Month: December 2012

I would submit that anyone incapable of understanding how free markets can work, is likewise incapable of understanding how what might be termed “free morality”, which is to freedom of the sort our Constitution guarantees, would work.

What certain types of weak souls want is perfect clarity.  They want a confidence that their pictures of the universe are the correct ones.  What they picture, when they picture society, is a static machine.  This is the essence, for example,  of class analysis, which deducts time and human agency from all deconstructions, all Tubaforms, that are used for analytical purposes.

They build structures without motion, which are characterized by metal, not water.  When I read something like Spinoza’s Ethics, when I try and create my own analogues of it, what I picture are waterways defining flows of water, which sometimes overwhelms the path, which sometimes makes its own way, but which is affected by my boundaries, my principles. I picture flowers blooming in places I did not anticipate, but which are none the less beautiful for it.

What Leftists built in their minds are “gardens” without flowers, and buildings that no one lives in, that are not used, except to satisfy the vanity of the intellectual.  In this respect, it is interesting to ponder how many actual empty buildings idiotic Chinese economic policies have brought into being.

Did you see this story: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/12/05/verizon_patent_would_monitor_you_as_you_watch_tv_so_it_can_customize_ads.html

Verizon–and it is apparently not the first in this–has filed a patent to listen in on at least your cell phone to determine what you are doing.  Among other things, it lists eating, exercising, laughing, reading, sleeping, talking, singing,
humming, cleaning, and playing a musical instrument.  It will detect if you are making love, arguing, or whatever, communicate this information to a central database, which will then send appropriate content to your TV.

Now, it also “looks” into the room, which could be done by the phone, but which would fail often, since the phone will likely not be in a place where the camera can see the room.  But many people do videoconferencing, or have WII’s or Kinects, and other such inputs, so these could at some point all be bundled and turned on remotely.

What needs to be added to this is that if Verizon is filing patents now, the government has this capability, in all likelihood NOW, since they are always ahead of the curve.  They are not interested in ads, though, but of mapping the social terrain.  Add this fact–that of pervasive spying on you at all times, if your cell phone is within audible range of you–to the ability to connect your social web to this.  If you are talking about committing a crime, they can hear you, even if you don’t think your cell phone is on.  Or take it a step further: they can track you as surely as if you actually HAD an RFID chip on you, if you carry your phone, and can map all the places you go every week, who you talk with, who you eat with, what websites you access, and build PROFILES on you.  They know how often you get angry, how often you make love, how often you exercise, what shows you watch, how you react to them.  All of this analysis can be computerized. 

A prospective dissident list can be created, and graded according to personality type.  If they catch you doing something, they immediately know who else might have been involved.  We are told this is for our protection, and possibly it is to some extent–this would have been the method for arrests we read about from time to time that were in the “planning” stages, and the reason the occasional attacks are from loners–but it is also true that Big Brother is now.  They can hear you NOW.

Aaron Russo claimed that Nicholas Rockefeller claimed the goal was for all people to have RFID chips implanted in them.  What I would submit is that to the extent people keep their cell phones next to them at all times, what has been achieved NOW is much more than that.  They can’t yet tie our bank balances to our behavior, but the goal of nearly perfect information has, for all those who participate in our culture in normal ways.

To be clear, I don’t know how corrupt the NSA is.  I don’t know if there is some Big Plan.  But I do know what is possible.

We need to be clear that the problem is spending and spending will not be controlled until we have a fiscal conservative in the WHITE HOUSE, and until fiscal conservatives control both houses of Congress.  Given this, the goal needs to be winning support in the electorate for fiscal sanity.  At this point, the only way this is going to happen is if we, paradoxically, give the Democrats EVERYTHING they want, and then step back and watch what I believe will be a substantial economic downturn which they will then be unable to blame on anyone but themselves.  This is important.  You people want no new taxes, but you don’t grasp that our borrowing is not $1 trillion a year.  We are borrowing BOTH from the Chinese AND From the future.  From the future–our children–we borrowed $4 TRILLION just last year.  Are you so stupid as to think that blocking an increase from 35% to 39% (I think it is) is going to make any noticeable difference on our net indebtedness?  Of course it won’t.  But it will make it harder in 2014 to get good people elected.  Face the music: you’re not running the show, and until you know nothing substantive will happen.

