Month: September 2011

I have work to do, but in a way this counts as my day job, the one that just doesn’t pay me a cent.

In baseball, the highest point on the field is the pitcher’s mound. Logically, then, we must see the field two ways, as a pyramid from the top–with the pitchers mound being the apex–and from the side, at an angle perpendicular to the side. From the top you have a usurper, who has taken the place of God, and from the side you have a person who is going to try and circumnavigate the pyramid in a counter-clockwise direction. For some reason, the name Porphyrion keeps coming up. And the field is green.

Based on such musings, I expect my “day job” to continue to be a labor of love.

Secondly, as I was pondering this idea of religions each having a shelf life, I got to thinking about Judaism in contrast to other religions. In Judaism, you have many prophets. It is not based on one. And many of them are quite imperfect, whiny, and disobedient. You really don’t see this often in world religions, at least the ones extant today. You certainly see Gods behaving badly in most religions, including old Norse myth, Native American myth and Greek myth.

But normally when it gets to human exposition, the prophets are seen as more or less perfect. This would include the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Rama, and others. Everyone but Yuddhisthira has their flaws in the Mahabharata, but Krishna is conceived of as a man/god, albeit a lusty one.

This pattern, though, of repeated failure and getting back up, is an interesting one, that is unique among the major world religions, as far as can tell.

The question to ask is: what are the structural advantages and disadvantages of this? I don’t have time to answer that now, but will likely do so at some future point, perhaps years from now, and perhaps today.

One good example of the chaotic but ordered nature of experience–chaotic on the surface, with deep, clear underlying themes within–is dreaming. I have had lucid dreams on many occasions, but I cannot induce them at will.

Several themes for today, one old and one new. Some time ago I went into a very old temple in a dream. Within the temple was a very large–perhaps 10′ tall–jade pyramid, onto which water was poured from a jug. There were grooves on the side, such that the water moved slowly, majestically, and symbolically. This was the entry of God into the world, into life. Water taken from the bottom was symbolically returned.

I think this temple exists. This is purely an intuition. And I think people use it, initiates, who no longer remember what it is for. They have lost their way, and need to find it. All sects decay. It is a commonplace that the third generation ruins the family business. Perhaps no religious order should last past its third leader. Had Islam faded with Ali, I think that would have been a good thing. Had Christianity never reached Constantine, that, too, may have been a good thing. It’s quite hard to say, but I think I can say with some confidence that what mystics call “baraka” (yes, same root), or darshana, does not last long in this world.

In any event, this pyramid uses the All-Seeing Eye. The very top is cut off, you see, as the pyramid is the world, but the top exists in the Godhead. Water symbolizes the movement of spirit on earth. The entire thing is intended to be very contemplative, and if possible you are to feel the entry of God into your own being as the flow that it is.

I do not understand the meaning of jade, if any, but will point out that our money is green.

At times-really, often, but I am rarely answered–ask for insight into things. This morning, I input the pyramid, and got Baseball. The following I offer as an exercise in cognitive flexibility only, with no evidence of any sort other than the possibility I propose.

If you read the history (linked on the word above), it is clouded in uncertainty. It’s not clear who came up with the thing. What I saw, though, was that Home Base is the Eye. It is the source and the completion. It is the beginning and the end. To see this, you have to imaginatively draw a line from second base to home, and imagine that you are seeing two sides of the pyramid only. Home Base is the apex. When you round the bases, you are traveling from God and back to Him again. That this is difficult is the point. If once you put out sufficient effort and send the ball–your nemesis of doubt, confusion, weakness and vanity–soaring into the skies far enough, your journey is made easy.

You have nine innings, and each inning consists in two sets of three threes. Each team gets three threes. In some cultures 9 is considered a divine number, since in a Base Ten system it is the highest you can go without starting over.

As I Google it, others have come to roughly the same conclusion, albeit not staring from a pyramid.

I will readily admit I am a strange man, but I am never bored.

To any reading this who have personal knowledge of whereof I speak, I will add that in my view you are decadent, and need to either destroy the thing and start over, or resurrect yourselves. Nothing good is coming of what you are doing now.

You cannot fill an emotional gap with anger. It might appear for a moment, for a time, to work–and in the flow of experience it does mask the gap–but in the long run that gap will stay the same or even grow, while you are not paying attention.

You can’t worry about what you did not get, or are not getting. The task in forward progress is always to tell the truth, and pay attention to the countless little emotional details which do in fact act to fill the gaps. Imagine contentment not as a unitary thing, but as countless little bits floating in the air, that will nest in your holes if you let them. And in aggregate, they will stop the leak.

None of us need be zombies, even though that is an apparently widespread tendency.

From time to time I “cite” popular culture as a referent. Here are the lyrics to “Wake me up inside”, by Evanescence.

Frozen inside without your touch,
Without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.

What happens if both people feel that way? What happens if neither feels the power to wake the other up? You get zombie parades, metaphors made real.

Here is the music

Listen with attention to the quality. It starts innocently, almost music-box like, in trembling intimacy, fear and hope, then distortion intrudes, and the fear wins. She’s unwilling to admit final defeat, but clearly there is an energy pushing her away from the very person she needs, and she is caught in a whirlwind of confusion that feels like death.

Listen in your life. See. Feel. Genuine hope and progress float around us, as invisible but helpful motes of the genuine air we need.

Posted this here.

We are in an interesting time. Even in the time of Reagan, he was blocked by Democrats controlling Congress. Bush got elected and reelected by moving to the center. Uniquely in my lifetime we are seeing a broad, principled, informed conservative revitalization, of a potentially transformative nature. EVERY artifact of leftist cultural attack and intellectual atrocity is potentially up for reimagination, and eradication.

When Obama was elected, the Left naturally assumed that their time had come. All the plots and conspiracies they had hatched over decades of more or less quiescent marginalization could now be brought into implementation. Large steps, rather than the small, quiet steps of wolves still dressed as sheep, would now be possible.

They have been waiting these last three years, and are simply unwilling to contemplate the idea that they might have to wait even longer, and are thus ignoring the signals of the American electorate that they are waking up to the truth.

The refugees of the Israeli War of Independence are no different. They think they can force through something, when in fact what is more likely to happen is that more Americans wake up to the fact that the UN was brought into being by a Communist agent–Alger Hiss–and that it does not serve our interests, or the interests of peace.

Ending our massive support of the UN is now something that can be contemplated as possible. Let us hope Abbas CONTINUES his abuse of justice and truth.

Here is an interesting idea: what if Bush was given credible information that the Russians were behind 9/11? What do you do with that information? Would we have been prepared to go to war with them? If not, would it be useful to put this image of Putin killing thousands of Americans into the publics mind, with no really viable means of exacting revenge? Clearly, we did face Islamic extremists. Would it not have been tempting to take on enemies we could plainly face with violence?

I think the aim on the part of the Russians was to draw us into one or more wars that we would then LOSE, weakening us, and causing a global retrenchment of the sort that followed our retreat from Vietnam. This is a guess. To do better, I would need to take the time to remember and researach what the world looked like in 2000, and then imagine what it would have looked like from the perspective of an ex-KGB director, and lifelong dedicated Communist.

That is more than I am willing to take on, so I’ll leave it here.

The point, though, is that one could plausibly see Bush covering up evidence, but not because of his own complicity in the crime. This actually makes sense to me.

As I understand the current story of the thing, Easter Islanders harvested themselves into extinction. I believe Jared Diamond made that the thesis of his second book, and argued by analogy that we were in the process of doing the same thing.

This betrays a fundamental ignorance of economics. Specifically, we have a finely calibrated shortage sensor that works over short, medium, and long terms: price. Price signals indicate when something in demand is in increasingly short supply. Long before we ran out of oil, prices would be so high that everyone would cut back simply out of economic necessity. We need fear no oil shortage. We will get plenty of warning.

Price only works, though, when it is not interfered with. If for example the government uses taxpayer money to prop up enterprises that are not providing a service or product people want at a price they are willing to pay, then the shortage and glut sensor malfunctions. Products are made that nobody wants. This is the whole problem of the Solyndra (Sp?) business. Not only was our money wasted, but it was in effect funneled to certain plugged in people. This is not how free markets work.

As I have argued in the past, Keynesian economics can be seen not just as a system for wasting money (really, transferring it from ordinary Americans to connected Americans) while increasing the bureaucratic power of the State, but also as a price disruption mechanism. It puts a crowbar in the spokes of the free market, and does so by design. The intent, plainly, was to cause economic decline, so that more of the same could be claimed as the cure.

Keynes was not actually so stupid as to believe his economics worked “to” the purpose he claimed it did. Nor do I believe Paul Krugman is that stupid, although perhaps he really is. He’s certainly no Keynes, and his Nobel Laureate is every bit as earned as those of Barack Obama and Yasser Arafat.

The Fed has announced–note, there are unquestionably many things they do that they do NOT announce, meaning that what they do announce is intended to sway actions on the part of someone in the direction of something–that they are going to sell off short term US Treasury bonds and buy longer term bonds. The intent is to keep interest rates low.

Plainly, high interest rates are not keeping people from borrowing money. Interest rates are and have been very low for a number of years now. People are not borrowing money because of doubt about the future. We have a Socialist in the White House who not only does not understand business, but is actively antagonistic and mistrustful of the very people he needs to be opening up their checkbooks and expanding, to create the sorts of jobs that have made America a wealthy and happy nation.

It is always hard to state what the real aims of this policy are, but it would seem clear to me that the long term future of America is in more doubt than the short term. I don’t think anyone seriously doubts we will be able to pay our bills for the next 3 years.

However, once the LARGE tax increases that will fund Obamacare–which in many respects is nothing but a massive expansion of Medicaid, coupled with large insurance premium increases for all small businesses–go into effect, it is unclear where we will be. If we fail to elect a true fiscal conservative to the White House–Mitt Romney does not fit this bill, but in my view Perry and Paul would (I like Cain and Bachman as well)–then our economic predicament could be getting pretty bad by 2014 or so.

Logically, the markets know this, so the interest that we would need to pay to get investors to buy the bonds would have to be increasing right now. The Fed is in effect putting a veil onto the precariousness of our long term economic future.

Free markets only work when market forces are allowed to operate freely. This should be obvious, but for many it is not. Here, an institution we the American people do not control is working to mask the symptoms of our economic illness. It is curing nothing, and helping nothing.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor portrayed himself and those like him as lonely, alien creatures, condemned to help people free themselves from moral freedom. His implementation of autocracy was, on his account, nothing but taking the obvious and necessary path that would have been chosen by the people, if they understood their own actual needs as well as he did.

As I have argued, this set of lies covers up, in my view, a fundamental misanthropy, and typically one coupled with clinical sadism. They may use proxies for their torture, but they know it is going on, because they ordered it.

It does seem to me, though, that there are and need to be positive such leaders as well, whose burden consists in freedom from the restraints and consolations of fixed identities and ideals. Religion is a consolation, because it gives you a place to occupy, an identity, a social network, thoughts to fill your mind with that don’t vary. Consistency is a species of eternity here on earth. It is rest.

But no religion, per se, can be final. Always, always, always, life is evolving. It is comforting for many to believe that compassion and empathy are always virtuous, but when they lead to the ascension to power of people who are cruel and violent, they are no longer virtues. They are rejections of necessity, of perception, of Goodness.

Most people do not want this degree of freedom, in my view, and since the contributions of religion are vastly superior to those of Leftism and Scientism, they are to be valued over inferior moral doctrines, which in most cases is to say empty moral doctrines. There is no content to Leftism. There is neither empathy nor justice.

The Good person, though, must accept being “Just So”, in manners which vary by time and place. To be maximally receptive, you must be empty. This is in the Tao Te Ching. This is a burden if you focus on what you are leaving behind, and a source of enthusiasm if you place your emphasis on what can be learned, and what new trails can be found and communicated to others.

I heard Rand Paul on the Laura Ingraham Show today, and he made a very interesting comment. He said that he called whoever the person in charge was at the Dept. of Transportation to ask if they had any prioritized list of the bridges in this country that need fixing. One would think, logically, that something which can fail and cause death and economic disruption, would be tracked by the people responsible for such a thing, particularly given the history of the Minnesota bridge collapse, and the fact that we JUST SPENT hundreds of millions of dollars [edit: make that BILLIONS; this is a number I cannot wrap my head around] on infrastructure. Where did it go, if no list was made?

The obvious and sickeningly obvious answer is that the money was never intended to lead to economic benefits for all Americans, but rather to go to places where Obama needed to shore up political support. The corollary to this is that he didn’t care if bridges collapsed. On the contrary, such a thing would have been politically advantageous to him. He didn’t care then, and he has not seen fit to include such considerations in the latest monstrosity he is trying to ram through against the will of the people, and contrary to the most elementary principles of economics and common sense.

We have never had a President who cared less about the American people as a whole, or more capable of the most atrocious cynicism imaginable.

As I think about it, I think the principle problem in meaning formation is not how it happens, but rather how it is prevented. I think there is something in this universe that tends towards order, and that evil is evil because it interferes in this process.

Increasingly, it seems to me that the root of all sin–where sin is an disruption in a self organizing informational pattern–is fear. What is pride, really, but a preemptive strike against those who would marginalize you? And what is self pity, really, but the expression of the idea that the universe should conform itself to us, rather than vice versa?

Life is a very serious business, by which I mean rules that may as well be treated as laws plainly exist, and exist not for us, but in themselves. For our parts, though, most of us react to this fact with ridiculousness, with vanity, self pity, tears, and rejection. All of these things keep us on this side of the water, and prevent us from crossing.