Adventure doesn’t come cheap. Smoking clove cigarettes in West Papua

The hillbilly in me wants to use the phrase “In all my lived, born days, I ain’t never seen nuthin’ like this…” Such is the furor approaching the mid-term 2022 elections. Life appears, pretty much, to go on like it always has outside the Matrix. But inside the Matrix, which is really only plumbed through watching the various factions of dark and light (dependent on your own view of the world, of course) on Twitter, have turned the volume up to 11. Elon Musk closed the deal on Twitter. And lotsa voices on the ‘general Left’ came unglued. I particularly do not like the tags of Left and Right, because they are inherently topical. I prefer instead the more difficult dichotomy of pro/con scaffolded independent agency, and relational creation/disruption, as it’s a more incisive viewpoint.

But I digress. Several linked items showed up in The Matrix in the last couple of weeks. First and foremost has to be AB2098, the California State medical disinformation bill. It basically says doctors can be punished for spreading disinformation if their view on treatment is reported to authorities (political, institutional authorities) as going against the current zeitgeist.

And if there needs to be a rough, albeit somewhat fuzzy dividing lines between recommended treatments in this day and age, it also falls out along memetic lines. The owners of institutional control (and proponents of AB2098) are very much into boundary violation (unwilling uptake of vaccines, for example) and coercive behavior, such as forced masking, while the voices against are far more about high agency treatments, like immune system boosting (more Vitamin D) and cross-over treatments like Ivermectin.

The problem with bills like AB2098 is they advanced a stated goal using a virtuous shield – disinformation, which is keyed supposedly to people’s core health and well-being, but is in reality about a problem that Authoritarians everywhere are all about. Authoritarians do not want disruption of information flow from the top of the power structure. The meta-problem, which is why the medical community is so prone to this type of memetic shift, is that physicians are already socially structured in tightly siloed, non-holistic organizations, and prone to the uptake of this kind of meta-pattern already. Look at how many licensing tests they already have to take.

But it’s even worse than that. What AB2098 really does is subsume the medical community inside the knowledge structure extant to the political structure. And outside influences not only will not be welcomed. Doctors breaking the rules of what the politicians say will be thrown out of the whole shebang. Think about the sunk cost of an entire medical education, and you’ll understand both their concerns, and their cowardice. If you need some examples, consider this. From COVID vaccines to saturated fat, don’t expect any doctor to warn you about the side effects of either vaccine boosters or statins. It ain’t gonna happen. Orthodoxy in treatment isn’t now just the rule. It’s the law.

What that does from an informatics/memetics perspective, though, is shut down innovation inside medicine everywhere. Established kingdoms/medical schools, with their own pathologies, may innovate incrementally on various treatments. But it really throws a wrench inside the innovative practice of physicians meta-identifying different treatments, with similar cellular mechanisms, and then running experiments or trials. Drug companies, already enmeshed with medical schools for a variety of reasons, will indeed be allowed to develop NEW drugs, as they have deep controlling mechanisms inside the Colleges of Medicine anyway. But innovation through cross-paradigmatic, or heaven forbid, trans-paradigmatic concerns, is basically done. At least in California. The upshot of this is that a field, already mired in treating symptoms and not root causes, will be even more hamstrung. Example — doctors continue to demand a drug to stop obesity, while ruling out large-scale dietary changes from mechanisms like the keto or Low-Carb/High Fat (LCHF) diets. And that means, even if the pill works against obesity, people will continue to eat toxic diets that potentially compromise their mental functions. Now you’re going to be skinny with Alzheimers.

But there are other insidious side-effects (or rather, global overarching effects) of AB2098. These involve demonstrating patterns for the capture of institutions across society, and particularly other professional communities, by what I call “vampire colonies.” What is a vampire colony? Let’s take a little segue.

I’ve written pretty extensively on this blog about my thoughts on psychopaths — how they act and interact in the various v-Meme structures that human communities are built on as they evolve. It’s quite easy to say something like “psychopaths are abnormalities in how social systems operate,” and few would argue.

