Month: March 2012

Adele has a song “rumor has it”, which tries to captured the mutable nature of rumors. I always get the last line wrong as to who is leaving who for whom, but one that popped in my head today was “rumor has it he’s the one I’m leaving me for”. I thought this quote apropos relative to a female friend of mine who is wrestling with her attraction to a narcissistic man who was quite awful. He was cheating on her, and trying to cheat on the woman he was cheating with. Some people are like that.

Corollary: it is sometimes appropriate to lie to others, but never to lie to yourself. I was going to publish that as a self declared bon mot, but will leave it here. I would call this my credo when it comes to the perceptual breathing portion of my “ethical” framework. Quotation marks because my ethics has no rules that govern anything but the inside of the individual’s head.

I have said this before, but I can be an asshole sometimes. I can rationalize it, as anyone with talent can rationalize anything, but that is the naked truth.

In my current living situation, I have a lot of black people around me. None of them scare me because they are ordinary, working people just trying to make it like me.

I will say, though, that I do get why black people feel oppressed sometimes. I was talking with a black guy in the bar today. He was the only black guy there, and I could just tell he was trying to blend, trying to belong. We had a nice conversation about Illinois football and basketball, and where he was from. Turns out I had driven through there earlier in the year.

In my comments on race, I want to be clear that there is one burning idea: if you are going to claim you are trying to improve the world, get the fucking thing right. Do it right, or get the fuck out of the way and let someone else lead.

The current people speaking for black Americans are not only not getting it right, they are causing an INCREASE in suffering. This suffering is very real. It is tangible. It is tears set in stone and forgotten and expressed in self destructive anger directed at they know not who. It is tears cried, and unpacified. It is fear, pervasive fear, inescapable fear, eternal fear, for which there is no ready solution.

I can be cold, but I am not cold. I want these problems solved, and it infuriates me to see lies told to cover up incompetence and indifference.

As I say often, it is as important to look for things NOT said, as that are said. You see, it is very easy to direct dialogue that exists in such a way as to prevent dialogue you don’t want.

In 2009, some 42 black kids under the age of 18 were murdered just in Chicago, most of them by other black kids. Premature death due to murder is an old story in the black community. I doubt things have improved under Obama’s ballet dancer with a fondness for the F word. The numbers were roughly the same when I lived in Chicago back in the mid-nineties. I personally heard one murder. I was already on the phone with the police to report a fight, when I heard 4-5 gunshots, and saw kids running. In this case, it was self defense, as the kid who got shot had attacked the other with a chain.

My point, though, is that in the last month or so since Trayvon got shot, it is statistically likely that just in Chicago 3 or more black kids have been murdered.

Who is talking about this? You will note the story above is from a British newspaper.

One would think that a man like Barack Obama, who was without evidence presumed to care about ordinary black Americans–whose experience was entirely foreign to his own–would be interested in the things that might actually help black people improve their lives. You might think that he would, as an example, address black on black violence, that Michelle Obama might be traveling the country encouraging young black kids to stay in school, work hard, and not get or cause someone else to get pregnant.

I’m not seeing it. What I see is a very cynical desire to use the few scraps of actual racism that still exist to ignite fires of anger that he can USE to distract people from the fact that in almost every respect, life has become WORSE under him. Obamacare won’t help the poorest of the poor: they already had Medicaid. His handouts will run out, and his overall economic policy is going to cause a disaster here which will hurt poor urban blacks the WORST, and FIRST.

There is no leadership in the black community that is effective because there are so many “liberals” whose sense of self and whose jobs DEPEND on their collective continued failure. They shout out, drown out those who want to say “we can do it”, “we can solve our own problems”. They call them Uncle Toms for what? For NOT wanting free handouts and preferential treatment. For valuing hard work and delayed gratificaiton over dependence on the Welfare Elite.

Did you know that “workers”–people who worked in factories–only constituted some 15% of the Russian population when Lenin led his coup?
[Edit: that is not much more than the 12% of our population that is black, and the principle involved is identical] Yet what he called his “revolution” invoked them. He needed them for propaganda. When he had them under his control, he smashed their unions, lowered their wages, increased their hours, eliminated what few safety standards there were, and sent to the Gulags anyone who disagreed with him. If you were tardy more than a couple of times, that alone was enough to get you sent to a labor camp.

