This whole thing has left—is leaving—a mark I would argue is a scar on our collective psyche.
So don’t do it.
The nature of this particular game is that our side–the side of sanity, restraint, community mindedness, integrity and genuine decency–has a much harder position to play. We are dealing with amoral psychopaths whose main goal is to drive us insane with emotional, physical, and intellectual violence (there is violence to established norms inherent in the complete abandonment of principle and moral coherence) then use our reactions, combined with their lies, to trick stupid people into supporting them. That is the game.
We live in the freest, most prosperous, most just nation in the history of the world. And with their lies, they have convinced large swathes of the population that they live in hell.
It is true than many Americans lack meaningful connections with one another. But this would happen, naturally, with no extra effort, if we were not being divided continually. But the sirens and horns are blaring non-stop everywhere. People get scared. They pause in their outreach, they wonder if they really CAN trust their neighbor. Maybe they are a serial killer. After all, the world shown in the 8 hours of daily television most Americans watch is a dark, dangerous place where your best friend is liable to betray you at the worst possible moment.
The real enemies of decency and true progress are people like the Umbrella Man, who is allegedly a cop with the Minneapolis police force. Watch this video, which I may or may not have posted here:
https://banned.video/watch?id=5ed16ba4ef3949002fba2d1b&fbclid=IwAR3M7aj5RMtf8IdTFDPuL44GO3Cfhuw7R2SFEc2j6q_H6A5tUSJ5QMeY3mA
When I searched the term, the first two websites which had had video, had had the video removed.
If you are not freaking out a bit, you have no brain.
But if this guy does not look like a textbook Agent Provocateur I’m a fucking Democrat.
THESE GUYS are the enemies. Later in the same video, some guy talks about military or cop looking guys on motorcycles trying to talk him into breaking into the Mall of America. This sounds plausible to me. Why not, after you see that video of the guy using the umbrella to hide his identity, after breaking windows in a building he had no intention of entering, and which he clearly did not break in anger?
These guys, and the people sitting in 20 million dollar mansions (or whatever floats their boat, which might also be a 20 or 50 million dollar yacht, which actually might make more sense) and pushing the buttons and paying the cash transfers, are the enemies.
Black people are pawns in all this. Yes, some small minority of them is very violent, but keep in mind those same people have been preying on other black people probably all their lives. George Floyd did four years for breaking into a pregnant woman’s home, pointing a gun at her belly, and ransacking her home with 3-4 other guys, after which he drove the getaway car. She was black, of course. Most victims of black psychopaths are black.
White people don’t care. Protests are a vacation, not a serious commitment to understanding, much less actual measurable improvement.
Keep your cool. Arm yourself if you feel the need, but keep your cool. Don’t give the bastards food and ammunition.
It’s a big task. But the facts seem clear enough: we were played, as Tucker Carlson put it. And those AgitProp efforts continue. They are happening right now on most cable news outlets.
Trump needs people to understand that the “invisible enemy” is in the gates, that they walk among us, with smiling faces, seemingly caring hearts, and that they are calling for “justice”.
I am strongly tempted to call them Wicker People, or children of the sacrifice. Much of this is very old. Any individual unwilling to lose their own ego must take the life of someone else. Any group of such people must make this process routine, lest they face seeing their own madness.
Much of this, I feel–and this is a sudden sentiment falling on me–was old ten thousand years ago. The choice all humans have to make sooner or later is if they want to be animals, or angels.
There are, I feel, heavens. And there are hells. None of us are truly ignorant of the basics. No one is born with no knowledge at all.
All of this: this is my own Chod, of sorts. I eat myself with my own doubts. Seeing this is liberating.
I will add something I felt in this mornings meditation: desire and repulsion are closely related, as are knowledge and ignorance, which might usefully be framed the rejection of knowledge.
With both desire and repulsion, there is a lasting connection, which makes you less free. There is an energetic tether, which is always pulling or pushing. And knowing is increasing awareness, and ignorance is closely related to ignoring, or choosing to reduce awareness.
What is left when desire, repulsion and ignorance are abandoned is pure free, liberated awareness. This is a cliche, of course, but I felt it more clearly than usual.
Oh, I need to put a pause on all this writing.
Terrible, terrible things are possible. So too are great things. We shall see.
President Trump: trust your gut. I think it is right most of the time.
Tucker Carlson, summarizing the lunacy of this time period, of the lockdowns. I’ve been saying all this for a while, but I have to say he is good at what he does. I like how he phrases things, often.
And it occurs to me to comment that the magic trick, the real magic trick, that Trump needs to perform is driving a wedge between the black people who were just revictimized by white radicals, the same way they were back in the 60’s, and have been ever since, and the radicals themselves.
He needs to find a way for black people to SEE en masse, how they are being manipulated, how their just demands are being used, not only to pursue ends which have nothing to do with them, but which in nearly all cases HURT them.
Psychologically healthy people don’t really have any frame through which to see psychic vampires, people who suck the life out of you while pretending to be your friend.
For better and worse, I suppose, I have a lot of experience with this.
Put another way, Trump needs to find a way to connect those who “smile in your face” with the Democrats who have so hurt and abused the black community for so long.
What is ironic and infuriating about all this is that IT WAS WHITE PEOPLE THAT TAUGHT THEM THIS.
The riots of the 1960’s were inspired by white people, just like the recent ones, which are looking to do more or less the same thing those did, which is inspire white flight, lost jobs, blighted neighborhoods, and more poverty and pain, none of it suffered by the people who instigated it, who will long since have moved on.
Those same white people bent over backwards to teach black people that it wasn’t their fault they were poor, and that they didn’t and couldn’t do anything on their own to make it better. It was the “system’s” fault, and the only fix was to trust white leftists with their vote, until they could make it better for them. “Voting for us will be just like winning the lottery”, they were taught. You don’t need no damned books, or book learnin’.
There is no precedent in black history for the denigration of education until white Communists started agitating in black communities . All of the slaves, who had been forbidden–sometimes on pain of death–from learning how to read, sought out education the moment they were freed. This is when schools like Howard University and Morehead College were founded.
It is really not too general a principle, I don’t think, to state that with respect to substantially ALL the actual, real (not invented) problems in our country, it is the Communists fault. Their agents worked to build and use racial divisions. They taught blacks self defeating behaviors, which allowed them both to claim to work on their behalf and simultaneously to know that their outcomes would be unchanged decade after decade.
Even now, Democrats–who black people have been voting for since the late 1960’s or so–are trying to blame Republicans for problems in places THEY HAVE CONTROLLED FOR 50 YEARS.
I repeat: these people are masters of illusion. They are the Royalty of Lies.
And they will attack Barkley, as sure as night follows day, as sure as dark follows light in any place they exist.
What serves their cause needs to be front page, and what hurts it or at least does not advance it, needs to be concealed and overshadowed by other news, where necessary by other manufactured news. Chomsky’s “Manufacture of Consent”, is, by and large, an example of itself. This is not to say, though, that we are not being lied to by many people, for many reasons, and that this has not been going on pretty much “the whole time”. Go back as far as you like.
At the moment, it is mainly the Communists–the globalists, the elites who use both parties to push us towards tyranny–who concern me.
[On that note, I would actually comment that Communism, itself, is just one more narrative leading to power. It should never be viewed as other than a useful lie told by psychopaths to useful idiots.]
The present Communist output in cities around the country is planned. This seems a reasonable hypothesis, and if we have any intact intelligence agencies working for America the Constitutional Republic–that historical entity which in theory and largely in practice values human rights, dignity, freedom, transparency, limited government, and accountability–they will KNOW who is coordinating much of this. They are using cell phones, email. They are not doing 100% of their communication by courier and face to face.
But what needs to be REMEMBERED is that much our country is still under lockdown. Something which has never been done to my knowledge by any nation in world history is being done to the American people. California is still shut down for everything but nihilistic and violent protests. So, too, I think, with Illinois, New York, and others.
This is the background. Don’t forget the background. Respond to the calls for “racial justice” by asking that we start by allowing black people to WORK the jobs they HAD until the GOVERNMENT PUT THEM OUT OF WORK. After that, we can talk. But until then, the focus needs to be on abuses by the government, in the name of a disease which has clearly passed, and which in any event never exceeded the lethality of diseases we have endured before, like the Hong Kong Flu, and which never even APPROACHED, not even close, the lethality of the Post World War One Flu.
