Month: January 2016

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/19/unitedhealth-group-earnings-downgrade-obamacare-affordable-care-act/76040322/

In my own, I think reasonably clear eyed, estimation, I am pretty smart.  I wrote one piece on Obamacare back in 2009, and another I want to say in 2012, during the Presidential election.

I was not wrong.  Virtually all complex systems have codes which unlock them, prisms through which they can be viewed which instantly clarify things into lines and circles and coherent forms which are USEFUL.  That last is important.  String theory works in theory, but it is to physics roughly what postmodern literary criticism is to useful intelligence.

Here, again, is the short version: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

Here, again, is the longer version: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/obamacare.pdf

http://counterjihadreport.com/2016/01/14/hillarys-benghazi-stand-down-order-exposed/

Here is what seems to have happened.  Obama and Hillary Clinton decided to topple the Libyan government, for unclear reasons.  The alleged reason was the support of democracy, but they supported the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, and continue to this very moment to support people fighting the Syrian government who are not Syrian, and who nearly universally support the Islamic State, and the goal of a regional Caliphate.  In point of fact, arms and training provided by the Obama and Clinton policies seem to have CREATED the Islamic State, and Obama’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he seems not to be making ANY serious attempts to stop or even slow the growth of the Islamic State.  He is, among other things, failing to bomb the oil tankers selling oil to Turkey in exchange for operational funds which obviously at some point may be used to buy WMD’s.

We know that the State facility in Benghazi was almost comically understaffed as far as security.  The only thing not comic about it is that two people who made the mistake of trusting Hillary Clinton died for it.  Sean Smith’s body had to be pulled out by people who disobeyed orders to try and come help them.

We know there was significant CIA activity in Benghazi.  What were they doing?  One story line has them tracking anti-aircraft missiles.  Another has them funneling arms first to the Turks, then to the “Syrian rebels”, aka ISIS in its infancy.

We know that support assets were available to the CIA Annex and were denied.

We KNOW that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama LIED knowingly in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of four Americans who made the mistake of trusting them.  This is not in doubt.

One wonders why the Left is so desperate to reject common sense standards of loyalty, common decency, and integrity.

But then again, not really.  You can’t not be a piece of shit and be in the middle of this thing, and you can’t not be a willing dupe and be in the outer circle.  Dumb and evil: these are the choices.  True liberals are nary to be seen across the whole horizon.

Someone I know is apparently fooling around with a married Muslim man, and this got me to thinking: the Islamic legal status of a willing infidel woman is likely that of concubine.  Muslims are allowed unlimited concubines.

This means that Muslims cannot commit adultery with Western women. And legally, both consensual and forced sex–rape, to be clear–are both completely acceptable and consistent with Islamic law and Islamic tradition.  Thus, when you read about elderly, married, Muslim men participating in gang rapes in England, they are very literally not breaking any precept of their religion. To the extent Islam speaks to the topic, it is likely to ENCOURAGE such behavior.

Their wives–of which they are allowed up to four–cannot of course have any relations with non-Muslim men.  Merely speaking to a man who is not a family member is enough to get women killed in some countries, like Pakistan.

In the West we forget at our peril that a substantial portion of the globe retains the sensibilities and mores of the 7th century,. which was, as has been most of human history, violent, misogynistic, and grotesquely unfair.

Only in the West did the concept of universal human rights come about.  Only here.  We are condemned with the very ideas which would not exist but for our cultural innovations.

You cannot repeat Soviet propaganda–and that is what they push on the Daily Cause and HuffPo–without being historically ignorant, unprincipled, and characterized by that stupidity which thinks it knows everything worth knowing, never guessing the extent of its intellectual depravity.

I am trying to say something, but I am not yet sure what.  What follows is, I recognize, incoherent.  There will likely be another ramble after this one, but not until I take care of some business.

As the State grows, individual power diminishes. As the State does for you, you do less. As the State embodies and expresses power, you embody and express less, you do less, you are less.

Someone claimed that one of the goals of an aspiring global totalitarian was to get everyone implanted with microchips which contain everything about us.  We can walk into a store, pick something up, and walk out, and the cost of that item is deducted from our account.  There is no need for a cashier, since they know who I am.  They know where to find me.  And if I act up, my chip is emptied, and my movements can be controlled.  They know who I talk to, where I go, even what I say.

But of course we have to agree to this.  And all of these ideas demand, for their implementation, fear.  Governments are grown because of fear: fear of war, fear of crime, fear of confusion.  And what drives fear is a sense of helplessness.

Terrorism is a perfect vehicle for authoritarians because it is amorphous.  It has no boundaries. It has no time.  It is not a conventional war, and thus can be declared in perpetuity.  I personally wonder if ISIS has not been built by our shadow government precisely BECAUSE we were winning the war on terror.  Certainly, Obama armed and almost certainly trained what became ISIS, and it seems we are not attacking the oil trucks which deliver wealth to ISIS, and are not effectively targeting their leadership or propaganda centers.  We seem in fact to still be arming people whose only allegiance to us is their claimed opposition to Assad.

It seems to be the case that our unconscious will only feed us information it feels we can handle emotionally.  A great many people–likely most, in my view–spend lives with shit crammed into the back of their emotional selves which never comes out, because they never give it time to, they never ask it to, and they are unprepared to deal with it if it does.

For my part, as I am watching darkness come out of me, I also watch it fade.  You cannot fight darkness in yourself: you allow it, and it dissipates.  All emotions have information.  Listen to that information, learn from it, and that emotion is no longer needed.  It is a telegram that has been read.

Last night I was realizing that as a baby I was not wanted.  I imagined this scene of fighting out of the womb–I had a difficult delivery–being placed in my mothers arms, and her face being filled with shock and rejection as she realized I was not the perfect girl her narcissism had led her to believe was the only possibility.  They did not even have a boy’s name selected, such was her certainty.

She tried to love me.  I don’t doubt this.  But will cannot coerce love, and she herself was never loved.  It is a mystery to her, as indeed it has largely been a mystery to me.

And I ponder how babies deal with primal rejection and neglect, and it seems to me that we are missing part of the puzzle: children are not born fully helpless.  All of us, all humans, come from another world, and reenter that world when we die.  This is my belief.

It is also my belief that we land on this world with a plan, and with a nascent self that has been in development over long periods of time.  We are not blank slates.  We are born with worlds of information latent within us.

Here is one of my favorite reincarnation stories: http://www.iisis.net/index.php?page=past-life-murderer-identified-ax-axe-skull-reincarnation-birthmarks-past-life-scars&hl=en_US

At three this child was speaking of what he knew, but somewhere in him it was there when he was born.

Fear and helplessness, it seems to me, are inextricably linked. And fear and chronic anger are likewise linked.

This thought pattern, which concords (I made it a verb) with my own sense of how “objective” (note the bias inherent in needing to use this word) reality works, is congenial to me, and perhaps may be to you as well.

Countless thousands of unwanted children are born every day. What is their destiny?  They are sundry, but we must never assume from one cause must proceed another effect where consciousness is concerned.  Life is far more complicated, rich, and interesting than that.

I watched Captain America–the first one–with my oldest last night, and the obvious theme was “I don’t like bullies”.  This is the American self image, and one which has animated much of our foreign policy over the past century.  We were of course often accused of being bullies by Soviet propagandists–perhaps, it must said, sometimes accurately, although not in Korea and not in Vietnam–and their propaganda was congenial to the conceits of very soft, historically ignorant western intellectuals.  It continues to be.

In a post which did not last an hour I told the Huffington Post audience that their beliefs could reliably be inferred by simply positing arrogance, complacency, and Soviet propaganda memes.  I view that as only very slightly hyperbole, and with respect to the Soviets, I will mention I have not had a post last an hour on that Goebbelsian–should I say Leninist, Alinskyan, or Obaman?–thought-vehicle in some years.  It doesn’t matter what I say.  It seemingly only matters that I say it.  These people censor opposing views then both wonder why everyone does not believe as they do, and why they are so angry at them.

The point I wanted to make relates to this sad story: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/15/15-year-old-boy-was-stabbed-to-death-by-migrant-because-he-was-protecting-young-girl-from-sex-assault/

A Muslim–and the religion is clearly significant, since rape is nowhere condoned by any civilized religion, even if it has sometimes been practiced–attempts to rape a Swedish school girl, and the boy who stops it is stabbed to death in retaliation.  The Swedes suppress the truth, call the victim a “bully” with no evidence, and rush to get the story from the Muslim, who of course makes something up.

The image I keep getting in mind, and I’m sorry this is not more classical, but perhaps the more useful for it, is the Minister of Magic in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, who keeps denying that Voldemort is back.  Despite all evidence he chooses to privilege the more congenial, the easier, the less painful, of two options, even though it has nothing BUT convenience going for it.

And see what happens when you are suppressing something you KNOW on some level is true is that you do not exist on a continuum, but the more WRONG you are, the more you FIGHT for your wrong view.  You get angry at those who insist on telling the truth.  You resent them.  You demonize them.  You push them to the side and marginalize them.

What we see in this Swedish story is that common decency and common sense are simply not welcome.  They are not interested in doing the right thing if it requires new thoughts, the reevaluation of the cultural direction they have chosen, and particularly if it requires JUDGEMENT.  They want to be nice.  They want to be all things to all people, and they do not want to admit evil exists.

I was describing this in my version of the Grand Inquisitor, when I had Sade say he would eliminate all notions of good and evil, as the best guarantee that evil would prevail.

If “all that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing”, then the cause of evil has to stigmatize the very idea of good.  And this has transpired.  A boy killed for preventing a rape is the villain, and the aspiring rapist and actual murderer is the hero.

