America is not a republic or a democracy or a democratic republic. It is a lie.

 Hey all, just wanted to make an observation of mine public:

What people think about when they think about America is one thing--a place of dreams where you can buy anything you want freely, where your possessions are protected, where there is stability and opportunity and jobs. A place where you have rights and the law man or the tax man can't just levy a tax and take away your things. 

And then there is what america actually is. 

In America, we have a three class system: at the top of the system is the 1%. Typically the 1% are self-made billionaires, which sounds like the American Dream, right? --Except the real path to reaching the 1% is to find a flaw in the system and exploit it until you make it on top and then close that exploit so that others can't repeat it. Many of the 1% come from wealthy families, its true, they come from the top 20% or even the top 10%, but the top 10% isn't unachievable. A hard-working and smart-investing family can rise from the bottom 5% to the top 10% during their life time and leave their children to carry the banner the rest of the way to the top 1%. So yes, in some ways, the American Dream is real, but before you settle in and feel good about things, lets focus back on the 1%. The top 1% of American society are cheaters. They are exploiters. They are liars and distorters, and they are ruthless. They put on a good show because the wealthiest of the wealthiest, Mark Zuk, Warren Buff, Elon Musk, Bill Gates--they all have a good PR. Many people love them--if not, they wouldn't be able to continue lying and cheating and getting away with things. --THAT is the American Dream. 

The next class is the politician. You're going to think this is the same old same old, so I'll spare you the details: Politicians are pigs and liars. You don't survive in politics by being a good person. If you don't accomplish something big in your first term, people forget about you and then don't vote fore you next go around unless you get lucky and your opponents are worse. Politicians get to stay in office by lying--and in a sick and twisted way they think that their lies are "For the better good" they think they are being ethical and that they're in the right, otherwise, why continue? Why be such a useless piece of shit and waste of space for society and yet continue to fill a role for society that requires you to at least listen to what the public is complaining about? --They all think they are heroes. They think that they're the only one who can push forward some idealized version of the future and they do everything they can to push for that future. It's actually quite pathetic because what we really expect a politician to be is to look after the current interests of the people in their jurisdiction, but the reality is that all politicians are looking out for future peoples who may or may not exist ever. Even when they succeed at bringing their vision for the future, the people they bring it for are too old or dead to really appreciate it. The reason for this is that you don't accomplish anything in politics without a mind for the long form. Everything a politician does is a long con in hopes of bringing a future about. The big problem is that they can't predict how people are going to be in the future and can't provide political wins for their future constituents. It sucks, but we're at least 10 or 20 years behind politically what we are socially on every front. Todays Boomers are starting to get the things they wanted 20 years ago, but now those boomers are leaving the workforce and in need to medical care--too bad they didn't care about taking care of the elderly 20 years ago, if they did, they would have elected people who would look for their retirement and make it a surety. Now, social security is a question, social trends hvae changed and their politicians are batting the wrong way and doomed to be scorned, and medical care is going to continue skyrocketing. 

LAstly, there is the working class. For all intents and purposes, the working class are really plebs. They're the 99%. The people who actually work, the people who do things for society and make sure "shit gets done." The plebs are all working for 1 of 2 things: retirement and death, or to accrue wealth to pass on to their kids and grandkids. The bottom 90% is so concerned about making it into the top 10% and the top 10% are either working to make it into the top 1% or to just make it to retirement. All this hard work that the plebs are doing just to survive causes them to forget that there is more to life than just working. They often just follow trends because they don't have time to think for themselves and develop a personality enough to set trends. Or they're so focused on the "Someday I'll retire..." and they work themselves to the bone to reach retirement only to die before they get to enjoy retirement. 

Meanwhile, our nation was founded to make the field more equal for everyone. It was supposed to do away with the ultra powerful king, the Absolute Monarch, the Dictator. Europe wasn't so bad anciently, there were many factions and the lack of centralized power made it so that someone on the outskirts could avoid the local lord's prying eye and then they could get away with things. Then monarchy progressed to where it became more stable to centralize the role and ultimately have just one king to rule the country. Then kings made alliances with other kings to protect their domains, and finally people rose up who had ambitions to rule the entire world, and the only way to do that would be to have absolute power within the nation. Thus, the Absolute Monarch was born in France. 

In the US, we started as several fractured states each with their own laws and forms of government. Eventually the states bonded together to support the idea of slavery and keep their economic power, but other states who had a conscious recognized that slave power isn't fair and isn't what the nation was founded on (remember? the idea that everyone is equal and can do whatever they want so long as they aren't hurting anyone--Liberty? Libertarianism? One of the great founding principles?). So they rallied under one leader who fought the civil war to make everyone equal again. The civil war was supposed to re-center the nation, and in many ways it did, but the politicians who pushed for it were doing so for the peoples of before the war. After the war there were more people, different people, freed people who had a different voice and different wants and needs. It took another 50+ years for those people to get hte right politicians in office who would push for their future. And then there was a counter push when those politicans finally made some ground and they restricted people again after 50 more years. And then there was a little bit more freedom and equality....

Some people describe this as the liberal pendulum or the progressive pendulum. Really, it comes down to the fact that American democracy doesn't accomplish anything quickly and by the time it accomplishes what people wanted now, the people who wanted it and had the majority and had the power--Those people--they're gone. And the new majority, the ones that are pissed off about this thing happening that htey don't agree with, then they form a movement that takes another 10-30 years and after that amount of time they get what they want. 

But I'm not the same as I was 10 years ago, or 20, or 30. 

What I want right now, I'm not sure if it will even be relevant in 30 years. 

Things I care about are climate mitigation, and in 30 years its too late. Removing the power that fossil fuels have on our nation would be great in 20 years, but I fear it might be too late. Damage will be done and we can't go back to the environment we had when I was a child. I care about personal liberty--not liberty over all but Personal Liberty. I think what I do with my personal property, my body, my toothbrush, the items in my inventory, should be completely up to me. I think anything that is connected cell-to-cell to my body should be under my jurisdiction, but me in 20 years might change my mind once people start adding circuity to their bodies to enhance their abilities so that they can become super beings and purge the earth of non-super beings. Or genetically modify themselves. --Yeah, I might change my mind in 20 years and say there are limits. That said, I don't know the future and no body does, and even if somebody could accurately see the future, no one now would understand it enough to  care to invest in it for the rest of humanity. Instead, one of the 10% would exploit it so that they could be the 1% and then close it off so that no one else could benefit from it. 

Sorry if this is classist. Sorry if this is doom-and-gloom. 

I just think America has failed. It has failed to give people what they want, which is what they want right now, not later. And when they get it later, it's contrary to what the people of the then-now want. So if you live in the present, you're getting something you don't want that someone else wanted and you'll have to wait to get the thing that you actually want and you may not live to get it. A better form of government or social structure would be one that can give you what you want right now, or one that can predict what you will want in the future and give it to you when that future occurs. 

I almost wonder if it isn't possible to design laws in a way that they are triggered by future predicted events and that we can change those laws up until they happen so that they can be modified to be exactly what we will need.  Like: a law 50 years ago would have been nice "in case" global warming surpassed an average of 1 degree C. Then suddenly fossil fuel is forced to scale down. If it was on the books, the fossil fuel industry would be prepared for it and less people would be investing in it if they saw the temperature rising 0.5C or 0.75C because they'd realize there was a limit to it.

Maybe we could write a law on how we would treat an alien species if one was discovered, and until then, we wouldn't have to do anything other than leave it on the books. 

But I digress. That's a reality I will never live in. People barely have forethought to save money for retirement, why would they have the forethought to prepare for something that might happen? 

Economics and Capitalism II

 I can sense and understand that our method of Economics and Capitalism is a problem, but I'm really struggling to wrap my head around a solution...

It seems like a pretty important thing in life, and possibly something that people wouldn't expect just one person to find a solution for, but I think many great writers and thinkers have, individually, come up with solutions for these great pressing problems of our time.

So I'm sitting here at the "why" stage--I know why it's not working, I also know THAT it's not working. But now I need to move into the stage of where do we go from here?

It's really hard to articulate this, but I'm really noticing in every conversation people have that is economics related or capitalism related just how bad those things are. Our understandings of economics is so ingrained into people that they don't realize there could be alternatives. Take for instance when people assign value to something: their first instinct is to say that the value is based on what someone will pay for it. That supply and demand is the main generator of value then. --That's not accurate, and that would put Marx's theory in some strange water because then the controlers of the means of production are those people who can create demand. It puts power in society into the hands of PR firms, Marketeers, and Sales people, which are an end product of value not a begining product. Those people sell created value, they don't create value to sell!

And capitalism. We often associate capitalism with corporate capitalism, or the public's ownership of public companies. But we have seen where that line of argument leads: corporations are treated like people rather than entities controlled by people. People use their ownership in companies as leverage for other things, even leveraging the assumed value of the corporation (although it is unrealized) to generate value. They offer up their shares are collateral to private investors who lend them money and in effect create value out of nothing. This is economic capitalism at its finest, but that doesn't mean there is actual value there. There is no real value to those deals yet people believe into them and it causes the economic engine to turn--generating increased value from nothingness! How can this be sustainable? How can this be equitable? It's no wonder there are so many huckers in the world today--so many people pitching lies to accumulate wealth--because that is in effect tapping into a limitless source of economic power: the belief of a lie that says there is value in something when there isn't! 

What's more, when we take a step back, no one has really put much thought into whether running this economic engine for the long-haul is actually beneficial to people? Is it? Is it beneficial to everyone or just a select few, because it seems to me like it is another form of propaganda, no different from religion. Economics is the new religion. Religion was the old method for controlling the masses and even, eventually, for controlling kings. The new method is economics. Kings rise and fall based on that "Economic engine," and not all kings hold geographic holdings in the same way that they did back 500 years ago. Some kings own corporations. 

What a lie this world is. What an illusion! What a waste. We humans are such a wasted species. We rely on fiction, we build our whole world on fiction, we are fiction. Is it really a human trait to look at the truth and turn away from it only to embrace a fiction that is more digestible? 

Economic Capitalism The problem of All of Us

The Climate Crisis may kill us all, and because we have already reached the tipping point--even though people don't want to admit it--humanity will be facing many changes and what society looked like 10 years ago is not what it will look like 50 years from now. It has already changed in many ways, too many ways. 

