Month: January 2012

Luck has a price: it is effort.

The older I get, the more I admire equanimity as a virtue. I admire those who don’t get upset by things, who are able to live without constant avarice of one sort or another: for experience, for wealth, fame, self respect, success in some enterprise or another.

Who is more successful: the CEO who is worth billions who has to fight every day to keep his position–and having to constantly compromise morally to do so, even if he or she refused to admit it–or the pipe-fitter who comes home tired and goes fishing with his kids?

Given how often the word “Imperialist” was abused in the last century, it is easy to forget that there was a time when Imperialism, by name, was a conscious policy of the supposedly enlightened British nation. They in fact built the largest empire the world has ever seen, carving out large sections of Africa and Asia, and of course controlling Canada, Australia, and numerous small countries like Belize around the world.

As I think about it, the patent Fascism of George Bernard Shaw and his disciple John Maynard Keynes is really just an outgrowth of the basic idea that some people know better than others, that some are just born SUPERIOR to others, and that the basic concept of the “White Man’s Burden” should be applied to social problems, and specifically to making all non-elites equal. The elites, of course, on this rendering, being superior, are not at all a part of the muddling masses under their direction.

Thus, there is no principled difference between a British Colonial officer directing “darkies” in Pakistan or the Sudan to do work he feels is in their best interest, and a member of what Keynes called the “Salariat” similarly interfering in and directing the lives of those he considers unequal to the task of directing their own life.

It is an identical arrogance, and moral dystopia.

I got drunk a few weeks ago, and listened to Florence and the Machine’s “Dog Days are Over” repeatedly. Here is the official video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOyfLBYtuU&ob=av3e

It is weird. Anyway, I can’t easily find a short explanation of what she says it is about, so I am going to take my best guess at it. This sort of thing is useful, because interestingly how people interpret lyrics that are ambiguous seems to be a sort of Rorschach test. If I inadvertently reveal something about me, then so be it. Won’t be the first time.

Here are the lyrics:

Happiness / hit her / like a train on a tra-ck Coming towards her / stuck still / no turning ba-ck She hid around corners / and she hid under beds / She killed it with kisses and from it she fl-ed / With e-very bubble she sank with a drink / And wa-shed it away down the kitchen sink.
The dog days are over The dog days are done The horses are comin’ so you better run
Run fast for your mother; run fast for your father / Run for your children all your sisters and brothers / Leave all your love and your longing behind. You can’t carry it with you / if you want to survive
The dog days are ove-r / The dog days are do~ne / Can you hear the horse-s/ ‘Cos here they come
And I- never wanted / anything from yo-u / Except / e-verything / you had And / what was left after that too / Oh!
Happiness / hit her / like a bullet in the ba-ck Struck from /a great height By someone /who should have known be-tte-r / than tha-t
The dog days are ove-r / The dog days are do~ne / Can you hear the horses / ‘Cos here they co-me
Run fast for your mother / run fast for your father Run for your children all your sisters and brothers Leave all your love and your longing behind You can’t carry it with you / if you want to survive
The dog days are ove-r / The dog days are do~ne / Can you hear the horse-s/ ‘Cos here they co-me/
The dog days are ove-r / The dog days are do~ne / The horse-s are co-min’ So you’d better ru-n /
The dog days and over-r / The dog days are do~ne / The horse-s are co-mi -n’ / So you’d better ru–n

First off, the music itself, outside of the poetry of the lyrics, is energizing. It is anthemic. It is large, not small. Whatever “the dogs days are over” means, the song itself makes me–and seemingly many other people–feel good.

As I interpret this, the whole song can be seen as an internalized conflict between a tacit agreement she had with herself that unhappiness was her lot, and light suddenly shining in.

Do you ever just feel happy, for no good reason? We spend our days, so often, enduring. Then for me at least, on some days, for no apparent cause larger than perhaps pleasant weather, or an unexpected break in work, or for no reason at all, I will feel good, happy, content, at peace. I am not worrying about my next move, or what comes next.

One of our greatest fears, though, is that of expanding, of growing, of breaking out of the protective shell we build and inhabit to protect us from the manifest ravages of the world. If you are open, you will be hurt. If you risk, you will sometimes fail. This is the nature of our existence.

But don’t you sometimes just accept this, and feel joy in the process? I have often likened it to my imagination of surfing (I’ve never surfed), in which there is a fear, but also a rapture that would not have been possible without the everpresent risk of falling. This is what drives risk takers, like skydivers, rock climbers, car racers, and yes artists.

