The weekly Hugh Demon Full Steam Ahead We went back every year for classwork out for fan reunions We'd go down to Muncie, Indiana or a place called Green Castle, which is just outside Muncie and nicest freaking people in the world. I never liked going, but it wasn't because the people just took a long freaking drive. It was kind of funny. We'd go to the 1970s.
It was always a moral day weekend. That Sunday, the moral day weekend was the fan reunion. And we'd go there and my mom's uncles and that side of the family, they would listen to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio. It would be blaring in the little corner.
It would be blaring the whole time. They'd listen to the Indianapolis 500. And I can barely watch it, but I'd much less listen to it. But everyone had this.
I thought it was Southern Accent, but it's not a Southern Accent. It's a hillbilly accent. And everyone outside the family had it. Even though I grew up and still live less than a mile from Indiana border.
When I was a kid, I thought everyone at Indiana talked like that. I thought it was kind of a Southern state. I knew geographically it wasn't. But for the reason when he crossed that border, a mile south of me, it would talk to that accent.
It was just kind of a task assumption I always had growing up. So I was in my school and I got to be a good friend of the guy from Muncie. He was talking about some friends of your his. They're from Muncie Tucky.
I said Muncie, why come Muncie Tucky? He was because of all the Kentucky hillbillies who moved up here during the war. And took over Muncie basically. He goes, everyone Muncie has this F-ed up hillbilly accent.
He goes, hey, those are my relatives. They're good people. He goes, hey, that's Mary one of them. He goes, they're bad people.
But they talk with that hillbilly accent. So I came together for him. He was like, ah, I'm 23 years old. Now I understand kind of, yeah, Mama.
She went to Detroit with her stepfather and her mother. They had three other children. And this is my mom's story. Even as a young girl.
My stepfather, he's a decent guy. Kind of rough on the edges. Growing up, he always expected more of my mom. Kind of like, hey, you're not my daughter.
I love you just fine. He goes, but you're older than my children. You know, than your half siblings. And so my mom was always expected to work and pay for everything.
I mean, he covered the bare basics. Well, he covered like, here a house and food. I work in GM or four, wherever he worked. One of the munitions factories and the car industry.
But would buy none of her clothes other than maybe, I think she might not say, always applied to her with shoes. And so my mom worked, you know, one of two jobs throughout high school. She had good grades at high school. She was a very attractive girl.
So she had a social life to bet she could. But for most part, no, she couldn't have much of a social life. She had to work constantly. It was kind of a Cinderella type thing.
Except when I get my step for grandfather, it was not a bad man. Just, my mom always knew that she was kind of the outlier. So it was kind of sad in that way. But she was no, she was popped up to carry me in and popped in.
Love me. But you know, this is kind of different. You know, it's like, I think if you ask Pop, you'll be like, oh, Rita's great. I love Rita.
But she's not mine. I think that's what I think that's what I've been. His reaction to the 1950s. And you know, people don't talk about that.
I mean, you can't talk about that way now. And these blended families were this step-grandfather. A step-parent is a real creep. Can't talk like that.
I think my step grandfather, who I always knew is my grandfather. I always really, really liked him. I think he'd be like, well, of course I don't want to go as much as my own. You know, but I love her.
I think that, and my mom's like, it wasn't, you know, it was a hard life. It wasn't a bad life. And I guess this different, more different ways of looking at things. When Pop came down with Lou Garris's in the 1980s, he came to our house to live.
And he said, it slowly died. You know, there was a very high level of faction for a different mom. Even though, again, it didn't necessarily love her quite as much as she did as other children. I'm to be honest with you, I think that shifted over the years.
I think it became more fine. My mom, she got older. But then she met my dad. They were working in the first national bank building in Detroit.
And I would say, well, my dad was like the Prince of Cinderella, but that exaggerate my mom's situation. And also, exaggerate my dad. I like to say, well, my dad was like the court jester. He liked the joke around a lot.
I don't think he'd call my prince. But my dad was that heavy duty smart, heavy duty hard worker. I'm not even ambitious. I don't think my dad ever really wanted to make a ton of money.
But the guy just loved to work. And he was freaking smart as a whip. I could tell you story about how smart this guy was and blow your mind. People still talk about it around my small town.
