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I saw a guy today who had “Until 2+2=5” printed on his shirt.  He was a mask person, so it seems unlikely it was ironic in any way, or that he knew the original reference, at least the most famous one, is to George Orwell.  I point that out, since the Left was buying 1984 in large numbers when Donald Trump was President.

Now that Biden and the people making decisions for him are trying to bring it about, they could not care less.  Orwell is so last year.

I think I commented here that the way things were trending, the Left was going to try and make 2+2=4 a “racist slogan”.  Work is apparently proceeding.

And it occurred to me that the real problem is not that they are crazy and don’t know  it.  It is that they are crazy and they DO know it.  They don’t care.  The pain of un-belonging is vastly greater, as a potential risk, than any present reality of continual irrationality, grotesquely inappropriate and destructive hyperemotionality, and a chronic sense of grievance and anger.  All worth it.  Totally worth it.

To state the obvious, you can’t reason with people who have not only lost the habit of reason, but who KNOW they are being unreasonable and don’t care.  Who in fact are PROUD of it, and who even brag about it.  Educated rednecks, arrogant in their willful ignorance.

Psychologically normal people seek out order and coherence.  They try and square what they say with what they do.  They don’t try and hold two contradictory positions at the same time, or even in rotation.  That sort of thing creates anxiety for them.  Stress.

But for the Post-Rational-Them, the anxiety comes with the thought of a world where they are no longer told what to do and how to behave.  They will give their souls to belong, and many have.  This means there is always a mob there for them when they need one, if not honest dialogue, sincere hugs, or real friends.

Artemesinin is AVAILABLE OVER THE COUNTER.

Here is the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=artemisinin&crid=1G8NQE97AQXOY&sprefix=artem%2Caps%2C216&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_5

I was thinking theoretically, then got to wondering if I could get this thing, and THERE IT IS.

This could be HUGE.  It is, I suspect, and what data I have supports this, roughly on par with HCQ.  It is an anti-malarial by design, and as I say, it’s discoverer shared the Nobel Prize with the inventors of Ivermectin.  That is just too good a “coincidence” for me not to see some deeper order involved.

And based on nothing other than intuition, I suspect this is what China is using.

The protocol would be like the HCQ protocol outlined by Vladimir Zelenko.  I linked the treatment protocol, but this stuff is so safe you could actually just follow the Prophylaxis protocols and add this in.

If I’ve understood the science, this medicine would do the same thing Quercetin is supposed to do, which is help get the zinc in the cells, so you could most likely take one or the other.  I’m not a doctor, and this is virgin ground, but that is a solid guess.

Again, if you are afraid (perhaps with reason, if you are sickly) take both.  I can’t guarantee its safe, but I also can’t guarantee you won’t have heart attack five minutes from now, or get hit by a bus tomorrow.  Life is unsafe, but taking both would most likely not affect your daily odds in any measurable way.

And SHARE THIS.  Particularly share this with doctors treating patients.  

Feelings are orienting signals, particularly negative ones.  They are supposed to cause us to move.

Growing up, many of us are terrorized into doing things we don’t want to do, and a common outcome of this is learning to lie to yourself about what you are feeling.  “Of course I am fine with this.  Why wouldn’t I be?”

And I think for the rich world a complicating addition to this is the sheer volume of noise, pace of life, and countless distractions that it sometimes seems to me amount to our main cultural product.  If you are never in silence, and stillness, you never learn to feel.  If you never learn to feel, you watch other people and do what they do.

That is why it has been so easy to induce Stockholm Syndrome in so many people.  Their instincts are kaput.  Their senses have the nuance of leather, and their minds are most comfortable with black and white.  Being told what to do by “respectable” authorities actually decreases their anxiety, even if the commands are ludicrous, as now in much of the world.

This is what you get when you never learn to consult your own feelings, to never take the time to ask basic questions and listen long enough to hear the answers.

And of course most of us like to think of ourselves as good people.  I would hazard a guess that if Goodness could be measured–and I would assume some psychological proxy could be and probably has been created, although I doubt they called the trait “Goodness”–95% of us would honestly believe we are above average.

You know, like 95% of men are better fighters and lovers than average.

Much of this of, I will hazard a guess, stems from the insulting belief that we are inferior.  That word insulting popped into my head.  I had intended to go another direction, but will now try and work into something that makes sense.

Most of us are mashed up, aren’t we?  Crushed, emotionally?  Our feelings as children not consulted, not cared about, and the demand made that we feel on demand whatever we are TOLD to feel.

Does that match anything in your experience?  It certainly does with me.

With my own kids I did a LOT of mirroring, in that when they were very, very little I would imitate the little noises they made.  As they got older, I would often match them emotionally in various ways.  I think explicit acknowledgement of inner states, without attempting to control them, by parents helps the feelings grow in a healthy way.  Each child is an individual seed that will grow in his or her own way, IF ALLOWED TO.

They are like little art works that build themselves.  It’s a pleasure to watch, not least because I have no ego stake in the outcomes.  I want them to be happy and have self respect, but the details I leave fully in their hands.  If they want advice, I give it.  If they don’t, I still give it sometimes and they tell me to stop, and I mostly do.  Some work needed there on my side, but not desperately.

There have to be boundaries, obviously, but there also needs to be respect.  I think this respect is missing from most cultures.  The parents beat their kids into conformity, and those kids do the same with their own.  It’s a pattern for a stable culture, and it’s not intrinsically bad, but there is a happier middle somewhere in most cases.

In our own culture, of course, we have gone much too far in the other direction, to the point where I think many parents want to be friends with their kids in unhealthy ways, and the kids do not hear NO  a fraction of the number of times they need to to build up resistance through use to the difficulties of life.  No is an immunization of sorts, no?  Rich kids act one way, poor kids another.

But for myself, one current work is watching the flitter of feelings when it comes to my work.  I will often make lists, then find myself doing something else completely.  Not infrequently, it is blogging.

But just in the past week or so, I have noticed this shadow that flits over my mind every time I look at a task.  There is a sadness that flits through me, and a fear.  It is those feelings, not the task, that I am avoiding. I’m not weak or lazy.  It’s just that I’m pulling much more weight than what is in the physical room.

So I’m going to try and spend an extra moment, when making my list, and when beginning each task, to allow those feelings to come up consciously, so I can learn to live with them.  It will be a bit like learning to walk a different way, but I am sanguine it can be done.  I’m ready.

I am going to make what may sound like an uncharacteristic claim: all human beings are rational, most of the time.  They are consistent, most of the time.

But much of the time they are either unaware of their real motives, or LYING, to you or to themselves or both.

If someone says their greatest hope is to win the lottery, but they don’t buy lottery tickets, there is a back story.

If someone says nothing excites them more than getting married, but they look miserable every time they are with their future spouse, there is a back story.

Any long term problem which does not get fixed, does not fail to get fixed because of incompetence, but rather competing rationalities.

I would articulate this general principle: All long term problems continue to exist because they benefit someone.  Someone rational has appropriated some aspect of the problem to serve them.

Wars serve military careers.  They serve arms dealers.  They serve politicians.  Some people–and I have met them–just LIKE war.  “It gets in your blood”, as one Army officer confided in me.

Poverty serves many agendas.  Most proximately, it provides the raw ingredients of racially divisive rhetoric, and the following ability to build group cohesion off of shared hate.

And ignorant people are easier to manipulate.  And they are less likely organize politically against you if they can be made to believe you are on their side.

Rationality often means literal money in literal bank accounts.  It means perks when you travel.  It means being showered with attention and respect and sex.

So whenever there is a disconnect between claimed intent and following action, I don’t think we should assume incompetence.  I think we should assume competing rationalities are interfering with the resolution of problems that benefit them.

COVID (and obviously, when I say COVID I am nearly always referring to the RESPONSE to COVID, and not to the disease that could as easily have been made to disappear, had the media chosen to do so) is a great case in point.

