Month: February 2018

I was wondering, again, as I do every four years, why nations like Norway, with a population of about 5 million, can outperform America, with a population of 350 million or so.  Are we that much more decadent and lazy?  This was my question.

But as I ponder more, it occurs to me our cultural sports priorities are completely different.  It is quite likely there are more competitive cross country skiiers in Norway than there are here.  It is a certainty there are more biathletes.  Same with Nordic Combined, ski jumping, and frankly most of the sports in the Olympics.  Have you ever seen a luge track?  I haven’t.

This thought makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing.

I would add that more generally Americans value a small number of sports, where we put the overwhelming bulk of our effort, where we spend our money, and which attract our best athletes.  I mean football, baseball, and basketball.  Even track and field, which we don’t ignore, is vastly more important and valued in other countries.

I’m watching the Olympics, and the top Ice Dancers, a pair of Canadians, selected for their music “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Hotel California”–which has long been rumored to be about the Satanic Church, and which certainly seems to feature Anton Lavey on the balcony when you open the album, which I used to own–and, if I’m not mistaken, “Black Magic Woman”, from the album Abraxas (“ The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jungtranscribed a short Gnostic treatise in 1916, attributed to Basilides in Alexandria called The Seven Sermons to the Dead, which called Abraxas the supreme power of being transcending both God and the Devil and unites all opposites into one Being“), by Santana.  Not hard to see a pattern there.  They wore black of course.

And I look at that, and it might well be their version of an inside joke.  Most Canadians are socialized to be atheists, like most Europeans.  Within such a world view, Satan is as irrelevant as God, with the difference that talking about Satan pisses people off who atheists see as enemies.

I will append to this an article I read about an overtly Satanic ice cream chain out of Canada: https://www.infowars.com/satanic-themed-ice-cream-shop-trashes-jesus-in-bizarre-marketing-scheme/

Again, might well be their version of an inside joke.   For everyone who laughs at Christians, why not make of sacrilege a political act indicating solidarity with the forces opposing, as they see it, reaction?

But as I have said over and over, there is something deeper in the appeal evil makes to people who lack a moral compass.  If you make a religion of being nice–if it is never acceptable to demand people respect non-negotiable, firm, unchanging boundaries–then the anger builds up.  It has nowhere to go.  The ego has no way of asserting itself, and thus firm individuation becomes impossible psychologically.  If you cannot be yourself, you have no home.  You belong nowhere, to no one.  And this is immensely frustrating, infuriating even.  This of course is why we see all this irrational and frankly stupid rage being directed at Trump.  But it is a very, very deep current of closely held emotion within people who are outwardly “progressive”, as they see it, nice, socially conscious, “good” people, like Justin Trudeau (who shows every sign of being Castro’s bastard son: look it up, the resemblance is textbook).  Rage can be redirected in many ways, and one of them is in structured, serious, long term destructiveness masquerading as niceness.  

It seems to me that there are spheres of fear.  There is immediate fear, chronic fear, anxiety, then what might be termed existential fear, the fear of being alive.  These fears have differing qualities, but the outermost–well, so far, from what I can tell, but I am wrong continually–is very subtle.  It is the root of clinging, the root of rejecting.  What I see is that to get beyond it, I have to expand beyond its reaches.  To overcome fear, you have to become very large indeed.

While on this note, it occurred to me this morning to wonder who exactly is asking for safe spaces for our kids.  I actually don’t think it is the kids, although they are being taught to demand them.  I think it is the “adults” in these colleges and schools, who themselves never differentiated, never individuated, never completed the psychological task of maturing in our admittedly complex and frightening world.

What more obvious, of people who fear the world, to project their own fear onto largely helpless children we have entrusted them to teach and lead, and to feel that if they can just keep them infantile and helpless, the existential crisis of realizing their massive life failure will never occur. In large measure, these “adults” are, if I am right, demanding safe spaces for themselves since, in their narcissism, they cannot properly differentiate their own needs from those of the kids in their care.

Something to ponder.  As with all complex things, the exact realities differ no doubt considerably from place to place and even time to time and person to person.  This never negates the possible utility, though, of speaking in the abstract.

https://literaryreview.co.uk/im-very-good-at-sex

Where I’m at, I’ll let you know at some point.  I’m pretty convinced there is truth at the bottom of the bullshit, but I’m still digging.

Actually, I find that funny.  Maybe that means something?  

I had some interactions with my oldest this weekend, and at some point realized she doesn’t need me any more.  She has things figured out, or in any event, has figured out how to figure things out.

Now, I don’t like sharing personal stuff, but I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a deep order in things, and it is useless worrying about everything.  Things which should not work out often do, and things which are easy and obvious fail at the gate.  None of us really understand all of it.

