Month: November 2017

You can’t fix the past. What you can do is fix the future by fixing the present.

I would like to stipulate a principle which I myself am not sure I believe: words cannot create a greater sense of inner peace than you have already experienced in the company of others. They can of course agitate you, or teach you to substitute one form of chronic tension for another, or calm from a state of agitation to an emotional state you know.

But if we posit, as I do, that the beginning of human self knowledge is the capacity for deep relaxation, practice, and ONLY  practice, can take you there. If you don’t know the place, no idea will ever take you there.  But another way, no philosophy can be written which will substitute for a mothers love. That you need a practice for.

Think about the options for making illicit money inherent in an organization shrouded in secrecy, black budgets, and the training to be extraordinarily devious and cunning.

I look at a John Brennan and I see a political motivation: working towards a global Communist state.  But what if some of these people are using their spy tools to make money.  Could they not spy on private corporations to gather top secret market information and engage in insider trading?  Could they not invest in companies in foreign countries, then interfere with the governments to make sure those companies were protected? 

Why not?  Who watches the watchers?  

It is an odd thing that Leftists so fear monopolies in the private domain, but not just accept but DEMAND them in the public, so called, domain, which is to say in the realm of government.  Everything to be “socialized” is inherently to be monopolized, is it not?  Single Payer is quite different from multiple payer.  One source is quite different from many sources.  One option is quite different from many options.

It is a clearly established fact of economic history that true monopolies are rare, and can only be maintained over time through using the leverage of size to provide more for less, by being the best.  Unless you take care of people, market alternatives emerge and slowly take market share.  White Castle, in my understanding, was the dominant–really the only–fast food chain for some years.  But today, most people have never had a slider (you’re not missing much, although I do like the jalapeno ones).

This is not the case with government monopolies, which do not need to be highly competent, to provide good service, or do anything at the best or even a reasonable price.  No market incentives exist.  Nothing prevents mediocrity from enduring and dominating indefinitely, but public outrage, and such outrage is necessarily diffused by the very nature of a large bureaucracy and the difficulty of fixing blame, particularly when the TRUE blame lies with the system itself.  The VA is a very good example.  It is horrible, has been horrible a long time, and has proven very resistant to change and improvement.  Why?  It is socialized medicine.  That is the shortest answer, and privatization–for example, by giving veterans an annual stipend equal to what the government was already willing to pay on their behalf in its own system, which they can use for health insurance, or to pay for health care directly–is the obvious answer.

Right now, veterans have no choice, if they want their care to be paid for by the government.  Right now they suffer, and in some cases die unnecessary deaths, because somebody somewhere thought that centralized control was humane and just, and the alternative inhumane, when the opposite is clearly the case.

The actual number appears to be TEN MILLION dead, and substantially everyone else enslaved and immiserated.  Those are really quite astonishing numbers.

Between World Wars 1 and 2 more white died than this, but in the Congo this number represents roughly HALF the population.

Here is the thing: when we tally up the atrocities of other nations, these atrocities can be added to the list.  White men are not unique in being greedy and savage.  What is shocking is the hypocrisy, the Christian veneer, the paternalistic and humanitarian rationalizations, which characterize our own violence and greed.

But the fact of them, the true intent behind them, is literally as old as human history, and presumably much older.

We are also, however, the first culture to call such things immoral in all cases and with regard to all peoples and races, however distant, and however different from us they may be.  The concept of universal human rights is a uniquely Western concept, and it is an odd thing to watch this notion being used, itself, to attack the West.  One wonders what will be left once the snake eats itself.  It does seem pretty clear, doesn’t it?  Nothing.

The world is filled with marvels.  Grotesque stupidity, I suppose, must be counted among them.

I had been searching for the documentary “King Leopold’s Ghost” for a while, and finally found it.  I’m about halfway through, and heading out for a bit.

Here is a thought you likely haven’t seen: whatever the depredations inflicted on the Congolese–and for that matter, all the nations the West colonized in the 19th and 20th centuries–they pale in comparison to the injuries and mass death and suffering Europe inflicted on itself in the two World Wars.

There is, and always has been, plenty of misery to go around.  Why should we not focus on improving the human condition everywhere, rather than exacting revenge for crimes which either never happened (differential economic success in a free market), or which were not perpetrated by anyone living?

I got this vision in my head today of effeminate vegans operating torture chambers.  They inflicted pain on political dissidents all day, then went home at night to put on their fuzzy bunny slippers and watch cat videos. [which by the way is something not too distant from what Terry Gilliam presciently portrayed several decades ago in the “winner because it got closest” dystopia “Brazil”.]

And I got to thinking of the old Charles Atlas ads–I think he was the one–who had the guy kick sand in a guy’s face on the beach in front of his girl.  What was his solution?  To become a better man.

What is today’s solution?  To bitch on the internet, post negative comments, maybe hack somebody’s social media, and dream of a day when an omnipotent government will allow you, weak and bitchy as you are, to be as cruel as you want.

And I think of the Left.  They like to accuse us of lacking humanity, of not even being human beings.

But think about this: on the right and in the very large middle nobody likes to talk about, people look back in time and see ancestors.  They see people like them.  They can picture the Greeks arguing in the Forum.  They can see the Roman Senate.  They think of the many kings and queens of Europe (and for that matter, Africa and elsewhere).  They can picture living in a log cabin, how hard life must have been.  They think back to their parents, and grandparents, and their parents, in a very long chain of humanity.  And they feel kinship with them

It is not necessary to agree with everything done in the past to feel a communion with it.   All human beings sin, some greatly.

Most normal people live in this sort of world.  They are nested, in a sense.  They feel kinship with the human race, with humanity as a whole, through the prism of their particular history.  They feel closer to people like them, and more distant from people who appear radically different, but in this country at least, we give everybody a fair shot.  That is what our parents did, in their own way, as did their parents, on back to the beginning.

They did, in other words, what they thought was right.  All people who feel ANY kinship with the human race whatsoever recognize that we all make mistakes, and that people and nations change over time, hopefully in a positive direction.  If a person makes one mistake, they do not become their mistake.  We look at the big picture, because God only knows what we would have done in their shoes.  Quite possibly something much worse.

But the Left is not like this.  It is an ahistorical creed.  It is a belief system which cannot look backwards and see anything but continual sin, but which when it is honest, cannot look forward either and actually see the utopia they talk about in their time travel brochures.

It is a place with no beginning, and no real end.  It is a place of infantile rages, helplessness outside the group, individual moral disempowerment, and continual struggle.  It is a place you can only remain if you are convinced everything everywhere else is much, much worse.  This is why it is so important to demonize conservatives and moderates continually and in the most aggressive, nasty, ugly terms.

There is no humanism in Leftist orthodoxy.  There is no place for living human beings.  There is no place for concrete outcome oriented policy.  There is no place for operational intelligence, outside the sphere of getting and keeping power.

You cannot live in this world and not give up the bridges you were born with, which tie you to your past, to a shared humanity, to a shared understanding that to err is human.

The Left has to rewrite history, in the same way they lie about what they want for the future.

So I would say again, as I have from time to time: there is something inhuman about this entire process, about the group shouting and screaming, about the demonic and continual rage, about the complete rejection of reason and logic and the practical process of understanding how things actually work.

As I understand the matter, there are two and a half questions:

1) does the FCC have the power to simply declare the entirety of the internet to be under its jurisdiction?  The answer, clearly, is no.  Would it have gotten away with it under Hillary?  Of course.

1.5) Should it have this power?  No.  The Constitution clearly makes this sort of the thing the exclusive domain of Congress.

2) Would the public benefit from the government taking over the internet–or at least the internet as it is accessed in the United States–rather than allowing it to continue as is?

