It must be in the stars or the water or something.  Three separate and unrelated groups of online friends of mine are all imploding at exactly the same time.  There’s a bunch of dirty laundry out there coming to light, and I just (sigh), I don’t want to pick sides.  I don’t want to dig into the details.  What is wrong with me?  Normally I’d be all over that truth-finding judgmental shtick.

People sometimes call me an old soul or a magician.  Perhaps all that means is that I tend to see things from a wider and more level-headed perspective than they do, although not always.  I’m prone to blind spots, the same as anybody else.  I do want to know the truth, usually.  It helps shrink my blind spots.  Yet, not right now.  Not for petty stuff hundreds of miles away.  Perhaps that’s my emotional boundaries talking.  It is not my business.  It doesn’t affect my day-to-day life, nor does it really affect my long-term goals.

There’s a lot of character assassination going on out there right now.  People are destroying other people’s reputations left and right.  Sometimes justifiably, sometimes not.  That’s the chaos of the cloud, eh?  There is a lot more public information out there than there was even 10 years ago.  According to fiction and myth, destroying reputations is very effective.  Shunning is effective at killing people.  Then again, verbal and emotional abuse is also effective at killing people, given enough time.

Having given up perfection, I sometimes long for the easy solution: to know for sure that I am a good person.  That is no longer an option.  I know for sure that I have a dark shadow side, and a bright shining light side, and a mystical shimmery grey and colorful side.  I have no need to kill any of them, and attempting to do so merely feeds them and increases their power.

As my communities end, I grieve.  I mourn their passing.  I learned a lot from them all.  Perhaps it is time to do something different.  After all, endings are also beginnings, and contain within them opportunities.  Darkness has fallen.  Darkness has come.  May it be that you see the sunrise shine upon you in the mourning.

There are times in your life when the pain is so bad, that all you can do is endure, secure in the knowledge that all things eventually end.

They just don’t make trolls online like they used to anymore.  A long time ago, on a forum long gone, there was a troll called Dennis From Oregon.  Dennis was a psychopathic liar, but he was very good at what he did.  It took more research than usual to prove he was lying.  Oh sure, he’d answer in vague terms a lot, but every once in a while, he’d slip up with the details.

I learned a LOT from what he wrote.  I learned about emotional manipulation in real time.  I learned about symbolism, and about mind control techniques as well as subliminal messaging from him.  I learned about propaganda.  Today’s fake news?  Pfffft.  Pales in comparison to the stuff Dennis From Oregon wrote.

The trick to the quality of what he wrote was to include a lot of real stuff along with the fake stuff.  So, he wrote over ten years ago, that he was bulldozing all of his topsoil into a pile, and covering it with a tarp, in order to protect it from the nuclear fallout which was going to come.  This was a doomer forum, so nuclear fallout was a given.  After all, all pipelines leak, so eventually, all nuclear stockpiles get released into the atmosphere.  That’s just the way things work in Murphy’s law, right?  Plus, he was digging a nuclear fallout shelter into the bedrock, just like his father and grandfather did.

The trouble is this.  If you’ve been a doomer long enough, you’ll have read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, or at least watched a few videos on how topsoil is created and maintained.  Soil is alive.  It contains millions of types of microorganisms, all of which are dependent upon the plants on top to keep them alive so they can make the nutrients in the dirt bioavailable to the plants in a very interconnected dependency web.  Tarping topsoil for a decade will kill it.  The moisture won’t get to the soil.  The sunlight won’t get to the soil.  The bacteria and fungi will change to anaerobic, and become toxic to the plants humans tend to like to grow.  Tarping topsoil to prevent nuclear fallout is a dumb idea.  If you’re a psychopath, the better way is to plant stuff that is very good at heavy metal uptake, like corn, and the harvest the corn and feed it to something that bioaccumulates heavy metals very well, like pigs, or sacred cows.  Oh look, now you’ve reduced the radioactive content of your soil!  Then, you just don’t eat the radioactive animal products.  Now that all the radioactive particles are concentrated, you can better dispose of them safely.

Dennis from Oregon also wrote quite a bit which pointed me in the direction of finding out how the money works.  He wrote about centralization of currency with “globos”, which were a fictional currency distributed by the one bank to rule them all, and about the business cycle, and about enterprise corruption.  He introduced me to the concept of “confidence.”  It wasn’t enough, but combining it with a little David Graeber later on cemented a better model than the stupid gold fractional reserve banking model which is so outdated it doesn’t work anymore.  Green pieces of paper with symbols and incantations on them, backed by, well, backed by a whole bunch of nuclear and conventional weapons, a bunch of oil flows, and a bunch of narcotics and human trafficking, that’s what money is.  When cryptocurrencies can buy any of the above?  That’s when you’ll know it is backed by something more than confidence.  And why wouldn’t it do that?  Theft and tracking of black market money are important variables.  The black market is always bigger than the official market.

Agrarian Peasants Must Die was a line too far.  Even that, though, planted seeds for me.  It made assumptions about doomers.  The assumptions are that doomers are loners, who will defend their bunkers with ammo, and live off the grid farming all the time.  The farmers knew better.  Even the non-farmers knew better.  We all live in community.  Some of our communities are healthy and functional.  In the end, we will protect our farmers, because we’d be dead without them.  When they lose their crops, because their climate shifts from time to time, and bad weather happens, the community should provide them with single-payer seed insurance instead of having them go bankrupt in debt up to their eyeballs.  Farmers are absolutely essential to a community, and keeping them out of tax prison, or regulatory hell, should become something worth fighting for.

The right kind of troll is very useful for newbie education.  The right troll provides the spark of curiosity.  Which part of what they said was true even though nobody talks about it?  Which part of what they said was a lie?  Which part of the official narrative is true?  How much of the official news is a lie?  That’s why we keep skeptics around to question everything.

You don’t have to put up with toxic people in your life.  You don’t have to put up with toxic organizations in your life either.  There are things you can do, to not feed them if they are narcissists, or to shatter their illusions if they think that you gave away your power to them.

I know, I know, what was I thinking?  I joined a few fakebook groups about how men are assholes.  I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.  Yet, at the same time, I do need to know what kind of behavior is not tolerated.  That’s the downside of growing up a wee bit on the Asperger’s side.  I still need access to conversations that tell me what the social conventions are.  At the same time, that means I’m surrounding myself with losers.

So, let’s say you’ve got a “friend” who is an asshole.  My friends tell me I’m married to one, but looking around, meh, I could’ve done so much worse.  It could be a parent, although I don’t really have toxic parents, and neither does my husband.  It could be a toxic church culture, a toxic work culture, whatever.  In your lifetime, you are going to come into contact with toxic people.  The question is, what are you going to do about it?

First, you don’t have to put up with it.  You are not a slave.  You can leave.  If your school teacher is verbally abusive, you can switch teachers, or be homeschooled, or go to a different school.  If your church is religiously abusive, you can leave.  The Constitutional right to peaceably assemble includes the right to leave.

Sometimes, you don’t want to leave, because the benefits outweigh the harms, however slightly.  Sometimes, you can get the toxic person to leave instead.  Sometimes, you can get the toxic person to change their behavior towards you.  You’ve got a few options in this situation.  You can try your basic “fuck off.”  You can try the safer for work “go jump in a lake.”  You can even use the all powerful “No.”  Without explanation.  Just no.  My favorite?  Laughter.

You want me to do what?  (long uncontrollable laughter)  You know that’s illegal right?  You know that’s not possible or practical, right?  That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard!  Do you really expect me to believe your lies about my friend?  What on Earth made you think I’d believe that?  Did you really think I’d believe that you’re better at handling the finances than I am?  Did you really think you could get me to believe that I was stupid or immoral instead of you?  What planet are you from?

Cowardly bullies hate being laughed at.  You’re not an easy mark.  You don’t do fear easily.

