A personal guide to boycotting

Editor's note: Great idea. Boycott everything. Do a total John Galt on the entire financial and economic system. If you don't need it don't buy it. Learn how to produce more than you consume. Brew your own beer or instead, patronize responsible companies that don't attach political agendas to their products. Lie to the financial and economic self-appointed corporate elites who hold financial leverage over you (financial terrorists) at a huge disadvantage. Since birth you have been programmed by external forces you have no control over. Most remain unaware floating through an existence that has already been created and is up and running. You are born and you get plugged in. The system is on autopilot. At birth you are inserted into this "pre-programmed simulacrum." Then depending on each individual if you "figure out something is wrong" you fight tooth and nail against it and attempt alerting others. That is not what you are here to do. You have been knit into the tightly controlled corporate fabric of this system and are prevented at every juncture from jettisoning yourself. And if you do jettison yourself, where are you going to go? And if you are looking for books to read in order to help you jettison yourself, forget it, ancient books with real knowledge that could make profoundly deep fundamental changes in your life are practically non-existent. 

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BOYCOTT EVERYTHING!

by Miles Mathis

I was already working on this paper when the boycott of A&E was announced. For those who aren't up-to-date on the latest news, a show called "Duck Dynasty" on the cable channel A&E suspended one of its actors for things he said in a magazine interview. He said he thought homosexuality was a sin, so he was basically fired for having an opinion. Political correctness now trumps the Constitution, by which you are supposed to have a right to free speech. Many groups are now boycotting A&E, and not just Christians. Everyone who believes in free speech—including progressives like Camille Paglia—has joined the boycott. We may see a follow-up lawsuit on this, but I am not here to comment on that.

The reason I led with this nod to today's headline is because I wish to tie this boycott to my paper already in progress. That paper was started after I recently got another email asking me to suggest a reading list. I gets lots of emails like that, and have for many years. Some of these emails come from those reading my science site, some from my art site, and some from my political articles. All these emails have a common thread, although the thread is often unstated in the actual emails. That thread concerns my method. These readers mainly seem to want to know how I got to where I am. They seem to think if they read what I have read, they will get where I am. A partially logical line of reasoning, I admit, but I am going to give them more than they asked for, as usual. I am not going to answer the question asked, I am going to answer the question implied.

For I thought about it for a while, and I came to the conclusion that I got to where I am more by what I haven't done than by what I have. Therefore, what would be more useful to my readers is a list of things to avoid reading. And, extrapolating from there, a list of things to avoid doing in general. As I compiled this list, I began to see it getting very large. Very soon, I was led to my title above: avoid everything. Boycott everything.

Of course that is a bit of an overstatement, I admit. But it is far easier to start from everything and make a few exceptions than to start from nothing and make a list up from there. The world is so compromised and corrupt, your first assumption upon finding a new thing (in the media) should be that it is propaganda of some sort, and therefore to be avoided. For instance, one of my older recommendations is that you should avoid reading anything written after WWII, and the newer it is, the more assiduously you should protect yourself from it. If it is famous, double down. If the author is rich or well known, double down again. If the author has a major publisher, run like the wind.

Of course there are exceptions, but I stand by that general rule. I have been personally aware of that rule for at least three decades, and have been promoting that rule for at least two. That should seem somewhat uncanny—even to me—considering that I didn't understand the extent of propaganda until the last decade. With hindsight, it appears I had a natural nose for propaganda from a young age, and intuitively avoided many things after only a sniff. Only later did I come to understand exactly why I was avoiding them, and how right I had been.

I will give you an example. I have always avoided drugs of all kinds, pharmaceutical and recreational. In the beginning, I mainly did that because I wasn't impressed by those offering them to me. I didn't wish to be like them, so I wasn't too interested in doing what they were doing. But even after I became an artist and a sometimes hippie, I still wasn't interested in experimenting with drugs. They simply held no fascination for me. I never avoided recreational drugs because they were illegal, since I have never had much respect for the law; but avoid them I did. Now I understand that the hippie culture and alternative culture and youth culture were flooded with dangerous drugs on purpose by the fascists running this country, so I have facts to back up my feelings. But at the time, I was existing mainly on intuition.

