Month: October 2013

This is a response to a non-debate with a silly person on the topic of Global Warming.  

The point I will underscore, repeated in the body of the response, is To the extent humanity still has problems, substantially ALL
of them can be placed at the feet of Socialists, who like all deceivers
go by many names.


This point is critical, and it is the first time, I think, that I have stated it so clearly.

Let’s simplify this. The question at hand is if it worth passing
economically disruptive regulations and installing in the process a
global government in order to stop something that is not even clearly a
danger.

Is it worth denying developing nations the benefits of
cheap energy? Is it worth raising energy costs across the board in the
United States and other nations, which will hurt the poor the most?

I
don’t believe anyone has shown clearly, much less beyond any reasonable
doubt, that the warming we have seen since the Little Ice Age is
anything but background variation. We have weather on a daily basis,
and climate across decades, centuries, and millenia. There were no coal
plants when CO2 levels were ten times what they are today.

I
don’t believe ANY of the climate models have yet predicted ANYTHING.
Quite the contrary, they make guesses, and simply adjust the models to
predicts in the past what actually happened. This does not inspire
confidence, is absolutely inconsistent with a scientific model based
upon falsifiable hypotheses, and CATEGORICALLY should not be used as the
basis for invasive, disruptive, and costly government interventions.

And
clearly many aspiring Fascists like Al Gore have seized on this issue
as a means of generating global government with few democratic controls.

This is made quite clear in this article: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

Global
Warming is nothing but a repackaging of the old Malthusian notion that
prosperity was going to make all of us poor. It was expressed for a
while in the claim that the Earth was going to get overpopulated. Some
initial Fascist policies were put in place, like forced sterilizations
and abortions, but none of the mass famines that were predicted have
happened.

In the past half century, virtually all mass hunger has
been the result of wars, usually wars involving Communists. To bring
back Mr. Boomtown Rats, the famine in Ethiopia was the result of INSANE
policies initiated at gunpoint by INSANE left wingers, who moved people
from places where they could feed themselves to places where they could
not.

To the extent humanity still has problems, substantially ALL
of them can be placed at the feet of Socialists, who like all deceivers
go by many names.

Global Warming–or Climate Change, which again is a lie–is simply one of those names.

There is no problem so bad that it cannot be made worse by a specialist.

I may have read this somewhere, perhaps in one of those Murphy’s Law books that used to be popular.  Still, I like it, and pass it along in the spirit of mild amusement, and perhaps a tad bit of wistfulness.  It is in fact quite true.  As one flaming example, Paul Krugman is a specialist.

Two points.  First, do you recall what Obamacare ALSO means?  It means the government take-over of the educational loan sector.  It means we are one step closer to Cuba, where education is “free” (even if even people with M.D.’s can barely make enough to eat, and the country as a whole is a squalid shithole ruled by two-bit Nazis).

Second, the rollout of these exchanges, and the lack of a reaction on the part of Reid or Obama, makes to my mind very clear they have NEVER cared if these things worked.  They were never the end game.  They were always just a step in the direction of full government control of the healthcare sector.  I think they quite literally thought that rhetorical work was sufficient, that no matter how bad these things stank, that because they had control of most of the propaganda apparatus of this country, nobody would notice.  If there were problems, they could blame them on Republicans, or just pretend they didn’t exist.  That is how they deal with all other real problems, and the truth is it works pretty well.  You just need to be an amoral asshole to use such tactics.  Given that–and Obama and Reid and Pelosi clearly qualify–you can cover a lot of miles.  Hell, there are people who still believe in Global Warming.

But as I have said, real people trying to pay real bills cannot be swayed by abstract rhetoric.  All is well and good until the shit gets real, THEN people notice how much BS has been floating around.

I will repeat: if the Republicans never rise above their normal level of incompetence, they may still make this a stake to drive through the heart of the Democrat Party for a very, very long time.  It is an awful law.  It is like it was written by children based on the fairy tale proposition that details don’t matter, and that everything always works out in the end for nice people. 

When it was passed, the ONLY concern was THAT it passed.  But now it is law–or likely to become law, assuming the usual cowardice on Capital Hill–and its many, many deficiencies will become clear to all.

Granted, my belief that Obama is an aspiring totalitarian backed by huge amounts of cash–provided both by a shadowy but very wealthy cabal and misdirected and misreported Federal funds–to help him pull it off makes me paranoid, but it does not seem to me this food stamp debacle was an accident.

It seems more likely to have been a test.  Obama now KNOWS that he can more or less induce riots on demand, and make them stop whenever he wants.  Further, among those receiving food stamps, he has reinforced both by withholding, and by being excessively generous the primary role government–HIS government–plays in the lives of these people.

It has been obvious for some time that his efforts to increase the number of people receiving handouts, whether by putting record numbers of people on food stamps in the first place, giving them free phones, paying them to protest, and the like, have had as their purpose creating people who over time will be unable to conceive of life where they have to fend for themselves, and who thus can be reliably counted on to vote Democrat.

What we now also know is that they are a potential tool for the creation of the sort of chaos that normally precedes a coup.  Violence in the streets is a couple keystrokes away.

