Author: White Whale

This is disingenuous even for him.

First, though, I have not explained recently why I single out Krugman. The reason is simple: as the messenger of economically disastrous–and lunatic– policies, as a “thinker” (actually, why don’t we insert “ideological activist” within those brackets?) who has a wide audience, he is arguably the single most dangerous non-politician in the country. Certainly, his name needs to appear on a short list that includes George Soros, and the elitists Obama has gathered around him to do everything they can to impose through fiat what they cannot get legislated.

If the task is job creation, the private sector does that. Is it smarter to take their money, spend it on pet projects favored by people who have never had jobs, then hope it trickles back to them; or does it make more sense to make more capital available to the people who use it to fund business growth and the jobs that go with it? Your answer literally speaks to your capacity for the use of reason.

I want to be clear: if the task is to eradicate all competitors to the Ivy League-ish, Fabian, morally weak but intellectually dogmatic people who think they are privy to a uniquely valuable understanding of how the world “really works”, then Keynesian economics works. The task JMK set himself was eroding private wealth and economic and personal liberty, under the cloak of helping increase private wealth and liberty. You see, these people are liars and liars lie. That’s what they do. That is the sort of statement that has become difficult to make in our post-rational age.

Anyway, Keynes–strike that, Krugman–hits all the usual suspects: tax cuts, war with Iraq, deregulation. These have by now become for synchronized leftists become little more than trigger points. They spasm when he says how high. They lie when he says tell the truth. They are perfectly trained.

But in the world most of us occupy, in which fact and reason are studied judiciously to develop statements which conform well to visible reality, Krugman is simply wrong.

The Bush tax cuts increased dramatically the share of taxes paid by the rich. They weren’t tax cuts at all. That demographic paid more. In most cases, presumably they paid more because they made more. They made more since they engaged in more economically productive activity. That activity is what creates jobs.

Net revenues to the government also went up under Bush. None of the irrationalists who want to pretend Keynes was other than deviant moral monster (exhibit A is his close relationship with George Bernard Shaw) ever take not of what actual receipts are. Deficits go up because WE SPEND MORE MONEY. If you increase you income 10%, and increase your spending 20%, is it the part of reason to argue that the increase in income was bad? Of course not.

War on Iraq: yes, it was expensive. So too has been the War on Poverty. The difference is that we won in Iraq, and we have been losing the War on Poverty since it was launched. I see no way of believing, on the contrary, that it has not played a major role in the IMPOVERISHMENT of large segments of our nation. Where two parent families were the norm, now they are gone.

Krugman won’t discuss this. Of course, he could: he seemingly has no moral compass or particular attachment to actually helping improve the lives of ordinary, normal people, so no doubt he can spin failure into genius, and horror into excitement.

Finally, the Great Recession. How did it start? The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Significance? They backed a very large segment of the mortgage-backed securities whose belated devaluation by the Credit Rating Agencies provoked the cash flow crisis that created the larger problem. The whole reason the Credit Ratings Agencies were able to pretend that securities of unknown and unknowable value were golden is that they were backed by, what? The full faith of the Federal Government. Bail-outs were promised to all.

The government ENABLED the crisis.

I will frankly never really understand how people like Krugman look in their mirrors with other than naked self loathing. He is not working to help the lives of anyone. He is protecting a fundamentally corrupt system–characterized by Central Banks who are only too happy to support his frequent calls for more spending, since they can print the money to make it happen–while offering nothing that will help John Q. Average on the street.

It is not obvious, but the end game of the socialists–the nihilists–who push so hard for the eradication of American culture is the end of all other cultures as well. They don’t want Mexicans to behave like Mexicans (as if such a diverse nation could be reduced to some uniform set of behaviors in the first place), or African Americans like African Americans. Everything must be the same.

I was watching this today in my mind, in a clear sky that was raining, and it occurred to me that what we want is negotiation. What we want, really, is the reconciliation of varying truth and behavioral narratives (truth and behavior can be separated, as in ritual).

