Month: April 2018

The phrase I think I would use to describe this film is “sympathetic absurdity”.  He show how ridiculous, how ponderous, how lustful we can be for “life”, however we define it, and how these sentiments, which we hope will be pure, deep, profound, can often shade quickly into absurdity, without our seeing it.  He is not saying life is absurd, but that Ferdinand is absurd, and that those who are like him are likewise absurd. 

Do you think your life will change in profound ways by running away?  Don’t count on it.  You simply create a world of new problems, which you will not be equipped to solve.  Stay in the fold.  Leave only when you are ready.  Less is very often more.

The boldest lines are sometimes the shortest lines.  La Ligne Chance, I think was the French.  You want a long line, one that goes over the horizon.

I was having dreams of madness last night.  I could not remember where I belonged, where I worked, who I worked for.  I wasn’t wearing the right sort of suit.  One of the most successful hyperconformists I have ever met–a guy who was making half a million dollars a year in his twenties–was telling me I needed to get my shit together.

But what I have learned is that our fear of emotional conditions–here, a break from the values of our country–quite often feed into a panic loop that then creates truly bad conditions.  I’m not crazy.  My reality testing is quite good.  I’ve met schizophrenics–we have one in the family–and I am not schizophrenic.

What I realize though is that it IS a sort of madness to see and FEEL, emotionally and viscerally, how contingent the values of our society–and any society–truly are.  They could easily be something else entirely.  And those of this nation, at this time, are truly insane.  Money?  What good is money, truly, when you have lost your soul? I say this not to judge, but to ask what is, to me, an obvious question.

All people who aspire to a genuinely spiritual path must be revolutionaries.  There is no other way.  Everywhere there is the bracken and detritus of centuries of dead habit, of thoughtlessness, of separation from primary awareness.

A sufficiently spiritually aware person could be dropped into any time and any culture, and quickly find their way.  The essence of spiritual truths is that they never change.  The Way never changes, even if it is ALWAYS specific to a time and place.  There is the inner and the outer.

I will make my habit post today.  I have been postponing it both out of a fear of pain, and out of a sense that, in the end, it may simply be mediocre and that I will feel stupid, which would actually be a bit comical, as it would imply I am taking myself vastly too seriously, which I am quite sure I do.  Life is simultaneously a deadly serious business, and not serious at all.  Living well means moving flexibly between those two poles as the occasion calls for it.  Sometimes being a good person means being serious.  Sometimes it is laughing and joking whole-heartedly, and in a spirit of innocence.  I need to do more of the latter.  It would be good for me.  I have a very robust sense of humor, and a very quick wit, when I am feeling good.

I am out of my comfort zone, even as it tenuously exists for me, but this feeling is good.  It is a step into the light, after long darkness.

I don’t get out much, intellectually.  I don’t read journals diligently, and I’m not really up on what people are talking about.  I go to about 5 websites habitually, and that is it.

So if I am stating the obvious, and the already-much-discussed, please forgive me.

There are twin dangers with AI.  There is obviously the Terminator scenario.  That one has of course been much discussed.

But the other is that it is a force multiplier for HUMANS, because it is a THOUGHT multiplier.  Used properly, it makes the possessor vastly more intelligent. It also automates many things which might once have been done by fallible humans.  You can give orders to robots which you know they will obey faithfully and diligently.

The world is filled with lunatics, and a great many of them ride their obsessions to great wealth and power.  It is right and proper to fear technologies which make small groups disproportionately capable.

As with all weapons, one can hope that the good guys with AI can counterbalance the bad guys.  Getting to the party early always has advantages, which dwindle as more and more join in.

As I ponder this film, I realize that Godard was satirizing a certain type.  He did call him “the fool”, and I think the ending makes his intent clear.  And his name was Ferdinand.  It truly is a funny movie, and  whimsical in very good ways.  I actually think I may watch it again.  It’s not really a noir.  I’m not sure it’s classifiable other than as extremely French.  I honestly can’t think of anything else it reminds me of strongly.

There are a lot of laugh out loud moments, which are memorable in the sort of way Monty Python or SNL skits were at their best, in that they become funnier with time. It is the oddest juxtaposition of moments I can remember, which include not least the musical and dance numbers.

I actually can’t remember ever laughing at a French movie other than Monseiur (?) Hulot.

It is an odd thing that speaking of life and death, of the felt sense of “living”, of love and betrayal, have come to seem deep.  This movie, obviously, opposed commercialism, and opposed Communism, Coke and Leninism, as they succinctly summarized it.  Stylistically, it was quite interesting, with the many characters at the party more or less literally speaking commercials.

And it was a funny movie. Black humor, for sure, but funny. And completely unpredictable.  It was perhaps the most ideosyncratic movie I have ever seen.  I was initially thinking it was a vastly superior “Badlands”, or perhaps even “Thelma and Louise”–as it starts similar in premise–but then it went its own way.