This is more complicated, but it still seems an obvious no.

AT&T, before breakup, was the natural result of the government controlling a public utility, here telecommunications.  Had Reagan not broken it up, we likely never would have had an internet age.

I see the claim made that without regulation, companies can decide–like cable providers–what internet sites you can access.  This may well be true, but who, where, is doing it?  I have never heard of this anywhere.  I have heard of Google altering search results, and YouTube censoring conservative videos (but not  demonic Left wing ones), but never an ISP turning off, say, Facebook.

But let us say this is a possibility, that the internet can be reduced by a private company to a list of allowed websites, with added websites only allowed at a premium,

The Leftist solution to this currently non-existent problem–at least in America, and the one Obama attempted to implement by Royal Decree–is to allow the government to TELL private companies what websites they have to provide access to.

But logically, would that same power not allow the government to tell them what websites NOT to provide access to?  Could, say, InfoWars, not get shut down as “fake news”, despite the fact that it routinely outperforms the New York Times?

People have short memories.  The internet only came into being because of the competition that deregulation enabled.  To return, now, to the 1930’s as regards telecommunications, would be to return to the 1930’s politically as well, and the continual threat posed then of a fascist take-over of our national government.  Virtually no one remembers the open fascism back then, and how FDR nearly got control over all wages and prices in the country, and was only blocked by the Supreme Court.

As with all things Left, Net Neutrality is really just a Trojan Horse for Net Partisanship and political activism.

It’s really a bit disgusting, honestly, that I can predict the opinions of so many people based on what they are reading today.  Yesterday they might not have even heard of net neutrality, but today they consider themselves enlightened gurus on the topic, and all dissenters ignorant.

The basis of this particular form of aggressive stupidity and ignorance is, as I have often said, a matter of emotional psychopathology, not informed reasoning, or the possibility of sustaining their views in an honest debate.

I have not followed this whole thing too carefully, but my understanding is that all the allegations are from decades ago.

Here is the thing.  His Republican opponent in the primaries must have known of these allegations, and chose not to mention them.  Why?  I can’t say, but it seems most likely to not damage Moore in the General Election.

Who was all too happy to trot them out?  Who waited until Moore had secured the nomination?  Who may well have contributed to Moore’s campaign, in the hope they would get to throw all this trash at him? 

Who else?

My take is that nothing he is accused of is remotely as serious as what the Left was quite willing to excuse Bill Clinton for, and excuse Hillary (who laughed about getting a rapist acquitted by attacking his teenage victim) for, and if this causes Alabama to elect a Democrat, it is nothing but a reward for the very dirty tactics which have made EVERY FUCKING ELECTION such an ordeal and muckraking hell;  which have, by design, made substantive policy discussions and public rationality itself all but impossible.

If I were in Alabama, I would vote for Moore in a heartbeat.

And maybe with another vocal and unafraid conservative in Congress we can launch an honest investigation into Uranium One, and just what Clinton’s connection with Jeffrey Epstein truly is.

I do believe in moral standards, but this election is not about moral standards.  The Left has made it very clear that nothing is inexcusable when done by their own.  That does not mean that we should stoop to their level, but it also does not mean the election needs to be about the distant past, when Moore has shown in the recent past a very solid conservative record and much-needed activism.

Sometimes there is no shelter from the vast sun, and sometimes the world looks like a desert waste.  But there is always endurance.  Endurance is a flower in the world, and a reliable companion.

Whoever you are, whatever you are feeling, smile for a moment.  Don’t worry: your frown will be back soon enough.  Pay less of yourself in frivolous things, and cherish whatever remains, however small it seems.  You are alive, and that is 90% of the battle.  None of us can know where it all goes, but if you can remember the curiosity within you, it will all be quite interesting.

I spent ten minutes Monday watching a tree shed leaves the way some people drive.  It was in a hurry.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps someday I will figure it out.