It's funny, the same social dynamics played out from different positions leads people to completely polarized positions. For example, the demonizing tone of anti-Hillary people has made me feel much more pro-Hillary (along with actually looking at her life, career and positional stances over time), while the same polarizing cognitive impulse has led anti-Hillary people into a trench of social media us/them clickbait and Trump supporters into a pit so deep the religious ones will fear for their souls and the machismo-cultists will spiral into depression and addiction when he is roundly humiliated in upcoming debates and in November.

People are basically cause-and-effect operated. One gains a certain leverage by knowing that and studying it, but one is never beyond cause and effect. It's a conceit of immortality, that one is immune from the great web by virtue of being "right". All in all, everyone is innocent, everyone guilty, everyone redeemable, some doomed to be socially stigmatized until their demise. The Tao reigns supreme, and it includes everyone and everything, forever, inside and beyond spacetime.

"Greg, I heard you joined the Nazi league at school, is there anything you want to tell me?"

"Well, Dad, I know you taught us to stay in school and avoid Jews except for homework and all but it's the Muslims, Dad, the Muslims want my position on the football team and they already have Ramadan, why do they have to ruin everything?"

Jan: "It's MARSHA who ruins everything! Muslims voted for me as class President. It's Marsha!"

"Hold on Jan... these Muslims got me in trouble for bullying, just because I called them evil terrorists and pushed one off the stairs. Why couldn't she dress NORMAL, Dad?"

"Now, Greg. This is the modern world and you have to be careful. Why not think about ways to get the Muslim kids in trouble without making it so obvious, use your wits and not your brawn, that's the Brady way."

"Gee, Dad, that makes a lot of sense! I'm gonna try it!"

Peter: "Gee, Greg, the Nazi league sounds swell! Would I get a uniform? What about a trenchcoat!"

Greg: "Hyeah, you can get all kinds of cool stuff if you join up!"

In unison: "HEIL TRUMP!"



Alice: "I don't like the sound of this, why do I feel like I should be twirling through mountain meadows... do y'all believe in past lives?"



Marsha enters... "Hey all, what's going on? Isn't it a groovy day?"

Some procedural and poetic Flash montages I made a while back for Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tango. 
 

Best outcome for Bernie supporters:

Get him a cabinet position (education or finance reform) in exchange for their Hillary vote (assuming they can get over their butthurt and fair-weather loyalty in order to think strategically).

Apparently some political newbies abandon their idols when they make a decision to compromise with reality in order to be relevant later on. Bernie was right.He just was. He didn't suddenly lose his ethics or become brain-damaged.And he'll still be relevant and have influence if you support his next moves.

Or, go right ahead and make a feeble protest vote that won't even register next to the Libertarian protest vote and risk *THAT* guy becoming the coked-out finger on the nuclear button, and watch the dollar fall to worthless as investors switch to foreign currencies. Hillary isn't quite the monster portrayed in right wing propaganda. She fucked up a little. He'll fuck up *tremendously*. Your protest vote won't make a dent, but your support for Bernie under a Democratic Administration will, if you understand his logic and give it.

#StillWithHim #StopTheOrangeMenace

Pstychopaths, sociopathis, corporate/gpvernment types, paper-pushers, button-pressers, zombies and post-traumatic land mines are a great deal of the problem. Two thirds of the largest police union endorses Trump. Who the mother-fornicating hell endorses Trump at this stage? Racist, misogynistic, sociopathic trolls, End Times gun-humping fundamentalist freaks and snake-oil get-rich-quick prosperty gospel narcissists and Ayn Rand types. This frightens me, and I have pale skin. And I'm *very* aware of that when I see police around my neighborhood. They're paranoid, on edge or just doing their jobs with no sense of what's going on on the holistic level. The one-third probably sees it all and wonders how to address it without getting fired, set up, murdered or simply ignored as "brainwashed, excuse-making liberals".

