October 27, 2022 - Covid-19 and 5G

The Link Between 5G, Covid-19, and Sudden Adult Death Syndrome 

Originally titled: A New Way to Die: SADs 

Archives of the Dr. Rima Truth Reports Published October 12, 2022 

Source: https://rumble.com/v1nqxoc-a-new-way-to-die-sads.html

Related Websites: 

http://drrimatruthreports.com/

https://preventgenocide2030.org/

http://www.opensourcetruth.com/

Video Games Revisited

I'd like to write now about video games. I resurrected an earlier post I wrote on the subject, "Coming to my Senses", simply because it is relevant to this post, and I changed my mind on a few things I wrote back then. 

When Playing Video Games Moderation is the Key

I've previously written about my early addiction to video games, and how I gave it up because I considered it a waste of my time, better suited for more enriching activities like reading. 

I still feel that reading is a more intelligent use of time, but video games, when used in moderation, can be a relaxing way to unwind when you don't feel like doing anything else. I consider video games to be in the same category as watching a movie, or a television show, or reading a magazine, or a simple novel. It's definitely not the most productive use of your time, but is just a way to relax when you feel you need a break from more serious projects. 

Playing video games really only becomes a problem if you do it too often, or causes you to neglect more important projects. For instance, if you never read, and you neglect your health, and you fail to get outside and exercise, and aren't really learning new things, but instead you're spending all your free time playing video games and neglecting everything else, then that's a problem. Like even if you work full-time, but spend your days off playing video games all day, every single week, I would say that is not healthy either. I mean you have the right to do it, but if you want to actually grow as a human being and realize your full potential, then playing video games all the time really could interfere with that. 

So it's really important to find a balance between relaxation and productivity, and it's okay to play video games once in awhile, as long as you are also making time for activities that are more mentally enriching and contributing to your health and fitness and overall prosperity.

I don't really spend that much time playing games, because my time is limited, and there are only so many hours in the day, and maybe I only have four hours, and the choice is between reading a book, watching a movie, playing a musical instrument, or taking a walk, and any time spent playing video games means less time for doing anything else. So, really I only play videos games when I'm not in the mood to do anything else, or if I'm just feeling too mentally exhausted or physically drained to concentrate on anything more meaningful. 

My Favorite Games

Right now I am basically only alternating between two games: 

The Long Dark and This War of Mine. I'm also a fan of the Fallout series, especially Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout New Vegas, but I'm not playing those at the moment. I really enjoy survival games and post-apocalyptic RPGs. I also enjoy books and movies in that genre as well. 

Well, anyway, The Long Dark is an excellent survival game, and is probably one of my favorite games of all time. It takes place in the Canadian wilderness, and your character is the lone survivor in a plane crash, in a world where apparently most of the people were killed off by a cataclysmic event. And the whole point of the game is to survive as long as possible while exploring different regions of the game world. It's just you and roaming packs of wolves, and other wildlife, some non-hostile like deer and rabbits, and others like bear and moose that will try to kill you first chance they get. 

The main obstacle is staying warm, followed by finding food, water and shelter, and defending yourself against hostile wildlife. What I find most fun though is exploring different locations, and finding new gear.

It's a really fun game, but one of those really time consuming games. I tend to play it in bursts, a few days in a row for a few hours, and then won't play it again for a few weeks, sometimes a few months, and then come back to it, and it's always fun, has never gotten boring. 

The other game is called This War of Mine, which is sort of a survival strategy game, involving resource management, where you control 1 to 4 characters sheltering in a damaged house in the middle of a warzone, where half the time is spent fortifying the house against looters, making sure your characters are in good health, and the rest of the time is spent looting other buildings at night and defending yourself against attackers. 

This one is definitely the more casual game of the two, and I sometimes play this in between calls when I'm working, if I don't feel like reading. 

The Truth About Conspiracy Theories

In my pursuit of the truth I've been reading a lot of conspiracy theory literature. Actually, it's my go to for daily information, but I am not so naive as to believe it to be all true. Far from it. You've got to be a very cautious and discriminating reader. Never accept a statement as fact without checking the sources. And this goes for the experts too, who are definitely not above getting it wrong.

Depending on your source, particularly if you're looking at some reddit conspiracy forum, where anybody can post, or a place like rense.com, where the links are all over the place, you will find that conspiracy theories are often a mixture of truth and fiction. 

You've got blatant sensationalism, completely made up or misleading stories generated solely for their click bait shock value, aimed at maximizing ad revenue and very little else. In other words, it's all about the money. Some people make a good living off of it, they don't care if it's true, all they care about is if it sells. 

