Battle Lines Drawn for the Upcoming Pre-Planned Pandemic

In my consumption of Youtube videos, I try to balance out my Catholic sources with Orthodox ones. Among my regulars is Abbot Tryphon who leads a community of monks on Vashon Island. He is not shy about expressing messages with a political tone to them, like this one. I consider him to be a national treasure.

Judging by Twitter and Youtube, everyone on our side is expecting them to come after us hard this winter, to shut everything down. One can sense that out there in America are legions of Lefties who feel bitter and defeated about the retreat of mask and vaccine mandates. They are looking very much forward to "being in charge" again.  It is part of the universal strategy of the left. They never accept defeat, only temporary setbacks. They did not get their way in 2020, which a "ten year shutdown" followed by a "Great Reset" of the world economy in which climate and social justice was established under world government. The destruction of chuches is of course something they greatly yearn for. 

My impression is that Abbot Tryphon in this video is expressing the universal sentiment of folks on our side, and of half of America or more.

Myself, having completely escaped vaccination the first time around---it's a no brainer to continue to do that. I'm almost looking forward to the battle ahead. 

Is There Really a Brotherhood of Man?

 The latest Spellbreakers episode, Number 32, just wrapped up--third and last in my "Summer Under the Stars" Series. 

I discuss the precession of the Earth, the motion of the pole star over time, reminisce about Boulder in the 1970s, while discuss the Antichrist and the writings of Carl Jung that terrified Jordan Peterson.

Listen to the end for answer to a question in the title.

Death Sucks

 Elisabeth, the late wife of my friend whom I mentioned in the previous post, probably would have disapproved of that post. Certainly her husband David, my close friend of many decades, whom I met in drama club in high school in the fall of 1980, would have disapproved, if know him. 

I don't know how Elisabeth felt about religion in general. I recall her mother was a devout Catholic. They lived in Sacramento, a large mixed-race family of many brothers and sisters. Her late mother was Phillipino, I think. Her father was Dutch-Indonesian. Elisabeth rebelled against her mother's religion in part by moving to San Francisco in the 1980s, living in the thick of the gay community in the mission district. Like many childless liberal women, she adopted the gay community as her children, and was fiercely protective of them throughout her life. That's my impression at least.

David I know to be a very strong atheist who tolerates very little "magical thinking" about religion. At least that is how I remember him. I haven't corresponded with him much over the last decade, and have not seen them at all since 2014, which the last time I visited them in the Bay Area. 

It was heartbreaking to remove myself from their lives in 2016 when I left Facebook. I knew I would not receive news about them anymore. They were very active on Facebook, and very forthright about their opinion of people who supported Donald Trump. They were not the only ones of my friends like that. I left Facebook in part because I wanted to preserve my love for them, which transcends politics. I didn't want to read the things they would inevitably write. They would not even know that they were talking about me. By this time, they had probably learned the "sad truth" about me---that I was one of them. I doubt my friends were curious about me at all, but sometimes even fringe subjects like yours truly pop up conversation when people get together. Certainly I know it would have been juicy gossip to share, to tell about my dive into what they would have considered some kind of psychosis. 

I loved Elisabeth for who she was, no reservations. I have nothing against her for her politics. I am glad I spared myself having to read anything she might have said about me unknowingly. It lets me have the great feeling of charity towards her, and mourn her, without the slightest dint of anger. Of course I hate it that it required an estrangement, one that lingers between my friend David and me.

I wrote him an email after I got the news, expressing my sorrow and giving my phone number. He has always been a popular guy, and the condolences will flood in on social media and in person. Maybe I am envious of that. When I go, hardly any one will notice at all. But I would not change places with him of course. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that Elisabeth is gone.

I sent David a card. He has such refined tastes that I struggled while standing in the card aisle of the neighborhood grocery store for one that would not offend his tastes, even in this state of mind of grief. Finally I picked out a tasteful blank one. For the message inside I used a heavy black magic marker and just wrote, "Death Sucks." 

Already Dead

 "I feel like...I'm already dead," I thought to myself, walking back from the coffee shop yesterday in the blazing sun, while carrying the remainder of my hot mocha in a paper cup.

