Month: November 2014

There was a skit I saw some years ago in which Clark Kent would take off his glasses, and the person speaking to him would suddenly realize he was Superman, then he would put them back on and they would wonder where Superman went.  I’m sure in the very first issue people were wondering how it could be than no one put two and two together.

I think the notion that the government has money is very much like this.  If I ask you to pay for your own healthcare (and as you feel necessary, insurance to protect you from catastrophic costs), that is a burden.  But if I ask you to pay taxes and the government will pay for it, then you’re happy (if you’re stupid, which plainly many people are).

This is a shell game, a trick.  It only tricks people who don’t get this process of sending a check to the government, which goes to pay for a government employee to cash checks and check tax returns, then a government bureaucrat to administer the payments to healthcare providers, and then to the doctors.

The government does what insurance companies do, but it does it worse, because it has no competition.  There is no impediment to bloat, and no inherent need for quality and speed.  It is a monopoly, at least in Single Payer systems.

What I think people fail to grasp about our free market system is that it has inherent quality control elements.  You can’t stay in business if you don’t provide something people want at a price they are willing and able to pay.  You have on the one hand the value of success, which leftists love to moan about; but you have also the cost of failure, which can also be quite high, and which leftists ignore, as if all businesses were foreordained for success.  The only such businesses are one underwritten by the government. The rest have to perform or perish.

Bureaucracies merely need to continue getting funding from people whose reelection campaigns they support, with taxpayer money.

I was reading the comments on a post about PTSD and somebody said his therapist said the three things that relieve it are social connections, a sense of mastery, and pleasure.

And it occurred to me that THAT is why I like arguing on the internet so much: I am really, really good at it.  It’s my go-to when I’m feeling intimidated or down.  And THAT is why I always seem to make things into a pissing contest.  To be sure, most conservatives in left wing places are insulted vigorously and constantly (and usually childishly), but my ideas are developed.  I can’t sell them if I’m inflicting them.  I think of Dale Carnegie and Two Gun Crowley.

This is a human perspective, which of course fails to take into account the inhuman nature of dehumanizing, predatory propaganda.

Still, I have not thought of this quite that way.  My task is to master more things, rather than play the same old tune the same old way.

I can’t stand it.

The thing about sailing is you leave no tracks, and you live suspended by something practically infinite and in continuous motion.

Ponder that as a life metaphor. 

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.


I was tempted to add my two cents, but reading it, no.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-now-spends-125-billion-per-year-on-riot-gear-and-stability-maintenance-2013-5

Did you know China spends more on its suppression of popular protests than it does on its military, which by size is the biggest in the world?

They have some 180,000 protests a year, many of which escalate to riots, most of them concerning Communist Party official corruption.

In Tibet, in some cities, they have extensive early warning systems–and large number of police/military on constant stand-by–so that when Tibetan monks set themselves on fire, they can be doused and hurriedly removed from the public space within 3 minutes or so.

It occurs to me that Zinn’s signature “accomplishment” is telling the Soviet version of the American story–the story which ostensibly justified all their violence, tyranny and cruelty–AS an American, and an American veteran at that. 


Since he deals only with the history of America, ostensibly, he is under no pressure to tell the truth about Communism, or all the cruelties it inflicted.


It can be argued that his book has facilitated more deception and leftist regression than any other single book written in the last 50 years.  I read that it is often the only book on American history even many college students read, and as more or less intentional agit-prop, it no doubt has made Leftist recruiting much easier.


I will submit that a much better book for anyone wanting to learn American history from someone who self identifies as a historian first and foremost (and not propagandist) would be Paul Johnson’s excellent “History of the American People.”  All of Johnson’s books are good.  “Intellectuals” is another one I think all people aspiring to a life of the mind should read, as warning.


Those two books really started my journey into being a conservative.  Some more good ones are Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics”, Friedrich Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”, and “Economics in One lesson”, by Henry Hazlitt.


What I want to underscore is that the conservative arguments cannot, in my view, be refuted on their merits.  I have exposed all these ideas to continual criticism for many years, including my own.


If you are a decent person, and want decent lives for the people around you, you MUST subscribe to some form of conservatism.  That is my honest view.


We have lost the messaging war precisely because we want to be nice.  We want to give people equal time.  But those people DO NOT want to us equal time for a very simple reason: looked at systematically, both in principle and their history of implementation, NOTHING the sorts of people running the Democrat Party today want can be justified.  The only ideas they hold worth holding are in general held by Republicans too.


If you want to help women or minorities, vote Republican.  If you want to help the environment, vote Republican.  If you want peace, join those of us calling for an end to foreign involvements, understand that current Democrats are no friends of peace either, and vote for some Republicans.  Vote John McCain and his ilk out.


We have allowed the shrill voices of the mentally unhinged to pervert and corrupt our national dialogue for too long.  We have many problems facing us, but we also have many untapped solutions, but ONLY if we return to the objective use of reason, to a firm commitment in ALL cases to the protection of human decency, to a foundational respect for ALL human beings.

I once described myself as an aspiring curmudgeon.  Well, as my kids point out from time to time–with justice–I seem long since to have tapped my inner Walter Matthau, and even if I like kids, I do like sometimes yelling at adults.  And I continue quibbling on the internet.

[although I will say that it is becoming increasingly emotionally clear to me how traumatized many segments of the right have been by the relentless lying and bullying that has been the Left’s most successful method.  I’m not putting up with it any more.  Truth attacks: I am going to still call that acceptable.]

I wanted to say “dance of the curmudgeon”, but they don’t dance.  We don’t have wings.  We throw stones at low flying pigeons.

OK, I exaggerate a bit.  A bit.

Here is what I wanted to write, a nice quote from Peter Levine’s “In an Unspoken Voice.”

In a situation of inescapable and mortal threat, the brain stem, or reptilian brain, sends intense signals to the viscera, causing some of them to go into hyperdrive (as with the gastrointestinal system) and others to constrict and close down, as with the bronchioles of the lungs or the beating of the heart. In the first instance (hyperdrive), we get symptoms like butterflies, knots in the gut or rumbling, uncontrollable diarrhea.  With the lungs, we have feelings of tightness and suffocation, which, when chronic, can lead to symptoms of asthma.  Likewise, the effect of the primitive vagus on the heart is to decrease the beat to a level so low that it can actually lead to (voodoo) death.  Because these sensations feel so dreadful, they themselves become a source of threat [and you suppress them from consciousness]. So rather than coming from outside, the threat now emanates from deep within one’s bowels, lungs, heart, and other organs and can cause the exact same effect upon the viscera that the original threat evoked.  This situation is the unfortunate setup for a positive feedback loop with disastrous negative consequences.  In addition, because traumatized individuals are experiencing (intense) threat signals, the PROJECT this inner turmoil outward, and thus perceive the world as being responsible for their inner distress–and so remove themselves from both the real source of the problem and its potential solution [again, they dissociate and fail to recognize that they even have these feelings]. This dynamic also wreaks havoc not only on the body but also on relationships.

If I can paraphrase this, it seems to be literally the case that small sensations in your viscera, that remain unconscious to you, can cause you to view the world as a dangerous place, and to be constantly on your guard, which is one of the symptoms of PTSD.

Conversely, as I have tried to copy Levine in saying, when your viscera are not normally worked up, and you are allowing the free flow of feeling, the so-called “gut instinct” actually works quite well.  That is what it is intended for: all our senses are antennas scanning for feedback.

Hopefully this makes some sense.

Oh, and I was thinking about being grumpy, because I am grumpy.  If it was my birthday, I would take my piece of cake and go eat it in the bathroom.  Bah humbug.

This too shall pass, but I am allowing it while it does.  I need to get it out/get through it. 

I have twice now had odd dreams, in which the intelligences in my gut–which feel to me like symbiotic, but separate animals (and I am talking the nervous system, not the bacteria)–were showing me they were reorganizing.  Implicitly, something has been off in that system. My relationship with food, and the way I interact with the world through food, has been deranged.  This is not a hormonal thing, or problem with allergies, or any of the foods I’ve been eating.  It is the WAY I have been eating, a way out of connection–of intrinsic, sympathetic connection–with my gut, with my instincts, with that part of me that when working well works as a superlative early warning system and bullshit detector, and general systemic monitor.

It manifests in my solar plexus, but the whole thing is involved.  I am trying to be gentle and to listen openly to the messages I am receiving.  This is “information”, formatted somatically, that I need.

Being me, let me go off to something completely different, but related.

So I was reading that Newtown was a Satanist hub, and decided to Google it, since when I am in this particular mood, I look at EVERYTHING, however far fetched, and came up with this: http://www.satanservice.org/theory/coscm.txt

Now, I noticed a long time ago that BDSM afficionados are quite good at verbalizing and rationalizing what they do.  There is a very good reason for this: trauma detaches you from body, forcing intellectualization.  This, in turn, is an unnatural situation, which means you need to return to the body, but in a contorted, unnatural way.  That is what BDSM does, and in my view Satanism is an ideological form, an intellectual form. of self and other abuse.

Self evidently, any creed which takes as its patron the Prince of Lies cannot be relied on to tell the truth about anything, but what he writes here looks reasonably honest, if only about the outside of what they do.

Here is the point that occurred to me: Satanism exists in the world of shit, literally.  In my own experience, the energies I get from my gut are trauma, fear, pain, horror.  These feelings reside, in my view, BOTH in the physical nervous system as artifacts of traumatic experiences that both stayed and never left, and which also get regularly retriggered by certain stimuli, and which are often not noticed by the person, particularly if they have been a neural firewall to keep those energies out; AND (yes, not the most felicitous sentence) within the subtle energy body described by the Chinese and others.

Freud talked about being anal, about either crapping all over other people–as in the Anal Expulsive–or more commonly being repressed, being Anal Retentive.

Now, he often was very right while being very wrong.  He often seems to have intuited important truths, then allowed his brain to take him on the wrong path entirely.

I would submit that these conditions, to the extent they exist, exist not just in relation to the anus itself, but to the whole system.  The anus, after all, is not the only thing which keeps shit from falling out.  The whole thing is involved.

And this system is VERY suited for receiving and holding all forms of tension and trauma.  We would not think it, but why would it not be sensitive to the environment, when the digestive tract, ultimately, is what converts food to continued life for us?

This is a bit out there, but if you’re used to this blog, you’re used to me speculating wildly.

As far as Newtown, who the hell knows?  Satanism is a cult, so it would seem that if there were one active member, there were likely more.  They only list two addresses, with the other being San Francisco.

I have met therapists who have worked with the victims of Satanic cults, and they are quite real.  Sadistic and horrific rites are in fact performed in this nation, allegedly in the service of and worship of Satan.

Here is a link that seems reasonably impartial, on the Satanisms we know of: http://www.religionfacts.com/satanism/index.htm

My interest in this was reawakened this week when it was revealed that according to official FBI statistics, no murders were committed in Newtown in 2012.

Digging in to it, it appears the consensus among those who think it was a conspiracy was that Adam Lanza did not exist, that his picture was photoshopped, that the mother had multiple aliases and is not only still alive, but gave an interview on camera, and that NO children were killed, and that whole thing was staged using actors and police and emergency personnel in on the “joke”.  The goal, self evidently, was creating an operative pretext to call all opponents of allowing a government monopoly on the effective use of force “baby killers.”  One can see the logic of this, cynical and absolutely awful as it is.

I have looked at a lot of videos, which I don’t like, since I prefer to read.  I can do it ten times faster, and filter for actually useful information.  I will save you the many links that were supposedly posted the day before, which seem to show preknowledge.  Here is one that is still active: http://nawlee.org/sandy-hook-press-release/ 

Note the date.  The Sandy Hook shooting supposedly took place on the 14th.  Why that has not been corrected, I do not know.  This being the internet, maybe a conspiracy theorist copied something.  The claim, which I don’t care to investigate further, has been made that MANY people did this.

The claim is now being made that Sandy Hook Elementary was not even OPEN when the shooting allegedly took place.  One person claims there was no internet use.  Another claims that if you look at hard copy public bulletins all references to Sandy Hook disappear about 2008, even though all the other schools in the area continue to post things like school plays, PTA meetings and the like.

I am tired of researching, so I am going to give you three points to evaluate, which I think in tandem are damning for those willing to see with fresh eyes.

One: watch the first ten minutes of this video (or however much you want, until what is not happening becomes obvious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8150kYsWlcM

Let me reiterate a few facts: the school supposedly had over 600 children.  The claim was made that some people were wounded and not killed, both children and adults.

Where are the ambulances?  They are at the Fire House.  There was no shooting at the fire house.

Where are the children?  Even the helicopter reporter asks this.  They have at that point not been evacuated, but there are no buses.  No one ever films them leaving, throughout the REST of the day.  We have a PICTURE of kids that got circulated, but one which could quite easily have been taken months earlier during a fire drill, and it is perhaps a dozen out of the 600.  Where is MedEvac?  MedEvac was apparently never even CALLED, according to another one of these videos.  They were never put on stand-by.

And most telling, just watch the demeanor of the cops.  They are loitering. They don’t give a fuck.  There is  no urgency.  You know what it looks like?  Another fucking boring drill.  And that is what it looks like to me too.

Now watch this video of alleged father Robbie Parker, and alleged aunt something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sino1wwm3cs

I want you to watch the video through three lens.  Watch it multiple times, if need be.  Imagine these people are serious, and just lost a dear child.

Then when that doesn’t work (I don’t think it will),  look at them as emotionally detached, pathologically unemotional people.

Then watch it as bad acting.  Robbie Parker particularly.  It is OBVIOUS that he is smiling, then getting into his role.

Imagine this scenario: he has just been in the back with a bunch of fellow actors, hashing out his statement, working out the details of their story so there are no inconsistencies.  Imagine he sees himself as in the middle of what he sees as a massive practical joke, a massive–thus far successful–fraud of a scale rarely attempted in American history.  Does that smile not make sense?  Does his failure to start with an appropriate demeanor not square perfectly with the mental mediocrity needed to be complicit in a lie this crass and abominable?

Now, every day is Halloween on the internet, and if I were desperate or unprincipled enough, I could have any credentials I wanted to tomorrow, make any claim, and some people would believe me.  Thus, I think it wise to doubt much of what one reads.

However, this website claims not just to have identified Parker as an actor, but to have found out his actual name: Samual Travis Delaney.  Profession?  Among other things, actor.

Now watch as many minutes as you like of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meV0UYxhxeY

The coroner is odd, but what I want you do to is watch the two cops on the right side of the screen, to his left.  I have done a bit of work in microexpression recognition–Paul Ekman created a training program that I’ve spent perhaps two hours with–and it seems OBVIOUS to me that both of them are suppressing smirks.  The one with the mustache in particular seems to break out into an actual grin a couple of times.  Pause it at 1:48.  Look at the guy at the left at 2:44.  There are a number of occasions where he seems to be suppressing laughter.  The woman smiles too, behind him, about 2:58, then immediately tries to suppress it.

Watch the guy with the mustache at 3:04 again, after being asked about the nature of the wounds.  He has to look down, and both the other cops have a grin barely being suppressed, like kids getting away with something.  He comes back up with a grin about 3:10, and sneaks a conspiratorial glance at the cop on the left.

I suspect I could go on, but if you can’t see it by now, you’re not going to see it.

This video footage could easily run by somebody skilled in lie detection and microexpression analysis, and it is not going to be consistent with grief.

Simple question: does this make sense if they have just seen a tragedy they are greatly affected by?  No, of course not.

Does it make sense if they KNOW everything this guy is saying is complete bullshit, and that everybody is eating it up?  Fuck yes it does.

We can certainly question the Republican Party as to its commitment to fiscal sanity and the principle of limited government.  In general, though, it has been a STRONG supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and the balance of power between the people and their government it was intended to facilitate, and that alone is worth a lot.  An armed populace is much harder to deal with than an unarmed one, and Obama alone has put tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of firearms into circulation.

Even though a great lie–and I would argue a great evil–seems to have been committed here, there is reason for cautious optimism because the people who put this show on seem to view it as vital to disarm Americans–something  they failed horribly in, creating in fact a massive surge in gun and ammo buying–and that current political weather is strongly in their faces.

It is important to tell the truth.  I would like to see an actual investigation done, with actual interviews with alleged parents and confirmation of their identities, to the extent possible.  I would like some sort of investigator appointed who could operate outside the normal demands of politics.  I don’t know what options we have.  Perhaps an Independent Prosecutor, if we can find an honest one.

A recurring theme among people who claimed to be knowledgeable in this field is that this was not only a hoax, but that it wasn’t even a very good one.

But this lie reaches throughout Connecticut Police.  It reaches the Federal level.  In my view, it reaches the Oval Office, and those voices which intrude in on it that wish no Americans well.

We need to start facing as a nation the truth that at least some segments of our government have set the gross curtailment of our liberty as a vital goal, and have in fact acted on it, and perhaps even committed actual acts of murder.

I’m at this point willing to consider many possibilities.  I had seen the claim made prior to the war in Afghanistan that it was really about an oil or gas pipeline.  I had never read or seen anything about this, the leftists blamed everything on Big Oil anyway, so I saw that as something made up by the cynical for the stupid.

But lo and behold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline

This fucking thing actually exists.  It was started in 1995, stopped in 1998 due to Taliban opposition, and started again in 2002 after our invasion.  Whether getting this thing done was a principle secret goal of the war or not, our war clearly enabled it to happen, and it otherwise likely would not have.  It opens next year.

We need to start asking bold and large questions about the last 30 years.  Now is the time.

No one who reads me can possibly accuse me of thinking small.  Saving the world?  I mean it literally. I mean putting into play–deploying–ideas which, if multiplied, will Act To stabilize global finances, cultural systems, and everything and everyone tied to them.

I have proposed the creation of ersatz, secondary, voluntary groups I propose calling Bohannons, which will act as extended families. [I don’t know where I got this name.  I had thought it was in Stranger in a Strange Land, but without rereading it, I can’t find it mentioned in the summary.  It does mean “victorious” in Gaelic.  I like that.]

It occurred to me that this idea is potentially much bigger than I realized.  It sprang from my first experience of Holotropic Breathwork, in which I was astonished how quickly groups of complete strangers achieved extremely high levels of emotional intimacy and openness.  My thought was obvious: why not create standing groups?  Why not grow old together?  This is beautiful solution to the problem of alienation and loneliness.  Groups of 20 or so are manageable.

Then I kept going.  Why not develop funerary rites?  I had in mind this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.  Every group could develop their own.  You could have regional variations.j

Members could help each other financially, as churches do.

You could support one anothers goals.  One idea I really like was from De La Salle High School football program, in which you pair up and give the other person your set of goals, and they hold you accountable.

But then I started into University of Chicago, cold stone building sorts of thinking.  Next stop: Abstraction.

The family as cultural unit is attacked by Marxists–which is to say just about all Professors of anything to do with the Humanities the world over–as patriarchal, unjust, predatory.  No doubt, in some cases it can be those things.

But what have I created?  A HORIZONTAL group, in which “leadership” can change hands in every meeting.  In my vision, the goal is not teaching or telling, but eliciting: giving people a space to tell their story in their way, and to expect to receive unconditional support.  They get advice only if they ask for it.  The world is not wanting for opinions.  It is wanting understanding.

In the Marxist world view–and this is the plain fact, even if the predatory rhetoric remains benign on the surface–there are two social positions: the isolated individual, and the State, or collective.  The goal is not to elicit from the in-dividual what is unique about them, but the exact opposite: to cause them to DENY everything that is unique about them, and to adopt a mindset and worldview that is dictated by a central elite.  Psychosocially, it consists in the emotional cloning of clinical narcissists and psychopaths, and the implantation of their ideas and manias in every member of the collective.  A hive mind, based on a lunatic queen.

I am offering, in conception, an intermediate, HUMAN position. Marxism clearly increases alienation, it facilitates it, even though it claims to oppose it.

Here is something that would work, something that is doable. I think I have more to say, but my brain is full.  I’m going to go climb a ladder and drill some holes in a wall.  It’s a great thing I do manual labor for a living.