I wanna be building my own daily briefings, I wanna be filling in a lot of gaps in my understanding of how the world works. It was easy enough just to make blanket statements before the last couple of years. Now there is so much volatility, the trigger happiness of a number of folks in the theaters of war right now means you have to live everyday like it's your last. Make sure the people that you care about know you love them. Start training and be ready for anything.
I'm in position to do that in my own way. I'm on my own behalf of my own recognizance on the tip of my own spear. I'm the king of my own nation, as it were, on private land, which gives me a totally different relationship to the state than when I'm a renter or I'm in public space.
That doesn't mean I'm a reservation or a sovereign nation or have any treaty. But my treaty is the deed to my property and my dues to maintain that treaty or pay my property taxes.
Other than that, if I obey the codes with my zoning, there's not a lot of interaction, superfluous, frivolous interaction, or risk or liability, or even oversight.
So this is as close to being a nation state of one as it gets in many places in the world, unless you're a seasteader in international waters.
But that may not go so well for you if you get attacked by pirates and allied navies of the world are not within earshot of you.
So I get the bonus of being protected by the national security establishment of the United States, and I get to have relative peace from police terrorism.
As long as I'm on the right side of the law, I don't have to deal with being stalked by Feds as it were.
So trying to just strike that balance, be a good citizen on my best behavior and stay out of trouble, and in my little domain, I care to be a an asset and not a liability in the grand scheme of national security.
I'm not the biggest champion of democracy because I carry the black flag if you know what I mean green and black flag more accurately but if I have to pick a side between dictatorship and democracy then I will choose democracy as corrupt and as problematic and as corporateized as many of them may be.
It's important to understand the grievances of those who are not in the dominant democracies and that are outside of it, or maybe have a different approach to politics but aren't themselves an evil empire.
So a lot of nuance out there, But for anybody in the world who does care about freedom and any of the principles that democracies aspire to uphold and maintain, we have an understanding of defense and at its best, not just looking at the worst aspects of the transgressions and violations and betrayals and corruption of the defense industrial complex…a theoretical approach to defense, at its best, national security.
These are all vocabulary terms and areas of study that I just brushed off in my youthful disdain for anything establishment.
I wasn't a utopian pacifist but a militant anarchist who thought that the anarchists could win a revolution by fighting riot cops in the street. Naybe I thought that the military would be so disgruntled with the system that they would train us and then join us.
But many of us in our teenage and 20 something mind tended to be narcissists thinking we were the vanguard of the revolution, whatever it might be.
I thought I had it all figured out. now I'm a little more humble and a little more willing to give credit where it's due. I'm gonna give some credit, not by name, but by category.
What I find the most engaging right now in the state of the world is the seasoned veteran military professionals with combat experience on the ground and up the ranks...not just book smarts, but those experienced veterans of whatever rank who have arrived at a critique of the military industrial complex without being radicalized by Marxism or Anarchism, and that their prerogative is national security.
They see the military industrial complex as destabilizing and jeopardizing and threatening national security. They see through the boondoggles because they were the ones putting their lives at risk in order to build the boondoggle campaigns out across the globe.
So those voices are the ones that I'm listening to most intently because they've got insights that nobody on the radical, impoverished ghetto of the left could ever imagine unless they were veterans, and they had drank that gung ho poison and put their lives on the line for What they quickly discovered was a total lie.
The academic left the non combat experienced, non veteran left that critiques the military industrial complex from book marxism, it's quite hollow and empty compared to the resonance that I'm feeling with these warriors who were there and who are there and who are anti war, because they've been in war, and they understand the economics of it. How much of a money grab and a land grab and a rebuilding contract grab it is, all of these perverse incentives.
They saw it all and they were disgusted, and they can talk about it now, it's been long enough that things are declassified so they can really dig in.
I'm keen to understand what gives them that posture of unrelenting fitness, like those generals that are getting really old and still, they jog or run miles and miles and miles every day...These lifelong peak performance warriors, always at the ready.
I'm listening to them talk about geography and history, these nuances and dynamics of events and battlefield tactics and strategies and different doctrines and personalities and errors, and the way that they flow through all of these domains.
You wouldn't think of them as nature boy hippies, but they've spent enough time dug into the training grounds and the battlefields, down range, and looking at maps.
They understand this planet in ways that even some of the most knowledgeable ecologists don't, which is so fascinating to me, because their objective is kill and maim and crush and roll over the bones and the smoldering ashes of the enemy.
But in the process of pursuing that mission or that objective, they end up becoming these supreme naturalists that do orienteering and land navigation and climb mountains and trees and navigate the waters.
So much of what we know, even about the technology that we have to explore our planet comes from that martial mission and prerogative.
I certainly learn from the ones who are very anti war and very disgruntled and very much hesitant to engage in frivolous war because they know it so well, and they know that the only sane position is to be totally anti war. Yet you can never turn your back on it.
You can never risk atrophying as a fighting force. You have always got to be training and preparing and evolving, counter intelligencing, if that's a word.
You can't just declare peace because you feel like it and live in a fool's paradise of utopian pacifism, even if you hate war.
In fact, the more you hate war, the more you have to train for it.
That's the paradox that they have to reconcile and live with and have nightmares about.
All the civilian world can basically be armchair quarterbacks or not even care and have no opinion, because we're in a bubble or a play pen buffered by warriors.
So we're either complaining or quiet. But not many are really appreciative. I'm learning to be more appreciative, and I'm learning to understand now more than ever how to simplify and replicate and transmit an understanding, sort of a civilian's guide to appreciating the military, not just thanking veterans for their service, which is great, but actually thinking more deeply and posturing oneself more seriously. Not in the sense of being a performative radical militia, but if special forces folks are silent professionals then maybe civilians should be silent hobbyists. You're not being that flamboyant, you're not being that performative, you're not trying to draw a lot of attention to yourself or be real loud mouthed about it.
So the idea of our Second Amendment rights being attributed to the concept of a well regulated militia. Well, we don't really have well regulated militias. That's not been a priority on the state and local level to maintain those, maybe there are volunteer fire and rescue teams...
There's definitely a modern template, a modern working existing, formal well regulated volunteer fire auxiliary and volunteer rescue auxiliary with the community emergency response team. That is well regulated, they have giant manuals and FEMA has developed the CERT program that's taught often out of places like the fire department.
So I would consider that to be a very well regulated volunteer first responder militia as it were, or for lack of a better word, and yet the cops and the military, any of the armed forces or security, they provide hybrid opportunities for different types of reservist affiliations and registrations, there's not anything like the countries where its mandatory military service at some level.
There are a lot of problems with the fact that it's not a civic duty to go through a rite of passage of becoming a marks person.
It's not a domestic violent extremist sentiment to say that it would make a lot of sense if we're not gonna do mandatory conscription, that we have a core curriculum at some appropriate level where unless you have a religious exemption, then in order to pass high school, you have to hit a target, and you have to know the rules of gun safety. You have to have done a certain number of hours of training.
