Month: January 2022

There is not truly any such thing as dispassionate analysis.  At the highest levels, intelligence is, in my view, deeply passionate.  It is a music.  You cannot go high or far without strong emotions.

I can feel this strongly even in such mundane things as Lumosity, which I’ve mentioned from time to time.  When my emotions are aligned I do better.  When I am conflicted, afflicted: I do worse.  I am slower.  The patterns appear to me more slowly.

The process of building intelligence from an IQ perspective, from a pattern formation, memory, information processing perspective–really, from a computational perspective–is neurologically not severable from the process of developing both emotional calm, as well as the capacity for deep passion, and intense emotional engagement.

I just hit 99.4 in my age group–and I will note this is among people who are paying members–which makes me prouder than it should.  I was wondering if a mature Sartre–I have some weird love/hate thing with him–would have ever cited test scores with pride.  Probably not, but maybe.  He and I are not that different.

And I like to think my own ideas are more useful.  You can be brilliant and stupid at the same time.  Beyond any possible doubt he was vastly more erudite than me.

But as I like to say, the guy who can tell you the bathroom is the third unmarked door on the right is more useful than the one capable of delivering a three hour disquisition on Marxism.  It’s not even close.  In the first case a small intelligence is being shared.  In the other, intelligence is being actively sucked out of the room.

Intrapsychically, I think resistance to change looks like violence.

Certainly, in most of us, externally, we get violent when people violate social rules, right?  If someone says something rude, or cuts you off in traffic, or steals from you, or is actually violent with you in speech or action, these are what trigger anger, are they not?  There is a way things are supposed to be, and when that “way” is violated, anger is the result.

Kun Zhi is the place of conflict.  It is the dark place, where there is anger on the horizon, fires lit, dim shadows fighting in the distance over you don’t know what.  It is your nasty self, the violence you may watch nightly on TV but refuse to feel in yourself.  It is the part that makes you watch “comedies” about assassins.  Ha, ha, ha.

I feel like a part of spiritual work is going through a meat grinder.  It is taking all the stable forms that you thought were you, and destroying them completely, and this is every bit as painful as it sounds.  It hurts like a sonofabitch.

You know, we look at pictures, or maybe have ourselves met, these yogis, say in India, who live by the Ganges and have the ashes of corpses on them.  We view them as some completely other sort of human being.  But they aren’t.  They are just willing to go farther than most of us.  They are blessed with a culture which encourages and supports this.  Imagine being smeared with ashes from a crematorium here.  You would be locked up quickly and gladly.

But it seems to me that if the main true deep spiritual task is learning to process all experience, then traumatic experience has to be a part of this, doesn’t it?  Trauma, if it has not happened yet, remains possible all the days of our lives.  If you are being systematic spiritually–Grundlich, in the inimitable German word–then you have to be prepared to process trauma too.  If it does not already exist in you, you have to induce it.

I would strongly encourage everyone to read Alexandra David Neel’s book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”.  The scene where she comes across an acolyte practicing Chod in a charnel ground strewn with bones, and some fresh bodies, who is having something close to a nervous breakdown, but not quitting, is absolutely unforgettable.  Not by me any way.  She finds his “guru” in a cave not too far away, who is in deep meditation at perhaps 2am, and tells him about it.  She says “aren’t you going to do something?”  In effect, he says “he knew what he was signing up for.  He will be OK, or he won’t.  Either way, this is how it works.”

I myself am going through some strong energy.  All the hippy dippy types I read say the world is going through weird energy.  I don’t know how much credence I place in all this, but I definitely am.  But it’s a logical extension of a long term process.

I had a very violent dream last night which ended, in the dream, with me puking in a toilet.  So I wake up, and the first thing I have to do is realize that all the players in the dream are ME.  Parts of me.  And the violent one, the one no one would claim, that is me too.  That would be the energy behind my Garuda.

