As I ponder the matter, it seems to me I would be justified not only in calling myself a Liberal, which I do, but a leftist as well.  From a strictly historical perspective, the true liberals sat somewhere in the middle of the French Revolutionary Assembly, but the mythos is that those on the right wanted stagnation–a return to a simply reformed “ancien regime”–and those on the left radical change; they were, as they could come to call themselves, in aspiration “progressive”.  They wanted to leave the past behind and build something new. In practice, of course, they replaced a tyranny with a worse tyranny, state violence with worse state violence, repression with yet worse oppression, and in general committed all the crimes of Louis the 16th without his redeeming restraints.  General war was waged for many years in which millions died, solely because of the legacy of these fools.

What I would submit is that those on the “left” today want nothing more than global Pharaohism.  They want a permanent elite to govern a permanent abject mass of helpless subjects.  This is what I feel.  Perhaps I am wrong, but it is difficult to see anything but evil arising in the hearts of those unable to commit to any form of substantive goodness.  They speak their fascism often.  You simply have to learn to interpret intentionally misleading phrases like “open society”.  In general, you have merely to invert them, to see the perversion behind them.

When you look at the stone monuments in Egypt, what they wanted to convey was permanence, stasis, the pointlessness of trying to change the system, which lasted for many thousands of years.  Changelessness was what they wanted, and largely got.  I have seen these chasms of carved stone in my dreams and they filled me with dread.  Human beings were reduced to cattle, and governed by cruel and abusive tyrants.

Thus the project of the Left is nothing but a return to the past, a past which took us thousands of years to climb out of.  Communism is Pharoahism.  Nazism was Pharaohism, complete with monuments.

The people who want true progress are those who want freedom, true freedom, meaningful freedom.  If we look again at the French Revolutionary Assembly as a sort of bell curve, both sides are anchored by people who differed only in the past they wanted to return to.  Those in the middle were in fact the most truly progressive, most truly visionary.  People like them led our own Revolution and founded our nation.  In France, of course, they were by and large killed.

Thus a true Liberal is a true Progressive.  I want progress in the form of continued access to technological advancement and all the advantages free markets bring, coupled with a steadily shrinking government, a steadily diminishing Pharaohist project.  I want the power elite to be put out of business, and countless communities of common interest formed which meet the emotional and cultural needs of those involved.

This is a truly radical notion. I am a proud revolutionary.

I will admit to fantasizing sometimes about what I would do if were to become King of America for two years, besides working on my evil laugh.

I would implement my financial plan.

I would implement this IRS eradication plan.

I would make it so no one who doe not pay taxes has the right to vote.  My reasoning should be obvious: to contain the problems first seen by the Greeks well over 2,000 years ago, and which are equally obvious today.

I would require everyone over the age of 16 who wanted to vote to read certain books and pass tests demonstrating understanding of the content.  The first two would be “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “The Black Book of Communism”, so as to teach the perils and methods of different types of Fascism.

They would read the passages in Keynes General Theory where he admits his aim is fascism, learn about his cultural milieu and close connection to the Fabian fascists, and read Henry Hazlitt’s refutation of Keynes in “Economics in one easy lesson”.

They would read “The Fatal Conceit”, Paul Johnson’s History of the American People, Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics”.

They would read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” followed by another text detailing the many factual errors, exaggerations, and omissions in that text.  Actually, it might work best if an annotated version were created, so that the truth and the errors are shown side by side.  To this we could perhaps add a Chomsky text, and an anti-Chomsky reader.   This would work to teach people that bullshit can appear to make perfect sense.

Anyone attending college would be required to read Jacques Ellul’s Propagandas to graduate.

They would be specifically taught the truth about our chosen abandonment of the Vietnamese people, and what it meant for them and the region in general.

They would read both the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers.

They would be required to demonstrate an understanding of the Constitution.

I would fund schools and teachers to do all this teaching.

We would IMMEDIATELY protect our energy grid from an EMP.  Why this has not been done is a mind-numbing mystery I prefer not to visit too often.

