1776-2020

When I was a teenager, I began writing a work of dystopian fiction. It took place in a future time when religious worship had been banned, and all white people, to atone for the sins of their forefathers, were required to befriend someone not of their race. Their friends could make any demands of them they wanted, and they weren't allowed to question it. It was all for "the good of the community."

I stopped writing it because I decided the premise was too paranoid and ridiculous. That was back in the early to mid-'80s.

Fast-forward to 2020, and that abandoned work is looking more like prophecy, with people banned from going to church, and guilt-ridden white people literally prostrating themselves for things they never did. Anyone who questions any of it is a bigot.

Of course, this kind of woke rage mob is nothing new. It's the same one that demanded you proclaim that women can have a penis and men can get pregnant, and if you didn't acquiesce, they'd make sure you were publicly shamed and would do anything they could to ensure you lost your job. You're not allowed to have a contrary opinion.

Now everything has just been jacked up, way up, as we try to erase history by destroying statues, Taliban-style. We're defacing monuments in the name of "justice." We're destroying our cities and disbanding our law enforcement. You can lose your job for not saying black lives matter. Books and movies are being banned. Social media censorship continues to ramp up for those who push back against the narrative. You can only believe what the Woke Mob says you can believe. And you must vocally profess your allegiance with the Woke Mob, because "silence is violence" (but apparently, burning down cities isn't violence).

It's all raw emotion. No logic. No reason. In a postmodern culture that has decided words no longer have inherent meaning, so that they can mean whatever you want them to, everything becomes an ideology. Facts and truth no longer matter. Only emotion-driven ideology. And you must submit to the party's ideology. You cannot have a differing point of view.

This is no different from what the Red Guards did under Mao. This is the kind of violent totalitarian intolerance Orwell warned us about in 1984. Those who forget history are indeed doomed to repeat it, it seems.

I said back in the '90s, when I was in college, how campus speech codes would create a slippery slope for freedom of expression. When I saw, firsthand, how Antifa tried to shut down a conference with threats of violence if the organizers didn't disinvite one of the speakers, I said caving in to terrorists would be a huge mistake.

And here we are, with Antifa having taken over a swath of downtown Seattle while the city's brain-dead mayor celebrates the illegal occupation as the beginning of a "summer of love." Yeah, the kind of "love" that compels speech and demands you capitulate on bended knee or suffer the consequences, Inquisition-style.

We've lost the culture war to a lawless totalitarian mob. We can't protest, but they can. They can burn down cities and get police departments disbanded. But if we peacefully protest, we're just selfish whiners, and probably dangerous right-wingers, who need to go back into lockdown and stop crying about things like losing our jobs, our freedom of movement, or even our right to go out without a mask on. The protests are for the Woke Mob, not for you worthless flyover deplorables. They get praise. If you act up, you get Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Bundy Ranch.

And there's no one pushing back. No Eisenhower sending in the National Guard. No Reagan or Obama to give an impassioned speech to unite and inspire people. No, we just have a little narcissistic bully who thinks leadership is writing a few mean tweets. If we had leaders who would act like grown-ups, stand up to the mob, and say NO, we wouldn't be in this situation. Even the strongest presidents would have their hands full in a time like this, but Trump is way in over his head, and it shows.

So let's face it. The America we knew, the America founded on liberty and justice, is gone. It's done. It doesn't even matter if Trump gets re-elected. The only difference it would make is how quickly our nation transforms from a one-time bastion of freedom and hope to a burned-out totalitarian woke hellhole under China-style dictatorial rule and forced re-education. It's not a question of if, but when. Because mobs are never appeased, and no one is stopping them, only caving in to them.

The best thing anyone can do is to act locally. Simplify your life. Try to make yourself as dependent on others as little as possible and as self-reliant as you can. Get to know your neighbors, because you may need them. And arm yourself before the Second Amendment is repealed -- and don't think it couldn't be. Your right to homeschool could vanish. Your right to choose whether to vaccinate could vanish. You could get your internet or your power and water shut off for expressing the wrong opinion. You could be placed under house arrest for disobeying. You could have your kids taken away. Any number of things you take for granted could well be gone in a very short matter of time.

America may cease to exist in the near future. If so, migrate if you can to a place that reflects your values. I am eternally grateful we got out of Washington when we did. I feel much more at home among Idahoans. I was raised in a conservative Midwestern home in a small town, after all, and I suppose to some extent you can't shake those early influences. Not that I'm a Republican by any stretch, but the Left lost me a long time ago as they decided I was a racist just for being born white and sexist just for being a white male. They don't see individuals, but groups. And so they judge you by the group you belong to. Of course that's racist, but you can't say that.

Identity politics is fatally flawed. It pits people against each other, rather than bringing good people together across lines of race and sex, based on character and integrity. Dr. King wanted to see a society where we were judged not by color but character. I want that too. But now I'm a bigot just because of how I was born. And this is the mindset that has taken over the nation. It's crept out from the college campuses as a fringe idea and has taken root in every major institution, from academia to the media to Corporate America to Silicon Valley.

There's no winning. All you can do is hunker down in place and work locally. If your state secedes in pursuit of preserving the values America was founded on, don't be afraid to let the idea of America go. Perhaps the only way to regain America is to start over and work from the ground up. Push the reset button.

At this point, it may well be our only chance.

The Lockdowns Are Over

For months, the media has shamed you and me into staying locked down in our own homes. Every headline was some version of "People Go Out and Live Their Lives Despite Coronavirus Lockdowns." It wasn't even news. It was propaganda designed to force people to conform. Want to go to church? Too bad. California's governor fought against your right to do so. Chicago's mayor blocked off a church parking lot. She also got a haircut when you weren't allowed to. Rules for thee, but not for me. That's how they roll.

Hang out on the beach? Get fined or arrested. Try to open up your business to feed your family? Get fined or arrested. Michigan's witch of a governor made sure of that -- all while her husband was caught having motored off to their vacation home. You peasants stay home. The rules don't apply to me.

Oh, but then the riots started. And the same leftist hypocrites who told you to stay home so you don't kill Grandma celebrated and cheered on the riots. Ol' Gretchen was out there arm in arm with the protestors, after demanding you stay home.

Apparently, C-19 isn't a threat anymore, at least not if you're setting fires, breaking windows, and stealing stuff from small-business owners who've already had to shut down their businesses for months.

Magically, just like that, the coronavirus is gone. Thanks, Antifa! For once, the terrorist lowlifes did something useful for the world.

Oh, the scolds in power will tell you differently. They'll tell you to riot 6 feet apart and set fires with your masks on. After all, they have priorities, and they'll tell you what they are. In NYC, as just one of so many insane examples, cops were patrolling the streets to make sure Jewish folks didn't congregate for prayer while the city was burning down.

Could the bullshit attempt to control people's lives be any more transparent at this point? If you're a law-abiding citizen just wanting to go back to work and church and do the things that make life enjoyable, you're a dangerous right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist. But if you're a thug burning down the city and assaulting innocent bystanders, you're a hero who'll have the full support of the same people who were shaming and threatening you for wanting to leave your house.

The lockdown is over, folks. Just go out and live your life. Go where you want. Open your businesses. If lowlifes can burn down cities, you sure as damn well can go back to work. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Defy anyone who tries to shut you down or send you home. They have nothing but contempt for you, and their hypocrisy stinks to high heaven. Don't let them win.

Don't let anyone bully you into espousing their point of view, either. If the batshit social-justice left gets its way, they'll create Maoist re-education camps until everyone recants on bended knee (literally). Don't let them guilt you into calling yourself privileged or a racist.

And before anyone gives me crap, you can go back through this blog and see that I've been writing for years about the militarization and unaccountability of the police. But the solution isn't to disband the police. The solution is to hold them accountable to all of us, to make them serve us, to get trigger-happy hotheads and small-dicked bullies on a power trip out of the police force. And, most of all, to get them to be defenders of law and order that we can look up to, not militarized agents of an out-of-control police state that we all have to fear every time we get pulled over.

Look, the numbers are in. C-19 has over a 99% survival rate. It's not the plague and never was. It was a threat to the elderly and immuno-compromised. The rest of us were fine to go about living our ordinary lives. The lockdowns were never necessary, just like I said from the beginning. The media whipped everyone into a panic, the public demanded something be done, and governors and mayors did something -- most of them far too much. Some of them seem to be enjoying their power trips a little bit too much. And with these riots, they've laid bare their hypocrisy and contempt for all to see.

Well, it's time to give them a good poke in the eye and defy them to send us all home. We outnumber them. We must never forget that.

No, We're Not All in This Together

As Daddy Governor starts the process of ungrounding all of Idaho, public Masses were allowed to resume in Idaho over the weekend. I can just imagine what a hoot of paranoias that must have looked like. All I know is that things are pretty much as they were at the time our coward of a bishop ended public Masses: no holy water fonts, no shared communion chalice, communion bread in the hand only, no sign of peace, no congregating before or after Mass. Now there's the added bonus of no missalettes in the pews, and, of course, the magical 72-inch barrier. I'd love to see how the ushers handle that. "Excuse me, sir. My tape measure shows that you need to move three and a half inches to your left. Jesus won't protect you from the covid unless you maintain the proper distance."

And you can wear masks to Mass! Masks that do absolutely nothing! I'm half-tempted to go to church just to walk in wearing a complete medieval plague outfit and see what happens. People would probably thank me for my diligence and not even register the mockery.

I miss having a regular spiritual practice, but it's obvious to me now that my churchgoing was more about holding on to something familiar and comforting from my past. I have no intention of falling back into the steaming pile that is the institutional church that runs in fear at the first sign of every small, imaginary danger.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Jesus was a pretty cool guy, and Mary as a symbol of the sacred feminine is something that still holds great appeal to me. But I don't need church to recognize either thing. The Sermon on the Mount is still a great ethical treatise, even though 99% of humanity will forever be utterly incapable of living out its edicts. And Mary is Mary in all her forms. Veneration for her developed in the first place as she filled the need for goddess worship in places that had it before the Christian missionaries showed up.

And anyway, Christianity lost its purpose as speaking truth to power once Constantine appropriated the whole thing for the empire. It had a good 300-year run, but once Christianity got in bed with the state, it became a tool of oppression and control for those in power, and it remains so even to this day. Sure, it still serves a purpose for superstitious fanatics who need something to blame their bad behavior on and think that saying a one-time prayer gives them a get-out-of-hell-free card even while they willingly continue in their bad behavior.

Plus, it's good for making sure uppity women know their place. Need to subjugate a woman? Haul out one of the many misogynistic passages from Paul, who was responsible for putting together the whole "risen savior" song and dance in the first place by mixing Hellenistic myths with Jewish messianic prophecy. Why Paul did it, we may never know. Maybe he was just an attention whore. Or maybe he was as certifiably nuts as his "vision" on the road to Damascus would make him seem. Either way, the manner in which he took a great ethical teacher and transformed him into God in human flesh has to be one of the most fantastic con jobs in history -- one that has prevailed for 2,000 years and served, for better or worse, as the foundation of Western civilization.

One thing that's definitely changed for me, as the institutional church has revealed its true colors, is my naive attachment to "good." Western civilization, after all, is rooted in the dualistic idea of good versus evil, and who would want to "side" with evil? Yet what is "evil," other than a scare word employed to keep people in line and obedient? As institutional religion declines in the West, the virtue-signaling social-justice warriors are taking over the crusade for "the good," the only problem being that their idea of "the good" sucks. It means "staying home and saving lives" and embracing the "new normal" of 24/7 health surveillance, masks and gloves, tyrannical leaders and cops, and Soviet-style snitching neighbors. Disagree with the lockdown freakout, and you're a Nazi who wants old people to die.

This is their stock in trade. If you hold a different opinion, you're not just an opponent. You're an "evil" degenerate who needs to be controlled or eliminated. This is the religious-crusader mindset that gives us Antifa. It's the mindset that demands people lose their livelihoods and social standing if you dare to point out that there are only two sexes, and that no amount of surgeries, clothing choices, pronoun abuses, or wishful thinking can ever change that.

In short, the religious impulse lives on, just with new holy words and symbols, dogmas, sins, and heresies. Same crap, different players.

I figure my wife was right all along in her embrace of the Taoist way. In Taoism, the notion of yin and yang is not an expression of opposing forces; it's a recognition that light and dark forces exist -- but rather than opposing each other as we think of in the West, they define and complete each other, such that there can be no light without darkness, no health without sickness, no life without death, no "good" without "evil." They are complementary parts of a whole. And if you live your life constantly pursuing one half of the whole while trying to evade the other, you're never going to be happy.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you embrace "evil," but rather simply acknowledge that it exists, and that the darkness has its own powers that allow the powers of light and "good" to also exist. They say it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. But why not simply acknowledge that light and dark exist and are what they are?

I've been reading books and treatises by people who embrace so-called left-hand paths, praising the sinister powers that lurk in the shadows. Yet in their battle against the "light" and the "good," they just become the shortsighted mirror image of what they claim to oppose. Satanists especially seem rather childish about their whole approach to spirituality. It seems a lot of them just want to be edgy by taking existing religious forms and turning them on their head, as if their only purpose is to shock "light side" religionists.

At a distance, you'd think they were just atheists being edgy, trying to get a rise out of people. But then you learn that one of the goals of Satanism is to turn yourself into a god, and you realize that they're just feeding the universal human religious impulse in a different way, by worshiping the ego instead of an invisible being in the sky.

You can easily see this, again, in the runaway narcissism of a movement that thinks humans can re-create themselves in their own image, any way they please. They are now God. They are the ones who decide whether they are created male, female, both, neither, or something else. Never mind those pesky genitals and chromosomes you were born with. Fantasy is truth. Scientific reality is Hitler. Hell, I could identify as a 30-year old in perfect health, but it wouldn't change the fact that I'm actually a middle-aged dude with too many chronic health problems to count. Fantasy is nice, but it doesn't change reality. I could be a fragile snowflake and threaten to end anyone who tells me I'm not a "transhealthy" person. But that would say more about my delusions than it would about anyone's criticism of the same.

And therein lies the whole problem with this society. In a world where everything is a postmodern joke and no one has any core identity or beliefs to cling onto, since nothing (supposedly) has any inherent meaning or value, people become easily led around by the nose. We're manipulated into being terrified of everything -- just look at all the safe spaces and trigger warnings that dominate our world. We've become a society of overgrown children who in their confusion and fear look to authority figures to either tell them what to do or to punish the bad people who hold a different point of view. Hence the worldwide panic over a bug no worse than the flu, and the subculture of snitches to rat out people who aren't doing what they're told and thus "making everyone die."

We live in a world that's afraid of the dark, where the most important thing in life has become not dying, even if that means locking yourself in your house forever. Forget quality of life. Forget freedom of movement. We have to be safe. That's how you get a world of germophobes that willingly commits economic suicide, creates magical 72-inch barriers around people, wears useless masks as security blankets, and demands that everyone stay home because you have to be as terrified as they are.

This kind of reaction could only happen in a cushy society completely cut off from the naked reality that we are all going to die. We have forgotten, amidst our first-world comforts and distractions, that we are nothing more than civilized animals who will never overcome our basest needs and instincts. We're herd animals who don't want to get kicked out of the tribe, and when our fight-or-flight reptilian brains override our logical thought processes, we cower and we conform. But not only do we conform; we demand that everyone else conform as well. Because our wise lords and chiefs and rulers -- a.k.a. the media and our elected leaders -- wouldn't lie to us. They know best. That's why they're wise lords and chiefs and rulers.

So it's not even so much that people are stupid -- though most people undeniably are. It's more that our primitive brains are wired this way, to react to fear by conforming to the illusion of safety that the herd provides, and to lash out at those who think differently. And so now that the media, in its thirst for ratings, has whipped everyone into a panic, and now that our elected leaders felt compelled to respond to the public cry to "do something," no one wants to back down out of fear -- and it's always fear -- of either being shown that the overreaction was never necessary, or that cases of Cooties-19 will flare up again and "kill us all." Couple that with the far-left wannabe Stalins who are loving the control they have and won't be willing to give it up, and right now it looks like we're pretty good and fucked.

No one wants to back down. The fear-ridden masses don't. The power-drunk Gretchen Whitmers of the world don't. And those who hate Trump sure don't -- because believe me, they're getting a lot of mileage out of turning a virus into a political football. So I have no idea how we get out of this mess -- other than wait for the media to find something else to obsess over, or until Trump gets bounced out of office, or we have 24/7 health surveillance, or something.

Meanwhile, we barrel head-on toward a global economic depression and a potential famine as food growers, unable to distribute their food because massive corporate conglomerates control where it goes -- meaning it can't be redirected to where it's needed, like to makers of grocery brands instead of foodservice companies that supply restaurants -- end up destroying tons and tons of food.

All I know is that we are most certainly not "all in this together." Don't you dare speak for me.

From a spiritual point of view, it's unfortunate that, despite its faults, Christianity is no longer the binding force that gave society a set of core values it could cling on to in times of trouble. With that core quickly eroding away, we're all left to find out own core values. And no society can hold together when it has nothing in common to embrace. That's why the innate human religious impulse is turning wokeness into a new religion, to fill that God-shaped hole that will apparently always be there.

I think that's also why Wicca seems to hold an appeal for so many people. A made-up, context-free modern religion, based on a vague, pagan-flavored sense of complementary light/dark, female/male energies, that has little if any basis in the reality of the way pagans actually would have worshiped in their everyday lives. Little wonder it appeals to young kids on a goth kick. You have a ready-made religion that lets you feel cooler than your parents and their "backward" religions. In so many ways, it fits perfectly in a rootless society where people are desperate for something to hang on to so they can "belong" to something.

As for me, I still admire the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, but I'm not naive enough to believe that the world will ever reflect its values. People are too selfish, too stupid, too violent, too tribal-minded. Our current global hysteria has proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt. It's easy as pie to control entire populations, especially ones afraid of the dark, and get them to abandon everything they ever claimed to stand for. That seemingly goes for their religious institutions as well. The institutions run and hide faster than the people in the pews do. They're an absolute joke. "Fear not," the Bible repeatedly says? Yeah, right.

I don't know where that leaves me. I do know that Bronze Age myths that worked on more superstitious minds are clearly just that -- myths, intended to give us purpose and make us feel good about our place in the universe. But now that we know our planet is a tiny speck of sand in an incomprehensibly vast universe, it's folly to think that we ever held any place of importance within it. Our ego tells us we do. Our ego tells us God put on skin and came down to save this one inconsequential little planet. When you think your planet sits at the center of the universe, it's easy to think that. When you know better, you see it as the comforting lie that it is.

Do gods exist? Well, I think something exists beyond our ability to comprehend. I've had brushes with the supernatural that tell me there's more beyond this life. And I most definitely think that the universe is full of male and female energies, and that it's up to us to harness and balance those energies. Being good little boys and girls won't achieve that balance -- that only skews us in the "light" direction of yin and yang. Being an evil narcissist or an edgy "Satanist" won't get you there, either -- that only skews us in the "dark" direction of yin and yang.

If we're honest, we have to admit that eventually the darkness will win -- that the sun will swallow up the earth and eventually burn out, that black holes will devour stars and galaxies, that the universe will eventually die, and that all will be plunged into eternal blackness. The left-hand, "dark side" religionists have that one right. Even the Buddha understood that nothing is eternal.

And I think that's why the symbol of the eclipse has resonated with me lately. The symbol was popular among medieval alchemists to represent the needed change in our lives before we could purify ourselves -- in short, you have to walk through darkness before you can see the light. But in another sense, the eclipse is a union of male (sun) and female (moon) energies, yet the feminine holds prominence by plunging light into darkness and reminding us that while the universe came out of the great void, and we all came to be in the darkness of the womb, so one day we will return the the blackness of death, the grave, and the end of all things.

The alchemists' symbol for ether, the quintessence or spiritual energy that pervades the universe, likewise combines the triangular symbols for fire and water, which also correlate to male and female -- and here again, the "female" of cooling water overlaps the "male" of hot fire. The feminine always predominates in its eternal dance with the male.

Still, none of this means we shouldn't strive for a balance of light and dark, yin and yang, while the reality that we live in still exists. Our times would try to tell us that you can find balance through the union of two like energies -- two male or two female -- but nature tells us otherwise, and the celebration of that which opposes nature is really just another symptom of how messed up our society is. It's not morally wrong, in an upright Christian church-lady sense, just in the obvious sense that male and female bodies have evolved to fit together, for the purpose of procreating the species. But again, stating the obvious in today's world makes you a raging bigot. Heck, my kiddo loves a cartoon whose entire purpose seems to be the normalization of transgenderism and lesbianism for kids, so no one is safe from the cultural propaganda anymore, not even those we used to protect from such things. (Just ask any library sponsoring a Drag Queen Story Hour.) I mean, if you're an adult, do what you want, but leave kids out of it, don't expect me to pat you on the back or to use your made-up pronouns, and also realize when your life is out of balance. We're all out of balance in one way or another, and it's good to be aware of our imbalances.

In any event, since I'm attracted to female goddess "energy," I'm gravitating toward finding my own personal yin and yang by embracing two deities who have appealed to me at times over the years -- Brigid, the nurturing and healing Celtic goddess, and Hekate, the goddess who leads us through the dark times of our lives. I can't say that they're "real" goddesses as much as specific aspects of feminine energy, as seen through the eyes of ancient cultures -- but even if I'm wrong, I still think they give our minds something to focus on as we try to align ourselves with the energies they represent. And that in itself can help us get to a better place in our lives. After all, the point is not to follow certain prescribed rules and behaviors to appease the gods, but to contemplate what they and the greater universe teach us as we strive to achieve balance in our lives.

The key to finding balance, I think, is to follow the example of the flow of nature. Again, my wife was right -- Taoism teaches us this very fact. Nature is neither good nor bad. When an earthquake or tornado strikes and kills people, nature isn't being mean or evil. The gods aren't punishing us. Nature simply is what it is. Bears eat baby fawns struggling to break away and survive -- not because the bear is evil, but because it's hungry. It takes humans and their supposedly advanced and intelligent brains to commit truly sadistic and evil acts. Nature doesn't do that. Only we do.

But one thing we can learn from nature is that ignorance will kill us. If anything should separate us from "lower" life forms, it should be the ability to use our rational minds to discern fact from fiction and stop running around in constant fear of everything. Neither ignorance nor fear will extend your life for a single second. Nor will they inoculate you from any virus. Knowledge, on the other hand, might just give you a fighting chance. Some fluffy-bunny tree-hugging pagan might say she loves nature, but she'll end up as some wild animal's meal, dying as she clutches her incense and crystals, if she's convinced that nature is all pretty sunrises and rainbows and chirping baby birds. But if she goes out camping with a bow or a shotgun, she just might have a fighting chance.

Bottom line: You just have to use your head. And far too few people do.

Malo Periculosam, Libertatem Quam Quietam Servitutem

Abner! There are people outside! Congregating!
Having fun! They're not wearing masks!
And they're not six feet apart! Do they want people to die?
Call the police!

It surprises me that even here in conservative rural Idaho, people are giving in to the hysteria. At the local Walmart, all the employees are wearing masks and gloves, and benches have been removed so that people -- apparently even family members that live together -- are forced to "social distance." Other stores are putting up plastic sheets and plexiglass barriers and using masking tape to mark the magical 72-inch barrier on the floors with an X. One store in our town that recently reopened won't let you enter without a mask (which, as a reminder, does nothing if it's not an N-95) and gloves. A little playground the next town over is taped off, with a notice posted outlining the governor's C-19 orders -- one of which says that outside recreation near your home is encouraged.

A few heroic local businesses have defied the orders and remained open. I won't name them, because I'm not going to give the Stasi snitches any ammunition.

Those business owners are heroic because they thought for themselves. They didn't let their fear-driven lizard brains hijack their critical thinking process. They didn't choose the economic suicide that our authoritarian leaders wanted to force them into.

And now those of us who were skeptical of this massive overreach all along are being proved right. With tests rolling out in New York, we're finding that millions have C-19 antibodies, which means that millions had the disease with no symptoms. That means the vast majority of people who get the virus recover from it completely or never get sick at all. That also means the mortality rate will drop dramatically.

The sky was never falling. This was never the black plague -- just another seasonal viral outbreak no worse than the flu. None of the draconian shutdowns and house arrests were ever necessary. If anything, they made the situation worse by slowing the spread of herd immunity.

Moreover, we continue to see that a drug cocktail containing hydroxychloroquine works. The media has only downplayed and demonized it because Donald Trump suggested it as a potential treatment. The New York Times and other "respected" media outlets went out of their way to find people who suffered severe side effects (this just in -- all drugs have side effects) when they just as easily could have examined why the FDA was approving the drug's use on an experimental basis for hospitalized patients. They went out of their way to speculate that Trump was making loads of money from a stock holding by pushing the drug, when the tiniest bit of research would have shown (1) that Trump held a stock indirectly through a fund valued at a grand total of $1,500 or less, and (2) that the drug is a generic that's been around for decades, which means there's virtually no money to be made from it.

This is the mindset of those with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They'd rather politicize a virus than let people get better. These are people who, if Trump told them breathing is good for you, would hold their breath until they pass out. That is the utter spiteful childishness we're dealing with here.

And we know that the numbers have been inflated, to the point that almost any death could be attributed to C-19. The vast majority of the dead have been elderly and had co-morbidities.

But if you tell people any of this, they treat you like you're Satan. And that's probably because they don't want to be made to feel like a fool for having panicked in the first place.

But then there are the safety Nazis who would cower in fear no matter what you told them, and all the Gladys Kravitzes of the world who peer out their window just looking for a neighbor to snitch on. These are the people making 2020 look like a rerun of 2001. Better safe than sorry, they said back then when the Patriot Act was enacted, "Homeland" Security was created, and the TSA was put in place to molest children in wheelchairs and old people with prosthetic limbs. This is the price we have to pay to be safe. Do you want the terrorists to kill us? Even if it saves one life, it's worth it.  

Home of the brave, my ass.

The only thing that's changed between 2001 and 2020 is what the lizard-brains use for their emotional blackmail. Now the same old baby boomers that so many millennials wanted dead are the reason we have to remain locked down in our homes. The same Grandma you couldn't be bothered to call three months ago is now your justification for making everyone on the planet a prisoner over a bug that's not even going to harm most people. If it saves one elderly person, it's worth it. Do you want them all to die?

Well, here's the thing. People die every day. More people die of heart disease and cancer than they do C-19. More people have died from the common flu than from C-19. Are you going to shut down the planet over the flu? Are you going to go out in your hazmat suit every time a bug is going around?

I admit, I already knew the overwhelming majority of people were idiotic sheep who do what TV and their leaders tell them to do. It was only an annoyance before. Now they've destroyed the economy and handed over our freedoms that we're not likely to ever get back. When you have to get your temperature scanned every time you enter a public place, it's the sheeple who will say it's for the good of everyone. When the government can track your every move to see if you've come in contact with an infected person and then put you in an involuntary quarantine, it's the sheeple who will say do you want people to die? When vaccines become mandatory, under penalty of house arrest, fines, or imprisonment, it's the sheeple who will say do you want to get everyone sick? And don't think it won't happen, because this is exactly how we ended up with the Patriot Act, "Homeland" Security, and the TSA. All because a bunch of terrified sheep were propagandized into accepting encroachments on their liberties for the sake of safety.

Well, a wise man a few centuries ago had something to say about that mindset.

America was not founded by a bunch of terrified sheep. It was founded by people who preferred the inherent unknown dangers of liberty over the slavery of guaranteed security. As Thomas Jefferson put it:

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

From people swarming to the beaches to pastors holding church services to organized protests aimed at overreaching elected leaders, Americans are beginning to push back against the lockdowns -- and that's a good thing. Notice, though, that in every story that deals with those pushing back against the lockdowns, we're reminded that they're doing so "despite coronavirus concerns." Or the media will point out that the protesters are being called "morons" and "covidiots," which is your cue to do the same. Because if you're no longer scared out of your wits, the media's narrative can no longer control you. Think about it. The media could just as well frame these articles by pointing out that some are thankful for the pushback. It could serve as an opportunity to have a discussion about how these lockdowns have gone way too far. But no. That's not part of the agenda. The agenda is to keep you afraid, to point fingers at the current administration, and to get you to support petty, power-tripping tyrants who dump tons of sand in a skate park to stop kids from having fun, or who ban the sale of seeds (because seeds carry Cooties-19?). Government knows best. Don't you dare think for yourself.

Rebellion against tyranny is the spirit that created America. So you can go out and live your life and accept the risks that come with living that life, or you can hide inside your house forever and demand that others do the same because you're afraid, all while you repeat your mantra of what about Grandma? to try to shame others into compliance.

We all have a choice to make. Which will it be?

The Easter That Wasn't

You can really tell a lot about a society by what it considers "essential." Like how liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries are considered essential businesses and are allowed to remain open -- while churches are shut down as tight as a drum. Heck, even abortion clinics remain open. But your local church? Forget about it.

One good thing about our current global psychosis is that it's really showing what people and institutions are made of. When bishops were shutting down churches before the lockdowns even came into place, they were telling their flocks loud and clear, "We don't need you." Oh, sure, you can watch the priests and their servers give each other communion every day on some webcast, but you can't come to church and have it yourself.

You can go buy vodka and weed, but you can't have the Body and Blood of Christ.

You can crowd into a supermarket, where everybody has touched everything, but you can't go into a church that almost by definition is going to be more sanitary than the local Walmart.

Nor can you go to confession because of the magical six-foot barrier.

Some bishops are even denying priests the ability to give dying people last rites. And when local and state governments ban priests from doing so, the bishops never push back.

The bishops haven't pushed back against anything. They could argue that church is essential for the salvation of souls, or even just for offering people comfort and hope in a time of crisis. They could do all that. Instead, they lock down their churches, deny the sacraments, and tell their priests to avoid meeting with anyone.

It's like they never believed anything they said, in countless sermons and books and talks over the centuries. Because if they did, they would have fought tooth and nail to keep themselves available to the people they serve. They didn't. They folded like a house of cards as they told people to stay away. And now, practically every Catholic church in the world will be shut down and empty during Easter, the most important celebration on the Christian calendar.

One of the most unfortunately humorous things I've seen during this mess is a YouTube video with a Catholic priest responding to people despondent that they can't get to confession. His reply was that you can go directly to God with your confession and receive forgiveness. This is exactly what Protestants have been saying for 500 years. He admitted that priests, and by extension the church, aren't necessary.

Well, plenty of us will remember that. We'll remember how easily we were locked out and abandoned by our "shepherds," with no attempt to even try to welcome the faithful in for Easter celebrations.

No one anywhere in the church is pushing back against the police roadblocks that were already being set up last week so people wouldn't dare go to an Easter celebration. No one anywhere in the church is saying it's wrong to tell people who want to celebrate Easter that you need to stay home or be arrested. No one. Instead, our "shepherds" meekly go along with whatever the political tyrants in charge tell them to do -- even in the face of authoritarian fascists like Kentucky's Democratic governor, who, being so drunk on power that he mandated ankle bracelets for noncompliant people infected with the virus, is now ordering the police to photograph the license plates of any cars gathered for Easter services -- and then serve them with a 14-day house arrest at their homes.

The planet has been turned into a prison ostensibly for our physical well-being. Well, what about our spiritual well-being? That's what our priests and bishops are supposed to be concerned with, not with following what our secular leaders do. They're supposed to be in this world but not of this world. They're supposed to be the front-line medics in the field hospitals for our souls. Instead, they just parrot secular blather about social distancing and "flattening the curve."

So why even bother being a clergyman if you sound and act no differently from an elected bureaucrat? Why bother even having a church if you shut people out when they want and need you the most?

One thing's for sure: We now know that when the going gets tough, the church will abandon you faster than the disciples abandoned Christ after his arrest. Then as now, saving their own hides and cowering in fear won out over remaining faithful to the end.

I almost left the church after the last round of abuse stories made headlines. I gave the church the benefit of the doubt. No more. I will never darken the doorstep of a church again. Fool me once, and all that.

At first, realizing my return to the church was over made me sad. After all, my family was going to church with me, I enjoyed the ritual and familiarity of the Mass, and my daughter was on track to be baptized and receive her first communion. Her baptism, in fact, would have been this weekend.

But now I can also see how I let the allure of the familiar draw me in. The Mass was a mainstay of my life growing up. Coming back to it was like finding an old security blanket.

Eventually, though, you have to give up the security blanket and grow up. You have to put away childish things, to use Paul's words against him.

So for me, all this has been something of a blessing in disguise. I tried to believe. I tried to rationalize the dogmas and doctrines. But I just can't fake it, and I don't think I was ever very good at faking it.

That has allowed me to reflect on what I really wanted out of my spiritual life. I was focused on the Sermon on the Mount and the Sacred Feminine, and I think my focus on the former just left me angry that so much of the world -- and in particular Christians who should know better -- couldn't see the wisdom in the teachings. My focus on the latter, meanwhile, had waned.

I was prepared to chuck it all in the trash. But I'm not an atheist. I've been down that road, and it never felt right. I've always believed in some kind of higher creative power. In particular, uniting the creation of the world with the feminine has always been simple for me. The Tao, after all, is the Great Mother, the grand cosmic womb from which all life arises. And we see that same creating, nurturing, and sustaining power manifested in every woman. For life to begin, the male has to enter her and give her a seed to plant. For new life to be born, it must emerge from her nourishing womb. The feminine is the gateway for all life. How could we not revere it?

Thinking about all that led me back to where I'd left off with my focus on the Goddess, before I found my way back to the institutional church. So I resumed my former journey by going back to the East, where I began by examining Shaktism and the possibility of yoni worship and tantra. That, in turn, led to a rediscovery of esoteric spiritual paths, such as Gnosticism, and into previously unexplored areas, such as spiritual alchemy. The deeper I went, the more I saw the dots connecting between things like astrology, tarot, Freemasonry, Hermeticism, Grail lore, the Rosicrucians, Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, druidry, Kabbalah, and more.

And all of that ended up revealing a path back toward esoteric Christianity, especially with regard to how the alchemists weaved Christian symbolism into their complex writings and illustrations, while overlaying them with concepts of the union of male and female, in the form of sun and moon -- shades of pagan imagery and the yin-yang of Taoism -- to promote an inner change and a union of the human and the divine that's not all that dissimilar from the Orthodox concept of theosis and the musings of the Christian mystics, like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Hildegard of Bingen.

I have lots of reading to do now, as I delve deeper and try to synthesize these views into something workable. Happily, they all leave room for the Sacred Feminine, and for me, the image of Mary as the feminine archetype, the nurturing and protective mother, still has room to exist there.

However, the image of the Black Madonna now holds some intrigue as well, in terms of how she reflects the darkness of the primordial universe, the black soil of the earth, and the darkness within ourselves that she can help us root out. The church's sanitized Mary has her place, but so does the dark Mary, the one who was present as Tao or Sophia at the creation, the one who roots us in Mother Earth, and the one who, like Hecate and the other dark forms of the Goddess, sometimes gives us tough love to help us wade through our own crap so we can heal.

And I think that's the major difference so far. Instead of being focused on ethical teachings that I expect everyone else to live by, this path focuses on getting my own house in order first. Which, in the end, ought to be far more healthy. After all, our current global psychosis only serves to remind me of my contempt for 99% of human beings and their utter stupidity. Why would I ever expect them to follow a way that would better the world in the first place? That's just setting myself up for disappointment and failure.

There's no reward -- secular or spiritual -- for being a good boy anyway, nor is there any deity that's going to act like a genie and wipe away our messes for us. Any deity worth her salt will make us clean our messes up ourselves. The deities may offer us moral support and guide us, but they're going to leave the dirty work to us. That's their job.

One might argue that a loving god wouldn't do that to us, letting us twist in the wind in times of need. But that's really just a corner that Judeo-Christian theologians have painted themselves into as they try to reconcile "God is love" with human suffering and the tyrannical God of the Old Testament. Other deities carry around no such weight. They could help, but no one expects them to, because everyone knows they're just as capricious as most humans. They might guide us if they feel like it or we flatter them enough, but in the end they're not to be relied on.

And there's something comforting about that. It's certainly less disappointing than pinning your hopes on a supposedly benevolent "ask and you shall receive" God who then ignores you in your time of need. Hmmm, just like the priests and bishops of today's church.

And so this is the path I'll embark on. Call it mysticism. Call it the occult. I just call it a path toward personal healing and transformation, so that I can ultimately be a better person for those in my orbit. The rest of the world can take a flying leap.

On this holiday when we celebrate rebirth, new life, and new beginnings, I say farewell to the institutional church, and hello to this new/old path. May it be a fruitful adventure. 

What Are You Afraid Of?

Must I fear what others fear?
What nonsense!
~ Lao-tzu, 2,500 years ago

In this time of mass psychosis, where we've handed over our freedoms to power-hungry tyrants more than willing to take what we're giving, ask yourself one basic question.

What am I afraid of?

Are you afraid of catching a bug that most people will completely recover from? That will give most people mild symptoms at worst? That won't even kill as many people as the annual flu?

Do you worry as much about getting the flu? Or getting in a car crash? Or dying of heart disease or cancer? Because you have a much better chance of having any of those things happen to you.

Are you willing to risk giving up your freedom of movement and association forever, because someone told you to be afraid of a bug?

Are you going to snitch out your neighbor because he's not obeying and conforming like you are? Does his refusal to conform make you uncomfortable about your own lack of reflection and your submission to peer pressure?

Are you OK with curfews? (Not like the virus works on a time schedule.)

Are you OK with arresting a father and daughter playing tee-ball in an empty park (which actually happened in Colorado)?

Are you OK with politicians telling you where you can go and what you can do, what stores are allowed to be open, and what you can and can't buy when you get there?

Are you OK that in some communities you can now be fined and imprisoned for not wearing a mask outdoors (even though non-surgical masks do nothing to protect you from the virus)?

Are you OK with killing the global economy to stop a bug? With putting millions out of work? Is it worth it?

Do you realize that hiding in your house will only prolong this madness, because it makes it far more likely that infections will spike again since we'll have established no herd immunity against the virus?

Do you realize that there's nothing magical about six feet? That a virus can travel farther than that, and that it can survive on surfaces other people touch at the grocery store?

Do you realize that the number of dead worldwide is still a vanishingly small fraction of a percent?

Are you tired of living in a media-induced panic? One that elected leaders who love power are all too happy to cash in on?

Do you realize you are being played? Manipulated? Controlled?

When are you going to stop? What will it take?

"But people are dying!"

Of course they are. People die every day. And they die in far greater numbers of other incidents and diseases than they do from C-19.

As a reminder, here's where things stand today:

0.001%: The number of C-19 deaths worldwide. One one-thousandth of one percent of the world population.

0.006%: The number of C-19 deaths in the United States. Six one-thousandths of one percent of the U.S. population.

That's what you're terrified of. That's what you're Covid-shaming people for when they dare to go about their lives. That's what you're handing over your freedoms and your economic security for.

You've been propagandized into thinking that if you let life go on as normal, everyone will die. They won't. It's a respiratory virus with a 95%-plus recovery rate. It's not the black plague. You let the media tell you every day about new cases and more deaths. You've let them condition you into seeing those who question the insanity as dangerous, reckless, irresponsible "Covidiots" who want to kill everyone. You don't stop to think that maybe they've taken the time to think through the official narrative and have found it lacking, rather than obeying like mindless sheep.

Every time you hear about someone going out and actually living life, and your response is "Do they want everyone to die?" -- then you can be sure you're being controlled by others telling you what to think. If you have a "Stay Home Save Lives" motto on your Facebook profile, or you go out of your way to announce that you're practicing "social distancing" and scolding anyone who doesn't, then  congratulations -- you're a good, obedient little citizen who's dutifully fallen in line and doing what you've been told to do, with a little virtue-signaling thrown in for good measure so that the herd will pat you on the back for conforming, just like they have.

And if the solution to what terrifies everyone is to turn the world into a giant prison, then is the "cure" really worth it? If your fear has you handing over your freedoms, then what have you gained? You may have avoided catching a bug, but at what cost to your liberties and your quality of life? Is avoiding a bug really worth it if it means 24/7 tracking of your movements for the rest of your life, mandatory vaccinations, or being put under house arrest every time you have a sniffle? Is your safety, your fear of death, really worth the trade-off?

Our lives will never go back to the way they were, all because terrified humans allowed politicians drunk on power to prey on their fears.

One good thing about a situation like this is that you really get to see what people are made of. You can see how most people are truly brainwashed sheep, easy as pie to control when you fill them with fear. And the rest of us suffer for it. As my wife likes to say, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Look, I know all about fear. I've always been an anxious person. A lot of it stems from early childhood trauma. Everybody's afraid of something. My point is, in this current environment, the thing to fear is not some bug that won't kill most of the people it infects, but rather the people fanning the fear, and the citizens who are willingly letting the government turn us into a Soviet police state out of that same fear.

The herd mentality, the pressure to conform, the unthinking reflection -- these are the things to guard against. Not a bug that will run its course, as all bugs do.

Must you fear what others fear?

What nonsense.

Groupthink Always Wins

Panic. Obey. Conform.

That's the pattern that has emerged out of our global mass psychosis. "Social distancing" and "flatten the curve" have become the equivalent of religious mantras. When masked consumers lean back while they pass you in the aisle and others stand halfway back the store from you in the checkout line, they're doing what they've been told, like good, obedient dogs, to maintain the magical 72-inch barrier around other human beings that will protect them from catching the New Black Plague.

Groupthink has one again prevailed, just like it always does.

Asch and Milgram would never have needed to run lab experiments if they were alive today. All they'd need to do is look around the entire planet to see how easily conditioned, easily propagandized, and easily controlled the overwhelming majority of human beings are. In no time during my life has that been more evident than now. Authority figures in the media whip the masses into a panic, so the masses turn to authority figures in the government to tell them what to do and how to act. Shut down your mom-and-pop and commit economic suicide, because we have to flatten the curve. Maintain a magical 72-inch barrier around yourself and all other human beings, because social distancing will remind all viruses that they aren't allowed to cross that magical barrier. Sure, the virus might be on the door handle you touched when you walked in the store, or on all the merchandise other human beings handled before you did, but that's OK, because the magical 72-inch barrier will save you. Five-foot-eleven? Nope, the virus knows you're too close. Step one more inch away and the force field will be activated. The woman on TV and the man from the government said so.

Better yet, let's just lock people in their houses and let unemployment skyrocket, while we create mass anxiety as human beings -- social animals that they are -- are reprogrammed to remember that merely touching other human beings will kill us all. Don't give a hug or a handshake, you social deviant. Do you want to kill Grandma?

Remember that authority figures always have your best interests in mind. They wouldn't lie to you. They wouldn't pump you daily with fear over numbers of new cases and deaths just to get you to obey them. They don't want you to beg them to please lock you up, take away your freedom of movement, in fact take away all your liberties, so you can be protected from a mutation of a virus that goes around every year, that most people will completely recover from, and that so far has killed 0.002% of the U.S. population and 0.0007% of the world population, while the flu has killed exponentially more.

Nope. Nothing to see here. Move along and "stay home, save lives." And if we see you outside your house, we'll snitch you out to the cops and make sure you're fined or jailed. Because that's how you virtue-signal like a good, compliant citizen in a time of mass hysteria.

Panic. Obey. Conform. Lather, rinse, repeat.