Called on Race-Baiting

I'm posting this vid because it is the FIRST TIME I have seen a black man call out a Congressman on race-baiting. It's about time. I can't help but think that any self-respecting black person who has a mind quite capable of ascertaining facts and making his/her own choices is getting real tired of always being cloyingly categorized as nothing more than a member of collective called BLACK. This is evidence for how racist the Democratic Party really is. It USES blacks as a group whenever it needs to trot out its moral superiority. It’s disgusting. Here it is so clear that for Barbara Boxer, human beings are not ends themselves – only something to be USED for her purposes. Besides that she behaves like an agenda-driven Panzer. Wake up America.

If you are interested in this topic, you will enjoy a black man's post on the subject: Boxer vs. The Uppity Negro.

Vitus

Vitus, a Swiss movie, hit the big screen in 2007. It won a Swiss film award that year.

I'd never heard of it. One website said upon release, its box office was $28,092; another said its US box office was $186,492.

It is about an intelligent child prodigy, Vitus, who is controlled when she realizes she has a real wunderkind on her hands. Her control goes too far and he decides he wants to be an ordinary kid. He uses his intelligence "being ordinary" to find his way to autonomy.

Spiritually, this is one of the best movies, among a very, very few, I have ever seen.

It is a heart warmer, but it goes far beyond that. A heart warmer may produce warm fuzzy feelings, but it doesn't produce the feeling of sheer joy and vitality that we all seek although we may have given up on it. A worked-for achievement does that. My spirit soared seeing this movie. In fact, I thought I would burst. My soul heard the music of its possibility. My mind was spinning.

Vitus is the healthy ego. He may go through rough times, but his spirit and intelligence is unable to bend to the dictates of society around him.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, she describes this feeling. "She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

Yes, deliverance. I got it.

Is This Coronation by Global Triangulation?

Suppose you have a close relationship with a friend/spouse. Your friend/spouse does something you don't like and instead of going to them with your complaint/concern, you go to another friend and talk about them. This person agrees with your side of the story which eases your angst. You don't really resolve your difference with your friend/spouse and you don't repair your relationship.

The situation smoulders; your relationship deteriorates. You wonder why you can no longer get it up. Your interest wains; an emotional estrangement ensues. A worse case is if you used what the second friend said as backing for your position in a talk with your friend/spouse. Needless to say, your friend/spouse will get angry, feel outnumbered and violated because you blabbed about them outside the relationship. This is the phenomenon of triangulation, the use of an uninvolved outside person/group to gain power in a situation.

There are other aspects to this like asking a question of the third person that you know they will answer in a certain way and then use that differently back home in a different context.

Obama is now in the Mideast, soon to go to Europe. Already Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, ran a controversial article stating that Maliki, PM of Iraq, agrees with Obama's 16 month plan. "When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded, as written in the article, 'as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned.' He then continued: 'US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.'"

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,566841,00.html

(I'm hearing now that Maliki said he was misinterpreted by Der Spiegel. This may or may not be true since the Muslim countries are known for their opaque manipulations. I'm left wondering.)

Is Obama going to Europe to get backing from a "friend" to finesse McCain? Cannot he now say (or better yet let us see for ourselves), "It's what Maliki as spokesman for the Iraqi people want so my timetable is right and your hedging on a withdrawal date regardless of your reasons is wrong?"

McCain's position as I understand it is that we have had tremendous success in Iraq. We don't want to mess it up by being hasty and opening up the situation to a reversal when it is in its closing phase. If the situation were to deteriorate we may have to go back for a third war in Iraq, the very thing that most people complained about how Bush I handled the situation.

Obama, after visiting Iraq and Jordan (he's already been to Afghanistan) heads to Europe for some "rock star" performances. 300 of the press are following his every move, beaming images and stories back to the US. Is he using this means rather than debate and dialogue with McCain and the American people to secure his coronation? I think he intends so.

Power and adulation is Obama's primary motive. Positive results in the districts he has representated are "shrimpy" at best and non-existent or negative in at least two important cases.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/27/grim_proving_ground_for_obamas_housing_policy/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP-YoB5mnZs regarding his association with Rezko who is now in jail in housing and http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/06/19/that-%e2%80%9cguy-who-lives-in-my-neighborhood%e2%80%9d-behind-the-ayers-obama-relationship/ regarding his education project.

I do not favor public housing under any circumstances as the free market is moral and it is practically superior for providing housing at all income levels. Also the same freedom provides responsible charity. The above links demonstrate the results for projects Obama put himself on the hook for. These projects are the result of an immoral ethic that pervades our society and which allows Obama to be irresponsible regarding his results. He says "I didn't know."

Further, political triangulation is a tactic from the class warfare playbook - pit one class against another, one ethnic group against another, ultimately one person against another in an ongoing group-based battle. Alinsky, his primary class warfare political tactic mentor, screams the only issue to be power, power, power, Everything I see in Obama is a match for these tactics. His campaign is certainly not about the issues. He says anything, contradicts what he's previously said or walks an oratorial tightrope in the hope to feed cake to all sides. As for me, my head is spinning; I have a headache; I don a neck brace before I watch TV (not really). The fascination with his eloquent preacherly orations have soured to grandiloquent bullshit. I don't believe any of it except that he loves adulation too much.

Just as the person in the opening scenario won't do the heavy lifting and endure the discomfort of rationally dealing with the real issues for whatever reason and opts for petty blow-offs, Obama continues to play the "I'm a star" game where "out-starring" his opponent is his answer. I find it deeply disrespectful to human being and anyone who actually cares and is interested in the workability of his ideas.

McCain is looking like a loyal friend/spouse while Obama galavants around the neighborhood looking for people who tell him he's cool.

Piercing the Pretense

When I saw this on The Drudge Report, I roared with delight. Finally someone had the guts to pierce the front and the stultifying PC that we know as Obama. Obama may get elected, but how can I take him seriously intellectually? I don't believe a thing he says.

Obama has so many untouchable subjects around him that whenever anyone points out obvious gaffes, inconsistencies, embarrassing blanks of knowledge, and the obvious tiptoe on his tightrope, he rebuts with why their remarks are inappropriate. He's "unable to understand why they would say that", "why they shouldn't have said that" and so "offended-waiting-to-happen" that he's painful to watch. Of course the cover above was "tasteless and offensive." (In this age of Ugly and Envy, since when has taste and inoffensiveness been a standard for much of anything?) He blows off serious discussion of issues. If you criticize him, you are wrong and very bad. Working around him must be "oh so much fun."

The New Yorker did him a favor.

I wish the article inside would have opened up this whole area for him and for us. Instead it worked real hard to make him an ordinary politician doing his thing. This he is not.

Obama is dangerous. Not in the sense of the cartoon, per se. He trafficks in class warfare. He uses any underclass as justification for all action. He is a political wonk whose main occupation is knowing the intricasies of how to gain power - and now ultimate power.

Whatever ideas he may use as justification in various settings, Obama is not a serious student of politics in any philosophical sense. If he were he would know better than to advocate these failed ideas. He exploits people to pit one segment of society against another. He loves grievances rather than ideals as his fulcrum. He spends other people's money to produce no change. Does this stop him? Not even a bump on the road.

In every satire is a grain of truth.

Distinguishing Empty and Meaningless

Empty and Meaningless, a term familiar to Landmark Education graduates, is the point at which you get in a course where you can now create something new. People go into the course to break through something that has stopped them in their lives. It can be in a relationship. It can be in one's progress in one's career. It can be in any area of life where one feels stuck.

After almost two days of deconstruction of the world that you have built, you come to a place in your mind where you are sufficiently clear of that to create a new future. You have seen where you've erred, interpreted events incorrectly, have taken into your being (i.e., adopted as a basic premise in your knowledge and/or evaluative structure) something that has been stopping you from moving forward.

This place, free of past attachment of any kind, is called "empty and meaningless." As a point to which one gets himself to be free to create something new beyond the way he has been able to create in the past, he has to let go of the meaning that the old way had for him.

The distinction I want to make is this. Life is not, I say NOT, empty and meaningless, and to think that it is has serious consequences. (Those consequences are for a later post.) Life is an aspect of particular kinds of entities - namely living ones. These entities are to be distinguished from stones, tables, books and all sorts of inert, lifeless entities. The existence of these lifeless entities just is. They cannot take action to prolong their life because they don't possess life. They are just "banged" or moved around in the universe based on their own identity and the identities of the entities around them via the law of cause and effect - rather like billiard balls.

Entities possessing life, however, have a completely different situation. They have to constantly take action that keeps their lives in existence. Life is not automatic. It is maintained by action consistent with what the life needs to exist.

In the lower animals, this is automatic in the sense that they act to maintain their life until they are killed or die naturally. But in humans, who are distinguished from the lower animals by the faculty of reason, this is not automatic. A human being can choose at any moment to end his life and take the action to do so. In other words, life, for a human being is something that he chooses to keep in existence or not.

Because of this fact, everything around a human being is imbued by him with meaning. The basic meaning is, "Is this for me or against me?" "Does this further or hinder my life?"

Man's life and his faculty of reason are part of his nature. His creation of meaning is automatic. He will create meaning regardless. It is said that "Man is a meaning creating machine." That's true, except that he isn't a machine, and he has no choice in this matter. Thus life is not empty and meaningless. On the contrary, life is everywhere filled with meaning.

Given that, the area where you have choice and control is the meaning that you give a particular situation, event or attribute. And the Landmark exercise is valuable in altering the meaning that you give something - especially events and situations that happened in your past.

A person can see a difficult childhood as bad or he can see it as good or some combination. There were things he didn't have and didn't experience. On the other hand, he learned to be strong in the face of that and those ways may lead to success in many areas of life.

The point of this distinction is to not blithely say, "Life is empty and meaningless" as a way to dismiss worrying about something or to dismiss another person's concern. The point is to get in there, take charge of and be responsible for the meaning you create. Each of us, after all, is responsible for this individual human capacity.