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Your lifespan is the relative duration of a lightning bolt; strive to burn just as hot. 26.02.02
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Morals are the guardrails of daily life. When laws are slow, ambiguous, or absent, morals keep neighbors from becoming predators. Yes—morals change, even within a single culture. Some call that “decline.” Others call it “advancement.” When morality ceases to be a shared thread and becomes a private permit, I’m only limited by my moral limits, which are the only ones that matter; social order is at risk.
We don’t have to guess whether moral change can be good. Slavery was defended based on profit and convenient readings of scripture. Interracial marriage was illegal in many states until 1967. Divorce was branded a moral failure, even as an escape from violence. Women who chose careers over homemaking were dismissed as selfish, as if ambition were a vice.
Even our smaller moral judgments have shifted. Tattoos and piercings, once shorthand for “irresponsible,” “a drunken folly,” or signs of criminal association, are now common, meaningful personal statements and art. Online dating used to carry a whiff of desperation, but now it’s ordinary, and even practical.
So the issue isn’t the changing landscape of morality. The issue is the persistent temptation of power to usurp it. It’s when a determined few, or an individual, insist that their morals should govern everyone else, while exempting themselves from the burden of society’s norms of consistency.
That’s when moral limits replace moral fiber. Moral fiber restrains the self. Moral limits wielded by the powerful are used to restrain others. When leaders claim to be the sole keepers of the moral framework, history doesn’t reward them with harmony. Instead, it rewards them with conflict, mistrust, and the slow degradation of the very moral foundation they claim to defend. And those who mainly want comfort, access, and advantage will often go along—because chameleon morality is profitable when you’re standing near the throne.
In a healthy society, the moral posture of elected officials should broadly reflect the people they serve—all of them, not just the loyal, the loud, and/or those who bend a knee. Moral diversity isn’t wrong; it’s necessary. But a line is crossed when one imposes their morality on others without dialogue. Majority rule matters, but so do minority rights—because “shared morality” without protection becomes tyranny with faux-moral backing.
Morals will keep evolving as life does. Moral fiber isn’t loud. It shows up in restraint, fairness, and the humility to admit, “I could be wrong.” A society isn’t shaken because people argue about morals; it is when the powerful stop being bound by anything—when “values” become a weapon, not a compass.
Find your moral fiber, but don’t stop there. Demand it—publicly and relentlessly—from anyone who seeks authority over your life. If they won’t live by civil standards, treat their immoral talk as propaganda to be challenged and rejected. One certainty: moral limits cease with mortality. NeverFearTheDream simplebender.com
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The only way for the majority to be safe is for the minority to be free, acknowledged, and protected. 26.02.01
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and Credibility Mortally Wounded…..
The first videos weren’t clear. They were chaotic—grainy clips, partial frames, shouting without context. But the official messaging arrived before evidence was gathered, witnesses interviewed, or a timeline stitched together, the verdict was delivered. Heroic officers. Clear self-defense. Thwarted mass terror. The dead were “deranged domestic terrorists,” and the valiant officers had barely survived and saved many.
That’s narrative warfare—not investigation.
This is the modern media playbook: speak first, speak loudly, and force everyone else to prove you wrong. Flood the zone with ‘certainty,’ half-facts, and righteous adjectives. Let supporters do the rest. If later evidence complicates the story, it won’t matter; the first impression has already been welded into identity. And if you can manufacture images, clips, or “context” with AI, you can make doubt look like proof while you stall, bury, and obscure the real record.
What makes the lie persuasive is that it rides on a few fragments of truth. A legal concealed-carry permit becomes a justification for killing. A photo of a holstered firearm becomes “brandishing.” A moment of chaos becomes “attempted assassination.” A tender snapshot of agents “helping” a frightened child becomes moral cover for whatever came before or happens after. The lifestyle of one is used to instill moral judgment and question motive. Just enough ‘truth’ to make the rest feel plausible to the true believers.
We’re told to relax. Trust the regime and its process. Wait for the facts they want to show us. The rest of the facts arrive late and edited—while the narrative sprints ahead, unchallenged and amplified by officials who treat accountability as optional.
There’s a deeper fatal wound: credibility. Bullets may have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but the words that followed targeted something larger—the public’s ability to discern what is real. When institutions train citizens to doubt their eyes and distrust every correction as “spin,” they aren’t governing; they’re conditioning. They are self-serving protectionists maximizing propaganda’s bullhorn.
So we should ask, without hysteria or naiveté: Was a five-year-old used as bait or as a shield? Was Good’s death justified or convenient? Was Pretti killed because he believed in the 2nd Amendment or because zealous masked bullies lost control of themselves? If we can be pushed to accept a finished story before an investigation even begins, what else have we been trained to swallow—about elections, wars, enemies, or the files that power keeps sealed? Move along, citizen. Nothing to see here. NeverFeartheDream simplebender.com
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Mindfulness is about awareness and acceptance—of yourself and everything around you. 26.01.8
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(Except for First Nations….Lest we forgot, we are all immigrants, lest we forget.)
America’s immigration history has two defining bookends—both failures that masquerade as solutions: brute force and endless procedure. In the 1950s, the United States chose force—regionally and aggressively. Today, it chooses process—nationally, diffusely, and with targeted intensity. Both claim legitimacy. Both avoid responsibility. Both are unapologetic for failure and death. Neither deserves moral cover; both merit condemnation.
