Category: Uncategorized

Social media means that we see–or think we see–what everyone else is up to.  We see what they show us.  And much of it–according to the people who created it, who run it, and who have become immensely wealthy through it–runs on the fear of missing out.

And much so called conspicuous consumption–say, photos of your skiing vacation in some expensive resort, with top quality skis and clothing and meals–consists mainly in the experience of the jealousy of others, and how much they admire you.  You may have had a shitty time and spent money you didn’t have on things you didn’t enjoy, while spending time with friends and family who annoy you as often as gratify you, but you can get the REAL experience of a certain quality of attention from others.  That is not made up.  That is authentic.

And since he is kind of a cultural touchstone, even if most people don’t know or remember it, Jack Kerouac (and Neal Cassady) more or less evoked FOMO for everyone stuck in a stable situation.  Life, we were told, is OUT THERE.  If you are a square, you are MISSING OUT.

But they both died young and stupidly.  Whatever life they were looking for, they never actually found it.

Here is what I will suggest: all of us should more properly be concerned with missing out on INTERNAL STATES SUBJECT TO CONSCIOUS CULTIVATION.  I can’t say if you do yoga every day that something magical will happen, but I can just about guarantee you will be more patient, and over time more relaxed and cheerful.  That is something you can’t buy.

Sitting still and doing nothing is moving around and doing a great deal, sometimes.  If you just watch the whirl in your head, it can be more entertaining and certainly more useful than an equivalent time spent watching people playing make believe on a box that would stop working the moment you unplugged it.

What you are missing out on, the most important part, is not out there at all.

And imagine you achieve whatever your dream is.  Let’s say you want to star in a Hollywood movie, or win the lottery and go on a trip around the world.  Those feelings are ALREADY accessible to you.  I honestly think that a sufficiently trained spirit, with enough focus and imagination, can conjure ANYTHING from nothing.  I really think this is possible.  Why not?  All the neurological and energetic states that are possible for you should be possible at all times, right?  If the buttons and switches are there now, why couldn’t you push them now?

I don’t know who is trying to rule the world, if there are competing groups and individuals, and multiple agendas, or how any of that works.  But that they want FEELINGS is obvious.

Maybe they want the feeling of power.  In my view the feeling of power is the feeling of a cessation of fear, for a moment.  Nobody can hurt you, since you are in charge.  Not infrequently it is combined with cruelty, which is delight in shaming others and inflicting fear on them.  Those habits and proclivities in turn come from having had shame and fear inflicted on YOU.  And that shame and fear is not exorcised by cruelty; it is merely abated for a time, which creates a temporary feeling of pleasure.  But your inner knowing knows that it will return.  It always returns, and will do so until healed.

Or maybe people THINK they want to help people.  In that case, they want the  sense of self satisfaction in knowing, or thinking, that they have helped people.  That is still a feeling.

All of life is state management.  All of life is understanding and working with the colors of emotions, of knowing them intimately and channeling and using them with skill and grace.

In important respects, evil is nothing other than deep emotional stupidity.  It is running away from your hearts desire in the name of your hearts desire.  It is self defeating.  I don’t doubt it has its moments.  I don’t think any of us are innocent of occasionally rejoicing in the failure of our enemies.  But that is nothing to base a life on.

I am now going to slowly work through some notes I’ve made over the past week.

Discuss amongst yourselves:

Conservatives have similar but diverse beliefs.  Some are Ayn Randian Libertarians, some Christian Fundamentalists, some–like me–Old School Liberals.  What unites is certain core understandings about economics and the nature of government.  These beliefs can be articulated, discussed, and debated, but the principles involved for most really don’t change.  They are stable.

Leftists, if they want to remain friends with their “friends”, if they want to keep their jobs at left wing places, MUST be more or less in lock step with the Dominant Idea of the moment.  But those ideas vary continually, and not infrequently contradict some earlier idea.  As I keep saying, feminism is not compatible with transgenderism.  You have to pick.  It is to her credit that Joanne Rowling picked, and stuck with her pick.  That in my mind makes her a Liberal, and not a Leftist.  She is someone who believes something, and doesn’t change it with the tides of morally incoherent fashion.

