The Danger of Reading Books

 

There are amongst us, people with differing reading habits. Some people read voraciously, always nose in the binding. Next there are people who read infrequently, but generally consider themselves readers. They keep books around, read a few books a year, would like to read more but it doesn’t get prioritized as often as they’d prefer. Then there are those who just don’t read. Those three categories should cover it.

It would be easy to state the obvious and claim that those who never read are to be considered the most dangerous category. But I don’t think that is true, and here is why.

Reading a lot of books is the absolute best and highest way to formulate a balanced and thorough world view. Reading books about a lot of subjects, books with competing narratives about different subjects, points and counterpoints. Read as many books about as many things as you can, break out of channels of thought and read across traditions, read across politically motivated ideological lines, read stories by people who did things, and read stories about people who did things. Take in the full breadth of human experience by reading a vast array of books, and you will find a steady and consistent world view, you will develop a practical empathy for humanity, a solid rock to stand on and assess the world around you with a refined perspective, not too heavily weighted by any one ideology or anecdote, and you will have a decent shot at clearly assessing events and behaviors around you as you move through time and space.

The next best reading habit to establish, and this is where I’ll depart from common wisdom, is the habit of reading no books at all. Next to reading as many books as you possibly can, reading no books at all is your best option. The person who reads no books at all, they’re going to have a more limited window on the greater world and its machinations, but instead will be intimately involved with the specifics of the immediate present. They need not be considered unintelligent, quite the contrary, they may be highly trained, highly capable, and high performing. Those with the least time to read are likely to be heavily correlated with those most busy in their daily endeavors. They may have a different path to finding their own global perspective, but the path of development will be consistently weighted as to the various inputs being assimilated through the course of their day. Their eventual “adult” or late life perspective (it takes a good third to half of your life in any case to establish a decent global perspective regardless of reading habits) will likely be effectively balanced and broad enough to take in daily occurrences and process forward projections effectively. This would be enough to manage their life without any unexpected shocks or disturbances in expectation of, and assimilation of, ongoing events, and also provide them with an anchored reality that is less easily swayed by intermittent panics or trends.

The person who will have the hardest time in that department will be those individuals who only read a few books. This is the worst possible reading habit to establish. When you only read a few books, each book will be too heavily weighted in your ongoing assimilation of reality. When a person reads a book once in a while, the time commitment to that endeavor and the lack of regular exercise of the mental processes used in reading and assimilating knowledge from books, those two factors collide to give the impression of something very important happening. The casual reader has a higher likelihood of considering the material they are consuming to be more important than it actually may be when considered in a broader world view. If you’re reading a book that is presenting a powerful new concept for you, something that seems to grip your psyche with intrigue and importance, your global world view is going to be highly affected by that book, certainly in the short term, but also likely in the long term throughout your life. If you have read three more books in the last couple weeks that also had such highly impactful insights, you are going to take each one successively in stride, building on each one, less swayed by each consecutive blow, as you carefully develop a polished and honed perspective. If this one insightful book is the only thing you’ve read in the last year or in the last quarter, then your global perspective is going to too affected by this one incoming perspective, this one book will be too heavily weighted as your ongoing global perspective calculations occur. You could accidentally shift your global perspective in a direction that was unintentional.  You could accidentally re-structure elements of your life, your identity, your affiliations, around this inappropriately weighted information, simply because of its novelty.

So, let us all read more. Let us read differing opinions. Let us understand the counterpoints to our current belief systems, and let’s check to see if we’re not accidentally operating on the lingering effects of some inappropriately weighted content we ingested along the way. Either read it all, or don’t read any of it. Half informed is far more dangerous than uninformed.

On Love and God (That Tension in Your Soul)

" In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another."

There is a tension in your soul. It’s so permanent you might have lost sensitivity to it. But most likely, you feel it all the time. Every day, all day. There are a few distractions here and there, where the tension subsides, or relents momentarily, but it can quickly resume and consume you.

The human soul is a very deep well. Bottomless. And we exist in a temporal realm, where everything around us is, well, temporary. The language we can sometimes use is indicative of our needs. We might say of someone who is clearly committed to a goal, that they are “pouring their heart into their work.” This is more than an idiom.

