Month: May 2017

We know our intelligence agencies  (we apparently still have some whose names we are not allowed to know, just as the existence of the NSA was for a long time classified), certainly including the CIA (which literally has and had no legal warrant for eavesdropping in the USA–other than, of course, their political support of Leftist causes), placed global surveillance on Trump and those around him, extending a currently unknown distance. [This itself, and possibly law breaking involved in it, would in my view be properly a topic for Mueller].[Sorry for this sentence: it demonstrates well how my wandering mind works, often]

Here is my thought: what if they found something to blackmail Trump with?  They keep talking about the Russians blackmailing us, but what if they are blackmailing Trump right now?  In addition to the opposition of the Republicans, the Democrats, and the media, this will make it nearly impossible to accomplish anything.

What if they further have incriminating evidence against nearly every member of Congress?  It is hardly a stretch.  We have the capability of seeing and hearing nearly everything, and it would be a rare individual who never in their life did something they would not want on the front page of a paper.

This might be why, other than his congenital commitment to principle. Rand Paul continues to be one of the only ones willing to ask hard questions, and to pursue conservative causes honestly.

Certainly I think Trump has done things we still don’t know about that would make for, shall we say, an unusually busy news day.  At the same time, the people who put him in office (I do think Trump won the vote honestly, although I also think hacking the election is something that is current project of US intelligence)  GET that this system is broken, and getting every year worse, and trending to the end of US sovereignty.  We would–and have–forgiven nearly anything.  If framed as political blackmail, I think truth telling might well work, particularly when combined with criminal charges against those responsible.

And let us assume that Obama was the illegal immigrant, here on a long-expired Indonesian student visa, an ardent homosexual, and son of Frank Marshall Davis.  Do you not think that they had him by the balls, even if he was in any event inclined to their cause?

Ponder carefully a largely unsupervised intelligence apparatus capable of gathering instantly a nearly unlimited quantity of highly personal data on any human being on the planet who has spent any time in our networked world.

Do the math.

In my view, our future depends on honest patriots–honest idealists and visionaries–within our system.  Part of my writing, here, is trying to build support for alternative futures, other than a global totalitarian state framed as our friend and family.

All of us have been poisoned by a system which teaches us to distrust our best ideas, to distrust our instincts, and to elevate a vapid niceness to a God we place on high, to be used as needed by the psychopaths among us to render us defenseless, and helpless.

It might be useful to see most addictions as “life abcesses”.  Addiction is merely an outer form, the one taken by the pain which cannot be felt and cannot be expressed in a healthy way.

The word recovery seems to indicate that everything was fine, then you hit a bump in the road, and now you just have to “get back on track”.  No: in a great many people things simmer and fester for long periods of time before they erupt in measurable anti-social or self destructive behavior.

I am in my middle age, and am only slowly feeling what happened to me all those years ago.

There is no addiction recovery.  There is a reinvention of self.

And there is no healing.  There is a release from a cage.

A different vision, for some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaEJzoaYZk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvUI-s4Azw4

I have long identified with this woman.  Oh, but more is possible than the slums and clouds of Dublin.

Sometimes I watch troubled clouds drift over me and rain.  Sometimes they thunder and lightning.  Sometimes I feel relative peace. I try to feel the sun.

But I feel at the moment that I would not exchange anything for my pain, for my visions, and for what wisdom they produce that may prove useful.

I am a Mountain Goat butting the heads of all who would oppose this.  I won’t quit, and you won’t break my skull or horns, or equal my skill in the mountains, or capacity to see and appreciate the sun in the higher altitudes.

The acceptance of pain is a blessing.  Because pain is nothing more or less than a teacher.  It is not an end.  I am not a masochist.  But I am one who watches, and to the extent I can manage, sees.

Learn: this is our shared destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_pkgi-qdyQ

About 3:40 Levine starts talking about the traditional Buddhist paths to surrender.  And he talks about surrender near the end, but for my own purposes I would call it “the end of continual struggle with a self sustaining victory”.

The four means he discusses are ecstatic sex, long term meditation, death (e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead and what might be called “Death Yoga”), and trauma.

Pondering this, and my own experience, and my INTERPRETATION of my own experience, I was wondering tonight if trauma could not just be a part of a spiritual path, but an INTEGRAL part of it, a planned part of it, a chosen suffering which was a necessary precondition for creating the struggle and the strength to do and become interesting.

What if people have horrible things done to them do so as a matter of a life plan which is intended to point them in the direction of Enlightenment, of a break from the compulsive attachment to this world, this way, this place, this time?

What, I was wondering, is WONDERFUL about feeling unloved, abandoned, and under constant emotional attack?

It is a bit different, I suppose.  It creates what we might call after Churchill the “Solitary Tree” mindset and aptitude. It forces creativity.  Over some time horizon it creates a capacity for the recognition from one’s own experience the suffering of others.  I have felt what most people have felt.  I can relate on some level to most of the people I meet on an empathetic level.

It creates grit.  Nobody who is worth a shit is without courage and determination.  Those qualities can come in many forms, and for some go unrecognized.  But those with those qualities, I feel, recognize their own.

I am someone capable of jumping into the abyss. I am not sure what to expect, but it is far from clear to me that the abyss can take from me more than I can take from it, or that I have more to fear from it than it has to fear from me.

Can one take nothingness from nothingness?  Is this not the definition of creation?

Few thoughts. I’ve had a few, but am far from drunk.  I’m now actually going to go hit my journal.

To become Good, you have to become human, and to become human, you have to understand evil.

And by understand, you need  know intimately what it feels like, why and how it makes sense, what problems it solves, and where those problems exist within you.

So much evil is done in the name of Good that Goodness itself has largely come under attack as a meaningless word.

This is, of course, ludicrous, and the product of inferior minds.

But it is worth remembering that all of us have the capacities of all of us.  All of us have both Ted Bundy and Albert Schweitzer in us.

An enabler is someone who has tuned into your self hate and who feeds it regularly, without either of you realizing it.

I will add, I am not sure this is true.  I don’t have any enablers in my life, but this feels right to me.

I woke up this morning with the keen sense that feelings are great blessings.  They constitute an extensive network of receiving stations which expand our capacity for perception immensely.  We are provided with a security and monitoring network that will tell us everything we need to know, and do so automatically.

The issue is with recurring emotions, emotions which properly belong in another time.  We get those when we are absent when they are trying to tell us something.  We also get those when they are imprinted on our nervous system in trauma.

I have for most of my life viewed feelings as a curse, because they torment me, and almost never give me anything good to feed on.

But, again, to get to a better emotional reality, often it helps–and often it is necessary–to plant the seed of a better idea.

http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/chris-cornell-death-depression-suicide-interview

“Most of the guys I grew up with ended up with the same struggles that I’ve had, which is you have every desire to communicate with your friends, family, with anyone, and absolutely no skill as to how to do it. And male-female relationships require that so much.”

I do not preach from a void, or, I hope, to a void.

I see the pain around me.  I feel it.  It tears me apart.  But I reassemble.  That is my superpower.

I will be fine.  And I will come for you one day, after I finish my map of Hell, and all the ways out of it.  It is a porous place, and the security is horrible.  In fact, it is designed with escape in mind.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of the previous sentence.  I have some booze in me, because I continue to wrestle with awful feelings, but I am slowly, slowly winning.

I don’t quit.  I have that going for me.  I made persistence a primary value for a reason.

Hang in there, if you can.  And you can.

It seems to me most socialists dream of a return to the “music of the spheres” which animated the social orders of the middle ages.  They dream of planets describing fixed orbits, and lives which revolve around clearly defined social roles.  They dream of fixity, of an end to existential angst, to what they see as an overabundance of freedom.

But complexity is how the world actually works.  It is how nature works.  Even if we cannot see it within our very short lives, everything is in flux in ways which are in principle and reality very different than the machines built by those who modeled Ptolemaic models of the universe.  Everything is in a continual process of change in ways not best described as linear, but only approximately linear.  In an infinite universe, we can in principle never know enough.  God does play dice.

The paradigm of Complexity says that things tend to work out over time, given good organizing principles, within human social systems, and without top-down efforts and control and ordering.

It takes some faith, as one example, to believe in our economic system.  But it manifestly works so well that the concern is not feeding people, but that we might grow to consume all the planets resources, which we have learned to use and exploit efficiently.

But even there, there are inherent limits in the system.  Even now, ones sees a market which brings to the table “sustainably sourced fish”.  One sees drives to recyling, and the reduction of waste.  Because there is an expressed need for this, our system brought it into being.  All it takes is awareness and time and economic freedom.

The faith required to believe in our system is vastly less than that required to believe in the individuals who claim they can do better.  No one has ever done better, and in the modern era those who have tried have not just failed, but created mass horrors.

The obsession with abstraction which is BEST, not least, seen in Socialism, cannot by its nature return us to stable social relations, and qualitatively better emotional connection with one another.  Economics, as I have said often, needs to be seen as a separate preoccupation from the system of meaning formation, truth formation, and political relations.  All are logically distinct, even if connected in formally complex ways.

I was listening yesterday as long as I could to some silly person pointing out that direct exchange is more socially meaningful.  This may be true, but in the eras and places where it predominated, so too did war, rapine, and plunder.  War has happened everywhere and always, in a great many cases because somebody somewhere had something that somebody else wanted, and had no other means of acquiring.

Human relations exist within an economic system.  We can choose to value people over things, but this choice must be made and expressed on an individual level.  There is no return to Eden if we try and mandate people get along in a certain way.

This truth emerges from the fundamentally crucial idea–paradigm/way of looking at the world–that social relations are Complex.  Love does not emerge at sword or gunpoint.  Connectedness cannot be coerced if it is to be valid and vital, real and lasting.

No, real change is gradual.  Seeds are planted, the soil is watered, and time is given.

Perhaps it would be most useful to speak of Social Gardening, not Social Engineering.  The topic is not machines: it is living beings, and the goal is growth and health and flourishing, not rounding up and managing.  That, we might with equal justice, call Human Husbandry.

Such an activity is the obsession of Leftists, who do not in any meaningful way connect with life as a whole, or with God, which we might call the Great Life.  They want to provide nothing more or less than the bookend to the process begun with the first emergence of self awareness in a biologically modern human.

This is what I see.