Month: December 2017

I rarely mention it to anyone–I only told my kids in the past few years–but I have had tinnitus for many years, often in both ears.  It’s not something I worry about, or spend more than a few moments contemplating in an average day, but I made a decision a while back to incorporate some POSSIBLE solution into my daily routine some years ago.  I’ll take some pill most people say doesn’t work for a few months, and it doesn’t work.  Currently, I am taking the pharmaceutical grade Gingko Biloba.  I may stick with it since it seems to have other good properties too.

But I also recently picked up an interesting pamphlet, https://www.amazon.com/Tinnitus-Tyrant-Friend-Ringing-your/dp/1515102440/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1512918907&sr=8-2&keywords=tinnitus+books .

In it, he describes curing himself of tinnitus by treating it as a outcome of nervous system dysregulation, specifically chronic “alarm bells”, chronic activation of the fight or flight response.  As such, there is a clear and fundamental homology between tinnitus, in this description, and PTSD generally, and I am reading the book as such.

One point he makes often and clearly is that most “tinnitus people” (he describes a type, with many of the typical characteristics applying to me) rarely take time for self care, for finding things that genuinely make them happy, make them feel warm, make they feel relaxed.  I certainly have long had trouble with this.  I am good at making lists, doing half of them–although often many of the hardest things on it–then collapsing emotionally and getting drunk.  That I have long experience with.

In his telling, and I think he makes a good argument, tinnitus is then a barometer of the state of internal hyperarousal.  It is a thermometer for inner systemic tension.  Curing tinnitus is then nearly the same–perhaps exactly the same–as curing PTSD.

I am going to try and be kinder to myself.  I am certainly long practiced in being cruel.  I am going to try and find things that do make me deeply happy.  Nothing is coming to mind at this moment, but starting to look is a first step.  This is the beginning of a move from mere survival to living.

As I think about this a tad more, it occurs to me that the line which has been crossed is that the idea that Israel will just fade away and disappear, through some miracle, is no longer tenable.

Jerusalem, the City of Peace, has been the Jewish capital, arguably, since before the word Jew meant anything specific.  When Solomon built his temple, the Old Testament–as people raised in my own tradition call it–had not been completed.  I forget what the Jews call it.  I believe it is the Mishnah.

For their own purposes, the Israelis have long claimed Jerusalem, in the modern era, as their capital.

Thus, as many commentators have pointed out, including Nicki Haley (who I love), Trump has done nothing more or less than ratify publicly the existing status quo.

And here of course is the problem.  The Arab world, in a sustained fit of magical thinking which would put even today’s Never Trumpers to shame, does not want to accept this step because it ratifies the existence of the Jewish state, which they STILL reject 70 years later.

Now, one can reasonably ask how it is possible to conceive this, that a highly successful, vastly more militarily powerful nation could just up and vanish, just stop being, so that lazy, ignorant, and emotionally retarded people could just march in and proclaim it reclaimed for Islam and the greater Arab world.

It is ludicrous, farcical.  Israel would destroy most of the Middle East before it would allow itself to be conquered by anyone.

But the thinking around this has not evolved at all in far too many minds in 7 decades, 7 decades in which the children of refugees lived their lives in tents, fed by charity, and unable to find work or anything like a productive, dignified life, all so that ugly minds could continue to nurture ludicrous and ugly dreams.

Often, the first step in needed change is the speaking aloud, in public, of clear and obvious, but unwanted truths.  Trump has done that.

In classic grump-eccentric style–which is to say in the style of a grown man who has carried far into his life unbearable wounds he cannot let go of or heal–I have taken to allowing myself to speak to myself when I am in private.  It’s a lot like Freud’s free association, and a method I’ve developed to allow my unconscious to literally speak.

One thing that has come out is that both of my parents watched the light fade from my eyes.  Whatever hope and spontaneous joy and innate creativity I was born with died at some point.  I became dull and listless, then angry for reasons that were unclear to me.

But it occurred to me that there should be a word for either failing to feed someone’s light, and certainly for actively encouraging defeatism, failure, cynicism, and moral and emotional death.  Hence Psychicide, which seems to be unique to me.  Google comes up with nothing, although to me the idea seems obvious enough.

And as I ponder it, it occupies a unique place between homicide and suicide, because the root of the death can be, and usually is, a combination of Others (Sartre’s les autres might here be apposite) and one’s own being, as divided into a combative, self destructive component, and an unexpressed capacity to return to home and authentic goodness.

I was watching an interview with the killer they called the Iceman, and he loved to watch the light of life flicker and fade when he killed people, and loved that the last thing they saw was him.

There are people in this world who love this equally, but not as the result of physical murder.  It is the love of power, the root of the love of power.  When you have power, you can suppress the innate individuality of everyone who is subject to you.  You can lessen everyone else.  You can dim their light.  And in many cases, you can sap their will to live outright, which again is what I am calling Psychicide.

