Author: White Whale

If you are going to repeat it, please fact check anything you see on here.

One statistic I throw out from time to time is the 12.4 payroll tax. This is actually 6.2% Social Security plus 6.2% Medicare/Medicaid, as I understand the matter, which further reduces to 3.1% paid by the employee and 3.1% by the employer who, if he or she did not pass the money along to the employee, would surely use it to expand the company, or buy something nice like a yacht that would employ yacht builders and yacht salesmen. It would find its way back into the economy, and far more effectively than by being given to a bureaucrat, who deducted his salary, then put some small portion back into circulation via his friends and bribers.

Social Security and Medicare are supposedly our money given back to us. Medicaid is pure charity.

To this is added, I think, Unemployment insurance. It varies state to state.

Actually, I don’t believe that, but do want to raise what are to me some interesting questions.

Jones has apparently believed for some 30 years–I watched a video he did on the Bohemian Society back around 1980–that substantially all the power elite in this country, Republican and Democrat alike, are in cahoots to end democracy here. Since this is quite far removed from the consensus view most of share, we call this paranoid.

What I would like to submit, however, is that substantially all Communist rhetoric and thought is likewise paranoid, in exactly the same way, in that it sees in the operation of free markets the collusion of an oligarchic class to keep the working class/lower classes down. This is a thesis with no evidence–the emergence of a middle class actually falsifies it–but they continue to believe it.

For his part, Jones offers, as far as I can tell, no alternative to the current system. Logically, if EVERYONE within the system is corrupt, there is no “out there” without completely rebuilding the system from the bottom up. Historically, this basic mind set enabled the mass murders which occurred in all Communist regimes, although some–for example in Nicaragua–involved merely hundreds of people rather than millions.

It is very important to be clear about which “them” you are talking.

Practically, Jones worldview encourages political disengagement, except for those few on the far left, like Van Jones, who go out and try to foment revolution. It deintegrates large segments of society, and it fosters passivity. What, really, can you do, but listen to his show and wonder how long he can stay on the air? (Hint: at least 30 years).

All of these things would be ENORMOUSLY useful to someone who actually was trying to take over the country, in that those who might potentially have made the most difference are now side-lined with their horrific visions, and who miss what chances for useful action present themselves.

In my view, George Bush was and is a glad-handing college frat boy, who grew up rich, knows how to ingratiate himself, and has a rudimentary but clear sense of right and wrong that he learned at home. He did not and does not want totalitarian Fascism implemented in the US. That is for people like George Soros, David Rockefeller, Jr., and their fellow travellers.

All that would have been needed to green-light the 9/11 attacks would have been a reasonably clear vision of how George Bush would respond, combined with careful pre-placement of people in key spots to do quiet influencing and directing. The goals may have been many, and may well have included a simple, absolute increase in the size of government, which, if it was a goal, was plainly accomplished.

If the government is reduced to a certain size, we need not fear it. If it is allowed to grow to a certain size, then history is clear that the question is not if it will be abused, but when.

The hard left, the secret influencers, made a bad mistake betting on Obama. The jig is up, and roughly half the American public is hopping mad beyond any reasonable hope of calming down, even with a Hillary candidacy. As I said some time ago, Hillary WAS the Fabian candidate, but this time around there will be no such thing. Their best hope now is Mitt Romney, who can at least be counted on not to shrink the size and influence of government. I don’t think they will get him, though.

We need to take stock in and appreciate the very clear, unmistakeable sea change that has happened since 2006. I have been blogging in some form for 8-10 years, and where the overwhelming bulk of posts used to be leftist, that has now turned to the right (except of course for hard left sites like the Daily Cause), with much of the rhetorical fire being both sustained and accurate. That does damage. You can always defeat trickery with truth, if you can get enough of it out there, and the damage is lasting. It goes far past a single engagement into the qualitative terrain of altering dialogue from invective to reasoned debate. No leftist idea can survive that climate.