Way back at the end of March, I managed to acquire a full-thickness rotator cuff tear, along with bicipital tenosynovitis and some funky non-calcific loose bodies floating around in places they weren’t supposed to be.  I was supposed to get a PRP shot to finally restart the halted healing process at the beginning of July, but that didn’t happen, because they couldn’t get enough blood out of me at the time.  I was supposed to get the more expensive Amniofix in mid-July, but the doc’s wife went into labor and had a baby the night beforehand, so that didn’t happen.

Tuesday, I finally got the shot.  It hurt.  A lot.  Which meant that I felt lightheaded and nauseous, and got to lie down in a dark room.  Being the statistically lucky kind of person I am, I then proceeded after a couple minutes lag time to look like I was having a seizure for a good 10 minutes or so.  It’s not a seizure.  It’s merely the convulsive type of vasovagal response that I get in certain very specific circumstances.  Fortunately, this doc is on top of his game, and didn’t freak out (unlike those other medical professionals at those other times).  Or maybe he did freak out and is an expert at not showing it?  Well, that’s good too, because emotions such as anxiety are contagious.

Since I’ve had the dramatic shakes before, I know roughly how long they’ll take, and am calm the whole time.  I’m not interested in hyperventilating with diaphragm tremors.  That’s not my idea of a good time.  You know what also isn’t my idea of a good time?  Driving home with the residual tremors because childcare has a hard stop.  Been there, done that, and was grateful I didn’t have to do that this time.  Once I’m upright and walking around, it’s hang out in the waiting room for at least 20 minutes time.

Hello pain, my old friend.  I’ve come to walk with you again.  I’m once again appreciative of my regular meditation practice.  It doesn’t stop white coat syndrome, which is what can happen when you almost die in a hospital in the past, but it can make it more comfortable, and stop feedback loops from making things worse than they could be.  Sometimes, I can be calm, even when surrounded by chaos.  Sometimes, I can hang out with my pain, and become best buddies with it instead of resisting it.

Ah, but that’s physical pain!  What about existential pain?  The pain that is lurking there in the background, whispering “you’ll never be able to swim again!”  Or “you’ll never be able to do a pushup or pullup ever again!”  Well, I can hang out with my existential pain as well.  I’m still me, even if I am not currently an athlete and can’t dress or undress myself completely.  I still have things to laugh and smile at.  It works on NTHE pain too, you know.  I’m not dead yet.  Let’s go be irreverent, as only somebody who has known intense pain can do.

In the tale of Pandora’s Box, the last curse, the worst one, at the bottom of the box, was blind hope.  Worse than any of the others, the plagues, the death, the wars, the tempests, and such, blind hope was the one which made people risk the most.

When you have 100 children, and only 2 of them will survive until adulthood, you don’t really go out of your way to protect them, to cherish them, to instill your values into them.  Why should you go to that sort of effort?  When you have 1 child, and that child is the only child you will ever have, how much of a helicopter parent will you be?  How much more protective and guiding will you be for one than for one hundred?  How much more willing are you to say “I will never spank my child” when you have one, instead of five, or ten?

I have heard that the isolated communities around the world all beat their children, and it is for this reason that they are very well behaved when outsiders are around.  Is this true?  I don’t really know.  I know that in the Christian quiverfull movement, it is true.  They take “spare the rod and spoil the child” seriously.  Why is that?  Why do they expect their parents within that community to spank their children as young as 9 months with blanket training?  Why do some authoritarian types expect that children must be instilled with fear in order to be productive members of the greater society?  Is that true?  Why is it that children who are not spanked, yet still disciplined in a manner which is intended to create self-discipline within the child, still seem to be productive members of society?

I use POSIWID a lot.  Does spanking work?  Yup.  People have been spanked, and grew up to be moral and productive people.  Does not spanking work?  Yup.  People have grown up without ever having friends or family raise a hand to them, and grown up to be moral and productive people.  Perhaps this isn’t about spanking.

Maybe the debate is really about controlling people’s urge to use violence to create a beneficial outcome for their family.  If there is a correlation between large family size and spanking, perhaps it isn’t about their religion.  Maybe it really is about safety as they claim it to be.  Maybe the bigger problem is about people trying to control what happens in other people’s bedrooms, and I’m not talking about sex.  There is a hope, a blind hope, that if children are raised without violence, then they will become non-violent adults.