And I wanted to emphasize that true morality, true goodness, flows from an authentic and spontaneous, free sense of self.  As I have said before, the Tibetan Windhorse is a fantastic image.  It is a horse, running freely, with speed, for the love of movement, and a fantastically bright shining jewel on its back, spreading light wherever it goes.

The opposite, of course, is killing movement, killing freedom, killing the joy of movement, making everything dark and unclear, and destroying beauty, substantially all of which were, AND REMAIN, core objectives of Communists like George Soros.

If I were Trump, I would assign a group of highly intelligent and well funded people specifically to counter Soros and other well funded propaganda.

Far too many people are talking about human survival as a race of animals, as if our mere physical continuance is a major victory.  What I see is that if we do not retain the beauty we have evolved, it is all for naught.  There is no beauty in machines.  They are not alive, and cannot be.  Life is not a mechanical process: it is a spiritual process.

Clearly, you can mimic life, as you can mimic virtue, if I might complete my thought.  Many dead people do all the things that truly virtuous people do–or at least pretend to–but they mean none of it.  I was reading recently the story of a priest who seemingly–he was just convicted for it–raped and murdered a young and beautiful girl 50+ years ago, who made the mistake of being too Catholic.

Did him being a priest matter in the slightest?  But the case is worse: seemingly, local church officials, and local Catholic law enforcement officials were worried that a scandal might hurt Kennedy’s election chances.  So this priest was sent to the same places they sent known pedophiles, to lay low for a time, then be reassigned somewhere.

Is there anything sacred about such a process?  Even if every sacrament, every Mass, was delivered correctly, is this something Jesus would recognize as his own?  Is this something God would proclaim holy or good?

Virtue is nearly always hidden.  It lies dormant in most.  Yes, most people have been habituated to doing things in certain ways.  Habit and courtesy intermingle, and we call the combination salutary when we recognize our particular habits in others.

But who are you is the deeper question.  What do you mean in the recesses of your heart?  Who would you be if you knew you could get away with anything?  My own feeling is that perhaps a third of the people out there are quite capable of murder.  There have been times I would have been quite capable of it.  I have felt that feeling in myself.  I still do, sometimes.  It would not pang my conscience a bit to put a gun to George Soros head and pull the trigger repeatedly, just to be sure.

In the end, I was killed.  I died.  My parents watched the light fade from my eyes.  I joined them in the darkness.  And my entire life path has been spent seeking, and slowly finding, resurrection.

I am not there yet.  I have many, many miles to go.  I’m not even at the end of the beginning.  I’m at the beginning.  But learning to walk again is a prerequisite to one’s first step.  And to do that, you have to get off the ground, and learn to stand upright.  And you can only stand on your own two feet.  You cannot stand on those of anyone else.  Your path is your own.  Only you can travel it.  Only you can see it.  Far too many people give their lives away, because they fear the freedom they have been given as a gift, and far too many people are all to happy to take that life, because it gives them, for a time, the ability to pretend that they, too, are not neglecting their own way, their own path, their own destiny.

Edit: I did find a few instances of Psychecide.  My Greek is non-existent, so perhaps this is more faithful.  Still, I will stick with my neologism.

I’ve been giving some thought to getting a Thangka, and found these images of Tara: http://www.thangkapaintings.com/Content/Catalog/Browse/?CID=d3d9446802a44259755d38e6d163e820|5f5d

I read she is the most popular goddess in the Buddhist pantheon, and her description–click on detail on any of them for a more complete summary–sounds not that unlike Mother Mary.

What if focus on, meditation on, an image of perfect feminine compassion and wisdom is a method for dealing with maternal attachment issues?

And I would submit that the ideals of feminine and masculine represent real potential energies within each of us.  I do think psychological androgyny is clearly most healthy, but that is not the same as confusing the energies, conflating them, or denying their utility as ideals in human consciousness.

What myths do we still retain in our world, myths that mean something?  We have a propaganda of efficiency, which was called such by Jacques Ellul in the early 1960’s, of which “hacking” is but the most recent manifestation.  We have of course residual religious sentiments, but they are under sustained and somewhat effective attack.

We have the myth of Science, as a quasi-omniscient God.  But this is an entirely masculine ideal.  It has no compassion, no nurturing, no love, no feeling.

We have the myth of Compassion, but it has in large measure been denuded of actual sentiment, if not sentimentality.  It is for practical purposes most often wedded to Science, in what to my view looks like a gay marriage.  Both are masculine, as implemented.  Compassion is not listening in the modern world, not when expressed politically, which is where the word is most often used.  Rousseau, who more or less directly called for mass murder, used the word often.

Where is there time to listen?  To feel honestly?  To love honestly?  Who embodies this for us?  Mother Teresa, perhaps, for a short time.  The Dalai Lama? 

Women, in our world, are much too eager to be bad men.  It may be that substantially all things men can do women can do.  But it is certainly the case that there are things women can do that men cannot hope to do as well.  They have natural strengths, such as empathy, which are not much valued in an industrial/information industrial economy.

We all need balancing.  We all need to believe in unconditional love.  We all need to believe there is a place for us, and the feminine is what creates and preserves those places.

People–here of course I mean Leftists–would not be in such a hurry to destroy everything they see if they felt they were in fact loved, that they did have a place, and that there was a sanctuary at the end of their day.   They lack the sacred feminine.

The place of your mother within your consciousness, how the thought of her makes you feel, what images come to mind, what you associate with her memory and her presence–if she is still alive, or even her “relics” if she is not–define much of who you are.

It occurred to me that throughout history not all homes have been happy.  Not all wives have been glad to be with their husbands, or happy to bear their children.  Not all children have been loved, and many resented silently and even hated.  I see no reason not to believe this has always been so.

Here, though, is a to-me-interesting-thought (TMIT): what if the role of archetypal feminine, of the compassionate goddess, the female angel, the Virgin Mary, serves to complement and improve the images and feelings which came with childhood for the individuals within that society?

Can we not posit that honest myth, used properly, completes pictures which are incomplete, in addition to presenting ideals, and expressing unpleasantness otherwise not subject to public examination?

I have my own issues, obviously–which I have discussed too much, almost certainly, although if it does me good, and it has, it obviously isn’t too much–but I’m not the only one.  This is an interesting thought, which springs from a very specific set of intrapsychic events I choose not to discuss here.

I think announcement will simply bring into the foreground, into the light, the massive underlying anti-Semitism–the racism, to be clear, the real, old school fertile ground from which mass murders and judicial injustice have long proceeded–which causes people to hate Israel so much.

I am just going to throw this idea out here.  I don’t know how to evaluate it.

What if Leftwing ideology has its deep psychodynamic roots in poor maternal bonding? 

Here is my logic.  At its root, and since at least the French Revolution, and following succession of tyrannies, the idea has been to overthrow everything that is, and replace it with something new.

Psychodynamically, what–or here, who–connects you with your past and culture in the deepest sense?  Your mother. Your father might teach you concepts like patriotism and honor and courage, if you are a man, but your mother teaches you who you are.  She tells you, through her behavior and bonding, whether or not you belong.

And if you can find no means to belong, revolution as an abstraction to replace failed emotional attachment would or could come to be very emotionally logical, even life-saving, which would explain the fanaticism which often–usually or even always might be more accurate–accompanies this form of psychopathology.

And I want to be clear: differing, true statements can be made about the management of human affairs.  Differing political forms can “work”, depending on how we define that term. I do not want to critique dogmatism in a dogmatic spirit.

What I am targeting is delusional politics, which seeks a utopia which is made impossible by the very blindness which occasions the quest.

I posted this somewhere on the internet, and thought it worth sharing here. 


I would simply submit, in an effort to help you understand “the other side” (which is of course as heterogeneous as your own), that there are vital differences between CORPORATE tax rates, and INDIVIDUAL income tax rates. 


My personal belief is that corporate rates should be zero, because everyone working there is already taxed. Even the CEO’s can’t shelter ordinary income in the places where they do business, but it makes vastly more sense for corporations to do business where they keep more of their profit. 


Profit is the motive for doing, and substantially everything you see or use every day was built for profit. This would include your car, your computer, your cell phone, the medical devices your doctor uses, the coffee you drink, and even the roads you drive and bridges you use were paid for with taxes paid by people seeking profit. 


The second point I would make is that from my perspective, Single Payer equals Zero Choice healthcare. I get assigned the doctor some bureaucrat chooses for me. I know the literature says that I will get lots of choices, but we were also told on the front end of Obamacare that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor”, despite the fact that the bill itself, in the small print, said otherwise. And in point of fact, many people lost health insurance outright. 


Regardless, much of this comes down to trust. Do you trust government more than the free market? You obviously trust government. In my own case, I don’t trust either, but I see free markets as a quick and easy way to fix problems–market demand creates business response–which are not present with government bureaucracies, which have not inherent incentive to be efficient, competent, or caring. Businesses are not caring either, but they want our money, and the only way they keep getting it is by providing good service.


And I will note, finally, that the monopolies so often feared are rarely seen. In fact, they are usually only achieved, and certainly only maintained, when government supports them. In my view, the reason the biggest health insurers supported Obamacare was to squeeze their competition out of the market, something which has happened, although regulators have prevented some of the largest proposed consolidations from happening. And I will end by asking: are you aware that most Medicare plans are administered, for profit, by the largest health insurance providers, like United Health Group?

It might be interesting for someone to compare and contrast the crimes of western colonialism with that of Communist tyrannies, their own colonialism and imperialism, and to add to all this an examination of Islamic imperialism.

These are just three of the most obvious systems of violence in history, but we are being told one was uniquely evil, which is true, but the Left had not identified the CORRECT one.

I get the feeling with some people strongly that they are playing roles.  They are actors, trying to react the way the character they want to play would act.  They are not interacting with reality, but through their imagined sense of how they would react if they felt everything appropriate to their character, which self evidently they don’t, to the precise extent I am right about this.

We are starved of authentic, deep emotion in this country.  I don’t know why, although of course I have reams of related commentary.  I am simply going to leave this here for now.