In nature, water likes to take the easy way out.  Water flows downhill the vast majority of the time.  Every once in a while, though, the river decides to jump its banks and change course.  People act much the same way, the vast majority of the time.  If everybody else is doing it, that’s because the energy it takes to get out of the rut, the river valley of behavior if you will, usually is less return than the energy expended.

When all of your friends are liberals, it is easy to bash Trump, and much harder to talk about the ways in which his actions have benefited the country as a whole, or are at least less bad than the alternative.  It is easy to say he’s a racist and a disabled phobic instead of acknowledging the Aegean stables of corruption he’s working on cleaning out.  It is much easier to complain about the local city council than it is to run an honest campaign, win, fix the budget, ban fracking, and overturn the local ordinances banning gardening and livestock.

It is much easier to complain about not being healthy than it is to adopt the lifestyle which promotes health year round.  It is much harder to put down the chocolate and delicious sugary things than it is to stare at beautiful bodies and wish you had one.  It is much harder to actually exercise 14 hours a week than it is to just play with your kids instead or read a good book.  That’s not even touching drug and internet addiction.

So here we are.  One of the things that is hard to do, is religious fasting.  Whether it is Orthodox Christian fasting (vegan practically half the year), or Muslim Ramadan fasting (a month of living the vampire life), not eating is hard to do when everybody around you is.  It is hard for the Mormon to not drink alcohol or coffee when on business trips.  It is hard for the Jew to only eat vegetarian when out at a restaurant or at their non-Jewish friends’ house.  It is even harder for the person with food allergies to eat in public.

It is also hard when you’ve got rules like, you can’t eat food from dishes which aren’t blessed and clean.  Or you can’t buy animal products from people outside of your religion.  It is easier to just be able to buy everything, to eat anything anywhere.  However, then you end up obese and sick, because it was easier to drive than to walk, and it was easier to buy the pesticide laden produce than to grow it yourself when the flood and the insects destroyed your garden a couple years in a row.

For now, it is easy to globalize stuff, and to centralize stuff.  That will change.  Think about what things are easier to tax, and what things are harder, and you can see where the future streams of human behavior might flow.  Magic itself is not immune to this.  Sigils are hard to tax, but widespread sales of candles and incense and statues of Santa Muerte are not.  What is easy, but risky?  What causes social behaviors to change over very short periods of time?  What social behaviors have stood the test of tens of thousands of years’ time?  Is there something I wish to culturally appropriate that falls in the latter category, but is hard?  Since I’m socially isolated anyway, what keeps me from doing hard things?

Every once in a while, I like to look back at my predictions, and see where we are on the timeline.  Over a decade ago, I knew that there would be civil war within the US, including more than one military coup.  We’ve come quite a way along the rose-strewn path since then.

Trump has done many things, and one of them is a dramatic polarization of people.  I just have to mention the word “Trump” and you can see the intense emotional response in my liberal friends.  A number of them would still love to see him impeached.  For why?  Because guns, schools, abortion, healthcare, and socialism, or was that communism?  So hard to tell the two apart these days.  Not that Pence would be better on all of those fronts, they just are so angry they can’t see a better way to obtain their objectives than beheading the king.

Are we closer to that part where people mistrust the government more?  You betcha.  Are we closer to civil unrest?  You betcha.  Is there are change in the civic religion?  Yup.  It is subtle, but it is there.  No longer are we shooting for the stars (goodbye NASA).  No longer are we doing everything we can to improve technological progress.  Oh sure, Elon Musk and his cohorts are still trying to get into space, but the vast majority of fundamentalist/evangelical Christians who wish to return us to living in the 11^th century are most definitely not.  A bunch of spiritual but not religious people who live as one with the land also are not interested in technological progress.  They choose which technologies work for them, not the other way around.

So here we are at the end of some of the archons, and the beginning of the rise of others.  If God would not allow his people to build a tower into heaven at Babel (door of the god), what makes you think that Jupiter and Set would allow Elon Musk to do anything substantially similar?  It makes me wonder which demon nine people in China decided to conjure up in a warehouse in the middle of the dusty desert, struck through with a river full of life, and also full of death.  Such is the way of things, after all.  Rising things fall, and when they fall, other things rise.

