Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Thirty-One to Forty

Thirty-One to Forty

31. My brother, you must always listen to your intuition, the inner voice, and be alert for its warnings while chasing women. There are many fishes in the sea. Sooner or later, you'll catch the one you want. Be sure the fish you caught wants you, too. Everything, including love, associated with human behavior and enterprise is a game. You must follow the rules of the game if you want to be a winner while not losing the higher values and principles you possess. Meanwhile, don't be shy. Be cool and talk with ALL women to hone your skills and experiences. I had had many years of failures when it came to women before I hit upon a winning formula: be attentive and nice, but be cool and indifferent if things don't work out. Remember, you must recognize that to live is to experience loneliness, aloneness, disappointment, indifference and even cruelty at the hands of others. Be cynical, if you must be, but you must not be cruel in return. Turn your head and walk away from animals and beasts before they contaminate you. 

You are a very fine human with a lot of love for fellow humans. Happiness starts from love. Other teachers go into teaching for paycheck and power trip. They make themselves unhappy. We get out of life of what we have put into it. Karma, brother, karma. Stay away from losers who ironically would tell you that you are a loser, not them. Those assholes are unaccomplished, untalented, and lazy cowards. They would never recognize the superiority in a person like you or me. A very first thing a real, authentic human being must do is to know who he is and his place in the world. Fuck all the losers! A bitch told me several times that the reason my English is better than hers because she came to the U.S. later than I did, and that she was too fucking busy working to support her two kids by herself. Fuck, she conveniently overlooked a glaring that my English is way better than that of 95% of the native speakers of the language. When I open my mouth at the poker table, the players are marveled at my ability to handle English and several of them have asked me if by any chance I am an university professor. Once a cognitive science professor who sat next to me complimented me on my English and asked me where I got my education. I am known in poker circles as an intellectual who is well-read and can talk about many subjects, not counting the fact I have been a winning poker player. Fuck, and these two fucked-up, stupid, little, ugly bitches had the gall to tell me that I was a loser! That infuriated me and spurred me to do more intellectual work to improve my mind. In late October and early November of 2014, I will go on a trans-Atlantic and Western European cruise. My finances are back in order. I certainly don't regard myself as a loser at all. Fuck, I hate all the motherfuckers who dish out gratuitous, baseless insults which are the products of self-projection and self-hatred. 

32. Chết là Hểt
Không thiên đàng, không địa ngục. Chết là hết. Ai không tin như thế, đầu óc chưa cởi mở.

Chân lý về lẽ sống và sự chết không phải chỉ có người Cộng Sản tin theo. Những khoa học gia, những ai có học thức, biết lý luận, và can đảm độc lập tư tưởng chống lại sự nhồi sọ về thiên đàng, địa ngục, đầu thai (reincarnation), thượng đế, và nhiều huyền thoại vớ vẩn khác, đều biết rằng cuộc sống giữa các sinh thực vật, tuy có tương quan nhau vì sự tiến hoá (evolution) nhưng cái giá trị của mổi sinh vật (organism) đều ngang nhau. Chỉ có những kẻ tự hào là con người nhưng ngu và dốt mà không biết mình ngu và dốt (không biết chổ đứng và chân giá trị của mình) nên mới tưởng rằng mình "hơn" chó.

Xin lặp lại, chết là hết. Chưa thấy ai và bất cứ sinh thực vật nào chết rồi sống lại bao giờ. 

Còn tin vào nhị nguyên (dualism) là còn bị tẩy não. Tâm linh và thể xác là hai trạng thái của một sinh vật, liên hệ và hỗ tương với nhau, không thể tách rời. Khi thể xác ngưng hiện hữu, tâm linh cũng "tiêu tùng".
 
The above was written (in stages) as a reply to stupid and ignorant humans who fancy that they are in the know about the meanings of life and existence, and as a rebuttal to stupid assholes and scumbags who think that I cannot express myself in my mother tongue. The truth of the matter is that I have yet found any Vietnamese who regularly posts on the Internet worthy enough for me to take them seriously. I posted my comments to their asinine writings because I could not stand their stupidity and ignorance anymore. They then opted to remain silent instead of pursuing a dialogue with me for fear of being further publicly ridiculed and humiliated. Fuck, I wasted my time commenting on their shallow, ignorant posts but silence might be misconstrued as concurrence, that was why I spoke. Ignoramuses had to be told that they were ignorant, otherwise they thought their views and positions were unassailable.

Back to the meanings of life and existence, I need to meditate further on the thoughts of Heidegger about being in the world and of Sartre on the interplay between being and doing. 

LONDON — Days after the apparent beheading of a British hostage held by Sunni militants in Syria, the parents of a 26-year-old American similarly threatened have released parts of a letter from him in which he says he is “obviously pretty scared to die.”

But the American, Abdul-Rahman Kassig, an aid worker and medic who converted to Islam last year, said in the letter, released late Sunday, that “the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping and wondering if I should even hope at all.”

The letter was said to have been dated June 2, more than two months before the militants first claimed publicly to have decapitated a Western captive, the American journalist James Foley.

