Month: February 2015

Made 1600 LPI on Lumosity.  Thought I’d brag.  I’m still only in the 97.9th percentile for my age, but I’m only a week or two into my new exercise program. I’ll make 99.  It’s the Problem Solving–basically, really fast math–that is my weak spot.

I am channeling my Inner Nerd.  I do that from time to time.

It is odd, come to think of it, that we live in a culture nearly entirely characterized by outer appearances.  The popular kids are the ones who dress correctly, say the correct things, and who are edgy in just the right ways.

Nearly our entire cultural landscape, though, is populated with ideas begun with nerds.  Our political life is dominated by ideas originating with intellectuals–or in defiance of them.  Our business lives are shaped by enterprises begun in many, many cases by inventors and nerds.  Only perhaps in entertainment does this change, and think about that: entertainment–frivolity, what you do when you are not being serious, not working.

And even there, consider, say, “Rebel without a Cause.”  The screenplay was based on a book written by Robert Lindner, and written by Irving Shulman, both of whom were likely nerds/introverts. Into this matrix stepped the ACtors.

It seems to me that the inner life is what creates meaning in the outer life, and denigrating those who largely live in their internal worlds is therefore a species of stupidity.  Of course, stupid is what stupid does.

You may never have thought of it this way, but nearly every word that leaves Obama’s mouth has roots in the life and intellectual work of some Dead White Nerd (as whispered in his ear by a very living Iranian-Chicagoan woman).

Here is how I think it works: you are attracted to what you are.

We are presented daily with a nearly infinite amount of possible complexity. We survive with heuristics and habits.  We form patterns out of the overwhelming chaos.  Some things stand out; some we ignore or don’t even consciously see.  These processes happen on a deep level.

How would you know if you passed up an opportunity your unconscious did not even allow you to consciously become aware of and evaluate in the daylight?

How would you know if some part of you gravitated to things which over time would prove destructive, if it felt “right” in some sense?

I do think this universe is interactive, but I don’t think it rewards positive thinking directly.  I don’t think there is a “law” which says that if we think constantly about what we want, it will be hand delivered to us in a gift wrapped box.

Neither do I embrace an idea of life as INHERENTLY one of struggle.

What I think happens is that small differences over time add up to large differences. People able to imagine themselves succeeding notice and exploit small opportunities as they present themselves, and over time this leads to much larger successes.

Me, I have to second guess my intuition, because half the time it leads me astray.  This is what I was taught.  This is what I have internalized.  This is why inner work is necessary for long term success.

Now, this by no means absolves me of responsibility.  No sane person should want to be absolved of response-ability, because that is a prima facie rejection of personal agency, and the possibility of GROWING beyond your–my–temporary constraints.

And there is, in my view, inherent benefit to figuring the system out, to learning to recognize negative patterns, and learning to diminish them.

And I would add that taking responsibility is not the same as beating yourself up.

I was watching a documentary/interview with Ingmar Bergman, where he was asked about his sundry and profound failures as a parent, if he felt guilt.  His reply was consonant with something I decided for myself.

He said something like: self abuse, self flagellation, is a form of vanity.  I cannot undo what I did wrong.  It was wrong.  I admit it.  And there is NOTHING I can do about it now.  I was an immature, self serving adolescent until some time in my fifties.  I can’t go back and become a good parent.  I cannot heal, now, the wounds I inflicted then.

I think there is wisdom in this.  Theatrical guilt is a form of display.  It is a distraction.  It is a way of avoiding learning the lessons that need learning, and getting on with a better way of living.  You cannot undo hurt.  All you can do is become a better, more giving person.

And I will add that I say this as someone with a reasonably clear conscience. My worst sins, by most standards, are pretty weak.  But the guilt I feel is comparing who I could have been, with who I was.

But the more I learn, the more I see that all of us are in large measure simple progressions on the path on which we began life.  What merit is there in focusing on failure, where we did less than our future selves now feel was possible?

We can only exist in the moment, and try to do better.  That is all we can do.

And I think many moral narratives are polluted by the absolutisms of most religions.  Certainly in my case, growing up with the threat of eternal damnation for moral failings of a scale I had and have no means to assess, I ingested a sense that all small failings were large failings.  There is little compassion possible in a world where the stakes are eternal and unavoidable.  It does not breed nuance.  It does not breed a spirit of exploration, of failing and getting back up.  What it breeds is conformity and fear.

These are the issues with which I wrestle daily, and I think that is the case of most who grew up like I did.

It is so easy, SO EASY, to choose an absolutism, to abandon curiosity, to abandon open hearted and open spirited exploration.

All Fascism and Communism are, are secular rearticulations of ancient solutions to the problems of confusion, belonging, fear of the unknown, and the omnipresence of the possibility of death.

And all Islamism is, is a revivification of old solutions in the face of modern terrors of inordinate complexity, death, and moral confusion.

We need new pathways.  We currently live in an ocean, and many drown.  Again, this is what I am working to create.  I have yet to create myself, though, and that is the logical first step.  Until you can trust your unconscious, you can never know when you are leading yourself or others astray.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-kept-reform-muslims-out-of-summit-on-extremism/article/2560525

This is quite encouraging.  This is the first organized group of Muslims I have seen calling for universal human rights and gender equality.

And Obama, sack of shit that he is, is ignoring them.

I get angry sometimes.  I can readily imagine the calls to God that follow watching your wife and daughters being raped.  I can imagine peaceful men being hung on crosses until they die.  I can imagine the horror of watching your children killed in front of you, and everything you love burned to the ground by savages cursing the name of God while claiming to glorify it.

And Obama is utterly unable to achieve anything approaching moral clarity on any of this.  There is more than a little of the pedophile in him.  He has that spirit–or rather spiritlessness.  I have often wondered if Frank Marshall Davis sexually abused him.  My best best guess is yes: I think both he and his maternal grandfather did.  That is why he is likely gay, and Michelle a beard found for him so he could be put forward as a mole people smarter than him could rely on.

And if one accepts that, one needs to wonder if his mother Stanley was abused as well.  Perhaps that is why she had to get away from her father permanently.  Perhaps that is why she herself likely fucked Frank Marshall Davis and posed naked for him at a very early age, in an era when that was DEEPLY, DEEPLY  aberrational.

Davis was almost certainly a sociopath.  And he was on Obama’s own account an important early influence, a male presence for a boy denied both mother and father.

What the fuck is wrong with the goddamned media that none of this can be discussed?  People are not even being asked to take a bullet: they are merely being asked to speak of unpleasant truths and risk being called names.

I finally watched the documentary on the alleged Franklin (Nebraska) cover-up, Conspiracy of Silence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQHrbJPhus4

Linked was another documentary from 1981, titled “Boys for  Sale”, of which I watched the first hour, after which I thought I had the gist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWY8T3ujxNw

Few thoughts.

First, the dates for the events described in Conspiracy of Silence happened in the 1980’s.  Nobody seemingly remembers anything any more, but I remember that the whole NOTION of sex crimes against children only got mainstream attention some time in the 1980’s.

I have not studied this issue in depth, but the book Assault on Truth–which I think every student of the history of psychology should read–was published in 1984, and caused an enormous amount of controversy.

It does not appear that the pervasive tolerance of pedophila by the Catholic Church started encountering large scale public resistance until some time in the late 1980’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases

Here is one lawsuit settled in 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/11/us/archdiocese-of-louisville-reaches-abuse-settlement.html

Franklin, of course, is a staple of what is sometimes called “alternative media”.  Much of this media is crazy.  But I consume it.  I read the stories about the alleged Marine who alleged there are bases on Mars.  I read Alex Jones, who I have come to believe is mostly sane.

I can rationalize this in several ways, several metaphors. One is Simulated Annealing, the net of which is that in initial exploration, it is useful and desirable to go as many qualitative different places as possible, prior to funneling attention more narrowly.  Another is Signal Theory, in which the goal is to increase Signal and decrease Noise, but which recognizes that the only way to allow all actual signals through, is to also allow all potential Noise through.

