I just saw Christopher Nolan’s epic movie The Odyssey, and I must say I really liked it. It wasn’t perfect, but I was impressed. I know Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, and a few other conservatives would not be happy with me, but who cares. I walked out of the theatre wondering what all the fuss was about.

Since I have not read Homer’s poem, I really had nothing to compare it to. The hoopla from the far right seems to focus on things like not sticking with the original story, the fact that Greeks of Homer’s time would never say “dad” or “fucking beach,” and poor choices in casting—such as Lupita Nyong’o as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” who, in their view, certainly would have been a white woman. There are a few other complaints I won’t go into just yet.

Let’s start with the most egregious of these issues—the fact that Nolan departed from Homer’s storyline.

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Starting with the Garden of Eden, it seems God figured out that if Adam and Eve had free rein, they would surely blow it. Free will, yes—they had to have the choice to do whatever they wanted—but with consequences if they did. Ah, yes, consequences. Imagine that! It seems these days people just don’t get the concept of consequences.

So, after a bit of time, ol’ Moses went up into the mountains and brought down the Ten Commandments, only to return to crazy people dancing around a golden calf. Jeesh. Leave ’em for just a minute, and already they are cavorting with the result of their free will. Consequences? Maybe not right away (although Moses got kind of ticked), but eventually the false-idol thing bit them in the butt.

No one seems to want rules, eh? Especially restricting ones like the Ten Commandments. But hey, there are only ten of them. That isn’t too bad, is it? We probably would do a whole lot better these days even sticking with just those ten. Do you think we can do it? Stick to ten rules? No way, José. No way.

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People don’t care because they don’t know. Simple as that. I know I’ve been through this a million times, but I just don’t think I’ve nailed it. Maybe now. It’s nuance, still, but it’s something more than I have written about before.

My stepson got married a few weeks ago, and I officiated the ceremony. Even though I did not know everyone who attended, I had the chance to talk to a lot of people. The wedding, by the way, was beautiful. I’m not really a fan of all the expense and hoopla that goes into these events, but I do believe rituals like weddings are important for keeping the psyche healthy. Most people these days still adhere to the rituals of dressing up, looking their best, and formalizing the affair as much as they feel comfortable with—“I do” statements, walking down the aisle, the formal declaration of “husband and wife,” even “kissing the bride.” So it was fun and meaningful in that regard.

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Right versus Left. Here we go again. I can already hear the knives coming out. Fine. Let’s try something slightly less bloodthirsty this time and look at what each side actually thinks it is doing, rather than the cartoon versions we usually throw at each other.

Both sides, if you strip away the slogans and the rage, are trying to build a community. They both want a place that feels like home, a shared identity that holds people together instead of letting them fly apart like shrapnel. They just have completely different ideas about how you get there, and what you’re allowed to keep once you arrive.

The conservative, or at least the classical Right-leaning view, starts with the individual. Each person is more or less on his or her own to become the best version of themselves they can manage. Community is not something a committee designs and then drops on your head. It is supposed to emerge. Free people, left mostly alone, tend to form families, churches, neighbourhoods, and habits that look a lot like one another. Shared language, shared stories, a rough moral consistency (the Ten Commandments still work surprisingly well as a starter kit), and a preference for the people who actually live next door rather than an abstract “humanity.” Love is personal first—your kids, your spouse, your actual neighbour—not a government program.

If you want that kind of cohesion to last more than a generation, you cannot treat every incoming culture as equally compatible. Some things will erode the foundation. So the Right, at its more honest moments, admits there have to be limits. Diversity is fine when it adds to what’s already there. It stops being fine when it starts dissolving the very thing that made the village worth living in to begin with. That is not hatred; it is pattern recognition. You can call it exclusion if you like. They call it self-preservation.

The progressive, or Left-leaning view, starts at the other end. Community is something you construct from the top, or at least from the middle, through rules, institutions, and a central authority that decides what fairness looks like. The great moral project is inclusion: every culture, every belief, every identity gets a seat. Equality is not just a goal; it is the operating system. The assumption underneath is that all these different ways of being are, at bottom, compatible—or can be made compatible if we just apply enough education, regulation, and goodwill. Good luck with that.

Here is where it gets sticky, and where the shrew in me starts twitching.

The Left also holds a set of very rigid, universal moral standards. Women must be treated a certain way. Speech must stay inside certain lines. History must be narrated a certain way. These are not suggestions; they are non-negotiable. Fair enough—every culture has non-negotiables. The problem is that the Left rarely notices that its own preferred culture (let’s call it late-liberal, secular, therapeutic, equity-focused) is itself a very particular culture. It is not a neutral container that can hold every other culture without changing them. It has its own priests, its own heresies, its own sacred texts. When a genuinely different culture arrives with different ideas about family, sex, authority, or the sacred, the progressive project has to choose: either water down its own standards or start policing the newcomers. In practice it does both, then pretends it is still being “inclusive.” Look at how the Left perceives the Christian Right (don’t even mention “Christian Nationalism” to a liberal). It isn’t pretty. So much for “inclusion.”

That is the contradiction that never quite gets resolved. You cannot demand universal conformity to a specific set of progressive norms and celebrate radical pluralism at the same time. One of them has to give. Usually it is the pluralism. The village that was supposed to contain every possible village-version ends up looking a lot like one particular village with extra flags.

I am not saying the Right has this all figured out. Their version can calcify into nostalgia, or worse into a kind of ethnic or religious club that treats outsiders as permanent guests at best. And “just let individuals be free, and community will magically appear” ignores how much shared culture already has to exist before that freedom doesn’t turn into atomized loneliness and shopping malls. We all have seen that particular movie.