If there's a way that's rational and ethical to opt out, then let there be that.
There are so many other elements of basic preparedness. That's why I'm a big fan of the real world, former military turned civilian disaster and emergency preparedness and gun fighting training and mobility training, all the things that you would learn to survive in a war zone.
Adapting those things back into civilian life, and reconciling some of the martial isms, if you will, with what you would get from going to the Red Cross website and being given a list of instructions on how to be better prepared for fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme cold.
In terms of national security, hopefully the idea is, you pay your dues in the infantry, and then you grow out, and you become more sophisticated with a profession and a skill set if you choose to stay on that path.
I chose to fight in different wars. Instead of fighting in the global war on terror, I fought in the eco war against the real eco terrorists, which are the corporations that are polluting our planet and our nation and cutting down our trees.
I got signed up with and joined the ecological militia of the united states as it Were, which doesn't exist. I don't think that exists as an organization.
I'm just trying to use broad terms, and without saying that I'm affiliated with any exact organization or other, because I'm really not, at least anymore, but I fought, I fought in the Drug War, and I was on the side of the shall we say plant drug warriors.
I fought in the eco wars, and I chose to opt out of joining the US military to go fight the global war on terror because I had my doubts about the perverse incentives of the war machine. And now as it turns out, those who fought the global war on terror and who kept their wits about them and survived and they found their heart, then they came around for full circles to discover something.
Like what I heard recently, it was most likely possible that the CIA could have arranged a deal to buy all of our terrorist enemies with gold from the nations that were hiding them, rather than trying to bomb those nations into the Stone Age and try to impose Western liberal democracy on the ruins and hire ourselves and ingratiate ourselves to do the rebuilding projects in this perversely incentivized boondoggle of a couple of decades that makes us look very hypocritical to the rest of the world.
But without going on a soapbox around that, I will say I picked my battles, but I'm still an American.
If I have to defend this nation from foreign and domestic threats, I'm gonna wanna be competent to do that and no one is offering me training to do that. They would rather offer me handcuffs in a jail cell for even daring to talk about things like this. That's the more likely relationship that I will have or would have with the state, as it were, even using the word militia in a non perjorative way.
So to me, that's a real problem, because there needs to be a well regulated militia. Because you either have a well regulated militia, or you have no militia, which is a problem, or an unwell regulated or a disregulated militia, which I think we kind of have.
We're somewhere between no militia and a disregulated militia, and we need to get to having a well regulated militia. And we're not gonna do that unless we understand until war college becomes war high school and it's part of the standard curriculum, which now I'm advocating that, that it would be, but I'm not trying to run for office and build a platform on that point.
I'm just saying, not mandatory conscription, but maybe a little bit more "mil ed" in high school.
Maybe just a little bit of some practical aspects as well.
It could go in a lot of directions, but that's not my job to figure out.
I'm gonna do it for myself. I picked my battles and I can't go back in time so all I can do for myself while I'm still of later fighting age as it were, create my, own war college and do my own research and do my own training, and train with people who I have affinity with.
There is game theory course that was done by a professor in the Yale Philosophy Human Nature session titled The Prisoner's Dilemma.
I think a lot of people throw around the idea, or the term game theory and I don't know what percentage of people who will drop game theory in a sentence or in a conversation who actually took a course on it or who could teach a course on it, or who could even really define it. But the quintessential case study, or example, that is the sort of heart and soul of game theory, is the prisoner's dilemma.
Then from that grows all the infinite number of permutations that get into all kinds of abstractions of math and social theory, and just bizarre chalkboard geometrical madness.
I did the Yale open course though, all the sessions of it were high functioning, gifted genius, brainiac, nerd game show material.
I couldn't keep up with even half of it. But I figured, at least I will be primed by osmosis to be receptive to it later, which was a good choice.
I'm glad I did it, because this philosophy of human nature session on game theory gels for me a million times better than any moment or anything in that whole entire course.
It's also the fact that the way she adapted the prisoner's dilemma of game theory to a number of other scenarios that are more well and more easily grasped in social theory, social science.
She mapped the prisoner's dilemma, sort of grid table matrix across a number of different examples.
A relatively peaceful compromise in most situations if the participants in any given conflict understand that little grid it's like, four cells, a table with two rows and two columns it's just a grid of four units like a window frame with two squares of the top and two squares of the bottom and it's a square.
Those four boxes represent the four possible outcomes of two different parties or two different people making a decision for one or another possible option.
Let's say the binary options between two parties is simply war and peace and that those states, like a computer science sense of the state of a system, of a computing machine. Whatever the state is, whether the bits are flipped
to one or zero.
If the binary is war in peace and party A can choose either war or peace and party B can choose either war or peace then while war or peace are the only options to choose from, the potential outcomes are nuanced in the sense that, depending on which of those two options, each of the two parties pick, you could have both choosing peace, both choosing war, one choosing peace, and one choosing war, or that as the opposite, or vice versa.
Now we're talking about tactical advantage and tactical disadvantage, or the potential to be subjugated versus the power to be the subjugator.
So here is the thesis that I have, I'm gonna call this game the Olive Branch or Berry Brier. There's a game theory that dissolves the duality of war and peace.
If we continue to roll with the idea that there's two parties and they're equally empowered to choose one of two positions, that they're going to posture themselves as a nation state.
Let's say they're neighboring nation states, because that's very apropos of the times geopolitically, but not necessarily.
They could be separated by oceans, whatever the geographic configuration.
Let's say they have equal size economies, equal size populations, equal technology, military industrial base potential and whatnot.
But if they're fledgling states, maybe newly de-colonized, independent, or they're just arriving from another planet. These are clean slates in order to nation build.
They each get to determine whether or not they're going to present themselves to their neighbors from a war footing or a peace footing.
There's a more scientific and more mathematical, more logical and algorithmic way. To arrive in an understanding that is a compromise, the duality of war and peace can be dissolved into a state of affairs that for most utopian pacifists, like I used to be, it would be counter intuitive to imagine that this is appropriate.
But now I understand it. This is why it's so powerful for me in this moment, because now I feel like the most simple way to de-conflate warlords with warriors and defense from imperialism or national security from imperialism or colonialism, to de-conflate those things, which they've become very conflated for a lot of certainly Western democracy and communist and dictatorships, otherwise, modern nation states have often conflated national security and defense with imperialism and colonization.
So as someone who is against imperialism and against colonialism, but for national security and for defense, I wanna deconflate those things.
So that means I wanna have a defensive posture that doesn't leave me weak and vulnerable, and I don't wanna be excessively offensive to where I'm trying to build an empire beyond my borders.
So here's where this tool gets very useful in decomplating those things.
If being anti war means you don't know how to fight wars, then you're doomed to fail.
That's what I'm learning from these typically mid to high ranking former military anti war thinkers, writers, authors, speakers now.
