Month: July 2018

You
Cannot
Go anywhere
In thought
Bright eyes
And a
Bright mind
Are
Two different things.

I got to thinking about the Nazis the other night, with regard to my comment on the British Empire, how it was perhaps a massive attachment failure.  My thought there was that maybe the British system of schooling created what amounted to millions of people unable to form stable adult attachments at a deep emotional level, and who took the resulting energy and invaded and conquered nearly every nation on the planet.  This idea arose from David Copperfield, which I am listening to.  “Character”, at least thus far, roughly equates to cruelty.

Ponder what must have been the attachment conditions for German children from 1914 to roughly 1925.  They would have been born to extreme anxiety, food shortages,  and from 1914-1914, absent fathers and perhaps grandfathers, and worried mothers.  The early 1920’s was the “wheelbarrow” period.  Things sorted out about 1925, but even then, ponder all the men in all the homes with severe “shell shock”.  Ponder all the consequences of war which never disappear–the fear, the pain.

A child born in 1914 would have been 19 in 1933.  A child born in 1925 would have been 8.  Was this not roughly the age range from which arose the Hitler Youth?  And were most of Hitler’s early supporters not college age students, those born perhaps just before the war?  As I think about it, any small child who suffered through that war would have been severely effected.  A child born in 1910 would have been 4 in 1914 and 8 in 1918, and 15 in 1925.   There would be scars.

And I ponder our own society.  Where are our Nazis coming from?  How is there so much hate, so much violence, so early?  What is the genesis of our own attachment failures?  One is the mothers working.  Another is what I will call the failure of the extended family.  But the main one I think, now, is the children raised not just with, but in large measure BY technology.  It has made far too many of them functional narcissists and even sociopaths.  They have ideas of goodness and compassion, but they really don’t understand what they mean.  That is why they “value” them so much they are willing to commit acts of violence against people they don’t understand, to “protect” other people in ways they also don’t really understand.  This is where the craziness comes from.  They need to believe something, but they lack the emotional intelligence to anchor their beliefs in reality.

What they want, really, is to live in a giant machine with rules they understand, and can manipulate like their iPhones.  There are ranges of possibilities, but all known and understood in advance.  Nothing truly new just “pops up”.  There is to be no genuine novelty.  That they cannot stand.  They are, in other words, demanding an authoritarian state, because they feel radically alone.

This aloneness is what connects ideology to action.  We might define ideology as “The rational in pursuit of the irrational”, at least as it concerns ideologies like Fascism and Communism.

I will have more to say on this subject, but I have to go for now.

I think these charges are fantastic. I think we should demand and expect to receive a full accounting of how Wikileaks came to be in possession of John Podesta’s emails.  I think we should offer him immunity in exchange for full disclosure.  After all, these are serious charges, and he is in a unique position to know where he got what he published, with Wikileaks, OBVIOUSLY, having been the main or exclusive source of all the emails which caused so much trouble by revealing so much corruption.

And we need to examine our election system, top to bottom.  We need to require all States to use paper ballots as backup–because it is certainly possible machines can be hacked–and we need to prevent Russian agents from using agents to place illegal votes.  Obviously, the only true way of preventing this is requiring valid and hard-to-falsify voter identification.

And this should be a bipartisan effort.  After all, the Democrats are concerned about interference by foreign agents, right?  The Democrats value the sanctity of our elections, right?

I say we give these sons of bitches exactly what they are asking for, and give it to them right up the ass.

I continue to wonder why Rod Rosenstein still has a job, but maybe it is precisely because Trump knew he would not be able to resist overplaying his hand.

I will comment, though, that the timing is self evidently intended to sabotage Trump’s meeting with Putin, and as such, is effectively a treasonous effort to undermine the diplomatic efforts of our chief diplomat. 

Having said that, given how much the Left hates Putin, I have to say I am growing to like the guy.  He can’t be a worse gangster than senior Democrat leadership and the people who keep them in power.

And if he is pissing them off, then he must be doing something right.

