Month: April 2018

Is there an equivalent anywhere in the Republican world to “Rules for Radicals”?  If one wants to argue that Karl Rove borrowed from it in 2000, fine.  But did he create it?  And has there not been a widespread rebellion by grassroots Republicans at the acquisition of power without principle?

Where, among Democrats, is there an equivalent to the term RINO?  Where are the people saying “we have abandoned the workers”?  Where are the people saying “we have failed the blacks who voted for us all these years”?

To the extent Democrats are criticized internally, it is for not wanting government control of substantially every last aspect of the lives of Americans, at a national level, forever.

I can’t know what will happen.  None of us can.  But I feel absolute calm that I have chosen ideas–and to the extent I can find them, people–consistent with the ideas I have formed about goodness, the point of life, and the purpose of politics.

I have never seen a Democrat able to claim the same.  They can’t, not if they are honest about their recent past and present.

https://www.infowars.com/unsafe-to-the-community-facebook-takes-on-pro-trump-diamond-and-silk/

When I speak of Leftism as Cultural Sadeism, what I intend is not that the typical Democrat goes around tearing the wings off of butterflies, or kicking dogs.

What I intend, ultimately, is that they have severed the emotional wellsprings of well-being, of authentic humanness, and authentic relating.  It stems from a sickness, now.  At one time, it was possible to both be a sincere, decent human being, AND to vote Democrat.  Democrats were the party of labor unions, when genuine abuses were happening.

They have never REALLY been the party of blacks, but let’s pretend that at one moment in time–perhaps the late 1960’s–this was possible to believe, because of LBJ and the Kennedys (and despite the disproportionate efforts of Democrats to block civil rights legislation; and while ignoring the original civil rights bill passed in the 1950’s by a Republican Congress and under a Republican President)..

But all that is gone.  There is nothing left but the shrieking.  Their beliefs have fallen into a deep, black hole, and they have pulled half of the Republicans with them.  They do not even ATTEMPT to make policy which is genuinely wise, in aggregate.

What does Facebook have against Diamond and Silk?  Simple: they are 1) black; and 2) unapologetically Pro-Trump, and pro-Republican in general.  This is not the, what?  The NARRATIVE they want to push.

Privileging perception–which is what a narrative is–over reality, is a hallmark of sociopaths.  People who CARE, who genuinely CARE, want solutions, and are willing to look in all directions.  These psychopaths are not looking for solutions.  Politics exists for two purposes: to help them FEEL good, particularly in the context of long term personal viciousness; and to help them LOOK good, in a world where appearances are all that seemingly matters.

Fear is a thousand tentacled monster you can only slay one tentacle at a time.

It is always interesting to me to see the cliche of the 1950’s as static, boring, insincere, and uncreative.  What is never added to the picture is that most of the people in the 1950’s had vivid memories of the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Most of them had seen, and many had been, in bread lines, had grown Victory Gardens, had served in the military, had been in combat, had had family members die.

Nuclear war drills were common, the Korean War was fought in the early part of the decade, and when you factor all this together, the thirst for normality, for calm, for consistency, is absolutely healthy.

But even there, I suspect there was vastly more capacity for diversity of opinion back then than now.  You could not predict a person’s entire political range of opinions based on a couple of question, or so I like to believe.  Nuance remained possible, I like to believe.

What is always unclever is taking any one people, group, time, or place, and assuming everyone behaves identically.  The Left blows a gasket if any white makes generalizations about blacks, but they do it all the time.  They simply make different generalizations.  And they are PROUD of the generalizations they make about both whites and conservatives.

In all times and places where is more going on under the surface that is first apparent.  What I see, under the parade of “diverse” ways of dressing, sexualizing oneself–and actually that is all I can come up with–the Left is dismally, abysmally, distressingly gray, conformitarian, and unoriginal.  As I think I wrote a week or two ago, they ARE what they like to mock.

The 1950’s were not like that at all.  A lot of great books got published then, and many great thinkers were doing some of their best work.

I can’t think of one public intellectual alive today I admire.  No, that’s not true: Thomas Sowell and Paul Johnson.  But they are not as well known as they should be.

All problems have death in them. It is up to us to find the life in them. And there are some forms of life, some qualities of being, which can ONLY be found in problems, which on that score should equally and accurately be labeled opportunities. A great life is a great set of problems, and a creative and generative interaction with them.

It is interesting to contemplate the vast difference in the quality of the eventual stories which might happen when identicsl events happen to very different people. What is an exciting and life affirming adventure for one person might well be terrifying and traumatizing for another. Something happens, we react, and from there it all goes spinning in countless different directions.

Should proper life schooling not consist in teaching how to generate the former reaction and minimize or avoid the latter?

And in a perfect world, wound we not to still want major fuckups to be possible?

No superior person, and no superior Power needs to be acknowledged as such.  Being is its own reward, and the attention and love of others is a poor substitute for it.  Seeing this is one aspect of being superior.

Worship exists for the worshiper, to help them achieve the humility which alone enables the genuinely new to enter.  Worship says openly there is something better, that there exists a path–perhaps a hidden, seldom trodden path–but a path towards so much more.  And “more” can expand indefinitely, can it not?  You can spend days and years traveling a narrow, dangerous, difficult path, only to one day find it opens onto a completely new world.  Respect for what comes next, though, for the path, is what enables this to happen.  This is worship.

God does not need slaves.  God does not want slaves.  Only humans want that, and then only inferior humans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madelyn_Dunham

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/march-for-our-lives-permit/

Here is what is floating around:  “In reference to your inquiry concerning the March For Our Lives Demonstration, here in the District of Columbia on March 24, 2018. MPD received a permit application several months prior to the actual event, and there was several months of planning for this large event.”


Snopes, of course, is in the business of making things go away. As I never tire of pointing out–because it is evidence, prima facie, incontrovertible evidence, in my view, of a sickness in our media and popular mind–Snopes, when it was unable to refute allegations that Obama’s mother posed nude as a teenager for a black Communist photographer in the late 50’s or so, simply deleted the claim.  Here is a link: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/your-right-to-know-more-racy-photos-of-obamas-mother-discovered-video/


I’m not going to go deeply into this right now, again.  Suffice it to say, that large, very world altering truths can be exposed, reach daylight, reach widespread saturation, and still disappear as if they were never uncovered at all.  Most people are stupid, few people remember anything from day to day, and very few people can or do take the time to think carefully about anything.


Here is the thing: Snopes claims to falsify this claim by a later report by the same Department indicating they had confused the March for our Lives with the March for Life.  Here is what they say: “However, Earhardt told non-partisan fact checker PolitiFact that he had confused the “March for Our Lives” rally with an annual event in January bearing a similar name: March for Life.”


First off, any time anyone says they are non-partisan, you should doubt their credibility immediately.  Snopes claims to be non-partisan.  Some joke.


But the salient point is that the original communication, which is seemingly transmitted verbatim, mentions a very specific date, March 24, 2018.  The March for Life happened, if I’m reading correctly, January 19, 2018.


How is this mistake possible?  Is it CREDIBLE to believe that this mistake, with a very specific date, was simple stupidity or carelessness?  Or is it more credible to believe that on first pass he had not thought through the implications of what he was saying, then later realized that if he didn’t recant immediately, that a firestorm was going to engulf him and his department?


I’m far from the only one saying this whole thing feels managed.  As near as I can tell, everyone died who is said to have died, and the shooter seems to have been Nicholas Cruz.  But something is not right.  I watched Double Indemnity over the weekend, and what I feel is that “little man” that drove Edward G. Robinson to nearly uniformly correct conclusions, even when they seemed to contradict what evidence he thought he had.


It’s like Obama’s birth certificate.  Whenever that became an issue, the responsible people went and looked for it, found it, then saw that the father was Frank Marshall Davis, and decided to shut the fuck up, and simply validate that it was there, and they had a record of a Hawaiian birth.  It’s not hard to shut up bureaucrats.  Almost to a person, they are career conformists.  That is how they have careers.  I would not last in nearly any bureaucracy.  I tried AT&T and didn’t even make it a year.  I cannot stand group stupidity, and cannot stand the energy needed to keep my mouth shut. 


But to the point here, there remain a ton of unanswered questions, and we cannot even remotely count on mainstream media to do its job.


