Month: April 2011

Our primary need is a sense of meaning, particularly one shared in community. This consists in a way of living which gives us a structured identity, a path to follow, and pleasure in both the large and small things in life. Unhappy societies can be very structured, but if they are unhappy, on balance, they are lacking in qualitative order, which is to say a genuine sense of meaning formation.

My dryer has been working only sporadically lately. I could get it fixed, but I also need the AC in my car fixed, and cash for some projects coming up. So I decided to run some clotheslines in my bedroom. I have to say, I really like it. It makes me feel oldschool.

All of these devices–blenders, and refrigerators, and toasters, and wafflemakers, dryers, dishwashers, clothes washers–have they made our lives THAT much better? As I understand it, many women used to go down to the creek together to wash clothes and talk. Nowadays they throw them in the laundry, and have a highball and smoke while watching the soaps.

I don’t have time to get too far into this, but will simply say that both Capitalism and Liberalism are very equal to the task of critiqueing progress for the sake of progress. No idiotic and disproven ideologies like Marxism need be added to the mix. Our system, done properly, is entirely scalable. We just have to plug the leaks I described here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Propaganda has as its purpose the creation of conditioned reflexes. If I say jump, you say how high. If I say hate, you hate. If I say love, you love. As Jacques Ellul pointed out, broadly speaking it is intended either to get you do something, or accept something. He called the former agitation propaganda, and the latter integration propaganda.

In Communist societies–Internationalistic Fascism–and in Nationalistic Fascist systems, you agitate against the status quo until you get your way; and then you tell everyone how wonderful and perfect and lovingly kind and well tempered, wise, and thoughtful the leaders are.

Our nation, and the world generally, has been exposed to effective propaganda for over a century. Many have been “taught” that wealth is theft, that stable moral systems are anachronistic, that government can play the role of ersatz parent and community, and that “rightists” lie.

Given this last theme, meme, it becomes easy to invoke the conditioned response of hate. The creation of on-demand hatred for any group whose existence is imcompatible with generalized tyranny and oppression of the society by an oligarchic elite is very valuable. For example, the Tea Party instantly, and with no evidence, became synonymous with racism. Racism is bad, therefore they are bad, therefore all correct thinking people will consider them bad, and hate them to the extent they want to consider themselves moral. The more hate they feel, the better they are as people and as group members.

The issue with the birth certificate–which does not seem to exist–is that to my mind it represents the triumph of a political discourse in which up is turned to down, right to wrong, and righteous indignation to vitriolic wickedness.

I used to get carded at bars. I had to provide my birth certificate to get that driver’s license. I have to show it every time I fly somewhere. I have to show it when I get pulled over by a cop. If I want to work for even a mediocre security company, I have to get finger printed, my record checked, references checked. To get hired anywhere you have to provide two forms of identification: normally a drivers license and a social security card.

Asking for verification of someone’s identity is, in short, not rare. And these routine investigations are a fraction of the scrutiny anyone who gets a security clearance faces. Investigators go back and interview your friends in high school–I know people who have gone through this process. They interview family members. They talk to employers. Nowadays, they would scrutinize your posting on the internet and twitter. They look at where you have traveled and when. For very sensitive positions, you get regular polygraphs.

Obama is in charge of all these people, and has access to things no single one of them–or very few of them–has access to in full. He is the head guy. He makes the decisions, in large measure.

Our Founding Fathers had a very simple reason for demanding the President be natural born: they had invested that position with a lot of power–power which has increased exponentially since their time–and it seemed that in a nation our size, it should not be overly challenging to find someone born here of American parents. Plainly, the concern was divided loyalties, like you might find, for example, in someone born in Kenya, with a Kenyan national father (and mother who would soon abandon American permanently).

When you are fighting a war–and we are in a war for our national soul on many levels–you do not win by letting your opponents dictate the time and place of battle. You win by boldness, creativity, and speed. You strike like lightning where they can’t find you or see you. A long, drawn-out battle is usually the sign of incompetence.

Traditional Liberals–Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill Liberals–are right. Our opponents–who can be equally well described as monarchists, since they want a return to an older way of living–are wrong. Why then have Liberals been losing for the better part of a century?

They are cowed by intellectual cupidity of the Leftists, who want to own all minds, all thoughts, all public speech, and who have developed effective tools for doing so.

They are afraid of being called names. They are afraid of public mockery. They believe, in short, that some part of the Leftists project must be worthy, and that these people cannot be as awful as they seem. Reality: they are. They are ruining our country and our world. They bring poverty, hate, discrimation, torture and murder wherever they go. They hoped openly for a civil war in Iraq, just so they could score political points. They wear T-shirts of a man who apparently got sexual excitement from murder (and of course rape), and who wanted to nuke New York and as much of the East Coast as he could. According to plausible accounts, the real reason Krushchev removed the missiles was that he was afraid the nuts running the place would use them, and start a war involving the Soviet Union.

