Month: October 2020

 Just watched this.  Few comments.

1) In my view, it shows the depravity and moral compromising which is an essential part of Hollywood.  Among other scenes there is an obviously younger girl in the middle of a sex party–who symbolically has been made to perform sexual acts–and the whole thing was so drunken that I felt drunk at the end of watching it.  He has on the one hand the artistic pretensions, and on the other the sordid and really unpleasant reality.

2) In that era, suggesting homosexuality as a latent motive was daring and bold.  On my “reading”, the latent subtext was that the Director, played by John Huston in an obviously self referential move, was a latent homosexual, and that his career consisted in creating scenes originating in a sort of self loathing voyeuristic homosexuality.

Within this subtext, we find that his young Adonis and acting protege was himself molested, much in the spirit of the British Public Schools, and encounter a teacher who himself we initially think is thrilled watching a naked woman, but come to find was in fact fascinated by the naked young man.

As I have commented, this seemed to me to be the only real substance and interesting content in “Catcher in the Rye”.  It seems to me this has long been a secret problem of our own, and probably most other societies.  Perhaps the Afghans and Pakistanis, with their dancing boys, are merely more naive and open about this problem, and I DO see it as a problem.  Such men grow up to be controlling, angry and often sadistic.  It is a self perpetuating cycle.

3) “Sex”, per se, is only one domain in which latent psychological conflicts–and we use this phrase as a cliche, when I think what is more accurate is to say unresolved traumatic events–come into play.  It is possible to be more intimate with someone without a word said, without a touch, than it is to be in any form of sexual intercourse.

We say that to be gay in a “heteronormative” world is difficult and traumatic.  This may well be true.  I’m not gay, so I can’t say.  But I can say that even as a heterosexual I find maintaining intimacy in sex to be difficult.  The sex part has nothing to do with it.  It has everything to do with an emotional split, and with the insincerity, the play-acting, the role playing that we learn to do early on.  Everything in our world has a sense of urgency.  You always have to be out and doing, and we train our children in that dross early on.  There is no time for unfolding, for seeing.  In any event, few seem to want to make the time.  Because what do you see?  Feelings you don’t want.  We do not live in a nurturing civilization.  

America is not an “empire” (other than that we conquered the land we live on and killed or marginalized the original inhabitants, which we certainly did do), but it is not wrong to say we are trained in imperialism, which is to say to duty, to reflexive adherence to Authority, to a need to be a part of some army or other.  Antifa is just one more answer to people trained in that tradition.  They are not free thinkers.  They are, on the contrary, in the main consolidated drones, chanting slogans just the way any other goose-stepping group has at any point in human history.  They are not a new story–their story is many thousands of years old.

Gayness–and more recently Transgenderism as the new ideology to replace the notion of “sexual preference”–is one way of distracting from the core truth of meaninglessness, anomie, and “adriftness” (which I will suggest as a good English equivalent of Verworfenheit).  The mania is the reality.  The pain of confusion is the reality, and everything else a deflection.  The ideas, and the things people do which support them, are secondary.  There is no desire to help anyone when we are told that “sexual preference” is no longer acceptable to the Commissars.  There is simply a thirst for destruction, of precisely the type shown in this movie.

4) I think there is some truth that photographs steal some part of us, weaken some part of us, as suggested at the end, in what most likely would have been Welles own chosen ending (the middle would have been the negotiation and editing).

If I trivialize some part of me every time I take a picture of myself, what are we to make of selfies?  Are iPhones little vacuums, sucking out our souls?

For myself, I have long hated having my picture taken.  I just don’t like it.  I never have.  I intentionally step out of most pictures.  I have been many places–events with groups of people–and you will find no photographic record of my presence.  I seen to sense cameras, and I avoid them.  I have never posted ONE selfie, ever, even though I have been many places.

5) Consider the central role of mass media, of Hollywood, in our culture.  When I cancelled my cable, they asked me “what are you going to do for entertainment?”  I told them: anything else.

6) All of us, instinctively, look to one another for answers.  As I think about it, it has been obvious to me for some time that I don’t anyone who has any answers worth listening to.  Methods, yes.  Techniques, yes, which I can use to find my own way.  But I can’t look to others.  It is a circular firing squad, which is more or less what Welles showed.

7)  Really, how could he have completed that movie without repenting much of his life?   At various points, he must have wished he was the one who died in the car wreck.

8) Reading his biography , Welles obviously had many unprocessed issues.  You can make manic energy work for you for a while, especially when you are young, but it catches up with you.

9) John Huston and Welles must have shared much in common.

Here is a snippet on Huston: According to actress Olivia de Havilland, “she [his mother] was the central character. I always felt that John was ridden by witches. He seemed pursued by something destructive. If it wasn’t his mother, it was his idea of his mother.”^[4]

10) In my view, there is little redemptive about psychological understanding.  I think knowing your “story” is useful, but that is a map of the known.  The task is to map out the new, from a new viewpoint.  In this, “spirituality”–let us call it a “sense of space and the sense of freedom within it”–is the sine qua non.

My work continues.   This movie was useful to me in multiple ways, none of which I have written about here.

 The task, I think, is to feel what is common to both “good” and “bad” experience.  That is the gateway to lasting peace.

 I will stipulate a principle: there are no views on the climb up the mountain which cannot be had from the summit.

I continue my work.  I am consciously letting ideas I once would have posted come up, linger a moment, then leave.  I am in any event only seeing bits and pieces, and it occurs to me that much of what we call “being an intellectual” is really just being a collector of fragments.

Yes, some intellectuals come up with “Gesamttheorien”, like Marx, but in general they are castles far up in the sky, and to visit them your feet must leave the ground, in an unhealthy way, and your common sense and innate wisdom will never be seen again if you choose to live within them.  On Earth, all we see are raining bits and pieces.

But I FEEL–and perhaps I should coin some term for the affective equivalent to what intellectuals do–that heaven is always right here with us.  I get flashes.  It’s all very simple.  Nothing is being withheld.

All of us consist in riverine systems.  Experience rains down on us, and flows through channels down to eventual experiential extinction, which is to say forgetting.  Perhaps some of it pools in lakes and ponds and inland oceans.  This is unprocessed emotional experience.

Heaven is a reconfiguration of all this.  I don’t know how.  But the key point is that WE CREATE these channels.  None of this is necessary.

And this is the point of meditation, to get back to primary experience, within which some part of us can begin to reshuffle things such that we can begin our return, or reemergence, or remembering.

I am actually having somewhat pleasant dreams some nights.  This is new.

And I have discovered I can go to a bar, have three drinks, then not buy a six pack on the way home.  This is also new for me.  And it just hit me this morning that the reason I always bought the six pack is that the brief socializing always made me feel more lonely.

But I am growing in peace, in relationship with myself.  It will not be an easy time, if Joe Biden wins.  Every whiff that he may pull off what should amount to an upset, and Wall Street tanks.  We already know that we have lost an amount of wealth comparable to what happened between 1929 and 1932.  An honest Depression, under the helm of an idiot like that, is very definitely possible.

But I signed up for all this.  I believe it.  We need whatever happens.  I need whatever happens; although I will continue to pray Trump triumphs, prosperity returns, and I am able over some time interval to begin to wage my one man cultural war against anomie, sadness, disconnection, and social destruction.

 You may not want the truth, but here it is.

Where it goes: https://fee.org/articles/im-the-00001-my-confession/

I have been stipulating for some time that the aims of the Left could easily be discerned by what they accuse their ideological enemies of conspiring to do.

Well, they accuse Republicans of “serving the rich”, and of being the willing agents of large corporations.  You have idiot kids out there with signs supporting the Democrats, who have been PAID to do so by large corporations, run by and for very rich people.

The politicians understand this, and the people who buy the politicians understand this.

As a matter of historical fact, the first time the Federal  Reserve was proposed in Congress it was voted down, because it was proposed by a Republican.  So they got a Democrat to do it, hired people to say that the banks who wanted it, actually hated it and were afraid of it, and it went through with no problem.

It is exceedingly difficult to operate an effective Republic when the citizenry is abominably stupid.  Universal and where needed free education–which was a key Socialist objective for most of the 19th century–has actually made most of us stupider, by teaching us as true things which are demonstrably not true, and by teaching our kids that feelings trump facts.  And implicitly, of course, they have taught that arrogant ignorance constitutes a winning argument of sorts.

This election, Republicans represent Main Street, and Democrats represent Wall Street, and the very corporations most idiot college kids think they are opposing by supporting Joe, since they can’t get Bernie.

A year of Joe, and many of them won’t even be able to get jobs in coffee shops.

I am trying to make my peace in advance with all options.

 It is a commonplace, perhaps even a cliche in some circles, that fish don’t know what water is.

They also do not know what dry land is, or what the meaning of stability is.  A foot on land is foreign to them.

 I have from time to time described myself as a “thought worker”, which is my own variant of intellectual.  True intellectuals, particularly of the European (think Left Bank, or perhaps Berlin) variety I consider to be “thought esthetes”.  They are smart, and very good at describing their visions, but their visions are not very useful, most of the time, and as a general rule they degrade humankind, by impoverishing them both physically and culturally.

Obviously, I am a fan of some, such as Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper, but for them a better term might be “serious academics”.

What thought workers do is they throw off thoughts.  Thoughts come to me in droves daily.  I will continually find myself on a ladder, pondering some economic point, or Trump’s political positioning or–well, if you read this blog, you know.

My task, though, is to graduate to spiritual work, and where thought work consists in new thoughts, spiritual work consists in learning new ways of being, new affective patterns, and new emotions.

Such work is described as “that”.  You need to be in the room with me to feel it.

But that is what I need to be doing, I feel.

 I continue to believe that we live in a world which is being attacked by both the willing and ignorant proxies of a powerful and hidden elite, and that there exists a simple and effective remedy to this disease, which itself is not ravaging us–most of the many dead were old and sickly–but in alleged RESPONSE to which we are being destroyed, our freedoms trampled on, and common sense put to the sword in the public square.