But the Left’s version has a built-in impossibility. It wants the warmth of belonging without the boundaries that create belonging. It wants the moral confidence of a creed while insisting creeds are oppressive. It wants a strong cultural identity that is simultaneously infinitely elastic. That is not a political program. That is a pipe dream.

From a psychological angle—this is the part I can’t help but tell you about—both sides are wrestling with the same old human problem: how much difference can a group absorb before it stops being a group? The Right answers by tightening the circle and hoping the people inside it still have enough room to breathe. The Left answers by widening the circle until the circle itself becomes the only identity remaining, and then wonders why people feel rootless and start inventing new tribes out of pronouns and grievances.

The agenda, of course, loves the fight. As long as we are screaming at each other about which village is the real one, we are not looking at who actually owns the land, who writes the zoning laws, and who profits from the demolition. Divide the frogs, and keep the pot on the stove. Classic.

I do not hate the Left. I have said that before, and I mean it. Plenty of people I love live on that side of the fence. What I cannot pretend is that their model, as currently practised, can deliver the community they claim to want. It keeps tripping over its own idealism. The Right’s model is narrower, sometimes colder, and frequently hypocritical, but at least it admits that a culture is a thing with edges.

So here we are. Two incomplete maps of the same territory. One starts with the person and hopes the village appears. The other starts with the village and hopes the person still matters. Neither is going to save us by itself. The shrew’s job, as usual, is just to notice when the tidy map they’re handing us—Right’s version or Left’s—doesn’t match the actual ground we’re standing on. And then to keep asking the question neither camp seems eager to sit with: what, exactly, are we willing to share—and what are we willing to lose—in order to have a place that still feels like home?

I don’t have the tidy answer. I just know both sides are describing a village they have never quite managed to live in at the same time.

If you would rather not subscribe at this time, and maybe give a little just for this article, please click the button above and give as much as you feel is comfortable. This helps me immensely in keeping up with my writing! Thank you so much!

[Hey folks, here is another blast from the past. I have not been able to write much these past few weeks…some personal turmoil going on. Hopefully by next week I’ll be back at it! So here is another reprint; I think the SECOND Shrew Views contribution. Let me know what you think, and let me know if it feels like it was recently written! I think it was April 2, 2022 when it first appeared!]

Everyone knows by now the analogy often tossed about these days describing a frog in a pot of water on a stove. The heat is turned up so slowly that the frog has no idea that if he (or she) doesn’t jump out he will be boiled alive.  Seems that most sheep, the normies, are like the frog. The rest of us (for the sake of simplicity I will call the rest of us “shrews”—more on that later!) are doing most of the jumping—or at least trying to. I don’t know if TPTB (“the powers that be”—need I clarify?) really care about a few jumping frogs, although our shrew numbers are increasing every day and may soon outnumber the sheep! What does seem to be clear is that some of the sheep are waking up and are attempting to jump out of the pot themselves.

It seems quite imperative that the majority of frogs stay in the pot, because if most of them jump out, there will be no dinner for whoever is cooking them. The shrew frogs are very much aware of the heat being turned up leading to their demise, the sheep frogs still are not quite sure what the hell is happening. In order to fully know the degree of seriousness regarding the pot and water situation you have to believe that the point of being in the pot to begin with is to be boiled—dead. Maybe we can still stick with a metaphor here, but possibly not—the intention of the boiling pot could literally be to kill the sleeping frogs contained therein. Or, at the very least, have them completely under the control of TPTB. Do they need to remain asleep forever? I can’t actually answer that question, maybe not, but maybe so. I would think it would be best that they are close to being asleep most of the time. If they wake up too much, they will possibly make too much ruckus. Look at all the totalitarian regimes throughout history, real ones, as well as made up ones (as in Orwell’s “1984”). Being partially asleep, if not totally asleep, seemed to be a rather important criterion in these regimes. Most people, historically, living under totalitarian rule are not that aware of the freedoms they have lost, or the dehumanizing power they live under. This control on a large populace was obviously achieved through government lies, confusions, departures from reality executed by the predominant media, censorship and the silencing of opposing voices—on and on. Us shrews are very familiar with these tactics. The sheep don’t believe they exist, even when their little noses are rubbed in it. These tactics have worked brilliantly for centuries in various contexts. Yes, there have always been thinking, awake, shrews, but they are typically silenced, or eliminated, very quickly.

Sheep do whatever they can to avoid seeing the truth. Obviously they think they see it, and make a lot of noise about what they believe is true and why it is true. In this Covid situation typically the noise they make is about how “unscientific” the shrews are, yet in an argument, you seldom hear sheep talk about actual science. They just like to rant on about how so and so is stupid, an anti vaxxer, or a science denier, or is publically discredited in various ways, or was kicked off of YouTube so they MUST be an idiot. I have never heard a sheep talk about actual science. Maybe they do, and maybe I’ve heard it, but certainly not often.

So the sheep continue to get cooked. Of course the shrews are cooking too. So far, the jumping shrews are getting just as cooked as the sheep, but they are awake, and feel the pain of the boiling water. And, of course, as much as they jump, they can’t get out of the water. Neither can the sheep, but they don’t seem to care—not yet at least.

TPTB are a bit concerned that there is so much jumping going on in the pot. It is possible that all of the shrews and some sheep might jump around so much the lid pops off and a lot of the frogs get out, which could slow things down—not stop things mind you, but slow them down. If most of the sheep and shrews got out of the pot because they were all awake, then that could cause a real disruption in the mainstream agenda. But most of the sheep that are hopping are not really awake. They must want to get back to what, in their previous asleep state, seemed normal. They are tired of Covid—tired of being afraid of it, tired of lockdowns, of restrictions, of inconvenience. They are not awake to the bigger picture like shrews are. In order to be fully awake, a sheep or a shrew has to believe in some rather radical things.

