Month: August 2014

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Posted in response to renewed class warfare propaganda.

 Keeping sane tax rates for the investing class makes for easy propaganda for you, the party of Detroit and the Rust Belt.  It is a liability because none of you are willing to take responsibility for understanding basic economics.  “Supply Side” economics is nothing BUT economics, period.  It is well tested, irrefutable, and works.  The alternative, Keynesian economics, has been tested repeatedly and failed every time.  It has only been applied as a solution  to economic downturns in this country twice, during what became the Great Depression, and during Obama’s reign.  Not coincidentally, both periods represent the worst recoveries in our nations history.

ONLY the private sector can create sustainable jobs.  How hard is this to understand?  And the people who run these companies are made rich, relatively, in the  process.  But we NEED them to create jobs.

You are obstinate because you hate wealth in people who do not support your schemes to change the world.  You are fine with George Soros, but hate the Koch brothers, who together have contributed many, many jobs, all of which resulted in huge amounts of taxes paid into the U.S. Treasure.

If you want to understand why we are working harder and getting less, it is because all of our wealth is being siphoned off by banks, through their power to create money; and by the government, which is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent, and in turn, roughly 60-80% of those dollars are being created by the Fed to prop up our credit in an utterly unsustainable way which will result in monetary inflation and following loss of wealth for nearly everyone.

Here is a treatment of this topic: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

To put this another way, if the top income tax rate were 100% above a certain income–and FDR imposed this during a period when he was trying to spur business investment, because he was stupid–do you think anyone would work one minute past the point where the government was taking everything?

history is clear: above about 25% tax rates, actual RECEIPTS go down.  Receipts from the top income earners WENT UP after Bush’s tax cuts, both in total dollars, and as a percentage of the whole.

YOu want the rich to pay more?  Keep the rates where they are at.
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Tribal Culture and difference

There is a continuum between dividing the world into us and them, and making the whole world us.  It is my view, which I suspect I could justify neuroanatomically, that some primitive part in us–to be clear, an ineluctable, inherent part of us that we can’t switch off–has a deep seated instinctual need to classify people as Us or Them.

But the mechanism–and I do think speaking of it as a machine is accurate, making us conceptually cyborgs in some respects already–works in funny ways.
Consider this example: it is possible to consider homosexuality wrong, without rejecting homosexuals as people.  This would both integrate the Us/them mechanism, and allow for higher level brain parts to use conscious judgment to guide action.  You integrate a visceral response, with a socially acceptable solution consistent with the maintenance of peace.
In practice, I think this is the sensible and appropriate course taken by most people who are faithful Christian, Jews, and others.  Of course, there are people who hate homosexuals, like Westboro Baptist Church.  This is a poor integration of mind and body.
But there is also the approach taken by the Left of judging those who are alleged to have judged, and putting THEM into a culturally Other category, of shutting down of reason and creative, useful discussion, and instead directing animal hate at this other tribe of alleged haters, who cannot possibly justify themselves, because nobody is listening, by and large.  I don’t see it, at any rate.  Go on the Daily Cause and say you hate the sin but love the person, and see if you last 15 minutes.
It was odd to me to detect in Peter Levine–a brilliant man, extraordinarily well versed in human (and primate) psychology and behavior–more or less invoking Democrat talking points at a certain point in his book, making Republicans out to be cold and heartless.
How does this happen?  
Here is the thing: we NEED difference.  We crave it.  And by difference, I mean putting people in categories and judging them as better or worse.
The egalitarian project, in its essence, works to deprive people of the ability to meet this need.  They wind up lost and rudderless.  Only in their membership within the community of the egalitarians can they meet this need, by separating out and judging everyone who is outside the group.  No, not everyone: they don’t judge Muslims for their misogyny, as one example.  No, they judge people within our society, only, who could be in their group but choose not to be.
The path of accurate and appropriate perception is a difficult one.  As Levine notes, we really have three “brains”, all of which have needs, all of which make demands much like Dr. Octopuses tentacles in the second Spider Man.  
You can only reconcile all three by becoming consciously aware of them, allowing them to speak, and then using your Executive function, your mammalian brain, to decide your actual course of action.
So much of modern life works to blunt our instinctual drives.  Levine dwells extensively on this. The urge to drive a mountain bike off the side of a mountain?  Instincts.
I am becoming more full of good things, as I let all of this wandering happen, let all this energy speak.  It is good.
If there is a point to this post, it is that we cannot build a better society, which everyone claims to want, even if in the form only of not breaking what was working, if we cannot agree to disagree; if we cannot maintain civil and productive dialogue even when our instincts are kicking in.  This much is obvious, of course, but I don’t think it can be emphasized enough that Leftism is an anti-tribal tribe, a cult of intolerant Tolerance.
And I of course can say this having spent thousands of hours trying to have productive discussions with them.  It’s always the same: redirection, insult (actually they usually lead with insult; I would guess I have been attacked 10,000 times or more), silence.  This is unfortunate.  Real human beings suffer from our collective inability to solve real problems.  
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Foucault

