Month: May 2018

I was in the grocery store yesterday, and walked by the soda aisle.  And it occurred to me that EVERY bottle there would be trash within 2-3 days of being purchased, and that this store likely runs through many hundreds of bottles daily.

Look around the rest of the grocery store.  Everywhere you look you see packaging that is used once, then discarded.

Now, I am obviously a hard core conservative.  The question of sustainability–can we keep doing this forever–is an empirical question.  The likely answer is that yes, we can probably do something like this for at least several more decades, during which time our lives will change in large and unpredictable ways.

But I would submit that there is an aesthetic element to this, which is not reducible purely to economics and science.

It is UGLY, throwing this much shit away.  It is unnecessary.  There are better processes possible.

Here is one immediate suggestion: https://www.thekitchn.com/ditch-the-plastic-10-reusable-produce-bags-174099

More generally, if you were to focus on reducing packaging you will almost inherently, and I know I’ve commented on this before, eat healthier.  You will wind up with whole grains, legumes, veggies, fruits, meat (in paper, which at least biodegrades), and oils.  An “oil bar” would be a useful thing too, so I could bring an oil can.

Conservatives and leftists get in so many pissing contests about so many things.  There is no reason we can’t side with the tree huggers on this one, with one distinction: the Left wants to ban what it doesn’t like, and require what it does.  I think all these things will respond well to education, peer pressure, and time, without the need for yet more government.

Can you imagine a black market for soda in bottles?  It might be possible to create one, with sufficiently bad policy.

It is not emptiness: it is fullness.  It is not nothing: it is everything.

But reaching fullness is a process of subtraction.  It is finding and untying the countless knots which bind you, and letting them fall away into nothingness.

This is why the Buddhists call it emptiness.

Love is not valuing people.  It is teaching them how to value themselves.

Love is not comforting those in pain.  It is teaching them how to comfort themselves.

What has changed, qualitatively, when you have passed through, which leaves no personal mark, that is love.

To love honestly is to be forgotten.  That is what I feel.

This is the work of life.

“the reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought It was just an idea.


we are programmed to always talk and fight race issues. We need to update our conversation.


I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. – Harriet Tubman”


From his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/kanyewest


He is speaking clearly enough.  He is simply being willfully misunderstood, by those who either benefit from the status quo or, more likely, lack the imagination to see how long and how completely their allegiance has been used by selfish, cynical people for personal gain.


He says he was speaking a feeling, the feeling of not liking being told what to say or not say, what to think or not think.  As a general rule, anyone trying to control you in any way, is trying to USE you, because you benefit them in some way.  He feels this, intuitively, and has whatever Kanye has that allows him to speak his mind, even when he knows he will catch hell for it.  Trump, of course, has this too.  He is a renegade in a world filled with lies and liars. This, of course, is also why he is hated.  Nobody who has invested bigly in the Big Lie wants to see it torn down.


What he is saying was said well by Bob Marley, long ago (by current standards): 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrY9eHkXTa4

“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/ nobody but ourselves can free our minds.”

Your best memories were at one time in the future.  There is no reason this process cannot be repeated over and over, unless you choose, having passed those times, to try and return to them in memory.

Allow life’s bounty.  This is all that is asked of us.  It will all be tallied in the end.  You will see where you have been, and you will know what you know, and what you have learned along the way.

Look forward.  Look backwards only to improve the future by learning from mistakes, and doing better.

You know, there are people like Thanos on Earth, who believe that the solution to all our problems is a mass extinction of some sort.  Bill Gates seems to be of this camp.  He keeps talking about how awful a global pandemic would be, but if you study his beliefs, he can’t have failed to see what, within his world view, would be the upside of such a catastrophe.

And these ideas sometimes appear naked in public spaces, as with the monuments in Georgia: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/05/georgia-guidestones-doomsday-monument.html

Obviously, we can’t support unlimited population growth forever, but there is no reason we cannot all decide to plan on reducing the population over the next few centuries.  This is the strategic role of the Global Warming hoax, in that it allows those pushing it to claim that we only have a little time, when in reality we have quite a bit of time, as far as anyone can tell.

Yes, things would be better in many ways if we had, say, 2 billion people on Earth.  But as I understand the math, we could fit everyone now living into suburban houses in the State of Texas, and give most of them back yards.  The rest of the Earth would have no one living on it.  There is lots of room, and lots of uncultivated land.

And if the Earth does warm that will free up hundred of thousands of square miles of added farmland, depending on how far north the ice line goes.

There is no need to panic.  What we need to work on first is global emotional health, which will necessarily involve gradually weeding out the psychopaths.  How we do this, I’m not yet sure.  My best guess is that if we can demonstrate the survival of death, beyond any reasonable doubt, many people who are currently beset by demonic ideas originating in their own sense of the pointlessness and futility of existence will evolve in new and more positive directions.