Why would I call that hope blind?  Because I’ve seen what it does to women, to be told that they must be gentle and kind and non-violent at all times.  It turns them into abused doormats.  You know what stops women being raped?  Women open carrying the means to kill their rapists, with the knowledge that even if they go to prison for it, their daughters won’t be raped by the rapist, who will do it again, and again, and again until they are stopped.

This is why Jensen says you’re allowed to use violence against those who use violence against you.  You’re allowed to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.  You must be familiar with and expect violence, to know how best to counter it.

If the tree of liberty is watered only by the blood of dead controlling centralizing types, then you have to be willing to spill the blood of your oppressors.  I am, although I am finding it increasingly difficult to have meaningful conversations with the pacifists.  I have wet my feet in the mommy wars.  So many people are so very judgmental about how other people’s children must be raised.  Breast is best.  No leaving your baby alone in a vehicle, even to put the grocery store cart away.  No letting your 9 year old play outside in your backyard unsupervised.  You must fully vaccinate.  No spanking your child in public.

They have no idea where the fight really is.  This fight is about the child of an alcoholic, finding a place to hide so she won’t be beat to death like her brother during her father’s rage.  This fight is about the child of a junkie, who hasn’t been fed in two days because her mother isn’t aware enough of what’s going on, and doesn’t have any clean clothes.  This fight is about the child who just missed being killed by a drone strike on her hospital, but is now missing a hand.  Or the millions of children experiencing rape each year.  Yeah, you shouldn’t do that.  You should care about your children enough to protect them from hunger, rape, predation, being beaten to death.  Those risks are real.  However, at some point, the children must know that they are capable of violence themselves, that they are capable of self-defense themselves.  Be prepared, instead of hopeful.

Eleven and a half years ago, I left my job as a lawyer.  I’m so glad that I did.  I still keep up my continuing legal education credits, and my license to practice law in the State in which I reside, but other than that?  No.  Just, no.  I don’t ever want to have a job like that again.

I was practicing immigration and uncontested divorce law in Chinatown, and don’t ask me about how they intersect, because they do.  It isn’t that hard to figure out.  Then, I got pregnant with my first child, wound up almost dead of preeclampsia and class III HELLP syndrome, and never went back to practicing law after her birth.  Honestly, I wouldn’t have gone back even if I hadn’t had such a hard time, because I hated it.

I hate conflict.  I really do.  While I know that I am really good at working the system and filling out the forms in the right way to get what you want through the byzantine laws and unwritten rules, it was the conflict that kept me up at night.  I knew, before my kids were born, that I couldn’t possibly manage to raise them properly and be a good lawyer.

The same rumination techniques which let me play chess by looking at every angle on the board, every future move, and strategically plotting a course with the least risk of ruin, would play havoc with my ability to multitask properly as a mother.  I’m bad at multi-tasking.  I always have been.  Instead, I hyperfocus like an autistic boss.  I can’t prioritize my kids, and also prioritize my job.  I just can’t.  That’s why I left.

That doesn’t mean I won’t practice law in the future, after I have sufficient amount of free time to hyperfocus on something besides raising my three children.  That doesn’t mean I won’t write laws, or write articles criticizing laws with a suggestion of better ones.  It does mean I can’t do it now.  I can’t work on 100 different cases with competence and efficiency.  That’s not my skillset.

In the mean time, I get to sleep in, sometimes.  I cook 99% of the meals my family eats.  The laundry gets done.  The shopping gets done.  The medical appointments and swimming lessons and soccer practice get done.  I have enough to do right now, and adding a law practice with life or death issues on top of that would be a very bad idea for me.  I really don’t want to be stuck between taking my kid to the hospital and dealing with malpractice claims due to court timing issues.

I miss it, you know.  I miss playing chess with competent players.  I miss the strategy.  I miss the filling out forms properly the first time, but the local school district still gives me the opportunity to do so at least once a year.  When the personality tests come out with me as a “Mastermind,” they’re not kidding.  That’s what I love doing.  Yet, that is not how one raises children, or stays married.

