Month: October 2019

It’s easy enough, obviously, to skew polls.  Just oversample a population likely to support what you want to be supported.  Today, oversample Democrats in asking whether or not Trump’s election should be reversed through an abuse of the impeachment process.

There is a more subtle element, though, too, I think: Republicans do not think about, do not value, polls the same way Democrats do.  Personally, if I get asked to participate in a poll, I say fuck no.  Why?  Why would I want to give you my time? 

Many on the conservative side of the ninety degree political mark would, I think, agree with me.

But polling on the Left almost equals morality.  These people are taught that a popular position must be a just and moral position.  In my years on the internet, I have been told over and over and over and over again that X is popular, and that this constitutes a valid argument.

There is a large abyss between those who think rightness can be equated with popularity, and those like me who are very firm in their convictions that you can be right even if the whole world is against you; even if you are an army of one.

The eagerness with which Democrats and Republicans encounter polls, then, is I think quite different.  I do not become more right if I give you my opinions, and you do not become more right if you find a lot of people to agree with you.  Rightness is a philosophical question, an abstract question, a question open to debate.

But for most Democrats, it really is a question of who has the best polling numbers.  This vast gap has to be considered in evaluating any poll numbers.

I am finding that clearing emotional blockages is a lot like when you eat too much peanut butter–or really any food that creates a pain in your chest–and it gets caught in your throat, then you drink water to clear it, and it hurts worse for a second, before it gets better.

Yes, that.

As far as I can tell, what we have learned is that some element in the intelligence community–yet unnamed, but perhaps affiliated with the CIA–has been listening in on the telephone conversations our President has, looking for political dirt.  They may be listening in when he calls his wife, daughter and son.  They may be listening when he calls old pals.  They may be listening when he calls Rudy Guiliani, or the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (which may have actually been run by good people in recent memory), or has phone sex with some bimbo whose name we haven’t learned, YET.

Does no one else see the problem here?  Can we not apply what might be termed the “Obama Principle” and ask: if this were being done to Obama, would the reaction be the same?  Of course not.  Of course not.

As I wrote in the lead up to the 2008 election, the damage Obama did to our country can be corrected.  We just needed a new leader, which we got.

But the STUPIDITY of an electorate so responsive to almost childish propaganda offensives that it could be manipulated into supporting and electing him: that is a problem with no easy fix.

Obama was obviously no saint, and Trump is no villain, but America STILL seems to be responding to these cartoons, these Looney Tunes, in the way the CIA and other affiliated persons and bad actors want us to.

I think it is past time for a repeat of the Church hearings, but this time with consequences for all involved, and a wholesale shredding of the whole outfit.  The media is taking direction, and the most obvious candidates are the one’s with the most experience in overthrowing governments, and electing illegitimate ones.

My view: a cynical photo op intended to attempt to peal wobbly Republicans away from Trump.  I watched her monologue, where she spoke approvingly of “whistle-blowers” at a football game, with an obvious second reference.

Ellen and W belong together, just as, in important respects, Clinton, George H.W., W, and Obama belonged together.  All of them are, or were, something different from Trump.  They were tools, of people whose names we don’t know.

Trump, himself, has inserted a spotlight into this darkness, and while we still don’t know the names, I don’t think, the existence of the problem itself is very, very, very clear.

I was reading the other day that one in four Swedish women are afraid to leave the house because of the HUGE increase both in rapes, and the violence of those rapes.

I read the other day an article from a labor organizer who was treating illegal alien workers in the same stroke as American workers, like he cared equally for them.

We see the letter string LGBT, without really recognizing that the T is really in opposition to the rest.  You can only be “gay” or “lesbian” if you recognize that men and women exist, and are different.  To this point, I was reading a trans activist the other day who was claiming that BEING GAY is transphobic.

This morning, I was reading this:


An excerpt: 

five years ago, I first started seeing lesbians were being publicly shamed, sexually harassed, and demonized by straight men calling themselves lesbians. 

These men also tended to call themselves progressives, feminists … They keep telling us now that they are absolutely indispensable to the women’s movement, and we cannot do without them. Everyone can always see this behavior, and they always get away with it. 

I didn’t think — and I still don’t — that sexually harassing lesbians is a good way to be inclusive. So I objected. 

It turns out it’s a firing offense on today’s left to complain about men sexually harassing lesbians if that man says he feels like he’s a lesbian. 

That harassment still goes on, and if anything, it has gotten worse. Women share shocking screenshots with me from lesbian dating apps, which are now just simply packed wall-to-wall with men. These men have even started getting women’s [social media] profiles suspended for saying no to them and refusing to recognize their gender and validate their feelings.

Core truth: YOU HAVE TO PICK SIDES.  You cannot be pro-women, in Sweden, and pro-immigrant.  They are incompatible.  You have to prioritize and choose.

You cannot be a feminist, and be pro-transgender.  The latter don’t recognize the construct of “woman” and are doing their level best to completely disrupt and destroy true women’s athletics.

You cannot be in favor of essentially unrestricted and unregulated illegal immigration AND claim you support American workers.  Cesar Chavez–who I cite endlessly because in the Southwest there about as many roads named after him as Martin Luther King Jr.–understood this.  He organized LEGAL Hispanic workers, who were being abused since even though they were either citizens or had green cards, their inability to speak English, and/or inability to really understand our system, led to their systematic exploitation, which Chavez worked his whole life to stop.  Illegals, who really amount to scabs in this whole thing, made all of that harder.  They eroded his gains, made regression easier.  So he hated them, and on at least one occasion sent his guys out to the desert to beat up and intimidate illegals who were camping there.

Thinking about it, the only continuity running through any of this mess is LOYALTY TO PARTY.  Who wins, always?  Those in power.  If they want you running in this direction this morning, and that direction in the afternoon, you yourself cannot claim moral continuity.  You can’t claim you believe anything, personally.  What you value, ALL you value, is conformity to those in power.

All of the examples I cited above conform to this matrix. 

And there is what I call, or have taken to calling–and I think I posted on this but can’t remember–the Law of Recency.  This is of course a learning principle, but here I would define it as “where alleged victims are concerned, the most recent to get our attention has primacy over all others.”

Blacks have primacy over the working class, but illegals have primacy over blacks.  Transgenders have primacy over LGB’s, who have primacy over women.  The Law of Recency is how the Democrats have abandoned substantially all actual Americans, without most quite realizing this is the case.  It’s astonishing, but really the inevitable outcome of people subordinating their own judgement to those of power elites.  The will to see atrophies.  The capacity for perception, for squaring up principle and action, slowly withers.

And the continual evocation of anger helps mask all this.  When you are angry, you are not thinking.  All they have to do is point out one crime, one injustice, and ignore the counterbalancing, often worse injustice.  Children here illegally are treated poorly, we are told.  Ignored is that 1) their parents sent them here, knowing this was the case; and 2) most of the children throughout Central America live in shit situations ALREADY, and we can’t save all of them.  That is the job of the adults in the region, and most of them are corrupt and violent.  It’s sad, but it is not ultimately our primary or even secondary responsibility.  This is a situation for international charity, and would not be hurt at all by an airlift of books by Hayek and Friedman.

You have to pick sides.  Either you do, or you are a politician, and worthy of receiving all the condemnation that job evokes with morally normal people.

I can feel the effects of this movie on America.  I saw a poster with Donald Trump as a superhero, that he himself is selling, and it makes sense to me now.  Intuitively, he sense America needs heroes.  We need people we can trust and believe in.

The Joker is a body blow to our collective psyche, quite intentionally.  It is a villain who supercedes all our heroes, to the point where he is not even a villain, just a truth-teller.

This movie, I think, is satanic, and will be taken as such by many.  The Joker represents the spirit of the mass shooter, the rioter, the gleeful sadist and anarchist.  But everyone is dressed the same, I think.  They all have the same mask.  The ability to express their rage and hatred comes at the price of personal conformity.  All amygdalic attributes.

I watched the psychic creation of this character.  He was struggling, and then a female “bruja” gave him what he needed, including his face.  I read the plot summary, and this female energy would be both his mother and Sophie.

For some time, in American–and probably other, since Hollywood has influenced most of the world–movies, there has been the righteous retribution motif.  Someone kills your dog, you are John Wick, and John Wick 4 is being planned.  The Punisher.  Batman, in directly relevant ways.  Outlaw Josey Wales.  Most Rambos.  This is a basic theme of a very high percentage of action thrillers.  Bad guys do bad things, then the good guy becomes a bad guy who is really a good guy.  Why?  Because he recognizes LIMITS.

Joker, seemingly, takes this retributive motif, and simply directs it at “Society” as a whole.  Everyone is guilty, or nearly everyone.  As the mass shooter, you might spare that one person who gave you the money for a cab or a Coke or something, but then shoot some woman right next to him you have never seen before in your life.

I’m actually going to go out on a small limb here, but with a high degree of mythic/psychological confidence: I think Martin Scorcese has major unprocessed mother issues.  He was the psychic backing of this film, which was on all accounts modeled in part on Taxi Driver, which I’ve seen, and King of Comedy, which I haven’t and won’t.  I read Scorcese initially wanted to be a priest, but failed out.  You can’t get subtle psychological dynamics, obviously, from Wikipedia.  The stuff that matters the most, usually, is often invisible to those involved.  That, in any event, has been my experience.  I’ve been doing some processing of my own I’m not talking about.

Based on my reading of the plot, finding out his mother was a sort of disgraced whore was the final unraveling, the final humiliation, the final shaming.

This is a mythically powerful film.  Its potential for evil should not be underestimated.  I personally have no plans to see it.  I am not immune to evil, although, having seen a great deal up close, having been visited by many demons, I think my resistance through recognition is quite high. It’s the demons you don’t see which get you.

I am washing toxins out of me right now, toxins I was unable to feel before.  Things are going well with me, but not well with our society.  We need new, better dreams.  We need hope.  We need civility, but won’t get it back as long as a large segment of our populace depends on what I will call “Amygdalic Politics”.  There may be a large crash before, hopefully, things get better.

I am reminded of a movie by Federico Fellini, called “The Orchestra Practice”.  As I recall it–having seen it many years ago–it may be a good metaphor.

Back to bed.  I had to write that, before sleep erased what I had to say.

In the 1950’s, drab conformists voted for Eisenhower.  In 2008 and 2012, they voted for Obama.  It’s the same people.  All that changed was who they were told to vote for.

I was having I guess a new version of nightmares last night–really anxiety dreams–where I was in some new happy place, with smiling managers, everybody dressed really well, and me miraculously somehow in a roughly fitting, somewhat rumpled but acceptable suit.  I was supposed to be selling something to somebody, after all the pep talks.  They gave me some list to start making calls, and I was supposed to know somebody, since they mapped my social network for me, but I had no clue who this person was, and made the mistake of asking them, and was starting to see frowns.

Corporate America really can be an odd place.  To play politics well, you kind of need to focus on it, and forget your core self.  You have to be who your bosses seem to think you need to be.  You have to perform, of course–something in my experience in most cases of outside sales means making selling something close to your real religion, something which intrudes into everything you do, such that church is a place to meet new contacts, golf something you use to close the sale, and vacations something you plan to use as an item of relating to clients–but you need to kiss up to the right people, too.  You need to be the right “sort” of person, the sort who never really makes any waves, who goes along to get along.

Two anecdotes:

1) I was sitting on a conference call a few months ago–something I avoid gymnastically and generally successfully–and was the first one to arrive.  I was on time, which meant everyone else was late, which I assume most of them looked forward to it as much as me.  Anyway, I asked the gal running it how the weather was.  She told me, then when the next person got on she said “Oh, we’re doing this fun team building exercise.  How is the weather there?”  The vibe I actually got from her was that corporate life had traumatized her, and she probably knew it. 40+ hours a week of conference calls will do that to you.

2) I and a couple other sales reps were socializing with this woman who worked for a Very Large Company (VLG), and one of them made some inappropriate joke about sleeping with clients, and she just smiled without batting an eye and said “I’m always willing to take one for the team.”  It was so extraordinarily unoffended I actually, honestly wondered if she WOULD be willing to do that.  It was a very weird vibe.  According to stories I hear, there ARE women who will sleep with clients to get the contract.  Imagine that.  They are paid, but the process makes them into literal whores.

Anyway, I think the underlying energy is anxiety.  I’ve gotten through the hard trauma–the screaming and shaking–by and large, but what is left is years and years of feeling out of place, scared, and anxious.

And to the title of this post, I think being forced to live like this has political effects.  Can you imagine the pressure of being a Trump supporter anywhere in Silicon Valley?  Or most of the West Coast?  If the corporate culture is already cult-like, how expanded and powerful must be the compulsion to conform at least publicly?

I was at an air show yesterday, filled with military paraphernalia.  They had both the planes that Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Doolittle flew.

And they had muscle cars, some of them quite nice.  And I was contemplating and wondering.  Is our government REALLY in possession of alien artifacts?  Unrelated: how badly were our soldiers betrayed in Vietnam?  We won the war.  But was the CIA secretly undermining us with one hand while supposedly helping with another?  What secrets exist which we don’t even suspect?

These sorts of things will drive you to despair.  There is no knowing.  Oh, and I was wondering about the dilution of our national wealth by money creation.

Then it hit me: in spite of ALL THAT, we made some really awesome cars.  I was looking at I think a Cobra or a Corvette (I’m a late 60’s Mustang convertible in that world, painted yellow or orange), and a sense of awe and gratitude came over me.  In spite of everything bad (most of which exists mainly in our imagination), there are some really amazing things in this world, both natural and man made.  The physicality of the car, the Done-ness of it, the completion, the this is something a group of men and women made at one time, really struck me.

Today, I am contemplating how one enjoys life.  Every one of life’s pleasures is evanescent.  They come and go.  How can you enter into anything which won’t last?  The answer, of course, is: what choice do any of us have?  There is a cheese plate with some excellent wine being placed in front of you at every moment.  You can say no, but why?  That moment won’t last, but none of them do.  And life is really just an endless succession of moments.  I think in Buddhist theory they do consider time to be discontinuous, and this would be the sense in which this would be true.

The conclusion I have evolved–and you know maybe they should make a movie about this, with oh I don’t know maybe Jim Carrey–is that I need to practice saying Yes more often.  I’m a grouchy old man, a badger in his lair, and that’s no way to grow older.

The sky shines for everyone.  You can take it or leave it as you choose.  You can enjoy where you are at and what you are doing all the time, or you can try and “spend” all your moments only in some times and places, hoping the outsized pleasure will make up for all the want.

 I would argue though that when you practice enjoying everything, that can only expand the experience when something truly amazing happens, like Twue Luv.

The more I learn about personal growth, the more I realize how little I knew.  

I am in a place emotionally now where I am trying to form a new normal.  I have become so used to strong, uncontrollable emotions bursting in on me, driving me, pushing me, pulling me, that calm represents something qualitatively new.

And what are coming back to me are feelings from the last time I felt anything close to equilibrium, when I was about 14.  Something happened then (I was not molested, although that would be a good guess) which changed how I approached life.  My light–which was to be sure not that bright to begin with–dimmed.

I think most of us are like this.  You lose your childish pleasure in things as you slowly find out about all the bad things that can happen in life, and start worrying about them, start anticipating them.  We shrink.  I shrank.

But this is not a necessary process.  If I might generalize very broadly, the best spiritual teachings are about how to retain the childlike wonder and thoughtless grace of a child, with the wisdom and capacity of an adult.

Bad experiences come and go.  The pain comes, and if you let it, it goes.  What so often stays, though, is the change in your base expectations of life.  “if this is how life is”, I probably said unconsciously to myself, “then I’m not going to feel that any more, or open myself up in any way.”  That “setting” stays, and for most of us it stays across a lifetime.

Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize Winner, although not acceptor) had that great phrase “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”

I think I am going to generalize and say that the point of most spiritual work is recovering spontaneous delight in life.  This is the root, the seed, of whatever then becomes possible beyond that, but very few of us even get that far.

I would like to shine.  I would like to be able to teach with my being.  I think it is possible for me, in this life, although certainly I have many miles to go.

https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-of-young-trans-people-seeking-help-to-return-to-original-sex-11827740?fbclid=IwAR1q3NK755q5R9NUDthtwY84dMtVSilzXz7r8fLNzzJr4oERIy0CPakZWnk

I don’t recall the exact language I used in the post where I discussed this, but this sort of outcome was pretty obviously a strong possibility for many kids “transitioning” for the wrong reasons, which in my view is nearly all of them.