Month: September 2018

Just because you hate your job, and just because there are very rich people out there, does not mean life or our system are unfair.

It is odd to think that so many people think intelligence is the summum bonum of human existence.  Intelligence comprehends the experience of competence, of understanding, of efficiency, but does not comprise it.  It is quite possible for someone baking really good peanut butter cookies to feel the same joy and pride as a mathematician might feel in solving a particularly vexing problem.

You might say this is wrong, because the one is vastly harder, vastly more useful, perhaps, than the cookies.  This may be true, but am I wrong?  Should we call the person stupid for feeling good about his or her cookies?  Should we not take MORE opportunities to feel good, not less?  Would the world not be a better place if we did?

In America, particularly, we have this cult of efficiency.  It has, to state the obvious, made us more efficient, but only at creating and distributing things.  It has made us stupid when it comes to the savoring and appreciation of life. In doing everything faster, we do everything which matters worse, or not at all.

I think AI is the ultimate emblem of this.  Some seem to feel that, as frenetic as our pace already is, it should be faster, that, lacking any sound reason for doing so, we should do more and more.

I ask: Why?  what is the goal?  We’ve solved the problem of hunger, in this country at least, at least for the vast bulk of our citizens.  And AI is not being created to feed the heroin addicts laying on the sidewalk down on Market Street.

It would seem we know more and more about less and less.  What we know doesn’t really matter, and what really matters we seemingly know nothing about.  This is only mild hyperbole, in far too many cases.

I talk with rich people sometimes, and you know, they pay a price for their wealth.  They earn it.  Don’t envy them, most of them in any event.

Turns out Nike calculated correctly: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colin-kaepernick-nike-6-billion-man/

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/what-boycott-nike-sales-are-31-percent-kaepernick-campaign-n908251

I think it was PT Barnum, or perhaps H.L. Mencken, who said that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”

Amazing.  We live in a fallen world, in my view.  Everyone staring at their smart phones, thinking nothing, believing nothing, and admiring people who do, even when what they believe is ridiculous, and what they think even worse.

I want to be clear that I am not stupid enough to think all Republicans are good, or that all Democrats are bad.  I know for certain there have to be lifelong Democrats, who remain Democrats, who are appalled by the radical direction the leadership of the party has been taking it.

And Dennis Hastert was a senior Republican.  I don’t forget.

What we are fighting for is not a specific content of policy, not a specific set of ideas, OTHER than that the most civilized, mature, and truly Liberal way of conducting business, of setting policy, of making decisions, is through principled and mutually respectful dialogue and negotiation.

Where the Democrats have good ideas, they should be heard.  And where Republicans have good ideas, they, in turn, should be heard.

But so much of our political landscape is militating against this very reasonable proposal.  We are to be reduced to a landscape of shouting and lies, a brawl in the mud, where the most aggressive, most devious side wins, the one that gets there “firstest with the mostest”.

All sane people should oppose this.  All sane people should oppose Dianne Feinstein sitting on this accusation for 2 months, then bringing it out at a time calculated to create the most trouble, and the most opportunity for political grandstanding in the face of the reasonable outrage and protestation she knew would be the result, long before brought out the letter she cited, but won’t let anyone see.

At issue is not just the accusation, but the process by means of which it was brought into the public domain, specifically the timing.  She can’t shout, now, that the committee won’t grant more time, when there was PLENTY of time, had she just done the right thing.

It is not entirely unjustified to point out that Republicans blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland for a year, and ultimately defeated it.  They played politics.

But if you study history, hyperpartisanship with regard to Supreme Court nominations, which have historically basically just asked “is this a good man or woman”, began with Robert Bork.  To “Bork” someone has entered our political lexicon.

And this process extends from the fact that increasing tribalization has forced us to ask not what is good for all of us, but what is good for one tribe or the other.

On the one side, Democrats want to continue the erosion of the Constitution, to continue reducing the protections of our civil liberties this document offers, and to continue to place a premium on selfishness, bias, and one-sided deals.

On the other side, because of this, merely asserting that you value the Constitution as written, that you value the freedoms of speech and religion, that you resent an omnipotent Federal government, that the government should fear the people, not vice versa, gets you labeled not just conservative but reactionary and evil.  Ponder this.

This whole Kavanaugh feels like a much more important fight than it should be.  For my part, I actually question Kavanaugh’s conservative bona fides.  I think he will be a more or less exact replacement of Kennedy, which means he will side with the Obama people from time to time.

But it feels to me like Republicans in Congress are fighting for the right of common sense, common decency, truth, and honest civic mindedness to continue to exist and prevail in our public domain, as against the attacks of lies, grandstanding, devious tricks, and ideological gerrymandering created by our media.

It’s maddening.

It’s hard to know the way forward.  But the way backwards, towards failure, is always as simple as giving up. It’s OK to be confused, unsure.  But it is not OK to quit making decisions, acting on them, learning from them, and trying to do better on an on-going basis.

Contemplating Neal Cassady, without whom “On the Road” would not have been written, and without whom, arguably, Howl would not have been written (it is dedicated to him, and it worth noting Ginsberg had a sexual relationship with Cassady and seems to have been in love with him), and thus, without whom, the “Beats” likely never would have been, it is obvious in retrospect that his “love” of life was really a mad dash away from himself, from his deepest feelings, from what hurt inside of him, and which was, thus, a race towards a suicide of some sort.

He died at 41.  Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

In January 1967, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George “Barely Visible” Walker and Cassady’s longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. In a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, they were joined by Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed drives in Walker’s Lotus Elan, and the use of LSD made for a classic Cassady performance — “like a trained bear,” Carolyn Cassady once said. Cassady was beloved for his ability to inspire others to love life. Yet at rare times he was known to express regret over his wild life, especially as it affected his family. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him; “twenty years of fast living—there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”

During the next year, Cassady’s life became less stable, and the pace of his travels more frenetic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, Denver, New York City, and points in between. Cassady then returned to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio, on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild), visited Ken Kesey’s Oregon farm in December, and spent the New Year with Carolyn at a friend’s house near San Francisco. Finally, in late January 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.

On February 3, 1968, Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. After the party, he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the tracks, reportedly by Anton Black, later a professor at El Paso Community College, who carried Cassady over his shoulders to the local post office building. Cassady was then transported to the closest hospital where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his 42nd birthday.

The exact cause of Cassady’s death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name Seconal. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply, “general congestion in all systems.” When interviewed later, the physician stated that he was unable to give an accurate report because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved. “Exposure” is commonly cited as his cause of death, although his widow believes he may have died of renal failure.

To my mind, Cassady kind of embodies the YOLO mindset.  But life is everywhere.  It is in the room where you are now.  It is in the eyes of those you know.  It is outside of your window, in the growth and the sleep of all that lives.  It seems to me that in PURSUING life, that you have forgotten how to live it.  You are chasing what is not already there within you.  Being empty, you go in endless circles, which you justify by calling it “drinking the marrow of life”.

There is nothing wrong with going slow.  There is nothing wrong with savoring all the plenty which is blossoming everywhere, if you only learn how to see.

I have taken to reading motivational quotes to myself in the morning, one of which is Chief Tecumsah’s call to “love your life, perfect your life, beautify everything in your life.  Seek to make your life long and it purpose in the service of your people.”

All of this may seem irrelevant.  But when Paypal, for example, bans InfoWars, the roots of that possibility extend back, in some ways, to how Cassady chose to live his life, to what he chose to value.  He should not be a hero.  He should not be a role model.  But this spirit lives on.  It leads minds into unnecessary vanity, stupidity, ugliness, pettiness, and ultimately aggression and violence.

Either you are with us or against us, college students are taught.  Either you are good or you are bad, and if you are bad, you cannot be reasoned with.  All of the beauty, all of the LIFE, resides on one side, and not the other.  All of the love, decency, courage lie on one side, and not the other.  The other people are ugly.  They are abominations.  They hate freedom, they hate tolerance, they hate everything all good people stand for.  Trump is literally Hitler, because he is not one of us, and Hitler is the only symbol of evil we can all agree on.

The guy who got Burroughs hooked on “junk”, and taught him the life of a petty hoodlum, thief, and general lowlife, was a guy named Herbert Huncke.

From the Beat Reader:

He first met William Burroughs in 1944, when Burroughs was trying to sell a [stolen] sawed off shotgun and some morphine syrettes.  Burroughs took Huncke, according to biographer Ted Morgan, as a sort of ‘Virgilian guide to the lower depths. . .[He] was the first hipster. . .an antihero pointing the way to an embryonic counter-culture, which would arise from this Times Square world of hustlers.. . .

Allan Ginsberg, on Huncke:

[Huncke’s] prose proceeds from his midnight mouth, that is, literal story-telling, just talking–for that reason it is both awkward and pure. . .In his anonymity & holy Creephood in New York he was the sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness which spread to others sensitized by their dislocation from History and then to entire generations. 

I will note that Brecht’s Three Penny Opera depends on the anti-hero, Mackie Messer, immortalized as Mack the Knife, who is a two bit criminal, thug, and cutthroat.

It is quite possible to look at all the unwashed masses of hippies as direct descendants of fuckups from the worst parts of New York.  They preach love, but you don’t have to talk to an average hippy too long before you start hearing stories of theft, abuse, grotesque selfishness, violence, and even sociopathy.

One rich girl I know (Ah, you’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it) told me a story of being on the road with the Dead, and they have a ritual–I forget the name–where LSD is fed forcibly and involuntarily to someone while they are held down.  She tripped for three days.  I think she still has PTSD from it, although I don’t think she can admit it, since she still loves the Dead, and Deadheads.

Going to Berkeley, I ran into more Deadheads than I can count.  By and large, the hard core ones are thieves, drug pushers, liars, and complete flakes.  While I was there a group of them built some pipe bombs which were found before they could do anything with them, and of that group one later broke into the Chancellors house with a machete, and was shot dead by a cop.

Large things come from small things.  This is why it is important to trace beginnings, because even large things carry the mark of their beginnings.

Our culture values hard work, honesty, civic mindedness, piety, family, courage, and it used to value frugality, which was made impractical by Fed policy of steadily diluting the value of our money.

To be “counter” to this, you need to value dishonesty, disengagement or active opposition to everything positive anyone is trying to do, laziness, radical selfishness, cowardice and prodigality.

This IS the “counterculture”.  They are reasonably open about it.  Watch Rent, and look for all this.  The frustrated “auteur” is in nearly all cases a radical narcissist, who merely needs people from time to time.

What we see in the Democrats today–and in the principled rot in many Republicans–is all an outflow from people like Howard Huncke. 

And I might comment that Beat has roughly the same connotation as Punk.  Kerouac later tried to claim it referred to beatitude and similar words, but in the original use it referred to being tired, worn out, defeated, done.  To being the dregs of society, the bottom, the gutter, the forgotten.  Because this is what they were.  This is who they hung around with.  And nearly all of them were homosexuals.  Burroughs was married for a time, but he shot his wife–accidentally, we are told, but perhaps accidentally on purpose.  Kerouac was bi, Cassady was bi, Ginsberg was gay.

And the term punk came from the slang for what we would in America call a prison bitch. They were the ones who wound up getting fucked up the ass in jail.  The losers.  The bottom of the heap, who, understandably, were filled with rage.

Ginsberg actually worked with The Clash, which was highly appropriate.

Truth is knowable.  What exists, can always be understood, or at least understood better.  Clear thinking is possible.  Clear language is possible.  Principle based thinking can still be performed.  Nonsense can be rejected, as needed with anger and even rage.

These things need to be said.  And I doubt very much they can be said enough, much less too much.

Well, with the ban rescinded, Google seems to have become evil: https://www.infowars.com/google-employees-reportedly-forced-to-delete-chinese-censorship-memo/

I say again: no TRUE Liberal would come within a mile of this.  China is the sort of repressive regime that Amnesty International supposedly exists to oppose.  They still arrest dissidents, they still operate gulags, and the mass of Chinese are still treated like serfs, as far as I can tell.

China is a class based society, like it always has been.  “Communism” changed nothing, other than to remove all the traditional, palliating notions, like that the King enjoyed divine favor, and that there were heavens to go to after this world.

We can debate the existence of  God, but “History” is plainly a fiction of academics like Marx who never left their studies, hated people, lied and cheated their way through life, and died miserable and pathetic human beings.

It occurs to me Grassley should blame Dianne Feinstein for Ford not testifying.  He should say that Ford’s Senator let her down.  Not only did she hold onto the letter long past the appropriate time to reveal it, but she is unwilling even now to share the original with the committee.

Feinstein is a senior Senator.  She knows the rules.  She did what she did intentionally.  She could have created the space to include Ford and give her plenty of time to work out agreeable conditions, but she kept her silence ALL THE WAY through the hearings, then pulled this out last minute.  It’s not appropriate.  It’s not fair to the Senate, to her colleagues and to the American people.

She had her chance.  She blew it.

And I will add, again, that you cannot simply allow left wing lunatics to insult you because they are wrong.  You cannot allow them to speak lies simply because they are lies.  There has to be a counter-attack.  There have to be competing stories, because when you have one story only, no matter how ridiculous it is to sane people, it will win for lack of competition.

I think Grassley should specifically attack Feinstein.  And as far as that goes, why not?  She DESERVES it.  She knew full fucking well what she was doing.  She is telling the Senate to fuck itself, and telling the American people to go fuck themselves.  This was not a mistake: it was a calculation, an opportunity to insult and denigrate her colleagues for partisan purposes.  Demeaning and insulting them with no true provocation IS the game she wants to play.

Trump has shown how to counter-punch.  All Republicans would do well to listen and learn.  They fear the fallout, but the truth is that many people are unreachable, and if you are speaking your truth clearly, blatantly, and even crassly, it will be heard, understood, and believed by more people than I think most of them would have thought possible.