Month: May 2012

If I were to ask you how many things you could have perceived yesterday but didn’t, how would you go about answering that question?  In my view, you can’t.  I certainly can’t tell you, and by definition you did not perceive what you did not perceive, so you can’t either.  But can we both agree it was significantly more than what you did perceive?  If you don’t think so, let me widen the parameters a bit:

What could you have realized about an enemy or friend or associate or family member that you didn’t?

What innovation at work could have occurred to you but didn’t?

What color was the sky, exactly, when you drove home, and how much satisfaction could you have realized as a result?

What spontaneous, positive emotions were possible for you, but unrecognized?  How can you know?

What you can do, is try to do better.

General Relativity did not come about just as a result of Einstein’s IQ.  There are people, even today, who are his superior in that regard.  He himself attributed his fecundity to imagination and persistence.

I would submit that the first imaginative act necessary for paradigmatic thinking is the idea that the paradigm may be wrong.  I do not think Einstein was fully original–others, too, knew or suspected that Newtonian mechanics were not quite right–but he was certainly not surrounded by admirers when doing his most seminal work at the opening of the 20th century.  He worked in a patent office and smoked cheap cigars with a small group of like-minded, but nowhere near as bright men.

Talent, the ability to imagine that what you know is wrong, and persistence: in my view, this is the full list of traits necessary for what is called genius.

It occurs to me that banks enjoy a special exemption from the detriments of socialism to private enterprise.  The money they create, which acts to siphon wealth from the private sector as a whole, is not taxable.  They are only taxed on the money they make on the money they create.  For example, if a bank creates $10 billion, and loans it at 5% interest, they are only taxed on the interest, despite the fact that the $10 billion is far more important.  This $10 billion, being inflationary, also creates wealth for them, but virtually no one sees this.  Not one man in a million, as I recall Keynes putting it, although of course he had in mind wealth reallocation via government money printing.  The principle is the same.

This is how to explain the apparently paradox of bankers supporting socialism: it is beneficial to them.  They get to loan money to governments, and corporations–having more of their money taken in taxation–are in greater need of the loans that they make.

As I have said often–scratch that, this may be the first time I’ve said it just this way–my motto is “Every citizen a Capitalist”.  Everyone, top to bottom, should be self employed.  They should capitalize their own businesses with money they save.  All this would be possible, if our system were not constantly leaking wealth to the banking elites.

Why would Wall Street–which heavily funded Obama’s campaign–insist on supposed “reform” (which seems largely to consist in a preprepared slush fund for them to pull from when they get in trouble)?  Why reform themselves?  Public Relations.  Since they benefit disproportionately the Socialism of people like Obama, it was no doubt thought prudent to create the illusion that he was socking it to them.  These people do not become billionaires through complacency or stupidity.  I would suspect they continue to prefer Obama over Romney for this reason, although of course they can work out a modus vivendi with him as well–hence the contributions to him.  If  you have a lot of money, no sense being niggardly (Hey, one could make a news story out of someone using that word; if one were stupid and ignorant): spread the wealth.  It comes back.  It always does.

Or look at the IMF: teeming with Socialists.  Why?  Again, socialism should not be understood primarily as a system of helping people.  It needs to be seem as a TOOL for the most cynical to increase their political power, which is best accomplished by increasing the number of things the government directly controls, which necessarily implies greatly increased burdens on the private sector.

China, currently, embodies ALL the critiques that Marx made of 19th century England.  The workers have no rights, they work long hours in unsafe conditions, and a few–very few–are using their control over this de facto slave system to become ENORMOUSLY wealthy.  Those few, necessarily, are in or close to the supposed Communist Party, which is far more abusive than the class of Capitalists EVER has been in any Western nation.

If you learn to see the world as it is, you see how many of the words floating in the air are pure cow manure.  On a deeper level, you see how few people understand how to cultivate useful, lasting, true happiness, and how many pursue power for lack of a perceived alternative.

In my view, the notion that final truths are possible about “human nature” or even reality is pernicious.  It is not intrinsically pernicious, but rather leads, in the way 4 legged chairs with a leg missing tend to tilt, towards the use of power to compel others to a certain way of thinking.

Take nutrition.  Our nation only became fat when it adopted a nutritional prescription intended to prevent obesity, the notion that fat makes people fat. Once this “lesson” was learned, obesity skyrocketed.  We are still dealing with it today.

