Author: White Whale

Presumably you know Oxy- stands for Oxford. Why ask dogs not to bark, cats not to meow, or leftist hacks not to propose salt water for our economic thirst?

Here he goes again: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0713-L15

“The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. ” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

This whole idea depends on this magical fantasy that governments have money. They don’t. They have the power to tax, the power to borrow, and the power–in most nations, not this one–to create money.

Always, always, always, the government is in the end either we the people–meaning we self-fund our own services–or We the Technocrats, who arrogantly choose winners and losers in an anti-free market fashion, which in aggregate does horrible damage to the private sector, which is the only sustainable source of wealth production and job creation.

Paul Krugman causes human suffering. He causes unnecessary human suffering: broken homes, chronic unemployment, depressed wages, bankrupt businesses.

If only he were capable of shame; but alas human history–particularly recent human history–is filled to overflowing with sanctimonious, destructive assholes like him.

I visited a reproduction of the cabin Bill Monroe spent his latter teen years in, and which was quite common in his day, and not entirely uncommon to this very day in some parts of the country, even if they now have more rooms. His mother died when he was eight, if memory serves, and his father when he was 16. That sort of thing used to be common even in this nation, prior to the advent of all of the benefits of a largely free market economy.

The cabin belonged to his Uncle Pen, who himself had had two children, both of whom died, and after which his wife left him. He lived all alone until Monroe came along, and played the fiddle every night.

The thing was one room, and of course the privy would have been in the back and consisted in a structure built over a hole in the ground, presumably without toilet paper. The cablin was cooler than I would have supposed, since the walls were quite thick and without leaks.

They ate fatback, molasses and corn cakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

This is the song about him: Uncle Pen. This music is very energetic, since it is intended for sad people leading hard, uncomfortable lives, and just trying to make their way in the world. They would often play all night long.

Most of the world still lives like this, and the policies designed to help them have, in aggregate, made things worse. For much of the world, you could take this basic poverty, make food unreliable, and add political oppression enabled by foreign aid.

Anyway, here are the lyrics:

Oh the people would come from far away
They’d dance all night till the break of day
When the caller hollered “do-se-do”
You knew Uncle Pen was ready to go

Late in the evening about sundown
High on the hill and above the town
Uncle Pen played the fiddle lord how it would ring
You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing

He played an old piece he called “Soldier’s Joy”
And the one called “The Boston Boy”
The greatest of all was “Jenny Lynn”
To me that’s where the fiddle begins

I’ll never forget that mournful day
When Uncle Pen was called away
They hung up his fiddle, they hung up his bow
They knew it was time for him to go

I have been seeing over the past several years cases of “conservative” who either don’t understand what it is the creed stands for; or who are active fifth columnists, who are adopting the mantle of conservatism in order to disrupt it.

It is important to grasp that for Leftists their politics is their way of life, their source of meaning. It is as inconceivable to them to listen openly to other voices as it would be for an Italian to pretend he was Chinese. Their entire sense of self, the part of us that holds our worlds and our lives together, depends on conformity to the notions that: “liberals” help the poor and downtrodden; that they are good for the economy; that they are the ones who support freedom; and that they have helped the world in aggregate, through economic aid, and by opposing wars of “oppression” and capitalist “exploitation”.

All of these notions are wrong. For years I have asked them in their own blogs and websites to justify themselves, and they can’t do it, in the face of determined, principled and informed opposition.

What they can and do do is disinform and sneak around. They engage in character assssination, and censorship. They engage in the social terrorism of demonising and protesting violently anyone and anything their leaders upload into their soft heads as “not like us”. They oppose all “alterity”–to use an academic term ironically and quite accurately–whatsoever.

Now, I have a strong personality. But it never migrates by default to insult. Yes, I can and do make general characterizations like those above regularly. These are not prejudices. They are “judices”, if I might coin a term, which are based upon intimate and sustained familiarity with the breed since before I entered college.