So, from time to time, I work on the problem given to me by an old friend: if I were going to reverse human habitat devastating climate change using the legal system, how would I do it?  Most of the time, I admit that it can’t be done.  Sometimes, though, I have some crazy ideas.  The key to it seems to be to break it down into manageable chunks.  For example, if all you wanted to do was to help leave the oil in the ground by crashing the global financial system using the legal system?  Oh yeah, that’s totally doable.  Banks fail = shipping halts = oil tankers don’t run.  That’s even explained in the movies, like that 1990s flick Sneakers, where the villain explained how you could ruin public confidence in entire countries using rumor alone.

Most of the time I don’t work on those things.  It’s just one load of laundry and one bill paid after another, and one book read to the children and one board game played after another.  Sure beats working myself to death.

There’s a piece on Charles Hugh Smith’s blog recently about how bat guano is a good investment during these troubled times.  Because oil is going to deplete and become something only rich people can use, bat guano is supposed to come back as a fertilizer source.  Oil is well known as an essential component of fertilizer creation, as well as processing and transport of most farm products these days.  So, I can definitely see his argument there.  People have to eat, after all.

Yet, it makes me uneasy to tell people to invest in bat guano.  Perhaps it is an example of a concept I’ve picked up recently: the “single product solution” as a red flag.  When you Decentralize All The Things, that must include fertilizer sources, and it must include investment advice and opportunities.  I understand the appeal, though.  It is a physical asset, not easily captured by highway robbers, and not easily taxed because they’d rather tax farmers and eaters (useless or not) instead.  There are bigger pockets there, you see.

When you scout out doomer investment advice, a bunch of them talk non-stop about two things: cryptocurrencies, and gold/silver.  Nobody talks about bat guano.  They do talk about their doomstead/farm, but usually in terms of how much money they have to earn outside of it to keep it functional and running.  Medical care and veterinarian bills ain’t cheap.  Neither are property taxes or the interest on mortgages and seed loans.

If you scour the corners, you can find more interesting things doomers invest in.  For example, some doomers set up their own local electricity grid.  Some people who aren’t doomers do the same, because they can.  Maybe their particular location just works a lot better with a solar/wind combo, and village scale solar recharged battery distribution.  Usually the village scale makes it worthwhile, or at least that’s the stories I come across.  I hear whispers of local water purification and distribution along the same lines, but that sort of thing is a lot quieter.

Water privatization is a thing that people don’t like to talk about.  Big multinational corporations swoop in and take over the country’s water system, start charging big bucks, and the demand drops to zero as does their profit, while the water pirates go all Robin Hood on the locals.  Who could blame them?  Who has the arrogance to declare that they own all of the drinking water that falls on the commons?  The Water Rights holders do, of course.  The almond orchards of California were watered decently while the drought continued and a small number of cities dried up.  This means, in case you are paying attention, that one can purchase all the water rights in an area, if one wanted to short some kind of stock that depended upon large amounts of clean water to be profitable.

Is that a better investment than bat guano?  (shrug)  I couldn’t say.  Is it any better that a Total Stock Market Index Fund?  Is it any better or worse than investing in quality long pork?  Or electrical companies?  It is better than investing in government bonds.  Those are essentially backed by absolutely nothing, because governments can just declare that they won’t pay them back for another 50 years if they like.  Perhaps the strategy that must be considered is one of satisficing peanut butter.  Peanut butter spreads investments over as many different categories as possible.  Satisficing means you aren’t chasing the best yields.  All you are doing is avoiding the ones with the greatest risk of ruin.  If you don’t get the best yields, you pay less legal fees, so there is that.

Maybe your investment strategy, instead of just bat guano, is to invest in the manufacture of tools which the Amish will buy.  That way, at least the Amish will buy them.  When everybody else needs them because the oil gets too expensive for them, then your market will expand.  These are physical items, with a demand which won’t be filled by drones and robots no matter what the technocopians may dream, which, while they are taxed, aren’t a deep pocket type of item to be really aggressively stolen by those who steal all the things they can.

