Month: June 2016

I am playing Fallout 3.  If it has to do with technology, I am on the tail end of the curve.  I am a last adopter. [I say this because this is an old game].

In it, all manner of moral perversions are possible.  You can practice cannibalism.  You are regularly required to shoot both men and women in the face.  You can gain points in a negative way for killing good people.  You are at one point invited to shoot children and their dogs.  You are at one point invited to bully a sensitive kid and make him cry, then to kill all the members of a congenial, stereotypical American suburb.  You can shoot and kill your own father.

What seems obvious to me is that those who choose evil are practicing emotional dissociation, and social isolation.  I have never been one of these people who says that video games make people go out and shoot people.  The reality is much more complex.  What is CLEAR is that you are PRACTICING violence.  David Grossman says this clearly.  And in practicing violence, you are moving away from union, from connection, from empathy, from belonging.  And in some extreme cases, isolation DOES produce violence, which is supported by the long years of practice.

I will not dilate long on all this, since it is not my principal focus here.

But logically, the other polarity is possible too.  Me being me, of course I pursue the Good Karma (as they style it).  And what is interesting is that even though it is virtual, virtual good deeds still feel good.  As boring and untitillating as this may sound, it makes me wonder if games where you do good deeds for people might actually enable and support mood boosts.  You help little old ladies across the street.  You do favors for people which involve normal video game sorts of tasks.  Etc.  Just putting it out there.

There is an underlying racism among Democrats and those otherwise ideologically conditioned by Soviet propaganda, which states that brown people are uniformly virtuous, and that any malice or violence they may express is our fault.

This is stupid.  Brown people are like white people: most of them are good, some of them aren’t.  They are diverse, believe many different things for many different reasons, and are quite capable of fighting among themselves without the involvement of white people at all.

I keep getting told that if I don’t support allowing all Muslims in period, then I am condemning an entire religion.  Leaving aside the fact that I understand the details of these things much better than most of those making the accusations, the possibility seems to be invisible to them that some Muslims might genuinely be evil, and that this evil is not our fault.

It is astonishing how patronizing such leftists are, when they accuse America of all manner of crimes, while ignoring the crimes of anyone who is not white.  This is a color blindness; this is a fundamentalist racism.  When you consider any group of people as homogeneous because you don’t understand them, there is no good word BUT racism.

When Muhammad Ali–who was clearly such a racist that his segregationism was openly welcomed by the KKK, who invited him to speak at a rally–said he didn’t want to travel to some foreign land to kill the brown man, he assumed that it was us who were killing, and them who were dying.  In point of fact, one set of brown people was fighting another, in an existential battle which, when lost, caused an enormous amount of suffering and death for the people we had been trying to help, and whose invitation to help we had accepted at great cost of death and suffering for our own people as well.

Leftists don’t get this.  They lack nuance.  They lack depth.  They lack the capacity for distinction, for non-racist sentiment, for adult, mature understanding.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/12/bourgeois-equality

I have long been arguing that the most important innovation of economic liberalism is the use of ideas to create wealth.  Anyone with a good enough idea can get rich in America.  And being born rich guarantees nothing.  This is the way it should be.

Time may not heal all wounds, but it is a reliable companion when you can stomach no other.

Bon mot?  You decide.  I’m not sure.  It feels right, for a curmudgeon, which I certainly tend to be.

Edit: solitude cannot be your companion.  Don’t be fucking stupid.  But small changes, processed slowly, can.

I was reading a quite clever book ad disguised as a personal development essay, which talked about Ben Franklin’s “Five Hour Rule”, which was that he spent an hour a day during the week reading and learning something.  I am told Bill Gates and Warren Buffett–who we are to consider as icons of success, since they are very wealthy and professionally very successful–practice this, or more.

I thought about it.  I spend most of every day in contemplation, and an hour a day in Kum Nye, and 10-15 minutes doing my EmWave2.  And it seems to me that far more important than book learning is self learning.  I suspect Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are, now, roughly the same people they were in their twenties.  They know a lot more facts, but they don’t know themselves at an intimate emotional level.  I would assume, in fact, that a principle driving factor in their success is the drive within them to AVOID emotional realities which they find difficult to process.  Both of them have philanthropic foundations whose activities likely serve as ersatz consciences.  But who you are, what matters, is who you are, here, now, and how fully.

I see much in my meditations.  Yesterday it came to me that most of my surface personality is really just a play act, a play, and the actors emotions whose role and dialogue is stage managed by a much deeper, highly practical, fully aware part of myself.  In most people, what you are seeing is an opera they did not consciously write, and do not realize they are acting out.  Some part of them does, but they cannot get to that part without considerable work.  That part is the intuition which can be trusted.  That part is highly competent, but its job until a certain level of emotional development is reached, is maintaining homeostasis among conflicting, violent, and primitive emotions.

As I like to say, we are not so much different from animals than we like to believe.  At the same time, I do continue to believe we are spiritual animals, here for a purpose.

And I would add that it seems to be my task both to cultivate a species of atheism, and a different species of spiritual awareness.  Atheism, in that the God of my childhood first beats me relentlessly, then tells me how loved I am.  The Christian God first condemns us to eternal fire, then says that he loves us endlessly.  The two are not reconcilable.

