I am in constant pain.  If I think about it, I’ve probably been in constant pain since late February.  It isn’t bad.  It just interferes with my sleep right now.  One of the things I’ve been doing to deal with the pain, is to get into pointless arguments on Fearbook.  They’re pointless, because they’re part of an echo chamber, and nobody is going to learn anything at all from them anyway, except maybe me.

Yesterday’s pointless argument started off well enough.  One of the more pointless arguments out there is to argue the historicity of Jesus to a bunch of atheists.  I don’t really understand why atheists don’t think there was a non-magical son of a carpenter (or was it a Roman Legionnaire?) going around spouting anti-Roman rebellious sedition, who got crucified and died because of that, and stayed dead.  Why is it so abhorrent to their worldview, or at least the ones I was arguing with, to even think that most of the myths of the world have a kernel of real world material truth to them?  I’m not even claiming that non-material reality is true for that one.

No, they said.  The myths around the world have no real world component to them.  They sprang up out of, I don’t know, the ether? The vacuum? The void? And then afterwards, people started imitating the parts they could.  Meanwhile, I’m arguing for the existence of archetypes.  Take Disney’s jealous step-mother, for example.  Based on a true story, right?  A village savior who sacrificed himself so that the village could continue to exist.  Based on a true story, right?  Little Red Riding Hood is based upon the true story of a girl who goes to visit grandmother, meets a bad guy on the way, and, depending on where you are in the world, because the story really is global, either gets saved or gets gobbled up by the bad guy.  No, they said.  Never happens.  These myths have absolutely no basis in reality, they say.

Do they not realize what their position leads to, down the primrose path all the way to the end?  If the myths of the world are not based upon a material reality kernel of truth of some kind, no matter how small, then spirits must exist.  If big ideas, a couple thousand years old, of Little Red Riding Hood’s admonitions about the privacy of location information online, do not arise out of material reality, then there must be a non-material reality from which those big ideas arose.  If scientific discoveries frequently occur simultaneously on two or three separate locations around the globe, before the internet and before telephones and before the telegraph, then there must be a non-material reality from which these ideas arise.

The muses are spirits.  They can be propitiated.  They can be welcomed.  They can be shut out.  They can leave you and find somebody else.  They can hang around and cause feverish spurts of unbelievably prodigious amounts of writing in a small amount of time.  If the simplest explanation for widespread mythological uniformity is a war in the spirit world, then why not go with that?

Myths change the meaning of actions.  If you believe that humans arose from trees, are you going to log them and burn them all?  If you believe that humans arose from dirt and a blood clot, then are you going to not make the dirt bare and spill blood?  If you believe that humans arose through random chance, are you willing to make the selfless sacrifices required by your community for its health and continued existence?

If Jesus was a channeled spirit instead of a body that actually walked around, then that would explain why so very many atheists refuse to believe he actually existed.  Yet, even the rocks cry out for the existence of animism.  They’re alive too.  So, what if Jesus was a channeled spirit who still exists?  What then?  The question is: is Jesus worth listening too, given all of the other channeled spirits out there?  Does Jesus work for your particular community, or for you as an individual?  Or do other spirits, like your ancestors perhaps, have more skin in the game and work better?  Is he too high up on the spiritual food chain now to actually affect material reality for you personally?  Don’t you want a saint instead?  Especially a forgotten one stricken from the calendar whose attention is not spread among quite so many people, so it is easier to get their attention?

I need more sleep.

If you lived in Rome during the decline and fall, and knew that the Roman Empire was collapsing, would you take the bread, and would you watch the circuses?  This is one of those trick game theory questions.  It does not say where in the Empire you live, nor does it say what class of people you are in, nor does it explain whether you belong to a close-knit group of people capable of repelling outsiders’ noses from your business.  It does not say whether Rome is burning as we speak, or will collapse 40 years from now.  It does not say if the bread causes ergot poisoning, or if you have other means of feeding yourself.

Different people in different circumstances will respond to the question differently.  Perhaps you are a circus performer yourself.  Perhaps you are part of the Legion.  Perhaps you are high up in the Emperor’s household or staff.  Perhaps you are a slave.  Perhaps you are a trader from outside of Rome, living there temporarily while you collect your wares.