1.     The Government of whatever country you live in is corrupt, and they really don’t care all that much about you, if anything at all.

2.     Big Pharma is corrupt, and although, if profitable, may come up with some stuff that actually helps people, for the most part they will kill you if they can make some dough doing it and keep most everyone asleep so they can keep doing it (turning up the heat).

3.     Most doctors are like privates in a huge powerful army. They follow orders from their generals and “commanders in chief” and they typically do not question them. They get all of their information from specific sources that could, for the above reasons 1 and 2, be wrong. They are NOT, usually, scientists or researchers (although some, on the shrew side, most definitely ARE, but we don’t hear much from them because they are typically silenced (see above.)

4.     Institutions such as hospitals and universities depend so much on funding from the corrupt government and corrupt pharmaceutical companies that they are completely unreliable, if not criminal.

5.     The mainstream media is also for the most part “fake.” The media is mostly owned and otherwise funded by the corrupt pharmaceutical companies, the corrupt government, and whoever else is supporting the power and money agenda.

This is a big pill for sheep to swallow . . . for anyone to swallow for that matter, but for some mysterious reason shrews, and wanna-be shrews, swallow that pill without even thinking about it. Why? I don’t know, and this article isn’t going to attempt to figure that out. We just do, and bless us for that.

There are even bigger pills to swallow than the five listed above—the Great Reset, which includes centralization of government and economy, possible eugenics/population reduction, etc. I won’t go into all that. Most shrews are onboard, some are not quite there yet, but some form of “bigger agenda” is at play here beyond just power hungry rich people.

So where does this leave the pot of boiling frogs? Many say the heat is being turned down. Why? Some say because TPTB believe all the frogs are going to get out and shut the whole shebang down. Some say TPTB are afraid for their own safety, that they could be held accountable, tried by a court, and punished—possibly by hanging from an end of a rope.  

Granted, TPTB have great incentive to keep most of the frogs asleep so they can continue to boil them. But, in my humble opinion, they are far from any immediate concern that there are too many rambunctious jumping frogs. They may turn the heat down, but only in effective ways that assure calming the frogs down a bit, while turning it up in other ways that the frogs don’t notice.

We need to continue hopping, and knock that lid off.

As far back as I can remember—and that is way, way back—I have never relished the idea of moving with the crowd. That is probably why I am a shrew, or at least the basis for it. My wife claims I just hate authority; I don’t think it is that simple. And even if it is true that my repulsion at joining the gang keeps me from complying and succumbing—and thus defying authority—it isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes the crowd is the right way to go. We humans were designed to comply with consensus; there is innate wisdom in groupthink, at least that is supposed to be true, assuming that groupthink is organic and not influenced by an individual or smaller group (like government) with its own self-serving agenda.

That is the operative word here: self-serving. It took me most of my life to realize that governments and the people who make them up are not serving the people who voted for them. I used to think that happened only once in a while, but otherwise there was usually good intention behind it—but nowadays, the ol’ “They’re doing the best they can” or “They didn’t have all of the information” argument seems to be the way to go if you don’t like what you see. Poppycock. Now I know better.

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Hey Shrew Pack!

Yet another interview I did with Jeremy Nell of Jerm Warfare on the popular alt news source UK Column:

UK Column. Jerm Warfare.

This is the description on the UK website:

Jerm and Todd Hayen examine the tension between free speech and social decency while they analyse how media control, AI, and power dynamics shape human behaviour.

They argue that to thrive in a free society requires maintenance of the fundamental balance between individual liberty and collective values.

Watch Now!

Ed Note: I decided today to run the first article ever published by this Substack back on April 1, 2022 (or, it could have been the second, not sure). This seems like an obvious description of “limited hangout,” a term not yet made popular. Enjoy!

Every good fisherman knows that reeling in a big fish takes skill and conscious intention. One of the first things they learn is that you can’t just crank in the big guy with one effortless winding up of the line. It takes finesse, a dance of sorts. While always keeping a steady line, you bring them in slowly, with the primary focus on wearing them out, almost hypnotizing them into compliance.

A popular fishing website HUK says this about the process:

Remember that too much tension can snap the line and when large fish decide to make a run for it, the worst thing you can do is try to keep them in place. By fighting their runs, all you are doing is increasing the chances that your line will break and your prize will get away. Instead, set the drag so the fish can take out line while still tiring itself. This will wear down the fish; eventually their runs will get shorter, less violent, and less frequent.

Hmmm. Sounds a bit too close for comfort, eh? I am afraid I am not all that excited about the current hoopla regarding our apparent victory over the mainstream narrative. I simply don’t believe it entirely. We’ve made a run, so to speak, maybe have gotten too rowdy, too powerful, and we are being given a bit of slack so we don’t break the line. This run is not being executed only by the folks on our side of the fence, but by the sheep as well. We are ALL tired, we are all ready to get out of this mess and call it a day.

It seems like a sensible tactic on their part—to let out a little line, but still keeping us hooked and apparently still in their control. All this euphoria about us finally winning the battle and that the narrative is finally crumbling indicates to me that we may be getting lost in the weeds of apparent success and the hook and line is still, in reality, firmly embedded in our flesh, only to suddenly reel us in again, after a dizzying and disorienting taste of freedom. I don’t like it.

