Sweet Death

The summer drought cut dry, choking out vegetation as green withered to pale brown. Death throes clarify transcendence and stimulate pragmatic finality.

Civilizations are defined by how their best works demonstrate peak human potential, and their finest efforts often appear just as death is overtaking the whole. A generation follows, continuing as if the last breath didn't yet happen, and often produces as it must, like an aftershock, but then art and philosophy rest idle without any force able to spur them, and then the civilization's death is undeniable.

We recall Western Civilization still alive in the 19th century, when in a short span lived Goethe, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche before utter silence fell. Spengler popularized the collapse and Nietzsche knew he was already living in an exhausted period. Today we avoid the implication of our impotence and ended civilization by praising imaginary progress as we dig ourselves deeper into misery, failure, and disharmony, and still no great art or philosophy has appeared for a century, and a previous spirit of vitality is clearly lacking, a barren signal that the end has long arrived.

The apple tree shriveled as it parched under the oppressive sun. It sensed quite correctly this would be its last season and there was no reason to hold back anything. The tree would perish, at least in its current form, so it summoned all the glucose stored within to put into its children, the conditions of death making for the sweetest fruits.

The greatest sweetness preludes death, an anomaly that is not intended to be sustained. "This is over, may a different way come another day."

Tempting fruit is a calculated last effort gambit, not a free gift or lucky coincidence. Life must go on, so reasons the tree. With its final gasp, it manipulates all seducible creatures with the tastiest lure, so they take and feast inadvertently, and inevitably spread seeds throughout the ground to give the largest chance of the tree's genetic expression rising again like a reborn phoenix.

We see that after all the pretense, praise, and phony selflessness, all life works for advantage and propagation, coercing others and commandeering them when beneficial. In bleak times, we should be more aware of deathly schemes.

May 14, 2012

Taking Back

First we take back the rainbow. It belongs to everyone and isn't a political banner.

Then we take back primacy in artistic tastes and standards. Heterosexual males created and have a long history of enjoying ballet, symphonies, opera, art films, and other peak cultural creations. Today's male is an artistic midget, grasping nothing more subtle than Rammstein. Great art belongs to heterosexuals also, and standards should be restored to their heights rather than cut short to fit consumable products.

All excellence should follow likewise: fashionable clothing, good food, interior design, interesting conversation, care for nuance, passion, personality, and developed style. Gay people are only 1-2% of the population yet dominate areas of superiority that once belonged to all cultivated people. The cultivated must reclaim these essential arts again and reject the modern idea that the rest must live as barbaric peasants made comfortable with a poverty of spirit.

Cultivation is an inheritance. Parents bestow their wisdom while introducing their best life findings, and one should also explore and become fluent in high culture and good taste. These once belonged to us and thus we shall learn to have them again.

May 12, 2012

And Civilization, If Everyone Behaves This Way?

One is tempted to write off Russians as self-caused sufferers of delusion and destruction, not only for being the champions of communism and hopelessly attempting to force equality and mediocrity on all unable to escape the empire. Stalin and Lenin were by no means unique in Russian tradition, a problem captured by works such as Puskin's Boris Godunov (1831) and Gogol's The Government Inspector (1842) trying to warn their countrymen by showing how bad tendencies doomed the entire society for the next several centuries.

The same sickness is psychologically harmonious with a lifelong vodka haze: utter disregard for consequences in favor of the moment's poisoned beliefs about reality, with tolerance of corruption sustained by violence against non-believers. This societal structure attempts to steal from itself, with value frittered away through lying, cheating, negativity, endless pits, fraud, and devotion to illusion. It was not a mistake that Dr. Lysenko won sainthood with his innovative and revolutionary discoveries.

"Evil men have no songs." How is it, then, that the Russians have songs?

It appears Russians have nothing in common with Europeans, until you find that their greatest artists and thinkers defy every tendency of their countrymen and share the same aspiration and awareness as all visionaries ever have. The brightness of their souls, daring honesty, and rich sensibilities -- as if transplanted by the cosmos as a gift of extraordinary perception intended to rehabilitate the whole or at least hold off total collapse.

