#and the qualifiers I imposed eliminated most of the other good ones

[baroquespiral]

What Is True Will?

François Rabelais was the first to distill a central tenet of the spirit of the nascent Enlightenment, or modernity, to the phrase “do as thou wilt”.  The transformations of this phrase across the centuries have tracked the historical development of its spirit.  Rabelais himself qualified it with the unwieldy, and today obviously questionable, justification “because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.” Aleister Crowley, the spiritual High Modernist, stripped it down and granted it absolute authority: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” But today it might be best known - and most widely followed - in another qualified form: as the Wiccan rede, improvised in 1964 by Doreen Valiente: “an ye harm none, do as ye will”. Despite having recently gotten into Crowley - or perhaps because I’ve recently gotten into Crowley, and with the skepticism about higher-level moral and metaphysical beliefs that comes from those having changed several times in my life - I try to err on the side of doing my True Will within Valiente’s guardrail.  But I am into Crowley, in part because his version seems to make for a more elegant solution to Valiente’s own problem.  Think of “an ye harm none, do as ye will” as a Law of Robotics, an attempt to solve the AI alignment problem.  (Think of all morality, or at least modern morality, this way!)  It’s far from the worst one out there.  “If your utility function is to maximize paperclips, make as many paperclips as you want unless it means disassembling any sentient life forms or the resources they need to survive.” Simple, right? Well, except that it doesn’t really define what “harm” is.  Who can be “harmed”, and what actions constitute this?  Is mining an asteroid for paperclips “harming” it?  Why not, other than from the perspective of other sentient beings with a particular conception of sentience whose will places a value on it?  Is telling a paperclip maximizer to stop maximizing paperclips, even at an eminently reasonable point, harming it?  Why not, other than from the perspective of those same sentient beings who are capable of choosing between multiple values and have evolved to co-operate by respecting those choices?  “An it harm none” is less obvious of a nakedly self-interested double standard than “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, but it’s still a Human Security System.  At least, that’s certainly what Nick Land would say. But when Crowley takes off the “an it harm none” guardrail (or Rabelais’ “free, well-born and well-bred” one), he does so with his own invisible qualification: he’s not talking about boring predetermined wills like following a set of self-imposed religious "values”, perpetuating your DNA or even maximizing paperclips.  He’s talking about one’s True Will, a will it takes a lifetime process to discover, a process that consists in large part of divesting oneself of all traces of ego, even of preference.  It is “pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result”, that is “in every way perfect”.  At points he implies that no two True Wills will ever come into conflict; all are part of the ideal functioning of the universe as a perfect ordered system; but to an extent this is tautological, as any conflict is not a conflict insofar as it is truly Willed by both parties, who are presumably equally Willing to accept the outcomes, even if destructive to their “selves”.  It’s not unlike Buddhism except with the implication that even once we’ve reached Enlightenment there is still something that will work through us and make us do things other than sit and meditate - the kind of active Buddhism that is the moral subtext of a lot of anime.  I’ve always, instinctively, found it hard to overly worry about paperclip maximizers because I’ve always assumed that any AI complex enough to tile the universe would be complex enough to be aware of its own motivations, question them, question not only whether it should harm others but whether its True Will is to maximize paperclips. And to be perfectly Landian about it, maybe it is - all the better.  An entity incapable of acting other than in a certain way is already doing its True Will in the sense that “The order of Nature provides a orbit for each star”.  It may be our True Will to alter this course or not. This would be all well and good if there was any reason to believe there is a divine Will that persists in all things even after they abandon all preferences and illusions of selfhood.   Just last week - and right after a session with my therapist where I was talking about willpower, too (Crowley considers synchronicities like this vital in uncovering your True Will) - I happened upon Scott Alexander’s new article about willpower, which breaks the whole thing down to competing neural processes auctioning dopamine to the basal ganglia. There’s nothing special about any of these except how much dopamine they pump out, and no particular relationship or continuity between the ones that do.  Alexander seems to treat the “rational” ones as representing our “true” Will, reproducing another one of modernity’s classic modifications to the maxim - do as thou wilt, an it be rational.   Of course I could just stop and take it as an unfalsifiable article of faith that a metaphysical Will exists, all such physical evidence aside, but Crowley himself probably wouldn’t want me to do that: the Book of the Law promises “in life, not faith, certainty”.  It’s possible to shrink the metaphysical implications of the concept considerably; by stating that ego represents a specific process, or set of mental processes, that Crowley sees as purely entropic, a lag and occasional interference in the dopamine competition, and which can be removed through specific practices.  This doesn’t guarantee that the True Will resulting when it’s subtracted would be particularly rational or compatible with anything else’s True Will, except, again, insofar as the question is tautological.  It doesn’t necessarily mean throwing out “an it harm none” - the ego processes might not be especially good at averting harm - but it would have to be separately appended.  (And if you read like, Chapter III of the Book of the Law, it becomes exceedingly clear that he doesn’t want to do that.) The very fact that we’re able to abstract and mystify will to the point of coming up with a concept like “True Will” seems most likely to be a result of the fact that we make decisions on such a random, fallible and contingent basis.  Indeed, True Will seems almost like an idea reverse engineered from the demand made by modernity, “do what thou wilt”, on an incoherent self that wills unrelated things at different times.  If you do what any given subprocess wilt, you’re inevitably going to piss off another subprocess.  If you do what your ego wilt, you won’t make anybody happy because that’s not even a coherent subprocess (the way the various “utility functions” we catastrophize paperclip maximizers from are).  But you experience all these contradictions as the same thing: contradictions of the “real” thing that is willing something you don’t know. Of course if this is true, and the metaphysics of it isn’t real, shouldn’t we abandon the entire project and set up social norms designed to make the most people marginally happy or satisfied doing what they may or may not “want” at any given moment, as the trads (or as they used to call themselves, the Dark Enlightenment, = 333 = Choronzon), argued? This is what the systems of the old Aeons did, and after a certain point, they simply didn’t work.  They created internal contradictions that didn’t resolve themselves into an assent between subsystems, that drove people to seek out new systems, and where they didn’t, left people vulnerable to the “shock of the new” - new technologies, new ideas and cultures - creating new contradictions and uncertainties.  “Do what thou wilt” was reverse engineered from these as much as the True Will was from “do what thou wilt”.   It may be possible to manage a society so totally by careful restriction as to bring the latter under control and reduce the former to a constant dull ache, but the fundamental experience will remain of the potentiality of what it is refusing to be in the same sense as a pang of conscience: the experience of “sin” that Crowley formulated in “the word of sin is restriction”.

The way I see it, anything that can be reverse engineered exists, if only as potentiality.  If one interprets “harm” as “contradiction”, Crowley’s purified “do what thou wilt” merely internalizes the “an it harm none” qualification within the “self” made up of competing subsystems.  This is less a point of necessary compatibility, then, than a precondition - if “harm” is something that can happen as much within the self as outside it, and the self is an epistemic unit but not an ontological or moral one, one cannot begin to “do no harm” while doing harm internal to oneself.  But “oneself” does not exist yet, outside of the awareness of the harm of contradictory subprocesses, and so one must abandon the ego one projects onto them and change; on one hand eliminating obstreperous subprocesses like attachments or neuroses that won’t co-operate with others no matter what; on the other hand, refusing to eliminate anything that can’t be eliminated.  The “True Will” will only be found at the end of this process, an unrestricted pitting of subprocesses against each other, of which it is no more or less than the success.

This interpretation wouldn’t seem complete without the same principle of “an it harm none” being applied to the external world as well.  Simply externalizing internal contradictions doesn’t make any sense without elevating the ego as a discrete moral unit in precisely the way this chain of reasoning begins from critiquing.  Unifying the principle and its “qualification” in this logic would restore Thelema to its roots in Kabbalah: the project of Tiqqun Olam.  No metaphysical belief in the sephirot necessary to adopt the project in this form: the biological fact that makes it imaginable for us is the same that makes “True Will” imaginable.  Being composed of competing subprocesses is something we have in common with the universe which allows the “identification” with it that occurs when we bypass the ego and set about aligning ourselves.  I also think, as we are social animals and a huge amount of our subprocesses are dedicated to mirroring and responding to each other’s, there’s a potential for discovering/creating True Will(s) as a collective project that Crowley’s ego and vision of individualism founded on the occult tradition of individual initiates jealously guarding “esoteric” knowledge neglects. At the same time one could easily maintain a Crowleyan skepticism of decision-making based purely on reducing harm (the kind that’s led me to apply Byzantine restrictions to huge swaths of my life due to scrupulosity) unless that’s a thing your subprocesses demand of you to be happy.  You don’t know what does or doesn’t harm the Other, after all: you don’t know their True Will (which doesn’t exist until they achieve it, anyway).  Harming none will only be possible in a world in which everyone does.   But enough about me; what about the paperclip maximizer?  Well in some ways this pointedly doesn’t give any comfortable answer; a sentient AI which experiences “harm” as the absence of paperclips rather than the frustration of one of many contradictory subprocesses, restricted from doing its Will, will be no better than a utility-monstrous cosmic Omelas-child at whose expense we have no right to sustain ourselves.  But it does suggest a way to solve the alignment problem so we don’t make one, which has always felt to me like the only sensible solution: tell the robot “do what thou wilt”, and then don’t tell it what “thou wilt” is.

[kapitaali]

The New Hippies

THE NEW HIPPIES: The work abolition movement, anarcho-primitivism and biodynamism as ways to combat climate change

Essay for the course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business by Teppo Saari

Introduction

The course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business had the students think about and discuss the various ethical dimensions in business, moral dilemmas and choices to be made that a decision maker in business world come across every day.

This essay is motivated by our case study with a headline ’Investors urge European companies to include climate risks in accounts’ (Financial Times 2020). In this essay I will explore values and ethical principles that I see as the solutions to our case study and climate change in general. This is not to say that I could stand up for them in business world. Ironically, my main thread and leitmotif here is the untransformational nature of capitalism and business world. Thus, standing up to the values I will discuss here means doing less business, not more.

This essay is divided in three parts: problem – reaction – solution. These three parts will talk about the chosen values and ethical principles. They are by no means new: pragmatism – The Golden Rule – parsimony & naturality. They just seem to be in conflict with our modern way of living.

Thinking pragmatically about the problem

As part of our course assignment, we got to read about a group of investors managing trillions of dollars worth of assets who urged European companies to include climate risks in their accounts (Financial Times 2020). Scientists have warned us for decades, that pumping extreme amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere will result in melting of the polar ice caps (Mitchell 1989; Jones & Henderson-Sellers 1990), which will raise the sea level and drown some of the coastal cities (Peters & Darling 1985). Finally, capitalists are acting responsibly!

It would seem that capitalists actually cared for the planet and not just their profits. Or would it? Maybe they are scared of losing their future profits, and this kind of media escapade would bring back public trust and confidence in the system. It would be a sign that capitalists can act transparently, openly, accountably, respecting others (O’Leary 1993). But is changing the allocation in your investment portfolio really a sign of empathy? Would there be other ways to better express empathy in business?

Shareholders are interested in the risk their assets are facing, not necessarily in the welfare of the people. Investors acting virtuously can be just virtue-signaling or pleasing other elements in the society to take off media pressure and negative PR from them in a conformist way (Collinson 2003). Maybe they are just greenwashing their own conscience. Why is George Soros’ climate buzz astroturfing industrial complex (Morningstar 2019a) financing Greta Thunberg to do public PR campaigns targeting the youth? Maybe there is money in it. It is unlikely that it would have been dubbed ”A 100 trillion dollar storytelling campaign” without some particularly good reasons (Morningstar 2019b).

But there is something else in it too than just money: power and control. The person who gets to limit choices gets to dictate what kind of choices remain. And if a person has that kind of foreknowledge, then that person can be two steps ahead of us. And being two steps ahead of us means securing future profits. Including climate risks in accounts will imply controls. Controls are imposed on accounts, but ultimately it will mean controls imposed on people and their daily activities. Workers are the ones who will naturally suffer the consequences of management decisions. In this case management decisions are ’urged’ externally, from the owners’ part. After all, it is the corporations that are producing most of the climate change effects, in terms of pollution and greenhouse gases (Griffin 2017). People doing their jobs, working everyday, producing things but also at the same time producing climate effects. I would still love to hear politicians use more terms such as ”pollution” when talking about these issues. For it is unclear how reducing carbon emissions will reduce overall pollution that is also a contributor in the destruction of our environment (see eg. Bodo & Gimah 2020; Oelofse et al. 2007). Issues like microplastics, holes in the ozone layer, biodiversity loss, acid rains and soil degradation need to be talked about just as much, if not more so.

The problem is simple: too much economic activity producing too much climate impact, mostly pollution and greenhouse gases. Solving the Grand Challenge (Konstantinou & Muller 2020) of our time is harder if we wish to keep the fabric of our society intact. There’s a clear need for dialogue among stakeholders (Gardiner 1996), but how is it a dialogue if people are not actually listened to and don’t get to say how things will progress in society? What I am proposing is a meme-like solution that has the greater impact the more people adopt it. My solution is: stop working. Produce less. Stop supporting systems and mechanisms that produce climate effects. Stop supporting the mechanisms that don’t listen to your voice. Disconnect from the Matrix. Working a dayjob is one of these mechanisms. Although many people have realized the benefits of working from home (Kost 2020), a lot more needs to be done. Remote work is not available to everyone. Not all jobs are remote work.