Good movies stir up things in the viewer, and this one did in me.  It is not inaccurate in some respects to say I live on an island, and send out bottles, via this blog, to the vast ocean around me.  I look at people madly trying to find meaning in their lives, to find the FEELING of being alive, and failing.  Everywhere I see failure, and I do not want to surround myself with it, with glib answers, and emotional superficiality.  I don’t like feeling misunderstood, and I can’t find anyone who understands me.  Not yet.  It seems I will need to fashion that world myself, with great effort, great difficulty, but victory will be sweet, if I can reach it in this life.

And I think of the Tibetans, living alone for 3 years, 3 weeks and 3 days.  Do you think that they, as human beings, fail to be confronted by all the same existential anxieties, fears, confusions?  Is it deep to suppose that style, and wit, and basic questions constitute profundity?  It is easy, watching the French in particular, although they are not uniquely guilty, to think that many people want to answer yes.  The “deepest” among us see little, and seemingly as a rule find small struggles to be insurmountable mountains.

When I made that post on Hitler, I felt death in me for hours afterwards.  What sort of world do we live on?  We live in a world where we have to face death, face despair, face hopelessness, face confusion, and stare them down, to the best of our abilities, all while doing our level best to become stronger by helping one another, and sharing what wisdom we can.

This is HARD.  It is very hard.  This is a difficult game, one hard to play well, easy to fail at.  But it is not an impossible game.  It is reasonable to look to the saints and spiritual heroes among us and see that a way can be found.  And seeking it is our job.  It is the point of the light in the sky, the flow of our waters, the air in our lungs, the ground under our feet.

And I cannot help but feel, again, that Kum Nye is the most direct path I have found to what everyone wants and craves.  The sense of being alive is the POINT of the whole thing.  And that is only preparatory. We are so fallen, that we have to begin far, far behind where more advanced peoples would have begun.  What is confusing to us was self evident long ago.  Of this I feel certain.  All of our technology, or most of it, is making us stupider in all the ways which really matter.

This movie is crazy.  I’m taking a break.

I’ll share this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=HWaG3cQGURc

It is quite reasonable for intelligent, reasonable people to conclude with reasonably high confidence that the “gas attack” wasn’t.

Then I read this: https://www.infowars.com/trump-seals-jfk-documents-until-2021/

Why is Trump sealing this evidence?  What CURRENT CIA operations could be jeopardized by disclosure?  He ordered that the names of any living agents be expunged, but that should suffice.  What leverage does the CIA have on our President, the elected representative of the people, and the one man most tasked with the protection of our Republic?

Then I read this: https://lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/lc-doj-grand-jury-petition/

This is on the plus side.  When I discuss conspiracies, many I simply leave as “unknown but interesting and possible.”  9/11 WAS a coverup.  Period.  There is ZERO doubt in my mind.  None.  The evidence those buildings were subjected to controlled demolition is incontrovertible, which is why assuming a cover up is necessary.  NIST was not and is not incompetent.

And the Alaska works remains on-going: https://www.ae911truth.org/news/444-update-from-dr-leroy-hulsey-on-the-uaf-wtc7-study

It’s of course possible that all involved have been receiving threats, and having odd things happen to them.  I obviously can’t know.  But I do also feel that there are multiple sides in this whole thing.  It is not the case that ALL members of the CIA and FBI etc. are venal, corrupt, evil human beings.  Merely too many.  This means that the one element which might make those threats has to keep other elements in mind.  The bad people know who they are, but the good people can’t know for sure.  All of them are highly intelligent and well trained and experienced in deception.

But what seems more likely in this particular case is that you have a career Structural Engineer whose career will end with, will be most associated with, this study.  It is all most people will know or remember about him.  And when it is released, so too will the wolves.  There will be howling, growling, shouting and shoving.

He has to be SURE it is right, that there is nothing in there, no small flaw, which critics can seize on to invalidate the whole project.  And in something that complex, that is a sizeable task.  It may not be possible at all, but it seems likely he wants to get as close to perfection as possible.  I would submit that about 95% is probably good enough to get the thing into the public media.

These things have a way of catching fire.  The thing is most people are unwilling to accept all the implications involved in the idea that our government, from on high, is capable of mass murder, the willful manipulation of public feeling for the purposes of war and implementation of tyranny, and that masses of people associated with it can be so corrupted as to cooperate in the project, IN AMERICA.

We want to believe that all these agencies and institutions to which we have ceded so much power have not become evil.  But it seems that large segments of them, in fact, have.  Google has become evil, and not being evil is in its motto.  Money and power make people funny.

It’s hard to predict the effect of a well engineered study being released by a highly credible professional, after a long term and well financed project, which indicates that 9/11 was CLEARLY, unmistakably, an inside job, and one covered up by other elements of the government who can be named.

I feel, though, that it could be substantial.  That is one area where bipartisan outrage would be well warranted.  It was not Bush.  Bush and Obama and Clinton and George H.W. seem to have all been playing on the same team.  I hate to go there, and would like to be wrong, but that seems the most sensible hypothesis. 

It’s small wonder I find myself thinking about death some days.  I’m not melancholy: it’s just hard to see how all this ends well.  I think of the Ray Bradbury story where everyone on the planet has the same dream the same night that the world will end that night, and the couple with kids puts their kids to bed like normal, then goes to bed themselves.  What else can you do?

I try daily to tell truths I am not seeing represented elsewhere.  It is all I can do.  Accepting and embracing and finding joy in the middle of impermanence is perhaps the core task of life on this Earth.  

I am working on a post that I will eventually put more work into than normal, but thought I would share in the meantime that, while sometimes these posts just flow out, to the extent that I almost can’t NOT write them, some are very painful.

If I had to point to one single factor in the persistence of stupidity in intelligent people, I think it could most easily be summarized as an unwillingness to suffer.  All smart people, if they remain truly open, will find their way eventually.  But countless people who make thinking the main purpose of their lives–academics and intellectuals–persist in stupidity in large numbers across long lifetimes.

I deal in aches daily I am long accustomed to, which I cannot avoid.  Adding to these aches by purposefully opening myself to insights and ideas whose course I can’t predict, which go I know not where, is really no extra work.  I do not have strong willpower, I don’t think: I am simply stuck in a moment, and one aspect of that moment is that confronting things which terrify most people is no extra work most of the time.  In any event, I am in the habit of doing it.

I am watching Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou at the moment, and will now return, now that my tea is done.

I will comment too that much of the French New Wave, Existentialism, and literature and art generally in Europe since World War 1 has to be seen in the context of the horrors of war.  No one escaped.  If you, your father or grandfather, brother or son did not serve, those of people you know did.  Many of them were scarred permanently psychologically, and shared their unprocessed grief and rage with everyone around them.  They raised children, married wives, worked jobs.  They took your money at the train station, sold you flowers, and walked their dogs in the parks.

Who we might become in a truly sustained peace, not filled with insane propaganda, it is hard to say, but I think the default of most human beings is peace and tranquility.  We have savage beasts within us, but we are not savage beasts.  We are humans, which makes us complex, with many possibilities.

Someone who, seeing Kim Jung Un walk across the DMZ, thinks immediately: My god, this might hurt us in the mid-terms.

Would it not be a much more beautiful world if I were exaggerating in the slightest?

Find genuinely idealistic people to consolidate power in the public interest.  Teach them to use the power beneficently, such that people embrace it.  Gradually aggregate latent functional, but not explicit, power in their hands. Then kill them and take over, once the surveillance and police state is a fait accompli.

I will contextualize this by sharing a link I found, on a documentary examining the claim that Hitler survived World War 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=608&v=Gw1hgOlHTD4

Data points include the seeming fact that no fragment of Hitler or Eva Braun’s bodies were ever found, with the skull shard which was claimed to be Hitler’s having been shown to be that of a 40 year old woman; that both Stalin and Eisenhower doubted accounts of Hitler’s death; the sophistication of the ODESSA operation; eyewitness accounts, as shown in the documentary; and the seeming fact of a house being found deep in the jungle which would have been exactly the sort of house one would expect Hitler to live in.  This is a short list.

The Nazis had a considerable amount of planning dedicated to all contingencies–Faelle, I believe is the German–and it is not inconceivable that Hitler not only continued to exercise some influence from the shadows, but that he also found Nazi loot ably invested and used by competent adherents and accomplices to continue the same rough goals.  Whether or not he had literal clones, does it seem unreasonable to suppose, if he did survive, that he had many IDEOLOGICAL clones?

Operation Paperclip is, now, well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

What if all these Nazis knew Hitler lived?  What if the American government explicitly helped make it happen, by which I mean to say, the OSS as run by Allen Dulles, as a means of guaranteeing their loyalty?  Jerome Corsi raises the question, without of course being able to answer it.  I have never been much of a Kennedy conspiracy buff, other than to point out that Oswald’s Communism was his most likely motivation, possibly buttressed by specific orders from Castro, but it does seem ODD, now that I know about it, that the equivalent of a John Brennan–but much more powerful John Brennan–was one seventh of the committee investigating the death of the man who fired him.  I mean Allen Dulles, of course.

What if Captain America: Winter Soldier is much too close to the truth?

I can’t know, but the objective of limiting government power has never been more relevant and important than it is in the days of Big Data, Big Brother, and Big Technology.

And is it not ODD that the Left has been taught to value everything the Nazis valued, all while believing–as indeed the Nazis did–that they occupy the higher moral ground, and that they are foot soldiers in something historic and monumental?

No: of course not.  This is the plan.

I will note, though, that if this account is true, Juan Peron must have known, and must have agreed to the whole thing.  Hitler and Peron were quite similar, I suspect, although I have not studied Peron much at all. When you are dealing with a cult of personality, the psychology, and the political objectives and methods, cannot vary all that much.

I felt marching armies in the distance, but I was at peace.  I don’t know what it all means.  It could all be major intrapsychic conflict.  That is certainly a possibility.