Month: August 2011

I can and have taken on entire websites for months at a time. What I mean by this, is that I intentionally go places I know I am not welcome, and post opinions which get me vilified. I have had posts–to be clear, posts that in most contexts would be seen as benign and innocuous–that attracted hundreds of insults.

None of this matters, though. The point is that you can be one single person, and no quantity of contrary opinions can overwhelm a correct idea. The world was not flat when all of humanity believed that it was. Light was still bending even when that was considered impossible.

Thus, I can “debate” 10,000 people, and not be touched, if the views I am defending are the best available on the topic.

You could not take 100 million people of average intelligence, and EVER get the Theories of Relativity, or Newton’s Laws of Motion. There is no quantitative addition that creates quality. It is a different beast. It answers to a different master.

This is why the idea of individualism is so important. We don’t want the average. The average happens naturally. We want the special, and the special disappears in the soup of aggregation.

The interesting thing about Ron Paul is that not only should he be able to garner much of the Tea Party vote, but he ought to be able to get the hard left vote as well, of those who think Obama betrayed them by not attacking “corporations” enough. Some of the most left-wing people I know love Ron Paul.

As I see it, the Federal Reserve is the primary cancer that has made us so sick. They created the Depression that FDR exploited to enact socialism in this country. They are setting the stage for massive inflation, if and when people start borrowing again. They are the principle and primary agent of wealth redistribution in this country.

And Ron Paul is the only candidate that truly grasps this. I have not studied him extensively, but if he only conquered the Fed, that would be enough. It has to be done right, but that is the key, I am convinced, to long term prosperity for the world.

Excuses are what are left when you deduct unforeseeable circumstance and ignorance from the gap between performance and intention.

Joy is the answer to why, not the converse. How is the only relevant question.

Did Jesus have a sense of humor? If one focuses on the doctrine of love, then you must say yes. If you focus on a God who condemns the frivolous to eternal torture, then you must say no–life would be much too serious then.

If you teach a man to fish, but he can’t reach a lake, then you have accomplished little. Wealth-building always begins with jobs, no matter what they pay, and any system that ensures structural unemployment is unjust, even if those who do not work are compensated for those failures.

There is a discussion going on at the Wall Street Journal as to whether or not religion is necessary. Something to that effect. With 10,000 comments there seems little point in adding my two cents there. Still, an interesting topic.

The following will be a bit stream of consciousness, since I have a three dimensional, textured thought pattern that I am trying to import over to a linear, two dimensional format.

Let me put it this way: Goodness is the fruit we desire. It is the capacity to interact optimally with our world, our “selves” (as if consciousness were truly severable), and with others. It is a way of optimizing experience, life as it is lived, motion as it is moved (?), speech as it is spoken. The whole enchilada. The bigger sum than you could ever conceive.

This fruit exists on a bush, or a tree, or a vine. It emerges from a latent order, a latent support, latent sources of nourishment, none of which resemble outwardly the fruit itself, but whose existence enable the emergence, the fruition, the granting of continued life that the fruit represents.

What is a fruit? Is it not symbolic of renewed life? Do actual fruits not contain the seeds that enable the spread of whatever plant gives rise to them? Can we not imagine some of these seeds will give rise to life that continues even when the tree that gave birth to them is no more?

Look at an orchard. There is a lot of life in there. The trees are in rows, often, but that order is nothing compared to the order which enables water and soil nutrients to be turned into life, and then the renewed life that, say, apples represent. Every apple that blossoms, then weighs down a bough, is a child that, given the chance, can have more children. It exists in a complex harmony that is no less rich because death is always an option.

Religion, to me, is the idea behind the orchard. It is the latent idea, the one hidden. We see the life. We see the fruits to which that life leads. But real, true religion is the possibility of all of these. It is the possibility of informational complexity, of rich diversity, of INTELLIGENCE.

As I see it, families have emotional tones. They have rich patterns that, were one sufficiently perceptive, have all the rhythmic complexity of a classical Indian tabla performance. We all of us move as oceans, back and forth. We have our waves, the winds act on us. We have tides and sun.

What I am seeking in the notion of Goodness is all of this. I have given a simple name to the very surface of the sea, and indicated what I think might be below the surface, but of which I am not entirely sure.

Certainly, I have applied logic to the issue. I have thought long and hard about it. Logic is a sort of boat that allows you to connect with the ocean, but it is important to remember that it also separates you from the water.

Sometimes I feel that in poetry alone can one be rational. I am no anti-rationalist, and I see readily enough the atrocities and horrors that come from taking no heed, accepting no responsibility, and from living as one pleases. This is not what I am advocating.

Do not stop short of reason: travel through it, to the other side, and becomes so accustomed to its dictates that you can travel back and forth from A to F spontaneously, gently, without force or violence.

Few thoughts. I am content with this, even if it appears nonsensical, and may not appear to even address the topic. Put a dunce cap on me and sit me in the corner. I’ll still be happy.

Where does it go?

No one looks at two parallel lines and sees freedom. Some escape, perhaps, but never freedom. This is natural.

Oi, what we need floats between us and teases us. I see it, but I cannot name it.

May you hear God’s blessing in your own way. It was already there, but you weren’t listening.

Next day edit: whiskey was involved there. Still, my sober self understands. One could perhaps paraphrase some Sufis that “to be drunk is to be sane”, although of course in their case no “sharab” would have been involved.

I think it is worth noting that this blog is one where I allow myself idiocy. If I were sufficiently erudite, I would render this as “let the reader beware” in Latin.

There is a continuum between genius and idiocy, and only if we were omniscient could we be certain of starting and ending in the right places. As things stand, sufficiently deviancies from normal can in the same day get classified by others as both brilliant and stupid.

There is a sort of rubberband effect. Dwell enough in qualitative diversity by allowing open musing–musing which may well be largely stupid–and you tend to create the motion and perceptual space to go somewhere new, somewhere that may well be quite intelligent.

Thus, I am often typing faster than I am thinking. I am a very good typer, and sometimes I just watch the screen to see what comes out. In effect, I am trying to channel my intuitive side.

Sometimes this results in things I am very happy with–this happens more often than not–but sometimes I quite literally could not explain what I just wrote.

My not unreasonable hope is that this blog mostly appears “intelligent-ish”, but please keep in mind that the angel of idiocy is floating around, and it takes time to know when you have been infected. This applies to all of us, certainly me.

Some interesting statistics on Right to Work versus Forced Unionization states. From Human Events, week of March 21, 2011:

Among America’s 22 RTW states (including Florida, Georgia and Texas) ,non-farm, private-sector employment grew 3.7% from 1999 to 2009, while it shrank 2.8% among America’s 28 forced-unionism states (e.g. California, Illinois and New York).

During those 10 years, real personal income rose 28.3% in RTW states and sank 14.7% in forced-unionism states.

In 2009, cost-of-living-adjusted, per capita disposable personal income was $35,543 in RTW states versus $33,389 in forced-unionism states. Americans in RTW states enjoyed more freedom, plus this $2,154 premium.

Just as minimum wage laws create higher rates of unemployment, so too does forced unionism create an overall lower standard of living, for the same reason: by forcing corporations to pay higher than market wages,they necessarily force less hiring, and less business expansion. In aggregate, this causes economic harm. Self evidently, the people that actually have jobs with the unions benefit, as long as they stay employed. But even they increase their risk of getting laid off, and benefits cannot be paid forever.

None of these things are complicated. People that take the long view, and who try to balance the interests of all concered are few and far between, though. Most people want something for themselves, and could care less about others. In the long run, though, this always rebounds to their own personal detriment. You can only get things by force so long. At some point the well runs dry, and it doesn’t matter than how well honed your protesting and extortion skills are. If the jobs aren’t there, the terms of employment are not negotiable.

Posted the following on the Blaze. Hadn’t thought about this topic in a while, but thought I’d pass along some thoughts I had many months ago, but don’t think I ever posted. I am leaving the link in there, since it would otherwise be hard to find.

I must have run out of room on the second link. It is here: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2010/11/tower-7-thoughts.html

To the extent of my knowledge, I am the only person to have proposed that United 93 was supposed to hit Tower 7. It is in my view stupid to assume that the explosives hypothesis is inconsistent with the consensus reality of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings and fields. They are fully compatible.

Moreover, it is quite possible to separate out the hijackers from the demolition entirely. It is possible someone knew of the plot–say Iranian intelligence agents, or whoever funded the operation through a cutout–but did not tell the hijackers of it. There would be many benefits to this, not least of which would be informational security.

Thus, there would be no reason you could not have radical Islamists, very committed to their cause, crashing their planes, and not knowing that they were funded by people who were indifferent to Islam, or to their version of Islam; and that those same shadow-people could not have set up a parallel operation, to ensure maximal trauma to the American people and economy.

As far as that goes, there was apparently short-selling in some markets. Given the capacity to imagine such cynicism, you could envision someone directly and consciously engineering this operation for profit.

There are many possibilities. What seems clear, though, is that Tower 7 was brought down through explosives.

I’m listening to an excellent series from the Teaching Company (btw, if I have not recommended their products on here before, and I can’t recall having done so, then please start spending “thirty minutes a day in the best classrooms in the world”, as their marketing pieces has it; they are free in most libraries, and most well worth the money if your library doesn’t carry them) by Robert Greenburg, on “How to listen to and Understand Great Music”. He does a good job of not just explaining but dramatizing things.

To the point here, we are now up to the Baroque Age. Baroque is a Portuguese word for an irregular pearl, one with various bumps and what would normally be called imperfections. It was intended at the time as a pejorative, and only recovered, presumably, as an acceptable description after everyone had forgotten what it meant.

The characteristics of this style were ornamentation–busyness–and order. On Baroque buildings, you have huge amounts of filigree, lots of little pieces doing curly-cues, and spirals, going here and there. Yet, looked at as a whole–Versailles is a good example–everything was balanced and ordered. What is on the bottom is on the top, and what is on one side is on the other.

Nature, in this understanding, obeyed rational, knowable laws, and thus the manifold complexity of nature answered, ultimately, to squares and triangles (I will note that the Writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker early on expressed his terror that this might be the case).

Within this line of thought, parts of Nature could be sees as flawed. As Greenburg puts it “there is a general belief that through thought humankind could order and dominate their world”. As he puts it, this passion for order extended to a “negative view of God’s own Nature.”

Here are some very illuminating quotes he offers in support of this thesis:

Malebranche: “The visible world would be more perfect if the seas and lands made more regular features, if the rains were more regular; if, in a word, if we had fewer monstrosities and less disorder.”

French Catholic Missionary, describing Niagara Falls: “Falling from a horrible precipice, foaming and boiling, after the most hideous manner imaginable, and making an outrageous noise, a dismal roaring, really more terrible than thunder.”

English traveller of the 17th Century, describing the Alps: “Hideous, uncouth, monstrous excrescences of Nature.”

This is all very interesting. Here is what I will submit: to the “Baroque”–the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment–is opposed not Romanticism, but the “uncarved block” of Lao Tzu. I have discussed this in a number of places, but this is a critical point.

The Chinese word/phrase normally translated as “Uncarved Block”–“P’u”– is composed of two characters, in my understanding. The first–and I quote here from “The Tao of Pooh”, which I am assuming got this right–“the ‘radical’ oor root-meaning one is that for tree or wood; the second, the ‘phonetic’ or sound-giving one, is the character for dense growth or thicket. So from ‘tree in a thicket’ or ‘wood not cut’ comes the meaning of ‘things in their natural state'”.

In Baroque ornamentation, what we have represented is the complexity of nature. A lawn of grass is endlessly complex, looked at under a fine degree of detail, but encased within carefully maintained borders, and planted in patterns of varying complexity, as in Baroque gardens, it can be made orderly on a perceptible scale.

Yet this “order” requires constant maintenance. The King must pay people to keep the weeds from the walkways, and artisans to repair architectural dtails damaged in storms. Forests require no maintenance. They endure.

In our own nation, attempting to tame wildfires actually made things worse, by tampering with the natural process of periodically clearing the floors for new growth.

As we have learned with Chaos Theory, simply because systems–such as uncut forests–appear disorderly, does not mean they are. All sorts of algorithyms can be applied to water flow, rainfall, tectonic action, resulting in clear statistical patterns.

Herein lies the foundational difference between Socialism and Liberalism: our foundational myths. One can, I think, usefully contrast the classical French Garden with the English Garden, which was consciously intended to appear completely spontaneous and natural. One can contrast French autocratic tendencies, with British Liberalism that survived in vestiges until after the Second World War.

One can contrast the “fatal conceit” that human society can be construed as an Alp or Niagara Falls, or rainfall, and tamed; with the vision (does that semi-colon improperly tame the English language? I honestly don’t know) that spontaneous order is natural, and enforced order unnatural, using excessive energy to achieve nonsensical goals.

Do you flow downhill, or pump water uphill, and call that order?

At its root, it has long seemed to me that the doctrine of egalitarianism is an aesthetic doctrine. It is morality as art; virtue as performance. As such, it answers to a process, but not an outcome.

If Versailles becomes overgrown with weeds, we are told–as it must millenia from now, if not sooner–then at least it existed once. Nature was conquered.

But was it? And what is the cost of building a Versailles? What was the cost, then, to the French people? Wars and taxes, was it not? That is my understanding of the history. And in the end, was it not the mass murder and tumult of the French Revolution, followed at length by the mass murder and tumult and naked conformity and dullness of Communism? Do we not still face would-be Versailles builders, who aim to sculpt human societies according to their aesthetics, which find in greatness and grandeur excess? Which would rather contain human life within very, very tight boundaries, then ornament what is left with artificial filigree?

This metaphor is very interesting. If we consider World War 1 as a figurative Niagara Falls, then symbolically it is fitting that from that disorder returned order. Yet Hitler concluded his own peace treaty after conquering France at Versailles as well. Hitler answered to the Niagara Falls vision of reality, an eminently Romantic one.

The Alps are neither great nor hideous: they are what they are. We are what we are. If we are to change, our first task is to determine our starting point, and that is much harder than might seem obvious. To “do nothing”, the Taoist sense, is not to do nothing, but to understand this foundational reality, and take it seriously.

“Drink is the work of the cursing class”. That’s what we’ve come to. It was funny when there was a choice between work and drink. For large segments of Britain, it seems, there isn’t. They are destined to be unemployed.

I ask again: what is more humane, giving people the opportunity to work at lower wages than many around them are getting; or forcing wages up and jobs down, such that those who have jobs are paid better than they would have been, and the rest forced to languish helplessly?

Helplessness is always a cancer. It eats away at the soul. In many respects, these British riots are logical. They are logical to the extent that a social order which compels upon them dependence must expect that the only way for them to express anger will be abstract, and at the world, at the invisible forces which have been forcing them to kneel their entire lives.

In my view, no person consciously chooses life-long dependence, except the very worst. Yet, people who for the duration of their lives are given no option are bound to feel the need to express their energy in some way. If it can’t be expressed positively, through work, through community service (no doubt run “benignly” by the State), then it will be expressed through crime.

We need to be clear that the growth of a generalized prosperous middle class is disastrous for socialists. It undermines their very reason for being, and their political commitments are not just their source of political power and income, but also their very reason for living, for working. “Protecting” others gives them something to do, which they otherwise lack. Hating or disbelieving in God, they need someone to need them, to protect them from their nihilism.

And so they have assiduously engineered permanent underclasses. They take away the jobs, but assure unemployment. Their consciences are clear, even as they are ruining millions of lives.

I posted this Judas Priest video some time ago. Consider the lyrics, and dominant emotional tone. This was in 1980.