I try not to say things that are untrue, so I looked up a biography of Foucault, to check my memory.

I don’t have time to read the whole thing, but will pass along the link, and a quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

“I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.”
Michel Foucault, 1983

Ponder a world constrained in such ways–and by the way atheism is safely implied.  Can anyone wonder that with our best minds so stupid that we are in such a mess?

If you look at the structure of our society, the mental and social structures, understood as massive complex systems governed by strange attractors, you cannot but wonder what but habit is holding us together.  Religious communities, of course, have their creeds, and that is why America has not failed, but everything being taught in our best schools leads to moral confusion, doubt, and darkness.

Science is not a light: it is a method, and the people responsible for using this method have systematically cut out large sections of possible human knowledge.  They have cut out psi, specifically, and the survival of death, both of which are indicative of the utility of believing the word God does in fact have a referent, even if we don’t yet understand just what it is, how to search for it, and what it will ultimately wind up meaning.
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Philosophy

Philosophy is the duck on the water.  Reality is the feet paddling furiously under the surface.

As I grow, I realize that useful philosophies are really more like myths.  They are simple, direct, and can easily be visualized symbolically.

My own creed was born of necessity. I was desperately depressed and angry and sad and confused.  The whole mess, mixed together; and alone.  It is seemingly my destiny to be fully misunderstood by many, largely misunderstood by most, and completely understood by none.

But: don’t feel sorry for yourself, never quit, keep learning.  It works.  I can attest to it.

But as I say from time to time, what we call philosphy–Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Locke, etc–is largely useless.  POLITICAL philosophy is useful, but what I would argue is that by taking morality out of the realm of the visceral, the obvious–at least by fully detaching from sensation–what has happened is that it has self destructed, by becoming unhuman.

The games the deconstructionists/poststructuralists–and ponder those terms on their own merits, from a common sense perspective–play are purely cerebral.  Foucault apparently like being whipped, to feel alive.

The philosophy that is useful, the animals have.  Life lived is the love of truth, the love of the search for truth.

Perhaps that is true.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps both.  I will have to go and see.

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EmWave2

I have really been using my EmWave2 seriously for a month or two, and what I have just realized in the past few days is that I can use it as a sort of auditing device, in the Scientology sense.  As I understand it, what they do is in effect hook people up to lie detectors, then read a series of words or phrases to them, and see where they react.  When they react, they are supposed to go into and experience those feelings.  That is my understanding.  Stan Grof speaks of this basic process with approval, although of course the rest of it is a mess.

I try to get to 200 twice a day on the High setting.  What I notice is that I will do fine for a while, I’ll get to the green, but then suddenly it will pop over to red.  What I have started doing is passing a baton in my imagination over to that part of me, the traumatized part, the part that wants to drag me down to prevent something worse happening to me.  I give it the baton to speak.  That alone is usually enough to flip it back to blue.

But recently it has been giving me memories, sensations, unpleasantnesses that I had suppressed.  I have a lot of unprocessed content, because I more or less never STARTED processing feelings.  I was traumatized before I could speak.

And this is a good thing.  It represents a method of house-cleaning.

Today, as an example, it gave me dinner-time.  Every evening was unpleasant, as my father would bully us, while pretending to be funny.  For many years, the compulsion to stand up and leave the table immediately after any meal was nearly overwhelming.  Numerous people I actually liked commented on it.  It was a strongly conditioned response that was very hard to suppress.

Well, I went into that feeling, and started shaking, per Peter Levine, and immediately felt something pop, and felt better.  I went right back into green.

It would be foolish to think that’s it, but it’s a good start.  In the grand scheme of things, that was a very mild trauma, but it has less hold on me now.

As I mention from time to time, I share too much. This is none of your business.  But at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that it is POSSIBLE that sharing this might help someone.  Anyone reading this blog does so of their own free will, and can stop any time they like.  So you are used to me now, and if you keep coming back, there must be a reason.

Again as I mention from time to time, I also believe that in a higher sense, nothing we do is invisible to higher powers.  I can’t hide, and there is no point in learning to try.  Whatever light I have, I do my best to contact and show.

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Truth is frangible

Consider this article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9286532/its-ok-to-mention-anti-semitic-attacks-but-not-who-commits-them/

Is it acceptable that in modern Britain Jews are forced to live in fear because the ruling elite–and don’t tell me Britain has not simply transitioned its aristocracy into a new ruling class, with socialism always and inevitably being characterized by a caste system far more abusive than anything a free market could generate–refuse to do the honorable thing and protect them?

I mention from time to time a scene a movie most seem to have forgotten, which has left a lifelong impression on me.  It is a scene near the end of the film “Judgement at Nuremburg”, on the trials of Nazis following the war, and Spencer Tracy, as what I recall as an American judge, is speaking with Burt Lancaster, who was a Nazi judge, who was accused and convicted of crimes against humanity.  Lancaster is asking Tracy “how could I have known it would lead to this, to mass murder, mass torture, so much death? [I am paraphrasing, as this dialogue appends another dialogue, in which a death camp guard calculates how many dead there might have been].  Tracy answers: “You knew, the very first time you sentenced an innocent man to prison.”

Edit: I looked it up:
 Ernst Janning: Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You *must* believe it, *You must* believe it!

Judge Dan Haywood: Herr Janning, it “came to that” the *first time* you sentenced a man to death you *knew* to be innocent.

British journalists KNOW what they are doing.  They just don’t want to admit it.  They don’t want to make hard choices.  They want the world to be this very nicey, nicey sort of place where all violence is simply misunderstanding, and that if they pretend blatant racism and bigotry are not being preached every day in substantially every mosque in the country, that somehow everything will just work out.

From where I am sitting, what is going to happen is British civilization is going to fail.  The rule of law, equality before the law, representative democracy, human rights, freedom of conscience and religion: all of it will be washed away because they are too weak to defend what is good about their country, and are too weak to admit that Islam is inherently opposed to universal human rights, to women’s rights, to democracy, to religious pluralism, to free speech, to nearly everything decent which Western civilization has created.  It wants to return to an age characterized by oppression, cruelty, violence, death, and misery.

Why countenance this, outside of cowardice?  I see no reason.

This is why I created the category of Sybaritic Leftism.  Not all leftists are bad people.  Some are kind, decent, skilled, capable, humane, empathetic, and all the good things.  Denmark works.  Sweden works.  But they are failing.  They are failing because they are unwilling and unable to defend what they have built, unwilling to stand up to those who oppose their order, oppose their way of life.

As I mentioned a few months ago, at current rates something like 1 in 4 Swedish women will be raped, in almost all cases by Muslims.  Why tolerate this?  Why be so inhumane as to subject your women to that?  Every immigrant there was born somewhere else.  They can and should be returned if they fail to assimilate.  This is not rocket science.

