January 13, 2026

I had no idea the Power Station (Duran Duran spinoff) released a 2nd album

Roughly 10 years after the first.

?si=kykb3c0tP4E5w5zf

December 18, 2025

This is a song about my codependency to a Borderline personality disordered person

I was going to post in Musicians..but I feel like it belongs here where it can truly be understood.

The video, "Chalk Dust and Roses," tells a story of an intense, passionate love that ultimately collapses. The narrative unfolds through phases, reflecting the speaker's experience with a relationship characterized by the "adoration and devaluation" often associated with borderline personality disorder, as mentioned in the video's description.

Initially, the speaker describes the euphoria of meeting someone new (0:17) who brings vibrancy to their quiet world. They felt an instant connection, believing they had found their "soulmate" (1:36-1:43) and experiencing intense passion (1:50-1:53). This period is depicted with imagery of "chalk dust and roses" and building a "shining castle" (0:42-0:52).

However, this "adoration phase" quickly gives way to "devaluation" (2:25). The silence falls, the connection is lost, and words become "shards of glass" (2:38-2:41). The loved one transforms "from angel to a stranger" (2:52-2:58), leaving the speaker in emotional wreckage (3:00-3:03).

The video concludes with a sense of loss and forgotten dreams (3:35-3:42), as the love, once grand, slips away "like grains of sand" (3:57-4:01).

?si=dp2K22DKurh6li71

Here is a much better version

?si=sQAPofDiisq7k7Od

October 6, 2025

1990s DARE. Gateway Drug to Modern Fascism?

JH Hannah (prodigitason)
Oct. 3rd 2025
Deep East Texas

When I was a high school senior in 1986, D.A.R.E. told me marijuana was a “gateway drug.” Supposedly the high stops being “enough,” and from there you’ll slide toward cocaine, heroin, or worse.

Even then, the logic felt thin. If marijuana ever led to something harder, the culprit wasn’t cannabis itself but prohibition. You went to your guy for weed; if he was out, he might offer pills or powder instead. That’s the black market, not a escalating addiction dynamic. You wanted cannabis, but prohibition got you something else.

D.A.R.E. wasn’t built around harm reduction. It was built to tell a morality tale. And it’s a tale that, even at this late date, still lives in the hearts of a few dead-enders — like Texas’s lieutenant governor, clinging to reefer-madness rhetoric while most of the country has moved on.

The Gateways We Actually Walk Through

Most people’s first altered state isn’t cannabis at all. It’s spinning around in the yard as a toddler until you collapse dizzy. Later, it’s sneaking cigarettes or drinking cheap beer in high school. By any honest definition, alcohol is the real gateway drug: it’s usually tried first, it’s socially celebrated, and it carries the heaviest toll.

Marijuana use, on the other hand, usually has a natural stop. You smoke until you’re high and then you quit. As the comedian Gallagher once joked: “If you’re high and you keep smoking pot, you don’t get more high—you just get less weed.” Alcohol and plenty of other drugs don’t work that way. Keep going and you’re not just wasting your stash—you’re courting a trip to the emergency room, alcohol very much included.

D.A.R.E. warned us about escalating highs: you try something, the next time isn’t as good, so you chase more and more until it controls you. That isn’t how cannabis works for most people. That is precisely how capitalism works for nearly everyone.

The thrill of your first car, your first smartphone, your first pair of expensive shoes, it’s electric. But the second never feels the same. So you buy the next version, then the upgrade, then the add-on. You tell yourself stories, sometimes your loved ones, about why you need it. You sacrifice time, energy, even health for the next fix. The system is built to keep you craving.

The irony is that D.A.R.E. encouraged kids to turn on their families. Suspect your parents? Call the cops. A free society doesn’t ask children to spy on loved ones—it conditions them. And while kids were made junior deputies, police departments were cashing in on civil asset forfeiture, keeping property they seized in drug cases. D.A.R.E. was the PR arm of a war that looked more like a business, a racket. I wonder how many moody loner MAGAs were active on 1990s DARE programs.
They were a perfect gateway drum to 21st Century fascism.

July 16, 2025

Pascal's Wager Is a High Pressure Sales Pitch

Pascal’s Wager Is a High Pressure Sales Pitch


Pascal’s Wager is often treated as a clever philosophical argument, a kind of cosmic cost-benefit analysis that makes the case for believing in God. The logic is simple: if God exists and you believe, you gain infinite reward; if God doesn’t exist, you lose nothing. If you don’t believe and God does exist, you face infinite loss. Therefore, the “smart” bet is belief.