The reality is considerably more complex. In low v-Meme, Tribal/Magical systems psychopaths are part of the homeostasis of these systems. How? Basically, if you don’t have enough of those crazy-ass Bear Warriors, when the neighboring tribe comes over and attempts to kill all the men, and capture the women, they get to do it.

The unpleasant side-truth in all this is that while psychopathy may be an essential part of the bottom v-Memes describing the human condition, how we ensure, from an EMERGENT perspective at those same v-Meme levels, that our subgroup has enough of them, is through sexual abuse. Simon Baron-Cohen writes extensively about the phenomenon, and I’ll leave you to find his work, instead of bogging this blog post down with something I’ve already covered. You need trauma applied across the society, at an appropriate scale, with actually appropriate healing rituals to ensure enough people have their boundaries torn down, and statistically enough being built back up, in order to see stability of the given tribal social structure. It’s not a bug, folks. It’s an emergent feature. Think about that the next time you hear folks arguing solely in the positive for ‘rites of passage.’ Like everything humans participate in, it’s a mixed bag.

As we move out of the Tribal/Magical v-Meme, and into the Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme, there are also transitions AND variations in what we see as far as relational formation AMONG psychopaths. Ideally, healthy Legalistic systems have stable social structures, well-grounded to reality, that provide the rule and algorithm sets for larger and more dense populations, that allow for that scale-up in population density such features also demand. And those institutions have a small, but critical number of individuals capable of speaking against the groupthink that naturally flows from these same social structures.

But what happens if there is an imbalance in homeostasis, or an ossification in those institutions? Then the psychopaths reach a critical mass and start taking over. And that’s a bad thing. I call these social structures ‘Vampire Colonies’, in that now their intention is not toward relational harmony and dedication to the well-being of larger populations, with some manageable level of healthy disruption. What we actually see is organizations now reinforcing other psychopaths, which inevitably means CREATING more of these same brain wiring types.

And once this happens, where the psychopath balance is thrown out of whack, we see a larger metastatic growth of these organizations. And since they ARE psychopathic (because of self-similar replication of value sets) they want to create more of the same. And once they have outgrown the natural feedback control mechanisms of a given society (math majors out there can think of this as eigenvalue sign reversal from negative to positive – some kind of parameter shift driving a bifurcation) they want to control everything and everyone.

There is simply no better example than what happened to the epidemiological and virology communities during the pandemic. When people are afraid they’re going to die, and they are under stress, their social structures are basically compromised. And when the psychopaths sweep in, with their fundamental collapsed egocentricism, it’s anyone’s bet what might happen. Look at the behavior of teachers’ unions, and pediatricians’ organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics. How could either of these organizations advocate so consistently against child well-being? Yet they consistently did, and still do. Mask up, little three-year-old. And take your 8-mouse-tested booster shot.

From an emergent perspective, it’s no surprise that psychopathic vampire colonies would focus on today’s youth. First off, youth are the easiest to recruit in creating more of the same (once again, see Baron-Cohen’s work on Empathy 0 +/-) . And secondly, if they are transitioned into the community far earlier, they are capable of much great relational disruption over the course of their lifetime, in that their memetic development can be frozen at an earlier v-meme (so they’re less likely to question the BS) and they have that many more years to become more sophisticated — picking up more and insidious techniques to both establish control, and hide their tracks. One need only look to the modified Authoritarian culture in China, developed over 2000+ years, to see the increase in both sophistication and proliferation of the v-Meme.

Now enter Stage Right the issue over trans kids. For those that get tired of my long-winded, technical analyses (you DO have my sympathies) below is an op-ed I wrote back in April on the whole trans-kids issue.

Grabbing the Ground Wire
Chuck Pezeshki, Reality-Based Lefty   April 6, 2022
 
Since the mainstream media has long operated on the principle that every issue we focus on either has to a.) terrify the bejesus out of us, or b.) only be relevant for a week in the news cycle until the irrelevance and shaming effect wears off, it’s no surprise that this week, it’s the issue of ‘trans kids’.
 