It is certainly a better idea than investing in Solar Roads, or a couple of those Elon Musk pipedreams.  There are plenty of other really bad investments out there, like real estate on the Florida waterfront, or pharmaceuticals which have a bunch of covered up scandalous studies showing harmful effects of the drugs they are selling.

It is hard to think about investment strategies if you are also thinking about NTHE.  It is hard to think about investment strategies if you are really into climate chaos and peak oil reducing the global population by at least 50% through food crops, clean water, and habitat loss.  You really do need to expand your definition of investment to include people, and local utilities, and the surrounding village’s health and well-being.  You can not be a loner hiding in a bunker when you get so injured that you can’t walk anymore, because everybody gets injured eventually, and then you need your village to harvest your crops for you that year.  You can’t do this alone.  You can’t invest alone either.  Getting out of debt must be a village effort then, with no city debt allowed.  No bond issues for the local schools, but rather coming up with the money up front.  You can raise that kind of money through crowd-funding these days, if people have sufficient amounts of discretionary cash lying about.  Do they?  Or have they been taxed too much?

As I was out bicycling about the countryside and the city, pondering repeating patterns, I came across a thought.  There really aren’t many flat surfaces in nature.  Flat dirt quickly sprouts weeds.  Flat sands quickly gets shaped into dunes by the wind.  Seashores are not flat, for they are covered with dead fish, or tide pools, or holes for the clams to breathe, or footprints.  Flat oceans are no longer flat, because plastic disrupts the surface if the winds and the waves do not.  Crystals in caves have imperfections.  Plants don’t grow flat, at least not at any scale.  The tall ones are rounded, like cacti and trees.

I’m not sure what to think of that.  Nature likes waves and curves more than flat surfaces.  Even the blade of grass bends down under the weight of the dew or the insect.  Things in space tend to be ovoids, not quite spherical.  The stars are never cubes.  I suppose black holes could be tetrahedrons.  That makes The Borg a very interesting anomaly, although if you look closely enough, the surface isn’t flat there either.  Planets aren’t discworld, despite the claims of the flat earthers.  Natural things tend to be round, like pebbles in a stream.  Even volcanoes and fulgurites are rounded.

This makes for interesting thoughts about western industrial civilization education.  Schools are filled with flat things.  Paper is flat, and the students quickly like to make them into balls.  I suppose that appeals to their sense of naturalness.  Desks are flat.  The first algebra equations graph out into a flat line.  Graphs themselves are made of flat lines.  The first physics labs are about flat lines of velocity, of a ball rolling down a flat ramp.  Floors are flat.  Walls are flat.

Even swimming is taught flat.  Proper Terry Laughlin style swimming is not flat.  Oh no.  It incorporates spin and rotation, because much of nature is spinning and rotating.  From chemistry to electricity, the left hand rule matters, because spin matters.  Yet you can’t spin in writing, or elementary school subjects.  Why is that?  Why do the children’s games involve spinning in circles so often then?  Well, I suppose hockey is played on a flat surface of the frozen lake.  Except, if you’ve ever been on an actual frozen lake, that’s not exactly flat either.

Nature is filled with recursion.  Thus, the economies of entire nations are bubbles which rise and fall cyclically, despite all the efforts to keep them on a flat upward sloping surface.  That’s not how markets work.  If it were, there wouldn’t be so many software stock trading programs describing minimums and maximums and falling knives with curvy stuff in the middle.  You’re here, and you’re generally headed this way, but in the short term, there’s a lot of variability within the boundaries.  Confidence isn’t a flat surface either.

So, here we are.  We use oil, measured in round things called barrels, with a non-linear discovery rate, and a non-linear production rate, and a non-linear refinery rate.  This week’s reading has been several blogs worth of people explaining how energy is the thing that drives economies.  If global energy production falls, then economies must also fall.  If future energy is less than today’s energy, then being in debt, and lending debt, are both bad ideas.  See, debt is the bet that enough energy will magically appear to generate a positive return on investment.  In the past, that was human labor, or horse and ox labor, or perhaps whale blubber and coal and wood labor.  When tomorrow’s energy is more difficult to obtain than today’s energy, who will bear that risk?  Not the banks.  They will only write risky mortgages if they’re allowed to short them and know for certain when they’ll fail.  See the last 10 years for how that’s working out for the general economy.

