When you are lied to by the fake news, the fake school propaganda textbooks, or when you are surrounded by ignorant people who can’t see things the way they actually work, you develop coping methods over time to deal with the necessarily resulting uncertainty.  This scales up nicely to the species level, and down to the individual decision level as well.  Humans just don’t know enough of the future to be able to make exact plans in advance.

All civilizations that I know of have come up with games to deal with uncertain decision making.  They are typically games of chance: geomancy, tarot, throwing the rune staves, dice, goat knucklebones and many others.  Believe it or not, mathematically, these work for the benefit of the species as a whole.  Not everybody should do the same thing, because not every circumstance is the same.  Thus, a question such as “should I move?” is answered differently for each family, and the families get spread out over the landscape.  Yes, some stay in the path of Vesuvius, but a bunch don’t.  Yes, some move into the path of the plague or the collapsing river dam, but a bunch don’t.

We learned early on as a species not to put all of our eggs in one basket.  Thus, some prepare for the global warming, and some prepare for the next ice age, and some prepare for the climate to be very slow at shifting, while muttering “not in my lifetime suckers” under their breath.  This is good.  Regardless of who is correct, somebody has prepared for the correct option, so somebody survives.  “Where should I move to prepare for the diminishment of the availability of oil resources and the next famine due to the lack of fertilizers and pesticides and working combines?”  The answer, obviously, is for some to stay, and some to move around, for some to garden, and some to keep researching the biodiversity of fungi in big university ivory towers, and some to manufacture and internationally trade plant-based medicine on massive scales.  There is no one right place to move to prepare for an uncertain future.  Perhaps the answer is, where the jobs are, or perhaps the answer is where I will have access to clean air, clean water, clean food, and medical care when I need it and to hell with jobs.

Humans are very good at lying to their conscious mind.  They can handle vast amounts of cognitive dissonance for decades.  Yet, if they tapped into their unconscious minds, a wealth of information would come forward.  They would know who is a creepy person, and would stay away from those people with the slimy eyes, simply by engaging with the patterns of body language which betray unspoken intentions.  This intuition is very useful in decision making when there is just a little bit of uncertainty.  If you are asking “Is my boss planning to fire me or lay me off?” usually, you have a gut feeling, even if you would not necessarily know why or when.  Tapping into that gut feeling using a game of chance can give you more information.

When there is quite a bit of uncertainty, using a game of chance is just about the only way to make the decision without succumbing to paralysis by analysis by the analytical paranoid types.  Sometimes, you just can not know in advance what the risks of ruin are for each option.  There comes a time when ranting and raving against the bought and paid for mainstream media doesn’t work, and you have to make a move, or perhaps wait motionless, based on only the very limited information and patterns of behavior which are available to you.

It helps a lot to be able to formulate the right question.  There are times when even the act of attempting to formulate the right question can give you insights into something you are missing or hiding from yourself.  “Should I lose weight?”  Is that really the right question?  Is it instead “should I lose body fat?”  Or is it “should I become the healthiest I can be, so that I am prepared and able to live life with joy?”  And what does healthy mean, anyway?  I mean, maybe you should really gain weight by adding more muscle than fat lost, or maybe you should have sufficient amounts of body fat to be healthy in the possible famine filled future?  And maybe your weight should fluctuate over time.  Maybe the inverted Moon tarot card is the best outcome possible, and that is a good thing.

I’m starting to notice problems with data acquisition via the internet.  A number of blogs I regularly read are starting to go behind a paywall.  It isn’t a big paywall, usually something on the order of a dollar a month or so, but troublesome for me.  I have this policy against paying money for stuff over the internet.  It has to do with a long-standing disagreement with paypal I’ve got going on.  See, I can not use paypal.  Not even for one-time credit card processing.  I guess I’m on a list of people they have banned, and I haven’t been able to figure out why.  Most of the time, I don’t care.  About once a year or so, I’ve want something that only takes paypal, and I’ve had to find a work around, or not buy it.  Preschool went to paypal for tuition payments, but I could still mail a check.  A local race required paypal to enter, but I searched around and discovered how to mail a check to them.

I’ve considered altering my identity information, pretending I’m my husband, and the like, just to be able to buy some books.  It turns out that Scarlet Imprint requires paypal.  So does a philosophy professor, and a sigil magic course I’m interested in.  What is in a name?  After all, I can use different names in different places on the internet, so why not with paypal and facebook as well?  Yet, I haven’t.

I understand why the token dollar paywall exists.  Those bots are brutal out there.  The DDOS attacks are increasing.  When Martin Armstrong talks about the shift of public confidence to private confidence, do you think he might be discussing such things as the public to private internet usage as well?  It could be.  The private internet, the darkweb, is already bigger than the public part of it.  The public part of it increasingly is vulnerable.  You can see that every time a bank website goes down.  How many times this year has Bank of America gone down?  How many times this year have you gone to the grocery store, and the new chip card doesn’t work because the connection to the server is down?

Kevin at Cryptogon is down this morning, and by that I mean the skin is there but the content is not.  Forums run slow, and the host servers lose data.  Facebook is down for people from time to time.  Things just are not as reliable as they used to be.  Is it just down for me?

How much reliance on the internet are you exposed to?  If the banking network broke, what would your cryptocurrencies be worth?  How much government theft of trillions of dollars could you cover up with a banking network failure?  More than you could cover up by three skyscrapers falling onto their own footprint, or by a bank’s records room being flooded out in Hurricane Sandy, I’d think.

These problems are not solved by one bank to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.  You can solve “show the note” mortgage problems (MERS) by merging all of the mortgage holding banks into one central bank, but the three factions won’t have it.  If the Vatican moved its records, don’t you think the banking system would do the same?  It is basic risk management.  There are various black swan scenarios which result in the death of the public internet as an effective means of communication.  As it is, all we get is increasing noise to signal ratio.  The truth is still out there, but you have to look at the fiction to find it.

This morning, I read yet another article on “I saved $23,000 by not buying stuff I didn’t need like movie tickets and new clothing and going out to eat.”  Okay.  I’m happy for you, oh childless one.  Generally speaking, the clickbait stories on people getting out of debt by not spending money are about people without children.  Go a bit deeper into the austerity movement, say, into Dave Ramsey territory, and you’ll find stories of people with children.

Some of my friends don’t like Dave Ramsey, because they aren’t religious, and he is.  Some of them just don’t believe the stories they read, though.  When they read about somebody paying off $200,000 of debt in three years, they just can’t believe that that would apply to them.  For the most part, they are right.  To pay off $200,000 in debt over three years, generally speaking, they sold something big like a house or a condo which was gifted to them, or they have a really high income, like they are receiving rent from that house or condo which was gifted to them.

For the most part, getting out of debt is a good thing.  Dmitry Orlov describes the iron triangle of house-car-job as the chains which keep people enslaved to soul-sucking cubicle slavery.  What is it that we need?  Dmitry rightfully points out, 80% of people on Earth don’t own a vehicle.  In 2014, there were 1.2 billion vehicles on the planet, and 7.1 billion people.  Think about those numbers for a bit.  I need a vehicle, because I have kids in upper-middle-class suburbia, which is deliberately designed, at least according to James Howard Kunstler, to require a vehicle to get to the grocery store, to a job, to the doctor’s office, because nothing is within walking distance.  I can’t grow my own food because I don’t have enough land to do so, plus city livestock ordinances.  I can’t grow my own fuel because I don’t have enough land to do so, plus no harvesting firewood from the city-owned greenbelts and parks.

There are plenty of people in the survival/prepper communities who implore people like me to grow my own something.  I do grow things.  I grow apples, quince, cherries, plums, pears, Asian pears, aronia berries, tayberries, blackberries, blueberries, kiwi, and other things.  However, this particular location can NEVER be self-sustainable, not even if the population reduced by 90% and I was in the favor of the local warlord.  I can make it better than the typical mortgage debt slave with a perfectly manicured lawn, it is true.  I have paid off my mortgage, my car loans, and my student debts.  I no longer have over $250,000 in debt.  Yes, I did do it by sitting on my butt at home and buying as little as reasonably possible.  There was self-sacrifice involved.  Meanwhile, friends move, and rent, and get another mortgage.  I don’t tell them I’m mortgage free.  They wouldn’t understand.

My kids get teased for their clothes at school.  They play hard in them, and rip the knees over time.  I don’t get around to replacing them, or sewing patches on the knees.  My kids get called poor.  How much greater does the adult level of teasing occur?  In order to do the austerity measures required to get out of debt, you can’t go out to coffee with your friends.  You can’t go do expensive events with your friends.  When you don’t spend money, you lose your previous friends who do.  When everybody in the neighborhood it seems has enrolled their children in Chinese, swim team, basketball, girl scouts, piano, play practice, dance, and horseback riding (and I’m talking ONE family with two children here), and I haven’t because those things cost more money in fees and gas and time than I’m willing to pay, is it any surprise when my kids just don’t play with their kids after school?  How could they possibly?

What is it that we need?  Maslow’s Hierarchy doesn’t include cars.  You need food, a warm bed to sleep in (you don’t need to own it), functional clothing, clean water, and a community to provide the other incidentals like medical care and friendship and insurance when bad things happen, and bad things always happen eventually.  When you start with a family culture of self-imposed austerity, there is sufficient cushion when bad things happen.  When you don’t have a $2000 monthly mortgage payment, a $600 monthly car payment, and a $250 monthly student loan payment, you have more cushion when you lose your job or get long-term disabled by a broken leg or cancer and can’t work for a time.  Yet, the financial cushion comes with a cost to your social cushion.  Not spending money includes charity.  Is that worth it?  Well, if your friends are leeches, who drop off when they don’t receive monetary gifts from you, then yes, it is worth it.  Be alone for a bit until you can find friends who aren’t financial leeches.

All of this makes me ponder whether there are spiritual leeches.  Spirits who require more maintenance costs than you are willing to give.  Heh.  I can think of a few deities which fall into this category so easily, demanding way more of me than they would give in return, with unfair terms which I just need to walk away from.  Go find the ones who aren’t spiritual leeches, whose negotiated terms are fair.

Sometimes, I get depressed.  Once a month or so, I feel trapped, pointless, worthless, and so on and so forth.  One way to move on from that place, is through meditation on ghosts.  It goes a bit like this.  Ghosts exist.  Go take your Ouija board into an abandoned jail where they tortured people to death and prove it to yourself if you have not yet had sufficient experience.  Or, if not ghosts, then spirits without physical bodies exist.  Which is why you can say that lizards have taken over certain powerful people in the world, or that creepy feeling you get when you’re in the presence of a mass murderer.  Or, even if you’ve never experienced that, then there are atheists out there with precognitive or telepathic abilities which they should not have, and can document.

All of which points to this one concept: I can’t die.  Oh, sure, my body can die.  But I can’t.  The me that is my will, that is the thing that watches myself think and fall in love and feel all sorts of powerful instincts and emotions, will still be here in the beginning and at the end of all things.  It is bigger than this body.  I am bigger than this body.  Which means I’m capable of dying and being reborn in another body.  Perhaps in a previous life I was an alien on another planet, with wings, watching the end of my species, urgent to protect my clutch of eggs, but helpless to prevent the solar outburst with dancing plasma figures across the sky.  Or possibly that’s the future, I always get the past and the future mixed up.

When I come to the realization that my soul is immortal, then I can take risks.  If my body is all that there is, then I must guard it as a precious thing.  If I live after death, even as a ghost able to travel through all of space and time because of the interdimensional nature of spirit, then it really is okay if the human species goes extinct.  If consciousness really can affect physical matter, then the ghosts will create bodies to inhabit again, or already have.  When it is okay to die, you can reach a point in your head, where you imagine yourself already dead.

Imagining yourself already dead is actually a technique that certain military commanders have successfully used during campaigns.  When the soldiers imagine themselves as already dead, they are capable of throwing themselves upon the enemy at severe risk of death, without fear, and complete their assigned missions.  I’ve found it in several fiction books.  Throw your life away, and catch it back in your hands.  Ah, but what are you throwing it away for?  Love.  Love is the strongest thing in the Universe, and has proven to be much stronger than hatred or fear.  Sure, you can go for non-attachment, but where’s the fun in that?  I have a physical body for now, and I may as well have an adventure with it.

Oh, and the other thing.  If there are ghosts hanging around, that means they didn’t ALL go immediately to heaven, hell, Valhalla, hades, the summerlands, or other afterlife that does not include them hanging around Earth and making sure we don’t nuke ourselves to death.  It means all of the religious rules of behavior go out the window.  Especially when you start catching those ghosts lying to you or trying to trick you.  That alone busts hierarchical obedient tendencies right off the bat.  Ghosts lie as much as politicians, so one might imagine that gods lie bigger than ghosts.  As with all animate beings, watch what they do, not what they say.