Month: July 2017

A sitting FBI Director finds major and unmistakeable evidence of felonies by the dozens committed by a politically connected woman, and refuses to bring charges. This same FBI Director DOES illegally leak classified information–which is a prosecutable crime–about an investigation initiated by a fake intelligence report initiated by Clinton operatives, and furthered by illegal CIA spying on the winning Presidential candidate.

Recognizing said FBI Dirrctor was in effect trying to engineer a coup against him, Trump fires said FBI Director. Somewhere in this process the idea is proposed that a good friend of said FBI Dirrctor–who I will refer to as Deep State Accomplice Number 1–be appointed, in effect, to continue the work of underling the Presidency from within, in pursuit of which task Deep State Accomplice Number 2–who we are told as often as possible is a “straight shooter”, and honest guy–promptly hired a Democrat Dream Team, which he empowers to dig into everything everywhere, making no pretense that the Russian story still holds, making this a self sustaining corrosive operation which, in the worst possible case, serves as a long term, major distraction for the man the American people elected to eliminate corruption of PRECISELY this sort.

Meanwhile, the likely nearly countless crimes of the Clinton Crime Sydicate go uninvestigated. This, while ostensible Trump ally Jeff Sessions continues to heed, as I understand it, the legally inaccurate advice that one meeting with a Russian requires him to allow this farce to continue in a department HE CONTROLS. This, despite what I understand to be the fact that the person advising him to recuse himself is his second in command, and an Obama ally.

The press is OUTRAGED that Trump is saying publicly WTF?

Did I miss anything?

I see how people are reading fewer books, and fewer “deep” books at that. They are addicted to spectacle, and incapable in large numbers of seeing the blindingly obvious truths these circuses seek to hide.

Trump is a fighter. He persists in the face of opposition. This is why I was an early supporter. But even I, as cynical as I am, did not think he would be betrayed by the FBI, the CIA, and God knows who else. Sessions seems to be a good man, but his opposition to marijuana legalization, his support of Civil Asset forfeiture, and his claimed–I get this from left wing links, but it sounds plausible-/financial ties to the prison industry soul all be enough for me to be glad to see him gone.

And if he can be fired, why not Rod Rosenstein, as I recall the name of his Nimbet 2–as well?

As I have said several times, purged are needed, decimations. Fire all obvious traitors, then another 10% for good measure. This problem has been evolving for decades. I see no effective half measures, although some on-going measures, like restaffing the judiciary might profitably be done first.

John Brennan is a traitor to the Constitution. So is Comey, and so is Mueller, if he thinks his fishing expeditions are intended for anything but using extra-Constitutional processes to vitiate the will of the people.

As I have said often, but will say in a slightly different way here, if we define intellectuals as people who made a life out of living in their heads, then we can assume without any further information that many or even all such people have large segments of darkness within them, of life which is invisible to them, of awful feelings which they have dedicated themselves to never unveiling fully, even if shadows and hints of them necessarily float throughout their work.

Sartre, to take my favorite example, wrote obsessively.  He drank wine, smoked relentlessly, and took amphetamines to fuel a daily habit of something like ten pages of prose.  He said “Hell is others”.

He was not, as they say, a people person.  Would it be even remotely psychologically plausible to separate this in any way from his Stalinistic Communism?  Could his Communism have been anything but an attempt to atone at an intellectual level for his gut level hatred of humanity, and desire for general destruction?  Can one not posit “the world” consists for most people in gut energy emanating upwards and infecting their thoughts?  The world “is” what their gut tells them, and their gut is speaking about something else entirely, but they are too stupid to understand this.

I walked into a Home Depot yesterday, and there was a guy there with an artificial leg who likely lost it in combat somewhere.  He was very friendly and asked if I needed help finding anything.  I just kind of grunted and moved on.  I didn’t want to “do” friendly.  I was in a foul mood.  I was, I suppose, having a “Pity Party”  as Zig Ziglar used to put it.

And I’m sure he wondered about this odd fellow.  Given how much he had likely been through, why is this guy being such a dick?  What does he have to feel bad about?

I, too, am not a people person.  I won’t rationalize my behavior, other than to say that superficial friendliness is not something I do well when I am in a certain mood.  I’ve been in Sales in some form or other for many years, so I can do that sort of friendliness when I work myself up to it–and of course I am a friend to the world when I am drunk–but sometimes I don’t want to pretend with the Home Depot fellow that we are friends.

But, again, this gets into somatic feelings about what “the world” is like.  For me, the world is a hostile place.  It always has been.  I don’t trust people.  I entered the world not trusting people, and for god’s sake they have rewarded my lack of trust many times over.  I will have to deal this week with a contractor who is trying to cheat me.

But of course, it is easy to focus on the bad things.  There are many of them.  But there have been many people I have met in the past week who were wrestling with their own demons and still put their best face on it.  I need to try and remember this.

I am speaking openly and randomly here.  I am not entirely sure what I am trying to find.  But there is something here, something useful, for me, and perhaps for you too.

I still have dreams where some force–it can take many forms–is pursuing me, and I am escaping and/or fighting it.  I cannot win, finally, of course, because it is within me.  It is energy I have not opened up fully, and integrated.  It is harm done to me I have not been able emotionally to process.  But I will.

But it occurs to me that societies, too, have such energies.  They have, first, a psychological energy which looks and feels like an enemy outside of them, but which arises within them.  It is all the unspoken anger, and hatred, fear, pain, loneliness, rage, confusion, sexual tension (I think this is particularly important in Islamic nations, where many men can’t marry at all) and everything else one is not allowed to own publicly in some societies, to admit openly, to share with others and in so doing reduce or even eliminate it.

So for many societies, this energy, already in the air, causes them to SEEK or create actual physical enemies so that what was already there has a tangible target.

And what seems ironic to me is that the only ACTUAL Xenophobia I see in our present society is being manifested ENTIRELY by the Left, and being directed at conservatives who–like the Jews in Nazi Germany–are their neighbors, their co-workers, fellow citizens, people just walking down the street.

They do not want to understand us.  They do not want to talk with us.  They simply want to hate and revile us, and–again like the Nazis–tell endless lies about us, to stoke anger, to stoke hatred, to feed misunderstanding.

Saying “Maybe letting in large numbers of people who hate our culture, who do not have a good history of assimilating, and who in large numbers state openly they want to kill us and destroy our society, isn’t such a good idea” is not Xenophobic.  Saying HITLER WAS TRUMP [sic: think about it], AND HIS FOLLOWERS ARE ALL ASPIRING MASS MURDERERS, IS Xenophobic.

I will note that simply because someone is using psychology words does not mean they are doing psychology.  I have seen many, many, many examples of people simply appropriating sometimes very trenchant comments people around them have made, and applying them indifferently and inaccurately, simply as a defense mechanism.  If it sounds like they have done introspection, it can confuse those who also haven’t, but respect the words and the idea of the process.  It can make fools seem deep.

I have been toying with a “goal setting” method which is not really a method, per se.  What I do is look at a goal–say to follow a specific diet and exercise pattern–and try to sense what feelings, what reactions, what sensations arise in my in the act of imagining doing x, y, and z.

The American world, at any rate, is filled with goal setting books, with action guides to GETTING THINGS DONE!!  Everybody wants to be the smartest, most switched on person in the room.  We are programmed to want “success”, which is winning.  Now, you want people who love winning to run competitive ventures.  You want them running businesses, and, as now, national governments.

But it seems to me far too much focus is placed on getting to a fixed goal, and far too little not just to the journey, but all the intangible, subtleties which life offers continually.  Should I want to run a marathon? Should I want to deadlift 510 pounds again?

I don’t know.

This is the problem: how does one answer a question about what one “should” want?  Do we not in a great many cases simply pick up goals that are in the air?  You know, Oprah ran a marathon, so I should too.  All the cool people run marathons, and I want to be cool.  You reach the state of cool when you can wander around with your marathon shirt on.

But compare this to, say, quietly and patiently creating an herb garden.  It’s not a hard thing to do.  You can’t brag to people “I planted some seeds, watered them, and plants sprouted.”  It’s a hobby.  Something you do because you enjoy it.

How does one compare the simple desire to have an herb garden, which is not the sort of thing you really need to put down as a GOAL, to the desire to climb some mountain, surmount some obstacle, face some fear?

Could we say that the proper goal of all activity should be self expression, in the sense that you put yourself into what you do, that you set in motion in the external world some inner and important part of yourself?  I think this is getting close to something interesting.

Until we know ourselves, how can we know what is worth doing for ourselves?  So much of human history oriented around survival.  We have gotten past that, in large measure.  A great many, somewhat metaphysical options have opened.  We fill them, in far too many cases, with mindless chatter, mindless activity, because the question of “what to do” is confusing.  It is hard to answer.

For myself, in one of these quasi-meditative sessions, it hit me that the root of self destructive behavior–or at least inconsistent, ineffective behavior–is that at some time in my childhood, I was faced with what felt like terrible existential threats.  When you are helpless, absolutely or relatively, the only possible movement is perceptual.  You can change your perception.

And how does one make an absolutely intolerable situation tolerable?  One accepts it absolutely.  One internalizes it as a template for future behavior.  One acts as if nothing is wrong, and everything is fine.  And what does this do?  It suppresses the feelings of repulsion, of revulsion, of terror, of anger and of pain.  All of this disappears.  It is conjured away on a magic cloud.  You are now a co-conspirator.  You are now a part of the whole.

I have called this an internalized Stockholm Syndrome in the past.  This is the same dynamic.  When you cannot escape, you make friends with your situation as a survival/coping mechanism.

But what happens when the situation is over, and it is now possible to feel appropriate feelings? You have to revisit what was conjured away.  You have to see what you did, how you sold yourself out.  How you lied to yourself in basic and vitally important ways.

And this part, this self, absolutely does not want this to happen.  It separated, it dissociated, for a good reason.  It is very, very hard to conjure back, in a time of peace, what happened in a time of war.

So, say my mother never wanted me to grow up, despite the fact that she terrorized me as a child: everything I do that is coherent and mature is going to feel like it risks bringing back all the bad times of the past.  The very cognitive distortions that saved me become jailers, become watchmen, become walls which are hard to climb.

This is where I am at.  I am slowly gaining some coherence in my behavior without the continual necessity of using will, of using force.  But it is a slow process.  But nearly everything worthwhile happens slowly.

One of my mottos of the past I have not mentioned recently was “Feed the slow, nourish the small.”  Quite often the largest possible movements begin very, very, very small.

I feel lonely today.  I live an odd life.  I don’t have an office I go to regularly, and most of the work I do is temporary, and often out of State.  I spend many weeks not talking once to anyone I know.  Both of my kids are growing up, and going out into the world, as they should.  I think overly clingy parents make the process of separation, which we have made a necessity in this culture, much harder.  And I do wonder if “safe spaces” on college campuses are not an outcome of the effort to recreate in the world the feeling of being in an overly protective home.

Be that as it may, I decided to just let that feeling be.  Most of the time, when we feel bad feelings we fight them.  We dread them. I dread them, certainly.

But I thought: I’m not going to pull or push.

And here is what hit me: all of us have many feelings and sensations and images floating through us all the time.  When we focus on one, it drowns out the others.  If I say “I feel lonely” and focus on the loneliness without letting it in–if I just watch it through my window, if I keep it at a distance–then it takes on a fixed, homogeneous quality.  If I do this often enough, it becomes a programmed reaction, like that Matchbox 20 song where they sing “Baby, it’s 2am, I must be lonely.”  You stop actually going to the trouble of feeling what you are actually feeling.  There are many shades of all emotions, and all of them are nearly always mixed with other things.

And in the same sense that one bright light in semi-darkness can make everything else invisible, the focus on one feeling can destroy knowledge of everything else going on.  For example, I was really enjoying the sun today, the feeling of the grass, the quality of the air.  These are positive sensations.

And sometimes I feel happy even when I have no “reason” to feel happy.  Nothing “good” is happening.  I am alone, like always.  I’m not drunk and and not contemplating getting drunk.

But here, too, is something: what if a feeling of being perfectly happy being alone is trying to find its way through this dense fog?  What if–and I do believe this is true–that even though we are evolutionarily social animals, we can find ourselves blissfully content all by ourselves?  What if you can learn to be happy by yourself, and also happy with other people?  These are not states you think your way into.  They are not something you get to by rationalizing, by allowing one part of yourself to create lies, for the consumption of some other part of yourself.

Imagine all the frequencies of light shining on us all the time.  So often we focus on only one small part of this light.  We shrink to avoid pain, then make it permanent.

I was contemplating this morning, this rainy, thundering morning, whether it is better to treat life as if EVERYTHING mattered, or as if NOTHING mattered.

