Why Ben Carson's Nazi Germany Matter by Peter Wehner

LIKE many other political autodidacts, Ben Carson has an odd obsession with Nazi Germany.

On several occasions, the pediatric-neurosurgeon-turned-Republican-presidential-candidate has compared the United States to the Third Reich. Mr. Carson has warned that a Hitler-like figure could rise in America. To understand what is happening in the Obama era, he recommended that people read “Mein Kampf.” And he won’t let go of the myth that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews in Nazi Germany had been allowed to possess guns.

To declare the United States to be “very much like Nazi Germany” is a special kind of libel, yet Mr. Carson is clearly drawn to it. Part of the explanation may be that people who want to impress sometimes invoke imbecilic historical analogies, with the default one often being Nazi Germany. Some part of the answer has to do with his staggering ignorance when it comes to the unique malevolence of Hitler’s Germany. And for still others, it’s a way to convey alarm and mobilize supporters. In the case of Mr. Carson, it also appears to be based on the belief that progressive ideas share intellectual roots with fascism, with Nazism — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — being an extreme version of progressivism.

One might expect a fringe presidential candidate to resort to the Nazi analogy. But what is disturbing is that in this case the person making the comparison is polling second in the Republican race for president. In the most recent Fox News national poll, Donald J. Trump drew 24 percent support while Mr. Carson had 23 percent. Between them, then, they are pulling in just under half of the support among Republicans.

In one respect, Mr. Carson is the antithesis of the crude and boisterous Mr. Trump. In tone and style, Mr. Carson comes across as calm, reasonable and agreeable. But in fact he is more rhetorically intemperate than even Mr. Trump.

For example, Mr. Carson has referred to the Affordable Care Act as “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” and compared it to slavery. He has implied that President Obama’s pledge to transform America was modeled after Cuba, Russia and other “places that have a Socialist/Communist base.”

Mr. Carson had expressed concern that if Republicans didn’t win control of the Senate in 2014, “there may be so much anarchy going on” that the 2016 elections couldn’t be held. He has endorsed the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a conspiracy-minded author and supporter of the John Birch Society. (Mr. Carson views Mr. Skousen’s work, especially “The Naked Communist,” as an interpretive key to America today.) He has also said that a Muslim should not be president of the United States, although he later insisted he had in mind Muslims who wanted to impose Shariah law on America.

Such rhetorical recklessness damages our political culture as well as conservatism, a philosophy that should be grounded in prudence, moderation and self-restraint. That doesn’t mean that conservatives should not use language that inspires people to act. But they should respect certain rhetorical boundaries. There are some places they shouldn’t go.

Mr. Carson doesn’t abide by such niceties, and he may be accurately gauging the mood of many Republicans. The Times reports that advisers who once fretted about his inflammatory rhetoric have now decided to “let Carson be Carson.” Mr. Carson has said that the message he’s receiving from supporters is, “Don’t stop. Don’t give in to the left-wing media. Go ahead and be yourself and talk about what we the people want to hear about.”

We hear similar expressions from supporters of Mr. Trump. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson provide evidence that, for now at least, a large percentage of Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued. People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it. Reason has given way to demagogy. In a political context, Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson represent the id rather than the superego, not just in what they say but in how they perceive the world around them.

For the Republican Party to overcome this will require its presidential candidates to inspire voters to believe in the large purposes of politics. But it will also require Republican voters to lift their sights and raise their expectations about the goals of politics, which are to improve the lives of our fellow citizens in concrete ways; to advance, even imperfectly, liberty, opportunity and a more decent and just society.

Self-government requires more of people than pounding sand. There is vital work that needs to be done, including addressing sluggish economic growth, a widening opportunity gap and an unsustainable entitlement system. Because these things are hard doesn’t mean we can give up, and we certainly don’t need conspiracy-minded amateurs like Mr. Carson and Mr. Trump distracting our attention from them.

Politics isn’t meant to be a catharsis. Yet for many of my fellow conservatives, raging against the system — the much-maligned “establishment” — is just that. I get that it may be emotionally satisfying to cheer on careless rhetoric, to portray every political difference as a “give me liberty or give me death” moment, and to imply that America under Barack Obama is like Germany under Adolf Hitler. But it is also intellectually discrediting, politically self-defeating and unworthy of those who are citizens of a great republic.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer

Obama's Doctrine of Restraint by Roger Cohen, NYT columnist

One way to define Barack Obama’s foreign policy is as a Doctrine of Restraint. It is clear, not least to the Kremlin, that this president is skeptical of the efficacy of military force, wary of foreign interventions that may become long-term commitments, convinced the era of American-imposed solutions is over, and inclined to see the United States as less an indispensable power than an indispensable partner. He has, in effect, been talking down American power.

