Moderates United

It’s odd: I genuinely don’t know who, if anyone, I am talking to.  I am perhaps on a lighted stage, in front of a dark room I can’t see.  Well, so be it.  I speak for myself, and in the hope my words might be more generally useful.  If not, so be it.

I am going to stop following politics for a week or two.  Cancel all my newsletters, stop visiting political websites, and just chill.

I had what for me was an important realization the other day, which is that the resting state of trauma is shame, and that shame is torpor and paralysis.  Because we need to live, people like me have to learn to shake that torpor off.  What do we use?  Well, what tools do we have?  Fear and anger.  Fear and anger.  Fear of punishment or failure or any other kind of pain, and anger at whatever presents itself.  Since fear is unpleasant it’s nice to be able to transition to some righteous rage at regular intervals.

So fear and anger as a survival strategy.  It’s an interesting idea, and I am very sure I am right.

And my weight is going up and down.  What I am realizing is that for me I am going to need to change my sense of self to make the next cut off, which is 245 for me.  And I am doing that.  I will describe this process at a later date.

But I am actually having not-unpleasant dreams occasionally, and seem to be shaking less.  I still would not wish my average night on anyone, but it is slowly getting better.

I have a bunch of ideas, as usual.  They will find their way here eventually.

I was at an higher educational institution the other day for some reason, and they had reimposed a mask mandate.

And it hit me that the scariest thing about COVID is not even that it showed how easily corrupted by money our educational institutions and government agencies are.  I would have thought the NIH and CDC were honest, but was proven wrong.

No, the scariest thing is it showed CLEARLY how utterly we are failing to teach BASIC critical thinking in our schools at all levels.  Nothing in a Liberal educational curriculum is supposed to teach blind obedience to Authority.  On the contrary, it is supposed to teach the history of the crimes and disasters that followed blind obedience.  The whole POINT of freedom and an open society (which is what we have now, and what George Soros has been working all his life to bring an end to) is that you leverage all the minds within it.  We are all only smarter together if we are all bringing our own perspectives to things.  If your perspective is identical in every particular to that on the TV, then you add nothing.

So whenever you see a college student, or person you know to be a college graduate, wearing a mask–especially now, but arguably at any point in the pandemic, since no university should have been stupid enough to go along with the mask mandates–what you are seeing is a symptom of endemic educational failure.

This, to me, is the most frightening thing about this time in general.  If we can get mostly fair elections, we can get Donald Trump in office, along with a decent crop of honest patriots, where they may well deliver the wrecking ball this fucking disaster of a government needs.  But that will do nothing to cure people of fear based conformity, or the habit of letting others tell them what to think.

I keep seeing this group described as “right wing extremists” and as engaged in “political violence”, yet when I look up details, there are none.

Read this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys

One guy hit a protester with a stick.  There was a street fight in New York after Anti-Liberals chased them down the street.  A good chunk of this was filmed, and it looked to me like the Proud Boys were defending themselves from people who were chasing them.

And that’s about it.  There is nothing “neo-Nazi” about most of them.  I’ve talked to a couple in bars, and they are normal guys who are just sick of being shit on by the media every fucking day.  White males are insulted and denigrated literally every day.  I read today that I think in Minneapolis if they have a reduction in force the rules now read to fire white people first.  That’s overt racism.  It’s not unreasonable to be angry about overt racism, or people calling for the deaths of white people, as has happened dozens of times in the past few years, as articulated by professors and leaders of various sorts who keep their jobs and rarely face sanction.  Some do, thankfully, but many are clearly congratulated for their “courage” by coworkers and students.

So this whole violent, neo-Nazi lie is more or less akin to, and bears a strong family resemblance to, the ACTUAL Nazi claim that Jews were undermining Germany, and preventing her freedom and flourishing.  It was always a lie, but enough Germans believed it that you know what happened.

And I have been told that, say, the ADL claims White Supremacists are super violent, scary, and who we need to be worrying about.  Here, they claim they commit most of the murders: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2021

Here is the problem: the number is 26 out of 29.  By their way of reckoning, 26 out of 29 makes “white supremacists” the most dangerous group out there, justifying enormous FBI resources.  The problem is that all or nearly all of these murders are by biker gangs and prison gangs, and nearly all involve personal conflicts unrelated directly to race.  Do some digging.  Prove me wrong.

