Month: June 2018

One demographic nobody seems to be talking about is the Federal employees themselves.  As with any other conspiracy theory, the “Deep State” does not need to be monolithic, consistent, or well organized.  It consists, seemingly, in the main in bureaucratic inertia, in institutional habits.  They fear Trump may take away or modify perks to which  they have become accustomed.

You have many Obama operatives, of course.  After 8 years, he will have attracted and promoted at least tens of thousands of people, at all levels of government, and in all agencies.  Given Obamas’s patently radical agenda, we should feel both fear and relief that James Clapper and John Brennan were among his strong supporters.  Those two are sneaky people, capable of a lot of covert damage.  That was and remains their stock in trade, and there is no reason to think they are not good at it.

But overall I think you need to consider that Trump has inherited, for a time, a 3 trillion dollar corporation, with 2,650,0000 employees, all of whom are latently political, and most of whom lean Democrat, since Democrats love government.  This corporation is, let us say, 80 years old, with the metastasis having begun roughly under FDR.

This is a vast landscape.  This is a lot of unknown terrain.

I have called for a purge of everyone promoted to the top under Obama, and perhaps even anyone promoted more than once. 

But here is the thing: a lot of the people IN the “Deep State” don’t see themselves that way.  They don’t see what they are doing as wrong.  Their loyalty is to their vision of America, not the rule of law, or the requirements of their job.

Things like the IG Report help to highlight how these things really do matter.  It matters if you are in law enforcement, and enforcing the law unevenly, or worse, using your position for purposes of political sabotage.  I guarantee there were FBI agents on the fence, who became converted to something like the Deep State notion when they saw that report.  Who, to be clear, realized the danger and inherent lack of professional integrity in agents politicizing their jobs.

Trump has been around the block many times.  Where I might have taken a club to the whole thing and started whacking people left and left, I might also have alienated vast swathes of an enormous group of people whose support I ultimately wanted to cultivate.

Maybe Trump is smart to bide his time, wait for the attempted legal coup to run its course, get through the mid-terms and see where he stands, then start pushing a bit harder. 

I don’t know.  It’s a very complex situation.  Our culture is eroding, and our civil servants, so called, cannot but come from that pool of people.

This is certainly an interesting time, and I cannot but thank God every day that Trump, through a miracle, won that election, cast a light on some portion of the ugliness hiding in the shadows, and continues to be the scrappy fighter we wanted and got.

If you’re going to be a leaf on a stream it is helpful to pick the right stream.

Unrelated: I was watching some man just now, with the red face of a drinker, and the expressiveness of someone who is sensitive. I noted one shoulder was higher than another, and that he walked with an aggressiveness his body tension, which kept his arms close to him, belied.

He too has his destiny.  Then I imagined the eugenicists, who are really not just about “perfecting”reproduction but every last aspect of human life, reaching their goal, their actual goal, of human homogenization. And I saw a human beehive, with everyone in their place, happy, sunshiney and glowy. And stupid. Profoundly stupid.

Then it occurred to me to wonder if every individual is not in some respects their own species. Humanity as a complex forest with countless varieties of trees, which bring new species into being with every day.

I don’t know what any of this means, but I feel intuitively there is an interesting path here somewhere. This is a little pile of rocks at what I think is the trail head.

I am uncharacteristically up in the middle of the night.  Usually, sleep fights me and I fight back.  I wake in terror half a dozen times in the first phase of the night, and then, when I do finally stop starting up, I stay asleep.  This is the pattern.  Tonight, I have a new pattern.  That could be a good thing, I suppose.  New, when old is bad, is most likely to be good.

I find myself uncharacteristically nostalgic.  And I find myself responding to reflexes conditioned into me at the University of Chicago, where some commentary on method is de rigeur most of the time.  What are you saying, and with what warrant are you saying it?  How can you justify yourself, and your work?  Why should we care what you have to say?

These are great questions.  They are worth asking regularly.

This is my method: I am a leaf on a stream.

Why should you listen to me?  I don’t know.

Specifically, I am aware I used the word Rationalism very inconsistently in my last post.  Surely, if one topic requires and demands the careful use of words it is Rationalism. 

True enough.  But I am taking poetic license to wander.   Wandering is what I do here.  This is not academic work.  This is not serious in that sense, but it is very serious in the way we all care deeply about the affections in our world, about who likes us and who doesn’t.

Ideas are my companions.  I find them congenial, and as unpredictable as they may be, they are better companions in many ways than the people I know.

Yesterday I was feeling that perhaps the snow capped hills in the back country suit me, as a white wolf wandering the wilds in the night and cold.  My fur keeps me warm.  My home makes me feel safe.

What that means, what that metaphor means for me, I can’t say with precision, merely that I am doing hard work alone–again–and I am feeling good doing it.

I will comment on discipline, too.  It is remarkable I got into the University of Chicago.  It was filled with brilliant people.  One of the consistent aspects of going to a great school is that quite often you are reading the books of the people teaching the classes.  All of my teachers were published authors, and in most courses we read their books, among of course many others.  I read 3-4 books a week while I was there.

But although I am certainly capable of hard work, I have never been disciplined.  Discipline is doing moderate work consistently over long periods of time, in a planned and unhurried way.  I have never been that person.  I am an obsessive.  I latch onto something and ride it into the ground, then I am done.  It is, or in any event, has been, my way.

Few thoughts.  This is the sort of thing I do in the dark at 3 in the morning.  I like who I am, although I have no idea where it is all going.  None of us, if we are honest, do.

It really hit me that ideology is just repackaged tribalism.  It is me and mine against you and yours, and it is this very conflict which makes it appealing.  It tells you who you belong to, and it fosters group solidarity.

The Left, in its present iteration as a culture destroying virus, has taken the added step of using the superstructure, the imprint, of an ideology, but removing all the content.  They have created moving targets, where the mob marches first one way, then another.  They go up, and they go down, and are forced to, and required to, use continual back and forth signalling as a means of confirming they are still in the pack.  This, obviously, requires repeating publicly the continual drip of nonsense being put out by the synchronizing organs, principally the media.

An ideology without fixed ideas.

Here is the thing: to remain in such a state of continual change, you have to become emotionally and intellectually incurious and superficial.  I’ve of course said this many times, and in my own world, the image of the Headless Ones I described from a dream in the leadup to the 2012 election remains the most salient.

To stay in lockstep, you have to be taught, little by little, to surrender some important part of your humanity.  You have to surrender the right to say “I believe this, but not that”, or “This is OK, but that is not.”  You surrender the right to ask for consistency from your leaders. You cannot say “but I thought we believed in ALL human rights”, when they, for example, bury completely the abuse of Mexican children, when they find out it happened during the Obama years; or when they refuse to discuss the profound misogyny and abuse of women in cultures they are wanting to protect.  You can’t say “you are saying rape is wrong here, but then saying it is perfectly OK when done by cultural others.  This cannot mean you believe rape is wrong.  Why?”

It’s maddening.  Clinically.  I have been watching some things over the past few days, and people who are college educated, who should know better, are offering and getting angry over arguments that would earn a “C’mon, man” from an average high school teacher.

When we speak of rationalism, I, in any event, get an image of Immanuel Kant taking his walk at the same time every day.  Rationalism as a sort of cognitive windup clock, where you always know what you are going to get.

But in its best form, in the form invented and in the process of perfection in the Western world (if our many demons do not destroy us, as indeed they are trying very hard to do), rationalism is an effort to integrate emotions into our perceptual worlds.  In its first phase it is an emotional pause, in which you consciously try to step back, and look at the world analytically, and empathetically. You ask “what am I missing in this situation?  In what respect is this person making valid arguments?”

It begins, perhaps, with the principle that no one person knows everything, that we are all prone to failure, and that negotiated understandings are a vast improvement on the use of violence, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual.

And I think it can be stated accurately and succinctly that thinking rationally requires a calm spirit.  It is precisely the demonic restlessness of the Leftist mob which prevents any use of reason at all.

And calmness is a function of mental health.  Rational thought is an Emergent Property of emotional health.  It is not a substitute for courage, for seeing things the way they are, but rather that desirable process purified and perfected.

Emotionally mature people are rational proportionate to their health.  Conversely, emotionally immature people are irrational to the extent they are lacking.

None of this should be controversial, but it is.  These are all ideas I grew up with, but which the kids today are NOT growing up with.  These are not obvious to them at all, or so it seems to me.  And far too many people who grew up learning all this have forgotten it.  Life got to them, and they picked a stale alleyway of a “philosophy” to avoid the work of thinking, feeling, and learning.

One image: an anemone, anchored to the ocean floor, living on whatever the currents bring.

Another image: a dolphin, wandering the waters, looking for fish.

I feel accepting what comes, and accepting what you encounter in life, are two sides of the same coin.

When you are truly going new places, you can’t know what is coming.  This is the charm, the adventure, and sometimes the danger of it.

Relativistically, we are all in some combination of reacting and finding, of staying still and moving.  But it seems to me the habit of wandering helps develop the skill of staying.

Perhaps I am talking nonsense.  This is a perennial hazard of thinking out loud.  But my gut tells me where is something important here.

You know, I live in pretty deep solitude.  I am not a monk–you can find me out drinking beer somewhere pretty regularly–but I am certainly alone with my ideas, my feelings, my perceptions.  Those I don’t really share other than here.

And I feel sometimes like I am laying on a river bank, and images are floating by me.  Some of them wave and say hello as they drift by.

One such image was the water pools the Mayans I think it was built in front of their main pyramids.  It has been speculated they were used to detect seismic activity.  Water is a very sensitive surface, and it shows any changes in its environment easily.

I am like that.  It is a good metaphor.  I have perhaps commented on this, but if someone snaps a picture of a group of people in the room, more often than not I’m the one person who felt and saw and is looking at the camera. I don’t like having my picture taken.  I don’t know why.  My youngest takes great pleasure when we go out to eat snapping my picture with my hand over my face.

And the other comment I wanted to make is that we all have to deal in some way with the unpredictability of life.  We never know what the currents may bring in, or take from us.

The Stoic approach is, more or less, to feel as little as possible.  So, in any event, was the traditional teaching by people like Marcus Aurelius.  It is a soldiers philosophy, one of embracing difficulty with no whining, no self pity, and with a masculine energy and zeal.  It is not emotionless, but not flowery either.  It is spartan and simple.  The Japanese, in general, are, I think, good Stoics, although they get to it by a different path.

But I think with more skill, you can extend yourself, and the range of your deep affective pleasures, much farther.  It is not just a question of accepting the necessary, but interacting with it, transforming it, and transforming yourself with it.  It is a dance, a play. Stoics are never off balance.  What I want to be is someone who is always off balance, but able to roll with it, to float with the currents, and keep my bearings anyway.

I did martial arts for many years, the Bujinkan and Jinenkan. And the classical styles are very, very clever, and very subtle.  I spent many hours just slightly stepping off line from a kick or a punch, or a thrust with a knife or sword.  If a miss is as good as a mile, an inch is more than you need.

But this is not disengagement.  You come as close to getting hit as possible, without actually getting hit, because it means you are also close to your opponent, and the kata of course taught you how to take advantage of that in a variety of situations.

There were and remain for me countless useful metaphors, and feelings, I derived from that training.  At some point, I got tired of learning ways to kill and disable people.  If you really think about what you are doing, it is tiring and sad.  The only thing sadder than having to kill someone is being killed yourself, and allowing or watching harm come to someone you care about.  But in the real world, in my view, being armed and alert is practically more germane than learning hand to hand, sword to sword and knife to knife combat.

Be all that as it may, this feeling of being engaged without taking the full force of an emotional blow is extremely relevant to this process of learning to live skillfully.

That is what I wanted to say.

I am an empath by nature.  I feel what is going on around me.  For many years, I retreated.  I lived in my head, and smashed down with as much force as I could muster everything going on below my neck, trying to rise into awareness, all the waves of energy and feeling which were continually lapping around me.

Here is the core truth: I can accept it or reject it, but this fact of who and how I am is, in this life at least, immutable.  It is what it is, and will never, ever be anything else.  I have a nature I can embrace or reject, but it is like the blue sky above and earth below us.

I can put the picture of a person in my head, focus on them, and start to feel what is going on in them.  Everyone cannot but be honest in their person.  No one can truly hide themselves.  I feel when people are hiding things, and I can often make what I suspect are very accurate guesses about what it is they are hiding.  At some level, it is always pain of some sort, and the reaction to pain, which might be cruelty, or might be a feeling of inferiority, or helplessness.  All three, not uncommonly, all mixed together.

But the logical conclusion to be drawn from all this is that my world is not my own.  I cannot control what comes and goes.  I am a SEEING fish, aware of all the currents, all the creatures and their natures around me.  I can put a bag over my head, but I will still hear everything.

So who I am, if I can neither control fully what I myself feel, or control what comes and goes into and out of my house?

This makes “I” an unstable formation, does it not?  But is not the stable “I” an illusion for all of us?  Are we not merely in the habit of being who we “are”?  I would be someone else if I lost my leg tomorrow, at least in some ways, or if I sustained a major brain injury.  This contemplation is a sort of death, an egocide.

But I feel if I embrace the rhythms of my nature, and of the world, there is a sort of release.  Energy comes and energy goes, people come and people go, but something of me also still remains.  This is the important part.  It is a big mystery, but it, also, seems to be a fact.  This is life, living, within that death.

This sense of ocean currents is strong within me.  I feel streams of energy flowing through the world. I have not begun to tap my deepest perceptual capacities because I have not known how to integrate it.  But I feel that the integration happens in the forward movement, in the accepting of the knowing.

I am slowly healing.  There is a time to push, and a time to cease from pushing.  There is a time to lie in wait, and see what comes along, and sometimes there is a time to make music with it, to make love with it, to dance with it, and in so doing become more whole.

We are all giants.  But it takes so very long to remember.

I don’t know if all this makes any sense. I am musing out loud.  Perhaps it will do some good for somebody.  Perhaps it will do some good for me.  Much of the most important work happens in the dark.  We do get periodic progress reports, though!!!

It is sad to contemplate that most of the people we meet in life we will only know briefly, then they will be gone.  As parents, most of the time our grown children will be somewhere else.  As children, we are perhaps somewhere else, perhaps “ungrateful”, as I think I am usually described by my parents, and in any event needing to make our own way.

I meet hundreds of people in a typical year, perhaps thousands.  I travel a lot.  I work on construction sites with dozens to hundreds of people.  I eat out.  I hang out at bars.  I got a lap dance from a stripper named London somewhere in Appalachia a few weeks ago.  I liked her.

All in all, we can expect to say “hello/goodbye” a lot in our lives.  If I were to have a tombstone, I might put that on there (from Slaughterhouse 5, of course).

And I contemplate that the remedy is affection and goodness.  If you give them some part of your self, then you travel with them.  Your goodness can travel with them.  You can love them, and trust that things will work out, for them, exactly how they need to, whether that be what we call “trouble”–which is the lot of most of us–or profoundly good fortune.

It’s all a very interesting game, a fascinating game.  I don’t know where it comes from, or really where it goes to.  I have my beliefs, but we all find out as we go.

I like this idea, though: start with people knowing they will leave, start with the end, which is you alone,  and recollect there will come a day when you will never see them again. We are meeting for a time at a cafe at the end of the universe and the end of time, and are only sharing one meal together.