I continue to assert Switzerland as the model.  Look at the data: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/switzerland/

The bulk of the dying was done by May 1, and the whole of the curve goes from about March 8, to May 24th. (Note: I used Wikipedia in my treatment of this topic a month or two ago, which manifestly was a mistake.  The data was close, but not precise).

There is a flare up, in June, when from what I read they stopped using HCQ on the recommendation of the Communist (and who knows who else?) funded WHO, but little since.  Between June 20 and the present, there have been about 120 deaths.  Switzerland has about 8.5 million people, making this death rate negligible.

And SWITZERLAND IS OPEN: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-78818.html

Virtually everything was reopened on June 8, including all schools, all restaurants, and all businesses.

Whatever the goals of the elite are, they patently include the use of the words “reason” and “science” as cudgels, but they plainly do not include their regular use as TOOLS of human advancement, and for the melioration of human suffering.  Suffering, they seem to enjoy.

I will continue to insist that SOME sort of conspiracy is demanded to explain the sheer volume and scale of the lies and intellectual atrocities being committed against the world as a whole.  Rich Satanists is a better explanation than most.  It is not unreasonable, watching all this with (I think) clear eyes, to wonder if the history of the past century was not in large measure a stage play where the actors spoke all their roles so authentically because they did not even realize they were being stage managed, and genuinely thought they were playing the roles on the historical stage they appeared to be.

What if Communism, like COVID-19, was a very real, very dangerous disease, but one which we always had the means to combat effectively, and simply never chose to do?  We could and should have won in Korea by chasing the Chinese far into China, and reclaiming the North for sanity and prosperity and eventual freedom.  We could have won the Vietnam War in weeks, most likely, and in any event we certainly won it on the ground, then lost the propaganda war, due to many traitors in our own nation, but traitors most likely funded by our elites.

What if the causes of freedom, justice and prosperity have ALWAYS (or at least for the past century) had one hand tied behind their back, without knowing it?

This all seems increasingly likely to me.  It is insane that G. Edward Griffin was describing today’s reality back in 1973.

 For those of you who won’t watch, or won’t watch yet, the link I just posted, let me say that, absent the names and some specifics, what is described EASILY can be applied to our own time and own problems, perhaps even more so.

And the claim he makes–which makes sense to me–is that the conspiracy depends on three elements: secrecy, Big Government, and control of the money system.

With all that has been revealed under Trump, the veil of secrecy for much of what is going on behind the scenes has been lifted.  No honest, serious person can deny that there are SERIOUS issues of corruption in our government, particularly in the FBI, CIA and State Departments.

If Trump can weather this storm, his jobs in his next term should be to get control of the money system, and to end Federal involvement in as much as he can.

And I will point out that the narrator notes that most of the people who believe they are “anti-establishment” are actually being FUNDED by and in effect doing the work of, the Establishment.  They think they are radicals, working for a better world, but are really foot soldiers for a new, global, and inescapable tyranny, one vastly worse in every way than the “systems of oppression” they think they are working to eradicate.

And I will note that the goal of global secularism has largely been obtained.  The wars of religion ended centuries ago, even if they were still fresh in Weishaupt’s time, and anti-Catholicism a reasonable political stance.

To my mind, there must be another circle, and another agenda, that no one suspects.  This could easily be the Satanism the globalists are so often accused of.  It would fit logically with all their other apparent goals.  Maybe Carthage was not destroyed.  Maybe something else is going on.

But to my mind, THAT the rich are funding the people publicly attacking the rich is a proven, obvious fact which needs explaining, and Griffiths’s explanation is by far the most persuasive.

https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-USA-Name-Civil-Rights/dp/B078JHYFRL/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hidden+agenda&qid=1601855555&s=instant-video&sr=1-1

I just finished watching this and STRONGLY recommend everyone watch this. Unbelievably, the precise tactics he is talking about in 1973 are being used TODAY.

It is called above and below pressure, and this whole COVID-19 global lockdown is TEXTBOOK manipulation. It’s unbelievable.

The narrator is lucid, well organized, informed, and in my view compelling in his narrative and associated argument.

Please give this a look.

 If we cannot do everything, let everything we do stand in for all the things we are not destined to do.  Sink into every moment, as it represents the sacrifice of all that can never be, at least in this life.

You owe it to all you can never do to partake consciously of what you CAN do, and ARE doing.  And worry is an insult to all those destroyed futures.  It is virtually sacrilegious, outside of healthy bounds needed to prevent preventable misfortune.  

And this includes worry about worry, tension about tension.

Be happy.  Be joyful.  Be relaxed.  This time will never come again.

I say these things, and I think some are actually sinking in, to that part of me which actually matters, and where the decisions actually originate.

We all know how to lie.  Most of us learn it early on, and most of us never learn how NOT to lie, even if we never consciously speak an untruth across long lifetimes.