When the Haemo-Globbin Comes Throb-Throb-Throbbin’ Along…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Gripes, Humour, Living in Korea, Uncategorized
With immaculate timing the current Coronavirus panic set in just as I was due to have another colonoscopy. Predictably, things did not proceed as planned…
It had been expected to just happen as normal: first the purge, then the laying prone on the gurney, unconscious, while the medics did the dirty work; usually a short and painless procedure, but alas, it was not to be! First I screwed up with the purgative, and then, on the day, my blood pressure was too high. Again. And again. The nurse in charge decided that the colonoscopy could not proceed because of the danger of accidental bleeding resulting from any internal injury during the procedure and decided that it had to be postponed (!) until my blood pressure had been stabilised at a more “normal” reading, and I ended up discussing it with a cardiologist, who put me on Norvasc (calcium channel inhibitor) for fourteen days and gave me a little book to write my daily readings in. Readings that I would take with my little Panasonic BP meter that I bought back in 2008 and appears to still be going strong. Alas!
Now, when it comes to the reading of blood pressure, I personally have a few gripes. When I went back into education in 1985 (because the job situation in the UK was so atrocious), one of the first things we studied was physiology, and we were trained in how to use an actual sphygmomanometer in combination with an actual stethoscope to listen for the Korot’koff Sounds and measure blood pressure, so I already have a very good idea about how to do this with the most basic equipment… but when the new regulations about annual health checks for foreign employees in South Korea kicked in at the end of 2007 (immediately after Lee Myung-bak was elected – remember?), I decided to get my own dumb-bell set plus my own BP meter (as the local Hi-Mart in the centre of Changwon had a range of different models available at the time). I also paid close attention to the technique required in order to avoid systematic errors when taking my BP each day. What I discovered was:
Posture was very important: Whereas the use of the sphygmomanometer/stethoscope pair allowed a range of body positions so that an optimum body posture could be employed (and most specifically, avoiding abdominal compression which would render misleading pressures), not only my own wrist BP meter but also a lot of the ones commonly available in public places involved a position in which the user has to sit down and lean forward. When the patient is overweight, this results in the abdominal fat deposits being compressed, increasing abdominal pressure and giving an elevated reading, so care is needed to find a posture which avoids this error. At home, I now take care to sit with my back straight and no pressure on the abdomen, and abdominal muscles relaxed, measuring elbow on the desk and supported by the other arm, as recommended in the device’s operating instructions.
Muscular exercise (for example, with weight training or more aerobic forms of exercise) causes the muscles to absorb fluid from the rest of the body, lowering the overall blood pressure. This can be seen by monitoring your BP some time after exercise.
Blood pressure taken in the early morning after awakening is usually the lowest (except actually during sleeping) because all body muscles have been relaxed during the night and have yet to tighten up due to normal diurnal body movement. BP peaks during the afternoon and evening and then begins to decline again. At one point (about eleven or twelve years ago) I would get up in the morning and measure my BP and get results like 50/30 (!). A normal (or more accurately, nominal) reading should be approximately 120/80 and even moderate daily exercise should maintain this. Again, measuring your BP some time after a long walk (for example, but allowing time for your body to relax first) should give a reading very close to normal.
My gripe with the typical automatic BP monitor seen in many public places in Korea is precisely this: that they encourage a bad body posture by forcing patients to be slumped forward, increasing abdominal pressure. To this I would add that in Korea, one is not allowed time to rest before taking a seat and being expected to take a measurement. The result is that (again) readings are too high and in the wrong posture to isolate the readings that you are trying to take. I have lost count now of how often – going back at least ten years – I have had to move rapidly between hospital departments for things like routine medical exams. Ridiculous!
Now obviously, with training in biomedical science and having twenty-four-hour Internet access, I do a lot of research online. Norvasc (which was prescribed in the first instance) is supposed to reduce ambient BP by up to 12/6 (systolic/diastolic), but so also is beetroot juice because it contains a lot of nitrate, which the body reduces first to nitrite and then to nitrogen (II) oxide, a potent agent for several processes including the relaxation of the artery wall muscles. I bought a liquidiser but unfortunately it wasn’t powerful enough to cope with raw beetroot, so whilst shopping at Lotte the other day I noticed that they sold at least two beetroot/apple juice combinations (one more expensive than the other). As it happened, after only nine days the Norvasc took my BP down to normal levels, but laboratory blood tests on sample taken concurrently with the initial consultation indicated that I was hyperlipidaemic (i.e. had a level of blood lipids deemed above normal range) and the consultant has now put me on Atacand and Lipitor. The actual blood pressure medication was therefore changed, although I was instructed to finish the last of the Norvasc pills (one per day) before changing to the new prescription.
Although this might seem a rather negative outcome, we have to remember that a lot of what has been observed is the result of an enforcedly static lifestyle. The walking distance between either work and home or home and wherever I would buy food and drink is very short and not likely to result in sufficient exercise; likewise, there is a great shortage of entertainment around here, so the result is an oversupply of food, boredom and a sedentary lifestyle. The human body did not evolve for the urban environment. Also – of course – people are being asked to stay at home while the Coronavirus issue is current, further compounding the problem. The consultant said that I should get at least thirty minutes of walking exercise per day, something which used to be normal until about two years ago because there could often be a long distance between home and work (or, at least, the nearest bus stop). If it had been possible to return to the area here where I used to live – in the north of the city, thirty to forty minutes’ commuting time – this would have been less of a problem, but last year, my manager was very insistent that she wanted me to be living as close as possible to the office in case of the need for a sudden interview. We have had no “sudden interviews” since I returned here, so that seems to have been a waste of time; now we discover that it has been deleterious to my health too.
Happily, at least according to the cardiologist yesterday, this is not an irreversible situation but it does involve a number of lifestyle changes which – to some extent – had already been in place. My alcohol consumption has generally been low recently as I have tended to want to hit the sack rather than stay up; the only trouble being that what I have been drinking has tended to be two or three cans of foreign cider on special offer, the issue here being not just the minimal alcohol input but also the deleterious effects of the sugar – fructose – which is a natural component of cider. My online research seems to suggest that this should also be avoided, but the trouble here is that it is a sweetener added on a truly industrial scale to a whole range of foods and beverages; very difficult to avoid. However, the cardiologist said that for a person my age, this should perhaps be expected, but could be mitigated eventually by diet and sufficient exercise. Now, if it would just stop raining…
It Pays to Be Solitary
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Odds and Ends..., Uncategorized
This article from Disclose.tv was so close to the mark, I had to link it here:
Interesting article and I agree wholeheartedly with the comment by Spaghetti_Monster_02 below… shame about the TEDx vid (someone feels a suicidal need to associate themselves with arbitrary authority), but hey, there y’go…
https://www.disclose.tv/people-who-prefer-to-be-alone-are-total-badasses-new-study-shows-333939
The Censors! The Censors! … Er, Please Hold My Beer While I Platform Myself…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Commentary, General, How-To, Uncategorized
I’m not going to spend much time on this because I have had a surprisingly tiring week even though we had a day off on Wednesday for Independence Day (1). I have four new bookcases due for delivery about midday tomorrow (which is thankfully a Saturday) and would like to spend as much time between now and then examining the backs of my eyelids, because a big cleanup and rearrangement of my apartment plus necessary job-related work will be keeping me busy.
