Author: White Whale

OF COURSE he knew what was in that newsletter. The questions are:

1) Does it matter?

2) If it matters, how much?

For context, let us consider that our current President sat in the front pew of a church in Chicago in which the theme every week was “HATE WHITEY”. This is no exaggeration. This was a weekly occurrence–when he was in town–for over a DECADE.

For further context, let us consider that with roughly 6% of the population, black men represent some 45% of the prison inmates in this country. According to this link+

The [incarceration] rate for white men was 736 per 100,000, for black men 4,789 per 100,000, for Hispanic men 1,862 per 100,000.

4,789 is 6.5 times 735.

Now I have lived all over this country, and overseas. It is a simple fact in my experience that more black people equals more crime. If you are living in a small town with no crime, black populations are in proportion to the country as a whole, at roughly 12% or less. I’m not supposed to say this, but it is true in my experience, and no amount of politically correct bullshit can alter this. The statistics support it.

Further, if you look at the intentionally divisive rhetoric of hate-mongers like Jerry Wright and his friend Louis Farrakhan, they WANTED a race war. They think, to this day, of America as an apartheid state in which the prisons are used to keep the black man down, rather than the inevitable result of breaking the law.

It is ASTONISHING that statements made by Ron Paul 20 years ago would get this much scrutiny, when Obama’s patent and absolutely inescapable pattern of associating with the most horrific hate-mongers on the planet is ignored by the media.

Here is the fact: we are going to founder and fail as nation if we continue on our current path. That is the goal of the sociopathic LUNATICS, who assume–in some cases rightly–that in congruence with the “some pigs are more equal than others” principle, the suffering will be meted out to OTHERS, and not to them. Self evidently, the suffering will come first and in greatest portion to those who are ALREADY SUFFERING.

Do you think Barack or Michelle Obama give a rat’s ass about ordinary black people? Seriously? Michelle refused to treat poor black people in the hospital she ran if they couldn’t pay for the services, and if they couldn’t get the government to pay. Barack commented on how expensive arugula had gotten, from which the clear inference can be made that he literally did not grasp that the rest of the world did not live in the cushy circumstances his political deals have allowed him to live in.

WE ARE BORROWING $125 BILLION A MONTH. The Federal Reserve and fractional banking system take the lion’s share of the wealth we earn as a nation without contributing anything productive.

Ron Paul is the only person who can be trusted to make the SCALE of changes that need to be made. As we have been seeing over the last decade, even a Republican President and Republican Congress cannot be relied on to fix things. They just make things worse a BIT more slowly. That is all. That is it.

This nation is being run by assholes and lunatics, and the media is fiddling while great and PREVENTABLE suffering lurks just over the horizon. Disgusting.

I have stipulated–this cannot be “proven” in a formal sense since I have also rejected the utility of the notion of ontology–that there are three elements of consciousness (which is to say that part of us which chooses what to pay attention to in an infinitely complex world) which, when combined in a moving system over time, tend to generate an emergent property which is best labelled “Goodness”. They are the rejection of self pity, perseverance in chosen tasks, and a commitment to perception, to the always present possibility of the need to change ones mind.

Within this framework, it could be argued that dullness and incuriosity (I’m getting spell check on that; if it is not a word, yes it is, and you just read and understood it) are incompatible with that wind I call Goodness. Someone who does the “right” things day after day without asking WHY, is sooner or later bound to do the wrong thing in the name of the right thing. The flaw that will then emerge as apparent badness will actually already be very old, even fossilized, and merely manifested as a result of changed circumstances.

Hell, this is about me, my vanity. I’ll just switch to open mode preaching. The way I personally choose to live my life is to be curious about EVERYTHING. I am always asking myself how things are put together: how cars work, how roads are built, how buildings are built, why grass is here and not there, why clouds have formed in one way and not another.

As I have likely pointed out, one of the least common questions people ask seems to be is: why this and not something else? What could or should be there instead? One obvious example was in the Great Depression, when a recovery that SHOULD have been there was not. We have only had one Great Depression, and only had one economic downturn in the government aggressively tried to intervene. Coincidence? Of course not. Economics–despite the efforts of the “professionals” to convince the lay public otherwise–is not complicated. When something like 90% of business owners think the government is anti-business, and when punitive tax rates are in place, then no business investment takes place, no jobs are created, and short blips become life-crushing epic events.

