Amerika

Blend: Erinmore Flake
Type: UK plug (Virginia, Burley)
Strength: medium-to-strong

For generations, pipe smokers have reached for the tin with the pineapple on it. This blend tastes like nougat: mild vanilla-ish flavor, a little bit sweet, but mostly just a pleasant grain and honey taste like toast with a mild dose of hazelnut flour and apricot in the mix.

This blend delights because it is solidly good, but you find yourself reaching for it again and again for what it is not: it is not complex, nor is it overly sweet, nor does it lack enough nicotine for a walk on the moor, and it does not have too much top note nor lack a little extra something.

In other words, it is a balance between not doing things like cheap shortcuts and subterfuges, and doing what it does do right; this blend knows itself, and aims for a pleasant uncomplicated smoke that can be enjoyed day after day.

My guess is that this blend incorporates just a bit of white Burley in its Virginia and then stacks it against some darker Burley. This gives it a little more punch but incorporates the natural vanilla-ish flavor of white Burley.

Like most flakes, this one rewards careful lighting and avoiding one curse in packing: stuffing. You want the pipe full but with a space for the flake to expand, because flake is compressed tobacco that always expands when burning. Then you light, tamp, and deeply light for longer than normal.

At that point the lunt — walking while smoking a pipe — can begin. The exercise brightens the cheeks and rinses the brain in fresh oxygen, expelling the old memories with the lingering stale air at the base of the lungs. A rise comes rushing at you out of the fog, so mount it quickly and keep pace.

Any memorable lunt will involve the process of first thinking what a tasty tobacco this is, then noticing the simple joy of walking, then the beauty of the world, and finally the addictive process of trying to make sense of things, which in my view is why we are here.

When one passes through woods and hills, the mind relaxes and escapes the immediate, which tends to consist of worries and fears more than aspirations. The transcendent hits: for whatever its downsides, existence presents the possibility of beauty, and so we stick with it even through our fear.

At that point, we can accept hard realism instead of pushing it away defensively. We can see its utility: to accept the world is the price we pay for seeing its beauty. That allows us to suppress bad behaviors and tweak the good ones to raise their quality and power.

Without insanity, we can find the basis for sanity. Without paraphilias and pathologies, we can find purpose. Without a fear of some methods, we can achieve our goals. Without illusions, obsessions, and delusions, we can see how simple it is to do what must be done.

To be absolutely cruel about it, we can say that most of humanity fears heady issues, so they avoid them, which leads to pursuing what Kant called hypothetical goals, namely those unrelated to reality. Most people spend their lives chasing those and miss out on the opportunities before them.

This means that in all areas of life, accurate thinking is hiding in plain sight. Most will never look for it because they fear it, so it could be printed on every ballot and would still be denied. The writing on the wall would be ignored like all other signs of how reality works.

Since a good lunt is perfect for compiling heresies, find here enumerated a partial list:

IQ determines outlook. In our light egalitarian times, this proves challenging, but intelligence determines awareness in time, space, and chains of causal events. A great mind can think thousands of years ahead across the universe, but a mediocre mind knows only the next two weeks in his favorite bar, workplace, home, and television. People who are more intelligent are aware of more of life, and therefore tend to be less obsessed with the trivial and controlling.

All costs are passed to the consumer. That this is heretical at all shows how far into the bureaucracy-socialism rabbit hole we have descended. Any cost that a business must cover is paid for by raising the price of goods. If there were no costs at all, meaning all materials were free and all employees were volunteers, companies could give away their products; since they pay salaries, taxes, legal fees, licensing, affirmative action costs, property taxes, lawsuit settlements, rent, and insurance, those get factored into the cost of each item. Cut them and prices go down.

What we tolerate, we get more of. This one also seems to hit tender nerves because it means that whatever we put up with will increase itself, and practical experience confirms this. Allow a homeless camp near your house, and soon you wake up to find a large homeless camp. Let your politicians steal money and lie to you, and soon they will all do this. Allow large corporations to sell destructive products, and others will compete by doing the same. Anything permitted finds a home and like an infection, moves in and takes over.

Right and Left are different. It is very popular now to confuse the existence of the Uniparty with there being no difference between Left and Right, but in reality Right = order (ends-over-means) and Left = individualism (means-over-ends). In individualism, the goal is assumed to always be the self, so what it craves is to ban the methods that could be used against it, effectively neutering its competition. On the contrary, the Right embraces competition like natural selection and aims to reduce overhead so that no one wastes their time on the soul-killing trivialities of bureaucracy and socialization. The Right says that if you find the correct goal, any methods use to achieve it are legitimate; the Left wants to eradicate methods it fears, but in doing so makes method equivalent to goal like with equality, creating a kind of closed circuit feedback loop.

Symbolism distracts from accuracy. Categories, optics, emotions, and symbols manipulate our emotions directly by making us assume an agenda to certain objects; for example, if we see a snake, we think it is conspiring to bite us when in fact it is simply chasing around for tasty little mice. Humans communicate with words, but these can be used in a symbol or absolute sense, or a descriptive sense where many small details add up to a silhouette or topography of what is being gestured. The latter gives us a chance to learn where the former manipulates.

Diversity is suicide. Although this upsets moderns, it is true: diversity begins by erasing culture, then creates a warzone of competing special interests, and finally genetically erases the host population by admixture. After that, you never get back the original, only a typical third world population of people aware only of their own desires. Morons like to play the good diversity versus bad diversity game, assigning some groups status as destroyers and some as acceptable, but in reality, diversity — of any form: race, culture, religion, ethnicity — leads to total erasure of your civilization.

Religion is not salvation. We all have some religion; atheism is a religion and even agnosticism rests on the presupposition that one cannot know the divine through intuition. However, religion is not a substitute for having culture, which requires having a homogeneous group, because culture encompasses all the things outside of big topics that tell us little about how to deal with the practical questions of everyday.

Culture upstream of markets. Modern people, made retarded by urbanization, bureaucracy, pacifism, and socialism, tend to sneer at the idea of culture. However, culture determines group attitudes. What if the strength of boycotts of Bud Light, Target, and Disney were in fact an everyday thing for any group that offended the majority culture or did something destructive? When culture is upstream of markets, the markets support culture instead of opposing it as they have in the consumerist years and worse in the post counter-culture years after the 1960s.

We all need blasphemies periodically to break the rigid structures in which we keep our thoughts and to force us to re-interpret what we know going back to the why we know what we know or discipline our desires in certain ways. Light a pipe and give these some thought.

Tags: erinmore flake, heresies, pipe meditations