Moderates United

If you think about it, current politicians should be banned from giving paid speeches.  When you are making $50,000 for a speech, that amounts to a legal bribe, when the entity paying for the speech wants something from you.  Nobody is worth that much.  This is a big part of how the Clintons became wealthy legally (to which, of course, must be added their de facto use of the Clinton Foundation as a piggy bank).

Former politicians should be banned from such activity for five years.  Perhaps they could accept a delay between political favors and recompense, but five years is likely more than most would be willing to wait.

People go to the House and the Senate and the White House from jobs paying $200-$300,000 a year, and wind up worth $20-$30 million within 10-20 years.  As a business proposition, as a pursuit solely of money and power, this is one of the surest bets going.  There are many, many forms of legal bribery.

We need to denigrate the national government as a whole in its overall role, and importance, and perhaps one step might be to diminish immensely the perks of office.

Let us suppose this universe is a vast, interactive, consciousness driven field, as many mystics have said. 

Let us suppose our souls, some part of our consciousness, survives death, as many have reported, and for which considerable empirical evidence exists.

What is the effect of spending your life playing video games?  Kids who start at 3-4, and wind up playing 8-10 hours a day for years on end?

I think I met the spirit of one of these kids last night, and they are insane.  They are monsters.  They have lost all their human traits.  They can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality in any realm.  They are not quite human, and not quite animal.  Most of all, they are confused, when it comes to the matter of inner truth.  They have spent no time in introspection, no time in silence, no time in quiet, receptive listening.  They are ill equipped to die, but die some of them undoubtedly do, in car accidents, cancer, suicide and all the other travails all of us are subjected to.

This world is insane, more than it used to be, perhaps.  Every piece of information any sane intelligent person could need to make informed decisions, and to form accurate perceptions is out there.  In abundance.  Nothing is lacking.  Closely held secrets from ages past are being shouted from the rooftops, and I think Revelations said it would be. 

But without open ears, an agile mind, and a receptive, heart, it is all waste.

Returning to Robert Mueller, I don’t know who he thinks he is, but whatever that self image is, I am completely convinced it is inaccurate to the point of farce.  I seriously doubt he sees himself as what he is–a political tool for corrupt elites.  No doubt the word justice crops up in his mind, and something like diligence and thoroughness.

If I had to take a guess, I think he in political sympathy with James Comey, who has also been a lifelong Democrat, and emotionally I think he sees this as a dick measuring contest which he intends to win, by hook or by crook, so help him God.  There’s an oath for you.

I don’t know how the center holds in the face of such determined lunacy.  I really don’t. And for that matter, by and large the center HAS broken.  You have the Left, and you have the rest of us.  This blog was created to help foster moderation, but it is hard to see how that is even possible any more.

I think Trump needs to start pro forma pardons of all people prosecuted by Robert Mueller until he either produces evidence which all sane people now know does not exist of “collusion”–the ‘evidence” for which was produced by Democrats and ingested eagerly and uncritically by an FBI which worked as a de facto operative for the Democrat Party, and which continues to do so.

Unless CNN can plausibly claim they have been camped out at Stone’s house for the last month–which I very much doubt–they were tipped off by the FBI, and that, in turn, can ONLY have been help them engineer within public perception a political effect intended to harm Trump and help the lunatic Left.

This leads to the necessary conclusion that OUR NATIONAL COPS ARE POLITICIZED AND FULLY CAPABLE OF TAKING POLITICAL PRISONERS.

To be clear, Stone may have stepped in a small way over some minor edge, but we have seen dozens of examples of similar malfeasance by Democrats that has been ignored, over and over and over.  This is straight up a political prosecution, intended to damage the sitting President.  Full Stop.

I don’t know how we purge the Deep State, but defanging Mueller by vitiating all his convictions would be a good start.  He is plainly a walking, talking violation of the 4th Amendment, which was specifically intended to prevent cops from mucking around in every last detail of people’s lives, searching for crimes, rather than having probably cause to suspect specific crimes, and offering to judges good reasons why they thought what they did.  Absent this fishing around, Manafort never would have been indicted and prosecuted.

