Month: April 2011

I have posted on this a number of times, somewhere, but figure it’s time for an update.

If you are going to move an immovable rock, how do you start? Is it not by eroding its foundations? Given time, the largest rock can be reduced by flowing water. The Grand Canyon was once solid.

The task of the brainwashing is to develop comfort with cognitive and perceptual dissonance. As one example, they might ask the captured American: do you think black people should be able to vote? Do you think they all deserve to be beaten? Do you think rich people owe no debt to the poor?

They might bring in some little girl who they say (it need not be true, of course) has been victimized by American bombs. They ask: do you feel sorry for this little girl?

They keep at this until they get some small agreement, then they ask you to write it down.

The next day they go a little farther, and then farther, and you acquire gradually the habit of small accomodations. Small changes, you figure, can’t hurt. You are kept in a ideologically sealed environment, such that you can’t see how you change over time in your views. One day, they tell you the United States is the Great Satan, which is the inverse of the truth where Communists are concerned, and you disagree. Then they show you all the notes detailing American aggressions. You want to fight it, but you wrote the notes. Emotional and cognitive pain follows. If you are going to fall, you fall here.

Once you fall, the justify it to yourself, that you are now in possession of the true truth, and you become an advocate of hate in the name of compassion, violence in the name of peace, and economic oppression in the name of economic liberty.

To the point on the question of who our President actually is, and if he is actually legally qualified to be our President (plainly, he is not qualified on his merits), the example I would use is the Communist use of sticks of varied lengths to gauge their progress.

First, they give you one stick that is 4″ long, and another that is 4 1/16″. There is a perceptible difference, but only if you place them right next to each other. They ask you if they are the same. You say no. They say that if you admit they are “mostly like each other”, that you will extra rations (they have of course been starving you to weaken your will, and diminish your judgement). This goes on for some time, and you get used to the rations. “It’s just a harmless game”, you say.

Then they put the two out, and they say, these two are of course the same, but do you see any difference between these two, where one is 1/8″ shorter than the other. Are they basically the same?

If you don’t confront them there, you will rationalize what they said. You will have internalized as truth something that just recently you knew to be false.

In my view, this birth certicate issue–where no representitive of the American people as a whole, which would presumably be a member of Congress and/or their designated representative, has been allowed to look at anything remotely conclusive–has a similar dynamic. We are being asked to accept as valid a process which is nothing of the sort. This situation is ridiculous. We are being asked to accept a a3″ stick as a 4″ stick. Once you have done that once, you will do it again.

That to my mind is the true significance of this issue. I don’t know and I don’t care what they find: they need to do the damn thing, as a matter of PRINCIPLE. Pass an Act of Congress forcing Fukino to release it to unbiased experts representing both parties, and the nation as a whole.

To do otherwise is to plead cowardice quite explicitly, in my view.

What if Frank Marshall Davis were listed as his father? Obama’s father abandoned him nearly immediately. What if he thought he were the father, and took her to Kenya to be his (second) wife, as allowed by the Islamic faith he was born into? What if he then found out that he wasn’t the father? He dumps her, she returns to Hawaii, then moves almost immediately back to Washington state, and the two of them have almost nothing to do with one another the rest of their lives. She takes the time when she leaves, though, to both get a birth announcement placed in the paper, and applies and gets a Certificate of Live Birth, naming the actual father, since she had no reason to believe it would ever matter? Obviously, her goal would have been to secure US citizenship for little Barry.

Davis, for his part, bragged about conquests of girls as young as 14 (and group sex with same). 18 would not have been a problem for him. Obama is never told, but the grandfather knows, and makes sure Davis is in his life as a mentor, even if not as an acknowledged father.

Let’s say Obama doesn’t find out until he goes to Hawaii just before the election to look at his birth certificate. He is upset, but as per his style doesn’t show it. His grandmother, however, stricken with grief, dies. I always thought it strange she died the day of his election, but could never quite bring myself to believe he had anything to do with it. This I could accept.

Now, he’s been using his COLB for everything until now. Obviously, he got his documents somehow. Let us say that he even provided Factcheck with a valid document, and that they really did delete things in good faith.

This still leaves him with a Communist, drug-using, sexually perverse father, as a matter of public record, with whom he on his own admission spent a lot of time as a child. That would be politically problematic. The father to whom he (or someone) devoted “Dreams from my father” was also a Communist. That’s a lot of Communists, but of course everyone that is thinking and paying attention knows that.

Communist=baby killer, just in case this is unclear; and literal, as a matter of policy, baby killer. NVA troops routinely shelled civilians on purpose for explicitly terroristic purposes. They put bombs on kids, put them on bikes, and detonated them when they were in crowds. There are no analogues for these behaviors–which were, incidentally, militarily counter-productive in most cases–on our side.

I will follow this with a post on brainwashing.

There can be no serious question that the black people suffer greatly in this nation, and that this should be cause for much concern. Yet, who is to blame?

When black people are victimized, who is normally the aggressor? Another black person. If a black kid gets shot, it was a black kid who pulled the trigger. If a black girl gets raped, it was usually a black kid who did it. They are robber and robbed.

As I ponder this, it seems obvious to me that there are two ways to look at this situation: we can look at it in a static fashion, as if an abstraction once formed could be assumed to forever represent reality; and we can look at it as a dynamic situation, in which even small changes can produce large and unintended consequences. We can live in a fantasy world, or in the world which actually exists.

In the fantasy world, all negatives must result from a positive somewhere else. If someone somewhere else has things better, then they must have taken from the less well-off person. This farcical statement is always made with no serious effort at determining how, physically, this could happen.

With black people, the claim always made is “racism”. What is the mechanism of this supposed racism? Are they thousands of huge factories located in black ghettoes who just don’t hire “colored” folk? That was true of FDR’s world, whose supporters were quite open in their racism–and why most all black people voted Republican–but that is not true today.

The black family is gone. An average kid has perhaps a one in ten chance of growing up in a two parent household, and distressingly large numbers of kids don’t even know their fathers.

What is the solution? Well, why do the fathers leave? They leave because they can’t support their kids, and because of cultural conditioning. The two are related. How can they support their kids? Obviously, if they can find well paying work. The solution is more and better jobs.

In the real world, what one has to ask is: what are the barriers to more and better jobs? What are they?

Well, why do businesses do what they do? Are they not trying to make money in competitive conditions?

Logically, a two pronged approach is needed. First, we need to make it easier to make money for businesses, and we need to make black neighborhoods more attractive business-wise. This leads to a number of conclusions I will partially itemize.

First, we need monetary reform. I have discussed my reasoning here. This is the big picture. This makes our real money expand, and addresses the only real problem which might justify Leftist anti-business rhetoric.

Second, most ghettoes have been created by anti-business activists under the tenet that money could be permanently reallocated by redistributive taxation. In my view, corporations should pay NO taxes. None. The Unions which are strangely (not really) exempted from rules against lobbying still manage tax exempt status. Imagine if you will that you had to pay a tax for the privilege of having a job, then another tax on your actual income. This is how things work for corporations: the entity itself is taxed, then the income of its employees is taxed again. This should stop. In exchange for tax relief they–and unions–lose their ability to lobby directly. Their members can still do whatever they want.

What the Fantasyland thinkers imagine is that wealth is more or less stored in a locked room, and that it just sits there. Logically, they think, why not take that money, which is not needed, and give it to someone who is hungry? Socialists do this all the time, and always economic activity declines. They get a higher percentage of a much smaller pool. Why is this?

The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of systems in motion. What is being taken is not wealth, but creative possibility. If I am a billionaire, you can take my billions, but you lose the next company I was going to create, employing thousands.

There is no way to sustainable, generalized wealth except through healthy corporations who pay their employees well. In my view, the end goal is that every individual in the world is their own corporation, making their control of their time, assets and creative energy entirely their own, but for the foreseeable future we are stuck with larger employers.

We need more of them in the ghetto. We need IBM and GE and Proctor and Gamble in there, hiring people they want. To do that, they need higher caliber people, and kids raised in broken abusive homes rarely rise to that standard.

I want to be clear: I see no functional difference between the gangster culture of the ghettoes and aggressive sociopathy generated in socialist experiments like those in Britain and Germany and elsewhere. The movie “A Clockwork Orange” is a good example of what I am talking about. Race has nothing to do with it. It is disempowering socialism which creates this effect.

The root problem is a lack of an outlet for the expression of creative energy. Dim the lights, and you get people self destructing.

There is no outlet since the socialists never imagine society as a system in motion. It is always for them objects–classes, races–which are set against one another in ways that can be described in the abstract without ever reconciling those descriptions with actually existing realities. They don’t realize that even if you can engineer permanent unemployment payments for those thrown out of work by destructive policies, this will generate misery, and that a life with more risk, but less dependency, will be more productive for everyeone.

As I thought about it today, evil is that condition which seeks to destroy energy. It seeks to reduce the world to wax figures. I think this image of a lifelike–but dead–world is quite horrible to most of us, which is why it has been used often in horror movies. Sade’s book “120 Days of Sodom” is filled with static images.

Goodness is that condition that seeks to encourage and foster motion. I want people to have a place to move. As things stand, large swathes of our population sit in stuffy rooms, with nowhere to go they can see. Jobs are the way to do this.

It seems obvious that charter schools work well. The statistics support this, and it would seem obvious that if the goal is to help people, it would not hurt to ask the people you are trying to help what they want. It is the height of arrogance when people like Barack Obama veto programs which are wildly popular among those using them, simply to support a core constituency–in this case “teachers” unions, with the quotation marks intended to question how much they are teaching, and what.

Few thoughts. This could benefit from editing, but only so much time in the day.

I occasionally see the way to live. The other day I was–in a dream–offering love and comfort to a black woman who had had a very hard life, with repeated traumas, and I was thinking that this energy, this love, is always there, but we hold back. From an early age, we are taught that to give someone is to get something, and we block our natural generosity if nothing is coming back to us. There is a tenderness we block.

Most of the time, what I think we want is recognition: we want people to see that we hurt too, or to acknowledge what wonderful people we are for giving our time and energy. If we can’t get someone to say “you’re so wonderful”, we don’t want to give; obviously, this would be implicit in people simply knowing what you do.

Yet, I felt an alternative, and felt simultaneous resistance to it. We all have our stories. We want to tell people our stories, to be seen, to be visible. I want to tell my story, to be seen.

But this path is short, and leads to death. The way forward is to forget who you are, what your sufferings have been, what your generosities have been, and to work patiently, daily, and as invisibly as you can to build a better world: to comfort those in pain, to encourage those doing things, and to live with as much personal congruence as you can muster.

It seems to me there is a limit to what you can take, but no limit to what you can give. That energy is infinite, provided it is not funnelled through a channel that has been unnecessarily reduced in size by your silliness.

To define sanity would it not be necessary to have a COMPLETELY accurate understanding of reality?

Oi, how far are we from that? I watch people who work jobs they hate for twenty years. I watch people work jobs they hate for money. I watch people prostitute themselves for money. I see many things, most of which do not get commented on here.

How many quiet, submissive people–who make no trouble for anyone–are nuts?

Me, I’ll walk into that darkness with a lot of tests in my past. I have not looked at any veils and wondered helplessly what was behind. I test what can be tested. I may be a fool, but I am not a passive or indifferent fool.

I feel at times like a relic of another age. I decided today not to apologize for poetry. My temperament produces it, even if I don’t carry it on my sleeve, or feel a need to be shouting it from rooftops.

People often don’t know what to do with me, if I show my true colors. I have a vast internal space, filled with prodigious quantities of what I think are interesting events: circuses, tragedies, villains, heroes, wrapped in an alternately luminous and spectral fog, coalescing and dissolving continually. Strange things flow from this mist at times, and I quite often let them. I try to be rational, but very certainly am not ruled at all times by reason. There are higher, more accurate knowings, even though reason is the shovel that moves the most dirt.

Romantically, I don’t think most women know what to do with this. I have met only one woman I can remember who seemed to be able to see me, and not react with confusion and unease. I don’t walk the paths other people do. I am out in the desert, or exploring a foggy bog, or on a boat in the North Sea discovering new islands. Particularly when I am still, I am in constant motion.

That will do for now. There is something I am trying to see–and a decision I am trying to make–but it isn’t coming to me just yet. I will keep moving.

I remember thinking in high school that the people we called leaders simply figured out which way the wind was blowing, then got in front. This is a politician. This is not a leader.

A leader is someone who has a clear vision, a deep and uncompromisable integrity, and the capacity to influence people.

Do you go where the people are, and go in the direction they are going; or do you speak of what you believe, and ask people to come to you?

The first is the talent of the rootless fool, and the other that of the genuinely good person.

In life you must compromise all the time on the outside, but you do not have to compromise on the inside. Memory is the tool of the great.

Is our President a liar or not? Does he occupy the highest office in the land legally, or should he be impeached and removed? The consequences of the answers are large, but the questions themselves are simple enough.

The situation is analogous to this: Obama is driving 15 miles over the speed limit in his convertible. A cop pulls him over and asks for his driver’s license. He hands him a photocopy of a driver’s license, with a face like his, but unclear. The actual Driver’s License number has been whited out.

The cop, understandably, demands more verification. Obama smiles at him, and hands him the phone number of a top DMV official, tells him to call her. He does, and she confirms that Obama is in fact a licensed driver. “Can you tell me his Driver’s License number, so I can run him for warrants and status?” “No”, he is told, “but he is certainly legitimate.”

Obama drives off without asking permission. The cop stands there confused for a few moments. A State official has vouched for him, but the evidence he has provided does not come close to what would be demanded of an average citizen, and he has no way of knowing if that official is simply protecting a political patron in exchange for a favor, or for partisan political reasons. He has no idea if Obama is even licensed to drive, with certainty, since he has no independent way of verifying the claims made.

He goes back to his office to try and pull the original driver’s license and is told by his supervisor he’s nuts, since the evidence is plainly complete. The cop scratches his head, realizes something is going on, finishes his other work, goes home to have a beer, and watches a basketball game.

This is where we are today, except that the next day the cop made another effort, and was told he was nuts once again for his efforts. Is asking of Obama the same thing asked of everyone else nuts? Why? How?

When new people get hired at ANY company, their Driver’s License and usually Social Security card get photocopied for the records. Mine always have been. If a contract–say with the government–included legal language that “natural born birth to be verified prior to employment”, then they would be. I deal with large contracts and large companies, and they leave no detail unaddressed.

This situation is farcical, and in my view anyone who is NOT a “birther” needs to have their heads examined. The task is not to get Obama disqualified; the task is to show how thoroughly and inexcusably our political-media complex screwed up on this fundamental and reasonable request: that Obama provide the same basic elements of identity verification required by relevant laws, in this case proving “natural born” status to a degree acceptable in a neutral and competent court of law.

Unless we believe his paternal grandmother is nuts, then he was probably born in Kenya, his COLB submitted some time in the next year in Hawaii, and a birth announcement released within a month or so of his birth. We can’t even be sure what exact day he was born on. Even if the COLB provided is valid–and if it is why can’t we look at it, and why are identifying marks like serial numbers missing–that still would have been paperwork generated on the basis of believing the word of the parents when they filed for it.

His father spent his life agitating for Communism in Kenya, dying a drunk, broken man when the Kenyan people rejected him; his mother spent her life in Indonesia, working to improve their lives. Neither of his parents seem to have liked America very much. Neither did any of the other adults who raised him until he headed for California.

Our Founders were not stupid, and regardless of their other political differences–and they were sundry, well expressed, and deeply principled–would have been unanimous in their disdain for the mental febrility which enables the reasonable to be trumpeted as lunatic, and common sense to become a sign of extremism.

I think the planning phase of the battle for the future is complete. We have some sense of the scope of the problem, which analysis I have tried to further to the extent of my ability. Genuine Liberals have been losing since Calvin Coolidge, but I think many people are realizing this.

We are still losing. What happened last November was a sort of stopgap. It slowed the slide, but did not stop it, and certainly did not reverse it. If we look at the extent of the cultural damage Leftism has caused in our nation, it is comparable to the national debt, and if we could measure it, the damage done annually to our cultural future is probably analogous to that done by Obama, the Democrats, and the complicit non-Liberal Republicans.

We are not even at the end of the beginning. We have a long road ahead, but difficult times and hard fights make for interesting, useful lives.

A few people have told me in just the last few days how they hated their kids in their teens. This seems sad to me. It’s hard to say what the future holds, but for now I have a very good relationship with them, and thought I might put a few thoughts out there.

Your kids need to know they will be responsible for themselves some day. That you will be gone, and that their sense of freedom and control of their lives will depend on their ability to work. I have been telling mine this since a very early age.

I have been telling them they will fail, and likely fail often, and that this is the way life works. It’s perfectly acceptable, as long as you keep showing up.

I tell them that pain and sadness are a natural part of life, and that they should not be rejected; nor should they be encouraged. Self pity is the worst and heaviest weight that could ever hang on their neck, and to avoid it at all costs.

I tell them it’s OK to break the rules, if they know why the rules exist. If you see a buttom which says “don’t push this”, then don’t push it. If you know that that button used to control something, but doesn’t now, then you know what will happen, and that rule is outdated and no longer useful.

In my view, this helps to teach the idea of consequences. I will periodically ask them why, say, it’s against the rules to run a red light, or to speed. Why is it against the rules to be tardy, or to be talking in class while the teacher is trying to teach? Why can’t you run at swimming pools? We discuss and evaluate different rules. As one example, I have told them I see no problem running red lights late at night, if there is no one around. This is not a safety hazard, and in my view it is not a moral issue. The law and morality are two different things. Segregation was the law. You have to be able to think about these things in higher ways.

My hope is that the explicit permission to break stupid rules will help curb rebelliousness. My oldest actually asked my permission to break a small rule–that prohibiting the chewing of gum in school–to earn detention, since it has never happened before. I said it was fine, but it hasn’t happened yet.

More generally, this line of thought ties into another post I wanted to make. I am still reading–it comes into and out of my hands regularly between other books–Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion”, and in one of the essays he discusses population growth in the Third World (it dates from the 70’s-80’s timeframe).

One point he makes is that in most developing nations, children take care of the parents, so there is ample reason to have a lot of them. There is also ample reason for the parents to make sure the children are raised to be economically independent and successful. Love and nurture is not so important as making them tough and agile.

Let’s be blunt and admit that by and large we raise soft, self indulgent children in our culture. We train them to be DEPENDENT.

I was thinking about this. In large measure, we, too have a system in which the children take care of the old, but they do it through the medium of so-called Social Security and Medicare. Our generation is bearing the burden of the bills of the previous two generations. That’s how the system works. For perhaps two years they tried to save the money, then poof the veil was torn, and the money taken.

But the key difference is that the kids don’t care for the parents: the government does. We pack our old into government-subsidized rest and nursing homes, pay their medical bills, and in almost all cases get them out of our homes. If they have provided for themselves, they get their own homes. If they haven’t, the children and grandchildren pay taxes to the government, who then doles them back out to the parents.

The question I ask myself is: what is the psychological effect of this system on the institution of parenting? Clearly, we have had some astonishingly dumb psychological ideas float through our world, like the primacy of compassion over justice and moral clarity. These have had their predictable effect.

But over and above that, the parents know the children HAVE to take care of them,and will take care of them. This is compelled by the force of law, and will continue until national bankruptcy or massive, necessarily unpleasant (except for my proposal, whose pain should be short) reform.

Do the parents, then, have to care about the success of the children? One sees many, many cases of kids coming back home to stay. If you look at, say, the Chinese, they are stern because their children will one day, in effect, be their parents, and they want them to be equal to the task. They are making an investment that will pay dividends down the road.

We have no such system. There is no system of accountability. I look around me, and it seems to me that where we should have walls, and lines and roofs and bunkers, and a skyline of an intact city, what we have are shimmering heatwaves, ephemeral, solid looking, but impossible to touch. Nothing is real; everything is illusion.

This situation is maddening, and that is why our kids are poking holes in themselves all over their bodies and listening to music that talks about suicide and violence.

Life is logistics. There are emotional and mental logistical tasks, in addition obviously to physical logistics. We are managing these things with stunning stupidity, short-sightedness, and complete failure of courage, in all too many cases.