Month: October 2013

I have seen the view expressed that Obama is behaving like a child, throwing a temper tantrum, in shutting down all these parks.  I would submit that this is not the best analogy.

As I noted a week or something ago, an ineluctable feature of the concept of paternalism is the possibility of bad parenting.  What Obama is doing here is acting like a father, when asked why a given rule exists, saying “Because I told you so.  Now go to your room.”  An opportunity for connection, for growth in the relationship, has been lost, due to arrogant narcissism.

Obama is not punishing the Republican Congress for thwarting his will: he is punishing the American PEOPLE, seemingly because he feels betrayed that his ideas even have to endure discussion, much less rejection.  In closing these parks, in taking away from the American people public land that it paid for through taxation, and which requires ZERO cost to keep open, Obama is playing the part of a bad parent who does not feel they need to explain themselves, even when they are acting abusively.  He is acting out, but from an assumed position of moral authority.

Obama has no moral authority.  He has not earned respect.  That is what makes this the behavior, quite literally, of an aspiring totalitarian, who views his subjects as children, to be disposed of as he sees fit.

Obviously, of course, Obama calculates that the craven, complicit media will cover him, and help him blame the Republicans.  But two factors work in the Republicans favor: 1) Obamacare is imploding as I write;  it is a failure, and a manifest one; 2) These park closings affect a lot of people, and they are indefensible.  I am already seeing scattered showers of semi-professional journalism that is almost approaching the top of the hill where they can see actual integrity on the next summit.

I will repeat that I think the longer this lasts, the more likely the Republicans are to turn this to their advantage, particularly if they make CRYSTAL CLEAR to anyone who will listen that the money has been appropriated for any number of programs that Harry Reid simply will not allow to a vote.  This will place Harry Reid in the position of shutting down programs that don’t need to be shut down, purely to protect a program most Americans didn’t want a year ago, and which they are finding out now they REALLY don’t want, because it is a clusterfuck even before the business mandate kicks in.

This thing could really, really sour for the Democrats, really really fast.

I seriously think that if the Republicans play this right–and they almost never do, so it’s hard to get hopes up–but if they don’t screw up, we have a good shot at retaking the Senate in 2014, and putting an actual conservative in the White House in 2016.  

When was the last time you felt true delight?  With this word, I intend a combination of happiness, surprise, and excitement, an engagement with reality that is very pleasurable.

It’s quite rare for me, but I do think that with my continuing Kum Nye practice, my experience of this emotion will increase.  I felt it yesterday, doing a very basic exercise.  It involves sitting, imagining two clocks in front of you, putting your right hand at 9, and your left at 3, then doing three very slow circles, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, while rotating your neck in the same direction.  You do 3, very slowly, sit for a couple minutes, then do 3 in the other direction, and sit for ten minutes or so to feel what happened.  (I describe the exercise, because I suspect I may have readers who think Kum Nye is “nothing but” Vipassana meditation.  It is much more.  It involves not just observing sensations, but actively stimulating them in constantly varying ways.)

While doing the circles, I contacted this extraordinarily rich energy, filled with life and vitality, and it felt like the first time I saw snowflakes.

All of our problems have solutions, including that of ennui.

Any casual student of history should know that the universal defense offered for Nazi atrocities at Nuremburg was “following orders”.  Had there been a reckoning of the even larger number of crimes committed by Communists around the world, it seems quite likely that they, too, would have justified their willing and often enthusiastic participation in crimes against humanity by pointing to the fact that someone higher in the hierarchy told them to do it.

This defense did not work in Nuremburg, by and large.  We all know the basic difference between right and wrong.  We know it is wrong to kill innocent people, wrong to torture them by starvation or electrocution, or horrific living conditions.

But one can say this while also admitting that failure to follow orders in many of these regimes would have meant death or torture.  What one cannot say, in our present era, is that members of our law enforcement community face death or torture for failure to follow unethical orders.  The worst that can happen is they lose their jobs.