I have quotes on each planner page.  Consistently, the ones I like best are from Helen Keller.  Here is today’s.  I had not seen it before.

“To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

Republicans need to start making people aware of the REAL fiscal cliff we face, that of a loop we can’t get out of of borrowing, increasing interest rates, increased borrowing, increased interest rates.  We need to develop simple, easy charts that show clearly that taxing the rich more will NOT, CANNOT come even CLOSE to addressing the actual problems we face.

These are not scare tactics.  They are mature approaches to real problems.  Obama and the Democrats are either TRYING to destroy this nation, or so economically illiterate and reckless that the same end may as well be their aim.

We can start running ads showing that our true debt is $86 trillion, which is $277,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  Now, the 86 trillion is payable over a number of years, so the situation is not as dire as it may seem, but it will get WORSE the longer we wait.

Why not start telling this story in the complicit media now, through paid advertising?  If the Republicans won’t do it, some other advocacy group like FreedomWorks needs to put it together.  Start fundraising NOW.  Start issue campaigning NOW.

Give Obama what he wants.  In absolute terms, as idiotic and destructive as what he is calling for is likely to be, it’s small change compared to our real problems.  Even getting a small concession is not worth the years of propaganda he will get out of it.  He is literally planning to blame what Republicans do now for economic conditions two years from now.

Why not just say “Look, we don’t like these policies.  NO Republicans want to vote for them.  But who knows? Maybe Obama is right.  If so, then he will proudly claim the economy two years from now.  If not, then he still HAS to claim it, as we gave him what he said he needed.  There will be NOWHERE else to point the finger.”

I got a good night’s sleep last night.  Dogs got me up a tad sooner than I liked, but hell 8am would constitute profound decadence nearly anywhere and any time (although hunter-gatherers seem to have had it pretty easy).

Be that as it may, it seems to me we could make this into a fun game, playing with Obama.  McConnell, as one example, could say to the Senate Democrats on Dec. 28th (assuming they are still in session) “I have secured an agreement from all Republicans neither to filibuster nor oppose your bill.  You may move ahead in confidence, knowing you have a majority”.  This will put the Dem’s in a bind, since they know Obama’s proposals stink to high heaven even by Democrat standards, but how can they oppose it?  It’s the “everyone but Reid take one step back.  Ok, you are the volunteer.”

We can start running political ads in solidly blue districts on solidly left wing media outlets like ABC, off and on over the next two and four years.

Philadelphia ad: Zoom to focus on MLK, Jr. (with subtitles for those who mute it): “Did you know Martin Luther King, Jr. was a lifelong Republican?  Did you know all the lynchings in the South were done by Democrats, and that the Republican Party was founded SPECIFICALLY to end Slavery?  Did you know that former KKK member Robert Byrd, a Democrat, was one of the longest serving members of Congress, and that he was praised as a great man by no less than Bill Clinton?”

Then we could play with more and less daring phrases.  More daring: “yes, the Democrats give you an allowance.  But have they given you a job that honors your dignity as a human being?” That may resonate with some.  Again, these things can and should be focus group tested in an intelligent way.

You could have a succession of images of people in KKK uniforms, with the caption “Democrat” underneath.  You could play the Malcolm X piece where he calls black people who vote Democrat “chumps and race traitors”.  Simple images would be what are needed here.  The woman who was so excited about her Obamaphone is not going to respond well to nuance.  And none is needed.  We are right: Democrats kill every flower of innovation that tries to sprout outside their direct control.

The overall point I’m making is that we can begin countering the propaganda.  I would donate to that cause.  What people need to understand is that propaganda, to be effective, has to be total.  It has to be the Truman Show, where nobody tells them it’s fake.  When you let cracks of light through, the risk increases that the whole edifice will come crashing down.