Nutrition often acts as a sort of ersatz religion.  Health is inextricably tied in with our mortality, so in some ways nutrition gets at the fundamental strangeness of human life: being here, but knowing this will not last forever, and that we will inevitably lose some large measure of our vitality before the end comes.

As I see it, many people, confronted with mortality, become vastly concerned with shaping out some area of CONSISTENCY, in the face of the randomness of death.  They find a little corner, and hide there, hoping death will find them last.  The need for this corner, this security blanket, this solace: this all leads inevitably to cognitive error.  But the point to be made here is that the error is SHARED.  That is the point of the corner: you are not alone there.  In fact, you have gathered around you in close proximity any number of kindred souls who have found the same hiding place.  This not only offers the comfort of “home”, but also family.

This does in fact serve many useful purposes, and I would propose that to the extent we have a diversity of corners, of opinions, we zig zag our collective way in the approximately correct direction.  This is the point of freedom, of genuine Liberalism.

Yet there exist those who want to impose their corner on the world, who cannot believe themselves that they are right until they have compelled everyone else to adopt the same world view; who in fact think it is there destiny, privilege, burden to share the “truth” with everyone out there.  This is the root of totalitarian thinking.

Academics are most dangerous for a simple reason: they have been taught–by test-taking, by obeisance to authority, by virtue of having substantial intellectual capabilities–that “right” answers exist in the world, and that THEY ARE THE ONES MOST LIKELY TO FIND THEM.

Practically, morality gets DONE every day, all over the world, by people making necessary decisions.  Academics don’t generally get to DO morality, so much as talk about it, about what a better world would look like, what “justice” looks like.

Thus, you have a confluence of people who DO something close to nothing, but who believe in absolute truth, and that they KNOW IT.

Why was the Russian nation–and virtually every nation bordering it–plunged into a nightmare?  Because of this dynamic.

Few thoughts on Woden’s Day.

It’s no use:
putting square pegs into the

ocean.  It’s not that it is round, but
that it swallows
measurement.

As long as you swim, you swim
alone.

Death is life, you see, and life death.

Nice poem for Memorial Day, my last post notwithstanding, and without failing to note and offer gratitude to all the veterans of all our wars, known and covert.

Of all the people in the mornings at the mall,
It’s the old liberators I like best,
Those veterans of the Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino
I see lost in Automotive or back in Home Repair,
Bored among the paints and power tools.
Or the really old ones, the ones who are going fast,
Who keep dozing off in the little orchards
Of shade under the distant skylights.
All around, from one bright rack to another,
Their wives stride big as generals,
Their handbags bulging like ripe fruit.
They are almost all gone now,
And with them they are taking the flak
And fire storms, the names of the old bombing runs.
Each day a little more of their memory goes out,
Darkens the way a house darkens,
Its rooms quietly filling with evening,
Until nothing but the wind lifts the lace curtains,
The wind bearing through the empty rooms
The rich far off scent of gardens
Where just now, this morning,
Light is falling on the wild philodendrons. 

Robert Hedin

I will be blunt: not every life given by a soldier serving our nation serves the cause of liberty.  We use the word to rationalize, and make palatable horrific outcomes: children without fathers, wives without husbands.  Death comes to us all, but to some sooner.

As I look back at the vast devastations of the last century, several things stand out.  First, that World War One was really unnecessary, at least for us.  We did not need to participate.  Multiple genuinely Imperial powers duked it out for 3 long years (I think it was) without us, none of them saints.  We lost some 120,000 dead, and presumably a multiple of that wounded (eyes, legs, arms, ability to be happy, gone).

A credible case can be made that we participated in that war to protect business investments made by JP Morgan.  I will not go into that at length now, but if you think back to your history, you get the Lusitania, but other than that, no credible threat to the US.

Arguably, World War Two came about as a result of the way World War One ended, and it only ended the way it did because WE WERE THERE.  Quite literally, EVERYTHING became worse as a result of our participation, for Americans.  It was better for Europe, of course, at least in the short term, but do we really owe other nations our blood for their foolishness, vanity, greed and ambition?

Both World Wars: unnecessary, for us.  Actually, to be clear, of course World War Two was necessary.  Sooner or later, Hitler would have developed a nuke and dropped it on us, repeatedly.  The Japanese attacked us, so obviously our national sovereignty was put at risk by their actions.  What I mean is that had World War One not happened, World War Two would not have happened, at least in Europe.  I will leave aside considerations of the war with Japan for the time being, not least because I don’t know the history well enough.

