Luxuries & Blackmails of the Underworld
Luxurious temptations and the alternatives.
Nothing about the Epstein Files could possibly surprise me, unless somewhere in those millions of pages recently released by the Administration, there would be the name of someone I actually know. I’ve met Mike Tyson and Wynton Marsalis. Hell I even met Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Carter back at the 96 Games in Atlanta, but they were all just being polite to a friend of a friend and would never remember me. I’m just a peasant. I’m a good peasant, but I’m going to die in the mud and chances are, you will too. It’s actually not so bad of a deal.
You see, if you’ve been reading my stoic observations for any period of time, you will recognize my Peasant Theory, upon which I have few updates. It’s pretty well debugged and will run in your conceptual brain without crashing. So far it has proved immune to the crises of the day. Iran. Venezuela. Minnesota. I crafted it from ancient materials. But there is one part I haven’t found time to talk about so let’s consider it for a moment.
Luxury Is Eternal
About 17 months ago, said nobody ever, I was hanging out with a few friends some old, some new, in a ski lodge on the back side of Lake Tahoe. It’s one of the better ones. Like Ser Duncan the Tall, standing out as I do among the peasant class, half man, half giant, I have some familiarity with the nature of upscale chivalry. Some days I have as they say ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings’. I ordered an Old Fashioned and Eggs Benedict. They were predictably good. Having grown up a favored son of a poor to middling civil servant, I had times between the beatings and humiliations of callow youth perchance to dream. Even along Crenshaw Boulevard waiting for the bus, or getting grease from the Chevron station, I watched in awe at the long Cadillac-heavy funeral motorcade. Somebody from here made it. Four motorcycles. That’s gonna be me. I’m gonna die in style. So when I find myself in luxurious surroundings, I’m already wearing the right attitude, if not the right shoes.
An Old Fashioned and Eggs Benedict taste excellent and those peasants who prepared it for me at three times what it would take for me to prepare them myself, to keep the overhead of this luxurious place, gave me the right smiles to my peasant order, small talk and comfortable attitude. They were patient and kind, I was generous and gracious. This edifice, as I peered around after a well-delivered joke’s laughter subsided, will pass from one wealthy corporation to the next until the bombs fall and burn every tree to the root. Because it’s done right. Because this is what humans will always want. Like sex and oxygen, we all know how to take all we can get. It will always feel right. This is part and parcel of the essence of being alive; luxury is inevitably what everyone wants, and everyone fits right into its comfortable silky snugness.
Until the bastards show up and let you know that you are breathing their oxygen.
The Rulers
The Ruling class has what you cannot get yourself. This is their primary defining characteristic. They alone can make you something that you cannot make yourself. Of course on any day they can take it all away. Rulers are especially cruel and especially arbitrary because they are especially powerful. Power makes the difference and they become cruel because they become bored, the longer they retain power. They only seem arbitrary because we peasants have no idea of the winds that blow at their heights.
On the other hand, some of our particularly American elites have behaviors directed at us, marketed to us, spammed into our every media orifice, that allow us to see through them, occasionally. What I have observed, by seeing where they don’t go, considering they have the power to go anywhere and everywhere, is finally this. They live in a circle jerk of blackmail. The effect of that wind is visible. We have named one of those The Epstein Files. Of course such artifacts exist. They exist as clearly as the rhetoric they spew in their hubris, and it works until the bombs fall and the edifice finds new owners & management.
The Overworld
Above the peasants are the Genius class which exist in limbo between the masses of us and our squeaky wheels and the Ruling class with their powerful and ultra smooth turbo-encabulators. The Geniuses invented the turbo encabulators simply because the Rulers got bored with their ordinary encabulators. So the fat bastards threw money at the market until some clever cats thunk it up. Ordinarily, brains are a cheap commodity, but if you’ve got insight into the circle jerk, you can make a killing for the killers. Trickle down does actually work because this is not a socialist country. Try not to forget that. The Rulers must feed the market. That’s why the name Richard Mille is emblazoned on Formula One race cars. But it’s just a watch and those are just cars and fat bastards enjoy games of chance because the rest of their lives are excruciatingly calculated. Why? As I’ve said, absolutely everybody understands the beauty and perfection of Eggs Benedict. Rulers keep the egg market afloat so they can always get theirs. Again, it trickles down.