I often see people say that a totalitarian state could never be brought about in this country, as the enforcers would rebel.  Would they?  I wonder.

Consider this case.  You have harmless old ladies being tacitly threatened with guns.  You have conversations about what constitutes “recreating” that would be farcical, even comical, were the abuse of power not so blatant.

What is going through these Park Rangers minds?  Do they not understand that they are participants in a political theater that has as a large part of its aim the eradication of a fundamental American freedom, that of choosing how and when we buy health insurance? Are they stupid?  Unprincipled?

At what point do members of our military and LEO communities rebel?  Do they?  ARE THEY NAZIS?  Will they one day commit crimes because someone told them to?  I don’t know, but it is discouraging how many are following orders to do things which are patently wrong, and almost certainly illegal.

Thomas Sowell always has good insights.  I wish he would respond to my Blueprint for a Capitalist Revolution, but I am of course one of thousands that has opinions expressed repeatedly, and most of us are stupid.  I will say that I understand fully that my plan will cause economic chaos for six months or a year.  So, too, will our inevitable default.  There is no conceivable scenario by means of which we are able to pay Social Security and Medicaid at current rates 10 years from now.  We needed massive budget cuts, and increases in FICA taxes years ago.  And in any event, our system is unjust, immoral.  Most of us work to make a very few rich, without their having produced any real goods or services at all.

Be that as it may, this is a good sentence:

If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of
the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four,
that would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things
that require mathematics.

We need to understand that the Democrats are vastly overplaying their hand.  Daily, now, Obamacare supporters are finding out that their premiums are going up DRAMATICALLY.  This is now not in the realm of rhetorical possibility.  It is not Us versus Them, our common sense versus their “experts”.  It is reality.

Of course, my own premiums have roughly tripled since Obamacare passed, but there are many out there who seemingly have held out hope that these Exchanges would fix all that.  They are making it worse.

And we are seeing veterans ARRESTED for visiting public parks, parts which in theory belong to the Demos of the Democrats. We are seeing priests threatened with arrest for performing masses for FREE.  We are seeing Park Service personnel put in OVERTIME to shut down open air monuments to an American history which Obama not only does not own, but most of which he holds in disdain.

These are high explosive rhetorical rounds that can be brought to bear for a full broadside not just against Obama, not just against Democrats, but against the Leftist project outright.  We are at a point where the American people are PISSED off, and all that needs to happen is a clear message–LEADERSHIP–coming from Boehner and senior Republican leaders.

This is not about a budget negotiation.  This is about competing visions of the American future.  Do we want to live in a nation where the government thinks public parks belong to it, that we can only visit them when it deems fit?  Do we want to live in a nation where our leaders can openly lie about the outcome of laws, and get away with it?  Obama said premiums for most would stay the same or go down.  As far as I can tell, this hasn’t happened for ANYONE.  How could it?  More service is being provided. More people are being covered, a great many at taxpayer expense.

Folks, the whole thing is simple: simple message, said by everyone, repeated often, that in our case happens also to have the salutary added benefit of being true.

Here are examples: Obama lied when he said your premiums would stay the same.  He lied when he said you could keep your doctor.  He lied when he said you could keep your plan.

Obamacare will make all our problems WORSE.  This is the simple message.

I was allowing myself to daydream a bit, about what might be possible if the totalitarians fail, and we are able to implement something like what I have been calling a Capitalist Revolution, which would create both prosperity and leisure for all.

I travel a fair amount, and have commented more than once how homogeneous America is becoming.  I would suspect a Best Buys in Fairbanks, Alaska looks a lot like the one in Miami, Florida.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this: economies of scale make things available for purchase by more people.

