Author: White Whale

Finally watched this movie. I had been putting it off, since I knew it would not end well. Frankly, it didn’t even begin well. Yet, the world is what it is, and it is the task of good people to see it as it is, in all its horror and glory.

My main thought was that Islam in most of the world is characterized as what can only be called gender Apartheid. Why is it that the screaming classes, the moaning classes, the feel gooders, and do-gooders have so little to say about the rights of women in Islam?

Really, it’s quite simple: they literally, clinically and very definitionally, have no principles. They reject the Enlightenment. They reject the concept of universal human rights. They reject, really, the rights of women, as a subclass of the more general rejection of human rights. They do not recognize right and wrong.

They only recognize, as I have often commented, legal and illegal. Thus the stoning of Soraya, reprehensible as it was even within the confines of Islam–where women have to prove their innocence, and men have to be proven guilty–was quite acceptable since it involved DUE PROCESS.

It is quite acceptable to try and release guilty mass murderers if, what? If they are tried and the evidence found wanting for ANY REASON.

This is nihilism, pure and simple.

This point is less than obvious. When most people think of nihilists–well, hell, I wonder what they do think of? The Big Lebowski? Nihilists are people who, at the end of the day, believe in–and are willing to fight for–nothing. The people who articulate this doctrine dress fashionably sloppily. They go to yogurt shops and coffee houses. They watch Seinfeld, and Dexter and Modern Family and Dancing with the Stars (or whatever the hell else people watch). They are polite, and tip their waiters at least 15%. They say “cool” a lot.

And they are morally bankrupt, and their ideas have consequences within the REAL WORLD. Real women, in particular, are hurt and killed because they SAY NOTHING about the systematic abuse of women in much of the world.

To be clear, conservatives, by and large, have no desire to express politically a desire to tell other nationsl how to live their lives. We can view Iran as an awful place, which abuses women and genuinely decent people for reasons of sadism and political convenience–a place utterly devoid of the grace of God–and yet not view it as our duty to tell them how their nation should be run, since our goal is in the main the protection of the United States.

Just as consistently, we can view it as morally contemptible–as I do–and call it evil.

Leftists, for their part, are constantly rendering moral judgements, but almost invariably in favor of anyone but the post-Enlightenment West. Chavez is the moral superior of the United States. So is Ahmadinejad. Why? He isn’t a “colonialist”. He is just a sadistic misogynist and anti-Semite. In Leftoworld, that is hardly a strike against him.

Yet real people get hurt. It is one thing not to condemn him. It is another altogether to render a moral judgement in his favor. One does not move us in a positive direction. The other moves us in the direction of countenancing evil.

For my part, I am quite willing to say that God has abandoned Iran, and most of the Islamic world. Their oil–far from being a blessing–is in my view a curse that has caused their social world to remain in a state of inertia which has prevented genuine moral growth.

Even within this film, a sign was rendered from God, which was ignored. God is not silent, in my view. He is simply faced at times with the willfully deaf. There are in my view few sins which are punished. Willful ignorance is one of them.

I am not a huge fan, but I have read one book by Gurdjieff, “Meeting with Remarkable Men”. It was an enjoyable book, in which he was in fact a successful “wiseacre”, as he put it, inserting many covert symbolic narratives in the strangest of places. One point he made, which I have remembered, is that he was successful in infiltrating himself into the Qaaba complex, and found God curiously missing. He found the essence of genuine Islam, on the contrary, in Central Asia.

No doctrine which is immune to perception can be enduringly useful. This is really quite simple. What was true in the 7th Century is not true today. No one who fails to see this can, in the end, be considered a good person, or have any reasonable expectation of realizing paradise.

God curses those who are granted sight, and yet refuse to see. It is impossible for me to say I am not one of those people; yet I can say I do my best daily to trip myself up, and see what happens.

Edit: I thought about this, and decided I am being unfair to Islam. To be clear, I’m not afraid of criticizing the religion in public. I’m pretty sure I have to die some time, and getting shot or blown up by an extremist is as good a way to go as any, and from what I can tell much better than dying of old age (or worse: boredom.)

Rather, I think to Christian history. Take Henry the Eighth. He had more than one woman executed to satisfy his lust (and desire for progeny, as I recall.) Men have beaten women in our world for just as long as they have in the Islamic world. I do think women have less rights in the Muslim world, but for all practical purposes that was the case in our own world until quite recently, say the last 100 years.

