Ross Peroting Trump with Coffee Man

The democrats are trying to make the starbucks dude into a credible populist candidate to sap votes from Trump.

Financial System Wealth Drain Better than Latin America Style Corruption

The current western financial system grew out of the industrial revolution and large scale industries like rail networks. The scheme for fiat money and theft through inflation is pretty recent, and as far as corrupt oligarchic systems go, it's not that bad. For one, since it's a theft per transaction, more or less, it requires useful economic activity to function--the hamster wheel must keep turning--so at least people don't starve or suffer other deprivations. Also, it fosters meritocracy, even among the ranks of the corrupt. Sure you get Potemkin village corporations and financial schemes to rob investors, but you also get some value from real honest people's efforts.

In other countries where cronyism and nepotism are the main forms of corruption, the systems that provide for people's well being rot and decay as they're stripped. There are so many examples it's not worth itemizing, but Venezuela is the most recent, most rotten one. Corruption and bad policies destroyed a country with a lot of natural resources.

Should the US intervene to overthrow the government of Venezuela? Probably not. The US should focus on home, and getting our shit together and being the example and the literal school for other countries. Collapsing another shitty government won't do anything to repair the infrastructure and systems of Venezuela, and working them over financially in the aftermath won't help either, obviously. Collapsing the government of Venezuela and converting it into a theater of Great Game bullshit conflict is retarded.

Will Corporate Produced Entertainment Face Internet Competition?

It's actually pretty interesting that news was the first media industry to face fierce competition from the Internet while other media, like comedies and dramas and other forms of entertainment haven't faced direct competition on a significant scale.

Immediacy and authenticity are big components of the value of news, and in many cases a simple recording of an event is superior to the type of reporting that the legacy media does, where a story is edited and condensed into a short clip.

Authenticity is a big component of the value of entertainment, too. In recent years, some corporate entertainment has become preachy on top of being repetitive and formulaic and has managed to alienate a large portion of its audience.

There has been independent entertainment content on the Internet since it's been able to deliver audio and video, however, as far as I know, there's nothing like the phenomenon of independent Internet journalism which seems like the next iteration of news. It takes more resources to produce a 30 minute comedy than for a guy to sit in front of a web cam and comment on politics, but really not a whole lot more.

I'm Going to Condense This Blog Into a Book

There are 444 posts on this blog. Over the course of 4 years I've managed to tease out a few observations and insights that I believe are valuable. While a lot of the stuff I write about is theoretical, my intent has always been practical, so in the next iteration of my work, I'll be putting some of the things I've been writing about into practice.

We're into the real cold heart of winter here, so it's a good time of the year for contemplation and planning. It will probably take a couple of months to edit the blog material into a short "book" form. I'll try to get it done by the spring equinox.

Linear History and Alchemy

Being human is really being "of the middle" and being a composite creature of mind and body and nature and culture. Being in the middle is conducive to learning and adaptation. Indeed, since information and knowledge are expressed as relationships among elements, being in the middle enables us to embody those relationships in our brains. A fairly popular notion is humans are unique and are the instrument of the gods in transformation of the world from the garden into the city on the hill.

The concept of Linear History is a religious and mythical concept. The idea that human history is the unfolding of some cosmic scheme permeates not only the Christian religion and bible, but it also permeates the occult and mystery schools in some cases. The alchemy of spiritual "tranformation" is one example.

Ideas couched in terms of linear history or evolution or spiritual growth and alchemy are really good fingerprints of a will at work, or a confidence game because they imply the fulfillment of a plan.

In a world like ours of all-change there's really no linear transformation or evolution. There's only co-evolution.

Sleepwalking with a 401(k)

You might hate the company Facebook and think it's a sociopathic parasite, but if you put money into a 401(k), chances are good you support it, maybe with hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. You might hate the democratic party, but if you're putting money in a 401(k), chances are pretty good that you indirectly supported Clinton's campaign through corporate and executive contributions to her campaign.

A 401(k) is a really good example of sleepwalking through life and avoiding conscious choices. Money that might have gone into local businesses or productive assets for an individual or family goes to support some random collection of financialized corporations and to support the lifestyle of the "managers" of the 401(k).

Covington High School Video--A Turning Point

One of the best scenes of the 1982 movie Conan The Barbarian is when Conan confronts Thulsa Doom and defeats him. Doom makes a great speech about how he was Conan's real father precisely because he'd toughened and strengthened Conan through adversity. (like the Johnny Cash song "A Boy Named Sue")

Doom is the embodiment of the world of lies. He's a trickster, con man, and murderer who is worshiped by a corrupt flower-child cult.