At the same time, I got to dreaming about the other direction: what if we take the logic of internet niches and reapply them to physical locations?  What if internet virtual communities become actual communities?  What if groups become so insular that they redevelop their own languages, their own argots (more than has already happened virtually)?  What if every city is filled with dozens of unique enclaves that have a passionate interest in X, Y, or Z?  What if there are “family zones”, complete with wonderful playgrounds–complete with monkey bars and merry-go-rounds because we are no longer pussies? (I will note that as a child we played tackle football on asphalt, back
in the era when a nurse was on staff and one or the other of us saw her regularly, but never for anything more serious than a skinned knee; we also took turns seeing if our
friends could throw us off the merry go round, and if we could knock our
partner off the see-saw.  None of this would have been allowed today at
most schools)

Can we not reimagine Home?  Can we not unleash creative potential through freedom to create culture, create belonging, create community spaces in new ways that satisfy our current emotional needs?

There are so many positive possibilities for the future, that it is really sad that so many people are so unimaginative, and so angry, and so self important, that they insist only doom and gloom stand before us, with tyranny a kindness by contrast.

No matter what their rhetoric says, Leftism IN PRINCIPLE levels interesting differences.  It levels curiosity.  It levels everything that makes life worth living.  It is a prison, not least for its most ardent advocates, who simply lack the emotional skill to see how stupid they are, how dull, how insipid, how denuded and empty.

I was driving down the freeway the other day, feeling a strong emotional identification with knighthood and chivalry, and looked to my left and saw something I have never before seen: a roughly 25′ box attached to the SIDE of a car, which was about 6″ square at the base (in the back), and which tapered to about 3″ square at the tip.  It looked for all the world like a lance, held on the right side of the car.

As usual, I will point out I understand confirmation biases and whatnot.  I just thought it interesting.

We fret about our children spending their days in front of TV’s, but perhaps we should fret more about PARENTS doing the same.  A comedian commented that texting while driving is worse than drunk driving, because in the latter case a drunk is driving, but in the former case NO ONE is driving.

Who is parenting when the TV is on?  Who is parenting when the parent is emotionally absent?  Who is parenting when everyone hides in their rooms, often seemingly from a very early age?

I think many children nowadays crave, hunger, are desperate for, honest, genuine understanding and feedback.  The essence of love is attention and compassionate understanding.  Not getting it is what makes them angry, but they don’t know why.  Yes, I think many parents are overly indulgent, but I think in many cases this overindulgence is the result of laziness and disconnection.  It is simply easier to let the kid do whatever he or she wants, even if it is not in their best long term interest.

This laziness, in turn, is taught by example to the children, who become less able to meet their own needs, less able to care for themselves.  In many cases they don’t know what their needs ARE, since never having had them met, they are at a loss as to what the question is, and what an answer might feel like.  As I have said a number of times, it is hard to know something is missing when you have never experienced it.

This basic process of emotional disconnection, combined with being lost in mass media, is a principle factor in what I see as the loss of HOME for many Americans, a loss of a place where one unconditionally belongs.  This is why so many enter into and stay in fantasy worlds.  This is the basic process which underlies the premise (in my superficial understanding, having only scanned it) of “Reality is Broken”.

I do not oppose video games in principle, but it does not seem to me that they teach kids how to be present in the present; how to be where they are, calmly.  They are simply better than lonely silences filled with the sound of emotional hunger.

All of these kids covered in tattoos, painful piercings, sad  or angry eyes: who raised them, if anyone?  Have many of them not been orphaned by mass media?

Pace my last post, I would to emphasize that I named my other website Goodness MOVEMENT because I view Goodness as a purposive movement, oriented around both personal growth, and general growth; between learning to live more happlly as what I will call a “monad”, (after Leibniz, if not others), and taking happiness and satisfaction in helping others to do the same; to wish yourself and others well.

What Goodness is NOT is a fixed set of rules which must be slavishly conformed to in all circumstances, for example being nice, being non-violent, and being loving.  Love, as I have said often, is a primary value, but if taken to absolute extremes it becomes stupid.

I have seen from time to time pacifists ask themselves if they would  have killed Hitler or Lenin if they would have both known the evil they intended and had the chance to to so.  As I have commented from time to time this is fundamentally a selfish attitude.  They prefer avoiding the pain of guilt for killing one person to the guilt they only would not feel, for allowing the murder of hundreds of millions, through self deception.

