redcairo

The Milky Way over Lenticular Cloud over Mount Rainier over Washington State by Matt Sahli A different crop version I like very well:

Yeah maybe, but I am quite specifically not religious. I am however a mystic (the accidental garden variety sort -- the "WTF?!" spontaneous experiences path more than the carefully planned path). And I live in a political world. So I still have to find the place inside me that integrates the two areas. Haven't quite got it down yet...

Humorously I was actually trying to demonstrate where politics and cultivation may join but I see that didn't succeed lol.

I tend to think Ataturk disproved the notion that dictatorship is intrinsically bad or tyrannical. I grant, he became a dictator mostly so he could kick the ass of everything bad, set up tons of good, and then establish a democracy to outlive him and outgrow him. He was non-religious and a war general but probably some evolved Being behind all that. Still, one could say that in a perfect world, dictators can sometimes accomplish something no other form of government could. The whole EU thing I see as a form of political multiculturalism. A lovely idea on paper. Doomed in reality.

One of my favorite sayings by one of my favorite historical people: "Sovereignty is not given. It is taken." -- Mustafa Kemal Ataturk It always has been -- and again someday will have to be. I think fundamentally, capitalism and democratic republics and that whole part of the spectrum is about the sovereignty of individual free will -- the caveat being, "...except as eroded by the system" which varies depending on the system. As I'm sure Karl could outline in detail, heh. "Blurring for the sake of bullying" seems like the way of politics in today's world. A complete inability to use discretionary thinking or evaluation. When I disliked socialized medicine as presented by President Clinton's "wife" it was because I didn't like the medical plan. When I disliked the ideas for 'Obamacare' it was clearly because I was a racist and he was black, go figure. If I dislike tenets of Islam that seem to enslave people and endanger the larger culture around them it must be because I just don't like Muslims but if I have the same opinion about a few elements in Scientology it doesn't get bound to a whole group. I suppose that's because so many of them are Caucasian. If I'm attempting to have a conversation about something like say, illegal immigrants and border security, and someone instantly starts ranting that I'm just racist about Mexicans, that's nothing but a bully tactic to prevent all discretionary thinking -- unless it's merely a tactic to displace any thinking at all because the accusers in question are themselves idiots.

This is one of the topics I find most challenging to my spiritual life. Once I was in a meditation (I do 'imaginal' meditations) in a place akin to several hundred years ago, and some soldiers were planning to go burn one structure, kill the people, and then take another. I was weary, and I said, why do I care. I cannot stop all these people myself. Why is it even my business? And 1st of 4 (part of my spiritual structure) tells me, "It is ALWAYS your business if this kind of energy is in your reality." Now, what qualifies as "in" my reality is a question I guess -- Germany is not in my reality unless I really reach out for it. Germany could cease to exist and I wouldn't even know unless someone posted about it on facebook. I probably wouldn't be affected in the slightest by it happening, either, except I'd miss a couple handsome actors. So really, it's not "in" my reality. Then again, I feel concern and a reaching-out for it, not just in Germany but the issue over all, including the issue as it unfolds in my own country, which to varying degrees IS in my life closely. So albeit indirectly it becomes something I care about. But then I ask myself again, what am I supposed to do about it. Why care. That's why I don't read, watch, listen to the news -- I can't fix it. (Besides, I did a study once, and the news is predictive, not reportive. That realization was horribly disconcerting for me and I've not trusted anything about it since.) But i care about this topic, and I ask myself why. Is it something in my metaphysical makeup that needs working out, that is parallel with this kind of energy? Are the issues of the planet reflective of our inner selves, the same way the issues of the cosmos are? In the way that Feng Shui is stronger from the perspective of the whole-house vs. one room, are political incidents like the feng shui big-house perspective of the energy of dynamic events? The tarot are the dynamics -- like the table of elements are qualities actually, the tarot are like a table of elements that are dynamics -- if we were to use "current events" as a focus in our meditations, would this actually have some specifically useful purpose I wonder? Is "the nature of mass events" partly this -- and would it be more powerful, actually, to do meditative work based on those larger structures of energy? I sometimes am a little lost as to how to "integrate" the world that is spiritual and mystical for me -- which is nearly everything, except my job (getting help for it can be those things, but otherwise it is pretty mundane :-)) -- and the raw energies of our outer reality. I am drawn to and a little bit fascinated by issues like this one, by the oppression and imminent breaking that is coming related to larger-government actions (and other side effects, like American politics which show clear signs of events that would likely never happen except in this kind of timeframe and situation). Sitting quietly and being "passive" has never actually been something I'm good with -- that is simply not my road, I think, the quietly and calmly for awhile sure, the passive not so much -- I believe in the Zen of truly "Living" capital-L and interacting with the reality that we went to all the trouble to manifest within. But how to make spiritually-sane decisions in situations where it seems like a little bit of everyone and everything is wrong? Where the situations are so far gone it seems like we're just going to need a few comets to drop us to the stone age and start over and hope it's better next round? P.S. Yes I know I did not actually posit much of anything there (except that elements are qualities and tarot are dynamics). It's mostly just a rant of confusion. Sorry, I guess that's where I happen to be concerning the "integration" of inner and outer worlds in this area.