Again, this is why liminal, sometimes crazy websites like InfoWars are so essential. I don’t agree with everything Alex Jones says by any means.  Sometimes I think he’s off in the deep end.  But he is not afraid to say what he thinks, to think out loud, to speculate, to run with stories that are not well documented, but which COULD be true.


Journalistic “professional” exist, in some respects, to “curate” information.  They don’t exist to tell all possible truths, and the truth is that many things are in fact true which can never be proven so.  Many things exist on a continuum of possibility, but most journalists tend to ignore anything which they can’t affirm to be true.  This leaves large segments of potentially useful information completely unmined, and it makes it easy to ignore ideas for which little evidence exists, but which might be world changing.


Most of the time, the people who more or less call themselves information professionals are merely note-takers, couriers of statements, made by this person or that person, or public cryers, announcing weddings and funerals.  They are reactive.  They don’t dig into deep issues, they don’t stay with hard topics.  They are reactive to our continually changing attention, but they also help create it.  They don’t ever ask anyone to pay sustained attention for very long.  And they themselves seem to have forgotten how to do it.


Here is a short video with some of the problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1I_rpG7WSM

The issue with regard to Hogg’s whereabouts seems to have been solved: it was bad editing, and the bike ride happened that evening.

But either the girl is LYING about Cruz–and her story is corroborated by a second witness–and obviously, they were in a crowd, so more witnesses could be found if there remained any honest fucking journalists–or we are being lied to about how many shooters there were, and who they were.

Why Cruz would cooperate if he knows he is innocent, I don’t know.  Perhaps he was threatened, perhaps he was offered something.

But something stinks to high heaven.  There are a number of flexion points which would make the whole narrative pop. One would certainly be proof that the permit for the March was applied for months ago, about when the FBI was warned about Cruz.

There is this idea that you can’t die in dreams.  I’ve seen it said, in any event.  I’ve heard it.  But I’ve died in my dreams many times.  I died last night, in a severe car accident, and floated away.  It took me a second to remember it was a dream.  I’m usually awake in my dreams, but not always.

And I felt the beginning of the Life Review.  What have I done?  What use have I been?  Part of you is the sum total of the influences on others you have had, what you have left behind, if on balance you gave or took, if on balance you left more or less than was there when you started your journey here.

And part of it is how you have ordered your time, what aims you have pursued, who you have become.  A life lived in solitude, neither hurting nor helping anyone, can be very valuable too, if you use that time to cultivate an inner beauty, an inner radiance, a capacity to be a sender of light.

Someone quoted Abraham Lincoln on my Facebook yesterday: if I had 8 hours to cut down a tree, I would spend 6 hours sharpening my axe.

I would take that spirit to life: if I knew, for sure, I had 80 years to live, I would spend 60 figuring out what was worth doing.  You can’t start knowing, not from your own observation.  But 80 was very old for much of human history, so jump starting the basics with a religion was not a bad idea.  But we need to grow beyond religion.  God has given us everything we need.  It’s lying out there, in plain sight.  Why do we fight over it?

I used to try and imagine what it would be like to live forever, in heaven, or in hell, as I was taught happened when I died by the Christian church. It made me dizzy.

As an adult, I realize that a big part of the issue is that most people would not want to live forever, as we live now, on this Earth, and find it very, very hard to imagine anything better.  We get the image of the cloud, and the angels, sure, but seriously: is that attractive?  Other than sitting in a glow, what is Heaven?  We have no idea.  We just know we don’t want to go to hell, because eternal torment is not hard to contemplate.  It is almost like the pleasure of staying in a four star hotel, or so I would imagine: it’s not worth $1,000/night, or whatever, but you get the pleasure of knowing you are living so much better than the plebeians.

It might be useful to summarize the work of spiritual growth as that of evolving an answer to these questions, to feeling, deeply, how one lives forever, how a form of life can be fashioned in which every moment is a joy, where life unfolds richly, and interestingly, and where you never tire of wondering where it is all going, while enjoying the process.

I don’t have the answer.  I am still afflicted at times by many things.  It is still not easy being me.  But it is what it is.  In my understanding of the universe, I signed up for this, and it is slowly getting better.