Month: May 2019

I’m involved somewhere on the interwebs with one of the sorts of mouth frothing, demonic, chronically enraged Leftists whose absence I was commenting on a couple weeks ago.  That energy does not evaporate, and these people do not learn.  They are far beyond the capacity for learning.  That is what I wanted to comment on here. 

But I wanted to make a brief comment on my own mental health, my own self assessment.  I seem to have formed a robust habit of weighing myself daily, and I am going to discontinue posting results here.  I hit 279 Sunday, got drunk Sunday night and gained a bit back, but I think the overwhelming bulk of momentum is going in the right direction.

In my own view, my reality testing is outstanding.  It is better than most people, better than most pundits, better than most professionals.  The reason for this is that I grew up in a home where everyone lied about everything continually, without even realizing they were lying.  You can lie with your being.  This caused me to grow up with a passionate commitment to truth telling, at least to myself.  It caused me to be able to recognize the presence even of unwelcome truths, of awful truths, of things I did not want to be true, but which I could not avoid.

On this score, I would count myself on the opposite pole from schizophrenia.

My core problem is self regulation.  It is impulse control, and more importantly, the inability to consistently calm myself down without alcohol.  This is residual trauma, which you cannot wish or will away.  It takes time, it takes patience, it takes strategy, and it takes tools, all of which I am applying with progressively better results.

I am, if anything, excessively aware of the feelings of others.  When I go to the mall, I have a pretty good idea what sort of state nearly everyone I see is in.

Now, having said that, I would like to compare and contrast myself with the Ideal Type of a dedicated Leftist.

What is conspicuous about such people is that they are never interacting with the you that you are putting in front of them with your words.  They are interacting with their idea of you, and that idea, in turn, is nearly entirely conditioned by an anger that you would dare disagree with them.  In important respects, it makes no difference to them if you are a real person, or merely an hallucination they have to talk themselves down from, to return to the Terra Firma of what they want to acknowledge as their core commitments, and the sense of Self they derive from those commitments.

Here is the thing: ideological commitments are foundationally different from religious and tribal commitments.  They derive from the same biological impulses, from the remembered need for sociality to survive, from a need for reinforcement in the patterns you have chosen, but there is ultimately no room for the actual individual in, say, a Communism or a Fascism.

If you live in a small Muslim community in, say, Jordan, you have a name and a place.  You are Ahmad son of Muhammad.  You are cousin to so and so, and friends with so and so.  People see you and recognize you as Ahmad.

To be clear, you are expected to abide by community standards, to go to the mosque on Fridays, to say your prayers (if that is a need in your particular community), but you can be both a person and a Muslim. You have the wave and the particle.

Ideologies, particularly Communism, discard with place and identity.  Your family is unimportant.  Your home is unimportant.  Where you come from is unimportant.  What you were raised to believe is unimportant, if it is other than Communist dogma.  Your city doesn’t matter.  Your country doesn’t matter.  YOU, in other words, don’t matter.  You are a donkey who carries the burden placed on its back.

There is no true belonging in Communism.  What there is, is a relaxation of the terror of being different.  You can feel safe that you will not be imprisoned or killed, because you are saying and doing the right things, but there is no festival which will make you truly feel like you belong as a person. 

Ideology of this sort is a sort of permanent spasm of the animal self.  It is an abstraction born of dissociation, itself born of trauma.  It is Satanic, because Satanism is that set of beliefs and practice which result if we give our selves over to our primitive nervous systems, to the unmyelinated vagus nerve, to the animal, to hunger.

In the wild, do you think animals think of their place of origin?  They have no culture.  They simply do every day what it takes to survive, and I think denizens of Leftist political systems are no different.  You are literally erasing everything that makes us human, that makes us different from animals, and calling it “progress”.

I think with this commentary I am getting close to the truth.  This feels correct to me.

I continue to look on with amazement, shock, and fear how fully and completely so much of our nation has fallen for horrible ideas, espoused by horrible people, ideas which should be readily recognizable as garbage by ANY educated person, and which should feel profane and wrong in the mouths of any sane person.

It occurs to there is a logical progression on this topic which is illuminating.

I think most of us would agree it is wrong and should be illegal to murder 2 year old children.  This, even though they are quite often very, very tiring, very annoying, and because we WANT to kill them.  I have long said that any parent who claims they have not thought about murdering their children is lying or saintly.

Same with one year old children.

Same with one day old children, children who have been born for 24 hours, who have been fed a couple of times, and presumably held a couple times.

But with a newborn, right out of the womb, it is OK, according to most Democrats today, who want to frame objecting to this as some form of radicalism, as some form of misogynistic, patriarchal control over women’s “bodies”, even though in this particular case the bodies have actually separated.

And ponder this possibility.  What if the mother doesn’t want her child, but wants to have it buried after it is killed?  What if the doctor tells her that would be illegal, because burying means it would have to be treated as a person, whereas if it is treated as medical waste, it is no longer a person?

What if the method of killing the baby is decapitating it on a little block with a meat cleaver?  Horrible?  Is that worse than drowning it or killing it through exposure in a cold room (as Obama voted to be legal in Illinois some 20 years ago, in what was then a radical and unpopular position even among Democrats)?  What if the baby is just fed into a grinder, to make it easier to deal with as medical waste?  Morally, if that is wrong, then all the other options are wrong.

Here is the thing; most European nations recognize that there have to be lines.  On this issue they draw them in approximately the right place (even if on most other issues they fail to do so).  They say “look, in three months you know if you want it or not.  Make up your mind in that time window, and if you change your mind, you have having the child then giving it up for adoption, barring major health problems”. 

But the thing is Democrats don’t even want to admit a born baby is a baby.  They are pushing it as far as it will go, at least they were until I came along. 

Here is my hypothesis: in nearly all cases, Democrats will avoid answering the question as to whether or not two year old have a right to life, and will fail indefinitely to affirm that it is legal and moral to prosecute as criminals anyone who would hurt them.

They have already said babies, born crying, whining babies looking for their mothers tits, are not human, that they are not worthy of protection.  Why not extend that indefinitely? 

And they KNOW this.  That’s why they won’t answer such a fucking simple question.  It really is unbelievable.

And BTW, I read this the other day: https://www.infowars.com/sec-endorses-mastercards-idea-of-cutting-off-right-wingers-report/

When I was talking about the Left coming up with alternative, with off the wall shit, to counteract their on-going, necessary, and inevitable failures to defend their ideas or results, this is the sort of thing I was talking about.  Back office, whispering, secret cabals.  They can’t allow sunlight or air to touch them anymore.  It’s proving fatal.

I had an emotional impact hit me last night that was worse than anything I’ve weathered yet.  It was like losing the three people I loved most in  the world in an instant without warning.

And it didn’t kill me.  I woke up sane.  I am starting to have faith in my recuperative abilities, and in my sturdiness.  This thing will take faith, certainly.

Then I had a set of dreams where I was trying to convince myself I played pingpong with a friend and two Playboy playmates while I was in high school.  It was a vaguely happy dream, even if everyone was stoned, as was the case at most of the parties I went to in high school.  My unconscious seems to be trying to construct happy memories.  I applaud this effort.

My past is slowly presenting itself to me in full color.  I wasn’t there, so to process it it needs to come to me.

Finished “Slaughterhouse-5”, and am tempted to wonder out loud: how far should our caring extend?  I was looking at a woman this morning in my Facebook feed more or less snuggling with a cow, crying over how many animals are abused the world over.  Then later this morning I was reading about the carnivorous diet which has taken hold of some segment of the population, and whose most public exponent is Jordan Peterson.

The only time Billy Pilgrim cried was when he realized how much the horses were suffering.  Then he was arrested and it is likely the horses died or were slaughtered for food.

How much should we care about the world?  Large birds are eating smaller birds and rodents everywhere all the time.  Large fish, small fish.  Pumas deer.

By all rights, I should be a vegetarian.  But I was a vegetarian once, and it was one of the most unpleasant periods of my life.  A Tibetan Buddhist text I read screams that I will live in hell a long time for eating meat.  But is it not functionally equivalent to a Baptist preacher screaming I will go to hell for fornicating or homosexuality?  Do not even people who are exemplary in other ways not sometimes make mistakes?  Who, what, can we trust?

I’m reasonably sure I could accustom myself to killing cows and lamb and goats and skinning and eating them.  Certainly, if the health and well being of me and my family seemed to depend on it.

Would a just God make it so that, even though biologically we are in most cases healthier eating some meat, that we are not supposed to eat dead animals?

And how about people?  No, not eating them: although cannibalism is apparently a popular theme among some, with the Hannibal show apparently taking it about as far as it can be made to go.

How much should we care about people?  There is suffering everywhere.  In India, they have by and large seemed to learn to overlook it, particular when suffered by non-persons like the Dalits.  It took Mother Teresa, a Christian, to do anything about the people dying on the streets of Calcutta.  Everyone else was “me and mine and fuck everyone else.”  That’s how the government operated for a long time, too, which was why India remained poor.

There has to be a limit.  There has to be a stopping point.  There has to be a way of not suffering daily from a preoccupation with other human suffering, yet also not becoming blind to it.  Perhaps it is engaging only with what is in front of us, and no more.  Jettison the abstract caring.

And there have to be times when we ourselves are ALL we worry about.  After all, if everyone else took care of themselves, then in short order most human misery would be gone.

As with anything else, perhaps cycles are the best answer.  Care some times.  Don’t care others.  Transit the middle.

If there are heavens and hells, as I believe, we are all in a continual project of negotiation, of reconciliation with what is really real within us, with what cannot be left behind.

It is not my job to make anyone do anything.  And it is particularly not my job if its something they could do for themselves.

But, I say to myself, people are ill.  I know this from my own experience.  You should care, I say to myself.

And so it goes.  I have no firm answer, and most likely there isn’t one.  Other than I don’t feel the need or the right to tell you how much you should care about anything, and feel the same should apply on your side.  Care all you want.  But don’t care about my caring.

If any of us base our peace of mind on the cessation of suffering, then we will never have peace of mind.  Not, in any event, for a very, very long time, and quite often the worst suffering comes from the inability to find peace.

Perhaps each of us is destined to do our best, most useful work, the moment we stop trying to do anything at all.  That would certainly be a Taoist sentiment.

I feel this voice, like a constant companion, which no matter what I’m doing–absolutely with no regard whatever to what I’m doing or how well or poorly I’m doing it–keeps telling me I’m doing it wrong.  Imagine a little person on your shoulder saying “you’re doing it wrong” at ten second intervals all day, all the time you are awake.

This is the “fire alarm” that Bessel van der Kolk talks about.

What can you do?  Some part of you learns to ignore it.  You have things to do, and this voice will never, ever contribute anything constructive.  But some other part of you can’t ignore it, since it is endogenous.  At the end of the day, the part that ignored it and the part that heard it have to reconcile.  That is when I get drunk. Or, if I don’t get drunk, the reconciliation is done through what I suppose I might term “night fighting”, where I get attacked by the part that absorbed all that negative energy, which is to say one part of me attacks another part of me, with the result that I shake, scream, and wake up thinking I am dying.

I feel this voice, now, which means it is slowly separating from me.  This is good news.  And I ponder all the years I have lost, being unable to make this voice go away or manifest in a way which I could deal consciously with.

The only thing that makes this loss seem reasonable is the thought that I can build a template for others to avoid my fate.

That, and that flowering bushes and trees, beauty, may be in my future.

Being dissociated is being split in two.  I am increasingly feeling it.

I am having dreams about things I should have had feelings about, but which I didn’t.  I was in largely loveless marriage for over ten years.  I didn’t know any better.  I had no reference point.  But when I feel it now, feel the dominant feeling-tone of our relationship, it hurts.

And I have dreams where I feel keenly that one side of me is on one side of the room, and the other on the other side.  I feel split in the dream, where I almost feel two simultaneous dreams.

But it’s all coming together.  You can’t think your way through that, but you can observe it, feel it, as it happens.

This morning I woke up, after a night of erecting defenses from invaders and failing, that perhaps I am playing an extended version of the joke most people will have heard in childhood, where someone–usually with a lot of personality and imagination, if it’s done well–will talk about a monster chasing them for a long time, through forests and deserts, and across rivers, and oceans, on boats, and trains, and planes, and automobiles.  Eventually you get stuck.  You can’t get away.  It looms up large, then touches you and says “Tag,  You’re it.”  Then runs away.

I felt that this morning.  Maybe life is a giant game.  One filled with horror and tragedy, to be sure, but which can be mastered, which can be digested, which can even be fun and regularly pleasurable.

I felt awful last night.  I was coming down with something and likely should not have worked.  This inner work is sucking something out of me which normally keeps me healthy.  But I’ll take today off and be fine tomorrow.

I forgot the teacup, I had I think beers, and I weigh 291.  I was munching last night on beef jerky (I make my own) dipped in this fantastic cashew dip I get at Costco.  No surprise.  I am slowly figuring all this out though.  I need my old supports still while I build or find new ones.

War is an evil.  The only thing worse than it is avoiding a necessary war through cowardice or stupidity.  An autocracy is a war on the individual and his or her freedom, is it not?  Waging war on such a system is not wrong.

When I dropped my health insurance I was paying about $350/month as a middle aged, healthy man who is a sometimes smoker, and thus for the insurance companies, a smoker.

It occurs to me that you can pay for a lot of prophylactic health care for $350/month.  You can pay for a weekly massage, or Reiki session, or cranialsacral therapy, or flotation, or whatever makes you feel good.

You can take a raft of supplements daily.  I take quite a few.  Here is one that is off the beaten path, but which I really like: https://www.amazon.com/Mimis-Miracle-Minerals-Supplement-Supply/

As should not need to be pointed out, but which manifestly DOES need to be pointed out, health INSURANCE and health CARE are two different animals.  Totally different.

One is the people who pay your medical bills out of money you have already paid them–in a typical plan–or who if you are unlucky enough to come down with something not normal will pay your high bills, and who operate on an actuarial basis to make money.  They gamble a certain percentage of the population with get whatever, and cover that eventuality in their premiums.  That is true insurance.

Going to the hospital, or going to the doctor or Nurse Practitioner: that is health care.  But what is that?  It is checking to make sure things are working, which is useful, and which can be paid out easily on a cash basis even without insurance.

Then it is prescribing medicines, surgeries, and procedures of various sorts to fix things which are already broken in one way or another.

Here is my logic: given that the Democrats and Obama require insurance companies to accept preexisting conditions–or so I understand–I can wait to be “insured” until I have some major illness.  I don’t have to pay into the system before then.

And in the meantime, I can spend the money I would have wasted, entirely, since I am healthy, on supplements and preventive care.

I don’t want to get too crazy, so I’m still working out my particular regime, but I really like Tebonin, the gingko supplement, which really does seem to help with my tinnitus.  It seems to work even better with Alex Jones Brain Force Plus, I think he calls it.  I also like his turmeric supplement.  Add to this Mimi’s Minerals, and that’s my first thing in the morning regimen.  I take Glucosamine/Chondroitin and a multivitamin with my first meal.

With respect to Glucosamine, most of the studies find it does not reverse existing damage.  I haven’t seen any studies looking at if it prevents or reduces the damage in the first place, which seems likely to me.  And as far as multivitamins, people who take them fare slightly better over the long term.  Not a large effect, but we are talking statistics, and vitamins don’t cost much.

Bedtime I take a mini-aspirin (orange flavored) and usually a ZMA/melatonin.

I also use Essential Oils daily.  I have a row of them, numbered 1 to 14.  I use them to track the phases of the moon.  New Moon I take the first, mix it with some lotion, and rub it on my belly and arms.  Etc.  There is overlap at both ends, so I recent added two more, for a total of 16.

Again, it should not need to be said, but doctors are not the ones who keep you healthy.  They help ameliorate, particularly in this country, all the ways you’ve been fucking up, and know you’ve been fucking up.

Edit: I also take an antihistamine, a generic Zyrtec.

Today: 286, I remembered, and no alcohol.

It occurs to me that what Rachel Maddow has been selling is anti-depressants.  As long as the Left can remain angry, it can stave off the sadness it feels.

And this is an existential sadness.  It certainly was amplified, or thrown into the light of day by the election of Trump–which they were told daily was not possible for a bit over a year–but in the end wherever you see persistent anger, continual anger, daily anger, you can infer sadness underlying it.

Depression, as one example, no doubt infuses the Daily Cause.  I would hazard a guess Kosmo himself has been on and off anti-depressants for years.

Anyone who provides a daily reason for anger provides simultaneously an anti-depressant.  And given that we are as a nation seemingly addicted to outrage–do we not, far too often, look for the latest atrocity in our news feed, and feel gratified when it is there?–does out political climate AS A WHOLE not perhaps mask mass sadness, mass confusion, and mass depression?  The pharmaceutical and suicide numbers would bear that out.

Here is a principle: if you cannot find meaning outside of politics, then the resulting politics will necessarily drive you mad.

I proposed maybe ten years ago that Culture can be treated heuristically as consisting in four tasks: the creation and distribution of meaning, of truth, of power, and of wealth.  Broadly speaking, Philosophy (Philosaffineia), Science, Political “science” (craft may be a better word: political craftsmanship, with our Constitution perhaps constituting the most masterful example of the acme of the carpenters trade), and Economics.

Political craftsmanship was never intended to give people a reason to live.  It presupposes it.  It presupposes, in fact, MANY and plural reasons to live, at least in the Liberal way of ordering things.  The goal is to balance as harmoniously as possible many competing agendas, and the tendency ALL human beings have to become addicted to power.  The goal is to enact Power, which is to say a State of some form, but to also DISTRIBUTE the power, such that it is never quite within any one person or groups hands.

Now the idea that there are many valid purposes for life stems from the Philosophical/Philosaffineic System.  Logically, meaning comes before anything.  Why seek the Truth?  Why have science at all?  Why try to share power?  Why seek to make wealth distribution equal, or fair?

As I have said before, Socialism is a moral system seeking an economic system, but because what it needs to happen is not based on accurate human psychology, it necessary becomes a political and power system.  They have to tell people what they want, because the people aren’t as smart, they believe, as their aspiring masters.  That people naturally do not want masters in most cases where they have tasted the alternative, is something they wrongly assume will pass with time.

You really can’t separate Communism from Nihilism.  Historically, in Russia, the Nihilists BECAME the Communists.  They were the same people, with roughly the same beliefs.  Marx just gave them new words to paper over old feelings.

And that Nihilism in turn was a feeling, a feeling of disconnection, of hopelessness, of powerlessness.  It was, if not enabled, greatly amplified by the felt need, in attacking the Tsar, to also attack the God and Church which justified his power.  You create the power to change an abusive system on the one hand, but on the other you eliminate all genuine purpose in so doing.  If there is no God, why do you even care?  This is a question the philosophers and writers of the 19th and 20th century tried desperately to answer, and regarding which they largely failed.

Atheism, in my view, is an inherently unstable structure.  This is not to say there are not outstanding people who are atheists.  I firmly believe there are, and that there are many of them.  But when you are building thought structures, small flaws amplify over time, across generations, across nations.  An atheistic world would look much like Europe, where they are not having children, and have seemingly largely given up on the future.  Merkel has no children.  Macron has no children.  May has no children.  And in effect, by conscious policy or not, all three leaders seemingly are facilitating the Islamization of Europe.  As Mark Steyn pointed out some ten years ago now, demographics alone ensure Sharia in most of Europe within 20-30 years, and in my view much sooner, because the Europeans have largely given up on defending their own civilization. 

This is what atheism gets you: tired, passive, and unable to defend in the end any civilization based on any notion of God.

In my hypothetical self help/healing center, I would also like to have a picture of that South Park episode where Cartman forms a Christian rock group.  I would like the cover of their record on the wall, with them all looking pious and holy.

I noticed a long time ago that you seemingly can’t get ahead in the New Age world unless you have a certain kind of smile, like you know something everyone else doesn’t.  Being the cynic I am, most of the time when I see that smile I call bullshit.

I must be wrong some percentage of the time–there are obviously genuinely good people out there–but my gut tells me I am more right than wrong the overwhelming bulk of the time.

As I’ve said before, if I were to get one principle named after me it would the one stipulating that the closer one gets to the true CORE of the inner work they need to do, the more overpowering the need to teach others becomes.  There is this repulsion there that pushes people absolutely any direction but inward.

If I felt the need to act or look pious, it would be the end of my work.  I have no doubt of that whatever.

Here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrhJT98IoaQ

This is completely wrong.  It is unsuitable for any audience, and should not be watched or listened to by anyone.

You were warned!!!

Fuck that makes me laugh.

If you’re a pious Christian, please forgive me.