Month: September 2011

I think a lot about the nature of identity. One of my personal preoccupations is growth, but it is worth taking the time to ask “growth for what? To what?” Successfully dieting, as an example, while no doubt beneficial to the body and ego, is most important in the habit of mind it implies.

My tendency is to think of behavioral rigidity as leading necessarily to perceptual blind spots. At the same time, though, if there is no consistency, there is no form. You have no personality at all, no traits, no attributes.

Logically, true inconsistency would involve both moments of discipline and moments of laxity, moments of cruelty, and moments of profound compassion, all disbursed randomly, and without reference either to principle or antecedant. This condition is not really realizable in practice–except perhaps in conditions of insanity–but does represent a limit condition.

What happens, practically, is that we are built like fiberglass poles, or trees. The rigid are never fully rigid, just as even the tallest, oldest trees still sway in the wind a bit.

Our task–what I see as our proper task–is navigating this world as happily as possible. In my imagination, I see us facing a trackless ocean, and needing to navigate it in one direction, and not another, indefinitely. We need a boat, and a means of propulsion, and most importantly, a way of maintaining course absent clear landmarks.

And perhaps, this is just the first leg of the journey. Perhaps on the next we have to cover a trackless desert. What works in one time and place will not work in another. We must be flexible.

Logically, the antipode to the rigid old oak is not the young sapling, but rather wind, or even the void itself. Even air has form, doesn’t it, now that I think about it. It is composed of molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, water vapor and other gases.

Personalities are structures that serve needed purposes. The personality of a soldier is not necessarily the best for nurturing small babies, or for tending sheep. The task, it seems to me, is to treat personality as a structure WE build, for specific purposes, and which can then be dissolved when no longer needed. What is left when there is no personality? That which the Buddha sought, and for which no name is acceptable, other than to call it a desirable condition, while realizing that desire itself is a function of personality.

I am meandering around a bit, but please bear with me (or not). The Buddha taught that everything about us is best thought of as empty (which is different than saying it IS empty), and composed of parts he called “dharmas”, little atomic bits that, to the point, can be severed, one from the other, and recompiled in new forms.

To be endlessly skillful in adaptation, it is necessary to start with a blank slate, and build what is needed, as needed, then dissolve it when its usefulness has passed. To do this, detachment of the sort cultivated by Buddhists is necessary.

One example I have long been fond of is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of making temporary art, usually sand mandalas, or images made in butter. They create the work, then dip the sand in moving water, or use the butter in food. It is there for a time, in a form for a time, then it is gone. The material is still there, but the information has moved on.

Few wandering and perhaps incoherent thoughts. This is my rambling blog.

While I’m conspiratorializing, let’s do the other major one.

My ideas on this are a little wild, but I think Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy because he was a Communist, and JFK was leading a global fight against Communism. You know, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Communist=tyranny, ergo Lee Harvey Oswald=assassin. Hell, he was married to a Russian, and spent time in both the Soviet Union and Cuba.

I don’t see any reason to think he was given instructions to shoot Kennedy, but see no reason to rule it out. If there was an actual conspiracy, it was a Communist conspiracy, which was cleverly turned, as these things tend to be by even mediocre propagandists, into an attack on the very people trying to protect us from the Communists: our military and government.

Maybe I need to write a book. The market seems to be large, and this view–which would seem self evident given a shred of historical knowledge–seems underrepresented.

This is my conclusion, which is entirely without substantive backing. It is an intuition, based upon eliminating unlikely suspects. I had intended a longer treatment, but this post which I just put up here, is close enough. Basically, I just see Putin’s face when I ask myself imaginatively who was behind the attacks, and have towards the end of this piece compiled a bit of very shaky, unsubstantial “evidence”.

Anyway, this will, I think, be my final statement on 9/11, pending new thoughts or evidence.

I have thought long and hard about this, and have come to some conclusions:

1) Tower 7 could not possibly have fallen the way it did due to fires of unknown origin, which fed on “office furnishings”, which is the official explanation. I deal with this topic here: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/11/tower-7-thoughts.html

That link includes a link to the longer discussion in the first sentence. I inventory everything that is in office towers, and there is nothing that would even stay lit for more than an hour or two, much less melt steel, much less cause a 47 story thicket of fire retardant treated steel beams to fall at the rate of gravity.

