Moderates United

I was at a very pleasant flea market in the hipster-ey side of town today.  The sun was shining, people were laughing and drinking beer, and buying odd little curios and various ethnic foods.

And the thought struck me: why does Barack Obama want to destroy all this?  Why does he want all the smiles and laughs gone, as they have been in Cuba for 50 years?  Why does he want all the boutique coffee shops, tattoo parlors, micro-breweries, corner restaurants, art galleries, nick-nack shops and everything else that is not needed to sustain life, but which makes it interesting, to disappear?

We need to be clear that our present level of spending is absolutely unsustainable, and everyone who has even a shred of sense knows it.

It is a miracle that the national credit rating has not already been downgraded again.  It seems likely a lot of arm twisting and maybe some cash or other quid pro quos have gone into keeping the illusion of solvency alive, but the day will come when our debt will be downgraded.  If the Fed were not buying 3/4ths of it, it would have happened already.  When that happens, all hell is going to break loose.  Unless something like my plan is implemented, we will face another national Depression.  That is my read on the situation, and I have a LOT of company.

And it seems obvious that this is the plan.  They crash the economy, and get control.  Then what?  They eliminate income inequality among those who are in the elite.  They provide a blanket and aspirin for every citizen, like Cuba, and call it universal healthcare.

Here is the thing: I had a pleasant day today, and if it is the case that someone made a billion dollars, I DON’T CARE.  It doesn’t matter to me.  I worry about my life, and wish everyone else did the same.  Taking care of yourself is the opposite of selfishness.  It is generous.  You don’t have to worry about me.

When this economic catastrophe hits–and it is a certainty if we elect anyone but an actual conservative to the White House next year–everything will be washed away that makes the people who put Obama in office happy.  Austin will not be weird, and neither will Portland.  We will see boarded up doors of places that once sponsored good times.  We will read weekly for years on end about new closings.

Does anyone even REMEMBER that we spent nearly a trillion dollars on Keynesian economics, and got nothing to show for it? The only reason our economy is not sputtering to a standstill now is the Fed is pumping $50 billion a month into the largest banks, who are using it to buy things they get to keep, but which also puts money into circulation.

I feel rage sometimes at the lack of thoughtfulness I see displayed all around me every day.  Yes, thinking is work, it is hard work, but people who do not want guns pointed at their heads need to do this fucking work in much larger numbers before it is too late.

Edit: Barack Obama does not relax.  He plays a lot of golf, and spends a lot of time not doing his job–which is good–but he does not relax.  No true ideologue relaxes.  The reason they live in their heads, the reason they are separated from the real world, from experience, is precisely that some emotional problem or problems push them away from that connection.  They do not see people: they see symbols.  They do not recognize suffering: merely symbols.  Fidel Castro does not relax.  Pol Pot did not relax.  Stalin did not relax.  Relatively, maybe.  They went to the ocean or the mountains.  But deeply: no.

Put another way, such people are unable to truly have fun.  They cannot play.  Their lives are characterized by one long emotional spasm.

So they do not VALUE the creature comforts and pleasures that an effective economic order makes possible.  Back in the days of open radicalism, they called them “bourgeois”.  But what is supposed to replace them?  What pleasures and comforts do they enjoy in Cuba?  Wealthy elites the world over go there for the hookers.  Fidel Castro even bragged that even his hookers have college degrees.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Is it not a perfect metaphor?  You are being fucked so you can survive, and your leaders are extolling the fact that you underwent State sponsored indoctrination.

Do you remember how the Soviets created special stores for Party elites, so they could buy stuff less good than what we take for granted now?  How Communism always, necessarily, betrays the ideals of egalitarianism, fairness, justice in any sense, and common decency?

No person who can stomach Communism can possibly have a conscience and a brain.  No person working to destroy our economy belongs anywhere but hell.  Given the opportunity, I would gladly help facilitate the journey.

I am a 6’0″, 275 pound person who drinks too much–did last night and the night before–and my blood pressure today was 110/82.  The doctors never believe it.  A few years ago when I weighed only 240 or so I had one doctor take my blood pressure three times in a visit, and it went down each time.

