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I read some comments on another blog and I started to write a post arguing blah, blah… when I realized that I lack the linguistic ability to express blah, much less blah, blah. It is not even about linguistic ability; I lack the translational abilities to render a comprehensible dissertation on some of the concepts that exist within my head. This I think is one of the reasons some people come off sounding, for lack of a better word crazy. When they go to reason and express their opinions, what comes out is not the beautifully reasoned, logical argument that played out in their head. Oh no, not that. Instead what you end up with is a driveling, uncomfortable pile of twice eaten dog shit; which might beg the question why do dogs do that? The reason for coprophagia in canines seem to be as varied as human political or religious ideologies and if you are concerned about this in any of your canine friends, I would recommend consulting a veterinarian. If, however, you are trying to make sense of what might be in your own head and how to properly extract it for the consumption of others, well that might be a bit more difficult.
The problem is that human beings are complex biological creatures with no natural predators to keep the population in check. It is therefore out of necessity that our species has adapted a self-regulation methodology to attempt population control. Cunning creatures that we are, we constantly find ways around any natural regulative agency. Afraid of being naked, we got some clothes; afraid of freezing, we got some warmer clothes; afraid of boredom, we got Netflix; afraid of living to an old age, we got booze and tobacco. We are very adaptive. So, you are probably wondering WTF does this have to do this being unable to get thoughts out of your head. Well I posit that if the thoughts you are trying to express could truly end war, famine or pestilence; you will not be able to get them out of your head, alternatively, they might get out of your head in an understandable fashion at which point you will be dead, usually in a violent fashion. It is part of the natural process, in fact, the opposite is also true, somewhere along the line of a self-destruction event, there will be a natural correction and the population will boom.
So, in a nutshell, there may be truths in your head that God lets run through your mind so you can mull them over, that may be as far as he will let you go with them. Well unless he needs a martyr, then your goose is cooked. But sometimes those truths that he reveals to you are so you can go and study a subject and get to the heart of the matter for yourself. So, until then express what you can and please if your dog needs it, take them to the Vet.

We have such potential, but we keep falling short. We have a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that talk of unalienable Rights among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. In our Constitution some rights are so important that they were written in as Amendments and the first among them states clearly.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
We are intended to speak, and not just speak but to speak out. To address our government and make our opinions known.
Sadly though we fall short on the entire idea of equality. The whole idea of “all men are created equal” was a forward looking statement on how great this nation could become, and we have come so close, toes right up to the line, we just cannot seem to get across that line. Take for example Meryl Streep; spoke out against an aspect of Donald Trump’s character and people want her to shut up. Mark Wahlberg believes celebrities live in a bubble and shouldn’t talk politics, wait what, we just elected a celebrity as president. And Putin just banned Meryl Streep movies, think about that why would Putin do that. But what was so bad, so horrible and awful that she said that is causing so much backlash?
Read it, I went and found the full transcript and include it below. Did she lie? Did she incite violence against the president-elect? Did she question where he was born or whether he loved America? Or did she just not kowtow? Or is it only ok for white christian men to take a stand against a president who they can paint as an “other”?

Meryl Streep full speech transcript
“Thank you very much. Thank you. Please sit down. Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year. So I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood foreign press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said, you and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press. But who are we, and what is Hollywood, anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida and raised by a single mom in Brooklyn.

Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem — where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in — no, in Ireland, I do believe, and she’s here, nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that — breathtaking, compassionate work. There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.

And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.

Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. Okay. Go on with that thing.

This brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community, to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re going to need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing. Once when I was standing around on the set one day whining about something — we were going to work through supper, or the long hours or whatever — Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is. And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. As my friend the dear departed Princess Leia said to me once, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.””

Thinking, thinking, trying to find focus in the fading light. Ideas like will-o-wisps dance away from me in the twilight. Dancing, dancing, away, flitting just outside of reach into the darkness.
Darkness, darkness where true thought ceases to exist. The darkness of ignorance that consumes thoughts and minds. It waits for all of us, just outside our waking vision, setting a thousand snares; falsehoods, half-truths, prejudices, fears, God… even real truths can ensnare… they can cause us to lose sight of what is most important.
When love, mercy and justice are pushed from the heart and mind; the trap has sprung shut.

How does on consider the order of things. Do you start from the beginning; was it a big bang, the word of God or a cosmic joke with a bad punch line. Is it necessary to understand the beginning of creation in order to create a grocery list? Perhaps the order is only important to creating the list based on he aisles of the store, yet that has nothing to do with setting goals for your life. But how can you know what you want in life and the steps you need to take in order to accomplish your goals, if you have not pondered completely the proper order of things that syncs with who you are as a person.
Consider if you will the grocery store that as you enter has fruits, vegetables and bakery to the right, meats along the back wall and dairy and breads to the left. From right to left you move from various food items, canned, boxed, baking stuff, to household goods as you traverse the aisles. So you go to different stores and see a similar pattern and order to the layout and location of products; you are comfortable with these stores because the order of things is as you expect them. One day you walk into a store though and it is the opposite, fruits and vegetables are in the back, household goods are to the right and meats over to the left; nothing makes sense so you wander around lost trying to find things that you need, all the while your frustration grows inside. How important the order of things can become to us in our lives.
Now consider how you create lists, using the example of the grocery store write out a typical grocery list relevant to yourself. Is it orderly? Do you group like minded items together such as vegetables, paper products, meats? Is it haphazard? Do you just jot down items as they come into your head? Is it a precise list with every item listed? Or is it a vague list with a generalization such as tacos that you understand to mean everything needed to fix tacos; meat, tortillas or taco shells, beans, ingredients for salsa, etc,. Did you know a grocery list could communicate so much about you as a person?
So now with grocery list in hand you can understand if maybe your planning is a little too high level or haphazard. With this information you can then go and pursue arcane knowledge from the hidden acolytes of cosmic order in order to circumvent this potential disaster. If however you find your lists are orderly and precise then I suspect you are only reading this for the entertainment and are totally beyond help. So now you are surely wondering about this arcane knowledge and what is required to find these hidden acolytes. Certainly they must exist because they are constantly leaving signs through out the world that speak to their presence. They are most assuredly in the US because there are 3 great pyramids, pi starts with 3, nothing is more American than apple pie, apple pies are round and so they must be around here. Now I know people like to give them different names, but I assure you that only they know their true name and they change it anytime someone gets too close to the truth.
Well you might be wondering, how then can we find them if they are hidden and only they know who they are. I tell you that is the beauty of who they are and there in lies the secret. It is only by studying them at length and tracing their presence through out the history of the world that you can uncover their current location and name. Before you can start tracking them you must consider the order of things, meditate on the order of things. It is only when you can grasp the truth of the following will you be prepared to pursue them. “I question, but I am deaf to the answers given me. I seek, but I am blind to the path before me. Though blind and deaf, my feet do not stray from the path and the order of things becomes clear in my own mind.”