People like Barack Obama PRAY–make that “wish fervently”, as I would assume Obama is actually an atheist–for the resurgence of the KKK and similar groups. This Trayvon Martin case enables him not just to avoid dealing in an actually substantive way with black issues generally, it also mobilizes support for him on an issue that is of no intrinsic significance even for the BLACK community–since most of their violence is black-on-black–and which distracts from his colossal failure to justify his calls for people to follow him in the name of hope.

Even more generally, we borrow $120 billion or so A MONTH and there are no plans to stop this. Only Ron and Rand Paul have sane proposals on the table. The rest is bread and circuses. This month it is Trayvon Martin. Next month it will be something else. What it will NOT be is relevant to the actual problems of any but a very small group of Americans.

I have no idea what actually happened when Martin was shot. I sincerely hope justice is done, one way or another, but would like to take the opportunity of this ruckus to ask one question: at the end of this process of demonstration, recrimination, verbal assaults, and purposive acrimony, will anyone have pointed out that black children from two parent homes have rates of criminality on par with the rest of the population; and that black children from single parent homes have rates of criminality on par with that of white children from single parent homes?

And that the LARGE gap in the rates of criminality between whites and blacks is entirely attributable to black cultural patterns that only emerged in this country following the so-called War on Poverty?

No, of course not.

At 12% of the population, blacks are some 40% of our prison population. This fact alone means that it is quite rational, in some neighborhoods, to watch black people more carefully than others. If you knew that people driving red cars were more than three times more likely to be criminals, it would be reasonable to watch the red cars more. The problem is not an unempirical, prejudicial racism based on a misunderstanding of black people; but rather a very real, easily verified FACT that black people commit crimes at much higher rates than everyone else.

The problem is not racism, but that this statistic is TRUE. The solution will not lie in forcing police to abdicate–or pretend to abdicate–their own daily experience of the world, but rather in addressing this higher rate of criminality, which as I have implied should in my view begin with addresssing rates of single motherhood and particularly teen pregnancy.

And to be clear, while no doubt rich white collar (as opposed to blue collar) criminals get away with crimes poor people would have been convicted of, there are far more white people living at the poverty level than black people, and they don’t commit crimes at the same rate. Not even close.

I was thinking today that clearly there is an element of paternalism in the treatment of the left towards black people in this country. The converse of paternalism, of course, is infantilization, which is the demand that that community not grow up, not develop, not demonstrate a sense of self apart from that permitted by their self appointed leaders.

In all this, I see not just paternalism, but demented, narcissistic, ABUSIVE paternalism, or what I have often termed maternalism.

I would like to quote an excerpt from the book “The Drama of the Gifted Child”, by Alice Miler:

What happens if a mother not only is unable to recognize and fulfill her child’s needs, but is herself in need of assurance? Quite unconsciously, the mother then tries to assuage her own needs through her child. This does not rule out strong affection; the mother often loves her child passionately, but not in the way he needs to be loved. The reliability, continuity, and constancy that are so important to the child are therefore missing from this exploitative relationship. What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother’s or father’s “love”) at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.

Could we not argue that this basic process is happening on two levels, that of the infant born, as so often happens, to an emotionally immature mother, who uses the child to meet her own emotional needs, creating inexplicable anger and sadness in the adult child, which is expressed either in misogyny (in men) and masochism (in women); and that this basic process ALSO describes the self defined “Liberals” who claim to be able to speak to the black condition and remedy it. They have been at this for 50 years, and things have gotten steadily worse. Poverty has not lessened, and some of the cities they have tried to “bless”, like Detroit, more closely resemble the war zones of primitive and undeveloped countries.

I was reading the other day that a teacher told a black student to read some poem he had prescribed in a “more black” tone of voice. There is this great concern on the part of so-called black leaders to make sure that things remain a certain way, that black people devalue education, speak in ways likely to hinder their job prospects, and above all that they not follow the standard path of progression, that of the American Dream, that of hard, inter-generational work, with an eye to economic and social improvement.

It is my sincere opinion that no worse blight has ever befallen black America, or COULD befall black America, than the people who claim they are trying to help them. These are people whose OWN identities DEPEND on certain, definitions of “blackness”, and which react in abusive and violent ways to anyone who wants to redefine them. Look at Spike Lee calling Clarence Thomas “A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom”.

Clarence Thomas is a symbol of what we should all strive to achieve. And he happens to be black. Because, however, he happened to have followed the path of hard work, self discipline, and higher education, he is not black.

What parent, I ask you, does not want their child educated? What parent does not want their child to be successful and admired for visible and useful achievement?

An abusive, narcissistic parent, that is who. This is who is running the so-called “civil rights movement”, which might more accurately be termed the “let’s keep blacks dependent on us forever” movement.

People solve problems, given the chance. The question is not why the black community has not advanced more than it has, but rather: what is preventing the formation of a GENUINE black community, able to address responsibly its own problems, and that is not based on the posturing of fools like Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Barack Obama, or Al Sharpton? Given the chance, this is exactly what would happen and it is to PREVENT this that there is so much demand for government intervention in the lives of black Americans.

Black Americans do not need their “leaders”: their “leaders” need THEM.

Plainly, clinically, there is a strong dose of sadism in the narcissist, and that is nowhere more clear in the failures of the last 50 years to raise up the living standards, and overall quality of life, of black Americans. It is shameful. Absolutely shameful and disgusting.

I need to be doing something else, so I’ll make this quick. First, from my Facebook:

Link discussing Joe Arpaio’s committee’s findings.

Were you aware that immigration files in the National Archives recording overseas arrivals into Hawaii are missing from the week of Obama’s 1961 birthday? Or that the clear evidence is that Obama’s alleged birth certificate, and probably his Selective Service registration, was created digitally? Or that Arpaio’s posse can both document newspaper articles in Hawaii at that time announcing foreign …born babies, and that it also found two cases of foreign born babies being “announced” 3 years after their actual birth? The issue is not whether or not Obama can run, but whether or not there are any conservatives with intact testicles. It doesn’t appear so. Fuck you Rush Limbaugh, goddamn narcissistic airbag. I don’t want campaign strategy: if the fucking truth is out there, then intelligent people can make rational decisions, and if we are all stupid, then we are screwed anyway. Do your job right or go home. That’s always been my motto.

I will add that I have no moral objections to anger. It is often counterproductive, certainly, but I would argue that people who are incapable of anger are incapable of goodness. You cannot be a good person if you are incapable of emoting. Likewise, if you constantly indulge yourself that is not good either.

Second link, in which a famous British non-conformist points out the obvious fact that our President has clearly posted a forgery on the internet, in the largely correct belief that the entirety of the American media complex finds it acceptable to be told baldfaced lies to their face.

I want to be clear: I don’t see this issue as a way to sideline Obama. I don’t care if he was born in Kenya. What I care about is: are our public figures capable of making decisions based on principle, with the principles here being not appreciating being lied to, and the illegality of violating the Constitution.

The “natural born citizen” was in there for a reason. It had meaning. It was meant to ensure at least minimal loyalty to the United States, and here we now have a President whose books may have been written by Bill Ayers, a man pictured standing on an American flag on 9/11 in the New York Times.

It’s worth asking, given the recent account given by Ayer’s mailman, that if he were sufficiently connected to provide assurances to Obama that he could be President 25 or so years before the fact, if Ayers and someone at the New York Times did not have inside informatoin on the attacks.

As I have argued–conclusively in my view–there MUST have been explosives at least in Tower 7. Given this, there was a much larger conspiracy afoot, and in my view it was one involving rich left wing activists, possibly with Russian Communist (Putin is still a Communist) support. Why could Ayers not have known of this?

Our Republic is in danger. In my view, the first and primary cause of that danger is cowardice on the part of people who should know better. If you give an inch, you will give a second inch. If you convince yourself that somes truths don’t matter, you have convinced yourself that the Truth doesn’t matter. In some cases, compromise is death.

If we fall, there will be a lot of finger pointing, and most of those fingers will belong to the guilty. Failure, too, is a group effort.

It occurred to me this morning that we become fully human when we are capable of seeing and owning all the areas of our psyche in which we experience pain. There are rooms in all of our souls where things lie gathering dust, decade on decade. And the detriment to us is that, unseen, these rooms crowd out the possibilities of the ordinary day; they blunt our joys, by feeding our covert fears. They allow us to sleep more soundly, to feel less, experience less, LEARN less, be less, and finally to do less. This, in any event, appears to be my own situation.

In my view, no one else can mute your fears or dull your pain, finally. You can use people in various ways–sex, conversation, distraction–but they can never carry your cross for you; or to the point, help you put it down as unneeded, since you have learned its lesson.

Nor can they feel your joys for you. These, too, you can finally own, once you have cleared the dust from the windows of your soul, and let in the light. This is living.

Finally, I was sitting in my bar last night, alone in a sea of noise as I often am, utterly lost in the sort of trance I go into, and it occurred to me that the solutions to pain have to be specific. There is a barmaid at this place with a pierced nose–the African looking thing that goes through the cartilage separating the two nostrils–and who has apparently decided to stop washing her hair indefinitely so as to grow dredlocks. She is an attractive girl, and I wondered why she is doing this to herself. Why do we see so many “suicide girls”, as I have seen these girls with the piercings and tattoos called?

As I see it–and I have to run and don’t have time to delve more deeply–all of these self inflicted wounds serve the role of helping them feel their pain. They are unhappy. Many of them have likely been betrayed by lovers repeatedly, been demeaned without being offered any emotional sustenance in return. Some have probably been molested. Some had narcissistic parents who inflicted many internal wounds, wounds which they cannot diagnose, which hurt them without any possibility of combating the pain and fear without truly understanding what happened.

So they hurt themselves. They more or less cut themselves in what have been publicly accepted ways, just as Kurt Vonnegut once called smoking a socially acceptable form of suicide. And the tattoos and piercings multiply. The temporary relief gained has a soothing and thus addictive quality.

In my view, though, the only true cure will involve going back and consciously experiecing EXACTLY what led to their pain in the first place.

This is what I was doing last night, for myself, seeing how I was crushed. As I look at my life, I will be candid and admit it is a miracle that I have survived as a more or less psychologically normal human being. It is only thanks to a very strong will, and a very adaptive and agile mind that I survived.

As I process things, I get closer to being a bit more open. I expect some interesting changes this year. I have some good ideas, I think, and it is getting close to time to try them out.

If I were a member of GoldmanMorganAmericaFederalReserve, I would fund the Occupy Wall Street protesters. I would. It’s money well spent. What you get people to do is run around in hysterical loops, vent their energy and frustration in very generic and completely harmless directions. If your enemy is everywhere, then that is where your energy goes. Finite energy spread infinitely is irrelevant.

There is in fact a 1%, and it may well be 1% of 1%, but if people are unable to disentangle corporations in general from those entities which create money from scratch, then nothing concrete or coherent can be done. Not only can it not be done, it cannot be ARTICULATED. It is literally the case that these OWS have the conceit of children that if they hold their breath, they will get their way. This is such a waste.

Consider for a moment that the institution which controls the value of our money, and which is empowered to create unlimited quantities of it to gift to whomever it wants, for any amount of time, is under the control of we know not whom. The Fed is a privately owned corporation, with stocks which more or less have to be offered by the institution itself to member banks, and which are non-transferable. As a privately owned corporation, it could be owned in part by any bank or even government in the world, although it seems likely most owners are domestic. It makes its policy decisions in secret, and without any consultation with any member of Congress, any business leader, or anyone outside of its system, which we must assume is run for the benefit of the members whose names–and thus interests–we are not allowed to know.

We can safely assume that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America are large shareholders. Thus when we read that “The Fed announced X, Y, Z”, we can subtitute “GoldmanSachsJPMorganChaseBankofAmerica” announced today. Or we can substitute “The representative body of the largest banks in America today announced. . .we are going to gift ourselves a lot of money. Or We are making plenty of money, and are going to stay the course. Or, the economy is doing well, a lot of value has been stored up, and we would like a sale. We are therefore going to dump our stock and bond holdings, deflate the currency, then buy things up at fire sale prices. These are their three principle operations.

People need to understand that Quantitative Easing 2, in which something like $700 billion in US Bonds were bought up, masked the decreasing value of our Treasury notes. Given ordinary supply and demand, which are oriented around value seeking and following equilibrium between price and value, the interest rates that the US would be paying on its debt would be rising steadily. Things do not get expensive suddenly: it happens gradually. Homes lose their value over time. Cars lose their value over time.

But this gradual increase, which of course would also imply the increasing risk of default which is plainly present, has not happened. The devaluation of our national stock, the value of the word of the American government, is happening silently, invisibly.

This means that the Fed is at this very moment positioned to radically alter the cost of our debt. If they dumped their holdings, we could see a multiple point spike in the cost of our borrowing within a month or two. It is that bad. And as I have mentioned, there would be no reason we could assume that George Soros himself is not a member of the Federal Reserve.

