Month: February 2016

I am going to go on a mild hiatus again, as I do from time to time.  I have realized that this blog is a way for me to externalize feelings by intellectualizing and “projecting” them out into space, rather than circling them back in and processing them.

An intellectual is someone who collects thoughts, the way a stamp collector might collect stamps.  The important thing about thoughts is that they become emotionally transformative, and if they fail in that, they are developmentally useless.  Certainly, they may allow you to build outer things–which indeed cannot be built without them–but never inside.

As collectors, intellectuals are neither the engineers nor prophets they both aspire and claim to be.   They are a sort of vocal virus, preying upon the insipidity and neediness of human beings, and sharing only, in the end, their inability to create, to process, to transform, and ultimately to be.

Even though I have many thoughts flowing through me which I could share, I am going to circle them back in, with I think the accurate hope that once I am complete, what needs to flow out will do so as needed, accurately and spontaneously.

Orwell was of course quite right that in an ostensibly Liberal–in the true sense of the word–society, the abuse of language always precedes the abuse of people and their rights.  It is quite unacceptable to pull John Smith off the street because you don’t like him, but we are getting to where it will be OK if you first call him a racist or “Climate Change Denier”.  The charges need not be truthful, obviously, as has been seen in every previous iteration of fascist mind control by deletion.

Like many, I am reading now that Twitter has gone overtly partisan, which is to say post-bipartisan, which is to say they have evolved beyond the willingness to pretend they are not congenitally intolerant, small-minded, bigoted, and very, very angry.  We see the claim they are protecting Political Correctness.

But why not call it what it is?  Politically inconvenient.  Political Correctness, as much as we might vilify it, still has the word correct in it, just as “progressive” still sounds good.  You will not hear me use the word progressive, and as of this moment, I am going to call partisans of PC either anti-free speech zealots, or people attempting to suppress the politically inconvenient.

The whole point of free speech is that it becomes possible for good ideas, in a large mass of competing ideas, to achieve ascendancy because they are superior.  This does not always happen, obviously, but typically the principle obstacles are not human stupidity and obstinacy, but the suppression of competing ideas.  So-called conservative ideas–which I would argue are the actually Progressive, Liberal, ones, which work to build actual Social Justice–are better than those of the Left.  This is why they suppress them.  No sane person can long defend the abuses of the past, those of the present, and those clearly planned for the future.  You cannot defend them morally, politically, socially, philosophically, or practically.  Everything they touch, speaking nearly generally, they darken, worsen, stain, and degrade.

Me, I have taken pains over long periods of time to enter into these worlds, to interact with these people, to debate them, to compare world views, to compete with them intellectually.  And it always ends in my getting banned, censored, banished, suppressed, silenced.  Some of these people would no doubt be gratified to hear I had been dragged off and shot.  I am evil because I disagree with them, and they have self appointed themselves the Apostles of Everything Good.

So: PC no more. It is regrettable, but I cannot use Twitter less.

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core.html

Somehow I fell into the 9/11 rabbit hole again this morning.

I will say for the umpteenth time: no sane investigator, who honestly seeks truth, can fail to conclude that this conspiracy was much bigger than a bunch of Saudis being directed by Bin Laden.  Clearly, top officials at the Federal Government failed flamboyantly to ask and answer basic questions, and this failure continues.

The smoking guns, I assume, are largely gone, but the FACT of the cover-up and conspiracy continues to be obvious, and can and should be addressed by those who claim to value America, American freedom and well being, and common decency.

I died several times this week.  Not really, obviously, but I was pushed past limits I was trying to hold on to.  What I find is on the other side is what I might call hopelessness, but it is a different sort of hopelessness.  It is the resignation that recognizes that you can expostulate, shout, scream, worry, fret, get angry etc. about how the world is, and in the end, your opinion, my opinion, really don’t matter that much.  This is not to say we should not try to change things for the better, but that we need to be clear that all worthwhile change takes time, and that if you tie your peace of mind to ridiculous, hopeless fantasies, you will be unhappy, and you will miss what opportunities for happiness DO come your way.  Above all, you will be ineffective.

Me, I fight this world.  I do not accept it as it is.  But I have to also accept it as it is.  You have to carry both ideas at the same time.