Having said all of that…
We find ourselves in the middle of what appears to be a Silicon-Valley-sanctioned take-down of a number of personalities online. The reasons we are being given are clearly spurious, and the results may be catastrophic for those taken down. However, I feel that there is an important point to be made here; several points, possibly.
The first point is that accounts are being taken down from what appear to be (in their most basic forms) free sites for which (at the beginning) no levy was made by the service provider and which the account owners may eventually have developed into something lucrative as it became possible for them to receive remuneration. Names such as Facebook, Twitter etc. are being mentioned. More advanced arrangements are different, of course, because of their scale (the particular case of Alex Jones springs to mind here).
Second point… quite apart from the fact that many of these platforms are on the skids anyway, why is everyone complaining about being suspended or banned from their services? Have you not done some research and found other platforms like MeWe, BitChute and Steemit? Even more importantly, have you not examined the options for self-platforming, the better to avoid these things if you are not looking for remuneration but just want to express yourself? I’ve been doing this for five years now. The cost is not great and there are plenty of free add-ons that you can use. Why worry about whether FB and the like approve of your viewpoint when you could have a platform of your own? I pay sixty Singapore Dollars per annum for the right to express myself, with other add-ons like free fora and chat rooms for no extra cost. The sad part? Despite repeatedly stating that I have made these private spaces available for people to use, and from which (at least within reason) they are far less likely to be cast out on their ear, they don’t make use of them. There seems to be an element of psychological dependency involved here. Or is narcissism for free more important to you?
If you don’t agree with your chosen platform’s attitude, you’re a fool to stay with them when other free or paid alternatives are available, and since those alternatives are available, what is it that keeps you there like a frog in a hot cooking pan? What are you afraid of? You could start up your own blog, fora and social web site as well as e-mail, chat site etc.
Hint: go beyond your comfort zone, look for your own platform. You could start at a place like https://www.singaporehost.sg. They have everything you need. Just choose a nice-looking WordPress site template (like I did), pay your annual subscription (about ₤40.00/year) and start blogging. Look at the services available in your cPanel and add them. But don’t complain about the cost. If you like to go out regularly for a drink, if you waste a lot of the food you buy and then do not eat or if you drive a lot, those can only be false economies at best and you have better things to do with your time and money. You also get private e-mail and all kinds of other things at no extra cost (unless you decide that you want more).
I express my attitude here at http://www.myeasternhorizons.com/wp/ (among others). I also have presences at (for example) the Vivaldi browser community (again, a free platform, better than its predecessor at Opera, and 5Gb of free e-mail account!!!). Dig into my blog to see my involvement with both of them historically. My personal blog there costs me money but I could have five times as much server space and not bat an eyelid, financially, each year as one year’s subscription to a 5Gb disk space (and unlimited bandwidth) would still be less than one month’s winter gas bill here in Korea. I kid you not. Do not complain about false economies!
Understand that there are elements of both false economy and hypocrisy involved not only in the deplatforming of established users but also in not voting with your feet because you are too cheap and lazy to platform yourself and tell your existing platforms to go take a hike. There, I said it.
Remember, as long as you stay with them, they own your opinion and control it.
What are you afraid of? I’ve done it, and so can you, so bite the bullet.
1: Independence from Japan at the end of WWII, that is…
Bang on the Button
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, General, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Came across this on FB randomly this evening, and I agree with him all the way… so I’m sharing it here, too:
Max is saying precisely what I am trying to adumbrate in these pages.
An End to Civilisation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
One would like to think that one were a “civilised” person, in terms of its connotations of sensibility and behaviour, but the term becomes unacceptable under the simplest analysis. Which other term could be used more accurately?
This time, I want to broach a theme which I have been mulling over and digesting for a long time, and the use of which – on reflection – perfectly encapsulates the psychological prison from which we have been unwilling to free ourselves. Yet that act of liberation – when it arrives – needs to be a psychological one, and not a physical one; it is a transition from one state of perception to another, a change of viewpoint. Physical liberation cannot come before psychological liberation.
Recently, I have been watching the videos (and listening to the podcasts) of Mark Passio on YouTube. Mark’s focus is upon the occult nature of much of what surrounds us in everyday life, as well as pointing out the common misconception among “lay” people (meaning, in this particular case, people who are not themselves occult practitioners) that the term “occult” itself necessarily equates with “evil”. As he points out, there is no actual connotation of anything in this term beyond its original meaning, which is merely “hidden” or “obscured”, and that many things in daily life are “occulted”, for example (my input here) the results of scientific research, which are usually sequestered behind a paywall erected by publishers. However, Mark’s real focus is with actual practitioners of the dark arts, whom he distinguishes from beneficial practitioners by referring to them as “dark” and “light”. He goes into some depth examining the psychology and motivations of the “dark” practitioners, having been for some ten years, and by his own admission, one of the “dark” ones himself, although, he admits, at a relatively low level.
Part of Mark’s exposition is that the modern practitioners of these dark occult activities are the descendants of others whose blood-line goes back thousands of years, that their own focus is primarily psychology, and in particular psychological methods of controlling large numbers of people to do the practitioners’ bidding; it is thus that such practitioners can attain and maintain positions of relative power, and hence profit and have a better lifestyle for prolonged historical periods despite themselves being relatively few in number. However, the result seems to be that they themselves have become demonstrably psychotic.
You can see almost four hours of his lecture on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odw6q4fcORE
Likewise, when one reads the novels of Carlos Castañeda, his teacher, Don Juan Matus, who was supposed to be a modern-day nagual or Mexican shaman (sorcerer), asserts that the true controllers of our lives achieved their aims by simply inculcating their own psychotic mindset in the general populace. After that, of course, people became easy to control by simply putting the appropriate ideas into their heads and diverting their attention. Let me here quote (at length, for clarity) the appropriate passage from Castaneda’s “The Active Side of Infinity”:
“This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do,” he said. “It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don’t stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow.”
I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth or various fleeting shadows moving from left to right or right to left or straight up in the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous fish. It was as if gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then, finally, it scared me. It became too dark to see the foliage, yet I could still see the fleeting black shadows.
“What is it, don Juan?” I asked. “I see fleeting black shadows all over the place.”
“Ah, that’s the universe at large,” he said, “incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you’re seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental.”
He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.
“What did they discover, don Juan?” I asked.
