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The FBI and CIA, and possibly the NSA need to be purged or ended

http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/whistleblowers-lawyer-comey-falsely-denied-evidence-of-surveillance/

At a minimum, REAL oversight, by elected representatives of the American people, needs to be implemented.

And until people start going to jail, the culture of lawlessness–of being above the law, and immune to it–will continue.  The highest officials of at least the CIA and FBI have told bald faced lies directly to Congress.  That should not be allowed to happen without the severest penalties.  I really think Comey, Brennan, and Clapper belong in jail.

Here is the thing: how can we even know what dirt they have dug up on Congress?  Why would it not be a reasonable assumption that, if Congress fails to do its job, that key members are being blackmailed by people we TRUSTED to protect America, not a lunatic left wing agenda?

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Music

I went to an outstanding concert tonight, and it occurred to me to posit the following logical chain: if music is an important part of life, and if life is worth living well, then good music is necessarily an important part of life.

One of the most basic foundational flaws of Islam that I can point to is its hostility to song and dance in any form.  Singing, playing music, and dancing are all activities which soothe us, which calm us, which tame the wild beasts within us.  They make society possible.  They facilitate the laughter and shared happiness which are the essence of communion, genuine goodwill, and the capacity for love.

Now, practically of course, many Muslims break this code.  They sing, they dance, they celebrate.  But the zealots hate all of that.  Their creed is one of meanness, cruelty, rigidity, death, and darkness.  There is nothing good they will bring to Europe.

Making everyone mean is of course good for the religious business, if the goal is expansion and control through agents of violence, but it is not good for peace or human well being, and certainly not for thriving.

I would add that shame is a basic tool which, when installed at a young age, makes social control much easier.  You inculcate through it both submissiveness, and fear of being different.

It is for this very purpose that shame is being so carefully cultivated in our own youth, in the form of the Original Sin of being born white or male or unapologetically heterosexual.  The indoctrinators want their propaganda targets to feel deep shame at their very existence.  And kids are so fucking desperate and stupid that they BUY this bullshit.  Amazing.

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Politics and community

Principle: politics can never be a means to community, merely an expression of it.

Politics comes from Polis, and the underlying Greek idea is that no true community could be larger than could hear a loud voice yelling from a 2nd or 3rd story rooftop.  They are small by design.

And America is by design intended to consist in many, many Polises (Poli?  Polei?  I don’t do Greek), many small communities.  This is the whole point of the Electoral College, whose SUCCESS we saw in the election of Trump.

We see fear of Trump ending any number of Federal programs.  If I might again paraphrase Bastiat, simply because someone objects to one person doing something, having control over something, does not mean they object to it being done.  To object to bad policing is not to object to policing.  To object to bad policy is not to say there should not be policy.

And to object to the Federal Government doing something does not mean that it should not be done.  We can and should point to long term failures in educational achievement and view the Federal role in it as either irrelevant or pernicious.  We can and should point to the fact that the arts have been completely politicized, to the point that conservative tax-payers are in many cases being forced to subsidize–in the NEA, in “The People’s Radio”–media that are overtly propagandistic.

But that is not to object to art.  Art, and environmental policy, and education, and food for the elderly and everything else can be funded by the States, if they choose.  It can be funded by cities and counties.

This is the thing: caring should be local and responsive to specific problems which individuals can see in the places they live.  It should not be monolithic, one-size-fits-all, and originating for most of the country in a far distant place, filled with career bureaucrats who get fat paychecks and retirement bonuses, and who are nearly impossible to fire, EVEN WHEN THEY FAIL MISERABLY.

The EPA has more or less said to Trump “we don’t work for you”.  Fine.  What they do can be outsourced to the States.  Where there is a stream or river or lake or land area that crosses State borders, the two States can negotiate.  The EPA has clearly been abused for partisan political purposes.  That sort of abuse should not be possible in a politically well organized nation, which is what our Constitution created.

Culturally, both the right and the left want their politics to represent some ideal of community.  But caring is not enacted by bureaucrats disconnected from the lives they have so much control over.  And we cannot go back to the past.  What I might call the log of the past is falling, never to rise again in the same way.

We need new ideas, new seeds, new visions.  This is what I continue to attempt to provide, and I do not think I am speaking out of turn in saying I have enjoyed some success in at least the articulating, even if I am a nearly complete failure, thus far, in the implementing.

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James Comey

I’m trying to avoid politics, but would like to ask a question: why the fuck does James Comey still have his job? He refused to prosecute Hillary despite a superabundance of evidence even in the public record, and is now apparently concerned that WikiLeaks someone triangulated with Trump and the Russians to deny a dishonest tired and evil hag access to the Presiddncy.

Comey is corrupt. Period. And we don’t need s politicized hack running an agency with the power of the FBI.

Are not all Federal employees at-will? If not, can we not make them that way?

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Moonlight

As I suppose was inevitable, I am going to indulge myself and offer a few comments on this movie, which I first watched last night.

Ultimately, it is about redemption and survival, which are both highly positive themes.  I liked the ending.

And I don’t think Chiron is gay.  This was not a movie about gayness.  It was a movie about the importance of positive and nurturing physical contact combined with trust.  Trust is everything, especially for people who have found the world hostile and dark.

And I really like that aspect of it: that there was no preaching, merely telling, merely relating.  There was no politics there, even if it is safe to assume Hollywood read the politics into it.

It is perhaps both poignant and appropriate that there should have been such a fuck-up at the Oscars.  Barry Jenkins never thought he could get there in the first place.  He got there only as a result of an extended act of faith, courage, and putting one foot in front of the other and hoping for the best.

And he gets there, and wins, and gets his thunder stolen. But he still won.  Whatever the shit was that happened on the way, and when he got there, he still found redemption and acceptance of his vision in the end.

We all get hit.  Many of us get kicked on the ground.  But there is no use dwelling on all that.  There is still much goodness, much love, and much reason for hope in this world.  Perhaps it comes in small doses at irregular intervals, but this is still God speaking in this stony world.

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Why would you hate someone you love?

Because they will hurt you in the future, by changing, by becoming ill, by dying.

In the past, the belief in heaven helped most Americans deal with this grief of anticipation, because whoever they lost, they would see again.  But more and more Americans–and the world generally–are indoctrinated in the creed of Materialism, or what I read is now more often called Physicalism.

To love deeply is to be hurt deeply, so why not make your relationships more superficial, and your lasting attachments to abstractions who will never leave you?

I look at our kids today, and at my own childhood not so very long ago, and I think many American kids bear subtle scars of having been loved a bit, but not enough.  Their parents were distracted by work, by media.  Quite possibly their mother worked full time and they were raised by care-givers who were not family and not able to care quite enough in the first two years.  Quite likely their parents divorced when they were young, each seeking some new adventure, or at least escape from an inability to mature into a healthy giving and receiving relationship.

I was struck many years ago by how much more mature kids in Europe seemed to be than American kids of the same age.  Partly it is the real demands placed on them by the school systems over there.  Partly it is the continuity of culture and expectation which is communicated person to person, parent and grandparent to child, and not socialization through television.

We did not used to be overgrown children.  Americans were as mature and able at the same ages as Europeans.  But the 1960’s happened, and somewhere in there the ideal of becoming an adult underwent a crisis and psychosis, and permanently weakened.

And the core of maturation is individuation, and the core of that is the development of a felt sense of personal agency, that your world is in important respects within your control, that your behavior dictates your future, that you have a say, and that even if dreams take time to manifest, that persistence prevails most of the time.

None of those core personality beliefs and attributes can manifest in conditions of continual protection from psychological randomness and difficulty.  Life inherently becomes something beyond control, something dark and dangerous, something fearful, and life in a cage–to be called a “sanctuary”–something to be treasured.

I do not feel today as I felt yesterday.  But I needed to let that energy out. I am tempted to stipulate as a general principle that if something is falling, let it fall.  Then allow something new and more robust to be planted and to grow where it stood.  No use protecting dead wood.  This is not how life–which is inherently wild when lived honestly and freely–works.

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I hate everybody

This is what I am feeling at the moment.  This is the core of evil.  I want to watch the Earth destroyed, and everyone killed and dead, including me.  Paint it Black, with only slightly more energy and honesty.

Why do I write so much?  Why did I write all those essays on Goodness Movement?  Why have I spent so much time in political and philosophical debate?

Because I was fighting, through proxy, demons within myself.  Anyone who is driven is driven by something, and a better word might be chased by something.

Love is gradual. Love is patient and takes the long view.  Love embraces and expands and it is flexible and adaptable.  It is attraction, not compulsion, not obsession.

Hate may manifest using the word love or the word goodness. It may project words like justice and peace, but it does not come from those places, and it does not really know them.

I myself was laid on a sacrificial altar and every effort made to destroy me emotionally by my family.  I had no shelter but abstraction and dissociation.  No one intervened to save me.  Even now, they refuse to recognize what they tried to do, and I am left with that memory.

When a knife enters you, it leaves a gap.  Your memory retains that gap, and fashions it into an identical weapon, to be directed against the world in some way.  Now, this energy can and often is introjected to create a second wound, through patterns of self destruction and self harm, but it cannot easily be dissipated except through knowing and a slow process of acceptance and integration.

I do not want to be smart.  I want to be wise.  And this process is non-linear.

My past indicates I will be fine, but right now I am dealing with some extraordinarily destructive and nasty energies, that I have, seemingly, kept at bay until it was time to deal with them.  That time is now.  I have long practice facing things which I cannot face.

Wish me well.  I feel I may be human soon, and have learned important things in this excruciating experience.

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What do we really have?

Buddhists do not renounce all attachment.  For a very long time, they attach themselves to the Tripittika, the Triple Basket: the Buddha, the Sangha and the Dharma.

In theory, even this attachment does not endure forever, but as a practical matter, for most Buddhists it does.

Psychologically, there is no way to say to people “you can have this, trust this, place all your faith and trust in this, and then kill it.”

Oh, life.

Perhaps you can say the first part, and then add: and when it changes color, and becomes smaller and less attractive, and when your inner world becomes filled with light and love, then you can leave it behind, as a vehicle which served its purpose carrying you across the water.

What interests me here is not the proposition that everything and everyone you love can be taken–this is obvious–but the idea that some things cannot be taken; or at least, that the taking involves a different level of misfortune.

We have all read the stories of people being captured and sent to concentration camps where they “have” flea infested clothes, tattoos, endless workpaindeath, and nothing else but their memories, and perhaps their hopes.

More sinister to me are the efforts to take from people not just their possessions, but their memories and beliefs.  This level of evil is unique to Communism.  Not even the Mongols would have contemplated that level of cruelty.  They simply enjoyed killing and taking.

So in this world, not only can your things be taken, but your very sense of self, too.  One can only imagine what brain-washing tools have been developed by psychopaths working on their own account for “the future of mankind”, and in reality in service of primitive wounds they have no hope of healing or even remembering.

I was contemplating the other day that the lowest levels of evil require justification and dogma.  A psychopathic killer is an animal in a man’s–more rarely, a woman’s–body, but there remains a connection between the frontal cortex and what we might term “the predator’s brain” in their viscera.  The frontal cortex negotiates pretending to be a socially connected human, and the viscera express to that person feelings of completion and the cessation of tension and anxiety.  Serial killers go through a cycle, one in which their acute sense of emotional disconnection is temporarily suspended when they commit an act of cruelty which is not evolutionarily disconnected, in my view, from a wild cat playing with its prey, then killing it.  Since this is always a temporary solution, they tend to repeat their acts, and, importantly, keep mementos.  This is a nearly universal trait among those who have been caught.

But to the point there is a connection between what is felt and what is thought.  They know what relieves the tension.  They have moments where they feel, relatively, good.  There is a connection between the social brain and viscera, where feelings and thoughts flow back and forth.

