Thoughts of the day

Loose criteria for starting a new thoughts of the day: new month and the feeling as I'm adding a thought to the last thoughts of the day that I've overstuffed it.

Being a computer-retarded technophobe, I still use the classic template this blog started on and I'm nervous like Jenga whenever I tweak it with a new feature. I just added pagination, which I had thought couldn't be done with the classic template, and labels (see sidebar).

Oldie but goodie: What qualifies as a 10 beauty? Judging a girl a 10 based on a photograph must be done with prejudice because some 10 beauties don't translate to photos and photo beauty may be fabricated.

Neat website what if? answers wacky questions with math and science in layman's terms. (hat tip to Mad Minerva)

Confederate American songs Dixie sung by the Metropolitan Mixed Chorus and I'm a good ol' rebel sung by Hoyt Axton (the dad in Gremlins) are catchy.

Joe Kennedy of Citizens Energy is an actual member of the Kennedy clan. I thought for sure he was an actor given the exaggerated style of the commercials.

A whole lot of Itchy and Scratchy.

Judy's favorite painting was The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot, who also painted Springtime. I bought a poster of The Storm from the Met for her dorm room.

While looking through some old files last night, I found some things I wrote about Judy that were disturbingly similar to my Traci experience. The word my recorded actions and thoughts evoked was 'habit'. I was disturbed because I attempted to learn from my mistakes with Judy, yet I fell into a similar pattern with Traci. The reason perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the similarities is my corrections were more like tinkers and tweaks; I didn't fundamentally change. Still, the axiom that the more things change, the more they stay the same applies to me, and that bothers me. The find also reminds me why it matters to keep records - I forget.

I dreamed of Traci this morning, though she only made a brief appearance, which was the point of the dream. I don't know what triggered it except perhaps a British or Australian girl (PS, she was South African) I heard on a morning radio show. The setting was a 2-story house with a living room, guest room, and my childhood room. She and I were sleeping over as guests (when it wasn't my childhood room). I saw her when we both woke up in the living room. Then she was gone, leaving her rumpled bed stuff as evidence she had been there. I asked around, but no one knew where she went. I searched for her in the living room and upstairs guest bedroom, which I thought of as her room. I found a blonde girl (not a love interest) waking up in her bed instead. I felt again the dull, stone-heavy desperation of every fiber wanting to be together and the helplessness of not knowing how to make it happen. Traci had, again, been tantalizingly close but out of my reach. The house seemed to be - or become - a British firehouse. The dream ended with me following the British firefighters and the blonde girl, who may have been with her boyfriend, out onto the unknown British city streets and then a bus stop.

Reactive desire, huh? That is different. I wish I had known about it when I was lot younger. That a man acting on his sexual desire triggers his woman's sexual desire seems like the counterpart to a woman's adoration triggering her man's affection.

The concept of a controlling "feminine variant of the super-norm" rooted in hypergamy - the "feminine imperative" dispensing the blue pill, according to Rollo Tomassi - is an even bigger foundation shaker. I haven't fully wrapped my head around the implications yet, but they contend feminism is merely a modern application of the super-norm, not the base code of the super-norm.

Thinking about blue pill and the Matrix, I guess the biggest split in the 2012 presidential election was along the urban and rural divide, not race, religion, gender, wealth, region, or other groupings. Just intuitively, the starkest culture cleavage is between city people and country people. The movie The Matrix was set in a city because 'blue pill' city people most identify with and depend on the system. The system, in turn, is most identified with the Democrats, thus city people voting their interests would more likely favor the Democrat presidential candidate. Election analysts likely have done the research on the urban/rural split, which I haven't bothered to look up.

The AALDEF polled how Asians voted in the 2012 election. Funny, no one asked how I voted. I don't believe reliable conclusions can be drawn from a 9096 sample size drawn from across the nation and then subdivided. It is interesting though that the report corroborates the urban/rural divide.

A descriptive and prescriptive must-read by David Horowitz for political reformers, from a comment in this neo-neocon post. It's aimed at Republicans but it's based on principles that are universal for activists.

We are often warned that our data on the internet is forever, so be careful about publicizing or even privately sending anything that might haunt us. Yet as anyone who blogs and posts links can tell you, links go dead all the time. Data gets moved or deleted. All of it may be electronically archived somewhere, and some things may well be on public display forever, but it's not a given that everything we place on the internet will be available to everyone as an easily accessed permanent record.

Farnam Street looks like a smart blog.

Byron Wong invited me to participate in a discussion at bigWOWO. In it, I raised the oppressor/oppressed axis of Marxism versus the civilization/barbarism axis of progressive liberalism. In practice, Marxism is adversarial, zero-sum competition whereas progressive liberalism is tolerant cooperation. In Iraq, the insurgency was Marxist whereas the US-led mission was progressive liberal.

A problem with being a pioneer who challenges a strong limit is that the pioneer internalizes the limit in order to muster the necessary faculty to battle and defeat it. Once the limit is defeated, it becomes quaint and powerless to other people, who then easily surpass it and don't look back. However, the battle-weary pioneer is still held in sway by the powerful image of the limit he had internalized. Moreover, the pioneer had configured himself for the epic battle, except now, due to his success, the role that defines him is obsolete. The pioneer is surpassed by all the people he freed. In order to catch up to other people and survive in the new normal, the pioneer who gave himself completely to the fight against the limit must now expunge the things that most define him, accept the limit-less world, deprogram his pioneer ways, start over, and program himself with a new relevant role.

Christopher Dorner ... holy shit! Dorner's manifesto seems to (have been) cut off mid-sentence in his Bill Cosby entry. I saw it described somewhere as 18 pages long, but paginated versions on-line have it at 14 or 15 pages. Dorner was acutely sensitive to the conspiracy of cliques, compounded by he seemingly was on a different wavelength than his colleagues. It's not an unrealistic fear. I, too, am anxious about unofficial social networks that turn against me while I am isolated, which has happened. Dorner's profile and parts of his manifesto indicate a conscientious model citizen - student-athlete, college graduate, Naval officer, police officer - but his current situation and other parts of his manifesto indicate an unwinding mind.

The counter-offensive to reclaim Joe Paterno's reputation makes a strong start.

Mark Turrell's TED talk on how things spread among humans, and how "spread" can be applied to world-scale social good.

There is some debate whether Chris Kyle was engaged in 'shooting therapy' with the ex-Marine Eddie Ray Routh who killed him or just hanging out at the gun range with some buddies. This Atlantic piece refutes that Kyle was attempting prolonged exposure therapy with Routh. If Kyle did have therapy in mind, I don't believe it was PE therapy. I've observed that whereas for soldiers, the Army is a way of life where rifle marksmanship is a job skill, for Marines, the Corps is a religion where the chief sacrament is mastery of the rifle. As such, if he had therapy in mind, I believe Kyle was trying to help Routh master his life in tune with the Marines' Rifleman's creed of "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life."

Eric