Some Thoughts And Advice About How to Restore Your Chill

First: Something I've noticed time and time again: People get the most frustrated and emotionally angry over disputes which are currently beyond their ability to resolve.

Ever suspect someone is cheating on you? It will drive you batty. You can't quite prove it. You don't quite know.

It consumes you, until you find the truth. Then, whatever the truth is, you're mostly unburdened. Sure you're hurt and upset, but you're no longer consumed.

Unanswered questions about big eventful things are distressing. Oddly, knowing the truth, even if it's not the truth you'd hoped for, is less distressing, most of the time.

Just be aware of this and don't fall too prey to this tic of the human mind. There are many questions you don't have the answers to (and which even the Great Unbiased Jake Tapper doesn't have the answers to, believe it or not!).

But there is no way you have to get that information, nor to influence events so that the answer turns out one way or the other. You can't.

When people are confronted with this situation -- of wanting an answer or wanting a certain outcome -- but have no tangible way to influence it one way or the other, they get frustrated and emotional, almost as if emotional exertion can somehow influence events.

But that can't either.

That's what I meant by the Mr. Blond quote. Mr. Blond was a psychopath in Reservoir Dogs, but he did see this point clearly. While everyone was driving themselves batty trying to figure out if Mr. Blue was alive or dead, or free or caught by the cops, he just shrugged as he drew some milkshake up a straw: "He's either alive, or he's dead, or the cops got him, or they don't."

All true.

His perspective on many things was bent, but on this point he was being sensible: We don't have the information to answer that question, and sitting around yelling at each other and trying to puzzle the answer out from the same three pieces of entirely-inadequate information is a huge waste of time as well as one's limited supplies of psychic energy.

I don't mean like psionics. I just mean the whole combination of emotional/cognitive energy in the brain.

So anyway: Trump may have done something very wrong. Or something somewhat wrong. He might be in trouble, or maybe he's not.

Mr. Blond would recommend that no amount of deductive brainwork can gift someone with the clairvoyance to see remote places, and no amount of emotional investment can sculpt the stone of reality.

So, just sip the milkshake, and think about the things within your direct power to discover or alter.

Second: I really have to recommend the Social Media Detox. If it feels like you can't take it anymore, then you shouldn't. Take a bit of time off from the Scream Machine.

24 hours is usually enough. 48 hours will cure much of what ails ya.

How all this works, as I've said before, is that people with limited, incomplete, and biased information try to start a stampede of people into agreeing with their questionable, dubious, partisan-twisted conclusions. They make a lot of noise -- a lot of noise -- shooting off their idiot partisan pistols to get the herd stampeding in the direction they want, none of the cows quite knowing why they're all headed in this particular direction.

It's a deeply stupid way to conduct "debate" over political issues, which is why the left favors it so much.

It's also grating on the mind and spirit to have to put up with so much empty noise.

Tune it out. You now know most of what there is currently available for knowing about the latest Dumb Scandals. There is no additional information currently available, and so there's not really much reason to Run With the Stupid Bulls.

When there's more information, you'll know it: The Unbiased and Wise Jake Tapper will tweet snarkily about it.

But there's really no sense in watching a Dumb Pot waiting for it to Stupidly Boil. It may do so tomorrow; it may do so next week. It might never boil because the Idiots Who Invented the Pot never had any water in it to begin with.

But again, no amount of intellectual probing or emotional exertion is really going to bring the closure one would want. Only time does that, and since time is already working on that, that frees you up to read a book or go for a nice sunset walk.

Last week someone asked me if I was following the Social Media Madness over Trump's Big Huge Scandal of Last Week. I think it was the Comey firing, but who knows.

I said "No." Why would I? What the fuck do I care what HuffPo "reporters" and various leftist shills think about this or that?

As far as actual information, I already had most of it, and what I didn't have would come out the next day.

There's a line that goes, "You're not playing the game, The Game is playing you." I think that sums up social (or anti-social) media.

Is the technology serving you, or are you feeling compelled to serve the technology?

If the technology is there for you when you want it, then it's serving you.

If you feel you can't break away because you need to see what's happening next, then the game is playing you.

I keep recommending this guy, who's my new guru. This video explains how the internet is designed to cause you stress which only clicking on the internet can alleviate, and this one explores the topic a bit further.

It's pretty compelling stuff.

In case you trust Anderson Cooper more than a random guy on YouTube whose name you don't even know (and I personally trust the random guy much more), 60 Minutes recently did a (more superficial than the YouTube guy) piece on this so-called "Brain Hacking."

When other people's children are screaming childishly, do you try to get down into the nitty gritty of each child's childish screaming agendas, or do you shut the door and turn on a nice bit of Smooth Sounds of the Seventies?

Third: If they take down Trump, they get Pence. Now, Pence isn't great, but you know, Trump isn't turning out that great either.

But Pence shares the most important quality of all with Donald Trump: Neither is Hillary Clinton.

No matter how much they scream, Hillary Clinton is not in the White House, but off in the "woods," discovering herself or something.

Pretty straightforward from here:

1. Impeach Trump

2. You get Pence

3. Hillary keeps trying to make Chelsea Clinton a salable commodity that she can sell on her political graft QVC network

4. You get to keep laughing at her misery

Things aren't that bad.

Even if they were -- who gives a shit?

Hillary Clinton will never be president.

Never. Ever.

Never, forever.

That doesn't make for a perfect world, but it makes for a reasonable livable one.

posted by Ace at 07:48 PM

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