I think too to the maxim of Lao Tse to the effect that 3 in ten people are good, 3 in ten are neither good nor bad, and 3 in ten are bad. [I was never clear who the tenth person was, but I suppose we can say he or she plops down randomly in one of the three other categories.]

Why would this not apply to all people in all religious and post-religious environments? In the case of the stoning of Soraya, it was fundamentally the social dynamic of witch burning. It was a combination of a type of avarice, cowardice, stupidity, and a desire to express hatred.

It is true, too, that men from time to time feel the need to persecute women. I suppose it is in our DNA. Women do not process the world the way men do–they are “other”, in some fundamental ways–and we have testosterone and greater physical strength. This has led to much injustice over the ages.

Our task, as I have often argued, is to rise above our biological heritage, in favor of what I have termed “non-statistical coherence”. I view us as beings of light incarnated in what amount to machines. The two are clearly related, and I think at odds with one another.

This is really generic Dualism, with the difference that I believe Spirit can affect matter, in that matter, per se, does not exist outside of spirit. Maybe I am a philosophical Idealist. I don’t know the word.

What I want to see–and I’m getting off topic, but it’s my blog and I don’t have an editor–is an end to philosophizing, and a beginning of empirical data gathering. To what extent can we measure so-called morphogenetic fields? Can we induce them? What is the biological significance of coherent light within our bodies? These are concepts which are simply not being explored.

As I have said often–likely here, but I can’t remember–what I envision as the path forward to a benign future is the incorporation of key religious ideas–such as the continuance of the soul after physical death, and the connectedness of all life–into science; and the utilization of the conception of Goodness (or something like it) within existing religious and cultural narratives to facilitate global, gradual change in the direction of light, peace, and sustainable economic sufficiency.

I often type, and just sort of watch what happens. That will manifest here as meandering thought. It’s like taking a walk through the forest. I am constantly going places I have never been, and often those without paths.

With regard to the previous post, I was wondering how I moved from socialists to Muslims, then it hit me: they share a distaste for Liberalism. People have often wondered how supposed “liberals”–who for example preach the rights of women–can countenance the many abuses of human rights that happen in places like Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

And it hit me: they share foundational autocratic tendencies. I heard on the radio the other day that the number one show right now among Democrats is Dexter (for Republicans it is “Modern Family”, about which I know nothing), and I thought about it. What does Dexter do? He murders evil. He attacks it, physically, without debating it. And I think that basic idea resonates deeply in the leftist psyche.

Who are you when you can never affirm a positive moral view in a condition of ambiguity or competing moral narratives? Who are you when every time someone asserts a right to x, y, or z, you have to listen? When no line is too far? When you can be pushed around everywhere? When your only value, tolerance, is implicitly a death pact with whoever has a better idea of who they are than you?

You are nothing. And being nothing makes psychologically normal people abnormal. It induces hatred and resentment, and a feverish quest for a moral absolute, sanctified in either figurative or literal blood. Such is the documented history of Leftism, which is accepted in full by the true believers: the French Revolution, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Maoist China.

Very often, I work intuitively. I have already seen this, and called it “Cultural Sadeism”, but from time to time a slightly larger piece of the puzzle emerges.

Reasonable people have to ask: given the manifest moral, cultural, social and economic bankruptcy to which Leftism leads, why do people keep following it? Why do they keep trying to impose a doctrine which generates misery, and to use in their efforts to do so deception, torture, murder, and every other devious and amoral device they can conceive? Why? Some of these people have smiling faces. George Bernard Shaw (like Hitler) was a vegetarian.

It seems to me the crux of the issue is that weak people cannot face, in the end, the prospect of rejecting both an other-worldly and an Earthly utopia. If they can’t have heaven, then they at least need the fantasy–and it is a fantasy, in the way they format it–of an end to all pain on Earth.

Now, I think that we can build a world in which most unnecessary pain is eliminated, such that we CHOOSE our pain, our challenges, our adventures. But you can’t eliminate it entirely. As I see it, in accepting pain, it goes away.

But Socialists don’t want to do that. They want to manipulate the outside world somehow so that pain is gone. And they particularly want to be freed from the burden of choice, of responsibility.

No stable moral order, no wholesome desirable “utopia” can come into being except as a result of decent people building it. Yet socialists want to pretend there CAN be such a thing as a collective morality, as a group, as a “society” that is not composed of individuals, each capable of perceiving and thinking for him or her-self.