At first glance, a life where nothing matters would seem to be necessarily empty, but as I thought about it, one where everything mattered would be unnecessarily FULL.

Ponder the sheer volume of information which confronts each of us each day.  We ignore–I’m sure I’ve seen a number, but let us say 99%–of what we see, hear, feel, think, taste, smell, out of necessity.  We cannot bring into consciousness literally every detail of an average city street.  We would be come paralyzed instantly. It could take a lifetime to live one minute fully.

And if nothing means anything, then we are free.  We assume–or in any event, this is what pops into my own head–we must be free to do evil, but why?  Most atheists make their peace with the world in some fashion, even though they know life is simply something that happens once, for them, then eternal nothing.

And as I zigzag back and forth, it occurs to me that there is an inherent tension between the two.  Some things seem to matter, and some not, but they seem different for most of us, and they change over time.

And it occurs to me that if, as I would postulate, the point of life is to LEARN, and if it is the case that a certain amount of exploration and experimentation, and boundary crossing has to happen to learn, then it follows logically that there can be no one behavior pattern, no one strategy which can be called perfect.  We make it up as we go.  We try, but in trying can never know if, when we did X, we should have done Y.  Unless, that is, feedback provides and enables learning.

In any given domain, relative perfection is approachable.  John Wooden came close to being the perfect coach, for example.

But in life, there are no fixed rules, unless one is religious.  But ponder even that.  Christianity is bound to instill the literal fear of God and of Hell in you.  It prescribes a behavior pattern–seeking salvation in Jesus, avoiding sins, loving ones neighbors–which is rooted in an emotional openness, theoretically, which is very hard to maintain when ones eternal soul is on the line.

For me, I am trying to land in time, and to stay above time.  I am trying to walk a difficult, perhaps impossible, line.

But I do recall to mind the aphorism from Lao Tse I have often quoted: “Renounce sainthood.  It will be a thousand times better for everyone.”

What if life is about playing, and it is not really as serious as so many panicked people want us to think it is?  What if no such statement can even be made from a position of confidence, and all we can say we are doing is picking a strategy, one of learning, one of spinning, one of laughing, one of trying, failing, succeeding, being lonely, finding love, and in all of it trying to find what beauty is there.

I can’t remember if I posted this, but I wrote in my journal the other day a good question: What gift is God trying to give me which I am simply being too stupid to see?  It is a useful question, trust me.

Off to work!!!

Looking at the 2016 Electoral map, our nation is a series of islands characterized by one thought and behavior pattern, surrounded by an ocean of people who think and act differently.

Now, it occurs to me that the election in many respects served as a referendum on the complicit media, since they told us–in as many ways as they could find and fabricate–all the reasons not to vote for Trump, and did so continually, blatantly, and for a good year before the election.  It was a rare week in the six months before the election that was not “Trump’s worst week EVER!!!!”

They did not fail to get their message out, including the message that 1) they had a message, as opposed to a principled desire merely to report facts they had made some effort to verify; and 2) their message was intended to defeat Trump, which is to say to be open advocates in the political arena.

NOBODY failed to get this.  Nobody anywhere, not just in America, but on the entire planet.  It’s possible some !KUNG tribesmen somewhere failed to grasp that MSNBC and CNN wanted Hillary to win, or maybe some nomads in Uzbekistan, but for the rest of us, it was more impossible to ignore than a trainwreck in our front yard.

Here is the thing: every vote cast for Trump was a vote cast AGAINST the media as it exists.  Given this, it is hard to see how the continuation of their propaganda after the election can in any way have served to win back Trump voters.

As I have said from time to time, anyone who studies propaganda becomes aware that it mainly works only in bubbles.  It only works when it is everywhere, and continually reinforced.  And it only works in the face of COMPLACENCY on the part of the public–or, as in North Korea, or the sort of nation Hillary still presumably wants to build–when you only have one source of media.

The capture of our media was incomplete in 2016.  There were and remain many alternatives, which is why they have been screaming so hysterically about Drudge, Breitbart, InfoWars and others.

But once somebody emerges from a bubble, they realize it.  They realize they were being duped.  They realize that the most handsome and prettiest faces on TV are quite capable of looking calmly and confidently into the camera and telling bald faced lies or, more commonly, creating controversy where there is none, or even more commonly, ignoring very intentionally all relevant news which does not advance their cause, or show them in a positive light.