Do you not think the Sopranos was popular not least because some part of most people wants the freedom and excitement of being a gangster?  Living in a world where life and death moments and decisions are common?  Where many moments have immediate and severe consequences?

I will lay in bed some nights, just feeling pain.  It doesn’t go away.  It’s like my tinnitus–I just distract myself better and worse.  But that’s not good enough for me.  That’s not a solution.  I want a solution, and not that solution.

And the other night I had this dream.  I was in a Marine training group.  Part of our training was sitting in a freezing rain on a boat to New Orleans without jackets.  We just had to put up with it.

I don’t know if Marines do this, but cold immersion is definitely something the SEAL’s do, and in reality all soldiers have to be able to put up with cold.  In the dream, it felt easier when a bunch of other people were enduring it with me.

Part of spiritual training is like this, I think.  It is learning to tolerate and put up with discomfort, with feelings you want to push away and dissociate from.  It’s not truly harmful, and in the end it is beneficial.  We were, in the dream, on the way to New Orleans for some time off.  Good times were on the way.

This is a pandemic of the UNPROTECTED AND THE UNTREATED.

Not the unvaccinated . Obviously.

The beauty of talking points it that, as H.L Mencken pointed out, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.  That’s an approximate quote.

Talking points distil this basic insight.  It is easy to be glib when all you have to do is repeat simple ideas, and this holds equally true if they are wrong.  Repeat a simple bad idea that SHOULD be true often enough–and this is really the sort of lie Goebbels meant–and what should be true eventually seems like it IS true.

The psychology of all this is not hard to understand.  Falling into error is easy.  But it was for some time the purpose of education to teach people to recognize and avoid such errors.  Now, it is seemingly the task of education to perpetuate them and the lazy mental habits which sustain them.

Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day.  Give them a fish every day, and they are your bitch for life.

Here is an analogy whose value is not fully clear to me but which I will offer anyway: what has been done is much like PROHIBITING people from wearing seat belts, then requiring ambulances to let them sit on the side of the road for an hour if and when they get in accidents.  You know, to see if they get better on their own.

The seat belt itself, the protection, the first line of protection, the thing that keeps you from getting thrown out of the car–from getting severe complications, to be clear–is an optimized immune system, if possible, and isolation from potentially infected people if not.

An optimized immune system, at a minimum, WAS KNOWN IN 2020 to include Vitamin D sufficiency, even if there was and remain valid questions about how to define that.  We knew and know how to define INsufficiency.  We’ve been doing that many years, as in you go in for a blood check, and the doctor says your Vitamin D levels are low and recommends a supplement.  I knew people this happened to long before all this COVID bullshit.

We knew zinc was important.  I don’t think “we”, certainly not me, knew about such a thing as a zinc ionophore.  But we knew that HCQ helped a LOT early on.  We still know that.  We will never stop knowing that, unless the Democrats get the demonic oligarchy they want, and memory hole all of the present era’s knowledge on the subject.

So, the seat belt, THEN, was at least Vitamin D sufficiency, a healthy weight, and being active.  Being fat: bad.  Unfastened safety belt.  Saying “don’t be fat” would not have made obese people skinny, but it would have provided them a de facto Informed Consent on the risks of carrying a lot of extra body fat around.  They would have known to take more Vitamin D, too, which would have made a huge difference.

Now of course the seat belt would be, in my view, daily Turmeric with Piperine (easiest as a supplement), 500 mg Quercetin, 20-25 mg zinc, 1,000 mg Vitamin C, D sufficiency, however you get there, which is probably at least 1,000 iu in the summer and 4,000 in the winter, and optimally Black Seed Oil, which has done well, even if it is understudied.  Get regular exercise, saunas can’t hurt, circulate with live human beings regularly, and talk to them, don’t be too fat, don’t eat shit, and try to keep your Zen about all this.

And the not treating is the decision the AMA and the nations doctors en masse made to just watch people get well or turn blue and wind up in a hospital where their incompetence killed them most of the time.

