Month: June 2020

https://summit.news/2020/06/12/former-advisor-to-steve-jobs-says-facebook-is-destroying-the-very-fabric-of-human-relationships/

If I might paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, who was certainly a clever man, but one who seemingly enjoyed being recondite (I get this, by the way, but there’s a time and place) the medium itself is part of the message.  There is the content on Facebook, the specific posts, like the video of the latest shooting in Atlanta [that exact scenario happened to me, by the way.  I got in my car, realized I was too drunk and–mostly–tired to drive, so I just parked on the side of the road, and woke up to see two cops circling me.  After questioning I flunked, like this guy, I was arrested, spent the night downtown, and was released about 10am.  I got a lawyer–who was not all that expensive, something like $500–and the whole thing disappeared after some easy community service], and there is the forum, the place, where people are in the habit of easy anger, where they hover and look for it.

I’m guilty of this, certainly. It’s an easy addiction to slide into.  The alternative is being productive in the real world, which is my current focus.

But I think everyone needs to get that there is a LOT of money flowing through these companies, and they can afford top rate psychologists to teach them all the ways to make all of this more conducive to obsession and addiction.

Capitalism–which by the way many of these greedy bastards use while opposing it in principle and in terms of who they donate money to–does not say you have to be greedy to the point of rapacity.  Ideally, it is tempered by moral notions of moderation, as taught in any of the major religions.  It simply says that you should have the right to be paid for your work, and that how you negotiate that amount is between you and your employer or your customers.

It is an odd thing, though, that the most greedy rich people we see–like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg–are all in favor of a world where socialists control everything.  No doubt they know that their own power and wealth INCREASE in such a world.  They will not be controlled.  They will not be regulated.  That is for the fools who don’t get on the gravy train early enough.

Virtually everything you see the 20 somethings chanting in the streets is the opposite of the actual truth.

The Invitations Overhead

At the edge of a golf course, a man watches
geese land on a pond, the bottom of which
is spotted with white golf balls. It is October
and the geese pause in their long flight.

Honking and flapping at one another, they seem
to discuss their travels and the man thinks
how the world must look when viewed from above:
villages and cornfields, the autumn trees.

The man wonders how his own house must look
seen from the sky: the grass he has cut
a thousand times, the border of white flowers,
the house where he walks from room to room,

his children gone, his wife with her own life.
Although he knows the geese’s honkings are only
crude warnings and greetings, the man also
imagines they tell the histories of the people

they travel over, their loneliness, the lives
of those who can’t change their places, who
each year grow more isolated and desperate.
Is this what quickens his breathing when at night

the distant honking seems mixed with the light
of distant stars? Follow us, follow us, they call,
as if life could be made better by departure,
or if he were still young enough to think it so.

Stephen Dobyns

A lot of vets have to be asking themselves right now if this is the “freedom” they spent the better part of the last 20 years trying to protect, and if this was worth paying for in blood, pain, fear, and death.  Many left parts of their bodies and souls overseas.  And for what?  A nation which has been undermined by successful Communist propaganda, and which is utterly wretched in mind and character, which is ignorant, gullible, foolish, and lazy?

Wake up, those of you who are still sleeping.  It is much later than you think.  I don’t know the solution, but waking the fuck up is unquestionably the first step. 

The choices this year are stark and obvious: lunacy and Trump.  As bad as things are now, there is absolutely no reason they could not be made much worse, and permanently–certainly for the rest of our lives–by a psychopath like Biden.

We have numerous people more or less openly calling for coups.

There is hope in this desperation–and it is desperation, since all their more subtle and seemingly legal or at least defensible ruses failed–but desperation often leads to terrible places.

https://www.infowars.com/istandwithtuckercarlson-trends-after-disney-t-mobile-papa-johns-pull-ads-from-show/

Eloquent, passionate, clearly reasoned, and balanced.  This is a great speech.  Carlson is a national treasure.  We are lucky to have him.

I sent Papa Johns an email indicating I won’t be buying their pizzas any more.  That’s not hard.  There are plenty of pizza places.  That was my go-to pizza though.

I can’t do less with Disney or T-Mobile.

When things are shaking like this, waves moving one way can very, very easily move rapidly back.  He’s right that we might just be stupid enough to elect Joe Biden.  I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens, but we will certainly go a long way down the road to becoming a totalitarian state.  I will most likely wind up in jail, which would be the only honorable place to be in such a place.  I’ll make sure I read “My Happy Time in Hell” as my next book.

But it seems obvious to me that many, many, many Democrats who have really not grasped how crazy their party has become, who thought all that was overblown Republican conspiracy theory, are seeing first hand everything we said, everything we predicted.  It has got to be scaring the shit out of them.

As Tucker said, though, this is a time to continue speaking the truth, even if your voice shakes, because there is actual physical and social danger.

A life without courage is not worth living.  I don’t want to die, but being a fucking little bitch like Mitt Romney scares me a lot more.

One of the scariest things about our times is how easy it is to scare people and start a political stampede. There are people who could be upset if they were told that half of all Americans earn less than the median income—though of course that is the way median income is defined

I’m reminded of the petition some smart ass got people to sign calling for the abolition of the use of Dihydrogen Oxide in human food preparation, even though that is just an unusual way of describing the structure of water.

It would seem many Americans feel that when they being are manipulated, it is bad form for the rest of us not to join them.

Individualism, as a creed, was in my understanding a part of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and is arguably the single most useful historical corrective to this coercive, irrational, and really primitive behavior.

Mobs are nothing new.  What is new–or was new, take your pick–was the protection of ideosyncratic and unpopular views by the people who control the police power of the State.

Lynch mobs are not new.  Police protecting the people the mob wants to lynch–even when the person ordering them there personally does not agree with them either–that is the innovation that helped create the freest, most just nation ever to exist on this planet, at least to this extent and at this scale.

Get rid of police, empower mobs.  Empower mobs, you empower collective stupidity, criminality, and completely pointless and avoidable violence.  None of the math on this is very hard.

And I would comment that much of the reason white people are not indulging their impulses to go crack heads is that this is OUR system. We built it.  We created the legal space to include people not like us.  We did that because we were convinced by logic and reason–which our culture values and elevates to a high level of honor and respect–that it was the right thing to do.

If the system collapses, if we see massed battles in the streets, we all lose.  Nobody really wins, except those who love chaos for its own sake, and those who hate this nation.  Effectively, Antifa and those like them HAVE in effect declared themselves enemies of America.

Over and above the legal and moral problems with using violence, I think many people get intuitively that if the shooting ever starts, something fundamentally good about this nation will be damaged permanently.  This is not North versus South.  This is neighbor versus neighbor.  None of us want a civil war fought at Walmart.

I will guarantee a lot of guns have been cleaned and recleaned over the past few weeks.  I guarantee many people got in some range time, and bought yet more ammunition.

But we are not seeing those people on the streets yet, and I hope we never do.  I hope our leaders do the right things, for the right reasons.

One final note: I watched the Swedish movie “The Girl who kicked over the hornet’s nest”.  In it, there is a breakaway, compartmentalized cabal working for the Secret Police that, in the end, is arrested by honest government operatives.

Until we start seeing people like Hillary Clinton–and probably Joe Biden, who pretty clearly did do the act for which Trump was impeached–in handcuffs, nobody who is paying attention is going to relax.

If I encounter someone at a store, and neither of us has COVID-19 (remember that?  It’s why you see so many people wearing masks, and why two of your favorite restaurants went out of business), then the chance of me getting COVID-19 is the same as the risk of them transmitting brain cancer, Marburg Virus, an inability to jump, musical talent, or a knack for sarcasm: Zero.  Zero with masks, still zero without masks.

And it appears to be the case that only symptomatic people transmit this, and then only until they develop antibodies, which takes approximately ten days for most.

Think about it: how would an asymptomatic person transmit it?  The virus is in their blood and lungs.  One of the two has to be transferred between the two of you.

In theory, they could pick their nose, pick some up, put it on an surface, which you then touch, and which you then internalize by picking your nose without washing your hands.  Nose to nose transmission via a surface.

But 1) the virus does not seem to last long on most surfaces; and 2) this circumstance only happens if both of you pick your noses without washing your hands.  Keep your hands out of your eyes and nose, and wash them after every interaction with potentially contaminated surfaces, and you are good.

But the asypmtomatic person cannot get to you through the air whether you are wearing a mask or not.  I think everyone with any sense would agree with this.  And as I say, it appears asymptomatic people may not be contagious at all, so zero risk.

So the only people in any given grocery store it makes ANY sense to worry about are those coughing and sneezing LIKE THEY ARE SICK.  If those people stay home–and most seem to be doing that, if there even remain any noteworthy number of people who have this thing in this country–then the masks on all sides do nothing.

And this is over and above the New England Journal of Medicine’s claim that to get this thing you really need to be in a confined space, like a bedroom, for at least five minutes and perhaps up to thirty minutes, with someone who is coughing and sneezing up the virus.  None of that is relevant in any business, or any store, if no one is coughing and sneezing.

And I would finally note that the debates over mask wearing really assume at least N95 masks being worn properly, i.e. the nose not visible, and a snug fit around the nose and mouth.  If I can see your nose, or you are wearing a bandana, then the whole things is symbolic show.  Nothing more.  It is completely fucking useless, on all accounts.  It’s useless if you don’t encounter anyone who is sick, and still useless if you do.

This same logic is available to all. 

I will wonder aloud again how deep the desire goes on the part of the Globalists/Deep State to injure all of us psychologically through these rituals which have no honest scientific purpose.

The best possible spin on all this is that it is stupid.  The obvious alternative is that it is malicious and wicked.

You know, I really do think I reason my way to my own conclusions, but am periodically reminded that so too do all other reasonably intelligent and independent people. This is from about 30 years, but as John Cleese points out in the tweet, it might have been ten minutes ago, although the enemies list may have changed slightly.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1271535485467283457

My own tone is slowly softening, which was my hope and my predictions.  My views won’t change as I heal and evolve, but I fully expect my manner of explaining them–and specifically my degree of pugnacity in the face of opposition–to change a lot.

If I’m honest, if I’m debating someone whose main goal is really just to get me to lose my temper and discontinue the exchange, then when I DO lose my temper, they win.  They don’t win intellectually, obviously.  Their bad ideas do not thereby become good.

However, I do believe myself to be better than them, so holding myself to a higher standard is reasonable.  They then become agents of my growth, and the chance is non-zero–as it likely is in most of my past exchanges–that I might actually change a mind, perhaps of an observer, if not the person trying to push my buttons.

What BLM and white radicals in general are doing to the black community is really not that different from what white radicals did to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War.

In the former case they portray all black failure as the result of white people, and as white people (BLM has blacks in it, but the leadership I am very sure is saturated with white radicals) they claim to be able to rectify all these failures for the black people.  They perpetrate, in other words, the crimes alleged in their own narrative.  They teach blacks to fail, while blaming everyone but themselves when it happens.

In the Vietnam War, we were helping South Vietnam protect itself from a North Vietnamese invasion.  That is the historical fact.

We were, in other words, fighting alongside “brown men” who were being attacked by other “brown men”.  We were fighting with a nation which improved a lot while we were there–including the extensive land reform which had long been demanded–against a totalitarian state where disobedience often meant instant death, or slow death through the exhaustion of a work camp.

But the war was portrayed as one of white men against the “brown man”.  And the white radicals wanted to punish their fellow whites for their racism and imperialism.  So they created the political climate in which a war which had already been won–where a peace treaty was already signed, and fighting ended–was lost in the end, due solely to our abandonment of South Vietnam.

Ultimately, millions of people died.  Many tens of thousands of boat people, just from Vietnam died.  Perhaps two hundred thousand South Vietnamese were summarily executed.  Hundreds of thousands of families were broken apart, their homes and possessions confiscated, and many wives never saw their husbands again, or either their children, who were often sent to brainwashing camps.

And the Khmer Rouge–who long, long predated the militarily necessary bombings in Cambodia–most likely would not have won, had we not abandoned the Cambodian government entirely.  You know, to keep white people from killing brown people. 

That abandonment led to one of the most horrific genocides on record, where large numbers of people were literally tortured to death, dozens every day in de facto dungeons all over Cambodia.  The death toll was up to perhaps a third of the population, which percentage wise dwarfs the Holocaust.

Yet somehow, through these enormous failures which would cause any person possessing an authentic conscience to feel terrible pangs of remorse and regret, the radical whites continued to believe in their own moral superiority, the necessity of their subversive efforts, and continued to believe that winning Communist control in this county would do anything different than what happened everywhere else.

You cannot not be borderline clinically schizophrenic and believe these fantasies. Yet, believed they are, by many people who are shaping the views of our young. 

It’s a bit like watching a horror movie.  You know it will not end well, but it is hard to know what to do.  Delusion and vanity are powerful emotions.

The elevation of one person or group does not require the denigration of everyone else.

At root, BLM is about trying to tear down, not build up.  There is no positive vision for the black community.  The calls for “justice”–with respect to a police officer who has been arrested and charged with murder, which is how the system is supposed to work–are really a smoke screen for nihilistic violence.

Are black lives being improved by Black Lives Matter?  I don’t see it.  Quite the contrary.  I see the ruin of countless dreams, endless hours of tough labor, and a repudiation of the faith particularly minorities and immigrants placed in our system.

All of this is only made possible by craven and largely wicked Democrat leaders.

It’s all there.  It’s on your TV.  It’s on your computer screen.  It’s on your streets, if you go downtown and look, which I have.

Where we are at, propaganda-wise, is at the beginning stage of a fight to determine the narrative of this time.  The REALITY of it, as far as I can see, is that in their desperation–like trapped animals in a cage–the Democrats have decided to destroy as much of America as they can.  If they can’t prevent Trump from getting reelected, at least they can punish the world.

The people who control our media are likely still working out how they will spin the past month or more of completely unnecessary, utterly destructive coerced labor stoppages.  But you can take it to the bank that it will blame anyone but those responsible.

The truth needs to be spoken by those who see it.  They need to do so publicly, clearly, and often.

We were played.  A trial run testing our compliance was conducted on us.  A large assault on our freedom, our prosperity, and our very soul was made, and continues. 

This is the truth, as I see it.  If you agree, make it known–or, to be clear, your own personal take on all this, modified from mine as you see fit–wherever you live, figuratively and literally.

I was meditating today and it hit me that where personal growth is concerned, the goal is not so much releasing trapped memories, but in loosening the energetic fields which hold them, as if they were encased in amber.  Memories are objects within a field.  Causing that energy to begin to flow again is the goal.  The memories are a byproduct, and it is important not to fetishize them, as most therapists implicitly recognize by suggesting no one get “trapped in their story”.

I was further contemplating that the Self, itself, represents a sort of energetic structure that makes action more efficient.  It is a sort of railroad tracks, which guide you efficiently from one Point A to another Point B.  It prevents you from getting lost, distracted, bewildered, ineffectual.

One common heuristic we use is asking ourselves if person so and so–and it may be us–is confronted with such and such a situation, how will they deal with it?  To the extent personality means anything, the answer is in our often correct guesses, when the actual test is done.

We speak of character.  When X happens, someone with character does Y, and someone without it does Z.

Socially, it is important to know what to expect of one another.  In this respect, the formation of a personal self, and a larger social sense of context and social self, is vitally important.

But spiritually, it may be that nothing really needs to be done.  Our lives are necessarily torn between these two realities.  As Lao Tzu put it, in the first stanza, “Ever desireless, one sees the Mystery; ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.”

We live in a deep ocean, which perhaps no manifest being in the universe truly understands.  But we also have bills to pay, and friendships to tend.

It is important, I think, to think about these things.  But not too much.  There is no equation sufficient to this purpose, no words, and no nameable path.  This does not mean there is not a Way for each of us.

Words are often wasted.  But not all words, with respect to all people.