A slightly sinful person who chooses their life in a condition of freedom is infinitely superior to a person who commits no sin, but has no choice. Given their druthers, such people become vicious very easily. Many Muslims are good examples of this.

Are Muslim women chaste? Do they have any choice? Has anyone asked them their opinions? Would something other than a beating happen if they gave the wrong answer? Neither their men nor women can be considered sexually pure, since they have no choice. Frankly, I suspect a lot of sexual abuse happens in most Muslim countries, reporting which will get you killed.

Net: there can be no useful or valid moral nexus outside the individual conscience, and no utopia that is built by someone other than the sum total of a society, voluntarily.

I’m reading the General Theory, but felt like typing something. I take a lot of hand notes, but typing is easier. I will underscore with respect to this post specifically, and this whole blog more generally, is that I am often thinking out loud. Most of these sorts of things used to–and in many case still do–go to private “notebooks”. But some of it gets out here, for the possible use of somebody.

Keynes basic idea is that production comes from Capitalists, which is to say “savers”. (His entire body of work is intended to glorify consumption and denigrate savings. In this, he echoes his Fabian mentor George Bernard Shaw, who likewise denigrated savings.) What he wants to do is integrate these savers into a system at equilibrium, which for him means full employment, and production equal to demand. Like Shaw, he is unconcerned with the details of what is produced, so long as he can control the access to Capital of the producers.

His nightmare scenario–which in popular myth was played out in the early 1930’s–is the production glut. Our pot-bellied, cigar smoking Capitalists have invested in, uh, table tennis rackets. Trouble is, the workers can’t afford to buy any more. The savings of the savers has bought too much. If they had paid their workers more, and saved less–or, hell, spent it on caviar, claret, and courtesans–then the workers would have the money to buy table tennis rackets and all would be right with the world. But they were too greedy.

So what do they do? Let some workers go, so that they can discount the table tennis rackets, and keep the same amount of money. But what? Now there is less money to spend. What to do?

Never fear, Uncle Debtor is here. Rather than lay those people off, intrepid Capitalist, and create structural unemployment, why not take this free money from the government, to pay off your table tennis rackets? You keep them employed, and they can then buy the badminton rackets you had intended to manufacture. You will need to pay them more, though, which is why we gave you all that money.

What has happened? In the short run, everybody wins. Capitalists get money, and the workers keep their jobs. What else has happened? The money has been created from scratch, by the government. The government now has the right to claim it as a levy in the form of taxation, from the very people who just got the money. Moreover, it has probably caused an inflationary effect, such that the buying power of everyone–workers and Capitalists alike–has diminished.

Keynes talks very specifically–I will be offering the quotes in my formal treatment–about the devaluation of money to destroy the investing class. He allows for some differences of wealth, but no big ones, and none that are in principle beyond the reach of the government, both in terms of graduated taxation, and outright confiscation through money creation.

Think of it this way: let’s say someone walked up to you and handed you ten $100 bills, and an invoice, payable in a year, for $1,200. Are you ahead? Is that a smart transaction? This is the essence of Keynesism.

As I view it, the problem is that classical economists have done a piss poor job of coming up with desirable economic equilibriums. Keynes has the appeal of offering (but self evidently not actually fostering) full employment of the sort normal people would want.

The missing link, which nobody seems to be willing to see or discuss, for whatever reason, is the inflationary, confiscatory nature of banking. This is what devalues our labor. This is how our collective innovatory genius gets diluted, such that most of us work long careers, at multiple jobs, and have little to show.

Socialism is not a solution. It is, to invoke the metaphor of Fabius Maximus, a delaying maneuver. It is postponing a reckoning. It is the creed of fools and scoundrels.

We need to imagine a future at rest. I am in full agreement with this. Yet, the way to solve unemployment is to raise the value of labor, and the way to do this is through enhancements in productivity that are NOT STOLEN.

It pains me to see this, but it is PRECISELY the doctrines of Keynes, in tandem with the natural avarice of bankers the world over, which has forestalled this. Not only did Keynes not point us to the promised land, he led us IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Had he not come along, had he been run over by a bus, or stabbed by a jealous lover of either gender, then the world economy would be much farther along. Everything he advocated has made us less rich, more poor, less free, and more indebted.

