Category: American wilderness

Taking the red pill express

Long ago I came across the term “ponerology,” or study of evil in politics. I thought maybe I had read a book by Andrzej Łobaczewski by the name of “Political Ponerology,” but I do not have the book on hand and have no notes about it. Reading reviews at Amazon, many people found the book, translated from Polish, to be dense and poorly written. Maybe that is why I do not have it, as my memory says I once did. Maybe it was too much for me.

Nonetheless, krogers in a comment links us to this article from State of the Nation, Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism by James Lindsay. Ponerology is in the subtitle. It is long (17 pages in Word) and challenging, and took me well over an hour to read. He introduces terms like “pseudo-reality,” or false and unreal constructions that are introduced into our lives by people of evil intent, psychopaths who have nothing but schemes to acquire power and control. Right away I thought of two schemes of that nature: Climate Change and Covid. I found the whole of the article easier to grasp by thinking in terms of Climate Change, a pseudo-reality constructed by hack and quack scientists and designed to change the way we live, travel, and enjoy life. But it all applies as well to Covid.

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Releasing . . . If Ida known better

The bottom of our street (photo taken September 2, 2021)

Hurricane Ida came through like a fast and furious wave — toppling me, yet reminding me to release and let go

I have been taking a much needed in-breath over the past few weeks — emptying my mind of swirling thoughts to just be and not be. I felt myself moving fluidly with life, despite perpetual challenges entering my reality. No need to go into any detail. We all experience curve balls from time to time.

But a sucker punch slammed me a couple days ago. As we had no warning, Hurricane Ida whipped through our house in a fury. Two tornadoes touched down within a mile of our home.

We are still standing. Our house is still standing. We have a roof above our house — fully intact (the last hurricane did not leave us as fortunate). Others we know have not been as lucky this go-around. Most of the surrounding streets have been submerged; cars have been swept away; and even one family had their cow swept away with the raging waters. 

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Montana passes law: Vaccination not a requirement for employment!

I wanna go home, I wanna go home
Oh, how I wanna go home. (Bobby Bare lyrics, Detroit City)

I spent the first 58 years of my life in Montana. It’s a very large state with very few people, and during my time there was run by rednecks. I didn’t understand until Covid the difference between Democrats and Republicans. It is as follows:

Democrats represent nice people who think of themselves as liberals. They believe in things like kindness and justice for all. Those elected to lead these people are liars and phonies, as liberalism, such as it is, is not allowed in real politics. Consequently, to be a Democratic leader, one must be a slut. Democratic leaders are forced to live lives of lies, pretending to be one thing to their followers, only being their real selves in private. Two of the worst human beings I ever met were the essential heads of the Montana Democratic Party, Max Baucus and Jon Tester. They both became senators and lied, lied, lied for decades. They make me wanna puke.

Republicans represent people who think of themselves as “conservative,” though the word is stripped of essential meaning by politics. (It means to exercise caution, to be careful, not to make radical changes, to preserve things that work. I’m a conservative in that sense.) But Republican leaders and followers are often on the same page, believing in the same ideas, falling for the same lies. Ergo, Republican leaders have the ability to lead without lying about their true beliefs. They tend to be nicer people than Democratic leaders, who are required to be sluts. Two of their leaders I knew were Ron Marlinee (1935-2020) and Conrad Burns (1935-2016). They lied. They were politicians, but I repeat myself. But they seemed like likeable men who could both give and take jokes.

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Ian and Sylvia, Karen and Richard

This is going to be a meandering piece, and I only know generally where it is going. I do know it ends with Karen Carpenter, so if you do not care for her music, I urge you, GET OUT NOW!

My music preferences have shifted dramatically over my life. When a kid, I liked the Beatles and 60s rock and roll, of course, though I now avoid anything remotely Beatle. The music of that period was a contrived force, the product of pretenders, performed, for the most part, by the Wrecking Crew (or a British equivalent).

I used to do a Public Access TV interview show in Billings, Montana, in the early 1990s called Piece of Mind. That’s why I named the blog as I did. Also, though I did not save anything from my school years, I oddly have an essay I wrote, eighth grade or so. It was not very good of course, not well thought out or directed. At the end I wrote that all I wanted was “peace of mind.” I had an unquiet mind, even then, I guess.

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Postcard from a quiet campground

One of my favorites views, from Island Lake, Lonesome Mountain front and center.

We’ve done a lot of hiking, my wife and I, these past 26 years. Needless to say, distances used to be farther, and a mile seemed a shorter distance than now. I am embarrassed to say that a mere two mile walk, 700 feet elevation gain, a few days ago, seemed longer and harder than that. But what can we do? Everything, every one ages, some slower, some faster. 