I would provide MASSIVE funding for research into psi, the survival of death, and all associated fields.  Atheism and materialism are counter-scientific belief systems, and their prevalence in the sciences is one of the reasons for the pervasive failures in the Humanities.

I would abolish most of the Federal government, gradually, giving States time to take up the slack and set up their own apparatus to retain what programs they saw fit.  I would get rid of most of Homeland Security nearly immediately.

I would retain most of our Navy carrier groups, and the Marine Corps, but otherwise downsize the standing military, while requiring the States to create the ability to provide trained units on demand.  I would strongly encourage them to create some form of compulsory service to grow kids the fuck up through difficulty, either military, or search and rescue.

I would reduce the NSA to two levels of connection.  No more open net spying.   I would massively increase the CIA’s HumInt capabilities (after a thorough audit of both agencies–and the FBI–to see how much bullshit they have been getting away with, and firing as many people as I needed to).

I would build an effective missile shield.

All of this would represent a very good start.  I have other ideas, too, but do not want to share them at the moment.

What would be left after two years would be a system again highly resistant to demagogues and tyranny.

I am a statistic.  I have been hung up on repeatedly, and spent many hours taking care of things that should have taken a few minutes.  You cannot convince me that the IRS has not chosen to pout about its budget cuts by making customer service much worse than it needed to be, even with the cuts.  They are doing a work slow-down to try and get their money back.  If their jobs depended on it, they could do better with less.  I have no doubt of this.  But nobodies job depends on it.  Lois Lerner told Congress to go fuck itself, and thus far has gotten away with it because they are, by and large, incompetent cowards (in that regard, did the Republican controlled House pass a budget and send it to the Republican controlled Senate?  If so, I didn’t read about it.  They need to make Obama veto fiscal sanity.)

Anyway, I got to thinking about privatizing the IRS.  Ted Cruz and others go around saying we need to “abolish the IRS”.  Well, no matter how much we cut the budget, the Federal government will still need money.  Somebody has to pay for the aircraft carriers and welfare cheats.  I have never called for the abolition of the Federal government, and have pointed out repeated that there is no point in a Constitution if there is no point in national government.  Thus, revenues need to be collected, but there is space within which to debate how and by whom.

My first thought was to allow private corporations–debt collectors, effectively–to bid for the right to collect taxes, something like the process in Jesus’ time under the Romans. On the plus side, you could collect data on efficiency and customer service, and factor them in whenever you periodically rebid the contract, with poorly performing companies losing the contract.

But there is an issue of scale.  The IRS has 95,000 employees, give or take, and no company can scale up and down that much with anything approaching speed or efficiency.  At least, I don’t think so.  This is a question of logistics I am not presently qualified to evaluate, or willing to investigate.  I suspect a transition would be a cluster fuck.

But here is an idea I like: what if the primary income collection were done by the States?  They have an existing tax apparatus and are already collecting money from their residents.  They would simply take more–usually nationally generalized percentages and procedures dictated by Congress–and remit them to the Federal government.

Some huge benefits would flow from this.

1) Most obviously, the money is ALREADY coming from the States, so we simply ratify and simplify the existing situation.  There are no Federal income taxes paid by people not living in a State or Washington DC.  What happens is the money is collected via a separate pathway, and then money used to bully and coerce the States into doing things the Federal government wants them to do.

How did they get a national speed limit of 55?  By threatening to withhold highway funds.

Medicaid in most cases is partially funded by Federal money, which again was simply taken first from the States, but in a great many cases this money is redistributive, since differing States have more or less generous Medicaid programs.  Roughly a third of the “Stimulus” (does anyone remember that?  Do you remember how passing it was “urgent”, and couldn’t wait for a thorough debate?  Do you remember it was supposed to keep unemployment under 8%?) went to bail out incompetently run Medicaid programs.  That money was taken from people in States who were responsible, and given to people who were profligate (to the extent the money was paid in taxes: obviously about half of it was borrowed outright).