My daughters are going on a youth mission trip this summer.  While I am not Christian, my husband is, and so my children go to church.  Last night, there was the mission trip fundraising meeting, where youth were being extroverted youth, and I got to remember exactly why I hate churches and groups of people.  It was the banter that got to me.  That and the cellphone use by the other youth.  They couldn’t leave their cellphones alone.  My kids don’t have cellphones, which is a whole ‘nother topic in itself.  The youth group leaders could not keep the room on topic, and the younger leader also instigated the off-topic banter at times, completely isolating the new kids and not allowing them to talk.

Ah, but that wasn’t what I was writing about.  Churches can only raise money by parasite/charity.  I get it, they’ll lose their non-profit status if they do things for profit, but it changes the way business is done.  When a youth group is fundraising, and not the women’s group, or the committee that runs the homeless shelter, or the college students, or the national charity organization’s overhead, they are limited in what they can do.  Bake sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  Rummage sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  The youth can put in labor for another part of the church, or for their congregation at below minimum wage rates, or they can do an auction of stuff, or put on a talent show, or a parents’ night out.  They can’t do another dinner, because that’s already been done too recently.

The list of things they can’t do is much longer than the list of things they can.  They can’t run a for-profit ongoing business, of any kind.  They can’t go outside of the church community and sell their services on craigslist.  They can’t invest in stocks and bonds and use the excess to run their programs and mission trips.  Thus, they have no stable source of income at all.  They have no clue about how to drag in the big whale donors, because youth group leaders are poor and don’t run in those circles.

I was thinking about the Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition as I was sitting there, increasingly alienated from church culture entirely.  Churches are parasites.  They take the money from their congregation, and flow it out into the greater community, which would be good in the Solari Report sense, IF the money actually stayed within the community, but it doesn’t.  It goes to another State, or even another Country entirely.  The realization that Churches of all stripes are financial tapeworms was a chilling one.  The Ferengi would have the money coming in, and it would stay within the local community instead of being siphoned off by the national church, by the 85% overhead of the church’s national charity organization, and they would certainly invest it wisely.  They would be feeding the local children in soup kitchens instead of digging wells in Africa or building houses in Mexico.

I think my values have changed in the last 30 years.

One of the things which bothers me a lot is the burden of knowledge.  Knowledge is a burden, in the same way that ignorance can be bliss.  As somebody who watches and learns and synthesizes vast swathes of information out there, sometimes the endless chatter gets to me.  It is not easy to sit and chat with the other soccer parents in good humor, while knowing full well that a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years.

Do I need to explain why I’m certain a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years?  I feel like I should at least provide an inexhaustive summary, yet again.  First, we have the hydrocarbon problem.  From peak oil production, to peak oil exports in the Land-Export model, to the war cycle causing supply disruptions with tanker wars and pipeline failures both manmade and not.  Knowing that hydrocarbons are the source of a bunch of pesticides and fertilizers, that hyrdrocarbons are required to mine the potash, that they’re required to run the processing facilities, to make the plastic bags, to make the cans, to deliver all the food hither and yon, and much more.  Our food supply is very entangled with hydrocarbons.  For that matter, so is our water supply.

Next, we have the banking problem.  The petrodollar has failed/is failing.  The debt can never be repaid, so it won’t be.  There are rumors of Russia/China going back to a gold-backed currency, and stepping up their financial warfare efforts.  Identity theft becomes more rampant.  Bitcoin is a sabot.  China is putting in the infrastructure for a completely new banking paradigm, and may be why the financial center of Empire shifts to Beijing.  The dollar gets rejected as the US chooses to become more isolated, bloated, bureaucratic, and police state.  Tax All The Things leads to dollar rejection, which leads to volatility and financial uncertainty, and financial uncertainty leads to demand destruction in a potentially deflationary spiral plus capital flight.