In fact, and I’ve never thought of it this way that I can recall (although there is much I can’t recall), perhaps the lust for power is at root a need to make the world comprehensible, orderly, fathomable.  The world is orderly, for you, because you control it.  You control your destiny by making it hard for others to control you.  A world where you never have to say you are sorry is an orderly world, is it not?  A world where other people are behaving in seemingly random, chaotic ways can never feel predictable and thus safe.

Be all this as it may, it occurred to me it might be useful to give her explicit permission to grow up, to be herself.  I said: “X, I realized this morning you have become an adult.  I think that I, like a lot of parents, have been slow to realize this, since it is bittersweet.  It marks the end of an era.  I’m proud you are on your way, off to who knows what life adventures, but sad because parenting is a precious experience, and it is largely over now for you.  But I will be excited to watch you in coming years.  I think some really cool stuff is coming.  Have a great day, and please do what you can to get a full nights sleep once in a while!!  I’m asking, not telling!!” 

She cried, of course.  It was my intention.  We have a family policy that periodic tears are necessary for mental health.

I share this because I am not alone.  But I do feel warranted in my belief that I can sometimes put to words things everyone feels, but which confuse them.

And I do think that the scariness of this world, the seeming precariousness of it, the sense that as fantastically built and developed as we are, it could all come tumbling down in a cataclysmic instant, makes many parents scared to let go of their children.  And it makes it scary for the children to go out in the world in the faith that whatever they build will stand, that we will all be here in 20 years.

I don’t know what will happen, of course, but I do know I have wasted many years in pointless fear.  As someone put it, Worry does not rob tomorrow of its pain.  It only robs today of its delights and pleasure.

It is appropriate to plan for what you can, but a faith in a deeper order is a more consoling and effective friend.

May this help you in some way.

This is straight ahead economic warfare being waged by an elite against Trump.  Do you think there is s CHANCE this is unconnected to the FISA memo and the enormous boost in confidence in himself and his policies Trump engineered with his SOTU speech (admittedly with no smalll assistance from the Democrats, but he KNEW that was how they would react.)?

No, I don’t think so. There are no market fundamentals driving such an enormous drop. As Sun Tzu wrote, it takes no great power of observation to see lightning or hear thunder.

The potentially HUGE upside to this though is that the Fed may have just put itself on Trumps radar. No serious discussion about any power elite can fail to put front row and foremost the secretive banking canal that has the power to create for itself and its clients literally infinite sums of money, and do so with no accountability or transparency even remotely appropriate for such an enormous power.

Do you think you could buy somebody off for a billion dollars? How about ten billion? How about a hundred billion? All chump change for people who have a magic keyboard where they put in as many ones and zeroes as they like, and nobody other than those involved is ever the wiser.

We have s lot of f great people in our government. But we have some sons of bitches too, and they are the bankers muscle and enforcers. That has to stop.

It seems to me that goal of a parent should be to foster happy kids who know how to work. Work without happiness is no life, and happiness without work soon becomes unhappiness.

And I would further say that there are three basic ways of framing “the world”:

1) the world is rough and if a man’s (or woman’s) gonna make it, they gotta be tough. (those might make good lyrics to a song).

2) The world is rough for some people, but you will be taken care of.

3) The world needs to change to suit your needs.  Any pain or difficulty anywhere is cause for outrage.

Expectations set moods, and moods set lives.

The paradigmatic creative act is seeing the world with your own eyes, unconditioned by what the “world” tells you you should see, both as the world exists today, and as it has existed in the past.  This of course applies to all the senses, and to the realm of ideation.  What we call creative work had to begin with seeing (hearing, feeling, thinking) what could be, but was not yet.

To copy others is uncreative.

To ask others to copy you is anti-creative.  It is rooted in a fundamentally destructive impulse.

The demand for perfect conformity is the polar opposite of the creative, living, soulful temperament.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned at some point a little routine I started doing a while back, where I take my fancy little iron Japanese teapot I got from Teavana, put a pinch of black tea in it, fill it with water, and pour it into a teacup to the point of overflowing, while focusing on what I am grateful for.  I got the idea from a Tibetan who did this every day.  Your blessings overflow.

It hit me this morning, while I was thoughtlessly saying something like “God, may you find me a worthy vessel today”, that God is not demanding anything of us.  God does not demand worship.  God does not demand devotion.  These are human activities, demanded by humans.  As an infinite Being, God does not need us.

There is a blending of Theism and Humanism which is salubrious, in my opinion.  Getting rid of the Church is likely a good thing, but this does not imply attacking belief in God, the connection of all life, or the survival of death.  Those are two discrete things.

What I think we should reasonably ask of ourselves is that we consciously try to live lives that are as happy and harmonious as possible, and that we make a daily effort to be more grateful–because gratitude is a key element in happiness and well being–and to be more aware of who we are spiritually.  God does not move, but our awareness does.