No educational system studies great people or teaches how a person can cultivate superior traits and become better, yet a handful of exceptional people created all of civilization, their efforts outlasting death and even previous civilizations long gone. If we change our role models and cultural expectations from the contemporary to those that are excellent and timelessly enduring, we could once again have a society that was meaningful and rewarding.

April 8, 2012

The Penis Is Innocent

Schopenhauer did his best to warn us that sloppy approximations, frauds, and half-truths become our shared wisdom, and are rarely examined or questioned.

[T]here exists certain universally popular and firmly accredited errors which countless numbers contentedly repeat every day.
* * *
Most of these are repeated parrot fashion without much thought being given to them and merely because when people first heard them said they found them very wise-sounding.

Previous generations had contact with nature and did not make this anatomical mistake, nor does any male who has bothered to pay attention to the actual source of this potent vigor.

The penis is just a worker following orders, at most a large and highly visible mid-level manager, typically a working stiff front man facilitating delivery plans on behalf of virile strategic executive initiatives. From a central encapsulated office, the testicles productively pump an endless pulsing energy that surges and drives everything before it, ultimately acting upon and propelling the entire world in its mission to spread seed.

Man schemes in vain to design a perpetual motion machine, yet he has his own organic factory from which all his efforts are born and to which his life is grateful.

April 7, 2012

Aggression

The Supreme Court decided that strip searches can be used for any purpose, including:

• violating a leash law
• driving without a license
• failing to pay child support

Citing examples from briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer wrote that people have been subjected to the humiliation of a visual strip search after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.

A nun was strip-searched, he wrote, after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration.
[NYT]

Currently in the United States, 1 in every 31 adult persons is either in jail or prison or on parole or probation. That amounts to 7.3 million Americans and a cost that exceeds $68 billion annually. This figure does not include juveniles accountable to the U.S. correction system.
[Yahoo!]

April 6, 2012

Thinking is Cheap

Almost nothing regarding humanity is an intellectual problem. We know everything relevant or can instantly devise it at the moment needed, so long as we are not allegiant to political, religious, or social ideologies, but instead revere reality as our one true god.

Our situations and opportunities are not complicated, except in how we make them so. We fall into numbing soul killing routines out of comfortable duty, stacking contingencies upon old suppositions that long ago turned false, yet somehow invoke loyalty that prevents a sensibly fleeing to the wild and fresh air.

Fractured trust instills hesitation, then brief windows close during long pauses of watching and thinking. No great thoughts come from this thinking, and no productive action. How rich you were before thinking!

During the day we wear costumes and acknowledge closed windows, but by the moon's light, crowbars and battering rams provide forceful access that smash past false barriers.

So few barriers truly stand, so few limits really limiting. If there is need, or even desire, there is a way. You should not be thinking about doing so much as assuming you can take victorious action, and then considering whether you want to keep the consequences of winning what you think you desire.

April 4, 2012

The Eyes Have It

One must create their own conditions of excellence, formed like a sculpted athlete carrying nothing unnecessary on his frame. We brew magic, not with illusions of appearance, but undeniable substance that strikes viscerally, creeps into dreams, and makes earthly union too tempting to deny.

Weapons and danger everywhere. Lightning and fire illuminate the night skies. Sunrise tempts with fresh open promise and growing warmth.

She glimpses the sight before her, sensing its essence, yet testing it frequently to be certain, and remains still as he approaches, finally melting as he greets her with a firm embrace and passionate kiss. Could this all be real? It seems to be, and how he eclipses her boyfriend!

Her senses overwhelmed and already moist, she feigns calm despite awareness that she is being swept away.

She wants most of all to lose control and be taken to glorious new heights by these torrid storms that toss her about like a rag doll. Her eyes grow big and betray her predicament, and despite uttering words, nothing she expresses is as true or deep as what the rest of her says.

♫ Words are so very unnecessary... ♫

Stunned silent, she can only touch and stare at the physical manifestation who submerges her into this blissful maelstrom. All her armaments of thoughts, facts, judgments, feelings, and schemes vanish and leave her empty handed when she can only whimper joyfully in wonderment.

Language is a costumed procession hiding the reality of human relations, a facade needing to be disrupted by trust, desire, provocations, and risk to lay truth bare.