You want one name upon which to hang the albatross of our international debt crises? He’s your man.

I’ll have more to say in coming days.

Many years ago, I had a dream of the Rolling Stones planning a party. It was really quite simple. They rented this large old home or castle, put up no decorations at all, but made sure there were plenty of beds and sofas, lot of wine and liquor, and loud music. All their bases were covered. They had been doing this for many, many years, and knew what the basics were. You get the women there, dance, get drunk, and screw. Nothing fancy. They had neither more nor less than needed.

This may seem like a strange way of approaching the idea of professionalism, but it is the most salient, for me, affectively. A true professional will penetrate to the heart of a matter quickly and with little effort. A good police detective will have a good hunch who did the crime the first time they meet them. A talented animal groomer will know very quickly how to calm an animal down.

Or, to take a story I’ve long been fond of telling, there was once a boiler that wasn’t working. It was a large, ungainly machine, that none of the on-staff people could figure out, so they called in an expert. He looked at it for about 5 minutes, then tapped one valve with a hammer. Instantly it started working again.

When they got the bill for $5,000, the owners were outraged. “How”, they asked, “could ten minutes work warrant a bill for $5,000? That is $30,000/hour” They asked to itemize the bill.

So he did:

Examimation of machine: $20.00
Labor to fix machine: $10.00
Knowing where to hit it: $4,970.00

They paid the bill.

The point I’m making here is that in life most of what we see is fluff. Most words really don’t matter, particularly if they come from politicians.

What we need to see from the Republicans in 2011 is that they GET IT, that they are in the same State, if not zip code of solving problems. Competence is not making sure you get credit for every little spot of grease on your well creased trowsers. It is GOING AFTER IT–the solution, a solution, anything that has at least a shot at working.

What I expect is much less than that. So much the worse for all of us. We’ll see. I see little cause for hope–except to the extent they will at a minimum make things worse more slowly–but never cause for quitting.

This post is written in that spirit, of never forgetting the Alamo, nor the sacrifices of our betters to get us to our hand-wringing, intellectually mediocre present.

I went to a Lip Synching show put on by parents at my kids school tonight. With a couple notable exceptions, it was awful. It was hard to watch.

Yet, I support mediocrity that shows up. I think the point of art is recreating yourself through spontaneous expression AS WELL AS YOU CAN. It is dumb to expect everyone to possess talent. But if they express what talent they have as well as they can, and grow from the process, then that ritual act was worthwhile.

The Tibetans perform a ritual in which they carve things out of butter. After a time, they melt the butter, and incorporate it into their food. They also make sand mandalas, that are ceremonially destroyed in rivers.

Once this art is gone, what remains is the effect it had on the people who created it, and that can be quite seperate from what it looked like, while existing.

All worthwhile societies give each person in them a space and a time where attention is paid to them, and in which they can rise to the occasion. The point of liberty is enough space to grow.

As I view it, growth is inherently a creative act. Economies grow when inventors invent, marketers market, and entrepreneurs entrepren (couldn’t resist).

When people innovate, they in effect create new money, by creating new value. This fact is hidden by the parasitical nature of our financial system.

Think about this word, “growth”. If you ponder it, can you not call to mind an image of a tree growing? When a tree is a seed, it is small. Then cells are added, form is added, and this process is continued until something small is something large. Every single cell which forms that tree is not only created, but recreated for the duration of that tree’s life.

In my own terms, the strength of the adult tree is weaked by parasitical vines and molds, which exist on its strength, without adding anything of their own.

Can that tree be forced to grow in the winter? Only with heat. And even then, if the heat ever stops, it will be out of season, and will die.

The ebb and flow of our economic life is the result of the ebb and flow of money creation. If we fix our currency, then what we get is the economic equivalent of the Mediterrean, with long growing seasons, lots of sun, and very little winter.

What advocates of government intervention want to do is dump fertilizer–bullshit in this case–on the tree, to try and force it out of a natural cycle. They want the tree to pretend it’s summer when it is winter.

Above all, they want to arrogate to themselves not just control of the economy, but to impose on the rest of us the idea that only they know what to do. This despite never having run businesses, or even done ANYTHING practical with their lives, other than perhaps changing a tire once.

The fact is, all they can do is move around wealth that has already been created, and that has a finite lifespan. It is like saving the tree by cutting it down. You can consume it, but its life is at an end.

