Moderates United

I think a functional measure of maturity is how easily the sense of helplessness is triggered in a given person.

Peter Levine speaks of “restoring goodness.”  Here is a sample video, which I found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8b-6C-5wQo

It occurs to me that what he is speaking about is the resolution of irrational shame.  People who are innocent, who have done no wrong, feel good.  I think feeling like a good person is something which comes naturally to relatively normal people who are, in fact, good people.  Neurologically, feeling shame and feeling good are on opposing ends of the affective spectrum.

This raises the interesting question: are people who are shamed into socially desirable behavior actually good?  I would answer: no, not really, to precisely the extent their own personal feelings would otherwise lead them in other directions.

This leads to the further consideration that a society, as a whole, which acts to shame people into conformity cannot really be called a good society.  Think of Communists.  Think of Southern Baptists.  The effect is the same, other than that Southern Baptists do not and never have felt the need to murder millions of people.

Shame and violence, of course, go together, but nowhere in world history are the two combined so inextricably as in regimes like that of modern China.  First there was the physical violence, the concentration camps and psychological torture camps.  Then the Cultural Revolution where millions were murdered by psychopathic children.  Current dictator Xi Jinping was apparently exiled when his father fell into disfavor during that cataclysmic series of atrocities directly inspired by Mao.

Now, the violence is indirect.  It exists in the “social credit score”, which is a more or less direct measurement of how much shame an individual should feel according to a government which, if it wanted to, would know how many shits you take a day, and certainly knows how many cigarettes you smoke, what books you are reading, what websites you visit, and how many and which video games you own.

All of this, though, is on a continuum.  Shaming can and should be seen as violence by other means.

Shame has a place, like all human emotions.  But it rarely leads anywhere genuinely good.  Its value is most conspicuous in its absence.  Chuck Schumer, for example, seems incapable of feeling shame.  In him, it would accomplish some good.

Liberal: I care about people, therefore I’m a Democrat.

Leftist: I am a Democrat, therefore I care about people.

And I will note that the evolution of the Norman Lear’s of the world–again, compare 1980 Norman Lear to 2019 Norman Lear–has consisted in “evolving” from the first to the second, as their proposed solutions to an array of social problems have failed and they have lied to themselves and everyone else about it.

They don’t want to hear our shit, because our shit is mainly pointing out that their shit is in fact shit.  Vanity is a powerful emotion, particularly when tied to time and habit.

I think all editorial writers who make predictions should end their columns: I will revisit this in X months.

Paul Krugman, for example, talking about the economic devastation of a Trump Presidency, could have said: “I predict death and famine, but I will revisit this in 9 months” and then DO it.

Honest, serious  people would have no issue with this.

The current crop, though: MAJOR problem.

It’s all about selling, yo.  Get me through this week, and then another week, and equally stupid people.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131125-do-the-velvets-beat-the-beatles


“The Velvets merged low and high art that disdained the middle, and made it cool to be not just different, but to amplify those differences. Cale called it “a theory of stubbornness”.


Theory of stubbornness.  I love that.  Most everything good was once created by somebody who pissed a lot of people off, who shocked them, who failed to comply with “obvious” standards.


All Elvis did, to repeat a cliche, was make the innovations and shocking behavior of blacks acceptable–after a time, to be sure, but there he was on stage and eventually on Ed Sullivan–to white people, which is to say the world.  He had a fantastic voice, to be sure, but he wasn’t the only one. 


I’m drinking a few beers, chilling out, and trying to understand, to feel, what made the Velvet Underground so influential.  


It’s so hard, decades after the fact, to hear music as it would have been heard when first played.  It’s so hard to really GROK “influence.”


I have never, to take another example, REALLY understood Bebop (some of the comments on some of the videos I watched actually referenced Bebop, but I don’t know what their context is; my own is that I have tried to GET this music, and took a class in college on jazz history), as it was understood at the time.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like Charlie Parker.  But to understand it in CONTEXT is, I think, to hear it very, very differently.


These are imaginative exercised I will never be able to do properly.  This is what I am choosing to do tonight though while knocking a few down.

Assessing the Constitutionality of a law is really asking whether A law violates THE law. And THE law was crafted with some 2,500 years of history in mind, history which showed pretty clearly all the ways liberty is lost in creeping ways.

The problem people like Mitt Romney have with Trump is that their apparent sobriety and sense of decorum are an act. He is not serious. His fellow RINO’s are not serious. They stand down to save face every fucking time they are challenged. They are Milquetoast assholes, who by their actual BEHAVIOR betray a lack of principle, and if you lack principle, no matter what act you may put on, no matter how you dress, or how seriously you talk, and how obsequious to abusive standards of behavior you may be, you utterly and completely lack gravitas.

