Month: February 2014

The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes.

I’m going to let you figure this one out. It has meaning on multiple levels, including the obvious smartass one.

I think it would be interesting to creat a “mirror” which deducted by computer the person looking in to it.

My intent would not be to suggest that person does not exist, but rather that the world is a much more interesting place when we don’t make ourselves the centerpiece.

Additional ideas: highly interesting or even interactive background behind the viewer, or taking their picture and adding it back in reduced and marginalized, but fully mirroring their motions. I think this is technically possible.

If you are not most happy with your own kind, you have no kind. Ponder that.

The root cultural invention of leftists has been to create a kind, a tribe, which dep
ends entirely on conformity to mutable propaganda. It has no substantive content; it is not trying to accomplish, say, an end to tribalistic violence as rxpressed in actual racism. It is in no sense Liberal. It does not truly appeal to universal principles, like the sanctity of human rights.

The tribe consists precisely in publicly acknowledging you belong. It has no coherent world view, no true catechism, no sense of the sacred, no sense of duty, which does not come from conformity to the tribes mutable organizing manias, hates, and avarices.

Where could he go?  Clearly, he was using drugs to kill some pain perhaps even he was not able to diagnose–hell, that he was LIKELY unable to understand, to fathom, to come to grips with.  It’s out there somewhere, but you don’t know where, you can’t figure out how or even where it is hurting you, but you hurt all the same.

Does he go back to rehab?  What do they tell him?  One day at a time, think of everyone you are hurting, we’re here for you.  But he hurts NOW, and none of this reduces that.

He had something on the order of 50 bags in his apartment, and 20 used needles.  He was on a massive pain killing binge.

My dream is to create places where one day people like him have somewhere to go–in the middle of a figurative or literal night, in the middle of a figurative or literal hailstorm–and where they can get actually effective help.  This has to do with worldview (hope relies in part upon structures you believe in which do not contradict any facts you know), with people possessing emotional empathy, and with therapeutic techniques that actually WORK. 

He was a bright guy, and no doubt decided no shrink was going to help him, and that if he gave up drugs he would lose his best and only true friend.  Small wonder his friend killed him.

Read this piece from Russell Brand and thought it interesting.

We all exist in an ocean of energies, of waves flowing through us at different frequencies.  This is certainly literally true (contemplate how many radio waves are floating in front of your eyes at this moment; or neutrinos passing through the earth; or Earth’s magnetic field encompassing you; or “gravity”, whatever the hell that really is), but there are cultural waves too.

Most of the hard core drugs addictions, like heroin, are happening in industrially advanced nations.  So, at any rate, it seems to me.  Can we not postulate that in the process of putting 1,000 channels on the TV, far too many of us have found ourselves on a frequency of one?  Can we not speculate that Russell Brand at least WAS on a frequency of one when he was doing drugs, that they made all the other frequencies appear in a rainbow before he drifted off?

In my considered view, the success of 12 step programs lie in two principle perceptual movements their system facilitates.  First: you are not alone.  There are a lot of people out there JUST LIKE YOU.  As the Police sang, there are a hundred billion bottles. And it is not just addiction you share with them, although that plainly int itself creates a bond that cannot be shared with all.  It is in some respects a view of life, that life as we have to live it is broken somehow.  It is bad enough that it is broken, but worse that we have to lie about it, to ourselves and others.

And then there is the idea that you can’t do it yourself.  You have to collapse, disappear, qualitatively reorganize based on the idea of a simultaneous destruction of your self destructive self, and your reconstruction as someone now living within a web of meaning and support that goes beyond the mere human.  You can rest without drugs or alcohol.

To this I would finally add that culturally we need insanity to be sane.  We need periodic breaks from deadlines and coffee breaks, and relentless greed and striving; and I don’t just mean vacations.  My own experience is that vacations, once you sort out the logistics and spend your money, are not always that recuperative, and in this country at least, the one week vacations we get stuck with really don’t do more than titillate us.  Still, I think Germans and other Europeans with much more generous breaks find many of the same problems.

No, I mean some version of dancing around the tribal campfire and letting spontaneous elements of yourself come out in a setting where you feel welcome, among friends.  This is what the hippies tried to contribute, but their failing was that what they effectively proposed was dichotomous: you were either one of them, or a suit.

Plainly, plenty of suits smoke pot and go to Dead shows.  This is not what I mean.  What I mean is that their proposals never stood any real chance of getting integrated into mainstream culture, and not just because of social conservatism, but also because of the countless casualties of that lifestyle.  Many, many people went mad.  Many more became relentlessly self absorbed and narcissistic, talking about Love, but really in love with the idea of themselves talking about love.

[pretend there is a segue here]

These problems have solutions.  I cannot emphasize this enough.

I will add, actually, one of my favorite lines from any movie, from “Battle: Los Angeles”: “Marines don’t quit.”  Simple.  Nothing fancy.  But there is a profound spiritual depth in persistence, in my view.

