Moderates United

The Left is characterized nearly entirely by small bits of seeming information which sounds good, but which, on close examination, evaporates entirely. They speak of tolerance while praising the use of flash mobs and bullhorns to interrupt people at breakfast. They praise socialism while ignoring the poverty, authoritarianism, and eradication of human dignity which always follow. Etc. If you read this blog, I have, to put it mildly, not been reticent on this issue.

They also reduce complex issues to short statements which can be written on index cards.  Alex Jones, we are told–and this is the seeming universal argument, which I have seen repeatedly in multiple places–is evil because he denies the Sandy Hook shooting happened. What about the children?  What about the grieving parents? Where did the children go? How is such a conspiracy possible?

To this I will oppose one simple question: why do the official FBI reports for December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut–Sandy Hook was the school–not record any homicides? Myself, I thought well maybe they don’t record statistics for children, although this seemed unlikely. But several teachers were also reported murdered. Adam Lanza, according to the official narrative, first killed his mother.

This is a damning fact, which I attribute to some unnamed individual or individuals within the FBI trying to send a coded message. Perhaps this report has since been amended, but I doubt it. It recorded no homicides the last time I looked it up about three months ago.

Now, you can say this is a glitch, an error, that something went wrong somewhere.  Fine. Do that. But is this REALLY an unreasonable question?

Do you know, personally, any of the parents or did you know any of the children? I don’t and did not. Everything I know came from the media, and everything the media knows is what it was told and which it accepted at face value. For 99.99 and a bunch more 9’s percent of the population, this is also true.

And there are other oddities. Supposedly grieving father Robbie Parker laughing and joking around before manifestly and in front of the camera putting on a grieving face. Seeming prior knowledge of an event going to happen. The immediate destruction of the building. An investigation in which at least one seasoned investigator reported never before seeing so many people who knew nothing. You can do your own digging. Perhaps YouTube has used this pretext to disappear some of the videos. I don’t know.

But what I mostly want to mention is how you engineer a conspiracy of silence.  Imagine you were a crisis actor and you get a crisis of conscience and discuss reporting your role to the media, and two minutes later you get a call from a spoofed number which plays your conversation back to you. The next day a credit rating agency calls to report your credit card has been stolen and used fraudulently.  The next day your boss calls you and tells you an anonymous source called to say you made some porno films you didn’t make, and is wanting to talk. The next day you get another spoofed call with someone crying out in pain. Dean Koontz has many twisted ideas in this regard.

This last, by the way, happened to me. I pick up a call, supposedly from Dayton, Ohio–although of course it could be from anywhere–and someone is just weeping in terrific grief and perhaps physical pain. It lasts fives seconds, then terminates. I call the number back, and whoever picks up says there was no one there who could have made that call. This makes sense. The number was spoofed.

Two days ago, I am doing my morning meditation, and a song I had discussed with someone appears in my playlist–which is quite fixed, and which has never happened before. Now, it was an emotionally important song to me, so I chose to think it was angels speaking to me, but it may have been demons (who by the way have stopped visiting).

Fear would be a not inappropriate response, but here is the thing: if “they” are coming, none of us will be spared. There is no hiding, not for anyone with s shred of brains or integrity. And we can all be broken.

But don’t break in fear. Break on the rack. Go all the way, to use Bukowskis phrase. We are eternal beings. All this has a purpose, in ways we cannot imagine. And there remain, perhaps, honest people in all our agencies of government. There remain people to fight back. They are perhaps even a large majority, and have simply lacked the capacity to truly GET how deep and awful the corruption among them is, how beholden to tyranny, to evil.

The hatred Trump has inspired is itself inspiring. He did not kick over a small beehive. No, it was a massive infestation.

Carry on. Believe good is possible, even when it seems impossible. Believe in the possibility of a good ending, even while swimming in lies, hatred, violence, greed, and profound stupidity.

“The Democrats went from complaints about foreigners interfering in our election to registering them to vote.”

The Republican pitch should be simple: if you want open support for political censorship, for street violence, for economic malaise, for open borders: vote Democrat.

If you support free speech-/however much you disagree with it–peaceful dialogue, more economic growth–which benefits the working poor and unemployed the most–andcontrol over who we allow in the country: vote Republican.

If you want a better world for Mexicans who come here illegally, and a worse world for everyone born here, or who came here legally, vote Democrat.

If you think we owe a social debt first to our own poor and our own veterans, then vote Republican.

The differences are clear. The Democrats have retreated from the middle. This case is easy to make, and hard to screw up.

And Jeff Sessions/Elmer Fudd: are you working on an anti-trust lawsuit? Perhaps I need to know more than I do–certainly, actually–but it seems to me a conglomerate that can disappear anyone they want following a lunch meeting at a country club warrants Federal attention.

