Month: July 2015

I have been here and there.  It may be that I was an exchange student, and learned at some point to speak fluent German (to the extent I was mistaken for a Swede, not an American), and saw a German folk singer singing his songs at my Hochschule.

At one point he said the phrase above, which translates roughly “The relationships/connections have been shit on.”  I don’t think it’s great German, but I like it.

Across many years, I have kept this phrase. In a lifetime, you only get so many good phrases, so many phrases that enter deeply into you, that become a part of you.  For me, for reasons I don’t care to elaborate, this is definitely one of them.

To You, World, I ask: do we not all have some cleaning to do?

Certainly, I do.

Of course alcohol is involved, but it has only ever been an amplifier for me, never a modifier.

I will admit I was tempted to delete the last post after realizing I made some inaccurate assumptions about the author.  But at the same time, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, can I not be forgiven if I render judgment prior to pulling the life history?

“Whereas the left has long attacked bourgeois institutions like family, church and property, fascism has made its peace with all three. It (very wisely) seeks political strategies that call on the organic matter of the social structure and inspire masses of people to rally around the nation as a personified ideal in history, under the leadership of a great and highly accomplished man.”

Note that he does not put “bourgeois” in quotation marks, as he would have, in this presumably edited piece, had he intended to distance himself from that sentiment.  “Bourgeois” was intended, by Obama, in his guns and religion comment.  Both are “bourgeois”.  Both are challenges to elevating the State to the status of God, which is desirable for the God-less.


And think about what he is saying.  Can we not assume he granted Obama the right to speak of “America”, and “Americans”, despite his patent distaste for both?  His objection here is not that Trump is arrogating to himself a right which he, the author, does not feel should never be granted anyone.


What he is implying is that appeals to family, church and property are INHERENTLY fascistic.  He is implying that authentic Liberalism isn’t Liberal, and that Leftist Sadeism IS what he wants.  For the life of him, he does not understand the people who insist on clinging to the things and people and institutions which render their lives comfortable, meaningful, and pleasant.


He doesn’t get that, because he was the kid in high school nobody liked, who ate with the kids on the periphery.  He doesn’t get that, because he has no authentic love in his soul.  He doesn’t get that, because for him living an authentic, emotionally open life would be hell, and his only true home is abstraction.


These people make me sick.  They mean the human race nothing but ill, and they lie about to everyone, including themselves.


Trump may be a fool, but he is saying things which no one else has the balls to say.  If you are going to lose anyway, why not go down fighting?  Why not try your best?  Why not bellow out all the unspoken obvious truths which fear has taught the prudent to keep suppressed?


And these truths are not the blatantly racist sentiments we are told by Leftist propaganda MUST be on the minds of “we the ignorant”.


Here is a truth: black people have not participated equally in efforts to raise their overall standard of living.


Here is a truth: Mexicans have a country, called Mexico, and it is not the job of America to rectify all the things they are doing wrong; and it IS the job of America–the people and the government–to help rectify what WE have done wrong, which is completely botch the process of integrating blacks into society, by doing for them things they could have and should have been doing for themselves.


Here is a truth: given a fixed supply of jobs, an increase in job seekers will ALWAYS depress wages.


Here is a truth: if you add enough people to the welfare roles, who take out but do not contribute, eventually the money runs out, even if you increase taxes.


Here is a truth: the White House is occupied by someone who was raised to view the American nation and people as racist criminals who deserved punishment.  He was voted for by blacks, who assumed he gave a shit, but he didn’t and he doesn’t, and he never will.  He will drop his “g’s” when speaking to black audiences, but the fact that black poverty has doubled under his reign does not faze him in the slightest.  It’s not even on his top ten list of priorities.  Hell: it’s probably not even on the list.  They probably just decide from time to time to sprinkle some goodies on black neighborhoods, and particularly just before election time.  It’s been good enough in the past, why not in the future?


Here is a truth: the entire project of the Left is built on destructive lies, and if enough people would just grow the balls to shout this truth from the rooftops, at some point, the whole illusion will burst like the delusional bubble reality it is.


Edit: I looked up the author, and his self conceit is apparently somewhat Libertarian: http://fee.org/people/detail/jeffrey-a-tucker

So I have to conclude he is simply stupid, because this article is asinine.  If I, as someone who reads the news and studies these topics relentlessly, cannot get to his actual point, neither, apparently, can he.  He doesn’t like Trump.  Fine.  Who the fuck do you like, and how exactly do you propose that person get news coverage without making waves?

I like Rand Paul, but he is being avoided and rejected by pretty much every Establishment there is.  Given this, what is the danger of Trump?  That we might lose the election?  If we put anyone but Paul (and possibly one or two others) in there, we will in any event.

Trump is providing a needed service, not by conjuring up jingoism, but by speaking truths that in any other country would be commonplace and obvious.  Mexicans don’t allow illegal immigrants.  Why do we?

So I was sitting eating some Thai Beef Basil noodles–alone, as I tend to be, and as I usually prefer to be–and I was dreaming about how we really should have a place-holder for cultural evolution.  We really should have processes in place for imagining a truly better world, which we get to by becoming better people, and we become better people by being saturated in good, wholesome, healthy ideas about the world and humanity, and the wonderful opportunities being human affords.

Who is dreaming these dreams?  I don’t see it.  Our cultural elite are a bunch of smug, entitled, whiny, intellectually incompetent bitches.

I supposed the New Agers are, but by and large they are completely complacent, and politically disconnected.  Maybe some wave of positive energy is going to sweep us all into a better future, but I’m not willing to put my faith in it.  It’s not working at the moment.  And to belabor the obvious, most of them voted for Obama.

Then I thought “why not focus on dreaming into existence things which have never been, but may yet be?”

And then I got to thinking about this word “revolution”.  To revolve.  To turn.  To be able to stay in motion.  Is a life well lived not a constant process of reinvention? Is it not “revolving”, from one state, to the next, only to return anew to the first state, with a childs eyes? Do we not in some respects “roll” through life?

Revolving is evolving, and evolving is what we are meant to do.

And I got to thinking that the task of the creative is to ask “what could we add to make this system better?  Better: how can we transform this system into something qualitatively higher, something more beautiful, something more welcoming and loving?  How do we MOVE this system, or guide this system, in a qualitatively good and better direction?  And how do we do this over and over and over?”

And the task of the socialist is to ask “what is here that we can REMOVE to make this system better?”  And it occurred to me to call this “Contractionism”.  They don’t add, they take away.  They take away initiative.  They take away responsibility.  They take away the family.  They take away cultural traditions.  They take away everything which might make life more interesting, more vibrant, more real, and more useful.

Like the word Liberal, the word “Revolutionary” has been corrupted, or redirected.  We are glad to claim the American Revolutionaries, but not modern ones.  This word, in modern parlance, has come largely come to mean someone working to foment a Communist coup which will nearly instantly work to oppress the very people it promised it would liberate.  This, of course, exists in a clear paternal line back to Robespierre and all the other lunatics of his age.  

Seen in a big picture, it is a reversion to an older age of humankind, with the added unpleasantness of combining the violence of old, with the very modern need to justify it as in the interest of those being harmed.  Even that, I supposed, is old: All the witches burned at the stake were “saved” for God, or so I think it was believed.

No, for me the word revolutionary is the one who wants us to ACTUALLY advance one qualitative step in the direction of our infinite future growth, the one who calls on mankind to grow up, and assume its spiritual responsibilities.

This work, that of creating chances, that of creating holes in the perceptual walls preventing us seeing into a pleasant and congenial future, is part of my own recovery.  You have to have hope.  I have to have hope.  I am learning that.

Survival mode is good for surviving, but it sucks for thriving.  You need wings for that.

http://spectator.org/articles/63484/barack-and-valerie%E2%80%99s-great-communist-party-marriage

It seems vaguely worthwhile to point out every so often that our county is being led by a man who was raised and mentored by Communists, and whose main partner in literal crime is Valerie Jarrett, who was also a red diaper baby.

I continue to believe the bulk of evidence points to Frank Marshall Davis–who this author believes must have been an associate of Jarrett’s father–being Barack’s actual father.

In a sane nation, it would be major news that the President’s mother almost certainly posed nude for a black Communist in the late 1950’s.  But it isn’t.  I doubt one person in 100 knows this story, and everyone around them calls them crazy.

But why did Snopes first take up the story, then drop it?  They are an extension of the Democrat Party. That in itself constitutes compelling evidence in my mind.

Here is a random link on that: http://www.obamareleaseyourrecords.com/2012/06/snopes-scrubs-article-on-obamas-mamas.html

But of course we don’t live in a sane country.  The thing about propaganda is that it has a life of its own.  People are saying and doing things even today, some 60 years later, that may have been initiated by actual Soviet agitators who Davis, among others, helped support, enable, and protect.