I am going to go on record as saying my belief is that the two best exercises for blood pressure are the standing barbell press, and the deadlift.  There is considerable evidence that weight training is good for blood pressure, but what I think makes these two particularly useful is that they require full body activation, and presumably push momentary blood pressure through the roof.  What I think happens is that the arteries expand and flex in response.  This is the whole problem with blood pressure: hardening of the arteries.  But if you ramp up the pressure periodically, I think, you force them to adapt.

I am not a doctor, and can’t say this approach is safe for everyone, but I dropped my scores about 20 points on both measures in a month once I started weight training again.

The EmWave2 is likely good too.  I do it every morning, and can lower my pulse about 5 bpm, and get very relaxed in a very cardiovascular specific way.

I think we can safely posit that no one enters the physiological state of adulthood in a state of full psychological awareness and maturity.  We all carry scars with us.  We are all limited, often in ways we can’t see.  How many people do you know who are absolutely relaxed, confident, empathetic, joyful, and able to become utterly absorbed in the creative expression of energy without neglecting their chosen responsibilities? Looking at that list, I can’t think of one person.  Most of the people we consider successful are in fact simply compulsive with respect to work and/or competitiveness.  Many outwardly decent people are still walking wounded, with anxieties and depressions, and cognitive distortions they simply deal with as best they can.

I have by and large stopped “debating” Leftists.  Purely as a practical matter, my viewpoints and the reasoning underlying them are actively suppressed at all the main sites.  But I still will find myself waiting on someone or something from time to time, and let me fingers (finger, I’m bad at it) walk on my phone.  Such was the case today.

And I am struck by the overall level of childishness which characterizes so many of those who have taken it upon themselves to repeat the days propaganda, and to attempt to silence through attack all who disagree with it.

And surveying this landscape, what I realize is it is characterized by a very visceral terror that conservatives are right, and that a principle purpose in life is accepting and developing the ability to be accountable to oneself and others.  This thought terrifies them. It requires psychological maturation.  It requires dealing with emotional problems they don’t want to deal with.

In Lenin’s time it was possible to believe that a new and better society could be built through terror and science.  It was never a humanism.  It was never Liberal in any respect whatever, but the experiment had not been tried on as grand a scale as he attempted.  They had far, far more time than the French ever had.

What happened, of course, was that Lenin was far worse than Czar Nicholas II in every possible way.  Mao was far, far worse than Chiang Kai Shek.  Ho Chi Minh was far, far worse than the French or Japanese.  Castro was far, far worse than Battista.  Etc.  It is a dull drill, and a series of facts lost only on who?  The terrified.

For the sufficiently emotionally disconnected, it is possible to nurture a belief that OUT THERE somewhere is the answer to all their problems, and that it is possible in the meantime to join a cult which will tell them what to do, what to say, what to think, and which promises to never, ever ask them to be responsible adults.  This reassures them.

These people are out there in droves.  They swarm on the internet like gnats.  They reinforce one another.  They reassure one another.

And for the power elite, they have their uses.

I’m looking this thing in my mind’s eye, and I see an order coming down from Obama to put in place and test a plan to keep Texas in the Union; just as I see a plan coming down to manage unrest in the United States in the event of a catastrophic event, like a nuclear detonation or disease outbreak.  Maybe the generals grumble, but they are where they are because they carry out orders, and there is nothing illegal in these orders.

And on it goes.  Our best and brightest, those who have risen to the highest levels of their profession, continue to hand Obama plans to carry out anti-Constitutional acts.  They put their imprimatur’s on them.  They sign them.

As an ideal, all soldiers are citizen-soldiers.  They are citizens, first, and soldiers because of the value they place on our system of government.

The only thing I want to say here is that the two can separate.  What is right as a citizen–as someone with a family, with children, with grandchildren, with a church, with a community, with a love of nation–can conflict with following even legal orders.

I have said before and will say again that the military needs to have contingency plans just like Jade Helm for a reinstitution of Constitutional government, if some part of those who have been granted power choose to foster and attempt to implement policies which are manifestly illegal, immoral, and which have as their goal the consolidation of power by eliminating the power of the people–which is and always has been the primary goal of the power elites that use socialist rhetoric to further their personal ends.

