Month: November 2012

One of our principle tasks on Earth, I believe, now, is to separate our emotions from our external circumstances.  This requires the growth of spiritual capacity to send out, rather than receive in.  I have been given an excellent reason and opportunity to practice this.

As far as the election, I would like to share some further thoughts.  Obama was voted for overwhelmingly in the ghettos.  The ghettos will be the places hardest and first hit by the coming economic downturn, and no amount of unfunded welfare spending will do much to seriously alleviate the suffering. One could argue that this is unfair.   One could argue that these people were tricked and lied to, and that why wouldn’t you vote for the guy who gave you a free telephone?

I would submit the following: they have been promised the equivalent of free telephones in two year cycles for the last 40 years, and have not learned.  Since the War on Poverty began, things in aggregate have changed little, and arguably changed for the worse.  Culturally, two parent homes are virtually unknown, and this creates all sorts of self perpetuating social pathologies, which include crime, but also lack of self sufficiency and sense of personal responsibility, which in turn create a sense of helplessness, anger, and sadness.

The situation is like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football.  Every two years they are promised the world, and every two years they are given virtually nothing.  You can buy a phone working for minimum wage within a couple of weeks.  But their greed, their desire to get something for nothing, has trumped over a VERY long period of time common sense and personal integrity.  As JJ Cale put it “you’d be surprised at the friends you can buy with small change.”

Put simply, they should know better than to trust people like Barack Obama. Obama is not even black.  I have never thought of him as black.  He is a white academic intellectual leftist. He just has a better disguise than most.  The wearing of masks is, of necessity, a leftist specialty, but he has done it better than most.

We will just have to see what happens.  I am done worrying.  I am going to dedicate my life to hard work, and hope for the best.

I believe in reincarnation.  I believe that plentiful evidence supports it, although I have no inkling what or who I may have been before, and really don’t care.  I would submit that in most lives, no major decision points are reached.  You are born, work, reproduce, work more, age, then die.  Your spiritual standing likely improves a bit, but not much in most lifetimes.

Occasionally, though, you live in a time where decisions have to be made.  You have to choose up or down, and the consequence of choosing “not up” is not the same as not having been asked to choose.  When you encounter light, you either embrace it or reject it.  There is no middle ground.  To be shown the path forward is simultaneously to see its opposite.

What you are asked to do, you either do, or reject and resent.  The universe is fair, but sometimes it asks something of you.  Sometimes you need to be determined to do the right thing, instead of just floating along, neither good nor bad, neither decisive nor indecisive, neither helping much nor hurting much.

This is one of those times.  You can’t not make a decision.  If you have chosen to reject knowledge, you have rejected truth, and you have rejected light.  I say this not as a dogmatic anything.  I say this not as the adherent of any religion. I don’t even say this in a spirit of hate, although anger is certainly close to the surface for me because of all the preventable suffering I see coming.

I say this because I believe it is true, and truth is something that should be shared.

This one looks relatively straightforward.  Obama wanted to get through the election, and he did.  Now he is housecleaning, to avoid having someone FORCED to resign under his tenure, which would look bad politically.  What we can infer, I think reliably, from the timing, is that not only does Obama have an enemies list, but he is also actively gathering dirty little secrets he can use to blackmail people.  These are pretty basic Communist tactics.

What I would submit, though, is that IT DOES NOT MATTER that Hillary and Petraeus resigned. They still need to be forced to appear before Congress to answer questions.  Their jobs are no longer on the line, but four men are still dead, and we still need to answer basic questions about our foreign policy, and we need to know what Obama knew and when.

Hopefully, Congress, Obama does not have dirt on all of you, and hopefully you still have a pair.  Do your fucking job.

I drink too much, usually Very Old Barton 100 Proof.  One thing I like about it is the quality is very uneven. Occasionally it is magnificent.  I drink because knowing that I can soothe the pain of emotional and perceptual risk taking helps me take those plunges daily.

Tonight, though, I would like to offer you a drink from a bottle at the very back of my shelf, one covered with dusts and cobwebs from lack of use.  That bottle contains hope.

Hope is dangerous, of course.  Frustrated hope is an easy cause of self pity, and anger at the world.  I would submit, though, that hope is a dish best served cold (unlike revenge: served cold it is a crime of calculation and hate, rather than passion).  You can think about the world, and see reasons things could work out, without passionately attaching yourself to them.

What I will submit to you are some observations which permit one, if so inclined, to view the reelection of Obama as a blessing.

First, we need to understand Romney was not going to balance the budget.  Paul Ryan, who is considered by all far to the right of Romney, doesn’t do so until 2040 in his plan, which has already been labeled “right wing social engineering” by Newt Gingrich, and of course much worse by the Left.

Romney was VERY unlikely to have been able to repeal Obamacare with a Democrat-controlled Senate, but he would have been demonized for the effort.  He would have been accused of being at war with the poor, and even the middle class.  And people would have been stupid enough to believe these attacks.

Had Romney been elected, companies would have started hiring immediately.  Because Obama was reelected, they have started laying off.  We consider the first outcome good, and the second bad, but is this really the case?  Superficially, of course, having a lower unemployment rate is better than having a higher rate.

But the reality is that the largest challenge we face, that of staying solvent in an ocean of accelerating debt accumulation, would not have been affected in any meaningful way by Romney’s election.  On the surface things would have been better.  People like me would have been happy, and felt better about things.

In the long run, though, it would have delayed the reckoning that MUST happen if we are to have a future.  What I would submit is that whatever gets us to national awareness of the crisis we ALL face–those on food stamps, and those living in mansions on the hill–is more desirable. I think we can get to that reckoning faster under Obama, and a lot of Democrats in Congress.

What we will see over the next year is a gradual decline in our standard of living.  I don’t think banks will be lending enough to turn Bernanke’s QE3 to actual inflation, but many companies will be battening down the hatches in the knowledge that Obamacare is coming, along with taxes, and regulations nobody understands, and which will be implemented by bureaucrats in fully unpredictable ways, and likely in uneven ways.  This will lead to steady increases in unemployment.

In the last year we have seen growth since companies wanted to grow, and were waiting because they feared Obama, but finally just said “screw it”, and started hiring.  Those companies will likely gradually shed many, but likely not all, of those jobs.

In 2016, after 2 years of more or less full implementation of Obamacare, insurance rates will continue to be very high, and much higher than they were before the law was passed, a burden that will be felt most by the middle class.  Tax rates will be much higher too; and yet, borrowing will be astronomical.  We may borrow $3 trillion ON the books to fund the increases in Medicaid and the subsidies to be paid for those not on Medicaid.

All of the misery that this will cause cannot be blamed on Republicans.  In this election, many people believed Obama, that he had credibility when it came to job creation, that Romney would favor the rich, that Obama was the champion of the middle class, etc.  All of these were lies.

If Republicans are intelligent, they will begin creating advertising campaigns NOW to start putting the idea out there that you can’t borrow your way to prosperity.  You can’t borrow forever and not wind up in disaster.  You can’t get enough money out of the rich to fund EVERYTHING.  I actually think cartoons targeted at kids would be useful, and very simple presentations for adults.

The ONLY winning strategy, the ONLY way out of this without going the Argentina route, is to develop generalized public awareness of our problems.  People pay attention when they are hurting, not when they are comfortable.  Obviously, things would have been better if they had paid attention before this unnecessary decline in our economic well-being, but they didn’t, and they didn’t because of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign by the Left.  The Right–and I just realized that I should not call this group “Republicans” any more–needs to create an informational campaign that is far reaching.  We should be visiting schools and talking with teachers to help them understand our world view, and the actual problems our nation faces.  EVERYONE faces the same problems: it is just that some are facing them honestly, and some will be blind-sided because of their chosen ignorance.

We should be doing outreach to black leaders, and helping them understand how Republican ideas on job creation–lower taxes, reduced regulation, and in my view programs facilitated by the government like Kiva, in which the suburban middle class donates money to urban business start-ups, in exchange for tax relief, possibly even in the form of credits–would help their communities more than Democrat ideas.

Fear is darkness.  It is a useful, even necessary emotion, but you can’t live that way.  We must always tell ourselves the truth, but there is a point where you just have to say “sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.”

Practically, there is little most of us can do over the next years.  Unemployment will go up.  We will have to deal with that.  Our insurance rates will go up.  We will have to deal with that.  Healthcare will start to get worse.  What took one week will take three weeks.  But they have survived not too badly in  Canada and elsewhere.  It is not as good, and this solution will not truly correct any of the defects in the system, but we will have to deal with it.

In the end, a bit of inconvenience and pain is, as often as not, a useful tonic for all sorts of ailments, notably self pity.  What will happen need not have happened, but it will.

And in the end, we can hope–I truly believe this–that America might wake up. In the story I just posted, he complained about the inability of the cashier to make change in her head.  But the truth is that that same cashier, if he had dropped his wallet on the way out, probably would have run after him to return it.  If he had a flat tire, she would have called AAA for him.

And in general the only hate crimes tolerated any more are leftist attacks on conservatives, and those are mainly verbal.

We have Islamists to fear, of course, and many other things.  But “a life lived in fear is a life half lived.”

This is our chance to become braver, more cheerful, more positive.

Have at it.

This article makes sense too.

We have to ask the question: given the decision of so much of our country, of our media, our educational institutions, our politicians, to be willfully ignorant, willfully destructive of our future, is it worth fighting the collapse any more?  As I just posted, it has made no difference over the last while–I think the time sample was 20 years–which party was in power, as far as our dealing with entitlement spending.

We are a nation filled with jackasses, who think iPhones just magically come into being without the profit motive, and that they appear in Apple Stores transported by little fairies.  That they can be reckless forever with NO CONSEQUENCE.

Benjamin Franklin said something close to “Experience is a dear teacher, but the fool will learn from no other.”  Nations of fools have to pay the piper.  Maybe the task of the intelligent is simply to see it coming, and make what preparations they can.

And of course tyranny may well be the result.  People do not get smarter in panic.

I’ll need to think about this.  I will say, though, that I am disgusted with a lot of people right now.  I don’t blame Obama. He is a robot following his programming.  It is those who are dumb enough to listen to him, who have access to all the information in the world, easily, at the tip of their fingers, instantly, and choose not to use it.

If he has both courage and integrity, Boehner will say, every time he is in front of a camera or microphone, that we borrow a trillion annually, but we indebt ourselves another 2-3 trillion because we are setting aside NO money for liabilities that will come due in the next 20-30 years.

He needs to remind people that UNDER CLINTON, in the era so-called Progressives hearken back to as a Golden Age of Democrat rule (forgetting that he had a Republican Congress for 6 of his 8 years), our spending was $2 trillion.  Obama plans to spend well over $3 trillion this year, and it will keep going up ON the books, and even more OFF the books.  Implementing Obamacare alone will likely add another trillion to our deficit.

We need to face this reality.  Failing to deal with it now will make it harder later.  Sooner or later, we have to cut spending, since if we TAXED EVERY LAST DOLLAR earned in income in the current economy, it would just barely balance our ANNUAL budget.

Better yet: print out copies of this USA Today article, which in a strange and unusual turn of events is telling truth:

The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.

A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.

The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.

The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.

Deficits are a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign, but USA TODAY has calculated federal finances under accounting rules since 2004 and found no correlation between fluctuations in the deficit and which party ran Congress or the White House.

Key findings:

•Social Security had the biggest financial slide. The government would need $22.2 trillion today, set aside and earning interest, to cover benefits promised to current workers and retirees beyond what taxes will cover. That’s $9.5 trillion more than was needed in 2004.

•Deficits from 2004 to 2011 would be six times the official total of $5.6 trillion reported.

•Federal debt and retiree commitments equal $561,254 per household. By contrast, an average household owes a combined $116,057 for mortgages, car loans and other debts.

“By law, the federal government can’t tell the truth,” says accountant Sheila Weinberg of the Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting.

Jim Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by cutting benefits or lifting taxes.

“It’s not easy, but it can be done. Retirement programs are not legal obligations,” he says.

His big plan is to pay for a $50 trillion debt by cutting benefits or raising taxes?  How does that work?  The cuts needed would be draconian, and we just established no conceivable tax increase could cover this NOW, much less as it metastasizes in the future.

I found his story interesting.  I knew, from reading a series of case studies on military special operations, that he had conducted a textbook rescuse of Mussolini, but found the sheer scope of his projects interesting,  even if of course his politics were odious. 

Among other things, he played a part in training Yasser Arafat in terrorism; was an advisor to the Nasser government, along with many other ex-Nazis; was an advisor to Juan Peron and bodyguard to Eva; and an advistor to Muammar Ghaddafi.

Now, I don’t know much about Juan Peron, other than that he is a left wing hero.  Looking up his story, I found this interesting quote:

Italian Fascism led popular organizations to an effective participation in national life, which had always been denied to the people. Before Mussolini’s rise to power, the nation was on one hand and the worker on the other, and the latter had no involvement in the former. […] In Germany happened exactly the same phenomenon, meaning, an organized state for a perfectly ordered community, for a perfectly ordered population as well: a community where the state was the tool of the nation, whose representation was, under my view, effective. I thought that this should be the future political form, meaning, the true people’s democracy, the true social democracy.[42]

—Juan Perón

Peron also clearly aided and supported the covert movement of many ex-Nazis into Germany.  Why not?  He liked their ideology.  For his part Skorzeny apparently hoped Peron would build a Fourth Reich in Argentina.

According to the link, 1,500 Communists rioted when Skorzeny’s memoirs were published by Le Figaro.  I find this interesting.  As I have said often, there is no practical difference between National Socialism and Communism, except perhaps the scale of the war on the rich.  In National Socialism, you tolerate the rich who support your regime, and in Communism you don’t, with the result that the economies of Fascist regimes–China is clearly a modern example–run more smoothly; but the human rights situation, the repression, the injustice, are the same in both cases.

Historically, Communists hate Fascists for the sole reason that Hitler waged war on the Soviet Union, and prior to that because they had been fighting in the streets over, in essence, whether the concepts of nation and race were useful or pernicious.

As an unabashed nationalist, Peron was clearly a Fascist.  It is a sign of the lack of clarity of thought on the Left that they can praise him and still claim to hate Fascism.  Again, if they had retained the capacity to think, they would not be Leftists.

The New Deal was a Fascist project, and I don’t think it is too early to call Obama–clearly and FDR admirer–a Fascist as well.  His project is that of Peron, and other than accepting the label Fascist, I think he would be proud to claim that legacy.

I would expect further efforts at press intimidation and curtailment of free speech in his second term.  Thank God the Constitution makes it more challenging for him.

Here is an idea: gather and use donations to put up billboards in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the next month or two saying: “You voted for Barack Obama and Democrats.  If things are not better in four years, why not try the Republicans?”  Something like that.  The phrasing can be improved. 

But I was reading today about Philadelphia, which is a shit hole, or used to be, and seeing how Obama got close to 100% turnout in many black precincts.  All the community leaders were warning about how Romney just wasn’t good for “the working man”.

Surely to God, though, if words mean anything, if the plight of the working man in these neighborhoods continues to decline over the next four years–which is a virtual certainty, even if Obama pursues his war on the suburbs–that Republicans can begin canvassing these neighborhoods VERY early in the election process, six months or a year from the election, or tomorrow, and asking basic questions, like Malcolm X asked. 

You are giving your vote to these people, and have for a very long time.  What are you getting for it beyond free phones, crappy housing, and the ability to buy crappy food at a discount?  Do you not want better?

And maybe they don’t want better.  If so, when things crash, they will lose what they have now, and have no chance at better.  That is the reality, whether they want to hear it or not.

But my take is to ask this basic question: why not tell the truth aggressively?  Why not ask people who have always voted Democrat what they think they have gotten out of it.  Most all of them have never been exposed to Republicans, since the Democrat propaganda machine has made them seem the root of all evil even though it was founded as a party to end slavery–over the STRONG opposition of the Democrats–I think there may have even been a war–and Democrats were the party of Jim Crow, and opposition to Civil Rights legislation.  Their only claim to fame is coming up with the great idea of buying votes by permanently making people dependent on them.  That is not something anyone should actually be proud of.

I like to talk from time to time about self pity as qualitative pain and physical and emotional pain as quantitative.  Physical and emotional pain consists in nerve impulses, not thoughts about those nerve impulses, or worse yet, thoughts that CAUSE nerve impulses.

