Month: February 2018

I was feeling confused last night.  You know, I am wracking my brain daily trying to figure out how we survive and thrive.  I am not quite obsessive, but it would not be an inapt word.

And I felt this confusion running through me.  I never know what to do.  I don’t know how to do self care, and to balance it with the work I do for money, and the work I do for love.

And I entered this confusion, and felt old spiritual masters smiling at me.  This was a feeling they became used to, and mastered.

And I felt that a life lived properly is very much like staying in that moment between when you jump, from one place to another, and when you land.  You are always in the middle, and there is no firm ground in the middle.  There is no place in the middle.  There is no stability in the middle. If you can learn to accept and even thrive on this feeling, you can go far.

“Being present to the moment” is not the beginning.  It is, I feel, the final act of a completed spirituality.

Grab bag.

Practically, “gun control” always means “let’s ban as many guns as we can get away with at the moment”.  This fact is lost on no one who has watched carefully.  There is always a “ratchet” strategy behind it, which is why the NRA is right to oppose nearly everything the Left proposes. 

Here is another conspiracy theory: what if the FBI ignored Cruz ON PURPOSE?  Impossible, you say?  So is falsifying documents, lying to Congress, and participating directly in the electoral process, but those all clearly happened.

Some great quotes on guns by dead white men, who in their time were vastly smarter politically than any other group of any other race on the planet: https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/gun-quotations-founding-fathers

I feel that the debate on a deep level really revolves around what it means to be human.  Is it our purpose on this planet to be ordered around?  Maturity comes with freedom, and guns are inherently a symbol and enforcer of freedom.  People who are willing to take responsibility for their own well being, and who in fact DEMAND this right, support widespread gun ownership.  Only people who do NOT want to take responsibility for their own safety, who WANT to place that responsibility in the hands of others, want guns taken away. 

For my money, guns in important respects are a symbol of social maturity, not the symbol of regressiveness the political Left and its propaganda apparatus wants to paint them as.

And:

As a journalist, I’ve definitely found myself in situations that have made me feel uncomfortable. But I’m sure it doesn’t compare to what the women in tech face every single day because they’re simply so outnumbered. I talked to women engineers at Uber who were getting invited to strip clubs and bondage clubs in the middle of the day. The middle of the day! And often they would go because that’s just what everyone was doing. It’s what you needed to do to fit in and be cool. 

Can any sane mind claim our social development is even remotely keeping pace with our technology?  Could it not be easily and plausibly claimed that the entire ruse of “Progressivism” is simply intended to distract the world from the true “Progress”–that of corruption and moral malaise, understood as a separation from authentic emotion and sense of self–present everywhere in the very places proclaiming themselves most advanced?

Why are we being lectured by amoral fiends?  Why does anyone listen?

I watched the movie “The Internship”.  As always, I found Vince Vaughn very funny.  But it seemed obvious that the movie had the approval of Google, and yet they went to a strip club.  Maybe, the intent was simply to portray that world accurately.

Public piety, private license.  It has long been easy enough to criticize religious hypocrites.  But are the hypocrites of the Left any different?  Is it anything but one more fucked up Church?  I don’t see it.

Could we not call school shootings “the visible face of social alienation”?  It may be that AR-15’s and their cousins are being used increasingly, but handguns are nearly as good.  Banning effective weapons will accomplish little.

And I would STRONGLY encourage you to listen to at least the first ten minutes or so of this podcast, where Tony Blauer interviews David Grossman:  http://knowfear.libsyn.com/lt-col-dave-grossman-ret

Grossman, who you should know from the book On Killing, has written a book specifically on first person shooters, called Assassination Generation, where he argues that we are making our children sick in the head: https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-Generation-Aggression-Psychology-Killing/dp/0316265934/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Grossman points out that murder rates are artificially lowered by the fact that improved medical technology allows people to live who would have died in the 1970’s.

He further points out that rates of violent crime are SKYROCKETING in Europe, which is supposed to be much safer due to how hard the governments there make it for citizens to compete with them.  The increase is so bad Interpol has classified the data.  And of course they don’t have a Freedom of Information Act over there, because they are not us. Only America is America.  Never forget that. 

I will note, as many have, that it was common for kids, particularly in rural areas, to bring guns to school every day.  Nobody said anything, and nobody cared.  The guns were used for hunting after school, and for target practice, with or without JROTC.  The nature of guns has not changed.  What has changed is how alienated people–particularly teenagers–have become from their feelings and from any meaningful sense of social connection and bonding.  The video games BOTH separate people, AND teach them the effective use of violence.  This is a witch’s brew, and if someone wants to assume the mantle of HONEST leadership, we need to seriously consider things like labels on violent video games similar to those on cigarettes, saying something like “this game may permanently fuck your brain up, and make you lonely, anxious, friendless, and constantly angry”.

The more I wake up, the more I realize most people are sleepwalking.  Very few people want to do the WORK of independent thinking, of stating ideas which have not been in the mix for the course of their entire lifetime.  Calling for “gun control” is not revolutionary.  It does not take courage.

Stating the nature of real problems clearly, and in such a way that many people will take offense takes courage. I can’t begin to imagine the screaming we will hear if we start putting labels on video games, if we start teaching parents how damaging they seem to be.  But can it be worse than the screaming following a shooting, which flows nearly linearly from the playing of the game, through minds made unstable for whatever reason, and out the barrels of actual guns?

