I just spent 5 weeks in Chicago, I went for a walk nearly every day. I didn’t experience even one incident of street harassment. That is wildly unusual! And given that this was consistent over 5 weeks, I don’t think it was chance, I think something is different now. The question is what? I don’t think I suddenly became unattractive. I got lots of smiles and nods, and ‘good morning’ greetings. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit older? Maybe it’s in the way that I carry myself or in the way I dress these days? Or maybe… just maybe, the culture has changed. Or is that wishful thinking on my part?

I am not a dominatrix, I am not a "dom". But, pretty often, people get the impression that I am. Why? Well I have managed to rid myself of sexual guilt. I am, at this point in my life, able to discuss sexuality without any refrain, without any pause for embarrassment. That’s unusual, especially in a woman. And often, the only other time someone may have encountered this is in a dominatrix. And this has lead me to a tragic realization. What our culture commonly thinks of as normal female sexuality... is actually shame.

While religion can bring people comfort and benefits, I am not a big fan of it for myself mostly because I have not found a religion that is not a shame based system, and a shame based mindset is wildly unhealthy for me. The particular combination that was my inherently analytical and focused mind + the shame based structure of some of the churches we were in when I was very young was an unhealthy combo for me. One of my first memories is of a Sunday night laying in bed after a long day that included a sermon at Church. The preacher was telling us that if you should, even for a moment, entertain the idea that god isn't real you would go to hell. And well, me being who I am, I couldn't not. So I laid there, terrified to do it, trying to avoid it, but I did, I, just for a moment, imagined that god wasn't real. And then I proceeded to have an anxiety attack worried that I would go to hell. Also, a few years back while dealing with depression/anxiety, I did this journaling exercise program and discovered that even in my late 30's I still had religious guilt in the back of my head. So much of my subconscious mind was shame based. I realized that, but it's a hard thing to undo. And then one day an interesting thing happened. I was in the midst of a massive wave of depression in what I call a 'should loop' or 'shame spiral'. My head was filled with thinking that I was doing everything wrong and hyper focused on what I should​ be doing. I was walking though the kitchen with 'maybe I should..., maybe I should...' playing in my head like a broken record when I heard something. Hearing voices is interesting cuz I didn't really hear it with my ears, it was more like someone hijacked my internal dialogue, and all it said was "This experience is for you." Which was wildly interesting and so, so different from where my head was in that moment. What if, what if life isn't a test, what if it's actually an experience that is for us, to benefit us? I now tell myself "this experience is for you" nearly every day. And this is my issue with religion, it views life as a punishment or a test, and not as a self directed benefit.

Communism, in small groups, is the natural state of humans. It’s built into us to care about our fellow humans, and to share with them. This helps us all. Things got complex once we started living in groups lager than Dunbar's number in villages and cities as our instinctual communism does not scale. This is when we develop money and ‘market economies’ as this does scale. As our cities have grown in numbers, they have shrunk in community and connection. There are now a lot of people who are incredibly lonely as we are living unnaturally isolated lives, and this is a big part of what fuels anti-capitalist sentiments. A lot of people who have perfectly natural and healthy human instincts make the error of trying to scale their sharing tendencies. They see ‘the state’ as their vehicle for recreating community care. These are the people who want the ‘social safety net’. And of course that is how humans are made to function, a community safety net is what we are built for. The issue, again, is with trying to scale it not only to above Dunbar’s number, but to millions of people. People who don’t know how to connect with others, for any reason good or bad, the ‘anti-social’ people, some autistic people, sociopaths, etc. tend to become “capitalists” in big part because they have less of the sharing instincts and have less ability to perceive the needs of others. Quite often the ‘bleeding heart liberals’ are the more psychologically and relationally healthy people. Their big error isn’t in their instincts, it’s in not understanding that the policies their instincts want them to support were built for small groups and don’t scale to millions. The solution here is to bring back the tight knit smaller communities, practice the natural communism in those groups, create social safety nets there, and to engage in ‘capitalism’ or ‘market economics’ with the broader world.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection of patriarchy, hierarchy, and sex. I think there is a ‘collective unconscious’ sense in our culture that being ‘on top’ during the act means that you are ‘above’ your partner in some sort of relationship hierarchy and thus better than them. And of course the reverse for being ‘a bottom’. Would you agree? Just look at the language we use around this stuff. “who f***ed who?”, “O he got f***ed”. etc, etc. It’s really kinda disturbing and sad. We say someone ‘bent over’ as a term for them being abused.