So something like this comes down, and she feels like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming train. She hides, and she hides again. She dissipates.

So there is a disconnect between the feeling and the fear. Even though there are no patent breaks in the narrative, I think we can see two voices, that of the frightened person being attacked by happiness, and that of a larger, perhaps divine voice insisting: your suffering is done, it is over. Can’t you feel the energy, the wind, of the horses, who can gallop at great speeds with absolute freedom?

She runs for her father, and runs for her mother. She leaves all her love and longing behind, because she wants to survive. Why?

The task of all children, which is to say of all human beings, is in some way to expand beyond the context of childhood, to develop a unique self, that in my view is capable of connecting with the transcendant, with God. In a universal sense, we have no parents. Our relation is that of a sovereign soul with the energy that permits our existence.

Now, she is running from happiness. Part of that running consists in a desire to HOLD ON to who she was, which is a daughter, and sister, and someone with an emotional context, a clear place, a self with loves and longings.

She was a selfish person: And I- never wanted / anything from yo-u / Except / e-verything / you had And / what was left after that too / Oh!

But now she can’t even hold on to that. Happiness hit her like a bullet in the brain. Nothing is left, but a swelling cloud of anti-misery. She makes it blue; I would make it yellow.

Oh, who knows if I am right, but I look at this, think of all the people I know, and laugh and cry at the same time.

I have proposed in my financial treatise that, if we follow the logic of inflation to its end, we should have some twenty times the purchasing power per hour worked than we actually do. This leads, in turn, to the logical conclusion that if we can survive on forty hours of work now, we should be able to survive on two hours in an actually well constructed, just economy.

This conclusion leads, in turn, to the necessary conclusion that unemployment is unnecessary, and that generalized prosperity should be our lot, such that no social “safety nets” would be needed for anyone who does even a minimal amount of work.

These are shocking conclusions, but in my view valid. Main Street should be twenty times more robust, and Wall Street and the Federal Government one twentieth the size they actually are.

The more I think about this, the more I think that a large part of the reason Germans are able to maintain economic well being and still afford their social “safety nets”–agree or not in principle, they are plainly there–is that they maintain monetary discipline. They have since the Second World War. This is Austrian School Economics, which holds that expanding the monetary base will always favor a few and punish the many.

The Austrian School, in important ways, is the most egalitarian of creeds; and Keynesism, intended to support supposed egalitarianism in the form of socialist polity ruled by a technocratic elite, is the most elitist.

Socialism IS elitism. This point needs to be made clearly.

Beyond any reasonable doubt, most of the decisions affecting the bulk of the world’s population are made by about 6,000 people, what someone in a position to know calls “The Superclass”.

If you look at the reviews, you will note that there is the former Ambassador to the UN, a former Fed exec., the Secretary of the Treasury: again, all people who belong to this class, and understand its workings.

That an elite has disproportionate influence on all of our lives is a bit disturbing. It has perhaps always been so, but all of us were brought up to believe that if we elect the right people, we can control our destiny.

Of course, the elites would prefer us to choose pessimism, that our destinies are in fact in their supposedly enlightened hands. That is presumably why so many put their names on this.

The future of course is impossible to predict, but I choose to believe that not all these people march in lockstep, that they often have principled disagreements, and that not all of them are sons of bitches, even though some plainly are.

There were many supposed “paranoiacs” who predicted that 9/11 would be used to create a police state in the United States. Like most, I thought this was ridiculous.

Yet, even if one dismisses the existence of a “them” (the subject of my next post), plainly one can extrapolate from the logic of bureaucracies, and see where the solution to one supposed problem can become a problem in and of itself.

Terrorism, because it is nebulous, and because the threat can never be quantified, as can, to a great extent, the danger of a conventional army, is the perfect foil for those who are themselves paranoid.

Take, as an example, the patting down of a tearful six year old, by the TSA.

Can any rational mind seriously argue that there was a threat here? Of course not. What, then, is the logic. It is simple, and technocratic, which is to say emotionless, and utterly disconnected from any desirable public outcome.

The logic is that all airline passengers are criminals until proven innocent. In Signal Theory, you always have a mixture of noise and signal. The only way to ensure no noise is to transmit nothing, and the only way to ensure no signal will fail to get through is to allow all noise.

The only way to make sure all innocent people get through is to allow everyone through. The only way to ensure no criminals get through is to treat everyone as a criminal. This is the logic.

