The Balance Between Capital & Social (Exclusive For Members)

Let's chat about the balance between capital and social. How exciting! In economics, capital means private while social means sharing. Are you a 5-year old who doesn't want to share or are you an adult who sees the benefit of sharing? While at the same time, of course having some things private. Which would be a balanced approach with the most co-benefit happening with a mix of both private capital and public social. Now, if we add an "ism" to these two things, for far too many, one of them stays great but the other becomes a boogeyman. And when we hear someone blanketly denigrate socialism can tell that not only are they self hating if they're middle class, but that they've been mind controlled by oligarchic media when that happens because the con of the oligarchy for hundreds of years has been to privatize gains and socialize losses, essentially keeping the best aspects of private and public for themselves, instead of for the people. A prime example being taxpayers bailing out banking crooks on Wall Street in the 2008 mortgage crisis. So what type of socialism, or capitalism for that matter, is one referring to? Because these things, on both ends, exist in a spectrum.

As for the accumulation of capital, we have:

Laissez-Faire Capitalism, State Capitalism, Corporate Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism, Democratic Capitalism, People's Capitalism, Natural Capitalism, Financial Capitalism, Green Capitalism, Creative Capitalism, and Inclusive Capitalism

And for the sharing of resources we have:

Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy, Utopian Socialism, Marxist Socialism, Libertarian Socialism, Revolutionary Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Eco-Socialism, Market Socialism, Guild Socialism, Fabian Socialism, and Syndicalism

So, even though we would much rather be talking about meditation, or Jungian Psychology, or our psychedelic experiences, or alchemical symbolism in engravings, or other esoteric things instead of anything orbiting the political, as we've said before, and we'll say again, because it can't be said enough, and also because one of the main pillars of our work is about balance, and we got a comment the other day blanketly denigrating the social aspect which led to our mouth sighing and then our eyes rolling because this is like high school level stuff that a lot of Americans don't get so we have to keep sinking down into lower consciousness insights to do our part to help democracy... in what configuration are you mixing these in order to have the most balance between the two, and thus the most liberty and freedom? Because 100% Capitalism without any public social, becomes Fascism, and 100% socialism, without any private capital, becomes Communism. Both of which are authoritarian and aweful. Psycho North Korea being an example of a communist nightmare. Which is a single-party system, that has a nearly 100% state (meaning totalitarian government) control of all significant economic activities, complete centralized planning and distribution, including the media and the means of production where there is little to no private enterprise - IE the government makes the food, shoes, and TV sets, and all that is tightly controlled by a ruling authority cult under a Marxisst-Leninist economic style ideology with complete lack of political and economic freedoms. At the complete opposite end of that polar spectrum, you have psycho Natzi Germany, which was Fascist, yet cleverly marketed itself during its formation as being "National Socialists" to win over the minds of German's at the time cause socialism was very popular in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's but the SS were actually just ultranationalists who immediately privatized all industry also under a single party totalitarian cult that also rejects liberal democratic principles such as a strong middle class, individual rights, pluralism, and multiparty democracy.

What does have the most liberty and justice for all is a balance between capitalism and socialism where corporations operate within a set of rules in which the government acts like a referee on behalf of the middle class - this is referred to as a social market economy or social democracy. An approach which combines the benefits of a market-based economy with robust social policies and government regulation to ensure economic stability, reduce inequality, and provide a basic safety net for all citizens.

A Social Market Economy or Social Democracy is the most populous system in the freest parts of the world because of its key characteristics that entail:

Having a mixed Economy: Allowing for private ownership of businesses and capital, fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. At the same time, it maintains a significant role in regulating the market to prevent monopolies, ensure fair competition, and protect workers.

Having a strong social safety net: Social democracies typically have comprehensive social programs, including universal healthcare, free or subsidized education, unemployment benefits, pensions, and social housing. Reducing poverty, supporting the vulnerable, and ensuring that basic needs are met for all citizens.

Having Progressive Taxation: Which ensures that the wealthier individuals and corporations pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. Preventing morbid wealth, reducing income inequality, and fund social services and public goods.

Having Labor Rights and Protections: Including minimum wage laws, collective bargaining rights, and safe working conditions, empowering workers and ensuring fair wages. Helping to build a robust middle class by promoting job security and fair compensation.

Having Regulated Markets: While markets are largely free and competitive, the government plays a role in regulating them to prevent abuses, protect the environment, and ensure public well being. This regulation helps to stabilize the economy and prevent crises that could disproportionately affect the middle class.

Having Public Investment in Infrastructure and Services: Creating jobs across the economic spectrum, improving the quality of life across the economic spectrum, and providing equal opportunities for economic advancement.

And having Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises: Through grants, loans, and favorable regulations which foster a diverse economy and reduce dependence on large soulless mega corpses.

A strong middle class is often associated with political stability because middle-class citizens tend to favor policies that promote public services and democratic governance, reducing the risk of political extremism and polarization. Contributing to economic resilience by providing a stable consumer base, fostering creative entrepreneurship, and promoting economic growth. Middle-class citizens tend to have more disposable income, which supports domestic consumption and demand. Reducing economic inequality and promoting a strong middle class can enhance social cohesion and reduce social tensions. When citizens feel that they have a fair opportunity to succeed, it fosters a sense of shared purpose and solidarity. This engagement is crucial for maintaining a healthy democracy, as it promotes accountability, transparency, and public participation in the political process. And most of all, and empire very much knows this, a prosperous middle class is more likely to be politically active, engaged in civic life, and then free to be focused on their self-development. Which is terrifying to the empire because it gives the most freedom to the people to control their own destinies.

Written Insight: The Problem With The Media #8 - Hate Broadcasts

There's a great quote by a hilarious comedian which says... “Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared they're supposed to be.”

As mentioned in the last insight of this series, there are really two base emotions on the extremes - Love or Hate. And the numerous underlying element to hate is just fear. And no one spreads fear like corporate or fascistic media. Especially what calls itself conservative media when we would say it's just trying to conserve robber baron criminality at best or imperial royal hierarchies at worst. It's regressive and most of all reactionary media, because it focuses on the negative, fears anything novel or new, and because its long sold out to the robber baron Godzillionaire criminal class (Ie, wall street, big commercial banks, big pharma, big war profiteers, etc...) it has to program it's viewers or listeners with a stronger physiological response to threats because that not only increases engagement, mistrust, and polarization, but most of all it has to misdirect them away from those previously mentioned who are actually causing their problems and instead misdirect their hate onto their fellow middle class or poor within their country and from other countries. Such as those without their same skin color, sexual orientations,or those who are more open minded than they are. ONe of the main ways this game is played is through border fear and hate. Because imperial agents know that austerity measures either lead to progressive revolution or fascism.

Now, we are not naive. And realize there is a quote which says, "If liberals don't protect borders, fascists will" and realize the single issue in liberal Europe's tendencies to allow extremely regressive wrong wing movements to re-rise, ala their past Italian fascism of Mousolini or German fascism of Hitleter is a single issue issue. Which is black and brown people from Africa or the Middle East coming into predominantly white Europe or brown people from South America coming into majority white but multi ethnic North America. As they're never talking about the white on white Northern borders such as from Scotland to Britain or Canadian to the US and are instead only talking about the southern borders. Those are the only ones that need hating. All though you of course cannot have mass open border illegal immigration, that never works out, look how it worked out for the native Americans for example, the goal is to live in desirable countries which have common since, compassionate pathways for legal immigration - because in the long run, that only helps that country's economy. Instead of a country with a mass exodus, which, in the long run, only hurts those countries' economies. The whole point of border this, border that, fear from the squawk machine is to ignite that pathos, fight or flight, fear hate primarily in Christian's in Name Only, who incorrectly and falsely think their country is a WASP nation. It's one of many poke points they pull at the heartstrings of fear-based lowest common denominator mind killer culture. That along with "There's a run on the banks, they're trying to assassinate you so you gotta stockpile arms and can beans, WW3, civil war, islamic jehad, they're coming for your gas water heaters and stoves, or to make you gay, the stock market is gonna crash, since I've been a corporate criminal my whole life and am now having to actually face accountability for my crimes... if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, there are Nukes in shipping containers. ICBMS can reach us in 33 minutes, bla bla bla."

Psychologists call a “negativity bias” when attention is biased toward the negative, the result is an overly threat-conscious appraisal of one’s surroundings. To many regressives, and within that is a (pho conservatism which has existed in a continuous state of terror and rage for most of its existence), the world may look like a much scarier place. This would explain why so many white haired outdated soon to keel over viewpoints tend to be rooted in fear and thus hate. Resulting in the less traveled incorrectly feel that the areas outside their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe, overestimating their odds of becoming a victim, or believe that crime rates are rising when the opposite is actually occuring, or considering the world to be a dangerous place. Because there's another accurate quote which says "the world's always getting better but far too many people inaccurately think it's always getting worse." We know someone whose elderly conservative parents were going to the city of Chicago and were so sure it was going to be like 1980's war torn Beirut that when it turned out to be the generally nice, clean, lovely, but Antartically cold during the winter city it was, they could hardly believe all the fear based media they had been main lining had been lying to them!

Hate speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristics such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. The identified common traits refer to: the targeting of a group, or an individual as a member of a group; the presence of a content that expresses hatred, causes a harm, incites bad actions beyond the speech itself, and has no redeeming purpose other than just venting and creating an other to assign blame to for your own personal life problems.

The controllers know they need to hijack minds externally and make them fear and hate based internally. Because not only is fear the mind killer, the more you hate what is out there, the more it really means you hate aspects of yourself. The Hermetic principle of "as within, so without" knows that there is a correspondence between our inner state and our outer experiences. With our inner thoughts and emotions shaping the reality we perceive and experience. Positive inner states tend to manifest positive external circumstances, while negative inner states often result in negative external experiences. When we harbor hate, hating ourselves, we tend to project it outward. This means that the hatred we feel internally can manifest as hostile actions towards others. The principle of "as within, so without" suggests that our external expressions of hate are a direct reflection of our internal emotional state. The principle also implies that like attracts like. By harboring hate, we might attract more hate from others, creating a cycle of negativity that perpetuates the emotion both internally and externally. To break the cycle, it's essential to engage in self-reflection and understand the root causes of this emotion - one of the main ones being dogshit corporate or fascist media - which should be turned off. And moving more inward to identifying and addressing the sources of hate within ourselves to thus help transform our inner state. By fostering positive emotions within such as forgiveness, empathy, and compassion, we change our outer experiences accordingly, especially in regard to those different from us.

Written Insight - Calling Out Empire #1: What is it?

We say this word, "imperial" often. So this leads us into a series of insights on Empire called "Calling Out Empire" which, just as our ongoing slow drip "Pro-Democracy" essay series and our "Problem With the Media" insight series, this series will also be peppered throughout other outputs. But we'll start this off by simply giving a few tiers of ways of looking at what empire is. While we could write a book on this subject, and many have been, to simplify, think of empire as the darkness & shadow of the world. While the light is the opposite.

It's very crucial to not think empires are a thing of the past. The poster for Empire would be the leading edge of a medieval hoard of armored soldiers on the battlefield with a giant cross. But if you dont think modern versions of that are still persisting, think again. In binary reality, Empire is, unfortunately, somewhat timeless. And from a mythological standpoint it exists from fantasy of the long past to science fiction of the far future.