President Vladimir Putin has seized on this profound foreign policy shift in the White House. He has probed where he could, most conspicuously in Ukraine, and now in Syria. Obama may call this a form of Russian weakness. He may mock Putin’s forays as distractions from a plummeting Russian economy. But the fact remains that Putin has reasserted Russian power in the vacuum created by American retrenchment and appears determined to shape the outcome in Syria using means that Obama has chosen never to deploy. For Putin, it’s clear where the weakness lies: in the White House.

Russia’s Syrian foray may be overreach. It may fall into the category of the “stupid stuff” (read reckless intervention) Obama shuns. Quagmires can be Russian, too. But for now the initiative appears to lie in the Kremlin, with the White House as reactive power. Not since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago has Russia been as assertive or Washington as acquiescent.

Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint reflects circumstance and temperament. He was elected to lead a nation exhausted by the two longest and most expensive wars in its history. Iraq and Afghanistan consumed trillions without yielding victory. His priority was domestic: first recovery from the 2008 meltdown and then a more equitable and inclusive society. The real pivot was not to Asia but to home.

Besides, American power in the 21st century could not be what it was in the 20th, not with the Chinese economy quintupling in size since 1990. The president was intellectually persuaded of the need to redefine America’s foreign-policy heft in an interconnected world of more equal powers, and temperamentally inclined to prudence and diplomacy over force. Republican obstructionism and the politicization of foreign policy in a polarized Washington did not help him. American power, in his view, might still be dominant but could no longer be determinant.

As Obama put it to The New Republic in 2013, “I am more mindful probably than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations.” After Iraq and Afghanistan, giant repositories of American frustration, who could blame him?

But when the most powerful nation on earth and chief underwriter of global security focuses on its limitations, others take note, perceiving new opportunity and new risk. Instability can become contagious. Unraveling can set in, as it has in the Middle East. The center cannot hold because there is none.

“I think Obama exaggerates the limits and underestimates the upside of American power, even if the trend is toward a more difficult environment for translating power and influence,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “By doing so, he runs the risk of actually reinforcing the very trends that give him pause. Too often during his presidency the gap between ends and means has been our undoing.”

In Afghanistan, in Libya and most devastatingly in Syria, Obama has seemed beset by ambivalence: a surge undermined by a date certain for Afghan withdrawal; a lead-from-behind military campaign to oust Libya’s dictator with zero follow-up plan; a statement more than four years ago that “the time has come” for President Bashar al-Assad to “step aside” without any strategy to make that happen, and a “red line” on chemical weapons that was not upheld. All this has said to Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping that this is a time of wound-licking American incoherence.

Yet Obama does not lack courage. Nor is he unprepared to take risks. It required courage to conclude the Iran nuclear deal — a signal achievement arrived at in the face of a vitriolic cacophony from Israel and the Republican-controlled Congress. It took courage to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough with Cuba. The successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden was fraught with risk. His foreign policy has delivered in significant areas. America has wound down its wars. The home pivot has yielded a revived economy (at least for some) and given all Americans access to health insurance.

Yet the cost of the Doctrine of Restraint has been very high. How high we do not yet know, but the world is more dangerous than in recent memory. Obama’s skepticism about American power, his readiness to disengage from Europe and his catastrophic tiptoeing on Syria have left the Middle East in generational conflict and fracture, Europe unstable and Putin strutting the stage. Where this rudderless reality is likely to lead I will examine in my next column

Có nên gửi tiền VN

Bài anh viết rất khá, lý luận rất cứng, anh TM à. Cũng như anh, tôi cho những người chống gửi tiền về VN không có suy nghĩ sâu vấn đề, dù có bằng cấp. Có bằng cấp chưa hẳn là biết suy tư. Có thể chúng ráng học như con vẹt hồi nhỏ hoặc chỉ đủ điểm thi đậu, rồi tự mãn, không cầu tiến, hoặc không có can đảm hoặc khả năng suy tư đến tận cùng của sự viện, nếu đuối lý khi tranh luận thì mang trò mạ lỵ, vu khống ra xài. Người có học vấn thực sự, luôn luôn cầu tiến và đón nhận một sự có thể là mình sai lầm trong việc dùng dữ kiện hoặc suy tư. 

Người có học là phải biết tha thiết với Sự Thật và Công Lý, chứ không khư khư là mình phải thắng khi tranh luận. Nên nhớ là chúng ta chỉ thắng những người thua kém chúng ta thôi, mà nếu chúng ta hơn những người như thế, chúng ta đâu có học hỏi gì đâu. Vì thế, khi tranh luận, nếu chúng ta càng thua, thì mỉa mai thay, chúng ta càng tiến bộ. Điều quan trọng là phải biết mình thắng hay thua. 

Wissai

Human Brain

SOME hominid along the evolutionary path to humans was probably the first animal with the cognitive ability to understand that it would someday die. To be human is to cope with this knowledge. Many have been consoled by the religious promise of life beyond this world, but some have been seduced by the hope that they can escape death in this world. Such hopes, from Ponce de León’s quest to find a fountain of youth to the present vogue for cryogenic preservation, inevitably prove false.

In recent times it has become appealing to believe that your dead brain might be preserved sufficiently by freezing so that some future civilization could bring your mind back to life. Assuming that no future scientists will reverse death, the hope is that they could analyze your brain’s structure and use this to recreate a functioning mind, whether in engineered living tissue or in a computer with a robotic body. By functioning, I mean thinking, feeling, talking, seeing, hearing, learning, remembering, acting. Your mind would wake up, much as it wakes up after a night’s sleep, with your own memories, feelings and patterns of thought, and continue on into the world.

I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.

How much would we need to know to reconstruct a functioning brain? Let’s begin by defining some terms. Neurons are the cells in the brain that electrically carry information: Their electrical activity somehow amounts to your seeing, hearing, thinking, acting and all the rest. Each neuron sends a highly branched wire, or axon, out to connect or electrically “talk” to other neurons. The specialized connecting points between neurons are called synapses. Memories are commonly thought to be largely stored in the patterns of synaptic connections between neurons, which in turn shape the electrical activities of the neurons.

Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or “connectome,” of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First, we are far from constructing a connectome. The current best achievement was determining the connections in a tiny piece of brain tissue containing 1,700 synapses; the human brain has more than a hundred billion times that number of synapses. While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)

Second, even if this goal were achieved, it would be only a first step toward the goal of describing the brain sufficiently to capture a mind, which would mean understanding the brain’s detailed electrical activity. If neuron A makes a synaptic connection onto neuron B, we would need to know the strength of the electrical signal in neuron B that would be caused by each electrical event from neuron A. The connectome might give an average strength for each connection, but the actual strength varies over time. Over short times (thousandths of a second to tens of seconds), the strength is changed, often sharply, by each signal that A sends. Over longer times (minutes to years), both the overall strength and the patterns of short-term changes can alter more permanently as part of learning. The details of these variations differ from synapse to synapse. To describe this complex transmission of information by a single fixed strength would be like describing air traffic using only the average number of flights between each pair of airports.

Underlying this complex behavior is a complex structure: Each synapse is an enormously complicated molecular machine, one of the most complicated known in biology, made up of over 1,000 different proteins with multiple copies of each. Why does a synapse need to be so complex? We don’t know all of the things that synapses do, but beyond dynamically changing their signal strengths, synapses may also need to control how changeable they are: Our best current theories of how we store new memories without overwriting old ones suggest that each synapse needs to continually reintegrate its past experience (the patterns of activity in neuron A and neuron B) to determine how fixed or changeable it will be in response to the next new experience. Take away this synapse-by-synapse malleability, current theory suggests, and either our memories would quickly disappear or we would have great difficulty forming new ones. Without being able to characterize how each synapse would respond in real time to new inputs and modify itself in response to them, we cannot reconstruct the dynamic, learning, changing entity that is the mind.

But that’s not all. Neurons themselves are complex and variable. Axons vary in their speed and reliability of transmission. Each neuron makes a treelike branching structure that reaches out to receive synaptic input from other neurons, as a tree’s branches reach out to sunlight. The branches, called dendrites, differ in their sensitivity to synaptic input, with the molecular composition as well as shape of a dendrite determining how it would respond to the electrical input it receives from synapses.