First a side trip, not about a hike, but an encounter. We had settled in to Island Lake Campground last week, and set up for a four day stay. It rests at 9,500 feet in the Wyoming Beartooth Mountains, and has long been a favorite of ours.  Not only is it nice to start out a hike at that elevation, but these days we bring kayaks with us, circumnavigating the lake before breakfast (but at my insistence, only after coffee). 

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The fish killers have backed off — for now.

A short while back, a handful of environmental activist and I were chest deep in a controversy over using poison to kill aquatic life in remote streams and lakes in Wyoming and Montana. Wyoming agreed to seek alternative methods to “bring back” native cutthroat trout populations, accepting local volunteers to use electro-fishing and conventional fishing to help native trout recover. In Montana, there seemed no amount of reason, logic, or negotiation would persuade bureaucrats at the US Forest Service-USDA and Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks to consider other options. They were dead-set against any other way. This is when we notify bureaucrats that “we’ll see you in court.” We notified, they thought about it, and then, quite unexpectedly, folded. Victory for water, frogs, salamanders, aquatic insects, humans, and life in general.

This would have been one of the largest poison and plant projects in the West. But as past history has shown, it’s likely that repeated poisoning over many years would be required to assure complete annihilation of the existing fish which were, ironically, planted by the same agency that now wanted to poison them.

“Thanks to a pending lawsuit by Wilderness Watch, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and other plaintiffs as well as efforts to alert the public through the media to the potential problems with this project, the Forest Service decided to pull the project.  As the Forest Service notification read: “The project decision included approving a Pesticide Use Proposal for the use of rotenone in the Scapegoat Wilderness and authorization of the following activities normally prohibited in wilderness: use of generators, boat motors, and motorized pumps to disperse rotenone; use of helicopters to transport equipment, chemicals, and fish; and development of spike camps and a radio repeater.”” – Mike Garrity

With all the fish dying statewide, why is killing more trout a top priority for the state?

Here’s a copy of the letter:

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Fascia

It was sometime in 1988 or 1989 that I sat on my couch reading. In those days I was intent on solving the Kennedy assassinations. I needed to break away from it, as it was obsessive behavior, and yet … I knew if I pushed and pushed that something might give way, and I might attain some new and unforeseen insight. What I got was not the insight I was looking for. It took me by surprise. 

I remember the moment well … reading a book written by ex-FBI agent William Turner and some guy named Warren Hinckle (both most likely controlled opposition), called The Fish is Red. (Those words were secret code and used to start the Bay of Pigs affair.) I paused, looked up at the ceiling in a nearby hallway and realized that there was nothing to fear in the USSR, and that the Cold War was not real. At that moment I experienced for the first time in my life since early childhood …  freedom. I felt a weight lifted off me. I could breathe freely. I had lived in a state of fear for most of my life, deliberately put there by our leaders. I was either 38 or 39 years of age. They took a good chunk of my life from me. 

Of course, after this realization, on 11/9/1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Such was my power!  (Europeans list dates as day/month rather than our convention, so that they would list that day as 9/11.)

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Understanding and Conquering The Mind Parasite (Wetiko)

“I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension.” – Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

Wetiko is not only highly communicable but also self-replicating.  It persists, clandestine in our psyches.  Generally, human hosts, when confronted with questions about symptoms being expressed as behavioral abnormalities, vehemently deny that they are infected/possessed.   Some who have studied this psychic pandemic describe wetiko as a form of cannibalism, but not in the common flesh-eating form. This ubiquitous form consumes others’ spiritual energy as a means of securing elevated personal status, wealth and supremacy.

At bottom, wetiko is a disease of the “I.” The “I” thought is a precursor to “full-blown” Wetiko. Without the I thought — attributing I to identification with thought and the world of appearances — Wetiko would not be possible. See:  Who Am I? https://www.amazon.com/Who-Am-Sri-Ramana-Maharshi/dp/1537599216  Ramana Maharshi teaches to get to the root. In other words, the absence of self-reflection leads to a pretentious sense of I (me, my, mine), which attributes an illusion of ownership to thought, therefore, the host perceives everything as “a thing,” an object to be possessed. 

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Are you burning Russian oil?

Hardly anyone talks about oil anymore. We fill up our cars, drive around, without much thought about where all that oil comes from, and where it goes before it’s processed at the refinery.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php

One thing I found interesting reading the article above is that the US imported 7.86 million barrels of “petroleum” per day from Russia. When considering all the hoopla about reducing our dependence on imported oil, and the truly insane narrative claiming that our dependence on “fossil fuels” is being replaced with “green energy” alternatives, this figure is somewhat surprising to me.

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