Month: January 2017

I read Trump wants no cuts in Medicare.  This can’t continue forever, but I understand this politically.

One change which can be IMMEDIATELY put into place though is severing Social Security and Medicare.  Bill Clinton made it so anyone who wanted to receive Social Security had to use the Medicare system.  Such, in any event, is my understanding of a massive and complex system.

Over time, we will want most people to prefer using their own insurance across the entire course of their lives.  But in the immediate future, some people might want to opt out of Medicare, since it is in many respects, in my understanding, inferior to other forms of coverage, and that would be to the good.

It would be worthwhile as well considering ways in which we can begin granting young people the right and ability to opt out of this system, in tandem with changes in the health insurance system.

And to do this, at some point we need to tell the truth, which is that NOBODY is setting aside their own money for their future.  The young are paying the bills for the old, and it has been this way since the very beginning.  The fiction is maintained by pretending that the Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid system is somehow separate from the “government”.  You have the IRS, which collects income taxes, then you have a separate system, which gets an off the top 15% cut of everything.

At some point, these will need to merge, so that we can recognize that all our old people are getting paid out of TAX revenue outright.  There is no difference between FICA and income tax.  What we are doing is paying out charity.  What we are doing is paying out a large multiple of what these people put in, let us say AT LEAST double. This is charity.  It is not a retirement savings account.  There is not and never was a “lock box”.

What we want is something like what Chile has, where people are required to save money, but can do with it what they like.  Is everyone a guaranteed winner?  Of course not.  We can keep some form of charity in place.  But allowing people to win, and to win big, should also be a feature of a sane system, one which does not make a large and abusive government the sugar daddy most people can’t do without.

1) merge the revenue streams and bureaucracies; 2) gradually decrease the required contributions; 3) create alternatives in insurance and retirement savings; 4) fund from tax revenue shortfalls in the system paying out to seniors who have nothing else.

And of course fix our fucking financial system.

All easy stuff, obviously.

It is worth pointing out that in contemplating cuts in government, everyone will hoot and holler.  There is nothing currently being funded which does not have an entrenched constituency.  I read today that two projects being looked at are funding for lawyers for rural people, and airports in Alaska.

I think the shortest means of making the obvious linkage is to describe them as rival street gangs, each trying to take over the city, absolutely and finally, both fully committed to extreme violence, and differing only in relatively unimportant doctrinal details.  I will note that even though both were committed Communists, there was enough difference between Stalin and Trotsky that the former had the latter killed.  There were and are rival Communist street gangs too.  Churches splinter: this is the nature of radical individual dependence upon abstract belief and group membership.

As I continue to watch these melt-downs, these states of irrational hyperarousal and cognitive distortions, it occurs to me that on some level the Left has realized we reached a turning point.  Their agenda was seen, understood, and rejected by enough Americans to matter, and this has pushed them into panic.

Trump is not crazy.  You don’t take $3 million and turn it into $3 billion by being crazy.

Trump is not even remotely a fascist, and all these ludicrous claims about concentration camps, and Hitler, are patently absurd.  They are off by many orders of magnitude.  There is ZERO factual basis for making them.

Here is what I propose: these people sold their souls, their responsibility for independent thought, for honest moral analysis, long ago.  They became slaves, because they could no longer tolerate their freedom, and entered a sadomasochistic relationship with the State understood abstractly, and expressed concretely as the means to achieving purportedly moral ends like “the end of racism”, all while pursuing an aggregation of power that has NOTHING to do with achieving any concrete social or economic improvement.

They felt in their bones the creep towards an authoritarian State, one they felt they could trust to “deal” with all the unpleasant people who continued to cling to notions like freedom, reason, and a belief in God.  The “progress” was well under way, and they felt that there would never be a reckoning, that no one would ever confront them with regard to their irrationality, their expressed inhumanity, their soul darkening rejection of the possibility of a meaningful life itself.  All of this was latent, unexpressed.  Practically, in their daily dealings with each other, all was outward harmony.  Nobody spoke about or even allowed themselves to think that they were building an authoritarian State.

Then Trump happened, the unthinkable, the impossible: someone who spoke plain, obvious truths in public without shame or holding back.  Someone who contradicted their ludicrous assertions of Goodness and genuine caring by pointing out their shameless contradictions, their continual failures, their gross hypocrisy, their hatefulness, their continually simmering anger and vitriol.