Nothing grows economies like confidence in the future and freedom. Nothing kills economies more than uncertainty, and excessive burdens in the forms of taxes and unnecessary regulation.

Think about it: who is in charge when the government is asleep? Who does the work? Everyone else. They forget this. Remember that when a leftist says “The People”, what they really mean is “me and mine”.

Thus when some hack says Republicans don’t “do” anything about the economy, they are betraying a fundamental disdain for, and misunderstanding of, the vast bulk of working Americans and business owners.

In toy news, Hasbro recently announced that Paul Krugman will be sponsoring a Magic Eightball for economic prognostication. After looking at the prototype, Republican spokesperson Mitch McConnell complained that no matter how you shook it, the answer always came up “spend more money.”

Democrats, however, were quite enthusiastic. According to Berkeley student Ima. B Thistlewhite, the results were “astounding”: “Every time I use it, it gets the right answer. It is almost spooky. In fact the only time it was wrong was when I asked it about Defense Department spending.”

Despite the controversy, a new Krugman action figure is being developed, with a pullstring which causes it to say “you’re not spending enough”, “spend more”, and “don’t worry about the deficits.”

Sales are expected to be brisk in California.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html?WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1110-L22&ei=5087&en=d1dd38e101e9a450&ex=1305003600&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1289574074-cA2ncPA3IhBKYtTq4zCMqg

Argument: Obama erred by not spending twice what he did, and indebting us twice what he did. Subtext: government action is necessary to create jobs, and that its job is to “do something”.

To this, he tries to sneak in the idea that Obama is “bank friendly”, but not as “bank friendly” as the Republicans. What should we take away? That Obama is actually a moderate, who has just been trying to get along, rather than a radical socialist whose patent distaste for all forms of private enterprise has had an enormous chilling effect on the optimism of those who actually risk their own money, rather than someone elses.

Recommendation: double down.

My response: read my piece, Keynes in a nutshell. I have been pondering a short addition, and will make it right after I click “post” here.

As I explored here, the official explanation of the collapse of WTC7, a 47 story building built according to modern building codes, is that it was the result of the combustion of office furnishings. It is not stated how the fires started, nor are any calculations offered on the difference between the heat needed to damage a steel I-beam treated with flame retardant, and what is possible if you built a bonfire of wood desks and books, which nobody claims happened.

The official account is simply untenable. This leads necessarily to the conclusion explosives were involved, and then necessarily to the conclusion that more people were involved in the plot than have been accounted for. Given how much we have sacrificed in Afghanistan–which war was a DIRECT outflow of the attacks–this is morally wrong.

Personally, I find it impossible to believe George W. Bush had any involvement in this, but the logic is inescapable that SOMEBODY, who has yet to be named, did. This constitutes a national security threat.

I wanted to further comment that given the foregoing thesis, the conclusion seems inescapable that the actual target for United 93 was WTC7. Here is the timeline:

Flight 11 takes off from Boston at 7:59 and crashes at 8:46 into WTC1.

Flight 77 takes off from Boston 8:14 and crashed at 9:03 into WTC2.

Flight 93 takes off from Newark–right across the river–at 8:42. Figuring 15 minutes to hijack it, this would have it crashing at about the same time as Flight 77. Bam, bam, bam.

In my view, the intent was to get coverage, get a lot of cameras, then blow all three buildings. They were supposed to go down together,one after the other.

Remember, too, that the Emergency command center for NYC was in WTC7, and that some high level officials in the Guiliani Administration said they heard explosions prior to either WTC going down. You can Google it, if you care. Their interviews are on YouTube.

What must have happened is that for whatever reason the United 93 crew screwed up. They likely just waited too long.

Their “support crew” must then have had to improvise, rigging some fires in WTC7, then blowing it, hoping that in all the confusion nobody would wonder too long or too hard how a 47 story modern skyscraper just drops like a rock when it hasn’t even been hit by a plane.

And that is what happened. People just don’t want to awaken to the horrible truth that buildings like that don’t just fall down because the curtains are on fire. As the official version commented, this would be the first time in history something like that has happened.

I’m not conspiratorially minded, in general, but it seems clear to me that somebody got away with a lot of murder on that day. May have been unidentified Al Quedists, or someone else. We may never know, but if we are to resolve this mystery, we have to first accept that that is what it is. The story we have been given is plainly wrong.