2) Logically, then, it must have been demolished with explosives, which is what people unaware of the context assume when first viewing the video.

3) If Tower 7 was brought down with explosives, there is no compelling reason to believe Towers 1 and 2 were not as well.

4) I see no reason to doubt that 4 planes were hijacked and flown into the buildings, per the standard narrative. What I believe to have been the case as far as New York is that United 93 was supposed to fly into Tower 7, which was the home of New York’s disaster response command center. United 93 took off from Newark, just across the river, and if it had been promptly hijacked, would have flown into Tower 7 within minutes of the other two planes.

5) The foregoing conclusions point to a large conspiracy, one with substantial logistical challenges: material requirements, personnel requirements, and money requirements. Given the organization that would have been necessary, and the enduring hatred of jihadists for the United States, it seems clear to me that people capable of such attacks, if they were in fact Muslim terrorists, would have been able to launch MORE attacks since 9/11, since they were and remain undetected, at least with respect to their role in this assault. Logically, this train of thought leads necessarily to the conclusion that Islamic extremists were NOT behind the placement of explosives. Once one realizes that the 19 hijackers could easily have been recruited on a “false flag” basis, then quite literally any large organization or government could be guilty. “Who?”, self evidently is the question.

6) In my view, this is potential an empirical question, if we treat this great catastrophe as the crime that it is, and investigate it like any other crime. What maintenance people were hired in the previous year? Have we interviewed them? Of course not. Where would the explosives have needed to be placed? Who had access to those places? Even now, at this distance, there are many questions the answers to which could potentially be found through a normal forensic police process.

7) In my view, George Bush played no role in this, nor Dick Cheney. Whatever their flaws otherwise, they are patriotic, decent people, and to believe that either had anything to do with this is to believe that both want the United States to be a totalitarian nation. I simply don’t buy that.

Nor do I believe that Israel could have benefitted in the SLIGHTEST from these attacks. We are their largest patron, and anything that weakens us, weakens them. They had no way of knowing we would go into Iraq, and Afghanistan was not a threat to them. Moreover, they were and are decent people, who hew to high moral standards. They had nothing to do with this.

The Chinese also use us as their largest source of income. We are by far their largest export market, and when economic conditions worsen–as one could reliably have predicted they would following such a disaster–they lose money. Clearly, Communists want global dominance, but China has a century long plan, which involves building their economy and military for a number of decades. Then or now would not be good timing.

You know who I believe was behind this? The Russians. The former head of the Soviet KGB had just taken over, in 1999, as head of the government. This is a man marinated in Communist ideology from the earliest age, whose grandfather was a cook for Lenin himself, and occassionally Stalin as well.

This is purely speculative–necessarily, of course–but in my view Putin thought that America was decadent, and that an attack of that magnitude would lead us into a permanent decline. He had been taught to think of us as soft and weak. Unlike the Russians, we had not been attacked on our soil since the War of 1812 (not counting Pearl Harbor). I think that he thought that by tearing us down, it would make it easier for him to continue the project of global domination to which he had long ago pledged his life.

He was sorely disappointed at our reaction. Rather than weakening us, it strengthened us, and that is why there have been no more such attacks. He is still circling, as the judoka he is, but he has been unable to find any clear openings to exploit.

I can offer little evidence for this, of course. A couple points that are vaguely supportive.

Pictures of the impacts were apparently taken by a Russian pilot:
http://englishrussia.com/2006/12/04/russian-pilot-making-photos-911-flying-above-nyc/

This guy should be interviewed. Obviously, the Russians would have wanted to be sure that the evidence of the planes flying in was incontrovertible.

Some of the most active conspiracy theorists are Russian. Here is a Russian General in effect blaming Capitalists for the sorts of plots the Communists hatched routinely. This is straight ahead use of the propaganda trick of blaming your opponent of the crimes you commit. An obvious example would be the constant use of the word Imperialist by the Soviet Empire. Here is the link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1788

The Russians gave us a 9/11 Memorial: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/r/russian-911-memorial.htm

One can only speculate, but even Putin at some point may have felt regret. Alternatively–since this actually seems doubtful on the part of someone capable of rising to the top of an organization as ruthless as the KGB–it may have been intended to divert attention from themselves as the culprits.