So, yes, you could ban seatbelts then want to reduce how many miles the average person drove because of the pandemic of traffic deaths, but this is idiocy of the sort Monty Python was created to mock.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in their book on applied manipulation as administered by enlightened technocratic elites–that’s what I heard, in any event, even if perhaps that is not what was said–came up with this idea of small measures that tend to incline people one way, versus another.  A nudge.  Just a small tap, not even a push, but which in a system, over time, was thought to be likely to achieve large results.  Small differences can often do that.  Stan Grof used the example of catchment areas, where a given raindrop might wind up many miles one way or the other, depending on which side of a hill it landed.

Thinking about all this, do not lockdowns and fear mongering generally–IT’S DANGEROUS OUT THERE!!!!–amount to nudges to stay home, avoid risks, and make yourself comfortable?  Do those in turn not amount to nudges to get fatter, less physically active, less social, and less discriminating in your dietary choices?

Yes, of course.  Of course.  Obviously.  This was all easily predictable.

It’s an endless snow storm out there, that may never end.  You don’t know.  It shows no signs of it.  Why not accustom yourself to a life alternating between your computer and your TV, filled with food that makes you feel good, a daily soak in the bathtub, and a bottle of wine at night?  If you gain a few or more pounds, who is going to see you?  And you never have to wear anything but sweat pants.

I will continue to insist the rest of my life, I believe–whether it ends today, or 50 years from now in a colony on the moon or the bottom of the ocean–that one of the most useful concepts I have seen in my life is Hayek’s distinction of Action To/Action For.

This is the Nudge concept in a nutshell, isn’t it?  An intelligent nudge is an Action To.  Almost imperceptibly, or perhaps fully imperceptibly, as something fully subliminal (sub-: below; limen: the threshold), it Acts To generate some desirable outcome, or in any event some outcome desired by the Manipulator or Operator.

But these lockdowns and fear mongering, as I just argued, amount to Action For, don’t they?  No no no no no the Branch Covidians say.  That’s NOT WHAT WE INTENDED.

Oh, I say.  That may be.  But that’s what you got.  And you could and should have predicted it, so I feel on decent ground wondering if even the most naive and deluded among you might on some level have WANTED this outcome.  You can usually avoid what you REALLY want to avoid, particularly when given the time and warning to avoid it.  But you didn’t, did you?

I remember writing in the middle of 2020, probably during the actual lockdowns, that there would come a time when the people who led us into this clusterfuck would throw up their hands and say “How could we have known?”  I said, in approximately April of 2020, that the answer would be YOU COULD HAVE FUCKING LOOKED.

I still think that will turn out to be prescient.  The advice I give people is often, perhaps even routinely, ignored by most people.  Nobody wants to admit that anyone could be that much smarter than them, or than the people on TV.  I’m used to this.

And I will add that I really think there is a curve, where with an increasing level of intelligence there is a tendency to get more and more arrogant, but that there is a point where it tips, and you start getting humble again, because there is a point where you start to suss out just how much true ambiguity there is in the world, and how easy it is to be wrong.

Now, I don’t owe it to anyone to discount myself, or play small.  On the contrary, in my view (and I say this knowing full well it is possible no one will read this, although my long term conceit is that I have readers, and perhaps quite a few, although I don’t know), I think I need to speak what I think I know as loudly as I can.

At the same time, I can and often do have open conversations with people with IQ’s half of mine on equal footing.  I have absolutely ZERO need to prove I am smart to anyone.  In fact, I play dumb the overwhelming majority of the time, with nearly everyone.  I prefer it.  It is a camouflage of sorts, and I like camouflage.  There are people I have known for a long time who have no idea that I have degrees from Berkeley and the University of Chicago, or that I am even remotely smart enough to have gotten into, much less done well at those schools.

