Moderates United

I was driving down the freeway the other day, feeling a strong emotional identification with knighthood and chivalry, and looked to my left and saw something I have never before seen: a roughly 25′ box attached to the SIDE of a car, which was about 6″ square at the base (in the back), and which tapered to about 3″ square at the tip.  It looked for all the world like a lance, held on the right side of the car.

As usual, I will point out I understand confirmation biases and whatnot.  I just thought it interesting.

We fret about our children spending their days in front of TV’s, but perhaps we should fret more about PARENTS doing the same.  A comedian commented that texting while driving is worse than drunk driving, because in the latter case a drunk is driving, but in the former case NO ONE is driving.

Who is parenting when the TV is on?  Who is parenting when the parent is emotionally absent?  Who is parenting when everyone hides in their rooms, often seemingly from a very early age?

I think many children nowadays crave, hunger, are desperate for, honest, genuine understanding and feedback.  The essence of love is attention and compassionate understanding.  Not getting it is what makes them angry, but they don’t know why.  Yes, I think many parents are overly indulgent, but I think in many cases this overindulgence is the result of laziness and disconnection.  It is simply easier to let the kid do whatever he or she wants, even if it is not in their best long term interest.

This laziness, in turn, is taught by example to the children, who become less able to meet their own needs, less able to care for themselves.  In many cases they don’t know what their needs ARE, since never having had them met, they are at a loss as to what the question is, and what an answer might feel like.  As I have said a number of times, it is hard to know something is missing when you have never experienced it.

This basic process of emotional disconnection, combined with being lost in mass media, is a principle factor in what I see as the loss of HOME for many Americans, a loss of a place where one unconditionally belongs.  This is why so many enter into and stay in fantasy worlds.  This is the basic process which underlies the premise (in my superficial understanding, having only scanned it) of “Reality is Broken”.

I do not oppose video games in principle, but it does not seem to me that they teach kids how to be present in the present; how to be where they are, calmly.  They are simply better than lonely silences filled with the sound of emotional hunger.

All of these kids covered in tattoos, painful piercings, sad  or angry eyes: who raised them, if anyone?  Have many of them not been orphaned by mass media?

Pace my last post, I would to emphasize that I named my other website Goodness MOVEMENT because I view Goodness as a purposive movement, oriented around both personal growth, and general growth; between learning to live more happlly as what I will call a “monad”, (after Leibniz, if not others), and taking happiness and satisfaction in helping others to do the same; to wish yourself and others well.

What Goodness is NOT is a fixed set of rules which must be slavishly conformed to in all circumstances, for example being nice, being non-violent, and being loving.  Love, as I have said often, is a primary value, but if taken to absolute extremes it becomes stupid.

I have seen from time to time pacifists ask themselves if they would  have killed Hitler or Lenin if they would have both known the evil they intended and had the chance to to so.  As I have commented from time to time this is fundamentally a selfish attitude.  They prefer avoiding the pain of guilt for killing one person to the guilt they only would not feel, for allowing the murder of hundreds of millions, through self deception.

Many people who call themselves Good, who claim to be pursuing a spiritual path are like this: they deceive themselves as to the TRUE consequences of their actions.  They are irresponsible children.  You cannot simultaneously genuinely grow and lie to yourself at the same time.  Your lies will bind you to an old order.

I am an asshole sometimes.  I am extremely generous sometimes.  But in all cases I do my best to be honest with myself.  I cannot of course know in this lifetime with complete certainly how honest I have been, but I can say that I have done my best to polish the glasses I look through.

A cornerstone of the Fabian method is to accuse those who oppose their radical agenda of being IMPOLITE.  Given the Bernard Shaw and the Webbs were ardent advocates of totalitarianism, mass murder, the eradication of political and individual freedom, and were more less open cheerleaders not just for Lenin and Stalin, but also Hitler and Mussolini, the TRUTH of course is that THEY were the brutal ones.

But evil can have a genteel face–as the Rolling Stones put it, the Devil is a “man of wealth and taste”–and the task of the Good person, the genuinely good person, the person who has marshalled all of his or her resources to the task of ACTUALLY improving human life (which first and foremost includes creating more opportunities for people to improve their own lives and that of those around them) is to OPPOSE this evil as needed, where needed, and using whatever methods actually WORK.