This is the most inspirational, sincere and funny anti-Trump voting advocate video I've found this far:

http://savetheday.vote

George Soros is mentioned a lot by detractors of Progressive politics, his book The Alchemy of Finance is really good, deep theory on market behavior when anticipation of trends factors in and alters the course of trending markets. Such things can make people a lot of money if they anticipate the psychological effects of market forces and compensating behavioral adjustments by large numbers of people affecting the markets. This can also be done with social capital, by adjusting one's communication to influence perception of trends in order to make trends better. Or worse,if one is black-hat trolling. Works both ways, depending on who's doing it.

Baa baa white Sheep, have you any soul
No sir, no sir, love is cruel
Guns for the master, none for the slave
Done for, the children who are beaten to be saved

Vote for the snake-oil wolfpack betrayer
Who adopts the flock into his basket of salvation slayers
March into a lockstep, scripture-pounding herd
And slander all who challenge such abuses of the word.

God forgive the foolish ones who followed with their family
Into the mouth of Babylon's crusade into calamity
Jesus said forgive and be forgiven for your sins
But what about the ones who store the seeds of hell within.

Baa Baa white sheep, have you any shame
No sir, no sir, only blame.

Death is just a self-preservation incentive. Once you're dead, there's no longer any need of an incentive to preserve a self that's passed. Then, you're everyone (because who are you now that money, time and self-presentation are obsolete, and *where* are you, exactly? Nowhere. Anywhere.,. Everywhere.)

There is no death, only the memory of once having been driven by fear of what no longer has any meaning besides that one. This actually happens in the last moments of awareness as ego dissolves into unconsciousness, infinitesimally expanding perception of time to infinity and place to everywhere at once, the fourth dimension finally perceived without the aid of psychedelics, which are an excellent tool for overcoming fear of death as well as addiction and self-limitation in any form.

This is the meaning of the New Testament's assertion that death will be overturned and everyone perpetually in glorious magnificent harmony in heaven. There is no need for supernatural causes, only a reframing of traditional concepts of spiritual truth.

Even demons exist, on a non-supernatural level. Demonic possession is an actual experience. It's not an "excuse" for behavior (though it could be falsely claimed as a causal feature), it's a socio-psychological phenomenon misunderstood as beyond causal chains of influence in a natural world. Much of the Bible is true, just not true on a literal level, and greatly misunderstood by most of its adherents.

Autists are evaluated as having no human feeling, and that is wrong. They have human feeling on a *global* and instinctual level that is not constrained by artificial historicultural boundaries. They'll die for stray animals and stand up for kids. They won't stand up for themselves or compete for economic advantage. Society betrays them, and keeps letting them fall into traps that ruin them. Fuck you society. Fuck you so much. And I love you, people in society. I'm not sure how to reconcile it, but the Tao, and me, and you, and everyone, will resolve it. One balancing means or another. Let' us make it a healthier balance than the others I see as likely if we let it slide any longer.

Several issues:

1. Societal indifference to the plight of people written off as "dropouts", "criminals", "troublemakers", "thugs" and "whores".

2. PTSD and other mental health issues unaddressed in prison and police systems.

3. Sociopathy. There are cabals of sociopathic cops. Often racist and viciously misogynistic. They do so much damage over time that the entire police force is regarded as corrupt and evil.

4. Good cops need a TON of support. They get what's happening. They're scared, and they're alone because they can't experience solidarity with either police as an aggregate or the public. Back them up. Give them the support they need, compare notes, triangulate and overcome the psychopaths. Fast. We're running out of time.

I like Hillary as a human being and I have friends who see her as nothing more than the human face of the war machine. I hate the war machine, I love Hillary's campaign, how it's taking on most serious threat to the planet since Hitler (yes, literally Hitler. I've never cried wolf. This is my first wolf-cry. He's Hitler. Or a mentally ill zombie narcissist whose mind virus keeps him from doing anything other than becoming the American face of hyper-fascism in order to preserve his secrets).

I like Hillary as a person and I like Chelsea Clinton even more than her mom because she's such a good activist for things I agree with, and obviously a human. I can tell humans from zombies, and Trump is a zombie, along with all his clones and influences, who are worse than neocons because they are the neocons' neocons, the cream of the crop for instigating unendable nuclear war.

