It will be off the paved road. It will be covered in spider webs and vines. The neighbors will eye you suspiciously as you wander with trepidation down that gravel path.
It will not feel like home. You will have to repair it, and only with time learn to live in it.
I can’t remember if I have told this story, but I was sitting in a bar in Greenville, SC last December, roughly, talking to a guy from Ohio who was down there a lot on business. He told me that on a plane flight he took from Cincinnati or somewhere like that down there last March (2020) there was a sick, scared, and poorly dressed Chinese guy on his flight, who had apparently flown directly from China, and gotten on multiple connecting flights within the United States. He said that in his view there was NO WAY a guy who looked like that could have afforded a direct flight from China. He said he literally looked like somebody they had scooped off the street he slept on last night, and put him on a plane, with nothing.
Is this implausible? I don’t think so. The Chinese routinely use people’s families as leverage, as hostages, to force behavior they want. This guy easily could have been a farmer from some province you have not heard of, who was infected with COVID-19, and told to fly to America, and if he said a fucking thing, his family would be raped and murdered.
They do stuff like that there.
And we have seen Chinese people talk about how this whole disease has been a “victory” in an undeclared war with America. The specific lecture I had in mind I am not putting my fingers on–I should have posted it–but here is a former virologist from Wuhan saying OF COURSE this thing was created and released intentionally: https://www.foxnews.com/media/chinese-virologist-government-intentionally-coronavirus
Here is my question: if true, IS THIS NOT AN ACT OF WAR? Is the concept of “biowarfare” not a recognized thing? And if it was an act of war, does that not make supporters of this war in the United States traitors and war criminals who have murdered hundreds of thousands of American civilians? Yes, I think it does. This is new territory and a new concept. Nothing like it has happened before, but I think the logic is there.
Could the United States military not, perhaps, convene tribunals to examine the evidence of war crimes? I don’t know. I will simply suggest it is possible.
Further: when the CIA in the past has interfered with other nations elections, when we have supported coups, when we have directly opposed the will of the electorate, were these not in some respects acts of war? What is the purpose of a war? To control another nation. To install your people. When the Soviets invaded Hungary–certainly an act of war by any standard–what was their aim? To put their people back in power. When the Nazis invaded France, what did they do? They put their people in charge.
Logically, if you could so abuse and manipulate another nations election system that you could get your people in charge WITHOUT AN INVASION, would that not still be an act of war? Of aggressive hegemonic intent? Of course it would. That is my view.
Thus, if it can be shown that our election was corrupted by foreign influences–either directly or acting through American traitors–then that too would be properly a military affair. Election fraud is an act of war.
Now, my view of the military is that as they progress up the chain of command most of them lose any common sense they might once have had. They become political. As a friend of mine once put it, they become assholes.
I will bookend this with another story that begins “I was drinking in a bar once”, and talked with a retired Army Colonel. I may have shared this story, but can’t remember. He told me he voted for Biden because as much as he disliked Biden, he hated Trump even more. Now, I’m thinking “how can anyone be that fucking stupid.” Everything Biden has in fact DONE was predicted by me and a host of other people like me, because IT WAS FUCKING OBVIOUS. They were not going to cheat like motherfuckers then govern from the middle. How could anyone be that naive?
Well, this guy was. And as it happens, his second career was that of a school teacher. I think he taught middle school. And he said that his kids were traumatized by Jan. 6th, that it “felt like another 9/11”, and he apparently did nothing to dissuade them, and seems instead to if anything have encouraged this, to me, grotesque distortion of the reality. (and if you read www.thegatewaypundit.com they continue to come out with more and more mitigating–and to be sure incriminating, on the part of Capital Police–stories).
And, now that I get to this part, I DID mention at least part of this story. His mentioning of 9/11 got me talking about the OBVIOUS fact, if you evaluate the evidence, that 9/11 was a much bigger conspiracy, and that this fact was suppressed by our government. And he got, honestly, a bit womanish–if I might be indulged in using that term. He got offended. He didn’t want to hear it. He called me a Tinfoil Hate conspiracist. I offered my evidence, and he admitted it sounded reasonable, but I had no doubt whatsoever that he was going to dismiss it all, and hope never to see me again. I have not in fact seen him since.
