Month: December 2011

One of the principle challenges I have faced throughout my life is an inability to take pleasure in my accomplishments. I have a very strong will, but that has thus far proven insufficient over the long term. As I grow older, it seems increasingly clear to me that the link between discipline and long term accomplishment is pleasure. You need reinforcement. You need something to tell you that all the pain you just went through MEANT something. I have never had that. I have pushed myself through all sorts of tough times, and my emotional tone stays the same. This, I have decided, is actually my principle challenge. My task is not pushing myself harder, but learning how to regularly match challenge and following gratitude and pleasure. As far as that goes, cultivating pleasure in general. The capacity for work is directly proportional to your capacity not just for rest, but pleasure. In effect, I need to recondition my motivational complex, and have started doing that, with some success. I have been going slower but steadier.

As an example, I rowed 5,000 meters on a Concept 2 today and all the way through, rather than pushing as hard as I could, I just imagined how I was making myself healthier, building will, and that I could take just pride in finishing. Now, I have done a LOT–1,000 plus–really, really hard workouts over time. For years I got up early and worked out HARD. But I was always emotionally numb. The only feeling I felt was aggression. There was no qualitative pleasure for me.

I have a book on my shelf entitled “The Decline of Pleasure”, written several decades ago. I truly think this is a common problem. The social sources of this malady I will leave for another time. I know my own personal history well enough.

This thought is passed along in the vague hope it may be useful to someone.

I’m purging my shelves of books I haven’t touched in forever, and came across a book titled “Speaking of Siva” (Saivite is pertaining to Shiva/Siva), with South Indian poems of devotion.

Two:

The sacrificial lamb brought for the festival
ate up the green leaf brought for the decorations.

Not knowing a thing about the kill,
it wants only to fill up its belly:
born that day, to die that day.

But tell me:
did the killers survive,
O Lord of the meeting rivers?

And:

The crookedness of the serpent
is straight enough for the snake-hole.

The crookedness of the river
is straight enough for the sea.

And the crookedness of our Lord’s men
is straight enough for our Lord!

Bit slow today, checking some things off lists. The entirety of Peter Bauer’s “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion” is quite wonderful, and well worth the read. As I argue constantly, to fail to consider the consequences of actions you conceive to be well intentioned, is to not be well intentioned at all, but self important and narcissistic, if not outright power mongering. YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES, to all people, and over time.

Here are a couple quotes from the concluding chapter of a book in which he has ably demonstrated that foreign aid frequently does little but support income inequalities, autocracy, and continued generalized poverty, all claims that fly in the face of “conventional” wisdom, then (1981) and now.

what explains the curious situation of contemporary economics, especially the acceptance of evidently insubstantial, even bizarre, notions?

The expansion of the subject since the Second World War and the circumstances surrounding it must be considered together. Unlike the expansion in the natural sciences in recent decades, especially in physics and chemistry, the expansion in economics (and other forms of social study) was not an instance of the growth of knowledge leading to a quantum jump in the number of people and money attracted. The expansion resulted from the belief that economists could help significantly in solving social and political problems; and that their capacity to do so depended largely on their numbers and on the money at their disposal. . . But, as the term is usually understood, economic problems are different. Economic problems do not typically present themselves because of perceived gaps or inadequacies of knowledge. Rather economic problems are said to exist wherever there are differences between proclaimed norms and observed reality. Such problems evidently cannot be solved by improvements in knowledge alone. Indeed, as suggested in chapter 1 (and noted repeatedly elsewhere), economists and other social scientists generally create problems rather than solve them [emphasis mine].

In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.

“When certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards. . . fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.”

Can there be a shorter summary of what is wrong with the leftist mindset, which does the same things over and over and over, always getting the same result–failure–and yet which fails to learn the lesson? As Bauer says, economics is not actually complicated. It is made complicated by people whose jobs depend on a lack of transparency.

Consider in that regard this quote he excerpts from a Professor Leontief.

Continued preoccupation with imaginary, hypothetical, rather than observable reality has gradually led to a distortion of the informal valuation scale used in our academic community to access and to rank the scientific performance of its members. Empirical analysis, according to this scale, gets a lower rating than formal mathematical reasoning. Devising a new statistical procedure, however tenuous, that makes it possible to squeeze out one more unknown parameter from a given set of data, is judged a greater scientific achievement that the successful search for additional information that would permit us to measure the magnitude of the same parameter in a less ingenious, but more reliable way. . . a natural Darwinian feedback operating through selection of academic personnel contributes greatly to the perpetuation of this state of affairs. Thus, it is not surprising that the younger economists, particularly those engaged in teaching and academic research, seem by now quite content with situations in which they can demonstrate their prowess (and incidentally, advance their careers) by building more and more complicated mathematical models and devising more and more sophisticated methods of statistical inference without ever engaging in empirical research.

