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.