In the late 1950s, Operation Wetback was panic impersonating as policy. It treated human beings as a problem, refuse, to be flushed from the system—quickly, cruelly, and visibly. Across the Southwestern United States, Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico became enforcement zones. Farms, towns, and cities were swept with little regard for documentation or citizenship. The only thing that mattered was ethnicity. Its defenders praised its “effectiveness,” even calling it “a model,” collapsing ethnics into numbers. Humans were caged. Deportations were swift. Fear spread quickly—along with the erosion of constitutional restraint and human dignity. Citizens were caught up. Families were broken. People died.
For all its cruelty, Operation Wetback held one principle firm: deportation meant returning people to their country of origin, typically Mexico. Removal was brutal, but the destination was at least coherent. The state expelled people to a homeland, not into geopolitical limbo.
Condemning that era is easy. The more demanding task is confronting the present.
Today’s ICE-DHS enforcement regime operates as a nationwide system, shaped by discretion, delay, and unequal impact. Enforcement now extends coast to coast, embedded in courts, databases, detention centers, and subcontracted detention abroad. Deportation no longer guarantees return ‘home.’ Individuals may be transferred to third countries not because of their origin but because corrupt, weak governments are willing to accept detainees in exchange for compensation or a diplomatic concession—transactional detention, prisons for hire.
There are hearings now, maybe. Appeals, maybe. Paperwork, surely. Shockingly, today’s violence is less and more isolated, but still vile, unnecessary, and with bystanders being provoked and killed. Actions outsourced to undertrained enforcement at the direction of uninformed and opportunistic bureaucracy. Masked agents, hide their faces, names, and affiliation, are brandishing weapons and using unwarranted force without accountability. Families are not always torn apart in a single raid; instead, more perversely, they unravel over months or years of detention, uncertainty, and displacement.
Operation Wetback was cruelty without due process. Today’s enforcement is often one-size-fits-all, due process without courage. One system expelled people brutally but directly. The other disperses suffering nationally and indefinitely. America’s most infamous mass deportation campaign reveals a shift not from cruelty to compassion, but from visible brutality to managed, indefinite human limbo and indifference.
Immigration laws should be followed by everyone and every organization. We need immigration control and enforcement, but not draconian brutalization. The tragedy is not that America once chose force. It is that, decades later, it still refuses to choose honesty. This is the immigration purgatory we now live in and may die in. NeverFearTheDream · simplebender.com
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Compassion is closer to reality than love. Love is blinded by fascination and lust—compassion accepts and supports. 26.01.07
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We like to think facts, arguments, and data persuade us. But we are fooling ourselves. We are moved by something much simpler and more primitive: being seen —being acknowledged.
When someone with power looks out at a frustrated crowd and says, “You’ve been ignored, dismissed, and lied to—and you’re right to be angry,” they’ve already won half the battle and most of the crowd. No policy yet, no cost, no trade-offs. Just an acknowledgement. And for people who feel they have been treated as invisible for years, those words are not just drunk, but we bathe in them.
This is the benevolent side of acknowledgment. It’s the foundation of honest dialogue. When people feel genuinely heard, they experience a sense of dignity and respect. They can tolerate imperfect outcomes if they trust the process and believe their concerns are genuinely recognized. Acknowledgment restores a sense of worth: I exist in this system. I matter.
The subsequent step is where things get murky and sticky. First comes acceptance: “At least this one is listening.” Then, subconsciously, we yield our trust: “If they hear me on this, they must be on my side in general.” Give it a little more time and constant repetition, and that trust quietly turns into loyalty. Not because the leader has delivered, but because the follower feels psychologically indebted: “Everyone else ignored us; this one didn’t. This one understands us, believes in us. We owe them a chance.” That shift is dangerous—moving from judging leaders based upon results to unquestioningly defending them because they once made us feel heard and important. This is precisely where healthy acknowledgement can harden into uncritical allegiance. Your ego has been played.
Once someone in authority is branded as “the only one who really understands us,” they can cash that emotional credit almost anywhere. They can stay vague on solutions. They can peddle simple stories for complex problems. Anything can be solved on ‘day one.’ Leaders may use hollow acknowledgment to manipulate, shifting blame and redirecting anger while still being applauded—because they’ve anchored themselves to identity, not performance. Questioning becomes essential to avoid falling for theater rather than reality.
At this point, the line between leadership and chicanery gets very thin and easily crossed. The leader doesn’t need to heal the wound; they need to keep poking it, refusing to let it heal, wanting it to fester. Keep naming the grievance, keep feeding the resentment, keep pointing at new enemies. Distracting you from seeing what is really happening. The followers’ loyalty is no longer about what’s actually being done; it’s about who stands with “people like us.”
Suppose the feeling of being acknowledged matters more to us than the reality of what is actually being done on our behalf. How long will it be before we become willing accomplices in our own manipulation, or have we already crossed that bridge?
Whenever a leader spends far more time jabberwocking and mirroring your pain than functionally measuring their results, don’t be flattered that they “see you”—check your wallet, your rights, and your future. NeverFearTheDream simplebender.com
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Stand in front of a mirror and accept who stares back—then, between the two of you, agree on who you want to be. 26.01.6
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Your life, like a candle, burns bright until the end. It illuminates and warms, giving comfort and refuge. And when spent, its memories waft in the air as fragrant smoke, reminding all who you were. 26.01.5
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