Today I got to wondering if it is coherent to speak of cognitive pain, of confusion, of not knowing what to do.  In practice, of course, mental confusion is manifested emotionally through anxiety and fear.  But formally speaking, can one call it pain?  Self evidently, one must first define pain to answer this question.

[Much sloppy thinking is enabled almost entirely by the sloppy use of words.  If one insisted, for example, on coherent and consistent definitions of “justice” and “fair” from leftists, their supposed philosophy–really a rhetorical habit–would be exposed for the muddled idiocy it is.  But that is another discussion, one done well by Orwell and others].

Here is my proposed definition: “any disruption in what appears otherwise to be a desirable equilibrium.”

Your body, for example, is in equilibrium, UNTIL you stub your toe.  That creates nerve impulses which you process as pain, and which in normal circumstances you would seek to avoid.

Emotions are more interesting.  We ASSUME that our normal lives are relatively desirable, and feel pain, per se, only when something we wanted disappears: for example when we lose a job or loved one or a major election.  But even before such things happen, we know intuitively that they are POSSIBLE, and that we must therefore include within our selves some sort of defense against them.  We are not fully open.  Very, very, very few people are fully open, in the way children are, and in the way Christ taught us to be.  You’ve been stung once: why could it not happen again?

So, in contemplating this, it occured to me that the goal is to be in equilibrium in as many possible circumstances as possible.  This means that it is much, much harder to cause us pain, and thus much easier to do without substantial defenses.

Early Buddhists took vows of poverty, lived as itinerant beggars, and only ate from roughly 4am until noon every day, fasting the other 16 or so hours.  What could they lose?  That is as limitless a life as one can imagine, if we understand the fear of loss as a limit.

In some respects, it is ridiculous that I allowed myself to get upset about the election.  It is what it is.  Why am I attached to things beyond my control?  It is stupid.

Press on, of course.  As I think about it, when you put your foot on a road that disappears in the distance, is it necessary to know if it leads to success or failure?  To my mind, there is personal integrity, and self deception.  There is a spirit of building, and a spirit of either allowing or causing destruction. 

All evil starts with a lie.  The Hindus have ample room for the demonic, but at root they call what might be termed “the spirit of darkness” Avidya, which literally translates as “not-knowing”. 

I think we all have within us MUCH more knowledge than we ever consciously activate, and much of it we suppress because acknowledging it would mean recognizing and acting on the responsibilities that go with it.

Last night I was dreaming about a vampire–Edward, from what I was momentarily tempted to call the Apocalypse series, but recall is the “Twilight” series (do you not see, though, that there are cultural twilights, too? Goetterdaemmerungen?)–who was very angry.  He was telling Bella that the baby would need to eat blood soon.  They were walking out, and I could tell he was up to no good.  His head became encased in concrete, making him a literal “block” head.

His plan was to crash an airplane into a crowd.  I was able to stop him.  I can fly, too.  The plane was careening downwards, the people were screaming, and then it pulled back up.  I talked him out of it.

Now, always these sorts of dreams have multiple levels. On the personal level, obviously I personally am feeling anger, and a desire to strike out.  This is an infantile level you can’t really prevent from voicing its concerns, but which you can control both by acknowledging it, and by refusing to give in to it, as I did in the dream.

But I think often what we dream is BOTH personal and transpersonal.  Parts of what is out there cause a sympathetic resonance in us.  We react to what we feel.  We are integrated into the universe in ways that are not readily obvious.

In this case, what I was feeling was an anger, an irrational, striking out anger, that is symptomatic of a darkness in our nation.  As I have said often, look at the books our teenagers are reading.  Parents are just glad, now, that their kids reading, but they are reading about vampires and werewolves, and graphic violence that would shock you if you knew about it. 

As just one example, a book was assigned to junior high school participants in our local book bee that had some of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales in it, and in which the author talked constantly about how “awesome” the most horrific acts of brutality were, such as a father cutting the heads off of his children and pouring the blood on a statue to bring a servant back; and a ghoulish man who in the presence of a child pulled the soul of a young girl out of her throat–to be put in a cage to die–and who then chops her body into pieces to be thrown in a pot and eaten.  She has a ring on a finger he can’t get off, so he chops the finger off, throws it away, and it lands in young Gretchen’s lap.  Hilarious. 

What happened on Tuesday is not that Obama won.  It was that the American people chose to lose.

They chose to crash the plane.  They decided they couldn’t handle the stress of life, that they were perceptually unable to see a way forward that incorporated current hard choices.  So in large masses they threw their children under the bus.

I was listening to Terry Gross, I think is her name (I can’t take NPR in other than small doses, and then only when they are interviewing conservatives so they can pretend that what they are producing as “news” is consistent with journalistic integrity, which of course it isn’t) interview Matt Kibbe.  He was talking about how we can’t afford the so-called “entitlements” (I need to come up with another word) we have NOW.  We are borrowing a trillion dollars a year NOW, with no added costs, and how Obamacare just piles on top of those in a completely reckless and irresponsible way, so we need to repeal it.

Her response was incredulity.  You lost the Senate, and you lost the Presidency.  How do you think you can repeal Obamacare now?  She did not even ATTEMPT to rebut his claim.  It can’t be rebutted.  It is categorically, necessarily true.  The numbers are not even remotely ambiguous. 

The whole project is one of wishful thinking and willed ignorance, combined with a HATRED of anyone who says differently.  It is a living death.  Hence the vampire metaphor.

But here is the thing.  You can set a plane to crash, but until it does, you can pull out. 

And my FEELING, inexplicably, is that in some way something good also won on Tuesday.  I think what happened was that the American people were forced to go on record on this cultural divide.  They were forced to choose, because the choice was clear.  Romney and Ryan–whatever their political flaws and merits–are two sober, serious, intelligent, well meaning people.  Obama is an unintelligent functional psychopath, and Joe Biden is in my view a LITERAL sociopath.  This is what America chose.  This is who they said they wanted to be (and don’t tell me on some unconscious level they didn’t know this, most of them).

Now they will get to see reflected, in actual events, who they have chosen to be.  They have chosen to be gray.  They have chosen to continue to see storefronts boarded up.  They have chosen more paperwork.  They chosen to continue high levels of unemployment.  They have chosen higher energy costs.

Once you accept that you need to make a decision between two camps, even if you chose one side, you can always choose the other.

People are hungry for a means of sharing their pain, of sharing their wisdom, and of connecting with one another.  Obama’s death cult is a means of doing that, but only at the cost of your life.  You deal with your pain by surrendering it to others.  You become deaf and numb to your own needs.

You have to have a path forward.  Even Fundamentalists are moving forward to a past that in most cases never existed.  They are creating something new and calling it something old.  That is how these things work.  In an organic, self organizing system you can never recreate the climate of another time and place, and people.

Goodness Movement.com is my reaction to having seen this truth some years ago.  It is not a cult: quite the contrary.  Its intent is to distribute meaning as broadly as possible by facilitating its self emergence among countless individuals, who can share and synergize.  As I have said, my eventual goal is to build what amounts to a “church”, but one which runs itself, which has no liturgy (necessarily: I am not opposed to locally developed rituals), and no absolute creeds other than my three core principles:

1) Never feel sorry for yourself, even, to any extent.  It is ALWAYS and without exception damaging.  Feeling pain is acceptable, and in fact desirable.  The two are very different, though.

2) Never quit.  This may simply consist in not killing yourself, or in finishing a long march.  Whatever it is, keep moving.

3) Learn every day.  Use both abstraction and concrete observation, and travel between them often.  Travel between your mind and senses.  Pay attention.  Be amazed.  React.  Build.

As I argue in my initial essay on Goodness, these three principles, if practiced sincerely, cannot in my view but lead to desirable–and exciting, unpredictable–outcomes.

I’m likely rambling.  Writing is how I process (and the reasons why this is so I’ve only figured out in the last week or two), but I will finish with a few quotes that have done me good.

“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal.  It is courage that matters.”  Churchill

“Success is going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm”.  Churchil.

And of course, from the last fiscal conservative in the White House, Calvin Coolidge (ironically from Vermont, which was once a bastion of conservatism, and which–who knows?–may one day be again):

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race