Author: White Whale

Press on, of course.  As I think about it, when you put your foot on a road that disappears in the distance, is it necessary to know if it leads to success or failure?  To my mind, there is personal integrity, and self deception.  There is a spirit of building, and a spirit of either allowing or causing destruction. 

All evil starts with a lie.  The Hindus have ample room for the demonic, but at root they call what might be termed “the spirit of darkness” Avidya, which literally translates as “not-knowing”. 

I think we all have within us MUCH more knowledge than we ever consciously activate, and much of it we suppress because acknowledging it would mean recognizing and acting on the responsibilities that go with it.

Last night I was dreaming about a vampire–Edward, from what I was momentarily tempted to call the Apocalypse series, but recall is the “Twilight” series (do you not see, though, that there are cultural twilights, too? Goetterdaemmerungen?)–who was very angry.  He was telling Bella that the baby would need to eat blood soon.  They were walking out, and I could tell he was up to no good.  His head became encased in concrete, making him a literal “block” head.

His plan was to crash an airplane into a crowd.  I was able to stop him.  I can fly, too.  The plane was careening downwards, the people were screaming, and then it pulled back up.  I talked him out of it.

Now, always these sorts of dreams have multiple levels. On the personal level, obviously I personally am feeling anger, and a desire to strike out.  This is an infantile level you can’t really prevent from voicing its concerns, but which you can control both by acknowledging it, and by refusing to give in to it, as I did in the dream.

But I think often what we dream is BOTH personal and transpersonal.  Parts of what is out there cause a sympathetic resonance in us.  We react to what we feel.  We are integrated into the universe in ways that are not readily obvious.

In this case, what I was feeling was an anger, an irrational, striking out anger, that is symptomatic of a darkness in our nation.  As I have said often, look at the books our teenagers are reading.  Parents are just glad, now, that their kids reading, but they are reading about vampires and werewolves, and graphic violence that would shock you if you knew about it. 

As just one example, a book was assigned to junior high school participants in our local book bee that had some of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales in it, and in which the author talked constantly about how “awesome” the most horrific acts of brutality were, such as a father cutting the heads off of his children and pouring the blood on a statue to bring a servant back; and a ghoulish man who in the presence of a child pulled the soul of a young girl out of her throat–to be put in a cage to die–and who then chops her body into pieces to be thrown in a pot and eaten.  She has a ring on a finger he can’t get off, so he chops the finger off, throws it away, and it lands in young Gretchen’s lap.  Hilarious. 

What happened on Tuesday is not that Obama won.  It was that the American people chose to lose.

They chose to crash the plane.  They decided they couldn’t handle the stress of life, that they were perceptually unable to see a way forward that incorporated current hard choices.  So in large masses they threw their children under the bus.

I was listening to Terry Gross, I think is her name (I can’t take NPR in other than small doses, and then only when they are interviewing conservatives so they can pretend that what they are producing as “news” is consistent with journalistic integrity, which of course it isn’t) interview Matt Kibbe.  He was talking about how we can’t afford the so-called “entitlements” (I need to come up with another word) we have NOW.  We are borrowing a trillion dollars a year NOW, with no added costs, and how Obamacare just piles on top of those in a completely reckless and irresponsible way, so we need to repeal it.

Her response was incredulity.  You lost the Senate, and you lost the Presidency.  How do you think you can repeal Obamacare now?  She did not even ATTEMPT to rebut his claim.  It can’t be rebutted.  It is categorically, necessarily true.  The numbers are not even remotely ambiguous. 

The whole project is one of wishful thinking and willed ignorance, combined with a HATRED of anyone who says differently.  It is a living death.  Hence the vampire metaphor.

But here is the thing.  You can set a plane to crash, but until it does, you can pull out. 

And my FEELING, inexplicably, is that in some way something good also won on Tuesday.  I think what happened was that the American people were forced to go on record on this cultural divide.  They were forced to choose, because the choice was clear.  Romney and Ryan–whatever their political flaws and merits–are two sober, serious, intelligent, well meaning people.  Obama is an unintelligent functional psychopath, and Joe Biden is in my view a LITERAL sociopath.  This is what America chose.  This is who they said they wanted to be (and don’t tell me on some unconscious level they didn’t know this, most of them).