These are my intuitions, which may or may not be valid, like any intuition. The core point I would like to make is that beyond any reasonable doubt there was a much larger conspiracy than we were told. All of the defects in response and investigation can easily, in my view, be attributed to a combination of cowardice and complacency. There need to be no omnipresent and omnipotent “them”, who control everything. The naked reality is that most people are stupid, frightened easily, and lazy.

Who, among government employees, wanted to be the one to shout out “This is a lie”? How many climate scientists deny the farcical notion of Anthropogenic Global Warming? Not enough, not nearly enough.

And self evidently, there well could be paid agents of foreign interests scattered throughout our poltical and military apparatus. They would be the ones at the meeting when things are discussed arguing that such a view is ridiculous, or potentially even the ones denying others permission to investigate. Clearly, there are scales and levels of conspiracy between total control, and no control. There are many variables, and few monoliths.

I lose no sleep over this. I don’t think the Russians have any more attacks planned, if this hypothesis even has any validity.

I will say, though, that there are clearly Communist sympathizers in the United States, some of whom have a lot of money, with the Rockefellers being the obvious example. These people can and have made efforts to influence our political process over many decades. As I see it, there is little we can do now to avenge the 9/11 attacks, but we must remain vigilant. The Tea Party is the best news I have seen in my lifetime, since it might be possible to get people in office who shrink the size of government, for the first time since FDR’s Fascist co-conspirators first got Socialism started in this country.

I was walking by a school today, and wondering about the kids. I tried to imagine them all happy, and the whole projects succeeding admirably. This is always a useful exercise.

Then it hit me that the love you are capable of can in part be measured by how deeply and sincerely you can imagine the success of others. I’ve said this many times in many ways, but here it is again: recurring theme.

It’s easy enough to take part in the joy of your own children, and perhaps those of your nieces and nephews. But it harder for kids you don’t know, people you don’t know. This sort of greed slips in, which stipulates that the happier they are, the less there is for you. I mean, we can’t ALL be happy, can we? Somebody somewhere has to be less happy, right?

This is the same logic Leftists apply to their projects. In their view of the status quo, the rich are happy while the poor are happy. The logical inversion, then, is making the poor happy and the rich unhappy. Of course, the fact that EVERYONE is made miserable in the process, since they have made not even a rudimentary effort to understand cause and effect, is lost on them, before, during, and generally after.

The question remains: what limits ARE there on happiness? Why can’t we all be happy, or happy-ish? Is this not an empirical problem, to be solved by paying attention to social and intrapsychic cause and effect relationships? I for one think so. I see no limits at all, particularly if we admit that occasional sadness is necessary for happiness.

Failure is a four letter word. THIS is an example.

“Attempts to minimize economic differences in an open an free society necessarily involve the use of coercive power. They politicize economic life. And economic activity comes to depend to a greater degree on political decisions. People’s income and their economic modus vivendi come largely under the control of politicians and civil servants. . .

“Extensive politicization of life enhances the prices of political power and thus the stakes in the fight for it. This outcome in turn intensifies political tension, at least until opposition is effectively demoralized or forcibly suppressed. And because people’s economic fortunes come to depend so much on political and administrative decisions, their talents and energies are diverted from economic activity to political life, sometimes from choice, sometimes from necessity.These consequences are manifest in many societies, especially in multiracial societies.

“In many countries the politicization of life, often pursued in the name of equality, now means the question of who the rulers are has become of the greatest importance.”

More, several pages later: “Redistribution of income and reduction of poverty are often thought to be interchangable concepts. Indeed, it is often taken for granted that egalitarian policies necessarily improve the condition of the poor. This is not so. The promotion of economic equality and the alleviation of poverty are distinct and often conflicting. To make the rich poorer does not make the poor richer.

“The advocates of egalitarian policies focus on relative income differences, or the relative position of different groups. They thereby divert attention from the causes of poverty, especially the causes which underlie real hardship and from the possibilities of effective remedial measures. Relief of poverty, especially the improvement in the position of the very poor, has nothing to do with the pursuit of equality. The policies of egalitarianism often ignore the very poor, especially those who are self reliant and enterprising.

“Except perhaps over very short periods, redistributive policies are much more likely to DEPRESS [emphasis mine] the living standards of the poor than to raise them. The extensive politicization brought about by large scale redistribution diverts people’s energies and ambitions from productive economic activity to politics and public administration.”