What do we do when we negotiate a price? We compare two different desire sets, and reconcile them in such a way that in a condition of freedom both are satisfied. Is the negotiation of culture any different?

Why is American culture so ubiquitous? Simple: to many people, it has value. We are the ones who solved the problem of self government, even if we are being overrun at the moment by fools. We don’t have to compel our culture: it sells itself.

Buddhists never used the military to spread their creed, but there it was: all over Asia, including Central Asia. The Mongolian hordes fell in love with Tibetan Buddhism, and–uniquely for them, as far as I know–left the Tibetans alone, and implemented Lamaism in their own social order.

In negotiation, you can still be you, and I can still be me. In socialism, this is against the rules. No one can exist with an identity not prescribed for them by the pseudo-scientists who have gained control of the system through brutality and lies.

Obama was apparently mocking Republicans for wanting to actually protect our borders, and for their reservation about rewarding 11 million criminals for their behavior. I posted this in response to an article about this. I suspect it won’t make it through the filter on the leftie place I read it, so figured I’d post it here, since I took the trouble to write it.

I’m making changes in my life. What was good enough last year is not good enough now. What seems to happen when you look down the road, and not at your feet, is you see all the constraints and webs of habit that have been bedeviling you, without your conscious awareness.

I realized this morning several things. First, failure which is unaccompanied by self pity is a means for generating detachment of precisely the sort the Buddhists, Taoists and others advocated. Any trauma, that you confront honestly, and which you do not contexualize as unnecessary–as if any life event could be called that–helps you grow. You become deeper and richer in the ways that matter. You become more invulnerable to the shocks to which the flesh in prone.

What also occurred to me is that we contextualize happiness. We view it as the outcome of certain sorts of experiences. I was doing my morning exercises, listening to music, and suddenly felt happiness. It just came to me. I don’t know why.

And this is the point: happiness does not NEED a point or purpose. I think we often feel it, and reject it on a preconscious level as contexually inappropriate. Why would driving to work make you happy? Why would doing another report make you happy? Why would being at work make you happy? Why not?

I spoke several posts ago about negative hallucinations. I think we have happiness negative hallucinations, in that happiness is there, it is present and possibly expressable to our conscious awareness, but we repress it, thinking it can only happen when you’re having sex, or on your boat, or shopping, or winning something.

It is, I think, accurate to say that to the precise extent you make happiness an end, it disappears. That is why so many members of the Me generation, and their kids, are on anti-depressants.

Think about how you conjure a Patronus in Harry Potter: you think of a happy, powerful experience, and you give external expression to it in the form of light. You do not find something out there: you take something inside, and move it outside.

I read a Sufi story once where he was talking about the innate justice of wisdom which, as he put it, could not be given to the unworthy, nor withheld from the worthy.

This feeling of Windhorse, which I have described on here somewhere, likewise can neither be withheld nor given. I saw that yesterday.

One more Harry Potter example (clearly, Joanne Rowling’s success arose in no small measure from her capacity for myth-making): the mirror of Erised. The Sorcerer’s Stone could only be released to someone who did not want to use it selfishly.

Life, likewise, in the sense of pleasurable, deep experience, can only be released to those who are not trying to consume it like famished wolves.

This probably sounds deep, and maybe it is, but I will point out that I am still often a screwball. There, now the mood is gone.

Or maybe that was the path forward. You decide. Good luck!!!!

Edit: I just noticed the I in Self Pity is too big. I was going to correct it, then realized that is a completely accurate statement. Think about it.

Self pity is our worst enemy. We are all born with empty backpacks on our backs. Self pity is systematically placing stones in it.

The other day I was sitting somewhere feeling the potential for self pity. Whatever it was (superego as editor: chasing women in the wrong place), there I was. I saw the self pity welling up like a wave, the “it’s not fair”, the “this should work”, the whatever made me feel sorry for myself.