And I don’t talk about this blog, ever.  Emotionally, for me, it is a public diary I don’t discuss, even if these thoughts are in principle open to the world.  I know two people who live in my city who know about it, although I don’t know who they told.  And one of them I know does not read it.  One used to, on occasion, but she has likely forgotten about it too.

The CEO of OneAmerica said deaths were up 40% among WORKING AGE PEOPLE.  So my math was off by a bit, probably quite a bit, since most deaths are not among working age people.

Still, these are people whose death rates have been stable for some time, or so I would think.  Let’s say the number is 200,000.  Why should we NOT attribute that to the lockdowns/masks/vaccines/stress?

Here is another quote from the article I posted a few days ago:

At the same news conference where Davison spoke, Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said that hospitals across the state are being flooded with patients “with many different conditions,” saying “unfortunately, the average Hoosiers’ health has declined during the pandemic.”

So OVERALL health has been hurt.  People are exercising less.  Socializing less.  Eating more.  Stress eating.  Drinking more.  Gaining weight.

All of this is monstrous, all wrong.  I get excited and do bad math sometimes, but someone out there should be doing good math, comparing COVID deaths, which are half what they were being reported as a year ago, with overall deaths, which are growing quickly.

I never said that the effects of the lockdowns would be immediate.  Most of this I expected to have a lag.

And all of the HUGE and long term problems we are going to have with children from all this torture we are inflicting on them have not yet BEGUN to manifest in anything like the wave that is coming, even if suicides are already up 50%.  That will take another year or two, perhaps, to become more obvious, even if psychologists have been sounding the alarm for a year or more.

This is all monstrous lunacy, supported by stable stupidity, which in my previous post I equated with misguided notions of sanity.

“We must be right”, the lunatics say, “because we are all saying the same thing.”

Much of what is called sanity is simply widely shared stupidity.

These are the people who say that the main thing about red things is that they are red; and circular things are those that go in circles and linear things those that go in lines.  We know, they say, because some go in circles and some go in lines.  It’s all so obvious.  You would have to be crazy to doubt that’s all there is to know.

About 3 million Americans die each year.  The CDC makes this a hard number to find, since they don’t publish it, as far as I can tell.  They publish a death rate per 100,000.  You have to calculate it, based on about 330 million Americans.

Actually, here is one number, on page 6 of this report: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db427.pdf

Rounded slightly up, 3.4 million Americans died in 2020.  For 2019, when I ran the numbers in about April or May of 2020, it was between 2.8 and 2.9 million.  That is already an overall increase in mortality of 500-600,000 people.  Blame COVID.  Don’t blame COVID.  It is still a number that warrants vastly more than the ZERO exploration I’ve seen in the public media.

And I think we know why we haven’t seen that exploration.

As far as I can tell, the numbers for 2021 are not out yet, but do you not think OneAmerica had the death numbers in Indiana, both among people they had covered and people they had not, down to the last death by noon on January 1st?  After a year like that, everyone wants to know the damage.

Here is the thing: one of the beauties of free markets is you get competing interests.  The GOVERNMENT, and the DEMOCRATS, mainly–although there have been a lot of Republican Quislings too–want to count UP COVID deaths, and count DOWN all other deaths.  They want everything they did to look reasonable, and SUCCESSFUL.

[I should note that you may assume it would be the opposite, that they would want less COVID deaths so as to make it appear they reduced them.  But the reality is that TRUE COVID deaths actually WERE quite low.  It was a bad flu year, if you count people who REALLY died FROM COVID.  That is my view.  So they had to vastly increase them to justify the drama and justify the historically unprecedented lockdowns and masks and all that, which never had any science behind them.  You can only do that sort of thing when you bullrush people screaming ITS AN EMERGENCY, then censor and shut down all the people who STILL want to stop your aggressions on freedom and common decency.

So the game is to keep high numbers–which are high enough to justify on going fear, ongoing repression, and make the usual idiots think its good policy, necessary, and its architects good and wise people–while avoiding any awareness on the part of anyone that you just killed 2 people with your medicine for every one you can even on the most generous standard claim to have saved.

