Author: White Whale

A question I ask myself from time to time is: whose life am I living? Am I living my own life? We all encounter objections, from time to time, to who we are. How willing are you to articulate who you are and why?

I sometimes place myself imaginatively in people’s positions, historically. Today, I have been trying to imagine sitting in a boat, rowing, for a month at a time, eating fermented milk that tasted nothing like yogurt. You wake up, row, then pass out at some point from fatigue, sitting on a not very comfortable bench. The night, perhaps, is spent floating. Then you do it again. You never change your clothes, and of course deodorant has not been invented yet.

Eventually you make it, say, to Paris. You and yours invade, and everything is possible. You can take anything you see. You can take any woman you see. She can be your wife, or you can simply have your way, then it is done. You take jewelry, religious icons, clothes, and food. You take slaves (derived from “Slav”: Russia is derived from a Viking word).

The raid ends, then you and your compatriots, possibly bolstered by some women and shackeled human beings, sail/row back to Norway/Sweden/Denmark. You spend the winter months doing little.

What sort of life is this? Is it a good life? An ironic and obvious question I ask myself from time to time is: “should the Scandinavians pay reparations for the Viking Age?”

History needs to be viewed from a detached perspective. None of us are innocent. None of us are free, absolutely.

Personally, reading history makes me sad. One can see so clearly what could have been done, and wasn’t. Ah: it is what it is.

The orthodox narrative as far as the Vikings is that they forced loose collectives to become kingdoms. Louis the Sixteenth descended from a line that began, if memory serves, after the first sack of Paris.

Anger and greed are always on the menu. Everyone reading this, in all likelihood, should count themselves lucky. We can still end life on earth, but damn if we haven’t achieved a lot of peace in the meantime.

Enter yourself in history, and see what was done, by whom. Saintliness is in rare supply, and the obvious and gratuitous satisfaction of other desires on ubiquitous display.

I’m increasingly persuaded that happiness is impossible if you do not enjoy work of all sorts–if you do not view work as enjoyable creation.

Personally, my work sometimes involves hard physical labor, with streams of sweat pouring out of me, dripping everywhere I go. I follow it with whiskey and very, very good sleep.

But–and I recall having mentioned this before–I get angry sometimes. Something is supposed to work, and it doesn’t. I was yelling and cussing in the middle of last night. The problems usually don’t even have the courtesy to be big things, but insist on being small and hidden, laughing like little gremlins or leprechauns at you.

This is in your head, of course. The question remains: what do you do when your work seems to fight back? Do you get angry, or do you realize that a golden opportunity has been granted you, in the form of a gauntlet thrown down, challenging you to maintain your cool and solve the problem?

I calmed myself down, and went back to it. It seems to me most of life is like this, though. If you can learn to enjoy the process of altering mind and matter through concerted effort, then most of what you HAVE to do, you will WANT to do.

Famously (to me, at any rate, since this is one of the few things he said that made absolute sense to me, so I quote it a lot), Freud said that the keys to happiness were “love and work” (or maybe “Work and Love”; it certainly wasn’t “flippancy and cigars”). It seems to me you love the way you work. The two are related. Love is always at least half what you give. Giving is work. Therefore you relate to others the way you work.

How do you do this? Are you patient, observant, flexible and persistent? Do you try to force things? Do you go hard, then stop? Are you lazy and complacent?

I can’t resist adding as well, that needing someone is not at all the same as loving them. You need food and water. Only weak people look first to using other people to help them maintain their intrapersonal and social homeostasis. What is desired is the capacity to exist independently, first; only then can you see other people as they are, and do for them what needs doing, and not what is most emotionally convenient for you.

I just watched an enjoyably witty and unpredictable movie targeted largely at teenagers called “Bandslam”. It is funny how the effect differs when you watch a movie that disrupts cliches. Generally speaking, of course, qualitative alterations are to the negative. Some consider it clever when the bad guy wins.

But here, it was all to the positive. Particularly if you have teenagers, I’d encourage you to watch it with your family. Some scenes may not be appropriate for kids under 13–I can’t remember–but older than that should be fine, at least in our day and age.

It got me to thinking, too. We live our lives in programmed ways. We watch movies, hundreds of them, in which the details vary only slightly within templates that are virtually indestructible. Our work is routinized. Most of us could drive to work in our sleep.

We tend, I think, to think of the future as having a track, of the present being on a line that is moving inexorably forward on that line. All that needs to be done to diagnose the future is a determination of the present. For Marx, all signs pointed to revolution. To Malthus and thousands of his followers today, to starvation. They tell us that we will all die if we don’t stop reproducing. To progressives, to further government control. For those worried about our debt, to financial chaos.

Yet, I would suggest the present is much more like a tornado, moving about unpredictably, going this way and that. Countless futures die in every moment, and countless more are born.

We do not live in lines: we live in the present. That is the only place we can ever be. And the best way to ensure a good future is to make our present the best it can be.

I’m a big fan of John Wooden, and he believed, with Cervantes, that the real enjoyment was in the doing, not the accomplishing, in the journey, and not the goal. His most enjoyable moments, if I’m reading him rightly, occurred daily, after well orchestrated and executed practices. He could see the future in his practice gym. That is where the games were won.

There was no golden past. Nothing was ever perfect, anywhere. If we had footage of our Founding Fathers arguing in the Continental Congress over everything, we would have doubted the possibility of the survival of our nation.

All we can do is look to today. Here is a poem I first read many years ago in Dale Carnegies excellent “How to stop worrying and start living”:

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

Love,
parcelled out in ounces,
stored in sanitized bags
in the freezer:

This is where Rage against the Machine gets its name from.

Can we not agree that some species of madness are therapeutic in a land where the ground has grown soft?

Do we need boats, or snowshoes? Can a compass without magnetism work?

Whither the suspense: sleep or confused engagement?

Edit: do you the reader ever think like this? Do you believe that reason can operate without a wide net? Can lines ever be trusted without consulting circles?

If all this sounds like bullshit, move on: I’m not talking to you.

It really is essential to grasp the demonic, consciously destructive nature of the work of Keynes. He was not wrong. There is no point in arguing Keynes versus Hayek. The answers are self evident to competent minds filled with accurate facts. The argument is lunacy versus reason, the wrecking ball versus brick and mortar.

As I thought about it this morning, I got to thinking about his coalmine analogy, reliably reproduced by reliable idiot Paul Krugman:

What is he arguing for? The diversion of money from productive to non-productive uses; the channelling of money from the actual economy to an artificial economy created by the government that will cease the moment the government stops spending money.

But the longer you can get the government to sustain an artificial economy, the more damage you do to the actual economy, and most importantly, the more DEPENDENT you make more people on the government. As I have said, this makes them pliable.

This is what was done in the Great Depression by FDR. He did “stimulus” spending on things–like the TVA–that were not inherently productive, and he deranged prices through wage and price controls.

A further consideration, plainly operative in our own day, is the mystification that deficit spending produces with respect to clarity on the part of producers what their future costs will be. Clearly, at some point tax rates or interest rates will go up, but it is hard to say when and how much. How do you price your products? How do you plan production? Is it not easier to produce less, and wait and see? Is it not more intelligent?

Add to that ridiculous idiocies like Obamacare and you get long term, unnecessary, economic malaise.

I was thinking the other day, also, about the French banlieus (spelling close), which are large housing complexes that are isolated from the economy. They are government built and maintained, but they CANNOT, of their nature, be self reliant. If we take as one pole of a continuum a subsistence farmer, who doesn’t really need anything from anyone, the opposite pole is that of people whose housing and income is provided by the goverment, and who are incapable of any independent economic activity of their own. No wonder they riot.

It is important to grasp that deep, profound intelligence can coexist in the same mind with profound evil. Not only can it, but it often does.

If you are only hard, you are cruel. If you are only soft, you are irrelevant.

The task of Goodness it to be relevant–to make a difference–but self evidently not to take pleasure from cruelty. I do strongly believe, though, that it is necessary at times to act cruelly, as in military drill instructors, and parents who want self reliant children.

If you’re sending snails out in the world without their shells, that is true cruelty. You have sentenced them to a life of pain.

As I ponder this notion of price derangement, the vision comes to me of setting small fires all over the economy, whose source no one can determine. Some of them–like the housing bubble–become quite large. Always there are these autonomous entities wandering our economic landscape and disrupting everything that is stable.

There are many examples, but let’s pick Davis-Bacon wages as an example. This scheme was enacted under Hoover, and stipulates, in effect, that any project involving labor pay above market wages. This is great for those who get those wages. It is bad for all the people who could have underbid them, and gotten work, but who couldn’t, by law. It is bad for taxpayers, who of course get more money siphoned out of their pockets. And to the point here it is a price derangement scheme, in which the proper value of labor is disrupted.

Mad genius that he was, he could clearly see that, in good times and bad, the constant prevention of the achievement and maintenance of rational pricing would over time cause recurring crises–of the sort Marx predicted, but which never occurred, forcing Leftists to “validate” him by causing disasters intentionally–and if the “solution” was always further price derangement, sooner or later the whole house of cards would collapse. This was his goal.

A further thought occurred to me today. I was sitting in a hipster bar, where everyone has long hair, beards of various sorts, where some of the women look like mannequins and others pincushions, and where everybody has a scooter. Somewhat incongruously, there was a very good bluegrass band playing. Bluegrass is real music.