What is that saying -- "Life is what happens while we are making other plans."

I have only written a couple of poems in many, many years. One was for a cat. :-) The other I wrote just before getting the cat (which was itself a sort of metaphysical experience), which was this one. The Deja Vu of Home I am a child of chaos. The tangled fractals clang in my cells and look for resolution. My body breathes the serenity of identity and soothes the inside-out with its ignorant bliss. I am colored outside the lines. The casually messy beliefs chatter in my psyche and refuse to march in time. My mind, it dreams of consequence and evidence and structures life from the outside-in with its prejudiced loves. I am the One. The soul’s intent and body in tension negotiate so something will get done. My destiny allows the precision of decision and waits patiently for orders which all of me agrees on. I am the mother of my cosmos. The stars blaze within me when it is darkest inside my big idea incarnate. My creation allows day or night wrong or right with classrooms of explanation around every inner corner. I am octaves of invisible color. The glowing lines of spirit pulse in my reality and redeem messy chaos with light. My soul longs for the complete I AM of the hologram and impels me forward on shadowed paths with the deja vu of home. I AM. (Palyne.com, August 22, 2002)

I had a lot of this problem when I was younger. I practiced self-hypnosis for many years, simple progressive relaxation tapes I made with suggestions that were positive and healing, and it was surprisingly helpful. I'm convinced I got more therapy done on myself in a few years than a lifetime could ever have accomplished through normal means. Any "mindfulness" technique that forces you to refocus on "here, now" instead living 20 minutes into the future as Max Headroom put it, is also good.

No, really, I am very difficult to offend. I interpreted your assuming my experience is "merely brainwashing" as what it was, socially, but I'm not bent by that. And yeah, sure! If you can't see it, I think it's not being competent to do so, but I meant no offense with that, it's not like it's some kind of required life skill. It's just that making it everyone else's imagination because you can't seems like a bit of an overreaction. I don't think any amount of intellectual assumption about "how it works" should affect one's ability to actually perceive it, because 'the way it works' isn't about, as you implied, simply telling someone the answer and then letting them imagine they find it in the visual patterns. I have heard there are some subtle eye/alignment issues some people have that may interfere with them seeing these, but I guess I always figured those were rare. Maybe not so much...

The shape is not made by the consciously-visual patterns so it's not really like finding Waldo or a shape in clouds. Honestly if you SEE it, you will know you see it, I mean it's super WOW obvious. The first time I saw one I was yelling OH MY GOD! at it, and laughing. Because I'd been staring at another of the damn things for awhile to no avail, and happened to try another (the coins) and finally actually saw the "depth" of it -- it's really just a depth thing -- and then it was like my brain and eyes understood it finally. I was able to see the shapes or layers in everything else after that although some of them took more effort than others.

No, but thank you for being insulting and invalidating. :-) I saw all the shapes in the magic eye images while having no idea whatever they were supposed to be, because in the books at least as I read them, front to back (I got the first as a gift back in the 90s), there is nobody telling you whatever it is. There is just a weird picture that you have to look at until it becomes clear. The coins for example do not have a shape in them. It's merely that the coins are in 3-D. Although the 3D of these shapes is more like a flat background wallpaper and then a few layers' worth of depth on top of that which can be made into a shape (such as with rounding) or just multiple 'levels' of something. It's so hilarious how you are attempting to pass off your incompetence at doing this as others being stupid! Really it's funny. Maybe you should just actually do it, I'm sure you can! Although at this point I'm thinking ego is going to prevent sincere effort. :-)

I think the 'visual mechanics' of the OP image is just that a constant 'adaptive motion' repeated, the eye gets accustomed to, and then when you suddenly look at something still, the eye goes on with that adaptive motion for a few seconds. Usually. I had this phase once where space kept reframing itself for me -- I would look at something across the room, and then "the distance between us would change radically" even though objectively the distance had not changed at all. Pretty sure it was a third-eye (ajna chakra) effect because I was having several other really obvious effects from that at the time as well. I had never considered that space is as subjective as time.