While being open to all idea about reality, my personal belief is that there is cause for cautious optimism, not just in the immediate future, but over the next century.

And whatever you believe, never be seduced into inaction. There is always something that can be done, and you can never know what might make a difference.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Obama’s “Jobs” proposal–really, a poorly formulated conjecture about what could work–will not work for the simple reason that it was not conceived with the intent of decreasing unemployment in this country. By extension, it was also not formulated with the intent of decreasing suffering in this country.

What it is intended to do is create an Alinskyan platform for partisan attack. Obama is figuring, one, that he has little to lose, and two, that his only chance at reelection is making people more scared of Republicans in aggregate than angry at his patent leadership failures, and all of his other plans that, likewise, have accomplished nothing for most Americans, all at enormous cost.

Taking his policy proposals that have been enacted as a whole, we are plainly worse off than if he had slept twelve hours a day the last three years, and spent his waking hours building model airplanes. If the cost of that were Michelle shopping seven days a week at swanky stores, and vacationing overseas continually at taxpayer expense, we would be better off to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of jobs that would otherwise have been created.

I won’t waste much time dealing with details, but plainly he WANTS Republicans to deny continued Unemployment benefits, so he can paint them as heartless, and he WANTS them to allow payroll taxes to go back up, so he can paint them as hypocritical. He WANTS them to reject his big idea of hiring tens of thousands of workers to do work which does not need to be done, all at taxpayer expense, so he can say “Republicans don’t want to put America back to work.” This is pretty straightforward. He is not clever or original; nor are the people whose ideas these actually are.

The block, of course, is to ask what happened the last time we spent a trillion dollars that he insisted was necessary, and what the consequences were on our national debt. He posited, then, a cause and effect relationship that was falsified by the ultimate judge: reality.

The more interesting question, to me, is the internal reality that enables him to care NOT AT ALL about actual human beings who do, to a regretable extent, depend on him, ideally, making things better, and at a minimum not making things worse, as he has in fact done.

We all have this vain tendency to wax sentimental about our heroism. I myself, sometimes, look at myself imaginatively running into a burning building–like Peter Parker does in the excellent second Spider Man–and either dying nobly or succeeding (I actually met a woman in a bar one time who did run through literal flames to save a baby, and who emerged with substantial burns). I look at that, and get a bit teary eyed at my nobility. Wow, I must be a really good person. If only the world knew what a great guy I am. We all do this at times, I suspect.

This is foolishness. It is perhaps useful at a certain level of development–a level I personally am trying to transcend–but is not even remotely Good is the sense I want to develop it.

I would like to offer an outwardly strange example, but one which has resonance for me affectively and cognitively. To frame it, I will say only that I did martial arts for many years, and came over time to find many, many life lessons inhered in it.

That example is from Musashi, author of “The Book of Five Rings”, and victor–successful murderer–of many duels. He states somewhere in there that you should always be thinking of cutting. That is the key.

This would seem to be obvious. After all, you are trying to win, and not die. But so many things get in the way. In a duel, for example, you might be thinking about how well you are fighting. You might be planning your next move, designed to win. In my view, though, if you plant the seed of your real, final outcome deeply, firmly, ineradicably in your consciousness, then things begin to happen that further that goal. What you need comes to you. This is non-linear, but no matter how things appear, we do not live in linear universe in all but the most superficial sense. Everything is system.

What a Good person needs to be focusing on is helping people. You have to start with the notion of people as self sustaining, happy people, who DO NOT NEED YOU. You have to have as an aim complete superfluity, complete uselessness, with no need to do anything but watch. To do what is right, you need to remove your own ego from the thing, reject all emotional compensation, and all flaky sentimentality.

Now, this does not mean being cold, or never being happy. If you cultivate your own happiness, you don’t need to be needed. There are plenty of pleasures in this life that are free and common. As an example, I personally am an avid student of the sky. I never tire of the interplay of light and cloud, shadow, wind and darkness. I can and do watch the sky for hours.