Black people in America thought he was going to help them. In effect, this is what he promised, and what they had been led to believe: the way ahead is through politics and not self determined, private sector economic advancement. Obama could not keep this promise, since none of his policies could ever have acted, except over the very short term, to do anything but continue the very thorough destruction of the black community that 50 years of leftist truth-abuse has thus far enabled.

Put another way, it was always the case that black Americans would suffer most, as would poor people generally (most of whom are Hispanic or white), once Obama took office. This was a foregone conclusion. Nothing but conservative policies would have stimulated the growth needed to create rising prosperity for all. The poor suffer first, and benefit last, clearly, and failing to see this does not become a plus for leftists in their pursuit of vacuous goals which result in much misery.

“The adverse effects of redistributive policies on economic performance are implied in such expressions as the trade-off between equity and efficiency, or between social justice and efficiency. These formulations recognize to some extent that economic activity is not a zero-sum game. But they still disguise the extent the outcome of economic processes depends on the performance of people–performances which can be promoted or obstructed by official policy.

I have already noted that it is by no means obvious why it should be unjust that those who produce more should enjoy higher incomes. And attempts to prevent them from doing so will affect adversely the average level of incomes. It will do so cumulatively because if everyone can expect to receive only something like the average of all income, this average itself will fall. A neat example of this process emerged from an experiment designed a few years ago by a teacher in an American university. The students demanded much greater equality in all walks of life, including the grading of their papers. In response to these demands the teacher announced that from a given date the students would be given equal grades for their weekly papers, and that the grades would be based on the average performance of the class. The experiment brought about a rapid decline in average performance and thus in the average grade, because the incentive to work declined greatly.”

This, in a nutshell, is why free markets and the profit motive are the greatest engines for generalized economic advancement and technological innovation ever devised: it harnesses motivation in the direction of creation.

As I say on my other website, you can be equal in both wealth and poverty, and since Socialism doesn’t create wealth, equalization in poverty is the default outcome.

“Old age, ill health, the bringing up of children and interruption of earnings, these are contingencies of life to be paid for out of one’s income, and for which adults can be expected to provide by saving or insurance. In many Western countries provision for these contingencies has come to be taken over largely by the State. Because the provision cannot be adjusted to the widely varying circumstances of individuals and families, it is apt to be both expensive and unsatisfactory. Such provision is necessarily financed by taxation. As a result many people’s post-tax income becomes like pocket-money,which is not required for major necessities and hazards of life because these are paid for by taxes largely levied on themselves. This policy treats adults as if they were children. Adults manage incomes; children receive pocket-money. The redistribution of responsibilities implied in the operation of the welfare state means the reduction of the status of adults to that of children.

“There is a further result of large scale redistribution of responsibility between the agents of the state and private individuals, a result which acts as anomolous [Bauer’s preferred word for utterly idiotic] and even ominous force for perpetuating and extending this policy. Prudent people, even if poor, can normally provide for the contingencies of life by saving and insurance, but only if the value of money remains reasonably stable. They are unable to do so when this condition does not hold. Heavy state spending on welfare in various ways promotes the erosion of the value of money, a risk against which many people cannot protect themselves, certainly not by saving and insurance. The difficulty, or impossibility of protecting themselves effectively leads them to accept or to demand that tax-financed provision for these contingencies should be maintained or extended, even if this is recognized to be unsatisfactory.”

Ponder this. What he is noting is both that welfare states infantilize people, by design, and also that Keynesian policies, through the inflation they tend to provoke, tend to make the little lambs cling yet more tightly to their mothers teat, out of necessity.

Always, the increase in dependence, through policies enacted through people who are themselves economic parasites.

“Why, in free and open societies such as those of Western countries, are some people better off than others–not necessarily wiser, happier, nicer or more virtuous, but better off? The precise causes of differences in income and wealth are complex and various, and people will always disagree on how they apply to particular societies, groups, or individuals. But in substance such differences result from people’s widely varying aptitudes and motivations and also to some extent from chance circumstances. Some people are gifted, hard-working, ambitious and enterprising, or had far-sighted parents, and they are therefore more likely to become well off.

“In an open and free society [note that people like George Soros mean by “open society” a Fascistic system of generalized government controls of all aspects of the economy and the personal lives of individuals], political action which deliberately aimed to minimize, or even remove economic differences would entail such extensive coercion that the society would cease to be open and free. The successful pursuit of the unholy grail of economic equality would exchange promised reduction or removal of differences in income and wealth for much greater ACTUAL [emphasis mine] inequality of power between rulers and subjects.”

