Moderates United

I visited a Zen Monastery, and in the pursuit of Beginner’s mind, they all follow very precise routes of behavior every day, doing the same things at the same times in the same ways, every day.  They meditate the same way, at the same times, and I could not resist the sense that the content and quality of the meditations varies little as well.

This is one thing I love about Kum Nye, is that there are hundreds of movements and patterns, and you are encouraged to never repeat ANY of them in exactly the same way, if possible.  How can you feel the waves around you, when you insist you must remain perfectly still?  We live in an endless ocean.  Perfect quiet is impossible, even if we can perhaps float like sea otters sometimes on its endless swells, quite content.

But we need all need this feeling of reinforcement, of reward.  In my own home–and there are many like me–I was early on often punished for doing the wrong thing, but rarely rewarded for doing the right thing.  Both parents were emotionally detached, as long as I was not blatantly misbehaving.  They were in their own worlds.  They still are. I can’t bridge this gap, not in this lifetime.

But I can’t help but feel, at this moment, that a root cause of the many variants of fascism, with Communistic Fascism being ascendant at the moment, is that people need to be complimented, rewarded, made to feel good, as a result of some action they can control.  And Communism is all about rewarding compliance and conformity.  Do what they say, and you are guaranteed an attaboy and a pat on the back.

Likewise with the Nazis.  If you were standing there, in that mass of people on the parade ground at Nuremburg, I think it was, you felt proud.  You were told to feel proud.  You were told you had made exactly the right decision for the right reasons.  You belonged.  You were valued.  You were important.

This is the dopamine feeling, as I understand it.  We all secrete it, but only when the organism feels the need to reward a behavior, and this, in turn, is learned.  If we do not learn it in childhood, if we are not given a set of behaviors about which we are taught we can reliably feel good–such as being law abiding, pious, and hard working–then we seek them out in other places, or find ourselves in any of the countless addictions, which do the same job, poorly.  It is like, say, a sex addict, gets one tenth of a hit of dopamine every time he or she scores, and this is never enough.  This is what drives the addiction.  Someone in a satisfied relationship, in contrast, might get 2 hits of dopamine every time they have sex, making frequent sex unnecessary.

But perhaps we could view the Communistic Fascism, the conformity, the painted shields and uniforms, the pride in “standing up” to people who, in general, are puzzled as to what the problem is, and who certainly have not been violent, can be viewed as the failure of our culture to provide templates to these kids–and the kids who biologically grow to be adults–for how to feel self esteem and pride in healthy ways.  It is, perhaps, that simple, at least in America, at this time.

A story: I was on an airplane a week or two ago that was seriously late.  I was never quite clear what the exact problem was.  Anyway, we were about an hour late into our major connecting airport, and the pilot asked that anyone who did not need to make a quick connecting flight stay seated to allow those in a hurry to get off.  The guy sitting next to me was telling everyone that he had ten minutes to catch his flight, but nobody was listening.  We were in the middle of the plane, he wasn’t speaking very loudly, and I think most people, like me, figured anything less than half an hour in a large airport was close enough to warrant standing up and getting off.  So 40 people crowded the aisle in front of us.

While we were standing there, some 20-ish guy, who looked very Portland or Seattle, although of course he could have been from anywhere, was standing facing backwards.  He first asked two Filipino looking guys if they had a quick flight to catch.  They said yes.  One looked at me, then looked back, like “who the fuck is this guy?”  Then, apparently having decided not to hassle the non-whites when he has a white male clearly at hand, he looks at me, and asks me if I had a flight to catch.  I said yes, it’s in about 25 minutes, and I have no idea where it is.  Then he says, “this guy only has ten minutes” or something like that, and I tell him I am not the problem.  The problem is the 40 people in front of us.  Then he makes some sort of snide comment I did not quite catch about the tshirt I was wearing, and I look at him, and he looks at me with this haughty smirk on his face.  Then I say to him: “Look, I’m not slowing anyone down.  We are all tired.  There is no need to be a dick”.  He replies “exactly”, which I am quite sure he thought was quite clever.

As expected, when the aisle cleared we moved very quickly.  It was literally no more than two seconds between me and the guy behind me.  I made no difference.

