Month: January 2017

That seemingly won’t die.

The inevitability of death is at the heart of the human experience, but we really don’t understand death.  Dogmatic materialists, obviously, claim without evidence that the brain and mind are one and the same.

However, LARGE amounts of evidence exist that this is not the case, that in fact something that is recognizable “us” continues after our bodies cease operating.

Would it not make a prodigious amount of sense to spend 1/1000 of what we spend on, say, Defense, to fund properly organized, methodical, scientific studies into things like NDE’s, mediumship and the like?  The sort of thing done at the Windbridge Institute, but with Global Warming levels of funding?

What a revolution for the human species to have PROOF that we go on after death.

Trump is a maverick in many things.  He could easily–and quietly–order a Manhattan Project of this sort.  The potential return is incalculable in terms of global peace, relief of human suffering, and the clarification of what exactly we are here on this Earth to do.

I thought I might write a few words (stop laughing: actually, I have been insulted many times, but sometimes with such creativity I had to admire them.  One of my favorites was someone quipping that if I ever decided to kill myself I could do it by jumping off my suicide note) about Obamacare.  First, I will link my two treatments of the topic.

Health insurance reduced to ten paragraphs: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

Obamacare, at length, and contextualized within a broader regulatory and business context, mainly for the benefit of leftists who won’t read it, and redundantly for those possessing basic economic literacy: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/obamacare.pdf

Now, to the topic of repeal, which is a present very real probability.

First, you have to separate the parts of it which were simply coerced charity–socialism–and the parts where it was claimed the government could deliver an existing service better and at a lower cost, which is always farcical.

Broadly speaking, Obamacare helps the poor, and hurts the middle class and affluent.  People who had been able to get insurance at a reasonable cost (at least by the standards now in force, after all this government “help”) were hurt.  Their premiums went up (for obvious reasons I detail in my paper), and their coverage went down.

The people who WANT the repeal of Obamacare are these people.  What they want is the ability to set the terms of their deductible, to set aside money to pay that deductible tax-free (and in an heritable manner, which was a Trump innovation I had not thought of: you get your parents health savings if they outlive it), to be able to choose between many competing providers, and to buy their own insurance directly from the carrier, rather than being forced to use whatever their employer provides, because it is a fucking Blue State and the Unions run things, and losing their coverage when they lose their jobs, or be forced into a plan they hate, can’t afford, and would not choose.

So: 1) require all States to allow all insurance companies meeting minimum standards to sell within their borders.  This is a proper use of the much abused Commerce Clause, since preventing de facto protectionism within the United States was seen as a proper role of the Federal government.

2) Make all money deposited in an HSA tax exempt, both on the way in, and on the way out, when used for medical expenses.  This will HUGELY incent savings, which helps everyone.  Also, make these accounts inheritable, or for that matter shareable, in that a parent could gift without tax consequence their 20 year old son the $5,000 he needs for his first deductible.

3)  Require all States receiving Federal money for anything (this is a cudgel, but it seems the most obvious option) to allow individuals to buy any individual coverage plans they see fit, that are offered by carriers in their States.  This means that, like your car and life insurance, your health insurance is your own, and can be continued exactly as you like if you change jobs, are fired, or move.

4) Self evidently, there is no market reason why plans could not and would not be developed to keep kids on their parents plan.  Why this was ever an issue, I don’t know.

But what I foresee is that people could have $10,000 deductibles, and only pay $25/month.  This is obviously highly affordable.

5)  Make all insurance premiums tax exempt also, PROVIDED that coverage is maintained for the previous 12 months.  Make both HSA and premium exemption contingent on this.  On the one hand, basic coverage will become very affordable, but on the flip side we want universal coverage in the not too distant future.

Now, as far as the poor, a big part of Obamacare was simply an expansion of Medicaid.  We saw endlessly the tired meme “all the other kids have universal healthcare”, but the truth is we ALREADY had a huge safety net for the poor and what market problems existed for everyone else were entirely the result of too much government.  The problem that could be solved with socialism had been solved, and the problem that could not was made worse.

One of the things we want with health insurance is to avoid the moral hazard of allowing people to avoid responsibility for their own health.  In terms of concrete health outcomes, one of the big reasons Americans compare poorly to many other nations is that our poorest pay no cost out of their own pockets for failing to maintain their health.  They just go to the clinic, and lots of stuff is paid for.  So, at any rate, is my impression. I am open to correction.

So what we need is a migration path for the poor.  Let us say that we require them, as a condition of receiving other social benefits, to maintain health insurance of a very minimal sort.  Let us say they pay $25/month for a $10,000 deductible plan which includes one wellness visit a year with a Nurse Practitioner, or Physicians Assistant.  If they get seriously ill, they won’t have $10,000, but we can make them responsible for some portion of that, depending on how poor they are.  Even if they have to pay $1,000 out of pocket, that will be incentive for them to give at least one or two fucks.

And having to pay something, versus just being gifted it for being born, helps build responsibility, and with it, some measure of earned self respect. The alternative is remaining a perennially needy and grasping child.

And I personally would support health education programs.  Maybe, again, they can be made to attend educational seminars as a condition of getting other benefits. Ask them to take care of themselves, but make sure they have at least the basics regularly reinforced.

These are a few ideas.  Repeal and replace for the middle class and up is easy.  For the rest, a migration path.  But perhaps we could take this logic past mere repeal, all the way up to a pathway to get rid of Medicaid entirely for most of the population.  Medicaid is something, but nothing remotely as good as what the free market could and would provide if allowed to do so.

Medicare is another story I don’t have time for right now.  I do think we all need to realize collectively that it is very selfish spending small fortunes to win small amounts of life extension, and that in very poor health.  We keep people alive with machines for months at enormous cost.  Their hearts may be beating, but that is not living.  It is of course enormously profitable for some companies, but they can just suck our dicks.

We could potentially allow people to opt out of Medicare when young, and have provisos written into their health insurance contracts that there are lifetime maximums on end of life care.  This, again, would allow Medicare to gradually fade away, although of course it will be needed for a while.  We COULD write lifetime maximums into current plans though.  These would not be “death panels”, per se: the expenses alone would dictate it. This step alone would likely make Medicare solvent, and we should allow people to opt out at all ages.  Right now, in my understanding, you MUST take Medicare if you want Social Security.

We should allow people to opt out of Social Security, too, but again I don’t have time for that.  Something like what they did in Chile would be good: required saving, but under the individuals direct control.

I have work to do.  Should have been somewhere a couple hours ago, but I can make it another late night.  It all gets done.

For a long time, I said “Thin Red Line” was my favorite movie.  I still love that movie, because it fucks me up every time.  But if I had to pick the movie I’ve seen the most times, that I wanted to watch, it would be “Battle: Los Angeles”.  I Love that movie.  Everything goes to shit.  Staff Sergeant Nantz has major traumatic guilt and likely PTSD, and he STILL has to go into combat.  So  he sucks it up, and does the work of a hero.  Not because he wants to, to be clear, but because the fucking work has to be done, and nobody else is doing it, motherfuckers.  Goddamnit.  1, 2, 3, go do what you know needs to be done.

And in the end, what does he have to lose, going all in?  And in the process, he becomes an honest leader.  He is not asking anything of anyone he won’t do himself.  He leads the way.

That’s a great movie, in my estimation, although I seem to be in a minority.

it seems to me we should have a global religion, but one amenable to endless local diversification. My first thought was to define religion as an organized and local attempt to build a sense of community and meaning through connection to s higher power, then I decided higher ORDER –i.e. The Tao–was better. Orders are latent, organic. We need to rid ourselves of the concept of Gid as king and master. God is the ocean within which we live. Within God is endless potential, but we choose what to pursue and focus on. We ARE radically free, but life does have rules; there are cause and effect relationships between action and result. This observations holds even if one is an atheist.

Prior to Christianity, and the unrelenting rejection of all other faiths which defines the Judaism from which it arose, religious war was, in my understanding, unheard of. The Romsns let everyone do what they wanted, and for those offering incense and sacrifices they felt kinship, regardless of the name of the God or Goddess on the other side of the phone line. This held even for the Jews, who until the destruction of their Temple were still slitting animals throats and casting them into fires.

This is what was so confusing about Christisnity–no sacrifices, and absolute intolerance. That spirit of course infused Islam, where the most dogmatic aspects of Christian intolerance were elevated to positive commandments.

But we need to remember that “religion”, per se, was not a reason for warfare for much of human history.

