Month: October 2020

1.  If we die, life has no point.  Nothing is worth doing.

2. Everything is worth doing, but there is not enough time for it.

The first breeds listlessness and disconnection, and the latter breeds restlessness and impatience and frustration.  You cannot read all the books in the library.  You cannot know all the things you want to know, or go all the place you want to go, or know all the people you want to know.  The list goes on forever.

It seems to me the best way to live is to accept, on the one hand, our condition of existential confusion, while granting that the best scientific evidence points to some form of the survival of our soul, in conditions we really don’t understand, but which to my mind should be amenable to scientific study, and that that sort of scientific study is really by far the most important study any group of intelligent people could undertake.

On the other hand, while we can’t do EVERYTHING, everything we do, we can do better, and that the feelings possible in any moment are in principle similar to those possible in any other moment.  You can be happier here, now, where you are, than if you spent the next ten years travelling the world aimlessly, or even in a monastery, studying meditation with people who simply happened to be in the habit of meditation.

When I make a meal, it makes me sad it will quickly be gone.  All experience is like this.  You have it, then it passes, and you can remember it, but that is not the same; and in remembering, you miss the next moment.

All good living, all true Savoir Vivre, partakes in the ability to simultaneously be present, to grasp, to connect, and then to let go.  To my mind, this is the only life skill really worth cultivating.

And it seems to me that all authentic love and generosity and compassion, flows from a spirit which can rest in the flow of life.  Manic generosity will benefit people’s bellies, but not their souls.  And we humans don’t need so very much, physically.  Most of our luxuries are really distractions pointing away, for a time, from our unhappiness.

And it tends to be true that the less our work matters, intrinsically–the more vulnerable it is to obsession.

I am trying to find my own middle point in my own life, my own ability to float in the moment.  I have been a carpet for a long time.

And obviously I have the part of me that wants to give up blogging–which insists to me THIS IS THE ONLY WAY–then some more generous part of me says “but it helps you feel and find your way, even if imperfectly, even if only for moments.”

The struggle is real.  Obviously.  But I will comment that obsessive creation and ideation is not at all the same as compulsive consumption.  For good and for bad, much of world, in all ages, was built by people like me, who simply found themselves unable to quit something.

 Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, when Nixon was still President, and before Watergate.

What has he done since?  It’s a valid question.  He is most associated with a crime bill in the 1990’s that caused incarceration, particularly, of black Americans to skyrocket, and which Trump is partially rolling back.

And the average life expectancy in the United States for men is 76.3 years.  Joe Biden was born in 1942, during the Second World War, and will celebrate his 78th birthday on Nov. 20th.  This means the average man his age is dead.

And plainly, he has dementia.  His doctors have found drugs to suppress it for short periods of time, and he was almost certainly wearing a mike at the debate, but he is clearly losing it.  There are dozens of videos of incoherent rants, brain freezes. and patently not right things he has said and done in recent months, which is why he rarely leaves his house, and never without supervision.  

If we elect this guy, we deserve what we get.  Not all of us, but part of me wants to inflict on the many millions of idiots in this country exactly what they deserve.  I will unfortunately get caught in it, too, though, so I can’t wish me and mine disaster as well.  But it still makes me mad.

 Democrats are REALLY hoping that there is a major surge in death in Florida.  Because if there isn’t, none of this makes any sense.

And many other States are opening up.  Tennessee has been fully open outside the major cities for a month or two.  Indiana is going 100% on restaurants and businesses in the next week or so.  South Dakota never really shut down, I don’t think.

I’m not going to do a full inventory, but will note again that numbers have to be compared between States that are open.  You can’t compare closed States to open States.  Until California is seating restaurants at 100%, we won’t know the full death toll.

And we also won’t know how deep the economic devastation is.  But it is obvious that if we don’t reelect Trump, a full blown Depression is not out of the question.  None of this is so bad that it can’t be made MUCH worse by the sorts of policies Joe Biden is likely to enact, and Kamala Harris is eager to enact.

 There is no humor without tension.  If tension is not allowed, there is no humor.

And laughter is a social lubricant.  If there is no laughter. the whole system gets constipated.

So comedy is like a social laxative.  Yeah, I’m going to stick with that, although I might work on it a bit later.  