As another example, importing limitless immigrants illegally is OBVIOUSLY damaging to those already here, and already struggling economically.  Illegal Mexicans hurt legal blacks.  Open borders are incompatible with claims to care about the black community, or to want to improve their lives in any way, but particularly financially.

So politically, you have a range of STABLE opinions.  Broadly speaking, all such opinions can be qualified as Liberal.

Off the charts, where the dragons are, you have limitless moral ambiguity, continual motion, and a sole constant value of conformity to a mutable agenda.

And this mutability comes with an emotional cost.  You cannot not be a fundamentally emotionally superficial person and change your beliefs on a dime.  This superficiality breeds anger, and it breeds emotional alienation.  Yes, you are connected to your fellow storm troopers, but all of you have to fear continually being disconnected from everyone else by the sort of small error or slowness of correction, which everyone is on the continual hunt for.

You cannot be forgiven when no values are in place, and so everyone has to live in constant fear and hypervigilance, lest their fellow travelers travel on without them, and beat them up as they leave.

That is a truly ugly way to live, and the reason now for so much public ugliness.

You know, it’s been a minute since I posted on here, and the reason is that, as my former father in law used to say, I had to see a man about a horse.

And this horse seeing involved some building in my own life.  Some physical work, to make something more beautiful.

And it hit me that one of the biggest obstacles all of us face to building beautiful things in our lives is the consciousness that they will all be undone.  Everything will pass and fall.  If the bastards conquer this planet, whatever they build will pass and fall eventually, as I explored at length some years ago in a post titled “Perfection”.

I think in my own case much of my own procrastination stems from a denial of Time.  If I just put something off, then I can pretend time isn’t real, that I have all the time in this life I need.

I’ve probably quoted it before, but I like John Mellancamp’s line “growing up means growing old and then dyin’; and dyin’ to me don’t sound like all that much fun.”

So we–and I think there are a lot of people like me–put off until tomorrow what we could to today, for the simple reason that we want to feel like we are going to live forever.  It is a comforting delusion, that is not just pure laziness.

We are born and meant to work.  We are born to do a reasonable days work every day, then sleep soundly.  This is our birthright, our heritage.  And most true, lasting pleasure come from work.

And this is where I think having a belief in an after-life–or continuation of life–helps a lot.  It is scientifically defensible, and arguably the default position from a truly empirical perspective.

And from this perspective, the task is not to build and expect anything to last.  What you are ACTUALLY building is the ability to build.  We have to learn how to learn, and learn how to build.  It is a habit that is worth cultivating, that you keep by it become part of who you ARE.

So what we term laziness really needs to be examined more carefully.  Yes, being an obsessive workaholic is not healthy, because it amounts to a continual deflection from unwanted inner emotions that kind of combine and project out as anxiety, but being lazy is just as bad, and arguably worse.  At least the workaholic can point to this, that and the other thing at the end of life.

So what is laziness?  It is what I said: a rejection of death.  What else?  I am typing out “loud” now.  Smoking a cigar.

I think in our society, refusing to work is also a form of self assertion.  Work is made to feel shameful because we are so often treated like peons, like slaves, like undignified little animals, doing stupid things that are boring, over and over, while someone else gets to play with the profits.  In our world, that is a big part of it.

And I think, too, that we DO need silence, down town, and play time.  Play, in its own way, is serious work. It requires energy, focus, attention.  Story telling, dancing, singing, games: these are forms of what might be termed Cultural work, or “social” work, even if that term is already taken.

What we are not meant to do is listlessly and mindlessly consume.  What we are not meant to do is watch endless hours of TV that does not occupy our minds, but rather satisfies an animalian appetite for violence and spectacle, but poorly.  Hunting, as one example, is a physically healthy, and perhaps emotionally healthy, for most, activity.  You are out there in the wild, on the plain or the woods, sensing, looking, prowling, aiming.

