Feathers of the goose pursued...

The subject is happiness and the achievement of the same, the trail long and long cold, it is as much of a goose chase as I’ve ever undertaken.  As an evolving contrasocial philosopher for most of my life I’ve chased questions of the why variety, enjoyed a beggar’s ration of success in the hunt, but the subject at hand is not a “why” kind of question.  It is more of a “what” or a “how” sort of thing.  Perhaps the question is more suited to the analogy of a prospector than a hunter, but that’s of little consequence.  It’s still a work of analytic introspection validated and verified by observations of internal and external reality.

Allow me to begin with the following statement to set an initial reference point, define a polarity: all positive states of being (happiness, joy, ecstasy, etc. et al) are states devoid of contradiction between the inner reality created by the self aware life and the outer reality shared with all other things which are not self.  

A rather chewy little tidbit of a thought.  Since every human being cohabitates two realities just exactly what constitutes a contradiction between the two? 

Allowing for imagination, dreams, fantasies, the entire creative process which has elevated human life above the animal it’s obvious the inner and outer realities are rarely to never an exacting match one to the other, from this it becomes equally obvious a contradiction is not a simple matter of some mismatch of fact between the realities.  In the inner reality of my imagination mighty starships fold space to cross the interstellar void in a fraction of a lifetime colonizing new worlds, no such vessels (of human construction) exist in the outer reality.  A mismatch of fact on the grand scale, and yet not a contradiction.

No, the sort of contradiction in question is not simply a matter of facts.  When considering the polarity of life matters of fact rarely have the majority say.  Of all things divided by the frontier between the inner and outer realities facts are actually one of the lesser considerations.  A lesser consideration, and yet the reference upon which are mounted the things that are of critical importance to the polarity of any given moment, or series of moments, some span of time given a discreet identity and considered as a unit.

…to be continued…

Dandelion...

Sometimes, at odd and inexplicable times, I really and truly do not give a shit.  Sometimes I wonder why.  Sometimes I don't even give a damn about that.

The moral of the story is...

He's down, one more and he's out...

...if you’re a lonesome cowboy just come to town beware strange women bearing gifts, particularly beautiful women bearing intoxicating gifts.  You’ll lose a lot more than your spurs.

The subject of the year is happiness, and happiness is a decidedly slippery subject to set into words.  Why?  Because where there are several words that name various levels and degrees of happiness there really are not many, if any, word symbols dedicated to defining the dynamic internal relationships which produce the perception of such states of being. 

On reflection I’ve realized this isn’t the first time I’ve bounced off this subject.  In the story “Pilgrim” my heroine SQ engages with this thought at a pivotal point in her quest of self realization.

For two days she floated and did little, the mid point of the voyage passed into the wake.  The mate had been right, a sedative was called for.  The narcotic had broken the tension she’d been building for days with her thoughts.  Things became distant, academic.  What was left to explore?  Her answer came at dinner, overheard between the purser and the mate, a discussion of philosophy and languages of the world.  The purser was holding forth that no language of the world contained as many words to describe happiness as it did shades of the opposite, the mate was trying to prove him wrong using the language of the Polynesian peoples for an example.  He might have been correct, but he couldn’t prove it.

Sundown was drifting with their debate, and taking her own tack with it.  It was quite a thought, really.  Words represent the things known to the people who speak them, the subtleties of their use the structures of thought.  If the purser was correct, as she was prone to suspect, then most of mankind truly labored against a curse of monumental proportions: the very language that set him apart from the animals biased his existence to the darkness.  On the other hand the mate was a good man, she’d seen that in the few minutes she’d suffered that he handle her giving relief from herself, there was no reason to doubt what he said, either.  He’d traveled the world and she suspected him of wisdom beyond what showed day to day.  The people of the south seas were rumored to have a happiness uncorrupted by what most called civilization, which allowed the curse was not native to all of mankind, it could be broken.

Happiness, joy, ecstasy, the English language assumes all of these things are primal beyond any precise or specific definition, states of life that might be experienced but never really understood.  In other words, essentially accidents or gifts of fate.  But if accidents they be then how is it that what is undefined and indefinable has generated multiple names but no understanding of the differences between them by which to pick the most appropriate name to describe such a moment?

