Month: July 2013

I have said this before, but in my view the case of Alberto Gonzalez should be put in the public eye regularly by all people of good will and who value the truth–which is to say by only perhaps a quarter at most of our media complex.

He was forced to resign by a campaign of sheer innuendo, waged relentlessly by the complicit media.  Then-Senator Hillary Clinton alleged that he was trying to hush up some unnamed and mysterious scandals.

Eric Holder has gotten hundreds of people KILLED while breaking the law, and he has not faced a FRACTION of the heat visited on Gonzalez.

Not everyone in this country is an asshole, or tolerates assholes.  Many people are simply ignorant, or lack the attention span to remember things when they leave the media spotlight.

Me, I have not forgotten that North Korea threatened to launch nukes at us, or that we still do not have a statement or even plausible presumption of guilt on Joker Tsarnaev–who seems not to have had a throat injury when arrested.  We don’t know anything about the Saudi the Obama’s got spirited away immediately. 

I have forgotten none of the scandals (which, as I have said, ought properly to be viewed and described as “evidence of Obama’s true intentions”).

Gonzalez, though: he is a textbook example of a propaganda operation waged for purely partisan purposes, and contrary both to the best interests of the United States, and the cause of truth generally.

I can’t remember what I said last time, but here is the shortest summary of the issue I have come up with:

The minimum wage only does anything when set above what the market was otherwise willing to pay.  If set at or below what the market was willing to pay it is irrelevant and unnecessary. 

In economic theory, any increase in price, given a fixed demand, will cause a decrease in the consumption of that product, which here is labor.  This is as ironclad a rule as one can find in the field.  Necessarily, then, artificially fixing the minimum wage above what the market was willing to pay will ALWAYS cause increases in unemployment.  There are no exceptions.

This is masked by the fact that in many places the minimum wages are set below what was going to be paid anyway.  People look at a high standard of living and confuse cause and effect.

I will add that in the United States part of our problem is the ignorance of large segments of our populace, which makes them worth less.  Both in rural areas, and inner cities some 40% of the kids fail to graduate high school.  The difference is that in rural areas there are a lot of opportunities for unskilled labor.  This is much less true in cities, particularly when characterized by high crime rates.

To belabor the obvious, universal public education was a key socialist objective for much of the 19th century.  They got it.  Now many of the people who ought in theory to most benefit from it fail to appreciate it at all.

When anyone says that “society” has failed an individual or group of individuals, what we almost invariably mean is that their FAMILIES have failed them.  The people our culture depends upon as the first and primary source of adaptive acculturation have failed to do their job.

This has been made unclear since at least the time of Rousseau since he himself sired a number of children  he flipped off to orphanages since he didn’t want to take care of them, since he was either a narcissist or a sociopath.  Thus, “society” is what you lean on when you are irresponsible, and which in practice means depending on the tender mercies of a power elite who use taxpayer money to buy votes, and thus to get the power they need to take de facto kickbacks and bribes.

Compassion is a necessary virtue in others for the irresponsible.

His family failed Trayvon Martin.  That is precisely why they are so mad at everyone else.  The mirror can be a painful place to look, and God knows they have plenty of help shifting the blame everywhere but where it belongs.  I don’t blame Martin for reacting in predictable ways to what was no doubt a very unpleasant environment.  I would say until about age 25, in our culture, kids are direct reflections of the work the parent(s) did or (in all too many cases) did not do.

Hell, it’s been WEEKS I think since my last conspiracy theory. 

She is there to facilitate the release of our latest nuclear research to the Chinese.  Not directly, but by hiring people at Lawrence Livermore who can hire people, who can leak the data.

I have said before, but not recently, that my conspiracy theory on the whole Ken Starr thing was that by keeping the focus on irrelevancies, nobody would think to investigate with the care warranted how so many of our secrets were either stolen, or sold outright to the Chinese.

If our system were not fundamentally superior to others, we would have fallen long ago.  We have many traitors–in a formal sense of giving aid and comfort to our enemies–in our midst.

I see this phrase “social engineering”.  I have been dealing a lot with architects lately, and it seems to me if we want to describe the activities of morally (and otherwise) obtuse political schemers, it would be social architecture.

Engineers as a group tend to be a bit cranky, insular, and pessimistic.  There is usually some older white guy who will tell you all the reasons something won’t work.  You normally shouldn’t build anything until this guy stops being able to find problems.  All architects in the end depend on structural engineers to make sure their visions can actually be built.

Architects, on the other hand, seem to self select as “visionaries”, in the sense of seeing, ideally, innovative, unique ways of approaching the craft of creating structures, of in some respects sculpting space, of creating openness and enclosure where before there was mere emptiness.

As I have said before, the visions of leftists tend to be static.  Like the ennumerated crimes of Sade in most of 120 Day of Sodom, they lack motion.  The same basic themes recur.  The dominant feel is not of a machine but a picture, one in which all the components are harmoniously interrelated.

Mao, in decreeing, say, for the Tibetans a crop which had not been tested in Tibet, and which was destined to fail, killing a million or more people uselessly, was not operating a machine, or modifying a machine.  The machine had been operating successfully for at least hundreds of years and likely millenia.  He did not ask the questions an engineer would ask.  He did not look at all the things that could go wrong.

What he saw was a picture of happy, smiling Tibetans, thanking him for so brilliantly changing their lives for the better.  He saw a static image.  He saw a society in the same way that a building stands, unchanging.

He was a sociopath, obviously–whether congenitally or made so by an evil creed is irrelevant–but one whose principle fault was a defective mode of thinking.

Couple thoughts.  I’m tired and perhaps disjointed, but this theme has been in my head a few weeks, and I thought it time to put it to bed as well.

If I were to offer a universal blessing of the Buddhist variety, I would not invoke compassion at all.  I would say something like “may all sentient beings be gifted with appropriate work, and the capacity to enjoy it.”

We need to abolish this concept of final rest.  Relative rest is a necessity, but it is my belief that even when we die, there is work to be done.  Movement is in the nature of this half of the universe (there is in my belief another half, a latent half, and since all structure is latent there, so too is all movement), and we may as well get used to it.

As a side note, I would include loving relationships within the category of work.  You cannot simply exist with others.  You must give them your attention, your affection, your time.  It is simply work that is rewarding, and like work well done, it need not feel arduous, and can be quite pleasant.

I will add, too, that this thought comes about from reading about the smaller Tibetan Prayer Wheels.  They also chant various mantras, like Om Mani Padme Hum.  I was fiddling around with that one, and noticed that it causes my breath to come out in slightly different ways.  If we posit that much emotional “baggage”–undigested experience–is held in the chest and manner of breathing, then this mantra is a more or less physical intervention to help release it.  That is my view, at any rate.

We know so little.  So many of our supposed thought elite live in a wasteland and never go anywhere interesting.

What is class warfare–which is only in actuality ever waged by the State against those it considers undesirables–but cultural eugenics?  Nazism and Communism only ever differed in how they defined undesirable.  We view them differently today because the propaganda of one was unmasked by military defeat.  The other is trumpeted to this day from podiums across the nation, making moral clarity impossible for most.

We read Denmark is one of the happiest nations on Earth.  In my view, this is because the communities are of a size where people can feel like they belong; they have a common culture; and nobody is really poor.  I think one could even make the case that egalitarianism is an OUTCOME of moral development.  It emerges when a people is ready. If compelled, it is NECESSARILY violent, since inner growth cannot be forced.  You need to learn to see more, not less.

What socialists claim to want is a world where everything makes sense and everyone lives in harmony.  Yet, their first step–that of rejecting individual moral distinctions and the possibility of moral growth outside of their political program–makes success impossible.  Where moral growth is needed, they reject it, and at that in the name of morality.

The point I wanted to make, though, before my fingers go away from me, is that I had this pleasant image the other day of finding myself sleepless one night, and getting up and walking down to a local church, where they had these Tibetan prayer wheels.  I imagined seeing someone there, perhaps someone I knew, and walking around turning them silently for an hour or two until my mind settled, then going back to bed.

Practices like this are seen as “primitive” by some, and for my part I don’t think prayers get “sent” anywhere.  But how emotionally healthy is it to focus on good intentions from time to time for an hour or two in a community sanctuary?

The Chinese are evil.

I really am an odd, odd duck, aren’t I?  C’est la me.

Here is a better analogy for what banks do: they take a dime from a thousand people, and give it to the person receiving the loan of $100.  The person, of course, does not feel like the money has been stolen, so my analogy with a hold-up is not right.

But inflation saps wealth–even if so subtly that, as Keynes observed, not one man in a thousand can detect it in ordinary circumstances–and it is created, by and large, by the institution of fractional reserve banking.  Inflation happens when the economy is good because the banks are lending.  We have relatively low inflation now because they are NOT lending.  Simple.

Obviously, they create the money more or less from scratch, which doesn’t sap the wealth of anyone, UNTIL it circulates.

Once you learn to grasp what banks do, and how large the gap is between what SHOULD have happened, and what DID happen, it’s a bit like dropping into “They live“.