Food Freedom: A Talk With Kyle Turnblazer at Liberty Forge

I did an awesome interview with my friend Kyle Turnblazer over at The Liberty Forge about food freedom and taking care of your most prized possession: your body and mind. Wow! What a great talk. Please listen and share. I'm unable to embed the podcast here so head over to The Liberty Forge and listen there, and check out the treasure trove of other information there.

Guns, Culture and Government

Leaving our emotions at the door to get to the bottom of a complex issue.

Needless to say it has been impossible to avoid discussions, information, and, especially, disinformation and propaganda over the issue of mass shootings in America. There are outright lies, statistics, statistics out of context, statistics purposefully distorted, appeals to emotion, idiots sawing their rifles in half, and emotionally damaged people coming out of the woodwork to talk about how they almost became a killer. Hardly any of it, hardly anyone, has the courage or the energy to discuss the root of the problem. I think it can be safely said that anyone who tries to say this is a problem that can be solved by infringing on access to guns for private citizens is not a serious person. At all. Becoming hysterical is not an expression of seriousness.

I cannot honestly or seriously proclaim myself as someone who understands everything that is wrong with society or can prescribe a cure. However, although I am not an old man, I have been alive long enough to know that this is a relatively new problem, and have lived through times when this sort of thing never occurred, even though there were more guns and more dangerous types of weapons (fully automatic guns were only banned a generation ago). What has changed these last couple of decades?

I can only speak to my own observations and experience, and apply what I know and form a hypothesis. What I can prove beyond doubt is that the problem has not arisen due to easier access to guns, or more deadly guns being available. The laws are stricter. These weapons are not new. People kill every day, and in large numbers, using weapons other than guns. Hijacked airplanes come to mind. Fertilizer-based explosives. Automobiles at high speed driven into crowds. Knives. This occurs everywhere.

I suppose I should take a step back before moving on and talk about the undesirability and impossibility of living in a safe society. This #neveragain movement strikes me not only as an exercise in futility, but of derangement. Is there anyone who seriously believes they can eradicate violence from a society of hundreds of millions of people and growing? Or would it simply comfort them, would they not care at all, if the violence and death didn't end, just as long as it wasn't done with scary looking, noisy weapons known as guns? Safety provided by government is and has always been the alibi of tyrants. This argument is almost always completely lost on the gun grabbers. The gentle government who holds your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side. This is the natural consequence of generations of people who've systematically had their sense of ownership and responsibility beaten out of them. You don't own yourself, so you demand your owners provide safety and security. And when they fail, flagrantly, miserably, one could say purposefully, most people ignore it. Just keep blaming the guns. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

And, just as an aside, I have no desire to live in a society that is absolutely safe, even for "the children". I am not a head of cattle. Freedom is risky. And you do not have the right to impose your fears, warranted or otherwise, onto my life. 

Kratom and Corporatism

A lot of people like to talk about democracy, as in, so-and-so politician or such-and-such law is a threat to democracy; or, they like to point out that America is not a democracy, it's a republic. I see no viable difference between the two (if anything, a republic is worse), nor do I, seeing them both as destructive to human freedom, care if they are threatened or weakened or destroyed. Politics is not only immoral, it is less than useless in terms of ordering society along the lines of liberty.

In America, government has evolved into it's most natural state; that is to say, being influence and force that can be bought, over many generations, especially since the creation of an extra-governmental cartel of banksters with a monopoly on the issuance of fiat currency, and especially since that currency became digitized, people and groups of people (industry lobbyists, corporate lobbyists, etc) have purchased government force and protection to shield them from market forces, destroy competition, socialize losses, and deflect fraud, theft, environmental destruction, and other crimes. This disease has metastasized and spread to encompass every aspect of our society; not only almost every industry, but every social institution: government, military, education, media, etc. There are innumerable examples to highlight this fact, but in the most current of events we can look to the government attack on kratom as an exhibit.

The Ethics of Eating

Venus fly trap doesn't care about your feels.