No, the fact that there exists more than one word naming a consummately positive state of being is ample evidence for me to assume there must be some degree of understanding at some level or another of the human condition.  Were it not so then one name would suffice.  A path to understanding the things these words name is likely hidden between these words, and it is that path I propose to follow as an initial exploration to build a set of range markers and references. 

Just what is the difference between happiness and joy and ecstasy?  Catch you later world, I’ve got some serious thinking to do.

The other side of Star Trek...

I've always found the Star Trek universe to be a true treasure trove of sarcastic wit and wisdom... entire races built around some quirk of human nature. Gene Roddenberry, old Hollywood vice cop that he was, did such a magnificent job of showing us ourselves as we might be seen by others.

For example?  A Ferengi banker is arguably one of the most dangerous creatures portrayed.  A successful Ferengi banker will always have at least one mummified head displayed on his desk, the final remains of  a defaulted borrower, but never more than three such totems.  Why?  More than three makes it look as if he's an easily deceived fool, and that?  That, you know, that's a bad for business.  Ferengi, go figure.  But gentle reader, I ask you this... are the Ferengi's elephant ears a coincidence?  Hmmmm....

A Song for the Singin'... not the Livin'

This one a bit out of character, the words are someone else's and the image one of mine.  Hadn't posted anything in a bit, figured I'd toss this out there just by way of saying "hi, and no, I'm not dead and I'm not in jail (yet)."

Life, Liberty, and the...

I've written a lot about the unhappy things in the world, written a lot, and thought even more, about how to disable and dismiss those unhappy things into the void of history, memories rare to never visited.  Let me rule the world for three months and I’m confident I could make some changes that would work serious improvements in a couple of key areas, set in motion some things that would over the decades evolve into a truly serious defense of what is decent and desirable.  Yea, if I ruled the world.  But, thank you God, I don’t. 

Still though, all of that thinking on the negatives has shown up above and beyond everything else one key and critical thought that desperately needs mapping.  Just as peace is not the same thing as the absence of war happiness is not the same thing as the absence of misery.  An army cannot make peace, neither shaman nor shrink can truly make happiness.  Needed functions, all of them, but to my thought far to often misapplied by reason of failure to understand the fact presented above.  They can establish an environment able to support the higher state of life, an environment free of active impediments to the desired outcome, but cannot in and of themselves actually accomplish the work desired.  Why? Because they no more understand what is actually involved with establishing such a higher state of being than anyone else does.

Boss said...

Yea, the boss said put something on the sign.  So I did, sort of.  It’s a new year, there should be something on the sign to mark the departure of 2014 and the arrival of 2015.  

What’s to say about the year just passed?  Well, it passed.  Slid off into the abyss of history while other operations, internal operations, were underway.  For me 2014 stands  as evidence in support of the assertion that when one sets about extricating and evicting the consequences of some major unhappiness from your life there’s a lot of prep work to be done before you call the guys with the dynamite and bulldozers.  Before you get to the stage of the game where the six horse hitch of D6 start taking tension on the chains waiting for someone to scream “fire in the hole!!!” you have to have made preparations to support what’s going to be left hanging over the hole when the whatever it was is gone. 

That’s what 2014 was for me, a year of carefully excavating around the edges of what 2013 revealed, a year of measuring and assessing and designing the scaffoldings, a year of experimenting with various quick set mixtures and building the forms to pour permanent columns beneath the load, working up the plans for how to fill the space between the columns with things of satisfaction and delight rather than fear and loathing clothed in lethal rage. 

For a year I’ve given thought to those in my life who’s lives are entangled with mine, those whose lives will be impacted, doing my best to set them gently on their feet well clear of the blast zone well before things get interesting.  Amazing, how the chains of causality twist around when you start really looking at things, amazing how much responsibility we all carry for the lives closest to our own.  Their lives have been influenced by mine over the years, they’ll have things hanging over that hole as well, it isn’t fair to pull without making as sure as possible nothing of theirs falls in either.  I wish I could do more, but then again it is their life, not mine, and they’ve had as much warning as I did.

What will 2015 turn into?  Not a clue. For all I know by the end of year I may be a homeless snowbird touring the land looking for someplace to settle, looking for someplace, someone, that truly feels like home.  If so?  So be it.  The what was is nothing but a glide slope to a grave, no reason to stay here  (cue up the song Wanderin’ Star from the movie “Paint Your Wagon”… yea, me and Ben Rumson…).  This town is way to contaminated for me to ever trust it, never again.  So, what’s left to say about 2014 going on 2015?  Not much, just four words:

!!!FIRE IN THE HOLE!!!

Heartless

Another night at the diner, another run of humanity.  Another thought sparked by one of those who also watch the wee hours go by waiting on the dawn.

She said “society is heartless.”  She’s right, it is.  And the why of that isn't so very hard, although to fully understand the how of it is to understand most of humanity's history as a side effect of that understanding.  

For society to have a heart society would have to be self aware enough, as a discrete entity, to host the functions of empathy, the ability to see in another self aware sentience an emotional state comparable to some state known to its’ self.  So far, to the best of my knowledge, no society has ever been self aware enough to host such a thought.  A simple answer indeed.

Perhaps if enough individuals become both self and self-source aware in time to do a decent job of parenting the emerging collective entities as they mature maybe someday there will be a society sufficiently self aware to actually have a heart on behalf of its’ component individuals. 

What a sweet dream. Merry Christmas world.

Someone's Child

===Originally published July 24, 2011===

We are all someone's child, all of us are.

One very, very good thing to remember is this: time moves forward for our parents just as it does for us. They were not the same people then as they are now, time's flow of events will have changed and grown them as well.

A great deal of unhappiness in our world begins from not recognizing this simple fact of life. Many, far to many, will look back on their childhood and judge the actions of their parents as if their parents were then the same people they are at the time the judgment is made. They will hold the younger parent responsible to the same level of understanding that is seen in the elder parent, a retroactive judgment. Such retroactive judgments are terribly unfair, both to the parent being judged and to ourselves, for when we form negative opinions, when we assign fault and blame as a result of such retroactive judgments many will be inaccurate, and our assumptions of motive (they just didn't care; I must be bad; I did something wrong but they won't tell me what; they loved so-and-so more than I; they sold me out; I was expendable) will likely be just as inaccurate.

We all have events in our past that did us hurt and harm, some unsavory event we would never want to repeat. Those events are history, fixed, they cannot be changed only grown beyond in understanding. All such events cast a shadow across a life, they do. Those shadows may be short, merely a bit of a dimming to our joy, or they may be long and dark creating such pain in our life as to rob us of joy for a time, but still: they are but the shadow of an event gone by, fixed and finite. They will come to an end unless something happens to extend them, to give them new power in the present as their power from the past fades to the light of new events arriving. Such shadows can only endure beyond their original lifespan if in some manner we help them to survive.

As I look out on the world, as I look in on myself, the most common way we help those shadows survive is in those times when a retroactive judgment causes us to assign a motive that is not accurate, that is not true, for those errors do not remain in the past, no, they come forward through the years with us. Every time such an error influences an event in the present the error creates a new shadow to add to the first, extending the shadow of that first unsavory event into times and places and peoples that had absolutely nothing to do with the event that created the shadow in the first place.

Perhaps the most damning form of this error is when we pass a retroactive judgment on ourselves, and allow the errors of motive to apply not to another (where we can separate ourselves from the error in some manner: a falling out, a divorce, a breaking of all ties) but to our younger self. Those, those are the most dangerous errors there are, for you can never be free of yourself. The error applied to another will only impact the parts of life where the other is found, but such errors applied to ourselves will impact any and every facet of our lives for after all, we are in EVERY moment of our own life. Those are the errors that can do more than damage a life, those are the errors that can destroy a life.

Neither they nor we are the same person now as was then, beware the damage retroactive judgment can do to your life, to the lives of those around you. Beware of allowing such errors to extend the shadows. I weep to think of how much misery is caused in such a manner.

Jesus and the Contra Social Blues...

Gaia always sleeps with her back to the city...
the humans built it, the humans can care for it.

Yup… here in the good ‘ole US of A it’s another Thanksgiving holiday.  Today is when, if you honor the tradition, you’re supposed to find something to be thankful for.  I had a bit of trouble with that thought this morning, kind of struggled with the idea.  Not that I don’t have a great many things in my life to be thankful for, I really do, but finding the sentiment to match the status just wasn’t happening.  And Thanksgiving just means Christmas is on the horizon, oh yea, you can hear ‘em bringing the Mighty Merchandising Machine screaming outa’ the hole in yet another totally trite full throttle launch, for those with ears to hear it’s rather deafening.  Before the day was very old at all I was hearing Howard Keel in the background, whisper soft for the time being but sadly certain to get louder and louder for the next month or so.

…You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch…

The holiday blahs, the secret bummed out depressions, nothing in those that hasn’t been spoken of a bazillion times in different places, by different people.   The facades and the fakes and the 100 proof punch that greases the wheels, nothing new, not at all.  So common place in fact they’re well understood as being just part and parcel of the culture.  Flipping this fact around though actually made me feel a great deal better, I found what I’d been looking for.

I’ve been calling myself contra-social for quite some time now, and for the most part it is a fair description that hasn’t treated me badly, not at all.  I make it a habit to commonly reveal this fact about myself in part as fair warning for those I meet, but mostly just to remind myself that being contra-social demands a fair amount of very deliberate care and compassion and empathy for those whose lives are anchored in the social as a safety mechanism for your own soul and sanity lest frustration empower the pathological.  To be contra-social is not to hate your fellow man, far from it.  It is actually to understand the inevitable consequences of what the law of averages compels society to compel on your fellow man, have something to offer him in defense of those discomforts.  What I realized is that the holiday blahs are actually just a fine, fine marker for those who are host and home to some degree of contra-social thought, and allowing for how common the holiday blahs really are that means I’m not nearly as alone as I thought I was, and that?  That, contradictory as it might sound, is actually something to be very thankful for.

End and upshot of it all is that I’m gonna kick back and enjoy the day, tell Howard I’d much rather hear him sing Stranger in Paradise, and continue my own tradition of giving someone something they really need in perhaps July, saying Merry Christmas, and meaning it.  C’mon world, cut all us contra-social grinches some slack, quit the whole psycho-sham faux pity thing.  And the same goes for all my fellow grinches out there, cut the crap and live up to your life not down to their expectations.  Maybe Santa only works out in public one day a year, but I’m pretty sure Jesus was the 24/7/365 kind, and after a century of what Madison Avenue has been hustling on his name? That makes which one has my loyalty a no brainer indeed. 

Yup, I’m contra-social, and the best part of this particular holiday is realizing I don’t need to apologize for it.

A fading...

This post is in memoriam of a truly great woman.   

My world is a bit thinner now. I always knew her as Aunt Bea.  In my childhood she was a fixture, in my youth a reference standard, in my adulthood a power-player in the realms of reclaiming those parts of my childhood lost.  She passed into history on Friday, and she will be missed.

Among many, many things she gave me back was the year of 1968.  It had been lost to folding memory to conceal the events of that year.  Some of them I now have in clear focus, others are still a bit foggy, but they’re there because of her.  It was not a good year for me, but even a bad year is still a year and needs to have it’s place in the chronologies of life.  She and the wife got to comparing notes and realized the truth, between them they convinced me.  What a gift.

There are so many stories I might tell of her, and I know only a tiny fraction of what there is to tell, but this one perhaps gives the deepest clue to the woman.  Once upon a time quite by accident she ended up serving as the justice of the peace for her town.  The fellow who’d had the job wanted to go on vacation and needed a two week stand in.  He took his vacation, while on vacation suffered a heart attack and died, Aunt Bea was stuck with a job she really didn’t want for several years.

Close to our home town is an Indian reservation, and the Indian folk were the most peaceful of people when sober, and some of the rowdiest when drunk, needless to say Aunt Bea as justice of the peace saw a great many of them in the state between, which is to say hung-over.  Now Aunt Bea was first and foremost a pragmatic woman, one of the last daughters of the frontier, and she was a most tidy woman.  Litter just did not sit well with her.  If the crime was simply being embarrassingly drunk in public she really didn’t believe in fines, her standard was to make an apology by cleaning the town square and park.  When both were immaculate you were done, go home.  Within the first year she had them pretty well trained: it didn’t matter if you’d been in trouble or not, come Saturday morning pretty much the full crew of drinkers showed up midmorning to help clean the park… so their buddies would get loose earlier in the day.