I suppose the rest of my thought pieces on this site are going to reflect the fact that we have a finite amount of years on this planet. Humanity used to change at a steady pace, but the rate of change has been exponentially growing and we are now approaching an infinite rate of change. What that means is chaos, anarchy. When we hit that point, everything is up in the air and whether we escape from it or not is dependent on whether humans are inherently good, or inherently bad; but the fact that we reached that point in the first place says that we are inherently bad. And by bad I mean, predominantly those negative traits that people think of.

Which leads me to the topic I wanted to write about:

Our current method of economics is fatally flawed and is directly tied into the flawed side of capitalism. The flawed side of capitalism is the side that over-exploits, seeks profit above all else, emphasizes and rewards greedy behavior, and leads to only a select few bubbling to the surface. 

This is flawed because it presumes that there is such a thing as "best of the best" in regards to human beings, yet anyone who studies humanity will tell you that humans greatest trait is that their weaknesses are actually strengths when pooled as a collective. The flawed capitalism concepts have been pushed throughout history, arrogantly, for centuries under different names like imperialism, or colonialism, serfdom, tributaries, and despotism. Capitalism is being wielded by greedy individuals to amass power, and unfortunately, Capitalism has done a much better job of it that its predecessors. 

As the rate of societal changes continues to press forward though, Capitalists ought to be quivering right now because social change is inevitable and just as the Rome was built and fell on the backs of the refugees it created though its wars, or how Imperialism crested and then was replaced, so too will capitalism die and be replaced and the people who it served will be forgotten.

Economics is presently a tool of capitalism. Money, currency, fiat, all representations of economics and not something tangible. Economics is founded on a principle that growth means more and loss means less. One flaw to economics-thinking is that it attempts to explain the resources of a finite world as though they are infinite. Infinite growth is impossible. In a natural system, there are a finite number of resources and the value of those resources don't go up when they run out, the value plateaus at a maximum value that I would coin "survival maximum." It is the price that one pays to survive--to live--which cannot be greater than the value of their life. Animals have a survival maximum the same as humans, yet economics undervalues them substantially. Plants, even bacteria have a survival maximum. Just because we can wipe out an organism relatively easy, doesn't mean that it's survival maximum is the same as the cost to wipe out said organism. The value of a wine culture is not the value of a campden tablet used to kill it off before bottling the wine, and yet the same approach is applied in many instances of the economics world. 

Wild animals that are often hunted for sport or sustenance do everything in their power to outwit the hunter, and yet the ecological services that these animals provide far surpass the lead and gunpowder used to kill them. How easy it is to destroy something that took so much to build, and yet, destruction or threat of destruction has been used for eons as a means to devalue resources and snatch them up well under their true economic value. 

Economics can never accurately value a living organism, and because of that inadequacy, it will always lead of false pretenses. Economics, by nature of being a faulty system, is therefore inadequate for most of the tools it has been used for. If anything, the only merit that economics serves is to deceive the unwitting into offload highly valuable tangibles and real property into the hands of master deceivers. 

After the thousands of years that money has been around--the prerequisite to economics--I think now is a good time to start developing a system to replace it. Some people have proposed cryptocurrency, but it is only a further expansion of the flaws of economics because it relies on economics for its very existence--moreso than previous currencies. Instead, we either need to latch our currency onto semi-infinite sources of energy, such as the sun, or do away with currency altogether. And yet, if we manage to harness the power of the sun and create infinite energy, there may no longer be a need for currency.

Sadly, the easiest alternative to currency is worldly power and political structures, and when society hits the chaos stage, those with amassed worldly and political power will attempt to base currency on this resource they believe they have an abundance of. "Favors" will attempt to replace "money,"  and yet that will not suffice because it has never been a stable nor a long-term solution. 

This all sounds like I am suggesting we all switch to a "wild" life, supposedly moving out into the bush to live off the land like our ancestors, but sadly we have never lived a sustainable lifestyle in the wilds. Human evolution has assured us that forming society is one of our greatest attributes as a species because it pools our weaknesses for certain traits and collaborates them with others' strengths. Living in smaller communities out in nature only gives a face-lift to the problem we are all facing--those people who live that lifestyle face the same problem, but they approach it in a different way and believe that they have evaded the "rat-race." Instead of competing with other humans over resources deemed valuable, they are competing against wild animals (who they perceive to be inferior to themselves) or Nature (who they perceive to be superior). At least in modern society, humans recognize that their greatest threats are their fellow humans--nature has been tamed as much as it can be and wild animals no longer pose a threat, but some humans are perceived as inferior and others as superior. The wild man or woman is merely avoiding facing his or her inadequacies and staring down the problem at hand and doing something about it. They are choosing to engage in selfish human behavior by focusing on their own survival and abandoning the global community at a very challenging time and I don't see that as a valid solution. 

We are all facing Nature. Nature hasn't been tamed. It is bigger than all of us and by attempting to tame it we have destroyed it. As Nature dies, it will destroy everything in its grasp, including all humans who so arrogantly thought that they could conquer it. 

Societal Perspective

 I thought I would write up some thoughts I've been having lately about society. *eye roll* another one of those posts...

Sorry if this sounds edgy:

I think American society is on a brink right now, we just haven't realized it yet. And honestly, it needs to happen. 

But hopefully it will happen in the best way possible and not the worst, because there are a lot of avenues to a bad outcome and only a few to a good one.

Sounds cryptic? 

America has become a land of capitalism solely. Our democracy (democratic republic if you will) is neither a democracy nor a republic. The wealthy control so much in government and they compete with one another for more power. The only saving grace for commercial take-over is the complexity of the system. Yes, the checks and balances work some of the time, but they are more of a check dam before the actual dam, and right now the waters of greedy capitalism are inundating politik. 

It really does stem from capitalism. I appreciate capitalism, but I think the scale has tipped too far in favor of the capitalist. People perceive money as life. At all levels. All races, all classes, all categories of people see money as the definition of life. This is not the truth, but rather it is a construct that has been implanted into our minds. It is an idea that has tainted our happiness. People perceive money to be the measure of a person's life. Wealth is all that people can talk about. But capitalism is more than money, it's about "capitalizing" which appears to be an extension of imperialism. It is the control over the production capabilities and domination. 

People seem to think that capitalism is solely about money, but in fact, when capitalists have capitalized in their field they always expand--expansion is in fact an aspect of capitalism, though they call it "diversifying". 

So lets define capitalism: Capitalism is the investment of resources in order to get a return on those resources. Currency is the exchange unit, though it isn't a universal unit because it varies regionally and across time. Energy is a more universal unit of exchange between mediums, but capitalists haven't quite figured out how to capitalize on it in a stable way or I'm sure they would use that instead.

The people, or inheritors of those people, who made daring investments a long time ago have gained the returns on those investments which has provided them with a sufficient pool of this exchange medium (currency). With currency they are able to expend those resources on whatever they want, though as they continue to be capitalists, they invest more in order to gain more, and when they have tapped as much as they can from one source they diversify to another source or another industry. And they don't stop and they assign heirs to do the job after they are gone. 

Some capitalists are corporations--or rather an organization or group of people who are all capitalists and who share in the wealth gains of the corporation, but don't share any responsibility for their capitalist decisions. If something goes great, they get praise and financial benefits and greater decision making latitude. If it goes wrong, they don't lose out financially, they don't have to personally pay any fines and worst case scenario they get fired from their position as CEO or COO or CTO or whatever executive position they held. After getting fired, they get poached onto some other board, or if they were a good capitalist they were diversified and are already sitting on other boards which tehy retain their position in. 

The American government was once founded on a different kind of ideals. There were certain human principles incorporated into the minutia of the government, but over time, capitalists realized they could even capitalize on government. They've infiltrated the election process and now it is the richest candidates who win elections. Those who invest the most money into the greatest returns and actualize those returns are the winners of government power. 

*phew*. 

This is hard for me to speak about because I understand what is occurring in a non-language. I will need to keep both a dictionary and an encyclopedia handy if I'm to even communicate this. 

Tangent: I used to believe that you could only think about and understand what you could communicate, but I think that is only true to an extent. I think our brains are fantastic and that they have a way of understanding things that they've maybe only once seen or heard and can form connections that our conscious minds didn't realize were even connected. Call it intuition, call it the subconscious, but it's really just the connection making ability of the brain.

Back to my opening statements:

I think American society is on a brink. Financially, the markets don't seem right: if businesses are supposedly struggling to hire people, yet unemployment is low, yet businesses are still operating as normal and those businesses that are up and running are making profits, right? Then is there really a problem? And yet, people are supposedly not working? Who is paying the bills? Who is earning money to pay bills? Are people offloading their savings? I Thought they didn't have savings? See. None of that makes sense. Socially, people are still distraught. Covid is still impacting our lives and the threat is still out there. People are still refusing to get vaccinated. Things have calmed down, but I don't think they are really calm. Inflation is setting in. And it almost seems like we are sitting in the eye of the storm beliving that everything will end up alright when it's only just begun. It seems something's got to give? 

Manipulation

Intro

 I want to make an argument that:

All manipulation can be broken down into 3 methods: putting people down, lying, and distorting facts or truth.

I think society has an unhealthy obsession with manipulation. They try to claim narcissism on everyone, they blame other people for tricking them or they make other people into the bad guy, but I don't think that 100% of the time that someone calls another person out for being a manipulator that they are being accurate. I've tried to stress my whole life that being accurate is very important because if you approach a problem with a person from the perspective that they are a master manipulator and they aren't, then you won't accomplish anything, you won't make headway. On the other hand, if you approach them as what they are, maybe selfish, maybe an asshole, you'll be able to work on that. 

So again, I think we should be accurate and I think there's a lot of fluff out there about manipulation. Doing a google search you'll pull up countless websites on how to determine if someone is manipulating you, but you will be hard to find any articles explaining how to tell if someone else is being manipulated. These two aren't the same thing. The signs that someone is being manipulated are different from the signs that someone is manipulating you, and the signs that someone is manipulating someone else are different from the signs that you are being manipulated. Hence why I propose this new method of thinking about manipulation.

