empire of lies

It's funny how I commented on this months ago, before reading up on China. I wasn't sure I'd be quite as supportive of them as I am of Russia. Now it feels completely natural. I like Russia, but of course I like China even more. Especially upon reading up on the major atrocities they're accused of, and realizing the west is full of shit, as usual.

This doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That is a crazy standard people attempt to throw at me. Right, show me the country that never does anything I disapprove of. It sure isn't the US. This is the most evil country in the modern era, and they have the gall to go around lecturing others on democracy. The American people have no voice or power. What they call "democracy" is just cover for the capitalist cancer destroying the planet.

Taiwan is of similarly critical strategic interest to China, as Ukraine is to Russia. During WW2, they both suffered massive losses via those regions. For a rabid hostile adversary like the US to set up puppet regimes and military infrastructure in Taiwan or Ukraine is insanely aggressive. Taiwan should be properly unified with China anyhow though.

The US is forcing a military response, and even worse, they must damn well know it. Our leaders may want hundreds of thousands of people to die, just to weaken Russia and China, while enriching the military-industrial complex, as we send them tens of billions of dollars, amidst soaring inflation. Spend that money on the American people? Hah, they just laugh at us as we're dying. 

That's how evil this country is. Democrats and Republicans alike are no better than Nazis. Slava Ukraini indeed. I don't care that blue Nazis want to kinda sorta almost protect abortion rights.

Guess I'm back to taking sides again. It comes naturally, and I'm feeling too burned out to give a damn. It's just that now I'm siding against this entire country. Summer hasn't been going as well as I'd hoped. At least geopolitics gives the feeling of hating everything some legitimacy.

multi faceted

I decided against my own free will not to go to the gym today. I make this sort of decision often and with great frustration. I was really looking forward to going, WHAT THE FUCK. I feel like a kid whose parent tells them they can't go out to play. A deranged and unstable parent whose judgment I don't trust, nor whose authority do I respect.

Watching my peers, I admire the ones who make it to almost every class and open workout. I try to emulate them, but I am not as fundamentally motivated as they are. I am motivated differently, often prioritizing protecting myself, both mentally and physically. I can get myself moving and with increasingly impressive levels of energy, but there are many days where it just doesn't happen. I can't find the energy, I can't find the courage, I just sit and listen as these two sides curse at each other until it's too late to go anywhere.

I often try to focus on the progress I continue making in spite of it. It's frustrating, but overall, I'm moving in the right direction and that gives me hope. Highly debatable though, is the prospect that the protective side is actually right. Occasionally even these young people cavalierly discuss how training destroys their bodies. They regularly come to the gym with aches and pains that I'd call an excuse to stay home. 

Once the endorphins are flowing, you hardly feel it. I've got two decades on many of them, so it makes sense for me to be more careful, but I even wonder if they're overdoing it, too. The longer we're alive, the more natural it becomes to think long term. Having good working knees ten years from now seems more important than winning a competition next week, to me.

Assessing risk is difficult, and we're heavily biased by what we want to do and what we feel like doing. I assess risk obsessively though, and worry that it's me overdoing it, making excuses, being lazy. Rationalizing. Look at the evidence though. I'm not destroying my body at all. It keeps getting stronger. I feel more resilient than ever. It sure seems as though I'm doing something right.

Yet, It doesn't quite add up. I don't have any joint problems right now. Some aches and pains, but nothing I should have to worry about aggravating. Emotionally, a dismal wreck, but going is supposed to help with that, not make it worse. 

This other part of me though, I don't know how much there is to it. Maybe it's more than just a dissenting view, but even has access to information I don't have. Unconscious, nuanced, complicated. The unconscious can juggle information in ways the conscious mind does not. While consciousness tries to focus, the unconscious strives to manage everything all at once.

There's an argument to be made there for trusting our instincts, which is to say, trusting our unconscious impulses, even when they run counter to what we really want to be doing. At the same time though, the future is looking so dark and narrowing lately. I don't know that I have much time left. Feelings of impending doom can be symptomatic of depression, but depression also has numerous ways of causing impending doom. I hope it's just depression, as I overreact to every day wasted, each opportunity missed or fumbled. Progress inches along, as the darkness closes in. 

