Month: June 2020

As I ponder it this morning, there is something abstract, depersonalizing, and actually distancing about social media.

Could you imagine someone writing the same letter to three friends in the old days?  100?

And is there not something fundamentally different about sharing an experience together, and describing one to people who are distant, even if only on the other side of town?  I think of a really good ad for Las Vegas where they show a group of obviously exhausted women.  After a few moments one of them start laughing, then they all do.  Then they cue the line “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” 

Is that not a fundamentally, totally different experience than posting pictures and descriptions?

And one of my kids commented to me that a good number of the rioters–the white ones–around the country seemed to be doing it in part for Instagram.  The violence and destruction was abstract, but the social media seemed real to them, which is a precise inversion.

I’ll post it here–SHARE it with you–if and when I find a way across the river. 

I’ve actually had as one of my quotes on Facebook virtually since I got the account that “if I ever get it all figured out I will text you.”  I guess I saw all this back then, too. 

It’s odd how we figure things out, then forget them.  As Churchill is said to have put it: “men will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

I think I’m going to extend my abstinence to all news.  Let’s see how I do with that.  No news, no Facebook, until July 4.  I won’t deny myself public comments here.

I’m going cold turkey on Facebook for a month, and giving serious thought to doing the same with drinking, for at least a month.  I’ve largely given up drinking, but I still like to get drunk once a week or so.  My sleep is still adventurous enough that I like to go to bed once in a week and know I have nothing to worry about.

But I was really going deep today, and realizing how my media addiction seems to mask a sort of existential nausea.  And then it hit me that is a perennial emotional anesthetic, and that the cost of losing it goes up the longer the addiction lasts.

Put another way, if you deflect using media–or anything else, including booze and drugs–the feelings don’t go away, but it gets harder to go back to them and process them.  If your life was a prison you were escaping, then the way out is to go back into the prison, and figure out how to walk out the front door.  That’s not an easy thing, particularly if you have an easy way to avoid all that.

Here is what I would like to suggest: part of our national affliction with respect to a large, really cult-like social grouping saying and doing absurd, damaging, and divisive things, is that the members are ADDICTED TO THE MEDIA PUSHING THAT PLATFORM.

What would happen if they woke up?  They would lose a security blanket, a known.  They would be thrown back to the wolves of unprocessed emotion, and this as people largely unable to deal with emotions in the first place, particularly those I believe have Borderline Personality Disorder.  The security of a Rachel Maddow–no matter how ludicrous the claims she makes–is vitally important to them.  As long as that emotional need is there, no rational dialogue will be possible.

One interesting aspect at this whole attempt at direct Internal Subversion, is that the very people Trump SHOULD be able to rely on to give him accurate intel as to the Who’s, and How’s might actually be the ones perpetrating it.

Who to trust?  It’s a tough question.  He could get a dog, but the dog won’t have much to say about the funding and coordination of this planned and supported violence and property crime, committed in the main by white people in black neighborhoods, as far as I can tell.

The thing with Flynn is that this corrupt judge (who in my understanding hired a lawyer.  Imagine that: a judge executing a politicized ruling himself hiring a lawyer) is just trying to buy a delay.  Flynn apparently is still a threat to them.

Assuming Trump can get through all this fraud, and the smoke of a thousand literal and rhetorical fires and win reelection, he needs to set the pitbulls loose.  He will have the support of enough of us that the screaming of the few really won’t matter.

And if we can get a fair election, this will be a bloodbath for Democrats.  I really feel that.  They are doing everything wrong.  Their old lies won’t hold anymore, not in the face of all this.  Black people–who even now are surrounded by young Communist radicals wearing skinny jeans tearing down BLACK neighborhoods–surely have to be able to see what is really going on.

1) I had a dream perhaps ten years ago, in the middle of the Obama era, that a number of left wing radicals were making it through SEAL training, and joining the Teams.

A couple days ago, somebody posted this: https://havokjournal.com/world/we-are-the-useful-idiots-how-our-nation-divided-is-playing-straight-into-the-hands-of-our-greatest-enemies/?fbclid=IwAR1LChvafrq6lPdrqf-ZabBhu83PwQezxRc7D_36r1n89Sh8dAtVfKKSKJM

Basically, a DevGru connected operative told this journalist “PSST.  THERE IS A CONSPIRACY.  We don’t know who–probably the Russians, but maybe the Iranians, or Chinese, or North Koreans.”

Left out, of course, is the CIA. 

Here is my thing.  This left a sour taste in my mouth: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2018/08/16/retired-admiral-navy-seal-compares-president-trumps-actions-to-mccarthy-era-witch-hunts/

Yeah, the guy was JSOC commander, all around badass.  He told everyone they need to make their beds.  But he was buddies with Brennan.  That is a fatal flaw in my view.  He supported the idiotic notion–and it has ALWAYS been idiotic, but plausible for fools, which he is not–that the Russians helped Trump win the election.  He knew better.  Hell, he may have provided guys to help Brennan run domestic operations.  They come from somewhere.  If not active duty–which is unlikely–recently demobilized and sheep dipped operators.

And that, in turn, makes me wonder if Extortion 17 was not a planned effort to take out a non-compliant Old Guard.  McRaven took over August 8, 2011.  The Chinook was shot down by people who were expecting it just two days before.

I am not the idiot who would want to throw dirt at all of them.  It’s a small cadre, in my view, but in that environment a small number of bad apples can cause a LOT of damage.

My point is that that unit seems to me compromised to some extent, and I will believe that until I see some reason to believe otherwise.  My opinion doesn’t matter, and it’s very possible I’m being paranoid to a more than usual excess.  But that’s my two cents. 