I read that in many districts in Phillie, not ONE vote was recorded for Romney.  Getting 100 would then be an improvement.  And those people are, occasionally, speaking up against the blatant use and abuse of the black vote by people who do NOTHING, or next to nothing–$200 in cell phone money, when it costs $30,000 or more a year to live decently, and no jobs paying that are being created–for them.

Large swings can come from small beginnings.  I read also that according to Dick Morris, the political ads in the last election did something close to nothing.  Why not invest that money starting now, on changing hearts and minds?

Here is another idea.  Zoom to face of man in a suit (or whatever tests well in a focus group), who looks in the camera and says “I was going to expand my business, but when I ran the math factoring in Obama’s tax increases and particularly the cost of Obamacare.  I couldn’t  justify it.  Would YOU work 80 hours a week for the same amount of money you could make working 40?  Me neither.  That’s ten jobs paying $40,000 you will never see.”  Make it a real business owner.  Then another 5 in quick succession.  Me, neither. Me, neither.  etc.  This is rough, but something showing jobs NOT created, which is the statistic that is real, but unrecorded.

The thing is, the complicit media can be flanked through paid ads.  You can reach people you would not otherwise reach.

I am a contradictory human being, because I often follow impulses I will call intuition, and which in some cases actually is (as opposed to garden variety “doing the easy thing” laziness).  This morning I chose to sleep in.  I will often do a series of exercises from the Kum Nye series of “yoga” from Tarthang Tulku, and I find if I sleep afterwards, all sorts of emotions and thoughts float up.

I have been spending a lot of time trying to reconnect emotionally with my past.  There was a certain point where I just locked up, time stopped, and I lost that line of identity.  I’m trying to recapture that.  It will make me more effective, happier, and generally useful.

Several things dawned on me this morning, though.  The first was a sense that there is NO WAY to do what I will call paradigmatic work, identity work, without time.  You need time, sweet time, blessed time.

How many of us have that nowadays?  You run, run, run all day long, eat shit food, then tune out and numb yourself up for another day of it by watching TV, usually with some violence you can participate in vicariously so as to assuage the anger and stress and caged-in-ness that you feel (“lemmings in shiny metal boxes”).

Then it made me mad that we live like this.  It is the Rockefellers, and descendants of the Morgans, and all the others who created a permanent throne for themselves in the Federal Reserve 99 years ago.  THEY are the ones who make us live like this.  THEY are the ones who live like kings while the rest of us work like dogs.

It is not hard nowadays to earn $50-$60-$70,000 if you have a college degree and are willing to submit to relentless stress.  But to do better than that you have to be a professional or start a business.  And both of those require HUGE time commitments.  It is not uncommon for starting attorneys, or doctors, or architects to work 80 hour weeks. And the same goes with starting any other sort of business.

Hard work has value.  It does.  I have worked numerous 80 hour weeks.  But it makes you mean, tired, and less willing to consider alternatives.  The first thing that goes when under stress is flexibility of thinking.  Everything becomes dichotomous, and mechanical.  You develop a routine, a pattern of thinking, and you follow it as if your life depended on it.  Only on vacation, only when relaxing, will you sometimes realize how stupid you have been.

We need more time.  Civil society simply will not function when the mass of the population is either overworked, or voluntarily submitting to nearly continuous propaganda on the TV [even fucking Jeopardy seems to be on the bandwagon for Obama; I hadn’t watched it in a while, and they work questions in there that can only be called political].

Then I was thinking that “finding yourself” is a useful idea.  We all need some sense of who we are relative to others.  Native Americans and others would have a spirit animal, that in part differentiated them.  Our problem today is we do not have any efficient, socially generalized MEANS of doing this.  They are no rites of passage, outside of small cultural ghettos like the military.

Finally, I was imagining that I had been on Earth many times.  How many times and places could you land where some son of a bitch was not making shit roll downhill and fucking everyone’s lives up?  How often could you say “this is a just society”?  I don’t think it would be often.  What we face today is on a global scale, but the basic problem remains that the human race is only here because it is not sufficiently developed to be somewhere else.  This NECESSARILY means that the vast bulk of people are mediocre, stupid, and unable and/or unwilling to pursue their own self interest through moral improvement.  Creating change here will ALWAYS mean rolling a heavy stone uphill hard enough to get it to the other side. Then doing it again.

If you are going to have a Church, you have to have an affirmation, something holds you together. Here is my current proposal:

I commit myself to living a happy and creative life, and to supporting the efforts of others to likewise live happily and creatively.  I commit myself to taking as much  pleasure in the happiness of others as I take in my own successes, justifiable pride, and companionship with those I love and who love me.

I reject fully and completely all resentment and self pity as pernicious and unworthy of any human spirit.

I commit to being persistent in the pursuit of my own freely chosen ends.  I commit to being persistent even in the pursuit of persistence, and the progressive perfection of my capacity for relaxed, engaged, joyful and effective work.

I commit to lifelong learning and personal growth, in the broadest possible senses.

You will note some flirting with Ayn Rand there.  She was close, but slightly off the mark.  My sense of her, though, remains of someone who fundamentally did care about people, who  did have a good heart, and who was in the most important ways decent, even  if she was prone to temper tantrums, childish self indulgences, and a pronounced need to control those around her.

This will evolve, but that’s my first stab at it. 

I will add, actually, that it is apparently a la mode for Christians to say “I am third”, where God is first, others are second, and they are third.  I don’t agree with this.  Christ was the essence of decency, and no doubt understood that the best guarantee for open affection directed at others is personal happiness. We give when we feel full.  Life is not supposed to be an endless slog.  It’s supposed to be light and easy, once we accept the necessity of some pain.  As my granddad used to say “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”.

I have his pipes, and plan to get them all cleaned and start smoking my place up.  It’s never too early to start practicing to be the Granddad.

On that note (God, does this guy ever shut up or follow straight lines?) I was looking at DVD’s of all the video I took of my kids when they were little.  It doesn’t interest me.  But I realized that it will be a BLAST to watch it with grandkids, when they are a certain age.

This is a bit uncohesive, but I’ll put it out there anyway.  Mine it for what you like.

How many dreams have died on the edge of a comfortable bed? It’s a good question.

As I think about it this morning, sipping some nice licorice tea, it seems to me many of us are being ridiculous.  Yes, that election was a disaster in many respects, but did it tell us we were wrong?  Of course not.  It told us we have failed to create a simple message that even the complicit media couldn’t spin in negative ways.

What you say is OFTEN vastly less important than your image, and HOW you say it.  I will give you a homely example.

I debated in high school, of the Lincoln-Douglas variety.  We were not poor, but somehow managed to live like we were, and in my first debate I literally wore my first dress shirt and tie.  I was a high school freshman.  My father was an engineer, and dressed like one.  I wore one of his shirts and a clip on tie.

I made it to the Octofinal round in a relatively large tournament, and thought I had beat my opponent handily, but the judges unanimously ruled in her favor.  The policy was for them to share their scoring criteria, on written sheets.  There were three,  I read the first two, and didn’t understand why I had lost.  The third, however, had a short comment “you would have more success if your belly button wasn’t showing.”  I looked down and realized that my stiff shirt, made of some synthetic fiber, had a habit of folding in an unfortunate way.

[There was no one there on my side to tell me.  This was one of countless times I’ve faced a challenge alone.  It has made me who I am, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else.  I like an occasional compliment, but I don’t need ANY, ZERO external validation to trust myself and my ideas.  And actually, thinking about it, it makes me laugh to realize that’s about what I have for most of my ideas.  Ah, so be it.]

Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were exposed belly buttons.  They didn’t just hurt their own races, but the national races as well.  They made it easy to portray the GOP as a the party of religious loonies.

On that topic, I would add that America will NEVER, EVER, EVER become a nation of committed Christians again.  EVER.  Not going to happen.  Period.  The tide may go out slowly–my guess–but the scientism of our age is ascendant, and simply incompatible with the theology of Christianity.  That is why I feel it structurally necessary to create a church.  We cannot move backwards.  We have to move forwards.

Christ was not a human sacrifice demanded by God for his own edification.  As I have pointed out from time to time, if the goal was for Christ to be a sacrifice, why wasn’t he ritually slaughtered on the altar in the Temple where all the other sacrifices were killed?  My view is that Paul and other early theologians simply got the message wrong.  I won’t go into that further, but I seem to recall discussing this in my Grand Inquisitor piece.

The net with regard to social conservatism is that it is a creed which is waning, and which will find it ever harder to win elections.  What I would submit is that this is a time for private piety, and public intelligence.  We need to concern ourselves more with BORN Americans, the 310 million or so of us (less political and financial elites: the 1% Obama protects so assiduously) who are going to face very tough times when our national economy collapses in a predictable way.

Back to my main point, what I think we all need to grasp is that the Left in this country has created the political equivalent of what Proctor and Gamble does when rolling out new products.  They focus group test words and ideas, make sure the resonate with the right people, then simply say them over and over. In the case of Barack Obama, he doesn’t even need to TRY and correlate reality and rhetoric, since the media covers for him.

But the fact remains that we are right.  We are increasing our debt $5 trillion or more EVERY YEAR.  Grandma is going over a cliff.  Grandma is going over a cliff, and it won’t matter if it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House when the shit hits the fan.  We have about ten years before something like my financial plan becomes necessary.

Republicans need to do two things: become the party talking about this–and the fact that taking up the ENTIRE revenue of the United States at this point would not prevent the necessity of drastic cuts–and understand time will be needed for this message to sink in.

In the meantime, we can have our cake and eat it too.  Boehner can simply say “Look, we think these tax increases and spending increases are a bad idea.  We think the economy will suffer from them, joblessness will go up, and economic misery will go up.  But we’ve been wrong before.  We are going to give Barack Obama HIS PLAN, what HE wants, what HE says is needed, and wait and see what happens.”

And in point of fact the tax increases under Clinton did not have negative effects, so it is POSSIBLE these won’t either, but the much larger likelihood is that we are going back into recession due to concern about spending, the fact that Obama is President, and the vast and unknown costs of Obamacare.

The most forward thinking Republicans might even consider beginning to talk about my plan or something like it.  My work output is becoming slowly more coherent, and rewriting that plan in book form is one of my top priorities, so I may have something better within a year or so.

The reality is that nations with our level of debt do wind up defaulting, to some greater or lesser extent.  None have defaulted in my understanding in the favor of the People (although I’ve seen claims Iceland did recently; I have not studied this in depth), but rather in favor of political and financial elites.  My plan is populistic, and would in my view receive widespread public support, even though of course it would also scare the crap out of a lot of people, and receive ROBUST opposition from the banking sector.

I don’t read much news–Drudge Report, Lucianne, Yahoo when I check my email. Front Page Mag and the Blaze when I have time–so I don’t know if this was reported, but Zig Ziglar passed away a few days ago.  I believe it was Nov. 30th.  He was in his later 80’s, so it was a good run.

In so many ways, the reelection of Obama seems epochal, like the ending of one phase of American history, and the beginning of a new–our “Post-Rational Democracy”.

Zig Ziglar was clearly Old Guard.  He lived through the Great Depression, served in the Navy in WW2, and lived as a traveling salesman, when it was straight commission, and you had to sell to eat.

He was in my view emblematic of the work ethic, integrity, honor and fundamental decency that historically has made America such a special place.  He worked hard to build a better world, and I have every reason to believe he had enormous success in doing it.  He helped me–I can say that categorically.  I used to wear his tapes out. I read “See you at the top” twice.  I still remember at odd times many of the anecdotes he used to tell, like about when he started his fitness program, and had trouble running around the block.

He was a good man, and the world will be lesser for his passing.  I have no doubt, though, that his soul is in a much better place, and the happier for knowing he made a difference with the time he spent on earth.