Marijuana

Relatives inspect a wild hemp plant, found on a farm in Iowa during a family reunion, summer 1980.

Yesterday I attended an event concerning marijuana use in California. The event was sponsored by my church and featured Bishop Ron Allen as the speaker. Dr. Allen is a long-time opponent of teenage drug use, and an ex-addict himself. The group attending was very small. There was only one person present who had a problem with a person she was close to and needed those kinds of answers. The rest of us were concerned with how best to counter the effects of legalization in California, and in particular in the Black communities. The church has developed an education program called Truth About Drugs which is operated by the Foundation for a Drug Free World. Bishop Allen has a more faith-based approach, but uses the Truth About Drugs materials. He has started his own group, called the International Faith Based Coalition. Its mission is to get effective drug education programs into all churches and being delivered to all young people.

But on that Saturday afternoon, with the eight or ten others that shared the room, Bishop Allen was mostly worried. He had come to realize that some of the government agencies that you’d expect to want to prevent drug use were instead pushing for legalization, supposedly due to the potential revenues from excise taxes. He found that they were buying into spurious and dishonest claims being made by pro-drug groups. And he recognized that the “black market” selling marijuana to minors continued to grow, with their costs now reduced due to legalization. He was also troubled by the continued problems in the black communities in dealing with drugs, crime and violence. He warned that the current focus on white-on-black violence was avoiding the more painful and prevalent issue of black-on-black violence, and of the broader problem of violence and war in human society. “All lives matter!” he said. And he repeated this many times.

All Lives Matter!

In embracing this concept, Bishop Allen to some extent turns away from teachings that require unwavering devotion to a deity but instead see deity in all people. Another way of stating this belief or awareness is: “What you do in life matters.” In other words, if an individual makes good choices, the effects of this will be felt by many others around him, and perhaps even improve the general environment. Conversely, if an individual makes poor choices, similar ripple effects will occur. This awareness is very similar to the awareness of connectedness that many who pay attention to the spiritual side of life acquire. This contrasts with the separateness that is implied or expressed in the popular pursuit of material advantage. Thus, Bishop Allen is confronted by a conundrum (puzzling problem) that has confounded the best thinkers of the ages.

Drugs

The Foundation for a Drug Free World pushes the message that all drugs are poisons. Biologically-created poisons are known as toxins. Toxin is a back-formation from toxic which comes from a Greek word for the poison used on arrows. The word “intoxicated” shares this root meaning. We start from this as our stable datum concerning drugs. If an overdose of something can kill you, then it is a drug. Otherwise, it is merely food, or a food-like substance, like vitamins. Certain drugs are also known as narcotics, the Greek root of that word meaning “numb.”

Because pain relief can be medically useful, the worlds of medicine and narcotics have become crossed – and have been so for a very long time. This should be understood as a problem of biology. However, the mind, and the mental effects of drugs, go beyond biology. This is the difficult point that many reach when trying to understand drugs, as many persons of this world don’t recognize the existence of any living thing beyond the realm of biology. In this they are most certainly mistaken.

Because pain and confusion can exist in the mind independent of the state of the body, the subject of drugs also crosses over into the realm of the spirit. This is one reason why churches are quite rightly involved and concerned. They can see this clearly; particularly those like Bishop Allen, who have been through the experience of addiction.

Addiction

Can physical and mental addiction be separated? Researchers say, “yes.” Spiritual people are not so sure.

A web article published by rehabs.com states:

In many ways, physical and psychological [addiction] are identical in that they activate similar brain regions.

The difference involves what happens when a person is deprived of the drug. Do they experience simple mental torture, or actual physical withdrawal symptoms (plus the mental torture)? That’s the difference. So we are talking about a difference of degree. One argument made about marijuana is that it is not physically addictive. But it is mentally addictive. Some call mental addiction “dependency.”

Imagine, if you can, that you have the body of a robot. Your body works on electricity which is supplied by some sort of power pack that is designed to run for years. You have been taken out on a long space tour, and you miss your robot buddies back on the home planet. You are sad about this, as you see no way of returning to your friends. You discover that when your smell sensors are overwhelmed by the presence of certain solvents (such as alcohol) in your environment, you forget about your lost friends, and switch to a different line of thought. So, to relieve your sadness, you seek out such solvents, and hover over them. You, a robot, have started on your path towards addiction. With a machine body, you could never get physically addicted to anything; you don’t eat or drink! Here on Earth your problem would be classified as psychological addiction, or dependence.