And their goal even then was to create a racial divide that could be used to weaken our  nation, not just to create unnecessary conflict, but to weaken our capacities for the effective use of reason outright.

In that, they manifestly succeeded, and continue to succeed.

I think when it comes to race relations, more or less what happened would be analogous to someone going on a binge diet, losing a ton of weight, and then insisting that all public pictures of them be from that period only, despite the fact that they subsequently gained everything back, and then some.


Why does Hollywood fetishize the slave era, and the Civil Rights eras?  7 years a slave, Selma, Django, Roots?


Why is there no catharsis or resolution in modern movies made in the ghetto?  My movie knowledge is not exhaustive, but lets throw a few out there: Clockers, Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood.


With regard to that last–which I have not seen, but read the summary of here–I infer the climactic line is when he “plaintively questions ‘why America “don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood'”. 


Can no one connect Selma with Boyz?  Is no one willing to ask where, from so much promise, so much disaster flowed?  Can we not point out that he is American too, and that what he seemingly means is WHITE America.  Can we not infer part of the problem there?  Why do black problems need to be solved outside of black communities?  Where did this really quite racist assumption come from?  Even if this is simple self pity, and the question asked purely rhetorically (it wasn’t: it was presumably a question asked in the movie to the white viewers watching, who presumably felt their share of guilt and then went out for cocktails to discuss it, then go home to safe neighborhoods build (largely) by and (entirely) for white people) the question is the same.


Where is the spirit of Frederick Douglass, who really should be a well understood cultural icon and model, having been an actual slave himself: 

What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

In the movie “We were soldiers once and young” a group of soldiers wives is getting together to coordinate with and help one another.  One black woman finds out that she can’t use a public laundromat, and she says “well, my babies clothes are going to get cleaned anyway”, and everyone tacitly applauds her spirit, and the meeting moves on.


What if that group of white women had decided it was their task to picket the laundromat so she could do here laundry there?  What if they had succeeded?  What would have been the path of her “success”?  White people.  What can she control on her own?  Whether or not her husbands clothes were clean or not.  


Her response, multiplied across tens of millions of people and the past 40 years, would have by now eliminated ghettos and any reason or opportunity for cynics like Obama and those around him to use race as a lever for power. 


In that regard, I saw the usual suspects accusing Trump of racism.  I posted on the Huffington Post a comment which appears to have been promptly deleted something like:


Can we not assume that Obama himself is not a racist?  Black poverty has doubled under his tenure.  If we elect an actual racist can we expect the doubling to double again?


They didn’t like that.  They don’t like anything I say, which is why I can’t post there.  They are liberal in conceit only.

It occurs to me that the present reality that true Liberals will be called racist no matter what they say is actually an opportunity as well. Logically, if you are going to be accused of a thought crime no matter how harmless–or obvious–the comments you make are, why not take full  advantage of this and start going for broke?

I think it is time we start calling ALL the alleged victories of the Left what they are: failures.

The civil rights legislation passed in the 1950’s under a Republican Congress, and again in the 1960’s under a Democrat President, and against the howlings of a great many Democrats, failed.  The efforts of leftist agitators to bring about the full equality of blacks in this country have clearly and beyond any shadow of a doubt failed.

Just look at the ghettos.  If you want to use another word, I would be curious what it is.

As I think about it, the efforts of people to use the power of the State to coerce opinions, and compel behavior are not different in principle than the efforts of the French Revolutionaries to remake society in their image (really, their vision of who they would have been, had they been actually decent human beings, a counterfactual); or the later efforts of the Communists to do the same thing.

Human society is a complex system. Complex systems respond to incentives and dominant tendencies.  They do not respond to fiats, or efforts to compress them flat, and then rebuild them anew.

For a long time, all Federal money, and much State money, flowed to unions, and for a long time, unions were allowed by law to ban blacks qua blacks, regardless of their individual merits.  That needed to stop, since it used taxpayer money to deny equal rights to people who may have otherwise been qualified.

But for the same reason I, as a private citizen, should be free to hire and fire people based on my perception of their worth, private companies in my view should have been left free to hire and fire–and serve or not serve–anyone for any reason they chose.

