Month: November 2012

Well, the Guardian posted my comment, at least for a while, but now has apparently blocked my ability to read and respond to comments.  Even though the header says there are 86 comments, I can’t get them to appear.

This whole thing feels Bolshevistic to me.  Not only does most media fail to report any and all news that does not support the positions it holds on faith and habit alone, but most left wing sites remove outright anyone standing up and yelling “you are wrong, and here is why. . .”  They have already decided they CAN’T be wrong, having defined right as nothing more or less than what they believe at the moment.

THE MOMENT you begin using technology–put succinctly, the moment you begin to ABUSE POWER you have–to silence rather than engage with ideological Others, you are voting for Nazism.  You are voting for a rigged judiciary, and even mass murder.  You are voting to end Western civilization, based as it has been–at its best–on genuine tolerance for intellectual diversity, the use of reason and fact to resolve disputes, and a constant desire for improvement.

These are not small issues.  They are not pedantic.  It has nothing to do with my ego.  Yes, these people do yoga, and take their kids to dance class, and drink wine in their hot tubs and dream of better things.  But AT ROOT, this is a moral sickness.  It is, itself, a form of violence. 

The Left, itself, speaks incessantly about the violence of shutting out the margins, those without a voice.  Yet it does it in perfectly clear conscience when those others are true Liberals.  Those not doing it look with approval on those who do.

It is literally like binding Truth, placing it on an altar, and setting it on fire, to burn completely, in a holocaust, while chanting hymns to truth, hymns to beauty, hymns to justice.  It is moral insanity.

I will keep reading about this, but based on some comments on the internet, what seems to have happened is that a minority of union members sold the entire workforce down the river to protect their own interests.

What Hostess was proposing was a cut in absolute compensation of some 8%, but roughly a one third reduction in added money that was being committed to future pensions.  How this money was managed, I don’t know.  Was it put into an escrow account, or was it simply promised?  Or were they diverting the compensation of current employees in order to pay retired employees?  That seems the most likely case, which means that the actual cuts would have been to the retirees on pension.  That is how Social Security, on a much larger scale, works today.

 Now, you had two groups: retirees who were not union members, whose pensions were paid by Hostess, presumably in part out of operating revenues; and you had union members, who were presumably paid more, and part of whose wages went to fund the unions own pension plans.

As I understand it, roughly one third of the 18,000 workers were unionized, and the rest were not.  

What seems to have happened is that the Bakers Union was concerned that with the cuts in pension funding they would not be able to afford not just the payments to their Hostess retirees, but to ALL their retirees. For example, I think they work with Sara Lee also. Their own pension would have been bankrupted, since they were paying as they went also.

What the union seems to want and expect is that following liquidation the union plants will be picked up by some venture capital firm or competitor, and reopened to keep the Twinkie and other brands.  Part of this process, they think, will involve a renegotiation of the pension contributions that will be better than what Hostess was offering, and which will enable their solvency across all the companies they cover.

What they did not CARE ABOUT is that the likelihood is that everyone who was depending on a Hostess pension–as opposed to a union pension–will stop getting it.  Not only did 18,000 CURRENT employees lose their jobs, but the overwhelming likelihood is that after all the real assets are liquidated, nothing will remain for those 60-70-80 somethings who worked there for 30 years, and were getting a check every month.  In effect, to help–maybe–some 6,000 workers (the number may be higher or lower, but the princple is the same) they knowingly cost some 12,000 people their jobs and pensions PERMANENTLY. 

This is the most awful cynicism, and far worse than ANYTHING Hostess management is accused of.

So the damage is actually likely even larger than it appears, and is the result of selfish calculations–based on greed and the profit motive–by paid Union operatives who themselves risked nothing in the negotiations.

I see people demonize corporations as greedy and money grubbing, and in large measure that is true: you can’t stay in business without making money, as Hostess found out. But in reality, ALL corporations make the most money when they have the most employees, provided they can keep those people productively occupied.  They WANT to employ people.

Knowing nothing else, who would you assume makes more money: the person with no employees, or the person with a thousand employees?

Ethically, businesses have first to create something people want at a price they are willing to pay, then it becomes a process of negotiating for labor.  Unions say it is unethical to pay less than they can, to give bonuses to idiots, but the simple fact is that the company is providing a service that NO union can provide, which is creating a demand for labor.  Unions exist solely to siphon off more wealth from entities someone else created.

The need for corporations is vastly prior to the need for Unions.  We could and did built wealth without extensive unionization.  We cannot and will not build wealth with all unions and no employers.

The reality is that the economic downturn Obamaism is going to cause will hurt workers the most.  It will hurt the working poor, the wage workers, and even the unionized, who will see more layoffs due to less work.

They have designated me a Super User, apparently to emphasize the irony of not allowing my posts through.  Maybe it will make it, but I doubt it.  Here is the link. 