So I snuck into San Francisco, and out, and was not outed as a cultural Other.  Apparently their screening technology is still in the process of deployment.  I even went to City Lights.  I even bought two books: a comic history of the Beats, and an anthology of their work.

As I have shared once or twice, the Beats, to me, are culturally important because they represent the moment that America became split.  Yes, of course Woody Guthrie sang his songs, of course FDR was surrounded by Communists and Fascists, of course Hemingway and Faulkner and others came back from Europe a bit different, a bit touched.  Bloomsbury had had its day, and the Fabian Society had been founded.  Yes to all this.

But still, the Beats really brought nonconformity into conformity.  They created the template by which you could belong by not belonging.  This was the beginning of the 1960’s.

And most of them were fuckups.  Cassady, according to some of the women who knew him, was a sociopath, Kerouac was an alcoholic who spent long stretches living with his mother and sister, who was in love with Cassady.  Ginsberg and Burroughs were both pedophiles.  Burroughs was one of these highly unattractive rich kids who went wrong.  He was apparently earning his money for a time as a fence and a literal “hold up your hands and give me your money or I shoot” mugger in the subways of New York. This before he shot his wife, and used the rich kid money his father sent to avoid a murder rap.

All this, in pursuit of prose which taught: something very close to nothing, where not positively pernicious.

Ginsbergs mother was clinically insane, but need the best minds of his generation have gone insane?  I don’t think so.  Alduous Huxley, as one example, was doing and writing some genuinely interesting things at roughly the same time, without, as far as I know–this is something I need to move on to, actually–being an obnoxious prick.

I will read Howl again.  I will likely read Kadddish.  But that Ginsburg was a NAMBLA supporter tells me all I really need to know about his ethics, and his mental health.

Here is the thing: I read about somebody like Slim Brundage, and I kind of like the guy.  His College of Complexes sold itself as “The Playground for People who Think”.  He said “there are No Trespassing signs on the minds of men as well as on real estate”.

Me, I like some creative anarchy from time to time.  I still like to get drunk. I believe strongly that we all need some form of “insanity” from time to time to remain sane.

But we need to do a much better job of pivoting from sanity to insanity and back again.  The Beats pivoted to insanity and stayed there.  This is not, and was not helpful.

But what if, as one example, it became routine for everyone to spend one week three times a year in retreat, where they do Ayuahasca or deep meditation?  What if?

People criticize the “Capitalist System” as if it had anything to do with cultural norms.  This is stupid.  Greed is and always has been the dominant motivation of people in large systems everywhere.  Capitalism, so called, merely makes it useful, creative, and generative of new wealth for all.

But our very wealth could be used for things like this.  If we ever fix our monetary system, this would become possible.  And I am not talking Soma and mood organs.  I am talking direct experience of elevated states which show the inherent value and meaning of this human existence.

It was sad, for me, when I picked up some of the magazines at City Lights and read them.  One was Adbusters, as I recall.  In the first 20 pages or so, flipping through I objected to nothing.  They talked about AI being used to manipulate people.  This concerns me too.  They talked about the vacuity of consumer society.  Again, I am right there with you.  I think they even talked about government spying and surveillance programs.  Ditto.  This SHOULD be a bipartisan, let’s put our differences aside for a moment to fix this, sort of issue.  But we remain divided.  Sooner or later, they started talking shit about Trump, the lunacy of his “regime”, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad seriously are you this stupidum.

I continue to dream.  I saw a fantastic picture of Belisarius, after he had been blinded, at the Getty, which I will get at some point.  I am going to get a wooden placard which reads COURAGE on it.

On my other wall, in my bedroom also, I will put a wooden sign which reads FAITH.  I have Matisse’s “Thousand and one nights”, the text on which apparently reads, in French, “She saw the morning light begin to pierce the night. She discreetly grew silent.”


Imagine not just the talent, but the faith required to be Sheherezade.  In some ways, this story is awful.  She marries a man who has killed a thousand women.  But she, herself, puts an end to the process.  She stops it.  And she stops it by cleverness and faith.


We cannot know what the dawn will bring, what awaits us each day.  But if we go with it, it is always interesting, is it not?


I fear for the future.  I don’t know how these psychopathic little brats we are raising up now are going to turn into good people.  I don’t know how we avoid the large numbers of extremely organized, well funded, and motivated people who want to subvert our democracy actually doing so.  They have so many tools.  They have intelligence.  They have will.


But it is my job, as I see it, to have the faith of a mustard seed.  It is my job to believe. It is my job to have courage.