The thought had hit me while I was drinking the mocha on the bench outside the front door of the shop, in a small alcove entrance shaded from the sun. I'd walked over there spontaneously a little before noon, feeling in need of more coffee, having woken up before 1 am, as becoming my habit increasingly. I had pushed my time of rising to half past two, in order to have more free time in the morning, and also to have part of day overlap the schedule of the developers whom I oversee as a team lead, and who live in India, China, and Azerbaijan. As soon as the work day starts here, my time becomes the property of other people, and I am liable to be called into a spontaneous meeting at a whim. If I want any time of concentration, I have to get up long before sunrise. 3 am sufficed. Then I wanted more time. Now my internal clock is waking me up regularly even before 1 am, and I lie awake until getting out of bed.

I'd wanted to visit the coffee shop which was in the enormous square plaza of shops nearby.  I love the plaza. It is the interior of a block along busy Scottsdale Road at the corner of Shea Boulevard. Unlike the rest of Scottsdale around it, which is cookie cutter on both a residential and commercial level, the plaza dates the post war decades and was built long before its surroundings. The shops along Scottsdale Boulevard, including a dive bar called the Dirty Dogg, face inward away from the road into the enormous parking plaza. The buildings are all differently constructed, side by side, by different developers long ago, giving it an organic feeling like a real city. As I walked around the exterior in the perimeter alley to access the entrance to the plaza yesterday, I smelled the odors of the alley, including the eateries and small immigrant-run restaurants. It felt like Europe. I was carried away to memories of travel, including just last year in small towns in Poland.

I had noticed the coffee shop during my ramblins around the plaza during daytime breaks. There are many salons and nail joints, a few pawn shops, a shuttered tea room, a 50s hamburger restaurant, and an addiction crisis center bookshop that one sees. The coffee shop has a darkened entrance. I had previously peeked inside to make sure that it was indeed a real coffee shop. Finally I went inside for real yesterday. It was expansive and well air conditioned. Everyone else inside the shop looked to be in their twenties. They were all of them on laptops, completely absorbed in their activity. It was a fifty-fifty mix of young men and young women. I was carried back to being in Austin in graduate school. I felt old. I was not he white-haired old guy in the coffee shop. None of them paid any attention to me, but I didn't take it personally. They were absorbed after all.

The bloke at the counter was friendly and made my hot mocha quickly. It cost five dollars and forty cents.  I drew out oa five dollar bill and a one dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to him over the electronic screen where one would swipe one's plastic payment card. I wondered how often they get cash. The name of the place is "Mythical Coffee."

When I got my mocha, I didn't feel like hanging around inside, so that's when I went outside the little alcove to watch the cars in the big parking plaza. That's when I had the thought, "I feel like I'm already dead." 

It was not a sad thought, not one of mourning, but rather of complete detachment. I felt like like I had already detached from the world, the way one aims to do as a Christian, the way that Father Mike Schmitz talk about in his Cathechism in a Year series on Youtube, which I watch in the wee hours of the morning after rising, and drinking my home-made coffee on the patio. "As we journey together towards our heavenly home..." he always says, in his intro to each installment.

I had the feeling that I was a different person that the one who called himself by my name, and who lived the life I lived. I have the same memories as he does, and inhabit the same body, but so many of the things that used to have deep meaning to that person no longer have meaning to me, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. At the same time I feel an intense love towards those around me, and to everyone I have ever met, and loved, helped, and hurt. 

It was a curious feeling of weightlessness, almost literally, as I sat there. That person--he roamed around Europe almost forty years ago with a backpack. He looked young like those young people inside at their laptops. He is old now. I am him? I hardly know. Who is he? Do I care? Who is left who remembers the man I once was?

Already dead. Not sadness. Liberation. Freedom is the ability to choose what we ought to do, as Father Mike said on today's podcast, Day 233.

When I got home I got a message from one of my friends---of one of the last who will talk to me. The message was brief: "I knew you were close."

It opened it quickly. It was a portrait of someone I know, a woman a few years younger than me, the wife of one of my close friends who lives in Oakland. Above her were vital dates, her. birthday in 1967 and today's date.

Eclipse-o-Mania!

 My favorite cactus in my undeveloped desert makes his debut, at least by mention, on my show tonight on Badlands. I revert to being a physics professor again. Also I take the brazen step of coming out as not a Flat Earther! Definitely my most controversial show to date. (link)

I Saw a Movie --- Oppenheimer

 Big news. I saw a movie---in a theater. A long time ago that was extremely ordinary for this blog. It's what I started this blog to do, fifteen years ago. But not lately. I had to reckon back to realize it had been five years since I had since a movie in a movie theater. The last time was when I saw The Greatest Showman in Mesa with Jessica and her folks. I hated that movie. It was everything I hated about the trend of our culture--completely woke, a two hour excuse to browbeat me with a message of social justice and oppression of various identifies. 

