Month: November 2015

I would renounce the goal of overthrowing Assad.  This is illegal, stupid, and unnecessary. I have yet to see anyone defend this policy, or for their part, seen the complicit media push the question.

I would remove all of ISIS sources of income.  I would bomb their oil production, storage and transportation infrastructure until every tanker in their region stood empty because no one would drive them.

I would ask for a volunteer force of at least 2,000 Special Operations folks, and give them all the support–particularly air cover–they needed, and tell them to go hunting.  I would make this a multi-national effort, and although I would want to keep ultimate control over my guys, I would be willing to insert them into a larger joint task force.

I would create an informational campaign to appeal to the civilized, decent, liberal sentiments in particularly the Western populations.  Kids who grow up here by and large do not want to see adulterers stoned, and homosexuals decapitated.  They do not condone slavery, rape, and conquests intended for pillage.  I would employ theologians to figure out how to deemphasize what I would call the demonic elements of their religion at its worst, and the angelic elements of it at its best, which I see embodied in the work of the Sufis.  Most of them were very Muslim, but they focused on a relationship with the One True God, and not so much on killing, raping, and stealing.  No sane person can defend those practices, even if they were equally common among Christians in the 7th Century.  That was a very long time ago.

I would treat all calls for subverting the Constitution in the United States–which is what the call for Sharia is–as treason. I would arrest and jail anyone who publicly proclaimed this.  We have tolerated open treason for far too long.

And I would convene a panel of the worlds most powerful and wealthiest nations, and ask them: what do you want the world to look like in 20 years?  Where do WE want it to go?  Have we not had enough bloodshed?  Can we not call Communism a failure in building a better world?  Can we not grant that freedom is the precondition of any form of dignity for human beings, and its alternative an abomination we should rightly reject?

I would do much more than this–this is just dealing with Islam’s tendency to spin out of control–but this would be a start.

Edit: one thing you will note is that I did not include “bombing”.  Bombing is the tactic used by those who want to create the impression they are doing something, but who are not committed to final victory.  It is not my belief that we need to retake all of ISIS lands with large Army units.  It is my belief that these smug bastards can be made very scared, and to spend most of their time hiding, by an all volunteer force.  That will choke recruitment, and economic violence will choke revenues.  Sooner or later, it will stop seeming like an adventure, and only the goat fuckers will be left, and they will not be hard to deal with.

I have a particular affinity for the Australian SAS.  I suspect no American or European Leftists want to know this, but senior NVA commanders left fairly extensive notes on what worked and what didn’t.  As far as what worked, the Aussies scared the shit out of them.  Americans would send out patrols, make contact, call in air power or artillery, then leave.  The Aussies would stay in place.  They would remain silent.  And they would engage them again and again at close range.  One Spec. Op guy I know said the Aussies he knew in Afghanistan would go on six month patrols.  That is the sort of thing I have in mind.  A sustained commitment, by volunteers.  People who blend, who study their enemies up close, and who, when ready, bring death and destruction.

I have been often tempted to find out if I have any readers, but scared of the prospect that I may not, that I may be preaching to the wind.  I have stats on site visits, but many of them are clearly not humans.  I have no way of tracking how many people subscribe to the feed or emails.

So: humans, is this blog of benefit to you?  Please answer Yes in comments if so.  Anonymous is enabled.

If I get crickets, I will laugh it off, but if not, well, that would make my day.

Edit: crickets it seems to be.  Well, I asked the question because I was prepared for the answer.  I need projects where I interact with actual people.  I realize this whole thing has been a bit–more than a bit–solipsistic.  My talent is and always has been adaptability.  I need to do new things.

And I thought: loneliness does not scare me.  Bring it on.  It is an important part of who I am, and I want to be who I am fully.

And then it occurred to me that healing has two parts.  One is allowing negative emotions to come to conscious awareness, so that I know what I am feeling, so that my unconscious knows it can communicate my emotional needs to me, but the other is building positive energies.  You cannot find the cessation of pain within pain.  This is obvious, but I am only now realizing it.

So I came up with three questions I will look at every day, which I posted on my door, my gateway to the world.

1) How can I make today an adventure and a celebration?

2) How can I inspire good feelings in myself?

3) How can I make everything I do a massage of healing and growth?

If I do say so myself, these are good questions.  Much of our experience during the days and nights of our lives has to do with the questions we don’t even know we are asking.  I think most of the time the main questions are “is this safe?” and “Am I fitting in with everybody?”

With respect to massage, that is the outer meaning of mNye in Kum Nye, but what I am realizing is that in a deeper sense it is something like pleasurable motion, pleasurable contact with the world, something which releases and allows and expands and facilitates motion.

But this whole thing is very interesting.  Tonight, while driving in the dark in the rain, I really noticed how mutable our sense of self really is.  Without realizing it, we transition countless times every day between different gestalts, different internal presentations.

And it occurred to me it would be an interesting meditation to try and bring them all together at once.  I brought my angry self together with my compassionate self and my sad self.  My driven self and my lazy self, and my average self.  My sexual self and my asexual and my average self.  All the contradictions, all the middles.

Who we seem to be, floating through the world, bears roughly the same relation as the color red, then blue, then yellow, then red, bear to pure white light, which is all the colors.

Behind this realization is a deep beauty, and a profound solace and source of joy.  I can feel it, even if I am not there yet.

As a Berkeley graduate, I have spent a lot of time on Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech Movement led by Mario Savio in some respects started the wave of student political involvement that we call “The Sixties”.  It was 1964 or thereabouts, before Johnson had betrayed his election year promise and greatly increased US involvement in Vietnam.

What I think many fail to grasp is that the “1950’s”, at least on my reading, extended to at least 1963 or so.  1964-1966 there were “weirdos” doing drugs and having all-night parties, but they were fringe.  They weren’t liked.

It wasn’t until the year of my birth, 1967, that things really heated up.  I am told whatever that astrological line-up was, the revolutionary mindset, is in my chart too.  And I do think of myself as a conservative revolutionary.

If I might indulge myself in a bit of droll self commentary, there aren’t many of us.

But the point I wanted to make–and I well remember that turning point in the song Alice’s Restaurant, as, again, I am a Berkeley graduate, even if I never had the money to eat at Chez Panisse–is that back then speech truly was limited.  There were many things you could not say.  There were many bounds you could not cross.

Few remember, but Urban Cowboy was X-Rated because without showing it, it implied a young man gave Jon Voigt a blowjob.  I watched an episode of Mr. Robot where in one episode we have a pretty graphic portrayal of gay anal sex, women kissing while on hard drugs, and the hero going through morphine withdrawal.

The Free Speech people got what they wanted.  But even if Savio’s principles were relatively pristine–and I’m not going to take the time tonight to research–those who followed used the path he created to relentlessly push Communist propaganda. This propaganda was allowed, and it cost us the war.

The Vietnam War could have ended after the first failed Tet offensive in 1968.  It was absolutely devastating to the North militarily and psychologically.  They were ready to quit.  We know this, because many of their top commanders wrote memoirs, not a few of them from overseas after falling afoul of the Fascists who got control of the system.

But Jane Fonda and people like her gave them hope.  That is how one phrased us: gave us the hope to continue.

So you push, push, push, so you can openly support the enemies of America–and mankind–then you take over the universities, and you pull, pull, pull, so that you can create free speech free zones, in the hope of gradually expanding them.

Shit, I’m wandering.  I bought the last Odd Thomas book and am enjoying it like all the rest.  I’m going to go read a while, while drinking some decent French wine.

Presumably, the world will be here tomorrow when I, presumably, wake up for the, hold on, 17,520th time.

I have a post I need to make about the Inner and Outer, but maybe tomorrow.  Maybe the next day.

How does one, really, describe a life?  Paper shells.  Everything else is always already gone.  You can’t take a picture of a sunrise.