Particularly in the present day, it seems that a great many college students are shocked that the fantasy world they have imagined has not yet come into being.  They dream of a world which has never been, then get frustrated that it is not already here.  This is infantile.

I say the present day.  Were not the projects of the Communists similar?  Did they not dream of worlds that had never been, social orders that have never existed, then commit acts of mass murder, torture, mass imprisonment, and put countless secret police on the corners to coerce this new world?

Without altering its fundamental nature, can you make a tomato plant grow in one tenth of the time?  Can you make human infants become adults in two years?  Nature has its schedule.  Human social change is the same.  Impatience is not only not a virtue, it is in general responsible for failure, which is what the “War on Poverty” has been, which is what the efforts to integrate blacks have been, which is what the war on drugs has been, and which in large measure is what the War on Terror has been .  There was no ISIS when Bush invaded Iraq.  That happened under the watch of someone whose election was in large measure engineered in opposition to that war; someone who seems to view the legitimate national security interests of the United States as inherently wrong, and who seemingly views our enemies as white hatted cavalry, for the simple reason that they oppose us.

Returning to my point, I was thinking about the phoenix.  It is reborn young.  All legitimate deaths result in new births, and renewed youth.  This is my operative hypothesis.

It hit me that sentimentality, which appears to be an overabundance of emotion, is really a lack.  It is to honest and mature emotionality what so-called ADD/ADHD is to healthy attention. Why do they give uppers to kids who are already bouncing off the walls?  Because their excessive activity is related to the inability to focus, which is related, effectively, to inner dullness and lack of energy.  You put them on speed, and they become normal.  They have to be accelerated to get there, not slowed down.

Likewise sentimentality, which surrounds us, is a lack of substance.  When I see something like “love is all you need”, or whatever they spelled out at the Superbowl, I see vapidity.  I see cotton candy.

We have become a nation which loves to have its emotions manipulated.  It has perhaps always been so.  I don’t know.  I haven’t lived in any other time, that I can remember, but as just one example I just watched “Slumdog Millionaire”, and it could not have been a more American ending.  Yes, it was set in India, but it was sugar coated.  Their movies may well be like that too–everybody loves a happy ending–but it seems to me the task of a genuinely Liberal culture is meeting and understanding life on its own terms.

For every hero there are many losers.  I cannot look at the poverty in India and not think that from 1948, when they got their independence (thereabouts) until 1990 or so, they pursued socialist programs to elevate the poor. These efforts were miserable failures.  About 1990, they got the government out from the middle of everything, and implemented free market reforms.  As they said in that movie Bombay became Mumbai.

China pursued a Communist agenda over roughly the same time frame.  They pursued it much more vigorously.  Far, far more people died, were tortured, were imprisoned for political crimes, and were forced to live lives of abject fear, and in the end, they had to implement some free market reforms.  China now is much more akin to a Fascist economy than that of Communism.  They retain, of course, a disdain for Fascists, because truth, common sense, the OBVIOUS, are all punished very vigorously.  This is how the mediocre protect their infantile egos, and of course their police-backed claims on absolute tyrannical power, which is used against the People, and contrary to most of their interests.

But Socialism appeals to sentiment.  Wouldn’t it be NICE if. . . .

Mature people deal with the world as it is.  Fools hyperventilate about how it should be, act as if it were the way they think it should be, and are stupid and craven enough to be surprised when water, again, flows downhill.

Here is a table on corn subsidies: http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

Here is an article on corn subsidies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

In the US, sugar tariffs and quotas keep imported sugar at up to twice the global price since 1797,^[25][26] while subsidies to corn growers cheapen the primary ingredient in HFCS, corn. Industrial users looking for cheaper replacements rapidly adopted HFCS in the 1970s.^[27][28]HFCS is easier to handle than granulated sucrose, although some sucrose is transported as solution. Unlike sucrose, HFCS cannot be hydrolyzed, but the free fructose in HFCS may produce Hydroxymethylfurfural when stored at high temperatures; these differences are most prominent in acidic beverages.^[29] Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to HFCS in the U.S. in 1984.^[30] Large corporations, such as Archer Daniels Midland, lobby for the continuation of government corn subsidies.^[31]

I had not been aware of the sugar tariffs either.  In the grand scheme of things this is not all that important, but it is consistently stunning to me that the Left is not better able to pick targets which are actually guilty of colluding with the government, and forming a genuine common cause with conservatives.  Most of that problem is that they do not grant us the status of being human.  They project their own failings onto us, and everyone else unlike them who happens to wander into one of their caves. 

