Theory Thursdays: We Own the Rain and We Own You

Because I am a Cult Leader, and a False Prophet, a Conspiracy Nut and wearer of tinfoil underwear, I follow Prepper news sites. And the prepper sites are tremendously concerned about laws regarding the saving of rainwater.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx

As the above link demonstrates, a number of American States restrict Rainwater Collection. This is done for various reasons which could be debated. I have no intention of doing this. I have no interest in this debate. Such consideration may be necessary for large governmental organizations claiming ownership (implicitly) of a citizenship, and thus feeling obligated to manage conditions within the land to which they lay claim.

I'm not looking at this from the point of view of a bureaucracy managing a resource to be shared between hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens. And while I'm not telling you to break any local laws, I am stopping to wonder at laws which make self-sufficiency difficulty and/or impossible to achieve legally.

What message is being sent here?

We will take care of you. You are our responsibility. We know better.

And implicitly also this: we own you.

Going back to the Second Song of the Song of Seven: Be Free, and we see that the requirement to take you life into your own hands and the requirement to defend one's ability to walk away anticipate the the verses of the Third Song. The second verse of the Third Song is especially relevant here. Learn to be self-sufficient.

Because if you can't do that, then you are at the mercy of those who can do that for you. Every parent has discovered those power shifts, when a child obtains a driver's license or gets a part time job that provides spending money. Suddenly the child no longer has to rely upon things which previously only the parent could provide. And this shifts results in a loss of raw power for the parent. If the relationship is not one built upon respect, the parent may not like the sudden change that accompanies the increased abilities and freedom which their children has obtained. The parent can, of course, pass new rules as long as they remain the child's legal guardian. They may ground the child, or forbid the purchase of anything over a certain price tag. And so may governmental organizations forbid things which a self-sufficient individual is able to do.

But once one is able, then compliance is a choice. For the would be tyrant or abusive parent it is far easier to prevent the child or the citizen from becoming able in the first place.

Become able.

The alternative is to remain a child forever.

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Talk Tuesday: I Seem To Be Obsessing over Shawshank Redepmtion

"Get busy living... or get busy dyin'." - Shawshank Redemption

Would you believe that I have not watched the Shawshank Redemption recently? I haven't. It's true. I just stumbled on some TVTropes articles that linked back to Shawshank's article and found that the story seemed to resonate.

But, back to the quote. I've mentioned previously, that whatever we do with our every day, that is what we have chosen to die for. What you do, is who you choose to be. Who you think of yourself as in your head means nothing, what you put done in the pages of life by your actions is who you are. And most of us are not writing stories that we would want to read, to say nothing of anyone else.

And, yes, the Hungry Empire wouldn't function if we all lived that way and nobody waited tables and worked in factories and stocked shelves. And yes, civilization wouldn't function is nobody sold crap and swept up and manned the assembly lines. And I know that I am writing this on a computer that wouldn't be feasible without those things. But are those things worth living a life you would not choose to relive if given the chance?

Seriously, this is a question you must ask yourself. Is this life, the one you caffinate and medicate your way through, worth the price you pay to get it? Are these toys and technologies worth the price you pay in the life that you keep deferring?

So yes, you need to get busy living. And you need to examine the life you are in fact choosing to live. Because every life you choose, causes all possible other lives you might have lived to die. You only get to choose one life (assuming the Buddhists and the Hindus aren't on to something), so choose one that you can look back and say- yes, that was worth dying to achieve.

Otherwise, you aren't busy living. You are busy dying for somebody else's life.

And hey...

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Talk Tuesday: Fallen Empires

Korean Peace? Let's assume that this is possible for the moment. From what I've read, the prime driver on North Korean coming to the table is the damage they've done to their own country through their nuclear testing.

Which is suggestive of something very scary.

Let's compare. The British Empire wasn't interesting in granting colonies freedom until their empire began to disintegrate on its own. The Soviet Union didn't loosen its Iron grip until that grip was rusting.

Empire doesn't negotiate until its dying.

And given the damage the Hungry Empire is currently doing to the biosphere, that may be a very scary prospect to consider.

And we, as individuals, are complicit in this. Of course, Empire does its level best to make complicity seem like the only possible course of action. But it isn't.

There are other paths. They are hidden. They are hard to find. But they are there.

Find them.

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A Diatribe Against the Alt-Right and the Dangers of Predictions

I meant to write an entirely different post this morning. But I've been unifying all my disparate web presences here and uploading old back ups of other blogs to this blog. And in the process, I found a piece I wrote that feels eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of the Alt-Right and Ascendancy of President Trump and Trump's America.

I called the Post:

The Souls of White Folk?

. . .

