Month: November 2011

This is a better name for the movement. They are interfering with ordinary citizens trying to do their jobs, pay their bills, and raise their families. There is no positive counterbalance to this. They are attacking people and police. They are trying to shut down the ports on the West Coast.

And to be clear, any “revolution” will necessarily hurt most ordinary, God-fearing Americans, most of whom are mostly decent.

When one studies the rhetoric and practice of class warfare, a reality emerges. There are the supposed elites, the “1%”. There is the supposed 99%. But the group making these distinctions, which itself is perhaps 1% of the population, does not include itself, the revolutionary class.

In the old Russia, there were a number of classes: the land owning aristocracy, the peasants, the proletarians, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and the REVOLUTIONARIES. What Lenin did was instill naked greed and hate in the peasants, greed and hate in the workers, and used that lust to kill large numbers of adversaries, then used that power to kill and control large numbers of, who? PEASANTS AND WORKERS.

Marx said revolution would be organic. He failed, in his economic analysis, to see how widespread the benefits of the Industrial Revolution would prove to be, and how effective Capitalism as an economic system would be at raising the standard of living of EVERYONE, even if unevenly.

As I have said often–actually that is a lie, as I have only implied this–what is often labelled “Marxism” ought properly to be labelled “Nechaevism”. Read the Catechism of a Revolutionist. This is the actual model Lenin followed.

Marxism cannot be “practiced” any more than gravity can be practiced. Marx thought he has found inexorable natural, historical laws, that could not be controverted. When they were, his theory was falsified.

Nechaevism–for which the term Nihilism was coined in Russia–has no content. It has no more content than the demonic doctrines of Saul Alinsky, who found actual gangsters to be his natural associates.

There is no practical difference between using the alleged victimization of the workers to gain power, and using the purported problems of overpopulation, Global Warming, racism, or anything else to gain power.

Practically, the two classes are a functioning, organic, relatively stable social order, and those who want to destroy it, to topple it.

Much of our financial system is in fact unstable, for reasons I have stated. Much of the instability is in my view, however, created intentionally by the revolutionaries. The people around FDR were tickled pink by the Great Depression, as it enabled them to implement programs they otherwise would never have been able to push through, much of which was actual Fascism, which was struck down by the Supreme Court.

To be or not to be: this remains a question the answer to which dictates, in the end, your politics. If you want death, then some variant of Nechaevism is where you will fall.

Just look at these people in New York and elsewhere: do they actually look like they are affirming life, or simply choosing to continue their process of zombification in public?

All you really need for happiness–and this is an overabundance, but I include all the items I value–is indoor plumbing, heating/air conditioning, a roof, useful work to do, people to love, health and time to sleep 8-10 hours a night. That should be enough for anyone.

I will add that, as I think I have mentioned somewhere, I have seen heaven three times in dreams (hell once). It is so much more beautiful, happier, than here, that the life of the most privileged person on Earth pales besides a handful of moments there. What do literal and figurative kings and queens do? They worry: about keeping their power. Those around them scheme to get it. Yes, they have perks of office, unique privileges, but none of them amount to much. To be innocent is to be free.

Listen to this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMc0ok9_V7Q

The bats are in the belfry
the dew is on the moor
where are the arms that held me
and pledged her love before
and pledged her love before

Chorus

It’s such a sad old feeling
the fields are soft and green
it’s memories that I’m stelaing
but you’re innocent when you dream
when you dream
you’re innocent when you dream

running through the graveyard
we laughed my friends and I
we swore we’d be together
until the day we died
until the day we died

Repeat Chorus

I made a golden promise
that we would never part
I gave my love a locket
and then I broke her heart
and then I broke her heart

Watch Tom Waits. He is such a sensitive soul. It is no wonder he is so notoriously private/defensive in interviews: he is already out there. He doesn’t like it, but it is what he does. Creation is how he deals with his tragedies. He has always felt innocent to me, despite his best efforts. It is comical in a way, for those with a taste for such irony.

There is no better way to destroy a good idea than to push it too far. It is right to be alert, to “fear” God, to remain aware of God. It is wrong to live in fear.

It is right to be loving, but ridiculous to think you can be loving every one, all the time, and that a failure to do so constitutes a failure.

As I tell my children, God, too, has a sense of humor. What loving being can fail to empathize with our frailties, with all the stumblings and to-and-fro-ings to which we are prone on this Earth, which is so resistant to our wishes?

Heaven, in my view, is for most people, except those who are willfully cruel, some of the ranks of which are the supposedly religious. To pervert sacred teachings through hypocrisy is one of the worst crimes, since it damages people not on the outside, which they can endure, but on the inside, which affects their ability to endure.

I am working extremely hard, but woke up today feeling good. May you have a very pleasant day. If it is sunny where you are, enjoy it. If it is rainy, enjoy it. Whoever you meet, try to appreciate what is good in them, and try to be a bit kinder than you normally are. Most of the time this just means actually hearing what people are saying between the lines. More than anything, people want to be heard and appreciated for what they do. This is the most effective form of love in my view.