There are times when risks and poor odds make sense, the more threatened we feel by circumstances continuing fundamentally unchanged. Change happens always. We can try to utilize change for the better, or we can leave it to entropy, atrophy, and decay.

I'm modulating the effort as well as I can, but I feel like a blind person trying to figure out if my handwriting is legible. I can't see a thing. I feel like a failure.

socialist china

"America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? … In another 50 or 60 years, we should be ahead of them." -Mao 

In 1950, average life expectancy in China was only 36 years. This blew me away, I didn't realize it was that bad. That's dark ages, even prehistoric. In the US, it was almost 70, even then. By 1975, life expectancy in China shot up to 63, while inching up to 72 in the US. I understand better now why older people think China's such a miserable place, but they're a little behind the times. Most of the world has come a long way in the same time frame, but none so far as China.

Twenty five years later, the US was still looking ok. Life expectancy went up another few years, with China only a few years behind. Now, China continues to advance with no sign of slowing down. In recent years, they've pulled ahead of us, as life expectancy in the US declines. 

The decline here is not the result of anything particularly recent. This is the impact of a political shift that happened back in the 70s, shortly after I was born. A shift that continues unabated to this day, as consequences continue to mount. It's been getting worse my entire life. It would take a massive course change for things to even begin the decades long process of turning around, and no such change is happening.

Who was king of China during that meteoric advancement of life expectancy itself? Oft compared to Hitler, Chairman Mao. Those statistics on life expectancy alone should give you pause. Holy shit, have I been lied to?

Yes. Chinese and Russian government officials alike refer to the US as the Empire of Lies. They lie all the goddamn time. This is the most important lesson I've learned in my longstanding efforts to figure out what the fuck is going on. If you believe any of it, you're falling for bullshit, I'm telling you. From Israel to Ukraine, from inflation to omicron, you've got to put in the time to sort it all out, because if you don't, you're better off not paying attention at all. 

Sometimes I stop paying attention myself, but it can be hard to turn away from watching the worst train wreck ever. Especially when I have nothing better to do, as the world seems to be coming apart. I keep thinking it's just me, but then I hear other people saying the same sorts of things all over the place. Sometimes it feels like we may only have a few years left. The way Biden's been desperately threatening Russia, China, and Iran, all at once, I'm thinking we may not even have that long. 

Or maybe this is just the virulent mindset of living through the death throes of an empire of lies.

supreme rulers

The issue of the moment is a little beyond my wheelhouse, and I don't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I have some thoughts on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. First, I just want to go over the ruling itself, as there seems to be a lot of basic ignorance of what happened exactly. 

We had a Supreme Court ruling half a century ago, giving women the constitutional right to have an abortion. This prohibits legislators from legislating otherwise, at any level, state, local, or federal. Now with it overturned, states can legislate against abortion as they see fit. Every state will be different, covering the whole gamut, depending on how religiously conservative the people in the state tend to be, etc. In most of the country, the law probably won't change.

This ruling was based on our constitutional right to privacy, the idea being that familiar slogan, "my body, my choice" - a pregnant woman should have final say over her own body, free of any government regulation. We've been treating this as settled law for decades, despite the fact that this rationale has to allow for exceptions. Once you allow for exceptions, the federal supremacy of the ruling falls apart. If there are times when our bodies can be regulated by law, every state will decide their own exceptions.

This has already been the case, to a great extent. Every state placing different restrictions, such that it was nearly impossible to get an abortion in some states already. This ruling has been a much more incremental change than people on either side want to admit. This has a whole lot to do with the specific nature of the ruling. It has always rested on precarious reasoning.

Calling abortion a privacy issue never adequately addresses abortion itself, except to create the exception for a fetus being "viable." This is a complex medical issue. We need laws that get very specific, based on modern science. The constitution doesn't say anything about it, and SCOTUS is supposed to be ruling on constitutionality. 

