Month: January 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/business/donald-trump-unions.html

I have said this before, and will say it again: Trump’s politics would have been unexceptional, and Democrat, in the 1960’s.  Who started the Vietnam War?  Democrats.  Why?  They wanted to protect America from Communism, and in the war for allies and credibility, some shooting appeared needed. And in point of fact, we won the war, then pissed it away after the phase transition happened in the Democrats from people who loved America and thought differently, to people who did not love America, did not love democracy, did not operate according to consistent standards of common decency, and who lied nearly as often as they talked.

That happened about 1972, which was about 44 years ago.  The Democrats kept some hold-outs through the 1980’s, and I think have a few even now in State and City governments, but by and large, they have ingested Soviet era memes about “fairness”, “imperialism”, and the rejection of patriotism (even though the Soviets were very patriotic).

How else to explain a party which supposedly looks out for the Little Guy, the Working Man, being so eager to welcome and support at taxpayer expense millions of new competitors for jobs which are already scarce, and whose wages have been stagnant for some time.  To the extent of my knowledge, not even the Keynesian lunatics reject the law of supply and demand, which obviously applies to labor too.

How else to explain the refusal to call Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism?  If you shout out an imprecation to your God before beginning the senseless and gratuitous slaughter of non-combatant civilians, what sound mind can but conclude that your religion played a role?  What person, reading the news, can but conclude that Islamic Fundamentalism–the proper term, since so-called “radical” Islam has merely taken the step of reading their holy book literally, and taking it at its 7th century word–has made major in-roads among Muslims the world over, making all of them–and particularly young men–prospective mass murderers?

Given the actual genocide being conducted against them, why is Obama allowing virtually no Christians or Yazidis from Syria and Iraq to enter this country?

And if rejecting refugees is wrong, what are we to make of the refusal of the Gulf nations to accept any of these “refugees”?  Is that racist?

We live in layer after layer of delusion.  Inanity.  Sophomoric imbecility.  Common sense isn’t.  Common decency isn’t.

I have met the spirit of this world: it is hunger.  Hunger.  The great Satan is that animal spirit which seeks to devour to satiate itself, to survive.

What each of us needs to realize is that we are prey.  We will always be hunted down and killed.  Always.  We can learn how to forget this, but we cannot avoid this.

The sense of being pursued is terrifying.  We are animals, and we feel just what animals do, when a lion, or tiger or bear is chasing them, trying to kill them, trying to rip them to pieces and eat them.

Me, I am in the process of making my peace with this energy.  I have felt terror most nights for the past 2-3 years. I  shake like a leaf, but there is nowhere but numbness to hide, and that is not a good spot.  I have to face this fear.  I have to accept the cup that it offers, and allow it to work within me while not becoming one with it.

It is possible to enter terror, to learn its ways, to feel its texture, and to allow it to dissolve.  And my feeling is that once this terror dissolves, very little will ever frighten me again, other than immediate and physical threats, which is what fear is actually for.  That is its purpose, not torturing your days and nights with a cloud that can only be penetrated with will-power, and only worked in with major effort, courage, and strength.

I have chosen a difficult path.  But it is an honorable one.  

I feel very acutely that all these words on this blog, on my website, and elsewhere, represent a sustained effort to begin something I have not yet begun.  But I think I am ready, now, to start.  At least, I can see the starting line.  That is progress.

I find it remarkable what working a long day, getting drunk, and then getting a really, really good night’s sleep does for me.  I put down a fair amount of alcohol last night, and today I get up and out of five games on Lumosity, get Top 5’s on 2, and blast through my record on a third.  My score was 50% higher than my previous best, and I’ve been playing it for many months now. [edit: they may have changed the scoring system; the point, I think, remains.]

It is an interesting thing, watching myself playing these games, how some internal emotional process interferes with me, makes me guess wrong, hides answers from my mind.  That process was simply muted today.  It is likely still in bed.

And I am increasingly persuaded that the first task for most people, the very first, the sine qua non, of goal achievement, is learning to accept the idea of success.  This is quite impossible for most people.  They are quite unable to conceive being unusually good at anything that did not come naturally in childhood.

I suspect not one person in 100 comes even remotely close to utilizing their full talents, what they might have been, could have been, if they had been able to love themselves enough to honestly seek out the fulfillment of their potential.

Most of us have been hypnotized to stop at a certain point, to succeed up to THERE, and then to stop.  To go farther is to invite jealousy, the attention of others, the responsibility that often goes with talent, the encounter with the unknown.  It is to let loose hidden fountains of creative energy that you cannot fully direct or predict.

I was watching an interesting interview with Gabor Mate where he was talking about “the myth of normal”.

It is a human tragedy that our society values conformity to an economic system over personal growth.  What do most of our “human development” “experts” talk about?  Making more money.  Becoming better at your job.  This is our mainstream culture.  Most people are focused on more money.  If they are not focused on their career, they are buying lottery tickets, and dreaming of what they would do if they won.

This is stupidity.  As is no doubt obvious, I am an ardent supporter of that combination of free markets and property law that gets called “Capitalism”, but as I have said many times, Capitalism, so called (again, I will note this was Marx’s term for a system he detested, which he did not describe accurately, and which does exist today in the form supposed by most) is merely an economic system within which moral narratives operate.  You can be Capitalist and live in an old bus, sweep floors for a meager living, and spend your ample free time meditating in nature.  We could all choose to do this.  We could all choose much lower standards of living in exchange for a richer culture, richer connections with others, and richer connections, more fulfilling connections, with ourselves and our true inner natures.

What we need to make this happen is to liberate time.  And that cannot happen until people recognize that wealth is being systematically siphoned away from the producers to the bankers.  This is not a flaw in “Capitalism”, and the solution is not an idiotic assault on “corporations”.  The problem is precise, and the solution is precise.

I have decided to start giving public talks.  You can choose the topic, but to my mind the most important one is the nature of our monetary system, its defects, and how to correct it.  Many billionaires benefit from this system.  Some of them are no doubt psychopaths.  But perhaps some of them have deluded themselves that they are working to create a more just world, without having any moral tools other than coerced conformity–which they call the justice of equality–to do so.

I wonder if I will be shot if I get to a certain point, but that could only happen if I am relevant, and achieving relevance would be a good life outcome.  This is not my first time here, not your first time here, and we all get as many chances as we need.

If you would like to host a talk, please email [email protected].  Depending on where you are, I may need some travel money, but I don’t plan to charge for the talks themselves.

My comment never appeared on that “Birth of a Nation” post.

I look around me.  It’s something I do.  I watch and talk with actual, physical human beings.  Given the nature of my work, it is not uncommon for me to share space on the service elevators–often after-hours–with janitors and security staff, many of whom are black, and many of whom are Hispanic.  If they are friendly, I talk with them.  I suspect in the course of an average week I rub elbows and talk to more working class people than the average Democrat politician does in any non-election year.

And I like to hang out at bars and talk to people.  It’s one of my hobbies.  I was in a bar frequented by Ford workers last night.  I was in a bar with scaffolding installers from what we call BFE (Bumfuk, Egypt) around here the night before.  I ask people questions about their work, their pay, and their lives.  Give them a couple beers and just about everyone, in this country at least, wants to tell you their life story.  I find all this very interesting.

And it seems to me that the alleged malady of  “racism” is a construct created by and for a power elite.  It is useful.  Any time you can say you will do something for someone that they can and should be doing for themselves, you win.  Step one, obviously, is convincing them that they CAN’T do for themselves, that they need you, and there is no other way.  Put alternatively, the Democrat power platform depends on the helplessness of minorities.  It depends on lies.

The average person is confused. This is a confusing world.  I’m really fucking smart, and I get confused myself.  How the hell is an average person supposed to sort everything out?  I ask them to, I expect them to, but in the end I can’t be surprised when they fail.  So many people benefit from bullshit, from confusion, from twisting partial truths to more or less complete lies.

What do college kids, and college professors who are themselves overgrown kids, get from this obsession with race?  Relevance.  And what I keep calling an Ersatz Morality.

When I say Ersatz, I mean fake, substitute, unreal.  It is not a moral code which admits right actions and wrong actions.  All it admits is people who agree with the day’s propaganda, with the daily kos (cause), and people who don’t.  Such a morality cannot animate an inner directed person.  It cannot animate an individual conscience.  It must be continually renewed, replenished, altered, and avoided for a time when it leads to open contradiction. Once that gap has been closed, it becomes safe again.  The True Believers accept the necessity for this process.

Oh, I need to go to bed.  I am tweaking my own outrage patterns, my own outlets, my own places I go to hide.

I am not innocent in all this by any means.

What I dream about, put simply, is a world where the truth is valued above group membership, above convenience, as a goal and aim in itself, as something with intrinsic merit.  We do not presently live in that world.  Indeed, much of the “college experience” has as its aim the stigmatizing of the very notion of truth, and the following process of rational, fact seeking exploration.  They want truth to be like a pack of cigarettes: they give you the smoke, and they give you the light.  What else could you want?

My marathon continues.  127 hours of listening, and I can usually only handle about an hour at a time, with focus.  I’m a bit more than half way through, I think.

I do feel, though, in listening to the constant fluctuations in fortune, that this is a history that would be useful in teaching kids in our present society about life.  Sometimes tyrants win.  Sometimes they lose.  Quite often one tyrant is replaced by another.  War hurts and impoverishes everyone.  Sometimes taxes are punitive, sometimes they are low.  Sometimes you can do and say as you please, but most of the time saying the wrong thing will get you killed or imprisoned.  This is most of humanity, for most of history.

Christianity is replete with violence. I was reading about some poor woman, a virgin who taught math, who somehow fell afoul of, if memory serves, the man who became St. Cyril.  They grabbed her in the street, stripped her naked, hacked her to death in a Christian church, scraped the skin off her bones, and threw her bones in a fire, in what amounted to a human sacrifice.

I read about a revolt of the Samaritans, in which 20,000 were killed, and 20,000 sold into slavery.

I read about a Persian king who invaded Jerusalem and Palestine and either killed or allowed to be killed 90,000 Christians.

It is a monstrous and absurd fact of modern American history that our children are led into believing that the fate of the slaves in the South was something other than what was done to other human beings in virtually every country on Earth 150 years ago, and for recorded history all the way back before that. They are led to believe that our wars are somehow different than the wars going back through time.  To the extent they are, it is because they are notable for lack of atrocities, absence of rapine, and for no notable effort at gorging our coffers with the fortunes of others.

Soviet era propaganda, and that is what we are dealing with, only works with historically ignorant, and damnably stupid and complacent people.  But that is most Americans.

I would add this book to those I believe should be read by ALL Americans.  Kids could read 10 pages a week throughout high school, until done.  I don’t think even the most feeble minds could escape learning some obvious lessons, and it would force them to encounter and learn to process actually skillful and rich prose.

Finally watched this.  The only thing I will say is that true order is never linear.  Javier Bardem’s character consists only in lines, which means he lives in the deepest chaos–true chaos–possible.

Post here: http://deadline.com/2016/01/birth-of-a-nation-premiere-sundance-stunner-nate-parker-1201690343/#comment-list-wrapper

It has not appeared.  I never know why my comments don’t pop up.  There are many possible explanations.  Certainly, it seems unlikely this site has me blocked, but who knows?  In any event, if I’m going to write something, it may as well appear somewhere.

And I will add editorially, that dwelling in the past is bad for both individual and groups.  Yes, it helps to know where you come from, to know who you are, to better marshall your personal resources to move into the future.  But the goal is always moving into the future.  Making movie after movie after movie of how bad being a slave was does not help kids born in ghettos to crack-addicted or alcoholic mothers.  It does not give them hope.  It does not give them a path forward, or a role model for anything but undirected and almost entirely self destructive rage.

It is precisely the failures–the long term, expensive, and obvious failures–of policies designed to remedy inequalities which make movies like this so easy.  Stirring up anger is a child’s task.  Calming it down, and directing it soberly in productive ways is the hard work.

Those same atrocities are being inflicted on Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria TODAY, as the direct result of Obama’s policy of arming and then not seriously fighting Islamist sadists.  At what point do people start living in the 21st century and acting like their moral compasses still operate?

And in point of fact 650,000 people died fighting a Civil War whose cause was the institution of slavery, almost all of them white.  Are the mutilations of cannon grape shot, bayonets, and bullets any the less atrocious?

I feel less than zero guilt.  I feel movies like this actually HURT the cause of black equality by working to build resentment about things that happened long ago, while ignoring the fact that the policies meant to help blacks have destroyed the nuclear family, eradicated their thirst for education and knowledge, taught them that they are helpless, and encouraged them to seek remedies for their poverty everywhere but hard work and long term plans.

All Frederick Douglas asked for was an equal shot.  All Martin Luther King, Jr. asked for was to be judged on the content of his character.  Movies like this have as their clear subtext the idea that blacks are owed something because of things that happened long before the lives of any living human beings. 

If I was still in graduate school, or an academic working in a world where conservatives were allowed to exist unmolested, that might be a fun title for a paper.

I read this, and it jibes with much of what I have been thinking and saying: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/01/why-humans-find-it-hard-do-away-religion

What is truth?  Well, according our modern educational system, it is the output of science.  Since the output of science is variable, then truth, and our understanding of it, must likewise be variable.

But for human cultural purposes, for sociological purposes, it is sufficient that there be a professional and sanctified priesthood.  In principle, once one has accepted the need to concur with and submit to and internalize their pronouncements, this is no different in practice or principle than submitting to the authority of an oracle which regularly offers new information, new truths, new principles, and new views.  You simply take it in stride, even if the information is contradictory.  You assume they are “getting closer”, because that is what “they” do.

So in the same sense that for much of Western history individuals were not allowed to have an unmediated relationship with God, so too does much of our intellectual establishment not want us to have an unmediated relationship with the truth.

They do not want us questioning Keynesian economics.

They do not want us questioning Global Warming.

They do not want us asking what good can come from universal surveillance.

This cultural development is in fact extremely well suited for an authoritarianism which has the sense to never be too open about its operations.  It is the antithesis of genuine Humanism, and the opposite of that spirit which seeks to elevate human kind by elevating all individuals.

We are taught to obey, not to think, and this propaganda is made perfect by insisting within the message itself that everyone who imbibes the daily poison is in fact heroic and individualistic, for braving the assaults of the determined fanatics on the Right, who know nothing, will only evil, and must be stopped at all costs.

This is the world we live in.

I was thinking how clownish this whole things is, a Cabinet level official using high school technology to conduct top secret–and apparently ABOVE top secret, which I guess is Code Word level access, or something like that–business. I was thinking how spy agencies spend years and huge amounts of effort to get agents in place to secure the sort of information she more or less delivered for free and at no considerable expense of effort and time.

Then it hit me that maybe that was the POINT.  We assume that she had her own server so she could conduct illegal and  unethical business on the side, but what if part of the deal is that she also secured money for providing access to top secret US policy positions and other such data?

I seem to have been unique in suggesting this, but I have proposed that the whole Kenneth Starr thing under Bill was designed to divert attention from the blatant and large security leaks to the Chinese that happened under his Administration.

There was an agent they caught, but Clinton also authorized the open and legal sale of dual use nuclear technology.  I remember a Spec. Op friend of mine telling me he had just been through SERE school, where among other things they get waterboarded and locked in small cages, and feeling very angry that he had to go through all that to learn to protect secrets which did not have a shelf value in most cases of more than a week, whereas with no resistance at all Clinton was simply handing over major secrets to a Communist nation, with whom we had been at war indirectly several times in the 20th century, and which we had every reason to expect would become a major rival.

The Clintons are awful people.  Bill has well developed people skills.  There can be no doubt about this.  But good salespeople do not need to be good human beings.  A good salesperson who is trying to steal the shirt off your back can make you feel guilty for wanting to keep it.  I’ve witnessed this first hand.  Psychopaths can be particularly compelling.

I don’t know who Bill is, but his wife is a lying bitch who thinks rules are for other people, and for his part there seems to be little or nothing that Bill is above.