Back in 2008-2010 when I was literally going to every movie possible, I saw how much our culture had degenerated from the time of classic cinema, in which honor was the central virtue of characters. By 2008, it was apparent that Hollywood wanted us to assume that honor is an outdated concept. Everyone is dishonorable. We wallow in the gutter, the Postmodern Gutter, I called it. 

But at least they weren't overboard woke yet back then. That didn't happen in our culture until about 2015.  Everyone on our side seems to identify that as the epoch at which wokeness took over pop culture, such as every single movie, television show, heck even every television commercial, must strive to rectify historical injustices against oppressed identities. It made me long for the just the plain old garbage culture days of 2010. 

Not only did we stop going to movies, we stopped watching all television except for College football/NFL games (during which we got our fill of social justice commercials at every break), as well as professional rodeo on The Cowboy Channel outside of football season. And of course Hallmark Christmas movies in season, since that's sort of hobby of ours, to examine the narratology of those stories (there too, one gets the awful commercials to tell us how far the culture has fallen into overt Marxist messaging).

I wondered if I'd ever see a movie again. Then came Sound of Freedom, which I haven't seen yet, but intend to see. I saw the real-life subject of that movie speak in Las Vegas, alongside the star Jim Caviezel, a couple years back, talking about how the movie was going to open people's eyes to child trafficking. Then nothing happened. The movie disappeared. I wondered about it. Did it come and go? Oh, well.

Thankfully I was very wrong. It had made well over a hundred and fifty million dollars at this point. 

That's not the movie I saw. I wish I could say it was what brought me back into the theater. Instead it was a mainstream Hollywood movie, about a physicist. It was Oppenheimer.

I was determined to see it in part because I had announced on my Badlands show back in January that I would see it. That's when Patrick was still the co-host. He no longer wants to do the show with me, which is fine by me. We have completely different views of what science is. I don't think we could possibly collaborate at this point. He grew tired of my unwillingness to sake that everything is fake.

He clearly chafed at the original show I did in which I discussed the historical J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atom bomb. He believes it is all fake, that nuclear weapons never existed. I could tell he strained at having to listen to me talk about it. He has many other venues to discuss his views. I have only my one little podcast show on Wednesday afternoon.

In mid July I did a show on the adrenochrome controversy, tying it in to The Sound of Freedom, and at the end of it I announced that next week I would do a review of Oppenheimer, as I had promised in January. As I did so on the air, I yelled out to the living room through my office door, "Jessica, we're going. to a movie!"

We planned it for Saturday. Jessica did research about IMAX and we determined we wanted to see it in that format. She located a nearby theater in north Scottsdale--an AMC off I-17---and we went online to buy tickets. The last time I was going to a movie one did not do this. Buy tickets online like going to a concert! So foreign!

We got there early and found our seats. Like I always I like to see the previews. I sat through so many back in the old days. 

By the time I gave my review, most of the other Badlanders, including Patrick had given their review of it on other Badlands shows. They all hated it. Not only was it boring and long, but it misrepresented history. It was fake history that glorified scientists, and therefor "The Science," to which we have become enslaved through such things as phony global warming and the COVID scam. That's their prerogative. 

It took a different view. First off, I said that I wasn't bothered by the length. I get bored easily, but I made it through all three hours without flagging.

It is a Christopher Nolan movie. I am not a big Christopher Nolan fan. I find his stories lack the coherency of good motion pictures. This was true of Oppenheimer too. For example, I asked my audience on my show, for those that saw the movie, what was the most important thing that happened in the first act, according to rules of movies? The answer: the scene where Oppenheimer almost murders his tutor at Cambridge (and also almost kills Neils Bohr).  By story rules this is THE most important revelation of his character. The rest of the movie should reflect this. It should prefigure the arc of the development of the main character, up to the climax. But it doesn't. Nolan doesn't use it. I don't see how it had anything to do with the rest of the story.

Also Nolan totally wastes the physics. He has Oppenheimer teaching quantum mechanics and never uses that thematically either. What a waste. 