And yes, the title was intentionally provocative. In the post, I point out that the legacy of White Europeans throughout the world is not good, to put it lightly. We have colonized and murdered, conquered and raped our way across the globe. I could easily line up a list of indictments and do so in the post itself.

If you are interested in properly educating yourself, I recommend some research into:

• The Congo Free State (The Belgium Congo)
• The Trail of Tears (United States of America)
• The Residential School System (Canada)
• The Lost Generation (Australia)
• The Amritsar Massacre (British India)
• The Middle Passage (The Atlantic Slave Trade)

And obviously this is just a sampling. Back to the original post however, because in the post I argue: " ...if the white folk don't find their soul and reclaim a collective identity that is positive- the world won't survive for much longer."

In the intervening years I have seen a strong case made for cultural identity on a smaller scale, taking pride in things such as Italian or Swedish cultural heritage, rather than white heritage.  This makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, given how diverse the cultures of Europe are, and thus, how diverse the cultural heritage of European descended white Americans would be. However, in the post I was primarily referring to ongoing damage caused to the planet ecologically.

But what is interesting (and not in a good way) is how the rise of the Alt-Right and Trump's America so clearly serves as a rejection of what I was arguing. The Alt-Right and the self-proclaimed deplorables are refusing to re-frame their cultural identities into something forward looking and positive. Rather than address the legacy as Germany did following World War 2 and the Nuremberg Trials, the Alt-Right are taking a stance of denial and pride in their monstrous past and nasty cultural heritage. They are doubling down, and fighting back against the progress made.

So I have to admit, looking back to April of 2010, I was right for the wrong reasons, and things are so much worse than I expected when I wrote those words.

Welcome to the Revolution. Here's your Crown.

Civilized religion and/or political ideology often begins as rebellion and ends as oppression. Look at Christianity and communism. What fights against the king is frequently conquered and then used by the king against his enemies.

Why do rebels become tyrants? Why do movements seeking liberation end up oppressing? Revolution as a word refers to a circle. And revolution keeps rolling back to oppression by tyrants, because nobody from tyrant to rebel to unwashed masses understand another method of living. We know only oppression. Rebels become tyrants because that can't imagine a system that functions without tyrants. They try to be good tyrants or to hold tyrants to some rule of law or to make tyrants democratically elected. But they can't imagine as system without tyrants.

We are all slaves. And we keep asking," if we have killed the master, who will rule us? "

We have spent ten thousand years isolated from the proper way for humans to live. We have spent ten thousand years finding and destroying that knowledge wherever we encounter it and typically destroying the cultures that still possess and preserve this knowledge. These cultures also revolve, circles of cultural transmission, as parents pass on the story and culture to the next generation necessary to rebuild the culture.

Tradition and treason share etymological roots. The empire does not relinquish power. Pharaoh does not die. He ascends to rule as a god. As did Caesar. As did Jesus of Nazareth. The empire is unwilling to admit to the ascendancy of natural cycles. The emperor does not die. The sun never sets on the empire. The kingdom does not decline. No autumn. No winter. Always summer. Always growing.

The Empire accumulates as a basic function, and it does not pass on anything to the next generation willingly. Look at the wars of succession throughout history. Note how new gods steal control of heaven from the old gods, as Zeus did from Chronos. And Zeus was revolutionary liberator and then oppressor, because there must always be a tyrant.

As was Christ. As was Lenin. As was Moses. As was Castro. As was Mao.

Whether political or religious, our cultural discourse has been unable to speak in any language but that of the oppressor since the Agricultural Revolution, the last ten thousand years.

And new concepts are built into the education of young slaves and oppressors (And all oppressors are also slaves). They are taught to believe in a reward and an afterlife following death, to better tolerate oppression while live. They are taught the idea of progress and the idea of the inevitability of progress, to prevent them exploring the old ways which contain the true keys to freedom. They are taught the idea of sin or the idea that humans are flawed and imperfect beings and that the inequality and oppression of modern life are inevitable.

We don't need a new way. We need the old way.


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Why you are probably a Supervillain

Much of the problems regarding human civilized impact upon the ecosystem is due our conditioned response to a now changed environment. We are Neolithic hunter gathers, used to living in group of less than two hundred people, now scrambling to manage in million strong cities supplied by massive mechanized farms. Our responses, honed by thousands of generations of natural selection, are unrelated and unhelpful to the world we have built.

Is the devil our instinct towards the life our ancestors lived for 3 million years? Why is the ability to act independently typically the hallmark of the dark side? Why does the supervillain seek change while the hero seeks status quo?

Why are stories where the hero is a rebel Typically science fiction or history? Why are we still afraid to depict a current revolution?

The answer is scale. A village of one hundred fifty people can be all heroes. All warriors. A city of one million needs workers, peasants, consumers. A village survives on initiative. A city survives o obedience.

Humans as hunters are like wolves. Humans as city dwellers are like sheep. Wolves get hunted. Sheep get sheared. Make your choice.

The hero of one system becomes a supervillain in another.

But we are not all sheep. Some of us are now shepherds. And they do not value the rebel. They do not value the reformer or the activist. That us the path of the dark side. And those who pursue the insights necessary to understand this are aimed towards ascetic pursuits, loke the Jedi.

Be passive or defensive if the status quo. Otherwise risk becoming the villain.

But I think, shifting gears here, that even rebellion is in service of the King. The scale differences mean that the best a rebel can hope for is to create a war nobody can win. Think of the history Afghanistan. The two sequels to the Matrix and the book The Rebel Sell do a good job pointing out how the rebellion serves the Hungry Empire and the Locust King.

So don't rebel. Look at what else is part if the dark side, part of the path of the supervillain.

Independence.

The villain can walk away. The villain can stand alone. If the King needs workers, then abandoning the loom and the assembly line is a more dangerous rebellion. Karl Marx imagined that the workers would seize the means of production. But that has been shown to create new Kings. Look at how many legends depicting the rise of new Kings and gods begins with a humble birth, from King David to King Arthur.

The solution is not rebellion or revolution. The solution is neglect.

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A closer look at the Wendigo

All monsters begin as something mundane. The fractal begins with simple rules, and then spirals out into something more, and sometimes, something much worse. The origins of the Giants are unknown to the Psychonauts, but the origins of the Wendigo are not. The Wendigo were once human.  

The Wendigo are what happens when the hunger of the Grey Locust is left wild and uncontained by the Locust King and the constraints that the Grey places upon the Hungry Empire in an attempt to maintain its cold order.   

The hunger drives them, and in the early stages they still seem human.  

The Stillborn  

From a distance, one might mistake the Stillborn for people. Up close, the mistake is unlikely. The Stillborn's skill has gone white and chalky, and clouds of dry skin cells explode around them with sudden movements. Their eyes have gone milky blue-white and the skin has tightened all across the face to give the eyes a sunken look. The Stillborn's hair has bleached to translucent silver and seems to defy gravity, floating about the skull like an unholy halo.   

The Stillborn still speak, but their language is unintelligible to any non-wendigo. They have their own culture and mythology, those none who understand it are able to transmit it back to those who still understand human speech. The path to hunger is nearly always a one way journey.   

The Hungry Ghost  

As the body is consumed by the hunger, the Stillborn go from emaciated to truly skeletal, with skin stretched so tightly of bone and sinew that they could be mistaken for desiccated corpses if they choose to remain still. The teeth sharpen and elongate and the eyes decompose completely in the head, replaced by cold blue lights. At this point, the Wendigo is known as a Hungry Ghost. The Hungry Ghost, like the Stillborn army, still physically eat. However, they no longer attempt to cook their food, and seem unable to digest it- as the food sits inside their huge distended bellies.   

The Ravener  

The final state of deterioration. The Wendigo's head is now a skull with glowing eyes, resembling nothing so much as the terrible love child of an elk and a bear. Carnivores teeth poke out of a herbivore's jaw. A predator's eyes sit uneasy in the skull of a prey animal. What skin remains is ragged and wispy and flutters in the slightest breeze. The Ravener is an animate skeleton that glows with a cold blue light. The body of the skeleton too is twisted, elongated and ape-like, but with the hooves of an ungulate, the ribcage and fore paws of a polar bear, and bizarre protrusions extending from the individual vertebra of the spinal column.      

A First Look at the Dead Gods of the Mirrored CIty

When a god accumulates enough power from offerings and worship they may build themselves a seat of power, a sacred throne which both amplifies their power and serves as a vessel for that power. When the Locust King began to build the capital of his Hungry Empire, he sent his forces to hunt down appropriate gods and steal their thrones for the Hungry Empire. The City of Glass is built around these thrones, now bonded to the wards of the city. The gods from whom the thrones were stolen are now shadows of their former glory. Publically lauded as official Gods of the state, they are little more than propaganda puppets; trapped in the stones and steel of the cityscape, whispering prophecy and begging for offerings in exchange for favors.

• Gildguld, God of Tax Collectors
• Mitchuas, The Son of Ash
• Gaibrus, The Birdgod of the Dawn
• Zeudin Vashas, The Six Faced Lord of Thunder
• Lamris, The God of Obedience and the Underworld
• Friedites, The Goddess of Sin and Purity
• Valstaris, The Goddess of Love and War
• Xerfer, The Goddess of Jealousy and Greed