Month: October 2017

I was looking out of the windows of an office building yesterday, pondering the mass murder in Las Vegas. It was raining, and there was mist everywhere, and what I saw was birds eating worms and bugs. Large birds eating smaller birds and rodents. Fish eating bugs, and large fish eating smaller fish. I saw animals dying of hunger and cold. I saw them fucking obsessively in the spring.

What I might assert as the Luciferian Principle argued that if God doesn’t care, why should we? CLEARLY, He does not prevent evil, does not prevent pain, does not obviously shelter and guide us.

What is remarkable is not that violence happens, but that we have evolved ways to make it less common.

Paddock clearly suffered from PTSD. He would lay in bed and moan and scream. I can relate.

Here is the point I want to make here, and I could say much more, but I lack time: at this moment in human history, given all the shelters and frameworks we have created, violence is almost intrinsically the result of trauma. If we, as human beings, want to evolve to the next phase of our cultural evolution, we MUST put trauma front row and center, and deploy ample resources so that where it is present, it can reliably be diminished.

My vision is a new cultural form I have been calling a “church”. I have spoken of this before, but I am approaching a point where I think I can take effective action. I have always been a bigger talker than doer, but what I have in mind is quite small. That is my source of relative confidence.

I think across a lifetime who we become is directly dependent on what we think is possible. For this reason I tend to think the best way of “defining” someone is by the sum total of what they think is possible, even if they are never able to manifest everything they see (I am of course speaking somewhat autobiographically there).

Most or all of us expand to the point beyond which we think “more” is impossible, at which point our lives become recursive.

Me, I see a massive fog, and I make no claim to know how far back it goes, but it speaks to me regularly. That is what this blog is.

I felt disgust with this blog the other day, and thought about discontinuing it. I am putting myself out there, to little seeming purpose. I have no followers, and few readers. But then it hit me that I ENJOY having ideas pass through me, and if the fog cannot plausibly see me as a conduit, then the ideas will stop, and I too will become a circle, or in any event more circular. Posting to no one is the price I pay to be me, and as fucking awful as it sometimes is to be me, I like being me. I would not change lives with anyone on this planet. This is my path, my choice, my destiny. This is beautiful.

Hete is a purpose of life: the spontaneous expression of complex order generated through regular moments of contact with the Transcendant.

I have spoken of Henomoralism, but what Henoreligiosity? What if one were to determine to take up a different religion, diligently, every decade of ones life?

Henotelearchy–differing organizing values and purposes at different times. Perhaps sometimes we should treat time as the ultimate object of value, as counseled by Seneca in “On the Shortness of Life”. https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pdf (I’m only a third of the way through, so I may be missing his ultimate point).

But perhaps sometimes we need big fat gaps of time. Ponder the fact that “work”, and a productive life generally, consists mainly in meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Many monks scarcely leave their monasteries in long lifetimes, and never marry.

Life is a large ocean, and we are floating in it. Land emerged from time to time, for reasons we don’t understand. The sun, moon and stars are our constant companions, and the whole interface between here and there, between a small present and an infinite one, is fascinating.

I have no idea what I am saying, by the way. Maybe you can tell me how this makes any sense.

Like many, I am waiting eagerly for news on the Vegas shooter. Since I don’t personally deal well with recognized large gaps in my understanding, I am going to offer a provisional hypothesis I will amend or discard as new facts-/which may or may not be forthcoming–emerge.

I read Paddock had far more weapons than he could have hoped to use himself. I read they found Antifa (which I will henceforth refer to as Fascist) literature in his room. I read there is a police account and a different account as to when he checked in. I read he apparently had a guest https://www.infowars.com/receipt-shows-paddock-had-another-guest-in-his-room-before-shooting/

Put all this together, along with low simmering unresolved emotional trauma, and relentless left wing propaganda calling for violent  resistance to the expressed will of the American people, and a relatively high IQ, and what I get is this guy conceiving an excellent scheme for the mass murder of likely Trimp supporters. I see him inviting many people to join him, at least one of whom actually visited his room. I see him sharing Fascist literature with him or her, and showing off his gun collections, and all the windows looking down on the spot where the country show was going to be.

I see cops reaching this conclusion early and going on a hunt for people who knew of his plans to due to direct invitation, and who chose not to join him on his suicide mission, which was the part they objected to, not the murder part, for which they applauded him, as some leftists have had the audacity and cruelty to do publicly.

So a hunt begins, with little information to go on. Perhaps he effectively wiped all his devices. Perhaps he left few clues. Perhaps there were no cameras in his hall, leaving them to guess who, among tens of thousands of visitors–many of whom were not guests–might have come to see him. This would be a MASSIVE undertaking and until they can get a confession–unlikely even if they find someone who knew–they have nothing.

His girlfriend has a practiced alibi and nobody can prove she knew anything g.

So in the end, after tens of thousands of hours of work, they have to propose a possibly radicalized lone shooter as their best guess, not wanting the public to know their real best guess is that up to dozens of people may have gotten away with complicity to mass murder.

Does anyone remember this movie? It changed my world in some ways. Things are not always what they seem.

Something is screwy in this whole Paddock thing but he is dead, and we may never know who else to question.

What functional difference could there be between the Communist rejection of “bourgeois morality”  and Aleister Crowley dictum “Do what thou will”?

On the note of Communism, Paul Johnson makes the interesting argument that the obsession with the money-obsessed Capitalist by Marx is really just a metastasized anti-Semitism, and the abuse of groups of people based on collective crimes by Lenin and those who followed him–such as efforts to destroy Kulaks, and the bourgeoisie generally–were morphologically pogroms in a classic Russian sense. People were pulled from their homes, beaten, jailed and/or killed, and their possessions confiscated.

It is an interesting thesis.

Hate makes hate. Marx apparently asked Heine, with whom he was acquainted, “Why so much love, and not more of the lash?”  Heine, for his part, lamented the grotesque violence he saw in the future of socialism, even if he was in many respects sympathetic.

Why 2 windows shot out?

Could it be that many people were invited or even expected to show up? Could it be there were multiple shooters , who returned their guns to Paddocks room before the cops got there?

I can’t know. But one or two or three guns with plenty of ammo is all one needs for mass murder.

It would seem an obvious step to find and question everyone who rented a room on that side of the building. Maybe some chickened out.

Does anyone else remember Tom Cruise, before Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise, shooting a machine gun out a window in Taps?  As I recall, when Timothy Hutton confronted him, he said “It’s beautiful, man!!!” just before both of them were wiped out in a volley of automatic fire.

Can any serious human being really argue that continual–and continually increasing–violence in our media has no effect?  To my mind, it has the dual effect of making people more afraid and thus more emotionally restrained and superficial, and the following effect of making them feel more  lonely, since they have shut down the pathways to the outside.

Take this basic alienation, and the ability to nurse a grievance–real, or much more often perceived–and you get this sort of violence.

How is it people who appear continually in violent movies can tout gun control?  They are complicit in making violence seem to be an answer to many of life’s problems.  Do not many American men idolize as badasses men like Vito Corleone and Tony Montana?

This madman may or may not have bought his weapons legally, but even if we ban them, the possibility of such shootings does not disappear.  Whoever controls a monopoly on the effective use of force has accumulated power, and accumulated power is sooner or later always abused.  I wonder how the referendum in Catalonia would have played out if guns were allowed in Spain?  More violence, certainly, but also perhaps more circumspection in the use of force by the authoritarian regime in Madrid.  I read some 800 people were injured.  If that is not a species of fascism–and I will recall for you that Spain was formally Fascist until the mid-70’s–then I don’t know what would count.

Federico Fellini made a movie doing some combination of satirizing and lamenting the Italian political world, although I’m sure he knew it extended farther, in a movie called Orchestra Rehearsal.  To play beautiful music, self evidently, all the sections need to get along.  When they fail to do so–if the winds are fighting with the brass, for example–it becomes impossible.

Other than that thousands of tons of supplies are piling up on the dock in San Juan, and that only 20% of the drivers who should be distributing it have showed up for work, no firm statements can be made, but it does appear the local Teamsters have chosen this time for a de facto sit-down/slow-down strike.  A video in Spanish which, it is claimed, supports this is making the rounds.

What makes America special–the reason we outperform so many nations economically and in actual social justice–is that we tend to be able to put aside our petty differences in countless ways, and work together for common aims.  This, despite our cultural and racial diversity, which the Japanese, as one example, do not deal with at all.

When Houston became a vast lake, Americans of all stripes and backgrounds pulled together to help out.  People were not worried about getting paid, or whether or not they were getting a fair shake.  Work needed to be done, and it got done, and is getting done.

Puerto Rico, on the other hand, now, is showing exactly why it was in terrible trouble before the literal storm hit.  Selfishness, laziness, resentment, and an unquenchable desire to shift blame all seem to be on prominent display.  I want mine and fuck you seems to be a common sentiment.

Now, I’m not there, and I’m sure there is a lot of sharing going on.  I’m also sure there is a lot of stealing and score settling going on too.  This is why they are who they are, and why we–and yes, culturally we are a different nation, clearly–who we are.

Success is not an accident.  This is claimed by people who know nothing about hard work and long term planning, for whom stealing equals the only growth they will ever know.  But it is not the American way.  We have thieves, but nearly everyone who gains wealth did it in one way, and one way only.

Media still working on why, and what his motive was.

Seriously: in what sane world does being hated become reason for hate?  One could as easily say–as many have throughout history–that Jews should be hated because everyone hates them.

I continue to be astonished by the emotional and intellectual superficiality on display everywhere.  I continue to wonder when and if the media and those who constitute and run it will awaken from their spell.  Yes, I get that the people at the top are completely cynical and believe in nothing but power, and power alliances, and Trump does not get them those things.  But the rank and file: how fucking stupid, for how long, can you be?

As far as this latest tragedy–oh, I hate to read the news sometimes–we will see what explanation we get, but the story seems to be two pissed off local hispanics–the term used by a woman who spoke with them, even if the term the media has latched onto was “Asian” for the woman, which in NewSpeak usually means Muslim–attacking a country music concert attended largely by white rednecks.

Can we not suppose anti-Trump hatred–for which he bears no responsibility–is in play?  Can we not, in fact, blame the media for relentless, white-hot Agitation Propaganda?

This is simply a guess, and particularly if I am right, we may never know it, but I think it is close to the mark.  You cannot run the equivalent of a Nazi campaign of structural anti-Semitism and not expect less-hinged people to take it literally and start killing people.

The hate needs to stop.  It won’t–the Left is far too emotionally gone for self reflection–but in a sane world it would.  I don’t know what the solution is.  In my small world, in my small way, I continue to work for local antidotes, and am making progress.