And you can speak usefully of the breed, in a way you cannot, for example, speak of African Americans, because conformity to a core ideology DEFINES it. If you don’t subscribe to that ideology and worldview, then I am not talking about you.

In any event, I am blocked currently from posting at Pajamas Media and Front Page Magazine, and as I mentioned just had a comment removed from Forbes. With regard to Front Page I believe David Horowitz made a serious error hiring David something, who seems to have de facto control of the blog. The guy spent his entire college career as a hard core Leftist, wrote a dissertation on David, and then somehow had some sort of epiphany which led to becoming a conservative. I don’t buy it.

PJTV, no idea what the issue is. I have never posting anything insulting or vulgar–certainly not of the sort that is to be seen regularly on there. I suspect there is someone editing the blog who is either really wobbly as a conservative, or an outright leftist. I knock heads when I debate. It’s a full contact sport, but it never, ever devolves solely to personal attacks on my part. That is always a species of idiocy to me, and I leave it to my opponents, who as a general rule start and end with it.

Yesterday or the day before I was very disappointed to read an article on the lightbulb controversy by Jonathan Seidl–at “The Blaze”–that was more or less an open apologetic to the leftist view on this. Yes, Republicans were involved, but the crop in office had just been handed a decisive defeat by Democrats in 2006.

This lightbulb law is a patent infringement in free markets in America. What that means is that powerful corporations–GE in particular–are using law to accomplish de facto monopolistic power that a truly free market would not have given them. We the consumers lose. The law is not necessary. If the bulbs make economic sense, they will sell themselves. If they don’t, then we are being forced to buy an inferior product at inflated prices.

Further, these things generate mercury vapors when broken. They have to be recycled by professionals. What this means is that this law is going to enable gangsters–a lot of waste disposal companies are run by Teamsters, who are largely run by gangsters, especially on the East Coast–to vastly expand their business, and probably rationalize the Federal Government imposing a law REQUIRING us to recycle.

No true conservative would fail to see these things; or to oppose the basic idea of the Federal Goverment interfering in our liberty. There is no difference between this, and mandating the level of nicotine in cigarettes, the alcohol in booze, the type of breakfast cereal we can buy, the kind of fans, and dryers, and washing machines, and hair dryers, etc, etc, etc we can buy. NONE of this was granted them in the Commerce Clause. They arrogated it to themselves, and cowardly politicians and judges–my contempt for the Supreme Court is in general quite profound, and greater than that of politicians, since the Justices (so-called0 do not have to worry about reelection, and are granted time to think about the consequences of their decisions–have let all this stand.

The net with regard to this post is that “by their fruits shall you know them”. If it looks like a chicken, and runs like a chicken, it is probably a chicken. We live in a sea of fools and cowards. I say this not JUST because I am being irritable–that I am, for cause, some well beyond the business of anyone reading this–but because on balance, from where I am sitting, that is the disgusting reality.

I had what was for me a hard day. By many standards, it was easy. Still, I have had a bit of whiskey. More substantive, abtruse ideas occurred to me today, but I will content myself with this one idea.

What is a perhaps manageable but for mr obligatory element of existence is imagination. Specifically, I see, often, how things could and should be. I see what should have been, and was not. I see, in so many words, the aborted children, whose lives were not just ended by abortion, but by failing to conceive them in the first place. I see the people who died, and were thus unable to father or mother anything. I mean this primarily figuratively, but literally as well.

I see the human waste brought about by gratuitous wars, and by murderous economic policy, of the sort visited by the vicious Leftist West on the Third World lo these last 60 years or so. I see the unnecssary dirt floors, and the unnecessary political murder, torture, and incarceration. I see flippant, grandiose, self congratulatory snf utterly reprehensible Western academics eating Thai food, feeling morally superior for their “stances”, but feeling NONE of the sufferings their idiotic ideologies actually lead to.