“They discovered that we have a companion for life,” he said, as clearly as he could. “We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.”
It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.
“It’s pitch black around us,” don Juan said, “but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.”
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.
“You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics,” don Juan said. “I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.”
“Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you’re describing, don Juan?” I asked. “There must be a logical explanation.”
“There is an explanation,” don Juan replied, “which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them.”
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.
“No, no, no, no,” I heard myself saying. “This is absurd, don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.”
“Why not?” don Juan asked calmly. “Why not? Because it infuriates you?”
“Yes, it infuriates me,” I retorted. “Those claims are monstrous!”
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I’m going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I’m going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you’re caught. Not because I’m holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!”
There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment. He was right. I wouldn’t have left the house for the world. And yet I didn’t like one bit the inanities he was spouting.
“I want to appeal to your analytical mind,” don Juan said. “Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.”
“But how can they do this, don Juan?” I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. “Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?”
“No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind. Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
“I know that even though you have never suffered hunger,” he went on, “you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“It’s not that I can’t accept all this at face value, don Juan,” I said. “I could, but there’s something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand. If it’s true that they eat us, how do they do it?”
Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.
As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus explaining that to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.
He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There must have been something to what don Juan was saying, which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment’s pause, long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan: “But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, don’t do anything about it?”
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about it,” don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. “All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They’ll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there’s an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence.”
“Diverted” is certainly how one would describe the modern city dweller, and at an observational level, the maintenance of distraction, obfuscation, misinformation and confusion is readily apparent in the media on a daily basis. To keep our minds diverted, we are fed an endless stream of these “pseudoconcerns”, to distract us from the real concerns created by the same people, for whom the world is simply a source of resources to be plundered and recreated into the objects of their desires, and for which the bulk of humanity is merely the slave labour through whose efforts the parasites’ collective dreams are realised. If you should doubt that these things are true, consider that when Don Juan discusses “… the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught…”, he is referring to the inculcated and ingrained narcissism of the individual who has been given the predator’s mindset. The public figures we see in the media, especially in “showbusiness”, are without doubt utterly narcissistic. Think about that. When they say that something is wrong and they think that something should be done about it, are you, as the observer, being manipulated by a narcissist?
But to be specifically on-topic, and to begin to see how easily their control might be exercised, let me begin by stating that a practical magician (occult practitioner) is acknowledged, broadly, to be a person who affects the behaviour of others by putting a suggestion into their minds, to the extent that they find it difficult not to see things in the way intended by the magician. In other words, by programming the listener’s or viewer’s perceptions before the event, an alternative outcome is prevented, or an event is factually different from the magician’s intention but the percipient still sees it as it was intended to be seen. It was for this reason that after the recent Doctor Strange film (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) came out, some online commentators marvelled (so to speak) that less familiar viewers did not realise that about half of what they had seen was actually possible in real life, simply because it relied upon the practitioner’s mastery of suggestion and perception. Engineer the perception of your target, and you too can work magic, or at least maintain an illusion.
This implies that much of what we might call “magic” is not, in fact, necessarily a physical result of a previous action, but rather an act of perception, the outcome of which was predetermined by the practitioner; the percipient has been pre-programmed by careful and selective verbiage and direction of attention to see a particular outcome. This means that it is possible for nothing visible to actually “happen” because the “result” is entirely in the percipient’s head. Much advertising in the media needs to be seen in this light, as both it and outright displays of propaganda are frequently varieties of public programming, in which the public are slowly conditioned, by sheer repetition if need be, to expect something to happen, and to react in a certain way when it invariably does. This is called predictive programming.
Remember: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”
With regard to magical practice, what startled me, some time ago, was how I myself had failed to comprehend what was on a printed page right in front of me, and which related directly to all of this. Reading a copy of a compiled book version of the early editions of “Man, Myth and Magic” (given to me as a present by my grandmother, of all people – what was she thinking of???), one page referred to the Dictionnaire Infernel of the French mage, Collin de Plancy, a book in which – among other magical things – the author had included copies of sketches which he had drawn of demons summoned by himself during previous sessions in the circle. In this particular entry, I read that although de Plancy had drawn/painted the alleged appearances of the demons named in his text, they were not “real” in a physical sense – they were, instead, impressions implanted within the minds of the percipient (in this case, a practising ritual magician or similar occultist), such that a non-occultist standing in the circle right next to him/her would probably not be able to see them; an illusion projected directly into the magician’s mind such that two occultists in the same room would probably see the same demon differently. I actually did not realise the meaning of all this until very recently.
The demon, in this way of seeing it, was pure illusion, and this explains precisely why one demon (or similar entity) would be able to offer infinite visual versions of itself to an infinite number of percipients. This is also like saying that the definition of a physical object would likewise be different between individuals. Maybe that is an important statement. Alternatively: the “demon” was a real entity but its appearance was not real, as it existed only in the sorcerer’s mind and, at the end of the session, could be dismissed. [3]
Now we come to my main point. We have this thing called “civilisation” which is constantly lauded as a state to be emulated and maintained, but it seems to me that this is shaky ground. Why? Well, we should perhaps consider where the term “civilisation” comes from. It comes from the latin civis, meaning “city”. The corresponding modern English verb civilise, therefore, means what? According to WordNet [1], it means:
1. educate, school, train, cultivate, civilize, civilise — (teach or refine to be discriminative in taste or judgment; “Cultivate your musical taste”; “Train your tastebuds”; “She is well schooled in poetry”);
2. civilize, civilise — (raise from a barbaric to a civilized state; “The wild child found wandering in the forest was gradually civilized”).
It is interesting that these descriptions refer to discrimination, training and schooling; no actual “definition” is given here. One would suggest, in fact, that the literal meaning of “civilise” is something like “citify”, meaning to condition people into a suitable mindset for living in a city. And we might ask ourselves why it should be considered necessary to do such a thing?
You see, in the mainstream paradigm’s interpretation of “history”, “civilisation” is supposed to be somehow undeniably superior to an allegedly “barbaric” state which existed beforehand. This is because there is some elitist intellectual arrogance according to which notionally “uncivilised” people are supposed to be “inferior”, when in fact they are more capable of surviving in their chosen environments, and do not surround themselves with the useless frippery which “civilised” man thinks is so wonderful (be warned, however, that historically wherever there has been a minority power “elite”, there have always been a majority of “slaves” to do their bidding…).
