{so then I get home from a quick trip to the bank and buying a Lotto ticket (and lately every time I buy a Lotto ticket within about twenty minutes I'll see a car with a license plate that has 666 for its numerical digits, which I personally think is a little outside the expected statistical norm) so I get back and now my mom's watching Bill Press and that bastion of Christian virtue Mr. Pat Buchanan. and amongst all the many and various wonderisms that Mr. B extolled this chestnut got my goat for the last time. the Hollywood blacklists were justified because Joseph Stalin was the biggest mass murderer (so far) in human history. the logic, if we can use that term at its most all-inclusive, is that Stalin was a commie, the Hollywood 10+* were commies, therefore the H'wood10+* were mass murderers, or less libelously, accomplices to the greatest mass murder (so far) in human history. what egregious nonsense this is. but what more can be expected from self-proclaimed magical thinkers? the point of my last, now intentionally missing, post was precisely this: that craziness is far from being a negative survival trait. that the reason craziness has so many little nodes in the human genotype is that it works. it allows its hosts to continue living when a rational and accurate assessment of circumstance would lead almost surely to disabling apathy and/or paralyzing fear. same-same with sociopathy which still hasn't been explored to the depth it calls for. Sam Smith said it first that I heard, that the scumsuck CEO's are almost to a man a special breed of autistic/sociopath, highly functional and absolutely devoid of emotional states the rest of us regard as essential human qualities. like certain kinds of psychopaths, they learn to imitate human emotions when they have to pass. point being it works. so it gets selected into the gene pool. so Buchanan's nuts, only he makes sense when he talks and he can kick your ass or have it done. so what's the definition of nuts? ask Dr. Phil, he started it. he said, paraphrasing, you have to find an explanation, some kind of *meaning*, for suffering because it'll drive you crazy otherwise. back to Buchanan, the heir to seven millenia of crazy-from-meaningless-suffering. Dr. P's intentions are level and compassionate, no question. but lying to people because it makes them feel better just defers the inevitable, maybe not for the individual deludee, but as we see all round at the present, these things are cumulative. they build up. America is being run by insane delusionals, who have no choice but to rush headlong toward the goal posts of Armegeddon. they have no choice most of them because they've pushed too far into that madness, and can no longer survive without it.
breathe
ok. the meaningless part is a little more complex than an empty bowl where reasons why should be. meaningless as in, the bad others took our grain and our cattle and raped our women and killed most of our young men. suffering. and the only meaning is biology. that's what they mean when they say 'meaningless' they don't mean void of meaning, they mean no edge to work, no way to make it pay, THAT'S where the breakdown is. the meaning is the bad others did it because they could and because they wanted to. but here's the kicker. the very ones who most deny the validity of that biological meaning, who condemn it and teach their children that it's wrong, OWE EVERYTHING THEY HAVE TO THAT AND ONLY THAT. see the foreskins, see the redskins, see the divine right of kings.
madness works.
get crazy kids, we're going in.
a little mop-up here. there were these odd folk a hundred plus years back in the US called 'Millenarians' they were End-Timers to the nines. and like most of that ilk they wanted it. a key attribute, the *desire* for it to be. so they were hyping each other up. and groups here and there ended up full-committing, lock stock and take the kids up to the mountain to await the Lord. well either it happened and this is some other world entirely, or it didn't happen. my bet's on the latter. so imagine some of those people coming back from that failure of vision. predictable responses, right? we got the dates wrong, we weren't pure enough. it happened, you missed it, we stayed behind to help. and the saddest for me, the ones who woke up just far enough to catch the light's edge as it faded. just sight enough to know they couldn't see. and where do you go from that? back to what? more crazy-from-meaninglessness-ness.
well these guys today don't have that option because, because now there's a massive surplus of human meat. those were still vestigial pioneer times. there was room on the frontier. there were places to go yet. that's over. individual human lives cheapen daily, right in line with the law of supply and demand. a lot of these neo-millenarians are primed to blow this whole place to Kingdom Come because of that surplus.
a lot of things are happening at once, some with all the trappings of genuine spiritual experience.
but then, if you accept the spiritual nature of existence, everything is a spiritual experience.
breathe}
image at Damian Thompson, from The End of Time at wwnorton.com
