Month: May 2018

People who think they are helping you will never stop hurting you.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/03/chicago-40-people-shot-warm-weather/577876002/

It’s of course ludicrous to suggest that black people who are affected by violence don’t care, or to suggest there are not many genuinely civic minded blacks working to decrease crime and violence.  I have never said this, as far as I can recall, and if I’ve said anything that could be construed that way, I apologize.  It’s not something I’ve ever believed, because it is ridiculous.

No, the point I’ve tried to make is that the WHITE people who arrogate to themselves the right to speak on behalf of black people (think Dr. Phil saying Kanye is “empowering racists”, or some such nonsense) don’t care about the plight of black people living in black neighborhoods.  To them this is all a game which doesn’t affect them in any way.  They live far from the places where you can’t find a bank and the fast food places have bullet proof glass.

They like to talk about how bad “racism” is because that abstraction is more real to them–more present to them in their imagination, and certainly in their moral posturing–than the real suffering of children growing up with one overwhelmed parent, poor, on crime infested streets, and condemned to go to horrible schools they will be lucky to graduate from able to read.  There are the REAL problems facing most inner city blacks.  They face hopelessness which is amplified by those who tell them on continual loop that the game is stacked against them, and that they are helpless without the aid of people they will never meet, and who have no interest in meeting them for more than the shortest, most stage-managed blips of time in election season.

Think about the effects of telling people: the world is against you.  The world was against everyone who came before you.  Unless the world makes major changes, you have no hope.  Unless the world makes major changes, your life is outside of your control.

Who REALLY benefits from all this?  Seriously: is this complicated?

I’m a bit achey-er than usual today, emotionally, so I’m not going to go through a full post here, but I am going to say that acculturation consists in telling people when to feel good about themselves.  It is telling men and women what their roles are, rewarding them when they perform and punishing them when they don’t, either actively or, in most cultures, through some form of shunning and even exile.

Even shunning within your group, though, has got to wreak havoc with your neurochemistry.  I’m quite sure there are shame hormones, which may be expressed negatively, as I think I have suggested, by the withholding of dopamine.

But here is the point: when you are dealing with a blank mass of people, who are shouting and acting in unison, they have been trained to secrete dopamine on those occasions.  People who “virtue signal” always get a dopamine hit when they do.  This reinforces it.

To the extent parents default to letting mass media acculturate their children, this is what you get.  The JOB of parents is to teach their children 1) how to feel good, how to feel pride, how to feel worthy of inclusion; 2) WHEN to feel good.  If they do this, and if surrounding parents do the same, you have a distributed set of reinforcing habits, which we call a culture.

As I have pointed out, the internet and mass media generally are more or less engineered to deliver “hits” of various emotions and the neurotransmitters that go with them.  But we all crave the DEEP hit, which we call a sense of meaning, and social participation.

Who owns this domain, in this country, more than any other?  Who has convinced tens of millions of people to engage in categorically contradictory and nonsensical behavior?  There are multiple correct answers, but the Left is the answer I am going for at the moment.

Do you want to feel good about yourself?  Can it get any easier than doing what all the other people who seem to feel good are doing?  Does it take thought?  Introspection?  Of course not.

I will return to this, I’m sure.  That will do for today.

Inhabit your decisions.  That is where life is.  That is where whatever home you might find that you can depend on will be found.

If you think about it, much of our evolutionary perceptual apparatus is dedicated to narrowing focus, to eliminating distractions, so as to pay most attention to what matters most.  If you can’t tell the different between grass rustling in the wind, and rustling because there is a predator in it, you won’t live long.

So we live in this world with an evolutionary disposition to narrow focus, but we also live, objectively, in a world where we can focus on an limitless number of things, most of which need to be ignored to do anything.

And this applies not just perceptually but in terms of chosen actions.  Most of us can choose from a very, very wide array of options.  We can live here, we can live there.  We can eat this, we can eat that.  We can do this for money, or that for money.  We can fall in love, or always hover at the edge.  We can care, we can not care.

To be intelligent, you have to always see all your options.  To get anything done, you have to narrow your options.

To take a mundane, but concrete and real, example, I get Men’s Health every month.  They always have lots of workout ideas, and food ideas. If I changed up my workout routine every time I saw something new, I couldn’t make progress in anything.  But at the same time, it is useful to know what is out there, so that if something REALLY better comes along, like Contrast training, I will know about it.

And I feel this is one of life’s tricks: knowing what you CAN do, but teaching yourself to be content with whatever choice you make.  It is always contingent.  It is always a guess. 

