Moderates United

I’m making some water kefir, and they insisted that the water not be chorinated or fluoridated, so I looked up our local water system.  They use both fluoride (required by law), and chloramine, which is a successor to chlorine, but possibly worse.  Here is the Mercola article: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/11/27/drinking-water-with-chloramine.aspx

They say it leeches lead out of the pipes.  Where in an average city might there be pipes old enough to have lead solder in them?  The inner city, the old city, the places where in most cities the ghetto is.  Wherever I look, the downtown yuppie condos are new, and most of the white people live in houses somewhere in the suburbs that in a great many cases have been built in the past 30 years.

So is more lead getting into the blood of inner city kids?

And although I don’t think I have mentioned it, it does seem that the John Birchers were right about fluoride: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/a-call-for-reducing-fluoride-levels-in-drinking-water/

Now it is Harvard saying it.

Here is Mercola on the same topic: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/01/20/fluoride-denialism.aspx

Net: it does not reduce dental caries, is toxic, is cumulative, and continues to be intentionally added to the water most of us drink.  And when consumed by children, it seems to make them dumber, with a best guess being a drop of 7 IQ points.

Hell: now I am going to have to start buying my water elsewhere.  These things seem legitimate.

I watched with some dismay the sheer speed and audacity of the assault on the Confederate Flag, which has flown continuously for some long period of time after the Civil War, even if it may have been banned in the immediate aftermath.  One week or less.  That’s all it took to largely flush down the memory hole an emblem of State sovereignty, and the duty to rebel against oppressors (edit: it is worth noting in this regard that at least 95% of the several hundred thousand people killed fighting for the Confederacy neither owned slaves, nor had any reasonable prospect of it.  They were fighting for their homes, and the PRINCIPLE of self determination. In this, I regard them as right, even if no one but Obama–who recently got a provision removed from the TPP disallowing trade with nations where slavery is still practice–can defend it.  Hell, even he can’t: he just did it, and correctly assumed it would go unreported by the complicit media.)

I should comment in that regard that nobody is calling for a return to slavery, reinstitution of Jim Crow, or anything but the right to say FUCK YOU to anybody you like when you find them offensive.  THAT is what the Left deems most offensive.  They want that right reserved solely for them and theirs, for their tribe.

But what I wanted to say is that human psychology is such that it cannot long tolerate two viewpoints; it does not deal well with internal contradictions.  And there is a profound contradiction between the images we are presented with regard to Obama, and his actual behavior.  He was supposed to be post-racial, tolerant, fair, charismatic, high-minded, and just.

His actual record has been one of nearly continual mendacity.  Everything he touches and says is permeated with falsehood.  The Stimulus was a lie.  Obamacare was a lie.  Syria was a lie.  Benghazi was a lie.  Fast and Furious was a lie.  The IRS scandal was a lie.  Literally, and I literally mean literally, damn near every policy he has proposed or implemented has partaken in untruth and/or the holding back of important information.

Who can reconcile that with a vote for him?  Who can defend that?  Nobody, at least nobody intelligent and serious, at least not in my view.

We have all known people who we initially formed one image of, but later found out things that caused us to question that image.  We may have found them very friendly, kind, tolerant–all the good things.  Then, maybe, we one day see Jared getting put in a police car in handcuffs.  May happen, may not, but it’s not looking good.

You cannot remain neutral.  You either have to mourn the loss of your idealized image, to realize it was an illusion all along; or you have to double down, to simply plug on refusing to listen to anyone or anything that contradicts your cherished image.  This, of course, is what all the minions, all the willing accomplices to tragedy and horror, of the Communists and Fascists did and do.

That is where we are at.  Astonishingly, Obama retains something like a 40% approval rating, despite having presided over the worst recovery since the Great Depression, and having spent the past 6 years lying about everything and taking responsibility for nothing.  How is this possible?  Simple: people sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “neener, neener, neener”.

Such people can be depended on to do and say anything the propagandist chooses, because they lack the spine to tell the truth, to themselves or others.  And the more they do this, the more reliable–the more lost to common humanity–they become.

I liked this article: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/donald-trump-was-right.php

The best empirical data seems to show that illegal aliens do in fact commit crimes at much higher rates.

And we have to question the illegal lunacy Obama is displaying in fundamentally saying that he refuses to do–or allow anyone else to do–any job requirements he doesn’t like.

Mexicans are not Americans.  That should be clear enough, and his first job is to protect Americans, both Americans lives, security and property, and American wages and jobs.  I read from time to time how Australia both enjoys high labor rates and low unemployment.  One factor among many is clearly that they have no issues, or very few, with illegal labor.

And Ann Coulter is clearly right that the plan is to bring all these people in here, get them addicted to welfare and public assistance in various forms, and build a new reliable Democrat base so that lunatics continue getting elected forever, up until, and even after, we go the Greek route.

I was working out today and pondering my inability to feel good for my many accomplishments.  Some part of my unconscious just doesn’t seem to like being nice to me.  I raised two good kids under conditions of enormous emotional want.  My intellectual output has been prodigious and extremely original (and I think useful, but that can only be tested with use and time).  I have done an excellent job at work making unmanageable situations work.  What I do, few people could do.  I am hard working, light on my feet, and very good at predicting and preventing trouble, and at getting out of it when it just appears out of nowhere (as it seems at this level of consciousness).  I could go on.

And I felt just a small fraction of a whiff of self esteem moments later.  This is new to me.  And then it hit me: you have to have an adult ego–or at least AN ego of some sort–in order to collect and enjoy your own acts of merit and goodness and all the things that lead in normal people to self respect.

My ego was obliterated.  As I think I have shared, when I was perhaps 7 I had a dream of being put in giant mortar and pulped with a giant pestle.  There was nothing but bloody ooze everywhere. I still remember all these years later the sensation looking at that pulp gave me. That is the part I will share (if I haven’t already shared all of it).

And then a further thought hit me: this is the problem with people who choose a path of evil: they have no way of getting positive reinforcement for doing the things goodness, or empathy, or society would dictate.  Most people who save a puppy will feel good.  But people who lack an ego lack anything to lay that self respect on, so they can nurture it and value it.  A feeling comes and goes, leaving nothing. It is almost like an on-going, rolling affective amnesia.

And I saw, or thought I saw, that many people–let’s use Sade as an example–may in fact early in their lives try to do good.  They may try to understand these emotions other people seem to feel, but which are foreign to them.  But as hard as they try to follow societies dictates, as hard as they try to be good people by the standards of the people they esteem worthy of emulation: nothing.  They get nothing, and it is enormously frustrating.  This should be obvious, but in my view this would be the result of trauma, and as I think I’ve discovered/shown/argued I hope effectively, large traumas can come from small things, particularly when we are very young.  I think many things that could be traumas are prevented or healed by otherwise persisting parental love and connection, but not all, even sometimes with good parents.

Returning to my main point, Goodness comes to seem an illusion, or even an evil spell, cast to torment them.  It pushes them away, like someone who pledged their loyalty to them and then betrayed them. None of the best feelings are open to them.  Honest, earned, self respect is impossible for them, since self respect implies a self.

And so they set in motion lives of sensation that IS real.  Sex is clearly real. The feeling of power is clearly real.  The pain of others–and of ones self–is clearly real.  Thus, emotionlessness becomes sensationalism in a formal sense.  They live for momentary, evanescent clues which remind them that existence may be possible, but not for them.

There is something quite deep here.  As I have said, I have evil in me, too, although I think this can be said of everyone.  Where I differ from many is that I have distilled it, and captured it, so I can examine it, learn from it, study it, use it to create one day an antidote or even preventive.

The mythology of Harry Potter no doubt came from somewhere deep in Joanne Rowling. This whole embedding of Voldemort in Harry Potter as a means of helping him DEFEAT him is quite apposite here, as is the splitting of self involved in evil and as symbolized by the Horcruxes.  Voldemort had no self.  He did not the first time Dumbledore met him, and all he did with his Horcruxes is formalize a preexisting reality.

On to my next activity.  Let’s just say I plan to sleep well (and legally: pot is not and never will be my thing, at least until I can get those pills legally. I  hear good things about those pills and sleep).

I just started contemplating all the equivalencies which are possible for people not bound by the actual law, tradition, common sense, or a concern for the future.

Men might be found equal to women, and unisex bathrooms abolished nationally by the Supreme Court.

All ethnic clubs might be found to be inherently exclusionary (and racist, of course, which is now merely a synonym for “offensive to the professionally offended”), so that the Hibernians, and German-American, and Lebanese-American clubs are forced to close their doors.

Might some species of animals be found “equal” to humans, and some form of vegetarianism compelled by Supreme Court fiat?

Might the rich be found equal to the poor, and all wealth equalized by bench legislation?

Might the police be found equal to the citizenry, and all citizens legally empowered to self-deputize themselves, and conduct pitchfork marches, bonfires, and lynchings anywhere and any time they choose, provided that they are hunting “haters”?

Might children be found equal to adults, and all previously exclusive parental prerogatives removed and replaced by the State?

I feel like I am giving these lunatics ideas, so I am going to stop, but I also feel that they have already thought of most or all of these ideas.

This is not satire.  It should be, and if the Supremes had a shred of actual legal integrity and sense of fidelity to the actual law, it would be.  But they don’t, and it isn’t. If it makes them feel good–the majority–then they do it, and then rationalize it, as those skilled in casuistry are quite able to do.

But a first principle of law in this country and those governed by common law is the precedent, and the first consideration there is what can of worms any given ruling might open up down the road.  With this ruling, I see no end to the worms and the wormy.

What is the difference between the State telling religious people they cannot practice some specific of their faith, and the entirety of their faith, except in extent?  Is the principle of State primacy not already there?

If I can say that homosexuality IS perfectly acceptable, that I can grant this principle absolute and unquestionable moral supremacy and ontology, then I would argue it is the fact of the granting of the supremacy that is most salient, and not the immediate content.

Can we not imagine a day when today’s processes have continued to the point where “science” and “common sense” make it impossible to square any form of religious belief with public piety, and that anyone who retains such beliefs is to be considered, ipso facto, as insane, and in need of conciliatory psychiatry so as to reconcile them with the actual truths of human experience, as condensed, codified, and turned into a code of universal conformity by “science”, which is to say an oligarchy of anti-patriotic, anti-moral, emotionally superficial, arrogant de facto sociopaths?

When I go into things, I try to go deep.  I look at the surface, see what it is showing, then dive in to research the depths.  And I believe I can go quite deep.

There is a direct, linear correlation between criminalizing Christians for beliefs that were universal 50 years ago, and scarcely controversial ten years ago, and my ideas on the necessity both for cruelty and conformity I developed in my Cultural Sadeism piece.  This is exactly what I predicted.

People who fail to conform are not considered as just having differing views, but as innately evil.  They cannot be conversed with.  The possibility of an honest and reconcilable difference of opinion is not and cannot be considered, once one walks far down this path.

Superficially, Cultural Sadeists can of course seem quite congenial, even fun.  But in their hearts, they cannot brook true, qualitative difference of the sort embodied in continuing religious beliefs.

I am told that the arguments against gay marriage are similar to those used against inter-racial marriage.  That was before my time, but let us assume that is true.  How has the Civil Rights Movement worked out?  How has the use of coercive Federal power to force integration worked out?  Brown v. Board of Education. Busing.  Everyone gets a shot at a good school.

Culturally, what I am feeling is that the nascent black consciousness was never given a chance to stand on its own.  They were not forced to negotiate difference, face to face with people who judged them.  Granted, this work was hard.  But it was ennobling.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great man.

If I might compare it with individual acculturation, it was like “momma” did everything for them, protected them from everyone who might hurt them, never let them stand on their own, never let them test their legs, never let them fail on their own and learn from that failure.  They were never trusted to work things out on their own, to use their freedom to mature as people and as a discrete culture with the American nation.

The Civil Rights Movement is an abject failure.  Success would have looked like full integration, and a demographic equality between whites and blacks.  Success would mean color no longer mattered.

But in point of fact, color is all some people want to talk about even today.

And who is doing most of the talking?  Momma, which is to say white liberals who do not understand the black experience, have no intention of living it as it is being endured today, and who are absolutely unwilling to take ANY responsibility for continuing to push policies which were obvious failures 30 years ago.

Similarly, gayness is not integrating into the mainstream.  It is concentrated in certain urban centers, largely, and this court decision, I’m sure, has left a lot of people furious with them, and in no mood for conciliation.

Christians do preach and in a great many cases in fact practice love.  Everything may come up sunshine and roses for the Gay Rights Movement.  But it will not be because contempt, hatred, and social violence was not heaped on people guilty of nothing more or less than attempting in the face of opposition to carry on cultural beliefs which are many thousands of years old.

My sense is that many years from now, this period will be seen as the beginning of our final decadence, our final separation from the principles and laws that once protected American success economically and political freedom.

And again this has nothing to do with my particular beliefs on this issue.  I don’t care if gays get married or not.  It is the tone of this non-debate that concerns me.

Within our lifetimes we may see attempts–I think we will see attempts, and over some time horizon successful ones–to get religious language banned from the public sphere outright.  The mention of Jesus will be as anathema as were positive references to Trotsky under Lenin.

To those who say this is ridiculous, I ask why?  Was gay marriage even on your radar five years ago?  The whole thing, soup to nuts, played out in less than that.  The attack on the Confederate Flag lasted less than a week.  The propaganda, and the those addicted to it and fully compliant with and dependent on it, is largely perfected.  Anyone can be successfully assaulted any time, with no fear of public reasoning, any sense of proportion or history or context, or of a backlash.

We should all be concerned with this, as I am describing nothing less than the final triumph of totalitarianism in the purported “Land of the Free.”

I want freedom for all, mutual respect for all, common decency, and common sense,  There will come a time, probably soon, where these are “code words” for whatever that Agit Prop practitioner needs them to be.  Anything to stir up the hate and fear, and anything to make sure there is never any time for people to take a breath, talk to one another as individuals to work out their differences, and use the brains and reasoning and empathetic skills that alone make us superior to animals.

I feel sometimes like an Old Testament prophet.  It is a feeling of frustration.  I can see danger, but people in all too many cases don’t want to hear it.  Yes, I more than most get that life’s wounds can make it much harder, that the pressures of everyday living leave little room for negativity, or even for introspection.  And practically, I never judge people face to face, or even on the internet.  I am judging ideas, by and large, except when it comes to the Sadeists.  They deserve a special  place in Hell, and I sense they will get it.

Never believe me when I say I am going to stop making political posts.  I am growing as a person–I am getting flashes of personhood that are lasting longer and longer–but this still continues to be a comfort.

Again, for the same reason that a compulsive carpenter can still be a good carpenter, a compulsive thinker can still be a good thinker.

The stipulation that Christians must modify their faith to accept homosexuality, and homosexual marriage, is an example of the State stepping in and altering Church doctrine, and compelling compliance.  They are saying more or less, “you can do what you want, but you can’t do this.”  In other words, they CAN’T do what they want.

They either now or soon will not be able to refuse to conduct gay marriages, lest they be sued; and whether they consent or not, the movement to revoke tax exempt status has already been started–this despite the fact that the concept of non-profit exists equally in a great number of groups that are completely non-religious.  The focus on the Christian churches specifically is in my view unmistakable.

Logically, why must it necessarily stop even there?  Once accepted in principle, why couldn’t the State force Christian churches to stop teaching that Christ is the only path to heaven?  Or that one must be “born again” to be saved?  Why couldn’t the State implement an “equality” doctrine requiring churches to give equal time to Muslim preachers?

Why couldn’t the pork producers lobby Congress and compel Jews and Muslims to eat bacon?

Why couldn’t pornography producers sue–and prevail against–Churches which condemn their products?

At some point, why couldn’t the State tell ALL churches that there is no God and that teaching about such a being constitutes unacceptable child abuse (violating the Equal Protection Clause, since parents are equal in their rights to their children)?

The motion is clearly to stifle religious belief in this country.  Obama’s enemies were people who “cling” to guns and religion.  Despite his best efforts, he got nowhere with gun control, so religion is the next logical target.

It remains to be seen how pissed off, and how well organized the churches in this country are, and how they will react in the next election.  Most of them were already Republican because of the last time we went through a convulsion like this, in 1973.

As I have said often, though: we must fear the loss of liberty of any and all, because all large encroachments begin small, beg necessity–or in this case moral virtue–of some sort as their cause, and grow slowly and imperceptibly (to most), until in a great realization people realize it is too late.  Some are saying that now.  I can’t say with confidence they are wrong.

But the American people–while naive, and generally unwilling to submit to the discipline required to do honest and comprehensive thinking–are in general good spirited, generous, and kind.  This remains one of our great strengths.  It has been perverted, not dissolved.

 Is it possible that children living in mud huts and defecating in ditches are happier than kids who grow up in suburbs with everything a modern American life can offer? Yes, absolutely.  Because they feel loved, that they belong, that their lives have a context and purpose, and because they have FUN often.  They sing, they dance, they create art.


One of the salient projects of modern philosophy has been demolishing moral ontologies.  This project, here, is neither relativistic, nor so vague as to be useless.  At the same time, I would want some sense of motion in it, some waves, ebbing back and forth.  It feels too much like another attempt to bring the music of the spheres into a perennial philosophy [note: I mean no nod to Huxley there; my work choice was poor], something that doesn’t change, and which can be counted on, like math, not to change.


And I have been thinking a lot about transformation as well.  Living is not like collecting experiences in a sort of bank account.  It is about periodic waves which change who you are.  We cannot say misery must stay misery, or that it lacks a purpose.  Neither should we be hard hearted and fail to help others.  But there must be a flux.


That’s my incomplete effort at coherence.  I am tired and going to bed.  This is a better morality than I have seen in a while though.

Now, if they beat people, strangle people, abuse them, kidnap them, kill them with their car, or otherwise create a public nuisance, well those were crimes ALREADY, and I have no issue with adding time for the drug part of it.

But what got me thinking was researching marijuana for PTSD.  Right now, I often dose myself, perfectly legally, with alcohol, to avoid some really awful PTSD related shit that happens when I fall asleep.  But this is bad for my liver and overall health.  It is impossible to get skinny when you drink like I tend to.

And I was watching a veteran in a video talk about his PTSD, and then I started researching.  Turns out that the whatever it is in THC that makes you forget stuff can, with pharmacological modification, help you forget trauma too. I won’t post the article, but the main research was being done in Israel.

People who are abusers–of drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, video games–ALREADY have emotional problems, and not infrequently outright trauma to deal with.  They are self medicating. They are doing what they can to make the pain go away.

How does it become morally virtuous telling them they can’t make the pain go away in ways we disapprove of?  Heroin is likely less damaging in some respects than a sex or gambling addiction.  You are not wrecking other peoples marriages or bankrupting yourself and your family.

And then I read about what happened when Portugal said fuck it: http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/what-happened-and-what-didnt-when-portugal-decriminalized-drugs

Portugal was in the middle of an “addiction epidemic,” with 1 in 100 Portuguese addicted to heroin.
But since the shift in policy, rates of STDs and drug overdoses have fallen dramatically. Since decriminalization, the Economist reports, drug-induced deaths have fallen by 80 percent, from 80 deaths in 2001 to just 16 in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of heroin addicts fell by half, in absolute terms, over the same period.
Because drug abuse is treated like a public health question instead of a criminal offense, the state focuses on treatment and harm-reduction.

People who shoot up heroin, or who smoke a doobie or two every day, are ALREADY in pain.  They are already miserable and dealing with it in a way which is dysfunctional, but the best they can come up with.

Would it not be wiser, cheaper, and more humane, to work to develop methods of dealing with trauma, with emotional pain, with social alienation, and sense of metaphysical pessimism, than simply increasing the misery of people who were already miserable, and congratulating ourselves for our virtuous rejection of others vices?

When I really grokked–as I think I have done–the sheer awfulness of sending the wounded into a new field of battle, it made me a bit sick to my stomach.

Yes, many people are childish and irresponsible.  Yes, people are stupid.  But it is my belief that given an actual alternative, most people will choose adult freedoms, and wisdom.  I just don’t think most people are ever presented with a choice.  Certainly not by our media or criminal justice system, in all too many cases at least. They are on the contrary praised for their self indulgence, and the people trying to point out a better way are condemned as judgmental.

But the person who tells you you are fucking up and then how to fix it and be happy is doing you a favor.  And the person who feeds your worst impulses is codependent, and passively increasing your pain, even if you can’t see it, and they won’t admit it.

With respect to my last post, I thought I might post a link to a really well done video put together by professional, credentialed, architects and largely structural engineers regarding the idiocy of accepting the received view of the events on that day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddz2mw2vaEg&list=PLCFCB1EBC1BD3F5D9&index=2

I will note that Lynn Margulies, in addition to being a National Science Prize winner, was also Carl Sagan’s wife.  Interestingly, she inverted my own college career by getting her B.S at the University of Chicago, and her graduate degree at UC-Berkeley.  She called 9/11 “the most effective television commercial in the history of Western civilization”.  I have made a similar point.  Some large section of humanity itself was tuned in live when Towers 1 and 2 collapsed. 




Most, of course, have forgotten Tower 7, which was really only shown on 


9/11 itself, and then scrubbed from media coverage.  It is worth wondering why.  Many 


explanations present themselves, some innocent, some much less so.  I can’t render a strong 


opinion one way or the other.



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