Nor are any of these parts of a living brain fixed entities. The brain’s components, including the neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses (and more), are constantly adapting to their electrical and chemical “experience,” as part of learning, to maintain the ability to give appropriately different responses to different inputs, and to keep the brain stable and prevent seizures. These adaptations depend on the dynamic molecular machinery in each neural structure. The states of all of these components are constantly being modulated by a wash of chemicals from brainstem neurons that determine such things as when we are awake or attentive and when we are asleep, and by hormones from the body that help drive our motivations. Each element differs in its susceptibility to these influences.

To reconstruct a mind, perhaps one would not need to replicate every molecular detail; given enough structure, the rest might be self-correcting. But an extraordinarily deep level of detail would be required, not only to characterize the connectome but also to understand how the neurons, dendrites, axons and synapses would dynamically operate, change and adapt themselves.

I don’t wish to suggest that only hopelessly complicated models of the brain are useful. Quite the contrary. Our most powerful theoretical research tools for understanding brain function are often enormously simplified models of small pieces of the brain — for example, characterizing synapses by a single overall strength and ignoring dendritic structure. I make my living studying such models. These simple models, developed in close interaction with experimental findings, can reveal basic mechanisms operating in brain circuits. Adding complexity to our models does not necessarily give us a more realistic picture of brain circuits because we do not know enough about the details of this complexity to model it accurately, and the complexity can obscure the relationships we are trying to grasp. But far more information would be needed before we could characterize the dynamic operation of even a generic whole brain. Capturing all of the structure that makes it one person’s individual mind would be fantastically more complicated still.

Neuroscience is progressing rapidly, but the distance to go in understanding brain function is enormous. It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind.

I certainly have my own fears of annihilation. But I also know that I had no existence for the 13.8 billion years that the universe existed before my birth, and I expect the same will be true after my death. The universe is not about me or any other individual; we come and we go as part of a much larger process. More and more I am content with this awareness. We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses. For the foreseeable future, bringing your mind back to life will not be one of them.

Kenneth D. Miller is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia and a co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

A poem in three languages

TẠO 

SÁNG

nhạc day dứt cho tình yêu tạo sáng

màu sắc khơi trên vạt nắng vừa tan 

tiếng nói khác mà sao như quen thuộc 

hoa héo thơm tận ngây ngất ngàn hoang

từ vô hạn nẩy mầm bao đọt sống 

ngửa tay nâng cả mộng ước hư không 

nhặt sỏi đá giữa biển khô muối mặn

xé mây khuya nhóm lửa đốt mênh mông

ta khao khát quay về nguồn sáng tạo 

đường thật xa chỉ hồi nhớ vọng dao

em đâu đó mùa đông nay tới muộn

lạnh dòng sông và lạnh cả hồn sao

Lưu Nguyễn Đạt

ÉTINCELLE 

DE VIE

ta musique s’illumine d’amour 

à l’instant où le soleil disparaît

telle une image autre et pourtant familière

une fleur agonise dans son propre parfum

de l’infini sans fond une étincelle de vie 

soulève le rêve du néant entier

et le grain de sable dans l’océan desséché

perce le ciel pour allumer l’espace immense

mon retour passionné à la source d’inspiration

prendra le long parcours de la mémoire à peine vivace

tu arrives tard mon amour dans le coeur de l’hiver

glaçant la rivière nocturne et l’étoile éphémère

Luu Nguyen Dat

LIGHT OF LIFE 

Music lingers on so love can shine

Colors explode on the disappearing light

Different voice but sounds familiar

Flowers fading yet fragrance in the wild stays forever

From infinity born countless waves of life

Sustaining dreams and dreams of nothing

Giving rise to pebbles in drying salty seas

Tearing apart night clouds to light up the sky

I'm coming back to the passion of creation

Along the endless road of recollections

Winter comes late to where you arrive

The river is cold and so is the soul of stars

Quickie Translation by 

Wissai

August 23, 2014

canngon.blogspot.com

A Letter to a Puny Mind

My dear, dear, little Pee Vee, 

Yes, really!

"Fea" is the feminine adjective of "feo", meaning "ugly", and thus the polar opposite of "Linda" (masculine form is "lindo"), meaning "pretty".

My Spanish is shaky, but I do know the basics, having studied it at graduate level for a couple of years. Thanks to you guys, I am working on it to refresh my knowledge, especially I am going to spend some time in Spain for the remainder of this month. 

Don't get too mad at me. You might get a stroke and that would be very unfortunate. Believe it or not, I am not really taking what's happening to heart. It's been a learning experience for me. Life is nothing but an accumulation of experiences. Who knows, you, Ito, and Linda might learn to like me, given time. Most people do. Just ask Mr. Tâm Minh and Mr. Trần Quang Diệu, not to mention Mr. Giác Hạnh and several others who wish to remain nameless. 

By the way, don't be overly impressed by the psychobabble that Linda has uttered about me. She gleaned the information from the posts on my blog, which were laden with dreams and fantasies. The posts were merely the recording of my struggles with the English language. I have taken great liberties in putting words together in the blog. 

Bye now, I will keep you fondly in my thoughts. Learn to take what you diss out and be more respectful and circumspect with facts and truths. Don't think you can understand me that quickly. 

Tschüss! Ciao! ¡Hasta luego!

An Accidental Man

I was a wanted child. My father assured me that on more than one occasion. My three elder brothers had died of childhood illnesses because of lack of the availability of modern medicine. My family lived in a backward part of the country. My parents were desperate for another son in case my eldest and surving brother who was 12 years my senior would not make it to adulthood.

After my parents made love during a stormy, rain-drenched night, they both knew a son was in the making. The earth shook and the sky thundered and rumbled all through that night

Apart from this planned, deliberate conception of me amidst lightning and thunder and winds and rain, and my entry into this world was no less dramatic which I may or may not elaborate and amplify later, I am hastening to emphasize that I have led an accidental, prosaic, quiet existence. 

I fell in love three times accidentally with all the wrong women for alI the wrong reasons. I found a white-collar job accidentally. And I picked up writing accidentally. I didn't elect to write. Not really. Writing came to me. It forced itself on me and refused to go away. Some people reach for a bottle, a cigarette, or a gun when they feel things are out of joint, I reach for my iPad and my fingers start flying across the keyboard. I write therefore I am. 

I just learned that humans are more fragile than they let on. Actually, I should not have been that surprised, but I was quite surprised nonetheless. That meant I was still sweet and innocent. On the other hand, that also meant I was stupid in defying conventional wisdom. Most humans are small-minded, mean, and not truthful when under attack or siege. They become ugly, dishonest, self-righteous, childish, pathetic, and pathetic. They become small. Some truths are better off unarticulated. If a person is smart, he would know them. Dumb asses can't understand them. Talking about these truths with them is like talking with children. An undeveloped mind makes a person forever a child, but he wouldn't know it. Maybe he does. Self awareness is not a given. Something is beyond your grasp if you don't have a capacity for it.  Be mindful of the bigger picture and the final victory. Things must be in proper perspective. Pay attention of the trigger points. Be eternally patient. Wait for the right moment. Life is all about waiting. Maybe forever. If the moment does not come. So be it. You can't force things. 

We use words to heal, but we also use them to kill. Words are a knife. Their values lie in their use. They are a wondrous invention, a precursor to actions, a means of communication, a tool to supplement music---sound upon sound. Humans use words to define themselves and let others know who they are. Two human strangers. They size each other first from the physique, body posture, attire, and facial expressions. Then come the words which form lasting impression because they are the product of the mind. They are also the definitive statement of self-declaration. A person speaks and he is instantly judged by others by the choice and rhythm of his words. I was recently involved in a protracted, ugly verbal brawl with ignorant, pig-headed, biased, brainwashed, and vicious scumbags. A few friends told me privately I should have chosen the Middle Way and stayed away from the brawl. My answer to them was as follows:

"Before you arrive at the Middle Way, you must go through the experiences of living/experimenting the extremes, otherwise you don't really know what the Middle Way is. It's one thing to just know something conceptually, but to really know something you must live/experience it. Life is the collision of the extreme forces, within and without. Now you have seen one extreme side of mine. You will see the pendulum swing back and I will be reticent, amiable, taciturn, laconic, and wise. Don't you know lurking behind the façade of a bombastic fool is the serene indifference of a smiling saint?"

Yes, after all what has been said, i arrived at a hypothesis that I am the only human that I know that doesn't practice hypocrisy and doesn't accuse others for precisely the sins and  shortcomings that I possess. I am not a fake as so many people around me are. Of course, I despise fakery and fakers. They are dishonest and they are weak. A few years ago, a not-too-smart, good-for-nothing woman loser told me that I was a stupid loser! I was stunned by her intemperate remark. A wave of understanding about how lesser humans "think" washed over me then. They definitely don't think as I do. My friends, if you are superior to me in any activity or trait, I would never deny that fact. It is what it is. I don't wish it to disappear. I don't deny its presence. Your superiority would not bother me one iota, even if you brag about it. In fact, I would try to emulate your superiority. You have inspired me. You have pushed me to be like you, knowing that while I may not succeed in my quest, but I will surely be better for trying. That's me in a nutshell. I respect facts and truths and self-improvement. That's why I respect Obama (cool under pressure, articulate and compassionate) and Pope Francis (a humble, empathetic churchman and a very able politician who is revolutionizing his Church). I recognize them as my superiors and I am emulating/aping their behaviors. 

Yesterday and today two fools tried to show off their stupid conceptions of Time in ungrammatical English. What a joke! 

The first fool (Nguyễn Nhơn)  wrote:

Life is too short.

Life is not too short nor too long
It's just time that flows always
As human soul flies by

Đời người không dài cũng không ngắn
Chỉ là thời gian trôi mãi
Khi hồn người bay bay

Then the second fool (Ito, who else?) chimed in:

Time is not real! 

It is your mind

Remember whatever passing by

Create an experience

Call it TIME!

Then the first fool gushed forth the agreement

Exactly, it's is our mind
That plays around the vanity world
And the immense universe

Đó chính là tâm ta
Dạo chơi nơi trần thế phù hoa
Và vũ trụ bao la

The fact that I didn't bother to argue with these fools indicated I finally overcame my own stupidity to hold a dialogue with fools. I would learn nothing but irritations. Let them show off to the world their stupid understanding of Time in their fractured English. I am tired of correcting the errors of the way these lesser humans "think". I am tired also of their defensiveness, ignorance, self-righteousness, and lies. These lesser humans serve only to confirm my conception and perception of myself vis-a-vis them. They are good for my ego, but useless to my mind. I learn absolutely nothing good from them. My precious time must be devoted to good friends, learning, exercises, making money, and meditation. 

I am on my way to Europe for 17-day vacation. The British accent of the flight attendant of the British Airways was crisp and very pleasing to the ears. Maybe I should adopt a British accent from now on. 

The British accent reminded me of her. When I was in my 20's, 30's, 40's, and even early 50's, I used to think of her every day, every second of my waking moments .I also used to dream of her, too, every three weeks or so, like clock work. And the dream would be the same damned old dream. I would chance to meet her in the streets, and I would run after her, asking her the same damned stupid question, "But why did you leave me? What did I do wrong?". And she would say nothing. She just took off on her Honda, her long hair flying in the wind, leaving me behind watching her disappear from me, second by second, minute by minute. And I would wake up, feeling sad beyond measure. For years, I improved my mind because of her. I studied languages, read books, and learned how to write so that one day she would chance to discover that I wouldn't be the same Roberto she left behind when she was 24 years old and I was a fool at 23. Of course, I don't love her anymore simply I realized she was not as good a woman as I had thought she was. She was all brain and no heart whereas I am now very probably both heart and brain. One only really loves those for whom one has respect. The moment I stopped respecting her, my love for her withered on the vine. But Baby, even now as I am saying to the world I no longer love you, memories keep standing the way. Love was short, but memories are long, too long. 

Guess what, you probably don't believe this, I forgave you. I forgave everybody. I had to. I wanted to live with joy, not with rancor. I hated being small. We all have choices, more than we think. We just have to say to ourselves that we want to be big-minded. Hate makes us small. Forgiveness makes us big and opens our heart and makes us get in touch with what Christians call Grace. A lot of Christians talk about Grace, but they cannot practice it. I ain't no Christian, but I know Grace and I practice it. And I have Peace within. Man is a clever animal. He invents concepts to help him survive, help him get through tough times, whether or not the concepts make sense or not. Of course, I wouldn't go too far down the make-believe lane/concept/myth and believe in a Personal God. Suffice to me that I subscribe to the concept of Grace because I know I myself need forgiveness, over and over again. Assholes and scumbags say that I am a hypocrite, but they don't know me. I have many bad traits, but hypocrisy is not one of them. They just don't know me well enough. They think I am just like them. They engage in self-projections. They can't and wouldn't admit that I am morally better than them. But I am. Trust me, I really am. People invariably discover that I am quite beautiful morally after they bother to get to know me. 

Yesterday I visited the two most famous works (Casa Milà, La Pedrera; and La Sagrada Familia) of Gaudí in Barcelona. Today I spent time at the museums (Barcelona and Picasso) and a monastery called Montserrat  built high up in the mountain. At night I partook in the nightlife on la Rambla neighborhood.