Probably her biggest gift to me though was a phrase, and the attitude that goes with it:  “Do what ya’ can where ya’ stand…”  I do try.

Farewell, Sunbeam.  

AP: Her Gaze...

You'll paint 'ore me what you wish my boy,

...see mother mistress lover toy...

and smile to think you've seen my all

...warm woman fertile fair and tall... 

who'll heat your midnight winter dreams 

...caress of fire spill'd sugar'd creams... 

but I say to you oh handsome lad 

...proud man of Athens logic clad... 

think not to sway my siren's heart 

...conniving bold cruel Hera's part... 

with deeds of war and hoarded gold 

...tokens torn from Hades' hold... 

of these I've borne a gluttons fill 

...as empty echo, sterile shill... 

so reach for me if think you must 

...make safe your heart, safer trust... 

in honest hope of hearth and home 

...adventure sated ne'er to roam... 

where we might dwell in cottage walls 

...and laugh my love for all who call. 

It still happens, from time to time... it's always such a treat when it does.  This was inspired by an image on DeviantArt [link].  It all but wrote itself in 30 minutes, and that included cooking lunch.  I wish to express my gratitude to the photographer Mark Daughn and his model Ms. Chrystal Lee for their gift so appropriate to a housebound snowy day. Thanks guys, until you've actually met Erato you can't know what a delight it is to find an image such as yours that awakens the gift of the muse.

By way of comment…

I offered this in a comment to an artist on DeviantArt.com who spoke of not really knowing the difference between erotic art and pornography.  The tone of their post was they had been beat up by the question to the point of not really caring.   I’m reposting it here because this is about as succinct a definition as I’ve ever managed to capture.  I feel this is an important thing to care about since in truth the subject runs a great deal deeper than simply the realms of art.

***   ***   ***

In your journal you pose a most pertinent question concerning the difference between erotic art and pornography.  Please, allow me to offer for your consideration the definition I've found that fits observable reality without contradiction.

As you say, there is sex, and there is death.  From nature's perspective there is one absolute demand placed on all life: make more life so life will not end with your ending.

From this it then follows that the erotic arts are all things, sexual or otherwise, that celebrate the ability to make more life.  The erotic arts are in fact quite wide ranging, but always share several things in common: they imply fertility; and, by literal or implied content are taken from a binocular perspective, more than one, for it takes more than one to create new life. By way of example, for those who truly understand the erotic an image of a fruited orchard is just as erotic as an image of a man and a woman sharing sex, for the end result is the same... more life.

The pornographic is however all things, again sexual or otherwise, that abdicate the responsibility of creating new life to replace the current life that death will, ultimately, set non-living.  There are many forms of pornography, sexual pornography being the most recognized but hardly the most damaging.  To my thought the defining characteristic of pornography is a monocular perspective, the perspective of one and only one, and in that lonesomeness ultimately sterile, and in sterility doomed.

Since pornography presents a monocular focus it, like the erotic arts, is indeed a wide ranging thing. Pornography of any form presents to the world the lie that some single point of focus can create the life desired rather than the truth which is that any single point of focus can but reflect the content of the life already existing.  To those who truly understand the pornographic there are so many forms of pornography: pistol porn, power porn, pain porn, money porn... the list just goes on and on, our world is saturated in pornographic thought.  But in common to all of them is the implication that this one thing is what validates life to continue.  To understand pornography is to understand the mechanisms of death, and death is always faced... alone.

The erotic arts reflect the courage of life determined to live on, pornography reflects the fear and despair of death.

Hooters and another Lovely Lass...

As is not so uncommon I’m once again indebted to one of the kids crewing my favorite little diner for the thought source beginnings of a post.  I’ve had my head off in me own little world(s) for a while now writing on the stories, hadn’t really been paying much attention to other things, not really.  Anyway, early this morning the lass in question was involved in a chore that put her across from me (sitting at the counter sucking down coffee waiting on the day to begin), and rather than focus on the chore she was rambling a bit.  She’s a good storyteller, an intelligent young woman who’s easy comfortable company, easy on the eyes, end and upshot was directly she’d sparked a thought.