The whole things stinks of creeping fascism.  The stink is palpable, and I will ask openly: what the fuck did Mueller fight for in Vietnam, if he is so willing now to crap on the graves of our Founders and the Constitution they enacted and enabled?  He believes nothing.  He is an amoral asshole.  I don’t know if he’s on somebody’s payroll, or if he just got into the habit of lying back when he was covering for Whitey Bulgur and just never stopped, but that he needs to leave Washington is abundantly clear.

Trump is innocent.  They have nothing.  And politically, I don’t think he would lose much if anything with these pardons.  Mueller should have wrapped up a year or more ago.

For more than one reason, but particularly with reference to his AWOL convictions in the Marines and his demonstrated habit of mendacity, can we call him Chief Running Bull?

1) We can afford it.  We sent twice the money Trump is asking for in aid to Central America without batting an eye.

2) It will help.

Here is the thing: a house with a fence around it is more secure than one without a fence, even if that, say, 4′ fence can be easily climbed.  You hear people climbing it.  You see people climbing it.  And middle aged women aren’t going to climb over.  3 year old children will not climb over.

Imagine a house with 6′ walls on three sides.  Is that house still not more secure than a house with no walls at all?  Of course it is.  The walls are not unscaleable, but it adds a layer of difficulty. You see the people when they are climbing over.

And this is more or less what Trump is proposing.  He is not proposing a wall which cannot be defeated by anyone.  He is proposing a wall which is much HARDER to defeat than open ground.  Such walls will limit how many people try to cross, and how they try to cross.  It won’t stop drugs, or human trafficking, but it will slow it down, and THIS IS GOOD.

Marginal improvements, self evidently, are still improvements.

The core issue, obviously, has nothing to do with policy.  This is a pissing contest.  Trump wants it, so Nancy Pelosi and Chuck “the corpse” Schumer want to oppose it through every cheap trick they have learned in lifetimes of cheap tricks, nasty lies, and enthusiastic corruption.

I had hope for a minute that Trump might be able lay off, say, 25% of the Federal workforce.  Do you know it is nearly impossible to fire these assholes, even when they make fat money and do something close to nothing?  This situation is unbelievable and presumably changeable somehow.  Perhaps it will take Congress to fix this, but if you can’t fire dead weight, you accumulate it.  Simple principle.

It does seem likely, though, that more and more people, the longer this thing goes on, are going to question what the hell the government actually does, when it employs nearly a million people who are not “essential”.  I haven’t noticed anything bad.  Have you?  Can’t we just keep this up indefinitely?  It’s not hurting me in any way that I can see.  Perhaps I am missing something.

But this pissing contest is Trump’s to lose, which means there is no reason that Pelosi will not cave at some point, perhaps after the EBT payments start getting affected in a few weeks, or so I read.  Again: these are hard core Democrats, who vote for a living, or something close to it.  What can Trump lose by “losing” votes he never had to begin with?  That’s all on the Democrats who, to be clear, are also pushing policies which in the long run will hurt the working poor in the United States.

Willpower is only possible to exercise consistently in nervous system conditions of relatively good self regulation.  It is an aspect of and benefit of self regulation.

People who never learned to self regulate properly cannot, formally, as a matter of neurophysiology, be expected to exercise willpower in an organized way over a long period of time.  It comes in fits and spurts, never sustained.

In important respects, the moral underpinning of our legal system assumes that, absent gross psychosis, people can choose their behavior.  Given this, if they choose wrong, they deserve punishment, and this negative reinforcement can be expected to move them in the direction of making better decisions in the future.

But if a person cannot really make decisions, if behaviors more or less “appear” to them, as happens in the case of severe dysregulation as brought about by developmental trauma, they will be back in jail, their own feelings about it in more sober moments notwithstanding.

Socially, and practically, fear of jail probably does keep people from committing crimes they may otherwise commit.  This is a useful function.  But in a healthy society, such fear should be vastly inferior as a motive to the desire to do good, to belong, and to the capacity to foresee the consequences of specific behaviors on others, and to adjust behavior accordingly.

I am going to go there: I think all convicted criminals should have qEEG’s, and be taught self regulation in jail through neurofeedback and as needed talk and group therapy.  This would be intelligent social policy, and in the long run, by reducing criminality, make the lives of everyone better.  Safer neighborhoods, happier people, less money spent on jails and enforcement: all positive.

It is easy to judge people who do things we would never do.  This is understandable.  We, rightly, view them as another species of human being.  In some respects they are.  But placed in the same circumstances from the moment of being conceived–perhaps in a hostile womb–and up to that moment, most of us would be acting the same.  And if we didn’t, it would be luck or grace or both.

God knows I am judgmental in some ways.  I don’t think anyone who is not healthier than I am ever gets away with it, even if they learn to lie about it–for example by judging people as hateful without evidence, then acting accordingly–but it is likely possible over time to let things and people roll without getting overly involved emotionally.

But I firmly believe old codes of morality need to be revised to incorporate new understandings of how we are put together.

Just stating the obvious.  I watched the very end of the Saints-Rams game, then saw that BLATANT interference, likely with targeting to boot, and was reminded, again, why I don’t watch NFL football any more.  I haven’t for some years.  I will again avoid the Superbowl.  I don’t even know or care who won the other game, or even if it has been played. 

Very disappointing, that that level of corruption can be allowed to happen in front of so many millions of people.  This is the America we live in.  There are high level criminals in many places.  Being a psychopath has advantages in business, certainly, and manifestly.

There is vastly, vastly more justice in blaming the run of the mill Leftist for the crimes of Communism than there is in blaming the average white person for anything they have not personally done.

Who aided and abetted the Holodomor?  Mao’s murder by indifference of 50-60 million Chinese?  Who actively worked to make it possible for the Khmer Rouge to murder a third of Cambodia?

Some of these people–certainly their intellectual heirs–are still alive.  Noam Chomsky is still alive.  Bill Ayers is still alive.

No one anywhere in my family tree ever lived in the South during the time of slavery.  Like most whites in this country, it only takes a couple generations to get back to Europe.  And not only am I OBVIOUSLY not guilty of crimes committed by other people, but they appall me too.

In contrast, the crimes of the Communists do not appall their fellow travelers in the least.  What is worse: 1) asking, say, 10 million blacks to live in slavery, and killing several thousand of them to keep them under control, while restricting their rights to vote, to own guns, to intact families, and to work of their own; or 2) doing the same for a billion people, and murdering millions of them to keep them under control, while restricting their rights to vote, to own guns, to have intact families, and to choose their own work?

Is a Laogai really that different from a plantation which cannot even offer the justification of being run for profit (although of course in China they likely do profit financially from the labor of their political prisoners)? On plantations, men were whipped for insubordination.  In a Laogai, they are whipped because somebody felt like.  They are already all criminals, or they would not be there.  There are levels of conscious and systematic denigration and dehumanization in “Reeducation Camps” never dreamed of by white slave-owners.  A slave owner might take your name and your wife.  A Chinese commisar wants those, too, but he also wants your capacity for rational thought, your sense of self, every shred of your dignity, and every last shred of misery he can extract from you.  Only when you are a wreck and a shell MIGHT you be sent out to be a wreck and a shell somewhere else.

Personally, if I had to choose between slave labor in the Antebellum South, and slave labor in modern China under Dictator Xi, I would choose the former.

But, to my point, Leftists are utterly incapable of this rudimentary perceptual process and the logic accompanying it.  It truly is a Personality Disorder.

Perhaps it should be added to the next DSM: Political authoritarian Personality Disorder.

A thirst for big thrills diminishes the capacity to see and value the small ones.