What made me think about this was I was doing some intervals on a football field. Since it’s winter most of it is brown and seemingly dead. But scattered in some places were bright green patches of grass, only perhaps 4″ across, and surrounded by brown grass. Why was this? I spent a couple minutes pondering, and then noticed that all the grass outside the field was also green. Then I noticed it thriving along one fence line, but not the others. Then I looked at the wind patterns, and decided that was the direction of the wind, and concluded that two types of grass must be in place, one for the field, one for around the field, and that some seeds must have been blown over when the outside field was seeded.

This may or may not be right, but the point I want to make is that there is endless fascination possible in even the most dull places and doing the most dull things. You can practice the capacity for problem solving and perception in even the most dull jobs, if you decide to.

This is a bit of an “I’m so cool” post, but trust me, I know better. This is just one data point. There are many I see no reason to put in the public domain which argue decisively for humility as the best policy.

This is posted in the hope it may be useful for someone.

Edit: I will add that it occurred to me that the above might make me seem like the most tediously dull human being on the planet. I was quite literally watching grass grow. That possibility amuses me. Like everyone else I like talking about myself, but I definitely don’t take myself too seriously. I’m only on this planet a short time, and burdened with so many limitations–like all of us–that it is easier counting the few rays of light that poke through the rock that encases me than figuring out all the ways I can’t move.

I seem to have no hobbies. I am by nature very serious. This blog is work for me, at least when I feel I am doing it well; pain is normally required for me to feel I am giving a topic its true due diligence.

But I do have one habit that comes close: listening to stories from strangers. My God, bars are places to learn about humanity, about what people really think and how at least some section of them really live. This is a source of endless interest for me. I listen to stories from everyone.

Tonight I heard a war story, from a Canadian Combat Engineer recently back from Afghanistan. A young girl, perhaps 10, stops a patrol begging for food. They stop, and pull some food from their packs. The next trip by, the same girl–or one the same age who looked just like her–is wired with a bomb, and someone just in the range of vision triggers her when the patrol stops, killing her (of course) and injuring several members of his patrol. He saw this with his own eyes.

I talk with people often, some soldiers, and a consistent pattern is that the realities of the EVIL of our enemies are consistently underplayed in the media. Somehow, they want to believe that cultural Others are somehow noble, and our aggressive, intrusive forces intrinsically malevolent. This is nothing close to the actual truth of the matter: we try harder to do the right thing, in my view, than ANY military force in human history. I say this as a student of history.

In my view the Afghan people are goat-fuckers who in large measure deserve nothing but studied indifference. To the extent we should be there, it should be to prevent a repeat of the terror training camps that flourished under the Taliban.

And to be clear, can we really connect the dots, in terms of unwashed sister-fuckers doing the monkey bars, and the attacks of 9/11? Their pilot training was in the US. Their tactics were primitive and needed little in terms of training. What, precisely, are the threats emanating from Afghanistan?

I have argued before, and will repeat here, that in my view 4 planes were clearly hijacked by extremists, who were mainly Saudis. They were crashed into the Pentagon, World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2, and a field in Pennsylvania. Uniquely, to my knowledge, I have argued that United 93 was headed for WTC 7.

This thesis is plausible if you accept that flames do not cause the collapse of skyscrapers specifically designed to resist the effects of flames, in such a way that they LOOK as if they were blown intentionally.

In turn, if we consider that if Muslim terrorists were responsible for blowing–planting and then detonating explosives–three skyscrapers, then it is HIGHLY curious that they have not been able to do more since 9/11. Terror is easy. Logistically, a group capable of planting covert explosives would be capable of a LOT.

This in turn led to my unprovable supposition that the Russians were behind 9/11. I simply can’t believe Bush was, or the CIA, or Mossad. Once we deduct them, put dunce caps on the Islamic homicidophiles, and see who is left, that is the conclusion.

Put all this together, and in my view we should draw down 2/3rd’s of our troops in Afghanistan, and only send them back if the residual is in danger of being overrun. We should then focus on Human Intelligence, and the people selling America as an ideal spread the world over, that I have often called for.

My two and half cents.

Phrase popped in my head, and made me smile. Do with it what you will. I’m not sorting it out at this point.

Today I again decided to go down a different road–literally, a different road. Being somewhat enigmatic even to myself–I make a lot of spontaneous decisions–I don’t know why. In many respects, I am a creature of habit. I have eaten at my favorite Mexican place at least 500 times, with no exaggeration. I only go to 2 bars.

