Author: White Whale

The Fed has announced–note, there are unquestionably many things they do that they do NOT announce, meaning that what they do announce is intended to sway actions on the part of someone in the direction of something–that they are going to sell off short term US Treasury bonds and buy longer term bonds. The intent is to keep interest rates low.

Plainly, high interest rates are not keeping people from borrowing money. Interest rates are and have been very low for a number of years now. People are not borrowing money because of doubt about the future. We have a Socialist in the White House who not only does not understand business, but is actively antagonistic and mistrustful of the very people he needs to be opening up their checkbooks and expanding, to create the sorts of jobs that have made America a wealthy and happy nation.

It is always hard to state what the real aims of this policy are, but it would seem clear to me that the long term future of America is in more doubt than the short term. I don’t think anyone seriously doubts we will be able to pay our bills for the next 3 years.

However, once the LARGE tax increases that will fund Obamacare–which in many respects is nothing but a massive expansion of Medicaid, coupled with large insurance premium increases for all small businesses–go into effect, it is unclear where we will be. If we fail to elect a true fiscal conservative to the White House–Mitt Romney does not fit this bill, but in my view Perry and Paul would (I like Cain and Bachman as well)–then our economic predicament could be getting pretty bad by 2014 or so.

Logically, the markets know this, so the interest that we would need to pay to get investors to buy the bonds would have to be increasing right now. The Fed is in effect putting a veil onto the precariousness of our long term economic future.

Free markets only work when market forces are allowed to operate freely. This should be obvious, but for many it is not. Here, an institution we the American people do not control is working to mask the symptoms of our economic illness. It is curing nothing, and helping nothing.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor portrayed himself and those like him as lonely, alien creatures, condemned to help people free themselves from moral freedom. His implementation of autocracy was, on his account, nothing but taking the obvious and necessary path that would have been chosen by the people, if they understood their own actual needs as well as he did.

As I have argued, this set of lies covers up, in my view, a fundamental misanthropy, and typically one coupled with clinical sadism. They may use proxies for their torture, but they know it is going on, because they ordered it.

It does seem to me, though, that there are and need to be positive such leaders as well, whose burden consists in freedom from the restraints and consolations of fixed identities and ideals. Religion is a consolation, because it gives you a place to occupy, an identity, a social network, thoughts to fill your mind with that don’t vary. Consistency is a species of eternity here on earth. It is rest.

But no religion, per se, can be final. Always, always, always, life is evolving. It is comforting for many to believe that compassion and empathy are always virtuous, but when they lead to the ascension to power of people who are cruel and violent, they are no longer virtues. They are rejections of necessity, of perception, of Goodness.

Most people do not want this degree of freedom, in my view, and since the contributions of religion are vastly superior to those of Leftism and Scientism, they are to be valued over inferior moral doctrines, which in most cases is to say empty moral doctrines. There is no content to Leftism. There is neither empathy nor justice.

The Good person, though, must accept being “Just So”, in manners which vary by time and place. To be maximally receptive, you must be empty. This is in the Tao Te Ching. This is a burden if you focus on what you are leaving behind, and a source of enthusiasm if you place your emphasis on what can be learned, and what new trails can be found and communicated to others.

I heard Rand Paul on the Laura Ingraham Show today, and he made a very interesting comment. He said that he called whoever the person in charge was at the Dept. of Transportation to ask if they had any prioritized list of the bridges in this country that need fixing. One would think, logically, that something which can fail and cause death and economic disruption, would be tracked by the people responsible for such a thing, particularly given the history of the Minnesota bridge collapse, and the fact that we JUST SPENT hundreds of millions of dollars [edit: make that BILLIONS; this is a number I cannot wrap my head around] on infrastructure. Where did it go, if no list was made?

The obvious and sickeningly obvious answer is that the money was never intended to lead to economic benefits for all Americans, but rather to go to places where Obama needed to shore up political support. The corollary to this is that he didn’t care if bridges collapsed. On the contrary, such a thing would have been politically advantageous to him. He didn’t care then, and he has not seen fit to include such considerations in the latest monstrosity he is trying to ram through against the will of the people, and contrary to the most elementary principles of economics and common sense.

We have never had a President who cared less about the American people as a whole, or more capable of the most atrocious cynicism imaginable.

As I think about it, I think the principle problem in meaning formation is not how it happens, but rather how it is prevented. I think there is something in this universe that tends towards order, and that evil is evil because it interferes in this process.

Increasingly, it seems to me that the root of all sin–where sin is an disruption in a self organizing informational pattern–is fear. What is pride, really, but a preemptive strike against those who would marginalize you? And what is self pity, really, but the expression of the idea that the universe should conform itself to us, rather than vice versa?

Life is a very serious business, by which I mean rules that may as well be treated as laws plainly exist, and exist not for us, but in themselves. For our parts, though, most of us react to this fact with ridiculousness, with vanity, self pity, tears, and rejection. All of these things keep us on this side of the water, and prevent us from crossing.

What are the principle emotional boundaries, within which we can exist as our deepest selves, in peace? Marriage, and religion. In marriage, you find the most intimate connection most people will have in their lifetimes, which includes both emotional connection, and physical. It produces literal life, or has historically in most societies.

In marriage, too, you generate the mother, the primal reality for all infants. If that marriage is harmonious, that mother is harmonious, and the world into which that child enters is harmonious. If not, then stress is present, and that child will be poisoned with unnecessary doubt and disorientation, traits which it will pass on.

In religion, you find the perfection of meaning, at least in principle. There is no reason to doubt that countless people the world over have found in the faith and practices of their forefathers deep internal solace, both in their work, and in long nights during periods of difficulty.

These are the places you rest. These are the things that, if they are given, and not unstable, provide the most comfort and strength for individuals and societies.

Logically, then, these are the first targets of Satanic doctrines like Communism, which seek first to destroy, then perhaps accidentally, at some unspecified and unplanned future date, to create.

Atheism, per se, is not intrinsically pernicious; but when it is proselytized in a world already struggling with meaning, it is. It is necessarily a disconnection from a world that contains intrinsic moral laws and meaning, and necessarily a demand that every person create their own meaning system from scratch, and on the fly. Since most people are mediocre, this means in practice that most such systems will be myopic and poorly constructed. They will not do the job well.

In practice, this fact underlies the continuing success of both Communistic Fascism and its intended antidote, Randian–and I will coin a term here –“Hero-ism”. By this, I connote this notion of the Grand Individual, who strides the world in his or her own way, answering to no higher calling than his or her own muse. In practice, some of the people embracing this doctrine have been among the most selfish human beings I have ever met. Selfishness works economically, which is Rand’s level of analysis, and she shares this with Marx, but it does not work socially, culturally, or in my view sustainably. One needs principles that bring people together in reliable ways.

Few thoughts on a Wednesday–Woden’s Day–morning.

Oh, let’s discuss the last century like it was last night. We have the Hindenburg disaster, Titanic, several World Wars, and some UN enforcement activities.

I spent time at Fort Knox, and saw where they staged their trains, which in years gone by would have included tanks, APC’s, and probably artillery.

My question is this: why would we not have had peace from 1950 to the present without Communism? For that matter, why would we have had FASCISM, if Communism had never existed? Please remember that a principle criticism Hitler levied, that was apparently widely shared, was that Jews were Bolsheviks. Germans didn’t like Bolsheviks.

If you look at the last century dispassionately, what becomes clear quickly is how much unnecessary suffering there was. There were liberal ideas in play, but they were marginalized. We the United States had to fight repeated wars to protect the very idea of Liberalism. Many good men died.

Why? This is the question. The answer is not that “war is never the answer”. Clearly, it IS sometimes the answer. Sometimes it is the ONLY answer.

We fought wars for a very simple reason: other nations did not desire peace. Communists, in particular, did not desire peace. They wanted, on the contrary, world domination, and were prepared to see unlimited numbers of deaths of all sorts to see it happen.

And what then? Then, the intellectuals would have had total control of innocent people, to terrorize as they pleased, and terror was something they always secretly admired and wanted.

This is the actual history of the last one hundred years. Howard Zinn would lie about it, but the Communist bastard is dead.

It is perhaps wrong to speak ill of the dead, but not in this case. That prick has found out that Hell does in fact exist.

Whiskey involved, but I never regret, fundamentally, things posted when I’ve had a few. These are my honest–and principled–opinions.

As I say on the side there, I reserve the right to reverse myself. As I think about it, the Jobs Bill is not a failure of marketing, but rather of producing the actual steak. They have the sizzle. Obama has his very own flag, and was branded quite well in 2008, which is why he won.

What his handlers cannot grasp, though, is that lies have shelf lives, and that shelf life, in an economic downturn, is much less than 4 years. FDR kept getting reelected because he was cunning like Bill Clinton, because he made better use of the political bribes made possible by the money flow from Washington (harder in our information age), and because people liked him. There is nothing likeable about Barack Obama. He is stiff, arrogant, and seems to have no genuine affability or warmth, which FDR plainly did.

And to the point, he does share with FDR a history of economically deletrious policy-making. Every time things get worse, he tells us he prevented a true disaster; yet, history is clear that recoveries happen much more quickly, normally, than they have here, just as the Great Depression is the only one which lasted that long, and is the only one which people tried to fix.

One of my favorite jokes has “Salesman” as the punchline, but I’m going to insert Barack Obama.

A man got married to a woman, and they went on their honeymoon. The first night she said to him:

Please be gentle, this is my first time.

Honey, how could that be? This is your fourth marriage.

Well, my first husband turned out to like men, and never showed any interest to me.

That makes sense. I’m sorry to hear that.

The second husband was drunk all the time, and never showed any interest in making love.

I understand. You had told me about him, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.

And my third husband was Barack Obama.

Sweety, I don’t get it.

Turns out all he knew how to do was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it was GOING to be.

“

As I think about this proposal, the most amazing thing about it is that I really think that HE genuinely thought it would work. A bunch of cognitively adolescent academic minds got together, and thought not about creating jobs, but their marketing strategy.

Now, marketing actually is a profession. There are people in this country that are very good at it. But they are businesspeople, and Obama has a phobia of people who earn their own money in the private sector, as do those who surround him.

Instead, their default assumption is that of all people who have not been around the figurative block: that what they don’t understand must be easy. “Marketing? BUSINESS PEOPLE do that, surely we can do better?” Laughs all around.

So this group of fools gets together and proposes with a straight face that borrowing money to redistribute to the already unemployed, and Obama’s Unions goons will create the sorts of jobs that Americans want.

Really?, as kids nowadays say. This is really quite a wonderful example of the most profound idiocy.

You know, I think the more important question in progress is not how it happens, but what is holding it back. The question is not Why but Why not. Not How, but where to start.

It seems to me most people have oceans of water in them, held back by doubt. They know what to do. They can figure out how to do it. But thought complexes, mental manias, distortions and lies keep this water from flowing.

All that is needed to follow the natural evolution intended for all of us in the direction of the better and more beautiful is to stop stopping.

Take as an example the ghettoes in this country, and their crime and poverty. The question is not why they exist, but rather what is being done that is preventing self organization in the direction of higher and more enjoyable ways of living.

Be a hurricane. Break the levies, and see what is possible. It may astonish you.

As I ponder the implications of a Republican winning a seat he lost by 20 points the last time in New York, it occurs to me that Obama’s persistent failure to produce a legally valid birth certificate has worked, in aggregate, towards the devastation of the Democrat Party. It has been beneficial for conservatives.

The default assumption of Alinsky, and therefore Obama, is in effect that you can lie with impunity forever; that you can maintain an effective and dedicated political base solely through constant attacks on your opponents, without proposing workable policies. Now, in 1984, and the very real dystopias upon which it was based, this more or less worked, but only in conditions of complete tyranny.

Given any shred of informational daylight, propaganda narratives do not just self destruct. It’s not a question of “oh, they didn’t believe that, let’s try something else”. No, what vanishes is the very POSSIBILITY of the successful use of propaganda.

Obama has literally destroyed, nearly entirely, the effectiveness of calling opponents racists. He has destroyed the effectiveness of calling opponents partisans, or selfish. He has destroyed most of the effectiveness of demonizing corporations, or of claiming that Democrats care about the common man.

Increasingly, the veil is being pulled aside, and what people are seeing is that the top leadership of the Democrat Party has been enriching itself at the political trough, without caring in the slightest about the people with whom it concerns itself rhetorically. Obama has made black people in this country more poor and less secure. He has made working class people more poor and less secure.

At this point, the only people he is keeping are those on the payroll–public sector unions; large, national unions; professional agitators and politicians; and welfare recipients.

Everyone else has only to look at the bank balance, their tax bill, and the national debt. No amount of lying will save him from having to answer to these inescapable truths.

Thus, we should be grateful he has been as evasive as he has. It has forced many people to accept that large segments of our political and media landscape are completely broken, and to think big thoughts, rather than small thoughts. That is how fundamental and useful reform–change–comes about. The goalposts have been reset, and we can thank Obama–perhaps the most dishonest, and certainly least qualified President we have ever elected. None of this would have been possible if Hillary had been elected.