Author: White Whale

Roughly 8 years ago I came into the office and found a bullet sitting on my desk. It wasn’t in the case; it was just the lead. I shrugged my shoulders, and went to work. When I told a co-worker about it, she said she would be freaked out. I thought about it, and decided that it was indeed a mystery but since no one was threatening me, and I had no enemies I knew of, I wasn’t going to worry about it.

I kept it, though, as an interesting symbol of the mysteries we encounter in life. It’s in my car. Not all questions are answered. Not all confusion is healed. Rather than sitting at the apex of knowledge, I think we ought properly to view ourselves as scarcely better than the insects. We quite literally have no way of knowing what we don’t know. This plain fact is easily missed in our current age.

It would in fact come as a disappointment for me to learn just how that bullet came to be sitting on my desk. I would say “oh, yes”, and it would all make perfect sense. But how dull that would be. I like a life where I don’t understand everything, and know I don’t.

Mystery builds room for creation, for speculation, for movement. It is that place where we build what comes to be “really real” in our persons, and in our social orders.

One more, then it’s off to some thirties pulp fiction.

I submitted this to someone tonight: Propaganda is when the number of adjectives so exceeds the number of verifiable facts that one reaches the end of even lengthy pieces unsure of what has been said, concretely, other than “I disapprove.”

Remember, propaganda has as its purpose the closing off of dialogue, the prevention of self organizing shared perceptions that are based on ideas which did not originate with the propagandist. Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.

Manifestly, no skilled propagandist could get away with saying they sky is green. Our every day experience invalidates that. They would lose their audience immediately. What they do, therefore, is tell the truth, but then sculpt it. The less truth they use, the better, so the more naked, unverifiable assertions, the better.

What they do is say “the sky is sad today”, or “the sky radiates hope today”, or “even the sky agrees with the Chairman’s joyous new plan to cut food rations in half.” You take a fact, and modify it in any way you want, even the most implausible, if you think you can get away with it. In a condition of a controlled media, largely you can get away with it. Obviously, the people know what you are up to, but if it is everywhere, they are influenced over time without realizing it, and if you don’t get too greedy, you can go far.

This is the role that adjectives play. The Tea Party is “racist”. Why is it racist? Because that is the STARTING point of all leftist narratives about it. How do you disprove racism? How do you answer “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Those predisposed to believe the narratives that they download from their preferred ideological docking station, are quite willing to accept unverifiable truths. It is not a question of physics. It’s not a question of chemistry. It’s not empirical in any way. It is an INTERPRETATION, one that in academic terms is essentializing, which is to say prejudicial to the aggregate, and indifferent with respect to individual differences and particularities. The quality supposed becomes an immutable fact.

The question becomes not “is the Tea Party movement racist”, but “How racist, and can they be stopped?” When you become used to living in seas of adjectives denuded of even a nominal effort at impartial factual analysis, then the importation of ideas like this is seamless and complete.

Those living in propaganda are for this reason something less than human. Not only are they not morally sovereign, in most cases they don’t want to be, and their lack of intellectual freedom is processed, itself, as freedom. Some people are born for cages, and given their shot at the wild open skies, will choose the oppressive gloom and certainty of a cave without hesitation.

This is the bulk of Obama’s dogmatic base. They are for all intents and purposes automotons, and it is precisely because this is a desirable state for them that they won’t listen to the imprecations of reason. In important respects, Leftism is a cult.

It has always seemed interesting to me that Communists change their names. Lenin was Ulyanov. Stalin was, if memory serves, Shakashvilli. Ho Chi Minh’s real name was Nguyen Tat Thanh. Pol Pot’s real name was Saloth Sar. And on it goes. You convert to the cult, and just like in the Moonies you get a new name.

One wonders, in that regard, about the significance of our current President choosing to use the name of a man he only met once in his life, and not his maternal name, or the name of the father who actually spent time with him. What provoked the need to learn more about his fathers dreams, and to carry them forward?

Wait, where did you go, audience? Oh, right, I don’t know if I have one. C’est la vie. I’m very much an inner directed personality.