But sometimes, I feel the need to break the pattern, to go somewhere completely new. I did that today. And as should be obvious, I am a self observer. I watched my feelings, and in my world–which shrinks and grows prodigiously in cycles throughout the day–this time, I felt something like melancholy, but not really.

When you take a new path–and I am speaking both metaphorically and literally, since I somehow comprehend much of my literal journeying as ritualistic and meaningful–it feels to me like both a relief and a mild ache, like when you stretch and massage tired muscles.

There was this moment when I thought “oh, this is new”, and I felt alone. Then I got to thinking about life itself. I like the line “every new beginning is some other beginnings end” (about hooking up, but let’s push it further, as indeed I think they were implicitly doing as well). Is life not constantly reconciling the need for change with the need for continuity? We want things to stay the same, we work so that things will stay the same, but they can’t and don’t. This is our principle tragedy, and our principle hope.

I was, again, applying this metaphor of wave/particle duality from physics, and I realized that as I traversed from the old to the new, at the moment of transition, I was suddenly filled with compassion and love for humanity. This is the “moment” of understanding, of both being able to relate to others as a sovereign individual, and be connected to them.

This metaphor of surfing is a good one. I dreamed once that that is the way to live, on the edge of a rolling wave, endlessly adapting, unafraid, and excited. The wave is merely a part of the ocean, a form of the ocean. You, on the other hand, have a place and a trajectory. Interfacing the two is the essence of surfing.

This is a bit meandering (Thoreau once approximately said “it need not be long, but it takes quite long to make it short”) but hopefully makes sense to someone. It was a strong feeling, and I thought I would do my best to pass it along.

Probably my last post on this topic. Ron Paul is to the left of Obama on foreign policy. His basic idea is “if you aren’t screwing with us, we will not screw with you.” This basic sentiment has a very long history in the Republican Party.

And to be clear, it was not OUR inaction that caused World War 2. It was the inaction of Britain and France. In fact, one could easily make the case that by overpromising and underdelivering at Versailles, Woodrow Wilson played an enormous role in Hitler’s rise to power.

And with regard to economic and political policy, Paul is far to the right of most mainstream Republicans, who say they want smaller government, but are never able to identify programs they themselves would cut. Paul is promising MASSIVE cuts, in both social spending and defense. He is credible on this score.

Given a good chance to get what they say they want for both anti-war Democrats and anti-Big Government Republicans, what’s not to like?

And please, don’t give me this “political reality” bullshit. Yes, of course the complicit media can spin anything they want into anything they want. They are good at digging up dirt–I’m quite sure they could find Jimmy Hoffa Sr. within a week or two if they thought it essential for Obama’s reelection.

But at the same time, if you are always backing down to CONSTANT attacks and threats of attacks, can that be called something other than retreat? Are wars–and we are in a war–won that way? Of course not. They are lost with plausible denial. They are lost without being able to assign clear blame, but lost nonetheless.

Does anyone seriously think anyone right of center will be capable of voting for Obama? That no matter who is on the ticket, that they will hold their nose and vote Republican? This is what we did with McCain. And what happened? We lost.

Democrats rightly criticize the Republicans as they have existed for at least the last 15 years or so as being more or less Democrats who just don’t want to raise taxes. They spend the same amount, and just generate more deficits since taxes stay low. These same people argue that our budget deficit is surely not just a product of spending too much. This is a fallacious argument, as anyone can see who looks at just how much Obama increased spending over the already ludicrous Bush levels, but the basic premise within a small range is not invalid. Plainly, we could tax more.

Such people will see no reason to back someone like Romney, who if the past is any indication will talk a big fight, then more or less turn into George W. Bush. Our national debt will continue to skyrocket, commissions will be formed, and after much bluster and brinkmanship, exactly 3 cents will be cut from our projected INCREASES over the next decade.

Look at what Rand Paul has done in Congress. As one small example, he was the only one to ask, in the context of Obama’s constant calls for “investments” in infrastructure: do you have a prioritized list of repairs? The answer was no. Since we just spent some $130 BILLION on repairs, that should cause shock in a psychologically normal person capable of rational thought. Plainly, the goal was not fixing things, but spending money, and spending money in places that were motivated by politics. Vote buying would be the shorter and more honest description of where some $130 billion of our tax money (40% of which of course was FUTURE tax money, plus interest, since we borrowed it) went.

