Patriot Earth

2012 Apocalypse?

2012-02-08T22:28:00.002-06:00

I just posted a new article to The End Is Here on how the apocalypse is likely to take even the best of us off guard.

The 2012 Apocalypse will blow your mind

This is actually a somewhat legitimate piece of philosophy unlike most of the other crap I post there.

Soon

2012-01-12T22:01:00.004-06:00

So life has done that thing it does where it puts me in the corner on hold.

I suspect though that this holding period is about to end. The year of the Dragon is upon us.

Shortly I'll be moving again. I'll be in a cabin on a mountain top in a Redwood forest with a garden and a beautiful woman. This is clearly a sign that the end of the world as we know it is nigh. I'm not that lucky. But I'm also not complaining.

Moving sucks, but I'm incredibly excited to step out of the holding pen and start writing the chapters the Fates brought me here to write, both literally and metaphorically speaking. It feels right this time. And I haven't been able to say that about my decisions for a long, long time now.

Ron Paul 2012 and Hitler 2016

2011-12-18T13:30:00.002-06:00

After a long hiatus I've written and posted a new article to Hitler 2012.

Ron Paul and Hitler

In the article I make the argument that a successful Ron Paul bid for the Republican nomination could potentially set the stage for a repeat of what happened with Heinrich Brüning in Germany in the 1930s. In short, making people desperate and pissed off with conservative approaches to politics sending them to a big government right wing nationalist we all know as Adolf Hitler.

Still Alive

2011-12-12T23:14:00.002-06:00

For some reason every time I think about the blog my mind opens up a great vacuous chasm and...

I'm in California. But I'm going to have to move, again. Moving 3 times in seven months, blehk.

Anyway, things are going well, slow, but well.

I suppose the fact that the Fates were going to make me move, again, after I just moved twice, had something to do with why I never managed to brag about the place where I am now. At least they saved me the effort and embarrassment. I'm really a much more decisive and stable person than this summer has made it look. I guess I've come to grips with the dynamic nature of my life by now, but I still wouldn't mind a nice straightaway on the road of life this next year.

There are a LOT of things I want to get done in the next 12 months.

Cali?

2011-10-19T16:12:00.003-05:00

The late summer part of this year in Washington state has been nice. Unfortunately, it's over. Now it's fall and it's cold and it's raining and gloomy. The Chanterelles have been relatively abundant, as were the huckleberries before them. But that's reaching the end of what this place has to offer me aside from Seasonal Affective Disorder.

So far I've cranked out 13,000+ words in the book writing process, but it's just getting too damned cold to be writing in a tent anymore. California beckons. What the hell does that state want from me? Whatever. I'm not resisting the flow of things anymore. I've been too damned stubborn the last four years, trying to create an idealistic future for myself against the requirements of my destiny. I just hope I'm not the butt of some twisted metaphysical joke amongst the Fates. I've wagered too much and lost too much. And I don't care to find out where my limits are. Isn't that the point of a reasoning mind? To spare oneself pain and increase one's success? Planning and working towards a plan once stood to reason, but the Fates said no and made my efforts a futile upstream swim. Now it stands to reason to go with that flow and so I shall, ...even if it means rafting into the pit of hell itself.

Not to Jinx Myself

2011-09-25T16:46:00.003-05:00

But, I'm happy to report that I've managed to re-read / lightly edit the first third to one-half of this book I'm scratching out.

And in the last week I've cranked out nearly 5,000 fresh words. Not bad for three writing sessions.

Here's to hoping I can stand to the challenge to keep chipping away at it!

(Photo taken in Goat Rocks Wilderness in Southern Washington State)

Lessons, Guilt, Love and Goodbye

2011-09-15T15:10:00.006-05:00

I have been holding off on mentioning this here for the better part of three months now. But I need to get it off my chest before I entrench myself yet again for my fall/winter writing season. I have no words or energy to give justice to the compounding importance of all the nuances of what has happened to me this summer. And, indeed, it would be wholly inappropriate to discuss them all here.