If the Left keeps up this relentless hatred, divisiveness, anger, and just nastiness, at some point they will be able to evolve the very hatred and violence they claim existed all along on our side. I am already getting much too much satisfaction watching cops pepper spray and manhandle these lunatics.  I’m not proud of it, but I am also tired of being called names by mindless drones who enjoy nothing better than spitting in my face.

Chuck Schumer is sitting on top of a seething mass of enraged goons, and his hands are tied.  I think he is politically smart enough to know that the Democrats are running a very real, very large risk of marginalizing themselves in a major way for a VERY long, but you can’t stop a boiling pot.  All these currents of rage and hatred and intolerance were stoked carefully for perhaps 4 decades, but kept below a simmer until the right time.  The right time was Obama, and all the stops were pulled out.   A perfect police state and propaganda operation were prepared, and awaited only Hillary’s anointing to bring to fruition.  Given that her election was a foregone conclusion, there was no reason not to fan the flames, no reason not to stoke anger, no reason not to take off the mask and show the fangs.

But then Trump happened.  You can’t just say “hey guys, all that stuff we said that made you mad, well you need to not think about it for a couple years while we work on getting our people back in control.”  So it’s an out of control train that has left the tracks.  It has a ton of energy, but nobody can direct it, and nobody knows where it is going.

So Trump just has to sit back and say “hey, this guy is reasonable.  There’s no reason other than partisan politics for the SAKE of partisan politics not to confirm him.”  And if the Dems STILL won’t do it, it helps our overall cause, and as I said, Trump can pull Kavanaugh and put someone farther to the right in January, if Republicans are able to take advantage of the anti-lunatic tide which seems to be coming in.

I’ll find other things to be upset about, no doubt, but them fighting Kavanaugh is not one of them.

I will wonder out loud again if this fire will not consume the lion’s share of the moderates in the Democrat party, leaving them lifeless on a national level. One can hope.  And the funny thing is: nobody can stop it, even if that is true.  The New York Times posted an editorial saying to tone things down for the mid-terms: they got a dose of their own hate for it, or so I read.

Any Cassandra’s in their midst would do well to be worried.  But nobody listened to Cassandra, did they?  

There is a marked difference between chronic anger–which is symptom of unhealed emotional wounds or traumas–and righteous anger, which is when someone breaks a common sense, commonly observed social taboo.  We can be grateful that true hate crimes have become something people shun.  We can be grateful that gays, by and large, no longer need fear being beaten up or killed, at least in American and Western Europe (for now).  True racism is rare in this country, even if it remains common in much of the world, where in many cases literal tribalism remains alive and well.

But there remain lines.  And calling someone a Nazi without any reason other than their failure to kowtow instantly to your lunatic agenda should be one of them.  The proper response is HOW DARE YOU!!  This, as my internet friend Tony Blauer likes to point out, is the root impulse behind all effective self defense, either physical or, as here, emotional.

The accusation itself is abusive.  It is inherently a personal attack on the character and basic decency of the person to whom it is directed.  It is intended to wound.  And in the propaganda network built under Obama, it is intended to promote and justify the further marginalization of that person, and to enable eventual actual violence against them.  Verbal violence always precedes actual violence.

I think we have all become anesthetized to all this, to the radical inappropriateness of it.  I have commented on this before, but I am really feeling it today. 

As an English comedian put it, in a rant where he was clearly venting actual anger, saying you are not a Nazi is like saying you don’t finger children.  We assume it.  It is the default.  It should not be necessary to deny it, because no sane people are Nazis, and no sane people are pedophiles.

Thus, as I said a few days ago, this accusation is very much a form of Gaslighting, in which you claim the other person is insane because they disagree with you.

Now, self evidently, this accusation was everywhere for a very long time.  Godwin’s Law dates back to 1990, before there even was an internet.

But I have never seen it be so relevant daily.  I see people say “But Trump REALLY IS Hitler”.  I ask: what do you know about Hitler?  Have you read any books, watched any good documentaries?  Answer: I DON’T NEED TO.  So we are to believe someone who has spent his whole political life mainly talking about bad trade deals is “basically” the same as someone who rose to power with an explicitly militaristic, clinically racist, and politically abusive agenda.  This is insanity.

Speaking for myself, I am losing my capacity to interact with these people at all.  Speaking for many on the right, I think, we have put up with the bullshit for so long because it is so obviously WRONG.  Dennis Prager created PragerU specifically to offer simple, well argued, fact based cases for conservative beliefs.  There is no equivalent on the Left, because there CAN’T be.  Their agenda is control achieved through conditioned responses to propaganda initiatives.

So I and people like me think “surely to God they can’t be that stupid forever.  Surely there remain people willing to listen.”

But I really feel that the public “dialogue” is really about who is human.  They accuse us of being Untermenschen.  We say that is ridiculous, try to prove them wrong, and they shout louder, then stop participating, all while calling us prejudiced and ignorant bigots.  It is lunacy.

For my part, I really am starting to look at THEM as an inferior version of humanity.  They lack principles, lack character, lack curiosity, are chronically hateful and angry, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive, and all in support of policies which in general make the very things they claim to care about WORSE.  There is no upside.  There is no sunny side view of this public debacle.  There is nothing good about it.  Real people are hurt, the social fabric is torn, and viable solutions to real problems are made impossible. 

I was really feeling angry last night, more than I have in a long time.  Perhaps that is why I was so flippant this morning.  How do you deal with all this?  I honestly don’t know.

I am a man of many moods.  Sometimes I’m up, sometimes down.  I’m usually chasing something, except when I am sitting still and staring at the wall.  I can think of nothing drearier than making a concerted effort to always agree with myself, and remember who I was yesterday.  I am most reliable when I predict I will be unreliable. I do have a Lambda, but sometimes I am still looking for crawfish in the creek or envying a lazy hawk gliding in the air.

Although: I’m not a Californian: no, I am not that gone.

I am merely curious.  There’s always something off in the distance, or staring back at me from my belly button.

This, of course, is my dog speaking.

But why not some Emerson, too? 

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Am I great?  Most days I’m an idiot, but I think I do have some good moments.  Perhaps: “to be genuinely curious is to be misunderstood”.  Curiosity takes you off firm ground, and sends you you know not where.  As Emerson says, implicitly, most people worry more about how they are perceived than how they are perceiving.  This is pure silliness, and perhaps the deep root of most of the world’s ills.

So,
I sleep on a futon on
the floor.
The sun hits me at an
angle, but from the
other side of this thing
I live in.
(I face South),
and I Wake Up and
try and remember if
I am lonely
This morning, I’m
not sure.
I worry more about the
Enemy Within, than the
Friend Without.
I sit down on the crapper and
read Bukowski and think:
Shit, everyone can be a
poet.

I view myself as nothing more, and nothing less, than a foot soldier in a spiritual conflict.  My job is no more, and no less, than to stand my ground in the face of everything in this world which is seeking to distribute darkness and lies.  I have my Lambda, and I have my code.

And when I die, however I die, I ask only that I die knowing I did my job.

And I want to be clear: I am not melancholy.  Having a sense of purpose is a beautiful thing.

I will contextualize this post several ways.  First, I just watched the first episode of Wormwood.  I must confess to feeling uneasy, among other things, being reminded of the previously prominent roles both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld held under Ford, and seeing documentation on the role they played, apparently, in suppressing further disclosure in the Olson case, which involved among other things willfully lying to and misleading a grieving family. I see no reason to doubt this happened.

Then I got wondering about Laurance Rockefeller, who funded Stephen Greer, not least after being reminded it was the Rockefeller Commission (led by his brother Nelson) which exposed many of the misdeeds of the CIA.

Then I read that Laurance funded the legal defense of a man I had not heard of, Dr. John Mack.  Mack was a highly erudite, intelligent, and seemingly honest man who investigated supposed alien abductions, and concluded that, since the people involved seemed neither to be crazy nor lying, that something real must be going on.

This, my friends, is a rabbit hole.

Finally, most saliently, I was attacked by darkness itself last night. And I laughed at it. That was when I posted about fear.  It was 2am.  Who and what am I protecting?  This is the foundational Buddhist question.  It is the foundational LIFE question.  What I am is indissoluble, and within that is the key to peace.  Everything can be blown to bits, and yet something remains.  It always remains.

My work continues.  I have many, many miles to go.  But I seem to going in the right direction.

Well, I’m off now to some sunlight.  Enough of the cave for today.

I was watching a video on positive thinking.  Just tell the universe what you want, and it will come to you. 

This seems to me like an imposition.  You are telling the universe you want more of you.  You want to grow materially, and you want it to support you.  You are pushing out.

I am very leery when I hear people say “control what you think”.  Clearly, tactically, when you are in the middle of some time delimited operation, it’s important to stay on task.  But in life, telling yourself to laugh when you are miserable, to act happy when you are not, to think good thoughts when you hurt emotionally everywhere: it is a recipe for self destruction through self deception. It makes you fake.  It is easy to spot the people doing it.  Miserable but not fake is a thing.  Happy and not fake is a thing too, but one doesn’t see it very often.  Modestly OK but pretending to be happy: this one sees every day.

It is quite possible to hang an invitation to the universe in the air, and ask it to come to you, so that you can share coffee together in the middle. You can ask it what lies ahead, what it can tell you about the best path for you, where the learning is to be found.  You can give and you can take, and both parties leave satisfied.

Now, this is quite separate from the relationship you have with yourself.  It is important to learn not to be self abusive, but this is very different from positive thinking.  This is a gradual process of untying knots, of opening energy, of remembering that you too are a child of God, and God a Father/Mother/Light from whom you can seek guidance.

There is an ecology of spirit which I feel should be respected.

We get so many things so radically wrong in this world.  My hope we can do better does not rest on positive thinking, but on the observation that the future is unpredictable, and that if the past is filled with miracles–as it is, if you look for them–so too might the future be.

My two cents: no matter who Trump nominated, the Left was going to scream and hiss and pout and scream and try to hold it off until November and make it an election issue.  This would have been true if he nominated Alan Dershowitz.  His nomination alone makes it abominable.  Nothing else matters.

Now, one of two scenarios will pay out: Kavanaugh will get confirmed BEFORE the elections, or after.  If the Democrats play hard core partisan politics to delay his confirmation, then they open themselves to charges of being obstructionist.  Kavanaugh seems to be a moderate, and more or less a  replacement–which conservatives did NOT want, for Kennedy.  We want someone who reads the Constitution and sees it as binding law.  There is no evolution.  Evolution is provided within the Constitution through the Amendment process.  It is a changeable document, but through a process.  Valuing the Constitution as written is the JOB, as I and many see it, of the Supreme Court.  We have a Congress for everything else. You want a  new law, pass it, and get it signed.

But here is the thing: if they block Kavanaugh, and get painted as obstructionist–accurately, since he’s not the preference of most conservatives–they lose political points.  And if then Republicans keep the House and Senate, and overall put on a strong show indicating national support, as I think likely, then Trump can withdraw this nomination, and put in someone much more conservative, and dare the Democrats to block them too.  They can’t yell and scream forever, especially in the wake of an election in which the opposing party usually sees strong gains.  So they will confirm that person.

So, unless there really is a Blue Wave, which I very much doubt, given how insane the Democrats have become, and how widely and rapidly this realization seems to be spreading, they can either confirm Kavanaugh now, or someone more conservative later.

And strategically, putting up a hard core conservative likely would have helped the Dem’s in the mid-terms.  They could have played on the likely destruction of Roe v. Wade.  This guy doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, which mitigates this campaign theme. He’s as far to the left as Republicans will tolerate, and as far to the right as we can manage, and still make a strong claim that there is no just cause to delay his confirmation.

Trump wins either way.  It is not an ideal solution, but if politics is the art of the possible, maybe this guy is what was possible.

Or maybe we got sold down the river.  I don’t know.  I prefer the first option, though.