Moderates United

I think I’ve said this before, but the teenage years begin when your children are still in diapers.

See.  See what is in front of you.  See all the way.

I have two teenagers, and they are both delights.

http://www.infowars.com/seattles-nanny-state-is-deputizing-trashmen-as-secret-police-to-snoop-through-wastebins/

A week or two I mentioned as a lunatic scenario the deputizing of the politically correct to act as direct and legal militants in favor of the State.  Well, here it is.  You throw away an apple core?  You will be found out and punished.

And I want to be clear that we always have to separate out whether or not some action is right or wrong, and instead address directly the increase in power and surveillance required to enforce it.

The city literally wants to empower people to go through people’s garbage in pursuit of some ludicrous political objective.  The world will not be saved or lost by apple cores and week old spaghetti.  It WILL be lost by people who insist such trifles are the direct business of an omnipotent State.

And in the second half of the story, they talk about police using analyzers to detect drug traces in the urine people flush down their toilets.

If that does not make you say What the Fuck, please take a long needle and stick it in the inside corner of your eye.  That will complete the lobotomy, which at this stage is just a formality.

This insanity can only end in total tyranny, unless it is stopped.

As I mention from time to time, I really like this form of meditation.  It is intelligent.  It evokes feelings and teaches you to process them.  It is in that sense eminently practical.  I have not done Vipassana, but in my understanding it consists in the awareness, but does nothing to evoke something to be aware OF. I did mantra meditation for a long time back in my youth, and have tried Zazen and the “just sitting there” forms of meditation, and none did anything but wind me up.  Counter-productive, as I suspect is the case for all people not already relatively well adjusted.  That, in any event, is what I read is often the case.

We are complex, rich beings.  We are like cabinets with countless drawers and shelves, and filing spaces.  Personal growth consists in the first phase in simply coming to know ourselves as we are, to open everything up, to see it, to become acquainted with it.  The spaces within us have unique and distinctive textures and feelings.

You have to have motion to open things up, and you have to have stillness to allow it to speak. Kum Nye has both.  Uniquely, in my not inconsiderable experience.

Today, between my last post and this one, I did my practice, and in the fifth part of this set of exercises, I was bringing my negatives into my “cloud”, and a Mr. Hyde sort of figure came up, and told the part of me that is loving “I always hated you and wanted to hurt you.”  “I”–I hate to identify with that other part of me, although I recognize in principle I must–asked why.  And it showed me that it needed love for a very long time, but had no way to get it.  And anything we need but can’t get we grow to hate.  It is natural for unloved people to grow to hate love.  Something tantalizing but 6″ out of your reach is maddening.

The nature of trauma is that the more you need people the more you push them away. Some part of you knows that your very desperation makes you intrinsically vulnerable, intrinsically gullible, intrinsically prone to error and the manipulations of others.  The harder you reach, the harder you pull back.  It is one more of the contradictions of loss and emotional privation.

But my two selves went for a pleasant walk in a pleasant park, and I think they worked something out.

There can be no greater gift, no skill more worth developing, than the ability to truly love oneself.  Once you can do that, you don’t NEED people, and so the desperation and clinging disappear, and so the ability to approach other people appropriately, in a spirit of welcoming and openness becomes available.

My life’s tasks are developing this ability in myself–I am nearly there–and then figuring out how to teach it consistently and efficiently.  That is one of my life’s tasks anyway.  Any regular readers I may have know I have set some other modest tasks in addition to that.

I have not been able to bring myself to watch “Unbroken”.  I KNOW, from personal experience, that there is a huge difference between surviving and thriving.  When you push your will to the utmost, with the fury and passion that terror and fear of death–and sheer stubbornness–compel, there is a cost.  There is a price to pay.  A debt is incurred, that is paid with sleepless nights, tossing and turning, nightmares, panic attacks, hypervigilance, inability to trust people, and the depression and sadness that these symptoms bring in their wake.  That was the aftermath of Zamperini’s war time experience. In my limited understanding, it was only when he embraced Christianity that he found peace.

