Month: December 2011

Probably my last post on this topic. Ron Paul is to the left of Obama on foreign policy. His basic idea is “if you aren’t screwing with us, we will not screw with you.” This basic sentiment has a very long history in the Republican Party.

And to be clear, it was not OUR inaction that caused World War 2. It was the inaction of Britain and France. In fact, one could easily make the case that by overpromising and underdelivering at Versailles, Woodrow Wilson played an enormous role in Hitler’s rise to power.

And with regard to economic and political policy, Paul is far to the right of most mainstream Republicans, who say they want smaller government, but are never able to identify programs they themselves would cut. Paul is promising MASSIVE cuts, in both social spending and defense. He is credible on this score.

Given a good chance to get what they say they want for both anti-war Democrats and anti-Big Government Republicans, what’s not to like?

And please, don’t give me this “political reality” bullshit. Yes, of course the complicit media can spin anything they want into anything they want. They are good at digging up dirt–I’m quite sure they could find Jimmy Hoffa Sr. within a week or two if they thought it essential for Obama’s reelection.

But at the same time, if you are always backing down to CONSTANT attacks and threats of attacks, can that be called something other than retreat? Are wars–and we are in a war–won that way? Of course not. They are lost with plausible denial. They are lost without being able to assign clear blame, but lost nonetheless.

Does anyone seriously think anyone right of center will be capable of voting for Obama? That no matter who is on the ticket, that they will hold their nose and vote Republican? This is what we did with McCain. And what happened? We lost.

Democrats rightly criticize the Republicans as they have existed for at least the last 15 years or so as being more or less Democrats who just don’t want to raise taxes. They spend the same amount, and just generate more deficits since taxes stay low. These same people argue that our budget deficit is surely not just a product of spending too much. This is a fallacious argument, as anyone can see who looks at just how much Obama increased spending over the already ludicrous Bush levels, but the basic premise within a small range is not invalid. Plainly, we could tax more.

Such people will see no reason to back someone like Romney, who if the past is any indication will talk a big fight, then more or less turn into George W. Bush. Our national debt will continue to skyrocket, commissions will be formed, and after much bluster and brinkmanship, exactly 3 cents will be cut from our projected INCREASES over the next decade.

Look at what Rand Paul has done in Congress. As one small example, he was the only one to ask, in the context of Obama’s constant calls for “investments” in infrastructure: do you have a prioritized list of repairs? The answer was no. Since we just spent some $130 BILLION on repairs, that should cause shock in a psychologically normal person capable of rational thought. Plainly, the goal was not fixing things, but spending money, and spending money in places that were motivated by politics. Vote buying would be the shorter and more honest description of where some $130 billion of our tax money (40% of which of course was FUTURE tax money, plus interest, since we borrowed it) went.

A major bridge into Louisville, Kentucky was recently declared dangerous and closed for six months. Was it on a list to fix? Of course not: there IS no list. I just said this. In preparing to spend $130 billion, not even basic homework was done. (note: that $130 billion is from memory. It’s in the range, even if not spot on).

Or take the recent decision by the Obama Administration to kill an American in Yemen. When talking about Guantanamo, my argument has always been THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS AND NOBODY ELSE WANTS THEM. But when it comes to Americans, we have LAWS that govern how to treat traitors and sabateurs and would-be mass murderers. We have a Bill of Rights, and the constitution to which it is an amendment.

Was this guy a danger to other Americans? Not really. Yemen is not exactly in our back yard. It’s in the back, back forty, and if it fell into the ocean tomorrow, maybe 100 Americans would know about it, ever. I speak with some confidence when I say that only perhaps 1% of Americans could find it on an unmarked map. Certainly less than 10%.

And from this flowed the bipartisan Congressional decision to create a law that would allow American citizens to be detained by the military indefinitely. This is a HUGE abrogation of our rights. Even if in practice that power is not abused in the short term, it means that technically arresting ANYONE is possible, without a writ of habeas corpus (as I understand the matter–I have not read the full language, and am not even sufficiently up to date to know if this was passed into law or not; it is the fact that it was proposed that concerns me here).

The idea is that Delta or DevGru can sneak into, say, Yemen, and do a body snatch. But once the principle is there, what about sneaking into QUEENS and doing a body snatch? What about pulling somebody out of their home?

