Month: September 2011

When George H.W. Bush used this phrase, he plainly meant a post-Communist world. From the end of the Second World War to the late 1980’s–some 40 years–the world order has been the free world, the Communist world, and the developing, third, world. Logically, in a new world order, the so-called third world would be second. This is a change, one Bush no doubt believed would be for the better.

Bush fought and nearly died for this country in World War Two. His plane was shot down in the Pacific, if memory serves. There is no reason to doubt either that he liked and likes the privileged world he was born in to, or that he is a sincere patriot who values the freedoms which our ancestors bought for us with hard work, good thinking, persistence, and blood.

Who, however, has ALWAYS talked about a New World Order? Who has ALWAYS blamed shadowy “capitalist” elites for all the worlds woes? Who has ALWAYS seen–at least rhetorically–in the actions of the United States malignant imperialism and the desire to crush the dreams of ordinary working people? Communists, of course.

George Bush did not want to create a totalitarian state in this country, or elsewhere. This notion is farcical. OF COURSE he is plugged in to groups of rich (mainly) white people for networking and mutual benefit. Of course he has always taken advantage of business opportunities.

But to think for a moment that he, his son, Dick Cheney, or other senior American politicians want us to look like the old Soviet Union is ludicrous.

The RUSSIANS want us to look like the Soviet Union. Why wouldn’t they? Putin to this very day no doubt feels that if he had been in Gorbachev’s place he could have kept the thing together. Why would he not continue the century-long conquest planned by Lenin? These people do not think in short time scales. That is the one advantage of totalitarian rule.

It is so interesting that what can be a very damaging story if understood one way becomes a tool when inverted. Bush has been blamed for an attack he had nothing to do with, and what is the supposed answer? Voting for Democrats, who are continuing the Fabian subversion of our nation. That, or removing oneself from the democratic process outright, believing wrongly that both parties are trying to end our freedom.

Think about Lee Harvey Oswald. How many headlines have you seen saying “Communist assassin kills American President”? None, I suspect. Who got the blame? A purported “military-industrial-intelligence cabal”. Who are those people in reality? Then, the ones trying to protect us from the Communists, and doing well at it.

Thus, the benefits are huge–even when your guy, if he was their guy directly–gets caught. You use it to further undermine support for the institutions that oppose you.

It needs to be said, too, that there is a much bigger difference between having strong internal surveillance capability and not having it, than in having it controlled by one set of people versus another. Once an apparatus is in place, it becomes a simple matter of perverting and redirecting it. It can be created by anybody. It could be created by a saint, and as long as he runs it, everything is perfect. Nothing can go wrong. But once that person is gone, the whole thing, like a cannon, can be turned around and pointed at an entirely different set of people. This is the essence of Fabianism. They don’t care who controls the apparatus, merely that it is created. That is the main thing.

The Federal Reserve is another good example. When founded, it was directed by the Secretary of the Treasury. It was, for all intents and purposes, a government agency. It had limits on what it could buy. For Open Market operations it was limited to purchasing Treasury bonds, as I recall. Yet over time, over failing memories, and official and journalistic inattention, and aggressive propaganda campaigns, and taking advantage of crises (most of which it created), it got unshackled, and fully independent, to the point where everything it did was secret, and where there were no limits on its power of money creation/reallocation.

Now, the fact that Keynes tried to end the Fed tells me it was not–at least then–an entity he felt congenial to him. That entity, today, would be the IMF/World Bank which he created in lieu of abolishing the Fed as it then existed. The IMF has, I read, $350 BILLION in cash reserves, most of which money was gifted it (created) by central banks the world over, but most importantly by our own Federal Reserve.

When contemplating a “New World Order”, that is the sort of thing we need to be concerned with. Does Putin meet with them? Are they congenial to the idea of a Communist resurgence? 70 years of failure were not enough to teach the most ardent Communistic Fascists of the error of their ways. Why would these people not be out there at this very moment, planning?