What was good about the movie? A phenomenal cast. What a delight it was to see so many familiar physicists brought to life on screen---not just the title character (brilliant performance by Cillian Murphy--totally believed him), but giants like Isador Rabi, Edward Lawrence, Edward Teller, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe. I had a bit a problem seeing Kenneth Branagh as Neils Bohr. Branagh calls attention to himself so much as an actor. But it worked ok, and I'm glad they got an actor of grerat renown to play Bohr. Compare that to Gary Oldman who absolutely disappeared into being Harry Truman. Tom Conti was a great "dark Einstein". I was pleased to Emily Blunt--who was cutting her chops ferociously in supporting roles back in 2009 during my movie run--now one of the great leading ladies of Hollywood. Hard work pays off. 

Every character seemed like a breath of fresh air, especially Josh Hartnett as Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron (and by extension all particle colliders), and especially Matt Damon! I cringed when I saw he was going to play Leslie Groves, but it absolutely worked. He truly is a great actor.

Back to the Nolan-ness. I cared nothing about the story about Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr. It was played well but I didn't care about that character. His downfall at the end seemed thrown in to give us a feeling of resolution and emotional satisfaction. Meh.

The "Communists are people too" bullshit was annoying but honestly it was weak sauce compared to what it could have been. Only during Emily Blunt's ranting speech at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing did it creak heavily on my nerves. To be honest I think they probably did the right thing by stripping it from him. He should have retired from all that after the war. 

That's the real tragedy of Oppenheimer, that was missing. He could have been America's greatest theoretical physicist, as he was on track to become before the war. He could have resumed that trajectory instead of becoming part of the national security apparatus. Instead he vacated that role, and in the vacuum came youngsters like Richard Feynman, who led particle physics down a completely different path, which has resulted in fifty years of stagnation. That's the movie I'd like to see made at this point. A great sequel. Feynman himself was wisely under-used by Nolan in the movie, appearing only in a view cameos, including playing the bongos after the Trinity test. Wise because Feynman is so strong a personality.

And here we come to the part where I ranted in huge dissent from my fellow Badlanders about their dislike for the fake history in the movie, of how it promotes the mainstream narrative they hate. Leaving aside the issue of fakeness, I told my audience (and them), Nolan gave you a gift. He created a narrative universe, one that can now be used to tell many stories. If you want to revise that history, it is a thousand times easier because of this movie. Don't just whine and tell me the history is wrong. Tell me the story with characters. Put them in a room and have them speak to each other. If not, you're giving me nothing.

You just need to add in the scenes that are missing to tell a completely different story. This happens all the time---Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkein. Give me a twenty-five million dollar budget and a Netflix contract and I'll assembly a team of writers (after the strike at least) and churn out a whole different take with the same characters, in the same universe. 

So that's my write-up. Haven't done one of those in a long time. I'm back, baby. I'm back. Might have to see Barbie now.

Heavy realizations

 Already 28 likes. Way better than usual. I might get the hang of Twitter yet.

Tests failed, Tests passed.

 The last months the bulk of my energy has gone into my new day job that i started in the second week of June. The job has been tough. It has taken a lot of my willpower to keep doing it. I have felt at times like I am hanging on my fingernails.

I am a very spiritual attitude towards it.  I have this conviction that everything about this job is a test. In fact it has felt weirdly like a reprise of all the tests I have failed over the last twenty years in various jobs. The little bit of grace I have gotten in this job seems to be from the few tests. I actually passed. For this reason I must see it through, or else I will get these same tests again, only harder. That's the way it works. if you kick the can down the road, it only gets more difficult.

My job entails being in charge of a team of four engineers. The fact that it is management is important to me. But it is difficult in part because the engineers live on the other side of the world. Even keeping weird hours, they do most of their work during the night here. So to get a jump on things, and not look like an idiot on the management call in the morning here, I have been getting up at 2:30 AM. It lets me do some work in uninterrupted concentration, because once the day starts, it is impossible to devote any time to concentration. My time may be borrowed at any time. I hate it. 

The hour between 3 AM and 4 Am belongs to me. I make coffee and drink it. I linger in prayer, and read a Bible passage that I find in the Bible I got for my confirmation, which remained pristine for years, and then grew very ragged during 2011-2012 while I drove around the country in a spiritual crisis. The worn cover reminds me of those times.  Among the prayers I pray is to be able to do my job well.

How my life would have been different had I been so conscientious all this time, I think. 

The job tires me out so that by Friday afternoon I am exhausted, in a good way, the way working people are. This despite the fact that it is optional for me to go into the office most days (part of the grace granted to me by passing previous tests, by being responsible while working remotely).