Month: June 2015

I was reading comments on an article at Blue Nation Review–doesn’t matter the one—and they were uniformly ignorant and self righteous, like always.  I started to do my thing, to put together a coherent counter-argument, to state the facts they were assiduously ignoring, to say the things their groupthink was evolving out of their consciousness as possibilities, and then it hit me: stupid people are stupid because they can’t imagine any other way to be.  They cannot imagine anything else they could believe.

And they are very happy, having reached simple and clear certainties they never have to question.  Why would they look outside their circle for anything?

And by telling them they are stupid, I can only be attacking them as people, even if I justify my claims with enormous efforts at facts and reason.  None of that matters.  Logically, if there is only one possibility, and someone disagrees with it, then they are haters.  And there is no reason to listen to haters.

I often fear for the future obviously.  It is frustrating to me to see such–to my way of thinking, which I can justify at length, and which I have often exposed to criticism–idiotic and dangerous ideas proposed so often and so enthusiastically.

There is no reason 90% of the stores on Main Street might not be shuttered in 10 years if nothing changes.

There is no reason this nation, from coast to coast, might not be filled with the sighs of the hopeless and the dispirited, helpless in the face of an omnipotent government which alone provides salvation.

Everything is in place for a crash.  Fed policy cannot be made more easy, and they have been pumping $50 billion a month into the economy for most of Obama’s tenure.

But as tempting as it is to feel I am doing SOMETHING in engaging with these people, the fact is I am not. I am in important ways completely helpless in the face of stubborn and proud imbecility.

It is time for me to acknowledge this fully and finally.  There is no reason I can’t write a book, and no reason I can’t start doing presentations to people who will listen to me.  There is no reason I can’t continue sending emails to economists, and working on my other projects.

But I need to be realistic.  I have never been. I have more to say, but will say it in the next post.

I have had a productive day, in my terms.  I set up an internal process that is already bearing fruit.  I will likely post on that at some point.

But I wanted to comment on PTSD.  The way it works is you can only be traumatized once, no matter how many traumatic events you have in your life.  That one time, that first time, causes you to create a room within yourself that is not public, that is beyond the reach of intruding emotions.  It is a zone of relative safety.

But this room comes with rent. There is a psychic cost to maintaining it.  And the more trauma you have, the harder and harder the beating on the door.  If it ever breaks fully, then that is a psychotic breakdown.  It is taking you beyond the breaking point.

Short of that, though, there is a lot of psychic energy that has to go into keeping it closed.  All of this pulls energy out of your daily life. It makes you less energetic, less open emotionally, and often depressed.  Fear leaks out under the door that cannot be fully ignored.

I may or may not have posted this story before: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/what-the-war-did-to-andy-19691231

In my view, when he put that electrical cord in his mouth at age 4, he got PTSD.  It gave him access to emotional dissociation, and practice in performing despite lacking some common emotions.  It likely made him better as an operator, but also unable to process in any meaningful way what happened to him, which was the fatal chink in his armor.

In coming years, if we survive the efforts of the Left, the Globalists, and the Islamists to destroy everything decent in the world, we will, I think, come to realize that pre-verbal PTSD is much more common that we has supposed.  In my dreams, we develop ways to identify it and treat it effectively.

The struggle I have been through could have been much shorter, but the categories I needed did not exist in any of the many dozens–likely hundreds–of books I read, or in the minds of any of the “professionals” I paid to help me.

Everyone carries marks of childhood–and not infrequently adult experience–with them.  Your experience dictates how you move in space.  Everyone has their own posture, or acture, as Feldenkrais called it, which is precisely those modifications your experience compelled on you from normal, relaxed, optimized movement. In point of fact, and to make a brief turn to the negative, in additional to facial recognition, the people who are foolish enough to gladly participate in using the pretext of terrorism to build a perfect authoritarian state are working on gait analysis, so that even if your face is covered or altered, how you WALK can still be identified.  Hiding will become very, very difficult.  I have thought about this: even if you walk differently, use molds to change your face, and wear sunglasses, the technology will evolve to where, if they can identify everyone BUT you, then you stand out for that reason alone.  It is my considered view that a huge part of the value of “anti-terrorism” is that the EXACT same tools that can be used against people who are overwhelmingly not trying to attack us, can be used to build a perfect Orwellian state.  There will be no escape but death.