My daughter is talking in her sleep and apparently she is dreaming of having existential debates with people... yup, that kid is mine lol

I’ve been listening to FinTech podcasts trying to get a sense of the FinTech mindset, and geez it’s weird. Yesterday I was listening to an interview with the CEO of PayPal and he seriously said ‘we need to remember to think about the customer’… Like what else where you doing bro? Maybe this is a mega corp issue? He’s like ‘we think about shareholders, and the board, and we need to think more about our customers’… That just seems like a really embarrassing thing to admit in public to me. Ya?

How do I activate my primal wallet? 🤔

You ever hear a song that just feels like your internal experience? Which song was it?

What’s an L402 token? It’s an HMAC-signed macaroon + a Lightning invoice preimage = proof of paid to access a service. No passwords. No accounts. Just sats. And here is a pretty graphic that breaks it down! 👇

Okay I have to go fix my zaps, but it's going to be annoying. I don't really have a LN mobile wallet, I'm always in front of my computer so I just always use my LND node. What wallets are easy to connect to Primal for zaps?

I don’t understand why there are so many men that are angry at women. The angry women I get. I’m not justifying it or defending it, but I understand how it happens. The vast majority of the women I know have been violently assaulted, groped, harassed, graped, etc. and while diving into collectivism is never the answer, I can understand how those experiences would result in a general anger at men. And yes there are subcultures where it is very popular to talk shit about men in general and that should cause some anger. But I would think being physically assaulted would appropriately cause a much higher level of anger, ya? But that's not what I'm seeing. So what happened to these dudes? Why are they so angry?

When you're from Chicago you develop a habit of attempting to cram as much as possible into a summer, which probably isn’t a great idea, but by that measure, I'm doing pretty well this year! So far I got to day drink on a boat on a Midwestern lake for the 4th whilst wearing an American flag cowboy hat #murica 🇺🇸🎇, went to a Renaissance faire, took my kids hiking through the mountains in Banff national park ⛰️🇨🇦, caught some sun at Oak St beach ☀️🌆, and drank and dined with all kinds of friends and family 🫶

I once heard someone say “god is the blanket that we throw over the mystery of the universe” and that really stuck. Yes, we don’t, we can’t, understand the universe, but we need some way to process it, some way to deal with the uncontrollable nature of it, and so we call it ‘god’. I read a book on happiness once that told a story about a young couple who had lost a child. They were religious and took great comfort in the idea that this was “all a part of god’s plan”. I have very mixed feelings about that. We can examine the seeming cruelty of ‘god’ in that situation, but we can also appreciate that they found a way to come to grips with the lack of safety in the world, and the uncontrollable nature of our universe. ‘God’, or religion, really does give a lot of peace of mind to a lot of people in crisis. The concept is a hack for learning to "let go." But there are down sides. No one wants to be a passenger in car when the driver says “Jesus take the wheel!” And this is just such a constant wrestling match in my head. How do you be a responsible person, how do you keep planning for the future while knowing, while holding the knowledge that you live in a universe without safety? A universe that you can’t control, where tragedy is always possible. How the fuck do you do that?!?! I do have some idea. I know that planning is entirely necessary in this life, and so you gotta keep doing it. And also, you have to hold the reality that there is some percentage, some amount of the situation that is, from our perspective, totally random and uncontrollable. I am now capable of intellectually acknowledging that, and I’ve been learning to decouple tragedy with shame or guilt, or even failure, in my thought processes. But I haven’t found a way to emotionally hold this reality. Ideas?

Shitting on patriarchy is not support for matriarchy. Any society "lead" by half the population while the other half is suppressed is by definition horrible.

Hypothesis: Ancient civilizations were not nearly as male lead or ‘patriarchal’ as we tend to think they were. We are viewing those places through our current patriarchal lens. I was having a chat with ChatGPT about ancient civilizations and was wondering why it wasn’t mentioning some of my favorites. It explained that some of those places didn’t have clear hierarchy, or clear military rule, and so they didn’t count… interesting. So any culture that didn’t have a clear hierarchy or clear military leaders essentially doesn’t count as a civilization? Wow. Have you ever read a history book and noticed that it’s 90% the history of wars? Kinda sad to view the world that way. And our culture seems to equate military might and military decision making with leadership. ...we equate violence with leadership. Very patriarchal, and not at all healthy. And of course men have a natural advantage in violence and we need women to make the babies, and so it’s mostly men in the military. In a world ruled by violence the most violent will rule. Patriarchy. What do you think? Note: As always, "patriarchy" ≠ men bad. Patriarchy is a culture that hurts everyone.