From time to time I make contact with a warrior persona in me.  It is not pretty.  This man has scars on his face and body, is hard and cold–cruel even; you don’t want him at a cocktail party because he will either offend the women or get in a fight with the men.  He is absolutely fearless, utterly determined, ruthless, and cunning.  When you want to fight a war, this is who you want to do it.  People like this are invaluable in that context, but they scare the crap out of people the rest of the time.  They are not human in the normal way.  They are not genteel.  It does not even occur to them to care about social niceties.

In some respects, I do not think it inappropriate to say we are fighting a war against the habit of being habitually NICE, of backing down whenever some de facto sociopath pretends to take umbrage at his latest seizure of a liberty, in the name of civility.

Civility is being used against us.  We can see this whenever Leftwing Sadeists claim that opposing them is opposing feeding hungry children or old people.  What we must REMEMBER is that it is THEIR policies which make children hungry, THEIR policies which make saving for old age difficult to impossible.  THEY are the ones who are actually doing all the things that they accuse conservatives of.

Never forget this.  I will put this simply: if you are incapable of saying FUCK YOU, then you are in my view constrained in your possible exercise of Goodness as I conceive it.

The leftwing Democrats claim that furloughing 13% of the massive Federal workforce is going to cause economic trouble.  This is not going to happen.  It did not happen following sequestration (which incidentally continues), and it won’t happen now.

As far as people being laid off, though, it might be worth comparing how many people are losing their incomes in the short versus those in the private sector who will either be laid off outright, stuck with unaffordable health insurance bills (which unlike healthCARE bills they will likely be unable to make go away in bankruptcy), or permanently set at 29 hours. 

Consider the economic cost of the IMPLEMENTATION of Obamacare.  It will be far, far worse than anything that will happen, ever, if the “shutdown” is continued. 

And the long game works for the Republicans better, in my view.  People will get personally pissed at Obama for closing the National Park Service if the Republicans get their message out.  They will be pissed that he is not even TRYING to APPEAR like he is interested in anything approaching a compromise on a bill that was and remains something the vast bulk of Americans oppose, and which was passed on a strict party line vote, barely.

I say let this thing go on indefinitely.  We have been passing Continuing Resolutions periodically anyway, since asshole Harry Reid won’t do his job.  We just keep funding everything but Obamacare.

I would add that these Exchanges are plainly a failure.  They are not only increasing premiums, but creating penalties where there were none before.  This is when they work correctly, which in a great many cases they plainly are not, despite the fact that Obama has had 3-4 years to get them set up.

The whole thing is a disaster, and the longer this goes on, the harder and harder it will be for the Matt Lauers of the world to keep the truth from getting out.

Anybody remember 4 years ago when the passage of Obamacare was “urgent”, a “crisis”, that we had to something, anything to remedy the “situation” (which of course was never properly defined, making an intelligent solution within that world impossible)?

Now I am reading that the exchanges make you put your information in before quoting you anything, are offering up exorbitant, even extortionate pricing, then offering the unfortunate souls dumb or desperate enough to trust Obama the choice of paying that pricing, or facing a hefty fine for not paying it, which will be collected by the IRS with all the powers it has to collect any other tax, which include wage garnishment, involuntary bank withdrawals, and the seizure of property.

Many businesses are flat out saying they want out of providing health insurance as a benefit, and will be forcing people onto these exchanges, which will no doubt work out to net disposable income decreases.  This in turn will lead to drops in consumer spending outside the insurance arena, and negative economic outcomes.  And all of this money is wasted.  People are either being cheated (there is no doubt a lot of government pork in these numbers, too: somebody has to pay the salaries and benefit packages of the bureaucrats administering this plan, and unlike in a free market, there is no cost for failure) or buying what I have called “prepaid insurance”, not true insurance.  My short, ten paragraph treatment of this topic is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

While we’re at it, does anyone remember that the “Stimulus” was also “urgent”, that if we didn’t pass it we would have unemployment rates pretty much like we have now?  I do.

