Month: September 2020

 Well, A truth: what your governor in announcing at regular intervals is that, on a “bad” day, NEARLY FIVE PERCENT of yesterdays deaths came from the reason we are destroying your economy.

I just bought a marvelous pie—two small chocolate cakes with fresh whipped cream in the middle—from an Amish bakery. None of them were wearing masks. Why would they be? They dont watch TV, and they eat a lot of fresh vegetables every day, exist among friends, and live a low stress, faith based lifestyle.

And I think in most States (and countries) 5 percent is on the HIGH side. The actual epidemic—defined as 7% or more deaths—has been over for months everywhere.

And what if a “second wave” drives numbers over 7% again for a second? It will not come CLOSE to justifying this massive criminal act.

The West German government became increasingly concerned that hostile communist states may flood the country with counterfeit banknotes. This would devalue the Deutschmark and destabilize the country’s economy as a precursor to an invasion from the East.

So Bundesbank launched a cunning plan. They printed an entirely new secret currency and put them in storage. If Russia and its allies launched an economic attack, the old bills could be withdrawn and new banknotes issued within a matter of days. This would cancel out counterfeit currency. 

 To take one obvious example, World War 2 was a very tough period in America. We had millions of men fighting overseas and dying, rationing stateside, and pervasive uncertainty and doubt.

But even though our government was no doubt sometimes stupid, at times in all places and all contexts, I dont think anyone doubted that FDR—his many enumerable faults notwithstanding—loved America and its peoples—plural intentional—and that he was fighting to win.

In this undeclared war, we are more or less literally being attacked BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENTS—plural again intended—and find ourselves equally fighting the more or less reified, concretized, and weaponized forces of madness It is far beyond mere stupidity.

Our enemies are educated, situationally competent, and living next door to us.

This is a new kind of fight. In my view, if Trump relinquishes power for any reason, we will never have a fair election again,  This is far, far beyond “the truth is in the middle”, and “all views have at least some merit”.

It is between fallible but intact reality testing and outright ideational hallucination; it is between wholesome dialogue, and political violence; it is between rule of law and outright fascism.

Let us all pray sanity prevails. It will take a fight, but this is the only fight worth any of our energy right now.

The enemies of sanity do not want “justice”. Black people and their lives are a stage prop for their theater, mere tools to be cast aside and ignored whenever their usefulness is at an end.

And the means right now is an engineered economic disaster, and voter fraud on a scale never before attempted.

I keep trying to distract myself, to back away, but continue failing. Every morning when I wake up I wonder: how can SO MANY people, the ones caught on the middle, be so fucking stupid? Figuratively and sometimes damn near literally, I keep pinching myself.

Where is the sanity? Trump gets it, as do many others, but why has everyone not figured this game put yet? I do not get it.

I know I repeat myself often, but I still seem to be in some degree of psychological shock.

 The psychological value of fatalism is obvious: the future is out of our hands, so why worry?

Perhaps the purest expression of this is the Arabic saying Maktub, which means “it is written”. The story is already told. We are waiting to see what our role on all this is. We will be given the script whenever it is our time on stage.

To be sure, this can breed passivity. As one Ranger Medic acquaintance of mine once quipped while in Iraq: “The Will of Allah seems to be inversely proportional to work.”

And of course, often, there is some small detail—or to be sure, the CHANCE of some small detail—which could make a difference. This is what drives me crazy. I think often maybe there exists some argument, some idea, some action which might make an unexpected and completely unpredicted difference.

But for all of is spectators, which is really all most of us are, most of the time, you need the ability to just let it all go, to “allow”—as if that were really what is happening!!—everything to work out the way it is going to work out.

Our modern world, with all it success—empowers us, but I think many of us take this too far. It is Life after all, and Ray Kurzweil will never succeed. Thoughts do not originate in the brain. William James called it over a hundred years ago, on “ Principles of Psychology”, and none of the important facts have changed since.

 Lie. Lie a lot. Self evidently, begin by lying to yourself, or few people will buy what you are selling. Then lie to them, about who you are, and what you want.

Avoid silence and honest companionship like the plague (or this thing, if you are true Covidian).

Speak continually of virtue, and regularly subject to scorn those who fail to live up to standards you also don’t live up to.

This is the easy way. There is another way, but it is much more difficult, and the path often includes honest confusion and anxiety, for which there are no truly good remedies, other than accustoming yourself to their company, and inviting them in from time to time for coffee or cocktails.

 I think all the businesses affected should band together and file a lawsuit against all local and even national media outlets which both A) Failed to share all the known details of the case; and B) Consistently ran stories which, absent that context, could reasonably be expected to inflame tensions.

I would argue that in intent and effect, many if not most media outlets covering this tragedy—but not this crime—have in effect acted as seditious agents by fomenting and inciting riots.

Until the bastards start paying a price, none of this will stop. It will on the contrary get worse.

 What happened in the Vietnam Era, as we tend to call it, was we were asked by an ally to help them repel an invasion by their northern neighbor, North Vietnam, which had been conquered by the Communists in the 50’s, with the usual purges, gulags, and Commissars put in place to monitor everyone, and the schools of course taken over for use in Communist indoctrination.  To teach madness, in other words, and an aggressive madness at that.

We helped South Vietnam, which in the early days was run by an unattractive dictator, but which in later days was run by a much more benign group of folks, who actually started implementing much needed reforms in the direction of political liberalization and what might then have honestly been described as social justice.  Land reform was undertaken, in specific, to overturn centuries of what I recall as de facto feudalism.

We won the war.  We kicked the NVA and VC’s asses in 1968 and 1969, and forced them to the negotiating table.  In 1972, the war was over in the South.  You could drive anywhere in the country without protection safely.  The invading troops were destroyed and incapacitated.