The Internet went down and I thus couldn't tell her what I wanted to say whenever I am physically away from her. Love is a mystery. It's more so when it's inarticulate and inexpressible because it's forbidden and strange. What others stupidly refer to as hypocrisy in me, is merely the manifestation of conflicting personality traits. As someone put it, I am a genre unto myself, comic, queasy, sweet and unnerving all in the same confusing, head-scratching, tongue-hanging moment. To talk with me is to encounter a series of non sequitur experiences. In other words, to have a conversation with me is to deal with humanity itself: conflicting and many-sided. No wonder I love words and languages. I traffic and revel in them. Only in them does my tortured soul find peace. 

To say I love her is perhaps more an over-statement than understatement. At this stage in my life, I honestly don't know what love is anymore. I know about dreams, though. I dream and think of her often ever since she took my hands into hers and spoke passionately about what could have been. Anyway, life is never what we want, but what we make the most out of it. I have always been partial to polished stones and polished, stylish, cultured women. Bitchy women bring out the worst in me. In life as in art, bitchiness is bad manners. Friends, like readers, said W.H.Auden, must not be shouted or treated with brash familiarity. 

Palma de la Mallorca is quite a city with thousands of sailboats in the marinas; the gorgeous, huge mosque/castle converted into a cathedral; and the masses of tourists congregating in the city, part of their journey to mainland Spain or to other bigger and more famous cities around the Mediterranean. Marseille is my next scheduled stop.

The last few days have brought on, into sharper relief, my awareness that one must have an unbridled curiosity of the world and boundless optimism in people in order to enjoy traveling. Also, one must savor the unsuspected moments of both joy and disappointment in condensed, concentrated encounters/discoveries of how people in different lands live and behave. In meeting and dealing with them, one knows something more about oneself. One must become an anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologist all at once. My traveling experiences have shown me, time and time again, people are the same and yet different from one another. To be human is to experience both solidarity and alienation with our own human brothers and sisters, whether or not they speak the same language, and share the same history and culture with us.  To be human is to be both blessed and cursed at the same time. However, slowly and in concentrated dosage, I have learned to be more amiable and forgiving in dealing with people while recognizing most humans have a strong need to dominate others, and to win in any contest that they enter. Ego is a relentless master and a burdensome friend. To be happy is to recognize and deal effectively with this master and friend in others and in us. 

Marseille was the oldest and second largest city in France. I took a little train that went by the old fort, the old winding road along the beach before clinging up hill the Guardian Cathedral which served as a military watch tower in times of war. The cathedral was beautiful. There was a statue of Jesus lying dead in front of the crypt section. I observed that many faithful touched the statue with loving adoration. And I was moved. And I had a moment of epiphany about Man's affinity for transcendence and sublimity. 

La Spezia, Italy,  was next on the itinerary. The city was pleasant. Free wifi was available throughout the city. I could go to Florence, but didn't feel like doing so as I was having a flu and felt a need for rest and sleep. 

I am in Civitavecchia, a deep water port which is about an hour drive from Rome. I've been in Rome before. The Vatican City didn't move me. St. Peter's Square left me cold. The size and the throng of tourists made me shudder of the hold of pomp and pageantry on most of humanity, the lesser and ordinary humans in my book. Yes, the masses fascinate me for their herd instinct and slavishness. Yes, I hold them in utter contempt. Yes, I regard myself as an elitist. I can take religiosity in small dosage, as in the Guardian Cathedral in Marseille, but not on a large scale because a large scale display of religiosity induces humans into delirium and frenzy and blind adherence to raw emotions of herd instinct and irrationality whereas a small dosage of religiosity  tends to bring on  contemplation and communion and reasoning to the why and the how and serious quest for truths and relevancy of our existence. 

I used to take pride in regarding myself as an artist. I used to beam broadly when people remarked that I had artistic sensibilities. Now I just live life with detachment and bemusement. I no longer care for the label attached to my existence. I just am, trying to hang on to life as long as I can while preparing myself for Death which may come at any moment. 

Avila: 

Teresa of Avila, the nun who was canonized and made Avila famous. I purchased a cap for souvenir. 

Segovia: 

-Cathedral of Segovia: last Gothic cathedral built in Spain. built to replace the one destroyed by war in 1525. 

-El Alcázar: fortress cum royal residence high on the hill surrounded by most and river, remnants of artillery pieces left behind.

EL Escorial:

Hapsburg Royal Palace: splendor, extravagant, grand, wasteful use of public funds. Money taken from the colonies. Inept rulers. No wonder Spain went into decline. Containing a monastery where there is a court yard of the Jewish Kings: rebuilt the replica of Jewish temple

Valley of the Fallen:

23 years to build(1940-1963) to honor the fallen soldiers in the Spanish Ciivil War: a grand stone construction of monument and church. Franco was buried there.So was the fascist party leader. Death is the good bye of everyone and everything, including memories. As I am getting old, childhood memories play an important role. 

Primark on Gran Via in Madrid:

A wonderful shopping experience, fashionable quality clothing merchandise at bargain prices, even lower than Walmart prices. Since the suitcase was already packed quite tightly, I could only squeeze into it pair of jeans and a winter scarf. The place was jam-packed with shoppers. It seemed to me that Madrileños do nothing all day but to shop, eat, and drink. 

Few men (in fact no one ) that I personally know can rival me in ribald humor, emotional depth, lavish inventiveness in and love for language. It's true when I write fiction, as I am doing now, it's hard to follow my train of thoughts as I give free rein to the swift mutations of ideas and images. Do my words, in all of their exuberance, occasionally strike a false note? You can bet your sweet ass that they do, but frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. I write more for myself than for you. I am searching for a voice that's quintessentially mine. I am looking for a way to have both catharsis and peace in this lonely world of mine. Last night I once again had another significant dream involving SC. I found her naked with another man. I had a gun in my hand and threatened to kill him. He dared me. I didn't give in to the impulse. I called the cops instead. Then I woke up and felt cold and cynical. 

November 8, 2015

À La Recherche Des Animaux Domestiques Perdus

À La Recherche Des Animaux Domestiques Perdus

I was thinking of writing this piece in French, but to save time, I fell back on my more reliable staple, the language the Bard Shakespeare wrote and in the process contributed to its richness.  

Writing has saved my life more than once. It helps me get my aggression out. I kill bastards, morons, and assholes with my words; I stab their ego and stamp out their pride; I go over the moon with my fantasies. I have made legions of enemies that way. I am looking for love in reverse. You don't have to tell me. I know I am different. I've been marching to a different drummer. Dale Carnegie isn't my hero; Nietzsche is. It's hard to live with humans, because silence is difficult. In order to make living with them more easily, I treat most of them with undisguised contempt and disdain, because they deserve it. 

They are fake. They pretend to be nicer than they really are. To know if they really are nice, I would make fun of them to see how they react. Almost invariably, they get angry and childishly try to protect their wounded ego. 

They are ignorant and stupid, so I tell them so. They rarely admit that they are afflicted with ignorance and stupidity, thus confirming what I think of them. 

They are really animals, impervious to truths. I am raising three of them as pets:

1. An ugly and fat iguana that answers to the pet name Pee Vee. It really makes me laugh and relieves me of the daily tedium. 

2. The poor crazy and skinny female formerly stray dog (bitch) with a rather fancy name Chienne Bleue or Dog Thanh. This dog is vicious and really delusional. It thinks it is a heroine about to save a poor people from extinction. 

3. A dim-witted, really stupid, but pretentious monkey called Toyota Itcho. It has tried to speak like a human, but it has no success. It even imitates me by typing on a computer, but the "words" that come out are of course all gibberish nonsense. Despite my years of being around languages, I can't decipher what the monkey has tried to convey. That validates the now accepted truism among linguists that only true humans possess language. Simians can scream and holler all they want, but what they produce is not language. 

These animals always try to get my attention. They howl, scream, and beg me to have a dialogue with them, especially Toyota Itcho. Sometimes, out of pity, I oblige them, making them deliriously happy. This afternoon, on coming back to my condo, I discovered that the place had been ransacked by burglars during my four-day stay in D.C., for a high school reunion; and the door had been left open. These three animals I've kept as pets availed themselves of the situation and got out of the condo. They are too stupid to know the way back. I am looking for them. Does anybody on the Net know where they are? 

October 5, 2015

La Ciudad de Pecados. 

Wissai

canngon.blogspot.com

Facts and Truths

Facts and Truths:

One of the most glaring aspects of the behavior of human animals is the inability to face unpleasant facts and truths about themselves or the world as it is. So they impose their own set of facts and truths on the real things. These human animals illustrate the lack of intellect, will-power, and honesty. 

Pee Vee, Ito, La Chienne Bleue, The Midget Blue, The Ignorant Intercouse  and many others are exactly the kind of human animals I've met in my journey through life.