Month: September 2016

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/07/now-that-courts-have-destroyed-voter-id-laws-the-gop-is-in-a-panic-to-suppress-the-vote.html

Read through this article.  It is AgitProp, designed to fuel hatred and anger towards Republican, and reward with a sense of moral sanctity those who adhere to the Democrat brand and ideology.

There are a couple of jewels in here.

Until the GOP ban, Michigan offered voters a bubble on their ballots allowing a straight-party vote without checking off all the individual candidates, which is favored by many black voters. Without that one-and-done option, black voters would take longer to vote and create long lines in precincts already plagued by long lines. 

Translated, blacks can’t read so good, and all those options confused them.  Now they can just vote the Democrat ticket again without all those nasty words and names to plow through.

The GOP must be panicking now that the federal court judges who once backed voter-ID laws are getting wise to the GOP shenanigans. Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh District says his vote upholding the Indiana law was wrong; he realizes that photo-ID laws are “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” Boom! 

Translated: the smart kids buy this bullshit, and you should too.  Boom!

The GOP has a sinister Plan B in North Carolina.  

Translated: GOP evil.  But you have a friend in Jesus and the Democrats, which are practically the same things.

Don’t be fooled by this historical amnesia. The two parties switched sides for good when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson rammed the Civil Right Act and Voting Rights Act through Congress. The Republican Party is now the Party of the New Jim Crow Voter Suppression.

Proportionately, more Republicans voted for those acts than Democrats.  LBJ had to ram these bills through in the face of relentless Democrat opposition, as for example that of Robert Byrd, ex-KKK leader, and on her own account a “mentor” to Hillary.

This is the sort of shit filling the airwaves, saturating the internet.  This is the sort of shit that makes actual progress almost impossible, because it makes honest, probing discussion of real problems and following real solutions impossible.

It is not accurate to call it imbecilic.  It has a purpose–that of rallying the usual troops around the usual metaphors and inaccurate assumptions–and it serves that purpose.

It is accurate to call it willfully wrong.  As such, it constitutes a crime against humanity, literally.

And I will note Yahoo put it on its main news page, and that it has comments disabled.  I would boycott these assholes, but it is assholes all up and down.  Lunacy reigns.  I can’t get away from it.  But I will continue to write about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/health/lonliness-aging-health-effects.html?_r=0

Note the day.  You won’t find me with a nice word to say about the Gray Whore very often.  They have done far too much to justify mass death and widespread horror, social failures at home, and to make the American people comfortable with the Big Lie.

I would call your attention too to how the issue gets treated as a public health problem, as a demographic issue, as if the fact that people are lonely is not reason enough to care about them, as if we weren’t all in this shit storm together, as if loyalty and caring were not innate human traits which do not need to be justified.

Does all of life need to wind up on a medical chart or government survey?  No.  Is this a sort of ersatz meaning system for socialists?  Yes, I think it is.  They have rejected what comes naturally.  They have rejected who they are: human beings.  And yet, they are not something new: they are something very, very old.

I have had sex with a lot of women–as best I can recall, the number is around 40–because I used to be pretty good looking, and I have never been shy.

And what I have learned is that sex doesn’t really solve anything.  The main lasting positive is the pride in the conquest. It is good for self esteem.

But in my own case, and I suspect that of a great many men, I consistently found myself unable to respond to women emotionally, on their level, in a connected way.  For the more attentive women–and I can count 3 very attractive intelligent women without batting an eye–this failure on the front end prevented the seduction in the first place.  They could see I wasn’t there.

My last relationship with a woman she was OK with me just coming over every Tuesday night for sex, and asked nothing more of me.  But even though this is about as congenial an arrangement for a man as could be imagined, even then–before all this work and learning I’ve done in the past few years–I could feel something wasn’t right.  I didn’t know what.  I couldn’t name it, but I ended the relationship some years ago.

It is said that women use sex to get love and men use “love” to get sex.  I think this is wrong.  Both sexes need to feel understood, appreciated, loved.  Men are merely more stupid about the whole thing, in general.  Our culture, of course, is vulgar.  We are fueled by sexual fantasies driven by increasingly disturbed pornography, that cannot ever lastingly satisfy anyone, because their real need is social.  They need connection, understanding.  Everything else moves them away from their real needs, their real wants, and makes them more and more angry, frustrated, and alone.

Since I read regular sexual expression helps prevent prostate cancer, and since I am concerned with my health, I express myself most days.  I pretty much never look at pornography of any sort, since I have a very vivid imagination, and I find most of it gross.

What I have in recent months started doing is including the emotional component.  I am trying to develop the ability to be in the room where the sex is, to be present emotionally.  I will literally start with meeting a woman, going on a couple dates, then go all the way through, then at the end imagine the pillow talk, her leaving, and what comes after, and how I feel.  To my mind, this is much more mature and less cartoonish than what you can see on porn sites.  And it is mental rehearsal for whenever I do decide it’s time to head back out into the dating world.

