Month: December 2017

There is a Nasruddin story I can’t currently find, in which an aspiring shopkeeper asks Nasruddin how to ensure he will be successful in business.  He tells him something like, dress up like a chicken and make funny noises for three days in front of your shop when you first open, then proceed as you would normally.

Some months later, after some travelling, Nasruddin passes through that village, and stops by to check on the shopkeeper.  He is told something like, “it was HORRIBLE.  Everyone thought I was crazy.  I had to work twice as hard just to stay in business.  Now my business is good, but no thanks to you.

Nasruddin replies: “oh no, it worked PERFECTLY.”

I was contemplating this morning, staring out into the rain, that I think hated my mother by the time I was 3, and I think she hated me. She wanted to break me, and not unreasonably, I did not want to be broken.  I had, and I think have, in some respects, a very powerful will, although of course I was broken.  I remember the dream where it became clear to me, a dream I had over four decades ago.

And I feel this sense of having been hated–and having felt hate–is not something that will ever leave me.  It was early, primal, primordial, fundamental to who I am and have become.  And it was extraordinarily unpleasant.  My home was never a happy home.  I never felt truly safe at any time in my childhood.  Never.  Anywhere.

But this primal deficit is the source of my energy.  It is why I felt I had to save the world to prove myself.  It is what fed my relentless drive for self improvement, for knowledge, for wisdom.

And I felt “you can’t replace memory”.  Then it hit me “what if I could?”  What if I could eliminate all those feelings of anger, worthlessness, isolation, pain and fear? What if I could do a memory wipe, such that only whatever good there was–and of course there must have been–remained?

I would not do it.  Who I am is who I am.  All of us have to learn how to deal with negative emotions.  All of us have to learn how to transmute them, energize them, use them for good, for growth, for wisdom and learning.  I would be neutering myself, destroying myself, eradicating the foundation for everything I have built.

None of us are truly wise enough to finally distinguish good and bad in this world.

The amount of ludicrous caterwauling I am seeing over this tax cut is unbelievable. It is very literally the case that most generic leftists have not a fucking clue about the rationale behind tax cuts, and the core elite that run the propaganda are agitating them so much no one has a moment to contemplate anything, or feel anything but outrage that 80% of us will get to keep more of our money.

Here, though, is one heuristic. Given a free market–which is to say one in which the government has not been corrupted into protecting or actively supporting monopolies–a rough sequence of events can be stipulated. To create one free market billionaire you have to create, say, 10 people worth 100 million, 100 people worth 10 million, 1000 people worth a million, and ten thousand people making $100,000 or more. These are very roughly, say, Facebook, or Google numbers.

Now if resentment outweighs self interest, you can enact policy to ensure no billionaires emerge, at least through the natural operation of free markets (Communist regimes, obviously, create very big winners, which is not hard when you can take money from anyone you like and give it to anyone else). Logically, if you prevent the billionaire, you also prevent everything downstream. You create Venezuela. You create Zimbabwe. You create the Soviet Union. Nobody has anything. Everyone is poor. And you STILL have huge income disparities, because some pigs are more equal than others.

Base your life on a positive vision for yourself, not envious resentment of someone else.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-scott-roasts-huffington-post-writer-for-calling-him-a-prop-at-trumps-tax-cut-speech/article/2644080

In other news, white leftist commentators were astonished to learn that a house negro possessed the ability to form complete sentences, and every appearance of coherent thought.  They are still trying to decide what to make of this shocking development. If they all get like that, it’s only a matter of time before white “liberals” aren’t needed.

The core truth the talking heads seemingly do not want to make obvious, although they know it, is that the Arab world has long had the destruction of Israel as their goal. They do not want peace, and they certainly do not want to admit Israel has a right to exist as a nation. 


They have used the refugees from a war that they started 70 years ago–and lost, despite overwhelming military superiority–as a bargaining chip and pawn in a long term effort to overturn the will of the UN, which created Israel. Recognizing Jerusalem is nothing more, and certainly nothing less, than saying publicly that Israel has a permanent right to exist. 


