Month: November 2014

I’m trying to watch more TV.  Shocking, I know.

Well, I can’t go and spring for cable, but I do have Netflix, so I watched the first two episodes of The Walking Dead.

My first thought: this is a deconstruction of the American Dream.  When we see monsters in cinema, they represent realities we are unable or unwilling to acknowledge.

The essence of all apocalyptic visions is failure: a failure of the dream.

Historically, Americans believed in our ideals.  They were taught genuine Liberalism, which depends on mutual trust, hard work, common decency, and in no small measure dreams about how the world should be.

We want peace.  We want prosperity.  We want true, deep, social harmony, connection, and love.

All of these things are achievable, but NOT ON THE PATH WE ARE ON.  We know this.  It is in every gut, even when the brains overrule them.

We have lost the faith, lost the ability to believe in notions like Good and Evil, right and wrong.

And I want to be clear that I don’t want to be the one to say what is right and wrong; nor do I want to relinquish that role to anyone else.  What I want to say is that we all judge OF NECESSITY, and that failing to judge means to fail to form as a person, as a character; extended, it means failure to form communities, tribes, thriving social webs which nurture and support and instruct.

As I have said often enough, proper moral judgments are local, imperfect, and necessary.

It seems so easy to embrace visions in which all confusions of our present sort fall away in the exigencies of survival.  It seems simpler, at least watching it from a comfortable couch in a comfortable home in a safe neighborhood.

That’s all for now.  I’m rambling.

As I think about it, the best strategy for Republicans is to keep pounding on the many scandals, and to the extent possible to refuse Leftists the opportunities they need to create their talking point propagandas.  The electorate is plainly pissed off.  And even SNL is skewering Obama.  He has lost nearly everyone.

And what I think needs to be said again, is that all Obama did was issue work visas to people who were here.  He did not grant them citizenship, and even though the move may be popular among Hispanic voters, it did NOT create a new voting block of 5 million new Americans, and given that the Republicans told him point blank that taking this action would make a negotiated agreement impossible, it is unlikely they will have ANY shot at citizenship en masse until 2017 and a new President.  We can and should make the case that he never negotiated in good faith, and for that reason set their cause BACK. He did not move it forward.

And this is/was a hugely unpopular move, because it doesn’t take professional economists to see Mexicans who don’t even speak English doing jobs that used to be done by middle class Americans, and realize that they are coming here illegally, and depressing wages.  I have personally heard this story from 3-4 people.  Remember, I’m on construction sites constantly, and talk with both the white guys and the Mexicans.  I’m always gathering data.  It’s what I do.  I am curious.  And this is first hand data.  I don’t blame the Mexicans.  I would do the same thing in their shoes.

But at the same time, anyone who has the first inkling of a sense of loyalty has to grant that our job is to protect Americans FIRST, particularly when our economy was already in the crapper.  Democrats, with this move, have signaled more or less overtly that their primary sympathies are with the world, and not ordinary–or even exceptional–Americans.  Hillary seems to think it would be great if America became a massive refugee camp.  After all: she won’t have to live with the consequences.  She lives on the mountaintop, and always will.

So Obama doesn’t get a massive voting block, angers many people even more, is driving a wedge between Democrat moderates and the radical wing that he answers to, and overall is sinking with no way back up.

Let time take its toll.  Nobody is expecting miracles out of a Republican Congress, but they certainly do not want more of the same.

Keep pounding daily on Obamacare (and I do think pushing a repeal through the House and Senate is worth doing, so Obama has to veto the bill to protect what has become a very unpopular policy), IRS targeting (someone should go to jail), the targeting we just found out about of Sharyl Attkisson (someone else should go to jail), Fast and Furious (jail), NSA snooping (massive retasking, which they are quite capable of), the undeclared war with ISIS, and the near certain role Obama’s policies played in placing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in the hands of the Taliban.  And whatever else I’m forgetting.  The list is too long to keep track of without notes.

A sea change appears to be happening gradually, in which more and more people are waking up to the dangers of unaccountable, unregulated, law-breaking government.  This shift is happening across the spectrum, and cross-aisle alliances will be shaky for some time, but I think Obama has made clear that putting unrepentant radicals in charge has consequences.  Prior to Obama, I don’t think most people believed the Democrats could possibly have veered that far to the Left.  Democrats owned messaging.  Republicans were constantly on the defensive.

But now, we can speak our truths, and increasingly reach audiences willing to listen.  That has not been true for 50 years or more.  It took Carter to create Reagan, and even then Democrats controlled Congress from roughly 1960 to 1994. And we are getting better at messaging, better at pounding home the moral superiority of allowing people the freedom and the economic wherewithal to create their own lives and own destinies.

