https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-wars-of-wars-part-i
He is a clever fellow, and although I have only been reading his highly informed and highly critical commentary on the abuse of the scientific method in the United States (and elsewhere) to marginalize Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, I think it highly likely his commentary on other topics equally worth your (and my) time.
I have had several dreams in recent days of dancing in the dark, once in the remote halls of a large corporation I have often worked for, and last night in a swirl of flowers, floating above the graves of the esteemed elders of a great university, in swirl of flowers.
It was not disrespect: it is life in the face of death. Dancing is coherence out of chaos, is it not? Rhythm from the possibility of randomness? Dancing is, perhaps, to emotions, what logic is to thinking.
I was once told by a Brazilian friend that I am a good dancer. He asked his housemate what she thought. She scowled a bit–she did not like me much for some reason–and said, “well, he has good RHYTHM”.
That’s enough I suppose. I continue to try and loosen the chains–much tighter them–which detract from my freedom.
I can’t justify it rationally, but I feel good things in the air. Our politics and culture is a shit show, and there is little cause for optimism. But even in the darkness, sometimes there is a way, and one’s feet find it.
We very much live in a 25 brands of Ketchup world, even if that particular decision is easy enough for most.
I sometimes feel like getting rid of 95% of the stuff I own and living “lighter”. But my mind would not really change, and I would soon enough start accumulating stuff, which in my case is mostly books and cooking tools of various sorts. I can feel that. I am an American, and we buy things. That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are all a bit absurd, but not really different from any wealthy elite in any bygone era. Columbus sailed West to find a better route for the stuff the rich of his day wanted.
It seems to me that the smartest route to simplicity is to treat every decision you make as standing in for ALL OTHER POSSIBLE DECISIONS. If you go on vacation to X, it stands in for every other option you considered. Every emotion is possible. All the pleasure is already there, if you can just seek it out by going through the feelings.
If you have ten things to do, you do EACH ONE OF THEM every time you do one of them. If you can’t focus on the first, logically, then you can’t focus on the second. This means they all get short changed.
But if your whole world is the first, then your whole world will also be the second, and some part of you in the back of your brain will record and notice this.
It is in some respects rational to feel anxiety. Most of us are forgetting something most of the time, and complex problems often benefit from rumination. I am not saying to forego all that. It has value. Within the OODA loop, that would still be orienting.
But I think all people capable of achieving tranquility let all that go when they make their decision. Yes, by all means assess the outcomes, but in the meantime let that decision stand in for the other possible decision. It is everything. There is nothing else. Do one thing, then the next thing.
This is common sense, in some respects, of course. I am, to use a now dated term, a bit neurotic, for reasons I have overshared often, so this is good information for me too.
It’s so easy to get distracted by trivialities. I do it daily, and so most likely do you.
You know, most of human history is littered with cruelty, both truly vile and much more commonly petty. In 1950 blacks were still banned from many places even in the North, and gays risked being beaten to death, and the certainty of social exclusion if discovered. Sexual harassment and child abuse in many forms were more or less tolerated.
Life was harder back then, objectively. Hunger–real hunger–was vastly more common. And even guys with good Union jobs in big cities scarcely lived better than our present urban poor, seen objectively. It was a big deal to have a car and TV.
But what they did have is a much more social nature, music intended to lift them up, and habituation from childhood on that life WAS hard, and that there is no use complaining about it. Resentment and the sense of innate privilege was not bred into them from earliest childhood, as it is now.
I find for myself most of my “difficulties” really amount to self pity. Yes, my first rule is the rejection of self pity, but I created the rule because I tend to wallow in it, sometimes with some justification–I do have some epically awful weeks sometimes, as I think most people in our soft America would see it–but most of the time, objectively, I’m fine.
And there is a dialectic here. People who just accept injustice as part of life are never going to change it. But people who find themselves CREATING “injustices” to justify a resentment which preceded the searching expedition WILL NEVER BE HAPPY. Not going to happen. Ever.
It is a flaw of our time that as we have become more and more prosperous our greed and resentment have pulled ahead, so that no matter how much people have, it is still not enough.
