Moderates United

I think we need to all collectively recognize that the FBI has been completely politicized and that a major house-cleaning is in order.

Yesterday, I spent an hour watching this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4VaRGqJZ_I (it is an hour, broken into roughly ten minute segments).

In it, among other things, they note the public testimony given to the Senate that a senior NTSB official caught the FBI destroying evidence in the middle of the night. The topic is the coverup of the destruction of a commercial Boeing 747 airliner off the coast of Long Island by what were almost certainly two surface to air missiles.

The relevance to the Clintons is clear.  They were involved in the cover up from the get-go:  http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/hillary_gorelick_and_the_corruption_of_the_twa_800_case.html

I don’t think it would be too much to call this Benghazi 1.0, although I am likely being overly generous in calling it the first cover up.

As I have shared, the Oklahoma City bombing also appears to have involved a much wider conspiracy, one also with the FBI in the middle.  Without taking too much time, I will simply share the letter a retired Air Force General who was an expert in the relevant field–that of damage assessment–to Senator Trent Lott: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm

I will note that one police officer involved in the case appears to have been assassinated, and at least one suspect tortured to death, almost certainly by the FBI.  No one was punished.  The truth was never told.

It is an odd thing to me to observe Democrats who fear their government when Republicans are in charge ceding to their fellow Democrats such enormous trust.  If the government can be abused by one party, why not both?  

We saw yesterday what kind of monster we are unleashing if we put Hillary in the White House.  She broke many laws–she lied to Congress, she lied to the FBI, she broke numerous regulations concerning classified data–and SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT.  In full daylight.  Everyone knew and knows what she did, and they said WE DON’T CARE.

The FBI has shown itself to the world to be a corrupt, filthy, disgusting travesty.  They follow the IRS in this.

Hillary has a long history of backroom deals.  She was selling contracts to the Russians.  She is taking huge sums from the Saudis right now.  She is venal.  She is for sale, and ethics is something she vaguely recalls reading about in one of her mandatory college classes many years ago.

I read today she likely played a major role in covering up a major attack in Long Island: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/hillary_gorelick_and_the_corruption_of_the_twa_800_case.html

She got an American Ambassador killed, along with 3 good Americans, then LIED ABOUT IT to all of us.

The woman is a fucking psycho.  She is a walking list of mental health problems, and power seems to be her sole consolation.  And power is not power until it is abused, and abusing it is clearly what she expects to do, and what any sane human being must expect her to do.  Why not?  Morality is off the table.  Common decency is something she has never known or had any reason to practice.  Fear of the law is off the table.  Obama has shown our Congress has been neutered, and now the FBI has shown itself to be her lap dog, as indeed it did for Bill in the 90’s.

And I read Gary Johnson thinks everything Hillary did is OK: http://www.redstate.com/california_yankee/2016/07/03/gary-johnson-gives-hillary-pass/

Johnson seems to prefer the Democrats to the GOP these days. In addition to giving Hillary a pass on her email scandal, he said that President Obama is “a good guy” and Hillary was “a wonderful public servant.”

Gary Johnson can’t win, but he is the only alternative to Hillary and Trump, and anyone who could vote for Trump and instead votes for Johnson is voting for Hillary.

How fucking hard is this call to make for anyone claiming to be sane, and to value the future of our country?  If you are on the gravy train, sure, I get a vote for Hillary; and if you aspire to be on the gravy train, likewise, I assume that like all Machiavellian gangsters she rewards loyal service; but for anyone else, voting for Hillary is a vote to continue our national suicide. 

Being something of a student of Islamic history–Gibbons treatment of it, by the way, in Decline and Fall, is excellent–I have never liked the term “Radical Islam”.  This implies that something has gone wrong with normal Islam, that it has been taken beyond the boundaries.

The truth is that most Muslims, in most Muslim countries, have gone torpid.  They have become drowsy with respect to their faith.  They have allowed their innate humanity to overpower the innate inhumanity of the Islamic creed.  They have privileged sloth and common decency above dogma and ideology.

Islam in its primitive form is ascetic (except for sex), violent, inflexible, and aggressively expansive.  Iran under the Shah was not Islamic.  Women were free to dress as they chose, there were many bars, men did not have beards, many people did not pray the right number of times or at all, etc.

As I have said often, the best Muslims are the worst Muslims.  Conversely, the worst human beings are the best Muslims.

Therefore the term “Activated Islam”, to me, better conveys the sense that the violence was always potential, it was always possible, just not yet present.  The task of the radicals, so called, is merely to activate it, to make Muslims read their own Koran and try to live by it.

And in the West we make it easier to recruit because of our fundamental decadence.  You cannot offer an alternative if you believe nothing.  Humans are believing creatures.  We are tribal creatures.  We need to belong, both socially and intellectually, to some larger group.

Nobody who watches Europe can say the are humanists any more, or that they believe in the promises of the Enlightenment.  They are superficial, egotistical hedonists who are not having children because they don’t want the responsibility of creating a world they will not cringe to pass on to their progeny.  This leaves a gap Islamists are only too happy to fill.

