Month: May 2012

It would be a very short list, would it not, if one were to inventory the hiphop songs about marital fidelity, sincere love, and the value of long term honest hard work.

If we posit that one can understand cultures through music, is it that hard to grasp how black people–the primary originators of hiphop, and the predominant consumers of it–constitute 40% of our prison population, despite being only some 12% of the population as a whole? 

Culture matters, and culture is transmitted perhaps most directly by parents, and then music.  Corrupt either or both, and you get failure.

We all live, to some greater or lesser extent, in varying worlds of illusion.  We lie to ourselves, about ourselves.  It seems to me that we deal with many false “selves”.  It seems to me, though, that we can reasonably infer we are dealing with our true selves, when we tell ourselves the truth, even when that truth requires laying aside as immature and weak crazy images of ourselves that made sense, long ago.

Most of us live many lives even in the one we can see, don’t we?

This is a paraphrase with addition of some interesting sections of the Tao Te Ching.

Renounce sainthood.  There are no saints on this earth.  Everyone you meet has something to teach you, and you have something to teach them.  Learn what you can, teach what you can: the rest is either chance or illusion.

I was driving home tonight, thinking about worship.  I drank a few beers, and had some nice conversations with 3-4 people.  Driving home, it felt like what I was meant to do.  I have many things to process, and this seems to be, for now, a method that is working.

Then this peace entered me, and I felt a very light, very happy touch on my heart, and realized worship is really nothing but offering a bowl which is then filled without effort with friendship and laughter. The singing, sacraments, Eucharist, praying:  all for social reasons, nothing more or less. They make people feel less alone, less confused.  They empower the weak to demand suffering of the non-conforming. They rape women, virtually and actually, and torture young children.  They demand wars, and refuse peace.

This is how I see most organized religion, despite the fact that I am often a defender of the religious against those who have the same flaws, and yet lack even the few virtues religion does cultivate.  The cult of Leftism is the most obvious example.

I got home, and walked my two dogs, who pooped 5 times.  I only had two bags.  I try to be responsible, but there are limits.  It was annoying.  My “worship” ended.  As I see it, very few New Age teachings have room for 5 craps and two bags, despite the fact that that is the frequent experience of most of us.

That is my goal: a “religion” for five craps and two bags.  It is actually funny, if you think about it.  Humor: the tone of God.

I will add: who can believe that God cares if men stick their dicks in vaginas or male anuses, if both parties benefit?  Who can believe that God cares how often we go to church, how much we drink, or that God can fail to understand those who suffer and make bad decisions as a consequence?  The Light: it sees all.  You cannot hide, and if you have nothing to hide, then it is Comfort and Joy itself.  This is my view; this is my experience.

If you understand the scientific method, it does not deal with “truth”, but rather repeatable and replicable measurements.  From those measurements–of gravity, of energy, or whatever–models are built that are never, formally, final.  Force=Mass times Acceleration is not final.  Nothing is ever understood, formally, as permanent.  This lack, this gap, this formal refusal to close any door finally, is what enables progress.

If some Church of Human Cultural Protection had declared Newton’s Laws as final, Einstein never could have proposed General Relativity.  If the nature of subatomic particles had been declared “unknowable”, we never would have had quantum physics.

The problem, in our current era, is that we have advanced to a point where many supposed scientists, and particularly their “lay” polemicists, want to declare certain areas more or less done.  They do this because there is a fundamental human urge or tendency to want “reality” to be fixed.

Now, in my view, it is quite likely that we will never as individuals EVER have a grasp of “reality”, whatever it is, in this lifetime, and possibly ever.  If one is going to take the method of science and deploy it culturally, it has to be done so with humility, and an ACCEPTANCE of the fact that there is much about this universe we may never know, but that many, many things are repeatable and measurable.

Oi: I am physically tired from some hard physical work.  I wanted to write this, to get some very rough ideas down, but seem to be faltering.  There may yet be something useful here for someone.

Actually, I will add this last thought: I don’t like the word truth.  The word I like is useful.  Ideas are not true or untrue; they are useful or useless, with both bookending a continuum in between.

Formally, what I am proposing is a de facto default.  This should be obvious.

My whole proposal also depends upon wholesale reform of the banking system.  We can get everything socialists want, though Capitalism, but only if we deal with the banks.

Post from here: http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/05/23/in-europe-time-for-plan-b-only-theres-no-plan-and-no-time/tab/comments/#comment-451562

I have a plan. It is a simple plan that depend on realizing only two things: 1) money is not real; and 2) the only reason that ANY modern nation has financial problems is that money creation, i.e. inflation, takes money out of the pockets of ordinary citizens.