I have been kind of watching this, trying to figure out what it is about.  Here is my conclusion: it is mission preparation for invading Texas in the event it secedes.  They have talked about it repeatedly, and they are not the only ones.

This particular exercise is not intended to impose martial law at this point, but, much more subtly, to season everyone–civilian, federal agent, and soldier alike–to get used to the idea of using U.S. military on U.S. soil against U.S. citizens, in direct violation of over 100 years of U.S. history and the letter and spirit of the Posse Comitatus Law, which was created in the after-math of the Civil War.

There is nothing new about the U.S. government invading unruly States. 650,000 or so dead and countless ruined lives are testament to that.  What is new in the modern era is trying to condition soldiers and Federal agents to effectively reject the notion that they joined up to protect justice and freedom–the American Way–and instead learn to trust those who whisper in their ears about sedition and treason, and “anti-Americanism”.  They have been hearing since Obama took office about spies and saboteurs and traitors, radicals, wild-eyed loonies, and conspiracy nuts.  Some may even be stupid enough to believe that opponents of Obama are racists.

Anything you do repeatedly you condition yourself to.  I read the plan is to make this thing an annual event: http://www.globalresearch.ca/jade-helm-15-police-state-usa-the-end-of-posse-comitatus/5445821

Can you think of a better way to stay in practice to pull Texas back into the grasp of the Federal Government than to invade it annually?  And they state openly the focus is Texas:

Texas is the main bulk of the activity. We are spread from east to west, north to south, throughout the state of Texas. 

If I were Texas, I would tell them to go fuck themselves.  I would get some good lawyers on it, and do everything within my power, within the limits of the law, to make the going as hard as possible.  They may like that, but that is about all that can be done without firing a shot.  And that day may come.

And the American military has never had mass defections, but I wonder how corrupt it has become?  Will soldiers follow orders simply because they are given by a superior officer?  The President is the Commander in Chief, because he has the PRIMARY responsibility for defending the Constitution, and needs access to force at times to do it.  But to the extent he violates the Constitution, no order he gives is lawful, and no unlawful order can be followed by any professional soldier.  Only legal orders are to be followed.

But what if he stays within the letter of the law, while being patently abusive?  Well, we will likely not be free forever.  We will only stay free if the people who need to do hard thinking have the commitment and integrity to actually do it.

And I would ask openly: what overseas mission set could this POSSIBLY be for?  The practice exercises use the FBI, DEA, DHS (who he does not name explicitly, and who can be assumed to be the lead Federal agency involved), who do not exist overseas.

How could this be a plan to invade Iran?  We have no chance at blending into the civilian population in large numbers over there. Ukraine?  Are we planning a war with Russia?

The whole fucking thing does not add up, and the SpecOp folks involved in this need to do some serious soul searching and ask whose fucking side they are on.  I’m not sure what the opposite of De Oppresso Liber is, but it seems it is becoming the de facto motto.

That is my two cents.

In addition to my Kum Nye practice, which conjures feelings, I will sometimes lay in bed and try to contact parts of me which are dormant.  As I mentioned, it came to me yesterday to address specific parts of me frozen in moments in the distant past.

Many moments in life have strong feeling tones, which we have long forgotten, but which reside somewhere in our memory.  The first time you went to the circus, perhaps; or the first time (and only time, for many) you saw Bambi (does it perhaps say something about our culture that this movie and Old Yeller have largely disappeared, or seem to me to have?).  The feeling is very specific, and even if it is similar to other such emotions, calling it say “excitement”, or “sadness” is akin to treating all shades of red and blue the same.  This is imprecise, and unhealthy.

Last night I was dreaming I was playing soldier as a child, with imaginary guns.  We used to do that, both with our hands as guns, and later toy guns, and pine cones as grenades.  There was considerable negotiation and argument as to who shot who first.

As I interacted with that boy this morning, there was an underlying sadness, which I entered into as deeply and as specifically as I could.  I entered into “that”.  He played at being a soldier because he was afraid.  Guns empower you; violence empowers you.  At least you are shooting back, versus cowering and waiting to die.