Last week, Mr. Kassig was shown in a video from the Islamic State militant group that purported to show the decapitation of a British taxi driver, Alan Henning. Mr. Henning was taken prisoner last December as he tried to deliver humanitarian relief supplies in Syria.

The news of his death dominated newspaper headlines and talk-show conversations in Britain, increasing pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to extend Britain’s participation in the air campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, and join American warplanes in attacks on targets in Syria. Mr. Cameron, like President Obama, has ruled out the deployment of ground forces.

Last month, Parliament limited the role played by British Tornado warplanes, which are based in Cyprus, to hitting targets in Iraq. But in the anger aroused by Mr. Henning’s death, some Britons have called for the deployment of Special Forces to hunt down the man portrayed in successive Islamic State videos as the killer of four captives so far: two American and two British.

The masked figure speaks with what seems to be a British accent.

In a statement accompanying the portions of the letter they released, Ed and Paula Kassig of Indianapolis, the captive’s parents, urged people to refer to their son by the name he adopted upon converting to Islam, Abdul-Rahman, and not by his birth name, Peter.

The parents have said that their son spent “a brief time in the U.S. military” before traveling to Lebanon in 2012 on spring break from college “to work there as a medic and humanitarian worker.”

In his letter, Mr. Kassig wrote: “I am very sad that all this has happened and for what all of you back home are going through. If I do die, I figure that at least you and I can seek refuge and comfort in knowing that I went out as a result of trying to alleviate suffering and helping those in need.”

“In terms of my faith, I pray every day, and I am not angry about my situation in that sense,” the letter said.

It ends with the words: “I wish this paper would go on forever and never run out and I could just keep talking to you. Just know I’m with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.”

Mr. Kassig’s parents said their son’s “journey toward Islam” began when he observed the monthlong fast of Ramadan in 2013. But he converted “sometime between October and December 2013,” after his capture “when he shared a cell with a devout Syrian Muslim.”

“After converting, he took Islam’s practices seriously, praying the five daily prayers and taking on the name Abdul-Rahman,” the parents’ statement said. “We see this as part of our son’s long spiritual journey.”

(To be continued

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Twenty-Nine and Thirty (a story)

Twenty-Nine and Thirty
 
The humid and hot tropical air assaulted me as I stepped out of the air-conditioned airport in high noon of August. The heat caused me to perspire and the humidity made the perspiration a pesky and persistent nuisance. I had no choice but to force myself to smile and to be patient as I was waiting for a shuttle bus to take me to a cruise terminal. Humidity and heat should not have bothered me because I was born and grew up in a poor, war-torn country not far from the equator. But they did. I was amazed at my own body's quick acclimation to dry heat and cool temperatures after spending only a few years in a desert oasis in American Southwest.   Finally---that meant after a "mere" wait of twenty minutes in the heat and high humidity, with the shirt clinging to my torso---a bus arrived.
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I met her in one of those "classic", "serendipitous" moments that "only" happened in the movies. I was eating a sandwich in the 24-hour establishment called Lee's Sandwiches (where the food quality is okay but rather high-priced due to the clean, well-lighted, well-conditioned ambience where one stays as long as one likes using its wifi services provided that one orders something from the restaurant) in Vegas when a middle-aged woman tourist approached me and made some inquiries about how best to spend the time in the Sin City. She was not an ugly woman. Her figure was fine at her age. Her face and voice indicated that she was not a mean, calculating woman. I suppose she was attracted to me because she kept talking to me and then later asked me for my phone number. The next day she asked me out for dinner at one of the inexpensive but very good restaurants off the Strip that I recommended. She told me about her life and made it quite clear that she liked me a lot on account of my looks, education, wit, and pleasant, good-natured character. She lived in Miami. She was a war bride. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, of old money, and ailing. She was looking for a  boyfriend and she decided that I was the man! She  never once asked about my financial conditions. I didn't volunteer to divulge mine. However, I made it clear to her that I was not well-off and that I liked a quiet, non-party life among books and barbells, and not of constant world traveling and fine dining to which she was accustomed. Apparently my kind of lifestyle didn't faze her. She told me so after we spent the night together. She was a tigress in bed due to pent-up demand unmet from an old, ailing white gentleman husband. I asked her if she felt bad cheating on her husband. She gravely shook her head. She did love him, but it was about time she lived her own life, she said.  She didn't want to die unfulfilled, lonely, and unloved. She picked me because I was good-looking, fit, yet looking sad, lonely, lost, but prideful, even arrogant. I deserved her, she said. I was lucky, she kept telling me. 

