Month: May 2016

1. It occurs to me that the root of self sabotage is that by creating problems in the outer world, you avoid the peace and calm which cause the problems in your inner world from appearing in your consciousness and demanding resolution.

I don’t think I have said this in quite this way before.

2. It occurs to me that worry, fear and anger are inimical to empathy.  It is easy enough to feel what someone else is feeling if it happens to coincide with what we are feeling, but the task is to see what’s there, not to resonate solely with like-minded people.  This teaches nothing.  You learn nothing.

And if you are worried about anything, your emotional vision is clouded.  If you fear, if you are angry, likewise.  If you are sad.

The best place from which to see honestly?  Happiness, if you are capable of also touching everything else.

is a political system in which the government can legally require public obedience to bad ideas and worse people.

Socialism always leads to authoritarianism.  Let me expand on this.  We live in an age where it is hard to know what is worth doing.  Our historical culture and its ideals have been attacked effectively, and confusion fomented.  This makes maturing harder, which is to say it makes true psychological individuation harder.  This leads to a default condition of physically adult humans who feel and act as children.  They do not want to take responsibility for their lives.

Socialists, for their part, are happy to assume the codependent and utterly unhealthy role of parents.  They promise to provide for their “children” in exchange for their obedience.  Since they start out kind and decent, this deal is easily made.  Has been made in Europe.  Was made in Venezuela.

But if you allow others to do for you, to do for you what you could and should have done for yourself, you become both weak, and dependent.  You grow quickly to NEED the parents.

Any rudimentary study of history will show that over some time period power aggregated WILL be abused.  That is the whole point of our Constitution: to prevent a concentration of power.  Once you let the government provide your health care, your education, and God forbid your very job, they have you by the short hairs, don’t they?  If you decide you don’t like them, well fuck you, you stupid son of a bitch.  It’s too fucking late now.

Every Fascist of the 20th century promised to make the trains run on time and to be more efficient that a legislative system.  They fixed some things, but overall made the people their thralls.

Fascism is a socialism which focuses on war, and war emblems, and national identity, while protecting relative economic liberty for a handful of large corporations run by people who cooperate with the government.  It is opposed to truly free markets, since the government reserves the right to interfere at will and for any reason in all economic activity, and property rights do not exist except at the sufferance of the political class.

Communism is a socialism which takes the bad ideas and bad people to the next level by not only rejecting property rights, but rejecting the right to property outright, and rejecting the idea of a private domain.

When Obama shook the hand of and sort of bowed to the Vietnamese dictator–his name doesn’t matter, since his kind are a dime a dozen, but let’s call him Ho, Jr.–what I think people need to grasp is that in all likelihood he is the sort of hypersensitive kid you knew in high school who was upset about everything, always resenting someone, who didn’t know how to tell a joke, and who didn’t like people or fun.  If you take that person, that nerd, that loser, and put them in charge of a country, and give them the power of life and death, the right to torture and imprison anyone at will, you have a snapshot of what Communism is.

It is a sickening creed, palatable only to disgusting people.  It’s sheer ugliness outweighs the worse abuses of Capitalism so much as to rank them by comparison no crimes at all.

Me personally I can’t get the image out of my mind of the millions of people who were locked in tiny boxes for long periods of time for crimes as small as reporting government corruption.  This is what these foolish children need to see, who think themselves clever for having learned to repeat Communist propaganda.

This whole world is insane.  Truth is rare, and hard to find.  I grew up in a home where lies were the stuff of the day, the currency of mutual coexistence, and I will grant that comforting delusions are hard to give up.  But there is no other good way to life.  A life of lies is a half life: no, it is no life at all.  It is a death.

Imagine a nation of such living dead, as imagined in Wrinkle in Time, or the Ministry under Voldemort, or the rule of Sauron.  Such are the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the North Koreans.  Horror on horror, called truth, called salvation, called honor, called anything but what it is.

Here is a good article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262988/obama-and-ho-chi-minh-embracing-evil-daniel-greenfield

Obama’s trip to Vietnam is not a mere strategic journey, but yet another opportunity for him to remind us that the left has not repented or recanted of its solidarity and support of Communist terror, whether in Cuba, Vietnam, or anywhere else.  It still sees every Communist dictator as a role model worth emulating, and every Communist mass grave as the price that must be paid for a better world.

This is batshit insane.  There is no moral excuse for it, and grotesque psychopathology can be the only explanation.  Our worst people embrace this doctrine, and produce the predictable results. 