Nietszche’s famous dictum notwithstanding, he wound up very much alive in an insane asylum.

I can’t embrace Christianity, and I don’t think most “moderns”, as I could call people like me, can either.  I wish I could, but I can’t.  It remains my personal belief that whatever Christ’s actual message was, it has been perverted through some combination of carelessness, avarice, and stupidity.

My dream is of methods which CONSISTENTLY, reliably, resolve trauma.  Our processes and procedures, our understandings, are those of infants.  Ancient civilizations, I think, were vastly superior to us in that respect.

One interesting thing I will note is that I have reached a point in my Kum Nye where after half an hour or so of doing the exercises, I very much feel I am in a cloud–that I sort of AM a cloud, or a field, of energy.  And in my current set of exercises we are reaching a culmination of sorts, where I invoke this cloud, and then bring past traumas and negative experiences into it, and they are transformed.  The ideal–and this is a realistic ideal, I think, based on my early experience of it–is to take all experiences of all sorts and instantly transform them into positive, even ecstatic energy.

There is a method to this.  I have been doing this practice 2-6 times a week now for about a year and a half.  It has taken this long to get to this point.  And of course I have been doing a lot of other inner work as well.

But I will reiterate my vision that things like this belong in temples at the very CENTER of our culture, which are not peripheral, but part of the sustaining core of what brings and keeps us together.

What a fallen, ugly lot we are.  Even in Christian churches, which speak–often but not invariably–honestly of love, they still retain a human sacrifice at the very center of it, and a vengeful, violent God.

And Christianity, and all other religions in America and the West generally, is in decline. Those outside of it have NOTHING but their politics, their work, maybe their families, and hedonism to replace it, all of them too ugly to be the focus of a good life.

We need more.  We deserve more, I think.  Certainly we need to demand more of ourselves.  We need to take the next step.  I am speaking to the wind again, but at the moment I need to.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/21/obamas-ice-director-no-immigration-enforcement-until-amnesty-is-passed/

We need to GROK that the Democrats–the national Democrats, which is not always the same people running local and State governments, although it is becoming that way–no longer value Americans, no longer value common decency, no longer value working for the common good.

They could not care less that many of these illegals are committing violent crimes over and above violating our immigration laws.  All they care about is that all these Mexicans–and by and large they ARE Mexicans–remember them come election time, and reward with votes the people who have been bought illegally, and who will be paid for out of the public coffer, out of the hard work of people born here, and who are supporting this very literally criminal enterprise.

Democrats need to wake up and realize that if their party is the party of the “Working Man”, it is the party of the MEXICAN working man, and that if you were born here, fuck you.  You can expect your wages to continue going down, work to be harder to come by, and whenever Hillary can get away with it, for taxes to go up substantially.

We are watching the evisceration of a system that works, to accommodate people from a system that does NOT work, and whose seeds they will undoubtedly plant here.

Lamenting this is common sense and common decency.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Where are the brave, good people to defend a way of life so many have fought and died for, thinking our enemies were somewhere other than our universities, our media, and our treasonous political elites?

It occurs to me that sometimes it is good to name feelings, and sometimes it isn’t.  When I did the Hoffman Process, we had a list of feeling grades we could use when someone asked us how we felt.  It was on the back of our binder.  Words included calm, centered, ashamed, vulnerable, dissatisfied, yearning, etc.

But I get these really interesting states doing my Kum Nye, where I feel a sort of connection with the air and space around me.  And I don’t feel like naming it.

When it comes to complex sensations and feelings, “that” is not just an acceptable answer, but sometimes the only appropriate one.

I would pull the lever with more confidence for Trump than Jeb Bush.  And I think this sentiment has spilled out across the country.  BOTH parties have shown they can’t handle governing responsibly.

And given that Obama has lost the war in Iraq, planted the seeds to lose the war in Afghanistan, has created more debt than any President in American history–with only George W. as a competitor–and has rammed through a medical insurance take-over that no sane people who pay income taxes wants or needs (or would do, given sensible and easy reforms), I ask: HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET?