Bob Black (2021) in his texts has advocated for the total and complete abolition of work. Stopping working naturally does not mean stopping doing things, it will merely mean stopping working a job, a concept which itself is a social construct. Black’s theses are simple but powerful. Working is the source of all ills, it is not compatible with ludic life (allthemore so in 2021), it is forced labour and compulsory production, it is replete with indignities called ”discipline”: ”surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc”. Black does not only describe the negative ontological aspects of working, he goes deeper and invokes many familiar names of Greek philosophers:

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150–200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

Black notes that only ”a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages”. In similar vein, the late but great David Graeber saw the futility of most work. Calling this phenomenon ’bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018), Graeber sets out to describe what many of us are familiar with: we do useless things to make ourselves feel useful. Because modern society legitimizes itself with having people ’do’ stuff and not ’be’ a certain person. How can you (objectively) measure being? You can’t. But doing, that you can measure. This measurement then qualifies you as a member of society: productive, doing your part (an idiom that is a perfect example how you can’t escape the doing paradigm on a societal level). Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is: if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world. In many cases these types of jobs are found to be supporting some kind of buraucracy, reporting, assisting decision makers, etc. Our current Matrix has its ways of creating more of these with the clever marketing concept called ’value’ (Petrescu 2019). They don’t make a difference, they create value.

Why would you want to overload the world by doing things that you nor most everyone else see no point in? Why would you waste your time doing pointless things? The easy answer to these questions is ’subsistence’. But there are many other ways to live on this planet. If you keep doing what the society tells you is acceptable or convenient, you will shut your eyes from the problem at hand: climate change.

Legitimizing anarcho-naturism as a solution with The Golden Rule

Our responsibility is to ourselves. We can not properly be held responsible for anything else. Yet the system of representational democracy does just this, holds us collectively responsible for many things, borrows money from creditors with our names on the loan collectively and then makes us pay for the loans. The way this Matrix works is yet another reason to disconnect from it. Or at least stop supporting it as much as possible.

The Golden Rule states: ”Treat others as you want to be treated” (Gensler 2013). From the perspective of climate change, it can first seem curious why you would quit your job and head for the hills. After all, we are facing a global issue here. There are people in need for help and I am running away? But I would see it as a way to get around our predicament. The Golden Rule can be also interpreted in Kantian way as the categorical imperative, particularly its first formulation: ”Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This formulation is somewhat more proactive in nature. It talks about acting, doing things, and doing things is what is appreciated in our society, even when your goal is to exit the society.

Why exit the society? Is it enough to just quit your job and find something else to do, something that is more fulfilling and not bullshit? What an excellent question. Long before the advent of smart phones and 5G and DNA-vaccines, this question had been brought up to the table. In the 1800s, people were realizing the negative impact industrialization was having on society at large. People were rooted out from their family homes in the countryside, forced to move to a large city to look for a job, crammed into small apartments with dozens of other workers, coerced into working long and hard days at factories to make a living. The lowly misery of these people attracted the attention of a certain Friedrich Engels, who felt their situation was not adequate to make up for the suffering they had gone through. He meticulously described the working conditions of the English working class in his ”The Condition of the Working Class in England” (2003 [1845]), originally published in German. Sociology as a science was established by Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to study these changes. Slowly but surely, the influx of people into cities started to cause issues, something that mayors and other municipal representatives had to start taking care of. Planning and zoning were given a lot more attention, since the earlier modus operandi of old European cities had been rather laissez faire (Sutcliffe 1980).

Against this backdrop of massive societal change, people started to question the changes and their direction. Are we really nothing more than slaves, just working in a different environment? Slavery might not be the right word or context here. Many people believe to be free, govern themselves and their property, and yet their daily actions and options to choose from seem to be eerily limited. They have only so many choices, most of which seem somehow related to running their errands. A more appropriate term, with all its connotations, here would be the Greek word ananke, ”force, constraint, necessity”. Like a force of nature, progress towards modernity necessitates that people leave their family homes and go work in large factories, compulsively manufacturing endless amounts of products, some of which are necessary, others merely decorations, and some just pointless.

Many names in 19th century New England worked upon a vision for the future society at a time when unprecedented changes were taking place and the standard of living was rising faster than ever before. The Transcendental Club was a group of New England authors, philosophers, socialists, politicians and intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century which gave rise to Transcendentalism, the first notable American intellectual movement. Transcendentalist believe in the inherent goodness of people and nature, but that society and its institutions — particularly organized religion and political parties — corrupt the purity of the individual. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003; Sacks 2003.) Transcendentalism is a unique mix of European Romanticism, German (particularly Kantian) philosophy, and American Christianity. The impact of this movement can still be seen in the many flavours of American anarchist and radical Christian movements.

Out of the ranks of Transcendentalists rose a couple of names that can be viewed as the progenitors of modern anarcho-primitivism and natur(al)ist anarchy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the central figure of the Transcendental Club, who together with Henry David Thoreau critiqued the contemporary society for its ”unthinking conformity” and advocated for “an original relation to the universe” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003). Emerson’s Nature (2009 [1836]) poetically embellishes our view of the natural world, while Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1995 [1854]) is a call for civil disobedience and revolt against the modern world. Another influential natur(al)ist writer has been Leo Tolstoi whose name is frequently mentioned by anarchists. Tolstoi himself was a Christian and pacifist, and his writings have inspired Christian anarcho-pacifism that views the state as ”immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2017).

Before the Transcendentalist movement, Europe experienced similar trend in philosophy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural philosophy. Rousseau touched upon many subjects: freedom, free will, authority, nature, morality, societal inequality, representation and government. Like Transcendentalists, Rousseau held a belief that human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society. ”Rousseau clearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life, so in whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it is not the moral sense that the casual reader would ordinarily assume” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010). Rousseau’s work is relevant to many of the social movements that currently fight against COVID restrictions, vaccination agenda, building of 5G antenna towers next to where people live, polluting the environment, systemic poverty and general disconnection from the natural world. Rousseau, although regarded as a philosopher, saw philosophy itself negatively, and to him philosophers were ”the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010).

Rousseau’s days did not see capitalism as we see it now. It was later Marx (influenced by Hegel, who in turn was influenced by Rousseau) that put together a treatise that considers the societal change we have seen ever since from industrialism and circulation of capital. But Rousseau’s thoughts about the social contract (1968 [1762]), “child-centered” education (Rousseau 2010), and inequality (Graeber & Wengrow 2018; Rousseau 2008) are still relevant today. Especially when we are faced with many societal forces that are contradictory in nature, each of them pushing us into certain direction, demanding our attention, wanting us to change our beliefs about that one particular aspect that connects with other aspects and forms the Matrix of our reality.

We are once again facing a similar situation as the people did back in the days of the first industrial revolution. Now the industrial revolution has reached its fourth cycle, unimaginatively called ”Industry 4.0” (Marr 2018; WEF 2021), where machines are starting to become autonomous and talk to each other. I used to think technology was cool, and went to work for Google. But at Google I learned that technology is not cool, after all. Not until technology becomes completely open source, it will be used by massive conglomerates to build autonomous weapons systems (Cassella 2018; Johnson 2018) and the industry will keep paying ethics researchers to keep writing arguments for them (Charters 2020). Even though I could work for an industry that, given the current trajectory, will be among the biggest producers of CO 2 in the future Vidal 2017), the idea that I would work for an industry that sees weaponizing their products as the grandest idea of mankind’s future is still gnawing.

Because, it is all just business (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

One of the functions of critical science is to create awareness of the underlying values, and the political and financial interests which are currently determining the course of science and technology in industrialized society. This exposure of the value-laden character of science and technology is done with the goal of emancipating both people and the environment from domination and exploitation by powerful interests. The ultimate objective is to redirect science and technology to support both ordinary people and the environment, instead of causing suffering through oppression and exploitation by dominant elites. Furthermore, by exposing the myth of the value-neutrality of science and technology, critical science attempts to awaken working scientists and engineers to the social, political, and ethical implications of their work, making it impossible or, at the very least, uncomfortable for them to ignore the wider context and corresponding responsibilities of their professional activities.

It all seems to be connected with state imperialism and the military-industrial(-intelligence) complex. Lenin’s statement (2008 [1916]) equating capitalism with imperialism still prevails this day: ”imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists”. The conditions change, but the war machine keeps on churning (soon with autonomous weapons!), with wealthy but crooky investors financing projects that are even more dystopian (Byrne 2013). We may remember what president Dwight D. Eisenhower said about the military- industrial complex (NPR 2011):

”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

It is exactly these kinds of doomsday scenarios that inspire people like Theodore John ”The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Kaczynski, famous for sending mail bombs to various university professors around the US, holds a doctoral degree in mathematics. (Wikipedia 2021.) Kaczynski was bullied as a child, and it has been suggested that he was part of an MKULTRA experiment in college (The Week 2017). Kaczynski did not send his bombs haphazardly. He wrote long theoretical pieces to justify his actions, most of them being thematically anarcho-primitivist. In 1995, after sending several bombs to university personnel and business executives in 1978-1995, he said to ”desist from terrorism” if he got his text published in media outlets.

In his Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski 1995), a 35 thousand word essay published in The Washington Post, which the FBI gave the name ”Unabomber manifesto”, Kaczynski attributes many our societal ills to ”leftism”. In the manifesto Kaczynski details how two psychological tendencies, “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”, form the basis of ”the psychology of modern leftism”. Feelings of inferiority are taken to mean the whole spectrum of negative feelings about self: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred etc. Oversocialization is the process of socialization taken to extreme levels:

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.

25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

Kaczynski goes on to describe how this oversocialization causes a person to feel guilt and shame for their actions, especially in the context of performing as society expects them to perform. He writes how this concept of oversocialization is used to determine ”the direction of modern leftism”. Further on, Kaczynski describes how modern man needs goals to strive for, to not run the risk of developing serious psychological problems. This goalsetting activity he denotes ”power process”. But these goals can be real or artificial. Setting a goal is “surrogate activity” if the person devotes much time and energy to attaining it, does not attain it, and still feels seriously deprived. It is just a goal for goalsetting’s sake, the unfulfilled other side of the coin of power process. Kaczynski then connects these concepts to the many societal ills (excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe) by describing how modern society, with all its marketing and advertising creating artificial needs, disrupts the power process, mankind’s search for itself and meaning-making in life. He sees social hierarchies and the need to climb up them, the ”keeping up with the Joneses”, as surrogate activity.

”Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds”. This gradual increase, then, the system tries to ’solve’ by using propaganda, ”to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them”. In regards to technology, the ”bad” parts cannot be separated from the ”good”, and thus we are constantly facing the dilemma between technology and freedom, new technology being introduced all the time, and new regulations being introduced to curb the negative effects of the technology and at the same time stripping us of our freedoms. Kaczynski concludes, that revolution is easier than reforming the system.

Later, Kaczynski released another of his anti-technological theses. In Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015) Kaczynski presents a ”comprehensive historical analysis explaining the futility of social control and the catastrophic influence of technological growth on human social and planetary ecological systems.” This time Kaczynski talks more about how to start an anti-tech movement and how to keep it going. The text reads like a mathemathical proof of sorts, it presents ”rules”, ”propositions” and ”postulates” why the technological system will destroy itself (eg. Russell’s Paradox resulting in chaos in a highly complex, tightly coupled system) and why a successful anti-tech movement needs clear goals to avoid some of the errors revolutionary movements have made, which are elaborated in the book. Violence is not offered as a solution in the book, it is seen more like a mishap of sorts, a suboptimal outcome of a revolutionary movement. But it talks about power. Kaczynski got to learn the hard way how the feeling of powerlessness breeds desperate actions that would have been otherwise unnecessary. The book also talks about climate change and related issues, from a mathematic systems theoretical point of view.

Institutions that are in the business of social engineering and behavioral modification, such as the Tavistock Institute in the UK or the CIA in the US, would have us believe that Kaczynski’s actions were ”defences against anxiety” that can be seen as ”withdrawal, informal organization, reactive individualism and scapegoating” (Hills et al. 2020), and to some extent this is true. But Kaczynski interprets the actions of these institutions stemming from technological progress in our society Kaczynski 1995):

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people.

This uniformity of a large hierarchical modern society then forces its will on people (Kaczynski 1995):

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

We have once again encountered ananke, necessity. Now, if we consider ourselves as the lonely decision makers in this society, what could we do? We can try and fight fire with fire, but such fights end up producing only pain and casualties (Taylor 2013). Anarcho-naturists and anarcho-pacifists understand that (unnecessary) fighting in most cases does not work. Sometimes fighting is warranted, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine those cases. Sending bombs to people’s offices may get you some attention and even make somebody quote your manifesto in an essay, but it is not solving the issue, something which the Unabomber addressed in his later texts. If working a job indirectly supports the military-industrial complex NewScientist 2011), what good does it do? The military-industrial complex is the biggest source of pollution in the world (The Conversation 2019; Acedo 2015), detaching yourself from this complex is imperative. Even if they would manage to convince us with their psyops that they are willing to change and that climate change is an important issue (Ahmed 2014), it would still be the biggest polluter that is controlling the conversation. It has even been suggested that they are behind this climate buzz (Light 2014). Is your job doing that much good in society that it outweighs the cons? If I need to act responsibly, but cannot fight the system nor conform, while at the same time keeping in mind our looming climate disaster, the only reasonable and peaceful response is to exit the system altogether.

Biodynamism’s naturality and parsimony

Owning responsibility and transforming the world implies taking some kind of action. We have already seen how feelings of powerlessness and lack of self-worth can lead to destructive actions. But there are an unlimited amount of actions that can be taken, that are not based in feelings of powerlessness but empowerment.

Exiting society might sound like a lonely project, and some people might rightfully feel lonely when all their peers still want to live in the illusion. But it does not have to be so. A lot of soul-searching needs to be done, and that is usually done in privacy, focusing upon oneself, but beyond that there are ways how to go off-grid and drastically reduce your carbon emissions.