Before I explain it, let me make a preface: I became preoccupied with manipulation a long time ago and have spent at least 10 years of my life trying to avoid being manipulative. Before that 10 years, I think I fell into the trap of toxic masculinity and in my teenage years I learned how to manipulate without realizing I was learning how to manipulate people. When I got into university, I learned through studying English how to write persuasive papers and how to twist claims in a way to always win, but I also learned that it is wrong to do this and I've read plenty of literature that explores why it is wrong to manipulate, a few good examples are Shakespeare's work, Macbeth, Othello, even King Leer. At the same time that I was learning about what are called fallacies in argument, I was taking a course on ethics and I learned the philosopher's path to being ethical, Kant, Utilitarianism, etc. The arguments presented by people like Aristotle and Plato for why we should focus on an ethical life I could not find any fallacies in them and believe them to be genuine and logically sound, so I choose to follow an ethical life and by combining the two: understanding manipulative speech and being ethical, I have spent at least 10 years of my life (since I was 18) trying not to manipulate people. 
I also served an LDS mission following my university instruction on the matter and I had some serious problems with the way the religion is spread and preached. I struggled on my mission and went home 4 months early because I had a huge "crisis of faith" or "moral dilemma" or "ethical quandary." I eventually left the religion because I believe I found too many fallacies and unexplained ethical dilemmas in the way the religion is conducted. In short, I believe 99% of the Mormon religion utilizes manipulation to get people to join, contribute, and stay in the church, and if the basis of the organization is that a solely benevolent (always good and ethical) god runs the church, then it makes no sense why even 5% of the religion would focus on manipulative tactics.

So that's my claim of why I feel I am qualified to speak about this topic. I've devoted my life to it, I have experience and have witnessed it on both ends, and the longer I devote to it the more I recognize manipulation.

The Argument

The claim I am making is that all manipulation comes down to 3 forms: 

1. Lying
2. Distorting facts and truth
3. Putting down

I have a hard time combining lying and distorting facts because I think there is enough difference between them that they should be separate.

Lying is telling falsehoods or failing to tell the truth when prompted. I feel as though there needs to be a criterion here to say that there is a difference between knowingly lying and unwittingly lying. I think it's hard to unwittingly lie, so maybe these should be thrown out, because if you don't know something is true and you act as if it is or believe that it is, I don't think you are necessarily manipulating people, I think you yourself have been deceived. If you tell someone something as if it were a fact even when you know it is not a fact, you are lying. If someone asks you a question and you knowingly tell them something else, you are lying. Most people understand lying and understand some of the problems with it. When it comes to manipulation, lying is manipulation because you can get people to act in your favor simply because they trust you. 

I should maybe take a step back and say that I believe there are two types of manipulation: manipulation that brings the manipulator benefit, and manipulation that brings someone else negative side effects. In other words, if you get a thrill from convincing people to do things contrary to what they would do, you are manipulating them because you gain from it psychologically, even if they benefit from the manipulation as well. Or, if you cause someone harm by convincing them to take certain actions, you are manipulating them. --Of course, both of these examples are prefaced by whether you are using one of the three forms of manipulation. For a good example, lets imagine you convince a friend to invest in the stock market believing that it will benefit them. You do so with no ulterior motives, you don't stand to gain from it in any way personally, and you're doing it to help them. If somehow the gamble does not pan out and they lose a lot of money, I don't think you are manipulating them because it doesn't meet one of the three form criterion, even if it meets the type criterion. 

Distorting facts is a little different from lying though if you obsess over nuances I suppose you could say it is a form of lying. Distorting facts occurs when you purposefully change past facts, or you cause another person to doubt those facts. Lawyers do this all the time, and it often does not pass ethical standards, even though they claim that it is unethical to punish an innocent person and they see letting a guilty person go free as less unethical than punishing that innocent person. We can all think of a few cases where a guilty person went free and the long-standing consequences of letting that person go free has touched so many people that I think it breaks utilitarian ethics. You don't necessarily have to lie to distort a fact, you can merely cause a person to question what they believe, or you can present them with things to think about that have no solution. A good example that comes to mind is when religions tell you to act on faith even though there is no way to prove that your faith leads to positive outcomes, they merely want you to believe and trust in hopes that one day things will work out. This is manipulative because it causes people to disregard negative outcomes in their life and in many cases it never brings positive outcomes--the understanding is that after death those positive outcomes will come, but no one can argue about what happens after death because no one has been there and come back from it--except for me, I drowned when I was a toddler and they brought me back to life in the hospital. And No, I can't tell you what it was like. 

There isn't a problem with faith based arguments, the problem is when those arguments are used to cause people to ignore problems in the present. If you convince someone that they need to break up with their partner because their partner is causing them to sin, and your argument is that they just need to have faith--then you are being manipulative (this really happened to a good friend of mine.) 

Putting down seems to be one of the ultimate means for manipulating people. I don't claim to understand completely why it works, but I do claim to know how it works. When you put someone down, it is a direct assault on their self confidence. Self confidence is what we rely on most to make decisions. If you lack self confidence, self trust, or self worth, you doubt your decision making ability. They are directly related: trusting in your self and decision making, believing you have value and decision making, and "going with your gut" or your instincts and decision making. When enough people put you down, or someone you trust immensely puts you down, you start to believe it, it impacts your self esteem, and then you struggle to make decisions. Once you are weak in that way, the manipulator can convince you to take actions. A former U.S. President was notorious for manipulating in this way. He would convince people that they were inadequate and blame it on certain oppressions by the government or by certain laws that favored minority groups. He would then build those groups up using false statements about how "beautiful" they were, or how great they are or how great they will be, that had no logical standing--it was a distortion of truth manipulation because there was no way to argue simply because they weren't specific enough or because they were opinion. He then would issue a target to these people: "The other party is trying to take away your guns!" and sometimes outright lie to do so, "These people are coming across the border and taking your jobs." And in that way he manipulated the masses into doing atrocious things that make me question my own patriotism. His method of putting down started with saying that America isn't great or wasn't great at the time, when if you look at the statistics and you look at key moments in American history, America was probably at its greatest just before he took office. But he caused us to doubt ourselves. He tore down our confidence and our trust in ourselves and in our government, and then he convinced us to act in a way that brought about a lot of negative outcomes and benefited him personally (financially*, emotionally, etc.) 

Final Thoughts

Just as a final note, I wanted to test out my argument using a common term that people agree is manipulaiton: Gaslighting. 

Gas lighting falls under the #2 form of manipulation though it usually encompasses all 3. Gas lighting is lying about facts or distorting past events and denying denying denying. It causes you to mistrust your ability to perceive and think about past events. And Yes, gas lighters knowingly lie about the past in order to manipulate you. I think there are probably a lot of manipulation terms that we use that can be applied to this framework of what manipulation is and I trust that this framework is adequate for defining manipulation in all forms.

One drawback I see to this framework of recognizing manipulation is that it doesn't speak to anything about how a manipulator can build you up with false confidence.--I think that falls more under the category of distorting the truth, or lying, but I can foresee people reading this and wanting to put that in its own category.

The benefit to this framework is that you can apply it to yourself "Am I being manipulated?" as well as other people "Is he/she being manipulated?" Just watch the suspected manipulator carefully and if they are doing any of these three things, then you merely decide if they are benefiting or if the person being manipulated is suffering negatively from those methods and if so, then yes they are being manipulated.

Sickness

I couldn't think of an immediate title for this post. It's been a long time since I've had the time to write much of anything for myself--and that's what this website is...a place for me to voice my thoughts to myself in a manner much like someone thinking outloud. The difference is that what I write can be read for years later.
I'll admit, this isn't the most sane thing to do considering people could look me up and possibly find this and some of the crazy ideas I've had and probably they could misinterpret them as though they are thoughts are currently share. I don't go back and read these very often. This is kind of a public journal, but it's funny because few people write journals to read themselves--more often their kids or family end up reading them or even their ancestors or people who want to know the dead.
I wonder if anyone will read all of these posts and come up with some grand theme or a common thread that all of them share--that would be really cool really, so if you are doing something like this, let me know, or if I'm dead then come to my grave and let me know because what you would be doing is summing up a rare part of my life throughout the years. You would essentially know me more than I know myself!
I just don't think anyone has that kind of time and although some of my ideas are extreme or cutting edge at the time, most of them are not so edgy anymore and most of them are more rants than gems. I might even feel bad for the person that takes the time to analyze these or make inferations from what I've written because there are so many more enjoyable things one could do with their life.

---There. That's all the intro you get to explain away the last several months since I've posted anything.

What I really wanted to write out was how I have that sick sick feeling again in my soul. That disgusting, creepy, black abyss that I sometimes catch a glimpse of as though this ship I call my body is about to set sail right into because I'm getting sucked further and further into it without any means of escaping. --Yet somehow I always find a way out of it, so there's also a bit of excitement to the whole thing and anticipation of when I will shift from darkness to blinding light.

What could be making me so sick to the core? What could be causing this weird hormonal imbalance?

If you HAVE been reading all of my posts up to the present then you'd understand that the thing that weighs me down is the world. Is people. Is bad people. Is people who disrupt my fun-loving, my peaceful, my cheery life.

Let's recap:
It's almost my wedding day. I've been succeeding in my schoolwork to the point that I'm sitting on a covetous GPA. I have the whole world ahead of me and truly feel as though there is nothing I can't do. I've reinforced those long known thoughts that: "If I put my mind to anything, I can accomplish everything." Things are looking up for me! Truly, they are!

Yet maybe I've been exposed to some bad pollutants and that's what's triggering me to see this sick thing and want to just crawl under the bed or hid out in the crawl space just to get away from it all.


People are disgusting.


Now that I'm old enough to say this, I think I'm going to say it: I've lived a very innocent and benevolent life. I used to think I was corrupt at times, mean, rude, selfish and all of those negative traits that people generalize about themselves. Yet, I really have not. I've never been to jail. I've only been drunk once in my life. I haven't had a speeding ticket in years. I don't lie and don't have a reason to lie--actually, let me correct myself: I lie, but it's nothing major and I'm so truthful that I actually paused and was going to correct myself but decided it was better effect to just append my statement about lying. I've never taken advantage of anyone even though it would have been sooo soooo easy to do so. I haven't done that because I have way more restraint than anyone I know. I've never stolen in my adult life--probably the last thing I've stollen in my life was my classmates tomagachi in 3rd grade. I've never done drugs, not even soft, legal drugs, never taken oxy, never been around people that take molly or ecstasy. Never even taken an ambien. I take two ibuprophen when I'm in pain and that's it, maybe some coffee to clear my head now and again. I've cut back on sugar to the point that I almost rarely eat candy. --I am a model citizen and proof that you can be good and still exist in life.

And yes, it's very easy to do it.
It's not that I haven't had opportunities. Its that I know my vice and I keep it in check, every day of my life, and all of those other things aren't appealing to me.

Wow--that was quite the backstory.


So my question is, with all that I've experienced in life, why is it so easy for other people to do these disgusting things. Why do our institutions reek of filth and corruption? Why do people get away with so many crooked things and there is no means to stop them?
I really am not okay with this.

I think one thing that hit me hard this week is the wages of nurses--RNs in particular.
They have a minimum of an associates degree and 1 year of experience and yet they make $25/hr starting pay. Yet you can be a janitor, cleaning up not just the shit people leave in the toilets but also the disgusting behaviors of people who purposely wipe their feces all over the bathroom just to give you more work. We've got so-called "essential" employees working behind cash registers that could easily catch disease from the creeps that purposely try to get people sick and they get paid $9/hr where I live. How about being a skyrise welder, wearing a harness and messing with both flames and high voltage just to weld a beam 100 ft in the air--those guys make around $25/hr in the height of their career and also have to go through about 18 months of training plus a year of experience or more. Compare that to the pay of government scientists with master's or doctor's degrees--they get $28/hr starting pay and know a hell of a lot more.
I just don't see the value here. I'm not sure if that part of my brain that is able to gage the value of something is just turned off or what, but I really don't see the value that RNs provide to society. Most RNs are working in a vanity industry trying to prolong the life of an individual who isn't able to support the community. I think people have an obsession with long life and that disturbs me, it disgusts me. I just don't think nurses are worth what they get paid.
Then again, I don't think doctors are worth what they are paid either, I think doctors are paid more based on the risk they take rather than the value they generate, and I think there's some degree of hyperinflation based on the fact that people will pay anything just to live longer, which to me is an ethical concern that doctors really should think long and hard about instead of settling on "That's just the way it is." But do nurses really have to take risks? Maybe physical risks and mental/emotional risks, but the magnitude of those risks really don't seem like enough to constitute being paid so highly.

I've also recently found out the nuances of hiring federal government positions: veterans, former federal employees, they all get privileged status for jobs over regular civilians. Is that ethical? does it really promote the best person working in these important federal jobs? What about on the local level--in many counties and cities, the community's taxes go to supporting cornies--friends and family of current managers of these places or political appointees.

Why do people garner power and then instantly abuse that power? Where have ethics gone?
I'm really disturbed by this and I am honestly starting to think that our civilization will fall apart in my lifetime because of these very bad bad things.

I really do not want to live in this world.

Ethics of Terraforming our planet and beyond

I read an interesting article about terraforming Mars, which has peaked the interest of the philosophy world. I won't get into that particular article but suffice it to say that there is a debate between whether it is ethical or not to alter the surface of a planet. The particular article I read summarized some other views and then presented that so long as there are no living organisms on the planet they contended that it was ethical to alter the planet because it would bring about greater knowledge of our own planet.

I guess that conversation is very far removed from the world we live in (earth), but it got me thinking about our planet...

Humans aren't the first living creatures on Earth. One theory submits that the original life on earth wasn't developed on earth but rather escaped some other planet and survived on an asteroid that impacted earth.

Another unique aspect of Earth is that it is in fact unique--the more that astronomers look out into the universe, the more they find rocks that are nothing like our own and those rocks appear to be common, yet our Earth, a pale blue dot, has an abundance of water. Lots of rapid change from weathering and from life(ok that's a cheat because we're the only planet we know with life :P) . A unique atmosphere. Basically, the more astronomers look into space the more they realize that our planet is uniquely suited to house life and yet those other planets and asteroids and moons are inhospitable.

So that gets me thinking. If these other planets aren't suited for life at the present moment, what good are they? Are they nothing more than intergalactic monuments? Nature's art? Points in space that are good for nothing more than to look at for a brief moment and then to look away to something more interesting?

The universe is vast and incomprehensible in it's entirety. If a person had the ability to spend a day on one celestial body per day and then travel to another body in mere moments and on that new hunk of rock they could explore and enjoy and exist, they would still only experience a tiny speck of what is actually out there, and yet if you look at life as a sensory experience that you are limited in how many experiences you have, then the universe is irrelevant because it is so large that you could never experience it all.

My point is, I think from a utilitarian point of view, there is not a lot of utility out there that we know of in outer space. Our planet is very much usable in its present state for whatever we wish, and it appears to have the capacity to heal itself given enough time.

The great fear that most people have is that what we are doing to the Earth is altering it in a way that will destroy all life on the planet. I guess there is a fear that we will ruin this great gem we have and make it unusable and then it will become just like all the other planets in the universe.

Thinking of it in that manner, I return to my original statement: Humans weren't the first living organism on earth. Though some people might say "we have as much a claim to this earth as any other living organism", I disagree. --It is difficult to explain in words here a concept I am trying to explain, so try to take this next part for its bigger meaning than the base words I will use.--I believe that we have as much of a claim on the earth as we can wage war with other living organisms to take it.
In a cubic yard of soil there are many many organisms, and above that soil there may be many many more organisms, all living and existing in very close proximity to one another--some even on top of one another. Those organisms appear to work in concert with one another, where one produces more wastes, another comes in to get rid of those wastes. There is a sort of market economy of life existing in this very small area.
That said, humans come along and they alter their surroundings for themselves. Much like the earthworm or the ant moves debris from the surface and feeds on it, thereby altering its surroundings, the human exists as one component of a bigger part of this planet.
Do you think the earthworm knows of the presence of the human working the surface of the field above it? Do you think the human knows of the presence of whatever force is shaping above it?

Cue Pocahontas music: "You can own the Earth and still all you'll own is earth until you can paint with all the colors of the wind."

What if the universe was moving in a direction that we cannot comprehend just yet because we are so tiny? What if we--and all life--play a role in the universe on a grander scale of time that we cannot see because we don't live long enough?


I think the Earth is inherently balanced.
I think it would be difficult for us as a species to go extinct because we know too much about the workings of our Earth and other life on it and can utilize that knowledge to remain alive. --Maybe not all of us, but some of us will always persevere.
However, what part could a resource hogging human being that severely alters the environment, destroys other species play?

Fair Distribution of Wealth

To follow up with my previous articles on this subject, I want to present my idea for "redistributing" wealth--even though it isn't "re-" distribution because I don't think it would be fair in any way to take away the wealth of someone who has already accumulated it.

What I do think is fair, is placing limits on how much an individual can earn in proportion to other people who aid in the production of that wealth.

For instance, McDonald's CEO earned 3,101 times that of the median employee, 1.2M times for Amazon's Jeff Bezos. --These numbers are preposterous.
I'm not opposed to the leader and financer making a large profit, but even pirates shared the wealth equally among themselves--this is worse than piracy, this is robbery.

Full disclosure: I invest in the stock market and believe in the American Dream. I believe in retirement by riding off of and taking part in the American Economy. However, I've been in the sorry situation before where my wages didn't cover my expenses. I think they call that underemployment, where you earn some money but it's not enough and you need to make more to keep on living. --Honestly, I don't know how I survived and now that I'm away from it and I have various mental and physical benefits from not having that stress in my life, I think I should turn back and say that this disproportionate distribution of wealth is not sustainable nor is it ethical.

My suggestion is that we place limits on the amount of money anyone can make on the backs of another human being. That includes the stock market, though I don't know how to make that work logistically speaking. If you invest money into a company and you make say 1000X or more what that company's median salary is, you should be required to pay (all or part of) the taxes of those individuals who earn less than that median salary.

So if you invest in McDonalds and you report earning more than $10/hr, you should be required to pay from your profit (say if the value of the stocks went up by $1,000 in the year) You should be required to pay the tax bracket rate that they get paid--in this case they are paid $10/hr which falls in %12 range, so you pay $120 divided by all of those employees (which comes down to like 1 cent per person).
But that one cent per person times the total number of people who gained $1000 off of the growth of McDonalds, plus all the Officers and personal investors who own the company, these indivduals could actually take home money (yes, I'm saying that they should be paid more than just their taxes, but I'd settle on them being paid just all of their taxes, which does amount to a significant portion of their salary.

Redistribution of Wealth and Death

Redistributing wealth after a person dies only perpetuates a world where there are wealthy individuals who remain wealthy--this is the world we live in presently. In the social world we have created for thousands of years, kings would give their power and wealth to their children (primarily sons because of tradition and bias) and those children would increase the household wealth, giving their children the incentive to please their father so that they can be held "worthy" of the amassed wealth.

Redistributing wealth before a person dies is also problematic. In the unique situation where a wealthy king or capitalist did not have heirs, he or she could opt to choose someone to be their stand-in heir. This involves a lot of political intrigue. Many of Shakespeare's plays explored the problems with this type of wealth and power redistribution.


After-Death Redistribution (ADR) of wealth favors the cheats of the world, the aggressive, the liars, so on and so forth--people who break society's rules to gain wealth. It favors such lowlifes because if they are not the wealthy powerful king or tycoon, in order for them to compete and rise to a level comparable with their local wealthiest person, they must cheat in order to rise at rapid enough of rate as to surpass or maintain the distance between the two of them!--If you are wealthy and invest your wealth, because you have more money to invest, you will gain more than the person who invests a small amount and gains the same rate of yield as you do.
With this form of wealth progression, wealth in society dumbs down to who can manage their money the best so that they mitigate losses and maximize gains, as well as who can exploit the system so that they maximize their gains more than the next highest person. --And all you have to do to see the effects of this is look in any national newspaper in 2018. Investment Bankers cheating the poor by writing up fake loans so that the shares of their stocks are padded. Rulers of countries changing the laws to support their own agendas or that of their cronies. Corrupt police and investigative forces throughout the world who discover criminals making lots of money and so they blackmail and coerce them into working for them instead of their selfish interest. You even see management and company officers who earn 120 times of that which their blue-collar, producer workers earn.--The people who actually make the product are being exploited by those who, in many instances, don't even know the intricacies of how the product is made.
It is this kind of exploitation that we as a society would like to eliminate, but every attempt to do so is thwarted and then exploited by the cheats of the world. 

A few more forward thinking individuals have decided that they will give ALL of their wealth after-death to charitable organizations, and although this is a good step, it will not solve this problem. This is merely a middleman attempt at Redistribution Before a Person Dies (RBD). Such billionaires turn over their wealth to an appointed heir rather than a blood heir, the only difference is that the appointed heir is an organization of people rather than one individual, such as a non-profit charitable foundation.
Just like in olden days when the king would declare an heir after much political intrigue and cheating to get ahead, today's RBD billionaires are merely creating an environment where only a select few who reach a specific requirement receive the previously acquired wealth of one person.--Who determines where the money goes? If it's a board of individuals, that's better than a solitary president or financial manager, but it also creates a desirable position to be fought for where one or a couple people are rewarded with wealth or power to mete out wealth and power to other individuals as they see fit. Which, again, leads to exploitation, cheating, and gaming of this kind of system.

Regardless of whether you redistribute your wealth after death or before death, you are still in charge of who receives your wealth. You still choose who to give your money and power to and that opens the door for unfairness.--You may have earned your money from hard work, determination, guts, intense risk, and shrewd decision making, but whoever you give money to did not earn that money, and the rest of the world who did not receive that money unfairly must live in a competitive world where Privilege gives a competitive advantage to a select few.
Socialists of hundreds of years ago saw the problem with this system and were outraged enough to form political parties that would rob from the rich and give to the poor, but that wasn't a fair outcome for the rich--regardless of whether 100% of the money was earned or not, it is not fair to take the money right out of their hand because those people believe that it is the hard work and decision making and skill on their part that earned them that money.
So we see a system where people believe it is their own skill that is giving them an advantage over others even though it is skill at cheating, skill at sucking up, or luck of birth. --And...I supposed you could twist the meaning of the word "skill" to signify those things, but it doesn't change the reality of what you are doing, and what you are doing is unfair to some. Perhaps the belief that "everyone cheats" is enough justification to permit rampant cheating, but I believe that surely there must be a better way! Surely there must be the possibility of a more equitable society.

Distribution of Wealth Vs Redistribution

I've been exploring the philosophy behind the redistribution of wealth lately. It's a really dumb idea honestly, but I think there is a core principle behind it worth looking at:
The core principle is that there is a problem in our society with how wealth is disproportionately found among an elite group of people. The problem is manifest in inequality relationships in class, race, education, religion, and most other strata of society. --Simply put, being born in a privileged group that has access to wealth and resources, grants you a circular effect of greater education, opportunities, power positions, etc. It allows for the domination of minority groups such as racial or ethnic groups, and it has the great potential of securing bad actors in the position of power.

But, redistributing wealth is a bad idea because wealth is only one factor in the equation. People who are born wealthy have more resources than just financial resources at their disposal. With wealth comes connections or social capital. With wealth comes positions of power. With wealth comes greater education (as much as I hate to admit it). --Not to say that someone who is poor can't become as educated or intelligent or even surpass that of a wealthy person, but the journey is harder and the statistics of intelligent wealthy people outnumber unwealthy intelligent people.
Redistributing the wealth of people who have already amassed wealth and power is a bad idea if done on a strictly wealth basis--I have to make that claim because there may in the future come philosophies where many factors (intelligence, means, wealth, resources, knowledge, etc) are taken into account and actually balance the concept of redistribution, but it doesn't seem as feasible in my perspective of today.

A better idea (though probably facing the same level of pushback as redistribution) would be redefinition of distribution. Meaning, changing the way in which wealthy people can make money and collect resources and political power away from the way it is presently done today. --We know of the inherit flaws in our systems, and it isnt' to say that our political or social institutions benefit wealthy people, but rather wealthy people are aware of how to game the system and are better positioned to do so to strategically place themselves in such a way as to secure their current gains and accumulated wealth and also future gains.
What I am suggesting is that we redefine what is acceptable and what is not acceptable (i.e. ethical and protectable by social/legal laws).

I will present my ideas on a few topics which I see as possible for the distribution of wealth (NOT the redistribution). --I still believe that the wealthy--initially-- will have an advantage and may thwart the attempts, but if bright philosophical minds can combat such thwarts, perhaps we can make a social course adjustment to a more ethical, more equitable society which we all dream about.

Another Letter to Mike Lee

A couple questions and comments
First: Your online contact form doesn't allow me to choose the appropriate topic of "associational life" / "Social Capital"

Senator Lee,

After reading your report "Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing" as well as listening to your town hall, I have a few comments and questions to bring to your attention:

First and foremost, I don't wish to criticize your efforts--I think you have compiled some valuable information on the family institution--however, my critical advice towards that report is that without first establishing a clear definition of what is "bad" about unwed childbearing, all you can do is point out what is happening. In other words, just because more and more children are being born into single-parent families doesn't automatically mean that those children are disadvantaged--a good political example would be Joseph Baena, who was raised by his mother through early life yet is in fact Arnold Schwarzenegger's son--statistically Baena would pull up in your cross-section, but that doesn't mean he's disadvantaged in the least, and in fact an argument could be made that he has benefited more by being the illegitimate son of a California Governor.--Sure, you can cut hairs and say, "he would have been better off if his father was married to his mother," but this is debatable. Yes, being born in a single-parent, unwed parent, household can put you at a disadvantage, but it doesn't automatically put you at a disadvantage in life.

I'm assuming by presenting "The Social Capital Project" that you are in fact trying to start a discussion and generate ideas from Utahns and possibly discover problems or solutions for future and present problems, so I'll go ahead and provide my opinions and comments and hope that some of them are taken seriously, because I think this is a very worthy endeavor and I can get behind it so long as it does actually accomplish beneficial things and not merely the appearance of accomplishing things.

If I understand you correctly, the project is meant to discover ways the government can encourage the flourishing of social capital among civilians and to recognize areas in which the government might be hindering social capital. I have a few ideas which you should look at:

Non-profits.
A lot of Utahns don't like non-profit laws that give tax breaks to non-profits, specifically property tax laws, but there are other incentives that non-profits receive that people are offended with. Personally, I don't think non-profits should necessarily receive any form of advantage that any other business organization wouldn't receive. The way that I interpret the spirit of the laws regarding them, they were designed to encourage non-profits to help the population at large, not just specific groups of the population. What I have seen, however, is that they only help niche groups get ahead and not others, and I don't see any other way around it either, because non-profits operate through the support of niche groups that only care about their niche groups' problems. The problem is that many truly disadvantaged groups are also under-represented by non-profits.
Case in point, you can go in almost any state in the US and find a shelter / safe haven house for victims of domestic abuse. The problem is, that 0 of those states recognize that Men can be the victim of domestic abuse. --They do not allow men into their facilities, only women and children. This is 2017, we're smarter than that--we know that in situations of domestic abuse, both partners are usually abusive. The discussion, however is completely one-sided, and non-profits are completely one-sided in this area too. So, why do we provide a benefit to shelters that help "victims of domestic abuse" yet those shelters are allowed to turn away "some" (i.e. men) who are victims?
More to the point, I'm a single male and outside of extremist groups that accept practically anyone that they can brainwash, I can't think of a single organization I can go to for support if I ever have struggles related to being a man, yet there are plenty of organizations related to women struggles that receive tax deductible donations. And along that same cross-section of society, which organization do you think brings in more money: Breast Cancer Awareness groups, or Prostate Cancer Awareness groups?
On the surface, the easy fix would be to encourage more non-profits to form so that under-represented groups can be equally represented, but a case can be made that because groups like the NAACP (people of color) or the NOW (women), or even religious groups like Joel Osteen's church or the Fallwell Dynasty, and yes, even the LDS church(religion), are so poweful that a narrative is established in our society that there must be something wrong with you if you stand up and support being white, or male, or atheist or some other group. --As another example, not all white nationalists are extremists, but they don't receive the same kind of benefits as other groups that represent other minorities, and sadly, the government doesn't always protect those groups the same way that they protect their equal-opposite groups.

Online Associational life.
More and more these days, networking has become less about on-the-ground networking as it has on-the-web networking. If you're going to investigate social capital, I think you should take a serious study of the digital world. It may be that people are retreating from the real world but proportionally increasing their involvement in the digital world. Thanks to digital networking, I landed one of my better jobs--a tech job based in Salt Lake City. I knew no-one who worked there, but through my social network on facebook, I was able to make friends with and receive his referral for a position that got me hired. --This job was (in my mind) the job that got me out of the recession.
Also, half of my real-life best friendships started as online friendships, though I have to point out that making the transition from online friend to real-life friend isn't easy or a smooth transition.

Volunteer opportunities/ Lack of opportunities.
I know a lot of the neighbors on my street and feel like I live in a good neighborhood even though I'm near many slummy neighborhoods in Ogden. Let me explain why: My subdivision isn't part of Ogden city--it was supposed to be created as an HOA, but the developers didn't form an HOA before they sold the lots and so it sits in a gray area. The city will not pay for any maintenance on the street and there is no HOA to cover normal expenses: that includes the broken water main line that we all had to pitch in and pay for last year (the bill was something like $8,000 to fix it several feet under the asphalt and the utility company which is run/managed by Ogden city, didn't pay for any of it but required us to fix it or have our water shut off), it also includes snow removal, so every winter, we all pitch in as neighbors to shovel our snow as well as the street. As far as I can tell, none of my neighbors are religious and none of them act out of religious fervor--we act as a community. One of my neighbors has a four-wheeler plow that they plow the road, sometimes I use my tractor, and a few other people have snow-blowers. I've met most my neighbors because of this. My point is, that our little community of about 30 houses is aware of who lives where and has an added sense of security because we have needs that we can't meet on our own and are forced to meet those needs outside of comfort zone.
Further to the point I'm trying to make, it seems to me that single parents (specifically single mothers) tend to be the ones who communities tend to know the most about because they are the neediest members of the communities. Second to them might easily be the elderly person who sits on their porch like it's still the early 1900s.
To restate the point I'm trying to make: it seems to me that the people with the greatest social capital are the ones who have the greatest needs. They are easier to approach because they can't turn down help--they need it too desperately--and by helping them there is a strong sense of personal fulfillment. Through those people--by getting involved in their lives--it is easy to network with others that help them or their family or their friends and then expand your personal network connection to them into personal Social Capital.
I think in older years it was the fact that people had needs that forced them to walk outside of their busy farms now and again and engage with their neighbors, whereas today, people have less of those needs because they can be met in many other ways.

Community Outreach
If anything, I would say there is a lack of awareness about other people in our communities more than a real lack of Social Capital. Maybe I have a warped imagination of what it was like in colonial times, but I picture the founding fathers getting together at community hubs to talk about politics openly--sometimes even spur of the moment. Today in Utah, it's hard to go to a city council meeting and see more than 15 people--10 of which are regulars. No one seems to congregate at the courthouse during trials. And there are very few physical places where people can engage in public forum unless they are organized by politicians as Q&A sessions.
Instead, from my experience, to get involved in local politics and things that matter to Utahns, you have to sign a clipboard during some county fair where some group put up a booth related to some topic you already care about. --I fail to see how anyone branches out of their personal opinions these days when the only place you might experience people of different opinion might be protesters of an event you already care about (and let's be real, no one listens to those protesters because they didn't come for community engagement, they came for whatever the activity was). Along these lines, if you do decide to meet up for a discussion outside of some public building (or inside) you usually have to schedule in advance with someone, stating that you're going to hold some meeting and then it gets put on a public agenda and then people who oppose the discussion that you have planned will be disruptive and sometimes violent (such as the debate over taking down Civil War Monuments that happened this year where supporters of keeping the monuments were harassed by people who didn't support it and triggered violent responses from both sides).
Aside from venues that charge fees to host events, I don't know of anywhere that people can go locally (within their own county) to discuss with other people who actually care about topics related to the community--excluding when they are already publicly scheduled. In other words, if I want to know about what other people in my county care about related to the national government, I have to listen to my Senators' Q&A meetings. --Caucuses in Utah were a great idea until they became polarized: I can't vote at both the Republican and the Democrat caucuses--Usually you can't even attend them both because they happen at the exact same time in different places and they don't happen all that often and don't typically involve Q&A sessions. How are good political ideas generated if half of them are stifled based on political affiliation?