Back to the point, though, the need to be needed is, itself, a type of dependency, and a dangerous one FOR OTHER PEOPLE. With this motivation, you will find yourself unconsciously undermining others, rather than building them up.

This is what people like Barack Obama do. He cannot conceive of a world which does not need him, and he therefore sets as his aim not helping people, but rather making sure that people like him stay in power, regardless of the actual outcomes of their policies.

This is a type of soft evil. It is not actively desiring pain for others, but rather an actual indifference to suffering that is tempered with a sentimentalism that is entirely divorced from reality, that consists entirely in wishful fantasies with him as the hero, and everyone else as praising him for his benevolence. Oh THANK YOU Barack, for caring about us so much, for being such a wonderful human being. We know that things don’t always work out, but you TRIED SO HARD.

I have in fact seen people taking bows to imaginary audiences after imaginary guitar solos. They can’t know you are there, or they feel immediately the ridiculousness of such things, but most such fantasies never leave the protective cover of the skull of the dreamer.

We can do so much better. All of us.

The “problem of existence” metamorphoses when you call it the “problem of becoming”. We are becoming all the time. The question is how and if to direct it. Put another way, what should we do, one, and why, two.

I have often found that many problems that are recondite in the extreme in the abstract can be solved if you simply begin, and assume a solution is possible. Almost invariably, you will pursue false paths. You will make mistakes, which amount to figuring out ways that don’t work. This is still useful knowledge.

And what you want–purpose, fulfillment, energy, peace–creeps up alongside you in the process of focusing on other things.

Existentialism, which might practically be called the doctrine of moral passivism (I tend to use the word “Moral” synonymously with “principled work”), amounts to a doctrine of craven obeisance to the dictates of the wider world. You get pushed and pulled, here and there, and you call the resulting queasiness “authenticity”. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Many of these people were sick at their cores, and wanted nothing more than to be told what to do. Hence Sartre’s lifelong support of Stalin, and de Beauvoir’s admiration for Sade.

Cowardice is not a virtue, and Exitentialism, as a whole, is pernicious precisely as a poorly constructed rationalisation for moral failure, perceptual failure, and following defensive self righteousness, all on the sides of the wrong causes.

I liked Albert Camus, because he always seemed to me like he was at least TRYING to solve real problems. The rest of them seem to have existed comfortably within a sadomasochistic vortex of principled pointlessness.

They can all be ignored. William James was, in my view, the last widely known useful philospher, and his usefulness was precisely in pointing out that “philosophy” per se–seen as separate from a more primal worldview–is useless until you are solving practical problems whose outcomes can be verified. If what you are doing can be hermetically sealed in a classroom, it is not math, and it is not useful. It is, to real world problems, what the game of Monopoly is to actually leasing real buildings. If it has ANY utility at all, it will only occur when you walk off the university campus.

When George H.W. Bush used this phrase, he plainly meant a post-Communist world. From the end of the Second World War to the late 1980’s–some 40 years–the world order has been the free world, the Communist world, and the developing, third, world. Logically, in a new world order, the so-called third world would be second. This is a change, one Bush no doubt believed would be for the better.

Bush fought and nearly died for this country in World War Two. His plane was shot down in the Pacific, if memory serves. There is no reason to doubt either that he liked and likes the privileged world he was born in to, or that he is a sincere patriot who values the freedoms which our ancestors bought for us with hard work, good thinking, persistence, and blood.

Who, however, has ALWAYS talked about a New World Order? Who has ALWAYS blamed shadowy “capitalist” elites for all the worlds woes? Who has ALWAYS seen–at least rhetorically–in the actions of the United States malignant imperialism and the desire to crush the dreams of ordinary working people? Communists, of course.

George Bush did not want to create a totalitarian state in this country, or elsewhere. This notion is farcical. OF COURSE he is plugged in to groups of rich (mainly) white people for networking and mutual benefit. Of course he has always taken advantage of business opportunities.

But to think for a moment that he, his son, Dick Cheney, or other senior American politicians want us to look like the old Soviet Union is ludicrous.