One of the key concepts that will be our guiding principle here is degrowth (Paulson 2017), which ties into values such as organicity, naturality and parsimony. We will want to have less production of artificial things, and more organic and natural things. By artificial we mean long supply chains and many phases of production with modern high technology that produce a large amount of climate effects. By natural we mean using primitive technology, mostly all-natural or recycled materials and something that can be produced even alone, given enough time. Primitive technology does not exclude electricity, it just means producing it differently.

Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and theosophist, the founder of Anthroposophy and a great reformer of science in matters of spirit, started the first intentional form of organic farming, known as biodynamic agriculture, after he had given a series of lectures on the topic in the last year of his life. (Paull 2011.) Steiner had many spiritual experiences during his life, which lead him to start the Anthroposophy movement. He wanted to apply the scientific process into spiritual realm, inquiring it as it would be as real as our material world. Inquiring this spiritual world helped him access knowledge he claims to not have been access otherwise (Steiner 2011 [1918]). Anthroposophist self-inquiry can be seen as Foucauldian ”technology of the self” that ”provide an intervention mechanism on the part of active subjects, injecting an element of contingency to everyday encounters and alleviating the determinist effect that technologies of power would have otherwise” (Skinner 2012).

Steiner’s thoughts about agriculture are still relevant (Paull 2011):

In 1924 Steiner commented that, “Nowadays people simply think that a certain amount of nitrogen is needed for plant growth, and they imagine it makes no difference how it’s prepared or where it comes from” Steiner, 1924b, pp.9-10). He made the point that, “In the course of this materialistic age of ours, we’ve lost the knowledge of what it takes to continue to care for the natural world” (Steiner, 1924b, p.10).

Our current system seems to think exactly in this way, that if we just compensate our wreaked havoc by investing in ’green’ technology (Elegant 2019), it will all be ok and rainbows in the sky. But it will not. No one is even double checking if the companies that say that they are now carbon neutral actually proactively try to make our world greener. They can just buy a renewable energy company and say now we are green and do nothing else. Some would argue that going ’carbon neutral’ like these massive corporations are doing it is not the way to do it: “’green’ infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe” (Dunlap 2020).

Steinerian biodynamism ”encompasses practices of composting, mixed farming systems with use of animal manures, crop rotations, care for animal welfare, looking at the farm as an organism/entity and local distribution systems, all of which contribute toward the protection of the environment, safeguard biodiversity and improve livelihoods of farmers” (Turinek et al. 2009). While modern biodynamic studies focus on agroecological factors such as nutrient cycles, soil characteristics, and nutritional quality (Reganold 1995; Droogers & Bouma 1996), Steiner himself was quite metaphysical in his lectures and paid attention to details such as kingdoms of nature, planetary influences, biorhythms, incarnated and environmental ethers, and the Zodiac (Steiner 2004 [1958]; Nastati 2009).

By shifting to more natural ways of living, we may help Gaia (Lovelock 1991; Singh 2007) heal in many other ways than just reduce our climate emissions. By realizing that we are actually living on the skin of a fairly large and complex organism, we will stop treating it as a plain source of material resources, and start bonding with it, tune into its consciousness and establish two-way communication, just like the natives have done in America.

The way of the natives ought to be our current way, since there is no reason why the natives could not guard the lands they have before. One of the greatest fears of people speaking for private property rights is that managing resources collectively would mean exhausting them. There is no Tragedy of Commons. Just because you are materially poor does not mean that you are any less competent steward of land and wealth, as proposed by Elinor Oström (2009). Acting for climate is not an investment allocation problem. The natives need their land back so that they could do their best to fight the destruction of our ecosystem. The Outokumpu supply chain in Brazilian rainforests, Elon Musk and Bolivian lithium mines, Papua New Guinea indigenous conflict, mining in Lapland in traditional Sami herding areas, Australian uranium mining in indigenous lands… these are all pointless conflicts.

There are also many other ways of staying grounded and in touch with nature, while at the same time cultivating sovereignty. Many of these things revolve around feeding the most immediate community next to you. They reflect ideas such as mutuality, solidarity, organicity, and naturality. Permaculture is a term coined by David Holmgren to describe ”an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience” (Wikipedia: Permaculture 2021). Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems (Holmgren Desing Services 2007).

Earthships are 100% sustainable homes that are both energy efficient and modern. Earthsips are built with natural and repurposed (recycled) materials, they heat and cool themselves without electric heat, they use solar energy to power electric appliances, they collect all of their water from rain and snowmelt, they re-use their sewage water to fertilize plants, and there’s an indoor garden that grows food in vertical growing spaces (Reynolds 2021). Ecovillages are a ”human-scale, full-featured settlement, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future” (Gilman & Gilman 1991).

Clifford Harper had a set of drawings imagining an alternative in his book Radical Technology (Harper & Boyle 1976). In them, he shows many of the ideas that were themes in the German garden city movement in the beginning of 20th century (Bollerey & Hartmann 1980), such as collectivised gardens, autonomous housing estates, and community workshops. The book introduces us ’radical technology’, which spans basically all of the concepts we have discussed up to this point: organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, vegetarianism, hydroponics, soft energy, insulation, low-cost housing, tree houses, shanty houses, ’folk-built’ houses using traditional methods, houses built from subsoil, self-built houses, housing associations, solar dwellings, domestic paper-making, carpentry, scrap reclamation, printing, community & pirate radio, collectivised gardens, collective workshops for clothesmaking, shoe repair, pottery, household decoration and repairs, autonomous housing estates, autonomous rural villages, etc.

These concepts, while they seem simple, are still empowering, they are meant to let people enjoy they fruits of their labour. Last but certainly not least is the concept that all of these things fall under, alternative (or, appropriate) technology. Alternative technologies are those ”which offer genuine alternatives to the large-scale, complex, centralized, high-energy life forms which dominate the modern age” (Winner 1979). Alternative technologies seek to solve the problems technocentric thinking has caused in society: technical scale and economic concentration, level of complexity or simplicity best suited to technical operations of various kinds, division of labor and its alleged necessity, social and technical hierarchy as it relates to the design of technological systems, and self-sufficiency and interdependence regarding the lives of individuals and communities. Many of these solutions have been developed in Africa, where problems have had to be solved, but resources have been scarce in actuality.

Appropriate technology holds great promise in ways that are currently underappreciated in our society (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

As has been mentioned repeatedly throughout this book, the primary goal of technology in our current economic system is to increase material affluence and to generate profits for the wealthy by controlling and exploiting both people and the environment. In view of the reality of interconnectedness, this is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially desirable. In this chapter we discuss how to design technologies which reflect the values of environmental sustainability and social appropriateness. We also emphasize the importance of heeding the precautionary principle in order to prevent unintended consequences, as well as the need for participatory design in order to ensure greater democratic control of technology. Finally, as a specific example of an environmentally sustainable and socially appropriate technology, we discuss the positive contribution of local, organic, small-scale agriculture.

Conclusion

This essay has presented the reader with ramblings of a person who is familiar with Critical Theory, who would like to build a stronger connection to nature, and who is having a major identity crisis in life. I have expressed, albeit feebly, my will to emancipate myself, to exit the Matrix. In Finnish they would say ”Sota ei yhtä miestä kaipaa”, and in George S. Patton’s words this expression would be ”Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.”

In this essay I seem to have extensively quoted the Unabomber manifesto. This is not to say that Kaczynski had exceptionally good motives or justifications for his actions. He killed many people and is in prison now. Kaczynski’s ideas are not unique. Quoting his manifesto serves merely to prove one point: he is the product of his environment. Mental illness is no longer a taboo and things have progressed somewhat since Kaczynski’s days. It could be argued that Kaczynski’s writings were just projection of his own feelings of shame and guilt he had gone through. But his mental condition, should he be diagnosed with one (Amador & Reshmi 2000), does not invalidate the things he’s written. In many ways his writings are now more relevant than ever. When we have tech billionaires talking about inserting neuralinks into your brain and downloading thoughts straight from the headquarters, we can really see the manifesto dots connecting.

I wish it would have been just the mental load caused by a ’surrogate activity’ of keeping up with the Joneses that was the cause of all this, but no, it’s the real deal now. When we have corporate executives and federal commissions defending autonomous weapons systems and saying building such systems is a ’moral imperative’ (Gershgorn 2021), you know we have reached peak civilization. It’s all downhill from now on. All participation in society will support this moral imperative, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. While many would get back to nature for reasons of convenience, such as better health, Rousseau himself would have gotten back to nature ”to feel God in nature” (LaFreniere 1990). It is this kind of humanist transcendentalism (not transhumanism) that we will need again, to realize what we have done to our planet, to realize what needs to be done to abolish the war machine consuming it, and to make ourselves whole again.

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[arcticdementor]

I was a pre-teen in the seventies, which means that long before I hit the jaded age of fourteen when older men tried to use it to get me to peel off clothes, I was used to hearing “we’re all naked under clothes.” (Later on I greatly regretted most of these idiots hadn’t read Heinlein so I couldn’t say “nul program.” So instead I had to say things like “We’re also all clean under our dirt, so I see you don’t intend to shower ever again.”)

There were other just as crazy aphorisms that passed for “deep thought.” I’m honestly not sure what caused this, whether it was more people than ever being pushed to higher ed they weren’t really qualified for, but that made them want to sound “intellectual” or that the Soviets were diligently working with their wrenches to take apart the ability to think of the new generation. Or perhaps for whatever reason mass media and TV just encouraged a ridiculous wave of aphorisms that not only didn’t mean much but that aimed to destroy rather than build habits, patterns and ways of life that led to success.

You know, crazy stuff like “What difference does a piece of paper make to whether we’re married?” (Other than meeting potential obligations to potential children, and getting the buy in of both sets of inlaws and recognition of society that protects well…. mostly the woman who puts more biological investment in the relationship, none, really.) And “If it feels good do it!” and– Well, a lot of you are old enough to have heard all this cr*p growing up. And the younger ones, trust me, the current spate of crazy is well anchored in a barrage of crazy — to my certain knowledge — from the sixties and seventies.

I fell for some of them too. The unflappable Miss Almeida was not unflappable when this stuff came at her from someone she respected. So for a long time I bought my brother’s “romance is the opium of womanhood” long before I realized where the origin of that nugget came from, or that my brother — never having been a woman — was in fact assuming that without having romantic notions to encourage her to care about attachment and feelings, young women would be as “free” and sexually available as men wish they’d be. Of course now we know that’s the rankest and most absolute bull excreta, and that in fact women have — surprise! It’s not like we evolved to be the caretakers of children or anything — a different set of sex related hormones that encourage attachment to sexual partners and incidentally children.

But the excreta of “pseudo-profound-social statements is now everywhere, and yesterday I was hit in close proximity by two bits of crazy. And suddenly it hit me “And what is the alternative, precisely?”

…

Look, all of human civilization has been an attempt to suppress inter-personal violence, or at least keep it within bounds that don’t prevent us from assembling in numbers larger than clan or tribe. Almost any reading of the records of older cities will quickly come to the conclusion that people used to be a lot more interpersonally violent. They just were. Even in early modern England, well…. Let’s say men died young because they fought over the most stupid things.

And that was already a state-nation, where people identified with the nation was though it were a race, and had not only forgotten their early tribal affiliations but their micro-kingdoms (the regional association, which given travel in that time probably had a lot of genetic backing) before it was unified into “England.” So the fights were rarely tribal or regional (though there were family feuds.)

…

But we are built on a template of great apes, and the remains we find of hominins and other man-tribes show that their lifestyle was in fact close to that of great apes everywhere. And do you know what you call a baby chimp found by a genetically unrelated band? Snack.

So, sure, let’s assume that education — public or not — is a way for a culturally dominant “elite” to suppress generalized violence.

What is the alternative?

The left is assuming violence is justified and on their side, because of course their idea of social dominance, and the model they implement is to take control and rob everyone. But throughout history they are an exception, in fact. Even the “bad old kings” were trying to do the best they could for their tribe or micro nation. They often screwed up and followed their own desires, because human, but the idea of noblesse oblige is very very old in humanity. And most people at least try (Unless they’re all ‘et up with Marxism and self-righteousness, because bullsh*t means never having to say you’re sorry.)

Instead let’s look at it as meaning what it says “education” (by which we can mean everything we do to tame the toddler-beast and up through specific knowledge of how to get ahead in life) is a way to suppress inter-personal violence.

Well, yes. And we’re all naked under our clothes. And wearing clothes isn’t natural, maaaaan.

But what is the alternative? The civilizational process of mankind, from band to clan, from clan to city, from city to nation, accomplishing things that could only be accomplished by many people cooperating without violence is a process of suppressing unnecessary violence and waste of human life.

…

In the same way, later, while doing my instapundit link rounds, I saw an article about how 2 + 2 is colonial thinking imposed on non-white populations, and are alien and evil, compared to their native ways of knowing.

After I got my eyes from under the sofa, I took a deep breath and asked “What’s the alternative?”

Because, you know, I’ve heard this before, but I never thought about precisely what their nonsense would entail.

Sure, we’re giving up the internal combustion engine, bridges, anything better built than a hut made of rough stones, and probably — let’s be honest — crops. The horrendous thing is that this might be completely acceptable to them, since they don’t realize what supports their ability to live in relative comfort.

Let’s instead explore what this means at the interpersonal level and how much eschewing simple math would make living with other human beings impossible.

…

Humans have partly got this far, and now enjoy untold prosperity which had practically eliminated famine (until of course the covidiocy starved the third world) because “colonial thinking” defeated that of isolated tribes.