It is only once you dedicate yourself to the belief that life is supposed to be easy, that it can be made easy, that hard choices can be avoided, that violence is never necessary, that moral choices become hard.

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What Leftists fear

Space and difference.  They want to be clumped together, and not in contact with anyone who is an ideological other.  They fear “alterity”, to use Academese.  Genuine alterity, of course.  Cross dressing transexual hermaphrodites they are fine with.  Anyone who THINKS differently, they are NOT OK with.

I just realized that HuffPo is deleting/censoring EVERYTHING I post.  I just had a post deleted that had nothing to do with politics, and was not even remotely offensive.  They fear anyone outside the realm of GroupThink.

You have to grasp that to live in fear is to live in anger.  Leftists of course accuse conservatives of this, and it is likely true of some, the Jesse Helms types, but my experience is that most of us just want a fair system that works to maximize opportunities for all, and a legal system that treats everyone as equal before the law, but no more than that.

What we categorically reject is an elite that uses the political system for personal enrichment, while using the labor of one group to buy the votes of another.

I value compassion.  I value empathy.  And conservatives–aka Liberals–best express these values, at least in principle, to my mind.

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Peter Levine

I am finishing up Peter Levine’s marvelous book “In an Unspoken Voice”, and have decided his basic thesis is absolutely correct: we are in most important respects animals who use math and language.

As he notes, this knocks us down a few notches from standard religious conceptions, but the USEFULNESS of his ideas make this a necessary conclusion.  I am still processing this.

What I will say for now is that even if one grants, as I do, that we are driven in large measure by primitive instincts that have NOTHING to do with reason, this does not mean that there is not a next evolutionary, and spiritual step we are meant to work on.

The evidence that the mind and brain are severable is to my mind conclusive, which means that some larger dimension is at play.

It is perhaps my confusion and vexation about needing to adapt to his thesis, though, that accounts for some of the aggression in my past few posts.  I have to reframe in important ways who I think I am, with I suspect very important qualitative gains to be had for so doing.

There is zero doubt in my mind that his ideas need to be multiplied and deployed.  Whatever is next, it goes through learning to process trauma intelligently, which is to say somatically and instinctually, which is to say as animals.

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Politics

Trey Gowdy, in my view, is clearly “playing politics” with the Benghazi committee.  He is going to try and get as close to the election as possible before he starts releasing the really damning stuff.  This is how the game is played.  Democrats plainly play it better, and have for some time–this is how they keep a hold of people’s minds, even when everything they touch turns to failure, even if some of the failures, like the welfare state, have not yet become obvious–but by definition all politicians play it.

But ponder this: could “playing politics” work with intelligent, well informed people with memories longer than the latest news cycle?  Would image trump substance?  Would games work?

No, of course not.  Playing politics is for stupid people, uninformed people, impressionable people.

It is quite possible to have legitimate policy differences.  It is quite possible to reach differing solutions to complex problems, and it is appropriate and useful in a democracy to do so.  But only if the discussions that result are substantial, and focused on actual solutions to plainly existing problems.

Playing politics is the art of failing on a sustained basis to do what you were elected to do, and yet somehow keep the trust of the people you need to get elected.  It is the art of convincing imbeciles to do your bidding, and cashing the checks after all–most–eyes have moved on.

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Free will

In the Tao Te Ching it says roughly that “those who know they are crazy are not crazy.”

I watch around me, and most people are not as qualitatively different from bugs or field mice as they might suppose.  They are governed, yes, by a combination of psychological programming and instincts, but they are on auto-pilot.  They never stop and ask what they really want, who they really are, and then set about getting these things–I would argue affects are what are worth the pursuing–and living out their own being as well as they can.

The free will discussion does not interest me, other than to comment that CLEARLY most people use only a fraction of the freedom that is plainly available to them on some level.

Our jobs on this Earth is to disrupt the patterns we were given, to divert our life energy from the trough into which we were thrown, and into something qualitatively better.  Few see this, and fewer still realize it.

This, at any rate, is my belief at the moment.