There's a quote from someone - I don't feel like looking up to be precise because my laptop is slow as balls - that goes something like, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine." In other words, it's stranger than whatever our imagination is capable of conceiving. The reason for that, I believe, is that the universe is infinite, and holographic - meaning all parts contain the whole. The conceptual mind cannot grasp what is infinite, because the conceptual mind is finite. This is the whole point of meditation. I've gone off topic.

The evidence is mounting that plants, which we've long thought to have no nervous system - the nervous system being the conduit for conscious expression - are conscious. I happen to believe that not only is the entire universe conscious, but that it is an emanation of consciousness itself. If that seems preposterous keep in mind that, again, the conceptual mind is incapable of describing the infinite, and consciousness is, after all, a concept. Suffice to say, nearly everything we are capable of observing, from electrons in a plasma field to planets to superclusters of galaxies, exhibits what could be called consciousness and intelligence in some form.

For this reason I have to laugh at militant vegans who compare me to a Nazi because I eat meat. The more evidence that mounts suggesting plants are conscious, that plants know they are being eaten and do not like it (isn't that another way of saying "feels pain"?), the more it is apparent that, according to their "logic", the only ethical way of consuming food is to not consume food at all.

Unfortunately there is often little distinction made between the horrors of the industrially raised meat most people consume and pastured, organic meats. Every health and ethical and environmental objection raised about meat flagrantly ignores this distinction. Wherever and whenever I can - and unfortunately there is a limited market for this in my current location - I purchase pasture-raised meats. I have my own free range chickens for eggs. Any argument that there is no "humane" way to kill an animal for food is ignorant of the viciousness of wild nature. Though shortened by slaughter, the life lived by pasture raised livestock is superior to life in the wild. These animals have an abundance of food and fresh water, and protection from predators. If we could ask these animals their preference - to live under constant threat of starvation, especially during the cold winter, being eaten alive by a predator, having only a slight chance of living to old age, or living comfortably and safely for a shorter while to provide sustenance for a much more gentle and benevolent predator, which would they choose?

We can't ask them that question. And yet we must eat. And, as it turns out, plants don't like being eaten any more than animals do. So, we are left with a choice: starve to death or nourish our bodies the way nature intended, applying our intelligence and a sense of empathy to the process, so that we find an acceptable medium between the need to properly nourish the masses of humanity and providing a better life for animals (and plants) that will become our food.

Something on TV Last Night

Apparently there were some welfare whores on television pretending to hate each other last night, talking about all the ways they can better rule our lives. Obviously I didn't watch. Politics is nothing but a gang of criminals trying to convince you they're legitimate. They have zero legitimacy. Zero. Because I don't consent. I don't vote, I don't petition, I don't give them one iota of my attention or energy, even to mock them. And believe me, with each passing election it becomes harder not to mock them. But I take comfort in knowing that the more ridiculous it all becomes, the more people will consider whether there is a better way. Their power rests solely on myth, on the belief we have that they're powerful. Yes, they are scheming to force me, and to take from me. But my firm belief is that the only counter to that fact is to not participate. To not acknowledge their power and authority. Ancient wisdom teaches us, "What you resist, persists." Like a Chinese finger puzzle, the more you fight it, the more it strengthens its grasp on you. Disregard the constabulary, friends.

A Simple Thought Experiment for Bordertarians

If I rob your safe and use the stolen money to buy crack, would you accept the crack in recompense or would you want your cash reimbursed? If the latter, why then is it you have no issue with immigrants except that the welfare state exists? How is it that the crack didn't belong to you - your stolen wealth did - but you feel entitled to say how money you view as stolen - taxes - should be spent and who should have access to those items and services?

The Problem With Whole30 and other "Diets"

It's the end of the first month of the year, and all throughout my email inbox and Facebook feed are posts about how close people are to finishing their Whole30. This has always ate at me.

The "Whole" part of Whole30 isn't the issue. Whole, unprocessed foods are what is needed if you are to remain in optimal health. And oh, by the way, that whole "everything in moderation" thing ... it's bullshit. But I digress. The problem with Whole30 is the "30". It's 30 days. It's temporary. Like I said in a previous post, what is needed is a life-altering paradigm shift in the way you live.

It also grinds my gears that there's this encouragement going out, like, "Keep going! You're almost there! You can do it!" This reinforces the idea that restricting your diet is some sort of sacrifice, or amazing achievement, like it was one of the 12 Labors of Hercules or something. I want to destroy the myth that has been shoved down our throats, that it takes superhuman willpower to eat clean. It doesn't. All that it requires is the understanding, not just intellectually but actually, that the "foods" you're avoiding aren't really foods, that they're actually poisons robbing you of life and vitality, and that the foods you're allowed to eat, because fat is not only not bad for you but essential for good health, not to mention the flavor of the foods you're now eating, are more than satisfying enough that there's no sacrifice or great feat at all behind avoiding bread, pasta, sugar, and other food-like garbage you'd been accustomed to eating your whole life. It's not a big deal, because what is left for you to eat is still amazing. Especially when I saw the results - and after 30 days if you made that commitment you will see and feel those results - it was obvious to me that I could never go back to that old lifestyle. Very often you don't know how lousy you feel until you no longer feel lousy. Your mind is adept at normalizing whatever condition you're in.

Anyway, just a rant. Don't set your sites on a finite period. Make the commitment, leave the garbage behind, and watch what happens. The Whole30 book is called "It Starts With Food," but really, it starts with your own mind. How you look at things will determine success or failure. Learning how to cook is a huge asset, and I'll be encouraging and helping you with that on this blog.

And oh, by the way ... take the same mentality to physical fitness. It has to be a permanent paradigm shift, or you'll fail, again and again. Namaste.

Jason Momoa's AR-7 Workout

I recently went through a phase where I was becoming "bored" with my workouts and started looking for something "new". After going paleo I lost 60 pounds in 8 months, but without the strength training to accompany it and without the added pounds to mask my weakness I started to look saggy and "old", so I did P90X and stuck with that more or less for a few years. My body is built through strength training, however, and I just didn't like the extreme leanness of my appearance, and neither did my wife. I was 195 pounds at 6'2, but my wife thought I was too "skinny".

I shifted from P90X to the AthleanX Inferno Max Shred Program, which was more scalable and was, I had planned, leading into another Athlean program called Inferno Max Size. But those programs are a hundred bucks a piece, so for some stupid reason, still looking for something "new", I became obsessed with celebrity training programs. I started off with Dwayne Johnson's Hercules workout, and did that for six weeks. For some reason I have it in my head, and maybe this is just the way my body is, that I have to train each muscle twice a week in order to get the results I want. So after six weeks I tried Jason Momoa's AR-7 workout. Jason Momoa isn't currently a household name, though most people are becoming familiar with his roles. He was the "new" Conan the Barbarian, and later played Khal Drogo on season one of Game of Thrones. Recently he played Aquaman in Justice League.

So I did AR-7 for the prescribed six weeks and liked it a lot. It allows for adaptability because it's not a specific type or order of exercises or muscles targeted but a principle of sets, reps, and rest time. So my version of this is not identical to his, but the principle is the same. Your first "set" of a particular exercise is 7 reps times 7 sets with 7 seconds rest in between. So if I'm doing bench press, 7 reps, put the bar down for 7 seconds, 7 more reps, etc. After the first 7 sets, rest 60-90 seconds, and do 6-6-6, and then rest, and do 5-5-5. So for each exercise, 7-7-7. 6-6-6, and 5-5-5. These workouts are short and intense if you're doing one body part - typically 30-45 minutes, so I do two body parts a day, and usually superset between them. So I'll do a AR-7 set of bench press, for instance, and immediately do an AR-7 set of barbell bicep curls. The pic to the right is me on my 43rd birthday, towards the end of six weeks of AR-7.

At this point, I was thinking, okay who is next? I checked into Chris Hemsworth's Thor workout, but what I discovered was that his was just a traditional body builder's workout like I had done most of my life. I was feeling a lot stronger at that point so I decided to go back to what was tried, tested, and true: my old high school workout, which was modeled around many of the legendary body builders of my youth - Schwarzenegger, Yates, Coleman, etc. I felt my old strength returning, which was exciting, however at my age, my joints and tendons were just not cooperating. I was throwing the weight around but it was uncomfortable and often painful.

