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November 7, 2024. Columbus, on meeting the Arawaks, famously wrote that they were such saps that "with fifty men we could subjugate them all." That must be how Trump feels right now. While the Dems are trying really hard and failing, he's like, I can't believe how easy it is to rule these soft and guileless people.
Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.
Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.
Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.
November 19. 
Just got back from Ireland. We picked it because it was cheap. Airfare and hotel for two weeks in Dublin was about the same as for five nights in Hawaii. A few notes.
Dublin is a very walkable city. In a half mile radius there are more good bookstores than in the entire Seattle metropolitan area. We went to all of them, and found some great books, including Listen to the Land Speak by Manchan Magan. I'm always looking for books about weird stuff, and Magan does a great job of making premodern manifestations accessible to mainstream readers. My favorite chapter is about Hy Brasail, an island now considered completely mythical, but it once appeared on respectable maps, and reliable witnesses claimed to have landed there.
And in a bookstore heaped with unfiled books, Leigh Ann picked out a gem that's not even on AbeBooks, The Paranormal Explained by Sean O'Donnell. He explains it as "anti-memory", a framing of precognition that he claims is completely scientific. This is the kind of book I love. The guy is sort of a crackpot, but he's smart and curious, and has lots of tips for being more intuitive.
The best museum in Dublin, everyone agrees, is the Archaeology museum, which is free, and contains breathtaking prehistoric jewelry and some cool bog bodies. The best lesser known museum is 14 Henrietta Street, a fascinating guided tour through a building that started out as upper class and eventually became filthy tenements.
Everyone knows the Irish love Guinness, but I didn't know how much. If you go into a pub and see three Irishmen at a table with three drinks, it's more likely to be three pints of Guinness than all other possibilities combined. In America I drink red ale, but Irish red ale has not kept up and is pretty lame. But where American IPAs tend to hide mediocre beer behind loads of hops and alcohol, Irish IPAs are excellent, typically light and citrusy.
We tried a lot of restaurants, and the best was a Chinese small plates place called Bigfan. But it's expensive and hard to get into. The one we went back to was Forno 500, an Italian place with excellent pizzas and a perfect atmosphere. Also we spent three nights in the west of Ireland, and a great hidden gem in Galway is a Mayan tapas restaurant called Sangria.
November 22. She Is A Shaman is a slow-paced documentary about the lives of ayahuasca shamans in Peru, with great music. Just watching it inspires me to do things more slowly, but what I find most interesting is the wide range of technologies they use, from satellite TV to pounding roots with sticks. This is probably how it's going to be for the whole future of humanity, because there will always be some high tech around, but we're coming to the end of our ability to completely encase ourselves in the human-made world. By the way, the director of the movie is the girl from this video, the The "I Love You" Loop.
November 25. The other night I had insomnia and it was the best thing ever. Just chilling in silent darkness, reveling in having nothing to do, feeling the glow of my body, it was so good I didn't want to fall asleep and miss it. I listened to the siren song of tinnitus and wished the night would never end. Now I'm wondering, does that count as meditation?
November 27. Yesterday I had some cool synchronicity. Right after getting high, I was walking through the Seattle Center, and in front of the autistic fiddler was a guy prancing around and angrily ranting to his phone in a language that sounded like French. Obviously he was making a selfie video, and as I made my way around him, he turned so that I was in the background of the shot, and among the string of words I heard "Ey Prieur".
If I were a paranoid schizophrenic, I'd think I was at the center of a dark conspiracy. If I were a physicalist, I'd say it was meaningless, because my god, meaningless chance, could totally pull that off. Instead I figured I was close to the veil of the interconnectedness of all things, and fate was winking at me.
5) Somewhere I read that the best detox is a very deep outbreath. That's probably not true, but I tried it, squeezing hard to the bottom of my lungs, and it sure feels like a detox. At first I always cough, as my windpipe tastes the bad air at the bottom. After four or five purges, the breath goes smoothly. I try to do this once or twice a day, and since I started doing it, I have not developed any crud in my lungs, even during my last round of Covid.
6) I believe that grass fed butter is the healthiest fat, and I eat a lot of it. Coconut and avocado oil are probably also good, and olive oil is good if it's not fake. The worst fat is anything partially hydrogenated, especially cottonseed, which is full of free radicals. The second worst, I believe, is the industrial blend of sunflower-safflower-canola that is common in highly processed foods.
7) Get some sun. I believe the present sun phobia will go the way of fat phobia as the evidence accumulates. This is a good article with plenty of science, Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? It's still important to avoid burning, but in summer I use hats and sleeves rather than sunscreen, and in winter I do 5-10 minutes of sunbathing on every sunny day.
8) Every chance I get, I walk barefoot in dewy grass. I believe that it's good for my immune system, and it also provides electrical grounding.
December 5. Doom, starting with two Reddit sub-threads, about ocean fisheries collapsing and electrical linemen retiring.
On the level of political culture, I think Biden's pardon of his son, and the assassination of that health insurance CEO, are part of the same trend, and I don't think that trend is moral decline -- as if industrial civilization was ever moral. The trend is that the sphere of public spectacle is increasingly Machiavellian.
December 10. Yesterday I posted a new instructional video, Piano Polyrhythms and Phasing. I don't know how prolific YouTubers do it, or for that matter, teachers. It took me hours and hours to work out how to present the material, and then a bunch of takes of the video before I got one that was adequate. Polyrhythms are my piano obsession, and the one place where I might have something to teach an actual good player.
December 14. Quick note on the mystery drones. They are a manifestation of a level of reality that we don't understand. Like all UFO flaps, the sightings will stop and will mostly never be explained. The phenomenon always appears through the cultural filters of the time. See the Mystery airships of the 1890s.
December 30. 
There's a lot of sympathy for Luigi Mangione, which I share. But I want to go darker, and sympathize with someone whose crime was unjustifiable, but not meaningless, Abundant Life school shooter Natalie "Samantha" Rupnow. I imagine that school shooters share my sense of the wrongness of this world, and the role of school in breaking our spirits to make us part of it. But they usually don't explain themselves. The best thing I've read on the subject is this 2004 essay, Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere.
"The simplest Surrealist action," wrote the leader of the Surrealists in 1930, "is to go out on the street with two revolvers in one's fists and blindly shoot down as many as possible in the crowd."
Rupnow, a rare girl shooter, also left a rare explanation, a "manifesto" titled War Against Humanity. You can see screenshots in this Twitter thread, and I don't see anyone saying anything nice about it. At worst, it reminds me of incel shooter Elliot Rodger, a troubled person trying too hard to be evil. While insisting she's different, she falls into negativity in a normal way.
But it also contains some nuggets and some honesty. I love this sentence: "This situation and the situation of a lifetime is a get the fuck out moment and don't come back." And surely we've all felt like this: "I hate looking at some of the people in the society, and seeing what they are and what they do with their lives." This bit is pure comedy: "If only some days we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn't mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged." Admit it, did you smile?
At the end is some teenage Nietzsche: "The wolf hunts its prey and continues life with no other bruises or scars. There is no predator and prey anymore, it is all filth walking. There's nothing more with filth, it simply can't die or make hunts real if all they want is value."
Wolves get bruises and scars of course. "Other" means non-physical, and it's true, being human is a decades long ordeal of emotional and psychic bruises and scars, a far outlier among all life on Earth. If you replace "filth" with "industrial society" or "disenchanted modernity", and add "quantitative" to value, you can see that she's only lacking clever words. Here are some clever words from Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, saying the same thing:
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Enveloped in a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.
And from the killer, the motive:
I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole
I once had this time when I was young
You made me dig for so long and now I can't leave it