But a minute later, as I am looking for the Departures screen, he walks by me and says “see, you could have caught your flight”.  I can’t resist commenting “you are a Democrat, aren’t you?”.  Unbelievably, he replies “I am a kind soul”, then flips me off, which he undoubtedly took to be a mike drop.

Here is the thing: he got off right after me.  He had no way of knowing if there not more people in the back half of the plane who were in a similar–or now worse–predicament.  This did not occur to him, seemingly.  And I am very sure it was very important to him to be close enough to me to point out to me his moral superiority, for waiting two seconds longer, but not five minutes longer, to be sure all the truly close connecting flights got off.

What he did is make a meaningless gesture which brought him dopamine, which brought him a feeling of “job well done”, which brought him a feeling of moral superiority and self esteem, all bought at the feeling of contempt and anger he directed pointlessly at me.  Nobody really won in that situation except him. 

And of course he was able to tell all his friends about this evil conservative he met, how we are all dicks, all while again trumpeting his seriously superior compassion, despite the fact that he almost certainly delayed someone else farther back as much as I did.

This sense of superiority is really, truly, ugly.  I won’t say I find it intolerable–I have been dealing with these sorts of assholes for many years–but it makes me fear for the future.  What I saw, looking in his smug face, was indifference to real suffering, an absolute rejection of moral autonomy and true personal responsibility, and a complacency to all the real crimes people like him have committed and continue to commit the world over.

He didn’t need results.  He didn’t need to know he accomplished meaningful good. All he needed was the ability to contrast himself with someone he asserted did not “care” the way he did.  This act alone sufficed for his purposes.

And this suffices for the Democrats as a whole.  They don’t need results.  They reject accountability.  It is sufficient for them to hate us.

I had not heard of the Fugs–it was Fucks, but they couldn’t get away with that in 1961–but came across them reading this book about the Beats.  They were kind of a link between the Beats and the hippies.

Ponder, though, how the well warranted mistrust of the CIA has given way to the very same people now accusing anyone who does not believe John Brennan and James Clapper of being unAmerican.  This is farce.  Satire.  Except it really happened.

I saw a bumper sticker on an old beat-up pickup truck when I was in California that read “I love my country, but I don’t trust my government”.  At one time, this would have automatically meant he was a Democrat of a libertarian bent.  The government was the Man, the drug war, the people who were overthrowing the governments of other nations, the oppressor of all non-conformists and misfits.

But now?  I see all the old hippies arranged in rows like Hitler Youth, parading around, with their ponderous boots of self importance and complete lack of humor and mirth (Stephen Colbert and company, in general, are not funny: their humor is that of a bully mocking someone he knows his audience hates.  Everyone laughs, but it is not a happy, inclusive laughter), and doing what they are told to do, saying what they are told to say.  It is like someone slipped them a brain control pill.  Someone Blue Pill’ed them.  It goes both ways you know.

To be honest, it bothered me quite a bit to read even Norman Lear had gone over to what I view as the dark side.

It’s still the fucking CIA, Man.  Don’t forget it.  They don’t seem to be on our side.  I’m not sure whose side they are on, but what most of us want from the world is not what the elite want from the world, so we can be reasonably sure they are up to no good in many, many ways, as well as, of course, the NSA, and the agencies whose names we are not even allowed to know.

Where did your free spirits go, hippies?  You went from an incoherent mass of colorful gobbledy-gook, to a highly coherent, synchronized set of zombie drones.  Somewhere in there choice was possible, but most of you missed it.

In some respects it is perhaps reasonable to say that the whole of Western philosophy has returned to Socrates, to knowing nothing.

Our universities, in the Humanities, do not speak of Truth any more.  They don’t even really speak of Beauty.  They speak of these as constructs, not as something real.  Nothing is real in the realm of ideas, we are told, no moralities are true, no  life paths are better than others.

This is, of course, a dual communication.  They say these things with their mouths.  With their feet, the submit vigorously to rote conformity to mutable political agendas, ones in most cases created by others, but which sweep daily, hourly, through all the halls of academia.

We are infants.  We were not ready for all this.  Just as we were not ready for our technology, for all the ways we can destroy ourselves.

It is true there is no Truth.  But there are countless truths.  All of us are true.  Our selves are true.  Who we are, in space and time, is true.  It is a task of feeling our way forward, of allowing growth to happen without stopping it by asking too many questions once the train leaves the station.