If I might paraphrase Madison, we would have no need of guns if we had a perfectly angelic, perfectly competent, and perfectly reliable government.  And if we ourselves were all uniformly angels, we would likewise need no guns.

But neither case applies.  The FBI and other law enforcement clearly dropped the ball on Cruz (multiple somebodies saw something and said something, which is the way the system is supposed to work on the “people’s” side), and overall our world seems to be getting more violent.

Every attack on our common culture–to the extent we have one–is inherently a call for mass violence.  I see no other way to view it.  The Left truly wants a civil war.  They don’t know why, but I will say I think it is because they have nothing left of their souls, and emptiness begets violence.

It seems that all of us deposit layers of experience, like so much sand, at the bottom of the oceans of our selves.  It floats down there, unnoticed, and creates a layer.  “Experience” has stages–although often many stages can be happening at once, as often happens in youth–and this creates many layers, a sort of sandstone which creates a continual, but background, sense of self that is present forever after.

This rock influences everything which happens.  It is never fully past.  It is never truly gone until we experience it fully and integrate it into the present.  I have not fully figured out how to do this for myself, but I have in the Kum Nye method of contacting, paying attention to, merging with the breath, amplifying, and expanding.

But I feel there is a certain ruthlessness needed for the spiritual path.  It is not all easiness, light, and effortless kindness.  I think we all feel this. I think it is why many of us, despite our temptation to be attracted to it, find much of the “New Age” movement almost comical.  They don’t mean to be comical or corny, but so much of what they say and do is based on ideas which are demonstrably untrue, such as that the world is becoming more spiritual.  The opposite seems to be true, to me.  We are becoming more isolated, mechanical, rigid, emotionally stupid, superficial, and conformist.

This is why I cannot yet bring myself to become a vegetarian.  It is perhaps cruel to eat animals, but I do not want, yet, to reject cruelty.  The world is cruel.  The wild is filled with animals eating one another, enduring harsh conditions, and dying where they stand.

An honest life is negotiated between Yes and No.  A life of purely one sort or the other is a life of  either relentless compulsion or relentless spiritual torpor.  I would actually roughly conflate the two.  We are intended to use our freedom thoughtfully.

Hillary seems to have taken over $100 million–$200 is the approximate number if we believe reports–from Saudi Arabia. This money would have been put to many uses, including hiring bloggers, but most importantly it would have bought campaign ads. If we are going to whine about 13 bloggers funded to the tune of a million or two, can we not ask about an amount 100x as large, particularly when Hillary was publicly threatening to take the United States to war with Russia on behalf, solely, of Saudi interests?

And can someone with a brain please point out that the Russisn intent was BOTH to help, in a very small way, elect the candidate who did not want a pointless war with them, AND to simply support the relentlessly divisive and violent character of our public discourse?

Their work was done, and continues to be done, by the complicit media with far more enthusiasm and effectiveness than they ever could have dreamed of.

Those who continue to call for Trumps impeachment might thus very reasonably be accused of “supporting the Russians”. They just want hate everywhere, and far too many are happy to provide it.

I was dreaming about Kevin Spacey last night.  It seems to me he is wandering the world as a ghost.  Those who knew him now shun him.  This is happening to someone who lived for that sort of attention.

I understand being a ghost.  It will be interesting to see who and how he is five years from now.  Perhaps we will never hear him spoken of again, except as a cautionary tale.  Certainly, he did terrible things.  Terrible things were done to him, if not physically, then emotionally.  But so many of us wander, lost and lonely, unseen and rudderless.  I have been this way for many years, but the fog is slowly lifting, wind is entering my sails, and I am remembering my steering wheel and map.

Religion should be s technology of sanity, of mental health. It should be a means of balancing ones own internal emotional environment, managing interpersonal relationships harmoniously, and remembering and respecting the sacred without fetishizing it. We need air to breath, but it is useless trying to remember this continually. In a healthy world, what needs to be done, will be done.

Very few crime dramas survive any more unless they have spectacular crimes.

When I was growing up, the grotesque was rare and generally remarked upon.  An alien emerging from someones stomach was horrifying back then, even if by today’s standards the SE were almost laughable.

Very few people rooted for the criminals, or so I suppose. But rooting for the criminal is the essence of most horror franchises any more, and they are very popular.  Hannibal Lector, the cannibal psychistrist (there is some symbology), became a hero.

Is it really asking too much to see connections between all this and, not the rate of violence, but the QUALITY of it, in our modern world?  

My question is: what happens if the government–or de facto government–comes to control our every last action?  If we allow this, are we “protecting our children”?  Not if we believe, as I do, that freedom is necessary for a fulfilling life.

And where are we drifting?  Is it really an improvement if we are all wandering around by ourselves, lost in some VR contained in high tech glasses, consuming vicious scenes of torture, murder, and wanton cruelty, and completely emotionally separated from one another?  Would this be better, if all guns of any sort had been confiscated, and everyone had to content themselves to shooting or watching being shot, hundreds of people every day? Is this peace?  Is this freedom?

Think.  Look.  See.