These are the kind of thoughts that flit through my mind, as I run through the forest on the wide paths.  A woman walking her dogs warns me that there have been bear sightings in the area.  She is glad that there are a lot of people on the trails.  Being in larger groups makes her feel safer, I suppose.  Yet, there are limits to safety in groups.  Too large a group, and you’ll be less safe, because the bystanders will do nothing.  Too small a group, and you’ll be at risk of predatory behavior.  Does being in a large group make me feel safe?

I hate large groups of people.  So, the answer to the question of whether I’d go watch the circuses, is a big NO, unless it was vital to my business affairs.  I remember the scene from The Life Of Brian, where the People’s Front of Judea, or was it the Judean People’s Front, met at the coliseum to plot and plan, or gripe and complain.  I don’t go to football games.  I don’t watch baseball games or basketball games.  I hardly ever go to the movie theater.  I haven’t watched a single episode of Game of Thrones, or Supernatural, or whatever it is that people watch these days.

However, I do take the bread.  I live in upper-middle-class suburbia.  Raising livestock is forbidden by ordinance.  I can grow some plants, and I do, but ultimately I depend on the grocery store, and I take full advantage of their rewards card.  Some of you don’t, both because you grow a lot more of your food, and because you value your privacy over your money.

Agriculture is not sustainable.  Or is it?  Climates have changed, and droughts and floods have completely changed the landscape.  What was sustainable in the past, the traditional local land management permaculture practices, is no longer sustainable now.  Things have changed too much.  Perhaps I should qualify that: monoculture oil-based agriculture is not sustainable.  There are other farming methods which are also not sustainable.  Do they build the soil or deplete it?  Do they build diversity, or reduce it?

Do bread and circuses build soil?  Do they build biodiversity?  Are there more species of fungi living and breathing as the soil or less?  What do bread and circuses do to the trees?  Are the trees healthier because you took the bread or went to the circus?  It is possible for the answers to these questions to be yes, although not very probable.

I finally got around to watching Jupiter Ascending over the weekend.  It was absolutely hilarious!  Little grey aliens and crop circles, and cloaked space ships with gravity beams!  Angels with wings!  Dinosaurs that were gargoyles!  Such rich mythological material!  (sigh)  Then they had to go and ruin it with the plotline.

The underlying story is that humans are a crop grown for the profit of royal bloodlines.  Certain humans receive the bounty of the technological prowess of so very many generations, and others are just harvestable stock of variable quality.  As if we should be proud to be robust stock.  That is such a metaphor for Jupiter.  Jupiter, after all, is the God of Emperors.  He doesn’t care at all about the little people, unless they get in the way of his profit, his power.

This brings me to talking about the oft-rumored breakaway civilization.  It has been inferred or surmised by quite a few intelligent people, that there have been quite a few technological advances which the deep state has acquired, yet only dribbles out to the masses in bits and pieces over the years.  For over fifty years now, we have had stealth fighter jets.  For over fifty years now, there has been a patent on mind control or brain entrainment technology held by the military.  Stare at your cell phone, and realize that just about every piece of that device came from or through the military, NASA, or DARPA.  When Jupiter Ascending talks about Monitors and Keepers, it does so because those things exist already, and you don’t even have to believe in space aliens to see that the military’s use of surveillance technology has improved vastly over the last 50 years, more so than they’ll admit.

I often wonder which nefarious or benevolent organizations have access to the results of the surveillance tech.  Such vast databases have got to be worth quite a bit to the mid-level minion class, and the profit-minded criminal classes, not to mention those who would control everything as if it were encoded in their genes as their birthright.  Yet, Congress can not see them.  If a Congresscritter asks to see the database, they’ll experience technical difficulties, or the person they are asking won’t have the clearance or authority to show them, or they’ll get the usual evasive answers.

This is to be expected at this point in the timeline.  Perhaps timeline is not the right word.  It is too linear, and does not account for the cycles of time.  Perhaps I should say, Congress is plagued with administrative bloat, with tons of different factions all fighting for power, resulting in gridlock, at this stage of the wheel of time.  If there are more than 15 surveillance agencies within the US Government system (that have been admitted to), and none of them talk to each other or cooperate with each other very well, why would they ever share the information they’ve gathered, their control files on various influential people, on the Congressional record?  Only if they were taking somebody down as part of a revealed blackmail material plan.

How many girls did Jupiter/Zeus impregnate on the side, much to Hera’s wrath and displeasure?  If pedophilia is as rampant within the US Congress as it is within the Roman Catholic Church all through its sex lives of the popes history, nobody wants to bring that out into the open.  However, all pipelines peak, all markets leak, and all secrets get revealed in time.  Even the technology discovered and developed in Antarctica will be increasingly disseminated into the wider population.  Jupiter isn’t the only god, you know.  Humans are more than mere crops, grown for the pleasure of the grains and the fungi in symbiosis, and harvested in time with skulls being kicked down from the top of the pyramid once more.

I’ve been listening to some Star Trek soundtracks while recovering from a bicycle crash.  There is a rich vein of metaphysical gold within the Star Trek Universe, just as there is in The X-Files, or Marvel’s movie franchise series.  Part of it is how Star Trek’s general political plotlines tend to follow the political plotlines of the times in which those particular episodes or movies were written.  We start with exploration of new technological progress, uh, I mean new civilizations, move on to the peak of empire’s power and glory where we have conquered, uh, I mean they have seen the wisdom of joining the United Federation of Planets, destroying the Borg (either biblical heaven or the communists), and then slide down the end of empire into darkness.

I was interested in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, because it seems to be a summation of how I see a species’ genetic attempt to survive the darkness that nature throws at us, much less the gods.  It is a critical component of decentralization.  You know you have reached the centralization narrative when you hear the unspoken words “we should all do this.”  We should all achieve healthy BMI.  We should all eat less meat.  We should all work a 9-5 job.  We should all receive a Universal Basic Income.  We should all be on statins and blood pressure medication.  We should all drink lots of fluoride.  We should all get vaccinated.  No.  No we shouldn’t all do anything.

Let me explain with an example.  Not all dogs should look alike.  A Terrier should not look like a Border Collie.  A husky should not look like a Great Dane.  A French Poodle should not look like a Chihuahua or a Mastiff.  There is a wide variety of dog breeds and types, because these dogs serve different functions in their local ecosystems.  The rat hunters are not sheep herders.  The cold-weather adapted dogs with thick fur coats are not the hot-weather adapted dogs with big ears and very thin short fur coats.  Not all dogs should eat the same diet either.  Working sled dogs need more calories than tiny subway purse dogs.

The same is true with people.  The hot weather adapted people look physically different from the cold-weather adapted people.  The hunters are not farmers, nor are they shepherds.  Some people are born to run, and some people are born to lift heavy things instead.  Some people are born followers, some people are born leaders, and some people are born loners.  Not every person should eat the same diet.  We’re supposed to have a wider range of body fat and body muscle than the BMI scale accounts for.  People are diverse, because diversity works.

Diversity of immunity is how species survive disease.  If, say, every banana plant on the planet were the exact same genetic clone, then all it would take is one devastating disease to wipe out the entire species.  If everybody lived on bread alone, then wheat rust would wipe out the entire food supply.  If every army on the planet used bronze swords and chariots as their only means of attack, then smallpox infected blankets harboring pneumonic plague infected rats would kill them all.  Diversity is such an essential species survival strategy that even the single-celled organisms do it.

What does this mean for you?  It means that we should not all worship one creator god.  It means that we should not all become one big happy global government, nor should we all become anarchists.  It means we should not all grow our own food to survive the end of the unipolar US empire.  We should not all stop having children, nor should we all get married and bear 3 children.  We should not all wear the same clothing style no matter what the outside weather is and what our diverse jobs are.  We should not all eat the same 10 plants (corn, soy, wheat, potatoes, you get the picture) in our diet over and over and over again.  We should not all vote in any given election, nor should we all abstain from voting in any given election.  A wide variety and diversity of things are possible.  There are times when uniformity works for the species, when the ants all gather together and hold onto each other to form floating mats during a flood.  However, nothing is a default, and ants holding onto each other when there is no flood means you can’t bring the food home.  We’re not supposed to be centralized and united, and the land spirits and deities will grow in their infighting to make sure that we do not become so.