Moderates United

As I may have shared at some point, I used to carry a pocket copy of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” with me.  In that era we have now forgotten before smart phones, I would pull it out and read it when I had a few spare minutes.  At the top of all considerations, you need the Way, or Tao.  You need mojo.  It is an indefinable something, but it is quite real.  The Patriots have it. Back in the day, the 49’ers had it.

Trump has it.

But we are looking at a long, long hard slog in the days ahead.  The battle lines are drawn. The enemies of freedom have shown their true colors.  They include all people capable of voting for today’s Democrats, and a significant segment of the Republican Party.  What we have seen with the Bill Kristols and the National Review and the Never Trump’ers is that, as is the case with the Left, ideological purity is much more important to them than concrete action, than accomplishment.  They insist on a sort of collegiality with the Left which, at the end of the day, does not allow them to draw any solid or enduring MORAL distinctions between their own ideas and those of the Left.  They would dispute this, of course, but I would say that in practical terms, Trump has done more in a short period to unmask the collectivist and totalitarian agenda of the American Left than they have in 50 years.  Practically, they are irrelevant.  But they still oppose Trump.

And perhaps most importantly, and this is the point of this post, we have what is called “The Deep State”.  It is good we are seeing this term appear in orthodox conversations.  They are perhaps the source of all the surface confusion and attack.

But who are they, and what do they want?  Are they homogeneous, or diverse?  Are their aims clear or confused and conflicting?  How could they be identified?

Sun Tzu teaches that any idiot can attack their enemies.  True strategists attack their PLANS.  And if it is true that the Deep State is the real enemy–and it seems that the media is simply one of their tools, even if the most obvious and ubiquitous one–then Trump needs to attack their Way, their plans.

Obviously, this is a foggy group.  But I do have one idea which appeals to me on all levels: take seriously the idea that the power elite engage in systematic pedophilia.  That pizza place in Washington was a nexus of the power elite in our Capital, and something was very definitely wrong there.  Find Anthony Weiner’s laptop and find out if it contained what Eric Prince said it contained.  Put a full time task force on the job of finding out if there is any truth to these rumors.  One arrest may lead to another to another to another.

My gut sense is that the wealthiest people on this planet, in general, are sick.  The government of the United States, though, is more powerful, if it is directed properly.

Would be using this whole Milo fiasco to LEARN.  Who is he, really?  What do his experiences say about homosexuality generally?  What unspoken truths about the process of becoming gay can we put into the public domain?  There are some obvious stories here which might be illuminating, if the bastards trying to crucify him had the capacity to listen and learn.

Removing people from discussions is, in my own view, disgusting, especially if they are thoughtful, and capable of expressing themselves.

How the fuck do you learn when you lock people out?  Who wants to confine what they are pleased to call a “conversation” to like-minded people?  Idiots.  That is who.  Determined idiots, who want to remain that way.

In my own world, it is perfectly OK to criticize people, but if you think throwing them into the pit is an interesting, clever, or effective solution, then you are my enemy. Engage with them.  Insult them if you need to, but listen to their responses.  Solve problems.  Hear the songs of human diversity and difference, even if they repulse you.

And fuck you National Review, on general principle.  Fucking Quislings, you sacks of shit.  You are worse than the Left.  We expect them to betray us.  That is who they are, and do not claim to be anything else. I really hope your publication fails badly.

Perhaps, I should say MORE. I’m not sure where it stands, since I haven’t read an NR article in at least six months.

I remember staying after school in high school to read that magazine.  I loved it.  But blue bloods can be traitors too, can’t they?  

There is this swirling mix all of us must confront daily, if we are honest.  I don’t know where it is going.  I know that Donald Trump is a very disciplined and determined human being, and he seems to be surrounding himself with people like himself.

I will offer one thought exercise: if you lost power for a week, how much of the news could possible affect you directly?  Does the Education Secretary really make a difference?  Trumps comments on Sweden?  Whatever the other fucking manufactured controversy de jour is?  No: it has no impact on your life.  You would have no way of knowing, even if Trump decided to fuck Melania on the White House lawn.  Everything you know, and thus everything you are reacting to, is funneled to you second, third, or fourth hand.  It does not affect the smell of freshly mown grass, the beauty of snow, the formation of clouds, or the course of a day not lived in abstraction and distraction.

I was in the gym today, looking at six different TV’s, tuned to 6 different channels, and it hit me that every person watching every one of those channels is waiting for emotion of some sort.  They pay for it, I’m sure, in reality TV: the people who seem to feel big, real, feelings.

There is a hole in the center of our world.

The Kum of Kum Nye is linguistically equivalent to the Buddhist Shunyata, in my understanding, or Void.  Thus it could be translated as “movement in space”.  It asks the question where consciousness “is”.  Is it here, or there?  Can it be located?

Often we are encouraged to realize–not visualize, but realize–that the boundaries of the sense of the body are porous.  Where we connect with the air is ambiguous.  We know that all matter is mostly space, do we not?  The empirical difference between space occupied by our bodies, and space NOT occupied by our bodies is quite small.  Ponder this a moment.

For my own purposes, the small difference I would draw, though, is that space is FULL, and only slightly more–or perhaps less, which is an interesting thought in itself–full where we are present.

The Void of the Buddhists is, in my considered view, the same as the Quantum Vacuum or Zero Point Field posited by Quantum physicists.  It is a field of nearly infinite energy.  It was used some years ago to DERIVE F=MA, where the field itself constituted the cause of inertia and drag. Perhaps mass itself.  There are a whole lot of things to unpack from this largely ignored, but completely mainstream idea.

But the point I wanted to make is that there is a large Ku which I seem to sometimes swim in.

And what I see is that all these people buying into these lunatic ideas about Trump, those who have been buying into the lunacy of the Left in general, have NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.  Their families are cold and disconnected.  Their social experience has been insipid and superficial.  Much of their lives is spent consuming media of various sorts: watching TV and movies, playing video games, listening to music someone else created.  When they are with people, they bring the plastic of the media they consume with them.

How often have you found yourself having conversations which consisted in the main in comparing scenes in movies you both have seen?  How often have you felt, truly felt, deep pain, deep joy, deep connection, deep sadness, a deep sense of purpose?  For far too many of us, rarely or never.

You go by, week by week, month by month, decade by decade, and nothing important is said.  Nothing important happens.  Perhaps you get married to someone you don’t really know, because you don’t even know yourself.  Perhaps you get divorced for some stupid reason.

Children seem to bring a sense of meaning and purpose to many of us, but so many people in the West and Japan are not having children.

What is there?  A shallow grave in which you eventually root, and a death which merely marks, formally, a long term process of dissolution.

What the Left has long marketed is belonging, membership, passion, purpose.  It is a lunatic cult, which categorically rejects individual growth, nuance, and ideosyncrasy; it rejects, in other words, everything which makes life worthwhile and interesting.  But it offers excitement, the same way sex does.  It offers belonging, the same way cults do.

It is a plastic way of life.  There is nothing authentically human or caring about it.  But it gets you from one side to the other.

Thus, what Trump has REALLY brought into stark relief is the moral and emotional poverty of large segments of the industrialized world.  They no longer speak as human beings.  They no longer recognize reason and proportion.  They no longer possess the capacity to form individual judgments.  Every cultural improvement over the past 4,000 years is lost on them.  They long to return to an era of tribalism, rapine, and cultural solipsism, because they do not know what to do with the gift of awareness, and have rejected a priori the possibility of personal authenticity and growth.

As I have periodically shared, going to bed without drinking is like packing for a nighttime combat mission.  I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but I know it will not be pleasant.

As far as addiction, any physiological withdrawals don’t last more than three days or so, and all physical effects are gone within a month or so.

I have gone three months with no alcohol, with no reduction in symptoms, which leads to me to conclude that my shaking and other symptoms have nothing to do with drinking, although short term withdrawals may exacerbate them.