I hate the war machine, and some of my friends identify her with the war machine as if she could just unravel it with a wave of her hand without making a mess even bigger than the current one we've been making since before Reagan.

Arms sales to the Saudis, banana regimes, Vietnam and the Cold War, the arming of Jihadists against the Soviets (that might have been justified, actually, since they were really fighting for their homeland and religious rights at that point), the suppression of Arab socialism, the best alternative to radical Jihadism, some good steps toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty and then funding the Israelis one-sidedly when it broke down and looking the other way at settler violence... we've done a lot of horrendously evil things as a nation and turned out backs to those harmed by it. We've never owned that, and I hate it because it keeps us from being all that we are, being SEEN for who we are, and making the world a truly peaceful place with justice for all. What is justice?

To me, justice is everyone doing their best to override the zombie march of clones driven by historical ghosts before they ruin us all. They are not human beings, they are spirits of once-unifying symbols and belief systems gone stale and empty-headed, exploited by the self-serving and used to justify harmful acts of patriotism and religious absolutism. Whatever makes that possible and stops the swarming mobs of psychopaths, manipulators, cheats and one-sided scolds, is justice, That's morality.

It's the 60's again. We're up to it. We know what love is, and we think hella-smart when we have to. We can overcome. We'll have to give up some pride and certainty, and allow for others to be wrong without wronging them as persons. We're able to evolve spiritually or psychologically, move ourselves into a position of determination and openness to manifold perspectives instead of just one unjustly justice-oriented opinion multiplied into exponential hell by slicing out and splicing in third-hand views of parties involved in this equation. There is no alternative. We shall overcome, as a once-revered prophet said, back in the springtime of revived American consciousness.

I went to a meeting of Toastmasters, and it was a really interesting experience. They did the Pledge and I sat, and my heart actually pounded a little, one of the guys there is a Marine and I didn't know if they were ultra-fundamentalist or just conventionally patriotic. But it was an enjoyable meeting and I'm considering becoming a member.

The Marine said he agreed with my decision on the grounds of free choice, and told a story of wearing his uniform to some happening and how he told someone he wore it to show respect and honor for the military person the event was for, and a Navy soldier who wasn't wearing his uniform got mad and said "So you think I'm NOT giving respect because I'm not in my uniform?" He answered, "I'm not saying anything about you, it's your choice, I'm not interested in taking that away from you, just because I'm showing respect one way doesn't mean you aren't doing it in your own way."

He's a math tutor and another intuitive, so I'm definitely going to hang out with him again. People you get to know when fear doesn't stop you. I was invited to talk for a minute extemporaneously and they were really impressed, I talked about how I like going into different environments and learning about people and how to bridge differences with empathic dialogue. One woman said it was brave of me to speak at my first meeting, I guess a lot of people don't do it but I've been in "sure why not" mode for a while. I love my weird life.

Narcissists think *you* think you're special if you refuse their agenda.
A Vice Principal in high school said "you're nothing special" to me when I refused to shower after gym class because I was being bullied and for some weird reason didn't want to be naked around guys who were harrassing me behind the coach's back. I dropped out later because I was just done with authoritarian environments where cruelty and indifference were the culture and anyone without a clique was either invisible or a target.
Dropping out led me to meet the most amazing people who were like me, allergic to authoritarian sociopathic crucibles. Almost all my friends are poor, but they're pretty sane and seem to be much happier than anyone under obligation and stress from hierarchical passive-aggressive narcissists.

The instinct for mimicry (of endless use) is powerfully influential and widely unrecognized, even as people engage in it, while rationalizing each morphological tug or shift or phase as some kind of noble cause, nationalist crusade, new relationship rush, ethnic clash, corporate back-scratching, emulation of hyper-masculine (therefore insecure) authoritarian ideologists, or just having fun at a party while engaging in drunken wittery and pun-upmanship, or doing a musical jam.

