Month: June 2020

I’ve probably said this many times in many ways. Here’s one more.

The hardest part of deep growth is that you have to be fully honest about who you are and where you have been emotionally. For those of us who have suffered, this involves casting away congenial lies involving emotions hidden and locked away deep within us.

We lie to protect ourselves from the pain, and to stop lying is to release the captured and bound pain.

But I see no other way.

And I will make a public note to myself that this process of lying often makes people stupid. You might think you are having a discussion about, say, masks, but you are really dealing with their repression of what they felt when their father left for good when they were ten. It all gets mixed in together in unpredictable and confusing ways.

And while it is reasonable to hope for rationality from those around us, we—I—need to remember that the tacit demand being made, as heard by their unconscious, is that they be made to suffer.

In all human interactions there is a lot going on, and a prodigious amount of latent communication and information being exchanged.

President Trump,

You need to take care of business.  We need to see the bastards ruining this country in hand cuffs.  If this doesn’t happen, then the good people of this country will despair, and that will lead to violence, bloodshed and death.  We are waiting patiently.  We are hoping good news is on the way.

But if you can’t deliver, bad things, I feel–very bad things–will start to happen soon.  The madness has gone too far.

I am not recommending anything, nor will I participate in anything bad.  But no one can live indefinitely without hope.

Even if you have reasoned your way into your views, if you have not reasoned your way into how you deal with people, it makes little difference.

Logically, any “empowerment” of the black community that consists in large measure of white advocacy and patronage is no empowerment at all.  It’s actually debilitating.

“Here, son/daughter, let me do that for you.  Because I am smarter and better than you.  And because your dependency is emotionally nourishing for me.  Please don’t ever grow up (read: thrive educationally, socially and economically).  I couldn’t stand it.”

If that sounds vampiric, it is. That’s how codependence works.  We literally have people who claim to be on the side of the black community saying they can’t be expected to get valid ID’s.  How is that different from saying they are more or less a “special needs” community?  It should infuriate anyone with self respect who understands what is being claimed.

In this regard, ponder that, from what I read, 5 out of 6 Black Lives Matter members are white.

I will add a metacomment that I’ve decided not to force myself to allocate the willpower and energy needed to keep myself from blogging/pontificating.  My logic regarding silence was sound, but I think I can and should still do this–count me among those who literally believe the future of the world is hanging in the balance right now–while also increasing my daily meditations to three hours or so.

I think most of us tend to view people who are dumbly happy as dumb.  Serious people look worried and spend their time focused and frowning.

But it occurs to me that the essence of the spiritual task is being happy in a simple and deep way  KNOWING full well what this life can hold.  How can you be happy and at peace when you know pain and death await all of us?  When people are tortured, shot, raped, belittled and scorned unfairly?

This is the core question.  This is the primary spiritual question.

The Buddha did not teach anyone how to overcome disease, old age, and death. Nor did any other spiritual teacher.  All of them, each in their own way, taught how to recognize and accept the realities of our existence and to still live a great life which was largely independent of the ups and downs which happen to all of us.

This time is no different than any other time.  Your house was on fire before, and it is still on fire now.  And most of us are still sleeping. It’s very, very hard not to.  All you have to do is tune into the noise all around you.  It is easier now than it ever has been in human history.  You can hear buzzing from the moment you wake until the moment you fall asleep.

The sound comes to me often, when I’m on that thread of thought, of the buzzsaw in the Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia.  It’s off in the distance.  It might be a leaf blower in the present era.

I can’t live in a cave, I don’t think.  I need people.  But that is certainly not a bad solution in many ways.  If I might echo Tolstoy, how much do you really need?

My intuition tells me it is time for me to focus on calming myself, on managing fear, on finishing a long process of dealing with fear.

The broad facts are in the public domain.  The Left has taken off its mask, and we can see the fangs in the street.  If you can’t see it now, you won’t see it ever.  No words I can say at this point will make much difference, if indeed they ever did.

