Month: October 2011

Watched the movie “The Eagle” tonight. History has long fascinated me: men of honor, met on a field of battle, slain, have so much more in common that the mediocre middle, who believe nothing, choose nothing, and die in their bed, ultimately alone.

Oh, do we need to kill one another to live? Need we die to compose our unique melodies of our lives?

I watch history. I study history. So many seem to assume that history, sometime very soon, will end. What was, will cease to be. The enlightenment, freedom, the locus of perception on the individual, will be gone. In its place, an irrational rationalism, imposed by those who use the rhetoric of freedom, and who hate dissent.

Why?

Why must we assume that we all together cannot solve our problems? Goddamn it: we know how to invent things. We know how to power things. Global warming is complete bullshit, and yet we possess the ability to deal with the more likely reality: global cooling.

WHY NOT LIVE? WHY NOT LIVE WELL?

Ah, some whiskey, and some honesty. I never stop watching, but I do allow myself an occasional break.

I feel these things so strongly, it runs through me like a river. Why can’t we do better? All of us, the world over?

Answer: we can. Just get the idiots and the shitheads out of the way. Details: follow them, and you have my vote. Follow generic rhetoric: you are my enemy, even if your short term goals are the same.

It seems to me that for self formation to happen, for self organization of any sort to happen, you have to have a perceptual space for it. It has to have a place relatively free of conflicting winds: a cove, a valley, a shelter.

Most children thrust into our modern world are ill-equipped for it. Under the thrall of delusional doctrines like the Self Esteem movement, parents more or less let their children parent themselves. Predictably, they do poorly at it. Their sense of self and self control is more like a goo than any sort of perceivable structure.

When they try to negotiate our culture, if they are unable to keep their religious moorings, they get lost. Nobody anywhere is saying anything that makes much sense, if you drill down far enough. The environmentalists, when you get to the core of the movement, seemingly want the extinction of humanity; at a minimum they find it hard to justify our existence. The socialists want generalized comfort, but have nothing to say about any deeper purpose of life. Meaning is pain transformation, and has no place if the goal was to eliminate pain in the first place. It is out of place, awkward. People who still believe things without reference to the prevailing winds look insane to the fully indoctrinated/acculturated.

These things I say often, but because every time I see a little further. As I have recently been arguing the question is not how meaning forms, but what the factors are that prevent the natural tendency among living, sentient creatures towards order from more fully expressing itself.

Why Kurt Cobain? Why Nine Inch Nails? Where is that failure? Is it simply overindulgence expressing itself by raging against boundaries that were never presented? Somewhat, but I think it goes deeper than that.

What is Dungeons and Dragons, or World of Warcraft, but a parallel world in which some sort of order exists, and whose future can be somewhat predicted.

Allan Ginsberg was not lazy. He was not apathetic. He simply was not able to form meaning WITHIN the boundaries of the place, the space, he inhabited.

Logically, the task is then building new spaces, congenial to new growths.

This is highly abstract, but that is where I normally begin. Hopefully this basic point is useful to someone.

In the morn from the privacy of the Palace of Creation
The Eastern Candle emanates in every direction;
Produces a clear mirror from the horizon’s pocket
In a thousand ways showing the world its own reflection.
In the corners of the grand cosmic music hall
The organ plays a tune, and Venus listens with elation.
The exalted harp cries, now where is the doubter?
The laughing cup cries, what happened to prohibition?
Look closely at the world, and choose gaiety and joy
Whichever way you look, this is the world’s situation.
The locks of the sweetheart and Master lock up and deceive
The mystics over this chain seek no confrontation.
Ask for a majestic life, if this world is what you seek
For He is benevolent and bountiful with compassion.
Light of the hopeful eye, eternal symbol of adoration;
Omniscient, Omnipotent, Soul of the World, King of the Nation.

Neither violence nor non-violence are always the answer. Anger is sometimes necessary, as is killing people. At the same time, violence is often counter-productive. It can solve physical problems of physical or other aggression, but it does not lead to inner peace. Only tranquility can do that.

As I look at the world, it seems to me that only a fool would be immune from worry. How can anyone not see that bad things happen to everyone all the time, often with little warning? Always, as Christ said, “wars and rumors of wars”, which can be seen as a metaphor for all the things we worry about: business downturns, making mistakes at work or home, inflation/deflation, recessions, Global Warming/Global Warming conspiracies, serial killers, car accidents, diseases, UFO’s, what people really think about us, what sort of season our sports team/hero will have/is having, terrorism, gray goo, the rise of robots, etc.

The complexity of our world differs greatly, of course, from 1,000 years ago; but for all that, they no doubt worried, too. And they objectively had, daily, much more substantive challenges than face us. Weather and disease were much greater enemies. People got sick and died–children, frequently–for reasons beyond their ability to explain. They lived for long years with painful ailments that could today be treated.

How can a rational mind conquer worry? Worry serves a purpose: it provides the energy to plan for multiple contingencies.

The answer of course, fiendishly simple, is acceptance. We must accept that change, pain, and death are inevitable. But how do we do that?

As I see it, some sort of spiritual faith is invaluable in this, in that you can bridge the gap between this world–full of unavoidable sorrow–and one in which our cares are gone. You have to live in two worlds, and occupy two selves–your Earth self and your spiritual self. To the extent that you can bring the light of heaven to Earth, you can live in peace here.

This is what I see. I have not figured out for myself how to do it yet, but I have some leads. I will post any successes.

I keep seeing conservatives saying Ron Paul is “nuts”. He may be. I haven’t met him; nor have I studied all of his ideas in detail. What is clear, though, is that he understands economics, and that he wants to focus on IMMEDIATE American national security interests, and not those which could become a problem 10 years from now.

To my mind, it is insanity to tolerate the Federal Reserve’s existence: an unregulated entity owned entirely by massive banks which has the SOLE power to create money, and which exercises that right with complete independence. Why would the banks NOT take care of themselves, at the expense of the rest of us? Why have we shifted from a manufacturing economy to a finance economy? Inflation. They create inflation. What else do you need to know?

I studied martial arts for some time. A basic principle for some throws is putting all a person’s weight and balance on one foot, then kicking that foot out, while directing their direction. Being in the air, they are less well positioned to do so. Some older throws drop people on the back of their necks from the height of the thrower’s waist.

This is what is seemingly planned for us. As I see it, the Bretton Woods agreement in effect converted the dollar into gold, as the international reserve currency. For some decades, it was nominally backed by gold, then that, too, was eradicated.

The plan would be simple: put all the weight of the worlds finances on the dollar, then kick the dollar. I think this was tried in the 1970’s, unsuccessfully. Inflation alone was not sufficient to destroy us.

The alternative is simply undermining the integrity of the American State outright through debt, which is well in progress. Where will people run, when the dollar collapses? There is nowhere to go, no currency vast enough to hold the world’s wealth. Gold (or other specie) is the only option, and self evidently a lot of people, besides Glenn Beck listeners, are accumulating it. This would include many central banks.

Gold is a terrible investment in conditions of growth. As Thomas Sowell points out in his excellent Basic Economics. A dollar of gold bought in 1800 (if memory serves) would now be worth only 75 cents or so. Bonds would be worth some 10x as much, and stocks 100x. What you buy depends on the context. Buying gold is in effect shorting the dollar. That many large banks are seemingly doing this is bad.

I want to be clear: I don’t know if Dr. Paul is a “truther”–that he believes that Bush wants America to become a totalitarian nation ensconced within a global hegemony run by a small group of oligarchs–but he certainly attracts them.

What is insane, in my view, is believing that Tower 7 collapsed spontaneously as a result of the combustion of “office furnishings”, particularly when it is not even clear how the fires started. I have dealt with this in some detail.

In my view it is ludicrous to believe that Bush wants anything but continued success for America. It is NOT ludicrous to believe that there are rich internationalists who would be willing to cooperate with the Russians in attacking American preeminence. I would be shocked if there weren’t. Why wouldn’t there be? Start the list with the Rockefellers and George Soros, who are in effect just fronts for people whose names could be known, but who did not get rich through stupidity.

Paul exists in this world. He gets it. He has no charisma or charm, but what we need are people with ideas and principles, and I believe he has them.

Again, I have not studied him much. I have not even read his books. But the fact that he wrote a book on “Ending the Fed” gives him credibility in my book.

I want to be clear on something else, as well: over time, the role of the Fed in sucking dollars out of the average Americans wallet is so ENORMOUS that it is literally stupid to talk about an economic recovery that is sustainable without addressing it.

As I have said before, I think Americans should be able to work 5 hours a week–admittedly without many of the fancy gadgets we have now–and pay cash for EVERYTHING. Education, housing, food, unemployment, medical care: none of these should be problems.

I will add, too, that there are parts of my plan that look scary. What would happen, for example, if ALL the money now held by Federal Reserve member banks were suddenly liberated for the reuse of the American people, from whom it was taken? The inflation would be MASSIVE.

Think of it this way, though: the rates of OWNERSHIP would also skyrocket. People would no longer have mortgages, and would own their homes outright. They would no longer have credit card debt. They would own their cars. There is no way to predict how exactly the initial way will play out, but the point is this: it will PASS. There will be an end.

Most of the time, inflation happens in secret. It is done gradually so the people being hurt by it don’t take to the streets and hang the government officials doing it. For its part the government of course wants to talk about inflation as a disease of some sort, rather than the deliberate affliction it is, that benefits a few at the expense of the many.