How can I translate what I'm learning and simplify it? This is the simplest way so that I found so far.
It's sensible and visually simple enough to where, it can almost be conveyed through just one unit of visual art, and not even all of this wind bagging, verbose, pseudo academic language that I'm using.
If anything, I'm a one man intelligence shop. I'm a one man think tank.
I'm not forcing anyone. I'm not coercing anyone. I'm not terrorizing or threatening anyone to listen to me. I'm just doing my thing. I'm doing me. I'm trying to do myself, but I'm gonna create the art.
This is actually going to lead to me doing computer programming and gaming programming of computer gaming, online gaming, educational experiences that teach this doctrine of defensive warriors, deconflating the honor of that path versus imperialism and colonialism.
So going back to that window. The potential outcomes that have now very different potential effects, ramifications for both parties.
But just to refresh that war/war, peace/peace, peace/war, war/peace.
So whether you are A or B, you're gonna end up with one of those four outcomes being the final outcome, you can't control the other nation state's, sovereign right to choose what their strategy is gonna be.
It's a little more of a poker game when it comes to foreign relations, geopolitics, wealth of nations and power politics. You may out of diplomacy and a sense of wanting to keep some of your secrets, your national security secrets to yourself… You may not be perfectly comfortable or have built the trust to be fully cooperative.
One way to characterize that binary, when there is risk and reward, or cost and benefit, the idea that there are cooperative outcomes and there are defecting outcomes.
You take a gamble there, because there's a chance now you've opened yourself up to a big mistake.
Let's say, going through them one by one, having the assumption that you don't fully trust them, you can't fully trust them.
You don't necessarily assume the worst of them, but you can't really expect the best either. So I would call it adversarial by default.
You have to be looking out for number one snd you have to choose the more self interested versus the less self interested option, because better safe than sorry.
In no order of of preference. I'll just start with, both nations choose a war footing in that scenario. What would you get with that?
Well, there would be a cost associated with building out that military industrial base, maintaining the forces, obviously, training them, cycling through the generations, and then being in a war economy where in order to maintain the arms race...that is the natural outcome of the two parties, not being at war, but being on a war footing, basically being prepared for war, acknowledging its potential and building a standing army and having that potential to defend their borders and also to strike abroad if necessary, but mainly essentially built for national defense, defending the homeland. But with capabilities of all the domains, space, cyber, air, land, water, electronic, information, whatever else. However many other spheres you wanna list, but mainly essentially building up that defense or the military industrial base versus not.
So that would be on both sides. What would that provide? That would provide readiness, that would provide security, provide the ability to rest, knowing that the peace that exists is guaranteed by the threat of violence, the threat of retaliation, the threat of equal force or comparable or commensurate force in a conflict.
That's the equilibrium that is possible, or theoretically possible if both sides choose to develop their war machines.
Of course, that comes at a cost, and it can be a sprawling cost. And then, if war ever breaks out, you have to ask, was that war made inevitable by the arms race?
Was it willed into existence by psychopaths who took control over what could have otherwise been a peaceful war machine?
All those risk factors are now involved. So it's not as clean and pure and simple as two nations being war=like though maintaining a tentative peace or a fire powered peace. There's nuance and trade offs to that.
If another possible option, for simplicity sake is they both choose peace. Well, that sounds very utopian. That sounds very much like a perfect world, there is an idealism to that.
But if we're remembering that we maybe aren't the same people, we don't speak the same language, maybe we don't have the same religion, maybe we won't have the same prerogatives, the same level of environmentalism, the same attitude towards our neighbors, whether shared or not shared, etc.
Even though we're getting along today, and we can both have peace and not build up any military industrial base, any war machine. It sounds quite Utopian, quite idealistic in a perfect world. But the reality that we don't share a very tight, bonded in-group, tribalism, within each other. Maybe don't agree with each other on a lot of levels. Maybe don't feel like we are the same or compatible, but we're willing to give each other space and remain at peace with each other.
Though one nation secretly starts becoming war-like after they had signed that peace treaty, or under whatever terms committed to that path of peace.
Then that leaves the other party always in fear and questioning and wondering whether or not it is safe for them to be at peace.
How can you ever really know, what a paradoxical trade-off to have to make policy around, to be responsible for those hard decisions?
Trust but militarize? That's a dilemma right there. That's where we're getting into this becoming very problematic, arriving at a compromise that works well for both parties.
So the two other options is where it gets even more messy, and that's where you choose to be on a peace footing and your counterpart chooses to be on a war footing.
There's not a lot of explaining that it takes to understand why that is very problematic to be voluntarily, tactically disadvantageous in the face of a potential adversary.
You would never rationally want to be in that position. I'm gonna name these categories, or these four outcomes basically, that you are subjugated.
You are the subjugated in a world where other nations are armed and your nation is not armed. Other nations have a military. Your nation does not. If you're not actively already being subjugated, then you're on a list to be subjugated by somebody because you're the low hanging fruit.
You don't have the means to defend yourself or to even feign any kind of defensive capability.
So you were asking for it, and therefore I would call you already subjugated.
Then the other scenario, the final scenario, which just happens to be last but not least, is the scenario where you have the military and the counterparty does not, therefore you are the subjugator, you get to be king of the hill.
So rationally speaking, for narcissists and warlords and empire builders, dictators, world leaders, who are hell bent on world domination.
That's the world they want to live in. They wanna strip away the military prowess of other nations, have the strongest military with the most bases around the world, and have their fingers in as many parts as they can get their fingers into, and have tactical advantage.
You couldn't guess who I might be referring to, but it's not just one nation state that is operating that way.
But when I just heard about the number of foreign bases the United States has versus the number of foreign bases that other competing adversarial nation states have, it's quite telling. I don't think that's something to be proud of.
I think that's something to be very terrified by the potential for history to repeat of an over extended empire, having too many wars to fight on too many fronts that leave its homeland, its motherland open to attack from within and from without because too much blood and treasure has been over leveraged abroad. And the fringes of the empire have sprawled too far, and it is top heavy, and it's gonna collapse.
So that's why I say, bring the guys in gals home.
Let's de globalize, re localize, and use permaculture to get there.
But before I get distracted with a soap box, tangent I wanna get back to those four options laid out.
Technically speaking, if we were to be using colors or numbers or shapes on that grid, then those four potential arrangements abstracted from any notion of power dynamics or preference..
Now you see where it really comes to life. Why this is useful. Because you have two options for potential outcomes that are the emergent property of two parties, deciding on which option to choose to go forward with in order to establish an outcome that's a mutual outcome.
Now that I have explained in more detail the nuance and the implications of each of those four outcomes, I'm gonna simplify it down to naming those four outcomes so that if we sort them in a different order and we start to say, we're gonna order them from most preferable to least preferable. Then it's easy to do that, because now we've labeled them.
It's not war/war, peace/peace, peace/war, war/peace. Those don't really work as labels to rank and intuitively instantly grasp the difference between them.