Yet, when we speak of a “War on Terror”, we are speaking of aggressive overseas interventions designed to counter ISLAMIC terrorism. We are not worried about the IRA or the Tamil Tigers.

El Al uses a very simple method: it figures out who MIGHT be a criminal, and then uses a continuum on them, which in some few cases might END with the sorts of abuses the TSA visits on everyone, but only with regard to people who know damn well why it is happening, and not six year old girls who are being virtually raped in public for reasons both she and I are at a loss to explain, if our goal is integrate them into a framework of reason.

Here is the thing with terrorism: once you accept that all passengers are criminals until proven innocent–a patent abuse of our Fourth Amendment, which well understood the value of treating everyone as guilty, as well as the abuses to which such thinking led, and which considered them antithetical to the dignity they intended to provide all American citizens–then there is no limit to the extent to which you can go to try and prove them guilty.

I visualize discussions going on at the TSA: “You know, you can take somebody’s eye out with a plastic spoon.” “OK. Let’s ban spoons.” “You know, a baby was used a suicide bomb in Pakistan”. “OK, from now on we pat down all babies, and since explosives can be liquid, we need to look in their diapers”.

And so on.

Intended or not, it seems that the proper boundaries of State intervention in our private lives are being exceeded daily, and that the grab continues apace. The EPA is another good example: they are forcing the shut down of power plants which are causing virtually no environmental damage, and which will cause higher energy costs which will be most burdensome to those who can least afford it.

Our freedoms are very literally disappearing. Our ability to elect representatives who are ABLE to protect us is dwindling. I say this after much thought, and do not believe I am exaggerating in the slightest.

Plainly, our nation will end some day. It may be tomorrow, it may be a thousand years from now. All experiments end. But it would seem to me there are far too many who are eager for the release from personal freedom and responsibility that their more or less open embrace of Fascism grants them.

On that last word: Fascism is nothing more or less than applying military thinking to the whole of society. It is making sure everyone has a place and an assigned purpose. This is very comforting for those who are unable to find purpose and meaning in their lives. These people can be counted on to support all forms of government which purport to increase the quality of their lives, regardless of whether or not that outcome is in fact achieved.

Have you ever stopped to realize that every day has its own, unique quality? That it may feel, on superficial analysis, like every day that came before, and which you expect to come after, but that this does not come close to plumbing the possible depths of the “ordinary”?

If memory serves, John Wooden’s father–a hard working, pious, and simple man–told him to “Make every day your masterpiece.”

Think of your life. Think of every day as a canvas hanging on the wall. How many did you paint, and how many did someone else scribble something on so you could mark the day “Done”?

Every day of your past, and every day–EVERY DAY–of your future will have slightly different shading, texture, form, theme, than the other days. Why not interact with it as art, accept the inevitable banalities of life with the sensitivity they don’t seem to merit, and CREATE as you move experiences that you can call creative, each and every day?

You work differently every day. Even your sleep, your dreams, your movements in the night, differ in subtle ways.

If change is a universal, why not invite it home to dinner and become good friends?

Perhaps the strongest argument to made against Ron Paul is his supporters. They seemingly, and contradictorily, want to make him into a demagogue. I want to be clear that what I want to elect him for is for what he will NOT do, not what he WILL do. It is commonly assumed that because the government is a certain size–usually expressed as a percentage of the GDP, as if there were any correlation–that it must perforce remain about that size moving forward.

What Ron Paul is proposing is not so much abolishing Federal agencies like the TSA, so much as NOT continuing them. He is proposing NOT continuing large scale deficit spending, which everyone else seems to assume is inevitable. He is proposing NOT continuing on-going large scale military conflicts around the world.

All any true conservative wants is to be left alone to pursue their own interests and passions as free from governmental interference as is consistent with public order. This means, logically, that our ideal President is someone like Calvin Coolidge, who slept 12 hours a day, if memory serves, since he didn’t view the job of the President as DOING things, but rather preventing others–Congress–from doing things that were counterproductive. Silent Cal got tricked by the Fed, which had its own agenda, and in large measure even then made its own decisions, which being slow and insidious were hard to measure in their effects. But that is what we want.

We want a President who will discontinue a whole lot of stuff, then go sit on a reclining chair in Boca Raton or wherever, and watch sports or write books, or play with his grandkids.

What Ron Paul’s fans seemingly want is a Savior, of the sort they wanted in Obama. Plainly, Paul is the only INTERESTING candidate in the race, but everyone around him needs to up their game.

Here is a case in point: http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-vs-the-rest/

Watch the videos. They made me cringe. In the first one, you had people chanting slogans, differing only in the words from “Hey ho, X has to go”. In the second, he screwed up the narration several times–which is something that easily could have been fixed before releasing the video–and had goofy music on there.

This is a race for the President of the United States, the most powerful elective office on the planet. This is not some college game. Ron Paul is not some colorful new British band that only the cool kids know about.

He is the only one proposing a serious package to halt and reverse the tremendous decline in our freedoms and economic well being that have beset us ever since Herbert Hoover. To the extent he surrounds himself with silly people, it hurts him. I am not proposing he reject his biggest fans, but rather that his biggest fans raise their game and overall sobriety to the levels required for him actually win the nomination, which is plainly a long shot.

This is intended to be emailed. Please copy it and email it to your usual suspects.

Please put aside your preconceptions for a moment.

In 2011 we are projected to take in $1.9 trillion, and spend $3.3 trillion. This is a gap of $1.4 trillion, or about $116 BILLION a MONTH. Our national debt already exceeds $15 trillion, and is equal to the entirety of our annual economic output. Debt loads this size have historically inevitably led to economic catastrophes. Obamacare and the entry of the Baby Boomers into our Social Security and Medicare rolls will only accelerate this process, which is already unsustainable.

What in your estimation constitutes a rational, proportional response to this situation?

Mitt Romney has pledged to cut $20 billion from our annual budget, and in effect appoint a committee to study the issue. Does this sound like a solution that is on par with the size of the problem?

Supposed “conservative” Newt Gingrich called Paul Ryan’s budget plan–which is at least trying to wrestle with the problems we face, “right wing social engineering”. Here is what is interesting about that statement: Ryan’s plan doesn’t even balance the ANNUAL budget until 2040 . During that period, our debt will continue to increase, year on year. Predictably, Gingrich makes no commitments at all with respect to budget cuts.

Ron Paul has pledged to cut annual expenditures by $1 trillion his first year. He is going to abolish the Departments of Education, HUD, Commerce, Energy, and Interior. He is going to abolish the TSA, which is strip searching everyone who flies that it wants to.

He is going to lower the corporate tax rate to 15%. This will have ENORMOUS and IMMEDIATE stimulating effects on our economy.

Self evidently, he will reverse Obamacare, and substantially every Executive Order Obama issued, along with implementing a legal framework removing the ability for the Executive Branch to impose laws without consulting Congress.

He is going to audit the Federal Reserve. For those who complacently assume that the Fed is benevolent, consider the following: our next generation aircraft carrier, the Ford Class, will cost some $10 billion each. Ben Bernanke, without asking any elected officials’ approval, created (just in the second round of so-called “Quantitative Easing”), from scratch, $600 BILLION–the equivalent of 60 state of the art aircraft carriers. And we don’t even know who got the money. We have no way of knowing. But we can assume it went to the already rich, and not to ordinary Americans, who will be hurt by the inflation that clearly will follow whenever the economy recovers. This is absurd.

With regard to foreign policy, talk with a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Ask them what good we are doing there. Ask them if they think we should be there. If you can find one who thinks that we are protecting America–now, after 10 years of war–then go buy a lottery ticket because it’s your day to defy the odds. Paul gets more donations from active duty military than all the other candidates combined. They are tired of fighting, and it is hard to blame them. It is impossible to measure progress. They sweep an area, destroy weapons caches and arrest some people, then three months later things are the same as before. Although only one percent of the population, veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars constitute 20% of the suicides.

With regard to electability, Ron Paul consistently places within a couple points of Romney when matched against Obama. He can count on everyone right of center to vote for him simply because they cannot stomach Obama. But he also appeals to large swathes of the Left, who share with the Right a fear of government power grabs, and who have a distaste for foreign wars.

In this CBS Poll(http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/09/Who-Would-You-Vote-For-in-November-if-the-Candidates-Were.gif), Paul is in a statistical dead heat with Obama, as is Romney, since the margin of error is larger than the difference between them.

PAUL IS ELECTABLE.

Here is the question: do you want to sacrifice genuine conservatism–low taxes, huge decreases in the size and power of the Federal Government–for a one or two point advantage in the polls, and for a candidate NOBODY–except the banking community–is enthusiastic about?

Please ponder this carefully before you vote in your primary, and please pass this email along to everyone you think might have an interest in reading it.

End note: I have ignored Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum, because their poll numbers–and showings to date–simply do not support the thesis that they can actually win in a national election.