Author: White Whale

There is this saying, “you’re not alone”.  I read in the comments of “Rock and Roll Suicide” that that song has saved lives.  I believe this.

The truth is that many people are lost and alone in many respects.  Primitive trauma isolates them from their own emotions, and makes connection very hard.  That is my issue.

But what I want to communicate, like Bowie did, is that people like me, and perhaps like you, exist in large numbers, and this thought is comforting, to me at least.  None of us are alone in the sense that we can learn to take care of ourselves, to open slowly, and eventually walk in the sunlight with others.  There is firm reason for hope.

Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves–their interests, preferences, and goals.  Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal.  But if your caregiver ignores your needs, or resents your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.  You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment.  Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. 

Bowlby wrote: ‘What cannot be communicated to the [m]other [both mother and other] cannot be communicated to the self.’  If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.” [page 123]

Another lengthy and perhaps useful quote/story:

In the early 1980’s my colleague Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a Harvard attachment researcher, began to videotape face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants at six months, twelve months and eighteen months.  She taped them again when the children were five years old and once more when they were seven or eight.  All were from high risk families: 100 percent met federal poverty guidelines, and almost half the mothers were single parents. 

Disorganized attachment showed up in two different ways. One group of mothers seemed to be too preoccupied with their own issues to attend to their infants.  They were often intrusive and hostile; they alternated between rejecting their infants and acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs.  Another group of mothers seemed helpless and fearful. They often came across as sweet or fragile, but they didn’t how to be the adult in the relationship and seemed to want their children to comfort them.  They failed to greet their children after having been away and did not pick them up when the children were distressed.  The mothers didn’t seem to be doing these things deliberately–they simply didn’t know how to be attuned to their kids and respond to their cues and thus failed to comfort and reassure them.  The hostile/intrusive mothers were more likely to have childhood histories of physical abuse and/or witnessing domestic violence, while the withdrawn/dependent mothers were more likely to have histories of sexual abuse or parental loss (but not physical abuse). 

I have often wondered how parents come to abuse their kids.  After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning.  What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children?  Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers.  At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions.  Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. 

About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping.  Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with these mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. 

Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/instrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most poweful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise.  Emotional withdrawal hd the most profound and long lasting impact.   Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults.

In other words, it seems to be human nature to prefer to be hated than to be ignored. It may literally be the case–in fact I would say it IS the case–that Hitler and the Third Reich, and Lenin and the global catastrophe of Communism, were the results of too many mothers ignoring their infants.  Lenin and Hitler, certainly, but all their followers as well.

And I cannot but think of the ghettos.  This is a continual theme with me, because in the midst of prosperity we have many people living in hell.  They create it themselves, in large measure, but this is not best regarded as a moral failing.  It should be regarded as what it is: the natural result of unnatural conditions.

Teenage mothers, who themselves grew up in emotionally unstable homes, are not able to attune with their infants, and they have many life stresses on top of simply dealing with a child.  The boy children tend to grow up angry and confused, and the girls grow both angry and docile, and confused.

Rap music, much of which feels demonic to me, is the natural music for a people where this sort of thing is common.  It both expresses rage, and counters depression and helplessness.  But it is not healthy.  It is not calming.  It is not harmonious.

From a public policy perspective it is hard to know what to do.  I don’t know what to do.  I will meditate on it.  But it does seem obvious that we need to hold the politicians to account who USE empty promises to secure and keep power accountable for their treachery to the cause of human betterment, and genuine progress.

We suspected but did not know much of this until the past couple decades.  The study referenced could not have been published earlier than about 2000.  The book I am referencing did not come out until 2014.

What we are truly getting to is an understanding of human nature.  In my own view, all the philosophies in the world cannot equate the knowledge one can find in ones own body about how to live.

And it does seem to me that many of the most demonic ideas–Communism, Fascism, religious fanaticism–come from people who learned to hate before they could speak, and who never in their lives realized it.

And a discussion of Feminism is relevant too.  It used to be a common phrase to say “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”. One has to ask how attachment patterns changed when women in large numbers started working outside the home, when careerism and their sense of self became conflated, when mothering became denigrated.