What does the term Birther signify, in reality? Someone who is dissatisfied with a political establishment that is willing to open the vault to our national security apparatus without so much as a phone call to check references. We don’t have the faintest idea who Obama is, and the birth certificate is the clearest symbol of this. WE LITERALLY DON’T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE HE WAS BORN.

Republicans lost the budget battle, in my view. They lost because they were afraid of the political points the Democrats would score. How is it going to get easier in 2012? 2013? Hopefully we can put a Republican in the White House, but the propaganda machine will still be there. They will still be telling us about the starving little old ladies, and ignore how many more starving little old ladies there will be when we file national bankruptcy.

We have to tell the truth, tell it openly, and as fully as we can.

Here is what I think Donald Trump should do: offer a $10 million reward to anyone who can furnish an authenticatable Obama birth certificate. No takers? Try $20 million. $30 million. In my view, it doesnt’ exist, and never has. This does not prove he was born in Kenya, but it certainly means that he has no way of proving he was born here. It seems clear enough what the courts should do with that information. What they will do, of course, one can only guess.

Bottom line: what most Americans don’t realize is that they have been brainwashed into believing Obama was a credible candidate: that he was actually intelligent, actually principled, and actually capable of leading anyone anywhere. He is none of those things, and people have failed to realize it simply because THE MEDIA HAS COVERED FOR HIM.

Once people realize the extent of the cover-up, the extent of the failure in due diligence, they never go back to blind faith again, and that can only work to the benefit of those who are actually telling the truth, and to the detriment of the liars and partisan activists in disguise.

I like to periodically remind any readers I may have that inflation is wealth transfer. It only results in actual price increases when it enters circulation.

Many, many commentators keep saying we are on the verge of hyperinflation. I don’t see it. What people have to grasp is that in Weimar Germany, the government controlled money production. Same in Argentina, and modern Zimbabwe and China.

Our government does not control money production. Theoretically, all excess money they spend is borrowed, so it already existed somewhere.

The hyperinflation of the 1970’s was, in my view, created by the Fed with the intention of getting increased freedom of action. They got it. Prior to 1980 or so, the Open Market Committee could only buy US Treasury bonds, as I understand the matter. After that–in the name of getting the “tools” to control inflation–they got carte blanche, a platinum diamond credit card with no limit that never needs to be paid back.

Bernanke and his cohort vote, say $100 billion in spending. They write a check to JP Morgan for half that, and the other half to Goldman Sachs. These groups had been holding US Treasury notes as a port in an economic storm, but now want to expand globally. They are able to sell the notes at whatever the Fed, which is them, is willing to pay–remember nobody audits these transactions, so there is absolutely no need to fear accusations of collusion–and then take that money and spend it anywhere they want.

We will only get inflation in this country if they choose to spend it here. My guess is they are buying up Japan at the moment, swathes of India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, or whatever else floats their boat. You get this huge, global transfer of wealth, and it is largely invisible. Nobody tracks them. Nobody can track the nexus of interaction between the Fed–which they control–and the member banks.

To be clear, the head honcho at JP Morgan sits–or sat–on the very committee that votes money for his bank. This is patent conflict of interest, but no law prohibits it. This is utterly and completely ludicrous.

When leftists tell us that “Wall Street” controls whatever, say 70% of our national wealth, this is the mechanism by which they do it. I have made this point repeatedly, and will continue to do so. For any new readers I may have, my series on this topic is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Marx liked to call “capitalists” parasites: they were supposed to benefit without effort from the work of the actually laboring class. This was stupid then, and is stupid now: someone had to create the factory, staff it, and run it. Someone has to decide what to produce, and how much, and where to sell it. All of these things have to happen. They have to happen in Socialist economies and in Capitalist economies. The only question is if these problems will be solved competently or incompetently. It would seem hard to find a better means of getting it done right than to personally motivate the people making the decisions, something which is absent in Socialist systems, in which mistakes are not punished, and in which sinecures for the inept are the rule.

Capitalists, as a class, then, provide a needed labor and service. The people who are the actually parasites are those who create money from nothing. By so doing they claim ownership of the products of other peoples labor, but add nothing of value of their own. This is morally wrong, leads to diminished income for most of the people, and needs to stop.

Hopefully this is clear enough. I am the only person saying exactly this, this way, that I know of. Please ponder what I am saying. I have thought this through with as much care as I could, and gone to great pains to expose myself to criticism, which has been slow in coming. The only critiques I’ve heard have been based on complete misunderstandings.

I have said before and will say again that the right and the left need to make common cause on this issue. If they object to the accumulation of great wealth, so do I, to the extent it is the result of unearned income. I have no problem with Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. My problems are with the people you have not heard of, like Jamie Dimmon , who himself is no doubt just a front man for people’s whose names some could guess, but which we really don’t know.

If you think about it, we have no way of knowing with certainty that $100 billion or more of the latest round of money printing didn’t end up in an individual’s pocket. How would we find out? We have no idea how much money was created, or where it went. Again, this situation is patently farcical. No serious economist should fail to see this.

Even though George Jones (“He stopped loving her today”, “These days I barely get by” among others), Hank Williams (“First Fall of Snow and many others) and other country artists give her a run for her money, I have long felt Sugarland’s–Jennifer Nettles’–song Stay is the saddest song I’ve heard. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to cry. I can feel her pain. She is a very open person, and I can feel what she feels. This is why they are as successful as they are. She puts what she has out there.

I don’t know the story behind this–I did some basic research, but nothing exhaustive–but I cannot help but feel that that amount of emotion has to be autobiographical. That kind of pain is shattering. It leaves a mark; but having survived it, one becomes better able to be confident in feeling deeply. To have suffered deeply is to have learned, if you do not reject that pain, if you choose to move beyond it, to get back up off your knees, and decide to live–to move–again: to reject helplessness, and the watery emotions that flow over you like a suffocating river.

Stay was not their first hit, but I cannot help but wonder if it was not the emotional basis for what has become a very first-rate career; if it was not latent and simply unwritten early on. So much that is good flows from conquered despair.

I have said often and will say again that one cannot assume that people that are “lucky” have good “karma”, and those who suffer bad. We are here to learn, in my view, and there are many ways to do that, but the principle one is to learn to transcend the many attachments to ways of feeling and being that cause us such misery.

Here, she has located her entire emotional life in a relationship which is cruel and random. She has lost herself in need and desire and lust. Her pain flows from a chosen “medication”, a chosen behavioral gestalt, that hurts her.

Could we not view ourselves–many of us, at any rate–in many respects as incompetent pharmacists, dispensing lifestyles which cure none of our diseases of mind and emotion?

To see is to make good; to be blind is to be hurt repeatedly, the blows inflicted from a darkness beyond.

I’m clearing out some blogs I started for various reasons. It looks like my first–and abortive–foray into broadcasting my thoughts into this electronic world actually happened back in 2007. I read it now, and as happens often to me, I find myself agreeing with myself, and realizing I have phrased some things better in the past than now. Anyway, here it is:

Saturday, October 27, 2007
Welcome!!!

It is with a mixture of sadness and relief that I inaugurate this blog.

Sadness, because my intent is here to “publish” for the world intellectual content in the development of which I have invested enormous effort. My prior intent had been to collate my ideas, present them to a publisher, sign a nice book deal, make loads of money, and retire somewhere warm and watery.

Last night, however–in the sort of development which I don’t think is unique to my particular psychology, but which may appear to some dysfunctionally ideosyncratic–I had a series of dreams which convinced me that I ought instead simply focus on getting my ideas out there, hopefully to generate some concrete good in the world.

This decision is in fact a relief as well for that reason. It is hopeless, I think, in most cases to fully tease one’s own vanity out from a received vision of reality; however, it must be said that I think some of these ideas, in their precise formulation and order, are both unique, and potentially world changing. Because I believe that in many important respects our culture is heading in the wrong direction, I likewise believe that with better quality ideas, we can begin–in small ways, in small places–to improve upon the foundations we have built with Western Culture, rather than continue to destroy them in the act of building. . .what? That is the question, isn’t it?

In a series of roughly 20-40 paragraph posts I will outline a system of morality which in its precise formulation is to my knowledge unique. There is a pronounced tendency, especially among the educated, to see something and say “this is nothing but x, y, and z”.

This sort of superficial overview is in a broad sense responsible for a great many human problems today. As I will argue, proper perception requires the ability to generalize, to examine issues in excruciating detail, and–most importantly–to move flexibly back and forth between the two, and to never cease this process. I call this perceptual breathing. You breath in, you breath out. Neither alone is sufficient to the maintenance of life, and neither the general nor the specific is sufficient to the task of proper understanding.

My preference is for the word Goodness. Both the words “morality” and “ethics” have a sort of bloodlessness about them that I find quite unappealing. They have a distance and a lack of personal immediacy about them that is attractive to philosophers but few others.

What most people want to feel, to know, is that they are “good” people. In the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, the now old and fading Ryan asks his wife “Tell me I’ve led a good life.” One gets the sense that when he passes on–or not, depending on how our universe is actually constructed–his dying thoughts will be on the nature of his life, how it was lived, how he conducted himself, and the standards he uses will not be intellectual. They will arise from within and be treated from within his gut.

There is nothing that cannot be rationalized, and thus there is no human evil which has not arisen from within a system which would seem on the face of it to oppose such evil. I will argue, though, that there is also nothing which can be hidden without a profound cost.

With that I would like to conclude my inaugural post. I will have a long day tomorrow, and am going to drink some beer tonight.