Month: November 2018

City Lights itself is generally in an anarchist, civil libertarian, antiauthoritarian tradition.  Martin [co-owner and founder Peter Martin] named the bookstore after the film by Charlie Chaplin, whose Little Man has always been a symbol of the subjective man against the world. In the tradition of the great literary bookstores on the East Coast and especially in Europe, City Lights began publishing its own books in 1955 and now has about 100 books in print, none federally financed by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Its editors, in the Anarchist/Surrealist tradition, like it that way.)

OK, I lied.  I lie.  Never trust me with silence.  What in there REALLY could an Objectivist find objectionable?  They are doing creative work, funding it themselves, and doing so in disregard to what other people think.  They are asking for freedom from coercion, but are not asking for a helping hand or a free lunch.  They are using Capitalist principles and methods to fund culturally original work.

In the same way that the Free Speech Movement WAS a movement for freedom, for useful freedom, for good freedom, these people, in their own way, were blazing a path that could have been useful.

But what expands too quickly tends to shrink.  Emotions based on naive hope deflate when they encounter opposition, and they turn easily to rage and resentment.  In my view, rage and resentment became their politics, after a good beginning.  Rage and resentment remained their politics, ever after, such that, to express their rage, they forgot their civil libertarianism and their antiauthoritarianism, certainly under Obama, but in spirit no doubt long before.  Most of these types have long since made their peace with authoritarianism which comes with the proper name and from the proper people.  They don’t know the quality of their coffee might drop precipitously, and objecting might get them in a Laogai.

This world is endlessly fascinating.  So often people say one thing and mean something else, without even realizing it.  You have to watch carefully, very carefully. 

I am going to do my best to throw myself into tomorrow, no matter what happens.  I am going to bed early tonight.  I’ll see at 5am or so what happened.  If we know. 

But I meant to post on something else.  Here is an excerpt from a Berkeley literary magazine, published around 1948:

Writers

There is a struggle going on for the minds of the American people.  Every form of expression is subject to attack of reaction.  This attack comes in the shape of silence, persecution, and censorship: three names for fear. In the face of this fear, the writer can speak.  We believe in the possibility of a culture which fights for its freedom, which protects the economic interests of its workers in all fields, including the arts, and which can create for itself new forms and new voices, against reaction, and against the threat of war.

I could go several directions with this, but the point I wanted to make is that they GOT the freedom they wanted.  It is like being a child demanding to stay out later, then you get that freedom.  And what, in turn, does that get you?  What good have these people done, really?

And I will add that “attacking reaction” is very much still with us.  I don’t know how this election will go, but this mindset of being outsiders is still very much with the political Left.  They don’t know how to govern: they just know how to oppose.  Hating Trump, as I’ve said. was their platform this cycle.  But if they could crash the economy so they could blame the Republicans then use the claim that they will grow the economy to get votes, they would.

There are people who are genuinely creative, who do truly benefit from greater freedom.  But I think attacking “convention” for the uncreative came at some point to be seen as creative in its own right.  What can I tear down today, they ask themselves.  What and who can I ruin? 

I’ll leave it there.  I know I repeat myself, but this theme–which amounts to the artist as human being, as libertine, as anti-bourgeoisie–is everywhere, and is everywhere pernicious to genuine creativity, and to genuine humanity and Humanism.

Look to the middle.  Always look to the middle.  Moderation, clarity, curiosity and persistence.  If you have genius, it will be found.  And if you do not, nothing and no one will be destroyed by your reckless imitation of it.

It is really astonishing that, given how negative the media is, that Trump continues to maintain and grow support.  As he says, the vibe I get is highly positive to Trump.  But maybe all the haters are simply hibernating and waiting their turn to do their best to shit on the best thing that has ever happened to poor Americans, at least for a long time.

We’ll see.

Fraud of course remains a possibility.  For the life of me, I don’t get why paper ballots are not required, at least as backup, and why we don’t have a national Voter ID law.  It affects the national government, and would thus seem to be precisely the sort of thing the 14th Amendment, I think it is, would allow the Federal Government to step in and regulate.  Either way, I’m sure Trump has many eyes on all the places where fraud might be likely or suspected.  Cheating with him as President will be much different than cheating when Obama was President.

More personally, I keep dreaming about my family.  And I am coming to realize I have to leave the emotional space I occupied then.  It was a traumatized, cold space, but a known space.  To travel farther down my spiritual path, I have to leave all I have known.  It is a difficult thing.  I have not known peace and comfort, love and true ease.  My home was not a happy place. 

But I have to walk out the door.  My uncle was charming, but he was a thief and a liar.  My parents welcomed me, but only as a prop, and a means by which to meet their own emotional needs.  My cousins are thieves too, and some are bullies.  Nowhere is there anything like a home.  Only a place I know.

Emotional motion is a subtle thing.  You see it in dreams.  I feel fear, even terror, walking out.  But I feel those things where I am.  There is no escape here: it can only lie there.  The only way out is out. I can only hope there is something better.  We all have to take risks in life.  Perhaps the part of life that matters most IS the part where we risk, and fail or succeed, and pick ourselves up, or celebrate.  With nothing to lose, gain feels much more empty.

Depending on who you believe, there may or may not be a caravan of people wanting to walk into our country and presumably either go on welfare, or take jobs currently held by someone else.  If they do exist, Democrats support them, because Trump opposes them.

Given that Trump is trying to help Americans, and manifestly succeeding in many ways, this attitude is childish, self absorbed and rude.

But you can vote for it, nonetheless.

Chance?  I don’t know.  It’s odd, certainly.  It started a few days before the march–which was last weekend–and is now more or less done.

When you read about what MK-Ultra was capable of–technologically and perhaps as importantly, morally–back in the 1960’s, where do you think they are now? 

On one of my conspiracy, spooky-dooky hippy things, they commented that the saying in Washington is that if you get caught doing something wrong, you change the room numbers.  If it’s really awful, change your telephone number.

It was almost purely by chance we know ANYTHING about MK-Ultra, and it seems certain that the mass of documents were ordered destroyed by the out-going CIA Director Helms.  That is certainly the allegation, and the facts of the case were uncovered by a private journalist, not the government.

I know what I know, and could I place someone into a contained dissociation, with some practice and proper equipment?  Yes, I think I could.  Under certain conditions, our personalities are made to split.  It is a survival mechanism.

God only knows what is really going on, but there is no reason to assume that benevolent, liberal minded, fair, and emotionally integrated people are running it.

I AM paranoid, but that does not mean it is not later than you think.

What IS happening, though, and it COULD amount to the same thing, is that the Left has REVEALED itself, before it intended to.  The basic template, the one enacted among others by Lenin, Castro, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, is to create a liberal and tolerant Big Tent sort of face, to generate broad support for your ascendency.  You signal Liberalism as long as you can.  THEN, once you get power, or close enough to power, you start knocking off your opponents.  Actually, that is more or less what Hitler did too, although his radicalism should have been obvious enough.  Fascists in general think the same as Communists, but they are as a rule much more honest.

What is happening here is the Obama prepped the totalitarian phase through 8 years of indoctrination, and only did this because it was assumed by all his reign would continue under Hillary, and that all this frenzy-inducing propaganda would at that point be helpful, since it would have been supported from on high.

Again: this is why Hillary’s loss was so catastrophic.  They had no Plan B.  They were arrogant.

But in general–and we will see what happens Tuesday, and again in 2020–ordinary, normal people are turned off by, and often repulsed by, blood sucking vampires and zombies.  They are repulsed by thoughtless, rude, contemptuous, violent people who insist that debate is where they declare themselves right and you agree out of fear or self interest.

If Castro had done this, he likely would have been toppled immediately.  But far too many people believed him far too long.  The CIA–God bless your corrupt, usually evil souls–called it right nearly from the outset.

Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Albany to Montreal every week to work at McGill’s Allan Memorial Institute and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there, the Montreal experiments. In addition to LSD, he experimented with various paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power.^[23] His “driving” experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many suffered permanent debilitation after these treatments.^[24] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.^[25] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the Intelligence Services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.^[26] Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.

On Cameron:

Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901 – 8 September 1967)^[1] — known as D. Ewen Cameron or Ewen Cameron — was a Scottish-born psychiatrist who served as President of the American Psychiatric Association(1952–1953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (1958–1959),^[2] American Psychopathological Association (1963),^[3] Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965)^[4] and World Psychiatric Association (1961–1966).^[5] In spite of his high professional reputation, he has been criticized for his abuse of minors, administering electroshock therapy and experimental drugs to patients without their informed consent. Some of this work took place in the context of the Project MKUltra mind control program. 

President of the WORLD Psychiatric Association.