Month: August 2016

But he would also know in his gut that this battle, this war for sanity, is winnable.  Churchill took a lot of naps, smoked a lot of cigars, and drank a lot of alcohol, and all seem to have helped buttress his inherent resilience.

My take is that if Trump is tired–and I’m talking to you, Mr. Future President, because obviously this blog is Yuge–take a week or two off.  The Olympics are a distraction.  This moment is not a prime time for campaigning.  The debates are coming up, and hopefully you have reached out to Assange to see if you can coordinate the next leak, and if you can be prepped in advance as to what to expect in detail.

And at some point, I want to see a massive media blitz.  I would like to see a couple hundred million flow out in well targeted ads aimed at swing states, and a continuity stream in the safe States.  I’m not an electoral strategist, but it would seem obvious some solidly Blue States can be ignored.  People get paid big money to figure this stuff out.

Hillary is a crook–might not hurt to juxtapose an image of her and Richard Nixon–physically frail, and hates our troops and cops.  You can juxtapose images of her supporting Black Lives Matter with the images of fire in Milwaukee.  The blacks who might find this offensive are the ones doing the burning, not those dealing with its effects, which is about half of them.

Finally, I would insist that all jurisdictions, at least in States you care about, have paper backup if they use digital vote machines.  There is no possibility of a recount when you are dealing with a hacked voting machine.  It will turn out the same result every time.  With paper–and after the hanging chad fiasco, the simple pen and oval method seems the most obviously useful–you can verify things.

And you can simply say that you will not accept the results of any vote in any jurisdiction that cannot prove no fraud was committed.  We keep reading, from the usual propagandists, that “no evidence of voter fraud has been found.”  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  If a fraud is successful, and not challenged by the loser, then the evidence is washed down the drain.  This is logically obvious.  And how many elections have been challenged?

Here is the thing: if you can cook the polling data, then hack the system to alter the voting data, you can make massive fraud appear plausible.  The only possible safety from this is paper ballots, and accurate voter rolls, and of course, in a sane world, proving that you are who you say you are.

But I thought I would write a quick post in reaction to a conversation I had last night with a woman in a bar.  She is having trouble with her boyfriend, they have a boy together, and both had very troubled childhoods: her parents had a really ugly divorce when she was 6, and his mother left the family when he was 3 without notice.

As she was leaving I told her: remember you are both scarred human beings and you don’t really know why you do half the things you do.

And I was remembering, remembering arguments I’ve been in.  What happens is we carry all these little harmonic emotional strings in us which vibrate to certain frequencies easily.  They are attuned to hear, for example, contempt and rejection, even when it is not there.  This triggers a whole cascade of reactive and largely unconscious responses.

This is how you get into huge arguments over nothing.

And it occurred to me that freedom is detuning all those string.  It is processing all the hurts, first, but then all the instincts, such that you know them and feel them, and can allow them the proper and healthy place in your life.  This is mastering “the body”.  This is mastering sin.  This is human perfection.

And it occurred to me as well that if I had been a perfect listener, I would not have offered advice (I didn’t offer much, but some), but done the task of helping her see herself more clearly, and figuring out how to solve her own problems.  True emotional problem solvers are facilitators.  They are not doers, or advice givers.  We are all born with all the knowledge we need.  We just suppress it with all the other things we cram into our closets, and leave in the dark.

There was a time when it was reasonable to assume that our diplomats were pursuing our interests through the peaceful process of negotiation and compromise.  That time is long gone.  In the present era what is called “diplomacy” is giving the fucking shop away with sufficient disingenuousness and bullshit that it can avoid provoking a wholesale revolt.

Quotes I keyed on:

In a draft of a letter written in 1881, Marx looked to the Russian peasant commune as the germ of a post-capitalist economy: ‘if the revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces to allow the rural commune its full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.’ Marx’s social-democratic Russian disciples believed socialism would only be possible after a longish period of capitalist development, but the master scornfully repudiated these ‘Russian “Marxists”’ as holding views ‘diametrically opposed’ to his own. As he saw it, a socialist revolution was needed before capitalism destroyed the village commune.

Point: Marx would have repudiated the Bolshevik coup in Russia, which completely destroyed traditional agrarian life.

How as he so misunderstood?

Marx’s views on this and many other matters have little in common with what later came to be understood as ‘Marxism’, but this is not because Marx’s work was traduced. Through his collaboration with Engels, Marx was implicated in the spread of a version of his ideas that differed significantly from his own understanding of them. Financially dependent on his collaborator, it was difficult for him to be open about the areas in which the two disagreed. 

More, Marx. . .

was the first to chart the staggering transformation produced in less than a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry. He also delineated the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless and unfinished character of modern capitalism as a phenomenon. He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destabilization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object for sale.

Disregard of boundaries and destabilization of hierarchy.  I can agree with this analysis. My own future utopias focus on small agrarian communities buttressed by modern technology, but choosing to live simply.

As human animals, we can only handle so many people, so much complexity, before we lose touch with our sense of self–rooted as it is in our own biology–the possibility of meaningful community, and larger non-political moral orders.

The larger the order as a single unit, the less it can meet the cultural needs of its members.  A global economic network is clearly good at producing stuff, but all too many of us are dying on the inside, lost in a constant whirr, seduced by greed–and encouraged in it–and looking only to the next deal.

It is a source of constant astonishment to me how many things we are think are so, aren’t.

In addition to granting some 20% of America’s uranium capacity to the Russians, in tandem with receiving $2.35 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation, and $500,000 for a single speech by Bill, there is this: 

“While serving as secretary of state, Clinton oversaw a program meant to “reset” relations with Moscow and improve ties. The program centered around the Russian city of Skolkovo near Moscow with the stated aim of “identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the American and Russian people.” 

The program transformed Skolkovo into a technology hub, a Silicon Valley of sorts. Sensitive American technology was transferred to the Russians, substantially enhancing their military and cyber capabilities. The US Army and the FBI concluded that Russia had exploited the program for military applications. 

Of course, anyone with a scintilla of foresight could have anticipated such an unfortunate and dangerous outcome. In Putin’s Russia, everything has military or security dimensions. Indeed, in 2014, the FBI warned American technology companies doing business in Skolkovo that the Skolkovo project “may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.” 

Russia’s access to sensitive American technologies represents but half the problem. There is a far more sinister side to this story. Schweizer notes that Russian and American companies and individuals involved in the Skolkovo fiasco “had major financial ties to the Clintons.” He further notes that during the Russian reset period, those entities provided the Clintons with “tens of millions of dollars” in the form of “contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties.”

So when Hillary complains about the national security implications of Russia hacking her 30,000 missing emails, she is managing to lie several times.  She is lying about what was in those emails, but she is also avoiding a discussion of what helped create that capacity in the first place.  It was likely HER and HER policies, policies based on graft.

The more I contemplate a detente with Russia, the more I like it.  Putin has ego, he has ambition: he and Trump should get along great.  And it would be a relationship not based on more or less open corruption, but one based on shared interests.

Hillary is a fucking crook. She is a lying, sick (morally and physically) bitch who has no right to be within a hundred miles of the Presidency. 

Over and above a universe of other things, the one, seemingly small thing about Hillary Clinton that bothers me above all others was that she LAUGHED about getting a man acquitted of the rape of a 12 year old girl she KNEW HE COMMITTED. The tape is in the public record. It is unambiguous. She is cold hearted, and her appeals to women are cynical and political. She accused the rape victim–who was put into a coma by the rape, and told she could no longer have children, of “seeking out older men, of being mentally unstable, that she had made rape claims before”, none of which were true. She attacked the victim, a 12 year old girl, brutally, in order to get a man she knew as guilty set free. And then forgot about her, and laughed about a system that allowed her to do it when it was brought up many years later. That is not a feminist. That is not even a human being. You can listen to the audio for yourself.

Today I read Hillary is on Coumadin, a blood thinner given to people typically with acute problems, but which in her case is given continually.  I know this is true, because the Goebbelsian truth-enactors at Clintion News Network say so: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/31/politics/hillary-clinton-health-tax-release/index.html

Here is the likely most honest treatment of this: http://www.infowars.com/media-lie-about-hillarys-severe-health-condition/


I look it up in WebMD, and they say this about possible side effects: 

Nausea, loss of appetite, or stomach/abdominal pain may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. 

Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. 

This medication can cause serious bleeding if it affects your blood clotting proteins too much (shown by unusually high INR lab results). Even if your doctor stops your medication, this risk of bleeding can continue for up to a week. Tell your doctor right away if you have any signs of serious bleeding, including: unusual pain/swelling/discomfort, unusual/easy bruising, prolonged bleeding from cuts or gums, persistent/frequent nosebleeds, unusually heavy/prolonged menstrual flow, pink/dark urine, coughing up blood, vomit that is bloody or looks like coffee grounds, severe headache, dizziness/fainting, unusual or persistent tiredness/weakness, bloody/black/tarry stools, chest pain, shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing.

Tell your doctor right away if any of these unlikely but serious side effects occur: persistent nausea/vomiting, severe stomach/abdominal pain, yellowing eyes/skin.
This drug rarely has caused very serious (possibly fatal) problems if its effects lead to small blood clots (usually at the beginning of treatment). This can lead to severe skin/tissue damage that may require surgery or amputation if left untreated. Patients with certain blood conditions (protein C or S deficiency) may be at greater risk. Get medical help right away if any of these rare but serious side effects occur: painful/red/purplish patches on the skin (such as on the toe, breast, abdomen), signs ofkidney problems (such as change in the amount of urine), vision changes, confusion, slurred speech, weakness on one side of the body.

https://youtu.be/FvuKUmK9eB0

But I was sitting there wincing, looking at my water dispenser, and thinking of the 3 X-men, where Jean Grey becomes Phoenix.  I was thinking of the bubbles in the water dispenser in the house scene.  What is not said is that she is clinically dissociated.  She is suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, and that, itself, is pretty much always the result of severe abuse.  She was likely molested as a small child.

And as a metaphor, you can see the small become the large;  you can see powerlessness turn into absolutely uncontrolled fury and lust.

Comics are very interesting to me. In important respects, they are our contemporary substitute for myth, and Comic Conventions of various sorts a sort of ritual.  People need order, and when it is not there, they create it.