Author: White Whale

Any individual or group of individuals that consistently works harder and smarter than some other individual or group of individuals, will be more successful.

It is not difficult to see, talking for a minute or two with the average ghetto dweller, why they live in the ghetto. Nor is it hard to see why, despite the trillions of dollars we have spent as a nation alleviating their condition, they continue to pollute their own streets, kill one another, and raise generation after generation of stupid kids.

This sort of observation is obvious. The harder question is what to do about it.

It is tempting to think it is the job of the poor to help themselves, and that their failure to do so means they are right where they belong, in the circumstances they deserve. This may sound harsh, but take one example: high school graduation rates. When black people were enslaved in this country, they hungered for the education that slave owners denied them. Now, when it is as simple as going to a school someone else is paying for, listening, and doing the work, they find themselves wandering the streets, literally unable to take a handout if it requires effort and dedication.

In my view, that has nothing–or so little that it can be ignored as a consideration–to do with race. It has everything to do with CULTURE. If you compare the natural resources of, say, Nigeria, with those of Singapore, Nigeria is vastly superior (at least I assume, since Singapore has NO natural resources). Yet, if you compare their economies, Singapore is several orders of magnitude more successful. This means one must compare the PEOPLE. That is where the difference is.

It is strange how the blindingly self evident is so often beyond the reach of ordinary conversation, lest one be labeled a “labeller”.

Is there a difference between cutting someone’s head off, and feeding them soup? Between sadistic acts of violence, and selfless acts of generosity?

These would seem to relatively unproblematic distinctions, yet our modern Left appears unable to make them. When a nation is submerged in State-sponsored savagery, that helps no one who needed help, they call it good. When a nation like the United States see steady economic growth for two centuries, creating the wealthiest “poor” class in human history, they call it bad, and try to undermine it.

Edit: concrete example: Michael Yon talked about coming across a silent village while on patrol with some American and I believe Iraqi soldiers. Jihadists had beheaded an entire village, including small children. There were numerous stories of jihadists raping, torturing and/or killing the children of sheikhs and opponents right in front of them. Self evidently, Saddam Hussein himself employed torture. His sons had rape rooms.

Yet, where did we see any of this discussed as morally problematic in recent years? What we see are condemnations of George Bush. Why? Among other things, since he is the LEAST threatening opponent they face, he’s easy. It doesn’t take courage to oppose him. An activist group was apparently even trying to get him arrested for war crimes on a trip to Switzerland.

If torture is wrong, then it is always wrong. It is wrong when we do it, and when other nations do it. It is to be opposed wherever it happens. In terms of the flow of words, though, they generally are in support of nations that are anti-American, even if they are much more vicious. Iran would be an outstanding example. The Shah–facing a revolution that eventually succeeded–was mean. The theocracy that followed him has been much, much worse. This moral “measurement”, though, is impossible for people whose public behavior is not fundamentally principle oriented.

Abu Ghraib was not right. Nor was it the equivalent of beheading an entire village, including some children. Not even close. Not within an order of magnitude.

Anyone who wants to do good in this world has to have some fundamental way of measuring it. This, in turn, relies on the application of general principles, themselves answerable to rationality in general. No rationality: no goodness.

The V sign used to mean “V for Victory”. Churchill used it all the time. Now, it has come to symbolize the abdication of martial and moral virtue, and tolerance at all costs.

The “Peace” sign, itself, is the inversion of a rune meaning “protection”, Algiz. It is quite literally a sign of surrender, which is made doubly powerful when added to the overt meaning assigned to it by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was supposedly semaphore for “nuclear disarmament”, or something quite close to that. They are the ones who came up with “better Red than dead”. That they got Comintern funding and had numerous Soviet agents in their midst should surprise no one.

And the “Bug” is a Fascist symbol. It was HITLER HIMSELF who suggested that the “People’s Car” should be engineered to look like a Beetle.

I’ve posted this before, but not, I don’t think, here.

Ponder all of this. Ponder how fragile your reality really is, once you expose it to a historical lens.

You are defined by what you CHOOSE to fill your mind with. In my view, the sole function of consciousness is choosing the direction of attention. Will is nothing but concentrated attention. It is ignoring all alternative courses of action, even in difficulty.

If you accept this premise, then please do this: look at your movie collection, then your book collection, if you have one.

Who are you? Is it who you want to be?

Let us put this illustrious trio at Point A, a circle in the middle of a vast plain. Let us posit (I am scarcely a story-teller, so feel free to soup it up if you retell it) that they are trying to reach a Point B, one hundred miles due North. Let us say this point represents global peace, prosperity, liberty, and contentedness.

At Time A, the Hare sets off due South. The tortoise sets off due North. Sleepy the Dwarf feels drowsiness overcome him, and he lays down right where he is and takes a nap. The Hare travels at four times the rate of the tortoise. He is efficient. He works hard. He has a plan.

After a day, the hare has travelled 30 miles. The tortoise has travelled 7.5 miles, and Sleepy hasn’t travelled at all. The race would seem to be to the Hare, but he is travelling in the WRONG DIRECTION. In point of fact, Sleepy the Dwarf, having done nothing, is thirty miles closer to the destination than the Hare. The Hare, despite having worked harder than any of them, is the farthest away.

Consider the work it took to completely ruin/rework the Russian and Chinese nations. Millions were killed. Millions were displaced. Mass starvation was endured, human rights were eradicated. Unions were banned, and working conditions were uniformly awful. And all of this took a lot of EFFORT.

Do you understand this? Communist officials, many of them, probably worked 16 hour days for years making this happen. And for what? For failure. For results that would have been achieved sooner and better had they contented themselves with playing chess and collecting mushrooms.

Laissez Faire does not mean “do nothing”. It means “let the locus of activity be among free people incented to innovate by the profit motive, and by their creative spirits.”

We kept seeing this idea that Obama had to “do something”. The same thing was said of FDR. Yet, doing something can be counterproductive. If you are doing the wrong thing, you are travelling backwards, like our idiotic Hare.

There are some 350 million people in this country. Some 200 million of them get up and do SOMETHING all day, every day of the week. Of those, some 200,000, say, have to make decisions every day: do they hire or fire people? Do they expand or contract the business? Do they open up new product lines or shut some down? This activity happens whether or not the President or Congress do “something” or not.

The effect Congress and the President have is on the actual decisions MADE. If people are afraid, they err in the direction of safety, which means less jobs, less growth, less tax revenue, and economic stagnation. This is what has happened in the last two years.

I have said this often, but we would quite literally be better off if the office of the President of the United States were occupied by some zoo animal that did nothing but eat leaves and branches all day. This time, let’s make it a koala. We could erect eucalyptus trees in the Oval Office. We could get periodic reports as to the status of the President’s health. Maybe we could even get some koala children. That would make for fun news.

The Secretary of Defense would be fully equal to protecting us, and we wouldn’t have any Czars at all. We could mostly do a whole lot of nothing.

This would be much, much better than what we have today. Businesspeople would not have to factor in a lunatic socialist’s policy proposals when making their decisions.

My take? No Obama, we would be down to 6% unemployment or so, and our national security would be at least as good as it is, and probably better.

For my part, I would like to encourage the President to spend more time golfing, napping, or picnicing–sailing, canoeing, horseback riding–somewhere with Michelle and the kids, and less time trying to “help” us.

I was on my ladder today in a business that lends money to farmers. Looking around and about, I was struck with how nice and new everything was, and how comfortable everyone looked. If you watch them, most people in banks don’t ever move with much of a sense of urgency. They have time. They can open at 9 and close at 5, most of them, and do just fine.

In my mind, I was contrasting this with the many farmers out there. I take little trips through “God’s Country” on occasion, and you see them by the dozens. People like that are normally up before dawn, and work until the sun goes down. For that, they keep their land, and most years are able to pay off the loan they took out from the Farmer’s Bank to buy seed and fertilizer. If they have several really bad years, they lose the farm. If they have really good years, they get a new truck.

As I have analyzed it, the core of leftism is a sense of emotional detachment and regret, that weak people seek to channelize through hatred and resentment. The emotional predisposition towards hate precedes the actual choosing of a target, but once the fight is begun, this becomes less than clear. It seems like they are making valid moral claims, when in fact if that is ever the case, it is purely accidental.

Yet, look at banks, which do nothing but leverage a place in the system–where, for example, they can get money very cheap from the Federal Reserve, then loan it at a markup. If it gets paid back, they pocket they profit, and if it doesn’t, they seize the real assets with which the loans are collateralized. Farmers grow the food we need to survive. Which is more important?

So I got to thinking about loans, and capital. You need money to invest to reap the rewards of the growth that comes from successful investing. If it doesn’t come from banks, where does it come from? As I thought about it, it occurred to me I have already answered this question: it comes from the farmer’s themselves. As I have argued in my series on our financial system (http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html ), if the value of money is not continually diluted, then wealth–buying power, to be clear–is generalized, such that farmers have the money in the BANK to buy the seeds for next years crops.

Now, leftists always want to get rid of the “rentier” class, which is to say those people who make money off of other people who make things. This would of course include the very banks leftists like Keynes did so much to support. This is just one of many patent contradictions at the heart of the evil he wrought.

Yet, what is the crime of the rentiers? Is it not depending on the actually productive for their livelihood? Would this not apply doubly to the intellectual class, to those people who write books, but don’t DO anything, or understand business?

Leftists don’t want to abolish the rentier class–they want to coopt it, into their own sphere. The moral indignities that attend making slaves of men do not disappear with the change in ownership. A slave does not stop being a slave when he is sold. This should be obvious.

The only possible means of ameliorating the inequalities of opportunity in our society is to fix our money, such that it retains its value. All sincere socialists should be in unison as to the desirability of this goal, as should all conservatives, libertarians, and other decent people.

I thought I might add my two cents. I have not followed this closely, so these are general observations, based on general understandings.

Mubarak has to be understood in the context of the “our son of a bitch” aspect of American foreign policy. Egypt cannot stop being a democracy, since it has never BEEN a democracy. Nowhere in the Arab world, outside of Iraq, do ordinary Arabs have civil rights. Everywhere you have secret police, who can make people disappear, and do awful, unspeakable things to them.

