Month: March 2012

http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/postman-ayers-family-put-foreigner-obama-through-school/?cat_orig=us

Interesting that the Drudge link was disabled.

It may literally be the case that our President is a Kenyan born Indonesian national who has been living and working in the United States illegally for 20 or more years, and who could literally be deported for it. He could also likely be arrested for fraud because of his use of a false Social Security card.

On that last point, to be clear, if he used that number to apply for work with a roofing or landscaping company, he would not be hired, as it doesn’t pass muster as a valid SSN.

In researching this last, though, interestingly, just in the LAST THREE YEARS courts have started deemphasizing the criminality of using a false SSN.

You have to KNOWINGLY use SOMEONE ELSE’s number, or put someone else’s name on there. If it is just fake, then it’s not that big a deal, if it has your name on it.

All the same, if we survive this period of history in freedom and the truth comes out, I think it will be astonishing how little we knew about a man we entrusted all our secrets to.

In another example of how little we know about Obama, a postman who had Bill Ayers family home on his route describes meeting a young Barack Obama back in the 1980’s, who told him that he was going to be President, and who said that the Ayers (who were quite wealthy and left wing) were putting him through school. For her part, Ayers mother described him as a “foreign student”, which makes sense, since the last citizenship we can confirm is Obama’s Indonesian citizenship, listed on a school application that is extant (perhaps because record scrubbing is harder overseas).

Here is a link, that appears to be getting interfered with by unknown internet forces: http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/postman-ayers-family-put-foreigner-obama-through-school/

Here is another link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_the_mailman_knows_about_ayers_and_obama.html

For those who have been watching this issue, it comes as no surprise. Ayers got Obama into the Chicago political scene in the Annenberg Foundation, and it has long been speculated that they must have had a prior relationship.

A credible case can be made that Ayers was the actual author of both of Obama’s books, since Obama is a dunce and almost certainly could not have written them alone.

I would like, however, to focus on one small detail, the fact that Ayer’s father–a very successful business executive–thought with absolute certainty that he could speak and act for the ordinary working man, without even ASKING ANYONE what it was they needed or wanted.

This basic conceit is that of the narcissist, who thinks their way is the only way, and that whatever makes THEM feel better, must be good for EVERYONE. They literally conflate their own sense of satisfaction with the general good. This is a universal trait among totalitarians; and remember in this regard that Bill Ayers and his group talked openly about murdering ten million Americans. This is the man who may have done more than any other to put Obama in our highest office.

One wonders, if we do lapse into tyranny, if there is one member of the Supreme Court or Congress–whose job it long has been, among others, to ensure the qualifications for office of Presidential candidates–who will feel shame in having failed so utterly. There are many fingers.

But anyone, anywhere, who failed to do their job, is responsible. Period. There is no ambiguity in this. Personally, at the back end of a successful defense of our freedoms in the civil war that may yet come, I would have a lot of people shot, and many more jailed, as de facto traitors. I don’t care what the cause of their cowardice is: it is unAmerican, and unequal to the traditions laid down by those who died for us. Anyone whose inaction causes injustice or tyranny is guilty of complicity.

It is best to avoid falling into all forms of fixity: postural, behavioral, cognitive, emotional. The world is much richer when you are able to greet every dawn as a unique miracle, to be approached as an individual, one-time, not to be repeated event.

As I look at my own history, and learn, it occurs to me that it is quite possible to pass from birth to death without ever learning how to learn. It is in fact so common that it might be termed the default outcome.

There was a long time I wanted to be in the military. I enlisted in the Air Force when I was about 19, but they wouldn’t take me. I got booted out of MEPS. I tried to get into Marine ROTC, but they would not take me either. My eyesight was too poor.

As I see now, what I wanted was an external framework to build within me the rigidity to avoid facing my emotional conflicts. When you are in a behaviorally small, conformist, and demanding environment, the little voices inside of you can readily be silenced. And having once done it, I think many people cross lifetimes like that.

Please do not get me wrong: there is huge value in self discipline. All the spiritual traditions and most cultural traditions are in accord on this. We read that some one third of CEO’s nationally are former Marines. That is a huge number.

The point I am trying to make pertains to me, certainly, but I suspect others as well. It is that we need to beware of easy fixes to deep emotional conflicts. As annoying as it sounds, particularly for men, sometimes we do need to admit a lack of control, a lack of the ability to form a clear plan of action, and even a lack of genuine hope that things will get better. I think that admitting these things is how light gets back in.

I have “Don’t whine/don’t complain/don’t make excuses/Never quit” tattooed on me. I get the desire to refuse to “wallow”. It has kept me going. The first three come from John Wooden’s father. But to the point, he clearly came from a wholesome, loving family, in which everyone felt they belonged, and in which there was clarity as to roles.

Genuine, useful discipline comes from a well tempered desire for the pleasures of accomplishment. It is a simple extension of the perception that most things in life that are worth having require work and delayed gratification.

The type of discipline which is bad is that in which no deep emotional expression is allowed (anger and envy likely being OK for most men, but nothing else), and in which the focus is on work precisely to keep this from happening. You can be a highly successful lawyer, or doctor, or business executive like this, and yet still feel misery, and feel the need for “hits” of power, prostitutes, and booze to silence that inner voice that is starved for attention and recognition.

Persistent failure can only be the mark of persistence.

A parent who is narcissistic wants their child to be just like them, to be an extension of them, and, in the spirit of latent but very real violence, to serve as the repository for all of the unprocessed emotional needs they feel the need to “outsource”. In a broken child, the parent/child is an emotional complex in which neither exists fully.

I was thinking, though, about traditional cultures. Let’s take a Sikh family from the Punjab. There are certain expectations for both boys and girls, certain ways of being, of dressing, of relating to others. There are certain beliefs that one is expected to share, and ritual and traditional roles to play.

Is a father’s demand that his son internalize these roles narcissistic? No, in my view, for the reason that these are generalized roles, and the son is being acculturated for inclusion into a tribe, a group of people who share the same ideas and values. The “narcissism”, and I am expanding the word here, is that of the WHOLE GROUP.

In our Western family, we have one father, one son, and a tribe of two (I am simplying the numbers for clarity; self evidently there are usually mothers, siblings, grandparents, etc.). In our Punjabi family, we have a tribe that is quite large, probably in the millions, although of course there are likely hundreds of sub-tribes, which account for regional variations of various sorts which are both class and geographically determined.

Given this setup, I got to thinking about ethics. For a Punjabi Sikh, there are certain absolutes. Values are listed on a proverbial card, and there is no need for individuals to interpret them, outside the legal parameters provided in their culture. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and the sanction for ignoring either BEGINS with social exclusion and shame.

In a two person monad, where one person has effectively stolen the spirit of another, there is no ethical content whatever, outside conformity to the mutable wishes of the pupper master. This, I would submit, is roughly the cultural substrate of what gets called multiculturalism or moral relativism.

Now, the broader point I wanted to make is that I don’t think any ethical absolutes with very specific content (thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife) will INVARIABLY result in what is best for all involved. I therefore reject moral absolutes.

Yet, plainly judgement is often needed. If you are unwilling to speak up, you are at some point going to contribute to evil.

Historically, morality was encoded in external behavioral codes. But today I would reference our psychological culture and submit better is possible.

Specifically, I have somehow wound up in a position where I am again reading self help books and benefiting from them. This is a surprise.

You read “he said this, and I felt that, harkening back to when I . . .” and on some level I want to shout “shut the fuck up and deal with it.”

Yet, when I look at my own behavioral limitations, I plainly need this sort of thing. Where in some other day and age I would have been told who to be and how to be, now I must create an autonomous self that makes its own decisions based on chosen principles.

I would submit this is progress. The moral ideal is for each individual to interact with every other individual not as subject to external absolutes, but as subject to the well being of both individuals. Morality is something that is constantly negotiated, with no final answers possible or desirable.

We are currently in a stage culturally where we (the westernized world generally) have rejected many external behavioral standards–particularly those associated with religion–but lack collectively the psycholgical maturity to negotiate with one another in substantive ways. Practically, people trade one set of absolutes for another. Try reasoning with a dogmatic leftist or atheist. It can’t be done.

In my view, leaving behind the chains of absolute moral codes is a good thing, but that brings the problem of narcissism to the fore.

Let me offer another thought on this topic. In large measure, narcissism is the result of unprocessed emotion, things felt by the child that the man lives but cannot remember.

Prior to all the technology surrounding us, most people spent a lot of time in silence. In silence, you cannot still persistent thoughts. I think a credible argument can be made that many people stop short their emotional development process simply because they CAN, because the endless distractions made available to modern man work effectively to silence unwanted emotion. What is Twitter, but a way to reach out to others and kill time, without saying anything substantive, or truly connecting with anyone? It is emotional styrofoam: plastic, dry, tasteless, lifeless.

Thus in a time when we need to be becoming more emotionally intelligent, we are getting dumber. This is not a necessary outcome.

Overall, we do seem to be much less brutal than previous generations of humankind. The cultural/tribal narcissism that enabled, say the conquest of the American Indians, or the Chinese invasion of Tibet, has largely faded. The old tribal bonds have loosened.

We do need to look forward, though, to something new, untried, and likely better than anything we see looking backward. Those who would return us to Feudalism are acting as narcissists, unable to differentiate between their own emotional need for control and order, and what is actually needed by humankind.

This is rambling, as I tried to incorporate multiple ideas, but I am tired and do not want to edit it. What normally in any event happens with me, is the same ideas will get developed on separate lines, and posted on at a later date. Hopefully this is useful to someone.

A fifteen year old outshines 99% of Ph.D’s in economics.

I’m not big on videos, but if that is how you prefer to learn, please watch it, then share it. He has literally isolated the entirety of our economic and following political problems.

I posted some time ago on the social costs of the Federal Reserve/Fractional reserve banking system. They include virtually every source of suffering extant in our nation today, including poverty, unemployment, racism, unaffordable healthcare, and the national debt.

My own solution is a bit bolder than just going back to something we had before, but getting just this knowledge out generally will change our political landscape, and hopefully get the bastards in New York at some point under control. There is a thin line between being a dreamer and being stupid. In this case, he has proposed nothing but a return to the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the value of our labor rose steadily. This is demonstrable, empirical fact.

Virtually every economic idea has been tried at some point. The only one that works every time is free markets and sound currency.

The only one that in my understanding has never been tried is 100% reserve banking. I have no desire to abolish banking in the form of actual capital accumulation and the charging of interest. I have a desire to abolish banks risking MY money for their own profit, particularly when they also ask me for MORE money when they lose it. Our system is nuts.

Look at this article, then read the rest.

I think it is important to note that the various dystopian scenarios–1984, We, Brave New World–should not be seen as having suddenly come into being, but as having been accepted gradually, with the acceptance of each step being so much more emotionally easy than active resistance, that soon the framework is in place. This is the essence of Fabian gradualism: the frog in the boiling pot. Large s…egments of 1984 are already upon us. We look at the internet as freeing us, and it does do that, but it also eradicates the possibility of freedom from spying. The government can already turn on your cell phone invisibly and use it as a bug. If your computer is on, and on the internet, they can see it, and everything on your computer. If you have a cell phone, they know where you are.

From this basis of technology, a more or less perfect surveillance state can and has been built, largely on the basis of needing to combat “terrorists” who seem nowhere to be found. I thought those who argued in 2001 that the attacks would be used to build a surveillance state were being paranoid, but I no longer believe that. Power that can be abused, WILL be abused. This power has been accrued, so absent aggressive and effective Congressional utilization of our Bill of Rights to combat it, the next step is a certainty. When, I can’t say, but it is not a question of if.

As I mention from time to time, I can never rely even on topical and polite posts to make it through moderation, so since I take the time to type them, I repost them here so I’m sure they will at least appear somewhere. Here is the original link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-14/watch-bernanke-s-little-inflation-capsize-u-s-amity-shlaes.html

Inflation is a vitally important topic. As an extension of the overall concept of monetary policy, I think it is at the core of what everyone needs to know about economics.

Here are a couple of vital points, generally missed by the public and the people who are supposed to understand these things:

1) Inflation is always wealth transfer. It moves, invisibly, the ownership and value of real goods and services from one place to another. Take the case of Weimar Germany. The inflation was VASTLY helpful to the German government, German industrialists, and to everyone who owned means of production. All of them had borrowed enormous amounts of money in the war, and all of them were able to pay their debts easily in inflated notes. Quite simply, absent the inflation if the early 1920’s, the Third Reich could never have been created. People forget that the inflation was brought under control nearly instantly by a man named Hjalmar Schacht, who I think we might call the German Keynes, simply by pegging the value of the mark to something outside Germany. I think it was initially tied to the pound or dollar, then some value of gold.

Inflation was created to transfer wealth from ordinary Germans, in the form of a tax they did not understand, then stopped when that transfer was complete. As I understand the matter, the only reason they did not also pay off their war reparations was because those had to be paid in gold and other real goods.

2) Even though the Fed is uniquely empowered to create money, per se, most price inflation is created as a result of the fractional reserve banking system. Every dollar the Fed creates can, in a hot economy in which a lot of people are borrowing money, create some 20 more dollars as a result of bank pyramiding. That is how Bernanke can increase our money supply by a third or more, and us still not see price inflation. What the Fed does is primary, though.

I deal with these topics at greater length in a treatise I collated for the Occupy Wall Street people. It includes a proposal to democratize inflation to pay off all of our debts. Inflation normally only benefits power elites, but it is a double edged sword, whose polarity can be reversed. Here is that treatise: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I keep reading where Paul will torpedo Romney. I don’t think this is the case, since virtually all Ron Paul stickers I see are accompanied by other bumper stickers I would normally associate with the Left. There are plenty of tree huggers who love him because he will undo the Patriot Act, and stop what they see as the fascism that started with Bush.

Yet, the fact remains that he has made the boldest, most inclusive CONSERVATIVE proposals in my lifetime to reduce the government, reduce spending, and redistribute power to more local jurisdictions.

Why not make a deal? Why not select a DEMOCRAT as a running mate? Why not work out some hybrid, quid pro quo platform that gets conservatives most of what they want, but also gets the left something they want?

As I keep saying, if we can enact a sound monetary policy, everything else will work itself out. I actually think that given Capitalist innovation in conditions of monetary stasis, that something like Socialism is affordable, because wealth would be generalized.

On the extreme end, of course, you have my Capitalist Revolution, but if that is ever discussed seriously, it will be because we are hanging at the end of a rope over hungry sharks. Still, that is on our itinerary, so it is not out of the question. It worked for Weimar Germany–for SOME people, of course–so why not us?

Edit: here’s the campaign slogan: “Storm the Center!!!!”