Month: February 2011

Please spraypaint this on your nearest concrete surface. If you substitute Jimmy S, no one will notice. Put it right next to Johnny M. loves Jenny N., and the other one you can’t read.

As insults go, this is clearly inferior to “big poopy head” and “conserveretard toon”, but I have Soapdish on my Netflix queue, and remember that as being one of the funnier scenes. If you haven’t watched that movie, you should. Along with Birdcage, Anchorman, Team America, and parts of “What about Bob?”, it ranks as one of my favorite comedies. That and “Most Extreme Challenge”, part whatever. Please note I am carefully separating my moral critiques of American culture from what I find funny.

Anyway, the problem obviously is not that Krugman is actually stupid, in the sense of his knowledge base or cognitive capacity. He has a Ph.D. from what is normally considered a prestigious school. He is a professor (or was: I have no idea if his NYT gig is full-time) at a prestigious school. If you sat him down and gave him an IQ test, or entered him on Jeopardy, or asked him to solve some Mensa problem, he would do better than most.

His problem is imaginative. He lacks imagination. Specifically, he is unable to imagine human suffering in the detail I can, and unwilling to see that the policies he advocates so strenuously, and with such seeming sincerity, act to the detriment of the human race. When I think of Vietnam era radicals, I think of nothing so much as sad, frightened Vietnamese, placed in little bamboo cages in the stifling jungle heat, unable to bathe, forced to urinate and defectate on themselves, and fed rice with sand in it, hurting their teeth.

This is the sort of imagination one needs. As an alternative, let us think of a frightened African-American child of say 7, third born to a single mother, who leaves him in the care of his 11 year old sister, who beats him. There is a hole in the roof, and none of the kids in his 1st grade class will sit still long enough for the teacher to teach him anything. Is the hope for this child, surrounded by violence and indifference from his earliest memories really in failed programs like Head Start? Head Start makes a mild difference for perhaps a year–and not one clearly positive in all cases–then the effect disappears: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/impact_study/executive_summary_final.pdf

Why would this be? Well, the 11 year old is self supervised, and choosing to bully the 7 year old and his 9 year old sister. What school program is going to counterbalance a daily reality of cruelty and indifference? It won’t. This child should not have been born. This is the reality.

Since I hate discussing problems without offering ANY solutions, I will allow myself one, although I have thought of a number: use taxpayer money to pay $10,000 to any low income person who voluntarily undergoes sterilization. Once 2 or more children have been born to a single mother, make sterilization a condition of future welfare checks. Harsh? Hell is for children, not mothers. The mother has the right to not fuck every man she sees. The child–not born in my example–has the right to a home and family that loves him or her, and having 5 kids you can’t afford is anything but love. I was reading about a real world example in Indianapolis the other day, of a mother who had kids 8,7,6,5, and 3. Five kids in 6 years, none of which she could afford. She left them home alone to go work, and was caught by CPS. They had been taken before because some man she had in the house abused them, and this time they were taken by CPS for good, no doubt mentally scarred for life. None of those kids is likely to reach whatever their natural capacity may have been; if they do, it will be a miracle, and public policy that depends on miracles is incompetent.

But I digress. The general point I wanted to make is that Krugman has clearly followed Keynes in setting as his task the implementation of Socialism in America. Towards that end, he employs creative misdirection, crappy thinking, and caustic ad hominem. Par for the course.

Pointing out his errors is not hard. It is of more interest to me showing his pattern of error, the types of thought errors that he commits over and over and over.

He makes these errors, to repeat, not out of a lack of critical capacity, but out of a deep seated emotional desire for certain things to be true about human life that are not true. It is not the case that if you punish supposed wrong-doers, that good results. You have to create good. You have to work for it. You have to define it, and articulate it as a principle-based behavioral system. It is never enough simply to eradicate what you define arbitrarily as evil. This is laziness. It is childishness. It is throwing a tantrum, kicking the flower pot over, and calling it philosophy.

Life contains pain. It will always contain pain. This in my view is the most practical view, and one which recognizes that pain accepted is pain diminished. It will always contain the pains of resentment and envy, confusion, anxiety, at least potentially. This is my view.

And if we are to have any chance of ridding ourselves of these pests, it can only be done on an individual level, and through spiritual growth. But this is not what the Socialists propose. They propose we solve them through the actions of SOMEONE ELSE. That we can outsource them. That with a properly planned society, they will simply fall away, and flowers burst from the earth, and the sun emerge from behind the gloomy clouds of greed. Killing the bourgeoisie (figuratively, then literally) is not just cathartic for those with pent-up anger spanning decades, but it is a sort of spirtual pesticide, that eliminates all the negative emotions to which human minds and spirits are prone. This is patent nonsense.

