Month: August 2011

I have every song Hank Williams (Senior, of course, although I do like much of what Junior did) ever recorded. This song, Fly Trouble, does not seem to fit his oeuvre (can you use that word for a country singer from Alabama?). It’s really perky, there’s no heartache, and it’s just not like most of his other songs.

I was listening to it tonight, though, and remembered a point Dale Carnegie made in his excellent “How to stop worrying and start living” about how people can often endure great difficulties without complaint, but then get worn down by the littlest things, with insects being a conspicuous example. You work all day in the fields, come home bone tired to the most basic food, sleep in a hot room, and yet it is the flies that finally cause you to snap.

A month or two ago I was talking with a man who spent his career in the Marine Corps, about the difference between Parris Island and Camp Pendleton, both of which host basic training classes for incoming Marines. In his opinion, the salient difference was sand flies. May have been mites. Little bugs that get on you and itch. They have them in Parris Island, and not in California.

You aren’t allowed to swat them away. You aren’t allowed to kill them. The drill instructors treat them like Hindus treat cows. This man said he had once seen a recruit forced to search for several hours for a bug he had killed, that had fallen in the sand (so that it could get a proper burial, as I recall; beer was involved, so this may be slightly off).

Old Hank knew what he was doing. Damn flies can, in the right circumstances, do as much damage to your emotional well being as your woman cheating on you. Maybe more, depending on the rest of the context.

Dale Carnegie framed it as “don’t let the little things get you down”, and that is sound advice. There’s always some little, unexpected, annoying thing. Be a big wheel, and just roll over it.

Some evenings, and sunrises, the air is just perfect, and the light shines off the leaves of trees, that are moving gently in the breeze, and I get this sensation, that I sometimes call “mystery”. Something is there, but I can only feel it. It is hiding, but feels like someone I have loved forever, and who has loved me forever, giggling unseen behind a bush, or perhaps floating somewhere in the air.

I mention this, because this is something worth catching. For me, it seems to follow long, hard work, fear, anxiety and the like. Then quiet.

To have the peace without the storm would be like living in California, and we can all see where that has led. Sorry, couldn’t resist. I have in fact lived in California, for what it is worth.

Can one mock the sublime? I think not: it is immune to irony and contradiction. It is merely often ignored. That is the fate of heaven.

For their part, I think angels can plainly see how stupid we all are, and yet still wait for us.

I’m in a remarkably good mood. I don’t know why. But, really, is there RATIONAL exuberance? By definition, you have left the lines, at least as I see it.

Few wandering thoughts, that can’t even cross from A to B, but which perhaps might lend some color to the ones that do.

See, I find that funny. I am a quirky sort, and no one who knows me can fail to see it. Still, I have fun.

Hard to know how personally to take it, but there are a number of sites where my comments just won’t show up. Most recently, the Mail in the UK, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC (no surprise on that last: I was noting that GE owns them, and that GE sits on the Federal Reserve Board of New York, or did until recently; Warren Buffet, of course, is also heavily invested in GE, which has seen a very good ROI out of this President, and the Dem’s more generally). Of course, it may just be shitty software. For my part, I need not render a firm conclusion at this point. [Many posts have now appeared that were posted after my own, so I must infer that the likelihood is it was not allowed through. Why, I don’t know. The text below is a cut and paste. If I worried about things like this, then I suppose I would worry about this.]

Be that as it may, I posted the following, in response to this article:

This was all predicted in Clockwork Orange, was it not? Can those with perception not see the bloodlessness and vampirism that follows the rejection of coherent moral and cultural narratives?

For my part, I have invented terms for all these things. Thinking new thoughts is always easier with new words.

If you click on the Political section of this link, you will see my treatment of different political orders, of which I recognize four. This is original, as far as I know: http://www.goodnessmovement.com

I also define Goodness in a way which I think could survive the PoMO critique of someone sincerely trying to improve the world, and/or to perceive/think clearly.

To the extent this trauma causes you to ask how the worms got into the middle of your cultural order, it will be useful. It is far better to realize you are falling, than to wake up one day on the ground, not knowing how you got there.

The mere fact that this bothers many Britons–apparently most–is positive.

I was reading this rare example of writing we can reasonably assume to actually be that of Obama, and it dawned on me that there are structural similarities between the current war on the war on the debt being waged by the parrot-(rhymes with robot)niks, and that waged by them against efforts to counter Soviet military power.