This is how smart people become stupid: they makes things so complicated that the forest is lost for the trees. This is exactly the same dynamic in play with Global Warming. Rather than planting thermometers all over the poles, which is where the warming is supposedly happening, they develop statistical algorithms to in effect guess what the temperatures “must” be, based upon the sensors they have hundreds of miles to the south. This is not science. Statistics can NEVER substitute for measurements, when measurements are possible.

As I have said often, you can “prove” anything, if you start from the right premises. Garbage in, garbage out.

First off, I have no emotional stake in this election. If Romney or Gingrich or Perry get the nod, I’ll just hope for the best. At the same time, what DOES bother me emotionally is the sheer quantity of stupidity out there. Stupidity is like a blackness hanging in the air, killing everything good in the world. And plainly there are those who feed it. This bothers me.

In any event, the following is a response to this link: http://news.yahoo.com/paul-builds-campaign-doomsday-scenarios-161301486.html

So you count as definitive the opinions of an analyst from JP Morgan Chase, whose firm quite literally IS the Fed, or a very important part of it? Here is how our system works: a dozen or so massive banks work in committee in the morning at the Fed, vote themselves money, then go across the street and spend it. What do you think “quantitative easing” was? We know $600 billion or so was spent. On what? To whom was it given? Anyone? Any answers? You don’t know because this is not public knowledge. Money is created and distributed to ANYONE THEY WANT. There are no rules. There is no oversight.

If you want to understand how our system actually works, read my treatise here, collated from previous work, without effect, for the unwashed fools camping out in our major cities: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

It is quite literally the case that were we to end the leaks in wealth creation caused by the fractional reserve banking system and the Fed which enables it, then ALL OF OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS WOULD BE SOLVED. We would be able to work 5 hour work weeks, have zero national debt, and zero unemployment. These are not small problems; they are the only problems that, in the end, matter.

For the simple reason that substantially all contemporary economists lack either the balls or the insight to recognize this, by definition only marginalized people will speak openly of these facts. That Paul is getting support likewise means that many, many Americans are openly rejecting our rapidly failing status quo, which is all to the good.

Paul has my vote. I will add that because no conservative will be able to contemplate voting for Obama, Paul will get all those votes, and very large segments of Obama’s alienated followers. He is in my view electable. Our problems are huge, and even if the mainstream establishment and media refuse to acknowledge this, most of us care about the future and are not stupid.

Read these lyrics, from “Fantastic Voyage” by Coolio:

I’m tryin’ to find a place where I can live my life and
maybe eat some steak with my beans and rice, a
place where my kids can play outside
without livin’ in fear of a drive-by
and even if I get away from them drive-by killers
I still got to worry about those snitch-ass niggas
I keep on searchingc and I keep on looking
but niggas are the same from Watts to Brooklyn
I try to keep my faith in my people
but sometimes my people be acting like they evil

Is the task of decent people to prevent open discussion of this problem, or to recognize patent and inescapable reality, and working from a point of KNOWLEDGE to help free the millions of ordinary, law abiding black people who just want to be free from constant fear?

How many “liberals” live in the ghetto? None, if they can help it. It isn’t safe there, and the schools suck. This is a national shame, and it will not get fixed as long as our media is obsessed with message control rather than fixing actual problems.

Fuck all you pieces of shit. Every time some little boy or girl is crying because of their horrible lives, you are there justifying it, and making sure nobody anywhere tells the truth about it. This is evil, not compassion.

OF COURSE he knew what was in that newsletter. The questions are:

1) Does it matter?

2) If it matters, how much?

For context, let us consider that our current President sat in the front pew of a church in Chicago in which the theme every week was “HATE WHITEY”. This is no exaggeration. This was a weekly occurrence–when he was in town–for over a DECADE.

For further context, let us consider that with roughly 6% of the population, black men represent some 45% of the prison inmates in this country. According to this link+

The [incarceration] rate for white men was 736 per 100,000, for black men 4,789 per 100,000, for Hispanic men 1,862 per 100,000.

4,789 is 6.5 times 735.

Now I have lived all over this country, and overseas. It is a simple fact in my experience that more black people equals more crime. If you are living in a small town with no crime, black populations are in proportion to the country as a whole, at roughly 12% or less. I’m not supposed to say this, but it is true in my experience, and no amount of politically correct bullshit can alter this. The statistics support it.

Further, if you look at the intentionally divisive rhetoric of hate-mongers like Jerry Wright and his friend Louis Farrakhan, they WANTED a race war. They think, to this day, of America as an apartheid state in which the prisons are used to keep the black man down, rather than the inevitable result of breaking the law.