In traditional Western thinking, this was expressed in terms of the “uncivilised” life being “nasty, brutish and short”, but generally speaking, people who lived in such a state, even into modern times, represented very little threat to civilisation; if anything, experience has shown that the opposite is true – “civilisation” in the Western model has proven horrendously destructive towards those whom it considers “uncivilised”, whereas the supposedly primitive “savage” was a person more closely in tune with their environment, and therefore more self-sufficient (being better able to find their requisites within that environment) and materially independent. What has really happened is that, having set itself up as a paragon of its own paradigm of a civilised state, the Western mindset has used the “uncivilised” periphery as a threat with which it, in turn, threatens its own citizens with a dire warning of what state they might descend into if they do not give the body politic the authority and resources to defend itself (and therefore, by implication, the citizens over whom it exercises its dubious “authority”). The nominally “uncivilised”, therefore, have usually ended up as the victims of the better-armed “civilised” nations. You couldn’t possibly observe a clearer and starker example of iniquity. Yet we call it civilisation.
Let us also ask ourselves what happens when the body politic’s identified “enemy” already happens to be, er, civilised. What normally happens is that they then try to dehumanise their notional “opponent”, the better to justify irrational (but highly profitable) warfare against them, which also has the helpful (from the elite’s point of view) characteristic of reducing the population of underlings… Our problem here is that the West has been self-regarding and narcissistic, and when their opponents are of a similar level of “civilisation”, ad hominem attacks (which is really what their irrational rationalisation of their intended or practical assaults are) is all that they have left. And as they are often unable to prove directly that what they assert is true, they are not above falsifying evidence and controlling its presentation at home to justify their destructive activity abroad.
We should also be asking ourselves what this actually means for the individual “citizen”, as all of this cannot possibly have happened without some obvious reason. To put it into an appropriate context, let us return to our supposed “primitive” and “uncivilised” person. Remember that we suggested that such a person must be more in tune with, and therefore self-sufficient in, their native environment, whether it be the forests of Africa or South America, the jungles of Borneo or even the coastline of sub-Arctic North America. People who lived in these places traditionally were able to feed and clothe themselves and do a range of other life-related activities without huge inputs of technology, but the essential point I would suggest here is that the logistic chain through which raw materials came to them was extremely short; they did not need expensive stores to offer them processed pseudo-foods, for example, because they knew from experience where to find what they needed to make things themselves. Likewise, they would have a way to clothe and house themselves and did not have to buy the raw materials for building their dwellings, because they could just walk out and get it for themselves, for free.
There is no mystery about this; what we have termed “civilisation” is simply the entrainment and coercion of people to travel from the countryside, where they were more or less self-sufficient, to the cities where they were dependent upon supply chains which were then used to siphon off the wealth that they were generating with their labour. The controllers (or their gofers) then also moved in (and, according to the experience of Mark Passio, are still moving in) to buy up the vacated land cheaply. The majority of the population, by this methodology, have slowly been deprived of their original resources and wealth. And with the added finance resulting from taxing their own “citizens”, the controllers then moved on to do the same to the inhabitants of other lands to increase their profits – empire – and the footsoldiers who achieved this were the same people from their own lands who had already been asset-stripped by their dubious leaders.
So we now see that what we describe as “civilisation” cannot be anything but a millennia-long confidence trick perpetrated upon the gullible by Passio’s “ancient psychologists”. The very people who were abused and coerced into becoming the hands of the power elites were the ones who created all of this, while the elites claimed all of the kudos and profit. Those who actually broke their backs putting it all together were the ones who were intentionally forgotten by the official histories because they were factual (or later, economic) slaves; a living could not be earned except by working for the elites in one form or another.
The greatest mistake that a modern “citizen” could possibly make, when repulsed by seeing the sequelae of this process, is to assume that there is a ready political cure for it. There is not. The rise of the Left since the time of the French Revolution has not led to any kind of Utopia – quite the contrary, since those people simply represent another narcissistic power clique who use the masses to whom they pay lip-service to achieve their own ends, and then show their utter contempt for them by abandoning them. Politicians are not there to serve the interests of the “citizens” – their function is to control the “citizenry” on behalf of their masters who exploit them. The obvious (and rather simplistic) dichotomy of “political thinking” is merely a dialectic imposed to split mass opinion and set people against each other. At best, any “revolution” has been merely a mask behind which authorities hide, and in which those who are ruled willingly enter into an increased servitude. The people you vote for represent only the interests of your rulers – everything they say is lies. The “facts” presented in the media are “facts” which are convenient to their narrative; the “education” you received suited their requirements in potential workers at the time, as well as constituting “propaganda” in their own right (because they were according to the dominant paradigm, and necessarily restricted in scope according to circumstances). Always think it possible that your “thoughts” are not original and your own, but were put there by someone else.
The first thing that anyone confronted by all of this needs to do is to learn to distance themselves from their emotions, since (as Passio explains) it is mainly by emotional dependencies and fear of a false unknown that the majority are usually manipulated. The second thing to be aware of is that in order to do this, they have to make people believe that there is some kind of a threat, be it a warlike enemy, or something in the environment, and then push this relentlessly, like a drug, until the public emotion has reached such a fever pitch that they are begging the leaders to provide a solution. In the modern context, the third thing to realise is that the controllers usually have some kinds of “provocateurs” to provide instantaneous stimulation to sweep people along – to lose themselves in their emotions and thus be more willing to react in the heat of the moment. It is for this final reason that we should always treat apparent “rebels” with suspicion, lest by losing ourselves while under their influence, we should simply be achieving the aims of the “leaders”. The very fact that any such person may be (a) in the media and (b) stridently criticising the status quo is a sure sign that they are provocateurs, and not genuine at all.
If this methodology seems somewhat far-fetched, it may be that you are suffering from a condition which came to be known as “Stockholm Syndrome” [2]. In other words, because of the apparent beneficence of your captors, it is difficult for you not to be sympathetic towards them when confronted with an alternative view both of them personally and their behaviour. But they are your captors: you live in a goldfish bowl, and they throw in some food for you every now and then. You are afraid of venturing beyond the goldfish bowl, because despite your restricted environment, it actually feels safe; and what you see through its walls is distorted and disturbing to your sight. You do not wish to remove the distortion for fear of the truth being even more disturbing; and so you stay in your goldfish bowl, accepting your situation; therfore, as we suggested at the beginning, your physical liberation is precluded by your refusal to first undergo a psychological liberation – to see that there is a different world out there and that you do not need your dependency. But the price of losing that dependency is the responsibility of making decisions in your own interest, something which the afflicted seem unwilling to do because they are so inured to being led by someone else, and to being in thrall of authority. It is only when we realise that the “authority” is flawed and factually toxic and destructive that people will realise that self-determination is not so bad, after all; better to die free and self-determining than as a helpless, mind-controlled slave. This is also what our aforementioned “neoteny” is all in aid of: the inculcated and conditioned maintenance of an immature psychology in the individual, the better to prevent them from making more informed decisions which might be detrimental to the Body Politic.
Again, quoting Carlos Castaneda at length, Don Juan provided an insight into what was required from the individual:
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. “The sorcerers of ancient Mexico,” he said, “saw; the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.”
I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn’t there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time, and with equal force, all that he was saying was absurdity itself.
“What are you saying, don Juan?” I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe.
“What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”
Don Juan’s words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.
“This predator,” don Juan said, “which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it and decide it’s so horrific that we don’t want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
“The only alternative left for mankind,” he continued, “is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five- thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.”
“In what way would the sorcerers’ discipline be a deterrent?” I asked.
“Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer,” don Juan said, scrutinizing my face as if to discover any signs of disbelief. “The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don’t have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.
“If the predators don’t eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while,” he went on, “it’ll keep on growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size.
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
“The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times,” don Juan continued, “was to burden the flyers’ mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers’ mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the ‘flyers’ mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That’s the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly zero. There’s no one to tell you what to do. There’s no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you’re accustomed to.
“My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples,” don Juan continued, “that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer’s life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.”
If an individual is repulsed by the sight of what their controllers have created, the “discipline” spoken of here by Don Juan is the maintenance of the sensibility which allows us to see it, to keep our eyes focused and trained upon it, and to avoid the recidivistic habit which would otherwise cause us to forever revert to the former controlled state, because the inculcated desire to delegate important decisions to “authority figures” empowered by ourselves leads, in the end, only to destruction. [4] The real world that we want to see will never come to fruition until we insist upon self-determination and self-ownership, and exercise the self-discipline necessary to do both successfully.
These have been the concepts which have been foremost in mind since my cancer operation earlier this year. I was frightened at the idea of having a fatal medical condition, but more frightened at the prospect of death, so I voluntarily surrendered to a procedure in the first major surgery of my life, and the result was that said life has been prolonged; nobody knows for how much longer, but we are all mortal and can only prolong our lives by making the correct decisions. At the same time, however, the realisation that nobody gets out alive has turned out to be motivating: this is MY life, I make all the decisions and I accept responsibility for those decisions. I have always disliked the ways in which some people have tried to involve themselves in my life and influence my decisions, and now I have a zero-tolerance attitude towards such interference. If people don’t like it, tough. I will make no apologies for my self-assertion. And what has emerged from this is greater self-discipline (somewhat more than previously, at any rate) and overall determination about the things I want to do and how I want to spend my life.
Bottom line: this is my personal existence. It does not belong to any government or to anyone else, but to me alone. I will determine for myself what I will eat and drink, what thoughts I will keep in my head, how I support myself and my own ultimate fate. I will not delegate these to anyone else and I will maintain the discipline until the time comes to submit to mortality. Which, I hope, is a long way yet to come… and if that means being “uncivilised”, then so be it. If history has any lessons to learn, it is that in the end, all “civilisations” have proven to be as mortal as any of their citizens.
[1] https://wordnet.princeton.edu
[2] https://www.history.com/news/stockholm-syndrome
[3] See “The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage” (translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers) for how an ancient practitioner might have done this. A version is available online at http://www.hermetism.info/pdf/Grimoire/The%20Sacred%20Magic%20of%20Abramelin%20the%20Mage.pdf.
[4] See: https://www.activistpost.com/2018/04/how-the-globalism-con-game-leads-to-a-new-world-order.html for some more enlightenment, so to speak, on this topic.
Entr’acte II
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
As things have been rather quiet with Yours Truly of late, a brief blog to bring everyone up to speed…
As a freezing cold winter slouches kicking and screaming into spring, and factually some of us are not getting any younger, we are also waiting – still – to sign our new contract and move on. How so? Well, I have (so to speak) “been here before” – caught up in the time-consuming activity of background checking for the new position, which is associated with the military. Again. And this time I think it is worth the prolonged agony, based upon what is a quite extensive experience of different employers.
See, in recent years, I’ve been through an alarming number of institutions, and the original motivation for chasing them for jobs was that I always thought they were professional entities, but the experience I have had with them (as a vulnerable E-2 visa holder) has been stressful; no wonder my hair has dropped out! And this whole thing has been very… disillusioning, as if the depth of diabolical despondency I had sunk into before I even left the UK was not enough. It has become very apparent to me that (in this particular instance) I was severely misguided in my assumption of “professionalism” in these companies, and so, now that the opportunity has arrived, I have had to reassess my opinions and ask what kind of employer is most suitable, and the answer is simple: the ones who will, for reasons relating primarily to their relationship with the Korean government, always honour their contracts.
Now, don’t get me wrong: the situation remains one in which I am surprised to discover that even at the tender age of 55 (in other words, I will be 56 this year), there are still institutions which will throw new opportunities at me: even the fact that I have been treated for (and technically am still “recovering from”) cancer has – it seems – not dented their enthusiasm. And this time, the essential “difference” is that my students will be exclusively high schoolers, which is something of a departure from my norm. However, the greatest surprise is the apparent eagerness, on the new employer’s part, to get me in there no matter what; so I temper my natural anxiety at being perilously close to the end of a visa with an element of patience and expectation – in anticipation of a positive and, one would hope, a mutually beneficial relationship to come. And I hope it lasts for a suitably substantial length of time. I’m talking years, dude!
It’s not clear yet how this will pan out because of the fiendish length of time I am having to hang on, right now, waiting for the (already apparently positive) result of the new employer’s two-stage security clearance checks before actually putting pen to contract, as my current visa is slowly edging towards expiry; also, surprisingly, the lack of actual details of the post itself, as the “interview” turned out to be something of a damp squib (apparently I was expected to do some kind of demo, but the recruiter didn’t pass that on to me, among other things, quel surprise). But, previously, I have worked for the Royal Air Force back in the UK and have done instructing for another military employer here in Korea, the KDLI in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do, so it’s not like there will be a huge surprise, in terms of practice and procedure (and security implications, of course). Right now, it’s just a case of being patient and getting in there ASAP.
But an interesting theme seems to be emerging while I am waiting… it’s been a long, long time since I had the dubious pleasure of a TV in my apartment, and truth to tell, when you consider that a lot of the time, I only want to watch older stuff (with exceptions such as trying out the latest Star Trek and X Files), and the amount available for free, on-line and on demand, from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion and – right now – 123MoviesHub.ag [3], means that a TV is basically unnecessary; everything is digital and available for free through my Internet cable. This doesn’t mean that TV is actually redundant (UFC, anyone???), but the dominance that it had over my mind when I was younger is shattered forever. I made a choice, and the result is that my mind is much freer. I need hardly point out that as this is Korea, much of what I might have to subscribe to here would also be rather irrelevant in cultural and linguistic terms.
All of which means that I have become progressively more open to information and opinions which formerly I would have considered ridiculous, unjustified and downright way out, which subsequent events have demonstrated to my satisfaction are possibly more deserving of consideration and merit than social (and media) conditioning would previously allow me to countenance. And yet, at the same time, I do think that since I was a teenager, I have been on a path away from notional orthodoxy, be it in terms of historical truth or scientific honesty, for example, in search of a kind of verisimilitude which cannot be tolerated by a control system the machinations of which depend upon the demonstrable covert destruction of important historical materials, the perversion of historical events and the erection of whole paradigms which work only as a result of indoctrination and saturated media propaganda (Bill Nye, anyone? Neil DeGrasse Tyson??? Who will the next buffoon be?) which seems to be resulting, especially in the USA, in a new caste of younger people who are emotionally unstable when their knowledge or opinions are questioned. This latter is the very opposite of learning and wisdom, and it is very revealing that, being unable to mount a rational and complicated argument against even just a person with a different opinion, the response tends to be a kind of emotional violence akin to that of a two-year-old. A recent example from Sputnik:
Professor Says Men and Women are Different
At a personal level, I am repulsed by this kind of thing, and it has been stimulating me to look more towards traditional philosophers; it does seem to me that inculcated infantilism is not a suitable response to the dangers which are arising in modern societies – and if you look at places like the Ukraine right now, it’s not “new” dangers that are arising: instead, it’s the return of the “old” dangers, rooted in the previous centuries but especially the events and attitudes of the mid-twentieth century. There is a word for this, and that word is recidivism – meaning a return to a former, inferior and usually criminal or otherwise socially unacceptable mode of behaviour [1]. Experience shows us that it is usually not a good idea to try to return to the environment of our past, primarily because we have changed – the increase in our knowledge and experience, not to mention the resulting changes in our personal sensibilities which also change the limits of what we will now tolerate, is what really makes a return to a past situation impossible. It is for this reason that we will often hear that the transition from an old paradigm to a new one is referred to as “being like dying”, as we shed the old attachments, possibly with great psychological difficulty, in order to accommodate the new – which seems somehow reminiscent of the comment by Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [4] – except here, of course, it is the concept which dies rather than the adherent.
As an example of the type of new input that I have been accepting, take a look at “Redesigning Reality”, a relatively new vodcast put out regularly by Dylan Charles of “Waking Times” [2] fame, assisted by his friend, Jeff Anthony, whose response to his own bodily injuries has been very philosophical and mature and has impressed me greatly:
http://redesigningreality.com
and you can see them regularly on YouTube:
plus, perhaps, honourable mentions for the likes of Vin Armani and his show… but alas, I do not tune in to Vin as often as I should.
However, we have to face all of these (and other) potential inputs with a severe caveat: none of them is one hundred per cent. reliable.
One would think that this was the prime result of enlightened exposure to conventional media – the realisation that there is a limit to how much credence we can extend to them. So, for example, recently Vin had David Icke as a guest on his show:
David represents an interesting example of information and opinion input, largely because of his long-time claim regarding the manipulation of humanity by unseen reptilian beings, for which he has frequently been lambasted by the mainstream media. But here’s the interesting point: take this away (or ignore it temporarily) and focus on the rest of his message, and what do you discover? It all connects well, and makes a disconcerting amount of sense, as well, perhaps, as being a lot more humane than the conventional narratives. Notice here how well it seems to interdigitate with Vin’s personal take on the situation. Subtract the one part of David’s narrative which is difficult to prove, and the result is a coherent picture; there is nothing which David expresses which should attract disrespect from the listener.
This is teaching us something: no source of information is absolutely reliable and foolproof, so approaching verisimilitude means having the bullshit detector on and weaving our way through a constant morass of misinformation and disinformation to uncover reality (note that I do not say “the truth” here). I would not accuse David of disseminating such materials – rather, the interesting point is that when his most contentious (and difficult-to-prove) topic is placed to one side, the rest makes striking sense. We should do this until it can either be definitively proven or disproven.
The implication here is that there are truthful elements within all narratives, but according to the reliability, affiliations and provenance of the originators of those narratives, each needs to be assessed on his/her/its own merits and compared with other narratives to arrive at a more realistic assessment of what we are seeing and hearing. To what extent are any of these truthful? How do they corroborate or deny each others’ veracity? Sometimes we need to return to these fundamental points, especially when we realise the extent to which such institutions as schools and universities are really just indoctrination houses for a particular paradigm. This point should be foremost in our minds at all times; we cannot judge the truthfulness or falsehood of what confronts us otherwise. When we hear the sayings of others, when we watch a documentary or read a book or a newspaper article (online or offline), what we are confronted with is either an opinion (which may or may not be reliable or truthful, depending upon previous inputs of information to the speaker) or a concoction of facts and non-facts intended to bolster support for a particular agenda – which I once saw in an old cartoon expressed as (and here I paraphrase): “a subtle blend of truth, half-truth and anything but the truth.”
To put it another way: On the spectrum from zero to one hundred per cent. “truthfulness”, where would you routinely place what you hear in the news? This is always a simple and convenient way of measuring things, and I often use this kind of scale for other purposes with my students:
On this scale, I would put David Icke at about 85%.
The final element here relates to my recent brush with death in the form of colorectal cancer, something I had not expected, but having said that, something for which I was mightily glad to find an accommodating surgeon; and the fact that post-operative recovery seems to have been so rapid (due to the experimental device used) cannot allow me to ignore the implications for the future. But one side-effect I have discovered, at the psychological level, is a loss of patience. By this I mean to suggest that the sudden unexpected encounter with mortality, having made me realise that my days are ultimately numbered, has stripped away my usual forbearance with certain social behaviours, and the constant attempt by certain sources to indoctrinate me into the obviously false paradigm is one of these; another is the visible recidivism in both myself and others, which will result in stagnation if allowed to proceed unchecked; essentially, I have lost my tolerance for distractions, and feel as if I want to apply Occam’s Razor to everything, the better to avoid constantly wasting precious time.
So from my current perspective, the arrival of my new employer has to be seen in terms of how it will enable me to develop and progress, as it is not like previous positions – what promise does it hold in its own right, and what might it eventually lead to, bearing in mind that I have never subscribed to (what seems to me to be) a rather antiquated view of “retirement” – excuse me? If I arrive at an age at which employers no longer wish to take me on, does my life suddenly end? Does my brain suddenly stop functioning? Of course not – this is really nineteenth-century thinking, a leftover from a time when employees of such institutions as the British railways could have the luxury of working for a single, reliable employer for their whole lives and then stop working. But my mind is too active for that. So we now arrive at a time of transition.
Last night (a Saturday night spent at home – again – because of the post-operative strictures imposed by the surgeon) I was looking at the philosophy of Epicurus, noting how it seems to fit quite well with my own outlook on pleasure and pain and (believe it or not) the avoidance of unnecessary acquisition of material satisfactions, and today, whilst thinking about this, noting afresh (and not without some surprise) how the basics of life could have changed so little since the man himself was alive. It is in this frame of mind that I will be facing the future – avoiding unnecessary discomfort (I would not use the word “suffering”, as this is illogical) by choosing carefully the things I wish to have in my life, and bearing in mind that what the likes of advertisers and other contemptible mind-controllers want me to waste my time on are not necessary for the essential core of my lifestyle. I am not someone’s convenient target market, I am a rational human being and will resist the tide of greed and idiocy in search of a reliable picture of reality.