He said “I have had men die in my arms. How can any such thing be true?”. Now, I will not claim to have ANY true understanding either of what it feels like to 1) command men in battle; 2) get shot at, and in turn to kill enemy combatants; or 3) watch friends die at close range. I admit that.
But that is STILL A NON SEQUITUR. To my mind, an adult mind is capable of admitting that things may be vastly worse than I fear, and certainly that I hoped and assumed.
Look at John Kerry. He has had a durable political career after assassinating the characters of our Vietnam warriors, using lies he offered opportunistically.
Look at the Vietnam War generally: it was pointless. At the end of the day NONE of those men needed to die. Not one of them. Why? Because politicians in Washington pissed away all of their blood, sweat and tears in an orgy of sanctimonious lies, and Satanic treachery. This is the reality.
And we nearly pissed away Iraq, too, Certainly much of the bloodletting after what I will term our first victory happened ONLY because Barack Hussein Obama armed and trained what became ISIS. He not only CREATED them, but did little to oppose them. On the contrary, until his last day in office, his goal remained using those sociopathic serial killers to overthrow Assad. Why? I don’t really know. Best guess is that he was bought by the Gulf States to put in a Syrian regime that would allow a gas pipeline across Syria.
And it remains true that the pipeline across Afghanistan was halted by the Taliban, and renewed by their replacements after we took control. Cause and effect? I can’t say. But I am more inclined to lend credence to such assertions now than I once was. Tower 7 was brought down by explosives. That much is more or less scientific fact now that Leroy Hulsey completed his analysis.
How much does our military recognize and value freedom? Sanity? A government of the people, by the people, for the people? If that colonel was any indication, not much. They are not different in kind than the executives at Coke and Nike.
But I always like to suggest possibilities here. So called “creativity”, as I have said often, is really just unpeeling latent realities which were always there. Everything you could ever think and know is already there. You are just too small to see much of it. We all are.
Edit: I am perhaps being too harsh on this Army Colonel. I really don’t know what it feels like to have the lifeblood of a friend splashed on me. I want to be clear that I understand–without really understanding–this large gap in my experience.
My comments come from a conviction that starts under my feet and goes through the top of my head that we OWE it to those who died to 1) Tell the Truth; 2) Learn. If it can happen once, it can happen again.
The lesson of Vietnam is that much of our intelligentsia hates this country, and sides willingly and easily with our enemies, which amounts to an alliance with violence, authoritarian rule, the suppression of human rights, willful deceptiveness, and the continual sabotaging of stable culture wherever they find it. One could easily argue that Islam, itself, has been perverted by these people into embracing a terroristic ethos in many quarters, and a ruthlessness and nastiness otherwise foreign to it. Middle Eastern terrorism was concocted in the Kremlin, as a way of pushing Arab nations away from the United States and towards their brand of Fascism, all in pursuit of what amounted to a goal of global conquest.
We do not honor those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan by LYING about the complicity of our own government in 9/11. On the contrary, we ENABLE these aspiring authoritarians by doing so, and in fact make the long term stable freedom most of them thought they were fighting for LESS LIKELY.
Life hurts. And no matter how much it hurts now, it can always get worse. For me, I would rather die painfully than develop the habit of lying about important things. As I have said often, that is a choice between a relatively easy death, and one made much harder by losing your soul, your integrity, and all self respect and the possibility of earned love in this world.
For obvious reasons, I am a fan of Rand Paul. I actually have in my book collection a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”–which in my view should be required reading at least at the college level, and optimally that of high school–that was given to me as a gift by the founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, and which I later got Senator Paul to sign at a book signing.