When the pretty girl marries the surgeon, that is eugenics. They have cute, smart kids, who go on to successful careers and marry similar people. For political correctness, let me add “when the pretty boy marries the surgeon, who may or may not be male, female, other, and who may be of any ethnicity, nationality, or religious creed (except Christian). Conscience clear now. Let’s proceed.

Two posts ago I talked about raising the average IQ of persons of African descent in this country. This would necessarily involve, immediately, ensuring to the extent possible adequate nutrition and intellectual stimulation in the formative years. Research on how to optimize this process would be useful. It would include vitamin intake and, presumably, not living in a war zone, which would involve more effective policing, which would mean, in the short term, more blacks in prison.

Now, for the life of me, I don’t know how ANY kid can grow up in the ghetto psychologically normal, much less optimized to participate in a society based on advanced social skills, including personal restraint, interpersonal trust, and the capacity to digest and use various forms of knowledge quickly and seamlessly.

Conservatives often tend to take this “lift yourself by your bootstrap” approach. Sometimes this works. Most of the time, if remediation of social ills is the task, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work in aggreggate, since most people are average. Only above average people lift themselves by their bootstraps. Depending on everyone being above average is planning on failure, by definition.

Conservative will further ask the question: why care at all? Why not let them rise or fall according to their merits? To my way of thinking, helping the less fortunate is the right thing to do. I think that compassion has often been used rhetorically by Leftists to gain power which they didn’t use to help ANYONE but them and theirs, but that fact does not negate the desirability of caring about our fellow men and women. This is a moral argument. I will not judge those who do not agree. All that is NECESSARY in this society, in my view, is that those who judge others do what they can to bear their own burdens. Most conservatives I know meet that criteria.

Be that as it may, the topic awaits. What if women who got pregnant outside of wedlock were given the option of, say, giving the child up for adoption, and getting child welfare payments anyway for life, if they would just get their tubes tied. No more kids. Sexual freedom. And if they elected not to get their tubes tied, then they get nothing for any future kids, and extra visits from Child Protective Services to make sure they are taking care of them.

What if men who got a woman knocked up and didn’t want to hang around could avoid child support payments, if they got a vasectomy?

In both cases, we would in effect be paying people not to have kids, just like we pay (or used to pay; I need to check if this is still going on) farmers not to grow corn. The kids wind up on the dole one way or another anyway, and it is precisely the non-producers–the ones who are not working 3 crappy jobs to make ends meet–who do most of the reproducing. Over time, this would have a salutary effect, and it would be fully voluntary. In the long run, I suspect it would save us a lot of money too.

Conversely, what if we paid parents in some low income neighborhoods extra money in child welfare checks if they got and stayed married?

This may already happen, but what if unwed mothers got more money the more education they received?

However we do it, in the long run much of social and personal structure is based on very simple pain/reward, carrot/stick calculus, and given this, our policies must explicitly reward desirable behaviors, and discourage undesirable, self-destructive behaviors.

Some of my conservative friends would be horrified (hell, may BE horrified, if any are reading this) how much place I am giving for the provision of social services.

The simple reality is that I am quite aware of all the suffering in the world, and I see no reason for unnecessary suffering. The problem we have faced for 50 or more years is that the self appointed guardians of the poor are power drunk fools who have made everything worse for everyone. They have not solved the problem, and they have run up massive bar tabs (Mr. Speaker, I’d like another shot of Self Importance when you get around to it) doing it.

Random thoughts. I need to chill before I go to bed. My damn brain runs 24/7.

Perhaps the most pernicious element of Socialism is its attack on culture, per se. If a just society is defined as one in which everyone is the same, in which all distinctions of class, national identity, ethnic background, religion (which of course is to be destroyed root and branch), or any other differentiator are gone, then culturally nothing is left. Everything is left to the winds. All that is stable is the State, which is omnipotent, and everywhere.

