Month: April 2021

The true Other is Stupidity. Every tribe has within it mostly stupid people but most likely usually a few switched on lightbulb people.

The POINT of most tribes is similarity. When you move into a new house you X. On New Years you Y. You all value ABC and considers the words of J sacred.

But these are external similarities. Certainly in communities of belief there is the possibility of moments of union, but few people are truly OPEN to life.

Put another way, every tribe has people eilling and able to take the time and expend the effort to understand members of other tribes as members of the larger tribe “human”. And the human tribe has members ready and willing to understand members of non-human races, such as what we term “aliens” who, for all we know, may predate humanity.  You know, native Terrans, who like Native Americans may not be FROM here, but predate us.

And every tribe has those who resist all this. They have, in other words, stupid people. The singular “accomplshment” of the political Left has been to make a virtue of hatred and exclusion in the putative name of kindness and inclusion. It boggles the mind of anyone capable of clarity in this regard.

And right now we are “led”, which and large is to say manipulated, by the stupid. Bill Gates is stupid. Mark Zuckerberg is stupid. Chairman Xi is stupid.

All of them, no doubt, have high IQ’s. What I am speaking to is their humanity, their emotional presence, theit empathy, and their openness.  All missing. In terms of human intelligence, all would be doing well to recite the alphabet and count to 100.  Total deficiency.

It is normal and healthy to have a tribe. It is a snug and comforting place to belong, or so I suppose.

But tribalISM is not healthy. Himan growth MUST come in the form of learning the skill of balancing inner and outer, which is to say tribe/not my tribe.

Early Buddhists were supposed to be lifelong homeless mendicants. But even they were given three steady comforts: the knuwledge that the Buddha won at the game of life, meaning it was possible; specific ideas and practices which, when applied, constituted one winning strategy; and the knowledge that somewhere out there were people thinking and acting like them, who were their spiritual family, which is to say tribe.

It is foolish to try and pretend we are not how we are, and lying in nearly all cases is retrogressive from the outset.

All our problems have solutions, but as long as idiots control our airwaves and internet, we are all boats drifting off into the dark, alone.

We have paddles and rudders, and there is light on the horizon but as men and women we need to CHOOSE to do better.

One of the reasons I was so fearful of Joe Biden—and enough Democrats to control the Senate and perhaps even the House—being allowed to cheat his way into power is that the amount of technological advancement over the next four years that is likely is nearly unimaginable.

Ponder single shot microdrones, perhaps even with invisibility technology; or bulletproof attack robots; kamikaze explosive robotic birds: I hesitate to say these things, but someone must have thought of them. As usual I will not share my more creative ideas, but you get the gist.

Never before in human history has there been such a blatant gap developing in capabilities between an rmpowered elite and ordinary people. Even when we brought guns to the Western United States, the bow and arrow, while mostly inferior, was still an occasionally potent adversary.

The Second Amendment foresaw rough parity between the weapons available to citizen and government soldier alike, and in point of fact the main difference had been legal access, and of course perhaps the ability to afford them.

But we are entering an era where traditional guns will be largely irrelevant. Numbers of soldiers will be largely irrelevant. There may come a time when the whole military may turn on the government, but if it loses control of its technology, then in principle a single person could defeat everyone. One person, who could even set it in motion and die during the process.

Most patriots have always imagined soldiers or cops kicking down their doors to get their guns and going down in a blaze of glory.  What if it is robots?

Even now, do you not think Biden and Pelosi would not prefer an Army of robots protecting them from the justly angry American people in Fortress Washington, which looks nothing like the Capital of the home of the free and land of the brave? You do not need to worry about the ideological loyalties of robots.

And of course AI bots will become ubiquitous on the web, and most social media CEO’s have all the political diversity of Maoist schoolchildren.

I have a very simple philosophy: never quit, but never stop telling the truth. I have no good answers to these problems, but do believe in miracles. They happen sometimes, but not reliably, and even if it were possible to deserve them, I very much doubt America does. We are stupid. This COVID bullshit should not be possible, but here it is.

Most of our leaders belong in jail, and most people—outside a narrow area of professional expertise—show no sign they were ever educated to do anything but parrot ridiculous lies.

It occurs to me to comment that Communism is really, as I said, a parallel alternative to the “civilizing” narrative told by most Western nations.  When we invaded, say, Iraq, we were going to bring democracy and freedom, whether they wanted them or not.  We were going to “civilize” them, which is to say import ideas which we liked but which were foreign to them, by and large.