March 31, 2012

Worth

The worth of something includes what you are willing to lose for it. No assurances, no safety, complete acceptance of the possibility and suffering of loss, even if facing the likelihood of despair, misery, and desolation. No desire to reduce scope and impose bounds to prevent loss, but to let all go free no matter what happens, for everything is fine however it turns out.

We love artists because they are willing to lose everything in exchange for tasting everything, without hesitation spent on practical or personal concerns.

March 29, 2012

Orientation

Our relations live or die with willfulness and willing. Poison them with doubt, reluctance, or indifference, and death from nothingness arrives.

We are not interested in cursing the darkness, so we steer away from the depressed and negative. Targets are clear in our sight and we aim to arrive. Saboteurs need not apply.

You wish to stall, hesitate, and put a damp towel on passion? Wherefore? And to seek safety among your eunuchs!

Marvels everywhere, yet few wish to taste them. With our rightful compagnons we go far, and nothing denies us its most intimate secrets.

March 26, 2012

Benefits of Feminism

• Women no longer know how to cook, clean, or run a house, but these remain important so men have learned to master them and live better for the effort.
• Though dating and marriage have been abolished, easy sex is abundant.
• The destructive game of chicken that some dislike for its unnecessary squandering and catastrophic consequences is a valuable filter.
• With wife and family no longer targets, neither are careers or work generally. Toward a new age of artistic and spiritual development instead of dutiful obedience, schedules, long hours of toil, and material struggle!
• It provides a banner under which adherents can gather to be quickly identified and understood.
• The grand experiment of dividing essential unity and still expecting civilization to continue functioning will result in the willful finding new paths around dysfunction, leaving experimenters with the mess of their glorious botch. It will be fun to play it out and see what happens.

March 24, 2012

Making a Good Thing

Let's say you want to construct a bridge. If you want it to function, you don't build it out of styrofoam, haphazardly put it on unstable ground, or indiscriminately set it on fire.

There are many types of bridges that work well throughout the world, and their essential and sustaining properties are easily discernible.

If you insist upon styrofoam, unstable ground, and fire, perhaps you don't really want a working bridge, but rather the self-victimized drama of poverty.

March 22, 2012

Celestial Union

We look at society with reluctant skepticism, uninterested in dysfunction, ignorance, amusement, obesity, wretchedness, senseless beatings, and defeat.

In truth, everything is easy. We inherit a long roadmap for living with prospering families, communities, institutions, and civilization. But now we are trendy, choosing to experiment with colossal failure, evading interventions and telling ourselves we are rich enough to lose everything and strong enough to give up this brutal habit whenever we decide to.

Nor are we the pessimists we appear to be. We can endure anything, but want no part of this soulless hellhole. As saving redemption, our great belief and experience in possibility edges out doubts about others and overcomes retreated reclusion. Freshly aware and unjaded, we welcome consequences as we fearlessly make our daring attempts.

We catch a glimpse: your face is so like mine, belonging together. We warm quickly and spark on touch, playful smiles feeling the chemistry pulse in one another before we've even said anything substantial, desire communicating beyond language. Smart, attractive, and soulful is all that's needed to power our perpetual motion machine.

No one loves nature unless they blossom with spring each year.

March 21, 2012

You Are Cruel To All The Others

Is it parasitic or somehow unfair to entice and steal someone's girlfriend? You know she is spoken for, yet you desire her, and it is within your powers to spin her loose and take her for your own.

"You'd probably get along really well with him too..."

Words are perpetually cheap. If she was satisfied and a loyal lover she wouldn't be warmly entertaining flirtatious dares, but would take care to rebuff advances that could upset her man if he found out. But she doesn't value the relationship, instead inviting good offers from high bidders, looking for one that promises to please her the most.

No code of honor protects the vanquished lover from predation and theft of his prize, nor is there any safety net for the conqueror. Wandering barbarians boldly take the treasures they find, dispatching all resistance before them, fully aware that anyone fiercer will unhesitatingly do the same to them.

March 15, 2012

Go Low

When everything in life is easy, it's hard to cultivate any appreciation for its actual fragility and the rare encounter with anything of value and quality.