An addicted robot? OK, perhaps a little far-fetched. But I wanted to stress the mental component of addiction and by extension, the spiritual component. In the end, it is the spiritual being who is addicted. And this is backed up by numbers: The most effective drug rehab program is Narconon, and that program addresses the being, not just the body (detox). Though withdrawal can kill a body, it is mental attachment, not physical attachment, that drives addiction.

Medicine versus Salvation

It has been the hope of Ron Hubbard, from the beginning of his work, that medicine, science, and spirituality could someday be harmonized into an overarching theory and practice that would handle any human condition.

However, it appears that medicine, as an institution has come to see spiritual practices as a threat. In this we see that some “doctors” have walked away from the ideals of medicine and into some other realm, which could – frankly – be labeled as criminal. This is an unhappy circumstance, as most practicing doctors would not agree with this. They still want to make their patients permanently better, and they haven’t given up hope about this. Those currently in control, however, seem to have different ideas.

Today we understand this to be a “dramatization.” A compulsion to display non-optimum conduct for reasons that have been totally buried and seem to be totally lost. But today we can handle dramatization. It works on many drug addicts. It could also work on many doctors.

Meanwhile, though, we have a problem. Organized medicine is opposed to many health-giving therapies because they aren’t medical! They have been pushing an anti-spiritual, anti-religion message for decades, only recently slightly relenting in the face of the overwhelming popularity of some of the simpler non-medical practices.

Whole industries have been built up that take advantage of various human weaknesses and conditions. So now we have business people and bankers also being lured into the criminal attitude that a sick population is better for business than would be a healthy population.

The Role of Government: Decriminalization versus Legalization

I have expounded in other places about the problem that government has with crime. It is summed up in the phrase: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” This is considered to be sound political advice. However, it contains a connotation of deceit, in that you could remain an enemy of a group while pretending to join it, and thus operate within the group as a traitor.

I have proposed – and this is not a new idea – that many people in government, if not whole governments, have been taken over by criminal interests because the criminals appeared stronger than the honest people they victimize. They are certainly not spiritually stronger, but in the physical universe – especially if given superior physical weapons – criminals can appear to be the stronger force.

This has been and will continue to be a problem for beings who want to do right. The most workable strategy has been to use spiritual strength to one’s advantage. And we know now that you can actually improve, or rehabilitate, the spiritual strength of someone if they decide to stay honest. Thus what we see playing out here on Earth – in really just its beginning stages – is an attempt by honest beings to recover control over the institutions of Earth, fought against by criminals using technologies of an increasingly devious and destructive nature.

These technologies very much include Bernay’s approach to marketing and public relations, which involves taking advantage of human psychological weaknesses.

So you have a situation on the planet now where the economy has stagnated and in some sectors collapsed. Governments, which depend on healthy economies for their own existence, become desperate for funds to continue providing the public services that the population expects from them. And so they become open to arguments that law enforcement costs would reduce and tax revenues could increase by legalizing (but taxing) activities that have become popular in the culture, but were previously seen as illegal. While some governments have only reduced criminal penalties for some acts (such as possession of marijuana – decriminalization) in the hopes of increased revenues from fines, others have opted for legalization for adults, as has been done with cigarettes and alcohol, expecting, we presume, even better economic outcomes.

The situation is further confused by the fact that centralized legal systems have never served the population well, and so popular sentiment is often in favor of fewer prohibitions. From the viewpoint of an honest citizen, this is a justifiable position. Laws are routinely used selectively on the population, enforced on persons that are dissidents or rivals, and not enforced on friends and family. There is also a significant and undeniable legacy of false and forced imprisonment across the planet and down through the ages, used by governments to prolong the reign of leaders or cabals who have outlasted their tenure of popular support. It is a common criminal practice, sometimes referred to as a “frame-up.”

That police departments continue to work with churches and the Foundation for a Drug Free World in anti-drug education programs and other forms of community outreach attests to the basic goodness and decency of people – particularly those who have pledged to work for the public good – but not in all instances, unfortunately, can the same be said for their political leaders or funding sources.

In the face of this morass of ethical and moral confusion at the leadership level, the question of whether or not to legalize becomes irrelevant. Leadership must first decide to unconfuse itself and start to lead for real. Leaders in government could then begin to serve their communities in some useful way, and would rise up out of the criminal situation where so many of them currently find themselves.

