Could one posit that pain is the root building block of joy?  That it is the atomic element from which all forms of life come? I said as much in my Goodness essay.

Could one define pain as “resistance to motion”?  Could one define joy as acceptance and amplification of motion?

Can there be any path to happiness other than learning to enjoy work?  I don’t think so.

Edit: let me expand on this.  Let us suppose that we begin as lumps of rock.  We are at rest.  If some vague life enters us, it compels us to move, but since we are rocks, moving is both unfamiliar to us, and seemingly difficult.  Our task is to learn to accept this new reality, then take pleasure in it.  Surely it is better being able to CHOOSE between repose and activity, if at various times one or the other appears more pleasurable to us?

Here is my take on the thing: we are all rocks.  Or cattle.  I had a dream once where angels were trying to instruct humans and it was literally like us talking to cows.  They hear wah wah, wah, with a VERY slight chance they know their name.

Our job is to move faster, and to move faster you must move faster than you ever have, and that is pain.  You resist it, or have an innate tendency to. 

Pain is the drag on your movement when you are growing. Or as the Marines have it “Pain is weakness leaving your body”.

The SEAL’s say “the only easy day is yesterday”.  This can only be true, though, when you are constantly pushing the envelope, constantly trying the new, constantly moving in new directions.  You can otherwise build your peace with nearly ANYTHING.

Serious minds know that this system, and Medicare, are broke.  They are running of an actual, large cliff, compared to which the current discussions are small change.  They really are.  The amounts in play on both sides are much less than a tenth of what SHOULD be in play in a rational polity.  The shit will hit the fan.  Granny will go over a cliff.

Given this, it is never too early to start trying to fail in a smarter rather than a stupider way.  Here is one proposal: tax credits or deductions for families who bring their aging parent(s) in to stay with them.  It may be the case that dependent parents can be deducted now, but I doubt it, since they would also be drawing Social Security.  We could incentivize what was considered basic decency in years past, in roughly all cultures the world over.

As I have said before, part of the reason many cultures focus on raising hard working, successful children, is that they will NEED them when they get older, to care for them.

Have you seen this new show, Killer Karaoke?  I’ve seen the trailers, and it looks like something along the lines of the Gong Show meets Jackass.  People are literally tortured while trying to sing, and we are supposed to find the whole thing funny.  Well, I guess if you think watching someone getting covered with shit while bouncing up and down on a bungy cord while in a Port-a-Potty is funny (a Jackass stunt), you might.

It seems to me like there is this pain floating around in the air–a virtual metaphysical entity, although I don’t literally envision it that way–and it doesn’t know where to land in our modern world.  We don’t invite it in in structured, shared ways.  We don’t REALLY suffer physically any more.  Our lives are soft, comforted, relatively risk free.  We have eliminated racism. People are nice to everyone but conservatives, which is to say those who refuse to renounce the right and duty to render moral and intellectual judgements outside the realm of leftist conformitarianism.

So where does it land?  In strange places.  Here, we have a literally sadomasochistic game show.  Dee Snider is the co-host. Here is one of his more charming lyrics:

A glint of steel, a flash of light
You know you’re not going home tonight
Be it jack or switch, doctor’s or mind
Nowhere to run, everywhere you’ll find
You can’t escape from the bed you’ve made
When your time has come, you’ll accept the blade!

You’re cornered in the alley way, you know you’re all alone
You know it’s gonna end this way, the chill goes to the bone
Now here it comes that glistening light, it goes into your side
Blackness comes, tonight’s the night, blade is gonna ride

[CHORUS:]

Cause you’re under the blade
Oh, you’re under the blade

It’s not another party head, this time you cannot rise
Your hands are tied, your legs are strapped, a light shines in your eye
You faintly see a razor’s edge, you open your mouth to cry
You know you can’t, it’s over now, blade is gonna ride

[REPEAT CHORUS]

[Solo – Jay Jay]

A glint of steel, a flash of light
You know you’re not going home tonight
Be it jack or switch, doctor’s or mind
There nowhere to run, everywhere you’ll find
You can’t escape from the bed you’ve made
When your time has come, you’ll accept the blade!

You’ve tried to make it to the front, now you’re pinned against the side
A monster stands before you now, its mouth is open wide
The lights go on, the night explodes, it tears into your mind
When the night does end, you’ll come again, the blade is gonna ride

[REPEAT CHORUS]

Here it comes, baby
Ow!

Now you’re under it
You’re going down, down, down, down, down, down
Down, down, down, down, down, down, down

Hey!
Ow!

Much was made back in the day about his ability to rationalize his impulses towards violence, towards graphic images of torture and murder.  I would suggest that it is a commonplace for sadomasochists to be able to intellectualize their activities.  At root, it represents a failure of the meaning system.  It  represents a failure to mature emotionally.  It represents a moral world that is to risen bread what a misshapen lump of water and flour is. You’ve likely all baked bread at least once without letting it rise properly.  The middle just isn’t right.

Formal sexual sadomasochism is theater.  It is role playing.  It is one person consenting to let another person do them things that are wrong for them emotionally, that feed something already broken in them.  I don’t doubt it brings relief, but at the cost of qualitative lowering.

And to the point, you can’t look at a Lenin or a Pol Pot, or a Castro, or a Che Guevera and see anything other than an intellectualized desire to do what Dee Snider is talking about.  It is the process of fitting a society to a Procrustean bed that they can vary in size at any time they like that animates them. There is no empathy there.  There is no concern for human suffering.  There is a deep joy in the idea of pounding others into nothingness, as in the Fabian window.

There is no one on the Daily Cause who, deep down, doesn’t want to inflict suffering on someone else,. who is not motivated more by hate than love. They simply justify themselves by figuring that if they hate the right people, that is tantamount to love.  But it isn’t.

I don’t know where the pain will land.  I am doing what I can to help in land where it works best–in individual moral judgments, and in self imposed creative challenges.

My creed could be summarized thus:

Reject destructive qualitative pain.

Facilitate quantitative growth through creative quantitative pain.

Facilitate qualitative growth and joy through chosen qualitative pain.

One must face the wind.  One must look into the future with a cold eye that becomes a warm eye in the accepting.

I have from time to time quoted Melville:

So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives
himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old
woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.’

I was talking with a guy in a bar tonight who described life as “a joke”, and self identified as an existentialist.  What I told him was that he needed a philosophical mechanic.  I asked him, approximately (beer was involved, as well as fatigue): would it not be better for you if you could be happy, have a sense of purpose, and do so without violating any of your principles or understanding of truth?

The answer of course was yes.  I referred him to my website since I was too tired for a detailed conversation, and would in any event have muddled it up.

But it seems to me that the net effect, the Action To, of much modern philosophy is breaking peoples digesters, their sense of life, their self organizing capacity they are born with.  They are born with all the tools they need to find meaning in life, and instead taught to throw them by the wayside and do the cognitive equivalent of praying to the actual Flying Spaghetti Monster. No wonder they get lost.  No wonder this world makes them feel alone.

I would submit that anyone incapable of understanding how free markets can work, is likewise incapable of understanding how what might be termed “free morality”, which is to freedom of the sort our Constitution guarantees, would work.

What certain types of weak souls want is perfect clarity.  They want a confidence that their pictures of the universe are the correct ones.  What they picture, when they picture society, is a static machine.  This is the essence, for example,  of class analysis, which deducts time and human agency from all deconstructions, all Tubaforms, that are used for analytical purposes.

They build structures without motion, which are characterized by metal, not water.  When I read something like Spinoza’s Ethics, when I try and create my own analogues of it, what I picture are waterways defining flows of water, which sometimes overwhelms the path, which sometimes makes its own way, but which is affected by my boundaries, my principles. I picture flowers blooming in places I did not anticipate, but which are none the less beautiful for it.

What Leftists built in their minds are “gardens” without flowers, and buildings that no one lives in, that are not used, except to satisfy the vanity of the intellectual.  In this respect, it is interesting to ponder how many actual empty buildings idiotic Chinese economic policies have brought into being.

Did you see this story: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/12/05/verizon_patent_would_monitor_you_as_you_watch_tv_so_it_can_customize_ads.html

Verizon–and it is apparently not the first in this–has filed a patent to listen in on at least your cell phone to determine what you are doing.  Among other things, it lists eating, exercising, laughing, reading, sleeping, talking, singing,
humming, cleaning, and playing a musical instrument.  It will detect if you are making love, arguing, or whatever, communicate this information to a central database, which will then send appropriate content to your TV.

Now, it also “looks” into the room, which could be done by the phone, but which would fail often, since the phone will likely not be in a place where the camera can see the room.  But many people do videoconferencing, or have WII’s or Kinects, and other such inputs, so these could at some point all be bundled and turned on remotely.

What needs to be added to this is that if Verizon is filing patents now, the government has this capability, in all likelihood NOW, since they are always ahead of the curve.  They are not interested in ads, though, but of mapping the social terrain.  Add this fact–that of pervasive spying on you at all times, if your cell phone is within audible range of you–to the ability to connect your social web to this.  If you are talking about committing a crime, they can hear you, even if you don’t think your cell phone is on.  Or take it a step further: they can track you as surely as if you actually HAD an RFID chip on you, if you carry your phone, and can map all the places you go every week, who you talk with, who you eat with, what websites you access, and build PROFILES on you.  They know how often you get angry, how often you make love, how often you exercise, what shows you watch, how you react to them.  All of this analysis can be computerized. 

A prospective dissident list can be created, and graded according to personality type.  If they catch you doing something, they immediately know who else might have been involved.  We are told this is for our protection, and possibly it is to some extent–this would have been the method for arrests we read about from time to time that were in the “planning” stages, and the reason the occasional attacks are from loners–but it is also true that Big Brother is now.  They can hear you NOW.

Aaron Russo claimed that Nicholas Rockefeller claimed the goal was for all people to have RFID chips implanted in them.  What I would submit is that to the extent people keep their cell phones next to them at all times, what has been achieved NOW is much more than that.  They can’t yet tie our bank balances to our behavior, but the goal of nearly perfect information has, for all those who participate in our culture in normal ways.

To be clear, I don’t know how corrupt the NSA is.  I don’t know if there is some Big Plan.  But I do know what is possible.

We need to be clear that the problem is spending and spending will not be controlled until we have a fiscal conservative in the WHITE HOUSE, and until fiscal conservatives control both houses of Congress.  Given this, the goal needs to be winning support in the electorate for fiscal sanity.  At this point, the only way this is going to happen is if we, paradoxically, give the Democrats EVERYTHING they want, and then step back and watch what I believe will be a substantial economic downturn which they will then be unable to blame on anyone but themselves.  This is important.  You people want no new taxes, but you don’t grasp that our borrowing is not $1 trillion a year.  We are borrowing BOTH from the Chinese AND From the future.  From the future–our children–we borrowed $4 TRILLION just last year.  Are you so stupid as to think that blocking an increase from 35% to 39% (I think it is) is going to make any noticeable difference on our net indebtedness?  Of course it won’t.  But it will make it harder in 2014 to get good people elected.  Face the music: you’re not running the show, and until you know nothing substantive will happen.

I have quotes on each planner page.  Consistently, the ones I like best are from Helen Keller.  Here is today’s.  I had not seen it before.

“To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

Republicans need to start making people aware of the REAL fiscal cliff we face, that of a loop we can’t get out of of borrowing, increasing interest rates, increased borrowing, increased interest rates.  We need to develop simple, easy charts that show clearly that taxing the rich more will NOT, CANNOT come even CLOSE to addressing the actual problems we face.

These are not scare tactics.  They are mature approaches to real problems.  Obama and the Democrats are either TRYING to destroy this nation, or so economically illiterate and reckless that the same end may as well be their aim.

We can start running ads showing that our true debt is $86 trillion, which is $277,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  Now, the 86 trillion is payable over a number of years, so the situation is not as dire as it may seem, but it will get WORSE the longer we wait.

Why not start telling this story in the complicit media now, through paid advertising?  If the Republicans won’t do it, some other advocacy group like FreedomWorks needs to put it together.  Start fundraising NOW.  Start issue campaigning NOW.

Give Obama what he wants.  In absolute terms, as idiotic and destructive as what he is calling for is likely to be, it’s small change compared to our real problems.  Even getting a small concession is not worth the years of propaganda he will get out of it.  He is literally planning to blame what Republicans do now for economic conditions two years from now.

Why not just say “Look, we don’t like these policies.  NO Republicans want to vote for them.  But who knows? Maybe Obama is right.  If so, then he will proudly claim the economy two years from now.  If not, then he still HAS to claim it, as we gave him what he said he needed.  There will be NOWHERE else to point the finger.”

I got a good night’s sleep last night.  Dogs got me up a tad sooner than I liked, but hell 8am would constitute profound decadence nearly anywhere and any time (although hunter-gatherers seem to have had it pretty easy).

Be that as it may, it seems to me we could make this into a fun game, playing with Obama.  McConnell, as one example, could say to the Senate Democrats on Dec. 28th (assuming they are still in session) “I have secured an agreement from all Republicans neither to filibuster nor oppose your bill.  You may move ahead in confidence, knowing you have a majority”.  This will put the Dem’s in a bind, since they know Obama’s proposals stink to high heaven even by Democrat standards, but how can they oppose it?  It’s the “everyone but Reid take one step back.  Ok, you are the volunteer.”

We can start running political ads in solidly blue districts on solidly left wing media outlets like ABC, off and on over the next two and four years.

Philadelphia ad: Zoom to focus on MLK, Jr. (with subtitles for those who mute it): “Did you know Martin Luther King, Jr. was a lifelong Republican?  Did you know all the lynchings in the South were done by Democrats, and that the Republican Party was founded SPECIFICALLY to end Slavery?  Did you know that former KKK member Robert Byrd, a Democrat, was one of the longest serving members of Congress, and that he was praised as a great man by no less than Bill Clinton?”

Then we could play with more and less daring phrases.  More daring: “yes, the Democrats give you an allowance.  But have they given you a job that honors your dignity as a human being?” That may resonate with some.  Again, these things can and should be focus group tested in an intelligent way.

You could have a succession of images of people in KKK uniforms, with the caption “Democrat” underneath.  You could play the Malcolm X piece where he calls black people who vote Democrat “chumps and race traitors”.  Simple images would be what are needed here.  The woman who was so excited about her Obamaphone is not going to respond well to nuance.  And none is needed.  We are right: Democrats kill every flower of innovation that tries to sprout outside their direct control.

The overall point I’m making is that we can begin countering the propaganda.  I would donate to that cause.  What people need to understand is that propaganda, to be effective, has to be total.  It has to be the Truman Show, where nobody tells them it’s fake.  When you let cracks of light through, the risk increases that the whole edifice will come crashing down.

I read that in many districts in Phillie, not ONE vote was recorded for Romney.  Getting 100 would then be an improvement.  And those people are, occasionally, speaking up against the blatant use and abuse of the black vote by people who do NOTHING, or next to nothing–$200 in cell phone money, when it costs $30,000 or more a year to live decently, and no jobs paying that are being created–for them.

Large swings can come from small beginnings.  I read also that according to Dick Morris, the political ads in the last election did something close to nothing.  Why not invest that money starting now, on changing hearts and minds?

Here is another idea.  Zoom to face of man in a suit (or whatever tests well in a focus group), who looks in the camera and says “I was going to expand my business, but when I ran the math factoring in Obama’s tax increases and particularly the cost of Obamacare.  I couldn’t  justify it.  Would YOU work 80 hours a week for the same amount of money you could make working 40?  Me neither.  That’s ten jobs paying $40,000 you will never see.”  Make it a real business owner.  Then another 5 in quick succession.  Me, neither. Me, neither.  etc.  This is rough, but something showing jobs NOT created, which is the statistic that is real, but unrecorded.

The thing is, the complicit media can be flanked through paid ads.  You can reach people you would not otherwise reach.