The Democrats have decided to run on a lucky shamrock of issues for the fall, somehow convinced in their activist wing that these are winners.  These are currently COVID paranoia, including masking toddlers, denying parents a voice in their kids’ education, starting a nuclear war with Russia, a.k.a. “standing up to Putin,” for a country Americans can’t even find on a map, and last but not least “trans kids” – the right of the population in their developmental years to take radical hormones, in anticipation of genital mutilation.  
 
It’s the last one that’s crested the media wave.  It’s so tone deaf as to even boggle the definition of tone deaf.  And if you oppose any of it, you’re a “hater.”  Well, sign me up, folks.  If there’s one thing this pandemic has taught me, it’s open season on those of us protecting children from political agendas, be it masks on speech-delayed kids, or kids suffering from depression from not fitting in.  Read some of the nonsense op-eds written by the Cowardly Codgers against me.
 
Let’s also get this straight. I’m all about adult bodily autonomy.  If, as an adult, you want to experience gender reassignment surgery, and the doctors say “yes”, then by all means.  But that kind of nonsense stops with children.  Having taught at least 3000 young folks over the course of my career, I can tell you that the adult mind, capable of even making such a choice, doesn’t start to emerge until 22, and really doesn’t consolidate until around 25.  Until 22, the students in my care, more than any knowledge in mechanical engineering, need raising.  And I do.
 
When you try to gauge the numbers of how many kids are really afflicted by some form of gender dysphoria, in my experience, I’ve only had a couple.  This is not some headlining problem in how society functions. Of course, bullying is bad.  But bullying is bad regardless of age, or gender. 
 
That means something else is going on.  The radical Left is really attempting to grab the ground wires of society and prevent people from possessing their own minds.  When you’re down at the level of denying people the ability to even assess, without a biologist and a pants-down inspection (as well as blood work) the basics of whom they’re dealing with, you’ve got another agenda – mostly in line with submitting to your betters.
 
This kind of deviant conditioning doesn’t build a liberal, egalitarian society. It’s master/slave. And trust me – if you’re reading this column in Pullman or Moscow, you’re not on the short list for joining the elite class.  
 
When you attempt to hijack language, especially in the name of arbitrary fairness, you’re a psychopath. And it’s time to call BS on it.  There are exceptions and extenuating circumstances for every condition.  But there’s also the raw truth.  If you feel it’s OK for Lia Thomas to call himself a female while dancing around naked in the women’s locker room with an erection, I’ve got some swampland in Florida you might be interested in.  
 
And as far as kids – especially everyone else’s kids – leave ‘em alone.  You’re at some level free to do whatever you want to your own.  But kids have a fundamental right to be raised, and be confused, on their own timetable.  Stop grabbing some fringe issue and using that as a cudgel to keep people silent.
 
Let’s get back to things that matter – the business destruction that occurred during the pandemic, inflation and gas prices, and the burgeoning mental health crisis in our young people.  The rest of it should be relegated to the bottom of Page 6.  
 
 

The trans kid issue is especially interesting in that it preys on the double whammy of depressed children, who are also likely being raised by a narcissistic parent. The way to understand this kind of child abuse (sometimes known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another – FSIA) is to understand the narcissistic parent as a spider — slowly poisoning and paralyzing their young, in the context of nurturing. Supposedly this disorder is more common among women than men, but I tend to think that empathy disorders such as this, while they manifest with different techniques due to gender, are more evenly spread across both. (It could be that women get away with it more often than men because the gender stereotype of women is the selfless caregiver, and so attracts less scrutiny. But it’s just hard to know.)

So let’s walk down a potential causal path toward more trans kids. First, you have decreasing social connection in society at large. This weakens normal individuals, while potentially offering new sources of energy to the relational disruptors, because if they get off on others’ victimhood, things are already going their way. Depressed people are far easier to group and control than healthy, happy people.

Add a social contagion that attacks these disenfranchised people, and whose power is also being boosted by campaigns by billionaires, that the narcissistic parents naturally gravitate towards. Tag on an extended, quantum-level morality in the already heavily fragmented relational landscape, that’s already creating more mental illness due to isolation and the dismantling of historic, scaffolding institutions, like the family, church, and anything with a historical basis. People in general, and especially children, profoundly need behavioral codes at all levels of the v-Meme ladder, regardless of the progression of social evolution. Take those away, as well as any avenue for grounding validity (more colloquially known as getting in touch with reality.) Trans advocates are very big on ‘you get to define your gender’ for good reason. None of this holds up to any viable external reality, and so has to be insulated from potential grounding.

But we’re not done. Add in a big dose of actual, physical health dysregulation due to diet. Metabolic syndrome, likely a root of much of the increase in trans-receptive individuals, dysregulates estrogen production due to fatty liver disease, or pre-fatty liver disease.

Then place this in a false-historical context as part of something strongly resonant with people in general — the struggle for civil rights, so you can use these kids as a weapon. Communicate across social media, that through the destruction of geography, allows the targets (and the psychopaths) to network to form critical memetic mass, even when there is no physically adjacent emotional support.

And then — the final coup de grace — change the law (or create laws like AB2098) to force the natural societal immune system into compliance with the chaos.

It’s no wonder the vampire colonies come running.

One of the big questions that is often asked is this: Why are the architects of this shift in the structure of The Matrix doing it? The answer is simple. They are doing it without empathy, or sense of consequence for their actions that exist in their pursuit of power and control. How can they do this to children? The answer is unpleasant — as the Joker in The Dark Knight says “I just DO things.”

The deeper problem with all of this is that it is emergent in the dynamics, and propagated by unknowing provocateurs that simply cannot care, or are dissociative from the immediate, personal misery they are causing. They’re in the Matrix as well. Societal forces have produced most of the situation above, and I’ve written in the past that much of this is due to increased population and transience of that population, decline of incomes, increased social isolation, and the bill coming due regarding dietary dysregulation, that anyone with half a brain can see when they go out into public. None of this knits a society more tightly together. And when coupled with a profound lack of emphasis, or even awareness, of what personal development and maturity actually means (when was the last time you heard a public figure talk about a definition of courage in a historical context that makes sense) , it creates a population vulnerable to kidnapping by groups of psychopaths. Psychopaths have a seemingly preternatural, but actually emergent sense of taking advantage of all of this. The psychopaths grab that ground wire through the standard methods of corruption of language, because that’s just what they do. And the larger community allows it because it believes that there must be some surface-level ‘reason’ behind all this, because most people build coherence among themselves at the top level due to their own level of development. Top level information is the stuff of most of our narratives, and is easily exchanged. But it’s also information that is easily corrupted. And so they project that belief, or mode of thinking, or as I call it, memetic processing on the people causing the chaos. But it’s not even close to reality. Because there really IS no reality to it.

But it’s a great tool for societal disruption and devolution, which is what relational disruptors emergently live for. What could be better for societal disruption than imposing the notion that castration and mutilation of children is for their own good? THat’s another double-whammy of both physical harm AND sexual abuse. Now we’re talking. Especially in a post-pandemic world, where we’re already self-identified with tribes supporting or denying with that insidious empathy-destroying mechanism, the face mask? It’s the closest we can get to turning ourselves into different species. Instant identification.

At some level, I’ve argued (probably because I create them) for a far better understanding of how societal dynamics create ebbs and flows in personal development, and truly different multiple perspectives. We don’t really have these, outside a couple of theorists, like myself. But this is truly an existential crisis. Maybe we’ll get off the dime and get with it.

And finally — is this about societal collapse? You betcha. That’s why we’ve got to wake up and start minding the multiple stores involved with all of this. Denial because of colloquial beliefs about the human species, projected from our own, egocentric biases, ain’t gonna cut it.

P.S. for those interested in psychopathic extreme warriors, there’s no better example than Audie Murphy — a true American hero. A nuanced case and worthy of reflection. Once you understand the dynamic described above, you’ll really start to get why war is hell. And why, at some level in the darkness of the human soul, it persists.