention.
Carlson had saved his career and reinvented himself as often as anyone in television. If Murdoch, with his last breath, was trying to make Fox his own political weapon (distinct from the political weapon it had become and for which he was blamed), waging an irritating battle for yesterday’s Republican politics; if he was going to die anyway, leaving the network torn between his children; if cable television was itself a dying animal; then the fifty – three – year – old Carlson needed his next move.
Ben Shapiro’s $100 million – plus enterprise was a model; so was Steve Bannon’s War Room ; and Megyn Kelly, Carlson had heard, was pulling down impressive sums from her deal with Sirius Radio. But, of course, there was nothing here remotely on the level of what Fox prime time got you.
So, the question was not if you wanted to be president, but what could be gained by running for president? You became a star because you had the platform and the canny or shameless wherewithal to focus attention on yourself. If you were a star who ran for president, cannily and shamelessly using the world’s largest public platform, might you not make yourself into the largest star ever?
It was a platform world.

Bud: “I always believed that Desantis is a closeted homosexual. The facial expressions, the boots, the snarkiness.”

Posted in Fox, Tucker Carlson | Comments Off on The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty

Rape as a weapon of war in the Arab-Israeli conflict (11-26-23)

01:00 My Fourth Day On Adderall, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153449
08:00 Hamas releases 40 hostages
19:30 Who is Defeated in Gaza: Israel or Hamas?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXpg-uwq-vs
50:00 Is The West An Unreliable Ally?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153461
59:00 Rape & The Arab-Israeli Conflict, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153468
1:04:40 Tucker Carlson talks to Glenn Greenwald about free speech, conservatives, Israel, Ukraine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kheIWQ0Qg0
1:19:00 Israel, Hamas, and the Laws of War, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/israel-hamas-and-the-laws-of-war/
1:29:45 Polls show Joe Biden losing to Donald Trump
1:35:00 Israel’s Evacuation Orders, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/israels-evacuation-orders/
1:42:00 The Daily Reprieve, https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/pb-av7bh-1bade2/The+Daily+Reprieve
1:43:00 Shim F – ”It Works if You Work It”, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shim-f-it-works-if-you-work-it/id1247514851?i=1000634187348
1:49:00 Elliott Blatt calls in about medication, nicotine gum
2:10:00 Elliott on psychoactive mushrooms
2:33:00 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
2:34:00 Dooovid talks about his failure as a Jew, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5C0YOK9OCY
2:45:00 Dooovid’s appearance with Mario Nawfal, https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal
2:54:00 CNN: Suspect in killing of Detroit synagogue leader Samantha Woll is released from custody, lawyer says, https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/08/us/samantha-woll-killing-suspect-arrested/index.html
2:58:00 Transmigration of Souls, Neuroscience, Metaphysics, Tensor Fields; Church of Entropy & Kevin McCairn, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwIjaFYOsNI
2:59:00 Week in Review 11-12-2023 My Failures as a Jew 2, Zoubida, Christian, Multiple Truth Hypothesis, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AALkjrFx4dE
3:06:00 Creating your own online community vs participating in real life Orthodox Judaism

Posted in ADHD, America, Israel | Comments Off on Rape as a weapon of war in the Arab-Israeli conflict (11-26-23)

Rape & The Arab-Israeli Conflict

One of the good things I’ve repeatedly heard about Israel’s armed forces is that they rarely rape, but according to this Washington Post article, Palestinians have rarely raped Israelis (until the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel).

Some forces in the Middle East, including those of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State, have used systematic rape as a weapon. But many armed groups consider the act taboo, even in war. The practice has never been used systematically in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to experts.

Many pundits routinely proclaim the non-rapey nature of the IDF but I don’t recall any of them noting that Palestinians have largely abstained from this behavior as well in their battle against Israel.

When I mention this to my Zionist friends (and I consider myself a Zionist), they tend to angrily deny it.

Sam Vaknin claims that the Hamas fighters who attacked Israel October 7 were disciplined, and that the rapes were committed by regular Gazans.

My intuition says that higher IQ people are more capable of empathy and therefore are less likely to rape than lower IQ people.

Posted in Israel, Rape | Comments Off on Rape & The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Is The West An Unreliable Ally?

I’m noticing this trope from many pundits — that America and the West are not stalwart allies.

Is anyone a stalwart ally? I fail to see how the West is less reliable than other entities.

Betrayal is inevitable in all relationships, including international ones between states. As soon as you form any connection, you generate fantasies about the other party’s priorities which will inevitably be dashed. It is built into the human condition to imagine that the world and other people and ourselves are more stable than we really are. To reduce our anxiety, we believe things that are not true (such as that there is an essential nature to ourselves and others, a true self, while in reality we are all different in different circumstances and often the situation will have more influence on our behavior than our personality). For example, we will tend to explain away our friends and our own bad behavior as not truly reflective of who we are. We will be quick to make excuses for ourselves and other to avoid changing our minds.

Betrayal is simply the hyperbolic term we give to others having different priorities than what we expected. If your best friend sleep with your wife, you may well call it a betrayal of your friendship, but for your friend, he was simply placing his relationship with your wife at a higher level of importance than his relationship with you. His priorities were different from what you expected.

If you knock yourself out at work and do the work of three men, and then you get fired because in your zeal for productivity you didn’t cross all the Ts and dot all the Is, you might be feel betrayed by your boss, but all that has happened is your employer has different priorities from what you expected.

