Month: February 2015

I would like to call again for a Congressional investigation as to what, if any, training and arms were provided to ISIS when they were pretending to be “Syrian Rebels”.  My memory is not short.  It is not confined to the news cycle.  I remember Obama and Hillary trying to get us to share trenches, blood, and bullets with the very same people who even then were dismembering Christian children because it amused them.

Why would they have NOT have given “our allies” training and material support?  This seems to have been the whole point of Benghazi–to funnel arms–and why would some training not have come with it?  As I have seen very knowledgeable commentator note, somewhere around 2012-2013, the ragtag “rebels” suddenly learned how to maneuver in larger groups, which is what enabled them to conquer the territories they have.

And while I’m at it, a brief word on Gitmo.  Only lunatics would argue that serial rapist and murderers should be free to roam the streets of America.  We recognize that some people have to be put away for life, and in point of fact thousands if not tens of thousands of violent felons have been thus incarcerated.  Had he not been executed, Ted Bundy would still be in prison.

Why, then, is Gitmo objectionable?  Granted, everyone should receive a trial by military tribunal.  I categorically, absolutely support that.  Standards of evidence should be relaxed, given the chaotic circumstances of war, but some evidentiary hearings should be done, with everyone.

But having done that, they are no different than the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world: they need to stay in jail for the safety of everyone.

I read our brilliant government has put a $5 million bounty on a someone WE RELEASED.  Who, anywhere, can justify such imbecility?  Yes, I get that no leftist anywhere gives a shit about brown people killing brown people–they are so hard to tell apart.

But surely such lunatics remain the exception even in the Obama Administration?  

I thought the last post was a bit off.  I would of course like to define as wrong all Meaning systems I don’t personally agree with, but that is inconsistent with my belief in freedom of movement.

Better is possible.  How is this: Meaning is a felt sense combined with a chosen path which combines to create a sense of Flow with regard to an ACTUAL goal.

Now, the ACTUAL goal does what I need it to do.  The purpose of Democart/Communist politics is not to help people. It is not to remediate racism, alleviate poverty, further global peace, or foster social harmony.  Those are merely propaganda memes.

The PURPOSE, the actual purpose, is to get your people in power and implement their policies.  These people and these policies care only about continued survival.  They are not oriented around an actual GOAL.  They ARE the goal.  Power IS the purpose.

Now, yes, this, too, is a goal, but it is one which contradicts the stated purpose.  The goal is a lie, and no coherent, USEFUL sense of meaning can be built on a lie.  That, I think–and I feel I will need to revise this again–is what I mean by an Ersatz meaning system: one based on self deception.

Imagine global peace, global prosperity, and a world filled with tolerance and equality before the law.

What do you do with yourself?  What purpose or purposes of living would you choose?

It is my contention that many solvable problems are not solved because the people controlling the discussion NEED those problems not just to keep political power, but for a sense of purpose.

Poverty, for example: two parent homes, sound money, free markets.  Done.  After a time, even two parent homes would not be needed.

Global Warming: nothing but the umpteenth resurgence of Malthusianism (aka Dismalism), trotted out because it serves an EMOTIONAL need on the part of many, which in no small measure is the need for centralized control and the “freedom through unfreedom” it implies, itself a Meaning System constructed by imbeciles.

This is where atheism is vastly inferior both scientifically and existentially. It is inferior scientifically because it uses a 19th century world view as its model.  People were shoveling coal into train cars when this world view took hold, and cars had not yet been invented.  Indians roamed the American South, and buffalo herds could be seen to the horizon.

Existentially because you remove from the table all possible purposes which cannot be found within a single lifetime. Practically,  what are left are engagement with work, estheticism, and “changing the world”.  But it is my contention that all tend to acquire an unhealthy dose of fanaticism, precisely because on a deep emotional level they have rejected free will, meaning of any transcendent sort, and connection of more than an animal nature (perhaps disguised as congenial intellectual compatibility).  We are talking animals, and animals themselves are merely cleverly constructed biological machines.  It is a dismal world view.