It seems to me what the Left sees in the Right–what it fears–is precisely what it fears in itself, not what is actually there.

I have been told regularly–many times daily, or as often as I dipped my foot in these polluted streams–that I am a racist, a hater, a bigot, an apologist for rich, an apologist for the power elite, a dupe, a sap, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a transphobe, a light bulb.  Maybe not that last one. Those shed light.

These are projections, in a clearly, purely, and unambiguously psychodynamic sense.  They see in others what they fear in themselves.  How do they deal with these?  They say that conservatives see in others what they fear in themselves.

Well, how many of us have you attempted to talk to in a rational, civil, human way?  My experience is that if they have attempted to interact with any conservatives, it was to yell, cajole, insult, and denigrate them.  To understate things, this is not a path well suited to building mutual understanding.

They don’t want understanding.  As I have said, true understanding would deprive them of their enemies, and thus their raison d’etre.  They fear this latent existential crisis, and this drives them deeper into the expression of outwardly directed fear and hate.

And I will add that it puzzles me how many psychotherapists fail to see this.  I guess they swim in such small and shallow waters that they forget the horizon exists, and that people live there too.

More likely: in developing the habit of expressing compassion, which people like, and in avoiding judging–which people dislike–they have forgotten that the spiritual path consists not only in being nice, but also in being right.  There are countless congenial lies, comforting to our souls, easily told among like-minded people, which work to make life worse for most if not all.

An obvious example would be the lie that the Islamic people–many of whom are not refugees at all, but opportunists where they are not outright agitators and aspiring terrorists–who are flooding into Europe will not work over the next 30 years to devolve all the humane institutions they have developed at great cost and over time, into relics of a primitive past.  The same people who agitate for the rights of women or gays will in the next moment agitate for the rights of “refugees”.  This is stupid.  And this stupidity, again, is the result of unprocessed emotions, of unfinished psychological work.

It hit me today that the deal with Trump’s hair, other than that it makes him very distinctive, is that it causes people to underestimate him.  In any conflict or competitive situation, at issue is not how competent you appear, but how competent you ARE.  He won the Republican nomination, in spite of the opposition of virtually every media figure with a pen and pulpit.  People look at him, at his hair, and think he’s easily dismissed.  He knows this.  He counts on it.

And I will add too that as a “reality star”–and to be clear he has had a talent for being in the news since the 1980’s, but didn’t have his own show–his job was to find and reward the most competent teams who were given specific tasks with measurable outcomes.  His job, was to identify talent, and get rid of dead weight.

Is that not what we need?

He may disappoint me.  No one can say they truly know what he will do, not least because I don’t think HE knows exactly what he will do.  But he will make decisions, quite likely large ones, and very likely ones which will benefit our country for a generation.  Making our national pension and socialized medicine systems–Social Security and Medicare/medicaid–sane is certainly possible.  Moving past Obamacare is certainly possible.  Stopping illegal immigration is likely.  At a rock bottom minimum, he will tell ICE to do their jobs, when Obama is telling them now, and Hillary will tell them then, not to do anything but look the other way, and release whoever stumbles over their feet.

And with regard to trade, at issue is not that we need to enact huge trade tariff’s.  The economics are clear that free trade on balance helps everyone.  At issue is that China and most of Asia put tariffs and restrictions on our products, which makes it harder to sell there.  We don’t want to tariff their stuff so much as stop them from preventing our entry into those markets.  That is my understanding.

But negotiating will require some gamesmanship.  At this point, China needs us more than we need her.  There is no reason to push things all the way to the brink, but they have been screwing us for a very long time, and they know it.

do you spend more time thinking about what you enjoy, or fearing what you don’t want? Do you spend more time in the pursuit of worthy pleasures–learning, mastery, communion with others–or running from what you fear, hiding from pain?

The universe is an open place. You can do as you please.

How’s this for a motto: “Do what thou wilt, but know thyself”?

Anton Lavey/Socrates double team.

It occurs to me that true transgenderism–the belief that you are an X trapped in a Y body, or a Y trapped in an X body (note what I did there)–is a form of advanced and highly pathological self loathing.  You don’t loathe yourself because you cross dress, or want to be the opposite gender: you loathe who you ARE, at the core of being, at the very root of your sense of self.  Nothing can be more primal than gender.  It is the most basic analogue distinction, even more important than race or religion.  And you can’t be anything else.  Every cell in your body is marked.

And even if this could be changed, it is the LOATHING which is pathological, not the state of feeling like a gender other than you are.  Anorexics hate themselves for being too big.  Obsessive bodybuilders hate themselves for being too small.  And Transgenders hate themselves for having been born who they were.  It is all of a piece; all one cloth. All one problem: deep unhappiness completely unrelated to the symptomatic presentation.

Nearly always–and I can at present think of no exceptions–the task is to deal with the root, not the flower.  That is merely what we see.  There is no virtue in being stupid.  None I have ever found.  And to the extent lying supports stupidity, it too can never be virtuous.

I think a healthy process of life is going often from normal to altered states and back again.  We do it continually without realizing it.  For many, driving is an altered state. Doing the dishes, when you enjoy it.  Hobbies.  Watching sports.  Working with focus. Perhaps the need to pursue altered states with drugs and alcohol relates to an insufficient ability to access them in healthy ways, due to trauma, which causes an inability to be submerged in the moment.

I feel that compulsive thoughts are like a tendril from something alive, living under the water, which produces a form when it breaks the surface, when it passes from the realm of feeling and sensation to our conscious awareness.  What is interesting is to live with thoughts before they are thoughts, to feel them, touch them, get to know them.

You can look at them and say “this will be a thought of worry”.  “This will be a thought of disgust and fear”.  “This will be a happy thought”.  And of course, I am thinking here.  Thoughts can in turn be used to look into the water.  This, too, is normal.

We are sensate beings, which means who we are is what we feel.  The effort to live solely in the mind is an effort to distance ones true self from this truth.

I am thinking aloud.  Here is an interesting way to choose to alter your consciousness: get a lacrosse ball, and a foam roller, and a timer. I like Gymboss.  Set the timer to 3:03 minutes, and follow this routine.  Put on some music which is pleasant for you.

Roll your traps–the tension muscles, which everyone instinctively massages first–with the ball by putting it on the space between your neck and shoulders and leaning against a wall, about the level of your chest.  Roll one side for 3 minutes.  Move it around, forward and back, side to side.  Lean in hard, at times, then move our head gently to the left and right.  You will feel a stretch, in all likelihood (although of course I am very tight since my traps are huge).  Do the other side.

Spend another 3 minutes massaging both of your shoulders with the ball, without forgetting the front.

Spend 3 minutes massaging your chest, again with the ball.

Roll your lats on the foam roller, by laying on it with your lats on the surface, and slowly moving forward and back, and side to side.

Lie on the roller, and massage your upper and lower back.  If you are tight or have a high pain tolerance, put the ball on first one side of your spine, work down, then the other.

Roll your hip flexors on the roller, one at a time.  Roll your hips and the top of your butt.  Roll the sides of your legs.  This usually hurts.

Sit on the lacrosse ball, and find areas of restricted movement and tension in your ass muscles.  Put it under your hamstrings at the top and root around.

Stand on the lacrosse ball and massage your feet.

For tight muscles, find a stretch and hold it three minutes.  Take your range of motion to where it is restricted, and focus on feeling those muscles.  Slowly move back and forth at the range where is restricted.  No pain, but opening, asking, inviting, persistently.

What will likely happen if you do this–and I don’t expect anyone to, but who knows?–is that you will feel emotions coming up, particularly when you find a tender spot.  Moments from the past will pop instantaneously into your awareness.  Go into those feelings too.

This is an interesting process.  I do it most days.

I was contemplating, as I do too often, all the ugliness in the world, and thought that Plato’s cave is really an escape, in a sense.  It gave him the hope that there is a world without ugliness.  The faith, I probably should say.

If there is no world without ugliness, one must either learn to accept ugliness, or go mad. And to be clear, failing to see the world as it is is a form of madness.  In my own view, and only slightly oversimplifying the issue, most of what passes for higher wisdom in our universities consists in a combination of the two.  They no longer have any room anywhere for any other world.

This is a pity.  It remains open to them, and the best empirical explanations we have of who we are and how we got here, and what we are supposed to do can be grounded in learnings which are accessible to all, but pursued by few.

These questions really are too important to attempt to answer from a position of sloppiness, unwarranted assumption, arrogance, and emotional need.  Failure, obviously, is inevitable.  Certainly, it has been.

But this need not continue.  No evil must proceed indefinitely.

Part of this comes from watching the disappointingly disjointed movie “Children of Men”.  I certainly got the sense when the crowd walked by shouting Allahu Akbar that it might have gotten some aspects of the future of Britain and Europe correct.