Education.
You talk about in your report on Unwed Childbearing that family is "an institution with primary responsibility for ..."--that is correct, it is AN institution but not the only institution. As the old saying goes "It takes a village to raise a child." Education is another important institution that can have a mediocre effect or a major effect on your social capital in life. --Many successful business founders meet their business partners at college. Many people meet their spouses in high school and many of their life-long friends. Furthermore, education is often where people learn the skillsets that are most crucial to their future careers.

And, unfortunately, many people think the school system is broken. This would be a small drop in the bucket if other institutions could pick up the slack, but citizens age 5-13 are required to spend a majority of their waking hours not with their family but among their peers and with their teachers, and like your report indicates, if their family life isn't supportive and their school life isn't supportive, that leaves a small handful of other institutions providing, "values, knowledge, aspirations, and skills to subsequent generations."

If you want to improve people's social capital really fast, give them more opportunities through their education. --I don't mean force them to make social connections, but give everyone (not just children <18) more access to on-the-ground educational programs where they can meet people who share similar interests and opinions(the key being on-the-ground, because social networks are formed by person-to-person interactions, not online, go at your own individual pace educational programs).

Forming social networks don't end once you're out of regular school. If the intent of public schooling was to make responsible voting citizens who wouldn't be manipulated by outside powers, doesn't it stand to reason that there should be other institutions that adults (no longer children, but sometimes equally irresponsible) go to to remain responsible voting citizens? --it's no wonder so many people fell for so-called Russian election manipulation. How would they really know about it? That wasn't an issue when they were children and they weren't taught in schools that "one day, another country is going to run a bunch of biased ads on TV, Radio and the Internet to make you angry and polarized against or for a certain candidate," and they have very few outlets to learn more about the complexities of modern life. --This used to be the library, and possibly today it is supposed to be the internet, but the internet is quickly becoming a luxury that poor people cannot afford--they can't afford to go to the library all of the time while tending kids and working and they can't afford a computer or smart phone either.



If you've read all of this, it shouldn't surprise you when I say that I've put a lot of thought into this topic. During the recession that started in 2007 I was a recent high school graduate with the world ahead of me, but I lacked experience for many of the living-wage jobs that I felt I was qualified for and that ultimately led me into on and off depression. I grew up in a "close" family both of my parents are still married to each other and are well off, I had plenty of institutions to turn to for support, but from 2007 until 2015 I honestly feel like I lacked social capital. I struggled to get a decent job even while I was getting a post-secondary education. When I graduated with a Bachelors degree, I still struggled to get a job because I quickly learned that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Many of my peers seemed to live happier lives--they got married, had children, had nice jobs, etc. Me, I struggled, even though I was more intelligent and had more things going for me (not only were my parents together, had no family drama, but also my parents were dual earners my entire life and that gave me a little more access to wealth than most other people [at the drawback of not seeing either parent as often]).
It wasn't until I started thinking outside of the box about what I was lacking (social capital) that doors started opening for me. I have more friends right now than I have ever had in life--more friends than I can even manage. I feel pretty secure in my career, and in all areas of my life, and it has been a long time since I have felt any kind of depression. --That's actually the last point that I want to make:
When you're depressed, it's hard to develop or even utilize your social capital. I'm surprised that so few politicians admit to having depression--it must be one of the more depressing careers full of let-downs and emotional roller coaster rides! Yet, at the same time, I don't know anyone who hasn't experienced serious depression at least once in their life. To me, the biggest benefit to living in a "close knit" community or an "active" community, or to have a diverse collection of social relationships is not actually the networking side, but the sense of purpose and fulfillment that comes with it. We as humans and Americans aren't just individuals going through life independently, even though to some people who are depressed it seems like that is all there is to life. It would be nice if we had another great rallying cry like the one made by President John F. Kennedy in the '60s, "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," but this time around the rally was extended to not just "country" but "neighbors."

Renewed Interest in Debating for My Causes

Hey,

I just watched a very interesting documentary in which one of my views was outlined very clearly, bullet for bullet with facts and data and presented respectfully and honestly for both sides. The filmmaker allowed both sides to speak without asking any questions and without really editing their responses. It was raw and came across very genuine.
I feel invigorated right now to stand up for what I believe in--on all fronts. I feel confident in all of my beliefs. I am grounded.

I feel like I've learned a few tricks from watching this documentary on how to face my opponents and I'm going to list them:

1. Remain calm, regardless of what they throw at you, the accusations they make, the misinformation they try to get you to agree to, listen to them, hear them out, and then ask them questions for clarity on whether they actually mean to say what I think they are saying.
2. Don't stop talking just because they are talking over me, if anything, get quieter.
3. A strong argument to use is: unless the environment is controlled, there are no zero-sum games. There is always loss, even people who win suffer losses to do it.
4. Strong argument line: Often the things that are debatable are non-comparable. They are all bad and worthy of sympathy, yet there is no way to say which is worse and no need to! 
5. Strong argument line: As a society right now things are changing so fast that it's easy to be going down one mental path so quickly that you go too far and lose track of where you should have stopped. 

Here's a list of things I stand for:

1. Men's Rights, Masculinity, and the Male Role
2. White Rights
3. Globalism, Diversity, and Individuality
4. Everyday Economics
5. Clean Air and Water for Everyone
6. Small Businesses before Big Businesses
7. Rugged Individualism
8. Protection of the Defenseless
9. Training of the Powerful but Ignorant

American

I have been on an American kick these last few months.

I love America. 

I'm not just saying this, no one put me up to it--in fact, my readership has been down and it is doubtful anyone will read this, but I do love America.

It seems these days that many people hate america, people outside the U.S. hate American ideals. People inside the U.S. hate American politicians and find fault with American processes. It is sad, but there is actually some sort of fear attached to me coming out and saying that I love america. There is such a stigma surrounding saying the words, "I love America," that I think many Americans don't talk about their patriotism. --I find that disturbing.

I am American and I love it.

I know a surprising amount about other countries--I'm not uneducated, so let me stop any haters who might say that, "[I] don't know what other countries are like, so how can [I] love America?"
Furthermore, I know a lot about Socialism, Communism, Monarchies, Oligarchies, Theocracies, Republics, Democracies, even Anarchy, and I still appreciate my Democratic Republic.

What do I love about America?

• I love that a bunch of old farts who were somewhat clueless about the life beyond their own states were able to come together and create a unified agreement that bound each of those states together under one flag--and that it worked!
• I love that a general, who was a relative nobody in the military world, was given a commission by a congress of people who also knew very little about war, and that same general was able to convince people to work the most dangerous job in the world without pay, with barely any food, without uniforms, and merely the promise of a future that wasn't even very well fleshed out at the time.--This isn't an exaggeration on General George Washington's story, this is what happened, and yet somehow they were able to keep the British at bay until a political resolution was made.
• I love that America is a collection of people, each with different backgrounds, ethnicities, heritages, and cultures, and yet they still manage to get along.

Americans throughout history have always been adamant people. They are hardheaded. They are self-interested and primarily focused on taking care of their own with little regard or sympathy for others--YET--There is one thing that always makes that attitude alright: the willingness to negotiate. 

People, some American and some not, look down on America's capitalistic approach to most things in life: "There is a price tag on everything." You can find American ideas, American entertainment, and American Products throughout the world. Yes. Everything has a price, even our weapons are sold to other countries. The point is, America is only found everywhere because Americans are willing to negotiate. If we were like some of our foreign counterparts during our formation, we might be too proud to include certain countries at the negotiation table. 

History may have ended differently if we insisted on complete military dominance of England rather than reaching peace agreements, much like many countries of the modern world are attempting at this time.

America is what it is because we include others and then tell them: work with us, or work independently to do something good, but don't work against us--and I like that.

Revisit what you think you know regularly

To understand this post, please watch this 20 min video:

VICE article "Charlotesville Race and Terror"



I think it's important for people to revisit what they think they know now and again. The impression I get from most people is that they hear the word "neo-nazi", or "kkk," or "white supremacist," or "alt-right" and they think instantly that everything is about race. And in fact, I think the protesters of these groups automatically assume that that's what they are protesting against.

However, from watching this video, I can see some things that need to be brought upfront and talked about:

First, this protest isn't about the civil war monuments. The monuments are just being used as a rally point, and whether they actually care about that or not is another story.

Second, if either side focuses on the issue of race, this battle will drag on for a very very very long time with no resolution. Both sides are so rooted in their opinions on race that there will be no changing them.
Furthermore, anyone who uses race (or race issues) in this debate as their evidence or main point of argument should be disregarded because the information they are presenting isn't new, is a strawman, isn't relevant, or is flat out wrong.
Race is another rally point in this conflict.

Third, there are foreigners invested in this debate. As you see from the video, there is a Canadian who attends the alt-right rally--we can assume that this is also true for the other side (actually, it's probably more true for the other side by nature of what their beliefs are).

Fourth, these alt-righters are very organized. They are prepared. They come to these protests with equipment, and props, and safety gear, etc. They also have clear leadership and a distinct face. If history has anything to contribute, the party that is most organized usually wins the debate in the long run, so I think their opponents have some work to do to catch up.

Fifth, almost completely opposite of these alt-righters, the left seems disorganized. They aren't just less organized, they are completely disorganized. They don't seem to have common points and vision, their beliefs and values are so vast that it adds to their disorder. They don't have clear and distinct leadership. They don't come to the demonstrations with safety equipment and they rely on the law to protect them (a very bad thing to do because demonstrations of this type imply chaos and anarchy that the law cannot protect)

Finally, I wanted to mention what I saw the common ground was, because at the end of the debate, it is the common ground that makes the most lasting long-term impact.