His facility with numbers and other things and his grasp of history and whatnot. But, and so yeah, my dad made good money. We brought it down to my small town where we still live and provided for it very well. She had a great, you know, last two thirds of her life.
She made it off to a rough start for the first 20 or so years. But the last 50 years of her life were charmed, I think. So, you know, dealing with grief and death is just tough. And I can talk about it because there's been doing books out there.
And it's probably, you know, 2% of my worth reading because it is a tough thing. But what I really hate is just it's just the pushball. You know, I had to keep my law office, my law practice on the rails. I couldn't just take off, especially since I'm on my stick the week before.
So I was the week before, I was highly distracted with like hundreds of text messages every day. You get updates, having to go Detroit to see her is just the week before. The week before was tough in the end of itself. And then she actually died and I was like, I got to the law office and keep things on the rails.
But then everything else, you know, so I had the produce site where I grow tomatoes and lettuce and flowers. You know, zero sales, zero harvest, that stuff is gone. And that's, that's nothing. I mean, there's like, who cares?
You know, so you lost, you know, 200 bucks worth of flower sales or let us say like I really couldn't care less. But one thing that really hit me though is, you know, I talked earlier about the hour of power as I call it. I hate that term, but that's what I call it. You know, there's no hour power in the morning.
And the one or two mornings I came down to try to concentrate, no ability to concentrate whatsoever. And what was bizarre, it wasn't all my mom. It was just all of everything. I mean, it was, as I said, your mind is so distracting with it.
This happens. I couldn't focus on the smallest task. I had to do some work for my mom's estate. We had three simple documents that each of my brothers, our three brothers, each of me had to sign off on it.
And their identical documents, this is, this is like the easiest legal thing I can do. And all three documents, I printed them out and read them and all three of them wrong. I just had the names transpose and my brother's phone number and this one on this brother's. It was humbly when I was just like, wow, I just, you know, and I was feeling pretty good.
That was like Thursday. So I just, you know, I felt like I was kind of getting over at that point. And like I said, it's like the simplest task I had to deal with. So hopefully this podcast doesn't show it.
And it won't because as I mentioned, I had this podcast recorded last week when the call came to my mom's ill. So after this segment, the rest of the podcast will be stuff I recorded when I was most in the right mind. Again, I was worried about my mom because she seemed like she wasn't doing well. But that point, I didn't realize the full gravity was going on until the call came in.
So the rest of the podcast will be regular fare. That's not much better, Shusky. Oh, maybe not. But I hope it'd be pretty decent.
By the way, this one quick thing. You have been so distracted intellectually, so to speak, or mentally. I couldn't go back to my regular studies, you know, the Jacques D'Arreter, Michael Foucault and those thinkers and things like that. I couldn't jump back into what I call my main emphasis of study these days.
So I picked up a couple of books from my dad's house by Thomas Sowell. And one of them is conquest and cultures. And I started reading that. It's like, my gosh, I mean, Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L.
This guy is the man. I just picked up this book and started reading it at random. Just to get my mind off all the other crap. And I knew I couldn't really do any serious reading.
And I was engrossed immediately. This guy, again, I'm talking specifically here about conquest and cultures. But it's pretty much any book this guy writes, although he has some hardcore economic books. You couldn't do this with those books.
But he's picking this book up and reading it at random. Reading two of the pages, I'm immediately engrossed. Here, for instance, I was engrossed by his explanation of why Africa sucks. He basically said, this is a massive continent that is wholly disfavored by the geographic gods.
He has waterways, are basically non-existent. He just goes through and talks about how even the Nile has its limitations, although that's a pretty good waterway. But the rest of it, really, the rivers mean nothing. They don't help much.
He has, they have no, like, very few natural harbors. He points out at one point that Europe, 30% of Europe is either islands or peninsula. You know, making it very easy for ships to go in. He goes, in Africa, it's less than 3%.
And you just don't have these natural inlets. He said the southern half of Africa. He goes, you can't get a ship in at all. He goes, because the water shall go all the way out.
That'll help out far out. But you guys, so the big ships are bringing in cargo or want to get cargo. You buy stuff. They can't pull into a dock like they can in every other continent.
