Moderates United

I have developed the habit of lingering with interesting emotions.  Good one, I try to hold for 30 seconds or so, letting them saturate me; and bad ones, likewise, except that they last much longer.  Today, I hit a spot of trauma, and had planned anyway on taking a long walk, and decided to take the feeling with me, to walk with me, to move with me, to evolve, if possible, while the world passed by.

Early on, I hit this point between anger and sadness.  That is where the focus needs to be.  Anger pushes out, and sadness pulls in, but both originate in the primal disruption, the trauma, that after which nothing was the same.  This is the best description I can offer, but what I saw was that both are unhealthy: sadness is more or less a decision you need help; and anger is directed at punishment of others.  Neither is actually oriented around healing, or forward progress.  Only by sensing and entering that middle field can you address on the emotional plain those things which continue to disrupt you, by diverting you down both of those paths, perhaps in alternating ways, perhaps in a “monopolar” way.  Can we speak of monopolar rage?  I think so.

Likewise, it occurred to me the other day that Leftism is really about EITHER punishing people, or “helping” them, whether they want it or not.  You punish the rich (or the Jews, or the Tutsis/Hutus, or Chinese, or whoever else, depending on where you are), while more or less coercing the poor, the working people, the class you claim to care about, in directions they would not have chosen, and which in almost all cases cause massive increases of misery.

Procrustes bed presumably never precisely fit anyone.  In this analogy, the rich have their legs cut off–and/or their heads–which is punishment; but the poor are likewise put on the rack, and stretched in directions the Leftists feel they should go.  Who fits?  Solely the ruling elite themselves, and then only if everyone conforms well to everyone else.

Is there not a structural homology here?  You have a direct expression of rage, directed in almost all cases at people guilty of nothing but superior intelligence and motivation to work; and on the other you “nurture” the sad, the lonely, the displaced, the outcast, the Other.

Can we not see this as a dual projection, in a psychological sense, of people who are unable to digest their own emotions?  Take Frances Fox Piven: she is an amoral bitch.  She wants to ruin everything, destroy everything, and for what?  To salve deep seated emotions SHE has, that SHE can’t get through, using a reality in which the actual human beings involved suffer horribly, predictably, and uselessly.

When you see people who can only live in abstraction, you can assume as a rule that they have enormous blind spots in them, forced upon them by turmoil–unreason, feeling, myth, “primality”–they fear deeply.  This is why the external order of totalitarianism appeals so mightily to them, why our academic caste has been so badly wrong–so monstrous, so demonic–for so long.

I started this blog with a post on Global Warming, here: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2008/01/global-warming.html

Within the last week or so I concluded a “debate” with a cult member, in which he ignored the entirety of the original post, and more or less simply kept repeating the tired, very old themes which constitute the catechism of the apostolic church of which he is an eager member. He left with his mind unchanged, and utterly convinced that despite the fact that I kept refuting his arguments, or showing their irrelevance, that he was right and I was wrong.  This is the nature of the beast.

You don’t debate, in my view, to change minds.  The people opposing you are so emotionally dedicated to their views that they will ignore absolutely EVERYTHING which fails to support views they did not reach rationally, and which they thus cannot defend rationally.

You debate to learn, because you learn under duress, in challenge.

Here, I refined my arguments yet further.  The “debate” is in the Comments section.

Here is the thing: according to ALL ACCOUNTS our atmosphere is ALREADY absorbing all the radiant heat in the frequencies, roughly 13.5 to 17 microns, where CO2 is relevant.  CO2 only affects about 8% of the total spectrum of infrared–heat bearing–radiation, and it is already absorbing 100% of that 8%. 

This means that NO amount of further CO2 concentration will matter AT ALL.

Here is my summary of the argument from there.  The first quote is from a cult members website:

“We see that for the pre-industrial CO2 concentration, it is only the
wavelength range between about 13.5 and 17 microns (millionths of a
meter) that can be considered to be saturated. Within this range, it is
indeed true that adding more CO2 would not significantly increase the
amount of absorption.”

If you look at the “wings” what you see is it is very inefficient at absorbing IR radiation.

A quote from here, which I have already linked: http://nov79.com/gbwm/prmr.html

“Climatologists
say radiation on the shoulders of the absorption peaks does not all get
used up. They say 5% is functional, and the greenhouse effect of CO2
occurs with this 5%. The 5% number is rationalized fraud with no
evidence or objective basis.”