There needs to be a constitutional basis for SCOTUS to take up a case, and while there's risk of over-reach, laws could also be carefully crafted to avoid it. The problem is that there isn't enough support in congress to pass any such federal laws. Democrats need to win more elections, but wait, they already control both houses of congress and the presidency. They vote blue no matter who, but it turns out, it does matter who.

As always, they need to win more before they can do anything. Republicans can always dismantle progress, even while they're the minority party, and Democrats are always helpless to do anything. So they're historically unpopular these days, and unlikely to gain any seats, let alone enough to matter. Thanks to the pandemic, they've briefly taken control of government, under the brilliant leadership of a racist old clown with dementia. They've already squandered the only chance they'll get. They'll be lucky not to lose big in both 2022 and 2024.

What's surprising has been watching the shift in public opinion. More support for the overruling than I'd expected. Public opinion may turn out to be an additional obstacle. Defining fetal viability can be problematic. If an abortion is done carefully enough to protect the fetus, and then measures are immediately taken to keep it alive, viability shoots way up. Instead, it's almost necessary to do the opposite. You can't have aborted fetuses surviving, often with severe birth defects, but occasionally entirely healthy. Holy shit would that complicate the issue. No worries, though. They never survive..?

Lots of countries have settled around limits of 12-16 weeks, because it does become a much more complicated issue shortly thereafter. Many US states put the limit at 22 weeks, but some go to 27 and beyond. Roe v. Wade was never really an adequate basis for abortion law. Striking it down is unfortunate, but a relatively incremental change to an existing controversy in this country. 

Public opinion may not be on Democrats' side anymore. They can't win elections anyhow. Even when they do, they can't legislate anything but corporate tax cuts, bailouts, and ever increasing funds for war. They haven't held a majority in the Supreme Court ever, in my entire life. They certainly won't be turning that around any time soon.

Like everything else in US politics, sorry, but it's not going to be getting better. All evidence seems to suggest it's only getting worse. China's doing pretty well though. Abortions are safe and legal there. Russia, too. While suicide rates in the US have doubled in the last two decades, suicide rates in Russia have fallen by half in the same time frame. The yuan may replace the dollar as standard global currency, soon. I hear the ruble is also doing pretty well. 

All is not hopeless, just the west and the corrupt imbeciles ruling over us here.

fireworks and mass shootings

Multiple mass shootings, the loss of civil rights, while the American people are milked dry to fund war crimes around the world. Happy Independence Day, everyone. America the beautiful, home of a dying empire. I don't care about gun control, or mental health services. I want to live in a country that doesn't drive its people to such insanity in the first place.

Liberals aren't feeling very celebratory this year. I never have been, but feeling less patriotic than ever. This country is never going to get better. Eventually, it's just going to implode, and that can't come soon enough. I didn't even leave my apartment this 4th of July. Was no one having any get togethers, or maybe I just wasn't invited on account of being a Putinist.

I neither know nor care. I wasn't feeling up to going anywhere. I've been training hard, my arms and legs in dire need of the recovery time. 

face punching

"If there were no contradictions, no struggle, there would no world, no process, no life. There would be nothing at all." ~Mao Zedong

It does feel a little weird to normalize being punched in the face. It feels weird to talk to others about it, for whom it is not normal at all, and rather concerning. The type of "martial arts" I do is the real deal though. We're not doing kata or point sparring. I got hit in jaw pretty hard on Sunday, such that it still hurts a little to chew. My sparring partner immediately apologized, as we're not supposed to be sparring that hard, but these things happen. Pretty regularly. 

Also caught a hard elbow to the nose during open mat BJJ on Friday. On Wednesday, my face collided with the shoulder of a guy who outweighs me by 70 lbs. A no-fault accident that could have just as easily happened while playing volleyball, but it was the hardest impact I've taken doing any of this. I had to sit down for a few. It was the one time I've thought, ah crap, there goes a few brain cells.

I often think of how crazy this sounds to people, that I subject myself to this, but I love it. Before the pandemic, we almost never did any sparring. The little we did was terrible. I had so much to learn. There were open workouts I never went to, and maybe sparring went on then, but I'm not sure. They had a sparring class that came and went. There seemed to be a lack of interest in it.

