Except for the eight years I spent on the Farm, I have been reading books constantly since I was a teenager. Some of it was science fiction and detective stories, i.e., Heinlein, frank herbert, Asimov, Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, but for the most part it was the classics of 19th and 20th century literature and non-fiction. For a boomer I am a relatively hyper-self-educated man.

But I haven’t read Milton or Dante or much of Homer or Aquinas. I don’t speak or read French or Latin or Greek. Compared to an educated man of the 19th century, I am an ignorant plebeian.

Of course I know several computer languages. I know a lot of Beatles lyrics. I’ve read Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Vonnegut, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, William Styron, Henry James, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Arther Koestler, Aldous Huxley, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Jung, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, etc., authors unknown in the 19th century.

At the same time I am woefully ignorant of any music or literature or Philosophy since the 80s.

At this point when everything is available everywhere all the time for anyone who is interested, what does it mean to have a classical liberal education? What should be included/excluded? It’s no wonder that colleges are struggling with this question.

But what I hate is that these choices are being made on the basis of equal representation for everyone except white Western males, rather than on the quality of the material itself. It has become an exercise in “social justice” rather than an attempt to put together a collection of the most profound human works.

If you are living within the bosom of Western civilization, what is wrong with studying the art, music, philosophy, and literature of Western civilization? And then, if you choose, you can also study the same of other civilizations. But basing the choice of what you study on the gender and color of the authors seems to me, to put it kindly, ridiculous, less kindly, insane.

Teachers are great. I love teachers. I have learned a lot from many teachers. There’s no doubt that Stephen Gaskin was a teacher. I learned many things from him. But when a teacher declares or implies or allows it to be said that he is something other than a flawed human being, that there is some whiff of the divine about him, you better run for the hills.

Stephen made that claim. Bhagwan Rajneesh did also, and many others, especially back in the acid days. I don’t think the Dalai Lama makes that claim, but he does allows it to be made about him. So did David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc., etc. Nowadays, it’s less common. i guess because the boomers grew up a little.

I’ve learned my lesson. I stay far away from anyone who takes that position or even flirts with it. I like guys like Jordan Peterson and Scott Adams and Krishnamurti, guys who would laugh in your face if you attributed the slightest superhuman qualities to their sorry asses.

Don’t ever forget it. We are all sinners. I do make an exception for Jesus Christ. I believe He is what He said He was.

There seems to be some surprise at the mounting evidence that maybe the FBI and the DOJ conspired to prevent Donald Trump from being elected, and, failing that, get him impeached.

I’m not surprised.

I expected him to be assassinated.

I’m a little disappointed to tell the truth. Not because he hasn’t so far been assassinated, but because I thought we were up against much more formidable foes than they have turned out to be. Chuck Schumer? James Comey? Peter Strzok? These losers don’t stand a chance against President Trump.

Killin’, Killin’, Killin’. That pretty much sums up all of my favorite TV shows. Peaky Blinders, Godless, Vikings, Knightfall, The Last Kingdom, and El Chapo. Great acting, great writing, great production values, and, last but not least, great history. Human history is, after all, like it or not, an epic saga of people killing other people.

As Americans, most white Americans anyway, we live lives far removed from murder. That’s not the norm. It’s the Western Christian civilization exception. In the past Christians have done their share of killing in defense of Christendom and in theological wars within Christendom, but these days, it’s relatively peaceful here in Europe, the U.S., the U.K., and the rest of what used to be called Christendom.

Outside of Christendom, the killing goes on. Within Christendom the faith is slowly dying. It is being replaced by militant ideological homosexuality, feminism, transgenderism, communism, and materialism, i.e. by Satan, the Father of Lies, the King of all isms. The one true church is ruled by a Marxist Pope. Many of the other churches are plagued by confidence men and half-heartedness.

I have not met Jesus Christ myself, but I believe in Him.

Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. On Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.

I am forced to question either the moral character or the mental independence of anyone who does NOT worship the God-Emperor Trump. No offense intended to pretty much everyone I know.

— The only good information is disinformation (@NickSew) December 9, 2017

Stephen Gaskin was a breath of fresh air in the San Francisco 60s Haight Ashbury. In an acid-fueled youth revolution against the entire square universe, he, with full acid credentials, preached common sense, traditional, square values.

Monogamy, hard work, no welfare, anti-abortion, no alcohol, tobacco, or hard drugs, not even synthetic psychedelics. Connect with your parents, discipline your children, be honest. Take care of yourself and help others.

That message was desperately needed in those times, in that place, for all those young people like myself.

But then he took it too far. He sought, was granted, and accepted, the mantle of a fully enlightened master who could do no wrong.

He exercised that power to create a community in which he dictated, in fine detail, dress, diet, language, sex, child-rearing, politics, economics, marriage, and hair style.

Without the exercise of that kind of absolute power, the Farm would not have been possible. Would that have been a bad thing?

Had Stephen Gaskin been content to just be a normal fallible human being with some good insights, he could have done a lot of good for the young people caught up in the psychedelic maelstrom that was San Francisco in 1967.

Instead he went for the delusion of grandeur. We could have done worse of course. He was, admittedly a cut above the other hustlers like Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Trungpa, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Maharishi, and all the rest.

I tell myself that Stephen saved me from doing something even more stupid.

As a young man, and even not such a young man, I believed and did the opposite of what a sensible person would believe and do.

I believed that it was wrong to want money and success, so I avoided them both as if they were diseases.

I believed that it was phony to do things and be a certain way in order to make people like me. So I was obnoxious as a matter of principle.

I believed that the smart thing to do was to take vast quantities of psychedelic substances like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, mushrooms, morning glory seeds, and of course weed.

As a result I am not rich or successful. I have few friends. And the flashbacks just won’t stop!

Looking back, I wonder, what if I had not done the opposite of what a sensible person would do? I would almost certainly be very well off financially. I would probably be recognized for my accomplishments with some awards and such. I would have many friends. I would have the unanimous love and respect of my family.

But of course I would be a very different person than I am now, with completely different experiences. Would I trade?

Nah.

Those at the highest pinnacles of wealth and power, and those in the lowest troughs, seem to share a tendency towards indulgence of their most animalistic tendencies. From Harvey Weinstein and William Jefferson Clinton, to Kentucky meth labs and black market oxycontin.

Apparently only those in the middle, the bourgeois, Christians especially, make any effort to curtail and contain themselves.

“There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”
-Bob Dylan

Listening to NPR (Commie radio) on the way to pick up a bottle of wine. They’re talking about the resurgence of tuberculosis in the U.S. They talk about the large number of people who are TB carriers but don’t exhibit any symptoms.

The piece goes on and I’m waiting for the punch line. Finally, at the very end of a list of possible causes, they barely, grudgingly, mention “people from other countries.”

Of course that is the whole story. There are the beginnings of a TB epidemic in the U.S. because of the large number of immigrants, illegal and legal, from countries where being a TB carrier is more common than not. I’ve been to China. In China most people are TB carriers.

They buried the lede because they are afraid of, and agree with, political correctness. Immigrants cannot possibly be a problem. The news dispensed from the major news outlets has become so distorted that it is of almost no use for getting actual information about what is really going on.

And so we are forced to seek out disreputable sources of information in dark alleys. Twitter, Conspiracy theorists, Alt (gasp) Right, Black Lives Matter, Scientology, the President of the United States. You can’t trust anyone, but if you’re thirsting for knowledge, the real skinny, you may have to associate with some pretty sketchy characters.

Nobody is going to filter it for you. Walter Cronkite is dead. You are on your own.

As the old morality recedes, the new PC morality replaces it, with a vengeance.

Gone are any serious concerns about pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. In the current Presidential election, both contenders each exhibited at least four of the seven deadly sins. Nobody cares.

Today the seven deadly sins are racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, transphobia, climate change denial, and fat shaming.

The penalties for transgression are pretty much the same as ever: ostracism, loss of livelihood, expulsion from polite society, loss of friends, etc. Fortunately, burning at the stake has not yet been brought back into vogue.