In terms of the first layer to define Empire, we'll go straight to some popular cultural science fiction references which do a good job of providing modern myths in regards to the subject... One being Avatar, with the indigenous and deeply nature connected to Eywa, Na'vi... Who have no concept of private property but instead what the agents of empire within the US would surly label as "hippie" or "socialism" or "sustainability" of sharing everything in a reciprocal cycle of living in balance. Then we have the Sky people, which are our future selves if we keep acting like imperial idiots. Whose goals are to commodify the elements of earth, air, fire, and water being 100% profit based with zero care for nature. Our next reference is Star Wars. Were you have the ragtag rebels, who do use advanced, yet stuck in the design theme of the 1970's technologies, but are fighting for justice and freedom from conquest while also having a lineage of spiritual Jedi on their side, who are the initiates into higher states of consciousness, working on behalf of the light side of the force. That compared to the dark galactic empire of fascistic, hyper hierarchical based, where no one ever smiles inside large scale advanced hard surface cold militaristic technologies, which at the top of their hierarchy are dark sorcerers who are also initiates into higher states of consciousness which either have risen in or unfortunately turned to the dark side of the force and are all about colonizing cause colonialism through wars and violence are Empire's mainstays. As a third analogous example, in the series Dune, there are Harkonnens, which basically are advanced technology yet worst case scenario psychopathic Roman Space Empires, who descend on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis, to mine, at any cost, no matter how many of the local population they kill, a priceless psychotropic substance that imparts heightened vitality and awareness called the "spice" because it's also key to interstellar travel.

The second layer, from a non-fiction geo-political standpoint, is the standard historical one. Being a central state or ruling power with a collection of territories controlled or governed by a central authority. Empires are always characterized by their expansionist ambitions, seeking to acquire and maintain control over territories (and those territories' resources) beyond their original borders. They are formed through conquest and colonization. Examples of well-known empires include from thousands to hundreds of years ago the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, while more recent versions have been the founding of The United States and its treatment to Native Americans and Africans or the Japanese Empire primarily up until WWII. Empires have played a significant role in shaping cultures, economies, and political systems around the world, which outside of infrastructure, which Empires generally do well, pretty much everything else about them is bad news. The United States is a great country. But, if we are to be honest, we must also admit its a militarized empire built on sociopathic settler colonialism and genocide and the backs of slaves and it still has a long way to go for making up for that. Because for example, at the time of this writing, it's still continuing it by funding the lunatics in charge of Israel whose goal is to expel or eradicate all Arabs from Palestine, who were there prior to the Jews. So, just as other Arab regions have been on the perpetrating end of the Empire, regardless of where you live in the world, unless you're an indigenous person, your country has likely been complicit in it. Each region shares the blame. Through the deep time of the precessional cycles of the Earth, in the good time, empires subside, but in times of darkness, they rise.

The third layer is the deeper psychological element to empire, which is the human administration of slowing or stopping and reverting the natural evolutionary process of each individual’s (or what one could call soul’s) spiritual growth or what could be called spiritual self development. Much more to discuss.

Written Insight: God is Non-Binary

So this title is not meant to be click bait, or in any way disrespectful, but we must address a foundational issue which we constantly hear misused and aim to state our case why that is regarding now. So our main ask here is to listen to this with an open mind because this is a very basic spiritual concept and is not hard to understand nor should it in any way be controversial. The only reason it's either of those things is because of thousands of years of patriarchal theocratic marketing that has people deep in Plato’s Cave. The concept is that it is incorrect to refer to God as a "he" or "him" .... yet almost everyone does it. We of course expect its misuse for thousands of years from the dogmatists, but we recently visited a Masonic lodge, which we consider a more sophisticated spiritual group, and even heard it used (or misused) by an individual there.

If you happen to visit a Masonic temple inside a lodge in your life, or even just look at photos of one online, you'll see the floor is usually a black and white checkerboard tile pattern. This is a symbolic representation of the binary material world. With the luminance of black and white tiles representing polar opposites on the floor. Where on Earth we have night and day, moon and sun, female and male, negative and positive electric poles, etc... Think of your soul as a ball of light within each of us piloting our meat suits, meaning our fleshy bodies. While our bodies only exist in the binary material world, and will one day fail and be worm food, an adjacent basic spiritual teaching is that our souls are eternal, and after many lives, will eventually graduate from the binary, into unity. Where those binaries merge into equilibrium and our souls melt back into the divine light - of which each is a branch. Now "binary" means the opposite ends, which are not all or nothing, there is a spectrum in between. Just as the day transitions to the night, and gets gradually darker and gradually brighter, between the symbolic colors of black and white there exists a gradient of all shades of gray.

Now we know this one is going to piss off anyone in a fundamentalist religion such as the extreme Christian Right and as a result we’ll likely turn comments off. Because fundamentalist cults can attract very young, immature, spiritually undeveloped souls which see things only in stark binaries and don’t have an interest in their members' spiritual self development but instead turning their flock only into an extreme polarized political block. Which we can back up by highlighting that it's common to hear from them, and other extreme religious ideologies throughout the world, the phrase, "we're good their evil" when speaking of those they disagree with. While more spiritually advanced and sophisticated souls see things as the shades of gray, and as they continue to advance they move more toward perfect middle gray of equilibrium. This is also one of the reasons why democracy is the human enactment of a spiritual idea, that not only do all souls have value and should have a system which works on behalf of all of them, and that decisions that lead to the most liberty on a societal level happen within a system that seeks a middle ground through compromise. This is also the reason why the Christian Right is the largest threat to democracy in the United States, because they don’t want compromise, they want only their extreme way, which is very far out on the edge of a political binary, to rule and have absolute power.

So with this very basic concept of lower less advanced polarity to higher more advanced unity being stated, how can a supreme being, which one could call source, or the divine, or God, which is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, that exists in unity have only one half of the sexual binary? It would not. Instead it is an equal combination of both. With its female aspect having no less importance than its male aspect, and vice versa. It has perfect equilibrium between the two and has graduated beyond the binary. This is a teaching to show us that women and men have complete equal value, with neither having greater or less value and the name of the game of thousands of years of Empire, has been to claim the male aspect is superior while the female is inferior. Which is incorrect and why fictional corporeal white caucasian God got a fictional celestial penis. A divine creator, does not have a corporeal body and can instead be more accurately described as non-binary multidimensional energy. So if we ever sell T-shirts in the store at our website, the first one would say "God is Non-Binary" which is accurate.

Now as an epilogue to this... Speaking of genitalia... at the time of this writing, the term "non-binary" is catnip for regressive reactionary hate. So to be fair, this natural law also applies to human meat suits in binary reality. While our personalities can have a gradient mix of masculine and feminine gender aspects, as those very much do a fluidity, with the exception of one in a million babies that are born with hermaphroditic like genitalia, our sexual genitalia can really be only female or male. So if someone is homosexual and transgender, and their meat suit was born as a male and wants to transition into a female or was born a female and wants to transition into a male, it is also incorrect for them to claim that they are "non-binary". Which is not possible in the binary material. Sexual reassignment can be a multi-year long process, not to mention an expensive one which many cannot afford to complete. Which initially begins in youth with thoughts and feelings, then adjustments to fashion, then hormone treatments, then sexual reassignment surgery if completed. And one may look very hybridized between the two sexes for years, but our meat suit sexual organs are only going to be one or the other - male or female. So a more accurate way to say it, and a way not to be untruthful on legal documents is to simply say one is a female transitioning to male or a male transitioning to female. No big deal.

Written Essay: Two Problematic Patterns Within Conspiracy

Essay - Negative Conspiracy Patterns

By Niles Heckman

We've had a background creating personal work in primarily the area of self-development which is really spiritual self-development because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience. That's the trunk that leads up the tree of the branches of the health of the natural world (environmental health), as well as mental and physical health on both an individual and then global societal level. Which we desperately need to improve because it's "evolve or perish", "grow up or die" time for humanity. This has led us into interests and experience with entheogens (especially their usage within indigenous traditions), as well as areas such as esotericism which means the little known inside. Searching into some of these alternate areas inevitably touches on other areas that could be related to "conspiracy" or what's sometimes called "conspirituality" which is sometimes a catch-all term for people who are in alternative medicine communities. Becoming more open to conspiracy is an early stage in spiritual growth. Which is essentially due to a distrust in cultural institutions and realization that they have not been fully or sometimes even partially honest with the public. Spending over a decade in this and its adjacent orbiting material, and in the early days of it thinking most conspiracies had validity, we matured into realizing certain things were very wrong with it. Primarily because of many folks within this areas support for the election of a deplorable excuse for a human being to the United States Presidency in 2016 and then how it dealt with the global Covid-19 situation, mainly having a strong one sided anti-vax / anti-science thread, we came to notice two patterns running in many "alternate media'' circles, especially those related to conspiracy and sometimes even conspirituality which has caused us to be much less supportive of said subjects. The philosopher Terrence McKenna who had mushroom gnosis would sometimes say, I'm not very supportive of conspiracy theory, and we've now come to see more and more why, because at the time of this recording, we're now 50/50 at best regarding it. Some conspiracies are valid, while others breed irrational or baseless thinking. So it's crucial to recognize that this term can be politically charged and might be used to dismiss legitimate concerns by painting them as mere conspiracies. As with any conspiracy theory, the validity of the claims associated with it should be evaluated based on evidence and critical analysis.

The first negative pattern we started to notice within conspiracy circles is the accurate identification of problems but then proposing batshit crazy solutions. Specifically related to what is public and what is private and a heavy asymmetry towards giving the private a pass. Being very 50/50 on the subject, the other main pattern is we've honestly come to think that 50% + of conspiracy or conspirituality, the half we don't buy, is really just extremist right wing politics in disguise. Nothing more. Since everything is all about the money, in the United States, liberal leaning politics is typically associated with progressivism, social equality of opportunity, and government uses in the economy to achieve social goals on behalf of the middle class - which is generally more compassionate. Modern heavy handed conservatism wants you to think it's somehow for individual freedoms and gives false binaries such as freedom or government control when a more accurate juxtaposition would be public democratic governance over private corporate greed. Conservative politics in the US, while claiming and historically many decades ago having some semblance of being for individual liberty, free market principles, and limited government intervention in economic and personal matters, doesn't actually do those things now and has basically been replaced with this neo-fascism which protects the wealth and power of godzillionares and mega corpses. Which hurts the individual, rigs the market to be corporate crony markets, uses government to only give tax cuts to the top 1%, privatizes everything for corporate profit, amplifies corporate greed through deregulation, gets in quagmire holy wars in the middle East for Israel, and then because those shit policies have been screwing over the middle class and the poor for nearly half a century, because it’s compassionless, tells people immigrants are to blame for their middle class ills - is a form of neo-fascism.

Most conspiracy accurately identifies that the way the world really works is that a small number of extremely wealthy people, probably a few thousand, on a planet (or as the flat Earthers would say, on a plane, lose the T) of 7 some billion people, have a massively disproportionate influence on governments throughout the world. Controlling industry and public policy. Authoritarian governments are awful. Democratic governments, while messy, are the most representative of all people and have the most freedom. A lot of folks in conspiracy, not even when speaking of authoritarianism but instead within democracies tend to say phrases like "governments lie" or "all politics is corrupt" or "it doesn't matter who you vote for" or "both parties one puppet string puller"... the problem with all of that is first off is not what they're saying, it's what their not saying. Which is that corporations lie even more and the reason governments lie is because they're corporatized - meaning they're captured only by private corporate interests. This is evident by the fact that newspapers 50 years ago had both a labor section (meaning speaking for the majority of working people) and a business section (meaning speaking for a small number of private business owners), and now usually only have a business section. 

The next problem with the "all governments lie and are totally corrupt" mindset, is that it throws all governments into the trashcan for working class people. Which is a very right wing misdirection trick. We were listening to the podcast of someone who we are generally fond of, who we've had as a past guest on earlier iterations of our own podcast, and now hosts their own podcast. Everyones got a podcast, Yeah... They had a guest on who was doing a really amazing deconstructing and analyzing of the problems with various cultural institutions such as corporatized universities and the corporate media. It was one of those things where the first hour was free to listen to and the second hour was for members only, with the first hour being tracking the problems with the second hour being some solutions proposed, and since we're not yet members of their podcast we honestly couldn't tell from the first half of the conversation if it was doing what we've seen far too many related discussions doing, such as many conversations on The Higherside Chats podcast, which is one of the world's foremost conspiracy podcasts, that we have been a past guest on, and now were 50/50 on, because like it and this other podcast, it seems many conspiracy guests are just sending people down into something more conservative and regressive politically by giving a complete pass to private corporate corruption and oligarchic corruption and only talking about public university corruption and government corruption which have only happened because they’ve become so for profit privatized by corporate interests.

Another problem with the “governments lie" oversimplified talking point is that the problems between left and right are not symmetrical within US politics. While both parties in the US absolutely have problems, mainly that they are both heavily captured by the conservative leaning Israel lobby, and we are going to do an upcoming series of insights on the problems of the extremes of the left, the difference between issues stemming from left wing policies are 15% of the problem and issues stemming from right wing policies are 85% of the problem. So why not work to continually be involved in fixing the better and more truthful of two dysfunctional options? So throwing one side, which has some corruption - meaning it mainly works on behalf of the middle class but sometimes only helps the morbidly rich, into the same pot as the side that does nothing for the middle class and exclusively and only helps the morbid rich in their policies, means "conservative conspiracy" solutions are an oxymoron. If anything, we'd buy a conspiracy if it leads to having more liberal ideals so that the government more works on behalf of the wide range of people instead of the micro narrow spectrum of special corporate oligarchic interests. In terms of accurately identifying problems and then proposing bat shit crazy solutions, the extremist right wing Q-Anon cult’s pitch is "Hey, there's a global network of sex traffickers and sex abusers, many of which hurt children, so let's try and put one in the white house while we give the others tax breaks''. While in the US what is considered more left-leaning conspiracy, sometimes labeled "Blue Anon", alleges that various right-wing groups are systematically engaging in widespread voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, particularly minority groups. Which is much more factually accurate.

We used to keep an eye on the work of an individual who dove heavily into the conspiratorial as one of their main pillars. Even though they claimed they’re work had little to do with politics, every time they touched on the political, everything they were saying became the same things the dark imperial agents of the Christian Right (really Christian Wrong) were saying, who want to turn liberal democracy into a fascist nightmare with the incredibly unpopular anti-American Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposed theocratic hellscape. This individual even started getting into the world of Natzi esotericist Julius Evola and alternate WWII history which basically = Natzi's were really good guys. Which is not only batshit but is an all good green lite for heading towards fascism, fuck that and "no way Jose". So after the realization of "oh my gosh, their work is just about politics, nothing more" light bulb moment going off... After deciphering the pattern that they were just leading people towards fascism, but doing it in overt ways, we figured we might as well include forward thinking, more balanced politics into our work in order to counter that awfulness. This is why we've gotten more political with what we call "pro-democratic political philosophy" mixed into our work over the last few years". And why much of it has been so up front and center in our material, because democracy is hanging by a thread in the US and it's us that need to keep fighting to save it for future generations.

Extremely rich captains of industry, via their tentacles such as their political organizations, lobbyists, etc... are very interested and involved in politics and want to turn democracies throughout the world into authoritarianism which is an ongoing fight cause it helps them and not you. Representative liberal democracy, while sloppy and slow, and direct democracy would be better, and the seven liberal arts, all have the ability to help you over helping them, but it also requires an educated and informed voting electorate to be the arbiters of who gets into the halls of power and who can sift through the massive signal to noise of corporate media propaganda. Which is not easy and requires knowledge of the logical fallacies to see through all the lies.

But being practical about sharing public resources, communal respectability, and the lower and middle classes and thus democracy shouldn't even be a partisan issue. The whole con is to get the middle class and poor people fighting against one another which only helps morbid wealth. The oligarch controllers want people to be more conservative (meaning more protective of private wealth hierarchy) and they certainly want you to be less liberal (meaning openness and freedom of heart) and less social (being more publicly communal minded). We are fiercely independent but we also personally recognize shared public communal resources are crucial for any healthy community. Liberal democracy requires a strong, activist, public minded, progressive (meaning wanting to evolve) middle class and fascists have been trying to destroy that our whole life. If anything, being more progressive, meaning wanting to help the middle class and electing those who enact policies which do so, in your politics should be like step 3 of 10 in your spiritual development. And since “conservative” policies protect wealth hierarchy while extreme right wing fascist policies that claim their “conservative” protect extreme wealth hierarchy while also empowering power hungry villains like Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it boggles our mind that so many conspiracy folks then end up falling down right wing rabbit holes. If anything they should end up moving less conservative and more progressive in their politics to more support the middle class. Instead of being down for intolerant extreme ideologies that breed wanna be fascist dictators. 

So our confession on this one is that all of our spiritual self-development themed work is not only intended to help you in your personal development, but the road to that is paved in helping make you into a more compassionate and open hearted and open minded person. More compassion for the environment, more compassion for the lives of all people, regardless of their economic class, more compassion for all animal life, more liberal (in the classical sense of the word) and especially more compassionate to the plight of the indigenous people - such as femicide of indigenous women. But you must go more outside of the empire to do that. That majority of our readers or listeners will read this or hear this and be like “OMG! right on! so true! thumbs up!” But those who have stopped reading or listening to these essays because they think what we’re saying is  “bleeding heart lib woke”, are not only more compassionless, but deeper in the empire.

Written Insight: What is Patternicity?

"Patternicity" is a term often credited to author Michael Shermer, to describe the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random data or meaningless data.

Shermer writes "We are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth... "He continued "Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. It's not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong." So he uses it almost exclusively as a pejorative (meaning in the negative) in terms of encapsulating why people have been said to see faces in clouds, hear hidden messages in music played backward, or be overly sympathetic to supernatural phenomena. We however, would say it should also apply to meaningful data because the concept can also be supportive in terms of the human brain's evolved ability to recognize valid patterns, a skill crucial for survival. Identifying patterns allowed early humans to predict weather changes, recognize dangerous animals, and find food. 

For example, our ancient ancestors, which have been both more primitive and more advanced than us in our current state, in their earlier more primitive evolutionary development, realized that when they saw high grass moving in a non-natural way, as would happen from the breeze or wind, it would mean a certain percentage of the time that a predator, which they could not directly see or even hear, could be lurking in that area, some of the time, but not all of the time. Most of the time it was an animal, but not one that would attempt to eat them or their children. But either way that pattern of behavior in the grass was worth paying attention to. Fast forward to today that the pattern-recognition ability can also lead to correct future outcomes or also to false positives, such as seeing patterns that aren't there because it’s usually better to be safe and err on the side of caution than it is to be sorry and miss a real threat. 

Patternicity is related to other cognitive phenomena such as apophenia, which is "the tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things" and pareidolia, which is "a specific type of apophenia where people see faces or other significant images in random stimuli". And with three definitions in this one already being given, we'll give one more adjacent definition... The word consciousness is a 64,000 hour conversation, and there are multiple good definitions of the word that each have overlap. But one definition of the word that we like is "your ability to recognize patterns and meaning both externally out in the world, and internally within your own psychology." Because there are absolutely repeating actions being played out in society that both benefit the average individual and the average people (which we also highlight as the balanced middle class), and also other repeating actions that do not benefit them.

So being conscious of patterns (both false and true) can help explain a wide range of human behaviors both within the world out there and within ourselves and in the next one we are going to share two specific patterns we've recognized, which we of course feel to be true, that have caused a dramatic shift on our personal outputs.

Written Insight: Respect for (Wise) Elders

In general, it is a good practice to respect our elders. Those who have been alive longer than we have. Yet there is an exception, which is if the elder is unwise, meaning not ebodying wizdom, they deserve lesser respect on an individual case-by-case basis.

As we age, the body, and thus the physical mind and physical heart, and other organs and muscular systems will all start to go. It's said we have maximum energy at age 10, then it's all physically and even mentally downhill from there. As an example, the United States just had a cringy presidential debate between the two oldest potential candidates in the country's history, one is an 81 year old elder statesman, and the other is only three years younger at 78. The 81 year old elder, has had bad doll hair plugs which have been upgraded with newer hair growing technology, has had a face lift, has a natural stutter and that combined with a bad cold resulted in him coughing often and speaking more quietly, thus appearing more frail, and when not speaking lingered with a strange cold stare. While the 78 year old elder is overweight with a gut, has a flappy neck vagina, bad toupee to cover up his bald clown head, wears bronzer and secret lift shoes to make himself appear an inch or two taller, and has severe fecal incontinence which essentially requires him to wear adult diapers and results in him being smelly. And probobally both have to pee three times during the night due to prostate issues. But none of those physical traits should be made fun directly at, cause fellas, all of us are inevitably also headed towards some of those things. What is of concern with both of them are their mental and moral capacities to be responsible for such a high stress, high tension, high stakes job, with the 81 year old elder having trouble efficiently and forcefully finishing sentences while having a superior heart and moral compass and the 78 year old elder also occasionally slurring a word, yet while serial lying and having zero moral compass. So in that case, we would say one is wiser than the other, and thus deserves more respect.

Historically, since about the beginning of the Reformation in the early 16th century, Western cultures have placed greater value on younger adults not because of physical youthfulness and not having any of the previously stated traits, but primarily because of immature and off-balanced Protestant values that tie a person's worth almost exclusively to their ability to "work". Eastern cultures tend to value age and the wisdom and experience elders can share more than Western ones. With multi-generational households being more common there than they are in the West.

In modernity, wise elders can offer into their retirement years, via past experience - guidance, perspective, support, contributions, legacy, and hopefully wisdom. All of which have huge value to enrich those younger than themselves, fostering a culture where experience and knowledge are cherished and passed on. Yet some elders are just not very wise. They are young or immature souls. Resulting in physically older bitter grumpy curmudgeons stuck in bad routines and outdated mindsets that add to ageism. While elder neglect, or abuse is unacceptable, and self respect should not decline on the curve of life, respect is a two way street so the caregiver, guardian, role model, parent, grandparent, and great grandparent also need to earn that on a flowering young mind. Via first practicing respect for themselves and others. Thomas Paine once said: “Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself”. This goes beyond respect into dignity and legacy.

In indigenous traditions around the world, respect for elders held and still holds a profound significance rooted in cultural values, spiritual practices, and community harmony for providing leadership, healing, guidance, sacrifices, passing down tradition, and most of all... as wisdom keepers. Typically being led for eons by councils of wise elders with learned experience within nature.

Even though their meat suits are failing and internal operating systems are slowing, respecting wise elders should be a timeless virtue that spans cultures and generations. When those elders embody some level of wisdom.

Written Insight: Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)

For this one we're going to be talking about two primary words. One is spirituality and the other is religion. In previous insights or essays which you can find in our back catalog we gave, at different times, what we feel are the two best simple definitions of each. And those are that "spirituality" is "full spectrum nature" while "religion" is "any system of faith, worship, or practice".

So a lot of heavily religious people think that their system or menu they subscribe to, and only eat food off that one menu, receive their spirituality only through that menu because religion = spirituality. While a lot of secular folks (meaning those that have no religious affiliation) are turned off by the word 'spiritual' because they think it's owned by religion and you must be religious to be spiritual because they've also been tricked into thinking spirituality=religion. Well... neither are correct. And we would say each way of thinking is a product of imperial (meaning of the empire's) mind control programming because the goal of empire is to slow, stop, or full-on contract the spiritual growth of each individual.

The United States has historically been founded with an enlightenment view. Although its founding was far from enlightened due to its psychotic imperial settler colonialism against Native Americans, to allow for all religions, through the first amendment of the constitution's "Free Exercise Clause" that guarantees individuals the right to freely exercise their religion while also simultaneously having the "Establishment Clause" that ensures that the government cannot favor one religion over another and protects individuals' rights to practice any faith without interference from the state. So you're free to not have a religion, or have one, with no specific one being superior. This is why Christian Nationalism, which is really just Christian Supremacy, is fundamentally of empire, not to mention anti-American being more analogous to the Taliban's ideology, and those trying to put the 10 Commandments in schools are dark imperial agents.

Although the US is still a quite heavily religious country, church attendance has been steadily declining for the last half century while during this time, interest in spirituality has been steadily increasing. This is a very good trend because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience, and are all on what we call "the spiritual path" but not religious beings" on a religious path because any formal system of faith, worship, or practice is not needed for that. They're are thousands of religions, and any of them can be used or accessed, but none of them are required. It's like saying, I want to go exercise, but I don't need formal team sports to do that. I can do it myself. You can access a more full spectrum of nature (or could also be said as "multidimensional" nature) on your own, by meditating, going in a flotation tank, taking an entheogen, going on a hike in nature, getting a good therapist, being a more loving and compassionate person, any combination of those things, and much more... The main way that the individual accesses spirituality is through an internal individual process. And getting out into nature only amplifies accessing more full spectrum nature. Indigenous people have known this for millions of years. And it shows because they live, unless co-opted by the empire, in harmony and balance with nature.

Now we are not hostile to religion if it has a personal esoteric path, we're hostile to big corporate imperial religion which promotes a theocracy that tries to push its view on others and then actually becomes hostile to nature with a dogshit prosperity gospel that says God put the oil in the ground for us to extract drill baby drill Dumbfuckistan yee ha and is generally hostile to the natural world, evolution, and the material sciences. This is the problem with missionaries who were absolutely of the empire, whose goals have been to assimilate other cultures, especially indigenous ones like the Borg collective. Because what are many of the world's big religions doing? They are taking the natural systems and hierarchies of nature, such as the elements of nature earth, air, fire, water, their associated spirits, the moon, the sun, the cosmos, the divine, and natural alchemical evolutionary processes which are both exoteric (out there) and esoteric (in here) and replacing them with only an external hierarchy of men. God or Allah (male), Jesus (male), Satan (male) and then a priest class (which also happens to be, shocker, primarily male) that they say you need to be subservient to or go through in order to supposedly access the divine.

The problem here is that for the most part, big religion is not interested in the spiritual self development of the individual, the internal individual's difficult path, but more interested in spoon feeding large swaths of people dogma through doctrine and far too often correlating that with regressive politics because it's very hierarchical. Because signing up to someone else's menu wholesale means you can outsource the work which is easy and why many people do it. But less people are wanting to do it, which is an evolutionary process.

Written Insight: Pattern Breaks

As a Westerner, we've just returned from a trip to the East. To Tokyo, in Japan to be exact. A mega city which is headed toward cyberpunk that has an incredibly efficient train system and toilets that can wash your tenders for you.

One of the best things we can do in our lives is to, on occasion, get out of our routines that establish recurring patterns, to see how things can be done differently. Travel experience, or experience interacting with others from other cultures are some very effective ways to do this. In order to see what things in your personal routine (otherwise called patterns) are working well, or which ones can be improved, by seeing the ways other individuals or cultures do things which may differ.

We are an American and we like America very much. South and North. The United States being one part of that combination of countries from two continents. And we'll never forget the time we first got to a hotel room in Australia, working there briefly on a project, and we couldn't figure out how to turn the lights on in the hotel room. We realized that we needed to put our hotel room key card into a slot by the entrance door to the room to prove to the room that you are there and then the lights can turn on. Which is an obvious way of saving energy by not letting occupants leave their lights on unnecessarily when out and about. And upon returning home to any major city in the US we would then see quite a few high rise buildings that have entire floors of their lights left on unnecessarily all night when no one is up there working. An obvious waste of resources (including money) because at that time this feature wasn't a thing in the US, but we have now seen it be adapted here, surely influenced by its initial uses overseas. 

Pattern breaks refer to intentional disruptions or changes in habitual thought patterns, behaviors, or routines. They are often used in various contexts such as therapy, intellectual development, persuasion, and communication to interrupt automatic responses and encourage new perspectives or behaviors. Therapists are essentially professional negative pattern identifiers and breakers. Who help clients interrupt negative thought patterns or emotional cycles or break destructive or unproductive behavioral patterns. This can involve surprising actions or questions that disrupt the patient/client/student’s usual mental patterns, prompting them to think differently. Such as someone trying to quit smoking who is required to change their routine drastically to avoid triggers. Anyone speaking in front of an audience for an extended period whose not making it a snore fest will also use pattern breaks to capture attention or change the direction of a conversation. This could involve unexpected pauses, changes in tone, or asking unexpected questions. 

One crucial element to truly evolving and improving oneself, and this gets into more esoteric psychology, is becoming conscious of things you had not previously been conscious of. This is why it's important to have good teachers in life. At various levels and various times. Because when you are not conscious of something, you have no idea what you're missing. And once an outside source helps show you that, and you are willing to listen to it, and or see it, and become conscious of it, you have leveled up in the school of life. But you need outer teachers (and sometimes inner teachers from something like a meditation for example) in order to do that. By breaking away from what have become conventional thinking patterns (at both individual and societal levels), solutions arise that wouldn't otherwise arise from preset standard approaches. So pattern breaks are crucial in creativity and innovation and overall, are tools used to disrupt existing inferior patterns of thought or behavior in order to facilitate superior change, insight, or personal growth. 

Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #6 - A Brief History of Bias

So we'll use one branch of legacy media as an example to share a brief history of how it became so biased towards regression. As we'll say this is the branch that is possibly the most biased, which has been AM squak hate radio. And we'll make what should be an obvious statement, which is that we support the official narrative of World War II and those who don't, speak in code in support of The Third Reich.

Modern talk radio as a major force in America started in 1926, when Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves. By the mid-1930s, as many as a full third of the entire nation listened to his weekly broadcasts. His downfall, and the end of the talk radio era he'd both created and dominated, came in the early 1940s when the nation was at war and Hitler was shipping millions of Jews to the death camps. Coughlin launched into hard-right anti-Semitic tirades in his broadcasts, blaming an international Jewish conspiracy for communism, the Great Depression, World War II, and most of the world's other ills. His sudden shift to very extreme politics, as he supported and lauded Hitler and Mousolini before the camps in Europe were revealed, eventually disgusted the majority of his listeners, and he retired from radio to return to his parish duties where he died in relative obscurity.

Between 1949 and 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was a longstanding policy of the Federal Communications Commission that required broadcasters to give airtime to controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a fair manner without editorial input from advertisers. Many say the Fairness Doctrine came about partially in part because of Coughlin's dark decline. There was a forward thinker and talker on radio for years named Alan Berg who sought to bring balance to America's airwaves, speaking more to a middle class and thus pro-democratic flavoring, and did so while honoring the doctrine while being fabulously popular, no problem. But like the Bill Hicks joke “Do you ever realize that we live in a world where good men are murdered, while mediocre hacks thrive? John Kennedy, murdered. Gandhi, murdered. Martin Luther King, murdered. Reagan, wounded” Berg was machine-gunned to death by extreme reactionaries likely from the Aryan Nation.

But after the FCC stopped the Fairness Doctrine under that reincarnation of Satan in 1987, broadcast corporations stopped having to worry about broadcasting in the public interest. So the now red cult figured out 40+ years ago, since the elimination of the fairness doctrine, it was all about turning the media into something that was impartial into something that was partial. Because the main way that stations "programmed in the public interest" was by producing news, real, actual, journalistic, non-infotainment news. Once Alzheimer's brain lifted that requirement, news was no longer the cost of keeping your broadcast license, instead, the news divisions of the various networks came under the sway of ratings and profits so it became an opportunity to make more money with increasingly dumbed down and salacious reporting.

Not coincidentally, just a few months after the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine, another ghoul whose surely rotting in the fires of hell for all of eternity, Rush Limbaugh launched his show, and in the years following, regressive reactionaries hiding under the label of "conservatism" put propagandists like him on stations nationwide, so that listeners could tune in to hate radio from pretty much anywhere in the country at any time of the day or night. And, station managers discovered, there was a loyal group of radio listeners who embraced Rush's brand of overt hard-regressive spin, believing every word he said even though he himself acknowledge he wasnt a journalist and claimed the show was "just entertainment" to avoid a reemergence of the Fairness Doctrine. The success of Rush led local radio station programmers to look for more of the same: there was a sudden demand for Rush-clone talkers who could meet the needs of the nation's Rush-bonded brain drained listeners, and the all-right-wing-talk radio format emerged, dominated by Limbaugh and Limbaugh-clones in both style and political viewpoint.

This was given a huge boost by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under the Clinton administration, a regressive lite corporate democrat, as well as a few other smaller laws and changes in FCC policy, that let a small handful of mega corpses to buy up all the radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in communities from coast to coast - hence the consolidation we've previously mentioned in this series. The vast majority of those radio stations were then programmed with hyper-corporate-friendly radio which speaks only for the rich and their needs while distracting through misdirection. Since modern American regressive reactionary policies only speak for 1% of the population, how do they get dirt poor Appalachian coal miners to vote for robber baron weasels? Through constant lies on the radio... In rural areas where people regularly drive long distances just for routine things like shopping, radio has been and still is incredibly important. And without the Fairness Doctrine and ownership rules in place, other broadcasters started to be more concerned about their bottom lines, instead of the public interest. One of the main reasons the GOP, now the GQP, has even historically had a chance in congressional elections with such historically unpopular regressive policies is that in low-population rural states the only voices on the radio promote regressive politics. As previously mentioned, there have historically been over 1500 regressive rightwing only commercial radio stations, and around 900 imperial religious nonprofit stations, almost all blasting out a pro-reactionary regressive message 24/7.

Into the 2020's this pattern continues. Regressive-aligned businessmen have bought over 300 Spanish-language radio stations across the country and put on them wrong wing Spanish-language hosts to try and bend the Hispanic vote away from the democratic and toward the authoritarian. The domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America has resulted in decades of talk radio stations across the nation never running even an occasional centrist let alone progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day but instead blasting out fringe hard-regressive squak that represents the political views of only the robber baron class, because corrupt reactionaries and their investors were the first to the market with a consistent and predictable programming slant.

*A disclaimer regarding our multiple references to hell in this insight... of course we don't actually think hell is a real thing. Heaven and hell are marketing fictions created by religion to sway, guilt, and control.

Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #5 - Heavy Regressive Bias

There’s a reason the framers of the Constitution wrote the press into the First Amendment: Democracy can’t thrive without an informed middle class electorate. In a democratic republic, the institutions of democracy are imperiled by a lack of balanced national debate on issues of critical importance. As both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia learned, a steady radio drumbeat of a single viewpoint, from one polar end of the political spectrum, is not healthy for democracy when opposing voices are marginalized.

We've previously spoken on the importance of progress over regress. Progress is anything that helps, through government policy, the middle class, and thus democracy. Regression is anything that helps, through government policy almost always under the ruse of wanting "less government", the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy and screws everyone else. And there's also usually a corollary between progress and regress, which is that progress is truthful while regress lies. Regress extends across the red cult and sadly also into corporate dems. So, bummer to have to reveal this, but pretty much all of legacy media, and even much of large new media, is either partially regressive at best (either just partially truthful), or mainly fully retrograde regressive as their middle, (untruthfully spinning or horse racing), or at worst, full on a fascist soup of lies with every breath being propaganda which we'll detail further later in this series. That's right, the more retrograde aspects of legacy media want fascism. Which is characterized by authoritarian and dictatorial power, suppression of political opposition, and often includes elements of racism and militarism. Fasc movements typically seek to create a centralized, oligarchical run autocratic government led by a dictatorial leader, often promoting aggressive and expansionist foreign policies and is basically the most extreme form of right (wrong) wing ideology.

Proactive progress, which is primarily structured in classical liberalizing, meaning divesting from narrow views or prejudices, thinks human beings are foundationally good. And thus works to enact policies which speak on behalf of all elements of society, starting with the middle class, and hopefully having compassion for the poor to become part of the middle and have a society which is structured to allow them to do so while also acknowledging that the rich are doing perfectly fine and thus need the least help. Yet the American empire and its media is primarily controlled by a staggeringly small amount of the aristocracy. There have historically been over 1500 regressive commercial radio stations, and around 900 imperial religious nonprofit stations, almost all blasting out wrong wing regressive messaging 24/7. Sinclair Broadcasting, who are ultra buddies with the serial lying recidivist orange criminal con man, owns and controls more than 190 local news stations across the country and had sought to become even more dominant by taking over Tribune Media before the FCC did its job and blocked their monopoly from becoming even more so. And in terms of corporate media nightly news broadcasting, there are really only 6 companies, Disney, CBS, General Electric, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom and all of them run through three dark imperial agences called the Council on Foreign Relations, The Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission and that shouldn't even be considered a conspiratorial thing to say. As a result, they all promote a very top down set of narrow views and prejudices which are foundationally anti-democratic. 

Regressive reactionaries have found a way to hide within "conservatism" because conservatism has historically defended and protected hierarchy and also been amplified with an underlying foundation in religious patriarchal hierarchy. Which historically through most of the dark ages of recent times was via kings, dictators, or other forms of totalitarians and made slightly better in the last couple centuries by slightly watered down versions of those same things called robber barons who are now called billionaires who own media companies. Almost everything you see from legacy media and even new media, composed of social media companies, generally algorithmically amplifies punching down and never up. So the problem is always based in fear and terror broadcasts of muslims, dirty brown immigrants into Europe or the US, black on black crime in inner cities, etc... and then into the culture war distractions of anything we don't like we blanketly label "woke". Never mind any of the crimes of the crooks on Wall Street, or within big banking, big business, big corporate religion, and even big science such as big pharma, big ag, big oil, and their heavy lobbying. 

We, on the other hand, aim to do the same thing a real journalist does which is to punch up and not down. Setting aside the shrill and nonsensical efforts of those who suggest the corporate oligarchic owned media in America is somehow "liberal," the situation with regard to talk radio is even more perplexing as it doesn't even carry a pretense of political balance. Having a near complete blackout of progressive voices. Progressives don’t see the algorithmic amplification of their messages that regressives do on modern social media platforms either, and apologists for the platforms will argue that’s because the algorithms are designed to promote “emotional” content and rightwingers are more likely to create inflammatory content. The reality is the corporate media have proven that when left to their own devices, they value responsibility to shareholders higher than social responsibility to inform the electorate about controversial issues of public importance. As corporate media don’t really care about covering real issues that impact the public, let alone covering those issues honestly or objectively. 

Written Essay: Pro-Democracy Series #10: Middle Class Caste Status

We have found roads crossing in both our "Pro Democracy Series" of essays and our "Problem with the Media" series of insights. Ones that are so crucial that we really think it needs to be recurrently said across all our work on a semi regular basis that when talking about self-development, that is focused on the self - that is the individual. While we are each infinite fractals of consciousness, both whole and part of the whole, and the little ego of your physical self on the chess board of the material world does have a place, we must also look at the structuring of the whole chessboard of society and where the self fits within that larger map. And a simple summary of that structuring, in terms of freedom, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the most free from Empire (which will be the subject of our next series) is all about how hierarchy is structured and distributed in terms of money and societal caste status. And as said before and well just keep saying, it is one that most benefits and continues to create an informed and educated middle class (and thus informed and educated voting electorate) as well as the poor to become part of said middle class. It's so about that, that we could call all of our essays and insights that touch on the societal and the political "the hierarchy files" and that is why we create these audio outputs - to help our fellow middle class become more informed and educated and self-developed.

The United States is a great country. But, if we are to be honest and not dark agents, we must also admit its a militarized empire built on sociopathic and psychopathic settler colonialism and genocide and the backs of slaves and it still has a long way to go for making up for that. Even into modern times spending the last century fueling coup's in South America, getting into quagmire and near endless stupid occupations of Muslim countries in the Middle East for oil and minerals, and is still very much continuing it to this day by giving money to the monsters of the Israeli Offense Force to genocide Palestinians. Empire is all about commodifying the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water through religious holy wars via colonialism. Essentially making money of what should not have money made off of it. Capital mixed with social, (Capitalism and Socialism) are the best two systems when intertwined and working in balance together. An element of private capital is the ownership of property while social is more for the public good and there's a saying that conservatives care more about property while liberals care more about people. This is why extreme regressive reactionaries short circuit at the sound of the word "socialism" when used with democracy, because they don't care about other people and democratic socialism uses the government to enact policies to help the middle class instead of just the ultra wealthy. The main downside of socialism without private capitalism is it starts turning into communism. The major downside of capitalism without any socialism is it assumes and requires a planet of infinite material resources to commodify and also that it heavily stratifies and amplifies caste status.

A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories. Class society or class-based society is an organizing principle society in which ownership of property, means of production, and wealth is the determining factor of the distribution of power, in which those with more property and wealth are stratified higher in the society and those without access to the means of production and without wealth are stratified lower in the society. When psychopathic settler colonialism came to the new world of America in the late 1400's, it was discovered that Native Americans had no concept of private property and were unbribable. Because they had not yet had those aspects of the imperial operating system installed.

In an imperial influenced class society, which is pretty much the whole world now outside of indigenous peoples, it divides and separates its citizens, at least implicitly, into distinct social strata, commonly referred to as social classes or castes. Historically in the dark ages of the West this was a hierarchy of Gods, then monarchies or royalty (which were said through old school lies to have divine rights), then aristocracy, then clergy, then nobility or gentry, then the dirt poor consisting of labors or servants or homeless or beggars. The modernized version of this is broken out into the lower class, middle class, and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and of course family lineage. Regressive boogyman Karl Marx, who identified problems with Capitalism well but then proposed not very good solutions, defined class by one's relationship to the means of production (their relations of production). Classes in modern social mixed with capital society are that the proletariat work but do not own the means of production, and the bourgeoisie, those who invest and live off the surplus generated by the proletariat's operation of the means of production, do not need to work at all.

A caste is a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to: marry exclusively within the same caste, follow lifestyles often linked to a particular occupation, hold a ritual status observed within a hierarchy, and interact with others based on cultural notions of exclusion, with certain castes considered as either more pure or more polluted than others. This is commonly seen in America within how the children of Indian immigrants are expected to marry. Which, like in India, is very conservative and class based. Because Hinduism expects Hindu's not only to marry other Hindu's but also ones at their similar or higher socioeconomic status, the American Indian girl from a Hindu family who is in medical school, is set up, in a kind of arranged marriage, even in the 2020's not the 1220's, with the Indian boy who is in law school, so the Indian doctor can marry an Indian lawyer. This is why most if not all Indians you know have married another Indian and why marrying one another is the norm, not the exception. And that brown Indian girl would get a ton of pressure from her family if she wanted to marry a black or white public school teacher. And we can say this as someone who did not marry within our race and did not have parents who said, "you must marry a white girl whose family is more rich than ours!"

This is also no more transparently seen in modernity than within the justice system. Which we'll be getting into soon, along with voting, in this series. Which is really a two tiered justice system. One that functions well for the wealthy and powerful - bourgeoisie and large corporations who can afford armies of lawyers vs the poor, often amplified by the over-policing of poor African Americans who must use public defenders. Or lawsuits by the ultra rich which are designed to drain the coffers of anyone who isn't wealthy.

John Grisham's 1995 novel The Rainmaker is about a young new lawyer, who just passed the bar exam, who takes on essentially his first case, and the case of a lifetime, against a large corrupt insurance company which is revealed during the trial that its internal company policy has been to blanketly deny all claims initially, playing the odds that the insured would not consult an attorney. The case is won by the new young lawyer, who sits only with his other legal helper who hasn't been able to pass the bar exam, across from the boardroom table from about half a dozen soulless long sold out corporate lawyers. The young guy is fighting for the small individual, lower in caste and socioeconomic status, vs the corporate lawyers who fight on behalf of the large company, made up of ultra rich criminals who have higher socioeconomic status. At the time of this writing, the Supreme Court is structured extremely conservative and regressive / reactionary. And the simple cheat code with them through nearly all the cases they take up, has been the corporation wins every time, and the little guy, a single member of the lower to upper middle class, gets screwed.

The long con attack on the American middle class has been by design to regress wealth and income inequality and continue to amplify class separation status back towards how it was in the dark ages. Thus hurting the self development of each individual. As a result, American tax policy, and that knock on effect across all of society, has been worse than any other developed country in the world in our lifetime, and the well-documented result has catalyzed a wide variety of social ills. This rupturing of working Americans’ economic and political power has not just produced anxiety and despair; it’s also caused Americans in the past to disengage from politics because they view the political system as hopelessly corrupt and only beholden to the godzillioars and the corporations that made them rich. Since your giant “conspirituality” realization should be that because power corrupts, at this point in the timeline, we simply have a bunch of greed from crooks at the top of the hierarchy, we are constantly boggled by those in the conspiracy world, or those on the spiritual path, who fall down into traps of cults, or nested cults based in religions of empire, or simply just become more regressive and reactionary in their politics which just end up helping the ultra rich and hurting the middle class, which they themselves are likely in the lower middle class to upper middle class strata of, and sometimes even toward the poverty line if they've struggled having a set career path. Thus only hurting themselves.

But we also know this is an imperial tactic in the war for your development and mind because the more amplified the wealth inequality the more it severely damages democracy and paves the way for totalitarian rule. In 2016, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk published a paper in the Journal of Democracy showing how, in the era since the trickle down, golden shower, nightmare of neo-liberal for the rich (meaning extreme freedom for the rich) economy of the 1980's, many Americans within nested cults that lean conservative, meaning mainly valuing caste status above their own have devalue democracy. "In the United States, among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a 'strong leader' who does not have to 'bother with parliament and elections' has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent." By the time the paper came out in 2016, almost 49% of Americans thought elites should make decisions, rather than "government." And the growing disillusionment with democracy is them being played like fiddles pushed toward solutions hatched by the dark agents of the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.

If we want to continue recovering democracy, one major simple thing entails bringing back sensible tax policy, like we had for over 40 years post great depression to the 1980's, pushing both the top estate and top income tax marginal rates back above 50%, to end cutthroat capitalism for the poor and middle class and socialism for the rich. But empire doesn’t like that.

Written Insight: The Problem With the Media #3 - Loyalty Only To the Dollar

Imperial dark Emperor Rupert Murdoch, who through his shadow tentacle company News Corp, is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, was once quoted as saying... "it's not about red or blue its about green".

Hard hitting journalism, which speaks truth to power, is deep hard work. It may not always be physically hard work like digging ditches in the July sun but it is mentally very much hard work. The more truthful it is, generally the more difficult it is, the more stressful it is because the more it requires going up against sources of entrenched power, and sometimes sadly, the more life-threatening it can be for writers, reporters, documentarians, or photojournalists. It's also straight up hard work not only for those creating it but also for those consuming it. Who's gonna sit down and search through troves of Wikileak archives or read the Panama Papers? Only real journalists. And then only more sophisticated people who want to be properly informed are going to be interested in what real journalists are publishing about the real truth. So like anything to do with self-development, it requires both ethos (credibility and ethics), pathos (emotions and feelings) and logos (logic and reason) and is thus more work than entertainment. But it's mature, sophisticated, and important.

Because of the consolidation and corporatization of legacy and big business internet news organizations, owned by mustache twisting aristocrats or Sith lord oligarchs, the main underlying important dynamic in media becomes the same corrupting force in any industry. Being that it's all about the money. And how much money can be made off the industry. Real deep journalism or documentary filmmaking require time and money. They are an investment. The 2015 American biographical drama Spotlight follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into a decades-long coverup of widespread and systematic child sex abuse by numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Although the plot was original, it is loosely based on a series of stories by the Spotlight team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For that one story alone, the newspaper had a room in the basement paying a handful of journalists salaries for over a year continued by multiple additional years of follow up stories. That's a lot of time and money for essentially a single huge story that ultimately challenged a rich and powerful corporate institution - The Catholic church.

So what corporatized, consolidated, only all about the money legacy media and new media organizations, who are beholden to add dollars, do at best, the larger they become, is transmute journalism in a degrading way into what is called "Infotainment". which is a portmanteau of information and entertainment - also called soft news as a way to distinguish it from serious journalism or hard news. The term is used disparagingly to devalue hard news subjects under infotainment or soft news subjects which sensationalize and prioritize fluff stories over informative or relevant content. This can lead to a focus on entertainment rather than providing in-depth analysis or context. Because their business models are based on advertisers, with staggeringly depressing amounts of money given to political candidates just going into media advertising by the way, the larger the audience the more big business media companies can charge for advertising.

So legacy media learned long ago, that because of the way low low educated or low information psychology works, that it's more about providing entertaining information that distracts through misdirection at who to be pissed off at then to provide real hard hitting truthful information that pisses off entrenched sources of power. So ethos, pathos, and logos are replaced with only logos and it becomes not about credibility and ethics, logic and reason, and most importantly truth, but making money off emotional infotainment at best. And even other things at worse, which we'll get into in the upcoming insights in this series.

Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #2 - Consolidation

In the previous insight regarding the problems with the media we said telling the truth in reporting is of foundational importance. But it also pisses people off or pisses them off before it allows them to make choices to be more free.

Primarily in the United States, and even in other democratic countries like the United Kingdom and Australia, legacy media over the decades has been continually consolidated. In the US this has happened under both political parties, one of which is mostly corporatized and the other of which is fully corporatized and each time it's consolidated it's become controlled by less and less people. And who are those certain people that become pissed off at the truth? They are the entrenched, corporate or corporatized governmental power structures, and those who support them. Now, who are at the top of large corporations that own large media companies? They are mustache twisting aristocrats, Sith lord Oligarchs, or in authoritarian countries, full-on dictators who are also oligarchs. Who, get ready for some truth, are always corrupt, because morbid wealth and extreme power, places people so far disconnected from the middle class to an insane asymmetrical level at the top of hierarchy and thus results in them thinking they are better than everyone else. Which is inherently corrupting. The comedian Duncan Trussell once told a story about how he got some highest budget free flight to the Middle East on one of their beyond first class / beyond business class tickets. The ones where you sleep in those cool pod things, the opposite of the sardine can that is coach. Then also had a private golf cart putt putt him around the airport so he didn't even have to walk the terminals and a private driver to his likely 5 star hotel included in the package. He said just after that one flight, he started to feel superior to everyone else at the airport. And this was on a public Emirates, Dubai, Qatar or airline, not even a private jet or yacht which are standard operating procedure for oligarchs.

Corruption can only exist within the shadow of lies and shrivels within the light of truth so oligarchs don't want the truth told because it would inherently cause de-corruption which they thrive within. They instead want to control the narrative because it only helps them - not the people. Concerns about large corporate ownership and its impact on editorial independence are frequently raised by those who value the journalistic oath. Because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that media outlets owned by big business are influenced by the interests of their owners, leading to self-censorship or a lack of coverage on certain issues. Traditional legacy media outlets have also very much historically played the role of gatekeepers, controlling the flow of information to the public. And as corporate consolidation increases gate keeping increases. Which limits the diversity of voices and perspectives that are heard. A journalist should fight the man, not work for the man. So the more media organizations are consolidated and thus corporatized, the more journalists employed by said media organizations have to cater to their oligarchic owners which are counter opposite to the truth.  All that should matter is what's true, so if you want a simple cipher for truth, check out our L-Curve oligarchy series on something called the L-curve (findable via www.lcurve.org), which is the medieval distribution of wealth that very much persists today. It's your secret cipher code for how everything in the world really works. In the West, from the majority of corporatized, legacy media, which has mediocre at best journalistic integrity, we get a very one-sided point of view on many things. Mainly the point of view that helps the top of the hierarchy - Godzillionaire oligarchs, mega corporate interests such as the military industrial complex, the dirty dirty dirty tub girl fossil fuel industry, big agriculture, the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries, the dark sorcery infested banking industries, and other things that want fascism instead of liberal democracy and the interests of everyday working people who are We The People.

There are plenty of decent to good wealthy folks out there. But the important differentiation here is wealth vs morbid wealth so the term "oligarchy" is a pejorative often used specifically to describe those with significant asymmetrical political influence and control over key economic sectors - one of which is always and absolutely media. Particularly when there are concerns about the concentration of power and its potential impact on democratic processes. As an example, who recently bought Twitter and renamed it to a stupid name that people refuse to even say without saying the previous better name and because their child is in a sexual identity transition and can't stand them for their un-acceptance of it has disowned them and their last name so they blame the $50,000 a year liberal arts school said child was attending and their counter solution was to buy Twitter and fill it with Neo Natzi's? An oligarch. One of the world's richest, if not the richest, who understands the importance of controlling the narrative by propagandizing the populace under the ruse of "free speech." Autocrats - communists and fascists know the importance of media ownership as Hitler and Mussolini also took over radio and newspapers during their time.

If they really cared about freedom of speech, Twitter, and any other social media network of a certain mega size, would be like a public utility, which everyone owns and within certain rules of content moderation, everyone has access to and not only that even have some public stake in - as a modern day analogue of the "public square". That would breed the best elements of transparency, honesty, and truthful free speech because it would allow for journalistic truth to thrive. With a more decentralized distribution of people co-owning it, like a co-op where the employees co-own the business. But when one source of corruption owns a media network, which is always the way with legacy and still problematic with new big social media networks, with a great deal of power and resources, that's harder for journalists to challenge, because it requires rocking the boat upward. Real journalism will speak truth to power, meaning it will be from a lower socioeconomic status, or a democratic middle-class socioeconomic status, and speak the truth against those at any level of the socioeconomic hierarchy, including and especially at the morbidly rich. 

Written Insight: The Problem With the Media #1 - Disavowing The Journalistic Oath

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off" - Gloria Steinem, American journalist

When in casual or public conversation, or any sort of discourse or rhetoric, the first thing that should matter, and the main thing that should matter, and frankly all that should matter, being of paramount foundational importance, is... WHAT IS TRUE. 

The realm of public, professional rhetoric, being shared to the populace belongs to that of the journalist. The frontline spokespeople for democracy. Because of this, the most important part of the media, by far, is a subgenre of it which is the journalistic press. IE, journalists - who research, write, and report on information to the public. Who's journalistic oath is "to seek truth and the public good. Expose injustice. Report with fairness and accuracy. Defend the public's right to know." When someone calls themself a journalist, however professional or amateur, they make certain promises to their audience. Ideally related to a pledge to impartiality, public service, but most of all truth. Cause whatever one's biases or whatever angle one comes at something from, all that should matter is what is true. 

Real journalists make these promises to protect the credibility of their work and earn the public's trust. Because their work can have a profound impact on society, with a trust that the public places in them, it is essential that they uphold the highest standards of ethical journalism in the public interest as a commitment to the principles of fairness, accuracy, transparency, and independence in their work. Yet, unlike professions such as medicine or law, which require a medical or bar licence to operate within, usually because a patient or client's life can be in their hands, journalists don't have a formal set in stone oath that they must follow and if broken has consequences. But honorable individuals in the field of journalism absolutely view their commitment to truth, accuracy, and ethical reporting as a professional and personal responsibility and know their work is a fundamental element in serving the public interest and fostering a healthy democratic society. While ethical journalistic principles and codes of conduct vary by country and organization, one well-known example is the Society of Professional Journalists "Code of Ethics", which provides a set of guidelines for journalists. The SPJ Code of Ethics is based on four key principles: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. All journalists, as well as authors, writers, publishers, streamers, commentators, documentarians such as ourselves, and anyone else active in the "news space" should adhere to these principles to maintain credibility and the public's trust. These codes typically outline principles and standards and the general golden rule being "speak truth and report it" because throughout all the noise and polarization, did we mention that all that should matter is what is true?

Now if we're honest and truthful, placing our hands on our hearts, we must admit that legacy media and far too much of new internet media, even in the democratic world, is utterly awash in lies. It does range on a political spectrum so the percentages of lies vary but we would say it's 50% of half truths at best on the honest end. Because, telling the truth entails pissing people off. And in the next one, we'll start to discuss who those people are.

Written Insight: Progress Over Regress

In our pro-democracy series and some of our orbiting insights related to pro-democratic political philosophy we've been saying this word "regressive" on occasion. And before continuing with our series highlighting the problems of the media, feel it's important to dedicate a couple insights into what it means when we say progressive or regressive. The Webster's 1828 definition of progress or progressive, is "Moving forward; proceeding onward; advancing; as progressive motion or course; opposed to retrograde" while regressive, is "passing back; returning".

Now in some but not all cases, what was older is better. For example, we find the 1800's Webster's dictionary to be superior to the more modern Webster's dictionary because there's been a century + long attempt to reduce our lexicon through the simplification of language. Which is intentional and see our essay "American Brain Fog" on something called the Gunning Fog Index and the reduction of reading. Especially dense and complex reading which has not always but far too often been replaced with brief and simple reading such as text messages or simple feeds while pecking on devices, primarily cell phones. We've also spoken on time not being linear but more like a sine wave due to the precessional cycles of the Earth, which are also conceptualized in astrology via ages. Such as going from the age of Pisces to the age of Aquarius. But those are 25,000 some years in length and are thus speaking of deep time which then gets into the juicy ancient civilizations more advanced than our own stuff. Where the further back you go, on a nearly 26K year wave, the more advanced its consciousness appears to get. But in terms of short time, go back a couple hundred years and see how difficult it was compared to today, yet alone going back 2000 years to the dark ages which was way deeper in the trough of the sin wave, and thus less advanced and much more de-evolved.

Society should always be evolving. Which usually happens via two steps forward, and unfortunately sometimes one step back. But just like the stock market, which may crash short term, over the long term, it's always growing. If there's one thing our parents have learned from politics, it's to never take any societal progress for granted. For example, they grew up in the civil rights era, which was a massive step forward for women and black and brown folks in the 1950's and 60's, who prior to that point couldn't even vote. Yet, there are forces at work, regressive ones, trying to always erode that progress and evolution. We'll be more specific as to who the regressives are in this push / pull in the next insight but the hint is it's the folks who don't even believe in evolution at all.

Anyone who truly listens to us, knows about the basic yet, quite frankly advanced spiritual concept that we are in binary reality. With a sun and a moon, and day and a night, and male and female. Which are all the same thing by the way, hint hint. And we know the left vs right binary political framing to be a binary trap. Because these things are not all or nothing. Black & white. They are variations of degree and it's likely everyone has some of each. We, for example, have been quite conservative on our amount of sexual partners and our financial savings through the years. It's never our intention to turn our personal outputs, this podcast, our future creations, into just a left to lib vs con to right battle. What we find instead to be a much better framing is progressive or regressive. Evolving vs de-evolution. Forward and not backward and will continue to put things primarily into this framing.

Asking the ghost in the machine what “Political regression" is and it said: “it can refer to a few different concepts, depending on the context: Societal regression describes a situation where a society reverts to a less developed or less advanced state politically, socially, or economically. This regression might manifest as a decline in democratic values, a rise in authoritarianism, or a return to outdated or harmful policies. In the realm of policy-making, political regression might indicate a shift toward less progressive or less effective policies. This could involve a reversal of previously enacted reforms, the adoption of policies that undermine democratic principles, or a retreat from international cooperation and norms. Intellectual regression refers to a retreat from reasoned, evidence-based discourse in political matters. It involves a decline in the quality of political debate, a rejection of expertise, or an increase in the use of fallacious reasoning or propaganda. Overall, "political regression" suggests a movement away from progress, development, or enlightenment in political thought, action, or outcomes.”

In a democracy, political progression represents by far, the largest block of populace throughout our country, and the rest of the democratic world. 2/3 at least. A moderate and balanced political "progressive" is someone who generally leans and advocates for social, political, and economic reform. Progressives often seek to address issues such as poverty, inequality, discrimination, and environmental degradation through governmental and corporate action and know none of which will happen without social change. They typically support policies that promote justice, human rights, and equal opportunity not outcome. They also typically advocate for more government intervention in the economy to provide social programs, regulate industries, and promote public services. And we will add an important element to that, which is that those advocations mainly cater to a balanced economic center, being the middle class. Basically, they work toward governments least dysfunctional workings which is to function on behalf of We The People. Because, when you cater laws and policies to the middle class people, that spills into getting the poor more towards the middle class and no, we're not going to say the rich more toward the middle class and trigger regressives with the thought of horrible communism, as there will always be some poor and some rich, but does prevent morbid wealth and oligarchy, which are threats to democracy. Because it can't be said enough, you can't have a democracy without a middle class. The middle class is what builds the most strong, free, and powerful countries.

So political progress is anything that helps and benefits and provides more freedom to the majority of the people, meaning a well educated, well informed middle class, from the middle class out, which is allowed to have space and time for creativity, contemplation, and the pursuit of happiness. While regress is anything that hurts or removes freedom from the middle class.

Written Insight: What is Legacy Media?

A traditional definition of "legacy" is "to send or bequeath" which is essentially the passing off of something from one generation to another. So "Legacy media" refers to traditional forms of mass communication that existed before the advent and rise of the internet - specifically the world wide web. Such as:

Print Media: Newspapers and magazines that are published in physical formats, as opposed to digital-only publications.

Broadcast Media: Radio stations that transmit content over the airwaves. Including audio and also video networks and AM radio stations.

Cable Television: Television services that are delivered through cable infrastructure, offering a variety of channels.

The Film Industry: Traditional filmmaking and distribution, including movies produced by major studios and shown in theaters.

Book Publishing: Traditional publishing houses that produce physical books rather than exclusively digital formats.

A pro-democratic highlighting of ownership of such media, which we support, is that it was historically, unless some sort of bottom up co-op, owned by wealthy business people who were usually white and of European descent with various backgrounds. While regressive authoritarians, which we do not support, typically dog whistle a secret and more specifically conspiratorial definition of legacy media which is... "The Jews".

As we'll get into discussing the many, many, problems of legacy media, in this insight series it is accurate to say this term is often used to distinguish traditional media outlets from newer, digital-native platforms, regardless of their ownership. With the term "legacy" there to emphasize the historical and established nature of these media forms of which many young children today will never know, contrasting them with the newer and often more technologically advanced methods of communication that have emerged in the digital age that young children might now use every week. In print that has occured for over multiple centuries now. However, with the rise of the web (and what happens with a web? Things get caught in it), this new media landscape has essentially changed almost everything. Legacy media has had to adapt to new challenges and competition from "new media" internet based digital platforms, which often operate with different business models and reach audiences in alternative, primarily more democratized ways. It's also a good way of describing that these things are the past, not the future and are being replaced via the internet at high speeds. By democratized we mean every individual now has a pen and or voice to publish and broadcast through new mediums such as websites, blogs, articles, digital channels, podcasts, etc... Which has some good and bad, but as a whole, we can say that legacy media has more top down gatekeepers, while newer media, while still used occasionally with the help of traditional gatekeepers, by no means requires those gatekeepers. Allowing for a broader range of discours and a more bottom up philosophy. Representing more people and a wider range than only what gatekeepers have historically allowed. Hooray!

Written Insight: Bread & Circuses

"Bread and circuses" is a phrase that originated in ancient Rome and refers to a strategy used by Roman emperors to maintain the loyalty and pacify the populace through the distribution of free food (bread) and entertainment (circuses). The phrase is often attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal, who criticized the practice as a means of controlling the masses and diverting their attention away from important societal and political issues. This pitch from selfish, highly dysfunctional, unhonorable, non-initiated leaders to one another being, "just feed them and keep them entertained."

In ancient Rome, providing free bread to the citizens, known as the "grain dole" or "bread dole," was a common practice initiated by various emperors as a form of social welfare. This distribution of free grain helped alleviate hunger and poverty among the lower classes, which was good cause you then didn’t have people literally starving and then getting very desperate, but it also served a political purpose by ensuring the support and loyalty of the population.

Similarly, the Roman emperors organized lavish public spectacles, including chariot races, gladiatorial contests, and theatrical performances, in arenas such as the Circus Maximus and Colosseum. These entertainments, while oftentimes brutal, played to our inherent human interests to watch a physical fight but were also intended to distract the masses from their grievances and discontent, fostering a sense of unity and loyalty to the ruling powers.

This concept is still very applicable 2000 years later. At the time of this writing & speaking, the United States has just had its largest sporting event, the super bowl. Which is not even the largest sporting event in the world, the World Cup being larger. And like with big everything, big sports are big money. While most middle class Americans, in the most powerful country in the world, can not afford an unexpected $3000 medical bill, the current price for said sporting event is now climbing up to a quite horrific nearly $10,000 per ticket on the low end, and going up to $100,000+ for some extra poshy seats. While democracy is often under threat, and to maintain healthy democratic systems requires constant participation from an historically well educated and well informed populace, far too many people put more money into purchasing their sports tickets than they do on small dollar donations to opposing pro-democracy political candidates.

While things very much have improved since the ground zero days of Empire, Ancient Rome, with more respect for human life, as the events no longer feature participants being run through or mauled to death, but instead kicked and punched in an octagon until bloodied, or smashed up against one another on a court or field, and occasional still gored via pissed off bull, it’s important to stress that in free and open society, circuses should certainly be allowed, but it’s about the amount of time one puts into them. While this is not intended to be us as a curmudgeon saying "no one should enjoy a sporting event", engaging with them only to the point where they are not allowed to be consumed to the point of constant distraction is crucial.

The phrase "bread and circuses" has since become a metaphor for any pro-oligarchic and pro-corporatized governmental policy or strategy that seeks to appease the populace with superficial benefits or distractions while ignoring underlying societal issues or problems. It is often used to criticize politicians or leaders who prioritize short-term gains or superficial entertainment over addressing more significant issues facing society and also highlights this dynamic between the aristocracy and bourgeoisie compared to the everyday folk, is very old and distraction had been figured out as a tool of control by the ruling but infinitesimally small minority long ago.

Essays Volume 3: Wisdom From Teachers

Third essay volume complete!

This collection consists of the third 25 essays created mainly from 2021 to 2023. We had 23 of these essays completed up until year ago, but we spent so much of 2023 absolutely SLAMMED working day job wise, so we just finished the last two essays (only privately available here or to folks who purchase this volume separately via our store) in March + April of 2024.

The essays included are: A Personal Workspace, American Brain Fog, A Street Photographer Appreciates A Street Artist, A Vast Ocean of Life Coaches, Awards Are Stupid, Cooling Harsh Rhetoric, Crossing the Time Wealth Threshold, Decentralizing The Big, Dual DisHonorables, Ingestion From The External, Karma Cafe, Lets Robin Hood The L-Curve, Making Bilateral effort, Multilevel Pyramid Cults, No Set Schedule, Recorrecting Visual Imbalance, Stormy Seas Continue, The Cannot Be Given Away Phase, The Spoken Word, Tools of Our Trades, Transitioning from Personal Development to Spiritual Self Development, Wisdom From Teachers, and Writing Makes You Unstoppable.

https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/6qzrvjoxe4zohta/NilesHeckman_Essays_Vol_03_WisdomFromTeachers.zip

A Personal Workspace (Exclusive for Patrons)

If there was a silver lining from the Covid-19 situation, it was the acceleration of the global adoption of "working from home". Of course not for every industry, but ones which primarily involve working in software in front of computers most of the day.

Being a sporadic documentary filmmaker requires a lot of travel, shooting, but then sitting in front of computers, primarily at home. While at the time of this recording we've made a few near feature length films, all of which have been financially successful, the amount of money they take to make has to date been small, so the prophets off such, while having brought in more that they took to make, still have not made us a living wage. As making money exclusively off being a documentary filmmaker is like trying to make a living off being a classical musician, or artist, or journalist - Meaning a struggle. Since it's extremely difficult in general to make a living off one's creativity, the classic saying is "don't quit your day job". That being said, our main day job for the last couple decades, which we freelance in sporadically and thus do quit on occasion, has been in various post-production roles which stretch across Hollywood and sometimes the commercial industry, the game cinematic industries, and the virtual and augmented reality industries. So we use a smaller percentage of our skillset on other projects in those contexts, and as a result derive most of our income from them.

We started this day job career when we were 19 years old in the Bay Area, then spent time working in San Francisco, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Toronto, and even some time in Wellington New Zealand and Sidney Australia. So outside of the US which told the monarchy to go screw themselves, we also lived internationally in other English speaking countries which stayed more loyal to the crown and have film industries. Our wife is a physician, and we actually moved to Los Angeles not for my work but for her's, as that's where she got her residency. When our daughter was born we decided to move back to the Bay Area to my home city so she could grow up in a great place and also go to the same good schools which I went to. My parents, while far from perfect and each have their issues, as we all do, they are very supportive, honorable, and we're eternally grateful to them for their many positive traits. Being an only child, with two aging parents, who we wanted to return the favor to for raising us well, we wanted to be more around them as they got older. Since they live in a very desirable area and were also amazingly willing to turn over their cluttered small hippy house to their son and his family... my wife and I spent the money we would be using for buying a home into building what's called an ADU in the United States, meaning "Additional Dwelling Unit", or second smaller house in the backyard. Due to the lack of housing combined with available and rather unused backyards, ADU's are becoming wildly desired for those who can afford them and state and municipal areas are now incentivizing them to help the housing crunch. After the ADU was built for my folks, my wife and I would be taking over inheriting the house I grew up in, and heavily rebooting it. That way my aging parents could get free senior care, my wife and I could get free babysitting, a more cost effective place to live in a very desirable and thus expensive area, and we could all get more for our money in terms of the place we live. Transmuting an overgrown, cluttered, crazy cat lady house, with a lot of hodge podge into one of the nicest and most hip minimalist modern farmhouses in the town.

The "living on your own & having your own 30 year mortgage" thing is a relatively new quote on quote "American Dream" invention. Ask a third world person, indigenous person, or even an Amish person if they spend 30 years and sometimes 40 years (barf) paying off a fancy modern farmhouse home with all the prestige and technology (including indoor plumbing), plus bells & whistles inside and they'll look at you like you are nuts. They will very much instead do the thing humans have done for thousands of years + and settle for a lower standard of living, which does not necessarily equate to lower quality of life, by living in a thatch house, yurt, hut, hobbit hole, wig womb, shanty cinder block structure, tiny house, ice cave and/or igloo, barn, tent, small cabin, treehouse, etc... and they will tell you if they need any of the above built, they will have others from their tribe or community help them physically build them then and there. Then they are done. Boom.

In terms of the costs associated with modern (and usually very expensive) home ownership, one way to cut that down has been to go back to multi-generation living. Asian cultures have long ago figured this out, with the grandparents often living with the parents for example. But living all under one roof can get challenging. After the 2008 crash, our mother in law once had 11 relatives living in her not very large house, and permanent family relationship damage resulted. With everyone being just too on top of one another for far too long. No fourty some year old still wants to see their seventy some year old parents every day let alone have them involved with every conversation around the breakfast nook. Since the Heckman family didn't grow up with any religious indoctrination and as a result believe in birth control and as a result is not that large, it's not that hard for us with five people on the property, and two dogs, and some cats, to get along decently enough within a modest sized area. But the key to that has been giving everyone their own space. We've accomplished that via a family compound with multiple structures. That now has not only two separate houses on the property, but two separate houses with another structure, a little 120 square foot office shed which my dad and I share which is our home office personal desk workspaces. So the stars aligned and the puzzle pieces came into place nicely allowing all of us to now live in harmony. Yeah!

Upon moving back to this home, which was just prior to Covid 19 hitting the shit fan in 2019, we, having spent a great deal of time on movie sets, as well as commuting to various production companies and post production facilities, which are often in "tec'y" or "office park'y" areas, had next to zero idea what we we're going to do day job wise from this location which could be considered "rural suburban" and thus a distant commute from any specific facility we had been associated with in the past for work. Basically our industries are not located here, at all. But as Covid made large amounts of people needing to be in the same room a potential health risk, our day job industry transformed into one that can be mainly accomplished primarily working from home. So to this day, we occasionally will be slammed working a day job gig, from an office shed at our childhood home, by remote accessing various networks with various post production facilities we've been associated with over the previous years. Like for many, this has been truly life-changing for us. As we absolutely despise sitting in bad traffic and absolutely adore working from home.

Sure there are times where it's beneficial to be at a physical office, such as for client interactions, networking, or spontaneous interactions or cold intros. But those serendipitous conversations that spark great ideas, and the collaboration that flows magically when employees are all in the room together are rare exception to what are instead the majority of the time colleagues who are socially inept desk trolls that rarely interact with the new person that sits down a few screens over from them. As distraction often outweighs physical proximity benefit, the vast majority of computer work, and basic work interactions for non social purposes, can be done from your own location accessing a company's network remotely. An article from an Australian news publication by doctor Libby Sandar which helped inspire this essay says "It’s hard to feel inspired or creative in a noisy open-plan office with rows of the same desks and chairs. Background noise, noisy co-workers, loud telephone conversations, impromptu stand-up meetings in the middle of the office and interruptions make it very difficult to conduct work that requires concentrated effort."

There is a psychological corollary to the physical workplace, having your own, unique, and loved personal workspace is crucial for several reasons. For comfort, privacy, organization, creativity, not to mention customizability. We are a big fan of desk home office design ideas, blogs, images, and videos so we've taken great care in setting up our home office. Which can be seen from the video versions of our shorter than essay insights podcast updates by the way. Since physical environments influence our psychological and physical states, having a beautiful and custom space that is your own, one which is individualized, can have a massive effect on your own sense of professionalism. All of which are able to be taken further in your home environment then they would be at an office location in which the majority of your work components are not your own personal gear. Because as Sandar says, "Where we work must enable experiences that match the state required for the work. A library can provide a sense of order, structure and focus by acting as a cognitive scaffold. At other times, a lively cafe space may be the perfect backdrop for emotional contagion and collaboration among a team. But in addition to focusing on the physical workplace, additional concentration should be on the underlying work state we are trying to achieve. The effect of our spaces on our physical and psychological states is more profound than we realize."

"The most important reactions we need from our workplaces are focus (a cognitive response allowing us to think and concentrate to complete our work), a sense of beauty (an emotional response, an essential, constitutive element of organizations which has important implications in organization theory), and connectedness (a relational response that involves the extent to which the environment facilitates a sense of community and a feeling of belonging to the organization). We need all three, but not at the same time. And not in the same place." Aside from the noise of most modern offices, another reason we often struggle to maintain energy or inspiration is that the uniformity, repetitiveness, and non-customization are very boring to our senses. At a psychological level, we are biologically disposed to seek out locations where there is some complexity, some interest, and where messages are conveyed in different ways. Such spaces evoke awe and a sense of beauty, fundamental human needs, and important precursors to positive mood, creativity, wellbeing and trust formation in organizations. A preference for beautiful environments plays a role in attracting people to restorative environments and retaining them for a longer time than would otherwise be the case, allowing them to recover from attentional fatigue and stress. It’s no wonder we don’t feel good among acres of gray carpet, computer screens and melamine." We personally got so tired in past years having to sit in undesirable cubicles or shared desk spaces that had non-ideal conditions, without fully adequate gear, and far too many distractions. Any sort of communal keyboards and mice are also not clean and thus notorious breeding grounds for bacteria by the way. Here's looking at your public library internet access station which gets nearly the same amount of hands on them as bus handles or gas station pump handles. Many times working in an office we'd ask ourselves "what's the point in all being physically crammed in next to one another when asked to be not that social and insteal mainly worker drones?" One facility we worked at in Venice California had such a terrible seating configuration, when our wife came to visit she was shocked at what a zero privacy sardine can it looked like. With employees at their desks in a straight line not quite but almost elbow to elbow, in what felt like a urinal row with no privacy dividers. And in other parts of the world, IE sweatshops, it's way worse. We do not miss that one iota, yet various company owners do.

Post Covid having wound down, some companies have given top down directives to return to their physical offices. A certain aspergers Godzillionaire who runs numerous companies who shall remain nameless has been quoted as saying "working from home is morally wrong" so F him and the push to get everyone back into the office is secretly being driven by two factors, neither of which is publicly spoken about up front because it only benefits people like him - sith lords, Robber Barons, CEO's, and various masters of industry & boards of directors, which are usually composed of weasels who own commercial real estate. The first one is concern about commercial property values. The second is a peculiar harking back by some managers to a 1950s puritanical regressive ultra-conservative "Theory X" approach which assumes that all workers are lazy and must be watched at all times with needing to be directed and controlled in order to maximize work efficiency which is the opposite of the truth. The number of managers and organizations who are still invested in outdated command and control approaches like this is still, unfortunately, significant.

Theory X only applies if people feel systemically underappreciated. Motivated professional workers, especially those who are well compensated, want to do a good job and add value to a company and can do so even more through the increased efficiency of working remotely from a personal individualized space. Productivity wise, not having to commute for example inherently saves each worker their personal time per day. Which is priceless. Being able to break up your day, do laundry, run errands, pick your little person or people up from school, leave early and perhaps hop back on later in the evening if needed, all create such wonderful flexibility. So the motivated worker is incentivized to get their daily or weekly work accomplished even more efficiently than in a dynamic where they must be physically present in their seat for show purposes until a specific time of the day. When that goes out the window because short of remote meetings, employees don't need to be physically seen, they can work from their underpants if they so choose and and what ultimately matters most is the results of the work itself. However they get that done remotely under their own time in their own personal workspace. Working for hire or as a launching point for their personal muse to get creative on their own time.