Ron and Rand Paul are some of a very small number of people who grasp the implications of all this. People like John McCain–who honestly I used to like–are not thinking long term. They need to ask questions like: if a good friend of Bill Ayers were in the White House, do you think at some point this could be abused, particularly in conditions of being able to censor the Internet, and having more or less complete control of other forms of news propagation?

Net: Paul will by default win the vote of everyone who hates Obama, and by virtue of his policies the votes of everyone who fears governmental oppression and who opposes foreign wars. This makes him electable, in my view.

We need to give him a try. Yes, Romney says he will put a hold on implementation of Obamacare nation-wide, day one. But the forte of left wingers is demonizing people in power. Who is to say they can’t remobilize a Democrat resurgence in 2014 with rhetorical pictures of diseased children and grandmothers, left behind by the Big Meany Head Republicans?

First off, I want to apologize because I feel I have not been very incisive lately. I am not sure I ever am, but I FEEL incisive sometimes, and I haven’t been feeling in the zone. I am working extremely hard, and my brain and body are both quite tired most of the time.

Wait, I don’t believe in excuse making, so let me repudiate, in the manner of a politician, the foregoing, without actually deleting it, so I can keep my options open (name the movie: “when I’m not kissing babies, I’m stealing their lollipops”).

Here is what I was thinking today, wandering around on my 10′ ladder: Ron Paul combines in one person a rejection of BOTH of the reasons for government expansion. If you look at the last–let me do the math–83 years (if memory serves, Hoover was inaugurated in 1929), you will see that when Republicans are in power, spending always goes up. Goldwater excoriated the 1950’s Republicans in 1960.

The argument is simple: we have been neglecting Defense. For their part, Democrats tend to say “we have been neglecting social justice.” Now, some want their cake and to eat it too, like Kennedy and LBJ, but most of the time recently, since Carter roughly, it has been “spend less on Defense, and more on Kodak moments”.

Thus, since Hoover, every Administration, Democrat or Republican has, for one reason or another, increased the size of our government. Only exception? Anybody? The Democrats hopped on it quicker than it takes Slick Willie to get the hots for cheerleaders: Clinton.

Clinton decreased our social spending AND our military. He did both, and in the context of moderate tax increases, this put us in the black (on an annual basis) for the first time in a very, very long time, likely since Coolidge. It should be pointed out that the Congress, as well as the mood of the country, was decidedly conservative, but still he did piss off a lot of the left wing of his base.

Now, Democrats hate the idea of decreasing social programs, so the mainstream ones hate Paul. That, and the fact that he is a Republican–or running as one–makes him anathema.

For their part, conservatives hate him because he opposes this basic idea that we need to spend more and more and more on Defense. Each of our roughly seven Naval Carrier Groups has a bigger airforce than all but the largest nations. We have thousands of strategic nuclear weapons–in radar evading bombers, missile silos, and nuclear submarines, a triad those alive in the Reagan years will readily remember.

In 2010 we spent nearlyh $700 billion on Defense. In second place was the Commissar’s Oligarchy of China, at $114 billion. It is a valid question: is this really defense?

We have spy satellites up the yin-yang, but would it not make more sense to spend some small, small percentage of this developing the best human intelligence networks on the planet? The war we are fighting is in large measure one of interdiction, of preventing in particular WMD’s from getting used here. Given the dynamics of the situation, it certainly helps denying safe haven to terrorists by occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, but think about it: absent good information, can we really say for certain safe havens cannot be created anyway?

And in any event, as I have argued, we lose some ten times the number of people in car accidents annually that we lost on 9/11. We have lost MORE military personnel in war than died on that day.

And here is the $10 trillion question: can we be CERTAIN that all the death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan has worked to prevent terrorist attacks that would otherwise have taken place? Waterboarding people with information is to me a no brainer. Invading their nations, though? I was a hawk on both wars. But I see them going on and on and on. I see men growing up without knowing their children. One Navy Seal I talked with said he spent maybe a week with his son in his first year and a half. Same with another Navy Commander I know. Many of these people come back with mental problems that permanently change, for better or worse, their lives.