So if the States collect the money it doesn’t flow the Federal Government, and then some of it trickle back.  No money flows from the Federal government to States at all.  They simply keep what they need.

2) If the Federal government is being abusive–as is clearly the case under Obama–then they can go on tax strikes.  They can refuse to pay.  This creates huge leverage, and redistributes in a major way the balance of power.

3) The taxing authority becomes more local, and thus more vulnerable to–and accountable to–the will of the voters.  Customer service gets better.

4) We are able to eliminate an entire agency.  Imagine the inefficiency of filing both State and Federal returns.  All we do is add some line items to the existing returns, and we could do the same or better with perhaps a third more people than already exist at the State level, and are able to give 95,000 people who exist at the expense of the tax-payers–who reduce by a vast amount the capital available for investment–their walking papers.

5) There will then be no agency at the Federal level which can be abused for political purposes.

6) This would directly support my contention that the locus of social welfare should be the States, each of which was always empowered in theory to be the principle center of decisions about morality, about issues which are intrinsically ambiguous and open to multiple solutions: abortion, prostitution, drugs, euthanasia, and to the point, the extent and form of using public monies to secure some form of basic protections against hunger, sickness, homelessness, and other ills.

I have to say, this is one of my better ideas in a while.  I think.  I am smoking on it–I have a lit cigar next to me–but other than the obvious fact that 95,000 people, AT LEAST–who are unionized at the tax-payer expense–will oppose it with every inch of their bureaucratic beings, I see no down side.

Researching this, we would likely need to abolish the 16th Amendment, which would require a Constitutional convention, but it was created, and could possibly be stricken down.  This would be the best and surest means of reigning in the Federal government.

I was laying in bed this morning, dreaming, as I do–as I remain very grateful I can do–and it occurred to me that what I need is a group of 10 sacred prostitutes to care for me for a couple of days.  Women who have processed all their own traumas, and dedicated themselves to giving, to healing–which itself can often be found in a certain sort of sexual contact, characterized by both physical and emotional intimacy.

Then I generalized: I suspect most men would benefit from this.  Most of us have never really made our peace with the feminine, with our own feminine sides, and of course with those of the women around us.  There is of course a role–an important role–for the masculine to play, but the feminine is larger.  It expands more.  There is more space in it.  It is intrinsically more spiritual. It goes farther.

Then I started thinking about hierarchies of belonging.  If we follow the Polyvagal Theory, then we really have three levels of nervous system functioning which can take over, depending on the circumstances and our reactions to them.  The lowest is the immobilization/trauma response.  Above this is the fight or flight response.  Above this is the social response, which would include reasoning, chosen self restraint, as well as higher emotions which are facilitated by existing at this level, which would include love and a sense of connection.

One can in fact rationally desire and pursue love, as the most rewarding pathway for human action to follow.  You can reason your way to it.  This is, I think, an important point.

But I got to thinking that you can coalesce groups of people around lower focal points too.  The bonding of men at war?  Persisting group experiences of shared fight or flight.  This bond exists at a primal level, because that is where it happened.  In other circumstances you may have nothing in common with–or even like–these men (and I am of course generalizing, since most people in combat are men, although the same would apply to shared stresses among woman or mixed gender groups), but when you face death together, you take something away.

And sacrificial rites would exist at the gut level, at the trauma level, at the unmyelinated vagus nerve level.  The bonding would exist at that level, that of fascination with death, that sense that compels you to look at a car wreck, wondering if you will see a dead body.

They are ritual horror, ritual death, done slowly and with great attention.  As I think I’ve mentioned, I wanted to do a paper in graduate school comparing the phases of a serial murder–there is an arc of psycho-physiological states–with those of a traditional ritual, particularly a sacrifice, using particularly Turner’s ideas.  I was turned down, but given that some of the first texts we were required to read–Durkheim and Freud–were written by atheists, I still no reason I could not have applied social psychology to the thing.