Conan surpasses Doom physically, but more importantly, by changing and growing his consciousness and understanding. Thulsa Doom's lie stops working and Conan chops his head off and unceremoniously chucks it at the cult members in a sort of reversal of Thulsa Doom's explanation to the answer of the "Riddle of Steel" koan.

I think this Covington High School incident is a turning point in modern-day US media propaganda. It's such a stark fail for the mainstream media, who ran with a totally incorrect story, which was then amplified by shrieking lefty partisans on social media, and was then immediately and resoundingly debunked in an almost comical reversal. (My inner conspiracy theorist wonders if the whole thing was staged to produce this exact outcome. The "Black Israelites" or whatever they're called seem like a fake, professional trolling troupe.) This might be the incident that snaps a lot of people out of the post 2016 election funhouse world into actual reality, and does severe and lasting damage to an already damaged MSM.

Reversing Globalism

The movie "They Live" is happening in real life in slow motion. A small percentage, but fairly significant number of people is waking up and seeing through propaganda mainly because of the Internet.

One of the aspects of the movie that's very distorted, however, is that the malaise and corruption in society is solely due to an external alien agent. That's obviously not true. Instead, people's collective lack of concern for themselves and others ends up being concentrated into individuals and organizations. The general lack of virtue, and more importantly conscious choice, gives power and life to the entities that oppress them.

That said, there are some prosaic things that people can do as individuals and as a nation to reverse trends of the past couple of decades in their favor and for the general benefit of all. This could be an enormously long rambling post if I itemized things, e.g. investing locally or using local banks instead of blindly shoveling cash into a 401(k). Instead here's the general concept. In recent decades, the laws of the United States and really the world were changed to favor financialized corporations as the pre-eminent means of producing every single thing from entertainment to food. It's really not all that hard to roll all that stuff back. It would probably take years to do it, but it's probably preferable to do it piecemeal anyway if that's what people really want.

But as I said above, the laws and the corrupt government and organizations are really not the problem. People are dispossessed because they dispossess themselves. They barely think and make conscious choices. They lack information and the ability to see the information they do have. Maybe most importantly we're guided by bad myths.

Will "Left Wing" (aka bankster establishment) Divide and Conquer Tactics Totally Backfire?

The latest left wing outrage mob mental breakdown was based on a completely fraudulent clickbait story promoted by propaganda/clickbait rags like the Guardian. The Covington High School story was debunked almost immediately by alt-media sites on the "left" and "right", and almost as quickly, the shitty tech corporations like google took down some stories that weren't promoting the lies.

While these tactics do fool some normies, they seem much more effective at undermining whatever is left of the credibility of the corporate media and serve as brief practical classes in counter-intelligence and subversion tactics. Before the Internet and the ability to quickly distribute video and audio media, it made sense to invest millions of dollars of resources in this type of propaganda, but it probably doesn't make any sense, now.

It also shows how contemptible the shit people are behind these tactics. Slandering a bunch of high school students is about as low as one can get.

The Yellow Vests and the 2020 Election in the US--Fighting the Last War

The yellow vest protests are like a preview of some alternate-reality US future where Trump didn't win and technocrats turned the fuck-the-people machine up to 11. The EU is further along the technocracy/totalitarian path than the United States is in many respects. It boggles my mind to consider just gas prices in Europe versus the US. $8/gallon versus $2 or less. On top of that, take home pay and household debt to income in the US are all generally better than in Europe.

As the 2020 election shapes up in the US, the uniparty globalist faction looks to be "fighting the last war" and trying to censor the Internets by taking people like Alex Jones, lol, offline. Perhaps they're feverishly data mining Faceberg and Twatter posts to try to set the stage for their next shitty empty suit off-white sub-group script reader political candidate. Trump's election win was probably unique. I don't think the tactics that got him elected will work as well this time. One element of his campaign propaganda that made it successful was its novelty.

I think that events have already moved onto the next stage, which is currently unfolding in France and with the Brexit debacle. The western world yeomanry are just starting to figure out who's been fucking them over for the past several decades and realize they need to fight back.

Yellow Vests and Populism--Is Violence a Necessary Outcome?