All poorly constructed Meaning Systems should be viewed merely as facades, as shells, as plastic on the outside, and nothing on the inside.  I have room for countless viable and good Meaning Systems, but any which fosters compulsions which squelch genuine curiosity, which become ends in themselves, should be discarded after careful analysis.

Problems exist to be solved.  They do not exist to pull us away from our existential, spiritual work.  The formation of true, authentic meaning is a problem, and it can be solved.  I can’t solve it for you, but I can point to failures.  And do, often.

The argument I want to make, I think, is this: trauma–true trauma, which is a short circuit in the nervous system–comes with a masking element.  It hides, or tends to.  Part of the self splits off, and becomes dormant, and we don’t notice this because it is a primal part of us, not needed directly to function day to day.

But its silence must be bought.  It must be fed.  Evil–taking pleasure in the pain of others–activates this primal instinct which is not that different than that which leads lions to tear apart gazelles and devour them. It is a rage and a satiation. It is compulsive precisely because it does not partake in higher consciousness, in the front cortex.  It is an instinctual hunger.

I have posted that–at least in my understanding of Peter Levine’s contention–neurologically, the circuits activated by curiosity are the opposite of those which store trauma.  To be curious is to engage precisely in an open and free way, versus engaging in a hostile and disconnected way.  Curiosity heals trauma, or at least reduces it.

Logically, then, curiosity is the most important virtue, as it is the virtue most directly opposed to the psycho-neural circuitry which conceives and perpetrates evils of all sorts, from racism to war to rape.

This has been my intuitive, “gut” sense for some time, but I think I can now rationalize it using words and concepts readily available in the public domain.

It is precisely a lack of curiosity which permits generalized anger and all the cognitive distortions it enables.  Put another way, a curious society is a good society.

And in what political form can curiosity most readily be pursued?  Freedom.  This means that morally freedom is necessary for true Goodness, as is an immense tolerance for diversity of all sorts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T8Vya-Znf0  Tee Tot Song

Rufus Payne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Payne

Little Hank Williams learned a lot of what he knew from a black man playing the blues.

For his part Jimmie Rodgers also hung around a lot of black folks when he “worked” (he got fired for doing something close to nothing but different than the day before) at the railroad.

Inescapable conclusion: substantially all American music originated in the South with at least substantial influence by black Americans.

As Muddy Waters sang, the blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll.

The babies older brother was country music.

Here is one more fun fact: Elsie McWilliams actually wrote many if not most of Jimmie Rodgers songs. It’s not entirely clear how many, since she never wanted credit.  Jimmie is often called the father of country music.  Maybe it had a mother, or at least parents.

Certainly, the impression I got visiting the Jimmie Rodgers museum in Meridian, talking with the curator, was that if not for Elsie, no Jimmie, and if not for Jimmie, possibly a very different, less rich musical history for the past 100 or so years.  He pointed to her piano and said “that’s where country music began.”

You know, giving birth to something is the hard part.  Adapting it, tweaking it, changing it: these are often needed to make something USEFUL.  But without that original Promethean fire: little or nothing.

God bless the creators.  May everyone on Earth one day become one.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau has found that more than four Dalit women are raped every day across the country. Dalit Media Watch, a group that reports on crimes against India’s lowest caste, has reported that two Dalits are assaulted, murdered and have their homes torched every hour.

But the reality may be far worse than the statistics show: “The national figures are grossly under reported since many cases of rape of Dalit women are not even registered,” says Pratap Kumar, a Dalit rights activist in Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “Conviction is a distant dream for many,” 

Here is another resource: http://www.overcomingviolence.org/en/resources/campaigns/women-against-violence/now-we-are-fearless/dalit-fact-sheet.html

Although Indian law prohibits discrimination and violence against Dalit people, in reality atrocities are a daily occurrence.

• 13 Dalits are murdered each week. 

• 5 Dalit homes are burnt each week.

• 6 Dalit people are kidnapped or abducted each week. 

• 21 Dalit women raped each week.   

It is estimated that a crime is committed against a Dalit person every 18 minutes. The problem not the law but the lack of political will, at local and national levels, to apply these laws. In 2006, the official conviction rate for Dalit atrocity cases was just 5.3%.
Social discrimination is also a major problem. Dalit people are considered ‘untouchable’; most higher caste people would not marry a Dalit, invite them into their home or share food with them.

• Dalit children sit separately from other children in schools.  Almost 1 out of every 3 government school in rural areas prohibit children from sitting together.

• Dalits are prevented from entering police stations in 27.6% of rural villages,

• Public health workers refuse to enter Dalit homes in 1 out of 3 rural villages,

• Almost half of Dalit villages are denied access to water sources,

• Dalit and non-Dalit people cannot eat together in 70% of rural villages

Dalit women experience triple discrimination based on their caste, their economic situation and their gender.

• 70% of Dalit women are illiterate in rural India

• Thousands of girls are forced into prostitution before they reach puberty. .

The International Dalit Solidarity Network states “ Violence, including sexual assault, is used by dominant castes as a social mechanism for humiliating entire Dalit communities.”

13 a week works out to 672 a year.  Let’s compare this to the lynchings in the South:

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black.  The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched.  These numbers seem large, but it is known that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded.  Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched.  That is only 27.3%.  

This works out to 55 a year, 40 for blacks. (It’s worth noting that there were periods of white lynchings, for example a number of Germans were lynched when we declared war in WW1).

Let’s compare this number to South Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid 

I can’t find good numbers in the time I am allocating to this exercise, but it looks like 70-odd were killed in Sharpsville, and there were occasional massacres in following decades, with perhaps a 1,000 dead.  Steven Biko, if memory serves, was tortured to death, and of course there were atrocities like the South Africans taking pages from the Communist playbook and relocating millions of Africans to places where they were poor, and unable to effectively sustain themselves.

Net: NOTHING in modern history, in a developed democracy, comes close to the scale of these atrocities.

Why, then, is no one talking about them?  Why, as an educated, reasonably aware and switched on person did I only recently become aware of this?

Simple: brown on brown violence does not fit the narrative that Soviet propaganda disseminated, that white imperialists were somehow uniquely evil, rather than uniquely good as colonizers.  Empires, violence, conquests: these are older than history.

What is rare is conquerors reforming themselves morally.  What are rare are attempts at empathy and connection.  What is rare is GUILT.  Historically, only white Europeans suffer from this, by and large (although one could of course cite people like Ashoka).

This is why I spoke of Leftist hypocrisy in the last post. They want to relive the American 1960’s because it was a period of relative moral clarity.  What they do not want to do is ask themselves to live by consistent moral standards and to apply those standards around the world.  They don’t CARE about the women raped by upper caste vegetarians, because they don’t know about them, and they don’t know about them because their thought leaders don’t want them to know.

I recently spent a week touring the Deep South.  Rather, I had work there, and as usual planned some sight seeing.

I visited Jefferson Davis’s final home, Beauvoir, in or right next to Biloxi, Mississippi. It is quite literally as far south as it can be, sitting right on the beach, or as close as prudent in an area prone to hurricanes; and of course in the State in my mind at least most associated with the Antebellum South.

Two things caught my attention.  One, he was married to Zachary Taylor’s daughter, who died three months after they were married, leaving a seemingly permanent hole in his psyche.

Second, and much, much more importantly, he was arrested after the Civil War, and placed in prison for two years without charge.  The obvious charge would have been treason, but he was never tried.  Why?

BECAUSE THE COURTS MIGHT HAVE VINDICATED SECESSION.  The right to secede has never been argued before the Supreme Court, in my understanding.  Lincoln simply DECLARED it illegal, and with a solidly Republican Congress behind him (all the Democrats, by and large, left with the South), was able to get war declared and waged.

Legally, though, the case has never been put before a high court, or so I believe.

It is of course impossible to defend slavery.  It is quite possible to put it in context by noting that it was then and remains common in the Islamic world, and that slavery has been a feature of life for all of human history.  What we know of the Roman Republic comes from a Greek slave, Polybius.  The Spartans depended on slaves for their ability to train warfare full time.  Most of the major cities in Ireland were established by Viking slavers, who bought the slaves created when one Irish clan or tribe defeated another.  The word slave comes from Slav, since so many Slavs were enslaved particularly for the Ottomans.  Etc.  The world over you find this.

At the same time, I believe NSA spying on every American was made possible by Appamattox.  Our Founding Fathers read history, and they understood that power tends to concentrate, and having concentrated, it tends to increase, in a manner quite similar to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Who could have imagined 100 years ago that literally every public communication in the country might be subject to the scrutiny of a Secret Police?  Our cell phones are tracking devices, which can be used as microphones for eavesdropping.  Every telephone call can be monitored.  Every email, every fax.  Some people even have wired in Kinect’s or Wii’s, that transmit EVERYTHING going on in your living room, in an EXACT replication of Orwell’s Big Brother.

Historically, it is clear that the Supreme Court has been the most proximate agent of tyranny.  Even now, it has not rendered an opinion on NSA spying, which if it is not violating the 4th Amendment, we may as well throw that Amendment out.

But all of the massive vitiations of Constitution were enabled by the after-math of the Civil War, specifically the Amendments passed by Congress after the Civil War granting the Federal government rights it had not previously possessed.  Were the goals admirable?  Of course.  But they were also long lasting, and have worked today for the concentration of an increasingly abusive and unaccountable Federal government.

Without the Civil War and its after-math you could not have a Roe v. Wade (not everyone realizes that this ruling was derived entirely from the Bill of Rights and one prior case ruling designed specifically to engineer this bench legislation) or Obamacare. One can certainly argue the merits of both, but my view was and continues to be that the only possible resolution of complex moral problems is through distributed solutions.  Let Texas be Texas and Oregon Oregon.  Anyone who dislikes their climate sufficiently can move to more congenial places.

But slavery.  Here is my take: did slavery end with the Union victory?  Did blacks benefit in immediate and measurable ways?  Did they?  Do you know?  What happened to them after the war?

The South was wrecked, culturally, economically, politically.  Everyone became more poor. And who was most poor to begin with?  Blacks.  What did most former slaves do to earn a living?  Share-crop.  Was this better?  Hard to say, but it was certainly not a large improvement.

Fast forward to Brown versus the Board of Education.  The Supreme Court mandates integration, despite the fact that this policy likely would not have made it through Congress or southern legislatures.  The problem is so huge, they effectively said, that SOMETHING must be done.  Something must be done.

And they did something.

And Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending legal segregation and discrimination.

And Affirmative Action policies came into being, policies which actively and openly discriminated against whites (and eventually Asians).  Progress, right?

Where, now, today, do most blacks live?  What is their average socio-economic status relative to the rest of the country?  What is their average income?  What does their typical home look like?  What is their average level of education?  At what rate do they get Ph.D’s?  As a group, what are their cultural ideals?  Who are their heroes?

Frederick Douglas had balls and vision.  Martin Luther King, Jr. had balls and vision.  Is Black America where they would have wanted them to be?  What do you think?

Here is my contention: complex social systems can only evolve in helpful, hopeful, useful ways when they evolve gradually.  If you pull out a hammer and follow the Fabian vision of change (I had actually not until this moment realized that both hammer and sickle are also weapons), it doesn’t take.  It is like a hollandaise sauce that clumps up (I have lots of experience with this).  It’s not only not optimal, it can even be retrogressive.

No one can call the Civil Rights movement a success who looks at the plight of blacks today, and in my view no one can blame anything but the destructive ideas of restitution and self pity which leftists implanted for use in their own political games.

Finally, one last reflection. The Antebellum South was in some respects a caste system.  You had the rich plantation owners. the soldiers, the businessmen, the poor farmers, and the slaves.  It was not unlike India, with its Untouchables.

I bring this up because I recently read about India’s on-going violence against so-called Untouchables.  It is horrific, and as bad or worse than anything done to blacks in the South.  Here is one article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html

People watch Selma and they cry, and they cry as if America is the only nation in the history of the world to commit crimes.  No: we are the MOST MORAL, because we have deeply moral impulses en masse, and because our crimes are admitted publicly, and atoned for.  There is a monument to the Selma march in Montgomery.  There are Civil Rights monuments throughout Mississippi and Alabama.  I saw many of them.

Who is speaking, today, about the 160 million Indians living virtually without rights?

The hypocrisy of the Left is nauseating.  I’ll leave it there.

Watch two tiger cubs playing.  Then watch two boys rough-housing.  It is the same behavior, and serves the same purpose: it sharpens their senses, forms mind-body connections, and increases emotional intimacy (although granted, of course, these get deployed differently).

Picture a Hungry God.  Picture Moloch, who was believed to consume children in fire.  Hunger is a human trait.  Why would it be a trait of gods?

The more I grow as a person, the more important I feel is the “gut brain” (the Vagus Nerve and Dorsal Vagal System, in my understanding of Peter Levine’s taxonomic description) in human life.

We are animals, are we not?  We share large segments of our DNA with mammals in particular, and we evolved from more primitive forms.  As I have often said, it is my STRONG contention that the overwhelming evidence favors a field theory of life, which clearly played a role in directing evolution, which is in important respects intelligent (this article, because it is able at least to guess at a materialistic solution, discusses the problems with the orthodox narratives), but the truth still remains that we are animals.

We evolved to eat, to survive, to enter into conflict, to bond.  And in my view, Moloch is a projection of a primal gut instinct to eat.  There is something insect-like in us, something worm-like, something dis-gusting (look again at that word) in us, which is in our gut.  It is almost like an intruder, if we choose to treat it that way.

And this is the problem with modern life, in my evolving view: we have taken the anger, the violence, the primal ENGAGEMENT with life out of it, and an important part of us, a primal, unthinking, unspeaking, completely unnuanced part of us misses it.

One could perhaps think of sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice, as war waged within a civil order, a managed, staged, ritualized war, but a war nonetheless.  Lives are lost.  Carthage was an advanced civilization for the time, but they seem to have immolated children, in what most today would view as a sort of Satanism.

And speaking of war itself, do we not constantly invoke SACRIFICE (which I note periodically means “act of the sacred”)?  Can we perhaps speak of those thrown into battle as human sacrifices of a sort?

I tend to believe America tends to wage wars not based in primal anger, primal violence, but I know from firsthand accounts that many of our soldiers develop a taste for it.  They like it.  I remember talking with a couple of West Point graduates at my bar, and they kept volunteering to go back.  They said it got in their blood.

I would argue this tingling of anticipation, this sense of not knowing where some large emotionally charged event is going to go, FEEDS our gut brain.  Combat is in some respects exhilarating for some.  It is a rush they can’t get any other way. And many of these people are otherwise psychologically normal.  They are not sociopaths, who would get off more on the death and destruction part of it, that they can feed by torturing small animals or serially seducing and abusing women.

War plays an important role in the human psyche.  We (most Americans) have not seen war on our soil in well over 100 years.  Not in the lifetime of anyone.  And how have we reacted?  Go look at your local Red Box, and see what people are watching.

Horror movies feed this beast, just like sacrifice does, just like war can.

I was in Napa a month or two ago, St. Helena to be specific, and there was a giant poster of a demon king of sorts posted in the window of one of the Main Street businesses, a design firm if I’m not mistaken.  It was the sort of thing you would expect on the wall of a Satanic temple.

And I thought: this is logical.  I am in a Sybaritic Paradise, the place where pleasure and congeniality reign.  Why wouldn’t dark, deep spirits come to be needed?  We NEED to feed this beast.  It will not be ignored.

And to get to the purported topic of this post, I woke up yesterday thinking about all the apocalyptic thinking and imagining going on: Mad Max, Hunger Games, Divergent.

Add to this Biblical imaginings: an End Time, a reign of fear for the unbelievers, chaos on the face of the Earth: Left Behind.

And I think this myth, too (we need not fall into chaos; death and destruction need not be our collective fate), serves to feed this beast.  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME, the pious, the calm, the bored, the sybaritic will face demons worth fighting.  They will activate their core, abusive, indefensible, violent, protean selves and fight to live or die trying (add hip-hop to the drama of war, and the gangster mythos).

This, I am convinced, is Freud’s Thanatos.  It is deeply biological.

At the same time, I view we are animal spirits.  We are mired in the mud of unfreedom, of instinct, of emotions based on biological heritage.  At the same time, we are SPIRITS here.  We have free will, a little bit.  What our freedom is, is to choose within a range of options what direction we want to evolve.  We hve perhaps 10%, perhaps 1%, perhaps 99% freedom.  Who can know?  But we counter the gravity of heritage with what I like to call “Non-Statistical Coherence”, which is to say, we have the power to negate our programming, to some extent.  We can defy expectations, and go in new directions.  And it is likely the more we exercise our free will, the more of it we get.  It is like building flexibility in your body.  You may not start with much, but change happens gradually over time.

And how do we tame this restless spirit?  How do we tame this primal pit into which we have always thrown unwilling sacrifices violently?

I feel the answer is engagement.  Ponder the image of the Wind-Horse, the Tibetan symbol for Goodness.  It is a racing horse with a radiant jewel on its back.  Become this horse.  Feel the wind blowing by you as you race across a high plain.  Feel the thrill of motion, the engagement, being fully in the moment.

Or put yourself on a catamaran, at full speed, racing on the ocean.  Every sense is engaged, every emotional pore is open.  You are excited, thrilled, successful, and finally rested.  You feed the beast, then you  rest.

This is living well.

The sense of flow, of excitement, of engagement: these feed the beast, in my view.  It can’t be just intellectualism.  It can’t be thought alone.  This in fact suppressed the beast, which will then come out in ugly ways.  You become a Communist.  You become a Nazi, like a famous and ugly director recently admitted.

You cannot not feel.  Our bodies see to that.  If we remove some part of our body–our SELF, to be clear–from conscious awareness, it intrudes in disturbances in our thought.  It is like a rock in a stream.  It disrupts the flow of water.  The water still flows, so you may not notice.  But what might have been–the beauty or clarity that might have been–is not, and you neither notice it nor correct it, if your destiny is to be in the thrall of ugly emotions, as for example von Trier seems to be.

These are in my view deep thoughts, that are getting close to the root of the human condition.

If everyone is included, no one is included.

If everyone is inside, then outside has no meaning.

As always, the emotionally detached narrative of egalitarianism, works to, in a Hayekian sense, and in my personal opinion, alienation, precisely because it does not recognize the biological imperative of tribalism.

It argues it is an anti-tribalism, but in my assessment and experience, they would be unable to cohere in any way without constant violence directed at the supposed “haters”.

It is a little known fact, but in my recollection a quite true one, that Hitler intended to build a museum detailing Jewish culture: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/hitlers-proposed-museum-of-an-extinct-race/

Even if he had succeeded in killing all Jews, there still would have been a place to come to hate their memory, and commemorate, together, the victory of the National Socialists in their eugenic success.

Dogs are friendly animals, but not to strangers.  There are a couple dogs that bark at me and my dogs every morning when I walk them.  Those same dogs are no doubt very friendly inside the house.  Dogs are territorial animals.  You can train it out of them, but they are born that way.  My dog, every time that dog barks at us, pees on the ground, then does a ritual claw dig, throwing grass behind her, every time.  She is marking her territory, saying “you get that; I get this.  You claim that for your master: I claim this for my master.”  She was born that way.  I did not teach her to do this obviously, although I could in theory train it out of her.

I would consider these observations facts, and worth treating as such.  Any successful purposive activity must, in my view, begin with important truths.