Month: August 2016

This is really quite amazing: http://libertyviral.com/the-clinton-body-count-part-1/#axzz4HtNJ5EvU

Part Two: http://libertyviral.com/the-clinton-body-count-part-2/#axzz4IFk3U5jg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/23/mild-bump-to-head-increases-risk-of-psychiatric-problems-and-ear/

Wacky article on Hillary’s concussion and brain injury from 2014: http://nypost.com/2014/05/19/real-cause-for-worry-facts-on-hillarys-concussion/

I read today that Hillary calls questions about her health “wacky conspiracy theories”.  Well, we know major, credible doctors, reading her symptomology and course of treatment are saying WFT publicly.  We know she a concussion in 2012 that caused enough brain damage that she had to use coke bottle glasses to function.  We know she is on Coumadin, a powerful–and according to Dr. Drew outdated–blood thinner.  We have seen her do weird ass shit on camera, in what medical friends of mine said looked like Parkinsonian seizures.

We can assume she focus group tested the words “wacky” and “conspiracy theory”.  They work in most cases, on most topics.  The usual suspects undergo the usual brain fade when the usual handlers tell them “there is nothing to see here.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.  And they don’t.  They were told not to.  The way they roll is they don’t.  They are inert matter, to be acted on by outside forces, solely.

But here is the thing: you can push this idea much too far.  Once someone has one time decided a conspiracy theory isn’t, then every other conspiracy theory on the table gets a second look.  And if we can infer anything from the continual presence of tabloids at supermarket counters everywhere, it is that people love gossip, and a conspiracy theory is just a form of gossip.  They are often hearsay, unverifiable.

But sometimes they were true.  Bill Clinton was fucking Gennifer Flowers.  Gary Hart couldn’t keep his dick in his pants for six months, or whatever it was.

And Hillary is sick.  She is hiding some major health problems that dwarf the issues of FDR, Kennedy, and even Wilson.  Things that impair her judgement on a day to day basis, and which pose serious risks of killing her, not least because the quack taking care of her has as his main virtue discretion and personal loyalty.

And Julian Assange is likely to be in a position to know who his informants are and were.  It could well turn out that the staffer killed in DC was one of his sources. What then?  A robbery that wasn’t doesn’t take much to turn into a hit.  This sort of thing happens.  We all know it.  I suspect a significant number of Americans don’t believe the official JFK story.

It seems very likely the Report from Iron Mountain is what it seems to be: the long term result of a sustained process of collaborative work conducted over a much longer period of work than would be needed for satire, and as humor would in any event need to be counted a massive failure.

It is quite easy to place 9/11 within the context of an abhorrence of peace, and the political need for enemies.

Here is my point: we are at the point of a massive tipping point, in which large segments of the American population simply detaches from traditional narratives, and starts getting its news from people like Alex Jones.  They don’t diminish their consumption of traditional news media: they stop.  They realize in large numbers they are being lied to, and they take to the streets if efforts are made to stifle political dissent and pluralism.

Hillary is much weaker than Michael Dukakis, and he was ahead by about as much at this point as Hillary was last week.  That lead seems to have disappeared.

Trump, in my view, is the likely winner, and my hope is that we reenter an era where truth is told.

As should be obvious, I am perhaps more committed to truth-telling in my life than virtually anyone you will ever meet.  But I am realizing that to a great extent it is lies which have kept me alive, and I would like to simply say that it is a measure of God’s mercy, too, that we can lie to ourselves, and believe our lies long enough to get through situations which would otherwise be unmanageable.

The surrender of Liberalism in the name of Liberalism.

One of the most common effects of classic PTSD is unwanted and uncontrollable intrusions: a smell, a sound, a picture will spontaneously appear, and retrigger the same affects which were present when the traumatic layering happened.

What I realized yesterday is that Developmental Trauma Disorder ALSO has intrusions, but they are unconscious.  You are going one way, then suddenly find yourself going another way, and you don’t know why.  I don’t know why.

It seems that the social part of us never really shuts down. It keeps trying to reactivate.  It hits start, and send, and the ping goes out, and that ping bounces off the protective elements in the nervous system, which immediately prohibit that part from coming on-line.  It is too dangerous.  It is like the government telling you where you can’t go, when they really have no idea if it is safe or not.  They don’t want to chance it, and don’t want you to chance it either.

This blocking is a sort of intrusion, one you can’t see.  The memories come up, without coming up, and they have an effect, but you do not realize they have an effect.  You just find yourself often numb, often unable to focus, and unable to plan.

And this goes on for a while, then this center hits temporary nervous exhaustion.  This is where addiction comes in.  This is where the desire to check out becomes overwhelming.  This is where you–I–need to hit the reset button, which is what drug and alcohol use does.

And it is interesting to speculate that perhaps in some senses standard, recognized addictions like those to drugs and alcohol might in some respects be healthier than addictions to work and sex and gambling, because there is a cycle of connection, and a cycle of disconnection.  An addiction to work is more or less continual shut down.  Most boozers have times when they are emotionally available.  They just can’t sustain it.  Heroin and opium addicts have written great works of music and literature.  They are there, and then they are gone, then they come back, and so a lifetime is spent.

And let me add one more addiction to the pantheon: the addiction to moralizing. If judgement is a cognitive reframing of the primal emotion of fear, then it is a logical concomitant of what I am calling unconscious intrusions.

I am usually most productive idea-wise in the morning.  This is not just because I can connect to the dreams of the previous night; rather, my fear of the day leads to continual ideas and dissociation.

In a Freudian sense–and I tend not to use Freuds language because he was more than a bit slimy–much of what I write is reaction formation.

And to be clear, the same idea can be presented in the same way, using the same words, but come from many different places emotionally.  It is not bad to theorize and ponder, and fight for understanding.  I am simply speaking to myself, in a public sphere.

A synonym for forgiveness might be “reinclusion”.  Practically, the sense of being loved and being forgiven are the same.  You are loved where you belong, and belong where you are loved.

To become someone else, you must first become who you are; and frequently this is practically the same thing.

I was contemplating forgiveness just now. I often wake up feeling the need to ask for forgiveness.  It is impulsive.  It arises and comes out.  I do often sleep in, but that is not the root problem: my destiny is to do something connected with this sort of work in the long run, once I get my own shit figured out.

From what does the need to ask forgiveness come from?  It comes from social disconnection.  A rupture has occurred, and needs to be repaired.  Some rule has been violated, some feeling of tenderness or propriety crossed.  There was connection, now there is not.

Childhood trauma, of course, will generate the continual sense of shame, of alienation, and the futile asking for, but never receiving, forgiveness. I myself compensate with arrogance.  It is a shield of sorts, or has been.  It is an interesting thing to contemplate that somewhere in the hardest human beings there is the capacity for tenderness and softness which they have forgotten.

And being me, I started contemplating the dynamics of asking forgiveness from GOD.  We cannot see God.  Is asking for forgiveness the same as asking for connection?

And being me, I started thinking about T’shuvah, repentance, which at one time consisted in offering animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem.  What is this dynamic?  I will need to feel about this for a while longer.

But the point I wanted to make here is that it is quite possible, and in my view desirable, to treat religion BOTH as a cultural artifact intended to enable social cohesion and the maintenance of meaning, AND as a set of objective claims about the physical universe which can be investigated in a scientific manner. A study can be made as to what works and why culturally, and as to what is true empirically.

As I’ve no doubt mentioned repeatedly, Religion (Religions, if you want to be more politically conformist) was my own academic field of interest, and sacrifice–“acts of the sacred”–my main interest there.  But the question “is this true?” was not an important question.  I think it should be.

The process of growing is making contact with what I visualize–and feel–as tight balls of energy, and allowing them to rise up and expand, and melt into the universe.  Some are prickly and painful.  Some ache.  Some bleed.  At some point I expect them to be pleasant and connecting.  That is the energy behind it all.

I will often lay in bed in the mornings and just feel.  I will interocept–I just made it a verb–and see where I am guided.

I have been lonely all my life.  Part of my problem, of course, is that few people can understand me at the level where I like to operate.  To a great extent, uniqueness and loneliness go together.

But as I’ve come to know, and as I’ve described here, I seem “have”–I’m not sure what the best word is–Developmental Trauma Disorder.

And I went this morning to a primal place, that of being a small child, looking into my mothers eyes, and feeling the terror and confusion of not seeing her looking back.  She could only see herself.

I touched this feeling.  It is oceanic, overwhelming.  But I have developed enough skill in this sort of thing–in pendulation, in titration–that I was able to work with this high voltage safely.  It is painful, of course, but my day will go on.

And I realize that is feeling myself, I am making up for that primitive lack. I am my own mirror.  And I feel that to SEE this is narcissism, but to feel it is healing. It matters how one does it.  Narcissists only see themselves, but they do not see that they only see themselves.  Narcissism is simply how the world is for them.  It, too, is the result of a primitive trauma.

And I feel this not being seen is what makes the world go mad.  It explains wars and cruelty and obsessions.  It is invisible for nearly everyone.

And I was pondering child rearing in this country, especially in light of a question a Democrat asked me in a bar.  We were talking politics and I said I was a conservative, and his first question was “what do we do with the old people?”  I first asked him “what did we do with old people before?”–to which he really had no response, being a bit drunk–and then I pointed out that in countries with socialized medicine they keep old people alive far less aggressively, and several leaders–such as in Japan–have openly wished for the old to die, as they were “unproductive” members of society.  In an allegedly morally superior social order, the old are seen solely in terms of their economic utility.  There is a huge push to get people on government run medical plans, then resentment at the cost.  The whole thing is ludicrous and contradictory.

But here is the relevant point: in the old days, aging parents lived with their children.  Grandmothers were there for their grandbabies.  In the old days, numerous women were around in an extended family, such that the babies looked in many eyes, had many opportunities for connection and union.  And because this was the norm, the parents themselves would have been more commonly available to their children emotionally.  There would have been much less Developmental Trauma Disorder.

And the old days continue in much of the world.  It is likely that the average child in an African village feels more love from its mother than the average child in America, even when the mother is playing Mozart and making sure there are lots of colors and shapes for the child to interact with.  Her mother is in California  Her sister is in Idaho.  The fathers mother is in New York.  They all come to visit, of course, but are not in and out of the home daily, as happens in more traditional communities with tighter family ties.

Healthy children become healthy adults, and they are not mass produced.  There are not techniques for thriving, other than those of connection, and providing a good continuum of both safety and opportunity to explore.  They need to feel safe, and they need to be allowed to express their natural curiosity, and to fail sometimes.  Failure is not death: it is, on the contrary, the essence of life.  Fail better, fail harder, fail forward.