Month: September 2011

I am guardedly optimistic about our future. I don’t expect anything like my financial plan to get implemented, but the mere fact that options exist prevents the imposition of an either/or scenario in the event of severe financial trouble. This reduces the options of the power elite who no doubt do largely influence events, if to a smaller degree than they would like, and to a lesser degree than the more conspiratorially minded assume.

I like to cook, and have made some good Hollandaise sauces, and some bad ones. If you heat things too quickly, the eggs curdle and the sauce breaks. Once it has broken, it is practically impossible to get it back to the status quo ante.

Whoever these power brokers actually are, they tried to do too much with Barack Obama. The man is a walking farce, a third rate intellect, with the moral compass of a Chicago gangster. He is no Mussollini or Lenin, or Hitler, all of whom–whatever else you say about them–were talented, cunning men. It is not enough and never has been enough to be whispering words in his ear. We are being “led” by a cardboard cutout with a speaker behind it.

People see this. It can’t be hidden. You can’t justify $125 billion in monthly borrowing. You can’t pass landscape altering bills, which will effect the lives of nearly every American, without reading the damn thing.

Obama is through. More than that, what he represents is through. The little lies, the “Communism by the drink” of the Democrats is just not playing in Peoria any more. Most Americans are wide awake and hopping mad, and this sentiment is only being inflamed by Obama’s continued efforts to insult our intelligence. He doesn’t get this, but he has never gotten much of anything.

More generally, the strategists, so used to lying with skill, have been slow coming to the realization that things really are different this time. This is not the Reagan Revolution. The fight this time is existential, and the prize this time the continued viability of the American experiment. We are going to the right, hard, and this motion will have the power of tsunami. 2010 was just the start. Everywhere I go I see post after post after post of informed outrage, of people making cases that were few and far between just 3 years ago. I often felt lonely then, but now I go many places and find I have nothing to add. This is a wonderful thing.

We do not need to revert to the Middle Ages to survive. This was, is and will always be nothing but a thinly veiled exercise in sadism, of psychological distortion, and moral depravity.

It occurs to me that faith and hope are different in subtle but definable ways. Hope, to me, connotes waiting. It connotes a gap between where you are, and where you eventually want to be, a gap that is bridgeable, even if you don’t yet know how.

Faith exists in the present. It is a means of interacting with the present in such a way that you create hope through action. You expect better because you do better now. It is much more robust and fruitful than hope.

Many of his admirers seem to be on the anti-war left. I’m not a big fan of this group, but would like to see at a minimum Paul do well enough to inject some of his ideas into the broader discussion.

Here’s my idea: register as Republicans and vote for him in the primary. Whoever the Libertarian candidate is is irrelevant, and Obama will get the nod for the Democrats in any event. You certainly won’t get anyone to his left.

The only one who really “gets” the extent of the institutionalized corruption that is the Federal Reserve is Ron Paul. I have not read his books, but this point seems clear enough. If you really step back and look at the big picture, it the fragility of our financial system, and systemic theft enabled by the fractional reserve banking system–that in turn is enabled by the Fed–that makes us vulnerable.

When we got hit on 9/11, it caused finanacial instability and an economic downturn the world over. This is a slick machine that is not robust. It appears to go fast, but it falls apart just as quickly. There are too many gears and wheels that are interdependent, and too many single points of failure.

I will not say that the wars we have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq were not worth it, but I will say that far more Americans have died in those wars than died on 9/11. Had we not fought those wars, it is far from clear that we would have lost 6,000 or more Americans–whatever the combined deaths from both those wars and the ones off the books–in terrorist attacks. Nor is it clear that such attacks would have cost the amount of money we have spent on these wars.

In my view, our financial system should be constructed such that a nuclear detonation in New York would be horribly tragic, but not crippling. Economies needs to be more local and more robust. Ending the Fed and the Fractional Reserve Banking System will do that.

We lost a lot of good people when Pearl Harbor was hit, but the situation was different. We faced an aggressive foreign power intent on conquering large sections of the planet, and possessing the military power to do it. At some point, there was plausibly reason to believe we would not just lose Hawaii but face foreign attacks on our own soil.

We face no such threat from the Islamists. They can kill people, and this is bad, but in my personal view they lack the capacity to inflict mass casualties on us, absent the help of a major foreign power, like Russia. Yes, several attacks have been averted over the last decade, and others not, like Maj. Hassan’s treasonous and shameful jihad on his own comrades, but in sum if they had all taken place, would we have lost more people and more money than we have in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? It is impossible to say, but those who would argue no do so from a very defensible position.