I will end by refuting a stupid idea one sees here and there, which is that because the “governing body” of the Fed is appointed by Congress that some sort of control exists over the Fed.

The meetings happen in secret. Nobody from Congress can or does attend. Nobody can gainsay their decisions, and most of the time we don’t even know what those decisions are. Do we know who got the $700 billion or whatever in QE2? Of course not.

The American experiment has been a noble one, but we cannot endure this abuse of power indefinitely.

Please use your brain.

As I posted a couple days ago, a mailman for the parents of Bill Ayers–who were of course rich, making Ayers a spoiled rich boy–commented that he met Barack Obama at the Ayers home a decade or more before Obama claims he first met Bill. At that time Obama claimed he was going to be President, on this guys account.

Here is the question that needs to be asked: with whom did he make contact in New York that he had that confidence? We know virtually nothing about Obama’s Columbia years. We can’t even verify that he went there. We have his word for it, and he seems plainly to a truth-optional human being.

David Rockefeller, Jr? The intersection of the Federal Reserve and political radicalism? Who was it? Who has the power to create a twenty year plan to put an undocumented alien in the White House, who can then insert cronies like Leon Panetta into our intelligence and defense networks, who in turn can make sure the right people are in the right places?

Just how foolish are we Americans? There is no courage required to put your head in the sand, and to the extent that courage becomes an extinct virtue, we have no hope, no reason for hope. People who know things need to make decisions. To do otherwise is de facto treason, in my view.

Every horror of the Communists was preceded by exhortations about justice, freedom, and democracy. They say what they need to say, but in the end all the leaders want is power.

As an end note, I was thinking about this yesterday: Vladmir Ulyanov (changed to Lenin when he joined the cult and surrendered his personality) is arguably responsible for more human death than any human who ever lived. All the Communist atrocities of the 20th centuries–and those which may still be planned–can be laid at the feet of the man who led the first Communist coup (to call it a revolution is of course to misrepresent what actually happens in Communist take-overs) and who created the Comintern that enabled so many more coups around the world. Some 100 million dead can be reasonably directly attributed to him.

And again: for WHAT? Communism is just sadeism implemented into a political regime.

I have been trying a new psychotherapy out on myself–always be your own guinea pig–and it seems to be working. I have a benchmark for myself, and when I achieve it, I will post the method and results.

For the moment, I was in the grocery store, and by habit I am one of these fast moving, impatient, irritable people. Someone who has a blog called the Goodness Movement should not be like this, but regretably I am how I am, and not yet how I ought to be. The best I can do most days is recognize it and tone it down.

Yet, today, the thought popped in “no nausea”. Now, I don’t ever feel nausea. I don’t get sick with anything. I don’t even get headaches from hangovers. But I thought about it, and I think for some people–the number is hard to estimate since we are less than fully honest with one another–life is something to be feared, and holding back in anxiety a “rational” reaction to this fact. I do this. I always have. I literally think it started in the womb.

But these reactions must ALWAYS be considered as habits that are provisional, mutable, and which can be altered. It does not matter if literally every waking moment of your life you have had some feeling: it can still be reduced in size, and quite possibly erased as a significant factor in your life. No matter what neuroscientists tell us, I will believe the brain remains plastic, potentially, for the duration of our lives.

That wasn’t the point I wanted to make though. The point I wanted to make was this: Jean Paul Sartre, in his “Nausea”, was pointing to a psychosocial dysfunction not “out there”, not existential in the human condition, but rather something that was definitive FOR HIM. He claimed we choose our own emotions, but one is hard pressed to see why if this is the case he would choose anxiety and nausea.

Rather, I think we need to look at him as a malignant narcissist, almost certainly raised in an emotionally detached and yet emotionally demanding family, and who reacted with clinical narcissism of his own.

Virtually everything he wrote had one purpose: elevating him in the eyes of the masses. Yet, one could easily see clinical sadism in a philosophy which condemns you to freedom without giving you any idea what to do with it; which equates authenticity with morality, and both with anxiety and angst; which in the end insists on perfect conformity to a political doctrine oriented around what I term Cultural Sadeism, of which the Stalinism Sartre and de Beauvoir admired so much was an excellent example.

Why are these people studied by philo-sophers, “lovers of wisdom”? Can not all “philosophies” in some measure be reduced to the psychologies of their creators, UNLESS they are practically valuable in some measurable way for the general population?

Few thoughts.