Moderates United

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madelyn_Dunham

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/march-for-our-lives-permit/

Here is what is floating around:  “In reference to your inquiry concerning the March For Our Lives Demonstration, here in the District of Columbia on March 24, 2018. MPD received a permit application several months prior to the actual event, and there was several months of planning for this large event.”


Snopes, of course, is in the business of making things go away. As I never tire of pointing out–because it is evidence, prima facie, incontrovertible evidence, in my view, of a sickness in our media and popular mind–Snopes, when it was unable to refute allegations that Obama’s mother posed nude as a teenager for a black Communist photographer in the late 50’s or so, simply deleted the claim.  Here is a link: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/your-right-to-know-more-racy-photos-of-obamas-mother-discovered-video/


I’m not going to go deeply into this right now, again.  Suffice it to say, that large, very world altering truths can be exposed, reach daylight, reach widespread saturation, and still disappear as if they were never uncovered at all.  Most people are stupid, few people remember anything from day to day, and very few people can or do take the time to think carefully about anything.


Here is the thing: Snopes claims to falsify this claim by a later report by the same Department indicating they had confused the March for our Lives with the March for Life.  Here is what they say: “However, Earhardt told non-partisan fact checker PolitiFact that he had confused the “March for Our Lives” rally with an annual event in January bearing a similar name: March for Life.”


First off, any time anyone says they are non-partisan, you should doubt their credibility immediately.  Snopes claims to be non-partisan.  Some joke.


But the salient point is that the original communication, which is seemingly transmitted verbatim, mentions a very specific date, March 24, 2018.  The March for Life happened, if I’m reading correctly, January 19, 2018.


How is this mistake possible?  Is it CREDIBLE to believe that this mistake, with a very specific date, was simple stupidity or carelessness?  Or is it more credible to believe that on first pass he had not thought through the implications of what he was saying, then later realized that if he didn’t recant immediately, that a firestorm was going to engulf him and his department?


I’m far from the only one saying this whole thing feels managed.  As near as I can tell, everyone died who is said to have died, and the shooter seems to have been Nicholas Cruz.  But something is not right.  I watched Double Indemnity over the weekend, and what I feel is that “little man” that drove Edward G. Robinson to nearly uniformly correct conclusions, even when they seemed to contradict what evidence he thought he had.


It’s like Obama’s birth certificate.  Whenever that became an issue, the responsible people went and looked for it, found it, then saw that the father was Frank Marshall Davis, and decided to shut the fuck up, and simply validate that it was there, and they had a record of a Hawaiian birth.  It’s not hard to shut up bureaucrats.  Almost to a person, they are career conformists.  That is how they have careers.  I would not last in nearly any bureaucracy.  I tried AT&T and didn’t even make it a year.  I cannot stand group stupidity, and cannot stand the energy needed to keep my mouth shut. 


But to the point here, there remain a ton of unanswered questions, and we cannot even remotely count on mainstream media to do its job.


Again, this is why liminal, sometimes crazy websites like InfoWars are so essential. I don’t agree with everything Alex Jones says by any means.  Sometimes I think he’s off in the deep end.  But he is not afraid to say what he thinks, to think out loud, to speculate, to run with stories that are not well documented, but which COULD be true.


Journalistic “professional” exist, in some respects, to “curate” information.  They don’t exist to tell all possible truths, and the truth is that many things are in fact true which can never be proven so.  Many things exist on a continuum of possibility, but most journalists tend to ignore anything which they can’t affirm to be true.  This leaves large segments of potentially useful information completely unmined, and it makes it easy to ignore ideas for which little evidence exists, but which might be world changing.


Most of the time, the people who more or less call themselves information professionals are merely note-takers, couriers of statements, made by this person or that person, or public cryers, announcing weddings and funerals.  They are reactive.  They don’t dig into deep issues, they don’t stay with hard topics.  They are reactive to our continually changing attention, but they also help create it.  They don’t ever ask anyone to pay sustained attention for very long.  And they themselves seem to have forgotten how to do it.


Here is a short video with some of the problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1I_rpG7WSM

The issue with regard to Hogg’s whereabouts seems to have been solved: it was bad editing, and the bike ride happened that evening.

But either the girl is LYING about Cruz–and her story is corroborated by a second witness–and obviously, they were in a crowd, so more witnesses could be found if there remained any honest fucking journalists–or we are being lied to about how many shooters there were, and who they were.

Why Cruz would cooperate if he knows he is innocent, I don’t know.  Perhaps he was threatened, perhaps he was offered something.

But something stinks to high heaven.  There are a number of flexion points which would make the whole narrative pop. One would certainly be proof that the permit for the March was applied for months ago, about when the FBI was warned about Cruz.