I don’t like passing up opportunities to bash Freud or the professional left, and won’t here: we are living with the legacy of bad ideas in the sexual–the connection–realm, and it is hurting us culturally, which is to say almost universally as individuals.  Married men feel like they are missing out, single men view sex as an acceptable end,  women feel like being used is OK, or that they won’t find a man who can connect with them emotionally.

All of our instincts for compassion, for intimacy, for caring, for love are suppressed.  I called this Qualitative repression some years ago, and continue to feel that a useful term.  College students are fed ideas which were bad when they were rolled out a hundred years ago–that sexual “repression” is unhealthy, that the sexual instinct is more important than the connection instinct, and that people are disposable.  We are all disposable.  This is the net teaching at most universities.

I’ll leave it there.  This is more autobiographical than I like to get, but it may be useful for someone.

First, I will reiterate that NO recount is possible without paper ballots. Period.  Full stop. There is no other correct answer I can see.  Any computer system can be compromised, and the errors never teased out.

Secondly, though, it occurred to me that if we are going to assume for the sake of political argument that black people are inherently and generally inferior to white and Asian people to such an extent that it is unreasonable–the word used is racist, but of course assuming they are that fucking stupid is itself the actual racism–to ask them to provide the same documentation required to drive, cash checks, buy booze, and board airplanes, then we may as well make it is simple as fucking possible to verify their identities: we photograph and fingerprint the voters who vote but do not produce ID.  That way you can avoid having hundreds or thousands of people traveling from voting booth to voting booth pretending to be different, and sometimes dead, people.  We could scan and cross-index fingerprints, and as needed compare pictures.

This would not prevent people both voting for themselves, then voting for someone else in another district who is dead or was not going to vote, but it would make the whole thing harder.  And it might piss off enough people for all of us to admit that assuming the worst of blacks is vastly the more racist policy.

Now, I assume, perhaps erroneously, that the rolls will be checked to make sure all registered voters are in fact citizens, but if we have fingerprints, and particularly if we set out long jail terms for voter fraud, we might get some goddamned common sense back.

I often feel I am living among lunatics.  They repeat as their own ideas imbecilities they have simply heard repeated, and consider themselves intelligent for having done so.  Oi.  And Oi usually means I’m drinking, but I’m not.

if you think about it, the primary job of politicians is convincing the electorate, and their fellow politicians, of their sincerity. Self evidently, everyone promises to fix something, but practically, since the systems in play in complex topics like economics are so recondite to average people, the REAL task, particularly for Democrats, is rationalizing failure in such a way that they continue to seem interested in solutions to the problems–like the failure to flourish among many blacks in this country—they claim as their own core concerns.

And a particularly insidious loop, on that particular issue, is that the very failure of the policies is argued as evidence for why Democrats are indispensable. “You are poor”, they say. “How could you possibly survive without us?” In that circumstance, and as long as they remain believable, the generalized amelioration of black poverty would be an unmitigated disaster.

This might well be labelled a moral hazard.

how many textures does the average person encounter in an average day? How many smells? How many unexpected sounds?

It seems to me modern life, where everything is smooth, predictable, electronic and sanitized, cannot but deaden our senses and the intelligence–the intuitive, instinctive, natural intelligence–which regular and open connections to those sensations enable.

There is something to be said for walking barefoot, feeling the textures of trees, smelling nature, listening to wind in the grass and the flow of water.

Any time the government gets bigger, the potential for abuse gets bigger.  And the more power and privileges government employees have, the more incentive they have to protect and expand them at the expense of the people.  This is simple human logic.

I was thinking about “dark matter/dark energy”: there is nothing dark anywhere in this universe: there are merely perceptual limitations.  In pitch blackness, at the bottom of a mile deep cave, everything is bombarded continuously with neutrinos and other radiation which, for its part, does not “see” the visible, “solid” universe.

If you think about it, thinking about emotions is a type of pendulation away from them.  It is the opposite of processing them.  It is sometimes necessary to use symbols–words–to perform logical operations, but it can never be inherently therapeutic.

If it is true that adult resilience can be largely predicted by how lovable mothers think their children are when they are two, then it should be fairly obvious why single parent homes do so poorly.  Children feel everything their mother feels, and if she is feeling anxious, lonely, angry, sad, she is not loving that child: specifically, she is not making it feel lovable.

It may or may not be the case that “there needs to be a man in the house”, but there definitely needs to be love, safety, and attention.  Who is a teenage mother living in poverty in a dangerous neighborhood?  Well, she is a saint if she is fully available emotionally, particularly when her own mother never modeled the behaviors she now needs to be showing her own child.

Humanity is not clay.  Our DNA, the hard wiring of our brains, our entire instinctual complex, is not something that can be molded like clay.  It cannot be overthrown overnight through any amount of violence generated by emotionally retarded, petty, arrogant, and blind intellectuals.

We have to work with who we ARE, not who it is preferable to believe we are.  Public policy has to be grounded in sanity, and the assumption that most people will pursue their own self interest, if they can perceive it, and that living productive, creative, engaged lives is and should be the goal.