So, I turned from commentary to confession.  The wine is taking effect.  I have several stories, several comments spinning around in my little head.  Perhaps tomorrow.  Some things, I need to think carefully if I want to share at all.  I have, perhaps, too many ideas.  I hope I am a good good guy–to the extent my values exceed my vices–but I would also be a horrible bad guy.   There, though, I suspect I would have a dismaying and dizzying amount of company.


Why this is, perhaps we will one day soon know.  This relates to one of the ideas I will most likely choose to share.

https://www.infowars.com/infowars-official-app-jumps-to-number-4-dominates-cnn-nyt-abc/

One of the slogans being chanted at Candace Owens–who I might note is black, and perhaps might reasonably be supposed to be opposed to the White Supremacy of which she was farcically accused by a bunch of white people–was “Fuck the Bourgeoisie”. 

This is of course a Communist slogan, but I think it needs to be translated.  What it means is Fuck the Middle Class.

And this is true.  Communism is about creating a fascist state in which a small, connected elite live lives of privilege and luxury, while the masses live lives of forced labor, squalor, and deprivation.

It is the ugliest doctrine ever concocted by the mind of man.  This is my honest belief.  One could at least rationalize a King as the steward of God.  And some kings were actually good kings.  It was rare, but not impossible.  There are no good Communist dictators.

And this evil creed is growing, and spreading, among the very people whose “education” should have made them sufficiently critical and informed to be immune to its silly ideas, history of mass violence and death, and horrible, ugly, hate.

I think on balance this whole thing is highly positive.  It was really stupid of Facebook, Google (YouTube, and presumably their search engine), Apple, and Spotify to all coordinate to “disappear” Alex Jones at the same time.  It betrays their reach, their power. And it betrays their corruption.  They allow many much worse things to be said on their platforms and ignore them completely.  Gross racism, for example, they ignore completely if it is directed at whites, males, or especially white males.  They ignore calls to violence issued by Anantifa.  They ignore calls for violence against Trump.

I’m reading about the Beats right now, and will shortly have some things to say, but for now let me point out that the obscenity trial in San Francisco (conducted while Ginsberg was most likely fucking boys in Tangiers) made him into a national, and even international celebrity.  Nothing builds name recognition like getting in trouble with authorities.  It works for criminals, it works for poets, and there is no reason Alex Jones and InfoWars–ponder for a moment that this salvo was launched at a site CALLED Information Wars–will not reap a HUGE uptick not just in traffic, but in respectability.  Anyone worth banning is worth reading.  I think most of us believe this.  By and large, if there is no criminal penalty, if you want more of a thing, ban it.

I will wonder out loud if Jones is going to become a new Rosa Parks in a new cultural conflict oriented around a new Free Speech Movement.

And I will point briefly to some stupid arguments being made, that 1st Amendment issues are in play.  No, of course Facebook and Google, and Apple and Spotify and all the other search engines collectively, and all the other websites on the internet generally, can eliminate all mention of Jones and not break the law, at least initially.

As a Wikipedia author pointed out, though, there are anti-Trust issues involved.  But this is a legally and morally interesting and sticky issue.  A monopoly, traditionally, is where you are the sole supplier of something, say railroad tracks.  In this case, the commodity is information.  What is the business value of information?   Is it, or should it be, illegal to centralize and the control the distribution of information, when done by private companies?  Personally, I say yes.  I do think it is in everyone’s interest to prevent overt–there was no subtlety here–collusion by information behemoths.

[I was wondering today if there might be some merit in using tax money to pay reporters to dig into local events and find out interesting things.  I can see downsides, of course, but the plus side would be that money would be flowing to people who could be made to cover all sides of all issues.  This should be something coming from a Democrat, but the problem of informational consolidation, and the gradual erasure of interested journalists is quite profound.  I would not support this nationally–just look at the farce of NPR pretending they do not have a robust political agenda–but there are many things I will tolerate locally and regionally I will not tolerate nationally.]

The other, to me more interesting issue, is the value of information in a good society.  How should we value political and ideational diversity?  Should our children not be taught to value it?  Should our college students not be taught to value it?  As consumers, should we not demand it?

I already see something called d.tube has been developed, as what my untrained brain sees as something like a Linux of video upload and retrieval.

It would not be hard to create something else like Facebook.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in coming weeks and months.  If the goal of the Left was to diminish Jones influence, I can only say I wish they were always that stupid.  But of course they are, but tactically, they are sometimes quite astute.  He came out with an app perhaps a month ago, anticipating this happening.  You can get updates on everything there whenever you want.  He still has his main website, and he makes good products.  I use his Smart Pills (whatever he calls them), his turmeric supplement, and his Lung Cleanse, which is fantastic.  He comes across as crazy, but he is not infrequently very right about important things everyone else wants to either lie about, or lie to themselves about.

As I say, I think most reasonable people look at  this and see the writing on the wall.  Anyone, any site, any set of ideas, any story, any picture, anything they don’t like for any reason–and I will note that none of the companies involved in banning Jones provided any specific examples of the charges they leveled at him, which is pretty generic totalitarian behavior–can be made to disappear.  POOF!!  Gone.  Flushed.  Never know it was there.

They may not be coming for you and your ideas today, but the fact that they can, and may, should concern you.  The pattern of the radically intolerant–and that is what we are dealing with here–is to become steadily more rigid and more intolerant with time.  These things are driven by obsessives and neurotics and no few psychotics, so this is inevitable.  It does not take long for such people to find ways of offending and then attacking–if they respond–nearly everyone.  None of the Communist cadres in any of the nation which had Communism inflicted on them ever drew the full support of more than about 10-20% of the nation.  The rest were taken in at first by the lies, then made to fear the government after they realized the horrible truth.  By then, of course, it was much too late.

I’ve been busy the past few weeks, and will have more to say in coming days.  I will be busy then, too, so it may take a week or two.

The core virtue of Socrates is that he taught us the utility and the method for building ignorance.

One might also call building ignorance “ground clearing”.

As our How’s proliferate, our Why’s dwindle.

Why, for example, should you be more efficient at anything?

Why should you be more creative?

Why should you want more of anything?

Why should you be a good parent?

Why should you be a good spouse?

Why should you be s dutiful child?

Why should you be a good citizen?

Do you ask these questions?

Why?

Or why not?

When was the last time you stopped moving long enough to wonder if somewhere along the way you got your head stuck up your ass?

The problem, of course, is not that there are no answers, but that the dominant cultural threads dominating the growing post-religious element of our society do not have GOOD answers.

And in such a world, a manic acquisitiveness and need for power is not emotionally irrational, even if it is inherently unbalanced and incompatible with contentment or lasting or deep happiness.

If I might echo Socrates, knowing nothing is vastly better than feeling confident you do know things which are manifestly wrong. You are then clinging. You are then afraid. You are then also alone in important ways. You live, not in a cave, but in a cage.

Here is thing: an open, direct relationship with the truth cannot be shared. It is yours alone. It is your path.

But you can recognize those who have also done this work, also crossed the void, the ocean, in their own way. And THIS unites people, where shared manias and shared lies, in the end, do not.

Slake your own thirst. Then you will have enough for all.

Would it be reasonable to view true moderates as the true radicals in our currently hyper polarized world?

Is radically normal a thing? Should it be?

https://www.infowars.com/video-news-networks-uniformly-use-trump-is-1984-script/

When we are dealing with events we did not personally witness, self evidently the “news” has to serve as our eyes and ears.  If they provide video or audio footage of something, we assume it has not been altered, but you can easily edit things to mean something else, if you omit clarifying and contextualizing parts of it.

CNN, MSNBC and others have long histories, not so much of saying things which are patently false, but of cherry picking information to support their agendas.  If something does not fit the message they are trying to communicate, the persuasion and indoctrination they are undertaking (usually in coordination) at that moment, they ignore it.  This is lying by omission, and they do it DAILY.

What is interesting is the psychological trick you can play, in which you tell people “think for yourselves”, all while knowing what they will be repeating that day on the internet and around the coffee pot is exactly what you tell them to repeat.

This 1984 meme amounts to “think for yourself. see with your own eyes”.  People think that, because CNN is saying this, that they mean it, that their viewers can in fact, in their estimation, be depended on to think for themselves.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is interesting to me about this–and in large measure I am simply describing human nature as it has existed for a very long time–is the parallel with the Buddhist dictum “if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”, which I reference from time to time.

Nobody does this.  Buddhists do not do this.  I have said this often.  They dutifully repeat this injunction as part of their canon, and in so doing kill it.  They kill the life in the idea.  Killing the Buddha is about protecting the AUTHENTIC dharma.  The Buddha did not and does not need to be worshipped.  This is a travesty.  If we tore down every Buddhist temple on the planet but retained the underlying notions, we would perhaps SERVE the cause of Buddhism.  Buddhism is the very opposite of idolatry.  Idols don’t change.  The world does, and change is the essential teaching in this religion based on direct, impartial observation of life as it actually happens.

It is so easy to go wrong.  But I do think having balls helps in all respects.  Fearful people say “reject fear”.  But they don’t.  That, too, is a learned skill, done through long term, purposive activity.

In important respects, that is my own task.  That is what I am trying to figure out: how do you tame fear such that your insanity is reduced, and such that over some time horizon sanity becomes possible?

As far as these media prophets: they have become farce.  It is a bad joke.  As I said yesterday, I hope I have a lot of company in this perception.