But compare a comedy on TV with a game of Charades played with actual people.  The emotional need underlying both is the same, but in the first you learn nothing because you don’t participate; and in the second you do.  It is like a tanning bed compared to the full sun.

And of course trauma changes our relationship to Time too.  Dissociation is timeless, and going back into time means recalling all those feelings that hurt so much.

As I have said before, this blog really comes from an emotionally unhealthy place for me.  I am driven.  It is fortunate that I happen to be unusually intelligent and observant (I think), but I would find something like this, where I said stupid things if that was all I could do, if I were not able to do this.

I had a brief moment of relative freedom from this burden the day before yesterday.  I did a neurofeedback session, and came out feeling like a injured animal.  I went to my bed and laid there, hurt, like a dog licking its wounds.  But the pressure of continual thought was gone.  I felt no need to say anything to anyone.  In its own way, it was great.

And as I said in the previous post, you can’t make the future brighter by making the present more gray.  My mission is to learn fearlessness, which is to say emotional present-ness in all circumstances, which is to say, only feeling fear when fear is an appropriate reaction.

And actually I will append a note I made myself the other day: it is acceptable to let a person or accident rob you of life, but never an idea.

And what I mean should be clear enough.  We all die.  But we should not spend every moment of every day trying not to die by thinking of all the ways something could go south.  I don’t need to be gaming which exit I will use if a shooter comes through that door when I am eating out.  I don’t need to be rehearsing drawing my gun for hours every day.

What will get you will most likely come out of left field.  If you work daily on developing situational awareness, which is BETTER if you omit the fear, because more complete, less blinkered by the tunnel effect, and COMPETENCE–which is the ability to plan out your action, then execute it (OODA), then change it if need be–then that is your best chance at surviving whatever.  You can do dry runs in literally everything you do, from taking out the garbage to filling out your taxes.

It is not only the samurai whose destiny is death.

And I will comment, too, that I think many soldiers and police and firefighters consciously choose dangerous professions as means of concretizing ambient fear which would otherwise have no obvious source.  If I start out afraid, it becomes a positive in a place where true physical danger is often present.

I myself wanted to be a cop, and I think for that reason.  Now, obviously this doesn’t apply to all of them.  I have met some truly brave–relaxed and fearless–soldiers, who operated from what appeared to me truly idealistic motives.  And I will actually add that the BEST soldiers I’ve met were very relaxed.  Most of the SEAL’s and others of that sort I’ve known were like that.  To do that job well you don’t practice fear: you practice relaxed competence.

And I will add that in that world, the ones I admire most are the CCT’s.  Their job is uniquely stressful, so to adapt they have to become uniquely calm and fearless.  They have to deal with the same firefights everyone else does.  They incur the same risks infiltrating wherever.  And typically they do so with people from another service, and usually while carrying more weight.

And their JOB is to do math, to maintain 3d situational awareness, and to THINK, to think HARD, all while under severe stress.  You cannot do that job without just not giving a shit at some level.

In that world, John Chapman, and Jim Hoteling–who spent something like 40 hours climbing a mountain in the dark with a 130 pound pack, then immediately provided many hours of accurate CAS, in my recollection–are two of my heroes.

The studs are not the ones teaching classes on survival and urban combat.  The studs are the ones who do that work, then come home and are fully emotionally present to their families.

 

For reasons I have articulated at length and for some time, there are ample reasons to be afraid.  Nearly all the people operating our apparatus of State seem to be for sale, and there is plenty of money to buy them with.

If President Trump had accomplished nothing else, making this obvious to the mass of actually woke Americans would have been sufficient to call him a great President.  How anyone remains asleep when we know so much is a mystery I continue to puzzle over.  No doubt it mostly relates to laziness, complacency, intellectual obesity, and the primacy of fear as a human motivation.

But something hit me yesterday I will share.  I was wondering, how can anyone look at all this and not be afraid?  And then I realized I needed to invert it: when danger is PRESENT fear is appropriate and natural, but not until then.