Both Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, had they been reasonably emotionally stable, would have gotten more pleasure by participating in the lives of their children than running around like fools chasing another relative high.  They would have lived longer, seen more, and grown old with dignity.

We may only live once, but we are all granted countless moments.

It is hard not to see the YOLO mindset as a logical, experiential extension of the Consumerist ethos.

Part of the problem, and a backdrop mentioned by many, is that odd nature of our contemporary life.  We are surrounded by luxuries–even the most modest of us–that would have been the causes of war and murder several hundred years ago, but we also all know that everything could literally blow up without warning.

To call it surreal is cliched.  Death has always been a constant companion of humanity, and most of us live vastly safer, vastly healthier, vastly easier lives than our grandparents, and on back into the mists of time.  Costco is an astonishing miracle.  So is every grocery store, every shopping mall.

But at the same moment we won more time, we lost track of what to do with it. Most of us have a hard time knowing what to value and why.  In such a situation, a degree of conformism is inevitable.  It is comforting, even if to varying degrees emotionally alienating.

And of course the Big Thrill, Mailer’s Orgasm, figurative and literal (I detect, by the way, some Reichian thought in there, but have not read Reich yet, so I won’t comment further), has a strong appeal.  Doing rote work, mundane tasks, assuming the constraints of responsibility all appear pale by contrast.

I do increasingly feel, though, that the secret to everything beautiful lies within the mundane, the small, the overlooked.  It lies in those overlooked things, which hide timidly, afraid to show their rainbows.  They say the path to wisdom is wide, but it looks narrow.  The truth is you can have a beautiful day by seeing an orange flower in a window box.  You can also buy yourself a $10,000 hooker and lose everything you gained the moment she is done and leaves the room.

Puppies, kittens, small children, flowers, a soft breeze on a warm day, snow on the rooftops, an honest smile: these are how one lives well.  Aim low and rise high.  I think this is close to a law of life.

Put another way: perhaps only by losing the fear of missing out can you actually participate.  FOMO is an eternal corner you are always approaching, but never go around.  It is always one step in the future.

Dialectic is being in disagreement, but there are two forms of dialectic: there is the anti-human dialectical MATERIALISM, which is power based, not agency based, class based, not idea based; and on the other, there are human beings, who see each other as human beings, who disagree, but who agree to mediate their difference through rational discussion based on an assumption that, broad stroke, we all want roughly the same things.  Being human, in other words, on the anti-Marxist account, entails roughly the same consequences for everyone, even if some get a much better apparent deal through force, luck, or effort.

Some alcohol was involved here.  The short story is I was listening to Little Stephens Underground Garage.  On one level, I will never forgive him for making his “Freak of the Week” Paolo Pasolini.  Pasolini is the one who set Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” to film, and who was apparently beaten to death for it by Italian rednecks (I can’t say I fault their judgment). I don’t forget things like that.

(Neither, by the way, do I forget or forgive Alec Baldwin and Martin Scorcese for defending the “artistic merit” of that film.  No, I haven’t watched it, but I read the plot summary, and I’ve read as much of the original as I could stomach.  It is quite literally sad/Sade-istic.  Remember Scorcese’s cameo in Taxi Driver, where he talks about sticking a large caliber hand gun up his woman’s “pussy”?  Sade certainly would have approved).

On the other side, though, listening to his music, I could not help but feel we could reach some agreements on music, and perhaps even some general agreements on society.

Me, I want freedom.  I want freedom for the fuckups.  I want freedom for the dissidents.  I want freedom for the non-conformists, the “marchers to the beat of a different drummer”.  I suppose he could not but support that.

But all of us, all of us, should support less government telling us what the fuck we need to do, and who the fuck we need to be, or else they will fuck up our lives.  No mistruster of government should want more of it.  How complicated is this?

I felt this.  I felt the give and take, and the perhaps not-quite-agreement, but the getting-closer, and the approximating parts of agreement.

Dude: I’m a hipster, except that I fucking hate hipsters, not because they should not be free, but because they are FUCKING IDIOTS.

Clear enough?