Here is the thing: whenever there is even the most flimsy and insubstantial POSSIBLE connection to white supremacy in acts of violence, it enters a news cycle it never really leaves.  The initial impetus for the protests in Charlottesville were to prevent the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.  People argued it was part of their history, and that once started, historical revisionism through physical violence to artifacts of history would be hard to stop.  In the event, they were right.  Even Frederick Douglass was not immune, for reasons fully opaque to me.  Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.  Then people they did not invite showed up, on both sides, and the Mayor ordered the police back to do what he could to ensure violence.  That is factually what happened.  Factually, Trump EXPLICTLY denounced the racists, in the part of that speech none of these lying jackasses ever quote.

But to take one obvious example, the Hell’s Angels, I am told by several people in Motorcycle Clubs, as they prefer to be called, told that that club is for “white boys”.  It was a black member of the Chosen Few who told me this, and biking was a huge part of his life.  It was later validated by someone I was talking with who had a relative who went to jail for the Hell’s Angels.  It’s white men and their women, and it has always been that way, or so I am told.

These are the sorts of people committing the VERY small number of murders that anti-Liberal jackasses are using to push their conspiracy theories about alleged right wing radicalism.  Our “right wing radicalism” is fucking hot dogs and ice cream on the 4th of July, a Christmas exhibit in the town square, and the right not to have racial insults thrown at us continually by mentally ill moral defectives and incompetents.

And consider this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-22/pandemic-murder-wave-fell-most-heavily-on-young-black-men

In 2020 those identifying or identified as Black or African American made up 13.5% of the U.S. population, according to CDC estimates (that for definitional and other reasons don’t quite match the results of the 2020 U.S. Census). They also made up 55.6% of the homicide victims, and 65.6% of the increase in homicides relative to 2019. To put it another way, the homicide rate for Black Americans rose from 22.9 per 100,000 in 2019 to 30.7 in 2020. For all other Americans, the rate went from 3.2 to 3.8.

This whole rate way of calculating things makes some sense, but it still forces you to do some math that is normally not provided, in this case no doubt because the raw numbers are scary.

Assuming roughly 330 million Americans, then 13.5 equals 44.5 million.  44.5 million divided by 100,000 yields 445, which becomes our multiplier.  445 time 30.7–the murder rate per 100,000–gets us 6,096.

So, we live in a world where 26 murders–mostly or exclusively of bikers or prison inmates killing rivals, and possibly not even of minorities, since if the ACT was committed by a person who meets their definition of white supremacy then the murder then becomes a white supremacist murder, even if it is of another white supremacist–are the global and nearly exclusive focus of the news and national “law enforcement” agencies, but 6,000 murders are just something we need to forget about.

6,096 divided by 26 is 234.  So for every claimed “white supremacist” murder, 234 black folks, mostly young men, were killed, the overwhelming majority of them by other young black men, and very commonly using illegal weapons in cities where gun ownership was made more difficult by laws enacted by people who had bodyguards or who lived in gated communities, far from the violence.

I look at this stuff, and I just scowl.  I’m more educated than most, but none of this stuff is tough.  None of it is that complicated.  What I just did took twenty minutes.   A responsible reporter could do much better in two hours, and two days would put a nail in the coffin with respect to any possible dissent.  There’s just no there, there, apparently because there’s no Here, there, either.  These people live in the mist, floating aimlessly through the fog, not knowing where they are, where they are going, or where they have been, and yet somehow managing to be always angry and always certain their idiotic viewpoints are the only correct ones.

 

I have known about this Tweet, but just watched it for the first time: https://www.c-span.org/video/?507774-1/president-trump-claims-election-stolen-tells-protesters-leave-capitol

As soon as he heard reports of violence, he asked everyone to “go home”, to “not play into the hands of these people” (or something close to that).

Why don’t you know this?  Twitter deleted THIS Tweet immediately, while leaving the one encouraging protest, which is as American and legal as apple pie.

When you REALLY start looking, you start to see lies, crooks, and spiders everywhere.  It’s not a pleasant sight, which is why so many people cling to delusions about who Biden & Co. really represent.  If you are worth $10 million or more, on the low side, NOT YOU.  If your kids did not go to some fancy private academy in England or Switzerland, or at least the US equivalent of British “public schools”, then not you.  They ask for your support, because standing in reality for the 1% of the 1%, while denigrating, in actuality, if not rhetorically, both the first 99% and then the second, would not play well, and they need a sizable contingent of useful idiots for the time being.  The robots are not quite far enough along, and their trust among our armed forces is not enough for an open coup.