But the logic of slow inflation and what I suppose I might call “Flash Inflation” is the same. With the latter, you can democratize–generalize–the benefits, and largely contain the detriment of being unable to plan for the future. Inflation that would be hugely damaging over years could be contained if conducted over weeks.

Hell: I think this plan is brilliant, but I have had “brilliant” ideas before that turned out to be Other Than Brilliant (my preferred euphemism). That’s why I keep trying to get feedback. I think it’s just so different from what people have seen before, that when combined with my (relative) anonymity and lack of official endorsement they just pass over in silence. I’m a UFO. What do you say?

For convenience, here it is again. I collated everything in a piece for the OWS and ahs, and with an exercise of will made the introductory page non-inflammatory.

http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

It is funny: I often get this image of Obama and his advisors–I think his handlers, the people who put him there, are now out looking for new talent to reverse the damage he has done their cause–sitting around a table brainstorming ways to get his poll numbers up. And what is funny is that they quite literally think in cartoons.

One: What about a war? Conservatives love wars.

Other: But where? It can’t last too long.

First: How about Libya? All those Reagan era fascist neocons hate Gaddafi.

Obama: we’ll do it. It CAN’T fail. This is me we’re talking about.

The way to think about Obama, in many respects, is as Bolt the Wonderdog, who has led a sheltered life, in which everyone everywhere has been telling him how wonderful he is, with no justification. He didn’t write his book, almost certainly, and all he did to get elected was read speeches like an actor, and outperform a very weak John McCain in debate, at that with questioners sympathetic to him.

The interesting thing is that all these people define conservatives solely in cliched terms; because they themselves do not operate on the basis of principle, they assume that the falsehoods they spread about us are actually true.

Error is both seeing things that are not there, and just as importantly not seeing things that ARE there. The classic mistake is being factually wrong: for example, by believing that Jefferson was our second President. This is the sort of error know-it-alls never make.

The error they DO often make is ASSUME things to be true that aren’t, usually because someone they consider of equal intelligence and intellectual grandeur has said it first. Global Warming is a good example.

The great virtue of common sense is that it consists in seeing nothing other than what is there. It is unimaginative, and not focused on radical world-altering schemes. All the same, for practical purposes it performs quite well, and it absence is always a tragedy and a mistake waiting to happen.

Cain’s plan, as I understand it, calls for a 9% income tax, a 9% sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax. For well over half of Americans, a 9% income tax will be a HUGE reduction. The most productive Americans are paying close to 40% now.

Likewise, the corporate tax rate for the non-connected (the OTG: Other Than GE’s) is something like 35%. If you want to ask why corporations choose to build things overseas, there is a big part of your answer. They set up subsidiaries, that are treated as separate profit centers, and thus tax centers. That is my understanding. They do this to pay less in taxes, and to avoid all the regulatory red tape that Washington keeps sending out, and which has gone into overdrive among the anti-business numbskulls Obama has put into positions of power.

China is a Communist nation, in theory, but this also means that they can bend whatever rules they want, when they want. If an American manufacturer wants to build a plant, they just point to the location and the deal is done. At a minimum, that plant will employ many Chinese, who in turn will pay taxes. Thus even at a ZERO rate of taxation, it is still hugely beneficial to China.

If an American manufacturer wants to build in America, there is a multi-year environmental impact study–which they have to pay for–countless meetings, lawyers, contract writing, tax negotiations, etc. etc. Small wonder that busy executives often say “Hell, with it: build the damn thing in Mexico. I can’t stand these assholes one more minute”.

But if we reduce red tape, AND particularly if we make it much more profitable to do business here–a 26% increase in net profit is quite enticing–then many of the businesses that have built overseas will come back here.

We need to be clear that just because the wages are lower overseas does not mean that this is always necessarily a good deal. Whatever is built overseas has to come across the ocean. There are thus logistical difficulties. Further, Americans in general are good workers, and given the right technology can build more per hour than many overseas workers, who have to be trained in their language, and with whom there are many cultural barriers to clear communication and direction.

Put simply, an American automotive worker making $40/hour may well outperform a South Korean worker making $15/hour, once you take their productivity and deduct their total costs. This makes the American a good deal, IF other factors like taxation and regulatory climate are also congenial.

People talk like jobs going overseas is somehow an inevitable process, a result of “greed”. This means the solution is less greed. Good luck getting that to happen. No person and no nation anywhere has ever failed to pursue their own conception of self interest, although the more enlightened found that self interest in generosity. Sainthood is an idiotic prescription for material progress, however.

Jobs go overseas because it makes economic sense. Period. And when it makes economic sense for them to come back, they will. This is simpler than the recipe for apple pie. It is abundantly obvious.

Cain’s plan does this.