Most everyone is familiar with the 1950’s Harvard experiment conducted by a rather soulless Curt Richter. Rats were placed in a tank where they had to frantically tread water to survive. Typically they lasted only 15 minutes or so before giving up, sinking, and subsequently drowning. A second set of experiments showed that if the rats were saved right before their demise, dried off and given a little respite, and then again returned to the tank of water, they could tread, and stay alive, for up to 60 hours. They called this the “hope experiment,” which is relevant to the current happenings. To maintain the narrative, people must maintain some sort of hope. When we are about to throw in the towel we are given a little slack in the line, and when the pressure hits again—with a new variant, a new virus, or, in a radical right turn, a nuclear war threat—we can sustain our loyalty, and ultimate compliance, believing we will not drown but will be saved at the last minute by our surrogate parents and archetypal “protectors.” These tactics work in different ways with the masses on opposing sides of the fence. The sheep need the slack when they are about to throw in the towel of compliance. The rest of us are not about to throw in the towel, but are about to gain greater potential of harm to the narrative—they respond to both situations with the same tactic, but with different results depending on where you sit in this whole mess.

This “hope experiment” reminds me of BF Skinner’s work (also a psychology research scientist of Harvard fame—many also believed Skinner has very little soul). His work with pigeons pressing levers to get food led him to conclude that a type of “uncertainty principle” affected animals, and thus people. If the food was dispensed at variable intervals, the pigeons went nuts, pecking the lever incessantly. There was no rhyme or reason when the reward would come, therefore the pecking never stopped. You can see how this psychology is relevant here (and yes, as much as I hate to admit this, behavioral science is indeed real, it doesn’t give answers to all questions, but humans, at times, do indeed behave like rats and pigeons). If something is given, taken away, given again, taken away again, at what seems to be for irrational and unpredictable reasons, you create craziness: variable intervals of tension and release. Good way to mess around with people’s heads.

It seems what we are seeing now with the seeming turning of the mainstream narrative is too calculated, too fast, too easy, and simply not as deep as it needs to be to declare victory. Where are the arrests and prosecutions of government officials or Big Pharma officials? Where is the accountability of the thousands who have been injured by the vaccines? Where is the admission that this all was a horrible attempt to create a New World Order?—A Great Reset? The allies in World War II had to literally LEVEL Germany before those bastards gave up. I don’t think this “victory” is going to be this easy.

James Corbett, of  “The Corbett Report” put it succinctly recently on his program “New World Next Week”. Corbett said: “This isn’t the kill shot, literally or metaphorically, this is the first salvo in a years long, decades long, process of re-engineering the governing principle of society into the biosecurity state, and this is just about re-laying the infrastructure.” Corbett goes on to say there is likely much more to come, another virus even more deadly and scary, for example, and that everything is now all geared up and ready for the next horrifying event.

So maybe Covid IS finished. It has possibly been tapped out. Maybe it didn’t make the full mark that was expected, maybe it wasn’t deadly enough, or maybe the variants didn’t propel the boosters forward as expected. Maybe the vaccine wasn’t intended to be such a dud. Or, maybe it all worked out exactly as planned. Regardless, they did make a rather substantial move. At the very least they have been successful in normalizing nearly every major goal they had set. The goals such as digital passports, social credit scoring, digital currency, and blind, stupefying, sheep-like compliance, to name just a few, maybe are not as deeply ensconced in the day to day operation of society as they had expected, but these concepts certainly are normalized now as active probabilities in the minds of the masses (and some of them, such as “blind stupefying sheep-like compliance”, are well established). It will take much less future effort to drop them into place, fully functioning.

Hannah Arendt, one of the past century’s most incredible heroes of truth, said in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism:

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Although I do not believe that the masses see everything as a lie, I do believe if it were proven to be a lie, it would have nearly no impact. I have not heard yet from the sheep side any sort of eating of humble pie. All this that is happening is seen as “business as usual” from the sheep . . . maybe some things have come to light that were just not known before (according to them), but they see this as a victory of their own—they have beat Covid by wearing masks, locking down, vilifying the nasty unvaccinated. The “I told you so’s” from our side of the fence are falling on deaf years. “The crazies on the Right have beaten up the hero-god Fauci, but he is still the hero-god to most.” As Arendt so deftly points out, the sheep continue to “admire their leaders for their superior tactical cleverness” as a result of any “backing down and changing the narrative” as we believe Fauci has exhibited in our own interpretation.

Yes, some have “flipped” so to speak. Maybe many have. But this is where the fishing analogy comes to light. The powers that be see the sheep taking a run, albeit maybe a small one, but a run nonetheless, they are hearing the masses grumbling about the efficacy of the vaccines, the pointlessness of taking the booster—the weariness of lockdowns, masks, and social restrictions. They say, “maybe it is time to give them a little slack  . . . to let them have a bit of a rest . . . before we reel them in for the final scoop into the net, the flop into the bucket . . . and the trip to the taxidermist”.  So some of them started to flip (run) and the narrative shifts to give them slack.

All that being said, I don’t think much has changed in sheep-ville.  Certainly most normies have never bought into what is to be found in the depths of the rabbit hole that imply a greater horror above the levels of government, viruses, and vaccines (as James Corbett points out). Few see a problem with digital currency, loss of constitutional freedoms, social credit, vaccine passports or the like. The agenda in this overarching echelon of control can, as it stands now, continue unfettered, Covid or no Covid. From this perspective, we’ve really won nothing at all. Can we call anything a victory as long as Fauci and his NIAID, NIH, HHS, FDA and CDC compatriots and minions remain standing? As long as the smear campaign to eliminate effective and inexpensive treatments continues? As long as vaccines are mandated or even just recommended without informed consent? Can we declare any sort of victory as long as people continue to suffer from vaccine injury and are not even accounted for? Can we really believe the narrative is crumbling when the perpetrators of these heinous crimes against constitution and humanity are not brought to justice? Can we sleep easy under the false euphoria of victory as long as tens of thousands of medical doctors and researchers and scientists go on being persecuted through the loss of careers and reputation and free speech? I could go on and on. No, we are not even beginning to see this narrative “crumble” until quite a bit more evidence is brought to light that this just isn’t another tactic in this ongoing agenda.  