Spirituality, in that I have really like William James accounts of what to my mind is healthy spirituality, which is a sense of God’s love being present, and a sense of being in time and place which make sense, which work to my good; that there is a plan, even if I can’t understand it.  Such people see and recognize that evil can intrude even into otherwise blessed lives, but that if accepted as God’s Will, then true and lasting happiness and peace are possible.

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/15/roger-stone-three-questions-huma-abedin-hillary-wont-answer/

When Barack Obama got elected, there were a LOT of unanswered questions about him, questions which by and large remain unanswered.  We don’t know for sure who his father was.  We don’t know who assassinated the gay members of his church.  We’re not sure what his real relationship with Bill Ayers was (and perhaps is, although he seems to have pissed Bill off).

The fact that someone who had accomplished nothing, about whom we knew virtually nothing, could be elected not once but twice to the American Presidency I declared in 2008 prima facie evidence of pervasive decadence.  This is inexcusable even once we factor in blatant media complicity in hiding what he wanted hiding, and trumpeting what he–and his handlers–wanted trumpeted.

Likewise, Hillary seems to have as a lesbian lover–there are many reports of this–the wife of Anthony Weiner, who in turn seems to have connections up the wazoo with Saudi terror sponsors.  Add to this the recent back door visit of a senior Saudi to Obama’s White House, with no press (in the last week), and Obama’s long term support of Saudi objectives in the region, and we are quite within the realm of reason to question why ANY sane person would put someone like Hillary, who has shown contempt over and over for American lives, treasure, secrets, and dignity, into the White House, when her closest confidant had close connections to people who want Sharia around the world, and is willing to support terror to do it.

I’m not going to take more time to figure this out.

Top: Lots of Muslims=women and gays live in fear.

Bottom: why are the people who object to this called the haters?

Open question: if it is OK to hate the haters, how come we can’t hate the Muslims?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3640941/Super-rich-quaff-champagne-Venezuela-country-club-middle-classes-scavenge-food-rubbish-dumps-DOGS-starving.html

In many jurisdictions this is how they refer to police officers, or Law Enforcement Officers.  Quite often, their motto includes some notion of the public safety, as in the LAPD motto: “To protect and to serve”.

Here is the thing: people CHOOSE to be cops.  They CHOOSE to put their lives on the line.  They choose to die, if necessary, to protect and defend the public from criminals.

But practically, most cops after a number of years decide, in my opinion, that it is “better them than me.”  We are told about the family they have to go home to, the baseball coaching, the responsibilities as church elder.

These are all noble and valuable, but in my view if there is ambiguity, the nature of the situation is that the cop needs to err on the side of protecting the public, even those likely guilty of being sacks of shit, rather than on the side of their own safety.

There have been many, many cases of police shootings that need not have ended that way.  Here is but one example: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/10/21/police-shoot-kill-knife-wielding-teen-on-south-side/

The cops of course say “But you don’t understand, knives are a huge threat, tasers don’t always work, pepper spray doesn’t always work” etc.

This is likely true. I don’t doubt it is safer FOR THE COPS to shoot first and ask questions later.

But it seems to me that somebody who takes an oath to “Protect and Serve” should be more worried about killing a member of the public unnecessarily, than with being killed themselves.

Yes, alcohol and drugs make people do things they would not do normally.  That means the person they are killing is not the person they would be most of the time.  That is yet another reason to take every reasonable precaution that they don’t wind up dead.

In Orlando, the cops waited 3 hours before entering.  Time will tell what the real reason is, possibly–or we may never know–but it seems likely that a concern for officer safety, over and above that of the people in the bar, was a factor.  You can hear the Officer in Charge saying “we’re not going in there until we have better intel.”  Meanwhile, the killing continued. Not one cop was hurt, but over 50 people lost their lives, and another 50 or more had their bodies permanently disfigured with what are no doubt some ugly wounds.

I am the first to admit I am glad I can call the cops if I need to.  I am not disparaging this.  What I am saying is that some soul searching is in order.  Priorities are off.

And I have some ideas on a solution.  I personally don’t think anybody should be a cop more than 5 years; not a beat cop, at least.  I think we should fold being a cop into some sort of national service program, where people are trained to do the work, but only do one “tour”.  Yes, obviously some careerists are needed for continuity, but I think most cities would benefit from a regular turn-over of police personnel, and a larger number of citizens trained in how to do it.

And as far as a national service program, consistent with my political views, I believe they should be run and organized by the States.  However, if we use the word “national” we need to involve the Federal government.  Here is my proposal: people who voluntarily commit to a service program of some sort (military service, search and rescue, firefighting, law enforcement, and perhaps some other areas I haven’t thought of) get a permanent deduction on their Federal Taxes.  There is a line item “National Service Deduction”, which is a percent or fixed amount: both would work.

This creates something truly national without coercion.  And with regard to Law Enforcement, we push out some of the cynical old bastards who teach their bad habits to all the new recruits.

Same shooter, same weapon: biker bar in Texas.