That former limitation, though, could quite easily change invisibly and suddenly.

I do continue to wonder about the sanity of military and LEO personnel who continue to fail to see the manifest, large scale, and extraordinarily frightening realities more or less obvious to anyone looking honestly.

It will interesting to see if the IRS can actually fill all those positions.  Everyone is having a hard time hiring, and this particular job opening might as well add to the advert that “people may hate you, and your friends may desert you.  You may get shot.”

The IRS has always of course been unpopular, but with all that just happened, that is going to double or triple.  It’s one thing to allocate the money; it’s another entirely to execute the plan.

And I would add that conservatives who need a job should be applying too.  We need people providing some level of moderation, if that is possible.

This is far from a fait accompli, although my personal instinct is that the moment that bill passed a lot of Dems said “we got this thing in the bag, and might as well start wrapping up.”  That was why they did not think through AT ALL the optics of the raid.

And they may be right.  I have no plans for violence against anyone, no matter how bad things get, but I do believe that in a completely corrupt world–where you have to tell fucking lies all day every day just to survive, which is all Communist regimes–the only honest places to be are jail and dead.  I fear both, but fear more selling my soul to buy a minute or two worth of respite from imbecilic thieves and psychopaths.

The fundamental claim being made by what I will call the GR partisans–billionaires and politicians–is that everything will be JUST FINE if we only trust in the fundamental benignity of people who just caused the deaths through managed medical malpractice of millions of people, and who even now are suppressing effective treatments in lieu of injections whose dangers are clear, and obviously vastly, vastly higher than competing ideas, of which the most simple is universal Vitamin D sufficiency.

Putting on my Captain Obvious hat, is there or could there be any reason to trust people capable of mass murder on that scale?  This is murder on the scale of Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, all of whom, in the end, may have posted lower numbers than the lockdowns, suppression of effective treatments, and insertion of dangerous and sometimes fatal injections.

Mao, of course, is the one to beat.  The guy who is on Chinese currency and whose picture is still everywhere caused the deaths of something like 50 million people through a combination of incompetence and callousness, and another perhaps 5 million through his Cultural Revolution, which, if enacted here, will see high school students beating their teachers to death with sticks in the courtyards and football fields of their schools.

Every day, every single day, I scratch my head and wonder how so many people can be so fucking stupid.  I really really think it is mostly LAZINESS and complacency,.  You can’t value what you have always had.  You don’t value freedom if you have never been told no in your life, and the great irony is that somehow, in the freest, most possibility filled world this planet has ever seen, large numbers of fat, stupid, complacent kids have convinced themselves that they, or people who have a higher standard of living than 90% of the planet, are “oppressed”.  It’s mind boggling.

Most of these “revolutionaries” would start crying and quit if they couldn’t get their favorite Starbucks beverage or craft beer.  Yet because they will have both, they are working hard to destroy everything which we were bequeathed by vastly better people, in general–certainly tougher, more dignified, and vastly less whiny–than them.

Children of Fear would work too.

The fabric of our shared social order was just ripped.  What Biden just did—and nothing of that potential political magnitude happens in the control obsessed world of the Democrats without the exlicit imprimatur via Biden of our real ruling oligarchs—was the equivalent of Nixon using the FBI to break into the Watergate Hotel on an invalid warrant issued by a political supporter, then blaming the Democrats for it, and the whole of the Republican Party erupting in celebration.

Nothing can be seen the same now. They have crossed the Rubicon.  The FBI stands naked now as a corrupt institution. Everyone who works there either IS a crook or knows one.

Probably not one American in 100 knows that reference, or how it ended. If you are in the 99, it ended poorly for both Rome and Caesar. But decadence has costs.

For me personally, I think my own highest and best use is continuing my own work.  In the end, all this results from spiritual sickness.  No generalized lasting solution can proceed from anything but generalized lasting spiritual renewal.

My work is very, very hard. It would shatter most people.

But I am not most people.

The ability to tolerate genuine difference—to be GENUINELY tolerant—is largely a function of how comfortable you are in your own skin. If your sense of self and community is strong, you do your thing and other people do their thing, and even if you dislike some things they do, and they dislike some things you do, you both recognize peaceful corxistence as MUTUALLY beneficial, so where needed you negotiate differences such that both sides are both equally happy and unhappy.

This is adult behavior, seen both at the individual and social levels.

The fundamental problem with the Left wing style is that they want to manage difference by DICTATING—through all means possible, includinv emotional, intellectual, and always eventually physical violence—that WE ALL HAVE TO BE AND THINK THE SAME, at least with regard to whatever issue they are freaking out about that day.

This is a style, a mode of being and interacting, that arises in FEAR. I might even call it a paranoid style, since it arises from the manic anxiety that someone somewhere may challenge their fragile egos, and thus call into question the edifice of lies amd bad ideas—mostly originating in a childish need to avoid mature responsibility—that constitutes the whole of their shallow, callow, and weak world view.

I might even term this a pseudo-culture, an ersatz, hollow culture; a tribe built on endlessly repeated and empty banalities, which uses the WORDS of true, real cultures, while retaining none of the deeply felt meanings and wise purposes behind them.”

I have from time to time wondered what happens to such people if they DO win. If they conquer the Earth and all its people, what do they THEN live for?  Their form of self creation through mutual self congratulation requires an Other, a nemesis.  This its defining feature and radical similarity with, say, the Nazis.

Yes, you build your beautiful cities and populate them with submissive people, but their souls are gone. Their selves are gone. All that is left is a superficial, unhappy shell, existing solely to enact a dismal, dishonest play on a stage seen only by fellow actors.

These are interesting times. The timing of the raid on Trump was not coincidental. They just passed a bill turning the IRS into a sort of personal political Army controlled by our senile kings handlers; and Trump—and the primaries—just proved the show trials—of Jan. 6 and Alex Jones—were not even remotely as they had imagined. Being narcissists, OF COURSE they don’t understand the psychologies or true needs of normies, and of course they consistently overestimate their own power and attractiveness.

As bad as this news is, I cannot help but feel a note of desperation.  All aggressions run the real risk of alienating former allies. The goal of an unopposed One Party State—everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State—has really become indisputable. Their cards are on the table. They are not the good ones. They are not protecting Americans. On the contrary, they are attacking non-elites by every means their devious and sociopathic minds can concoct.

In this war for civilization, for true human progress, we are perhaps in our darkest hour. We are where Churchill found himself in his own darkest hour, when everyone was telling him to give up.

I will admit to crying in that movie when the King visited him in the middle of the night to tell him it made him ANGRY to think of throwing in the towel to barbarians.

As Churchill himself said somewhere, its impossible to see the end at the beginning. All we can do is determine to never quit, and to do every day something to make things better. If there is a path, it will be revealed step by step.

Why would someone want to keep some other person, or some other group, small?  Because they feel small themselves, and want to protect themselves from awareness of this fact.

Why would someone want to fear someone else?  To rationalize irrational fear that is stable that they do not want to acknowledge and process.

Anyone who wanted to build a Mass Formation has to first denigrate individual judgement–for example by building a cult where the Expert is the High Priest, and by ritually expelling all qualified people unwilling to speak Orthodoxy–and then by generalizing anxiety with violent media, weakening of the nuclear family and religious communities, relentless hysteria in the news, and isolating people in their homes with TV’s as cultural altars that they control.

Thinking about it this morning, the core problem we have in much of the world is that people have been made to NEED enemies.  This is the true disease.

The symptom is that they reject dialogue.  They reject efforts at negotiating difference in conditions of mutual respect, that is at least contingent on achieving understanding before judging.

The root problem is not that people believe, for example, that men can become women, fully and completely.  The problem is that they become hysterical when anyone doubts it, for example by referencing the whole of Biology as it existed until a few short years ago, when like most of science today, it was politicized, and ceased speaking open truth as presented by the evidence, and started speaking possibilities as needed to get grants and avoid denunciation and cancellation, and depersoning.

I talked for a half hour or so yesterday with a lifelong Deadhead.  He had by his estimate attended 500 Grateful Dead shows.  He  claimed it was the world’s longest continuous work of cultural art.  I liked this idea.  It’s tenable.

Since he was also a bit of a Dead historian, who taught me a lot about the culture, he noted that the whole thing came out of CIA/military experiments.  I had not realized it, but Ken Kesey himself participated in MK/Ultra at Stanford.

This whole article is quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects on the patients of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT.^[40] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey’s role as a medical guinea pig inspired him to write the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.

On this guy’s account, the whole counter-culture that emerged in the 1960’s arose from that period.  This is also a tenable hypothesis.  Ken Kesey was the Uber-hippie and the way LSD came to be used and seen in the 1960’s could without too much trouble be traced to his Acid Tests.  And since Neal Cassady was their driver, he was sort of the bridge between the Beats and the Hippies.

So I got to wondering: what if this whole culture was created in some respects as a matter of POLICY?  This guy was claiming the CIA was trying to see if they could get people to dance in the streets.  If so, they succeeded.

And as support he pointed out that the whole Dead thing could have been shut down at any time.  It wasn’t.

So being me I got to wondering if this whole bifurcation in our society was not engineered long ago.  The Left, as it exists today, traces its cultural roots to the acid and marijuana culture of the 1960’s.

This is their happy place.  Their happy time.  Their colorful time, in a world where Gray is literally and figuratively becoming a dominant color.  This is where they MADE A DIFFERENCE.

If the Freedom Riders were not dropping acid, the people who were supported them strongly, at least after the fact, and after the real danger, conflict, and struggle were largely over.

All of this kind of coalesced eventually into a world where the United States, in principle, as constituted, was the enemy.   They grew not to oppose this or that, but the WHOLE THING.  Obama was the apotheosis of this, in that we still have no idea who he really is–whether, for example, his real father was Frank Marshall Davis, as to me seems likely for many reasons–and of course Joe Biden is his retarded and morally vacuous successor, whose sole job is to rubber stamp whatever people whose names we don’t know cause to be put in front of him.

We live in a world where, to modify a cliche, more and more people know less and less about more and more.  I don’t think most Antifa members could give a coherent two paragraph summary of who the historical Nazis were, what they believed and why, and what they actually did and how.  Yet, in their own minds, they oppose “fascists”.  How do they define a fascist?  Anyone who opposes THEM.

I will remind you Mussolini defined fascism as “Everything inside the State [Us], nothing outside the State [Us], and nothing against the State [again, Us].”

So the fundamental Fascist activity is eliminating opposition and genuine diversity of opinion.  Who is trying to do that?  Well, they have many names and exist in many places, but their militias–their street mobs morphologically identical to the SA and Black Shirts–are Antifa and BLM.  Their job is to intimidate people into compliance that they cannot win with persuasion.  They are functionally terrorist groups, intended to build terror.  Say the wrong thing, they show up at your house.  Hitler or Mussolini would readily recognize, for example, what these mobs are trying to do, and being allowed to do by Joe Biden, to the Supreme Court justices they have identified as outside the State as they want it constituted.

What is a traitor?  Anyone outside or against the State AS THEY WANT IT CONSTITUTED.  What is an “insurrection”?  Any group protesting openly against the State as they want it constituted.

The mob that was allowed, and even directed, into the Capital on Jan. 6th was not there to overthrow the government of the United States.  This is obvious.  They went into the Capital, took selfies, then left peacefully.  Their arrests by and large happened later, one by one.

As I have said before, the whole Hippy thing really amounted in many ways to an abdication of adult responsibility.  It amounted to a decision to remain, on some level, a Flower Child.  The conceit is that they are harmless, innocent, loving, good, because outside the system where nations contend for power and prestige.

But living in a Liberal democracy, or Republic, was not compatible then with the aims of the sociopathic narcissists running the Communist world.  It had to be opposed.  Choosing “peace” in a world where fights had to be fought was never an option.

And as I will never tire of pointing out, our decision to retreat from Vietnam AFTER WE HAD WON, caused horrific pain and suffering in South Vietnam.  Hundreds of thousands were executed outright.  Millions of families were broken apart, and villages that were perhaps in some cases a thousand years old broken up and destroyed.  Torture was common.  Misery was nearly universal, and for many years.

Here is another core problem: Leftists–people who came out of this culture–have got to admit THEY WERE WRONG.  Nixon does not have to be made a good guy to admit that leaving Vietnam–and Southeast Asia generally–the way we did creating completely unnecessary and unimaginable suffering.  Laos suffered, and continues to suffer.  And Cambodia saw a third, perhaps, of its population murdered in more horrific ways than most people can begin to imagine.  A great many were literally tortured to death, as a matter of policy.  They were not looking for information.   There was no goal: just the infliction of as much pain on people whose sole crime was, perhaps, owning eyeglasses, which marked them as potential intellectuals, and thus Outside or even against the State.

For my part, I can listen to anyone tell any story without judgement, and I have heard some doozies, and had solid reason to suspect crimes which were not confessed.  Judging individuals as individuals is more work than I normally want to do.

But judging groups for the behaviors which arose from their core beliefs is something that in my view is necessary.  And that judgement, for me, takes the form of stating obvious truths, such as that mass murder is a bad thing in all cases, and if we support it, then that is bad.

But who supported mass murder in Vietnam?  The Left.  The hippies.  In no small measure, and no doubt mostly passively, the Deadheads.  And to be sure, the DEMOCRATS, who literally condemned millions of people to gruesome deaths when they cut all funding to all of Southeast Asia and forced the withdrawal of all troops.  Among other things, that created the space for the emergence and military victory of the Khmer Rouge, who were at one time allied, if memory serves, with the North Vietnamese Communists.

With the Plumbers Richard Nixon was trying to protect the victory he and his policies won in Vietnam, which resulted in the Paris Peace Treaty.  Nihilistic liars sacrificed all that on the alter of their narcissism and belligerent stupidity.

There is a current in our society that stems from all this that says “Just live for now”.  YOLO.  Live like a child, free from the cares of adult responsibility and accountability.

But no sane person would call this good.  It IS good to be present to the present.  It IS good to be aware and focused on living well.  But you also need intelligence.

Abstraction is how we predict and CREATE the future.  Behavior organized around governing principles defines the direction of our cultural order as a Complex system.  I have called this a Telearchy.

Living for the moment is a telearchy destined for collapse.  Living without thinking is a telearchy destined for less and less authentic, real, spontaneous order, and one which more or less demands an externally imposed order of the type fascists–or their predecessors, who were religious zealots of one stripe or another–are only too happy to provide.

This nation cannot survive with so many people hysterically attached to childishness, to a primitive and atavistic narcissism.

And I will add one more comment: animals are functionally narcissistic.  There are cases of one species interacting harmoniously with others, but rarely in the wild.  Some species take care of their own; some, like sharks, literally eat their own.  But animals are not people.  They do not possess the capacity for abstract reflection, and for truly empathizing with other animals, truly understanding them.  There is a certain capacity for altruism in some higher species, but it is instinctual.

So here is what I have suggested before, and will say a bit more strongly: I don’t think the vegetarianism of the Buddhists and Hindus had to do, primarily, with the killing of animals for food being wrong.  Tormenting them clearly is, but our entire Earth is covered with animals who readily consume one another for survival.  Within a block of you birds are eating worms, and larger birds are eating smaller birds.

I think the axiom to not hurt came from an effort to reform social orders based on sacrifice–which is to say primitive narcissism–by making their fundamental element anathema.  Sacrifice, and probably including human sacrifice, was an essential element of Hindu culture for a very long time.  As Frits Staal discovered in funding an Agnicayana in India perhaps back in the 1970’s or 80’s, the original instructions for that ritual included a human head built into the base of the altar, presumably from sacrifice.  The Ashvamedha certainly included the sacrifice of a horse.

Human life is not so complicated that we cannot abstract useful governing principles from it, and the more ideas we allow and discuss and investigate, inevitably the smarter we get.

What we are facing is in effect a global Primitivism, an atavism, an apparently induced instinctual obsession with returning to an earlier and worse state of human consciousness, all buttressed by an ubiquitous and less and less surmountable technology; all of which is rooted in primal fears we could and should have overcome long ago.

We could institute meditation in schools.  Biofeedback and Neurofeedback.  Audio-Visual Entrainment.  Training in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology.  We could legalize all psychedelics for research by qualified professionals, and introduce those which work into our mental health system.  This would cause, among other things, though, a huge loss in revenue to Big Pharma, who–no doubt among others–has been and can be expected to continue to oppose all this.

What sane person would oppose all this?  No sane person would.  So who DOES oppose all this?  I honestly don’t know.  It remains a mystery.

We live in a world where individual psychopaths can and do exercise more and more disproportionate influence.

All I know to do is continue to see as clearly as I can, and in all honesty hope for a miracle of some sort whose source I cannot see.