Then we lost the war over here. Communist propaganda caused OUR OWN PEOPLE to give up, willingly, even enthusiastically, the gains won with so much death, so much pain, and after the expenditure of so much treasure.

The effectiveness of the propaganda was such that I would argue VIETNAM INVADED AMERICA.  Rather, Communism as a creed did.  They tried to take over our nation, and failed.  Barely, but only after many, many gains in our social sphere.

Today, we are seeing the same madness in our streets, the same counter-rational slogans, the same pointless destruction, and same alliance forged with madness, decay and death.

I really think the riots could be seen as the second phase of the conflict fought all those years ago.  I CERTAINLY think this is how all the old radicals, the old lunatics, see it.  They could have learned from our chosen failure in Vietnam.  They could have seen the boat people and realized that they were siding with violent fascists.  But they didn’t.  They haven’t.  

It is unfathomable to me, the sheer extent of this betrayal of basic morality, basic good sense, and basic humanity.  None of this is complicated, and most of these assholes have high IQ’s.  The leaders, I mean.

 For some years now, if a conservative was talking, they were wrong, as far as the Left was concerned.  “Open your mouth, get slapped”, was the de facto slogan and tactic. “If I wanted your opinion, I would tell you your opinion.”

It doesn’t matter how well reasoned what you say may be.  It doesn’t matter that they are lying and all you are doing is pointing that out to them.  It doesn’t matter that the lunatics are destroying the lives of the people they are claiming to protect and care about.

There is no good way for a divorce, but CLEARLY conservatives need to stop pretending that the Left EVER, EVER, EVER wants dialogue, intelligent policy discussions, actual success, or anything but the marginalization and destruction of anyone who stands between them and absolute power.

Battered women make excuses for their husbands.  Maybe he really does need his cookies in two precisely aligned rows.  I knew that.  It must be my fault.

None of this shit–or almost none of it–is our fault.  Free markets work.  The black community has been abused and destroyed by the Left.   The Global warming “emergency” and the necessity of COVID lockdowns are both bad jokes.  We made more economic progress in 2 years of Trump than we had since the Clinton era, which saw government limited by a  Republican Congress, and the following internet boom.

All of us, ALL OF US, need to stop trying to pretend that any of us can win a game with the Left which does not involve submission to lies, bad ideas, psychopathic thugs, and the continued ruining of America, and by extension, much of the world.  Say what you are thinking out loud, or not, but stop pretending any of this is our fault, or Trump’s fault.  He’s just the first one to talk back to them, and like the abusive bullies they are, they can’t stand it.

 It occurs to me that when you are drunk, you are in effect in the state of a small child.  Your mind is gone, your capacity for rational planning gone, and you act on nearly all your impulses.  You feel no pain, and not infrequently euphoria.

Ponder for a moment the value of that for someone with Developmental Trauma.  You get to return to your childhood, but this time without the pain and stress.  But of course you then sober up every time.  Still, that part of you gets a rest for a time, and unless and until those wounds are healed, you keep coming back.  I think this is my own issue.  I had a dream tonight which seemed to say that.

I would like to propose this as a deep reason for chronic drunkenness, for many.  Heroin does the same thing, as do most barbituates.  Weed not so much, and certainly not amphetamines.  But the most common drugs used worldwide otherwise, including opium, hashish probably, morphine and the world’s most popular drug, booze, all return us to childlike states.

Political manias, now that I think about it, most likely do the same thing.  Most of the people throwing tantrums in the streets are not just figuratively acting like 3 year olds: they are LITERALLY acting like 3 year olds.  A child cannot be asked to foresee the consequences of their actions.  If you are older than 18, though, it is a reasonable request, even if one you have not been taught to honor.

 1. No reform—which is to say conscious alteration in the direction of hoped-for improvement—is possible within an incoherent system.

2. Coherent human social systems are formally complex systems, the rules of which are defined by generally distributed moralities, which can and to be sure usually differ widely. It is the FACT of conscious moral codes which matters, vastly more than the specific content. The American experiment in political Liberalism depends on private moralities, nearly all of which contain basic elements which, broadly speaking, have iteration of the Golden Rule, even while retaining certain tribal and exclusionary elements.

3. There is no moral equivalence possible between those who believe something and those who believe nothing. Muslims and Christians, as one example, can and often have, negotiated difference, and in point of fact have often lived in peace together across wide stretches of time. This applies to all religious and social difference.

4. Principle is practically our conscious intent. Even if most people have fallen short of their own ideals, their presence creates a fertile soil for growth and improvement. There is a baseline and an ideal, even if most are far from the ideal in practice. The idea of “America”, for example, is mythically powerful, even if we have in practice fallen short of our ideals nearly continuously since our founding. Our ideals create the soil within which coherent reform is possible. Without them there is merely chaos and entropy.

5. For practical purposes, the opposite of a principle based orientation is a conformity based orientation, and conformity—elevated itself to a principle—is the tendency which is uniquely unequal to moral growth. Conformity is intrinsically incoherent, since it has no content.

6. Spirituality is a uniquely human activity, when defined as the effort to grow in awareness of God, with God being described as the root of all experience and consciousness, and the essence of the really real.

7. Social systems incapable of reform are inherently anti-spiritual. No system based on conformity, then, can spiritual.

8. When spirituality is rejected, what is left are the plain facts of our biology, which are sex, hunger, violence, and contingent and mutable social relations.

9. All of us are born with a drive to the transcendant, so logically any system which rejects God must reify and worship our animal nature.

10. Hence Satanism, with Satan part goat, which is say part animal.

11. Humans are born with reason, and reason is how we find our way forward.

12. There is an emotional equivalent to reason. We use our minds to reason our way to truth, and our hearts to reason our way to peace and connection.