This is where decadence, weakness, spiritual sickness, which I term “Sybaritic Leftism” transitions into that hatred, violence, anger, and pervasive deceit I call “Cultural Sadeism”.  As I say over and over and over, they are connected.  The one MUST lead to the other.  It lacks the strength to defend itself, and it lacks an alternative vision that is constructive and coherent.

“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings” Ludwig von Mises– from “Human Action: A Treatise on Economics” (1966 edition)


The salient intellectual question of our time is how contemporary intellectuals–the thought leaders, the primary creators and consumers of propaganda–can be made to realize the nullity of their socialist project, as seen morally, psychologically, spiritually, and economically.


The purpose of economics is not to provide a meaning to life.  The purpose of economics is to provide food and shelter, leisure, and peaceful spaces.  Conflating the two is merely the most obvious intellectual sin of the socialists.


Life is interesting.  Seeking to make everyone the same, because this radicalism makes you different, for the time being, is not. It is quite dull.  It is the play of fools, the strategy of cowards, and the creativity of the utterly insipid.

It is always growth when you see evil in yourself.  It did not suddenly come into being: it was always there.  It is your awareness which has evolved.
 
And we are moved to anger when we see the evil in others.  This is appropriate.  But at the same time, I feel this anger stems from a fear we have that it lies in us too.

I think it is appropriate at this primitive level of existence to punish evil, because fear remains an important source of social order, but it is never necessary for good people to hate evil.

This is a subtle point.  It is EASY to say that being nice is a solution to everything.  This is delusional.  Evil in others spreads, takes hold, and creates fear, pain, sorrow, and death.  It must sometimes be fought body to body, death to death.  Wars can have a moral purpose.

The goal is to transcend this need, not to ignore it, not to fail to feed the good because of fear of our own evil, which we cloak in an abysmal “niceness”.  Fuck niceness: do what is right.

It’s an odd paradox, to me, that a fulfilling life seemingly requires us both to take time seriously, and to be able to act as if we had all the time in the world.  If you measure every second, you will be outwardly effective.  Bear Bryant supposedly carried in his wallet these great stories about time. They are about cultivating the pleasures of flow and accomplishment.

But there  are larger, slower energies, too, that take time to manifest, and disperse quickly if you are in a hurry all the time.

I found myself saying to myself today, even though I have things to do (none of which are however truly urgent), that I have all the time in the world.  I can take all the time that I need.

How often do you say that to yourself?  For me, I think the need to hurry all the time is related to primal injuries.

On a related note, I was in Best Buy today, and it hit me that one major reason people fail to individuate, fail to mature emotionally, is not just that our lives are easy, but that the countless distractions we have prevent facing the silence of ourselves.  We turn the TV on in the morning, and listen to it before we go to bed.  You are never alone with yourself, and the things which demand attention, the emotional house-keeping that needs to be done.  You can kick all that down the road for a lifetime, and die barely wiser than when you were born.

It takes courage to face the pain of inner growth.  I can well see why people avoid it.  But each pain only truly hurts once, or for a period of time, and then it is out of you.  It is gone.  It is done.  The alternative is leaving a thorn in you for a lifetime, which interrupts you when you are sleeping, and speaks in your ear when you are awake.

I had a lot of strong emotions hit me today, and it occurred to me that you can only really feel self-compassion when you can feel fully what you have been through.  For people who have been through the ringer, getting to that point is very hard.  Numbness is hard to set aside.

And pain is not the point, but rather feeling how disconnected from your own feelings and those of other people you became at some point.  How disconnected I became.

And THAT process is painful.  It is like thawing a frostbitten limb.  Nobody would argue that the fact that frostbite makes you numb means it is positive, or that there is any easy way back to normalcy, or semi-normalcy, without going through the reacquisition of feeling.

It does seem helpful to titrate, to use Levine’s analogy, and to pendulate between the difficult feelings, and remembered or conjured positive ones.  Still, the process is not precise, and some flooding is inevitable.  You just have to deal with it, and accept it.

And I will say with respect to my last post that I don’t deny that sometimes I am an asshole.  But what I would argue is that sometimes being confronted bluntly and unapologetically is what people need.  What the outcome is depends largely on how they choose to take it, which means that I can’t know in advance if being nice or being a dick is going to be more useful.  It is really out of my hands, and up to them.

As for me, I have my own shit currently to deal with, and have a pretty simple choice: have a pity party, or man up and deal with it.  There is no way out of a pity party, so I’m going with option B, even though I don’t like it.  The world doesn’t give a flying fuck if I like it.

The world as I see it is so much more complex than the simplistic creed of “being nice”.  People need to be pushed sometimes, and “allowed” sometimes (given space and time), and they need to be loved, sometimes all at the same time. There is no perfect one answer that can ever be divorced from the process of perceiving dynamically, and adjusting regularly.