Start here http://thegeniusdeck.com/ and you will be on the path

There are many days when I wish I could just hear that one motivational speech that would just turn everything around. I would listen to it every day and my life would get on track and I would never look back. I would be able to grab my bootstraps and be on top of the world. I would wake up refreshed every morning, positive, motivated and hungry for success. Nothing could stop me, nothing at all.
You see right now I am out there in a sea of depression, dog paddling with a death grip on a lifebuoy, looking around for a life raft and dreaming about a helicopter. I am dreaming about a helicopter because I want to get to dry land and quick. Dry land, a place I have always dreamed about but never seen. I have only ever managed to get on a boat for awhile, until the sea gets too rough and the boat capsizes. I want to soar up high, where the air is clear and I just know that land is visible and I can get a bearing on which way to fly. Down here on the sea in the life raft, there is no sail, oar or motor; just the currents to carry me along.
People like me need a life coach service to help them sort through our mess, sure sometimes therapists but more along the lines of behavioral therapy that is a administrative assistant as well to get us on the right track. World doesn’t work like that though, sink or swim unless you can pay to play.

A shroud of darkness.
There are no forms here,
just emptiness stretched out.
Uninspiring landscape,
from horizon to horizon.

A shroud of darkness.
There are no lights here,
just twilight stretched out.
Uninspiring dimness,
no darkness or light.

A shroud of darkness.
There are no sounds here,
just silence stretched out.
Uninspiring muteness,
within and without.

A shroud of darkness.
There are no thoughts here,
just hollowness stretched out.
Uninspiring deprivation,
no dreams or visions.

A shroud of darkness.
There is no warmth here,
just cold stretched out.
Uninspiring iciness,
biting at the bone.

I am used to viewing the world from a wide field of vision, 180 degrees of panoramic clarity until age caught up with me. Now with bifocals on I have 3 different areas of vision, the area outside of the glasses and the two areas within. These new limited fields of vision I find disconnected and disjointed, at times disorienting as moving objects pass into view from blurred to focused. The sides next to the reading part seem useless as looking through that portion of the lens requires closing the other eye.

I had a thought though about how people perceive the world around them and why perhaps so many are full of fear. Their vision is restricted, people who are not like them exist as a blurred image. Because their minds cannot comprehend what they are seeing or hearing they are full of fear. Their lack of comprehension is also fed by people just like themselves and by the charlatans who desire power over others. The charlatans can see clearly but their ego’s are fed by those who follow them, so they spoon feed them what they can comprehend even when it consists of lies, they can not see the truth so they will never know the difference.

In this world there exist ideas as grains of sand; I see the grains of sand and understand them. I can grasp their meaning as they fall through my fingers. I see beyond the grains and watch how they flow together in a stream and I know why they are flowing; the pattern is clear in the moment in which I observe the stream. 

Understanding is all I am allowed and only as I actively observe. I cannot act on the knowledge or take it with me. It slips away from me as soon as I turn away and life moves on. I am in the neck of an hourglass watching as time passes away.

When regrets and remorse are the chains that bind you in a mental state of existence, how do you break free?
I keep seeing this commercial for one of the smoking cessation products and the man says something to the effect that since his child was born he has been able to quit smoking with this product. So when I see this commercial I feel a deep guilt that it took me more than a decade after my daughter was born before I quit. Additionally I continue to struggle with my addiction and cravings, when I smell cigarette or cigar smoke, I want one even after 10 years that has not gotten any easier. I have a lot of remorse that I started smoking and regrets that it took me so long to quit.
I scream inside because of how weak I perceive myself to be. Not mentally or physically strong enough to accomplish my goals. Regretting not being able to push myself through pain and injury to stay in the Army because all I did was change my location still had to push through to get through life.
So I chained myself mentally and emotionally in this spot where I feel all of this guilt and even shame that I have held onto for decades now. When I think about it I know that for some reason I do not want to let these things go, I want to hold onto all of my baggage and I can not explain why that is. Really does not make any sense.

Humble is defined as not being arrogant or proud, but also being subservient. It is an interesting concept because if we are truly humble we cannot lay claim to being humble since the claim itself would be prideful.
So being humble would be a state of living that permeates our entire life. If we remove our pride and arrogance from our lives and live a life intentionally in service too others, then how much easier would it be to live the following verse.
Ephesians 4:2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.
If we live this way then surely it would follow.
Psalm 147:6 The Lord sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground.