Month: April 2017

1. The left wing agenda is really a corporate agenda. Why else would so many massive corporations and billionaires support it?  Government  equals wealth and control for those who are connected.

2. Positive thinking is not about ignoring the bad but rather allowing in the good. Bad things will happen whether we want them to or not, but there is absolutely nothing necessary about taking risks based on the hope for something better. Most people, in fact, never do, and leave life with all the bad that was coming anyway, but none of the possible good that required belief.

Allan Bloom talks about how our culture is affected by the knowledge on the part of both children and parents that at some point they will likely leave and never return.  They will travel for education, then career or marriage, and even if there is a reunion in a happy family once or twice a year, the relationship will have changed permanently.

And as he points out, the possibility of separation is already the fact of separation.  You have to prepare yourself psychologically.  And one has to wonder how this changes the relationship between parents and their children.  They know they will not depend on their children in their old age, as was the habit of the world until the present age.  Their children view it as their job to get out of their control, and to become economically and psychologically independent as soon as possible.

Do parents–especially mothers–sometimes unconsciously soften their children, make them more dependent and less able, in order to reduce the chance of their figurative voyage overseas, leaving them all alone?

And how has the nature of the necessary relationship between children and their parents–again, especially the mother, who is the emotional center of most homes–altered the maturation process.  In past ages, you would stay or–if at war or engaged in commerce–return to your home and extended family, your community within the community.

We no longer have communities within communities.  Most of the time, we do not even maintain the so-called nuclear family.

Now, I am speaking here of suburbanites and city people.  In the countryside, much of the old ways remain.  People are born, stay, and die in the same small place, where they have family, and know everyone.  This makes their culture, their expectations of others, very different than those who live in continual anxiety brought on the necessary social separations which their very different acculturation causes them to view as necessary.

People need people.  We all need to feel we belong, are understood, are valued independently of our economic worth, and can love and be loved without fear of loss outside of those which come with life.

I have made some significant progress in my own healing in recent days.  I may post on it, and I may not.  But I do continue to ruminate about how we get from here to a healthy global culture 100 years from now.  It is quite possible.  All the elements are there.  But we have to stop acting like and making love to machines. 

I’m slowly going through an inventory of old movie “classics”, and watched this one yesterday.

My take is that the plot would have been equivalent and in most respects better if it had chronicled a cabby in San Francisco slowly having a nervous breakdown, then jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, surviving, then finding a new lease on life.

I don’t know why people think it is deep and “real” covering seamy stories we all know about, but doing so without any higher purpose, without any redemption.

Travis wanted to kill himself.  Option A was taken–that of killing a Presidential candidate whose only crime was being supported by a woman who, with considerable justification–had rejected him, so he went with Option B.  Iris was an after-thought.  His plan was if he couldn’t get death by cop, he would get death by mobster.  Option C, which also failed, was simple suicide.  He ran out of bullets.  That’s all.

Scorsese seems to think that extreme violence equals depth.  In the respect that it mirrors latent violence within so many people trapped in this giant rat cage, yes, it is deep.  But violence in itself is not redemptive.  It teaches nothing.  There is no lesson to be learned.  This is not an old school western where the bad guys are punished, and the rule of law and principle upheld.  This is a chaotic emergence from a world where everyone is venal, dark, sick, and lost.  Travis is not a good man.  He is suffering from undiagnosed trauma–likely traumas–of various sorts.  This is why he can’t sleep.  He would have been more honest as a full blown alcoholic who spent his money on whores.

As Iris said, Sport was not a killer.  Nor was he abusive, even if we can all grant that having sex with a 12 year old is sick.  Travis was a killer.  But we are supposed to side with him, apparently.

I can check that movie off, but I can say with some finality that I am not a Scorsese fan.

On a pretty regular basis anymore when doing my Kum Nye practice, I will enter moments where words are acidic and damaging.  I feel fields of motion, perceptual domains where things are moving, where colors exist, where SOMETHING is, but where calling things out by name is ridiculous.  Change happens without planning, without thought.

And what I feel by extension is that the evolutionary purpose of psychosis is qualitative change within fixed brains.  There has to be nothing there for a moment, for something new to emerge.  The problem in our contemporary world is that if you cannot embrace this radical change, then the process can never complete, and you get stuck in the intermediary ground between one sanity and another.  And our system, by labeling, encourages people accidentally to stay there.  It medicates them so the process cannot complete.

I think many rituals of past tribal peoples, who knew much more about many important aspects of life than we do with what we assert to be our “science”, understood that a butterfly is nothing for a period of time after it is a caterpillar, and that if you break open the cocoon too soon, what you see and get is a muddled mess.  You cannot conclude from that that nothing was happening, or that butterflies are impossible.

I would like to define sanity for the moment–I may change my mind or heart tomorrow–as being consciously connected to the spirit of Goodness in a dynamic and adaptable way.

There is a wind blowing through the world–it has been called the Way–which suffuses the lives of those who breathe it with delight, resilience, compassion, and higher level intelligence.  If you can feel it, and know how to breathe it, how to be in it, then you are sane.

And if you do not, then you are some level of insane.  This is most of the world, certainly most of the “developed” world.  It continues to feel odd to me that Socialists–who as a cultural group are very amenable to diverse ways of doing things, to some forms of artistic culture, and certainly to oddness as a discipline–are so utterly unable to realize that there are rewards in life that have nothing to do with money, and that the rich are often miserable, and poor Africans who pound oil barrels into wood burning stoves they can dance around on cold nights are much happier.  God forbid they get rescued by professionals, which in most cases in the 20th century meant do-gooders creating the economic means for them to be reenslaved by their own people using Western money.  They went from one frying pan into another, while those, like Mugabe, who were copying the Western imperialist model using socialist rhetoric were praised by the “rescuers”.

I watch people: at work, in bars, on the street, in restaurants, in the gym.  Everybody I see is hiding something.  Everybody I see has secret pains they in many cases cannot even admit to themselves, but which show up in behaviors they can explain but not really defend.  It is not what they really want.

This is Duhkha.  The Buddha was counseling nothing more or less than better mental health.  If your house is on fire, and you continue living there: insane.  Do you really need a reason to change other than realizing you are miserable and have been all your life, compared to what is possible?

I get this wind sometimes, for moments.  It only takes a whiff of perfume to process it, and this experience is the same.  It feels like the world is nurturing, soft, close, fascinating, and my own ability to respond with excitement and interested engagement even in the face of obstacles (which I faced literally today while I was trying to remember how wise I am (I am very wise until some mother fucking piece of shit gets in my way, then I start swearing, but, uh, in a spiritual way.  OM)) is robust.  Even bad things become interesting.  All experience becomes a source of growth and moving closer to continual contentment and frequent joy. Nothing shocks you, because you know that even in fabrics of grief there are threads of consolation, and that frustration and continually reinforced indignation are childish, churlish, and warrant starving, not feeding.

Becoming sane is, in my view, the point of life.  It is only accomplished rarely, but approximated by many.

I will likely make notes from time to time as I go through this book.  His is the sort of clear mind which is sorely lacking in nearly all universities, and which I would have loved to have encountered in my own education. He taught himself to see what was in front of him, while retaining a memory of what was ideal.  Put another way, he deals honestly with life’s contradictions, a feat which is perhaps the summit of what education at its best makes possible.  Certainly, that is what I hear him arguing thus far.

He makes the point that whereas parents and grandparents in the past viewed it as their task to inculcate notions as to what is good and desirable, parents today focus more or less on vocational preparation.  He comments as well that with the ubiquity of media, parents have lost much control over their childrens moral development, even when they do try to instill what they consider moral values.

One point I found particularly interesting is the importance of music in culture, and thus in political life.  I think I have always sensed this.  I worked hard to bring my kids up with good, wholesome, honest, “life” music.  Both of them have thanked me specifically on a number of occasions for raising them with good music.

In any home there is always what is said and what is present but not said.  You want both to be in harmony, in congruence.  Music is a beautiful way to speak without talking.

“Openness to closed-ness is what we teach.”

I finished listening to Confederacy of Dunces.  I really do believe that Ignatius Reilly–with his continual outrage, compulsive lying, emotional detachment, grotesque self obsession, and delusions of grandeur–really does represent an Ideal Type in a Weberian sense of the typical Leftist.  If you take Michael Moore, he even more or less LOOKS like him, although he likely has trouble sourcing Dr. Nut.

Likewise Myrna Minkoff (spelling approximate, since I listened to the book) is obsessed with saving people.  She wants to save HERSELF through her crusades to save others.  This, too, is the model behind the Daily Cause.  You have large numbers of emotionally fucked up people who want to feel better about themselves by finding–or inventing–people in “need”, who in turn need them as saviors.  Being saviors, their lives are not without meaning, and being saviors, they are superior to SOMEONE at least.

I would add in that vein that it is odd to juxtapose the obsession with material wealth which suffuses socialist thought with the grandiose, Olympian detachment which intellectuals direct at the “bourgeois”.  On the one hand we are to believe that only material equality matters–social inequality merely being a means to material inequality–and on the other that the culture of intellectuals is superior to the mere pursuit of material things, which are thus signalled as unimportant.  Unimportant, to be clear, to THEM, but not the poor fools who need them to agitate on their behalf.

Bloom himself, turning to my main point (as a segue I should note this is the new audiobook I am listening to), noted all this 30 years ago.  He points out that the intellectuals want to make of minorities the majority, with themselves as aggregators and shepherds of the minorities taken as a whole.  This is where we are today.

But the main point I wanted to make is that he predicted the outrage at Trump 30 years ago as well.  Trumps absolute core sin is positing such a thing as “American Interest”, which might also be called the “Public Good”.  He speaks of improving the lot of the “American People”.

This is a sin because it posits as an absolute truth that such a thing exists, that positive coherent action is possible in support of clearly defined objectives; and positing an absolute truth is exactly equal to Fascism.  Since he speaks of the Public Good he is therefore, through a short chain of tortured logic, a Fascist.

I would encourage our public intellectuals, such as they are, to revisit this book, which was describing 3 decades ago the world we live in today.  It has simply become much worse.  Public lunacy is now tolerated in far too many places, and embraced by far too many people in power who should know better.

The claim made is that this voice matches John Podestas. If true, this can be verified with s high level of precision.  And should be.

Actually, the video–which was audio of someone torturing a child–seems to have been removed already, while I was typing. Still, it hit the public domain and I’m sure HONEST law enforcement can find it and investigate it.

John Podesta is connected to everyone.  If he is a violent pedophile, as alleged, then some very powerful people in this country are very sick, which has been the allegation.

I found the video. I won’t watch the whole thing. The voice needs to be identified: https://youtu.be/7b273RhFHCY

Say what you want about Alex Jones, but he is right in nearly all cases about important general claims he makes.

Dr. Phil has embraced the idea that a large, global network of members of the power elite who engage in sexual deviancy and evil exists: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/25713-dr-phil-interview-exposes-global-elite-pedophiles

Here is a group working to fight them, founded by a Seal Team Six veteran: http://www.vets4childrescue.org/

I am going to give them money.