The RUSSIANS want us to look like the Soviet Union. Why wouldn’t they? Putin to this very day no doubt feels that if he had been in Gorbachev’s place he could have kept the thing together. Why would he not continue the century-long conquest planned by Lenin? These people do not think in short time scales. That is the one advantage of totalitarian rule.

It is so interesting that what can be a very damaging story if understood one way becomes a tool when inverted. Bush has been blamed for an attack he had nothing to do with, and what is the supposed answer? Voting for Democrats, who are continuing the Fabian subversion of our nation. That, or removing oneself from the democratic process outright, believing wrongly that both parties are trying to end our freedom.

Think about Lee Harvey Oswald. How many headlines have you seen saying “Communist assassin kills American President”? None, I suspect. Who got the blame? A purported “military-industrial-intelligence cabal”. Who are those people in reality? Then, the ones trying to protect us from the Communists, and doing well at it.

Thus, the benefits are huge–even when your guy, if he was their guy directly–gets caught. You use it to further undermine support for the institutions that oppose you.

It needs to be said, too, that there is a much bigger difference between having strong internal surveillance capability and not having it, than in having it controlled by one set of people versus another. Once an apparatus is in place, it becomes a simple matter of perverting and redirecting it. It can be created by anybody. It could be created by a saint, and as long as he runs it, everything is perfect. Nothing can go wrong. But once that person is gone, the whole thing, like a cannon, can be turned around and pointed at an entirely different set of people. This is the essence of Fabianism. They don’t care who controls the apparatus, merely that it is created. That is the main thing.

The Federal Reserve is another good example. When founded, it was directed by the Secretary of the Treasury. It was, for all intents and purposes, a government agency. It had limits on what it could buy. For Open Market operations it was limited to purchasing Treasury bonds, as I recall. Yet over time, over failing memories, and official and journalistic inattention, and aggressive propaganda campaigns, and taking advantage of crises (most of which it created), it got unshackled, and fully independent, to the point where everything it did was secret, and where there were no limits on its power of money creation/reallocation.

Now, the fact that Keynes tried to end the Fed tells me it was not–at least then–an entity he felt congenial to him. That entity, today, would be the IMF/World Bank which he created in lieu of abolishing the Fed as it then existed. The IMF has, I read, $350 BILLION in cash reserves, most of which money was gifted it (created) by central banks the world over, but most importantly by our own Federal Reserve.

When contemplating a “New World Order”, that is the sort of thing we need to be concerned with. Does Putin meet with them? Are they congenial to the idea of a Communist resurgence? 70 years of failure were not enough to teach the most ardent Communistic Fascists of the error of their ways. Why would these people not be out there at this very moment, planning?

I see no reason to doubt this.

Oh, writing sorts like me are supposed to have words on this. All I will say is that this is all much more confusing to me than it used to be.

I don’t think Islamic terrorists are very smart. If they were, they would have launched more successful attacks. Muslims, in general, are not very smart. They don’t invent things. They don’t work hard (a Ranger I know who did several tours in Iraq commented that work and the “Will of Allah” seem to exist in an inverted ratio, where less work equates consistently to more “Will of Allah”.) They are not individualistic. You just don’t hear often of Islamic creative geniuses. They have existed, but rarely. They don’t listen to music in many countries. They don’t paint. They don’t sculpt. They don’t dance in most countries.

Virtually every creative outlet which defines culture in general is proscribed to them by their holy book. In my view, creativity aggregates. People who foster creativity in one arena tend to be capable of processing it in many arenas. It would seem clear that the converse is also true, that the less avenues for the expression of creativity that are open, the overall creation will happen. There are no Mozarts or Leonardo Da Vinci’s in Islamic history. There have been some very good poets, but most of them are frowned upon by the orthodox. They created only by rejecting–they no doubt would have said expanding and clarifying–some core elements of the doctrine.