A vision based on reality

In the real world, for ages past and for ages to come (I hope), people will do what they decide to do. Yes, laws can serve as guidelines towards the better path. But they can never replace the resolution of a being to pursue his choice, no matter what. Thus, a “legal system” based on guilt and punishment will never fulfill its purpose of improving conditions, but will tend to worsen conditions. Only a legal system based on education and real understanding could hope to do that. Where beings lose hope that they could ever attain their ideals, the improvement of conditions becomes impossible. Thus, absent a general improvement in the population on the subject of happiness, a general improvement of the human condition on Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) will not occur.

Thus, this vision starts with The Way to Happiness. I know of no other book that does what this book does, without once mentioning God, heaven, or scriptures. We need a universal moral guide, and this is the only one I am aware of that exists on Earth. In it are our stable data, the foundation on which a better society may be built.

Next, groups need purposes to survive as groups. Put otherwise, they need games, goals, visions of the future to work toward. The lowest common denominator purpose on Earth has been war. That has to change…but not necessarily that much. How do you turn a game from something destructive for the larger group, to something constructive? There are two main ways: 1) Construct the game in ways that allow the defeated rival to survive and play again, as in sports. 2) Pick a rival that is external to the group, either physically or conceptually. Thus, “fighting human aberration” becomes a playable game if it doesn’t actually destroy human life, but only strives to remove the self-imposed barriers to a fuller life experience. In the hands of psychiatry, “mental health” became a criminal game. But it doesn’t have to be. With effective mental technologies, it is a game very much worth playing, and winning.

In this vision of the future, what does government and law look like, and how can we move in that direction from our current scene? Would marijuana be an “illegal drug” in that new world?

If we start with The Way to Happiness as our foundation, then we can imagine that law, to the extent that it was necessary and desirable, would parallel the Precepts. Take Care of Yourself. Be Temperate. Be Industrious. If someone was abusing marijuana, they would have problems in some of these areas. And their community would be organized to assist them to change their ways. If they got into Ethics trouble, say for missing work, they might be assigned a Condition. If they could not get out of that Condition, an investigation might be undertaken to determine if that person had criminal ties or tendencies. If so, further handlings would be recommended. If those handlings did not result in turning the individual around, a justice procedure might result in the person being placed on a list of persons with unhandled drug dependencies, limiting the sorts of employment and assistance that would be available to them. They’d have a hard time in life. Would they go to jail? Possibly not. Would they be given opportunities to detox and get rehabilitated? Probably so. It would be in the community’s interest to turn such people around, so the community might even help pay the cost of such services. Or maybe the addict would be billed for the cost, and expected to repay after he got cleaned up.

What we can do right now is push The Way to Happiness into use. All the police organizations of the country of Colombia know this book! They used it to help create a truce with the FARC rebels. In Los Angeles it has been used to reduce gang violence, with similar results in Denver and many other cities.

Even the Ethics technology has made some inroads into society, and should be promoted as an adjunct to the criminal justice system. Third Party Investigations have been mentioned as useful in conflict resolution work in Los Angeles, and deserve much wider recognition and use.

These are both educative technologies, and that’s what the planet needs right now. Some reach for it. Others know they need it, but are afraid to ask. You can often get cooperation in forwarding this data just by assuming that you will.

That’s the way – briefly stated – to run a community, a city, a state, a planet. Care about everyone. Make sure they know and understand their moral and ethical choices, then let people get on with it, and see what happens. The curbing of crime and of criminals is an important aspect in such a world. It simply has to be done in an honest and humane manner, with the application of as much effective mental and spiritual technology as seems practical. Earth, after all, is not the end of our problems. Even now, as many more than do should realize, other worlds – worlds many of us once participated in – are knocking on our doors, inviting us to learn and play their age-old games of commerce and war. Do we meet those invitations with the moral compass of our ancestors, or with The Way to Happiness? What we decide in the next few years could make a big difference over a long stretch of our future.

As for pot and drug addiction: I’m sure glad I didn’t have to worry about that this lifetime. Was there an anti-drug education program in my school when I was growing up? Yes! Will such programs save everyone? No, but one saved me. Can I get an amen?