There is this idea that you can’t die in dreams.  I’ve seen it said, in any event.  I’ve heard it.  But I’ve died in my dreams many times.  I died last night, in a severe car accident, and floated away.  It took me a second to remember it was a dream.  I’m usually awake in my dreams, but not always.

And I felt the beginning of the Life Review.  What have I done?  What use have I been?  Part of you is the sum total of the influences on others you have had, what you have left behind, if on balance you gave or took, if on balance you left more or less than was there when you started your journey here.

And part of it is how you have ordered your time, what aims you have pursued, who you have become.  A life lived in solitude, neither hurting nor helping anyone, can be very valuable too, if you use that time to cultivate an inner beauty, an inner radiance, a capacity to be a sender of light.

Someone quoted Abraham Lincoln on my Facebook yesterday: if I had 8 hours to cut down a tree, I would spend 6 hours sharpening my axe.

I would take that spirit to life: if I knew, for sure, I had 80 years to live, I would spend 60 figuring out what was worth doing.  You can’t start knowing, not from your own observation.  But 80 was very old for much of human history, so jump starting the basics with a religion was not a bad idea.  But we need to grow beyond religion.  God has given us everything we need.  It’s lying out there, in plain sight.  Why do we fight over it?

I used to try and imagine what it would be like to live forever, in heaven, or in hell, as I was taught happened when I died by the Christian church. It made me dizzy.

As an adult, I realize that a big part of the issue is that most people would not want to live forever, as we live now, on this Earth, and find it very, very hard to imagine anything better.  We get the image of the cloud, and the angels, sure, but seriously: is that attractive?  Other than sitting in a glow, what is Heaven?  We have no idea.  We just know we don’t want to go to hell, because eternal torment is not hard to contemplate.  It is almost like the pleasure of staying in a four star hotel, or so I would imagine: it’s not worth $1,000/night, or whatever, but you get the pleasure of knowing you are living so much better than the plebeians.

It might be useful to summarize the work of spiritual growth as that of evolving an answer to these questions, to feeling, deeply, how one lives forever, how a form of life can be fashioned in which every moment is a joy, where life unfolds richly, and interestingly, and where you never tire of wondering where it is all going, while enjoying the process.

I don’t have the answer.  I am still afflicted at times by many things.  It is still not easy being me.  But it is what it is.  In my understanding of the universe, I signed up for this, and it is slowly getting better.

David Hume, in one of his foundational works (I forget the title, and seem to have purged the book from my shelf), proposed, as one option, that our universe was designed by committee.  He argued that, based on what we know, it could be one God, two gods, many gods, quarreling gods, or a committee, among many other possibilities.  We don’t talk with God, directly, the way we talk with one another, so who knows? 

Even now, we guess, using science, and it is my understanding that our best known guess, the Big Bang Theory, has some bit theoretical problems.  As I understand it, there is at least one place in the math where they have inserted “and then a miracle happens” to make it work.  Honestly, it’s as good as anything, but it still requires faith.  What requires that degree of faith has not yet risen to the standard we call fully “scientific”.  It is an activity that is done by scientists, and called science, but it is still educated guesswork.

I would like to propose my own idea, based on a spiritual understanding of things.  What if the universe, the visible universe, which is a very, very small fraction of what is, was created by advanced beings, but not God, and what if it was created for the very specific purpose of furthering spiritual evolution?  What if this creation is on-going, and filled with a lot of fuck-ups they are still trying to fix?  What if Earth, specifically, was groomed for life, one of the first in many, many efforts at creating this form of life, this form of hard life, this form of mechanical life, which was successful?

I am not proposing this as true.  I have no idea.  I am proposing it as POSSIBLE, just as Hume’s ideas were possible, and INTERESTING.  Expand your mind.  Can’t hurt anything.

And to be clear, Hume did not propose all those ideas to mock them, or to say that any or all of them were clearly untrue.  He simply said “we don’t know”.  I have long said that agnosticism is the only intelligent option for people who do not want to study the evidence of God. Atheism is an act of faith mislabeled as an act of reason.

I was praying this morning, beginning my morning Kum Nye practice, asking God “What should I do?”

An image floated into my head–it felt more like I merged with it, but that is close enough–where God manifested as a man, roughly in the image of a Greek god, but which was as large as half the visible universe.  I understood that the was a projection of something ineffable,  and utterly incomprehensible to me.  It was a courtesy.

And I asked God “what should I do?”.  And God replied, “what should you do?  you should make your bed.  You should brush your teeth before bed.  You should worry about everything.  You certainly shouldn’t sleep.” And He was smiling as he was saying this.

What I felt was that God was like a father who figures his kids will figure it out sooner or later.  If they are idiots, it will take them longer.  Not his job to make them smarter.   He was gently mocking me, and my questions.  He was implying that I know most of the answers, that life is a question of trying things and seeing what happens.