And to be clear, within Islamic doctrine, there is nothing to be done. Their world is perfect. Their customs are perfect. Their faith is perfect. They have but to live a life without breaking the rules, and their salvation is assured.

It is perhaps not overstating the case to say that the only obvious open path for progress and creativity is jihad. If your world is perfect, you must go outside of it to find creative challenges.

The Washington D.C. sniper showed how easy it is to sow fear. Terror acts are simplicity itself. Get a truck and crash it into something. Derail a train. Shoot up a shopping mall. Yet, virtually none of that has happened.

Yes, authorities have detected and stopped a number of plots–at least, we are told that plots were underway and were stoppped.

But, again, given the manifold challenge of rigging and blowing a skyscraper in New York City without being detected, surely minds capable of that would have done more. This, too, leads to my belief in a broader conspiracy that involved non-Muslims.

I will mention, too, that it is strange how thoroughly the Tower 7 story has been buried. Yes, Towers 1 and 2 were much taller, and the disaster more complete. But think about this: a 47 story building would be the tallest building in almost every city in the U.S.

Here is a list. The tallest building in Alabama is 35 stories. In Arizona and Arkansas 40. Only about half the state in the US have even ONE building that is that tall. Imagine the outcry and investigation if one of them spontaneously collapsed.

The official story of Tower 7 is that the combustion of office furnishings caused the collapse. Yet, what was on fire, where, that caused the collapse? How did the fires start?

It is stupid for conspiracy theorists to waste ANY time on Towers 1 and 2, since plainly the cause of the fire and structural instability was jetliners being flown into them. Never fight toe to toe when you can flank. The task in falsifying a paradigm is not attacking the points of strongest defense, but the weakest, and attacking them hard. This is basic.

It would be easy enough to test the official theory, by starting a fire in an area filled with the contents of the office where the first beam failure allegedly occurred–towards the top, if memory serves, making the issue of the genesis of the fire that much more problematic–and seeing what the peak temperature is, and how long it lasts, in the region of the structural steel.

I look in the office I work in, and I see nothing capable of sustaining ANY fire for more than an your, and that is likely pushing it.

The world is mad. It has always been mad. My work is dedicated to the ideal of helping more people go sane. I can do nothing but tell the truth as I see it for now, but that is a much better starting point, always, than an illusion.

I’ve been reading a bit of what I assume is history on Wikipedia, that concerning the Fasces, that axe in a handle made of many branches bound together, that I had thought was carried by the Roman Consuls.

I was wrong. Here is the link to the Fasces. Apparently they were carried by Lictors, who were in effect bodyguards to various officials. The axe heads had to be removed to carry them into the sacred inner part of the Rome, symbolizing that the authority of the magistrates the Lictors protected ended at that point.

This was not true of Dictators. This was the first time I read of this history, but apparently there were times in the history of the Roman Republic when the two consuls in effect ceded their authority to one individual who was called a Dictator, and whose bodyguards were allowed the run of Rome.

It is interesting to me that this symbol comes from the era of the Roman Republic, and not the Empire. It symbolizes binding together, and it symbolizes power.

I’m flirting with this topic, and will no doubt return to it. This warrants a bit of thought.

Given the ubiquity of this term, I think it worth contemplating what, if anything, is new with “Fascism”. First, read what Mussollini had to say about it here.

Several points. One, he understood himself as counteracting the decadence of Italy.

Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude.

This is the “he made the trains run on time” element of it.

He calls, in effect, for perpetual war, in service of Empire, in effect the police of the Romans themselves: “War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”

He rejects Marxian notions of history:

Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production…. Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect.

What is he saying here? What he is saying is that individuals can make a difference, but only certain individuals, certain exceptional individuals.

Before dilating on this point more, what does he have to say about the State?

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality — thus it may be called the “ethic” State….

…The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone….

What is interesting about all this is that Mussollini was himself formerly a Communist.

He is rejecting impersonal historical forces, but still retaining an understanding of an impersonal State, which exists as a whole, as an element in the historical process. So in effect he is replacing class warfare with overt imperialism, but still finding no place for the self organization of a Liberal society, saying that it merely “records” results instead of creating them.

But there is no such thing as an impersonal State any more than there are impersonal economic forces. Both Fascism and Communism depend, fundamentally, on a reification of “forces” which consist ENTIRELY in the aggregate motion of actual human beings. Both doctrines appeal to intellectuals precisely they abstract very complex systems into simple, easily cognized narratives that are WRONG.

The cart is before the horse. They want certain things to be true, so they work very hard to make them true, to put people who believe what they believe into positions where they can DICTATE history

Mussollini was able to wage war (ineffectively). Communists can kill members of unapproved classes. But neither action reflects “history”. There is no “State”.

I’m repeating myself. This is light thinking here, done on a day dedicated to relaxation. I am not thinking to the point of pain, which is what I do when I take up topics in earnest.

The question, though, is this: what is new, with this term “Fascism”? Consider the concept of proscription. It was used in the 1790’s in France, and it was used in 82 B.C. by Sulla.

What is the difference between a Fascist dictator, and a dictator like Sulla? Plainly, Mussollini had someone like Sulla in mind.

That leaders would seek to rule by fiat, and torture and kill political opponents is likely as old as history. So is the glorification of war, and the desire to get stuff by stealing it from others. Sulla, for example, took the possessions of his political enemies just like the Nazis stole the possessions of the Jews, and the Bolsheviks and their descendants stole the possessions of THEIR political opponents.

As I see it, this is the old battle of Good versus Evil, the creation of happiness ex nihilo versus the effort to conquer happiness by conquering others, to master resentment by transmuting it into actual violence.

We all live short lives, do we not, permeated by confusion? There are no letters in the sky to guide us, nor a physical book that fell from the sky to tell us what to do. And if there were, how could we be certain those words should be followed? Can we, in the end, be guided by something other than a goal we have in mind, combined with practical observation leading to consistent correllations between desired end and the means of accomplishing it?

Do Fascists really want misery? Some of the leaders, yes, but misery they inflict on others.

What most people want, though, is a sense of purpose, of knowing what to do, and having a place to live, to call home–which includes not primarily a physical place, but a mental and emotional place where rest is possible. Most people want to be understood, they want to feel valued, and to know what to do so that they will be valued. They need to know what the rules are. Mussollini invoked holiness and nobility. Translated, these mean “rules”.

A boat afloat at sea with no anchor, no sail, and no rudder is a lonely place. So much faith is needed to imagine a desirable end. So it occurs to some minds to impose an end, to imagine everyone else is as adrift as they feel themselves to be, and to impose for them–against their will, since they don’t know, on this reading, what is good for them (or they lack the will to pursure it)–a set of circumstances that they will be compelled to inhabit as a home.

Anti-Individualism NECESSARILY implies autocracy, to a greater or lesser extent–certainly inequality. Individualism means that rights, including the right to perception, inhere in all people equally. No one is above the law.

To invert this, as for example Keynes does in “End of Laissez Faire”, and imply that the locus of rights and power is other than in concrete organic beings we call in-dividuals, is necessarily to say that some people have more rights than others. Those within the State have more power than those external to the State.

Anti-Individualism is, then, necessarily injustice, if we define justice as all people being equal before the law.

Oh, this is getting a bit deep for me today. I’ll circle around again eventually, in my own time and way.

Max Weber thought we were destined to be confined in “iron cages” of reason, of rationality, of NECESSITY. In his world, all the fairies and demons, angels and unexplained beams of light were on the way out, on the verge of extinction. Matter was what was real, if I recall his epistemology right–or at least his metaphysical suspicions–and thus everything would one day be explained. Then, the course of life would become a road for all to travel together. There would be no other roads, because only ONE would conform to reason.

He went mad for a time. He came back, but it was no doubt quite unpleasant.