Now, you say, this is ridiculous.  How can anyone justify not letting blacks dine at Woolworths?  It is insulting.  It is degrading. Yes, it is.  It was.

Today, blacks can eat anywhere they want.  Are they better off as a group, in the North or the South?

Here is the problem: blacks were freed by law from the necessity of insisting, face to face, on the propriety of their demand to be treated with dignity.  They were freed from the social necessity of deserving respect as a price of demanding it.  Rather, they were told that they deserved respect, period, and that all of their sense of self worth was supposed to be intrinsic, supposed to be the result of having been born black.

This simple transition has had incalculable, and horrific, effects.  The problem with the ghettos is not that blacks are kept down by law.  The fact is much more insidious: they are kept down by a culture which prevents rising, which prevents the urge, the need, the passion to raise themselves to the levels of personal integrity, diligence, erudition, perspicuity, and civic mindedness which would COMPEL respect, not by force of law, but by force of personality, force of presence, force of success in the face of odds.

Compare, if your stomach will take it, Frederick Douglass with Jesse Jackson.

Here is something on Douglass:

He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Would not a Civil War era Southerner, touring a typical American ghetto, not find his arguments that blacks were inherently unable to care for themselves amply vindicated?  Given free schooling, access to preferential grants and scholarships, and in many cases free housing, what have they made of it?

Here is the thing: when you deny someone the right to their own struggle, to making their own way in life, you deny them the right to grow as people.

The way to deal with a Woolworths is to educate yourself, train yourself, rise “above your raising”, and then go talk with the owner of the store, and show him you are no different from–and ideally in actual fact BETTER THAN, more educated than–the white people he does serve.

And if he doesn’t relent immediately, then form black businesses, black schools that are GOOD, and a community consistent with your own dignity.  And if you can’t do that where you are, go somewhere where you can.  Overt racism was confined largely to the South.  This is a large country.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.  This is advice white people take in stride, and see the value in.

But far too many white leftists have felt, and continue to feel, the need to tell black people that they don’t have to do anything, that they are “good enough”, no matter how they behave, no matter what decisions they make.

This is a covert way, a very subtle way, of also telling them they are stupid and inferior.  It implies that better is not possible.  It implies that without the guidance of white Leftists–and some small number of token black people raised up in white leftist propaganda factories–you truly ARE nothing.  You truly ARE less.  This is not said, of course.  But it is clear.

And I look around me, and I ponder and ponder: how did this happen?  This is how it happened.

And I would apply the same logic to gays today.  It is not their right or privilege, and it is not helpful, to launch hateful attacks on Christians. They do not change minds.  They do not win hearts.  They certainly do not win respect.  Merely public fear, which prevents actual reconciliation, actual social growth.

The means that are chosen show clearly the moral and human advancement of those using them.  To use violence, to use coercion, is the opposite of building humanity as a whole.  It does not matter what the assumed urgency of the goal is.  There is only one way to do the thing correctly.  Everything else tears down the actual bonds of friendship, the actual bonds of community and mutual admiration.

We are told that an insult–or even a mere insensitivity–hurts people.  That may be true, but only weak, degenerate, childish people.  For mature, serious men and women it incites them to better efforts.  It grants them the opportunity of enduring insults with pride and grace and dignity.

And we make people weak, degenerate, and childish by shielding them from the honest opinions of others.  We weaken our society.  We build decadence.

And we ARE decadent, in many respects, although of course there remain many positives.  We have lost the generalized drive to understand our world, and take our educations seriously.  We have lost the civic pride to understand the issues facing our nation, and to make informed decisions based upon that knowledge.  We have lost pride in and respect for our Constitution, which has no equal anywhere in the world, either now, or at any point in human history.  In our zeal to, as many assume, “correct” wrongs, we are failing to protect the actual law, and more importantly the principle of equal rights=equal responsibilities that undergirds it.

It is time to revision the past, based upon an honest appraisal of the present.  The hammer–and Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade, and this gay marriage decision and many others have been hammers–has failed.

With regard to Roe v. Wade, I will say simply that that issue, too, should have been negotiated.  In their defense of “women’s bodies”, the left has forgotten that babies have bodies too.  The polarization that has happened–always the result of abusive propaganda (and there is no other kind, if we consider the abuse of truth as always damaging)–has prevented discussing the whole thing humanely, socially, away from the intruding eyes of ubiquitous would-be Governors of the Public Morality in the government.