I seem to be OK with the place I am at.  This surprises me.  Like everyone else–or nearly everyone, as I cannot know with certainty what I am seeing around me–I have always craved a cage.  With a cage, you can see and feel the walls.  You know where you are.  Everything is fixed and familiar.

When you walk out the door, you can smell the air, and it smells good.  There are both flowers and the stench of decay.  There is life and there is death.  And you can’t know where you are going.

It is, I think, our task for a long time, in this life and in what comes, to travel, and to make the road our home, and every chance meeting an act of beauty, every friendship a richly crafted artwork, and to see the love which underlies it all.

This is, of course, an ideal, and I am far from ideal.  I will continue to share my thoughts, though, as I evolve.

I might speak of the blindness of ordinary life, the blindness of the beginning of a path–I suppose it could be called a darkness, which really only means that you are realizing you were already living in darkness–and a severe myopia which, possibly, at some point, emerges into genuine sight.

We are all lost in an endless ocean without eyes, at least, without eyes we know how to use.

It is no wonder, really, that people choose to remain small.  For my part, I am trying to do a better job of remembering this.  I am, to be clear, still as blind as a bat, but it has occurred to me something better may be possible.  That is what I seek.  And I am willing to step into the void to seek it.  This is the only way.

And I will add that I am beginning to see what the Buddhists mean with the Void.  It is a heart vision.  It is something which is felt, when you enter a world devoid of markers.  You cannot float if you are unwilling to risk sinking.

Tides and waves are reliable, though: they are always moving.

I will add something, too.  I was tempted to say something negative about some group, but will refrain.  I will suffice myself by saying that I feel that a living meditation should feel like something is growing in you, it should feel like something is flowing, that something is  alive and moving.  Meditation should feel like participation.  You are not sitting apart.  You are joining what really matters.

If it makes you feel dull, if it makes you feel like dry wood, then you need a better system. I will again recommend Kum Nye.

In my travels, I have yet to meet anyone who has heard of it.  Someday I will, and it will make me happy.  And I have more to say about it, but not now.  I am tired and drinking.  And dreaming, like always.  I see and feel a great deal in an average day.  It is tiring, but I seem to be used to it.

Self evidently, the Democrats want to impeach Trump. They likely could not convict him in the Senate, but they can prevent Trumpfromdoing his job for six months, all in pursuit of betraying the EXPRESSED will of the American people. They want to reverse the election, which they STILL have not accepted they lost fair and square, by running a worn out career criminal with zero charisma.

We all have to ask ourselves if we want Nancy Pelosi to have the gavel again, and using her parties power to stonewall criminal investigations, and prevent Trump from being an effective and successful President.

And with Justice we can and should question the priorities of people who want the elected President to fail, even if it means great suffering and difficulties for the very peons they claim to speak for. Pelosi is rich. All the House Democrats are rich. This a game to them, and the casualties of that game invisible and irrelevant.

They feel no obligation to even pretend to speak the truth. They just have to pretend to care. Why are they allowed to continue to play this nasty game?

Edit: I had intended to also to make the obvious point that the Democrats sent an imposter to this meeting, who was wired. That, or one of the caterers or somebody was working for them. Like all good aspiring authoritarians, they have a dirty tricks team. They don’t–can’t–compete on ideas, so they cheat.

Do you remember the MoveOn.org girl who nearly derailed Rand Paul by rushing him in a way calculated to provoke a response? I do. That shit, and this Nunes eavesdropping is another example, should piss off all people who value truth, common decency and the spirit of fairplay which, when present, makes life so much better, and which, when absent, makes life for everyone so much worse.

To state the obvious, this is not a culture in any meaningful sense of the word.  It is a collective and collectivist fit.

This last point is essential to grasp: the counter culture NEEDS Communism, or something like it, veiled with abusive and disingenuous language, because their whole enterprise rests, and has always rested on lies. Either they envelop the world in their lies, or they must be forced to admit the hard truth: their work, where not directly pernicious, as it on balance has been, has been irrelevant. No new, better world has emerged, at least not one which could not have been created more peacefully within our existing cultural framework.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not need the hippies, and when they started jumping on the Civil Rights bandwagon in the late 60’s and in the 1970’s, they set the cause of true equality back 40 years. We should be much farther by now. The polarizing and abusive rhetoric which got the worthless Obama elected should have been rejected by all as what it was: a calculated play on the sympathies of sentimental and thoughtless people, intended solely to support a bid by the radical Left for political power.

