Month: November 2018

Nothing of consequence ever came out.  Remember Trump ordering this declassified, and that it was to be done expeditiously?  It wasn’t done at all, as far as I can tell. The Deep State won again.

We all–and I am guilty no doubt myself, often–get sucked into a news cycle of accusation and counter-accusation, event-interpretation-counter interpretation, such that there is so much noise, very little Big Picture, where is this all going sorts of conversations are possible.  Certainly, in any event, they don’t happen.

I’ve never seen an honest public discussion of the Fed in my lifetime, not by our Congress or any President.  Nor an honest analysis of the effects on our generalized well being of easy money and following inflation. As recently as the early 1970’s the value of sound money was understood.  Since we forgot, the amount of money in existence has quadrupled, with most of the wealth going to 5 or 10 banks.

Some amount between $10 and $21 TRILLION remains unaccounted for over the past twenty years or so, which is something between a quarter and half of TOTAL outlays.  How is a discussion of this not imperative?  You could fund ANYTHING with that much money.  Can we not at least audit the DoD?  And how about the CIA?

It remains the case that high level, highly intelligent, well connected people have said that our government is in contact with extraterrestrials–people like Edgar Mitchell, sixth man on the moon, and Paul Hellyer, Canadian Minister of Defense.  They didn’t benefit from these claims in any way I can see, and thus there was no reason to lie, and neither seems crazy.  This was a favorite argument of C.S. Lewis for the sincerity of Christ, but it works equally here.

Think big.

You know, global warming is not a real global issue, in my opinion.  AI is.  It is something we should be debating carefully, and regulating as well as possible, while recognizing that the drug war did not work.

I just watched Deep Space, Season 2, Episode 11, and it was vastly less weird than some of them, although I am probably forgetting some of the really weird things I happened to agree with.

Why do you think this is not a popular conversation?  Is it, perhaps, for the same reason the solvency–as discussed from a detailed data perspective–of Social Security and Medicare are not discussed often, at least honestly?

I really think that, by and large, the future of the human species will be decided within ten years.  By 2030 at the outside, but likely sooner.

Think about Moore’s Law: a doubling in processing capacity every 18 months.  Take today.  By the middle of 2020 current best chips will have doubled.  By 2022 again.  By 2024 again.  Etc.

And when you are doubling something that is already absurdly fast, that is a major step forward.

Can anyone really doubt that what they call in that documentary Stage 2 AI will happen somewhere in the early 2020’s, if not sooner?

As I say, I look at all this, and I am awed.  Overawed.  I want to retreat.  I want to dissolve my perceptions, and retreat to simply and stupid things.

But, that is not how I am built.  I move into uncertainty.  I look at what frightens me.  I stare at it.  Sometimes I obsess with it.  I move into it.   I do my best to take control of it.  This is my job.  This is why I am here.

How it all goes, I have no idea.  I will, however, fight to my last idea, and my last word, and my last bit of resistance.

Maybe it will all work out, magically.  But that sort of magic I place very little faith in. Most of the time, if something looks fucked up, it is.  I don’t know how we survive all this.  I only know that we have to try.

Non-Player Character Battleship gray is currently trendy in Corporate America.  I’m not making this up.  I’m plugged into all that.  Gray makes for ugly fucking spaces.

Nationalism, the way Trump uses it, really has only two components:

1) As individuals, we should feel greater loyalty to, and compassion for, our fellow Americans, relative to the citizens of any other nation. This does not mean we should not feel compassion for the worlds suffering, but rather that we recognize there remains plenty of work to do here.

2) On a national, policy level, when there is a conflict between American interests and those of some other nation, we side with America. This should be self evidently the JOB of our government, but Obama, particularly, pursued a different policy, one which saw our national leader abasing himself in front of two bit dictators like Fidel Castro.

What doesn’t kill you can still leave lasting wounds. You first have to survive, then survive the surviving.

