Month: August 2011

Please keep in mind that the Federal Reserve, while it is theoretically an independent entity, is actually owned and controlled by private banks. They “buy” stock, as I understand it, but it is non-transferable stock. In effect, you have to be invited to the party.

For example, sitting in one of the three primary seats on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York–the most important one, by design–is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. I was reading on CNBC today that JP Morgan doesn’t expect the Fed to raise interest rates any time soon. How could they know this? Well, in large measure because it is their decision.

The point I wanted to make, though, was that something on the order of a trillion dollars was given out to US Treasury bond holders, which no doubt included preferentially Federal Reserve member banks, who not surprisingly are posting large profits. This money was created for the purpose. What they are doing with it, we have no idea, but how hard would it be to buy up blocks of stocks, then dump them to create market disruptions, and then bargain buying, or politicaly instability?

That this is illegal would not matter if the discussion were held at a Federal Reserve meeting over tea and crumpets. None of these meetings are open to the public, and the Fed has no serious reporting requirements.

As I say often, it doesn’t matter if conspiracy theories like this are true or not: what matters is that if they COULD be true our system has serious flaws in need of fixing.

We need to end the Fed. http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

This plan will work for Europe and it will work for Japan.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200

How are we lunatics? Let me count the ways.

First off, I am not rescinding my support for the deal just cut. But we need to spend the next two years EDUCATING people. No rational human being capable of the most basic thinking can possibly rationalize what Obama is trying to do. It’s impossible. You can say that it would be great if it coudl work, but it can’t.

Look at that chart. First, notice that Obama is the first President to ever try and spend more than $3 trillion, and he is doing it not just once, but forever, on these projections.

Note further that the revenue projections for 2011-2016 require collecting a lot more than we EVER HAVE.. What you will note is that in 2016 they have us collecting $3 trillion in revenue. This is a 50% increase over 1998, in inflation adjusted dollars. They have us spending $3.5 trillion, which is nearly a 100% increase over 1998.

Put another way, if we had Clinton era levels of spending, then with their revenue projections we would have a balanced budget and could start paying down our debt.

Yes, George Bush added a lot to our debt, but Obama is doubling down.

We are not in imminent danger of crashing, in my view, but we damn sure better get our hats on straight and take care of business.

Edit: I will add that the, say, $8 trillion our debt was supposed to increase, and the 7.9999 trillion it will be reduced to with the debt deal, comes from these numbers. If their revenue numbers are wrong–if, for example, the massive 2013 Obamacare tax increases knock us on our ass–then the deficits will be higher.

Through 2016 I count 4.6 trillion, I think it was. This also assumes demographic projections are accurate, which is to say estimated healthcare and Social Security expenses.

Truly, this is lunacy. That many nations have found themselves in the same place–many going over the cliff–does not change this.

We are better than this. We are much better than this.

Tarkovsky had a remarkable ability to balance and oppose images. As I think about it, the wife rolling on the floor in despair has to be balanced against the man rolling in the proverbial clover. His “happiness”, in his dream world, is bought at the expense of hers and their daughters. And then, it is plastic. He winds up back in bed, where he started. Bed, rolling, rolling, bed. There is sleep, too, in the middle, that was not there in the beginning, nor in the end. There is a deep structure in this thing that he likely mapped out.

The dog, in my view, goes with the daughter: a source of love and happiness he fails to see.

Finally, I wanted to note that this movie likely killed not just Tarkovsky, but many of the people on the crew. Many if not most of them got cancer from the literal poisons in the place they chose to film this movie. The drifting white flakes, that added so much atmosphere, were toxins that just happened to be there.

One could go in many directions with this symbolically. It is the first film I know of that killed most of its participants.

Rather, though, I think I will go back to the film itself. Water is a very common thematic element in Tarkovsky. There were a number of scenes in Nostalghia in which it was prominent, always or often in decaying, decrepit structures, whose roofs no longer protect against it.

Water can mean many things–and the beauty of unexplained art is that I can come up with ones he never intended, and derive use from that process–but here I think it is the intrusion of doubt. It connotes a sensation of sleeping, and not living. It is a dreamland, where what we hope comes into being, as does what we fear. It is mutable. It flows, and it collects.

I’m speaking out loud. I think I would need to watch the movie again to pull more out. I do think the film could be described as a symbolic polyphony–polysymbolism, perhaps? Richly textured, mythic.

Ah, life calls.

It seems to me the bits of cloth Stalker uses to find traps might be seen as metaphors for worry. Always he throws them out, and never do we see a trap. One readily imagines what would have been possible with modern American special effects artists.

As I recall, Stalker did make reference to losing people, so presumably he had seen actual traps, but for us, the viewers, it is suspense which never results in actual danger. For all we can tell, all of them could have walked straight to the room.

And he is accused of meandering by one of them. I forget the details of the dialogue, but let’s approach this metaphorically.

