Bypassing the Brain, Straight to the Spleen

If you're someone who aims to maintain rationality and balance even when upsetting things are happening - if you don't want to be reverse-spun into the sort of stupidity and extremism that set you off in the first place - then you'll see things like this - which stoke your outrage and stroke your confirmation bias - and have the discipline to run it past your brain, where you'll recognize the hollowness and overreach:

Putting Moore in the Senate will not sacrifice the innocence of any children, duh. That's hysterical, empty nonsense. We don't need to keep him out of the Senate FOR THE CHILDREN (if he's still molesting - and there's no reason to assume he is - he can do so as easily in AL as in DC), we need to keep him out because his history of lawless predation and hypocrisy disqualifies him from leading the nation.

Statements like the above make our spleens pleasantly throb, in the same way that a given scummy hunk of Steve Bannon demagoguery resonates with his people. It completely bypasses the brain.

Don't let anyone bypass your brain. The brain is certainly not everything, but it's our only hope for maintaining rationality and balance in troubling times. The brain is what's missing on the other side. Don't be jerked into imitating them.


Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

How to Fall Asleep on Cue

Having practiced meditation for 45 years, I've learned to navigate several states of consciousness. Yet I've never been able to fall asleep on cue. It's bugged me, so I've been working on it. And I've finally cracked it.

I just returned from Singapore, which involved a ghastly 25 hours in the air (the Sun rose and set twice; I thought that was something only experienced from the International Space Station!). So I've had a chance to test this with worst-case-scenario jet lag...and it works!

It's simple - as stuff like this tends to be:

1. Increase the weight of your head

I don't care how relaxed you think you are; you are holding your head oh-so-slightly above your pillow via neck, shoulder, and trunk muscles. Tension! Let your head get heavy, so it sinks further into the pillow. Maybe even push downward, ever so slightly.

2. Let your thought stream get whimsical

Once your head gets heavy and sinks into the pillow, your thoughts will immediately turn dreamlike. And here's the shocking part: you are already asleep. Mission accomplished! Sleep isn't distant. Sleep is always right around the corner...and you've turned that corner. You just don't know it. So there's truly nothing further to do, except....

3. Answer "Yes".

A thought will very soon surface, through the surreal dream imagery, questioning whether you're truly asleep. Just say "yes". And let your head drop. And let your thoughts unfurl. Don't think about this process (it's so simple, there's nothing to think about!). Don't monitor. Don't manage. Just let it go. You are already asleep. Nothing more to be done.


Here's why it took 40 years to develop this (it involved stupidly repeating one of my stupidest-ever mistakes):

For my first twenty years of meditation, I could easily unhook myself from my mental noise and plunge down to a repose of silence (I'm not talking about sleep here; that's a different thing). But quite often, a great big crass thought would trumpet through: "Crap, did I leave the car windows open?" or "I forgot to call so-and-so!" Everything seemed ruined. I was back at the surface, expelled from the depths, needing to start again. I was a terrible meditator!

After two goddamned decades it finally occurred to me that these loud thoughts were just more thoughts; more noise to unhook from. They weren't special. They might trumpet, but they couldn't disrupt my meditation unless I chose to disrupt it by paying them heed. I'd been an idiot to imagine there was an "up" and "down", or that external phenomena could control me. Silence is right here, right now, and it's entirely a matter of where I choose to place my attention.

The issue was prioritization. Garden-variety thoughts ("I'm tired", "I'm hungry", "Am I meditating correctly?") are easy to let go of. Just let them be! But if the house might burn down, well, that seems worth ceasing my meditation for! So my mind learned to produce thoughts which coaxed me into heeding my mind.

The task was to let go of these seemingly high-priority thoughts. To do so, I needed to deepen my commitment to meditation - to convince myself that nothing else was a higher priority. The car windows may be open, and I may hear rain, but the car can fill with water, I don't care. The gas might be on, but my house can explode, that's fine. I'll lose work if I don't return the call, but...cool! Deeper commitment meant no disruption could disrupt. I've enjoyed thoroughly peaceful meditations ever since.

I figured this out - that the loud thoughts are still just thoughts - twenty years ago, and yet I've always allowed the "Am I truly asleep?" thought to snare me back into a thinky awake state. Thoughts can't snare you! Only your responsiveness can. Answer a distant, dreamy "yes" and let the sleep you were already in fully envelope you.

Even Consent is Insufficient

The Louis CK situation should be considered differently from Weinstein, Trump, Cosby, et al., because he always asked - and received - permission first. But it's currently believed that even consent can be insufficient. As Louis himself said this morning:

"When you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me."

Let's leave aside Louis' weirdo sex prefs (aren't we all supposed to be non-judgemental these days?). Let's also leave aside the obvious fact that power itself is attractive (people with no power have a rough time getting laid). Let's leave aside that beautiful people enjoy a great deal of power over others, and often milk that power for all its worth (for sex and for countless other advantages) with impunity. Let's leave a whole bunch of meshugas on the table and get to brass tacks.

It's been made clear to me that it's "gross" to date women who are younger, and it's "creepy" (and perhaps harassment) to even politely proposition a woman who might be deemed "out of my league" (i.e. has more power than me). I also must avoid sex with women who admire me (because then I have power over them), who might ever conceivably be employable by me or helped by me in their careers (again, POWER), and who have fewer connections and assets than me (POWER!). When there's a power imbalance, even consent is insufficient*.

So who, precisely, am I allowed to fuck? Can someone please tell me?

* - Except for the power of physical attractiveness. If you've got that, go nuts. Enthrall, exploit, and dump as you wish. You're good to go.


Even if consent were sufficient, I still must be prepared to instantly retract and recoil, physically, at any sign of equivocation at any moment in any relationship, because anything less than explicitly/verbally corroborated ardor might be deemed rape. And, as we know, women always know exactly what they want, are never ambivalent or hard to read, never offer positive feedback to assertive men, and they really really love it when guys keep nervously re-verifying their ongoing consent. Consent is a slippery thing, to begin with, and if it's not even sufficient, that means we've gone stone cold crazy.

Update: Facebook discussion of this posting here (be sure to uncompress all the replies).

One last note, since I'm tacking on here:

If Louis CK's sexual preference (which I personally find icky) is to be publicly excoriated because it's icky, then that leaves the door open to relitigate all sorts of sexual preferences. Hey, I don't feel particularly rosy about the practice of chopping off one's penis to "become" a woman, but I've been persuaded - quite rightly! - that I should live and let live. How did that suddenly stop being a thing?

Slick In-Flight Wi-fi Move

Fun fact: you can pause your time with in-flight wifi. This means you can buy just an hour and spread it out. Check email quickly a bunch of times during flight, and pause the service while you compose replies, etc., etc. Of course, if you want to spend the entire flight merrily surfing, you'll still need to pay for full-flight wi-fi.

To pause, just return to the web page where you paid for the service. Somewhere on there (you may need to read a FAQ) is a control to pause service.

Slimy Conniving Toads Burned by Sunlight

This July I wrote:

Historian Consensus Circa 2117

Nixon: Should have burned the tapes.

Carter: Weak; paralyzed by minutiae.

George W Bush: Late to disengage from Cheney's enthrallment.

Obama: Deliberateness is noble; equivocation is not.

Trump: Campaigned to enhance brand and ego, never intended to win. Victory ensured punishment for lifelong criminality that otherwise would never have come to light.

Consider Paul Manafort, a wealthy, powerful man who's now disgraced and destined for serious cell time (on state charges if Trump pardons the federal ones). What in hell did he need this for? The first rule of slimy, conniving toads is always keep a low profile. Of course, Manafort never expected Trump to win, and, man, was that ever an expensive miscalculation (you thought you were harmed by that surprise outcome!)

This will eventually be the long view rap on Manafort: victory ensured punishment for lifelong criminality that otherwise would never have come to light. And the same for Flynn and Cohen, and, finally, Trump and Jared. With the mobbed-up money laundering and all the rest of it, there's way more than just treasonous colluding with a hostile power to swing an election. Mueller has Manafort's and Gates' tax returns, and a granular financial transaction record via FinCEN. He surely has Trump's, too.

He never should have run. Mistake of his life. When all is said and done, that will be the clear assessment.

Hell is an Unexpected Second Iteration

The very worst tech experience is needing to do something complicated twice - far enough apart that you've forgotten how to cut through all the aggravations.

The Domino Fallacy

Monitor your confirmation bias as you read this:

"Anti-Trump Republicans wringing their hands at what's become of their party are not intellectually honest. If they can't see Trump as the inevitable outcome of Palin, they're failing to come clean. And Palin was the inevitable outcome of Gingrich, who was the inevitable outcome of Saint Ronnie. Given that mainstream Republicanism has sowed these seeds for some time, these guys shouldn't be shocked at what they've reaped."

For those left of center, the above might sound completely reasonable. But it's fallacious. Here's a visual representation:



By the same token, 60's leftist terror groups (Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc) could be seen as the inevitable outcome of militant, uncompromising radical groups like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society. And the Black Panthers and SDS could be seen as the inevitable outcome of GreenPeace, the ACLU, and NAACP.