This is not true for ideologues.  I feel the conscious connection between the social brain and the viscera is severed, in a permanent act of dissociation expressed through abstraction, and invariably in the service of an ideal which uses words which are socially acceptable, such as justice, progress, and peace.

What this means is that ideologues are disconnected, consciously, from their hatred, their anger, their violence, their venom; ultimately, given the words they always choose to use, from their hypocrisy and soul-level dishonesty.

No wild beast commits mass murder for no reason.  We can watch a cat play with a mouse, but one mouse is sufficient for most cats for a while.  Then they lose interest.

I am losing my way here.  I am tempted to delete all this, but it feels important to me emotionally at the moment.  I am not completely sure why.  I am trying to reach the abstraction needed for mass slaughter.

Nationalism is in some respects tribalism.  But tribalism represents concrete connections with actual people with whom you share an historical and cultural and social connection.

What do we call the tribalism of the abstract?  How do we understand their crimes?  I can’t go farther down this path at the moment.

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Logan

As I have shared several times, I identify (like many men) with the Wolverine character.  In my own case, perhaps among a smaller group, I identify with the recurrence of severe pain which does not kill him, from which he recovers.  But he feels the pangs of conscience.  He feels the pains of physical wounds.  He feels the pain of absence and loss, and his torture is surviving everything which kills everyone he makes the mistake of loving.  Small wonder a lifetime of continual disappointment makes him so hard, even if he can never bring himself fully to stop caring.

For me, this movie was somewhat redemptive.  As stark as the loss at the end was, it brought me emotional comfort, which puzzled me.

My children grew up watching the X-men movies with me.  This was a part of their childhood, and my parenthood.  A long story line has come, seemingly, to an end.  And my children, for their part, have grown.

But in some ways his pain was my pain.  I have long felt myself a “warrior”, which for my own purposes I would define as “someone who keeps fighting when he can’t go on and does so for a very long time.”

I felt some peace last night, as I realized that it need not remain my self appointed task to try and solve the problems of the world.  There is a difference between someone who fights, and someone who provides an alternative to fighting.

This world is broken.  None of us have the power to heal it fully.  Certainly, I don’t.

Douglas McArthur, among others, reminded us that “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

What does this mean?  When someone has given their all and then some, when they have consecrated their souls to battle, to the taking of lives, and enduring watching the lives of their own kind, their friends, their own spiritual flesh and blood, being taken in turn, there is an energy in the air created, a torment, a turmoil, a restlessness and recklessness which continues long after their bodies are dust.  They are memorable, and remain felt for a long time.

But I feel my path is to provide an alternative to war.  And for those who have known war, a path out of it.  Soldiers bring war home.  They may not show it, but it is there.  Once it is in the blood, nothing else feels right, for most.  They may fear and loathe it, as McArthur did.  But they cannot get it out of them.  It is a tinge, a coloring, an odor that remains.

I have never been in an actual battle, but within my heart I have endured countless hours of desperation, of reckless, seemingly impossible courage.  I am alive because of these battles, which I think would have claimed many in suicide or a suitable equivalent.

But I felt, last night, for the first time, the possibility of peace.  It goes not through arguing, not through that disputatiousness I use to protect myself from unmanageable emotions, but by letting it all go.

I feel that the inner cutting which attends deep perception is painful to me.  I am unwilling to renounce it fully, but I am willing to admit my clumsiness, my lack of skill, my painful stupidity, and with it, an alternative.

That alternative is silence, and the allowing of healing.

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This song influenced me a great deal when I was younger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bfA3fhsSnk

Much of this blog, perhaps, is me working it all out in my own way.  That whole album is excellent.

I am dealing with evil right now. Peter Levine says healing involves contacting our inner goodness, and I believe this, but in my own experience the path through it is an awareness of human evil, and specifically an awareness of its presence in our own hearts, all of us.  I watch it simmering up in me.  It is no longer hidden. I am becoming one, not two.

There is no easy way to be fully human, but that is what my aim in life is.