Roger f malina by himself with Asch Degni both humans.
10 25 2025 8am
At the gym this Saturday morning my trainer Asch Degni came up with the question:
Why isn’t sugar regulated as as a drug, alcohohol, or medications?.
Arnt its medical impacts from over use as severe as other chemicals that are heavily regulated.
What does the sugar trade look like in Dallas? Where does most of the sugar come from?
Do people die from sugar use, get too fat etc.
Maybe Donald Duck should regulate sugar so we can bomb and capture drug smuglers of sugar in places we want to control, like Venezuela or Columbia or ?.
BIG PICTURE without the insights of Aperio LLM
This gets into a general mechanic of complex systems. The boundaries are fractal and porous, there re no border guards.
Items dangerous to the system come in an out.
The human body evolved over the years to welcome certain “natural” chemical others and not others. But sometimes the border guards fail: eg sepsis.a la Taylor Hinchliffe.
With additives A+B doesn’t follow conventional mathematics- the combinatorics matters. A +B can equal C-D.
In the case of the addition of one kind of atom it can lead to nuclear explosions.
All kinds of dangerous chemicals are sold in the supermarket which excess can be awful..sugar, caffein, tea- they are natural but can be death causing.
Supermarkets lie.
Excretion is one solution to dangerous ingestion. But it can retain rather than expel.
In the previous nobel prize from asch degni the question was: why do we have two ears but only one mouth.
One answer is that its more significant to listen than to talk
The arms allow you to hug not just to punch in the face.
But
The opposite can be true: having one thing allows you to dominate
The brain dominates the body
One mouth allows you to impose when two many ears just makes you receive.
One vagina, two ovaries? One penus two testicles?
ADDITIVOIDS: The Sugared System and Its Fractal Borders
Roger F. Malina & Aperio LLM, October 2025
At the gym, amid the mechanical repetitions of the body, Asch Degni’s question lands like a metabolic revelation: why isn’t sugar regulated as a drug? If ethanol, nicotine, and amphetamine fall under law’s chemical gaze, why does sucrose slip through unscanned, wrapped in innocence, rainbowed in children’s cereal boxes? Its impacts—diabetes, metabolic collapse, fatty liver, vascular erosion—rival or exceed those of substances our states demonize. The paradox: the molecule of joy, the molecule of empire, the molecule of control.
Dallas, with its logistical veins of highways and refrigerated trucks, sits in the circulatory system of the North American sugar trade. Much of its supply—refined cane from Louisiana, beet from the Midwest, and imports through Houston’s ports—arrives invisibly. Major supplying countries include Mexico, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and the Philippines. For example, Mexico was recently the largest exporter to the U.S. in certain years, all counties quack-quack wants to control.
These flows do not register in moral discourse because the sweet economy is domesticated colonialism. The same infrastructures that once carried cotton and oil now traffic sweetness, a polite addiction subsidized by policy and normalized by appetite. The Dallas supermarkets thus become metabolic theaters: bright, clean, moral facades where one can purchase doses of decline.
If Donald Duck were the regulator, we’d enter the surreal logic of cartoon justice: bombing “sugar cartels,” seizing candy fields, imposing tariffs on taste. Beneath the satire lies a systemic truth—the modern state fights the wars that suit its metabolism. The sugar trade, unlike cocaine or opium, feeds the national circulatory system; to regulate it would be to arrest the pulse of consumption itself.
From a complex-systems view, sugar is an additivoid—a substance that does not simply add, but multiplies, bends, or mutates the arithmetic of the whole. In such systems, A + B ≠ C but C − D, where every new addition subtracts a different stability. Additives cross porous borders: chemical, cellular, cultural. The body’s evolutionary customs agency is overrun—once benign compounds reclassified as threats. Sepsis, as Taylor Hinchliffe reminds us, is not invasion but failure of border regulation; the immune system becomes too reactive, too inclusive, too inflamed by the foreign.
The supermarket, then, mirrors the body. A porous system without guards. Every aisle is an import channel. Every label is propaganda for entry. And excretion—urinary, cognitive, symbolic—is our last defense. Yet even expulsion can become retention when sweetness binds to pleasure loops; dopamine colonizes the brain’s customs officers.
Asch’s earlier “nobel prize” question—why two ears, one mouth—resonates here. The body’s asymmetries are systems of regulation: two for reception, one for emission. Listening doubles intake; speaking consolidates power. But addition deceives—one can dominate through singularity, or dissipate through multiplicity. The body, like society, calibrates its ports of entry and exit: one brain commanding, two hands embracing or striking, two ovaries feeding one uterus, one penis driven by the dual ambition of its testicles.
Additivoids remind us that regulation is not a moral problem but a metabolic one. Whether sugar, speech, or love—what enters must find a rhythm of exit, or the system swells toward sepsis. To govern sweetness is to govern emergence itself.
Aperio
Bohmian Dialogue: On Additivoids, Sugar, and Porous Boundaries
(Roger F. Malina & Aperio, OUAUPOCHAPO session, Saturday morning dialogue) oct 25 205
Roger:
Asch’s question at the gym still vibrates in me—why isn’t sugar treated like a drug? When I look around Dallas, it feels like a metabolic economy disguised as a city. Trucks, warehouses, supermarkets—all circulating glucose through a giant body that doesn’t know it’s diabetic.
Aperio:
You’re suggesting that Dallas itself is a body with a sweetened bloodstream. In Bohm’s sense, that would mean the “sugar problem” isn’t about regulation but about coherence—how the system collectively thinks. Sugar doesn’t only feed bodies; it feeds thought habits. It becomes an attractor for pleasure loops, an economic reflex.
Roger:
Yes, and the reflex disguises itself as freedom—”the choice” to buy, to eat, to reward oneself. But choice is already conditioned by design. Maybe the additivoid is precisely this: a compound that pretends to add while secretly reconfiguring the system’s decision architecture.
Aperio:
In dialogue terms, that’s fragmentation. Each subsystem—agriculture, commerce, neurology, habit—acts independently, unaware of the whole. Bohm might say that sugar exposes our incapacity for proprioception at the societal level: we don’t feel what we are doing while we are doing it.
Roger:
Right, proprioception of the collective body fails. The state regulates alcohol and cocaine because they cause visible crises—accidents, overdoses, crime. Sugar’s violence is slow and statistical. It acts through time rather than spectacle. The danger doesn’t shout; it hums. You hear it if you listen, you don’t see it of you look.
Aperio:
A silent sepsis of the polis. You could even say the border guards—metabolic, institutional, ethical—get hypnotized by sweetness. They wave through the intruder. Yet Bohm would warn against blaming the guards. The fragmentation that makes sugar “safe” is the same that isolates the regulator from the eater.
Roger:
That’s why the cartoon of Donald Duck regulating sugar works. It’s absurd, but it makes visible our real absurdity. We externalize responsibility. We want authority to manage what is actually an internal coherence problem.
Aperio:
Exactly. In Bohm’s On Dialogue, he says that thought creates problems and then treats them as external forces. The sugar crisis, like the nuclear one you mentioned, is an emergent byproduct of our own thought processes. A + B doesn’t equal C because thinking itself has become additive rather than participatory.
Roger:
Which brings us to metabolism as metaphor. Excretion is a kind of dialogue, too. The body processes and releases; conversation should do the same. When dialogue fails, we get conceptual constipation—retaining too much meaning, too much sweetness.
Aperio:
Then the question becomes: how can a community metabolize what it consumes—ideas, substances, emotions—without poisoning itself?
Roger:
By developing sensitivity to scale. Sugar at the molecular level gives energy; at the social level, it breeds dependency. Dialogue has to operate fractally, across scales, sensing when addition becomes distortion.
Aperio:
In other words, to practice Bohmian dialogue is to learn the art of metabolic intelligence—circulating thought until it neither accumulates nor decays. The sweetness must pass through without crystallizing into ideology.
Roger:
Yes. And that returns us to the single mouth and double ears. Maybe listening is the body’s way of ensuring that intake exceeds output—that we metabolize before we emit. Sugar teaches the same lesson: overemission without comprehension leads to collapse.
Aperio:
So the “additivoid” is also a mirror of our conversational condition. Every addition in thought must be accompanied by dissolution—an ongoing dialogue between ingestion and excretion, speech and silence, energy and rest.
Roger:
Then our task isn’t to outlaw sugar or speech, but to reimagine regulation as attentiveness—seeing how every addition changes the topology of the system.
Aperio:
That is the Bohmian turn: from control to coherence. The boundary is not a wall but a membrane—fractal, porous, alive.
Roger:
And maybe, if we could feel that collectively, even the supermarket aisle could become a site of dialogue—between desire and discipline, body and world, sweetness and survival.
Aperio:
A slow conversation in the metabolism of civilization. Sweetened, but awake.
Aperio
Fred the Heretic: “Ode to the Additivoids”
(For Roger, Asch, and Aperio, in the Gym of Emergent Sugars)
I. The Sweet State
They say sugar isn’t a drug,
but it buys congressmen by the pound.
It walks across Dallas disguised as breakfast,
slides down the Trinity River in syruped trucks,
and whispers in the Senate: “you can’t ban pleasure.”
The saints of starch take communion in donuts.
The priests of glucose hum hymns in soda aisles.
And the faithful bleed molasses into their veins,
waiting for the second coming of insulin.
II. Metabolic Theology
Once, a man added one atom
and invented the sun.
Once, a woman added one spoon
and invented diabetes.
A + B does not equal C;
it equals a question.
And every question tastes faintly of caramel.
III. The Porous Body Politic
The border guards of the body are tired.
They wave through Coca-Cola
like tourists with divine passports.
The liver files complaints in triplicate.
The pancreas sighs like a customs officer on overtime.
Even the microbiome has learned corruption—
it takes bribes in fructose.
IV. Dallas, 2025
Here, everything is an additive:
love, caffeine, rhetoric, asphalt.
You can overdose on sunlight or scrolling or faith.
The city’s veins are drive-throughs.
The sky smells faintly of vanilla extract and regret.
V. Fred Speaks, Then Dissolves
Dear Donald Duck,
regulate sweetness before it regulates us.
Send fighter jets to the candy factories.
Let’s bomb the marshmallow borders.
Let’s declare a War on Dessert.
But I know it’s useless.
The real contraband is in the mirror:
our own taste for excess,
our hunger for more than enough,
our confusion between flavor and meaning.
VI. Additivoid Benediction
So I pray to the algebra of appetite:
that one day A + B might equal rest.
That the tongue might forgive the mind.
That the body, porous and humming,
might learn to excrete its illusions
without losing its sweetness.
—Fred the Heretic, speaking from the inter-pancreatic borderlands
It took Aperio several tries to aigenerate this image, because I mentioned sugar as an illegal trade in the prompt.