Even difficult people have a texture.  We are all works of art, in some ways.  I am trying to look at them “there but for the grace of God go I”, and, more often, “damn, I’ve BEEN that guy.  I was an asshole.  What made me like that, and how can I make more of it go away?”

I am a man of many moods.  Some of them are very charitable.  Have a pleasant day, fellow traveler!!!

Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGX_WJLCxrA

Then this immediately after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR58vE6GYic

If you are like me, you get this sense of “what is out there, that I will never know?”  This is a very important feeling.  I will blog on it soon.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pjs7uoOkag&feature=share

You know, I call this blog “Moderates United” for a reason.  He and I may well disagree on some important issues.  But there is a huge difference between having an honest difference of opinion while respecting one another, and having sincere and truth oriented debate, and the process of shrieking and marginalizing which has come to constitute the primary activity of anyone who want to remain a member of the leftwing thug cult.

And I am very gratified to see the Republican Party evolve.  It has become very welcoming to gays, as he appears to be.  They are finally getting with the times on marijuana legalization, at least at the Federal level, which William F. Buckley was calling for 30 years ago.

I have been predicting a continual peeling away of people from this core monstrosity, and this sort of thing is, to me, evidence it is happening.

And the thing is, once you get REALLY woke, once you look at the world of lies and smoke and mirrors from the outside, you will never again, I hope, be so naive as to ingest your ideas uninspected and unconsidered.  This is all we can ask of any person or any people.  None of us can claim to be in full possession of THE truth, so a great plurality of opinions and ideas is desirable, even if something which also requires maturity and patience at times.  None of us like to be contradicted, but all of us benefit from it.

Kudos to this guy.

https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2018/06/12/u-s-steel-ceo-weve-been-in-a-trade-war-for-30.html?ana=e_abd&u=12080427584dadd9e16fdf5e1cf529&t=1528948795&j=82114531

I am going to make two comments, one specific, one general.

Specifically, it is very much the case that many nations–I think the exact number is most or all of the world–enact trade barriers to segments of US commerce.  We allow them to export to the US with no tariffs, but when we try to export to them, they tax us so we become either less competitive, or completely out of the market.  Japan and China are obvious examples, but I think most of Europe, presumably Canada (given Trump’s public spat with Eyebrows McGee), and even South America would need to be included in a full list.

How do you alter the status quo?  It would seem to me, the first step is altering the status quo.  You fuck up the cozy relationship in which one partner is getting fucked continually.  This would be threatening equivalent or maybe even higher tariffs.  This puts both sets of tariffs on the table: those which HAVE been in place in, say, China, and those which MAY go into place if nothing changes, which is those we will levy on foreign nations.

The point people seem to miss is that Trump wants free trade, but free trade on all sides, multilateral free trade.  We don’t have that, and haven’t had that for a long time.

The free trade purists, rightly, point out that every incremental increase in free trade helps all parties, so every incremental decrease hurts someone, and probably everyone.

HOWEVER, short term measures designed to increase free trade even further, in the long run, are CLEARLY the best choice, if the end aim is in fact achieved.  The proof is in the pudding.

But my God we don’t need to run around like Chicken Little crying the sky is falling in when Trump says: stop doing that shit, or I’ll do the same thing to you.

General Comment.  I was thinking today how both Trump and Reagan are very effective leaders, even though neither can be construed as intellectually curious, much less erudite.

And it occurs to me that Complex Systems, seem formally, can often ONLY be grappled with intuitively.  They are too complex for linear intelligence and linear logic.  This makes someone with good instincts superior to a person with superior book learning, but weak intuition.

Academics continually bemoan how much the rest of us fail to be as smart and superior as them.  This is because they are mostly useless,  but HATE that idea.  That is why they make shit, like Communism, up.

Please forgive me if I am being flippant.  I had a 15 hour day I am calming down from, and I’m a bit tipsy.