We also have a climate problem.  We have floods and droughts, winter turning straight to summer without spring, a reduction in pollinating insect life in certain locations, and a change in chill hours.  We still have wind and hail destroying crops, as well as things like wheat rust reducing yields substantially.  We have a sunspot cycle which isn’t helping things.  Plus the food we do grow has less nutrients because the soil has been killed, the microbiota isn’t there to make the extra nutrients bioavailable.  Plus 2000 more locations besides Flint, Michigan still have even higher levels of lead in their water.  That’s not even touching Peak Water, as aquifers run dry.  We also have deadly viral illnesses which are becoming more common, or maybe they just spread more rapidly than they did in the past.

Understanding that the future is headed downhill, that people won’t be able to meet their needs no matter what their ideologies say, can be difficult to tolerate.  Yet, I must.  I can’t handle alcohol, so I’m not one to drown my sorrows in wine or harder.  Instead, I go run, or swim, or bike, and do something that makes me sweat.  To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter whether the government is run the best way ever, if the oil, the food, the water, the medical care just simply can’t continue on at the same levels as before.  People are still going to die in much greater numbers than usual.  Even so, perhaps there is a reason that declining empires right after the peak have vicious warlords at their helm, followed by self-absorbed megalomaniacs during their further decline.  Perhaps the pattern is necessary to drive people to flee to better locations, to encourage the rise of the death rate before the resources run dry so that everybody else suffers less.  It isn’t clear that bad governments are a bad thing.  If they encourage self-reliance and self-resilience in the downswing of public confidence, perhaps they necessarily prompt people to decentralize.

Meanwhile, social media is cracking down on hate speech, and by the way, everything is hate speech.  At least, everything digital is hate speech.  Analog speech is still just fine, especially if you don’t show your anxiety over the future and can talk about the weather, or where they think the best burger place is within the soccer league boundaries.  For some reason, I value it more now than I did.  Perhaps, in the back of my mind, I know they’re going to die, so I seize each precious moment I’ve got?

I managed to make my way to the local big box store, twice, looking for suitable jeans for one of my girls.  Why twice?  It seems that the only thing they sell in her size is jeggings and super-skinny.  Um, no.  This is not parental cultural control, by the way, although it should be fine even if it were.  No, this girl can’t stand tight pants and has leg muscles which make those “jeans” uncomfortable.  We would have preferred to purchase the straight-leg style of jeans, but only the junior section sells those, and she’s not junior sized yet.  On the third attempt, we finally found some bootcut jeans.

I’m not currently shopping for t-shirts for the girls, but if I were, I would be similarly horrified.  One girl is mildly allergic to polyester, and finding 100% cotton shirts has been challenging.  Then, there’s the problem that almost all of the available shirts have things written on them, or faces with huge disproportionate eyes on them, or are otherwise unsuitable for children.  Why can’t they have a plain t-shirt like the boys have in their section?

Then, there’s the girls’ shorts.  Ugh.  The school’s handbook states that shorts must come down to at least mid-thigh.  The girls’ section only sells shorts that come down to a quarter thigh at best.  They’re really short, and if they bother to have pockets at all, they’re abysmally small.  Now, the boys’ section sells some decent shorts!  We’ve gone back to the knee-length basketball style shorts.  They’re perfect!  Bonus: they don’t have any “sexy” words on the butt.  Even the cargo shorts in the boys’ section are decently long, to prevent grass burn and sunburn up high on the thigh in the summer, and for climbing trees and fences with just enough leg protection.

Meanwhile, I watch the oil prices and gas prices.  There are some financial analysts claiming that oil may have a price shock in the next couple months, again.  I hear rumors of military members understanding what a reduction in available oil would do to their employment prospects, and how their paychecks are tied to it, who are quietly making contingency plans.  All of my doomer friends are quietly staring at their food stores, and topping them up.  They throw around terms like “inverted yield curve” because they remember.  A couple doomer talking heads who have been saying “not yet, slow burn” have very recently changed their story, because they think financial chaos is closer.

This sort of thing makes me wonder if I should learn how to make sturdy durable functional clothing instead of purchasing it.  The trouble with making my own clothing in upper-middle class suburbia, is that I would no longer be hiding in plain sight, and that’s necessary in fedghetto land.  Although, potentially I could claim it as an SCA project, depending on what style I chose.  I’m not sure.  An uneasiness has settled.

While avoiding the topic of Crazy Ivan maneuvers in Syria, perhaps we should discuss privacy instead.  While Sugar Town, um, I mean SuckerBurger tells Congress that if we want to stay out of the CIA’s database, we just need to not use their products, I sit here and think about how untrue that is.  There’s facial recognition software, and all it takes is one friend uploading a picture with you in it to a popular social media database.  Not only that, but some people who avoid social media are still discussed by name on those platforms.  For an obscure example, John Michael Greer has never joined facebook, yet he had a profile page filled with information from Wikipedia.  He didn’t escape having a digital footprint there, despite never having signed a user agreement.

We’ve known for some time now that because you’re not using something doesn’t mean your friends didn’t compromise your privacy instead.  The rich heiresses all learned at some point not to put pictures on Instagram, because it compromises their safety and security.  The poor people are way too busy actually earning money at their two and a half jobs or eating or sleeping to be able to spend much time managing their online profile.  That leaves stay at home soccer moms, artists, intellectuals who write papers, and retired farmers as the majority of hardcore users of social media.

All of these people have time on their hands and nothing better to do with it.  Idle hands make for, um, better societies?  At any rate, how much privacy does the Bilderberg Group have these days?  How much privacy have the Clintons purchased?  These days, secrets get revealed.  It just happens, a lot more than the archons would like.  What do they have to hide?  Indeed, what do I have to hide?  I’m not sure.  Sometimes hiding isn’t the right strategy.  Sometimes, establishing an alibi works better if you’re public about where you’ve been, and what you’ve been up to.

At the same time, I really do have to ask how much time I should spend on various activities versus other activities.  How much time should I spend reading this article, and how much time should I spend on the phone with my friend whose mom just died and is now dealing with the death bureaucracy?  How much time should I spend playing video games with my son, and how much time should I spend reading Captain Underpants to him instead?  How much time should I exercise, and how much time should I spend making sure that my family eats healthy food?

Privacy is not a simple yes or no answer as to whether you want to protect it completely or partially.  What I want to know is how come the Deep State gets more privacy than I do?

At what point are you old enough that you’re allowed to die?  If we’re going to talk about business cycles, and war cycles, and currency cycles, and empire cycles, shouldn’t we also think about life cycles as well?  At what point do you tell your cardiologist, screw it, I’m going to eat that ice cream and cake and chocolate, and if I die of a heart attack tomorrow, don’t resuscitate me?  Do you really have to be 77 years old to start living like that?

At what point are you allowed to enjoy life?  The children are allowed to enjoy life, for a while, until puberty.  Then, not so much.  Then we burden them down with chores, school, after-school activities, jobs, then they have children and have no time to have fun.  Or do they?  Do you know any young adults who really enjoy life?  I do.  Do you really have to wait until you retire to do the things you love and are passionate about?  Do you really have to wait until you are old to spend time with the people you love?

When is the last time you felt that you were worthy of love and attention?  When is the last time somebody hugged you?  Listened to you?  Connected with you instead of judging you or being disappointed in you?  When is the last time you felt sunshine’s warm embrace, as if nature herself was supporting your valued presence, instead of feeling like you are always at war with the world, wrestling to get what you need?

When is the last time you truly relaxed?  When is the last time that you cleared your mind of all of your obligations, and sat there at peace with yourself, letting your thoughts come and go as they pleased?  When is the last time you weren’t in pain?  Remember, there is no mind-body separation, and what we call psychological pain as well as physical pain use the same neurotransmitters to get their message across.  When is the last time you were comfortable?

When is the last time that people told you the truth?  When did information just come to you about what you sought?  When did the obstacles dissolve and move out of your path?  When is the last time that you could see your path, and know what it was?  When is the last time that you just stood still on your path, breathing in the sure knowledge of the meaning you’ve assigned to everything around you?  When is the last time you talked to the rocks, the trees, the hills, the waters, and heard what they had to say about perseverance, integrity, courtesy, and self-control?  When did you last heed their warnings and stay safe when trouble came?

Knowing that peace comes from the barrel of a gun, when did you last feel confident and strong and capable?  When did you last feel utterly competent, yet not allowing hubris to make you slip?  When did you take your anger and shape it into a powerful change?  When did you take your fear, and bravely let it enter you and pass through you, to make you wise?  When did you last ask for help, and receive it?

I’ve been thinking, that the 15-20 minutes of shaking after every vasovagal syncope event are not psychogenic.  There’s a problem with the mind-body separation hypothesis, and it infects the diagnostic criteria for movement disorders.  The mainstream medical establishment wants to know if a non-epileptic seizure is psychogenic or physiologic.  I don’t see the distinction because the mind and body are not separate, but inextricably interactive at all times.

There is no shame in being anxious.  People are afraid of all sorts of things, because we’re human, and because not a single one of us has escaped trauma in our past.  Fear is a gift, when not overwhelming.  When I say I’m not anxious of needles or blood, it doesn’t mean I’m fearless.  Sure, I’ve got white coat syndrome, but that’s not what makes me shake.  It doesn’t help though, and biochemically speaking is something that makes it worse.

I’m going to speculate that the reason my shaking episodes look like parkinsons, and act like parkinsons, with akathisia, and a little dystonia thrown in for good measure, is because of 15-20 minutes of relative dopamine deficiency after an acetylcholine spike.  I’m going to speculate further that some dysautonomia tremors can be fixed with Benadryl, and some can be fixed with beta-blockers.  The medical forum comment cloud of people have already figured out that beta-blockers help sometimes, but I’ve never heard anybody describe a dysautonomia tremor as extrapyramidal, and I’ve never heard anybody try Benadryl, except maybe the mast cell activation syndrome people.

I’m not really interested in hearing that it is a “hysterical psychogenic pseudo-seizure.”  Words matter.  If you called it a transient relative dopamine deficiency instead?  Or a transient extrapyramidal response to neurocardiogenic syncope?  That is a lot better, because I’m not phobic, I’m not faking it, and it has a biochemical basis, which means it is potentially treatable, and even preventable.

In my listening to various youtube and podcasts over the years, I’ve come across some interesting concepts.  First, it is pretty clear that social inequality is highly correlated with male violence and incarceration.  This partly explains the USA’s prison population.  Second, the US army doesn’t take soldiers with IQs below 81.  Carefully think about that, because the US army loves its cannon fodder, loves their obedient unquestioning masses of soldiers, has the budget and needs more people to swab the decks of ships and do all sorts of grunt work, yet they really won’t take the very stupid.  The reasoning is pretty obvious: the very stupid cost more than they are worth to the US military.

These two things interact, by the way.  The conscientious intelligent hard-working types are the ones who get rich, and they are always actively looking for others who are willing to put in the effort to get things done.  When people self-select for the intelligent being given opportunities, and the stupid being given nothing at all, then you get a nice Pareto distribution of wealth, which concentrates further over time, creating more social inequality, and therefore more male violence and incarceration.  Until the revolution hits, as David Graeber points out in his anthropological writings.

It is kind of like rats who need to play.  They’ll play with the bigger rat if the bigger rat lets them win some of the time, let’s say 30% of the time.  If they never win, if the bigger rat always pins them down, the little rat eventually will say “fuck you” and refuse to play with the bigger rat.  The same could probably be said about wolves.  If an alpha wolf is particularly brutal, the females get together and shorten his reign of terror.  If, instead, an alpha wolf is nice to the female, takes an interest in raising the cubs, and has lots of friends, well, he’s bound to be in power a lot longer than the psychopath.

If enough of the lower class men develop the “fuck you” attitude towards the rich, because the rich have exceeded the bounds of social inequality winning, because they have not been philanthropic, because they have neglected to improve the welfare of the children, then revolutions occur, and the redistribution of wealth occurs.  Inevitably this is followed by the dark ages because they’ve lost a bunch of intelligent problem solvers in the revolution, however restratification always occurs over time.  This is probably the basis for a bunch of the cycles of history.  War cycles, empire cycles, currency cycles occur on a fairly predictable basis.