Every other continent, you have numerous bays or harbors you can pull into. Because you don't have that in the southern Africa. You get an anchor way out and then have smaller ships bring the cargo and bring the cargo out, which is very expensive. And they said, it's going to other things.
He basically says, you know, just the waterways alone have disfavored Africa. He hasn't said this, but I think that's where he's going with it. He's like, that's one reason this place can't be lifted out of poverty, or it's been really, really hard. Then he goes into other things about the insects that don't die off because they don't get cold weather and he goes to other things as well.
But again, he just has a knack for just distilling really, really interesting facts and applying them in a pithy way. I can't say enough about Thomas Sol. He's still alive. I thought he died, but he's still alive and he's still producing.
Anything like Thomas Sol is worth reading. He's going right in the middle. I don't even visit somewhat briefly the whole LSD thing. I want to get into this last week, but the podcast is running along as it was.
I just didn't get a chance to. So quick recap of last week. I kind of ripped off Joe Rogan's statement that LSD is the ultimate ego dissolver under the effects of LSD, the ego dissolves. And I said, I like that.
Again, I've never seen LSD much less taking it. But the concept of the ego dissolving is like a zen-type concept because dissolve is an intransitive verb. I mean, it has no object. You don't lay down.
Okay? You lie down because lie is intransitive verb and it's something you're doing upon yourself. There is no object of the verb. And so in a way, when you say the ego dissolves, you're saying there is no object, there's no goal.
It's just it acts upon itself and dissolves. And I said, that's kind of like what makes LSD like Zen mode, Zen mode on steroids, Zen mode on acid. It makes extreme Zen. The subject yourself has dissolved and it's not latching onto an object.
So you're in this middle area and you're kind of hovering there. When you're in this hovering area, this Zen mode area, you're probably coming to union in some ways with a thing. The mystical theologians like Meister Eckhart called the ground. It's like the transcendent being that you can't reason to.
Keep in mind, reasoning applies to yourself or the objects. If you're not relatched on either one, you're kind of transcending or surpassing or going behind, going beyond out here how you want to put it. You're going beyond reasoning. You're not in the subject object mode.
You're beyond the reasoning mode. It's like when you go beyond time and space, you're beyond reason. You can't get a head around things, aren't in time and space. So when you're not in subject object or you're not in time or space, you've gone beyond the sphere of reason.
I'm sure some people say, well, there's no such thing because I can't understand it. Therefore, it doesn't exist. It's like, well, you're missing a huge, huge mystical literature from every faith tradition. And you're even ignoring your own mystical experiences.
When you see a sunset and things like that, everyone has these kinds of experiences that you came and reasoned to understand where they're coming from. And not necessarily emotional, you're just kind of transcended, but no matter. I firmly believe, and I think anyone who's honest with themselves firmly believe that there is a sphere of existence that is not reasonable, it's not rational, so to speak. It transcends it.
You know, one of the greatest discursive reasoning philosophers of all time was St. Thomas Aquinas. He was a firm believer that you have to use natural philosophy on aided by revelation, on aided by scripture, to come to philosophical truths and the torch of his life from 1273 to 1274 right around there. He had some massive mystical experience where he put his penicide and said, you know, everything I've written seems like straw.
I was like, you know, I've been reasoning my entire life. I was only 49 years old and it was amazing what his output was. But I've been reasoning my whole life and then I saw this and I can reason no more. He didn't even say that.
He said, basically I can write no more. And I think a reasonable speculation on that is not that his wrist hurt. It's that mentally he had nothing else he could really say. The process of reasoning fell short to what he saw in the mystical experience at Mass.
What I want to draw a connection to today, kind of circling back, I want to read this quote from a writer from 1944. He said, quote, direct knowledge of the ground cannot be had except by union. And union can be achieved only by annihilation of the self-regarding ego, unquote. And this is a book called the perennial philosophy.
And he's kind of exploring these concepts. And he said, look, you're not going to find a spiritual calculus. Calculus is very reasonable. You're not going to find a spiritual calculus.
He goes, you have to look at the, I think he called them the empirical theologians. You know, the people who have the experiences, yes, see what they've done throughout all the faith traditions. And then you start seeing certain truths emerge that are going to be paradoxical, they're going to transcend the reason. And he goes, when you do that, you might start approaching union with the ground or what you call the transcendent or reaching in with God or reaching union with Jesus Christ, however you want to put it.