So, with that happy thought, not entirely irrelevant, it occurs to me that we all have a mix of emotions that can best be viewed as a solution.  They are dissolved in our everyday experience, and combine in ways which are constant and hard to see and define.  Fear, for example, can be inferred as much by what you feel, as in what you choose not to see. Its presence can be inferred by negative hallucinations, where people fail to see what is right in front of them.  Such a person may otherwise seem fear-free, but they are not.

A principle task in spiritual/emotional growth is isolating through precipitation those emotions which are not desired, which impede open and happy expression.  In my case, I have found that a primal fear underlies my tendencies towards anger, depression, and anxiety, all of which spring from a common root.

In my last post, what I was describing, I realize, is a precipitate of fear.  This is an unambiguously good thing, from a personal growth perspective.  I have isolated and concentrated it, and I can now deal with it on its own terms.  I have some terrible nights, but have noticed the past few days I have been quite calm during the day.

This whole process is as difficult as an analogous chemical reaction, but it is needed.  Alchemy was held in mystical reverence for a reason.

I realized this morning that I have nightmares without the content.  I taught myself to fight all evil creatures in my dreams.  Nothing chases me.  Nothing attacks me that I don’t attack back.

But I sometimes–and last night was an example–mainline fear.  It is like fear–really terror–was concentrated and injected into me.  And I have all the normal reactions.  I shout out, I shake.  I more or less literally fell out of bed twice last night and wound up shaking on the floor.  Not pleasant.  And I verbalize in weird ways I won’t try to describe, but this is the main feature that makes me think this is most likely PTSD, and not some other ailment, like heart trouble, or metabolic derangement, or sleep apnea.  I had some particularly odd experiences last night I won’t describe, but which were completely inconsistent with any of those diagnoses.  It is not something I have seen described anywhere.  I continue to most trust myself as my own therapist.

And you live with something long enough, you begin to show contempt for it.  And its source is changing.  It was in my legs, then my belly, now it is in my heart region.  There is an energy of panic and being startled/terrified just floating around there, somewhat randomly.  This dovetails with my current Kum Nye practice, which is oriented around releasing areas of holding.  This iteration I am again working on the belly, but now the face as well, and implicitly everything in between.

I am going to need to focus on positive things for a period of time.  I am going to need to focus on sleeping through the night, which will include eradicating blood sugar issues (not a big factor, but may be a factor), getting more consistent in my Kum Nye, and overall reducing for the time being the number of things I am worrying about.  I worry about global events that I can little affect, and certainly not control.  All that tension and anxiety adds up.  It accumulates, and there is some part of me that is the perfect place to receive it.

Google Chrome has an app called StayFocused.  I’m not a big fan of Google–after all, they were Obamas’s biggest campaign contributor and employ Ray Kurzweil–but if I want to use only politically and economically sane technology companies, I am pretty much SOL.  Anyway, I’m going to block all my political sites, and only allow 15 minutes a day on Facebook until I can sleep all night.

Edit: Stayfocused wasn’t doing shit–it was not counting down on the sites I blocked–and I then realized it allows Google to track me in even finer detail than before, and they have NO way of removing it from Chrome, once installed.  So I switched to Firefox, and am simply going to try and control myself.

Correction: you CAN remove this extension.  I still don’t like Google, but I try to tell the truth about things.

And I’m going to try and watch a comedy nightly.

I read through the list of attendees, and I have to say, I think there is another convention somewhere else that the actual power elite are going to.  The Prime Minister of Belgium?  Yes, Eric Schmidt is there, and some Goldman Sachs folks, but surely any good mind would have to grant that with the secrecy gone, with more protesters showing up every year, sooner or later they would convene a separate meeting somewhere else, in actual privacy, and actual secrecy?  They keep this show going, so no one is the wiser, but re-Bilderberg the Bilderberg conference.

Specifically, I’m wondering where Bill Gates is. And Jamie Dimon.

I think Jekyll Island would be quite appropriate.  It has a history of secret machinations.

I just finished watching Kieslowski’s Blue.  It is the best treatment of the process of grief and mourning I have ever seen.  It was hard to watch at times, but ultimately redemptive.  I don’t know who the composer was, but the music was quite beautiful.

And it occurs to me that a principal challenge I have faced is both the presence of grief, and the fact that it is linear.  A typical cycle of grieving is life-death-life.  I started with death.

I have done the thought-work of creating a complete world for myself, cognitively.  I have developed a moral code, and comprehensive worldview.  I have understood myself deeply, down to a very, very primitive level.  I know where I come from.

But it seems to me now that the only way forward is to allow myself to touch moving water and let it guide me into something new.  Will will not avail me in this process.  This is my truth, today.  Acceptance must be my truth today.

I got one emailed response, from a professor at Princeton:


See http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben-bernanke/posts/2015/06/01-monetary-policy-and-inequality?utm_campaign=Brookings+Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=18033774&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9I1V72Q9tmsfGTm8FMVMGPSwgTOe8AvxzNmZGQE1LEnd82_0lo35H8WTfmNPH_gNQk6N7x2nOusEaksvIl5Vc6rB2_DA&_hsmi=18033774

I just took a chance.  I sent a DVD on 9/11 to someone I figured would be pissed off at me.  It’s unclear if that’s what happened, but preliminary indirect indications are yes. Yes, plus fucking ignorance: he didn’t watch it, goddamn it.

Here is my position: it obviously takes balls to run into enemy fire, and face death.  But you are running with a lot of other people.  You are doing EXACTLY what you were trained to do, what you were brainwashed to do, to do reflexively without thinking about it.  You are conforming to the behavior of everyone around you.  Particularly given your training, it is in many respects easier to do what is expected, than what would otherwise be natural.

When you are taking an unpopular position, you are not, in most cases, in danger of death.  No blood will flow.  No letters will be written to next of kin.  This is all to the good.

But you will be hated.  You will be attacked verbally and often implicitly threatened physically.  You are doing the opposite of what your cohort otherwise would have wanted you to do.  You are swimming against the current.  You have no companions.  No one has your back.  You must fear people swarming around you in open contempt.

This is not death.  This is an important point.  BUT, I think many people would sooner face physical death than censure by those around them.

I think most people would sooner face bullets with their friends, than hard decisions, alone, on contentious topics.

This is, to take a Spockian perspective, illogical.  One case may kill you.  The other may merely embarrass you.  But I feel strongly, based on long term personal observation, that this is the case.

People very simply do not want to be the only ones saying something.  They do not want to feel that solitude.  They do not want to endure that neglect and ire.

My fear is slowly falling away.  This means I give less and less fucks every day.  If people want to be willfully  ignorant imbeciles, with a nod to Yogi Berra, nobody is going to stop them.

I was a drunk when I made that last post.  I’m trending that way right now.

But I’ve spent about 12 hours driving between yesterday and today, and done a fair amount of thinking.  I’ll have more posts, but thought I’d revisit my last one.

I travel lines.  I travel them doggedly, mercilessly, like a chase dog pursuing prey.  I go wherever the logic or facts lead me.  I smash preconceptions.  They are useless to the task of perception.

And what if a travel a path a certain distance, and wind up in a place where people call me crazy?  What if I travel more, and they call me sane again?  And then I travel more and now I am insane again?  Then more, and now I am sane?

Does my passion, attention, capacity, or intelligence differ along that trip?  No: what varies is my conformity to views most people have simply imbibed somewhere, from either an unserious source, or someone willfully trying to skew their perception.

You have to be willing to be called crazy to be capable of anything approaching sanity.  Most people are terrified of public opinion, and this makes them stupid/crazy.

that’s it.

What a cage, “sanity”.

Do we not live in an endless universe, and do we not all die?  Both of these facts, somehow, miraculously, can still be forgotten by the determined.

I don’t forget.  It’s not one of my attributes.  I remember everything.

Or at least I think I do.  How could I know for sure?