Month: May 2018

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/12/harry-reid-sent-sensitive-trump-collusion-letter-o/

It’s hard to know what really happened, but Brennan’s account of this rings true.  What makes the most sense is that he wanted to spring a trap for Trump he was not prepared for.  They wanted to fabricate evidence, fabricate proof, then either attack Trump decisively before the election, or use the “evidence” to keep him on a short leash through blackmail in the then unlikely event he would win.

Reid, by leaking the fact that Trump was being accused in secrets places by shadow people of insidious and subtle crimes, telegraphed to Trump to look for and prepare for the surveillance which eventually happened.  It is hard to know whether Reid’s stupidity or his corruption are his most salient aspect.  It is like having to choose between two Pinocchio noses.

And who roughed him up?  This adds an interesting possible angle. [Edit: I looked it up, and that happened in 2015: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/03/31/why-harry-reids-home-exercise-accident-story-does-not-add-up/ .  Still: who knows what is possible in this country, at the present time?]

Here is the thing: the people in the news, the “mouths”, are in general not who you need to be looking at and for.  I figured Brennan early on for the most likely architect of this whole thing, for the simple reasons that 1) he is smart; and 2) he knows how to keep his mouth shut.  He doesn’t have any need to now, since his influence, now, has to be in the public eye.  But then, he had powerful surveillance capacities, the ability to run covert ops, and the very willing and even enthusiastic collusion of the FBI and Obama.

I would stipulate as a general rule that we should ALWAYS be looking at who is behind the people in the news, and who is behind them.  No one with brains EVER allows their influence to become obvious.

[The topic was a black woman writing about yet one more way that black people have it way worse than white people, citing some likely accurate examples involving media bias.]

All of what you say makes sense, but it focuses mainly on white media. You can’t control, as you say, what other people say. You can’t control how other people view you. You can’t control racism.

But you can control what you say to yourself. And I would ask: what message does hip hop send? Is it a positive message of hard work, self empowerment, self respect, love and happiness? Some of it, maybe. But most of it? No, not at all. It is misogynistic, power hungry, and violent.

And what message do Democrat politicians–the ones you support, the ones who claim they are on your side–send when they speak continually of the ubiquity of racism, but never speak of opportunities which actually DO exist, such as performing well in school, and the institution of charter schools in inner cities to improve performance?

If you say: “hey, if you graduate high school, don’t get anyone pregnant out of marriage, and show up to work on time, things will get better”, you get called “racist”. Why? This makes no sense, unless the goal is keep things exactly the way they are. My grandparents were poor. So were those of many white people.

There is nothing inherently wrong with pointing to real problems. But there is something profoundly wrong with, in one moment, blaming others for how they treat you, then in the next ignoring all you CAN do to empower yourself. The last 50 years of political history in the black community amounts to demanding fixes of white politicians–and black politicians who in effect report to them–who never deliver them.

Their excuses vary, but amount to “it’s a tough world, kid. Racists everywhere. I did what I could. Vote for me next time, and I’m sure something good will happen.”

When will you wake up? I’m not saying the world is fair, or that racism is a fiction. Clearly, real problems exist, racism is in many cases quite real, and examples of unfairness abound. But ALL OF US deal at times with unfair situations. All of us can honestly say that some parts of our lives suck. PARTICULARLY if all that is claimed to be true is in fact true–if you do as a community face all the objective challenges you say you do–then you need to find your own way, and not depend on people who let you down continually, and have for 5 decades.

To say you want something better, then to demand it of everyone but yourself, is a failure of responsibility, and a de facto plea of helplessness which is undignified, and which will never lead to better outcome of any sort.

I know I’m not supposed to write things like this [this is presumably why it was removed, since somebody’s head would have exploded], but it angers me to see the entirety of the rhetoric involving this issue oriented around, on the one hand, moral sanctimony ,and on the other relentless language of defeat, and defeatism.