But here’s the thing: Pascal’s Wager isn’t really a wager at all; it’s a pressure tactic, the kind used by car salesmen. It doesn’t invite belief; it corners you into it. It doesn’t argue that God exists; it just warns you not to risk being wrong.

It’s not a philosophical argument, it’s a rhetorical trap.

Where traditional philosophical reasoning seeks to illuminate truth through evidence and logic, Pascal’s Wager bypasses both. It appeals instead to fear, to self-preservation, to our instinct to avoid loss.

In modern psychological terms, it’s classic loss aversion, the tendency to fear losing something more than we value gaining something else. And in this case, what’s on the line isn’t a few bucks, it's your eternal soul.

You don’t reason your way into belief under Pascal’s Wager. You hedge. You say, “Well, I guess I better believe, just in case.” And that’s not faith, it’s existential FOMO.

More than anything, the Wager exposes a fundamental confusion between belief and performative agreement. You can’t will yourself to believe something just because it seems safer. If I told you that failing to believe in invisible dragons would doom you to endless torment, would you actually believe in them — or just pretend to, nervously?

And if there are thousands of different religions, each with their own version of the wager, which one do you hedge with? Picking the wrong one seems highly likely.

As many have pointed out, Pascal’s Wager assumes a binary choice: believe in the Christian God or don’t. But in reality, there are thousands of gods believed in by billions of people. Picking one and betting on it is hardly the safe choice. It's a lottery.

The Wager oversimplifies a rich and complex landscape of belief into a coin toss with eternity on the line.
And even if you try to take the bet, you’re faced with another problem: belief isn’t just a switch you flip. You can’t choose to believe something in the same way you can choose to go to the gym or buy a used Camry.

Belief is a product of conviction, evidence, and internal consistency — not fear-based gambling. Pascal's Wager asks you to fake it until you make it, as if God won’t notice the difference.

If a god exists who rewards strategic hedging over honest doubt, is that a god worth worshipping?

Let’s call Pascal’s Wager what it really is: a theological sales pitch. It doesn’t open your mind, it shuts down inquiry. It doesn't inspire reverence. It manufactures compliance. Like any con, it thrives on urgency and fear.

It wants you to feel that you’re running out of time, that the stakes are too high for the slow, often painful process of searching, doubting, experiencing, and sometimes believing.

Pascal’s Wager doesn’t help you do that. It just plays on your worst instincts.

It’s not philosophy. It's marketing.
jhhiii

I would be greatly honored if you subscribed to my substack below.
Thanks.
John

https://open.substack.com/pub/factotuminstanter/p/pascals-wager-isnt-a-wager-its-a?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5t4diw

May 31, 2025

Jordan Peterson and Performance Art for the Insecure

Elevating mythical hyper-masculine
stoic archetypes while crying uncontrollably

Jordan Peterson and Performance Art for the Insecure

by: prodigitalson

You may have caught a recent video where YouTube’s favorite philosopher for celibate pick up artists, Jordan Peterson, sat down to debate a group of young atheists. As usual, he said a lot of things that sounded serious if you didn’t think about them too hard—and plenty that meant absolutely nothing at all.

But one moment really stuck out.

At one point, in full angry dad in a Christian movie mode, Peterson leaned in and scolded one of the college-aged participants:

“A belief is something you’d stake your life on.”

It was delivered like a thunderbolt from Mount Wisdom, as if this pronouncement would end all debate. But let’s be honest: it’s nonsense. It’s not profound—it’s philosophical cosplay. And worse, it’s part of a tired act we’ve seen before: performative masculinity dressed up as intellectual rigor.

Because here’s the truth:

Most of the beliefs that shape our lives are not the kind we die for. They’re the kind we live by.

You believe in brushing your teeth. You believe in wearing a seatbelt. You believe in voting, paying your bills, eating protein, calling your sister back. You believe in democracy, public schools, and maybe that dogs are better than people. These aren't “opinions.” They are beliefs. They shape behavior, routines, and relationships.

But none of them require martyrdom. And that doesn’t make them less real.

Peterson isn’t interested in that kind of belief, though. He wants cinematic belief. Stoic suffering. Heroic sacrifice. Tragic masculinity with a mythological soundtrack. His philosophy—if you can call it that—is built around preserving cultural myths that reinforce hierarchies and elevate manly archetypes: Achilles. The lone gunslinger. The bloodied-but-unbowed pipe fitter holding up the world in silence while the rest of us ungrateful woke ingrates sip lattes.