The human soul is one thing above all. The human soul is the capacity for love. The human capacity for love, to be loved, to love, is infinite. There is no maximum capacity for love in the human soul, whether receiving or sending out. We are capable of love beyond our wildest imaginations, and many of us feel sparks of this at different times in life, with loved ones and friends, in times of ecstatic joy, we can feel love, if we let ourselves, we can feel love well up inside us and even bust out of the borders of our flesh and seemingly glow outward into the universe around us, outward and ever expanding, as if it were capable of filling all of time and space itself, infinitely and forever. Love is that infinite. Your ability to feel and project love is infinite. You are capable of infinite projections of love and beauty and joy.

But our daily lives are not generally lived to this capacity. We fill our days with menial tasks, chores, jobs that we maintain so we can pay a mortgage or rent, feed ourselves without having to plow fields, and burn our free time on whatever trivial distraction we can access moment to moment, subconsciously avoiding the consideration of why this tension keeps building up inside.

We have built up a society that can fool us into thinking we are seeking satisfaction in our actions and in our behaviors, even our possessions. We feel we are working towards something, a goal, a completion, a satisfaction that should come, but it never does. Or, if we do achieve a brief satisfaction from achieving an earthly goal, it is just that, brief and fleeting. We maybe enjoy a single beat, or maybe an entire evening before the tension and need to perform re-establishes its permanent seat in our psyche, and another vain attempt at satisfaction will begin. There is nothing on this earth that will satisfy you. It isn’t possible. You can immerse yourself in sport, song, hobbies, you can strive to accomplish the earthly goals of finance, you can cross off goals along the way and compare yourself to others, you can decide at some point that you are successful. But all you have and all the accoutrements of your success are temporary. Furthermore, it’s hard to see in youth, but becomes clearer with age, these material goals, these earthly goals, ultimately do not provide satisfaction, the tension never ceases. This is because these earthly goals are too shallow.

In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another. We have structured our society to encourage this, the hunt for monetary wealth, power, prestige in the earthly realm, these are all temporal and shallow, entirely incapable of receiving the full measure of love that you possess. If you go about your days pouring your infinite heart into shallow vessels, the tension you feel will ultimately become immense and could bring you down under the sheer weight of the built-up pressure; you can become mentally and physically wore down.

There is only one vessel that can possibly contain the infinite love you are capable of. There is only one infinite being capable of receiving and reciprocating infinite love. God. You will not find peace until you find God. There is no earthly pleasure, process, or power that is deep enough, that has the infinite potential to fully accept your infinite love. Your attempts to pour your heart into shallow earthly vessels is causing the tension you feel. If instead, you pour your love into God, you begin to feel the infinite nature of love well up within you, you feel the tension actually dissipate, the pressure behind the dam is finally released, God can take it all! Let it out, send it out. You will begin to feel the love emanate from your soul out into the universe around you, the warmth of it will begin to bump into those around you. Tell them, tell them what you have done, when they feel it and look at you with wonder, tell them. Tell them you’ve woken up, you are no longer busy pouring your energy into shallow earthly affairs, you have allowed your love to bloom outward into the infinite space of God, and that they too can let go, and let their love flow outward. And your love can join with theirs. And the next person, and the next. Let your infinite love pour outward, filling the voids and gaps that distance you from those that have not yet seen the fate of a shallow existence. Let your love awaken them, let it penetrate their tunnel vision. Let it spark the love within them to overflow their shallow concerns and join with your expanding love into the heavens above.

Imagine the love of all souls on earth, growing outward from each individual, expanding outward and dissolving into each other, expanding further and upward into a heavenly harmonic song, ringing through the molecules of space and every instance of time, feel your love join together with the souls of eternity, the souls of the ages, in one singular vibration of harmonic ecstasy.

This and only this will heal the tension within you. Alleviate your fears of the future, your shallow concerns about daily affairs. These are merely distracting you from your purpose. Ring out love with every ounce of your being, pour out your heart, pour it out through time and space, through cell walls and planetary dust, send it out faster than the winds, pour it out in full into the endless reservoir of God. It is the only way. As fraught with conflict as our earthly realm is, the state of tension so high, with solutions seemingly so harsh yet the lack of solution even worse, and the trade-offs becoming increasingly unpalatable; the act of pouring your love into God, letting it expand ever outward, and allowing your love to infect the existence of those around you, that is likely the only Good that can be done.

Tax Fixed Income! Bonuses for Bankers!

 

There’s a distinct feeling of being fleeced that one gets each year around mid-April. I’m not one to think the Federal Government can or should be funded without the common and general support of the population, but it’s pretty hard to go through the income tax ritual every year without having some pretty dark feelings about the state of that Federal government and our collective finances as a society.

When we see the Federal government losing track of $15 billion dollars on occasion, just losing it, it’s difficult to sit for hours and diligently record the income and expenses of a middle-class family, dealing in the 10’s and 100’s of thousands of dollars, trying to sort out your declared share of the financial burden of the country, without feeling like a total rube. I mean, seriously? I need to report these hundred and low-thousand-dollar expenses, I need to classify each three and four figure interest statement? I need to send a check for an amount of money that is substantial in relation to my income and savings, but entirely invisible when compared to the frivolous outlays and outright loss and corruption, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at the hands of our federal government? It’s asinine.

The four to five figure tax burden paid yearly by those in the middle class is a pittance in the face of our national expenses, even though they would be life changing amounts of money to the family forced to remit it. To truly add insult to injury, the taxes collected from everyone each year doesn’t cover the overall expenses of the government. It starts to feel preposterous that we have to continue the charade of paying taxes to support our government for our mutual societal interest when the funding of the government is done entirely through debt cycling, with very connected individuals profiting in the 8-9 figure range for managing the charade through various security and debt instruments.

Don’t forget the tax preparation industry raking a cool $104 billion dollars a year right off the top and the bankers that manage the slush fund of debt who reap seven figure bonuses. Meanwhile, a 72-year-old pensioner on a $3000 per month fixed income is sending $4000 a year to the IRS to “fund the activities of the government.”

This is not a system for the people. Those inclined to argue for higher taxes for the rich have good intentions, I think. They see there is an unfairness in the system and believe the culprit is tax cheating rich people. The mythology surrounding what rich people pay is pretty far off base from reality. The top one percent do pay the largest share of taxes, and that number is higher than most “tax-the-rich” folks would advocate for once they learn the actual number. The problem isn’t the tax rate at any given level per se. The problem is bigger than that, and there are myriad angles that could be discussed here, but I’ll focus on these two. One part of the problem is debt fueled spending that drives inflation, wiping out the monthly buying power of the citizenry, and then still demanding 8-15% of their income to finance that very same debt driven spending. The second part of the problem is the method and implementation of the tax system itself, and the expense of that implementation and enforcement.

The problem is not disparity in taxing the rich vs the poor, the problem is in the expenses of the government and whether or not the expenses that system requires is bringing fair value to the citizenry. As long as our overall governmental expenses are greater than the income collected through taxation, inflation will secretly steal away value from everyone. Changes in tax rate, at any tier, won’t cure this. At current spending levels, no amount of taxation would cover the expenses of operating our government in any one year.

Eliminating hundreds of billions worth of expenses that are incurred due to the methods and implementation of our tax code would go a long way to getting those overall general expenses under control, allowing for less overall spending, lowering inflationary pressure, and lowering the tax burden on everyone, especially those most vulnerable who are on a fixed income.

Paying taxes is never an exciting and happy feeling thing to do. But it is a necessary evil in a cohesive and generally organized society. However, the taxes aren’t currently paying for the orderly execution of social needs. In fact, they barely cover the interest on the debt, so bankers managing that debt can profit billions, and CPA’s can profit billions, while fixed income pensioners send four figure checks to the IRS in some sort of financial sacrificial ritual. Being able to keep that $4000 would change that pensioner’s life for that quarter, but instead, it becomes barely a molecule of debt service once paid into the banker’s slush fund.

At this micro level, we have to be able to see how letting the citizen keep the money is the only answer. The citizen would need less assistance, cutting down on the need for social services, lowering the need for ever larger tax receipts, and allowing us to reduce the cost of government further, bringing inflation under control so that buying power in the middle and lower classes could stabilize, allowing low-income and fixed income citizens to maintain a basic living standard without further eroding their ability to provide for themselves.

We need to see that first laundering a citizen’s money through the accounting, banking, and federal bureaucracy to then provide that citizen with the “help they need” is preposterous. In no system, imaginary or otherwise, can that be a more efficient and cost-effective way of getting services to a citizen. Stop taking their money and they won’t need so much help. Stop deficit-spending our dollar into oblivion and the citizen won’t need so much help.

And for goodness’ sake, quit taxing the pensioners. It’s just payola to the CPA industry and an obvious Ponzi triangle of financial shell games between CPAs, federal bankers, and the government bureaucrats that protect them, and who profit alongside them at our expense. If those who profit from this system can keep the rubes distracted by arguing over marginal rates, the entire charade can continue unchecked, profiting the connected to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and fleecing the public, like sheep, every April.