Obviously, this is the sort of place where artwork of various sorts is on display. I looked at a crudely rendered painting of a women, where her breasts physically emerged from the canvas. Oi: not really that clever. Then I realized they were skulls. The skull theme again. It’s all around you if you pay attention. Death and aggression.

Anyway, it occurred to me that moral relativism is consonant with, resonates with, is systemically connected with, the abandonment of the gold standard. Eradicating the gold standard was a virtual obsession with Keynes, and was accomplished early in FDR’s first term.

What does abandoning the gold standard do? It makes price derangement easier. Unbacked currencies can be inflated and deflated almost at will.

One gets the sense that there he was, in Paris for the WW1 negotiations, furious at the terms imposed on the Germans. He writes a scathing condemnation of the Versailles Treaty in the work that made him famous: “Economic Consequences of the Peace”, where among other things he points out that inflation is a means of wealth confiscation, and that it had been lauded by Lenin as the best means of undermining Capitalism”.

Lightbulb moment, somewhere in the early 20’s, perhaps a bit later: inflation AND deflation derange prices, and the two combined at the same time will create an invisible and damaging wave that will cause problems that can always be claimed to be curable by government. This allows a gradual take-over of all economic sectors that will ACCEPTED by the people, since they will be in crisis, and the consequences of which will only gradually dawn on them, after it is too late.

This was the task he set himself, and the “intellectual” underpinning of which he clearly accomplished.

Moral relativism: in what does this consist? Does it not consist, practically and empirically, in condemnation of specific practices, but never an affirmation of actually universal values. We can judge racism in this country, but not in other nations.

What gold does is anchor value. What moral systems–meaning systems, in my rendering–do is anchor meaning. If values are allowed to float, then they become unclear, do they not? A sense of right and wrong becomes diffused, then gone. You have the commands of the leaders, but that does not work on a sacral level. There is no sublimation of pain into meaning. All you have is pain.

So I watch these people who poke thick rods through their noses, and eyebrows, and get tattoos all over their body. What they are doing is functional for them, useful for them, but only based upon defective starting points.

One last thought, then VOB: I was watching something like Jackass, but different. Guys driving camper trucks over ramps and getting 20′ air, then crashing. Flipping go-carts in water pools. Boys being boys.

This is male masochism. I have said for years that most boys are lucky to make it to physical adulthood. Males just take risks, and enjoy taking risks, well knowing what the possible results are. In olden days, this was the impulse behind war. The goal is to win, but many men just want to get it on, and see who prevails. You have energy, and you want to walk into a wall and knock it over.

We have reached a point in our cultural history where we can begin asking general questions about what sort of life we want in the future. There are many correct answers to this question, and as I have often argued, I expect the best ones to be local. Meaning, like investment, is best deployed locally, using local information and intelligence.

We can and should ask questions, though, like “what POSITIVE role has and does war play, and how can it be replaced?” What sorts of pain are desirable, and how best should we pursue them consciously?

Well qualified people are coming forward stating that Obama’s purported birth certificate is a forgery. http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=316749

When is someone in our government going to grow the balls to challenge him on this? I understand politics, but the essence of the Alinskyan method is terror, and if you give in to it, it works, to the detriment of everyone but the sociopathic sons of bitches trying to erect hell on earth.

This situation is very simple: if Obama had had a birth certificate, he would have released it in 2008. He did not. He put a picture of tampered document on the internet, along with the word of campaign supporters that it was real.

There are two failures here, both inexcusable: first, the Supreme Court SHOULD have rendered a judgment as to whether or not a man with a foreign national father was “natural born”. Self evidently, the warranted concern on the part of the Founders would have been divided loyalties, and in point of fact Obama has undermined our special relationship with England, and it would seem obvious beyond the need for argument that his identification with his Kenyan father–the book, remember, was “Dreams from my father”–has played a role in this.

Secondly, the Supreme Court should have forced a disclosure of a legally valid document with respect to the birth certificate. The lawsuits were there; they could have heard them, and done their job.

Cowards that they are, they failed in both tasks. We can still hope that someone in our government will do their jobs, but right now I want to spit in their collective faces for shaming our proud history, and all the brave men and women who died protecting our nation–and who used their lives building our nation–by letting patent lies with respect to important issues pass by without action.

I don’t have time to type out some of his memorable statements, but I want to strongly recommend students of economics–which should include people who genuinely want to help the poor, but want to do so from a position of intellectual clarity, and not childish sentimentalism–read Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion”.

I think the evidence speaks clearly that so-called “aid” policies have had the net effect over the last 60 years or so of promoting totalitarianism, slowing or halting economic development, and contributing to even wider poverty throughout the world.

Put another way, leftist politics have damaged the lives of nearly every person on the planet Earth, in clearly identifiable and quantifiable ways.