Moderates United

I’m quite sure I should have achieved moral clarity on this years ago.  I used to joke with my kids about CCC: Cheap Chinese Crap.

But they have literally and figuratively raped Tibet, for no reason at all.  It is not a resource rich country as far as I know.  But they literally throw Tibetan women into men’s prisons for long term rape and humiliation.  They torture women.  They have a system for identifying people who reach their wits end and set themselves on fire as a last fatal protest against the dehumanization being inflicted on their nation.  Such people are “put out” and hustled off the street within five minutes, when the system operates properly.

They operate psychological torture camps, which they–in typical Communist fashion–lie about.  They call them job training camps.  Where are the people working who have “graduated” from these camps?

They more or less directly manifest the cultural ethos of Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie, which I will note again is in my view the closest to the truth dystopian movie I have seen, at least in this stage of our possible decline into barbarous authoritarianism).  You have a plastic, pretty, cultural elite living on the backs of people made slaves BY Communist ideology.  All being a Communist REALLY means is that you can do whatever you want to whoever you want, provided you proclaim from time to time that it is “for the people”.  If the people riot in the streets, then you blame foreign agents, not your own regime.  It’s all a lie, and everyone knows it’s a lie, but it akin to a ritual peculiar to this particular form of mental and moral derangement.

And it will be like boycotting 19th and early 20th Century Britain and America, in the so-called Robber Baron era, when the worst abuses of the nascent industrial age were happening, and being mislabeled Capitalism by its enemies.  Chinese workers have no protections.  Chinese environmental regulations are non-existent.  People work themselves to death.  They die from preventable accidents.  They die from being poisoned by their environment.  All while an elite laughs and drinks champagne and complains about how horrible the rest of the world is.

And while it is bad enough that Planned Parenthood harvests organs from babies they kill in the process, the Chinese elite seemingly has the power to order, say, a Falun Gong member seized when their alcoholism causes them to need a new liver.  Falun Gong live healthy lives, so their livers are in good shape.  The troops pull them from the street, or their home, throw them into a mobile ambulance with the ability to perform operations, pull out what they want, then put the body where they put the last body.  Pure evil.  But this is how I understand it most likely works.

Finally (for now), they are one of the worst polluters of the ocean.  As I think I mentioned, I pointed out to my environmentally conscious youngest that China was one of the largest polluters, not America.  She replied that since much of that pollution was created making shit for US, that we were in fact indirectly, and almost directly, responsible.  This is a valid point.  Boycott China if you want to stop contributing to ocean pollution.

Don’t give them your money.  Stop buying from these creeps.  The people are not the problem, but until they allow Kiva money in, there is no way to help them directly without benefiting CINO (Communist in Name Only) fat guy assholes.

Life offers options, not certainties.

It is Duhkha to observe that for every decision I make, I foreclose all others, for that moment.  If I make carrot cake I cannot also make bakhlava.  If I become a Tibetan Buddhist I cannot also honestly be a Zen Buddhist.  I also cannot be an honest Sufi or Christian, or Jew, or Parsi.

If I chase and win that girl, I cannot then chase and win the other girl.  If I read this book I cannot properly also read that book.  If I choose to follow this career I cannot also follow that career.

These are pretty obvious observations, but I am trying to reason my way forward.

There is really no Givenness in life.  Perhaps that some things hurt and some things feel good, but there are grades of hurting and feeling good.  Some things that hurt at the time–like working out–feel good in the long run.  Some things that feel good at the time–like marital or relationship infidelity–hurt in the long run much more.

So it is hard to use primary feelings to navigate.

My reason tells me the only way to avoid complete confusion is to have some form of metaphysics, some belief–or educated, operative guess–about how the universe works, as it relates to us, and our souls, if we choose to include that belief.

Within my own metaphysics, the path is love, learning to love, deeply, completely and continually.  To love life, to feel wonder often, and to love people.

Towards this end I offer my body and my comfort.

But who am I if and when I start to achieve this goal?  What do I have for breakfast? If I do Paleo I can’t do Dean Ornish.  If I do intermittent fasting I can’t do the Zone.

I think for happiness there has to be a sort of functional nihilism on some topics, that it, as Bill Murray had it, JUST DOESN’T MATTER.

I think for me part of the issue is chronic overarousal.  No matter what I do, some little voice says “why did you do THAT?”  It doesn’t matter what I do.  There is no correct choice.  If I make a decision I hear criticism, and if I don’t make a decision I hear criticism.  It’s an internalized voice from my childhood.

On that score I might offer an update.  I have learned to sleep reasonably well without alcohol.  Nearly all my nighttime adventures have ended.  I can have one drink and still sleep, although I do sometimes still have more.  I had six beers last night.

And the past two nights have revealed some antique feelings.  Two nights ago, I felt the energy of being broken, completely.  My pride shattered, my feet shackled, and entering into shame.  I think this happened about age 3.  I had a strong will, my mother couldn’t stand it, and she broke me the way you break a horse.

I suppose some of this is needed in socializing.  You certainly don’t want to appease the 3 year old too much.  But proper acculturation–and here we might say indoctrination–teaches both what not to do, and what TO do.  That part I was never taught.  I was just taught to be silent in the corner, and for many, many years, some part of me has complied.  It was just shattered.  My core sense of self was shattered.  I felt that energy.  It has a feeling tone.  Feeling it is intrinsically healing.

Last night I felt my fathers profound paranoia.  He used to talk of what he called a “bunker mentality”.  He more or less locked himself into his home for his last 30 years.  He did very little other than watch TV.  I felt that energy, because of course to some degree he infected me.  I carry his genes.

It’s so hard to see who you are, honestly, deeply.

But my work continues, and it is bearing fruit.

Few ramblings.  They help me.  They really do.

I think a useful heuristic, in reading Leftist cant, is asking: whose position, whose interest, are they trying to advance?

The overwhelming bulk of the time it is that of A) someone else that B) they don’t really understand, and who C) may not know that person is trying to argue their side or D) WANT them to argue for them.

Advocating for Others.

TOS: Telling Others Stories

DVO: Demonstration of vicarious outrage.

BRWP: Being a rich white punk.

I think it is reasonable to say, witnessing hundreds of, as they like to be called, “journalists”, do everything they can to whip up an impeachment fever out of NOTHING, that the CIA controls nearly all our media. Rather, the people who control the CIA and the rest of their confederates in our government and around it, control our media.

They are all in to get Trump. They have stopped even PRETENDING to be news sources and have opened up the naked and Communo-Fascist propaganda. Old school stuff.

I say again: if you knew nothing else, this alone should cause you not just to support Trump but to pray daily for him, and for an eventual recovery of sanity in our country.

1.  Most Americans are two thirds media.

2.  The story of Job would be interesting, told from a Buddhist perspective.

I was taking the long way somewhere yesterday–I often do this, to see what’s new, what’s changed, and to see things I’ve never noticed before–and drove past a graveyard.  A large one, with a large wall of stone names.  I don’t if they slid the bodies in like they do in New Orleans, or if their ashes were there.  It was a lot of names.

And I got to thinking about life.  Making it count.  Pretty typical stuff, really. 

But it hit me that whatever you think constitutes how to live life: climbing mountains, skydiving, meditating, lover deeper and talking sweeter (as Tim McGraw has it), meditating, pursuing your passions: there always has to be some room for doubt, and a residual, contemplative awareness.

I put the number at 25%.  Do what you think you should be doing, but keep 25% of your awareness unattached, so that you can see the metainformation outside of the system.

This was my thought.  I think it is what I instinctively do.  Looking at it written, I don’t know if this is wise, but I will often an analogy.  In Kum Nye meditation, you leave your mouth very slightly open and touch the top of your mouth with the tip of your tongue.  Supposedly it is to complete an energy circuit.  I believe the rest of the system so I suppose I believe this too.  Certainly, though, that is a passive way of preventing you from tightening your jaw and lips, as many of us do thoughtlessly throughout the day.

In my own world, it might in fact be a good idea to meditate three hours a day, or do yoga for three hours a day, or even both.  You are here to travel spiritually.  Make your time here count.

But I think whenever you get obsessed with the One Thing, you lose something.  There are always new things being blown from the future or the past or from distant lands into your life, and if you only focus on the One Thing–and that one thing could even be mindfulness, ironically enough, if you are dogmatic about it–you will miss them.

I don’t feel like I am expressing myself well here.  It was a sensation I had, something which fluttered in with the fall leaves, then fluttered out.  Perhaps I am describing Grace, what the Christians call grace, or at least what I understand the Christians to call grace (damn son: did you get them to twist your brain somewhere?)

There is a latent concept in meditation that “enlightenment”, so called (and I think in practice this refers to a large continuum of related but qualitatively different experiences by different individuals), is something you get at the line of long period of directed effort.  For example, I was reading yesterday about these meditation caves in Bhutan, where people aspiring to Buddhahood meditate first three days, then if they are good with that 3 months, then finally if they are good with that, 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years, presumably something good has happened, but not necessarily “enlightenment”.  That is a gift, and I guess this is  my point: that energy, that light, is always there.  It is not necessarily a product of effort and striving.  You can do the effort and get nothing, and be lazy and complacent and poof there it is.

Obviously, emotionally healthy people will organize their lives around effort of some sort.  You have to work.  Empirically, that and loving relationships count for most of the happiness in the world.  Not watching TV.  TV really doesn’t make anyone happy.  By and large, neither does most time spent on the internet.  Not even jacking off to beautiful women.

I think that’s closer to what I wanted to say.

I will add that it also occurred to me to comment that there are countless paths to enlightenment.  In some respects each of us has to invent our own.  This is another meaning of that saying I quote from time to time that “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Pure Buddhists are not Buddhists.