But. . . . maybe I am wrong. Maybe it just takes a little time to kill all of the hydra’s heads. Just killing one won’t do it, they will just grow back, but maybe we have just killed one or two heads and it will take time to go all the way through them, killing them all. Maybe the Trucker’s Convoy, the Boris Johnson announcements in the UK, the US Supreme Court ruling are indeed signs of the agenda crumbling, a few of the many hydra heads being lopped off by the swords of justice and sane thinking. I don’t want to give up hope, but I do think at the very least we must continue to be wary, with swords continually drawn and always at the ready.

I am sure this isn’t news to anyone, but I have reached one of the last stages of “response to sheep” with regard to Covid. Yeah, yeah, I know, Covid is such old news. I think the Fauci debacle has opened that old wound, and like Amfortas’s gash (from Wagner’s Parsifal), it wasn’t healing anyway. I say “one of the last” stages because I really don’t know what the last stage will be, maybe “acceptance” or maybe “disengagement” . . . not sure.

This stage is “bitter,” or maybe just “anger” again, not sure. The multiple stages of “response to sheepism” seem to me to be:

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When I am lying in bed trying to fall asleep with visions of transgender fairies and other cultural oddities swirling around in my head, I sometimes (regrettably) scroll through Facebook Reels to force sleep into my body. Here I catch up on a few things Matt Walsh is babbling about, or other comedians, and maybe a clip or two of some interesting views from Peterson or Musk.

Last night I ran into this: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1698365917962058. At first I didn’t give it a second thought; there is so much crap like this buzzing around everywhere that I have become rather immune to it. But I watched it. And thought about it. And became rather confused by it. Wha? Then WTF? What is it?

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There is so much to say about the Fauci fiasco that I barely know where to start. But I have to start somewhere.

What the f__k?

Yes, the f-word. If that truly offends anyone reading this, tell me. I curse like a sailor in private life, but I am careful with clients—many of them are deeply religious and find colourful language genuinely offensive. I respect that. I want to be careful with you as well.

Still, I said it once, so saying it again hardly changes anything.

What the fuck?

There, now the whole word. Senator Moreno had no trouble dropping the same bomb during the hearings: “...who the fuck do you think you were...” aimed straight at Fauci, who then promptly pleaded the Fifth. Nonsense.

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In a word, “no.” Do I use AI to help with my writing for Shrew Views? In a word, “yes.”

Before I get on with this article, let me tell you this. I am f_cking tired of this AI witch hunt amongst writers, publishers and readers. (Please forgive my use of the “F-bomb,” but this has really got me angry—and also, AI doesn’t use the “F word” so that is even more reason to use it.) In fact, I am so upset about all this that I am seriously considering giving up on Shrew Views because of it. And truth be told, I believe this mass of hatred toward AI’s LLMs (primarily responsible for the AI writing craze) is agenda-driven. I’ll get into that in a moment (why would the agenda be behind the witch hunt against AI writing?)

I just read an article about a writer who has put his writing through the famed “AI detector” that Substack now offers its readers, and it flagged his writing as 100% AI-created when he claims none of it is. So, to begin with, the “detectors” these witch hunters are using are not even accurate. They work by detecting patterns, certain “AI-exclusive words,” and, in a nutshell, “good grammatical writing” . . . and then flag it as AI-written. In other words, if you are a writer who already writes in a pretty grammatically perfect way, with all spelling accurate, all sentence structure as good as it can be, and nice big, intelligent words that only morons would not understand, you will be accused of using AI to write your stuff. I will stop writing if I have to write poorly just to avoid illegitimate AI detection. That’s crap.

Good, informative, meaningful, insightful writing is in the eyes and minds of the beholder. If you have to get a computer algorithm to tell you that a computer algorithm has written what you have read, then you are missing the whole point.

Now, I’m sure it isn’t that cut and dried. If I told AI, “Write an article on the AI witch hunt,” and it spit out a 1,200-word article on that topic without any other input from me, then sure, your fancy-schmancy detector may be able to flag it as computer-generated accurately. If I asked MY specific AI “helper,” Grok from xAI (Elon Musk’s creation) to do the exact same thing, after having proofread hundreds of my articles and books, and knows MY style, MY use of certain words, MY humour, MY sentence structure, then MAYBE the detector would not pick it up. Maybe it would look like my writing so thoroughly that it would be impossible to distinguish between the two. I’ve never tested this as I have never asked AI to write an article for me from scratch that I have published. Maybe one of you will want to test it, if you do, let me know the results.

OK, as a little experiment, read the paragraph above, then compare it to the paragraph below. The paragraph below has been cranked through Grok to check the grammar, sentence structure and clarity. And I DO use AI for this purpose. Do you think AI WROTE that paragraph?

Now, I’m sure it isn’t that cut and dried. If I told AI, “Write an article on the AI witch hunt,” and it spit out a 1,200-word article on that topic without any other input from me, then sure, your fancy-schmancy detector may be able to flag it as computer-generated accurately. If I asked MY specific AI “helper,” Grok from xAI (Elon Musk’s creation), who has proofread hundreds of my articles and books and knows MY style, MY use of certain words, MY humour, and MY sentence structure, to do the exact same thing, then MAYBE the detector would not pick it up. Maybe it would look so thoroughly like my writing that it would be impossible to distinguish between the two. I’ve never tested this, as I have never asked AI to write an article for me from scratch that I have published. Maybe one of you will want to test it; if you do, let me know the results.

Different? Sure, a little bit. Sometimes it changes things even more radically. Sometimes I change it back. But that is how I use AI in my writing. And for that, I am hung from the nearest “He uses AI to write for him” tree.

