Avoidant: How to Love (or Leave) a Dismissive Partner keeps chugging along, with translations into Chinese, Romanian, and Spanish due soon. Some new reviews on Amazon:
Author: Jeb Kinnison
Nessun Dorma: Insomnia and Sleep Aids
Most people experience less than satisfying sleep at least occasionally, but some sufferers go for years without relief. Not being able to fall asleep at the normal hour in a reasonable length of time is known as “sleep onset insomnia.” Older people especially may suffer from waking too soon or not getting enough deep sleep. Sleep is a complex neurochemical phenomenon, and a wide variety of different causes for poor sleep make it hard to diagnose and relieve.
What’s often called sleep hygiene is a collection of good practices and habits that tend to lead to better sleep. Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine has a good list.
If you’re getting exercise and avoiding caffeine or alcohol late in the evening, you might still have problems. Chemical sleep inducers in the form of drugs and supplements can help get you to sleep or keep you asleep, but prescription medications like Ambien and Lunesta can have side-effects, cost a lot, and can be addictive. Many people have been hooked on them (and the drugs of past eras like tranquilizers and sedatives) for years, unable to stop without going through far worse withdrawal symptoms.
If your problem is getting to sleep, your body and mind may be revved up and out of synch with your natural sleep hours. Not engaging in eating, drinking, or stimulating activities for a few hours before normal bedtime can help. Some natural supplements — chemicals already found in your body or food that promote sleep — work for many people. A list:
Melatonin, one of the body’s primary sleep signalling chemicals, is continuously produced by the pineal gland, but destroyed by light hitting the eyes, so it is a driver of the sleep-wake cycle that lags exposure to light; it’s partly because exposure to light synchronizes your sleep cycle that staying up late with bright lighting can disturb it. Taking natural melatonin a few hours before normal bedtime reinforces the natural cycle somewhat, although there’s little evidence of it crossing the blood-brain barrier after absorption by the digestive system. Try sprinkling a bit of melatonin in powdered form under your tongue, perhaps by opening a commercial capsule like these. Melatonin, like some other drugs and vitamins, can be absorbed somewhat by the blood-vessel-rich skin under the tongue — this is called sublingual administration. Melatonin successfully reduces time-to-sleep and insomnia for most people, though it is less effective at keeping you asleep. If you’re already getting up to go to the bathroom at 3 AM, though, you can do another sublingual dose of melatonin and sleep a few more hours successfully.
5-HTP or its precursor L-Tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid component of the proteins in many meats, eggs, and dairy products, and is commonly believed to create the sleepiness after a big Thanksgiving turkey dinner — though turkey meat has no more L-Tryptophan than most other meats. It is also usually credited for the “glass of milk at bedtime” method for assisting sleep. After a Japanese manufacturer of L-Tryptophan produced contaminated batches in 1989, injuring thousands and killing as many as 37 people, L-Tryptophan was banned by the FDA in the US. These restrictions were loosened and finally lifted completely in 2005. As a result of that incident, though, more people still take 5-HTP, which is a metabolite of L-Tryptophan and his similar effects. A few hundred mg of either does tend to produce faster and deeper sleep in most people, and like melatonin thet are both safe and not habit-forming.
Valerian Root is somewhat less harmless. An old herbal standby, this herb in capsule form is used by millions as a sleep aid. While it does work, it can’t be recommended for any but the shortest-term use because it is a mild liver poison — long-term use damages liver function. Other herbal teas like chamomile also have some sedative effects without any obvious toxicities.
GABA is another amino acid and neurotransmitter which doesn’t seem to cross the blood-brain barrier, yet has some obvious effects, producing calm and deeper sleep and perhaps aiding production of growth hormone in older body builders who take it. I take a gram every night before bed and it seems to deepen sleep. It also has some side-effects reminiscent of the niacin flush for some, so be careful and experiment with small doses before trying more. A reliable low-cost provider of GABA powder which can be mixed into any drink is here. Capsules tend to provide less effective dosages.
Doxylamine succinate is an old standby which works fairly well and is cheap and safe as a sleep aid: as an antihistamine, it is obsolete because its side-effect of drowsiness is intolerable during the day. But while it’s unwise to take any drug regularly unless you really need to, it’s at least not addictive and is easy to buy OTC: as this Kirkland-label product from Costco, for example.