It is ASTONISHING that statements made by Ron Paul 20 years ago would get this much scrutiny, when Obama’s patent and absolutely inescapable pattern of associating with the most horrific hate-mongers on the planet is ignored by the media.

Here is the fact: we are going to founder and fail as nation if we continue on our current path. That is the goal of the sociopathic LUNATICS, who assume–in some cases rightly–that in congruence with the “some pigs are more equal than others” principle, the suffering will be meted out to OTHERS, and not to them. Self evidently, the suffering will come first and in greatest portion to those who are ALREADY SUFFERING.

Do you think Barack or Michelle Obama give a rat’s ass about ordinary black people? Seriously? Michelle refused to treat poor black people in the hospital she ran if they couldn’t pay for the services, and if they couldn’t get the government to pay. Barack commented on how expensive arugula had gotten, from which the clear inference can be made that he literally did not grasp that the rest of the world did not live in the cushy circumstances his political deals have allowed him to live in.

WE ARE BORROWING $125 BILLION A MONTH. The Federal Reserve and fractional banking system take the lion’s share of the wealth we earn as a nation without contributing anything productive.

Ron Paul is the only person who can be trusted to make the SCALE of changes that need to be made. As we have been seeing over the last decade, even a Republican President and Republican Congress cannot be relied on to fix things. They just make things worse a BIT more slowly. That is all. That is it.

This nation is being run by assholes and lunatics, and the media is fiddling while great and PREVENTABLE suffering lurks just over the horizon. Disgusting.

I have stipulated–this cannot be “proven” in a formal sense since I have also rejected the utility of the notion of ontology–that there are three elements of consciousness (which is to say that part of us which chooses what to pay attention to in an infinitely complex world) which, when combined in a moving system over time, tend to generate an emergent property which is best labelled “Goodness”. They are the rejection of self pity, perseverance in chosen tasks, and a commitment to perception, to the always present possibility of the need to change ones mind.

Within this framework, it could be argued that dullness and incuriosity (I’m getting spell check on that; if it is not a word, yes it is, and you just read and understood it) are incompatible with that wind I call Goodness. Someone who does the “right” things day after day without asking WHY, is sooner or later bound to do the wrong thing in the name of the right thing. The flaw that will then emerge as apparent badness will actually already be very old, even fossilized, and merely manifested as a result of changed circumstances.

Hell, this is about me, my vanity. I’ll just switch to open mode preaching. The way I personally choose to live my life is to be curious about EVERYTHING. I am always asking myself how things are put together: how cars work, how roads are built, how buildings are built, why grass is here and not there, why clouds have formed in one way and not another.

As I have likely pointed out, one of the least common questions people ask seems to be is: why this and not something else? What could or should be there instead? One obvious example was in the Great Depression, when a recovery that SHOULD have been there was not. We have only had one Great Depression, and only had one economic downturn in the government aggressively tried to intervene. Coincidence? Of course not. Economics–despite the efforts of the “professionals” to convince the lay public otherwise–is not complicated. When something like 90% of business owners think the government is anti-business, and when punitive tax rates are in place, then no business investment takes place, no jobs are created, and short blips become life-crushing epic events.

What made me think about this was I was doing some intervals on a football field. Since it’s winter most of it is brown and seemingly dead. But scattered in some places were bright green patches of grass, only perhaps 4″ across, and surrounded by brown grass. Why was this? I spent a couple minutes pondering, and then noticed that all the grass outside the field was also green. Then I noticed it thriving along one fence line, but not the others. Then I looked at the wind patterns, and decided that was the direction of the wind, and concluded that two types of grass must be in place, one for the field, one for around the field, and that some seeds must have been blown over when the outside field was seeded.

This may or may not be right, but the point I want to make is that there is endless fascination possible in even the most dull places and doing the most dull things. You can practice the capacity for problem solving and perception in even the most dull jobs, if you decide to.

This is a bit of an “I’m so cool” post, but trust me, I know better. This is just one data point. There are many I see no reason to put in the public domain which argue decisively for humility as the best policy.

This is posted in the hope it may be useful for someone.

Edit: I will add that it occurred to me that the above might make me seem like the most tediously dull human being on the planet. I was quite literally watching grass grow. That possibility amuses me. Like everyone else I like talking about myself, but I definitely don’t take myself too seriously. I’m only on this planet a short time, and burdened with so many limitations–like all of us–that it is easier counting the few rays of light that poke through the rock that encases me than figuring out all the ways I can’t move.

I seem to have no hobbies. I am by nature very serious. This blog is work for me, at least when I feel I am doing it well; pain is normally required for me to feel I am giving a topic its true due diligence.

But I do have one habit that comes close: listening to stories from strangers. My God, bars are places to learn about humanity, about what people really think and how at least some section of them really live. This is a source of endless interest for me. I listen to stories from everyone.

Tonight I heard a war story, from a Canadian Combat Engineer recently back from Afghanistan. A young girl, perhaps 10, stops a patrol begging for food. They stop, and pull some food from their packs. The next trip by, the same girl–or one the same age who looked just like her–is wired with a bomb, and someone just in the range of vision triggers her when the patrol stops, killing her (of course) and injuring several members of his patrol. He saw this with his own eyes.

I talk with people often, some soldiers, and a consistent pattern is that the realities of the EVIL of our enemies are consistently underplayed in the media. Somehow, they want to believe that cultural Others are somehow noble, and our aggressive, intrusive forces intrinsically malevolent. This is nothing close to the actual truth of the matter: we try harder to do the right thing, in my view, than ANY military force in human history. I say this as a student of history.

In my view the Afghan people are goat-fuckers who in large measure deserve nothing but studied indifference. To the extent we should be there, it should be to prevent a repeat of the terror training camps that flourished under the Taliban.

And to be clear, can we really connect the dots, in terms of unwashed sister-fuckers doing the monkey bars, and the attacks of 9/11? Their pilot training was in the US. Their tactics were primitive and needed little in terms of training. What, precisely, are the threats emanating from Afghanistan?

I have argued before, and will repeat here, that in my view 4 planes were clearly hijacked by extremists, who were mainly Saudis. They were crashed into the Pentagon, World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2, and a field in Pennsylvania. Uniquely, to my knowledge, I have argued that United 93 was headed for WTC 7.

This thesis is plausible if you accept that flames do not cause the collapse of skyscrapers specifically designed to resist the effects of flames, in such a way that they LOOK as if they were blown intentionally.

In turn, if we consider that if Muslim terrorists were responsible for blowing–planting and then detonating explosives–three skyscrapers, then it is HIGHLY curious that they have not been able to do more since 9/11. Terror is easy. Logistically, a group capable of planting covert explosives would be capable of a LOT.

This in turn led to my unprovable supposition that the Russians were behind 9/11. I simply can’t believe Bush was, or the CIA, or Mossad. Once we deduct them, put dunce caps on the Islamic homicidophiles, and see who is left, that is the conclusion.

Put all this together, and in my view we should draw down 2/3rd’s of our troops in Afghanistan, and only send them back if the residual is in danger of being overrun. We should then focus on Human Intelligence, and the people selling America as an ideal spread the world over, that I have often called for.

My two and half cents.

Phrase popped in my head, and made me smile. Do with it what you will. I’m not sorting it out at this point.

Today I again decided to go down a different road–literally, a different road. Being somewhat enigmatic even to myself–I make a lot of spontaneous decisions–I don’t know why. In many respects, I am a creature of habit. I have eaten at my favorite Mexican place at least 500 times, with no exaggeration. I only go to 2 bars.

But sometimes, I feel the need to break the pattern, to go somewhere completely new. I did that today. And as should be obvious, I am a self observer. I watched my feelings, and in my world–which shrinks and grows prodigiously in cycles throughout the day–this time, I felt something like melancholy, but not really.

When you take a new path–and I am speaking both metaphorically and literally, since I somehow comprehend much of my literal journeying as ritualistic and meaningful–it feels to me like both a relief and a mild ache, like when you stretch and massage tired muscles.

There was this moment when I thought “oh, this is new”, and I felt alone. Then I got to thinking about life itself. I like the line “every new beginning is some other beginnings end” (about hooking up, but let’s push it further, as indeed I think they were implicitly doing as well). Is life not constantly reconciling the need for change with the need for continuity? We want things to stay the same, we work so that things will stay the same, but they can’t and don’t. This is our principle tragedy, and our principle hope.

I was, again, applying this metaphor of wave/particle duality from physics, and I realized that as I traversed from the old to the new, at the moment of transition, I was suddenly filled with compassion and love for humanity. This is the “moment” of understanding, of both being able to relate to others as a sovereign individual, and be connected to them.

This metaphor of surfing is a good one. I dreamed once that that is the way to live, on the edge of a rolling wave, endlessly adapting, unafraid, and excited. The wave is merely a part of the ocean, a form of the ocean. You, on the other hand, have a place and a trajectory. Interfacing the two is the essence of surfing.

This is a bit meandering (Thoreau once approximately said “it need not be long, but it takes quite long to make it short”) but hopefully makes sense to someone. It was a strong feeling, and I thought I would do my best to pass it along.