In both cases, you have a factually ungrounded argument, that appeals to naive young idealists, who simply cannot believe that what appears to be the truth, can in fact be the truth.

In the case of the debt, we are looking at financial collapse, of a sort common enough in history. They happen all the time. Such a collapse–and no amount of tax increases will prevent it, and may well hasten it–will hurt the poor and middle class the worst, PARTICULARLY if it is called a “revolution”. This is what happened in France. It is what happened in the Soviet Union. It is what happened in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Yes, you can take people’s stuff. But it lasts a blink of an eye, then you are sifting through rubble looking for morsels of stale food.

The poor and middle class will not have comfortable country homes, the ability to stockpile food, or–the simplest remedy–to just move somewhere better. They will not have cushy jobs in the new government, which arrogates to itself more than enough, while others starve. Given a sizable enough collapse, starvation is conceivable even in America.

Likewise, the anti-national defense movements seemed predicated more or less on the subversion of our national sovereignty. “Better Red than dead”, they said, which also implied “better red than wealthy”, “better red than capitalist”, and “better everyone poor than anyone rich”. These things all go together.

The cynics of course knew the goal was ending American autonomy, but among them were many stupid children who thought negotiation with the Soviets was both possible and desirable in conditions other than national strength. Reagan did sign agreements with them, agreements which followed the development of good negotiating positions brought on by credible military capabilities.

If we alter “Standing against Militarism” to “Standing Against National Defense”, we get an acronym describing the actual intellectual and moral foundations upon which leftists want to erect their utopian palaces.

Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22krugman.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0727-L17

I’ll pull out two comments:

In particular, cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of weak consumer demand.

What we need to read here is “cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of considerable uncertainty with regard to our regulatory future, our tax future, and our overall economic conditions that are resulting from that uncertainty.” Reading fools like Krugman, you would think people were banging on the doors of Colonel Sanders, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison to DEMAND the products that made them rich. This is stupidity of a depth possible only for someone who has never run a business, or had a real job. Krugman doesn’t even seem to have had the high school job at Burger King.

For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great.

I do know my 1930’s history, and what happened is the Fed inflated our currency in the late 1920’s, the DEFLATED it very consciously, beginning just before the Crash it more or less caused, and continuing roughly through the first year of FDR’s tenure. No one is calling on the Fed to pursue deflationary policy, and cutting government spending does not constitute deflation by any rational definition.

The naked fact is that we will be paying some $1 trillion JUST IN INTEREST a decade from now, which will constitute what was as of a couple decades ago our ENTIRE BUDGET, and as of a tad over ten years ago HALF our budget.

These leftists are so stupid they assume that businesspeople are unaware that at some point tax increases will be necessary. They are planned for 2013 already, and amount to something on the order of a 30% hike. By 2016 the plan is to collect $3 Trillion in taxes annually (and self evidently spend much more than that).

None of this is complicated. Taxes deferred are not taxes avoided. In fact, the longer it takes to pay them–as with any debt–the higher the eventual cost. This basic phenomena is familiar to anyone running a business or a household, and will in my view not be lost on the bulk of voters next year, Krugman’s avid propagandizing notwithstanding.

I have an idea for a reality show. Take people who have been on some form of public assistance their entire lives, give them tasks for which they are not prepared, and see who can succeed. For example, you dump building materials in a parking lot somewhere, leave a blueprint, and see who can organize the project and get it done. You could pay for the college, or vocational training of the winner. Maybe every participant gets something–for example a job.

This is the sort of model that needs to be on display. Currently, the motto seems to be “get rich (by luck) or die trying”. Rather than seeing a pathway to progress, teens in ghettos (and I would include here all the chronically unemployed of all races in countries like Britain and France) engage in risky behaviors of all sorts, including not just drug dealing, but assuming that some sort of athletic or musical talent will get them out. They do on occasion, but rarely.

We need to be clear that black people in this country have been segregated more or less as a conscious policy of Democrat policy-makers, who have insisted that their path forward consists in electing and reelecting the same people who fail them year-in, year-out. Every election cycle, the promised manna falls in small bits, but never enough to fundamentally alter anything, with the major exception of the cost/benefit analysis as it regards out-of-wedlock parenthood.

Currently, African-Americans are incarcerated at a rate at least three times that of European-Americans. Yet, as I understand the matter, if you correct for single parent households, this disparity disappears. White Americans that are raised in single parent homes commit crimes at the same rate as black Americans also raised in single parent homes. This is, then, not a racial difference at all, but a cultural difference, and the culture in question cannot be understood outside of the politics of separation, resentment, and victimhood that have been playing in the ghettos ever since Jesse Jackson used the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to launch his own brand of political entrepreneurialism.