It seems to me Leftistd dream of our children inheriting a POLITICAL order, within which culture is marginalized; whereas true Liberals want to gift their children a CULTURAL order, which includes a cultural political tradition of tolerance and the negotiation of difference.

Mussolini, who coined the term Fascism, and who presumably understood it better than ahistorical millenials, defined it succinctly as “everything in the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.”

Leftists as uniformly aspiring totalitarians obviously meet that standard. Here is relevant point: culture must necessarily exist within that State, and historically, beginning with the French Revolution, efforts were made both to destroy all traditional “clingings”, and to COERCE a new “culture” from scratch. It failed every time, because that is not how humans are wired. Nothing authentic and real can arise in conditions of fear, which is the ubiquitous and intended emotion in regimes of the sort Bill Ayers admired and admires.

http://www.infowars.com/warning-domestic-terrorists-and-communists-declare-war-on-fascist-trump-regime/

I read Bill Ayers and others want to enact “Days of Rage” on a national scale, but particularly in Washington, D.C. As someone who planned the cold blooded murder of millions of Americans, he somehow finds Trump objectionable, because he has conflated his own propaganda with the truth.

I continue to be somewhat befuddled by how they can treat Trump–who on all accounts is a very congenial guy who treats his employees well, and hyperventilating complicit media claims to the contrary, has never said anything even remotely racist, and has certainly never blamed “black people” for anything the way Obama has repeatedly blamed “white people”–as if he is, to use the overused phrase, “literally Hitler”.

They have no sane basis for making this claim.  Here is the claim I will make, though, which allows their ridiculous propaganda to make more sense on an emotional basis, which is its origin and destination (sometimes via circuitous and hazy waves of words): this will be the bookend to the 1968 Days of Rage.  It is the end of an era, of a bad dream, of a pompous, childish, absurd vision that America could be improved with a kick to its collective balls, and that the children of affluence who never held a real job, who never understood or even cared to associate with ordinary Americans, could somehow “perfect” this nation, if only granted access to the reins of power.

They got what they wanted in Obama.  He was the result of 40 some odd years of dissimulation and behind the scenes work.  It seems Ayers and his father played a direct role in his ascension, as a covert hard core Leftist, to our nations highest office.

And it has been a disaster, which all sane people could have predicted.  Nothing good has happened, and much bad has happened.  It continues to be the case that our nations universities have become hard core indoctrination centers, but we just saw in the last election that they are not churning out enough brainwashed and demented drones to overpower the vast majority of sane Americans in the voting booth.

I read Obama and the DHS just federalized the elections, presumably because they continue to believe their own lie that Russia influenced the election.  As with all things they do, this is poorly thought out, because it provides the perfect avenue for Trump to begin the work needed to help make Democrat vote tampering and election fraud a thing of the past. Absent fraud, they are on a steep downhill decline.

The Democrats, as I was reminded today, lost, on balance, the last three elections: 2010, 12, 14.  Yes, they retained the Presidency in 2012, but they lost seats in Congress, and nationally in the States.  Overall, they have lost, I read some ONE THOUSAND seats of various sorts under Obama.  This is a decisive and irrefutable repudiation not just of him, but of everything he stands for.  

It is, to be clear, a repudiation of the fascist “democracy” (e.g. the German Democratic Republic, or Students for a Democratic Society) which Ayers envisioned, along with his wet dreams of murder on a scale larger even than that of Soviet Russia (edit: he wanted to kill 5-10 million more people than Hitler, making him and his co-religionists the only “literally Hitlers” in the room; as usual it is the ACTUAL fascist accusing everyone else of it).

48 years later, the 1960’s are over.  Can we expect rage, violence, pouting, churlishness, anti-social behavior, bullying, spitting, shouting, screaming?  Yes.  But the institutions protecting our Republic–even if suffused with traitors, as I suspect many of our agencies are now after 8 years of Obama–will very, very likely prove more than sufficient to, in the main, ignore these pathetic Nazis, their jackbooted behavior, and their hatred of virtue, decency, and the American tradition of freedom.

I read this article last night: http://www.themillions.com/2017/01/staring-into-the-soundless-dark-on-the-trouble-lurking-in-poets-bedrooms.html

It’s not bad, although of course it is unsurprising that a modern academic would get to sex and death fairly quickly, as those were Freud’s conclusions: thanatos and eros.

Without commenting too much on the specifics, I would submit that writers and poets have sleep problems because they BECOME poets and writers because they have large numbers of unprocessed emotions which drive them into the creative process.  They have demons, and demons they choose to keep, as Rilke famously commented.

The alternative is silence.  I myself of course have many sleep problems and many unprocessed emotions.  But I see where they come from.  They are not random.  They are not just an affliction from God which landed on me.  They have a source and they have an extinction.  Perhaps one day I will abandon this blog entirely.  Nothing will drive me to write.

And I think of societies which have disappeared in the mists of history, where all the children felt loved, where families were uniformly nurturing, where life had purpose, where the small things in life were cherished, and where people died without fear.  Some Native American tribes seem to have been like that (certainly not all: some were just like the imperialist West, merely less technologically sophisticated, and perhaps slightly less greedy, since there was less to steal).

And one has to ask: are the skyscrapers Ayn Rand admired so much really the acme of progress?  Is progress not more in how we feel about life, about one another, about death?  Is all success in techne really masked social mediocrity and failure?

Most science fiction writers focus on how technology will change our lives, for better or for worse.  It seems to me the more interesting question is how we perfect our society, so that all babies get the nurturing they need, children emerge into a coherent cultural order which is not confused, and which is rooted in genuine wisdom (rather than pious sounding platitudes, and stupid ideas repeated endlessly), where adults possess the emotional strength and maturity to use their freedom in personally and socially productive ways, and where we have learned that death is not the end, and nothing to be feared.

As Madison pointed out in one of the Federalist Papers, if we were all angels, we would need no government.  Is this not the obvious direction to go?  The alternative seems to be rule by demons who think they are angels because they see and feel nothing important, ever.

And what I would add is that there is no evidence that “equality”, which is to say disindividuation, the repudiation of ideas of merit and individual moral progress, makes anyone happier, or happy, or for that matter, less miserable.  I think it was either Ford or Eisenhower who commented that prisons provide free healthcare, housing, and food.  What they also provide is an egalitarian environment.  Everybody gets the same size cell, and everyone gets the same amount of food.

The jail is in fact the perfect emblem of a totalitarian system, both in practice–witness how many risked and paid the price of death to escape countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and East Germany–and in theory, where the minds, too, must be chained.

Leftism is a mental illness.  There is no other way to view it.  The great emotional virtue of the egalitarian creed is that since we are NOT all equal, there is a continually replenishing supply of opportunities to feel anger and resentment which predated the political commitment–which were present due to emotional illness–but which are justified by it.  So often, I think we feel something first, then reach around for something to justify and mask it.  The alternative is investigating it honestly, and coming to the realization we are not who we thought we were, which makes many uncomfortable, and willing to fight hard.

I was drinking beer tonight and watching basketball, and it occurred to me that Nirvana, in the Buddhist tradition, is really like retiring from Samsara.  Samsara is the job, and you don’t have to do it anymore.  Within the Boddhisattva tradition, of course, you still do periodic contract work, but you don’t have to.  Your “time” is your own.

And I feel, without knowing how to explain it, that there are small nirvanas.  It is an energy that you first become aware of, but cannot stay with.  With time and practice, it stays longer, more purely, and you can expand it.  It is not an extinguishing of what matters, but a flourishing.

As the Tao Te Ching puts it, you are fed by a different mother.

All tigers in the wild move the same way.  Absent injury, you can’t tell one from the other by their posture and way of walking or running.

With people, of course, we are so different that technology has been developed for automated gait and posture analysis such that even in disguise some of us could be identified.

We hold tensions in various places habitually, and this affects how we move.

What I am realizing is that some part of me wants to hold onto tensions, because they are familiar.  But the image that is coming to mind is water.  Even if I have become used to the idea of water being constantly swept by wind, has its nature changed if the wind dies down?  Nothing has changed in the water itself.  Only my perception of it.  And in important respects, it is more itself, more natural, more real, more authentic when it is still.

Visualizing a pool of calm, blue water is actually a meditation within the Kum Nye practice, which I think comes from the Buddhist tradition.  But it is a relatively advanced practice, I think.  Certainly, I have had trouble with it.

That won’t last forever, though.  Good things are happening.