As with most things, I am seeing rank imbecility on all sides, but mostly the Left, on this issue.

The Constitution contains many checks and balances, and more or less compels the necessity for the negotiated settlement of differences.  It is not a winner takes all system.  It is a system which by design makes it hard for aspiring tyrants to make much progress unobstructed by their opponents, which is the principle reason why aspiring tyrants–the Left produces nothing else–see it as passe.  The dislike it for precisely the traits which make it invaluable.

The President nominates Supreme Court Justices.  The Senate confirms them.  Nothing is preventing Obama from nominating whomever he likes, and nothing is preventing Republicans from using their control of the Senate to block his nominations until after the next President is inaugurated.  There is no timetable given in the Constitution of which I am aware.  The only impediment to being completely obstructionist is the likelihood that at some point the same tricks will be played on those serving as obstacles.  Given how blatantly Obama has abused the law, one wonders what anyone can say when a conservative does the same things.  They certainly cannot say there is no precedent.  Obama governs as if there will be no after, as if Democrats will rule forever, and the hens never come home to roost.  Given how patently imbecilic much of this nation is, he may be right.  But of course, it is quite possible he is wrong, too.  Trump appears to me the favorite in both the Primary and General Elections.  Too many people are too pissed off about too many things.

This is the rough and tumble of political systems which attempt to reconcile differing agendas and positions peacefully.  The alternative is violence in the streets, or the use and abuse of the police and military to suppress dissent, both of which of course have been common throughout history.

I saw an interview with Norman Lear where he was saying Donald Trump is the middle finger directed at the media elites, and the PC fascists, but that he had no staying power.

Why?  Where does the anger of 40 years or more of being ridiculed for speaking common sense go?  How long can you shit on anyone and expect them to take it with equanimity?  How rationally can you expect them to adopt your positions when your only argument is shouting them down and insulting them?

The vicious tactics of the Left can and have achieved silence among many, but they have not bought agreement.  They don’t debate. They don’t negotiate.  So the only persuasive force they can wield is getting physical power over their opponents, and beating them with it, in the same manner cavemen once beat each other with cudgels.  The essence of their strategy appears to be getting Political Correctness the force of law.

And can we not see something like a Cultural Revolution on the horizon?  Are todays students really that different than those of Maoist China?  Are they reflective?  Inner directed?  Capable of exercising independence of conscience?  No, they are none of these things.  They are completely unable to recognize that genuine compassion and viciousness are incompatible, and that the only ones capable of reconciling them are those who are interacting with ideas and not actual human beings; who are using an ideology to form a tribe based upon Other-directed violence, which is the oldest game in the human biological playbook.  It is atavistic, and should be recognized as such, but of course that would require a return to reason.

So we see everyone on the Left saying vicious things about Scalia, in a demonstrable COMPLETE lack of understanding as to why decent people defend the Constitution.  They conflate civil rights with the expansion of an omnipotent and omnipresent government, when in fact virtues like respect, peaceful disagreement and coexistence, and the like, are negotiated not by the government, but by people, and that to the extent the government gets in the middle, it delays the process.

You can always point guns at peoples heads.  Violence works for a time.  But it has a shelf life, and violence breeds violence.  Trump is the electoral expression of a vast rage which dim-witted narcissists cannot comprehend because they are not capable of even the rudiments of empathy, despite their obsession with “helping people”.  We are breeding vicious children, packs of wild dogs, controlled by the whistles of propaganda and situational conformity, and as Malcolm McDowell recently said, we are not all that far from a Clockwork Orange.  Such pride the children of the “Love” generation must take in their accomplishments.

Can we say now that it was crazy to see a “communist conspiracy” to dumb down America, alter her educational and news establishments, and begin a gradual process of indoctrinating and then dominating her people?  Exhibit One: the election, not once, but twice, of an unvetted man about whom we know almost nothing who on his own admission has been surrounded by Communists–in the case of Frank Marshall Davis, one with a literal CPUSA card number–all his life, in infancy, in childhood, and by his own choice as an adult.  How many Americans even now know the name Valerie Jarrett?  Most Americans think they are doing well if they can come up with the name of the Vice President.

Can this execrable ignorance be anything but the result of long term, conscious policy?  Of course not.

Harvard now tells us that water fluoridation does next to nothing to prevent dental caries–those have been reduced by affluence, and the following access to dental care, better hygiene, and greater awareness of the importance of caring for the teeth–and seems to make us dumber: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/

In a meta-analysis, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and China Medical University in Shenyang for the first time combined 27 studies and found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children. 

Is this paranoia?  Well, it IS Harvard, and we are not talking about the economics department, or any of their lunatics in the Humanities.  This is the word of THE MAN.  This is the center of the mainstream.

And I was watching a video about how sugar alters consciousness on Victor Zammit’s weekly report, and it occurred to me that the government has been underwriting in the form of corn subsidies the very addition of high fructose corn syrup to our food that he claims alters and clouds our minds.  Why do these subsidies, so damaging to the public health, continue?  I mean this over and above the question as to why taxpayers are being used to give money to people who are otherwise engaged in for profit businesses?  If they need the subsidies to survive, then they are not producing something valuable at a price people are willing to pay.  Failure is the price of success in “Capitalism” (I never allow myself to call leftists Liberals, but I will grant Marx his use of the term Capitalism from time to time.  Like “Descendants of the refugees from the war of 1948”, being more precise is cumbersome).  You cannot have the latter without the possibility of the former, in a free system.

And did Truman and Eisenhower allow China to “go red”  Clearly.  Could we have reinvaded North Korea and then China–when it was lucky to put shoes on the feet of its soldiers, and a gun in every other hand–and prevented countless millions of deaths?  Clearly.  That would have been a humane policy–even if we had used nukes, and killed hundreds of thousands or even millions–as could have been foreseen then (as indeed Churchill foresaw in 1918 in calling for massive support for the Whites), and as is obvious now.  We could have avoided the famines in China, the famines in North Korea, the Vietnam War (in all likelihood), the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and countless billions of ordinary lives lived in misery and poverty under the hands of oppressive tyrants.

This is common sense.  This is common decency.  It is precisely the refusal of the Left to accept the outcomes of its policies, of its refusal to learn, and to apply the concept of universal human rights honestly and sincerely to all, which forces it into positions of truculency, anger, obfuscation, propagandizing, sloppiness, laziness, and ubiquitous fear of discovery.  It forces the cultivation of all the qualities that all civilized societies the world over have considered odious.

By and large, the John Birchers were right.  If they saw a Communist conspiracy under every tree, we know now they were largely right.  The Soviets spent 4 rubles undermining values and attacking cultural institutions for every dollar they spent on the KGB and all its frolics.  They told us this, just as the North Vietnamese tell us that the support of people like Jane Fonda–who they name by name–was critical to them hanging on in the face of massive and humiliating battlefield losses, and ultimately winning only as a result of our craven and disgusting retreat after having achieved tactical victory at the cost of 56,000 or so American lives.

Listen to this, because: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho8ZSzKbiMc

It is interesting to me to contemplate that all this pacific music which to most contemporary ears is foreign and boring, was a creative reaction to the virtually incessant warfare in Europe since time immemorial.  You can say the Romans pacified it, but only parts of Europe, and there was always continual warfare on the boundaries, always “Scythians”, or Vandals, or Franks, or Germans, or Lombards, or Burgundians, or others causing mass violence.  Most of the cities in Europe have been sacked at some point, their inhabitants sold into slavery, and their goods stolen, then in a great many cases been stolen back, or stolen a second time by someone else.

I will reiterate that one learns something about the human condition listening to Gibbon.  Even the graduates of our allegedly best schools–I can’t honestly say “best educated”–know very little of history.  They cannot place our current era of peace, judicial impartiality, human rights, freedom, and economic prosperity, into anything approaching a sane context.  They repeat stupid things said by stupid people.  Every time they open their mouths they subtract from the sum total of human knowledge (I borrowed that from an early 20th century Republican, whose name escapes me).

But listen.  There is solace in war, refuge in conflict.  There is a place for churches, or something like them.  They have no ready substitute, certainly not arenas of political theater, which can only be satisfied with violence.  There is nothing new in that.  It is the oldest story we know.  Perhaps there was a time before violence, but that was before people felt the need to record the deeds of war, which is more or less what history is.