Month: September 2012

I would like to see Mitt Romney schedule some campaign stops in ghettos.  Obama won’t do it: there’s no money in ghettos, and he doesn’t give a shit about them.  But it would be highly effective symbolically.  And I think he needs to bring ideas.

Here are my own: Kiva.org has already added American small, poor, entrepreneurs to their client list.  Make these contributions tax exempt, and publicize this great organization.

Further, make all business startups within ten miles of a designated “economic development area” exempt from ALL taxation for two years.

Finally, let them choose their schools.  Give them vouchers and let them find what school makes the most sense.  Poor people love this idea.  It is teachers unions and Democrat machine hacks who hate it, as it dilutes their money flow.

Overall, the reality–and hence the truth that needs to be conveyed–is that Republicans will stand by ANYONE who wants to work to improve their life, and that Democrats will stand in their way.  Get this idea out in a big way, and interesting things will start to happen, in my view.

I was watching Thursday football tonight–I will be honest here, and admit beer was involved in this post–and this crazy idea hit me: what if instead of football we dedicated three hours every Thursday and Monday night to substantive policy debates about the future of America?  I know, the future of the most powerful and affluent nation in the history of the world is not exactly “EXCITING”, but what if we could pretend that foreign policy decisions matter, that monetary policy matters, that the fiscal policies of local, State and particularly the Federal government matter?  What if we pretended for some short period of time that the future of our children was important enough for us to tear ourselves away from men in tights throwing an unround ball?

Ludicrous, I know.  We all know that bad things never happen to Americans, and that no matter WHAT we do, everything will turn out swimmingly, since that is what happens in the movies.  We can always rely on that implausible Deus Ex Machina.

Still, lets’ continue down this path to crazyland:

What if we could link up conservatives and self-identified Liberals, not for stupid courtroom dramas once every two to four years, but twice weekly?

What if we debated the future of the national debt, on national TV, twice a week for a month?  Would Americans still be ill informed fucking imbeciles?  No, I doubt it. 

How is it we have become so stupid?  Nightly sleeping pills, delivered by the complicit media. It’s very frustrating, not least because the intelligent can plainly see that the policies advocated in absentia by the media (they never place their voice honestly on things; they just condemn through faint praise actually workable ideas) will work TO hurt most the people they claim they are helping.  The whole thing is a goatfuck start to finish, where NOBODY is helped except the elites who did not need helping in the first place.

Then they lie about it, to themselves, and everyone else, and resent INTENSELY those who fail to join them in their fantastic voyage, one at odds with the realities of those they are supposed “helping”.

Come on, y’all, let’s take a ride
Don’t you say shit, just get inside
It’s time to take your ass on another kind of trip
‘Cause you can’t have the hop if you don’t have the hip
 

Grab your gat with the extra clip
And close your eyes and hit the switch
We’re going to a place where everybody kick it
Kick it, kick it, yeah, that’s the ticket
 

Ain’t no bloodin’, ain’t no crippin’
Ain’t no punk ass nigga’s set trippin’
Everybody’s got a stack and it ain’t no crack
And it really don’t matter if you’re white or black
 

I wanna take you there like the Staple Singers
Put something in the tank and I know that I can bring ya
If you can’t take the heat, get yo’ ass out the kitchen
We on a mission
 

Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, slippity slide
With switches on the block in a ’65
Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, who ride?
No valley low enough or mountain high
 

I’m tryin’ to find a place where I can live my life
And maybe eat some steak with my beans and rice
A place where my kids can play outside
 

Without livin’ in fear of a drive-by
 

And even if I get away from them drive-by killers
I still got to worry about those snitch ass niggas
I keep on searching and I keep on looking
But niggas are the same from Watts to Brooklyn
 

I try to keep my faith in my people
But sometimes my people be acting like they evil
You don’t understand about runnin’ with a gang
‘Cause you don’t gang bang
 

And you don’t have to stand on the corner and slang
‘Cause you got your own thang
You can’t help me if you can’t help yourself
You better make a left
 

Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, slippity, slide
I do what I do just to survive
Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, who ride?
That’s why I pack my 45
 

Life is a bitch and then you die
Still tryin’ to get a peace of the apple pie
Every game ain’t the same ’cause the game still remains
Don’t it seem kinda strange? Ain’t a damn thing change
 

If you don’t work, then you don’t eat
And only down ass niggas can ride with me
Hop, hop, hop your five quickly down the block
Stay suckafree and keep the busters off your jock
 

You gotta have heart, son, if you wanna go
Watch this sweet chariot swing low
Ain’t nobody cryin’, ain’t nobody dyin’
Ain’t nobody worried, everybody’s tryin’
 

Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’
If you wanna have something, you better start frontin’
What ya gonna do when the 5 roll by?
You better be ready, so you can ride
 

Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, slippity, slide
When you’re living in a city it’s do or die
Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage
Slide, slide, who ride?
You better be ready when the 5 roll by

Just roll along, that’s what you do
Just roll along, that’s right
Just roll along, that’s what you do
Just roll along, that’s right
 

Do you want to ride with me? Do you want to ride with me?
Do you want to ride with me? Do you want to ride with me?
Do you want to ride with me? Do you want to ride with me?
Do you want to ride with me? Do you want to ride with me?

The left wants to spin this as a Romney “gaffe” (Oh, he’s so Joe Biden-like, isn’t he?  If we could admit Biden is a fucking moron, of course), and the right wants to spin it as the truth.

The reality is that one could argue that those who get handouts will always want handouts, but I think this is a mistake.  In America, at least since Clinton, our welfare benefits have not really been that generous, from what I can tell.  In Britain you have multiple generations of people where NOBODY has had a job, but I don’t think that is how it works here.  I think single mothers get food stamps, public housing, and in some cases perhaps even a stipend of sorts, but the whole thing pretty well sucks.  It is not good living.  It is not happy living.  It is not “I’m going to go on vacation at the taxpayers expense” money, as they have in Britain and other nations.

We are not, in other words, so far along that we have a FULLY dependent class.  What we have are people who see few jobs in their neighborhoods that are worth a damn, and who tend to drift into poverty and apathy, or poverty and efforts to leverage what good jobs there ARE, which normally is in drug dealing.  High risk, but at least worth it if you succeed.

I think about this song from time to time: Breaking the Law

Here are the relevant lyrics:

There I was completely wasting, out of work and down
All inside it’s so frustrating as I drift from town to town
Feel as though nobody cares if I live or die
So I might as well begin to put some action in my life

Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law

So much for the golden future, I can’t even start
I’ve had every promise broken, there’s anger in my heart
You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t have a clue
If you did you’d find yourselves doing the same thing too

He breaks the law because WHY THE FUCK NOT?  He was promised the good life, a good job, to be taken care of. Everything was supposed to be golden.  But he voted for the good life, and got jackshit.  That is what Obama voters get.

What Romney and Republicans need to focus on is the fact that most poor people want something better, and many–certainly not all–are willing to WORK for it, GIVEN THE CHANCE.  They don’t get the chance, and THAT is why they vote for socialists like Obama.

But whenever they see a real CHOICE, if someone can convince them that they actually will create decent jobs–or to the point of my own political philosophy, not convince job creators not to hire–then Republicans are golden.

Democrats have delivered for Unions, union contractors, and some large campaign contributors.  Everybody else, including the poor, has been shit on and tossed onto the garbage heap.  Every couple years the Dem’s pretend to care about the poor, but they just want votes.

That makes this demographic primed for a take-over, by somebody CLEVER enough, and ARTICULATE enough to pull it off.

Romney, that is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

I can’t claim to know who will win in November–the ninth month in the old Roman calendar–but some things seem certain: the news media will still be highly biased to the Left; entrenched interests will remain entrenched, from those receiving corn subsidies, to banks protected by the FDIC, to welfare recipients, to politicians on one dole or another, to the Federal Reserve; truth will continue to be slanted to serve the needs of the postrational within our educational institutions; and many other negatives, as well as positives, will continue.

For the time being, we retain the rights to free speech, assembly, gun ownership, a fair trial, to vote, etc.  This is to the positive.

What I feel strongly we must look to for a strong, good, future, is a generalized capacity to think.  Within a democratic Republic, nothing can take the place of good thinking.  And I think a case can be made that this capacity has never been generalized anywhere, certainly not outside the educated elites, and our particular malady is that the elites are the worst offenders.

There is so malignant hatred out there, so much venom, so much blindness and deceitfulness, almost all of it on one side of the debate (a fact obscured by the further fact that they invest all their energies accusing their enemies of these traits): it is hard to know how to deal with it.  There is no truth you can speak which cannot, as Kipling had it, be twisted to make a trap for fools.

Generations of fools stand in front of us: generations of leftists who have dedicated their lives and enthusiasms to the task of making government omnipotent.  To what end, they cannot say, but since they long ago renounced concrete improvements in human conditions of life, their sacred duty has become a generalized infantilization of all nations.  Logically, if they can’t help people who are not infants, they CAN help them if they first make them helpless without them.

Again, this is hate, masquerading as love and compassion, and it is hard to know what to do with it.  They want you to quit, they want reason, justice, truth to mean whatever they need it to mean at any given moment.

Here is my truth: you can’t quit, and you can’t use their tactics.  They are good at what they do, which is shrinking minds to the point where they literally believe whatever they are told.  Even if we somehow got everyone to feed such minds accurate ideas, conservative ideas, they would still be infantilized.

We must take the high road.  It is a harder road, and it is an uncertain road.  But it is the only path with dignity, and without dignity, without honor, there is nothing.

Feelings are always rational.  They are responses to what I might call “your sense of self” to environmental stimuli.  They can be altered with cognitive patterns, but when you feel them, they are real, and there is no use pretending otherwise.  That is the path of reason.

What is often called the path of reason is the SUPPRESSION of emotion, purportedly in the name of logic and dispassion.  You cannot be dispassionate: you can merely be passionate consciously, or unconsciously.

To be clear, when you look at someone like Ayn Rand, she was PASSIONATE, but she also had a large quantity of emotions in the background which were completely invisible to her, and made so by her cognitive and emotional habits.

Posted here: http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/16/george-will-fed-on-its-way-to-becoming-the-fourth-branch-of-government/ 


The issue of monetary policy is the missing arrow in the traditional conservative quiver, which otherwise assumes are markets ARE free.  They are not, and it is plain that the malfunctions that leftists blame on “capitalism” are in fact brought on by the part of our system which is a relic of the age when Kings granted monopolies to the connected.  That is all the Fed is: a monopoly on the power to control the trade in and creation of money.

Will is of course right in recognizing the power of the Fed.  What he
apparently has not YET realized is that the Fed initiated the Great
Depression through conscious inflation and deflation of the currentcy. 
Friedman showed this conclusively back in 1960.  Further, though, it
seems to have caused the inflation of the 1970’s, which was related but
not ultimately caused by gas price increases.  And in 2008, it
effectively declared all limits on its power to create and gift money to
whomever it wanted gone.  It granted trillions to FOREIGN banks, which
we only know due to the miniscule auditing capability we do have.

Obama
can’t fire Bernanke, and Congress can’t tell him to quit printing
money.  This is not a branch of government, but a monetary cartel run by
and for bankers, which pretends as needed to be good for the economy as
a whole, but which actually represents the REAL 1%, which is those able
to print and spend money first.

Inflation is theft.  I deal with this topic at length here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

What room is there in a Scientistic culture for sadness?  Is sadness not a flaw in the system, a problem to be corrected with medication or pseudo-scientific “psychotherapy”?  Given, as I suppose, that the way out of sadness is THROUGH sadness, do we not magnify the effects of normal life events over time by suppression?  By pretending that we live in a perfect magic world where sadness and delusion slowly drop away in the service of a superior, and unemotional reason?  That we need not process them?

