Month: November 2010

An ordinary–if distraught–man is sentenced to 7 years in jail for guns he owned legally: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20101130_Family__New_Jersey_man_serving_7_years_for_guns_he_owned_legally.html

The simple fact of the matter is that guns decrease crime. Jamaica puts you in jail for years for the possession of a single bullet, and yet has one of the highest gun related crime rates in the world. Big factor: most of the police are corrupt. How do you defend yourself against a corrupt government? You don’t.

That’s why we have the Second Amendment, which was nothing less than another part of our checks and balanced system. Many of our Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with the idea of a standing military, since history had shown clearly that such militaries can be corrupted to support a corrupt government. To counterbalance this threat, they envisioned State militias, and universal access to gun ownership.

And to be clear, if you find yourself in a place with no crime, chances are good you are in the country somewhere, where most people in most states have multiple guns.

In my view, Congress needs to make a statement against all forms of restrictions of gun ownership. If it needs to be a Constitutional Amendment CLARIFYING the existing language of the Second Amendment, so be it.

If people are killing people, it is because our culture is in decline; and our culture is in decline because of the socialists who reject reason, custom, and common sense, in this area, as in all other areas where they render their asinine and perverse judgements.

I am involved in the contracting process quite often, sometimes with the Federal, State, and local governments. I’ve done business with all three. And I can say with absolute certainty that racial and gender preferences cost the American people money.

Case in point: my boss quoted some material to the government at price X. He also quoted it through pass-through that had some desirable minority trait–details vary, but in this case it was a disabled veteran–at price X plus 15% or so. They went with the second option, even though it was the same exact material. All that happened was the government signed a contract with the disabled veteran, and he signed a contract with us. He pocketed much or all of the difference. His job? Be a disabled veteran and be in the food chain. I see this all the time: one person companies that I call “cut outs”, who just flip contracts.

We need to call Affirmative Action what it is: an integral part of the political spoils system. If you’re black and you vote Democrat, contracts will come your way. Same if you’re a woman, or Hispanic, or transgendered bisexual performance artist.

The only conceivable case for Affirmative Action is to rectify racism. The simple fact of the matter is that there is NO evidence–NONE–that qualified people are being denied jobs or contracts based upon race. There is MUCH evidence that UNqualified people are being advanced due solely to their race. This is racism.

The secondary implicit argument made by advocates of Affirmative Action–never made explicitly, obviously–is that African Americans and Hispanics and women are too stupid and incompetent to survive an openly fair and competitive environment. I disagree with this assessment.

Yet, it is patently the case that people who are mollycoddled–who are taught shortcuts in the game of life, rather than the rules–develop bad habits of petulance, ingratitude, a sense of entitlement, and poor work ethic. All of these factors do lead to inferiority. This is not an outcome dictated by accident of birth, but accident of political and following social environment.

The simple fact is that any spoils system requires money flowing out of the coffers of the State, and that anyone who can direct this outflow to their people, will ensure the loyalty of those people.

It will be argued that Republicans engage in corporate welfare. In what might that consist? Lower tax rates? Less obstructive regulations?

What do these lead to? More jobs, and better jobs. Remember, no public sector job is sustainable without taking the same (or slightly more) amount of money from the pockets of private enterprise, who then cannot invest it or spend it.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the use of Unions to obtain better working conditions. But when the government MANDATES membership for some professions, and when it allows open labor trusts such as the UAW, then it no longer has anything to do with free markets, and everything to do with just one more aspect of the spoils system.

Every State should be “right to work”, no exceptions. This should be the law of the land, by Constitutional Amendment, if necessary.

And we need to get rid of these bullshit “minority participation” worksheets, which are not just used by the government, but by large corporations. This is de facto institutional racism, which I thought we had decided was a bad thing.

We take these words for granted. I have on my wall pictures of both John Hancock and Sam Houston. If you think about it–really think about it–the two are irreconcileable. John Hancock was defending a soon-to-blossom Yankee status quo. Some years later, Houston was defending what became a slave state against the aggressions of the Spanish colonists who had transformed themselves into the “Mexicans”.

Ponder South Carolina and Massachusetts in 1776. They were totally different. Yet, they bonded together. They melded. They formed one nation out of many. E pluribus unum.

We fail to appreciate this miracle simply because it happened. Had I sank the winning basket in some championship game, you would fete me because of the circumstances of fate. You would claim me to be special for some reason.

Likewise, we take for granted the surrender of sovereignty by some very serious people in pursuit of what has become a nation. We forget what they staked. We forget the seriousness of their claims.

They had every right to go their own way. They could have forgotten the North–conversely, the South–at any time. Yet, they staked their claim with their fellow colonialists. We should not forget this.

I see a lot of conservatives hyperventilating over the extension of the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. To my mind, this is not a critically important issue. We had a good economy under Clinton, before he enacted the tax cuts.

I am an anti-Keynesian–since his policies were intended to foster socialism–and therefore what has come to be called a “supply sider”, which is to say “anti-demand sider”, which again is to say “anti-Keynesian” and by extension anti-socialist/fascist.

Common sense economics is embodied in the Laffer Curve, which stipulates that actual goverment revenues will in fact increase up to a certain point as tax rates are increased, then begin to decrease, both as economic investment becomes de-incentivized (the government takes the rewards of your risks, and you suffer any losses privately, a lose/lose situation), and as money is simply invested in more productive places.

It is far from clear, though, that we have reached the point of diminishing returns. Clearly, if we are to have a government, we must pay taxes.

The bigger, much, much, much more important question–which Republicans seem too cowardly to pose in a serious fashion–is the size of the government. The Bush tax cuts worked. Overall revenue increased. And yet with a Republican Congress and a Republican President, overall expenditures skyrocketed.

Did we really need a Dept. of Homeland Security, when the root problem was a series of fuckups by the agencies tasked with intelligence gathering? To the extent the problems were political correctness, do we fix them by giving more power to the same sorts of people, people like Janet Napolitano, whose agency ignored the pleadings of the underwear bombers own father, and whose response to that fuckup is to grope small children or take nude photos of them?

And to be clear, I personally do not think Bush had a hand in it, but 9/11 was clearly perpetrated by a larger group than those men who hijacked the planes. Most conspiracy theorists are not sufficiently light on their feet to see the places where their narrative splits from the necessary to the possible. It is in my view necessarily the case that bombs were set in at least Building 7, and by extension that they were likely set in Buildings 1 and 2. This leads necessarily to the conclusion that people were involved who have not been identified or–probably–caught. This is a serious shortcoming, which manifestly has not been fixed by our so-called Dept. of Homeland Security, which at the moment is refusing even to defend our borders. Nothing desirable was accomplished for this massive expenditure. We need to recognize this, and learn from it.

Perhaps we need to consider abolishing the DHS.

Certainly, and this is the point I intended to make, we need to fire everyone Obama just hired. We then need to continue firing. We need to abolish all Departments and agencies that are not a part of the core mandate of the Federal Government to protect our borders, and regulate relations–within reason–between the States.

We do not need Department of Energy. What do they do? Is it helping? Are we energy independent?

We do not need a Department of Education. Our system is failing, and they are doing nothing to help it.

What we need more urgently than anything is an end to public sector unions. All of them. Teachers unions, AFSME (or whatever it is), and the rest.

In Capitalism, a union is a counterbalance to the ability of business owners to collude to fix wages. The price of labor is set by free market forces, in negotiation between two entities that in theory both want the business to succeed. I say “in theory” since some union leadership–for example the UAW–really cares more about keeping their six figure salaries and power–which itself is an aphrodisiac and desirable for some in its own right–than in protecting ordinary workers. They are quite happy to see mass layoffs and permanent unemployment, if they can keep enough people on the gravy train to keep themselves on the gravy train.

Actually, I should expand on this point, before making the next one.

What Democrats enable, by their economic meddling, is the use of coercive government power to maintain labor monopolies in perpetuity. The UAW bankrupted GM and Chrysler. Their members get extremely generous pensions and healthcare benefits, which are simply unaffordable. Their benefit packages add several thousand dollars to every car which rolls off an American assembly line.

In a free market, these benefits would have been written down to maintain employment. Given a choice, many Union members would have preferred keeping their jobs at a lower wage and benefit package, than to play a lottery where if they win, they keep everything, and if they lose, their job is lost forever. Self evidently, many people have lost, and continue to lose, as jobs leave our shores, preventably and likely permanently. But the government allows unions to mandate membership. This is collusion and is both morally and economically wrong.

What has happened with Obama is that the government has provided the money to keep union pensions and healthcare packages solvent. This means that tax money has been diverted from legitimate public use, and used to fund a minority of American workers, who have gamed the system without creating compensating economic benefits. This is my understanding. It is my further understanding that under Obamacare these same union benefit packages will be immune from taxation, whereas everyone elses–the people producing actual wealth–will be subject to taxation.

Finally, I wanted to comment that public sector unions do not engage in market forces at all. It is one set of politicians negotiating with another. Union leaders negotiate with Democrats, in the main, for wage increases, which are funded with taxpayer money. It is thus a redistributive scheme which is utterly immune from market forces. This means that it is effectively a system of bullying and favor buying, rather than a legitimate activity.

Witness, for example, the teachers unions in New Jersey that wanted continuing pay increases far in excess of inflation, during a recession. This is unconscionable.

In my view, public sector employees need to take what they are given. If we don’t pay enough, we won’t attract good people. If we pay too much, the taxpayers need to revolt.

Right now, we need to revolt, since the average Federal employee makes a third more than his equally trained and able private sector counterpart.

This is the important issue. We need mass firings, the cessation of large Federal bureaus, the end of public sector unions, the normalization of Federal salaries to their private sector equivalents, and an overall decrease in the size of the Federal Government by perhaps one third.

In exchange for that, I would be extremely happy to let the Bush tax cuts–all of them–expire.

Will stupid people scream? Of course.

Is it certain we will continue as a democracy, or as a prosperous nation? No.

Do we deserve to? That is a really good question. Our response to our current fiscal crisis will provide the answer. If we choose to remain as children, and not adopt the ways of mature adults, then no, we do not deserve to remain free or prosperous.

All nations end. It is just a question of how long they endure. I like to think we are capable of exercising mature judgment, but the jury is still out, and there are many many feeble and yet vocal minds among us.

Finally watched this movie. I had been putting it off, since I knew it would not end well. Frankly, it didn’t even begin well. Yet, the world is what it is, and it is the task of good people to see it as it is, in all its horror and glory.

My main thought was that Islam in most of the world is characterized as what can only be called gender Apartheid. Why is it that the screaming classes, the moaning classes, the feel gooders, and do-gooders have so little to say about the rights of women in Islam?

Really, it’s quite simple: they literally, clinically and very definitionally, have no principles. They reject the Enlightenment. They reject the concept of universal human rights. They reject, really, the rights of women, as a subclass of the more general rejection of human rights. They do not recognize right and wrong.

They only recognize, as I have often commented, legal and illegal. Thus the stoning of Soraya, reprehensible as it was even within the confines of Islam–where women have to prove their innocence, and men have to be proven guilty–was quite acceptable since it involved DUE PROCESS.

It is quite acceptable to try and release guilty mass murderers if, what? If they are tried and the evidence found wanting for ANY REASON.

This is nihilism, pure and simple.

This point is less than obvious. When most people think of nihilists–well, hell, I wonder what they do think of? The Big Lebowski? Nihilists are people who, at the end of the day, believe in–and are willing to fight for–nothing. The people who articulate this doctrine dress fashionably sloppily. They go to yogurt shops and coffee houses. They watch Seinfeld, and Dexter and Modern Family and Dancing with the Stars (or whatever the hell else people watch). They are polite, and tip their waiters at least 15%. They say “cool” a lot.

And they are morally bankrupt, and their ideas have consequences within the REAL WORLD. Real women, in particular, are hurt and killed because they SAY NOTHING about the systematic abuse of women in much of the world.

To be clear, conservatives, by and large, have no desire to express politically a desire to tell other nationsl how to live their lives. We can view Iran as an awful place, which abuses women and genuinely decent people for reasons of sadism and political convenience–a place utterly devoid of the grace of God–and yet not view it as our duty to tell them how their nation should be run, since our goal is in the main the protection of the United States.

Just as consistently, we can view it as morally contemptible–as I do–and call it evil.

Leftists, for their part, are constantly rendering moral judgements, but almost invariably in favor of anyone but the post-Enlightenment West. Chavez is the moral superior of the United States. So is Ahmadinejad. Why? He isn’t a “colonialist”. He is just a sadistic misogynist and anti-Semite. In Leftoworld, that is hardly a strike against him.

Yet real people get hurt. It is one thing not to condemn him. It is another altogether to render a moral judgement in his favor. One does not move us in a positive direction. The other moves us in the direction of countenancing evil.

For my part, I am quite willing to say that God has abandoned Iran, and most of the Islamic world. Their oil–far from being a blessing–is in my view a curse that has caused their social world to remain in a state of inertia which has prevented genuine moral growth.

Even within this film, a sign was rendered from God, which was ignored. God is not silent, in my view. He is simply faced at times with the willfully deaf. There are in my view few sins which are punished. Willful ignorance is one of them.

I am not a huge fan, but I have read one book by Gurdjieff, “Meeting with Remarkable Men”. It was an enjoyable book, in which he was in fact a successful “wiseacre”, as he put it, inserting many covert symbolic narratives in the strangest of places. One point he made, which I have remembered, is that he was successful in infiltrating himself into the Qaaba complex, and found God curiously missing. He found the essence of genuine Islam, on the contrary, in Central Asia.

No doctrine which is immune to perception can be enduringly useful. This is really quite simple. What was true in the 7th Century is not true today. No one who fails to see this can, in the end, be considered a good person, or have any reasonable expectation of realizing paradise.

God curses those who are granted sight, and yet refuse to see. It is impossible for me to say I am not one of those people; yet I can say I do my best daily to trip myself up, and see what happens.

Edit: I thought about this, and decided I am being unfair to Islam. To be clear, I’m not afraid of criticizing the religion in public. I’m pretty sure I have to die some time, and getting shot or blown up by an extremist is as good a way to go as any, and from what I can tell much better than dying of old age (or worse: boredom.)

Rather, I think to Christian history. Take Henry the Eighth. He had more than one woman executed to satisfy his lust (and desire for progeny, as I recall.) Men have beaten women in our world for just as long as they have in the Islamic world. I do think women have less rights in the Muslim world, but for all practical purposes that was the case in our own world until quite recently, say the last 100 years.

I think too to the maxim of Lao Tse to the effect that 3 in ten people are good, 3 in ten are neither good nor bad, and 3 in ten are bad. [I was never clear who the tenth person was, but I suppose we can say he or she plops down randomly in one of the three other categories.]

Why would this not apply to all people in all religious and post-religious environments? In the case of the stoning of Soraya, it was fundamentally the social dynamic of witch burning. It was a combination of a type of avarice, cowardice, stupidity, and a desire to express hatred.

It is true, too, that men from time to time feel the need to persecute women. I suppose it is in our DNA. Women do not process the world the way men do–they are “other”, in some fundamental ways–and we have testosterone and greater physical strength. This has led to much injustice over the ages.

Our task, as I have often argued, is to rise above our biological heritage, in favor of what I have termed “non-statistical coherence”. I view us as beings of light incarnated in what amount to machines. The two are clearly related, and I think at odds with one another.

This is really generic Dualism, with the difference that I believe Spirit can affect matter, in that matter, per se, does not exist outside of spirit. Maybe I am a philosophical Idealist. I don’t know the word.

What I want to see–and I’m getting off topic, but it’s my blog and I don’t have an editor–is an end to philosophizing, and a beginning of empirical data gathering. To what extent can we measure so-called morphogenetic fields? Can we induce them? What is the biological significance of coherent light within our bodies? These are concepts which are simply not being explored.

As I have said often–likely here, but I can’t remember–what I envision as the path forward to a benign future is the incorporation of key religious ideas–such as the continuance of the soul after physical death, and the connectedness of all life–into science; and the utilization of the conception of Goodness (or something like it) within existing religious and cultural narratives to facilitate global, gradual change in the direction of light, peace, and sustainable economic sufficiency.

I often type, and just sort of watch what happens. That will manifest here as meandering thought. It’s like taking a walk through the forest. I am constantly going places I have never been, and often those without paths.

With regard to the previous post, I was wondering how I moved from socialists to Muslims, then it hit me: they share a distaste for Liberalism. People have often wondered how supposed “liberals”–who for example preach the rights of women–can countenance the many abuses of human rights that happen in places like Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

And it hit me: they share foundational autocratic tendencies. I heard on the radio the other day that the number one show right now among Democrats is Dexter (for Republicans it is “Modern Family”, about which I know nothing), and I thought about it. What does Dexter do? He murders evil. He attacks it, physically, without debating it. And I think that basic idea resonates deeply in the leftist psyche.

Who are you when you can never affirm a positive moral view in a condition of ambiguity or competing moral narratives? Who are you when every time someone asserts a right to x, y, or z, you have to listen? When no line is too far? When you can be pushed around everywhere? When your only value, tolerance, is implicitly a death pact with whoever has a better idea of who they are than you?

You are nothing. And being nothing makes psychologically normal people abnormal. It induces hatred and resentment, and a feverish quest for a moral absolute, sanctified in either figurative or literal blood. Such is the documented history of Leftism, which is accepted in full by the true believers: the French Revolution, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Maoist China.

Very often, I work intuitively. I have already seen this, and called it “Cultural Sadeism”, but from time to time a slightly larger piece of the puzzle emerges.

Reasonable people have to ask: given the manifest moral, cultural, social and economic bankruptcy to which Leftism leads, why do people keep following it? Why do they keep trying to impose a doctrine which generates misery, and to use in their efforts to do so deception, torture, murder, and every other devious and amoral device they can conceive? Why? Some of these people have smiling faces. George Bernard Shaw (like Hitler) was a vegetarian.

It seems to me the crux of the issue is that weak people cannot face, in the end, the prospect of rejecting both an other-worldly and an Earthly utopia. If they can’t have heaven, then they at least need the fantasy–and it is a fantasy, in the way they format it–of an end to all pain on Earth.

Now, I think that we can build a world in which most unnecessary pain is eliminated, such that we CHOOSE our pain, our challenges, our adventures. But you can’t eliminate it entirely. As I see it, in accepting pain, it goes away.

But Socialists don’t want to do that. They want to manipulate the outside world somehow so that pain is gone. And they particularly want to be freed from the burden of choice, of responsibility.

No stable moral order, no wholesome desirable “utopia” can come into being except as a result of decent people building it. Yet socialists want to pretend there CAN be such a thing as a collective morality, as a group, as a “society” that is not composed of individuals, each capable of perceiving and thinking for him or her-self.

A slightly sinful person who chooses their life in a condition of freedom is infinitely superior to a person who commits no sin, but has no choice. Given their druthers, such people become vicious very easily. Many Muslims are good examples of this.

Are Muslim women chaste? Do they have any choice? Has anyone asked them their opinions? Would something other than a beating happen if they gave the wrong answer? Neither their men nor women can be considered sexually pure, since they have no choice. Frankly, I suspect a lot of sexual abuse happens in most Muslim countries, reporting which will get you killed.

Net: there can be no useful or valid moral nexus outside the individual conscience, and no utopia that is built by someone other than the sum total of a society, voluntarily.

I’m reading the General Theory, but felt like typing something. I take a lot of hand notes, but typing is easier. I will underscore with respect to this post specifically, and this whole blog more generally, is that I am often thinking out loud. Most of these sorts of things used to–and in many case still do–go to private “notebooks”. But some of it gets out here, for the possible use of somebody.

Keynes basic idea is that production comes from Capitalists, which is to say “savers”. (His entire body of work is intended to glorify consumption and denigrate savings. In this, he echoes his Fabian mentor George Bernard Shaw, who likewise denigrated savings.) What he wants to do is integrate these savers into a system at equilibrium, which for him means full employment, and production equal to demand. Like Shaw, he is unconcerned with the details of what is produced, so long as he can control the access to Capital of the producers.

His nightmare scenario–which in popular myth was played out in the early 1930’s–is the production glut. Our pot-bellied, cigar smoking Capitalists have invested in, uh, table tennis rackets. Trouble is, the workers can’t afford to buy any more. The savings of the savers has bought too much. If they had paid their workers more, and saved less–or, hell, spent it on caviar, claret, and courtesans–then the workers would have the money to buy table tennis rackets and all would be right with the world. But they were too greedy.

So what do they do? Let some workers go, so that they can discount the table tennis rackets, and keep the same amount of money. But what? Now there is less money to spend. What to do?

Never fear, Uncle Debtor is here. Rather than lay those people off, intrepid Capitalist, and create structural unemployment, why not take this free money from the government, to pay off your table tennis rackets? You keep them employed, and they can then buy the badminton rackets you had intended to manufacture. You will need to pay them more, though, which is why we gave you all that money.

What has happened? In the short run, everybody wins. Capitalists get money, and the workers keep their jobs. What else has happened? The money has been created from scratch, by the government. The government now has the right to claim it as a levy in the form of taxation, from the very people who just got the money. Moreover, it has probably caused an inflationary effect, such that the buying power of everyone–workers and Capitalists alike–has diminished.

Keynes talks very specifically–I will be offering the quotes in my formal treatment–about the devaluation of money to destroy the investing class. He allows for some differences of wealth, but no big ones, and none that are in principle beyond the reach of the government, both in terms of graduated taxation, and outright confiscation through money creation.

Think of it this way: let’s say someone walked up to you and handed you ten $100 bills, and an invoice, payable in a year, for $1,200. Are you ahead? Is that a smart transaction? This is the essence of Keynesism.

As I view it, the problem is that classical economists have done a piss poor job of coming up with desirable economic equilibriums. Keynes has the appeal of offering (but self evidently not actually fostering) full employment of the sort normal people would want.

The missing link, which nobody seems to be willing to see or discuss, for whatever reason, is the inflationary, confiscatory nature of banking. This is what devalues our labor. This is how our collective innovatory genius gets diluted, such that most of us work long careers, at multiple jobs, and have little to show.

Socialism is not a solution. It is, to invoke the metaphor of Fabius Maximus, a delaying maneuver. It is postponing a reckoning. It is the creed of fools and scoundrels.

We need to imagine a future at rest. I am in full agreement with this. Yet, the way to solve unemployment is to raise the value of labor, and the way to do this is through enhancements in productivity that are NOT STOLEN.

It pains me to see this, but it is PRECISELY the doctrines of Keynes, in tandem with the natural avarice of bankers the world over, which has forestalled this. Not only did Keynes not point us to the promised land, he led us IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Had he not come along, had he been run over by a bus, or stabbed by a jealous lover of either gender, then the world economy would be much farther along. Everything he advocated has made us less rich, more poor, less free, and more indebted.

You want one name upon which to hang the albatross of our international debt crises? He’s your man.

I’ll have more to say in coming days.

Many years ago, I had a dream of the Rolling Stones planning a party. It was really quite simple. They rented this large old home or castle, put up no decorations at all, but made sure there were plenty of beds and sofas, lot of wine and liquor, and loud music. All their bases were covered. They had been doing this for many, many years, and knew what the basics were. You get the women there, dance, get drunk, and screw. Nothing fancy. They had neither more nor less than needed.

This may seem like a strange way of approaching the idea of professionalism, but it is the most salient, for me, affectively. A true professional will penetrate to the heart of a matter quickly and with little effort. A good police detective will have a good hunch who did the crime the first time they meet them. A talented animal groomer will know very quickly how to calm an animal down.

Or, to take a story I’ve long been fond of telling, there was once a boiler that wasn’t working. It was a large, ungainly machine, that none of the on-staff people could figure out, so they called in an expert. He looked at it for about 5 minutes, then tapped one valve with a hammer. Instantly it started working again.

When they got the bill for $5,000, the owners were outraged. “How”, they asked, “could ten minutes work warrant a bill for $5,000? That is $30,000/hour” They asked to itemize the bill.

So he did:

Examimation of machine: $20.00
Labor to fix machine: $10.00
Knowing where to hit it: $4,970.00

They paid the bill.

The point I’m making here is that in life most of what we see is fluff. Most words really don’t matter, particularly if they come from politicians.

What we need to see from the Republicans in 2011 is that they GET IT, that they are in the same State, if not zip code of solving problems. Competence is not making sure you get credit for every little spot of grease on your well creased trowsers. It is GOING AFTER IT–the solution, a solution, anything that has at least a shot at working.

What I expect is much less than that. So much the worse for all of us. We’ll see. I see little cause for hope–except to the extent they will at a minimum make things worse more slowly–but never cause for quitting.

This post is written in that spirit, of never forgetting the Alamo, nor the sacrifices of our betters to get us to our hand-wringing, intellectually mediocre present.

I went to a Lip Synching show put on by parents at my kids school tonight. With a couple notable exceptions, it was awful. It was hard to watch.

Yet, I support mediocrity that shows up. I think the point of art is recreating yourself through spontaneous expression AS WELL AS YOU CAN. It is dumb to expect everyone to possess talent. But if they express what talent they have as well as they can, and grow from the process, then that ritual act was worthwhile.

The Tibetans perform a ritual in which they carve things out of butter. After a time, they melt the butter, and incorporate it into their food. They also make sand mandalas, that are ceremonially destroyed in rivers.

Once this art is gone, what remains is the effect it had on the people who created it, and that can be quite seperate from what it looked like, while existing.

All worthwhile societies give each person in them a space and a time where attention is paid to them, and in which they can rise to the occasion. The point of liberty is enough space to grow.