No, I’m actually not drunk.  Just a long day.  But I still have time!!!!!

This is a deep question. On the surface, for economic reasons.  If they don’t someone else will. It’s all a big race, somewhere.

On a deeper level, we live in a culture which privileges intellect over emotion, where mourning is something that makes people uncomfortable, where even forgetting to put on your emotional mask, and pretending everything is alright makes people uncomfortable.  Authenticity bears a peculiar valence, being both attractive and scary.  Attractive, because it is what we all need.  Scary, because it calls to mind everything that has been swept under the carpet, closeted, closed off, unprocessed, most all of it painful.

In an abstract world, the world of the machine, there is no pain. There are only interesting problems to solve.  AI itself is a very interesting problem, for people fleeing life.

We can ask: when do the robots become the slaves enabling our freedom from work, our freedom of time and creation?  As I read the situation, only if we rework our financial system in a sane and equitable way.  Absent that, we get something like Blade Runner: a dystopia characterized by general impoverishment and pockets of extreme wealth.

And here is the point I started to make: can we not point to all our gadgets as “parents” of a sort which, in always being there, ready to guide us, make it less necessary to use judgement for decisions?  Any opinion you want, you can find preformatted to your liking on the internet.  You don’t need to carry facts in your head, when they are just a search away.  You don’t need maps: it’s all on the phone.  You don’t need to think: the experts have done it for you.

Once you accept your phone as a repository of truth, you have become the perfect peon, the perfect pawn.

I would say that technology itself is contributing to the manifest infantilizing of our youth, as is the quasi-industrial demand for perennial and ubiquitous safety.

You can’t grow sharp people in rubber rooms.

Me, my hope is to find my home in a perennial center soon.  All time and all space are always present.  It is possible to connect both with this world, and with something beyond.  I feel this clearly.  One can only hope where this world is concerned that some benevolent Tao is flowing through it now.  One can hope that somehow, somewhere, biologists allow a new, field based theory of life to come into being.  That the world of people like Cleve Backster is studied, and the appropriate lessons learned.

The enemy of this is the emotional weakness of “scientists” who have a deeply rooted need to own life, to own the unviverse, by being able to reduce it to a machine with rules they have deciphered.  This is not how this universe works, though, so violence is inevitable; indeed, only violence has kept the truth hidden thus far: violence to new ideas, violence to unorthodox people.  As it has always been.

Socialism is at root an emotional search for a community which the very intellectualism and following unprocessed emotion that gave rise to the idea, make impossible.  No connections are made.  Whenever and wherever Communists succeed, people become objects.  The objectification of humanity, the reduction of every person to a 1) price in Capitalism or 2) use in Socialism, is simultaneously precisely what they claim to want to avoid, and the necessary consequence of their perceptual failures, their unrecognized and unchallenged manias and delusions.

What would appeal to you more: 1) living in a hut with a dirt floor with people with whom you are deeply emotionally connected, doing work which has intrinsic meaning and feeling to you, and surrounded in a small village with like-minded people who share some sort of belief and ritual system that allows the regular expression of emotion, of joy, of celebration; 2) living in an efficiently designed, energy conserving gray home, by yourself, and plugging yourself daily into a slot in a machine?  Can there be a debate?

I read once on a bathroom stall that “Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals”.  If I take that at face value, what I find is that the IDEA serves to deaden emotional pain.  It places the eventual release of primitive emotions some time in the future, where there is this ill defined–because laughably unrealistic–place and way of being in which that person can be free, where they can freely exchange love and affection, where there is no large scale grief and pain, where living is easy.

All the actual things socialists want can be had within Capitalism.  In fact, that is the ONLY way they can get them.  But the entire project of actually improving humanity, of improving society, depends upon the individual work of learning to see things as they are, of knowing ourselves, of deciphering our true needs and desires, and of understanding that nothing worthwhile is built overnight, and that what is built overnight–particularly using the violence which is the default mode of utopians–is not worthwhile.

I might summarize this by noting that no one can run forever.