Many people who call themselves Good, who claim to be pursuing a spiritual path are like this: they deceive themselves as to the TRUE consequences of their actions.  They are irresponsible children.  You cannot simultaneously genuinely grow and lie to yourself at the same time.  Your lies will bind you to an old order.

I am an asshole sometimes.  I am extremely generous sometimes.  But in all cases I do my best to be honest with myself.  I cannot of course know in this lifetime with complete certainly how honest I have been, but I can say that I have done my best to polish the glasses I look through.

A cornerstone of the Fabian method is to accuse those who oppose their radical agenda of being IMPOLITE.  Given the Bernard Shaw and the Webbs were ardent advocates of totalitarianism, mass murder, the eradication of political and individual freedom, and were more less open cheerleaders not just for Lenin and Stalin, but also Hitler and Mussolini, the TRUTH of course is that THEY were the brutal ones.

But evil can have a genteel face–as the Rolling Stones put it, the Devil is a “man of wealth and taste”–and the task of the Good person, the genuinely good person, the person who has marshalled all of his or her resources to the task of ACTUALLY improving human life (which first and foremost includes creating more opportunities for people to improve their own lives and that of those around them) is to OPPOSE this evil as needed, where needed, and using whatever methods actually WORK.

From time to time I make contact with a warrior persona in me.  It is not pretty.  This man has scars on his face and body, is hard and cold–cruel even; you don’t want him at a cocktail party because he will either offend the women or get in a fight with the men.  He is absolutely fearless, utterly determined, ruthless, and cunning.  When you want to fight a war, this is who you want to do it.  People like this are invaluable in that context, but they scare the crap out of people the rest of the time.  They are not human in the normal way.  They are not genteel.  It does not even occur to them to care about social niceties.

In some respects, I do not think it inappropriate to say we are fighting a war against the habit of being habitually NICE, of backing down whenever some de facto sociopath pretends to take umbrage at his latest seizure of a liberty, in the name of civility.

Civility is being used against us.  We can see this whenever Leftwing Sadeists claim that opposing them is opposing feeding hungry children or old people.  What we must REMEMBER is that it is THEIR policies which make children hungry, THEIR policies which make saving for old age difficult to impossible.  THEY are the ones who are actually doing all the things that they accuse conservatives of.

Never forget this.  I will put this simply: if you are incapable of saying FUCK YOU, then you are in my view constrained in your possible exercise of Goodness as I conceive it.

The leftwing Democrats claim that furloughing 13% of the massive Federal workforce is going to cause economic trouble.  This is not going to happen.  It did not happen following sequestration (which incidentally continues), and it won’t happen now.

As far as people being laid off, though, it might be worth comparing how many people are losing their incomes in the short versus those in the private sector who will either be laid off outright, stuck with unaffordable health insurance bills (which unlike healthCARE bills they will likely be unable to make go away in bankruptcy), or permanently set at 29 hours. 

Consider the economic cost of the IMPLEMENTATION of Obamacare.  It will be far, far worse than anything that will happen, ever, if the “shutdown” is continued. 

And the long game works for the Republicans better, in my view.  People will get personally pissed at Obama for closing the National Park Service if the Republicans get their message out.  They will be pissed that he is not even TRYING to APPEAR like he is interested in anything approaching a compromise on a bill that was and remains something the vast bulk of Americans oppose, and which was passed on a strict party line vote, barely.

I say let this thing go on indefinitely.  We have been passing Continuing Resolutions periodically anyway, since asshole Harry Reid won’t do his job.  We just keep funding everything but Obamacare.

I would add that these Exchanges are plainly a failure.  They are not only increasing premiums, but creating penalties where there were none before.  This is when they work correctly, which in a great many cases they plainly are not, despite the fact that Obama has had 3-4 years to get them set up.

The whole thing is a disaster, and the longer this goes on, the harder and harder it will be for the Matt Lauers of the world to keep the truth from getting out.