Corrupt Capitalism vs. Good Business

I'm prompted to write this because of the minimum wage raise in California.  It's obviously well intentioned but will end up a disaster because the economic system will just adjust by raising food prices and firing workers.  That said, the old school conservative response has annoyed me to the point of putting down my thoughts.  They're laughing at the idea of "unskilled labor" making $20 an hour.  Critics like Jesse Waters, who makes big money running his mouth and providing no real service every night is one of these Capitalist preachers and it pisses me off.  How dare workers be allowed to make an actual living!  Those workers who slave to ACTUALLY PROVIDE A SERVICE TO OTHERS!!  So I wanted to clarity the difference between these corrupt capitalists and what is good and helpful for society, namely good business.  

Business has been around for thousands of years.  The oldest known surviving records are accounting transactions on clay cuneiform tablets from Sumeria.  "Person A trades a goat, chicken and 50 pieces of copper for one bull," for example.  Good business is merely the transfer of goods for services.  This has had a very positive effect on the history of society as it's helped make life easier and more workable.  Good, honest business is good faith transactions between people.  I give you want you want, you give me what I want and we're both cool.  

Capitalism, on the other hand, is the abuse of business by people already in power positions to keep and expand their power.  It's been a vehicle morally bankrupt Westerners (primarily but obviously not totally) have used for centuries to stockpile resources and keep the non-powerful from challenging their financial rule.  It's its own form of financial totalitarianism, a method of staunch social control to keep a super tiny minority on top and everyone else down.  The Capitalist American, for instance, doesn't admit to this level of "all mine and no one else's."  He states that Capitalism and business are synonymous and that if you're against Capitalism you're against business.  It's how the lying manipulator keeps the system of financial dominance perpetual by mixing the goodness of business with the badness of their behaviors.  The Communist then overcompensates and over-rotates by preaching full governmental control over what people can and can't earn.  It throws the baby out with the bathwater.  Capitalism is checked but so is good business.  Humankind loses with both such methods of power and control.  

So there you have a simple definition of the differences.  Much of corrupt Capitalism comes down to the morally bankrupt, financial criminals who hoard money and abuse others for power.  It's the corruption of good business by a handful of predatorial power players.  Sadly, throughout history, those people often get their way and we're all worse off as a result.  

Why you should feel shame and embarrassment over addicted behavior

 There's a major movement in therapy these days to try to "de-shame" addiction.  I think this is potentially deadly in terms of getting in the way of overcoming that addiction.  

As I myself have chronicled, I was handed an accidental drug addiction to benzodiazepines and a massive overreliance on mountains of anti-depressants.  During those years, I partied and drank, often to get my own pent up energies out.  When you're on a maximum dose of anti-depressants and you're bipolar without knowing it, you have a LOT of pent up energy.  So I drank and partied and overate and generally didn't give a rat's ass.  I wanted to be free of my pain and I wanted to release it.  When I partied, I also talked and and talked and talked.  The world was my therapy appointment and I was going to express myself and share as much as I could.  Looking back at it, I'm ashamed of all of my behaviors and I SHOULD be.  I got sucked into the modern therapy trap, that you can solve all your problems with drugs.  I was like a kid with laundry detergent.  "If a little detergent gets clothes clean, a LOT of detergent will get clothes REALLY clean!"  And, of course, too much detergent destroys the clothes.   

I feel very torn over having taken therapy into my own hands.  After all, it is me.  I take the stuff.  I feel the effects.  I have to live with how it makes me feel.  That I've been forced onto medication makes it all the more tougher.  The medication makes me feel bad yet is supposedly "working."  I got that in therapy all the time in the early days.  I'd go in, tell my doctor how terrible I felt, he told me how well it was working and I'd leave.  I remember trying to figure out as much as possible so I could organize my thoughts as best I could before each appointment.  Those appointments felt like the thin part in the middle of an hourglass.  All that bad sand on the bottom but, if I could just tell the doctor well enough what was happening at that choke point, maybe healthy sand could then spread from there.  All I got in therapy was the medical model.  "Just take your meds and thanks for coming."  So I took my therapy into my own hands, specifically the drugging.  If I felt terrible, up went the dosage.  If I felt horribly sad, up went the dosage.  If I felt horribly anxious, up went the dosage.  After all, I had my world of comfort to protect.  What mattered was work and functioning.  Who cared if I was healthy?  Is anyone?  What mattered was producing and being able to be out there.  In my stupidity, I ended up destroying my functioning as much as anything.  You can't function with a head full of mania and a nervous system completely dominated by downers.  I inadvertently ripped myself apart.  As I've also noted, my GP was psychiatrically incompetent and all but forced me to take it into my own hands.  I communicated the symptoms of mania several times and he missed it every time.  In telling me, "It's you not the drugs" I ended up identifying with my lunacy.  That guy couldn't have murdered me any better if he'd put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.  Massive malpractice in the psychiatric community (though he was a GP) is rampant, I guarantee it.  Sadly, patients have to let go and let God on this one as far as it being worked out.  

Back to my addicted behavior, I am embarrassed.  I don't care if the damn doctor messed it up.  I don't care if my mother all but forced me to take drugs I didn't understand or was prepared for.  I don't care that I'm a legit victim.  I SHOULD have known better.  I didn't have to know everything.  But I should have known BETTER.  And I'm ashamed I let it get that far.  That's my attitude now.  I don't care if doctors threaten me (and they have threatened me.)  My place in this world is my place.  Doctors don't make my destiny.  Drugs don't make my destiny.  I do.  My fear was taken advantage of when I was younger and I resent that.  If anyone asks, "Are you saying you should have known everything about alcohol, addiction, co-dependency and everything about psyche meds and mental illness as a kid without any training or education?"  My answer is, "Yes."  

The End of my Disability Services and more Psychiatric Trauma

 Due to an error in communication, my disability has been ended here in Florida.  I've filed an appeal and it remains to be seen if it's accepted.  If not, I have to leave Florida.  I have no clue how but I have to have my medication and cancer treatments and those are impossible without my disability insurance.  I have no idea is this is Ron DeSantis "new conservative sheriff in town" or not.  If so, it's evil.  Ending disability for someone who's thoroughly disabled is murderous.  That a representative of the evil United States government,  whether federal or local, would do this does not surprise me.  Granted, I don't know if this is true or not.  

Last month was my birthday and my SSA disability payment came in so I was able to survive.  That means both buying food and paying bills.  My food stamps and smaller SSI payments were discontinued last month.  If my appeal is rejected, an emergency response from me and my family is imperative.  I can't last two days without my medicine and I can't pay for it without my disability insurance.  

I've tried to use this time of great turmoil and emotional upset to do some extreme, extensive therapy work.  I actually cut out using my anti-depressant for a few days as it triggers my mania to a slight degree.  I greatly overused anti-depressants in college in the 90s and feel I am still dealing with the effects it's had on my brain.  So I thought going cold turkey, like the drug is cocaine, might be in order.  However, my depression is so profound that I could only think of death and choosing homelessness during this time rather being a continued economic burden on family.  I've been ready to go ANYWHERE as long as it's not in this world.  So I took my anti-depressant again and it's gotten me out of my funk.  When I'm depressed, I not only want to die but I choose death.  When I take even a small amount of anti-depressant, my fighting spirit and instinct to live return.  So I have to accept the positives and negatives of the anti-depressant.  It treats my OCD and severe depression.  I have to ride out the bouts of mania with my mood stabilizer and anti-psychotic.   I just checked on my mood stabilizer and I run out in a few days.  I have a doctor's appointment in 6 days but no means by which to afford the drugs.  I'm not sure how much Lamictal costs but it's in the hundreds and my family will have to pay out of pocket.  As they've failed me repeatedly over the years, I have no doubt this big picture won't end positively for me.  They'll help some but not nearly enough.  The  only possible answer would be moving to North Carolina to live with my Mom and Father-in-Law but my mother has rejected this in the past.  What kind of a mother rejects her disabled son?  Mine does.  If end up living there, I'll probably go back in and delete this part.  If I don't, I won't.  

So not being on my anti-depressant for a week or so has opened up some old issues and I've journaled about them.  All the highs and lows of a time where everything was going wrong.  In trying to stop it, I only added to the problems.  I tried to drug my way through only.  This was 1992-1996 when I was completely ignorant to psychology, psychiatry and mental illness.  America does not teach it in grade school or even HS and that has a devastating effect on the mentally ill community.  If we don't have doctors in our family, we're completely ignorant to our own troubles and it will be virtually impossible for us to help ourselves fight them.  That was me in college.  I had fully formed as a human, even though I realize now I was suffering severe effects from OCD and, a little later, bipolar.  Life is stressful and I was being forced to live it as a normal person.  This had devastating effects on me.  My development is skewed from having two major brain diseases that manifested in HS.  My sexuality developed, in a word, crazy.  I'm now a sexual shut in and my gratification comes from porn, fantasied and autogynephilia.  That is, essentially, being your own sexual partner.  As the people in Wisconsin hated me when I moved there, I was forced to look inward for everything as there was no healthy outward course.  I am not ashamed of this at all because it was a path forced on me and I coped and adjusted in the only way possible as I am a loving person.  If there's no one to love outside, you have to do it inside.  I also developed transvestic fetishism to cope.  I became my own woman to please the man I am.  I look back now and consider it a wonderful coping mechanism.  However, you're also doomed to live a "not normal" life.  This is apparently on the transgender spectrum and I did experience a bit of occasional gender dysphoria, though I now feel that came as a result of intrusive thoughts.  I'm a man and have always identified as such.  However, when you're kind of crazy, your mind strays and you can convince yourself of any lunacy at various times.  I noted that when I first stared taking my anti-depressant, these feelings and behaviors ended.  I'm still attracted to it but I don't do it.  This is why I'm against "gender transitions" for kids.  Some of these kids have homosexual OCD and will be mutilated before they figure it out by an out of control medical system.  I find classification labels extremely silly.  I'm not "this or that."  I'm a crazy person who coped as best he could without understanding what was happening.  I just lived and did it.  