Just popped in my head.  I like it.

As I think I have argued, thought systems can be boiled down to their basics.  They can be understood practically with the same precision with which mathematical formulas can be understood.

However, thought systems are deployed by human individuals, and of course this means that thought systems in REALITY never look exactly like they ought to in theory.  Chaos enters.  And this is fun.  It makes things entertaining, and life. . . lively.

I have, for example, argued that the only good Muslims are bad Muslims.  By this, I mean Muslims who ignore the many verses inciting them to kill and terrorize (terrorism is already in the Koran: how many people openly admit this?), and who instead rely upon what I would regard as GOD given instincts about what is decent and what is profane.  And if someone wants to argue this is the overwhelming bulk of Muslims, I have no argument with this.  Most people want peace, want harmony, want prosperity, and detest violence and hate.

Scandinavia: I spent a number of formative years in the frozen North, surrounded by many blonde kids with names ending in -son, or -sen.  I know what it is like to stand at a bus stop when it is 20 degrees below zero and the bus is late, and you wore tennis shoes because the misery of feeling like your toes will freeze is less than the misery of the mockery of wearing snow boots like a grade school kid.

As it happens, being the macho man that I am, I am listening to Abba at the moment.  And in point of fact, I just watched Bergman’s Island a few days ago, where he talks candidly about his many “neuroses” (I am conflicted about that word.  I will likely post on this at some point; I have been contemplating how I would describe my own emotional dysfunctions, and “neurotic” seems as good as anything, even though I felt like kicking Woody Allen even before I knew he married the adopted (and much, much younger) daughter of his ex-wife.)

Shit: I’m channeling Arlo Guthrie: “But that’s not what I came to tell you about. . .”, or something like that.  I played Alice’s Restaurant at a bar once, but you couldn’t understand a damn thing.

Suffice it to say that “sunshine in a bottle” may be in play, but I always get to the point eventually.

Read this article: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-miracle-brutal-truth-denmark-norway-sweden

Lots of interesting content.  I want to focus on Sweden.

“Swedes seem not to ‘feel as strongly’ as certain other people”, Daun writes in his excellent book, Swedish Mentality. “Swedish women try to moan as little as possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over, whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they did not.” Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and “remembered long afterwards”. The Swedes are, he says, “highly adept at insulating themselves from each other”. They will do anything to avoid sharing a lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.

Effectively a one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist families – for much of the 20th century, “neutral” Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters) continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north.

OK: what the hell is my point?   This: the miracle of the North seems predicated on being as INhuman as possible.  It works to eradicate the Male, and the Female.  It attacks families.  It works to mechanize humanity–where Socialism is merely a rationalization of applying industrial ideals to social engineering–without the least thought about what it means to be human in the first place.

What is the point of life?  Can we not ask this question?  And can we not query the Swedes as to the generalized answer their One Party State has created?  And what is that answer?

In my view: nothing matters.  Nothing matters absolutely.  If you KNOW that Islamic immigrants rape Swedish women at five or more times the rate of indigenous men, why care?  That is unpleasant knowledge.  It could lead to judgmentalism. It could lead to unpleasantness, perhaps even–fucking hell and horrors–spontaneous EMOTION.

Here is the deal.  I watched Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” perhaps two weeks ago.  It affected me.  As my kids were mocking me for, movies tend to take weeks for me to process.  I cried during Toy Story 3, when all the toys were in the incinerator, making common cause, connecting, facing death together, with bravery.

I make no apology.  I think it is a great thing, and a wonderful privilege, to be fucked up by something you see on screen, and to have the capacity to wander through a myriad of feelings, and walk out a bit wiser and more organized emotionally.  This is what the fuck life is about, god-damn-it.

Cries and Whispers is a powerful movie.  Bergman himself was locked up in a morgue as a youngish child, perhaps 8, and says a dead women on a table watched him with her eyes.  This seemingly left a permanent impression on him, which he perhaps processed in part with this movie.

But the point about the movie is the extreme emotional restraint.  I remember, from my own life, how extreme cold can push you into yourself.  It turns you into an introvert.  As Garrison Keillor–who I don’t like in most respects, but who is UNQUESTIONABLY a great story teller puts it: extroverted SWEDES (I inserted that) are the one who look at YOUR shoes.

Remember the English are Vikings who studied Latin.  The Angles.  The Saxons?  Boats, hard men.  1066?  Normans/Norsemen.  And that was the second such invasion in quick succession.  I forget the king who lost, but shit he was a Norseman too, and he won the first go-round.

Where am I going?  Beside the freezer for booze and ice?

Oh, hell.

In that movie, I actually felt for the older sister.  She has massive unprocessed trauma, but lived in a world where weakness was not allowed, even for an instant.  Therefore, she lived in hell.

The younger sister: she felt compassion.   She cheated on her husband precisely because she idealized love, and found it in the Doctor, at least for a time.

But she was vain, weak, self centered.  She tried to comfort her sister, in THAT scene, but failed.  She tried to be there for her other sister, briefly, but was unable to forget the abuse that got visited on her, by a sister who desperately needed connection, but who also wanted to hate and attack as a matter of principle everyone she could.

Fast forward: OH, we are all crazy.  In my own small world, in my own small perceptual domain, I watch people.  I watch vanity, error, stupidity.

This of course does not mean I look at myself as exempt, but it does mean I  put myself in a slightly different place.

That place has no walls, but exists in a land with rivers, and no obvious mountains.

Truth: I am having to edit this, since I am not sufficiently drunk.  Truth: I like people when I am drinking, and even when I’m not I value family connections.

In the Bergman movie, the maid has the worst work, but she is also the most real.  She does the hard work that the elites around her are frightened of.

She is nobility, in my own iteration.  She is what we should all strive for, even thought most of us are cowards.

She lost her child, as we discover early on.  She is pious, and still capable of love.

Oi.

I’ll leave it at that.  Too much complexity.

YOU, though: chances are good I feel your confusion and anger, too.

Postscript, the day after: I’m going to leave this mess as is.  Clearly, alcohol does not make anyone smarter, but in my own case it has often allowed me to process emotions that needed processing.  It is an anesthetic I use for emotional surgery, or have used.  I am in the process, again–but this time feels different–of giving up drunkenness.  That was my first bout in two weeks, which is good for me.

I think the surest sign that alcoholic is not the best word for me is that I retain, sober, an affection for what it has done for me.  It has not cost me any relationships, any jobs, any major loss of self respect.  It has on the contrary helped me manage otherwise unmanageable emotions, acted as a balm when I needed it, and all with no visible affects on my health or overall well being, other than a few extra pounds in my belly.

Republicans are imbeciles when it comes to messaging.  Perhaps they think too much of people; perhaps they think too much of themselves.

Regardless, the situation is simple.  Obama’s talking point–and Democrats evolve these things with care, which is why you always see them talking about talking points, one of which is that Republicans use talking points, but that they implicitly don’t, which itself is a good talking point–is that “If Congress doesn’t act, I have to.”

The response, the obvious response, is that “The President doesn’t get to tell Congress what to do.”  Period.

Expansion: if Congress decides NEVER to forgive people who came here illegally, if it chooses to treat them the way MEXICO treats illegal immigrants, that is their prerogative.  The Presidents JOB, REMAINS, enforcing existing laws, which he is plainly not only not doing, but not doing FLAGRANTLY.  He does not get to decide which laws he likes and which he doesn’t.  Period.  Anything else is incompetence or law breaking.

Added thought: Obama cannot naturalize these people even within his grossly inflated sense of Executive entitlement.  This move, therefore, will NOT create legal voters, and will piss off roughly 90% of the American electorate, which is the percentage I see opposing this action.

As I understand it, what he wants to do is simply make official his de facto policy of not enforcing our immigration laws.  This does not put people on welfare rolls, legally at least.   And it certainly does not make them citizens.

And to the extent Congress takes this as a poke in the eye, it extends, perhaps forever, the amount of time before these people actually get American citizenship.  Hispanic activists, therefore, should not only not take this as a victory–since practically little is changing–but quite possibly as a major strategic defeat.  Republicans are on sound polling ground in opposing this, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

I have in the past overlooked these elements, and am assuming–perhaps mistakenly–that I have understood the situation now.

As I say from time to time, I screw up.  I am not a full time media consumer, and no doubt channel some ideational version of Emily Litella on occasion.

It seems obvious that Obama has reached the conclusion that he can use the power of the office he has won to pander to a new prospective electoral base: Mexicans who have fled the conflicts and economic devastation of Mexico and come here illegally.

But I don’t want to discuss that here.  What I do want to do is submit a couple points/ideas I find relevant and interesting.

First, most Mexicans, by my straw poll talking with them–including people here with  green cards–would rather live in Mexico.  They speak the language, understand the customs, and generally feel more at home because that IS their home.  The United States is not.

An intelligent long term strategy for dealing with illegal immigration would be to strengthen the Mexican economy and return the rule of law such that they don’t WANT to come here, except in small, easily manageable numbers.  Then you don’t need a fence, at least to deal with this issue (national security is another issue).

I read 93% of crimes in Mexico are either not reported or not investigated.  In both cases, the legal system has failed.  This is a statistic consistent with a failed nation state.

The problem seems to be that the sheer volume of drug money coming in makes it easy to buy up all the cops, all the military, and most of the politicians.  The ones who can’t be bought can be killed by someone who is paid to do so.

So step one logically is shrinking this pool of money.  Since 70% of the revenue is from marijuana, we should legalize it nationally.  I personally would like to see the DEA disbanded entirely.

Doing this would instantly shrink revenues by nearly 3/4ths.  I would then like to see us legalize cocaine, if prescribed by a doctor.  I think most people would be able to handle taking some coke on weekends at parties, and behaving during the week.  Peoples use could be tracked, and obvious patterns identified if strongly negative.

Adding this to marijuana legalization would eviscerate the cartels.

Then we institute a program like Kiva, where people make loans directly to Mexicans to start businesses.  The government kicks in 50% of the money (yes, taxpayer money is used, but it is being used now for ICE, jails, welfare, and God knows what else), and mounts a campaign to interest ordinary Americans.

We negotiate with the Mexican government for economic liberalization.  My understanding is that like all Latin American nations they have repeatedly experimented with the idea that there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch for everyone (aka Socialism), and not yet learned from their mistakes.

They need to learn from their mistakes.

We also require them to pass an equivalent of the 2nd Amendment.  Mexico has to legalize individual gun ownership across the board to all law abiding citizens.  This will be the final death knell for the cartels.

Within 10-15 years, Mexico could become a decent place to live, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time ever for the bulk of its populace.

This would work, but of course many entrenched interests could be counted on to work hard against it.

I took a turn for some Toltec mounds somewhere.  I drove 10 miles, saw nothing, and figured it was one of these things where they lead you on, and you wind up driving 40 miles out of your way, so I went back.

Somehow I got to thinking about Indians, though.  By and large, in my understanding, none of the many tribes inhabiting what became America had written languages.  This meant that myth and ceremony had to be passed down orally, and through initiation and participation.

And I got to thinking about kids asking tribal elders deep questions, like: what happens when we die, exactly?

And it seemed to me that in such a system, it is at least possible that the elder, rather than reflexively mouthing something he or she has heard, or going to consult a recondite text found in a library somewhere, as would happen in places with long written traditions, would on the contrary find HIS OWN answer through reflection, through solitude, perhaps through some sort of “accelerant” like peyote.  And that person would then answer from personal knowledge.

It seems to me that religion, to be alive, has to be constantly reinvented, and in some respects having a written tradition makes this harder.  You have words you can appeal to, and then repeat.  You can FEEL like you have answered a question, when in reality, as far as your connection with the answer, as far as your sense of personal knowledge of the answer, you may as well be reiterating a Latin phrase as a non-Latin speaker.

If guns are banned, only the government and criminals will have them.   If the two combine, you have tyranny.  This is what has happened in Mexico, and in my understanding Jamaica, both of which have very strict gun control laws.

I think the PHILOSOPHICAL importance of an armed populace for a truly Liberal nation cannot be overstated.  I personally would allow the purchase of rocket launchers, grenades, mines, and other such ordnance to people who pass background checks.

The simple fact is that per capita American civilians are by far the most heavily armed in the world, and that in the places where we have the most guns, there is almost no crime.  I don’t know how widely known this is, but in a number of states you can buy and shoot fully automatic weapons.  Kentucky has an annual machine gun shoot where people even bring miniguns.

Only when you get to Democrat bastions do the guns revert to the sole domain of cops and criminals, and only there do you see widespread gun violence.

None of this is complicated.  The  psychology is not complicated, and the epidemiological data is not complicated.

Most politicians, to survive, have to be sensitive to the winds.  In particular, our nation–and all nations which have had the leftist infection inflicted on them–is one in which all people proposing conservative ideas have to count on withering attacks on their persons every time they say something that contradicts Leftist propaganda.  Something as simple as “we can’t borrow 40% of our money forever” brings out the choruses of pushing Granny over a cliff, even though it is true, and even though Granny will fare far better with intelligent planning that long term denial and hasty reactions to what will then be intractable problems.  Think about it: if you care about Granny, is it the part of compassion to ignore the future, or think about it?

What conservative Republicans need is what amounts to counter-battery fire.  They need lots and lots of voicing stating coherent view in support both of the specific policies, and the wisdom and MORALITY of those policies.

Who, anywhere, who still claims to value reason, rejects planning for the future?  And yet that is exactly what this Administration is doing.  A credible claim can even be made that they are bankrupting our country ON PURPOSE.  Who, anywhere, who still claims to value reason, can argue for economic ruin as a tool for bettering the lives of Americans or serving the cause of enlightment or moral improvement?  No one can, and yet they continue to get away with it with large segments of the zombified, propagandized populace.

We need to understand why and how our ideas work better, and argue them consistently and constantly, anywhere we can, until–and I think this would be a good bellweather–most academics admit our decision to fail in Vietnam–and abandon Southeast Asia generally–opened up a chamber of horrors, ultimately causing unimaginable misery, and millions of horrific deaths; and that the New Deal not only didn’t work, but that it prolonged the Great Depression.

Then I watched myself eat.  I tend to “wolf” down food.  Think about that word for a moment.

And I watched World War Z the other night, where humans became like rabid animals, and bit one another.

We are animals.  We are animals not so very different than the dogs and cats we keep in our homes.  And I think all of us retain atavistic instincts.

In my case, I have discovered a great deal of residual tension in my gut, from unprocessed trauma.  And I think the tension can go all the way from the mouth to the anus.

I think many people clench their jaws because they are biting back anger, and an unrecognized primal reaction to danger, that of biting.

We watch primal humans in that movie, and they pull their lips back like dogs, and for the same reason: they are protecting themselves and projecting aggression.

And I got to thinking about territoriality.  Humans likely retain some instinctual need for home and tribe.  We need to belong somewhere, and within some group.  Modern rejections of xenophobia mean that we are all the In group, at least in theory, but our guts may be telling us something else.

Part of the Us/Them dynamic is that you have to feel you belong, intrinsically belong, somewhere.  You feel at peace with you and yours, and whatever aggressions you may have are reserved for the Others.

But what if you never belong anywhere?  Is it possible that leads to chronic low level activation of our territorial instincts?  Could this be behind some of the obsession with zombies?  Could the zombies represent some unexpressed part of a more primitive part of our nervous systems?  I think there is some merit in this idea.

And I got to thinking about dining, one of life’s great pleasures.  In dining, you merge, you blend these nervous systems.  You combine the appetitive, visceral part, with the modern social part of your brain.  It seems to me that pleasant, relaxed meals with other people with whom you feel connected is an important part of mental health.

That many families no longer eat together could also feed this disconnect between gut and sociality.

Peter Levine has an exercise in his book.   Actually, he has a number.  Looking this one up, I found some more I had marked but didn’t try.  Here is Exercise 4:

The jaw is one of the places that most people carry considerable tension.  There are reasons for this.  The following exercise may serve to illuminate both reasons for this typical “holding pattern” and what may lie on the other side of it, as it dissolves.

At your next meal, or with a crisp apple in hand, take a good “aggressive” bite into a food that you desire.  Really, take a good bite out of it and then begin chewing deliberately.  Continue chewing, slowly, mindfully, until the food turns to liquid.  As you do this, become aware of other sensations and reactions in your body. If you feel the urge to swallow, try to restrain it–to “play the edge” of feeling the urge to swallow, when it arises, and continue to focus on gently chewing.  This may be difficult or uncomfortable, so be patient. Note any impulses you might have such as the urge to swallow, tear, vomit, or associations to things going on in your life–present or past. If reactions such as nausea or anxiety become too strong, please don’t push yourself.  Make written notes of your reactions. Page 302

I tried this tonight, or what I remembered of it, and was able to develop a sort of conversation between my gut and the rest of my senses, and realized it is left out of most of what I do.  It is a burden I carry, but don’t integrate, or haven ‘t yet.

And I got to thinking about anorexics. I could easily see trauma embedding in the gut and becoming a sort of alter ego, a Wolf self, a vicious self, and I could easily see a person as unconsciously wanting to attack and starve that wolf self as violent, angry, and vicious.

If this notion is correct, then the way to treat anorexics would be to have them make somatic contact with their guts.  What would pop out would a lot of horrible shit–I use that word deliberately–but there would be an end.

A key problem with severe trauma is knowing where to start, how to start.   There is no pleasant, easy way to deal with horror.

We have two brains.  This is something that needs to be integrated into mainstream psychology.

This is a bit meandering, but fuck it. I think there are some good ideas here, possibly some REALLY good ideas, inspired by Levine’s excellent work.