Communism is no different.  It is a Western idea, rooted in Western ideals, which seeks to impose a specific vision on any number of different peoples, with different needs, differing beliefs, differing histories, all of which are subsumed into an artificial, and artificially grand, historical landscape concocted nearly entirely from whole cloth by the lazy, bitter, slob Karl Marx and those who came after him.

Communists say “we are here to save you.”  They literally told the Tibetans this when they invaded in the 50’s (I think it was).  The Tibetans asked “who are we being saved FROM?”  There was no good specific answer, so no doubt they were told “from imperialists”.  You know, because being made a part of the Chinese Empire protected them from being a part of any OTHER empire.

Or perhaps from “exploitative Capitalists”.  You know, of the sort that would colonize Tibet, rape its women and landscape, and leave the people desperate, poor, helpless and friendless, like the Chinese are doing.

Saving people for God and from “Capitalists” is morally equal, with the sole difference that PRACTICALLY Communist have no limits to their rapacity, since the disease itself requires an advanced capacity for self and other deception, and everything is possible when everything is a lie.  This means that in real terms,  Communists are vastly more dangerous and damaging than Western nations ever were at the height of the Imperialistic Age.

No morally sane person with half a brain should be anything but repulsed and nauseated at Communist crimes, and at the complicity of Western intellectuals in their commission, a complicity which continues to THIS MOMENT.

Joe Biden did not win the election.  He and his son took bribes from the Chinese and Ukrainians, and quite possibly the Iranians.  And I see very, very few people who call themselves Liberal articulating ANY objections to the sale of America to criminal sociopaths.

It occurs to me to expand on something I just said.

Here is a principle I believe to be true: in conditions of constrained dialogue bad ideas tend to chase out good ideas.

The limiting factors can be both self censorship to political bullying and abusiveness directed at non-conformists, or outright censorship.

Those who point out that the US has often interfered in the affairs of other nations for very venal reasons which served the rich and powerful are not wrong.  This has often happened.

In all human affairs, of course, motives are mixed, but it is quite right to say that pious rhetoric has often masked effectively villainous motives, and morally indefensible results.

So those who say “my country, right or wrong” would likely either find themselves defending really awful things, or feeling deep regret, if they knew or were told about the full extent of our activities everywhere.

We are not always right.  We have never been always, 100% right.  This is the truth.

But what is interesting that occurred to me just now is that our IDEALS truly are exceptional, and we have often asked that we be judged by them, and our CRITICS take the same mindset, the same emotional gestalt to simply invert a disingenuous narrative into ANOTHER disingenuous narrative that is equally wrong, equally blind, and equally indefensible.

America is always right becomes America is always wrong.  It is the same spirit, the same jingoism, and same lack of critical attention and insight.  It is the same latent tendency all Americans have, which is to be judged by intentions.  All we see, often, are ideals and not dead smoking bodies, and starving children.

Apologists for the creed of American Exceptionalism, especially in its worst manifestations of Manifest Destiny and the civilizing influence of our way of life (even if we have tended to improve most of the nations we invaded, in many ways), have the other kind of apology to make.  We were often at least in strong measure the bad guys.  It is not hard to understand why Afghani tribesmen would resent us in their valleys and mountains.  It is not hard to see why Iraqis would resent foreigners telling them what to do in their own nation.  At best, we often advanced good causes obliquely, and often at considerable cost.

But the people who HATE America, and view us as the locus of much evil, ALSO have apologizing to do.  As I’ve said for years, the catastrophe inflicted on South Vietnam when the American “Peace” movement caused us to flee a field of battle where we had ALREADY WON, and just needed to maintain the peace, was absolutely nauseating.

They get upset seeing Mexican kids in cages.  How would they feel watching millions of families getting broken up at gunpoint, separated for life–parents who never see their children again, and husbands who never see their wives again–and everything they owned confiscated, after some 200,000 people (best guess) had been summarily executed for purely political reasons?  That is vastly larger than Katyn, but nobody knows any of this.

Or Iraq/Syria: we had WON the first battle with Al Queda, after a lot of trouble, when Obama pulled our troops out, then FUNDED what became ISIS.  All that conflict we caused, and those who supported Hillary and Obama should apologize for that.

We–America, as led by the anti-American faction of our political landscape–overthrew Muammar Khaddafi with no real plan, and that nation suffered years of conflict, killing tens of thousands.  Again, Hillary in particular owes the world an apology.

Here is the thing: when you see things in black and white, when everybody is on one side or the other, you are an idiot.  It is manifestly a feature of the Leftwing mindset that they describe everyone OTHER than them as thinking in black and white terms, and their own views as nuanced, mature, reasonable, and humanitarian, when none of this tends to be true.

All of us are prone to either/or thinking.  It is hard-wired into us.  We are tribal by nature.

But only discussion brings this out.  Only TRUE openness, and not the farcical tyranny envisioned in George Soros’ Open Society, permits perception, regret, and correction.

It is precisely because the Left has committed and countenanced so many horrific crimes–our abandonment of South Vietnam was clearly a VASTLY larger crime than fighting alongside the South Vietnamese to repel a North Vietnamese invasion–that they are laser focused on their enemies, which is ordinary Americans.

No doubt many of the guys flying flags in their pickup trucks are naive.  They are ignorant.  But they are not claiming to be educated, most of them.  The REAL damage comes from the people who are DO claim to be educated, who hold tenured positions at major universities, who are ALSO naive about the effects policies they supported and CONTINUE TO SUPPORT have had on actual human beings.

Even now, take the anti-law enforcement initiatives.  If you get rid of law enforcement officers, you get less law enforcement.  If you have less law enforcement, you get more CRIME.  This is so obvious an average sixth grader could figure it out.

But most of them ARE NOT AFFECTED themselves.  The hippies of the late 60’s and early 70’s PAID NO COST FOR OUR ABANDONMENT OF OUR SOUTH VIETNAMESE ALLIES.  Like the ridiculous children they were, they congratulated themselves on their “victory”, in precisely the way that patriotic Americans might have congratulated themselves in, say, the first Gulf War, even though hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed, many in awful ways.  Bombs kill in a thousand ways, but most remain unseen by anyone, except those affected.  We killed women.  We killed children.  But “America, Fuck Yeah”.

What I am trying to do is strike a middle path, one open to reason, to discussion, to learning, to doing better.  And what I will suggest is that “America, Fuck Yeah” is STILL arguably on much more solid ground than the “America, Fuck NO” crowd, and 100% so where the Vietnam War in particular.

The Fuck NO people DO NOT LEARN.  Across many decades they keep saying and doing the same stupid shit.

And NOW, they have abandoned their anti-war stance completely.  They have abandoned all efforts at even rudimentary intellectual consistency.  They just do what they are told to do, and shout what they are told to shout.  This is the SAME THING they have been accusing of all these years.  The inverse of knee-jerk patriots is knee-jerk anti-patriots.

And I will add that against the global landscape of human history, by and large we HAVE been the good guys, more often than not.  History is filled with horror, with violence, with injustice, with repression, with crimes of all sorts.   But no nation I can think of has ever combined so much power with so much restraint.  We could have conquered the world, easily, in the aftermath of World War 2.  We could have invaded many, many nations who would not have had a shred of a prayer against us.  We are an 800 pound gorilla which on balance behaves quite well.

And I live in a nation where I can SAY ALL OF THIS.  People do not really understand how rare freedom of speech is.  It has never REALLY been a value anywhere, in any nation, in all of human history, UNTIL WE MADE IT SO.

We are all sinners, as individuals and as groups.  All of us–ALL OF US–have fallen short in some way or other.  When someone sins you do not give up on them.   When I myself sin I do not give up on me.  The task is to see clearly, and to–over time and with much continual effort–DO BETTER.

You can’t do better in a nation which does not value dialogue.  We cannot elect better politicians if the election are rigged.  And you cannot even discuss “better” if intellectual and moral coherence are not treated as the intrinsically necessary tools they are.

Gobbledly-gook shouting down and banning intelligence–in a sort of ideational Gresham’s Law–is not something any sane, morally aware person could or should condone.

I told someone today that Communism derives from an atavistic urge for imperialism and monarchy.

Pondering this, I think this is the reality and certainly as a filter in brings out latent patterns I have long described.

We have all experienced the impulse to take things we want. Why work, when you steal? Stealing has been most of history.  If you look at most remaining royal houses and take them back far enough, they stole somebody’s shit and kept it. And then as now since everyone was guilty the thieves looked out for themselves and crafted a narrative within which they were the heros.

To that minute extent, Gramscian critiques are valid. But obviously he took them vastly too far, as angry, weak people often do.

Nothing changed fundamentally with respect to human nature in the Enlightenment. Our IDEAS changed, but human greed, laziness, vanity all remained.

In PRINCIPLE, however, and in our public rhetoric and associated morality, white people changed. The idea of universal human rights emerged, and the rejection of slavery.  Imperialism was conducted not just because it could be, but under the rationalization of “improving” either the natives, or the world by granting superior people rhe stuff that had belonged to “ inferior” people.

All this was bullshit of course, or largely (Western imperialism in many nations did tend to raise at least the physical standard of living).