But now that we've done that work, I think we can give them names,so I'm gonna name them, I'm gonna start with an order that sorts them in a self interested rational, adversarial mindset, that's strategic and is the "trust but militarize" sort of prudent preferential ordering.
Number one: subjugator, number two: ally, number three: enemy, number four: subjugated, that's as simple as it gets.
Then to just add the parentheses to that, it would be, obviously. The first one is the best option. The second one is the second best option. The third one is the less worst option, and the last one is the worst option.
So from the best to the worst option for each individual party, in terms of power, politics and realism and all that gets very advanced and I don't claim to understand any fraction of it, political science and foreign relations or whatnot, but from the sense of just anybody who plays any board game or video game or game on the sidewalk, where the idea of self interest and wanting to win the game and wanting what's best for you and yours and your tribe and your group.
You're going to go through that assessment, consciously and unconsciously, probably a million times a day. So this is very natural to do. Now it's worth going into a little bit more nuance, an explanation of why you might order those differently, and then also what would be in the sense of compromise, what would be the most sensible outcome, so that both parties maybe don't gain the most, but at least they don't lose the most either.
So they risk mitigate, and they get to a tactical and strategic equilibrium. It's not the best, and it's not the worst, but it's hopefully better.
It's the second best, and not the less worst.
So that's kind of the hope. That's the hope of this compromise.
It's obvious that between subjugator and subjugated, it's the opposite of compromise there. That's a zero sum. That's a winner and loser. That's not a compromise. That would probably be the least sustainable path forward in the real world between nation states to try to sustain that dynamic.
That's what leads to revolts, like the original revolt of slaves in Haiti, which is a very interesting study in uprisings in world history.
But the carrot or the stick. That's part of what these colonizers had to figure out, and part of how hegemony works.
There's a lot to be said about pacifying the oppressed colonized Indigenous people and I want to pay no respect to any of that state craft.
I wanna again think about sovereign nations with their own borders, their own peoples, and understanding between them that...a totally distorted world where their power is infinite and unchecked...maybe the best option is that they have the military and the other nation doesn't, but that's not very realistic and if they were to try to impose that dynamic, it might not last, and it could be very unstable.
So really, what seemed like the best outcome is also very risky and problematic, because it creates the condition for instability and volatility.
You could also say the most selfish at the top and the least selfish at the bottom, or the most powerful at the top and the most vulnerable at the bottom.
Really, when it comes to that mutual outcome, whether you are the subjugator or the subjugated, the inherent volatility of those poles make it so that you're probably going to be rotating those polls from cycles of rebellion and revolt and revolution and coups.
So it's actually not that advantageous. Ultimately, over time, you end up discovering that you would do better to compromise in a way that doesn't disproportionately favor advantage to either nation.
But if allies are agreeing to have a peaceful footing towards each other. That could change at any time and if it ever did…
In my utopian pacifism bubble as a green leftist, I thought the military industrial complex had to be ground to a halt. And swords to plow shares, and the entire military industrial complex completely ended.
All that money going to homelessness and sustainable regenerative horticulture, permaculture, etc. No defense budget. We'll just put a flower in the barrel of the gun and we're done, that was almost as simple as my thinking was.
In my greeny lefty days of wanting to tear down the entire establishment and have no military Of course, I had to at some in some sense, be intellectually honest about reconciling...well, if we dismantle our military and our enemies don't dismantmantle their militaries, isn't that a problem?
Then, of course, there would just be any number of circular arguments, total bypass, intellectual whistling past the graveyard.
But that's where the revolution is gonna make everybody realize that we can just be harmonious and not need to fight wars and not need to fight over land.
As if your little teenage college age ideology that you cooked up out of a book and partying with your band mates and going to protests, and you think your patch and your slogan and your flag is gonna unite the world and have them bury the hatchet over millennia old blood feuds around religion and ethnicity and geography and resources.
Nations are built around borders that people fought and died to establish and defend and steal. The more I learn about it, the more I understand this is a very thin facade over a state of total war and violent chaos and I'm willing to reckon with that and be intellectually honest with that in a way that I haven't been before.
I'm jaded and cynical and old enough now to know that's not realistic.
I need to become realistic fast if I want to survive in this world, as that facade is becoming thinner and thinner and thinner by the day, so what is that sensible, non warlord, non war pimp, warrior, defender, non imperialist, non colonialist?
Well, unfortunately, ranking these, sorting these out again, and saying, well, if subjugator and subjugated, those polar extremes that we thought were the best or the worst, if those are eliminated and it comes down to now, which is more sustainable and more realistic being allies, or being enemies, or both being on a war footing, or both being on a peace footing.
The utopian pacifist would have said before, oh, it's great.
Hey, let's just both agree to be peaceful, and that's great, and we'll dismantle everything, and that'll be great, doesn't that sound great?
It does sound great. It looks good on paper. And it frees up all of that material, all of that budget, all that research and development for peaceful activities, peaceful public works, maintenance of infrastructure.
But it relies on just one simple thing, a handshake. Swearing on the bible, I don't think we can really bank on that when it comes to this adversarial reality that we're in.
I hate to say it but I have arrived at that so called Nash equilibrium, which is war/war, which is both parties, in order to not be in terror of being vulnerable to the potential of a betrayal by the other, there needs to be a war machine at the ready at all times, so that it you're able to speak softly and carry an equally sized big stick.
Now I understand why the military budgets of the world are what they are, and where it gets perverse and corrupt is when that sensible, reasonable, rational, logical conclusion gets distorted and abused to justify black ops and covert ops and coups and regime changes and democratization by force.
All the forms of neo colonial imperialist endeavors that serve corporate interests and ultimately weaken and disempower the homeland of the nation States that engage in that kind of militarized misadventure.
Now I'm starting to integrate the sentiments and the language and the wisdom of these war fighters who have lived as tools of that corruption and lived to become the whistle blowers of it.
So that's where it becomes this very fine line. Okay, if we're going to now discover that option number three, out of that presumed option of best to worst, option number three, the less worst option becomes the most realistic compromise for actually sustaining peace.
Unfortunately peace on its own, doesn't sustain peace, militaries sustain peace. It sounds messed up, and I wanna puke when I say that, but I can't deny it now that I've done this back of the napkin analysis, thanks to game theory, and thanks to this modification of the prisoner's dilemma, it really hit me hard.
I've taught a lot of women in my life how to defend themselves. Some of them, they take right to it and they put full force into it, and they impress me, and they, they whip on my focus pads, and they learn the techniques, and they're a hundred percent with it, and I don't have to psychologically intellectually convince them.
For some of them, it's because they've been assaulted and they say, never again and I'll take any tool that's ever offered to me and try to master it, to be able to use if I ever need to defend myself again. I will never be situationally unaware. And I will never let my guard down. And I will always be ready to fight back. And I'll always be a fierce mama bear, for myself and for my loved ones to break the cycle of abuse through combative readiness.
There are women in my life who didn't need me to intellectually sermonize them to get them to be on board.
Then there are others where they were very flaccid and lukewarm and non committal and disengaged and not interested when I walk them through the exact same training, simple, 30 minute basic street self defense, combative training system that I co developed, which is just very the most simple Swiss Army knife of self defense tactics that you could ever learn, they're simple enough that you can master them quickly and deploy them for the rest of your life.
There are the women who really didn't care, and they did it to sort of placate me, and I didn't bother them with it again.
I didn't let them really get very close to me in my life, because I only wanna be close with people who understand tactical advantageousness and understand the negative outcomes of tactical disadvantageousness, and hopefully not because they learn the hard way, like many people.
So many people do so on that personal microscale. This is where all the abstract, all the theoretical, all this chalkboard nonsense kind of intellectual self aggrandizement, if you will, to avoid other words.
Where it gets real for people on the street is, how do you convince the people you care about to train, to defend themselves if they don't care to?
How do you build a narrative that allows more Americans to feel very masterful with firearms and not have their stomach turn the way a vegan or vegetarian stomach turns when they think about meat or dairy.
I don't wanna coerce anyone or force anyone to eat meat or dairy, I'm mostly vegan, mostly vegetarian, and mostly raw, but there is a time and place for me.
I don't have the biggest firearm arsenal, but I am armed.
I'm still more on the pacifist side and more on the vegetarian vegan side when, when it comes down to it, but not positionally. Just as a matter of fact, believe me, I would like to have more guns. I would like to have more meat. Okay, not really so much more dairy, but I have a deficit of guns, ammo and meat, but I'm not completely starved of it either.
With all that being said, the analogy goes back to, you have people who are tactically disadvantaged and who have no psychological basis to train themselves whatsoever to become tactically advantageous, and there's no one in their life to do it for them.
That's a problem for all nations, it's big problem in the United States.
So my goal, with this, for myself, having gone through this exercise, is to take the spirit that I take to those women who need a little nudge, to care, to train, to defend themselves, and need a little bit of a conversation about what kind of vocabulary they should upgrade to.
So they start saying things like, I don't take s**t from people who tell me I shouldn't be armed because I decided that I'm no longer going to justify the value of my life to anyone, and I'm just going to be armed, be silent about it, be compliant with local laws about it and know that it is my prerogative to value my life as highly as I choose to, and highly enough to where it is defensible within the limits of the law and the limits of my budget to do so.
And those are the women and people that I like to have close to me in my life that are not afraid of violence. They're not afraid of guns. They know how to do violence. And they don't need me to sermonize them to build self esteem and cultivate a sense of self worth that would make them want to defend themselves viciously.
And certainly, if they had dependents, be capable as an ethical moral duty, to be tactically advantageous in defense of those who are dependent on them, who don't have that choice because they're small and weak because they're still growing up.
But if you're a grown person and you're tactically disadvantageous voluntarily, then let's start using these tools to start shaking out some of this logic and get down to where we understand that peace is sustained by not being shy about the potential of combat.
It's not my favorite thing to say. I wanna say that we can live in a perfect world of utopian pacifism, and will never think about combat again.
I certainly have a whole thesis about the peace that was prehistoric societies, where we have no fossil record evidence of organized violence.
I would like to say that the bonobos are a template of a primate cousin that are quite peaceful for various reasons, and that chimps and baboons, among others are negative reinforcing models for trying to justify patterns of organized violence in human society.
I have a whole primatological thesis and a whole anthropological thesis about pre modern pre industrial pre agricultural pathways for peace. but we don't live in that world. We live in the modern world. We live in a world that's armed to the teeth. And we have to choose as individuals and as nations and as neighborhoods and as communities at whatever level, like the Black Panthers. Do we wanna be unarmed or do we wanna be armed in this dynamic of being terrorized by the police that are of a different race that is a supremacist race that is occupying their neighborhoods. The black neighborhoods chose to get armed and become proficient defensive warriors, that's a great historical example.
The visual art, that makes all of everything I just said, scream without words in in one simple illustration.
It doesn't even have to have that grid of four or the four different examples, although it could, but it could be in one painting, or one photograph, or one Little mime skit, if you will. But when I started thinking about what makes people complacent about combat and violence and the military, it's just the idea, well, peace is good. Peace is good and weapons are bad. Those weapons are kind of nasty and gnarly, and most of them that actually kill people.
In close quarters, non ballistic combat, they're pretty gory, like axes and maces and swords and daggers and all that medieval stuff, sure it looks cool.
Disney movies and video games where it's all nerfed and you don't see the horror of it.
But if you watch Brave Heart or something of that nature, you're gonna have another thing coming.
In the modern sense, the way a vegetarian has this unnatural, learned, cringe revulsion aversion response to the sight or thought or smell of any kind of meat or dairy. That's the way utopian pacifists have become towards weapons and combat, and that's a big problem.
So how does that get overcome?
I'm owning this defensive warrior posture now more than ever in my life and not a minute too soon. Maybe pretty soon it's gonna be too little too late, because I will be too old.
You never know how potent you will be for how long in that capacity.
I did the sacred ritual transgression after being a strict vegetarian, if not vegan, for many years, when I started to reintegrate some forms of meat that I thought were the healthier, least processed, most ethical. That was a ritual transgression that I engaged in, mindfully and consciously and with, with a spiritual, emotional, ecological, intellectual, economic foundation for it.
So the same goes now for me to relinquish my pacifism and say, I'm going to be a defensive warrior. Not just a martial artist who does self defense training as a hobby, but as someone who is really going to start to learn and build my own war college so that I can speak the language. Know the language and be useful in war. Should I ever be called upon.
That's a responsibility that was not intrinsic to going through school. It wasn't a mandatory conscription year or years of my life.
It's an optional, auxiliary, self directed project that I'm doing for myself in this format.
So for those of us who were pacifist, green left martial artists, who are now thinking, maybe I own a gun, or maybe some experience with guns, but I really need to be proficient in gun fighting.
I need to go pay people from law enforcement and military backgrounds and private security detail backgrounds, who have real world experience and who have a kill count under their belt, literally.
Not to fetishize them, but to be humbled by them and let them actually build you up and train you up within the limits of the law for civilians per jurisdiction, but with a standard that would make the forefathers proud of there being material to organize a well regulated militia with.
I don't consider myself even at the halfway point towards that goal.
But someday before I'm totally decrepit and just unable to even stand, I would like to have the dignity that says I did not serve in the armed forces, but I had enough respect for them after careful consideration, as I reached my later potential fighting years, to say, if it's physically possible for me to be a competent civilian war fighter, than within reason I'm going to pay for and apply myself to whatever training I can get my hands on. For that training to become a pillar of my existence that I'm proud of, and that's reliable, that that my nation can rely on, that my neighbors can rely on, and that if I were to have dependents, they would be able to rely on as well.