And there will always be an INFINITY of things we can’t and don’t do.  You might be able to fall in love with a redhead in Paris at a particular restaurant.  But you won’t fall in love, then, with another redhead in Barcelona, at least in quite the same way.  Some people make a habit of falling in love, but they then lose the experience of being in love for a long time.  You can bang a 1,000 women, but lose the feeling of sustained tenderness and emotional openness with one.  And if you stay with one, you never know what else might have been, if she was TRULY the best possible answer for you.  Who did you miss? 

It is maddening, in a way.  No matter what you do, some other path is foreclosed.  I can recall talking about this before, because it is a daily struggle for me, and I suspect many, in our affluent world.

Logically, emotionally, the task is separating emotionally from all that might have been. You do not need to ignore it.  That takes energy, and requires cutting off perception.  No, just don’t feed it, and DO feel your sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with whatever you do choose.  Everything we do is imperfect, but what we CAN do is bring perfect contentment to it.  This is the task of life.

If you cultivate the capacity for pleasure, for fullness, for inner peace, then it fills whatever decisions you make.

This is the thing: so much of our current YOLO culture views experiences as one-off’s, that you either have or don’t.  You either hit all your “bucket list” items or you don’t, and are diminished proportionately as you fail.

This is absurd.  If you cultivate inner harmony, every lottery ticket is a winner.  I wonder sometimes if I will end my life in a jail cell somewhere, as a political prisoner.  What sort of life would that be?  How do I make that great?  The same way.

Being present to your blessings is a skill like making free throws, or running fast on a track.  This is the ENORMOUS value of technologies like Kum Nye, and spiritual philosophies like Buddhism.  This is one choice that is easy.  It is, if you will, a metachoice, that both makes you wiser in the concrete decisions you do make, and better able to enjoy the results, however they turn out.

This is not quite as clear as it was in my head, but I don’t always think in words.  I have these little forms with feeling and color.  I think this is close, though.

Ponder this.

And ponder, too, the political and economic benefits of inner peace.  We call dial the consumer culture way back, if we all learn to be content and happy with much less.  We are in a phase of insanity.  But it need not last, and there is no need to replace it with a period of much deeper, demented and psychotic insanity that lasts a very long time.

If you think about it, the vast bulk of the intellectual energy of the Left over the past century has been devoted not to discovering the new, but protecting the old. Their minds are bent to affirming orthodoxy, in roughly the same way the best minds in the Catholic world were bent to the defense of the faith, the Church, and its dictator.

And this orthodoxy tells us to believe in the benign nature of an absolute despotism organized to reduce (or elevate, in some cases) all of us to the same economic and social status. It is an orthodoxy, on other words, fervently and violently dedicated to making the world and its inhabitants as deathly dull and indistinguishable from one another as possible.

And to add insult  to injury, it is all to be done for our own good.

Small wonder these people found the need to start talking nonsense 50 years ago. Clear thinking and the clear speech which follows it, can only be inimical to such wicked stupidity.

And to be clear, Marx, writing and prognosticating in the middle of the 19th century, WAS original. He was also wrong. That is why it is stupid to defend his ideas, and all the downstream ideas that follow and flow from his misanthropic logic.

Whether or not they are interesting is a not bad way to judge ideas and people.   It is of course ideosyncratic, and unique to a particular perspective, but what the label “interesting” implies is that there is something unknown, but potentially knowable about someone or something, and it bespeaks curiosity.

And as a general rule, interesting people are curious.  They are interested.

And interesting ideas are not the same old, hackneyed ones you have seen your whole life.  The fact is, the tried and true ideas may be the best ones.  I think they are, in general, and certainly as it relates to economics and Liberal political theory.

But obviously what we have been doing has not worked as well as it should have.  New ideas are needed, to be layered on to, and added to, what has been known.  These are what interest me.

There is always some new direction possible.  Looking for it is a habit.  So too is that of trying to foreclose the new by assuming “pretty much” everything that we need to know, we already know.  That is deadly dull, and in my view, antithetical to discovery and needed innovation.

We innovate readily in technology.  Philosophically, socially: not so much.  Very little at all, actually.  Very little that is interesting at all is going on in those domains.  We are told to sit down and shut up by the Democrats, and Republicans, to the extent they are coherent, want to return to a time which never existed, and in so doing, pursue the impossible.

No, a social revolution is needed.  A philosophical revolution is needed.  And we need to finally take seriously the insights of physics and modern consciousness research.  All of them.  Few are even trying to do this, and no one in a position of influence, as far as I can tell.

Democrats are expending a lot of political capital in attacking Trump. It’s hasn’t seemingly hurt them that much yet, because a lot of people believe the lies they are being told, lies that, like all effective  propaganda, is disseminated daily, uniformly to the extent possible, and as widely as possible, which is most media outlets in this country.