To the very day, this is the approximate project of the Socialists, who want to see in science the way forward to a definitive vision of what to do and why. We will look to neuroscience, and pharmacology. We will look to social science, and anthropology, and the right sorts of psychologist to tell us how to live. We see this daily in the newspaper: “experts” telling us how to think, how to act, what to do.

The Cult of the Left is in no small measure the Cult of the Expert, for the very simple reason that they have accepted the idea in principle that all principles are negotiable. There are no perduring truths, nothing to hang a hat on. Everything is being negotiated, discovered, redacted and informed with statistics.

My question is this: what sane person would want to live in such a world, where I might be asked to be someone else tomorrow, with no more reason than that some person with a degree says I should? What am I to infer when they change their minds, as they constantly do? Are they still pushing Vitamin E so assiduously? What happened to Gingko Biloba? Where is Dr. Spock, except in ghost?

There is nothing necessary about the iron cage, but it is endlessly interesting how much emotional appeal it has for so many people, to this very day. We do not live in a material universe. That idea was refuted, more or less decisively, some 50 years ago. Why do we still act as if we do?

We hear from the Left, from old hippies, “go with the flow”. There is some merit to this idea, but why does going with the flow, for them, equate to losing form entirely?

Oh, there is so much that is possible, and ignored and rejected by poorly thinking, poorly functioning, defective human beings, who have been blessed with lives they choose to live in direct opposition to the best that is possible, and to what was intended for them.

One of my favorite pasttimes is watching people, figuring them out. I’m not detached: I talk with people in bars (and elsewhere: I’m capable of being very, very social) all the time. Still, a few beers, and I start analyzing. Who is that person? And that person? What do they feel? How do they approach the world? Why?

There is this feeling of love that invades me from time to time (note: I’ve had a couple drinks tonight, so there may be a bit of the “I love you, man” thing going on), when I see how STUPID yet loveable people are. I love them BECAUSE of their flaws, because of the ineffective ways they are trying to solve real problems. Oh, we are all like that sometimes.

Hell, I’m one of the dumb ones. I must be. I’m not perfectly happy, yet I see no reason this should not be one of the states attainable on Earth. That I have not attained it means I am being stupid, and believe me I have ample reasons for believing that.

I said I lose no sleep over 9/11. Well, last night I was awake about every 30 minutes all night long either seeing a Russian conspiracy, or–and this is where the unconscious kicks in–wondering why glass won’t stretch. Why doesn’t glass flex? It is pernicious. We can see through it, but it won’t stretch at all. It just breaks. Such a pity. Someone needs to invent taffy glass.

Be that as it may, it felt like a species of insanity. Now, as Lewis Carroll, I believe in the voice of the Queen had it, I sometimes think two impossible things before breakfast, but even I have to tell the truth sometimes, and say this isn’t right.

I can analyze the symbolic content of this, and likely will, but the point that is running through my mind now is the fragility of experience. We think it is unitary, we think it is solid. We think we are material objects traversing a material land, and that everything is put together just so. We call this condition of thought sanity. Sanity is existing in a time and place according to the ideals of that time and place, being able to explain them, being able to defend them against heterodoxy (interesting that we see the word ortho-doxy, but not homo-doxy; the former formulation makes the repetitive, imitative aspect of it less obvious, presumably), and being quite satisfied that what one knows is what one needs to know, and that what one has not been told to know is either false or not worth knowing.

I have long felt that being open to the idea of being insane CAN be useful, although not necessarily. For me, I want to live in a more or less orderly space, but I also want to venture out from time to time, to see what else there is to see, to find out what else there is to know.

No box with 6 sides can ever close. No world with a finite number of dimensions can be said to exist.

Oh, that, the sound of one hand clapping, and a pint of whiskey might bring you to the edge–but oh it is just over there, not here, on the other side of the dark river–of enlightenment. It’s OK: I’ll be sitting there next to you, still well satisfied it was a good time.

Let’s be dumbasses together. It’s plainly a burgeoning field. You lead, and I’ll fail to follow. We can take turns.