Month: December 2012

This is not as organized intellectually as I would like, but it is well referenced: http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/background/scientificproof/scientificproof1.html

It deals with the evidence for the survival of death.  I think www.victorzammit.com is a better initial resource, but the point I wanted to make here is that it is apparently censored in the formerly Great Britain.  Quite literally, EVIDENCE, scientific EVIDENCE is being suppressed.

I will point out again that the Brit’s do not have a Bill of Rights. Orwell got his idea for memory holes from actual work at the BBC.

The right to keep and bear arms–to secure liberty by force if necessary–is second only to the rights of religion, free speech and assembly in our own Bill of Rights.  That placement is very intentional, in my view.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/congress-unproductive_n_2371387.html

Why in God’s name would you consider passing new laws being
“productive”? I would consider a Congress that passed NO new laws–no,
one which revoked existing laws–to be “productive”. Beyond any
possibility of contradiction, the existence of new laws is, ipso facto, a
curtailment in our liberty.

Of course, if fascism is your aim, then absolutely you have picked the correct system of measurement.

Guns represent power.  When dispersed among the populace, they represent freedom.  A man or woman choosing to carry a gun is doing more than facilitate self defense: they are choosing response-ability; they are choosing to believe that they themselves are best qualified to protect themselves.  They are rejecting the mindset that protection–and everything else–is somehow OUT THERE, somehow someone else’s job.

The concept of the militia was the citizen-soldier, that every able bodied man was potentially a part of the army, potentially someone who would play a role in our national defense.

Freedom is about self organizing systems, about people getting together to solve problems spontaneously, organically, locally.  Guns are an inextricable part of this.

No guns, no freedom.  It really is that simple.

We will not stop future Newtowns by passing draconian regulations.  We might in fact make them more likely.  In my view, the only moral, sane, responsible response is to question why IN HELL we continue to pretend that suicidal mad-men will check their guns at ANY door.  We consistently disarm prospective citizen soldiers, and prevent them from doing their own police work.

The record is clear: 14 killed on average when the “professionals” do the shooting, and 2.5 when civilians do.  One number is larger than the other, and not likely to change.  There were 26 dead in Newtown.  5 revolvers with 6 rounds would have done that.

We need to focus on common sense, CONSTITUTIONAL solutions.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider what to me is the fact that our Secretary of State, one of the most important officials in our government, faked an illness to avoid testifying about the murder of at least one of her employees–four Americans total–murder seemingly watched by many in her organization, and likely including her.

She faked an illness to avoid answering why the two Americans who chose to fight back were denied AVAILABLE air support.

This is execrable, nauseating.  Honor is not a word which means anything to her, or anyone in the current government, as far as I can tell.

I read that the Senate Republicans have said they will not confirm John Kerry until Hillary testifies.  If so, that is a good thing.  We will fail as a nation if we cannot get more people doing their jobs with integrity.

Driving the frozen north last week I was looking out my windshield, pondering the sensation of pleasure.  I have fun watching leaves blow, and clouds move, and the movement of light in the sky, and just about everything.  And it occurred to me that behind EVERYTHING you see there is God.  When you reach out to an object, God is behind it.  When you draw your emotions out in objects, you are already moving towards the worship–the connection with, the recognition of–God.

In Asian traditions Tantrism consists in many specific practices, but what I would submit is that the essential one is sensuality.  It invokes emotion, and connection. It is not an ascetic austerity, devoid of humor and blood, but on the contrary the pursuit of wisdom through sensation, through pleasure.  Perhaps most famously, sexual intercourse is made a ritual act of worship.

Idolotry is what you get when you focus on an object.  What I realized is that the whole point of their practice is to see that we exist in a web–the meaning of the word, as I recall–of connections.  Traditional meditation tends to cut off connections.  It tends to frown on emotional expression.  But I feel that this also curtails all the natural happy energies of life, those that make it enjoyable.  And I can’t see how anyone unable to live happily in this life has in any way warranted heaven.  On the contrary: who can give who is miserable, who is punishing themselves all the time?

My depression, which I’ve had substantially my whole life, seems to be breaking. It is quite extraordinary for me not having to fight every step.  And my thinking seems to be clearing.  I think deep thoughts because they are not any more painful for me than regular ones, which is not the case for most people. On balance, I think this has been a good thing.

It occurs to me though, that my body of thought is emotionally weak.  I have developed a theoretical template for defining and facilitating the growth of Goodness, but I have not articulated a Dharma, which is a Sanskrit word meaning many things, but for this purpose I intend duty, or path; a behavioral gestalt that guides and informs decision making and behavior.

What I would submit we must all do roughly daily is spend some time working to understand our world in a dispassionate way and improve it.  This means working daily to grow emotionally, intellectually, and physically.   Emotionally, particularly.

We need to work daily in building an inner beauty that is contagious. This means surrounding ourselves with beauty, in music (I’m listening to this right now, and it is quite pleasant), in poetry, in visual art.  I think laughing daily is highly helpful, and think most people would benefit from watching at least one good comedy a day.  I just ordered the first season of Frazier.

Ponder deeply what you feel when the energy of generosity flows from you.  Most emotionally healthy people will know what I am talking about.  There is a wind that blows when you are being truly loving.  It is very pleasant.  Feel this energy and work to build it.

And notice all the ugliness around you.  You can’t help the world, the shootings and wars–at least in the near term–but why ADD to it with violence in media and music?  Why allow yourself to be addicted to the worst aspects of life?  If you like excitement and adventure, take up motorcycle racing or mountain climbing.   I have no objections to those.  They are healthy outlets for energy.  But why expose yourself to things that drag you down, even if they are titillating or exciting in the process?

Consider that you can raise your daily emotional state, you can improve it, by changing all the inputs you allow. Your unconscious is geared to process what you feed it, and if you are feeding it junk, it is adjusting your internal qualitative state to match.  It is doing what you tell it to do.

I feel heaven sometimes.  It is very different than here.  But why not exuberate (yes, a neologism) it?  Why not develop the courage to be a center of balance and peace and  positive energy?  Why not use your time here to build what is good and wholesome, and oppose with all your heart what is evil and pernicious:?

It can be done.  It has been done.  It needs to be done again, better.

HuffPo again.  The linked editorial is worth the read.

Fact:: in theory, history, and legal precedent, some form of gun ownership is guaranteed by law.

Fact: this means guns are not going to disappear.

Fact: The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when
the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of
people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by
civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when
it started. (from here: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/)

LOGICAL conclusion: empowering teachers to defend themselves and their
students is the only moral option. Anything else is doing NOTHING
effective to stop shooters. It is merely a sop to hysterics.

In response to the question on how many mass killings with guns there have been in Japan recently.

There were 8 children killed with a knife and some 20 wounded just a year or two ago, in Japan.

And
to the point, Japan was a fascist, totalitarian state for most of its
history.  Non-Samurai were banned under penalty of death from owning
“state of the art” weaponry.

Freedom and guns are inextricably related.  They cannot be separated.

And
in point of fact, there are MANY countries where guns are illegal and
gun crime is common.  Jamaica and Mexico are two obvious examples.  You
can’t get “guns off the street”.  They can be smuggled.  This means only
criminals have them.

The democratization of gun ownership is foundational, elemental to democracy outright.

Only one thing has been shown to stop mass shootings. One thing. Not
two, not three. One thing: that is someone shooting back.

We should not have armed guards at schools, but it is stupid to pretend
that responsible individuals–and these are the people teaching our
kids, so one hopes they are responsible–are incapable of carrying and
protecting handguns.

Gun free zones do not stop criminals. They advertise that no one will be shooting back.

You can pontificate all you want, but if the goal is actually DOING
something, which is a refrain I see over and over, that is the most
OBVIOUS, simple, and cost effective thing to do.

Posted here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/26/frank-luntz-nra_n_2364860.html

I am likely driving my Facebook friends crazy, so I am going to start cross-posting here.  If I take the time to write something, I want to be sure it appears somewhere.  I wrote a five paragraph response to Michael Moore’s (could he be any uglier?) latest piece, but unsurprisingly it did not make it through moderation, despite consisting of nothing but careful and factually based reasoning from basic premises.

I am growing, which is a good thing.  I’ve been slightly off my rocker the last week, perhaps. [although I think worrying excessively about the propriety of what I say would likely be a net negative for me.  It’s better, I think, to screw up then correct it than to not take a position at all.] 

Be that as it may, one thing I have recently started doing is engaging with my breath. I think one could make a case that the primary PHYSICAL reality we all deal with is the fact of our breath.  If you think about it, breath is both conscious AND unconscious.  We can choose to take a deep breath and hold it.  But if we don’t think about it, it happens anyway.

I’ve been reading in a superficial way “The Perceptible Breath”, by Ilse Mittendorf.  Her basic position is that trying to control the breath is useless, but so is ignoring it.  The basic method is simply to let it come, naturally, then let it go, naturally.  No work is needed.

But I find in doing this that all sorts of emotions start coming up.  I would speculate that part of the reason for the effectiveness of Wholotropic Breathwork is that it accesses a root element of our unconscious perceptual reality, which is our breath.  I suspect most all emotional constraints and traumas and everything else is locked up in our breath.

It is a strange thing: to be alive is to breath, which means that to accept life you must accept your breath.  Sometimes, though, I get angry with it, angry with life, impatient, perturbed, untranquil.

We have what I normally call bodily gestalts, which is the result of the peace we have made between the need for motion and constraints on the willingness to move created by fear, and emotional scars.  Moshe Feldenkrais noted many years ago that given perfect calm, all people would “operate” their bodies the same way, but we all know that many people we can recognize simply by how they move.  This gestalt is also, I would submit, a paradigm, a framework from within which you perceive the world, but one which INHERENTLY prohibits certain types of movement.  The emotional “binding”, and the perceptual binding are integrally linked.

As any long time readers I may have well know, I like to dream. I dream of a day in which the normal, standard education provided to all people in the world includes a physical education that teaches them to be aware of emotions, to process emotions, and to grant the world access to them, and all the wonders of experience that will enable.  I visualize ritual centers, and beautiful monuments.  Why not build Rivendell?  Why not emulate the fictional elves in the Lord of the Rings and dedicate ourselves to tranquility, harmony and beauty?