Do you know a Unicorn

BLM:90 WHM:90 SMN:90 THF:90 WAR:90 DRK:90 RNG:90 PLD:90

The city is one of the most advanced creations of the modern age. Only with a city do people work together and do we see a cycle begin to take hold. A cycle of construction and obsolescence.

I am playing Civilization: Revolution and in it the game lauds the city as mankinds last hope for world domination... for good. And it teaches a great many useful things that as an intellectual, as someone who needs to understand HOW things are put together, YOU NEED TO KNOW.

For example, it teaches simple things about styles of government. In feudalism, the advantage is +1 to combat troops while losing any culture points. In democracy, you get +50% gold production and science but you can't start a war unless attacked first. In communism, you get +50% production, but it costs you science and gold. So you might think what a neat theory that game if it were true, right?

Yeah, well answer me why these things happened. Did communism fall due to lack of trade? As the world super-power do our businesses seek to trade with everyone while at the same time NOT being able to attack the people we want to? In the game if your city is really high on culture output, you get GREAT people to show up and they can change your city lickety split, JUST as though you had researched a new technology, which takes years. And if your culture is high enough, cities nearby JOIN your nation and leave the others without you even having to send troops over there.

Is that what happened in the Ukraine? Did people there want to join the EU and leave Russia simply on the basis of culture? And was Russia a democracy when it walked into Crimea or was it a FEUDAL state at that point?

So while you might think I am doing nothing, fact is I am always learning and saving my examples to teach people. Why? Because people don't respond well to "because I said so".

Cities are the first step of organization that comes after a family. A family is very hard to separate and surely, there are differences within. I told one of my cousins recently, they were visiting me from Honduras, about how you could tell someone was family. I told her it's because "that's why you can tell we are family because we are so DIFFERENT". You see friends tend to be of the same cuff as you. If you are an intellectual, you're friends are intellectuals, if you are a shill, your friends are shills, if you use nicknames, your friends use nicknames, if you are police, other police are your friends.

But not in a family. In a family you have spent so much time together with your siblings confined together that when you finally break out you will almost always CHOOSE a personality decidedly different from your brothers. And the odd things is that as an exception, your brothers will be the ONLY ONES you can suffer to be around that have that different personality.

Unless you TRY to be different, TRY to be like them, which is perhaps a mistake.

Now, getting back to explaining families, families are NOT cyclical. They can be made to self-destruct but they don't do it of their own volition. Parents can usually define what we are all about and if they are strong, can keep the family together by suffering the change that happens, by BEING the center of divergent forces. They should not stay together for the sake of children if sex has gone out of the room but usually, everyone will agree that children, even grown up and self-sustaining, are plenty of reason to stay with your mate.

Now I don't like talking down to people like I am doing now but what's obvious is not always obvious to people, especially when they are stressed or "loyal" to other forces they don't understand. Families are difficult enough to maintain without taking into account that your mates figure into this somehow. I see the downside of having mates and upside to keeping your family. Mates ALWAYS spell trouble for the family. The tried and true tradition of the mother-in-law is not just a legend. People that haven't spent time with you won't love you like their own family. Everytime there has been family problems somewhere in my OTHER family, a mate is always somehow mentioned in there and I KNOW that they are the ones lying or gossiping or bastardizing something serene.

But I have said this before, sex is job one for you on this Earth. If you ain't having sex, there's a problem. If your mate is not giving it to you, there's a problem. If there is ever any doubt as to where to rank your father and your mother and your dog and your children and your mate... your mate is RANK 1.

It's not hard.

Everything in life is like math. Just imagine attraction and repulsion and give people nothingness and then relativity and you begin to realize how important you are and how important others are to you. Use Nodes theory. Imagine being a part of a collective but that some people are more important to you and some are important in society, that should create for you a bright little network in your head. And that is useful because a bright network attracts others. Your BRIGHT FAMILY, as mine was, attracts others. My bright family was good for business because it attracted others. That's why it's so important to network so that the city becomes charged with information and highways that lead to more interaction.

At the center of each family is a node and a nice cluster of nodes makes a small city. And as you begin to understand cities you understand what causes it's downfall and what helps bolster it further.

Ok I am about to go off on a tangent but I might forget to mention this later so here it goes. Cities are NOT natural. As soon as a city goes up, the trees get chopped down, the soil gets used up, the water gets dirty, and the animals get chased away. Soon people in the city get sick and soon the food has to be delivered to continue to support the people. This means what? Well it means cities were meant to move. Just like the Indians moved across the country in herds, people should move in herds. It's no small wonder that gypsies tend to be the happiest people as they come down on a city already sick with laxity and prey on them and then leave before people know what happened to the Police Department's Pension. And the entire behavior might seem evil but you cannot ignore that it works, you must just struggle to UNDERSTAND WHY and then make adjustments.

Cities can be self-sustaining but the only people that will honestly care about that will be people that don't intend to move. Now you might think OH that means we need to keep our rich people right where they are, and let them get richer. Not exactly, as cities we need to have the good people in charge and by good people I mean trusting people. Leaders with a lack of trust tend to take power away from the populace, for example through gun laws, through disease, through harassment. If there is any way to harass the public and not go to jail for it, TRUST ME, they are doing it and paying for it to happen.

If you feel this happening to you, take out your camera and start building a case because they aren't thinking about doing it to you, which takes years of planning, they are already ACTING against you, and that means it's like duck season and you can't figure out why you like to quack and waddle all of a sudden.

Ok I could go into it more but you get the fact that cities should move because they are using up resources and if they don't move they must keep different people in charge that don't feed off of their own populace. I could go on but I want you to start there.

Now back to cities as a node. Cities, even if they move, should be the LAST level of involvement for you. If you think you can influence government at the federal level, you are mistaken. Your BEST source of influence, AFTER you are done with your town hall meeting and talking to your local leader is to take a close look at the products you are buying. All of these corporations are like hidden little cities with their scoop down next to you. Every time you walk into a Wal-Mart instead of Ma and Pa, that money goes OUT of the city. Every time you buy foreign, jobs go OUT of the country. If you want to be the BEST citizen, FORGET climate change, forget football, forget church, the single most important thing you can do is to WATCH where you spend your money because that is what is going to keep YOU and your local job, healthy and perpetually well off.

I have said this before, working for the public good or for public service is good until the public starts to feed off itself. If that happens, selfish is better.

Meaning we should BE selfish with where our money goes. Maybe instead of McDonald's, today you buy a Subway or maybe even just get a hot dog from a vendor. I used to go to a local Food Court and one time I noticed one of the businesses go out of business. Nothing is as obvious as a closed business sitting right there in front of you while you are eating. I resolved right then that since I had plenty of money, I would make the effort to change around where I ate so as to spread around the money. I used to always eat at Taco Bell because I knew what to expect but if I can just TRUST that all food is good if I try it, I can keep all the diversity of the food court alive and my excitement at eating out, at a maximum.

Ok so where was I? Yeah, so the purpose of writing this today was to discuss cities but more importantly it was to discuss belief. You can be loyal to your family right? I mean, people say that all the time that "you can say what you want about me but don't talk about my mother!" That's belief working there. You are willing to act because of simple words. You might think hey that's not right people should NOT act because of words. Well, my friend, then you are NOT a fan of belief.

And fact is in this country we are NOT a fan of belief.

I mean it is the most natural thing to want to feed your spirit and feeding your spirit IS exactly what it means to BELIEVE in something. People involved with football, don't realize that they are BELIEVING in the Jaguars for example, until the day someone comes along and insults them. And in the bar, that sort of thing happens a lot, especially when you have a band leader for a brother-in-law. He doesn't believe in nothing. In fact to get as many people singing along to his music as possible, he is going to BEAT DOWN your beliefs. He is going to make the culture of being in the bar as banal as possible. When you go to complain about bad service, it's time to make fun of you for being emo. If you start to clap too loud, it's time to start the next set without a break. If you love this one song, it's time to not play it for a while. People in a band will insult the crap out of each other in an effort to get an emotional reaction, like that's a bad thing. All of this is meant to keep belief as far away from the bar as possible. It's kind of a good idea right? I mean, only if there is belief do people react physically and yet people without belief have no purpose and are easily led about.

People without belief TRY things, yeah?

It's easy to see how someone in that environment would begin to talk to drug-dealers and whores without caring too much that it's illegal because "no one cares". Yeah, noone cares until you get arrested and you can't figure out who turned you in. It's great fun until it isn't, and then it's never going to be fun again.

Ok sidetracked again, to end this I want to bring to light the necessity of having a belief. A full spirit is the very definition of confidence. Someone full of confidence has is full measure of belief. He believes he is all that like band leaders do, he believes he is the smartest like accomplished people do, he believes he could poison the crap out of people like bartenders do, or they could choose to believe that all people want to trust each other like philosophers do.

That is our belief in this country. We believe NOT in a book of laws that say there is ONE MAN we owe our existence to, we have a book of laws that says we owe our existence to the collective, to democracy. Our non-belief IS our belief. And that is what we must strive for, to make including everyone a part of our nation's belief.

Inevitably, some people will get lazy. And because some are lazy, others become tired of having to see that so they become restless. And restless people without belief, like I said before start to FEED off our own people. They are without goodness right? They are acting against us and yet they figure we ought to keep them safe while they do that right? So once they have slopped their face full of an old lady's pension or have finished their third shot talking about that one guy in the drive-thru that CERTAINLY got what was coming to him, it's time to wonder if anybody else is doing this... so I can KEEP ON acting selfishly against others! And once this happens, all belief in those people has been lost. They don't BELIEVE what they are doing is right, they are controlled by their fear of getting caught and yet are fed by the temporary rush of feeding over and over. They don't feed their spirit off of the node at the center of their collective. They can FEED right now off of others.

This is what people mean when they talk of someone as godless. This is what a vampire is.

But what do you call SECUPP? What about Bill Maher and SarahK? What do we call Rachel and others that hold a higher standard when it comes to worshipping?  What if I want to worship the Constitution but there is no mention of God there? What if I am godless and an atheist but I'm a good person?

You my friend, are a Unicorn.

ps. A democracy is unnatural, being godless is unnatural, a unicorn is not a regular animal, it is rare and quite sophisticated; and if you are like a unicorn, you are unnatural, and it's DIFFICULT to stay that way.