And I will note that all this is CURRENT numbers.  We can’t know how many people will die directly or indirectly from the effects of these Messenger RNA injections in coming years.  Those numbers will presumably be as undercounted as they are now, and as COVID numbers have been overcounted.  There will in any event be some true ambiguity.]

With the NIH and CDC they can likely get away with their Fun With Numbers.  There are a thousand ways to lie with statistics, and with this much practice they are no doubt great at it by now.

But OneAmerica is looking at a huge loss of profit with all this, and they are going to want to limit their losses in 2022, which may well mean a full court press to get back to normal.  That would make sense.  Lobbying efforts.  Speeches to Congress.  Spots on Tucker Carlson.

Their bean counters gave them a worst case scenario, using the numbers they had on COVID (which were almost certainly HONESTLY calculated, using the data of someone like John Ionniddis), and they exceeded that worst case scenario probably 3-fold or more.  Absolute catastrophe.  Maybe they are reinsured–that’s what derivatives in some forms do–maybe not.  They are rich, but this sort of thing is not why anyone is in business.

And the 40% absolute increase in overall mortality will vary State by State.  I think OneAmerica mainly or only works in Indiana, so their numbers will apply to Indiana, but a change of that magnitude has be approximately as large everywhere.  I would assume it is BIGGER in places like New York and California, and smaller in places like Florida and Texas.  We don’t have the numbers yet, but it may be the life insurance companies who spill the beans because they are losing their shirts and need to get this shit fixed PRONTO.

Here is the main point of this post. The main event.  The meat of the matter: if 3.4 million people died in 2020, and 2.9 million in 2019, and the overage relative to a normal year was forty percent, then if I use 3 million as a baseline, then 40% of that is 1.2 million.

Logically, if 1.2 million MORE people died in 2021 than were predicted (and I don’t know if this is relative to 2020, which was already an outlier, or historical averages) then THE COVID POLICIES OF THE DEMOCRATS KILLED 1.2 MILLION PEOPLE, just in 2021, and just in America.

Ponder that.  Ponder it carefully.

At the VERY OUTSET of all this, way back in April or May or June of 2020, I looked up that quote from the Big Short, where Brad Pitt brings his young  proteges down with the sober reflection that a mere 1% increase in unemployment kills 30-40,000 people EVERY YEAR it lasts.

I cited this quote often.  I linked the BBC broadcast where they evaluated this claim and found it plausible, even if it was impossible to say with confidence a precise range in any given set of circumstances.  That more people died of all causes in bad economic conditions seemed obvious, and the only debate was really about how to predict the numbers in a coherent and reasonably accurate way.

But STRESS KILLS.  If there were some way to know the average blood pressure of the populace as a whole, it most likely went up 10-20-30 points during the lockdowns, and mask mandates, and the “get this jab or lose your fucking job asshole” bullshit.  A lot of people got locked up with people they realized they didn’t like.  A lot of divorces happened.  A lot of ARGUMENTS, about money, about unresolved stress, about being in the same fucking room all day every day for months on end with fucking cops yelling at you if you took a fucking walk in the park.

People stopped getting checkups.  Our kids stopped getting the immunizations that actually ARE immunizations. None of the vax folks want to talk about that.  Cancers grew without people seeing doctors.  Heart conditions worsened.  People put guns to their heads and pulled the trigger.  They ran into trees or oncoming traffic while drunk driving.  They stuck a needle in their arms that was removed by the coroner.

And do you not think these numbers are not going to found EVERYWHERE?  In Germany?  France?  The UK?  The Netherlands?  Even in Japan.  Even and perhaps especially in China, which of course will not report them.  Xi is even less honest than Fauci, and that is saying something.

This whole thing is a fucking disaster.  It is a global catastrophe driven by ABSOLUTE INCOMPETENCE of such staggering stupidity that I continue to find it impossible to see it as accidental, or driven by other than venal and ideological forces.

I’ve been calling this a Nuremburg Trials worthy crime for some time.

Fauci killed over a million Americans just in the last year.  Just think what a forty percent jump in death across Europe and much of Asia looks like.  Just think what happens when we add in deaths from hunger and extreme poverty that his policies created all around the world.

Just think how EASY it would have been to allow doctors to TREAT this disease rather than do the worst possible things while waiting for a vaccine that kills more people than it saves, forcing the government to lie on behalf of Big Pharma.

It takes a bigger imagination than mine to fit all that in one brain, the lost lives and LIFE, the cruelty and malice, the greed and the lies, and the KNOWING ALL THIS TO BE WRONG, on the part of so many thousands of doctors and clinicians and experts, who in the main said nothing, and did nothing.

It’s believable.  But it’s nauseating.  I count myself on the right  side of this global human drama, but I don’t have nearly as much company as even mild cynics would have expected.  No, you have to view most of humanity as gullible, weak, unprincipled, and cowardly to get to a group this small.  It’s tiny, perhaps 5% of the population that really GETS all this, and spoke out often and aggressively.

How can evil lose when 95% of the decent people in the world lack the backbone to say no to evil?  It hasn’t been losing.  That’s obvious.  It’s winning.

 

Really, what this amounts to, is finding and learning more about the boundaries of your experience, how far you go, how, and how that feels.  Where are the lines?  Can you feel why?  Can you extend them?

And it is an interesting question what the relationship is between experience and thoughts.  Are thoughts a form of experience?  Or are they a sort of distancing from experience, the experience of not feeling, the experience of rejecting experience?

How are these thoughts related?  What is similar, what different?  Your answer not only can but should differ from mine.

Nineveh was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Life is basically fair.

Life is basically unfair.

The Moonlight Sonata is in C Sharp Minor.

It’s hard to think a thought without experience, without feelings of one sort or another intruding, isn’t it?  Some thoughts are more evocative than others, and of course for all of us it will depend on our associations.

For me, the first thought conjures a vague memory of D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”, although I think it portrayed a sack of a different city, I think of Babylon.

Life is fair/unfair.  This is emotively laden for nearly everyone, isn’t it?

Moonlight Sonata, if you know it, how can you not hear it in your mind, and then feel something?  But if you are a musician, the C Sharp Minor is bound to pull up all sorts of other things.

Thoughts tug emotions out of us.  So if you want to live in abstraction, if you want to live outside of experience, you have to be careful what sorts of thoughts you allow.  You have to find thoughts denuded of emotional content, and you have to KEEP THEM THERE.  New thoughts risk new feelings, and new feelings can lead to old feelings, and the whole balance can vanish in a moment.

This is how you build rigidity.  Rigidity is a prison you build to keep the world out, where you can slowly die in a linear way.  It is a suicide.  That is the line.  That is the thought and intent.  A slow desiccation and then a cessation of everything.

Bouncing.  That is unpredictable.  It is often painful.  But that is where the orchestra is.

I cry sometimes.  It is deeply, deeply painful being me sometimes.  But I am blessed with a constitution that somehow doesn’t break.  I don’t know why, but I have faith in it.

I feel sure the path to knowledge is sustained confusion.  You have to allow it free reign.  Allow it to travel in you.  You have to learn to live in it, never knowing what is next.  It is a green which can eventually carry you to new places.

And what I am writing here is incomprehensible to those who have already chosen, most likely long ago, to die in prisons.  To them, it is irrational not to live behind bars.  I see this.  To them, I appear a lunatic.  So be it.  I cannot rescue anyone who is desperate for captivity.

You are always a recipient of any emotion you inflict on, or gift, anyone else.

I don’t think I’ve seen it put quite this way.

Part of the energy goes to them, and part flows to you.