We are dealing with magicians, masters of optics, of illusion, of skillful and quickly and professionally executed lies. Watch their hands, not their eyes. When they want you to look at one thing, look at literally anything else, scanning for what they are trying to hide.
Always, always always look for what should be in the headlines, but isn’t. One obvious example: the massive wave of new infections in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas and elsewhere that hasn’t happened.
With regard to Texas, they got a small nod. 2,500 new hospitalizations since Memorial Day or something like that.
What is NOT being reported there? They had some bad news, right?
Well, there are nearly 29 MILLION people in Texas. About 190,000 die every year.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/vs15/t01.aspx
This works out to almost 16,000 a MONTH. 2,500 hospitalizations, with perhaps a 10% death rate among those hospitalized, is a rounding error.
Let me repeat myself; ALWAYS ask yourself what could be reported, but isn’t being reported. That is how you find what they are trying to hide. It takes work and thought, but if you’re going to try and have an opinion that makes sense, you NEED TO DO THE WORK.
Don’t ask one of these fucking assholes to do it for you. They will, but what you will get is shit soup served with a smile.
Trump is hurting in the polls. That can be fixed. Chaos always favors strong leaders, and he is quite capable of being that.
But we all need to GET that our nation is being undermined, as conscious policy, by people who have names and bank accounts. Many of them may work for our government. Doesn’t matter: arrests and confiscation are the solutions, or so it seems to me.
And to state the obvious, urban black communities are being set back DECADES. They are being destroyed completely. Trump needs to be hammering this point.
We are literally seeing open Communist agitation (ACAB, by the way, which I’ve seen here locally, means both All Cops are Bastards, as well as All CAPITALISTS; if you are so inclined, you might write out on the graffiti All COMMUNISTS) on our streets. They smell blood. They think a “revolution” is imminent.
If he is smart, if he keeps his cool, Trump will get through this better than before. 80-90% of Americans are appalled by all this, I would think, the relentlessly media cheerleading notwithstanding.
Trump needs to keep pushing the idea, I think, that we are under attack. Blacks have every right to protest, but their cause, their well being, is being undermined and obliterated by white radicals.
We have many months until the election. Trump needs to present a strong front, take decisive action within the law, keep pounding how the Democrats want chaos and destruction, keep his cool, and do absolutely everything in his power to prevent mass voter fraud.
Chod is the Tantric–I think–practice of offering your body as a “Red Feast” to demons. You imagine yourself being dismembered, and flayed, and offered as food to any demons who want to take part.
Neel is distressed by the man seemingly losing his mind (her intent, by the way, had been to meditate near the body parts herself), so she finds his teacher, who is literally meditating in the middle of the night in a local cave, and he more or less tells her “he knew the risks. It is up to him now to realize that he is the one devouring himself. I won’t tell him.”
These are vivid images. Two nights ago I dreamed that Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest project was instructing her Goop team to engage in cannibalism. Last night the spirit was similar, but really without any defining images. If you are a sensitive sort, imagine feeling that sort of horror every night, and you get a feel for what my average night is like.
And it occurs to me that, in important respects, I myself am engaging in involuntary Chod. I am being forced to confront fear in a more or less pure form.
What is most likely the most primitive, basic fear engrained, embodied, in each of us? I would hazard a guess it is being eaten. Our fight/flight/shame and freeze systems are designed, in the first case, to prevent us from being eaten, and in the second–the lizard brain–to deal with the horror of it when we can’t avoid it. This is what dissociation does.
And obviously the amygdala response, and the lizard brain responses are related. It is my basic, not particularly knowledgeable–and I’m not at all sure that the best scientists working in the best universities really understand this either–understanding that what lasts in trauma is the shut down that happens when the lizard brain takes over. There is a push and pull in normal people between social consciousness–the front brain–and the lizard brain. In the middle are hypo-and hyperarousal, which give the most obvious affective signs of trauma, which is to say anxiety, fear, shame, chronic anger and unnecessary aggression, and, in tandem, periodic lethargy, listlessness, and emotional detachment.
In Chod you are more or less directly activating all this circuitry. You are offering yourself as food. In the long run–and this is a practice which might be done periodically and even regularly for long years–the fear subsides, particularly once, as the lama implied, the practitioner realizes that he or she is both the origin of the horror and the recipient, making it a loop that can be ended. This makes sense especially when you consider that Chod literally means to sever.
I really think that much of spiritual practice, in the beginning at least, consists in developing the skill to voluntarily control the fear systems. We know that yogis can learn to voluntarily do all sorts of amazing things like control their heart rate and even skin temperature. Why not their ability to feel fear?
As I have said often, within the Kum Nye system which appeals to me by far more than any other system of personal growth I have yet encountered, the goals are very broadly to learn relaxation, then mindfulness, then concentration.
Within this context this would equal, roughly, “cutting” yourself off from fear, learning to monitor yourself for recurrences, then over time learning to concentrate and expand the positive feelings which eventually drift into your awareness, once you stop pushing them out in fear.
Christ himself taught “always there will be wars and rumors of wars.” Most of us are not facing literal death every day–that might actually be a relief, in some ways, for some of us–but we are all growing older, knowing we will one day die. We fear discomfort, and even inconvenience.
Lao Tzu wrote “we lose by gaining, and gain by losing”. I can’t claim to know what all he meant by that, but that we fear losing more when we have more seems clear enough. In their own way, perhaps your local homeless people are more free than you. Most of them are homeless because they had demons they couldn’t handle, but not, I don’t think, all of them. There is no reason to be jealous of them, but if I might riff again on an otherwise tired them, you might want to “check your attachments.”
I get a little better every day, I think. It’s not easy. My life is not easy, and to be sure, these are not easy times.
I do think Trump needs to keep his cool, stay on message, and investigate the origins–if he can find honest people to do it–of all the present attacks on our society.
Joe Biden is the weakest, worst, most execrable and cringe-worthy candidate of any major party in my lifetime. I won’t venture to say in the history of our Republic, but he has to be on the short list. He’s a rapist, seeming pedophile, serial groper, the origin of any number of idiotic public utterances, very, very old, and losing his mind.
I saw a piece yesterday calling this the battle of good and evil. I would agree with that.
And what is evil, really? A spirit in a human body that never really stops identifying primarily with the lizard brain, which seeks out terror and destruction because those are the only things that make it feel at all.
If not, why not?
As far as I can tell, just about all the ideas being advanced to “help black people” that have not been on the Libertarian and honest Conservative agenda for several decades are going to make things worse. Getting rid of the police will empower the most violent and disempower the peaceful.
Yes, by all means get rid of no-knock raids. Make gross misconduct easier to prosecute, especially when repeated. End the drug war. I’ve called for all these things, explicitly or implicitly.
But cops are not the enemy. Stupidity and violence are the enemies.
And again, Chauvin could and should have been disciplined and perhaps fired long ago, but a Democrat chose not to.
All these people calling for “change” have been in charge of most of the places being discussed for some decades. Now, they want everyone focused on who is not jumping high enough fast enough. But that is CLEARLY to take people’s eyes off of THEIR failures.
All 10 of the top crime cities have Democrat Mayors, and most of them are top poverty too: https://amac.us/americas-25-worst-cities-are-democrat-led-the-answer-new-leaders/
THESE are the people telling us “we need to do better”. Why aren’t THEY doing better?
Do you understand yet how this whole thing is a pack of lies intended to resurrect racial strife, prevent blacks from finally starting to get en masse off the Democrat plantation, distract from the radical attack by our governments on our ability to earn money and live in freedom, and prevent Trump from coasting to an easy victory on the strength of manifestly successful economic policy?
Democrats want death, failure and destruction, so they can pretend they want to solve it. And every time you vote for one, at any level, you reward them for their cynicism.
Republicans are no saints, but at least we CAN tell the truth, and by and large most of us are articulating sound and defensible policy.
Democrats policy, in contrast, consists in calling everyone who asks them what their policy is RACIST.
But they certainly don’t want you to infer from that they want to DO anything for black America. They need their failure–which they are doing so much right now to continue to ensure–much too much to let them go.