 

Electric Cars are the CFL Bulb of Automotive History

 
"So inefficient, so toxic, and so inconvenient are electric cars that no one wants them. They are not books to scrolls or cell phones to landlines, the electric car is a CFL bulb. Over engineered, inconvenient, toxic, and not readily adopted because the technology it is attempting to replace is known to be more reliable, more convenient, less toxic, and generally speaking, more affordable." 

Recently, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary of the US government, compared people who are slow to adopt electric car technology to people unwilling to give up their landlines in favor of a cell phone.

This comparison is an excellent jumping off point to discuss the real problem with slow adoption of the electric car.

When a new product emerges on the market, once word has gotten round of the product’s existence, the people of the earth make the final judgement on whether or not that product is useful and effective. We no longer carry around scrolls, for example, because books turned out to be more useful for carrying information on the printed page. One doesn’t need to unroll their fifteen-foot scroll to find a specific passage, you simply turn to the correct page and there is your passage. Books were such an improvement over their predecessor the scroll, that adoption was rapid and unfettered. No global mandate was required for us to abandon our use of scrolls and begin using books instead. The new product was a superior product. Human beings, being very adept at recognizing efficiency and improvement in their immediate and daily existence, picked up the book with rapid acceptance. The scroll became an artifact. No mandate required. Just a better product.

As Pete pointed out, cell phones happened in a similar way. At first, they were a bit pricey, but even people who couldn’t afford one saw their utility, and as soon as the price came down, pretty much everyone bought one. Land lines began fading soon thereafter, and though the technology still exists and can be accessed, few people avail themselves of it, the cell phone basically killed off the landline in almost all cases. And again, there was no mandate, there was never a government demand that everyone ditch their landlines and instead pick up cell phones.

How is this possible then that everyone made the change without a government mandate? Well, that’s because cell phones are a better product. Everyone could see that. You didn’t need to propagandize people to make them believe cell phones were better, the cell phone was actually a better version of a phone. Anyone could see that being able to take your phone with you was going to free up untold amounts of time and allow for a more mobile population. This was appealing to people, so they adopted it. No mandate needed. Just a better product.

Sometimes, new technology arrives on the scene and it isn’t immediately and broadly adopted, even after the best efforts of central planners to encourage adoption. Many of you reading this will have the evidence of this type of historical error in judgment in your garage junk drawers: the CFL bulb.

The compact fluorescent bulb was hailed as the savior of the planet when it was first brought to market. The citizens of the world were going to save energy, save money, and save the planet by switching from those inefficient incandescent bulbs to the more efficient CFL bulb. So purifying and uplifting was this environmental cure that we began to divert our tax dollars to subsidize the purchase of the CFL bulb. Why did they need to be subsidized? Well, the cost of manufacturing a CFL bulb was orders of magnitude higher than manufacturing an incandescent bulb. Incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, are cheap to make because they are simple, using simple materials, requiring minimal energy inputs to produce. CFL bulbs carried in their chassis a mini ballast, highly technical glass manufacture, and of course, toxic gas. Never mind that those who decided to compel a shift from incandescent to CFL bulbs don’t generally consider the input energy and materials needed to manufacture a CFL bulb when they calculate how much “energy” such a bulb will “save.” Manufacturers were compelled to switch products, even to the point of incandescent bulbs being outright banned, putting bulb manufacturers out of business and leaving their employees looking for work. In this way, the CFL bulb was effectively mandated (though replaced by the LED bulb before the ban came into effect).

But why did the CFL bulb need to be subsidized, mandated, and have its competition literally banned from production? Wasn’t it better tech? Why didn’t the people adopt it immediately and with joy?

CFL bulbs sucked. That’s why. The light they emitted was sickly, the length of time they took to warm up was unlivable, and to top it all off, if you broke one you had to call in a hazmat team because these new environmentally friendly bulbs were actually full of toxic gas. That’s why you still have some in your junk drawer, because you can’t just put them in the trash, and the recycle centers are inconveniently located, so we all have these permanent, fragile, toxic residents in our junk drawers and garage cupboards because we’re trying to save the planet!

This is the same future that awaits the electric car. So inefficient, so toxic, and so inconvenient are electric cars that no one wants them. They are not books to scrolls or cell phones to landlines, the electric car is a CFL bulb. Over engineered, inconvenient, toxic, and not readily adopted because the technology it is attempting to replace is known to be more reliable, more convenient, less toxic, and generally speaking, more affordable. And just like the CFL bulb, the electric car is being enabled through subsidies, mandates, and the abolition of competition, and even still, people aren’t buying it. It’s not that people are slow to adopt electric cars because they are too dumb to see the advantages. The electric car is not being adopted because the people are too smart to fall for such useless and expensive tech. People aren’t adopting electric cars because electric cars suck. Just like the CFL bulb.