 I had a very nice barbeque meal today somewhere in Tennessee.  Almost no one was wearing masks, and nobody working there was.  It felt good.  It was refreshing, for me.

I had a talk with the owner, and while he recognizes this disease is real, the response is obviously bullshit.  It is the Democrats ruining America to get at Trump.  And as I pointed out to him, they are not just ruining this country, but causing hunger for BILLIONS, with last I heard up to 125 million at risk of death from STARVATION.  In 2020.  Because of Anthony Fauci and the people operating him like a marionette.

The owner said he personally knows 21 restaurant owners in Nashville, all of whom have at least 100 seats, who will NEVER reopen.  They are done.  Kaput.  Finished.  Because of the lockdowns.

And here is the thing: the top five States, in terms of deaths per capita, are all run by Democrats.  New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Louisiana.

Florida, number 12, is run by a Republican, but it is now opening COMPLETELY, and these statistics were current as of a couple days ago.

Rick DeSantis: “If you go back in March, we were told 15 days to slow the spread,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “Now people are saying, ‘hey even if there is a vaccine, it’s still going to take another year before you can operate appropriately,’ and I don’t think that’s viable, I don’t think that’s acceptable.”

Oregon and Maine, both States run by Democrats, are near the bottom, BUT THEY ARE STILL LOCKED DOWN (not sure about Maine–I wanted to go there this summer for vacation, but you can’t travel there without a very recent COVID test–but pretty sure about Oregon).  At the top you have New Jersey and New York, still locked down, but with high death numbers, many due to putting sick people in retirement homes, which was the dumbest possible thing to do.  And at bottom you have low numbers, and absolutely wrecked economies and lives.

Joe Biden is the candidate of the lockdowns.  He is the guy who will see them reinstituted periodically the REST OF OUR LIVES.  Now that the elites know how sheepishly compliant Americans are, they can and will lock us down any time they want, for nearly any reason.  I fully expect this year’s flu epidemic to be greeted with masks and unprecedented restrictions.  Why not?  It worked this time.  It will work again.

Donald Trump has got to adopt a refuse to lose mentality, and make the case strongly, persuasively, and articulately, that we can’t allow our economy to be on an on/off button subject to whims of de facto dictators.  We can’t and don’t need to contemplate wearing masks the rest of our lives.  That is depressing, and the science behind it is non-existent.

In and of themselves, the lockdowns seem to make things worse.  It is unclear why, but that seems to be the data.

Sweden, to take the obvious example, had higher deaths for a time than their neighbors, because they remained largely open, but the deaths dropped.  This is what Farr’s Law/Curve looks like.  Now, they are open, and they cannot be compared to their neighbors because their neighbors have not gone through the curve yet.  It comparing apples to tomatoes.

Florida is our Sweden.  Their numbers may be higher than, say, California, but why would California’s numbers not go up when they reopen?  Of course they will.  It is the curve.  It is Farr’s Law, which stipulates the amount of death under the curve is the same across all time horizons.

And I continue to want to see suicide and drug overdose numbers.  We have not seen good data yet, even though it is the job of the CDC to collect it, and that of the NIH to factor it into policy.

I will rationalize this post later.  But the key point is Joe Biden is ahead–IF he is ahead–because people associate all the drama and danger and pain and fear and anger concerning these lockdowns more with Trump than with the Democrats.  If he can flip that impression to something accurate, I think that will win him a lot of votes.

And remember: what happens in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.  You can vote for Trump and tell your friends you voted for Biden.

 At root, this election is a sort of referendum on masks.  It is clear that most people are afraid to be seen not wearing them.  But do they ACCEPT this fact, privately? Are more Americans psychologically suited for authoritarian and essentially capricious and irrational rule, or do more Americans, privately, RESENT what is being done to all of us in the name of the perennial enemy of freedom, an illusory “public safety”, even if they are too timid to say it publicly?  Are our youth, particularly, chafing at this more or less literal bit, or are they like the cattle they seem to be, complacently awaiting any fate that may come, unaware even that the world is churning?

If people are complacently accepting, en masse, the irrational tyrannical destruction being inflicted on them., I wonder what Trump could say that might persuade them to vote for him.  He is right and Biden is wrong on ALL the issues, as far as I am concerned.  Any of us that want a swift recovery, protection of our civil liberties, the rule of law, an intact Constitution: Trump is the only candidate.

