Moderates United

I am going to assert that Helen Keller was braver than Miyamoto Musashi, even though the latter faced death many times.  Musashi was a master in dealing death, but I don’t think it can honestly be said he was a master at dealing life.  He was a warrior.  He pursued the warrior’s craft consummately.  But he dealt death.  This is what warriors do.

I’m continuing to negotiate my shadow.  I find myself wanting to buy a really good knife.  I keep looking at this site: https://www.zombietools.net/shop/felon/

Bowie is like .45: classic American.

Somehow I got to thinking about martial arts tonight.  I studied what I think most afficionados would call Koryu for some years.  And I remain damned impressed how clever those Japanese were.

And I remain vaguely sickened by how many ways I know how to break bones and kill people.

Here is the thing: you can’t live forever.  Not in this form.  And we all have destinies and fates.  It is right and proper to have basic self protection skills and tools.  But obsessing about it is a form of dereliction of duty.  This is what I am telling myself.

Kum Nye is not athletic.  It is not badass.  It can’t be competitive, since it all involves subjective internal states.  But it gets very close to the core purpose of human life, and as such is the single activity–or one close to it–worth pursuing.

This is me processing some old truths, old ideas, and how I have interacted with life in the past.  My past is gone.  It is not coming back unless I continue to invite it, and that leaves no room for what is really fucking cool in this world.

I’m rambling, but I think there is some use in this for me.

Edit: We all want to be badass, or at least most men do.  I did.  But there is no end to it.  It can become an obsession which takes away life.  I have known men who killed other men in conflict.  It leaves a scar that does not make that man richer in any way.  What they can say is they did what needed to be done, and carry no regrets.  But that is not enrichment, on balance, not how I see it.

My jagged work continues.

It’s hard for me to believe the Democrats are STILL on about Russian collusion, which was investigated for two years by a patent partisan hack, and the origin of the story of which we now know to have been an illegal attempt to sway the election, using the CIA, and FBI.

I reading the comments on the latest, and wondering just what the hell is wrong with people.  I can’t imagine myself that stupid on my worst day, and I do have some bad days.

Then it hit me: they are like Richard Gere, in “An Officer and a Gentleman”, when Lou Gossett Jr. asks him “WHY ARE YOU HERE?”, and he replies, crying, “I have nowhere else to go.”

So really all this is good news.

What did the Democrats NOT do after the 2016 election?  Ask themselves what VALID reasons were present which ensured their loss, both in the Presidential election, and in many Congressional and State elections.  They did no soul searching.  They made no effort to connect with voters they lost.  They made no attempt to learn from their failure.

Rather, being Leftists, and thus immune from learning, they blamed anyone and everyone but themselves, their message, and the way they delivered it.

That this whole Mueller thing is still going on means this process STILL has not started.  It may never start.  If that is the case, and absent major fraud–which I hope Trump is taking steps to make between difficult and impossible–then Trump is a shoo-in in 2020. He can’t lose. 

In 2018 it was still possible to be informed and believe that something might come out of the Mueller investigation.  Now, it is not.  No sane person believes anything is being hidden except means and methods of intelligence gathering and the names of the people involved.

And I can’t help but wonder if all these attacks on Barr and Trump will not embolden them in their investigation–really, their COUNTER-investigation–into how Mueller got put into play in the first place.  How could these games not make both really, really want to shut these assholes the fuck up?

It is time to see Hillary in handcuffs.  I really believe this.  I would like to see James Comey in handcuffs.  It would do the reputation of the FBI a world of good.

I think all God really asks of us is that we participate.  Show up, in life.  If you win, if you lose: it is all good, all progress, all time well spent.

I will add that I think we need to think of God as a metaphor.  For what, I don’t know, but something real.

The actual racists probably do vote for Trump, for the same reason that the actual Communists vote for Democrats: neither gets what they want, but it’s closer than the alternative.  It’s not hard, really, to understand why a self respecting white person would vote against the party which is by and large proclaiming being white to be a crime.  No complex psychological analysis is required.

I would add that it is interesting watching the endorsement of David Duke as a barometer.  My understanding is that he has endorsed Kamala Harris because she is his kind of anti-Semite.

On that note, I will add that I visited the Indiana State Museum a few weeks ago.  First: did you know that the word comes from “Land of the Indians”?  There were many tribes there.  We signed treaties limiting white settlement, then broke them as soon as we had the numbers to resist the Indian war which followed.  That is what I recall, in any event.

Secondly, though: the second iteration of the KKK was largely founded not as a particularly anti-black party, but an anti-immigrant party.  They opposed Jews, Italians, and I think even Catholics, which is to say Irish, Polish and others.

In this regard, what needs to be said is the obvious, which is that Trump does not oppose legal immigration.  Neither do I.  I think nearly everyone who has studied the issue has concluded that economically, immigrants are a HUGE bonus for America.  They come here bringing fire, passion, ideas, and a fierce work ethic.  Many, many important companies were founded by immigrants.

But legal immigrants are people we invite.  They ask to come here, and we say yes.  Trump has not really affected this process, other than to, for the time being, ban people from countries where a sizable part of the population has experience dealing terrorism, and which hates us.  Not cool bringing those people here.

People we do not invite, who sneak–and sneak is the word–in here without asking permission, without seemingly CARING about permission: those are the people who we all should be concerned with.  They break our laws the moment they come here.  A very great many of them wind up on welfare and in jail.  The numbers are night and day legal versus illegal immigrants.  By and large LEGAL immigrants use less welfare and commit considerably less crimes than people BORN here.  Illegal immigrants, of course, invert this.  I read something approaching 50% of the people in our Federal jails are people here illegally, who subsequently committed other crimes requiring incarceration.

That our national conversation is disrupted in damaging ways daily by most of our media is really beyond dispute.  What they take from this, why they do it, why they find it acceptable, I continue to wonder.

We all need to stop saying the name of God long enough to allow God to get a word in edgewise.

Where you are is always a good starting place.

In response, I myself, if asked what I think about this theory, could simply say “I am an American.”  That means that I value the rights of ALL people, that I view all people as worthy of dignity, hope, a chance in life, and that the lowest among us should have no less access to a dispassionate and fair Law than the highest among us.  We are all equal before the law, and the Law exceeds all of us.

We are a  Constitutional Republic, which means our State is a Public Thing based upon a set of laws not quite but nearly written in stone, which can be changed only with the greatest of difficulty, and for the reason that they are sound, well considered, wise, fair, and prudent.  The Law is what governs us, through fallible human beings whose power is carefully constrained so that no one or group of them can easily arrogate all power to themselves. 

I come from a place of possibility, where a low birth means nothing, and a high birth little.

Compare America even now to most of the world.  Most of humanity is ruled by oligarchs and dictatorships, by powered elites, by gangsters, by one tribe relative another, and even, even now, by kings.

It is one of the truly astonishing, and truly evil, feats of the forces of regression–the Left–that they have managed not just to sap our confidence in our actual history, but in our ideals themselves.  They have corrupted words like justice and tolerance to where they mean nothing any more.  They have corrupted the word democracy, and the meaning behind the word “people”.  They have infused the ideals which animated our forebears with lies, with smoke, with hatred, with self revulsion, with everything but the just pride which all of us should feel in them.

Communism is a very old idea.  It is Kingship, masked in lies.  It is Kingship, which pretends it is purely benevolent, purely beholden to the “People”, who are in theory the kings, but who never get within a thousand miles of the Capital City, much less any chance of offering opinions which will be listened to. 

True Kingship is vastly preferable, and vastly more honest, than Communism.  The worst despots are no worse than average Communists, and even if in all cases such despots mask their actions in the language of one sort of necessity or another, no one is fooled, least of all those who help them, who are motivated by greed and power lust, and confused by neither.

I will say again: I am proud of America’s intellectual tradition, of the philosophical and idealistic underpinnings of this great nation, which have suffered so much from a century of lies.

And I will add: this was the INTENT.  The Communists attacked us at the level of philosophy in order to make us weak, uncertain, and unable to respond to their global imperial ambitions.

Why so many sap headed academics went along, and continue to go along, maybe I will one day figure out, but I have not yet.  It takes great stupidity, great cowardice, and an utter abjuration of the most basic loyalty and fellow feeling, to reach such a state.

I was being lectured last night by an Arab Sheikh on his theory of governance.  It was pressing a thumb print into a date, and adding ground pistachio.  He was quite sincere, that this was the best way, the way of wisdom, the way of Allah.  It was impressing one’s will on a soft substrate.  There was a very distinct feeling tone, one which cannot be communicated with words

And they were showing me Arabic letters showing up in random places, like electrical wiring.  When they happen by accident, it is considered God speaking.

Within humanity, there are many spaces.  These spaces can be entered, and learned from.

All my life, I have only been operating at a small fraction of my actual capacity.  I may one day soon be able to see much more.  Inshallah.

“When we are partners with ourselves, we can make our life into a beautiful work of art that we can enjoy and present to others.”  Tarthang Tulku, in Love of Beauty

I am beginning to feel this.  I am beginning to feel like my life is mine. It has never felt that way before.

Edit: I will add, that he goes on to describe a few pages later how the fucking Chinese tortured his aunt and mother.  One of the tortures was making his aunt stand on ice in her bare feet while they screamed Communist bullshit at her.

Evil.  Pure evil. 

It is a stark contrast, the vision of a teacher of goodness like Tarthang Tulku, as compared to lunatic sadists animated by an ideology of cruelty, ugliness, and war.

These people cannot be fought fiercely enough.

It is impossible to speak large truths to yourself when your survival depends on self deception.

In an abusive family system, if you “wake up” and realize everything is wrong, that system will no longer have a place for you.  You will react in ways which show that you’ve changed, and that will be unacceptable.  Unless you have another place, this is an unmitigated disaster, or in event, as a child, it seems as such.  It feels like a tidal wave which will overcome the world.

And this is how we learn to lie.

And one of the reasons I focus on Communism so much–in addition to the fact that these ideas represent clear and present existential threats to everything good we have built in this world–is that they so remind me of my own home. I recognize, from my own experience, the lies that Communists tell themselves, about their benevolence, their peacefulness, their tolerance.  And I see that Communism consists almost precisely in turning your whole actual emotional world over to your Shadow, while learning to label it Light and Goodness. You dissociate spirit and mind, and focus on words only.  Words, mere words, and lots of them.  Countless words, all self serving and habitual lies.

But when you are trapped, the very terror and irrationality of the system can, if you can’t escape it, push you INTO it.  This is the essence of brainwashing.  You create an unbearable situation, and only one way out, which the nervous system has to take, or break completely.

But, again, ponder the minds, and the ideology, which would be CAPABLE of performing the science of turning human beings into trained, whipped dogs.  This is pure evil, pure madness.