But Trump is clearly innocent. He didn’t hire a dozen Russians to write things on Facebook, and in any event if you compare this to the seeming FACT that Hillary took $200 million from the Saudis ( one small fact among my many) it’s ludicrous to even care. Farcical. Nonsensical.  All thinking people see this immediately.

Here is the thing, though: there is an arc to controversies. If this one lands with s judge throwing everything Mueller has out of court and sends him packing, that may well Red Pill a lot of people, who have been naive enough to fall for this bullshit. Trump could then clear house without fear of a backlash.

And this eventuality is not out of the question. Mueller was appointed on the basis of claims that were KNOWN to be factitious, he himself has been ethically compromised from the start, as has Rod Rosenstein, and he has been proceeding as if there isn’t a 4th Amendment. That worked in New York, in front of a Hillary hyperpartisan, but in won’t work forever in all the places they would need to take cases. Not if the judges are honest.

Sometimes waiting is the smartest play. I can’t feel I can speak confidently when I lack many important facts.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/u-s-judge-questions-special-counsels-powers-in-manafort-case-idUSKBN1I51WE

I will note that Rosenstein’s name is everywhere even when, as noted, he is supposedly a material witness. 

Rosenstein, as an employee of the Justice Department, is trying to launch an illegal, but judicially executed, coup against his ultimate boss, Donald Trump.  Jeff Sessions is AWOL.

Can’t we put someone in charge of the Justice Department who 1) likes Donald Trump; 2) values the rule of the law; 3) possesses moral courage; and 4) is intelligent?

Is that REALLY asking too much, Mr. President?  Again, I don’t know what’s going on.  Maybe you are getting ready to issue arrest warrants for all the Clintons, their cronies, and their enablers.  I don’t know.  But if there is nothing going on but mumbling and fumbling, this is not what competent management looks like.  Trump can do better.  He knows it.  He also knows better than I do what has stayed his hand so far.

And I can’t resist the idea that Giuliani putting the idea out there that Trump lied about the payment to Stormy Daniels is a sort of trial close, a balloon lofted to see which way it goes.  Does anybody care?  Apparently no.  The usual screamers screamed, but they do that every day, no matter what.  One would think they would be tired by now, never shutting up.

Here is the thing: EVERYONE knows that Trump knew about the payment.  We knew it then, and it doesn’t surprise us now. 

And most of us can contextualize this as maneuvering in a severely hostile environment, filled with liars, thieves, and probably a few murderers.

We know that for every lie Trump might tell to cover his ass, the media and his enemies tell 100 trying to get his ass.  And a great many of us are on his side.  Fuck those people.  Fuck the people who lie as easily as breathing, yet are somehow surprised and disappointed that we don’t react the way they hoped when they show us some new alleged atrocity Trump has committed.  We get they are criminals themselves, covering for criminals, trying to get a man who is honest in the ways we care about.

If Trump fucked Stormy, then gave her some money to shut up for a while, so fucking what?  That’s between him and Melania.  North Korea is on the verge of ending a war which has lasted since the early 1950’s.  And I suspect Trump has an end game for the Israeli-Arab conflict too, and quite possibly even Iran.  Those are the major conflicts, or potential conflicts, we face. 

You have to ask: for whom would global peace be a disaster? 

Who are the people who are frightened and threatened by competence, honesty and sincere patriotism?

It’s partly a question of following the money, but also one of following the ideology.  I ask again: how did a man who voted for the Communist candidate in 1976 get to be head of the CIA?

Here is one more story: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/05/earth_to_jeff_sessions.html

I have of course often wondered why Jeff still has a job.  As long as Rod Rosenstein has a job, Jeff is failing.

Here is the thing: it is obvious that the Justice Department as a whole, is adversarial to the Trump Administration.  The tone is that of a Congress which is adversarial to the sitting President.  This is comprehensible, when the President is of one party, and the Congress is controlled by another.

What I don’t get, though, is that the Justice Department ANSWERS TO TRUMP.  It’s in his control.  It’s his baby.  It’s within his Administration.

How is it that a group of people who report to a CEO can get away with openly attacking him, flouting his lawful orders, and–as the one agency most responsible for protecting and enforcing the law–continually break the law, both in principle and fact, over a period of, now, some eighteen months? 

How is it that, as far as we know, nothing has been done to reopen the Hillary investigationS?  They prosecuted Lulu in Brazil.  Are we no better than Brazil? Are they to be our shining light and example for how to conduct business, and uphold integrity in the public domain?

I don’t get it.  I don’t know who has pictures of who, who is being overly patient, or how the fuck a legal disaster this big can get the support of so many deluded imbeciles.