It's not that it "works on you." It's not hypnosis! It's simply whether or not you have the ability. A little like being color blind or not, as an analogy. Except I suspect everyone can see this if they just make the effort and allow it.

There absolutely IS a heart shape in that rose picture you guys, though I had to make it larger and hold the screen differently in the light before it was obvious. It might have been obvious because I have the book that pic was originally published in though so I recognized it! It took me a bit to see the so-called magic-eye stuff. I do it by holding the pic fairly close, making sure there's plenty of light, and then focusing "well past" the picture (like a foot deep into it) and just hold that comfortably. The brain works out the pattern, and I very slowly pull focus back toward myself, no rush on it, and it starts to come together as you do but keep going slowly, and not until the pattern is fully clear do you let yourself actually look at the shape to define it. Other people talk about crossing their eyes and various stuff, I don't really understand that approach. I think the first one I was able to see was the coins pic, this one: http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa24/SteveStrummerUK/magic-eye-coin.jpg Once I saw it, my metaphysical analogies for it sort of exploded all over, because seeing one reality inside another that seems different just from perspective, is very cool!

Does it matter what a cause is, once the thing is in place? It may matter to 'understanding' for not making that decision or action again. But it doesn't change the past. Wherever you are... there you are. You have to deal with the here-now. Whether it's because you did something stupid, or because someone else did something stupid you had nothing to do with, or because xyz happened in a past life (some would say), or because totally random in the chance universe dropped it on your head -- what difference does it really make? That 'place of worship' sounds more like a place of blame. A better sign sponsored by the same insight might say, "Every moment is a new chance to be better and do what's right. We'll help you find the right road." Or whatever.

Is there a place to store them like commodities in the meantime I wonder. Saudi has a million-man tent city ready for living, but they haven't accepted any Syrians and are building a huge wall instead. There's Gaza's situation where they had a place but just got hemmed in and pressured all around until its nothing but implosion. The part I find frustrating is the inability to tell the difference between who is a current war refugee and who is just someone who wants to immigrate. I see photos of people with children who are looking terrified and helpless and gods, I want to help people like that. I have a back room. I don't have a lot of extra money. I'd still be willing to suffer some to help someone in that bad of a situation spend a few years learning the language and working on being able to get at least minimal work. (Although, if there are not drug/alcohol/etc. problems, I'd probably help a homeless veteran first, if I knew one. Charity starts at home, as my dad used to say.) But then everything else I see and read makes it sound like any given group of 'immigrants or refugees' is going to be this big consortium of people of whom those desperate war-refugees number only a few, and at best the others are just 'immigrants who want welfare' and at worst are Daesh infiltrators (which after recent publicized discoveries of them actually running the ID/bus centers in some areas seems sadly believable). And it would sure be easier to boil it down and say, only send us women with underage children and if they are married, their mates, but we just had a woman with a six month old child go on a killing spree so WTF.

I have to agree with that. By not specifically calling out clear disagreement with the "enslave and kill and undermine the world" parts of the doctrine inherent to Islam, all members are inherently in agreement with it and hence at least a potential direct or (more likely) indirect threat to everyone and everything around them who is not Sharia. To be fair, most of the old Testament is the same kind of utter cultural dreg, but the Christians escape because most of them think Jesus changed all that (technically wrong but socially accepted), and the Jews escape because they are not cutting off hands and heads and selling people into slavery anymore so it's fair to say that neither group is "acting on" that stuff to any appreciable degree worth worrying about. However the ongoing issues and violence associated with Islam is impossible to ignore, so some actual "that-stuff-is-really-not-what-I-believe" is necessary. And doesn't happen because it's so dangerous for anyone to say so. It's probably easier to leave the religion altogether than openly state disagreement with even a few elements of Sharia. So, sad as it is, for the most part anyone part of it is at least passively supportive. I sometimes think one of the inherent problems with people recognizing the danger of certain philosophies is that they are too broad. When you hate everyone equally it's hard for people to take seriously. If we just added in some tidbit that made all those plans specific -- such as being against only Polish people for example, or only against people with blue eyes -- it would be far more glaringly obviously how profoundly inappropriate, murderous and horrifying it all is, and how anybody who would even be part of a group bearing that doctrine should be questioned as appropriate to live anywhere with a different government or cultural structure. One of the ironic but amusing things is that the former leader of Iran used to come speak at universities and would complain that no matter what he and others said, no matter how clearly, or loudly, or repeatedly, that literally we "did not take them seriously." It's akin to someone saying, "Damn it, I am going to kill you, and here is how" and everyone goes, "Oh how cute! And we totally get that those headscarves are your fashion!" No amount of being-utterly-clear makes the West, particularly the media, take it seriously. Media has an interview and it never occurs to the media person that the guy sitting across the table from them, under any other condition, would rape-enslave-kill them and everyone they know. Gee but the guy seems so normal drinking Starbucks and talking about "cultural differences" and how mean the warmongers are. It's really surreal from start to finish. Tell you what, let's send the media home with these people, and if they survive to come out again after a year, then they can have an opinion on the need for multiculturalism or how the only problem is that the West has been mean for a few decades and that's the reason for all the dispute. > Should we allow into our home country people who have this ideology ? My answer is to say No and to say that regardless of them being refugees or having skills we desperately require. I actually do think anybody coming in the door should basically have to say/write/sign somewhere that they will not attempt sedition against the country or harm to its people, and should they be found to be participating in anything like that may be deported. It should be pointed out that any religious establishment doctrinizing *politics* which threatens a government or the constitutional/amendment rights of its people is potentially that kind of threat and should be avoided. Mosque leaders will still obsess on Sharia and undermining everything but at least make them do it more privately and quietly. I don't know that it's practical or possible to just flat-line prohibit anybody of a given religion (though it doesn't stop several countries from acting against Scientology I notice). But I do think we have no obligation to take 'more' people from any given area or background. And that if we want to obsess on taking more middle eastern folks, let's take the interpreters and people who fought for us and often have suffered horribly (and are literally dying while waiting in many cases) -- if we have to hedge a bet on which people are least likely to do us harm, the ones helping us even when it meant potential great harm to themselves for so long seem like a better place to start.

Gee, so many controversies in one thread. :-) I'll take Homophobia for 500, Alex... I simply cannot re-define the word 'tolerance' to mean 'agreement' because to me tolerance just means "lack of concern about that point" or "lack of willingness to insert myself into someone else's business on that point." It isn't about mental agreement in favor of a behavior, it's about physical inaction regarding my disagreement with the behavior, if that's what I feel. Tolerance is "up to the point of my doorstep." I don't care what people do or think on their own. If it 'interferes' with me in some fashion, that's when it would change, but most things don't, why should they. I don't care if someone for example is gay. I have no reason to care. It literally has no impact on my life whatever. If they are my coworker, or my waiter, or my mailman, or my landlord, it still has no impact on my life whatever. I adore typically-testosterone-males, and I get along better with males than females usually, so I'm likely to socially align myself with them first, but so what. I personally do not see any significant difference between choices in sexual gender vs. choices in sexual partners of quantity or sexual behaviors of quality or style (e.g. BDSM). Maybe I like having multiple men (or people), or being whipped with a wet noodle, or prefer women, or god forbid like folk music, but who could possibly have reason to care about this besides me and the people I'm engaged with? That's how I feel about people who may be gay-or-whatever. It's their life, their business, not my business, and I would say the same for anybody else's hobbies, religion, philosophy, and so on, with one big caveat: That is, right up to the point where it's a "known" that a given "idea-set" is destructive to people other than that individual and those who as adults willingly participate with them. At that point they become a "potential risk." It's only potential so I can't and won't act on it, but my brain still categorizes them as a potential threat, directly or indirectly. So, there are cults that I consider the ideologies of damaging "outside their sphere" -- if not "always by everyone" at least at high risk for showing up in some % of their adherents' population. This includes religions which are pretty much just very, very large cults (I consider Islam inherently seditious to literally "every" government and culture). Note that there are other religions that are also 'manipulative' in some respects -- for example, Mormonism is determined to "breed out" others, gain political influence through numbers, and bring a degree of their own culture 'with' them, but it so happens that their own culture nests comfortably within the culture of my country (frankly it vastly improves it IMO, despite I don't want the dogma) so I don't have a problem with it in that case. If I know of a religion with a high probability of killing children over even simple illnesses as they refuse medical care, because it's a child not an adult I consider that a larger social issue (even though I consider things like school and vaccination etc. very much a family not government issue). I consider some political ideologies an issue (e.g. I consider Marxism inherently seditious to a democratic republic such as the USA where I live). But there are such thing as laws, and morality, and freedom of speech I totally support, not to mention many of these people are lovely people and some are friends or could be, then it would be inappropriate on several levels to say, "Some percentage of these people probably are dangerous to my people or country, or will be someday, or will shelter those who are, so let's just deport (or shoot) them all as a preventative measure." Or even harrass them. That would be "intolerance." But that doesn't mean that my brain does not categorize them as a potential "other" (like a tribalism separation, but subtle), it simply doesn't act on it, because "tolerance" means "as long as you are not interfering with my life or actively working against my people or government, I let it be." That doesn't mean I agree with it. Sometimes I vehemently disagree with it. Tolerance merely means that I will not act upon my personal biases because stepping over my own doorstep (so to speak) and getting in their face, is as inappropriate as them stepping over theirs and interfering with me.