Then you've got the garden variety trolls, people who think it's funny to make up some completely crazy, outlandish story, and to get as many people as possible to believe it, so that they can have a good old hearty laugh at their expense. In other words, it's all about the Lulz. 

Then you've got legitimately mentally ill people, paranoid schizophrenics, who live in a world of angels and demons and feelings of persecution and internal delusion, who publish their conspiratorial fantasy as fact, as if their own personal horror story is mass projected onto the whole world, where they are no longer alone, but the whole world is now in on it. 

Then you've got pure speculation, creative people of sound mind brainstorming conspiratorial possibilities, as a sort of science fiction thought experiment, that is kind of fun to think about, and to talk about with others, and it may or may not be true, but nobody is claiming anything definitively.

Then you've got disinformation agents who for whatever reason infiltrate conspiracy theory channels (but also do the same for mainstream media as well in the form of press releases and Reuters news feeds) and drop false leads, maybe for reasons of national security, or for corporate espionage, such as attacking the competition, or downplaying negatives (such as cigarettes causing cancer or vaccines causing injuries), or for manufacturing consent (as in selling an unpopular war, product, service), who have a vested interest in misleading, misdirecting, and manipulating reality for reasons of power and profit at the highest levels of corporate and governmental interest.

Then at the bottom of the conspiracy theory hierarchy, you've got the true whistleblowers. Regular people who have identified a great verifiable evil being committed by a powerful entity, a great cover up of blatant greed, corruption and lies, who have absolutely nothing to gain from disclosing this information, neither in the sphere of power or profit, other than in that doing so benefits the greater good. For instance, if they have evidence that a product is killing people without their knowledge or consent, it may be in the public good to let everybody know about it. And maybe the mainstream media won't give them the time of day, because the mainstream media is funded by the entity they wish to expose, and the only place that will broadcast their message is the world of conspiracy theory.

So, that's pretty much the full range of information you can expect to encounter while perusing conspiracy theory literature. It's difficult to navigate, for sure, but it's important to look at, simply because sometimes there's nowhere else to look. You will find, at least in regards to certain subjects, that the world of conspiracy theory is the last bastion where underground knowledge has the freedom to circulate.

You've just got to know how to look, where to look, and if you look the right way, in the world of conspiracy theory, it is possible to find truth in a forum of lies, and only a fool would completely dismiss it without even looking at it and verifying the facts for themselves. 

Commercials no longer human?

I generally don't watch much television, haven't had cable for over six years now, but when I do, with the exception of Netflix (which I probably won't keep) I stream the majority of what I watch online for free, which is mostly YouTube, Tubi, and Freevee. 

Since I haven't watched cable TV for years, I'm not sure if the streaming TV commercials are different than what's shown on regular cable TV, but I've noticed something peculiar happening the last few months with the streaming commercials, particularly on the free apps Tubi and Freevee. 

I've noticed that many of the streaming commercials are clearly being narrated using Artificial Intelligence, and what's really bazaar is that not only is the voice not human, but the script is often improper English, suggesting the commercials are originating outside of the US, probably China, though not absolutely certain about that, and written by people not fluent in English. 

You probably have some exposure to what an AI voice sounds like if you've ever used a virtual assistant like Cortana or Siri. Well, I've had a little bit more exposure than that, because one of the freelance side gigs I've done in the past was listening to audio files and evaluating experimental AI voices for qualities such as naturalness, professionalism, situational appropriateness, emotional warmth, and overall likeability.

So, after listening to hundreds of audio files, I've got a good ear for what AI voices sound like, and not sure if other people have noticed this, so I'm putting this out there for the benefit of anyone who may not have been aware of this, that they are in fact using AI for voices on some TV commercials. 

This relates I think to a news story I heard not long ago about China experimenting with using holograms for TV presenters, which may or may not be AI based, and were testing if viewers could detect the difference between a hologram and a real person without telling them about the experiment. Apparently most people were fooled, or never suspected anything different about the news presenter. 

I've always suspected something off with the NBC news presenter, Lester Holt, who always seemed kind of robot like to me. Like I wondered could this guy really be an android right out of Westworld, or maybe he's a hologram, or maybe he's not even real. I mean I've never met the guy, how do you know if the people you see on TV are even real, they could be AI based simulations. Which is not to imply that they are all simulations, but that some of them could be, as the experiments in China have proven it's been done before.