It also factors into innumerable systemic innovations and malfunctions, from quantum physics to solidarity for/against bullying in high school, to weaponized lone wolves unleashing terror upon demographically targeted segments of society, to all forms of addiction and casual cruelty, to bait-and-switching sociopathic human-traficking gangster cabals. Mirroring is fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of or species. How much time have we given it?

It's weird how long-past incidental things have been codified as traditional norms, which everyone was expected to follow in order to earn 'credentials'. One example: musical notation.

Modern music production software often uses much more intuitive and easy to follow methods of visualizing music. Outdated notation is extremely difficult to learn because it was developed as a highly compact way representing notes in time, *for the time*. On paper, it was efficient. They didn't have graphics to make it easier on the eye and less confusing. As everyone who has contemplated being a professional musician through classical training knows, who decided it was just too much rigor and the notation was too hard to drill in the brain, there was just a visceral feeling that the notation was *wrong* and the rigor not right for musical brains.

There are reasons for it. Cognitively, musical notation and the classical structure of drill and training are off-putting (even viscerally painful) for most musical brains. Fortunately that is now moot because of better visualization formats that are software-based. The only issue is, do schools allow alternative visualizations in lieu of traditional notation? Or do they penalize those who cannot handle the archaic formatting?

Another example: the national anthem, written by a slave-owner who gloried in war, and various other cynically employed rituals of patriotism, . Do those who cannot conscionably display reverence for the ritual (which to the mainstream emotionally symbolizes unity and victory but has so much blood-tainted history in light of the fourth dimension) deserve to be hurdled by mass stigma, death threats or intimidation through loss of income?

So many hurdles, so little time.

I know some of my Bernie buddies are focused on Hillary's negatives, but before you make your final decision, please please please read the full text of Donald Trump's 'Values Voters' speech to the religious right. He has promised to fill Supreme Coutprt slots with anti-abortion judges, and previously he said women should be punished for having an abortion. If you want to know who wants to own your womb, it's this guy. Please read it. It matters.


http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/full-text-trump-values-voter-summit-remarks-227977

As we argue, Chelsea is doing her best to change Ivanka's mind. Their friendship is the greatest hope we have. The other day, Ivanka quoted Emma Watson quoting another source, and Emma Watson is a feminist. No one in trump's camp would reference a feminist like Emma Watson. It came from Chelsea. Chelsea is a feminist. This is good. (Cue conspiracy theories about the two candidates in the most brutal and potentially lethal election with accusations of treason and blood libel being in cahoots. Because that's how you'd tag-team in a country full of guns and mental health crises).

Abortion rights matter. Please read Donald Trump's 'Values Voters' speech to the religious right, in light of several Supreme Cort openings being filled by the next President of the United States.

The Tao is funny... at this time, I'm seeing the corporate establishment and the Democratic party very positively, and I've never been one to get involved with any sort of authoritarian structure because it doesn't fit my ADD. Their incentives are mostly aligned with Tao, while many idealists unwilling to compromise based on personal experiences (which are TOTALLY valid, many anti-Hillary people have Boomer issues and I would too if forced to 'act like an adult' as Boomers are wont to say) are wasting energy denouncing her as a warmonger, Wall St. shill and wicked witch. Being an Xer with more of a 'use everything for the best purpose' mindset, I'd advise Millennial Xers to shit-meme the fuck out of Trump, see what Hillary does after the election and use Bernie and Stein's social capital (and some Libertarian voices) to ensure honesty and pressure for integrity in the DNC, as well as stacking Congress with Greens. This is just me. My sense of the Tao. I could just be too high to see reason. But this computes, and feels right. If wrong, will adjust strategy. And so it goes.

The Nutterfly Effect:

One bunker-ready End Times fundamentalist flapping his Bible-signs in small town Alabama can set off chain reactions that lead to a hurricane of alt-Right misogynist trolls rampaging at a Texas university.

Lockhart's Second Law of Logodynamics:

The longer a 'brand' remains unchanged, the more idiots and assholes take it over and make it look evil.

(First Law: Authoritarian Hierarchies Are The Devil*)

*See my Children's Guide Through A Demonological Garden of Sociopolitical Apparitions And Boogeymen.

