Month: October 2012

I would encourage any readers I may have to click on this link:

http://www.kiva.org/invitedby/barry5427

It will take you to a donations page for Kiva.org, which is a group which facilitates the bundling of business loans to very small groups–often individuals–so they can purchase supplies to build businesses and the economic self sufficiency that goes with it. For example, someone may want to buy dairy cows, or thread to make clothes, or money to pay the rent for a laundry.  Most global poverty happens due to the lack of access to capital by the poor.  This program addresses that.

What few people realize is that most foreign aid we have sent out over the last half century has neither supported democracy nor alleviated poverty, nor even supported our foreign policy aims (what is the point of giving money to Egypt and Pakistan, if it does not buy us the ability to tell them what to do, in at least some circumstances?). 

On the contrary, even when it was not our intent, it has generally supported tyranny, and made control of the government a principle means of personal enrichment, rather than actual long term economic development. This has led to many civil wars, much death, much misery, and much economic retrogression.  It has not only been wasted, but has made things WORSE, in yet one more example of leftist indifference to outcome making the world a more horrible place.

Kiva addresses that.  Please click on the link, then start spreading the word yourself.

 It is astonishing to me the moral depravity of those who are shilling for Obama.  They are People of the Lie. There is no end to their willingness to pervert truth and reason in the service of what can only be called a cult.


The following is a response to this article which, astonishingly, called ROMNEY the liar, when Candy Crowley herself had to back off her patent advocacy of Obama’s mendacity.

Is there any end to your capacity to lie for a man who broke every promise he made, and who is leading us into an economic wasteland that will hurt most the students, minorities, and working poor who voted for him?

OBAMA LIED.  HE LIED.  There is ZERO ambiguity about this.  He claimed for nearly two weeks, falsely–and we KNOW this, because his own State Dept. contradicted him–that the cause of the attack was a “spontaneous” riot caused by a film released six months ago.  The President of Libya himself called this ridiculous.

Stevens had asked for added security multiple times, because he wasn’t stupid.  Smaller scale attacks had been happening with increased frequency.  Obama, as always, was asleep at the wheel, and not even attending most of his national security meetings so he could focus on getting reelected and continuing the process of destroying this country.

Then, in front of a hundred million Americans, he claimed both to have called the attack a “terror” attack, when if you read his remarks he said nothing of the sort, and that he indicated he was resolved to hunt down those responsible.  He said nothing of the sort. 

You people at Yahoo realize, don’t you, that California is being abandoned by some 4,000 high net worth individuals a WEEK?  Who do you think pays the taxes, the taxes you NEED to balance your budget?  They would have, but policies of the sort you are advocating by effectively endorsing Obama, by twisting the truth in horrific abuses of journalistic integrity, are forcing their hand.  They are going to Texas, and Tennessee, and Arizona: anywhere but California.  Then when your State starts fully teetering into chaos, you will blame anyone but yourselves.

Pathetic, and horribly wrong.  You are the worst sort of people: capable of intelligence, but emotionally unwilling to tell yourselves hard truths, so you put your intelligence to the service of engineering our cultural and economic downfall, all while pretending to yourselves and others than you are benign.  You are ba$tards.

Fix for our financial system: check.

Fix for moral relativism: check.

Template for new church and psychotherapy: check.

Systematic treatment of political philosophy: check.

Evidence marshalled for the after-life: check (not by me,though).

Are there any generals out there willing to lead the troops I’ve marshalled?

We lack the ecstatic in our lives, the completely uncontrolled and uninhibited expression of deep latent emotional and spiritual realities, particularly the ecstatic as expressed within, and reinforced by, communcal connections.  We lack the drumming around the campfire, and the becoming truly, DEEPLY lost in trance, the non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Clubbing, especially with drugs, partially serves this role, but it is not integrative.  You become lost, but you do not come back better.  It is just “fun”.  It actually seems to fracture most people, since they now have to contrast the deep ecstasies they felt when dancing while high, with the pedestrian world they occupy most days of most weeks.  It actually makes them sad, on balance.

Sex, often combined with clubbing, partially serves this role, if you allow yourself to become fully lost.  But it is not integrative, and if the sex is random and conduced in an emotionally detached way, I would argue it actually is alienating for both parties.  You achieve connection that is immediately sundered, and thus you become progressively less willing to risk emotionally, less willing to commit emotionally, and thus in many ways more shallow.  Unable to risk pain, you feel only muted pleasure.