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Sorting Out Society

The “Thinking Out Loud” category is for hypotheses, ideas, opinions. Though of course these are always influenced, or colored, by prior training and study, I put a post here when I am unsure of the facts, or don’t care to be academically rigorous.

Sketch I made for art class, about 1970. I picked it to symbolize the effects that “bad things” have on life and the individual.

A problem of money

What got me going on this line of thinking was a difficulty I was having obtaining funding for a project. I thought to myself: Someone doesn’t want to spend this money; they want to sit on it instead. And that lead me to the subject of banking.

Banking

Banking, it is said, started when tradesmen (this is the story I heard) wanted someplace to store their gold securely. The “banker” stepped forward, offering to provide this service. In exchange, he would be allowed to loan out the money to others, and collect interest payments on these loans. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, originally the most secure places for such deposits were temples and palaces. But we won’t go down that road just yet.

Here we have a situation where a professional-level service is invented to fulfill a need. The service consists basically of amassing deposits (and safekeeping them) which one can then earn money on. It is presumed the need arose due to 1) lack of space at home to store such items, or 2) fear for the security of the assets.

Today, money exists as figures in accounting books. And those books are actually stored on computers. There is no longer any great need to provide security for currency. All one must do is secure the computers.

Traditional banking still exists, but cash deposits bring back virtually no earnings to the depositor. Investment banking, on the other hand, has skyrocketed. The whole society has been pushed into making investments and buying on credit. Why? Keeping deposits safe doesn’t make money, especially when they are only numbers in a computer. Traditional banking can still pay off, but there is much more to be made managing investment portfolios and offering short-term credit at very high interest rates. This work relies on the existence of asset pools, and managers of these pools are often rewarded according to the size their pool. Even if you could sell some assets to buy, say, land (which works under a different system), the modern banker would prefer to loan you the money to buy the land, with your assets as collateral. It would be simpler for the land buyer to just sell one asset in order to buy the other, but is not in the interest of the bankers to operate that way.

Back to Basics

The original need for banking, then, arose – we are to suppose – from an uncertainty concerning the security of real assets (gold). Why would anyone have this uncertainty? Because people existed who were willing and able to steal such things from other people who had acquired them more-or-less honestly. Those people are commonly called “criminals.” They have always been a major nuisance in any society. They are willing to break the most basic rules, or morals, in a society. Why? That is a question to be answered elsewhere. It HAS been answered, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is irrelevant.

Let’s say you had a criminal of somewhat unusual intelligence. What might he be attracted to do, say, in the banking scenario above? One thing he could do would to become a banker. Then he could hire some hoodlums (criminals of leser intelligence, we might imagine) to go around town and steal precious things from people’s houses. He would then advertise his services, noting the recent increase in the crime rate. He would have to keep his connection to the hoodlums a closely-guarded secret. And in such a wise, he would attract more business to his bank.

Application of the criminal modus operandi (MO) to other fields

Mishaps, crime, sickness, hunger, disputes and war are some of the big problems that society must deal with. Smart criminals could secretly cause such things to happen, then offer services to “protect” people from the bad effects of these things. In modern times, criminals have even been accused of causing bad weather, floods, earthquakes, and ecological collapse. For them it would seem like “good business,” would it not?

What professions these days offer such services?

• Lawyers
• Doctors
• Insurance Brokers
• Psychiatry and Psychology
• The military and arms manufacturers
• Police
• Governments
• Educators
• Preachers

All of the above fields are subject to pressure from the criminal world and can turn criminal. In other words, they offer services based on the fear that something bad will happen. Most people, though, would not be interested in causing such bad things to happen. Only the criminals would.

The real essentials

All an honest society of human (or similar) beings would need to survive – even prosper – would be the following:

• Food (and water)
• Shelter (housing and community buildings)
• Clothing sufficient for seasonal weather variations
• Transport
• Systems for handling waste
• Means of communication
• Quiet times
• Opportunities to play
• Opportunities for spiritual growth

How, then, did we get governments, lawyers, war, insurance companies and psychiatry? It traces back to the criminal and his origins.

Institutionalized Crime: Banking

Member of animal superorder Selachii.

In Part 28 Jonnie Tyler finally finds out who the “small gray man” is. He is a banker, portrayed by LRH as a member of the alien race called the Selachee.