> Governments began because Won't dispute any of that. All a done deal no point to debating anyway (though I generally agree). > If people wish to come to a country to settle, to be a productive, independent, law abiding citizen then that's fine. It is quite another thing for the Government to force on the population a large group of refugees and then expect the population to pay for them. I agree but I suppose part of me feels like "well then they shouldn't have a socialist government," but even most the capitalist governments are so infested with socialism at this point there's probably no getting around that. Any situation where the people have agreed to let the government decide who is supported with the money a limited set of people earn is going to lead to that. Maybe they're war refugees in the popular-now but they're illegal immigrants or other "supported" people in other situations. I'm not actually for letting people starve in the streets -- my capitalism doesn't extend nearly that far (or rather, I believe in a heavy social side to things that is NOT from government but sadly doesn't seem to exist without it, as if humans cannot organize themselves to do what is appropriate without some parental force, so it ends up in government which is an inappropriate mess as a result) -- but I do agree that each 'country' (yes I am using that as an Entity again) should decide "who" it's going to host and especially pay to feed. Apparently in Europe that's "everyone." In the US we take in a crazy number of people but through many different categories, and the whole thing is a study in incompetence in many areas -- there are literally up to 24 YEARS delay in 'processing' in some areas even when everything goes right (this to include getting children under 18 brought over to family, who may be young grandparents by the time they arrive!). > No one is forced to pay in the sense that a 'country' must take in refugees as some form of duty/punishment. I agree that's the way it should be -- my argument so far to friends is we owe nobody anything but our own people, as tragic as any situation may be (as if tons of situations haven't been tragic for the last century). There is no cosmic law that says anybody 'has to' take in refugees. And we already DO take in so many people -- we actually take in a number that is way out of proportion to the % of our population compared to other countries. But Europe is basically socialist, and even before this latest period had already made it clear they welcome immigration without clear numbers (or anything enforced it seems), so they got themselves into that mess. I feel sorry for their people. I totally see their point of view. However that doesn't free one from observing that when people are let en masse INTO a place, then letting them starve and freeze with their children on the sidewalk while the people in-country vs. their government argue amongst themselves about what to do with them, is not a good situation either. They might have been better off shuffled back to the Long Walk to any place that would at the least keep them sheltered for the winter and fed. It is not their fault either. The time to decide whether people should be accepted is sometime prior to their actually starving on your sidewalk.

> Government earns no money itself, it sponges off its producers and then expects the producers to pay for the Goverments false altruism. Yes, government is an emergent-property identity -- as are humans as we know them, IMO -- which is supported by its aspects since itself, it exists solely for the purpose of centralized decision. 'Producers' by which I assume you mean citizens or the humans inside a country, everything fundamentally is theirs to build or break; only the decisIons lay with the layer above. As for false altruism, I do think there is clear disconnect between leadership and reality always but moreso over time and especially in politics, but I see that as pretty common in most countries especially those most prosperous -- where the leaders allegedly attempt to maintain the 'ideal' the people allegedly believe in, but eventually the friction between the ivory-tower ideals and the street-tough reality start heating up, friction, eventually some kind of change. Oppression usually comes first. That dynamic once told me in a meditation that 'breaking' was basically intrinsic to it -- that oppression always led to breaking, for one side or another, or in one way or another. > Of course the 'country' did not let them in.(love these equivocations). It's ordinary conversation. That is the accepted model of presenting it. Government does act 'on behalf of' an entire country of people so technically what they decide is what "the country" decides to the outer-world.

So openness and privacy are opposites in this model; but I don't see why it would need to be one extreme or the other. One can be open within certain limits. I allow that my neighbors are pagan on one side, christian on the other side, atheist behind me, and I'm a mystic, and that's ok, and I want all of us to be able to be open about what we do and are and engage in and think and so on. Only at certain limits when some neighbor decides we all need to be punished sooner than their idea of hell for not meeting up to their standards do I reach the "privacy" point of wanting me and their ideas to stay safely in the confines of our heads or at least our own properties. Tolerance and justice are opposites in this model you have; but that implies that inherently one thing is right and everything else should be adjusted, and only our "tolerance" will 'allow' the 'violation' of whatever-it-is. Much like the above, I'd say tolerance comes with a certain 'tolerance' range itself. And diversity and stability are opposites in your model, but in the cultural context we're not talking about one person changing their mind daily we're talking about a lot of people each of whom have their own thang - 'diversity' is spread across the group -- there might in fact be lots of stability present at the individual and family level. Actually, when I think of "comparing" the group of ideas "privacy-justice-stability vs. openness-tolerance-diversity" it sounds a lot like the old Church... culture did move on from that. Well in most places. > Openess is the absence of any resistance to state in any aspect including ideas and personal privacy. How did a cultural 'ideal' which can be understated depending on implementation, end up at the full extreme of thought police totalitarianism here? Though I can't argue that any country that outlaws freedom of speech has pretty much left the building of any kind of citizen rights. > Tolerance is that which the state decrees you must accept no matter how bizarre. Well in some cases perhaps it is, but I think growing up in a culture where you learn to be 'tolerant' for example of other ideas and religions (such as for example my hometown was) versus where you don't (e.g. much of the middle east) seems like a better thing, not a bad thing. > Diversity is multiculturalism as being good for the sake of itself. Multiculturalism failed hard, but I think that's partly for the same reason forced school bussing is such a fail. A city of diverse cultural habits is one thing -- you have chinatown here, and the italian sector there, and the french quarter over there, it works out. But when you try to force them all to blend, it's totally "destabilizing" because like generally needs like to establish a sense of security and tradition which humans need. But I wouldn't say that means a culture cannot be somewhat 'open, tolerant and diverse' if it's done right. It's just that like any government I suppose, those attempting to force it, are doing it horribly wrong.

Did the OP read the story? These are not people complaining because they don't have enough TV's. They have no food, no shelter, winter is coming in, and they are in front of many more people in their situation (who would be helped by resolution also). This includes children. No country should let anybody in if they're going to literally make them lay there and freeze hungry on the sidewalk. That is ridiculous. They have a perfect right to use the systems that the country has already put in place for trying to bring attention to the problem, to bring attention to it. That doesn't make them bad guys, it makes them people trying to defend themselves and their people from a horrible situation. I would also like to mention that they came from the middle east and it's near Winter in Germany. I moved from southern coastal California to Connecticut one Winter and thought I was gonna die, the climate change was so hard on my body. So their shelter situation probably seems even more traumatic. Edited to add: I suspect the reality is that Germany is just having their own internal problems. The higher-up politicians want to take in more and more people, but those who have to care for and provide resources for those people are being overwhelmed, and the immigrants are basically trapped in the middle of the internal country's dispute.

Maybe I should add one thing. Regarding immigration in general, this reminds me a bit of the situation with Mexico. I have worked when younger around a lot of illegals. These people -- mostly men -- worked 16 hour days, 7 day weeks, making almost nothing -- literally slaves, living a dozen to a room in a house I wouldn't put a dog in -- to make a little bit of money they could send home to their wives and children. Because in Mexico the primary job is, or leads shortly to, a bullet in your head. There are just so few options. One guy says to me, when I said, but you never even get to see your wife and kids! He says, but what do I do? Stay with them and we all starve together? Watch them suffer? Here at least I can make a little, it's not much but it's worth more there, and they can live. I swear, I had more respect for many of those men than anybody I have ever met. But then in the border areas, there are lots of immigrants who are nothing but bad attitudes, who abuse everything offered. You see them in pictures that of course make the media -- grabbing their crotch, flipping off the cameras, trashing the flag, and so on. These jerks really are jerks and we should send 'em home. Hard. But they really wreck it for a lot of people who are good people and who, as genuine hard workers, are frankly the very kind of people that built this country and who I think are worth having as citizens. I had a friend who was a illegal, her family spent years, a whole extended family, to buy her passage with a coyote over the border. She was literally a slave in a house in L.A. as a maid. I mean everything you hear about forced slavery, it's real. She barely escaped. I adored her, and when she decided to go home (her mother was ill and she had six young brothers and no father) (Gods! my life which seemed hard was so easy comparatively...) I gave her nearly everything I owned, shipped in big boxes via UPS, because anything she couldn't use she could sell. I have nothing but respect for her. If I were Mexican, I'd probably be cleaning houses in L.A. too. How can I resent anybody for doing what I would do in their situation? But the incoming numbers of illegal (not counting legal, those are fine) are too massive. And now, the issue of terrorism is genuine and our borders are like a gaping door. Nearly every decent-economy country in the world has a very clear and guarded border on their territory, and I don't see anything injust about protecting our people by arranging for this. It's overdue. But it isn't racial. It isn't even about immigrants. It's just about what seems reasonable to me. Yet to hear most people tell it, you'd think that makes me some kind of right wing lunatic who just hates people with browner skin. (Ironic since I am about 15 nationalities myself. I just look generically super-light-olive aka white. Ish.) We have to get past the knee-jerk political emotion and drama in order to have reasonable conversations about anything.

When most of us think of war refugees, we think of desperate people, terrified parents and children, and I think anybody with even half an ounce of compassion feels moved and wants to help anybody in that situation. A very large number of so-called refugees are not war refugees. If they were ever even in the war area/s in question it was often years prior. They may be political or economic refugees but often they are literally just people who chose to immigrate. Many of those people fill the spaces in European countries who are socialist and offer insta-welfare. Many are from cultures where it's not merely that non-islamics and especially women are 'not equal,' they are actually encouraged to be done harm, directly and indirectly. This doesn't end well when those immigrants are in drastically different cultures filled with all the people they've been brought up to despise. And young men - I'd say 15-30 generally -- are the driving impetus-energy of any culture, and if the culture is negative, so is the result. (I read an article recently suggesting that much of historical violence is literally related to sex or lack thereof, which sounded far out at first, but it was a thought provoking idea when explained.) Just recently it's been found how much of the 'syrian refugee' system (busing and IDs and more) was actually being run by the daesh interests themselves, so at this point, the issue isn't whether we feel obliged to help genuine war refugees, it's our difficulty in figuring out who the genuine war refugees actually are. Even once we know that, we also know that statistically some tiny percentage are going to eventually do harm and some much larger percentage are going to know about it and do nothing. The FBI has all kinds of info on this and nobody wants to hear it. Recently, in some European countries it's been discovered the media's been lying to everyone for a long time, suppressing and minimizing or marginalizing stories about immigrant violence, specifically because either police or government interests told them to, for the sake of "not creating bias against the immigrants." Locals who have been aware of the goings-on, and the surreal conflict with reality that law enforcement and government and media have with it, were already enraged, not surprisingly, and now that some of it's coming out in public to validate what a lot of people already knew, it's getting worse. Some resignations have begun. Today a German politician shipped a whole busload of refugees to the country's leader, as he'd warned he would, because his quota was full and he was unwilling to let the surreal denial from above to take in more people continue and beat down his resources in his area. In Sweden you can get arrested for talking about the wrong thing publicly, which has got to be the most draconian laws of this century in a first world country. Of course we're talking about a country that actually mandated what you were allowed to name your kids. Some degree of governmental overkill must be tradition. :-) Nobody learns from history it seems. This is partly because history is not only written by the victors, but unwritten or avoided for hyper-sensitivity reasons. For example in the the US's history, the development of the KKK (a terrorist vigilante group focused against people of color almost entirely African-Americans) was partly a result of a "context situation" of the sort of extreme Sweden seems to be driving. For all the racist lunatics who push those sorts of groups, there are lots of people who seem more reasonable in the middle and who participate for other reasons and whose numbers make these things possible. Much like we see what happened that led to part of WWII following the treaty of Versailles, there are smaller, intense cultural examples that are also worth learning from. In the founding of the Klan, you had the civil war which had hideous, bitter enmity between the North and South and as the North gradually won, the Southerners lived in a context situation where their law enforcement was helpless, they were automatically wrong and often imprisoned or killed for merely lifting their head above water so to speak, while at the same time a large population of people with no education or jobs were suddenly just "free" which also meant free to starve and be lost because they couldn't just become bankers and welfare didn't exist and the whole south was trashed from the war (even the whites were starving and greatly jobless, the fields were salted, and so on). Some of them had a lot of rage, which most of us would say was justifiable, but regardless of reason, it was what it was, and there was a good deal of crime against whites especially the more helpless who were traveling or in somewhat outlier areas (this often meant women). But due to the Northern soldiers' presence pretty much nothing could be done and in their own bias they sometimes encouraged if not carefully looked away for a lot of this. So people who might not otherwise have ever gone this direction, eventually reacted to the sense of helpless rage and fear and they in fact supported the literal 'terrorism' -- not like today's terrorism where you just blow up everyone just to create chaos, but a targeted terrorism to strike fear into the hearts via vigilante-ism, to say: you're not safe. You commit a crime against our people and we will get you -- not formally, but we will. When you least expect it. And an otherwise respectable banker and baker and sheriff would don a sheet and go kill someone because that person was believed to be guilty of a crime. Which likely led to a lot of people being killed who were not guilty of anything, and true racists hate everybody so that expanded, and I assume anybody part of such groups today is a genuine sociopath of some kind, that's crazy. (The victors and media would have you believe nobody ever did anything bad and that group founded solely because some crazies couldn't stand that blacks weren't slaves. Much like the larger political question of federalism taking over state autonomy, today's version is polarized and ridiculous.) AT THE TIME and IN THE CONTEXT in which it occurred, I believe that many of the people who were part of the early org thought they had reason, caused dominantly by the surreal disconnect between the need of the common people to defend themselves, and their legitimate fear about "the other" which was posing a genuine threat authorities would not address and even protected. We are taught by media and history's victors now. Allegedly the US civil war was entirely about slavery (despite few people had them, and blacks even fought on the south side, and that all the early literature was about federalism -- a bigger issue today than then, but too late to fix -- and that Lincoln himself said he'd continue slavery if it would help win the war to keep the federal government in control of all the states (rather than them being independent nation-states who as such had the right to secede). So now people can't talk about things like the Klan - which still exists today as what I wildly guess is a lunatic's club - for political correctness reasons. But that keeps us from learning from history. And one thing we learn is that if people are scared of repeat violence that authorities will not address, and authorities not only prevent addressing directly but even speaking out against it makes you a target or criminal -- eventually that is going to lead to vigilante-ism and reverse terrorism and drastically more bias than merely being honest about the situation from the start would have resulted in. Lying and suppression never ends well. In the USA, what I think many of our own people just don't think about is that we already let in a million people a year and there are very careful and strict numbers for all of this. There are many people who are waiting, hoping for a "special exemption" from the waiting lists. One group, for example, from the middle east in fact, are the people who have fought with our soldiers. These people have often had family members killed for their involvement, they often die while still waiting for us to get around to letting them immigrated. They risked their life often daily and often for years and if there is any obvious example of people who, of all the people in that region, should be best trusted as likely on our side of things -- given they were even under the worst most dangerous conditions over there -- it should be them. If we're going to make an exception and let some "war refugees" in, I think starting with that group would actually be good. We don't have any kind of 'requirement' that says we must let in yet more immigrants than we already do, from any region for any reason. Wars and people wanting to come to the US have been going on for the last couple centuries. Granted we're helping far too much with those wars now which implies a greater responsibility I suspect, but that separate ethos issue is probably not going to be part of this. Bottom line is, we are not "rejecting muslims" by not taking in syrian refugees; rather, we are simply not agreeing to make a "special exception" and take in MORE people from that part of the world or situation than our existing quotas already plan for. But I suspect the truly desperate, most people including me would like to help. But when I think of truly desperate, I think of for example, frightened people, parents holding children, grateful for anything that actually lets them NOT DIE. I don't think of bad attitude immigrants angry because their welfare isn't enough, their shelters don't have enough TVs, and who take their religion of Some Bad Ideas into the public and hurt the very people who are helping them. I would like to help the former group. I just don't know how anyone can weed out and find those people in the big mess of alleged refugees -- and intentionally planned daesh setup 'refugees' -- that we are presented with.