We have a President currently who is beyond incompetent: he is working for our enemies.  He is working for our demise.  And he is getting it.

At a minimum–unlike Jon Stewart and all the silly people who very simply cannot have serious, adult conversations–Trump does love this country, and he can be expected to make decisions to help further its interests.

That should be a sine qua non for being President, but clearly it isn’t.

Granted, he is an egomaniac, and a blowhard, and a hypocrite, and he has often changed his mind.  Why, then, is he still the most honest politician on either side of the aisle? It is not Trump who needs to apologize for saying what hundreds of millions of Americans are thinking: it is those who want to represent us, but show no vision, no courage, no leadership, and no UNDERSTANDING.

I have not started watching it again yet, but did want to comment that there is something mystical, something compelling, about night and flame.  The night rallies became more than political: they partook of the religious, of the rite, of the initiation.

You work 8 to 5 or whatever, then go home.  That is your day life.  By asking people to come out at night, to stay out at night, and to bring torches, they got into people’s innermost recesses.  They got into their homes and families.  They broke the separation between public and private.

This is a provocative thought, but I can conceive of ways in which the methods of totalitarianism could potentially be turned to the good.  We need to know why what they did worked, how it worked, and what the long term effects were, both good and bad.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/07/20/trump_teachable_moment_how_come_liberals_can_savage_mccain_s_service

I didn’t read all the way down, but will just support one point he made: if you provide ANY answer to the question “have you stopped beating your wife yet”, which is the set up for every media hit, then you lose.  And they want you to lose.  That is why they love this tactic so much.  They will ignore serial killers if they are Democrats, and find moral outrage for Republicans who jaywalk.  That is the way it works.

By not apologizing, Trump of course nurtures his ego.  But he also does not buy into this game where he will invariably and necessarily lose.

As I have said on a number of occasions, the only way you can deal with this system is through relentless offense.  Their whole method is to put doubts in people’s heads, to make them feel guilty about crimes committed dozens of times a day by the Left, and to slow them down, and stop them.

Romney did not go for Obama’s jugular when he should have.  Why?  He is a decent, introspecting man, and he feels some bonds of human decency.  That is a fatal defect when dealing with wolves.  Whatever his manifest flaws may be, lacking a killer instinct is not one of Trump’s shortcomings.

And when it comes to sexual escapades, I will note that Bill Clinton was fucking an intern in the Oval Office, and nobody seems to care.  Hillary seems to be a lesbian, and nobody cares.  Hell, I don’t care: that is by far the least disqualifying thing about her. My only objection is the lie of their marriage.  They are political allies, nothing more.

Trump is over the top, but none of that really matters.  If we are supposed to normalize gay marriage, why not infidelity and sexual voracity?  We’ve been through the sexual revolution.  John McCain cheated on his wife, too, as far as that goes.

https://sharylattkisson.com/fact-check-the-washington-post-on-donald-trump-and-john-mccain/

This seems to be getting ZERO air time.  He called McCain a hero three times, but wanted to be clear he was not an Audie Murphy war hero.  And he wasn’t.  He displayed great courage, but was not particularly successful in killing the enemies of America.

Actual quote: “He’s not a war hero.  He is a war hero.  He’s a war hero because he was captured.” 


And this is true.  And it’s worth adding for context that McCain accused Trump, among other things, of “bringing out the crazies”.  It is worth noting in that regard it is a virtually CERTAINTY that McCain and Lindsay Graham helped create ISIS by secretly knowing about and agreeing to Obama arming and training supposed Syrian “rebels”, who have from the onset been on all accounts foreign born and committed to Islamism.


I think to this very day Obama is still providing arms to these people, in a war which continues even now, and to his enduring discredit and dishonor, McCain has not changed his position an iota, that I can see.


We can both respect past service, and call bullshit on present policies.  McCain ran a shitty campaign in 2008 and that is part of the reason we got Obama.  


I for one wish he would retire.  It would help us remember the good things with greater clarity, rather than being forced into concluding he is as dangerous as Obama.