I think the situation is pretty simple: virtually all media outlets have become de facto propaganda arms of the Democrat Party, and that is worth a 10 point swing or more.  They could destroy Obama in a week if they chose.  As it is, they dutifully repeat talking points from the White House.  We do not yet have a Propaganda Minister (Anita Dunn, as an open fan of Mao, was not a good choice), but we don’t need one.  Anyone who doesn’t want to know the truth has only to tune into any network but Fox, and anybody who wants the full truth won’t even find it there.

How many of you know that our true annual deficit, if the Federal government used the accounting methods in universal deployment in both the private and public sectors, is around $5 trillion a YEAR, right NOW?

How many of you know that it is a virtual certainty that Obama’s mother posed nude for Frank Marshall Davis?  When the story first broke, Snopes claimed it was someone else.  Turns out their breasts didn’t match, and Snopes took the story down.  Here is a link to an analysis from Obama’s own website, which seems clearly to show a doctored photo: http://www.obamasrealfather.com/breaking_news001/

Conservatives are grieving following this election.  We are not just grieving because Romney lost, but because America has shown clearly that it doesn’t WANT to know any unpleasant truths.  That is quite simply horrible.

I was doing some Kum Nye exercises and it hit me why I like her so much: we have nearly identical personalities.  She is highly analytical, very observant, and conversant with feelings, but not ones that emanate from her.  She reads those of those around her, while keeping her own mind and self under tight control.  There is a something that she never releases, that is like a windup clock that never winds down.  Her writing output–and she has said she really can’t not write–is the hour and minute hands winding their way around the clockface.

What the hell am I doing here?  The same thing.  I am wound up.  Yes, I think I am capable of good ideas and trenchant analysis, but the whole thing, I see now, is like a screen, behind which something much larger can be experienced.

You will know I am making serious progress when my posts diminish to one or two a week.

Round about now, silly ideas are floating around.  One is impeaching President (that is still hard to say) Obama.  The fact remains that the Senate is controlled by Democrats, and they will NEVER vote to remove him.

What I have never thought about, though, is that the President is formally a U.S. citizen, and subject to the laws of our land.  The Impeachment and removal process was put in there for gross incompetence.  But if the President breaks laws–for example through perjury–could he not be arrested and put in jail?

This is where I think the voting machine errors are important.  I think we need to investigate what happened carefully, for a number of reasons.  The first and most obvious is that if voting fraud happened once, it not only can but WILL happen again.  I don’t think the result will change, but we need to know what happened and how.  Secondly, though, what if it could be shown that Obama or an Obama agent played a direct role in it?  That is a criminal offense.  Perhaps a plea deal could be cut with an accomplice to implicate him or Valerie Jarrett directly.

It seems likely this could EASILY have been funded with “Stimulus” money.  Speaking of which: Congress, are you ever going to demand a serious accounting?

It is ASTONISHING that our Congress allowed this.  If you don’t know what happened, not only did Congress authorize the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism, or being an accomplice in terrorism, but tried to allow it even AFTER acquittal in a jury trial.  This subverts both the letter of and intent of our Constitution.  I could be accused of something vague tomorrow–an accusation never made public, and made to disappear. This is the law on the books in America TODAY.  If this doesn’t frighten you, you are stupid.

What John “fucking imbecile” McCain and somebody else wanted was to make it the law that if I were charged with something, underwent a formal trial, was found not innocent, I could STILL be made to disappear.  In this country.  That proposal was just made in the last week or two.

The ONLY reason they didn’t get it is Sen. Rand Paul used his power as a member of the body to demand that the vote be recorded.  Apparently our lawmakers, the highest power in the land, can play the part of weasels when they want to and voter for things without accepting accountability for them.

We are fortunate to have Sen. Paul there.  We need honest men.

What we have to ask is why Congress is populated with such craven and unprincipled men.  Romney did not oppose this act.  Why?  We need to be clear: we have TRIALS for people accused of crimes.  No one is proposing the guilty go free.  But we are not a banana republic.  We don’t have “desaparecidos”. 

Why the FUCK are these jackasses so stupid?  Even suspected nuclear terrorists, or biological agent terrorists, need to undergo trial.  This is otherwise a short trip to full blown Fascism, and I use that word clinically.

Imagine being as worked up about the election as you are, but sleeping in a tent, in the winter, with insufficient food and clothing, and already having seen some of your comrades killed in combat.

I’m thinking of George Washington, in that long period of partial victories and fighting retreats.  How must he have felt?  If he lost–which must have seemed certain, often–he would be hung, as would some or all of his men.  He had no ability to feed them effectively.  He had no promises he knew he could keep.

He kept Joseph Addison’s Cato by his bed, along with the Bible.  I have Cato on my shelf, and would recommend everyone read it.  The very prose evokes a much more heroic, much more serious era.  “Give me liberty or give me death” was a quote Patrick Henry stole from it.

Cato kills himself, rather than submit to Caesar.  He does in fact choose death. I suspect Washington had a similar intent, and that fact may well have kept him going in what were no doubt some EXTREMELY gloomy hours.

We remain, all of us, comfortable physically.  We are anxious about what MAY happen, but my god if life were certain what would be the point of living it?  The VERY BEST may happen too.

I have morning courage and afternoon anxiety.  This is plainly true.  It is hard to be positive when you are tired.  But my physical state does not in any way affect the reality.  The reality is that we still have a Congress–the ascent of Caesar meant, of course, the functional end of the Roman Senate and thus Republic–many honest judges, and a military that WILL NOT support Obama in a coup.  Historically, you need an Army, and he doesn’t have one.  Lenin had one.  Mao had one.

What Obama is going to do to us is simply a slow drip, drip, drip of decline.  Nothing big.  Unemployment lines will get longer, paperwork will get more complicated, taxes will go up, businesses will shut down, access to healthcare will diminish, etc.

But if you think about what many of us took for granted as kids–for example, no central air, and virtually NEVER eating out–then a return to that might be of benefit to the young of today, who feel so entitled.

When I am analytical, I must admit there is ample reason for hope.  We fear the worst–and the worst may be what happens–but the likelihood is that determined work and organizing will have predictable effects.

Go to it.

I’m taking an Adult Education class with this woman who grew up on a dairy farm, who is home schooling her 12 year old daughter, who is helping her.  I can’t help but look at these two, and go back to my own youth, when things really were much simpler.  You had less TV, more time outside, and just a lot more innocence; or so my middle aged memory paints it.  The Dirty Harry movies scared me.

They have Hostel 1 and 2 (2 apparently includes scenes in which a naked women hanging upside down from a chain has her throat slit, and another where kids play soccer with the head of someone they apparently had called friend at some point) in the checkout line at my local grocery store.  They are likely not even bothering to try to prevent young kids from buying them.  I was in a  Big Lots, and they had Wolf Creek, again next to some romantic comedy and a cartoon DVD.

In our society, children are watching these movies when they are 12-13-14.  They are watching the free and unregulated porn on the internet, possibly from even earlier ages.  All of these things have an effect, on empathy, on emotional intelligence, on their “sense of life”.

Could you imagine someone producing and selling a movie in grocery stores in the 1970’s that consisted almost entirely in graphic depictions of torture and murder, with NO redeeming values at all? Which to the extent it took a side, took the side of the torturers, the Elite Hunting Club, I think it is called?  It would have been a national outrage. A Congressional committee would have been formed.  All the politicians would have felt the need to denounce it.

My take, virtually from the first, was that Amanda Knox was effectively feted and defended by the left not because she was innocent, but out of morbid curiosity, out of sympathy, out of recognition of the fact that she DID IT.

It is hard to feel much optimism for the future, but as I say often, I don’t run on hope.  I have plans, and will executive them as well as I can, within the limits of my emotional and physical stamina.

Meaning: an emergent property of a system in motion–the relative shape and boundaries of which are defined by chosen beliefs–which acts to facilitate emotional well being, competent work, and felicitous social interactions.

Like most “things” which are qualitative, it is not correct either to say “it exists”, or that “it” doesn’t exist.

Speaking of de Bono, I will mention that I flew down to Texas and got certified in his Six Thinking Hats method some years back.  The teaching was competent if uninspired, as was the curriculum, but certain elements got me to thinking about thinking, which was IMMENSELY useful.  I recommend to this day everyone read several of his books, such as “Practical Thinking”, “The Six Thinking Hats”, and I think he has a Course on Thinking. Something like that.  Some of his later books, from what I understand, might as well have been entitled, “I need more money”, but his basic ideas, like po, and lateral thinking, are very useful.

My own system I call the Telearchic Cross, and discuss in my essay on Goodness.  Basically, our perception of reality can in my view be manipulated in three principle ways: laterally, as on a continuum; vertically, as in the movement from abstraction to concrete perception through the senses, which includes emotion, and back again, in what I call Perceptual Breathing; and temporally, as in systemic interactions which can only be seen historically.

What I wanted to say is that I foolishly thought, once I got the certification, that Universities–as places filled with thinkers–would be excited to learn about this method.  I contacted the offices of many University Presidents with some persistence.  I learned, slowly, that they have close to ZERO interest in learning how to think.  Their self evaluation is that if they have Ph.D’s, they already KNOW how to think, and have nothing to learn from me or anyone else that is outside their field.

In the Engineering Dept. they know they have a good idea when something works–an engine runs, a light comes on.  In the Philosophy Dept., they don’t.  They could literally jabber utter nonsense and be as RELEVANT.  I think of the “Killing Joke” from Monty Python.  What if there were an Exceptional Idea, that when conveyed, suddenly caused a burst of understanding from everyone? 

Does anyone expect this to happen?  The closest we can hope for is a renewed commitment to reason.

In my considered view, there should be no discipline called “philosophy”.  There ought to be a discipline called something like Psychophilosophy which works empirically to determine what ideas work best to facilitate happiness.  They ought to work in tandem with a new academic discipline called Spiritualist Sciences, which investigates, academically, how the world of the spirit works, how best to communicate with spirits, and how best to optimize our lives, knowing we exist within a larger reality.

I am really pushing the envelope now as far as getting my work done today, but wanted to ramble just a bit more.