We had talked and emailed to each other for about three months after the Vegas encounter when she called me one evening and interrupted my poker game. She broke the news that she had just buried her husband a week before and she was looking for a break, so how about my flying to Fit. Lauderdale and meeting her at the ship. She would be waiting for me at the bus drop-off and we would check in together. She would pay for the entire trip, including airfare. We would have a whole week dining, dancing, drinking, seeing shows, frolicking among the waves of the sea on the beach, and talking. "Please don't say no. That would be an unwise thing to do", she emphasized. 
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"Roberto, you're too soft and sentimental for your own good. You must learn to take care of yourself first. Humans are mostly evil and selfish. They would take advantage of nice but weak-willed folks like you. Honey, please commit to memory what I am going to say. You don't really know people until you watch them how they spend money, especially on you. Forget about the saying, "you can't buy love". Yes, you can. If people are generous with you, that doesn't necessarily mean they love you, but if they are not willing to spend money on you, they certainly don't love you. Money is a very reliable measure of humans, trust me. Thanks to my husband, I have known a lot about money and how it exposes people's true feelings and nature. I know you are not a gold digger. Five minutes after talking to you at Lee's Sandwiches, I knew that right away. But that didn't mean you were not flattered and touched by my feelings for you, right? I think I like you a lot, but I'm not sure about you. You have too much excess baggage and you're indecisive and you're too much affected by the past.
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"Well, Rosita, I've been on this planet for 65 years. With luck, I may have another ten. Tops. I'd like to be happy and serene in the waning years of my life. I want no drama, no heartaches, no tears. I don't have as much money as you do, but I have enough to live comfortably until I die. I could have 5-6 million of dollars in the bank if I didn't take too many chances. But I don't really regret of my past follies. Because of my follies, I learned who really cared for me. Words are cheap. Money talks. You know who your friends are when you ask for help. 

I am an ordinary man except for two things: I read, eat, sleep, drink, and think of philosophy; and I pay attention to certain languages. You already know that sex is not a big deal for me, but knowledge is. I have a very big ego. I fancy that I know about certain realities much more deeply than most people. I guess what I want to say is that I am a thinker. And I certainly don't view myself as a "stupid loser" as a stupid little kike characterized me. You see, ever since I was on the receiving end of that ridiculous, facts-challenged insult, I've been much more sensitive to word usage. 

Of course, I was pleased and flattered by your attention, but please do realize that you're not the only one woman who was struck by my magnetic personality. I'm not a womanizer. I'm just a dreamer. I dream that there must be a woman out there who understands and appreciates and cares about me. She does not have to be rich, but she had better be nice and pleasant. I cannot stand bitches. Not anymore. I don't have delusions about you or about myself. Time will tell whether or not your feelings for me are a flash in the pan. Meanwhile I want you to know that I do love and care about my wife. Love is very mysterious. Everybody talks about love, but only a very few know what love really is. I'm glad you have not told me you love me. Honesty is very important in a relationship. The other indispensable element is respect. We don't talk thrash when we love a person because we respect that person and care for that person's feelings. Words spoken in anger tell the world who we really are. I'm not perfect. So I'm not demanding that people be perfect with me. You see, nothing of value is free in this world. You've got to work for them. Love is hard to get because to receive love you must have a lot of love inside. You must learn to give first if you want to receive. That's the way things are and operate. Maybe I'm disclosing too much of myself, baring too much of my soul. I really don't wish to be as naked and confiding as a recent columnist for a national newspaper. He talked openly and beautifully about his bisexuality. But I wondered  as I was reading his self-disclosure that whether the volunteering of one's interior sexuality to the whole world necessary. I understood the cathartic value of the confession, but the grace and the dignity of the confession and the confessor were missing. Something is better left unsaid. I am well aware that perhaps I should practice what I preach because I am a confessional "writer", and unnecessarily so. However, not everything I have written is autobiographical. There are indeed elements of "surrealism" and imagination in my writings. That makes reading them a bit more "interesting" and "challenging". There should be a "lingering" question in the reader's mind that whether Roberto was telling the "truths" or he was letting his imagination get "the better" of him. I don't usually lie in real life, but I love to embellish and sometimes downright bullshit when I whip out my iPad and let my fingers do the talking. But Rosita, mi pequeña flor linda, I'm digressing. I'm talking too much, as usual. That's why hardly anybody takes me seriously. But I don't really give a fuck. Right now, for me, what counts is if you understand what  I'm trying to say. The world I'm navigating is full of surprises and disappointments maybe because I'm stupid and naive. Just when I thought I finally wised up, I learned that my judgement and understanding was flawed. But I'm telling you one thing. Since I've met you, I sleep better, I exercise more regularly, I dress better, and I'm feeling less lonely. For that I thank you. You've been good to me, much better than I expected, much better than my kinsfolks. For that I appreciate. What I really want to see is that we are friends for life. Friendship lasts longer than love between a man and a woman. I do have a lot of female friends, some are more dearer than others."
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-"Roberto, my dear, I certainly don't read much. I do not give myself a headache by thinking about philosophy as you do, but I am good at reading people. I had to. Before I was a war bride, I was a bar girl. Things got really bad after my father died from the war. He was an officer. A lieutenant. I was the oldest in the family. I had four younger brothers. I dropped out of high school to help my mother raise my brothers. A bar girl in Saigon in those days was just a step above a common prostitute. I was lucky. Because of my looks and youth and some education and an ability to speak English, I was popular with American GIs. I met my husband there. He was a much older man. An officer like my Dad. He was an important man. A colonel in military intelligence. He went through hoops to marry me. He must have approval from his bosses. They wanted to be sure I was no VC. I brought my Mom and brothers with me over here just before Saigon fell to the VC. My mother died ten years ago. All my brothers are okay. They went to college, got married, and have children. I have no children. My husband didn't want any. One of these days I would like you to meet my brothers. I didn't go to college. I wish I did. I was busy to make my husband happy. Maybe one of these days, I will go, like one of those people graduating when they were in their 80's."