And no matter how objectively easy people’s lives are–it was not possible to be as fat as many of our poor are now in recent history and survive–they still complain.
I’m rambling a bit. What sparked this was listening to this wonderful music, and contemplating that this music gives energy to the tired, and hope to those suffering. It helps me, in any event.
Sidney Bechet, 1952: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REYLNs0rh-g
No doubt when he visited Memphis he had to stay in the Lorraine Hotel, as did all the other black folks visiting.
Did that hurt him emotionally? No doubt. This music, though–his music–is a rebellion against injustice, and a celebration of life.
I complain a lot. Complaining has some value. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the person unwilling to be rolled over rarely is.
But it unquestionably also true that sometimes you have to just look at the world as it is, and see what is good and needs no fixing, no attention.
It is the same with personal growth. Self acceptance cannot be predicated on perfection, or no person will ever even set foot on the path.
I have recently been thinking of it as climbing a mountain. When you look up, you see the whole mountain, but the beginning is a trail or path, and in climbing you have to focus on each step. Often, in switchbacks, you can’t see much. But periodically you will emerge on a new vista, and better view.
This is the RECOGNITION of a quantum shift which has been happening silently, and which is the result of patient daily effort over a period of time. Often we cannot see how we have changed until some familiar situation occurs, and we realize that we are responding in new and better ways.
Anyway, my two cents for today.
is an amplifier. The intentions you put into it become larger. It will help save massive numbers of lives and to destroy them. It frees people from drudgery and condemns them to it.
To my mind the most pressing human task is cultivating the maturity and wisdom to use all these amplifiers, but most of humanity seems blind and lost to the most basic moral insights.
With respect to Silicon Valley specifically, it is literally like adding leftwing politics to their to-do allows them to check as done the life task of “Develop moral coherence”.
Introspection and honest sustained silence are foreign to them. No doubt they go on retreats and listen to the usual suspects saying the usual things, but these are more or less ideational objevts they add to their collection.
Two Marvel moments that come to mind: in Ant Man the bad guy meditated. Why not? It might give him an idea that made him money and/or got him more power. As I have noted greed and competitiveness seem to be the main reasons so many Tech executives are microdosing acid.
And Robert Redford, in The Winter Soldier, had a Buddha statue, one we saw shortly before he killed his maid.
As I have said before, most gold does not glitter. Not at least until it is found and purified and polished.
It is worth repeating that China would stand to benefit most from a pointless war between Russia and the United States, particularly if they plan to fight a war with us themselves at some point; although controlling our government as they seem to do, may eliminate any need for any shots fired. I see traitors and whores in every dirrction I look, certainly in the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, Congress, Supreme Court and the White House. I literally cannot name one organ of government I trust. None of them.
The SCIENTIFIC truth is that if I am not sick I cannot infect anyone. Period. Full stop. No alternative possible.
What keeps this thing going, the reason it had and has legs to reach around the world, is the idea that you can be sick—and thus contagious—and NOT KNOW IT.
This serms dim witted to me. First off, asymptomatic spread is just not possible. If you test postive for antibodies but were never sick, YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM DID ITS JOB. The virus got in and was promptly bounced out on its head by the guardian at the gate.
The WHOLE THING, this entire global mind fuck—arguably the most damaging practical joke ever played on humanity, which continue accruing costs with no benefit for a generation or more—rests on the idea thar for a day or two I might be infected but not know it.
But on any given day what are the odds of this? I personally have been exposing myself to unmasked at work and in bars for over a year now, and have not suffered a sniffle that was not beer related.
And is it not logical to ask what the most LIKELY source of spread is? Is it presymptonatic people? How many of those could there be?
No, as the Swedes—who are done, and suffered a third less death than us—and others pointed out long ago, MASKS CREATE A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY.
They CERTAINLY do not protect from the illness. The Danes showed that.
But they ALSO do not work as source protrction. And what they do do is give people with mild symptoms—a headache in one actual case I know, mild allergies in another—the erronepus idea that even though they are in public they are protecting others. They are not. Almost no one is wearing masks rated for any medical purpose whatsoever. Most seem to choose masks based on their graphic designs or comfort, and almost no one wears masks which have been tested for ANYTHING.