Those who oppose this move effectively are declaring that they do not and never have wanted anything for Israel but its destruction, and the death by brutal murder of all its Jewish inhabitants.  In a sane world, it would be shameful to oppose this move.

It occurs to me that there is an arc to this whole Mueller investigation.  One of the key pieces of advantages in assessing the situation Trump has–relative to us speculators–is knowing what information Mueller COULD find.  Now, Trump has gotten audited every year for many years.  He knows the drill.  He knows what he can get away with, if anything, and what he can’t.

But we are rapidly reaching a point where not only has Mueller found nothing but an incoming National Security Advisor guilty of nothing but some combination of stupidity and hubris–complacency might be the word, since “wire-tapping” senior officials then releasing the transcript for political purposes, then cajoling a contradiction under oath, has not traditionally been a low our intelligence/counter-intelligence apparatus would stoop to–but has begun breaking the law himself.  He recently sought and received, seemingly illegally, thousands of emails he had no right to.

The thing about arcs is they can reverse.  All the cannons firing at Trump can one day, at the right time, be made to fire at the foundations of the Deep State.  Mueller himself can be investigated for his investigation.  He can be investigated for sundry blatant conflicts of interest, for overreach, for willfully overlooking blatant violations of the law by Democrats.  He can be investigated, and perhaps indicted, for failing to end the investigation outright the moment he realized that the entire thing was based on fabricated evidence created by a combination of Clinton operatives and law breaking members, and spouses of members, of the Deep State.

It is like the whole thing is on a bungy, that is getting ready to bounce back up.

Or, to use a metaphor that is a bit cliched (I did something like jiu jitsu for 7 some odd years): it is like judo, where in the classic iteration, you use the energy of your opponent against them.  When you are dealing with skilled opponents, though, this almost always needs to be through a feint.  You have to appear to give them an opening, something they want, to which they commit too much energy.  This energy then becomes your means of taking their balance and throwing them.

I have seen calls already for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Uranium One.  Since these people have no reasonable bounds, I would think Mueller himself, and everyone under him, could equally be objects of investigation.  Applying the same standards applied to Flynn, Mueller might even be an indictable criminal.

Unless I am missing something major, it would seem to me he himself would be prudent to give people reasons to stop asking about and digging into the Steele dossier that started the whole thing, and why he brought on board so many people who were hyperpartisan, and plainly guilty of serious derelictions of duty.

It has been perhaps an act of genius for Trump to let this whole thing play out, to distract and obsess the Democrats, and ultimately–after the smoke clears, after Mueller has done his best and found nothing–to provide a clear means of unmasking a vast mass of traitors in our midst.

It is perhaps the case that the “insurance policy” was a terrible idea, even if it was illegal, and indictable.

This blog exists for people to steal my ideas, to use as they see fit.

You know, skilled fault finders, in looking at the world, can quite easily survey the landscape and see a lot of misery.  It is not hard to see conflict.  It is not hard to find unhappiness.  It is not hard to find people with tough stories, with hard lives, with tales of quite sincere woe, even if they are fighting the good fight.

And it’s not hard to feel that previous generations–our “parents” in a general sense, that of those who created “this world”–have failed us.  Intellectually, it is hard to find anything useful in most universities in the “love of truth” departments.  You will need to look in the “study of the mind” department, and then only if they have chosen to focus on happiness, using antique “love of truth” ideas like Eudaemonia.

It is easy to think this is a terrible time to live.  We face the risk of nuclear war from North Korea, and nuclear attack from anyone who can get the materials.  Technology becomes steadily more intrusive, such that any tyranny enacted by the Federal government would be effectively impossible to combat.  We see many ludicrous movies where rebels plan and organize in secret, when such a thing would be in fact impossible, as Frank Church recognized long before the internet, the iPhone, and Facial Recognition technology.

