Month: April 2017

Last night, I think for the second time, but I really can’t remember, I had some turbulent force erupt 1′ from my face, in one of those dreams where you are more or less awake, and awake instantly when it is done.  I just watched and felt it.  My capacity for fear itself seems to be slowly fading.  You can only have so many bad nights before some fatalistic part kicks in, and I am hoping that is soon.

But the energy got me to thinking this morning.  The demonic is everything a properly socialized, intrapsychically healthy individual is not.  One acronym I have introduced in the past that I got from Dan Siegel is FACES, which is flexible, adaptable, coherent, energized and stable.

I would invert all but one of these for the demonic to inflexible, controlling, chaotic, and completely unstable.  The one I would keep is energized.  In fact, I would make the energy completely compulsive.

Thus, a demonic person is one who needs to control others because they are inflexible, and who need that power because what they are asking for, what they need, varies continually, all in a context of hyperarousal, fear, and furious energy.  A whirlwind.  That is what I felt.

Once again, I will channel my own inner pedant and point out that this describes the Left.  It is not that they want concrete things–actual amelioration of any human conditions, for example–but a channel for the expression for incoherent and destructive energy.  It is demonic, as I continue to say regularly.

As for me, I will add as a goal something the 109 year old also said, which is that he would sleep just fine with all his doors unlocked.  He was not afraid to die, and figured when it was his time, it was his time.  I’m not going to go to that length–I haven’t lived a century after all, although I suspect he’s been like that most of his life–but it is worth asking the question: what do we LOSE through continual thought about and preparation for the worst?

I have seen demons.  They did not hurt me.

I was watching a video on a man who has aged to 109 beautifully. And what struck me is that he has numerous things throughout the day and week that he likes and which make him happy.  He likes to smoke cigars. They make him feel good.  He likes soup.  He likes to drive.  He likes to go to church.  There are a number of small, controllable things that bring him comfort and small pleasures.

Over and above the wisdom of this, I suspect small things which make us happy also enable us to live longer.

Spring flowers do not last forever.  Enjoy them when they are at their peak.  It is beautiful around here right now.  And eat cookies and candy from time to time.  I suspect the stress of orthrexia is more damaging over time than the shortfalls of the pretty close approach.

I am house watching for someone, and they said I could watch TV and grab a beer from time to time, which I took advantage of tonight.  I watched the end of one of the Transformers movies, then 2 and a half episodes of the Walking Dead.  Tonight is the season finale, but I needed to go to bed, and in any event I don’t follow much of what they are talking about.

But I could not help but feel I was participating in American culture.  This is what we do.  There is a morphological similarity between knowing that everyone in your culture is performing a certain ritual at a certain time, and the ritual of TV.  It is a talking point.  It is a means of bridging individual gaps.

And I see that we are all confused.  TV really is in important respects our culture.  When people want to talk about something shared, it is usually mass media in some form, whether it be TV, music, movies, or something on the internet.

Where people did things slowly and together–as in church, as in Rotary, as in the Masons–half a century ago, now it is solitary, but shared later (although sports, of course, many still watch together, which is good).

And I felt, too, that interacting empathetically with the characters made me feel less lonely.  Emotions were going on, and I felt like I was sharing them.  There is a sociality with TV and movies, where we create the feeling of being with others, and participating in their lives.

It is an odd fact of our age that we are culturally disconnected already, and vast segment of our thought leaders in the universities and political arena are working HARD to deconstruct what few cultural markers and shared assumptions remain.  The crowd is getting lonelier.

It is odd that watching normal TV makes me feel like a part of the human race.  I should do it more.  Really, I should get cable, and a better couch.

I am an odd duck.  I often feel I am in the wrong time and place.  I have, I feel, so much to offer, but few people seem to have any interest in my many ideas and projects.  Misunderstood: ah, there is a word one sees often with outliers.

Shit, I do still need to get cable.  I find sports relaxing too, especially baseball, golf and tennis, because I could not care less who wins.

So I spent an hour or two listening to Shostakovich, and I cannot escape the idea that what we need to eliminate is not nuclear weapons–and all the other things that could destroy us, like weaponized AI, and germ warfare–but the IDEA of all of these.

Everyone at some level wants peace.  All nations–the people of all nations–want peace.

What we need to figure out is who wants war. There are many people in positions of power who want war.  Who need war, despite the cost.  At any cost.

Nations who do not want war still prepare for war, because so many people in this world are still insane.

My sense is that we need to eliminate those who cannot be negotiated with, and negotiate with the rest.

Why can’t we all want a world where we are all free to live and die as we see fit?

There is nothing there, until something is there.

I am day drinking.  I might make Sundays the day for it, and swear off more than one or two anywhere else, but it is interesting and, I feel at the moment, productive.

Ponder for a moment the emotions latent within a single person interacting with the world at home via the internet, TV, and movies on DVD.  It is overwhelming, and it is small wonder that so many of us shrink our perceptual domains so much.  The world is large, and it is all in our rooms.

This morning, after taking my dog on a long walk, where I listened to and failed to find several woodpeckers, watched robins chasing squirrels, watched tall trees gently dancing in the wind, and felt how beautiful this world can be (bon mot: Beauty is fleeting, but eternally refreshed), I spent half an hour watching Alex Jones talking about pedophile rings after talking with an ex-Seal Team 6 member who is saying that based on information conveyed to him privately that most of what Alex has claimed to be true is in fact true.

Then I watched Sunset Boulevard, which had long been on my to-do list.

There is a feedback loop here, in that the plot of the movie revolves around a certain latent insanity in the movie business, but that it itself was a movie, one which talked about how so many of the makers of our popular culture are in some respects insane.

And I can only process, myself, so many emotions while drinking.

I say process: of course, anesthesia is coming short of a full reckoning, but in my own case my own feelings are so powerful that I need an intermediate or softening step.

Look at all of us, with our TV’s, our news, our video games.  No one can possibly process the world.  We are not strong enough.  We are not evolved enough.  Everybody falls short, and goes into belief and abstraction.  We create filters.  We dissociate, then call the remaining sense of outrage profound.

One can never know–I can never know–if I speak for others.  We cannot read one anothers minds.  But I continue to believe William James basic insight that introspection must be one tool for figuring out what applies generally.  It is that, lab rats and white coats, and some combination of the two.  That is all we have.

We are not meant to care for the world.  The world is much too big.  I only recently memorized all the countries in Africa.  The NAMES.  That is all.

All order must of necessity be local.  There can be no other kind.

But I see, and feel, those who would make of information technology, of computers, of AI, something bigger than all of us, which CAN see and know and thus “feel” through distancing and analysis all of it.

We can build a perfect world, we are told implicitly, if we can just build monsters which CAN process all of this, which have no human limits.

And thus some of our best minds dedicate themselves to a world where humans really have no place, where souls are not a recognizable category, where “life” is merely an accidental machine which has yet to be fully analyzed.

Where, to be clear, their fears, and doubts, and confusions, disappear into an abyss of perfected matter.

Goethe said that nothing human was foreign to him.  I am no Goethe, but I understand why he would say this.  We all operate according to simple codes, which in cases of profound dysfunction proceed from an existential premise that none of us are loveable and life has no purpose.  This “premise” proceeds, in turn, from primitive realities, from truths such people cannot remember.

A perfected world is small.  Many, many people see this, without perhaps being able to articulate the reason.  This is the root of “Keep Austin weird”.  Keep Portland Weird.

Local knowledge must be in the hand of local control.  This is the essence of Liberalism as I define and embrace it.

I see sometimes in my reveries screams from the future, saying “save us, save us”. I am but one man, perhaps half a man, if you factor in all the ways I don’t work properly, but I do what I can.  It is small, but all I can do.

Was John Brennan the “high level” leaker?

We need to be clear: the allegations supported by evidence are that the CIA attempted to either throw the election to Hillary, or to at a minimum delegitimize–which is to say destabilize, which is something they have long experience doing in OTHER nations–Trumps government.

That is huge.  A large, well funded agency with many decades of experience in covert operations has turned rogue, seemingly from the top down, and it working AGAINST American democracy, not for it, which is its mandate.  An agency founded to FIGHT Communism was seemingly being run until recently (I don’t know if Brennan has yet stepped down) BY a Communist. I continue to fail to see how anyone capable of voting Communist in 1976 would ever fully change their mind.

One other point that hit me the moment I woke up this morning: all parties involved know that most electronic communication is vulnerable.  As Trump pointed out, the only secure communication is courier.

Connect that dot with the fact that Obama and his intellectually mangled and profoundly ugly handler Valerie Jarrett chose to remain with walking distance of many of the seats of power.  Could they not from there play an old fashioned spy game of sending and delivering messages, and even old school stuff like dead drops, microdots and the like?

If I were Trump, given that Obama has vowed to work to vitiate the results of a fair election which no one has seriously suggested was interfered with in any substantive way, I would surveill him.  I would watch who comes and goes, particularly.

I will wonder out loud if John Brennan–who we can all safely assume is highly intelligent in ways neither Obama nor Jarrett are–is wondering why the fuck he ever allied with them in the first place.  That was a dangerous and in the event stupid bet, or that seems to be how it is trending.

I see that some one hundred or more art house theaters are screening 1984 this coming Tuesday, in protest, as they say, of the assaults on free speech constituted by the Federal Government cutting public support for private art projects.

I read many things that make my head hurt, but conflating the defunding of what has for decades amounted to left wing propaganda, with actual restrictions on speech–of the sort, oh, I don’t know, which AmerSoc is inflicting on college campuses and on city streets daily in the name of free speech–is completely imbecilic, intellectually half baked, emotionally stunted, and profoundly delusional and dangerous.

How do left wingers reach a point of such complete intellectual depravity that they are able to view anyone but themselves as the originators and supporters of the ideas of tyranny and totalitarian conformity which are presented in the book and movie?

We want smaller government.  They want larger government.  Do the math.

I was watching CNN at lunch. I can take it in small doses with the volume turned all the way down.

And it occurs to me that where this manufactured controversy–dependent entirely on journalistic errors of both commission (lies) and omission–is certain to be regarded with resentment and anger is among career military and particularly officers, and particularly high ranking officers.

Flynn is a decorated combat veteran who served his country faithfully–so faithfully, in fact, that Obama canned him for trying to do his job with integrity and competence–for 30 years.

Now the fucking Democrats–who plot treason nightly in their beds in lieu of counting sheep–are trying to string him up in a political lynching that has nothing to do with integrity, protecting America, the rule of law, or anything but naked political opportunism which seeks to ruin him for short term gain, then forget about him, his sacrifices, and the truth as they move onto the next political hit job.

All of this obvious to people who think, and particularly to those who could easily see what is being done to him being done to them.

It has become obvious that we have anti-American moles throughout our government, but anyone who wants single party rule HAS to have the support of the military, and the Democrats seemingly cannot get their fill of insulting, belittling, undermining and attacking them.