“When social scientists talk of social problems, the usually mean discrepencies between social reality and what they assume to be norms [ahistorically: these are actually posited desirable norms and not objective conditions to be found in actual human history]. Because they are largely preoccupied with discerning, announcing and emphasizing discrepencies between their assumed norms and reality, social scientists tend to GENERATE [emphasis mine] social problems rather than solve them.”

“In an open society income differences normally reflect the operation of voluntary arrangements [the negotiated agreement being less onerous than whatever the alternative was]. The absence of coercive power in most forms of successful economic activity is recognized in Dr. Johnson’s familiar observation that ‘there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than getting money.'”

Note that Bill Gates did not rob anyone, but all Communists have.

“The accumulation of wealth, especially great wealth, normally results from activities which extend the choices of others, as is clear from the fortunes acquired in, say, mass retailing or the development of the motor car.”

“In recent years inequality has come to be used interchangeably with inequity, and equality with equity. That differences is a more appropriate term than inequality is also suggested by the accepted practice of referring to people’s physical characteristics, such as height, weight and strength, as differences rather than inequalities, and never as inequities.

“On the other hand, the term inequity is appropriate in discussing political power because that power implies a relationship of command between rulers and subjects. . .those who have political power can coerce others by restricting their choices, while wealth does not by itself confer such power on the rich.

“In contemporary parlance social justice has come to mean substantially equal incomes. Why should this be so? It is not obvious why it should be just to penalize those who are more productive and contribute more to output, and to favor those who produce less. This conclusion is reinforced when it is remembered that relatively well off people have often given up leisure, enjoyment and consumption, and that these past sacrifices have significantly contributed to their higher incomes.”

If you read Communist propaganda–which continues to be generated to this very day, albeit not generally under that precise name–you get this feeling that money is theft. All those houses on the hill were stolen from the people at the bottom of the hill. But look at America: almost all fortunes are first generation. These are cardiac surgeons whose parents were born in small villages in India or Pakistan. These are successful entrepreneurs born to average middle class parents.

And the list of the wealthiest American families has changed constantly since whenever it was first produced. Some names stay the same–notably those such as the Rockefellers, who can use the power of government to support and create anti-free market conditions–but most come and go with regularity.

“Major beneficiaries of redistribution include its advocates, organizers and administrators notably politicians and civil servants, who are NOT among the poor. This outcome promotes the self perpetuation of the process. . .On the national level, the operation of the welfare state comprises two quite different forms of redistribution: wealth transfers between groups, and redistribution of responsibility between between the agents of the state and private citizens. Welfare state policies do not always redistribute income between rich and poor [emphasis mine]. They do not necessarily redistribute income even among individuals. The same people may be taxed at some times and subsidized at others.”

As one example, the average wage earning has some 12.4% of their income AT LEAST taken out immediately to support Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Some amount more, depending on the State is further taken out to fund a State run unemployment fund. Low income individuals are also taxed with sales taxes in most states. Thus they pay in in one place, and take out, maybe, in another. The entity which wins EVERY time is the government, which is to say that large number of people whose paychecks are paid out of tax dollars taken from the pockets of everyone who works for a living.

I have been slowly working my way through Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion”. Everything one would need to critique not just development programs overseas, but also domestically is in this book.

In fact, it is quite easy to argue and document that the economic policies pursued by most of the European colonial powers in their overseas colonies from roughly the 1930’s–heyday of Fascist theorizing–through independence were, your choice of word, Keynesian/Fascist/Socialist; and that the continuation of those policies has led to grossly reduced wealth production, political control by privileged elites, famines and war.

Take India as an example: they implemented the tight government controls Keynes called for. The government invested heavily in infrastructure projects. They controlled wages and production. And what they got was 40 years of stagnation. In the early 1990’s, they opened things up, stopped riding the asses of every entrepreneur in the country, and have expanded steadily for 2 decades.

There is no ambiguity about how to grow an economy: it is to let people seek their own way, in conditions of freedom, including to the extent possible freedom from taxation.

These are a few general thoughts. I am going to quote Bauer extensively, as he has a way of saying things clearly and simply without the loss of important aspects of his meaning. That will be the next post.