I see no reason to doubt this.

Oh, writing sorts like me are supposed to have words on this. All I will say is that this is all much more confusing to me than it used to be.

I don’t think Islamic terrorists are very smart. If they were, they would have launched more successful attacks. Muslims, in general, are not very smart. They don’t invent things. They don’t work hard (a Ranger I know who did several tours in Iraq commented that work and the “Will of Allah” seem to exist in an inverted ratio, where less work equates consistently to more “Will of Allah”.) They are not individualistic. You just don’t hear often of Islamic creative geniuses. They have existed, but rarely. They don’t listen to music in many countries. They don’t paint. They don’t sculpt. They don’t dance in most countries.

Virtually every creative outlet which defines culture in general is proscribed to them by their holy book. In my view, creativity aggregates. People who foster creativity in one arena tend to be capable of processing it in many arenas. It would seem clear that the converse is also true, that the less avenues for the expression of creativity that are open, the overall creation will happen. There are no Mozarts or Leonardo Da Vinci’s in Islamic history. There have been some very good poets, but most of them are frowned upon by the orthodox. They created only by rejecting–they no doubt would have said expanding and clarifying–some core elements of the doctrine.

And to be clear, within Islamic doctrine, there is nothing to be done. Their world is perfect. Their customs are perfect. Their faith is perfect. They have but to live a life without breaking the rules, and their salvation is assured.

It is perhaps not overstating the case to say that the only obvious open path for progress and creativity is jihad. If your world is perfect, you must go outside of it to find creative challenges.

The Washington D.C. sniper showed how easy it is to sow fear. Terror acts are simplicity itself. Get a truck and crash it into something. Derail a train. Shoot up a shopping mall. Yet, virtually none of that has happened.

Yes, authorities have detected and stopped a number of plots–at least, we are told that plots were underway and were stoppped.

But, again, given the manifold challenge of rigging and blowing a skyscraper in New York City without being detected, surely minds capable of that would have done more. This, too, leads to my belief in a broader conspiracy that involved non-Muslims.

I will mention, too, that it is strange how thoroughly the Tower 7 story has been buried. Yes, Towers 1 and 2 were much taller, and the disaster more complete. But think about this: a 47 story building would be the tallest building in almost every city in the U.S.

Here is a list. The tallest building in Alabama is 35 stories. In Arizona and Arkansas 40. Only about half the state in the US have even ONE building that is that tall. Imagine the outcry and investigation if one of them spontaneously collapsed.

The official story of Tower 7 is that the combustion of office furnishings caused the collapse. Yet, what was on fire, where, that caused the collapse? How did the fires start?

It is stupid for conspiracy theorists to waste ANY time on Towers 1 and 2, since plainly the cause of the fire and structural instability was jetliners being flown into them. Never fight toe to toe when you can flank. The task in falsifying a paradigm is not attacking the points of strongest defense, but the weakest, and attacking them hard. This is basic.

It would be easy enough to test the official theory, by starting a fire in an area filled with the contents of the office where the first beam failure allegedly occurred–towards the top, if memory serves, making the issue of the genesis of the fire that much more problematic–and seeing what the peak temperature is, and how long it lasts, in the region of the structural steel.

I look in the office I work in, and I see nothing capable of sustaining ANY fire for more than an your, and that is likely pushing it.

The world is mad. It has always been mad. My work is dedicated to the ideal of helping more people go sane. I can do nothing but tell the truth as I see it for now, but that is a much better starting point, always, than an illusion.

I’ve been reading a bit of what I assume is history on Wikipedia, that concerning the Fasces, that axe in a handle made of many branches bound together, that I had thought was carried by the Roman Consuls.

I was wrong. Here is the link to the Fasces. Apparently they were carried by Lictors, who were in effect bodyguards to various officials. The axe heads had to be removed to carry them into the sacred inner part of the Rome, symbolizing that the authority of the magistrates the Lictors protected ended at that point.

This was not true of Dictators. This was the first time I read of this history, but apparently there were times in the history of the Roman Republic when the two consuls in effect ceded their authority to one individual who was called a Dictator, and whose bodyguards were allowed the run of Rome.

It is interesting to me that this symbol comes from the era of the Roman Republic, and not the Empire. It symbolizes binding together, and it symbolizes power.

I’m flirting with this topic, and will no doubt return to it. This warrants a bit of thought.

Given the ubiquity of this term, I think it worth contemplating what, if anything, is new with “Fascism”. First, read what Mussollini had to say about it here.

Several points. One, he understood himself as counteracting the decadence of Italy.

Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude.

This is the “he made the trains run on time” element of it.

He calls, in effect, for perpetual war, in service of Empire, in effect the police of the Romans themselves: “War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”

He rejects Marxian notions of history:

Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production…. Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect.

What is he saying here? What he is saying is that individuals can make a difference, but only certain individuals, certain exceptional individuals.

Before dilating on this point more, what does he have to say about the State?

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality — thus it may be called the “ethic” State….

…The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone….

What is interesting about all this is that Mussollini was himself formerly a Communist.

He is rejecting impersonal historical forces, but still retaining an understanding of an impersonal State, which exists as a whole, as an element in the historical process. So in effect he is replacing class warfare with overt imperialism, but still finding no place for the self organization of a Liberal society, saying that it merely “records” results instead of creating them.

But there is no such thing as an impersonal State any more than there are impersonal economic forces. Both Fascism and Communism depend, fundamentally, on a reification of “forces” which consist ENTIRELY in the aggregate motion of actual human beings. Both doctrines appeal to intellectuals precisely they abstract very complex systems into simple, easily cognized narratives that are WRONG.

The cart is before the horse. They want certain things to be true, so they work very hard to make them true, to put people who believe what they believe into positions where they can DICTATE history

Mussollini was able to wage war (ineffectively). Communists can kill members of unapproved classes. But neither action reflects “history”. There is no “State”.

I’m repeating myself. This is light thinking here, done on a day dedicated to relaxation. I am not thinking to the point of pain, which is what I do when I take up topics in earnest.

The question, though, is this: what is new, with this term “Fascism”? Consider the concept of proscription. It was used in the 1790’s in France, and it was used in 82 B.C. by Sulla.

What is the difference between a Fascist dictator, and a dictator like Sulla? Plainly, Mussollini had someone like Sulla in mind.

That leaders would seek to rule by fiat, and torture and kill political opponents is likely as old as history. So is the glorification of war, and the desire to get stuff by stealing it from others. Sulla, for example, took the possessions of his political enemies just like the Nazis stole the possessions of the Jews, and the Bolsheviks and their descendants stole the possessions of THEIR political opponents.

As I see it, this is the old battle of Good versus Evil, the creation of happiness ex nihilo versus the effort to conquer happiness by conquering others, to master resentment by transmuting it into actual violence.

We all live short lives, do we not, permeated by confusion? There are no letters in the sky to guide us, nor a physical book that fell from the sky to tell us what to do. And if there were, how could we be certain those words should be followed? Can we, in the end, be guided by something other than a goal we have in mind, combined with practical observation leading to consistent correllations between desired end and the means of accomplishing it?

Do Fascists really want misery? Some of the leaders, yes, but misery they inflict on others.

What most people want, though, is a sense of purpose, of knowing what to do, and having a place to live, to call home–which includes not primarily a physical place, but a mental and emotional place where rest is possible. Most people want to be understood, they want to feel valued, and to know what to do so that they will be valued. They need to know what the rules are. Mussollini invoked holiness and nobility. Translated, these mean “rules”.

A boat afloat at sea with no anchor, no sail, and no rudder is a lonely place. So much faith is needed to imagine a desirable end. So it occurs to some minds to impose an end, to imagine everyone else is as adrift as they feel themselves to be, and to impose for them–against their will, since they don’t know, on this reading, what is good for them (or they lack the will to pursure it)–a set of circumstances that they will be compelled to inhabit as a home.

Anti-Individualism NECESSARILY implies autocracy, to a greater or lesser extent–certainly inequality. Individualism means that rights, including the right to perception, inhere in all people equally. No one is above the law.

To invert this, as for example Keynes does in “End of Laissez Faire”, and imply that the locus of rights and power is other than in concrete organic beings we call in-dividuals, is necessarily to say that some people have more rights than others. Those within the State have more power than those external to the State.

Anti-Individualism is, then, necessarily injustice, if we define justice as all people being equal before the law.

Oh, this is getting a bit deep for me today. I’ll circle around again eventually, in my own time and way.

Max Weber thought we were destined to be confined in “iron cages” of reason, of rationality, of NECESSITY. In his world, all the fairies and demons, angels and unexplained beams of light were on the way out, on the verge of extinction. Matter was what was real, if I recall his epistemology right–or at least his metaphysical suspicions–and thus everything would one day be explained. Then, the course of life would become a road for all to travel together. There would be no other roads, because only ONE would conform to reason.

He went mad for a time. He came back, but it was no doubt quite unpleasant.

To the very day, this is the approximate project of the Socialists, who want to see in science the way forward to a definitive vision of what to do and why. We will look to neuroscience, and pharmacology. We will look to social science, and anthropology, and the right sorts of psychologist to tell us how to live. We see this daily in the newspaper: “experts” telling us how to think, how to act, what to do.

The Cult of the Left is in no small measure the Cult of the Expert, for the very simple reason that they have accepted the idea in principle that all principles are negotiable. There are no perduring truths, nothing to hang a hat on. Everything is being negotiated, discovered, redacted and informed with statistics.

My question is this: what sane person would want to live in such a world, where I might be asked to be someone else tomorrow, with no more reason than that some person with a degree says I should? What am I to infer when they change their minds, as they constantly do? Are they still pushing Vitamin E so assiduously? What happened to Gingko Biloba? Where is Dr. Spock, except in ghost?

There is nothing necessary about the iron cage, but it is endlessly interesting how much emotional appeal it has for so many people, to this very day. We do not live in a material universe. That idea was refuted, more or less decisively, some 50 years ago. Why do we still act as if we do?

We hear from the Left, from old hippies, “go with the flow”. There is some merit to this idea, but why does going with the flow, for them, equate to losing form entirely?

Oh, there is so much that is possible, and ignored and rejected by poorly thinking, poorly functioning, defective human beings, who have been blessed with lives they choose to live in direct opposition to the best that is possible, and to what was intended for them.

One of my favorite pasttimes is watching people, figuring them out. I’m not detached: I talk with people in bars (and elsewhere: I’m capable of being very, very social) all the time. Still, a few beers, and I start analyzing. Who is that person? And that person? What do they feel? How do they approach the world? Why?

There is this feeling of love that invades me from time to time (note: I’ve had a couple drinks tonight, so there may be a bit of the “I love you, man” thing going on), when I see how STUPID yet loveable people are. I love them BECAUSE of their flaws, because of the ineffective ways they are trying to solve real problems. Oh, we are all like that sometimes.

Hell, I’m one of the dumb ones. I must be. I’m not perfectly happy, yet I see no reason this should not be one of the states attainable on Earth. That I have not attained it means I am being stupid, and believe me I have ample reasons for believing that.

I said I lose no sleep over 9/11. Well, last night I was awake about every 30 minutes all night long either seeing a Russian conspiracy, or–and this is where the unconscious kicks in–wondering why glass won’t stretch. Why doesn’t glass flex? It is pernicious. We can see through it, but it won’t stretch at all. It just breaks. Such a pity. Someone needs to invent taffy glass.