He goes on: “Sometimes, the claim
is made that the absorption peak will widen as CO2 is increased. It
absolutely will not. The width is dependent upon the energy state of the
molecules, and increasing the concentration does nothing to change the
energy state. All real measurements show this. How can so much crap
enter real science? It shows that this subject is not real science.”

I want to be clear, too: warming, per se, is not evidence.  Evidence of warming, then, is not evidence, either, of anything but “weather”, which is a synonym for climate change.  The climate changes daily, the world over.

Not only is the Global Warming idea ludicrous, not only is it a horrific commentary on the capacity of scientists for corruption, but it is clearly a conspiracy conducted by those I have taken to calling Neomalthusians (aka Chicken Littles and Petty Tyrants) to support global tyranny.

We swim daily in a deep sea of lies.

In the overall, ongoing, massive and perceptually ineluctable disaster that is Obamacare, I have seen little mention of a story I saw last week that Kathleen Sebelius has used the ridiculous and unConstitutional authority granted her in this farce of a bill to require insurers to cover mental health and substance abuse issues, and to treat them the same as regular health issues.  This is no small thing.  The costs associated with mental health issues are ENORMOUS.  Serious problems may as well be chronic cancer.

I don’t want to dwell too long on this, but here is a quote which brought this back to the forefront of my mind.  From “Tranforming Depression”, by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman:

The Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) conducted a three year health-risk and medical-cost study with 46,000 people from 22 companies and governmental organizations (Goetzel et al 1998).  The study showed that people who reported persistent depression had 70 percent greater medical costs than those who reported not being depressed.

After depression, uncontrolled stress resulted in the second greatest medical costs.  Almost 20 percent of the people reported that their stress felt uncontrollable.  Their annual medical expenses were 46 percent higher than those of people who were not stressed.  Stress was also found to be a significant predictor of cardiovascular disease in women, which is the number one killer of women.  Stress contributed to 79 percent of cardiovascular disease costs–more than smoking or obesity.

Overall, people who were both depressed and stressed had medical expenses 147 percent higher than others.  This figure is radically higher than the health hazards we hear about more often, such as lack of exercise, smoking, and high blood pressure.  In comparison, the increase in medical costs for those health hazards was minor.  A sedentary lifestyle resulted in a 10% increase in health care costs; smoking cost 14% more than nonsmoking; and high blood pressure cost 12% more.  The cost of depression and stress was more than ten times greater than each of these other factors.

Granny Bloomberg and Michelle “I know better than you” Obama should be focusing on decreasing stress, and increasing happiness.  They would both best serve these goals by shutting the hell up and leaving us the hell alone forever.  Alas, this is not likely to happen any time soon.  Bloomberg is out of office, but he is rich, and he is an asshole, so we will keep hearing from him; and we are stuck with Michelle until early 2017, or until people grow balls in Congress and impeach Obama (House) and remove him from office (Senate) for any of half a dozen offenses which in another era would have meant instant removal from office.

I’ve decided to take my Netflix queue into the artsy realm.

Tonight I watched a, to me, very interesting film by Alexander Sokurov, titled Russian Ark.

Being a rather odd human being, I have taken to burning some frankincense while watching some of these movies (Kronos and Samsara being other similar movies I’ve watched recently), which creates an odd mood.  I like odd moods.  They are different than even moods. (there is an inside joke here that I won’t bring outside).

The process is a bit interesting, too, and I think quite old: you light a charcoal briquet, put it on a special purpose burner, and put bits of frankincense resin on it, which creates a lot of smoke.  Actually, as I think about the Greek Orthodox background of Russia–since whoever it was visited Constantinople–incense in a brazier is quite appropriate.

With regard to the movie, there are some truly marvelous dance sequences towards the end.  Throughout, you get glimpses into how people lived hundreds of years ago.  During the dance sequence, I was thinking of a home I visited in Colonial Williamsburg, which is more or less an open air museum dedicated to preserving a half dozen or so very old buildings.  In that home, George Washington and others had been entertained, and the dancing frequently went on all night, and if memory serves, sometimes several days–with breaks of course.

You see Anastasia, and Nicholas the Second, and you think of the very deep evil that focused on destroying joy, destroying innocent pleasure, rather than seeking to democratize and generalize it. 

Communism is not about elevating human souls.  It is not about happiness.  It is not about utopia.  It is about punishment.  It is about rage.  It is about bullying and creating fear.