Your friends are the ones who demand more of you, not less. They are the ones who see potential, not victimhood. They are the ones who believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself. Your enemies are the ones who tell you, in a thousand ways, that you can’t make it on your own, and there is no use trying, and who, in the process, personally enrich themselves beyond the imagining of most. The wealth of a typical career politician is hard to believe, but the cynicism needed for such a career path–one based on keeping the downtrodden downtrodden, while claiming continually across decades to be their savior–is truly mind-boggling.

I continue to be confused as to how so many people can be so fucking stupid.

My operative hypothesis–and obviously I’ve visited this topic many times–is that all the people whose entire morality consists in the saccharine dictum “be nice” have to have an outlet for all the hatred and anger which boils up in them.  They have been trained, through propaganda, not to believe in principles, not to believe in the rule of law, and so it is hard to KNOW when it is OK to be abusive and willfully hurtful.

Trump gives this to them.  He does not deserve a whiff of the vitriol directed at him and his supporters daily, but THEY HAVE NOTHING ELSE.

Unlike Alan Dershowitz, who does believe in something, they can’t simply say “breaking the law is wrong for everyone.”  They can’t point to absolute principles which guide them, such as “working to cover up a rape is always wrong”, which is what Hillary was accused of by a former Democrat supporter.

They have nothing.  This is why reason and logic and proportion are completely absent.  They are howling ghouls because there is so much rage they feel–not least at their more or less complete disindividuation, and emotional separation from their own instinctive and intuitive knowing–that they cannot get out any other way, and it is a rage which has been boiling in a small bottle for a very long time. Ever since they found out the world wasn’t perfect, and that is was vastly easier psychologically to find some simplistic villain to blame it all on.

Leftism is very literally the OPPOSITE of healthy psychological development.  We all need to wrestle with life in our own ways.  They choose not to do this work, and instead view all people and circumstances through a narrow prism of good and evil, Us and Them, then cloak the whole thing from their own eyes (but not those of us who took the harder path of growing up) by lying about their intentions, affections, and capacity for tolerating actual difference. 

It is childish.  Clinically.  These rages are those of three year olds who have never been told no, and refuse to admit it applies to them too.

I feel what the weight symbolizes is the need to use will to manage emotions you can’t express.  A perfectly calm person need never be violent, but a person who is constantly beset by internal stressors which are inappropriate socially–such as those which result from trauma, which is atemporal, and rarely relevant to all but circumstances unconsciously engineered for the purpose–will find violence a release.  A release from what?  From the continuous need to use willpower simply to exist in a social space.

We hate people when we feel we cannot express what we feel around them.  I think this is close to an important truth, although of course I have a tendency to universalize from my particulars.  And this hate of others can easily be redirected into self hatred.

And I feel we become depressed, in the end, from emotions which simply won’t flow, or–perhaps more accurately–which we cannot allow to flow without winding up in jail or a mental asylum.  Again, I think this is close, if perhaps not precisely on the mark.

The process of knot-untying, of releasing, of relaxing, is inherently something which makes life easier, since there are fewer emotions you have to control.  You can trust in “life” when you can trust in yourself not to feel a spontaneous and powerful impulse to strangle someone.

To let tensions drop away is inherently to become less violent.  Conversely, to live in continual tension–as so many Americans do–is to become more violent.  And just look at our TV and movies.

Often, to release a feeling, we need someone to release it to, to confess it to.  When they then say “yes, I recognize this feeling.  I have felt it too”, this often allows you to allow it to fade away, or at least diminish in intensity.

Kum Nye, by focusing attention of feelings, and the sensations and images which precede them, is a sort of internal, non-verbal conversation which I feel over time has the same effect.  You can always understand yourself with much greater precision than anyone else, and, having done so, you will also understand others much better too.  You will see what they are feeling, perhaps better than they do, because you have gone so deep into the process of emotional awareness.

Pink Floyd, in their album “Animals”, which is actually the first record I ever bought, speaks of the “weight of the stone”, and also being dragged down by the stone.  Then of course you have the Beetles and “Carry that weight“.  I could of course go on for a long time.

