Month: September 2018

And it felt like they VALUED it, perhaps the way the Spartans valued their own such practices, and felt that British SOCIETY, as a whole–the pubs and bobbies and tea time–depended on it.

But British society is collapsing, is it not?  “Britain”–England, in any event–is dying.  It is on a respirator in a poorly maintained hospital, calling for nurses, who are indignant about being bothered, indifferent to the plight of the patient, and eager for him to die.

They used to sing “Rule Brittania”.  Now “Brittania” can’t even rule itself at home.

If I am right, it is past time for the truth to be told.  A new start must be made on a new foundation.

Now, America, to my knowledge, is the only major developed nation which does not require valid ID nationally to vote.  Mexico, to take but one example, requires valid ID to vote.  Iraq, in their first election, placed red ink on the hand of people who voted, to ensure they only voted once.  That is my recollection.

We are told requiring ID is “racist”.  I want to do a simple exercise to unpack the latent and really quite horrifying racism inherent in that claim, to the (likely small) extent it is made sincerely, and not in simply support of voting fraud (likely large, and certainly largely unexamined in Blue States, which refused to cooperate with Pence).

Here we go.  Simply apply the logic consistently.  This yields the following formulation: Black people are too fucking stupid to be expected to drive legally, cash a check, board a plane, buy a gun legally, buy alcohol, open a bank account, rent a hotel room and a whole lot else.  In fact, without Democrats in office, they would be completely helpless like small children.  They have to be guided and led by their superiors.

Do you see the problem?  I am not exaggerating at all.  This is not hyperbole.  This IS the claim being made, by senior Democrats everywhere.  Self evidently, they are not using these words, but everything I just said is implied and absolutely present in principle.

Since I am on the topic of voter fraud, it is inconceivable to me that no Federal regulations prevent open violations of voting laws.  It is perhaps the case that individual States can enact their own laws, but it is ABSOLUTELY the prerogative of the Federal government to insist minimum standards be met for any representative of any State to be seated in the national assembly, in the Senate or the House.  Anything that reaches nationally, and by definition Federal legislation does just that, should be subject to the control of Federal law.

So when San Francisco openly signs up people who are not legally allowed to vote, there should be consequences.  Those people, obviously, are not going to be the deciding factor in whether or not the imbecile Nancy Pelosi wins reelection.  That is a given.  But there is a Statewide Senate race in which a few thousand votes might make a difference.

We have to restore the integrity of our voting system.  We have to make paper ballots and voter ID mandatory in all States.  We have to punish severely individuals and States caught cheating, encouraging cheating, or supporting it.  People need to go to jail.

The problem of living in an echo chamber, is that the walls doing the reflecting also keep out alternative voices.

The Democrats really seem to believe that if they just shout long enough and hard enough that they will get their way.  They literally seem to want to pout and fit their way back into national dominance.  Something has been taken from them, they don’t get it, they don’t understand it–CAN’T understand it within their own paradigm–and emotional spasms are all they have.  It’s all they got.

Again, to me the Nike error is fascinating.  Anyone with a shred of common sense could have predicted this.  The moment I saw Kaepernick on the ad I knew this campaign would backfire badly.  It took me a tenth of a second.

But this campaign was months in the planning, perhaps even years.  Negotiations and discussions likely started happening not long after the whole kneeling thing started, I guess the season before last, so perhaps up to two years ago.

Highly paid professionals sat in well appointed meeting rooms, drank excellent coffee, perhaps sometimes worked late into the night, all in support of this big initiative, this bold move which they likely framed as “risky” when they wanted to seem like brave souls out fighting the Good Fight, but which they must have been sure would succeed on balance, and perhaps all the more if it offended, you know, the white supremacists who seem to lurk in Small Town America, but which Nike never needed to succeed.

Here is the thing, though: Trump won the election, and did so after similar miscalculations by the Democrats at a national level.  The egregiousness of the error, the complete failure of the polling data, is one reason why many of the more rabid lunatic ones continue to believe the Russians “stole” the election, even when nobody anywhere is claiming that.  The DoJ merely said they tried a little bit, and failed a whole lot.

But in all honesty, I thought Nike’s ad might at least appeal to blacks or to Democrats.  But it seems to have failed across the board.  They lost Republicans almost entirely, but even millenials, even Gen X, even blacks, even Democrats now seemingly few Nike less favorably.

I don’t think it is overstating the case to call this a bellwether for the election.  Kaepernick stands for a certain brand of politics, a certain political stance.  The sheer extent of his patent unpopularity can plausibly be viewed as that brand of politics, too–the OBAMA brand of politics–similarly dropping like a rock in water.

There is a sea change in the air.  I feel it.  It may or may not happen, but the stage is plainly set.  It is plainly possible.  As I said a few months ago, it might be possible for the political Left to lose in 50 days 50 years of work.  The whole world could just turns its back on them and their lunatic, cruel ideas.

This is very much a forest for the trees thing.  Economists grow up with certain core unexamined assumptions.  They don’t think about how money creation subverts all creative efforts, dilutes the value of work, transfers wealth with no truly useful activity delivered in return, and overall enables the continuation of poverty in nations which should not experience it, at all, anywhere.  We should not have ghettos.  We should not have homeless.  We should not have any trouble paying for top quality medical care.  All our problems should have been solved. 

I see all this clearly.  Why so many professionals are so fucking stupid, is one of those things that in my worse moments makes me hate humanity.

It is true to state that most societies have elites.  It is equally true to say that MUCH–certainly not all–of the wealth amassed in the 19th century concentrated itself in the hands of industrialists.

But this was an era of real money.  It has since concentrated itself in the hands of banks, who are in the business not of making money, but MANUFACTURING it.  I have dealt with this many times.  Just look at how much M1 has increased since 1970 or so, when we dropped the last vestige of restraint on the creation of new money.

The amount of money in existence has roughly quadrupled since 2000 alone.  Do you recall the so-called Quantitative Easing program of the Fed, which it practiced for most of Obama’s two terms?  They gave $50 billion a month to Wall Street banks–which also run the Fed, to be clear, who also sit at both tables, to be clear–for something like 80 months straight.  That would itself account for the M1 increase from 2008 to present.

But the point I wanted to make is that systems are always run by people, and people always have the same motives: power, greed, and sex.  This was true when the Babylonian kings ruled, it was true when the French monarchy ruled, and it was true when the French Revolution replaced it.  Something different, but always the same.

Capitalism is CERTAINLY not the enemy: it is an unmitigated boon, which raises all boats–some more than others, but that is to be expected in a fair system, in which you are rewarded in proportion to your contribution.

Our system is not Capitalism, though.  I have struggled what to call our system.  Perhaps Plutocracy is as close as anything, with the qualifier that it is not just the rich who rule, but those with the power to create money at will.

But the core point is that the enemies of God, of Goodness, of shared power, of generalized prosperity, of freedom and justice worthy of the name, are always the same.  They find a variety of words, use a variety of systems, take and wield power in a variety of ways, but their core crimes, and their core deficiencies as human beings do not vary all that much.

The enemy of “the people”, of the ordinary, are people who are incapable of valuing Beauty for its own sake, who are incapable of breathing honest breaths, and truly inhabiting their bodies.  Who are incapable of true friendship, true kindness, and true warmth.

Virtuous people do not create monolithic power structures, and people who create such structures are not good people.

But everything comes down to morality, to Goodness, to either feasting on the sumptuous banquet of life directly, or being forced to settle for power and continual, unsatisfied and unsatisfiable hunger.

I am rambling.  Perhaps you get what I am saying.  People always want cartoon enemies, but in reality our enemies are always relatively dull, scheming, plodding, perceptually unoriginal people who seek power in lieu of life.  There is no one simple “them” when the true enemy is dullness itself.

The language used to get such regimes in place has to do with eliminating “income inequality”, of getting rid of the Haves/Have nots, but the reality of such systems is a radical INCREASE in such inequality.  This makes socialism a HIGHLY congenial form of government for elites, for people far, far, far above the middle class.

Do you think Obamacare affected Warren Buffet in any way?  Bill Gates?  George Soros?  Would an economic collapse?  It’s most likely that within a broad range, a collapse would HELP them.  Those with money, in times when money is scarce, find everything and everyone is for sale and on sale for cheap.

Cuba is a two-tiered society, with a radical separation between the Party cadre–which has its own medical system, and probably its own educational system, and first claims on everything–and everyone else.

Here is the thing:  if all boats are rising, then the system is not Socialist.  And if the system is Socialist, not all boats are rising.   Winners win because they are connected, not because of the quality of their work, or caliber of their intelligence.  Losers lose because they don’t know how to play the Socialist game, or because they refuse to on principle.

When you are dealing with these truly horrible ideas, they are only made palatable through lies, through continual lies, through directed, conscious, carefully crafted lies, in which they say they oppose everything they support, and where they claim to support everything they in fact oppose.

They claim to get rid of the power of “corporations”, for which we might substitute “unelected elites”, but in fact they make unelected elites the only people who matter.  They take them from relative influence to direct and absolute control.

Let us all pray we survive this time with our freedom and dignity intact.  We are under assault by intelligent, well funded, determined people.  They do not mean the rank and file among us any good at all.  We are Untermenschen to them, irrelevant, to be used as and when needed, and then discarded.

I will likely have more to say later, but for now I want to point to the mindset inherent in the commodification of objects, the mass production of identical objects.  You can go to Walmart and get this t-shirt or that t-shirt, but you can’t get one that is custom.  If you want something truly unique, go to a Flea Market and get one airbrushed on the spot.  Go to an individual.

I think there is this latent idea bred into Americans from birth that ideas can and should be like manufactured objects.  You pick this one or that one, but you never fashion your own.  You take what is out there, and make it your own.  You buy it.  You buy into it.  You consume it, make it a part of your ideational furniture.

In order, therefore, to make everyone a fucking idiot, all you have to do is create Pattern 1 and Pattern 2, and tell people they have to choose.  You can have any kind of politics you want, as long as it is either Democrat–as expressed by what Democrat leaders are saying–or Republican, as expressed by what Republican Party leaders are saying.  Anything else is ridiculous.  Those products do not exist.  They will not be made for you.  You have to make your own.

Trump is unique.  He is his own creation.  And he does not fit either pattern at all.  His danger to the System is precisely that his very possibility–that someone outside the System could come to exist inside the System–calls into question what were very tidy lines, what was an easily manipulable system.

Do you really think the Power Elite CARE who is in power, between owned Republicans and owned Democrats?  If they put one of the Republicans in power, like George W. Bush, they get credibility for “national security”, and thus are able to push through a program of Orwellian surveillance, which is what happened.

If they get a Barack Obama, they get to expand drastically the power of the government, and teach people to depend on the State.  Either way they win.  If they fight wars against foreign enemies, they own the arms companies.  If they fight “poverty” or “racism” or “injustice”, they own the companies that get the contracts.

You can’t pick a “Pret a porter” idea off the shelf and credibly present yourself as someone who is doing any thinking at all.  And this applies to esoteric or off-beat, or uncommon ideas like Anarchism or Communism.  This is just going to a boutique store which sells hard to fine items.  You are still buying off the shelf.  You are still buying, and buying into, someone else’s ideas.

This idea, that you should be discouraged, functionally, practically, from thinking for yourself, is the root idea of totalitarianism.  This idea has entered our cultural world through Consumerism, through the replication of the consumer ethos in all parts of our lives.

Brown University, I think it was, recently conducted then suppressed a study seeming to show that many kids nowadays who decide they are “trans” were in reality manipulated by social media.  They weren’t “born that way”.  They were not even bred into it.  They saw something on the shelf they decided to try on for a time, perhaps to buy, and certainly to rent, prepackaged.

I can see how transgenderism could easily be seen as bucking the conformity all around us.  But it, too, is conformity, merely to different ideas.  Punks dressed like punks.  They were readily recognizable as such.  “Rebels” dress like rebels.

It is very hard to think for yourself.  It is hard to think at all.

But it is made exponentially harder when you operate from a subliminal suggestion that all the important ideas, all the best ideas, all the accurate perceptions, will be arrayed on a shelf for you, in a line for you, like so many willing prostitutes at a brothel, and that your only job is to choose from among them.

None of us being God, there is always something even our best minds have missed.  Always remember this.

I am often angry and intolerant.  But I am not heartless.  My feeling hurts me, and so I dial it down.

But I feel that there is a middle way between complete emotional dissolution–one based on a fetishized “creativity” which, when it fails, as it usually does for all but the most talented, and even for them often (Hemingway killed himself when he ran out of ideas), turns to destruction–and a robotic existence hemmed in by clocks, tedium, and emotional vacuity and superficiality.  There is a way between the bohemian and the Organization Man.

More life is possible, which is not seeding at every moment its own failure and cessation.  Seeds can be planted which sprout and yield more seeds.  Life is a pasture which can be cultivated, a garden which can be grown, all within limits.   This is my own work.

And as I have said before, the paradigmatic creative act is perception.  It is not the paint you put on a canvas, but the vision you have of something you have not seen before.  This vision is a perception, and crystallization of something which you now see was always possible.

And craftsmanship is an act of creation too.  Woodworking is creative, because it requires an on-going perfection of technique, of detail, of a deep understanding of how things work and how they go together.

I’ve been talking about this slippery slope from what I might call intellectual sloppiness to political dogmatism for some time, but for some reason, now that the extent of what these tech companies are capable of is really hitting me because it is HAPPENING–Alex Jones, self evidently, is nothing more or less than the canary in the coalmine, as I believe he has described himself–I am wondering again how seemingly good people could be led down this evil path.

I sat down to post on something else, but I’m not feeling it at the moment.

We are at a crossroads.  Our culture has been bifurcated between those who value reason and principle, and those who have either forgotten what those words mean, or–ironically enough–rejected them AT the level of principle, for reasons they can’t really articulate because they don’t exist at the level of logic.

They are animals seeking shelter from the storm, nothing more.  What was human, advanced, noble in them: they no longer want.  They want crumbs from heaven, and the relative warmth of caves.  Give them that, and they will follow anywhere, do anything, believe anything, permit anything.  There are no “No’s” left in them.  Their “Yes’s” they are given, and those same “Yes’s” can be and are taken away at the turn of a hat, and pushed in some completely other direction.  They can be made to love anything, or hate anything, based simply on the headlines they read that day.

Daily Cause indeed.  Perhaps there needs to be a publication called the “Nihilistic Prophet”.