Res Publica versus Rule of the Demos.  With regard to the former, if my history is not mistaken, what amounted to the Constitution of the Roman Republic was literally written in stone.

I had not really thought about this very obvious point, but America–as many have taken pains to point out in recent years–is by design a Constitutional Republic, not a mobocracy, which is how the framers of our Constitution viewed the Athenian Democracy.

Thus, Republicans in the name itself are truer to our Constitution than those who foster the rule of the Demos, the People, the mob.

Keep in mind that the word Demagogue has the same root, demos.  Democracy and Demagogues go hand in hand.

And in reality, of course, the rule of the “people:” is almost always practically rule by an oligarchy which has simply duped enough people.  Thus the “People’s Republic of China” is neither ruled by the People nor a Republic.

Many people get confused by the first Buddhist precept, that of duhkha, which is normally translated as “suffering”.  This is not really accurate, at least according to my understanding.

What Buddhists want to point out, at root, is that unlimited emotional space and expansion is possible, and that only varied forms of ignorance and emotional and cognitive dysfunction prevent us from realizing this fact.  I realize the name for these dysfunctions, which are categorized and placed in lists in various ways by different traditions, is Klesha.

Karma, to put it another way, is the outcome of the operation of Klesha.  Klesha is how and why you screw up, and Karma is the outcome.

But again, at root, the notion is that our natural state, the state God (the universe, the Law, or whatever name we want to use) intends for us, is one that is completely happy in ways which transcend the normal notion of happiness as something close to and not exceeding having all the things and love that we want.

Reaching previously unknown emotional states is strange, but fun.  I remember Annie Lennox singing about a “new emotion”, and wondering how that was possible.  It would be like a new color.  They have all been catalogued.

But all of us are capable of feeling emotions that are new TO US.  And for that matter, there is no reason not to suppose all emotions are unique to people, times and places.

Think about this, actually: even at the best restaurant, is every meal EXACTLY the same?  Not if you pay attention to detail.  Think about the sky: does it ever repeat exactly?  No.  Is the lawn of this year the same as last year?  Of course not.

Even machines, I would argue, are not exact.  There is always room for randomness, for chaos.  Can I say God is a pirate, too?

Ah, ramblings of a confused soul.  Thank God I am confused.  I knew everything before.  With a nod to
Bob Dylan, I will say that I seem to be getting younger.

I read a line from Tarthang Tulku, in which he said roughly “in the West you have psychology; in the East we have Karma and Klesha”.  Karma, of course, is a word we are all familiar with, but I had to look up klesha.  Then, being me, I got to thinking.

Karma literally means action, to do.  It simply means “what you do”.  Implicit within this notion, though, is the idea that actions have consequences.  If you are cruel, the problem is not that you offend God–God doesn’t care, because he has given you an infinite number of lifetimes to get smart, and an infinite amount of joy when you do–but rather that you hurt YOURSELF.  This is essentially the claim I have made in my own ethical system is that the punishments for “sins”‘ are INHERENT within them.

Take a psychopathic serial killer.  They are scarcely human.  They live their daily lives filled with rage and fear, lusts they can only rarely satisfy, and completely disconnected from most or all of the world.  They are alone, even if they have partners.

Take a more subtle sin, like marital infidelity.  If you are psychologically normal, all of the positive moments will likely be balanced with anxiety, and disconnection both from your partner, and from that part of yourself that is capable of innocent joy.  You become little more than an animal in rut.

I would contrast the relatively lax Hindu/Buddhist approach with that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the first case, you exist in an infinite amount of space and time.  If you fail, get back up and try again.  You have as many chances as you need.  In the latter religions, though, there is an anthropomorphic deity conceived more or less as a father. 

In the case of the Jews, he intervenes actively DURING your life, to variously bless and curse you, not just according to your piety, but also sometimes simply by whim.  Your only recourse to get the best deal you can is to follow the Law very diligently, and to fear God.  There is in fact a saying, if I am not mistaken, that “the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom.”

In Christianity, you nominally have a loving God, as “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  Ponder this.  God controls everything.  He controls the movement of the stars, the tides, the seasons.


Yet we are to believe both that he only had ONE son, and that he needed that son to be killed in lieu of sacrificial goat, sheet and chickens so that he could assuage his own anger at the sins of his “people”.  I do not think atheists are wrong to point to the fundamental craziness of this notion, even if in their case it is frequently a constitutional sadism that motivates them, and not a concern for truth.


Further, this God is quite content to condemn for ETERNITY people who violate his laws.  The role of grace in redemption, of course, has as a theological point no doubt gotten many people killed in many wars over the centuries, in what, also, can only be seen as craziness when located within a religions nominally devoted to love and non-violence.  But what kind God, given infinite freedom, would structure a universe in such a way?


I have said on a number of occasions that I don’t think Christ himself would be a Christian, as the faith exists today.  I think that early on it was perverted for purely political, power-mongering purposes.  It is an interesting apparent fact that Christ’s Mass began to be celebrated during the existing pagan Roman festivals, one of which was the Saturnalia, and the other of which I don’t feel like looking up.  But December 25th, the exact date, was chosen because that was an important holy-day of the Mithraic cult.