A major bridge into Louisville, Kentucky was recently declared dangerous and closed for six months. Was it on a list to fix? Of course not: there IS no list. I just said this. In preparing to spend $130 billion, not even basic homework was done. (note: that $130 billion is from memory. It’s in the range, even if not spot on).

Or take the recent decision by the Obama Administration to kill an American in Yemen. When talking about Guantanamo, my argument has always been THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS AND NOBODY ELSE WANTS THEM. But when it comes to Americans, we have LAWS that govern how to treat traitors and sabateurs and would-be mass murderers. We have a Bill of Rights, and the constitution to which it is an amendment.

Was this guy a danger to other Americans? Not really. Yemen is not exactly in our back yard. It’s in the back, back forty, and if it fell into the ocean tomorrow, maybe 100 Americans would know about it, ever. I speak with some confidence when I say that only perhaps 1% of Americans could find it on an unmarked map. Certainly less than 10%.

And from this flowed the bipartisan Congressional decision to create a law that would allow American citizens to be detained by the military indefinitely. This is a HUGE abrogation of our rights. Even if in practice that power is not abused in the short term, it means that technically arresting ANYONE is possible, without a writ of habeas corpus (as I understand the matter–I have not read the full language, and am not even sufficiently up to date to know if this was passed into law or not; it is the fact that it was proposed that concerns me here).

The idea is that Delta or DevGru can sneak into, say, Yemen, and do a body snatch. But once the principle is there, what about sneaking into QUEENS and doing a body snatch? What about pulling somebody out of their home?

Ron and Rand Paul are some of a very small number of people who grasp the implications of all this. People like John McCain–who honestly I used to like–are not thinking long term. They need to ask questions like: if a good friend of Bill Ayers were in the White House, do you think at some point this could be abused, particularly in conditions of being able to censor the Internet, and having more or less complete control of other forms of news propagation?

Net: Paul will by default win the vote of everyone who hates Obama, and by virtue of his policies the votes of everyone who fears governmental oppression and who opposes foreign wars. This makes him electable, in my view.

We need to give him a try. Yes, Romney says he will put a hold on implementation of Obamacare nation-wide, day one. But the forte of left wingers is demonizing people in power. Who is to say they can’t remobilize a Democrat resurgence in 2014 with rhetorical pictures of diseased children and grandmothers, left behind by the Big Meany Head Republicans?

First off, I want to apologize because I feel I have not been very incisive lately. I am not sure I ever am, but I FEEL incisive sometimes, and I haven’t been feeling in the zone. I am working extremely hard, and my brain and body are both quite tired most of the time.

Wait, I don’t believe in excuse making, so let me repudiate, in the manner of a politician, the foregoing, without actually deleting it, so I can keep my options open (name the movie: “when I’m not kissing babies, I’m stealing their lollipops”).

Here is what I was thinking today, wandering around on my 10′ ladder: Ron Paul combines in one person a rejection of BOTH of the reasons for government expansion. If you look at the last–let me do the math–83 years (if memory serves, Hoover was inaugurated in 1929), you will see that when Republicans are in power, spending always goes up. Goldwater excoriated the 1950’s Republicans in 1960.

The argument is simple: we have been neglecting Defense. For their part, Democrats tend to say “we have been neglecting social justice.” Now, some want their cake and to eat it too, like Kennedy and LBJ, but most of the time recently, since Carter roughly, it has been “spend less on Defense, and more on Kodak moments”.

Thus, since Hoover, every Administration, Democrat or Republican has, for one reason or another, increased the size of our government. Only exception? Anybody? The Democrats hopped on it quicker than it takes Slick Willie to get the hots for cheerleaders: Clinton.

Clinton decreased our social spending AND our military. He did both, and in the context of moderate tax increases, this put us in the black (on an annual basis) for the first time in a very, very long time, likely since Coolidge. It should be pointed out that the Congress, as well as the mood of the country, was decidedly conservative, but still he did piss off a lot of the left wing of his base.

Now, Democrats hate the idea of decreasing social programs, so the mainstream ones hate Paul. That, and the fact that he is a Republican–or running as one–makes him anathema.