Now, we spar all the time. I don't know what changed. The whole world seems to have changed. Sparring is my favorite part of all this, second only to actually stepping into the ring. Ok, I haven't tried that yet, but I find myself hoping that's where this is going. I never thought I'd be doing this well at my age. I was happy to be able to do it at all, but I keep doing better and the carrot on the stick always seems to be out of reach.

I can tell myself stories of how things should be. I can imagine how easily they could be that way, but my imagination does not contain all the building blocks my reality does. The models we create in our minds being a cartoonish simplification of why things are the way they are. We are bound to leave a lot out, thus concluding how easily things could be different.

It's important to healthy brain function to want things, and to strive for that. To feel capable of striving for that. The carrot is important. Striving is often difficult, unpleasant, even painful. It's important to get over the idea that pain is inherently bad; that suffering is inherently bad. It's ok that getting what we want just means wanting something else, too. The real purpose of it all is not to get what we want, but to live. 

This is just living in a reality that is entirely transient. Everything is process. The very concept of getting what we want ceases to make sense. Contradictory as it may seem, the healthy part is that we want, regardless. If you want to end the suffering of all beings like a good Buddhist is supposed to, that's great, but for now, I want to train. I want to fight. I want to live.

My brain function being rather less than healthy, I've had trouble finding much that I both want and deem myself having any chance of achieving. I lost interest in things, no pain or suffering being worth enduring, just to be miserable anyhow. I wanted nothing, I strove for nothing, I achieved nothing. 

I protected myself, and maybe I needed the protection. Maybe in retrospect, I underestimate all the realities of what I was going through. I form an ideal model of what could have been, leaving a whole lot out. You might say I survived and award me points for that, but it doesn't really matter. It serves as an example of a vicious cycle best avoided if at all possible. Not wanting anything, not caring about anything, falling into despair and finding myself ever more trapped in the mire.

In some sense, I'm talking about decades past. In another, I'm talking about last month. It's still a constant battle, that for the time being, I'm pulling ahead of again. I always seem to get knocked back down, and I don't know why. I fear the day I won't get back up ever again, but I guess that's life, too.

This of all things, I've decided I'm capable of, and the whole world opens up for me like it never has before. I'm learning how to deal with that, way behind schedule. I've yet got a ways to go and may never get there, but it's a process.

individualist regime

The US is an especially terrible capitalist country in large part due to our cult of individualism. We could call it capitalism taken to an extreme, although I'm not entirely sure our wrongheaded economic system is to blame. It could be the direction capitalism always ends up going. For now though, it's fairly distinctive to the US. Lots of countries share similar problems, but America is number one, world leader in radicalized selfishness.

I think a lot of our problems stem from this. Living here my entire life, a lot of my problems surely stem from this was well. It's interesting to me that we can look at problems in different ways, all of them true, but leading to entirely different conclusions and consequences.

Do I blame myself, or do I blame society? Do I blame the past or the present? Everything is intertwined, all of it factoring into the current situation, but one can negate the other, instead of balancing it. Blame society, and I might feel better about myself, feeling righteously helpless to do anything about it. If I blame myself, I'll feel terrible, but potentially, just maybe, do something differently.

It's also this intertwining of factors giving rise to everything in life. Pratityasamutpada. This includes people, and everything about who we are. We base our society on this rank delusion that we're all individuals capable of doing whatever we want. Anyone being trampled by our ludicrous system deserves it. Don't blame reality, only blame yourself.

Just don't blame yourself out loud. Nobody wants to hear the negativity. Grab those bootstraps and shut the fuck up about it.

So, I'm this lone crazy person, ranting into a void. I could be yelling at strangers on a street corner, but instead I just blog. How normal the view that society is fine, while I'm essentially projecting my mental illness?

People largely seem a lot happier than me, I do have to concede. On the other hand, I don't meet the ones in prison, or living on the streets. I don't meet the ones living in trailers and ghettos watching TV all day every day. Most of them don't even tweet. Suicide rates and drug overdoses have doubled in the US over the last twenty years. I don't meet the casualties of that, either.