I might note in this regard that this blog was CREATED to address this issue. Go back to my first post, in 2008, ten years ago, before ClimateGate, and before the ice caps failed to do their job and disappear, or at least shrink precipitously.

And before I perfected and simplified my argument.

Here is the core, absolutely ineluctable reality: for atmospheric CO2 to act as a climate forcing agent the upper Troposphere has to warm at about three times the rate of the lower atmosphere. This is because the core hypothesis is that CO2 accumulation in the upper Troposphere will create runaway heating there which will then radiate back down, warming the Earth at surface level, melting glaciers, killing reefs, disrupting weather patterns and ocean currents etc.

This warming is easily detectable with satellites, which deliver continuous, reliable, and over the past 30-40 years or so, long term measurements. Patterns are easily seen. Evidence, if present, is damning and incontrovertible.

But it is not present. This region is warming and cooling at the same rate as the atmosphere as a whole. It is clearly not a factor. The hypothesis has been falsified, and should surprise no one, since CO2 only absorbs about ten percent of the radiant spectrum, and has already been blocking most of it for some time. It’s role asa “greenhouse gas” reduces by half for every doubling, and there have been many, many doubling.

That, in this non-debate, models are ALWAYS privileged over observation, should tell any thoughtful person all they need to know, not just about the “science”, so called, but about the people funding and pushing it.

Edit: one of the few rational arguments I hear is that the stratosphere is cooling. This means, logically, that less heat is escaping. However this is easily explained: as the Earth warms, more water vapor is produced. Water vapor is the PRIMARY “greenhouse gas”, and as such, will absorb more heat.

And what would drive heat, other than CO2? That fucking enormous ball of incomprehensible energy we see warm the sky every morning. Not complicated.

Earth has been covered in sheets of ice, and it has had no ice anywhere on it at all. Everything between us thus, logically, possible as natural, unforced, variation.

Having grown up in a small town in Nebraska, Straka knew a lot of people who voted for Trump. “I was really on a quest to try and understand why did they vote for this man who was a racist, who was a bigot.” A friend who is a lifelong conservative contacted him, sending a link to a YouTube video titled “Debunking That Trump Mocked the Disabled Reporter.” Straka was skeptical: “I almost still sort of had that liberal rage inside of me, that sort of thought, ‘I can’t wait to watch this and then tell her how stupid she is for being brainwashed by this idiocy.’” The video was a compilation of footage of Trump performing the same flailing hand gestures and rambling voice that he had enacted when imitating a disabled reporter. Brandon was shocked. “It became clear to me that he didn’t mock that man’s disability whatsoever. Yes, the man was disabled, but what he was really doing was making fun of the fact that this person who happened to be disabled was caught in a lie. You know, it blew my mind.” 

As Straka dug deeper into the media’s coverage of Trump, he discovered more inconsistencies that disturbed him. “I even found footage where there were groups of black people who went to Trump’s rallies to support him,” he says, “and when [the media] got there, they actually framed up the shot to cut the black people out so that it appeared there were only white people there. … I started to see that I had been incredibly unkind and judgmental towards all of these people in the country who I thought were horrible people, because the media had made me believe that these people were terrible people, when in fact it wasn’t true.”

When he reached out to liberal friends and family, asking if they were aware of how the mainstream media was manipulating the public’s perception of Trump, he found himself shut out. “People were starting to disengage with me, they were starting to cut me off in real life, they were starting to cut me off on social media. There were all these different things that people were saying about me in order to be able to justify that I had sort of walked away from the camp and walked away from the groupthink.” 

For Straka, the turning point had come. As he sat down to write what he calls his definitive manifesto, it dawned on him that perhaps he could create a video campaign that would inspire others such as himself, former liberals who no longer identified with the left’s ideology, and also conservatives who felt their image had been misconstrued by the media, to tell their own stories their way: “Maybe it’s time for the silent majority to become unsilent.”

I will note his Facebook page had 165,000 members as of the day before yesterday.