And so we are presented with the prospect of a continent which invented democracy, virtually every major scientific discovery of the modern era, the philosophy of Liberalism and universal human rights, returning to an atavistic stage of cultural evolution firmly rooted in the 7th century.  That this is absurd, does not mean it is impossible, or even improbable.

I am seeing some interesting things.

It seems to me that a key element in developing self acceptance (in quieting the fight or flight responses I will discuss momentarily) is realizing that EVERYTHING you do has a reason.  You may hate yourself for always winding up with the same sort of romantic partner, or for oversleeping, or for being a workaholic, or for abusing drugs and alcohol and sex, or whatever.  EVERYTHING you do has a reason.  It is emotionally logical.  It is intended to save you pain, even if of course in the long or even short run it increases it.  You are substituting a conscious pain to avoid dealing with an unconscious one.

And what is interesting to me is that as I slow down, I am realizing that every day, countless times a day, people go through sequences which have a middle part that they are unaware of.  You see a person, and a series of events trigger in your brain, and a reaction issues forth.

Let me reframe that a bit.  Emotionally healthy people are likely aware of why they do things, but most people are not emotionally healthy, not by a long shot.  You find yourself saying “I don’t know why I said or did or felt that”.  There is an answer, but the part of you which ACTUALLY made the decision did so in a split second, in an altered state of consciousness that may have endured no more than a tenth of a second.

Healing, become healthy, consists in being able to touch this place, to speak with it, to give it room to express itself, to feel it, to make contact with it.  Invariably, it is where things are hidden which make you uncomfortable at best–and invoke deep feelings of horror and violation at worst–which is why they are hidden.  Some part of you is protecting you from things it can’t make go away, and doesn’t yet know how to process.  Suppression enables you to function, even if suboptimally.  This is a truism of course, but old truths are sometimes worth saying again with new words.

What I realized this morning is that I cycle between fight and flight.  If you pin a bird to a board with a nail, it will alternate fighting and passivity.  But if you look at this metaphor–and it is a bit gruesome, but suitable for my purpose since it evokes the actual feelings involved–the fighting and flighting are the same motion.  The feeling of wanting to escape and wanting to attack are quite similar.

There are two cycles involved in people dealing with trauma.  There is a cycle between depersonalization–passivity–and fight and flight.  And there is a cycle between fight and flight.  Fight is when the traumatized person gets enraged and angry in an inappropriate proportion.  Flight is when they become lost in daydreams.  It is not the same as numbness.  It has motion to it.

And what I saw this morning is that fight and flight cycle back and forth, but they go through a dark zone which evokes fear, but which is really the latent possibility of calm and peace, of relaxation.  The traumatized person fears relaxation, because it feels like it increases risk.  Certainly, I do, on some level.

There is a lot to ponder and feel here.

When you interact with another human being, and they fail to be fully present, this on some level, if you fail to perceive it, works to distance you from your own emotions.  What I am seeing is that other people, and to the main point here, parents, can say all the words you need to say but that if they don’t mean it, it hurts, on balance.

They can say “I love you”.  They can say “I am there for you”.  They can say “I am proud of you”.

But if they are narcissists, if they are watching TV while they say it, if they are heading out the  door, then that bond is not formed, that connection is not made.  And in point of fact, you are being trained in superficiality.

To look a child in the eye and say something you don’t know how to mean, or are unwilling to take the time to mean, is emotional neglect.  And what is interesting about this is that this neglect will not be easily perceived by either party.  The child will think “they said they love me, so this must be what love is”.  The parent will say “I said I love you, what else can I do?”

So often I think that in this and now other countries, media fills the gap where emotional honesty should have been.  People are hurt, do not know they are hurt, do not know they are missing something, and use constant distraction as a means of managing it without ever becoming consciously aware of it.

This is a fragile system.  In the past, absent these distractions, something would have given.  Some truth would have been told.  The delusion would have collapsed.  But in our modern world, delusion can survive a very, very long time, and it is buttressed by sentimentalism as a pseudo-moral creed.

I am consciously directing most of my thinking to my diary, but I felt this needed to be said publicly.

Things are going well for me.  I will have crossed the ocean soon.

Edit: could we not say that what we might term the Age of Divided Attention is the Age of Ineffective Love?

I am playing Fallout 3.  If it has to do with technology, I am on the tail end of the curve.  I am a last adopter. [I say this because this is an old game].

In it, all manner of moral perversions are possible.  You can practice cannibalism.  You are regularly required to shoot both men and women in the face.  You can gain points in a negative way for killing good people.  You are at one point invited to shoot children and their dogs.  You are at one point invited to bully a sensitive kid and make him cry, then to kill all the members of a congenial, stereotypical American suburb.  You can shoot and kill your own father.

What seems obvious to me is that those who choose evil are practicing emotional dissociation, and social isolation.  I have never been one of these people who says that video games make people go out and shoot people.  The reality is much more complex.  What is CLEAR is that you are PRACTICING violence.  David Grossman says this clearly.  And in practicing violence, you are moving away from union, from connection, from empathy, from belonging.  And in some extreme cases, isolation DOES produce violence, which is supported by the long years of practice.

I will not dilate long on all this, since it is not my principal focus here.

But logically, the other polarity is possible too.  Me being me, of course I pursue the Good Karma (as they style it).  And what is interesting is that even though it is virtual, virtual good deeds still feel good.  As boring and untitillating as this may sound, it makes me wonder if games where you do good deeds for people might actually enable and support mood boosts.  You help little old ladies across the street.  You do favors for people which involve normal video game sorts of tasks.  Etc.  Just putting it out there.

There is an underlying racism among Democrats and those otherwise ideologically conditioned by Soviet propaganda, which states that brown people are uniformly virtuous, and that any malice or violence they may express is our fault.

This is stupid.  Brown people are like white people: most of them are good, some of them aren’t.  They are diverse, believe many different things for many different reasons, and are quite capable of fighting among themselves without the involvement of white people at all.

I keep getting told that if I don’t support allowing all Muslims in period, then I am condemning an entire religion.  Leaving aside the fact that I understand the details of these things much better than most of those making the accusations, the possibility seems to be invisible to them that some Muslims might genuinely be evil, and that this evil is not our fault.

It is astonishing how patronizing such leftists are, when they accuse America of all manner of crimes, while ignoring the crimes of anyone who is not white.  This is a color blindness; this is a fundamentalist racism.  When you consider any group of people as homogeneous because you don’t understand them, there is no good word BUT racism.

When Muhammad Ali–who was clearly such a racist that his segregationism was openly welcomed by the KKK, who invited him to speak at a rally–said he didn’t want to travel to some foreign land to kill the brown man, he assumed that it was us who were killing, and them who were dying.  In point of fact, one set of brown people was fighting another, in an existential battle which, when lost, caused an enormous amount of suffering and death for the people we had been trying to help, and whose invitation to help we had accepted at great cost of death and suffering for our own people as well.

Leftists don’t get this.  They lack nuance.  They lack depth.  They lack the capacity for distinction, for non-racist sentiment, for adult, mature understanding.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/12/bourgeois-equality

I have long been arguing that the most important innovation of economic liberalism is the use of ideas to create wealth.  Anyone with a good enough idea can get rich in America.  And being born rich guarantees nothing.  This is the way it should be.

Time may not heal all wounds, but it is a reliable companion when you can stomach no other.

Bon mot?  You decide.  I’m not sure.  It feels right, for a curmudgeon, which I certainly tend to be.

Edit: solitude cannot be your companion.  Don’t be fucking stupid.  But small changes, processed slowly, can.

I was reading a quite clever book ad disguised as a personal development essay, which talked about Ben Franklin’s “Five Hour Rule”, which was that he spent an hour a day during the week reading and learning something.  I am told Bill Gates and Warren Buffett–who we are to consider as icons of success, since they are very wealthy and professionally very successful–practice this, or more.

I thought about it.  I spend most of every day in contemplation, and an hour a day in Kum Nye, and 10-15 minutes doing my EmWave2.  And it seems to me that far more important than book learning is self learning.  I suspect Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are, now, roughly the same people they were in their twenties.  They know a lot more facts, but they don’t know themselves at an intimate emotional level.  I would assume, in fact, that a principle driving factor in their success is the drive within them to AVOID emotional realities which they find difficult to process.  Both of them have philanthropic foundations whose activities likely serve as ersatz consciences.  But who you are, what matters, is who you are, here, now, and how fully.

I see much in my meditations.  Yesterday it came to me that most of my surface personality is really just a play act, a play, and the actors emotions whose role and dialogue is stage managed by a much deeper, highly practical, fully aware part of myself.  In most people, what you are seeing is an opera they did not consciously write, and do not realize they are acting out.  Some part of them does, but they cannot get to that part without considerable work.  That part is the intuition which can be trusted.  That part is highly competent, but its job until a certain level of emotional development is reached, is maintaining homeostasis among conflicting, violent, and primitive emotions.

As I like to say, we are not so much different from animals than we like to believe.  At the same time, I do continue to believe we are spiritual animals, here for a purpose.

And I would add that it seems to be my task both to cultivate a species of atheism, and a different species of spiritual awareness.  Atheism, in that the God of my childhood first beats me relentlessly, then tells me how loved I am.  The Christian God first condemns us to eternal fire, then says that he loves us endlessly.  The two are not reconcilable.

Spirituality, in that I have really like William James accounts of what to my mind is healthy spirituality, which is a sense of God’s love being present, and a sense of being in time and place which make sense, which work to my good; that there is a plan, even if I can’t understand it.  Such people see and recognize that evil can intrude even into otherwise blessed lives, but that if accepted as God’s Will, then true and lasting happiness and peace are possible.