Do you want to know the truth about life? What is really real? Or do you dread it, fearing meaninglessness, and complete collapse? Do you believe others should believe things, but find yourself unable to do it yourself?

You are circling. And you will necessarily create these elaborate cognitive traps, which segment one part of you from the other. You will create thought rituals, which you do not even recognize. What you will never to do is put what belief you have to the test.

And so you wait, which we are told is the “condition” of “modernity”. In reality, cultural modernity is a creation of monied intellectuals, people paid well preach hopelessness. Our universities are filled with them.

Questions as to the meaning of life necessarily begin, when done properly, wwith questions about the context within which we live. Are the brain and soul the same thing? Does consciousness cease with death? Are we connected in non-physical ways? Is there a consciousness underlying this universe? Since these are questions about reality, they are NECESSARILY empirical questions. These are not philosophical questions. The question, then, is one of tactics, and not aim.

But it is the height of idiocy to derive necessary conclusions from false premises and consider oneself clever, as most modern intellectuals do.

They view their plight as inescapable. This is risible foolishness. There they lie, thrashing about, complaining of thirst, surrounded by water.

I really enjoy the films of Andrei Tarkovky. They are deep in the best sense, and invariably invoke hours of–what is the word?–not soul searching, perhaps viewing. I watch the world for some time through the prism he has given me, I see how things play out from past to future, I see farther out than I have, the world fragments and reassembles. This was, I think, his intention.

One thing I think I need to mention right up front is that we all must learn to defend our beliefs. It is the hardest thing in the world to be forced constantly to invent some new disease in response to the latest pessimism. You read Nietzche, or Sartre, or even Glenn Beck at his most pessimistic. You surround yourself with violence and conclude that peace is impossible. You can’t imagine life after death, or a just God.

It is important to create your world view consciously. This is a lot of work, but work that anchors you, and gives you hope for the future. You may not know what is going to happen to you, but you can speak with some confidence about who you will be.

Here, I will not summarize the movie. The plot is on Wikipedia, but to really get what he is doing you must watch the movie. He was a truly amazing cinematographer. Many of his long shots feel like they could be framed and hung on the wall as art. He has in there a monologue about music: I get the sense that his movies were in part created as visual symphonies, where different shots constituted different melodies–or similiar melodies, repeated with suitable variation.

To my mind, the most significant detail of the movie was that the flowers had no odor. Is odor not the most characteristic feature, other than color, of flowers? “Would a rose by another name not smell as sweet?”

What the Zone is, then, is a half-world, a retarded world. Yes, it grants wishes. But what really matters, it cannot provide. Why did Porcupine plow the flowers under? Their possible, but unrealized, full beauty tormented him. Despite their color, they were plastic, unreal: like him.

The Zone is a romantic view of the world, a world of unrealized yearning. Yes, you move from dingy browns and greys to greens when you go there. This is the romantic quest for “truth”. It is the quest of Tolstoy, who damaged many lives in his rolling around moaning, looking for some thing called “truth”, which of course doesn’t exist. Stalker does this to his own wife, and more or less abandons his own child.

The room doesn’t get you this thing called truth. It just gets you things. In my own terms, it cannot change your world qualitatively, only quantitatively.

For this part Stalker wants to believe in this thing called truth, but cannot stand the idea that he would not find it in the room. He wants someone else to find it for him, and bemoans their failure.

He is in despair, and yet magic is in the very next room, in the form of his child. A truth, a useful truth, is in the next room, for her part despairing too at her abandonment. Everyone loses when stupid people chase “truth”.

One could, I think, lay the nihilism that led to the Russian Revolution at the feet of truth-seekers. This is a Russian disease.

Now, I want to be clear about what I am saying. I am not saying there is no truth, that nothing is true. What I am saying is that it is not a thing, but a quality of how your mind-body-spirit complex interacts with the universe, and the people around you. There is no “thing-ness”. You can’t get truth. You can’t buy truth. You can’t read truth. You express it. Perhaps that is the best way of putting it.

For myself, I have cleared all the underbrush in my intellectual life. I have only three core beliefs, and everything else is contingent, and subject to alteration.

I believe you should never feel sorry for yourself.

I believe you should persist in the things that matter to you, and that what you persist in defines you.

I believe that as you persist, you should be thinking, perceiving, and SEEING the effects of your actions on both yourself and others, and calibrating them in the direction of happiness.

Tarkovskky called Stalker a tragedy in intent. The hamartia of Stalker was selfish sentimentality, and the cost was great and unneeded pain for him, his wife, and to my mind most importantly, his magical child.

One sees so much stupidity in this world. It makes me sad. Sometimes I am the stupid one. I try to fix this constantly. That’s all I can do. For all that, I have many, many very happy moments. We are surrounded by beauty and the capacity to do good in this world. What else can we ask for?

As I see it, the Room could only work for those who didn’t need it. Who knows: maybe it is out there at this very moment. I will not look for it. It is is irrelevant. It can’t give me anything I need.

What if you had a magic lantern, and were granted any three wishes you liked? Me, I thought about improving the world, but I suppose I could have put some personal stuff in there.

The thought I wanted to pass along, though, is this: simply because you effect, by magic, some change in the world, does not mean you get what you intended. For example, say you wanted to end poverty. Poof!!! Everyone now lives in a 5 rooms mansion. Now, the struggling working family that was held together in part by economic necessity falls apart. Divorces abound. Nobody has to work anymore, so nobody knows what to do. People start having mass orgies in the streets, which are effective for a time, but which grow tedious. Eventually, people retreat to their mansions, and drink all day. Many take up drugs. Everything decays.

Or say you determined everyone should be smart. Poof!!! It happens. What now? What have you done to dumb people? They are no longer who they were before. They don’t recognize themselves. Could you not argue that in some important respect you have killed them?

Is this a stupid argument? You decide.

As I look at the world, though, I never see lines. I see patterns, evolving over time. If you have ever seen a fractal generate, that, in my view, is the most accurate picture of how life actually works. You have an initial input, but where it moves from initiation is something you just have to see, and which is very hard to predict.

Net, net: I am not certain that an omnipotent person granted three wishes would NECESSARILY improve the world, even if that was their intention. I think this is roughly what Lao Tzu had in mind when he said he didn’t think the earth could be improved. Obviously, you can buy a hungry man some bread and wine–and in some cases you should–but you are not improving the “world” per se. You are doing your job. You have taken an abstraction and generated a concrete reality. Those realities are what matter.

Few thoughts. I’m watching Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, and these thoughts popped in my head. I’ll likely have more to say after a bit.

If personality–identity–is a chaotic system defined by “strange attractors”, I will submit that what we choose to persevere in, and why, is the most important definition of who we “are”. This means the most important part of you is not particularly what you do, but what you do voluntarily that is hard.

The foundational idea of America which appeals most to me is not that of liberty. Liberty is a means to an end. The end is perfectability, progress.

What liberty enables is correction, learning. It enables self organizing systems to organize. Tyranny prevents this.

Our early Presidents were slave owners. I think even Adams owned a slave at one point, although if memory serves he freed him. But our system organized morally. We fought a war in which some 650,000 Americans died, and a multiple of that lived with physical and emotional wounds for the rest of their lives, in no small measure so that slavery would be ended. Saving the Union was the stated goal, but the Union would not have needed saving had the Republicans not brought the issue of slavery to the fore, frightening Southerners.

This notion of perfectability is the entire reason that political regressives have been able to get traction by calling themselves “progressives”. The basic idea is already in our genes, which tend naturally towards idealism.

I believe strongly that Americans are basically decent people, who are simply starved in our disinformation age for accurate and contextualized facts. Give them the facts, and they will make the right decisions.

Isn’t just a town in northern Michigan.

Wow, the complaints on this debt deal. Let’s contexualize this a bit. First, the left more or less owns the New York Times, Gannett, and all the newspapers–including USA Today–Gannett owns. They own CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CBS, NPR, and virtually every teacher at any level in the country.

Further, when George Bush was running up his then-record amounts of debt, both Houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. It was their profligacy that in large measure got Obama elected. The thought among many, no doubt, was “how could he be any worse”? Those people are sadder and wiser now.

So are the Republicans. Reality is, the only way Republicans got elected in 2000 and 2004 was by more or less accepting leftist propaganda narratives, and more or less committing to bigger government, which they did in fact create.

In my lifetime, this is the first time there has been a large, vocal, and active conservative insurgency that is not likely to go away. The Republican class of 1994 faded away in no small measure because the left had all the informational gateways under control. Rush was out there, but we didn’t have a dozen good conservative voices out there as alternatives. There was no Fox news. There was no Drudge Report.

People are learning. This is why they are so mad. Yet, the situation is a bit like an alcoholic quitting drinking, then deciding to run a marathon in two weeks. Simply because you realize your condition is unacceptable one day does not mean you can radically change it in the next. Change takes time, especially when most of the media that most Americans consume is run by talented propagandists.

All we controlled this time was the House. As bad as this deal was, it was still much less than this President wanted. They are gnashing their teeth on the Left, too, which surely means something good has happened.

So if you’re mad, get active. Get active in the organizing process. Go educate people. Find an even more conservative candidate you think can win. Contribute to Michelle Bachman or Tim Pawlenty or Rick Perry (let’s hope he runs), or Herman Cain, or Ron Paul, or whoever seems sincere to you, and serious. Channel your anger, and be creative with it.

The best has just begun.

Intelligent plans request perfection, but do not demand it.

This occurred to me today. Perfection is being demanded of me.