To see the full ranging width of perspective, you must first be familiar with the total loss of your greatest hopes and aspirations, to have accepted solitude, incivility, uncaring, smothered trust, and malicious destruction, having endured despair over simple truths of nature rendered increasingly elusive and needlessly impossible.

From nothingness we emerged for a brief respite and adventure before we soon return to it forever. The imminence of the hourglass prompts our search for others who live for purposeful alignment and expend themselves upon our one and only chance, a short moment of non-nothingness.

How wonderful to have entirely lost yourself and all your wishes many times, and from catastrophe become reborn into a richer and freer self made able to see loss as gain.

For happy pessimism is restorative! One has been worn by experience to presume nothing positive, and only expect loss, suffering, waste, grind, and vandalism. We are trained by the striking blow of the animated pathogen, bracing in expectation of its lash. When it fails to arrive and something healthy shows itself decisively instead, what a gift here below!

The taste of utter oblivion is both a tease and promise that it will one day return to swallow you completely. Only from this can you appreciate the warmth and yielding of a young woman. A man feels it in his gut, or more precisely just below, churning and stirring with unrelenting desire when her chemistry allures. Somehow as we wandered the desolate wastelands, we found one another and knew to make a world together while we could, loving its unknowns and honoring the vulnerable wealth we are for one another.

March 6, 2012

Idealism

Our ideals are inherited, indicating an accumulated high water mark from an old era when ability and discipline were necessary. To not seek attainment of ideals burdened one with a difficult life. The wisdom inherent in them was an instructional roadmap, with local examples of failed people illustrating the costs of ignorance, inattention, and deviation.

Times changed, and today life is easy and effortless. Accordingly, the substance and essence of old risks and warnings were forgotten, yet idealistic phrases and ideas were repeated without context or consideration.

Eventually cause and effect became blurred. In this opportunistic haze, progressive new ideals were introduced, demanding loyalty without permitting questions or discussion of consequences. A mass of clever sharks gathered around this movement and demanded freedom from the oppression of reality. They cast blame on invisible external factors, insisting their own actions and self-caused conditions were innocent, benevolent, and enlightened, and thus attributed their failures to shadowed others who were surely keeping them down, especially the successful and well-adjusted who needed to be destroyed at any cost.

This worked, so long as attention spans were crippled and everyone was conditioned too afraid to confront lies, excuses, and filibusters. No one dared oppose decisions with obviously bad outcomes looming, and instead pretended to disavow knowledge of their effects. Even probable results were denied, and people politely rejected that likely outcomes could ever be binding or absolute for any individual case, even if true of the aggregate. Tolerance for everything reigned supreme, with costs borne most by one's neighbors.

Similarly, all choices were promised available with consequences discreetly hidden. If you believed the marketing, this rationalized selfish hedonism as a higher pursuit than cultivated ability or purposeful action, the latter now relegated to losers who were missing out on a profound amusement park experience.

Rather than obligating people to profess belief in ideals no longer in reach, we could free them from hypocrisy by rebalancing idealism to match contemporary reality. We would start by admitting we need guidance because most people are irresponsible, self-destructive, lazy, passive, irrational, unaware, unrealistic, and desirous of deception.

From this vantage we can more accurately look at human behavior to better consider what we should do, how to improve ourselves, make a healthy society, and critically assess how situations we create are likely to unfold.

February 29, 2012

Treachery

The first few times you're lazily spending a weekend in bed with a girl and she answers a phone call prompted by her boyfriend's pulsing Spidey senses, it's both funny and insightful for the logic it reveals. You already knew she's not interested in that relationship, but now you get to watch masterful disingenuity performed with utter calm as she lies about her location, activity, and present company -- and is believed.

What are you dealing with? Skills that normally operate in stealth are now nakedly on display in a lewd showcase, the curtain pulled up for you to peer deep within.

Typically the cheating woman has a grievance with the boyfriend or husband, but does not communicate it or constructively work for a solution. She holds it in silently, letting it boil for a while before eventually plotting passive-aggressive revenge. What better retaliation than to desecrate the relationship by blatantly violating the trust that once sustained their precious unity?