I have submitted my books to publishers and contests where I have been told I will be disqualified, or not considered, if I use AI for RESEARCH alone. You can’t do a Google search these days without using AI. So I guess I better renew my library card and hit the stacks for my research, the internet is out.

Oh, one more bit of disclosure regarding my use of AI for research. Anytime you read any statistics in my articles, or any major political presentation of what was done when and how (with regard to legislation, executive orders, international monetary policies like tariffs, etc.) you can be sure Grok has searched those details out for me. Sometimes inserting them into the article using my style of writing to do so. Oops! AI “wrote” something I am claiming is mine!! Off to the gallows I go.

I don’t recall mathematicians and scientists being crucified back when calculators first came on the scene: “Oh, that guy didn’t figure out that calculus problem in his own brain; he is a fake, a quack, he had a CALCULATOR do his work, and is claiming it as his own!!! Death to him!!!”

Now, I do understand the problems with AI writing stuff. And those problems are too complicated to go into here. I get the whole “soul sucking” aspect of AI doing human stuff. Please limit my concern to the specific issues of writers using AI to do research and to do extensive copy and content editing. I remember back in the day when I was writing my dissertation. I had a “high-end” editor working with me, and she made more extensive changes in my manuscript than AI typically does (if it does make radical changes, on occasion, I tell it to back off). But that was all OK: I guess because she was a human. Witch hunt.

I will admit here that when AI first came out, I did experiment a bit. I had it put together some stuff, just to see how well it could do it, but never fully from scratch. I was always prompting it; it was always my idea, my concepts, my observations. I just had AI do the heavy lifting and had it write paragraphs for me. I don’t do that anymore, as I said; I was just curious to see its limitations (and there are not that many). The main reason I don’t do that now is that it isn’t any fun. I am a writer. I enjoy writing. As screwed up as it might be, it is still “the way I do it.” BUT, I don’t like inaccuracies. I don’t like crappy sentence structure, and I don’t like my ideas to be presented in my writing as ambiguous, awkward, or unclear. So, I have AI clean that up for me, just like a good editor can do. Should I learn to do it myself? Sure, but I don’t care; I would rather get more ideas on paper than slave over something (like grammar) that I never was that good at anyway.

Sue me, sue me, shoot bullets through me. (Guys and Dolls (1950))

Why is this agenda-driven? First of all, the frenzy complaining seems way over the top for it to be something that has organically come into the collective mindset. No one cares about the lies regarding genetically altering vaccines, so why in hell would the masses be concerned about what’s actually being written—AI or human? The masses don’t respond to much of anything unless the agenda tells them to care.

Also, the way I see it is that these actions are going to ultimately destroy legitimate writers, not computer writing programs. Writers will not be able to conduct legitimate research without being accused of wrongdoing. They will not be able to edit their work using AI, without creating the same hatred for them. And since AI is detected by “how good the writing is from a technical perspective,” then decent, grammatically correct writing—clear, precise presentation—will consciously be eliminated by writers in their own writing, thus dumbing down their writing to avoid being burnt at the stake. That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

So, there you have it. You can bet your sweet bippy I wrote this article. Send it through an AI detector and see if it says otherwise. I didn’t even let Grok proof it. If I did, and it changed a few words and sentence structures here and there, it would have been a better article. And that now is a no-no.

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It seems that nearly every bit of information we receive these days is hearsay, or more bluntly, a lie. I think most people do not believe that a lot of the things they hear, or read in the news, are out-and-out lies. In fact, a distinction needs to be made between conscious and intentional lies and things that are simply not true. Once we make that distinction, we find that most of what reaches us belongs to the latter category.

That fact changes things only a little bit. False information is still false. And the falsity or truth of any information remains the responsibility of the conveyor. If I tell someone something I am not personally certain of, I typically qualify the statement with “I think this is true,” or “this is what I heard,” or “so-and-so said this, not sure if it is true.” Although I must admit that, realistically, I do not say this as often as I should. If I did, I would almost never make an unqualified statement—unless I had literally experienced it: “It is raining outside; I was just out there, and I am soaked.” That’s not hearsay, but if someone I told that to, repeated it to someone else based only on my statement, then it would be hearsay.

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This might not apply to all sheep-types, but many of the ones I have encountered simply do not care. This could be the reason we can’t seem to get through to them with the facts we are constantly shoving down their throats. Of course, the ones I’ve talked to may just be saying they don’t care to shut me up, but I really don’t think so. They seem pretty sincere.

How could they not care? Now, that is the $64,000 question. People, in general, do not care about things they do not see directly affecting them. They should, but they don’t. People these days, at least, don’t seem very skilled at discerning things that will—if not cared about—eventually bite them in the ass. I think people used to be better at determining such things. They used to see war in a neighbouring country, for example, and say, “Hmmm, if we don’t do something about that, those bloodthirsty marauders may be over here next.” People who thought that way—speculating about a potential ass-bite—actually disappeared a long time ago, if they ever existed at all.

Still, my point stands: if it doesn’t directly affect them in the present moment, they don’t care.

Sorry, I think that is weird.

And, of course, people seem very inconsistent about this. Some things they do care about, and usually those things are not as important as the things they should care about.

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Sad, but true. Since the Covid fiasco I’ve seen the true nature of people—or at least the nature they were willing to show once the fear got turned up and the herd started moving. Most of them are still firmly under the sheep banner, content to graze wherever they’re told. A small handful stand under the shrew banner. Those are the ones I still trust. The shrews. The sheepies? I don’t trust them anymore. Did I ever, really? I thought I did, back when I was younger and still believed most people were basically decent when the chips were down. Turns out that was optimistic.