There's a lot of footage and images coming out of France that are showing police beating and maiming yellow vest protesters and random people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Macron is a despicable piece of shit. He's an empty suit bankster puppet who, unfortunately, the French people were collectively dumb enough to put into office. Their government is basically opposed to its citizens. It seems like the globalist oligarchy is maybe in panic mode and is starting to lash out.

Their main problem is they're just a small group that leverages their power by controlling institutions through bribery and blackmail. Maybe altogether they're a few thousand people--the boards of directors of large corporations and government bureaucrats and the like. When "the people" act in a concerted, directed way in any nation, the oligarch's control would be lost as they either flee the country or die.

There's really no difference between France of the present day and the counties of the former Soviet Union in the 90s when all of a sudden the regimes in power lost credibility and were flushed down the toilet into the septic tank of history. When retards like Macron start a violent crackdown, all of a sudden they make violence and revolution preferable or an equal choice to marching around and complaining in the streets, which is a total waste of time.

I'm hoping the US system can better mediate the internal conflict between the yeomanry and our own oligarchy than France. The election of Trump and the political wrangling is preferable to protracted and destructive violence.

Investing Yourself in Institutions

The series Lodge 49 prompted me to think that institutions like the Masons in the United States, or other fraternal orders that were  extremely common in the 19th century were a valuable counterweight to corporations and other large institutions in the US. There's a large segment of the population, I think, that actually hates institutional/corporate life maybe because of a genetic predisposition. I'd include myself in that group. To me, going off to live off the grid or in the woods is endlessly tempting. I'm sort of working toward that in a slow and planned way.

On the other hand, there are people who totally invest their life in institutions and see them as a sort of tribe replacement or mechanism for the sort of immortality that's available to humans--a picture on a wall or a statue or a name plaque on a building.

The fraternal orders or small town churches of a prior era were a middle ground between the corporations and bureaucratic/legalistic creatures of today. Of course there are still churches and fraternal orders and other civic or small organizations like sports clubs, but membership in many such organizations has been on decline for years, probably because they compete with corporations and governments for resources and attention.

The Grange is a really interesting case because of its success, then a refusal to grab the ring of power, basically. It's also an interesting case, because like the NGOs of today, it lobbied for the creation of governmental institutions to do the things it could have done itself.

The Seven Years War Doubled British Debts

Here's a nice writeup of some of the economic causes of the American Revolution. Many of which were spurred on by the debt the British Government owed to Dutch and British Bankers.

Flipping the Current Day Relationship Between People and Institutions

The wave of discontent with the corporate/banker western world is currently sloshing over France and seems to be picking up momentum and intensity. It's somewhat surprising that it's taken so long for the middle class people in the west to react to the worldwide corporate oligarchy known as "globalism". The main problem is the central institutions in most western countries are, at this point, overtly hostile to their own populations. This is a pretty common pattern, of course, in history, but what's novel today is that the countries in the west are representative democracies, but now they represent oligarchs and corporations rather than their own people.

The corporate imperialism of globalism is in the very early days of being superseded by the Internet. The dispossessed middle class people of the west are probably ripe for a sort of new religious revival and the corresponding creation of a new set of institutions that actually serve their interests instead of fuck them over and reduce their lives to an endless run on the hamster wheel.

The Dems and Schisms in Post Cold War Politics

"W" Bush was the last president of the Cold War era US. His term destroyed the old GOP and really the Democrats too. The wars and bank and corporate bailouts that went on during his and 0bama's term poisoned both of those parties. The GOP died and part of it became the Trump party, but the RINOs of the Bush era are still around, of course.

Now as each Democrat candidate announces their primary run, we get a seismic sounding of that shitty party as it starts shaking apart. The latest to announce was Tulsi Gabbard, who made her name as a critic of the wars. The corporate warmonger DINOs of her party started to launch attacks on her. She probably can jump out to an early lead in the clown car field of no-names.

We'll probably end up with two new parties after a couple of election cycles. The oligarchy/poors party of corporations, and bankers and warmongers and the America First middle class party.

"Lodge 49": An Artifact of the Times

"Lodge 49" is a new AMC series that's available on Hulu. We just watched the first season, which was meditative and interesting while also being entertaining. It's a pretty good cultural snapshot of the United States today and actually hits on many of the same themes as this blog.

The United States is suffering from a protracted hangover of the post WW2 era. The end of the cold war basically destroyed any reason to hang onto the empire, except for crass commercial reasons, and crass commercial activity started to dominate every aspect of life. Actually, a good way to look at the present day western world's controversies is it's a protracted quarrel about how to live in the post cold war paradise we actually have.