She was telling the story of the time she applied to work at a Hooters.  You know, Hooters, the place where they cater to all the misplaced bottle babies of the world.  She had the job if she wanted it, no issue there, but the manager who interviewed her said he was afraid she might have trouble fitting in being as how she was to intelligent.  Of all things... to intelligent to work where stereotype sexy is the defining job requirement.  As the story went she sat in with the other girls for an hour at a slow spot in their shift and in the end agreed with the manager.  She came to the conclusion that if the most intelligent comment heard in an hour involved a new shade of eye liner then no, probably not an enjoyable place for her to work.  She took a different job, like I said, she is an intelligent lass.

The thought she brought to focus doesn't have anything to do with eyeliner, or Hooters for that matter.  It has more to do with the cultural cliché of sexy dumb, blond or otherwise, and what that says about a significant fraction of the culture.  

Sometimes the mask does slip...
 when she doesn't think anyone is looking

Once upon a long time ago I knew a sexy blond, and yes, she was sexy, I mean drop dead gorgeous sexy, queer check sexy as we called it back in the day (queer check: walk her through a crowd of fifty boys and forty four of ‘em start dropping IQ points for lack of blood supply and the other six are confirmed gay), and she was anything but dumb.  Unless of course there was a strange male in the picture at which point you’d have sworn (if you didn’t know her) that she’d need help unwrapping her bubble gum.  It was so solidly part of her culture it was foundation deep in her personality, all but automatic. It’s the reasons behind this odd cultural convention I’m spelunking in today looking to see what’s to be found, a new rabbit hole if you will.

And the band played on...

I knew the phrase as an old folk euphemism for a long time before I found a source from history that made sense.  From the context folks used it in I’d assumed it meant doing the same old something in defiance of the fact it wouldn't do much good for anything, just force of habit, but since it was what you knew how to do you kept on doing it.  Like the dance band on the doomed Titanic, you know? What else do you do until it’s your turn to die?

For a couple of days now I've been wondering in light of how rapidly things change in this digital day just how much of what I see in the public domains is actually a case of some band that plays on, and what are the consequences of their music?  It feels like simple habit is an ever increasing power player in what I see.  I suppose I shouldn't say habit, that’s an unkind way to put it, habit is something personal.  I should say social momentum and try to be just a wee tiny bit politically correct.

Yes. Social momentum.  What happens when the liberals can’t believe there might  be a solution for a problem the conservatives can’t really  believe exists... and the band plays on.

To Castrate a Balrog...

This is actually a reply to a most excellent comment offered by my friend Alapip on my post “Tale Bobbing a Checkerboard CueBall” below.  Where this will stand on its’ own it will make more sense if you read what prompted it first.

  ===   ===   ===

Indeed, the trusted messenger who carries the deception.  Brings to mind Sauron, Sauron the deceiver ( JRR Tolkien’s classic example from his truly epic fantasy fiction... cited so as not to play favorites among the religions/mythologies currently working). 

In the days when Sauron seduced the Numenorian’s into such arrogance as to enact suicidal folly he still wore the body of a man, would appear fair to beautiful in the eyes of the world, and of course was still a Mia (empowered servant) of the fallen first Ainur (primordial spirits from before the world was made solvent) Melkor who was later renamed Morgoth, “Dark Enemy” (read “Devil” as is used today).  Point is, Sauron (at that point in the tale the conquered captive of Numenor) seduced the once noble Numenorians using exactly the same tactics, fears and divisive lies that were used to seduce the once noble American Conservative. 

The question before us is “who in the modern world is in the role of Sauron?”  With a total salute to Professor Tolkien’s genius I’m going to use the name of his character to represent the enemy of today, the forces and powers who in our world reprise the actions of Sauron in the service of his master Morgoth.

