Month: September 2011

What are the principle emotional boundaries, within which we can exist as our deepest selves, in peace? Marriage, and religion. In marriage, you find the most intimate connection most people will have in their lifetimes, which includes both emotional connection, and physical. It produces literal life, or has historically in most societies.

In marriage, too, you generate the mother, the primal reality for all infants. If that marriage is harmonious, that mother is harmonious, and the world into which that child enters is harmonious. If not, then stress is present, and that child will be poisoned with unnecessary doubt and disorientation, traits which it will pass on.

In religion, you find the perfection of meaning, at least in principle. There is no reason to doubt that countless people the world over have found in the faith and practices of their forefathers deep internal solace, both in their work, and in long nights during periods of difficulty.

These are the places you rest. These are the things that, if they are given, and not unstable, provide the most comfort and strength for individuals and societies.

Logically, then, these are the first targets of Satanic doctrines like Communism, which seek first to destroy, then perhaps accidentally, at some unspecified and unplanned future date, to create.

Atheism, per se, is not intrinsically pernicious; but when it is proselytized in a world already struggling with meaning, it is. It is necessarily a disconnection from a world that contains intrinsic moral laws and meaning, and necessarily a demand that every person create their own meaning system from scratch, and on the fly. Since most people are mediocre, this means in practice that most such systems will be myopic and poorly constructed. They will not do the job well.

In practice, this fact underlies the continuing success of both Communistic Fascism and its intended antidote, Randian–and I will coin a term here –“Hero-ism”. By this, I connote this notion of the Grand Individual, who strides the world in his or her own way, answering to no higher calling than his or her own muse. In practice, some of the people embracing this doctrine have been among the most selfish human beings I have ever met. Selfishness works economically, which is Rand’s level of analysis, and she shares this with Marx, but it does not work socially, culturally, or in my view sustainably. One needs principles that bring people together in reliable ways.

Few thoughts on a Wednesday–Woden’s Day–morning.

Oh, let’s discuss the last century like it was last night. We have the Hindenburg disaster, Titanic, several World Wars, and some UN enforcement activities.

I spent time at Fort Knox, and saw where they staged their trains, which in years gone by would have included tanks, APC’s, and probably artillery.

My question is this: why would we not have had peace from 1950 to the present without Communism? For that matter, why would we have had FASCISM, if Communism had never existed? Please remember that a principle criticism Hitler levied, that was apparently widely shared, was that Jews were Bolsheviks. Germans didn’t like Bolsheviks.

If you look at the last century dispassionately, what becomes clear quickly is how much unnecessary suffering there was. There were liberal ideas in play, but they were marginalized. We the United States had to fight repeated wars to protect the very idea of Liberalism. Many good men died.

Why? This is the question. The answer is not that “war is never the answer”. Clearly, it IS sometimes the answer. Sometimes it is the ONLY answer.

We fought wars for a very simple reason: other nations did not desire peace. Communists, in particular, did not desire peace. They wanted, on the contrary, world domination, and were prepared to see unlimited numbers of deaths of all sorts to see it happen.

And what then? Then, the intellectuals would have had total control of innocent people, to terrorize as they pleased, and terror was something they always secretly admired and wanted.

This is the actual history of the last one hundred years. Howard Zinn would lie about it, but the Communist bastard is dead.

It is perhaps wrong to speak ill of the dead, but not in this case. That prick has found out that Hell does in fact exist.

Whiskey involved, but I never regret, fundamentally, things posted when I’ve had a few. These are my honest–and principled–opinions.

As I say on the side there, I reserve the right to reverse myself. As I think about it, the Jobs Bill is not a failure of marketing, but rather of producing the actual steak. They have the sizzle. Obama has his very own flag, and was branded quite well in 2008, which is why he won.

What his handlers cannot grasp, though, is that lies have shelf lives, and that shelf life, in an economic downturn, is much less than 4 years. FDR kept getting reelected because he was cunning like Bill Clinton, because he made better use of the political bribes made possible by the money flow from Washington (harder in our information age), and because people liked him. There is nothing likeable about Barack Obama. He is stiff, arrogant, and seems to have no genuine affability or warmth, which FDR plainly did.

And to the point, he does share with FDR a history of economically deletrious policy-making. Every time things get worse, he tells us he prevented a true disaster; yet, history is clear that recoveries happen much more quickly, normally, than they have here, just as the Great Depression is the only one which lasted that long, and is the only one which people tried to fix.

One of my favorite jokes has “Salesman” as the punchline, but I’m going to insert Barack Obama.

A man got married to a woman, and they went on their honeymoon. The first night she said to him:

Please be gentle, this is my first time.

Honey, how could that be? This is your fourth marriage.

Well, my first husband turned out to like men, and never showed any interest to me.