Lately this loss of trust has had me thinking about the American Wild West. Not the Hollywood version—the real one. Back then, almost every man who wanted to stay alive carried a revolver on his hip. It wasn’t for show. You never knew when some mean-eyed bastard might decide your horse, your money, or your life was worth more to him than it was to you. The sensible ones stayed ready. They watched people. They didn’t assume good intentions just because someone smiled and said howdy. Trust was something you earned slowly, usually after a man had proven he wouldn’t sell you out the first time it became convenient.

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I was recently watching footage of the NATO Summit held July 7–8, 2026, in Ankara, Türkiye. I couldn’t help but notice how similar the gathering looked to the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) shows I used to attend while working in the music business in Hollywood. Every year, all of us music nerds would get excited to head to the huge convention center in downtown L.A. to see the newfangled hoopla the music merchants were releasing that year. We gobbled it up, of course.

The NATO event looks like essentially the same thing—a trade show—except the newfangled hoopla is of a different kind. World leaders, all decked out in fine suits (nerds of a special kind), stroll the aisles admiring missiles and tanks engineered for maximum lethality. Billions are spent to make killing more efficient. While societies debate the cost of keeping one person alive in their final months, trillions flow into perfecting the technology of death. People who still think can see the terrible clarity in this inversion: when the soul recedes and the material world reigns, efficiency in killing becomes one of the highest values of our age.

Personally, I don’t think there is a better definition of insanity than the way humans delight in war and death. Yes, there was a time when killing your neighbour because they wouldn’t let you eat an apple growing on their side of the tribal fence made a tiny bit of sense. But what it has evolved into today is pure insanity. Humans are supposed to be capable of compassion. We are supposed to be able to sort out our differences with other tribes. We are supposed to care more about human life than we did in the cave days, when it was all about survival and who would or would not get the apple. What happened to all of that? For any of us to justify wholesale killing the way we do only proves we haven’t gotten anywhere in hundreds of thousands of years.

It is all so screwed up, as is nearly everything. Nothing makes sense anymore. It is crazy to me that, for one small example, Canada can go ga-ga over its health system paying for the last months of a citizen’s life—spending millions if necessary to keep them alive—yet the same government will spend roughly $2.2 million on a single Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon designed to destroy high-value targets and capable of killing dozens of people (or more) in one strike. This is the kind of arithmetic they are running through their heads while strolling the aisles at their NATO war show: “Now tell me again—how many people will this weapon kill, and how much does it cost? That’s some nice bang for the buck! I’ll take 20 of ‘em!” Insane.

I just read that Canada is deep in debt and running persistent deficits, while Ukraine sits on roughly $4 billion worth of gold reserves. So, Canada (and everyone else that can) keeps giving money to a country that already holds billions in gold, all so more people can be killed. And don’t tell me, “Russia ruthlessly attacked Ukraine! They should pay for it!” Yeah, right. If you are saying that right now, you are, unfortunately, still thinking like an ignorant caveman. That is not the whole story; in fact, it is very little of it. But Russia doesn’t get off the hook either. Grow up, people. Figure this shit out and quit acting like ten-year-olds playing in the backyard with stick guns.

At least the stick guns don’t deplete the treasury and suck the tax-paying population dry. It is astounding to think that most of us work a lifetime just so our country has the resources to kill—or help kill—thousands of other working stiffs who are simply minding their own business and trying to get through life in one piece. Almost no one fighting in these wars has any real inkling why they are out there killing other people. The idea of the apple as something needed to survive is long gone. It is all a game now—not for the people dying from the weapons their leaders are buying, but for the leaders themselves and the oligarchs who own the companies making all this hardware. It is their little game. And they are having a blast.

I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m blue in the face. It is all a game—a sophisticated 3D chess game. And we, the common useless eaters, are not at the table playing it. In fact, we barely even exist to the real players. Sure, they use us for kill stats. The more of us who die, the more some oligarch or world leader can claim victory and collect his chips.

Look at the actual numbers if you still doubt it. According to the latest available data from SIPRI and the International Institute for Strategic Studies:

The United States leads the world by a wide margin, spending roughly $920–950 billion a year on its military.

China follows at around $250–340 billion.

Russia is third at approximately $186–190 billion (about 7.5% of its GDP).

Germany has surged to over $100–114 billion.

India sits near $90 billion.

The United Kingdom spends close to $90 billion.

Ukraine, despite its size, is now pouring roughly $84 billion into its military—an almost unimaginable 40% of its entire GDP.

Saudi Arabia, France, Japan, and others round out the top tier with tens of billions each.

Canada, after years of lagging, has ramped up significantly and is now spending in the range of $35–40 billion (with recent announcements pushing it higher to meet NATO targets).

These are not abstract figures. These are the concrete resources extracted from ordinary people—through taxes, inflation, and delayed infrastructure, healthcare, and housing—so that a small circle of decision-makers can keep the machinery of death humming. Trillions of dollars every year, worldwide, flow into the business of preparing for, and conducting, the efficient slaughter of other human beings.

And still the game continues. The leaders meet, the contracts are signed, the missiles are ordered, the justifications are written, and the body counts are tallied. The rest of us are expected to cheer for “our side,” wave the correct flag, and never ask why the same people who claim to care so deeply about human life are so eager to spend our money perfecting the art of ending it. And nobody seems to care. As long as their game of pickleball is not disrupted, the leaders they seem to adore so much can continue to play their game to their heart’s content.

I don’t know how much longer this particular round of the game will last. I only know that as long as we keep accepting the premise—that war is inevitable, that leaders know best, that the dead on the other side somehow matter less—the players will keep dealing the cards and raking in the chips. The rest of us will keep paying the price, both in treasure and in blood.