Since I really think that specific book is what began the process of turning me from a generic college Democrat into a passionate conservative, it is significant for three reason. If you have not read it, I would encourage you to do so. It is not polemical in the slightest, in my view. It merely makes clear the assumptions upon which leftwing economics are based, and their logical consequences, which are less liberty, less wealth, and greater inequality.
Be all that as it may, Senator Paul has done by far the best job of anyone in our “System”, writ large, in asking Anthony Fauci obvious questions, and pointing out his inconsistencies, dissimulations, and outright lies.
The specific scientific question of the moment, which translates to a political question, is how much immunity having had the illness provides.
Now, as I pointed out multiple times over the past year, starting last spring or summer, “vaccines”, so called, work on the immune system. If no lasting immune response can be achieved, then no vaccine can work. Conversely, IF a vaccine, in the proper sense of the word, CAN work, then having had the illness will convey the same or better level of immunity.
This is more or less saying that if X=Y, then Y=X. It is common sense. It is obvious.
Politically, though, the whole of the lockdowns and coercive panic depended on the notion that Herd Immunity could not be achieved without “vaccines” (since I’ve discussed mRNA often and recently, I won’t here). The WHO in fact found itself compelled, for patently political reasons, to modify their definition of Herd Immunity–which was at that point scientific, historically based, and obviously accurate–from a condition where enough people had gotten the illness and recovered with immunity that the disease stopped spreading, to a condition in which engineered immunity through vaccination (sterilization? We don’t know yet, but they did that in Africa) was the prerequisite.
Before, it was “either recovered or vaccinated”. The new version was “vaccinated only”.
Why? Because WE COULD AND SHOULD HAVE ACHIEVED HERD IMMUNITY SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR AGO, if we had followed the “Focused Protection” articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, and most likely far fewer people would have died, far fewer lives would have been ruined, much less economic destruction would have happened, and the collective trauma would be much less.
So vaccinations and the abusive public policies of most of the worlds governments go hand in hand. If having had the illness conveys the same or better immunity, then that means the policies of the last year were pointless. It also puts back into play all of the better treatments which were NOT USED. We have to wonder why vitamins and mineral supplementation to eliminate Nutritional Immunodeficiency were not recommended. Why HCQ and Ivermectin were sidelined as “dangerous and unproven” while injections barely six months old using a technology new to the purpose were pushed as “absolutely safe”.
Science is politics, now. To argue the “science” is to dissent with the Church, and its priests. And to be branded a heretic is to risk political, personal and economic consequences. They cannot, yet, burn people at the stake, but they can engage in “high tech auto-da-fe‘s”, if I might offer a nod to Clarence Thomas (one of only two honest Supreme Court Justices).
So when Rand Paul and Fauci argue particularly about this topic, they are offering two solutions; two visions of the role of government; and effectively, between the Enlightenment, and the medieval Catholic Church; between actual science and reason, and purchased indulgences and all the corruption they imply.
I have not had to modify any of my views in the last year. That is saying that all the data needed was available last March. In point of fact, I proposed something like the Great Barrington Declaration last April or May or June. It was a logical deduction from really indisputable premises.
Millions of people will die unnecessarily from this massive crime. People will starve to death in the Poor World (I have been struggling for words to replace the Third World, and perhaps that is it) and die of diseases they would have survived had they not been chronically hungry and stressed.
They will die of cancers that would have been caught in time.
They will die deaths of despair over the next decade or two. Children, who were in 6th grade, will develop depressions in their twenties that lead to drug overdoses in their thirties, all because of this traumatic period.
They will die of stress and alcoholism brought on by being unemployed for two years, or forced to work a much worse job. Yes, there are plenty of jobs in the service industries, but they do not pay well. Middle aged men and women who lost good jobs in this thing may never get them back.
And as Martin Kulldorff particularly has pointed out, the blow struck to public faith in our systems–in the NIH and WHO and CDC particularly–is substantial and extremely damaging. I don’t trust those motherfuckers. No one who GETS what just happens does, or will for a very, very long time, at least, if they do not publicly engage in some Glasnost and purge their ranks of political pukes.
In nearly all ways, the past year has made most of our lives darker (I may be an exception, but I was ready for this), more fearful, less certain, less trusting, and less free.
All of this is pure evil. Almost none of this was ever necessary. As I put it to a guy in the front of this battle, we lost the war for the Present Narrative, but the battle for the future of the past is beginning now, and there is every chance that if we retain a critical mass of decent human beings in our government, universities, press corps, and citizenry generally, we might prevent the bastards from filling the history books with a bunch of fucking lies.
Over the past week or so, I keep getting notices on my Facebook page that “your comments have been deleted as they go against our Community Standards [what a fucking joke both words are in this context] on spam.
I can’t see most of them. A circle with a line across it shows when I try and click on most of them, but here is one example, which I have just cut and pasted:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/what-if-the-sars-cov-2-virus-is-weaker
His concluding, as he calls them “troubling” questions:
Where are the adults in the room?
What the hell are we doing?
What is the endgame of pretending like we’re not living through an avalanche of deadly lies?
I’m reading a history of Bon in Tibet, which around 800 becomes mixed, as in a double helix, with Buddhism. As I think most know, “Tibetan Buddhism” is a hybrid religion.
Bon practiced animal and sometimes even human sacrifice. It is a vaguely Manichean faith, which sees both good and evil forces in the world, and which seeks in particular to minimize the evils caused by a variety of spirits. When possible, they turn them to the good, and in general the Buddhist aim was to turn them to the protection of the Dharma. I see in this a spirit not too different from that of the Catholic Saints, and the overstepping of the Saturnalia with Christmas, the spring festivals with Easter, etc. Halloween is connected to All Soul’s Day and All Saint’s Day, and I think those are layered onto something older.
Here is what I am going to wonder out loud: was the Buddha more concerned with the eating of meat, or with the sacrifice of animals as offerings to spirits? My gut instinct is that it was the latter, and vegetarianism evolved as an unnecessary, and perhaps not intended result. He was trying to stop the ceremonial killing of animals, and the only way to make sure he was not misunderstood was to stop all killing of animals, if possible.
Reading about the history of vegetarianism in India, it seems the Hindus followed the lead of the Buddhists, who possibly followed the lead of the Jains, who are by far the most strict sect in the world in regards to ahimsa.
We are born into this world, and asked to live in it. We are not born with a book. We are born into cultures, but all cultures, I would argue, consist in mostly arbitrary rules. If they are enforced viciously and aggressively, dissent becomes impossible, and those arbitrary rules come to look like rules of nature. They are iron clad. Sacrosanct.
But I look at trees around my house. Birds are eating insects, and each other. Fish in the seas are eating other fishes. Lions are devouring antelopes, bear fish.
Is this not a world where all are bound to die, and not infrequently at the hands of other inmates of this planet?
Personally, I have gone back and forth on vegetarianism. I was a vegetarian for two years, but never felt well. I was lacking something, and I don’t think it was just nutritional. So one day on impulse I just bought two cheeseburgers at Burger King, and have never been a full vegetarian since.
One of the key underpinnings of particularly the more ardent, more militant vegetarianism is the anthropomorphizing of animals. They see them as inarticulate humans. They are not that. They are animals, which feel, which hurt, which obviously bleed, but which do not feel resentment and injustice like humans do.
And I think in most cases such people not only see animals as human, but in important respects project onto those animals all the positive traits they are unable to find among their fellow humans. Animals become good, and people become bad.
And I think often this leads quickly to a fundamental hatred of humanity. I also think a love of animals STEMS from a hatred of humanity, which is to say a generalized sentiment rooted in personal experiences with nameable individuals.
So in my observation and belief, many, many vegetarians, particularly the more aggressive vegans, are misanthropes first, and animal lovers second. That is my feeling.