That makes sense. I’m sorry to hear that.

The second husband was drunk all the time, and never showed any interest in making love.

I understand. You had told me about him, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.

And my third husband was Barack Obama.

Sweety, I don’t get it.

Turns out all he knew how to do was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it was GOING to be.

“

As I think about this proposal, the most amazing thing about it is that I really think that HE genuinely thought it would work. A bunch of cognitively adolescent academic minds got together, and thought not about creating jobs, but their marketing strategy.

Now, marketing actually is a profession. There are people in this country that are very good at it. But they are businesspeople, and Obama has a phobia of people who earn their own money in the private sector, as do those who surround him.

Instead, their default assumption is that of all people who have not been around the figurative block: that what they don’t understand must be easy. “Marketing? BUSINESS PEOPLE do that, surely we can do better?” Laughs all around.

So this group of fools gets together and proposes with a straight face that borrowing money to redistribute to the already unemployed, and Obama’s Unions goons will create the sorts of jobs that Americans want.

Really?, as kids nowadays say. This is really quite a wonderful example of the most profound idiocy.

You know, I think the more important question in progress is not how it happens, but what is holding it back. The question is not Why but Why not. Not How, but where to start.

It seems to me most people have oceans of water in them, held back by doubt. They know what to do. They can figure out how to do it. But thought complexes, mental manias, distortions and lies keep this water from flowing.

All that is needed to follow the natural evolution intended for all of us in the direction of the better and more beautiful is to stop stopping.

Take as an example the ghettoes in this country, and their crime and poverty. The question is not why they exist, but rather what is being done that is preventing self organization in the direction of higher and more enjoyable ways of living.

Be a hurricane. Break the levies, and see what is possible. It may astonish you.

As I ponder the implications of a Republican winning a seat he lost by 20 points the last time in New York, it occurs to me that Obama’s persistent failure to produce a legally valid birth certificate has worked, in aggregate, towards the devastation of the Democrat Party. It has been beneficial for conservatives.

The default assumption of Alinsky, and therefore Obama, is in effect that you can lie with impunity forever; that you can maintain an effective and dedicated political base solely through constant attacks on your opponents, without proposing workable policies. Now, in 1984, and the very real dystopias upon which it was based, this more or less worked, but only in conditions of complete tyranny.

Given any shred of informational daylight, propaganda narratives do not just self destruct. It’s not a question of “oh, they didn’t believe that, let’s try something else”. No, what vanishes is the very POSSIBILITY of the successful use of propaganda.

Obama has literally destroyed, nearly entirely, the effectiveness of calling opponents racists. He has destroyed the effectiveness of calling opponents partisans, or selfish. He has destroyed most of the effectiveness of demonizing corporations, or of claiming that Democrats care about the common man.

Increasingly, the veil is being pulled aside, and what people are seeing is that the top leadership of the Democrat Party has been enriching itself at the political trough, without caring in the slightest about the people with whom it concerns itself rhetorically. Obama has made black people in this country more poor and less secure. He has made working class people more poor and less secure.

At this point, the only people he is keeping are those on the payroll–public sector unions; large, national unions; professional agitators and politicians; and welfare recipients.

Everyone else has only to look at the bank balance, their tax bill, and the national debt. No amount of lying will save him from having to answer to these inescapable truths.

Thus, we should be grateful he has been as evasive as he has. It has forced many people to accept that large segments of our political and media landscape are completely broken, and to think big thoughts, rather than small thoughts. That is how fundamental and useful reform–change–comes about. The goalposts have been reset, and we can thank Obama–perhaps the most dishonest, and certainly least qualified President we have ever elected. None of this would have been possible if Hillary had been elected.

If you are going to repeat it, please fact check anything you see on here.

One statistic I throw out from time to time is the 12.4 payroll tax. This is actually 6.2% Social Security plus 6.2% Medicare/Medicaid, as I understand the matter, which further reduces to 3.1% paid by the employee and 3.1% by the employer who, if he or she did not pass the money along to the employee, would surely use it to expand the company, or buy something nice like a yacht that would employ yacht builders and yacht salesmen. It would find its way back into the economy, and far more effectively than by being given to a bureaucrat, who deducted his salary, then put some small portion back into circulation via his friends and bribers.

Social Security and Medicare are supposedly our money given back to us. Medicaid is pure charity.

To this is added, I think, Unemployment insurance. It varies state to state.

Actually, I don’t believe that, but do want to raise what are to me some interesting questions.

Jones has apparently believed for some 30 years–I watched a video he did on the Bohemian Society back around 1980–that substantially all the power elite in this country, Republican and Democrat alike, are in cahoots to end democracy here. Since this is quite far removed from the consensus view most of share, we call this paranoid.

What I would like to submit, however, is that substantially all Communist rhetoric and thought is likewise paranoid, in exactly the same way, in that it sees in the operation of free markets the collusion of an oligarchic class to keep the working class/lower classes down. This is a thesis with no evidence–the emergence of a middle class actually falsifies it–but they continue to believe it.

For his part, Jones offers, as far as I can tell, no alternative to the current system. Logically, if EVERYONE within the system is corrupt, there is no “out there” without completely rebuilding the system from the bottom up. Historically, this basic mind set enabled the mass murders which occurred in all Communist regimes, although some–for example in Nicaragua–involved merely hundreds of people rather than millions.

It is very important to be clear about which “them” you are talking.

Practically, Jones worldview encourages political disengagement, except for those few on the far left, like Van Jones, who go out and try to foment revolution. It deintegrates large segments of society, and it fosters passivity. What, really, can you do, but listen to his show and wonder how long he can stay on the air? (Hint: at least 30 years).

All of these things would be ENORMOUSLY useful to someone who actually was trying to take over the country, in that those who might potentially have made the most difference are now side-lined with their horrific visions, and who miss what chances for useful action present themselves.

In my view, George Bush was and is a glad-handing college frat boy, who grew up rich, knows how to ingratiate himself, and has a rudimentary but clear sense of right and wrong that he learned at home. He did not and does not want totalitarian Fascism implemented in the US. That is for people like George Soros, David Rockefeller, Jr., and their fellow travellers.

All that would have been needed to green-light the 9/11 attacks would have been a reasonably clear vision of how George Bush would respond, combined with careful pre-placement of people in key spots to do quiet influencing and directing. The goals may have been many, and may well have included a simple, absolute increase in the size of government, which, if it was a goal, was plainly accomplished.

If the government is reduced to a certain size, we need not fear it. If it is allowed to grow to a certain size, then history is clear that the question is not if it will be abused, but when.

The hard left, the secret influencers, made a bad mistake betting on Obama. The jig is up, and roughly half the American public is hopping mad beyond any reasonable hope of calming down, even with a Hillary candidacy. As I said some time ago, Hillary WAS the Fabian candidate, but this time around there will be no such thing. Their best hope now is Mitt Romney, who can at least be counted on not to shrink the size and influence of government. I don’t think they will get him, though.

We need to take stock in and appreciate the very clear, unmistakeable sea change that has happened since 2006. I have been blogging in some form for 8-10 years, and where the overwhelming bulk of posts used to be leftist, that has now turned to the right (except of course for hard left sites like the Daily Cause), with much of the rhetorical fire being both sustained and accurate. That does damage. You can always defeat trickery with truth, if you can get enough of it out there, and the damage is lasting. It goes far past a single engagement into the qualitative terrain of altering dialogue from invective to reasoned debate. No leftist idea can survive that climate.

While being open to all idea about reality, my personal belief is that there is cause for cautious optimism, not just in the immediate future, but over the next century.

And whatever you believe, never be seduced into inaction. There is always something that can be done, and you can never know what might make a difference.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Obama’s “Jobs” proposal–really, a poorly formulated conjecture about what could work–will not work for the simple reason that it was not conceived with the intent of decreasing unemployment in this country. By extension, it was also not formulated with the intent of decreasing suffering in this country.

What it is intended to do is create an Alinskyan platform for partisan attack. Obama is figuring, one, that he has little to lose, and two, that his only chance at reelection is making people more scared of Republicans in aggregate than angry at his patent leadership failures, and all of his other plans that, likewise, have accomplished nothing for most Americans, all at enormous cost.

Taking his policy proposals that have been enacted as a whole, we are plainly worse off than if he had slept twelve hours a day the last three years, and spent his waking hours building model airplanes. If the cost of that were Michelle shopping seven days a week at swanky stores, and vacationing overseas continually at taxpayer expense, we would be better off to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of jobs that would otherwise have been created.

I won’t waste much time dealing with details, but plainly he WANTS Republicans to deny continued Unemployment benefits, so he can paint them as heartless, and he WANTS them to allow payroll taxes to go back up, so he can paint them as hypocritical. He WANTS them to reject his big idea of hiring tens of thousands of workers to do work which does not need to be done, all at taxpayer expense, so he can say “Republicans don’t want to put America back to work.” This is pretty straightforward. He is not clever or original; nor are the people whose ideas these actually are.

The block, of course, is to ask what happened the last time we spent a trillion dollars that he insisted was necessary, and what the consequences were on our national debt. He posited, then, a cause and effect relationship that was falsified by the ultimate judge: reality.

The more interesting question, to me, is the internal reality that enables him to care NOT AT ALL about actual human beings who do, to a regretable extent, depend on him, ideally, making things better, and at a minimum not making things worse, as he has in fact done.