But I remember the 2012 election.  I felt strongly Mitt Romney would win.  Then some awful dark mist floated in from the ocean–it took the visible form of a hurricane, but it was much worse than that–and Obama won, despite being horribly unpopular.  Looking back at the things James O’Keefe uncovered, fraud has to be considered as one of the key elements.

My point though is that the most important fight is spiritual.  That is where the true struggle is.

As long as people are living in fear–and everyone across the spectrum is feeling exaggerated fear now–then the math works most for those who live in and deal in fear.

It doesn’t matter that some of this fear is rational, and most of it is not.  Trump is not a horrible person.  He’s a genuinely decent person, and we are lucky to have him.  But that is not what people are being told to see, and far too few people are realizing that what they are being told to see is not what is actually THERE to see.

Hordes of people were tricked into the delusion almost instantaneously that the simple, obvious solution to police violence is no police.  That this is horrifically stupid doesn’t matter.  That this will hurt persons of color the MOST and the fastest doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters any more for many but the Narrative, and the Narrative is whatever emotionally unhinged people with clinical Personality Disorders tell them it is, and it varies day by day.  The goal is daily fear and daily anger.  The Narrative is whatever, in their judgement, will push in those directions, and away from careful, moderate, thoughtful consideration of real problems.  No thinking allowed.  No problem solving allowed.  No perduring principle based behavior allowed.

In the face of such madness, my best recourse, I feel, is to cultivate my own sanity.  I’m not immune to any of this.  I am angry and afraid, but for reasons I quite obviously can and do articulate at length regularly, here and elsewhere.

I need to go into the dark, where the demons live, and confront them there, harry them there, make their efforts difficult there.

That is my intention.  I may not post for a while.  I am going to try not to, although I am a profoundly compulsive person, which is to say I am often bounced around by emotions I have not yet figured out how to regulate.

But those who can see, see.  Those who cannot, will not.  A better argument for those without ears is an exercise in futility.

Trump understands what needs to be done: a good campaign, the prevention of cheating to the extent possible, and at some point mass arrests.  The lunatics have names.  They have addresses.  And they don’t want to be in jail, so the whole network, if ever attacked HONESTLY, will unravel quickly.

And as with Khrushchev, the sins of those who came before can be publicly aired, and their defenders publicly chastised.  If we are to survive as a civilized nation with a functioning and trustworthy government and system of laws, this MUST happen.

I went back to this table again: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku

93% of the deaths were of people over 55
97% over 45
99% over 35

And 160 people under 25 died, they say from COVID.

During the period where 107,000 or so people died from COVID, 1.2 million Americans died of all causes, or a bit more than 10x that number.

The mortality rate is still a closely guarded government secret–I’m half kidding, but only half–but according to the guy at Stanford who called this thing, in my view, more or less right from the very beginning, and who is certainly qualified to comment, the true death rate among those infected is “between 0.02%-0.4%, far lower than the 1%-and-way-up numbers that were once bandied about – and much closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu.”

So .4 is on the high side.  So if you are a 30 year old person in reasonably good health, and someone injects you with COVID-19, your risk of dying is .4 on the high side, multiplied by your demographic share of those deaths, which is 1%, multiplied by .66 because about a third of people have natural immunity for some reason.  Actually, I can’t find that study at the moment, so let’s stick with the original math: .004 (four people in a thousand) multiplied by .01 (one person in a hundred).  I can do that in my head.  .00004.  4 people in a hundred thousand.  If that is right by other math is wrong.

But this math is if you are already infected.  Most people walking just about every street on the planet are not infected.  So your chance of being EXPOSED to the disease in the first place is quite small.  And then there is the chance that you will actually GET it.

Something around one in a million to one in ten million seems to be in the neighborhood.  The risk is so close to zero, and so much lower than risks we all take for granted every day–the risks of obesity for example and driving–that it should not be a factor for anyone under 55 at all.

I am reminded again of the Bush 1% doctrine, which was supposedly based on a quote from Dick Cheney: If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.

Or to quote Ronin, when there’s any doubt, there is no doubt.

This is the level of panic and supposed care going on.  But what is missing in all this is the mass famines looming on the horizon from the disruptions in the food chain, mass drug overdoses and suicides and mental illnesses, disease fatalities that would not have been fatal if we hadn’t paralyzed our healthcare system for no reason, the excess mortality from increases in unemployment, Etc.

The whole thing is a cluster fuck.  If I might retool an old metaphor, it is literally like investing all your time fixing a window while your building is on fire.  Saving 1 life and losing 5 because of how you saved the one life is stupid.  And it’s not even clear that one life was saved.

If we had done nothing more than ask everyone older than 55 to wear masks, and to shop at designated times at their local stores, and for people in poor health to do their best to stay home and not socialize, far fewer people would have died.  Cuomo and others in effect murdered tens of thousands of people with stupid policy. 

Measurably: https://twitter.com/MdKnightBabe/status/1275537902009675776

The video of George Floyd being murdered would have been immediately pulled from the internet, and everyone who saw it arrested and never seen again.  The government would have made a statement indicating that the People’s Revolution continued and that even though counter-revolutionary elements were trying to sabotage them that the representatives of the people were performing heroically in protecting the working people and middle classes.

Same with Breonna Taylor, whose death was a necessary outcome of the struggle against Fascists and counter-revolutionaries.

All deaths, by State sponsored and controlled police, would be deemed vitally and regrettably necessary, and all conflicting footage and people made to disappear.

Put another way, any honest person who genuinely wanted to improve the world would not last a New York minute in an authentic Communist regime.  They would disappear without a trace, and lies would be told about them in their absence.

I don’t understand why academics, who could and should study what is now open history, well attested by thousands if not tens of thousands of people, continue to fail to draw obvious and inescapable conclusions.  For my own part, it is hard not to believe they WANT bloodshed, death, pain, and an irrational and omnipotent State.

I have, of course, argued this often.  At some point, the switch flips, and they root for the bad.

One very plausible, and perhaps even attractive explanation for why Trump is not engaging in mass arrests of Antifa is that they are helping him in many ways.  The people they are hurting, by and large, live in solidly, ridiculously, reflexively Blue States. If he comes busting in there with Federal agents, the Governors and Mayors who have been failing their citizens, who are betraying the trust given them, can blame Trump, and refocus all the bad on him, which the mass of their citizenry are only too happy to allow them to do.  None of them want to face the lunacy and destructiveness of their own.

So allowing the shit show to continue can only help Trump, and stopping it forcefully is, on balance, likely to hurt him politically.  Conservatives, of course, see how wrong and awful all this is, but the Left does not.  And if he can’t continue peeling moderates away from the hard core nutjobs, then he is not making progress in the cultural war of ideas.

It is sometimes said of Trump that he plays “3D chess”, by which is meant chess with added complications, making him some sort of complicated genius.  I think there is genius in him, but it is instinctual.  If he were the former kind of genius, it would show in his speech, and it doesn’t.  He struggles to get out, often, what seem to be clear sentiments and clear images in his head.

Rather, what he has across his lifetime had is a sense of where things are going, what the Big Picture will look like at some point in the future, and he intuitively finds ways of getting in tune with and benefiting from and often influencing for the better existing underlying but subtle patterns.

When one looks at a chess board, nothing ever changes, unless someone moves a piece.  You can replay to the last detail games that were played 100 years ago.

But in the real world, the “pieces” move themselves.  The whole thing is in constant flux and agitation.  Moves are made for you, and moves are made for your opponent.

Quite often, in such a situation, the best “move” is doing nothing, and waiting for your opponent to paint themselves into a corner, as the Left seems to be doing.  They could checkmate themselves without him lifting a finger.  As I believe it says in the Art of War “when your enemy is making mistakes, never interfere.”

This would be chess with a time component, a dynamic, mutable component.  This, I think he plays really, really well.  He’s not so much thinking 5 moves ahead as SEEING five moves ahead.  It’s an important difference.  His intellect is about what it appears to be.  But his intuition is vastly, vastly better than that of most people, and when tied to his confidence and pugnacity, the package presented is just what we need.  I wish he had Churchill’s eloquence, but I will settle for his willingness to fight, and for his instincts and vision.