That’s a big fucking mirror for people who have allowed themselves to become soulless monsters to look into.  And it scares the living fuck out of them.  They can’t escape it and they can’t deal with it. Hence the massive hyperarousal.

But if we are to build a genuinely humane, decent future for our children, it was what was needed.  Trump is not a statesman, and he is not a philosopher.  But he is honest, genuinely concerned with Americans, and has a lifetime of experience in solving concrete problems.

These protests actually create a huge opportunity for Trump to continue the process of pealing moderates off from the Democrat brand.  This process has been on-going for years, but I think his moderation in the face of all this lunacy is an excellent background from which to accelerate this process.  I think he should make some sort of public statement saying something like the following:

“Look, I want jobs for American workers.  Does that make me a fascist?  I’m called a fascist by people who won’t watch my speeches, won’t look at my website, and who know NOTHING about me.  Mexico enforces its border as well as it can.  What is wrong with this?  Cesar Chavez wanted a strong border.  Was he a fascist?  Was he a racist?  Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted an America where everyone was guaranteed an equal shot at their own version of a good life, where ability and determination made the difference, not skin color.  Over and above anything else, our inner city schools are a DISASTER.  Am I a fascist to want to improve them? Would Martin Luther King, Jr. have marched in the streets to protect the jobs of incompetent teachers and completely useless schools?  No, he would not have.

I want good things for all Americans.  I want a strong economy. I want LESS government, not more.  Do all of you understand this is the OPPOSITE of fascism, which wants to control everything you do and say?

Folks, it’s fine to disagree with someone, with their ideas.  But in OUR COUNTRY we value constructive dialogue, we value the negotiation of difference, we value meaningful engagement.

These people attacking my supporters with extreme prejudice, knowing nothing about them but that they support someone who wants to bring jobs back to America and protect our borders, they are engaging in meaningless activity.  Nobody learns anything.  Nobody becomes open to new ideas.  The ENTIRE point of that sort of thing is to instill fear in people,. to silence them with violence.  Nothing more inimical not just to the American spirit, but to human DECENCY, which transcends all cultures and times, could be imagined.

I am going to do my best for ALL AMERICANS–I can’t emphasize that enough–and I expect that my work will even benefit strongly those who hate me the most. So be it.

God bless this country, and God bless you.”

And there is no reason he can’t make his own internet videos.  He can stage manage his own “press releases” such that they hit Facebook and supportive news sites completely intact.  He can do multi media where he includes videos–here, for example, of Trump supporters being attacked–with his narrative.

Hillary wanted to ban Drudge and Breitbart, and InfoWars, but Trump is in charge now, and those sites will flourish.  Trump can literally control his own coverage.

The irony of having large marches in most of the major cities of America is that most of these cities voted for Hillary.  Our cities are and long have been overwhelmingly Democrat.  But most of the land area, and most of the people in this country, do not live in our largest cities.  They will not see these marches, and for his part Trump is well aware that this is smoke and mirrors designed to give our complicit media ammunition to do yet more ineffective lying.

It will feel GREAT for those involved.  They get to feel like they did something.  They can slap each other on the back.  But it is a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise.  They are not changing any minds at any level of our body politic.  In fact, most of us who voted for Trump are sick and tired of their loser bullshit.  We wish they would keep their fucking word, accept that they lost an election they would have won if they had any useful fucking ideas at all, and stop pretending that the entire political world does and should revolve around their patent childishness, ignorance, intolerance, violence, and narcissistic pouting. 

It was a bit surreal watching Obama getting into the helicopter with Michelle.  8 years ago many of us felt great fear about what was to come.  And Obama did pretty much what we expected, but we all benefited greatly from his innate mediocrity, his lack of genuine drive, and the profound incoherence that befuddled everything he did.

Clearly, he politicized our government, with the clear intention of handing it to Hillary to finish the task.  Many government agencies did patently illegal things intended almost entirely to help ensure Democrat victories illicitly, without appeal to ideas, or recognizable benefits to anyone they were asking to vote for them.

It is quite possible government agencies were involved in assassinations domestically.  Certainly, this has been claimed for people like Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings, and even Tom Clancy.  I continue to wonder the connection between John Podesta talking about “wet work” and Antonin Scalia’s odd death three days later.  Perhaps Trump can provide the cover for an honest investigation into all these.

I continue to believe there was a massive coverup at Sandy Hook, and quite possibly no shooting at all.  Experts who have looked at it continue to say it was the most screwed up and incomprehensible thing they have ever seen, and the FBI officially did not recognize ANY deaths there. That single data point should raise the eyebrows of any intelligent person.

I could go on, but all this is now in the rear view mirror.  There is much that can, should, and hopefully WILL be investigated now that we will have an Attorney General who considers the laws more important than partisan politics.  And in any event, enforcing the laws will likely prove highly partisan for the simple reason that the Democrats seem to have gotten in the habit of breaking any and all of the laws that they find inconvenient, at all levels of the government.  No doubt there are guilty Republicans, but clearly much of the swamp exists to further the agenda of the Deep Government, which has always leaned (D).

And I have not forgotten the claims made by Eric Prince that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained a vast trove of horrible material implicating much of our government.  Perhaps Trump will see fit, if it is there, to use it as a weapon, but my sincere hope is that if crimes have been committed, that he will do the right thing and arrest and prosecute the offenders.

I think part of my odd mood too is that after many years of anxiety, I’m going to have an interesting time learning to process the idea of having someone in our highest office who is both honest and competent. Such, at any rate, is the reasonable hope of many of us.

I have alluded to this, but I have in recent days realized that you can touch the feeling of dissociation directly.  Now, the idea of dissociation is that you are disconnected from your emotions, but the feeling of being emotionally disconnected is a feeling too.  It is neither a painful nor a scary feeling.  Nor is it a good feeling.  It is a bit like just being there, just being a set of eyes and ears.

A few days ago I was getting my oil changed, and the main guy was actually pretty genuinely friendly, which is rare for those places, which do a lot of the fake peppiness, and I was just sitting there, and I was feeling odd.  He noticed it and asked if I was OK, and I said sure I’m fine.

But what I now realize is that I was being openly dissociated in public.  Normally I hide.  I know how to be social, how to make small talk, how to make jokes.  I can talk with nearly anybody about nearly anything.  I have a lot of practice with this.

Sometimes–some weeks in the past, frequently–I use anger to separate myself.  All the yelling and upselling (which is actually a good idea where maintenance is concerned) gets on my nerves.  It’s insulting when I have to put my keys in a can, or be “escorted” to the bathroom as if somehow their capacity to navigate that 20′ is superior to mine.  It’s lawsuit-avoiding corporate America at its worst.

But that day, I was just sitting there naked: openly a man apart.  I paid my bill, headed off, and worked a hard week, mostly by myself.

What I am realizing though is that emotionality is a way of avoiding a core sense of disconnection, one which I feel runs strongly through American life.  I feel most Americans feel disconnected from the streams of HONEST emotional life, of honest emotional connection, and that most of them don’t even know it.

Anger, of course, is a common reaction to an inner sense of disconnection.

I was pondering the Headless Ones, the fascists, the authoritarian mobs, and it occurs to me that the sort of fascism on display on college campuses–most recently at the University of Washington, where Milo was speaking–is really a way of building mass social connection based upon anger and fear, which is to say based upon the limbic system.  If everyone is feeling the same thing as you, at the same time, in response to the same stimulus, then you are PART of something, aren’t you?  Nothing good is ever built on anger and fear, but that is not the point of the exercise: the point is to exorcise anomie, alienation, as many have pointed out in commenting on the authoritarian ethos.

Some commentators as well have claimed to see sexual repression behind fascism, with the obvious counter-fascist prescription being more sex.  And of course the Headless Ones are hyper-sexualized.  Sex and sexual orientation is almost all they seem to talk about sometimes.  But for all that, it seems to me the amount of SATISFACTION they get from sex is quite low.  Theirs is a  low trust culture.  They must be constantly ready and willing both to change everything they said they believed, AND to denounce and distance themselves from anyone who proves a heretic and must be burned.

Simply having sex–even weird, deviant sex–is not satisfying at a deep level.  There has to be connection, openness, intimacy, emotional risk, and I feel all these things are quite impossible in conditions of chronic emotional arousal, of chronic anger, and chronic fear, especially the fear of social isolation and banishment.