And a bomb could be seen as the inevitable outcome of a Molotov cocktail...which could be seen as the inevitable outcome of a nice stiff drink. It's temptingly easy to trace literally any super-bad thing back through progressively milder antecedents - and to paint the entire chain with the same brush. Especially if you feel a general disdain for the group you're looking to condemn.


Many will argue this by insisting that Palin, Gingrich, and Reagan were truly awful - as bad (or nearly so) as Trump. While I'm no fan of any of those figures, if that's truly your thinking, I'd urge you to have a very long walk in a quiet place until you've regained your mental faculties. My only solace in this political era is the prospect that its sheer cataclysm may finally help the fuzzy-headed realize that everything they dislike isn't The Worst Thing In The World.

Trump - a paragon of vileness, ignorance, treason, and corruption - is the ideal vehicle for restoring perspective. That said, I haven't yet spotted much maturation in people's sense of proportion (watch folks howl when we wind up with President Pence, who, being on the wrong side of issues like abortion and LGBT, is The Devil Incarnate).

The Black Cop

THIS is how you punch a Nazi without actually, you know...punching a Nazi.
"FUCK YOU, SPENCER!" #SpencerAtUF👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽pic.twitter.com/NHXYLfg6j3

— Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 19, 2017

Some people might watch this video of the first 30 seconds of Richard Spencer's talk today at U of Florida and see a repugnant ass with a microphone. Others might focus, with sanctimony or ambivalence (I'm the latter), on the screaming kids drowning him out. What really gets my attention is a seemingly minor player: the very professional-looking black cop stoically standing there, protecting our enshrined right to peaceful free speech and assembly.

There were plenty of similar cops at the notorious Charlottesville rally. Always the black cop, completely unfazed, unimpressed, just keeping the peace. Period. That's the side he's on. Everything else is, quite rightly, yadda yadda.

Don't forget the cop. Focus on the cop. That's America. Not punching Nazis or drowning out Nazis or being Nazis; just standing there hyper-competently protecting everybody else's right to act like asshats. He's the good news people miss.

Baking Fresh Every Time

This is roughly-expressed - an insight "under construction" - but it's both true and seldom observed. And it applies to many facets of life - especially anything creative:


If your toddler daughter skins her knee and wails from the fear, and you somehow manage to say just the right thing so she immediately calms and feels better, you may repeat those same words with her some other time, or with other children, and they might help, but they'll never work quite as well. The words (or, really, whatever magic is behind those words) were tailored for that unique moment.

It's less so with everyday speech. But at crucial moments, when stakes raise, or something arouses inspiration, the result is always best seen as a one-off - a bell that can't be rung twice. Reused, the words will never have that magical effect. There's no getting around it; we need to bake fresh every single time.


One reason people seem to petrify a bit as they age is that they stop baking fresh. As every chowhound well knows, canned products are never the same.


__________

The above connects with "Desperately Parched for Surprise ".

See also:
Baking Banality
“Baking Fresh, Japanese Style"
"The Crux-of Creativity"

Perspective on the Scariness

An old friend asked the following on Facebook (in reply to this morning's scary posting):

I grew up in a country in which bigotry, racism and hatred were on the run. Equality, tolerance and acceptance were on the rise. What happened to that country? Why have we taken so many steps backwards??

Death throes. It's death throes.

The problem is that death throes and aftershocks can last a while, and be quite painful, even if, in retrospect, they're a negligible blip in the long march of history.

But look at these pathetic, incompetent idiots. Were the sad sacks at Charlottesville legitimately scary? Does Richard Spencer make you shake in your boots? For that matter, is Steve Bannon truly the diabolical mastermind he imagines himself to be? Or just a feces-throwing man-child?

75 years ago, someone like Bannon might have gotten real traction. Sean Hannity might have seemed like a bona fide gnarly superhero, and Sebastian Gorka a weighty visionary. But their time is past. We know it. We feel it. They're craptastic....not to say crap doesn't stink.

True, one of the Charlottesville mob killed someone. I'm not saying the situation is completely defanged, and I'm not saying things won't get worse before they get better (I've pointed out one possible avenue that might take). But this isn't the inky darkness of inevitable nihilism. This isn't all our hard-won gains collapsing. What this is is the impotent last stand of the assholes. It's their curtain call as they go out the door. They're entitled; they certainly had a long, long, long run!

Expect things to stink for a good while thanks to all the shit they'll be throwing. Hey, cleaning up is a dirty job. Did you really think it'd be easy?

My posting on Resilience included this relevant illustration:

See also The Un-Self-Aware Assholes’ Last Hurrah