Is it any wonder, though, that so many people in modern America are so superficial?
Our media are so concerned that he is sharing secrets that they release all the details on the front page. Am I the only one who sees the problem here? I don’t think so. His approval ratings are astonishingly high, considering the 24/7 media hate campaigns being waged against him.
I will add that if Sean Hannity is forced out at Fox, I will start watching and listening to him wherever he goes. I think Bill O’Reilly and him could do quite well somewhere, perhaps the network where Mark Levin and Michelle Malkin are broadcasting. I would pay just to support the concept of a press not dedicated to daily lies supporting global fascism. We need that, and have far too little of it.
Released in 2007 and 2009 respectively, the enemies in the first one are Russians and Syrians (the guy we are looking for is named Al-Assad, and at a certain point he detonates a nuke he allegedly got from the Russians), and in the second one the Russians invade Virginia.
It is odd to me that these two countries specifically would have been chosen back then. The Iranians, the North Koreans, and even the various Al-Queda groups in Iraq and Afghanistan would have made more sense. We were fighting them then, and the possibilities were and remain considerable.
When the story of the modern era is told honestly–if it ever is–we may all wonder how we were collectively so stupid.
As I have pointed out to the point of tedium, National Socialism, and actual Fascism, both spring from utopian impulses. This makes them Leftist projects.
True conservatism, “rightism”, is the process of valuing and where necessary returning to the old. In France, from whose revolutionary “Assembly” we get the term “rightist”, it implied Monarchism. There had been a king, the king was overthrown and killed, and they wanted–and got–one back. This is conservatism.
NOTHING that contains the word “new” can be called “rightist”. Yes, Hitler through and with Wagner invoked the old Germanic myths, but they had not been present when he came into the world, and they can’t possibly have meant exactly to old German tribes what he made them mean in his modern Germany.
His Aryan–which is a Sanskrit word–was the result of philological study which indicated it was POSSIBLE that his neck of the woods was the original homeland of those tribes who became the creators of the Sanskritic, Greek, and Latin traditions and cultures. They were the Urheim, in other words, of most of the best ideas of the world. This was his myth, his claim.
It is astonishing to me that in a world where we are being told gender specific pronouns are wrong, that concepts of gender dating back to the first births of human consciousness–being based, as they are, on measurable differences in brain structure and of course biology–need to be discarded, and that all received views of our common culture are outdated and harmful, that those who seek to preserve some connection with our past would be conflated with the utopian projects of the Nazis.
That this is propaganda is obvious. That the author does not see this is equally obvious.
I wonder sometimes about what I am beginning to think of as “the mind in the air conditioned world”, which is so soft that it sees almost nothing, all while spewing words like a waterfall of acid. So many are unconnected with the world, with reality, with common humanity, which is not common to them at all.
So many, so active on the stage of public affairs, are Sophists, while believing they are scientists. Nothing to them is true, which makes their words the only truth they care about.
It is scary, and very hard for me to comprehend. I have said to people often: I do not know how you function with your brain in such a small box.
This would seem to be a no-brainer: the CIA is actively trying to overthrow the democratically elected leader of THIS country, which makes them his enemy, which makes anything that weakens them good. It is hard to see how anything vindicating the CIA would be contained in those files.
Alternatively, depending on how desperately they want those files suppressed, he could use this as a weapon to force them into a MAJOR house-cleaning, one which would happen long before the October deadline. We need an agency that works FOR America, and it seems to me a lot of heads need to roll to make that happen–and in the process they need to just be retired, not allowed to hire on immediately with a private corporation that seeks the same ends, but funded by foreign governments and who knows who.
It is interesting that Obama had the opportunity to allow–apparently it happens unless stopped, which means he stopped it–the release of the files on the Bay of Pigs invasion. All accounts point to a feckless and cowardly JFK abandoning his soldiers on the beaches of Cuba at the first sign of resistance. The historians I read argue that the Russians saw this and concluded he was a pussy, and this is what created the Cuban Missile Crisis, which far from being a sign of his genius and leadership, was the outcome of more or less secret failures he had been able to suppress.
By law the cycle is 25 years. However, it does seem to me that the President ought properly to be able to order the declassification of anything he chooses, at any time he chooses. He runs the intelligence agencies. The law simply states that there will be an automatic declassification.
If I am right, this might be an interesting project for Trump: combing through secret files and determining what will most embarrass the people trying to embarrass him right now, and releasing that data, or holding it, subject to them acting like fucking patriotic Americans.
What he could do IMMEDIATELY is put somebody intelligent that he trusts on the project of reading through these files, which could contain very, very explosive information, and figuring out some combination of what is right and what is practical. Those decisions would depend on the details.
And what if the CIA WAS in some way behind the assassinations? That would mean they have been involved in internal regime change since at least the early 1960’s. Surely that is something Trump would want the American people to know, especially since that same CIA was capable of hiring, in 1977 or so, a John Brennan who voted for the Communist in 1976.
I talked about these things about 7 years ago in this piece: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Website–Sybaritic%20Leftism%20and%20Cultural%20Sadeism.pdf
As I said, the main problem is not primarily that people choose the decadence implied in asking the government to take the risk of living out of their lives, but that such people have no means of defending their system from those who want to crash and destroy it. They can’t even bring themselves to stop bringing such people into their countries. The whole thing is ludicrous, and based on emotional weakness, and sloppy thinking–thinking which in important respects rests on the ideas of humans as finite animals in an infinite universe, one in which everything comes to nought, no matter how hard we try.
Ideas have consequences. This is why serious people have to honestly question their own first assumptions, particularly when it is OBVIOUS that they are emotionally rooted.
There are no atheists out there who consistently reconcile their positions with the best data available. This is impossible, because the best data implies some form of theism, and requires of anyone honestly committed to the scientific method at least agnosticism.
No: it is a belief system, one which, once adopted, becomes prey to the same Confirmation Biases they can see in everyone but themselves. What makes it impossible to escape is that they conflate their dishonesty with honest science. Atheism then becomes not a scientifically defensible position based on science, but becomes SCIENCE itself, and all dissent inherently ignorant and psychologically rooted.
Unanswered, because unanswerable in a formally post-rational context, is the question: has human civilization advanced in the last 1,500 years? If not, then Muslims following their religion scrupulously–and the rules are set out VERY clearly and are not supposed to change, ever, for any reason, until the end of time, at least formally–are no different than those who believe in universal human rights, the importance of an accountable government, and the value of political and moral freedom.
The man who beats his wife for disobedience–or even to prevent it in the first place–is EXACTLY equal to the children marching in the streets for his right to do so.
The man who participates in a gang rape of an infidel woman, as he sees it, is EXACTLY equal to a feminist who argues for women’s rights.
There is no difference, because where no morality exists, no progress is possible, and no basis for judgment exists.
It is a short step from here, to labeling residual efforts at morality “false consciousness”, and then formally embracing evil as a creed, as all hard core Leftists–what I call Cultural Sadeists–tacitly and not infrequently explicitly, do.
All of this is only made possible by bad ideas, advanced by mental and emotional defectives, and amplified by well funded sociopaths.
At some point he could not stop himself, or, at any rate, he didn’t, regularly.
I think there is such a thing as “self enabling”. In some cases, of course, there is some sycophant who secretly takes pleasure in your self sabotage, but I also think that only augments something already there.
Let us say as an example that you decide to give up cookies for one week. White sugar, calories, self discipline, etc.
Two days in, the temptation becomes overwhelming, and some voice comes in your head and says “it’s no big deal. It’s only a couple cookies”. We all know this little devil on the shoulder. Or most of us do, in any event. We all mostly get by, but fail often in small things.
What is this?
What I would suggest is this is poorly regulated biological drives, combined with insufficiently developed self calming capacity directed by the frontal cortex.
Our addictions–and addictions can be very, very small, like binge watching Netflix–connect our sense of self with our more primitive gut intelligence. The gut is the energy behind everything nasty and everything good. It is a primal force, which has to be channeled, and which is mostly, but not entirely, channeled by most modern Americans in positive ways.
Freud told us that sex was the primary drive. But so many people are having so much sex, and it is not making their lives much better, and seems in a great many cases to be alienating them from themselves, and from others.
Given the current obesity epidemic, over and above the abysmal stupidity of the anti-fat movement, it is not hard to argue that as a culture we have switched from the sex drive to the gut drive, instinctively. It is more primal, and better at helping at least immediate self regulation. It, too, has a hunger, and unlike when we speak of “sexual hunger” this one is literal. Gut imagery underlies much of our speech and thought.
“We”, as emergent properties of the complex interaction of many nervous system inputs–which would in my view include spiritual inputs as well–have as our task moving from matter to spirit.
I would like to suggest that the main point of life on Earth is learning to choose the Good, which is to say what we choose from our higher Selves, and choose consistently, and do so calmly and reflectively.
When you DECIDE something, really decide it, the process is perhaps not easy, but is automatic. You don’t have to choose repeatedly.
For myself, I can imagine a world where sticking to a diet and exercise and work program is easy. I decide what is good for me, and lose along the way that competing voice which tells me that this choice–like every other choice–has forgotten some other part of me which feels the need to make itself heard through what we call self sabotage.
Ponder this conception of self sabotage. For me, I was watching a war in my dreams last night between the bad Transformers, and the good ones, led reasonably enough by Tony Stark. I of course wanted the good ones to win, but as an adult in the waking light, I realize that the bad ones are me too. They are parts of me trying to get a voice, and which having obtained a voice, will become allies.
The word integration is overused, but it certainly includes incorporating–look twice at that word–our own evil, with all the energy for good it held hostage.
I do believe there is a teleological element to life, that this world in some respects is a breeding ground for choosing beings.
And the point is not to punish evil doers, but to herd all of us gradually in the direction of good. Without negative–and positive–feedback, the system does not work.
Here is a mantra I have decided to use for myself “Everything good is good”. You need this idea of goodness to support yourself in your own decisions. The idea is invaluable. Do you not think it has to compete with the idea that self denial is bad? That we are basically animals characterized by anxiety in a herd much too large for us to compass, and that anything which meliorates any sense of unease for any period of time is defined, by our culture, wrongly, as “good”, and perhaps even “god”?
These are some deep ideas. I offer them to you in the hope they nurture your spirit.
Could the whole Russian campaign be a false flag intended to make Trump himself believe that someone who might be sending anonymous notes is Russian, when in fact it is John Brennan, through many intermediaries?
Again: walls need to be put in place, if this is technically possible, which protect civil rights, and they need to be guarded by honest people. This may be hopelessly naive, but perhaps we could hope that rival spy agencies will spy on one another, and that the patriotic one wins.