I'd probably be a really tough college professor

This is my brain on antibiotics. I've gone to plaid.

I suppose I might have lost a few people in that last post.

click for 15 Jokes Only Philosophy Geeks Will Understand

I've talked about how I feel about Plato's allegory of the cave. I don't often talk about how I feel about current events in politics and religion, which I believe is nicely summed up in the book of Amos, on which I did a paper for an Old Testament class on prophets. In short, all organized structures become layered with corruption, God himself loathes and throws out the traditional feast and worship days, corrupt leaders are warned they'll be dragged over the walls on hooks like butchered carcasses, because the cattle of Bashan wreaked havoc on the populace with their demands.

People have been arguing about what and who the cattle of Bashan are for time out of mind. Years ago during the writing of my paper, I found a very rare document that described actual wild cattle that ran loose in the mountains of Bashan, with great long horns, untamable to the point where they would shred domesticated cattle to bits with their horns if they came across them. One hardly needs to go into lengthy allegory with that visual.

I have a fondness for a movie called Equilibrium, loosely based on the Orwellian novel 1984. (Funny, calling an Orwell work Orwellian, a mild faux pas kind of chuckle.) Without boring us all, it's pretty much about the literal opiate of the masses, as it were, layered with the purging of human expression. The whole point is government control.

We are living in a golden age of human expression, on the cusp of mass inebriation with entertainment being the drug, a delightful causal loop I hope philosophy students can appreciate. We are so addicted now to entertainment saturation that we don't know what to do with ourselves if we are not somehow involved in either experiencing it, fabricating it, interacting with it, or creating it. The industry pimps and pushers make money on it, no doubt, but behind the boardrooms and off the books are the unofficial content editors. One example that springs to mind is the rumored Stanley Kubrick debacle.

click to see Movies In Color

My problem with modern interpretation of any kind of truth is that our methods of revealing truth still keeps people's eyes shut, even when they think it's opening their eyes. Diversionary tactics include well-timed truth leaking so heads will turn and miss other truths right under their noses. No one wants to see what's really going on, and those who fall the hardest for 'truth' (even when it really is truth) often wind up becoming the very tools that help propel the diversions.

I stopped feeling shocked by anything years ago. Of course good people are really bad guys, or, to say it more correctly, bad guys wind up in good people jobs. It makes total sense that a judge is a secret pedophile, or that a cop is a rapist, or that a nurse contributes to an underground baby racket. Of course governments make quiet deals with drug and sex traffickers. The whole not negotiating with terrorists thing prompting homeland security to oversee and synchronize local police forces is only one of many necessary steps in a very long history of growing pains in this world. I said during a private discussion the other day that all governments arose from crime lords taking over and protecting their territories. We could go a step further and say we are all owned by one system lord or another, in pyramid schemes that go back at least a thousand years. The latest in fashionable 'truth' is that we have nearly reached that fabled balance of world powers that Orwell painted out for us. So... and then what? Some believe it must be congealed into a new world order so that we can stop all this silly continual war stuff, but the fight is over who will ultimately shape that final world order before we lock into an equilibrium state of world idealism, because idealism isn't the same thing from one part of the world to the next.

Good and bad are so layered and intricate and redefined from moment to moment that it's getting harder and harder to figure out what good and bad really are. At the lowest level, the person who praises someone rescuing ducklings or a kitten in heavy traffic might turn around and publicly mock, belittle, and treat another human so badly that a crowd rises up on facebook over one cat being abused or eaten, demanding the deaths of a person's family and even an entire country over something that doesn't warrant that kind of hatefulness at all. The frenzy of hate has become the new good, as long as hate is pointed in the right direction, whatever that is from moment to moment. Harnessed, that kind of energy drives powers far beyond our petty controls at the voting polls.

There is one truth behind all other truths- them vs us. As long as we keep falling for the them vs us thing, there is no hope for this world, no matter who you are or what you believe. Them vs us will always be the mechanism by which we are controlled. It's so simple to grasp, yet so difficult to accept. Every time we fall for the hate game, we propagate agendas we probably don't actually believe in going on at much higher levels.

"Researchers believe that the closest representation of the aurochs alive today is an Asian breed of cattle called Gaur... Photoshopped to be the size of an ancient aurochs."
click pic for the article

In the book of Amos, oppressors of the poor and crushers of the needy were called cattle of Bashan. This has been wildly misinterpreted so many times, so let's keep it simple. The untamable (above the law) do as they wish to those who are helpless to evade the abusery going on in institutionalized systems and programs. (Not that it actually matters, but if you believe in God at all here, pay attention that all the holy days and their traditions were roundly denounced by the end of Amos on the premise that they'd been so desecrated that they no longer had any meaning, ultimately highlighting that all days are holy, all grounds are sacred, and no one owns what God has made.) (Yes, ask why they're still being owned, why any religion or government would continue to lay claim to ownership of any kind. The Ancient Aliens guy said it best- religion was set up to regulate a slave system. It doesn't matter whether it was actual off-planet aliens. What matters is that control depends on a belief system.)

Let us consider that we are being conditioned to become dependent on daily crutches for our lives. One wild inconsistency I've wrestled with is an 'official' program telling me what is healthy for me to eat, insisting that I must eat like that in order to be a healthy person, but if I actually eat like that, I get very sick. In order to handle being very sick, I need medications to help me live with the problems that healthy eating causes me.

Did that make any sense? Whole grains being supported as a major food source in a diabetic guideline is a joke. Whole grains are a huge worldwide business. Coming from relatives who helped build the breadbasket of America, I've gotten to hear first-hand discussions on how tightly regulated the grain industry has become around genetically modified super seeds and the people who are getting wealthy off the monopoly over a food source (it's illegal to plant non-approved unpatented seed), squeezing out natural selection and creating legal battles over 'heirloom' planting. I see all kinds of political wrangling going on over food transport tariffs and labeling while people are starving to death in some parts of the world. Most of all, I'm watching a nation of diabetics keep shoveling breakfast cereals into their poor bodies while they can't understand why they can't seem to get some kind of control back over their lives. *I* did. Why can't they?

Gluten aside, modern grain sucks and here's why
Top 11 Biggest Lies of The Food Industry

There are so many ways we are being lied to, taken in, used, scammed, controlled, and ultimately guided into lives of self-medicated panacea for depressions and sufferings that don't need to be happening in the first place. Is it because there is a dastardly plan to make us weak and die? I sincerely doubt it. I think it has more to do with big corporations and big pharma being able to manipulate ad and product placement and target sales. No one really wants to hurt anyone. They just want to make money, and somewhere at the top of heap, someone is enjoying being kinda powerful. Life is more fun when you're powerful.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a truther. I'm not a religious zealot. I'm not a political activist. I do think I live in a country that won a bidding war over the brain fallout after World War II and acquired some really nice intellectual property, and that said property is being used to experiment with pumping up the populace (healthy citizens make a country stronger), and that some of the experimentation has backfired a little (one example being rumor of peanut allergies springing up from peanut product use in vaccines, no idea if it's true, but peanut product use is so handy and cheap, it's just everywhere), and it's not really anyone's fault, but yes, it would be nice to have more full disclosure and informed citizens. In the meantime, there is a very real threat of world pandemic, nuclear war, and crop failures, so thank goodness there are teams all over the world studying this stuff. I just hope they don't use the withholding of knowledge and rescue to gain power while people suffer and/or die, right? While we have power skirmishes between countries, this is a real problem.

I'm a cynic. (That links to the philosophy of modern cynicism.) (Not to be confused with pessimism. To get technical, I'm a pessimistic opportunist, ready for fail recovery on a moment's notice, lol. If my glass is half empty, I get a smaller glass so it can run over. It's all about perspective.) Mostly that means I don't trust Machiavellian types (which is most of them), and if we're going to be herding human cattle through a pyramid power structure, let's at least do it respectfully on all levels. We're all human beings here.

I don't necessarily agree with the source this graphic clicks to

The last post I made before this one is an art form of a sort, intended to communicate layered content. Just as a street entertainer will go to great lengths portraying the human condition, my blog sometimes go to exaggerated extremes making subtle (or not so subtle) points. If you are not practiced at seeing literary commentary as art or aware of the history of modern arts springing forth from the strange dark hallways of baroque-en humanity (yes, rub your eyes, that was intentional), then you probably think I'm a nutty fan just splashing around on a silly little blog.

You couldn't be more mistaken. But that's ok. If you don't get it, it's all good. I love fans. I love human expression. And now I'll add that I especially love innocence. It's so refreshing to me when someone has no idea what I'm talking about most of the time in a world where bad things go on unnoticed all around us.

Incidentally, I do believe we need world citizenship, and that we have a whole lot of growing pains to go through before dignity is a birthright over the entire planet. It's ok if you don't get what I'm really saying there. What is important is that no matter what happens or what comes, we need to care about each other, because if we don't, there is no hope in this world. Constantly pulling apart into hate camps over this and that judgmental opinionating is what makes people easy to control. Chew on that.

If this music is a drag, it's ok to skip it and go back to the other layers of silliness I sprinkle around my blog. Silliness might just be what saves our souls.