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Humanity is unravelling. In the span of just a few generations—scarcely a century—we have witnessed a precipitous decline in the quality of our shared life. What was once a world of craft, connection, and quiet moral coherence has given way to machine-made uniformity, moral drift, environmental squalor, widespread addiction, and a pervasive spiritual emptiness. The symptoms are everywhere: drugs flooding communities, garbage choking landscapes, ethics treated as quaint relics, families dissolving, and relationships reduced to transactions. Many sense the rot but struggle to name its root. The cause, at bottom, is simple yet profound: we have ceased to value what is real. We have traded conscious relationship with soul for mere stuff.

This is not merely nostalgia for a romanticized past. For most of human history, daily life was saturated with human presence and intention. A child’s hobby horse was not ordered from a warehouse but carved by hand—perhaps by a parent or village craftsman. Houses rose under the skilled hands of bricklayers, carpenters, and masons who brought years of embodied knowledge and personal care to their work. These creations carried something especially potent: the energy of focused attention, love of craft, and a sense of participation in a larger story. Even primitive shelters—the thatched huts of early communities—were built in the context of kinship, mutual reliance, and a felt connection to the living world. Soul flowed visibly through the making.

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Sorry for such a horrific image, but this is exactly how I feel right now!!

You won’t believe this, but the worst possible thing has happened with the new volume of The View of the Shrew!

Long story short, Word screwed up the final version of the book and DELETED ALL ITALICIZED WORDS!!!! WOW!!!!

So what I have uploaded to Amazon was wrong, the Kindle book was wrong, and any other instance where the book could be downloaded was wrong.

Easy fix for most of you . . . just go back to the BookFunnel link and redownload the PDF or ePUB file you originally got. Here is the link:

BOOK FUNNEL FREE BOOK

Now remember, this free offer is for people willing to write a review!!

If you bought the paperback book from Amazon, send me your name and address through this email…

kingshrew@auraboros.com

If you bought the Kindle ebook from Amazon, they will soon be correcting it (replacing your version on your device with the new one…I know, I know, don’t get me started.)

SO SORRY ABOUT ALL THIS!!!

Here’s yet another thing that bugs Dr. Shrew to extinction. Drive through any unassuming suburb and behold the gleaming 10,000-square-foot monuments to excess sprouting like mushrooms after rain—while the rest of us scrape by on fast food and fret over five-cent gas hikes. This glaring disconnect between perceived scarcity and ostentatious plenty whispers of deeper currents: not mere luck or hard work, but an economic shadow realm where the rules of reality bend for some and crush the rest.

I don’t know if this is true where you live—more than likely it is, especially in big-city suburbs such as the Greater Toronto Area where I reside. But the spectacle repeats itself across countless American and Canadian metros. Add to this the proliferation of high-end shopping malls sprouting up nearly everywhere. Rural shopping centres may be spared the worst of it, but in populated regions, the contrast is impossible to ignore.

Who supports all of this? Not just the flagship luxury anchors like Saks Fifth Avenue or Nordstrom, but the hundreds of smaller (yet still premium) retailers such as Lululemon, The Gap (and its sister brands), Anthropologie, Madewell, and Abercrombie & Fitch. These stores don’t typically sell $10,000 handbags, but shoes and women’s purses don’t have to reach that stratosphere to feel expensive. A “nice” pair of designer shoes or a quality leather tote can easily set someone back several hundred dollars—well beyond the reach of many scraping by on stagnant wages.

When I was a kid, the elite who could casually afford a $10,000 watch were few and far between. They may have to shop in exclusive boutique retailers nestled in the good parts of major cities like New York City, Paris or London. Now they seem a dime a dozen. A decent Rolex that might have cost around $3,000 in 1990 now starts at about $10,000 and can climb to $100,000 or more for exotic models. You can walk into a jewelry store in your local mall—sandwiched between a Walmart or Target—and drop $20,000 to $80,000 on a Rolex, Tag Heuer, Breitling, or Cartier. Who in hell does that? How do these high-end businesses thrive, not just in flagship downtown locations but in suburban malls across the country?

I guess the same folks who own the big mansions also visit the malls. They grab a taco at Taco Bell, then stroll over to Neiman Marcus to buy a Hermès Birkin purse for $40,000. Yeah, go, girl.

Who are these people? They are the visible avatars of a bifurcated economy—professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs who have ridden waves of asset inflation, tech booms, finance, and selective opportunity. Many are dual-income households in high-earning fields: tech executives, finance professionals (bankers, investors, hedge fund managers), corporate lawyers, specialized physicians (surgeons, anesthesiologists), real estate developers, successful business owners, and mid-to-senior level managers in lucrative industries like consulting, pharmaceuticals, or energy. A significant portion also includes inheritors or those who benefited from generational wealth transfers, real estate appreciation, or stock market gains over the past two decades.

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In an era where our every word, step, and glance can be archived, summarized, and replayed by sleek little discs pinned to our chests, the ancient archetype of the all-seeing eye has found its modern silicon incarnation. What was once the paranoid whisper of conspiracy has become the marketed convenience of ‘life logging’—yet beneath the promise of perfect memory lies the total erasure of privacy, turning every shrew into a unwitting performer on the surveillance stage.

During a recent three-hour ramble with my sister—one of those wide-ranging, idea-sparking talkathons we’ve shared for years—the little recording device I had just bought, attached to my phone, quietly drank it all in. Every tangent on culture, politics, family, and the state of the world was captured, summarized, and later served back as a tidy slideshow of “highlights.” It auto-suggested calendar entries, pulled up past chats on demand, and generally made itself indispensable. For a moment, I felt the rush: This is the future. No more forgotten details, no more scrambling for notes. Pure magic.

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