Actually, though, China would not have become Communist had the Japanese not invaded.  This is a history I need to learn at some point.

I actually believe that both Korea and Vietnam were more necessary than World War One.  Our interests were at stake, since we faced a global power genuinely intent on conquering–one nation at a time–the world, and the Cold War was a war of public opinion, of military credibility, and of alliances.  We won this war.  Frankly, we also could have won the Korean War outright–China had no nukes at that time–and we DID win in Vietnam, only to to abandon our victory due to the influence of Communists in our government.

Which brings me to our two most recent wars.  As I keep saying, the importance of realizing a larger conspiracy was in place on 9/11 cannot be overestimated.  Given the logistical challenges inherent in planting enough explosives in the right places in three large office towers, undetected, one must assume formidable organizational prowess, planning capacity, covert operational ability, and malice.

Many assume this must have been the CIA.  Certainly, the CIA likely has those capabilities, but do people really want to argue that at the top levels everyone in the CIA wants America to become a totalitarian state?  I don’t think so.  Nor was Iraq such a present threat that any significant number of Americans could have been persuaded that the best means of dealing with it was the mass murder of Americans.  That is why I choose the Russians as the likeliest candidate to have been working with American and other bankers, who would have benefited both by increasing the loans they could make, and in terms of apparently long term objectives of ruling the world.

I alluded to this video earlier.  Here it is, ten minutes of the Aaron Russo video: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/oygBg6ETYIM/nicholas-rockefeller-admitted-elites-goal/

Now, Russo himself was a Republican, then a Libertarian.  You can read his biography here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Russo

One of the themes that dominates debates about wars is pacifism versus what I would term realism.  Some people say all wars are bad.  This would seem to imply that all political regimes are equal, since if you fail to wage war at times, you will lose your political sovereignty at some point, and live by someone else’s rules.  Would you rather have a regular person with common sense morality as a boss, or a violent psychopath?  Only if you view the two as equal can you say all violence is wrong, and war never necessary.

But there is this subtle trick that happens here. Ron Paul gets called a pacifist all the time.  He is not a pacifist: he is simply unwilling to risk and lose American lives for causes that do not genuinely support our way of life and the interests of the American people.

What happens is that those who understand war is sometimes necessary get angry with those who call our troops baby-killers, who call all American use of power overseas necessarily imperialistic, and who want to sugar coat and sanctify the often horrible people running other nations.  These people, those who truly support our troops, in defending our troops and the abstract necessity of fighting wars, will often find themselves defending wars that, if they looked at them analytically, and solely in terms of protecting American lives in the actual United States, they might not agree with.

The war in Afghanistan should have been wound down  back in 2009, not escalated.  We sent troops in to retake areas from the Taliban that they will take back the moment we draw down. There is no point in taking something that you know you will eventually have to give back anyway.  It does seem clear to me that there were in fact terror training camps there, but–and here is the important point–it is IMPOSSIBLE to evaluate what the objective danger of those camps was, until we understand who all was involved on 9/11.

Iraq is the same thing.  I do believe that the nuke program was transported to fellow Baathist (which I think might accurately be called Fascist) nation Syria in the lead up to our war.  How much danger it represented to AMERICA, I don’t know.  I can say that clearly part of our goal was stability in the region for the OPEC nations, and that it would not have mattered strategically to us if we were energy independent, which would be greatly expedited with a LOT more drilling.

In the end, of course I value the sacrifices of our troops.  I have spent years defending them.  It just bothers me that they were better in many cases than the causes for which they gave their lives.  We do not respect and remember them properly if we fail to see this out of convenience or cowardice.  Effective soldiers do not have the luxury of illusion on the battlefield, and neither do we, on the battlefield of ideas.

Short version: our troops are the tip of the spear, but who is at the other end?

I believe I have admitted this, but will again: I do not always know why I write what I write.  Sometimes only later, sometimes much later, do I realize what I myself meant.

Whatever name we give it, there is a place in all of us which understands everything, which operates upon principles and tendencies that became a part of the “real” us at some point, usually in ways we cannot recall.  We mimic our parents, of course.  We mimic movie characters, teachers.  We choose our behavior fully only rarely, and only if we can identify and account for all the latent patterns within us which force us one way or another.

We need to recognize this.  I was listening to a book on CD on “Why we make mistakes”, and one point they made is that when people change their minds about some fundamental issue, they often change their MEMORY of their PAST opinions, such that they were ALWAYS adherents of whatever belief with which they now identify.

Likewise, experiments have been done with hypnotic suggestions that are very mild, such as “scratch your chin whenever you hear the word ‘elf'”.  What they find is that when asked why they did such and such, they believe that it was their intention.

For this reason, I think it is important to have this category “don’t know”.  I don’t know why I said that.  You must be OK with this ambiguity, if you really don’t know, as the alternative is abusing the truth.  You are not just not telling the truth: you are creating a real, nearly ineradicable false reality when you insist on clarity and consistency that is NOT THERE.

A metaphor I have often used for myself is from traditional Japanese kenjutsu, which is the art of the sword, specifically (normally) the katana.  When you swing, it is nothing like the motion of a baseball bat.  With a bat, you need power.  With a razor sharp blade, you need the right sort of motion, which needs power, but far more importantly a quality of motion of the blade.  When you swing, therefore–and strike or attack may both be better words–you swing through the target, but only barely.  If you were trying to cut someone’s torso, you swing perhaps 6″ at most–and that’s likely too much– past where the opposite side of their body would have been if you had hit.  This prevents you from falling off balance, and from creating an opening for an attacker by foolishly offering up a weaponless, undefended target.

The point here is that you move, then you stop, all while retaining a clear sense of balance and rhythm. Perception is like this.  I was thinking about this yesterday, and I think for me a perhaps accurate metaphor for my engagement with perception–with the pursuit of truth–is that of a hunter, or a swordsmen chasing down endless opponents.  Musashi taught that the essence of his teaching was to always think of cutting.  For someone cultivating the process of perception you must always be looking for the essence, the detail or generalization that will grant greater understanding; and you must always be learning to ignore the trivial and/or misdirections with which the universe and the people around us perennially confront us.

Done properly, this is a daily battle that makes life interesting.  That’s my view, at any rate.

As I have often remarked, it is interesting that serial killers have become heroes.  I wonder to what extent modern culture has made all of us wear masks of passive niceness covering deeply seated aggressions we don’t know how to express or even share publicly.  I read once where settlers in the West, perhaps Utah, executed a murderer, skinned him, and made boots out of his skin.  Violence is nothing new, and has often been expressed publicly in the past, by the group.

Leaving that aside, I wanted to focus on an aspect of this.  I think we have all felt the urge for the great to fail; for the “hero” to falter.  That hero represents both an ideal and a challenge.  If the hero fails, then we can rest more comfortably in who we are.

More deeply, though, I think when we are unhappy we want others to share in it.  This is the essence of Schadenfreude.  There is this motion towards tearing down.

Here is the point I want to make, though: that tearing down applies to us, too.  It is possible in this life to very happy, to have frequent, nearly continuous moments of contentedness, of satisfaction.  But only if we attach ourselves to them.  When we cut down others, we sever the connections we otherwise might have had in the direction of our own happiness.  We pull out knives that work in hidden ways on our own psyche and potential.  We are psychological serial killers: every moment of joy is killed in its infancy, by something angry.

This certainly true of me, and I may be projecting on others.  I have reached a point where I can see with reasonably clarity who I REALLY am, ugliness and all–my shadow, if you want to use Jungian terms.

You cannot kill ugliness.  You cannot will it out of existence.  As I see it, it is dissolved with progressively greater doses of light, of which truth telling is the principle or at least first manifestation.

We all find, to some greater or lesser extent, comfort in repetition, in doing the same thing repeatedly, perhaps even in redundancy and repetition?  What is repetition, but creating a pattern in chaos.  Squirrels come hard-wired to climb trees, copulate, and store nuts.  People are nearly entirely “user defined”.  One function of culture, of course, is to provide a behavioral template.

But even though the apparently order of repetition–say going to a bar every Saturday and church every Sunday–is illusory, isn’t it?  It could be some other way.  This is what it feels to me like the Existentialists–none of whom seem to have been very clever–thought an original insight.

I don’t even think you can say that what comforts us, we repeat, unless we define comfort as ANY form of anxiety and confusion release. Quite often what we repeat is bad for us, but it worked once, so we continue.  This order is preferable to an unstable peace.

I am increasingly persuaded that I have been insufficiently paranoid.  If you read prominent, mainstream academics and public officials, they are skeptical of democracy, of the “people”–most of whom are not decreed and pedigreed like they are–and of the possibility of a positive future unless they run everything.

If you doubt this, read this article, which was very eye opening for me: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

Some of the most prominent “ethical” thinkers–including some of Obama’s Czars–seem only able to justify the very existence of the human race with difficulty.  This is not paranoia: this is the content of their thinking, and these people hold the highest posts in the best universities, and HAVE INFLUENCE.  Certainly, granted the existence of the human race, they want it tightly controlled, since we are supposedly using all the resources of the planet.  This argument, of course, is as old as Malthus, and amounts to the argument that increasing wealth will cause decreasing wealth.  It ignores the role of price in resource allocation (this is a common, perhaps definitive, failing of socialists).

Anyway, some years ago Aaron Russo, who was quite active in the entertainment business, claimed that he had been told by his then-friend Nicholas Rockefeller that the plan was to imbed all Americans with RFID chips, and turn them off (cut them off: imagine that your credit card is in your chip; you can walk into the store and out with whatever you want and have it automatically tallied; that technology exists today) if they misbehave.

Here is a website which promotes his movie, Freedom to Fascism (which I have not watched, but likely should): http://freedomtofascism.com/

Anyway, all of this came back to me when I read this story: ww.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Students-will-be-tracked-via-chips-in-IDs-3584339.php#ixzz1vsssNfl7

The net is that a high school is going to use RFID chips in high school students ID cards, to keep track of them.

Let us imagine would-be totalitarians as pedophiles.  I don’t think the psychological dynamics are all that different, with clinical narcissism up to and including full blown sociopathy being common.  What do pedophiles do?  They “groom” their targets.  They start with small inappropriate things, then act as if the intended victim is misbehaving if they object.  They continue to violate boundaries, until the victim loses a sense of self, and the ability to object, even though they don’t like what is going on.

We all know you start with the kids if you want to build a different society.  We all know the society being built today in most schools is not a good one.  But the one being proposed here is one in which kids are being groomed to be monitored 24/7–for their “safety” of course (even though there has likely not been one act of violence on any of them in some time; or at least one that could have been prevented with a chip).

As I have argued, I believe the TSA sexually molesting everyone from kids to grandmothers unable to walk is a part of this grooming process.  I believe their VIPR patrols, which in a categorically unConstitutional fashion claim to be able to stop, detain, AND SEARCH anyone traveling on public transportation ANYWHERE.  This is not just a clear violation of the Federal and State functions, but a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  CLEARLY.  There is NO ambiguity here.  This is EXACTLY what the Bill of Rights was intended to protect us from.

And on that note, it is interesting that less than two weeks or so after Rand Paul announced plans to work to end the TSA the CIA “found” a double agent–who knows who he actually works for–with a better underwear bomb, so now the TSA can say “look, we are really protecting you.”  Bullshit.

There are some 650 million people who travel on a commercial jetliner annually.  Since Sept. 11, 2001, how many have died in terrorist attacks?  Not one.  How many credible attempts have there been?  In my view, not one, since neither the shoe bomber nor the underwear bomber had, in my estimation, bombs that could have taken down an aircraft.

So let’s multiply that out.  Between 9/11/01 and for simplicities sake let’s say 9/11/09, which is roughly when the Obama Administration decided to start doing the nutsack and vagina searches, there were 5.2 BILLION individual flights.  Not one death.

Look at this list of causes of accidental deaths: http://listosaur.com/miscellaneous/top-5-causes-of-accidental-death-in-the-united-states.html

In the same time period choking killed some 20,000 people, fire killed some 21,000 people.  Falls killed 200,000 people.  Poisoning (including drug overdose), killed 310,000 people.  And car accidents killed 336,000 people.

How do we compare the risk of terror attack with these other risks?  We can’t.  The risk is not statistically zero: it IS zero.  For this, we are forced to choose between having a nude photo taken of us or getting sexually molested by a paid pervert?

I am not prone to conspiracy theories, but it is my increasing conviction that Prison Planet is closer to the truth than Fox; or at least much closer than the more complacent among us would like to admit.

To be clear: these academics, like Hitler, have MAPPED OUT what they want to do, in writing, and in public.  And most of them are seemingly conscienceless, despite constant outward hand-wringing.  Morality, to them, is an abstraction, and the worst of crimes easily rationalized.  Most of them are clinical narcissists.