This creates greater alertness among everyone this has happened to.  Lying to them becomes harder, and trust becomes harder to win.

The net of all this is that not only can I not see the media so many Americans rejected last November winning anybody back with the antics of the past six months, I cannot see anything but downside.  Their BEST CASE scenario is keeping the already indoctrinated in their bubble.  But how is this possible, with an openly defiant President who has on his own opened up alternative media pathways they can’t control?

If they can’t win anybody back it would seem the only possible direction is on-going defections in the path of alternative media.  They have set up this system which is absolutely inflexible, which cannot respond effectively, and which has already failed massively on a national scale.  They cannot lie more, and at this point lying less is unlikely to do any good.  There seems no path forward which does not lead to their on-going decline and irrelevance.

Perhaps this realization, more than anything, is what is driving the on-going hysterical need to feed the Russian story, which is already hurting them in my opinion, and will hurt them the more the longer it goes on.

It is possible we might see a sea-change over the next couple years.  We might see not a reversal to the Left, but a massive shift to the Right, particularly in light of the on-going failure of the Republicans to act like honest conservatives.  Fuck that: to act like honest human beings with integrity and balls.

I see all these people shouting the same things, striking the same condescending and arrogant tone, still trying to shout and shame people into silence, still acting as if the world is not changing around them.

As a famous Yogi put it, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future, but I have to say that–at this moment, on this day–I feel things are trending in the direction of human freedom, and human dignity.

I was listening to some old Brian Eno albums last night on the way home from Detroit, and initially it hit me that his weirdness is his way of distancing himself from his feelings.  It is the musical equivalent of using humor–the unexpected, which you throw like a flashbang in front of you to make it the locus of attention–to distance people. (I won’t deal with them here, but Tom Waits and Beck seem to have this trait too.  They are capable of music of great depth and beauty, but seem to feel the need to create ugliness as well.  I believe it was the movie Ararat where a painter created a full portrait, then for some impulsive reason smudged the hands.  Perhaps they can only handle so much of their better angels without breaking down looking at this fallen world).

Here is an example: Dead Finks Don’t Talk.

Musically, it is interesting.  It is different.  But is it sincere?  Have I learned anything interesting about the passions and conflicts of Brian Eno?  As a contrast, I had visited the Motown museum in Detroit the same day (Did you know Berry Gordie’s parents ran five businesses, and required all of their 8 children to contribute $10/month to a general incubator fund, from which the $800 Gordie borrowed to start what became Motown was drawn?).  Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mVrZmTj_rw

It is sincere.  There is no guardedness, no pushing away.

Then you have some songs by Eno which always bring tears to my eyes, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGX_WJLCxrA

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZCDNqmFqs

And it hit me that there is a creative sensitive core to Eno, which he is always trying both to hide and to express.  He does not have, to my knowledge, songs which say “I am very lonely and it hurts”, although I’m sure his personal collection has plenty of those.

Then I was cycling between this distancing–which is a mild dissociation–and this sentimentality, and it hit me that the problem with sentimentality is that it is emotionally simplistic.  It is the emotional equivalent to simplistic thinking.  If {oversimplification} and {oversimplification}, then {false or incomplete conclusion}.

Edward de Bono described what he called Catchment Areas, which I have mentioned from time to time.  What he intended is that raindrop falling on a mountain peak might hit just barely on one side or the other, but wind up hundreds of miles away, after flowing down the mountain, and into a river.  We have a Continental Divide in the United States, so that a stream of rain might wind up even thousands of miles from drops which once were inches from it.

Thinking is like this, so that rather than retain the nuance of what is actually there, you say phenomenon X is “basically just. . .”, and in so doing you kill its uniqueness, and in the process degrade your own perception, and make life less interesting by a lot.

But emotions and thinking are closely related.  No firm dogmatism unsupported by emotional rigidity is possible, in my view.

The assertion I would like to make, though, is one I have made many times in many ways: the emotional superficiality PRECEDES the bad thinking.

And sentimentality is basically flowing naturally fully into one of a small group of unnuanced emotions: sadness, happiness, anger.  When you feel each of them, you feel them roughly the same way.  They don’t change.  They don’t evolve.  They are a species of psychologically immaturity.

And so one can easily posit, and see in the case of Eno, that both psychological defensiveness, and a tendency to maudlin emotion, can easily coexist.  One can see him both weeping profusely, and being very aloof. I myself am often like this, so perhaps this is projection, but I think it is more likely recognizing in another something I see in myself.

And in this respect I will call back to mind the SIFT heuristic.  Reversed, most Thoughts depend on Feelings, which arise from internalized and constant–if often unconscious–Images, which in turn arise as emergent properties of specific bodily Sensations which were adaptive at some point in time, and retained in their wholeness, both the adaptive parts, and the now unnecessary parts.

We are, you see, in many respects our tensions.  And in reversing our tensions, and in finding relaxation–peace, a synonym–we become more like one another, and better able to interact as fellow travelers beached on the same cosmic shore.

This, for me, is the beauty of Kum Nye.  It teaches one how to look behind what appears to be there, what appears to be firm, what appears to be fixed, what appears to be immutable, what appears to be in some final sense who we ARE.  What a terror to be stuck forever with some disruptive event–some psychological puncturing–which happened oh so long ago!!!

And Neurofeedback plays into this since for the truly traumatized, significant calming needs to happen before some sensations can even be brought into awareness without tripping the circuit breakers, which is how I put it (although I can’t recall if I’ve put it that way here; internally it’s long been my term).  What I mean for this is a relapse into dissociation, which is a foggy world, but one devoid of sharp sensation, to which one would otherwise be terribly open.

My work continues.  I will add one more ingredient to the mix, one which in very much in my consciousness at the moment: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalog.  I watched numbers 4 and 5 last week.  I find his work amazingly moving, precisely because he avoids the cheap shots, the easy sentimentality, the simple answers.  What he is asking is that people feel what it is like to be human, with all the confusion, the conflicting emotions, and lack of given answers.  I feel watching these makes me richer in the ways which matter.

I had some specific commentary on number 4, but will make it some other time, if I choose to make it.  Some thoughts I keep to myself.

For this government, I mean.  Everyone involved in City Hall makes good money, wears fashionable clothing, has an office paid for by the taxpayers, and is respected as somehow superior to the average citizen.

And the people they are allegedly “protecting” self evidently don’t want their protection.  The lack of a staircase–and the inaction of City Hall–had ALREADY caused ACTUAL, not theoretical, not possible, injuries.

Who is being protected here?  BUREAUCRATS, who, if people realize they don’t need them, or would even be better off without them, might just tell them to go fuck themselves.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/toronto-man-builds-park-stairs-for-550-irking-city-after-65-000-estimate-1.3510237

One thing I neglected to mention in my last post is that of course people who pay in less than they get out can be expected to support the Nanny State.  They accepted long ago the price of being made into perennial beggars and children.

But the other element is those who USE government to gain advantages in what would otherwise be competitive free markets, which would constantly evolve to better serve the consumers at lower prices.

Here you almost certainly have a contracting firm or firms, which got written into the code–after some pricey lunches and hefty campaign contributions–unnecessarily restrictive building codes, which vastly increase the price of any work done pursuant to those codes.  Given what we can assume are also licensing restrictions, they also likely cut out many potential competitors, like this old man who just wanted to see the fucking problem fixed.

On the one hand, you ensure all solutions are expensive and relatively profitable, even if contracts are bid, reducing overall profits a bit.  On the other, you make sure your buddies are the ones awarding contracts.  This is how you go from $500 to over $65,000, which is more than a 100 fold increase.

The world needs less of this, not more.  We need less of this massive monster which exists for its own sake, and more of people exercising common sense and being allowed to do so, and even rewarded for doing so.

Returning to the investment/consumption analogy, it is always worth asking if government is overpriced.  We assume from long habit that it is different in some fundamental way from private sector services.  Paying taxes is not like buying a hamburger.  But is this true?

Is there anything the government does that cannot be privately contracted?  Security can be contracted.  Fire protection can be contracted.  Roads can be contracted.  Paying a doctor to prescribe medicine or administer treatment for ill health can be contracted.

Consider this article: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/what-happens-when-you-ask-pro-taxers-pay-more?utm_content=buffer3fa07&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Could it be made any more obvious that the main aim with Leftists in calling for more taxes is to make it easier for the government to use the money of one group of people to pay another for their votes?

When I send in my money in taxes, do I get back more, less, or exactly what I paid for?  As far as I can tell, I don’t get anything.  I am sure the troops in South Korea, and the naval flotillas sailing continually around the world have some benefit, but not directly to me.   The roads I use and the police I could call could be provided at a tenth of what I actually pay.  It is worth noting that 3% tax rates were enough to produce armed revolts in the past.

We have a system where the people who pay in NOTHING get something back.  If you pay zero taxes (other than sales taxes), but get food stamps, free medical care and the like, you have every reason in the world to keep that system in place.  And there exist people who view moral corruption as a career choice who miss no opportunity to call everyone a villain who would question this system of vote getting by entitlement.

I have said in the past that only people who pay into the system should be allowed to vote.  After all, it is THEIR money which is being spent.  People who do not pay into the system should not get to vote on how much of other people’s money they should get, PARTICULARLY when all politicians retire very wealthy after careers on relatively modest salaries.  It is a lucrative venture, being a “representative of the People”.

Asking “what do I get with my tax money” is a reasonable question.  A retirement program with a negative rate of return which is on shaky financial foundations?  If I could, I would opt out.  Access to government run medical care when I get old, care which is inferior to that which I could get by opting out?  Again, I would like to take a pass.  Cops, firemen, roads, traffic lights?  That has nothing to do with the Federal government, and could be bought much more inexpensively.

What I pay for is a massive bureaucracy which in most cases exists in the main for its own sake.  I pay for people who like their jobs very much, very much want to keep them, and very much want to continue getting regular pay raises, increases in benefits, and more co-workers, regardless of the economic climate, and regardless of the necessity of these jobs.  All bureaucracies quickly exist for their own sake.

And self evidently Obamacare fits squarely in the middle of this.  Why turn all of this over to ANY bureaucracy, and particularly to a FEDERAL bureaucracy?  Once the government owns it, I have lost choice.  There is no longer a free market.  There is no longer competition.  There is no longer an Option B when Option A tells me in words and actions they don’t give a shit if I live or die, as happens so often in nations which have been stupid enough to turn their healthcare systems over to unaccountable bureaucrats.

Helping the poor is obviously laudable to a point.  But there is a patent moral peril in making indolence, bad decisions, and antisocial behavior patterns which are rewarded.

There is no nobility possible in dependence.  There is no self respect.  There is no freedom.

As I mentioned, I am reading Jose Saramago’s book Blindness.  The basic premise is that an epidemic happens in which people can become instantaneously blind through merely being in the proximity of someone affected.  The first group affected is quarantined in an old mental hospital.  The Army delivers food every day, but one group decides to use violence–one has a gun–to take control of the food and to parcel it out based on the conformity of the rest of the patients to their wishes, which are first for material goods, and then for the right to rape the women.

This seems to me a good metaphor for Socialism, although I suspect he intended it represent that cartoon character “Capitalism”.  I will perhaps get a better feel as I progress.

Within socialism, the goods come, for most people, from somewhere else.  They do not control them, cannot create them, and cannot directly control how they are dispersed.  Much of the hunger which follows Socialist/Communist take-overs in the developing world (Socialism being perhaps the most pernicious export of the Western world) comes from greedy bureaucrats taking their share of everything before doling it out, IF they dole it out at all.  Full warehouses in the presence of starvation have been, in my understanding, a common feature in particular in Africa.  That is, self evidently, not Capitalism.

And what has been interesting to me in this book is that the victims vastly outnumber the oppressors.  There is one gun, which could not have more than perhaps 10 bullets in it, a handful of clubs, and roughly 20 people against several hundred.  Yet, the majority acquiesces.  Why, I wonder?

Most Americans would readily perceive the need for revolt. But Saramago was Portuguese, and they lived under a fascist government for many years.  Oppression–Socialism, as they are the same thing–breeds out of people their natural drive to protect their individual dignity, their right to self determination, their “live free or die”, which I think most people are born with.

It is really quite an astonishing fact of our time that everything good in the world has been made bad, and everything old and terrible has had a new facade placed upon it, covered with glittery lights and a fashionable mural, and is being extolled by a variety of idiots and co-conspirators, and even people with brains are eating it up.  Tyranny is nothing new.  It is the oldest game in the world.

FREEDOM, political freedom, the sort enshrined most perfectly in our Constitution, is what is the exception to the historical rule.