2) I had a dream perhaps 10-15 years ago that Bill Gates was building an enormous server farm underneath the lake next to where he lives. It was obvious in the dream that his intent was to gather very, very, very large amounts of data on people.  The purpose was unclear, but now what I would suggest is that he has set himself the goal of rivaling the NSA in his ability to gather, store and analyze data.  There is no reason at all not to think that literally every computer on the planet that runs Microsoft software and is connected to the internet cannot be breached easily by built in back doors, not just in the Operating Systems, but in Word and Excel and the like, not to mention Explorer.

You know, a few billion here, a few billion there, spent intelligently, and pretty soon you have yourself a thing.

I will say, I don’t want to spend my life in prison.  I don’t want to be shot.  And I definitely don’t want to be tortured.  These are all possibilities.  I get that.  But they are possibilities whether I speak my piece or not.  Life is an inherently uncertain process.  But it is much, much worse if you spend it as a coward, hiding.  I have managed unmanageable fear all my life, every day, most of every day.  I don’t like it.  I fight it, and that is how I choose to live.

If my journey ends early because I talked too much, so be it.  In any event, that was probably the plan all along.  To some extent we are all straw dogs, as Lao Tzu teaches.

Really, what has happened is that what should have been multiethnic, united, broad based protests to reopen our economy have been coopted–seemingly by plan–to create divisions among us.

This extraordinarily evil tactic has also created suffering in the black community piled on already deep suffering. There can be no doubt that the riots supposedly protesting the death of George Floyd will create much, much more pain than change or justice (I say supposedly, because this was also clearly a Communist AgitProp operation layered onto honest, sincere and warranted grief) .

But politically, this whole thing is both stirring the racial pot, AND creating a massive DISTRACTION.

It is leading people to forget just how large the crime was that our sundry governments just committed–and indeed continue to perpetrate–against the American people. If you want justice, seek to end this labor lockout first.

And the nightly fires are also pulling attention away from the Congressional hearings on the crimes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

1) Identity Politics amounts to handing out handicaps.  Instead of saying “you can do it”, they say “you can’t do it, and it is someone else’s fault.”

2) In most of the cities and States where the riots are happening, neither black more white people are being allowed to work.  We are all being oppressed.

But seemingly, black people can riot and loot, but not work, not legally earn an honest living, in among other places, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California.

In important respects, is it not stunningly tone deaf to attempt to return Obama era racial division and institutionally endorsed anti-white racism at a time when the government is enforcing a labor lockout of more or less the exact variety old school industrialists used to during the labor movement?

Rather than talking about racism, would it not make sense to talk jobs and returning to them?

Small wonder all these tin pot tyrants are eager to see riots, and eager to talk about anything but the failure of this massive attack on the private sector to do anything meaningful or measurable in saving lives.  On the contrary, it seems a virtual certainty that 5-10 MORE people will die for every one that can plausibly be claimed to have been saved by this disaster.

The delusions will soon fade, I think.  This is not like the Obama era at all.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/chauvinism

One of the many truly odd things about all this is Chauvin’s name.

I think it needs to be said that the same people saying we need to “do something” about racism, and police brutality, and whatever they are upset about that day, have been RUNNING the governments where most of it is supposedly happening for fifty years. They are the somebody’s who should have been doing something.

Minneapolis? Democrat Mayor, Democrat Governor. Illinois? Democrat Mayor, Democrat Governor. Etc.

It is really quite extraordinary for these people to claim that their failures are somebody else’s fault, for them to point fingers, specifically, at Republicans who have been in a minority wherever the problems are largest, and been so for many decades.

Democrats got really good at winning elections by promising the electorate the moon and stars every election, then forgetting about them. They pay off the Big Money every time–that’s just business–but the little people they only remember every time they are running for reelection.

What black people need is what everyone needs: good jobs and the good schools that make them qualified for the good jobs. Good jobs will fix in short order nearly all the problems of the inner cities. And good jobs were emerging steadily in Trump’s economy, and may still yet.

But even though it is a complex topic, it is not unreasonable to trace the progress of blacks in this country economically as consisting in a steady upward line up until the beginning of the riots in Detroit, and Watts, and elsewhere–which, then as now, were largely instigated and led by Communist agitators, or so I believe–and downward or flatlined thereafter.

After the riots, nobody wanted to invest in those neighborhoods. They singled themselves out as different and dangerous. White flight began. The money started leaving and not coming back. Many majority black neighborhoods now were once very nice middle to upper middle class places.

And White Privilege is really an invention of exhausted minds to rationalize all this failure–THEIR failure, to be clear–in such a way that their utter and complete uselessness and hypocrisy could be ignored and a residual feeling of moral superiority retained in the face of complete irrelevance.

The riots are really simple. The labor lockout–which was a tool used by Management in the Labor Wars to punish disobedient workers–was a kick in the collective balls to people already on the margins, already struggling each and every day just to survive. Pain breeds fear and fear breeds anger, and if you just add a match you get rage. This is not emotionally very complex.

But I don’t think anyone who cares about where the black community is going to be in five years can support any of this nonsense. We need to open all of our economies back up fully, and do it NOW. The media has stopped pretending this virus is the existential threat they made it out to be, and our leaders should follow them, and just say fuck it: open everything.

All of our problems have solutions, most of them simple and obvious. But lunatics and nihilists continue to seek to destroy every sprout of good that emerges from the ground, and trample on everything we have built. The problem is not what to do, but what NOT to do. If I could wave a magic wand and make these people disappear, we would live in a utopia in short order, with no poverty, no racism, and a generally happy and content world.

I was meditating yesterday and it hit me that in many ways each life is a bit like an Escape Room.  Your job is to find and assemble small clues into a coherent pattern that allows you to escape.

Nearly all of us miss most of the clues just about every time.  But it’s not unreasonable to suppose all of us get better with time.