Month: June 2018

The end purpose of meditation is to make moving and being still roughly equal in affective valence, in feeling tone.  If you can’t sit still, you are being driven around.

Many meditation teachers preach to “still your thoughts”, but the thoughts themselves come from an emotional impulse to move, rather than simply be.  It is always the emotions at the root, or, rather, the sensations.  As I have said, I think the order is sensation, image, feeling, thought.  The thoughts are just a guidewire you can use to travel deeper down.  There is, I think, a thought within a thought.  There is a way of being aware of them, but separate from them.

I’m going to go work on that.  Peace, which is what we all hunger for, is found in this direction, I am quite sure.

Silverstein created an adult version of the story in a cartoon entitled “I Accept the Challenge.” In the cartoon, a nude woman cuts off a nude man’s arms and legs with scissors, then sits on his torso in a pose similar to the final drawing in The Giving Tree in which the old man sits on the stump.

Jackson and Dell (1979) wrote an “alternative version” of the story for teaching purposes that was entitled “The Other Giving Tree.” It featured two trees next to each other and a boy growing up. One tree acted like the one in The Giving Tree, ending up as a stump, while the other tree stopped at giving the boy apples, and does not give the boy its branches or trunk. At the end of the story, the stump was sad that the old man chose to sit under the shade of the other tree.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Tree 

It would seem to me Silverstein himself was clear in what he was trying to say, even if he was persistently misinterpreted.

Recall that he wrote the lyrics to “A Boy Named Sue” also.

Where one side is giving and the other taking, there is no love.  Giving everything you have is not virtuous.  It allows others to indulge themselves in selfishness, and the proper purpose of all moral activity is helping others to GROW, not shrink.

The term for this is codependence, where “the more you suffer, the most it shows you really care, right?”

The Left does not consciously want to destroy this country.  They are simply willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the FEELING of being virtuous, which being poorly integrated, emotionally hollow people, they cannot get through actually productive activity.  They get it by taking the stuff of one set of people and giving it to another, which does not deserve it and has not earned it in any way.

It is impossible to calculate the economic costs of an open border, but it runs into the many trillions.

America should not be a Giving Tree.  This is a model for suicide, and there is no virtue or benefit to anyone for good people to willfully throw themselves into the fire, or to allow the fire to spread around them.

I will add, that this core issue of boundaries, which start with psychological boundaries, rests upon a fundamentally moral foundation.  You have to be able to form clear opinions from clear beliefs, in order to have coherent actions.  If you believe nothing, you can never say no.  And never saying no is what I am discussing.  The Giving Tree never said no, and wound up as a stump with the ungrateful ass of its boy–and it is appropriate that this person was called boy throughout the story–upon it.

So I gather from reading the synopsis of this story I have not read in some time.  We had it in the house, but I didn’t like it.  That story always made me uncomfortable, because I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell was wrong with both the tree and the boy.

NO WAY was Donald Trump going to win.  They censored us on their websites, delivered insults as emotionally painful as they could conceive to us every time they encountered us, considered us ignorant, rude, and inferior, and certainly not a national threat.  Trump supporters were certainly not THEIR neighbors. 

But of course we were.  Many or most of us kept our mouths shut precisely because we knew we could expect a verbal barrage and quite possibly a physical attack if we spoke our views publicly.  But no better way of misgauging the Zeitgeist could be imagined.  You have one group histrionically proclaiming the death of another, while that other group still retains the right to vote privately, and to speak privately, however they choose.

And we picked a loud mouth for a President.  Thank God!!!  That was the point.  We wanted a big talked, because we were and are tired of being insulted without any of our leaders returning fire in the way and at the volume it was launched at us.

So here we are, a year and a half or so into Trump’s Presidency, and many of these psychological misfits are still trying to figure out what happened.  What happened is that their bullying simply made us hold our tongues.  We never went anywhere.  Nor will we.  My best guess is that their tactics can only be causing our numbers to grow.  We are the true Liberals.  We are the protectors and defenders of the authentic American traditions of tolerance, justice, rational self defense, and reasonable introspection without irrational shame.  Our nation is not perfect yet.  We get that.  But it is perfectable.  We can continue doing better, without feeling the need to cower in the dirt and hang our heads in shame because we were not doing as well 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago, as we are now.

But safety is now a matter of Federal OSHA standard, and there is not much need for unions at this point to address any particular grievances.  Most issues of labor law are handled at both Federal and State levels.

Union workers do get more money, but they also pay a healthy part of it back to the Union.  As Roger Miller sang: “Old worn out suit and shoes; I don’t pay no union dues.”  I assume he means that yes, he is poor, but no, he isn’t forking over his money to someone else.

To the extent they are still useful I think unions should think of themselves as educational institutions, the graduates of which have EARNED the right to charge more money because they do better work.  This is reasonable, and I think to a great extent the case.  Some buildings only use union workers not because some goons from back east threatened them, but because they do better work and are overall more reliable.

And of course as I’ve probably commented often, public sector unions are a non-starter.  In the private sector business owners want to keep wages down, while unions want to raise them.  They negotiate something they can both live with.  In the public sector the governments wants to pay their own workers–themselves–more and so do the unions.  There is nothing to control costs.  Add to this the fact that the same people who are doing handsomely can then turn around and use the union funds they collect from people required by law to pay them, to help elect people who will allocate them even MORE money, and the whole thing becomes ludicrous.  There is no justification for public sector unions.

With respect to law enforcement specifically, I do think some form of collective legal representation is reasonable.  Cops are often accused of things they didn’t do.  They are also accused of things they did do.  But I think all public pensions should be eradicated.  They create too much hassle.  And all the laws government retirement savings should be liberalized.  I personally think we should adopt something like what Milton Friedman talked Chile into, where people have to save a percentage of their income for retirement, but where and how they invest it is up to them.

Keep in mind Social Security is inherently a negative investment.  Inflation alone means would you get back only, say, 75% of the dollars you put in, and that is only IF your remittances had not already been spent on the generation before you.  Add to this the overhead of a 62,000 person organization, and the whole thing makes zero sense from an investment and financial perspective.

And constant distraction, itself, morphologically as seen from a temporal perspective, works to mitigate deep reflection and deep thought.  It distances us from our own inner knowing, our own inner perceptions.  You need something periodically like a complete media break, a week without TV, iPhones, internet of any sort, or even a CD player.

The horror with which so many would view that tells us something about the state of our addiction.  What is wrong with silence?  What is wrong with doing nothing?

The constant tap tap tap, drip drip drip of news–any of it, from any perspective, saying anything at all–demotes our inner silence and rewards, so I feel, the same limbic system. We get addicted to stress and outrage.  This is perhaps the true addiction.

I am trying to build silence in my life.  It is hard, because it is also a solitude for someone who has been somewhat socially disconnected all his life, because of a lack of ability to activate my frontal cortex, due to hard core and awful trauma.  That is slowly changing.

And my hope, and occasional brief glimpse, is that the world may soon seem less hostile.  It is easier to be alone and undistracted when a pervasive sense of attack is not pressing in continually, until you relent and distract yourself by buying something, playing a video game, getting drunk and/or high, or watching TV.  Or watching porn.  That’s never been my particular thing although I do watch it sometimes.

We may survive this time.  That is my hope.  We may build mile high skyscrapers with elevators that can connect to space ship loading docks.  We may build bases on the Moon and Mars in our lifetime.

And, vastly more importantly, we may introduce into mainstream science the notions that we survive death, that God–or something we may as well call God, even if it is nothing like the Christian God–exists, and that we are all interconnected energetically in interesting and fun ways.

There is so much wrong now.  Things seem to be trending, culturally, in such bad directions.  All anyone can do is stay awake and aware, not panic, and keep exploring and trying. If I get stopped mid-sentence or mid-journey one day, so be it.  I WILL be in movement, internal or external.  I will be looking.  I will be seeking.  And I don’t think it is overstating the case to say I have done some finding, too.

And the Left has thrived because it has mastered the art of the small, simple thought, which uses words the person agrees with, which is both easily digested, and which offers easy, simple views of the world.

America is too violent.  Get rid of the guns and it will be less violent.

America fights too  many wars.  Disarm and everyone else will too.

We owe the poor charity.  If we give them money, we will ease their burden and they will disappear.

These are simple, but wrong, ideas.  Conservatives–genuine Liberals–require more than a sound bite.  We have to talk about the vexing but quite real complexities of economic theory, international relations, and efforts to create a government monopoly on legal gun ownership.  We require time and attention, and what works against us is a background of anxiety and fear.

And so a very large number of people have sought out the seeming safe harbor of congenial, simple, and wrong Left wing ideas, nearly all of them designed to abuse their trust in the pursuit of oligarchic power.

This is a factor in the current left wing melt down.  To accept that the world view they have accepted in its entirety, as one piece, as a fully fleshed out vision and feeling of the world, is wrong, is utterly devastating to them.  Most of them won’t do it.  Their defense mechanisms kick in LONG before they perform this conscious analysis, and they get angry and aggressive.

Cult members are the ones who can’t listen to anyone else, who are triggered by alternative views.  As I have said often, all conservatives cannot but have heard Leftist ideas ad nauseum most of our lives.  The same is not true of the Left.  Most of them are only ABLE to assume we are racists because their ignorance is complete.  It is otherwise such an idiotic claim that it could only be granted credence by congenital simpletons.

Hate is not the right word: I oppose these people.  This is the animating principle of my life.  And I feel similarly for dogmatic materialists, those who want to kill God–despite the scientific evidence–because it makes them feel strong and powerful.  No few of them seem to additionally have clinical sadistic impulses.

The Left is trying at the moment to create a situation in which people are forced into supporting them or being publicly branded an anti-humanistic radical.  Ponder this.

None of us should be forced into saying we are not Nazis, even though self evidently we aren’t. I grew up, like most Americans, watching World War 2 movies.  Two guesses which side I was rooting for.  I give you two, because some of you may be Leftists, although it hard to see how any Leftist could read this blog for long, and not lose at least the unreflecting hatred and disgust which animates their race.  And if they lose the hate, I am willing to call them Liberal.

This whole border thing felt like a loyalty oath.  Either you felt the proper amount of human compassion and empathy, or you were a monster.  Either you wanted to cry with Rachel Maddow, or you really were LITERALLY HITLER.

It is of course illogical and stupid for any student of the political left to ask or expect of them anything like moral or intellectual consistency–or even the attempt at it–but I will note that when Joseph McCarthy–and his counterpart committee in the House, since I will note he had plenty of company–was asking for loyalty oaths, the Left hated it, PARTICULARLY because many, in fact, in our government and the culture at large plainly WERE Communists, or at least kissing cousins.  But they called it, itself, Unamerican, knowing they were liars, knowing that cause was just.

And Trump seems to have awoken many predatory beasts who had been in hiding, whose presence only the most paranoid among us suspected.  Ponder the spectacle of the former head of the CIA OPENLY calling for what would amount to a coup, conducted against a man who clearly won a fair election.  Who would have thought this possible?  Who would have thought our media could be so corrupted as to become a nearly uniformly political organ, which daily expresses lies, half-truths, political vitriol, and bad ideas?

My dreams were quite wild last night.  We are going through a storm.  I don’t know where it stops.

And I will add, procedurally, methodologically–these may seem odd terms for something deeply personal, but that is how I am wired–it is very difficult to separate personal dreams from collective dreams.  But I think that when I am dealing with something personal, and it matches the frequency of something playing out in our greater Collective Unconscious, or collective “space”, then the dream goes farther and becomes more powerful.  That is what I felt last night. I felt large numbers of savage beasts unleashed, which no one had suspected.  We didn’t know they were there.  They were highly organized, highly savage, but waiting, hibernating even, because it was not yet time. Their cave has been breeched, and they are now waking up and hopping mad.  I do think this is a collective dream.

Personally, I am getting very deep into my trauma.  I am feeling increasingly that getting rid of the death in me will itself feel like a death.  It is a poison I have lived with all my life.  Or perhaps I will literally die soon. I  don’t know.

It is important in life to face it with what equanimity you can manage.

This is very much like the much mocked meme put out by a thoughtless leftist that “blocking voting rights for convicted felons is racist”.  The person, self evidently, was visualizing most felons as black, as indeed they are, at least seen proportionately.  But that claim, too, simply validates the original point.

As I understand it, the ban in no way affects the vast majority of the world’s Muslims.  It does not include Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia or Malaysia.

It DOES include Venezuela, which is not noted for its high Muslim population.  It DID include North Korea, but it is possible Trump may change that.

The countries last year were Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Chad, and Somalia, at least according to the first list that came up with my DuckDuckGo search.

And it is worth noting that Syria, Yemen and Libya are largely hellholes because of the policy initiatives of Barack Hussein Obama, and his minions (sure I’ll go there) Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.  Do you remember “We came, we saw, he died, hahahaha”?   I sure do.  The results of that policy had been, when I checked last year, some 40,000 war dead, most of them civilians. I’m sure that number has grown.  Do you wonder why the media never talks about Libya?  Just kidding.  There is no serious doubt as to what is going on there.

And again, Syria: Obama armed, trained, and funded what became ISIS.  In important respects he ENABLED them to become ISIS.  As I have commented before, around 2012 they underwent a major and sudden qualitative improvement in their war fighting abilities.  Somebody obviously trained them.  And that training enabled their military successes, and all the horrors that followed them, the crucifixions, the rapes, the sex slavery, the indisrimate beheadings, the tossing of gays off of buildings, complete with laughter.  This is all on Obama.  It is a war crime, in a very real sense.  There was no conceivable policy justification for it, and he can’t claim ignorance if I was reading on the internet about how the moderates were a fiction in 2012.

And Yemen, too: it all got worse under Obama.  I have not studied the details, other than to know it is nasty war in which we are–or were–supporting the Saudis in a civil war which is killing a LOT of civilians.

So if you add these considerations to it all, the grotesque anti-humanism of the Left wing attacks on this policy become more clear.  The Left does not care about people.  They were not horrified, as I was, when ISIS put young girls in a cage, doused them in gas, burnt them to cinders, and filmed the whole thing as an act of piety.  They didn’t care about any of these atrocities.  They were told to care about Al-Assad, and they dutifully did.  Everything he did was a crime, even if it didn’t happen.  Everything ISIS did was simply ignored, and people who wanted to talk about it accused of Islamophobia, which in that region amounted to what they would no doubt consider an irrational desire for your head to remain connected to your body.  Perhaps we should call it Homicidophobia, the fear of being murdered, or perhaps Psychopathophobia.

But of course, there is nothing irrational about realistic anxieties.  Hence Trump’s policy.

I am glad to see we chalked up another win today for the rule of law, for common sense, and indeed for sanity.