It is one thing to feel the pain of the world: another again to see it against the backdrop of what was possible, and willed out of existence by stupid and greedy people, none of whom were Capistalists, and all of whom arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of people they neither understood nor actually cared about.

Ironically, the author was an Argentinian. The Argentines are among the most economically stupid people this world has yet produced. Their collapse was preventable, with a shred of discipline and common sense.

Yet, it is to them we must look as we contemplate the specatacle of such an idiotic and short sighted America. I can’t blame him for deleting me, of course: he is stupid, and no debate would have gone his way. Hard to make a living if you are handed your ass in a public forum discussing your own column.

What it is essential to grasp is that the Federal Reserve—which might more accurately be described as “the private banking cartel to whom we the American people have entrusted the control over the value of our money and investments”—can only solve problems it creates.

On Bernanke’s own account—given here http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm –the Federal Reserve played the pivotal role in the crash which began the Depression, by first inflating the currency, then deflating it.

This article is misleading, however, in that he uses it to take shots at gold. Here is the simple truth: if money is tied to gold, and gold is in finite supply—which it manifestly is—then inflating the currency is much harder.
Keynesian socialists hate this, because the essence of their Fabian strategy is the price derangement that follows both inherently unproductive “stimulus” spending, and coupled—as today—with inflation.

What needs to be understood about inflation is that it is not primarily an increase in prices. It is an increase in the money supply, which is to say money that COULD be spent. We don’t know where the money Bernanke is printing is going. Virtually everything this moral midget does is hidden from us. Prices only go up when money is competing for money. If he’s sending this money to foreign banks, who are keeping it on their shores, then we will see no price inflation at all.
What you have to grasp, though, is that money creation is inherently and necessarily wealth transfer. If I give you a check created from nothing, and you go buy something, I just took that something from the economy as a whole. I allocated wealth to myself.

My series on the topics of monetary policy, the Fed, Keynes, and my fix for it all is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Edit: Fontevecchia is the guy’s name. Me, I don’t mind putting on waders and heading out into the shit to meet the enemy on his own ground. If you are offended by the smell of manure which cannot even be used as fertilizer, avoid this name.

The shortest path to a clear conscience is a poor memory. Witness hippies, who fail to this day to see their role in the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands.

Corrollary: the shortest path to a useful moral sense is a large volume of knowledge and practical experience.

The task of the TSA–as stated, since I believe other purposes have been added–is to sift potential threats from law abiding citizens. As I mentioned in I think the previous post, the only way to ensure that no “signal”–a terrorist with the intention and physical ability to commandeer or destroy a plane in flight–gets through is to treat everyone like criminals. There is no logical limit to this, if we have no idea what the actual signal is.

Put another way, it is quite possible we would have few to no incidents every year if we did NO security screening. We don’t screen buses, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen trains, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen subway passengers. Yet, in that confined space, a well constructed bomb could kill nearly as many people as destroying a plane in flight.

Some 32,000 people died last year in traffic accidents, or about 93 a day if memory serves. None died in terrorist attacks on our airliners. Nor the year before that. Nor the year before that, nor. . . to 2001, which was an exceptional year, both looking to previous years, and since.

The statistical chance of each of dying at some point is 100%. The question is how far short of our otherwise maximal life expectancy this will happen.

I literally believe that it would not be that big a deal if an airliner or two got hijacked or blown up, for the simple reason that we are already accepting 32,000 annual deaths as the cost of the freedom to drive. Is adding a few hundred to that, in the grand scheme of things, really that big a deal?

Nukes are huge threat. Crashing jets, not so much. We know now that if they get commandeered, we need to shoot them down. Commandeering them quickly, now, is very difficult simply because the cockpit is locked.

The net is that as far as I can tell, the actual signal is at or close to zero. The efforts to detect it–with massive abrogations of basic freedoms–are nowhere near proportionate to the actual threat. The threat is being used to curtail rights; the screenings are not, therefore, primarily being used to catch would-be terrorists, but to condition Americans to accept increasingly intrusive Federal government.