We know the best masks, fitted perfrctly, are only rated down to particles 3x bigger than the viruses they are trying to stop. We also know masks never worked fir the flu and smallpox, and that they weee tried numerous times.
In my view, DeSantis, Abbott, Noem and other governors should BAN mask wearing. This woukd in my view cause the mildly symptomatic to stay home, and serve the cause of honest science by providing large control groups.
And it would be a no more more egregious curtailment of liberty asking people who want to wear masks not to than demanding that those who do not wsnt to WEAR masks. The science in my view favors banning them outside true medical settings wearing genuine medical masks.
All these are things I have said or implied more than once. Here is what hit me this morning: the physical virus, as an actually existing microorganism with describable properties has morphed into the minds of many into a psychological contagion, against which the mask is a magical protective amulet.
Never mind that the virus does not transmit outside: I see pictures of people on bikes and even motorcycles wearing masks BUT NOT HELMETS. What they protecting themsrlves from? PHYCHOLOGICAL contagion, which is say a panic attack relatedto scientifically wrong ideas that have nonetheless been pushed into their heads by a relentless panic based media, which is leveraging this induced terror to MAKE MONEY.
You create the problem, then sell the cure. Its a profitable business model, evrn if an odious one.
Here is my prediction: the first Stare to ban masks will see dropping infection rates immediately.
And I will add that if we could test fir mental health damage as easily as we test for COVID, the results woukd br truly TERRIFYING.
This is a global crime I truly think will murdet—and that is the word—more people than the Nazis. I honestly think in the next ten years 100 million or more people will die from the RESPONSE to this not-very-dangerous disease than would have if sanity, goodness, competence, and science had prevailed.
All castles are built in the sky.
1) Home: what constancy and the known permit is somnolence and relaxation. We speak of “sleepy little towns”, even though most of the people in most of the small towns I know get up very early. But they also go to bed early and I think in most cases sleep well.
Most outsiders call them sleepy because the streets clear out in many places by 8pm and no one is on the road by 10.
They also feel restful, though, stress free, even if if course many ARE suffering at least financially in this global attack on that way of life.
There is something to be said for knowing the Smiths and the Jonea and the other Smiths on Sycamore lane. Your filters assessing Friend or Foe can be turned way down. You never get lost on streets you grew up on. Every corner over time has a memory.
But there is little change and with little change comes little growth. Perhaps one of the key skills in life is developing the ability to tolerate, integrate and PROSPER, emotionally, from change.
And seeking it out, as I have said, is the Buddhist method, or was. The Hindus likewise have four stages of life: child, adult, forrest dweller with your wife, and I think only for men the life of the Sannyasin, or wandering ascetic, who gives up his name, his place and his family, once he has ensured their continuity.
2) Love is very close to an emergent emotional property of trust. Love for a person comes from emotional openness to them. Love for community comes from a trust that you belong. Love fir himanity comes from the faith that if you coukd kniw each individual person you coukd connect and bond with them in at least a murual recognition of the himan condition.
I am not fully sure I belirve this or that it is useful, but engage it fir what it is worth to you, and profit from it if you can.
The central misunderstanding between conservatives—most of whom I would label honest Liberals—and Democrats is mistaking intent for reality.
There is nothing wrong and much right with Democrat ideals. We all want a more fair, just society and world.
The problem lies with their ideas. To say a given policy DOES NOT WORK is not to reject the putativd aim. It us to say “we can and should better, if we really want to accomplish X, say racial economic and social equality.”
In my view it is precisely because Democrat ideas have been tested and FAILED that—rather thsn suffer the ignominious truth to be told— they focus on language. You cannot be wrong within a self contained linguistic construction, particularly if you feel free to modify the meaning of words at will.
To me, over and above its value as a propagandistic cudgel and bullying device, this is why the focus on White Supremacy. It is an abstract concept, created more or less from whole cloth, and utterly useless as a tool for empowering and raising up persons of color.
But it is an endlessly fertile source of moralizing words and rhetoric which, in the main, exist solely to empower and gratify those uttering them.