Dear Employers (Hit your own Targets)

Your target goals are meaningless to us. We know that a business needs to make a profit. But your business is a sausage, by which I mean that we have no idea what's gone into it. Huge bonuses to the CEO? That's just part of the payroll budget, and actually means we AREN'T making a profit. That means you feel justified raising targets on the next performance review so we don't get our bonuses down here on the sales floor.

Making a profit is a tricky business of smoke and mirrors accounting. Need to show a profit to shareholders? Do the math one way. Need to show a loss to the tax inspectors? Do the math another way?  And you don't even have to break the law. The only group you cheat is your employees.

We know how much the CEO and other executives make compared to the rest of us. And speaking for myself. I've watched how fast one can swap CEOs in and out. I've worked under three CEOs in less than ten years. That doesn't seem to justify the payroll disparity to me. But maybe I'm bitter.

So. Just to confirm, CEOs have no problem giving themselves credit for any successes, but still giving themselves golden parachutes when the roof of the company falls in. But we don't get a bonus, one that the CEO wouldn't bother to pick up if it were lying on the road, because we didn't match some arbitrary measurement next quarter, just before we've figured out what we need to do to reach those targets.

So no. You performance targets don't impress us. They are capricious and deceptive and you can use them as a rectal thermometer.

Friday Finale: New Friday Thing

I am working to provide updates five days a week. And in the effort to avoid burn out, I have decided to use Friday as a synopsis of what I've been noticing and working on through the week.

Minions, cultists, acolytes and fanatics on my Patreon will get early access to my private Archive Notes. To be honest, as per my open source and free access mandate, these will be made available to all at the end of each Mendasa Luni-solar year. But until then, if you want access to the newest entries in the Harbinger Archives, you will need to be a patron. I need to find some way to strike a balance between open source and giving benefits to patrons. So there you go. Now back to the lies!

Things I've found and liked this Week

• I downloaded and listened to the Buddhist Catechism from Librivox. the book dates itself quite frequently. But as I wasn't reading it as a Buddhist, but as a student of religion and culture, I found it quite interesting. 
• I also tried downloading the Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, but found the audio and narration quality not manageable, and sadly abandoned it. 
• I've been listening to Tim Ferriss' Podcast again. Specifically his interviews with Terry Crews and Kevin Kelly. The Terry Crews interview is worth a listen from the power of Terry's honesty alone. I found The Kevin Kelly interview very interesting, as Kevin is a very smart guy who is thinking about similar subjects to myself and coming to very different (and more optimistic) conclusions. And anything that challenges your own ideas is useful. 
• A nice little article about Lewis Dartnell and his book The Knowledge. This book is already in the recommended reading, so there you go.
• Ryan Holiday writes on the danger that having a strong routine can also make you brittle to shocks and how to address it.
• A listicle (I know, I'm sorry) about Ancient books of Magick that promised supernatural powers
• We now live in a post truth era if this video is anything to go by. 
• The Tropical Fruit Tree Americans Forgot, because being a warrior means providing for yourself. So there are going to be some gardening links now and then!

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.

All us Children

The Dreamwalker is the two who are one, connected mystically to man of void and Lady Of Fire. The Dreamwalker represents the first of the three pillars of the free path. The pillar of critical thinking. It is they who first noticed something wrong amongst the heroes who flee from the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness.

First Mother. The daughter of the last king. Sister to the could have been King. The little mother who fled the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness. Who founded the first tribe. Who learned the ways of self-sufficiency from the Weaver, and woe the scavenger folk back into the circle, into the web of the story.

First hero. The stranger, the outsider, the outcast who joins the tribe and proves a True Believer. First hero is the fire in the drive, powered by the great Patron the Great Serpent. First hero is the Mythic embodiment of self-defense.

The free path is supported at its Center by three pillars colon critical thinking, self-sufficiency, self defense as personified and embodied by these mythic figures.

These skills are what gives us the freedom to walk away abd act of our own volition.

Speak out, start Fires, fight back.

If you can't think for yourself, someone is willing to think for you. And they will do so to their benefit.

If you can't provide for yourself, you are a slave to the person who can provide for you. You will work for your daily bread forever.

If you can't defend yourself; then whatever you gain, somebody else can take from you. If you can't defend yourself, then you are a victim, forever.

Without critical thinking, the dreamwalker is just two lost souls toiling as wage slaves in the city. Without self-sufficiency first mother is just a little princess trapped as a sacrifice to the hungry Empire. Without self-defense first hero is just an outcast scavenger and a victim of fate and predators.

Without these skills, none of us are adults and all of us are children.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Service Update: Importing Old Blogs

I'm afraid that there is nothing fancy in terms of content to be added on this post. I may post again later today, schedule permitting.

This post is to note that I am in the process of mirroring content for other blogs on this blog for unity and continuity purposes. My writing has been spread across the internet. I'd like to unify the body of my work, and so I've spent this morning importing content.

I have marked some of the content as reprints already, however, this is not a finished process. Likewise, there may be dead links on a number of the imported posts. I'm going to continue to work at unifying this.

But for the moment, I'm just advising of the process as it currently stands.

Are you Free? All us Inmates

I will tell you the story of the Man of Void and of the Lady of Fire.

Long ago in the future.... In the last days of the Empire an attempt was made by men and women of science to escape the constraints of Planet Earth and limits of the biosphere. If it did not fail, then the result might have been Man of Void and Lady of Fire.

Man of Void is a mythic representation of the ultimate test of freedom; the ability to walk away, to travel freely.

Lady of Fire is a mythic representation of the ultimate path to freedom; the decision to take responsibility for ones own life, to be "a light unto yourself" (to steal from Krishnamurti) and to act by your own volition.

Imagine two men. They step into a ring and begin to throw punches. If they do this voluntarily, then we would call it a boxing match. But if they do not do it voluntarily, if they are unable to choose whether they start or stop, because of outside compulsion by others, then we would consider it torture.

Imagine a small child, the mother says to the child, "Would you like to clean your room or clean the playroom?" The child does not realize, that by engaging with their mother's question they have given up their freedom. Few of us would consider this malicious, because it is the job of a mother to teach and manage the child until they are able to make such decisions for themselves. But once we are no longer children, this process should cease. But what happens when we are given such false choices by Kings and Prime Ministers and Presidents? Are we not still children being given false choices?

The restriction of volition and mobility is domestication writ large. We have made pets of ourselves. And of course pets and animals kept in zoos live longer than those in the wild. With humans, it took some 2,000 years before this was true. We have packed humans into such sardine dense cities that the transmittable diseases are appalling. Only the advent of modern medicine leveled the playing field, allowing the civilized human to live longer than their wild counterpart. But what good is a long life if you hate it? And yet, we fear the end of life- even the end of a life of torment. Even with the rise of suicide as a feature of modern culture, most of us fear death more than a life we have to medicate ourselves (whether by alcohol or tobacco or marijuana or actual anti-depressants) to endure.

And so our Kings and Emperors use that fear of death in order to extract our submission, to push us into the field and factory and make us work for their benefit. It is this fear to take ownership of our life that is used against us to restrict our volition and our ability to move freely.

The good person may now object that we have an obligation, a duty, to do our share. But this isn't true. A duty or obligation springs from an voluntary agreement. We have twisted this in the modern usage, trying to pretend that duties can be inescapable. What is this but slavery? To be a duty, to be an obligation in contractual sense of the word, both parties must have entered the agreement of their own free will. To say that because one was born within these borders, in a world made of nothing but borders, that one is then obligated to participate as a member of this group; this is still merely slavery disguised. To abstain must remain a genuine option in order for participation to be in any way free.

I can hear the protests now. The land would be filled with freeloaders! Nothing would get done! Then I ask a question. If the work ordered by the Empire is so odious that no free person would do it, why should it be protected? If, for three million years humans were able to find enough people to do what must be done, what have we done so wrong in the last ten thousand? Why, for three million years was the voluntary participation of free peoples enough, and in the last ten thousand years only the forced participation by slaves would suffice?

And why also does the slave defend the slave master? Has the master so completely and effectively removed the slaves ability to stand alone that the slave cannot imagine life without the master? If the master is gone, who will whip me and make me work? Are these the questions we are reduced to asking, as we pretend that we are free men and free women? Perhaps we need better questions.


Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Are you Indigenous? All us Colonists

If you are reading this, and I assume you are, then you are interested in the Free Path- sometimes called Mendasa (But ignore that for the moment). The Free Path is built upon the Song of Seven, and the First Song begins with an admonishment to be indigenous.

What does it mean to be indigenous? According to the dictionary definition we like (And thus actually use), being indigenous means to belong to the land in which one lives. But what does mean.

Well, a digression.

All humans are Africans.the evidence is in. If you want to argue go elsewhere. Our DNA, the fossils if our ancestors, the trails of tools and artifacts, and other mountains of archaeological and anthropological evidence that tells us our lineage. We are all African.

And so if you are human and live anywhere but Africa, then you are a colonist. So what does it mean to be a colonist? Honestly, not much more than an awareness of the fact that we're all immigrants or the children of immigrants. But there is another recently emerging factor that tends to immigrate with us.

People tend not to think of the first humans coming out of Africa as colonists or settlers. This applies to the Sami of Finland, and the Franks of France, and the Ainu of Northern Japan, and the Tribes of North America. Why is a Frenchman in Africa a colonist? Why is a Lakota Sioux not a colonist?

Obviously part of the equation is whether the area already had human inhabitants. But we call many a people indigenous who colonized lands already inhabited.

But, leaving our digression, part of the equation is how we live once we settle somewhere. Do we live like that land belongs to us?

Or.

Do we live like we belong to the land?

Do we live like the land is a resource from  which we may extract what like, or do we live like the land is a collaborator with whom we are in a long term working relationship? The first song is an exhortation to be indigenous, and this is mirrored by verse 4.4 of the song: Live for the Unborn Elders. By which is meant that one should live so that ones actions do not harm the livelihood of any of the next seven generations of descendents.

So again, to be indigenous is live as though you belong rather than living as though it belongs to you.

How does one do this? Well obviously, one must live lightly and live in a way that gives back to the land. The Mendasa Story Canon gives us another useful metric. The most mysterious of the Elders of the Shadowlands (which is saying something when you consider that the Elders include the Great Serpent and the Weaver and Mystery), is the Whisperer: the voice of the land and air and sea. Stop and be still, and listen. If one pays attention you will hear a small voice speaking to- giving you the path in a whisper.

It is the Whisperer who gives the discontent that drives the Kudavbin King to give up his Empire like Siddartha or Moses. It is the Whisperer who inspires the Dreamwalker to tell their stories and inspire change like Martin Luther or Paul of Tarsus. It is the Whisperer that connects First Mother back to the Weaver's web and to her story. And here I have no examples within the stories of the Hungry Empire; because while the Empire can assimilate the stories of the Dreamwalker and the Kudavbin King, redirect their attempts at freedom back to the Grey Path, but First Mother is never assimilated. Instead, if caught by the Empire, First Mother is sacrificed. And she is sacrificed because, while the Dreamwalker points to the path of the indigenous person, and the Kudavbin King tears open a path which will lead to the indigenous life, First Mother teaches and walks the path of the indigenous life. And this cannot be tolerated.

But the Hungry Empire has blind spots. And this message seeks to live in such blind spots, and to whisper to those who wish to hear, teaching them how to belong.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.