Month: May 2018

Much of the magnificence of life is hidden in the interstices between slabs of pain.

I feel so many of us spend lifetimes fearing to look carefully in certain places.  We fear what we might find.  We know something is there, but we never spend the time to put a spotlight on it, to see if it is good or bad, to see if it is just stuck, and keeping some larger wheel from coming to life and contributing to our well being.

Fear, I think it can be accurately stipulated, underlies all cognitive, affective, and behavioral rigidities.  People keep fear, though, because doing the work of finding out what lies in that dark corner amplifies the fear EVERY TIME.  You look that way, introspectively, and the anxiety increases.  You look away, and the anxiety decreases, but never disappears.  You have to go in that corner to make it go away, to heal.

I get overwhelmed often.  I think big.  Nobody has my back, not really, and perhaps that is the way it always is, when you are trying to see the world with your own eyes.

But increasingly I feel that if I follow the stream of fear, that is where salvation is.  That is where joy and beauty are hiding.  It is a hard, hard path, and it is small wonder most people never even contemplate it, as far as I can tell, outside of some massive life event that makes some emotional shifts impossible to avoid.

But that is where life is, at the end of what you fear most.

http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I haven’t discussed this in a while.  The way I work is I get on fire with a problem, write and think about it obsessively for a time, then let it go when I am satisfied.  This piece here needs revision, but the broad outline, that banks steal wealth, and that the solution is reversing the “current” of wealth long enough to make things right, then closing the sluice gates forever, remains my core contention.

It’s funny: I read stuff sometimes I wrote years ago and think: I LIKE this guy. 

One would hope so, but somehow I still find it surprising.  I remember who I was back then.

The flip side of the Broken Window fallacy is the support window makers have for rioters.  It is true that a broken window does not support society as a whole, because it directs resources from more productive uses.

HOWEVER, by redirecting those resources TO window makers, they become wealthy.  Such people, if lacking scruple, could be expected to support ardently public unrest, anger, violence, and vandalism, even if they only do so by supporting BOTH sides, and doing what they can to build tension between them.

This, in a nutshell, is the arms industry, and those around it, like Halliburton, which may actually be guilty of the charges made of it by the Left.

The Left lies compulsively, but that does not mean it is impossible that they are sometimes, accidentally, right on the money.

I don’t know what just happened.  Kim not wanting to be deposed, killed, and have a knife shoved up his ass (after which–who?–John Bolton perhaps?–can say “we came, we saw, he died” with an utterly inappropriate giggle, while millions struggle to dig out of a billion tons of radioactive debris) is not incomprehensible.  Zero sum demands make no sense in a sensitive negotiation.

It may be that Kim is playing us, but it also seems that complete denuclearization is ridiculous.  That is his trump card.  That is what prevents him from being forced into an abject and humiliating surrender and opening him to a massacre like those of the Indians in the American West.

Everyone involved should know this.

Our approach needs to be gradualistic, and we need to take regime change off the table.  Even if we could somehow use some ultra high tech light bomb to surgically remove every fighting man and woman and their weapons tomorrow with no cost to us, it will still take a generation for those remaining to regain some sense of intellectual freedom and possibility.  They have been brutalized far too long for anything quick to even be conceivable, much less desirable.

I want Kentucky Fried Chicken in Pyongyang.  McDonald’s.  Grocery stores filled with food.  Programming and other jobs for North Koreans.  Maybe their names will fill the credits of the next Marvel movie.

Kim may want to prevent a mass exodus.  Fine.  This might even be ideal.  The North Korean people need to work their way around gradually to new ways of thinking.  What we DO need is regular visits from people from the other side of the DMZ.  Let this all take time.

Kim knows, I suspect, that a nuclear war would kill him, and millions of his people.  He can’t hope to win.  But he CAN keep the threat of nuclear attack on the table to prevent a wholesale invasion of his country.  And we should let him.

I say again: there are many people in this world who benefit from the continual threat of war, and even more from actual war.  They don’t suffer from it: they BENEFIT.  These people need to be marginalized and kept at the periphery, and excluded wherever possible.

My personal view is that John Bolton sabotaged the peace on purpose.  Kim Jung Un is irrational in some ways, but utterly rational in others.  The threat of another Libya could really only be understood in one way, and only reacted to, at least initially, in one way, the one he chose.

I will often let my unconscious stream.  There is a more less pervious–is that a word?  I say yes–barrier between my waking mind and what lies Beyond.  There is a lot of stuff in the Beyond.

Sometimes bits of childish chatter will float up.  I will find myself saying NO, or “you can’t do that”, or STOP.  My mother, particularly, did not know when to stop.  There was no real connection there.  And, again, I was not sexually abused, I don’t think.  It is simply the case that psychologically normal people instinctively feel the presence of boundaries, feel a sense of going too far, but that some of us were not raised by psychologically normal people.

Be all that as it may, the metaphor of the movie “The Others” came to me, especially the part where the children are whispering among themselves if they should tell their father “what she did”.  It is never clear, until the end of the movie, what she did, but you feel this presence it was something terrible and irreversible.