I keep hearing turkeys gobbling. Many are dying now, in preparation for our national feast day. I choose to eat meat, but I can find common cause with those, ordinarily on the Left, who want massive reform in our food industry. That is a topic I will explore in another post.

Another example, then my point: I can find common cause with those who find Wall Street greed unacceptable. I cannot imagine a world coming into being any time soon without greed, but I can imagine legal reforms which would prevent the greedy from taking without also giving. Henry Ford because very wealthy, because he made something many people wanted, which he made affordable; that something would not have come into existence when it did, had he not lived. We were fortunate to have him.

Jamie Dimon, who is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and not coincidentally who also sits on the Federal Reserve Board of New York (or did until recently), does not make things. He moves money around, much of which is created for him by the Fed or the process of fractional reserve banking. No actual, tangible wealth is created by what he does, yet he is able to seize the actual wealth created by others through what he does. This is wrong.

My point: imagine two streams of water, colliding head-on with one another. What happens? As it happens, they cancel out, and the water falls. We have a fountain here like that. What happens, though, when they hit from similar vectors? They add to one another. Both become stronger.

There is no such thing as a Hegelian thesis/antithesis in the real world. Such dichotomies are the artifacts of our brain architecture and following intellectual sloppiness. We live in a web of interconnections. Sometimes, a tone issued from one place causes vibration elsewhere in the web. If it then responds, something larger emerges. This is proper synthesis.

The Left and the Right can come together, if we find our common ground, which will begin by defining shared problems. This would have happened a long time ago, had the Left not largely abandoned actual problem solving in favor of complicity in brainwashing narratives that subtracted the possibility of reconciling intent with solution. All it is capable of doing is generating non-substantive rhetoric, repeated with minor variations for all topics and situations.

This is ludicrous. I do not believe all Leftists are stupid or wicked. I think many of them are lazy, and that their contempt for the right blinds them to the fact that alliances are not just possible but necessary.

I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant the other day, and the song “God Bless America” came on. The owner, a former Mexican who came here illegally, was deported several times, and was finally granted citizenship, has a picture of himself and “God Bless America” prominently on his wall, along with this story.

As I listened, the word “Idolatry” popped in my head, and after pondering it, it made sense. Idolatry is reducing the infinite to the finite. God cannot be contained in an image. God cannot be confined to granting very selfish and local wishes. He is not the subject of banquets and special favors.

Patriotism, likewise, is granting special favor to specific lands and people, rather than the ideals to which they in theory aspire. Patriotism, in the time of the French Revolution, led to tremendous death and destruction, despite the supposed attachment to “liberte”, which of course meant tyranny.

America has been a great nation, a great experiment in genuine idealism. That is what makes us great. We are not great simply because we happen to have been born here. There is nothing sacred about our land, our language, or our culture, EXCEPT to the extent it supports the infinite, of which every worthwhile ideal is an example.

I read my own posts sometimes, and wonder: What the hell is he talking about? Where did that come from? Non sequitur, ambiguity, randomness: all found here.

I type out loud. I let the words flow. I’m not trying to build structure, so much as watch what happens when I let my mind wander. Sometimes it gets caught in eddies, but the words keep flowing, and eventually it moves on.

Here is a nice song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSfrIvE0nAc

I’m big on self referential irony. I count seven uses of the word I as well. Make that eight. Ah: can you start anywhere else? Not as far as I can tell.

It is hard for me not to see a sharp divide between Mozart/Haydn and Beethoven, in the sense that a film should show “and here it broke: the dogs were let loose and destroyed everything”.

In Clockwork Orange, why are the hooligans so obsessed with Beethoven? Because it MAKES SENSE. Gone is order and proportion. Yes, some of his work is beautiful, but it
is broken. He has built a machine condemned to missing the cogs that make it affirm life.

Highly subjective view, but I just finished the Viennese Classical period in my music course, and am now being assaulted by the Romantics. Oi.

I am not exaggerating when I say I see little difference between Beethoven and the Ramones. That comparison might well have made him happy.

Now, I have nothing per se against songs about Teenage Lobotomy, but is that culture? Is it the culture of sensible people, making rational, measured decisions?

Do I want to blame the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls for our national debt? Sure, why not? I would be willing to take that position in a debate.

It seems to me that there are more people hurting in this world than helping. There is a negative emotional cash flow. If you hurt, but are not giving, then you are either taking, or wanting.

The logic of Christianity, of love, is simple: if you want the world to attain a positive emotional balance, then you have to give rather than receive. You have to take the hatred you are offered and at least not make it worse, and ideally soften and even end it.

Looking at the world around him, the solution of Christ was eminently logical. He never ended Mosaic Law, but rather completed it, by pointing out the important parts. If thou shalt not kill, then thou shalt not kill ANY part of a person. Thou shalt not attack them, hurt them. Thou shalt honor that which is sublime in this world. Thou shalt honor those who made you who you are, and in so doing honor yourself and those who will follow you. Thou shalt not be envious and resentful.