Greece presumably has a central bank.  That bank needs to print up enough drachma to declare their debts settled.  They then need to revalue the drachma such that it is tied to the dollar or gold.

If there are any adults in Greece, they then need to reform the system such that they work the same hours and number of years as everyone else, because no one will any longer be willing to fund their lifestyle, but they will have been given a second chance.

Cry not for the German bankers: they make money out of nothing too.  This just flips the currentcy (sic) direction.

I deal with this idea at some length in my treatise, here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

My inclination normally, when seeing this phrase, is to think of the Eagle’s song “Get over it”.:

Complain about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick it’s little ass

Now, what’s interesting about this is that when they did their Hell Freezes Over tour, they literally, in my understanding, had to pay someone to pass notes and messages between them, as they refused to speak face to face to one another, their terrific harmonies on stage notwithstanding. (note to self: needed a few, more, commas, in that sentence).

As I grow older though, and I think get more perspective on my own emotions, it seems to me that this concept of the inner child has some merit.  On occasion, I get deep enough within my own self that I feel as though I am lying underneath my emotional self, separate from it, and that I can feel it, see it, process it, as it is.  And frankly in most respects I am not the sort of person I would want to be.  There is ugliness in me that I hate to see, but must admit.

It is truly astonishing how deep and pervasive and long lived illusions about your self can be.  We think we are one sort of person, and can live out a life, easily, without ever grasping who and how we really are.

The value of the “inner child” idea is this: it is a place holder for the notion that at some point in our lives we stop–or never begin–processing emotion honestly, directly, spontaneously.  We equate our selves with how the world sees us, or how we feel we must be seen by the world.  We equate ourselves with goals and accomplishments that are compulsive, the energy for accomplishing which does not arise from our selves, but from other people, from persuasion, from illusion.

To win is not the best end to strive for.  To accomplish, or to experience quantitatively (I saw 42 world landmarks last year, and visited 27 countries) is not the best end.  Checking off lists is not the best end.

What to me seems worthwhile is the learned capacity to feel deeply, and in particular to feel spontaneous positive feelings deeply, and in response to normal, routine stimuli, like cool days, warm days, cloudy days, clear days, rainy days, sunny days, around pleasant people, and around challenging people.  It is far easier to make your world interesting than to seek out an interesting world.  You have far less competition, too.

Most people stop feeling at some point.  I don’t know why this is, if it is a peculiarly modern thing, or if it dates back to the earliest moments of culture.  As I have often remarked, it is interesting how many songs talk about losing the ability to feel.  As one example, Lady Antebellum’s “Need you now”: “Yes Id rather hurt than feel nothing at all.”

One can accurately, I think, look at all the death metal, speed metal, Marilyn Manson, punk rock, etc. as expressions of a need to feel something while in the throes of an emotional apocalypse.  It is so hard to see what is not there, which in this case is the capacity for the expression of innocent, constructive, meaningful, satisfying emotions.

You cannot blame your childhood for adult dysfunction.  You must force yourself to do your job.  At the same time, I think a life lived without down time, without leisure, lounging time, is almost necessarily going to be wasted.  That is when you re-create yourself.

Thus, this idea of the inner child is not an excuse, but it is rather an opportunity to look back, to realize that you lost something useful, something valuable along the way.  The concept is not a regression into helplessness and irresponsibility, but rather what for most people will be an advancement into the ADULT expression of primary, honest emotions.

Hopefully that makes sense to someone.

We have been reading, over the last week or two, how JP Morgan “lost” $2 billion.  Presumably, this was from the London trading office, but it was never clear to me, and irrelevant to the point I want to make.

According to the Financial Times, their net profit (note this is profit, not revenue, which was some 27 billion) for the first three MONTHS on 2012 was some $5.4 billion.  That means they were tracking to net some $22 billion on the year.  Why was there so much press over a “loss” of a mere $2 billion? 

That this was a story is itself a story.  That the media ran with it the way they did indicates to me that they were more or less given direction to run with the story.  For its part, JP Morgan clearly did not suffer from this revelation.  My best guess is that they continue to want to get burdensome regulations put on smaller banks that will reduce effective competition, and enable them to corral yet more of the market.  They needed some lead-in to give the usual suspects, the paid politicians, some reason to shout about regulating the banking industry.

Truly, the stupidity of the press on this and nearly every other topic is quite breathtaking.  I am not willing to believe they are all complicit; their complicity is simply not needed, their buy in is not needed, when all you have to is spin them three times then set them off in whatever direction you choose.

A herd of cattle would at least not do us the disservice of pretending to inform us.  Silence is preferable to misdirection, most of the time.