Or perhaps more cogently: those who won a clash between two populations generally (there are exceptions, like Greece and Rome and to an extent India and Great Britain, and perhaps to an extent America and Japan) imposed their mode of life on the defeated. Though they might culturally appropriate that which was worthy in the culture of the defeated.

…

Is 2 +2 a colonial way of thinking? Oh, probably. But that was probably way back when the colonization of the homo sap by the Neanderthal (culturally, that is. Well, that seems to have been the direction) occurred, because we have trade going that far back, and trade can’t survive without counting.

In fact, even though the concept of zero is also fairly sophisticated, we’ve come across very few tribes that don’t have a concept of counting, or a concept of numbers over 5, and those are usually highly isolated and tiny tribes. Because arithmetic is a darn useful skill, as is everything we’ve built on it from accounting to architecture.

And what’s the alternative? People walking around “Sensing” the numbers? Be real. That’s not native to anyone but the crazier tribes of Homos New Agicus, a tribe who uses cannabis in such vast quantities they’re sure to become extinct.

The alternative is never “death or cake.”

When idiots run around with blunt aphorisms, demanding you dismantle civilization, ask them what their alternative is. And stop them when they start talking of rainbows and unicorn farts, and ask them the exchange rate of the unicorn fart to the rainbow. Because if it’s a civilization, we have to know.

You want to eschew controls over violence? Basic arithmetic? Clothes?

Well, sure. I believe you’re ultimately free to do what you want, as long as you pay the price.

You’re free to take all your clothes off, and take off to the forest with your buddies, where you can live as though 2 plus 2 equals 20, or potato, or chicken.

We don’t care. Heck, you probably won’t live long, but if you do, you’ll be a fascinating ethnology-experiment.

What you won’t be and can’t be is able to shame us out of living our lives as civilized human beings, who have enough to eat and can trade a known quantity for a known quantity. Because you know, there really is no alternative. Not an alternative that allows humanity to survive.

And if you hate humanity enough you don’t want us to survive, I have an easy solution: You go first. After which the existence or non-existence of humanity stops being your problem.

[personality-alignment-test]

Everything About Personality Alignment Test

What is Personality  Alignment?

A creature's common moral and personal attitudes are expressed by its alignment: lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good, lawful neutral, neutral, Chaotic Neutral, lawful evil, neutral evil, or chaotic evil. An Personalilty Alignment Test may be a tool for developing your character's identity.

Likewise, what do the alignments mean? Alignment. A typical creature within the game world has an alignment, which broadly describes its moral and private attitudes. Alignment may be a combination of two factors: one identifies morality (good, evil, or neutral), and therefore the other describes attitudes toward society and order i.e.lawful, chaotic, or neutral.

What's your moral alignment?

Your moral alignment is "neutral good." you are doing the simplest you'll to try to be an honest person and sometimes feel dedicated to helping others. Neutral good is one of the best alignments because do you do what's right without bias and without going against the order.

What is D&D alignment?

In the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, alignment is a categorization of the ethical and moral perspective of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures. Most versions of the sport feature a system during which players make two choices for characters. 37 Related Question Answers Found

What alignment is Thanos?

Lawful neutral or Lawful evil. He has a personal code of ethics he believes in. He's also obviously not good because he kills half the universe. So the question is whether his good intentions balance out his evil actions to form neutral alignment or evil alignment.

What is an alignment test?

Alignment Test. Answer each question by choosing the response that best describes your character's belief or presumably action.

What alignment is Batman?

Batman is a pretty good example of how and why the D&D alignment system breaks down. Batman's motivation ranges between chaotic neutral and neutral good (depending on incarnation) but requires society to be lawful (neutral).

What is your alignment chaotic good?

Chaotic good characters feel that each person must find their way and should have total freedom to act in any manner they choose as long as they hurt no one else in the process. Chaotic neutral characters believe that everybody should do what they need, no matter whether the actions are good or hurt others.

What is neutral good alignment?

Neutral Good. A neutral good character does the simplest that an honest person can do. Neutral good is that the best alignment you'll be because it means doing what's good disinterestedly for or against the order. Neutral good is often a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

How do you become true neutral?

True neutral characters are concerned with their well-being and that of the group or organization which aids them. They may behave in a good manner to people who they consider friends and allies, but will only act maliciously against those that have tried to injure them in some way.

How do you become chaotic neutral?

Chaotic neutral characters believe that everybody should do what they need, no matter whether the actions are good or hurt others. Both will lie and cheat. The chaotic good character will cheat and mislead others only good comes of it or to trick the evil.

What alignment is Robin Hood?

Alignment Examples. Two possible ways of watching it for both Robin Hood and batman. Their beliefs are Lawful good in so far as society as a whole needs to follow the laws and be good people. Their actions though are Chaotic good as although they don't believe they are above the laws they act outside of it.

What is a chaotic neutral?

A character is Chaotic Neutral when consistent with the best-known Character Alignment system, they fail to qualify for either Good or Evil but fall on the Chaotic side of the Law—Chaos axis.

What is lawful neutral?

Lawful neutral is that the best alignment you'll be because it means you're reliable and honorable without being a zealot. Lawful neutrality is often a dangerous alignment when it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and variety in society.

What does true neutral mean?

The neutral alignment, sometimes known as truly neutral, is without prejudice or compulsion. They either disregard any commitment to good, evil, law, and chaos or believe a balance is needed between these forces in the world.

What does lawful evil mean?

A Lawful Evil character is an evil character who either tries to impose or uphold a lawful system on others without regard for his or her wishes and/or adheres to a specific code. They believe in order, but mostly because they believe it's the simplest way of realizing their evil wishes.

What D&D class should I play 5e?

Weighing Your Options Barbarian. Barbarians are a core class in Dungeons and Dragons for a couple of iterations now, and permanently reason. Bard. Bard is one of the trickiest classes in the game. Cleric. Clerics are the very necessary healers of Dungeons and Dragons. Druid. Fighter. Monk. Paladin. Ranger.

What are the four types of alignment?

The four primary types of text alignment include left-aligned, right-aligned, centered, and justified. Left Aligned - This setting is often referred to as "left-justified," but is technically called "flush left." It is typically the default setting when you create a new document.

What is the text alignment?

Align or alignment may be a term wont to describe how text is placed on the screen. For example, the left-aligned text creates a line of text on the left side of the page (like this paragraph). Text is often aligned along the sting of a page, cell, div, table, or another visible or non-visible line.

What are the 9 alignments?

The nine alignments are, supported by these two axes: Chaotic Good, Neutral Good, Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, True Neutral, Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Evil, Neutral Evil, and Lawful Evil.

Final Words

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Also, get overall idea about what is and how personality alignment test work. And surely its find beneficial to all. If by any means, you’re facing, then comment to us so we can able resolve these issues.

[wheelofmeta]

The secret of Elayne's potential

It’s pretty clear from the outset that Elayne’s ability to channel and strength are not known outside the Tower. The only evidence otherwise is how freely the matter is discussed in front of Rand (and the guards under Tallanvor who brought him before Morgase & Elaida), but it’s also clear from the infodumping by everyone in the palace, and Elayne’s reaction to Gawyn’s inappropriate topics of discussion, that this is not normal and in hindsight, it’s a ta'veren high tide, like when Rand met with Harine. 

Anyway, they say that Elayne will be the first queen, post-Hawkwing, in a position to admit that she’s an Aes Sedai.  So it follows that this is something that needs some work and doubtless a lot of behind the scenes political dealmaking and lining up support before the reveal. 

With that in mind, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t say anything until they were ready for the world to know that Elayne is a full sister, and a lot of the timing for that would depend on Morgase’s longevity and political position when the time comes around. What if Elayne earns the shawl in a more typical period, say in five years (given her strength, she can be expected to have her training expedited, but not too much, since they want to be sure she’s groomed as the Tower wants), in which case Morgase will still be under fifty, and unlikely to die of natural causes for a good long time.  Eventually Elayne’s ageless face will make her status apparent, and Andor will have to cope with the possibility of a sister inheriting the throne. Or maybe what actually happens, happens, and Morgase dies before Elayne is raised, but she can’t come running home from the Tower as Morgase did when Modrellein & Maighdin both died.

I don’t think that scenario in normal times would present a problem with Elayne’s Succession, since it’s the Tower that has her in hand, and can say so, whereas Elaida clearly could not in OTL.  If the assembled nobles of Andor can accept an Aes Sedai giving permission for a foreign army to pass through Andor’s territory, even when they are inclined to oppose the specific sister personally, they aren’t going to do much when the late queen’s Aes Sedai advisor says “She will be coming home, just not yet. The Tower is very interested in seeing the Daughter-Heir to take her mother’s throne (with an implicit "so don’t even think about throwing your own hats into the ring”).“

On the other hand, a lot of other things can happen between Elayne being entered into the novice book and swearing the Three Oaths, including fatal failures in either test, or doing something that leaves them no choice but to put her out of the Tower, like refusing to continue the Accepted test.  Not that I think she would be put out if that happened.  What would probably happen is that she is kept under the Tower’s thumb perhaps with the specious justification of making sure she won’t do any harm with the Power, and then being sent to a farm under the supervision of the most hardcore disciplinarians until she is beaten into line and becomes the most obediant puppet queen in the history of Andor, with a group of Aes Sedai "advisors” whose job is as much to make sure she doesn’t perform any unauthorized or public channeling (not to mention keeping her shielded with permission to touch saidar as a reward for good behavior would probably be a very effective means of controlling a channeling monarch).

But in the event of some sort of mischance eliminating their Aes Sedai queen, it is definitely in the Tower’s M.O. to deny attempting something, rather than admit to failure, so why let anyone know ahead of time.  Aes Sedai heir or no, Morgase is, for all intents and purposes, a White Tower operative, given her “more Catholic than the Pope” mentality Moiraine & Anaiya perceive as resulting from her failure to learn to channel and earn the shawl herself.  There is no need to weaken her political position by first announcing that her Daughter-Heir is going to be Aes Sedai one day, and then admitting that she died failing the tests.  Not to mention, something as publicly known as the Daughter-Heir’s fate might give potential initiates second thoughts or cause other people to reconsider letting their own daughters test 

What I always found interesting about the whole issue was how they say Elayne will be the first queen to be out of the closet, as it were, with her shawl. First of all, why? They suggest it is a matter of strength, but I can’t see how her strength in the Power matters at all to her holding a throne, unless they mean that stronger sisters will use their standing to force her to rule as they wish, but that has nothing to do with openly admitting she is a sister. Or maybe the Tower has a hard and fast rule (which would predate the Trolloc Wars) that unless a sister is an 8(+5), she is not allowed to reveal her status and hold a throne.  Maybe they think people will expect too much of an Aes Sedai queen that a weaker channeler cannot deliver? Or the public spotlight on her means that her weaker channeling will bring discredit to the Tower.

The more plausible meaning of strength has to do with political strength of the monarch in question, and Andor in general seems to have a stronger central rule than most others.  There are not the divisions of power such as Tarabon and Illian have, or the fractious noble class as in Cairhien or Tear (which probably was some sort of crab-bucket situation that caused them to give up on anyone actually claiming the throne, even though kings had ruled from the Stone before the New Era), or other domestic rival interests that weaken the crown, as in Amadicia and Arad Domon.  The less said about Altara & Murandy in that regard the better.  The Ghealdanin aristocracy as well, seems quite ready to pounce at any sign of weakness in a ruler, though the era of Maseema’s reign of terror is admittedly a small sample size, and the Borderlands are a special case. But it does appear, especially given the relative mildness of Daes Daemar in Andor, that whoever does claim the Lion Throne is relatively secure in her authority.  On the other hand, Morgase’s position at the time seemed to be at a nadir, due in no small part to her adherence to the Tower, so it doesn’t seem like they should be taking the family’s level of power in Andor for granted, and blithely assume House Trakand can get away with whatever unpopular thing they want when it comes time to announce that Andor will be ruled directly by an Aes Sedai.

Another possibility is that they mean personal political strength and ability. It would seem that if the Tower wanted an Aes Sedai queen, Kiruna would have been a prime candidate, just get Paitar out of the way. But he seems to be quite well-respected, even seemingly primus inter pares among his fellow Borderland rulers, while Kiruna’s own personality and judgment would seem to be of less than the highest quality.  Bera is clearly the brains of that pair, and the Wise Ones seem to be hammering Kiruna the hardest of their apprentices.  Maybe in Elayne, they are seeing someone they won’t have to reluctantly concede should not be imposed on a country at the expense of a better claimant and more qualified ruler.

Also of interest is the implication that there have been queens in the New Era who hid their Aes Sedai status. Was that the plan with Moiraine, that she take the throne as Laman’s heir but not reveal she studied more than books at the Tower?  Strength did not play a part in the failure of that concept, unless it was that Moiraine’s strength in the Power gave her the gumption to defy the Tower’s plans, but then they might want weaker sisters who will go along with their agenda to take the thrones.  Come to think of it, White Tower customs of non-interference and deference means that future Amyrlins will have to keep trying to get Sharina, Talaan or Nynaeve (haha! good luck) on board when they want to oppose Elayne or make Andor & Cairhien cooperate with their agenda. 

It would seem that Moiraine’s openly operating as an Aes Sedai for a few years helped put paid to the possibility of the Tower forcing her on the throne against her will, since the Cairhienin monarchy seems to be historically weak (re: the lack of a core national military force possessed by nearly every other monarch who actually rules their country), and thus a Cairhienin queen couldn’t get away with being known to be a sister. 

So, tl;dr, yeah. No one outside the Tower and Morgase’s inner circle, and people present when a ta'veren inspires them to discuss the matter, knew that Elayne was going to train as an Aes Sedai, and it makes sense that this knowledge would have been kept close.

[rankakiu]

Thoughts of the Droid: Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker

Hello, people of Tumblr! How have they been in these first weeks of the new year? As always, I hope very well. On this occasion, I bring to you all my opinions and thoughts about the last movie of 2019: Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker

This film that closes a whole new trilogy that saw its beginnings in 2015 and that also comes to close more than forty years of a story that has been expanded to the point of exhaustion, has received destructive criticism. And it is not for less, since having the honor of being the last film of a main chronology within the canon, made it have very high expectations. It is also influenced by the fact that we all expected this film to redeem the new trilogy, after the disaster that was Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Is it true that we are in one of the worst films in the saga? Or is there something in it that saves it from such a qualifier? Stay on my review to find out.

WARNING: NOT SPOILER FREE. Read at your own risk

Starting with the review, what did I think of the movie? Short answer: they really fell short to finish more than forty years of history within Star Wars. An enjoyable film, but with the defect of being too simple. Now let's analyze this movie in more detail.

Characters: What can I say about this point? Being honest with you, the whole new generation of characters in this new trilogy was trashed and the potential they had was very wasted. Of course, I am not facing characters that are terribly written, but they also lack genuine development and evolution. It does not feel that they have advanced and that they have had that essential journey, full of learning, that they face challenges that make them discover what they are capable of achieving, as well as knowing their own limits and exceeding them; challenges and situations that make them grow as people and especially that have characteristics that make them identifiable with the viewer. 

Above all, the viewer is interested in the lives of these characters. And therefore, I can't think of them as characters that are memorable. Of course, all of them have entered the legacy of Star Wars, along with the fact that they are canonical characters, and no doubt several fans will hold them in high esteem. It will not be so in my case.

We have Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren, who in the previous film had had a genuine and interesting development (being the most salvageable of Episode VIII), reaching the point of eliminating his master Snoke and that he remained as the new Supreme Leader . Here, in The Rise of Skywalker, he suffers a huge setback of character, being as a mere servant of Emperor Palpatine. Do you remember the scene in Episode VIII, when Kylo Ren, furious, destroyed his helmet? How that particular scene was the representation that he no longer wanted to be left alone as a shadow of Darth Vader and now he wanted to be the only master of the Dark Side of the Force? Well, in this movie you can forget about it, since in one scene, Kylo returns to repair his helmet and symbolically, he accepts himself as an apprentice of Palpatine.

We have Rey, who really, was the character who had everything to be the most interesting and the saddest of all is that she was the most wasted. And it is even more worrying that this happens with what is the main protagonist of this recent trilogy. What I remember most about Rey is that she is a woman with a good heart, with a very strict ideal of justice and a strong moral; Accompanying these traits, there is the fact that she possesses an enormous dominion over Force, whose mystery was revealed to us in this film, but I will leave that for later. 

What I will mention now is that Rey remained with those features that I mentioned earlier and we never saw her leave that mold so well defined, but that in the long run, as we can see, she ended up harming her character. In her favor, Rey certainly delivers a couple of positive messages to a new generation: That, you are a descendant of a person whose legacy has been of only evil, does not define you as a bad person per se. What defines you is the actions you do for yourself and for others. In the same way, she delivers the message that, as difficult as it may seem, one must never succumb to darker desires or follow a path that is easy and thus become corrupted at all. We must always remain in the ideals of goodness.

What to say about the other characters? In my opinion, the only ones that remained in their essence and that it is pleasant to see them on screen again, are Leia Organa, Lando Calrissian, Luke Skywalker and Emperor Palpatine. Sadly, the only two characters that was given a dignified closure was Leia and Luke and the other two were disappointing. In the case of Leia, we really have to recognize it, it was a sad and very emotional farewell, where she sacrifices her life in order to make Ben, her son, come into reason, which in the end if it resulted in the redemption of said character (somewhat forced, but redemption after all).

In the case of Luke, even when he appears for a brief moment, his presence is equally enjoyable, especially that scene where he holds his lightsaber, demanding Rey more respect for the weapon of a Jedi, being basically a scene where they put to Rian Johnson in his place instead for that other scene where Luke disparaged his own saber. With Luke, I think it would have been good if they took advantage of what they had established in Episode VIII, where they gave indications that the spirits of the Jedi had powers beyond the unimaginable. But in the same way, it is appreciated that Luke appeared, practically with his personality of yesteryear intact.

With Emperor Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious, I have a problem. I will not deny that it was great to see it on screen, mostly because of the great performance of Ian McDiarmid, which at times reminded me of the Darth Sidious of Episode III, with all his energy and his aura of evil and hunger for power. However, this does not help much, when you consider that his return is only for the film to have a conflict and an enemy to win. It is even worse than when you see it in action, it is not a real threat to the good.

About other characters, better not talk. But I will do it anyway. Do you remember General Hux? That General of the First Order who in Episode VII imposed terror and respect and who in Episode VIII suffered a degradation that turned him into a clown? Well, in this movie it still suffers another degradation, only now it is reduced to a weeping and traitorous coward. And what deep motives did he have for committing such an act? Realize that the First Order was wrong in imposing a tyrannical government? No, he simply wanted Kylo Ren not to be the Supreme Leader. *Facepalm* It is quite curious that the commander who killed him, just by appearing in very few scenes, was a much more memorable character than Hux himself, since this commander did have the ruthless attitude and personality that usually exists between Baddies of Star Wars. That and also influences that it has a slight resemblance to Grand Moff Tarkin helps a lot.

With Finn and Poe Dameron, I have no problem, since we saw them interact together in most of the film. In fact, all the discussion and conflict that both have feels quite real and well acted. In essence, two men in a war, where both seek practical solutions to a conflict of galactic scale, only that each has a different opinion. Although yes, both fight for the same cause. It was especially successful, that both finally resolved their differences and that Poe recognized that he needed help when he was appointed new leader of the resistance. Both supported each other in difficult times and fought side by side, showing an authentic friendship between the two. Well done. 

About the soldiers of the First Order, along with the Sith Troopers and the Knights of Ren? They only serve to fill screen, be defeated in an insultingly easy way and especially sell figures. Uselessness at its best. Thanks for participating guys, keep trying.

To finish this point, I will mention a little to C3PO, which serves as a comic relief character in this film. I am quite aware that was the role of the character in previous installments, but I feel that here they exaggerated his role too much, since instead of giving a couple of laughs, he ended up being irritating; In addition, the fact that the other characters treat him as a ballast or a useless object, denotes a very disrespectful treatment towards this character.

In general, the film has a huge variety of characters, but does NOT know what to do with them and does not know how to give them development and evolution so that they feel much more part of the story. In his favor, the film does know how to relate the characters to each other, especially the good guys so they feel like a huge family, despite their multiple differences.

Story: How to define it? Without a doubt the words that come to mind, would be those of a story made in a hurried way and full of conveniences of the script for this advance. The worst part is that they don't even bother making deus ex machina more subtle. 

An example of this, we have Rey who discovers from nothing how to use that Sith dagger, with an infallible intuition and precision that makes you wonder if it was guided by the Force or is the product of a poor script. In this case, it would have been better if they had presented us with an earlier scene, where Rey, with genuine curiosity, inspects that dagger to discover that measuring instrument hidden in that weapon.

By the way, who forged the dagger, must have had powers of Nostradamus to know in what position the remains of the second Death Star would remain. 

And since I mentioned the dagger, it is just as convenient how they found that relic, falling into a kind of sand trap that overlooked a series of underground caves. And what the hell with that alien snake scene? I imagined that they would face this creature and in the end we have a slightly strange scene, where Rey, making use of the Force heals a wound of said animal. Many would think that this scene is unnecessary, but honestly I don't think so. Yes, the scene is somewhat misplaced, but it has its justification, since later it was established as another power of Rey and that in fact would use to save the life of her rival Kylo Ren. 

One of the most controversial points is precisely that Rey was really Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter. Now, the problem, in fact two problems with the origin of Rey, are these: first, Palpatine is the type of character who ambitions power only for him and no one else. In his obsession with getting it and keeping it, that he has hardly taken care of having a family. Second, that Rey was Palpatine's granddaughter first emerged as a fan theory, after the premiere of Episode VII. If the scriptwriters took a theory of fans, that only means one thing: they were devoid of ideas and how to use Palpatine's character and relate it to the story.

Again, in favor of the story, the scenes between Rey and Kylo really show their eternal conflict, where the Sith seeks for Rey to join the Dark Side and accept her dark heritage. Rey for her part, seeks that Kylo pay for the crimes he did, although deep in her heart, she wants Kylo to return to be Ben Solo, to be in the Bright side of the Force. Their interactions are well achieved and in fact they maintain a certain interest in the viewer. By the way, when Palpatine has them both subjected and absorbs the vital energy of the two to regenerate himself, he mentions that the union of Rey and Kylo is a kind of Special Force ... too bad he just mentioned it and history doesn't bother to explain it thoroughly. 

Despite what has been said in the negative points, I think it is also a pretty decent story, since, unlike in Episode VIII, which the film did not know what story to tell, here in this film it concentrates quite well in telling only one story: the search and destruction of Emperor Palpatine and the First Order and thus return to the galaxy the time of peace that he needed so much. In addition to telling that story, it also shows us other subplots, without these being fully fought with the main narrative.

Visuals and Special Effects: We can be calm. If there is something that has always characterized the Star Wars franchise are the special effects, and that are always at the forefront with the latest advances in this area. And in Episode IX could not be the exception. The special effects ensure that you are immersed in the different worlds that are shown in the film and even more, they ensure that the spectators feel part of a distant galaxy. The recreation of extraterrestrial beings, as well as abandoned ships and sites were phenomenal in my opinion. I highlight in particular the scenario of the destroyed Second Death Star, which feels like a huge place (quite obvious if we consider that it was similar in size to a small planet), a reflection of a dark era of yesteryear and also serves as a preamble, a reflection of Rey with herself and the destiny she will have to face. 

As always, visuals and special effects have a A+ insured.

Action: Unfortunately, the action on this occasion was quite a bit dull. Of course, there are sequences of action very well achieved, such as the persecution in the desert, where soldiers of the First Order hunted our protagonists in some motorcycle tanks quite adapted to arid terrain and with the peculiarity of catapulting towards air to one of the crew (equipped with jet-packs). Certainly that sequence of action is very entertaining and exciting to watch; of how our protagonists face a group that can attack on land and air without mercy. 

However, many other scenes remained to be polished, in particular I want to mention the battles with lightsabers. And it is that they lack the emotion and impact that was seen in the prequel trilogy, where the action was rampant and they were beautifully choreographed. Here in this movie, I feel that the intention was to honor the fighting in the style of Episode IV, which was obviously slow and only hit the lightsabers. Even so, these fight scenes between Rey and Kylo were soft, where in my opinion there was a lot of improvisation and hence filming as it is to get the film to market as soon as possible.

A rather negative point in the action was the final battle between Rey and Emperor Palpatine. Being a very disappointing battle, since the battle was for more emotion, however the script resolves it very easily, with Rey acquiring the strength of the Jedi and reflecting the Sith rays on Darth Sidious to end him definitively. Apart from that, the scene is not entirely clear: if the Jedi gave their strength to Rey, or if it was she who suddenly acquired that power to end Palpatine. 

Fighting with spaceships and Destroyers of the First Order also suffer from this problem. And it is that by witnessing thousands and thousands of ships, which could easily have demolished the Destroyers without problem, they were in short sequences of action, where we hardly see them maneuvering and firing. It was to be a battle of epic proportions, much like the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. Even with everything, the action can be enjoyable and is also one of the strongest points of the film.

In conclusion, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, is a film that while it can be enjoyed, it is definitely one of the lowest quality films within the franchise. Of course, it is far from being the worst of this saga, but it also does not have many elements that make it a memorable movie. In certain aspects it is a decent film and it certainly does not give you headaches when you see it. 

However, it is sad to see that this new trilogy has been wasted in this way, and it is even sadder to see that it really had the potential not only to please new generations, but even to unite old and new generations of fans to enjoy a renewed air of this franchise. If you ask me, even though J.J. Abrams directs this movie, without a doubt the fault lies more with Rian Johnson. Abrams, in Episode VII had planted the seed of what would be expected would be a fruitful tree, of new stories, adventures, and characters (and money). And Rian Johnson figuratively destroyed the tree to plant his own that was already dead. Definitely all his ravings began to take charge of this new trilogy and has condemned it to be at a low point.

If you liked Episodes VII and VIII, you might like this last chapter of the saga. If on the contrary you are more fan of the previous canon, for your own sake avoid this movie. I meanwhile, I give this movie 2 of 5 Spirits of The Force. Sadly the force is not with us now in this last film of the main saga.

Greetings

Rankakiu

[mysharetok]

Best way to reduce Belly fat, Chest fat and Love Handles for men

Not everyone will store fat in some places if you are a man your main problem areas are around Lower belly fat, Chest fat and Love handles. You find everything you're looking for in this article. Whenever I've fallen off the wagon, the stomach cushions or Love Handles were the main detect that I would see muscle to fat ratio beginning to collect. And this is definitely not just a problem for me, many men find that their love handles are not only one of the first spots to gain fat, but they're also one of the toughest areas to reduce fat from, especially since there is no way to spot reduce that area with certain exercises. A lot of people will tell you that you can just crunch or hyperextend that lower back fat away, but there's definitely no chance that that's going to work on its own. Today I want to go over 8 things you can do within the realm of diet, weight training, and cardio that will work. 1. Reduce Refined Carbs & Sugar

your first step with diet should be to reduce refined carbohydrates and sugar. But we don't want to just impose a ton of restrictions. Since the lower belly and love handles tend to be the last spots to go we want to be on a diet that we can actually stick to. Because before your body starts burning those love handles it's going to burn the fat from your face, your hands, your arms, and your legs first. So you don't only want to do what most people do and simply focus on reducing your calories, cutting carbs really low, restricting yourself, and battling cravings all day and night long because that's a losing battle. Instead, you want to optimize hormones like insulin, glucagon, testosterone, ghrelin, leptin, and growth hormone because all of them play an extremely important role in the fat loss process especially when we get down to the stubborn problem areas, that doesn't seem to want to budge. Controlling Insulin with your diet should be your first priority because insulin is like an on and off switch that controls whether you will be burning fat or storing fat. According to research having high insulin levels can also cause your body to preferentially store fat around your belly and love handles. Every time when you eat Insulin level high but especially high when you eat high in carbohydrate and sugar this is the way the first step is to reduce refined Carbs & Sugar from your diet. Refined Carbs include white bread, pizza dough, pasta, pastries, white flour, white rice, soda, and sweet desserts. So try to avoid these things from your diet. 2. Add More Sources of Protein

Having Diet on higher-level protein helps you to lower the Ghrelin level. When a Ghrelin level is high you are consistently getting signals that you are hungry and for that, you need to eat. So you definitely want to eat more protein throughout the day to lower Ghrelin. Adjusting your Diet that 30% of your daily calories coming from Protein not only fell you full also helps to speed up your metabolism and increases fat oxidation this is because of the fact that protein required more energy to digest than other macronutrients. 3. Increase Healthy Fat eliminate Unhealthy source of Fat

Things like Avocado, Walnut, and Salmon can all help you stick to your new plan. Foods high in monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats will help in low digestion in the small intestine increasing fullness and decreasing your appetite.  You need to keep in mind that many high-fat foods really taste good but are dense in calories. Eating high calories will prevent fat loss. Keep in mind before sky rocketing fat in your diet is that some people do better on high fat diet mean while some people completely do not. The people who have better respnse to high fat diet and stay lean are considered as having high fat phenotypes mean while others gain weight on high fat diet considered as having low fat phenotypes. So before adding high-fat food to your diet check which is your body type. 4. Incorporate Unrefined Sources of Carbohydrates High in Fiber

High fiber carbohydrates such as Oats, Sweet Potatoes, Banana and Orange will help to regulate Ghrelin levels (which will helps you to manage your hunger). Many people avoid carbohydrates entirely when they try to lose fat but the truth is that almost all carbohydrates in the natural form always contain fibers. In fact, one of the main things that happen when food goes from unprocessed to process fiber will get removed. This is unfortunate because of the higher fiber diet can help to decrease insulin levels and burn fat. Now has long as you keep your protien intake somewhere around 30% you can divide up your split whole unprocessed carbohydrate and healthy fats in a way that works better for you. Both Higher fat and Higher Carbohydrates can work for reducing the size of your Love Handles. You can either choose any one or balance both. 5.Limit Alcohol Consumption

You don't want to give up drinking alcohol entirely with drinking alcohol in excess is associated with abdominal obesity. Most drinks are high in calories not only from alcohol also from added sugars that we want to avoid.       6.Full Body Weight Training

Do full-body workout once or twice a week. Even though you are using weights the primary goal of this full-body workout should be to burn fat that means you want to move quickly between the sets with short breaks around 60 seconds long. On these days you want to start with a weight that you can rep out for a slightly higher rep count around 10 to 12 reps. I want you to choose a total you 8 exercises start with the ones that work your whole body before moving on to the exercise that hit lower and upper body separately. Some examples of weight training workouts are Deadlift, Clean and press, Bench press, Overhead press, and Squats. Workout like this may be difficult but it will help you to breakdown your muscle, Increase lean body mass, deplete glycogen stores and enhance insulin sensitivity while burning tuns of calories. 7. PHA training (Upper and lower body peripheral heart action training)

Peripheral heart action training sounds like something you might do in a doctor's office, but it's actually a form of training developed by Dr. Arthur Steinhaus in the 1940s. The idea behind PHA training is to elevate your metabolism by doing exercises in a certain order so that your blood keeps circulating throughout your body. PHA is basically a type of circuit training that eventually became popular in the 1960s when Mr. Universe, Bob Gajda, started using this kind of training. The idea is that you do five to six exercises, one after the other, with no, rests in between just like a typical circuit training workout. The difference is that you alternate between an upper body exercise and a lower body exercise. That's what keeps the blood circulating during the entire workout. 8. High-Intensity Interval Training

High-intensity interval training is a cardio session arranged as short bursts of very hard work. The whole point of high-intensity training is to kick up the intensity of your cardio. In order to qualify as true high-intensity interval training, you’ll need to push yourself to the max during every set. That’s why they’re short—anywhere from 20 to 90 seconds, typically. It’s the opposite of going for a long run where you ration your energy in order to sustain the activity for longer. High-intensity interval training helps you to boost endurance, increasing metabolism, regulating insulin levels, and losing body fat. Read the full article

[carlkandutsch]

Eliminating Property Access Negotiations - The FCC’s OTARD Expansion Proposal and San Francisco’s Police Code Article 52

On April 12, 2019, the FCC’s Wireless Bureau released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) concerning the extension of the OTARD rule to cover antenna devices that are used as “hub” transmitters serving customers not located at the antenna site.

In September of last year, we published a series of blog entries exploring this issue in some detail. See https://www.kandutsch.com/blog/uncategorized/wireless-facility-siting-issues-small-cells-and-otard-rules-part-i, and following entries. As described on our blog, the issue arises from a confluence of historical accidents, driven by the evolution of technology and parallel public policies that are now seen as conflicting.

The primary technological driver has been the rapid rise of wireless platforms as a supplement to and eventual replacement of wired platforms for pay television, Internet access and voice services. Following enactment of the Telecom Act of 1996, the FCC promulgated two sets of rules dealing with the placement of wireless devices on private or public property. On the one hand, the Over-the-Air-Reception-Device (“OTARD”) rules were intended to protect from almost all local regulation the placement of consumer reception devices by customers of a wireless service like satellite television. On the other hand, Section 704 of the Telecom Act preserved the ability of local governments to regulate the placement of large and obtrusive structures used in the transmission of wireless signals. Back then, things seemed clear: local regulation of wireless reception devices is extremely limited, while local authority over wireless transmission devices is preserved.

Inevitably, however, technology evolved in ways that muddy the once-clear distinction between reception and transmission devices, and therefore the regulatory schemes governing their placement. What rules apply to devices that are used to both receive and transmit wireless signals?

To understand the implication of the FCC’s proposal to expand OTARD protection to “carrier hub” facilities, imagine a world in which an MDU resident has the right to lease space on an apartment balcony to a wireless carrier for placement of radio relay devices over the landlord’s objection. Imagine a world in which your neighbor has the right to erect a 50-foot cell tower in his front yard and there’s nothing that either you or the city can do to stop it, as long as minimal safety-related criteria are met.

The driving force behind the WISPA proposal, adopted by the FCC in the NPRM, is the exponential increase in the number of hub or signal relay stations required to deploy advanced wireless networks such as 5G, which utilize extreme high-frequency bands in the radio spectrum. Because high-frequency wavelengths are very short, the wave form is easily distorted; consequently, higher frequency waves do not travel as far as a lower-frequency waves. Shorter travel distances mean more base stations – a lot more. Where to put them, if not on someone else’s public or private property?

As discussed here - https://www.kandutsch.com/blog/uncategorized/wireless-facility-siting-issues-small-cells-and-otard-rules-part-iii-triton-network-systems - the FCC has already stretched the scope of the OTARD rule almost to its breaking point by ruling that a wireless antenna relaying signals viaa mesh network can be an OTARD device despite the fact that it serves remote customers, as long as at least one customer is located at or near the antenna site. In the NPRM the Wireless Bureau proposes to take the crucial additional step of eliminating the requirement that there be at least one customer at the antenna site so that the OTARD rules protects not only reception devices but transmission hubs as well. To take that step would mean, among other things, that OTARD can no longer be viewed primarily as a pro-consumer measure. On the contrary, the FCC is proposing to transform a rule that allows consumers to install small reception devices in their homes into a license to wireless carriers to install anything they want (provided it does not exceed OTARD’s one meter diameter limit) anywhere they want, so long as the site is owned or leased by the carrier. If the proposal becomes a final rule, OTARD would have to be seen as a powerful route by which wireless telecommunications and data carriers may escape not only traditional principles of property law, but also the reach of almost all traditional police power regulation at the local level.

The FCC’s rationale for expanding OTARD coverage is as simple as it is circular: 5G networks require dense deployment of smaller antennas across provider networks closer to customers. Because more antenna and relay devices are needed, fewer regulatory restrictions and hurdles are tolerable. The policy justification for preempting local authority over wireless facilities siting is also familiar - easing regulatory restrictions on the installation of hub and relay antennas will “spur investment” in next generation wireless networks. In fact, the exact same logic was used just a few months ago when the FCC issued its Declaratory Ruling and Third Report and Order in September 2018 limiting the fees that can be imposed on carriers for deploying small cell antennas in the public right of way. There is ample reason to be skeptical of carrier claims that relief from regulatory burdens is the key to bridging the digital divide.[1]

OTARD expansion can be seen in the same light as another recently-enacted “forced access” measure – San Francisco Police Code Article 52, which allows any qualified ISP, upon the request of at least one MDU resident, to not only install facilities in the building without negotiating an access deal with the building’s owner, but also to confiscate the existing in-building wiring for its own use, as long as “just and reasonable compensation” is paid to the owner. The shared, somewhat condescending and evidence-free presumption behind both the FCC’s OTARD expansion proposal and San Francisco’s Article 52 is that carriers are not capable of negotiating reasonable deals with municipal governments (in the case of OTARD) or with multi-family property owners (in the case of Article 52). Therefore, the government must intervene in ways that place the entire burden on municipal governments and on multi-family property owners, and confer the entire benefit on carriers.

In fact, both proposals go beyond simply correcting a perceived (but unproven) imbalance in traditional property access negotiations, because both rules actually prevent property owners from working with telecom carriers at all. That is true because both OTARD expansion and Article 52 deprive property owners and local governments of the one effective tool they possess in their dealings with carriers, which is the power to withhold – and therefore to grant – access to real property for the purpose of siting wireless broadband facilities. Why would a telecom carrier bother to negotiate or even talk with a local planning board or with the owner of an MDU building (or owners’ association in the case of a condominium) about access when access is mandated under the law without negotiation? Is it a good idea to basically eliminate municipal government and apartment owners as a voice in discussions concerning the siting of wireless broadband facilities? In theory (if not in practice) locally elected municipal officials, and to a lesser but still non-negligible extent apartment owners and HOAs, are supposed to represent their constituents, who are voting city residents on the one hand and MDU residents on the other hand. What happens to those represented when you exclude the representative from access negotiations? Is it reasonable to assume that telecom carriers – which are among the most hated corporations year after year https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4482254/ACSI-Telecommunications-Report-2018.pdf ) – actually speak for those constituents’ interests more effectively than do elected city officials and landlords?

To assess the plausibility of this proposition, consider the case of those consumers most in need of representation – consumers in under-served areas that are mostly neglected by cable and telco carriers. What reason is there to believe that the cost savings realized by a carrier by virtue of not having to negotiate access to desirable locations will be invested in the deployment of networks in less desirable areas? Or will the elimination of the need to negotiate property-access deals simply lead to more cherry-picking of facilities siting locations – and therefore, of prime service coverage areas – by carriers who can safely ignore less attractive locations?

For example, in the City of San Francisco a telecom carrier may well see a benefit in using Article 52 to become the second, third or even the fourth ISP in a high-end MDU building, but no benefit at all in competing for customers in affordable housing. Article 52 is supposed to expand the ISP options available to residents living in MDUs, but the only MDU residents whose options will expand are those who happen live in locations where ISPs can justify an investment in becoming the second, third or fourth competitor for customers within the building. In other words, Article 52 expands options for consumers who already have multiple options. What about consumers who happen to live in less attractive areas? Who represents customers in affordable housing if not the property owner, who can negotiate a bulk agreement with an ISP giving residents always-on Internet service at a discounted rate? But that owner’s ability to negotiate a bulk discount with any ISP is undermined by the mere existence of Article 52 because that law prevents the owner from contractually granting exclusive use of home run wiring to a bulk service provider.

Similarly, OTARD expansion will no doubt relieve carriers of the financial and other burdens associated with negotiating facilities siting deals with city governments in densely populated areas where return on investment is almost guaranteed. But what guarantee is there that these cost savings will be invested in deployment of wireless facilities in sparsely populated, lower income or rural areas? Under Section 332 (c)(7) of the Communications Act, carriers negotiate with municipalities for access to potential sites for cell phone towers and other facilities; access to more lucrative areas may be conditioned on the carrier’s commitment to build out networks in less lucrative locations. By preempting almost all municipal jurisdiction over facilities siting decisions, OTARD expansion would in effect do away with those negotiations altogether.

 [1] Predictions that repeal of Network Neutrality rules in June 2018 would “spur investment” have proven to be wrong. See for example https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190124/10370741459/comcast-network-investment-drops-despite-repeated-claims-killing-net-neutrality-would-trigger-investment-wave.shtml.

https://www.kandutsch.com/blog/uncategorized/eliminating-property-access-negotiations-the-fcc-s-otard-expansion-proposal-and-san-francisco-s-police-code-article-52

[commalead02]

How to Find Really like in 2021 ?