As I wrote some time ago, though, that if you use sex as a drug, like all drugs you have to go deeper and deeper to get the same effect.  BDSM is the logical ending place, as the most horrific and yet poignant and memorable iteration of it.  It makes people feel “alive”.  They know, intuitively, that they need pain to live, and their lives are comfortable and protected and free, so they have to go seek it out. 

What I would like to repeat, here, is that what they are trying to do is seek out deep, hidden emotional realities that have to be accessed SPECIFICALLY.  The analogy that occurred to me is that you could compare wounds to a Poker hand.  Let’s say a person holds 2 Kings, an 8, a 7, and a 2.  If you put up a 6 or a 3, you get nothing.  This is the equivalent of undergoing a masochistic experience, and feeling great emotions, and an emotional release, but one which accomplishes no long term result.  Nothing is really released on a deep level.

[And I would compare the sadist with the masochist this way: the sadist is less advanced since they feel pain through others;  the masochist wants to feel their own pain, but they don’t know how to do it effectively. I think masochism can also become a habit when one is punished often.  Cruelty can become the only connection a child has with its parents, and thus being hated and hurt the only sense of CONNECTION it has felt, and which it thus later seeks to replicate.]

Effective long term psychotherapy, of the sort described in the excellent book “Trauma and Recovery” , which I think all the Usual Suspects (you know who you are) should read, gradually establishes what those cards are, and what their effect has been.  It is a gradual process of connecting the conscious mind with what is hidden.  Things emerge first in a fog, then grow increasingly distinct, then at some point you have a more or less open conduit from the unconscious to the conscious, which is the therapeutic goal.

What I would submit (W)holotropic Breathwork does is facilitate the self emergence of each of those cards, in order of relative importance.  We might see in one session the King of Hearts emerge.  You say “oh, there it is.  I had forgotten that feeling or experience”.  Or maybe you don’t even name the experience, but just emit an emotion, perhaps one tied to long term emotional states you had suppressed.

Stan Grof has done many, many sessions, and he said there is usually one thing, one piece, that comes out.  It seems to be unitary that way.  You don’t get a lot of things, but one important thing, then another in the next session.

This is a strange connection, but what I would submit practitioners of BDSM REALLY want is the sort of release Holotropic Breathwork enables.  Certainly if you have misery in your past, and want to find it, it will get you there. 

Where the former is concerned, you really simply further life in a dark place, even if you get occasional respites from your obsessive normalcy.  Look at the covers of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, (being sold in grocery stores, Target, and other places by the truckload, making this discussion timely and relevant).  Is that the sort of life you want?  No, it is the sort of life you choose ABSENT ALTERNATIVES, absent a sense that you can in some other way escape your mundane world, where nothing really different or exciting ever happens.

I think one could sum up much of Western Philosophy–certainly modern philosophy–as a search for a “Final Thought”, as if life could be contained in thinking.  What I FEEL people have tried to do is submit philosophy to science, and create a thought system as strong as F=MA.  They have failed miserably, and have resorted to trying to reframe–reduce–humanity to a fundamentally mechanical system that can be “decoded” by means of biology.  We are surrounded by anti-humanists, who in their brutality are not fundamentally different from the Nazis who executed and decapitated Jews in what they “harvesting of samples”.  It is that bad.

That subtracts poetry from the human experience. It subtracts the ecstatic.  It subtracts, in other words, human EXPERIENCE outright, which is to say both all the joys and the sufferings to which we are prey.  Thoughts are not experiences.  They are machines, little crawling machines like spiders that, when well formed, will build for you, and when poorly formed, tear you apart.  Since thoughts are machines, and since people want to reduce human experience to thought, we are becoming increasingly mechanical, rude, infamous, plain, detestable, thoughtless, dismissive, idiotic.

A descent into the poetic seemed appropriate there; or perhaps, properly, an ASCENT, back from the dank basement of an UNNECESSARY project conducted by fools for other fools, to our collective detriment.

The science of the afterlife–which might be called the science of human qualitative supremacy–is solid.  As long as we seek a final, glorious, idolatrous machine–an UEBERmachine–a Golden Calf, something we can see, weight and scientifically evaluate as to its qualitative aspects, we will remain blind to this fact in large segments of our intellectual sphere.

When you look at reforming Medicare, one thing that will clearly be needed are reductions in End of Life care. They are enormously expensive, and do not do much to lengthen lives.

This may seem callous, but it is my hope that at some point scientists generally start acting like scientists, instead of the Fundamentalist Materialists they are in most all cases today.  If they do so, they will start evaluating the actual evidence that our spirits survive physical death, and conclude that it is overwhelming.  If they do that, then the idea will become generalized through the very effective conduits currently provided to the ideologically approved, and fear of death will wane. 

Such a reduction in fear has, of course, absolute value, in facilitating both personal growth and increased happiness. It also has economic value. 

Being the sort of “I don’t see any fucking box at all” thinker that I am, I would like to propose that MEDICARE invest in afterlife investigations, scientific investigations, of the sort that they otherwise no doubt do all the time. 

I was in a daycare today, and saw that the toddlers had to wear bicycle helmets to ride Big Wheels.  I just find that wrong.  I never wore a bike helmet, and yes I got into multiple accidents, but without injury.  I think when you overprotect kids you disempower them.  You make them mistrust their own instincts and abilities.  You make them timid in the face of life’s challenges, which makes them weaker, which makes them more easily overwhelmed and prone to depression and despair.

As I have said several times, it is in my view incontestable that part of the appeal of Harry Potter was the openness with which risk was tolerated.  Such openness runs contrary to our Nanny culture, which seeks to turn all our children into Bubble Boys and Girls, protected from every last hazard from cradle to grave.

This is pernicious and in my view, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, cruel.

I was reading an article by someone the other day that in effect was trying to figure out how to mobilize sympathy for the poor (by particularizing, which by the way is a tactic I have also found effective).  I read it, and thought “she’s answering the wrong question”. 

What the world is most short of, in most places right now, is not wealth, but meaning. In our own nation, for example, our POOR live better than kings of old.  If you have ever been in a true castle, you will see this easily.  That king had no access to spices on shelves in every market now.  He had no access to sugar.  He had no access to porcelain.  He had no access to coffee or tea.

I can see a world where all of us live much more poorly, much more modestly, than we do today; but in which we are HAPPIER.  My principle gripe with socialism is not that it impoverishes people, or encourages equality, but that it DESTROYS culture, which is the very thing which no government can provide in a way which matches the needs of the people it supposedly is helping.  It is the MEANS, and in particular the involuntary nature of those means, coupled with attacks on all notions of qualitative difference between people–which is necessarily an attack on the idea of personal moral growth–that I most object to.

Would be humanitarians would do well to ask themselves what is ACTUALLY necessary for human felicity, and above providing the basics, it is community, love, and purpose.

It is very important not to make the mistake that because you understand something intellectually, that you UNDERSTAND it.  Always hold some part of your confidence in yourself in reserve, even AFTER you have walked ten miles in a man’s moccasins (as some Indian tribe had it).

To take one obvious example, Obama wanted all of us to “feel his pain” when he talked about how, as President, he had to receive the bodies of men killed by his incompetence.  He didn’t feel that pain, but he felt he understood intellectually how someone who HAD felt that pain would act and react.  He was acting, in other words, and that fact became clear when he callously called their unnecessary deaths “not optimal”. 

Not optimal is Sales talk.  It is executive talk, when you want to deemphasize something negative.  It is bureaucratic talk. It is not HUMAN when you are talking about the violent murders of men who looked to you for protection, who you failed, and who even now you feel ZERO actual sympathy for.

Like all ideologues, Obama is plainly someone who has put his intelligence in the service of a philosophy that facilitates the murder of unwanted negative feelings, which for their part find expression in the violence and venom of his outlook, his desire to punish and hurt those he has framed as enemies, which is to say those who create virtually all the jobs in this country.

You can’t think well when your emotions are out of whack, and, again, you cannot UNDERSTAND the experience of others, except by comparison with your own; and if you have never experienced, say, war, then you are simply guessing.

As is likely obvious, I like to think of myself as a general, commanding ideas instead of troops, even though I identify emotionally much more closely with NCO’s.  In the real world, even though it would likely be a waste of talent, I would emotionally rather be an excellent Sergeant Major than an excellent General.  The NCO is the conduit through which idea is made manifest.  He is where the rubber meets the road. He is the source of order.  He is what enables an Army to be a self organizing system, particularly in the face of the chaos of the battlefield.

Be that as it may, I would like to make some predictions, and suggest some tactics and strategy.

