Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The Peanut Butter Manifesto

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Let us begin with a simple premise.

Remarks that are black are not allowed here. If you make them, you will be banned. (In this sensitive age, let me stress this is not related to race, but merely color, for the purposes of a metaphor).

The community, surely, could agree on subjects that are “black”. They could be child pornography, or animal torture, or anything else repellent and vile. That’s simple. And how easy it would be, if human thought was along these lines:

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The Year the World Fell Down the Rabbit Hole

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I would like to personally thank Tim for the privilege of posting at SoH for another year. It has been an honor to occasionally write for you folks and be associated with this first class website. Happy new year. –Gary

Conspiracies and bias hurt investors

It’s no wonder so many people have been unable to attain proper market positioning in 2020. You invest with your heart, soul, fears or even sometimes your intellect and you risk blowing yourself up at worst, or missing out at best. For much of 2020 Twitter has been a forum for ‘influencers’ with tens of thousands of followers spewing dogma and influencing their herds alright. I watched it happen all year, in the Twitter machine and at other venues.

You know the perma-bearish or ‘got gold?’ types, issuing dire warnings and authoritative discussion of just how bad off the world is (well, it ain’t good, I grant them that). But it’s the practical reaction or lack thereof, not the news itself that matters.

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Inspiration from Hypocrites

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We humans looks for patterns in things. I am especially prone to this habit. Patterns help us understand. They help us group. They help us sort things out and try to learn. Sometimes they mislead us. Other times, they light the way.

Following my discovery of the works of Alan Watts – – far too late in life, but better late than never – – I have been trying to reconcile his inspired philosophy with his early death. Here is a man who, from earliest adulthood, spoke with the eloquence and power of a prophet. He spoke of reality, the art of living, and the paradoxes of our existence. He is the sort of man whom you would want to see live past 100 as a revered sage, helping to lift humanity.

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