But consider the close relationship of Keynes with George Bernard Shaw. They corresponded constantly. Shaw was one of the first people Keynes told when he finished “The General Theory”. And consider who he was. He openly advocated involuntary euthanasia–murder–of social undesireables, and even mused publicly about the development of Zyklon B roughly a decade before Hitler ensured it would not only become a reality, but used in approximately the way Shaw intended. You MUST watch this video, if you are to truly grasp that Fascism is nothing more or less than a type of Socialism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw7DtjO4V6c

To the specific piece: Eat the future. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?ex=1313470800&en=56519977c80612d4&ei=5087&WT.mc_id= NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0216-L18

The argument: Public research says that the basic mindset of pork barrel politics is still alive. People want other people’s stuff cut. From this, Krugman infers that the Republicans do not have a mandate to cut the budget. This is patent nonsense, of course. In almost all opinion polls the national debt is the top concern, and that people differ in how it should be cut is a far cry from being able to claim it isn’t important.

Further, the problem is ENORMOUS. We will be paying more in interest expenses within the decade than we spend currently on the ENTIRE Defense Dept. budget. This is because we are running $1.5 trillion ANNUAL deficits. This is simply unsustainable. NO AMOUNT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH CAN PAY OFF THIS DEBT AT THE RATE WE ARE ACCUMULATING IT, IF WE DO NOT RADICALLY REDUCE EXPENDITURES.

Clearly, taxes may need to be raised, but the historic pattern is taxes are raised to meet shortfalls, then EXPENDITURES ARE INCREASED AGAIN. It’s a revolving pattern. This year, this Congress, we HAVE to make a stand. We are plainly going bankrupt, and arguing that we CAN pay our bills is no different than the arguments of people I’ve known that their ability to afford their $200,000 annual lifestyles means spending every cent they make is OK. Just because you have money, does not mean you should spend it. And since we DON’T have the money, that makes it apply doubly.

To the requisite attack on Republicans as dumb meany-heads. Republicans have cut food stamps. http://washingtonindependent.com/98886/the-real-impact-of-food-stamp-cuts

You need to understand that Krugman exaggerates to the point where he may as well be lying. The so-called “Stimulus” was actually a massive, but in theory temporary, expansion of the welfare state. Roughly one third of it–$250 billion–did nothing but fund pet Democratic social spending programs that Congress was otherwise unwilling to fund. It shored up bankrupt State Medicaid accounts. It shored up bankrupt food stamp programs. What the Republicans have done is roll back spending on this program to 2008 levels. The spending all along was supposed to be temporary.

What Krugman and his fellow socialists want, of course, is for temporary money, appropriated through underhanded, deceptive means, to become permanent. That will bankrupt us that much more quickly, and enable the “rationality” of–can I call it this?–Uebergovernment, a central State of Chineseian power and control, and ruthlessness.

Republicans cut money for nuclear non-proliferation. Horrible, right? You know how this program works? We give money to Russians and others to find lost nukes. They keep it. This is really a pretty simple process. This has been going on for a long time. This does not make lost Russian nukes less dangerous, but there is categorically no direct relationship between money appropriated and actual outcomes. Most of it, in fact, is wasted. As things stand, we still have $2 billion allocated for it.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2011/02/congress_moves_to_help_terrori.html

Here is what this money has accomplished recently:

At the close of 2010, NNSA announced that 111 pounds of bomb-making highly enriched uranium were removed from three sites in Ukraine. Since April 2009, six countries have given up all their highly enriched uranium and a total of 120 bombs’ worth of nuclear material was secured.

Useful? Of course. $2.6 billion worth of useful when we have many more billions allocated to overseas intelligence and Homeland Security? Probably not so much. Most of even this $2 billion will likely be wasted on fancy lunches, good cigars, and exorbitant salaries for people who accomplish one thing every decade they “serve”. I could be wrong, but Krugman’s case is far from airtight.

As far as the IRS agents go, I would be curious if he can back up that claim. The IRS asked for an INCREASE of $338 million. This article is from Feb. 15th: http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/tax/irs-releases-2012-budget-proposal-summary

The point is inescapable, too, that greater collections means more tax revenue, which means more cash out of the system and into government coffers. For all intents and purposes, all increases in the IRS Collections activity amount to tax increases. As I said, we will at some point likely have to raise taxes. What we MUST do, first, is demonstrate the capacity to stop using our goddamned charge card for every little thing that catches our eye.

