Month: March 2013

OK, GOP, repeat after me: Even WITH the sequester we are spending a trillion dollars more a year than we did under Clinton. 

Unemployment was low under Clinton. For most of his eight years.

Ergo, Federal spending is not needed for prosperity.  This point is obvious, but somehow these dumbasses seem unable to develop and deploy a clear message.  Yes, again, of course the media is in the tank for the  forces of bankruptcy and evil.  But they give at least nods to caring about the truth, so the GOP–to the extent they represent the forces of reason–needs to make its sound bites count.

is emotional alienation.  It is emotional superficiality, and the inability to form deep bonds with friends and family and community.  It is in my view reinforced strongly by media.

That’s all I will say for now, but would encourage everyone to stop watching TV, and to be careful in the other media you choose to consume.  It works on you in deep ways that are not immediately apparent.

That Obama could consider it POSSIBLE to win the public relations war over this topic is tribute to the stupidity of Republicans,and of course the craven and unprincipled complicity of the thousands of awful and demented human beings who create so much of our informational tapestry; those who, to be clear, throw shit on the wall and proclaim it gold.

I am reminded of an Onion article from some years back, after the Saints–then the favorites to win the Super Bowl–lost to the Seattle Seahawks.  The headline read: “Saints lose first round bye.”

The process of informational warfare is simple: create simple, easily understood statements–which in the case of Republicans will always have the advantage of not being patent falsehoods–and repeat them often and in unison.  It is what our opposition does.  They do it better, because successful long term lying requires a lot of planning and coordination, but we can learn the game.  We need to learn the game.

I have created some numbers, with three columns.  We have the year, the unemployment rate, and Federal spending.   What you will note is that we spent 50% less than Obama for most of the last 20 years, and had MUCH lower unemployment.  A strong case could in fact be made that the HIGHER the Federal spending, the higher the unemployment.  You have to go back to the Great Depression and our last socialist President to string together multiple years over 9% unemployment.  The unemployment numbers are here.  The tax data numbers are here.

And to be crystal clear, the cuts due to sequestration are about $85 billion.  Obama has increased spending $500 billion since 2009, which means that even with sequestration we are spending a TRILLION dollars, adjusted for inflation, more than Bill Clinton did.  Wake the fuck up people.

1992	7.5	1.9 trillion
1993	6.9	1.9 trillion
19941	6.1	1.9 trillion
1995	5.6	1.9 trillion
1996	5.4	1.9 trillion
19971	4.9	1.9 trillion
19981	4.5	2 triliion
19991	4.2	2
20001	4	2
2001	4.7	2
2002	5.8	2.2
20031	6.00%	2.3
20041	5.5	2.4
20051	5.1	2.5
2006	4.6	2.6
2007	4.6	2.6
2008	5.8	2.7
2009	9.3	2.7
2010	9.6	3.1
2011	9	3
2012	8.14	3.2

Since the Vietnam era, the power of the Executive to commit US ground and other forces to combat has steadily been allowed to increase, despite the clear and principled decision of the framers of our Constitution to place the power to declare war in, and only in, the hands of Congress.

The idea was that wars need to be paid for, and Congress manages the money.  Wars need to be led, and someone needs to be in charge.  But the person in charge, who may want the war, needs to be subordinate to those who are not in charge, but have to pay for it.

With regard to Syria, to the extent we have a national security interest, it is staying OUT of Syria.  Would it not be INTERESTING if one or more of our top generals, if they receive orders to deploy combat troops, tell Obama to his face that they will do so only upon receiving a declaration of war from Congress.

Now, by law, soldiers–including top officers–only have obey lawful orders.  An order to initiate a war without Congressional approval is, therefore, an order which soldiers are not required by law to obey.  Clearly, they could be sacked, but the political value of the exercise, in getting Executive power back in line with the Constitution, would be quite valuable, particularly if they made their case publicly, either directly, or via managed leaks.

Our troops have done enough.  They have suffered enough.  Obama lies about everything, of course, but he campaigned for peace, and it is impossible to say that if Iraq was NOT a justified war, how Syria comes within a hundred miles of meeting the standard.

We are not the errand boys for the Saudis, despite how beautiful our President may find the call of the Muezzin.

One potentially interesting way to approach this issue–which at root is about the right of the American people to ask basic and appropriate questions about leaders, even and perhaps especially when Congress and the courts lack the integrity and balls to do their jobs–would be to circulate a document along the lines of a petition, asking current and former judges if they would accept as evidence in court what Obama has thus far providef. My strong assuption is that virtually none of them would.

We are in an informational war. This is how you create and deploy informational weapons

Lord, grant me a lifetime of interesting problems, and the courage and cunning to solve them in interesting ways.

We have multiple words for doing something wrong–error, mistake, omission, oversight–but how many do we have for doing something right?  Is there a one word opposite of error?  You can’t say “making a correct”.  But the act of doing something correctly–even though we assume this is what will always happen–is in fact the result of mindfulness and care, and is every bit as much an act as screwing up.

My initial proposal was rorre, which is error backwards, but that doesn’t work.  I looked up “to do” in Greek on Google, but since all the results come up in what I think is called Cyrillic script, I can’t read them.  Eu- plus “to do”, or “to make”, would be good.

Having done a lot of coursework in various languages–Chinese, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, all for at least a year (with the exception of French when I got caught sneaking into class at a school where I was not enrolled), I can say that some things are easier to say in some languages than others.  German lends itself to abstraction.  English–with its HUGE number of descriptive adjectives, and overall massive word count–to observation.

Any and all generalizations of that sort are obviously provisional, and very limited in their utility, but that has been my experience.  That is perhaps why I derive such childish pleasure in inventing new words.

Vaguely related, I was thinking about the word “hypothesis” the other day.  Hypo means, “under” at least in words like Hypoglycemia, hypodermic, etc.  Hypothesis then refers to a thesis that is small, or less than a thesis.

Being me, I of course instantly added hyperthesis, for something larger than a thesis.  Here is an example “Richard Dawkins is slavishly attached to the hypertheses of materialism as a final explanation for the nature of reality, and to the use of unmodified Darwinian Natural Selection as the exclusive mechanism of speciation.”

To this I can add “it would hypobolic to call such unfounded and empirically indefensible ideas asinine and unhelpful.”

I deal often with serious things, but I like to play as well.  This is nerd play, yes, but play it is.

In reference to this news story, we need to be clear that, if trained by US, or NATO, the rebels absolutely DO have both access to chemical weapons, and the skill to use them.  Since Syria is claiming the rebels launched the missiles, this would not even be a false flag operation.  I discussed all this at length, roughly in December.

What seems to have happened is that Libyan arms, including chemical weapons, were covertly transported to Turkey, and then to Syria, after weapons training by Western agents. 

Given that at least half of the “rebels” in Syria openly sympathize with Al Queda, and given that Assad is not causing the United States any serious problems otherwise, the only credible reason to support the rebels is to lead to an outcome similar to what happened in Egypt: the installation of an anti-Western, Islamist government.

Given that this outcome very definitely is NOT in our interests, this policy is plainly both treasonous, and morally noxious.

Congress needs to get to the bottom of this.  People are very literally dying because of what Obama seems to be doing, and many more will in the future.  We SHOULD NOT, SHOULD NOT commit ANY troops to this conflict.  It is an abuse of our soldiers, and a waste of our money.

I was reading this link yesterday (which, by the way, I found on aldaily.com, which posts some interesting things from time to time; being an academically focused site, it of course leans left; still.  . ) about a meeting of some of the most determined atheistic proselytizers on the planet–among them Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett–and the whole congeries felt to me like Nazi scientists discussing how to further understanding of German racial superiority, and Jewish inferiority.

The science, they felt, was self evident.  No doubts existed in their minds.  Nor were there any outstanding moral questions: Jews (for Nazis), and humans outright (Dennett, Dawkins, et al) were nothing of intrinsic worth.  Jews were subhuman (Untermenschen) and this lot has discarded the notion of human worth outright:

A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few—but only a
few!—contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate
the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing,
continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and
sometimes even the soul.

Or Francis Crick’s famous:

“ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

What is NOT possible within such a worldview?  Dennett calls us “moist robots”.  Ponder this: do we feel empathy or remorse when we send an old toaster to the dumpster?  Only if we worry about trash.  Does it send our moral sense tingling when an old car is crushed for scrap?  Or an old computer disassembled for scrap parts?

Why would vivisection on humans be wrong on their account?  We are, after all, nothing but machines, and morality an artifact of evolution.  Humans have no innate dignity, no innate rights.

Let me reframe this: they are not Nazis.  Nazis at least respected Germans, and Nordic peoples generally.  They are WORSE than the Nazis, by far.

Quite clearly, what they envision–all being radical leftists–is a society in which all humans but an aristocratic, technocratic elite (among which, of course, they will be priests) will be made equal by some combination of force and deception, and live out their meaningless lives under the benign protection of their betters.

I will note in this regard that even people who, in PRINCIPLE, view all humans as meaningless and temporary assemblages of matter cannot help but view THEMSELVES as somehow different.  This is why they are crusading for this insane idea.

We have known for the better part of 50 years that their “common sense” materialism does not best fit the data.  It is a false idea.  Everything, clearly, is interconnected in ways we can MEASURE.  No “spookiness” is required.

For instance, Ganzfeld experiments have consistently yielded results of such statistical significance that they would EASILY qualify any drug for sale in the United States.  So too have experience on psychokinesis.  (You can read about these things in Dean Radin’s “The Conscious Universe” ; I will note, as well, that you cannot trust sites like CSICOP and SkepDic, for one simple reason: THEY LIE.  They lie like motherfuckers.  They like true pieces of shit who derive sadistic pleasure from the looks they see on peoples faces when they tell them their brother is dead, when he isn’t.  I say this from considerable experience with them.  They only value science which conforms to their emotional needs.)

To put it simply, their view of the world is plainly based on EMPIRICALLY WRONG foundations, and their conclusions simply dreadful, and unnecessarily so.

Much of our academic elite has been overtaken by an evil ideology, which does not best explain the world, and which permits the commission of acts we don’t even want to begin to imagine, but for which Dr. Mengele was only the start).

This designation is familiar enough to students of totalitarianism.  It is a catch-all phrase, which can be used to justify the detention, torture, and murder of substantially anyone who is unfortunate enough to draw the ire of a member of the power elite.

What I think we need to make crystal clear is that the word “terrorist” has been  used as a backdoor way of creating this category in the United States, with the drooling support of intellectual midgets like John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

Terrorist=enemy of the state, whose rights are no longer protected.

The most recent National Defense Authorization Act allowed the President to declare ANYONE, including Americans who have been charged with no crimes, terrorists, and their rights as Americans–Writ of Habeas Corpus, the right to trial by jury, the protection from forced self incrimination, and others–vitiated.  Ended.  Gone. 

Via NDAA, citizen becomes terrorist becomes enemy of the state.  And not unsurprisingly, Obama stated clearly that he feels he has the right to kill Americans, even when they have not yet committed a crime, nor are an imminent threat to do so.  He recanted publicly following Rand Paul’s filibuster, but given horrific crimes like Fast and Furious, and Benghazi can anyone doubt his compliance with the laws of our nation is merely a matter of rhetoric and political convenience?