Be that as it may, it felt like a species of insanity. Now, as Lewis Carroll, I believe in the voice of the Queen had it, I sometimes think two impossible things before breakfast, but even I have to tell the truth sometimes, and say this isn’t right.

I can analyze the symbolic content of this, and likely will, but the point that is running through my mind now is the fragility of experience. We think it is unitary, we think it is solid. We think we are material objects traversing a material land, and that everything is put together just so. We call this condition of thought sanity. Sanity is existing in a time and place according to the ideals of that time and place, being able to explain them, being able to defend them against heterodoxy (interesting that we see the word ortho-doxy, but not homo-doxy; the former formulation makes the repetitive, imitative aspect of it less obvious, presumably), and being quite satisfied that what one knows is what one needs to know, and that what one has not been told to know is either false or not worth knowing.

I have long felt that being open to the idea of being insane CAN be useful, although not necessarily. For me, I want to live in a more or less orderly space, but I also want to venture out from time to time, to see what else there is to see, to find out what else there is to know.

No box with 6 sides can ever close. No world with a finite number of dimensions can be said to exist.

Oh, that, the sound of one hand clapping, and a pint of whiskey might bring you to the edge–but oh it is just over there, not here, on the other side of the dark river–of enlightenment. It’s OK: I’ll be sitting there next to you, still well satisfied it was a good time.

Let’s be dumbasses together. It’s plainly a burgeoning field. You lead, and I’ll fail to follow. We can take turns.

Goodness is not niceness. One of the most subtle and pernicious ways of undermining the notion of Goodness is by equating it with banality, with Ned Flanders, with goody-two-shoes, with boredom.

A truly Good person, on the contrary, is relentlessly alert, relentlessly engaged, passionate about what they do, and open to experience.

It is bad people who are dull: they are stuck in tedious manias, endless rage, and an inability to process experience. In the end, the “greatest” sadists this world has ever known were incapable of more than evanescent enjoyment, and that at a very low grade level.

This is an important point. Jesus went after the money changers with a whip because they deserved it. There is nothing meritorious about being an affect-less doormat.

This is two thoughts posted in one.

First, it occurs to me that with respect to 9/11, the only reliable responses would have been an engagement with Afghanistan, economic trauma, and probably large increases in Federal spending.

As I look at Putin in my mind, I see the one survivor from Company 9. I see the lasting scars the war in Afghanistan left on the Russian psyche. I think Putin thought we would meet a similar fate. I really do. Everyone was telling us on the front end how dangerous it was, and in point of fact the obvious leader of a Taliban-free Afghanistan was assassinated just two days prior to 9/11. It has been blamed on Bin Laden, but I don’t think Bin Laden thought we would go into Afghanistan. Putin would have known better.

And I see potential allies in the United States among our financial elites. Again, the Rockefellers’ name pops up immediately, but it is hard to know how many people out there want to end their own sense of meaninglessness by pursuing a totalitarian agenda.

Moral psychosis is a term I just came up with, to be used as a synomym for moral death, but I think I like it better. The psychiatric condition of psychosis is one of being utterly decontextualized, utterly removed from ordinary reactions to human situations and emotions, and denuded of the capacity, not just to tell right from wrong, but to perceive reality accurately in any fashion.

If you lie to yourself over and over and over for decades, if you involve yourself in deceiving others, there must come a time when for all intents and purposes you are an automaton, devoid of normal human reactions, and utterly without purpose, but filled with energy. This is the condition of the hard core Leftist, who is Satanic in all but name.

This is a fever of insanity. It really is. Sybaritic leftists are not insane: they are just soft. Cultural Sadeists are lunatics.

I read today that 40% of Europeans exhibit signs of mental illness, illnesses their socialized medical systems are not equipped to handle. How is that Socialism, that freedom from responsibility and failure working for them? Not well, I suspect. We would need comparative numbers for Americans, but I have been told by more than one European visiting that it is amazing how normal most people seem. And we are normal, by and large. We don’t have the neurotic ticks and manias that seem common to the Europeans. By and large, most of us are content with our lots, and with life. Yes, rates of depression are going up, but not at European rates, or at least that is my best guess.

I spent some time studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming some years back. I didn’t take any classes, but did like I do and read 10 or so books on it.

One of the lasting insights I took away was the concept of channels, by which is meant the idea that many people, much of the time, are sending signals on multiple channels. An obvious example is a man SAYING to a woman he respects her mind, when it is quite clear to her that what he wants is her body.

There are countless ways to say I love you, both in the sincere way, as in Louis Armstrong’s “how do you do”, and in fake ways, as in a man saying what he needs to to get in a woman’s pants.

Consciously or not, we receive on all channels. Dissonance is how we pick up on insincerity. Lie detection depends entirely on incongruities between a chosen exterior and subconscious signals to the contrary. People that feel no discomfort lying cannot be caught.

When people choose to ignore unconscious requests for help, it causes hurt or anger. When they try to control you, it causes passivity or anger. You feel emotions, but you don’t know why if you lack this concept of channels.

The corrollary to this is that most people also have multiple “parts”, which, too, is a concept I got from NLP. Most people in effect have multiple personalities, all with their own syntax and aims.

As I have argued, I feel that personal growth consists in paring down the number of selves and motives to a point where your personality is fully congruent, then, ultimately, in flux with the universe, with undivided consciousness of joy. This is enlightenment.

Few thoughts. I’m taking notes off my voicemail.

Some interests in the United States benefit equally from both “conservative” and “liberal” policies.

With Republicans, they get deregulation and, some, tax benefits that are not distributed uniformly. What gets deregulated, we can assume to benefit disproportionately those who pushed for the deregulation.

With Democrats, they get policies enacted which damage some businesses, but at the benefit of their own. Democrats don’t really go after large corporations, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. What their policies do is hurt small business, which helps large business. The very people whose careers rest on their alleged anti-corporatism enact laws which act, in aggregate, to strengthen the multinationals they claim to oppose. Since leftists never bother to compare the effects of their policies with their stated aims, they don’t notice. Of course, if they stay in office, many don’t care. They get all the perks of office.

A clear example of this is Obamacare. It won’t hurt the GE’s of the world, or the AT&T’s. It will hurt Ted’s Diner, and Ann’s Wine Shop. That’s why so many small businesses in Nancy Pelosi’s home district moved so quickly to get waivers. This will be enormously damaging to them.

In all realms of endeavor it is important to think clearly, and it is nowhere more important than in evaluating policies which have the potential both to build wealth and to destroy it, to facilitate job creation or–as is plainly the case with this health insurance mandate–to put many people out of work.

The net point is that if you are thinking in unanchored abstractions, if you “oppose war”, or oppose corporatism, or want to end poverty, or want to increase freedom, you must think in terms of details. Almost everything which helps one person hurts someone else. The task politicians set themselves is to focus your attention on the first, and keep it away from the second. Prudent people, however, do not let this happen.

When you tax a business out of existence, you do not hurt most the business owner. You hurt the janitor, and the line worker, and the clerk. Failure to grasp this basic point has enabled the development and continuation of horrifically destructive polices the world over for the better part of a century.

Supposedly we are going to see mass protests on Wall Street in the next few weeks. These people think in cartoons. They love the idea of themselves as heroic crusaders, but are not at all equipped to take the time to understand that the world is a complex place, and that damage to the economy will hurt big business not at all.

Thus even if they are successful, they will fail. This is the policy of fools.

Morality in action NECESSARILY requires sustained efforts at building understanding, since moral people care primarily about the outcome of their actions, and not at all about how best to generate emotional satisfaction from romantic narcissism. They are invisible, to the extent possible, and neither ask for nor expect thanks. That is my view.