So back to college.  I felt CRUSHING anxiety at age 19 and didn't know why.  I'd also started to party and get drunk once a week for the first time in my life.  I feel that contributed to a growing depression and exhaustion.  I hadn't taken drugs until half way through my freshman year.  That year was GLORIOUS.  The best year of my life.  I'd been an all-area baseball player in my senior year and was sort of basking in the afterglow of that triumph.  I'd adjusted to college infinitely better than expected.  I had new friends, a sort of girlfriend (splitting duty between me and another guy) and I was never more socially happy.  I felt I'd finally made it, finally overcome the total social rejection and abuse I'd suffered every day for three years when I moved to Wisconsin at age 10.  If I only knew those problems would be dwarfed by what was to come.  But for one year, I was happy.  

One night in the spring of 1992, I came back from partying that Thursday night with my girlfriend and experienced such profound exhaustion that she had to help me to my room.  I'd never felt that before.  It didn't come from the partying.  It came from something else.  Mom had split from Dad and was suddenly telling me all about mental illness in our family and all that.  So I went to her local GP and a talk psychologist.  That became my life of psychiatric drug taking.  Psyche drugs are both a wonderful mental savior and a backbreaking mental burden.  One drug can cause or exacerbate another problem and then you have to take ANOTHER drug to calm that down and so on and so forth.  I started taking Prozac and Lorezepam, not having a CLUE what either did.  I went solely on how I felt.  If I was anxious, I needed more Lorezepam.  If I was sad, I needed more Prozac.  Prozac was indirectly treating my OCD and I had no clue of that.  That was a benefit I didn't even know was happening.  I always had an athlete's attitude about functioning.  If I have a broken arm, inject me with something and get me back out there.  For three years, I wasn't interested in learning about depression or anxiety.  That was my fault.  I needed to learn but wasn't having it.  This being sprung on you at age 19 was a dirty, sleazy trick.  I just wanted to take drugs if I needed them (miracle drugs I was told) and get on with my life.  It was like popping a caffeine pill.  Give it to me, let it affect me and I'll get on with my day and not think any more about it.  As the internet wasn't a think yet, I can look back and cut myself a tiny bit of slack.  If the net had been there from 1992-1995 as more than small curiosity, I would probably have eventually looked things up.  I also wasn't even diagnosed bipolar until 1995.   By that time, I was on three Prozac a day and three benzos a day.  I've written in the past about that GP's psychiatric incompetence and misdiagnoses costing me dearly.   I would love to say this name here and get him kicked out of medicine (he's now apparently working with children in Wisconsin) but I'll leave that one to God for now.  I confronted him by telephone in 2000 and that's enough for me for now.  I developed both full on, high level mania and experienced massive memory problems with the benzodiazepines, which I took daily for four years straight. I was not told of ANY of these side effects by the multiple doctors I had by then seen.  The COVID tyranny from the medical community in 2020 makes it all come back to me like a nightmare because I experienced with psyche drugs decades before.  It's the same old medical community BS.  The drugs work miracles.  They cure everything.  There are no side effects blah blah blah.  I was jumping out of my skin and was very suicidal in my thinking by 1993.  I told this to the GP and he said, "It's you.  It's not the drugs."  The drugs were TRIGGERING these things.  The idiot didn't know it.  This error destroyed me for years.  I began to identify with mania and OCD.  "It's me, it's not the drugs," my ignorant self told myself.  I began to think I was borderline godly.  Memories of my baseball success still on my mind and having made it into college, I became an egomaniac.  I perceived myself as some kind of dominant force because of the mania I didn't know I had.  I was still fighting some intrusive thoughts at the same time, which I didn't know where a symptom of OCD.  I began to identify with the intrusive thoughts which is VERY potentially dangerous because those can tell you to do all kinds of horrible things.  I did some things I'm not proud of during those years.  I treated a girlfriend of mine very aggressively in bed and she told me I hurt her.  She kind of hurt me, too.  I didn't think anything of this until afterwards.  I honestly thought I was pleasing her.  I look back on this now with guilt and just a sense of tragic despair.  More than anything, I hope she's okay.  

While I was taking anti-depressants in massive amounts to escape my depression, partying once a week became my lifeline.  It was when I could lose my inhibitions and cut loose all my massive stored up energy.  I'd dance at clubs, socialize like a madman and binge eat my way into a fifty pound weight gain.  I suppose during this time I was entertaining.  I was told I was.  Funny thing is I was socially happier and had friends and girlfriends like I'd never had before.  But my health was taking a terrible price.  Funnier thing is I had convinced myself I was mentally healthy because I was taking drugs.  "They've fixed all the problems," I said to myself.  Meanwhile, my mania was crazy and storing up like a blazing hot hurricane in my mind.  The benzos kept me stoned enough to keep me from flying off the handle so now I had too massive drug problems I'm still paying the price for.  Those things do change your brain and do damage.  I was fed the "miracle drug" and "good drug and bad drug" narrative by well meaning doctors and, as I said, I was not advised to side effects.  I've since learned doctors DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THESE SIDE EFFECTS EXISTED.  They were just covering their asses for legal protection.  Sound familiar?  Sound kind of like what happened with COVID in 2020?  Apparently they're still engaging that.  Experiment, deny problems and eventually admit to the errors.  Now a mania and suicide warning are on anti-depressant prescriptions.  If I served as guinea pig to help others with that, even though it was unwilling and unintended, at least that's something.  I suffered so fewer people in my group would later. 

That's all for now.  

Direction

 As my entire life has become an exercise in being separated from my fellow man on a virtual island, my future posts are going back to being (MIAB), Messages in a Bottle.  As a romantic historian, my view and hope is that one day my comments will be found online like a cuneiform tablet found in the dust hundreds of years later.  "Wow, what was this guy all about?" the discoverer, one with an open heart and mind, will wonder.  What guy, indeed.  

Forced Drug Addiction

 It's always surreal to me when I remember who I became addicted to benzodiazepines because it's the kind of thing you wouldn't think could happen, at least not to a kid you grew up well off in suburbia like I did.  I've posted about my struggles with mental illness but I don't think I've properly chronicled how I stuck on anti-anxiety drugs.  In short, I was made a drug addict by an incompetent GP.  

It was 1992 and I was having crushing anxiety issues at college.  Internal things were happening I didn't understand and external factors included my parents recent separation and the emotional trauma of a mentally ill mother calling me up from out of state making me feel even more horrible and depressed than I had been.  Turns out a lot of the anxiety was clinical OCD combined with growing up with social anxiety and avoidant habits (which I feel grew into Avoidant Personality Disorder) but I was completely clueless to psychiatry at that time because the American school system refuses to teach it.  I guess it would be too "offensive" to American crazies, of which there are millions, to actually try to teach young people about mental health.  ANYWAY, I went to a doctor for anxiety and depression, not knowing yet I had bipolar disorder.  I started taking Klonopin for anxiety.  Just a little.  I can't even remember why?  I had ZERO clue about benozs and that they were narcotics.  I also started taking some Prozac and somehow the narrative that the Prozac and the benzos were the same thing got blasted into my mind.  The GP and others in this practice were telling me all these wonderful things about medication.  I started taking the meds, fully intending to not take them forever.  At some point, I got diagnosed by this GP as having either depression or whatever that would need meds forever.  So here I am, 19 years old, being told I had to take drugs forever.  By then, the Prozac would trigger the mania I didn't know I had.  The incompetent GP didn't notice the symptoms when I told him the drugs were making me jump out of my skin.  Any competent doctor would immediately see the drugs were triggering mania but he wasn't competent.  I'll never forget his response.  "It's you, not the drugs."  By then, I just wanted to get off all the shit but the doctor said I couldn't or I'd have a seizure.  He meant the benzos.  I had no clue what he meant.  It was further reinforced that I could never get off the drugs.  They meant the Prozac.  Combine all this with a crazy, guilt ridden mother who was also taking psyche meds and I had it further drilled into my head that my problems were a chemical imbalance.  I feel that was my mother's way of trying to absolve herself of any parenting guilt.  "I didn't do anything!  It's all a chemical imbalance!" but that's just speculation.  So, if the drugs were the way to solve my problems, I'd need more was my reasoning.  This is when I got the "right combination" and "cocktail" talk the psychiatric profession uses.  So, I concluded drugs, including an increasing amount of benzos, would solve my problems.  That is a TEXTBOOK thought process which leads to and perpetuates addiction.  So now I'm trapped in hell.  I'm addicted to benzos but the doctors, thinking I'm trying to "get off my meds," won't phase me down.  I was also not informed of ANY side effects.  This was in 1992 when doctors essentially lied to patients they were experimenting on.  All I got was "wonder drug" and "magic bullet" and all that.  Looking back at it, I think the people who said these things were trying to be helpful and positive but they were negligent not telling me about the side effects of benzos, which are well known.  I had that stoned look and feel, that haunted quality benzos induce and began to have MAJOR memory problems.  I still have those problems to this day.  Doctor didn't tell me anything about any of this.  I had to suffer along the way.  This is what cracks in the medical system are all about.  If you get a bad doctor, you're fucked.  That my incompetent mother proposed him to me isn't surprising at all and I'm just coming to grips that  had incompetence FORCED ON ME.  I did what I was told because I didn't know any better by people who were guessing.  It took my own determination to get me off benzos.  I made it happen.  No one was interested in helping after my Dad's first few impotent tries.  Then again, I think Dad wanted me  off the Prozac.  When I said a few years later I was having memory problems, he said, "You look all right to me."  This is what I was dealing with.  So I eventually got off the benzos 100% by my own initiative and I have still have trauma and nightmares from those days from 1992-1996.  I'm now 100% against forced drugging because the idiots who do it don't care about patients.  They want to "protect society" or something.  They make way too many mistakes.  I do find it funny I was apparently a test subject with anti-depressants.  I thought I was a human being trying to live a life and be happy.  Now there are a billion side effects mentioned about anti-depressants.  Nice to know my lonely suffering and trauma helped with that, medical system!!  Yes, this was rambling.  No, I don't care.  

What can be considered "Normal" vs. "Abnormal" (Emphasis on American Context)

 People often tend to think of "Normal vs. Abnormal" based on instinctive observance, usually braced by personal experience.  Most people, even if extremely different, consider themselves normal because they're normal to themselves, normal in this case meaning usual and ordinary to the individual's life.  In a border definition, normal can be grounded in Kant's Categorical Imperative.  What is overwhelmingly considered normal is normal.  I would also include healthy with normal.  What is overwhelmingly HEALTHY is normal.  Americans, especially, love making things as they go and living in romantic fantasy worlds.  In that context, Americans are more than fine with THEIR majority being considered normal, even if that majority is unhealthy.  I argue what is unhealthy cannot be considered normal, is the majority in a democracy thinks it so.  We're talking about human psychiatry, brain health and time tested genetic realities and behaviors.  So what is healthy, keeping in mind that it's improbable anyone has perfect genetics.  

A)  My definition of health is both genetic and behavioral.  Some people just have faultier genes than others.  I put myself in that category (and to show I'm not playing favorites) as I have bipolar disorder, clinical OCD and other various kinks.  The person who's genetically abnormal is, to put it bluntly, screwed.  This person, through no fault of their own, inherited defects from their parents when they were nothing but tiny little embryos.  They can find ways to behave perfectly normally but will always have the predisposition to mutate (aka grow in abnormal ways.)  My argument here is not to say whether this is a proper adaptive advantage in terms of evolution (like turning into an X-Man.)   It's just to say that defective genes will lead to defective health, thus migrating (as it were) the human away from strong physical health.  As humans are a species that has existed and evolved for thousands of years, I can only conclude that most people overall have genes that are at least strong enough to function consistently well.  As over 90% of people are employed, the vast majority of those jobs being steady, I can conclude those people can be considered relatively healthy, as they wouldn't be able to work steadily otherwise, and thus can be considered "normal."  

B) The second definition of health is commonly known to everyone as basic behavior, meaning you don't need to be a geneticist to understand it as we all do it on a daily basis.  Behavioral health comes down to the choices people make.  People with more defective genes (again, myself included) often struggle to make good decisions based on health as their genetic programming twists and turns them into odd and disorderly behaviors.  Substance abuse is now considered a disorder born of bad genes.  Obviously, the substance abuser pursues unhealthy behaviors.  In this person, genetics and behavior overlap.  The defective genes lead to defective, unhealthy and, thus, abnormal behavior.  Behavior as abnormality in this context refers more to people with stronger genes who, for whatever reason, pursue more abnormal behaviors.  This is the classic "nurture over nature."  Perhaps a person is perfectly physically strong and healthy yet pursue destructive behaviors through peer pressures and Group Think.  This is EXTREMELY common in the United States and other democracies where whatever group wins an election or a vote think they have the right to order people around.  We see that most prominently in things such as forced liberalism.  People considered sane and normal don't want their kids to see drag shows (which ARE adult entertainment) yet, if you get certain people in power, those parents face enormous social pressure to make their children go.  In my view, this is the corruptive, unhealthy and, thus, abnormal dysfunction in democracies.  The right of the individual to say no to something they know is harmful and destructive to them is rejected in the name of making a mass of unhealthy, abnormal people who've banded together feel a sense of existential happiness and belonging.  Of course, if it's forced, it's not really legitimate, just like saying you did something with a gun to your head isn't a legitimate confession.  The normal, healthy, stronger person, through no fault of their own, is forced to comply with aberrant behaviors that can only weaken and hurt them.  This is blatantly immoral.  Even if a group of people with defective genes feels isolated and picked on, this doesn't give them the right to hurt innocent people who've committed no sin by being the recipient of proper, healthy, normal genes passed down by previous generations.  

I threw in some "moral vs immoral" with my argument there but it all basically overlaps.  What is destructive and abnormal can also be considered immoral and what is healthy and normal can also be considered normal.  I'm not making value judgments towards people who are truly different.  I'm in that group, myself, due to my genetic reality, one that I didn't ask for.  In this context, however, moral and immoral can be a slippery slope.  If an extremely odd person who believes and acts transgender acts out in a way THEY consider good and normal because it's normal to THEM, can they truly be considered immoral just because it's unhealthy?  My conclusion to that is it all comes down to conscious awareness and moral choice.  Like all people, if transgender people do things they consider morally wrong, they are morally wrong.  If they do abnormal, unhealthy things because they don't know any better, they're not morally wrong.  They're tragic.  

Thanks for reading this far!  I often don't go back to edit and streamline these posts so I hope I didn't ramble too much.  

A Spiritual Perspective on Instinct

Instinct is thought of as the expression of physical perceptions and movements to things sensed.  It's not considered rational or thoughtful.  We react at times because our bodies are trained a certain way.  As we are immaterial souls in physical bodies, I feel our spiritual impressions, those parts of us that are soul, also learn instinctively.  When we're in our souls, which usually just comes from being like when we're meditating or just not trying to reason, we perceive the great beyond, the eternal void.  In a state of purity, that is separated from our animal sides.  Unfortunately, we can't live our lives as our immaterial souls as we're bound by our physical pains, lusts, desires, etc.  I feel that when we're aware of what our souls are and have been in touch with them for any amount of time, our souls become instinctive in interacting with our physical bodies.  Freud would probably call that combining the Id with the Superego.  We don't just naturally recoil from a hot stove.  We SPIRITUALLY recoil from things considered abhorrent or perverted.  We don't just reject corruption because it's physically different.  We reject it because it's borne of various levels of perversion which the immaterial soul, which cannot be physically perverse, recognizes from experience.  I believe the soul evolves in human form.  If that's considered reincarnation, that's fine.  Over that enormous amount of time, we grow as spiritual beings as well as physical ones.  We may be a physical tabula rosa but we are not a spiritual one.  It seems likely every soul alive has learned something positively spiritually that they've carried over from evolution to evolution.  I know from experience that we often lose those instincts depending on our physical realities.  If we have abusive parents, we're probably going to become dysfunctional and, consumed with anger, last out at the physical world.  Even though that programming may be no fault of our own, we've become perverted and corrupted by it and we forget our soulful instincts to be in a state of spiritual grace.  I feel religion exists as a kind of rudder to help us focus and refocus on God and the soul.  The material world corrupts us and the religious world (if operating properly), keeps us on course.  When we reject that guidance, we become materialistic and increasingly physically animalistic.  I have experienced all those states in this life.  The disconnect from the soul, if continued long enough, invariably leads to addiction and other forms of dependence.  We have to get through life somehow and, if we aren't physically connected with our spiritual instincts, we become dark inside and decay.  Political power is all about moral and spiritual decay, which is why its adherents choose physical and financial dominance in the from of sadism as a way of trying to be happy.  Their perverted physical instincts have won and they've become spiritually useless.  

The genetically flawed (of which I'm one) are the greatest tragedy.  The body really only exists to help us express our souls and our spiritual sides.  In that way, it just needs to be functional and healthy.  People with twisted genes like me have to deal with genetic perversion only a daily basis, which forces us to drift farther and farther from our internal souls.  It's the equivalent of needing to cross a bridge to be happy but there are constant walls being constructed in the way.  We have spiritual instincts but they're often blocked by many things that just won't get out of our ways.  Those blockages lead to spiritual pain and hopelessness.  It's a tough responsibility to keep trying to remove those blockages to be the best spiritual beings we can be, to access our souls.  We have to cope as best we can, knowing we can't be where we want to be all the time because we can't be healthy enough to do so.  I understand the physical lessons of being a disabled person.  Are there spiritual lessons to be learned from it?  I think so.  I've learned that the soul and the light within are what really matter but I don't want to become Manichean, thinking that the physical world is evil and the light within good though I can definitely see why Manicheans think as they as I age.  Evil is rampant in the world and the light within is perpetually in a state of goodness.  IF we refine our spiritual instincts and try to BE with them as often as possible, we can bridge the gap as a society to a more beneficial level.  We have to learn to reject the evils of the physical while living our physical lives day to day with proper spiritual instincts.  We can't just disconnect.  We have to bring good to this world in the form of ourselves.  Thank you for reading!  

Money

 Of all the things in my life, money and everything to do with it probably confused me the most.  I say that in a spiritual sense.  As I have become an enormously spiritual person, I see money as an evil.  Not a necessary evil.  Just an evil.  I think money is disgusting and repulsive.  It's an immortal tool people use to dominate and control others.  It's a vessel for producing pain.  For me, acts of kindness are free and should be free.  I commit acts of kindness without any thought of payment because that's where the pure spirt of goodness lies IMO.  I fully understand the basics of economics and how money is seen by us arrogant humans as a wonderful invention meant to facilitate the flow of goods and services blah blah blah.  Economics is cold, empty and robotic, three reasons why I've always hated it.  It's lifeless materialism.  All this said, I worry about my life as I'm disabled and have no job thus I have no money.  This is the confusing part.  I know my feelings about it but I still have to live in this shitty world and I don't want to be thrown out on the street.  So making money is apparently important.  How do I do so?  Or do I sit back and let God (meaning family) take care of me my whole life?  Try as I might, I can't not be a nihilist about money.  It's so important to so many people and it just makes me sick.  The times in my life I've pursued money, I've had prescription drug addictions and did it merely to live and because it was just want people do, which makes me feel like a coward.  That makes me think money is a product of nothing but physical evolution, which is illusion and fleeting.  I hate rich people who exist just to make money.  I want to take their money not for myself but to just destroy it and ask them who they feel then.  I bet they'd have no calling at all.  The next day they'd wake up and ask what they need to do to make more money.  It's the Id impulse.  Humans scurry like lizards to make enough to anesthetize themselves to the pains of life or make tons to dish pain out.  As I get older, I can't not see life in a much more Manichean way.   All that really matters is the spirit, the light in us all.  All the physical does is clutter and corrupt us.  Or am I just a dumb asshole who doesn't get anything?  Younger Jeff Riley would look at me as confused deadbeat philosopher, which is what I've become.  Younger Jeff would hate older Jeff as older Jeff hates younger Jeff.  I hate what I once was.  

Purpose

 As someone who's had the "normal" procedure of a human life denied to him, I very frequently seek a purpose for myself and my life.  By normal, I mean the life of a normal person.  Spouse, job, kids, age, grandkids, death.  As a bipolar person who can't work a full time job and hasn't made a penny as a writer, I have to almost constantly assess and reassess my purpose in life as to not fall into a great depression.  As I began failing physically in the 1990s for the first time, I had no coping mechanisms or education or awareness of what I was or what I was to be.  I was very much a materialist and felt like my life would be dictated by such materialism.  As my health failed, those ambitions and aspirations faded and disappeared and I was left adrift mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  I had a hard reality forced on me and became totally lost for what I felt like my destiny/fate would be.  By destiny/fate, I mean that instinctive sense of why we're here on Earth, each as individuals.  I'm not referring to nihilists, which so many people are (nihilism being people who believe we're here to live and die and that's it with no purpose.)  I'm talking the idea that we're all here for a reason.  My reason for being here is not to have kids and spread my genes as that would be a disaster, right not both for me and the world.  I've thought perhaps my purpose is to be an entertainer as I am a naturally gifted writer and storyteller but the works I have online are largely ignored.  It's also the wrong era for me as I find that white male writers are increasingly ignored and minority writers and women are pushed forward.  That said, I'm also in a minority group as a bipolar person but the book I've written based on my experiences with mental illness has also met with no reaction.  I've only finished a third of the story and maybe I'm meant to finish it all.  Time will tell.  As is, I have no desire to finish a story I already know just to have it completely ignored by everyone else.  

So my purpose for being on this Earth isn't physical and, thus far, doesn't appear to be creative so what is it?  I've been on meds for bipolar disorder and have been for years.  It doesn't seem like there's any purpose in my symptoms for study as I just pretty much take my meds and talk to my doctor once every three months for more meds.  Perhaps my purpose is over my cancer treatments.  Maybe the experimental injections I'm getting will pave the way for new treatments.  Maybe it's important that I be the one to get the shots.  

Any which way I look at it, I can't help but conclude my purpose hasn't materialized yet.  At age 50, with two cancer surgeries behind me, riddled with clinical OCD and Bipolar I and seemingly no future in the classic sense, I have no idea what that could be.  If I'm being a nihilist, I would conclude my life is meaningless and I'm only here because I'm not not here but I consider that thought process defeatist.  There's a reason for me to be here and it can't have arrived yet.  It may be for something very important though I definitely don't see that for me, personally.  Though a very interesting person, I'm very much a grain of sand on the beach, possibly more valuable as a guinea pig than anything else.  If so, the doctors who create the treatments are the stars and the ones who are truly valuable and it takes nothing special to get jabbed twice a week with needles to make sure my cancer doesn't spread.  So we'll see.  I feel I'll know it when it happens.  I hope I will.  

I hate myself...

 ...during those years, too.  How could I have been so stupid to let all that happen to me and then to do it to myself?  

My fake life- 1992-1996

 I can this period my fake life because I was in full denial about my growing mental problems.  Unable to cope with what would be diagnosed as my Bipolar Disorder and very chronic OCD, I crafted a fake life with a fake future for myself during those years, one marked by rampant psychiatric drug use and abuse and the lie that it had "fixed me" and that I wasn't crazy.  In short, I popped pills and went about my business, only caring if I felt okay/not depressed and completely unconcerned with diagnoses and actually trying to fix problems.  I'm so adrift during those years, completely unable to cope with my growing disability, which would become overwhelming, and convincing myself I can have a normal life like everyone else.  Hey, I had just some depression and anxiety!  Give me some anti-depressants and benzos and I'm good to go!  I'm normal!  That's how I lied to myself.  In my defense, I also got some terrible advice from my GP (who I resent to this day) and I came to identify with my symptoms.  The anti-depressants cycled the mania I didn't know I had into overdrive.  One misdiagnosis later and I was convinced I was some sort of god, that I was a superior being.  Hey, my GP said those crazy thoughts I was having were really me and my brain is telling me I'm a god so I must be a god!!  I was also manipulated by a drug addicted mother which kept me a drug addict for those four years.  I look back on it it now and it's hell on Earth.  I'm trapped in a dark, manic dead zone, like a permanent mixed episode.  I can't help but be resentful as i was failed by everyone during the most important time of my life, when it was time for me to go out into the world and have a life.  I resent my mother for her endless meddling and manipulating.  Think Hillary Clinton trying to keep someone on her team and that's my lying mother.  My Dad didn't understand and quit when my Mom left him.  He even had a girlfriend and went to her kid's hockey games while rejecting me.  It clear to me this little kid was a sports replacement now that I was done playing baseball in HS.  Darkness and anger and depression.  Only started getting better after my seizure and near death experience in 1996.  I was woken up.  I've long since accepted my problems and I'm permanently on meds now.  I hate those years so much and I hate several of the people in my life during those years so much.  

How we define "Good" and "Evil"

 There are two different ways we look at the ideas of good and evil.  The first is an irrational, illogical ideology based on our own biases.  We consider ourselves good and anyone we don't like evil, regardless of behaviors.  This is all too common in the American Republic.  Millions of Americans see themselves as good and Donald Trump as evil for no other reason then they don't like the guy.  What they do and what he does is irrelevant.  He's just bad and they're just good just because.  Obviously, that view of good and evil is thoughtless and irrelevant.  It's good and bad as black and white regardless of other factors.  It's brainless "either/or" with nothing else in it.  The second way is the proper way of looking at such concepts, as being catch all categories for certain traits.  When we think of good, we think of various qualities that can be shoved into the term.  Good means responsible, giving, just to the less fortunate, honest, helpful, non-abusive, etc.  Evil includes things like murder, rape, manipulation, lying, etc.  The levels of Hell in Dante's Inferno is a great example of how to separate the traits considered evil into various tiers.  I feel what a person is labelled (if we can use that term) depends on how much of each quality they have, keeping in mind that the vast majority of human activity is based on just regular behaviors not included in either category.  There's no good or evil way to go to the grocery store.  As humans, we go because we need food.  There's no good or evil to it (unless we describe the meeting of our basic needs as good.  The flip side of that can be seeing overindulgence in our basic needs as being evil.)   Such labelling is like various points on a spectrum.  The more positive qualities we have, the farther towards good we go.  The more negative, the farther we go towards evil.  It's much easier to condemn a person as evil based on one trait.  An unrepentant murderer can be considered evil, even if he or she is almost saintly in every other way.  It's much tougher to qualify a person as good based on one quality.  Just because a person is extremely giving or nice or helpful doesn't mean they're good if they're also an abusive liar.  We have much greater standards for people being good.  They need A LOT of good qualities to be on that list.  We frequently hear someone being built up as good then someone who knows them chimes in, "Yeah, but they lie all the time."  Thus, they stop becoming good in our perception because we rarely use the term "less good."  We don't say a person is good but they're less good than others, though there are some colorful expressions intelligent people use occasionally.  I'm reminded of Frederick Douglass calling Abe Lincoln, "A first rate second rate man," a perfect way of saying he's a good man but only to a point.  He's "sort of" good.  There's also a comedic expression going around by the American establishment that the US "isn't as bad" as other nations.  We're bad, we're just not as bad!  😄  So what a proper thinker sees as good and evil is involved with much thought and depth.  It's frequently stated simply but it's actually complicated and involves multiple insights.  That separates it from the borderline personality view of good and evil, the "anti-Donald Trump" way of looking at it.  When discussing these ideas, if our goal is to learn anything, we have to make sure we know who we're speaking to, as some will understand good vs. evil in one of the two ways illustrated.  The "we're just good and they're just bad" perception that dominates modern politics leads to nothing, while the philosophical and intellectual way of looking at it can bear much fruit.  Thanks for reading!  

Was Trump vs. the Establishment America's Gracchi Moment?

 As I re-watch Garrett Fagan's Teaching Company lecture series on the History of Ancient Rome, I can't help but see parallels between the situation which started the downfall of the Roman Republic beginning in 133 BC with the election to Tribune of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and the political situation starting with the ascension of Donald Trump through the year 2022.  Was Trump a modern day Tiberius Gracchus?  

Though experiencing the typical bumps in the road of any growing Republic, the Roman Republic had largely avoided any major internal crisis through to  the 2nd century BC.  That changed when Tiberius Gracchus was elected as one of two Tribunes in the Tribal Assembly of the Plebs (common people) in 133 BC.  A member of a family of the highest prestige, I see Tiberius Gracchus as a man with a Caesarian view of his own importance.  Namely, a man at the top of the social order destined to change everything by his actions.  I think his motives are beyond reproach.  Land reform in Rome was desperately needed as the rich bought up the land of poorer farmers, most of whom spent enormous amounts of time away from home in the Roman legions.  As those now landless men increasingly became members of the poor collecting in Rome, something needed to be done to change the situation, even if it meant taking a certain amount of land from the rich and giving it back to the farmers.  This should not be seen as "Communist."  It should be seen as the rectification of a major problem started by the greedy, greed which traditional Roman patriotism wouldn't have created in the first place as any rich patricians wouldn't have bought up the land of those who served their country militarily, leaving those people essentially homeless upon their return to Rome.  As Tiberius grew more aggressive in trying to make this necessary reform happen, the Roman Senate, bound by their own traditions apart from the masses, moved to squash it by manipulating Gracchus' Tribunal colleague into vetoing his proposals.  At this point, tradition and policy take over as the Senate digs in and Tiberius, through his role as a Tribune, destroys precedent and has his colleague in the Tribal Assembly, who offered the veto, removed.  Tiberius breaks further tradition by running for Tribune for an unprecedented third time.  The Senate's response these tradition breaking actions?  Making up a reason why Gracchus wanted to be a dictator and eventually killing him and his followers.  

SO MUCH of that drama has repeated itself, granted in slightly different ways, with populist "man of the people" Trump opposing the American establishment, namely Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat controlled House and the Democrat controlled Senate with the collaboration of Neocon Mitch McConnell and his cabal of associates including Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn and Mitt Romney.  

So where are the parallels?  The first upset in American political history is the rise of Andrew Jackson, a man greatly opposed by both the Founding generation and the then establishment led by people like House Majority Leader Henry Clay.  Jackson, in Trump-like fashion, became a populist hero, earning the undying support of millions of Americans and riding that popularity to victory in, essentially, three elections (the one in 1824 was notoriously stolen from him.)  So, early on, we have a precedent of a populist like Gracchus and later Trump throwing a monkey wrench into the plans of the then establishment.  What follows is the Age of Jackson, where (white male) America spreads to the West Coast and rises as a world power.  

At this point, I'm largely going to gloss over the Civil War.  Yes, it is THE great political upheaval in American history but it is very different than the situations between Jackson/Trump and the Founders/Clay/Pelosi and McConnell.  Northern and Southern America had become two different civilizations by 1861, separated along the lines by slavery and other vast cultural differences.  The war was fought after the South seceded and became its own country, therefore that conflict can be seen as a war between two different nations.  Neither the Confederacy nor the Union were bound by any laws to support the other side at that point.  So we move on past this point.  

The US post Civil War is one beginning to integrate its freed slave population into the general populace, a process which, IMO, has irreparably destroyed its civilization, not because integration is unjust (it isn't) but because black and white Americans refuse to get along and that has irrevocably divided the country for good.  In short, Americans on both sides of the fence refuse to integrate properly.  BUT I DIGRESS from my narrative for that personal opinion!  So, other than the bumps in the road of America's racial problems, the American establishment has largely gotten along well enough to lead us into 2015.  The Pelosi and McConnell wings oppose each other politically but are generally good friends away from Congress.  Politics is often a blood sport but, for most of the 20th Century, firebrands in politics were few and far between and no real Jacksonian level figure had emerged...

...and then a certain gentleman rides down an escalator.  At first, the establishment is amused.  After all, Trump is a man they know, a man of enormous public voice and power via his wealth, and it's not like he has a chance of actually winning!!  He's one of them, the establishment says, and life will continue as smoothly as ever once his sideshow quickly passes.  BUT suddenly something happens.  Trump, instead of opting to kiss the ring of Mitch McConnell and literally rub elbows with Nancy Pelosi as he does, goes into a completely opposite direction.  Trump, like Gracchus, sees problems with America and Trump,  like Gracchus, decides to go to the people the establishment ignores, "the masses," as a way of seeking power by bypassing the traditions of the established order.  That establishment reacts just as the Roman Senate and the American Senate/House of Henry Clay and Co. reacted.  That Trump is a dangerous man to the Republic and must be stopped at all costs.  Suddenly, virtually that entire establishment responds like never before in my lifetime (born in 1973.)  Politicians on both sides attack and denounce him.  The media goes from his fawning toadies to his deadly enemies, making up fake story after fake story in the desperate attempt to stop him, a process beginning in 2016, motoring through the Russia collusion lie and into the present.  Trump responds to this like both Tiberius Gracchus and his brother, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus.  A blood feud erupts between he and his populists vs. the established order (the Roman Senate/American Congress.)  The nightmare scenario is completed in 2016 as Trump wins the Presidential election.  Now, as Tiberius Gracchus was an elected official causing trouble for his Senate, Trump is an elected official causing trouble for his Senate/House.  Both Tiberius and Gaius (even more extreme and hateful of the Roman Senate than his brother) need to go.  There can be no negotiations or peaceful resolutions.  The Roman Senate responds by murdering Tiberius Gracchus literally then later murders his brother both politically then literally.  The American Senate/House responds by murdering Trump's reputation and public standing,  thus murdering him politically.  (And, honestly, there also isn't one person in that establishment that didn't want a random American citizen killing Trump literally.)  Thousands of followers of both Tiberius and Gaius are also murdered in the Roman Senate's attempt to "cleanse" the political scene.  Hundreds of influential voices in the Trump movement are purged on social media and constantly (and often unfairly) attacked in the mainstream press, the mechanisms that hold the keys to public perception in any democracy, thus also murdering them politically.  Thus, Trump and the followers of Trump are murdered by the establishment in the eyes of the people, the people being the ones who vote to give others power. 

So IMO this is A Gracchi moment in American history.  HOWEVER, because of the establishment media's stranglehold on public perception (and that's not hyperbole), there's a better than average chance that the average American won't even see it!!  🤣🤣🤣   Politicians have been burying their misdeeds, ranging from lies and manipulations to worse, for thousands of years.  No one did it better than the Romans and the current American establishment is doing its best to emulate that behavior.  What the mainstream power establishment (political and media) wants to do is just sweep the Trump years under the rug.  The followers of Nancy Pelosi and the Fox News Neocons will eventually just pretend the Trump years didn't happen.  In Democrat circles, he'll be a great boogeyman like the constantly invoked Hitler.  "We don't talk about that creature or those years" will be the refrain, much like the Emperor Augustus didn't want to talk about his early political years where he proscribed thousands of wealthy Romans, leading to their murders and a seizure of their properties.  The Lindsey Graham/Paul Ryan Fox News Republican will also sweep these years under the rug as a "time when we lost the better angels of our nature" and other mountains of self-righteous rhetoric.  American textbooks will be manipulated to portray Trump as both Hitler and a Satanic figure.  However, what those groups can't sweep under the rug is that the Trump years ACTUALLY happened and no amount of purging from the ranks  of American history textbooks can change that.  He didn't seize power.  He was CHOSEN for it by the people.  So why did it all happen and what happens from here?  I've stated several times how the traditional establishment feels but there are many who will remember the Trump years fondly as a time when the common man/woman took on the rich, traditional aristocratic oligarchy and actually won for a time. 

My conclusion as a college history graduate?  The Roman Republic eventually fell and became the Empire, the rule of one, but I don't see it happening in the United States, at least not as a result of Donald Trump.  The Romans were male dominated and valued the dictatorial spirit of military conquest and might making right above all else.  By its very nature, it was ripe to eventually fall to one man who could defeat all his competitors (Julius Caesar) like a player in a tournament. The American Republic is much more complicated than the Roman Republic due to its integrated racial diversity and the impact of women in power positions.  Yes, we have an infuriating aristocratic oligarchy who are, essentially, a cabal of kings and queens that operate in the perceived holistic bubble of being more than one person.  Only in the hands of one person is a dictatorship seen.  For thousands of years, parliaments of nobles have ruled "non-dictatorships" in the fashion of dictatorial minorities and the reaction of our establishment to Trump proves we're no different.  The people elected Trump?  SCREW THE PEOPLE!  We, the aristocratic few, are in charge.  We don't like him so he has to go.  Screw what you want!  They painted Trump as a dictator but was it so?  Was Trump a dictator trying to conquer a wonderful, positive, essentially good establishment (as they claim) or a freedom fighter trying to bring a corrupt Uniparty who largely ignores regular people to account?  THAT will be the argument for real historians.  The current Joe Biden establishment has fake historians kissing its ass and telling it what it wants to hear but it's all much more complicated than that and real historians will eventually dig into the Trump years like a banquet feast to study how it all went down.   IMO, due to media control (and they know it), Donald Trump was A Gracchi moment but it isn't THE Gracchi moment.  His time as President proves he wasn't a dictator and the reaction to him was far worse than anything he did.  In trying to smear and destroy a man they considered without honor, the traditional power establishment did the most dishonorable things possible.  

Thank you for reading this far!  

Why the Church has to reject Secular Materialism NOW

 Firstly, I'll just say that there's a definite place for secular humanism, while I completely reject secular materialism.  That said, the Church, an institution that MUST exist to meet the SPIRITUAL NEEDS of society, has moved dangerously close to, and in too many cases fused with, secular materialism.  I write this post because I just saw old nuns on NBC at a Notre Dame basketball game on IPhones.  I'm guessing they weren't doing the work of the Church or the Lord.  A minor criticism?  Possibly but it's illustrative of the shift in the modern Church from deep thought and the pursuit of spiritual development to one of wanting to be cool with the secular masses.  I'm sure the nuns I saw are considered "great nuns" and are very hip and cool with those they speak with, meaning they probably teach the modern secular liberalism that's made globalization so profuse.  We already have WAY too much of that.  If the Church doesn't go back to its spiritual disciplines sooner rather than later, it's become useless to civil society because it will have ceased to be the alternative its supposed to be.  

VERY SORRY I wasted my time and emotions on the United States

 As the 2022 midterms come to a close and my place in society is once more invalidated and irrelevant, I have to express my final feelings on politics in the United States as being a complete waste of time, thought and emotion.  The ancient Romans, even in their Republic, had an illusory system of "democracy" which only existed to favor the very rich and powerful, always in the concept of a super minority of family connections.  The regular people suffered and did all the work.  Guess what we have in America?  The same thing.  We have a political Uniparty, essentially their own family power structure, which exists solely to further its own financial and power lusts.  Outsiders need not apply, just like they need not have applied thousands of years ago.  America sucks.  It's always sucked in some capacity and it always will.  America is a nation of the Godless, the materialistic, the addicted, the empty and the mentally imbalanced.  It's fake "freedom," the "freedom" to detach from reality and live a fantasy where the natural laws of mankind can be ignored and denied to the inevitable detriment to all involved.  Reality WILL not be denied.  It can't be.  It has its effect whether it's acknowledged or not.  The United States is fantasy. It's a nation LOADED with problems which its arrogant nature refuses to see or cope with.  When we live in the light of reality, we see that the United States is a great enemy. as all elements who choose to live in fantasy in a world where we must acknowledge reality are fated to become.  The wealthiest will once again be the only ones who profit while the decent people suffer.  The most corrupt people will continue to harm the most innocent.  The brainless herd will desperately try to nudge their way into the elite classes to benefit in the useless materialism and the fake security it affords.  Just like in ancient Rome, one of the most corrupt "civilized" civilizations in human history.  Fake, illusory, savage and vicious.  Sorry I tried to save you, America.  YOU wasted MY time.  

Short Post: Are our emotions spiritual or physical?

Spiritual.  In my experience, our emotions are spiritual and eternal.  They go way beyond the physical.  They're as close as we get to God, which is encapsulated in the idea that "God is Love."  Our emotions are not scientific.  Our emotions are not disposable like our physical bodies.  When we die, our emotions do not cease like our physical bodies as our emotions are not guttural and instinctive.  Our emotions are our souls and make up who we really are in the ether of eternity.  We cease to be physical people.  We never cease to be emotional beings.  

Is Mathematics hard reality like science or creatively conceptual like poetry?

 Just watched a neat philosophy lecture on Pythagoras and it made me think of mathematics.  We all know science is physical reality.  It's tangible. something we can feel.  It has mass.  It has a cause and effect impact of us and your world.  Mathematics is intellectual and at least perceived as in the galaxy of scientific reality but is it really?  If a piece of wood is at a right angle, we know the wood is real but how are we to analyze its right angle?  Abstract thinkers (as they were back in the day) came up with a thought process that this piece of wood had a certain bend to it and that numbers, merely ways of counting physical objects, could be applied to this bend but was seeing a bend in the wood necessary at all?  Why would we need to conceptualize this angle in the first place?  It's a hunk of wood and has the laws of physical science behind it.  We MUST acknowledge it's a hunk of wood.  It can be in our way.  It can hit us over the head.  It has a potential impact outside ourselves we can't deny.  But must we acknowledge mathematics?  Nothing about the wood or ourselves changes if we don't see the wood is at a right angle.  Physical reality goes on whether we see it or not.  In that way, is mathematics a necessary application in the real world at all?  If we didn't conceptualize math, with all its intricate calculations, would we be the worse off for it?  

In that way, I see math as being a bit like poetry.  Like the poetry of beautiful things.  We experience beautiful things like flowers in the real world because they have mass like the block of wood.  We then think of ways we can creatively express what we're seeing in an aesthetic way.  We apply it to our emotions.  in contrast, we apply the idea of a right angle in a block of wood with pure intellect, largely free of the emotions.  We can get emotional over a right angle but it seems rather silly!  While it's virtually impossible to create good poetry about a flower without some sort of emotional aesthetic.  In that way, mathematics can be seen as emotionless poetry, intellectually creative yet devoid of any need for an emotional connection.  Mathematics is often very important for creating a sense of order in our lives which helps makes our existence bearable in a technical fashion.  It's a facilitator of problem solving.  However, if all we need to do is see the block of wood as just a hard, physical object devoid of shape and we need not use our emotions to conceptualize it, is mathematics even necessary to our existence as the acknowledgement of the physical and the emotional are?  Food for thought!  

My Spiritual Views

 As no one reads my blog anymore, this is pretty much for me.  

I grew up a Catholic and I went from believing it definitely to being more questioning to being agnostic to being a complete disbeliever.  Certain experiences (like a near death one) have opened my eyes to the idea of spirit, specifically the "great beyond" as it were.  

Combination of views and philosophies:  

As I've grown, as my senses have been blown wide open and I've largely separated from the social distractions that come from organized religions, I've studied different views and I've become a combination of humanism and ancient tenets and philosophies.  

Roman Stoicism:  

All intelligent people eventually "figure out" religion, meaning realize a lot of stuff in religious stories is made up to prove points and build a common mythology.  Nothing wrong with that at all but, if we're searching for spiritual truth, more aesthetically pleasing than helpful.  So, a seeker of truth turns to more thoughtful, intellectual concepts in searching for truth and that means studying other "religious" ideas and classical philosophy.  I love the ideas of ancient philosophers the most because they lived in times where there were fewer mental and emotional distractions, therefore their insights are a bit more clear headed.  I love the later Germans and Brits but there's SO much for them to consider that they become SO complicated!  Beautifully tough to learn but very cluttered!  So I love the ideas of Parmenides and Heraclitus, especially because they're simple, eternal and at the root of perception.  "No man steps in the same river twice" is a perfect concept for evolution.  Parmenides' view that life and time are eternal and present and that we essentially never go anywhere is a perfect concept of the timeless nature of soul and spirit.  In terms of looking at society, I really like Roman Stoicism, maybe because I love old Roman history and because it's a more masculine view I can connect with.  That all things happen for a reason, even the horrible things, that we can't comprehend is a great thought process for letting go, for trusting in life and the processes of life.  Without such concepts, we try to control everything and we can't get through a day without being overwhelmed by the horrors of the world, especially in today's social media climate.  Which leads me to the next idea I've come to embrace. 

Taoism - "The Way" 

Roman Stoicism is a great way to learn to let go of trying to change what cannot be changed in the physical world.  Taoism is then a great direction on a new direction to go in, namely getting in touch with the rhythms of the universe and ourselves, the metaphysical, the eternal, the spirit beyond the world.  It eliminates the distractions of the physical and allows for clear contemplation of the ideas of God and the universe, which then leads to the question of why we're on Earth and where we go when we're done.  Also if there's any purpose we have, if there's anything we need to do on this planet and why we're here.  I find that being in touch with the natural order of the universe, not the disorder of the physical world, purifies my thought and thus my spirit to a certain extent.  If I ponder what is good, I ponder what is good and bad in me, what I need to work on, bad traits I need to eliminate, etc.  It's spiritual work, not material work, which can carry all sorts of poisons with it.  Even evil men have jobs, as they say!  It's learning to go with the flow of the eternal and NOT the flow of society.  I used to go with the flow of society and I lost a lot of ground doing so.  In trying to navigate the world, I became a mouthpiece for the current, as we see so many people do, especially in the media.  "What's happening now?!  Because whatever is happening now is good!  I need the latest device to be cool, etc!"  You become lost, easily willing to not rock the boat in order to get along.  After a time, you look at yourself and you just feel weak.  You have no purpose.  You live and fight for nothing.  Maybe you have nice surroundings and a nice job because you get along but, take those away, and what do you have?  Just an empty shell that needs the illusions and distractions of the physical world to be able to function mentally and emotionally.  That emptiness leads to such pain, which is why people seek faith and spiritually in the first place.  I'm proof positive that material pursuits and success, no matter what the cost, is ultimately a dead end, and no addiction or pleasure in the world can heal the disconnect from what is truly universal.  Spirit is depth and soul and happiness.  Being at one with the universe is peace.  

Neo-Platonism: 

That said, being one with the eternal, the Nous, is one of the top ideas of Neo-Platonism which I've come to embrace.  For me, we no doubt become one with the Nous, the universal concept of what is considered God, when we die as we no longer have a physical body to stop us.  I kind of see The Way as God coming to us.  I see Neo-Platonism as us going to God.  The former is finding peace in the physical world by conceiving oneness with God.  The latter is actually being in his arms, which I feel is a very loving thing.  We become good when we're associated with good, when we're connected with good.  The physical grounds us in pain and the progressive corruption of human desires.  The spirit, the soul within, is free from such things.  Merge our souls in eternal love, goodness and happiness and we have a place we will never leave.  We will have arrived.  

People Currently Responsible for the Current Race Violence in America

Here are the people currently involved in and leading the current violence. There are a lot of them which leads to a perfect storm shit show.

1. Older liberals/Democrats who desperately want to get rid of Donald Trump and believe discord and violence is the way to do it. They're the worst of the worst. They're the old guard Democrats like the Nancy Pelosis and the Charles Schumers. They know exactly what they're doing and they don't care if the country burns because they think one man is literally Satan.

2. Black people/liberals who legitimately believe white people are hunting them on a daily basis. I feel bad for some of them and some of them are just paranoid and uneducated. The latter are abused and used by the liberals in No. 1 to do their dirty work for them. I see people like Chris Cuomo as being in this group.

3. Liberal/Communist/Feminist/Anarchist Media who are only interested in achieving their social gains. The feminists at rags like the New York Times fit this group. Combined with No, 1, these people are the lowest of the low because they relish the violence and egg it on simply to stop a President whose very existence has dominated their emotions for four years. People like Don Lemon are in both No. 2 and No. 3.

4. Little shit bag suburban liberals of all races who think being a revolutionist is "cool and fun!" They're the Black Out Tuesday people who think they're street and cool to attack cops and promote protesting. Once this is over, they'll move on to their next "cause." These people are symptoms of the disease. Buzzfeed is the perfect example of this group of annoying little shits.

5. Antifa. The terrorist wing of the Democratic Party. Liars who say they only exist to fight fascism when really they exist to destroy ANYONE who disagrees with them by labeling them fascists whether they are or not. No. 3 defends and protects this group and some are no doubt involved with their activities. No. 3 also believes these people are some sort of heroes when, in truth, they're violent thugs with no real set purpose other than producing fear.

6. Hollywood. Stupid celebrities believing and saying stupid things. The group with arguably the most clout combined with the least competence.

7. Black athletes and their white sycophants. The people with arguably equal clout with Hollywood. Most of the voice of black athletes are from people with CTE or guys closer to Bad Newz Kennelz than they are PETA. But they're black so people think they know what they're talking about. Have a ton of clout with the actual rioters and looters and have been cheering them on the whole way. LeBron James is in this group. Certain black athletes like Colin Kaepernick who grew up well off who suddenly think they're oppressed victims. People who, if they weren't athletes, would be front and center robbing Target Stores. Their white sycophants are the those on networks on ESPN like Colin Cowherd and Skip Bayless who think people like LeBron James are social heroes (insert laughter emoji.) I grew up playing sports and sports culture is black so there's a ton of whining going on by rich black guys who should be praising America for their lives instead of bashing it. Rich whiners included people like Shannon Sharpe, who apparently thinks he speaks for "his people" about shit that happened hundreds of years ago.

8. Black Lives Matter. This is the most interesting group because there are parts of them in all Numbers 1-5. It's a murky term that means different things for different people. Antifa/terrorism is included in it. Well meaning black people who think white people are hunting them for sport. Black people like the 1619 Project so filled with hate and delusion that they don't even believe their hate and violence is hate and violence. Black Karens (to use the term) are in this group and they want to see your President about making white people kneel and bow to them. They're dangerous instigators only interested in satisfying a horribly toxic need for social revenge over their lot in life. Little shit bag liberals who think Black Lives Matter isn't a black panther redo and that it honestly attacks evil racists. Hollywood and black athletes are mouthpieces for it.

9. Legitimate revolutionaries. The deadly people. The truly malevolent force that wants social destruction, no police presence to stop their lust for power and victory over and dominance of white people. The only good cops are dead cops to them. Also the hardcore socialists that want society to burn because it best helps initiate Socialism/Communism. An increasing number of Black Lives Matter members are in this group. They're the 2020 Black Panthers. Murderous sociopaths using tragedy to rape, pillage and plunder. Some of Antifa overlaps here, too.

A lot of elements have to combine in life for a horribly violent catastrophe to occur. The nine examples above are responsible for the current chaos. I'm not talking justice for George Floyd. I'm talking the CURRENT CHAOS.

It's Time, America. It's Time for an Enlightened Military Oligarchy to Run this Country

I'll preface this by saying "military oligarchy" does NOT mean military tyranny.  It does not mean a fascist takeover.  I'll elaborate below.  I want to get this out now so I'm only going to post basic ideas and policies.  I will elaborate more in the future.  

Qualifications:  I have a history degree with a political science minor from Wisconsin-Whitewater.  

Note:  These are obviously my opinions for the direction the government of the United States.  

Voting: 

Eliminated.  This would be the biggest system change.  The citizenry of the United States, due to recent events, has forfeited its right to choose its own government.  Military officials would be chosen by patriotic, nationally interested men and women with the power and will to enforce its laws and enforce societal order.  They would run the important governmental offices with speed and efficiency.  All unimportant offices will be eliminated.  In short, you've lost the competence to govern yourselves, America.  Time for orderly, sane, competent, capable, mature individuals to mete out policy and justice.  

Rights:  

So what does this mean for your rights?  You would essentially still have them except the right to vote or cause dissension based on free speech.  Social (more below) and racial dissension would be considered "fire in a crowded theater" and not tolerated. The Constitution would still exist (amended where necessary but that is a separate discussion.)   I realize amending the Constitution is an enormously important issue but the vast majority of it will be the same.  You WILL have the right to criticize your government but make the criticisms COUNT.  Don't be lying about or slandering your government because it would still WORK FOR YOU.  The only change would be the leadership that would make that happen.  

Media: 

The media in America is the No. 1 source of discord and disorder.  CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and all independent media "think tanks" would be 100% eliminated.  No Sean Hannity.  No Don Lemon.  No Chris Cuomo.  No fake Meet the Press BS.  No White House press conferences.  No "gotcha" media like Jim Acosta.  Local and national media would still exist but it would be under a tight system where facts and statistics are given and ALL political rhetoric will be eliminated.  Political opinions based on Left/Right ideology would be eliminated.  "We report, you decide" will be enforced and all biased factual inaccuracies will be met with severe penalties.  Social media sites that engage in actual time responses like Twitter would be eliminated.  Thus, the coordination of violent activities and other threads being in illegal rhetoric would be, at least, squashed before they pick up any momentum.  Strict ground rules for "illegal rhetoric" would be made very clear to all.  Companies like Facebook and Instagram would be tightly regulated to prevent immediate coordination of violence.  

Legal System: 

Instead of a chaotic system of jury trials and biased elected officials, sane, competent groups of educated military officials would run the trials based on dispassionate evidence.  Testimony would still be heard, things like fingerprints and DNA evidence would still be used.  Our trial system today is not a disaster.  However, this tweak will streamline it.  It's doubtful there would be more OJs or Casey Anthonys because the politics and media garbage would be eliminated.  Justice, not politics, would be the SOLE focus.  

Illegal Immigration: 

No more of it.  No open borders.  There would be both walls and increased border security.  Don't even try coming in illegally.  If you do, military personnel would have the authority to use lethal violence if necessary.  This is not for the average illegal immigrant, obviously.  If illegal immigrants come to our southern border, Mexico will be responsible for letting them in their country via THEIR southern border.  

Violent protests:  

Eliminated 100%.  If you are using violence and you persist, you will be arrested at the very least and military personnel would be instructed to use lethal force at worst.  The current (June 2, 2020) race riots would be met with an immediate lethal response.  If you're going to use violence, you're going to get violence.  As stated, that response would be immediate.  

Social and economic issues:  

Good jobs for good money would be available to all.  Hiring practices would be by military personnel.  Discrimination would be eliminated as would reverse-discrimination.  All citizens would be equal both before the law and in practice.  Equality would be enforced as will crushing all dissension based on race.  That dissension is NEGATIVE, harmful dissension.  It is not crushing free speech.  Just dangerous, potentially violent free speech.  Race rhetoric beyond scientific conversation will be considered inflammatory and unacceptable.  Thus will the economic and social problems that cause discord and violence be eliminated.  Capitalism will exist.  Business will be business.  Economic inequalities can still exist but that means billionaires can be billionaires.  The difference will be poverty and homelessness would be eliminated so that pain would be gone.  All people with mental illnesses would be put on medication and afforded any help they need, be it economic or things like housing.  Social security would still exist and would be still be administrated.  The medical community would exist as always.  

Race rhetoric:  

Eliminated 100%.  Any race politics and race discussions beyond scientific ideology would be eliminated.  All race information will be based on statistics, not opinion.  

Political Parties:  

The Media system and the political system will be the two most radically chanted institutions.  Political parties would be eliminated and made illegal.  No Right or Left rhetoric.  No political or social power to the citizenry.  Things like religious beliefs and assembly would be allowed as always.  People would have the right to hang out in whatever groups they choose and they can discuss Left vs. Right ideology is they choose but it would be gone from the national discussion.  

Identity Politics: 

Eliminated.  All people with different sexualities and gender identities will be welcome and tolerated but the political pushing of identity politics as a means of social "progress," which is, in truth, divisive, would not be tolerated.  

Sociology:  

NO policies will be made under the biased banner of the pseudoscience "Sociology."  

Police: 

Law and order (not as a dog whistle) would be the only focus for police.  They would be taught to understand different people with various problems to better help their performance but they would be there to enforce our laws, not cheerlead our citizenry or make biased political decisions.  

Creativity:  Political dissension on a mass scale would be eliminated in mass media like movies and TV.  Political dissension AS AN IDEA would be more tolerated (though not much more) in literature but not much more.  

Education: 

No more "white privilege" kind of stuff in schools.  No more liberal sociology in schools.  No religious rhetoric in public schools.  Only fact based education.  ALL "teaching" from politically motivated individuals designed to manipulate and "change minds" will be eliminated and those that persist in such biases will be fired without protections from unions.  

That's it for now.  The only real difference between our country now and under this system is that proper, competent military officials that care about the country would run the show, not the average citizen.  The only real liberty people would lose would be the vote.  Yes, that's a big one but society must move forward.  Americans have proven they are not capable of doing that.  Life will still essentially be the same but the political discord will be completely eliminated.  

This would still be the United States!!!  It would just be a better United States.  

That's mostly the gist of my argument, though without the necessary details for the moment (as I just started thinking of this last night.)  

Previous art with more work

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Writer. Intellectual. Bipolar. Views of Jeffrey Riley. : Playing around with Microsoft Paint

Writer. Intellectual. Bipolar. Views of Jeffrey Riley. : Playing around with Microsoft Paint

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Playing around with Microsoft Paint

A critique of American liberal thought

Growing up a Republican before realizing I'm much more of a Centrist, I've long pondered conservative American thought.  Based on the personal beliefs I was taught and experiences with Republican friends and family, it's been relatively easy to understand how personal bias colors how right wing people see the world.  Most of that comes from limited contact with anyone outside the tribe.  In American conservatives, that typically means being diversity free and, thus, not understanding of the experiences and motivations of people that are different; namely, other races (black, Hispanic, Asian, etc), sexualities (LGBT) and anything else not experienced by the exclusive American conservative (namely, very white) grouping.

The election of Donald Trump and the radicalization of the American Right has proven a disgusting, despicable revelation for me as I loathe everything at its root, namely the ferocious racism of its stupid, overwhelmingly white adherents and the subhuman talk radio shock jocks that give it life and sustenance.   This is how I never saw conservatives growing up.  I saw Ronald Reagan and the conservative ideological pursuit against things evil (whether you think the Soviet Union was evil or not is your opinion) and Reagan's endlessly inspiring, compassionate oratorical skills as being the epitome of all that was good with the world.  Conversely, Trump's childish, insulting, dimwitted, "insert a million more scathing realities" rhetoric, playing to the worst traits in the lowest common denominator has forced me as an educated man, like many other educated men like George Will, to disgustedly and, to a certain extent, forcibly detach from all things Trumpian.  In short, "American conservative thought" has become an oxymoron.  The intellectual ideology is gone in favor of the dipshitted ilk of grade school dropouts like Limbaugh and Hannity.   American conservative voters found their inherent stupidity while conservative spineless politicians keep allowing it to fester because a non-Democrat is in the White House.  

So I'm disgusted!  The party that I thought were the good guys are decidedly not. The people that I thought were about justice and principles are not.  So what is an American thinker to do?  For me, that means considering the other side.  I break from many on the new American Right because I very much believe in social justice.  That means justice FOR ALL.  As I will illustrate in a moment, liberals only believe in social justice for liberals but I'll get to that.  I want life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for everyone.  I admit that comes with caveats.  If I feel certain people are jerks, I'm not interested in them prospering.  It's not that I want these people to die but I don't want them to be successful, either, until they become better people.  I also have the animal instincts all human beings have.  In this case, I feel the tribal energies and pulls like everyone else but I choose not to succumb to them.  I want to be a better, broader human in a better, broader, more egalitarian world.  "Whiteness" used to provide me with great comfort and joy because it's what I knew and I didn't have to think about the uncomfortable realities of "different" people.  Truthfully, I could easily go back to being a very white, narrow minded right wing person but, as stated, I don't want that.  I'll also state that right wing people are not the inherently monstrous people non-understanding liberals make them out to be.  Right wing people very much love and care about their families.  However, as conservatives, that tends to be the only groups they care about.  I'll further comment on any other right wing views as I go along but I'd like to get to my critique of how I see American liberalism in 2018.  I have to preface this by saying this comes mostly from my observations of liberal culture and contacts with liberals on Twitter, YouTube or other forms of social media.  I have had many contacts and conversations of this kind so I feel I've gleaned a few things.

1.  Liberals are just as tribal as conservatives, though not in the same way.

Due to the indoctrination of various groups, American liberalism is a looser tribal confederation than the more homogeneous conservatives.  Liberals, in their attempts at beating the more racially centralized conservatives, learned some time ago that organizing and indoctrinating different ethnic, sexual and racial groups was their best option.  The organizing overwhelmingly comes from white educated liberals, those with education enough to have abstract views of right and wrong in America.  The marginalized groups (blacks, gays, etc) are primarily used to being marginalized.  That's their American experience.  They vote Democrat out of a feeling of necessity because of the perception (and frequent reality) that it's all they can do against people who hate them.  This makes for a conglomeration of diversity that isn't exactly unified yet isn't distinct (at least politically.)  The more educated, typically white liberals very much want a strong, inclusive group dynamic.  They're the ones who preach American ideals like "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses..."  They're the main tribal organizers because, as typically self-indulgent, self-righteous Americans, they KNOW in their hearts it's the correct way to go.

The problem is that modern American liberal thought is stuck in the past.  Listening to liberals today is like listening to a speaker from 1850.  To them, slavery and segregation essentially still exist and they're the ones how have to combat it.  This outdated thought is very dangerous to America because it ignored progress and teaches a form of learned hopelessness.  Thing are bad, always have been bad and always will be bad is the rhetoric.  America has made progress in racial matters.  Trump being elected doesn't change that.  However, the PERCEPTION that has accompanied the election of Trump, fueled by the "mainstream" media, had created the idea that we're just as racist a nation as we were 200 years ago and that is false.  Not only is it false, it's dangerously false because it stirs up potentially violent action in the name of falseness.  I'm not sure if Democrats at the top are using such rhetoric to keep themselves as unified as they can be or not.  I do think they all honestly believe we're as racist now as we were in 1819 and that is without question not the case.

2.  Liberal Americans are flaming hypocrites.

American liberals are in that sick, dark place where rhetoric and practice are near complete opposites.  Their preaching is in the typically American style of perfect self-indulgent self-righteousness that affects both sides.  "I'm right and you're wrong because I'm going to say all these wonderful things that you do and we don't."  For liberals, it was the idea of "When they go low, we go high."  After Trump's election, many Democrats went public with their disdain for this idea.  They lost an election to a HATED opponent and lost their marbles and principles at the same time.  American liberals tend to be driven more by their emotions than their logic.  When they get in a downward spiral, this can prove deadly because they don't reason their way out of it.  They don't catch their breath and think, "Okay.  Calm down.  I've got this."  They become easy proponents of what's happening now in the arena of rage and hate.  That's where American liberals are right now with Donald Trump and the US Presidency.  They're full of rage and hate on a daily basis.  Whether you consider it righteous or not, it's still very toxic and frightening.  The fake "counter balance" is their rhetoric of peace, love and understanding.  The reality is that they're movement is peace, love and understanding FOR SOME, which means whoever is in their group.  I've read and experienced several comments from LGBT people, for instance, that talk about how they're all about love in one breath then they spew as much hate as you could ever possibly read towards right wing people the next.  Apparently, "love" only means their group.  Have LGBT people faced hate and discrimination in American history?  Definitely.  However, claiming they're all about social love when they also spew social hate is hypocritical.  I don't mean to pick on the LGBT community.  I'm just giving an example as they're in the liberal tribe.  Liberals will also throw people under the bus (like mentally ill people) if it fits their agendas on issues like gun control.  Hey, I thought you guys were inclusive!  Just not towards crazies and white men, apparently (pardon the personal rant.)

3.  Liberals are not self-aware.

"Know thyself" and be humble in what you find are ideas lost on the American liberals of 2019.  Amazingly, they typically don't see their rather startling level of hypocrisy in attacking people not in their tribe.

More to come later.