I watched it, then let it go. I visualized a drain, in which all those dark waters simply disappeared. Lo and behold, they did, and there I was listening to some songs I put on the jukebox by Sugarland and the Ting-tings (and some more macho bands, but frankly I enjoyed those two the most). It was calming. It was nice.

If we could all live like that, the world would be a much better place. Let it go. Let the resentment go. Let the self importance go. Let the anger go. What good does it do you, much less anyone else? It is a damn anchor, sinking you down into the black water. If you want to float, you need a boat, and boats don’t need heavy weights.

And if you are under water, step one is to look up, n’est pas? Oxygen will be along soon enough, if you swim where the light is.

You have perhaps heard the old saw “for those who think life is a comedy, and for those who feel a tragedy.” This is fodder for the depressed, over-intellectualized-yet-angst-ridden college kid.

Think about what makes us laugh. Is it not ridiculousness? Vanity? Greed? People bumping into things, tripping unexpectedly. Consider Seinfeld. Were not most episodes not about nothing, but rather about neurotic, selfish people acting neurotic and selfish?

Comedy is dysfunction. It, also, consists in dramatic hamartias, but flaws expressed in unexpected ways which generate and release tension.

Here is a funny story, from one of the Darwin Awards books: two Marines developed a routine whereby they would drive in a truck, and on left turns, one would swing out on the door, then swing back in. Most of us have thought about doing that. It was amusing. Then one of them hit a lightpole, was flung into the cab, and knocked the other guy out his door. Fortunately the truck came to a halt, and neither was permanently wounded. That catapult image, though, I find amusing. My kids did too.

Why? They were both hurt. The accident was stupid and preventable. But don’t many of us see why someone would do that? Do we not see in them, perhaps, a bit of our own silliness, and laugh from relief that it WASN’T us?

What we find funny has a lot to do with how we set our default expectations for life. If we expect it to be easy, then every little bit of pain out there saps us, and drags us down. Nothing is funny, if funny consists in an ironic appreciate of the misery and stupidity of others. It’s all just a bore; it’s all just work.

If we expect life to be hard, then we realize that all of us are stupid, and we learn to appreciate and laugh at all the little things that happen to us. I managed to set my oven on fire last night. After I put it out, and got the smoke detector stopped, I thought it was funny. That’s not a bad story. Not just everyone is stupid enough to set their oven on fire. My kids thought it was funny too.

It seems to me, too, that you have to have multiple selves to analyze and process life properly. If you are analyzing humor, it isn’t funny. You have to be able to switch back and forth, here and there. This is the Tao, at least in part.

I have often objected to Scientism, which I define roughly as “that doctrine which believes that everything in the universe is in principle measurable empirically”, on the basis that it lacks what I tend to call a “qualitative place-holder” for the transcendental: for experiences which are real, but which cannot be fully described within the limits of a materialistic paradigm, wherein all apparent “experience” is simply an epiphenomenon of biochemical processes.

It just occurred to me that what I mean by place-holder is a conceptual basis for the elimination of the negative hallucination, which is when something is there, but invisible to you, as a result of effective hypnotic programming. We likely see signs of the divine daily, but lack the perceptive capacity to recognize them. We are much more likely to do so, though, if we accept in advance that such things are POSSIBLE. I have often debated dogmatic materialistic atheists, and it is quite obvious to me that were a spirit to materialize in front of them, and punch them in the nose, it would make no difference in their belief system. How much less could one expect them to feel or appreciate the subtle?

It is strange to think that all the skyscrapers in our largest cities were in no small measure created in response to the sexual instinct. Everything you see in front of you–the roads, homes, stores, telephone lines, your computer, the Internet–were created in some measure as a result of the sexual instinct.

For his part, Freud wanted to see us as swimming in an endless ocean of emotional energy ultimately deriving from the reproductive urge, which is to say our sexuality. The only events that matter in this lifelong swim are birth, reproduction, and death. Everything else is meaningless detail. Dawkins “love” of science is a sublimation of the instinct to put his penis in every hole which opens up to him, and plant his seed there. It “means” nothing. Meaning, itself, is an artifact of this process. It conduces to reproduction.

For my own part, as I have often said, I feel (and for which I can offer empirical evidence) that we are composed of both our instincts, and something higher, which I tend to term the capacity for non-statistical coherence, which is to say the ability of consciousness to affect what we term matter, which would include our brains, and behavior.

Yet, here we are.

Once, I dreamed of a beautiful purple crystal created by the Swiss over a long period of time, a structure that created itself, but with loving care by craftsmen, who directed it much like a bonsai tree, who created tendencies, but not precise outcomes.

Perhaps we are like children on an endless river, forced to choose left or right, and given a tendency, but who with work can make a different choice, and at some point sever the alternative, travelling a unique canyon.

I watch my own sexuality, and it has often seemed a curse. Do men not often look at women as sexual objects, without meaning to? Do we not catch ourselves sneaking peaks of breasts, even of women we consider friends? Is there not this endless need, at least for the sexually healthy, to inseminate the world? There it is: driving, driving, driving.

So much misery comes from this, especially in our modern world. Historical cultures faced the same evolutionary biology we do. They solved the problem, in many cases, of sex by creating very strong, and very strongly enforced, social taboos, making the miseries of jealousy and resentment logistically difficult, since failure was so violently punished. Not in all cases: many American Indians shared their wives with early explorers, getting syphillis and gonorhea for their trouble.

You can’t have sex with everyone all the time: this creates, at least in this stage of our evolution, a lot of trouble.

And to the point, it is not sex we want: we want connection. If I have any readers, they may roll their eyes, but I was reading an interview with someone who had had many Out of Body Experiences (which, by the way, is a scientifically replicable procedure for most people, as far as I can tell), who was commenting that “sex” in other worlds is in effect a meeting of souls, in which you share who you ARE, in the most intimate sense, and so does someone else. This makes for the most perfect connection possible. It has nothing to do with the “exchange of body fluids”. That exchange is merely an inferior symbol for what is possible. In our own world, this exchange can be that of life itself, but the life of another. In other worlds, I believe, that exchange can be of OUR lives.

Consider this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpJotjP2kM

Here are a few lyrics:

You left me here
Alone in my own world
From pain
A new light is born
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
I hate your face
Reminding
Despiting
I hate your life
You cast me down
You look at me with one glance
And turn your face
To watch you burn
You bury me alive

In your perfect world
I’d rather make peace with 3 rounds

Now, I was looking for a different song I just heard on the radio, with roughly the same theme, but this will do. I don’t expect most people will get far in that song.

Sex and love are connected with trust. To the extent we value sex, we value multiple partners, since reproductively all fertile men and all fertile women are roughly equal. If life is just about sensations, then why not have as many as possible?

Yet, this mindset leads necessarily to betrayals of intimacy, of love. I don’t think it is precisely accurate to say that the more sex, the less love, but it is close. I heard the Summer of Love summarized once by someone who was there as: “a lot of sex, but very little love”. Summer of betrayals may be perhaps more accurate, where jealousies were masked but not eliminated by drugs and alcohol, and a culture which demanded that anything go. In all such cultures, there will be winners and losers.

When I listen to this music, I can’t help but seeing it as the inverse of the Summer of Love. It is the ugly reality, stripped of its veneer of superficial joviality. It is the insanity of never being able to deeply trust anyone, since everyone is always looking for something, and someone, better.

These are a few thoughts. I think by thinking, and as I have said chose some time ago to think publicly, in the hope my musings may benefit someone.

I have come to the conclusion that the only way to counter the effects of the sea is to grow legs long enough to reach the bottom. We must become giants, and that cannot be done through reason and emotions alone.

The truth of that statement is in the spaces here. You will note that the possibility of the words emerges from that space. Nothing otherwise would have form, and no communication would be possible.

Happy Moonday!!! May your lunacy be less today, and your sanity more.

It occurred to me that it is symbolically significant that the major fashion centers of the world: Paris, Rome/Milan, and New York, tend to centers of political radicalism.

Burke commented 200 years ago that the Leftist revolutionary tradition tends to create an enchantment with novelty. They want lots of new things, particularly new things that do not arise from a traditional focus. They want lots of noise and fury; they want entertainment, and it can be the sort provided by the worst excesses of the Roman Coliseum.

What does not organize the flood of the new is any sort of goal or tradition-oriented principle. The New is assumed to be progress.

Politically, this leads to mass support for stupid ideas, which people do not think through. It leads to the subversion of reason. When you take a powerful car, put it into drive, put a brick on the accellerator, it will run into a wall, sooner or later.

The Conceit of the intellectuals who try and run the process is that they know what they are talking about. Most of them have NEVER accomplished any practical task–Lenin didn’t, Mao didn’t, Hitler didn’t, Ho Chi Minh didn’t (although he did wait tables and work as a cook, which is useful). What happens, practically, is that the torrent of images and novelty creates chaos. Chaos can only be tempered by the individuals in question, or by forcing everyone to fit into a Procrustean Bed that is the exact dimension of the intellectual in charge. This means that the exact energy unleashed by the elimination of reason will lead, in short order, to oppression.

This begins with the sacralization of the evanescent. Conservatism is the best block to this. It slows progress, but stops regress, which is positive. The Liberal ethos, based on Reason, leads to progress, slowly, but inevitably. Any rejection of Liberalism goes in the opposite direction. The question is: do we go 3 steps forward, 1 step back, or 5 steps back and stay there?

Traditional Chinese society was delineated into four classes (a common enough pattern around the world): the Jin Shi, which was a class of intellectuals who had passed the examinations; farmers; tradesmen and manufacturers; and merchants. Merchants were at the bottom since they did not make anything.

Modern Chinese society, it occurred to me yesterday, still has a Jin Shi: the Communist Party. The Party, like the traditional Jin Shi, is composed of many people who were born connected, but not necessarily. With sufficient brown-nosing and/or talent for helping subordinate the nation to the Party, anyone can rise to the top. It is clearly not a meritocracy, as in the old system, since there is no test. The test is ideological conformity, which is to say intellectual and moral mediocrity.

The important difference is that the old order–the “ancien regime“–placed moral blocks on the behavior of the elites, at least in theory. Heaven, in its governance of the Earth, was ruled by li. There were certain rules to be followed, and revolution was considered acceptable, if successful, since it, ipso facto, was considered the Will of Heaven.

Communists think the same way. They consider themselves to be just because they are in power. “History” is their version of “li”. History, being whatever happens, necessarily means that whoever wins, by whatever means, is correct. This is roughly the same doctrine, based more explicitly on Darwinian evolutionary theories, that motivated and justified the violence of Hitler.

Communist condemn racism, but they are racist. Look at how they treated the Tibetans. They condemn Guatanamo Bay, but practice torture regularly as a matter of State policy, and as a way of generating the only virtue they recognize: conformity.

So what has happened in China? After tens of millions of unnatural and unnecessary deaths, and the wholesale ruination of billions of lives; after widespread torture, civil wars, and mass suicide, moral assaults on tradition, and the utter corruption of the capacity for rational thought: we have the same class system.

We can argue that manufacturing has overtaken agriculture, as has, possibly, business activity. What has not changed is that an elite is still in power.

This is the progress of idiots and the wicked. They still have kings, dukes, and business oligarchs. The only progress has been out of the hole dug by the Communists, and would have been vastly faster had they not ruined their society in the first place.