Which brings us to the weeping.

Yes, the weeping. If you've seen enough Peterson, you know what I mean: the full-on, tear-choked, voice-cracking laments about how we don’t properly honor “real men” anymore. He literally cries about how society no longer venerates the quiet heroism of construction workers and pipe fitters.

Now pause and try to picture this:
A real pipe fitter. Covered in grime, finishing a 12-hour shift. Sitting down with a beer and watching Peterson cry about him on YouTube.

Is he touched? Flattered? Or is he just confused as hell, muttering, “What the hell is wrong with this dude?”

Because that’s the paradox of Jordan Peterson:

He’s the loudest advocate for stoic masculinity—and also its most theatrical violator.

He praises men who suffer in silence, then turns around and cries in front of a ring light because not enough people say thank you to ironworkers. He wants every man to be Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone flick—grim, unshakable, unknowable—but delivers his message with all the grace under pressure of a melting stick of butter.

Imagine Casablanca, but instead of Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid,” we get Peterson sobbing, “I just think we’ve lost something sacred... like airport baggage handlers... and welders...” as the plane takes off without him. It’s not timeless. It’s TikTok.

And it all circles back to belief.

This claim that “you don’t really believe something unless you’d die for it” is just another part of the act. It's meant to make everyday belief seem small, weak, unmanly—unless it comes wrapped in stoic martyrdom and blood. It’s a trap: a false binary between epic heroism and meaningless fluff.

But in the real world, belief doesn’t look like Achilles going down in flames.

It looks like showing up. Like consistency. Like treating people decently.

Like brushing your teeth, voting in school board elections, and building a life worth living—without needing to collapse in tears to prove you’re serious.

So let Peterson keep weeping for the fall of manly archetypes.

The rest of us will keep living by our beliefs—quietly, imperfectly, and without a myth to prop us up.

Because that’s what belief actually is:
Not what you die for. What you live by.

January 22, 2025

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Wore a Symbol of Resistance to the Inauguration

Yesterday, during the inauguration, while Mark Zuckerberg was yucking it up with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez and Elon Musk simply could not hold himself back from throwing a thumbs-up to the camera, Justice Jackson sat quietly. With her judicial robes, she wore a collar and a pair of earrings made up of cowrie shells. While Jackson hasn’t elaborated on why she wore the statement piece, according to Vogue, the move appears to be a symbol of quiet resistance. The shells served as prized possessions in ancient African cultures, but more notably, for African Americans, cowries were talismans of protection. The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that historians “speculate the cowries may have been brought to America as talismans to resist enslavement.” (Jackson’s ancestors were enslaved.)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/celebrity/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-wore-a-symbol-of-resistance-to-the-inauguration/ar-AA1xCglV?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=4ea41487bd604373ad7969c027a0cab9&ei=15

October 9, 2023

thanks for the link. I'm not surprised

the way these things seem to have gone in my lifetime is some suicide bomber blows up a restaurant/club etc. often killing and maiming dozens of civilians including children...some pretty horrific stuff.

then the IDF levels blocks and blocks of residential areas that probably had some bad guys in at least a couple of those buildings..but also hundreds of civilians including children.

wash and repeat

however, what just happened and is still unfolding is quite different. according to the very informative link you shared I believe just over three hundred Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian (or other) terrorists from 2008 - 2023 (compared to a staggering 6,000 on the Palestinian side.

Now let this sink in - Hamas has killed twice as many Israeli civilians in the last 48 hours than they, Hezbollah and anyone else combined did over the last 15 years, not to mention the hostages they have now taken and are threatening to execute tit for tat with Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF.

Hamas has guaranteed a brutal response from the despicable Netenyahu, and it will rally Israelis around him. But even without Bibi any Israeli government's raison d'être would be to eliminate Hamas root and branch. And many many innocent people will die.

September 24, 2023

Trump's fascist will to power

Donald Trump will defy judges and anyone who stands in his way. He knows that the two most likely paths his life will soon take are prison for life or dictator for life. So he will do exactly what his psychotic instincts tell him to do and his followers will love it. Unless one of these judges is willing to lock him up for defying them he will have overcome American democracy through sheer force of will...as dictators do. Someone needs to show some guts and enforce the law or there will be no law, only the madman's will.

August 7, 2023

DiSantis campaign explains smaller venues

August 4, 2023

so if I were to say to Eva Braun...well well who do we have here, if it isn't

Mrs. Adolph fucking Hitler. I'd be out of line?