On a somewhat related note, what's up with this guy's neck? Either he has some undisclosed medical problem, or he's not human. I showed this clip to my mother, who is not in the least bit conspiracy theory minded, and she said something like not only has she never seen anyone do that, but she said this guy looks like he doesn't like humans much. 

Humans are now hackable animals

Translation: "Evil Noah is Here"

So, I was up late last night, doing what I do, which is either reading my book, surfing the internet, or streaming programs, and taking notes. I'm not blogging too much lately, because I'm on a computer all day for work, and so by the end of the day, typing anything more than a couple of paragraphs can be somewhat difficult, due to issues with eyestrain. 

Anyway, last night I found the picture I posted above, along with the video presentation it was taken from, and I was really disturbed by it. Of course, I was drinking my India Pale Ale and smoking a tiny bit of cannabis, so perhaps I was looking at things from a perspective I normally wouldn't see. But I was looking at the name, "Yuval Noah Harari", playing around with creative word association analysis, and thinking that could read, "Evil Noah is here". Like a doomsday prophecy. I know, silly, right?

I actually have one of his books, Sapiens, which I've previewed but haven't read yet. It's possible I was put off by its atheistic tone. Now I realize this guy is a key player in the transhumanistic agenda. He's not just some obscure intellectual who writes books, he's become this major advisor to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, who is another sinister character in the transhumanistic agenda. 

Then I thought to myself: How could this relate to another news story just released, like this: 

The Human Genome Project pieced together only 92% of the DNA – now scientists have finally filled in the remaining 8%

Then I thought: What other factor could have contributed to this completion of the sequencing of the human genome?

Could it be the pandemic, or rather all those millions of nasal swabs collected from peoples Covid-19 tests, where they failed to properly inform people that they were also collecting their DNA?

CDC Says 10% Of COVID Swabs Sent to Genome Lab, Raising Privacy Questions

So now humans are hackable? What's the plan going forward? I guess I'll have to read Mr. Evil Noah's books to find out. But in the meantime this presentation may offer some clues. 

Will the Future Be Human? - Yuval Noah Harari

In case you don't have time to watch it I will highlight one phrase, which I've taken the time to transcribe: 

"In the coming generations we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. This will be the main products of the economy. Of the 21st century economy. Not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds. Now how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people who own the data. Those who control the data, control the future, not just of humanity, but the future of life itself."

And another gem:

Yuval Noah Harari: "And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be: what do we need humans for? Or at least. What do we need SO MANY humans for?"

And his answer: "At best guess we have to keep them happy with drugs and computer games." 

My question is: Just exactly who does he mean by "we"? I'm guessing it's not average Jane and Joe Shmoe on the street. He doesn't really say specifically, other than hinting at it's whoever owns the data.

He also said: "History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods."

My comment: So, basically the vast majority of humans will be placated with drugs and video games, harvested for their organs and used as batteries to power this massive 5G enabled supercomputer that you plan to upload your consciousness to so you get to pretend to be God? Am I right? You know this is going to backfire right? I mean you say it will be the end of history, I mean if by that you mean a mass extinction event, which probably will include both you and your supercomputers, then yeah could be. 

Okay, I haven't become some Bible thumping Born Again Christian, but I swear this sounds like the anti-Christ to me. Either way it can't be good. But I'll let you judge for yourself. 

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

I just finished reading the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. I don't do book reviews. What I do instead is give the book a rating, on the scale of one to five, and then make a few comments about it. It's the lazy way, but it works for me. 

Anyway, I gave this book 2.5 stars. It wasn't a bad book, but it felt rushed and incomplete, like the author tried to fit in too much information, without really connecting the information in a meaningful way. It's like he took all his research notes and tried to squeeze them all into this book 'as is' without telling an engaging story. Ultimately this book raised more questions than it answered and left me with a feeling of complete information overload, but I did learn a few things. 

Basically, the idea is that 1) Laurel Canyon, and by extension Sunset Blvd, was the birthplace of the hippies. 2) That most of the countercultural rock stars that settled there in the 1960s had family connections to military intelligence. There's too many names to list, but a few examples include Jim Morrison, David Crosby,  and Frank Zappa. And 3) there was a classified military intelligence facility located in Laurel Canyon, with a fully operational movie studio, which was not made public until modern times. 4) With the hippies, and the birth of psychedelic rock, came the consumption and widespread promotion of psychedelic drugs. There was heavy drug use, promiscuity, and exploration of the occult. To cater to the drug fueled hippies, a drug trafficking industry was born, and with it came prostitution and pornography, and the emergence of hippie communes and satanic cults. 

The main theory of this book I think is that the whole drug fueled hippie countercultural phenomena was a PsyOp. It did not happen naturally, but was socially engineered. That there was an agenda, and the hippies were actors in a story they did not write. That possibly the whole thing was this massive mind control experiment. Give people drugs, encourage them to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy and immoral, and convince them that what is happening is good, and that there mind is being expanded and that they are being liberated.

Besides the hippies, the rock stars, the drugs, and the cults, there was also a huge amount of unexplained murders and suicides and all sorts of weird phenomena going on in 1960s Laurel Canyon. Most notable were the Manson murders. But there were many more that occurred long before the hippies even arrived on the scene. Maids and butlers that ended up floating dead in the pool or thrown out of windows. Numerous suicides and car accidents that seem a little fishy. There were huge multi-million dollar mansions from the 1920s that looked like something out of an old black and white horror movie, with peepholes in the eyes of paintings, secret levers with hidden passageways behind book cases, and subterranean tunnel systems all over the Canyon connecting different houses and parks, with evidence for occult activity having occurred.

Anyway, since I've never been to California, and prior to reading this book, didn't really know much about the history of Laurel Canyon, which is located in the Hollywood Hills outside Los Angeles, what I did while reading it was supplement my reading with looking up pictures from the era online, looking at archived photos of the people and houses and specific locations mentioned in the book. I also went on YouTube and looked up some of the bands and listened to a sampling of songs. I was already familiar with a lot of the music groups from the era, was a huge Doors fan back in my teenage years, but some of the music I wasn't too familiar with. Most notably Frank Zappa, which I had heard of, but didn't really listen to, and the band Love, which I don't think I ever listened to, or if I had heard it didn't know who it was. I don't know how I managed to not listen to Love before, because their really good. 

This is the best album of there's by far: Love - Forever Changes (1967). 

In closing, here's a sample from that album:  

My Experience With Cough Syrup

In the last post I wrote a few words about my experience taking LSD, and mentioned that I didn't really have any hallucinations from it, and in this post I wanted to talk about my experience using cough syrup, which did cause some hallucinations.

Keep in mind that I'm writing from memory here, about something that occurred many years ago, so pardon me if the description is not as thorough as it would be had it just happened.

Cough syrup is nasty stuff, and is most certainly bad for your health. The recommended dosage for its intended use for the treatment of coughs is a couple teaspoons worth. For accessing its psychotropic properties, you would consume between 2 to 4 fluid ounces. First of all, not all cough syrups are equal, some contain harmful additives that if consumed beyond the recommended dosage listed on the label could cause organ damage and may even kill you. But this post is neither a tutorial nor an endorsement so you'd have to find that information elsewhere, just be forewarned that if you don't know what you're doing it could kill you.

The reason why cough syrup has psychoactive properties when used at a higher than recommended dosage, is because the active ingredient Dextromethorphan (DXM) is molecularly similar to PCP, the street drug also known as angel dust, a dissociative, which can trigger a feeling of being outside of your body. So at low doses it has been described as being similar to the drug ecstasy, and at higher doses is similar to a PCP high.

It takes between 30 and 60 minutes before you start feeling the effects, which last I think maybe six to eight hours, and similar to LSD begins with the heightening of your senses, especially your sense of hearing, but perhaps a little milder, and consequently without the feeling of terror that I got from LSD, as in regards to not being frightened by the heightening of my senses, but there was some paranoia that derived from another source, which I will describe later.

The next thing you notice is that your body begins to feel very heavy, and when you walk or move your arms they feel like rubber, almost robot-like, voices sound tinny and kind of far away, your movements clunky, almost as if your head is separated from the rest of your body, and your body feels like it's not quite you, like some kind of machine, like an inanimate prosthesis, but in my case I did not consume a high enough dose to have a true out-of-body experience, it was more like a partial feeling of separation.

The other thing I noticed is that strangely enough it really intensified my feeling of empathy, like when I watched a movie while under its influence, I could feel the emotions of the people more strongly than I normally do, and I was like picking up on this whole other dimension of the story, the unspoken feelings of the characters, that I either wouldn't had noticed or put much importance on otherwise. And also increased my appreciation for music, you feel it more, it becomes a part of you, soaking it up like a sponge.

Now this is where the hallucinations come in, and also the feeling of paranoia, while under the influence of cough syrup there is a sense that there is another world overlapping this one, (something I did not get from LSD at all) you get this feeling, even if you are alone, especially if you are alone, that there are other beings in the room with you, watching you, whispering things about you, are clearly non-human, troll-like, dark, alien, almost like their world is in black and white, and I got a bad feeling from them. But I want to make this clear I didn't actually see it with my physical eyes, or hear it with my physical ears, is more like something in a dream, astral, more of a subtle impression, a feeling, like when you're drifting off to sleep and are awakened suddenly right when you were starting to dream, and you still have this strong impression of the dream world, which you know is not based in the physical world, it's in your mind, where you've got a clear mentally visualized image of it, but in this case, I was not sleeping, and I had not been sleeping, but it was similar to that.

I had that experience of these subtle troll-like beings every time I used cough syrup, which was I don't know maybe a half a dozen times, so it was a repeatable phenomenon. It doesn't happen right away, but later, during what you would call the peak, this subtle awareness of being watched by beings of another dimension. That was the closest I came to having a hallucination. Once again, have no intention of ever using cough syrup again, just seems too dangerous, bad for your health. I also think that repeated long-term use could probably cause a person to have mental problems, where they may gradually lose their grip on reality.

But it was interesting, my experience with LSD and cough syrup showed me that our perception of the world can be drastically changed, that reality has many different dimensions to it, that what we see through the filter of our human senses is not the one true objective reality, that what looks like a flower to you, may appear as a spiral galaxy to another, and that what we consider the ordinary human experience is just one perspective out of a potentially infinite range of possible worlds.

The danger of using psychedelic drugs is that they radically change your perception of the world, but without providing you with any way of understanding what you see. It's like suddenly being dropped onto an alien planet without a guide, without a map, without a compass, without a spacesuit, or a backpack with supplies, without any preparation or knowledge about the world whatsoever. You could get yourself into all sorts of trouble that way.

You could get lost, never find your way back home, or maybe even encounter hostile natives that capture you and lock you up in a cage and eat you for breakfast. In other words, it can be dangerous, and that's why in traditional indigenous cultures, where psychedelics were used, it was the shamans and priests, who carefully oversaw the whole operation, acting as guides helping the psychedelic journeyers navigate the waters of the psychedelic realm safely without losing their minds.

They got a whole system of knowledge built up around it to prevent a person from falling off the deep end into the abyss. But when people go it alone, without any knowledge or preparation, anything could happen. It's like jumping off a boat into an unfamiliar body of water and attempting to swim across it without a life jacket and with no idea where the closest body of land is.

Maybe things will turn out okay, and maybe they won't. Either way, it's a risky operation, best undertaken very sparingly, if at all, with extreme moderation, ideally in a safe, comfortable environment, free of hostile influences, and around supportive, knowledgeable people.

*Originally published 4/11/2015

My Experience With LSD

It's been more than a decade since I've used any mind altering drug, the last being marijuana and cough syrup, and twenty year's since I've used LSD. That's about the most hard core drug I've ever used. I don't regret trying it, but in all honesty, I didn't much enjoy the experience. It made me feel crazy, like what I imagine someone with schizophrenia feels all the time, and it was definitely not something I'd want to experience again.

I'll describe the experience for you right now. It takes between a half an hour to an hour before you start feeling the effects, which last over twelve hours. What you notice first of all is a heightened awareness. It makes you more sensitive to everything. In my case, I found my sense of hearing to be magnified to almost superhuman levels. What normally would be considered super soft sounds, like breathing, water dripping in a distant room, shifting your position in a chair, or even the sound of your own voice whispering, sounds like it's magnified over a loud speaker.

I found myself feeling frightened by the sounds, ordinary sounds, because they were so loud, and at the same time I was also paranoid that someone was going to notice that there was something wrong with me, that I was on drugs, that every movement I made was making me overly conspicuous, as if I were being louder than I actually was.  My feelings were also magnified, I could feel people, almost as if I could read their thoughts, and that was scary too, because there was just so much noise all around, like I said everything was magnified, but to the point of it being overwhelming. There was a feeling of being trapped, knowing that this was going to last for twelve hours, and it was like I was hanging from a precipice, holding on for dear life.

I guess that's what you call a bad trip, oh and I remember grinding my teeth, worried that I was going to break my teeth, and I had no control over it, which suggests the drug was laced with amphetamine, but actually, towards the end, probably about 3/4 of the way through it, the experience became much more positive, the effects were toned down a bit, where I felt the heightened awareness, but without feeling afraid and overwhelmed by it, and the teeth grinding also subsided, and at this point everything was beautiful, I remember it being summer time, and lying on the ground outside under a canopy of trees, hearing the heartbeat of the earth, the birds, the insects, the trees blowing in the wind, and feeling a sense of oneness with everything. Basically, the experience encompassed the entire spectrum of human emotion, from terror to bliss. Actually, I felt a heightened sense of awareness for many days afterward.

Didn't really have any hallucinations though, as far as seeing anything otherworldly or mystical, it was just an enhancement of the senses, accompanied by fear and paranoia, the loss of logical reasoning, and the unpleasant side effect of grinding my teeth.  There may have been a slight amount of visual distortion, as far as lines squiggling a little bit, but I didn't have any perception of seeing anything that wasn't there. A lot of it was I suppose sort of dream like, most of it occurring in my own head, replaying old memories from the past, re-experiencing the feelings, and this sense of just waiting for the effects to wear off. 

This was not a one and only time. I tried it a few times, hoping for better results, but ultimately didn't like it. Would never do it again. I didn't enjoy feeling like a crazy person. Still, it's interesting how it magnifies the senses. I'm telling you, it's not just a self-delusion, it really does magnify your senses, I really had some supersonic hearing, and I think it could be verified by tests. Which makes me wonder if a person could trigger that ability without drugs, like it's some untapped skill that everybody has sitting latent.  Amazing how the sound of a water drop could sound like the thunderous roar of a waterfall, and a whisper like a shout. Also interesting how ordinary sounds when magnified beyond your control can be frightening.

Other than that, what I didn't like about LSD (if in fact that is what I had, as there is some question of its purity, being most likely a mixture of other adulterants), is that the effects lasted way too long, with the negative effects far outweighing the positive effects, that it just didn't seem worth it.  And as far as inspiring profound insights and creativity, I actually had much better results with marijuana, and the only drug induced hallucination, or experience of otherworldly phenomenon, I ever had was from cough syrup, which I will write about next.

*Originally published 4/11/2015

Of Cults and Crazies and the People of Walgreens

I went on my bicycle yesterday to run a few errands. Went down to the old shopping center down the street from where I used to live, which despite being somewhat of a more affluent area, has a much more noticeable transient population, with panhandlers at all the major intersections. Remember those People of Walgreen's posts, like the old Mexican bandito who after asking me for the time in slurred broken English, ended up urinating on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance after I went in. Well that's the same shopping center.

Anyway, I pull into this shopping center, which I've only been to about three times in the past five years, after being a regular there for most of the years I've lived in this city. It's a little public square with outdoor seating for the variety of restaurants which share its space. I lock my bike up at the only bike rack in the shopping center, which is right outside a bagel shop.

There are several people sitting around chatting, but one man sitting alone caught my attention, because he had a long gray Moses beard, dressed somewhat shabbily, and looked to be in his sixties and homeless, but also sending off somewhat of a Plato philosopher vibe. That's what I thought when I saw him, I thought of Plato. Though be careful with that, as appearances are not always what they seem, a long beard and few possessions is no accurate indication of wisdom, but usually is just some dude that is too lazy to shave, or who maybe enjoys the quasi guru vibe, leveraging that to his advantage against less discerning minds who equate beards with wisdom.

Anyway, I lock up my bike and do my shopping without event, but it's when I return to my bike, packing up, getting ready to go, is when he makes contact.

"Do you know what time it is?" he says.

I tell him.

He then says, "You from out East?" Apparently detecting the accent in my voice simply from me telling him the time.

"I'm from Wisconsin" I say, like an idiot, realizing I already gave out too much information.

"Oh, you sound like you're from New York."

"Nope, Wisconsin".

And this is where it gets weird.

He then proceeds to say, "You've got to be careful around here, out in New Mexico and here in Arizona, pretty much the entire western United States, they've got a lot of cults out here. Do you know what a cult is?"

I reply, "Of course I do. You mean like Charles Manson?"

He says, "No, not not like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. I mean Christian cults. The end times. I used to belong to a cult, wasted my life in it. Now look at me. Now, I am a Christian. I believe in the Bible. It's the oldest book in the world, but these cults manipulate the teachings and exploit the gullibility of their members for their own personal gain."

Okay, I'm thinking to myself, this is kind of interesting, but why is this guy talking to a complete stranger about this? Why does he feel compelled to approach a complete stranger in a shopping center parking lot getting ready to leave, to warn them about a major cult presence in the Southwest?