It may benefit Trump to put it that starkly.  Joe Biden is casting himself as the masked candidate, and by this I mean “masks for the rest of your lives; masks forever, worn whenever anyone says, without question, and under penalty of fine and imprisonment”.  Masks without borders or time limits.  Trump could easily position himself as the man for people with faces and personalities, people who want something in life, and believe they have places and purposes in the world.  Take your pick, America.

 I watched “The Social Dilemma” last night, and a lot became vastly more clear to me.  We are witnessing, through planned psychological manipulation for profit, the creation of a new breed of neurotic, compulsively conformist, addicted human being.

I really thought there would be rebellions against these ridiculous lockdowns by now.  Our young have no reason at all, really, to be wearing masks.  They are at no risk, and if the people in their lives at high risk self quarantine, there is no risk to anyone.

But the young are the biggest conformists of all.  As one of my kids told me, they are all terrified that someone will take a picture of them without a mask on, and it will be posted on social media, and their lives destroyed by a horde of mindless, thoughtless, reckless, and emotionally violent banshees.

So we have in place a system of complete social domination, which has as an inevitable feature the erosion of initiative, individual personality, creativity, and emotional independence.  We are creating empowered zombies, who will voice the same opinions en masse at the same time in the same way, all thinking that they are being bold and brave and unique.

It is baffling, and truly mind boggling.  I can’t fight this.  No ideas will work against forces like that.  Something monolithic, something in government–I hate to say–or some strong voice from within the stream of noise that they all tune in to has to fight this.

Even in the movie, they bring up the Russian interference idea, even though it was then, and remains now, thoroughly ludicrous.  They polarize within a movie about the negative effects of polarization.  They, to their credit, show an “Extreme Center” party, but then show fighting in the street between two sides, as if the right and left, in this country, were even remotely equal in their violence.  It is 99% the Left, and occasionally the right will show up, then they will talk about it continually for three years, as if it was an example of something happening daily or weekly.  This was in that movie, and I doubt many partisans of the Left failed to see the Extreme Center as a thinly veiled caricature of their vision of the Right, one that manipulated drones on the Left keep fighting in their dreams, while they are fighting the structures of their local communities–its buildings, its economy, its police, and indeed its citizens–in lieu of actual physical opponents, who they continue to invent in hoax after hoax.

You want to hear something crazy?  The guy who seems to have led the team that developed the iPhone, Richard Williamson, was my best friend in high school.  Strange irony.  We played Dungeons and Dragons together (it is apparently becoming nerd chic now, but was not then), hiked, played chess (I am not very good at chess, by the way), and I spent a lot of time at his house.  The very first time I got drunk when I was 16–on Everclear, which is very dangerous, and his brother Michael was plainly to blame–I puked in his bed.

I corresponded briefly with him back in 2016, I think it was.  We had lost touch with each other long ago.  He had always looked down on me a bit, not least because I was in many respects an idiot.  I was also crazy, for reasons I have discussed here, but which I had no inklings of back then.  I had no idea what my problems were.  But when he realized I was a Trump supporting alcoholic, the correspondence ceased again.  He himself never posts on Facebook, and I had the impression his kids–like those of the executives in the movie–were not being addicted to their phones and social media as most kids in this and other countries are.

I have an altar in my home.  I have taken to lighting a small candle every day.  It is the candle of hope.  None of us can truly foresee where all this is going.  As the guy who invented the Like button said, he thought it was something which would make people happy, but it seems to have worked instead, on balance, to make people miserable when they don’t get enough of them.  The world is filled with unintended consequences, and in my view the most useful aspect of Friedrich Hayek’s work is describing at length the futility of even the smartest people trying to plan the world, rather than to work with its intrinsic, and desirable, Complexity.  Liberalism is politically deployed Complexity Theory. Socialism is its opposite.  Socialism is straight lines deployed against the raging currents of human life, which can only work by constraining and containing human energy to bounds which are unnatural to it, and unhealthy for it.