More generally, as we hear often, what is needed is more money in circulation. The so-called “Stimulus” (really, jobs for votes) package had this as its rationale. It didn’t work, because the money was not spent on sustainable entities. You build a highway, then you are done. The job is gone. And the money was borrowed, causing anyone with a shred of sense to know that that job was funded with future taxation.

There is a HUGE, HUGE amount of cash in reserve right now among American corporations. They COULD spend it, if they were not afraid of the future. In particular, Obama is plainly anti-business, and they have no idea what his regulatory czars will roll out tomorrow. They can, with reasonable confidence, assume that it will be poorly thought out, and in particular have taken no consideration AT ALL of the effect it will have on business investment.

Further, it is abundantly clear that Obamacare, with all its mandates and tax increases, will have a very painful effect on small business. It will increase health insurance costs across the board, deliver next to no improvements in the delivery of healthcare in the short term, and DAMAGE health delivery, through rationing, in the future. 2013 will see the most aggressive efforts to deliver revenue to the Federal treasury in HISTORY. Obama already plans to tax more than any American President has in the history of our Republic. This is bad.

Cain’s plan will cause an IMMEDIATE and LARGE increase in the circulation of capital, among those best positioned to create jobs. We don’t need tax cuts for those making $20,000 a year. At best, they will buy a few more cigarettes, and in any event are already only paying payroll and State sales taxes anyway. The people who create jobs are those with enough cash to start new businesses, or to consume in large quantities. These are the people we want spending their money, and Cain’s plan will do that.

Given enough circulation of money, the economy will improve drastically and quickly, and permanently.

Finally, tax rates. This is simple math, but 1% of $100,000 is more than 90% of $1,000. What matters is not tax rates, but the amount upon which they are based. If you want to increase tax receipts, don’t increase taxes: grow the economy. And you grow the economy by INCENTING people to spend their money.

Yes, Cain’s plan will increase the share the poor are paying for our government, which is currently zero. Is this fair? Is it fair that nearly 50% of Americans play no role in paying for our military, social programs, highway building, or any of the other countless roles government plays? Self evidently, as a practical matter, the 9% income tax may well get eliminate in implementation for people under a certain income level, and possibly there could even be an exemption card for the Sales tax. The amount of money under consideration is quite small where the poor are concerned.

The big picture, though, is that this program–regardless of the actual numbers used, as long as they are much better than they are now–will generate immediate and robust economic growth.

Whatever work you do, it influences your manner of thinking. Lawyers approach problems differently than, say, salespeople, or accountants.

I personally like manual labor, since it requires the constant physical, measurable solution of problems which actually exist. The contrast, of course, would be mental “work” which seeks to solve problems which may not even exist, and whose output cannot be measured. In many academic settings, treatises are written which cannot readily be understood, and which make NO difference to anybody anywhere, outside of, perhaps, an esthetic pleasure among a very small group of people.

This may sound provocative, but I mean this literally and sincerely: a plumber who fixes a broken toilet does more good than a thousand page book on the perils of post-modernism. Post-modernism is a CREATION of academia, which has been extraordinarily incompetent at solving it.

Self evidently, if your income depends upon the perception of problems by those who pay your salary, there is a strong disincentive to fire yourself through competence. By extension, this pattern BREEDS INcompetence. It fosters it. It encourages the multiplication of problems, and the “problematization” of solutions.

As for me, I have found the demand that things work properly to be a great Godsend in my thought work. I apply the same mindset required to master complicated wiring diagrams and logistical difficulties to large problems of general concern. If you define what you want, you can stop talking when you get there.

This is the doctrine that the world is composed of two sorts of people: those who operate through dichotomies, and those who don’t. Self evidently, most leftists consider themselves to be in the second category. Their moral strength lies in their resolution to oppose, with violence if necessary, the rule of those who divide people into categories.

United in their determination, they resolutely oppose the Republicans, who operate strictly through bigoted Us/ Them categories, such that one need know nothing about any of them to form firm and–of COURSE–accurate judgements. Their perfidy knows no bounds.

This is what you get when you destroy reason. The worst part of it, I think, is that the capacity for irony oriented humor is lost. Nothing is funny, any more, but the most vacuous and angry spiteful sorts of humor.

I was playing with this today. Consider this statement: “this statement is simultaneously true and false”. If it is true, it is false. If it is false, then it is not true, but that is includes as well.

This is the sort of thing academic philosophers do or did, and doesn’t interest me much beyond a couple of points.

Words can never be true or false, in my view, except to the extent they point to a reality beyond words. Math can be true, within its domain, but only beyond it to the extent it incorporates knowable facts like the accelleration of gravity.

Reason, so called, can be infinitely corrupted by the abuse of language. Yes, people can be classified as Other, but this process does not become benign when the “right sorts” do it. This is nothing different than the bigotry that was universal a thousand years ago.

These comments may be a bit disjunct, but arise as a result of recent repetition of a discussion I have done dozens–likely hundreds–of times.