Month: July 2015

One wonders if the latest deal is really an intended outcome.  It appears that Greek sovereignty will to a great extent be sacrificed outright.  Granted, it is their idiotic short-sightedness (Aesop was a Greek, wasn’t he? Has everyone forgotten the Ant and the Grasshopper?) which has enabled it.

But so too has the ability of the European Central Bank to create money from nothing been the drug with which they addicted the foolish Greeks.  You float them, then wreck them.

It has long been my sense that something like this was the original intent both of the International Monetary Fund–which has been wrecking economies virtually since its inception with imbecilic Keynesian economics–and World Bank.

Centralization pours cold water on individual development.  It fosters corruption, and enables a power elite to buy off the poor with other people’s money. That can of course only last so long.

To this day, the Greeks seem to think that governments can have money which they have not first taken in taxes, borrowed, or printed.  But they can’t.  They have those three methods only, with confiscation outright in a Communistic fashion merely being the logical end game of taxes.  It is a total, rather than a partial, seizure of assets.  The principle is the same; it is merely any sense of proportion which has been exhausted.

And returning to the main point, the EU is currently more or less a Confederation.  Most policies are still set at the local–which is to say the national level–and not in Brussels.  They do have a Central Bank (why again are people blind to groups in our midst empowered by law to create money, sometimes in unlimited amounts and with little or no accountability?), but not final authority on most issues.

With regard to Greece, it may soon be the case that their folly has destroyed their democracy and again redirected their national sovereignty northward–much farther north, this time, than Macedonia.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259439/punch-leftists-mouth-daniel-greenfield

For some reason I keep getting calls from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  I swear at them until they hang up.

We cannot and should not absorb an endless train of illegal Mexicans when we already have enormous pockets of poverty, overwhelmed social welfare systems, chronic systemic unemployment, and are only staying afloat by borrowing–on a national level, to the tune of something like 40% of all money spent.

It is not generosity or compassion or decency or humaneness to fail to take account of the future, to fail to consider our children and their children in our present political calculations.

When and if the system crashes–and it may last indefinitely, but it is also primed for a crash tomorrow if certain people decided to make it happen–EVERYONE but the already rich will suffer.  All the poor who the Left claims to care for will suffer greatly.  Everyone who has been bamboozled onto the government teat will suffer.  The middle class will suffer.  The old will suffer.  The young will suffer.  Marriages will suffer.

As I say over and over and over and over: you do not get credit for how you feel.  You get credit for connecting a feeling to your rational sense and reconciling them.  If you want to help, and in fact develop plans that, based on current fact and past history, in fact appear to help, then you are doing the right thing.  If you claim to want to help, though, and push hard to continue failed policies, and push hard to short circuit and prevent rational debate as to the propriety and utility of those policies, you are part of the problem.  Period.  

If I don’t think you can do something, and you prove me right by not even attempting it, is this truly my fault, even if my opinion of you played a role?

It is a foolish, ridiculous belief that something should only be attempted once everyone around you is singing in unison “you can do it.” Had that been the standard in America, very little would have been attempted, and even less built.

Racism is when you show up for a job completely prepared, ready and willing to do a job, and you are told “we can’t hire you because you are black”.  This was the case, as one example, with substantially ALL unions, North and South, from the period of Wilson until perhaps the 1970’s.  Democrats knew this, and did nothing to curtail it. FDR made it worse, by only awarding contracts to unions, who he knew refused to hire blacks.

What racism is NOT is you showing up in baggy pants speaking broken English demanding a high paying job and not getting it.  It is NOT you getting fired for showing up late 3 times in 3 days.

Racism does not force young men to impregnate young ladies when they are 16.

Racism does not force 40% of urban American blacks to drop out of school.

Racism does not force black men to murder black men in large numbers.

The problem is that the concept of equality has been hijacked.  It was forced onto a plane at gunpoint, and flown to some unknown location, and an impostor placed into service.  This impostor does not want to improve the lot of actual black people, but rather to change the DIALOGUE, so that rather than being forced into a position of judging people not willing to judge themselves, we can create a congenial illusion that all the real problems of the world can be solved by TALKING, and that the only real sin is not talking in the right way.

Stupidity is no longer a vice.  Laziness is no longer a vice.  Greed is no longer a vice.

No: the only true vice is incorrect speech.  Such speech is obvious, and it can be judged instantly and harshly.  And that is exactly what the college trained imbeciles behind all this nonsense view themselves as best qualified to do.

It is exactly like they think they can solve world hunger by improving global grammar.  It cannot even be called illogical, since no attempt is being made at logic.  It is the sort of interpersonal game played in bad relationships by emotionally shallow and profoundly disturbed people.  Nothing is what it seems.

A Greek and a German go out drinking.  The German drinks beer quietly all night in the corner, while the Greek wants to be the life of the party.  He is buying rounds and shots all night, and when closing time comes, he can’t cover it.  He asks his friend the German for money.  The German smiles and makes up the difference, but tells him good naturedly: you owe me.  And no more of this.

Next time, same thing.  The Greek wants to party hard, but can’t pay for it.  But all his friends have come to expect largesse from him, and his ego prevents him from saying no.  He again asks the German for money.  The German pays his bill, then takes him by the shoulders and says: “Dimitris, seriously–this is the last time.  You can’t do this any more.  And you still owe me.”  Dmitris promises no more, and absolutely he’s good for the money.

Next time, same thing.  Dimistris approaches his friend and asks for more money, and Hans says “NO.”  Dimistris punches him in the nose and says “you BASTARD.  I thought we were friends.”

Commentary: it is one thing for a given person on a given night to act like a drunk.  It is quite an astonishing thing for an entire nation to on a sustained basis.  But America is doing the same damn thing.

Our nation was built by people who went through Ellis Island, not around it.

And spare me the nonsense about how the Mexicans somehow are not the ancestors of Spanish conquistadors, or that the Mexica Aztecs were not themselves imperialistic.

America is what we–primarily English speaking ancestors of people born in the UK or Ireland–made it, and if it were still populated by sparse populations of Indians, the Mexicans would have invaded it a long time ago, to steal what they could.  They certainly would not be immigrating illegally to places where nothing had been built.

We know what happens when Mexicans are given the chance to build a nation.  They already built one, and large numbers of them prefer ours.  That is the plain and simple truth.  Remember this.  Truth is going the way of the cigarette machine and the dime store Indian.

Truth is simply not something whose existence can be tolerated much longer as an artifact independent of State propaganda.  We live in times where facts are tortured.  The history is pretty clear that at some point this will lead to the real thing. I wish I were exaggerating, but unless someone can convince me that Lenin, and Mao, and Ho, and Fidel, and all the others are figments of my imagination–or unless someone can convince me that the same words and ideas they peddled are not even now ubiquitous among people who should know better–then I see no reason to doubt it.

I hope it is not too late, but it is certainly becoming too late, and I don’t know what to do about it.  So much stupidity, so little time.

This is the sort of science I have in mind: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043041/evidence/why-our-brains-love-high-ceilings

I have no objections to neuroscience.  Within my belief system–which I would like converted through science to a more comprehensively evidence based belief–our minds manifest through our brains, and this process does in fact leave measurable phenomena.

With respect to this article, ponder how churches are built. Can you not feel, imaginatively, how a space with a 50′ ceiling differs from one with an 8′ ceiling?  What is the effect of walking from a low ceiling to a high ceiling?  From a high ceiling to a low ceiling?

And what about light?  What about walking from light to darkness, and darkness to light?  And do not the colors themselves in a church have a psychological effect?

Here is an article dealing with color in marketing: http://www.helpscout.net/blog/psychology-of-color/

I am told by an advertising guy that the blue of Lowe’s and the orange of Home Depot are very intentional.  Lowe’s attempts to appeal to women, and Home Depot to men.  The aisles are or tend to be different widths, and they merchandise differently.  They use space differently.

Candles and torches are different from electric lights.

And is there not a difference walking in procession between walking single file and two or four abreast?

Do not the clothes we wear make a difference?

We are pattern forming animals, and much of the work of the sacred is to create an habituated distinction between normal and sacred space (and even normal and sacred time).  You can create a situation where every time you walk into a certain sort of space wearing a certain set of clothing, a range of conditioned reactions appear.

Scents have all sorts of effects the Aromatherapy people have described, but which I don’t think has been subjected to formal scientific analysis.

Music: can we really say what effect various cadences, and frequencies, and melodies have on people?  Group prayer, or group chanting: I suspect there would be a beneficial effect if a group recited the list of ingredients for Fig Newtons out loud and in unison.

Hypnosis tells us a lot about how key words can activate or pacify people.

What would be the psychological effect of allowing animals in what we call churches?  Dogs.  Cats.  I have never seen one in a church.

All of these things–and much more–can be put together by men and women of genius to create healing and elevating places and rituals.

And I would add on that last point that the word “healing” is overused.  Once scarred, you are never the same, so it is useless to speak of a baseline, having crossed which, you have completed the “healing process”.  What a wound does is force us to open up to the idea of growth, and growth never ends.  No matter how happy you are today, more is possible.  This should be a source of comfort.

And if you are miserable, well then: healing.  Nobody is supposed to be miserable.  There are always paths forward.

I suspect much of the most relevant CURRENT research exists in the applied persuasion/marketing world.  Their field is understanding and redirecting human behavior, and they measure success carefully.  The techniques of merchandising likely would be relevant.

Why not dream big?

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g298003-d2615522-r169527496-Pergamon_Asklepieion_and_Acropolis-Bergama_Izmir_Province_Turkish_Aegean_Coast.html#photos

I think I ended the last post with a positive vision, even if I have little faith that the nuts running our schools and media will stop being nuts because I asked them to.  [Best English accent: if you would be so kind as to stop fucking the planet up with your horrible ideas, unchecked emotional needs to interfere with other peoples lives, inability and unwillingness to learn, and functional economic incompetence–all while relentlessly accusing people like me of the same–I would be ever so grateful.]

Here is another.  A friend of mine posted a video of this marvelous complex in Turkey with which I had been unfamiliar, the Asclepion of Pergamum.  The Asclepion comes from Asclepius, from whom we get the caduceus, which is still a modern symbol of medicine.  Pergamum is the Roman city where it was.

It was a healing center, where among other things they had sleeping chambers where you would go to have dreams which it was hoped would provide the clue to curing whatever your ailment was.

What struck me was what we might call the ceremonial science, in which you would drink water thought to have healing properties, and then in my understanding walk a path between columns and through a tunnel into what I think were underground sleeping chambers.

Ritual and architecture, song and chant and music, ceremonies and images and sculpture: all can be evocative, and supportive of altered states of consciousness which are healing.  I think they knew, then, some things we have not yet rediscovered, about how to nourish and tend to the inner self, the spiritual self, and how then to integrate it back into the outer world.

And the image returned to me, which I shared a few years ago, of modern temples build using actual science.   There is no reason we could not study what they did then–and what various religions around the world do even today–and discover what value they provide, and eventually how they provide it.

We can and should develop a Science of the Sacred.  Complete psychospiritual integration should be a university level discipline, one which uses aspects of psychology, sociology, visual arts, music, architecture, literature, biology and biochemistry, neurology and neuroscience, and philosophy.  And whatever I forgot.

The task of learning to live with love and pleasure in this life, and learning how to properly enter the next, is really all that human life is actually about.  We have entered an age in which leisure COULD be nearly universal.  We have made slaves of our machines.  We can exist well with relatively little work, and without living on the backs of anyone, as most of the world has for most of history.

But we have to overcome bad ideas, stubborn, recalcitrant people, and the clinging to a past which is gone.  We have lost matter, and it is not coming back.  We are left with spirit in the middle of our science, but all too few want to admit it.

We need to admit it.  We need to tell this truth too.  We need to begin to build a world which is beautiful, not ugly; free, not confined; and genuinely liberal, open and honest.

There is a huge difference between saying “I know just what you need” and “How can I support you in your growth?”

One is a statement and one is a question.

One comes from me to you, and one asks you to come to me, if you choose to.

One assumes that person needs something–they may not–and the other asks if they need something in order to help them help themselves, which assumes that even if they could use something today, they may not tomorrow.

One creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior, and the other a relationship of equality and at least potentially friendship.

The former fosters growth in neither.  The person “giving” is not asking if what they are giving is needed, and the person getting it is either accepting it or refusing it.  In neither case is a conversation happening, and the mutual learning it would enable.

The latter fosters growth in both.  It encourages the person who is being offered help to ponder their own condition and ask themselves if they need to grow, and if so what might support it; and the person asking the question gets to learn something about the other person, possibly about themselves, and they get the pleasure, if they are a good person, of possibly seeing an increase in happiness and well being on the part of a fellow human.

The political parallels are obvious, but I will offer one concrete application: white leftists, if they were sincere about helping the poor and minorities, would ask: how can we help you help yourself?  And the poor and minorities would think it over, and provide answers of different sorts.  But they would speak in THEIR voice, about THEIR problems and concerns, and they would be listened to.

There is something fundamentally wrong that the most vocal–the most annoying, self righteous, and LOUD–supposed “protectors” of the poor and minorities in this country live in enormous mansions, attended Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Columbia, send their kids to private schools, and spend close to ZERO time trying to build the sorts of coalitions of ACTUAL community leaders with whom they might interface to get such questions answered.  Instead, they talk with people like Al Sharpton, whose first consideration is ALWAYS WIIFM: what’s in it for me?

And they paper over their failures with distraction campaigns.  What do you think the whole Trayvon Martin thing was?  Should we not have been more concerned that he had no future?  He was bound for jail, likely sooner than later.  He was extremely angry, likely prone to fits of despair he reacted to with violence and drugs, and I doubt very much he truly felt anyone loved him.  Both of his parents were likely self absorbed–victims of their own traumas–and emotionally unavailable.  He was an accident waiting to happen.

So was Michael Brown, who more or less committed suicide.  [in that regard, watch this video of a police shooting caught on camera.  He fires 8-10 rounds, all of which may have been on target, and the guy he was shooting was much smaller than Michael Brown.  They teach cops and soldiers, now, that where deadly force is required, to keep shooting until they stop moving.  I assume too many people were getting second chances that they used effectively. And this also appears to have been a suicide by cop, because the “gun” he pulled was a BB gun, although of course the cop had no way of knowing that.]

Should we not have been more concerned that Michael Brown felt he had nothing to live for, than that he chose to use a cop to commit suicide?

Should we not feel compassion for the countless young men like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin who live lives of despair, hopelessness, and fear?  Do we help the living by attacking the police for defending themselves and occasionally fucking up?  (the Officer In Charge at the Eric Garner arrest in my view clearly should have been fired, but inconveniently she was black).  Half the cops in the Baltimore case were black.  If they were “racist” was it a case of self loathing?  Of course not. The whole thing was bullshit.  Cops in Baltimore now are  afraid to do their jobs, and this is causing a massive increase in homicides.  Perhaps 100 people a year will die now because of the AgitProp campaign launched to protest the death of 1.  In common sense, using basic math, how is that an improvement?  How is that sane?  How can any person of genuine goodwill be other than appalled?

These propaganda narratives not only don’t help, in general they make things WORSE.  If white and black leftists were honest they would realize their internal dialogue goes something like “But, you know, fuck black people.  None of us know any without college degrees.”  There is no concern.  There is no respect.  There is no empathy and compassion.  Leftist react in a Pavlovian manner any time the bell is rung, and stop the moment the stimulus stops.  There is no thinking.  There is no reasoning.

Genuine respect and decency require sincere reflection, and sincere action which is oriented around visible results.  If you are not trying to, for example, see more smiling faces in the ghetto, more 2 parent families, and more kids eager to do their school work, then you are an asshole.  And you are not sincere.

And precisely because I am not a fucking hypocrite, I can’t say what the ghettos in particular need, but it does seem that a closer relationship with the police, and possibly even something like self policing–could we deputize men between the ages of 25 and 50?–might be beneficial.  The ability to own a gun to protect yourself decreases crime everywhere, so returning them that right–which was also revoked by Jim Crow–would be good.

Actually, I like this idea: if you put the kids who would be the criminals in charge of keeping the peace, provide them training and self respect, and an INCOME; crime would go down sharply, I suspect.  You could have a Harlem police force.  The police union being what it is, they would have to be a part of the overall NYPD–union leaders in general being self absorbed, self aggrandizing assholes–but the concept is good, I think.  You would exactly reverse the current motion.

School choice (vouchers and charter schools) would be wonderful, and is in fact in my understanding supported by substantially all members of the black community with whom the idea has been shared (that are not teachers, self evidently).

And the Left has never shied away from propaganda campaigns.  They are great at getting the word out about all the programs they put in place to buy black votes (and ameliorate to an almost imperceptible degree their actual poverty), so why not a campaign to marry the mother of your child?  Or better yet, a campaign to do the three things you need to do to get out and stay out of poverty: graduate high school and ideally college; not have a kid unless and until you are married; and work hard at your job.

Can you imagine “Work Hard” posters around the ghettos?  They would be called racist.  Why?  I don’t think blacks are intrinsically lazy.  Do you?  Honestly, I think THEY do.  It is the self image they have been taught implicitly to internalize. They are taught to wait for handouts from the earliest age, and the underlying assumption is that they aren’t able to fend for themselves.  It is white propaganda which has created this situation.  Working “like a nigger” used to mean you had three jobs.  Black unemployment in the 1950’s was lower than white unemployment.  Now people make racist jokes about work boots (in private, of course: actual racism is not diminished by being forced out of the open, but it is hidden).