According to the “Boys for Sale” video, in 1981 about 350 boys were killed every year in Houston alone by perverts, most of whom were heterosexual in their open lives.  Most of these crimes were not reported as homicides.  One boy, for example, who was killed through what I guess is called fist rape, died of  “massive internal bleeding”.  He was, if memory serves, found naked in a dumpster.

Searching for statistics, they are hard to come by.  Here is one resource from 1998: http://www.veronicasvoice.org/statistics/

Here is one from 2009:  http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/10-surprising-and-counterintuitive-facts-about-child-sex-trafficking

In that last one, it is interesting/disturbing to note that children under 18 are more likely to be charged with a crime than helped, if they turn to most authorities.

I will grant that in this post I am exploring.  I saw something a few months ago that gave me cause to believe that pedophilia is common among the power elite.  I won’t say more than that, not least because it is hard to believe I saw what I saw, and I would not be prepared to swear on it in court.

But I do want to say a few things.

1) It is not necessary to believe in a Grand Conspiracy with regard to Franklin. It is merely necessary to believe in moral cowardice on the part of the FBI and Omaha police.

As with 9/11, as with Sandy Hook, there is a great deal of evidence that no one in a position of authority wanted to take up.  Doing so would have meant creating massive public controversy, becoming a target of very vicious attacks by the actually guilty, and perhaps even violence.

Mostly, though, I think in Franklin those who were responsible for conducting the investigation were unable to IMAGINE that these crimes were possible.  They were further lulled to sleep by people like the District Attorney, who in fact WERE in on a conspiracy, and finally put everything back on the shelf because to do otherwise would have meant taking bigger risks than they were prepared to make, all for allegations which befuddled them, and seemed inconceivable.

One sees the claim made, in discussing this documentary, that the trail went “all the way to the White House”.  What actually happened is that an influential lobbyist–who later killed himself, if memory serves, prior to going to jail–took kids on tours of a closed, dark, sleeping White House.  They did not meet the President, and on no accounts did anything of a sexual nature happen in the White House.  It is certainly conceivable that someone able to put together large political donations would get privileges like this, without the President or his staff knowing just what was going on.

2) This is my more important point: The lessons of that 1981 documentary seem not to have been learned by anyone.  It seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that the market for teenage boys has disappeared.  According to one of the studies cited above, teen boys seemingly continue to constitute roughly half the prostitutes in America.  Back in 1981, hundreds were killed annually in Houston alone, and their deaths reported as everything but homicides.

Has male perversion decreased since then?  Or is this STILL going on, today, in nearly every major metropolitan area in the country?  The thing about young male prostitutes is they are not victims of “child abuse” in a formal sense.  They are not being held against their will in most cases, or forced into selling sex.  And at my age, I have never imagined or known that HALF the prostitution in this country was homosexual (I will note that Thomas Philpott took care to note that the homosexual aspect is secondary; it is the power dynamic that is primary).

I can’t find statistics on this.  Why would the best documentary be 34 years old?

And here is one more major question: what happened to the masses of kids from Central America who flooded our border last year?

As a nation, we seemingly STILL do not have a category for the systemic prostitution of, and abuse of, by any standard, boys.

Why?

I was thinking about the link between the Left and Islam, and another connection occurred to me.

What you have to understand about the hard Left is that the don’t believe anything.  There are no principles guiding their behavior.  Functionally, they are nihilists, whose sole reason for being consists in membership in a cult which uses the words and rhetoric of morality for anti-moral, anti-principled ends.

The history of Western Europe, and to a lesser extent America, from the Spanish conquest of the New World (to them) through perhaps the 1960’s, was one of colonialism, which can also be called Imperialism. In some respects, collectively, Western Europe was conquering the world.  The British, at the height of their Empire, controlled more land than any nation in history, including the Mongols.

Watching this, and craving a global domination of their own, the Soviets and their allies expended considerable effort denigrating and denouncing these conquests, all while doing everything within their power to increase their own land holdings, first in the reconquest of Central Asia, then in the functional annexation of Eastern Europe.

The club of anti-Western denunciation was founded by propagandists, who saw no objection in principle to supporting conquests and empires, merely ideological incompatible conquests and empires, which of course were called one name, while regimes founded on torture and repression, like Cuba and China, were called another.  They were called “liberated”.