-What would you like to study?

-Psychology.

-Good choice. But you don't have to go to college nowadays to acquire knowledge. All you really need is a desire to know, to get to the bottom of things. Information is now freely available on the Internet and at the library. A college degree is just an expensive way to get into a disciplined habit of thinking. Even so, most college graduates are not educated in the proper meaning of the word. I have talked to many of them. They are not well-read. They can't reason logically. They have no respect for facts and logic. They can't express themselves coherently in writing. What comes out of their pens are replete with platitudes and grammatical errors and misspellings. More importantly, deep down they have no respect for themselves. They lie effortlessly to themselves. They believe in the bullshits and lies fed to them by their religious and political leaders. They are pathetically stupid and ignorant and yet vain. They attribute and accuse others of traits they hate about themselves. They engage in self-projections. I despise them and I sometimes openly show them my contempt. They unwittingly make me feel good about myself. If I had the power and the means, these stupid scumbags would have a memorable experience. Anyway, they remind me that life is not all roses. 

-But Roberto, don't carry too much hate in your heart.  You will not live long.

-I know. 

- I know you have suffered a lot. I could see that in your eyes when I first met you. You glanced at me when I fist walked into the restaurant. You gave me a quick-over but came back to your book.  Then to make sure I caught your attention, I walked past you one more time with a smile on my face. When I saw you smile back, I knew then I got your attention. As we talked I knew my impressions about you were correct. I didn't expect we hit it off so well. Believe it or not, you would think I routinely picked up strangers from my previous life in Saigon, but the truth was that you were the second man after my husband. The first man was an American, a long-time friend of my husband, and a widower. He took a romantic interest in me after my husband came down with cancer two years ago. He said he would like to take care of me as my husband did. He was a retired colonel, like my husband, but five years younger. I told my husband about Darrell's interest in me. Peter, that was my husband's name, strangely didn't get upset. Instead, he encouraged me to go out with Darrell. I did for about six months and then I called it quits. I didn't feel right about the whole thing. It smelled too much of commercialism and calculation. My husband was good to me. It was the first time I knew a man after I married my husband. I knew that my husband loved me very much. He wanted me not to worry and to be lonely after he was gone. I loved my husband. He was very smart and very good to me. He was more like a father than a husband to me. I told him about my family circumstances and of my first love, a fellow tenth grade classmate. I broke his heart after I became a bar girl. My heart was broken, too. But compared to others, my family didn't pay too much of a price to survive the war. Others suffered much, much more. What about your family, how did they do?

-We were very lucky. We lived in dire straits after my father died of liver and lung cancer. But none of my six sisters had to become prostitutes or mistresses of wealthy men in order to survive. My mother was a remarkable woman. She became a businesswoman after my father died. It was she who supported the whole family. All of her daughters relied on her for livelihood. We struggled and we suffered, but we managed to keep our dignity and honor intact. As for myself, my sufferings were largely self-induced and brought on by my stupidity and naïveté. I didn't really know what inner peace was really like until you came along. But I'm running my mouth too long already. I'm probably exhausting your patience.

-No, darling. Go on talking. Don't you know that your words are music to my ears? The more you talk, the more peaceful I feel. I haven't met such an interesting, compellingly talkative and honest man like you before. All you want to do is talk. You have such a strong need to be understood.

-But not necessarily accepted. You're right. I need to be understood but I don't give a fuck if nobody agrees with what I have to say. Assholes and scumbags and bitches have voiced a false complaint that the reasons I have used to buttress my points of view and arguments are half-assed, but they are the ones who cannot read or write or reason for they maintain that there is a "God" who "takes good care of them". To that staggeringly stupid view of theirs, I have rhetorically rebutted that if their God is indeed so omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent, why the dude has not "punished" me?  More importantly, I have sarcastically asked them what the fuck so special about them that their "God" feels compelled to protect them, and not the victims of all the genocides all over the world. Of course, they have been tongue-tied to my simple question involving logic. You see, assholes and bitches like those have made me feel good about myself. They have twisted themselves into a pretzel trying to prove their worth to me, to no avail. Once they were born both stupid and lazy, they cannot improve yourself. So the only course of action left for them is to moan and groan and complain and ask for "help and protection" from their "God". What a fucked-up and miserable kind of life! 

--Roberto, honey, please pay them no mind. Just hold me tight and sing for me your favorite song, "Tuý Ca" (Song of Inebriation) or the one you wrote, "Drink Until She's Pretty".

-One more thing, then I'll sing both songs. In fact, what I've been saying is a kind of song. I can't help myself since I feel I must speak about the all-too-common syndromes of rigid self-righteousness and unwitting defensiveness fueled by a deep-seated sense of inadequacy held by many assholes and scumbags and motherfuckers that have crossed my path. Instead of reflecting on the values and merits of my observations and commentaries, they have turned the table around and accused me of possessing all the flaws that I've seen in them. Once they convinced themselves that they are okay while I'm full of irritating and offensive hot air, they see that there's no need for them to change. As I said before, to change requires both wisdom and courage. And they have none of these two qualities.
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I have to say I had a pleasant time during the cruise with Rosita. We dined leisurely while drinking copious wine; we soaked in the open-air hot tub on the 15th deck as the ship was making its way to the islands of choice: Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Martin; we talked into the wee hours by the pool as cool ocean breezes swirled around us. I even crooned a few songs during a Karaoke evening. She taught me how to do bebop and pasa doble. The last night on the ship, she asked me what I felt about her and whether we would have a future together. I told her:

-Let's play it by ear. You already know I've complications. True love will have a way to manifest itself. Sooner or later, we'll find out our feelings for each other are either real or just Memorex. Actually, love, as I mentioned before, is often bandied around, but is really understood only by a few. We've been moving along the corridors of affection and love at supersonic speed. Maybe we should slow down and see if separation makes the hearts grow fonder or out of sight, out of mind. 
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Her response to my rather cold and super-rational analysis was silence and materialization of tears in her eyes. We said goodbye to each other at the airport with an embrace and a kiss. I slept soundly on the plane on the flight back to Vegas with hardly a dream that I could recall later. When I shared this latest romantic adventure of mine with a friend, she looked at me strangely, "Roberto, es importante  que visite a un médico, tal vez a un psicoterapeuta. Tu tienes los síntomas de Walter Mitty."

September 27, 2014

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Twenty One to Thirty

21. Peshmerga is Kurdish for "one who faces death." The Kurds claim they have "no  friends but the mountains." I have only a few friends in real life but plenty of companionship in books.

There was a time when certain feelings cascaded over me, and I struggled to wrestle and understand them. Now I think I understand what they are. 

The other day I was sitting next to a psychiatric nurse at a poker table. He was manic. He talked in a loud voice and almost non-stop. He revealed that his choice of profession was influenced by the psychic conditions of his mother. He also disclosed that the night before he had had to take a Xanax to relax so he could sleep. We (including our emotions) are nothing but the functioning of the chemicals in our brains. 

Note to the following article by a philosopher and psychoanalyst concerning ISIS:

The words hit home with me. Silence and indifference, not thunderous and incessant denunciations, are the hallmarks of superiority. Truths require intellectual courage and emotional fortitude. The scumbags and assholes and motherfuckers who falsely characterize me certainly don't have intellectual courage and emotional fortitude. 

1. So what if one is anti-Semitic? A human is allowed to be anything or anybody that he wants to. To be human is to recognize we are essentially free in our choices. What counts is the intellectual and emotional basis of our choices. Further, we must be responsible for our feelings and actions. We must take ownership of them. Stupid and cowardly folks are the ones who try to appear politically correct. Stupid Jews and those who try to appear politically correct never bother to examine in depth WHY anti-Semitism is widespread and has been around for so many centuries. They, like all conditioned animals, readily jump up and down and say, "don't blame the victims!". They don't bother to think no sane human hates a warm, loving, gracious, generous, self-effacing person. Most Jews are far from being warm, loving, gracious, generous, and self-effacing folks. I have interacted closely with them. I know who they are. The destruction of Gaza carried out by the Zionists has been rekindling anti-Semitism in Europe. 

2. ISIS jihadists are living on borrowed time. They will be destroyed. The problem with them is that they hate everybody (including themselves. Their suicidal behavior is a manifestation of self-hatred. One must learn to love oneself, no matter what. One must find ways to walk tall, no matter how dire the circumstances), instead of selectively and fairly. There is nothing quite like excess. It never lasts. Nature favors balance and harmony. 

"It has become a commonplace in recent months to observe that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is the latest chapter in the long story of the anticolonial awakening — the arbitrary borders drawn after World War I by the great powers being redrawn — and simultaneously a chapter in the struggle against the way global capital undermines the power of nation states. But what causes such fear and consternation is another feature of the ISIS regime: The public statements of the ISIS authorities make it clear that the principal task of state power is not the regulation of the welfare of the state’s population (health, the fight against hunger) — what really matters is religious life and the concern that all public life obey religious laws. This is why ISIS remains more or less indifferent toward humanitarian catastrophes within its domain — its motto is roughly “take care of religion and welfare will take care of itself.” Therein resides the gap that separates the notion of power practiced by ISIS from the modern Western notion of what Michel Foucault called “biopower,” which regulates life in order to guarantee general welfare: the ISIS caliphate totally rejects the notion of biopower.
Does this make ISIS premodern? Instead of seeing in ISIS a case of extreme resistance to modernization, one should rather conceive of it as a case of perverted modernization and locate it into the series of conservative modernizations which began with the Meiji restoration in 19th-century Japan (rapid industrial modernization assumed the ideological form of “restoration,” or the return to the full authority of the emperor). 
The well-known photo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, with an exquisite Swiss watch on his arm, is here emblematic: ISIS is well organized in web propaganda as well as financial dealings, although these ultra-modern practices are used to propagate and enforce an ideologico-political vision that is not so much conservative as a desperate move to fix clear hierarchic delimitations. However, we should not forget that even this image of a strictly disciplined and regulated fundamentalist organization is not without its ambiguities: is religious oppression not (more than) supplemented by the way local ISIS military units seem to function? While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies, including robberies, gang rapes, torture and murder of infidels.
Upon a closer look, the apparent heroic readiness of ISIS to risk everything also appears more ambiguous. Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.”
It may appear that the split between the permissive First World and the fundamentalist reaction to it runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able fully to engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.
It is here that Yeats’ diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: The passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction — their violent outbursts are a proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization.
The problem with terrorist fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority toward them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that they already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists of ISIS and those like them really lack is precisely a dose of that true conviction of one’s own superiority.
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and social theorist at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He is the author of many books, including the forthcoming “Absolute Recoil.” 

22. Yes, the space between the thoughts. 

One of the reasons I enjoy playing poker is that each poker session is very much like a session of meditation. If we are mindful, insights and wisdom will come to us. Certain "recently refined/distilled" "insights":

a. Self-respect is paramount, even though to those who appear to have none by virtue of their actions. 

We may not respect others, but all our actions, in one way or another, reflect a desire to make us feel that we are somebody and worthy of respect. This "fact"/need has two consequences:

a. i: When a person does something despicable like lying or stealing or begging or raping, he always rationalizes it.
a.ii: We react with passion when we are not treated with respect, especially if it's based/reinforced/ on lies or deliberate distortion of facts: e.g., my being accused as being a "stupid loser' by a midget who is a clear failure by many yardsticks. Insults or put-downs are acceptable (at least to me) if factually correct.

b. Mercy is important. Moderation is grace in action. Punishment must be commensurate with the crime. Excess causes imbalance. Extremism does not last because it is harmful, not only to others but also to the person(s) doing that. Everything, except maybe love, must be done with moderation. 

c. We must learn to forgive ourselves and others over and over again because if we do not, we are sowing seeds of destruction to ourselves. 

23. We must not carry any sorrows and regrets inside us as we are going through life. Instead, what we must have is an attitude that yes, mistakes were made because of our stupidity and ignorance, but we are bigger than our mistakes and we have learned from the mistakes. So we are now wiser and stronger because of the mistakes, not only made by us but also by others. Life is a learning process, a sum of our experiences and our choices. We valiantly and joyfully go through life acknowledging that there are indeed moments of joy and uplifting encounters in the general spiritual emptiness and the moral indifference of the world around us, and that we are indeed bigger and stronger spiritually and intellectually than the human animals we despise.  We already determined who the human animals are by their actions regarding truth, love, sex, money, power, and pride. 

We must really know who we are and where we stand in relation to others. 

24. Meditations on Bushido

Seven virtues of Bushidō (as visioned by Nitobe Inazo)

The Bushidō code is typified by seven virtues:

Rectitude (義 gi?)
Courage (勇 yū?)
Benevolence (仁 jin?)
Respect (禮 rei?)
Honesty (誠 makoto?)
Honour (名誉 meiyo?)
Loyalty (忠義 chūgi?)

Associated virtues
Filial piety (孝 kō?)
Wisdom (智 chi?)
Care for the aged (悌 tei?)

In May 2008, Thomas Cleary translated a collection of 22 writings on Bushido "by warriors, scholars, political advisers, and educators". The comprehensive collection provides a historically rich view of samurai life and philosophy. The book, Training the Samurai Mind: A Bushido Sourcebook, gives an insider's view of the samurai world: "the moral and psychological development of the warrior, the ethical standards they were meant to uphold, their training in both martial arts and strategy, and the enormous role that the traditions of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism had in influencing samurai ideals." The translations, in 22 chapters, span nearly 500 years from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

A woman of the past long gone just informed me that next week she will have a stop over for a few hours at the airport of this mountain desert town and is wondering if I would like to meet her. My reaction was to put on my running shoes and head to the mountain top. As I labored through the winding path to the summit, my vision took on a clarity. I love her no more. She has become a complete stranger to me. The past means nothing to me except as a lesson. I thus gave her no reply. My silence spoke volumes of my feelings for her. Love, like honor and self-respect, is not fully known unless it is put to the test. Instantaneous reactions, not long deliberations, reveal one's attitudes about love, honor, and self-respect. Today, I have made a vow that I am to be filled with Bushido. 

Today the sky is bluer than usual. Not a single fluff of cloud to mar the blueness of the sky. The air is crisp and invigorating. I am in the yard, breathing in deeply the unpolluted mountain desert air. I am looking up to the sky. A vastness of white and blue. My soul is taking off like a rocket, flying up and far, far away. I am the sky.

A woman of the past long gone just informed me that next week she will have a stop over for a few hours at the airport of this mountain desert town and is wondering if I would like to meet her. My reaction was to put on my running shoes and head to the mountain top. As I labored through the winding path to the summit, a clarity came to me: I love her no more. She has become a complete stranger to me. The past means nothing to me except as a lesson. I thus gave her no reply. My silence spoke volumes of my feelings for her. Love, like honor and self-respect, is not fully known unless it is put to the test. Instantaneous reactions, not long deliberations, reveal one's attitudes about love, honor, and self-respect. 

Words are always personal. They mean whatever we take them to mean, their lexical meanings notwithstanding. Although we always talk about love, honor, and self-respect, we all don't conceptualize them the same way. We have our own understandings and interpretations of these concepts based on our values and experiences. These concepts mean differently to different people. Not only these concepts, but all concepts suffer the same fate. There is no true universality of meanings accorded to them. Each individual human has his own way of understanding and handling of them. The Self is not necessarily the same of the Other. Despite some commonalities, are we not islands separated by vast distances of water? Among the more intelligent and/or educated folks, each one of us/them fancies he is superior to the Other and complains or disdains of being not understood. It remains, in the final analysis, who is more honest to himself and others. Take the case of love, while everybody desires and needs love, not everybody understands or deserves love. The cardinal, número uno, rule/requirement in the game/nature/essence of love is that to be loved, one must make oneself lovable. Nobody loves a sarcastic, self-oriented, self-centered, narcissistic person. Love is not about Self. It is always about the Other. Ironically by focusing on the Other, the Self gets, ultimately, gets what it wants from the Other. To be able to receive, one must learn to give of oneself. And to be able able to give of oneself, one must be comfortable and honest with oneself. Love, like charity, begins at home. 

25. I am getting a feeling and a confirmation with each passing day that I am a late bloomer with regard to almost everything: morally, physically, intellectually, and even romantically. My understanding of things is getting more incisive and I am more at home with myself while I recognize that I am different and maybe even better than most folks I have come into contact with. Certain basic realities are driven home to me. But I could be delusional about my mental prowess. I could remain as stupid and gullible as I was. At any rate, life is getting too short to be self-conscious. What really counts is the ability to enjoy the remaining years of my life on this planet. There is absolutely no need to kill myself as Yukio Mishima did. I don't intend to shock the world. I am just a nobody. What I really want to do today is to be less stupid and more informed than who I was of yesterday. As Mishima himself wrote, the artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal. 

So friends and citizens of the world, lend me thy ears. I am disguising and learning who I am at the same time. I always remember a wise man told me after having witnessed the sound and fury of my frothy, wounded pride. "Listen, amigo, all the sounds and noises you just made cannot heal the wounds of a blind man who has just walked into a lamp-post. You must learn to realize, it's your blindness, not the lamp-post that was at fault. You must learn to be less self-righteous, to talk less, and to observe silence more. Silence should be your friend and your guide."

I have meditated on the words of that wise man ever since, especially when memories of pain involving my youthful and immature past rush back and torment me. I slowly am coming to terms with my stupidity and gullibility. If I had been indeed smart and clever, no woman would have walked out on me. And it was stupid of me to wallow in pain and self-pity for so many long years. Failures in love finally brought forth moments of insights about myself and the women I foolishly "loved". 

26. I am drawn nearer to the idea of living my life as if this very week and maybe even this very day were my last moments on this planet. So should I continue hating this and that asshole or motherfucker, or am I better off concentrating my time on more important projects? To be great is to be misunderstood, I keep reminding myself so. This world is full of dumb, stupid, ignorant assholes who deserve no pity or compassion from me. I just have to ignore them. Those motherfuckers are just like animals. I just have to pay them no mind while I walk on my path.  Now I understand why certain men whose faces betray no expressions and whose voices are dry and cold as ice. They have been through much. They have known  ignorant and stupid human animals who are full of vanity and ego, but no true pride or honor. 

On a night like this ("En la noche como así"), I am keenly, acutely aware of the solitariness of human condition and the tenuousness of human connections. Deep down we humans are all alone. And we must come to terms and make peace with that aloneness. All the friendships and loves and get-togethers are just temporary respites from the aloneness. We lie to others to make ourselves look good; we lie to ourselves so we don't feel too much pain. We fancy that we are good, honorable, and respectable, or at the very least, "okay". We don't want to admit openly that we are lonely and that we feel something missing in our lives, something resembling peace and serenity and contentment, because we are lousy conversationalists and of boring, if not irritating, company. We quiveringly, tremulously wonder if we are nicer and less selfish, less self-centered, less sarcasm-laden, we probably would have more friends and would find love. Character is Fate. At my age, regrets are bad. The Present is everything.

27. F.N. alleged/asserted that one must have chaos within oneself  in order to give birth to a dancing star. Whether the allegation/assertion is true or not, it does not matter a whit. What does is that the metaphor is beautiful, sublime, and strikingly original. Yet it also eerily knells and echoes of madness. Madness is crossing the line and going over the boundary of rationality. Madness is a breakthrough and a breakdown. To fully benefit from madness, one must be able to come back to this side of reality and rationality. For that to occur, one must possess self-awareness and courage and capacity for change. Grammar is order while poetry is going beyond order. Language is where the mind finds itself. Thus, we must pay close attention to how a person expresses himself. Often he engages in simulation and dissimulation. Only very rarely does he reveal himself. To lie is human; for one to speak only of facts and truths, one must be comfortable with oneself and rejections while respecting silence. One speaks only when one has to. Words emerge after long stretches of silence usually have a distillation and concentration of truth and power and vulnerability. Words must be like nudity. To have a beautiful naked body, one must spend time working on it. For words to have impact, one must spend time thinking about truth and wrestling with poetry. So, while Hugh Prather famously said, "I am afraid to tell you who I am because I am afraid you don't like who I am, and who I am is all I have.", I, Wissai, laughingly enunciated, "I am not afraid at all to tell you who I am, and I don't give a fuck whether or not you like who I am, for I know if you are smart enough to know who I really am, you will really like me. And if you are a woman, watch out, you may even end up falling in love with me."

28. Pythagoreanism: : the doctrines and theories of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who developed some basic principles of mathematics and astronomy, originated the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, and believed in metempsychosis, the eternal recurrence of things, and the mystical significance of numbers. 

Well, the above is an approach to realities. Another approach, perhaps more pragmatic and life-oriented, is concerned with lengthening life's longevity through finding happiness. We make ourselves happy or unhappy. We, not the circumstances, are the masters of our own feelings The efforts expended by us are the same. The only difference is the direction. It takes wisdom---a higher, applied, and learned form of intelligence---to be happy. So, am I really happy? Oh, fuck, yes---finally---I realized so a few days ago when certain insights rushed to me while I was riding a stationary bicycle. It is better late than never, being happy. Ever since, I've been looking at life with a new vision and attitude. And I laugh more at myself and at the assholes in this world. But mostly I don't laugh. I just snicker and chuckle at my follies while having a bemused smile on my face at the follies of the assholes. I no longer wish to exterminate the assholes and scumbags and motherfuckers of this world anymore. They all soon will die at their own hands or others'. After I told a smart-aleck asshole about my new "vision and attitude", he predictably posed a question to me, "But Wissai, don't you feel much better about yourself and make you a better person in the eyes of others if you just forgive and forget the people that you nauseatingly characterize as "assholes, scumbags, and motherfuckers". 

I leaned back and emitted an eardrum-busting laugh and then I smilingly told him, "Listen, my "friend", 'forgive and forget' is a cliché and I hope you recognize it for what it is. Just because everybody parrots that hackneyed phrase, that would not make it an eternal verity. The truth of the matter is that we humans don't forgive and don't forget. Not all of us, anyway. Not you. We have two things called memory and vengeance, remember them? We invoke the oft-repeated phrase 'forgive and forget' because vengeance is not feasible now. We pretend to ourselves and others that we are noble-minded and wise because that is the politically correct and seemingly wise thing to do. But if we are honest to ourselves, we would unhesitatingly strike at those who badly hurt and injure us if an opportunity comes up. Meanwhile we engage in "soft-core" tactics of slandering and badmouthing. True forgiveness is silence and complete oblivion. Come on now. Be honest. Don't pretend to be who and what you are not. I laugh and snicker and chuckle because that makes the waiting more tolerable. Remember, this world is teemed with evil, weak, stupid, and ignorant folks. It's not healthy to wear a frown when meeting them. It's far better to smile at them openly and laugh at them discreetly. We must laugh our ways through life and to our deaths. 

Anyway, I'm done "talking" to you. I need to get back to the song 'La última mañana que pase' contigo". Yes, the morning, the goodbye before I got on the bus to the airport, the sunglasses that hid her tears, and my stupid, immature, unwise desire to come back to her."

The following was my reaction to a friend who disclosed that he might have blown his opportunity with a pretty 23-year-old woman. My friend is 30 years old and has been looking around for a wife. 

"Thanks for sharing. Sigmund Freud had an awesome elaboration on the duality/dualism of human nature. So please pay close attention to that. Succinctly put, humans have a Death Wish. We are own worst enemy. We tend to do self-destructive things. A well-balanced person has integrated well the warring polar drives/qualities/ attributes in humans: the Death Wish and the Will to Live. You deserve happiness. You deserve pretty women and all other fine things in life. The key is whether or not you want them badly enough and work hard to get them without sacrificing higher values like honesty, loyalty, fairness, justice, etc...In the end, we have to answer to ourselves. Our conscience is the gatekeeper of our soul, of our worth as a person. There are always girls/women in this world. Always be prepared to seize the opportunity. Napoleon famously said, 'Opportunities only come to those who are prepared.' 

Guess what? I read recently about Laugh Yoga. As a consequence, everything is "laughable" to me now. I think I have reached a new level of self-discipline by confining my latest few entries here in my blog instead of sending them to the usual "victims". Ego would be just bad for me. It would keep me perpetually juvenile. I don't really need confirmations or accolades at my age when most people I know are dying like flies. Life is meant to be fun and happiness from self-actualization, not external praises or admirations. A man is insecure if he needs validations and confirmations.