Why?  Why has all this happened?  Because white leftists thought they knew what the poor and the blacks and everyone else needed.  They took simplistic ideas, failed to think them through systemically, and are even now so fucking self absorbed, smug, arrogant and complacent that they refuse to learn.  That, and of course there are de facto sociopaths like Hillary and Barack who literally don’t recognize the concept of “truth”, and who will say and do anything that furthers the elevation of their egos and personal interests.  Hillary would climb a pyramid of black slave backs to get to the White House, and then proclaim her profound commitment to the cause of black freedom, without batting an eye, or losing a moment of sleep.

I”m not a big fan of Amazon, for reasons partially but not entirely attributable to a general tendency of being irritable with large corporations.  I have some specific beefs with them too.

Having said all that, I really like Audible.com.  I was listening to Gibbon today in sheer delight.  It is a comfort and genuine pleasure to spend time with people who value the English language and treat it with craftsmanship and care.  I can remove myself fully from todays cares.

And I think I said this, but there really is a qualitative difference between LISTENING to a book, and reading it.  I greatly enjoy this man’s Queen’s English, and as Gibbon himself noted, “books” in the ancient world, at least Greece, were read aloud in groups and discussed.  The listening evokes a different part of the brain.  It is of utility over and above the ability to do it while driving.

If you change the medium, you change the message.  I’m still not sure what he meant with “massage”, although we can all guess, if we take pleasure in unexplicated ambiguity.

I have 127 hours of Gibbon I WILL traverse, then James Varieties of Religious Experience, Johnson’s History of the Jews, then Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

I am a one man nerd Army.  Fear me. Or at least get me something from the ice cream truck.  Here’s $2.56.  Hopefully that’s enough for a Bomb Pop.

We have been slowly going mad for quite some time: http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2015-07-08.html

We do not denigrate the citizens of any other country the rights to patriotism, and to looking out first and foremost for the people who were born there.  It is natural. It is human instinct.  And logically, if you have to prefer one group over another–if the interests of one group are by and large in direct conflict with those of another group–why do people on the Left choose the OTHER group?  They cannot actually support the rights BOTH of American born blacks and incoming Mexicans who are drawing from the same pool of benefits, and competing for the same jobs.  They speak of their “caring” for one group, and then of their “caring” for the other out of the other side, assuming as children do that Santa has an infinite amount of goodies, and that no one need EVER be told no.  It is the creed of imbeciles.

It is not a question of people being hurt.  There is not and never are solutions in which everyone benefits equally in situations of conflicting interests.  Either we deny some Mexicans the ability–they still do not have the right, and should never have this right, which they certainly do not grant anyone in their OWN country–to come here illegally and take advantage of all the things we have done well on this side of the border to make our economy so much better, and nation so much more just and prosperous; or we deny some Americans the rights to life and liberty, to jobs, and to the highest wages possible.

There is a continuum.  To say that too many illegals are here in this country is not to say there should be no immigration.  It is just to say that if Hillary gets elected and does even less than Barack to enforce the border, and half the country comes up here, everyone will suffer.  Mexicans will get a relatively better deal, since their country by and large seems to be a poor shithole filled with dishonest politicians and cops, and a citizenry that is all too happy to vote for people promising free stuff.  But what America WAS, it will be no more.  Poverty will increase, unemployment will increase, and crime will increase.  That will not be good even for the many millions of Mexican-Americans who did everything right; who are law abiding, hard working, pious and honest; who are an asset to our nation.

I have been feeling keenly this sense of unreality, the way I imagine Germany must have felt in the late 1920’s, at least to the sensitive.   Things were going well.  The economy was relatively good.  The hyperinflation was all gone.  But something wasn’t right.  There was something in the air.  All it took was a sharp economic downturn, and they got Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, who they quickly learned to take seriously.

We have lost the ability to speak about, to negotiate, to consider, to bring out into the open, all issues of race and sexuality and gender and consider them honestly.  That this is an intended outcome of social propaganda does not make it any less odious.  Decent people, who should be open to discussion and compromise, are not.  I have to walk a line with friends who watch MSNBC, because I know that if I cross it too blatantly, they will likely not forgive me, because they will have to classify me as a thought criminal.  That is very vexing, and discomfiting.  It is, honestly, painful.  It hurts me to see that we have come this far from true Liberalism, and that this fact is seen by so few.