Now they will get to see reflected, in actual events, who they have chosen to be.  They have chosen to be gray.  They have chosen to continue to see storefronts boarded up.  They have chosen more paperwork.  They chosen to continue high levels of unemployment.  They have chosen higher energy costs.

Once you accept that you need to make a decision between two camps, even if you chose one side, you can always choose the other.

People are hungry for a means of sharing their pain, of sharing their wisdom, and of connecting with one another.  Obama’s death cult is a means of doing that, but only at the cost of your life.  You deal with your pain by surrendering it to others.  You become deaf and numb to your own needs.

You have to have a path forward.  Even Fundamentalists are moving forward to a past that in most cases never existed.  They are creating something new and calling it something old.  That is how these things work.  In an organic, self organizing system you can never recreate the climate of another time and place, and people.

Goodness Movement.com is my reaction to having seen this truth some years ago.  It is not a cult: quite the contrary.  Its intent is to distribute meaning as broadly as possible by facilitating its self emergence among countless individuals, who can share and synergize.  As I have said, my eventual goal is to build what amounts to a “church”, but one which runs itself, which has no liturgy (necessarily: I am not opposed to locally developed rituals), and no absolute creeds other than my three core principles:

1) Never feel sorry for yourself, even, to any extent.  It is ALWAYS and without exception damaging.  Feeling pain is acceptable, and in fact desirable.  The two are very different, though.

2) Never quit.  This may simply consist in not killing yourself, or in finishing a long march.  Whatever it is, keep moving.

3) Learn every day.  Use both abstraction and concrete observation, and travel between them often.  Travel between your mind and senses.  Pay attention.  Be amazed.  React.  Build.

As I argue in my initial essay on Goodness, these three principles, if practiced sincerely, cannot in my view but lead to desirable–and exciting, unpredictable–outcomes.

I’m likely rambling.  Writing is how I process (and the reasons why this is so I’ve only figured out in the last week or two), but I will finish with a few quotes that have done me good.

“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal.  It is courage that matters.”  Churchill

“Success is going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm”.  Churchil.

And of course, from the last fiscal conservative in the White House, Calvin Coolidge (ironically from Vermont, which was once a bastion of conservatism, and which–who knows?–may one day be again):

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race

It is good that I work with my hands, most days, to earn my income.  It allows me to think, AND to blow off steam sweating.  I had a number of ideas which I will share in what will likely be a somewhat disorderly way.

The first idea I had to title this post was “Tits”.  Here is the reason: it hearkens to some dialogue in the move “Tenacious D”.  Jack Black asks his partner: “What’s it going to be, Kyle, tits or destiny?”  Kyle whispers back “tits”.

The American people chose tits last night.  It’s actually not a funny thing, although it helped me adding that example.  What happened yesterday is a large chunk of America chose not to grow, to perpetuate their childhood.  The grandparents who voted for Obama effectively fucked their grandchildren.  It was an astonishing display of selfishness and willed ignorance.

I am going to start calling these people the “headless people”, the ones who said their incantation and CHOSE to be decapitated, who CHOSE to let someone else do their thinking for them.  It’s like the tension built up and up between the image of Obama as a dangerous radical who was bankrupting America, and the experience of their lives, which is that most people are nice, most things work, and we   have had no major economic disasters for over  75 years.  Confronted with this dichotomy, what did they choose?  What was EASY.

This is the true problem we face.  Being idealistic, I truly thought that if I spent the time building clearly argued, closely reasoned, factually accurate treatments of our problems, that that would matter somewhat, when combined with all the other things Glen Beck, and Matt Kibbe, and Ron and Rand Paul, and Rush Limbaugh and others are and have been doing.  I thought that what we lacked was information.

But our true lack is moral courage, and emotional strength.  That was not a political vote yesterday, but a CULTURAL one, one that indicated clearly that Americans lack the balls to look at and deal honestly with our problems.

To my mind, the conclusion is clear that until we reach crisis stage, nothing will be done.

Here, though, is a reassuring thought (perhaps): Mitt Romney showed no sign of dealing with our deficit issue seriously either, and had he been elected, he still would have been blamed for it.  This way, it is squarely on the Democrats.

As far as the House, I would say this: they are going to be blamed for being partisan whether they are or not. It doesn’t matter.  Obama’s version of “bipartisanship” is calling you hyperpartisan if you do anything but what he wants.  Given that, fuck Obama.  Drag every heel in the place.  You may as well do something to deserve blame, since you’ll get it either way.