Again, the people who advance the radical ideas are not humanitarians.  They are anti-Humanist, because they hate themselves and bring the world along with it.  The nature of mind and self is that you first feel, then explain.  What I have called “Rosebud” moments always have, and will continue to determine the course of human history.

What we call morality is simply an ex post facto explanation of emotional health.  No amount of explaining can reorder a disorganized self, and no explaining is needed where order is present.

Primitive simplicity is animals acting like animals.  Wolves do not eat their own, and they care for one another.  Our current global task is becoming spiritual, thinking, animals.

There is this saying, “you’re not alone”.  I read in the comments of “Rock and Roll Suicide” that that song has saved lives.  I believe this.

The truth is that many people are lost and alone in many respects.  Primitive trauma isolates them from their own emotions, and makes connection very hard.  That is my issue.

But what I want to communicate, like Bowie did, is that people like me, and perhaps like you, exist in large numbers, and this thought is comforting, to me at least.  None of us are alone in the sense that we can learn to take care of ourselves, to open slowly, and eventually walk in the sunlight with others.  There is firm reason for hope.

Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves–their interests, preferences, and goals.  Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal.  But if your caregiver ignores your needs, or resents your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.  You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment.  Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. 

Bowlby wrote: ‘What cannot be communicated to the [m]other [both mother and other] cannot be communicated to the self.’  If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.” [page 123]

Another lengthy and perhaps useful quote/story:

In the early 1980’s my colleague Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a Harvard attachment researcher, began to videotape face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants at six months, twelve months and eighteen months.  She taped them again when the children were five years old and once more when they were seven or eight.  All were from high risk families: 100 percent met federal poverty guidelines, and almost half the mothers were single parents. 

Disorganized attachment showed up in two different ways. One group of mothers seemed to be too preoccupied with their own issues to attend to their infants.  They were often intrusive and hostile; they alternated between rejecting their infants and acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs.  Another group of mothers seemed helpless and fearful. They often came across as sweet or fragile, but they didn’t how to be the adult in the relationship and seemed to want their children to comfort them.  They failed to greet their children after having been away and did not pick them up when the children were distressed.  The mothers didn’t seem to be doing these things deliberately–they simply didn’t know how to be attuned to their kids and respond to their cues and thus failed to comfort and reassure them.  The hostile/intrusive mothers were more likely to have childhood histories of physical abuse and/or witnessing domestic violence, while the withdrawn/dependent mothers were more likely to have histories of sexual abuse or parental loss (but not physical abuse). 

I have often wondered how parents come to abuse their kids.  After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning.  What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children?  Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers.  At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions.  Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. 

About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping.  Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with these mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. 

Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/instrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most poweful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise.  Emotional withdrawal hd the most profound and long lasting impact.   Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults.

In other words, it seems to be human nature to prefer to be hated than to be ignored. It may literally be the case–in fact I would say it IS the case–that Hitler and the Third Reich, and Lenin and the global catastrophe of Communism, were the results of too many mothers ignoring their infants.  Lenin and Hitler, certainly, but all their followers as well.

And I cannot but think of the ghettos.  This is a continual theme with me, because in the midst of prosperity we have many people living in hell.  They create it themselves, in large measure, but this is not best regarded as a moral failing.  It should be regarded as what it is: the natural result of unnatural conditions.

Teenage mothers, who themselves grew up in emotionally unstable homes, are not able to attune with their infants, and they have many life stresses on top of simply dealing with a child.  The boy children tend to grow up angry and confused, and the girls grow both angry and docile, and confused.

Rap music, much of which feels demonic to me, is the natural music for a people where this sort of thing is common.  It both expresses rage, and counters depression and helplessness.  But it is not healthy.  It is not calming.  It is not harmonious.

From a public policy perspective it is hard to know what to do.  I don’t know what to do.  I will meditate on it.  But it does seem obvious that we need to hold the politicians who USE empty promises to secure and keep power accountable for their treachery to the cause of human betterment, and genuine progress.