For their part, conservatives hate him because he opposes this basic idea that we need to spend more and more and more on Defense. Each of our roughly seven Naval Carrier Groups has a bigger airforce than all but the largest nations. We have thousands of strategic nuclear weapons–in radar evading bombers, missile silos, and nuclear submarines, a triad those alive in the Reagan years will readily remember.

In 2010 we spent nearlyh $700 billion on Defense. In second place was the Commissar’s Oligarchy of China, at $114 billion. It is a valid question: is this really defense?

We have spy satellites up the yin-yang, but would it not make more sense to spend some small, small percentage of this developing the best human intelligence networks on the planet? The war we are fighting is in large measure one of interdiction, of preventing in particular WMD’s from getting used here. Given the dynamics of the situation, it certainly helps denying safe haven to terrorists by occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, but think about it: absent good information, can we really say for certain safe havens cannot be created anyway?

And in any event, as I have argued, we lose some ten times the number of people in car accidents annually that we lost on 9/11. We have lost MORE military personnel in war than died on that day.

And here is the $10 trillion question: can we be CERTAIN that all the death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan has worked to prevent terrorist attacks that would otherwise have taken place? Waterboarding people with information is to me a no brainer. Invading their nations, though? I was a hawk on both wars. But I see them going on and on and on. I see men growing up without knowing their children. One Navy Seal I talked with said he spent maybe a week with his son in his first year and a half. Same with another Navy Commander I know. Many of these people come back with mental problems that permanently change, for better or worse, their lives.

Is this national DEFENSE? Ron Paul claims to have received more in donations from military people than all the other candidates COMBINED. If this is true, it is because, having fought, killed, and suffered for freedom, they have conclude that no, it is not DEFENSE. It is certainly an offense intended as defense, but it is hard to know what might have been. I cringe saying this, since it the sort of thing the peaceniks love to latch on, but every bully claims it is in self defense.

We are not bullies, but can we hawks not at least CONSIDER the idea that maybe protecting the world from itself is not our job? There are no Nazis now, there is no Communist bloc now, and to the extent China represents a threat, it is now economic, in the form of being able to crash our economy.

Today I was reading that Paul will be ignored if he wins in Iowa, since it will only be because lefties came and voted, only to plan to vote for Obama again.

Some people don’t get out often enough. I’m not one of them. I talk with these people all the time. Just the other day a bartender who is a registered Democrat told me he would vote for Paul, but not Romney. He said if Romney gets the nod, he’s voting for Obama again.

What people need to remember, and this is CRITICAL in assessing Paul’s appeal nationally, is that he appeals both to the anti-war and the anti-government crowds, and that often both traits are found in people REGISTERED AS DEMOCRATS.

Why do the hippies have Ron Paul stickers? Because they expected Obama to let them down, and he has not let them down in letting them down. He stayed in Iraq. He stayed in Afghanistan.

More importantly, though, he continued the Patriot Act. People under his direct control started strip searching grandmothers and children. They are talking about an internet kill switch.

A principle fear of MANY Democrats was that Bush was corrupt, and under the control of corporate interests, and intended to institute a totalitarian regime. I saw this over and over and over.

Those same people will vote for Ron Paul in a heartbeat. The polls showing him trailing Romney by a lot are among REPUBLICANS. Paul can attract a HUGE cross-section of the very young people Obama depended on to get him elected, a cross section that will sit home and play video games if Romney or even Gingrich get the nod. They will vote for Obama, but not with enthusiasm.

This is an interesting election. In rejecting all the things that enable government to grow, he has something to alienate every priviledged bureaucrat and lobbyist, but something to actually make a difference for ordinary Americans.

Ask yourself this question: among the candidates, who is most likely to make radical changes to our absolutely unsustainable status quo? Someone who has been saying it needed to be done for 30 years, or people who just got small government religion last year?

Few thoughts, at least for me. This is disorganized, but I’m going to go drink some beer, and buy a Christmas present for my oldest.

In my lifetime I cannot ever recall seeing a serious candidate–he is second in Iowa and third nationally in the polls I read–as carefully ignored by all media as Ron Paul.

If the primaries are undecided by the time they get to my state, he will get my vote.

I have long been a hawk, thinking we needed to go out and meet the enemies of America proactively, on their soil, and not ours. Like many others, I have long invoked the memory of Munich and the fallacious “peace in our time” negotiated there, and noted often that Churchill always called World War 2 the “unnecessary war”.

But we do not face a Nazi Germany. We do not face any coherent foe at all. We face a disorganized mob of radicals. I agree with the basic concept that they should not be granted safe places for organizing. At the same time, all we need in Afghanistan, in my view, is sufficient troops to trim the wings of the radicals from time to time. If they are organizing obvious training camps, we hit them and everyone dies or gets arrested. This benefits us and the Afghan government, and most of the people.

In the end, we have massive military power, far greater than that of any power before us, or present on the Earth today. It’s not even close.

What we have lacked is credibility. Saddam Hussein defied us and the UN because he thought we would never invade. We did. This provided a good lesson to many around the world.

At the same time, our greatest dangers, now, are from economic chaos and collapse, both of which are actually made worse by our massive military spending (although made “most worst” by our unfunded social spending mandates, by far).

I’m willing to give Paul a shot. I watched this video, and there are plainly some mistakes. Mossadegh was no Communist, but the Soviets were very actively trying to organize a coup to overthrow him so they could get access to Iranian oilfields. The Shah was no saint, but was much more humane than the radicals who followed him, and the Shah’s overthrow–far from being inevitable–was only made possible by Carter’s decision to abandon him, to cut off all support and aid, and refuse to allow the use of American assets to protect and defend him.

The poignant moment for me, though, was at the end (yes, the thing is plainly trying to tug on heartstrings), when children saw their fathers for the first time in a long time.

I know many, many soldiers, and deployments are hard. They change peoples personalities. They end marriages. They distance children from parents who were unable to be in their lives. This is true even of ordinary deployments, where the soldier, sailor, Marine, airman comes back psychologically normal.

Being a student of history, I think back to the Romans. The Roman Empire became as big as it did because they kept pushing the borders back to protect from barbarians. They would conquer one set of them, then be attacked anew from the new border by another set.

Now, Rome fell in large measure due to the failure of Augustus to establish a clear method of transferring power, which in turn led to numerous internecine conflicts that led to the decay of the caliber of the Legions, and the necessity of in effect using mercenaries. It did not fall because it was an Empire.

But it is also clear that no matter how far out they went, the fighting, somewhere, never stopped. They never conquered Germany. If memory serves, they may have conquered parts of Iraq, but not Iran. That’s where the Parthians were, who at one point–again if memory serves–captured and I believe killed a Roman emperor.

The United States is plainly not an Empire. You take stuff when you are an Empire. We don’t do that. We on the contrary spend money to build things, then leave. But the lesson here is that if you can’t end the fighting anyway, why not become so powerful on our home turf that no one can even consider attacking us, then waiting until credible, actionable threats emerge?

We are not going to invade Iran. Nor do I think a credible military solution short of that exists. To my mind, the rational solution is deterrance. Yes, many of them are nuts–or act nuts–but are they really going to risk the destruction of their nation when there is nothing in their actual theology to give them reason to think the Mahdi’s emergence can be coerced through stupidity and violence? Some believe this, but my suspicion is that much of this is merely bluffing. If you can convince someone you are nuts, you can get a lot of concessions.

Few thoughts.

My kids have reached the point where they are asking about infinity. Within the last week, I have had discussions with each of them, about living forever with one, and about an infinite universe with the other.

You really can’t imagine infinity, any more than you can imagine God. But you can feel love, and love fills up all that emptiness.

I will add as a footnote that this word “love” has been mangled beyond recognition. It has been twisted and pulled and pushed, triangulated, managed, abused. People “love” football. They “love” Doritos. There was a “summer of love” (with lots of humping, and no few number of pregnancies, but no stability, and nothing enduringly good created). We call it “falling in love” when our innate need for procreation finds a compatible hormonal mix across the gender aisle–or even within the same gender section.

Love to me is alternating solitude with communion. You cannot love if you cannot create, and in my view you cannot create unless you are capable of existing as a stand alone human being, something which necessarily means the capacity for solitude, which simply means that you an agent, a sovereign entity, responsible for yourself, even when you are with others. You are not leaning. A group of people like this will sometimes becomes more than the sum of the parts. They will at times feel an energy of connection. This is love.

To be clear, love is not desperate. It is not clinging. It is not “needing” someone. To say that you need someone is not to love them, but to demand they love you. This is not love.

Have to roll. I always cringe using this word, even though it does have its place. I have seen it abused so often, and wanted to speak a bit on it.