Now, I have argued and continue to believe, in the abstract, that the only sensible explanation for the collapse of Tower 7 on 9/11–which most people have not even heard of–is that more agents were involved than those in the airplanes. I make that case here (and in the link embedded in the front). This in turn implies that the entire set of events of 9/11 included participants who have not been identified.

We are seeing the TSA act in increasingly paramilitary ways. They have formed what they call “Viper” teams, which in effect takes the worst elements of airport “security” on the road, such that they can perform physical searches of random people who have done nothing but buy a bus ticket. Presumably at some point they will want the authority to stop us in the mall or grocery store, all for threats which have taken no lives in ten years.

I am increasingly persuaded that the most paranoid takes on 9/11 may have been in broad stroke accurate, in that the fear of terrorism that was invoked is being used to erode our fundamental freedom. TSA’s mandate of nudity or molestation is a blatent and utterly indefensible violation of the Fourth Amendment, whose essence is that if you have done nothing suspicious, you are to be left alone. It would be more effective from a crime fighting perspective to spend all day stopping and searching random people, but that is effectively a Fascist State, quite literally. It is being enacted under our noses.

But let me put on my rose colored glasses, and look at this in the most benign way possible. What people have to understand is that government agencies take on lives of their own. In the private sector, competition forces companies to improve quality and cut costs. The motivation is the desire for profit, and to avoid business failure.

In the public sector, however, “profit” is calculated entirely differently. It is figuring out ways to get more people on your payroll, and how to get them paid more money. People making careers out of it learn to figure out ways to create problems that may or may not exist, so that they can justify higher and higher allocations of our tax dollars.

In the private sector, sustained incompetence leads to bankruptcy. In the public sector, there is no cost to incompetence, since the only punishments are political, and which can be managed entirely externally to actually effectively accomplishing your stated mission. Everyone involved has every reason to increase the size and scope of the mission, and ZERO–make that NEGATIVE–incentives to economize, unless and until the legislators and executives get after them.

To be clear, there is no cost to the people who spend other peoples money of spending that money. They actually benefit more, the more they spend. Add to this the patently farcical claim that government jobs are sustainable and good for the economy, and you have a huge problem.

The TSA obviously benefits by increasing the scope of its mission. Since they have not stopped any terrorist attacks in ten years, plainly either they need to be downsized, or lighten up on security, but even absent the consideration of more sinister motives, they have every reason to grow every year until Congress stops approving the funding. To grow, obviously they have to move into new “market segments”, new allocations of labor, and that too–combined with utter and complete Constitutional ignorance, failure of the basic process of perceiving long term consequences, and excessive machismo–would also explain the VIPER squads.

This certainly does not apply to all of them, but some cops really get off on uniforms, and with taking away people’s rights. I think we can with safety assume the Obama Administration is looking for and hiring those sorts of people preferentially.

If you watch that video, what these jackasses did was literally make an entire busload of people take part in what amounted to a training exercise. This included patting down and searching the baggage of people they had no cause to suspect had committed a crime, and who had not authorized this search in advance.

That should make everyone with a heartbeat and a shred of common sense very nervous. These are Federal agents, doing things even the FBI can’t get away with, and who ultimately report not to Congress but to the President.

Personally, I think the TSA and DHS should be disbanded. As Reagan said, though, approximately, there is nothing closer to eternal life than a federal agency. That, for the reasons I mentioned. Too many careers and incomes become dependent on sustaining the thing, and they are always spending someone else’s money.

I woke up this morning remembering vaguely having written something about Lady Gaga, and fearing I had gone a post too far. I read it this morning, and it isn’t too awful, even if sentimemental in the way people who have thoroughly “relaxed” get. Me, at any rate. I was going to delete it, but think I’ll just leave it.

I worked out my ex post facto rationalization, though, and thought it worth sharing.