So I think even a modern Wilhelm Reich could look at the campus Brown Shirts and see and recognize a clear affinity between their mass emotional gestalt, and that of the Nazis.  Plainly, all of them are willing to countenance mass violence against people whose only crime is ideological difference.  These street demonstrations are merely the best they can do.  They would much rather lock people up, banish them, beat them or kill them.

I read that the Seattle Police took pipes, sticks with spikes on them, sharpened sticks and the like from the demonstrators there, who seem to have literally intended murder.  One person was in fact shot.  Last I read it was unclear who shot who why.

It is certain though that the Left has developed and deployed their own Sturmabteilung, for the same reasons the Nazis did.  They are capable of murder.  Thank God they don’t have Hillary in the White House giving them cover.  Quite the contrary.

I continue to believe though that Trump can pressure these major universities–all of which get a lot of money from the “Federal Government”  (which is to say money first taken from the people of America, then given back to them in ways the people running the government see fit)–to protect on their own nickel dissident speakers, arrest violent protesters, expel any students caught in acts of violence, and fire or retire anyone preaching anything but a Constitutional Republic in America.

I think in important respects, this moment in history could be viewed as the moment America stopped a long term drunken binge.  For decades, Republicans–the ostensible keepers of the notion of limited, Constitutional government–have given in to the Left, little by little.  A little here, a little there.

This is a bit like saying “every time I say racist we do a shot”.  Inebriation–moral incoherence, political incoherence, confusion, getting lost–has been the result.

These children in the streets want to keep drinking. They want to continue to pretend the party can last forever, that deficits have no consequences, that policies can be imposed which can be paid for by gold farting unicorns.

Any time you stop drinking, the world slowly gets greyer and uglier.  But if that is what you see, that is what it was to begin with.  The task is to build an ACTUALLY better world, rather than a fucking pipe dream that will explode with time, by which time you plan to be dead or in charge.

And ponder too how disproportionate the outrage to Trump’s pussy grabbing comment was.  We have allowed some 40,000 Libyans to be killed in a completely pointless civil war.  ISIS has murdered thousands in often horrific ways, all so Obama and Kerry could pursue a nonsensical goal of “regime change” in Syria, which most likely would have led to much more mass death.

All of these people had lives, families, hopes, dreams, homes, jobs: all destroyed, by Obama’s evil policy.

And for Trump’s part, you know what most likely followed any pussy grabbing he did?  Sex.  Really good sex.  The assumption is made that he grabbed women who were noncompliant, women who hated him, like these lunatics do in the streets of America.  No: IF he did what he said he did–and the more I think about it, Trump is one of the most impulsively honest politicians in American history, which is an asset in my view–then he did it with women who idolized him and wanted him sexually.  It was a form of foreplay, nothing more.

And none of the women who briefly appeared and then rapidly disappeared after the leak of that tape were credible.  Trump is a playboy.  That is the word.  He always has been, and has never been shy about admitting it.  He has seduced many women, some through blunt touch, and most of whom likely welcomed it.

Mass murder versus compulsive seduction.  Obviously, any reasoning mind has to find the latter much more objectionable, right?

Ponder the lunacy of calling a man “Hitlerian” who wants the policy of the American government he runs to be oriented around American interests.  Whose interests SHOULD they be oriented around?  And why the fuck would we want as President someone who wants to pursue anyone’s interests BUT ours?

Is it fascist for someone in the Rust Belt who has been out of work a long time to want a job?  Is it fascist to want people guilty of rape and murder who are here illegally to be deported, or at least JAILED?  Is it fascist to want good trade deals?  Is it fascist to want to improve the schools in our inner cities?

Words have lost their meaning.  A large segment of our population has lost the ability to use the English language–or any other language–to engage in dialogue.

I will be honest: I don’t have any good ideas on how to fix lunacy like that.  I am usually an idea man, but this is literally a form of cognitive psychosis. It can’t be medicated, and for now at least it cannot be reasoned with.

Personally, I am wanting to see mass arrests and some head knocking by the cops.  It’s not a solution, but it is at least not allowing the problem to fester in the open; and as a general principle of government people who are unwilling to engage in honest discussion can only be managed through fear.  Discussion is what we want.  It would be what we would want with the Islamists, too.

But if they won’t go there, the next step down the ladder is effective counter-violence.  Take violence off the table and perhaps some will recover their senses and begin acting like social human beings again.  Don’t bet on it, but one can hope.