The planet Psychlo, as Jonnie has just learned on his own by sending fancy video cameras out into space using the transshipment platform, was blown up a little over a year ago when Jonnie managed to secretly send a load of bomb-filled coffins there. The huge nuclear bombs blew down into Psychlo, held in on top by a tremendously strong protection shield. The explosions reached its molten core and eventually turned the whole planet into a small star.

Psychlo was the home planet of Intergalactic Mining, which had taken out a loan from their bank about a thousand years earlier to purchase Earth from the government. The Psychlo Empire had discovered the planet after finding a map of its location on a space probe launched from Earth. According to the bank, Psychlo had “legal title” to the planet, which had been transferred to Intergalactic at the time of the sale. The mortgage had a payoff period of over 2,000 years. The company had stopped payments on the mortgage a year ago, when Johnny had succeeded – unknowingly – to destroy its home planet.

The bank was looking for the new legal holder of the title so it could serve loan delinquency papers on them.

Does this sound ridiculous? It happens every day on Earth, on a much smaller scale.

Of course, at the level of a planet, it is ridiculous. Not because of the concept of “legal title” but because of how the law favors appropriation of lands (or planets, or space) by force, with no further responsibilities or liabilities attached. This is law written by the conqueror and is unjust on the face of it. Yet we deal with such laws every day.

Did the native inhabitants of any lands on Earth have any say in the “laws” that governed the disposition of those lands when Europeans overran them by force? Of course not. They were required to learn European law to retain any control at all over any piece of their former territories. From a more humanitarian viewpoint – or even from the viewpoint of “natural law” – what occurred when Europe overran the Americas was theft, plain and simple. In all of the Americas, there is very little if any “legal title” that can be traced back to a real, human, transaction between friendly parties.

But banks set up a legal system that would favor their interests. And I can only imagine that they used various forms of blackmail and propaganda, as needed, to bring pressure on the writers of those laws.

I haven’t finished re-reading (listening to) the book yet, and I don’t remember how Jonnie solves this problem.

There are obvious basic principles of respect and responsibility that could be applied in such situations. The first and most obvious is that an inhabited planet should not be considered “fair game.” If it can be demonstrated that any individual, group, or society is occupying and taking care of an area of space, that gives them “title” to that area. For many reasons, use of land – or space – cannot be governed by quite the same rules that cover personal property such as clothing, furniture, tools. Yet the bankers have distorted law in that direction, while overlooking certain obvious contradictions.

The result in many places is that land can be bought and sold as if it were private property, while if stolen by certain protected parties, will be considered as belonging to them regardless of the act of theft.

I you want to wreck your shirt and buy a new one every week, that’s your choice. But you can’t treat land – or planets – that way. A conqueror that kills a planet or its inhabitants, or sells them into slavery, has no right to legal title and incurs a debt to the inhabitants or their survivors. That our laws should protect such a conqueror is only institutionalized crime.

My study of this subject has only taken me as far as Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty. I found his basic ideas very persuasive, and I recommend the book. Law, however, can always be broken and re-written by force. This is an irreducible fact of life. So, to go far, one must speak softly, but carry a very big stick.

TED busts out…

…and other developments.

I got my usual weekly email from the popular TED Talks site last week, but it was oddly different.

Perhaps it was because they had started releasing videos from their latest event in February, or perhaps it was for some other reason. But not only did all the featured talks seem interesting – including an interview with Linus Torvalds, the original developer of Linux – but the featured playlist on “secrets” included talks as old as 2005 that I had never been aware of.

I downloaded about 20 talks, filling up my C: drive (but happily emptied into my “network storage” computer, which I finally got back up and running last week).

The presenters were mostly “journalists.” This category seems to include a very wide range of people these days. Several “techies” besides Torvalds were also represented, including a lady who works at Pixar Studios (they make completely CGI – computer generated images – movies), and another woman working to bring the US federal government’s digital services into the 21st century.

Topics included the search for life in outer space, understanding shifts in global development, the recent growth of organized crime and other “non-traditional” economic and social changes.

I was introduced to an extremely esoteric photographer / journalist named Taryn Simon who had some interesting things to say, a journalist named Will Potter who has been documenting government’s complicity in the crackdown on anti-corporation activists, and Robert Neuwirth another journalist who specializes in the study of “alternative” urban social structures growing up across the Third World.

 

Vaxxed

In other news, a film made to document the story of a Center for Disease Control doctor who claims he was pushed into going along with a plan to hide data linking some vaccines to autism, has been getting considerable attention.