I think that's very moderate. It's not extremist. It's not threatening and it should be as American as apple pie.
It's not just owning guns and knowing how to operate them and it's not just trying to dress like you're all kitted up and have all the gear and be a weekend warrior or, or something of that nature, more to the point of being being a war college of one. That's where you start to understand the theory and the history and you appreciate how important it is that we maintain vigilance and readiness because of how horrible things have gone wrong in the past when we make miscalculations in war or in preparation for war.
Having more of an acknowledgment that we are not really in a stable global peace.
There's a term of art and nuance, sovereign conflicts, there are a lot of places embroiled in civil war, civil conflict around the world. So there's not that much peace in the world, as it turns out.
But we think there's peace because the big nations are not in world wars, at least kineticly, although we are economically and in the cyber domain, and we're gearing up in many ways that if somebody slips on a banana peel at one of these demilitarized zones, world War 3 is gonna possibly be over within minutes because of all the nuclear subs able to turn the lights out and block out the sun.
Uncomfortable things to think about. What would rather think about? I'd rather go through the process of transgressing my fear of understanding what it means to have a defensive warrior posture and to build a defensive military that's healthy and fit and contained within the borders.
Having to think about things like combat casualty wound care and the difference between a civilian first aid kid and a combat first aid kid and things like that I'm willing to push through that potential squeamishness because the much more squeamish thing is to think about irradiated nuclear tidal waves blasted from off the coastline that destroy coastal cities of a target nation within minutes, with no ability to shoot down missiles because it was done under water by submarines creating a force of destruction that isn't fire, but is deadly, radioactive water.
That's scary to think about, and the nuclear winter that would result from the fires after the blast, so much material being turned to ash and kicked up into the atmosphere, that the fires we're seeing now would be dwarfed in the extreme by orders of magnitude.
At that point, sun gets blocked out, all vegetation dies, temperature drops.
So whether or not you survive all of the ill effects of radiation, the simple uninhabitability almost overnight of the entire planet, for however long. To me, being oblivious to it all is the most dangerous position to be in, because while you are drunk on prosperity and your civilian population is engaged in culture wars and your cyber security is for sh*t, and you're chasing shiny things, like all the shiny things that we chase, and the more dedicated, more sophisticated, subjugating forces that are taking advantage of our tactical disadvantage...
That's what terrifies me the most. They're digging in and inching into positions of nuclear and cyber checkmate in scarier ways than they've ever done before in my lifetime.
The more I learn about it, the scarier it gets.
I have no military prowess, and I have no position of decision making or war fighting whatsoever.
But if it comes down to the red dawn moment, am I gonna be obese and an easy, soft target to neutralize?
Or am I gonna be fit and be a hard target? Am I gonna be hard to kill? I think I owe it to the nation that despite all its faults, it allows me to exist.
It allows me to own land. It allows me to study and learn and think.
Whatever level of eyebrow raising I do in my little lane doing what I do, I'd like to think that I'm an asset and not a liability to national security, and by working through this material and translating it and being a delegate now a liaison from the disgruntled underground intelligentsia...
If I can be a liaison from their intelligence back to my green left roots, the green left can become more tactically wise, stop fighting street battles with the cops, and start to develop more of a sophisticated national security mindset as eco warriors.
That's what I'm trying to do here.
So that visual piece, how to make all this come together in an image that's haunting, that could be embedded from looking at a billboard for a split second.
That tension about the touchy-feely-ness of peace, we tend to feel so good about the idea of peace, we kind of think like, okay, well, it's cool not to have a military, cause we're peaceful.
Most nation states are peaceful, even though, as I just said, that's actually not really the truth, and peace is just the time that warring nations retool.
If we look at that game theory, if we live those game theory options, and we go, oh, well, being allies and choosing the peace/peace option, well, that's very easy. That's cute. It's easy. It doesn't turn my stomach. It's the easiest, cleanest, most utopian, perfect world, living on a prayer whistling past the graveyard.
We'll just be peaceful, and we'll just hope everyone else will be peaceful and we'll trust each other to be peaceful, and we're gonna trust and demilitarize.
Now, I'm saying, no, that's a mistake. How do we convey to the woman on the street who doesn't care to learn to defend herself and the nation that doesn't care to build a standing army and train its citizens to be competent with weapons and with wilderness survival and basic tactical and strategic wherewithal.
Without glorifying war, without lusting for war, not glamorizing it, but acknowledging the need to be competent and to be tactically advantageous and to be ready.
How do you convey that? How do you market that?
What's the marketing message? So I arrived at the idea that when I was working through these options I'm like okay if the options are peace and war what if we, say the options are armed and unarmed?
Okay, that works. But the thing is, people are so biased and have such normalcy bias to where they think, well, it's okay that everyone's unarmed, it's just the police are armed. That's okay.
I don't really need to be armed. That way I can have this cognitive dissonance and fall back to the peace option, even though that is problematic because of the vulnerability and the susceptibility to betrayal.
So I thought, is there a more haunting image that immediately has more punch? What has more sting as a visually impactful, binary set of two options.
Because armed and unarmed, unless you're really into guns, or you're really macho, you're gonna think, of course be an armed. That's bad ass. Of course. I'm gonna be armed. I’m not gonna be weak. I'm not gonna be unarmed. But most people who are not into the militant aesthetic, they're gonna be like, no, you're a wing nut, wanna be Rambo, or you're just a macho man, agro, alpha, jock, whatever.
I don't need that. I don't need to be armed, just unarmed is fine. Peace is fine. To me, that's where that the marketing fails.
People get complacent, living in normalcy bias, situationally unaware, setting themselves up to be victims of nation states and of sexual assault assailants. Right? So here's what I think is a more beneficial, useful, poignant, packs a punch, which is that what if we say that the two options are not war in peace, they're not even armed and unarmed.
It's shackled and unshackled or restrained and unrestrained. But I think shackled or unshackled is probably the best visual way to set this configuration up to where what it really looks like if you were in peace, peace is that you're both shackled, and therefore you have this debilitated state of being, hindered to do violence, the way we shackle prisoners so they can't run and they can't fight back, and they can't escape, they're severely limited in their ability to do so.
There's a cost to maintaining that piece, because if one of them breaks those shackles, the one who didn't is imperiled, right?
So that's the way I look at it. Now I'm like, I get it.
Some people, they don't wanna be armed. They're fine being unarmed. But would you be fine to be shackled as long as everyone else was shackled?
Because now that everyone's shackled, we can have peace. So is that okay with you?
Probably you would want to be unshackled. What does that mean? Oh, that means I might swing my fist, and it might be my right to swing that fist that ends at the beginning of someone's face.
Now I have the freedom to possibly intentionally or accidentally swing that fist beyond the scope of where I'm free to do so, which is where someone else's face begins.
