Month: September 2020

 It occurs to me to comment that the Democrats have managed to replicate, in a handful of months, their reign of disasters from the mid-60’s through the 70’s.  They have facilitated highly destructive and counter-productive riots in many major cities, created block after block of boarded up buildings anywhere near where black people live, spurred mass white flight, business failures, and high crime rates.

This, when we had record low unemployment rates in the black community, specifically, just SIX MONTHS AGO.

If mass failure is success–and we need to remember that their main tactic is to create disasters, blame them on their enemies, then promise decade after decade that they will fix them, while never actually doing so–then this year has been an unmitigated success for Democrats.

As for me, it feels increasingly pointless to provide political commentary.  Perhaps it has always been useless.  Perhaps I have always been preaching to the wind.  Perhaps not one soul on the planet reads this blog.  I have long felt otherwise, but I really don’t know.

But when you have Joe Biden pushing all the things that just created mass destruction, poverty, pain and misery in real time–the cause and effect normally are staggered enough that it is possible to deny the connection, but not here–how can any sane person fail to see what is going on?  How could any nuanced argument make the slightest bit of difference when the crimes are so large, so egregious, so undeniable to anyone with eyes to see?

 You know, Sisyphus never got his rock over the hill.  But would his torment have been different, in some respects, if his work consisted in pushing the same rock over an endless succession of hills for eternity?

Is this not life, in some respects?  

I was thinking about lists.  I come and go as far as my ability to make lists and work my way down them.  Some days I am reasonably productive, many days less so.  I am almost never optimized by anything but clear and present necessity.

Here is the thing, though, the FACT of the list never really varies, does it?  That is your stone.  It will be there waiting for you every morning.

The path to sanity is remaking and renegotiating your relationship with that stone, to accepting it, and feeling gratitude that there IS variation, that it is not Groundhog Day, and that the quality and spirit of your work is amenable to change and improvement.

What SHOULD our natural, default state be?  Motionlessness, or work?  The Jews figured 6 days on, 1 day off was a good ratio.  That makes work our default state, and rest the means of not breaking down from work.

We have so many associations with “work”, many of them bad.  Work is effort, is will power, is doing things you don’t want to do.  What is the opposite?  Play.  Work hard play hard, right?

And as they say, if you find something you love to do, then you never work a day in your life.

The task then, is approaching work with a spirit of play, and play means never quite exactly repeating yourself, and allowing spontaneity.  You don’t steel yourself to work; you allow yourself to work.

There is something useful in these ruminations, I think.

 I propose we start calling people who think the lockdowns are a good idea “Flat Earthers”.

Their argument: we just don’t know what’s out there.  Why risk finding out?  

Well, California can compare itself to, say, Tennessee, or South Dakota, crunch the numbers, and do the comparison without changing anything. 

And what they will find is they are slitting their own throats, to no useful purpose.  These lockdowns are an egregious and unconscionable attack on world freedom, prosperity, and life itself.  

Ponder this: more people may die from the RESPONSE to this Wuhan virus than died in World War 2.  In total.  All of it.  

If you are not sick and disgusted, you are a moron, or you are a psychopath, and probably cheering your fellow travelers on.

You know, I don’t know the circumstances most of you are living in, but it occurred to me to comment that by and large I have left my house daily since early April, worked on job sites where no one was wearing a mask, had beers regularly in bars which were not social distancing very well (no masks of course), and all has been fine. I flew on a jet out West a few weeks back. They had everyone wear masks and kept the middle seats open except for families, but it was otherwise the same.

 The great conceit underlying socialist dogma is that politics really is science, and governance really is a matter for the “experts”.

But the “expert” is really just a very old idea under a new hat and a new coat.  It is really nothing but the “Just King” theory, refurbished.

Because in the same way a king would not need checks on his authority if he were completely honest, and had the perspicacity of an angel, the expert could in theory lead us all to prosperity and harmony and peace.

But not all kings, OBVIOUSLY, were just–in fact very, very few were–and the REALITY is that most experts are self evidently corruptible, with Anthony Fauci EVEN NOW, EVEN NOW, refusing to admit that his policie–copied from the Communist Chinese, and never inflicted on humanity at any time in this way at any point in human history–are causing vastly, vastly more harm than good, and that lockdowns seem to INCREASE mortality, EVEN FROM THE DISEASE, rather than decrease it.

Think about what a lockdown does.  You lock groups of people together all day for months on end, knowing that some of them have to go out for supplies, so they don’t starve, and knowing that if that person gets infected, most likely ALL of them will get infected.  People don’t exercise.  They get little sunlight.  They are under unremitting stress, and in constant doubt, since no one knows when some arbitrary government asshole will see fit to relieve them of their confinement.

This is obviously a rich environment for disease.  The model we copied, that of the Chinese, may have killed as many as millions.  It is the model that produced the worst death rates in America in New York.

And the countries that copied us and the Chinese around the world put large segments of their population at risk of death from STARVATION.  That is death, too, OBVIOUSLY, and now we are dealing with disgusting and unfathomable numbers.

And as I pointed out to someone last night, if 125 million people are at risk of starvation–the last number I saw–then that means ALL OF THEM right now are hungry and hurting, and suffering from other diseases that attend extreme poverty, including diseases like rickets and even scurvy that accompany malnutrition.

And that number can be extended.  I think a good case could be made that the lives of a BILLION or more people took distinct turns for the worse because their governments followed policies of the sorts being recommended by Anthony Fauci and the Communists running the WHO.

Fauci says no double blind studies have supported HCQ, even though Switzerland and other nations have shown its value.  First off, the studies in progress at the outset were CANCELLED following the LIE that Lancet published.  Secondly, no double blind studies support MASK WEARING.  What studies did exist said universal mask wearing was a bad idea unsupported by the literature.  Yet there he is, recommending it anyway.  Third, people are DYING: they are dying in small numbers from the disease, and likely to die in large numbers from the lockdowns.  Given people what amounts to tonic water carries little to no risk.

Here is the main point I wanted to make: all government policy should be treated as a scientifically formulated hypothesis, which contains at the outset the indicators that would falsify it.

When legislators pass a law, they should state what impact it is predicted to make, and what outcomes, if they come to pass, would indicate that their assumptions were incorrect.

You could even BUILD INTO THE LAW triggers which would cancel the law.  If an anti-poverty law INCREASES poverty two years in a row, then it should be rescinded and something new tried.

In reality, obviously, many politicians break things then lie about it.  This is the Communist strategy.

In our country presently, we have common sense and common decency–deployed in an array of ways–fighting against Communism.  Communism is the main problem we face.

Actually, I would qualify that.  Communism is a method.  It is a method for getting and keeping power and creating and protecting structural inequalities.  That this is the opposite of the stated purpose is both obvious and part of the value of the system for those who control it.

I continue to believe our banking system is the greatest injustice we face.  It is a system by means of which an unelected, shadowy elite can create essentially unlimited amounts of wealth for themselves, which they siphon off invisibly from the sweat and creativity of the rest of us.

It is ultimately this elite who is behind all the nightmares facing humanity right now, in my view.  They hate Trump, which is why I love him.  If he fails, we all fail.  I truly believe this.

 It occurred to me that it would be an outstanding idea for the FEC or other designated body to spot check all the State elections.  They should, for example, mail in fake ballots–all for Joe Biden of course, or an equal number of each–and see how many get through.  They could use names the KNOW are not on the voter ballots.  They could sign them “Mickey Mouse”.  They could use their own names.  Do this, then see how many, if any, get kicked back.  Say 25 in each major precinct.

They could vote in person on behalf of known dead people.  They could use fake ID’s, and see if they are spotted.  

And if the FEC can’t do this sort of thing for some legal reason, the Republicans in the various States should push for it.  

The reality is that our voting system is outdated and really, really stupid.  Because the Democrats have been cheating to an unknown extent for an unknown number of years, they have for a long time railed against OBVIOUS remedies like Voter ID, which are in place EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.   

Given the important of elections, and the likelihood of violence no matter who wins–or appears to win–it seems like now is an obvious time to put in place common sense protections that will help convince people like me that the assholes are not cheating and lying their way into position to destroy my Constitution, for which so many hundreds of thousands of Americans have fought and died.

None of this should be controversial.  THAT it is should tell anyone with a grain of intelligence all they need to know. 

 There is a certain obvious parallelism between ambient anxiety, which feels like something “out there”, which is nameless and formless, is out to get you, and a virus you can’t see or sense in any way.

If the goal is to build fear, an invisible enemy is the way to do it.

 I would suspect that children who are given electronics at an early age–in my view, honestly, before age 12, which of course makes me a quasi-Luddite, but in any event before age 6 or so–tend to run around on playgrounds less, and to want to spend less time on them.  They want to get back to their electronics.

This postulate could likely be tested.  The meaning of all this, of course, could and should be debated endlessly, but in my view less spontaneous physical play makes kids stupider and duller.  That iPad is not creating a little genius: it is creating a little Nazi.

 It occurred to me one of the primary social detriments to universal device addiction is that it builds habits of passivity, complacency, and conformity.

Children need to play.  They need to run around like little crazy people, laughing and screaming, and within reason need to be allowed to do so by their parents.  They need time to do this, and place to do this, like playgrounds.

It’s hard to gauge the emotional damage being done, locking so many children in their homes, but it must be substantial.  And given that kids neither get this disease nor spread it, it is really inexcusable, like the rest of this clusterfuck.

But I have long noticed this seeming passivity.  Young adults have been turned into groups of eyes, watching, waiting.  They respond positively to the first person who tells them what to do.  They have been consuming, consuming, consuming information and content and directions since the earliest childhood.

You can’t build a sense of self without some robust interaction with your environment, and that happens in conditions of play.

And it occurs to me that the process of helpful, functional, adaptive, optimal maturation involves learning how to play within the context of meeting adult responsibilities.  They are not mutually exclusive.  There is nothing about being an adult that requires you to stop laughing, stop kidding around, and stop having fun. In fact, all the above probably make you a better worker, better lover, better spouse, better parent, and help you live longer.

I watched an interview with RFK, Jr., who has adopted a much more visible face in recent days, although he has been heavily involved in dealing with water pollution and vaccines for some time, where he commented that IQ points seem to have dropped nearly a standard deviation–7 points–in the past 40 years or so.  I think our food is less nourishing and filled with potentially toxic things like steroids, GMO food–both directly, and as fed to our animals–and cheap fillers.  Harvard showed that fluoride in the water also makes kids stupider.

But I have to wonder if the sheer volume of TV kids watch, and now smart phones and tablets and the like, which stand in for play, which stand in for running around and being crazy, don’t play a role in all this.

I don’t think you can be truly rational without being physically balanced. I think the health of our thoughts, our emotions and our bodies are all tied together.

Actually, come to think of it, my youngest read something saying that kids nowadays often lack the ability physically to negotiate uneven surfaces, or at least they are relatively impaired compared to previous generations.

It seems reasonable to suppose that overall intelligence–understood as a sort of perceiving Gestalt consisting in common sense, reasoning ability, emotional perceptiveness, and physical awareness–emerges from constant and mutable “shocks” or changes in the environment.  You need new ideas, problems to solve, exercise in philosophy, a range of emotional experiences and stimuli, and varying physical tasks.

Moshe Feldekrais coined the term “acture” to describe the dynamic way we interact with the world.  He meant physically, mostly, but it was clear that he well understood that the way we move physically is affected by, and affects, how we feel and think.  In some respects his system is intended to retrain–or perhaps release from its fetters–the mind by retraining the body.

I would suspect that most Antifa members have characteristic ways of moving.  They rigid in mind, rigid in emotion, and even if they are physically flexible–doing yoga for example–the movement AS EXPRESSED in acts as simple was walking down the street likely show their dogmatism physically, for those with the eyes to see.

Yet one more creepy thing about the modern era is the advent of “gait analysis”, which is intended to supplement and perhaps replace facial recognition.  But the gist is that we are all fucked up in subtle but unique ways, which reflect in how we walk.  Feldenkrais commented that perfectly well adjusted people, with no neuroticism at all, would all walk the same way.  But we don’t.

If we survive this crunch time with our freedoms, prosperity and dignity intact, then we really need a national conversation on child rearing.  Our children REALLY ARE the future.  But they are treated as disposable cogs in a machine if they get in the way of any dogmatism, which most usually comes from the Left.  Kids do not thrive in single parent homes, in general.  We know this.  But it is politically inconvenient for those pushing policies which make single parent homes more likely.  On the one hand they destroy the black community, and on the other decry the “racism” that they want to blame the following problems on.  It’s unconscionable.

As a short list, it seems obvious kids need–and these are evolutionary requirements–an attuned mother; a present father; a sense of physical safety; the freedom to play, venture, risk and occasionally get a bit hurt; playmates; and the sense that as they mature they will be entering a culture which is coherent, with rules that are emotionally nurturing and comprehensible.  If some or all of these things are not present, they will be unhappy.

And I will wonder too if the latent message of internet addiction is that “the answer” is “out there” rather than “in here”.  I myself spend too much time on the internet, but a good percentage of it, for me, is spent writing and creating.  This blog is the most obvious, but not the only example.  That is a very different experience than consuming and watching, which I do relatively little of.

 Because they break everything they touch, then lie about it.