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Good Friday 2018. The day, despite its waning significance is still.
Still
I said I will find what is lowly and put the roots of my identity down there: each day I’ll wake up and find the lowly nearby, a handy focus and reminder, a ready measure of my significance, the voice by which I would be heard, the wills, the kinds of selfishness I could freely adopt as my own: but though I have looked everywhere, I can find nothing to give myself to: everything is magnificent with existence, is in surfeit of glory: nothing is diminished, nothing has been diminished for me: I said what is more lowly than the grass: ah, underneath, a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss: I looked at it closely and said this can be my habitat: but nestling in I found below the brown exterior green mechanisms beyond the intellect awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe: I found a beggar: he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying him any attention: everybody went on by: I nestled in and found his life: there, love shook his body like a devastation: I said though I have looked everywhere I can find nothing lowly in the universe: I whirled through transfigurations up and down, transfigurations of size and shape and place: at one sudden point came still, stood in wonder: moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent with being!
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The Great Sadness of Ben Affleck – pity the Alpha in these days of retribution
My morning was lit by the New Yorker evisceration of the privileged white male everyone needs to mock. Ben Affleck, easily the absolute apotheosis of desire when it comes to gifts of the flesh and spirit is bumbling around looking disconsolate. Tortured by the people-of-color gossip sites, abandoning his wife, Jennifer Garner who is loved by movie-going soccer moms everywhere, addicted to gambling, addicted to drinking, and no doubt cocaine and pot, Affleck was also outed in a minor way during Pervnado, minor yet distinct. He pandered to Harvey Weinstein for the “art”. Result? We get to observe in full, his Dark Night of the Soul.
Let’s let the New Yorker writer, Naomi Fry have it:
“The resulting pictures have become reliable meme-fodder. A series of images of Affleck vaping in his car, his eyes shut in seeming resignation, made the rounds; so did another picture, of the actor smoking a cigarette, his face a mask of exhaustion.”
Poor Ben. Academy Award winner, reliable male star and superhero, unfathomably rich, three children, a sparky new gal pal, and he’s miserable.
SO, more from the New Yorker:
“His gut is pooching outward in a way that, in a more enlightened country like, say, France, would perhaps be considered virile, not unlike the lusty Gérard Depardieu in his prime but, in fitness-fascist America, tends to read as Homer Simpsonesque. A blue-gray towel is wrapped protectively around his midsection—recalling a shy teen at the local pool. Staring at the water before him, his gaze obscure and empty, Affleck is a defeated Roman senator, or, perhaps, the most anti-Romantic version imaginable of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 “Wanderer in the Sea of Fog.” The image suggests not just the fall of Affleck but the coming fall of man. There is something about this exhausted father that reflexively induces panic. We’ve been living in a world run by Afflecks for so long, will we even know ourselves when they’re gone?
I don’t know why but I. Can’t. Stop. Laughing. Here are some more pics: Sing it brother.
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Trump’s speech astonishingly reboots American spirit
This is an amazing speech. I would imagine that everyone in the media will largely ignore it, other than shouting about ‘lies’. What he’s talking about is business. Good business. How to create wealth that everyone experiences. I worked in the media for more than 25 years. I did not meet one single journo who understood how business worked. I met a lot who could burble impressively about economics. But they were too often wrong. No one will report on this speech, nor understand it, but this speech reboots America.
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Sean Penn’s prose in “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff”
Jesus wept:
“Hence, his life remains incessantly infused with her identity-infidelity, and her abhorrent ascensions to those constant salacious sessions of sexual solitaire she’d seen as self-regard.” ― page 11
“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.” ― page 36
“Behind decorative gabion walls, an elderly neighbor sits centurion on his porch watching Bob with surreptitious soupçon.” ― page 71
“While the privileged patronize this pickle as epithet to the epigenetic inequality of equals, Bob smells a cyber-assisted assault emboldened by right-brain Hollywood narcissists.” ― page 99
You can read more at the Huffington Post.
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On a day when nothing was accomplished, at least I made some bread.
And moussaka. So not a complete waste. I can get fatter.
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Why Women are higher in trait neuroticism.
Jordan Peterson, who admits he is now living in a state of terror, so suddenly is he a target, explains something that has puzzled me for a long long long time. Why are many of the women I know either miserable or crazy at least some of the time? This is so true as to be never mentioned in common congress but accepted as a truism. A shared misery is the accepted temperature of many intimate friendships. Not all by any means, but enough to be concerning.
Trait neuroticism is one of the big five personality markers and used in the Meyers-Briggs Personality Test. According to Wikipedia, “individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness.”
Women consistently score higher. OK, but why?
Peterson explains it this way. Womens’ nervous systems have been hard-wired to that of an infant since the year dot. We evolved to be primary caretakers of the child, especially in its initial time on earth. We had to fend off all dangers, deal with the hunter male, taste food, respond to every cry or whimper or illness. In order to do that job, women developed intricate sensing perceptions, aware of every fillibration of the environment, every personal danger, and always always counting themselves secondary in that primary relationship.
SO MUCH SENSE! It explains the hysteria present in our politics I think, especially that which is taking place around Trump. High-pitched calls of danger rocketing from one women’s group to another, obviating any reason or calm. Prior to that, it was the environment. When I came home from the big show in the big cities, the environment was the story where I lived, and given that I needed to write to eat, I reported on it. This meant thousands of interviews, hundreds of thousands of policy and scientific pages read and 20,000 miles driven through the backroads of the US and Canada. And what became crystal clear, was that nearly ALL the catastrophes predicted by the movement were based on either bad or really bad science. Not that there isn’t cause for concern. Several issues still worry me. But the fixes are both obvious and in many cases, easy. But somehow, because it was the environment women were driven to panic. Most enviro orgs are staffed (but not headed) primarily by women. Women’s concerns drive the movement. And women have been fooled.
We better evolve to handle public life fast.
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My hard-core breakfast Latte
Morning latte: almond milk, fo ti, ashwagandha, maca, reishi, mucuna puriens, lion’s mane, alkaline protein powder, coconut oil, almond butter.
Came to the dire conclusion that everything in my diet must change. If Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a precursor of cancer, which it is, then the relapse is a strong strong signal. Cancer is relatively easy to beat back the first time, harder the second and the third, well, the prognosis is not good. Therefore no going back to old way of eating: no coffee, no diet coke, very very little drinking, very little animal protein, no gluten, very little dairy, and the addition of 10-20 fruits and vegetables, adaptogens and nutritional supplements.
Hence, this:
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Jocko Willink – “Walk INTO your Fear”
I was raised by an army colonel – he retired as Colonel of his regiment – the Victoria Rifles – after the Second War. He enlisted and went to officer school in 1938, was rescued at Dunkirk, landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. His company, C Company – went further into enemy territory than any other company that day. He was put in charge of a Nazi work camp, and that changed him forever.
He didn’t feel pain. When we’d ask, he said it was because he’d seen his friends die in real screaming agony and anything he had was as nothing.
He spent the interim before the landing training young men to go into battle. Farm boys and clerks and mechanics. Eighteen-year-old kids.
That’s who raised me. We need those men acknowledged in our culture. We’ve spent 40 years disavowing their strength and honor, upon which every single one of us rely. The problems facing us need men of action, who will do whatever it takes. We need to stitch them back into the culture.
and
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Men’s waists are back in fashion says the New York Times
What does it say about us? asks the header. That’s easy. It says we have added way way too many estrogenic chemicals to our water and food. Same reason for crashing sperm counts. Good job global elites! Way to solve the population “problem”.
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Kamala Harris is dreaming big in Vogue. Dream on Sister
Vogue Magazine continues its celebration of dodgy politicians with a puff piece on Kamala Harris, the mixed-race politician from California, who clawed her way to the top by the way of more than one bed and spouts verbal garbage inveigling against big banks and corporations just like any leftist circa 1970. Life is a little more complicated and interesting than that, “Comma-la” and I am sure when you run for President and get mowed over, you will discover that. Then, like every leftie pol, you will proceed to loot the taxpayer. Which is where the real money is made these days.
