Month: October 2013

Anybody remember 4 years ago when the passage of Obamacare was “urgent”, a “crisis”, that we had to something, anything to remedy the “situation” (which of course was never properly defined, making an intelligent solution within that world impossible)?

Now I am reading that the exchanges make you put your information in before quoting you anything, are offering up exorbitant, even extortionate pricing, then offering the unfortunate souls dumb or desperate enough to trust Obama the choice of paying that pricing, or facing a hefty fine for not paying it, which will be collected by the IRS with all the powers it has to collect any other tax, which include wage garnishment, involuntary bank withdrawals, and the seizure of property.

Many businesses are flat out saying they want out of providing health insurance as a benefit, and will be forcing people onto these exchanges, which will no doubt work out to net disposable income decreases.  This in turn will lead to drops in consumer spending outside the insurance arena, and negative economic outcomes.  And all of this money is wasted.  People are either being cheated (there is no doubt a lot of government pork in these numbers, too: somebody has to pay the salaries and benefit packages of the bureaucrats administering this plan, and unlike in a free market, there is no cost for failure) or buying what I have called “prepaid insurance”, not true insurance.  My short, ten paragraph treatment of this topic is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

While we’re at it, does anyone remember that the “Stimulus” was also “urgent”, that if we didn’t pass it we would have unemployment rates pretty much like we have now?  I do.

Let me remind folks of Alberto Gonzalez, too.  We were told he did an awful thing to cover up some sort of crime they were sure would be outed soon enough.  That was a number of years ago.  Hillary is making noise about fulfilling her narcissistic fantasy of standing on a podium, convinced that the nation loves her.  She was one of the most vocal critics calling for Gonzalez’s resignation.  Since he was the first Hispanic Attorney General, the normal rules would have been to protect him at all costs, like Obama has been protecting Eric Holder from what in my view should be “accomplice to murder” charges.  But Bush was the President, and anything they could do to weaken his public image was fair game.  They play to win elections; they don’t play to improve the lives of anyone. Destroying people is just part of the system.  Hillary was an acolyte of Saul Alinsky, too.  If I’m not mistaken, I think she actually met him.

An essential assumption of propaganda is that people forget everything the media is not presently talking about.  This means, as one example, that both the North Koreans and the Boston bombing have disappeared.  I remain unconvinced that we actually know who all the actors were, and I suspect at least a handful of people got away, probably including Obama’s Saudi buddy who only a few months later was a guest at the White House. Benghazi is only still out there because people are working hard to keep it out there.

The very abundance of news, the constant news feeds, the 24/7 coverage actually makes it much EASIER, not harder, to suppress stories.  I will reiterate that is why you need to periodically check in with alleged cranks like Alex Jones to see what he has dug up that is being ignored or forgotten.

I suspect I have some readers who are mainly political and roll their eyes at the confessional posts, and others who have to quickly scroll over my political stuff.  So be it.  I am a complex person, with a prodigious number of threads running through my mind at all times. I  feel strongly it makes me a better thinker.

Be that as it may. . .

First off, the government is not shut down.  Most of it, in my understanding, is still running.  Edit: the number I am seeing is that 87% of the government is still running, and still getting paid.  Obama is clearly, beyond any possible doubt, doing what he can to increase the pain associated with the 13% of government that actually is furloughed–as in shutting open air national monuments–but the reality is that the wheels of government are still churning through AT LEAST $100 billion a MONTH.  It would be easier to know the exact number if Harry Reid would do his CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY and pass a budget, but that would be too embarrassing, so he won’t do it.  And that, to be clear, is the reason that the House has to keep passing these Continuing Resolutions every few months, and has since Obama took office.

Second, and this is the most interesting point I want to make, at least to me, is that this standoff is forcing Democrats in one of two ways: the headless ones have no choice but to unleash hatred and venom at the Republicans, because the alternative would be to think of us as human beings just like them, who care for the poor, the country, their own families, and who simply have a policy disagreement, and are not evil human beings.

Thus they have to choose between reclaiming their humanity and granting that people can disagree with them without being monsters; and putting on public display the full extent of their posthumanistic viciousness, as Harry Reid did in not even understanding why it would be wrong to callously say he didn’t care about a kid dying of cancer, because after all OBAMACARE itself was at stake.  You know, everything important.

It’s interesting to note, too, how they keep calling this awful law “healthcare”, or the “healthcare law”.  It is nothing of the sort.  Our hospitals, doctors offices, and other health provision services continue to operate just fine, and will if Obamacare disappears tomorrow.  In fact, the only net effect Obamacare will have will be to make the actual provision of healthCARE, as opposed to insurance, less efficient and/or more costly.  Rationing is very likely, because they will likely put price controls in place.

At the moment, though, only healthcare being denied is at the National Institute of Health, which Harry  Reid refuses to fund for purely partisan purposes.

When I said Fidel Castro did not care that children for whom he is ultimately responsible were being treated with expired aspirin, I was being quite literal.  Harry Reid has shown himself, clearly, to be cut from the same moral cloth.  This is Cultural Sadeism, which is the elimination of principle based behavior.  You do things not because they are right, but because they win you power.  Justice, or human rights, or alleviating poverty: these are all rhetorical ploys.  They don’t want to help people.  If they did, they would feel BAD when they failed, and plainly they don’t.  How many Detroit Democrats feel bad about their long term failure, about running the most prosperous city in the world into the ground?  None, I suspect, not really.

In any event, as the Democrats get increasingly flustered as Obamacare fails in practice, and as the public increasingly blames Obama for not even TRYING to negotiate, their inner ugliness will get harder and harder to hide.

I said a week or so ago that I though the shutdown was a bad thing.  I don’t think it is, IF the House Republicans continue to pass resolutions funding military families and other people who are directly hurt. If the Democrats continue blocking them, they can only rationalize that for so long before people start getting really pissed at them.

Yes, of course Obama and the left wing own most of the complicit media, but in my own observation if you read the actual comments people leave on articles posted on websites where people of both political persuasions go, like Yahoo, there is a groundswell both of knowledge and anger at the direction our country is headed that is stronger than anything I have seen in my lifetime.

Obamacare is a fundamentally flawed law.  It will wreck things that are working, cost a fortune, and help very, very few people.  It was passed on a strictly partisan basis, using parliamentary chicanery, and rushed through so fast the people who voted on it did not know what was in it.  Given all this, asking that it be given a second look and modified to at least be less bad is not an unreasonable request.

Bill Clinton would have cut a deal with Republicans years ago, and is likely reminding Obama even now that he himself got to Yale on his own merits, and he had better listen to him.  Clinton may or may not be advising a deal, but he is too good a politician not to see the risks of not even attempting to APPEAR interested in a compromise, or even bipartisan dialogue Obama, for his part, likely does not even see his arrogance for what it is.

Why do we assume Obama can’t compromise, can’t rewrite at least some parts of the law?  Because he never has.  He has never compromised on anything that I can recall.  Not once.  He is hyperpartisan, and the results of that, unsurprisingly, have been hyperpartisanship.  What else can you do when the other side ignores you but knock them on the head with any means at your disposal?  Power only responds to power, and the House is using the one club short of impeachment that it has.

 

I am certainly not the first, second, for 51st to say this, but dance is a useful metaphor for life, for thinking, for working, for feeling.  I have bought the Kum Nye Dance book, and am curious to see in what ways it builds on the “normal” Kum Nye.

I keep an open mind about Astrology.  There seems to be something to the Natal Chart (obviously, ignore the newspapers, except the one in the Onion, which is occasionally funny when he isn’t too nasty), although of course I have no idea how it would work.  If it is true that our consciousnesses create the universe, there is no reason to suppose that there are not some arcane and mysterious currents running deep below the flow of the things we have measured.

The point I wanted to make, though, is that I’m vaguely proud of my chart, which has some unusual elements in it.  Frankly, I’ve been thinking I’m pretty special.  Then it occurred to me that if there were 370,000 people being born a day back then, there are that number of people who have my EXACT chart, virtually everything. I’m not so special after all.  This made me laugh a bit, and was a useful and needed thought.

There is a necessary dance between vanity and self confidence, between submissiveness and humility, between realism, and useful grandiosity.  All of them mix together.  I haven’t quite opposed them right, because there are many possible continiums to draw. Sometimes if you are ridiculously proud, you are full of it.  Sometimes even though your aim is high, your understandings of your own capacity are accurate.

All of us are prone to self delusion and illusion.  I picture stupidity as this mangy, Cupid knockoff flying around on one wing, and shooting us as often as we give him chances to.

Another metaphor I know I have posted somewhere is that stupidity is like the barbell in the bench press.  We have to keep constant pressure on it to keep it from crushing us.

I started taking the Paleo Diet seriously about two weeks ago, and it seems to be helping.  What sort of forced my hand was a terrible bout of allergies.  The claim made by Paleo advocates, which appears to have had merit, is that allergies, which are a type of autoimmune disorder in my understanding, are the result of a preexisting substrate of inflammation caused by low grade food allergies.  In Celiac Disorder, for example, people are CLEARLY, immediately, reacting to wheat. 

But the claim is made that in most all other people, even those exhibiting no symptoms, there are underlying physiological traumas happening which are necessary but not sufficient for a host of diseases, up to and including cancer and heart disease.  I don’t see anyone claiming you will live forever if you abstain from grains, but they certainly predict a much longer life.

I got to thinking that psychological trauma is like that, too.  It exists in the darkness, in the background, but creates the necessary substrate for cognitive and emotional disorders.  You can have a lot of trauma and be relatively unaffected, just as many people have Big Mac’s regularly across long lives without any apparent negative effects.  But you are primed for it.  Given new challenges, the stage is set for dysfunctional reactions.

And further, you are not abundantly HEALTHY.  You are less than you could be.

The thing is, EVERYONE has traumas in their lives.  Everyone.  At a minimum the birth is traumatic, even for C Sections.  You are now in the cold place where you have to breathe and eat.

The task in life is to develop the capacity for emotional digestion.

Everybody wants to be around people who make them feel better.  Even misanthropes and hermits–people I can relate to–want connection; they just fear, based on experience, that people will make them feel worse, which is why solitude is preferred.

Here is my question: are you a fulfilling person?  If you want to be fulfilled, if you want satisfaction, and you are not BRINGING it, then how are you anything but a thief if you are taking it?

I think many people do fall in [a mutually reinforcing narcissism], then  fall out of a [mutually reinforcing narcissism].  Some sing songs about it.  But that is not love.

How can you improve what you bring to the table?  How can you become overflowing with gifts?  If you want satisfaction with others, this is a good, perhaps primary question to ask.

If you have no answers, I will suggest starting the eKumNye program.  Or do a Holotropic Breathwork workshop.  Those are what have worked for me.

Here is what has not worked: Progressive and Autogenic Relaxation (although as I undo emotional knots I am going revisit particularly the Autogenics, which I feel had a great deal of therapeutic potential; I just have not been able to relax enough to get results); yoga; self hypnosis; NLP; Feldenkrais (which has a great deal of merit, I think, but does not strike at the emotional root of things); pilates; martial arts (Ninpo Taijutsu); various workout regimens; self help books; psychotherapy; time in nature; drinking; pot; sex; other forms of meditation, including Zazen and mantra meditation and probably other things I am forgetting.

Nothing helped me as much as Kum Nye and Holotropic Breathwork, both of which started with the insight that you have go through the emotions, to process the emotions of your trauma.  Talking about it does something between nothing and make it worse by making it permanent.  To process, though, you have to have a method.  These are methods.

I agree with the fundamental principle Zig Ziglar articulated, that we are all “born for success”.  Why, then, do so many of us live lives that are far less than we are capable of?  It is not a lack of time, or in general a lack of opportunity, or even the ability to SEE that opportunity.  It is a lack of patient, daily, goal directed, coherent, organized behavior.

This morning, awakening from a night on the town, I stepped back from a cycle I now see in myself.  What I realized is that if you terrorize a child ONCE in a beating it does not have the emotional maturity to understand, that child will internalize that beating and make it a part of a recurring cycle.  It will cycle between the bad and the good.  It will “beat itself up” both in obvious ways like excessive self criticism, and relationships that are in part masochistic and unfulfilling, but also in more subtle ways through lowered expectations from life globally, generally.

You can’t live in that place where you were crushed forever, so you leave it, and have moments of relative happiness, but since the original pain was unexpected, and you don’t know on an unconscious level what to expect from the future, you feel a sense of acute anxiety if the next beating is too far in the future, so you bring it on yourself.  You self sabotage, you learn to live in feelings of lowered excitement, you compromise.

And in my own life, I now see for the first time, I have cycled between the beatings and the emotionally dominant atmosphere, which was low level anxiety and emotional detachment.  If you compare to the beating, it is relatively more pleasant, so you feel you like you doing yourself a favor in leaving that place.  You can create, through cycles like this, the feeling that your life, on balance, is in balance, that you are doing well, everything is fine, it’s all good, just a few bad moments here and there.  But you can be miserable because NOWHERE in the cycle is there AUTHENTIC happiness, love, joy, creative engagement.  You don’t have that reference point, so you don’t know you are lacking it. 

And I want to be clear that this has been the norm for human history for almost all people.  Almost everyone who has ever lived has fallen far short of their potential. What is unique about this time is we can shout this truth from the mountaintop without being crucified.

The purposes of life are to learn to love and be loved, and to pursue goals, purposive work.  Our goals are to learn to connect with others, and to connect with creation in a teleological way.  Life has these purposes, but they are sundry and appropriately pursued by all in their own unique and thus beautiful way.  It is the seeking and the finding that makes us unique.

I look around me, and I am not unique in the nature of my emotional scars.  On the contrary: people whose parents genuinely nurtured them to love and be successful are few and far between.  The only thing unique about my past is the extent to which I have engaged with it, found my centers of distress, and walked into them and asked for an explanation, and listened long enough to get it.

I have reached some truly deep places.  This realization is filling me, somatically, with anxiety, but it is the feeling of a poison I long ago learned to accept and ignore slowly leaving my body; a cancer being denuded of nutrition.  The fangs of the snake are being removed.  There will be few, if any, more injections, and I will walk down the road lighter.

I am feeling peace, and wish you the same, friend.

I would like to repropose an old idea, with a modification. To my mind the Germans have proven beyond reasonable that light transmision within the body is biologically important and coherent as a field. Their thesis is that cancerous tumors are parts of the body which have lost contact with this field, and are growing without intelligence. A tumor is “fieldless” organic matter.

We know that when light of certain frequencies is shine on any organic system, it reacts coherently, like it inhaled the light, then exhaled it. This is a principle piece of evidence for the biophoton theory, as dead systems do not react this way. They react just like the unintelligent mattet that ignorant claim we are made of.

Here is my idea: wherever the tumor is, find the frequency at which the healthy tissue responds, and take turns irradiating it, then letting it shine back out, in an analogy to breathing. Over some period of time it should reactivate the light sensors, and bring the diseased tissues back into the system.

Actually, I may have said this exact idea already. My brain gets full sometimes and purges files.

What seems CERTAIN is that no cancer cure  thst is more intelligent than a club and a knife will be forthcoming until scientists are willing to get beyond their dogmstic ignorance.

You cannot choose your emotions, but you can control your actions through the agency of will. Thoughts are actions, to some extent. Certainly you can suppress them, and repeat them.

I would stipulate as a general rule that if your emotions are not serving you, they are hindering you, and that if you are suppressing them you are losing a great deal of your action-potential.

I would stipulate as well that positive thinking only stimulates positive affect where it is already present.

Sartre claimed we could choose emotions, but I think he was emotionally constipated, and lukely a clinical narcissist.

I would argue that a religion is a social system concerned with preserving behavioral norm and beliefs, whereas spirituality is an individuslistic effort oriented around growth. Clearly, thete is overlap.

What got me thinking about this wasvthe Amish. Their child rearing likely does involve breaking the children “for their own good”. You build a peaceful society, but not one in which growth is encouraged. Rather, conformity is required.

Couple analogies:

Religion is to spiritusluty as Statism is to Liberalism.

If Statism is “one size fits all” (the nerd in me must reference “one ring to bind them”) then Capitalism is “what do you want, and how can Ihelp you get it?”

Free markets create countless creative liaisonsss between producers and consumers. That is why they work.