And I feel that trauma is sometimes like being the sole inhabitant of an empty house you haunt like a ghost.  You are there physically of course, and learn over time to do a passable impression of being there emotionally and socially, but it is never quite true.

And there are whispers of the truth, but only whispers.  The full thing is too much to bear directly.

But there is a fire I am waiting to start, or kindle.  There is something, I feel, that I need to contact and allow to expand in its own way, at its own rate, in its own direction.  It needs freedom from direction, since it is escaping confinement.

I share all this because we all live in this strange world together.  I feel winds blowing through all of us, first one way, and then another.  Sometimes it smells of roses, sometimes garbage.  Sometimes the birds are singing, sometimes starving and freezing and falling from the air.  All of this is mixed together, in winds sweeping sometimes up, and sometimes down.

We, all of us, are left to make sense of it all.  We do need one another, and I aim to hold my own place in that vast line.

Can and should we not start speaking of a global peace?  Can we not speak of an end game, in which all the major powers cease their striving to build the best and most destructive weapons?  Imagine if we redirected one third of our Defense Budget to other purposes, like global economic development using something like the Kiva program of microloans.  We reduce the warranted fears of the Chinese and Russians, and we help the world.

And can we not let the Chinese have their part of the world, the Russians, theirs, and we “get” our hemisphere?  Is it really our problem what happens overseas. now?

There is an old saying that only the dead have seen the end of war.  But why?  Why, with all the material abundance we possess, the technology we possess, the POTENTIAL we possess?

I was laying in bed last night picture the astonishing, mind boggling, truly incomprehensible logistics of sending a fighting army halfway around the world to wage many year wars in two countries, one of them landlocked.  We know it ran (is running: we are still in Afghanistan for some reason) to the trillions of dollars.  This amount of money cannot be understood, but the paychecks, the sea and air transport, the bullets and bombs and cannon shells and the like can at least be approximately imagined.  It is overwhelming.  Imagine how much MONEY the arms industry made in this period, and indeed continues to make.

And all this was made politically–which is to say psychologically–possible by 9/11.  Obviously, as I have explained at length in several posts, I reached some years ago the conclusion that we were being lied to about 9/11.  NIST reached a politically determined conclusion, not one supportable by science, which is to say a reliance on known laws of physics, and what is physically possible.

The importance of this failure, and the Big Lie which was underneath it, cannot be overstated.  The Deep State did all of this.  Our wars, the unacceptable death on our side, the perhaps millions of dead around the world, the economic cost, the psychological cost: these are all on the shoulders of people who remain to be named, who have gotten away, so far, with one of the largest crimes in human history.

These two videos are good, and short.  He builds a model with bricks to simulate what is claimed to have happened in Tower 1 and Tower 2, and points out that Newton’s Laws of Motions are not suggestions.

https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/videos/video/13-9-11-experiments-collapse-vs-demolition-part-1

https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/videos/video/14-9-11-experiments-collapse-vs-demolition-part-2

https://spectator.org/john-brennans-plot-to-infiltrate-the-trump-campaign/

Consciousness is something which is real and irreducible.  Put another way, there is no “bit” of consciousness.  Where present, order is present.

Related: Rationalism is the doctrine that the fundamental unit of human consciousness is the idea.

That’s getting closer.  Ideational atomism would be a synonym.  Maybe.

I seem to be getting younger.

So, I got to thinking Rationalism can be defined, for my purposes, as the proposition that all things which are knowable can be deduced through reason.

This is inaccurate.  It is a caricature, but it is not sufficiently far from the truth.

The truth is that people who style themselves Rationalists believe that FEELING something to be true is never sufficient.

That might be true. I’m not sure.

But then I got to thinking of Scientism, and this I DO definitely believe to be true: the core belief of the Scientistic disciple is that matter exists, and is absolute.  Something, however we define it, has to be physically and measurably final. It can be Superstrings, Fields of various sorts, or some as-yet undiscovered physical “bit”.

Because if matter in some form is NOT absolute, then consciousness almost necessarily has to become a part of reality.  Perhaps even absolutely necessarily.  Certainly, this is what von Neumann argued, without being able to say what exactly that meant, or what the final end result might be for our philosophies and self understandings.

Consciousness might be defined as “an ordering principle”.  That might be good, or severely lacking in some way.  But let’s run with it.

Picture a beam of light sent out by a star 50 million years ago.  In principle, we can interrupt that beam of light anywhere on its journey and it consists both of discrete photons, and a continuous wave.  In some respect, does this not make the light “conscious”, as I have defined it?  It is ordered, continuously ordered, and ordered at far past the speed of light.

I have in the past called Free Will “non-statistical coherence”, but might here expand that definition to include Consciousness itself.

I’m not sure what I am saying, and I am running late as usual, but do with this what you will.  I will keep germinating, without quite knowing what sorts of blooms I am sending into the world.