For this reason I've decided to stick with the AR-7 tactic for the foreseeable future. Because of the intensity of the workout, I cannot use anywhere close to my max weight load. My bench press, for instance, is typically what I warm up with - 135 pounds. Conventional weight lifting wisdom teaches that higher reps/low weights gives you a lean, ripped look, but somehow this approach has constructed a nice size for my frame - I'm up to 210 pounds, but I'm still around the same body fat percentage at 12-13%. If you're older or you have joint issues due to neglect or injury, this is a workout you might want to try. My specific workout is below. You can use his specific regimen or mine, or you can add your own preferences. Let me know what you think.

Paleo Life: Chicken and Broccoli Casserole

People literally think I'm crazy when I describe Paleo to them. There are, I think, two reasons for this. First, we've been indoctrinated by generations of clever marketing to forget that the primary purpose of food is to nourish the body, rather than gratification of our taste buds. This has led to a standard diet loaded with sugar, sodium, artificial sweeteners and flavors, and a blitzkrieg of chemical flavor enhancers like MSG that dull our tongues so that healthy food tastes like cardboard. Second, we've also been indoctrinated over generations to think that fat, which is where the flavor comes from in many foods, makes us fat ("you are what you eat" (no you're not)) and causes heart disease. This was based on junk corporatist science mostly from the sugar and vegetable oil industries, and I can't even begin to imagine how many people met their demise long before their time due to these lies.

I eat a diet that is high in calories, high in fat, and high in cholesterol, and yet, at almost 44 at the time of this writing, I am in the best shape of my life. I recently had to switch life insurance companies and underwent a physical, and my wife and I both received a discount because of our superior health. My body fat percentage is around 12-13%. All I did was shun all processed foods, excess sugars and grains. I eat a whole foods diet, consisting primarily of meats, eggs, and leafy and cruciferous vegetables. Being high in fat, and no longer destroying my taste buds with mega doses of sodium, sugar, and chemical flavor enhancers, I can taste my food, and I eat like a king.

I made this dish for about the hundredth time last night, and will continue to eat it because it's easy, it's cheap, it's healthy, and it's filling. I bought a fancy looking notebook to write my favorite recipes in, and as I do so and remove the bookmarks on my browser, I'll share them with you here. This comes from the food blog Grass Fed Girl - I recommend you give her a "like" on FB and subscribe to her emails.


Chicken and Broccoli Casserole

• 2T coconut oil or other cooking fat
• 4 cups fresh broccoli florets
• 1 medium white onion, diced (use 1/2 onion to cut carbs, if desired)
• Sea salt and pepper
• 8 oz. mushrooms, sliced
• 3 cups cooked chicken, shredded
• 1 cup chicken bone broth
• 1 cup full fat coconut milk or 1 cup organic heavy cream
• 2 eggs, pastured soy free are best
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, optional

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a casserole pan with half the coconut oil and set aside. Steam the broccoli until just barely cooked and set aside, uncovered. In a sauce pan melt the coconut oil, brown the onions and season with salt and pepper. Add the mushrooms, saute until cooked and move the pan off the heat. Transfer the broccoli, mushroom, onions, and shredded chicken into the casserole pan distributing evenly. Mix the bone broth, coconut milk, eggs, nutmeg with a generous pinch of salt and pepper in a bowl with a whisk and pour it over the contents of the casserole dish. Make sure the mixture is spread evenly and all the contents are covered. Place the casserole in the oven and cook for 35 to 40 minutes until done in the middle. Remove from the oven and let it cool for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

Expanding the Scope

This blog is, I think, almost ten years old, if not older. I don't know, I'll have to check. Throughout the years, it has evolved from a hysterical Infowars clone to a spiritual awakening to shut down to anarchist education. It seems as though my days on social media, particularly Facebook, are coming to a close. First and foremost, I both hate and love Facebook, but over the years the scale has been tipping decisively into the hate category. It has almost no value to me, except to keep in touch with distant family and friends. Lately I'm feeling that, in light of how much I hate it, friends and family aren't reason enough. Second, Facebook has recently marked my shared posts from this blog, particularly those related to vaccines, as "spam", on both the MindFilter page and my own personal profile. My reaction to that was not very enlightened - I told them to eat a dick. So I almost hope they take enough offense to just put me out of my misery and ban my account.