We must persist.  We must assume that good will see its day, will win the final victory, that happiness and general prosperity can be achieved.   Or we die trying.  These are the choices for those with eyes that see and hearts which see.

How often does this really mean “Can I tell you what I need you to hear?” or “Can I tell you what I want you to hear?”

We all have internal dialogues, and one regrettable element of my own is that this phrase pops in my head constantly.  Growing up, it was always followed by lies of varying shades. Truth and love are both words to which I am borderline phobic.

I will add a semi-related, but not really, point: if a psychotic tells you that the bathroom is the third door on the right, and they are correct, this is useful information.

When you dig into psychology, there are all sorts of trick mirrors and trap doors.  You are projecting.  You are indulging your infantile self in fantasy gratification, or whatever.

One can easily psychologize, as one example, people like Alex Jones, who see Illuminati everywhere, who think that a cabal of several hundred super-rich, super-powerful people is plotting regularly at the Bilderberg conferences to institute a global government, and abolish democracy and human rights.  You can break him down.  You can say that he is suffering from some psychopathology or the other.

But at the end of the day REALITY still exists.  Truth statements can still be made which can be validated or falsified. And if he is right, EVEN IF he is crazy, he is still right, correct?  Third door on the right?

For many years of my youth I eschewed psychology for this exact reason: it can make lunatics of the sane, and treat the insane as wise elders.

This video is excellent, and true: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwiaW-N7qWg

I would encourage you to share it, particularly with any folks you may know in the areas being described.

This is the wavelength people of genuine goodwill need to be focusing on.  We need to confront vigorously and without shame or hesitation the lies awful people have been telling for half a century about their true intentions.

No one who genuinely cares tolerates this level of failure, decade after decade, without realizing that what they are doing is not working.  No one is that stupid.  No one.

From this, one MUST infer that the people pushing these policies DON’T CARE.  Yes, they may be hypnotized automatons, drunk on their own rhetoric and narcissism, but no one can lie in their hearts as to who they are.  They can simply cover it up by directing hatred outwards.

It is precisely the knowledge of their horrific and ubiquitous failures that drives the invective against true Liberals, which is to say, in this country, political conservatives.

I took a career profile someone posted on Facebook, and came up with “humanitarian”.  I accept this.  This is what I am trying to be, with qualifications.

When people hear that word, they think someone trying to provide water to people, or to heal or comfort the sick and dislocated.

In my case, though, I think structurally: what IDEAS are floating around that are CAUSING mass suffering?  I look not just to objective poverty and deprivation, but to CULTURAL poverty and deprivation.

Are the Tibetans suffering more from poverty, or from the sustained Chinese assault on everything they value and love?  They were poor before, and I suspect most of them would go back in a HEARTBEAT to the status quo before the Chinese came, even though that would mean many of them living in cold places in yurts (or whatever they call them.)

What are the pervasive American maladies?  I would say sanctimonious indifference to preventable suffering in our midst, materialism fed by a lack of a good alternative, and a complete abandonment of sensitivity to spiritual crisis and growth.  We want to be clocks.  We aspire to be gears in vast machines.  Some gears are bigger and shinier, but qualitatively the same.

This is my principle enemy.  This is the principal problem we face.  We have good tools for economic development: property rights, free markets, and political freedom.  These have always worked and always will work.  Why are they not generalized the world over?  Bad ideas. Horrible ideas, and, again, a sanctimonious indifference to outcome, which is to say preventable human suffering.  It took both the Chinese and the Indians over half a century of mass starvation to adopt free markets, and they have advanced more in 20 years than the previous 1,000.

I am a Humanitarian.  This is why I get pissed so often.  I hate stupidity, and hate it even more when it works to inflict pain on innocents.  As some meme I saw put it, keep in mind that one option for those who aspire to be Christlike is pulling out a bullwhip and running the bastards out of town.

I saw they debated, read a couple highlights, see no need to watch it.

Here is the deal: if you are debating a leftist and you are not dragging them around by their hair with their own words until they cry uncle, your strategy sucks.  You don’t truly understand the difference between true Liberalism and the evils these people embrace daily.

Let us take as an example the so-called Native Americans (who came from Asia, almost certainly).  When the British colonists got here and set up camp, there were likely about 6 million in what became the United States.  Some we killed, many we put into concentration camps that we called reservations.

Here is the question one needs to ask Ayers: is it WRONG to commit mass murder?  Is this a bad thing?  For all people, or just some people?  Is it wrong to take people from their land and forcibly relocate them? If so, why?  Universal human rights?  Does he believe in these?

What the fuck do you think the North Vietnamese did when they won their war of aggression on the South?  Mass murder, mass relocation, destruction of families and traditional ways of living.  It seems likely that far more South Vietnamese died as a direct result of Communist atrocities just in that one conflict than Indians killed directly or indirectly by American force in the century of our expansion.

In the Trail of Tears somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 Indians died.  We all know about the Trail of Tears.  Well guess what?  Some 3,000 Vietnamese (you know the brown people that all look the same to left wingers) were EXECUTED in Hue ALONE just during the 1968 Tet Offensive (which failed so badly).  They were murdered and their bodies hidden, all at the order of TOP Communist officials.

You want atrocity?  Look at what was done by the people Ayers SUPPORTED, whose victory he did everything in his power to help secure.

Let me requote some dialogue–perfectly historically accurate dialogue (I will note that we now also have the testimonies of soldiers from the North; there is no doubt about what happened, at all, period), from the movie “The Green Berets”:

Miss Sutton: Yes, I guess horrible things happen in war, but that doesn’t mean they need us or
even want us.

Doc: I’ll try to answer that question for you. Let me put it in terms we all can understand. If this
same thing happened here in the United States, every mayor in every city would be murdered;
every teacher that you’ve ever known would be tortured and killed; every professor you ever
heard of, every governor, every Senator, every member of the House of Representative and their combined families: all would be tortured and killed, and a like number kidnapped. But in spite of this, there’s always some little fellow out there willing to stand up and take the place of those who have been decimated. They need us, Miss Sutton, and they want us.

Gladys Cooper: Sergeant, I’m Gladys Cooper, a housewife. It’s strange that we’ve never read of this in the newspapers.

Sgt. Muldoon: Well, that’s newspapers for you, ma’am. You could fill volumes with what you
don’t read in them.”

Read here for a very partial listing of NVA terror attacks, starting on Page 8. The terror goes all the way back to the very early days, when Ho Chi Minh was assassinating his rivals.  Diem’s brother was buried alive.

Bill Ayers is a pompous prick.  This was the reality in 1968, and things got worse, before a combination of American skill at arms, and South Vietnamese resolution not to let their nation fall to these sadistic savages enabled a general pacification of the South.  Students of history will recall it was North Vietnamese tanks, not an indigenous uprising, that signaled the fall of Saigon.

None of this is in question historically.  There is no doubt.  I repeat, we have detailed memoirs from North Vietnamese commanders, many of whom have been interviewed. 

Or, to look at the United States, would it have been wrong, given a Communist victory in the United States of the sort Ayers and his fellow sociopaths worked in their incoherent, intellectual and ineffectual way to facilitate (before they realized they needed an Obama), to murder 10 million Americans (to be clear, a number almost certainly larger than the entire population of Indians in the continental United States, most of whom we relocated, and did not kill), which is what a reliable informant claimed was the goal of the Weatherman?  This question still applies if Ayers claims–and if his lips are moving, he is telling some shade of lie–that Larry Grathwohl was lying.  Mass murder of alleged elites, of bourgeoisie and capitalists, is a prominent and ubiquitous feature of Communist coups.  What, if any, moral objection would Ayers have had then if one of those around him raised the question?

Or take voting.  Is it bad to disenfranchise people?  Is it morally wrong to exclude by law some people from the voting process?  If so, why? 

Is it then also wrong that people cannot vote AT ALL, with or without ID, in North Korea, and China, and Cuba?  What about Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in charge?  What about the pervasive voting fraud under Hugo Chavez? 

Is war wrong?  Was it wrong still when China invaded Tibet, or North Vietnam South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos?  Was it wrong when North Korea invaded South Korea?  Were any of the wars of Communist aggression in Africa wrong, or are mass famine and death perfectly acceptable if one uses an acceptable rhetoric?  In general, are some wars OK and some not?

And if he wants to claim a double standard–it is wrong when we do it, and OK when someone else does it–is he not invoking tribalistic ethics, and if he wants to do that, by what means can he claim that what OUR tribe values is wrong?  All that has to happen is that most of us believe in it, then it becomes, by his process of logic, morally acceptable.  By that logic, every American imperial conquest has been perfectly moral.  By HIS LOGIC, nothing we have done that most of us believed in was wrong.

Basic moral reasoning is not complicated.  Yes, leftists confuse everyone because that is what they do, by going on offense and asking people to justify things which cannot be justified, but who themselves overlook and even endorse MUCH WORSE at the SAME TIME they are criticizing.

Fuck this.  Go on the offense.  Alinsky said “make them adhere to their own standards.”  This works both ways, and frankly much BETTER when WE are attacking THEM.  Go for the balls.  Go for the throat.  Show no mercy, rhetorically, because they sure as fuck will not show us any mercy.  On the contrary: they have been getting away with LITERAL atrocities–rape, torture, murder, political repression–for a century or more, and all of them explained away with verbiage no fool should tolerate for a second.

Look at our inner cities: people like Bill Ayers created them.  Look at the sad faces on every corner in Cuba: this is what Bill Ayers wants.

He wants death.  He wants pain.  He wants poverty.  Make him admit this.