And I think many of us feel keenly this sense of carrying the weight.  I long have.  It weighs you down.  It takes the joy from your life. It makes everything harder.

But it occurred to me yesterday that that weight is really a part of our core selves which has been hollowed out of us, and externalized.  It is the part of us which we have not lost, but which we have forgotten how to use.  It is like an emotional tumor which grew within us, and was placed on our shoulder, but which still consists entirely in healthy tissue trying to get back in synch, to find its way home (listening to the Beetles, it almost sounds like the “lullaby” is “carry that weight”.  That is one of those songs you’ve heard so many times it means nothing.)

And it felt to me like our job is to tap into this weight, and to slowly allow it back within us.  It is a painful process.  It is like eating–rather, swallowing–a bucket of pebbles.  But each pebble, reintegrated, becomes a part of our light system again.  It both stops weighing us down, and then starts lifting us up.  It is a reintegration.

All of that weight is potential.  All of that weight is darkness which was once light, and has lost its way, because some part of you has lost its way.  But it is always still there.  You just have to face it, allow it to speak, allow it to dissolve, and allow it back into your consciousness, into your body, and into your emotional life.

This is the path.

British, at their best, strive to speak perfect Queen’s English.  Americans, at their best, strive to speak clearly.

I am having trouble evaluating this.  It’s not good enough to be called a bon mot, even by my loose standards, but also perhaps not entirely stupid either.

If you discount some of the great dialogue in movies like “The Big Sleep”, Americans really have little tradition of repartee.  At the same time, we tend to view language like food: a necessity.

Is even this right?  I’m not sure.  Do with it what you will.

Sometimes the first 3 inches are the hardest.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/09/new-army-goggles-help-soldiers-see-through-smoke-fog/588488002/

This is what they are admitting, what is combat ready. It is a fraction of what I have seen in my daydreams.

Every new weapons technology developed, no matter the purpose, no matter the purported need, no matter the prospective enemy, works to make every single person more potentially powerful, and the lunatic dreams of power of psychopaths more realizable with fewer people.

We can develop these tools to defend America, but once existing they will, over an increasingly short time horizon, be available to everyone.

I don’t know the solution, but I do know we have among us enemies of a global peace without a global tyranny.

This phrase popped in my head this morning.  Not infrequently, I get phrases, then try to explain them to myself.

Here, many things are best allowed to die.  Parts of ourselves we thought we couldn’t live without, bad habits, ideals which have outlived their usefulness: all better allowed to fade and disappear.  Why carry something across a lifetime which makes you heavier, less spontaneous, and sadder, with nothing to compensate you for these losses?

And even Death itself we fear, but is this necessary?  The sages tell us the living are the unfortunate ones.

How much more fortunate we would all be if we learned to live with what we have, and also to welcome change–all change–as a breath of fresh air, and a new life.

We are continually faced in life with the question of whether to “fix” something, or accept it.  Most of what we call “creative problem solving” is oriented around fixing things.  You don’t like your job, find another one.  Your problem is how.  Don’t like your wife?  Find another one.  The problem is how.  Don’t like who you are?  Change.  Figure out how.

But it occurs to me that there is ample room for creative responses WITHIN acceptance.  Let us say that you will always have the job you have, always have the wife you have, and always, in large measure, be who you “are” today.  Some things just won’t change, for reasons which are unclear.  All of us, to be sure, have certain genetic (and, if you believe in something like Fate, karmic) tendencies.  This is not a curse: this is what you were given.

You can raise your game in how you relate to your job, your wife, and the stupid shit you sometimes still do.  You can accept, yes, but you can also find responses which make you happier than the responses which are happening now.

We tend to view acceptance as passive, as a stoic acceptance that what must be, must be.  Acceptance of necessity is clearly a good thing, when contrasted with non-acceptance, whining, pretending, and resentment.  But why stop there?  Why stop with simply saying “what must be, must be”?