SO...that said...I wish to expand the scope of this blog to include lifestyle. I'll be talking about homesteading, preparedness, meditation, health, wellness, and exercise. Feel free to question, comment, and respectfully interact. It's been a while since this blog has been running on all cylinders. So I don't expect a lot of readers at first. If you find anything here enlightening, educational, or inspiring, please share, and let me know if you run into any resistance from Zuckerberg.

Loving Life in the Flu-pocalypse

Yeah, so I'm one of snarky, uppity health and fitness assholes who can't shut up for five minutes about how the modern American/western lifestyle is killing people. I am constantly turning my nose up and grimacing at people and the garbage they joyfully allow to pollute their own temples. What do you want me to say?

I'm sorry if it's literally insane to me that it doesn't occur to you, while you lay in bed in a puddle of your own sweat, puking and shitting all over yourself, in pain, that you would rather endure that at least once a year and constant colds and other maladies throughout the year than stop feeding your body shit. I watch people suck down two and three or more Red Bulls a day, eat chicken tenders and highly processed pasta dishes made with fake cheese sauce ... you know, I could describe this shit all day ... and I look at them and I'm like, yeah, the flu is going to kick the living crap out of you. And like the self-fulfilling prophecy that is, it happens. Oh, you're sick again? You're just down on your luck, aren't ya.

I and countless others can attest to you that food doesn't have to be garbage to taste good. The problem with people's perceptions of healthy food is that for years "science" lied to us and said that fats were bad for us. Well, fats are where the flavor comes from in foods, so instead of fat they shoveled a heaping pile of highly refined and nutritionally devoid carbs in your face, and loaded that shit up with sugar and salt - hey, it's low fat! My diet is high in fat, high in cholesterol, and high in calories, yet my body fat percentage is around 12-13%, and I walk confidently amongst the chronically sick and ill utterly unworried about catching whatever bug they're suffering. My food is delicious, because I cook it in bacon drippings and smother it in egg yolk. I eat homemade mayonnaise. I drown my vegetables in butter, my chicken in homemade gravy.

I see people post amusing memes about wanting to be skinny but also wanting to eat tacos. Well, pick one and own it. If you want to eat tacos - and, oh by the way, I cook the best tasting Mexican dishes you've ever had that have no flour or corn tortillas - then eat tacos and forget about being lean and healthy. If you want to be lean and healthy, forget about Taco Bell and learn how to cook Mexican food at home. You have the entirety of the internet at your fingertips. You're a gourmet chef if you know how to read and follow directions.

Even if you don't want to go full paleo, you can take some pretty simple steps to lessen your chances of getting sick, and limiting the severity when you do:

• Eat your effing vegetables. Raw preferably, lightly steamed otherwise. Two-thirds of your portions is preferable.
• Get enough sleep. You can't fight disease if you're exhausted. If you can't sleep, your adrenal glands are probably fatigued. Stop sucking on energy drinks.
• Drink water. Sugar is the number one contributor to disease. If you're drinking soda all day, or energy drinks loaded with more sugar than I consume in a week, you're going to get sick. If you're dehydrated, you won't get enough sleep.
• Take care of your gut. 70% of your immune system is the bacteria in your gut. If you're sucking down antibiotics, drinking diet sodas or consuming highly processed, chemical-laden "food", your microbiota is going to take a beating and won't be able to do its job.
• Limit alcohol consumption. Alcohol is poison. It's called inTOXICation, people. Geez.
• Get sunlight as much as possible. One of the main reasons there's a flu "season" is sunlight is limited. The days are shorter than the nights, and then, typically being cold, we fully cover our bodies to keep warm. Your body converts sunlight into vitamin D, and then vitamin D into anti-microbial peptides that kick the snot out of pathogens. Almost any illness can be attributed at least in part to a vitamin D deficiency.
• In lieu of sun, take a whole food-derived multi-vitamin, and remember, you get what you pay for. I take Mercola Whole Food Vitamin-Plus. It's like $52 for a month supply, but almost anything you buy at the store is going to be shit. The vitamin D dose has to be at least 2,000iu; preferably 5,000. The RDA of vitamins is just enough to keep you from getting deficiency illnesses like rickets (vitamin D) and scurvy (vitamin C), etc. You almost always need more than that. A lot more.
• If you really want to go all-out you can take a mushroom supplement like turkey tail, which will really supercharge your immune system.

Health and wellness requires a holistic approach - that is to say, treat the whole body to keep the whole body healthy. Disease is a symptom. It's a symptom of imbalance and deficiency in your body; it's almost always entirely environmental. Yes, some people are genetically predisposed to get certain illnesses, but those are only triggered by nutritional deficiencies or environmental exposure to impurities, be it the air we breathe, or the food and water we ingest. If you're sick all the time now, that will be the same reason you get cancer when you're older.

Most people don't realize how lousy they feel because they've become accustomed to feeling lousy. So, not surprisingly, they think I'm an asshole because I constantly flaunt in their faces about how much of a machine I am. So I suppose they have no frame of reference when I try to explain to them how awesome it is not to feel like shit all the time. It's your life; torture yourself if you wish. But I'm here to tell you: eating healthy is not a sacrifice. It's not a burden. When you know what the shit is doing to your body, and you realize how awesome healthy food can taste - especially when your taste buds are no longer dulled by mega-doses of sodium and artificial flavor enhancers - it's not difficult. At all. It's so easy, in fact, that I can't shut the fuck up about it.

Spring is Almost Here

Here in zone 9a, Gulf Coast, it's been a rather harsh winter by our standards, reminiscent of many winters I spent in New Jersey during most of my life. But spring comes early here and it often comes hard (PHRASING), so it's time to start prepping for the next season, even if you live in northern climates (if you can get a shovel into the soil). Already there are heirloom tomato, cherry tomato, jalapeno and bell pepper starts in my greenhouse. I have several beds broadforked, amended and tarped ("stale seed bedding" technique), and will prepare several more as the month closes out. When February roles around I'll start planting zucchini, cucumbers, and potatoes. I may prep some sweet potatoes to grow slips, depending on time and space. I went a little overboard when building this garden - a quarter of an acre dug and built with hand tools. It's a lot for one person even if I didn't have a nine-to-five, and my nine-to-five is more like a nine-to-seven. So I'll be looking to convert many beds to perennials, perhaps strawberries, sunchokes, and some bushes like goji berry.

As I mentioned a few days ago, growing your own food is an incalculable benefit to your health and well-being. Not only do you get fresh, pure, nutritionally superior produce, not only does this save you money, but it's a spiritual endeavor as well. It's an act of Creation, especially when you throw a bunch of yard and kitchen waste with manure into a pile and watch it magically turn itself into soil, and as that soil is added to your garden you see the transformation, especially if your soil is poor like mine. Grab a shovel and get to work. Grow a better world. Set the example. Be the Light.

Medical Establishment in a Panic Over Growing Mistrust in Vaccines

They're calling it a virus of mistrust, and it's going to kill us all. Those filthy anti-vaxxers are sowing discord amongst the plebs, and many are now foregoing vaccines. But this article from Medical Express is the epitome of why this mistrust exists. One of the consequences of this mistrust, they say, is that diseases with vaccines like measles, mumps, and whooping cough are resurgent. Vaccine mistrust is causing a spike in preventable disease! What they neglect to tell you, of course, is that the victims of these (relatively benign) diseases are almost all already vaccinated. So of course the vaccine skeptics are being blamed for what is clearly a failure of the vaccine.

The fact of the matter is, vaccines do not work (but you should get them anyway!), and they have never worked, except to weaken our immune systems and cause all manner of havoc throughout our bodies that make us clients for the medical establishment for life. With these facts in mind, we can more intelligently evaluate the risk/reward ratio when considering vaccinating ourselves and our children. No longer can it be said that the reward is too far greater than the risk to forego vaccination. We must intelligently and bravely resist the establishment propaganda that it was the vaccines which eradicated these diseases and keeps them at bay. In every case of a disease we are told vaccines saved us from, the rates of mortality had already plummeted prior to the introduction of the vaccine. Here is but one example. See more here.

Homestead Against the Machine

If you've been following my blog since the early days, when, wow, was I losing my shit (sorry?), I ranted hysterically about a coming economic collapse and the soft-kill mass murder of the industrial food machine. This is not to say I still don't believe these events are imminent or ongoing; the current corporatist US economy is unsustainable and I still believe the conflagration will be spectacular. The industrial food machine is more poisonous than ever. But, to paraphrase Alan Watts, who was speaking of psychedelics but I think this applies to any type of intelligent or spiritual awakening, when you get the message you have to put the phone down.

What does that mean? It means that, yes, the economy is fake and unsustainable. It will collapse. The next downturn will be worse than the last, and the last was pretty spectacular. It took us to the brink. Will the corporatist facade survive the next crash, or will the house of cards come crashing down on all of us? Either outcome will be painful. Yes, the industrial food machine is full of chemicals that are designed to make you sick, fat, stupid and weak. Yes, they are permanently defacing the genetic fabric of the planet with their GMOs, and creating horrific environmental destruction with their petrochemical fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides. Yes, this food is toxic and devoid of nutritional value due to depletion of the soil over generations. Where people panic, where they lose hope - and I was victim to this once - is they believe someone else has to come along to save them from it all, to fix things for them and put everything right. That's not how this works, my friends.

In Search of a Messiah

There is a method of control in place employed by the establishment known as the Great Man vs the Bogeyman. Following the Hegelian Dialectic, the State creates a problem - in this case, the Bogeyman: an object of revulsion and fear that will destroy and kill and harm. Next follows the reaction from the mob: panic, anxiety, confusion, uncertainty: "What is to be done?!" Finally, the State, which created the bogeyman in the first place, steps in and says, "I will save you. Give me more money and more power; surrender your freedom and I will protect you from this new threat."

Generations and generations of this assault on our minds have indoctrinated many of us to seek out the Great Man - the savior, the messiah - even in a misguided attempt to increase their freedom. It doesn't occur to them that seeking the Great Man is precisely the manner in which we've found ourselves in this horrible predicament. Government has used fear of the Bogeyman for every usurpation of wealth and power in its history, and in America we've seen how it turned the most minimalist government ever into the grotesque Leviathan (if this offends you, compile a list of anything you can do without paying government for permission, and leave it in the comments) we live under today, where the laws are so numerous and vaguely worded it is literally impossible not to break them. 

An adage I've resonated strongly with goes something like, "The master's tools will never destroy the master's house." When you come to a complete, honest, unapologetic understanding of where we are and how we've arrived here, the idea of using political means to erase generations of political ends is seen as the absurdity that it is. The Great Man is a spook. A phantom. It doesn't exist. 

The tragedy of Ron Paul is that, though his intentions were, I assume, good (the road to hell and all that), he hoodwinked people into thinking some good could be achieved through the political means. We are often fooled into believing that because a method worked - and Ron Paul is a statistically insignificant exception to this rule: the overwhelming majority of politicians are scum - that it is or can be a moral and effective way to affect change. Here is why this is absurd (besides all of modern human history): you have consented to the outcome, for good or ill. Even if I run on a platform to leave you alone, it still assumes that someone else has the right to run on a platform to control everything you do. So even if you vote for Jesus Christ, if Satan gets elected, complain about it all you want - you are responsible; you consented to that outcome. 

They say if you don't vote you have no right to complain; the exact opposite is true. And do not allow anyone to tell you that not participating in politics is the same as doing nothing. Politics is neither a moral nor an effective method of ordering society, and I for one have faith in the smartest being in the known universe to order himself without the use of violence.

People searching for the Messiah will never be free.

Krishnamurti on Authority

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers, and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher, and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

How Your Brain Is Getting Hacked: Facebook, Tinder, Slot Machines

Former Google app designer explains how social media manipulates your mind.