As I see it, victory over another person consists not in attaining their submission, but rather in helping them untangle knots in their own lives that prevent their full creative expressive potential from manifesting, and thereby infecting the world with the new, the joyous, the beautiful. That is victory. That is winning. That is the goal. Everything else is failure in pursuit of success.

Coda:

Tonight I sat next to a woman at a bar wrestling with addiction to crack cocaine. I found this out because I am good at finding things out. She in any event wanted me to know that she was moving in with a man who did not do drugs, because she was going to conquer her habit.

I watched her, at once hopelessly furious with herself, helpless, lonely, longing, confident, sure, antagonistic, supplicating, earnest and disingenuous. Back and forth, in furious circles. I said the things one says, but I don’t think it will do any good. She is consuming herself, like a star in the grip of a black hole. She knows what she is doing, but the reasons she has to live for aren’t enough to keep her off drugs.

Did Elvis Presley commit suicide? Yes, in my view. So did Michael Jackson. The details don’t matter. If you are doing things to yourself that you know will shorten your life, you have chosen to shorten your life, no? A=A?

Christ came that we might have more life, which means more meaning, more love, more purpose, more “place”. We are not all that different.

She was on my left. To my right were two Indians with very thick accents who insisted they were born in America. Bring up the Middle East or Pakistan, though, and you got some fierce words and looks. Kashmir: “why don’t they just man up and bring it on?”

Circles–life is circles. Here is an example. I’m not drunk, either: this is how I am. It does collate from time to time, though, which is when I’m perhaps more worth reading. I feel deeply, but how does one blog that? You don’t, of course.

Would it not be INTERESTING to think this world was interactive? Interactive, not on a crass physical level, but to our thoughts, and feelings?

Synchronicity is one of these horribly unscientific ideas, if we define “science” as “if Siberian Snow Tigers really exist, then you should be able to show one walking out of those woods tomorrow at 11am on the dot”. No tiger, oh sorry, it must not be “science”. Ergo, snow tigers do not exist, and only stupid people insist on looking for them.

Interestingly, Michael Farraday was supposed to attend a seance of the then famous Daniel Home, to describe whom the word “psychic” was invented. Many, many times, he made tables rise up into the air in normal light, in front of many witnesses, when there was plainly no physical force capable of doing it. He was tested, and was able to make a violin play in a cage, and to change the weight on a scale without touching it. Farraday insisted that he be told in advance EXACTLY what would happen, and when informed that it changed often, refused to come. This is anti-scientific. If something can be seen once, then over some period of time, it can be seen again, even if it is irregular in its appearance.

Of course, I read psychology and know about the confirmation bias. Of course this effect exists. To deny it would be stupid. And yet, and yet: Jung came up with the term when a patient was describing an exotic, rare beatle, which just happened along as she was doing so. Not unreasonably, he attached significance to it.

Today I posted something in German on my Facebook, I believe for the first time. Tonight I ran into some Germans in a bar, for the first time in 3-4 years and got to practice my German. Apparently I still have a Swiss and not American accent.

Random coincidence? Somebody wins the lottery, right? I choose not to think so. That is my choice.

Exercise: watch for this sort of thing over the next month, and see if you are not surprised. I have every reason to believe the world we live in is magical in ways we cannot even imagine.

I indulge my vanity a bit by looking at the site stats. I’m certainly no superstar, or star, or even bright light. I’m a lamppost in the shady part of town: useful for some, but hardly front row center. Still, I enjoy seeing all the countries checking in, and the number of Americans who are clicking on some my posts.

My intent, however, is not to feed my vanity, but to share what I hope are good, useful ideas, and to that end I will point out that you can follow me on RSS, which basically means you get all the posts without clicking on anything; or you can subscribe by email. If you do that, you get a daily email in the middle of the night with my last edit of whatever I posted. I don’t get notified of your email address, and frankly have no way of knowing how many people–if any–are subscribed via RSS or email. It’s totally private, at least to me.

Are we not all to some extent unwillingly made invisible? We fear discovery of our innermost secrets, but we still resent sometimes the failure of others to see them, who we “really” are. I dare people to understand me, and they fail. They don’t even hear the question. This is stupidity, but very human, as I see it. It is vanity, my craving to be understood and recognized. We all have this flaw, to some lesser or greater extent.

Life is work, love and death. Work is an extension of love, done properly. Love is building form in the world. Emotional love, the recognition we crave, is building individual selves. Abstract love is building a better, richer, more interesting world.

It is no tragedy to lack people who understand you: the tragedy is lacking the capacity to care about others, and to work to build them. That is useful love. The rest is vanity, and as much as we like to have our vanity stroked, it is an unessential element, like carbohydrates.

Yes, I’m tired and complaining in my very abstract, analytical way. That is part of who I am. I have failed, in a way, and am working on soothing my ego, and doing so publicly in the hope my scribblings may be useful to someone else.