But I could not help thinking of all the poets and writers who killed themselves thinking the future was hopeless.  Games are played to the end, because the ending is sometimes a surprise.  I am making my own peace with my death at some point.  We may as well.  It comes whether we want it or not.

But for the time being,  life is interesting.  There is much to see and learn.

I had a feeling, too, watching this movie which I have never had before.  I felt that even though the movie was gloomy and oppressive–and inaccurate in that the surveillance state in 2027 will be perfect–that it was the product of human minds, human creativity.  That even the worst, most pessimistic movies still represent the human spirit in some sense.  Perhaps they are using art to wrestle demons.  Whether they win or lose, this is an eminently human and thus beautiful act.

This will prove a helpful insight, I feel.

This is reasonable: http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-truth-warming-alarmists-dont-want-you-to-know-about-the-climate-models/

There are many, many flaws with this whole notion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but one of the most obvious is that the hypotheses–the models–are treated as DATA.  That is a circle.  That is not how science works.

The only reason this whole farce has been able to be continued–admittedly at great cost and considerable effort–is because the time horizons in play prevent the immediate and incontrovertible empirical refutation of their models. They have been, and continue to be, wrong, but they keep telling us, decade after decade, that the final tweak is just around the corner.  There is no historical basis either to believer this now, or to trust them in the slightest at any point in the future, absent actual corroboration of their models.  They lie.  That’s what liars do.

Well, this conservative never thought I’d be quoting a rapper but Azealia Banks is one smart cookie. Even though she has tweeted insults about Donald Trump she now tweets that she will vote for him because Hillary “talks to black people as if we’re children or pets.” She also tweeted that, “Right, black folk having been voting democrat for the last 70 years and we don’t have s**t to show for it.” 

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a black man, accused the Democratic Party of “bigotry” because their programs have “decimated the black family.” On a Fox News program he responded to a question about Hillary Clinton’s statement that a Trump presidency would put “more kids at risk of violence and bigotry.” “If black kids are at risk from anybody, it’s from other black kids in black-on-black crime. The bigotry that she’s talking about stems from her party that has decimated the black family. It has kids shackled — black kids shackled — to failing K-12 public schools in urban centers. And it’s where black men in these urban centers can’t find meaningful work.”

Why aren’t the leaders in the black community ranting about how the Obama Administration is spending millions to find summer jobs for refugees? Obama’s brought thousands of immigrants here who will take away the jobs from Americans of all colors. The racial hucksters have fomented race riots with lies like the ones in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore that destroyed black neighborhoods and plunged them into further residential despair. Facts were ignored by a complicit media that did whatever it could to continue the blatant false reports that made victims out of the unworthy.

When will the black community recognize that their biggest enemies are the ones who treat it like Ms. Banks asserts-like children and pets?

This November, it’s time for the Black community and the whole country to grow up.

I will add that I got the chance to listen last night to a short talk from a man I’ll call the Anti-Sharpton–the Anti-Jackson, if you prefer–named Christopher 2X.  He was wearing a t-shirt saying “We all we got”, which is a beautiful motto.  Whenever some young black kid gets killed, he is one of the first people who gets called.  He comforts the mothers and grandmothers–please note, this seems to be the reality–not with vapid soporifics and platitudes, but by saying “this will hurt the rest of your life, but if you help me work to try and prevent the next one you will be able to manage the pain, possibly.  I am here for you, whatever you need.” He offers, as he said, strength.

That is hard, ballsy work.  His goal is to teach young kids that there are better ways, alternatives to crime and violence.  The goal is not to give up your self, not to stop caring, not to stop having balls and principles, but to direct them more productively.

And I was sitting there wondering how much energy, how much drive it must take to confront the endemic hopelessness, sense of uselessness, that he faces every day.  He is clearly doing it the right way, but it is a hard way.  He tells young kids they matter, that they were born for a purpose, and he has found that if he can convince themselves of that, that they care more, do more, become more.

His message needs to be amplified.  Blacks have been told by self interested and self satisfied Democrats–the overwhelming majority of whom live in mansions and send their kids to private schools, like Obama, like Jesse Jackson and Jesse Jackson Jr.–that their way out is the voting booth.  This is a lie congenial to their ambitions, and apparently not insufferable to their absent or dormant consciences.

I live alone.  It is rare that I interact with people.  I am not incapable of social interaction–I’m actually quite good at it.  What I have difficulty with is trust and openness.  I probably should have talked with him, but I chose not to.  I am working my way back into the world, slowly.

Be that as it may, I am glad to see good people out there, doing tough work in the face of considerable resistance.