What would you rather feel, sadness or fear?  It seems to me that, today, in a world where no one can stand to watch Old Yeller anymore (although I will grant “Me and Marley” apparently did well), that fear is easier for most.  And for the “rational” fear is perhaps easier to rationalize.  It is a relic of the fight or flight response; it is an evolutionary adaptation.

I believe, increasingly (and obviously I assert many things on this blog, but in dealing with deep emotion it is hard to be confident in large scale generalizations; this does not mean one should not attempt them in the pursuit of deeper understandings) that fear in our culture increasingly substitutes for sadness.

Take “50 Shades of Gray”,  I hear it is now called “mommy porn”, and can attest to at least one mother of three who appears psychologically normal enjoying reading it at the pool.  I think it was an act of rebellion in an endless process of getting kids from here to there, feeding them, dealing with their crap of all sorts, dealing with the husband, and the thousand things that home makers do.

Such women become sad, not infrequently.  There are often assumed, not appreciated.  How tempting it must be to feel fear–and S and M is sex plus fear of the unknown–in place of that ambient sadness.  Hence that book has set new sales records, and I think has sold the most the quickest of any single book in UK history (as I hear anecdotally on the radio; certainly it has sold many, many millions of copies, and is according to one account has even been sold on large tables in supermarkets; I know I’ve seen it displayed prominently at Target, which is otherwise a bland middle class store not in the business of selling sadomasochistic literature).

The converse of this is that it is hard to justify irrational joy, exultation.  We all feel pride at accomplishment, at the accomplishments of our children.  We feel happy when something WORKS, especially after long labor.  But do we come even close to approaching the amount of happiness we COULD feel?  Do we truly allow our hearts to fill to overflowing?  No: I think most are emotionally timid.  In America at least, as adults, we have a relatively narrow bandwidth of permissable emotions.  I think this is true, but I may be wrong.

Then I get the sense of the scientistic that their worldview enables a profound esthetic appreciation of the universe, of order, of the brilliance of the blind watchmaker, of natural “law”.  Yet, I would contend that what they are feeling is a sense of superiority to matter, through their “understanding”.  They stand apart, gazing, “knowing”, as they feel.  But their own presuppositions prevent this from being a tenable view, finally.  Examined carefully, they are not apart from the universe in any way.  Everything they think, and that they feel, is of a piece with matter.  They are no more free than ants laboring to feed their colony.  They are no more free than pieces of rock duly traversing the sun in their obedience to gravity.

I have no objections to Empiricism.  I want MORE of it, not less.  The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the propositions that we survive death, that we can communicate telepathically, can foresee the future, can see things psychically at a distance from us, and much more.  The problem is not that the data is lacking, but that it cannot find its way into the research arms of “mainstream” universities, and thus get added in what would UNQUESTIONABLY be a useful way to our national and global dialogues.

My short question is this: why invest so much energy in the pursuit of death, when life is an obvious alternative?

Posted here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/romney-stands-comments-video-says-were-not-elegantly-032830339–election.html

I will add that it was AMAZING how quickly HuffPo dropped the riots in the Middle East once it become undeniable that the Obama/Clinton policy will turn out to have been an effing DISASTER.

You really have to grant that the left, having lost the capacity for rational policy making, has not lost a talent for purposive misdirection and name calling.  We KNOW now that Obama’s support for the so-called Arab Spring is going to be a complete disaster.  It is going to put terrorists in charge of nations across the middle east. 

We know that his economic policies have led to the worst recovery in 60 years, at least.  We know that he has racked up more debt in 4 years than Bush did in 8, and that Bush’s spending was ALREADY excessive.  We know he has no plan to save Medicare, and that his plans to radically expand Medicaid and overall healthcare related handouts CANNOT BE PAID for if we took 100% of the annual income of the top 10% of income earners.

We also know that about 47% of Americans pay NO income taxes–many in fact get refunds on money they didn’t put in to begin with–and that they therefore don’t care if taxes get lowered or raised.  It doesn’t affect them.

Romney is right.  And if the Left had any brains they would admit that four more years of the past four years will lead to disaster.  But they don’t CARE about the poor.  That is a rhetorical propaganda device used to trick people.

The more you study what we “know” of Obama, the more it seems to me like this ENTIRE life may have been fabricated out of whole cloth.  We know Barry Sr., the anti-colonial Marxist to whom his book (which he more or may not have written) met his mother, as we have pictures of them together.  We know they married. We know she returned to Washington state to study, and that his “father” stayed in Hawaii.  We know he attended school in Indonesia, where he was listed as both a Muslim and an Indonesian national.  We know he went to  rich kids school in Honolulu, which would have been the same place Mitt Romney would have gone if he had grown up there.  We know he was a pot smoker.  On his own account–and there is no good reason to lie about this–he spent a lot of time with Frank Marshall Davis, and looked to him as a confidant.

Then, the next known data point is his community organizing days in Chicago, after he allegedly went to Columbia, which is roughly 5-6 years after he left Hawaii. Somewhere in there a Pakistani friend funded a trip to Pakistan, apparently.

Then he was at Harvard.  We don’t know if he deserved to be there, or how he paid for it.  We know there were racial tensions when he was there, which likely made electing the first black to the position of editor in the Law Review a very easy political decision.

We know he was offered a contract to write his book/memoir, which was revoked when he failed after 18 months or so.  We know that he tried again, was failing again, and according to at least one biographer finally went to Bill Ayers to help him write it.  This time, the book was written, sold well, and set the stage for his political career.

But there are several large gaps in there, including all the time from when he left Hawaii to when he hit Chicago as an Alinskyite practitioner of Agitation Propaganda.

This reminds me of the moment in “The Usual Suspects” when Chaz Palmintieri realizes that all the names he’s just been given came from pictures behind his desk, his coffee cup, and elsewhere, and that virtually every important detail he has just been given may have been completely fabricated.

As I ponder it, it actually makes sense that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama’s real father.  If there were some way to verify those pornographic images that look like his mother actually ARE his mother, I would say it would be a virtual certainty.  Girls do not let men take pictures like that, then stop short of intercourse, not with a man like Davis, who seems to have had a talent for seduction–due, no doubt, to a lack of conscience and frequent practice, both desirable traits if the goal is getting in a girl’s pants.

It would have made sense for Dunham to have more or less dumped him on his real father when she returned to Indonesia.  And it would make it possible both for the Registrar–or whatever her title is–of Hawaiian public records to say she had viewed Obama’s birth certificate without lying, AND for it to make sense for him to forge a false one, if Davis was listed as his father.

In the era when he was born, having a father who was a KNOWN, card-carrying, unapologetic Communist dedicated to overthrowing the rule of law in the United States would have been devastating to virtually any career he could have chosen.  It may be in part because of that that his mother chose to move him to Indonesia.  When things loosened up in the late 60’s, it might then have encouraged her to return him, so he could grow up with the unique advantages that attend growing up in the United States.

I have said before and will say again that if we survive this era with our freedoms intact, some set of future historians–probably not even that far in the future, perhaps 5 years–will wonder HOW IN HELL did this guy slip through: unqualified as far as what we know, unvetted with regard to what we don’t know, and having had far left associates ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT far back into his childhood.

Tragedy: intact social order, fear, sadness, relief, greater social cohesion

Comedy: intact social order, laughter, relief, greater social cohesion

Horror: broken social order, fear (alleviated in the short term, aggravated in the long term), decreased social cohesion (I will note, too, that tragedies were meant to be watched by groups of rough peers; most modern media consumption is solo or in small groups).

Sadism: broken social order, broken personal order.  Can generate social cohesion only among those equally broken.