In Islam, everything is absolutely black and white, right and wrong, and social conformity an absolute value.  It is an effort more or less to automate human society.  One could in fact see parallels between the industrial age, with our factory whistles and daily grinds, and the call to prayer for all men sounded five times a day.  This is the reason that Muslims have culturally been so uncreative.  Aside from some very interesting geometric patterns, they have contributed very little to any realm of human knowledge or art.  As I have pointed out, Israel, with roughly 1/100th the population, easily eclipses the number of patents generated by the entire Muslim world (or perhaps it was the Arab world, but the point is the same).


In the end, what I want to argue for is a merging of science and religion, to the benefit of the FORMER.  Religion knows things that “science” (and it is always dangerous to assume it to be a unified thing, rather than the collective output of millions of people of varying levels of talent and integrity; and much more dangerous to reify it and conflate it with “reality”, as some poor thinkers do) does not.   Scientists, for their part, can help to make plain what is wheat and what is chaff in religion.  What beliefs appear to survive critical scrutiny, and which do not?  

It is my considered view that most of Buddhism is scientific in the formal sense that their claimed chains of cause and effect can in fact be observed and–to the extent it is possible with any subjective human state–measured.  This will be the path of actual human progress, and will depend entirely on not letting Fascists like Barack Obama and whoever backs him dominate the world.

From here: http://clashdaily.com/2013/10/bombshell-ex-cia-agent-claims-obama-killed-breitbart-clancy/#CvdAB6Z4s2AXZscf.01

Here is the meat of the thing: “Lastly, he
revealed that Obama’s administration was made up of Marxist Muslims who
all take their orders from Senior Adviser to the President, Iranian-born
Valerie Jarrett. Dr. Garrow said that
it is well known to intelligence agencies all over the world that Obama
is a foreign plant who was placed on the path to the presidency by
ultra-rich Saudi nationals This is why, Garrow said, that all of Obama’s
education records have been permanently sealed.”

We have no
way of knowing if this guy was actually an agent, or if he is just a
nut, but we KNOW beyond any doubt that Valerie Jarrett is 1) Iranian; 2)
the child of Communists; 3) privy to all our secrets; and 4) very
important from a policy making perspective. I have said this before,
and will say it again: there seems no doubt Eric Holder acted on Obama’s
orders in the Fast and Furious operation, and it seems clear that they
KNEW beyond any reasonable doubt that their policy would get innocent
people killed. Given that they were capable of doing it anyway, in the
name of imposing gun control, what AREN’T they capable of? 

Also, can we explain the attempted war with Syria as other than something the Saudis wanted, for their own purposes?  Have you forgotten yet that even NOW Obama is arming people who cut the arms and legs off of little girls?

Please read this: http://www.zimbio.com/Stanley+Ann+Dunham+Soetoro/articles/1QoEw1BV74X/President+Psycho

The formatting is terrible, but this is, I
think, a pretty good guess at the truth. Things I did not know were
that Obama’s grandfather, who raised him from age ten through adulthood,
had severe emotional trauma stemming from finding his mother
dead from suicide, and then being abandoned by his father. I did not
know that his “nanny” in Indonesia was a transvestite. I had not really
thought through the psychological implications of his mother being
named Stanley, after her father. I did know that he is likely a
homosexual (there is a picture in here of him apparently holding hands
with another man, who himself appears gay), that his mother posed nude
for a black Communist photographer who is also likely his real father,
and that most of his actual history has been scrubbed. I will point out
again that beyond any doubt two gay men at his church, one of whom he
was apparently quite close with, were killed “execution style”, to use
the police description, and no motive or suspects were ever uncovered.
If you consider that it is at least possible that there are those around
him willing to commit murder, you have to realize that the shut down is
small potatoes compared to what he is willing to do to enact his
radical agenda, and that his actual mind is a bag of cats.

Actually, I will add that if his mother is the Ann from Davis’ memoir “Sex Rebel Black”–which seems very plausible, particularly since it seems clear beyond debate that it is her in the pornographic images Davis published in sex magazine–then she was having threesomes with a married couple when she was, if memory serves, 14.  We need to keep in mind that that is aberrant behavior TODAY, symptomatic of severe emotional disorders and a pathological need for love that is not present in the home.  In the early 1960’s, before the sexual revolution, before interracial relationships became more common, this was SEVERELY aberrant.  This is the level of emotional disturbance that, given an only slightly different expression, gets people put into psych wards.


And this was Obama’s mother, who abandoned him at the age of ten, more or less for the rest of his life, after which he was raised by her father, himself beset with apparently severe, unprocessed trauma, and who reintroduced Davis back into Obama’s life as a formative influence, and figurative “Big Brother”.


Consider the “shut down” in this context: Obama views Obamacare as just one step, one checkmark on a list that includes confiscating our guns, getting direct control of energy production, and eventually doing away with Congress.


There will be no better time to stop him than now.


Finally, consider that Obama has been in office five years, and even though I have studied his history as well as I can, I did not know some of these things.  What does that say about our press?