Sunday, November 1, 2015

Fred Dalton Thompson has Passed

I remember him best from Law and Order and those reverse mortgage commercials. My blog overlaps chronologically with the 2008 presidential elections, but I apparently rightly determined that John McCain was the man to beat and never really focused on Fred Thompson, who if memory serves, sort of took the whole primary notion in stride because he worked before and never saw why he had to work hard at the political thing now.

So he didn't.




But no, really. He was a fine actor. I never did pay adequate attention to his actual political record.

3 comments:

Formerly Amherst said...

Hi Vixen, I came to update you on Slender Man, but I may as well say something about Fred while I'm here.

I liked Fred Thompson and was sort of rooting for him when he ran for president. Until his lethargy became apparent he would have gone through Republican primaries in the South slicker than a hound's tooth. We Southern boys sometimes get a kick out of the opinions Yankees draw about us because of our accents. Fred was a little like this. His grasp of politics, global world views, and all were quite sophisticated, but because he didn't sound like he was raised in Connecticut people would sometimes be deceived.

Fred reminds me of a paradox that I see politically nowadays. Back when I was a leftist we were wrong, but we had some clear ideas of what some principles were supposed to be. The idea was virtue in a proletarian (ordinary working stiff) would rise to become a political leader. Whether Marx, Lenin, Engels, or any of the others saw the class struggle being successful when the guy at the bottom could become the leader bringing his values and feelings of equality along with him.

A funny thing happened on the way to the circus. Fred was such a proletarian, likewise Sarah Palin and John Boehner though somehow the left started to embrace the bourgeoisie, fat cats like John Kerry and so many others. So suddenly the left has become the bourgeoisie and a lot of TEA party types are the proletariat, and now there is no more fundamental world view to support contentions.

The truth is both the right and the left are a full of crap as a Christmas goose. They endlessly fight over two impossible abstractions that would destroy the country should either come to fruition. What we have learned recently on the right is that both sides are up to their ears in debt to Wall Street and other wealthy donors. They, right and left, get elected by receiving huge amounts of donor money. And the whole objective is to kid the public while they do their darnedest to carry out the will of their puppet masters in the donor class. There's not enough legitimate sincerity among the political class to fill a shot glass.

**
The girls on trial in the Slender Man case were 12 when they carried out Slender Man's wishes, and now they are around 14. A legal battle is occurring relative to whether they should be tried in adult court or juvenile court. In adult court they could get over 60 years. The defense says they were obsessed. I could write quite a lot about what obsession is and what possible ingredients come together to create an obsessed state (remember, demons come with the ghosts. Most ghosts are OK, but sometimes demons use the opportunity of haunting to co-opt the haunting state.) Anyway, one interesting point is that the court entered a Not Guilty plea for the 2 girls. So, who did the stabbing? Slender Man? Incidentally, all that stuff that made up our conversation on Slender Man is the straight story. My remarks were not invented or made up. They were as substantial as the prerequisites that go into constructing a scientific explanation. (Well, a social science anyway.)

Vixen Strangely said...

I feel like people could once differ about the ways problems were handled, at one point, while still agreeing on what the problems were. Now, I think it's become increasingly difficult for politicians to get beyond 1) the search for donor money and 2) lip service to their "base" to even see the problems in the same way--it's like the Republicans and Democrats have a Venn Diagram of concerns with a vanishing overlap. Sadly, I think that area of overlap was the only thing that got stuff done. I won't say that the parties do those two things in either the same degree or in similar proportions, but it's part of the process of what I'm seeing as the increasing partisan entrenchment.

Trying these girls as adults doesn't make sense to me because looking at what happened, only kids whose brains aren't all "there" yet could entertain killing another child to please "the bogeyman". If one doubts that was their motivation--you would seriously have to figure out what other motivation would exist...for twelve year olds. In their deadly game, it makes sense to them that they are carrying out the desires of Slenderman, and if they believe that Slender has a reality outside of the internet, then they can feel that is a real, compelling reason to do what he wants. Irrational to adults who aren't a part of the fantasy space they opened, more logical according to rules of contagion.

Formerly Amherst said...

“If one doubts that was their motivation--you would seriously have to figure out what other motivation would exist...for twelve year olds. “

I completely agree, and the motivation is the factor that contributes to the high strangeness of this attack. You may be aware that in cases of poltergeist activity one of the first things you look for is a pre-adolescent child, particularly a girl. There have been cases of a lot of poltergeist activity that then disappeared when the young girl passed through puberty.

The idea has been ventured that psychic energy prior to being channeled into normal sexuality can be like a rogue elephant without a prescribed method of release. Sometimes poltergeist activity can take place with an older person, and sometimes people can teach the person's mind to behave itself, and the poltergeist activity goes away.

Then of course there is poltergeist activity that occurs in what we refer to as a “haunting” without any human agency, and most likely that is done by discarnate beings of a variety of categories. (Not always bad.)

In the past we have discussed what happens to this “libido” or energy if through continual brooding a talismanic image has been developed spontaneously. And we mentioned that if the form is built correctly enough the force that corresponds to that form can use the form for expression on a couple of grades of significance. One, the grade of significance that we refer to as the mind, and second, even the physical expressions.

Most malevolent entities influence and overshadow and take control of the mind of someone. Then the energy in a prepubescent girl can vivify the mental image and give it a power source in which to operate on the two grades of significance I mentioned. And this is what happens in one kind of obsession. In smaller and more harmless measures it happens more often than people realize. People would be surprised if they realized how often their thoughts were influenced by a discarnate, mostly benevolent entity.

So we could conjecture a para-psychological phenomenon in which girls with unintegrated sexuality had energy to lend to a very vivid talismanic image, and a discarnate force corresponding to the image then obsesses the minds of the girls and uses the energy to create a force for attempted homicide that is barely stoppable in the best of cases.

I was once called in on a much more lighthearted case. Every time 'Mom' tried to take her daughter to school, the car doors would spontaneously lock. Or they would have a flat tire; or something would be wrong with the car's engine. In this case, I was given the authority to invite the daughter into an apprenticeship in our magical lodge. So we had immediate possibilities for “curing” the problem – either get her a boyfriend or train her in magic. Incidentally, our investigations revealed that she had an interesting incarnation in the wine country of 17th century France. Like many of us, this was not her first rodeo. It worked out fine in the end.

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