Does this guy think I'm a sucker? An easy mark? Do I look like a tourist? I've been here for almost twenty years. At this point I'm realizing that I've got to get out of here, actually I have a legitimate reason to make a quick exit, as I have a quart of ice creme in my pack, and it's eighty degrees outside.

So, I quickly hop on my bike, thank the man for his warning, wish him the best of luck, and get the hell out of there.

Constipation

This is a spontaneous insight I had last night, didn't post it then, because it was already really late, and didn't want to dilute the waters, having already posted my post for the night.

Okay, so apparently there currently is an epidemic of heroin addiction in the U.S. I thought of this because I saw something on the news about it yesterday, saying just that, but also mentioning the fact that heroin causes major constipation, where the addicts may go weeks without a bowel movement.

I myself have never tried heroin, and based on what I know about it, probably wouldn't if given the opportunity, but I've known a couple addicts in my life, and I remember them saying that that first hit of heroin was the best moment of their lives. We're talking religious ecstasy, in their words better than sexual orgasm, the most blissful moment ever, but never again reproduced. They get the best high of their life, but it's only a one time thing, each time they use they try to reproduce that original moment, but to no avail, and from this point forward the more physically dependent they become on the drug, they need it just to feel normal, but never again feeling super normal.

My spontaneous insight is that perhaps the reason why heroin causes constipation is because at some level it is a mental/emotional laxative, which fools the body into thinking that it has already let go of the biggest BM of their lives, but in actuality it was only in their own mind.

They are constipated because the drug fools them into thinking that they already emptied their bowels, when in actuality they merely descended into the bowels of hell, masquerading as heaven. They let go mentally and emotionally, but physically, not so much, making the letting go no more real than an illusory dream. Which is why in this sense most drugs, perhaps all drugs, don't have the power to make you enlightened, when the enlightenment gained is at a dream level, which rarely, if ever carries over to actual physical space.

Fake News, Real Commercials

This is a spontaneous insight.

A thought occurred to me today, a question, a speculation, just a thought, that sometimes what we watch on the news is put there not because it is newsworthy, but because someone paid money for a particular story to be aired, because they had a vested financial interest in one particular point of view being promoted.

Of course, this is self-evident, right, that the presentation of news is subject to commercial and political manipulation, but did it occur to you that maybe there's an actual underground market going on with the mainstream national news, where news is bought and sold like commercials, much of it totally scripted to fit an agenda. Not always political, but purely commercial. Meaning, that maybe people are meeting behind the scenes, to discuss the buying of national news slots, meaning we'll cover this story if you have enough money to pay for it.

Example #1

The Martian movie is released, coincidentally there is a big story on the national news about finding new evidence of life on Mars, namely a source of water, which would make colonizing Mars a real possibility.

Speculatively, you could call it a covert infomercial, where the producers of The Martian movie made a deal with the network to air a news story, backed up by science, which would surely generate interest in and boost sales of their product.


Example #2

Online fantasy sports betting is the latest rage. Stories of people winning millions, some making six figure incomes. I'm thinking wow, I don't really watch sports, but maybe should get into this. I used to play poker, but the site I used to play at got shut down by the Department of Justice. While there is still some legal online poker, it sucks compared to what it used to be, the earnings potential are just not worth it in my case, is heavily taxed, fewer players, etc.

But now we've got fantasy sports betting. Not necessarily new, but lately it's been getting a lot of media coverage. Just today I saw a segment on the news about a guy, with an economics degree, probably in his twenties, claiming to make a six figure income from it, and just this morning made $12,000.

I'm thinking wow, I've got to get into this. I've got a knack for this sort of thing, recognizing patterns, strong intuition, looking for profitable loopholes in the system. But then a spontaneous insight occurred to me about this particular news segment about the guy claiming to make six figures from this, that that kind of endorsement must surely be good for business, beneficial to the fantasy sports betting industry. Do you know how many sales that must have generated? Probably a lot.

Point is, maybe that story was planted. I mean maybe the guy was telling the truth, and he really did make as much money as he claimed, but how common is it really? Likely it isn't very common, but maybe the guy isn't just lucky, but is maybe also a shareholder or something, and for each new person that signs up, as a direct result of hearing his success story, he takes a cut of it. It's like a sort of insider trading. How much does this happen? Probably all the time.

School shootings, overexposure of gun violence, bought and paid for by the anti gun lobby. There's all kinds of factors, but I'm beginning to think that the majority of news is bought, nothing more than a paid infomercial pretending to be news.

