Month: September 2012

There is an unexamined assumption that a properly “designed” society is safe.  You are free from the risks of unemployment, physical injury, war, natural disaster, etc: substantially everything but death, and they are working on death (literally: the plan is to “download” our personalities, presumed to effectively be software, onto non-perishable hardware, and to live forever; to what purpose, I don’t think they can say).

But I would question this assumption.  Why do people ride motorcycles?  Is it to increase safety?  Why do people snow ski, or climb mountains?  As I have posted earlier, the research clearly shows that children who are not exposed to real risk–which in any large demographic will lead to real injury, even death–are less meaningful (my word) as adults, less able to wrestle with ambiguity, less able to manage fears, less able to march forward towards the Sun.  I picture them huddled down, near the ground, unable to stand up for want of a skeleton.

Historically, this is the role war played: it energized people, mobilized their spirits, demanded and received great and heroic efforts.  Yet, war is stupid.  It is the last recourse of exhausted minds, who have for long period of time failed to see far enough ahead to make intelligent countermoves.

Doris Lessing wrote an interesting book called, if memory serves, “The marriages between Zones 3, 4, and 5”, in which the protagonist, a queen in an utterly feminine realm (think Sweden) has to marry a soldier from an eminently manly realm.  [I will note in passing that one can perceive, I think, echoes of her Communist past in her positing the Canopeans as benevolent rulers whose dictates were always correct, even when incomprehensible; she mentions organizing an society as an army again in Mara and Dann.  I think for the more sensitive it is hard not to see the suffering of the world, and not want to find and elevate an enlightened ruler to make things calm and rational.  I may of course be completely off the mark here.]

At first, she is disgusted with how course and unrefined they are.  Over time, she comes to respect their discipline and comraderie.  Then, the order comes for the king to marry a princess from another zone, one completely wild, and apparently modeled on Afghanistan.  The queen realizes you need wildness, you need chaos, you need the unpredictable, in order to grow. 

Upon realizing this, she decides to visit Zone 2, which is a rarified realm (note: I read this twenty years ago, so I may be a little fuzzy on the details).  She cannot quite breathe the air, but she realizes it is better than her own Zone.  It took the events of her marriage and contact with Zone 5 to make this connection.

Metaphorically, I think this symbolizes how life should be lived.  I don’t think a perfect society will be free of random death, or even disease.  We may conquer all these things, then decide to reintroduce them, particularly once it is generally realized that death is not final at all, that we are spirits who come here to grow.

And I think we can see shades of this in some utopian scenarios.  Take the Hunger Games.  A people achieves complete material abundance, but still feels the need to participate–albeit vicariously–in the chaos of violence and death.  The shades of death and despair, pain and fear and hunger and desire–and love, a chaotic force that both creates and destroys in its emotional form–will always haunt us.

For my own purposes, I have found the work of the Tibetans the most practical.  And it is interesting that as wonderful as some of their practices are, they find the need to incorporate death, in the form of bone flutes, and terrifying masks, and even drinking from skulls, if I have understood correctly.

As long as we are on earth, Halloween will always be with us.  The task is to integrate these energies usefully.  There are many ways to do this.  I have suggested a few.

When it comes to minimum wage laws, there are three possible outcomes: that the State mandated wage is less than those already paid; that it is equal to them; or that it is more than market conditions would normally allow.

In the first two cases, it is unnecessary.  The third condition, then, is the one which matters.

Labor, like any other commodity, is subject to supply and demand.  When there is a superabundance of work and not enough workers, wages rise.  When unemployment is high, and work is scarce, wages fall.  In all cases, business owners need workers to make money.  It is never in the interest of anyone who wants to grow a business not to grow a business by not hiring people.  Hiring always means more money for the business owner, IF there is money left over after he has paid his expenses, of which the largest is usually labor.

Let us say that a business owner collects $1,000 a week in revenues, and pays out $600 in costs.  If he can hire someone for $200 a week, he can still clear a profit, and free himself up for marketing.  If, however, he is forced by law to pay $400 a week, he will not hire anyone. He can’t afford it.

Let us say that someone desperately needs work, and would be willing to work for $200, but is forced by law to charge $400.  Both people lose.

Leftists do not ask themselves what the people who are competing for low wage jobs want.  They ASSUME they would rather either be paid more than they are perceived as being worth, or be unemployed.  This is almost certainly an error, though.

We have some 50% unemployment in black neighborhoods and poor rural areas, which is close to the high school drop out rate in both areas, and there is probably a lot of overlap between the two.

Kids who have not even graduated high school offer very little in terms of job and life skills.  If they are going to get hired by anyone to do anything, they will in most cases need to discount their labor.  Such a first job would amount to an apprenticeship.  By law, they can’t do this, and so in many cases they go years without getting that first job, never learn work skills, and never become optimally productive as citizens. 

Minimum wage is not intended for people who have careers, who put their time in over a period of years.  Even Burger King and the like pay more than minimum wage for virtually anyone who has worked there more than six months.

These laws do not raise up anyone.  On the contrary, they represent a barrier for entry to the job market for people who in many cases really, really need a job.

Spent the day writing this.  Not quite happy with it, but I am tired, and know the rest of my week will be busy, and the likelihood is I will never return to it.

My last post got me to thinking, and rather than append this to that, I decided to do a separate post.

I have long felt a qualitative difference
between the blues and country music.  I enjoy the blues.  On my iPod I
have albums by Robert Balfour and  Junior Kimbraugh, a few singles from
John Lee Hooker (I should note I have a VERY old iPod that I have maxed
out at perhaps 500 songs), and have spent many happy hours at blues
bars, particularly in Memphis and Chicago.

At the same
time, though, I have never felt the blues as cathartic.  It is music
which entrances you, or makes you move.  But it fundamentally feels–to
me, and this is paradigmatic subjectivity–like time is standing still,
that no matter what you do the situation cannot be transcended.  Blues
is a break from existence, not a deepening of experience, of tragedy,
from which you emerge renewed.  There is no form which it is trying to
create.  It is merely trying to prevent emotional stagnation.

There is no code in blues music, no sense of honor and dignity, which is abundant in country music.

Country
has many songs about boozing, jail and cheating.  It also has many
songs about hard work, patriotism, God, honor, and family.  It is a
comprehensive look at life as it is actually lived by most of us: full
of contradictions, high and low moments, tragedy and comedy, with most
of us looking ridiculous most of the time, but also capable of quiet
moments of dignity.

This is one man’s opinion.

Edit: I will add that this basic mindset was inherited fully by rock and roll and all its off-shoots, including techno, heavy metal, rap, and others.  I read yesterday that Michael Phelps liked Deadmau5, who I had never heard of.  Watch this video.  Is this life affirming music?  The one mouse symbolically kills the other.  Nobody cares.  This is music in which fantasy is all.  Nothing is real.  It is a break from reality, presumably fueled for many by marijuana or Ecstacy.

Or consider the image of the rock star, which I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about.  What does it say about our culture that our icons are self absorbed and self destructive narcissists whose lives revolve around the most primal of sensations?  What does rock music build?  Nothing.

On the contrary, the rock star says to you that your life is insufficient if you are not “living large”.  If you are raising kids, paying your bills, living a quiet life, that is not enough.  You are losing out.  There is so much out there, if you just go get it.  And people try. They try and go get it.

I lived in California for a number of years.  What I remember, particularly in northern California, is that virtually everyone I met who grew up there has some sort of grotesque  and ridiculous story of their home life, of self involved and selfish parents putting their kids through ridiculous exercises.  This is the outcome of the hippy movement, which oriented around unstructured sensation.

Life is not just about the pursuit of sensation.  In fact, such a pursuit leads to the destruction of all the worthy sensations, particularly true love, which involves loyalty, the capacity to put your own immediate needs aside, and time.

In my honest view, it is only barely an exaggeration to say that it is country music fans, nearly alone, who have prevented the wholesale decline of this nation into complete moral mediocrity.  They are the large red segments seen in every State when the national votes are tallied.

We see bright, shiny lies up in the elevated halls of our political elite.  We see bright spotlights, and adulatory media coverage of its chosen true sons.  But none of it is real, and common sense alone is needed to see this.

I had a dream the other night in which my entire world was washed away, and I was adrift in an ocean with my friends.  I created a new world out of the ocean, which they at first could not see, but I swam to it, and crawled out of the sea.  It was already populated, and in talking with the first person I met I realized that my old world was completely gone.  The year was 571, within their calendar.  Everything I had known was gone, as I don’t think any of my friends had made it.

This dream had symbolic meaning to me, which is likely somewhat obvious, and which I will simply say I took as emotional growth, but I wanted here simply to make one point: I had my iPod, incongruently (but aren’t all dreams like that, where in recounting it you say “and then SOMEHOW. . .”?), and realized that I would never be able to charge it again.  I had decide what the last five songs I would listen to from my old world would be.

This is an interesting question: what five songs would define you?  Or, alternatively, do songs define who you are, who you want to be, what you want to remember, or something else?  I feel strongly that music defines people, which is one of the reasons I look at the crap getting spewed out right now and feel anxiety about our future.

You have to make a quick decision, as time is running out.  Well, I came up with five.  My thought was that in developing and building a new life, you need music with substance, but you also need lightness, humor, and even a bit of frivolity.  It is a weighty thing, building a new life, but the end goal is happiness, is it not?  And is happiness not inconsistent with the decision to be ponderous?  Can one not laugh even in the face of death dealing waves?

1.  Hank Williams “Nobody’s Lonesome for me”.

2.  George Jone’s “The King is gone”.

3.  Waylon Jennings “Honky Tonk Heroes“.

4.  Pine Valley Cosmonaut’s “Pan Handle Rag”

5.  Louis Prima’s “Buona Sera”.

What do all these songs have in common?  They are simple and make me happy.

I will add to this an imaginative exercise, which I believe I have offered several times: Imagine you woke up in a new country, surrounded by people you did not know, without a memory.  Where would you start?  What parts of you that matter would be retained?  If you are a liar and a thief, would those habits still be there?  What leads you to such things?  What, ultimately, defines you?  Would you have a new start?

I just realized this morning that there is little difference between a government sponsored injection of money to “stimulate” the economy, and what happens normally in the course of fractional reserve banking backed by a central bank.

Think about this with me.  Prices are a signal that indicate relative supply and demand.  As demand for something increases, prices go up and/or supply increases.  Usually both.  Given finite humans on the planet, logically demand is finite, which means there is a finite supply which can be created and sold.  Suppliers KNOW this, and further realize that if they incur production costs for things or services which cannot be sold, they lose all their money.  You can’t have a yogurt shop on all four corners of an intersection and expect all four to stay in business.

Yet, one must measure this in terms of risk and reward.  In conditions of easy money, it costs the entrepreneur none of his own money to open a business, and it costs the bank none of ITS own money, either, since it is in the end creating the money from scratch.  Both entities can just invest the money, and if they go belly up, the entrepreneur just files bankruptcy for the corporation he created, and the bank writes the loan off, goes into receivership, or gets bailed out.  The individuals involved are never made to suffer any serious consequences, as for example they would if they had had to save up the money involved through long effort (which is how most people envision our system.)

The lack of penalty has serious consequences, as it incents overproduction.  We are conditioned to consider inflation as something that can be accurately measured, and which affects economies as a whole.  This is not the case.  Localized inflation is so common in the modern world as to be almost the rule.

Inflation, to be clear, is in my definition any increase in the money that COULD be circulated.  It is not tied directly to price inflation, although of course the two are related.

In the 1920’s inflation happened almost exclusively in the stock market.  Prices for homes, cars, and other essentials increased only slowly.  This inflation was facilitated by margin buying, which is to say money creation which was a result of fractional reserve banking, and which was supported for a time by low rates at the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (I just realized, by the way, where this term comes from: when you borrow money you are saying “I will give you $105 in the future for $100 today.”  You are selling an IOU you paid $105 for for $100.  You are discounting the IOU by $5).

This led of course to “irrational exuberance”, and overinvestment.  It led to investment which WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN PLACE absent the ability to borrow the money in question.  And the crash happened as a direct result of a credit tightening that the Federal Reserve initiated.

