Month: February 2018

I’m not here to make excuses for you: I am here to make DEMANDS on you.

I’m not here to make things easier for you: I’m here to make things HARDER for you.

Why? Because I LOVE you. You are my people. And what I see, that you can’t YET see, is that there is no poverty worse than living without a sense of pride and dignity. And NOBODY can give that, and nobody can take it away. You have to GIVE it away. You have to surrender pride. You have to surrender dignity.

And I can’t stand watching it happen, day after day, year after year. We have so much to be proud of, but none of us have earned the respect our forebears earned  We can’t swagger because our people suffered and survived indignities 150 years and more ago.  We haven’t earned what they earned.

Pride is born in YOUR OWN sweat, no one else’s.

BECAUSE I love you, I am asking you to stop prostituting yourself to false messiahs, to empty promises, to deliverers who never arrive. Look in your own hearts: YOU are the heroes you’ve been waiting for.

Ponder that, arguably, Kevin Spaceys most famous line–in a role for which he won an Oscar–is “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”

I look into my heart, and feel I am a poet, and a thief and a liar.  I rarely do exactly what I say I am going to do.  I rarely follow my own plans.  I spend great amounts of time dreaming and reading, feeling.  I rarely show who I am to anyone.  I am rarely what I appear to be.  I create most of my own problems.

But I feel that the only way any of this will change, paradoxically, is if I accept that that is how I am.  You can only change from the middle, and you first have to find the middle.  That has been a challenge for me my whole life.  I live in a murky ocean, with strong, conflicting currents.  That is my natural home.

(LOL): to be suitably maudlin, let me add thundering skies above.

I was attacked by a demon again last night.  I have gotten to where it is not quite like I am playing with them, but the deep fear is gone.  It is a problem to be solved: how best to get them to go away?

It was storming last night–the rain was fierce at times, perhaps even those tumbling balls of energy I call demons were seeking shelter.  Carlos Castaneda did say to keep your windows closed in certain weather.

What I feel is a spirit of fear, but it seems each of these things has a slightly different energy.  It is not a recurring nightmare.  It really feels like different life forms.

Fear, at root, is the spirit of contraction.  It is what happens to a sensitive plant when you touch it, or bread dough that is rising when you punch it.  A demon is a life form which has taken contraction to be the nature of life, of living.

Logically, then, goodness and spirituality come from expansion, from fearlessness, from that place where you are not brave because you have forgotten what it means to be afraid.

But here is my point: what if we DO live in a “demon haunted world”?  What if God IS like a distant parent who neither cares if we live or if we die?  Logically, if we are immortal beings, sooner or later we ought to be able to work things out.  But in the meantime, what if our destiny is up to us?  What if there are malevolent forces against which we must take up the arms of spiritual work?  What if there is no cavalry which is going to rescue us, no plan which is inevitable?

What if this universe is saying: “sink or swim: it’s up to you”?  For me, I feel this demon work is giving me the opportunity to figure out how to create light in darkness.  I created a fraction of a small candle last night.  I believe I can and will learn how to do better.
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In any event, how would you feel about such a world?  Is it better, worse, or–unlikely–the same as one in which God does not exist at all?  How about compared to a universe where you get one shot, and your success or failure are both eternally final?  That world scares me.  So too does the one without God, although I suppose I could learn to deal with it.  In any event, I don’t see that as a necessity.  The scientific evidence is on my side.

According to FBI: UCR Table 12, there were approximately 374 people shot and killed with rifles of any kind. There were 1,604 people killed with “knives or cutting instruments.”

Table 12 also shows that more people were killed via the use of “hands, fists, feet, etc.,” than were killed by rifles of any kind. In fact, the tally shows that the death numbers were not even close. While approximately 374 people were shot and killed with rifles, roughly 656 people were beaten to death with “hands, fists, feet, etc.”

Logically, if we are concerned with public safety, we should ban both knives, and hands and feet, before we ban weapons which are used much less often, to much less effect.

But of course this is not and never has been about public safety.  The fucking Left breaks everything it touches, it makes coherent and intelligent policy discussion impossible, and makes the fixing of actual problems so ball-breakingly difficult that most people of genuine goodwill simply give up.  Their process is one of sidelining good people, promoting bad people, polluting public discussion, and using every problem as a political tool.  They were ready and loaded for bear when this shooting happened.  They were eager.  They were drooling.  They were not the LEAST bit upset (the media, I mean: clearly there is genuine hurt and anger among those who remain at least somewhat sane).

As Jonathan Hari notes in this great talk , rats who live alone who are given a choice between cocaine water and regular water will choose the cocaine water until they die.  This is the root of the idea that cocaine is “addictive”.  This study was done many decades ago.

More recently, another professor, up in Canada, noticed that the rats had nothing better to do than do drugs, not entirely unlike many unemployed people in poor areas, particularly rural areas.  So he built a “rat park”, with lots of rats, lots of stuff to do, good food to eat.  Heaven for rats, as Hari puts it.

None of them became addicted, and most never used the cocaine water at all.

So it is not hard to make the connection that addiction is a functional adaptation to a dysfunctional environment.  It is a sign people are disconnected from other people, and the capacity for authentic, spontaneous play.

Now, and here is my point, take that idea, consider that food is a drug like any other–or can be–and go look at all the people at Walmart or the shopping mall.

America is, in important respects, a very, very poor nation.  And we are exporting what we call our culture around the world.

Now, I want to be clear.  I am emphatically a fan of the ideas underlying our Republic, and the people who proposed them.  We just need to understand that violent sadists have been disrupting everything that works, to the best of their ability, for a half century or more.  We can’t undo this damage, in my opinion.  We have to create something new.  This remains my focus.

They say “Healer, heal thyself”.  This, to be more specific, is my current focus.  I got drunk last night.  But what is interesting is that I do my Heartmath EmWave2 every day.  I did it this morning.  And I have noticed a very consistent pattern that, although my heart rate is always elevated the next day, my overall coherence is much higher.  Drinking soothes me.  It is a functional adaption.  My challenge, my logical next step, is to figure out how to build for myself a rat heaven of some sort.

Squeak, squeak.

Sometimes the blind are leading the sighted.  I see it every day.  I wonder why people form in these lines, and why they continue to follow them.

I am, as I think I commented at some point, listening to “The Agony and the Ecstacy”, and am struck by how tribal the Italians were (and probably still are, albeit to a much lesser extent).  In Rome, every group–including the Florentines–had their own ghetto.  Everyone thought everyone else was inferior.  But even in Florence there were conflicts.  Within the book, there was an anti-Medici faction, and a pro-Medici faction.  There were conflicts over Savonarola.

I am struck, contemplating it, how amazing and perhaps a bit frightening it is that America has created a relatively uniform culture across such a large land mass.  On the plus side, we have in some respects eliminated most conflicts related directly to religion, or family, or city, or ethnicity.  We speak a common language, and there are few dialects left, and most pose no issues from one side of the country to the other.  We are all Americans.

But, as I have commented before, if everybody belongs, nobody belongs.  We need smaller groups to belong to, not necessarily to engage in conflict with to create solidarity, but to know and be known.  If you can assume nothing about people, it is hard seeing them, and hard for them to see you.

I think this unconscious search for a tribe is one factor driving our current divisions.

The other, though, and this is where this thought was leading, is that when you have a uniform cultural space, the power of propaganda is amplified tremendously.  Without realizing it, most of us have consumed and internalized massive quantities of propaganda.  We are being manipulated, but most do not see it.

So it is perhaps not entirely apt to say that, politically, the blind are leading the sighted, but certainly true that the sighted are being led into traps they could and should see.

Gun Control is one.  The national debt is another.  The existence of the Fed, and fiat money is, though, the largest.

The essential idea of Conservatism is that without continuity with the past, there can be no reliable community, no solidarity.  This is never to say that progress is not possible, but it needs to be emotionally intelligent, gradualistic progress.  In the same way that you cannot change your personality overnight, you cannot change a society overnight.  And trying to do so creates trauma, failure, and more violence.

Socialists, of course, make the tacit and sometimes explicit claim that their MOVEMENT constitutes a form of solidarity.  But where is it leading?  It is created out of nothing, and going nowhere, from a cultural perspective.  The people pushing it assume some sort of miracle will happen, but why would it?  Miracles are for the religious, and they wear the mantle–disingenuously, to be sure–of Science.

The French, and the Khmer Rouge, and others, tried to simply impose a new culture on people by force.  They literally tried to force people into new personalities, to mold them into something they weren’t.  It is a horrific spectacle.  It is pure evil.  And pure stupidity.  Everyone loses.  No one wins.  Even those at the top of the dungpile of history are only there because they are amoral psychopaths, and that is an illness which makes of life a mania, and which makes true satisfaction in any meaningful sense impossible.

He seems to be who he claims to be: a student at the high school where the shooting took place. He is also clearly self aggrandizing–he is perhaps a Geraldo in the making–smug, entitled, narcissistic, and  attention seeking. Who else would be proud of getting on the evening news for being an asshole to a lifeguard doing his job who simply asked that they not block a trash can, and to whom they responded by telling him to “fuck off”?

And of course the pictures are of the student journalists.

The problem I see in all this is that an FBI agent would not just raise this little left wing shit, but seemingly support him in his anti-Constitutionalism.

How fucking corrupt IS the FBI? How many crypto-Communists do we have working in government? It is a reasonable question. If John Brennan could rise to lead the CIA, anything is possible.

I spend an hour a day or so simply connecting with and amplifying feelings.  Yesterday, it popped in my head that “constant distraction IS brain washing”.

If your attention span is 15 seconds, if you are constantly demanding the WORLD bring you things to pay attention to, you are a slave.  You are not choosing what you pay attention to.   You CAN”T choose.  How could you?  You can’t even form a complete thought, when you are used to other people telling you what to say and think.

It doesn’t matter what the distractions are, either.  If the thought of spending an hour in silence and without moving terrifies you, you are not free.

And self evidently, EVERYONE was able to do this 100 years ago.  Even the most distracted people in the biggest cities had far more quiet time than an average teenager in our own time.

I will admit to reading “The Medium is the Massage”, but not understanding it.  Having said that, the morphology of time made inevitable by our technology, and the way most use it, has an effect far more significant than the details of any series of interactions. I don’t care what websites you are going to.  I don’t care if it is porn or video games or sports scores.  All of it is brainwashing you, making you a fit vessel for organized propaganda.