We all have this vain tendency to wax sentimental about our heroism. I myself, sometimes, look at myself imaginatively running into a burning building–like Peter Parker does in the excellent second Spider Man–and either dying nobly or succeeding (I actually met a woman in a bar one time who did run through literal flames to save a baby, and who emerged with substantial burns). I look at that, and get a bit teary eyed at my nobility. Wow, I must be a really good person. If only the world knew what a great guy I am. We all do this at times, I suspect.

This is foolishness. It is perhaps useful at a certain level of development–a level I personally am trying to transcend–but is not even remotely Good is the sense I want to develop it.

I would like to offer an outwardly strange example, but one which has resonance for me affectively and cognitively. To frame it, I will say only that I did martial arts for many years, and came over time to find many, many life lessons inhered in it.

That example is from Musashi, author of “The Book of Five Rings”, and victor–successful murderer–of many duels. He states somewhere in there that you should always be thinking of cutting. That is the key.

This would seem to be obvious. After all, you are trying to win, and not die. But so many things get in the way. In a duel, for example, you might be thinking about how well you are fighting. You might be planning your next move, designed to win. In my view, though, if you plant the seed of your real, final outcome deeply, firmly, ineradicably in your consciousness, then things begin to happen that further that goal. What you need comes to you. This is non-linear, but no matter how things appear, we do not live in linear universe in all but the most superficial sense. Everything is system.

What a Good person needs to be focusing on is helping people. You have to start with the notion of people as self sustaining, happy people, who DO NOT NEED YOU. You have to have as an aim complete superfluity, complete uselessness, with no need to do anything but watch. To do what is right, you need to remove your own ego from the thing, reject all emotional compensation, and all flaky sentimentality.

Now, this does not mean being cold, or never being happy. If you cultivate your own happiness, you don’t need to be needed. There are plenty of pleasures in this life that are free and common. As an example, I personally am an avid student of the sky. I never tire of the interplay of light and cloud, shadow, wind and darkness. I can and do watch the sky for hours.

Back to the point, though, the need to be needed is, itself, a type of dependency, and a dangerous one FOR OTHER PEOPLE. With this motivation, you will find yourself unconsciously undermining others, rather than building them up.

This is what people like Barack Obama do. He cannot conceive of a world which does not need him, and he therefore sets as his aim not helping people, but rather making sure that people like him stay in power, regardless of the actual outcomes of their policies.

This is a type of soft evil. It is not actively desiring pain for others, but rather an actual indifference to suffering that is tempered with a sentimentalism that is entirely divorced from reality, that consists entirely in wishful fantasies with him as the hero, and everyone else as praising him for his benevolence. Oh THANK YOU Barack, for caring about us so much, for being such a wonderful human being. We know that things don’t always work out, but you TRIED SO HARD.

I have in fact seen people taking bows to imaginary audiences after imaginary guitar solos. They can’t know you are there, or they feel immediately the ridiculousness of such things, but most such fantasies never leave the protective cover of the skull of the dreamer.

We can do so much better. All of us.

The “problem of existence” metamorphoses when you call it the “problem of becoming”. We are becoming all the time. The question is how and if to direct it. Put another way, what should we do, one, and why, two.

I have often found that many problems that are recondite in the extreme in the abstract can be solved if you simply begin, and assume a solution is possible. Almost invariably, you will pursue false paths. You will make mistakes, which amount to figuring out ways that don’t work. This is still useful knowledge.

And what you want–purpose, fulfillment, energy, peace–creeps up alongside you in the process of focusing on other things.

Existentialism, which might practically be called the doctrine of moral passivism (I tend to use the word “Moral” synonymously with “principled work”), amounts to a doctrine of craven obeisance to the dictates of the wider world. You get pushed and pulled, here and there, and you call the resulting queasiness “authenticity”. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Many of these people were sick at their cores, and wanted nothing more than to be told what to do. Hence Sartre’s lifelong support of Stalin, and de Beauvoir’s admiration for Sade.

Cowardice is not a virtue, and Exitentialism, as a whole, is pernicious precisely as a poorly constructed rationalisation for moral failure, perceptual failure, and following defensive self righteousness, all on the sides of the wrong causes.

I liked Albert Camus, because he always seemed to me like he was at least TRYING to solve real problems. The rest of them seem to have existed comfortably within a sadomasochistic vortex of principled pointlessness.

They can all be ignored. William James was, in my view, the last widely known useful philospher, and his usefulness was precisely in pointing out that “philosophy” per se–seen as separate from a more primal worldview–is useless until you are solving practical problems whose outcomes can be verified. If what you are doing can be hermetically sealed in a classroom, it is not math, and it is not useful. It is, to real world problems, what the game of Monopoly is to actually leasing real buildings. If it has ANY utility at all, it will only occur when you walk off the university campus.