But I did want to let my friends and family know that after four years I broke up Jana. It was my decision and I did not do it under the most respectful of circumstances but when I laid the situation on the line she agreed that it was the right course of action.

It has not been sudden and liberating as sometimes a breakup you choose yourself can be, but rather a slow and sad process. I know I've made the right decision but my reflex emotion is that of guilt, of loss, and undertones of gratitude. In some ways it has been like grieving for a lost loved one whom died in an accident that you will always wonder if you could have prevented.

But never-the-less, each day I am more and more comfortable with it all, and glad, glad that she was in my life for the exact amount of time she was needed, glad for the rare good times and glad for the improvement in my character her impossible requirements for a man demanded and encouraged me to make.

But I am also glad to not have to be "the villain" every day, I am glad to not be at fault for evils never committed, and I am ready to move on with my life as the better person it was so hard to believe I had become while crushed under the sadness of the unending barrage of guilt. I am so very glad to be able to have an opinion or to be upset or sad or tired without being accused of doing it to manipulate. I am so very glad to not be punished for being alive.

But four years of being beaten daily with that much guilt (even when most of it for the first few years was well warranted and needed) has a way of working deep under ones skin and lingering. Logically speaking I should not feel guilty for moving on from her, but I still do sometimes, though a tiny bit less each day. It's tough when you care.

The bottom line is that after four years I was forced to come to the acknowledgement that she was either not interested in or capable of showing concern for my emotional well being. If I was sad she threw guilt instead of a hug. Nothing is lonelier. Whether it was lack of intelligence or lack of caring I won't speculate, but it had to be one of the two, and the result is that I stopped respecting her. I can't respect someone who treats another person with that insulting and painful level of disregard. And thus the cycle of de-evolution was about to begin. And the minute I realized that the death of my respect for her was affecting my behavior I acted. It was sloppy, of course, coming under highly inconvenient circumstances for her but I didn't let the relationship devolve into abuse, and for that, at least I can be proud.

I suppose this sounds like a weak excuse, or an just an insult, but I have my reasons for saying this, and vengeance is not one of them. It's really not, even though she did decide to appropriate a lot of my possessions to compensate herself for the inconvenience, something I find laughable when she let me date her, let me blow thousands and thousands of dollars to travel across the world to see her when she was totally emotionally unavailable and then lost 4/5ths of my once substantial life savings fighting the flow of destiny in a doomed struggle of epic proportions to be with her.

Am I angry that she never learned to just shut the fuck up, quit brow beating me and hold me for a minute when I was sad once in a while? A little, yes, but not with her, I'm just angry I was so dense that it took four years of being emotionally and spiritually stifled in order for me to learn the lessons that I did about how to treat someone whom I respect with the decency they are due. But that tiny shred of anger too is passing.

I want to say something here to say that I don't mean this to sound like I'm putting her down, to say that I still hold her in high esteem, as I do, and I do with a sense of gratitude that can bring me to tears, but even so I'm not willing to diminish the statement that I've felt dead for four years. Call it tough, passive-aggressive love. She's a magnificent woman of innumerable virtues including an iron will, but her iron will is both her greatest strength and greatest weapon of destruction; it sculpted me for the better, but also broke us apart. I only hope that our breakup will help her to know to take care in it's use.

But there is one more thing I hope for her... Our relationship was based on idealism and brute determination. While these can be, and in many senses were, virtues, I don't think we were ever a good match. She always had a fear of sharing too much of herself with me, that it would somehow compromise her identity. Logically that was bullshit that kept me feeling alone, but maybe intuitively it was brilliance, or just the Guardian Angels of our Destiny keeping us confined to the passing but poignant lessons we were meant to be for each other. Either way... What I hope for her is that she can find someone with whom she can share her full self without apprehension. I can think of no more loving wish to send with her into the world.

With love, here's to a fresh start; here's to life.

Cheers

Another Summer

2011-09-06T12:50:00.002-05:00

The huckleberry bushes are already turning red with the first chills of fall in the Cascades. And my very short summer work-season is already over. Quite the whirlwind summer, changing everything, but for the better... well everything for the better except my financial situation which is teetering on the edge of not-so-good, un-aided by the short work contract this year. Oh well, I was ready for it to be done this early anyhow.