And things go on far, far beyond this Earth.  We live many lives.  We have an infinite expanse of time to figure things out, so why should God fret if some of us are imbeciles?  The whole universe WANTS us to evolve, to get smarter.  It allows us to be stupid.

I think it was Dostoevsky who said “if God is dead, then everything is allowed.”  Well, even if God EXISTS, then everything is allowed.  Try it.  See what happens.  You can eat turd if you want.  You can stub your toe on purpose.  You can poke a fork in your eye.

And you can be cruel to other people.  See how it works.  Try it a lifetime or two.  What happens?  See?  Why do you have to be so fucking stupid, son?

More than anything, it felt to me like a father who raises his children, then sets them free, to rise or fall on their own.  It felt to me, to be honest, like a country father, who, when his sons come and tell him they’ll be out rabbit hunting for a day or two, says “great”, and doesn’t ask any questions.  They’ll be fine, he figures.  They aren’t dumbasses.

I remember the Soke, head honcho, of the martial art I used to study, once using the analogy of a tiger mother, who pushes all her cubs over a dirt embankment.  Those who make it back up have proven themselves.  They are not dead weight.  She won’t have to carry them.  They now belong.  She loves them, then.  In this larger analogy, everyone makes it back, sooner or later.  None of us can comprehend an infinity, but God IS infinity.  God is beyond any possible concept.

And I will emphasize the overall sense, the spirit, was benign.  But what good does it do me to be told what to do?  What benefit is there to me in a world where it is perfectly acceptable being a fucking idiot, where there is no negative consequence? 

I have to admit, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem with our current world is that many people make it to adulthood and reproduce, who would have died in many earlier ages of the world because they were dumbasses, if I might quote Red Forman.

The whole thing felt very liberating.  All religions are fine.  Islam: fine.  Christianity: fine.  Flying Spaghetti Monster: also fine.  What is happening with religious worship is that God will show in any form you ask he/she/it to.  God fills the Earth and the stars, but is also everywhere, in every moment.  God is quite equal to the task of having a “personal” relationship with every living creature, while also being vastly, and indescribably larger than anything we see or can imagine.

Where God falters in his kindness, what God does not like to see, is fear.  When we obsess over small details of behavior, this manifests in what I saw in an earlier vision as a “mark”.  It is a stain, a blot.  It is not the act.  It is not a Jew eating pork, or working on the Sabbath.  It is the fear which drives him away from a God who is not, in turn, withdrawing in any way.  It is the fear which pushes people into stupidity, into what amounts to the only sin: turning away from growth, joy, play, and engagement.

In this world, if you do 90% of the work, you get 90% of the benefit.  It is not zero sum, or either/or. You can grow in many ways, at many rates of speed.  You can backslide, then turn around.  It is not all sudden ascents and horrific falls.  It’s a moderate landscape, and only made otherwise by dumbasses.

I continue to believe that the Tao Te Ching is the most profound thing I have read.  The “road”, the “way”, is how we continue to move forward.  We all have one. 

I have more to say, but am having trouble organizing it.  I will do more in separate posts.

The net, though,  is that we need not fear this time, this place.  Nothing which cannot be undone in the abundance of time is even possible.  The worst torture can be processed in a couple lifetimes, or perhaps the equivalent in an afterlife.  Nothing can happen which will be permanent. 

Yes, your mind can be erased.  You can be broken in countless ways.  This has long been my fear.  Congenitally I tend to go to the worst case scenario.  I had a period perhaps 4 years ago where I was obsessed with all the ways I could be killed, and all the bad things that could happen to me. 

All this is possible.  No honest person can tell you it isn’t.  But in the fullness of time, all is worked out.  God is betting on us.  The task is to be smart, to be switched on, to do the work, to pass the test, to get through the challenge.  This is hugely hopeful.  Very, very, very hopeful.

And, of course, things can still work out in this world, in this life.  I hope so.

Everything is blooming and Bib Seeger is finally on Spotify. 

You know, I’m not sure how the tone of the previous post came out, but I feel good. I’m getting the range on this thing, figuring out where it bends and where it doesn’t.

I saw God in my meditation this morning. It was highly useful and a bit amusing. I got some questions answered, sort of.

I will post more later, I promise. I am largely insulated from having to work when others demand it, but I am not insulated from meeting deadlines, so day job it is for a while.

I got “attacked” by another demon last night.  I don’t mention it every time it happens.  It’s happened so many times.  10-15 I would suppose, in the last 6 months.  I’m like “I was having fun with the other dream.  Why are you bothering me?  What do you want?”

As I picture this thing, it would be useful for you to picture millions–perhaps billions–of demons flying around in the night, creating tension.  That is all they need to do: create tension.  We do the rest.  Posit a given, inherently stable system.  Add sufficient tension, and it will careen out of control eventually, as we are.

Does not our world seemingly exist, in the main, to make us tense?  Does it even matter where you stand on the political spectrum?  Does it even matter if you are involved in politics at all?  All you need to do is watch TV.  And who do you know who is neither involved in politics nor watches TV?  I can’t think of anyone I personally know.  They must exist.  You don’t know them, though, because they are off the cultural grid. And likely lonely, because they are “weird”.

What I feel is that the demonic represents the inner side of us, the dark side.  There is nothing particularly interesting about this observation.  But before I got distracted, I was in a dark place where I could see the inner realities of everyone.  Imagine a world where you ONLY interact with people as they truly are, where you see what they have not processed yet, where you see what REALLY animates them, where they cannot lie to you about who they are.

Seriously, imagine that.  Would that not be scary as shit?  It is little wonder I am a bit–perhaps more than a bit, although my social skills are fine, when I’m putting on my social face–of a lone wolf. I have reached a point in my work where I can seemingly live with my work, where I can make processing my pain and separation from God a primary focus.  I have the energy and resolve.  This is good.

I will admit that I cried, listening to “The Agony and the Ecstacy”, when Father Bichiellini died, because I have never had a friend or mentor like that. I think so many of us, in this world, are crying for want of wisdom, for want of someone we can trust, who is wise and good and kind in equal portions.  TV, our culture, our lifestyle, makes “wisdom” the trait successful entrepreneurs have, not successful human being.  I have learned, regretfully, to mistrust nearly everyone in the self help industry. I do retain a fondness for Zig Ziglar.  I do suppose he cheered me up at times, the way a true mentor would.  He was old school and hokey, but for all that, I think he was sincere.  Don’t ever dump on Zig in my presence.

And one last thing, before I move to my work.  I watch people, conforming to their expectations of how they are supposed to be, separated from their own guts, their own hearts, their own minds, their own will, floating.  This is not different in principle from what ants do.  Ants operate according to programs with which they are born.  They can no more decide what they are going to do than can a complete conformist, confronted with evolving social realities.

The point of life is to be DIFFERENT from animals, not the same.  It is not the details of the conformity which bothers me, but the fact of it.  It is no better to be a conformist conservative than Leftists, but the practical difference is that being a Leftists asks much, much more of you: it asks for your soul, by changing the terms of the engagement continually, by asking more and more and more and more, until there is nothing left but self righteousness, and the propensity for chanting in the pews, in affirmation of your “identity”.

And the so-called Singularity, if it ever comes (and it will come in parts, in dribs and drabs, and indeed is already arriving, but the mind is not the self, so it cannot come fully), will merely emphasize not the most human aspects of our lives, but the most primitive, most ant and cricket-like.  We might have instantaneous access to the whole of human knowledge, but will still be chirping.  We will know the Thus-ness of everything, but the texture and the why of nothing.  There is no spirit in machines.  They are neither friend nor enemy.  A supercomputer and the first pulley are not different in principle, if they serve truly human aims.  But are we human?

Increasingly, no.  We are rats in a maze, looking for food pellets of human warmth, companionship, and love.  And there are countless demons absolutely willing to keep us company, at the cost of everything we are.

My work continues. I  am of course quite willing both to give my life for this work, and to dedicate my life to this work.  I don’t want to die for what I do, but I believe I am on this Earth to fight, and fight is what I intend to do until my dying breath.

It is my understanding that when Eric Blair–you know who he was (edit: it occurs to me George Orwell is already a memory destruction of sorts, interestingly)–worked for the BBC, they would literally destroy records to alter “history”.  What he wrote in 1984 he had, even then, already seen.

I look things up here and there.  I use DuckDuckGo mainly.  It doesn’t track my every move, I don’t think, and it isn’t evil.

And it occurs to me that all the old paper records are going the way of the dodo bird.  Nobody has encyclopedia’s any more, I suspect.  Why?  It’s all a click or two away.  Even on your PHONE.  Your fucking phone.  Who saw that coming?

But if everything is in a place where it can be amended easily, can it not be disappeared easily?  Alex Jones has been going on about AI bots which learn our personalities and generate fake news to generate political tides, and which even imitate us, for a variety of purposes.

Such bots clearly are possible.  How much and if they will be deployed remains to be seen.  We may never know, really.

But history can be played with, now, too, with much less trouble than in yesteryear.  Many of us still have many books, much history.  But most people don’t, and the trend is towards everything being digital, and easily mutable.

Everything depends, ultimately, on the wisdom and humanity of the people who get control of power and knowledge.  Things are trending badly in that regard.  I sure as fuck don’t trust Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Apple.  The people running them are bad people.  It’s likely safe to say most of them are atheists.  Most atheists will tell it doesn’t matter, but in my view, it is very hard to create coherent and shareable morality which will remain coherent in the long run as an atheist.  And in any event, they are not even TRYING.  Their morality consists in throwing gold coins from their chariots to the plebeians, while on their way from one palace to another.