And it explores the book, the different ways of doing that. Ten years later, this guy became an early pioneer in like a prophet of LSD. It's Aldous Huxley. And I find this absolutely fascinating.
So Huxley, back in, this book was published in 1944, the perennial philosophy. But so I'm guessing he wrote those words in like 42, 1943, right around there. And he'd already basically come to these conclusions, you know, he was, I don't think he was, but he was. I mean, the man was not a believer in any Christian sense whatsoever.
I don't exactly know what his, what his religious outlook was, but clearly not a believer in any conventional sense. But he recognized, hey, there's something, there's something out there. There's something that transcends our ability to reason to it. I think people like Joel Rogan would take LSD.
They're seeing there's something more often than we can necessarily reason to. That's not a connection fascinating. I'm going to talk a little bit more about LSD the next segment. Okay, cyber run.
Don't walk. Cyber run to Tom Woodshow in download episode 1494 came out last week. It's an interview with Stephen Kinzer. It's called the CIA in mind control.
Now I'm listening to some of my car. And I'm just like, boy, this Kinzer sounds like kind of a nut. I mean, he does some really bizarre things he's saying. Yeah, I was like, yeah, this is, this is some extreme mess and I'm not sure I believe it.
So then, but it was so fast I went back and started listening to parts of it again. Now, I'm going to look up this book. He's talking this book about the CIA in mind control experiments. And I thought, this guy is Sal Vasal.
He was a journalism professor at Northwestern. He wrote for the New York Times in Boston, low for 20 years. He has mainstream credentials, Al-Dying Yang. And he wrote this book called Poisoner in Chief, Sydney Gottlieb, and the CIA search for mind control.
And stuff is all freaking true. So it's all about this guy in Sydney Gottlieb who, like, in the night when he was home, he was like, you know, he called me a proto hippie. You know, proto by the way, it means, yeah, I had a few time. If you're a neo hippie, that means you're kind of going back to earlier time.
So a proto hippie would have been someone before the 1960s who lived like a hippie. A neo hippie would be someone today who lives like a hippie. So he called me a proto hippie. He said that he meditated at night.
He grew his own vegetables and was really in the gardening. It lived a very simple existence, like in a cabin, like off the grid. But by day, he was like objectively evil. I mean, he was out to literally destroy people's minds and then rebuild them.
I guess it came from a 1949 trial of a Catholic cardinal. I can't pronounce any of them. They mentioned it by the men's density, Joseph Men's density. And I can be honest with you, I was thinking about this where he said things that the pope couldn't believe the cardinal was saying it in favor of the Soviet Union.
And it said he must have been brainwashed. This must be mind control by the Soviet Union. And apparently that got the CIA off and running thinking, hey, it must be possible to do mind control. You want to make sure you're in Canada type of thing.
And said he got leave. He was like an expert poisoner. And then he branched off into mind control. To destroy people's minds, he would give them massive doses of LSD.
I feel like he said, you'll go to the podcast and it lays out. And it's like 200 hits of LSD over the course of 70 days and something like that. He was literally trying to destroy people's minds. And it did a lot of it on our prisoners.
Basically, you guys are going to be proud of the experiment. I don't know if they gave him a cigarette or what, but I doubt they had much of a choice. You know what, basically discovered by the way is, yes, you can destroy a person's mind with drugs, LSD, and stuff like that. But you can't rebuild it.
That was a final conclusion. Kinds or recounts how the CIA brought LSD to America. I guess they brought up the entire Swiss laboratory that makes it. See the CIA bought their entire stock and bought it to the United States.
And from there, it made us wait at the streets. You know, John Linden said one time, you know, ask about LSD. He goes, well, let's not forget to thank the CIA. The counterculture, the United States, they knew where the LSD came from.
I guess they didn't know it early on. They didn't realize it was from the CIA, but information out there that all came through the city got leave. You can miss the CIA to buy up the entire stock. And then the stock made its way to the streets somehow.
I don't know the story. But if you get a chance, go there and listen to that podcast. Actually, fascinating. I really want to buy the book.
