Month: December 2011

In assessing all of our Federal Departments, with an eye to eliminating them, it is worth asking at least two questions. The obvious one is: what is this Dept. designed to accomplish, and is it accomplishing it? The less obvious one is: in what ways can this Dept. be abused for financial gain?

Take the Dept. of Energy. It is guaranteeing loans for companies who apparently did not have good enough products to get private guarantees. In large numbers, companies like Solyndra are going bankrupt, and in so doing sucking money out of the pockets of the rest of us.

Yet, simply because the COMPANY goes bankrupt does not mean that dozens of people running the thing don’t walk away with fortunes. If you as CEO make, say, $500,000 a year for five years, you can put together a nice little nest egg, can’t you?

And this doesn’t even factor in actual fraud, such as misappropriation of funds, where you say on the balance sheet that something went for “research”, and it actually went to pay off your mansion in Malibu. This is of course against the law, but sufficiently clever people can and do get away with it.

Moreover, EVERY bureaucracy has an inbuilt financial benefit for all its members: by virtue of the fact the thing exists, everyone there draws a nice paycheck as long as the thing exists; a paycheck, and a beautiful benefit package, to be paid for by our children.

Government agencies continue for the simple reason that they benefit everyone in them, regardless of whether they accomplish anything or not.

It is, of course, for this reason that they unionize. This allows them to make sure that the people–the Democrats–who continue to vote them money and continued existence, stay in power. Quite literally, the Democrats vote themselves campaign contributions every time they expand a government agency.

We need to be clear that being a Democrat has enormous financial advantages. There is no contradiction at all when, say, a John Kerry docks his yacht in another state to avoid taxes. His intention all along has been to pursue his OWN self interest, and he, like all Democrats, merely uses the rhetoric of class warfare to keep enjoying all the perks of office.

All of these things are made possible ONLY by the idea that government makes life better. It does not, not beyond the most modest aspects of police, fire, EMS, highways, national defense and the like.

Plainly, the dose makes the medicine or the poison. Without saying there should be no government–there would have been no point creating a Constitution if the goal were zero government, as the less practical Libertarians often call for–it is abundantly clear that our Federal government, and most State governments are far, far, far too large and powerful.

This is not a heavy post. I just wanted to point out that in a functional cultural order, signified by the operation of the yes/no system, there must logically be a counter-point to conceptions of the ideal. If we can imagine the angelic, why not the demonic? One direction is desired and the other prohibited and feared.

We see some academics want to eradicate this yes/no operator. For example, some anthropologists want to find in the yes/no operator the genesis of human conflict. So what do they do? They REJECT it. I am assuming here you are clever enough to note my point.

Most people are not very clever, and this applies perhaps with more than ordinary force in those hallowed halls where real things never happen, and actions flow from ideas unseen by the generators of those ideas.

What needs to be remembered is that there was never an Eden without any rules. Adam and Eve had rules. The pygmies of Africa have rules. Groups of people living in the most remote, inhospitable areas of the jungle and tundra lived by rules–live by rules. These rules certainly can be mutable and perhaps negotiable, depending on the time and place, but the need for social structures and expections–responsibilities–is not negotiable.

Clearly, they can be avoided, and this is the point of social ostracism and exile. We have, now, within our social order many, many exiles, who cannot be incorporated as they exist now back into a sustainable world. We must, and indeed seem to be, reject that non-culture, that anti-culture (not counter culture, as they have not offered an alternative), that is defecating on our streets and protesting the work of others that makes it so easy for them to survive on long hanging fruit.

I parked my car in frozen mud today, and walked across it in my boots. Although very messy yesterday, it felt interesting under my feet. There are tiretracks everywhere, and they make the surface uneven.

Later, walking back out, the mud had thawed, and now had a different texture. Like a little child, I played with this feeling in my shoes. The ground feels different in different shoes. The ground itself changes in texture and contour.

In modern life, what do we do regularly that is uneven or even jagged? All of our floors and walls are smooth. Our homes are smooth. Our parking lots and cars are smooth. Where do we get to experience the random? If we rarely or never venture outside carefully defined boundaries, then not often enough.

Our bodies and minds are clearly linked, and I wonder if a part–perhaps a small part–of the so-called disease of modernity links to deficits in kinesthetic experiences?

Just wondering out loud, perhaps stupidly, as always.

This is one of my favorite Hank Williams songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzY2Qcu5i2A&ob=av2e

Listen to it, and note that the music is not sad at all. The LYRICS are sad.

This is a two channel communication. On one channel you have happiness and on the other sadness. Our conscious minds process the sadness, but temper it unconsciously with rhythm.

The task in sadness is to continue. The music does this. This song has always felt cathartic to me. Really, it makes me happy. I don’t know why, and this is especially true when I am already feeling down.

I think it has to do with the pattern interrupt implied by the dichotomy between the music and the words.

It seems to me that the principle benefit of travel is creating a space in which you can reimagine yourself. Surrounded by a thousand habits, it is hard to feel new feelings.

Today, I was following a straight, habitual path somewhere, and decided to turn off and go somewhere I have not been before. For about 20 seconds I felt this feeling like the entirety of my being was malleable. It was like I dropped all the weight of expectations and worries and responsibilities that I carry around and which in large measure define me. I was truly and completely open to something new. It was a pleasurable and qualitatively different sort of experience.

It seems to me that we define our rough attributes early on, with the broad outlines in place by age 13 or so. But what if it were possible–and it IS possible–to fundamentally open ourselves up to experiencing life in a different way? In that space, I did not care for my family, my job, my bills, or all the things I have to accomplish on a weekly basis. It was all gone. I was free.

As I see it, it is not good for people who do actually have responsibilities to drop them, but it IS good to be able to invoke a state in which that feeling is attained, when appropriate. In classic Hindu society, men will build homes, procreate and raise children, then at a certain age, if they want, they can go live in the forest with their wives. Later, if they so desire, they can forego their names and wander as itinerant beggars called Sanyassin. This is an interesting idea.

The feeling is incommunicable, but I would like to feel it again.

This would not post at the article site, so I cut and pasted it here.

I have spent a lot of time debating leftists. Plain rhetorical patterns emerge, which happen over and over and over. With regard to this topic, a very common tactic is what we might call the “fact dogpile”. They aggregate large numbers of claims which are all individually demonstrably untrue, but which act to create the appearance of accumulated “evidence”. Unwary minds say “where there’s smoke there must be a fire”, and those who are trying to debate them are left with the unpleasant and time consuming task of refuting EVERY claim. If one goes unanswered, they claim victory overall.

This is, of course, a propagandistic trick, but while no credible mind could accuse left wingers of having credible minds, no one can deny that they are talented at ignoring the obvious, and at pushing the dubious and wrong.