Rambling–I’m drinking coffee and warming up my brain for what will no doubt be a very tiring day–I was talking with a gal I know in a bar a few weeks ago.  She got religion, and it seems to have done her good.  And she thinks Buddhists worship the Buddha.  This is a common misconception.

But really, thinking about it, when you see monks chanting mantras directed at a picture or icon of the Buddha, or some other luminary, like Padmasambhava, and lighting candles and burning incense, is such a perception really completely wrong?  This is not killing the Buddha at all.  Quite the opposite.

And culturally, sociologically, of course, this makes a ton of sense.  We all seek grounding, tradition, the expected, a habitual rhythm to life.  But if the Buddha argued anything, it was that all those things were fragile, transitory, impermanent, and that relying on them was Duhkha, now or in the future. 

As I understand the doctrine, it would actually be now, in the sense that some part of you senses that you are held up by a network of fragile webs which can be taken from you at any moment.  This latent, unconscious sense holds you back from the joy and fulfillment you could attain if you released yourself from those webs.

Blech.  I need to stop procrastinating and go do something for that ugly beautiful money.  I will say, though: this is not a bad way to procrastinate.

There is nowhere else.

As I think about it, many comic reinforce an American pattern of the One Guy versus the Mob.  Think Spider Man facing off dozens of enemies.  Nobody has his back.  Nobody asked him to step in: he just did it, because there was a problem and it needed fixing.

This is a version of High Noon.  Gary Cooper didn’t want to take on all the bad guys by himself.  He spent half the movie trying to solicit help.  But when he didn’t get it, he didn’t quit and he didn’t back down.  This is an American style hero.  I suppose we are not as unique as we like to think we are, but I think in most cultures you have a hero leading an army.  The Army of One is, I think, one of our particular ideosyncracies.

But One is always the unit of perception, is it not?  And does not all change, or growth, or innovation, or improvement in any way have to begin with one person?  Why are Americans so creative, at least entrepreneurially?  Well, our system encourages it.  We value it.  We don’t punish it with silly levels of taxation.  And we attract the best and brightest from around the world because of this, and because of our system of graduate education.

But there is something in the American character–at least, the traditional American character–which admired the solitary hold out, in a world of conformists.  Think Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.  Would the Henry Fonda of that movie–which I think was intended to warn of the dangers of lynch mobs, as something which many people feared from the Right back then–be at home in today’s Democrats? 

LOL.  Not a fucking chance.  If show trials and kangaroo courts aren’t your thing, then you are probably a Russian spy.

Put another way, we don’t need art to tell us life can be shitty, that people can be shitty, and that most people are just making it up as they go along: we fucking KNOW this already.  Only the morally and emotionally numb need reminding of this.

What we need to see in art is what we DON’T see in ordinary life.  If you’re going to focus on the bad, take it all the way, as in tragedy.  Catharsis is a real thing.  I’ve felt it.

But the sorts of movies I like are those of a prolonged struggle, filled with mistakes and hidden vulnerabilities, but which finally emerge in a victory of sorts.  And there are many like me.  Such movies give us hope when things are not working out, courage when it is hard to see anything getting better.  Just hold on, they tell us.  Just hold on.

I have said this before, but comics in some respects are literally like modern myths, and as such arguably deeper than Robert de Niro getting a funny haircut, failing to kill a politician, then killing a bunch of pimps prior to trying unsuccessfully to kill himself.

I watched that movie, and thought WTF?  Not because I don’t do art movies, but because it had no point whatever that I could see.  I mainly wanted to see the context for the famous “You talking to ME?”  And needless to say, I was disappointed.  It’s really a stupid scene.  We all know people we can readily imagine doing that in the mirror, don’t we?  I know I do.  Where I live, they all have concealed carry permits, and they do pack everywhere they go.

Martin Scorsese dislikes Marvel movies because in them most of his protagonists would be villains. Complex villains, to be clear, but obvious malignant forces to be fought by brave, talented, sometimes vain and stupid, but ultimately self sacrificing heroes.

I would add that taking a long hard look at moral and emotional decay and disease, without redemption, has no intrinsic “artistic” value. Artists, to my mind, are those who help all of deal with the chaos, confusion and pain of life, by showing beauty, clarity, and worthy examples of healthy behavior, ideally after sustained unhealthy behavior.  They help us make sense of our lives. They help us find purpose. They awaken us to dormant potentials, remind us of what is wonderful. Perhaps the even point the way to the sacred, the numinous.

I would compare Scorsese to, say, Tarkovsky. He is like a petulant and impatient child compared to Tarkovsky. Scorsese CONSISTENTLY mistakes physical and emotional violence with profundity.

My hierarchy would have Tarkovsky at the top, Marvel movies in the middle, and Scorsese abusive assaults on our common bonds at the bottom.