It has been taken off the program of a high-profile film festival in New York City, and more recently, another showing in Houston, Texas was stopped.

In the eyes of the “common man” the whole narrative, starting perhaps even before the development of Darwin’s theories into a sort of new religion for academia, is becoming worn out and useless.

It is obvious that the general population is being lied to, and this film just points out another example of this.

Without a firm understanding, though, of how this whole situation came to be, it is very unlikely that any popular movement, no matter how well-intended, can succeed in turning the situation around.

As Taryn Simon tried to express in her own words, the human race seems to be on a collision course with its own past mistakes. Until the ignorance is lifted, the planet has little choice but to dramatize a past we have all lived through yet have almost totally forgotten.

Blackout! and other news

Monday (the 7th of April) was one of the warmest days of the year so far in Pullman. Having neglecting my weekend grocery shopping, I accomplished it that Monday afternoon and returned home at 4:30 or so. By the evening I was busy with one of my electronics projects. At about 6:30 or so the lights flickered, went out entirely, pulsed back on once again, and again died in what seemed a kind of spasm.

It was pitch black in my basement apartment, though not nearly sunset time yet. I fumbled around on my work table until I found my flashlight. I use it to inspect my soldering work. Then I searched around the place for a better source of light. I found a head lamp I had purchased from All Electronics and a shake-light I had acquired I don’t recall where. The head lamp was great for getting around inside. I found my jacket, put on my shoes, and went out to see what was going on.

As I went out “front” (the side facing east onto Grand) a car from the fire station up the street drove by with siren on. Other than that, all seemed normal. A couple were above me, leaning on the balcony railing, speaking quietly about the loss of our electric power. So I went back in.

I put my head lamp back on, sat down at my work table, and tried to continue on the design I had started, hoping the power would soon come back. But, it didn’t. It was basically too dark to do anything. Inside it was completely quiet, as the fridge – the only source of noise – was off. I resolved not to open it until the power came back up, in hopes that my just-purchased food would stay reasonably cold. There was nothing else to do. Without electric power I was totally without the usual devices that I use day-to-day. My only battery-powered devices are flashlights (I plan to change that some day). I don’t have any “mobile devices” (I don’t plan to change that any time soon).

So, I went to bed.

I didn’t rest well, as I kept anticipating the power returning. It finally did at about 12:30. I was needing now to get my rest, so I stayed in bed a while. But all the lights were on. So I finally got up and turned everything off and went back to bed for real.

At work, only a few others had experienced the blackout, as it was fairly localized. I heard stories of what had happened, but didn’t look them up myself until today.

Distraught being

As it turns out, a distraught person – drunk – had been hurtling south on Grand in her 1999 Chevy van, sending several cars to the shoulder or otherwise off the road. One of these cars swerved off the road and rolled down a hill into a power pole. The impact broke the insulators holding up the high-voltage wires, and they fell to the ground. The driver was trapped in his overturned vehicle by these high voltage wires until the utility company was able to de-energize them about an hour later. He was – amazingly – unharmed.

The police caught up with the “crazy” lady a little while later. They had to take her to a hospital to get treated for minor injuries before arresting her.

One of the news sources published a Sheriff’s Office photo of the lady – from some earlier incident. I edited it down to just the face for this post: This is the face of a very distraught being.

 

Other News

That same weekend I received a portion of an instrument panel from a DC-8 aircraft. This was one of the first jet airliners to be mass-produced during the 1960s. I bought it for the aluminum panel and to see how it was constructed. It arrived a bit the worse for wear, but I took all the parts off it and cleaned it up, and it looks promising. I think I will make a battery charger with it.

DC-8 panel detail, showing the registration number of the aircraft it is from and its most recent “SELCAL” radio message code.

The deer return

This afternoon walking home, I saw a family of deer grazing in the field below the “industrial park” where I work. It looked like a buck and three doe. Probably the same deer that were here last year. They somehow managed to live down in the wetlands that the bike/jogging trail goes through, just the other side of Grand. That’s where the electric poles are, too; like the one that guy ran into.

I wasn’t sure they would return. Last year they were here earlier. I remember seeing them in the same place when it was still snowy. They lost one of their young to road kill that year. I know: I saw the dead deer myself. It was at the “vacant lot” where I took many of my wildflower pictures. So I thought they might go somewhere else this year. But there probably aren’t too many other places to choose from for these deer. They do have to be watchful, and not only for cars. I’ve seen coyotes in this area, too; though its the rabbits who usually suffer when the coyotes come through.

Government as insurance company

What I consider fact:

Modern government, certainly on the federal level in the US, is acting like an insurance company.

The hypothesis

Proposition 1: People experience violations of their basic human rights.
Proposition 2: An armed force has been considered the best protection against such violations.
Conclusion A: People considered they needed armed forces to protect their basic rights, and thus the need for armed governments arose.

Proposition 3: Real criminals act through people who are willing to use violence to get their way.
Proposition 4: Since real criminals are unable to operate as honest citizens, they survive by stirring up trouble between groups that are willing to use violence to get their way, pretending to advise one or the other side on what the other side might do next.
Conclusion B: The whole “civilized” pattern of warring states was basically created by real criminals for their own personal purposes.

Proposition 5: Most forms of insurance exist to protect the insured from various types of criminal violence.
Proposition 6: It is in the interest of those who offer insurance protection of this type to be able to secretly control the amount of violence that actually takes place.
Conclusion C: This makes any form of paid “protection” against losses due to violence actually a criminal protection racket.

Proposition 7: Most forms of insurance, going back to early times, consisted of pools of funds or resources that were contributed to roughly in proportion to an individual’s or group’s productiveness, and paid out according to who suffered the most “bad luck”.
Proposition 8: This fits the Marxist model of a “scientific” society, and also the philosophy (to the extent that there is one) that justifies such abominations as income tax.
Conclusion D: A government funded by income tax is about the same as an insurance company funded by premium payments. And both are basically protection rackets.

Ramifications

Naturally, people who are “lucky” and never need insurance payments can feel a bit cheated by this system. From my viewpoint this is totally true. They are in fact being suckered or leaned on into supporting criminals. The real criminals are not usually the ones getting the payments. They are the ones running the racket (the crime syndicate, the insurance company, or the government).

The perception that insurance is widely necessary because “shit happens” feeds a fatalism in society that can become widespread. And it enriches those who are working hardest (to the extent that you can call this work) to give people the impression that there are some things that they just can’t control.

This idea is basically a lie. Although in the physical universe it seems very logical, in the spiritual universe it is totally specious.

Since our universe is a mixture of the spiritual and the physical (the sublime and the ridiculous, the divine and the despoiled) we should take a better-informed and more balanced approach to this whole issue.

Physical health

Here is a realm in which the spiritual and the physical often violently clash.

It has been demonstrated that treating a person in a totally spiritual way can affect his health in a variety of ways.

This gets into the whole topic of predisposition. In modern medical jargon, the only recognized predisposition to disease besides “genetic” is called “stress.” Stress occurs in the presence of criminality.

The way out of a violent society

The way out of this cycle of violence, a growth in criminal influence, and the subsequent decay of organized societies is the knowledge of its root cause.

With this knowledge, one can help individuals and groups who want to improve conditions to rise above the influence of suppressive criminals who are trying to keep them fighting, unhealthy and confused.

We can have any form of government, taxation and insurance that we want. But without a better knowledge of the spiritual aspects of these human activities, they can easily be used to destroy what is good and decent in life.

Crime

I felt it necessary to revisit this subject and lay out the basics of it as I see them.

Etymology: Thought to originate from a base word meaning “cry for help.”

Tradition definition: A violation of law, or a moral offense.
Modern definition: A counter-survival action.

A crime is any action that lowers the survival potential of the individual, group or species.

Potential points of agreement:

Crime is bad; more crime is worse; less crime is better.

Definition: Criminals cause crime.

This does not mean that criminals DO crimes. This means that they cause people to commit crimes. We are not trying to develop a code of justice here; we are trying to describe what actually is.

Proposed handlings for crime:

1. Reduce the activity of criminals.

2. Reduce the attraction of criminal activities to “ordinary” people.

In a somewhat honest environment, criminals can only remain active by remaining undetected. As the environment becomes more criminal, criminals can operate more openly in it.

Methods for remaining undetected include:

1. Various forms of stealth, such as use of disguises, operating only in dark places or while most people are sleeping, operating at a distance with the help of various technologies which include guns, especially rifles, and also computer systems and other remote-control devices.

2. Use of disposable operatives – such as soldiers, spys, or robots – that can be paid to do a job and then destroyed when it is done.

3. Blackmail. This is used to secure the cooperation of someone in a respectable position by getting them to do something that could threaten their position if known about and then threatening them with leaking the information if they fail to cooperate. A form of fear-based coercion.

4. Hypnotism or similar memory blocking technologies. This results in an operative who, if caught alive, will not be able to remember why he committed the criminal act. Used on most operatives if bribery and blackmail don’t work. Not considered fool-proof, so best to use only on disposable operatives.

Note: There is a striking similarity between criminal tactics and military tactics. In fact, the only function of an honest military would be to fight crime. However, because of this similarity in tactics, it is difficult to distinguish honest operatives from criminal operatives, and criminals can take advantage of this fact. Because they fight each other, warriors and criminal operatives are in fact very close to each other mentally and spiritually. This means that the military can be subverted by criminals if it is not kept under strict control by honest people.

Conclusions:

1. “Gun control” has nothing to do with reducing crime and could just as easily be seen as an attempt by criminal elements to disarm honest people.

2. The keys to fighting crime are a) understanding how criminals operate and b) knowing how to proof up crime fighters and the general public against attempts by criminals to get them to switch sides.

Crime fighting can only be effective in a social environment where crime is understood and frowned upon. A society that becomes more and more willing to accept criminal behavior as “normal” is itself descending into a position where it is operating entirely for criminal purposes. Historically, such groups self-destruct in about six generations maximum.

What If: Higher Education

What they don’t teach you in school.

My “What If” articles are meant to deal with highly speculative concepts.

This particular article was inspired by a job listing for a teacher for “disadvantaged youth.”

I thought: If those in charge really wanted us to know what we needed to know to “get ahead,” what would they teach us?

And I came up with at least three subjects that are not taught at most schools, but that have helped various persons make a mark on the planet (of some sort or another). These are:

1. Esoterica. Mystical or Occult teachings and practices.
2. Military Arts. Usually only taught to soldiers.
3. Street Smarts. Stuff you pick up when forced to “live tough.”

If you can acquire some mastery of two or more of these subjects (I don’t know that these are the only ones, just what I thought of) and make good connections to some folks involved with those subjects, your career possibilities could open up substantially.

The accompanying diagram gives my rough estimate of what sort of “professions” education in these subjects would prepare you for. Not that I necessarily recommend going in any of these directions. But the fact is, people who seem to be doing quite well seem to know about this stuff, and “normal” people don’t seem to.

In the interest of seeing if this theory has any sort of validity, I looked up some biographies of some famous individuals on Wikipedia and extracted a few salient facts. Formal higher education played a major role in only one of these persons’ lives, and he is by far the lesser of these four personalities.

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790)
Father: Maker of candles and soap.
Schooling: No higher education, learned via reading and apprenticeships.
Street smarts: Ran away from home to Philadelphia at age of 17.
Esoterica: Initiated into the Masonic Lodge in 1731.
Profession: Printer, polymath, statesman.
Criminal dealings: Had a son out of wedlock, and had to take his wife in common-law marriage, as she was previously married. But basically, he seemed to be an honest man.

George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799)
Father: Tobacco farmer and businessman. Slave holder.
Schooling: No university education. Got surveyor and military training.
Esoterica: Joined Freemasonry in 1753.
Profession: Surveyor and landowner, military officer, politician.
Criminal dealings: As a military officer, he killed native enemies of the British colonizers.

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (23 February 1744 – 19 September 1812)
Father: Personal supplier of coins to the Prince of Hesse.
Schooling: No formal education is noted. Learned banking by apprenticeship.
Esoterica: There is a persistent belief that Rothschild financed the work of Illuminatist Adam Weishaupt.
Profession: Banking for royalty.
Criminal dealings: Imported goods across Napoleon’s continental blockade.

Johann Adam Weishaupt (6 February 1748 – 18 November 1830)
Father: Professor of Law.
Schooling: Educated at a Jesuit school and at university.
Profession: Professor of Law.
Esoterica: Founded “Order of Perfectibilists” in 1776, became a Mason in 1777 and developed “Illuminism”.
Criminal dealings: Writings of 1784 considered seditious by Elector (Duke) of Bavaria.

This sampling is not sufficiently broad to prove anything. But I’m really just trying to make a point. The guys in charge of the “education” system: They’re not going to tell you what you really need to know!