Month: October 2018

I found this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen

Both of my degrees are from schools which, spelled phonetically, say “you see”.

With respect to a background I will not say more about, I would like to comment that intellectual in-breeding is both the impetus behind, and the principle result of, safe spaces. The longer term result is plainly Selection for hypohemic, hairless rodents which spend all their time gnawing and hiding, and seeking out the relative warmth of shared opinions and fellow Yes’s.

Couple thoughts:

1.  Sometimes you are the only one.  Do not be afraid to be the only one.  Speak your truth even if the world thinks you are mad, because if you let the world see through your eyes, then you truly ARE mad.  There is a sharp contrast drawn in this movie, and conformity–made inevitable through the principled rejection of Individualism which is the foundational principle of Collectivism–is the opposite of life, of human flourishing, of love, of laughter, and of the spirit.

2. I am reminded of what I in my own mind, and perhaps here, have at times called the Wolverine Code.  It is a set of principles which will allow you to survive, even if everything you know, including your identity, is taken from you.

They will be familiar, if you have followed me for any lengthy of time:

1. Reject self pity
2. Persevere
3. Be curious and always learning.

Everything good, in my view, can be built through these principles over time.  They are principles which tend, always (such is my hope and intent, at any rate), to the good over time, and tend away from dogmatism, lies, and death.  We all make mistakes.  The only mistakes which are permanent are those which you conflate with reality, and genuine curiosity prevents that from happening, again over time.

3. Something like this is at the root of all religions.  Christianity posits this world as a temporary place, with heaven, hell (and Purgatory, if you are Catholic) being the true realities.  Ponder this for a moment.  Consider it as real.

4. This movie really made me appreciate the value of sunshine, beautiful fall days like we are having today, and overall made me grateful for one more day alive, one more day to learn, to enjoy the countless gifts which have been given me, and one more day to begin to remember who I am, and what I am here for.

Edit: 5. This is also a good symbolic representation of Heideggers “Verworfenheit”. He was not wrong about this, but what we were born not knowing, we were born with the capacity to build. Building is life. Perhaps we are all merely sophisticated beavers. So be it. Build anyway.

You can only give from a surfeit.

I think I can state this as an absolute principle.  I think most of the trouble in the world comes from people trying to give what they don’t have; and, of course, from people taking what they don’t have, which is as old as humanity, and probably endemic even among animals not restrained by herd or pack instincts.

Thieves are obvious enough.  It is the apparently enlightened givers of nothing, or of others somethings, which concerns me here.

And I would say, in order to make myself slightly more clear, that the giving which matters most is of calm, order, peace, inspiration, and purpose.  There are rickshaw drivers in the Orient (yes, the Orient) who are vastly happier than billionaires in mansions overlooking the sea.

And I would add, too, on a slightly different note, that one obvious take-away from the history of religion, which is or was my particular field, is that massive paradigmatic cultural changes are possible, and can happen suddenly, as seen from the perspective of history.

First, watch as much as this video as you can take.  I will warn you, it never gets better, and arguably gets worse, but hey, maybe that is your thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b27dcvjOOs8

Here is your question, which I will form in a Kantian way: would you want the ethics, values and manner of social engagement of the person doing the filming generalized?

Put another way, would you want to see this on every street in America?

If so, then Democrats are your people.

If not, vote straight ticket Republican.  You have no serious choice, unless you happen to have some residual sane Democrats in your area.  I’m not seeing any national sign of them anywhere.  Sure, some Mayors here and there, and perhaps a Representative or two–the one in my area is swinging hard right (for now)–but overall, if these lunatics get power, they will FUCK THE COUNTRY UP.

Jobs or mobs.  Builders or wreckers.  Sanity or the demonic (and I do mean that literally).

Edit: I will add that he literally seems to think that his footage helps his case.  He demands the officers immediately surrender the footage to an attorney who hates police.  He posted what he posted thinking that he had captured something other than extraordinarily disciplined and professional police officers trying, despite his best efforts to do their job.

He is very much like the limp wristed bully who is gleeful when he can torment a bear tethered to a stake, or confined in a cage.  He KNOWS he is safe, PRECISELY because he knows the cops, in actuality are disciplined professionals.  In Mexico or Brazil, to take a couple examples, they would just break his camera, beat the shit out of him, then throw him in jail to marinate for a week or a month.  He’s that little dog that barks at you from a distance, but gets terrified the moment you move towards it.

All bullies are like this.  And all these people are bullies.  They are driven mad by anger issues which have nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with their uselessness and powerlessness as human beings, but which get EXPRESSED through politics.  And for those who need to get out rage, the Left has always had a ready avenue.

And I do think that while people should be free to say what they want to police, there need to be limits.  This is very much a social Broken Window sort of thing.  If you put up with people calling you asshole to your face, then much worse things are coming.  If you arrest, consistently, such people, then eventually that will stop being a daily stressor, which for all any of us know, may get taken out on some poor soul far from cameras and far from help.  You know, like a black man, who none of these white thugs ACTUALLY give a flying fuck about.  Nobody is allowed to CALL them the N-word, but it is thoroughly implied by all.

Black people, for their part, need to realize that there is no worse enemy than a false friend.  They are better off with people who don’t care if they live or die, than with people who want to keep them down as a matter of policy, so they can make themselves rich.

The question is really this: how do we occupy, emotionally, a world which is in a process of continual, global, and paradigmatic change?  A world where we fear daily we will read about some massive holocaust, and where we do read about angry people, new and possibly dangerous technologies, amoral leaders, and in which seemingly everything and everyone is interconnected?

I vastly prefer this to, say, the dislocations of the Hutus and Tutsis, both, in their civil war.  I think of the 250,000 Hutus who entered the Congolese jungle, and of whom only 40,000 emerged, all of whom, with perhaps a few exceptions, were then slaughtered and starved even then.  This is horrific.

What is happening to us is not that concrete, not that specific, not that real.  Rather, it seems there is a drip, drip, drip in which we daily lose some fixed source of comfort, in which something we thought we knew is taken from us, in which our culture and history is attacked, in which some small slice of our sense of self is taken elsewhere for examination, in which lab coats and expensive suits tell us everything will be alright, and we don’t, in the main, believe them.

How to occupy this world, with eyes open, with a receptive heart?  This is the question of our age, and those who have glib and easy answers are idiots.  Their solution is blindness.  Blindness is always an easy answer, but in my own world–resting as it does on the primacy of building accurate perceptions–such a thing is as close to a mortal sin as I can conceive.  I speak here mainly of those I call Sybaritic Leftists, and would include there people whose views on the universe and human relations as a whole I would otherwise support, like Deepok Chopra and Brene Brown.

I, obviously, haven’t worked it out.  I may never work it out.  But I guarantee I will spend the rest of my life trying.  It’s the only game in town worth playing.

Edit: I will add that the superficiality, particularly, of all hard core Leftists–who I will include in this group in the process of defining them–consists more or less in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of relationship with the “captors” of uncertainty, cultural erosion, and fear of the future, as manifested in psychotics with plans, like George Soros and the people ultimately behind Barack Obama.

Perhaps the relationship of fearful minds and evil has always been like this.  I suspect this to be true.  There is nothing new under the sun.

Courage, of course, is the answer.  How to summon and sustain it: that is my task.

1. How is it no one is asking questions about the apparently $21 TRILLION which is unaccounted for?  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-government-spent-21-trillion-of-our-money-without-telling-us/#6949fddd7aef

I was watching my little weirdo alien series on Gaia again last night.  90% of it is stupid.  90% of it is not worthy anyone’s time.  But occasionally they share things I did not know, and seem to have parceled out the actually interesting bits across multiple shows.

A core, recurring contention is that we have what they call a “breakaway civilization” which is funded, in the main, through diverted Federal tax revenues.  Would $21 trillion be enough to do that?  Of course.  As recently as 2000 or so the annual budget was roughly $2 trillion.  $1 trillion, self evidently, is half of that.  HALF.

Here is an excerpt:

On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s “failure to correct system deficiencies.” The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments.  No information is given about these 170 transactions.  

Now, the entire Federal budget was not $6.5 trillion in 2015, so these must relate to past transactions.  The $21 trillion number relates to 1998 to 2015, or over $1 trillion a year, when the budgets were $2-3 trillion or so.

In what I might submit as the understatement of the year, this is not chump change.  Why is no one asking questions about this?

2.  I will ask again: why is everyone in our political world perfectly OK with our money being controlled by banks whose exact dealings are completely secret?

Put another way, why WOULDN’T they use this absurd system to become sickeningly wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, as seems to have happened?  As I understand the math, our money supply has roughly quadrupled since 1980 or so, when the Fed used the inflation they created to get the last restraints on their action removed.  ALL of that wealth went, first, to them.  No doubt much of it was invested productively, as loans to expand businesses, but this is very much a “one for me, one for you” sort of situation.

It’s absurd.  Ludicrous.  And self evidently, if they are in on whatever game the DoD is playing, there is no limit to how much money they can give them. 

I think now would be a good time for people who pray, to start praying for our country, and for the world.  Pray for peace, pray for understanding, and pray that Republicans (and any good Democrats, if you are able to identify any) win the election.  Jobs or mobs.

If you visualize, visualize.  If you meditate, meditate.