Experience flows into all of us, all of our conscious, waking hours, which includes our dream time. On this base of experience, we inflict patterns. I say inflict, since reality is what it is, the waters flow according to gravity, and these processes need no commentary. What we need, though, are maps, to get from Point A to Point B, reliably, if possible.

Now, some patterns are simply wrong. Socialism as a means of raising the living conditions of the poor does not work. As a means of aggregating power, it does work. But that is not the stated goal, for most.

What we call stupidity is simply a persistent inability to develop accurate patterns–or to understand those granted by education or experience–to move reliably from A to B.

Yet, this word “stupidity” refers to an average, a persisting statistical tendency.

In Signal Theory, you have always some mixture of noise and signal. The only way to eliminate all noise is to eliminate all signal, and the only way to perceive all signals is to allow all noise.

To the point here, stupidity is a necessary element in proper perception. You have to be willing to be stupid at times in order to be intelligent. You have to take educated guesses, and be wrong sometimes, in order to learn at your maximal rate.

As I have pointed out several times, you can’t “be” intelligent. Nor can you “be” stupid. Not all the time, on all topics.

We see from time to time the word “paranoid”. In common usage, what does this mean? Wrong. It is stupidity combined with fear. Yet, as one studies human history, the patterns of oppression are ubiquitous. Patterns of the desire for oppression are, today, ubiquitous among those educating our children. This is simple fact.

Virtually no faculty member of any university in the country would feel shame among their colleagues announcing a sympathy for class warfare and the coerced “redistribution of wealth” (which of course in practice means “eviscerating our collective wealth production capability”), by any means necessary. I myself have seen a tenured professor announce openly that he was a Marxist. He was able to be confident that nobody would accuse him of being the Fascist that this sympathy plainly implies.

Few thoughts with my first cup of coffee.

Can I, without being accused of playing for the “other team”, admit I think Lady Gaga has more singing talent than Madonna?

To be clear, I am not a huge fan. I just see this early–20-somthing girl filling stadiums. I don’t own any of her albums, and am at this moment listening to Big and Rich. Wait, make that Miranda Lambert. If Blske Shelton doesn’t work out, I’m definitely available. Ah, Martina McBride in a tear-jerker, “Concrete Angel”.

Hell: whiskey. What do you do with admiration? People who go out and risk themselves? How do you produce, logically, whatever the hell Lady Gaga’s real name is? She was twelve and shy once, wasn’t she?

Let me just say, then retire for the evening, that I love deeply all who give what they have, plus more. If you give all you have, and something is left, you have grown, haven’t you?

I talked in a previous post about how tough I am. This is in large measure a lie. I’m not tough: I keep going, often after momentary failures brought on in part by a lack of sustained discipline. I know truly tough people, and I could not keep up with them over the long haul.

Apparently like most kids that age (roughly 5-11) I used to like Wolverine, in the X-men. But the way I remember him is he was usually the first into many fights, and the first to get his clock cleaned. The other X-men did more of the actual work. His main attribute was often that he survived things others couldn’t. He couldn’t fly, he couldn’t jump, he couldn’t project anything. He just kept going, and he could cut things with his claws. (as I think about it, with changing attitudes towards extreme violence, this role may have changed a bit; I always remember his claws being out, but never killing anyone). This is kind of how I think about myself.

The attribute I grant myself–and I share this because it may be more generally useful for someone out there–is the capacity to hold extreme emotions, and extreme thoughts in close proximity and generating imaginative insightes from their interaction. This is a painful process, holding everything in place. I visualize it as a sort of X-ray, where you have to project it from more than one angle to get a three dimensional view.

Reason happens within a field. It is never enough by itself. Biologically, our rationality is, in my understanding, a subset of our larger neurological complex. To follow lines well, you have to embed them within a field of trained emotion.

This is a subtle insight–and I’m not completely sure this isn’t BS–but I thought the words worth typing.