The Putrid Smell of Disease

You know how old people have a tendency to smell bad? You know, that whole cliché about smelling like an old geezer, or an old biddy, smelling like urine, BO, bad breath, and dirty crotch. Sorry to be so blunt, but you know what I mean.

The elderly. Usually it is assumed that the smell is the result of poor hygiene. Being unable to wash properly, either due to poverty, of not having people care for you and unable to care for yourself, or of laziness, not having the energy or the strength to care, each breath a hardship, getting up is a struggle, walking around, a struggle in balance, a broken hip waiting to happen. They lose their hair, and their coordination, and their ability to reason, their ability to speak, like their reverting back to infancy, like a drooling baby, with no knowledge about the world, unfamiliar with their body and the laws of gravity, totally at the mercy of the elements and the goodwill of strangers.

But the difference is that the bright light animating the infants zest for life, being open to it all, smiling, because everything is new and wonderful and beautiful and brilliant and creative, and they are eager to learn, to love and to be loved and to become a part of this life, a wonderful adventure awaiting them, is missing from the elderly falling apart, dying not because they choose, but because it is a written death sentence; the ground is breaking away beneath their feet, the organs are collapsing, the skeleton support of life is disintegrating, and it is entirely out of their control, and they are unprepared for it.

Disintegration while still living, little by little things stop working properly, like an impending computer hard drive failure, things slow down, start acting strangely, chaotically, programs don't boot properly, they freeze up, like a glitch in the system is causing complete chaos and malfunction, and eventually the computer is dead, it just won't boot anymore, nothing you can do but replace it.

The insight is, that the horrible smell so often encountered in the elderly, is not simply a matter of poor hygiene, poverty, or laziness, but rather, it's the odor of decay, of disintegration, of sickness and disease, of organ failure, and of death, eating them away as they live, gradually gnawing away at them, until nothing is left. You see, you start dying long before you actually die, sometimes even before you actually start living, in the sense that life is experienced in the full awareness of your heart. It can go on for years, this disintegration, being a very gradual process, but the signs are there for those who know what to look for, what to smell for, and what to listen for.

The smell of urine reveals much. A great depth of insight can be had, for those trained, or intuitively receptive, to know the signs, to recognize the differences between healthy urine and unhealthy urine. The smell of death and disease is always unpleasant and putrid. No perfume or cosmetic can cover it up, it is exuded in the pours of the skin, in all bodily fluids and secretions, it shows in the eyes, in the nails, the complexion, the voice, and the breath. It is fully visible with no place to hide, except in plain sight to those who fail to see it.

Seeing Orange

Been reading The Adding Machine, a collection of essays by William S. Burroughs.

Some essays are pretty good, most are nothing special, but there was one essay that described a writing exercise, or rather an exercise in paying attention, in observational awareness, that he used during his brief stint as a creative writing teacher at a college in New York City. Which was to pick a color, take a walk, and look for the color. Look for any traces of the color within your field of vision. 

So if, for instance, you choose orange, you spend the next few minutes or hours, paying attention to things that are colored orange. Seeing orange cars. Seeing orange lights. Seeing orange t-shirts. Bicycles. Flowers. Paper. Billboards. Balloons. etc. etc.

That's what I did today. Well, not the only thing I did. Only did it for like twenty minutes, en route to running my daily errands: post office, bank, store, library, etc. etc.

Thinking maybe I should do an exercise in seeing green, try to materialize some money out of thin air. Yeah, next time, I'll keep you posted.

I go to the post office to buy stamps. I leave, walking through the parking lot, I hear somebody shouting: "Can you push my wheel chair for me?" I keep walking, then realize that there is a woman in a wheel chair on the storefront sidewalk, not wearing orange, nevertheless, she is speaking to me. And I'm not the only person around either, there are other people walking to stores, cutting through the parking lot, but this woman focused on me. Me. She wanted me to push her wheel chair to the post office, the post office I just came from, to buy stamps. How weird is that? I'm hardly saying anything, and she's just talking non-stop, about needing surgery, where she lives, which is just down the street, about her husband being ten years younger than her and having stage three cancer, etc. etc.

I don't know this woman, but I've seen her before, at the library, at the grocery store, I helped her once at the library reach a book at the top shelf, a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Intriguing, but honestly the woman is annoying. She talks too loud, in what I believe to be either a Long Island or New Orleans accent, and she stinks. Sorry, it's true. I tend to avoid her, but I helped her out today. Seeing Orange.