Here is a counterintuitive truth: Trump fundamentally has more gravitas than Mittens. Trump has beliefs and he acts on them, consistently and daily. Mitts has beliefs right until the moment he has to be impolite to call bullshit on the latest left wing outrage, and then he is a fucking scared puppy on the corner. I personally will never forget his failure to call Obama a liar to his face, when he was lied to, to his face.

I was in a comfortable little diner the other day, in the sort of red-necky part of town, and was struck by how badly most of the people hobbling into and out of there walked.  They were fat, in general, but over and above that many seemed to struggle just physically moving their bodies.  Yes, at the time of day I was there most were a bit aged, but they were aging terribly.  They were no doubt all regularly consulting physical therapists who were asking them if they were doing their exercises to which they were answering no.

And a suggestion I have made before reoccurred to me: if Americans slept on mattresses on the floor, and sat on the floor when watching TV and eating, the way they do in some (perhaps most: I don’t know) Asian countries like Japan and I think Korea, they would HAVE to take better care of themselves, and the very act of getting down and back up would ensure a basic level of mobility.  I sleep on the floor and have to do a lunge every time I get up.  It’s a good thing.

We have a decent life expectancy in this country, but we age terribly.  Our old people take dozens of medications daily and spend much of the latter years of their lives sedentary on couches watching television.

Actually, on that note I will insert parenthetically without the parentheses, that if we eliminated TV, and all other ways of consuming media, such as computers, smartphones and tablets, that our national IQ would go up nearly instantly.  That is my view.  Everyone is beguiled.  A spell has been cast, which people have willingly embraced.

One other note: high blood pressure.  I am a large man.  6′, 285 or so.  A boss told me a couple years ago I look like “someone who could hurt somebody”.  That is likely true, but that is not an aspiration of mine.  Violence is stupid in nearly all cases.

My blood pressure should be through the roof.  But the last time I had it measured, about two weeks ago, when seeing a nurse (I will note for anyone living in a Blue State: around here, you can see a Nurse Practitioner at the grocery store for $70.  You don’t need an appointment, and you can pay cash if you are uninsured.) for an eye irritation.  110/80.  I’m not buying this 70 stuff: I think the pharmaceutical companies pushed that.

But a week and a half earlier I was 145/90.  I had actually bought myself a home tester because I figured this was something to keep an eye on.

So I developed a plan.  Here is the thing: blood pressure is called hypertension.  It is called hypertension because your veins and arteries are not pliable (a word Tom Brady has not yet succeeded in trademarking).  They are stiff and rigid.  So what to do?  FLEX them.

How to do that? 

1) Full body myofascial release and a reasonable program of stretching, using balls and rollers of various sorts and sizes.  Work from the traps down to the feet.  As an inevitable result, you are kneading everything that carries blood within a few inches of the surface, and with the stretching probably going even deeper.

2) Cold showers long enough to elicit a response.  I’m doing what I guess are called Scottish showers, where you take a normal shower, then just turn it to cold when you are done for 30 seconds to a minute or so, maybe a tad longer if it feels good, which sometimes it does.

3) IMPORTANT: saunas.  20 minutes 5 days a week.  I have taken to going into the gym and just doing this, even if I don’t work out.  Cold and hot should not be alternated, in my view, since it confuses the body.  But both, in the course of a day, are I think helpful.

4) Weight Training.  Full body movements, especially, like the squat and deadlift, must in my view vastly increase the pressure on the system for a moment, then release it.  This is very much like stretching your blood vessels.

5) Some form of NO booster.  I take Animal Pump.  Again, this is supposed to loosen up your veins.

6) Relaxation.  I do many things.  Kum Nye, EmWave2, Neurofeedback, Spoonk (30 minutes while listening to the sounds of thunderstorms), Floating, and walks in nature.

It’s a comprehensive HEALTH approach.  You’ve likely seen the cartoon about the long line in front of the pill counter, and the non-existent line in front of the Lifestyle Change counter.

Me, I don’t want to age like a typical American.  Fuck that.

It’s odd, because I am not a Christian, but it feels to me like Christians, as a group, are probably the single largest group able to resist the craziness flowing through our society.  I think they were a large part of Trump’s base in 2016–his infidelities and other sins notwithstanding–and that that support is growing.

Being a “Buddhist” does not seem to help.  Being a “mental health professional” does not seem to help.  All these people are caught up in the mania.

It almost feels like the angel of death is passing through the land, and that only those with crosses hanging in their homes are being spared.

Now, this is I think overwrought and vaguely histrionic.  I just woke up and was having some exceptional vivid dreams–what are called lucid dreams are not at all uncommon for me–but that is, in any event, what I am going to SAY, while processing how I feel.

I will comment, actually, that part of the reason Stranger Things was so popular is that I think we all sense there is something like the Upside Down.  There is a place where everything is connected.

I will add that I am taking a week off from news and social media.  I am much too addicted.  I call it an information fast, as I have likely shared in the past.

I am also directly confronting some dark and old forces in me, and all that media distracts me.

Kum Nye—or in this case more accurately the habits of perception which are taught and cultivated in Kum Nye—is a bit like laying traps and waiting to see what comes out. That part of me which I might term my inner terrorist, because it inflicts anxiety, inconsistency, and pain on me—requires such a set up. It will not easily reveal itself. It requires sustained patience, waiting, and alertness.

And what I “catch” are glimpses, brief images and sensations, then they are gone.

And the goal is not to kill it. It is something which had a time and a place. It was needed at one time. It no doubt saved my life at one time.

But it exists and operates in the night. It comes and goes on the darkness of my unconscious, and, trying to solve again an antique problem of long ago, it causes me pain it never sees.

One therapist might speak of a complex. Another, of Condensed Experience (Stan Grof term). Another, unreconciled and unintegrated trauma. I like the term part, which the NLP people use.

Our inner landscape really IS that in important ways. We have a default background, into which thoughts and decisions and feelings and images and sensations come and go, as in a wood or a savannah.

And the goal is to maintain a degree of wildness, of spontaneity. But with light, awareness. Let what works work in the open. Let all work for harmony and beauty.

There is obviously nothing wrong with intelligence UNLESS that is all you offer.

I’m sitting here in my car, smoking a cigar, getting ready to go in and do some work, and it is a beautiful rainy fall day. And I feel clearly whatever intelligence I personally have to offer to the world needs to be tempered by the spirit of a deer in the rain. There has to be a connected continuum? One between abstraction and experience, between the cerebral and the animal, which humans normally express in the primitivism, as seen from the detached view of Science, of ritual.

I think of Silicon Valley types, who deal daily in the abstractions of dealing with their products, and in negotiating fierce competitive terrain, all for ego and the dollars which measure success, which is to say social dick size.  11 and a half months a year this is their world. Then a number of the ho to Burning Man. They flip, in another words. Burning Man is not on a continuum, but represents a short term qualitative flip into a different quantum state.

During the rest of the year their left wing politics act as a symbolic place holder for what would be a conscience if they had one.

Fir most of them, though, their politics is the equivalent of a 400 pound man ordering a Diet Coke with a 4,000 calorie meal. It is not a replacement for actual moral health, actual moral behavior.

Oh, their lives are not my life, and moral commentary is not a replacement fir my hen work, which continues. I’ve figured a few things out that I may it may not comment on.

The same people who murdered Jeffrey Epstein–after numerous commentator’s said “they are going to murder Jeffrey Epstein”–very, very, very much want to have Trump removed from office, or at least neutered.

What else do you need to know? 

And if you doubt Epstein was killed, I would ask: do you REALLY think the FBI is EVER going to tell us what they found out about the “malfunctioning” video cameras monitoring him during his 24/7 suicide watch in a high security prison?  No: OBVIOUSLY they were tampered with, which means that OBVIOUSLY someone on the inside played a role.  This means we have a short list of suspects, none of whom will ever be made to roll.  The fix is in, from high up, and that fix includes the FBI.

And in case you missed this: https://www.infowars.com/fbi-declassifies-documents-on-secret-pedophile-group-the-finders/

After several paragraphs of redacted information, the FBI disclosed that someone “has alleged that the Finders are involved in a well-organized child abuse scheme, and that [redacted] in conjunction with the State Department, and the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence section, conspired to cover up those abuses.”

“The source reported children were used in rituals by the groups, but reported source never observed any actual child abuse,” the declassified files stated.

Subsequent searches using testimony obtained by children and witnesses led investigators to a Virginia farm where they found “evidence of satanic/cult rituals” and cages that “witnesses revealed were used to keep children during their visits to the farm.”
Search warrants were also executed at a warehouse involving “classified maps of underground tunnel/sewer system” in Washington D.C.

As I continue to say, if we use inference, and look for what sort of thing most explains what we are seeing, in my view something like this is needed.  This is beyond basic corruption.

I will note this is from official FBI files, and dates back to the 1980’s and 90’s.  Would there be any reason to suspect anything has changed, other than the level of sophistication, and degree of corruption?

We are at a flexion point.  Either we go deeper into the swamps of madness, or begin to again smell the cool air of sanity.