To the point, the message is that no matter what you do, what decisions you make, you deserve something from others. That personal responsibility is not a primary virtue, and that anger combined with political agitation is the pathway to the future.

For his part, Jackson’s business has done well. He has made a lot of money. But he has not helped anyone help themselves. The best he ever gets for anyone is a place at a feeding trough filled with food provided by other people.

He does not produce producers. He does not produce self respecters. He does not produce wealth. He does not produce innovation. He does not produce GOODNESS. The seeds he has sown produce burning buildings, of the sort seen here some time ago, and quite possibly soon enough again.

Rant over.

Religion is the only human cultural system preoccupied full time with the problem of meaning. Philosophy thinks about it, but does so in the abstract, and has no ritual, art, or other associated tradition.

Art, in the form of aesthetics, for its part, does not take as its primary task the creation of meaning. Art can enable you to transcend difficulties, but has not historically treated it as the primary objective, in the secular tradition.

The task is to transmute pain into acceptance. To tie people together, not just as communities, but as in-dividuals. Only religious art, in the broadest possible sense, does that.

To reject religion, then, is to reject meaning formation. Socialism, quite literally, is a system which is self destructive on the most basic level. It is not economically productive, leads to political tyranny, homogenizes truth, and rejects the possibility of individual meaning formation, which of course is the only place it could ever form, since none of us can exist as abstractions.

Does George Soros produce anything? What he seems to do is sow and profit from chaos.

In this, he differs from most corporations. All jobs, wealth, and production in this and most other nations comes from corporations. Government sucks up the wealth thrown off by the productive use of capital, redistributing it to bureaucratic elites, ostensibly in support of redistributing it to “the poor”, but of course no leftist really cares about the poor enough to pursue policies which actually help them.

All a corporation is is a shield that limits personal liability. As a way of limiting risk it is simultaneously a means of stimulating risk-taking, of the sort that underlies all of our economic progress. Ford started somewhere. Edison–founder of GE–started somewhere.

Thus it is the height of idiocy to simultaneously decry “corporate greed”, and rising poverty. Corporations create wealth. What creates long-term poverty is government interference in the private sector.

The obvious example, to me, is the use of minimum wage laws, which are intended to raise the living standard of the poor. What happens in reality is that you increase unemployment. Some people get poorly paid jobs; and the rest get no jobs at all, but long term endurance on the dole. This leads to frustration, and the failure to learn the skills which are necessary to be worth more than minimum wage to someone, which in turn is the only stable way to rise up in the world.

I am seeing even the Israelis–who as a very educated people one would have thought would understand the most basic economics–agitating for leftist policies.

We need to be clear: minimum wage laws are not untested ground. Rent control is not untested ground. Both have been tried, often, and around the world, and ALWAYS result, in the first case, in rising unemployment, and in the second in the rationing of housing and skyrocketing property prices, and/or in the complete decline in the value and livability of what property is available. These are the predictable outcomes of assuming that prices exist in a vacuum, separated from the rational decisions of rational people.

So much childishness: how does it persist? God only knows. I could speculate, but I won’t here.

There is nothing particularly deep about sadness, except to the extent that those unable to feel it deeply are necessarily emotionally constrained, and hence superficial.

Love always contains the possibility of sadness, as well as, of course, joy, humor, fun and all the other positive emotions.

To live you have to be able to move, and this means you cannot have any closed black doors that say “do not enter.”

I liked this song, which is currently a hit, and playing on the radio, till I started hearing something about “outrun my bullets”.

Why in God’s name is this crap on the radio? Yes, it’s a catchy tune, but one about a mass murder of school children.

Robert’s got a quick hand
He’ll look around the room
He won’t tell you his plan
He’s got a rolled cigarette hanging out his mouth
He’s a cowboy kid
Yeah, he found a six-shooter gun
In his dad’s closet hidden in a box of fun things
And I don’t even know what
But he’s coming for you, yeah, he’s coming for you

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet
x1

Daddy works a long day
He be coming home late, yeah, he’s coming home late
And he’s bringing me a surprise
Because dinner’s in the kitchen and it’s packed in ice
I’ve waited for a long time
Yeah, the slight of my hand is now a quick pull trigger
I reason with my cigarette
And say your hair’s on fire
You must have lost your wits, yeah

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet