Month: November 2019

Now, this sort of thing is not for everyone–spirit guides, the spiritual generally, past lives, intuition of a non-physical variety–but I personally take it seriously.

I really feel I am on the right track.

If you can find a teacher willing to call you a fucking moron, then that’s a good thing.  Firstly, it is certainly true, but secondly, they would not bother speaking to you if there was no hope.

But I wanted to say, once, and then no more, that if this blog is actually meaningful and important for anyone, speak up.  As far as I know for sure, I have zero readers.  I have no followers at all.  It has long felt like I had readers, but it was just a sense, and I have come to the time in my life where I start telling the truth about everything.  No more bullshit.  No more comforting illusions.  No more little lies.

So I’m actually serious about the May 1 thing.  If I am providing any measure of comfort to anyone, speak now, or I’m going dark for six months or so.

I drew the Devil Tarot by the way.  Perfect.  That is exactly where I want to go: all the darkness, everything hidden, everything which gains power only through fear, rigidity and ignorance.

But the process itself is compulsive.  What I am trying to create in my life is continuity and consistency, and right now I think my computer in general interferes with that.  I’m addicted to it.  I spend hours every day on it.  This is not good.

There was a time before computers.  There was even a time before TV’s.  I can’t say people were saner then.  I don’t know.  Certainly actual and blatant and violent racism, sexism, hatred and fear of homosexuals and many other social ills existed.  But there were not also the high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, despite the standard of living being much lower.  Divorce rates were much lower, no doubt in part driven by economic factors, but also cultural ones.

And it is odd to speculate that when you look at a shelf of “literature” that much of it more or less amounts to people with a compulsive need to speak, to be heard, to tell stories, to organize words somewhat or nakedly compulsively.  When you look at the classics, you are perhaps looking at a gallery of neuroticism and personality disorders.  I recently started “The Once and Future King”, because it is a classic in its genre, but T.H. White was a mess.  Look him up.

For me, I need to remember a time before all this, before I lapsed into all these bad (somewhat: although this blog is not a complete waste of time.  Many men my age spend this time on porn or even video games) habits.

This is audacious, and I’m not at all confident I will succeed, but I would like to give up blogging until May 1st of next year.  I need to channel that energy into cooking and cleaning and reading and walking and hobbies and working out and Kum Nye.

I need, most of all, to directly confront all the negative energy in me, without an escape route.  It is time for this work to begin in earnest.  I have put it off long enough.  To be sure, I’ve needed to do a lot of preparatory work.  This was essential.  Timing in life is everything: if you fuck it up a sure thing becomes a failure.  But I think now is the time.   I am going to draw a new Tarot, for new winds, and leave it up until then.

Wish me luck. If you pray, pray for me.  This is, I hope, the final test, at least for a long time.  I’ll be back.

And there is evil out there.  This is the part it has taken me thus far in my life to wrap my brain and emotions around.  It can’t be willed out of existence.  Quite often in this world the bad guys and gals win.

Do you REALLY think human nature has changed since the Nazis made soap out of the fat of slaughtered Jews?  Since Mao reduced nearly a billion people to starvation and cannibalism?

No, it hasn’t, and the latest aggression by evil, in my view, is being undertaken under the banners of compassion and justice and progress, as indeed it was by the Communists and Nazis both (if we remove compassion from the lexicon of the Nazis, who were not hypocritical enough to claim they were trying to save anybody but the people they liked).

But I have, all my life, somehow personalized all this, like it is my fault and my responsibility.  This is a feature of my particular childhood, and my particular sensibilities.

No: you need to get by with cunning, strength, stealth, and skill.  Most days, for most people, the need for these things is not obvious.  This is how we have become so decadent that we BELIEVE what the horrible people in our media are telling us.  The truth is not hidden.  It is not hard to find, or so I believe, in my conceit that I know–or rightly guess–at least a substantial portion of it.

The immediate task of all of us is to save ourselves, and those around us we care about.  If everyone did this, the world would immediately be a better place.

But without losing sight of my idealism–and I am no doubt naive in many ways, my often expressed cynicism notwithstanding–I need to do a better job of mending my own fences, and taking care of myself.

Boundaries, boundaries: this is something which finally seems to be arriving, after much work.  I have never really had them.  My parents took them from me.  I have always been wide open to the world.  I am good at looking and acting fierce, and in a pinch I suppose I could BE fierce, but my actual nature is gentle and overly trusting.  I hated killing bugs when I was little.  I literally didn’t want to hurt flies, from the earliest age.  I have learned to fight it because that nature has been abused more times than I can count.  And of course, too, when you mistrust people, that can itself be the beginning of a bad relationship.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Always in life appropriateness is the aim.  As Aristotle said–and this would apply to any emotion, including fear–anyone can be angry, but being angry at the right things, at the right time, to the right extent: that is the domain of the superior human being.

Put another way, all emotions have their place.  We need all of them, including hatred, greed, lust, and even sloth.  But to the right extent, at the right time, and in response to the right stimuli: that is the task.  All of these really only become vices in excess, and excess is precisely what is being avoided.

But the main villain, I will call him–although he has robust competition–states at one point that his ancestors were slaves. He looks Maori to me, so I looked up Slavery in New Zealand. This is what I got, from Wikipedia:

“Before the arrival of European settlers, each Maori tribe (iwi) considered itself a separate entity equivalent to a nation. In traditional Maori society of Aotearoa, prisoners of war became taurekareka, slaves, unless released, ransomed or eaten.[355] With some exceptions, the child of a slave remained a slave.

As far as it is possible to tell, slavery seems to have increased in the early 19th century with increased numbers of prisoners being taken by Māori military leaders, such as Hongi Hika and Te Rauparaha to satisfy the need for labor in the Musket Wars, to supply whalers and traders with food, flax and timber in return for western goods. The intertribal Musket Wars lasted 1807 to 1843 when large numbers of slaves were captured by northern tribes who had acquired muskets. About 20,000 Maori died in the wars which were concentrated in the North Island. An unknown number of slaves were captured. Northern tribes used slaves (called mokai) to grow large areas of potatoes for trade with visiting ships. Chiefs started an extensive sex trade in the Bay of Islands in the 1830s using mainly slave girls. By 1835 about 70–80 ships per year called into the port. One French captain described the impossibility of getting rid of the girls who swarmed over his ship outnumbering his crew of 70 by 3 to 1. All payments to the girls were stolen by the chief.[356]

By 1833 Christianity had become established in the north and large numbers of slaves were freed. However two Taranaki tribes, Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga, displaced by the wars carried out a carefully planned invasion of the Chatham Islands, 800 km east of Christchurch, in 1835. About 15% of the Polynesian Moriori natives who had migrated to the islands at about 1500 CE were killed, with many women being tortured to death. The remaining population was enslaved for the purpose of growing food, especially potatoes. The Moriori were treated in an inhumane and degrading manner for many years. Their culture was banned and they were forbidden to marry.[357]

Slavery was outlawed when the British annexed New Zealand in 1840, immediately prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, although it did not end completely until government was effectively extended over the whole of the country with the defeat of the Kingi movement in the Wars of the mid-1860s.

Some Maori took Moriori partners. The state of enslavement of Moriori lasted until the 1860s although it had been banned by British law since 1809 and discouraged by CMS missionaries in North New Zealand from the late 1820s. In 1870 Ngati Mutunga, one of the invading tribes, argued before the Native Land Court in New Zealand that their gross mistreatment of the Moriori was standard Maori practice or tikanga.[358]“

There is so much bullshit about Europeans and slavery that is preached, particularly in our universities, whose JOB it is to figure this stuff out. We presented with these images of peaceful people deprived of their land and rights. Well, in this case–and this applies around the world–the White People were the ones who ENDED slavery. The British Empire was BY FAR the most important weapon against slavery the world over that the planet has ever seen. Slavery has been practiced everywhere, with very few exceptions in any lands or peoples, the world over since the dawn of history.

And it was CHRISTIANITY which was the driving force against slavery. Islam has no issue with it whatever. Getting and keeping slaves was part of the appeal of jihad. Slavery is condoned in the Old Testament. And as I have noted a number of times, the main “product” of the Vikings was slaves. To be clear: WHITE slaves, to be sold most of the time to Arabs. Most of the major cities in Ireland were founded as trading hubs, where the main product was human beings taken in internal conflict.

And when you look at people, their minds are all over the place.  You can be addicted to the past.  You can be addicted to sports.

Here is a metric: what, if taken from you, would give you a nervous tick, would make you anxious, would make you think about it all the time?

What is your blankie, of the sort Linus carried?  I suppose we all have them, and probably are safest emotionally when we have a number of them: hobbies, passions, go-to activities and thoughts.

Most of human civilization represents long efforts to bring order to the world, to make regular and predictable not just food and shelter and peace and social connection, but how you should understand the world and your place in it, which is made easier when everyone around is saying and doing the same things.

In this respect, difference feels like an assault.  You have been given a choice, where there was none.  It is an intrusion of chaos into the sane, normal and known.  You resent the person who is different to the precise extent you lack faith in who you are, as a person, and as the group to which you belong (if any).

I suppose if everyone counts as different–as in the case of extreme social alienation–then all of them are attacking you with their very being.  In the Joker–which I still haven’t seen, but vaguely feel like I ought to see, since it seems to have tapped an important vein in our collective lives, to the extent that as I predicted we are already seeing protesters breaking things in clown-face, as I recently saw in Chile–he could have been made violent without any assault on him at all.  I don’t think most school shooters are physically beaten up, although most are likely verbally mocked, underscoring their alienated status.

The life of mankind has been long, and many, many solutions have been formed.  I read some 86 languages are counted in both Ethiopia and Laos.  Laos in particular is not a very large nation.  Does it not seem obvious that with every different language come differing customs and beliefs, even if they are only slightly different?  And that even within the same linguistic group, the tribe on the other side of the hill may do things differently, and believe slightly different things?

We are at a stage in history where some part of us looks to space.  Relative to space, we are a single planet.  But we all (or most of us: some of us have none) have a home, a bed, specific sheets we put on the bed, a nightime routine, loved or hated or tolerated others, and things specific to us.

Then we wake up and go out in the street, and meet we never know who.  In most large cities, you will see people you don’t know all day long.  You see them at the grocery store–where if you are lucky, or live in a small town, you may sometimes run into people you know.  You see them driving.  You see them at Home Depot.  Always different people, although many employees remain the same.

This is a hard way to live, for most of us at least.  I think most of us would be happiest being born somewhere small, and living there most of our lives.  Yes, perhaps everyone needs to spend a few years roaming around.  Maybe that could become a new normal, in lieu of college.  Roaming around makes you appreciate home more.  You get that restless energy out.  And you always have the internet.  But you return home, where your family is, where you have uncles and aunts and cousins and of course parents and grandparents.  All of them are there, to welcome your own children, who in their turn are made to feel whole, secure, and welcome themselves.

I tend to think the country folks in this country are, by and large, the sane ones.  Many if not most of them are likely small minded, but that is not a bad thing in small places.  They understand the value of place, something which is forgotten on the national scene, in the big cities, in our metropolises.

Aristotle, I think it was, said a polis should be about the amount of land where everyone could hear a single loud voice calling from a tall place.  No more than 10,000 or so, and if you think about it, knowing 10,000 is itself damn near impossible.  People, people, everywhere, even in small places.

But if you lose your family, as I have, voluntarily, since they make me emotionally unwell, then this world is a large place.  Still, I have my physical place, my bed, my kitchen, my habits.

Within Kum Nye practice, your goal is to develop a home in your feelings, to develop an innate calm which you take with you everywhere.  Home, really, IS a feeling.  It is that place where you feel warm, safe, wanted, accepted.  If you can cultivate those feelings towards yourself, with no external validation, then your home is wherever you lay your hat.  And this state, in itself, is a powerful resource against Duhkha.  I personally think Tarthang Tulku has shared, in Kum Nye, some of the most powerful teachings Tibetan Buddhism has to offer.  They are perhaps only introductory–there is, I think, vastly more.  But for most people, and particularly most Americans, that practice alone will get them on the right path.  Nothing else is needed.  The spiritual IS emotional.  This is something I think many of the thrill and high seeking hippies failed then and fail now to grasp.

Be all that as it may, finding your home in your own feelings may sound scary, but only because you (and I) have not yet built that nest of feelings, that warm place where we always feel welcome, and where everything that happens is a source of wonder, growth, and not infrequently delight; where there is nothing to fear, including pain, fear itself, and death.

Few thoughts.  I think I have finally myself reached the depths of my own experience. I am finding that you have to–and this is a Bon Mot, by the way, shared with you free of charge, and with a bit of a giggle at my own nerdiness and strangeness–Stay with what you can’t leave behind, until you CAN leave it behind.

That’s my own, although of course I am aware of the U2 album, which has some great songs on it.

Two nights ago, I got to the bottom of the ocean.  There was a giant, a monster, which I could not beat, which defeated me completely, which subjugated me and made me its bitch.  This feeling is at the root of my own experience.  The monster was certainly in part my mother, but probably the totality of my life and what I was feeling at the time.  My home was cold, and we moved around so I lost my friends.  I could do wrong, but seemingly no right, and from the earliest age.  I was first spanked before I was yet a year old.

I checked out, covered up that layer, and created in effect a fake persona to perpetuate the lie, and protect myself from it, and learn how to protect myself from the predations of others, while some part of me never forgot that I lost the first battle of my life, decisively and finally.

And I realize that that monster is not something I can ever defeat, since now it is in me.  It IS me.  It is the AllFear, the fear without cause, without clear beginning, which never leaves.  You cannot defeat one part of yourself with another.  You are a system, and all parts are needed.  It is all a fabric.

This is the thing, though: the monster represents a wrinkle, a knot, an eddy, a dam, a constriction.  It is not a thing in itself, but a symbol of constricted/restricted energy.  It is “defeated” by going into that energy, and living there until the water begins moving again.

And I see this is the way to heal trauma, deeply.  It is at least a one, and more usually a two stage process.  As I have said before, you have two sets of perceptual nexuses: you have the thought/feeling nexus, and then the redemptive, resolutional sensation/image nexus.

Most “meditation” is to my mind incompetent, because it doesn’t make this fact obvious and explicit.  You sit there and try not to think, and “return to the breath” in most iterations.  Maybe you are feeling the breath, or counting the breaths, or chanting a mantra, or focusing only on the out-breath (which triggers the parasympathetic nervous system) but there is no following.  You have to follow.  When you sit quietly, your inner recesses will SPEAK to you, and if you don’t listen, you will never get much smarter.

In its essence, Kum Nye is evoking–which is what all the exercises do–listening, then following, then dwelling, then eventually expanding and releasing. It is a process of consciously becoming who you already are, but which you don’t know, because what you think is you is a tangle of knots which need to be released.  This could certainly be seen as one meaning of Anatman, although I am quite sure it goes much deeper.

But for many of us, this stage is quite impossible to approach directly.  Where trauma is present–and if we add in Developmental Trauma, I think it is present in at least a numerical majority of Americans, which is what makes us so habitually driven to overwork and then narcotize ourselves, most commonly with TV and binge consumption of all sorts–it triggers the circuit breakers and you say something like “this meditation is making me anxious.  I feel much worse”.

So I think for most people you need some means of dialing down the background fear and noise.  For me, Neurofeedback seems to be doing the trick, although it has taken me a while to figure out a protocol which works for me.  I think that field, which in itself should be seen as emerging and developing, has been tainted by the “need for expertise”.  I think it has been overcomplicated by people with degrees, who want to be seen as working some form of magic.  I think it can be simplified in specific ways I will describe in more detail once 1) I feel like my own work is done; and 2) I have worked successfully with others.  My own view is that any work I might do with others will be strengthened and made vastly more effective if I can offer myself as an example of what is possible.  A large problem most therapists have is that most of them suffer from most of the same problems their patients do.  How can you credibly claim to be able to cure someone else of something you can’t cure yourself of?  This large contradiction is at the heart of nearly all ineffective “mental health” practice.

But Neurofeedback is not the only option.  Yoga might work.  Perhaps swimming or running.  Floating is good. I do that too.  I think I had a moment of Samadhi last week.  I didn’t know I was in it, when I was in it, then I woke up.  And it was a bit disconcerting, but I also felt like something had released, that it was healthy and good for me.  So I’ll keep showing up, and keep doing my best to keep the faith and keep my courage up.

I think learning to accept solitude constitutes accepting learning to live with it.  I am finding that for myself, sometimes literally just sitting there, like a bump on a log, not listening to music, not meditating, not even smoking, just going into the feelings, or really just letting them know I know they are there, and that I’m not running away, seems therapeutic. Sometimes you are doing a lot when you are doing nothing at all.

And I think focusing on all this is important.  I am always running away.  I’ve always been running away.  The feelings are absolutely terrifying.  It is the feeling of being ground into a pulp by an infinitely more powerful being.  But they are getting smaller.

Life expands from the center.  And until you get to the center, you are really just going in circles.  Inner work is the key to outer work.  I want to plant my feet firmly in the middle and learn to live there.  This is my goal.

And I have moments of panic, where I wonder what I am doing with  my life.  I am much too smart to have accomplished as little as I have.  But I started my life more than a little insane.  Becoming sane is really the best use of my time there could be, much better than creating world class art, or becoming a faculty member at an elite university, or anything else I can think of.  Because who you are is what really matters in the end.

To complete U2–and I saw the title as a clear reference to death–who you are is all that you can’t leave behind.  Life is a time to work on that.  This is my belief, in any event.

Edit: thinking about it, the fact that I am writing this means I was not broken.  I have just been hiding until it was safe to come out.  Being truly broken is becoming someone like Hillary or Bill Clinton.  There is nothing left there, no residual capacity for deep introspection, much less empathy.  Their lives are moving objects around for their own personal benefit.

It just hit me today, though, why: they spend so much time not being able to be who they are–if not in their present lives, then at least in their childhoods–that being who they are openly is a huge source of relief and happiness.

Heterosexuals feel this elation too, but usually when in love.  Think Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.  Gay men, I think, feel this when they are with other gays.  It is a natural home, a natural place, somewhere they finally belong completely.

These are very abstract generalizations, but I think there is something there.  This is my doodle blog. I can guess or say whatever I want.

I am the song that I sing.

Edit: I may be plagiarizing someone, with Whitman an obvious candidate.  I’ve read excerpts of Whitman, but not much in the whole.

But if no one has said this, they should have.

This is obscured by the fact that they have a new cause daily.  They even have a website called the Daily Cause.

But the Daily Cause is always yesterdays cause.  Your task, as a dutiful Leftist, is always to feel something they want you to feel, and which always has the net result of making Republicans look ugly and mean.  It is usually anger and outrage.  But it may be sadness–oh those poor KIDS–which they induce by removing all context, historical or demographic.

Always you have default emotions of anger and outrage.  This is perennial, continual.

And these are buttressed by nearly all media outlets.  All educational institutions.  Everywhere you look, you see a SYSTEM, one which exists mainly to get a small core of cynics rich and powerful, but which is sold as the norm, as the sole source of reality, as the sole way to be kind and good.

Again, look around you: do you see a power elite which the Democrats OPPOSE?  It’s laughable.  Most of the wealthiest people in America give their money to Democrats.  What Democrats are selling is a system which can be bought, and obviously for anyone with money, that is the ideal.

Republicans are not innocent, but they are naive, they don’t play this game well, and they are clearly not an important part of the racket.

I’m wondering of Kentucky is a trial run for cheating nationally.  We know voting machines can be hacked, then programmed to read anything.  You could reliably win by one vote if you wanted to, but of course the goal is to make it seem close, but not so close that a recount is needed.  In Kentucky, the Governor’s race was decided by just OVER 5,000 votes.  That’s about what I would have picked, if I were doing the programming.

We all need to understand that TRILLIONS of dollars are at stake.  The amount of money on the table is staggering.  It is more than enough to buy ANYONE who is for sale at all.  And for those dollar amounts, people are willing to do, to stoop, to nearly anything.

And it’s worth emphasizing that The System has evolved to the point where our choices are between madness and the alternative, whatever it may be, however it may be constructed.  They are eradicating the lines between normal and insane, between legal and illegal, and between moral and immoral. 

The System exists, at this moment, solely to perpetuate itself, and if and when we let them get full control of elections, it will never be unseated without violence.

I think all States need to audit their elections.  I think they need to recount 10% of the vote for every election, automatically, and obviously using paper ballots which are harder to forge.

To do otherwise is to instill a very healthy mistrust of the system–by which I mean a growing suspicion that there is A System.

Consider this statistic: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/u-s-has-3-5-million-more-registered-voters-than-live-adults-a-red-flag-for-electoral-fraud/?fbclid=IwAR3JQKAAWktcgBGHd7-WN26HxiXhgwbR48ATuoXOxAyiZ2sqszP7TK8Qm-8

We have more REGISTERED voters than live adults.  3.5 million more.  When you consider that 92 million eligible people sat out the last election, every one of those 92 million is potentially a fraudulent vote.

I think Democrats study voter rolls, and look for people who are unlikely to vote, then vote in their stead, particularly in states that don’t require valid ID.  It is literally still possible, in two thousand fucking nineteen, to “vote early and vote often”.  One would have thought “progress” would have made such a thing impossible.  The technology exists to make it impossible, which would include actually scanning drivers licenses to track them, but for obvious reasons the Democrats particularly oppose any step in that direction.

It is worth asking: how would the history of the past half century have been different, if Democrats didn’t cheat?  For one thing, Nixon almost certainly would have won in 1960.  That alone would have changed a lot, I think.

Democrats tend to spend all their time thinking about strategy, which might be summarized as “what do we need people to think we believe in each of this list of battlefield locations?”

I got to this pondering the Kentucky election.  5 of the 6 Republicans won easily.  It was clearly a partisan election.  Why, then, did the Democrat barely squeak by the Republican governor?  Bevin is not the monster the Left paints him to be.  I think they say “he is wildly unpopular” in exactly the way they say Trump is wildly unpopular, even while he is filling up stadiums all around the country.

I think they cheated.  Then I got to thinking: it would be helpful to have spies working in their campaign, to report any whispers around the coffee pot, or back rooms.  Cheating is not a one person effort.  It takes a team, coordination, and planning.

Then it occurred to me the Democrats are almost certainly ALREADY doing this, which is to say planting their people in Republican campaigns, where they listen not for policy ideas (BORING!!!) but for strategy, if there is any. 

It’s an obvious move.  It’s part of strategy, where winning is everything, where everything is a battle–not for principle or policy or result–but for votes and elected sinecures from which rain manna from heaven. It’s back scratching all around.

Why would they care if their ideas work, when their whole focus is just on winning elections?  How would they even notice, unless they took time off from their primary focus?

Me, personally, if you put me in charge of something like this: I would come up with TRICKS that would work, I think most of them.

Democrats run their campaigns like military campaigns.  They are disciplined, organized, and focused only on victory.

In theory, nobody is supposed to be a “professional” politician.  We are supposed to be electing not just bankers and lawyers, but tradesmen and farmers.

In theory, the electorate is offered two competing sets of ideas in every election, and the set which best conforms to their own beliefs wins.  But in reality, one side is grooming the electorate in a thousand ways to vote for them, regardless of the value of their ideas, or to put it more clearly, how damaging they always are.

Professionalizing politics is a lot like making a trade out of lying.  It is image management, where the image is whatever the image needs to be at any given time and location.  This is a truism, but no less valid for it.

Republicans are much less professional in this respect.  I remember some noted Democrat strategist saying that our ideas were better, but he could never vote for a Republican because we are so stupid.  And by stupid, he meant letting Democrats pull off amoral stunts election after election, and never getting the wiser, never fighting fire with fire, and never doing anything but learn how to lose to inferior people and ideas, all while pretending the fight had been fair, when it was anything but.

Couple thoughts.  One, the present Swedish ideal–what we think of as “Sweden”, even though they have adopted school choice, vouchers, and a system of social security tied directly to the current economy–was enacted early in the 20th century as a direct outcome of Eugenic thought, which looks at human society as amenable to the same sorts of planned interventions as animal husbandry.  People could be bred like cattle, desirable traits selected, undesirable traits eliminated (through sterilization, although infanticide was also likely practiced at times), and a better world created through biology.  Biology was the supreme science.

Socialism and Eugenics have a common history and a common root.  Both look at human beings as, in effect, problems to be managed by superior people.  The perfect society, the utopia, is understood to be the inevitable result of putting everything in the hands of the right sorts of people.

And Nazism and what might be termed the Swedish project were kissing cousins.  The concept of “racial hygiene” that Hitler preached was already ubiquitous throughout northern Europe in the various universities, perhaps most notable the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.  Nothing Hitler did was illogical when viewed from the premises which motivated Swedish socialism and social engineering.  And to be sure, Sweden was never invaded by the Nazis.  They supplied, if memory serves, a lot of raw iron or even steel to the German war machine, and were left unmolested, unlike Denmark and Norway.

And going down the line, Planned Parenthood should be seen clearly as what it is: the last vestige of Eugenic thought present in the modern world.  Killing black babies particularly was seen as a form of racial hygiene, of protecting the rest of the world from inferior beings from an inferior race.  Racism, to put it another way, is absolutely and inextricably linked with Planned Parenthood, and this holds, I would argue, to this very moment.

Planned Parenthood does not exist to provide advice on how to deliver healthy babies.  That is for obstetricians and perhaps gynecologists.  It is exist solely to PREVENT births, or what Eugenicists refer to as negative eugenics.  Less black babies, less problems: this was the argument, which I am summarizing but not agreeing with.

Watching all this, particularly the Soviet efforts at trying to figure out what in the brains of geniuses made them geniuses (in Lenin’s case, they might also have wondered what made him a psychopath, but of course that was a path to disgrace and murder), I was reminded how often we overvalue the power of intelligence.

The logic of pure brain power leads to, ultimately, as seeing computers as superior to us.  After all, they will soon be able to do calculations, to know things, to think ahead, with vastly more power than any of us will ever possess.

I have long meant to post this, but things float into and out of my memory, but Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in Sirens of Titan where he talks about an alien race which decides its robots are better than them, so they commit mass suicide.

But this is really a means of denigrating the spiritual aspect of existence, the way LIFE, and life alone has of participating directly in the cosmos, in the energy swirling around us.  It is a life out of balance,  a head without a body, a mind without a soul, which of course in many respects is what Communism was and is now.

But I remember this way of thinking.  I have often fallen prey to it.  After all, I have a reasonably high IQ, somewhere in the top 10% of the top 1%.  Being smart, though, is not, in itself, a path to being happy.  You need love for that, and you need a heart for love.

Again, I continue to try to make connection with all of my being.  It is a long term, difficult task.  I have many strange dreams, and feel frequent confusion and lostness.  This is the price, though, of coming back to where I belong.  This is the price.  You always have to pay the price.