Be that as it may, in this regard I think we could see some parallelism between the Jewish practice of ceremonially slitting the throats of sheep and goats and other animals and calling it the praise of God; and those of Satanists, who use cruelty to build bonds among themselves.  These people do exist.  I’ve known  therapists who worked with their victims.  They seem particularly to enjoy hurting children.

There is obviously a continuum.  But I would recall to your memory–if it ever lived there–the story of God telling Abraham to “Take your son , your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. ” 


God tells Abraham to make a holocaust–a burnt offering–of his son.  He winds up not doing it, but the story is there, and that in itself is telling.  How can we know what actual practices were excised from the Bible, which I would insist must be viewed as a human and cultural document?


Thus we would see here a human cultural evolution from one nervous system focal point to another.  From horror, to fighting, to reasoning, at least in principle.  We have departed from reasoning in our allegedly highest cultural centers, because they have tied themselves up in knots intellectually, because they lack the capacity to process life emotionally.  This state need not endure, although it remains to be seen if they will burn down–or allow to be burnt down–all the highest accomplishments to date of the human species; if, in fact, they will facilitate another and larger holocaust.

I was reading this, and got to thinking: http://rare.us/story/why-millennials-are-afraid-of-scary-ideas/

1. True Liberalism requires adults, which requires individuation/separation from the  womb.  Fascism in some form–and understood broadly I would incorporate monarchism under this banner/ceremonial ax–can be the only creed for a society whose members consistently fail to individuate. I would note that most of human history has seen tradition imposed by violence at every level from the home to the State.  To this very day, if an Untouchable walks in an upper class Indian neighborhood, he is liable to be killed, and no police report ever filed, much less the crime punished.  This is a society which does not value individualism, or rising above your operant conditioning.  Most societies are like that.

I wonder from time to time what exactly Bill Ayers taught. He wrote a number of texts (in addition to Obama’s two books) which I have long intended to look up, but there is only so much time in the day.  Child Development was his field, if memory serves.  One could scarcely do better, in building his version of 1984, than to generalize the parenting practices on display here.

2. As a general rule, parents who raise children who fail to individuate have not done so themselves.  The parents of these perma-children are co-dependent.  They need to keep their children sucking at the proverbial teat so that they themselves can avoid the pain and confusion which would attend the recognition of their long term failure.  For children to individuate, they must be pushed away by the parents to some extent.  They must be told to take risks, and to risk failure regularly.

3. No good parent should wish only good things for their children.  All of us need challenges to grow, and unplanned challenges do the most in forcing us to become more resilient, adaptable, and ALIVE.  You build emotional muscle in the using of it. Hoping for an easy slide through life is the equivalent of encouraging them to avoid any physical exercise at all, because it requires effort.  It is a hope for their failure.  It is the opposite of love.

4. Only people who have individuated can even begin to think about spirituality.  The path one needs to walk shifts constantly, and no one can tell you where to go and what to do, reliably. No one can guide you on a path you are inventing as you go along.  You have to learn to trust yourself, your own instincts, and to go where no one you know has gone before.  Certainly, there are good tools, and some good teachers, but in the end we all are responsible for ourselves.

5. I think we could perhaps speak of Male Fascisms and Female Fascisms. Male Fascism is arresting and jailing or killing anyone who dissents.  It is Communism.  It is Nazism.

Female Fascism, like women themselves, would be more subtle.  Think about what would happen if these women got complete power.  Would they be crucifying people in the streets, shooting dissidents in the head?  No.  I don’t think so.  What they would do would be to ostracize people who failed to goose-step with them.  They would limit where you could live, and where you could shop.  They would limit where you could work, and who you could marry.  You would have no access to the internet, or physical access to a public place where you might say something inconvenient.  You would be, for all intents and purposes, removed from society, but not directly.

And even though this process would be based on the very same hatred, the very same cruelty as Male Fascism, they would be able, in their discussion groups where they debated how best to “care” for society, to consider these merely unpleasant but absolutely necessary precautions to prevent unpleasantness that might ruin someone (else’s) day.

It would, in other words, be based upon the same grandiosity and self delusion which guide all left wing lunatics.

I got to thinking about that dream I had back in 2012: the ritual decapitation of leftists.

When the head is gone, what is left?  The gut.  You have a being which is pure instinct, which feels rage and hate and violence and all the other nasty emotions with no governing control, no conscience, no restraints.

If those energies had been stagnant, this is liberating.  It feels like freedom.  You can finally express a rage which was bottled up in hesitancy, which you could not justify rationally.

One of the major problems with soft rich white people–who are the main demographic contributing to leftist politics–is that they do not allow themselves to believe anything.  You can’t be truly Christian–not if it means judging gays.  You can’t be proudly American. You can’t be proudly male.  You can’t value success in a conventional way.  Virtually every pathway for expressing creative energy which is sometimes tinged with anger and violence–these are normal human emotions, felt by all–is blocked.

So the solution is to stop thinking, and start reacting.  If you like, you can paper it over with a stance of ironic detachment: detachment from the actual constructive use of reason.

You become an anger machine, one absolutely resistant to the persuasive efforts of anyone who may disagree with your politics based upon the blatant and ineluctable fact that the chosen methods never lead to the purported ends.  Never.

One of the paradoxes of Identity politics is that they reduce identities; they do not increase them.  If you are fortunate enough to be one of the “protected” groups, you still are only defining yourself as a non-white male.  I would argue that the principle problem in black communities is precisely a lack of identity, of a sense of self.

You create an authentic self through making decisions based on principles you have chosen to value, particularly when these decisions are sometimes difficult.  That is how you define who you are, what sort of person you are.  That is how you build authentic self respect.  There is no other way.  There is no other way.

The essence of Identity politics is division: it is trying to strengthen one group POLITICALLY by attacking another group, typically rich white males. IF ONLY Republicans did not exist, IF ONLY the Man didn’t have it in for them, IF ONLY manna was not prevented from falling from the sky by those evil corporations, all would be right with the world.

But of course this is bullshit, or at least largely bullshit.  Anyone who is given a free education and fails to make use of it is stupid.  Anyone who does not have a plan to improve their own life, or at least that of their children, is irresponsible and stupid, at least if they don’t like the quality of their life.

You do not build people up by making excuses for them, by giving them reasons not to do work only they can do.  This is obvious wisdom, and will never change, no matter how technologically sophisticated we become, or how wealthy.

When I say Identity politics work only politically, I mean that.  They work to get cynics elected, and to make them rich.  The lot of actual, individual people is impoverished: morally, culturally, socially, and economically.

I have been to Baltimore.  Driving downtown, you pass block after block of ghetto, to finally arrive in a nice, gentrified, white, downtown.  It would appear the whites live in the suburbs, come downtown for ball games or concerts, then go back home.  This leaves thousands of unemployed blacks sitting on their porches every day watching the world go by.  You do nothing long enough, it kills your soul.  It is depressing.

But I will return to the fact that two parent black families fare just as well as two parent white families, at least when it comes to raising children.

All of the efforts of Democrats to help them have made their lives horrible.  Only headless people would continue to believe the lies.

Virtually everything that gets called “spirituality” is in my view bullshit.  I spent a lot of time in that domain in my early twenties, and it was and remains my perception that the vast bulk of the money and time involved in this huge industry is spent on vanity, self-aggrandizement, and even oneupsmanship.  In that domain, you are often surrounded by flakes and emotionally superficial people.  I understand the cynics fully.  Both the words love and spirituality are vaguely traumatizing for me, after having endured their abuse for so long.

But I have to say I have reached a point in my personal development where I am beginning to open up to my Kum Nye practice, and have realized that true spirituality literally is about the pursuit of new emotions.  I remember the first time I heard Annie Lennox sing about that, and wondered how a new emotion could be possible.  After all, haven’t we all felt everything?

No, no we haven’t.  I literally feel I am exploring new facets of myself, undiscovered caves and tunnels, which are filled with riches I didn’t suspect were there.  It is exciting.

Here is a nice quote from “The Joy of Being” by Tarthang Tulku:

There is beauty that you have not yet seen.  There is sound that carries consciousness into heavenly spheres.  There is fragrance more exquisite than the rarest incense.  There is joy that expands beyond ecstacy and dissolves the seeds of suffering.  You deserve to experience all these treasures and manifest their significance to all humanity.

I know it’s a bit cliched to return again to that mountain of wisdom, Die Hard, but if you will bear with me, I think some nuggets remain unexposed. It is such a richly textured film.

Alan Rickman and his Germans have detailed plans to get through every layer of the safe, until the last one.  They work and work and work, and then are stopped.  Then the FBI cuts power, and the last layer opens itself.

It is my personal belief that a daily or at least regular spiritual practice of some sort is very useful and important.  But I think sometimes playing hooky can actually be enormously beneficial.  I said this a few posts ago.

Sometimes doing nothing is what you need.  And I don’t mean self consciously “doing nothing”.  I mean: hey look, a SQUIRREL!!!  I think I need chicken and waffles today.  I wonder if they have Seinfeld reruns on Netflix.  My dog needs a belly rub. My goodness, what a pretty day!!!

In any event, this is what I personally need sometimes.  And I did have chicken and waffles today.  Very tasty: salty and sweet.  Now I’m going to listen to Green Onions.

The only way to take life seriously is to laugh at it sometimes.

You hear that?  It’s laughing too.  The airs of this world have many blossoms and many terrors, but it is all interesting.

I was thinking today about the pervasiveness of what I would call Tubaforms in the “interpretation” of literature.  You have Freudian psychosexual analyses: Henry David Thoreau had an unresolved Oedipal Complex.  You have class analysis: the construction of sexual and class identity in the works of Dead White Male (or female exhibiting False Consciousness–since we know what true consciousness is).

In my view, what every human being on the planet needs is love.  They need to be able to receive it without guilt or holding back, and they need to be able to give it in the same way.  This is a very, very simple tubaform, but one which concords better than ANY other of which I am aware with the plainly observable needs we all have.

In breaking down “class” for example, what is the end game?  Is it human felicity?  Given that such narratives invariably depend upon hate and destruction, how could any sane person expect anything good?  Mack the Knife is a left wing hero. I mean that literally.  Look it up.

I look at these simplistic analyses, and it occurs to me they are mechanistic.  Thoreau was not someone whose mother failed to give him authentic permission to individuate as a man.  No: both were embroiled in an occulted biochemical mechanical process which occasionally creates incomplete reactions.

I get why people would want to dream of utopias; but as I said the other day, you do not create a utopia based solely on what you do not want.  In point of fact, that process is utterly lacking in intelligence and purpose, and no one who fails to purpose anything can claim to be working FOR anything.  They are lost in a house of mirrors.  That many are lost with them changes the basic situation not one iota.

In the same sense that curiosity is the neurological opposite of trauma, I would argue that fear is the opposite of playfulness, and that playfulness is necessary for creativity.  Play is unstructured, spontaneous, fun.  It calls on creative instincts intrinsically.   This makes it something which interacts with existing paradigms in interesting and unexpected ways.

True spirituality, in my view, is playful.  It is happy.  It is free.

This is obscured by the fact that religion–which is the devolution of usually honest spiritual awakenings to structures of power based upon codified and rigid ideas–relies on fear for compliance.  Sin and you will go to hell.  Sin, and we will SEND you to hell.

And I don’t think it is true that play has NO rules.  Different dances have different names.  I simply think that it calls forth an open flow of energies of the sort that need to flow for any of us to interact directly with Life, and to look forward to, to cherish, the prospect.

People who despair, are those who cannot imagine playing in a world filled with cruelty and destruction.  Ah, it is all sound and fury, and behind the curtain there is nothing to fear.

Here is one of my favorite poems, which I have likely posted at some point:

BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE