Month: October 2020

 Power, to me, is riding a horse full speed on the high plains of Central Asia.  Joy is doing it with friends and family.  Spirituality is feeling the sky above me, the ground beneath me, and the air moving by me.

The same image would work well with Native Americans too.  I personally feel more connection to Asia for some reason, perhaps past lives there.

If you think about it, jailors ALSO spend most of their lives in confinement.

The ocean is a metaphor.  It can be found everywhere.  At least until recently I suspect many  Tibetans felt closer to it than those who live on the beach in Malibu. I suspect for many Californians it comes over time to represent frustrated longings.  They have everything, but they don’t have everything, and in important respects, they have nothing.  They live in deserts.

 https://www.infowars.com/posts/marianne-williamson-justifies-philly-looting-by-claiming-bible-says-nothing-about-stealing-being-bad/

One way of defining decadence is “when your elites really aren’t that good.”

America is filled with highly competent technicians.  But very, very few of them ask themselves Life questions, and almost nobody working in the fields of Emotional Intelligence–Daniel Goleman certainly included–seem to be able to connect their own work to our national cultural decline, in which standards of rationality, accountability, self regulation, intellectual independence and a host of other virtues are in the toilet.

Do I need to look up who Daniel Goleman is voting for?  I don’t think so.

Do I need to look up who Marianne Williamson is voting for?  I don’t think so.

Our best and brightest are, in general, dim and dull.  They shine perhaps in their own narrow field, but lack entirely the emotional and intellectual capacity to ask broader questions and come up with interesting and useful answers.  They are talented ants, scurrying here and there, completely unable and unwilling to look at the Big Picture.

Culture, per se, has become a concern exclusively of conservatives, and conservatives do not own the culture.  The Left does.  And every year they make it more sadistic, less emotionally intelligent, more violent, more “grabby”, more conformist, and in all respects less interesting as other than a horror movie being played out in front of our eyes.

Are you old enough to remember when the Left opposed violence in movies, because they opposed John Wayne and the cowboys?  Dirty Harry and effective if violent law enforcement?  They were the ones creating the shows on PBS that were actually good.  My own kids watched almost nothing but PBS growing up, and it was absolutely the right decision.  

But I see these people posting with degrees from top tier schools, and they are ABYSMALLY stupid.  It is embarrassing.  How did this happen?  

This is decadence.  

Sweden:  https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se

United States: https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us

Switzerland: https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/ch

With Sweden you see a clean Bell Curve–Farr’s Law–that is what Herd Immunity, so called, looks like.  Even though cases are rising, deaths are not.

With the United States you get wave after wave after wave of death.  It is not hard to look at that graph and imagine it going on like that forever.  That is what incompetence looks like, even though it the inevitable result of the cries to “slow the spread”.

Finally, Switzerland: done in 45 days or so.

I feel no confidence predicting a Trump victory, but will submit a few data points: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2VpfUqRoo

This is worth the watch.  It is an interview from I think 2003 of Ted Gunderson, who was high enough up in the FBI that at one point he was on a short list for consideration as FBI Director.  He ran regional offices in I think the LA area and Dallas.

 Most American movies have happy endings.  Since life frequently does NOT have happy endings–and since in the long run we are all dead, to quote Keynes, albeit to another purpose–this makes most movies “escapist”, as we say.  A pleasant alternative to reality.  Most American media exists to help people working jobs they don’t like, in places they don’t like, often with people they don’t like, to narcotize themselves enough that they stay on the conveyor belt of Life.

Here is my question: what if most of our movies had tragic, sad, “depressing” endings?  

On the one hand, with happy endings, we wind up wishing we were those people.  On the other, with tragic endings, we are glad we are NOT those people.  One fills you with longing and regret–within which self pity and resentment can find ready homes–and the other with gratitude.

It has been many, many moons–a year perhaps of full moons?–since I read Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy” (in German of course, because I am so special I would not even be my own friend), but in addition to the famous Apollonian/Dionysian opposition he drew, I recall one where he commented that the decline of the Greeks began when they started to prefer comedies to tragedies.

A comedy is a way of forgetting your cares.  A tragedy is a sort of tonic that after an initial wave of fear and pain and sadness, braces you to your life, with new energy.  As one cop I knew liked to say, what doesn’t kill you can still ruin your day, but I am sure Nietzsche’s famous similar dictum had its origin in something like the intended cathartic effect of tragedy.

Orwell was calling us decadent in the 30’s, I guess it was.  Jacques Barzun’s book “From Dawn to Decadence” was published twenty years ago.

Decadence is clearly a mutable, subjective idea, but that most Americans–and indeed most of the developed world–has lost its way, is pretty obvious.  For me, it was the election of Barack Obama, someone about whom we knew nothing, who had accomplished nothing, and whose main talent was and remains the ability to read a prewritten script with the gravitas of an acceptable soap opera actor.

So much can happen.  The show is not over.  The Greeks decayed, but the Romans replaced them.  Life is change.  Certainly, life could change for the worse the planet over for a very long time, but that has not happened.  It could also continue to change for the better, as indeed it has been for the past few centuries.  Either way, I will keep doing my thing until I can’t.  I see no other good option.

 Democrats want THIS GUY to be PRESIDENT.  Of the UNITED STATES.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1320933051648692224

On the first day in office, Joe Biden would be older than Ronald Reagan was on his LAST, and age was an issue when he was first elected 8 years previous to that.

The world has lost its fucking mind.  It’s been coming for some time, but it has jumped the shark, jumped the bounds of the river.  That any sane person would vote for Biden is puzzling to me, and that any intelligent person would is absolutely inconceivable to me.

 It occurs to me the ego is the space within the bellows that Lao Tzu talks about; it is the hole in the middle of the spokes of the wheel that makes the whole thing work.  It is a space within which and around which externally expressed work happens.

It is a shelf upon which you keep your intentions.

It is an alchemical flask within which transmutations happen, and then disappear.

The feeling came to me last night that I have never had an ego.  My mother drowned it every time it tried to emerge.  I felt this keenly.  It was highly unpleasant, but like most useful insights, in a sense liberating.

To have an ego is to be consistent.  I have always been inconsistent.  The ego is the place where you decide who you are and what you are going to do; what you will put up with with respect to others and yourself, and what you will not.

An ego is supposed to be a place where actions and reactions, transmutations, happen.  They appear, wax, release energy, and then disappear.  It is a place regularly filled, and then emptied, in an optimally functioning person.  There is an undulation of activity and inactivity, of focused self and work, and then of productive emptiness.

If you look at all the Personality Disorders, they are disorders of this process.  Specifically, they are incompleted processes.  

With Narcissists, the process of ego creation is never completed, and so the ego continues to try all the time, every day, to complete that process, by making itself the focus.

With Sociopaths, the process of connecting the ego to other egos–to society–is never completed. The pleasures of connection are made invisible, and the gratification of physical desires necessarily becomes the sole focus.

With Borderline people, the ego is unstable.  Something keeps interrupting its completion, making them emotionally volatile, which I would suppose is most likely unprocessed trauma.  Narcissists and Sociopaths are dealing with traumas of omission, where they did not get some vital ego nutrient–love, broadly speaking, and connected attention–whereas the Borderline folks are dealing with things that happened that disturb them deeply.

It has long been obvious to me that consistency is the hub around which an orderly life flows, but I have not really understood emotionally why it was so hard for me.  I have a strong will, but I have had even stronger emotional impulses which always wear me down eventually.  They have no limit, since their essence is weight.

This is a useful insight.

 It is a bit of an emotional hassle, but I continue to go into stores without a mask.  I refuse to submit to the IDEA either that they make sense–reality testing dies slowly of a thousand unnoticed cuts–or that my Governor has the power to compel this level of submission for more than a month without Legislative approval.  We are not at war.  There is no reason we could not get these ideas ratified by people who in aggregate are supposed in all American governments at all levels to be the most powerful ones, because they make the rules the Executive then enforces.

What I am finding is that the largest stores are usually the easiest.  My grocery store, most Target’s, Walmart, Home Depot: all fine.  I noticed at all of them but Target that people went a bit out of their way to engage me in conversation.

This is smart.  If you have a thousand people come through the door, and 2 are not wearing masks, what real threat is there?  And those two people–especially if you go out of your way to be friendly–will become loyal customers.  That is certainly my intention.

The alternative is permanently alienating people who come into the store for one thing, get yelled at, then vow never to come back.  I have a personal shit list of local businesses I will not go back to even once this mask nonsense is done.

Despite my own background, that of own continual fear that stems from factors not yet under my control–or really perhaps because of it–I cannot help myself from feeling a profound contempt for people who look at my unmasked face in terror, especially if they are young, 20-ish people.  It is absurd, it is risible, and it is profoundly awful.  How will our civilization survive with such high degrees of cowardice?

But here is the point I started to make: we need to add the terms “mask realism”, and “climate realism” to our public lexicon.  The latter would be intended to point out that NO ACTUAL SCIENTISTS are saying there is an emergency, or any large scale catastrophe around the corner.  This is a fact.  It is the politicians, who know NOTHING, or close to nothing, of the science who are trying to use panic for political purposes.

And here is the obvious thing with masks: we have been wearing them everywhere in public–in stores, in the office, in restaurants–for SIX MONTHS–and the virus is still gaining.  I won’t get into the minutia, because this is a FACT.  

Yes, you can say that it would be worse without them, but I will again trot out the salt throwing analogy: if Fauci had told us that we needed to throw salt over our left shoulder every time we went through a doorway, and to sacrifice a chicken every Sunday, and that this was what was needed to “slow the virus”, would the results be any different?  No one knows, but my view is that no, they would not have been different.  The nations and States who most closely followed the recommendations of Fauci and people like him had the worst results.  At best, they were no better than those places that did a fraction of that destruction, which means none of that bullshit was necessary.

I keep ranting.  I keep talking about this.  I cannot wrap my brain around how fucking stupid so many people are being.  None of this requires an advanced degree, so much as a modicum of common sense, oriented around 2 basic question: 1) What is the end game?; and 2) If the recommended policies were in fact doing nothing, how would we know?.

There is no end game outside of Sweden and perhaps some other nations we are not reading about like them.  Sweden said at the outset: this is our plan, and this is how we will do it.  They did it, and continue to do it.  They are protecting the freedom and quality of life of their people in a genuinely Liberal way.

And effectiveness?  We have been shut down to varying degrees for SIX FUCKING MONTHS, with no end in sight.  Nobody is making predictions, at least in the Blue States.  In most Blue States, they move the goalposts every time some marker is reached.  They seem to want the cessation of all human disease whatever as the criterion by which they decide to reopen.

Again, I am ranting.  I need to stop.

But mask realism is a good phrase.  

And here is an excerpt from a good link on Sweden: The country’s senior epidemiologist Anders Tengell has also criticized the wearing of face masks as “very dangerous” because it gives a false sense of security but does not effectively stem the spread of the virus.

https://summit.news/2020/10/23/sweden-refuses-to-impose-new-lockdown-measures-saying-people-have-suffered-enough/