This Planned Parenthood scandal should surprise no one.  Once one grants in principle that a baby has no more significance than a kidney stone–and this is the plain, necessary conclusion in conflating the baby with the woman–then babies are nothing more than objects to be disposed of.  We would not grudge a market in kidney stones, so why not cut up baby cadavers, or their parts?

Superficiality is common enough.  When one goes deep enough, is silent and reflective long enough, one comes face to face with one’s own demons, one’s own flaws and traumas and unresolved griefs.  I know this far better than most.

But not only can and do people survive this process, they in fact THRIVE in the long run as a result.  Nothing that you run from ever gets farther away from you.  It is always there, like your shadow.  It may be that light makes shadows deeper and more ominous, but with enough light, they disappear entirely.

We need a revolution in consciousness.  I say that with respect to every level of our personal. social, and political lives.  It is time to start speaking truths.  It is time to start caring about decency and GENUINE mutual respect, not that hollow shell which fear and the law compel on the unwilling.

http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/news-wire/2015/07/10/hobby-lobby-ruling-implemented-firms-that-object.html

Companies that object to paying for contraceptives (I don’t see elective abortion on here, but am not going to research it) don’t have to.  The contraceptives will be paid for with magical fairy dust.

One is tempted to assume that Leftists really do think you can get $3,000 for a piece of shit car missing two tires and a windshield.

Because this may not be obvious to some–most people seem to fail even now to grasp the basest rudiments of economics and business–obviously the insurance companies will pass these costs along in premiums, probably spread among all insureds.  Ultimately, Hobby Lobby will still be paying for contraceptives.  I think 5/9ths of the Supreme Court should be put in stocks and have rotten fruit thrown at them.  They are abdicating their roles as defenders of the Constitution, and at that implementing bad policy, which will hurt far more people than it helps.

I was dreaming I lived in a post-apocalyptic world last night.  Logistically, it was harder.  It was harder to find stuff.  Nothing was handed to me.  But the bartering and planning and scheming were not that uncongenial.  Sometimes a lack of given-ness can be exciting.

I am changing.  I am finally starting to be able to enter this realm of qualitative change, to get at things on a deep level and move them.

And the more I do so, the more I realize that the WORLD needs qualitative change.  We see everywhere that we need to “love” one another, which means something different for every person saying it, but usually comes from a place of emotional lack, and not supersufficiency.

We see that we need to “change” before it is too late.  Obama’s propagandists skillfully played on this obvious meme.

But I will double down and say that the PRIMARY chance we need to see, the one that will actually make a difference, is a qualitative generalized shift in how our cultural elite view the cosmos.  As Chesterton said, it is not a question of if one’s view of the nature of reality matters, but if in the long run anything else does.

There are no serious competitors to quantum physics for First Prize in the Reality Contest.  Physicists have tried and failed.  The Higg-Boson will not alter the facts of non-locality, and wave/particle duality.  String Theory was an expensive and fairly embarrassing failure.

It is time for the best minds in the center of the field to start admitting that we have NO IDEA what is “really real”, and that our best guess is that consciousness and what we call “matter” dance in an interactive process, and that at the bottom of the line of turtles is an endless soup of realities waiting to be created.

It is time for our best minds to grant that a MODEL of reality which does not match up with measurable events is WRONG.  When someone says that Robert Jahn is–or was–doing bad science, that he is an embarrassment, that person has a professional responsibility to actually study his data.  This did not happen, which is manifestly egg on the face of every clown who claimed to be a “scientist” and to take the empirical method seriously.  You can’t simply say “this is impossible”.  That is what the Church did when informed about the heliocentric model.  Nothing could be imagined that would be further from the spirits of honest empiricism and free inquiry.

We do need to change as a world.  We don’t need to recycle, or buy Priuses–both in my view are by and large both expensive and more than a little silly (recycling most products takes more energy than it saves; and Global Warming isn’t real)–but we DO need to integrate new, primary visions of the nature of reality into our central discussions.  Psi and the survival of death and the interconnectedness on a primary level of all life need to be taught at a university level to all students.

And we need, as I said yesterday, bold economists to start pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.  Absent fractional reserve and central banking, we would have no booms and busts, a steadily increasing standard of living, and eventually no unemployment, no poverty, and no issues with health care, the world over.

Well, I just had $900 land in my lap, which I am going to take as validation I am not wasting my time. How does $900 fall in your lap?  Well, it’s not bad being me.  I have built a lifestyle congenial to my monomanias–by necessity, by chance, and by dint of a lot of hard work combined with not inconsiderable intelligence, talent and agility.

To continue:

All these groups of people are not monolithic.  The people opposing civilization in the name of humanity are not all alike. They all have their own needs and desires, prejudices, prides, hopes and dreams.

All complex systems are inherently unstable in some ways, and more importantly they are built on dominant principles, dominant habits, dominant tendencies.  They are refreshed continually, minute by minute, day by day.

If you can take away one dominant assumption–and I would argue the important one  is the pure materiality of humankind–then the whole thing can transform IN AN INSTANT, historically speaking.

All American leftists believe they are the best hope of minorities.  What if they realize this is not only not true, but that they have become in fact their worst enemies (with friends like these. . . )?

The globalists have convinced themselves that humanity needs them.  What if they realize that neither global warming nor overpopulation, nor pollution are in any respect existential crises, and that in fact people can be taught, in conditions of freedom, to consume less, and over time either reduce global population, or reconcile our populations with environmental homeostasis?

And returning to basic metaphysical assumptions, there are any number of further areas of research that can and should be pursued.

Survival of death is an hypothesis which has already been tested at a university level, by Gary Schwartz, at the University of Arizona.  That work continues in the affiliated–but chronically underfunded–Windbridge Institute: http://www.windbridge.org/

They use all the methods of science–like a double-blind protocol–and still consistently achieve positive results.  I’m sure there is a standing invitation for charlatans like James Randi to attempt to replicate their results–they have nothing to hide–but what you realize quickly in studying the antics of these Materialistic Radicals is that once the science in any given field advances to the point where they literally have NO methodological critiques to make, they simply ignore them as if they didn’t exist, and if they do speak about them, they either choose the weakest evidence and treat it as the strongest, or they make shit up outright.  What they always do is ignore the most compelling evidence, for which they neither have an answer, nor the forthrightness to admit it.

Another university level project that should have generated a lot of interest and following research that did not was the work of Robert Jahn.  The New York Times, as usual, delivers its hit piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html?pagewanted=all

The simple, glaring, inescapable, methodologically irrefutable fact is that he demonstrated beyond any scientific doubt (certain levels of probability against chance will in any other field generate the term proven, or some synonym of it, as in “what we know”) that the human mind can influence physical processes.

But nobody would publish it.

Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist, has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. “We submitted our data for review to very good journals,” Ms. Dunne said, “but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?

To be clear, “peer review” is SUPPOSED to be about professionals analyzing the METHODS being used, to assure they are rigorous and comply with general standards.

But what happened here is that their RESULTS were analyzed, and found unacceptable.  No one would review their actual data.

It is important in this respect to comment momentarily on peer review.  Peer review is an utterly broken system.  The presence of peer review means nothing, and the lack of peer review means even less.

As they say here:

If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market.  Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws.

Here is the New York Times itself on the same topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/health/02docs.html?pagewanted=print 

There are a range of topics broadly discussed under “psi” dealt with at length by Dean Radin here and here.

And then we have the possibility of a revolution of consciousness where our financial system is concerned.  I personally have sent out 240 emails to economists at major universities concerning my understanding of the fatal flaws of our financial system, and how to correct them. That’s not much–I am just one man, and just sleeping through the night has been a major challenge for me for years–but I am not alone, I don’t think, even if I seem to be the only one saying what I am saying.

What if bold Economics students started asking fundamental questions and following up on them with genuinely open, new analysis?  There was quite a stir a few years ago, when some World Bank economists got vaguely into my zip code:

The Chicago Plan Revisited is an IMF report from 2012 by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof. The focus of the study is the so-called Chicago plan of the 1930s which the authors have updated to fit into today’s economy. The basic idea is that banks should be required to have full coverage for money they lend. Under this proposal, banks would no longer be allowed to create new money in the form of credit in connection with their lending activities. Instead, the central bank should be solely responsible for all the creation of all forms of money, not just paper money and coins. The advantages of such a system, according to the authors, are a more balanced economy without the booms and busts of the current system, the elimination of bank runs, and a drastic reduction of both public and private debt. The authors rely on both economic theory and historical examples, and state that inflation, according to their calculations, would be very low.

I of course reject the need for a central bank, and the power that intrinsically goes with it; and I see no means of getting from a condition of universal debt to a condition where there is NO or little debt, without something like what I proposed.  But one can dream.