As far as his “death panels” quote, obviously we cannot pay end-of-life care indefinitely. But who should decide? The patients, with their family and chosen insurer, or an omnipotent government panel trying to keep costs down? The latter alternative ALREADY EXISTS IN EUROPE, and is inevitable here. To claim otherwise is, frankly, to be an asshole.

I’m tired and irritable. I will leave it there for now.

No: one more thing. If Krugman had a shred of human decency, he would take the time to grasp that the policies he advocates, on balance, cause human suffering. Rich people hire poor people, making them not poor. Poor people suffer. They don’t hire anyone. Socialism creates the latter, in the process of destroying the former. Cubans, 40 years after the full implementation of Communism, live on $20/month, and are uniformly surrounded by secret police, and under the constant threat of political arrest if they have the temerity to call bullshit on the whole nasty, sordid, roach-infested hell that leftists have been looking to as an example all these years.

Shame on you, Paul Krugman. You are a nasty piece of shit. Hell has a place for you. I don’t wish it on you, but in my view things have a way of working their course. Your task, all your life, has been to understand what is good, and work for it. You have failed, and you continue to fail. You don’t get points for what you say you are trying to do. You don’t get points for willful self delusion. You know what the reality is, and if you choose not to acknowledge it, if you continue a parade of lies calculated to expand human evil on Earth, you bear the full brunt of the responsibility for your actions.

I avoid ad hominem in general as intellectually vacuous. Occasionally, I do seem to feel the need to vent, though. It may not be useful rhetorically, but it feels good to be completely frank sometimes.

I just want to discuss the phrases, and their antecedants “War on Poverty” and “Global Warming”.

In the first case, a “War on Poverty” was launched in the 1960’s, and guided by a man with the ironically appropriate first name of Sargent. It failed. If it was a war, they were thrown back at the beaches into the sea.

So what did the Left do? They changed the name. Look at Detroit today. Three decades later, if someone said they needed money to end poverty, they would be laughed out of the room. Just kidding: only conservatives would laugh, since for leftists every day is a new day, since their “reset” button never wears out.

The thesis of global warming is that the Earth–all of it–is warming. Warmth is measured with temperature. If the temperature goes up, warming is happening.

However, the people running this project launched all sorts of dire predictions back in the late 90’s about what would be happening NOW, if we didn’t act THEN. How embarassing for them that they were WRONG. That is the most correct word here.

So what did they do? Did they abandon or greatly modify their falsified hypothesis? No: they renamed it to make it less empirical. The phrase global warming implies warming. If the warming doesn’t happen, then the prediction was wrong. But how beautiful from a policy–if not scientific or moral–standpoint to be able to make “predictions” ex post facto? All you have to do is wait and see what happens, then predict it RETROACTIVELY. OF COURSE the glaciers are expanding in one place and contracting in another. OF COURSE we are having a terrible winter. OF COURSE we are at a 50 year low for global hurricane activity.

In my view, the tendency to rename things, in and of itself, normally betrays lack of clarity of thought and evidence.

In the case of the old word “social justice”, of course, many meanings CAN be implied, but this particular one seemed most egregiously wrong. As a general rule of thumb, it is the antonym of “legal justice”, as embodied in protected individual civil liberties.

A book arguing the case that Obama’s books were ghost-written by Bill Ayers comes out today. Whether his thesis is correct or not, and Obama’s manifest stupidity argues powerfully that SOMEONE other than himself wrote his books, what is clear is that we know ALMOST NOTHING about this guy. Many years of his life are documented only by what he himself says–directly or through a proxy like Bill Ayers–in his books.

Virtually none of the people surrounding him in his youth are known to us. At least one has come forward, though, and stated that Obama was a Leninist in college, and saw himself as working for a global Communist revolution: http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/obama-college-marxism-occidental/2010/02/08/id/349329

He was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, which anticipated that there would be a revolution of the working class, led by revolutionaries, who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute the wealth

Note that his roommate was a Pakistani, wealthy enough to own a BMW, and comfortable with Obama’s politics. When Obama went to Pakistan, this guy likely paid for it.

But place yourself in this mental context: Obama is friends with people like Bill Ayers and others who want to end our Constitution, and implement something like what they have in Cuba, or China.

Many of us have been saying for years that he is a radical, he is a Communist, he is anti-American. But what are the possible implications of this? What can he do?

People look at his most obvious proposals, those intended to take over healthcare and energy, and to create more legal biases in favor of unions. But what else is possible? Let me offer up a few possibilities.

He can insert moles in the CIA, FBI, DHS, DIA, and various military services.

He can insert people into positions with access to our secrets, who will leak them. For some stuff, he can leak it on his own, in closed door meetings–for example with the Chinese.