Having tried every other possibility, it seems my only option is to go through these things and learn to live without fear.

Last night was particularly bad.  It was like someone hit me with an electric shock about every ten minutes the first half of the night.  At some point, I was hit about every 5 seconds for minutes at a time.  Eventually, I fell asleep from sheer body fatigue.

At some point, I found myself saying DOWENT TAYEEK, which I realized was probably an infant version of “don’t take”.  I am told I was very, very attached to my pacifier–which was likely one of the only things I trusted to calm me down–and as with everything else they did, my parents likely took it precipitously one day without explanation.

But here is the interesting thing: I calmed down after that came out.  It was a moment, frozen within me, which thawed, finally. I reached, got in touch with, some primal part of me, and opened a line of communication, of understanding, of respect and listening.

On many surface and internal layers I have neurosis and difficult emotional pain.  But I really think at the very core of the thing, of my self, there is an indefatigable and absolutely committed warrior.  I fight battles continually, and even though they are in my mind, even thought nothing external is going on, they FEEL the same as real battles.

I share this, because I know I’m not the only one.

And later in the night, I was surrounded by zombie children in a library, in a dream.  I told them: I don’t fear you, you need to fear ME.

And I look at my own history.  Everything in my past worked to destroy my core sense of self, but I survived.  Everyone in my family is crazy, but they told me I was crazy.  I persisted.

All my life, I have seen things a bit–sometimes a lot–differently.  This is because I am not afraid to pay the cost of being different.  I am not afraid of mockery, or personal attack.  I do not fear for the sense of reality and sound thought I have fought so hard and long to attain.

I have created myself, at great cost of effort and pain.  I have created a world view, a philosophy, a path to a better future.  I have offered solutions to all the problems confronting human kind, and I have been able to do so because on some level I do not fear the dark. I am the one who lives in the dark, and points the way to the light.

The terror impulse must weaken over time.  I can look it in the eye, and know from long experience that I can take what it deals out. I am getting stronger by the day.

At some point, I will become truly interesting.

I wonder if 1 in 100 of the people doing what they are told, and chanting slogans against Betsy DeVos, know who Obama’s Secretary of Education was?  I don’t, and I’m a political wonk.  There may well have been more than one.

But as I ponder the graph here, it seems to me this could be drawn another way: dollars spent per unit of educational outcome.  Logically, if there were a relation between dollars spent and outcome, then it would show up in such a graph.

What this graph REALLY shows is that the amount of actual education achieved for dollar spent has been DECREASING, somewhat precipitously.  Our educational Return on Investment has been in steady decline for decades.

How could Betsy DeVos possibly do worse than quadrupling spending and achieving NOTHING?  Science scores actually went DOWN.

I was pondering today the large buildings all large school districts have, filled with people making six figure incomes who never teach students at all.  What if we got rid of all the administrators, or most of them, and took the saved money to pay our teachers $150,000/year, provided they de-unionized, allowed vouchers and school choice, and were willing to be audited periodically?  Would we not attract and keep much better talent?  We need much less governing, and much more doing.  Bureaucracies are cancers, whose nature is to grow and grow and grow, and snuff the life out of everything surrounding them.

I was wondering too if we could require all teachers to be videotaped.  My youngest was telling me that one of the teachers there regularly goes off on hour long rants about nothing.  They will schedule a quiz, and a class discussion, and then she will just go off on a personal tangent and never come back.

I am uncomfortable with the idea of students controlling teacher’s fates–because that could easily become a tool of intimidation–but if students could complain, and then point to a video of a teacher being stupid, progress would be possible; again, if the teachers unions can be broken.

No matter what Trump does there will be screaming.  It’s hard to believe, though, that it has any chance of working the way it used to in the past.  As one meme floating around has it, Trump could cure cancer, and then be accused of denying the Grim Reaper his due.  The American people–over half, at any rate–see this for what it is: mean spirited, anti-American, intentionally destructive, and filled with lies and blind hate.

I was drinking, of course,

But I seem to have discovered that despite all my years of dissociation, that I did feel things when they happened, and I can access them now in memory.

At some point, with my history, you do wonder where your life has been.  I have spent so many years just trying to get through the day, just trying to function as a human being.

And I am realizing is that strength is for special occasions.  It should not be needed continually.  Once I get myself calm, I will have very powerful resources I can put to better use.

Some nights, I feel I have somehow swum into the middle of the dominant stream of American or even Western cultural life.  I will spend hours “dreaming”, which is really catching and feeling the feelings of an immense river flowing over and through me.  I do it while sleeping, but it is intense sometimes.

Last night, I kept doing tours of the top of a skyscraper, which had amusement parks, gardens, and everything needed for human life on it.  Except for actual nature, and something other than plastic.

And I looked at my world today, and felt I am plastic, myself.  It’s interesting.  I took a class on burial rituals around the world in graduate school, and rural Greeks, as of the mid-90’s or so, still buried then dug up their deceased loved ones and placed their bones in an ossuary.  They were finding it tough, then, though, because modern plastics we unthinkingly imbibe delay or even inhibit the natural decay process.

Who knows how much plastic is in me?  But plastic is where I seemingly need to live.  So many of us live there.

Where is this world leading?  Well, you, I, and chance have some say don’t we?

I thought I had more to say.  It’s been a long day, and I am tired all over.

I am healing, slowly.  I will say that.  I was looking around my space tonight, and I feel I have put my feet in life, often.  Sometimes those experiences freeze up, too.  Sometimes. the risks I took, and the feelings that opened up, freeze up.  I see this.  But I have the key.  The keys.

My place has pictures all over it, and every one has a story.  I could do a two hour tour of the small place where I live. Meaning is everywhere.  My purpose, the strong passions that drive me, is everywhere.

Often, I am silent when I am real.  Oh, but what flows through me!!!  I am oceans.  This is life.  This is life.

The cowardice and complicity of Republican leadership.  They have been pretending for years that it was only Democrat opposition that prevented them from doing X, Y, and Z.  Let us say, passing a budget.  Better yet, a balanced budget.

But whatever merits Paul Ryan may once have had seem to have vanished when he took power.  He is currently third in line to the Presidency.  I remember him coming off as an honest policy wonk, the guy with a plan, the guy who could balance the budget and prevent fiscal ruin.  Where is that guy now?

So, in total, what stands exposed under the Klieg lights Trump brought to Washington is a SYSTEM which makes continuous excuses, but which has run out of excuses.  There is nothing left but the pathetic truths of complicity in crime, apathy, cynical grandstanding with no sincerity, and covert sympathy for the indefensible positions of the Democrats.

I have made this a sort of running joke.  The complicit media continues to fail to grasp the implications of the fact they did their VERY BEST to ensure Trump did not get elected, but that he still got elected.  This means that their VERY BEST, now, is unlikely to achieve any other result.  They make mountains of mole-hills.  They lie when the story isn’t good enough, and when there isn’t a story that makes Trump look bad, they simply make it up out of whole cloth.  They are skilled tailors.

But the American people get this.  They have demonstrated it time and time again, and most importantly on November 8th, when the media had Hillary a virtually lock on winning the Presidency.  If I am reading the polling data right, the whole manufactured Flynn controversy–which as I have argued should actually HELP Trump in the long run–seems to have caused Trump’s numbers to go UP, not down.

The media has had American politicians on a leash for such a long time, they don’t know what to do when somebody just ignores them.  They can’t argue the facts, and like long term addicts, they can’t break away from the habit of lying.

Thus, when I say ‘IT’S TRUMPS WORST WEEK EVER.  AGAIN!!!”   I am mocking them, and their dishonest and dishonorable efforts to prevent honest and genuinely useful policy from being implemented to help actual Americans, and to defend common sense and common decency.