I write because we live an in Information Age. It would have been nice to have lived in the Space Age, but Elon Musk had not yet been born and we’ve suffered some incompetent Presidents who let things get off track, rocketwise. On the other hand, the CIA has never been at a loss for funds, even after the Church Commission slapped their wrists in 1975. Fewer of our Representatives have balls of any sort these days, so the information economy thrives and not so many of us worry about things like domestic surveillance. What I know, having worked the the digital fields for decades is that computer systems can be made to never forget, but also to remember that which isn’t true. There’s an acronym called GIGO, which means computers never lose their ability to lie, so long as that is what they are fed. They don’t complain about it, they just fail, but computer minds are an even cheaper commodity. You should notice that computer chips are not getting much cheaper or faster, but they operate on less electricity. That’s the scarce resource - but you can bet there’s probably a nuke at Fort Meade, so they have nothing to worry about. My point is that these deep state actors exert more and more control of the growing and growing information economy. They are experts and secrecy, paranoia, propaganda, deception, infiltration, misdirection and some of them can shoot pretty damned well. They own the underworld. Make no mistake about it. They know everything that is true. They know everything that is false, and they have a better bead on Mr. In Between than you think is possible.
Journalists don’t have a chance. Entire media organizations don’t either. Think about it this way. How many new TV series and films are being produced? More than we ever imagined with ‘a thousand channels’. How many new news organizations are being produced? Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Two. And the Washington Post is in the midst of collapse. Here’s the takeaway. All of the relevant truth is known to the Underworld. We live in the Overworld where our shenanigans are mostly irrelevant. Our job is to consume what is produced, and reproduce ourselves. Searching for the meaning of life the universe and everything might be found in Archive 42, but the fat bastards have signed a mutually assured destruction pact to keep most of that luxury to themselves.
No Conspiracy
This is not a conspiracy theory. I am far from saying that a peasant life is not complete and full of all of human necessities or comforts. I’m saying that for the most part, effort is wasted barking up the trees where a complement of genius enablers keep house for the ruling class. Even representative democracy means barking up the trees of power. Well, there are a lot of trees and this is a dark forest. You don’t know all of those dogs, all of their fights and which trees to piss on. Some of them you can’t even smell.
Nor am I saying that you should extinguish your hopes and dreams and sit idle while the fat bastards drop turds from above. I am merely indicating that there is inner power, self-control, and the capability for us with sound minds and bodies to master the skills of life and enjoy a life well-lived. That liberty works, and an open society is best. But there is a significant difference between sign making and bomb making and we don’t have the bombs.
Death and Loneliness
We all love our luxuries and we all strut around as if our rights were not the forbearance and gifts of the strong. Most of us know how to behave and why, but there comes a point when a man decides he doesn’t like being a peasant and he wants to fight the fat bastards, which are not the entire contingent of the magical ruling elite, just the dementors. Such a man should join the army. In a free country with a standing army only those who are trained in building and diffusing bombs are going to be of any use whatsoever when it comes to defending life, limb and property. This is as true as the delicious taste of fresh poached eggs.
Without the marital skills of the most powerful nation on the planet, the rest of us peasants are playing Lego cosplay. Those include the kinetic skills as well as those deployed in information warfare. And you should never forget that the active duty and reserves aren’t the only ones possessed of these skills, just like today’s college students are not the only educated Americans. So this should serve as a warning to those whose outrage motivates them to step into the ring with professionals and even ex-professionals. You are not even Jake Paul, with your Instagram followers. Nor are you Frank Church.
Over the weekend, I attended a Founder’s Day celebration at Los Angeles’ most outspoken political black church, FAME. There I was treated to a forty minute sermon by Stacey Abrams who has given up her career in elective politics to stump and stomp as an activist. Having been an elected State Rep, on the forefront of a certain flavor of minority whip politics, her grassroots agenda is pretty clear. She demonstrates the conviction of someone who has smelled rats, and she punches up with the energy she can demonstrably extract from the right crowds. But her audience in attendance was, for the most part, as old as I am and older. I would estimate 85% of them were over 50. They came to hear that old time religion. It’s good enough for them. It was with little irony that she was introduced to the congregation by Bishop Francine Brookins, the daughter of Bishop HH Brookins whose name is on the cornerstone of the church.
Religious discipline moves slowly and it is in this slow lane that we peasants can gain the confidence needed to combat the swift and slick talk of the constant stream of horseshit that passes for the news of the world. Those like Epstein have now been shown to have operated for decades. We should have known. But we are the people who believe that our credible arguments can be caught and proven in slow motion video of events that take mere minutes, as if this were the battlefront.
So here is the Stoic challenge.
There is but one way to overcome living in the overworld anonymously and the tacit compliance it entails. That is to simply decide to not fear death. Which is to say to configure your life into that of a warrior. Rare is the warrior who would face death and battle without a commanding officer. On his own honor is a thankless place for the warrior to be. If you’re watching the new GOT about the hedge knight, then you know.
Otherwise, join the peasant audience for violent combat from the cheap seats and watch the carnage remotely.
Here is the proviso.
There are opportunities to find aligned cliques. More on that later. You may not have to live and die alone.