THE TWELVE STEPS OF DOUCHEBAGS ANONYMOUS

1. We admitted we were powerless over douchery—that our lives had become
unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
douche-less sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we
understood Him.(Note: Abrahamic deities may be powerless over their own douchery, so go with Buddhism, my advice).

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, and resisted Nietzsche.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature
of our douchery.Lucked out and didn't get doxxed and flooded with douche threats. Maybe skip that last one.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.* (See above warning about gods.)

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.* (Physician may not have fully healed Himself, depending on how you interpret Revelation. Violent obsessive fantasy or sureally ironic meta-commetary? His psychiatrist is on the fence here.)

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.* (May qualify as stalking in some instances.)

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do
so would injure them or others.* (Milk this for all it's worth if you're douchebag and someone thinks they'll make amends without a little guilt-grifting.) [To self -- edit this later.]

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it. *(May not apply to some candidates for political office, we're not trying to lose here... or ARE we? Hmm...)

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with
God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and
the power to carry that out.* (Again, this could go really badly if you're priming your prayer-antennae with some of the more psychopathic verses. DO NOT prescribe to psychotics, people on anti-psychotics, or anyone bipolar).

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to
carry this message to douchebags, and to practice these principles in all our
affairs.* (And got the courts to endorse our blatantly religious agenda! How cool is that.)

Factual note: AA was first envisioned during a hallucinogenic drug trip (belladonna was used for detox, before further research on hallucinogenic interventions for addictions was banned).

Paraphrasing Matthew 5, a treasure mine of beautifully ironic (when juxtaposed with Religious Right hypocrisy) sayings attributed to Jesus, as well as social media commentary:

“Therefore, if you are offering your opinion in the chatroom and there remember that your bro or side-chick has something against you, leave your opinion there in the input box. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your post.

Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to social media court. Do it while you are still private messaging on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the pedantic sociopath dissecting your opinion and identity to a kangaroo court of trolls, and the trolls may hand you over to the obsessive conspiracy theorist with apocalyptic delusions and undiagnosed schizophrenia, and you may be doxxed. Truly I tell you, you will not clear your name until you have paid the last bitcoin."

Social networks are now tribal. People trust what they see their friends and allies trusting. They trust the sources their people trust, mistrust opposing sources, and for some curious reason it all lines up divided into narratives that affirm 'our pride and innocence against their deliberate, shameful, sinister wrong.'

People with a curious and open nature, who venture from their living rooms and cross subcultural lines for edification and experience, are finding this a time of urgent culture-weaving. Their lifeblood is a cross-cultural, free, friendly exchange of ideas, energy, hospitality, knowledge, and opportunity. They're smart, they're connected and popular, deeply concerned, and they have trust currency. And they're going to undermine the monocultural fetishists who hide behind social categories, flags, charged symbols and ideologies to shred the global social fabric. The dead have no Idea what the living are up to. They will figure it out soon, panic, flail recklessly in ways that get good people hurt, tailspin and dive, crash into the earth catastrophically and tragically, and become fertilizer for a civilization being born.

These are momentous times. Words accelerate, they heal and they kill. Treat language as sacred. Especially in comedy, possibly the most sacred art form available to primates. Be hilarious, be fierce, be determined and prolific. Obliterate authoritarian ego-driven conformist hierarchical ideological power trips. Undermine them at every step. Confound the linear, blow up inconsistencies, speak out for people with more to lose, and take endless delight in unleashing the power of truth in love until there is no refuge for hate but confessional and renunciation for cancerous, contagious forms of vicarious power. Use your words. Use my words. Use all words.

In verba, victoria.

Laws against women's nudity were at he time a solution to the problem of men fighting over women and using sexual harassment of women to goad men into fighting (putting the onus on women's for men's weakness of self-control). We carry those laws forward in culture without looking at their origins. Both men and women denigrate women who dress 'immodestly', whether that means dropping a veil or going nude. It's only a matter of degree, and Westerners who regard the burqa as oppressive need to look at their own mindset about revealing clothing and nudity worn by women. There is no justified cultural superiority in that.