Here is the thing: why should I feel, all day and every day, what is only appropriate when action is possible?  This is how you lose life.  I am not protecting my life with this fear, I am shrinking it.  If you want a long, good, free life, START NOW.  You can’t control when someone might take it from you, but for God’s sake don’t take it from yourself.

Now, like most things, this is easier said than done, but this is an interesting hobby, no?  Learning to live without fear when no immediate threat is present, no gun pointing at my head, without also falling asleep?

This is a great game.  I am going to start trying to play it effectively every day moving forward.  And if I lose my fear, then it will still come back when I need it for something.

It occurred to me the other day that the de facto assaults on small business–to the benefit of Big Business–has the political effect of making it easier to turn political propaganda offensives on and off like spigots.  The recent near universal and instantaneous “Pride” (another word usurped by the Left, along with, among many others, woke, and the symbol of the rainbow, which was once quite innocent and in my mind at least associated with happy children) offensive in Corporate America is a case in point.

When all the largest corporations can simultaneously begin saying the same things, and pushing the same agendas, they have more or less become fully politicized, and another front in the culture war, one run by the same Generals, and directed to the same ends the agents in media are.

What the Left wants, obviously, is less and less “cranky” small business owners putting signs on their doors that don’t comply with their agenda, which in the end amounts to turning us all into frightened serfs, working diligently for peanuts and various opiates, including violent TV, which I might term vicarious participation in sacrificial violence not different in principle from gladiatorial contests.  Doritos, craft beer and CSI is our own Panem et Circenses.  We are even paying people to stay home, as the Romans once did.

And the same basic idea applies to police departments.  What is happening, more or less is that these cynical, truly evil human beings are denigrating the actual police trying to do their dangerous and in the best of times often thankless jobs.  The honest ones will leave.  The corrupt, politicized ones will be taken care of and promoted.

The mid-term goal is to use the politics of racial grievance, coupled with the vast increases in actual crime directed at blacks BY blacks, to both push increasingly centralized control of local police departments–another intermediate institution–as well as the disarming of law abiding citizens.

They are doing the same thing in the military.  They are doing their best to push out honest patriots, and replace them with people like Milley Vanilley, who is to honest patriotism roughly what that pop band was to genuine artistic ability.  Teaching racism is the OPPOSITE of everything this nation stands for, and that is what CRT is.  I was watching a video on Front Page Magazine the other day, where people attending a CRT conference in Somewhere, USA were LITERALLY capable of blaming white people for all our problems in this country, then IN THE NEXT SENTENCE denigrate judging racial groups en masse.

That sort of stupidity has to be trained.  It cannot occur naturally in an organically sound human being.  If they don’t have brain damage, that sort of thing should not be possible.  It is conditioned, and the conditioning of course starts with the perversion of words.

In my personal view Milley–who is an absolute disgrace, and yes we do have the right to judge anyone in public office–has done more to damage the reputation of our Armed Services than anyone since John Kerry, who started his career by creating the myth of the fucked up Vietnam veteran, which he himself knew to be a lie when he was telling it.  It’s appropriate he too is part of this whole shit show.

And we have the various National Guards, but I wonder how they too are being undermined.  Perhaps bringing them to Washington created opportunities for indoctrination.  And in any event, they are more or less “temp” soldiers, appended to full time combat units in most cases when they are short staffed; and otherwise used by the States as trained and logistically solid cadres to deal with natural disasters and on occasion internal violence larger than the police can deal with.

So you look at the landscape, and all the possibility for “weirdness”, for local ideosyncracy, is being slowly erased.  Roughly a third of small businesses were destroyed by national and local policy, while Amazon and its brethren (whose motto might be Big Business for Big Government) posted record profits.

Most local police departments are being taken over by lunatic Leftists, and ordered to do non-sensical things that are making the streets much more dangerous, the police officers themselves furious, and pushing out all the good people.  And obviously the crime will be used to support gun grabbing that is completely counterproductive.

Always remember: more legal guns, less crime.  This is fact, and borne out in many volumes of data the world over.  And if you want to flip that, you can: more ILLEGAL guns, more crime.  Both hold true.