She checked out of the relationship before the act of betrayal, writing it off as dead while keeping up lukewarm appearances without a hint of her plans. It's only over in her head -- all kinds of things live in her head -- and now she needs someone's help to complete her performance of contempt and derision. She finds a willing accomplice and seals the deal with an ultimate act to irreparably sabotage the relationship so it is forced to end, needing the transgressive fling just once to achieve her aims. Alternatively, she might enjoy tremendous satisfaction through the subversive clandestine violation of oaths and promises, an anarchistic joy fueled by many months of cheating until the spite and bitterness eventually overtakes her relationship and shatters all semblance of decency, often compelling her to triumphantly announce her prolonged campaign of disgust. She doesn't even use the sex for physical pleasure, but loves the irrefutable wreckage and depravity it celebrates, so dominating is her desire for retribution against what she once cherished.

Some of my male friends sleep around, but when in a serious relationship they rarely cheat, and when they do it is for good reason that can be discussed openly without lies. To make cover stories about one's choices instinctually feels to men a cruel deception that is uncomfortably dishonorable. Accordingly, few men are inclined to wield such tactics, instead recognizing them as highly effective but internationally banned because of their unfairness and brutal consequences.

Nature likely needs men willing to help a woman end relationships they no longer care for. Accommodation comes without pity that she is unable to communicate her feelings. We remain agents of nature with a gift for leading things where they must go.

February 23, 2012

Reparations

Everything has a price.

They wanted me to drink a soda everyday, but I valued my health and quoted them $1000/day. When they tried to work a package deal to also get me to watch an hour of television every day, my daily fee became $2500.

In a universe spanning billions of years and perhaps infinity, I couldn't give away a short life for nothing.

February 21, 2012

Empathy

Rather than turning away when I see suicidal self-checkmates, I am artistically experimenting with empathy to play with the motives, imaginations, tangled knots, suffering, and disappointment that make up the action.

We politely pretend people are complex and unique, but nature is efficient and endlessly recycles the same few themes, easily noticed and comprehensible, masked in obvious ways that are transparent to see through.

We waste a lot of time believing in the fable of individualism while ignoring the patterns of the whole.

February 18, 2012

Tolerate Everything

Is fire hot? Perhaps in a relative sense. The sun is hotter still and more oppressive.

More importantly, fire is natural and has always been with us. It's improper that authorities prevent us from having bonfires in our living rooms or anywhere else we want. How could you restrict a fire? It's free and goes where it wants. We need to learn and discover our humanity by becoming educated that fire is harmless and should be accepted as part of our community, perhaps even taken out to dinner and apologized to for past slights.

Fire poses no threat, but popular misconceptions about fire create a biased atmosphere leading to real harm. It's time we all grow up, which means everyone who disagrees must begin agreeing by giving up their observations, experiences, and beliefs, no longer concerning themselves with critical thinking, historical consideration, and proximate consequences.

The truth is there is fire in our community, and it's not going away. It should be tolerated, embraced, legalized, normalized, given special rights, protected status, tax exemptions, statues, holidays, made immune from criticism, considered impolite for adult discussion, advocated, taught, and given a free pass to do whatever it will.

Small bigots want to extinguish fire and keep it out of our community, wishing with hateful hearts to relegate it to campsites, burning trashcans, and other contained spaces. But who has the right to say I can't have a bonfire in my living room, kitchen, or bedroom? The so-called fire marshall might be upset, and the city counsel can pass fire hating laws, but no amount of legislation can prevent what we desire or keep us from our right to happiness.

No one can say whether it's good or bad to have houses burnt to the ground, therefore it's good. We're not here with goals and purpose, but rather to accept everything equally and passively spectate as we allow things to happen without distinction and valuation. We won't be enlightened until everything is accepted and every outcome is treated identically.

Some people might have had bad experiences with fire. We can't deny an authentic narrative and though you might have been burned or disfigured, fire holds no ill will toward you. It wants only to live judgment free and treated as normal or benevolent, as do we all, especially the badly flawed, decadent, and undesirable.

Now stare deep into the hypnotizing flickering flames and declare obedience to all permissiveness. We call this progress, and please don't judge the outcome.

February 16, 2012

Unique Personality

The steak was tasty, with browned edges and a pink center. The organic cow from which it came was grass fed in stress free fields, and had a distinctive attitude and unique personality. He felt a particular way about some things and had definite opinions, some insightful, while others were humorous or banal. He had his likes and dislikes, eccentric tastes and styles -- just look at his iPod tracklist and you'd know it was him.

We finished the juicy steak and reflected on the exceptional characteristics of his life. What a loss we feel in his absence.

February 14, 2012

Fresh Love

What is better than the mystery of maybe? It hints at a way to explore lush beckoning fields for the first time. Every event is a lucky chance encounter tempting your essence to survey whether she is ready to give herself to you. Will she attract you to press on and pursue? Or evoke nothing? For we shall not merge unless she first allures and tempts, stirring the suitor to uncover and dispel her modesties.

Like nomadic traders meeting at a strange outpost far from any familiar shelter, we begin by seeking a common language and curiosity. A gentle handshake and preliminaries ensue, then scales to measure raw goods, followed by swordplay to discern the adroit from shallow.

Bared pockets and a customary patdown suggest proof of fidelity beyond simple deception, and then he pledges the penultimate oath:

I, of willful intent, am intrigued, drawn, and captivated, choosing to know your hidden wonderment and mysteries, standing before you with virile desire and passion worthy of your willfulness and yielding, overtaking restraint as a force of nature for which you will be appreciative and awed, ravaged and loved, as you are swept away by chemistry, ineffable drives, and potent storms that will be witnessed and experienced from its apparent epicenter, but never understood.

Eternal wheel ever rolling! We are made of fuel for raging fires that propel the world, but need your spark to ignite.

February 4, 2012

Intimacy

Precious and fragile, so easily replaceable by rash lashing out, dependency on stronger stimulants and depressants, and studious consideration of the imaginary.

Alright, if you think that's better. Our new loss leader is a lose-lose proposition with acidic environmental damage, sleep deprivation, and now you have to wear long sleeves so no one can see you are an innovative cutter.

The truly devoted terrorists blow themselves up to avoid looking at the useless mess they create.

February 1, 2012

Shame

"What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame.
 What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself."

What is called "shame" today is usually the judgment that a person's essence and actions render them of no worth to us. It's not a moral argument -- no one believes in morality or invisible gods anymore. We are solely concerned with the reality of function. Because we value our lives and want to go far, we are not going to get entangled with someone who destroys their value and every opportunity they encounter.

It is not shaming to point out the consequences of behavior and their effects. When we see that someone is obese, we reflect that they are harming their health and sense how they depress others by their demonstration.

We dislike the habits of substance abusers because their binges of consumption and self-destruction are ugly to watch as they take toll on themselves and those around them, the whole time failing to confront their underlying psychological issues.

Emancipated women choosing promiscuity aren't shamed so much as recognized as having lost the ability to sustain long term relationships. Men interested in easy sex will continue to enjoy them, but that's third-world ambition.

There is no shame in recognizing something for what it is and assessing it as a type of decline that lacks value. We aren't here to flatter the worthless or pretend that all choices are equal in outcome.

January 30, 2012

Poverty

Like a massively inefficient economy, most of what we value is hyped pump and dump, bubbles about to burst, shoddy goods, and innovated obsolescence. When not distracting with self-important insistence on being the central hub, it is crowding out culture, meaning, good taste, sensibilities, and standards of quality.

There are no Superbowl commercials for fresh air, wild salmon, sleeping, hiking, or Seneca's Epistles. Everyone healthy already knows what to do. But to get money from people by convincing them to harm themselves by consuming junk, that takes an investment of millions in advertising before they respond as cued.

Our time is wasted valuing what has no value. This is more vulgar than noble poverty.

January 24, 2012

Lock and Key

Nature pairs the willful and willing, aligned in moments of opportunity and tested to see if they can hold on. We sniff and play house to glimpse the future and then choose to keep what is right for us.

Men age like fine wine and better whiskey. At 18, they are young, dumb, and full of comeuppance. This origin as utter nothingness has an upside in spurring motivation to achieve. His inspiration burns and strives rich with dreams and desire, and by 25 has done well and is on track for a successful life.

Women are rockstars at 18, able to stun and take over a room by merely entering it, and easily capturing the attention of any man they want. But this arsenal has lost effect by 25, or earlier if drunken hookups have worked their magic of worn emotional ambivalence. Worldly and callous seems bold but smothers the sparks that ignite love.

When people talk about the wild experiences of youth, there is little substance to it and much damage. No great information was uncovered by bringing pointless danger upon oneself, and restless acting out demonstrated a lack of reverence for life. Standing on a ledge brought nothing when they should have been going somewhere.

The ones that retained their value kept their heads down, worked towards goals, honed skills, explored good options, and lacked interest in spending energy on destructive rebellion. Their healthy souls nourished purpose and beauty, forming a harmonious pair that fits well together.

January 14, 2012

Aphorisms: Belief, Uncertainty, Action

I've compiled another edition of aphorisms from recent travels and found a thought that repeats with unchanged essence but different angle of attack, with four years trading psychological assessment for urgency of quick action:

2008:
Breaking the stalemate -- taking decisions is a race against the dissolution of time. Waiting rarely provides greater information for a wiser choice, but typically is a passive means of discarding opportunity.

2012:
Imperfect information is usually good enough for taking decisions and avoids the death spiral stall of waiting for what is unlikely to arrive.

We can discard information for clarity because the reason for the effect doesn't matter, only the function of the effect. We've seen the pattern before and know how it can play out given all possible decisions -- the rest is trivia. Thus we move forward to cast destiny into motion.

January 13, 2012

These Aren't Hippies

People told me I'd love Boulder, and it quickly shattered expectations. It's normal to walk, run, and bike everywhere, making it the fittest city in the U.S., full of attractive, energetic, willful, and positive people.

I came to Boulder during the annual Shakespeare festival, a beacon for all locals who love the arts and the potential of communication, more spirit than mind, with desire to take potential to its limits to uncover possibilities.

There are hints of the hippie lifestyle with legal marijuana dispensaries, but I haven't been able to find anyone who admits to using them or even being very aware of what that culture is in Boulder. Just as odd, there are a few extremist health food stores that only sell left handed apples picked by crippled orphans, drawing enough devoted customers to stay in business without being obvious mob money laundering operations.

On the surface there are plenty of people with crazy hairstyles and colors, wild piercings, and unusual makeup, but scratch the surface and you find they are just middle class college degreed youth with absurd uniforms. They mark themselves to announce distinction from the previous generation, screaming to not be measured with the same yardstick and grouped in with the wreck that proceeded them. So what type of world are they making?

Boulder's predominant characteristic is a compelling culture of excellence. Its cuisine favors demonstrations of experimentation, both sensible and interesting, careful to avoid cliches while using local offerings in unexpected but harmonious arrangements. There is even a battle to get high quality vegetables to market for an extended growing season, and to maintain tight ties with farms for fresh meat, with the most serious restaurants even taking ownership of their sources.

Colorado has a long craft beer history, which itself is a statement of dissatisfaction with the quality of generic quantity-centric factory beer, and a counterrevolution of high standard brewing. Local microbrews compete with friendly judgment and criticism of one another, keeping one other sharp and inspiring the Munich of the West, an inspiration now overflowing into artisan whiskeys.

Boulder also takes coffee seriously, rivaling Seattle with joy instead of depression, creating a climate in which each cafe competes to craft better espresso. Indie shops dominate, making it easy to find a great cup almost anywhere you happen to be.

All this and more because they didn't want to be mistaken for their parents.

January 11, 2012

Broken

A group of children approached and tried to provoke the leopard by waving their hands between the bars, but the cat remained transfixed on his circuitous journey to nowhere. "That's so weird!" exclaimed the youngest boy, "and it reminds me of episode 23 from season 6 of Seinfeld." The others nodded in agreement, all deeply knowledgeable in the complex stories of situational comedies.

"That's like the scene from Batman," said the boy in the red Nike shirt, compulsively recalling the fictional images constituting his consciousness. He had no awareness of literature, classical tales, theater, philosophy, or any cultural reference point -- and never would -- only streams of entertainment products meant to pacify people with comforting lies, dull cliches, and predictable story arcs.

"He walks like an uptight Republican just like Jon Stewart said," offered the pigtailed girl, obediently repeating what she had learned about political ideology from entertainment as a supplement to public school indoctrination.

Progress had achieved its destiny.

January 7, 2012

Liberalism Begets Bladed Libertarianism

There are many ways to win with force and aggression. You can easily badger others to comply with any demand by saying all who disagree are close-minded, untrendy, uneducated, hateful, unprogressive, and bigots. This manipulates others into agreeing to the demands out of an attempt to deny the titles the attacker has claimed.

You can run a sit-in and occupy anyone's property, shutting down the area until the neighborhood gives in to your demands. You don't need a bomb or to take human hostages when you can take over the business they need for income, or make the neighborhood in which they live unpeaceful while you wait for their capitulation. In the long run, masses with desire for personal gain always defeat law, order, and sense.

The media helps spread confusion by inflating things far beyond proportion, promoting drama to bored entertainment consumers and misrepresenting inconsequential issues so there is something for proles to talk about. News is a type of entertainment programming existing to sell commercials instead of factually inform, telling stories through a game of "telephone" where there is a grain of truth in the source, progressively and willfully distorted until presented with a straight-face as dutiful benevolent social interest.

Some people feel trapped by organization and the rules of reality, instead seeking to create a more permissive society. Government barely reacts, being mostly defensive in trying to stop specific destructive acts and decay, rather than taking interest in what people do. With few police and many people, the masses are almost completely unchecked, and the police cannot afford to monitor private actions. Over time the permissiveness of liberalism and sheer size of hedonistic individualism enraptured by diverse and contradictory desires turns society into a de facto libertarian system in which people can do whatever they want with minimal restriction or consideration of results.

This has side effects, especially when families, education, and public discourse are weak and ineffectual. There is no awareness of how acts are self-destructive, perhaps because it is more immediately enjoyable to pretend everything is harmless, and the masses love the idea that they can and should do whatever they feel like doing at the moment, regardless of consequences. Wisdom is dismissed as opinion, and every fool has an opinion, therefore reality can be anything someone imagines it should be, even when it isn't, in which case a secret conspiracy is surely the origin of oppression.

From observation and experience, sensible people know how things turn out, but eventually decide to pull back entirely, no longer attempting to reason with or help others doing violence to themselves. Instead, they accede to having all laws and public judgment removed, allowing unwise people to find their own results, which means to make no effort to scout or plan ahead and then be surprised by rough situations they brought upon themselves. The twist is that we no longer care what happens, as some are adamant to do what is known to be destructive, so we renounce all connections and responsibility, allowing them to be absolutely free individuals playing with sharp moving blades, sans training, sans guidance.

This gets funnier when the liberal social structure remains, forcing a comedy of paradoxes. Are you responsible to pay for your neighbor's irresponsibility? If his stupidity and neglect leads to his misery and suffering, should you give him free money to compensate for his poor or careless ability to navigate life? Secular doctrine reminds us that we're all equal and can't judge.

Should you have to pay for your neighbor if he decides to have a drug habit or wants to sit on the couch getting fat? We're all bound together as one, so either have to raise our standards back to healthy as they were decades ago or work harder to tolerate destructive behavior. Alternatively we could kick hopeless people out of the system as parasitical freeloaders, but this implies some people are not equal, at which point the whole deck of cards would collapse, not allowing us to drag it out longer until collapsing on its frail bloated weight.

Being forced to pay for the irresponsibility of others calls the bluff. When we're all forced into the same boat, what do you do when someone starts sinking it and convinces others to join the sabotage?

Old methods have been arrested. Progressive tolerance denounces most truth as offensive, knowledge from our best sources isn't propagated, and intergenerational wisdom is no longer transmitted to pass on lessons of experience. Schools do little more than indoctrinate, preventing critical thinking, creating a demographic of parrots, and leading to degrees of no value to employers. You can get mad and riot that uneducated and unskilled people don't matter much to civilization, but you've earned and created all of this from the utopian society you've been working on since the hippie revolution.

Now with forced toleration, everyone is totally free to walk to their doom. No warnings, pleas, arguments, judgment, help, or rehabilitation will be provided. It's your world baby, and it's all about you!

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