Edit: agents can slow down or misdirect the flow of intelligence. They can either not do their jobs, or supply disinformation. Counter-intelligence agents can collude with foreign agents. They can abet foreign industrial espionage.

Obviously, they can gather information on political opponents, as FDR did.

Money can be siphoned off from the Stimulus and put into accounts for bribes, here and abroad; for funding leftist organizing; for election campaigns; and to pay full time Leninist revolutionary cadres.

He can weaken us through intentional overspending, which he is doing right now.

He can damage our alliances, and fail to pursue our legitimate interests, which he is doing.

As I think I posted on here, I was reading the other day about Harry Hopkins, who was almost certainly Agent 19, described as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States”, by former Cheka (read Gestapo) handler Iskhak Akhmerov. Among other things, Hopkins engineered the hand-over of Poland to the Nazis, excuse me, the Soviets. Effect was about the same, although the Katyn massacre had already happened.

Consider the case, though, of Col. Phillip Faymonville. Everyone who knew him called him “The Red Colonel”, for his Communist sympathies. Hopkins got him assigned to Moscow to run our Lend-Lease program, and eventually got him promoted to Major General. While in Moscow, he was seduced by a male NKVD agent, which enabled the Soviets to put considerable pressure to bear on someone already largely sympathetic to them.

Imagine this basic dynamic amplified a hundred times. Imagine that Obama WANTS the Muslim Brotherhood to take over the Middle East. Imagine that he is covertly sending them money. Imagine that he is assigning US intelligence assets to help them, under some pretext or other. Once he gets his people in the right places, no pretext will be necessary.

All the people he puts in place remain behind once he is gone, much like the Communist agents who stayed in place in the South when North Vietnam went red (figuratively, and with the literal blood that the red symbolizes). Perhaps I should say “when the lights went out”, in reference to North Korea.

We need to cover many more miles in our understanding if we are to right this wrong, and get our nation back onto a track into a sustainable future. The future of humankind depends on the United States.

China has shown itself to be utterly ruthless, and completely dedicated to one party, totalitarian rule. Yes, the Chinese people can open businesses now, but only ones approved by the Party, and nothing happens that they do not approve of, tacitly or explicitly.

Europe is a sick old lady, done in by a greed for comfort and sleep.

It’s on us, and we are being poisoned, in my view.

In my view, it is time for a frontal attack on Obama’s credibility. I want the Republicans to demand at least his birth certificate, and preferably all his college records, travel documents, Social Security number (what is it? Is it legitimate?), and college publications. Given that he is the most poweful man in the most powerful country on the planet, these are not unreasonable demands.

As I have said before, the question is simple: is he above the law, or isn’t he?

Edit: as I think about it, the most valuable place to insert your people would not even be in the intelligence handling part of things. It would be in the group that does background investigations and security clearances. If you can corrupt that group, you open a funnel into the core of the intelligence apparatus.

I will add, too, that there are those who simply cannot grasp that Communists can still be around and active in today’s world. My response is: why not? They knew their doctrine didn’t work in the 1950’s, at the very LATEST, yet they continued expanding and recruiting throughout the 1960’s and 70’s. Their facilitation of the invasion of South Vietnam by North Vietnam led to rivers of blood, but they didn’t and don’t care.

This is the core question: in the last 30 years have they come up with a good reason to live? Self evidently, most of these people are atheists, who view death as final. I don’t see it. I see them talking increasing gibberish, like stroke victims who have learned to speak to one another in noises that sound like speech, and which are treated like speech, but which rationally amount to the cognitive content of jackhammer noise or a cement mixer. It is a dysphony of despair, expressed in a deep-seated emotional need to see the world burn to the ground, and humankind reduced to skeletons in a primordial dust–morally, if not always literally.

It is interesting to think about the intersection of small things with large things. I think many lives we call great are much like the pearls sparked by grains of sand in oysters, from small discontents resulting from what I guess we could call primary events in childhood or youth.

Would the oyster not have been happier without the sand? The pearl is of no use to it, and in fact often leads to its death.

Ponder.

I was listening to some of my Mozart this morning. I had forgotten that a CD I don’t listen to very often had Mozart’s variations on this theme, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, which I found very enjoyable. Like many of you (if anyone is reading this), I had heard somewhere or other that he wrote the theme at an early age, but that appears not to be the case. It is a traditional French melody of unknown provenance, on the theme of which he wrote what sound like jazz-ish improvisations, Koechel 265.

Being me, this led naturally to thinking about Anne Frank’s father in a concentration camp in WW2. I own a documentary on her and her family, and unless my memory is seriously flawed, he spoke of how he and his fellow inmates used to try and recollect melodies by Beethoven, and Brahms and other “classical” composers. I thought about what adult Americans, in similar circumstances, would think about. What beauty could they muster to counter such ugliness? What hymns do we truly own within us? What myths that will sustain us? Only the religious would have a chance at accessing such comforts, in my view. Our culture is so shady, and so fallen. Certainly, obviously, there are positives, but are they the ambient “temperature”?

It seems not.

Edit: I got interrupted before I thought this through. As with all my posts, I may not agree with it tomorrow, and may well be disputing myself an hour from now. This is my “thinking out loud blog”, and that’s the way it works. Some stupidity is inevitable.

I don’t want to leave the impression I think Classical music–the music of the European courts in the time of its composition, and in general of well-to-do elites (who goes to the Orchestra?) today–is somehow the acme of human culture. I don’t believe that. In point of fact, I mainly listen to country music.

What I am trying to express here, poorly, it seems, is a sense that what ties us together is not as sturdy as it once was. The common references seem qualitatively less rich.

This may not be true, but I keep getting in my mind swapping quotes with people from Animal House or Airplane.

Again, things to do. I will likely be back on this post after a while.

Edit two: the concept of a “harmonic” appeared to me. What I think I may decide to use this word for is a sense that feeling tones which connect us can respond, like a tuning fork, to certain notes, certain qualitative gestalts.

In America, we talk about movie dialogue with one another, and what was on TV, and sports. If you find, say, a fellow Alabama or Auburn fan, you have an instant connection, a harmonic.

What I am looking at is a chaotic system, like a galaxy spread across the horizon, which responds with visible order the moment the right note has struck. Any system which does not have harmonics is disordered, and the closer the harmonics get to the fundamentals of the human experience–birth, death, pain, love, tragedy, comedy, absurdity, meaning–the better they are.

When I listen to great classical music, it evokes deep feelings in me sometimes; at other times, I am pleased in a somewhat cerebral way by the order which has been created. It massages some part of me that needs massaging.

Country music is meant to evoke recognition: you have been in that situation, you know what he or she is talking about.

Music which does not do that, which talks about getting laid, or the feeling of power over other human beings, or superficial sybaritic pleasures, would tend to evoke, it seems to me, very superficial connections. You sound the note, and the response is dim, blurry, foggy, indistinct when it comes to deep human realities.

I don’t do this in a morbid way, but I think about death every day. I live my life in response to my understanding of the meaning of death. As I see it, that is the most sound general orientation possible. Of course I fear death, but I think of it analytically. I don’t think death is the end. I think I will see, there, what I have done here. Some of it will disgust and dishearten me, but I like to think some of it will look I did the right thing after all.

What happens to people whose only thoughts of death come to them in horror movies, who have no ability to contextualize and transcend it? It seems to me that the images of death multiply precisely to the extent the capacity to process them, to abreact them into life energy, declines.

You get more and more death, and less and less life. It is like trying to end hunger by eating cardboard. All of us are in the same boat, floating to the same destination; but we are increasingly alone in that boat. This is the outcome of unintelligent, superficial cultural strategies, most notably those of the intelligensia. They have been destroying without creating for well over a hundred years. Utopia is always in the future, and always coming to us, not us going to it. This is lunacy.

I think that will do for this post.

I pray in several senses, consistent with my beliefs.

I will at times send whatever positive energy I can muster out to anyone and everyone that needs it. I feel the energy, and the task is directing it without polluting it with what I guess I could call my “fatigue” energy (somewhat ironic, I guess, but even the universe slows down but never stops). I choose to believe this is beneficial, without having any firm evidence in favor of that conjecture (or against it, as far as that goes, since no natural laws are violated, in my understanding of how things work, according to our best models of reality). I choose to believe, not entirely without evidence, that applied consciousness has an organizing effect on the universe.

What I do not believe is that there is a God out there looking out for me.One does not have to celebrate many birthdays to observe that terrible things–cancer in children, car accidents, financial ruin–happen to genuinely decent people; not the ones who are secretly sinful, but actually decent people.

As I have often argued, pain is how we learn. Pain is temporary, in an eternal universe. It is impossible to say if some negative event will be good or bad. Even is someone dies, I believe in heaven, so I believe that they may well be the lucky ones, since their day of work is done for the time being.

When I pray, I pray to spirits of light. I believe that we are surrounded by positive beings, who exercise some small influence on events when they can. But we have to have already set up the sort of environment where their influence will work. God helps those who help themselves.

For myself, I normally only pray for two things: for courage, and for wisdom. I pray that whatever trouble comes down the pike that I can take it, that I can learn from it, and hopefully be clever enough to get out of it.

It occurred to me just this morning, that this is the prayer of a functional member of a self governing system. I have my own goals, and pray to be able to help myself. The opposite of this is “God, please take care of me and mine”. That is a dependent mindset.

I have known numerous people deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one once told me that “The Will of Allah”, and work seemed to be inversely related. The more they said “it is the Will of Allah”, the less they worked. If you look at any Islamic society, you will see that the “Will of Allah” builds palaces and mosques, and precious little else. This is not the mindset of a self governing people, and certainly not of a prosperous one.

Religious belief, clearly, can be done in different ways. And large outcomes always depend on repeated small beginnings.

This will be a post in two parts. First, the “Stimulus”.

It has long annoyed me that so little attention has been paid publicly to the patent farce of the dispersal of Stimulus funds. BILLIONS of dollars have been sent to non-existent Congressional Districts, and non-existent Zip Codes. For reasons known only to them, New Mexico Watchdog has taken down the description of the process they got from Ed Pound, El Jefe of the Stimulus accounting program. What he said was this:

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

On my reading, this would seem to indicate a check—actual or virtual—is created by someone, deposited by someone, then self-reported. You get the money, then type in whatever information you want. That information is then duly relayed by the [bureaucrats]to the taxpayers, as if they had done their job.

This system, quite obviously, is open to fraud. If you are plugged in, you get money wired to you, your buddy Twitters you a password, you log in, then you type in anything that sounds plausible. Can we not suppose that legitimate recipients are cognisant of their district and zip code, meaning that errors of this quantity cannot be random? We are talking about amounts equal to the annual revenues of large multi-national corporations.

And according to their chief spokesperson, the very agency tasked with monitoring the money is in essence saying that if people cheat, they will not be caught. Once the money is gone, it’s gone.

Let us take this fact, and add it to the current Middle East situation generally. How would you get money from here to secret agents in, say, Egypt? Simple: you set up a front company supposedly doing “Stimulus” work, with one of your guys. They get a check which they claim was for the 22nd District of New Mexico. It’s “only” for $10 million, so nobody really cares anyway.

Your recipient is plugged into the Hawala system, and the money goes to agents in 6 countries. This is categorically not impossible. I have been arguing for some time that that money might just as easily have gone to radical groups in the U.S.

Are these uprisings random? If so, why so many, and all at once? The status quo in the Middle East has been much the same for the last thousand years. One greedy SOB has taken the place of another. Some have been more cruel than others, but democracy has never been seriously considered. Democracy has, however, long been a code word used by Leftists for tyranny. It plays well in the all-too-compliant Western media, and as long as you keep using the right words, you can kill innocent people in the name of freedom, jail innocent people people in the name of justice, and usurp power for an unelected elite in the name of “democracy”.

Taken as a whole, does this situation not feel a lot more like a Socialist Summer of Rage? Like activists have been going around, putting up posters, inflaming sentiment in public speeches and COMMUNITY ORGANIZING?

We read the Muslim Brotherhood initially did not back the protests. They weren’t sure what they were about. Is it not equally plausible that their agents set the whole thing in motion, and stayed publicly on the side-lines so as to not make their role obvious to all?

I am of course talking about treason here, on the part of Obama and his cohort, but why not? The man is plainly a radical, and ALL of these nations would on his accounting be the victims of Western Imperialism. We have kept many of these petty tyrants in power, largely to keep even worse tyrants from seizing power. Case in point: Iran. No rational human being can even BEGIN to argue that ordinary Iranians are better off under the Mullahs than the Shah. He only persecuted radicals who wanted to overthrow him. As it happens, his fear of a coup was quite justified. The Mullahs persecute, torture, and kill anyone who differs from them ideologically AT ALL.

Whenever you see these sorts of coups, you can run the numbers. Without looking it up, I can tell you–and someone feel free to prove me wrong–that the Shah killed or tortured say 200 people in the decade before losing his throne. The Revolutionary Guards, guaranteed, did that in their first six months in power. That is how these things always work. Does anyone seriously think the Shah’s torture chambers were closed, or that some amorphous decency of “the people” restrained them from using it to support THEIR AUTOCRACY? To be clear: the SAME FORM OF GOVERNMENT THEY CLAIMED TO ABHOR.

These protests in Egypt are not at all about democracy. When you look at leftist rabble-rousers, they will say ANYTHING they have to to get themselves installed in power. They then bide their time, let the dust settle, get the army and police under control, then take back EVERYTHING they offered, and more.

It is my considered feeling that at some point in the future, assuming our democracy survives, which I think likely, we will have just cause to look at large segments of our intelligence community–both civilian and military–with unrestrained contempt. All too often, they don’t do their jobs, in my opinion. They are shackled by political correctness, and sometimes just politics. Things are going on that they should know about. No excuses. It doesn’t matter who the Commander in Chief is. Get it done.

To Congress: a starting point is a THOROUGH, top down audit of the Stimulus. No more checks go out until the past checks are accounted for. And if they can’t account for the money, and if it is in the billions, we could impeach and remove Obama for GROSS negligence and dereliction of duty. You cannot lose BILLIONS without consequence. In the end, he is where buck stops. This is his responsibility.

Quoth Forrest (one wonders why he was named after the Fort Pillow villain, and founder of the KKK; another time): “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”. Any readers I may have are no doubt familiar with that. What is this really, though? A box of chocolates is not fully random: it is a system defined by the theme of chocolate.

In my own lurching way, that is my warning that this blog, too, wanders hither and fro, although not in a fully random way. Obviously, there are recurring themes and words.

Among them, good and evil. Since I use this blog in part as a sort of therapy–wandering is therapeutic for me–I will offer a shade of personal information. I have been sick for two weeks. Not enough to keep me from working, but enough to sap my enthusiasm. This never happens to me. My health is normally excellent. The last time was 15 years or so ago, when I was working a job that I think was literally killing me, and I got the flu, and no choice but to lay in bed for 3-4 days, which I never did even in childhood, at least that I can recall.

I think sometimes illness is thrown at you (let’s not worry about agency here) as a last obstacle when you are on the verge of a qualitative breakthrough. I had mine this morning, and expect my sickness to fade fairly quickly. (let’s hope!!!!)

I don’t want to discuss the details of that particular breakthrough, but will offer some other insights that came to me.

The most important was this: I don’t think we can ever fully purge ourselves of evil. I think we carry it with us everywhere. No one is immune from evil thoughts and evil impulses. No one is perfect. Yet, in important ways we are separate from both our good and our evil impulses.

The image I have is that of a room of statues and objects–to use a Harry Potter theme, let us imagine what I recall was called the Room of Requirement (whatever the storeroom was called where Malfoy was tinkering with the Vanishing Cabinet). Think of all your thoughts, and all of the actions they led to, in the course of a lifetime. Imagine them still, flickering with life, but frozen. Every bad thought you ever had is there. You can see them. The fumes of black smoke that emerge from the top of your head when–in your opinion–someone just did something stupid in traffic. A good example for me was how angry I was–the violent thoughts I had–at the refereeing of one of my kids ball games the other day. This sort of thing can never be eliminated fully, without eliminating life itself.

It is possible to cram oneself into a box–or more accurately to BE crammed into a box, but that is not living. If you have no room to move, you vanish, you cease to exist as a vital human being. This is the case in societies which mete out draconian punishments for moral infractions. Many Islamic societies would be perfect examples. You can’t be GOOD in such societies, because the same spontaneity that leads to genuine generosity of spirit can also lead to negative emotions of greed, anger, spitefulness, and all the others.

What I think our task is is not to deny our negative emotions–they are there whether we want them or not, and whether we acknowledge them or not–but rather to integrate them into our awareness, to watch them develop, bleed (they are always a sort of wound), and then fade. As we grow as human beings, we see them more quickly, and can “defund” them, stop feeding them, more quickly. They will always be there, but we can just let them float like momentary clouds over the sun on a wind-swept day.

Last night I dreamed I was speaking–interacting may be the better word–with Rumi. He had a line I made note of many years ago: “Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.” I asked him if he had evil in him, too, and he showed me some dark images (frankly, of the sort that pepper your local Redbox), frozen in shadow. These were impulses he had had while living.

Then I went up a level, and light was everywhere, and he was playing with his wives and children in Heaven. It was happy.

Then I went up one more level, and was in the light of God. The only way I can describe that feeling is that it scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had. There is this ineffably wonderful smell, and a sense of belonging and contentedness none of us will ever know in this lifetime. Actually, the line before the one quoted above is: “the cure for pain is in the pain”. That is relevant. If the reason why is not immediately obvious, think it over.

The point here, and the reason for the title of this post is that ALL OF THOSE WERE HIM. He was all of that. He could (can, in my view) see all of that, know all of that, be all of that, consciously.

It seems to me we all need to recognize that we are all fractured in some ways, and perhaps always will be. I can’t claim to know how the universe works, but plainly, as I discussed in dealing with the experimental work of Janet (I think I did that post; I had been reading William James brilliant “The Principles of Psychology”–just skip Freud entirely, and devote yourself to his work), we all have multiple “minds” even on Earth. Freud called it the Unconscious, but I think James is right to point out that it appears more congruent with the evidence to say that the less integrated among us have multiple conscious selves. Under hypnosis, they exhibit autonomy of consciousness.

All of this is a bit disorienting, no doubt. I think what ties it all together is a tendency towards love. Things are splitting and rejoining in this world all the time. What I am describing is one direction, one possibility of movement. The other of course is unity.

Few thoughts. Hope they make sense and are helpful to someone. Feel free to email me if I messed with your mind. This is a bit deepish.

I have written a lot–I think mainly in my notes–about the mythical world Joanne Rowling created in Harry Potter. I own all the movies and have watched all but the most recent one numerous times. I read the last two. I like them on many levels, and am always amazed at how creative she was.

The short point I wanted to make this morning (and I had logged on to post something else) is that she has created a model of English virtue. In a post-virtuous world, this is something of a miracle, that she has smuggled something old into the modern (can I say post-cynical? Doesn’t cynicism imply you once cared?) world.

There is courage, loyalty, keeping a stiff upper lip, and yes, eccentricity.

I think this should be added to her list of accomplishments.

I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations”, and thought about the lyric “once I was a rich man/now I’m so poor. Never in my sweet, charmed life have I felt like this before.”

I got to thinking: it’s unclear if his “wealth” was literal or figurative, but if he was a typical hippy, it was both.

Then I got to thinking about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. “You went to all the best schools, but you know you only used to get juiced in it”. Something like that. Rich girl, who gave it all up to wander, and wound up having to in effect sell her body to get by.

Look at the social wastelands generated by the 60’s. Was there really hope? What happened to them? Some were permanently damaged by drugs or died–I’ve known several people who had no idea why they were still alive–but most of them just sort of stopped wandering at some point, and settled down–petulantly, no doubt, at first–then started living more or less ordinary, bourgeois lives after a ten year or so gap.

What did they get in that period? You’ve all heard the old saying: if you can remember the 60’s (70’s), you weren’t there. David Bowie supposedly lost an entire year of his life. Is that really living?

I think it is past time to recognize that the 60’s, far from being a period of deep creativity, were in fact characterized by a profound neglect of social responsibilities–to the future, to the present–and the hauteur with which former drop-outs looked at those who failed to sympathize with them does nothing to mitigate this.

Urban blight is a product of the socialism of the 60’s. The inability of wide swathes of our youth to achieve a sense of belonging and “ennestedness” is a product of the 60’s. The essence of Conservatism is to try and protect what is useful in human life, and the most important of this is extending to our children a place in the world, and a sense of belonging there, and the capacity to be happy there.

A trap, you say? Nothing doing, you say? Normality is for fools. It is for saps. It is for cowardly conformist losers. The true “life” is on the road, in the winds of passion, not stuck in some 3 bedroom suburban home raising kids.

Before you insist on that riff, look at the world we actually live in, not the fantasy you can imagine. Millions of kids hit the road in the 60’s. Did it do them any good, on balance? Are they happier? Most of the ex-hippies I know are neurotic and maladjusted. A high percentage of them have or have had to overcome substance abuse problems. People who are happy don’t feel the need to anesthetize themselves, which is all drugs do. That is why you voluntarily lose long periods of your life. That is not living.

Living is having useful work to do, and people around you who understand you, care about you, and are loyal to you. Vagrants do not have useful work, and they cannot rely on most of those around them. Deadheads are notoriously flaky. They love one another when they are high–I’ve seen it–but I’ve also noticed that long term LSD use makes people irritable, and lacking in even the most basic emotional self control.

There are so many examples–we are surrounded by them–but take this song, by Green Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8krdLDuEx3U

Listen both to the quality of the music–the mechanical dullness, the dissonance–and listen to the lyrics. He is probably singing about trying to sleep while stoned, but a clear element in this is almost certainly clinical depression. He is sad. He has no point or purpose.

And his parents were likely hippies. They likely didn’t discipline him, and probably taught him that much of America is “bullshit”, and that the spontaneous arrogance of youth is superior to the time-honored truisms of the old and the dead.

And this is what you get.

A wicked wind blew through here in the 60’s/70’s. All of this is the result of only PARTIAL rejection of God and American ideals. This is a hint of socialism, only a hint. Much worse is possible.

At the same time, much better is possible, if we can look at this era and its aftermath with unjaundiced and new eyes.

It has seemed to me more than once that the stubbornness with which former hippies hold their political views–in the face of all evidence continuing to argue they have merit–is in no small measure related to a desire for that apparently wasted part of their lives to have actually MEANT something, when in reality they were just running–and not finding–in almost all cases.