Month: May 2014

If you have not seen the latest X-men, and like narrative surprises, don’t read this post.

We think of Wolverine as possessing the power of physical regeneration, but if you think about it, he also has the power of continuing to exist in existential limbo, in confusion about his identity and place in the world.

In the first movie, he has no memory, and has to deal with this.  In the latest, everyone he “knows” has become a sort of stranger.  He has even become a stranger to himself, in that he cannot remember how his life has been conducted over the last 30 or whatever years.

There is to my mind a mythic power to this.  I have often wondered how I would deal if I woke up somewhere without memory.  If a self is anything, it is habits, and the three habits I would absolutely want would be the rejection of self pity, perseverance (in all the forms it takes), and the capacity for and thirst for learning.

I was talking with a cop tonight who among other things was trained in crowd control.  He said they were trained in large measure by the Feds.  I asked what department, knowing full well what the answer would be: Homeland Security.

Ask yourself: what do these people do?  They don’t have field agents as far as I know, like the FBI.  They don’t have foreign intelligence capabilities like the CIA and DIA.  They are not in the business of snooping, like the NSA.

What do they do?  They are extremely well funded, and of late extremely well armed

Here is one thesis: under Obama at least, their job is the militarization of police departments.  Now, this guy had common sense, and understood that protest is a valid political activity, one protected by the  Constitution.  He resented the anarchists, and having seen these kids first hand myself, I didn’t blame him one bit.  I would hit some of these kids upside their ass myself.

But would it not make sense–within the Leftist mindset–to first create a training capability for crowd suppression, a mindset, and then seed key positions with people capable of relaying effectively lies told for the explicit purpose of manipulating the minds and emotions of otherwise honest cops?

You call someone a genuine racist, or child molester, or domestic terrorist, even if it is a lie, it has a strong chance of eliciting a strong response, a response that you can channel down training patterns you have facilitated.

The other interesting thing he said is that they now have a wave weapon that attacks people inner organs, making them so uncomfortable that they have to disperse.  This one was mounted on an APC, or what I suppose they now call an MRAP, of the sort that the DHS just bought over a 1,000 of.

Stay awake.  Sleep is what the totalitarians want.

Addition: Can you think of a worse potential for abuse than a well-funded bureaucracy with no real mission?  The job of the DHS is to counter threats, and the job of bureaucracies is to expand.  Logically, then the very existence of the DHS depends on manufacturing threats, if they don’t exist.  To do otherwise is to risk becoming smaller, which is unacceptable to all bureaucracies.

We should abolish the DHS.  While we’re at it, take the DEA and ATF with them, and most drug seizure laws.  We can fight drug, alcohol, tobacco and gun (and explose)  related crime through standard law enforcement.

While I’m thinking about it, I wonder if we have tried paying Mexican and other officials on the drug lords payroll more than the drug lords.  It’s hard to see how it would cost more than the drug war, and we could even provide and fund volunteer or mercenary troops.

I don’t have cable, but I will flip around from time to time in hotel rooms.  More than once it has struck me that all the emotion, all the drama, all the violence, all the hurt and anger and fear–is fake.  It is staged.  Cameras are all around the actors, whose world is quite small in comparison with the large studio around them.

The average American spends perhaps 2-3 hours a day watching people who pretend to feel things for a living; people whose real emotions are hidden.

Ponder spending time with people who could convince you you were their best friend while secretly hating you.

Given that what Hollywood produces, in large measure, is strong emotion, ought it not to be a deep place, filled with contemplative and deep springs?

I hung out in a bar on Hollywood Boulevard a few months ago, and it was funny to me how often it came up that some group was superficial.  The people who move here from out of State, but not us locals.  The people who live in LA, but not Orange County.

Could we perhaps posit that many actors become actors precisely because they DON’T feel deep emotions?   That pretending to do so is therapeutic for them, that it fills, temporarily, some gap in them?

What is the fallout of surrounding ourselves with icons whose job is merely to pretend they feel things?  Does it wash through our cultural order and promote insincerity, plastic lives, constant grasping for states they merely pretend to reach?

I mentioned narcissistic empathy as a trait of people who desperately want to be able to think of themselves as concerned human beings, but who are incapable of doing so in the concrete, in the particular, in the only places that truly matter.  Is this perhaps one root of Hollywood’s leftist mindset?  That at root they feel nothing deeply, believe nothing deeply, and so latch onto what is easy, what is made easy by political operators?

Would Annihilationism be a better word?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/

Read this and ponder it.  Ponder the connections between believing nothing, and the need for an omnipotent State.

I would compare black violence here with pervasive sexual violence in Sweden: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/1-in-4-swedish-women-will-be-raped-as-sexual-assaults-increase-500/

If it was white people raping blacks, there would be outrage.  Why?  Rape is wrong.  I think all sane people can agree with that.

But once one enters this never-never land of leftist ideology, nothing is any longer wrong if SOMEONE OBJECTS.  All you have to do to stop a sybaritic leftist is accuse them of insensitivity.  They have no place-holder for justified violence, for self defensive violence, for violence in the name of principle, in the name of decency.  They cannot justify blaming this epidemic on Muslims, and cannot justify asking them to either behave or leave, which is quite obviously within their rights.

And if they fail to do this, they will fail as a Liberal nation.  They will fail as an advanced nation.  They will fall, of their own free will, to primitives.  They will demonstrate, in the end, that they believe nothing.

Perhaps the salient difference between a Sybaritic Leftist and a full blown Cultural Sadeist is the extent to which the latter creed is infectious.  The first is not living, and the second is an aggressive flesh eating zombie.

All of these myths–the zombie, the vampire, the werewolf–address important sociological realities.

Liberalism is possible. It is both possible and desirable to reconcile cultural and social differences, peacefully, through shared understanding.  But you cannot do that with primitives who insist on imposing their vision of the world on you.  You cannot negotiate with people who do not WANT to negotiate.  That is why wars and violence will be needed at times until all of humanity grows up.

One of the benefits in believing in God–believing one can both move towards and away from God–is that moral judgement becomes possible, not in the sense of judging people ontologically, but in the sense that their chosen patterns of behavior are either moving them towards God or away from Him, away from Goodness.

Read this: http://americanthinker.com/2014/05/widespread_memorial_day_black_violence_ignored_by_national_media.html

The problem is that the pervasive cultural nihilism, which is an ineluctable element of dominant notions about the nature of human life, make calling this what it is–unacceptable and shameful–impossible.

If human life does not matter, then so too do those of blacks not matter.  Then so too do those of whites not matter.

Practically expressed, the very anxiety that these ideas produce makes the shelter of ideological conformity–which sees and hears nothing which does not originate from a “trusted” propaganda source–almost necessary, and certainly very comforting.  The world can be coming apart around you, but you can still have faith that you don’t have to make any personal decisions about it.  This was the essence of New York under Dinkins.

It does seem to me that black youth are getting angrier.  And why not?  Relentless race baiting will do that.  So too will the on-going failures of left wing economic policy.  Why should any of these kids have any hope at all?  As I have said repeatedly, nobody gives a shit about them: not their parents, not their leaders, not society as a whole.  They are just asked to only kill each other, and not worry the rest of us about it.  That’s what ghettos and prisons are for. If they wind up eventually getting out of their boxes, I can see how that would happen.

But hate does not build self respect.  Hate does not educate.  Hate does not create jobs.  Hate will not get them ANYTHING but momentary relief from self loathing and emotional pain.  And those who encourage it are evil.   They will be judged.  I do not believe hell lasts forever, but I do believe it lasts for thousands of years.  That I do belief.

The essential proposition of the spiritual path is that there are not just some, but many feelings you can feel, which you have never suspected.  The Hindus and Buddhists, at least, list a long number of new sensations, new senses of the world, that you go through on the path to enlightenment and release.

These lists were compiled over thousands of years, by people without electric lights or TV’s, living with the stars, living with nature, living patiently and with no demand for instantaneous anything; who were taught from childhood that the universe is connected, and never given any reason to doubt it.

I think of the story of Hafez, at least one version.  He fell in love with a woman, and kept a 40 vigil at the tomb of a saint to win her, but found that the feelings of connection with God which emerged were infinitely more rewarding than any mere love between a man and woman, even though parallels could be made.

I worked 15 hours yesterday.  I have found that sometimes long days elicit interesting emotions.  Driving down some back country road last night, I felt an antique emotion, that I have not felt since early childhood.  It was my regenerative emotion, the energy that I let through myself when I was emotionally hurt, and which healed me, if I stayed with it.

This was beaten out of me.  My parents have confessed, as I think they have come to feel some mild guilt over this–they are narcissists, not sociopaths, so they retain some sense of conscience–that I used to get very quiet and just play with myself in a sort of trance, and they used to spank me for this.  This frightened them, no doubt because everything out of the ordinary frightens them.  Only once they took this away were they finally able to break me.

But I can reclaim it.  It will take time.  I cannot demand it. I need to invite it back carefully, by creating a congenial environment, and letting it come back when it is ready.

On a related note, I dreamed that I visited Harvard last night.  I tend to view Harvard as an epicenter of most of the bad ideas which have created so much suffering in this country and around the world, rightly or wrongly.  Harry Dexter White, who more or less created the IMF and World Bank, which in my view have both worked consistently to make it easier for global banks and corporations to rape developing countries, got his Ph.D there.  He was also a Soviet agent, who died before he could be brought to trial.

Alger Hiss, who played an important role in creating the UN, and who served time as a Soviet agent, got his Law degree at Harvard.

I could go on.

Be that as it may, I went down a hill, and the place was filled with the cafes, bars, book stores, and life and energy of a good college town.  Then I went back up a hill, and was on the campus proper.  In the middle of a central building I heard someone telling someone else: “Life is a meaningless accident”.  Then I looked to the side and saw people who had been physically wounded, rehabbing.

As I say from time to time, one must assume that all dreams pertain in some measure to oneself.  How this applies to me, perhaps it will be easy for a reader to surmise, but for myself I am not sure.  Perhaps I am healing the idea that life is meaningless, although I have never consciously believed that.  Perhaps I felt it.

On a larger scale though, I think it is readily interpretable.  At the CORE, at the very heart of the Science departments of almost all universities, of which Harvard can stand for all, is this belief.  Human kind was accidentally assembled, by chance and time, and means nothing.  We are born, copulate, reproduce, and that is the sum of what is biologically, evolutionarily important.

To believe that no person matters is to believe, necessarily on some level, that one does not matter.  Everything you do and say is nugatory.  Everyone you love, you love because of impulses beyond your control, impulses put in place because of evolutionary necessities perhaps a million or 100 million years ago.

You do not “exist”.  The sense of self is illusory.  One sees many arguing this very explicitly, even if they are completely unwilling to act as if this were true.  Logically, if nothing matters, then it does not matter if people are religious.  It does not matter if we wage wars.  Wars might in fact be good.  Certainly, there is nothing to proscribe them.  Why does it matter if humanity itself survives?  We are no different in principle from the rocks of the Earth whose existence until the Suns expands seems certain.  And even then, they will become a part of the Sun, and reblended with the universe in one way or another.

Now, college life is also social.  People who believe themselves machines made out of meat all day long find relief and comfort drinking beer with their friends, talking about many topics, debating points within the paradigm they allow.  They do not act as if their work is demeaning mankind, making it primitive, ignoring all that is good and expandable.  This is how they write books arguing that the writing of books in inherently useless and meaningless.  And write a lot of them.

What I would submit though, is that within this paradigm all of the emotions I mentioned, everything that has been passed down to us by people much wiser than us, are not possible.  Emotional growth in large measure is replaced by intellectual growth.  Intelligence becomes valued over emotional virtuosity.  Abstraction becomes valued over love.  Thought replaces connection.

And people become isolated and lonely without even realizing it.  They substitute their work for authentic human connection.  I don’t doubt that Richard Dawkins has many friends.  But I think in the middle of the night, he feels alone, except when he is with his work, particularly the aesthetic aspect of it, the beauty of science, of theory, of CORRECT THINKING, of honesty and truth, of the moral perfection of good math.

Humankind: we can do so much better.  We are infants.  We know nothing.

Rather: we know a great deal, oceans of knowledge, but most of us ignore it.  It is being swept away like trash into crowded corners, rather than valued as the treasure it is.

Ponder that substantially all the work going on in the sciences and Humanities is working to make human emotional and cultural life smaller, less fulfilling, and more dangerous.

We need to bring back “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

I would append my previous post on this topic by offering a simple heuristic I taught to my children: is the meal you are about to eat something you could live healthily on the rest of your life?  If you had to eat THIS MEAL three times a day for the next however many decades you have on this Earth, what would your health look like?

If you only eat meals you could live healthily on the rest of your life, then I would say you are doing well.

This would be my submission as a good example: http://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/country-captain-with-cauliflower-and-peas

I make it with coconut oil and chicken breasts.  Very flavorful.  This is probably my favorite dish that I make.