Everyone’s sleep problem is different, and with age staying asleep becomes the most common problem. Natural substances can help but good sleep hygiene should be tried first.
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations
[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
More reading on other topics:
Regulation Strangling Innovation: Planes, Trains, and Hyperloop
Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Child Welfare Ideas: Every Child Gets a Government Guardian!
“Income Inequality” Propaganda is Just Disguised Materialism
The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):
Fear is the Mindkiller
Mirror Neurons and Irene Gallo
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Selective Outrage
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
“Tomorrowland”: Tragic Misfire
Review Roundup: Avoidant, Bad Boyfriends
While I’ve been working on other projects, more reviews came in for Avoidant: How to Love (or Leave) a Dismissive Partner. There’s also been some activity on my older book, Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner. As usual, readers are invited to take questions and concerns to the Jeb Kinnison Attachment Type Forum to discuss attachment issues and their own special situations.
Here I’ll recap the better reviews, leaving out the obvious axe-grinding ones. It’s not uncommon for a reviewer to react negatively for personal reasons and then take it out on the book. Those reviews are self-identifying.
For Avoidant:
5.0 out of 5 stars – Five Stars
By Kate on January 21, 2017
Excellent read! Very informative.5.0 out of 5 stars – Great to read with your partner
By J Harrison on January 18, 2017
Incredibly helpful. Great to read with your partner, to help guide those difficult conversations.5.0 out of 5 stars – Along with Wired For Love and Marriage Rebranded
By room7609 on January 9, 2017
If you’re reading this then I know you can relate. This book, along with Wired For Love and Marriage Rebranded, saved me and my marriage. Read all three and ask your spouse to do the same. You’re welcome. 😉5.0 out of 5 stars – WOW
By M. M. Jackson VINE VOICE on December 25, 2016
Fantastic, fantastic book. Very therapeutic and helpful. A window into the soul of these tormented people who, knowingly or not, manage to so thoroughly torment. I’ve read a few treatments of the subject, this has been the best by far yet. Expands upon his “Bad Boyfriends” book (which also applies to girlfriends, in my case) and in fact pretty much includes a lot of the same material, which you will find expanded here. Between the two, buy this one.
For Bad Boyfriends:
5.0 out of 5 stars – Excellent Primer on Attachment in Relationships
By stephen jensen on January 23, 2017
I’ve been reading a lot on attachment theory lately and so far this has been the best summary of the theory and its implications on relationships. It is focused, dense with insight, and unflinching. Highly recommended. Don’t let the primacy of “Boyfriend” in the title mislead you- its intended audience is everyone.5.0 out of 5 stars – Five Stars
By S. Boydon on January 1, 2017
This is worth buying because it’s hands-on with lots of material.5.0 out of 5 stars – I would recommend this book.
By Stephanie P. on December 27, 2016
Well written and correlates to other scholarly or reliable books on attachment theory. My daughter is a childhood and adolescent development major so the links between infancy to dating partners made sense when discussing portions of this book with her as well. The percentages of healthy attachment style adults over 40 was a bit depressing, yet makes me feel better about how hard it’s been to find a good partner after leaving a long term marriage. It’s not that my online profile needs help, it’s truly rough out there.5.0 out of 5 stars – A book like Kinnison’s reminds me that there are many ways to …
By Catherine Coan on September 24, 2016
Attachment theory can seem limited — avoidant, anxious, secure, I get it! — but it’s not. A book like Kinnison’s reminds me that there are many ways to know a thing. In this case, at the level of love relationships, delving deep. Excellent!2.0 out of 5 stars- There are much better books focusing on men’s relationship issues
By L. A. Duranon on October 9, 2016
This book is NOT for men. Despite the parenthetical attempt to make this non-gender-specific in its subtitle, this book is really geared toward women’s relationships. If you are a man, don’t buy this book. There are much better books focusing on men’s relationship issues.