So I come closer to the time of signing and remain here for a short while longer, throwing out trash and planning the transition, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that the avoidance of recidivism usually involves throwing out some of your own junk. That, I think, is a good point to end here: letting go of my junk and opening my mind to new vistas of knowledge and thought. Epicurus, at least, got that part right.
References:
[1] See also the definition given at http://www.dictionary.com/browse/recidivism?s=t.
[2] See: http://www.wakingtimes.com
[3] See, for example: https://123movieshub.ag/series/star-trek-discovery/
[4] See: https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=max+planck
The War that No-one Wanted (Continued)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
And what should be doing the rounds lately, but:
The War that No-one Wanted
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
It’s probably because I don’t have a TV any more (and I would probably only watch UFC etc. all the time if I did), but if the Norks lobbing the occasional dud missile into the sea constitutes “provocation”, might I respectfully suggest that the people saying this are in need of “medication”?
Because you’d have to be living in a media-shill-controlled little bubble to think that the Norks are going anywhere fast. The parties with an interest in all of this are clear to see and the Americans in particular should have been sitting around a table with the Norks, Chinese and Russians, at least, to find a solution.
War on the peninsula is not inevitable but is being stoked by those who profit from it, for whom any person who is not in their diabolical little circle (ordinary people in Korea, North and South, plus the remainder of humanity) is expendable trash, that’s exactly how they see us.
And if anyone starts to raise the dubious spectre of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism” or similar waffle to justify a conflict, let’s remember that there used to be regular meetings between the concerned parties (“democratic” and otherwise), and an agreement was reached to help the Norks with their power requirements, which the Americans were proposing, but, ah… the disadvantage of “Democracy”, in this case, is that when the citizenry are swayed to change their administration, policy also changes, and that is why we are talking about this today, otherwise the “problems” with NK would have been solved around fifteen years ago and everything would have been much more tranquil.
But hey, there’s no profit in peace… is there?
Pentagon should move US military families from S. Korea ahead of possible war – Sen. Graham
The (Alleged) Death of Dialogue
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
What follows is an edited and extended rant in response to an online friend’s link to an article in The Federalist. [1]
As a remote but entertained observer of politics both in the USA and Europe (and therefore, by extension, in my homeland, the UK), I am sometimes – nay often – left gobsmacked by the execrably low level of public discourse. The USA is a place where ‘free speech’ is allegedly enshrined in their Constitution, which is all fine and dandy, but very often nowadays you will notice two things about it: that it is routinely abused, on the one hand to cause gratuitous offence, and on the other in a narcissistic manner, as if the very fact that one could speak freely means that what you say needs no prior critical faculty in the grey matter (read: bullshit filter), yet in the end, peoples’ intolerance will be the death of it.
When it comes to the right of free speech – something I would never wish to deny to anyone – it does seem to me these days that its abuse in the US stems from the notion that ‘freedom of speech’ equals the right to say literally anything, which common sense clearly suggests it does not. In particular, the tendency of people in positions of financial or political power (I shall leave religion to one side for the purposes of this diatribe) to spout out anything that they think their audience wants to hear (with the aim of gleaning more votes) has been demonstrated in abundance during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, more particularly, one thinks, by the losing party, meaning that onlookers have been alternately buffeted between hysterical laughter and mindless horror for the duration. We won’t continue to trouble ourselves with the fates of the sore losers, except, perhaps, to note with a little more amusement that among the so-called ‘snowflake’ population – young millennials who protested so vigorously against the possibility that The Donald, who seems to originate from outside the rarified atmosphere of normal political circles, might actually win and allegedly had to retire to ‘process’ the ultimate (negative, from their point of view) outcome – were often demonstrable hypocrites who did not even bother to actually vote (the startling figure of 48% non-voters among that group of electors has been bandied about). [2]
‘Free speech’ means that one should be allowed to express one’s opinion without fear of persecution. It does not mean freedom from criticism (which is a different barrel of sardines entirely), or freedom to libel or slander others. Yet this seems increasingly to be what many people desire – the enshrined right to vilify, demean and otherwise generally insult people without fear of legal or physical retribution. To this we might add the increasing general intolerance of many to anything but their own opinion; however, this only serves to remind us of my previous remarks in these pages because what we are seeing is the expression of narcissism; they don’t like to be reminded that their echo chamber is not private.
I have personally been shocked (but on reflection, not necessarily surprised) at the kind of malicious talk of some in the anti-Trump camp, who have thought that their candidate was ‘the One’, when in fact she (yes, I’m talking about Hillary, not Bernie or any of the others) was clearly ill, received more than twice as much in donations as her main opponent and still lost, flip-flopped between all kinds of stated positions and, being part of the Rarified Few, patently thought that the election was hers, like some kind of entitlement. This was a person who would have taken the US and everywhere else (and their dog) to World War III, which was clearly what some of her major financial donors wanted. As for The D., I would say that we should sit back and see what he is able to do. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t assumed his elected office and one would at least like to be charitable enough to suggest that he surely couldn’t be as bad as some of his predecessors…
What brought me to the keyboard today was an article linked on Facebook from The Federalist, which appears to be an American on-line publication with a more right-of-centre slant than one tends to encounter on a routine basis. This is called The Death of Expertise and was written by Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College (which sounds kind of ominous)[1]. I read his article and while I would agree with him broadly as to his main points, I have a fundamental disagreement with him when it comes to the desirability of ‘experts’. Partly, this is a humorous hangover from previous participation in the UK business environment, where we often say that ‘X’ is an unknown quantity, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure, but also partly that people are often described as ‘experts’ without any guarantee that their alleged ‘expertise’ will lead inevitably to favourable results or situations.
But I would like to assert my view that a person like myself with a background in practical science is hardly the kind who could be branded (as I think this author is trying to do) as a ‘non-expert’ (although in commenting on this, I have to point out that I am not an American citizen myself, and have no desire to be, the way things there seem to be going). One of the reasons I gave up on science is that much of it is falsified and cannot be supported by the data as they stand (or to put it another way, current paradigms fail to account for all the anomalies), and the ‘healthy option’ of having a range of competing hypotheses which could replace the current paradigm is barely ever mentioned because of the emotional, financial and career-related attachments that practitioners enjoy, and do not want to lose. Someone like myself will always be critical of authors like this because when they write, they are really trying to justify themselves and the system which supports them. To take a parallel from science when reading an article like this, one has to remember that waaayyyy back in the year that I was born (cough, cough), Thomas S. Kuhn was already lamenting, in his landmark tome “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, the fact that ‘normal science’ had given way to ‘verification’ of the paradigm rather than trying to challenge it; likewise, in his own book “Against Method”, Paul K. Feyerabend asserted (against a wall of criticism) that ‘normal science’ involved an anarchistic process in which the progress of a scientist’s career – if successful – involved an awful lot of schmoozing and ass-licking. This is essentially what we are seeing here, in the political context.
The author is talking here about the larger political arena, and while he is right to lambaste those who criticise the practitioners in this field on the basis of their personal delusions and acquired (inculcated) opinions, he unfortunately shows where he is coming from when he starts name-dropping with some of the 20th century’s greatest unhung criminals – the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski. What he is really saying is that when you criticise ‘experts’, you are criticising the ‘status quo’. This is, in itself, wilful obfuscation: we would all acknowledge that (a) a brain surgeon is a virtually unchallengeable ‘expert’ in his field and (b) virtually any commentator (other than another ‘expert’ brain surgeon) would be unable to contradict said brain surgeon’s opinion as to methodology with any reasonably sophisticated or even meaningful argument. However, the brain surgeon operates in an area where peer review (and managerial and other feedback) works to prevent disasters as far as possible; colleagues in the field would be able not just to criticise his practice, but to make positive suggestions. One cannot say this regarding (for example) broad areas of science, where very often an erroneous paradigm is maintained at all costs, and even the direct observation of phenomena (and the data resulting from research) is deliberately obscured so that questioning the data and their interpretation is made extremely difficult. And the more difficult observation becomes, the more outlandish the claims; I have made my opinions clear about this in a range of blogs, but not before undertaking a lot of reading and attempting to understand the nature of the criticisms as well as the phenomena being observed.
To comprehend the nature of my criticism here and my continued reference to the practice of science when the author’s original theme was political, consider the following: the practice of engaging militarily inferior ‘enemies’ at great distance from the homeland mirrors the scientists’ practice of constantly attempting to place phenomena in sufficient isolation, be it in space or time, that casual observation is in fact rendered impossible. Examples from cosmology include the so-called ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Black Holes’, not to mention ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’. We are still living in an age where the power of stars and even the heating of planetary interiors is thought to be due to radioactive decay even though more logical hypotheses such as EU now seem more relevant.
In both cases, when non-practitioners desire to see things for themselves, chances are that practitioners will defend their contemptible little patch up to and including litigation, enactment of specific and targeted new laws (as has been seen in the aftermath of Fukushima in Japan, and now elsewhere) and in the final resort, outright murder of critics. Even U.S. Presidents are not immune from this.
We see also that “Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School.” In other words, he is a well-integrated component of the ruling system whose career is closely bound to its survival; his interest is political as well as practical. But his ‘expertise’ is such that he could never come to me and tell me how to improve a chromate conversion coating on zinc by altering the pH, or likewise how to remove metals from solution by a similar method. I also doubt if he could tell me anything useful about soil husbandry, animal rearing or solar or wind power if my final disenchantment with politics should persuade me to head for the hills. MY education, training and experience therefore lead me to distrust HIS ‘expert’ opinion and to suspect that there is a subtext to this article, and to think that I am right (Kissinger, Brzezinski). I therefore challenge his assertion that a person like myself should be considered unfit to pass comment in the political arena, and advise Americans to be even less tolerant. In reality, he’s trying to tell his fellow citizens how to think.
The kind of obfuscation seen in the scientific context is now rampant in the political arena, where the broad “West” is clearly trying to justify starting World War III by demonising countries such as Russia and China and dependencies such as Syria, and their prime agents are their puppet media; where are the signs that we need to understand the nations in question? How is Russia, in particular, posing any kind of ‘threat’ to the West? The ‘system’ controls the media (do what they say, or lose your career), demonstrating how dangerous the ‘gatekeepers’ can be; and the fact that many modern American laws seem to be the result of industry lobbying and graft rather than solid scientific investigations and/or popular opinion demonstrates the falsehood of this so-called ‘democracy’ itself. Surely modern America is an obvious plutocracy when such things can happen? And when people in the know reveal those things which the system wants to keep hidden, they are not labelled as ‘citizens exercising their democratic right to free speech’, they are ‘whistleblowers’, demonised, legislated against and maybe even murdered for their efforts and opinions. Yet, for some reason, this system advertises itself as the epitome of democratic sanity. Perhaps we should remember that the incoming President got himself elected by (a) inflaming the ‘mainstream media’ to get their outlandish reactions and (b) made (and is still making) extensive use of alternative media to get his messages out. That is democracy and inclusion. The ‘mainstream media’ represent the exact opposite.
Unfortunately (from my own point of view), those who claim ‘expertise’ in the political arena must always be subjected to the most rigorous criticism, because their errors (which may be in concert with the interests of large industrial entities) are of a nature where the consequences of their execution may be dire and when they themselves are dead, other people’s descendants have to handle the downstream sequelae. One would not wish to support a system, as can be seen in so many countries these days, where there is sufficient obfuscatory power that legal systems can be co-opted to actually prevent people from uncovering and interpreting its inconvenient data. Increasingly, so-called ‘liberal democracies’ have been enacting laws to prevent both journalists and citizens from discovering and disseminating information about things that affect them (like Fukushima), the media are dumbed-down and demonstrably complicit in the obfuscatory process and the media themselves shout down anyone who questions anything the system doesn’t like to be in the public arena. This behaviour even extends to sciences like cosmology, which is an utter disgrace to the broader scientific enterprise.
Why all the obfuscation, you may ask? What is the point of all of this? Well, the alternative word for ‘obfuscation’ here would be ‘occultation’, yet when we think of the word ‘occult’, science is the last major field of human endeavour that comes to mind, showing that this methodology of disguise has worked extremely well so far. Science is just as much an ‘occulted’ activity as any Hermetic Order, and therefore its practitioners seek to make access difficult for the ‘uninitiated’; likewise practitioners of politics and the performing arts often have similar involvements, which they often give away with their words and gestures. Mark Passio goes into this in some depth here [3]:
So thank you, Professor, but you’re not an ‘expert’ in any area which interests me. Rather the contrary: from what you are saying, it seems like you are trying to justify a system which essentially disrespects the opinions of intelligent and experienced onlookers like myself, and represent said system’s ossification and elitism. In my opinion, this kind of haughty commentary is only a step or two away from criminalising political dissent… oh, wait…
[1] http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/#.WG8fBOJEFTy.twitter
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3942278/PIERS-MORGAN-Memo-millennials-awful-feeling-ve-got-called-losing-happens-want-know-win-stop-whinging-bit-learn-lessons-Trump.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1V98DsNXi0
Minor edits: Sunday 12th February, 2017.
Why All Taxation Is Theft
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
Damn right!
This is an anarchist talking… something we need to understand better, if only because current political philosophies are so bankrupt and common sense is sorely needed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6C1M_7BzZ0
Always remember: Theoretical anarchism is only ever enlightening.