Let me remind folks of Alberto Gonzalez, too.  We were told he did an awful thing to cover up some sort of crime they were sure would be outed soon enough.  That was a number of years ago.  Hillary is making noise about fulfilling her narcissistic fantasy of standing on a podium, convinced that the nation loves her.  She was one of the most vocal critics calling for Gonzalez’s resignation.  Since he was the first Hispanic Attorney General, the normal rules would have been to protect him at all costs, like Obama has been protecting Eric Holder from what in my view should be “accomplice to murder” charges.  But Bush was the President, and anything they could do to weaken his public image was fair game.  They play to win elections; they don’t play to improve the lives of anyone. Destroying people is just part of the system.  Hillary was an acolyte of Saul Alinsky, too.  If I’m not mistaken, I think she actually met him.

An essential assumption of propaganda is that people forget everything the media is not presently talking about.  This means, as one example, that both the North Koreans and the Boston bombing have disappeared.  I remain unconvinced that we actually know who all the actors were, and I suspect at least a handful of people got away, probably including Obama’s Saudi buddy who only a few months later was a guest at the White House. Benghazi is only still out there because people are working hard to keep it out there.

The very abundance of news, the constant news feeds, the 24/7 coverage actually makes it much EASIER, not harder, to suppress stories.  I will reiterate that is why you need to periodically check in with alleged cranks like Alex Jones to see what he has dug up that is being ignored or forgotten.

I suspect I have some readers who are mainly political and roll their eyes at the confessional posts, and others who have to quickly scroll over my political stuff.  So be it.  I am a complex person, with a prodigious number of threads running through my mind at all times. I  feel strongly it makes me a better thinker.

Be that as it may. . .

First off, the government is not shut down.  Most of it, in my understanding, is still running.  Edit: the number I am seeing is that 87% of the government is still running, and still getting paid.  Obama is clearly, beyond any possible doubt, doing what he can to increase the pain associated with the 13% of government that actually is furloughed–as in shutting open air national monuments–but the reality is that the wheels of government are still churning through AT LEAST $100 billion a MONTH.  It would be easier to know the exact number if Harry Reid would do his CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY and pass a budget, but that would be too embarrassing, so he won’t do it.  And that, to be clear, is the reason that the House has to keep passing these Continuing Resolutions every few months, and has since Obama took office.

Second, and this is the most interesting point I want to make, at least to me, is that this standoff is forcing Democrats in one of two ways: the headless ones have no choice but to unleash hatred and venom at the Republicans, because the alternative would be to think of us as human beings just like them, who care for the poor, the country, their own families, and who simply have a policy disagreement, and are not evil human beings.

Thus they have to choose between reclaiming their humanity and granting that people can disagree with them without being monsters; and putting on public display the full extent of their posthumanistic viciousness, as Harry Reid did in not even understanding why it would be wrong to callously say he didn’t care about a kid dying of cancer, because after all OBAMACARE itself was at stake.  You know, everything important.

It’s interesting to note, too, how they keep calling this awful law “healthcare”, or the “healthcare law”.  It is nothing of the sort.  Our hospitals, doctors offices, and other health provision services continue to operate just fine, and will if Obamacare disappears tomorrow.  In fact, the only net effect Obamacare will have will be to make the actual provision of healthCARE, as opposed to insurance, less efficient and/or more costly.  Rationing is very likely, because they will likely put price controls in place.

At the moment, though, only healthcare being denied is at the National Institute of Health, which Harry  Reid refuses to fund for purely partisan purposes.

When I said Fidel Castro did not care that children for whom he is ultimately responsible were being treated with expired aspirin, I was being quite literal.  Harry Reid has shown himself, clearly, to be cut from the same moral cloth.  This is Cultural Sadeism, which is the elimination of principle based behavior.  You do things not because they are right, but because they win you power.  Justice, or human rights, or alleviating poverty: these are all rhetorical ploys.  They don’t want to help people.  If they did, they would feel BAD when they failed, and plainly they don’t.  How many Detroit Democrats feel bad about their long term failure, about running the most prosperous city in the world into the ground?  None, I suspect, not really.

In any event, as the Democrats get increasingly flustered as Obamacare fails in practice, and as the public increasingly blames Obama for not even TRYING to negotiate, their inner ugliness will get harder and harder to hide.

I said a week or so ago that I though the shutdown was a bad thing.  I don’t think it is, IF the House Republicans continue to pass resolutions funding military families and other people who are directly hurt. If the Democrats continue blocking them, they can only rationalize that for so long before people start getting really pissed at them.

Yes, of course Obama and the left wing own most of the complicit media, but in my own observation if you read the actual comments people leave on articles posted on websites where people of both political persuasions go, like Yahoo, there is a groundswell both of knowledge and anger at the direction our country is headed that is stronger than anything I have seen in my lifetime.

Obamacare is a fundamentally flawed law.  It will wreck things that are working, cost a fortune, and help very, very few people.  It was passed on a strictly partisan basis, using parliamentary chicanery, and rushed through so fast the people who voted on it did not know what was in it.  Given all this, asking that it be given a second look and modified to at least be less bad is not an unreasonable request.

Bill Clinton would have cut a deal with Republicans years ago, and is likely reminding Obama even now that he himself got to Yale on his own merits, and he had better listen to him.  Clinton may or may not be advising a deal, but he is too good a politician not to see the risks of not even attempting to APPEAR interested in a compromise, or even bipartisan dialogue Obama, for his part, likely does not even see his arrogance for what it is.

Why do we assume Obama can’t compromise, can’t rewrite at least some parts of the law?  Because he never has.  He has never compromised on anything that I can recall.  Not once.  He is hyperpartisan, and the results of that, unsurprisingly, have been hyperpartisanship.  What else can you do when the other side ignores you but knock them on the head with any means at your disposal?  Power only responds to power, and the House is using the one club short of impeachment that it has.

 

I am certainly not the first, second, for 51st to say this, but dance is a useful metaphor for life, for thinking, for working, for feeling.  I have bought the Kum Nye Dance book, and am curious to see in what ways it builds on the “normal” Kum Nye.

I keep an open mind about Astrology.  There seems to be something to the Natal Chart (obviously, ignore the newspapers, except the one in the Onion, which is occasionally funny when he isn’t too nasty), although of course I have no idea how it would work.  If it is true that our consciousnesses create the universe, there is no reason to suppose that there are not some arcane and mysterious currents running deep below the flow of the things we have measured.

The point I wanted to make, though, is that I’m vaguely proud of my chart, which has some unusual elements in it.  Frankly, I’ve been thinking I’m pretty special.  Then it occurred to me that if there were 370,000 people being born a day back then, there are that number of people who have my EXACT chart, virtually everything. I’m not so special after all.  This made me laugh a bit, and was a useful and needed thought.

There is a necessary dance between vanity and self confidence, between submissiveness and humility, between realism, and useful grandiosity.  All of them mix together.  I haven’t quite opposed them right, because there are many possible continiums to draw. Sometimes if you are ridiculously proud, you are full of it.  Sometimes even though your aim is high, your understandings of your own capacity are accurate.

All of us are prone to self delusion and illusion.  I picture stupidity as this mangy, Cupid knockoff flying around on one wing, and shooting us as often as we give him chances to.

Another metaphor I know I have posted somewhere is that stupidity is like the barbell in the bench press.  We have to keep constant pressure on it to keep it from crushing us.

I started taking the Paleo Diet seriously about two weeks ago, and it seems to be helping.  What sort of forced my hand was a terrible bout of allergies.  The claim made by Paleo advocates, which appears to have had merit, is that allergies, which are a type of autoimmune disorder in my understanding, are the result of a preexisting substrate of inflammation caused by low grade food allergies.  In Celiac Disorder, for example, people are CLEARLY, immediately, reacting to wheat. 

But the claim is made that in most all other people, even those exhibiting no symptoms, there are underlying physiological traumas happening which are necessary but not sufficient for a host of diseases, up to and including cancer and heart disease.  I don’t see anyone claiming you will live forever if you abstain from grains, but they certainly predict a much longer life.

I got to thinking that psychological trauma is like that, too.  It exists in the darkness, in the background, but creates the necessary substrate for cognitive and emotional disorders.  You can have a lot of trauma and be relatively unaffected, just as many people have Big Mac’s regularly across long lives without any apparent negative effects.  But you are primed for it.  Given new challenges, the stage is set for dysfunctional reactions.

And further, you are not abundantly HEALTHY.  You are less than you could be.

The thing is, EVERYONE has traumas in their lives.  Everyone.  At a minimum the birth is traumatic, even for C Sections.  You are now in the cold place where you have to breathe and eat.

The task in life is to develop the capacity for emotional digestion.