From my friend’s therapist, Dr. John House.
12. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.
The sphere of human affairs that is influenced by facts, cause and effect, logic and well-argued, more or less persuasive positions, is like the visible part of an iceberg.
Invisible in the water is the far greater bulk of the iceberg, the visible part being only a small fraction of the iceberg. Emotion in human affairs is like all the stuff below the water line and plays a gigantic role in keeping the whole thing afloat and upright. We may not be able to see that vast bulk without an underwater camera, but without that giant underwater part, there’s no iceberg. No living, sentient head without the much larger, deeply feeling body to carry it.
It’s the same way with our emotions, they carry us. And when they’re inflamed, no amount of logic alone can touch them, let alone soothe them.
The seemingly logical question needed to solve a conflict “what do you need from me? how can I heip?” cannot be asked or answered by someone whose emotions are clenched in childhood terror. They’re simply impossible questions to form when we are upset that somebody seems angry at us.
Yesterday, after the Senate parliamentarian did her thing, it was put to a vote whether private insurance companies would also be required to cap insulin payments at $35 a month (and presumably lose a mountain of money). 43 Republicans voted no, effectively a filibuster.
When the entire Inflation Reduction Act, the skinny, almost unrecognizable, reconciliation-ready version of Build Back Better ( filibustered quite effectively with the assistance of two rogue Democrats), came up for a vote, those same seven bipartisan Republican senators voted with the other 43 against the entire bill. That’s called party discipline and loyalty to an angry base.
So we wound up with a fraction of what the vast majority of Americans actually want, but it is much better than zilch. Until we can fix it, that’s democracy in the age of Koch, Trump, Barr and the likes of Ginni Thomas and friends like Mark Meadows and fervent midievalist [1] Snarlin’ Sam Alito.
That said, congratulations to us all and to this poor, magnificent earth we have long been such negligent stewards of.
[1] To save you a click on Google: One who sympathizes with the spirit and principles of the middle ages: often with the sense of one who is antiquated or behind the times.
From the very worthwhile series on the development of policing in the US, Behind the Police, by Robert Evans with co-host Propaganda.
When you are in a brutal conflict that will not stop, when every move anybody makes (or doesn’t make) to try to solve it twists the knot tighter and tighter, and the standoff seems increasingly hopeless, how do you begin to resolve a mutually painful and desperate impasse?
Fuck if I know, though one thing I’ve learned is that no solution to any painful interpersonal battle comes from the application of logic. I’ve also learned that Reason, once everybody’s pain is inflamed, is sometimes entirely irrelevant.
Paradoxically, the more reason is on your side, sometimes, the harder the other party, now accused of being unreasonable on top of everything else, will have to resist and the worse it will go for you, for everyone.
Sometimes you will turn an emotional corner for reasons you can’t completely understand in that moment but your emotions will tell you something true and important that you need to do immediately and you can do that, and sometimes that may help.
It will certainly help more than being stuck on the senselessness of placing all blame on one person, alone responsible for putting a world of trauma on loved ones. The exact reason for your emotional pivot may be revealed to you afterwards, if you puzzle over it long enough, though that reason also doesn’t matter.
Fucking humans, man, no wonder this planet is always at war.
You get what you pay for. Another excellent and important presentation by Sheldon Whitehouse, number 17 in his series The Scheme, which is about the “Libertarian” billionaire industrialists’ scheme to control the regulatory state, the entire government, society and culture by controlling the Supreme Court. And a dirty little billion dollar scheme it is.
All of these women were actively battling or recovering from battles with various cancers. All of this creative animation was done in four two-hour sessions. A very nice 8 hours, indeed.
From a recent Washington Bezos exclusive:
Prospective jurors in [Roger] Stone’s trial had completed confidential questionnaires that asked for their views on Trump, Stone and others caught up in Mueller’s investigation. Stone’s lawyers agreed to keep the responses confidential, and no details had been disclosed publicly. Questionnaires completed by those selected as jurors were later leaked to right-wing operatives, prompting an FBI investigation. No findings were ever publicly disclosed.
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