I never saw Unbroken, because I knew enough details to know his struggle was not done when that war was over. And thus I find it fascinating they made a second movie about his healing. THAT is the part that interests me.

So often, in surviving, you have to mortgage everything, nearly everything that makes you human. You put your best parts in hock, in exchange for just getting through. What is left at the end is not what began. And in such a circumstance, it is not really healing, but recreation. That is all that is strong enough. Everything else is bandaids and blindness.

You cannot care equally about all people, all the time.  You can privilege this as an ideal, but practically, if you are worth a shit to anyone, you have to make decisions.

And logically, if you care as much about people who are far from you as those who are close to you, you can and should be regarded as an unreliable and disloyal flake.  This is a principle as old as human history, although it may be that only in recent decades have people even thought to contravene it.

The Democrats claimed to care about American working poor for a long time.  I think we can safely say they have moved beyond that.  They are siding with a caravan filled with the refuse of 4-5 countries, over poor single mothers born here, over working poor, over our own homeless, over our veterans.

This is madness.  Simple madness or, as Gillum’s aide put it in the O’Keefe video, with reference to Gillum “Crazy, crazy, crazies.”

We have a Ruling Class, and they hate Trump.

Do you think getting rid of Trump will get rid of the Ruling Class? 

Do you think they hate Trump because he HELPS them?

Do you think Socialism is something other than a congenial way for them to get your ass and lock it up forever?

BLRO: Big Lie Repeated Often.

Geobbels woudl rejoice to see his methods working so well, even more than half a century later, even when people COULD, if they chose, consume enough media sources to approximate truth.

When they say “Medicare for all” say, “no, VA for all.”

And it’s a much better comparison.

I was dreaming of my family last night.  I get lonely sometimes.  And they are all right there.  I can talk to any of them any time I want.  But I invariably get this feeling of being unseen, and a feeling of numbness.  I felt like I rented a room at my home, that I paid them to be there, and that they felt no more affection for me than a landlord would.

This sort of thing leaves a hole in you.  That hole may be numb.  But numbness has a feeling texture to it, and within it is a creepy horror of sorts. How DO we lose one another?  Do you think my story is that unusual? 

Fear hovers over the landscape.  There are many fears.  There is the fear of nuclear annihilation, of course, fear of crime and losing your job.  Fear of illness, perhaps.

But mostly I think there is this fear that we are all alone, that we are all destined to spend our lives pretending to be somebody we aren’t, and that all of our screams need to be silent and never seen.

Perhaps horror movies represent the inner landscape of many, perhaps of many who do not even realize what is wrong.  They feel, something, but they have no word for it, and to the extent it is an absence–an absence of true love, of true intimacy, of true belonging–it will always be hard to put a name to it.

I myself remember fighting with my father, who insisted he gave me everything I needed, and when I protested–I will never forget his face or the word he chose–he said, is it something, more esoteric?

What I needed was love and recognition.  What I needed was a father who was emotionally alive.  But even I couldn’t put words to it back then.  Love was simply not a word that was used in our home.  They never told me they loved me, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why.  It just wasn’t something I ever thought about.  Love was not on my radar as something to worry about or pursue.

And so I became intellectual, as I am here.  Over time, I have grown, but I still have severe developmental deficiencies.  It can be hard being me.

And I am not so foolish as to think there are not millions like me.  We are the potheads, the drunks, the heroin addicts, the techies (addicted to work and abstraction).  We are all the people who feel alone wherever they go.

I feel terror every day, sometimes, still, to the point of shaking.  At night, always, if I don’t go to bed drunk.  But I am determined to make a difference in this world. I continue to take steps to pursue my vision.  None of this alienation is necessary.  If our best minds had made it their task to reestablish Gemeinschaft rather than mine alienation for political gain, we would live in a different world.  But our best minds came up with Nazism and Communism, which are simultaneously totalizing and atomizing.

There is a better way.  There is a better way.  I am well on my way to mapping it out fully.