In my view, there is a certain cruelty in this world which is inescapable. If it is not expressed one way, it will come out in another. I think by all means we need to avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals. I have long paid extra for chicken and beef I had reason to think was treated at least a bit better than happens in the worst places.
But you have to find your darkness and own it. You have meanness and pettiness in you. Yes, you. No, you. We all do. We have bellies. We have to eat to survive.
Personally, I think the healthiest thing for me, the way that I actually become the best possible version of me in these circumstances, where I know I will die, know I will hurt, know that I don’t really understand all the rules, or why things work the way they do (or even if any of this should be treated as real), is for me to reject sainthood. To reject doing things which inconvenience me for reasons which are not a deep part of my emotional constitution.
There is apparently controversy over whether or not even the Buddha was a vegetarian. Some people believe that he ate meat if it was offered to him, if he did not believe that animal was killed specifically for him.
For me, I have decided not to decide. I am going to leave it open. I am going to eat meat because I feel emotionally and physically healthier and stronger. I don’t know if it is right or wrong, or if it is completely irrelevant to my spiritual progress. I tend to think it is the last though. I don’t think it matters one way or the other.
I wonder, most nights, when I go to bed, how I am doing in Life. By conventional standards, I am a bit of a failure. I have good kids, and I haven’t spent more than a night in jail, and I pay my bills, and no one can say I screwed them over, but I should probably be a professor somewhere.
Last night I said to myself, well, I’ve lived a life of courage. I haven’t given up. I have done my best to decide what is important and what is not, and pursue the important. What I think is important is personal growth, emotional soundness, peace of mind, the ability to love easily and openly, resilience, wisdom and depth.
And like a typical American, I want those things NOW. I wonder why I am not farther yet. But I think most people never honestly START on this path. I have been stumbling, crawling–sometimes on my belly–falling off the path and getting back on, sometimes laying for a night or a week or a month flat on my back thinking I can’t go on but getting back up eventually, all of this, for a long, long time. Failure is when you quit. It is not when you hurt so much you can’t focus.
And it hit me that there is a relative 100% you can give. It is like Relative Humidity. The amount of moisture air can hold is relative to its temperature. The warmer it gets, the more moisture it will hold. When it is very cold, it does not hold very much. Very cold days up north in the winter have a feel and a sound to them. It gets quiet, to where the air itself always felt to me like it was crackling. It feels like you could hear a bird chirp 100 yards away like it was next to you. This is moisture free air.
And emotionally, if you are giving until it hurts sometimes, and giving at least a bit past your comfort zone regularly, daily, then that is your relative 100%.
And I look at kids nowadays, and their 100% is not very much. But it is what it is. And they themselves are keenly conscious of their own unhappiness, their own weakness, and so I would suggest that for most of them working daily to build a better 100% would be a salutary practice.
But you can’t ask from anyone more than they have. There is no 110% if you define relative 100% accurately. If you ask more, they will dissociate. They will disconnect. They will stop trying. This is human nature, wired into all of us.
If you are imprisoned, and you can’t find a way out, you will either go in circles or give up. Going in circles, in my view, is better than giving up, because you are retaining the idea of freedom.
And I think in important ways what Jack Kerouac, his generation, and those who emulated them, did, was go in circles. The implicit assumption–one stated in various ways by various authors–was that this whole country–maybe even Western culture generally–is one big prison, that emotional freedom is difficult or impossible to achieve, and “running from” without a “running to” was the best antidote to despair.
So Jack and Neil went in circles. Then they died. Young.
It is an odd thing that people can have actual political freedom–as seen from any sane and informed historical perspective–and still feel unfree.
Actual freedom, in some ways, is a sort of torture. For a lot of people, I think it is like Red, in Shawshank Redemption, who had been imprisoned so long the World seemed impossibly large, and impossible to manage.
American culture until the 1950’s was pretty much like all cultures the world over, for all of history: we had expectations, and we had sacred institutions, and if you stepped over the line, you could expect violent consequences. This is how culture is enforced. And it applied to the Plains Indians, Zulu Warriors, Australian Aborigines, Swiss Burghers in the Middle Ages, Egyptian nobility in 1,000 B.C., and the Shakyas in Buddha’s time.
This is the meaning of Rousseau’s idea of being “forced to be free”. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. The most useful commentary (on Rousseau–and also on Nietzsche, who many read, but few have anything intelligent to say about) on this is Alan Bloom’s truly outstanding book “The Closing of the American Mind”, which of course foretold the era we are in. As he says, Nietzsche himself foretold cancel culture and the sacrality of victimhood. They are logical developments of intellectual evolution based on bad foundations. Ideas have consequences. Obviously.
But what Rousseau was perceiving, without in my view really understanding (something he had in common with Freud, who was nearly always almost right), was that most people are actually happier in cages. They are happier with limits which cannot be negotiated. They are happier forgetting there is an outside, and an Alternative. They are like trained dogs. Most people don’t train their dogs to Sit, and Stay any more, because it feels mean, but I think dogs actually like that. They want to have clear ideas about how to behave.
And our aspiring Overlords are not on completely irrational ground when they assert that most people WANT to be controlled, WANT to be told what to do, WANT to have their freedom limited to Coke and Pepsi and Mountain Dew.
What about water and wine and whiskey? Oh, we don’t sell that here.
I think the bisexuality of Kerouac and Cassady (and homosexuality of Ginsberg, and likely pedophilia and certain hard drug use of Burroughs, etc.) was an important element in their lives. Men having sex with men was culturally taboo, and back then men were beaten to death for doing it sometimes. But a small culture was emerging in New York, and perhaps San Francisco and elsewhere, where it was ALMOST open. Where such men could find each other, not in the light of the day, but in rooms with the door partially ajar, and the windows not fully shuttered. In the right place, you know, and at the right time.
And Almost Freedom is almost worse than open captivity, of the literal sort that Oscar Wilde faced. Almost Freedom is a prison door cracked enough that you can imagine it open, but which won’t open enough to let you out. I think that is what drove much of their madness and their crazy pounding on the doors of our collective culture.
As I have argued, the nervous breakdown in our culture started in the arts, and in my view started with the Beats, which I will recollect for you originally meant beat down, or beat up. “Beat”, as in tired. It was only later that Kerouac tried to spruce it up and turn it into something it was not. In spirit, in fact, it is a lot like “punk”. Punks, in my understanding, were the guys who got anally raped in prison. It was not a positive thing to be a punk. Certainly, though, such people would have good reason to be angry.
[I was reading last night, incidentally, that Clyde Barrow was apparently repeated raped in prison. He killed his attacker eventually with a pipe, and got away with it when a lifer claimed responsibility. In his early marauding days, though, he planned a retributive attack on that prison, and I’m sure his experiences had a lot to do with how many people he killed, some pointlessly.]
Learning to live with freedom is both a personal and a cultural task. Imagine how hard it would be to navigate our social worlds if we shared no holidays, if we all used different calendars, if none of us read the same history, if none of us had common reference points, like George Washington, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus.
You would feel lost, daily. So we all need a bit of Givenness, in the midst of this Thrownness. This amounts to a freedom from one form and source of anxiety. This is the extent to which Rousseau was right.
But our true Home is in the Moment. Rules and institutions are our training wheels, or our crutches, while we learn to walk. Prison bars keep us from falling down while we are finding our feet and our voices. They are not meant to last, in my view. There is something inevitable about them falling away, in this life or the next.
Do you think they celebrate Halloween or Christmas in the next life? For us, these are special days, but what if every day is special, and so much better than our best days that it is literally vastly beyond our ability to imagine?
Oh, I am Stream of Consciousness-ing again. It seems to do me good. I let things out, sometimes invisibly to myself at the time, through this process. Imagine it as a brief flood down a stream, intended to liberate stuck logs, and help them continue their path down the river. Too much water and you overflow the banks, but just enough, and everything is moving that should be.