Can you see Vladimir Ulyanov dancing serenely, smiling, in such a setting?  No: he had death in his eyes.

One can certainly feel pity for the peasants, for the poor, for the undertrodden, while watching the elite in their pleasures.  But you cannot build through destruction.  Hate cannot forge love.  Violence cannot forge an honest peace, not if fear is sustained.

Some time ago I listened to a series on Russian history, and the first Tsar to create a Duma, an assembly, which had any relevance at all was assassinated.  Certainly, it was a Parliament roughly equal to the British Parliament in, say, 1500, as I recall, but it was progress.  That progress halted and went into hard reverse when the Tsar was killed.

Nihilist is a Russian word, and was quite appropriate then.  They damaged their own cause, stupidly, uselessly.  They hurt–as Leftists ALWAYS do–the very people they claimed falsely to care about.

Anyway, something to add to your queue, if you want something different.  I thought it very well done.

It is hard to accept the discipline of granting that ALL the themes and characters one sees within dreams are parts of a larger Me.  We want the good stuff, and want to deny the bad stuff.  We want the clear stuff, and to deny the incoherent, dark, misty stuff.

It is of course a commonplace that we forget most of our dreams.  Most people, in my understanding, have three periods of REM sleep a night, and most of us are doing well if we can remember one dream.

The last two nights I have been having dreams sort of “on the other side” of this giant block standing in the way of my awareness I have just become aware of.  This itself constitutes an expansion of awareness.

And to the point of this post’s title, I last night had a dream of a contentious but non-violent assembly, in which all the parts sought to negotiate a modus vivendi, a peace.

So often we have dreams of people chasing us, of falling, of a gap between what we want and what we get; between comfort and experienced reality.  We fear.  We fight.

But is the logical end of psychological growth, of psychological integration not more or less the development of harmony among our various “parts”, between our shadow and our normally acknowledged self?  Is the logical end not a sort of unity, which can become a unity of purpose–a true unity, not one in which some major but unrecognized “self” dug deep in our unconscious is constantly creating friction and conflict?

And it occurred to me that there is a homology between the negotiations, the mutual recognitions and acceptances, necessary for individual harmony, and that of the democratic process which–when unmolested by radicals refusing to join into the social fold, the social field–ends with a deeper peace than would have been possible in a situation of coercion.

Democracy, self rule, negotiations between people who differ in values in lifestyles, true Liberalism: these are tools for social growth.  To the extent we can grant the existence of something called “Society”, it is built in this way, and destroyed by the authoritarianism of the Socialists, who, having failed to individuate, having failed to achieve any degree of personal psychological integration, see in the realm of abstraction–of intellectual violence to reality–the only possible solution to their mental problems, and who thus make the primary reality something which does not even exist, the Society.

Buddha famously posited Anatta, or Anatman, which is that the self does not exist.  This is self evidently true, if we want to think of the self as a unitary, unevolving, block.  But with individuals you at least have a singular body, and a singular mind, even if it changes.  With regard to society you don’t even have this.  It is an utter fiction.

We might say that growth is decreasing the number of selves by increasing the overall complexity of the Self, the underlying informational richness.

Likewise, social growth that matters is increasing diversity of behavior–which is something Socialists actually detest, even if they gladly accept social deviance because it acts as an acid which helps to dissolve remaining non-ironic cultural traditions.

When it is said that Leftism is a mental disorder, it truly is.  It represents an emotional inability to handle complexity, a lack of capacity to integrate primitive emotions like anger and fear, and a following behavioral rigidity tied closely to the process of rejecting reality by interacting only with reified lies.

Do you think when he looks out of the window of his eyes that Obama sees actual people?  Of course not.  That is how he can joke about murdering them.

It is hard for me to believe that a nation as talented at intelligence gathering as Israek is has not dug up some dirt on Obama. If so, I woyld encourage them to release it. How much worse can it get having the shots called by an Iranian, their secret missions publicized, and deals cut wirh Iran with no strings?

As long as Obama is in office he will be working–secretly and not-so-secretly to further an anti-Israel, Islamist agenda.

Other than the fact that he makes Nixon look like an icon of moral rectitude–Nixon was, after all, just trying to prevent the Left from losing the Vietnam War, and failed only due to what amounted to a legislative coup–and that propaganda apparatus of the complicit media is working FOR him–where for Nixon it was a constant, vicious, and utterly ruthless opponent, we can usefully compareObama and Nixon.

In that spirit, I would submit we need a new question for a new age: what DIDN’T Obama know, and for how long didn’t he know it? And why?

Buddhists recognize three types of pain: physical or emotional (or even intellectual) pain; the pain of change and adjustment; and the pain of “conditioned existence.”

This evening, after a good Kum Nye practice, I had this extremely pleasant sense of emotional omnipotentiality, which felt like magic.  All of us live conditioned lives, lives dictated by what we fear and crave, by profit and loss, by honor and dishonor.  In large measure, we are defined by and constrained by what we avoid and what we seek.

But behind this, there is the possibility of getting past all that, of feeling like you have simultaneously realized all your life’s dreams.

And I want to be clear: we assume that achievement, or sensation has to precede certain emotions, like pride, or wonder, or the sense of magic, but why?  Can we not treat emotions as self originating, if the person is sufficiently skilled enough at “conjuring” them?

No Buddhist gets fully beyond the pain of loss.  They don’t want to feel physical pain any more than anyone else does, but their path–when taught properly, and in my view it devolves often into simple masochism or empty ritual–offers an alternative.  You can choose between this and that.

I haven’t heard anything new about nuclear fusion reactors in some time.  Either the technology is not being developed for political reasons–since many Greens, being misanthropes, want humanity to be poor–or technical reasons.

Presumably part of the problem is finding a way to create power without something going BOOM.

Well, just daydreaming a bit this morning after my shower, it occurred to me you could build rooms in granite a mile under the surface and just set bombs off.  You could attach those chambers to hundreds of escape valves with turbines in them that generate power.  These would, in some quantity, dissipate the blast.

You could also fill many underground reservoirs with water (or some other material) that would boil, let off steam in the manner I understand fission reactors do, and also drive turbines.

We likely already have 1 kiloton bombs.  We could more or less drop them down a chute, and bang, immediate and sustained power.  Since the power output would be in units–since there is no minimum critical mass to start, and no need for cooling rods to stop the reaction–power could in this scenario be fitted to actual needs.

As things stand today, it takes more power to create a wind turbine than it will ever create in its lifetime.  Quite literally, even if it does its job well throughout its lifespan, humanity as a whole has lost, even if Obama donor and Federal Reserve Board member GE does a very tidy, very profitable business in the process.

Over some period of time, though, solar might become viable, and in some localized instances wind may make sense too.  Both are highly dependent on the environment, though, so some equivalent of a coal or wood fire would be good, in which if the fire is dying down, you just add bricks or logs.

We could have dozens of “kilns” (I will call them), and keep only those occupied for which there is a need.  Power output could be scaled real time to power demand.

Who knows?  Perhaps even small communities could one day have such arrangements, perhaps even houses, with microton bombs.

I am a staunch opponent of the idea that humans are having a significant, or even measurable, impact on global temperatures as a result of using plentiful and easily deployed fuels.  At the same time, I do not oppose efficiency per se, and this might be a step in that direction.

As I said in a previous post, “Allahu Akbar” can mean “I am getting ready to shit on God and curse the righteous”.  It can also of course mean “I am grateful for my existence, made possible by the only God there is, and intend to serve the cause of righteousness diligently.”  This latter is never the meaning when someone is preparing to commit, or celebrating, murder, particularly of innocents.

All phrases–all “gestures”, to use a term common in Kum Nye for both physical and emotional movements–mean what our inner reality projects into the universe.  This is already in, I guess, Wittgenstein, or perhaps Korszybski, one of whom I  believe said that the meaning of a communication is what is understood by the recipient.

But this goes beyond that.  Let us posit a universal recipient, an omniscient God, or perhaps merely angels who at our level are functionally omniscient.  What are you saying?  What would be heard by a Being capable of comprehending the entirety of that “gesture” which is your incarnation in this world, and what you have done with it?  This is the question we need to ask when dealing with questions of sin and redemption. 

One of my favorite books, although I have not taken it up in some years, is Idries Shah’s “Wisdom of the Idiots”, which is a collection of Sufi teaching stories.  I have long felt an emotional affection for, and attachment to, the Sufi Way.  It is not to be my way in this life: I am much too far afield culturally.  But they offer many useful truths. 

One of them is that Sufis hide in many disguises, and that of “profane” can be one of them.  It is your inner gesture that matters.