In the spring, when the kings go to war, King David stayed home, and stared at Bathsheba.  In the spring, a ton of people yage leave forums.  It seems to happen pretty predictably every year.  In the spring, after having stayed in the long house through the winter with a bunch of gathered people, and listened to the stories, and feasted on the communal harvested food, in the spring, people got cabin fever, bickered over petty differences, and left to go their separate ways.  In the spring, the people split up into smaller groups, to hunt, to plant, to fish, to steal their neighbors’ stuff honorably by duel, to enslave a neighbor, to marry a rival.  People have not strayed that far from their connection to the land, to have left behind this spring behavior yet.

Maybe that’s why I hated, loathed, and detested school in the spring.  The winter was nice.  The fall was okay, but the spring made me itchy to leave and get things done instead of learning.  A feeling of restless angst overcomes me every year in the spring.  “It’s time to move on.  It’s time to get going.  What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing.  But under my feet baby, the grass is growing.  Yeah, it’s time to move on.  It’s time to get going.” – Tom Petty

I was having yet another argument on failbook, which is a waste of time, but it helps me hone my moral and philosophical thinking in ways that mere books can’t always.  I had discussed how Jordan Peterson has a different take on motherhood, and why females don’t get above the glass ceiling that often.  He said that the data showed that really well qualified females tend to be the conscientious personality type, and just as they get really good at their jobs, they figure out that they have families who they are also conscientious about, and then they don’t accept the high-powered position that is actually offered to them because they want work-life balance.

My friend responded with the typical identity politics labels of pseudo-intellectual, anti-feminist, and transphobic.  Here’s my response:

No, he isn’t. JP is an academic ivory tower type (Nassim Taleb would call him intellectual yet idiot), somebody who acknowledges that the science shows that males and female are biologically different in personality types which makes their behavior different, and who shows that dominance hierarchies appear throughout the animal kingdom in certain circumstances.

Those short one or two word labels to describe somebody are the problem I’m having with identity politics. See, he’s called a “conservative,” even though most conservatives hate his guts. He is more than his labels, and I’m not a “blind follower” because some things he says I disagree with.

The good thing about him, is that he gets me to think through a couple issues I have in ways I haven’t done since dermot explained the true history of the relationship between the church and science. A bit like my brief flirtation with Ayn Rand’s philosophy in college, I, too, had a brief flirtation with feminism recently. I thought that I wanted equality of outcome. I thought I wanted dominance hierarchies to vanish off the face of the Earth, because I’m still anti-centralized globalized Patriarchy. But through listening carefully to the Scandinavian experience of equality of opportunity, and hearing how it drove the outcomes even further apart, I was able to understand that I actually wanted equality of opportunity, much more than I wanted equality of outcome. From there, I understood that I wasn’t opposed to hierarchies as a complete category of behavior, so long as they included separate matriarchies as well as anarchies within them for the majority of the time.

This means it is not enough to say “global civilization is a heat engine” and be against it. Nor does that automatically make me a technocopian. It isn’t either/or. I’m neither. I’m not a label. I change my mind when presented with compelling evidence. In every storm, there are pockets where living creatures find shelter from the worst effects of the devastating wind, rain, and hail.

I found that JP was all for women choosing how they wanted to live their lives. Is that not feminism? Is it freedom of choice that is feminism? Or is it equality of outcome? You can’t have both. You can’t have liberty as well as safety either. This is part of the philosophical struggles I have with some of the very basic foundational principles of western civilization. I don’t have a simple two word label for my answers, and they change. There are very specific and rare situations in which equality of outcome is actually the preferred thing. There are very specific and rare situations in which I would choose safety over liberty. Not always though.

Meanwhile, she who feeds you owns you. Jordan Peterson doesn’t feed me my breakfast. No, the grocery store, and therefore the petrochemical industrial vulture capitalist system does. What say we put aside our trivial differences and focus on our agreements, then? The equivalent of Jordan Peterson’s “Clean up your own room” translates very neatly into “grow your own food.” That’s not individually, because from a risk management perspective, that wouldn’t work, but it is very locally though.

Water is life. Water is alive. After you’ve cleaned up your house, clean up your local rivers too.