In the above video, Israeli Sam Vaknin says: “We are in the throes of a global reordering of powers similar to the period of the 1950s and 1960s when the US tried to contain both the USSR and communist China. Now the United States is a much diminished and spent force. It is polarized. It is paralyzed. It’s democracy is threatened from within. It doesn’t even have a regular budget, only stopgap ones. The USA can scarcely provide to more than two allies or proxies at any given time. NATO is under-funded and under-trained. As Ukraine and Israel will find out soon, the West is not a reliable or long-term ally. The axis of resistance (Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Hamas) is becoming aware that the West is not what it used to be. It is a facade, a potemkin power.”

Many pundits have noted diminishing American support for Ukraine and Israel. If true, that is not an indictment of the fickleness of America. It is simply an acknowledgment of reality — that the previous level of American support for these countries was not aligned with America’s best interests.

When America withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in August of 2021, it looked bad, but it was in America’s best interests. There are many times in life when it is best to leave something in a shambolic way than to hang around to try to preserve your dignity. America’s influence does not ultimately depend upon such appearances. Rather, it springs from America’s military and economic might.

So can you depend on America? Yes, if your interests and America’s interests are aligned.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Is The West An Unreliable Ally?

My Fourth Day On Adderall

Almost three weeks ago, I was diagnosed by a doctor with ADHD. I’d thought about getting this checked out for about 15 years after learning from a sex addiction counselor that every one of her clients had ADHD.

I only did something about my problem when people I love plead with me to get this examined.

On Thursday, Thanksgiving, I began taking my prescribed medication – two 5mg pills a day of Adderall. I’m now on day four of this new experience.

According to Wikipedia:

Adderall is generally well-tolerated and effective in treating symptoms of ADHD and narcolepsy. At therapeutic doses, Adderall causes emotional and cognitive effects such as euphoria, change in sex drive, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control. At these doses, it induces physical effects such as a faster reaction time, fatigue resistance, and increased muscle strength. In contrast, much larger doses of Adderall can impair cognitive control, cause rapid muscle breakdown, provoke panic attacks, or induce a psychosis (e.g., paranoia, delusions, hallucinations). The side effects of Adderall vary widely among individuals, but most commonly include insomnia, dry mouth, loss of appetite, and weight loss. The risk of developing an addiction or dependence is insignificant when Adderall is used as prescribed at fairly low daily doses, such as those used for treating ADHD; however, the routine use of Adderall in larger daily doses poses a significant risk of addiction or dependence due to the pronounced reinforcing effects that are present at high doses. Recreational doses of amphetamine are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious adverse effects.

Before I took my first pill, I was warned by friends about Adderall’s dangers such as addiction and loss of sleep. Those people in my life with the most negative views of Adderall were generally addictive personalities and single (and who had abused Adderall in the past and thus got into trouble with it), and hence on the margins of life, while those most supportive of my trying this medication were securely-attached and married, and hence in the middle of life.

My initial experience of Adderall was disappointing. I felt no surge of energy or productivity or euphoria. I felt medicated. I didn’t feel like myself. I lost no sleep, however, and felt no negative side-effects beyond that general medicated not-myself feeling.

The changes I’ve experienced with Adderall have been subtle. I notice myself cleaning more (I vacuumed my room for the first time in ten weeks) and taking care of routine tasks (such as ordering new jeans on Amazon and throwing away my old torn jeans as well as replacing fluorescent light bulbs that emitted a hum with no-hum non-fluorescent light bulbs) that I previously let slide.

I now notice that when I read, I have no desire to listen to music at the same time (which was my habit). I notice less impulsivity and a greater calm when dealing with mundane details.

I’ve spent my life blurting out inappropriate things and walking around with a fear that no matter how precious the relationships I enjoyed, I would inevitably damage them by saying the wrong things. Under the influence of Adderall, I don’t have that fear any more.

I may have caused more needless pain to people by this one trait of inappropriate speech than all my other traits put together, and this bad habit might well get cured by one simple pill.

I’ve spent my life finding it exceedingly difficult to focus on details that are not exciting. This has caused me to be compulsively careless, and to walk around with a fear that I will compulsively miss important details at any moment and thus hurt innocent people as well as myself. I don’t have this fear anymore.

In 12-step programs, we often say that there is no non-spiritual solution to a spiritual problem. At the same time, there may be all sorts of non-spiritual problems such as ADHD to which there is no spiritual solution.

We live in a post-modern world where no single narrative is sufficient to make life cohere. Spirituality is not enough. Religion is not enough. Medicine and psychology are not enough. We need multiple narratives and complex hero systems.

If you have an emotional addiction, you might want to get checked out for ADHD as well as get an overnight sleep test. It’s hard to improve your life when you are acting out and getting inadequate sleep.

I went on Modafinil in June of 2013 and it mildly helped me with my ADHD symptoms (modafinil is not prescribed for ADHD but for wakefulness). I’ve now quit Modafinil to try Adderall as my sole medication.

I’d love to get a more dramatic boost to my life by trying a higher dose of Adderall but I’m grateful to miss the negative side-effects with this low 10mg a day dose. I might hang out here a while. Excitement can wait.

Bernard: “How can you really appreciate the good days, good health, good company without the bad days, bad health, bad company, etc? You take things for granted if you don’t get the bad experiences.”

No matter how much you improve your life, you will always have bad experiences, and you will always take things for granted. There is no magic pass for leaving the human condition.

I have no history with abusing prescription medication. For example, I never doubled-up on my prescribed modafinil. I don’t expect to start wrecking myself now.

Posted in ADHD | Comments Off on My Fourth Day On Adderall