The possible list is long, and my imagination–and knowledge of perils recognized in the public domain–is considerably larger than that of most.

But this morning I was doing my Heartmath, and it occurred to me that in the Buddhist and other traditions, ANY incarnation as a human being is a blessing.  Just showing up here, just being alive on this planet, is a blessing.

And we live in a time where all the best ideas of the entire history of mankind–the public part at least–are available everywhere all the time.  I have most of the primary texts of the forms of Buddhism which interest me.  I can and am using Neurofeedback to calm my brain, which will save me decades of patient and very, very slow effort.  It is not “40 years of Zen”, as one person with a talent for marketing, but seemingly little wisdom, put it, but it is a huge advantage.

I have my Heartmath.  I have time, precious time, time not contingent on membership in a monkish convent, time not devoted to backbreaking labor.

As Yogi Berra put it, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”, but it is quite easy to make predictions about your own future states, if you develop the ability and capacity to choose them.  This is really the essence of the spiritual path: cultivating the ability to calm yourself, to choose happiness, and to choose communion and expansion.

I was contemplating yesterday that it takes a fair amount of wisdom to plumb the depths of your own stupidity.  Realizing how little you know is the beginning of the spiritual path.

And spirituality is absolutely compatible with ordinary happiness, with being in a good mood, with positive feelings, with enthusiasm, with enjoying your work, with enjoying an innocent good time, with smiling, with laughing, with being of good cheer.

It is so easy to confuse a permanent frown and furrowed brow with profundity.  My youngest–who in many ways takes after me the most–was recently sharing with me that her happiness and enthusiasm makes some of her friends uncomfortable, that she seems “ditzy”.

But the SCIENCE that has emerged clearly places a premium on happiness.  Happy people work harder.  They are more creative.  They are more fun.  They live longer.  They have better relationships (of course, having good relationships makes you happier too).  They do all the things our culture supposedly values better, as well as those things we don’t value sufficiently, like play.

In my own work, I think I have finally reached a complete summary of how I became how I am.  I won’t share all that here, but even though the past few days have been hard for me, I am glad to finally get there, to feel I have been to every major latent feeling within me.  What this means, now, is that I can begin focusing on the positive ones.

I will add a comment on that.  What I have found, is that I have long been able to access positive states, for a time, but there is always this dark cloud that smells them out, then shows up.  Clinically, I can be doing Neurofeedback, doing deep relaxation, and I am on track, exactly on target, then out of nowhere massive tension shows up.  It is like when you are having a good time, and somebody you don’t want there comes along, and the whole vibe of the thing changes. 

Put another way, I have never been able to trust fun, trust relaxation, or let down my guard for any length of time without regretting it.

But this tension, these angers, these traumas, they all arose long ago, and are now nothing but a conditioned association, a neurological habit.  As such, I can think of them as echoes of something once real, but now gone, and practically, I can practice merging them with relaxation.  I practice learning to see them come, then still revert back to where I was.  If I do this often enough, they will stop showing up.

And when this happens, the ache that has dogged me all my life will lift.

I am indeed skilled at finding fault.  I spot problems easily, inconsistencies, lies.

But I feel some guilt at the moment, for doubting in some respects the power of love, and communion.  Sex is also the perfection of an open soul, and the sharing of its contents.  It is a mystery, and a rite of beauty.

I have felt much pain in my life.  It has colored my vision.  But according to my own lights, my own principles, my own beliefs, my goal is to rise far above where I have been, and to do that I need to become a better good-finder.  There is no skill in repeating the past.

Fascists–and the Nazis particularly–were leftists in their embrace of totalitarian government.  “Everything in the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State” is how Mussolini defined his creed.

Leftists will sometimes say fascism is “corporatism”, which is to say, in the version their propagandists like to articulate to help differentiate their own delusions from those of the fascists.  But this gets things backwards.  It does not mean corporations rule the government.  That did not happen in Italy.  It did not happen in Germany.  It did not happen in Spain.

Rather, the government forms a partnership with the largest corporations to mutual benefit.  The corporations back the government and support it materially and politically; and in turn the leaders of the government award all the contracts to the Krupps and I.G. Farben’s of the world, which makes their owners enormous amounts of money.

Inherently, Fascism favors large corporations–which can be easily controlled by making sure those in charge support your cause–and denigrates and damages small business.

Inherently, therefore, and in my view this is a necessary conclusion, any policy which damages small business and rewards large business is tending towards fascism.

Obamacare damaged small business.  It was heavily supported by the largest insurance providers, who stood to destroy their competition, force industry consolidation, and provide very lucrative, secure business for many years to come.  It is not widely commented upon, but most Medicare plans are administered by the very corporations which the Left–in calling for “Medicare for everyone”–denigrates as for profit monsters.  Their OWN POLICIES are used to make the largest corporations richer.  If they got everything they wanted, we would have de facto Fascism in the insurance business.

But when and where have Leftists ever demonstrated the SLIGHTEST capacity for independent thought? 

Finally, and this is the actual point I had started to make, I wanted to note that Communists derive their identity from their PARTY.  Fascists get it from their nationalism, Communists from their Party, which their arrogance enables them to equate with the interests of people they don’t understand, which is to say “the workers.”

You have a small, inward-looking cabal in both cases.  And practically, of course, the Party equals the delusions and prejudices of narcissistic intellectuals.  What is actually referenced is a precise form of mental illness, and shattered reality testing.

It’s a song, isn’t it?  Listen to the radio, it is filled with varying degrees of open pleas to find someone to connect your genitals with, go through a period of more and more tension, then finish with what is hopefully an enormous release of energy, leaving you feeling calm and happy.

In some respects, could we not say that the obsession with sex in our culture is in some measure an obsession with tension, and with the need to release it?  Could we not say sex, at root, is about relaxation?  About a release from tension, more specifically (as opposed to a deepening of a preexisting tendency for calm and rest)?

I was reading Salma Hayek’s story today, and it occurred to me that the life of Harvey Weinstein has been a continual pendulum between tension, rage and anger, and their temporary cessation through sex, and through the abuse of power to get that sex.

As I have said before, we ask far too much of sex.  We ask far too much of single partners–of husbands, of wives, of lovers.  We ask that they “complete us”.  We have visions of a single person who will resolve all these tensions, all these confusions, all these inchoate rages (for many of us).  We ask that they make the world right, when in reality, how can they?  Confusion about the future is inherent in our time.  Far too much is going on, far too balls are bouncing around, for anyone to have any good guess about anything.

And to ask someone else to provide you the calm you need is to petition them to allow you to suck them dry.  And some people will allow this.  This is clearly true.  Most forms of this we call codependence.

I like looking at naked women.  It calms me down.  I have some old Playboys I will take out and look at from time to time.  And I do watch porn from time to time as well, although most of it I find gross.  I even hit a strip club once a year or so.

But I find if I don’t allow my mind to confuse me about what my body truly needs, then listening deeply to great music is vastly better than using my wiles to seduce women I don’t truly plan to love or cherish.  I used to be good at it, then I just stopped.  I can’t justify it.  And it never got me what I really needed.  It was, in important respects, not just abusive, but stupid.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  So many of us adopt behavior patterns that do nothing for us, but which we continue for lack of imagination, and lack of the courage to see the truth.

I have seen several commentators note the vast difference in sexual energy in India versus the United States.  I have not been to India, but most Indians I know are pretty relaxed people.  They invented yoga.  They invented many forms of meditation.  In the United States, on the other hand, we might not have invented obsessive work, but we certainly learned how to mass produce it.

Work and sex: could we not call those the idols of our present moment?   Tension, and release, and nary a whiff of wisdom or genuine insight in the middle.