And finally I have my church.  I am on the verge of getting some traction on that.  I will post more on that.  First, I want to write something I will modestly call “A Manifesto for a New World”.

I want to take this thing to colleges and universities.  Most college kids have literally never been confronted with the actual ideas underlying what are called conservative economic and political ideas.   They have been fed cartoons, and cartoon characters, Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Do-Right, with grandma being tied to the train track, where only the saviors of the Left can save her.

I would ask simply: how is grandma doing in Venezuela?  How about Greece?  About the same as everyone else, with the pains of age, I would expect.  All basic, honest economics STARTS with asking what the effect of a given policy will be across all populations, and across time.  Communism works great for a small power elite, and it screws everyone else.  If you only listen to the propaganda, this is easy to miss.

How about this old lady in Cuba?   You may see joy and exuberance there.   What I see is a street performer trying to earn a little extra money to buy things her Socialist government cannot and will not provide.  What I see is another form of the universal prostitution which Castro’s horrific regime forces on all the women, in a land which was supposed to be freed from the terrors of “sexism” and every other -ism, except Communism.

Cuba has long been known for its sex trade, and I suspect all that the relaxation of travel restrictions have facilitated are sex trips.

Here is a link on that: http://naughtynomad.com/2013/10/26/sex-in-cuba-5-tips-for-hooking-up/

If you’re the type that pays for sex, you’ll be in a heaven. I honestly can’t think of a country where prostitution is so ingrained and pervasive in the culture. “You fuck, you pay. That’s Cuba,” one local guy told me on my first day.

Is this what American Leftists want for the Cuban people?  For Cuban women?  To make them impoverished college graduates who have to sell their bodies in order to eat anything but rice and beans?

I will end this rant–which I personally need for my own personal development–with some books that anyone who wants to consider a “conservative lifestyle” (why not be radical?) should read.

I will start with the books that made me a conservative (I am going to shift after this to what I actually call myself, which is a Liberal.)  .

[Actually, a word on that: socialism is Pharoahism.  If we think of the political arc as starting on the right, rising up, then lowering again on the left, like a rainbow, then we went from kings who took their authority from God on the right, to Liberalism in the middle (this blog is titled Moderates United for a reason), and now are in danger of completing the arc to Pharoahs on the left who take their authority from some combination of “history”, “necessity”, and “science”; the results are the same.  Only Liberalism, which is to say a system based on Constitutionally protected freedoms and rights, can really claim to complete history.  Everything else belongs in it].

My conversion began with an editorial by Thomas Sowell on summer reading, where he listed a bunch of books.  The first three I read were all by Paul Johnson:  A History of the American People, Modern Times, and Intellectuals (this last really underscores what hypocritical SHITHEADS most of the important intellectuals of the past 150 years or so have been).  Then I read Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit“.  That did it for me.

Some I would add are Sowell’s Basic  Economics (if you still don’t understand why raising Minimum wages does NOTHING to raise standards of living; or why rent control doesn’t work); Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which demolishes Keynesian economics beyond any hope of redemption; and Peter Bauer’s Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion .

I have not read it, but anyone who still thinks welfare states do anything but breed dependence, depravity, crime,  hopelessness, and chronic unemployment, should read this: Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom.  He records there substantially all the same ills we see here in black ghettos.  Public policy and left wing ideas are everything: race, if not quite nothing, is very little.  We can say this because all the same stuff happens over there in purely white neighborhoods.

Beyond this, just look at the books that pop up on Amazon or anywhere else.  The words have been said.  The ideas and their outcomes have been tested and found wanting.  They are flawed at the theoretical level, and fail at the practical level.  What works in our world is largely the result of free markets, property rights, internalized moral codes and political Liberalism; and what does not work, especially in the most advanced countries, arose precisely from those times and places we deviated from those principles.

Anyone who claims to value decency, to value truth, to want to elevate the human spirit and mind, to improve society, to provide solace to the hurting, MUST DO THE WORK OF THINKING.  And it is impossible to think clearly when large oceans of facts are unavailable.  It is no use comparing one abstraction to another.  You have to compare deployed–used, tried–abstractions, to concrete, measurable, physical, outcomes.

If everyone did that in the political domain, things would straighten quite quickly.  But they don’t.  This is my modest or audacious–as you see it–effort, today, to change that.