Me, I don’t know. Are we preventing terror attacks originating in Afghanistan being there? If you argue, as I have, that the 9/11 hijackers had to have had the help of a major intelligence service, then it becomes clear that we have grossly overestimated the actual capabilities of these terrorists.

Are we containing Iran? Maybe, to some extent. We were doing better when Bush was President. We have a platform to attack them, if need be. But are we willing to do that? Should we do that? Candidly, if they start posturing like they are going to use their nuclear weapons–which they will have, sooner or later–our best military play is a first strike. We have the weapons, and this risks no American lives.

I used to care more about the lives of Iraqis than I find myself able to now. We have lost a lot of people, and spent a lot of money to get them to this point. And we are in any event drawing down, so this one is more or less already in the history books.

If we bring most of our troops home soon, I think that would be a good thing.

Few musings.

It is easy enough to complain about the drain on America that paying out benefits to people who do not pay in causes. At the same time, what is the solution? Is anyone proposing that we deport 30 million mostly Mexican nationals? I haven’t seen that. I see a lot of complaining about our porous borders, and what amount to welfare cheats. No matter how many times you multiply a complaint, you never get a sum that amounts to a solution.

As I see it, we have three basic options:

1) We continue with the status quo. Among other things, this means new starter babies every year with new uninvited citizens, paying out money for incarcerating non-Americans, paying for the education of people not paying taxes, and providing medical treatment for people who never pay anything back.

2) We can identify, detain and deport everyone not here legally. Logistically this will be an enormous task, and would logically need to be combined with VASTLY increased border security, or else they will come right back. This will unquestionably lead to enormous protests on both sides of the border, and probably riots. We can handle that, but that will be the cost.

3) We can provide amnesty to those here. Ultimately, this is probably the most practical solution. If we do this, though, we need to set out conditions. We could, for example, charge illegals higher tax rates for their first 10 years. We could use that money to build a better fence with Mexico.

We NEED a Congressional resolution clarifying the process of becoming a citizen, and remove this idiotic practice of allowing women to come across the border to give birth to American citizens. This should have been stopped decades ago. We need to set down that any relatives of those naturalized must go through a standard immigration procedure, with no advantages being conferred by having a relative who successfull snuck in.

Moving forward, we need to require that you need to be a citizen for ALL publicly provided services, including hospital visits and education. We need to create as many disincentives as possible for future trespassers. Yes, this will cause some hardships, but they already have a country, and if it’s shitty it’s because they made it that way. If we cave in, they will keep coming.

Few thoughts.

I like brownies with anchovies and peanut butter.

As I look at it, my blog follows that basic pattern. God bless you if you are hanging with me through this random (is it APPARENTLY random? I don’t know) mess.

I’ve always said that when I die I don’t want to come to realize I’ve lived someone elses life. I don’t think this will be my fate. Whatever I am, it’s different and probably unique.

You can do that too. Please do. The world is thirsty for people blazing their own paths. Those people laughing at you: they are secretly jealous.

I haven’t watched the debates. I sort of ooze in ideas from the environment, inference, gut instinct, and etc.

It seemed to me the other day it might be useful to assign short descriptions to the major candidates. Here they are:

Rick Perry: Boy Scout

Mitt Romney: CEO

Herman Cain: Businessman

Ron Paul: Professor

Michelle Bachman: Soccer Mom

Perry wrote a book on the ethos of the Boy Scouts. He is an Eagle Scout, and so is his son. Contemplate that for a moment. If you read about his early life, he grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and took baths in a tub in the backyard until roughly his teens, as I recall the story. He conducted a prayer ceremony for America, seemingly without regard for political positioning. Contrary to the mood of most Republicans, he is showing compassion for the many illegal aliens in his State.

In my view, Perry is an honest man. He may not be ideologically pure on all counts, but he is honest. This needs to count in his favor.

I will add that he needs to do defensive drills on “evolution”. The focus needs to be on “Speciation through Natural Selection”, and “Life arising randomly”, not the word itself. Change over time plainly happened. The salient question is how. There is no evidence in the fossil record that anything like Darwin’s gradualism actually happened. This is an unimpeachable fact. At some point, he will sit down with some leftist hack journalist or other–Baba Wawa for example–and he needs not just to defend, but counter then go on the offensive.

Enough of that. He’s my current favorite among those likely to get the nomination.