Anyway, a few weeks of fun then back to business. That half written book beckons once again.

The Religion Trap

2011-08-19T10:41:00.002-05:00

Ever since I left my white-collar career five years ago to pursue a more meaningful life, my blogging in the summer months has been much slower than during the rest of the year. This summer is no exception, but I have written at least something. In my original fashion of wild scrawl across the pages of a well worn composition book, I scratched out this metaphysical rant on June sixth somewhere in the Oregon high desert after a trip to climb a mountain in the deep snow and visit my land which was lush with spring wildflowers at the time.

Typically I would have just let this one rot in those weather warped pages but something happened that day alone in the desert; I let go of a fist full of anger and it was enough to finally begin moving on from that fight with the flow that carries one towards his highest destiny. It was a landmark in my spiritual growth, and though it is just a rant and one that overuses the word consciousness more than a bad Terrence McKenna lecture at that, I found it again recently and found it to be a fair bit more lucid and poignant than I remembered. It's not much, but it marks a day for me, a day after which my life immediately began to change, and I began to reconnect with that powerful spiritual flow that carries knowledge and infinite peace, joy and jest through all things. I haven't felt so alive and, at the risk of sounding like a some sort of brain-dead dope fiend, filled with magic, for exactly four years.

I can't help but think that if that day was so significant, then perhaps this rant is worth sharing, so Cheers my friends!

The Religion Trap

I've been particularly hard on religion recently. For a large part it can be, I'm sure, attributed to my travels in Europe and the innumerable scenes of gratuitous torture and genocidal violence that invariably accompany such a trip. However, the existential has been on the mind as well and I've been attempt ting to reconcile my guttural revulsion to all things religious, or at least all things Abrahamically religious with the guidance of intellectual reason and, as well, my own sense of spiritual intuition. It's taking some time, language limits us far more than most of us ever imagine and, I expect, far more than the most brilliant of us ever conceive.

Perhaps it is this limitation that also irks me so about religion. I'm not talking about the rules about things like when we can do violence, who we can fuck when and under what conditions, or what we can eat on Fridays; the limitation of religion goes far beyond these behavioral restrictions. The existence of religion, even when we don't subscribe, limits the expanse of our consciousness.

This is where the limitations of language get in the way. The problem with existing in a culture with a significant religious element is that that element demands all things answer to it. All sets of beliefs get labels and conflicting beliefs are denigrated. Often the non-conformists don't care, at least not at the surface but inevitably and invariably the non-religious are drawn into speaking about their own beliefs in the language of the religious whether to defend themselves, promote their own ideas or simply to share. And that's the trap, the explaining does the limiting. The language, the terms, are the trap.

If your consciousness is like a red light how can you share it with someone who's consciousness is like a blue light without the whole damned thing ending up a muddled purple? How can you even make a god damned analogy without having the "God" already there to damn it?

I want to say consciousnesses are like languages that not only don't translate but have no concepts at all in common, but even saying that does damage.

...This is why metaphysics is so fucking hard.

Even the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen have fallen into the trap of talking about consciousness, inter-connectedness, morality, existence, etc on the terms of the oppressor. Tolstoy is a very good example of this. He started and ended with Christianity and, while making some monumental points, really just ended up sounding like a crackpot.

It was a noble effort to stretch Christianity to house a broader consciousness but he failed to open the world to a broadening consciousness because he kept it all within the cul-de-sac of religion...

Back to this metaphysical dilemma...

Here, let's say you live in an "undiscovered" tribe of highly advanced indians (just go with it) and have a culture and consciousness where the concept of God does not exist. You may have a vastly meaningful and spiritual relationship with the universe but when you finally meet and talk to someone from a religious culture they ask if you believe in God; your answer isn't "no" because you never had the concept in your sphere of consciousness. You may say "no" to answer them when they persist but what you mean is not the same as what they understand; you never chose not to believe in God, he was just never one of the finite human concepts about which you had to form an opinion. But if you say "no" you're damned to having to explain your understanding of the wondrous functioning of the universe to this person in a crude and limited set of terms and ideas that have no possibility of doing justice to the expanse of your knowledge and experience of of the existential, that is to say, you're damned to explain it in his language. You'll never be able to explain it to him, you only waste your own existence on bickering over a triviality, and certainly the growth of your own ever-expanding consciousness benefits very little from the affair. What good did we ever do making words about God?

I hate being called an atheist and worse I hate being called an agnostic. Whether the existence and nature of God is known, knowable, certain or refutable is not the question; the question is "Does it matter?", followed by "And do we help or harm the expanding of our consciousness, that which the religious crudely conceive of as the quest to 'know God', by engaging in such dead-end arguments?"

My answer to this is NO it does not matter; heaven, hell and even reincarnation are so barbarically primitive and un-eloquent as concepts they could originate in no other mind than that of a stick-swinging monkey. The perfect simplicity of a double helix of auto-arranging proteins itself is but human bastardization of a mere hint of a universe far more vast and magnificent than our mired consciousness can ever hope to holistically gaze upon.

The question as to whether it helps or harms us is a question of optimism. When you manage to avoid the genocide and the torture, every once in a while a religious community can function peacefully albeit at the cost of a consciousness eternally damned to pace laps back and forth across the cage of religious dogma like a tiger at the zoo wearing a track in front of the glass. Usually these experiments in religious rigor fail in a cavalcade of fratricidal bloodshed, though they do sometimes rot for a dozen generations of inbreeding as is the case with the Mennonites. But, you may get lucky, it hasn't happened yet, but you might... The long and the short of it is that you have to be both the pessimist and the optimist to choose this path: The pessimist to believe the human mind has reached its cultural and existential zenith and will forever be incapable of peace but through harsh imprisonment of consciousness; and the optimist to think that that shit will actually work.

If you haven't guessed it by now, this is my way of sending out a joyful Fuck You to ever blank eyed prick who ever called me an atheist or thought he was quite clever when he decided I could be classified as Agnostic. They were wrong; I am neither. The tragedy is that no one can ever prove it to them.

...Religion is to consciousness as a virus is to a computer, an inescapable logic loop that halts progress and creates nothing but hate.

Deleted Again

2011-07-19T23:26:00.002-05:00

If you've stopped by sometime in the last three weeks you noticed that this blog had disappeared entirely, not just the posts...

There was a reason for it, and I'm not going to discuss it here, not now but I want you to know that I am OK, good actually.

Life is bitter and it is sweet and sometimes it is both at the same time; for me, this is one of those times.

Anyway, now that I caught a couple hours to rearrange my online presence I'm putting a lightly edited-down version of this back on-line. Of the changes I've made I have disabled the comments. A blog works best as a one-way communication. Just email me if you want to talk and when I crawl in from the woods I'll write you back.

If you are wondering about facebook, and I know a few of you are, the answer is No, I did not block you, I just suspended my account temporarily. I did not block or "un-friend" anyone. I just don't have the time to manage the many facets of that medium right now.

Take care, all of you. I'll be telling stories here again in good time. I just need a little peace right now.

Osama Bin Laden "found" in the suburbs

2011-05-02T09:46:00.005-05:00

It pains me to have to comment on this, the whole ruse is so insulting to our intelligence and analytic ability, but people are particularly dense on this matter and so there are a few important points to make here. I'll pose the first four points as questions to make the blow a little softer in case you have an emotional investment in flag waving, of either persuasion.

1. Obama killed the Boogeyman a week after officially launching his re-election campaign. Co-incidence or cheap trick?

2. Have you ever read Orwell's 1984? Do the words "two minutes of hate" resonate at all with the fist and flag waving morons that poured onto the streets of Washington D.C. last night?

3. Why did they dump the body at sea so rapidly?

4. Did Obama's speech last night sound as much to you as it did to me like the crap we used to make fun of coming out of Maoist China and other hokey police state media outlets?

5. Have you noticed the unmentioned significance of this event yet? That is to say, the United States now openly admits to being at war on the ground in Pakistan, and well into the middle of Pakistan. This makes it official, the United States is at war with FOUR Islamic countries.

Now that's Change you can believe in. Let's "win" the future.

The bankers are going to make shit-tons of money financing Armageddon.

A warning

2011-04-29T14:53:00.005-05:00

For the most part I've sworn off giving unsolicited investment advice, not because my advice is crap, which it may or may not be, but because I'm not very good at following it myself.

However, I want to urge caution on precious metal speculation right now. Silver is damned near $50 oz. It was at $9 when I first started following it in 2005-2006. Eventually it will go much, much higher, but it has moved way too far, way too fast right now. So do make sure to hedge your bets and set stop loss orders. A couple put options can buy you a lot of insurance against a major correction.

Likewise I wouldn't bet heavily against silver either. The term is called trying to catch a falling knife...

UPDATE May 02, 2011: Silver took a 20% smash down over the weekend, and has already recovered most of the loss. I cashed in my puts this morning for a modest 40% gain over the weekend, and have no position in silver except a couple of junior mining stocks that I'm holding for a longer term. The whipsaw is likely to keep cutting people.

UPDATE May 06, 2011: Looks like I was a bit premature on cashing out those puts. The smack down continued from the highs near $50 down to $33 this morning. The whipsaw metaphor persists, but I'm playing it the other direction now. This dollar bounce seems like a dead cat to me.

Spreading Thin

2011-04-26T23:23:00.003-05:00

My theme for this year seems to be biting off more than I can chew and then spitting some back.

There are just so damned many things I want to learn and do and my time and money are so sadly finite.

I've been studying construction, and fishing, carving spoons and grinding axes, reading esoteric literature, researching for the book and, as always, sifting through financial news. (hint, short sell OpenTable.com (ticker: OPEN) at 190 times earnings are you shitting me?)

And that's just a small fraction of what I've been up to when it looks to the rest of the world like I'm being a hermit. Sadly, one can't do it all, so everything I take on has to get scaled back and go through some sort of time and budget prioritization. But at least I'm not feeling stuck; small progress in lots of projects is much better than no progress in a few. At least in this way 2011 has had a good start. But it's going to be an outright daunting task to accomplish my minimum goals that I've set for Fall of 2012. Hopefully I won't have to make too many more cuts in ambition.

If you don't hear from me here that often, don't be surprised; I'm sprinting to meet an arbitrary level of disaster preparedness by an arbitrarily chosen deadline that just happens to roughly coincide with the termination of the Mayan Long Count, a peaking in the 22 year solar activity cycle and a max-pain point for the fall-out of the real-estate bubble. ...not to mention this whole slow moving, yesterday's news peak-oil thing...

Keep in mind though that 98% or so of the preparedness I'm talking about is related to developing skills rather than acquiring shit. I spend between 12 and 14 hours of nearly every day studying or otherwise working towards the goal.

If I end up being dramatically wrong about where I see us heading over the next few, rapidly approaching years, then I've still gained an immense amount of always useful knowledge, but frankly I can imagine nothing short of an out-of-the-blue surprise, super cheap, ultra rapidly scalable energy source miracle that could possibly make the next 20 years as generally comfortable as the last 20.

We may never see a Mad Max Zombie Apocalypse, but that doesn't mean you're not going to have to get primitive-style creative to make ends meet. ...especially if the currency is destroyed, a scenario that looks more and more like a possibility every day. And no, I am NOT a hardcore hyperinflation pulpit pounder.

Anyway, as things progress for me, I'll try to share from time to time the efforts I've made that have paid dividends and the ones that are best left to specialists. I still want this blog to be useful even if it is, these days, mostly just a means to update distant family and friends.

Perfect Brown Rice Recipe

2011-04-25T15:31:00.002-05:00

I just posted my favorite Brown Rice Recipe to TheEndIsHere.org

Just a little thing, but little victories make it possible to reach distant triumph.

iPhones and Evil

2011-04-20T11:52:00.001-05:00

New post on Hitler 2012 about the link between consumer complacency (a la iPhones, iPads, etc) and political complacency.

Downstream

2011-04-11T16:14:00.006-05:00

Seems like I spent 2010 in a trance of some sort. No, scratch that. It's more like I had my head stuck in a waterfall and spent a year trying to swim upstream, blinded from reason by the flow and struggle.

Time to float downstream with the flow for a bit.

More Cabin Fever

2011-04-06T11:22:00.004-05:00

Made it out for 3 days in the canoe in the Washington Desert but Spring is still not here in Spokane.

I find it interesting that a place with such perennially oppressive weather has a population of generally the most decent people of any city in the country.

Suffering brings people together.

Wealth and Good Weather make people into pricks. Ever been to West Hollywood? Case in point.

Cabin Fever

2011-03-31T19:54:00.009-06:00

Ah! Spring! Hurry Up! Ahhh!

My early winter momentum has now worn fully off and I'm in that mode of "getting fat and waiting painfully for the liberation of Spring."

The Idaho Blue Eyed Grass is already blooming, so it must be close. I'm so looking forward to starting my new job and more importantly moving this summer. New states, new mountains, new people and NOT working for the US Government, at least not directly. It can only be a good thing after the last season which despite having afforded me the opportunity to learn a ton and make a little money for a change, drug on me like a boat-anchor through slow grinding, irritating bureaucratic struggle and constant mental and physical fatigue.

This year I won't make nearly as much money, but my hope is that the changes in job and locale will afford an increase in quality of life to more than compensate.

Anyway, time to start getting back out there, and back in shape.

Why Greenies Should Buy Gold

2011-03-29T11:50:00.002-06:00

New article on Hitler2012. I'm making the argument that buying gold with your savings is "greener" than putting it in the bank.

Zeitgeist 2012

2011-03-27T11:49:00.004-06:00

I thought this recent Newsweek issue was rather interesting. Well, the cover anyway, I haven't actually opened it to read any of that tripe.

The Apocalypse has apparently gone mainstream. To me this is a prescient clue that this moment in time will be shown in future historical movies in bullet time, the moment a millisecond before the projected feces collides with the blades of the high speed fan.

It also means that "crash-blogging" is dead. In the past there were people blogging about the high likelihood of collapse with genuine benevolent intentions, good people along side many of your standard fear mongers. Now that the collapse of the American Empire has begun in visible earnest, the idiocy of predicting what is already happening is rightly relegated to the media.

The intelligent thing to do now that "doom", or at least severe malaise, is clear and present is to switch over from reading predictors of doom to people who help you with strategy, tactics and skills. This was, of course, always the prudent thing to do, but you first had to break the shackles of denial to begin acting. If a blogger hasn't changed his strategy by now from prediction to helping people navigate through the collapse and to cope with the emotional fallout then he is either sadly unintelligent or he has intentions that should be heavily questioned.

Survival Recycling

2011-03-23T12:44:00.003-06:00

New post on TheEndIsHere.org about the benefits of an extreme recycling mindset in a collapsing society.

Like everything on that site, it's intended to be a little more light-hearted than commentary I'll post here. Different site, different audience.

Patriot Earth Reborn

2011-03-22T02:09:00.004-06:00

I couldn't sleep. My head buzzed with discontent. Then I got up and deleted nearly five years of blogging.

It was magnificent.

Gone in an instant, hundreds and hundreds of hours of anger and joy, hyperbole, philosophy and politics, my all-embarrassing past. Clutter. Slop. Confusion. And a little bit of inspiration.

It's good to purge from time to time. Everything in this life including life itself is temporary. If the cycle of creation, death, decay and rebirth present in all things wasn't good would we bother to exist?

Would we be so excited about this Apocalypse?

Patriot Earth was always about creating a planet of heroes, one at a time, starting with myself. And it still is and will be. But how am I to reach anyone through a pile of cluttered and broken ideas?

I've written some good things, indeed, but I've also written a lot of tripe and anger and things that are outright wrong. To have to defend or explain away things I wrote when I was less aware, more naive, hurting or reckless wastes the energy I have to affect a greater purpose in life.

The question now is simple. What will I / (we) do with this fresh start?