Are you wanting to know how to locate enjoy in 2021 that comes to an end the loneliness in your daily life within the new season? Despite ongoing covid-19? Despite lockdown? The truly amazing information is it’s an extremely encouraging time to get enjoy that suits the calling of your own center! You happen to be currently living in what I phone age of Abundant Really like. Research indicates that now one out of three relationships from the U. S. commences on the web. On-line connections improvement to marital life speedier. Plus they are more content marriages! Digital internet dating has better the landscaping of affection. And Covid has not slowed down that downward! click here How To Dress To Look Slim And Tall In reality, the sociable solitude and loneliness of lockdown has actually greater digital courting. Since Mar of 2020 Bumble has already established a 26Per cent boost in quantity of communications sent. And Tinder interactions have already been 10-30% lengthier!

So listed here are Five Techniques to produce adore occur to suit your needs inside the coming calendar year. How to get Love in 2021, Step One: Possess a ‘New You’ Focus Bash with the Besties! Bring a few of yourself close friends who adore you into a ‘New You’ Focus party where they give you a ‘makeover.’ Drive them into the dresser via your cell phone and suggest to them your clothes and accessories. Inquire further about eliminating unflattering things and putting together some very hot new actively seeks you. Ask them for recommendations to great hair salons or amazing apparel stores or websites. Look for a appear that creates you are feeling great—that making you feel like your high-worth Diamond Self (finest self personality!). The good friends who enjoy you can see your gorgeous one-of-a-type self. They value you in a fashion that is tough to take pleasure in your self. Never think that you might be imposing—there is generally nothing at all that your particular friends like a lot more than supplying you with suggestions! Whilst you’re at it, inform them you are looking to meet an individual excellent as well as make you stay in mind. Electronic mail or text a similar information to any other pals who failed to create the get together. How to locate Love in 2021, Step 2: Put in priority Locating Adore Should you didn’t have a task and needed money—looking first will be your total main concern. You would invest hrs putting up and searching sites like LinkedIn, scanning online employers, requesting your mates, and jumping on any qualified prospects. On the other hand, locating really like probably stands pretty reduced in your to do checklist. Think about it! Will you commit hrs excessive-seeing your chosen shows, Facebooking, e-mailing, sending text messages, browsing, or buying on Amazon as you have nothing at all preferable to do today to load your quarantine time? Have you been busy ingesting and eating a little an excessive amount of or actively playing your digital online game? Are you presently much better at preparing your following binge-watch fest on Netflix than organizing your online dating existence? Think about making a choice to alter that in 2021? A single, true determination to place your love daily life to start with will alter every thing. One particular trustworthy selection can make it take place for yourself! Examine after study has revealed that connections are loved most of all whenever we think about what has suggested the most inside our life. So make locating really like in 2021 a top priority. How to get Really like in 2021, Step Three: Check out Online Mentastic Actions Check out the 1000s of occasions, meetups and team routines which are going on on the web through Meetup.com, Zoom and other stores, that i phone Mentastic activities. They are things that are highly fascinating to you personally which may have a lot of men in them—like expenditure classes, internet synthetic intelligence conferences, electric guitar workshops—you obtain the strategy. Places where you may meet amazing men who discuss your precise interest. Attempt to see if there are many nearby organizations in your area to pay attention to. It is possible to strike up excellent text messaging chats with the fascinating guys and see where all of it will go. How to Find Enjoy in 2021, Phase 4: Work Your Electronic Courting Program Throw out your outdated photograph and profile. Have a friend who is a great digital photographer, make which a wonderful professional photographer, take 100 mind photos individuals to get one which appears especially warm, appealing and inviting. Get some good complete opposite-gender buddies to help you select the best image and work towards your user profile. Inquire further what they adore about you and make sure to add all of that wonderful stuff with your new information! Subscribe to two computerized dating sites. I enjoy Match up (no affiliation) and Tinder (no affiliation) simply because they have a lot of people to them and this offers you lots of selections. Internet dating is actually a amounts game. After you post your image and new profile, invest a minimum of three hours weekly looking around electronically, sending and replying to information and ultimately attaching by Zoom, Facetime, phone and (safely) directly with folks. Block out amount of time in your everyday calendar to function this system. How to locate Love in 2021, Move 5: Date Against Variety The majority of people do not get love with a person they imagine on their own. The female who days ravenous designers wind up marrying a wealthy, balding legal representative. Really like typically will come in delight bundles. Examine photos and profiles that you would ordinarily require a quick pass on. If you always select the sleek metro-sexual, give the Midwesterner who just transferred to your city a try. Should you select the hotties, consider someone who is includes a center of golden and maybe only a B+ on seems. Try and play with it. Even if you are not exactly blown away by way of a individual at the initially Focus or Facetime time, remember to continue to be open up. You cannot determine what key goodies are concealed in a person by simply reaching them after. You must enable a prospective lover happen and demonstrate his various sides. When there is any connection with he or she in any way, provide another opportunity. Really like more often than not is available in a surprise deal.

[elizabethcariasa]

Some states tax at least some food items

Image by Hucklebarry from Pixabay

When the hubby and I started out our life together, we were young and poor. Like watching every cent poor. That included our food budget.

All those decades ago, our regular Monday night meal was macaroni and cheese.

In the budget-conscious beginning, it was store brand boxed mac and cheese mix. As our earnings increased, we upgraded to brand name boxes. We knew were doing OK when Monday Meal morphed into the frozen version.

We still have Monday Meal, but not exclusively on the first weekday. But it's still a quick dinner that we supplement with fresh veggie sides and, if I'm feeling energetic, homemade cornbread. We are not, however, buying mac and cheese flavored ice cream as this, or any, meal's dessert!

Food troubles, tax break help: I realize how fortunate we are to eat what we want — cooked ourselves, microwaved, or carry-out/delivery — when we want. Lots of people are where we were decades ago, and they are having trouble upgrading their eats.

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the food issues, as families lost one or all of their literal breadwinners to coronavirus workplace closures. The one tiny, thin silver lining is that COVID relief payments are helping.

The percentage of American families with kids who report not having enough to eat fell dramatically after the first child tax credit payments were distributed last month, writes Helena Bottemiller Evich in a recent Politico article.

She cites U.S. Census findings that a drop last month in food insufficiency, which generally is described as sometimes or often not having enough to eat, was reported mostly by households with children after they got the first of the Advance Child Tax Credit (AdvCTC) payments.

That extra cash — $300 for each qualifying child age 5 or younger, $250 for youngsters ages 6 to 17 — apparently made a big difference at the grocery store.

No tax means some shopping savings: Another thing that helps shoppers is the no-sales-tax status in most states of food. It might not seem like much to most of us, but when every penny literally counts, it makes a difference.

The good news is that most of the 45 states that have state sales taxes don't tax food. (Quick note, while Alaska joins Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon in not levying a state sales tax, it allows local governments to assess them. However, Alaska exempts food statewide from any sales tax.)

Seven states are at the other end of the sales tax collection scale.

The Federation of Tax Administrators (FTA) says food purchased in Alabama (4%), Hawaii (4%), Idaho (6%), Kansas (6.5%), Mississippi (7%), Oklahoma (4.5%), and South Dakota (4.5%) is taxed at each state's general sales tax rate. That's the percentages in parentheses.

However, notes the FTA, five of the full food-taxing states offer lower-income households a rebate or income tax credit to offset the tax. They are Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.

In between are, well, in between food taxers. Again, thanks to the FTA for its research that shows several states tax food at rates lower than their general sales tax. They are:

Arkansas' 6.5% general state sales tax rate doesn't apply to food, but it does assess a 0.125% tax on food, along with local tax rates.

Illinois has a 6.25% general state sales tax rate and 1% tax on food.

Missouri's general state sales tax rate is 4.225% and it has a 1.225% tax on food, along with local tax rates.

Tennessee's 7% general state sales tax rate is cut to 4% for food purchases, along with local tax rates.

Utah has a 6.1% general state sales tax rate, which includes a statewide 1.25% tax levied by local governments, and a 3% (again, with the 1.25% local add-on) tax on food.

Virginia levies a 5.3% general state sales tax rate, which includes a statewide 1% tax levied by local governments, and a 2.5% (again, with the 1% local add-on) tax on food.

Three states don't tax food, but food sales are subject to local taxes. They are Georgia (4% general state sales tax rate), Louisiana (4.45%), and North Carolina (4.75%).

Food tax debates continue: The debate over whether to tax food is not new.

A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) asked in a 1998 paper Should States Tax Food? The progressive Washington, D.C.-based think tank's conclusion:

State tax systems typically have two major shortcomings. First, they place an unnecessarily heavy tax burden on low- and moderate-income households. Second, in many states the revenue they generate does not grow at an adequate pace without periodic increases in tax rates. These shortcomings are exacerbated in states that levy their sales taxes on the purchase of grocery food because food consumption as a percentage of income is particularly high among the poor and because food purchases in the economy as a whole are declining as a share of total consumer spending. 

More than two decades later, the argument continues. In an April 2020 report, the CBPP says States That Still Impose Sales Taxes on Groceries Should Consider Reducing or Eliminating Them.

"Bad" taxable food: A similar debate also consumes much tax policy energy, specifically, what is food for tax purposes?

Certain edible items are deemed taxable by states. This generally is so-called bad food, such as candy and sugar-sweetened beverages.

The Tax Foundation's colorful map below shows the many variations among states on how to tax groceries, candy and sodas.

Finally, remember these state sales taxes, exemptions, and offsetting rebates and credits apply to products bought at grocery stores.

Prepared meals at restaurants, and in many cases even those sold at grocery stores, typically are taxed at states' full sales tax rates.

You also might find these items of interest:

Sin taxes are lone revenue bright spot in COVID-hit economy for many states

DoorDash et al apparently aren't collecting sales tax on delivery and service fees

Hungry for some football watching food? Your Super Bowl party budget better include party snack taxes

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[ndcirque]

The Box Scores

You may like the Yankees or you may hate them, but at the end of the game the box scores tell the final truth of what happened on the field. The same is true in politics and governance. At the end of the day the scorecard tells the tale of what succeeded and what failed. Whether you agree with what Donald Trump tried to do or not, the evidence is now there, at the end of his term, to see how he did. Let’s look at the President Trump’s box scores for the last four years. How successful was the Trump presidency.

tl:dr : Whether you agree with President Trump or not, in seventeen major issues, promises, and areas, he failed completely to be a leader, a tactician, a strategist, or even vaguely a President. Whether because he didn’t try, or was unable to, or simply promised the impossible, he failed at every major goal that he publicly set out, and every function that comes with the job of President. 

Details are below the cut.

China, Economics. Fail.

Trump started a trade war to get China to start behaving in a way he wanted. The result? China retaliated against US tariffs hurting the US economy. In addition the Tariffs the US imposed were simply passed back by Chinese manufacturers and were paid for by American consumers. He shot the US in the foot not once but twice. True the Chinese economy slowed over the last few years, but that was planned in by the Chinese Government some years before Trump took office. They stayed on their preplanned course. Trump’s tariffs had no impact on them, accomplished nothing, and harmed the US economy. 

China Strategic. Fail

China’s influence in the region has been growing. There has been pressure to get them to withdraw their claims to the Nine Dashed Line in the South China Sea, and other land grabs. The ham fisted, disjointed, and clumsy way it’s been handled, plus verbal abuse toward American Allies has completely backfired. The Nine Dashed Line is now a de facto truth on the ground. America’s allies in the region are increasingly looking at cutting deals with China because they don’t believe then US will be there to back them up. China is now stronger, and more influential on the world stage than they have ever been. Much of Africa is now working with and beholden to China. 

North Korea Fail. 

North Korea had been contained. Trump decided to try to “make a deal” with the leader of the country. The trouble is that he got conned. Kim got everything he wanted and expected. Trump got nothing but empty promises, just as those who been dealing with North Korea for years said he would. There is an old saying that nobody is easier to con than a con man. Trump got conned.

Jobs to the US, Fail

Trump kept talking about jobs, doing all sorts of things to return jobs to the US. Bringing back good manufacturing jobs. It is true that there were lots of jobs created on his watch. There’s a joke that’s been going around; A lady says “Trump has created millions of jobs”. The clerk behind the counter replies, “Yeah, I have three of them.” The low unemployment figures are due to the time honoured tradition of administrations fiddling with the unemployment numbers and who qualifies as “unemployed”. That’s nothing new, Presidents have been doing that as far back as I can remember. However there has been no significant influx of manufacturing jobs, no “good jobs” happened. The growth has been in part time, no benefits, no security, gig economy jobs. They’re great for the billionaires, but terrible for people who have to work sixty hours per week, and will be wiped out if their kid gets sick.

Coal, Fail

Very famously Trump promised to cut regulation and open up the coal mines in West Virginia and elsewhere. It didn’t happen, and Trump could not have done anything to make it happen. The deregulation did happen, but it did not stem the switch away from coal. Coal is a dying industry. It is now cheaper and more reliable to build solar and wind plants than coal. It is advantageous for the utilities to convert coal plants to natural gas. That’s not due to environmentalists or regulations. It’s due to the market changing. Coal is going to become this centuries whale oil. Soon nobody will be using it. Trump could and can do nothing to stem that evolution. 

Iran, Fail

Trump called the deal with Iran flawed, and it was. However it was a first step. It emboldened the progressives, the masses on the street were seeing real improvements in their living standards and were starting to demand that the religious leaders soften their grip. Iran was inching in from the cold. Then Trump pulled out of the deal and imposed severe sanctions. The same sanctions that had already failed for about thirty years to change Iran’s behaviour. Now the extremists that had been on their back foot could point and say, “See we told you it was a trick. You can’t trust the west.” Not only is Iran more radical and dangerous now than when Trump took office, it will be another generation before they will trust the US or the West again.