Romney is slick. In my professional life I have met quite a few business owners and no small number of CEO’s of reasonably big companies. For my own purposes, I differentiate between a businessman–and I’m pulling Cain in here–and a CEO. CEO’s by nature are politicians. They figure out which way the wind is blowing, head that direction, then pretend it was their idea all along. At some point or other, you will see them marching with a determined, stoically posed face in all four cardinal directions, and up and down if the circumstances request it.

One of the principle tasks of the next President, assuming we the American people are not so ready for national collapse that we reelect Obama, will be to undo Obamacare. It involves among other things an ENORMOUS tax increase in 2013, of the sort that will destroy whatever economic progress happens between now and then. How can we trust Romney to undo it when he implemented something nearly identical in Massachusetts?

Yes, the Massachusettsians–Martians for short–wanted it, because they are congenitally impractical in the modern era (vitiating entirely the well earned reputation of Yankees as being hard-nosed pragmatists), but the point is he gave it to them. Why? That is the direction the wind was blowing. Now it’s blowing another direction, and no doubt he is firmly committed–look at that set jaw, that steely stare–to undoing it. But what if a bunch of people show up to say nasty things, and stink up Washington with body odor, cannabis and Patchouli? Can we count on him? No. Never count on a politician to do anything before sticking their finger in their air, calling their “strategist”, and running the political pros and cons.

Cain, as a businessman, is focused on getting things done. He wants real solutions, that he wants to implement because he thinks they will work, and he will be willing to change his approach based on what actually happens, unlike the current President, and his many ideological forebears. Cain would do a good job, in my view.

Ron Paul is a thinker. He happens to have proposed many ideas with which I agree, and bears an uncanny resemblance at times, in the way he smiles, to Stan Laurel (completely unrelated, but this video amuses me every time I watch it).

In classic stereotypes, professors know what they are talking about. They are smart. In the modern world, when it comes to politics and economics and philosophy, this notion is completely outdated. Most of them are functionally slobbering imbeciles fit for little but yardwork and employment as Obama Czars. Paul is different. He has the Austrians in his heart, and with good ideas like that, you can be consistent.

I come and go as far as isolationism. In my more sanguine moments I think it could work and should be tried, provided we retain the balls for severe retaliation if anyone messes with us.

Conversely, at times I think Paul is idealistic to the point of being simplistic in a bad way. We really do have enemies out there, and it’s easier to fight them elsewhere than here. This is a topic without easy resolution, as it depends in large measure on intelligence I don’t have.

What I will say is that the Fed–and the fractional reserve banking system it enables–is the greatest enemy of the prosperity of ordinary Americans that we face, and Paul categorically understand this, although as I have argued often simply ending the Fed is not a good idea. We need to do it right, and this would include ending fractional reserve banking, which cannot be done easily if the thing is not thought through. I’ve posted my thoughts often enough.

Oh hell, here they are again: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Bachman I like, and would definitely vote for, but she just seems to lack gravitas. Now, Obama had the weight of perforated balsa wood, so plainly being substantive is optional in the American Presidential race, but even so I feel she needs to know more than she does.

Altogether, it seems plain to me that not one of the major candidates would fail to do much better than Obama, but why would an adult brag they could beat a 4 year old in a foot race? The bar is exceptionally low, and our task is to raise it a LOT.

America deserves a good President after all this time. I proposed elsewhere and will propose here a Perry/Guiliani ticket. A Perry/Christie ticket would be even better. Anybody that can get elected as a Republican in a Blue state has something to add.

I have been in a strange mood the last week or two. I am working extraordinarily hard, but that is not unusual.

What I have been feeling is that I am a part of a circle, in search of the rest. My sensory talents can go so far, but then they stop. They dead-end. They are limited.

What I feel is that God can and should be a present reality, and not an abstraction. Theology kills God. It really does. It buries the reality in an enormous pile of trivia, that is then used for the concentration of temporal power.

God is a wind, an uneven wind–like all winds–that blows through, and is felt by few. I look into the darkness surrounding me, and feel something, but its nature escapes me.

The point of this post, though, was that growth begins with a sense of absence. You cannot pursue that which you do not feel you are missing. Had you no sexual instinct, the species would die out. Had you no hunger, you would need not learn to work.

On a more subtle level, if you cannot perceive your emotional or cognitive shortcomings, you will never fix them. You will never address them, unless and until some crisis forces you to.

No doubt most are familiar with the Taoist notion of the empty pot. Logically, for optimal growth, you should start with maximal absence. The more you want to learn, the more you feel you need to do, the more you will learn and do.

It has become clear to me recently, too, that learning/growth is a source of meaning in and of itself. It need not lead to something else. It is fine alone. You can decide to live so that you can learn as much as possible, where learning is not primarily academic, but emotional. You can learn to move better physically and emotionally. You can learn to think better. And yes, you can learn the Japanese Tea Ceremony, or the Samba, or how to brew great beer. These things all exist externally, but all learning grows your spirit to some extent, in my opinion.

When you are learning, you are moving. New facts and behavioral patterns are being introduced.

The other day I was looking at a tree, and contemplating the play of sun and shadow on it, and watching the clouds behind it, and it occurred to me that all that was happening, as we are told, in my brain.

Visual images, we are told, are input upside down, and “fixed” between our ears. Sounds generate harmonic responses in our ears, and are “collated” in our brains. If I touch something hot, receptors in my fingers send value-neutral impulses to my brain, which then assigns a value to them.

Why can’t intuition work the same way? The mind is a putter-together-er. It assembles fragmentary experiences into wholes that can then be examined cognitively, as frames of experience, now abstracted. If the nerves in my fingers have no mind, why must whatever brings in sensations through the ether, or whatever we call it? It is the assembler that matters.

As Bishop Berkeley argued, in effect, we have no means of determining that we are not minds in a vat, input sensations.

I am meandering, but hopefully there is something useful here for somebody. Long day, some beer involved.

One task I constantly set myself–or, seen phenomenologically, work that presents itself to me–is seeing things in new ways. We are all familiar with the idea of reincarnation, called “metempsychosis” in older writings. In some renderings, it is comforting: you never die. In other renderings, like Hinduism and Buddhism, it is seen as problematic, since life on this world pretty much sucks for everyone, if they look honestly and accurately. The Buddha had the best of everything, but realized much better was possible. We are all on fire, he realized, with the flames of unrealized potentials for deeper fulfillment. Moreover, everything changes. His idyllic life would have ended for him, if he had stayed where he was, when his kingdom was overrun, and everyone he cared about placed in a pit and trampled with elephants. That is my understanding of the story.

So on some accounts, the task is to escape Samsara, the world of birth life death something else rebirth, seen as a wheel with no sense of humor, and no pattern variations, except in details.

To this is added, in Buddhism, the Bodhisattva, who, roughly, depending on the canon you read, is determined to win release for all sentient beings, no matter how long it takes.

Can we not imagine lives as trilogies, in which one task is undertaken in three lifetimes? Can we not imagine a rhythm: boom, Boom, BOOM, and then a pause? That life is skipped, because it can be.

Must we choose between EITHER life escaped, and Samsara? Can there not be an intermediate point, of work and rest?

Most all truth depends on puncturing bubbles, and noting carefully what is left. This is my task here. I know many will think me nuts. I may be nuts, but if that is the case, I am very much a functioning, practical nut, who solves concrete problems on a daily basis, and who can and has defended his views in very diverse environments from hordes of critics on a sustained basis, using nothing but commonly available facts, and the disciplined application of reason.

I drive myself nuts. I get ideas in my head, and have to follow them. That’s why I work with my hands for a living.

Look at this image of the ten story Russian 9/11 Memorial. I can’t tell if this is a rendering or actual picture, but it’s close enough. We are told this portrays a torn city, and a teardrop within it, symbolizing shared grief over the hole torn in our psyche on 9/11.

What I would like suggest–and this is merely a possibility, for which no suitable verification is even remotely likely to happen–is that this could also be seen as a symbolic rape, where the building is seen as feminine–the hole is roughly in the shape of a vagina–and the teardrop as sperm. The aircraft were thrust into the buildings.

Here are images of teardrops: http://www.google.com/search?q=teardrop+shapes&hl=en&sa=G&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=SueBTtGNGoSatwf30szoAQ&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=675

Here are rendered images of sperm: http://www.google.com/search?q=teardrop+shapes&hl=en&sa=G&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=SueBTtGNGoSatwf30szoAQ&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=675#hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=sperm+images&oq=sperm+images&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=21819l22278l0l22516l6l4l0l1l0l1l212l564l0.2.1l3l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=1352c85337ea1a11&biw=1024&bih=675

Which one does the memorial more closely resemble? I don’t like this idea, but pass it along because it cannot, in my view, be dismissed out of hand.