The point I want to make is this: overinvestment, which leads to a need for steep discounting, cannot happen absent what I am going to call dumb money entering the economy; and there is no fundamental difference between money which enters the economy as a result of being created as what amounts to fake Monopoly money, and money which enters the economy via government spending projects.

Keynes argued, in effect, that economic downturns were the result of overproduction relative to demand.  This is not entirely inaccurate, as for example the initial phase of the Great Depression was the result of the overproduction of MONEY.  This created all sorts of miscalculations as to future demand, and resulting overproduction of real goods.  Further, since most of the money in circulation had been created by banks, when mass numbers of banks failed, it caused monetary contraction, which caused everything to decrease in price, at a time when oversupply would already have put downward pressure on prices.

However, the result of the government putting money back into the economy would not be anything but a repetition of the basic problem: the temporary overstimulation of some local sector of the economy, at the expense of the economy as a whole.  As an example, in a dam project everyone could be paid twice the prevailing local wage for their trade, which would pull those trademen away from otherwise productive work, then when the project finished, the whole local “bubble” would collapse.

In both cases, where the money is NOT flowing is into carefully considered business projects where the originater has skin in the game, where they are incented to CARE about the outcome as a result of actual pain that would attend failure.

The goal in all economic activity is adding INTELLIGENCE to the process.  The essence of Capitalism is innovation, which we might summarize as intelligence.  That system which pays people to be smart will, logically, over time become better organized and efficient.  Our task at present is to remove the idiocies (the incentives that pay people to take foolish risks or to game the system) that are plainly present in our current system.

It is in my view a useful heuristic to assume that all evil or unpleasant or annoying forces in your dreams are parts of your own psyche.  Assume this in advance, and you will gradually come into touch with the less agreeable elements of your own personality, the ones you complacently assume exist only in other people.

I visited Knox College last week, as there were signs on the freeway indicating a Lincoln-Douglas debate took place there.  While there, I got to talking with a student there, who told me about ghosts on campus.  One of them, she had heard.  She was working I guess in the kitchen, and kept hearing a young woman crying on the stairway.  She went up and down, looking, and could see anyone.  She was told by a woman working there that “that’s just Andrea”, Andrea being a young lady who had been murdered there two years prior.

Now, obviously she may have been lying to get attention.  It happens.  But I have heard similar stories from dozens of people, who had no obvious motivation to lie.  The point I want to make is not about ghosts, per se: the evidence is in my view overwhelming.  We have a physical theory–quantum physics–which accounts for them, and copious empirical evidence.

The point I wanted to make is how SAD it would be for a young woman, looking forward to life, to have her life taken so suddenly and violently.  From what mediums gather, when you die, your mental and emotional life is virtually identical to what it was.

People ask the question: do ghosts exist or not, but seldom try to put themselves empathetically in their position and ask “how can I help you?”  I haven’t seen it.

I will add, too, that pain has long been a theological problem.  Let us posit, with the Christians, that our souls are infinite.  Let us add, with the Hindues and many others, that we live repeatedly.  What if a thousand lifetimes is just a blink of the eye, in the grand scheme of things?  What if the life of Earth itself is just two blinks?  How can any temporal pain, even the worst, matter in such a scheme, if most time is spent pleasantly?

I have touched that rough topic before, but not from precisely that angle.

Food for thought.  Please chew consciously and carefully. 

I was thinking about Sisyphus this morning, and thought/realized, that he himself allows the boulder to roll back down.  There is something within his constitution that never allowed him to become fully human, to form a meaning system, to grasp the point of human life: learning.  He was wicked and deceitful in life precisely because he could allow himself to reach the brink of understanding, only to more or less consciously forget every time, symbolized in the fall of the boulder.  How often do many of us reach the brink of understanding, only to reject it?  When only one more push will lead us to a qualitative change, a glimpse at what lies on the other side of the hill? We fear that change, more than we fear monotony and wasted effort.  We fear the new far more than we fear a known and long-suffered evil.

Tantalus, likewise, reaches with one hand, and removes with the other.  It is literally apparently possible in deep hypnotic trance to make the two hands of one person fight with one another.  This is a nice metaphor for what surely happens in the darkness of what we refuse to see, or what we usually call the Unconscious.

To be clear, things hidden need not remain hidden; we can see them.  We simply fear the unknown.