But Communism is not and never was an OPPOSING narrative. It was a parallel narrative, one origjnating in Europe and serving the same purpose: justifying theft and explotation, classist societies, and inherited prerogatives.

What did they do? Rather than use and abuse the rhetorics of Christianity and “civilization” they used and abused Enlightenment notions of universal rights, equality, and fairness.

Ask yourself, for example, what the USE of “equality” is, if everyone is poor. The use, clearly, is rationalizing an unequal system administered by those whose job it is to “prevent”inequality, even while prscticing and deepening it.  They are the nobility, who wamt to be praised for their generosity and sense of noblesse oblige.

I say again: human nature is what we need to change to build a better world. We need a world filled with empoweted, mature, emotionally intelligent people, building everywhere in creative ways; and the main “building” that interests me is cultural. It makes little difference if we live in grass huts if our emotional and spiritual needs are met; and conversely, OBVIOUSLY, great material wealth does not in itself make anyone happy.

But we need to dispense with the lie that it is “Utopianism” being discussed.  The Christian City on the Hill is mich realizable than an Earthly paradise built on greed, theft, brutality and lies.

This may be my new preferred term for Fascism. It is better in German but in English can be translated perhaps “Artificial Togetherness”, or “Artificial boundness”.

Here is what I want to assert: the urge to Ersatz Verbundenheit increases pari pasu with the decline in a society of a felt sense of place and meaning.  Hitler never intended to return to the old, but to create something new, call it new, wall it in, then herd everyone he could inside and kill or conquer everyone on the outside.

Same with the Communists, who added to this “new normal” the presence of continuous conflict, which created continual fear that one might accidentally be found on the wrong side, which led to people often herding themselves into enclosures with moving walls, but within which they felt relatively safe.

Self evidently there is a sickness at the core of this. It is the feeling of a herd animal left to stray, desperately seeking its pack and the relative safety therein.

Nothing is less natural to human beings than developing and seeking out our own individual moral code. Little is harder than facing, negotiating, and creatively integrating true difference.

Put another way, curiosity and openness are far from easy virtues. Within our own grouping both courage and compassion come relatively easy. They had and have evolutionary benefit, whatever you take that word to mean.  But moving tribe to tribe without feeling lost: this is hard.

Over the past century or two, our tribal affiliations have been hammered continually. We are told and have been shown that many of our most cherished beliefs are arbitrary and “unscientific”.  Efforts have been made to make science a tribe, but it is ill suited to this purpose. Tribalism in science leads to bad science, which itself undermines the core assumption, that we can “all come together” in science. This is bad science relying on worse philosophy.

But we need better answers to why the world is losing its mind. Why are smart, ostensibly “educated” people clinging in mobs to ideas,methods, and emotional gestalts which in history always lead to screams of terror and loss, to lifeless eyes in mass graves, to large masses of joyless, glazed facrs tramping indifferently to work they do only because the alternative is death or prison. Why?

Here is the core idea of Ersatz Verbundenheit: if I feel alone and lost, I will no longer feel alone and lost if I join a mob. And that mob, in turn, should have the power to force EVERYONE to join or die. And when that is done my existential anxiety and aloneness is palliated well enough that with low grade continual violence I can continue to not kill myself.

In Nationalistic Fascism the main vehicle of violence is war and conquest.

In Group based Fascism there is war, but to that is added tribal warfare, which is to say way between the artificially bound and arbitrary groupings which vary by time and place. The “bougeoisie”, certainly—which is thd middle class I will remind you many Leftists still disingenuously claim nowadays to care about—but whatever else may be needed from time to time to keep the water boiling into violence.

Ponder that “transphobe” was not a thing any of us had heard about when Obama was first elected. Government mandates that 14 year olds—or EIGHT YEAR OLDS— be allowed BY LAW to undergo irreversible surgeries more or less on a whim would have seemed preposterous. But here we are.

Creating enemies is the core action of a group which lacks a stable sense of place and purpose. The grouping itself is constituted amd furthered in induced tribal conflict. They can only be them in hating us.

There is no rest there and no peace. It is the “home” only of the manic, suicidal and delusional.

What the world needs is freedom and steadily increasing emotional intelligence, which allows difference to become good and useful and generative. In a perfect world all of us are simultaneously tribes of one and children of both God, humankind, and the Earth.

One last note: both the words Fasism and Religion refer to “binding”. The Latin “religio” literally means to bind together, making another translation of my German “Artificial or manufactured Religion.”

And the Fasces, of course, is a bound bundle of sticks with an axehead attached. The sticks symbolize the power of the mob, as directed by thr Dictator. The axe symbolizes the violence which is the nature of such as unnatural grouping.

I say let the dust fall where it may, and twigs and branches remain ungathered.

Let humankind learn to live in peace. So may we all pray, each in our own way.

Growth only happens in a space of consent.

Our personalities are dust which clouds God’s light. [God’s light=Buddha Nature]

Home is where the calm is.

I have found for some time that in most small towns in my region, nobody cares if you wear a mask.  Some people do, some don’t.  Personal preference, as it should be.

But I found a quantum leap the other day which made me happy, which was a fully stocked Chinese buffet.  They had everything, and all the tables were occupied.  The only concession to COVID they made was they asked you to wear a plastic glove when handling the ladles, which actually does make a bit of sense for ALL diseases (even if I’m not afraid of other diseases either).

Here is what I will say: one of the reasons we have a Columbus Day is not just because he discovered the New (to Europe) World, but because it took BALLS to sail off into the West when everyone was telling him he was doomed to sail off the edge of the world, or get eaten by dragons.

Fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful human emotions.  Not taking chances has a lot of evolutionary value, but in reality, TAKIKNG chances that pay off ALSO has a lot of value, and in point of fact that is how we evolved from cave people to skyscrapers and astronauts, with countless risks in the middle.

With every step forward someone was forecasting doom, and somebody else–almost invariably a man–was saying “fuck it”.

There was a time people thought going 50mph (or something like that) on a train would kill you.  They didn’t know what would happen if you broke the sound barrier.  Etc. Etc.

The thing with COVID is it is invisible.  But it not REALLY fully invisible.  Most of the time if someone is going to spread it, they are sick.  Yes, there is the very, very small group of presymptomatic people, but they are insignificant in my view.  I think it is masked people with mild symptoms doing all the spreading.

But here is my point: until you take the chance of TRYING something new, like Texas did, you never know how large the danger is.  I think it is really, really close to zero for healthy people who take Vitamin D and zinc.

Everyone is saying “you’ll sail off the edge of the Earth if you reopen now.  There are dragons.  It’s doomed, doomed, doomed.”

We need more people saying “fuck it”.  I am very, very sure all will work out fine.

And one last point: we are being told that HCQ is dangerous and the vaccines are safe.  Ponder that.  One drug that has been given to billions of people over the past 55 years, and one that was just invented somewhere around last July or August.

This whole thing is insanity.  I sigh every day seeing how fucking stupid the world is being.

This is the best documentary I can recall on the evidence for the survival of death.  It is reasonable in tone, filled with lots of examples, and does not make any wild swings that made me uncomfortable, as many of these sorts of movies do.  I will love 95%, but hesitate to share because of 5%.  This thing is good start to finish.

https://vimeo.com/101171248.

And I will comment that I literally think wealthy conservatives would do well to fund research into these areas.  Yes, I would love to see leftwing folks donate as well, but most of them seem to be atheists infected with technocratic Scientism.  Drug using atheists, perhaps, but atheists nonetheless.

I think in particular, as I have commented from time to time, that it is LONG past time that some mainstream Biology Department at a major university duplicated Cleve Backster’s experiments.  Yes, in the same way Hydroxychloroquine was made to seem dangerous Backster’s experiments were swept under the rug.  Dishonest people, who just wanted him to shut up, used bad science to create the illusion of good science long enough that the world moved on.  In any event, most of the “educated” world, infused as it is with unexamined biases, WANTED to move on.  They just needed an excuse, and they got it.

He tells the whole story in his book Primary Perception, which I see has gone out of print.  Basically, he told them how to replicate his experiments, and they failed to follow his instructions, seemingly with the express intent of NOT getting his results.  They succeeded in that.  But he showed his results to anyone who would watch for many years.  He would do the experiments in real time, and always get the same results.

His experiments were easy, readily replicable, and not explicable within existing biological paradigms.  That is the EXACT sort of thing which needs to be pursued.

Politically, bringing the spiritual into the mainstream would change everything.  Most people think they have to choose between “science”, religion, and just muddling along without thinking about all this too much.  But we could create a SCIENTIFIC spirituality, upon the basis of which we could build a global society living in peace and with purpose.  We could build a body of knowledge on other dimensions and realms not based on speculation but by the trained observation of skilled and dedicated minds.  Entire universities could be dedicated to this goal.

To my mind, it is a symptom of our stupidity and lack of imagination that this was not done long ago.  No more important question exists than the survival of death.  All life decisions are logically based on how we understand death.  And moralities built on the basis of survival are vastly more robust and reliable than those built on extinction and endless nothingness.