In a sense seeing the scale of the trick being played is liberating for me.  I understand the mask people now.  Nothing I can say or do will make much difference.  They NEED their conformity.  You can’t use reason to denude someone of a deeply rooted emotional impulse.  The future may be bright and it may be dark, but I can in good conscience stop trying to pretend I can even in minute way shape it from this chair, in this room, at this keyboard.

I will continue my other projects, and devote more time to them.  What might make a real difference is ideas I can only deploy in the presence of other people.

 I am feeling increasingly good.  I have lost 35 pounds or so, but have only been able to do so because I am calming down.  20 more or so and I will be a lean, solid 230.  

My system has been to lose 5 pounds, then maintain that weight for two weeks before lowering the bar.  I weigh myself and take my belly measurement daily, and write it on an erasable board in my bathroom.  I use the Lose It app, and shoot for 150 grams of protein, 30 grams of fiber, and whatever the calorie count is.  

I think lowering through a series of plateaus helps me get psychologically used to being that new weight, and I also think there are memories contained in fat, or in a certain sort of body memory, and they need to be processed.  If you lose too much weight too fast, you can’t process them, and psychically you are just stretching a rubber band which is bound to contract back, sooner or later.  You have to relax into a new way of being in your body.  All of us get fat by using food (and of course booze, which was my main issue, although food was too) as a drug.  If you don’t deal with what caused you to use food that way, your weight loss will not last.

I’m going weeks not just not getting drunk–I’ve done that before–but not even WANTING to get drunk.  That is new.

This blog represents a series of spasms, in a way.  It is a labor of love, but it also represents an outlet for manic energy, for my childish urge to impose my will on the world, to be relevant, to matter, to feel some sense of control, which of course I really don’t, in any important way.  What will be, will be.  That would probably sound better in French.

My history of keeping my word when I say I am going to stop blogging is not good.  Terrible, in fact.  Really terrible.  It feels like I would lose a friend, something important, a vital outlet.  And maybe I would.

But I am going to try and take the leap again.

I will share a couple thoughts first, though.

1) It seems to me that Leftist AgitProp had really created the sense among many that black people are a different species of human, that their “experience” somehow partakes of a mystic unintelligibility for us white folks, and that in some latent way we nearly need to worship them.

Here is the reality: all of us–or most of us–have had the shit knocked out of us emotionally at some point or other.  All of us have had people make unwarranted and negative assumptions about us.  All of us have been discriminated against.  Black people are not a different species of human.  You can talk to them, you can listen to their stories, and you can compare them to your stories.  You know what?  There is a lot of overlap.  They are not that different from “normal” people.  Yes, that was consciously an echo of the racism of the white people (mainly) comprising and running BLM.

I think most normal black folks, looking at the white people wanting to kiss their feet, have to be thinking “what the fuck is wrong with these people?”  Some, of course, seeing suckers all around them, figure out how to take advantage of it.  It’s a target rich environment, for sure, and honestly I can’t blame them.  How often do any of us get people begging to be taken advantage of, and heaping praise on us for doing it?

2) I have been calling the global lockdowns a crime of historic proportions.  What they also represent is an historically unprecedented abuse of expertise, of the secular scientific priesthood, and the trust we place in such oracles and leaders.  THEY ARE LYING TO US.  They are not doing science.  None of these responses are tested, and none stand up to scientific scrutiny.  

We should be copying Sweden or Switzerland.  This is an unmistakable FACT.  It can’t be argued, in my view.  So why aren’t we?  Because our priesthood has been corrupted.  It’s unbelievable, the venality and recklessness of people we should be able to trust, but obviously can’t.

I am quite bullish, by the way, as far as Trump.  HCQ will prevent serious complications, in my opinion, and with zinc and Azithromyacin he will probably get through this whole thing without significantly decreasing his work load.  He’ll sleep a few more hours a night for a few days, but I think that will be about it.  I may be wrong, but I doubt it.  The actual science seems reasonably clear.

 What is the difference between having a place and having a song?

 Who dares, wins.

Unofficial: Always a little further.

Life requires chances, and chances need timing.

I have no idea what os possible because I have no idea what is really happening. We common folk have little to do or say that will affect anything, but I would encourage our President to think big, and decisively.

So much is timing and terrain and logistics, but as Sun Tzu wrote long ago, the Way is the most important, and that is something that must be felt.