Month: August 2015

It seems to me that honest compassion requires a high pain tolerance, or perhaps a well developed ability to transmute pain.  Yes, the latter.  And with the latter in place compassion becomes a sort of wind under your wings, which nonetheless must hold their shape and carry you up.

Compassion is vitally important to me, even though I am frequently irritable and judgmental.  In my view compassion is understanding combined with an intent to act, to help alleviate suffering.  If people are fucking up, then you do not help them by understanding and then excusing them.  Compassion is also challenging people who need it, in ways which are appropriate, and which can get through.

Most people are weak, and cannot stand to be criticized without blaming the criticizer, so as a practical matter being very soft, very indirect and very subtle are the best approaches.  I don’t deny this.

What I deny is that people can and should be spared the work of judging, of truth telling, of being as objective as possible even when surrounded by self serving lies.  How can I help you if I accept at face value the lies you are telling yourself?

There is in my view an edginess to honest, deep compassion. Christ did bring a sword.

Personally, I feel deeply the pain of the human condition.  It is at the very root of my sense of self.  I cannot begin to describe the pain which flows through me sometimes.  The best analogy is a whole body electric shock.  But I am figuring out how to add movement to it, how to harness and use it.  This is a good thing.

Given that Uber cannot but disrupt the employment of those cab drivers who are unwilling or unable to migrate over, I got to wondering what they will do for work.  Then it occurred to me that I have not had a non-Muslim cab driver, as far as I can recall, in at least 5 years, and I have never, that I can recall, not once, seen an Arab on a construction site.

Given that they theoretically have all the same opportunities Mexicans have, I wonder why it is they migrate to cab driving, and this in turn makes me wonder if cultural factors might not be on display.

As a group, Muslims are taught the doctrine of supremacy, that their faith and culture are better in an objective an ontological sense than all other creeds, and are destined to rule the world; or at least, that is the task given the faithful.  I wonder if the idea of working for an infidel is simply something they cannot countenance.  They work for someone as taxi drivers of course, but are largely on their own.

And I think too to some acquaintances I’ve known who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I remember one Ranger I knew saying something close to “The Will of Allah and the will to work seem to be at odds”.  I remember someone posting about how the plumbers were completely indifferent to getting the hot and cold consistently on the same sides, or even matching up the red and blue, and wondering how such a sloppy and indifferent people could ever be made into a coherent and peaceful nation.

I wonder, to put it briefly, if they simply detest physical labor.  As conquerors who took copious slaves, the default mindset of all Muslims, in my outside looking in view, is to want to be a part of a ruling and privileged elite, who by definition do not defile their hands with manual labor.

These are of course generalities based on my individual experience, which at that I cannot claim to be comprehensive.  I cannot say I have researched this. I merely offer possibilities, of the sort most people are unwilling to offer.

One of the most important economics books I have read is “Economics in one lesson”, by Henry Hazlitt.  In it, he discusses two important notions:

1) that all economic changes have differing effects on differing groups, both immediately and over time.  Any intelligent analysis, therefore, must keep this in mind.

2) That, particularly, new technologies both destroy existing ways of doing things AND create new ways of doing things.

Uber unquestionably affects the income of traditional taxi drivers.  In that model, you have a brick and mortar building owned by a company which purchases and maintains a fleet of taxes, and which advertises its services, fields the calls placed to it, and passes those calls along to its contractors.  The drivers, in turn, are in my understanding in most cases simply leasing the cabs on a daily basis. Their daily profit is the amount of fares they take in less their cost to rent the cab.  The leasing agency–and this is really what a cab company is–may also take a cut of the fares.

This is somewhat abusive to the cab drivers, since they have a fixed cost, but no guarantee of income.  The cab company wins no matter what, except when they are unable to provide enough fares to the drivers to keep them coming back to a losing situation.  This may be because they don’t advertise enough, have ugly poorly maintained cars, hire the wrong people, or for some combination of factors simply present an unattractive image.

Cost, obviously, plays a role as well.  The higher the costs, the fewer the rides. This is basic economics.  Even when you are dealing with drunks on Saturday night, some percentage of them will choose to risk it when your cost is 2x rather than 1x.

For people traveling, rather than just call a cab on Monday morning, they will find a friend willing to drive them to the airport for $10 and an IOU.

For people in cities, their decision as to whether or not to drive themselves, take public transit, or take a cab, will be a feature of cost.  Whatever ones final opinion–and this is one of those major gray areas which seemingly can make some economists pompous pricks, due to the difficulty of the analysis, and fragility and uncertainty of the results, which makes people argue the most about the least–people TEND to make rational decisions in most cases.

Uber eliminates the brick and mortar entirely, except in its HQ and wherever computer programmers are doing their thing.  It does not own a fleet of cars.  It does not have a call center filled with dispatchers.  It also makes no promise of income, but in turn demands no cost OTHER than having a decent, well maintained car.  It may be that some people buy cars to drive Uber, but the costs they incur are up to them.  It would seem most drivers already have a car, and are simply diverting it to an alternative use.

Uber does not eliminate the boss, but rather automates it.  Drivers are scored by passengers, and if the gradual, collective verdict is persistently negative, they are fired.

So on the one hand Danny DeVito, and Flo the dispatcher, and John the mechanic who worked at Yellow Cab over time see the people working with them diminish, and maybe even disappear, and who perhaps lose their own jobs; and on the other hand, Uber provides de facto jobs for a roughly equivalent number of people, who are in much better control of their destinies in many respects.  It creates a room full of IT professionals working to keep the App working and making it better.

Costs are cut dramatically, due in large measure to costs cut on the supply side. No building has to be maintained, no cars need be bought and maintained, at least by Uber, and the connecting process is not only automated, but vastly improved such that service response times are reduced substantially, and in busy times with many drivers, to close to zero even in areas taxis would not normally be.

The logical effect of greatly reduced costs should be, and presumably has been, greatly increased use of hired drivers.  Where people walked, they now Uber.  Where they drove drunk, they now Uber.  Where, in a city, they thought they had to maintain a car, now they Uber.

How one finally sorts out who the ultimate winnners are is impossible, but it seems obvious at least that the end users, the consumers, the people spending their money to make the whole thing work, are getting an equivalent or better service at a lower price.  This makes their finances better, and frees them up to either save that money, or spend it somewhere else in the economy.

To side with taxi drivers, then, is to side against consumers.  Their gain is the consumers loss, and vice versa, even before one factors in all the opportunities for part time employment Uber affords.  It is impossible to predict exactly where any formally complex system will go, but in a free market, it will always tend to gravitate towards improving products, lowering prices, and creating new jobs for those destroyed.

Here is the issue, though, and as far as I know I’m the only one talking about this: as technology is automated, what it SHOULD be doing is increasing the value of all human labor, almost exponentially, to the point where a considerable amount of leisure is possible.  We have, as Oscar Wilde urged, made slaves of technology, which ought to have bought us the indolence, or passions, of the Greek and Roman ruling classes.

Instead, the steady sucking of actual wealth out of our economy–of the actual ownership of real goods, versus a lease or mortgage on them created by fiat money, and satisfied in blood and sweat–has made it harder and harder to earn a living.  In part, this is because the advertising age and easy money have amplified our wants.  We want bigger cars and bigger houses which necessarily cost more money, even with more effective means of production.

But even given this, ALL wages, for all professions, ought to have been going up rapidly, and are instead stagnant or even falling.  Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats, but NEITHER party has even begun to discuss, much less grasp, the final centrality of the problem of money creation.  Nobody, that I can see.

One sees people like Murray Rothbard and the Austrians talking about the instability of fractional reserve banking, but this point is obvious.  One has only to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” to get the problems.  We know about business cycles, and in my view only the corrupt and foolish deny their causation.

No, the case is MORAL, and moral in an important teleological way, in that small elites are gathering all our wealth to themselves, in an orgy of greed regrettably often precendented in world history.  They have, I feel, created the 1% meme to amuse themselves, and to divert and divide the masses.  And people are too fucking stupid to understand this.

There is another consolidation worth mentioning as well, which is the movement of well paying jobs to the more intelligent.  Logically, if someone who is simply answering the phone is replaced by a computer programmer, the relative demands of the job have gone up with the pay, but one higher paid person might replace 100 of the lower paid, relatively unskilled people, who are then thrown out to compete for the same jobs, and who thereby lower their wages yet further.

This is likely a second dynamic behind wage stagnation.  The best paying jobs are getting better paying, but the less skilled jobs are decreasing in value as more people (now including Obama’s proposed permanent Spanish speaking Democrat base) compete for them.  As efficiency increases, the skill level and intelligence needed to cash in on the new jobs replacing the old jobs increases.  This has been a fear since the beginning of the Information Age–can we equally call it the Age of the Intellectual Ghetto?  Or the Age of Vacuous Information?–and a valid one in my opinion.

That genie is out of the bag, though.  We cannot uninvent the robot–and both the automated attendant–especially IVR and the Uber app are robots–without massive disruption.  And to the point, we don’t need to.  Our largest, most substantial fault in our system, and therefore the one area most productive of effectual improvements, remains our financial system.

Rand Paul continues to be my favorite for the Presidency, and he is doing the best he can.  It is hard to win the Presidency, though, without the active support of the Wall Street king makers that Democrats and Republican elites likewise kowtow to.

One wonders, though, what excuse Mitch McConnell COULD offer for not pushing through the Audit the Fed bill.  With transparency, and public knowledge, perhaps a discussion could at least begin.

And one wonders, too, why the best and brightest and most public economists are too stupid or too pusillanimous or too enmeshed with this system to first understand, and then to take this issue on.

I think much of our sense of life can be seen in how we view children, as miracles or nuisances, as wanted or superfluous.

A meditation which I likely read about somewhere, but which certainly occurred to me, is looking at children, feeling that spontaneous desire for their health and happiness, and taking that feeling and applying it to all people.

And on that note, it occurs to me that a useful reflection is that the biggest asshole and the biggest bitch you know would be admirable human beings, if they only knew how to get the love that they need, that we all need.  Everyone needs love.  There are no exceptions, even if countless people learn largely without it.  No one can learn to live fully without it, even if this urge gets perverted, for example into the love of cruelty.

And you cannot look at the Baphomet statue in Detroit and not see an anger at living children, and a latent anger at the hurt children who live within the people who created this demonic work.

It seems to be my destiny to be able to imagine goodness, and to see evil.  With regard to those Satanists, they are just the tip of the iceberg, in my view.  You know what they say about the one cockroach you can see.

But Heaven is still near.  This world is an odd, crazily interesting place.  Most of us cannot even imagine how little we perceive of what we could have perceived, had we merely been more awake.

240 years or so after the first completed work of one of the most erudite, passionate, principled and brilliant assemblies ever created by humankind, we deserve Donald Trump versus Joe fucking Biden.

Two terms of Obama make this clear.

I am tempted to buy a farm somewhere, and buy a bunch of goats and milk them daily.  But my self appointed job is to stay in the ring, to the extent I can find one.

And I continue to be tempted to buy a “I see Stupid People” T-shirt.

You got to play the game.  You got to play the game.  I have to keep repeating that to myself.

Does Donald Trump, and the support he has built in the Republican base, not in some respects validate EVERY suspicion the Left has inculcated in the conformists who toe their line, that the Right is racist, sexist, ist, ist, ist?  They have been trained to convict us in absentia on much less–indeed, frequently non-existent–evidence.

Can they not use him to inculcate the idea that we are bad people, and to vote straight ticket again when the time comes,  and leave the thinking up to the Democrat leadership, and don’t worry too much or pay too much attention if Democrats win the election–your part is done for now–it’s all dealt with and LOOK there is a new Thai place at 5th and Main.  I bet the Pad Thai is amazing.  Thanks for your support, and we’ll see you again in two years.  Okay?

Oi, I can feel my brain shrinking.  I think I need to listen to some Mozart or Haydn.

You know, whoever this Ishmael fellow is, he is pretty clever: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/dean%20rosengarten%20reply–modified.pdf

Seriously, I read my own work sometimes and am surprised at how many thoughts I have thunk. Yes, thunk.  I write so much, I forget what I have said, and can almost read some of this as if for the first time.

This paper was sent to the then Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, who I was acquainted with as a very amiable, extremely intelligent, highly motivated and diligent person.  I had asked for feedback with respect to a book proposal, and found myself writing this, which I think pretty much screamed that I did not understand the concept of a book proposal.

I like the work I did, but it was not what he committed to review, and I never heard back from him.  He was and no doubt remains an extraordinarily busy man.  I was surprised, honestly, he agreed to look at it at all.

The cynical part of me, though–and it has no food to nourish it here, to be clear–has wondered if part of the problem was my assertion at the outset that the Humanities ought to be useful, and that philosophical progress is both possible and desirable. These sorts of ideas create the intellectual equivalent of the vapors in modern academic environments.  One can imagine women fainting and sensitive men hyperventilating in paper bags.

Humanistic Positivism?  Has anyone coined that term?  Google thinks not.  Plant that flag on my intellectual 40 acres.  We are plowing ahead with empirical Intuitionalism.  We will sort the details out as we go.  I have many ideas.

It is a good thing for my mental health that I spend most days surrounded by HVAC and data guys, carpet layers, drywallers, electricians.  Their ignorance and small-mindedness–actually I feel the need to point out most of these folks are much smarter than you might imagine, and much smarter than a lot of college graduates in every way that matters–I find quite tolerable.  The other kind–and I reiterate this is not directed at any individual–drive me up the fucking wall.   Far better to literally BE up the fucking wall.

Shit: I’m whining.  Breaking my own first rule.  But you know that is the value of rules: they serve as way finders in this vast expanse of trackless desert we call Life.  Something is true.  In my system, the truth is that if you are feeling sorry for yourself, you are fucking up.  Period.

Here is a question: do you want a Hitler or a Stalin or a Castro to tell you what to do, or are you willing to submit to the energy of your own sense of things, own sense of propriety?  You will be bounded.  As Bob Dylan put it in his Christian phase, you gotta serve somebody.  The question is, will this happen by chance, or through an honest process of thought and reflection?  Will you remain alive, or will you choose death?  You have both options, in every moment of your life.

When I compare a Buddhist or Hindu doctrine that we get an infinite number of chances, to the Christian and Islamic ideas that we get ONE CHANCE, and one chance only, the amount of tension the latter generates in comparison is unbelievable.

And I think, too, about what an awful doctrine it is that I was born fucked up–that the consequences of decisions made by someone thousands of years ago must be carried by me, that I was “born in sin”, which is to say that I was born convicted of a crime, born guilty of a crime–and that ONLY by full and voluntary submission to the ideas of those leading one church or another, through de facto submission to men, in the name of God, can I somehow be “washed clean”.  And for more than a thousand years, that submission was quite directly to men who profited from it. Yes, my baptism at birth would have saved my soul, but it only stayed saved through the surrender of personal autonomy of conscience and behavior.

Countless thousands perished in the literal fires built by men who claimed to serve God.  The Romans found Christians distasteful only because they rejected everything they believed, quite publicly.  They were otherwise completely tolerant to all beliefs and practices.  The Jews were less tolerant, but there is no record of anything like inquisitions and the mass killing of alleged heretics.

One does not find radical intolerance UNTIL Christianity, the creed allegedly based on love, but whose unique power rested on fear.

It is certainly possible to say that “the truth is the truth”, but on the face of it does this sound like a merciful God?  I cannot remotely accept their scientism, atheism, and belief in matter, but I understand quite well the theological objections of the Dawkins and Harris’s of the world.

Gibbon is really helping me contextualize Christianity.  He really seems quite partial to the Romans.  He knows the history well, and I am enjoying him tell it.  He deals with the grotesque hypocrisy of the Roman Universal Church, the kingdoms it formed, the lies it told, the wars it fought, and the immense wealth it amassed and keeps, all in the name of a poor, pious man who preached humility, service, and the rejection of earthly wealth.  No one can look at a Roman Pope and see anything but a grotesque mockery, a big “Fuck you” to Christ, whoever he was.  Whatever Jesus taught, it was not intended to serve the causes of pride, power and prejudice.  And like it or not, all Christianity comes through the Catholic Church.

What I am realizing is that the most important doctrine of Christianity is not the power of love, but rather the fear of eternal damnation.  Who can think calmly and rationally when the possibility is put on the table of going to Hell FOREVER?  You do not win converts through cultivating love in them, through expanding them, but rather by putting the literal fear of God–an ostensibly loving God, who nonetheless was “forced” to create Hell–into them.

Many early Christians were eager martyrs.  In his snarky style, Gibbon makes this quite clear.  The Romans, for their part, were quite confused. I think it was Marcus Antoninus who said something close to “Surely those who want to die cannot fail to find themselves rope or a precipice?”

Surely we can consider a religion which cultivates an eagerness for death one which is NOT life affirming?

The Catholic Church is not built on love.  Of course, there are charities–public charity actually being a key means of developing support in the early years, one which is used in the same manner and to the same effect by gangsters in New York, Italy and elsewhere, who hand out Christmas gifts to kids, and provide food to the hungry–but can it truly be said that the love of love outweighs the fear of eternal pain in most?  Once you have been “saved”, of course, it frees you to focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, but does not the power of the Pope to “excommunicate”, which is to say, to condemn to infinite pain, carry more weight?  Or did it not, for many centuries?

It seems, increasingly, that given a supposition of eternal hell, that Islam is actually a far more logical religion.  Rather than let people be condemned to hell, they go out and conquer them and convert them at the point of a sword.  They create an airtight society geared to public piety, and to the continual reinforcement of all the behaviors which will help a person avoid hell.

They avoid a rich, entrenched, politically powerful clergy by conflating temporal and religious power in a Caliph.  They avoid ambiguity through a clear text, with clear rules.  There can be, in theory, no question if someone is “saved” or not.

Ponder, if you will, the existential angst that must have attended, and continues to attend, the lives of those whose beliefs posit that only a certain number of people can be saved, or even worse that Divine Grace–what a word!!!–alone can save them from a pit that that same divine being created.

These ideas can and have driven countless millions–billions, certainly–mad.

We need to move past the religions of the past.  We cannot and will not reconstitute globally even the best religions, such as Buddhism.  We need a wedding of society and science, but a science which is honest, which includes the data about an after-life, about psi, about a cosmos which is conscious.

Increasingly, it is my honest belief that Christianity, as it has come to be expressed, has been a curse on humanity, not because of the value it places on love and service, and sacrifice, but because of the doctrine which it alone taught, of eternal suffering.

For their part, the Romans and Jews and many other polytheists didn’t really think about the after-life at all; and among the Asians there were heavens and hells, but none lasted forever.

You know, one might conclude from somewhere or other that I am a mighty reader.  I’m not.   I suck, frankly.  I’m going through “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” slowly, on Audible.com, but the one book I am reading, “Antifragility”, by Nassim Taleb, I am inching, snailing, turtling my way through.

But I will invoke one passage, where he critiques Steven Pinker for believing that the reduction in war and violence over the past 1,000 years, let’s say, somehow means the future will continue that way.  He says risk is in the future, never the past, and we are at a place where so many things could get so fucked so quick, that no sane person could say we are safe.

And I feel this.  We all have our demons, our past.  We all have emotions floating up from somewhere, if we listen to them, that take us here or there.

But there is the macropicture too.  Sane people, in my view, wonder how long we can borrow 40% of the Federal budget, mostly from the Fed.  Sane people look at Medicare particularly, and wonder how it can stay solvent, with the mass retirement of the mass Baby Boomers.

Sane people wonder who got Barack Hussein Obama elected.  Sane people wonder where he was in his twenties; who paid for it; whether or not he is gay (like Hillary); whether or not Frank Davis was his actual father, and his mother a porn “star”; what his actual birth certificate says; and who paid for his education.  And who wrote his books.  Michelle is apparently on record as saying Bill Ayers wrote them.

Then you have 9/11. Once you dig a certain amount, you start to question your sense of reality.

But I would say this: anyone who is serious has to add to their possible list of “mental health events” the wholesale collapse of American society.  No one can say it is impossible, and increasingly it even seems likely.

If telling the truth has become a revolutionary act, we need more revolutionaries.