You cannot be a Leftist and not find comfort in cognitive dissonance.  It is the icing on the cake, the salt on their meat.  It is the very craven, slavish conformity to blatantly subservient narratives which constitute the eradication of freedom and validation of cruelty which leftists so need and seek.

To my point, though: logically, if Western Imperialism is defined somehow as the acme of evil, then it is not enough simply to oppose it, but rather one must counter it through the “spontaneous” expression of alleged subalterns.  Thus, Obama’s attachment to Islamism.

Now, it seems clear that Islamism is the result of long term Soviet propaganda operations, beginning in the 1960’s and extending until that Empire’s dissolution in 1990 or so.

But Islamism is categorically a world-conquering narrative.  It began as such and after a long hiatus, it longs to continue as such,  And so weak and decadent are the Europeans, that, as Mark Steyn has argued, demographics alone may deliver the cradle of Western civilization, the home of the idea of universal rights and generalized political freedom, to Sharia, a law rooted in political, social,and economic stasis; which seeks to create nothing, to change nothing, to improve nothing, because perfection has already been achieved.  And perfection, as I have already stated, consists precisely in universal and craven submission (this is the meaning of Islam) to laws which seek to eradicate the moral man ,the choosing man, and replace him with the conforming man, the company man, the drone, the insult to the opportunity God granted us to pursue our personal Enlightenment.

Like many of the ideas floating around for the past century or two, I find this prospect repugnant.  But it seems only America has the balls to even begin to resist this insult.  And we have been corrupted and infiltrated by people who hate Goodness, who hate freedom, and who love the ideas of tyranny and the inflicting of pain.

My inner work continues.  I saw, in what I will call a meditation, that people often settle into what amount to fixed displays.  They take on a static quality.  They get stuck somewhere.

You become a museum display.  Maybe you move around, like in the Zoo.  But you exist behind a glass wall, confined.  You have a place, and a time that never changed.  There is no flowing water. There is no evolution.

Except in the dark.  Even those tied up in chains move in the darkness, when the lights go out.  I would suggest this is in part why the Night at the Museum movies are more deeply evocative in some respects than outwardly apparent.

But this movement is confined, too, to the Museum, to the place where fixed displays happen.  There is no there, there.

I see this.  The most repressed, uptight person you know tends also to be angry and judgmental, perhaps from an allegedly Christian perspective.  All the emotions that are not daylight emotions–the hate, the rage, the anger, the sexuality, the fear, the sense of horror–they don’t go away.  They percolate in the unconscious, in those parts of our bodymind that we cannot consciously access, which indeed our participation in the museum display program requires us to keep hidden from ourselves, and until they are seen and processed, we, too, must live a large part of our lives in darkness.

This is of course a psychological truism–and I’m repeating myself, again–but this metaphor feels powerful, at least for me.

If we posit that the principle practical manifestation of Moral Relativism as a habit, if not a formal creed–indeed, how could one concretize as a creed something inherently mutable and inimical to unchanging principle–is conformity coupled with legalism, then morphologically it resembles Islam quite closely.

Christianity calls for love.  This is quite different from legalism.  Love takes courage.  Legalism and conformity take fear.

If you look around the world, substantially all violence is related to either Islam or Communism.  Darfur?  Islam.  ISIS?  Islam.  Cuba is a terror island, where informers are on every corner, and complaining might get you put in a box barely big enough to fit a dog, until you break. In North Korea, they might literally feed you to dogs.  You can be shot for possessing Western movies.

Consider this video: http://clashdaily.com/2015/02/religion-peace-woman-stopped-street-pronounced-guilty-shot-head-wearing-red/

I see no reason to watch it all the way through, but my understanding is she is shot dead  in the end.  Look at all these emotionally uncooked, immature, relentlessly dogmatic pseudo-men with rifles.  This is something like the peer pressure kids face in high school, except the penalty is death.  For her part, this woman probably said “fuck all this black shit. I’m wearing something colorful.”  She was warned, and now she is dead.

And for what?  Red is apparently prohibitied in Islam.  Here is some commentary: http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=showfatwa&Option=FatwaId&Id=83820

Note the tone.  Everything seems to be black and white.

Everyone in my view should read at least a few Sura of the Koran.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you pick it up, it will consist nearly entirely in telling you the rewards of heaven and the torments of hell;  how it is right to be blessed by Allah, and horrible to be condemned by him.

To put it mildly, this kind of language does not breed nuance.  You are being told, over and over and over and over, that your IMMORTAL soul’s future depends entirely on conformity to the Koran, as interpreted by men long dead, and men currently living, depending on men long dead.

And here is the point I wanted to make.  As Steven Pinker, in the first useful writing of his of which I am aware, points out, violence is seemingly at an all time low globally.  Many things factor in to this but one major influence he cites is the advent of the novel and short story.  What these do is build empathy in people.  They put you in other peoples heads and teach you to think about being in their shoes.  They teach rapport, understanding.  Moreover, the painting tradition of the West involves considerable amounts of portraiture, which also helps you SEE people.

Islam lacks all this.  They read one book, by and large.  Even Western educated Muslims seemingly crave and are fascinated by the cult-like ideological adherence demanded by the Koran, by its rejection of personal agency, by its rejection of human moral choice, by its reduction of every last aspect of human life to inalterable law.  Like Communism, Islam rescues people from freedom, from free will, from confusion, from doubt.

Their refusal to allow individual pictures means something.  NO ONE can be pictured.  This is why pictures of their alleged Prophet are so infuriating for these moral children and savages.

Individuation is a process of trial and error.  It consists in making choices and learning from them.  It consists in learning to interact in harmonious and spontaneous ways with people who are different from us.  It is not a straight line process, but if people are granted and use freedom, they eventually attain psychological maturity.

Nearly all the process needed for individuation are absent in strict Islam.  People do not read novels (although of course in practice many do, I’m sure).  They do not paint pictures.  They do not make moral choices.  All their choices are made for them, and enforced by the most fanatical–which is to say the LEAST individuated among them.

All the modern Western inventions which lead naturally to tolerance of difference, of diversity, via genuine empathy, are absent in Islam.

Islam is a cage, within which animal passions are allowed to rage with impunity through jihad. It is not pure ugliness–despite it all, many decent Muslims exist around the world, because Goodness is a natural impulse among us all.  And it has had many moments of reform, such as through Sufism.  But the orthodox kill the Sufis.  They torture  and torment them.

There is no love in their hearts.  And if Love is the only commandment, then they are pure sinners in the only way that matters.

I’ve been wearing work boots and blue jeans (Ballroom Jeans, to be exact, because that ad made me want to buy something from them, and I’ve never had cause to regret it) for 7 years or so.

Here is the thing about construction: you can’t posit anything.  You can’t make a washer with a 1/2″ diameter have a 1/4″ diameter.  You cannot build anything you don’t have the tools for, which means you need a detailed plan of attack.  You need to think concretely about what you are going to do, in what order, and what will be needed at each stage.  I’m in the middle right now of a fairly complex, involved piece of work that involves a lot of tools and pieces.

Many times I have encountered obstacles that made me want to quit.  I’ve faced problems I didn’t think could be solved.  EVERY TIME I have found a way.  That is my job.  That is what I am paid for.

But here is the thing: in the life of the mind, if you run into an apparently insurmountable obstacle, you can just ignore it.  You can pretend it doesn’t exist.

You can pretend, for example, that we are not facing a major crisis in Medicare, and that no hard decisions have to be made now or in the future.

You can pretend it is possible for everyone to be nice all the time, and to form plans based on it.

If it never touches a tape measure, delusion need have no end.

John McCain and Lindsay Graham (and others) were on board.

What do you call a policy of arming and training violent men which results within a year or two in those arms being turned on civilians for the purpose of mass slaughter?  I don’t think incompetence is strong enough.

And why the fuck were they even wanting boots on the ground in Syria again?  It never made sense to me then, either.  We have no skin in the game.  It doesn’t matter who wins, except to the extent that EVEN  THEN it was obvious that if Assad lost we could expect an Islamist state.