Now, we have politics. Now we have these dilemmas that arise from the freedom to possibly do violence, but the laws and the security infrastructure within and among nations in order to allow for there to be the freedom to wield weapons and to weaponize...
That is rational ultimately, and it is the reality of the world we live in.
Whether you like it or not, we don't live in a world where we all chose to be in a form of peace, where in order to have any guarantee of that peace, we're all just gonna live in shackles.
We chose a world where we're not gonna live in shackles, which means anyone has a potential to weaponize themselves. Anyone can become a terrorist.
Anyone can join the military and be part of the armed forces and wreak havoc on enemies abroad.
At the stroke of a pen from the Commander in Chief, the potential for weaponization and violence is taken for granted, and certainly it's exploited and it's corrupted.
So the whole point of all this is to say we need to clean up our military industrial complex, but we can't have a backlash and over extend and pendulum swing in the opposite direction to where we end up shackling ourselves while other people in the world, other nations in the world are not going to, by any means, shackle themselves.
They're training hard while we are training soft, if at all.
Every day that Captain Willard slept in that hotel room waiting for his mission, he got weaker. And every day Charlie was squatting in the bush with a bowl of rice and some rat meat, not a lot of R and R...
He was keenly aware of what it means to get soft, just as an individual warrior.
One of the other analogies or applications of that game theory grid that the professor in the Yale course shared was one where she said let's say you have two gardeners.
I'm gonna put it my own words a little bit, but try to maintain the structure of it.
Say you have two gardeners and they are neighbors, and one of them is growing tomatoes, and the other one, for some reason, at some point, has a lapse of good relations, and decides to walk over to their neighbors tomato garden and steal a tomato.
Then the tomato gardener, catches them, or suspects them, or discovers it, and they in retaliation, go over with their pitchfork and start tearing up and destroying the garden of the offending neighbor who stole the tomato.
Therefore, you have Lord of Flies. Morbid anarchy, total meltdown, collapse of society of biblical proportions, etc.
The end of the world as we know it. So what do they do?
They decide to each build their own fence. They're gonna build fences around their garden and be mortal enemies forever after.
But at least there will be a sort of mechanically facilitated enforcement of the hard fact of peace through the implementation of these bordered secured boundaries that are not impossible to defeat but a deterrent enough and they both did it against each other so that so it's Subtle.
They learned the hard way that utopian pacifism could have been so great and synergistic, living in peace and not robbing and retaliating.
They decided they would compromise on not the best and not the worst, but a workable peace through the implementation of something tactical, which is building those fences.
This adaptation of the prisoner's dilemma, beyond the simple war and peace application, she actually adapted it for me to use in this tactical permaculture sense, where that actually teaches the entire thesis of what I'm trying to do with this rebranding of myself, dedicating myself as an almost lifelong utopian pacifist on the green left.
Now having a midlife crisis in the beginning of World War Three, and saying, I'm waking up from this delusion of Utopian pacifism and realizing that I'm a wimp and that I am not a skillful war fighter, even though I fancy myself a plant drug warrior and eco warrior. I've had some ex military mentors along the way. That doesn't cut it. That doesn't equal real world combat experience or real war college degrees. I can do war college study as a civilian but I'm not about to go and be a volunteer on any battlefield right now.
I'm not about to join any extremist group to accelerate access to that kind of experience.
I just want to be as competent as I can be, doing dry runs and not be the worst, the lowest liability, and probably not be the greatest asset, but being somewhere in the middle.
It's a matter of adapting permaculture design thinking to paramilitarism and to tactical advantageousness, from hand to hand self defense street combat at the gas station, whether you're in a poor neighborhood or rich neighborhood.
Now, it doesn't matter the plague of the zombies of all kinds, gangster zombies, homeless zombies, people with nothing to lose, who don't care to die or go to jail, who are willing to stab you without thinking or shoot you without thinking to get whatever pennies you have in your wallet or steal your car.
That encroachment of the zombie apocalypse, it's everywhere. And so whether it's street self defense or war fighting, being a competent gun fighter ready for war.
It behooves us to not be completely a deer in the headlights when it comes to violence at any scale. It's looming on all scales and only those of us with experience navigating law enforcement on the streets, military who fought wars abroad, those folks in uniform who want to train civilians. That's again where this comes back to.
What I would like to bring to it is permaculture design thinking, where I'd say, how can we permify the firing range?
How can we permify the military base? How can we permify the forward operating base?
How can we permify everything so that energy that goes into it can be as nontoxic and regenerative as possible, so that we can be sustainable warriors and not unsustainable warriors, because of how toxic our fuels are, how toxic our paints are, how toxic are our munitions are.
Wherever I can find that edge to create a tactically superior product of any kind, legally, of course, with the right permitting, and the right laboratory scientists.
But I do believe that bentonite is more powerful than than dynamite or any other explosive when it is used tactically and strategically in a permaculture design, a tactical permaculture design.
I've talked about that before, I'll talk about it many times again, but the totally non explosive, basically totally inert mineral, bentonite clay.
To me, that is the most powerful secret weapon for any nation building itself and defending itself in the world and building sustainable, peaceful relationships among the nations that it forms alliances with.
I'm just gonna say that that's one dimension of where I'm trying to bring permaculture to the battlefield, on all fronts, at all levels, on both sides of enemy lines, at home and abroad.
That garden feud application of the prisoner's dilemma and of game theory...here's how I would add to it.
Do you extend the olive branch versus establish the berry brier? The fact is, conflicts are going to arise, and it's not intelligent for there to be excessive weaponization of a counterparty and lacking weaponization of yourself, there should be a balance of power, a balance of weaponization.
For that to be done in a permaculture informed manner, then those two gardeners, if they were to be lamenting this dilemma that they're in through their metal fences, their barren metal fences, looking at each other's garden, going, you know what, man, if these fences weren't here our gardens could commingle and actually synergize and become even more productive.
But then are we back to square one, a fool's paradise, leaning towards Utopian pacifism again.
Or is there a way that the form of the fence can follow the function of it?
We could say, how do we not sacrifice all potential ecological synergy by building fences that block the flow of ecology when all we're trying to do is dissuade each other from pilfering from each other.
Well, where's the nuance? How can we put our design thinking cap on and do some biomimicry and go, how does nature do it?
How would nature do it in a way that creates more ecological niches, more potential for synergy, and more numbers of cooperative interactions among the all the trophic layers of life in the ecosystem, from the soil up to the sky to the upper canopy of a forest.
How does a tactical dilemma of the potential for war between neighbors...how can that be more nuanced than just two metal fences that block off each other's gardens and really flatten the ecological potential and limit synergy?
Those lamenting gardener warriors now are at an impasse where they have a far less productive ecology between the two than they could have, and they could have spent that fence money in a different way.
They could have said, we're gonna consult with the tactical permaculture people. And what are they gonna say? They're gonna say, well, we're gonna save you a lot of time. I'm not gonna torture you and torment you with game theory and adaptations of the prisoner's dilemma. I'm just gonna say form follows function. You both arrived at a nash equilibrium, which is that it's not the best scenario for either of you, but it's not the worst.
Essentially, you get to have more peace of mind and sleep better at night knowing fences are up. Though you sacrifice with the sunken cost of building the fence that costs time and energy and monetary resources that could have gone into growing more production.
Instead, it was sacrificed to install this security measure, that’s in fact redundant.
You both do it because you can't risk one of you becoming the subjugator or the subjugated. So you both had to do it. So the defense arms race, you both embarked on that together, but now you're kind of lamenting.
So is there a potential to create a pro social synergistic value-add on top of that grim, cold calculus of a Nash equilibrium in the prisoner's dilemma, applied to war, applied to the garden, and the tactical permaculturist says, yes, guess what?
I'm gonna come over and bring vining, edible and medicinal food plants that you can grow that are gonna add beauty and fragrance and diversity to your dinner table and biodiversity to the landscape and to the natural ecosystem.
And that fence which was an eyesore, is gonna still be there and serve its function and maintain that tactical balance and that tactically informed peace. But now it's gonna become a trellis. And you didn't have to tear it down, it was able to serve its function.
But now it's serving multiple stacked functions, and it's now growing you food and medicine, creating beauty, possibly some extra shade and cooling effects.
And now you have this whole list of value-add that comes when you bring permaculture to your tactical insulation.
That goes for both folks on both sides of both fences.
Now, I would take it even to the next level, which is that if it were possible to intervene in the design phase before they chose the form, without thinking about possible, multiple, different alternative options that fulfill the function in a different form…
If we could go back in time or if I could have been there to be an arbitrator or mediator in that conflict, or if they were willing to tear the fences down...
But an even more pro social and even more ecologically optimal and even less costly and even more elegant solution that address the tactical, functional need of there to be some dissuasive barrier between them. This is where I would say, let's grow whatever you like to eat, or that is preferable to your medicine cabinet, your herbal apothecary.
Let's grow thorned bushes and berry briers, and make it a soul building and culture building part of your fabric.
You'll sing songs about it. You'll tell stories about it. You'll become master gardeners and horticulturists of the plantings that you do to have an edible tactical living barbed wire fence that dissuades and keeps your dogs out of each other's gardens and keeps each other out of each other's gardens.
If you wanna create some sort of corridor for diplomacy where you have garden parties and you can walk through that corridor, and maybe that's a less costly, smaller footprint of the metal fenced area that you can still grow stuff on it.
But if instead of having an all metal fence for a long stretch of your entire perimeter of your gardens, instead you grow prickly pear, or you grow blackberry or raspberry or even rose bushes. Tight, tight mesh grown.
You can artfully and craftfully weave together plantings of thorn bushes and even different types of thorn trees to where you can create a impenetrable fence that's very dissuasive because of its thick brush and sharp thorns.
That will prevent bad people and bad animals and unassuming animals from going where you do not want them to go.
Then you could spend the money that was allocated to dead metal fencing that does nothing other than one thing, and you could have a multi functional, stacked function, tactical, edible, medicinal food hedge.
That's like living barbed wire. It's regenerative, doesn't rust out, that will actually live longer than you.
If you maintain it, it could live indefinitely.
That's a regenerative perimeter that's tactical and serves the function.
You could set aside a small percentage of that budget to have some sort of stone work.
You could create a very beautiful non-prison like full circle with the prisoner's dilemma.
You could create a very, aesthetically pleasing, very rustic stone pathway with some security. But that gives you the the ability, when you are getting along, to supervise each other in your garden parties without having to turn your back on each other at night, lest one of you just waltz over and steal a tomato and then cause a feud that results in that pitchfork night stealth destruction mission that started this whole thing off.
That feud didn't lead to shooting and blowing each other's limbs off. You're either gonna build fences or grow your rose bushes, and berry briers and otherwise thorned edible or medicinal hedges.
Hopefully you haven't got to the point where you blown each other's limbs off, and it's gonna be a very slow and painful process to get that stuff established.
Hopefully you made some sort of peace, or that you put up the fences before things got uglier.
But we're living in a world where there's a lot of amputees now, a lot of disabled veterans, and for them to mend fences in this ecological manner that I'm speaking of, they're gonna wish that option had been available earlier.
We could be settling wars with bentonite, and not dynamite, building fences with edible living thorn, berry bushes. It's not so unforgiving as concertina wire and on down the line until we get to a point where it's not that you're being tactically disadvantageous, or that you're being weak and allowing yourself to be subjugated.
Rather we partner with the natural weaponization, that is the natural toxins, the natural poisons, the natural architecture of weaponization that most wild animals have built in to their to their venom emitting teeth and their bites and stings, and all of the weaponization that nature is, that we lack intrinsically and that we have to build technologically.
My thesis is that using an understanding of this game theoretical intellectual toy, we can get to a point where we find a better solution.
The prudent thing to do for those two gardeners was to have a perimeter that was impenetrable and where there was a corridor that was manageable and penetrable on terms that were tactically mutually advantageous, not leaving either one to be easily subjugated.
And now, by design, peace is the emergent property of superior not necessarily firepower, but rather leaning on and replicating the fair fighting that wild animals do in nature.
Replicating the fair defensive tactics that plants use to generate poisons to protect themselves from predation and to grow thorns to ward off their potential enemies.
There becomes a balance, and nature is in a state of constant war, and I'm willing to acknowledge that.
It wasn't like a hippie having a bad trip that made me realize that nature is inherently weaponized.
I get bit and stung all the time, and if I don't purify my water, I'll get sick.
There are infinite, uncountable ways in which the weaponization of every form of life, even every cell, the way that their cells defend and fights to defend themselves and build gangs and militaries to the fight.
It's called your immune system. There are tactics and strategies at all levels.
You can't be in denial of it. If you do, you will be victimized. You will be subjugated. And the most evil among us will exploit every tactical disadvantage that exists.
So there is no excuse not to be a fighter for your health, for your garden, for your community, for your family, for your nation.
But I think we can green the fight.
That's where I'm coming out out with this. And yes, let's live in an unshackled world, which means trust, but militarize.
And remember that haunting image of utopian pacifism that requires everyone being shackled for it to work. That's dystopia.
We can have a dangerous freedom or a safe tyranny.
I think I'm gonna go with the dangerous freedom and just stay fit and become more proficient with weapons in compliance with the laws and in the spirit of the founders and stay well regulated.
My friends stay well regulated and stay unshackled.
Let's green the battlefield. And the battle cry for me is quite simply growing is half the battle.
I'm no longer a child playing with GI Joes.
I'm just living and working and growing into this body that I have as a man, and it’s getting older and starting to fall apart.
And I can do a lot more now than I could playing with the GI Joe toy.
But I sure wish I could have had a GI Joe garden set with a GI Joe shovel.