Here lies one whose name was writ in electrons

I'm a black market teacher. Here are my 95 theses.

Comedy and instruction are the same art. Teachers put the punchline first.

There are three layers of the mind: lizard, social mammal, and human. The three correlating types of power are violence, money, and lies. Warren Zevon wrote a song about it.

Power seems to come in threes. There are three loci of power in any state. Roughly speaking, they are the empire, the rebellion, and the criminal syndicates. These three loci coordinate with the three types of interpersonal relationships. The rebellion is communal, the empire is transactional, and the criminals are exploitative. Anybody who stays in power for long manages all three.

Those who make beasts of themselves get rid of the pain of being human.—HST

America has always been a traditional European feudalism with a superstructure of mostly fake democracy. We’re still running the beta test constitution, and deliberately sabotaged it to get the slave states to sign on. Every time we expanded the franchise we abstracted more of the real power into the shadows behind the government. Giving the ladies the vote was the last straw. J Edgar seized all power and for the next fifty years all the politicians had to do whatever she told them to.

The world has about a million lords and eight billion peasants.

The lords don’t need many peasants any more. They have machines to do the work and computers to control the machines. Most of the peasants today either work in population suppression or are part of the suppressed population.

If you need an actor to read you your information, you're probably being played. It's like the difference between reading your own bible and letting some rapist at a pulpit mansplain it to you.

The Soviet Union failed because it was atheist. You can’t build a propaganda totalitarianism out of rational parts; you have to walk people way past Occam’s razor as kids if you want them to prefer to believe lies as an adult. That’s why nobody ever mentions how much Jesus looked like the milkman.

Any system will work if the people buy into it. Humans will put up with damn near anything, especially if you give them a scapegoat to hate on.

If you can not write, don’t.

You are nothing more than a parasite inhabiting a thin green scum coating the surface parts of an unremarkable rock orbiting a middling star in the outer spiral arm of one of two trillion galaxies. Deal with it.

Psychiatrists aren’t real doctors, they’re preachers with a medical degree. Real doctors use imaging.

When people get pushed to extremis and abandon self-restraint in favor of lashing out, we all break primarily one of five ways. In our core, we are suicides, vandals, thieves, rapists, or murderers. I’m a vandal. All comedians are. Except bill cosby.

All matter is merely energy condensed, and we are the consciousness of the universe experiencing itself subjectively.—Bill Hicks

Life sucks. Get a helmet.—Dennis Leary

I refuse to join any organization whose standards are so low they’d accept a reprobate like myself.—Groucho Marx

Instant gratification takes too long.—Carrie Fisher

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.—George Orwell, writing in 1946

Any time you use your emotions to overrule your mind, you are being played.

If you’ve got ‘em by the denial mechanism, their hearts and minds will follow.

Duck and Cover didn’t work so they had to invent school shootings. And nuclear Armageddon. And global warming. Terrified people are easier to control.

There are no unintended consequences in politics.

We banned alcohol for ten years precisely to create organized crime. The FBI needed a dirty wing.

When Karl Rove cracked wise about the “reality based community” and claimed the ability to “create reality”, what he meant is that the Bush2 administration was going to deliberately create a bunch of failed states in the Middle East in order to flood Europe with refugees. This gave Europe’s right wingers a pool of nonwhite people to use as scapegoats. It’s the same thing America’s been doing to everybody South of our border for at least a century.

All the surviving religions rape everything on two legs as young as possible to drive both parties scalp deep into suppression and denial. The kinder faiths were exterminated centuries ago.

Circumcision makes the men all rapy and it works best when you keep it in the family; make everybody live in denial of what’s going on. This is why Jews still exist after millennia of contact with Christians. Not even the Vikings could manage that, and they were pretty bad-ass. Vikings just didn’t have rape culture. Viking women had rights that American women didn’t get until the 1970s.

Knowledge is power. Whether implicitly or directly, the Catholic Church blackmails people with what they learn in confession.

Generally, the most evil and depraved society wins the war. Protestant Christians have the best system to become monsters and live with themselves afterward. Don’t discount the papists, though. They’re second best, so they try harder.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.—John Maynard Keynes

You know why Mormons and Muslims are allowed four wives? Because you use women up by fucking them. Their bodies can only pop out so many kids before failing, so you need a fresh one every fifteen years.

Priests may enreason thousands of beasts, crying of demons. Their speech seeks shape to spin stone from sudden illusion; draw light unto iron. These would render the heavens a cathedral of chains, these would murder the angels for the jewels of their crown. The betrayer moves ever among you: heed not his ways. In bitter coin is bartered freedom on the highway of swords.—Unknown

If you are not equally agnostic to the existence of Harry Potter as you are to your god, you are not agnostic. You are religious with doubts.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the internet is a sucker’s game because they always turn out to be, or be indistinguishable from, self-righteous sixteen year olds with infinite free time.—Neil Stephenson

Debating religious people is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon will knock over all the pieces, take a crap on the board, and then fly back to its flock to claim victory.—Scott D. Weitzenhoffer

Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.—Mike Tyson

Beer! The cause of, and solution to, all of my problems.—Homer Simpson

Everybody dies alone.—Malcolm Reynolds

Quoting the past masters isn’t just homage, or in-group signaling. Why reinvent the wheel when somebody already expressed it perfectly?

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he’ll let you pick his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.—LBJ

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.—C. S. Lewis (The flaw is religion; it’s the ability to hold power over other people through their first and best denial mechanism, their imaginations. I can understand why he missed it.)

A belief in a soul, spirit, or afterlife is logically a belief that you can make your mind immortal by wishing. Grow the fuck up. Everything dies. Except a corporation.

As evil is clearly built into the fabric of reality, if a supreme being exists, it is incumbent on us to be his moral superior.—Terry Pratchett (Fortunately, this isn’t difficult.)

Hitler and Trump are the obvious and inevitable penultimate step on Christianity’s road. Omnicide is the endpoint of any death cult.

Christians are born evil. I was born feral, and humanized myself as I aged.

You’re not paying for that internet service with money, you’re paying with pieces of your digital soul. This is not a good bargain.—Dr. Faustus

Turning and turning in a widening spiral/ The falcon can not hear the falconer/ Things fall apart, the center can not hold/ And mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned./ The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.—Yeats on WWI (1920)

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.—Pete Townshend (1971)

Christianity is a slave religion. After a couple thousand years of bondage, the Jews made shitty slaves. The Romans understood social engineering and so gave the Jews their messiah but made him a pussy; a slave god. It would have worked but the Romans didn’t understand Jungian psychology and didn’t realize what a monstrous shadow self they were creating by asking people to emulate an archetype of pure empathy.

I never understood what’s so horrible about the abyss. It’s just reality. We’re all born in it, and I ended up building myself a bone cabin down here. From where I sit, the absurdity is the universal acceptance of believing delusions.

The truth may be out there, but the lies are already in your head.—pTerry

The Matrix is faith. Laughter is the antidote. Fuck hope.

To get rich, you use other people’s time and other people’s money.

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric.—Charles Goodhart (Explain that to a billionaire :) If they were hoarding cats or newspapers, we’d recognize it for the pathology it is.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can alleviate pain.

Only actions that harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other should be criminalized.—Peter McWilliams

America is ranked 187th out of 250 by population density. We have tons of room. Stop hating on immigrants, you easily-led automata.

Why the hell are the blue soldiers allowed to unionize? It’s not like we’d let the green soldiers have a union while they work to suppress foreign populations.

They say you should lead, follow, or get out of the way. I never understood what was wrong with getting out of the way. I can’t follow and won’t lead, so my options are circumscribed.

You should truly never care about other people’s opinion of you. In the end, only your own matters.

I long to taste your honey-blossom’d lips/ And catch the cloud of love behind you./ The jizzum from my penis drips/ Onto the towel I quickly threw/ Down to contemplate your fecund hips./ Finished now, my ideas flew/ Like sparrows to more menial thought/ Like the joy your love once brought.

To win without fighting is the greatest victory.—Sun Tzu

Ignatz Semmelweis should be your hero.—Kurt Vonnegut

I like to verb words. Verbing weirds language.—Calvin

Be careful you don’t attribute to stupidity what can be explained by malice. The stupids take advantage of the leeway we give ‘em and do shit like walk around spreading disease.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to but they do/ They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra just for you./ Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf/ So get out as early as you can/ And don’t have any kids yourself.—Phillip Larkin

Before people grew up with video, they needed other coping mechanisms than simply lying. Teevee taught the Boomers how to act well enough as children to bald-face their way out of everything, and every subsequent generation has been increasingly infantilized.

Before video games had save points, people tried harder to not make mistakes in the first place. Try sculpting marble.

The medium is the message.—Marshall McLuhan

The people in the last Dark Age didn’t know they were in a dark age, either.

Never pay for anything that managed to fling its advertizing feces in your face. This would disenshittify the internet overnight.

Life is pain, Princess. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.—Westley

The top tier of artists lose it when they sober up. The rest get better.

By the time you hit a bully, he’s already won. You have to mock him early and often so he doesn’t build a following.

Manicheans see reality as defined by two competing poles, but it’s really a series of intersecting bell curves on an infinite axis topography with constellations of exceptions flickering past like chaos butterflies.

I’m unique. Just like everyone else.

There’s nothing special about being smart. I was born that way. It’s like being born tall.

Education is a lifelong, self-directed process that forced schooling is designed to subvert.

The day you stop learning is the day you start dying.—Albert Einstein

The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.—Albert Einstein

People will not be free until the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last megapreacher.—D Diddy

The Germans have an expression: If a Nazi eats at a table with ten other people, there are eleven Nazis at that table. Much the same can be said about tolerance of religion. It is reprehensible abuse to tell a child they are immortal, or protected by an imaginary friend with magic powers, especially today when we have actual answers for most things. Demanding a child believe things their rational mind can tell aren’t true destroys the hard line between fantasy and reality with which we are all born.

Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will own the man.—Jesuit saying

Enduring pain and hardship develops one half of your being. Mastering pleasure and recreation develops the other half.

When something bad happens, it can go one of three ways. It can destroy you, define you, or strengthen you. The choice is rarely yours to make.

Whatever doesn’t kill you usually leaves you crippled. Fuck Nietzsche.

Other people are the only thing that makes life worth living. Fuck Sartre.

Being aware of history in no way inoculates you against repeating it. It just gives you a Cassandra complex. The people with the power treat history as a guide to what works. Santayana was an idiot.

To understand the world, you need to grok three things: Person, People, and Tech.

The generative AI hype bubble is obscuring the truly revolutionary scientific development, CRISPR. CRISPR will be the end of involuntary death when we get the bugs worked out. That’s a pretty big milestone for a species.

By the time I met that Indian kid on my path, I didnae have to kill him. We simply nodded to each other as equals and went our separates.

I’ve been trying to sell out all my life, but nobody’s buying.—John Waters

Take my life. Please.—Henny Youngman

Reality doesn’t get a voice.

You can’t give a pack animal a mind.