The show is about the brother and sister survivors of the solar family the Dudleys. The mother died young, and the father died recently in mysterious circumstances. (There are countless shows, movies, and stories with the same starting point, and at least as many characters, e.g. Lex Luthor in Smallville, Sam and Dean Winchester in Supernatural.) The children are struggling with debt and dead end jobs, and the nagging idea that they should be doing something else.

The main character Sean "Dud" Dudley through a series of accidental circumstances ends up as a "Lynx" (Stand-in for the Masons) Fraternal Order. The show follows the typical pattern of a "slowly revealed secret" show, but it keeps things moving and doesn't get too bogged down.

Globalism and the Anachronism of Identity Politics

In the United States today almost every "white" person is really an "American" blend of random European ancestry but has zero connection or affiliation with Europe. That sort of mixing of groups and tribes has been going on forever. The idea of "white" people as a catchall term is a pretty recent idea that probably only makes sense after the settlement of the New World. Those people's ancestors used to be Germans, or were Polish, Italian, Scots, or Irish or whatever, in an even earlier era, those people's ancestors were Swabians, or Bavarians or Lombards or whatever.

The idea that "white people" went around enslaving every browner person is a pretty recent idea, too, because for thousands of years the tribes of the ancestors of the "white people" of today were slaughtering and pillaging and enslaving each other when browner people weren't doing the same to them.

The main driver of human history seems to be that it's easier to take and destroy than it is to make. The people who settle down and invest in infrastructure, towns, and cities end up at a distinct disadvantage to the groups who are more pastoral and mobile in many respects. But the mobile/pastoral life seems to suck so much that those groups want to abandon that lifestyle as soon as they can once they encounter the settled life.

One of the weirder aspects of "globalism" is how it exploits identity politics, really a super dumb version of identity being derived from skin tone, even though globalism is supposedly all about the "one world" of coca cola commercials with all hues of singing children who achieve their human dignity through consumerism and by chasing money tokens.

Setting the Stage for Violence with Corporate Politics

The US political system was setup so political factions would burn up all their energy and resources in elections and lawsuits instead of murder and mayhem. That system worked in the days of actual capitalism, but might not work so well in corporate world. Now that corporations are injecting the personal politics of their boards of directors and executives into their business activity, they've become a real threat to peace in the country.

Almost unbelievably the "mark of the beast" conspiracy theories of AM radio conspiracy talk show days have come true. Anti-establishment figures and organizations are being regularly deplatformed. It's possible the Federales will step in and the dusty anti-trust department will actually do something to break up the monopolies but that might be a long shot. The congress is close to completely corporate owned.

I think the most likely outcome is people will abandon the mainstream corporate system and just do something else over the next decade or so, but another fairly likely outcome is violence.

2020 Freakshow

People are still worked up over the 2016 election and the hype for the 2020 election is just starting up. I think it could be an even bigger freakshow than 2016.

The democrats are going through the same type of metamorphosis as the post-0bama GOP. Ironically, their best bet is to ditch neoliberalism for Trump's populism, but without the bombast. The Trump populist GOP is really like the sane version of the democrat party of old and thankfully the Bush/Clinton era corporate whore/warmonger agenda in the USA seems to have gone by its expiration date.

The neoliberal mantra seems to be "Orange Man Bad", while the left wing fringe of the fringe is "white people are bad and communism is good". The neoliberal and marxist parts of the democrat party will probably be represented in the field of candidates. It's even possible that a sort of softer version of Trump will show up in the field of candidates and maybe win--somebody like a Sherrod Brown. Actually, many centrist people who were pushed to be soft Trump supporters by the Clintons and the far left freakazoids of the blue squad would probably ditch the Trump train for the normalcy of a career politician like that.

If the shitty democrats don't consolidate around a moderate candidate like Brown pretty early on, they'll probably go full on freak-show mode and maybe split into two parties during the campaign season. The longer the far left maniacs are on the stage, the worse the chances are for the blue squad. Abortion rights..... for trans wxmens! It's hard to even imagine how far into the swamp of identity politics bullshit they'll wade.

A worrying and very polarizing aspect of the political landscape is corporate boards and execs injecting their retarded politics into their business. That could eventually lead to a violent confrontation, especially if the banking system gets into it. Another worrying element is that the maniacs who have climbed the spy provided ladders of radicalization on both phony sides are ready to go full ape shit and do mass murders and bombings, which could then touch off retaliatory medieval blood-feud style violence.

Patronage Networks versus The Internet

If you look on census zip code maps, you'll find communities of super monied people in cities all around the United States. Some of those people are corporate executives or lawyers, some of them are old money families who have been stacking cheddar since the 17th century and have ancestors who helped found states like Ohio or who owned shipping and industrial enterprises at the dawn of the Industrial Age. They're the people who sit on boards of directors of corporations, or make up the governing bodies of park systems and planning commissions.

They're really "the establishment". Networks of friendships and relationships of various sorts connect them to people throughout a region of influence or through industries or institutions like colleges or universities. Their influence moves at the speed of a handshake at a glad-handing party, or at the rate a rich old man in Orvis Madras Pants can get a bottle of gin from his patio bar so a group of alcoholic wives can decide which style of garbage can the park should have.

Those networks attract creative people like artists and writers that often, surprisingly, promote and foster ideas that seem opposed to their interests. Far left ideologies like communism, or identity politics, or promotion of mass immigration seem at odds with a stable nation, and steadily growing economy, but they permeate institutions and media outfitis that are tied into oligarch patronage networks in cities like New York and San Francisco.

The mode of influence and idea spreading via the Internet is the converse of the glad handing, money club. In fact, the two groups of people probably couldn't even understand eachother and would probably have a fight if they were in the same room. The oafish, self-deprecating, "offensive" counterculture of memes and jokes of the internet probably has no appeal to the prosaic, pretty banal mindset of the generational cheddar stacker who's "hard work" is trying to decide if they should raise the rent on the carriage house on the other side of their estate by $50 or $75 a month in the next fiscal year.

The internet has no institutional influence, yet it might destroy them all for that very reason. The establishment really is like the nervous system of the meta-anmial of society, but it's outmoded. As the establishment organize NGOs and committees of lawyers to "fight back" against the alt-media, it'll be really interesting to see how quickly the Internet flows around their efforts.

Fake Feedback in the World of Lies

Most things that make us civilized are also things that eliminate feedback from the natural world. For people who are making a regular income and have a roof over their head, most of their day is spent inside a bubble of comfort and delight. The only cues they need to respond to are social cues and the phony cues of the financial world. They spend their time seeking social status or seek distraction from that rat race. Their food, warmth, and comfort are provided by a clean, pretty efficient system. The only time we're unintentionally exposed to real world cues is by illness or injury, or by a breakdown of the systems that keep us warm and fed as a result to natural catastrophes or simple decay and deterioration of something like a roof on a house. The other times we're exposed to real world cues is via hobbies like hiking or backpacking.

The phony cues of the financial and consumer world are like stimuli in a rat maze. These stimuli get amped up by advertising and media that consciously target our primal sensory filter networks. The people who create these phony cues and games inhabit an even more fake world, where they believe the highest form of consciousness is grifting.

The practice of virtue is really a return to nature, or to seeking guidance from natural cues, and to seeking out the voice of the gods of nature. In the world of lies, this is actually a very difficult undertaking, and the task is at odds with the present civil and social order.

I wonder if ascetic orders or spiritual/philosophical traditions like Stoicism take off in rotting Empire times as spiritual life boats.

The Allure of Perfectability

Since we live in the woods, I own three chainsaws--small medium and large, basically. The large one is an old (1980's vintage) Stihl 056 that I've scrounged parts for on e-bay and fixed up. It's a very impressive machine to use. It's like holding a running motorcycle engine in your hands. When it's sitting on the ground idling, it hops around as the piston pops.

In a lot of ways chainsaws remind me of road bicycles. There's a sort of severe, warrior monk feel to them. They were engineered over more than 100 years of history to be simple and durable and survive and perform in a wide range of conditions and to withstand severe abuse. Frivolous and stupid or merely inefficient design elements were weeded out by demanding users and harsh conditions. (They're both good man-made examples of how nature stores information.)

The contrast between a tool or device that's engineered that way versus a planned obsolescence, value engineered consumer product is palpable. Unfortunately, almost anything you get your hands on today to use is "value engineered" pre-garbage mainly because the corporations who make them aren't on the path of perfecting their craft, but are driven by finance rather than virtue, or natural necessities.

It's actually pretty odd that sole pursuit of profit and money tokens is even acceptable or admirable rather than derided and scorned.