We suspected but did not know much of this until the past couple decades.  The study referenced could not have been published earlier than about 2000.  The book I am referencing did not come out until 2014.

What we are truly getting to is an understanding of human nature.  In my own view, all the philosophies in the world cannot equal the knowledge one can find in ones own body about how to live.

And it does seem to me that many of the most demonic ideas–Communism, Fascism, religious fanaticism–come from people who learned to hate before they could speak, and who never in their lives realized it.

And a discussion of Feminism is relevant too.  It used to be a common phrase to say “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”. One has to ask how attachment patterns changed when women in large numbers started working outside the home, when careerism and their sense of self became conflated, when mothering became denigrated.

Again, the people who advance the radical ideas are not humanitarians.  They are anti-Humanist, because they hate themselves and bring the world along with it.  The nature of mind and self is that you first feel, then explain.  What I have called “Rosebud” moments always have, and will continue to determine the course of human history.

What we call morality is simply an ex post facto explanation of emotional health.  No amount of explaining can reorder a disorganized self, and no explaining is needed where order is present.

Primitive simplicity is animals acting like animals.  Wolves do not eat their own, and they care for one another.  Our current global task is becoming spiritual, thinking, animals.

I am in the final stages of my healing.  The continuous hyperarousal is largely gone, although it keeps rearing its head.

And a key symptom of healing, I see, is beginning to realize what was always there, but I couldn’t name it, couldn’t see it.  Imagine if Jupiter were to somehow disappear from sight.  As we learned about gravity and the universe, we would begin to infer it was there, based on its effects, but it would be another thing entirely to SEE it with our eyes.

We all live in oceans–Finding Nemo and Dory were interesting metaphors, for me–and things float down from out of sight sometimes. It floated down to me today how often I reached out to my father in my youth for support and reassurance and guidance, and “fathering”, and how completely he rejected me.  And how I ignored it and rationalized it, and pretended it didn’t matter.

This pretending, itself, becomes a symptom, that of dissociation.  As I read about trauma, I realize how my difficulty in connecting to a sustained purpose is all part of the package.

And I realize that the only sustained emotionally nurturing relationship I have had in my life has been the one I built with my children.  And even that is based on the healing nature of giving.  I don’t take from them, the way my parents took from me.

Giving and taking are like breathing: a healthy life needs both.  Giving, only, is compulsive.  It is emotionally unhealthy. Much of Christianity is unhealthy in its basic principles.  That is why Christians took over the world, all in the name of Love.

And I wonder, how the fuck am I mostly sane?  I wonder that about many of us.  My wounds and history are not unique, and of course a great many people have it much, much worse.  The only bottom of the pit is actual death.

And I feel, and sense, that underlying everything, there is a love which is made available to all of us.  It is in the fabric of the universe, just like anger and hate, but much more powerful.  No explanation of survival is needed.

And this love is vastly larger than anything any human could ever offer in any event.  Human love is just a pale shadow compared to it.

I say this partly intellectually, but partly from actual understanding.  That is what it is now my task to focus on.  One day soon my nights will stop being hells, permanently.

I watched a video in the past day or so with an interview with a computer programmer who claims to have written a program to rig elections.  This seems like an obvious evolution for the Democrats.  It is a more efficient “vote early, vote often”, which has always been their stock in trade, at least in big cities.

I read the Virginia Governor has more or less declared himself dictator, and that even though the Courts have told him it is illegal, he wants to restore voting rights to enough people to possibly swing Virginia.

I read ICE is busing illegals all around the country.  Why around the country?  Well, it would seem obvious to me that Democrats draw maps and demographics, and do the math about where they are just a little bit short.  Why wouldn’t they be busing illegals to places where they want to swing the vote?  Why wouldn’t they be precise?

The whole thing is a giant game to them.  It is not an effort to use the power of ideas to improve human life.  It is a set of practical problems, to which Machiavellian solutions are used often.  Lying, cheating and stealing are their stock in trade.  True or not as to whether he actually said it, the attitude attributed to James Carville is plainly accurate:

Ideologies aren’t all that important. What’s important is psychology.

