And, if I might channel Mike Myers feeling verklempt, please discuss amongst yourselves: the People’s Republic of China is not run by or for the people, is not a republic, and is no longer culturally Chinese.
And when today’s kids speak of Socialism, what they intend is a world where “the world” gives them stuff like their parents did, where “the world” demands little of them, like their parents, and where “life” encourages them to be selfish and self absorbed little shits.
For me, “life” is a place where everything I have is always about to be taken from me, where people cannot be trusted, and which always feels confusing, like a mountain shrouded in fog, from which gravity has been removed. I don’t know which way is up.
I will add, that quite often, people describing the most grotesque emotional experiences, if they are truly participating in the description, are often healing them. Talk therapy is not useless, even if substantially everything Freud ever wrote might most benefit the world by being burned.
I state that as a theoretical, obviously: no book should ever been burned, because we need to remember and learn from mistakes. We need to REMEMBER how bad things start.
So I did a tad bit of research, here.
I watched a documentary on 9/11 called “105 minutes that changed America”. It ended, roughly, with the collapse of the second tower.
Those clouds of dust you see, the ones that followed the collapse of Tower 1 and Tower 2: they are the result, most likely, of explosives.
The multi ton metal facades being ejected hundreds of feet from the towers: explosives.
And I might note, although it is superfluous both for believers and idiots, that the special I watched made no mention of Tower 7, other than a brief visit there where they claimed it was fully evacuated.
In my own mind, there can be no doubt of the scope. depth, and profound evil of the conspiracy.
I myself had a very vivid dream I have no doubt mentioned the night before, where I saw an enormous person controlling the slaughter of pigs. He was a pig farmer. He was Bin Laden. This dream was very vivid, and unique.
So on that basis I do think bin Laden played a role. But I think so too did Dick Cheney. This is the most reasonable conclusion.
It is a shitty conclusion, a bad conclusion, a scary conclusion, a conclusion that no reasonable person would admit to publicly.
Indeed.
The second argued that the nature of sand was hard and soft. If you hit it, it resists you. If you stroke it carefully, if you scoop it carefully, it is infinitely malleable.
The third argued that its nature was dryness and moistness. Hold it when it is dry, and it falls apart. Moisten it with water, and it becomes like mud.
Two days later the first man said the nature of sand was dry little rocks, all piled together
The second man said that the nature of sand was hard, because it was pitiless.
The third man said he could not remember a sand which was wet, and so dryness must be its essential nature.
Two days later, the first man said the nature of sand is death.
The second man agreed.
The third man agreed.
And they all died.
What they could not see, because they did not look, was that there was a spring on the other side of the hill, with date palms. The moon saw all this, and was not overly concerned, for it knew these men would see sand again, would see the desert again, and would again be offered water and food, for the cost of wandering just a little more.
It pondered, as it wandered off to make way for the sun, that perhaps life is little but water and date palms, and when those are absent, it does not last very long.
Moral: REMEMBER. You know how, but you have forgotten. So have I. I do think, though, that I have remembered that I have forgotten something, and that is a start.
Oh, and if you can explain what I just wrote to me, it would be greatly appreciated. I am not drinking. It is something else.
Actually, since I am being a bit cryptic, I will add that I could parse this story several ways. I can parse/interpret/pull A lesson out of, nearly anything. It’s a skill in itself. The beauty of parables is they make you alert. They can be read multiple ways, and all the ways are true, if they facilitate new insight in you.
For whatever reason I’ve been feeling kinship with the Sufis the past few days. If I might add a nod to Omar Khayyam, I AM drinking wine.
It cut me, like it does
Blood fell everywhere, as rose petals
In severing me in two, it
doubled me
No thousand Kalis could hope to
lick up all my itinerant blood
Which rises to the sky, and falls
in yellow petals
and blue
A purple rainbow crosses to demand we know
it is an end to the end,
the death of death.
I reach the bottom of the pit
of despair, and find in the crack
at the bottom
a high peak, and the Sun.
Life is much more than gathering acorns
and piling them one on one on one.
It is much more than screaming at the night
Or watching willing women elevate the soul
of my body and then squeeze it out.
We must see that there is kindness in the knife
Everything is our friend. There is no outside
there are no enemies: all is friend.
Walk in this.
And it felt like they VALUED it, perhaps the way the Spartans valued their own such practices, and felt that British SOCIETY, as a whole–the pubs and bobbies and tea time–depended on it.
But British society is collapsing, is it not? “Britain”–England, in any event–is dying. It is on a respirator in a poorly maintained hospital, calling for nurses, who are indignant about being bothered, indifferent to the plight of the patient, and eager for him to die.
They used to sing “Rule Brittania”. Now “Brittania” can’t even rule itself at home.