Why not ALWAYS be scoping out what control you do have, realistically?  Creativity is nothing more or less than seeing what is possible, but not yet manifest.  Every art work ever created was possible, in potentio, until actually created.  And there are an infinite number of things which remain possible.

I may have told this story, but I was talking with someone who had gone to SERE school once.  In the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda’s allies were fond of locking captured prisoners in small cages for very long periods of time.  Many Americans wound up in such cages, and it seems quite possible some of the POW’s we abandoned died in them while the hippies were celebrating their “victory” by snorting coke and dancing in discos.

Be that as it may, being locked in what amounts to a dog cage is a part of the training.  You have to spend 24 hours in there without having a nervous breakdown, which some people do.  Usually that sort of thing is weeded out before they get there, but not always.  I remember talking with a woman in a bar whose brother had a panic attack in there, and failed the training.  I forget what service he was with.  Basically all combat pilots and all commandos have to go through it.

Anyway, I was talking with him about that specific thing (after talking about the feeling of forgetting to kill bugs before eating them, and feeling them squirm all the way down his throat), and he said it wasn’t so bad.  He stuck his butt out and tensed his body, so that when they put down the back slat, which was designed to make his fit as tight as possible, he wound up with an extra 4-5″. He sounded both proud and matter of fact.

And it recently occurred to me that the training must include the importance of winning small battles, of taking back small–infinitesimal, but real–amounts of control.  It might be as simple as saying “fuck you” every time you see your guards, but you need something, anything, which keeps you from fully identifying with your situation, your victimhood, and your objective helplessness physically.

And to the point here, creativity may be needed.  It may take some experimenting to find something which really helps.  Even in abject, true helplessness, small amounts of power can be found.

From a sociopsychological perspective, I think most of the pathologies one finds in the ghetto relate to this need.  People feel the need to feel important.  Their homes, their society, their schools: they don’t give this to them, except as victims.  Nobody who is psychologically healthy wants to be a victim.  This is where the guns come in.  A gun is power, especially if you aren’t allowed to own one. A gun is power, especially when those around you are unarmed.

It is likely not overstating the case that much violence is avoided by allowing people to own sources of power.  We have all met people with what I would view as odd and obsessive interests in guns and knives, and all the other stuff that goes around inflicting and protecting oneself from violence.  If you own 50 guns, that is obsessive.

But for such people, this is an actually, objectively, non-violent source of the feelings of power and safety.  For whatever reason, they feel unusual and unhealthy amounts of fear.  Trauma–likely Developmental Trauma–is a likely source, but regardless, they calm themselves down through hobbies which, in the overwhelming, 99.999 percent of cases, never result in harm to anyone else.

Most murders are committed, I suspect, by people who own 1 or 2 guns.  As a tool, you only need one.

That’s enough for now.  Thought I’d spout off a bit.  I am trying to make my peace with some emotions going on in me this morning.  Writing often helps.  It is, perhaps, a way I find my way back to some of my own power.  I am intelligent: I have this going for me.  I am also often attacked by powerful emotions which make it hard to stay any course I might set.  I have developed strong willpower over the years, of necessity, but it is fully occupied most days performing what could and should be habitual actions, in behaviors I have to reinvent over and over again. It is tiring, but I am making progress.  I am sleeping most nights without alcohol, even if I still get shaken awake 2-3 times.

Have a happy Tuesday!!!  I have set as a goal accumulating statues of the various gods and goddesses represented by our days.  Tuesday is for Tyr, the Norse God of War.  Iconographically, he is best known for helping bind the giant wolf Fenrir.  The wolf would not let anyone close enough to tie him up, until Tyr offered to place his hand in the wolves mouth as a promise of safety.  The wolf was then bound, and Tyr lost his hand.  This is sacrifice and courage.  Today is the day remembering Tyr and Fenrir.  May you be brave, and may you be blessed with sight!!

Now I really need another cup of coffee and a shower.