The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to
do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became
an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do
is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole
cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd.

Eighty percent of the people who call themselves Democrats don’t have a clue as to political reality.

What amazes me is that you could take a group of people who are hard
workers and convince them that they should support social programs that
were the exact opposite of their own personal convictions. Put a little
fear here and there and you can get people to vote any way you want.

The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic
operative instead of a Republican was because there were more Democrats
that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.

Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the
truth. If you’re smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it
is. That’s why I’m a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think
whatever I want them to.”

Unbelievably, the Democrats just nominated someone who has plainly committed more crimes than Richard Nixon.  Unbelievably, the DNC chair had to step down for gross ethical violations–and voter fraud, in important respects–and was immediately put on the payroll of the Hillary campaign, which she chaired in 2008.

Here is the point of this post: Trump needs to fight HARD to ensure a fair election.  He needs to demand paper ballots which can be recounted.  He needs an army of observers, particularly in places like Philadelphia.  He needs to demand that the votes of felons in Virginia not be counted.  He needs to demand that reasonable protections be in place to ensure illegal immigrants are not voting.  He needs to watch these amoral assholes like a hawk, and FIGHT them wherever there is the slightest appearance of impropriety.

I said in Facebook post the other day that this election is going to be a knife fight in a phone booth.  You need a brawler for that, somebody not afraid of some bare knuckles boxing, not afraid to get dirty.  You need someone who likes combat, and who thrives on it.  That is Trump.  That is why he is and always was the ONLY logical nominee.

Even if I had been able to get Rand Paul, he never would have stood a chance.  He doesn’t have the Big Money, and never would have gotten it, since it comes with a price tag he would not have been willing to pay.

https://youtu.be/Y021WAdUlW8

Here is the Firing Line segment again.

As I watch this all the way through, I realize how thoroughly the Left has dominated the American political narrative for the past 50 years.  It is ASTONISHING to me to see that Sowell had solid solutions, based upon a non-patronizing view of blacks, based on a sense of black potential arising from his own experience and how ARROGANT and racist this left wing woman is, who focuses relentlessly on the idea that uneducated black parents can’t be trusted with educational choices because they are too fucking stupid to pick correctly.

This is where we remain today, except that blacks have had another 35 years of shitty schools and following substandard opportunities and lives because the fucking Democrats and their teachers union backers have prevented sanity and decency on this issue.

Economically, Sowell deals effectively with virtually every Leftist talking point.

One of the wonderful things about having trauma in ones past is it creates a continual sense of watchfulness, of fear, of mistrust and doubt.

Now, by and large this is harmful.  It creates problems where none exist.  At the same time, of all of the things one figures out one can fear, some of them are real.  As they said in the 60’s, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

I read yesterday that Google–the most powerful, effective, successful search engine in the world by a large margin–was returning for the search result “Presidential candidates” (or something close to that), the names of Hillary, Bernie, and the Green candidate.  Maybe even Gary Johnson.  But it was not returning Trump’s name.  They said this was a “technical glitch”.  I won’t even attempt sarcasm: if you believe that, you are a fucking idiot.

Today I read that Twitter is flushing Trump’s fundraising Tweets down the Memory Hole.  It is “disappearing” them the way people disappear in Fascist regimes of the leftist and rightist variety.

Many years ago I recall reading that a San Francisco newspaper was covertly hiding conservative commentators, but in such a way that the poster could see his or her own post, but nobody else could.  They didn’t know they were being censored.

Many years ago, when many more people valued principle, honesty, and true civic engagement, debates might happen in the editorial pages of papers everyone read.  They might happen on Public Access TV, as in Firing Line.  Watch as much of this, for example, as you have time for:https://youtu.be/Y021WAdUlW8
They are trying to do it right, to ask hard questions, and trying to find answers.

Our public dialogue in the past 20 years has been channeled into digital form, and into ideological ghettos. It is quite possible to receive an education up to the Doctoral level and NEVER encounter in a pristine form true Conservatism, to never understand economics from a conservative perspective, to never really GET the point of the Constitution, and for that matter, to EVER truly understand the real problems besetting blacks in this country.  You read about people who speak on their behalf, or claim to, and who in most cases benefit politically from so doing. 

As far as the Left is concerned. every conservative website could drop of the face of the Earth tomorrow, and it would take them some time to notice, and then they would be HAPPY.

Here is the thing: bigotry is assuming the worst of people who are different than you.  Our educational and media system have evolved to present a wall of noise demonizing conservatives without ever explaining them, without ever understanding them.  Our educational system and media–virtually all of them–are HIGHLY bigoted, highly prejudiced, highly colored by hatred and mistrust of people do not think like them.

As a cultural form, Leftism removes people from their historical cultural context, one of whose features is a GENUINE Liberalism, of the sort seen on the Firing Line.  Buckley grants a voice to dissent, in order to further understanding.  When we engage in dialogue, we humanize one another.

Where we have arrived at–and this has been the entirety of the intent of the moral pessimism and more or less overt practical nihilism which I have called Cultural Sadeism–is that a large section of our country has been separated from its history, and been reintroduced into a de facto cult.  They are told daily that they are moral ones, the honest ones, the good ones, and everyone else evil.

And we are seeing practically what this has made possible in recent days.  The DNC Chair is forced to step down for gross ethical violations, and immediately put back on the payroll of the woman on whose behalf she was cheating, and the media accepts this.  Many Democrats accept this.  Indeed, they have accepted as their candidate a woman who is clearly corrupt.

Logically, then, if Hillary wins, why would she not break the law to get Drudge off the internet?  Infowars, Breitbart, Front Page Magazine.  We are already seeing private corporations using their power to silence people solely on the basis of their opinions.  All that has to happen for mass censorship–the consequence of which will of course be an open path to tyranny and the final vitiation of our Constitution, and everything good about our noble experiment–is to label non-conforming sites “hateful”, and to make “hate speech” a crime.

I really believe that if Hillary wins, the last wall will fall.  She will appoint activist left wing judges who will rubber stamp her tyranny, believing themselves principled and moral in the process, and that result will be immediately supported by all the information outlets who are presently doing so much to erode free speech on their own.

I do wonder how Google justifies such behavior.  How Twitter does it.  How all the complicit media do it.

Leftism is a mental illness which seeks in its early stages, rhetorically, the rectification of wrongs, but which in the process eradicates all capacity for true moral reasoning.

As they say on the Firing Line, Sowell’s research, published 35 years ago, was greeted with universal hostility by the Left, even though it should have been empowering.  It said to blacks: you can fix this situation.  It is in your control.  That was not what their white handlers wanted to hear.  That is not what racial demogogues like Jesse Jackson wanted to hear.

Whatever else Donald Trump is, he is not a part of this process.  He is not someone who is going to shut down public debate.  He is not someone who is going to impose tyranny on the American people.  As a general rule, and this certainly applies here, you can easily see what the Left plans by what they accuse genuine Liberals of wanting.

We are on a precipice.  Liberty, historically, is always abolished.  There are always greedy, hateful, lying, power mongers who destroy it.

To vote for anyone but Trump in this election is, in my view, lunacy, even for those who think they will benefit in the short term from Hillary.  Tyrants cannot be loyal to all.  Heads always roll, usually for not thinking exactly like you are told to think, which most people cannot do.

I was over at a friends house the other day for a dinner party, and we got to talking about how few people realize how good we have it in this country.  I had watched a movie at the Air Force Museum in Dayton a few weeks back showing the rescue in Haiti, and remembered how people live in much of the world.  I’ve been to the bad parts of Tijuana. I’ve seen the corrugated roofs and the dirt floors, and the gas stoves.  Water from a public tap or even a well.

And it hit me that we are the Capital in the Hunger Games.  The metaphor does not extend to the fact that we took anything from anyone (which of course is the core argument the Left wants to make for why our society and cultural order should be destroyed), and we do in fact work hard to help other nations develop, but the fact remains that even ordinary people in this country live like kings compared to most of the world.

We have roofs that don’t leak.  Astonishingly, we have machines to heat and cool our homes.  We have clean running water.  We have indoor plumbing and reliable sewers (in much of the world they shit in the street or in holes somewhere without toilet paper, which can cause disease).  If we have insect or rodent infestations, we can call somebody to get them out.

We have shoes.  Most of us have multiple pairs of shoes, and socks.  We have clothes, many clothes, and miraculous machines to clean them.

A great many of us have cars, and in cities there are buses and trains for those who don’t.

Our world is safe, by and large.  There are no marauding gangs shooting and killing people.

Our grocery stores are FILLED with food.  We worry a great deal about eating too much, and hardly at all about too little.  You have to be pretty stupid and lazy to go hungry in this country.

Anyone born in this country has already won the lottery of life.  Even if they are born poor, they can work hard and become wealthy.  This is still true.

It is astonishing how the Democrats have been able to brainwash so many people into thinking they have it hard, when half the world lives in huts, surrounded by shit, at the mercy of the heat and cold, and is forced to drink bad water, and endure hunger and disease.

Whining is undignified in all cases, and entirely inappropriate in the face of all the misery in this world.

Brazililan shantytown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDg-ejjFBI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqVNPwsLNo

Start at 22 minutes, although it is all good.

This guy (Larry Elder)–who happens to be black, but who more importantly is very articulate and intelligent–is awesome.

Is something people do who know something is wrong, but can’t name it, and have no idea how to get to it.  It concretizes experience.  They become real, for a moment, in the process.

Here is the thing: dissociation numbs pain.  This is good. But it also numbs pleasure and positive connection.  The two come from the same place: heartache and terror; and a healthy connection with life and the emotions and sensations that attend it.

So pain connects people with the place where pain is felt, which is also the place where pleasure is felt.  This is confusing to some.  You must first REMEMBER that some other place exists before you can hope to live in a happy place which exists as one possibility in that universe.

I get so many people I see walking around, and stopping in bars and drinking.  My gut tells me I need to try again my “church”.  Something will likely be forthcoming soon.

Politics is the art of the possible.  The art of the impossible–of the idealist–is that of the irrelevant.

Great thoughts are great thoughts.  But they don’t matter any more than great works of art hanging in galleries.  Until they affect and infect people in a position to make a difference, they are inanimate and useless practically.

We have a great infection within our Body Politic, a cancer of sorts.  That is a body composed at full strength of 9 people, who collectively have been allowed to wield more power than the Executive and Legislative Branches put together.  Their JOB is supposedly to protect the Constitution.  It was in the name of this outwardly noble cause that they were allowed to usurp the power of Judicial Review, which is nowhere contained in the Constitution.

But power, once assumed, is never relinquished, and always eventually abused.  The Four Horsemen held off a complete fascistic take-over–and that is the correct word–under FDR, but they were unable to hold off massive corruptions of our national life in the form of patently unConstitutional abuses and enlargements of Federal authority.

At the present moment, we are at the edge of a deep precipice.  If Hillary is elected, the final corruption of the Court is inevitable.  All reasonable, all legal, all principled blocks on the final arrogation of ultimate power by the Federal government will be removed, likely in short order, and that under the most corrupt human being ever to stand in striking distance of the White House, at least as far as I can recall.  Regardless of his countless abuses of power, FDR at least thought he was trying to help people. Hillary is and always has been solely concerned with herself.

We cannot risk Hillary’s victory.  Even if we game this out, and even if we privilege feeling as an acceptable motive for a given strategy, it is in my view impossible to overlook the FACT that whatever momentary feelings may be gratified by voting for “the best man”, the allegedly honest man, the one who at least understands the importance of Constitutionality, that bad feelings will follow soon enough in the continuing encroachment of an unimaginably large, impossibly powerful leviathan, which like all such monsters kills freedom simply by its existence, even when not directed to do so by power mongering lunatics, which is who we put into the White House with Hillary.

Look at what they did to the DNC.  Imagine what is possible with an activist left wing Court.

Trump is the only possible vote for sane people.  I see no possible valid counter-argument to this position.