If we had given Vitamins D to everyone at the outset, almost no one would have been hospitalized.  The data is pretty good on that.  The cytokine storms only happen when the body gets to a certain stage of its immune response, and the floor drops out because of the lack of a needed tool; and a tool, I will emphasize, that is readily available and CHEAP.

Ivermectin and HCQ, along with Zinc and Vitamin C, also seem to make a huge difference in early to middle stage cases; and very, very few cases, treated early, should ever progress past that.  Based on what I read, the deaths from COVID should literally have been on par with a bad flu years, which is to say 100,000 or less of mainly old and sickly people.

So what gives?  Why push unproven and potentially very dangerous spike protein injections before recommending general supplementation of a Vitamin that is in any event essential to health, and really hard to overdose on (although it is possible)?

Competing rationalities.  When I say “some conspiracy theory is needed to explain all this”, “competing rationalities” could be used as a synonym.  Other agendas.  Conflicting agendas.  Competing greed.  We are greedy for a return to normal and for our loved ones not to suffer with idiotic restrictions, and die sometimes from a not dangerous disease; others are hungry for power and money, and all that money will buy, which does also include power.

And I commented elsewhere, and will share here, that the denigration of “Conspiracy Theories” is itself the result of a conspiracy to silence people telling unwanted truths, or at least partial truths.

Most of history is conspiracy theories.  It is psychopaths plotting in secret with one another to off one person or group so they can get their stuff and start telling everyone one else what to do.

To take a long ago example, from about 2,500 years ago, Babylon seems to have fallen to Cyrus “without a battle”.  The existing king was unpopular, so traitors invited in a replacement.  That is a conspiracy.  Those who suspected that was about to happen would have been “conspiracy theorists”.

To denigrate “conspiracy theories” as a class of ideas is to claim that psychopaths do NOT plot in secret, that they DO telegraph their intentions, and that there do not exist many people in the world who are capable of literally anything to get what they want.  This is obviously a counterfactual claims.  Conspiracies do happen.

It is simply the case that some conspiracies are more plausible than others.

I was thinking this morning that one intellectual task any honest person confronted with the many competing secret rationalities of this world must undertake, is to overlay each on the facts, like templates, to see what matches, what doesn’t match, and to identify the many gray areas where there just isn’t enough information, either about what IS happening, or who might be driving it.

For example, I listened to this talk (https://www.thriveon.com/911/) yesterday with David Icke and Foster Gamble (descendant of the Gamble of Proctor and Gamble, who seemingly grew up pretty comfortably).  What to do with it?

Icke makes a lot of points that seem well documented.  He explains in some detail who brought down the towers, and how they covered it up.  The culprits, on his account, are an elite cult which controls most of the world’s intelligence agencies, the Vatican, most think tanks, and certainly Israel.  They are nominally Jewish, but secretly highly anti-Jewish (Anti-Semitic, as he points out, would functionally mean, if the term were used properly, anti-Arab in nearly all cases, which is something I knew, but had not thought much about), to the point of having played a role in the Holocaust.

[ Holocaust, by the way–as he points out elsewhere– is itself a somewhat blasphemous term, in that a holocaust is an offering to God.  It is an offering that is burnt to smoke in the fire.  It is fully consumed, to ash.  Is that an appropriate term for the murder of 6 million people?  An offering to God?   I knew that was what a holocaust was, but never thought about it in those terms.]

Is he right?  I don’t know.

And this morning, I was thinking about Stephen Greer.  He is all about the aliens, and the coming alien false flag.  In his world, the dominant reality is that our government knows about UFO’s, BUILDS them using technology most of us don’t suspect exists, and is in contact with a number of alien races.  As I have said Edgar Mitchell backed this up, as did Paul Hellyer.

Is he most right?  Can elements of both theories not be true?  Along with something else?

As I was discussing with someone in a bar a few weeks ago, it’s really important, in my view, to have a large gray area marked “Unknown”.

To me, the NEED for a conspiracy theory to explain the world’s willingness to march into Fascism over an easily managed disease is absolute.  That is not in the gray for me.  That is an obvious and indisputable fact.  Incompetence and stupidity just won’t cut it.  Not by a long shot.  It is willful.

But why?  For whom?  Those are questions that cannot be answered with confidence.  They go into the gray area.

But I will say that all of us should ALWAYS look at the congruence between what someone says they want, and what they actually do.  Anthony Fauci does not want to save lives.  That is obvious.  What his real rationality is, his real calculations are, I cannot answer from evidence; but if what I might term primary rationality is not present–and it clearly is not–then you have to move into the darkness, into the conspiratorial, and most of what lives there is guns, drugs, sex, money and a power elite.

A meme on this study (link is https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-experiment-and-reflections-on-the-welfare-state/)–which deals John B. (not John C.) Calhoun’s experiments in mouse utopias–has been floating around, and I had intended to make a post on it.  But I this is a good commentary.

The gist of the thing is that mice, when you give them everything they need, such that life is easy and requires no decisions, become stupid, decadent, and die.  Literally.  All the individual mice in the contained utopia die.  Every time.

And ask yourself if any specific examples of this come to mind:

Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid.

I will append two comments.

1) Mice have obviously survived just fine in the wild for millions of years.  So you cannot use this experiment to generalize to “humanity”, at least humanity OUTSIDE OF A CAGE.

And to be clear, we live very easy, very decadent lives, most of us, that don’t involve life and death decisions, the POSSIBILITY of hunger for most of us, or any real doubt that we will be taken care of, in some way, by someone.

We are not yet in cages of someone else’s making, but greater wealth and ease are clearly not what would be GOOD for us.  On the contrary: we need more pain, more challenge, more fear and excitement, and more difficulty generally.  Most of us.

In that vein, I’ve been considering reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/0593138767/ref=sr_1_1

You can cut and paste the link.  As I say, you need more work in your life.

I probably won’t read it–I think I’m doing OK in the challenge department–but then again, I MAY.

2) What I would suggest is that the system as a whole lost information by losing Complexity, as an Emergent property of countless individual volitional–which is to say they could have gone this way, or could have gone that way, as in the wild–acts.

This leads to the conclusion that just occurred to me that opposite of complexity is not simplicity, but rather decay and decadence.  A living human beings behavior is complex.  The decay of a human body, much less so.  A vibrant human society is complex, richly ordered, many faceted.  A decadent human society is monomaniacal, repetitive, simplistic, and lacking in energy.

What data are you aware of which would contradict your claim, and how would you respond to it?

Now, most people, of course, don’t even have data to SUPPORT their claim, other than the dismally obvious and ubiquitous “Must Be” mistake, as Edward de Bono labels what amounts to arrogance, which is more or less to say chosen blindness.

But this is a good clarifying question, for you if not for them.  What is the destination of your pearls of wisdom?  A sty, or a mind showing signs of a living education and capacity for Liberal thought and sentiment?

Most authentic spiritual teachings are wasted on most people.  Most people are TRULY preoccupied, I think and feel, with truly petty worries.

Without speaking to the rest of the world, I think what most Americans need is just to grow up.  To mature.  And what is maturity?  For me it is calm consistency.  Achieving this is harder than you think.  I’m not there yet.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for the treadmill.  The Buddha was calmly consistent, in all the right things.  Jack Kerouac spoke of Buddhism but died of alcoholism.  To be calmly consistent, far from being stuck, is being able to CHOOSE your life, rather than have it dictated to you.  If you really get down to it, Kerouac had his life directed by emotions he never processed and dealt with.  They killed him, and of course his friend Neil.  HE was on a treadmill, wasn’t he?  Of getting up every day, feeling the same things come up, then running from them as far as he could, and never succeeding?

And, again, to most likely say something I don’t need to say, I am very, very familiar with Corporate America.  I am outside of it, but connected to it.  I observe it every day.  There is a lot there I would not want to be stuck in.

For the clever, though, there is always a way out, and perhaps your first move is to try and be more clever.  Actually, prior to that decide there is CERTAINLY some way you can improve your situation.  You are not helpless, not even now, not even with two kids, a mortgage, and a lawn that needs to be mowed.  There is no doubt there is something you have not thought of, some feeling you have not yet felt, some insight which has been knocking on the door you have been telling to go away.  Some scary thing that may just be the gate to the next path of your journey through this life.

But it is interesting to note that you can buy within ten seconds books whose content was a closely guarded secret, in many cases, as recently as perhaps a century ago.  There are teachings out there which, if an initiate would have unwisely divulged them, could have gotten him or her killed.  There are books people would have given their right hand and ten years of relentless effort to possess, that you can have delivered in a day with Amazon, or find today at your local bookstore.

We have this ocean (make that a large fresh water lake for the following metaphor) of wisdom, of spiritual water, and the inability of Tantalus to drink from it [actually, is there a salt water ocean of stupidity out there, that makes all who drink from it more thirsty?  I think so.]

Obviously pearls are wasted on swine.  The task most of us face is not looking for an advanced teaching, but developing the ability to benefit from it.  If you want pearls, don’t be swine.

And there is of course this notion of a “spiritual bypass”, a term which made immediate sense to me when I saw it.  I tried to do that in my late teens and early twenties.  You read Rumi and Advaita, and the Tao Te Ching, and Meister Eckhart, and try to get spiritual.

This is a recipe for emotional illness.  Trust me on this one.  At some point, some part of me said “fuck this: it isn’t working, and it’s not going to work.”.  That’s when I started reading psychology, which is vastly more useful for most, and certainly was for me.

Still, it is interesting to note–and I am not sure I have here–that I have had my Kum Nye books since the late 80’s.  The actual physical books.  They are one of my oldest possessions, along with a cow’s horn that was made into a trumpet of sorts, that I blow every time I move into a new place.  I’ve had that since my teens.  It made me feel like Boromir, if I am honest.

It hit me this morning that Kun Zhi (“hard ground”, in Tibetan, or so I understand, and which I have mentioned in the past, albeit most likely a few years ago) is really the emotional ground we walk on.

You have all your normal emotions that you go through your day with.  The ones you walk with and drive with, which are present when you are upright physically.

But you move on a substrate of emotions which are NOT consciously available to you.  This would be, in a less elegant term, the unconscious.

The ground creates the sky, and in turn both create your “world”.  The purpose of meditation is for the ground to disappear and merge with the sky.  Shunyatta.

We cling to forms–which very certainly includes most importantly emotional forms–but what we really want are higher feelings, such as that of release, of joy, of belonging.  We settle for constancy, and the vague promise of a permanence that is of course impossible.

The image came to me a few weeks ago of what I called “The Crying Stone”.  This is something I conjured as a reference point.  It is all the memory and thus presence of misery.  Any time I get confused, I can orient myself by bringing forth and touching the crying stone.

That such a process is severely limiting should be obvious.  Some part of me just has not yet come up with something better.  The only something better that makes sense to me intellectually is a better way of walking emotionally.

But that walking will need, eventually, to be done without feet, and without ground.  This “walking” is what covers levels of meditation.

And that connects with an experience I had yesterday.  I was listening to some sad song, that misted my eyes up.  And I thought “oh the HUMANITY.  I feel people’s pain so much.”

Then I looked more carefully: what was REALLY happening was that I was sad, and I was rationalizing my own reasonable and appropriate responses by making them something more high minded.

For me, I was never given permission to feel my own emotions.  I am therefore, of course, obsessed with them, with obsession itself being perhaps at root a LACK of feeling, not overabundance of it.

It is in some respects a calming and easing thing to do, to project and generalize your own painful emotions.  You are upset and sad, and sadness easily can seem like compassion, and such sadness can easily lead to anger, and such anger can easily be rationalized.  You just flip on the news and get your dopamine hit of self righteousness, and you have taken a transient personal emotion, that you could and ideally would have identified, felt fully, accepted, and allowed to pass, and transformed it into a more or less concretized and enduring politics.

You have, in other words, avoided dealing with an intrinsic emotion, an endogenous, personal feeling that was telling you something important about yourself, and created a prison out of everything that followed; and at that, one with generally negative social and often even physical (in terms of policy outcomes) consequences.

If arrogance is a “mistake in the future” (Practical Thinking: worth the read), as Edward de Bono rightly observed, then self righteousness is a conflict in the future.

And feeling this, I felt myself get softer.  I quickly fixed it by flipping through my news, but it was there for a split second.

That is a joke, but it is also more or less true.  These are not the confessions of an innocent man, and even though I often moralize, I do so from a very short stump, if not sometimes a hole in the ground.

In reality, I probably float up and down continually.  I likely have some basis for saying what I am saying at some moments, and none whatever in others.  The words endure.  The man who said them changes continually.  Their life, I suppose, is what you choose to do with them.

Most authentic spiritual traditions exist to point these sorts of things out.  As I say, I am partial to my understandings of some sorts of Buddhism (it is, by the way, always perilous to speak of “Buddhism” as if it were unitary;  it branches off in many ways after the 4 Noble Truths, or so it seems to me), but I think any tradition which involves long periods of silence, and a focus on something transcendent–with Buddha Nature being a sort of ersatz God–is going over time to lead in approximately the same direction.

As time goes on–or appears to go on–it seems to me that one of the Idealisms seems most likely to best accord with how the world “really” works, which is to say that Mind is the main reality, and that speaking of anything else as “actually” existing is a mistake.  We can create anything we like, so there is no limit to what is “really” real.

Oh, the whole thing can simplify down, I think, to being glad you are alive.  That is simple enough, and if I get my choice, that is what I choose.  Enjoy your coffee.  Enjoy Autumn as it slowly makes its way into your life, if you get one; and if you don’t, then enjoy the flowers and persistence of Spring.

Even if we are eternal beings, it’s nice to have a cookie once in a while, and I am partial to fondue.  On some days the air feels wonderful, and of course we always feel better after a workout.

I’ll stop the rambling there.

A plantation system in which the slaves lack even intrinsic monetary value.

That this is more or less literally true is shown in two ways.

First, you will not infrequently see left wings nuts differentiate Communist slavery from “chattel” slavery. The tacit, and among the less self aware explicit, argument, is that Communist slaves have it better because THEY HAVE NO MONETARY VALUE. You cant buy or sell. One Commissar can just them to do anything he wants one day, and something different the next. The Commissars pocket the profits and can beat, rape and steal from his human cattle with impunity and even praise.

Second, Communists treat their slaves WORSE than slave holders in the United States, Ethiopia, or Niger ever did or would. No matter how inferior racists or tribalists (black people who own other black people from another tribe or ethnic group) considered their human cattle, they still had monetary value, like cattle. You do not beat to death cattle for no reason.

But Communists have OFTEN killed their slaves out of sheer indifference and stupidity. The example burned in my mind is the trainloads of political slaves dumped by Lenin in the woods of Siberia in the middle of winter, with no tools, no shelter, and insufficient winter clothing. Nearly all died, and thise who lived had to engage in cannibalism.

No slave owner would EVER do something that callous and stupid.

And of course the death toll in all is 100 million or more. The KKK in its whole history killed about 4,000 people, most of them after slavery was abolished.

Putting this yet another way, what the Cuban Communists have done to Cuba is vastly worse than what white slave owners did in the antebellum South.

You think of Kunta Kunte always running away. What do you think the Boat People—both those from Cuba and South Vietnam after our ignominious retreat—are? People who would rather DIE—and who often have, as entire families—than live in Cuba.

Slaves were whipped, you say. What do you think they do to dissidents in Cuba? What horrors are not possible in a place filled with torture chambers which would have put a smile on the face of Torquemada?