There is nothing more important than knowing if we survive death or not, but if you pick any possible research topic, like whether or not right handed or left handed people pick their noses more often, it will almost certainly be better funded.  Why?  This is ludicrous.  We spend many billions of research on everything under the sun, most of it merely validating things which were already reasonably obvious.  Some government has probably funded studies showing men in general prefer large breasts and that many women like chocolate.

This is the world we live in.  Hopefully one day it starts making more sense.

If you think about it, when Jesus said “God loves you”, if he did, the intent can only have been to teach people to look within themselves for the love they needed.  If people love themselves, they don’t NEED others to love them, and are instead ready to OFFER love, when it is appropriate.

In a perfect world, everyone is perfectly content with themselves, with who they are, and “in love” with themselves such that they are happy and radiant without needing the validation or support of anyone, even if they choose, with their happiness, to share that happiness with other happy people.  This is a short definition of heaven, at least as understood socially and intrapsychically.

In a perfect world, in other words, the people who feel the compulsive need to “serve” others, in order to meet their own unmet needs, have no work.  They would, instead, become the objects of compassion themselves.  “Why so much anxiety about saving the world?”, they would be told.  “The world is saved.”

You have to always look to the end goal, and work backwards.  Seen from this perspective, much of what passes for compassion and love is simply mislabeled mania.  It is easy to deflect eyes from your own inner emotional world when you are always “doing” for others.  Obviously, this is the root nature of what is called codependence.  The “Co” references the often overlooked second lane on that street going the other way.  It is fine to be codependent with dogs.  They are kids who never grow up and can’t be expected to grow up.  It is not fine to be this way with human beings.  It is a type of emotional assault which I might term emotional sapping (in both the sucking sense, and the military sense of undermining).

One other clarifying comment I wanted to make is that if we accept that souls are eternal, there are, finally, no parents and no children.  The relations of any given set of souls is that of their relative development, not their birth order on this planet.  This leads quickly to the thought that there is no incest in the other plane, which is a gross thought, but then to the further thought that we get everything backwards here, and misunderstand, consistently, what matters.

Sex is basically a means of resolving physical and emotional tension, which evolved as a means of propagating physical existence on this planet.  It is a very low level of relatedness when it comes to soul contact.  What is beautiful is not great sex, but great love, great seeing, the sharing of light and love and laughter instantly and completely.

Imagine seeing all the souls for a mile around you, without the walls.  Imagine they were all happy, and we all lived in this endless quiet ocean.  Seeing their happiness would make you happy.  This is close, I think, to what is meant by pure love.

It is obviously true that helping people build themselves, their spirits, their egos, their capacities is work, and it is work undertaken with a vision of who they can be, and with the expectation of one day realizing the happiness of seeing them succeed, of becoming who they wanted to be, or were meant to be, as you both understand it.  This happiness, though, is the goal.  The rest, what we call love, is a mature process of delayed gratification.  It is self oriented, in that you want to feel something, but selfless, in that you take no direct benefit from the success of others.

Few thoughts.

I was listening to some kid at the theater tonight–I did finally go see the movie that may as well have been titled Thanos–and thinking he was nerdy.  Then I thought, well, he has lived his whole life surrounded by media, and has been undersocialized.  This is basically what being nerdy is.  A kid might be nerdy because he studies all the time, because plays video games all the time, or because he finds some other way to hide in his room, perhaps with a few people like him or herself.  But the lack of interacting, talking, going back and forth, learning how it all works: that is fundamental.

Then I thought about what I was doing there.  A movie theater is a good place for a nerd.  There are lots of feelings there, lots of emotions, lots of ways to live an ersatz life.

Then I got to thinking about how it is quite possible, in our world, to spend a majority of time feeling other people’s emotions, ones that are peddled to you.  I have long said I don’t want to die and realize I lived someone else’s life, but in important respects, if you consume media habitually, that is what you are doing.  When you come to die, when you look at how you spent your time, how you got your pleasures, how you got your equivalent, in many cases, of social interaction, it was vicariously, through either people playing roles, or pretending to be real on reality TV.

What IS a life spent watching TV or playing video games?  Is that life at all?  Is not killing time a sin of some sort?  If you spent the time staring at the wall, emotions would come up that were YOURS, no one elses.  Those emotions make you who you are, and not someone else.

But vast sums of money are made pushing emotions, pushing feelings.  “They are making a new Mission Impossible, and it looks like lots of ups and downs.  I can’t wait.”

Why would this movie be exciting?  Because you get lots of ups and downs.  They do deliver, in most cases.  This is not a lie or a false promise, EXCEPT that no movie can give you a life.

Obviously, I am a bit of a cinephile, but I view cinema as a way of ENHANCING my life experience.  I watch perhaps two movies a week when I am watching heavily.  I watch Jeopardy most nights, and allow myself to watch some of the documentaries on the Weather channel and sometimes American Ninja Warrior.  That’s it.  My normal day often includes no TV but Jeopardy, which I enjoy, even thought I am just not QUITE good enough to play on it.  I’m not good at pop culture, and current novels, and sometimes I just brain fade.  On the latest quiz I couldn’t remember Myanmar.  I don’t know why.

But all that as it may, consider the role ersatz experience plays in your life.  Do you sit still long enough, ever, to really know who you are, and to be able to observe your self as it expands and contracts, as it reacts to things and situations, and people?  Can you feel subtle qualities of sensation as they arise and stay with them?  This is what the Indians in the trees and plains and mountains did.  This is how you feel a landscape.  This is how you feel a place.  This is how you sense subtle changes.

That which is not used withers and dies.  We are exposed to vastly too much affect, such that our endogenous capacities seem to be weakened.  People complain they can’t feel anything.  This is most likely because they have felt too much, for too long, that had nothing to do with them at all.

Souls take nurturing too.  They require water and sunlight and fresh air.  At least, our relationship with our souls, our conscious relationship, does.

We all die.  This is sad, and it is happy.  Perhaps when it is my time, I will breathe a sigh of relief.  My last words might be “Fuck, that was hard.”  But I do think we all need to take care to live in our own bodies, to think our own thoughts, to feel what we feel, to allow what we feel, to learn to understand and regulate at its own level what we feel, and to find our own ways in life both intuitively and rationally.

This woman has a remarkable ability to get in the news for saying profoundly stupid things.  Given this, though, I spent a few moments thinking about her.

Here is the statistic she really owes her voting public: since her entry into “public service”–which is a very, very lucrative profession–in 1990, what have been the economic trends in the districts she represented?  She has represented 3 districts in California, as I understand it: the 29th, the 35th, and now, since 2013, the 43rd.

Never mind that, as a public servant, she has earned enough money to afford a $4 million mansion that is not located in her home district, even thought that indicates a lot, even to the near sighted.

What has been the net effect of her presence in Congress for the core black constituency she not only claims to speak for, but which she claims to speak for so strongly that she feels she can brand anyone who disagrees with her on anything a regressive racist?

I am finding that poverty trends over time by Congressional district are hard to come by.  Would this not be a useful statistic, for a lot of reason?  What were the poverty trends in Chicago while Obama was President?  Are blacks in the 29th, 35th, and the 43rd districts on balance better off since she was there?  Does anyone know?  And if they don’t know, how can they claim she does something other than talk a good game, eat fine meals paid for by lobbyists, show up in the House once in a while, and otherwise just cash her checks–Representatives make nearly $400,000 a year, plus lifetime paid benefits–and have a good time?

Do YOU think that, if I were to find this data, that her presence would be in any way detectable?  My best guess is that everything in all the Districts she has represented got worse from 2006–when Democrats took over Congress–until this year, when Trump’s presence began to have an effect.  More importantly, the data line representing “Percentage under the poverty line” has probably flatlined in all her districts, statistically, since 1990.  Whoever replaced her likely did as little as she does.  Blacks vote for Democrats.  This means Democrats don’t need any game at all.  They don’t have to deliver on anything.  They don’t even have to try and pretend. They just need to talk about the damned system, damned white people, and damned Republicans from time to time.  That’s all it takes to keep the racket rolling.

Does anyone want to openly say they view their job as getting black people better quality crumbs from white people’s tables?  That is in effect her spiel, one that keeps her in a job, and a very good job at that, with little work, high pay, and a whole lot of perks we aren’t allowed to know about.

So I read some other rapper wants someone else (not him, not him) to fuck Kanye up.

And I am left to wonder, AGAIN, why the black community thinks Trump is out to get them.  Trump has always been very open to minority participation and success.  That’s why he got an award on the same platform as Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali.  That is why Jesse Jackson partnered with him on minority outreach.

If I were to pick one single aspect of public black life which most opens them to the accusation that they are inferior in some way–to be clear, to racist beliefs–it would be their inability to see, after fifty years, how blatantly they have been used and abused by the Democrat party, which was ALWAYS the party of Jim Crow.  There was never a Republican Jim Crow, only Democrat.  The  Republican Party was founded to end slavery, and to some vastly lesser extent, to end racism.  Republicans oppressed Southern whites, but all the racist oppression: 100% Democrat.

And now, not to be Democrat is to hate blacks?

This, to be clear, is why they are told to hate Trump: he isn’t a Democrat, and, they are told, only Democrats protect blacks.  But how?  What have they REALLY done to protect blacks?  Free phones with 150 minutes of speech a month?  Slightly better food stamps?  Seriously?

As Kanye pointed out, Chicago did not change in ANY WAY in Obama’s 8 years, other than that it got more violent, the economy got worse, and the educational system either stayed the same or also got worse.  And Obama was from Chicago.  Do you think he gave a shit about the blacks who voted for him?  Of course not.  He was more worried about the price of arugula.