on logic - update

For the past couple of weeks I have been exploring and tasting and trying to better understand the stories I tell myself, the logic-parameters within which I go about my daily business. Many of these logic parameters I set up around the age of five years old, in the wake of a sexual assault visited upon me by a shady, rapist neighbor. I was groped and abused then told to never tell anyone, on pain of death. Around the same time (because he apparently didn’t know, or bother to try and find out, how else to deal with the changes in my behavior) my father became psychologically abusive toward me. I was doing poorly in school; I had become overly sensitive to external stimuli (especially deep-voiced men); I was having trouble concentrating in general; and it seems that he thought that by being mean and spiteful toward me he could snap me out of it and somehow fix me. Now, almost 35 years later, I am still trying to fit the pieces of my psyche back together in the aftermath of the Big Shatter - being fed the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge at too young an age. I gained from these traumatic childhood experiences a number of things, among them a strong empathy toward and desire to protect individuals downtrodden and weak; a nearly photographic memory of conversations and situations; a passionate dislike for and lack of fear of authority figures; the ability to make small children smile, and feel safe; the ability to detect - with a glance - sexual perversion in adult males; the ability to see beyond what the eye can usually see (such as where energies within the body are not flowing smoothly) that borders on the power to read minds. These abilities are of course counter-balanced by appropriate and equal disabilities, most of them existing in the form of the logical parameters I use to interact with the world - especially with women whom I find attractive. I have given myself until the rising of the next full moon on 14 November 2016 to explore and taste of these logical parameters so that I may start to heal myself more fully, and would like to profess my utter thanks and profound gratitude to the Lunar Goddesses of the Many Faiths who have watched over and sheltered me along this path. Mahalo, and om swastiastu.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on our common Nazi heritage

(I had begun to write a piece lambasting Americans for our shameless and widespread use of technologies developed and perfected by the Nazis, until I realized that every person living in today's industrialized societies benefits from the murder, chaos, fear, and hatred perpetuated by those horrible people; this article has changed significantly since its inception.)

As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.

Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.

There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit