Moderates United

I was in the liquor store last night, and talking with the cashier. The guy in front of me told her “there’s always hope” in relation to some problem she was having. She said “that’s just a cliche”, then to me “hope has never done anything but cause me pain. I’m a black woman and that is just how it is.”

I told her she could trust in persistence. She asked me if that was a cliche too, and I told that was the truth. Another black woman (I reference black since she did) in the store agreed. I told her you can’t quit, and that is something you can rely on.

Hope is a happiness you feel, thinking something good is going to happen. When it doesn’t happen, you feel worse. It is, therefore, a bad guide to the future for many people, except the lucky.

Yet, persistence IS a good guide for everyone. It is a form of what psychologists term “precommittment” (I read about this in the book “Willpower”, and had not heard the term before), in that you make the decision in advance that NO MATTER WHAT happens, you will keep going. You will keep moving until God takes the breath from your body and you go to whatever is next.

This is liberating, in that you can rule suicide, formal or virtual, out of your life and mind, and therefore confirm within your self the decision to grow in some way or other for the duration of your existence on Earth.

Yes, this is a drinking blog. I need to “freedomize” (software to keep yourself off the internet) myself when I pop the cap. Sorry about that.

As I reread it, actually, it is not fully hopeless/idiotic. All that happens when I drink is I get more honest, which is hard to do, since I am very honest.

I took a personality profile once, which measured adapted versus “real” personality. They were in precisely the same quadrant, with the difference that I tone down my real self slightly. This, because I am an enthusiast, and most people are not.

I check my posts, to some extent. As I see it, nothing threatens our shared survival more than those who simply cannot believe freedom, life, flexibility, decision are possible in large groups. Seemingly, some want US to die; to stop caring about the outside world; to stop validating perceptions consistent with long term viability.

We are so big. The United States of America is so large. Why do we so limit ourselves? Are there not sand pits, and small lakes, and unindulged Indian tribes to which to offer our affection and concern? Of course there are.
They know who they are.

My hope is that we all wind up under a grand banner declaring the greatness of the United States, and that we stand there, appreciating all the death and suffering and other sacrifice our comfortable lives mean.

My further hope is that we remember not just the designated “heroes”, but all the men who did their job under horrific circumstances and came home intact, nonetheless. God Bless them twice. Those who died, or were seriously hurt, thrice.

Oh, I see the world unsentimentally We all have our claims on the bastard of existence, the claim made on our lives, our pain, our sorrow. I see past this. Please tell me I am a son of a bitch granting your dead the respect of having died bravely, doing their job under arduous circumstances. I feel this, I hurt this. That is all I can do. The rest rests with you. It will fade with time. It will never disappear. It will never fully go away.

OI. I should move along, but I feel your pain. If you should move along, move along. If a shortsighted dumbass helps, then I am your guide.

How many, I wonder, will grasp this post? What I seem to be is what I am.

Edit: I will note that I was drunk and tired when I posted this, not necessarily in that order. I left it up, because it is not wholly useless, even though of course it does lapse into the sort of incoherence I normally like to think I am successful in avoiding.

Yes, I am capable of irony. I use it regularly.

Nothing is more pernicious in human life than unexamined assumption. Nothing works to the Good more than intelligence fortified with humility and goodwill.

Corrolary: No matter how clear you think you have been, someone has still misunderstood you. This effect cannot be fully erased, which means that all plans must have room to be amended. The people who do the amending are not normally the planners, but the doers. Such people are invaluable, even if commonly unnamed, unnoticed, unappreciated, and unrewarded. Upon them rests in large measure the future of the world.

Just kidding. That is my sense of humor that would resemble dust if it wasn’t so dry it’s already gone. It’s ether. Etheric humor.

I did want to make a point, though. This whole notion of thesis/antithesis/synthesis leads to some serious flaws of thought. The image conveyed is of two cars racing headlong against one another, colliding in a massive spasm of metal and gas fumes, tumbling up in the air and then apart, and something useful flowing from the wreckage. This is not even remotely the way the world works, yet it is the basic metaphor for revolutionaries, who think they must destroy what came before, so something new–a “synthesis”–can come of it. The OWS clowns think if they can just destroy Capitalism, something BETTER will come of it. They are assured by the “Marxists” (there can be no serious Marxist today, since his hypotheses have been fully falsified; they are necessarily Leninists, as I have defined the term) that “history”–which has all the empirical validity as the word “God” as it is commonly used–is on their side. This is patent nonsense.

The better metaphor is two rivers, coming from different places, flowing together in a wider place. Neither has taken from the other; on the contrary they have reinforced one another.

You cannot make the poor rich by destroying the rich. This has been tried: not once, but many times. It doesn’t work. But, and this is a big but, it DOES serve the role of expressing hatred and rage, and the innate propensity for indulging evil that both those sentiments imply.

First off, I just tried to donate $100 to his campaign, but the website was not secure. I tried to send them a message, but the software didn’t work. These are both serious problems. Could be hackers, could be incompetence, could be both. Plainly, this needs to be fixed. I also don’t like websites that I have to scroll across. This problem is easily and cheaply fixed. We will call this the “lacking Soros and Wall Street big bucks” problem.

(I will add: self evidently, George Soros has plenty of friends on Wall Street. His goal is not global freedom. He has done nothing to support that. His goal is the conversion of a de facto oligarchy into a de jure oligarchy, using the veneer of socialist “progress”. “Socialism” has shown itself to be a useful rhetorical ploy for power mongers over the last century.)

Back to Cain. This is go time. Figure out the money situation, then counterattack. Make a list of ALL the sexual harassment stories on Democrats that were buried by the mainstream press, then confront them with it. Choose say the last half century. Hell, start with the facts that Kennedy slept with a woman who was not his wife nearly daily, and that FDR had a long term girlfriend and that he didn’t even sleep in the same room as his wife. In Kennedy’s case, quite obviously there were many women who were propositioned, and who said no, and who in this day and age would have sued him. Clinton will yield plenty of material. Ted Kennedy and his houses of hookers, not to mention Mary Jo Kopechne. Make a list, a long list, and publish it. Ask: why does a powerful black man scare you so much?

Here is the actual answer. Blacks constitute about 12% or so of the population. They vote at lower rates, in my understanding, in most elections than the rest of the population does. But they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. For Obama, it was over 90%. Let us say that half of all eligible black voters vote in a typical election. This means that some 5-6% of the population will ALWAYS vote for the Democrat. In big cities, where blacks are disproportionately present, this number goes up substantially. In cities like Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Detroit, it is probably not overstating it to say that whoever gets the black vote wins the mayoral election and City Hall.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. He was a Republican because the Democrats have ALWAYS been the party of racism. They were the party of the secessionists and the segregationists. You will hear that the racists left the Democrats after the mid-60’s and joined the Republicans, but I see no evidence of this. Take Robert Byrd. This man actually JOINED the KKK, and in my understanding held a leadership position, and was LIONIZED when he died by the Democrats. Can you imagine a Republican KKK member being so treated? Of course not.

For the Democrats, the issue is not combating “racism”. It is protecting their power and privilege by making entirely insincere claims that they are protecting black people. Yet their policies consistently lead to high unemployment rates, out of control crime and hopelessness in inner cities.

Barack Obama is no more black than I am. He reminds me of Niles Crane, a prissy boy who always wants hand sanitizer near him, and drops his g’s only when he wants to be one of “them”, the real black people. Keep in mind he was hired as a community organizer in Chicago by two Jewish students of Saul Alinsky, who needed a black face to do their circus act, which amounted to a racist rounding up of the monkeys (I want to be clear: this is not how I view it, but how I visualize them as having viewed it, since organizing never was intended to help the people involved, but rather to exploit them to acquire power. Power is all that is of interest to an Alinskyan/Leninist). It was cynical and detached at its very heart.

Herman Cain grew up in a thoroughly typical black southern family. His parents both worked multiple jobs. He experienced real racism. And he raised himself by his bootstraps. The contrast of Cain and Obama would be very, very striking. Obama’s phoniness could not be hidden, if standing on the stage next to Cain. Every black viewer would see this, and if they hear from Cain’s mouth an actually credible defense of conservative ideals, many of them will PERMANENTLY change over. Self evidently, there is no distance to which Democrats will not go to prevent this. They have no moral compass. Nothing is off the table.

But my hope is that Cain survives this storm. I don’t know what the 9/9/9 plan will do, if enacted, but I like the idea of 10% cuts in all Federal departments quite well, which Cain has pledged to do when elected, and I know that freeing up both capital and confidence will work wonders for our economy. Putting a true businessman in the White House–as I have said, I count Romney as a CEO, not a businessman, with the difference being between political savvy, and the ability to grow a business–will work wonders for confidence.

How’s this for a campaign slogan: Sometimes it DOES take a rocket scientist: Cain 2012.

I’ve recently come across some rare bits of good psychology. As a general rule, I don’t think most psychologists have the tools to do anybody much good that they could not have better done themselves, under the encouragement of friends and church. Quite often, I think psychologists–pop psychologists and clinical psychologists–breed self pity and resentment, which makes things WORSE.

However, I will recommend the book “Willpower”, by Roy Baumeister and (I think) John Tierney. I will also recommend the “Panic Away” set of exercises by Barry McDonagh.

The two are related in many ways, which continue to occur to me.

As far as willpower, what I found interesting is that it is a physical quantity, in effect, not that different than physical stamina. Like physical stamina, it can be built, but it finite in quantity, and used for all sorts of things we would not normally consider, such as suppressing emotions, suppressing the expression of emotions, paying attention, resisting temptation, and thinking new thoughts (this last is my extrapolation from their basic thesis). Every use of willpower pulls from the same pot, so logically putting up with idiots at work requires a lot of willpower, which is why it is so stressful.

When you run out of willpower you get more emotional, and everything seems more vivid. This is the feeling some of us have had where, if not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, we can at least see the street that deadends there.

Logically, absent other tools, combating anxiety also requires the use of willpower. I will allow myself a tad bit of autobiography because it might be useful to someone. I grew up in a very nervous, emotionally suppressed home. I took these traits into adulthood. Most who know me would not describe me as nervous or emotionally suppressed, but I see now I exert a lot of energy keeping emotions in check, which leaves me with less energy for other tasks.

The trick to maximizing willpower, you see, is using it in the right places. If you are using it to suppress emotions, then you have less energy to form good habits. Habits in turn reduce the need for willpower, since decision-making, too, requires willpower, and tires you. If you obviate the need for a decision, then that energy carries forward. William James said this 100 years ago, but somehow this book made this more clear to me. All of this is common sense, of course, but it only becomes common for any of us when we actually GET it. I probably only understand half of what I say. Maybe less.

It occurs to me too, that much of our culture is dedicated to the goal of making us more nervous, and less trusting. Look at all the CSI clones. Yes, of course like all crime dramas they are about bringing closure to a crime. But unlike all entries in the genre until perhaps the late 1990’s or so (I don’t watch them, so am not familiar with the exact history), the physical acts of murder, the details, are a character on the shows. People obviously want to see the bodies, watch the autopsies, and in so doing serve some ghoulish impulse in them that we all have.

The opposite of fear is not indifference. Courage, in many cases, amounts to indifference, since it can be the absence of fear. Sociopaths can be quite brave, for the simple reason that situations that normally induce fear in us, simply produce nothing for them.

The opposite of fear is love. It is the capacity to imagine being tender, completely open, and understood; to be in a warm room where everyone welcomes you, as you–with no pretenses, and no hiding of flaws and failures, and shortcomings. We all have them. Only fools (and scoundrels, for their own ends) pretend otherwise.

I am a great believer in the therapeutic effects of deep relaxation, and have experimented with it from time to time. I’ve tried Jacobson’s “Progressive Relaxation”, and have as my goal getting Luthe’s entire series on autogenics. It is an interesting intellectual/political/business question as to how he has been so thoroughly shut out of mainstream psychotherapy, at least in the West. My understanding is he consistently achieved excellent results. Of course, the literature on him seems, on my superficial analysis, quite small. He was no Freud, no Skinner, no Rogers. He simply developed a body of work that over definable periods of time was effective at alleviating the most obvious symptoms of treatable, non-psychotic illnesses.

Be that as it may–and that was a long digression–I really like McDonough’s work because he has apparently incorporated some visualizations from some spiritual tradition, likely Buddhism, that work to connect relaxation with the expression of love; and at that not universal love, which is hard, but simple love for someone or something that is personally important to you. He has that in the Seven Minute Exercise and the Deep Relaxation. In this, he is unique in my experience. Most of them just work to relax you. This is defense. Offense is creating an internal world in which you are actually comfortable.

A large part of my problem with deep relaxation has been that once I get relaxed, I get MORE irritable dealing with the countless details and idiocies that I encounter on a daily basis. Quite often, it makes my mood WORSE, which is not the goal at all, obviously.

I get the newsletter from Victor Zammit weekly. He is a quirky, probably a bit cantankerous at times, but all the same recognizable and lovable person who puts together weekly–at no benefit to himself–videos and stories dealing with evidence of the after-life. Viewed as a whole, the evidence is quite substantial, and some of the cases really don’t have alternative explanations than that our consciousness survives physical death.

One week, he had “symptoms of inner peace”. One was “A loss of the ability to worry (This is a very serious symptom).”

This makes sense to me. If you are spiritual, or trying to be, then you are trying to conquer fear and worry. We all have it. Most of us worry about something all day every day. This is no way to live.

That is why I got McDonough’s series. It was a $100, which is not cheap. Yet, it’s been worth it. I actually feel some progress. The series is principally targeted at people who have panic attacks. That’s not one of my problems, but I’ll close with some observations on his technique.

The tactic is to EMBRACE the queasiness and fear, then to ASK FOR MORE. This is strongly counter-intuitive. If something unpleasant is happening to you, the normal reaction is avoid it, to try and get away. Yet, as he points out, a panic attack is more or less one part of you attacking another part of you. Given that you cannot get away from you without lapsing into psychosis, then the best defense is a good offense, so you turn round, face it, and move forward. According to thousands of testimonies, this apparently works wonders.

This of course (I am often tongue in cheek with my streams of consciousness, if that is not obvious) led me to think of country music. Country music mixes the sad, the happy, and the silly all together. You might one of each, one after the other. For the seasoned country music listener, you’re OK with Randy Travis’s sad but inspirational Three Wooden Crosses, maybe followed by Miranda Lambert’s “House that built me”, and Jason Aldean’s “My kind of party”.

This is an emotional tonic. Three wooden crosses gets me misty eyed every time I hear it, because there is so much love in there. Love and tenderness are related: it’s a good kind of sadness, one that strengthens you for the challenges of life.

I have other work to do, but hopefully the connection I am trying to make here is clear enough. If you have a world of troubles, I’d encourage you to try out McDonagh’s work. Solving problems is hard enough–doing it with lots of worry and grief is even harder. If you can save your willpower for your work, you’ll have more of it left for others, and for yourself.

I don’t get paid for anything, and I’m not getting paid for that. That, for the more cynical among you.

From time to time, I go to this site with badly translated Hafez poetry, to read my fortune. You fix your question, then in theory look at a random page and line of poetry, and there is your question answered.

Tonight I did that. I won’t quote it, but will paraphrase the line: “Pain is recondite wisdom. Persevere and that wisdom will emerge into the light.”

This is, in my view, a useful belief.

I will add that, quite frequently, as a Pragmatist, I conflate true and useful. If it achieves the desired end, then it WAS true, correct? It may not be true for the next person, who lacks belief, but contingently, it was good enough.

I am going to vent a little bit. The simple fact is that you can trust selfish people. They reliably do what is in their self interest, and to motivate them all you have to do is show them how you can benefit them. If you yourself benefit as well, that is just a part of the deal. This is how honest, good business gets done. I want something; you want something; let’s make a deal.

The people who infuriate me are egotists, those who would rather cut off their nose to spite their face. They only feel they are advancing their self interest by preventing you from advancing yours. They are quite happy with zero sum or even negative sum games–in which both parties lose–provided only that they fare BETTER THAN YOU.

Concrete example: I will shortly be proposing a deal in which I make $2, and someone else makes $1 for every three dollar increase in price. Since this benefits me, it will happen much more reliably than the current arrangement, in which for every $4 increase, they get $3 and I get $1. Since price can determine whether a sale is won or lost, it little behooves me to increase prices for such a small benefit, so I don’t do it. I charge as little as I can.

I expect this proposal to be rejected, even though I can plainly show the clear benefits that will accrue, for the simple reason that I benefit more than them, on paper. This is egotism. This is not rational business.

The same basic process is in play with Socialists and tax increases for “the rich”. If I tell them that they get $1 for every $2 the rich get, they will be outraged. If I tell them that the rich lose $2 for every $1 lost by everyone else, they find this acceptable. They ignore the fact that incomes are decreasing, and that for every rich person worth twice some other person, it will run out for the less wealth person FIRST, meaning that that person was disproportionately HURT.

I hate egotists. You won’t hear me say that often, but I am too tired to sugar coat it. It is a form of power relationship, and as such morally wrong according to my own beliefs. And to be clear, morally wrong means stupid and counterproductive according to any rational understanding of appropriate, helpful, desirable uses of human life and energy.

Story one: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/koch-funded-study-changes-prominent-global-warming-skeptic-to-a-believer/comment-page-3/#comment-2157339

Summary: Oh my God, I was like so not a believer in global warming, but I got money from the Koch brothers and despite their pernicious, neo-Satanic influence, the forces of light and truth prevailed and I saw the TRUTH, which is, uh, something we are in the process of, uh, getting peer reviewed–soon, I promise–and which doesn’t include, you know, things, like ocean temperature, or mention the lack of thermometers on the poles, or explain how we were uniquely able to correct for the heat island effect, but, HEY: LISTEN TO ME. Koch brothers, former skeptic: this is a GOOD STORY.

Story two: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html?fb_ref=LikeButtonTop&fb_source=profile_multiline

Summary: Muller’s coauthor on all four papers: what the FUCK were you thinking, you ethically and mentally challenged jackass? That is not what we found AT ALL. We found that global warming had stopped. We found that the climate models were wrong, and had plainly assigned too large a role for CO2 in global warming.

Go find yourself another partner, you oleaginous cretin. That shit smell on your shoes is something you’re going to have to clean off yourself.

My summary: what is worth noting here is not the patent effort at lying to a media very eager to be deceived. This is nothing new. I just want people who are not able to reliably observe this phenomena simply to read the two stories, and try to reconcile them. Ask yourself what is actually going on here, and if by even the most generous stretch of imagination you can call this honest science, as it is being predigested and distributed.