The common ground I see is that both sides mistrust the powers that be (The government).
Both sides are afraid of losing their identity.
Both sides believe that they have been oppressed.

In an ideal situation, both sides will win some sort of government representation.
Both sides will be allowed to respectfully maintain their identity (most people know that ethic and racial minority groups want to be accepted by society at large, but they don't usually consider that white [a majority group] also want to be accepted for being white and having separate, distinct identity.) And both sides will, through their government representation or some other means, gain powers and privileges that will protect them from government oppression on all levels of government (city, county, state, federal).
--That's the ideal.

But what will actually happen is still up in the air, however, the alt-right definitely holds a powerful position, and I could see that being both good and bad--if they lose the debate, then they will receive more oppression as entities step in to further limit them (the way that affirmative action has or reverse racism) and as the tension builds they will be out for blood. On the flip side, if they win the debate, they may try to over-reach because they are powerful and because in the real world people still take racial arguments seriously even though they have been misused as a political tool since the founding of this nation.

A list of You Can't Haves

What I'm about to say is very sensitive information. I have told several people bits and pieces of this information, but I haven't explored it from a bigger picture, and I haven't told everyone everything--like I'm about to do now.

This is a list of my last girlfriends post-college and why I am not with them anymore, as well as what I learned from the relationship. It may seem like a jab at these individuals, and perhaps it is, but I am fine with people assuming that I will talk poorly of them years down the road if things ended badly. I am over them; all of them, but one can never truly be over all of their past relationships. The best I can hope for is that the more I talk about them, the more free I am for my future relationships. People who know me best will realize that the things I share below are merely my opinions and views and do not represent my personal character.


In order of appearance:

BreAnn Hoffmann, though I knew her also as Bre Orton. Bre went to high school with me and we were mildly friends though I could never fully commit to any feelings with her because at that time of my life she was too weird for me.
While we were together, Bre cheated on me. Not just once, not just twice with the same person; but with multiple people all of the time. I raised/babysat her child from when he was one until he was almost two. She was still married initially, in a bad relationship where her husband would manipulate her, and she had recently had a child and planned to divorce her husband when I came in the picture. Because her husband had a tight hold on her, guilting her at every turn, threatening to pull her financial support out from under her, and various other things, I suppose Bre turned to me because I was safe and steady. I am aware that I am a very stable person--my emotions don't always fly off the handle, I make people comfortable around me, and I'm a very hopeful person; so I'm sure the appeal of being safe, with someone nice, attracted her somewhat.
I'm not perfect, and I realize now that there were times when I did get upset and emotional--after all, I kept discovering that she was cheating on me and I found it difficult to trust her. In any case, I think because I cannot do any more than any other human can do, I got her scared of me. She was scared that I would pull the rug out from under her the way that other people in her life did, and that initial safety she found in me dissipated.
She broke up with me. I had committed to work through everything she threw at me--I was somewhat arrogant at the time thinking that my ability to resolve conflicts would allow me to overcome anything and that I could make our relationship work. And, you know what, I think Bre actually gave me a lot of experience in resolving conflicts--real world experience that people pay good money for and I got it for free just by having my heart ripped out and smashed over and over and over.
I don't regret her breaking up with me. Initially, I wanted to get back together with her because I thought that somehow it was my fault, but over the years I have realized that I did everything I was capable of doing and that she was in the wrong--I don't normally attribute rightness or wrongness to people, but in this case, what she did was very wrong. Very very wrong.
I am at peace with this relationship and how it played out, how it ended. The benefits of it, the growth I made, the things I learned--they outweigh the bad things that happened. I would repeat this relationship if given the chance again, even knowing that I would ultimately fail and that it would end the way it ended. The only bad thing about this relationship was that I had grown too close to her son and when it was over, I never got to see him again. I kind of wonder how he will turn out--whether he will make it, or whether he will have problems, but I will never know the answer to this.

After Bre, came Brianna. Sadly, her last name escapes me. We weren't together very long, but if people wanted to do some digging I could say that her family is an Itallian family (long since came to the U.S.) her dad was an LDS bishop, they live in Layton and he owns a yardscaping company. Brianna helped me while I was remodeling my Taylorsville house--she painted with me, she kept me in good spirits so that I could do the work of a craftsman. Things were good, but we had a few conflicts and after my last relationship I had resolved not to bend as much.
Brianna wanted to be a stay at home mom. She was divorced and, sadly, depressed. She was a porn addict who sat at home playing the Sims all day and, well, watching porn regularly while she recovered from her divorce. Her parents desperately wanted her to be a Mormon girl and guilted her and planted all these wild ideas in her mind that diminished her self-esteem. I think that that is what brought us together, honestly. I am a builder. I build people up, I'm positive, and I've had enough experience in life to know and see what sorts of things drag people down and burden them. Her parents blamed her situation (she was divorced) on her wickedness. I thought that was the dumbest thing. She needed to be loved while she made her transformation, rebuilt her self-worth, and then succeeded at life.
She knew I wasn't going to be Mormon, I don't know how she felt about it--I believe she wanted me to join in churchness with her, but I wasn't ever going to. Through the course of the relationship, though it was only a few short months, I saw her get worse and worse as her parents tore her down and her own mind tore her apart seeing me how I am. She had a breakdown when pulled out of her element and that solidified the end of us.
You see, she wasn't "allowed" by her parents to stay out passed midnight. I was very accommodating of this because I didn't really have a house equipped to spend the night (it being under construction and me living in it through the process). I would pick her up in Layton, drive her to Taylorsville, and drop her off at 9o'clock at the front runner train station which she could take home on the last train. If she wanted to stay later, I would simply drive her all the way home, which would put me home at around 1 or 2 am and then I would have to be to work at 8am. I learned just how much sleep my body needs, even under the physical constraints of working 8 hours in a high stress environment and then coming home to several hours of physical labor remodeling my home. I'm a workaholic, plain and simple.
One night, I was tired, I didn't want to drive her home to Layton, and I warned her that I would not be driving her home. I think she wanted to push her limits and experiment to see if she would be fine mentally staying overnight; but I don't think she realized the toll her parents would put on her for staying over. She didn't have work the next day so I told her she could hang out at my place, or walk to the store or basically anywhere from my home while I was at work. She stayed the night, she stayed at my house all day, and the whole time she texted her mother who must have thought she had been led astray by a devil. When I arrived home from work, she had packed everything she ever brought to my house. She even took back a few gifts that she had given me and proceeded to tell me that it was over. Then the awkwardness ensued: how does she get her things back to her house? --Being the nice person I was, I offered to drive her, but she said I wasn't welcome at her parents house, and that her dad was on the way. I told her that I could take her part way and she said to just drop her and her stuff off at the train station in case he decided not to come she could just travel with it on the train. --That was the most pathetic thing I had heard; I believe she thought her own father was going to disown her and might not actually pick her up. So I dropped her off at the train station.
Boy was I mad.
In my anger, I sent out the nastiest --yet TRUE-- text I have ever told anyone. I sent it to her father, explaining how he was destroying his own daughter. I told him about what I had observed in her and that his guilting her and keeping his thumb on her ultimately was bringing her down. She wasn't learning how to be a real person because he was making her ashamed and, in truth he was abusing her mentally in a deranged need to control everything about her. I am disgusted by him. Even still. I am disgusted by him and by everyone like him. You do not do that to your daughter. You do not do that to your family. You do not do that to anyone. She claimed it was because he was Italian and had that fiery Italian personality, but I saw it differently. I saw a puny, disturbing, disgusting man who tried to compensate by controlling other people who were less powerful than he.
Interestingly, I hung out with her at her house a few times after that--up until her father informed her that I had talked poorly of him through a text message. Big baby. Most likely he didn't tell her the truth of what I had said. Now that I'm 28 and more of a man, if the same things had happened again, I'd probably not be afraid to go punch his lights out if he did them again.


Then came Taylor Gough. I hear she's married now, good for her. While she was with me, I was coping with things and trying to figure out what life I really wanted to live. Perhaps I was shook up from my experience with Brianna and thought that maybe I should go to church, or perhaps I was merely looking for validation and to fit in in a state that is so animositous to people who are not like them. I don't really know, or don't want to say that I know, but I was attending church and looked like a Mormon boy--sorta. I think Taylor thought I would be a super Mormon, but no one who leaves the LDS church and comes back is ever a super Mormon because they realize things about the real world that put bad light on the LDS church. It just doesn't work. In any case, if I had stayed Mormon my whole life, Taylor and I would probably be married right now because my pre-college days I probably was the person she hoped I would be.
She broke up with me. We got engaged on Christmas and I was expecting a long engagement, but as time goes on you wonder why you are engaged for so long when you're so young. I've learned that the older you are, probably the longer of an engagement you need in order to get your life, career and everything else in order so that the two of you can be settled with each other, but at 22 or 23--however old I was, it seemed pointless because both of us had careers ahead of us and life ahead of us, it would have been better to just be married and tackle it as married couples do.
I remember the day she broke up with me. It was a sunday, and for her sake I was trying to be a Mormon, so I was at church while she texted me saying she "needed to talk"--I knew it was over when I got that message, even though there really wasn't anything wrong in our relationship.
You see, Mormons feel very guilty when they get sexually involved outside of marriage. Funny thing was, we weren't sexually involved. A little bit of grinding, yes, putting my hand up her shirt, sure, but actual sexual acts--none. None! We didn't do anything and it was hard for me because I have a slightly higher sex drive so those months with her were difficult (another reason to push the marriage forward).
She actually wanted me to come home from church early to talk to her, so I did, and what she told me was "I don't want to have to push you to go to the Temple with me." --I was temple worthy. I had been to the temple the month before, which is kind of a big deal, you don't just get a free pass! But somehow that wasn't good enough for her. She had never been to the temple in her life, she didn't know how weird it is, the brain fucking that goes on in there--it's a wonder I'm even remotely sane having lived through that. Yet, she wanted to go to the temple every month or every week or who knows what, and thought that I wouldn't allow that when we got married. Ridiculous.
I remember being so angry that she told me that. I felt like I wasn't good enough for her, even though I was doing everything I was supposed to. I felt I was being screwed over by a phony religion that teaches girls that they can't have a relationship with, or marry anyone who isn't in the religion, and that somehow those people are lesser people. I was angry. Really angry.
I believe the words that came out of my mouth were, "Fuck you! You are a selfish bitch. You think that a relationship is all about you and what you want? It's not, it's a two way street and you have to be shaped by me as much as you shape me. Get out of my house!" And I kicked her out in that manner. She left. I was vindicated. I felt pretty good for sticking up for myself in that way. Fuck her. And fuck anyone who thinks that religion is more important than relationships. Your beliefs are not more important than the relationships you hold.

I suppose I should take a step back and point something out form the big picture level. I get the impression that Taylor was using me--as did all of these girls without knowing it. They were using me to look respectable, to look like they had their lives together and were capable of luring in an attractive, well-to-do man. Taylor had just become an elementary school teacher, things were looking up for her, her family was proud of her and it was looking like she was going to pull herself up by her bootstraps, get out of the semi-poverty that her parents were in, and be on scale (maybe even better) than her sister and brother. I was another element of that success: she was trying to build herself out to be a perfect person where everything is perfect, and she didn't see (because I didn't let her see and because it didn't bother me as much) that she was being very one-sided. Taylor was arrogant.
Brianna was using me to make herself think she was capable of luring a man in. She was using me to build up her own self-worth and as a safe hideaway from her oppressive family--again, how could she ever become a real human being if she wasn't given independence and wasn't verbally degraded regularly? How could she become a real human if she was scared?
Bre, too, used me for safety as well as to appear successful and capable of luring a man. She was using me as a self-esteem boost so that she could recover and be able to fight back and win her own independence. You'll see that everyone else was the same way...

After Taylor, I went through a phase of no-girlfriend, just sleeping around. I had one-night stands, I had three night stands, I had good experiences, bad experiences, in between, but none that I wanted to keep in my life. I also quit my job in Salt Lake and moved to Ogden again to figure myself out. I learned a lot as a bachelor or semi-bachelor and made a friend or two that I've kept. Then, I started dating Miranda.
Miranda Kronieg was a virgin, though she had been married for three years to an officer in the air force. They were "separated" but living in the same house and he was often gone with military business anyway. It's weird that I was okay with this at the time, but you learn through experimenting. They were Christian, and on their wedding night she was so scared and he was so scared (both virgins) that they didn't actually have sex. They didn't talk about it, she blamed him for not being confident, and their family and friends all assumed they were having sex. I took her virginity. I liked her, I dated her for several months and she moved out of the apartment they were living in, got a job with TSA and had filed her divorce papers or rather, she was in the process of responding to them. I kept aloof from that aspect because I didn't want to be considered an influence for her getting a divorce.
During that time, I got a job in Draper and was fed up with the commute so I moved to West Jordan rather quickly. I didn't really involve her in my plans because, again, I didn't want it to seem like I was pushing her to get divorced, and I simply told her that I was going to move closer to my work. Meanwhile, she moved to N.Salt Lake to be closer to the airport anyway, so it wasn't like we were moving drastically away from each other. --I only mention this because she made a comment to me about how she wished I would have told her, but I'm not sure why.
When she finally got settled into her apartment, she broke up with me. I remember that I had lent her my DSL modem because I was on their competitor at the time and didn't need it. She told me over the phone, rather angrily that she could never be with someone like me. --I didn't know what she meant or why she said that. I calmly asked if I could have my modem back, drove out there the next day, picked it up, said "Thanks," as cheerfully as I could and never spoke to her again. I didn't want her to see that I was upset and confused and any other emotions so I acted the man and coolly collected my possessions and left for good.
I really don't know why we broke up, I don't know what she meant, "someone like [me]" or why she was angry. I remember that she was being hit on at work and decided to hang out with some guy friends she met at work, but I can't say whether that was influential in her decision or not. I also recall that she got confused when I made the statement about her childhood (she was foster-adopted because her original family was into drugs and a bad environment) and she had me read her adoption letter/socialwork paperwork. I told her "this stuff doesn't matter to me, what matters to me is who you are now," and I think she took it as, "I don't care about your past or what you've been through," but how would I know this without her telling me?
 I lack all details and if the details aren't apparent I don't even bother trying to figure them out once a person tells me its over. I have developed a very strong, very firm stance that "If someone wants me around, they will make it apparent. If they don't want me around, they will make it apparent as well; but if they are in between, then I don't want to be around." I would rather they want me around if only to figure out whether they want me around, than to be lukewarm, unsure if they want me or not. [[Women, do yourselves a favor and don't ever be lukewarm--your sex complains about men for the same reason and so many men make the attempt to be either hot or cold, show the same respect.]]

After Miranda, I was back to the bachelor life. I ultimately quit that job in Draper to remake myself again, slept around a lot, and progressed in other areas of my life.

Then I met Shelly King. Shelly is a single mother or three kids--two adopted one of her own. Her ex-husband is something else. He has committed identity fraud in the past and who knows what else because from the sound of him he's a habitual liar. I know a few of those and can only imagine what it's like to be married to one.
Regardless, Shelly has issues of her own. Though I wouldn't say she's a habitual liar, she does exaggerate a lot. She has a lot of confidence--false confidence--but she plays it well. It took being with her for a while to really recognize how full of shit she was. I think she lied to compensate, but she could also lie due to deep seated mental illness that has gone diagnosed. Overall, she's a good person, but perhaps I don't know her well enough to make that judgement?
In any case, while we were together things were good, up until she pulled the whole "I want to be a Mormon" card, and I started having flashbacks of being with Brianna and Taylor. She also gave me a scare like Bre did when, one night out of the blue, some guy showed up at her house, parked on her lawn (not even the driveway) and was over for a couple hours doing who knows what.
Shelly claimed that he barged in uninvited and she was too nice to send him away, I waited outside her home without her knowing for an hour waiting for him to leave(I got off work early and was going to surprise her after she put the kids to bed). She was texting me the whole time and I told her to give him the count of three to leave or I would come over and kick his ass. I counted to three and walked over to his truck, deflated the tires, and that's when he came outside. I yelled at him told him not to come back and she filed a report with the police.
Ultimately, I broke up with her because of some off comment she made about how if I wasn't going to be the kind of person she wanted me to be (a Mormon) that she had plenty of other guys who would be that for her. I didn't wait to find out if that was true, I ran; go find a guy like me only better if you don't appreciate me.

Finally, my last girlfriend was Kenzie Rentie. She was nice and sweet initially and gave me the right level of attention that I needed, but then she got over her head in her career. I started to see a side of Kenzie that was bitter and vengeful that I didn't like. She was upset because of her work environment and I think she turned inward and shut out the world. She stopped texting me and for the last two months of our relationship it was hit or miss on whether I would get to hang out with her on the weekend, or any weekday.
What I noticed about Kenzie, was that she had plenty of time to text back and forth with other people and plenty of time to coordinate and hang out with her old friends and co-workers, but I got put in a second seat. I hated that. I put my relationship with my significant other first--if I haven't spent enough time with them then any of my spare time I would expend to be with them. Quality time is important to me, and if I can't have quality time, then at least communication, and we didn't really have either.
I broke up with Kenzie because she wouldn't talk to me or make time for me. She claimed that she was just so used to being independent that it didn't cross her mind, but let's be real here: I'm the most independent person around and yet I still find time and have always found time to make everyone satisfied. I don't need people, I just like certain people in my life and will go out of my way to keep them. I work more than most people, often putting in 60+ hour weeks because I run a small business, and I still text, call or hang out with everyone I care about. Independence isn't the issue, self-centeredness is.
Kenzie was obsessed with running away from her life and problems. Granted, she had a few minor problems, but if she only knew to reach out to basically anyone around her, she would realize that her problems aren't so bad. She kept telling me that she was going to move to Germany, or just disappear one day and not tell anyone--and that she had already done so once in the past. Telling me this only made me feel insecure about our relationship, I wonder what she expected me to do, just wait around for the day when she left without telling me? She had the personality to not care about people, she distanced herself from me by not talking to me enough, and she vocalized that she was going to leave at some point in the future--that's not the kind of things people do who want to keep relationships in their life and so my fear of being left behind and not having a future with her, as well as the fact that the latter months of our relationship consisted of basically no relationship at all, I broke up with her.
I can't speak for her motives, I can only firmly express my own opinions and observations, but from what I saw I'm gravely disappointed. Kenzie had a plan to go through life on her own, by herself. She obviously enjoyed me in her life, otherwise she wouldn't have kept me for as long as she did, but ultimately she threw me in the trash for her own personal objectives. Relationships don't work that way.
The funny thing about my character, as I learned from being with Kenzie, is that at any moment I was willing to jump back aboard her ship that was setting sail if only she would tell me that she wanted me to come with and made accommodations for me. I forgive and I forget easily, but if there is one thing Kenzie did wrong with our relationship, it was that she didn't instill hope in me. I've learned that if you want a relationship to last, you have to make sure your partner has hope for the future with you.
After being with Kenzie I have realized that I am not going to as easily assist my significant other as I have in the past. Kenzie might not realize this now, but I would like to think that at least a few of my previous girlfriends do realize that being with me comes with seen and unseen benefits. I am stable. I am confident. I am smart. I am hopeful. I put a lot of time and energy into making my girlfriend comfortable so that she can handle her other areas of life. I try to relieve burdens, not just the obvious ones that free up time and boost energy, but I also offer myself as a sounding board and thinking cap so that they can think about and deal with their mental or emotional burdens. I do my part in my relationships, that is certain.
With Bre, I took care of her kid so she could get experience working, network, and advance in her career. I took care of her in a lot of unseen ways and I did the same for Brianna, Taylor, Miranda, Shelly and yes, even Kenzie.

I'm not like other guys, even the nice guys, because I have both a natural affinity to certain skills and was also trained in communicating and understanding people and life in general. I don't know everything there is to know about people, but I know a lot more than people twice, three times, even four times my age. I get so frustrated with people in general because I see them and I see their problems and I see how easy the solutions are and yet I also watch them opt out of the solution because they don't know, haven't learned their lesson, or don't care anymore. I also, apparently, have a terrible time finding someone who is my equal, because all of the women I have been with in my adult years have used me as a crutch to stand up with, support themselves, and heal, and none of them have treated me like an equal, like a life-partner, like a true friend.
I understand that I have a lot to offer. I understand that I'm cute and attractive and that through some magical osmosis the women who hang around me appear to be slightly more attractive as well. I get that I'm a giver and I freely share my positive energy with everyone. I also realize that I'm an empathetic person and people find it very easy to connect with me and feel at ease. And yeah, I am intelligent, I have a lot of practice coming up with advice and quotes and I utilize thinking methods that increase the perspective of others and expand their minds. And sure, I come from a wealthy family that is also somewhat respectable and I too have plenty of money horded away. BUT, all of these great things about me are not an invitation to use me for a self-esteem boost or as merely a getaway from danger. I expect more and I will have more.