Now, if you like torque and rapid launches, then electric cars are for you. No one can deny the incredible torque and launch times electric cars can achieve. But that’s not how the electric car is being marketed in the main. We are being told that the electric car is the future because it is more environmentally friendly. This is wholly and entirely poppy-cock. There is not one single thing about an electric car that is more environmentally friendly than a gas car. Not one thing.

There are lots of folks who buy electric cars because they are perennially in 2^nd or 3^rd place in the unending race against the proverbial Joneses. The fancy polished plastics and glittering widescreen tv in the dash bedazzles them into thinking they are modern and stylish for driving around in what amounts to a near-future heap of toxic waste. Like the CFL bulb, our yards and driveways will eventually be littered with inoperable electric cars, as they prove too expensive to maintain and too costly to recycle, they’ll sit like toxic bulbs in our junk drawers, slowly disintegrating into microplastics, and always remaining a terrifying fire hazard.

The electric car is not cut out to replace the gas car. There are a few uses here and there where an electric vehicle might make sense, so I see no reason to ban them as an option, but the people of the earth can see through the façade they’re being sold. No one wants to be trapped in the path of a hurricane awaiting a charging station. Anyone who has been without power for more than a couple days knows that in a post storm scenario, gas products work, electric products don’t, period, full stop. Gas products work, electric products don’t.

But aren’t electric cars more environmentally friendly when it comes to CO2 emissions? Well, they effectively move the production of CO2 from the tailpipe to some other location, either a power plant, or a windmill or solar panel manufacturing facility. It doesn’t reduce anything, but it does shift it to a different location. I will caution anyone concerned about the quality and cleanliness of the environment to try not to maintain a myopic focus on reducing the quantity of a life affirming gas in our atmosphere that allows plants and animals to flourish on earth. If, in your concern for reducing this harmless and life giving gas, you are willing to strip mine cobalt and lithium in massive pit mines using child slave labor, pour massive concrete foundations in previously arable farm land to support toxically manufactured windmills that produce less energy than they required for manufacture, leaving toxic solar panels strewn about the once beautiful countryside, leaching toxic silicates into the soil as they deteriorate, then maybe you have mixed up your priorities a bit. You aren’t going to save the planet through manufacturing. You’re not going to save the planet by building out new infrastructure. Extruding more plastics and strip mining more toxic heavy metals will never save the planet.

The electric car is either a short-term profit center for enterprising marketeers who will not be on the hook for dealing with the mass of toxic waste their products will have created before the public finally notices their being sold a Betamax, or, they’re a totalitarian government’s wet dream, in which no one can travel freely unless granted access to the electrical grid.

Gas cars are better. In every way. They provide more freedom, they are less toxic, drilling for oil is far less destructive to the environment than mining for battery commodities, gas cars can be worked on and repaired more easily, and maintaining a running car for many years is the most efficient way to maintain a car. Buying new cars every couple of years is the least environmentally friendly thing you can do. An electric car only becomes more efficient than a gas car after the 300,000^th mile. Try to find a used electric car that has that many miles on it.

Stop trying to make electric cars happen. They’re inefficient, toxic, and less reliable long term than any current internal combustion technology. If electric cars were better than gas cars, we’d all buy them within a year. It’s been a couple decades now that they’ve been trying to force electric cars down our throats and we simply don’t want them. To the Pete Buttigieg’s of the world, it’s not because we’re too dumb, it’s because we’re not falling for it. We’re actually able to discern a better product from an inferior product. Electric cars are an inferior product that are less environmentally friendly than gas cars when their whole lifespan is taken into consideration. Electric cars may relocate CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant (or the Chinese solar panel manufacturing facility), but for the tradeoff of re-locating our CO2 emissions we are asked to give up too much. We don’t like the risk of being stranded, we don’t like that we’re more likely to need a new car sooner, we don’t like that we’ll be more dependent on FEMA after a storm event, the list goes on and on. But mainly, we don’t like being told an outright lie: that there is something environmentally friendly about electric cars.

Human beings can analyze cost and benefit quite well when either their pocketbook or their safety is on the line. Electric cars make us less safe, cost more, and are more destructive long run to the environment. It’s time to park electric cars in our junk drawers so we, as a society, can move on. A more efficient tech likely exists, but to find it, we need to first stop spinning our wheels on the dead-end street of electric cars.