If I am right, it is past time for the truth to be told. A new start must be made on a new foundation.
Now, America, to my knowledge, is the only major developed nation which does not require valid ID nationally to vote. Mexico, to take but one example, requires valid ID to vote. Iraq, in their first election, placed red ink on the hand of people who voted, to ensure they only voted once. That is my recollection.
We are told requiring ID is “racist”. I want to do a simple exercise to unpack the latent and really quite horrifying racism inherent in that claim, to the (likely small) extent it is made sincerely, and not in simply support of voting fraud (likely large, and certainly largely unexamined in Blue States, which refused to cooperate with Pence).
Here we go. Simply apply the logic consistently. This yields the following formulation: Black people are too fucking stupid to be expected to drive legally, cash a check, board a plane, buy a gun legally, buy alcohol, open a bank account, rent a hotel room and a whole lot else. In fact, without Democrats in office, they would be completely helpless like small children. They have to be guided and led by their superiors.
Do you see the problem? I am not exaggerating at all. This is not hyperbole. This IS the claim being made, by senior Democrats everywhere. Self evidently, they are not using these words, but everything I just said is implied and absolutely present in principle.
Since I am on the topic of voter fraud, it is inconceivable to me that no Federal regulations prevent open violations of voting laws. It is perhaps the case that individual States can enact their own laws, but it is ABSOLUTELY the prerogative of the Federal government to insist minimum standards be met for any representative of any State to be seated in the national assembly, in the Senate or the House. Anything that reaches nationally, and by definition Federal legislation does just that, should be subject to the control of Federal law.
So when San Francisco openly signs up people who are not legally allowed to vote, there should be consequences. Those people, obviously, are not going to be the deciding factor in whether or not the imbecile Nancy Pelosi wins reelection. That is a given. But there is a Statewide Senate race in which a few thousand votes might make a difference.
We have to restore the integrity of our voting system. We have to make paper ballots and voter ID mandatory in all States. We have to punish severely individuals and States caught cheating, encouraging cheating, or supporting it. People need to go to jail.
The problem of living in an echo chamber, is that the walls doing the reflecting also keep out alternative voices.
The Democrats really seem to believe that if they just shout long enough and hard enough that they will get their way. They literally seem to want to pout and fit their way back into national dominance. Something has been taken from them, they don’t get it, they don’t understand it–CAN’T understand it within their own paradigm–and emotional spasms are all they have. It’s all they got.
Again, to me the Nike error is fascinating. Anyone with a shred of common sense could have predicted this. The moment I saw Kaepernick on the ad I knew this campaign would backfire badly. It took me a tenth of a second.
But this campaign was months in the planning, perhaps even years. Negotiations and discussions likely started happening not long after the whole kneeling thing started, I guess the season before last, so perhaps up to two years ago.
Highly paid professionals sat in well appointed meeting rooms, drank excellent coffee, perhaps sometimes worked late into the night, all in support of this big initiative, this bold move which they likely framed as “risky” when they wanted to seem like brave souls out fighting the Good Fight, but which they must have been sure would succeed on balance, and perhaps all the more if it offended, you know, the white supremacists who seem to lurk in Small Town America, but which Nike never needed to succeed.
Here is the thing, though: Trump won the election, and did so after similar miscalculations by the Democrats at a national level. The egregiousness of the error, the complete failure of the polling data, is one reason why many of the more rabid lunatic ones continue to believe the Russians “stole” the election, even when nobody anywhere is claiming that. The DoJ merely said they tried a little bit, and failed a whole lot.
But in all honesty, I thought Nike’s ad might at least appeal to blacks or to Democrats. But it seems to have failed across the board. They lost Republicans almost entirely, but even millenials, even Gen X, even blacks, even Democrats now seemingly few Nike less favorably.
I don’t think it is overstating the case to call this a bellwether for the election. Kaepernick stands for a certain brand of politics, a certain political stance. The sheer extent of his patent unpopularity can plausibly be viewed as that brand of politics, too–the OBAMA brand of politics–similarly dropping like a rock in water.
There is a sea change in the air. I feel it. It may or may not happen, but the stage is plainly set. It is plainly possible. As I said a few months ago, it might be possible for the political Left to lose in 50 days 50 years of work. The whole world could just turns its back on them and their lunatic, cruel ideas.
This is very much a forest for the trees thing. Economists grow up with certain core unexamined assumptions. They don’t think about how money creation subverts all creative efforts, dilutes the value of work, transfers wealth with no truly useful activity delivered in return, and overall enables the continuation of poverty in nations which should not experience it, at all, anywhere. We should not have ghettos. We should not have homeless. We should not have any trouble paying for top quality medical care. All our problems should have been solved.
I see all this clearly. Why so many professionals are so fucking stupid, is one of those things that in my worse moments makes me hate humanity.