Airplanes are round.  Their fuel tanks are round.  Their routes are circumpolar and not “straight”.  Bicycles are built from round tubes for the frame, round wheels, round cabling.  Buckets are round.  Propane and helium tanks are round.  Wine bottles are round.  Textbooks are not.  Pencils are round.  Diplomas are not.  Screens are filled with round pixels, but are flat.  Fondleslabs are flat.  Deeds of property are flat.  Sales are flat, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing.  Populations of any species are not flat over time.  They rise and fall, sometimes based on supply and demand of a keystone species, and sometimes not.

If you pave a road, nature will find a way to disturb it.  If you erect a gravestone or a rectangular building, nature will find a way to break it, to make it curvy and jagged, pockmarked and covered with ivy.

A friend in India asked a question this morning.  What is the difference between bad and evil?  So I took a stab at it.  I’m not entirely certain even what “good” means. If I looked up a dictionary definition, I’m pretty sure that bad would mean morally wrong, unsatisfactory, inadequate, inferior, of poor quality. Evil would mean profoundly immoral and malevolent. Which makes evil mean intensely bad, perhaps.

I get stuck in the weeds sometimes, though, when considering examples. Is murder wrong? Well, sometimes the deliberate killing of another with malice is the moral thing to do, such as in self-defense of the tribe, or in war for resources so you don’t all die. Even just killing isn’t wrong, because hunting, or because killing all the bad bacteria to save a life And that’s the thing with the examples, often the taking of one life is linked to the saving of more lives on the other side of the balance scale.

Which brings me to a question of why western morality is so intent on saving human lives. Is that always moral? Is it really morally our job to stuff as many humans as possible onto the planet at the expense of the biodiversity of non-human life? Is that really good? Isn’t death and destruction part of the cycle of life, and should be perpetrated and celebrated by humans from time to time to renew the tree of life/liberty/Yggdrasil?

Drinking poison is not always evil. Take chemo for example, or the various forms of illegal cancer cures like turpentine. Even self-destruction is not always evil. Some religious traditions love their self-flagellation. They love the self-imposed scars. Or they are Ahora and purify themselves with alcohol and fire and the skulls of the dead.

Instead, perhaps, not accepting that people must die, not allowing them to do so with reduced time and suffering, that is the evil thing. If I accept the premise that all life and all actions are sacred, because they’re all connected by the red threads in the tapestry of the universe, then I must also accept that all deaths and all destructions are also all sacred, even the suicidal ones. I don’t expect anybody to accept this with me. I am free to change my mind, should more information on the foundational structure of morality come along.

Most people I’ve met have a morality a lot like Daniel Quinn’s description in one of his Ishmael book series. There is the in-group, your own tribe of Bawks and Cawks and Dawks, which you are to keep alive at all costs, and the out-group, which it is preferable to stop from killing the in-group, which may mean killing them but not at the expense of your own deaths. Some people go further, and say that protecting your in-group extends to protecting your land-base from destruction. Most people don’t, because they are nomads and will move on to the next greener wateringhole they can find and take.

In the depths of myth, though, they’re aware of the ancient practices of human sacrifice to the gods for a good harvest. Unable to face death without fear, they scream “All Lives Matter!” and “All Lives are Sacred!” as loudly as possible, as if to drown out Kali, as if to drown out Moloch.

So, to answer the question, it depends on who decides what the definition of bad or evil is. Is it your tribe? Is it you? Is it “society”? Is it your government? Is it your church? There are splits and schisms all over the place on how people answer this one. Is it morally right to rape your wife if a child results? Can you see how different foundations of morality could make different cultures answer the question differently? The answer must be decentralized. It must be local. What is bad for me may not be bad for you. What is evil for me, may not be evil for you. Does that make us inherently unequal?