There is a reason the Conservatives (~Republican) were attacked first... they’re the homogenous core culture of America.  The Progressive, the Liberal (~Democrat) are not, they are the various offshoot cultures, the sum of them approximately equal in numbers to the core, and yet internally not one but rather several cultures who form alliances and coalitions to represent the various agendas sponsored by their varying motives.  Where they cooperate they do NOT truly trust each other internally, their motives are to disparate for full internal trust... net result being no ONE line of persuasion/propaganda would be effective against all of them, and their internal distrust would make it likely any one seduced would be set upon by the others.  The common culture Conservatives were near bulletproof to any external source, but being naively trusting internally totally vulnerable to a Sauron trained operative who once accepted was able to emulate their culture while corrupting it (dare I say Ronald Reagan?... oops, I just did...).

Since the core culture of America is predominantly Christian the churches became both victims and contagion vectors of the attack.  Sauron skillfully exploited the contradictions, the rationalizations inherent to any religion to disable the internal ethics of those he attacked.  Once the rationalizations had been in place for a generation or three they’d migrated into the culture, and the political structures  of religion that validate the ethical content of any culture embracing their belief structure became autonomous allies in his cause, ever more compromised and corrupted in any comparison between the ethics of the modern and the theologies evolved across the ages. 

Of course Sauron worked malice on more than simply the Men of Numenor, his malice was directed at all the free peoples.  In many places across the ages of middle earth he built alliances between essentially estranged peoples focused against some single group using the very lies he’d foisted on the one group to unite the others against them.  He was actually very, very good at letting others do the dirty work for him so that when his Orcs marched against them all they’d all been weakened.

Which brings me to my greatest fear in the present.  As I said earlier, the Liberals are not one culture, they are in fact several cultures and as with the speaking people’s who were Tolkien’s characters quite often quite estranged one from another.  Looking at the modern world objectively I am afraid Sauron is again using his old tactics: having corrupted the Conservatives is now using that corruption to unify the Liberals to the point they are terribly vulnerable to being deceived and seduced by some singular lie based on the focus of their alliance (most probably a lie impacting the spiritual, the theological elements of their lives that serve as the reference standard for ethics and the morality those ethics enable... convince them that the corruption they see is the result of Christianity and they're not likely to remember say the deeds of Zeus in his control of Olympus, or the actions of Loki or Spiderwoman... all the religions have equivalent characterizations of the same modes of thought, and the best way to get people to ignore the teachings of their own religion is to get them convinced “that only happens to those damned Christians/Pagans/Jews/Hindus/Muslims... ).

For those who might read this who are of the Conservative mindset (~Republican) I implore you to understand how it was your very strengths demanded Sauron attack you first, and how those strengths are not lost, the metal of them still lives among you and may be re-forged into new understandings beyond Sauron’s deceptions even as Anduril was re-forged from the shards of Narsil to arm the Dark Lord’s most feared enemy!

For those who might read this who are of the Progressive or Liberal (~Democrat) persuasion I implore you: beware, and be wary!  The next stroke of Sauron’s war will fall on YOU!

Tail Bobbing a Checkerboard Cue-ball...

Sometimes I really am just plain dumb.  I should have understood this decades ago.  Oh, well.  No time like the present to correct the situation. The focus of my fubar has to do with the ongoing covert cultural warfare being waged against my nation, to be specific a class of cultural mutagens being used as weaponry by those who wish to degrade a culture evolved in and from democracy to the point it will accept any of several possible forms of totalitarian tyranny. 

 

It’s a fact of life that people carry grudges (grudges, for lack of a better and more precise word) against certain things.  The grudges people carry but never really recognize for what they are, the ones that aren't fully acknowledged, the ones that float right there at the top of the subconscious are some of the most powerful.  Any shrink will tell you that, a great deal of their work is in exposing that sort of grudge to the light of day so someone can deal with it in a rational manner rather than let it beat up their life and the lives of those around them. 

When you back up and look at people as a whole what is to be noticed is the focus of those grudges fall out into categories: with the parents, their elders, a church, the education establishment, the other gender, the law and the social order it represents, the boss and the drama politics of the workplace.  Categories.  There’s only so many basic categories of course, the count of those categories will be close to the count of the authority figures present as folks grow up.  Why?  Because it is authority misused that creates a grudge, but more on that later.