Is this national DEFENSE? Ron Paul claims to have received more in donations from military people than all the other candidates COMBINED. If this is true, it is because, having fought, killed, and suffered for freedom, they have conclude that no, it is not DEFENSE. It is certainly an offense intended as defense, but it is hard to know what might have been. I cringe saying this, since it the sort of thing the peaceniks love to latch on, but every bully claims it is in self defense.

We are not bullies, but can we hawks not at least CONSIDER the idea that maybe protecting the world from itself is not our job? There are no Nazis now, there is no Communist bloc now, and to the extent China represents a threat, it is now economic, in the form of being able to crash our economy.

Today I was reading that Paul will be ignored if he wins in Iowa, since it will only be because lefties came and voted, only to plan to vote for Obama again.

Some people don’t get out often enough. I’m not one of them. I talk with these people all the time. Just the other day a bartender who is a registered Democrat told me he would vote for Paul, but not Romney. He said if Romney gets the nod, he’s voting for Obama again.

What people need to remember, and this is CRITICAL in assessing Paul’s appeal nationally, is that he appeals both to the anti-war and the anti-government crowds, and that often both traits are found in people REGISTERED AS DEMOCRATS.

Why do the hippies have Ron Paul stickers? Because they expected Obama to let them down, and he has not let them down in letting them down. He stayed in Iraq. He stayed in Afghanistan.

More importantly, though, he continued the Patriot Act. People under his direct control started strip searching grandmothers and children. They are talking about an internet kill switch.

A principle fear of MANY Democrats was that Bush was corrupt, and under the control of corporate interests, and intended to institute a totalitarian regime. I saw this over and over and over.

Those same people will vote for Ron Paul in a heartbeat. The polls showing him trailing Romney by a lot are among REPUBLICANS. Paul can attract a HUGE cross-section of the very young people Obama depended on to get him elected, a cross section that will sit home and play video games if Romney or even Gingrich get the nod. They will vote for Obama, but not with enthusiasm.

This is an interesting election. In rejecting all the things that enable government to grow, he has something to alienate every priviledged bureaucrat and lobbyist, but something to actually make a difference for ordinary Americans.

Ask yourself this question: among the candidates, who is most likely to make radical changes to our absolutely unsustainable status quo? Someone who has been saying it needed to be done for 30 years, or people who just got small government religion last year?

Few thoughts, at least for me. This is disorganized, but I’m going to go drink some beer, and buy a Christmas present for my oldest.

In my lifetime I cannot ever recall seeing a serious candidate–he is second in Iowa and third nationally in the polls I read–as carefully ignored by all media as Ron Paul.

If the primaries are undecided by the time they get to my state, he will get my vote.

I have long been a hawk, thinking we needed to go out and meet the enemies of America proactively, on their soil, and not ours. Like many others, I have long invoked the memory of Munich and the fallacious “peace in our time” negotiated there, and noted often that Churchill always called World War 2 the “unnecessary war”.

But we do not face a Nazi Germany. We do not face any coherent foe at all. We face a disorganized mob of radicals. I agree with the basic concept that they should not be granted safe places for organizing. At the same time, all we need in Afghanistan, in my view, is sufficient troops to trim the wings of the radicals from time to time. If they are organizing obvious training camps, we hit them and everyone dies or gets arrested. This benefits us and the Afghan government, and most of the people.

In the end, we have massive military power, far greater than that of any power before us, or present on the Earth today. It’s not even close.

What we have lacked is credibility. Saddam Hussein defied us and the UN because he thought we would never invade. We did. This provided a good lesson to many around the world.

At the same time, our greatest dangers, now, are from economic chaos and collapse, both of which are actually made worse by our massive military spending (although made “most worst” by our unfunded social spending mandates, by far).

I’m willing to give Paul a shot. I watched this video, and there are plainly some mistakes. Mossadegh was no Communist, but the Soviets were very actively trying to organize a coup to overthrow him so they could get access to Iranian oilfields. The Shah was no saint, but was much more humane than the radicals who followed him, and the Shah’s overthrow–far from being inevitable–was only made possible by Carter’s decision to abandon him, to cut off all support and aid, and refuse to allow the use of American assets to protect and defend him.

The poignant moment for me, though, was at the end (yes, the thing is plainly trying to tug on heartstrings), when children saw their fathers for the first time in a long time.

I know many, many soldiers, and deployments are hard. They change peoples personalities. They end marriages. They distance children from parents who were unable to be in their lives. This is true even of ordinary deployments, where the soldier, sailor, Marine, airman comes back psychologically normal.

Being a student of history, I think back to the Romans. The Roman Empire became as big as it did because they kept pushing the borders back to protect from barbarians. They would conquer one set of them, then be attacked anew from the new border by another set.

Now, Rome fell in large measure due to the failure of Augustus to establish a clear method of transferring power, which in turn led to numerous internecine conflicts that led to the decay of the caliber of the Legions, and the necessity of in effect using mercenaries. It did not fall because it was an Empire.

But it is also clear that no matter how far out they went, the fighting, somewhere, never stopped. They never conquered Germany. If memory serves, they may have conquered parts of Iraq, but not Iran. That’s where the Parthians were, who at one point–again if memory serves–captured and I believe killed a Roman emperor.

The United States is plainly not an Empire. You take stuff when you are an Empire. We don’t do that. We on the contrary spend money to build things, then leave. But the lesson here is that if you can’t end the fighting anyway, why not become so powerful on our home turf that no one can even consider attacking us, then waiting until credible, actionable threats emerge?

We are not going to invade Iran. Nor do I think a credible military solution short of that exists. To my mind, the rational solution is deterrance. Yes, many of them are nuts–or act nuts–but are they really going to risk the destruction of their nation when there is nothing in their actual theology to give them reason to think the Mahdi’s emergence can be coerced through stupidity and violence? Some believe this, but my suspicion is that much of this is merely bluffing. If you can convince someone you are nuts, you can get a lot of concessions.

Few thoughts.

My kids have reached the point where they are asking about infinity. Within the last week, I have had discussions with each of them, about living forever with one, and about an infinite universe with the other.

You really can’t imagine infinity, any more than you can imagine God. But you can feel love, and love fills up all that emptiness.

I will add as a footnote that this word “love” has been mangled beyond recognition. It has been twisted and pulled and pushed, triangulated, managed, abused. People “love” football. They “love” Doritos. There was a “summer of love” (with lots of humping, and no few number of pregnancies, but no stability, and nothing enduringly good created). We call it “falling in love” when our innate need for procreation finds a compatible hormonal mix across the gender aisle–or even within the same gender section.

Love to me is alternating solitude with communion. You cannot love if you cannot create, and in my view you cannot create unless you are capable of existing as a stand alone human being, something which necessarily means the capacity for solitude, which simply means that you an agent, a sovereign entity, responsible for yourself, even when you are with others. You are not leaning. A group of people like this will sometimes becomes more than the sum of the parts. They will at times feel an energy of connection. This is love.

To be clear, love is not desperate. It is not clinging. It is not “needing” someone. To say that you need someone is not to love them, but to demand they love you. This is not love.

Have to roll. I always cringe using this word, even though it does have its place. I have seen it abused so often, and wanted to speak a bit on it.

This is a simple way of putting it: to assume that tax policy does not influence rates of investment is to claim that someone will work as hard for $10/hour as for $50. For anyone who works hard, it is very hard writing checks to the IRS.

Why risk anything–and business expansion is always a risk–if even if you succeed you are working for peanuts?

I’m reindulging my interest in Aromatherapy as a sort of mood modifying and spur to creativity, and it occurred to me it would be interesting to integrate essential oils into dining experiences. As they say, half of “taste” is in fact smell, so would adding complementary smells not potentially alter in a synergistic way the experience of dining?

As an example, adding the smell of cloves or black pepper to a meal of steak, or bergamot to a pasta marinara dish, or cinnamon to a desert that otherwise does not contain cinnamon. Orange to a salad course. Or, presumably, there are many synergies out there that are not obvious, just as there are in cooking itself.

In a multicourse meal you could put aromatherapy pots out, and switch them as the courses change. You could key them on the wine or beer, or the food, or even a mood you were trying to set.

Then I got to thinking about it, and thought that you could add appropriate music for each course. You could have leitmotifs tied to certain foods or ingredients, recurring themes.