On that last review, I’m guessing the reviewer finds it disappointing that I see the attachment types as largely independent of gender — the sexes differ on average, and in particular avoidant and preoccupied traits are reinforced by sex role stereotypes, but there’s no special “men’s point of view” about relationships. I have run into lots of men whose wives are dismissive and rebuff their attempts at intimacy, inverting the usual stereotype. Dismissive women and preoccupied men are more likely to have developed camouflage to hide their true feelings, since “society” is more likely to disapprove of the needy male and the intimacy-avoidant female.
Interstate Commerce: Trade Barriers Between States
Ilya Somin has a post at Volokh/WaPo about “foot voting” (people choosing to move to jurisdictions that have local governments that reflect their values or offer economic opportunities lacking in their current home areas.)
One phenomenon often discussed is migrants bringing their voting habits with them and voting into place local governments that duplicate the conditions in, say. California (they are said to “Californicate” the new area.) People who move because of economic opportunities may have no understanding that the existence of the better job opportunities and lower costs of living in the new place owes much to more enlightened, less business-suppressing tax and regulation in the new location. Since they never realized those business-unfriendly California laws were suppressing local opportunities that might have kept them there, they don’t modify the type of politicians they support and so begin the process of bringing Progressive political machines and micromanagement to their new homes.
Outside observers look a country like India and wonder why reform of internal trade barriers, which are relics of the pre-colonial states, are widely understood to be prosperity-enhancing, but progresses very slowly if at all. Products made in one Indian state can’t be sold to a customer in another without paying additional taxes or being blocked by local content regulations.
In the US, regulation of interstate commerce was intentionally made a Federal matter, making the US a free trade area. This aided in creating the world’s largest internal free market and allowed local industries to grow up specializing in one manufacturing segment to serve a national market — regions specialized in furniture, shoes, textiles, steel, and so on, aided by economies of scale and able to take advantage of local resources that gave them a national advantage. If each state had been able to put tariffs on incoming products or block shipments from other states by regulation, the nation’s growth would have been stunted.
But services and professions are still licensed by states and even smaller units. To braid hair or do massage in a town can require licenses from both state and local authorities, with professional guilds using such licensing to block competition. This prevents poor entrepreneurs from finding work providing services and increases costs of those services for poor consumers, all in the name of consumer protection.
At the higher end, doctors are cartelized and regulated by states as well as the Federal government, which runs the subsidies and residency schemes that keep production of new physicians expensive and restricted. Healthcare services that could easily be handled by less expensive technologists are often required to be provided only under a licensed doctor’s supervision, pumping up the incomes for even the worst doctors (who may use their credential to take jobs in prison or institutional settings where their record of incompetence is ignored because their license is valid.)
New technology that might allow low-cost Internet doctoring by out-of-state or even out-of-country physicians is blocked in most states. Concern for consumer health is always cited as the reason, even when poor consumers can’t afford to seek any face-to-face care for their health issues. It is apparently better to go untreated than to allow the poor to buy “good enough” services on the Internet. The inability of above-board, higher-quality companies to run such remote doctoring systems leaves the field open to bootleg quacks.
So even the US is not truly a free trade zone, since many services (cable TV, real estate, medicine, restaurants, schools) are heavily regulated by state and local governments, and outsiders trying to break in face high barriers to entry. Big companies can overcome the need to manage 50 or more different regulatory regimes, but smaller chains just starting out have to choose wisely and only expand in areas where the regulatory environment is more supportive.
Not surprisingly, the result is vigorous competition and lower prices in less regulated areas, and sluggish investment and higher prices in more-regulated areas.
It’s clear that Federalism (state and local control) applied to service regulations is costing the economy growth and raising prices in an era where barriers to travel and communication have come down. Medical, teaching, and real estate professionals should not have to undergo licensing in every jurisdiction where they might practice. Cities and towns should not be able to extract concessions from a monopoly cable TV-Internet provider which result in high prices and no local competition.
Perhaps we should thank those Progressives who battered the Supreme Court into submission and started making the case that every local economic decision could be regulated by the Feds, since even the tiniest decision locally has some effect on the national market, no matter how minuscule.
The Progressives opened the way, so now it would be constitutional to overrule all local and state licensing of professionals, insurance companies, and other services, which could now be much more competitive in a true free national market. So if they wanted to, Congress could rule all medical and communications services licensed in one jurisdiction to be sellable in others. nationwide insurance policies would provide travel flexibility and economies of scale, and these companies could provide services via Skype examination that would undercut local doctor and hospital cartels. Sick people in the Bronx projects could be “seen” and prescribed treatment and medication from doctors in low-cost South Dakota, say. “Oh, no!” cry the Progressives, “They could be quacks!” And the products sold in New York from manufacturers in South Dakota, Michigan, or even China could be fakes or defective. Yet we tolerate the free trade of goods because it is in the long run best for everyone, and the wholesalers and retailers of goods have an interest in keeping bad products out of their systems. And now that low-skilled manufacturing jobs are mostly outside the US, isn’t it interesting that professions and industries that benefit from barriers to trade in services — lawyers, doctors, communications giants, drug companies, public schools — resist any effort to open themselves up to competition.
In “Death by HR” I discussed one remedy — a “Freedom of Contract” Amendment to the Constitution to clarify the Common Law right of adults to contract with each other and service providers in any way they choose. If I choose to buy a product from a Chinese company, I deal with the risk and consequences. I should be allowed to buy services from anywhere I want — to have my skin lesions imaged to a doctor in Florida, to have the treatment done by medications from a pharmacy in Oregon, to have a local contractor handle any hands-on services, and so on. The key problem with many necessary services today is regulation and a resulting lack of low-cost options. This is especially true in medicine, which Obamacare only made worse by restricting practical treatment options to small geographic regions. The solution is radical deregulation.
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
More reading:
A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work
Tom Woods Commenter Dialog: “Death by HR”
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations]
The Tom Woods podcast on Death by HR is here, and on Youtube here.
On Tom Woods’ site, a commenter with a long career in HR had a number of criticisms of the interview, though he had not actually bothered to read the book — the HR version of “skim until offended,” jumping to conclusions about the content of the book and spending more time criticizing and reacting than looking deeper. But he had a lot of interesting things to say about his career, apparently working in mostly smaller and poorly-managed companies where managers frequently used their position to act arbitrarily based on ethnic, racial, or sexual prejudices, or put their own satisfaction ahead of company goals.
The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
More reading:
A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work
The Tom Woods Show, Episode 817: “Death by HR”
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations]
The Tom Woods podcast on Death by HR is here, and on Youtube here. We ran overtime a bit, but aside from editing out some lapses and timechecks, they ran almost all of our discussion.
I invented a new term, “reverse regulatory capture,” to describe how HR culture has generally come to accept the attitudes of the progressive regulators and labor lawyers toward much of their work. One of my editors told me when I used “Stockholm Syndrome” to describe the phenomenon that many readers would not understand what that term meant — here’s an explanation. Often used when talking about Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 who adopted the revolutionary name Tania and participated in bank robberies with them. Responding to someone who holds power over you by first pretending to adopt their values to avoid punishments, and eventually coming to truly believe them. HR has complied with government enforcement so long that its thinkers and educational programs have adopted the progressive values of the regulators.
I took his introductory comments as a blurb for the book:
“Interesting, cutting, incisive book about what’s really going on in HR departments in companies across the country.” — Tom Woods, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show
The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
More reading:
A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work
Death by HR: Audio Introduction
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,]
The Tom Woods podcast will be doing a segment on Death by HR tomorrow, and when they send me the link I’ll put it up here so my readers can listen. I wasn’t familiar with his extensive writings or his career, but it’s impressive as seen in his Wikipedia entry. His current web site is here, and his podcast show is popular — old episodes are here. He’s closely associated with Peter Schiff and has him on frequently as a guest, and he recently started the Contra Krugman podcast — which uses the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s partisan writings on economics and current affairs as a foil to discuss more realistic economic ideas.
I enjoyed our discussion and was gratified that he supports the book. I did a practice segment a few days ago that turned out well enough that I’m posting it as a good short introduction to me as the author and the ideas in the book. Tom’s interview segment will be 15 minutes or so, and directed to a few areas of interest, so the focus is different — there’s not too much overlap.
So enjoy and pass on the audio of Jeb Kinnison introducing “Death by HR.”
The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.
[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
More reading:
A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work