And ARREST ERIC HOLDER.  What do you have to lose?  The asshole deserves it richly, and it is within the legal purview of the House.  He and Obama both told them to fuck off.  Why not return the favor? 

As far as my previous post, and black magic: I don’t know if I meant that or not, but SOMETHING weird is happening.  Three times in Obama’s Presidency, he has been on the verge of confronting a sea change, and had media attention distracted long enough to avert it as a result of a natural disaster.

Support had been waning for Obamacare–and was much broadcast in the media–when the Haiti earthquake hit.

Scott Walker had just signed the bill prohibiting public sector unions in Wisconsin, generating national attention, when the Japan Earthquake hit.

And of course Obama was clearly ebbing when Hurricane Sandy hit.  I had actually, unseriously, wondered in the back of my head if something like that would happen.  He’s a fool, but Chris Matthews among others felt the storm helped Obama.

So you have this energy shifting, moving.  You have a momentum in one direction, then you have a tidal event, and everything switches back.  Strange.  That is why I proposed, in the spirit of saying whatever the hell I like whether it makes sense or not, that perhaps the HAARP had something to do with it.  Causing earthquakes is a non-obvious use for it, but it was DESIGNED to affect high altitude weather (and presumably as a prototype ballistic missile shield).

Now, this is crazy paranoid, I know.  Black helicopter stuff.  Got it.  Here is an even weirder idea: what if there is an energy backing him that is causing these things?  Yes, I just lost the materialists (but how do you put up with my shit anyway?), but it’s a thought worth putting out there.  SOMETHING happened.  I can’t explain it. 

I don’t think the polls were rigged, but I have wondered who does the exit polls.  If you have electronic voting booths, the only real protection against their being programmed to react in desired ways is the Exit Polls, which offer a sort of quick reality check against vote tallies.  But who does that?  Is it a private firm?  Do Fox and CNN do their own?  Can we assume the talliers are incorruptible?  I would say not.  Wall Street had hundreds of billions to throw around.  That is serious money.

Finally, I wanted to say that what won yesterday was hate.  People would rather hate large corporations, than work to build a better society.  You can’t have both.  It is a dominant emotional tone, and it affects thinking.  Ironically, voting for Obama IS voting for large corporations, but here is the thing: the headless people don’t want to hear that.  They have a simple worldview: all good things rest with them and their tribe, and all bad things are outside it.  They get to be super mellow, super friendly, super open with their tribe, because all their HATE they can direct outside.  They can justify it by defining their ideological Others as IN PRINCIPLE, AT ROOT evil, which of course is the root emotion of racism, nationalism, and every other socially expressed bigotry.  But they don’t see that, since they are nice INSIDE the tribe.

And what one sees–what I see, daily–is that they use the SAME WORDS to demonize conservatives that we use to DESCRIBE them.  Take that word “tribal”.  I have used it often, and got it from Friedrich Hayek.  I saw it, looked at the discursive patterns of left wingers, and said “damn, that’s accurate”.

But today on NPR they had a guy who wrote a book on how the Republican Party has been taken over by the radical right and–you guessed it–tribalism.  We see them accuse us of being fact-averse, or invariably overwhelmed when apparently valid claimed are contextualized.  I have seen, often, the EXACT WORDS I have used to describe the thought patterns of people I have been debating used against me, inaccurately.

Words do not mean anything, once you’ve been through the decapitation ceremony.  They are simply signifiers indicating friend or foe.  They are code words saying either attack or don’t attack.

I have said this approximately, but will try to say this more clearly: in my view Sybaritic Leftism exists in a continuum with Cultural Sadeism.  The first drifts into the second.  That, in my view, is a predominant reason why the Horror genre is so popular now.  What happens is that you want comfort.  You don’t want hard thoughts.  You don’t want anyone to remind you of how bad things have gotten in various parts of the world even in the last ten years.

So you start lying to yourself.   You start pretending that all the problems of the world could be solved, IF ONLY people were not standing in the way.  And you have this very benign self image.  You do Yoga and Pilates.  You are a vegetarian.  And of course you vote Democrat, because you care about women, and women’s issues.  Frustration gnaws at you.  Why can’t everyone see that all these things have simple solutions that cause no one anywhere any pain or difficulty?  Why can’t they see how easy life could and should be if the government just took care of everything?

And I think there is a break point where you lose touch with reality.  That is the moment you are decapitated.  That is the moment that words lose their constant and intrinsic meaning.  As I have said often, you become a leftist the moment you no longer care about outcomes.  And you become a Cultural Sadeist the moment you care more about hate than love, more about power than truth.

Large segments of our electorate just went through that process.  The dream I had was perhaps prophetic in some ways.

Finally, finally (I think I said it once already) I would submit that for those who are very upset: I get it.  It’s OK.  But at the end of the day, we live in a very comfortable nation.  Our police are largely still honest.  Most of the good things in life, we still have.  The questions I would ask are simple: are you still telling the truth?  Then don’t stop.  Is what you are working for still worth it?  Then don’t stop.  Just be realistic and understand that many Americans don’t want to hear you .  We have, of course, a huge problem with an effective propaganda system developed by the Left.  But the raw data is out there.  Anyone who wants to learn, can.

Therefore I would submit that our battle is cultural, and that realistically we need to be thinking of options when the shit hits the fan, which it will, sooner or later.  My financial plan is a good one, I believe, and as time permits I will be fleshing it out. 

Much of this is beyond our control, though, and I feel events are just going to have to play themselves out.  There are times to be outraged, times to cry, and times to wait, and not be tired by waiting.  Or, being lied about, not give way to lying. 

Hell: here’s the whole thing.  May it be a tonic.  I look at it daily.

IF you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Finally to the third power: I think of Churchill, and how he must have felt watching Adolf Hitler come to power, knowing full well that a PREVENTABLE disaster was in the making, and being ignored.  Tens of millions of people died because of the failure of the Western European powers to bring Hitler to heel early on.

I don’t know what we face, but it can scarcely be much worse than a global war.  Whatever it is, we can face it with courage and faith.  The rest is out of our hands, and I think sometimes accepting that fact is the path of wisdom, and the peace of mind that comes with it.

I called the election for Romney, but I was wrong.  Strangely, I am not as upset as I thought I would be.  It occurs to me that I simply need to become more selfish.  I can’t wear myself out worrying about a nation stupid enough to elect Barack Obama twice.  We deserve what we are about to get.  To be clear, I don’t deserve it.  My children don’t deserve it, but the American people–especially the ones bought for cheap with baubles and trinkets–deserve it. Those who voted for free telephones will continue to live short and shitty lives.  Nothing Obama does will change that, and in point of fact, it will get worse there first.

We will become steadily more hateful, and less able to work with one another.  I think of my dream about people willingly letting themselves be decapitated.  This is, certainly, our media.  They have surrendered their reason.  They have given up their freedom. They don’t want to be free.  They want to live with the sense of PURPOSE that submission to the leftist creed, the demonic creed, gives them.

There are, in my view, literal Satanists out there, working literal magic, but ONLY able to do so because people WANT them to, NEED them to.  I can’t affect that (not that I am saying I ever could). It is much too large now.  Too many people  have asked it to grow.

Things will have to get much, much worse before they can get better.  All we can hope for, in the end, is courage and wisdom, which is all I ever pray for.

I will stockpile food, donate monthly to Freedomworks, and focus on riding this thing out as well as I can.

The larger a government, the greater potential for illicit profit taking both by individuals and corporations.

Look at this website: http://obamaphone.net/ .  You have a picture of Barack Obama, and you have free telephones, paid for by the taxpayers.  Obama is literally using the power of his office to tie his largesse with our money to buy votes.  If Bush had tried something like this, he would have been crucified.

I have never seen a more cynical Administration in my lifetime.  Bill Clinton, being the pragmatist that he was and is, reformed entitlements.  Obama is trying to reverse everything he did.

I look at Obama, and what I see is someone whose every waking hour is devoted to keeping and increasing power.  He devotes NO thought to policy issues, to what will actually work, what will actually help real people, because he literally cannot separate his ego projections of omniscience from reality.  He literally believes that because he, Barack Obama, favors something, it must perforce be good, and therefore need not be questioned.  He didn’t need to know what was in the Obamacare act.  It had his name on it.

His world is very simple: all good flows from him, and all evil from his opponents.  The point of politics is the enhancement of his ego by getting things passed with his name on them, and gradually edging out all other names and ideas.  He can’t rule forever, but he can ensure that his ideological descendants keep and enhance their power.  That is his goal, at any rate.