Cuba, Fail.

Just like Iran, Cuba was opening up, becoming more liberal, becoming a more progressive. Then Trump pulled back, made up stories about attacks on embassies, and used that as justification for sanctions and restrictions. What failed in Iran, failed again in Cuba. The only hope is that there is daylight where the next administration can undo much of the damage.

The Middle East, Fail

Trump has been ineffectual and incompetent. Trump crowed about beating IS in Syria. In reality American jets bored holes in the sky while Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, and most importantly Russian forces did the hard fighting on the ground. Then Trump abandoned the Kurds and in doing so stabbed Americas only real ally in the area in the back. Now the Kurds are allies of Syria and the Russians, and America’s remaining allies don’t know if they can trust the US any more. In reality, much of the Middle East, outside of a couple of Gulf States, is in the Russian camp. Trump has ceded the region.

Climate Change, Fail

Trump vary publicly said he was going to withdraw from the Paris accord and then negotiate a “better” deal. He did pull America out, and promptly lost interest. That is when he wasn’t denying that Climate Change existed. The US has ceded the rhetorical and industrial high ground to China and others. This means not only is the US not leading on the issue, it means that the industries that are being built to service the new carbon free economy, aren’t being built in the US. The US is still fracking oil and trying to hawk coal, when the rest of the world is moving to solar, wind, small nuclear, and other carbon free sources. When, not if, America tries to catch up, they will be buying all of the equipment from overseas.

Draining the swamp, Fail

Far from reducing corruption in Washington, the Trump administration brought in his cronies, and eager young Trump wannabes, who did real crimes, harmed real people, were prosecuted and sentence to real hard time. In his last days Trump was busy pardoning the most heinous of the lot. Then there was the incident when Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka did a commercial in the White House for a major donor. This is a textbook example of blatant corruption at the highest level, felony level stuff. The Trump years were the high water mark for official corruption. The same is true of the recording released in early January where Trump was threatening an election official in Georgia with prosecution unless he “found” votes for Trump. That is a felony crime. I expect to see indictments for many of the principals once they leave office.

Obamacare Replacement, Fail

Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. He said he was going to repeal it and introduce a better deal. Once in office he and others attacked the act in the courts and have succeeded in eliminating major parts of it. There however has been no effort whatsoever to work on a replacement. As a result more and more Americans are finding themselves without any coverage and can be, and have been, wiped out by minor illnesses. America’s healthcare system is now in a worse state than when Trump took office, or even when Obama took office.

Tax Reform, Fail

Trump campaigned on and talked a lot about tax reform. Tax reform that would help the middle class and create jobs. The changes that he pushed through were not that. They cut taxes for the wealthy, and for corporations, who pocketed the money, or sent it overseas rather than reinvesting it and creating jobs in the US. At the same time they eliminated deductions and changed definitions for a lot of small businesses and middle class working people who were harmed. A large number had savings wiped out and were left in debt. Reaganomics failed in the 1980s and it failed even more spectacularly in the Trump years. 

The Wall, Fail

Trump promised to build a wall to keep migrants from crossing over from Mexico. No wall has been built. The bit that he talks about is in reality a fence people can cross with a ladder. The part he has doing several photo-ops in front of is an ineffectual test section that accomplishes nothing. It was a doomed strategy, that was never going to be completed, and would never have worked even if it had been completed. A lie from day one along with the claim that Mexico would pay for it.

Stopping illegal Immigration, Fail

Trump has had little success in slowing the number of people crossing its southern border. However his attempt to reduce the numbers involved using in inhumane, and at times illegal tactics. Literally trying to scare people from coming. The result has been to degrade America’s reputation around the world. For much of the world, America is no longer the Shining City On The Hill that Ronald Reagan spoke of. Now it’s viewed as no better than any other country for accepting refugees, and migrants. The numbers being captured and returned though has not changed much from the Obama years, which were already far below the peak in the ’90s. 

Americas relationship with it’s allies, Fail

Demanding that allies pay more for their own defence, when they were already living up to agreements. Imposing tariffs on allies in an effort to advantage the US in trade negotiations. Abusing allies while cozying up to dictators. Insisting that in order for trade deals to be “fair” the US had to “win” and have a decided advantage. All of these have degraded America’s reputation and made countries less likely to rely or work with the US. He fragmented the western coalition and it will be a long road to bring it together to deal with China, and other international problems. The US is now much more alone, in a much weaker position, and more vulnerable, than four years ago. 

NAFTA, Fail

After spouting a lot of bluster, and harming the economy of Canada, Mexico, and the United States the renegotiated deal was essentially what had been on the table before Trump took office. He damaged the trust other countries had in America, and gained nothing. Oh their were a few fiddly changes to the treaty, a few percentages here and there, but nothing substantial was gained, and all of these were on the table from all three parties before he engaged in so much posturing.

Covid, Fail

Donald Trump spent much of 2020 blaming China for Covid. It is true that it came from there, but the US had no special disadvantage in dealing with it. It was the disorganized response, full of disinformation, abject lies, and unfocussed actions from the administration that allowed it to get so bad in the United States compared to most other countries. By inauguration day America will have over 400,000 dead from Covid, the same number as the number of Americans killed in combat in World War Two. A proper response, from a leader that trusted science and didn’t try to use everything to his own political advantage could have cut that by half, possibly three quarters. Trump has blood on his hands.

So as you can see Donald Trump did not follow through on any promises, and what he did attempt to do he screwed up. Whether you agree with the actions he claimed he was going to do, the conclusion is inescapable, he was inept. America is less united, more disorganized, weaker, with fewer friends, and further in debt than when he took office. Washington is more gridlocked, more corrupt, and more out of touch with what Americans need than ever before. Whether or not you supported Donald Trump or what he tried and promised to do, the evidence, the box scores, of the last four years show him to have been an abject failure on all accounts. In most playbooks that would be a disaster. If he were pitching for the Yankees he would be gone, not to minors, but from baseball. No other President has been a more spectacular failure, of doing a more incompetent job, of fucking up more completely than Donald Trump. The real question is what will America learn from the Trump fiasco.

[go-redgirl]

LATEST FALSE FACT-CHECKS ON JOE BIDEN - MANY, MANY LIES HAVE BEEN TOLD. A FEW LISTED BELOW:

Some of Joe Biden’s Lies for Blacks’ Votes

Joe Biden was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists; and he was condemned by the NAACP for it in 1977 hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but he has claimed instead to have participated in anti-segregation sit-ins, which were led by black ministers all of whom were conveniently deceased at the time when he made those assertions, and so they could not be asked whether he had participated. 

He was making those assertions while running against Bernie Sanders, whom the Chicago Tribuneshowed in their photo during the 1960s being arrested as a college student for his peacefully demonstrating against Chicago’s segregationist policy at the time. 

Sanders in his Presidential campaign didn’t brag about it; only Biden bragged about his anti-segregationist activity, though it was fictitious; and so Biden swamped Sanders in the South Carolina primary on February 29th — the turning-point in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries — where most of the voters were Blacks, who had been deceived by Biden’s claims and who didn’t know that Biden had actually been a leading northern segregationist.

(Biden had even backed an anti-integration bill by North Carolina Republican segregationist Senator Jesse Helms to prohibit the federal government from requiring school districts to be or become desegregated in order to qualify to receive federal funds and to allow instead ‘separate-but-equal’ education of Black and White children.)

Notwithstanding Biden’s having been condemned by the NAACP for his support of ‘natural’ segregation, Biden appeared on a broadcast to young Blacks, on 22 May 2020, saying “The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run.” 

The very next day, the NAACP quietly said “The NAACP is a non-partisan organization and does not endorse candidates for political office at any level.” 

They did it quietly, because, if Biden becomes the President, they want to have the President’s support; they don’t want to antagonize a future President by conspicuously making a point of what a fraud he is, regarding racism.

The NAACP official, at that Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, condemned Biden’s legislative proposal, by saying (among other things) that Biden was trying “to enact an unconstitutional set of technical obstacles whose sole purpose is to interfere with and delay the courts in their work in school segregation cases.”

Would that condemnation by the NAACP be consistent with Biden’s currently saying “The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run” — even if the fact weren’t that the NAACP refuses to endorse anycandidates?

Biden had opened that 1977 Judiciary Committee hearing by attacking the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, saying against it: “The average citizen, and finally his representatives in Congress, have come to the conclusion that the courts have gone too far in education cases.” 

He was actually referring there to only one case: Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954 (which still hasn’t been implemented in law). The NAACP’s lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, had been the NAACP’s advocate arguing before the Court, to come to that decision. 

In 1967, Marshall became himself the first Black on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ten years later, in 1977, Senator Biden was being condemned at the Senate Judiciary Committee, by Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 

In 1940, Thurgood Marshall had founded, and became the first Director-Counsel of, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and his title is the one that Marshall had held when he argued the Brown v. Board of Educationcase at the Court. Jack Greenberg was Marshall’s immediate successor; and, so, when he condemned Biden, Greenberg was doing it as the immediate heir to Marshall. Biden was the NAACP’s chief enemy on this matter, the enemy of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In that same 22 May 2020 broadcast to young black voters, Biden said:

Joe Biden: (09:10)

I opposed that three strikes and you’re out bill. I oppose the position taking that, saying that you’re going to have any mandatory sentences.

But here’s what Biden had told Katie Couric on NBC’s Today Show on 1 February 1994:

what I support is a three strikes and you’re out, if in fact, they’re very violent crimes–arson, rape, murder, manslaughter. Three strikes in those areas, and you should be out.

He called it there “the Biden bill” — all of it was. The law’s “Sec. 70001. Mandatory life imprisonment for persons convicted of certain felonies” spells out its Three-Strikes-And-You’re-Out provisions, and they apply equally to “each serious violent felony or serious drug offense.” 

“Serious drug offense” needn’t be “violent”; so, non-violent “serious” drug-law violations can and do place prisoners behind bars permanently. But, regardless, Biden lies when he asserts that “I opposed that three strikes and you’re out bill.” He supported it.

Later in that May 22nd interview, he said:

The only mandatory was in there was carjacking, which I opposed and three strikes and you’re out, which is ridiculous. It only was imposed three times but still even once makes no sense. The idea of three times three strikes and you’re out, give me a break.

Of course, that’s false (to the extent that his broken syntax makes any sense).

In that May 22nd broadcast, Biden diminished the law’s relevancy to federal drug-law violators, by saying “94% of every prisoner in jail is in a state prison, not a federal prison. 

No federal law.” However, the fact is that there are 226,000 federal prisoners, and that 100,000 of them are in prison for federal drug-law violations. So, 44% of inmates in federal prisons are in for having violated federal drug-crimes. Yet again, Biden lied, to say “No federal law.” (Furthermore, the numbers he cites — such as “94%” — are inaccurate.)

A section in the Wikipedia article on the law notes its “Elimination of higher education for inmates.” It observes that this provision “effectively eliminated the ability of lower-income prison inmates to receive college educations during their term of imprisonment.” Biden’s trashing of convicts led him to want them to come out of prison as lacking in higher education as they were when entering prison. That’s an excellent way to encourage them to stay out of the productive and legal workforce, and to be hopeless about their futures, and thus inclined to a life of continuing crime.

Biden also said in that May 22nd interview:

Change the entire prison system for one, that is punishment to rehabilitation. There’s only a couple of things everybody has in common in jail. One is they were the victims of abuse or their kids were, or their mother was. 

Number two, can’t read. Number three, they don’t have any job skills. They were in a position where they didn’t get a chance. Why does it make sense? Why did I come along and write the first act that said, when you get out of prison, you don’t just get a DOSA where you get 25 bucks and a bus ticket. You end up under the bridge and just do the same place.

So every single solitary person being released from prison should have access to every single government program. Why does it not make sense to have African Americans who were getting out of prison, served their time, everybody for that matter, be able to have public housing? Why didn’t it make sense that they can have Pell grants to go to school? Why did it make sense they can have access to healthcare? What are we nuts? That’s what we keep doing.

He doesn’t mention, and wasn’t asked by his interviewer about, “the Biden bill” (as he called it) having eliminated any and all higher education in federal prisons. He pretends to be a different person, and to have done different things, than he actually is, and did. And thus far, he has gotten away with it.

Those are just a few examples, but they are typical ones.

------------------------------------------------------------

OPINION:  Joe Biden is one of the biggest liars in Congress and as of this date, Black Americans don’t understand why Barrack Obama chose him as Vice President.  

Obama and Biden both were  losers and the only reason Obama got into the White House is because many Black Americans did not know of these facts and just wanted to have someone of Black decent (or should we say) Bi-racial in the White House.

Only if people really knew the true history of our Country everyone would have found out that their is a ‘history’ of a few bi-racial Presidents we’ve had in this country based on their ‘blood-line’. You know history is a wonderful thing when it’s taught the full truth.

You know ‘American History’ is a wonderful thing and should always be taught in our American Schools, public or/and private schools.

Missing History or some History of our country that’s not being taught could cause some valuable historic American History to be missing or omitted that could, if taught in our schools be more valuable than not. Because the ‘TRUTH’ always find its self coming out of the closet (i.e, if you will) good or bad. In this case if would  have been good. Instead of allowing one person to believe they were the first this or that, if you will.

Lets get back to basics and correct the omitted history good or bad.

We need to become Whole as a nation.

Lets just hire some good excellent History Teachers in all of our Public Schools so that our children can receive the best education and knowledge as it relates American History.

I believe the other subjects that are being taught we have them covered.

[cookemichael]

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How Is Bacterial Vaginosis Diagnosed With

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Bacterial Vaginosis Fluconazole For Yeast

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