And we made the decision some 35 years ago to, in effect, pay Egypt off as a condition of signing a peace treaty with Israel. That was Jimmy Carter, for those of you who are historically illiterate. Sadat paid with his life, but we have kept in people loyal to that basic agenda since then.

It has seemed for some time, though, that given the amount of money we give them annually, that we should be in a position to influence political liberalization. The fear in that region, of course, is always that in an open election the Muslim radicals will win. That means, of course, the end of open elections. It’s a one-off deal, then you get Iran, where the leaders decide who gets elected.

What the Muslim world as a whole lacks is a genuinely Liberal impulse, one which neither supports autocratic Sharia, nor the rule of the strongman. Given this gap, this lack, it is hard to find the people to back who will actually work to help anyone outside their small clique. Always with small-minded people it is win/lose, zero sum games. They don’t ask “What is good for Egypt as a whole?”, but rather “how can I take over Mubarak’s corrupt regime, so that the benefits of corruption will flow to me and mine?” It’s not corruption, per se, they care about.

Obviously, Mubarak is the target now, but whoever takes over–if someone takes over–can be counted on to be just as bad.

Democracy depends on decent people capable of looking at the big picture. For any people that is not decent, and not capable of wisdom, it is not viable. Such people get the governments they deserve, even if they are not the ones they want.

The word “holiday” comes from Holy Day. The intent was to create a separate type of time, of which the Sabbath is one example. It seems to me this is a useful idea. I sometimes get into that other type of time, when I’m not preoccupied with problems, planning, and the endless ruminations that define so much of my personality. Sometimes I’m just there, enjoying the day.

When you get like that, you can see your normal life in relief, such that you have perspective. So often I think we live mechanically, but never really stop to think about it, or see where we could do things differently.

To this day Catholics recogize different types of time, and even though I suspect most Catholics don’t take it very seriously, most do at least nominally adhere to, as an example, Lent.

All religions of which I know have this feature. It is useful. Most of us just run like rats on a wheel. Eventually, we retire or die. We can do so much better, as individuals, and as a culture.

Some random thoughts after a long day in normal time.

Edit: I want to add to this.

I think back to some exceptional meals I’ve had–Muriel’s in New Orleans, the Oak Room in Louisville, a hotel in Mendocino–and I remember some details (the first time I had a really good steak au poivre, or duck, or foie gras), but what I mostly remember is a feeling, that of contented engagement, of sufficiency. We never seem sufficient, do we? At least, I never seem to. There is always something just over the horizon. In a round world, that means it never gets here.

Or some memorable musical moments. I will never forget being in a literally smoky old blues club in Memphis at 2am–needing to work the next day, but being unable to drag myself back to my hotel room–listening to a first rate band, playing what they wanted to play. After about 1am, it just doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t remember one song they played. But I remember feeling the room, feeling the crowd, and it was pleasant. It was another sort of time.

Or a walk I took on the beach in Myrtle Beach. We had an hour between one set of meetings and another. I didn’t know what to do, the sun was setting, and I figured I’d explore. As I did, something in the atmosphere entered me. There was a sense of peace. And you look at that, and wonder if you’re going crazy. If you never feel deep, profound peace, it appears to be a species of insanity. It is qualitatively different than anything else in your experience. I doubted it, and to some extent I remember fighting it as some sort of foreign influence I didn’t understand. Yet, in the end, I still remember that time, as a unique moment in my life I didn’t expect.

It seems to me that we process life as many discrete qualitatively distinct moments–both good and bad–filled with a muddying average-ness whose quality is, I suppose, perhaps influenced largely by our openness to qualitatively good moments, and where we choose to set our average, perceptually.

What is the Good Life? It seems to me we all need to answer this question in our own ways. It seems clear to me, though, that our environments are all filled to overflowing with the raw ingredients needed to build it, from any starting point (almost).

I probably need to reread “Flow”, and then see what he’s been up to since. I tend to shy away, in the long run, from metaphysical pessimists. It colors their work in subtle ways. Yet, when mechanically correct–and I view thoughts and the words that form them as operating on the level of machine–they can be useful.

Linked on the title. Respond if you care to, but keep in mind I am not stupid, patient, timid, lacking for words, or ignorant.

At root, here is the question: is the President above the law, or isn’t he? Is he a normal citizen with an extraordinary responsibility, or is he like a King of old, who obeys only those laws that suit him?

No person applying for any sort of security clearance can avoid providing basic documentation. This will always include the birth certificate that EVERYONE–barring exceptional circumstances, examples of which I am unaware–has. Mine has my footprints on it. It says where I was born, what doctor delivered me, how much I weighed, how long I was, who my parents were.

I had to provide it to get my Social Security card. I had to provide it to get my Driver’s licence, and again to get my passport.

This situation is as plain as day. There is no ambiguity. There is no leeway, or room for doubt. The man most responsible for enforcing our laws is showing himself in profound contempt of them, both as implemented, and as intended in spirit.