Obama is going to lose badly, really badly.  He is trending badly now, and as he gets hammered on Benghazi (not optimal?  What do you think Romney is going to do with that, combined with his patent lie at the last debate, and his decision to fly to Las Vegas rather than actually act like he cared)), and the expansion of the Welfare State, and the enormity of his increase in our national debt, etc, etc., even many Democrats are going to turn on him.

Here is where it gets interesting.  The lunatic radicals that have taken over the Democrat Party, and who thought they had found the winning combination by putting suits and congenial smiles on some of their members (pretty much the whole inner circle, certainly including Obama and Holder) and talking in generic platitudes, are going to get unmasked.  They only constitute perhaps 10% of Americans, and the really nutty ones are only perhaps 1% (the Bill Ayers, the Jeremiah Wrights, the Saul Alinskys, the Frank Marshall Davises, the Anita Dunns), but through the sheer force of will and tenacity that lunacy gets you, they have achieved much broader power.  That is, in my view, about to end.  I think this will be their Gettysburg, where their insurgency, and invasion of normal, non-lunatic America will end.

What did Candy Crowley do?  She tipped her hand.  She openly supported Obama.  She supported his lie.  She interrupted Romney more often, and gave him fewer turns at bat.  Moderates noticed this.  The hard core Obama partisans of course didn’t care, since they are increasingly a maddened shrieking mob.  And this is important: when Obama loses, they are going to take to the streets and internet in droves, screaming bloody murder, and I think large segments of the middle will notice this, and realize that their support for Obama was never rational in the first place. This will be sobering for them.

And this creates an opportunity for conservatives (or as I like to say, genuine Liberals) to educate.  I was talking last night with someone in bar about talking points.  I have said this before, but talking points are propaganda, and propaganda damages our public dialogue, our capacity for rational thought, completely.  Even if your side wins the election, the cause of truth has lost.  The cause of GENUINE national debate about anything has lost. The willingness to study issues and reach emotionally unbiased conclusions atrophies.  That is how we elected Barack Obama in the first place.

But in my view there is NO OTHER WAY to get our nation back on track but by recreating–or more likely creating for the first time–an actually educated electorate.  The elitism among our Founding Fathers was based on deep historical knowledge.  They knew most people are driven by vanity and self interest, and that such people, granted access to other peoples money, would take it, even though in the long run it would plainly hurt them as well, and probably most of all.

But everyone has the vote now–and I am not saying this is intrinsically  bad thing, merely that it HAS been a bad thing.  Our task is to make voting an expression of social coherence based upon factually accurate information.  We need to generalize economic knowledge.  We need to generalize political knowledge.  That is why I spend so much time writing my pieces.  I don’t know who if anyone reads them, but I have increased MY OWN knowledge, my own internal qualitative richness, and prepared myself for a time when such material may be useful.

I think the Left is right in its argument that George W. Bush was elected on talking points.  Karl Rove appropriated the Alinsky method by channeling widespread conservative hatred of Clinton to get Bush elected.  And conservatives were happy, for a very long time, even though Bush acted like anything but a conservative.  He didn’t just start two wars: he expanded social spending as well.  And people forgave him because he wasn’t Bill Clinton.

Mitt Romney is not George Bush.  He is much smarter, and I think more capable, at least potentially.  What our task will be on the first day he takes office is to begin putting steady pressure on him to stick behaviorally behind all the excellent rhetoric we have been hearing in debates.  The Mitt Romney of the debates is who the people will be voting for, and so there is NO REASON to back down once he gets there.  We need to keep him honest.

OF COURSE the attacks from the Left will be relentless, but we have been learning over the last four years how to refute their arguments in depth.  Grandma’s Medicare is ALREADY insolvent.  Adults understand that you can’t get everything you want for nothing.  Social Security is ALREADY insolvent.  Between the two of them, our actual increase in national indebtedness is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR.  The most important stuff they keep off the books. Neither the private sector nor State and Local governments are allowed, by law, to do accounting the way the Federal government does.  To actually pay for the bills coming due, we would have to hand over ALL of our income, today, and IT’S GETTING WORSE.  Unaddressed, Medicare alone may soak up the entirety of our tax base within 10-15 years.  Annual interest on our national debt will be more than the current Dept. of Defense budget within ten years, assuming no more debt downgrades.

Put accurate facts in people’s hands, coherent arguments.  There is no need for stentorian yelling.  There is no need for fighting.

Our decline has been gradual, and our ascent back up into usefulness will be gradual as well.  But we can all thank Barack Obama and his fellow radicals for enabling the organization of a long term and vital conservative resurgence.