Local media has largely been coopted long ago.  Your local newspaper is likely owned by a conglomerate.  Gannett owns an awful lot of them.  Same with your local TV news.

The internet remains relatively free, for now, but obviously Social Media, writ large, is where most of the talking and exchanging happens, and that too is under relatively centralized control.  Facebook talks to Twitter who talks to Google, and if they want to make something or someone disappear, its a few mouse clicks.

I wonder, actually, AT THIS MOMENT what stories have been fully disappeared?  We read about ones that are posted and then removed.  We don’t read about, obviously, the ones that are killed before birth.

I continue to wonder why there would be hope.  But something in me continues to feel that something good remains possible.  I don’t know why.

Last night I was dreaming I was on a plane rounding a bend, and the sun came out in a most beautiful way.  And we were climbing steadily, and I realized the pilots were competent, and I went back to sleep.

You know, what the world asks is specific and literal.  It is countable.  It is numerical.  It is nameable.  Once you pay it, everything else–which is most of life–is yours.

Most people fail, across sometimes long lifetimes, to realize how much intangible wealth they were born with, and how easy it is to create more.

Caesar has no interest in your soul (or did not until Communism).  Buy him off cheap.  He will never know or care.

If you were hoping for something sappy, I am going to disappoint you.

I will say this: if you NEED to say “I love you”, it is only because there might have been doubt.  For people deeply in love, saying it is superfluous.

Or so I suppose.  I haven’t had this experience.  I may not ever have it in this life.  That is OK.

But I’m going to let my grumpy old man out of the closet and say this: most of the time, men say this to women to help them–the women–rationalize their way through a long series of warning signs. Women say it to men to storm the gates, and try and win power.

Now, obviously, I GET that men REALLY DO feel love for women, and women for men.  I am a cynic, but I am also a realist, and obviously there are happy stories out there.  Not enough, but they do happen. Truths are told.  Souls are exposed and the trust rewarded.  It often ends badly, but not always.  Not always.  Most of life is rolling dice, and sometimes you get lucky when you deserved bad luck, and vice versa.

Most of the time, of course, what you might reasonably have expected to happen, does in fact happen.  This still somehow often surprises people.  Mon Dieu.

But if I might continue to indulge my obsessiveness, my four stomach (I think that is right) cow, Camus’ more or less said this of Rieux and his mother.  They loved each other.  Both knew it.  Neither said it.  And nothing was lost by this.  The words were superfluous.

Often what needs to be said will be a lie, and what cannot be said is the only truth.

That sounds deep.  Maybe it is.  I’m on my fourth beer, so I’ll leave it to you to determine.  Is there a three quarters deep?  Is it an either/or proposition?  Is there a deep-ish?  Deep with reservations?  Almost deep?

Yes, that is me joking.  I am however also listening to King Lear, and wondering what Cordelia’s problem was.  Unlike her sisters, she was inarticulate but sincere.

This is a fascinating world.  I am intrigued by damn near everything I see.  I really am a fucking dog, sniffing everything and wagging my tail and especially when drinking smiling my dog smile.

I read that an FBI agent got arrested down in Louisiana yesterday for in effect being a pedophile and all around creep.  That was on Gateway Pundit, and apparently he is the second in a few months.

That got me to thinking about Ted Gunderson.  Watch this talk, if you are not familiar with his name and the broad claims he made: https://youtu.be/BplUD6kQYuU

Obviously, if I were a Rothschild and looking at the perhaps trillions I JUST made through this engineered disaster, looking at the people I own, the institutions I own, the corporations, the schools, the printing presses, looking at all that, I would feel pretty confident.

Me, of course, my brain tells me that if we live in a world where what just happened, and continues to happen, is even POSSIBLE, that corruption and cowardice are so endemic, there is little reason to anticipate a return to sanity.

It is what it is.  My best way of fighting is working daily to be a bit calmer, a bit happier, a bit kinder, and a bit wiser.  That is my play.

But all that got me to thinking about these poor victims of behavioral AND PERCEPTUAL modification through structured torture, aka brainwashing.

The basic method is one of creating so much panic and pain that a person dissociates to escape, and into a personality which is fully and reflexively compliant.  A robot, in the ideal, whose robotic behavior can be turned on and off, like in the Winter Soldier.

As William James described at length, hypnotic alters are relatively easy to generate even for a good hypnotist with a good subject.  The issue is that the alters are dull and uncreative.  They are not real, in the senses we would understand from a common sense perspective.  They are splinters cut off from the whole.

Here is the claim I will make, and the reason for this post: no one CAPABLE of doing such a thing to another human being could do so without THEMSELVES being already robotic, already trance driven, already a ready and willing slave and prisoner.  How does such sadism arise?  Well, it was inflicted on them, in some way.  They were humiliated, terrified, caught, and trapped.

Prison guards still spend much of their lives in prison.  And people who willingly inflict pain on others are just making them more similar to themselves.  What they do to others was done to them, not literally, but in spirit.

Humiliation that was poured in as shame comes out as cruelty and arrogance, ruthlessness and hostility.

I continue to wonder about this world.  We have answers to all the Big Questions which are decent, and we are positioned to make all those answers vastly better, through the intelligent, thoughtful, and morally aware use of science.

But a flame from long ago continues to burn through this world, to turn wisdom into ashes, joy into misery, and plenty into want.

I am certainly neither the first nor the last to contemplate this in my minds eye.  But it’s the first time I have done it for myself today.

What I would suggest, though, is that ruling the world is not worth a bucket of spit.  Those roaches crawling up and down the spine don’t disappear, there.  That quivering in the stomach does not disappear. No amount of power is enough for one individual to end or even diminish their pain for long, and obviously if power winds up in one set of hands, there will always be another keen for it.

The spectacle worth pursuing is a happy, prosperous planet, filled with morally intelligent, capable, and sturdy human beings, living in balance with one another and the cosmos, who work and play, dance and sing, and who do not fear death.

One of the latent benefits of both the fraud surrounding the efforts to install Joe Biden, and the farcical anti-scientific narratives surrounding COVID is that their sheer audacity and scope make it scary for people to even CONSIDER that such ideas might have substantial validity.

Nobody would subject a billion people to desperate poverty, would they?  Not on purpose?  Nobody would enlist an army of people and develop a detailed tactical and strategic plan to completely alter an American Presidential election, would they?  It’s crazy, right?  Can’t be true, right?

Ordinary people can easily imagine small lies, told here and there, on small scales, and which affect few people.  But few can imagine 20,000 people working to defraud American voters of their rightfully elected President, and rightfully elected Congress.

Few can imagine that Anthony Fauci has been lying since last March, that he participated in CREATING this virus–and possibly even releasing it, although I personally don’t think that was part of HIS plan–then participated in suppressing the most obvious life-saving measures, like the perfectly safe HCQ and Ivermectin, and vitamin and mineral supplementation.

To even THINK these ideas may be true is traumatic for many people.  It fills their guts with fear.  They feel rage and despair welling up in equal measures, which they can easily dispel by doing nothing more complicated than agreeing with their TV.

You have on the one hand unbearable existential anxiety, and on the other perfect peace and complacency.  You need a strong mind to value truth over peace.

I might put it this way: to recognize a kick in the nuts you have to have BEEN kicked in the nuts.  Most Americans have lived peaceful, decadent, slothful (outside of work) lives, filled with little thought, and less honest difficulty.  Most Americans seem to have forgotten that people lie, cheat and steal, and not infrequently while simultaneously claiming to be working for peace, prosperity and justice.

Europeans have less excuse.  In their case, they have good educational systems, but they seem to, if anything, be even more submissive to their own “experts”.

I have both light and dark in me.  And I can consult both when the occasion calls for it.

I think it is much easier for demons to live in noisy places, and I mean that both emotionally and literally.

And actually I would add to that the cluttered intellectual landscape of too many words which mean too little.