Nowhere in the system does anyone look outside the system, other than to gauge the winds to see what words people want to hear, and who needs to be paid what for their support or silence.  The thing is pure narcissism, start to finish.

One can almost look sympathetically at Boss Tweed.  He was just trying to live the good life, and he enjoyed the rough and tumble of politics.  He liked people, and he liked himself.  But he did not labor under the illusion that it was his mission to “fundamentally transform” anything.  He had a comfortable status quo, everybody around him got taken care of, and the city really wasn’t that bad a place.

There is nothing warm or comfortable about what Barack Obama has planned.  It will be a disaster.

And thinking about it, his main goal in life is the enhancement of his ego.  That is the goal, and even when America is vastly less powerful, and wallowing in long term poverty, if he is relatively important, as Fidel Castro is in his clusterfuck of a nation, that is acceptable.

These are awful, awful people, with literally NOTHING redeeming about them.  They break what they touch, and they don’t care. 

I really hope the tide turns today.

I feel that any supposed spiritual path that does not have risk in it is false.  I feel the need for darkness, and I am beginning to see why the Tibetans have angry demons on many of their mandalas.  Darkness and danger coexist with light and love.  A path which does not demand of you the ability to travel through a dark forest alone at night, figuratively at least, is not one which will lead to interesting places.

Then as I thought about it more, it occurred to me that in any path of growth, loss is inevitable.  Some part of you will have to be sacrificed–your vanity, your complacency, your sloth–in order that you can reintegrate on a higher level.  You have to die, in some ways, on one qualitative level, so that you can be reborn on a higher level.

I would add, too, as a general thought that I have been many places and done many things.  Among those things I have attended meditation retreats, and would submit that many people who like to say they are “on a spiritual path” just need to grow up.  They live their lives as silly people, then get all mellow and metaphysical on the weekends.  Fuck that.

Pondering this, what I would submit is that the first task is always to make your peace with your physical environment as a mature adult, to interact socially in a felicitous way, work effectively, love others effectively, and THEN expand your sense of self to the non-physical.  All spirituality is is incorporating higher realities into your current reality.  Becoming a Buddha is just growing up in a different world, after growing up in this one.  It is hypermaturity. 

Few thoughts.  This didn’t quite hit the mark, but screw it.  I’m whiskey bound.

Most people in the middle have realized they made a mistake.  I am seeing people saying things like “I’ve never voted Republican before because I hate their social views, but we can’t take any more of Obama”.  Much of the far Left will vote for Gary Johnson, since they are furious with Obama for being just as war mongering as George Bush.

He can count on the votes of people who vote Democrat because they vote Democrat, because they have generic world views sculpted by leftist propaganda (the rich don’t pay their share; we have to preserve the planet; everyone deserves everything).  But many of his votes seem to be coming from barely literate people being rounded up like kindergartners and bussed to polling places, where they are told who to vote for.   And the reason they are doing this is that they are being told either that they will get free stuff, or that the other guy is so awful he wants to kill them.

Here’s the thing: whatever free stuff they get will suck.  Their “free” healthcare will suck.  Their free housing will suck.  Their food stamps will suck.  The simple reality is that whatever handouts are offered, they are a FRACTION of what would be available to them if they simply had decent jobs.

Here is a nice clip from Malcolm X, where he points out that the Democrats were elected because of the “negro” vote, but basically ignored them.  It is a matter of historical fact that, percentage-wise, WAY more Democrats opposed Johnson’s Civil Rights initiatives than Republicans.  I did the math once, and it was roughly twice.

I will add that it is a horrible shame Malcolm X was shot.  He was a true leader.  He was racist, but if he is calling for black self respect, and black self determination, that is something I can easily live with. In fact, I admire it. He had balls.  He answered to no one but his own conscience.  He and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the only true black leaders I have seen in my lifetime, although Bill Cosby has made some efforts at it.

The simple and inescapable truth is that if I were a behind the curtain string puller TRYING to ruin black America, I could do no better than to foist upon blacks leaders like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, Louis Farrakhan (who if memory serves was possibly involved in Malcolms’ assassination), and Jeremiah Wright.  If you wanted to DESTROY black America, these are the sort of people you would choose.  Why?  They are self aggrandising, unprincipled egomaniacs whose sole purpose is obtaining wealth and power through race baiting.

What has Barack Obama done for black people?  What has he even TRIED to do for black people?  Everything Malcolm X says here about Johnson is doubly true for Obama, since black people voted for him BECAUSE  he was black.  But he isn’t black.  And he doesn’t care.  Black Americans are being played, again, for chumps.

If for profit we substitute “motivation for producing”, it can be seen readily that without it, little gets done.  I was reading about Cuba yesterday, in a National Geographic article, and the universal lament is “nothing works”.  All their cars are American cars from the 1950’s or pieces of crap from the old Soviet Union, which also of course are quite old.

Why do you work?  You get paid.  That is profit.  Why do villagers work in Africa?  To eat.  That is their profit. 

Entrepreneurs create new things to get paid.  If they don’t get paid, they don’t create new things.

The fact of the matter is that there is no way to succeed in a Capitalist economy if you do not produce things people want, at prices they are willing to pay.  If you don’t do that, you can’t profit, UNLESS you get the government to help you, as in Solyndra and a dozen other similar tax-payer funded expensive failures that STILL netted the people created them a lot of money.

If you see a successful person, they created a lot of things people wanted at prices they were willing to pay.

Other than government, the only other exception is bankers.  I will share again a link I have posted often: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

It has come to my attention recently that something along the lines of my proposal was pushed aggressively in the 1930’s by a number of economists under the name of the Chicago Plan.  I am researching it, but since it effectively cedes control of the banking sector to the government, I doubt I will be able to support it.  I will however be able to use it as an example of smart and erudite people suggesting something LIKE what I have proposed.

As far as I can tell, I am the only person ever to have suggested that the quantity of money be fixed forever, and that its value should be allowed to increase.  That seems unlikely, but I have yet to see anyone else saying it.  If you the reader have seen it, let me know.

Normally, when you say to someone they are “living in a world of illusion”, or in an imaginary world, what you are saying is that they are avoiding facing hard, unpleasant realities.  Since most people, not unreasonably, tend to avoid pain, this is usually accurate.

What I would submit, though, is that this phrase is equally apt when people unjustifiably limit themselves, cognitively, emotionally, or behaviorally; when they are capable of much more, but don’t believe it.

To this extent, I would suggest that we ALL live in imaginary worlds, because all of us fall far short of our potential, of what we could do if we believed it and chose it.  We all want to be happier.  How many of us act on it consistently, and with our full focus and energy?

In virtually all cases, the answer we must give to the question “is this the best you can do?” is a decided NO.  We lie to ourselves if we day otherwise.

Now, relaxation and repose are essential elements of productivity.  Most of my best ideas come to me when I am being outwardly lazy.  But I guess the point I want to make here is that we MUST, in the interest of being as intelligent as we can be, include in all calculations and self assessments the possibility that we are deceiving ourselves.

In reading the narrative of the disaster, one of the first things that struck me was how early Chris Stevens disappears.  Could it not be–is it not in fact the most plausible possibility–that he was tricked and captured by elements of his own supposed guard and handed over to the Ansar Al Sharia terrorists?

I would want to know, as well, if an autopsy was done, and if he was tortured, as would seem likely in that part of the world.  They claim to have raped him.  Did they do anything else?  

Further, Woods and Doherty were in Benghazi, per the Daily Telegraph several weeks ago, as part of a mission to find and destroy anti-aircraft missiles that our government gave the Libyan rebels, who then were defined very generically as anti-Gaddafi.  This would have been very unpopular with the local Islamist militias, and may be part of the reason for the attack.

If at some future point one of these missiles takes down a commercial jet-liner, that is going to be very embarrassing for the Obama Administration, if there still is one four months from now.

I can’t see how allowing the deaths of Doherty and Woods would have helped cover that up, though.  Their superiors knew of the mission, and in any event it was well enough known that it made it into at least a British newspaper.

I continue to think Hillary is just a cold-hearted bitch, and was likely angry at them for disobeying orders. And Obama is a boy thinking he can do a man’s job, who simply isn’t smart enough to know that his Size 3’s aren’t up to the task. I literally don’t think he has advanced emotionally since high school.  He thought he knew everything then, and he thinks he knows everything now.  He’s a Choom Gang President.