It wasn't all intuition, since there were tangible things that affected my judgment. I may not have known that the government was trying to confuse all progressives by a general drugging, but I could see that those already doing the drugs were confused. I could also see that the heightened confusion was an outcome of the drugs. So why would I wish to experiment along those lines? Who wants to be stupider? Who wants to pay money to be stupider? Some people, I suppose, but not me. So I have boycotted all drugs from an early age. It wasn't strictly a boycott, since a boycott implies avoiding something you previously didn't avoid. But the effect was the same either way.

What else? I killed my TV in about 1985. Again, this wasn't a reaction to learning about propaganda. At the time, I didn't know anything about that. I just began to have a sick feeling every time I watched TV. I hated almost all the programming, and the news the most. I hated the news even more than the advertising. I could see it was all bullshit, and one day I just pulled the set from the wall and stomped on it until it was a pile of crumbs. I have never regretted it. I have a TV now—or my fiancée does—but it gets no reception. We use it only to watch old movies.

But back to books for a moment. I said that some books after 1945 are exceptions to the rule, but I should have reminded you of the flip side: many books before 1945 are also fascist propaganda. Although propaganda went into high gear after the war, and has accelerated ever since, I don't mean to imply everything was clean before the war. In recent papers, I have gone back to 1875, and even back before the Civil War, showing some main lines of modern propaganda; and of course it goes much further back than that. But in general, the further back you go, the cleaner you will be. Even if you trip over some propaganda, it will often be outdated and harmless, and you can usually just chuckle at it. In most cases, propaganda is very culture and time specific, and a century will have defused any power it once had. But of course if you find some propaganda that looks very modern, get your defenses up immediately. If it looks like modern propaganda, it will act like modern propaganda, and may still be a danger.

One of the ways I avoid new books is by avoiding the bookstore. I haven't been to a Barnes&Noble or similar bookstore in years. Why? Because they don't have any real books. Like the major newspapers and magazines, the bookstores were taken over long ago. They are just fronts for the CIA. I suspect they are subsidized and they may be run directly from Langley. Again, I have been avoiding mainstream bookstores for at least 20 years, but I only recently figured out why they don't have any real books. Real books don't fit their agenda. They want you reading Oprah books on self-help or pseudo-psychology. Either that or fake history books, fake political books, or fake current events books. They want your reading experience to be totally manufactured by their inserted agents. Yes, they still have some classics, but only the classics that don't interfere with their program. You will find that most classics that contain any useful information have been phased out. And the ones that remain are fronted by asinine introductions and ugly covers. They are sprayed with formaldehyde, coated with toxins, inserted with tracking devices, and then marked up to three times their value. You can get old first editions on abebooks or ebay for cheaper than the smelly new books.

So let that be my first positive recommendation. Buy your old books from one of the online outfits or from a local used bookstore. For myself, I go to ebay, type in a date from 1850 to 1920, and just look at all the books that come up. If I have a certain subject I am studying that week, I also may type in that searchword. But most commonly I just let the Muses guide me. If I find an interesting book I know nothing about, I do a websearch on it. Sometimes I can read parts of it at Googlebooks or the whole thing at Gutenberg.org. Or if it is really interesting, I just buy it for a few bucks. A lot of old books you can get for little more than the price of shipping, and they are well worth it.

As for science, I really don't know what to tell people when they ask for a reading list. They seem to want me to point them to a corrected textbook, one that avoids all the mistakes I reveal on my site. Of course that doesn't exist. Since it doesn't exist, any reading list I could offer would be mostly a negative list. I would recommend you read these things because it is important to see exactly where they are wrong. Just about anything could be on that list, but at the top would be Newton's Principia, Maxwell's books, Planck's books, Einstein's books, and Schrodinger's books. Those are at the top because they are the least wrong and because they are mostly sensible. You continue to feel like a real scientist while you are reading them, instead of like some modern impostor. You should also read Euclid and Archimedes and Galileo and all the other old guys in the original texts. I don't mean you have to read them in Greek or Latin, I just mean read their own treatises instead of commentary on them.

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