Queen Story's Mere Servant

and the thing is that it's still true that claude will make fuckass mistakes like recommending that i check out a restaurant ninety miles away from my hotel when it's helping with trip planning

Following the Treaty of Washington (1871) the Great Lakes were mostly demilitarized, and there is no standing dispute between the United States and Canada today.

But as a side, the United States Navy built the USS Michigan at Erie, Pennsylvania, to constitute the Great Lakes Patrol, in 1843. She was the first ironclad built in the U.S. in fact.

Surprisingly one wld think that her career would have been uneventful given they are placid inland waterways, but there was actually some excitement here and there.

The Great Lakes Patrol was involved in stopping the so-called timber pirates, which smuggled logs. It also attempted to intercept alcohol smuggling during the Prohibition Years.

The timber pirates are interesting bc they remind u that there was piracy even on inland waterways. Bizarre as it might seem, there were actually pirates active on the Ohio and on the Mississippi. They wld raid Spanish riverine shipping.

There are a number of caves from which they operated, which are tourist areas presently. Eventually the U.S. military put an end to river piracy, but once upon a time the Mississippi was a wild frontier too.

Matter of fact there are still river pirates on the Rio Grande. These are mostly in the form of drug smugglers, a common phenomenon in our modern piracy.

Matter of fact 2—as recently as 2011 Mexican Marines landed on an island in Falcon Lake, leading to a shootout with a cartel that had established a camp there.

But most interesting of all, the Great Lakes Patrol was involved in the bizarre story of James Strang.

Strang was a Mormon follower of Joseph Smith, and upon Smith’s death he claimed to have read a letter in Smith’s hand appointing him as the head of the Mormon Church.

This caused a schism in the church as many of the other leaders rejected this claim. What one might call the Orthodox Mormons stayed in Utah under Bringham Young, while the followers of Strang left for diff pastures.

They ended up on Beaver Island. Beaver Island is a large island in Lake Michigan roughly between northern Michigan and the southeastern coast of the Upper Peninsula. Beaver Island is also in the far north of the lake, and in a commanding position in regard to the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Michigan proper from the Upper P.

James Strang declared himself King James I of Beaver Island and evidently intended to attempt to create an independent schismatic Mormon state on an island in Lake Michigan.

As fun as his story was, it ultimately ended anticlimactically as the Navy put an end to this delusion after landing on Beaver Island and taking Strang aboard.

I say anticlimactically bc the idea of a Mormon state on Beaver Island obviously never went anywhere, but it didn’t just die quietly. Incredibly enough, Strang was shot and killed while in Navy custody, which led to conspiracy theories abt the Navy being involved in his assassination.

Whatever the case may be, Strang was eliminated and his group of followers eventually returned to Utah to rejoin the Church of Latter Day Saints.

hmm... wait. Are all of these questions from kids? Some of them clearly are. "Why does the teacher get cross with me when I smoke?" One teacher says tea is bad for you, another says it's fine.

okay, that would explain something... it's not really that I think they're stupid questions, just that I just didn't get why he would be in a position to answer them. They don't correspond to any particular expertise. Why are they asking him, not each other? Well, if they're all children, that's a reason.

Ooh, one of the questions is "How did you come to learn all that you are talking about, and how can we come to know it?" He answers, not by reading religious or psychological books, but by observing himself, gaining self-knowledge. And he seems to deny developing his own doctrine; he says on a long journey you must carry little, and everything can be discovered anew in each moment.

For some reason, people ask my advice a fair bit. Most of it comes down to calmly talking them through "What are your options? What do you really want or not want? I get that that's a sucky option, but the other ones seem worse for you. Have you considered what you want out of it, not just what you're expected to want?" etc.

people ask me for... i wouldn't say advice on decisions, more like insight on abstract questions. I think it's a natural kind of "relationship" in which i am particularly "attractive".

with these manipulative gurus that generate bay area rat drama, it seems like a toxic version of a normal interpersonal relationship. I mean these small-time "cult leaders" that don't have organizations, that are basically just charismatic people that are dicks to their friends. And when it's toxic it's toxic in similar ways as other relationships. There seems to be especially a kind of jealousy of other intellectual influences. Among the rationalists, Ziz took this farther than anyone, see The Matrix Is A System. I've certainly had such feelings, because the kind of person who looks to me for insight is also looking to others, including charlatans.

But i guess the conclusion ive come to is that unlike maybe in a romantic relationship where jealousy is natural, in this kind of life coach relationship it defeats the purpose, which is, or should be, to help someone develop their independent judgment.

Which is part of why I'm so interested in Krishnamurti. Like, what do you do with all these people looking for answers from you.

From Besant & Leadbeater, “Occult chemistry: a series of clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements” (1908)

admiring the heavy lifting being done by "can" in this sentence :3

fun's over

So, this is weird. As far as I can tell, the company responsible for this cable did everything absolutely properly and professionally, and didn’t ever plan to do anything which would disturb the beach at all. There were reasonable concerns about the fact that it’s a beautiful beach and tourist asset which shouldn’t be messed around with, but these were all taken into account at a very early stage in the planning because they were so obvious. Harry Potter fans didn’t cause anything to be changed. The project got permission really quite quickly and has been in operation for a while now.