Have an individual feel wronged by some member of any of these categories, a wrong never set right, and you've got a good chance of them forming a grudge with the whole category.  If this were an essay on mental health I’d have appended “with all the attending problems to be expected as a consequence of an irrational bias against an entire segment of life rather than the actual villain of the scenario” to the previous sentence.  But this is not an essay on mental health, this is an essay on how what has been learned of mental health has been bastardized into the weapons of cultural warfare.

An interesting tidbit of a coincidence?

The book of Revelation in the Bible is a fascinating read, it really is.  If you start from the assumption the ancient prophet and sage really did see the future then the issue becomes understanding how he would describe give or take our now using the words available to his times and experiences.  The segment about the number of the beast has always been of particular interest to me, being as how his understanding of numbers was really rather primitive compared to ours... he didn't even have the concept of zero to work with.  Anyway, for some reason I've always felt that the number of the beast was actually an attempt to give a population value for Planet Earth, perhaps a warning about how many people can live on Earth before population pressure would cause things to start degrading into barbarism... say perhaps 6.66 billion or so?

But tonight a different thought occurred to me: what if it was indeed a population value, but one that marked when mankind would hit a certain level of technology?  A level of technology sufficiently advanced for mankind to be at serious risk to a technology greater than his wisdom?  Tonight I grabbed the big calculator and started playing with some numbers relative to that thought.  Guess what... if you take six sixes, thirty six, and then raise that value to the sixth power guess what you get?  Ok, you don't have to guess, you could work it out for yourself on your big calculator, but just to save you the trouble what you get is 2,176,782,336... two billion and some change.  Would you like to guess when the population of planet Earth hit that value?  According to the 2010 United Nations estimates courtesy of Wikipedia planet earth passed that value somewhere around 1940... just about the time of the first atomic weapons.

In post script: or was the triggering technology of that vision Eniac... the first truly digital computer developed and built at the same time as the first atom bombs?  Project PX (the government code word for the work) didn't predate the Manhattan Project by enough to matter, considered against the centuries between those works and the work of John...

Things that make you go hmmmm.... and think about it.

Mommas, don’t let your babies...

...grow up to be cowboys... They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone... even with someone they love.  Country music the way country music should be, truth set to a tune you can whistle, how could it not be a hit?  Of course it was, still is, probably always will be.  That’s pretty much what makes country music country, a truth that ain’t gonna change so you might just as well sing along and get used to livin’ with it.

Am I a cowboy?  Not really, not anymore.  Was at one time for a time, sort of.  But not so much anymore.  I’m not, but she is.  It’s soul deep in her, a barrel racer with five saddles and thirteen belt buckles and a horse she probably loves more than the last three boys she took to her bed.  She’s cowboy, the song fits her perfectly.  Don’t give me any damn libber crap about gender either, she... is a cowboy in all the ways that matter and them that love her just have to understand.  And I do, I’ve still got enough genuine cowboy in my soul to understand.  Via con dios sweetheart.

Keeping company with her was good for me.  Like I said, for a time I was cowboy, it’s my heritage: a daddy and two uncles who rode saddle bronc and roped, one crazy uncle who rode bulls, a family that at one time had give or take five thousand head of cattle on open range in southern Idaho.  She reminded me of where I come from, the things I learned there and then that built the foundations of who I am now.  Some of ‘em had been getting a little dim with the years, seeing them afresh was good for me.  Don’t think she meant to, doubt she knew she was doing it, but she brought those days back to me, let me look at what could have, would have, been my life turn north instead of south fifty years ago.  But that’s just what a good woman does for you, bottom line... her being her shows clear the you ya’ really are... good women do share a lot with good music...  truth that don’t change, you know?  Good women, real women, the kind who might only look at you once a day and you know what’s all wrong will be alright... but that ain’t Waylon, that’s Neil and a different song entirely, except... for some reason Kentucky is on my mind, has been on my mind and she put it there.  Kentucky... what do I know about Kentucky?  Not a damn thing. 

Smack... duh.

Oh gentle reader, contemplate if you will the state and fate  of the world, so very changed.... a sixteen year old punk with a smart phone really does know everything, his sacrifices to the Gods of Google give him that, and that in the end does nothing more than illuminate the lack of wisdom that only the years and the tears can truly impart.  Wisdom... there's no app for that.