That kind of well. I won't get wrong with reading the entire thing. I'll probably be the first couple chapters in a pulled away someplace else, but it's an absolutely fascinating podcast. I'm sure the book is even better.
Let's do some planning segments. So I'm listening to a podcast by Russ Roberts DeKontan. It's a wild and popular podcast. If you're not listening to it, you gotta give it a try.
It's part of everyone's cup of tea, but I think it's excellent. And he recounts this conversation with AJ Jacobs. And AJ Jacobs is an author. I really like him.
I haven't read a ton of this stuff, but he does like stunt journalism. So he read, for instance, the encyclopedia Britannica from page one to the last page. He's about 28 volumes of it. And then he wrote a book called The Know It All.
His body's experience of trying to read the entire encyclopedia Britannica. Well, not trying. He actually did it. And he just goes through it.
He just gets autobiographical. And then how things just read and the encyclopedia kind of tied in his everyday life. Interesting facts that he learned from reading the encyclopedia. It's just a real fun book.
He also spent a year trying to live like an Orthodox Jew, but exactly in accordance with the Old Testament. And I guess that was pretty funny. He spent a period of time doing something that I think is way fascinating. Doing no multitasking at all.
And I read some excerpts in the book there and I heard a podcast and he was talking about it, but like absolutely nothing. So he's going to the grocery store and he's waiting in line to pay for his groceries. He says, keep telling himself, I'm buying groceries. I'm buying groceries.
That lives mind-wonder. You know, not read the national choir. That's at the checkout. And he talked about the various mental vistas this opened up for.
But anyway, Russ Roberts mentions that AJ Jacobs keeps a one thing file. Now, if I'm at concept fascinating, I won't back and listen to AJ Jacobs' podcast with Russ Roberts. He basically says that he writes down quote, one thing I remember from a meal, one thing I remember from a conversation, a book, a podcast, unquote. He's looking for that one thing from whatever type of mental interaction it is that he finds most interesting or memorable.
And he said he keeps an entire file. And these things. I know he said, you know, sometimes I write down two or three things. And I think it's great idea.
So I started doing it and I've done it a due to, I can't percine vouch for it. I know that AJ Jacobs and Russ Roberts, two very successful men, vouch for the system. And I actually went through and wrote down some things in the past week that stood out to me. And this light segment is going to be all my first entry into the one thing file.
So the Joel Rogan podcast with Ron Zombie, Ron Zombie, the rock star and movie producer horror films, you want to make a movie about the Broad Street Boys. These were the early 1970s, Philadelphia Flyers, who were just the NHL bad boys. He said they got manhandled as a franchise, some team like really beat him up on the ice in the late 60s, early 70s. And Mantra said never again.
And they assembled a team that was so freaking mean and tough that players on the team was with the games out there, they faked the flu. They faked an injury. So they went out to play these guys. I guess one of them were like a Nazi skullcap.
And they're so mean and fierce, but could also play hockey. They actually ended up winning the Stanley Cup. He said it's an absolute fascinating story. He said there's a documentary out there about the Broad Street Boys.
He said you got to check it out. And it's definitely a nice list of things to look at. Listen to the Bill Burr Monday morning podcast. He mentioned he went to the Iron Maiden concert and he loved Iron Maiden, which struck me because I could never stand Iron Maiden.
I was never really into that really really hard rock. But he made a reference to Sapsley Crack Me Up. He mentioned that he was on day 300 of not drinking at all. He goes, I really miss it.
He goes, but he goes, it's kind of fun being sold by these things, especially at this thing, where there are a ton of people. He said, ton of people are really getting after it. He goes, God bless them. He's at one point.
He goes, I try and go to the bathroom and there's a drunk guy walking towards me. I can't get out of his way. He goes because a drunk guy walking is like a bat flying. That's pretty funny.
I was reading a few notes from my retreat down in Kissimony last June. I never crossed the quote I wrote down from Thomas Merton's book on the Desert Fathers. The Desert Fathers, these are the men and someone who went and lived in the desert in the fourth century in Egypt. Palestine, a place like the Al-Dazza to get away from civilization.
He wrote down a quote from Abba Agathon, that said, when Jesus commands in the gospel's good fruit, Abba Agathon said, that means custody of the mind. I looked up another translation of that Abba Agathon quote. He didn't translate Merton dead. The good food is custody of the mind, but the translation wasn't consistent in custody of the mind.
I think that's crucial to living. Your world starts in your head. You have all sorts of feel good type self-improvement books. I'll tell you this.
It's very true on a much deeper level. That's why for me, say repeatedly, try to get in the habit of saying thanks at all times. Last week I said it could shift your consciousness like LSD, not very, very mild LSD, but can I shift your consciousness? Because the mind would entail this habit of giving thanks and not thinking negative things and not thinking evil thoughts.
So a good friend of mine tells me that a co-worker gently scolded him for not being better read on current events. He's like, you know, you really got to keep up with current events. No, and no. I firmly believe with Nastim Taleb that we're just inundated with current events.
The man who thinks he's educated because he reads in New York Times by morning is Abba Fone. And that seemed to lab. He points out that he never reads the news. He said it's a news where it will reach my ears.
And he's absolutely right. I get on drugs every morning and I look at the headlines, but that's really too graphic. That's just during my morning constitution, so to speak. I never ever read the frickin' news.
I just don't care. And I believe it's Nastim Taleb. If it's important, I'm going to hear about it. And then I can read about more detail at that time.
So my local Catholic Church is pretty much from taking over by the Mexicans. The bishop has, I think, consciously decided to drive the whites out and make it into a Mexican parish. And I respect that. The parish has been more abundant for years.
And I think the bishop has been basically two choices. I can have a thriving Mexican parish with a kind of good Mexicans and develop Mexicans and hardworking Mexicans who make this into a thriving parish center. Or I can try to keep it, kind of like this half mix, half white, half Mexican, more abundant, schizophrenic type, poor church. And I don't mean poor money wise, I'm just talking spiritually poor.
It just sucks. And I think you still want to end and say, nope, we're going Mexican. This is going to be like the hallmark of the Hispanic parish in our Southwest Michigan diocese. And not intentionally, but knowingly saying, screw the whites.
And so we kind of just chugged out. And I'm okay with that. I really am. I've started the occasion going to the four o'clock Spanish Mass, even though I can't understand that much of it.
And I'd really, really enjoy it. And I think I'm going to do a Latin Mass, right? The city, people couldn't understand anything. I think there's something about it.
The music's really charming. I find it very, very good. I can't understand it in the homily, but I take the literature to the hours and read it there in it. And it's struggling because if you go into your confession books, it'll say things like, one thing gets to confess is being intentionally distracted during Mass.
It's like, well, if I'm going to Mass, I literally cannot understand. And if I have to Mass itself, put aside the sermon. But I'm going to say not half. I'm going to say about a third of Mass itself.
There is no translation. We have this missile out so you can be English on the left-hand side, then Spanish on the right. So about two thirds of Mass itself, I can follow along with all the readings, about half of the prayers, but none of the sermon, which goes on for like 15 minutes. I can't pick up any of that.
And then the announcements at the end, I can't understand, but that's not part of Mass. And they go on way too long anyway. It should be like 30 seconds. But anyway, so I text a friend of mine to pray knowledge once I think it's okay to go to Spanish Mass like this.
You know, back of course it is. Why wouldn't it be? When I say, you know, the intention is to distract during Mass. It's because I don't see a problem.
It goes, he said, in fact, because he may even pray better. And my response was, like, I can't pray any worse. I go to a faith healer. That's not true.
I go to Massage therapist who he has a weird school of massage called fashion release or something like that, my old fascia, whatever. A couple of good friends of mine swear by this guy. And I've had pretty good luck with him as well. But very kind of a very spiritual type.
He's kind of a kind of guy, kind of a different kind of guy, kind of definitely marches to the tomb of his own drummer and has a different outlook on things. But he doesn't trust GMO foods and all that stuff. Kind of like a neo-hippity. He might call him.
But I really like him. I think he knows what he's doing. And he has this constantly about everything in moderation. Moderation, moderation.
And that really just means variety. He goes, their flip side is the same coin. But just fast and he's absolutely right. If you're doing a variety of things, every individual thing you do must be being done in moderation.
I don't know. This guy's dead right.