More generally, the goal would be the creation of a mood which combines aesthetic novelty with pleasure, with meditation.

Then I got to thinking about it, and thought that you could add colors–fabric stretched between poles for example–potentially combined with feng shui–and move tables around, move fountains around, or even change artwork.

A talented artist could create a multimedia experience, combining original artwork, music, food, aromas. To add touch you could alter the texture of the chair, or table cloth. Obviously food can have different textures as well.

Then I got to thinking about Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk idea, and thought this would actually fit the bill better.

So much happiness is created with food, so much pleasure, with the right people, in the right place, right environment.

Then, of course, I got to thinking about what modern artists would make of this, bringing out plates of raw meat, and angry music, and bitter colors, destroyed on a tattered canvas.

There is no creation in destruction. This should be obvious. There is a profound difference between describing failure, and creating success. Life follows life. The first and foremost creation of any useful art is a character and self consistent with life, with the spirit, the energy of Goodness, of love, of possibility, of a FUTURE.

When we see destruction in art, what we are seeing is self destruction. We are seeing selves which have not formed, and which rather than trying to form choose to reflect in “creativity” their failures.

Destruction can always appear to be creation, since change is happening, movement is happening. But plainly it is not.

This idea is original, I think. I have not seen it anywhere else. Particularly the Aromatherapy idea seems to me to be interesting.

Life is work.

Clarifying Correlates:

Rest is work.
Love is work.
Love is rest.

To live is to create; to create is work. To create space is to rest; resting consists in creating space: space to dream, to waste time, to disorganize time, to manifest things you had no clue existed.

When we create, we are imitating in a beneficial way our Creator, whose sole joy in life–whose life consists in joy, which is work and rest–is to create.

Love is both work and rest; it is the particle and the wave. When in communion, when surfing a perfect wave, it is effortless. When the wave ends, you must swim back out to catch the next one, and that is work.

That about covers it.

I will add that words are of course symbols, as has often been pointed out in the last century, and their meaning–the precise images and affects conjured–therefore is always in the end somewhat individualized.

In discussing God with my oldest, the image of God as a “white blob” came up. My response was that God is much, much more interesting than that. I would say that whenever you spontaneously create a feeling of engagement, of effortless work, of joy, of beauty, of BEING INTRIGUED, you are worshiping and seeing God at the same time. What we call love is just a form of fascination, of effortless work, is it not?

I had to write that. Now I’m going back to bed to dream some new dreams, to restwork and workrest.

Somebody posted this on my Facebook page: http://inhabitat.com/german-village-produces-321-more-energy-than-it-needs/

I am a grumpy Republican, who self identifies as a Liberal, but who could easily be called a Libertarian. I’m supposed to love gas guzzling cars and coal dust in the air. I don’t. I’m not stupid.

I do categorically reject the falsified hypothesis of significant anthropogenic influence on the climate. However, I like the idea of local. I like the idea of things–including power–being made and consumed within close proximity.

We need to break all the large things down, and let self organizing systems organize on scales that are manageable. I believe Aristotle defined the proper size of a Polis as that distance within which the shout of a man with a strong voice from a high point could be heard. That has always made sense to me.

Tom Waits song.

We all have problems. Some of us, though, carry things we cannot name or identify, that go back into that magical world of our childhood, into currents that formed us.

Without sharing all the details, I remember a dream from when I was very young, perhaps five, in which I was being crushed into a pulp.

When I look at Tom Waits, I see that same sort of dynamic. I know a few details of his life, but the broad outline is that he was presented with a psychological survival situation where it was sink or swim, create a new self, or be condemned to a life beyond his control.

I think many creative and adventurous people face something similar. Greg Lemonde, as an example, was apparently molested.

One can say that suffering is always bad, but I simply don’t agree. I don’t think this Earth, this world, is really designed for happiness. That is what what we call heaven is for. This place is for learning, and sometimes I think one of the best teachers is people trying to kill you physically or psychologically. In such a situation, you cannot remain still. You must either adapt–which includes learning how to adapt–or die.

I’m zeroing in on something. That is why the personal notes. Why I post in public is in the hope a flash of recognition may help someone else out there feel less alone.