And although all this likely sounds hokey and absurd to people unused to this sort of work, I am “talking” with all these newly discovered parts of me and encouraging them to share their experiences with me, everything, without hesitation.

One of the reasons I infer I was traumatized as a baby is that I will often wake up verbalizing like a baby, just saying nonsense syllables over and over.  My operating hypothesis is that I must have been babbling in the night and my mother, who was presumably very tired of waking up to care for me, came in and screamed at me to shut up.  The process was interrupted, and I started shaking.

That part is incomplete, unfed. And I think many people have things like this in them: they just don’t take the time and make the effort to do this very difficult work. So this morning I imagined holding that baby in my arms, and telling it is was safe, until it started cooing like a happy baby, and some sounds came out again, which I allowed, while pendulating my head back and forth, which I have read helps in neurological processing.  There are many emotional upsets in me, but this is where the shaking comes from.  I am sure of that.  We will see what happens.

And I will finish this post by referencing the notion of rooms.  It has since been eclipsed by many horror films, but back in the day The Shining was quite scary.  One of the oppressive things, to me, about the hotel was the many rooms, and you never knew what lay behind each door, what history, what horrors.

I would submit that in large measure our psyches are like hotels, with many rooms, and behind many doors there is a static scene that is lost to conscious awareness.  We both have to learn to interact with these scenes with our conscious awareness, and animate them, bring them to life; and to get all the scenes to interact with one another.  They are all parts of us.  This is how flow throughout the whole self is facilitated.

I suspect Jack Nicholson has many unopened doors.

I had a rough morning this morning.  Tons of feelings were flooding me.  I was feeling depressed and dispirited.  Somewhere in there I felt a radio communication come through (not literally, folks: I don’t need to be medicated, and am not sure I would want to even if I did) from my younger self, on behalf of all my younger selves, and felt happy.

I have been traumatized many times.  I was traumatized as a baby, as a toddler, as a youngster, as a pre-adolescent and as a teenager.  There are specific events and emotional states I associate with all of them.  I went through an consciously contacted all these “selves”, which had lived in relative isolation from my conscious awareness, and from each other, until I opened up communication.  I told them to communicate any feelings they have, any time.

And damned if I did not get a few weird moments of feeling things I felt when I was, say, ten, and had completely suppressed.  It is an odd sense, meeting old feelings anew.

This is a very Kum Nye approach: opening feelings, expanding them, and welcoming them with interest, kindness, and curiosity, no matter their content.

And this afternoon I was feeling good, and got to thinking: there is a parallelism between rejecting bad emotions and clinging to good ones.  There is a morphological quality of holding which itself prevents the self organization of the system on a deeper level, and following qualitative adaptation.

If you neither seek to force the emotion of happiness, nor to avoid the emotions, say, of fear and loneliness and sadness and grief, something deeper takes hold.  This is in my mind unquestionably at least one of the things Buddhists aim at with the creed of non-attachment.

What I think many fail to grasp is that at root the sense of the spiritual is exactly that: a sense.  A feeling, a refined emotion, one which we cannot get if we react to the superficial, outward emotions.  You must be calm.

All of this is me articulating in slightly different words what I am being taught in my Kum Nye lessons.  I really think anyone who is not feeling bliss 24/7 would benefit from taking up this very nourishing practice.  I have preached this often–and convinced one person to do it briefly–but have otherwise failed completely as far as I can tell.  But self evidently, I am not driven by a need to manifest success, nor a compulsion to avoid failure. I am driven to learn and explore.  This is merely where I communicate what I think I’ve learned.

There are large problems with land temperature measurement.  You have the heat island effects, and the logistical problems of locating thermometers around the North and South Poles.  In my understanding, NOAA simply GUESSES those temperatures, based on their models, and they then use those models as data.

But we have two very simple and very reliable places we can look to see if global warming is really happening: the polar ice caps, whose maximum and minimum ice extents can readily be measured; and more importantly, the temperatures in the stratosphere, which we can get very reliably from satellites, and which suffer none of the complicating effects of land temperature measurement.  The atmosphere is reasonably well mixed at that height, in my understanding, and the amount of air movement is much less.

Some basic physics may be in order.  The postulate of the Warmist Cult is that human-produced CO2 emissions will rise into the upper atmosphere–the stratosphere–and remain there for a very long time. CO2 is present at ground level, but has very little effect relative to water vapor.  CO2 only absorbs about ten percent of the infrared, radiant spectrum, whereas water absorbs most of it.

Let me repeat that: CO2 only absorbs AT MOST 10% of the radiant energy being released by the Earth.

At the frequencies where it operates, it is fully saturated.  No energy leaving Earth in, say, the 13-15 micron bandwidth, makes it to space.  This has been the case for some time. Everyone who is familiar with the science knows this.

The Global Warming Conjecture is based on the notion that as stratospheric CO2 concentrations increase, the altitude at which the energy is fully absorbed will continue to decrease.  Higher temperatures will slowly creep down.  On the face of it, this is not a farcical proposition.

Here is the issue, though: the air in the stratosphere is very, very thin.  No conventional airplane could operate up there.  This means that to have an effect on the lower atmosphere, a LOT of warming has to be happening–in my understanding, roughly 3x the warming we can actually observe with highly reliable satellite data.  One could in fact make the case that to the extent CO2 induced forcing is happening, it can be seen real-time in stratospheric temperature data.

Since this warming is a necessary postulate of the models, and since it cannot be observed, the models are clearly ipso facto falsified, and the high priests must KNOW THIS.

Here is what I think is actually happening: they have all the usual fears, of overpopulation, species extinctions, running out of food, ruining the environment in a broad sense, and they want a global government to, as they see it, implement “sensible” policies.  Humans have too much freedom.

And they have the long term propaganda success of Global Warming to use.  It is a highly complex situation, within which every weather event can be used as evidence for the ignorant, and thus very suitable to the purpose.  They rationalize their lies by saying it is for the higher good, that humans are too stupid to be allowed to continue as they have.

It is an elitist mind-set, and a very old one.  The notion of being saved by one’s betters has been used to justify a large segment of the world’s tyrannies throughout human history.  That the entire project is founded on a lie shows the lack of moral compass or vision on the part of those perpetrating it.

I think one of my principal talents–a singular and unintentional gift from my childhood–is seeing what is in front of me. This is quite uncommon.  Most people unconsciously substitute what they think OUGHT to be there for what in fact is there.  As I’ve likely mentioned, one of my favorite line from any movie is the line when George Banks sings his “it’s grand to be me” song, then reaches to touch his childrens heads, and asks “Dear, where are the children?”  “They’re not here, dear.” “But of course they are.  Where else would they be?”

As some will recall, the 1% Doctrine was the decision making heuristic that if there was any doubt–a 1% doubt, to be exact–there was no doubt.  If someone MIGHT get nukes, they had to be treated as if it were a certainty.  This in no small measure is why we invaded Iraq.  He was clearly going to get them at some point.

But can we wonder, given all this fear about nuclear attack, why we spent $2 trillion or more on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, but have not spent $2 billion to harden our energy grid?

Be that as it may, can we not posit that if there is a 1% chance the Bush Administration in some form was involved in 9/11, that we must launch an investigation?

Two things stand out to me as obvious: 1) explosives were used, beyond any doubt.  Literal and unmistakable fragments are everywhere.  2) this fact was covered up by the investigation: intentionally or not can be debated.  I prefer what I call the cowardice hypothesis, but it may not be the best one.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is doing really good work.  Their three main board members are all AIA registered architects, two of them with a good amount of experience in high rises. They have rented a large and I think prominent booth at the upcoming national AIA convention, where an initiative to take an official stand on 9/11 will be voted on.  They will presumably fail this go-round, but I think simply seeing fellow architects in suits, who are plainly not crazy, and who are committed to the cause, is going to have an effect over time, since the facts are plainly on their side.  This is in my view undisputable.  Anyone who argues otherwise is arguing from what they ASSUME the facts are.  Assumptions make everyone  dumb, sooner or later.

I give them $25/month.  It’s not much, but this battle will go on over the long haul. I would encourage you to support them as well.