If this image is appalling, then we must envision the alternative: the acceptance, in principle, of individual and cultural variety. More: that such variety is not just a species of injustice, but the very fruit and flower of what is most noble and best in human beings. Our identities are what we offer the wider world, what we use most efficiently to enrich others.

Given this, with respect to racial integration, what is needed is not the eradication of cultural differences, but their reconciliation in countless individual encounters, in improbable friendships, surprising commonalities between strangers, and an underlying theme that we are all alone together, and may as well make the best of it. This requires neither giving up our identities, nor asking others to do so.

So often, it seems to me that the valorization (acadamese for valuing) of the Other is not intended so much to exalt or respect the Other, so much as to denigrate US. Once WE are gone, then that same hammer will come crashing down on everyone else. There is no genuine tolerance in this, no reaching across cultures such that we both grow. It is a zero sum contest, in which many of those playing it want US to lose.

When I say US, I mean old fashioned Liberals, for whom the Constitution is the most brilliant political document ever written, and who value personal autonomy, a sense of moral structure (which they refuse on principle to impose on others), political freedom, economic freedom, and a modest but very real and very deeply felt patriotism.

Some random, disconnected thoughts on race.

I think in many ways a genuine meeting of the minds never occurred with respect to the issue of race. What happened was that through a process of intimidation and exclusion, a coterie of mavericks, thought police, and thugs made it impossible to HAVE a rational discussion, with the result that general adherence to the ideal of perfect tolerance and open mindedness is a thousand miles wide, and an inch deep.

Under the surface, I think black people retain all sorts of doubts about white people, and white people retain all sorts of doubts about black people. This is the main racial divide. If you look at crime statistics, they are not random with respect to race. On the contrary: with some 12% of the population, Americans of African descent make up some 40% of our prison population. That is a significant number. There are more than 3x the number one would expect based on their demographics. As an example, roughly 16% of the population, and the prison population is Hispanic. It’s a match. Caucasians commit crimes at rates lower than one would expect.

Nor are crime statistics consistent with respect to income or class status. Most American poverty is in the Appalachians and similar areas, where they have drug related problems, but nothing like they do in big cities, and where crime rates are really quite low.

We need to ask big, bold questions like: if African Americans have lower IQ’s than European and Asian Americans, on average (which is a fact, albeit one which can be spun many ways), then how do we better integrate them into an information economy? IQ’s are malleable, particularly across generations. How do we start that process? How would we pursue that process in a democratic, voluntary way? What would such programs look like?

Leaving that issue aside, let’s look at another angle: if my experience is that if I am going to victimized in a large city, it will be by a black male, aged 15-40 or so, then it is quite pointless asking me to drop stereotypes. What happens, instead, is people keep their mouths shut, and simply move to the suburbs. Problem solved. There, in their little hideaways, they are quite content to be told not to discuss racial issues. They have rendered them irrelevant.

But no African Americans have been helped thereby. On the contrary, the tax revenue that could have been used to make the city a nicer place–let’s take Detroit as an example–has vanished. Who has suffered in that process? Not the suburbanites.

What is needed in the cities is economic growth. That growth will only happen if people feel safe in their persons, their property, and from confiscatory taxation.

Step one, there, is to be able to say: I don’t feel safe in many areas of Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and those are mainly the areas that are mainly black. Who can say that in the current climate? Who is going to speak up for African Americans and–rather than deny the problem and accuse the person of racism–actually start to implement solutions to address the problem. Who are the victims of crime in black neighborhoods? Other black people. Does this hurt suburbanites? Not at all.

Can anyone blame people with the means to do so for moving away from such problems? Of course not. Yes, political firebrands love to paint them as evil, nasty, racist, and generally bad human beings. But they are simply reacting with common sense to a problem that has been created by an inability to have a rational conversation about realistic, actionable solutions. You can’t solve a problem you can’t recognize.

What I want for all Americans, and the whole world, is a life of peace, prosperity, and confidence in justice before the law. The question is not and never should be: “what sorts of statements are allowable?”, but rather, “what is the problem–who is suffering–and how do we most quickly make this problem disappear forever?”

Those who refuse to allow the debate to be framed this way are, by this act, demonstrating contempt for the lives of the very people they claim to be protecting.

It seems to me the only real security in this world is found in a code you can “cling” to–a word taken from one of our Presidents more memorable and unintentionally candid phrases.

You can’t depend on people. They will let you down, and they will die.

You can’t depend on material things, as they are in constant movement. Fortunes are both made and lost, although large ones seem relatively durable, which is presumably why the rich spend a lot of time protecting their wealth, which is understandable. It is also unfortunate, as it enables an alternative to a life of real risk, and the corresponding need to develop a moral code.

I would say you can’t even depend on God, at least in the short term. Are prayers always answered? If I pray to live forever on this Earth, will it happen? If I pray that nothing bad ever happen to me until I die of old age in my bed, can I be sure that will happen? Has every soldier in war who prayed for safety made it through alive and in one piece? Of course not.

As I see it, this world does have structure. There is a sort of “God’s Law”, or Divine Providence, or “Will of Allah”. This structure is founded on the basic process of perception, in how we relate to others.

As I see it, our task is to build others, and in so doing build ourselves, such that we can live happily. One could call this love, although I tend to eschew the term as over-loaded with baggage. Yet, can we make of love a commandment? I don’t think so. There are times when you are so hard pressed that love is the last thing on your mind.

Love is a type of aggression in the battle of life. It is an expansion. It is for times of plenty, where plenty is defined according to how qualitatively rich you are. For some, they can live in utter poverty, and still have plenty of love to share around. For others, they can live in the lap of luxury and think only of themselves.

The root of qualitative expansion is a sense of safety. Safety, in turn, depends on a secure defense.

Psychologically, I believe the most robust fortress possible can be built from the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and constant perceptual motion, all of which values are well familiar to anyone who reads what I write.

On my arm, I have a tattoo which says, in initials, “Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses, and never quit”. Those are contained in what I call the Qualitative Cross, where the vertical axis represents Quality (roughly what I called Li a few posts ago) and the horizontal represents Quantity, or Chi.

This tattoo is a sort of protective amulet. When I want to quit, I remember that quitting in a noble cause is simply not allowed. It is against the rules. It doesn’t matter how hard the slog is: that is the rule. This is of great defensive advantage.

Likewise, when I find myself involuntarily counting the reasons I should feel sorry for myself, I limit the scope of my possible dialogue by removing whining, complaining, and excuse making (that set of three, by the way, was given to John Wooden and his brothers by their father, who must indeed have been the remarkable man Wooden said he was). Then I just sort of look through my emotional “body” for traces of resentment and rejection of what is, and cautiously isolate them as contaminants.

Perception is how you overcome roadblocks. It is how you overcome crappy thinking. Creation, you see, is a type of perception, too. It is seeing what could be there, but isn’t, yet. This keeps you moving, and gives you the direction in which to move.

Most evil in this world comes from lacking a core. It was Ibsen, I think, who pointed out that when you peel an onion, there is nothing in the middle. Unlike, say, peaches, there is nothing in there. There is no seed to further growth.

Likewise, evil is lacking a defense. It is lacking a core principle, which is valued more than life itself, and which thereby makes life bearable and even pleasurable.

Sadism, then, on this reading–and I am in part thinking out loud–is simply operating from a realistic assessment of defenselessness, and deciding that the best defense is a good offense. Rather than using love, though, the evil person will use power. Rather than feeding on love, they feed on fear.

I think that’s close to the truth. Stuff to do.

Peace be upon you. And also upon you. This is said in every Catholic Mass. It is said as an every day greeting by Arabs and–through the contraction Shalom–also by Jews.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that there are countless ways of actually saying this. The intent is to convey love, acceptance, warmth and a more general sense that we share the wars of this world together, and thus share a deep desire for the tranquility of social harmony and rest from unnecessary battles.

Yet, this greeting can mean “I want to kill you, and take your place”. It can mean “I am profoundly jealous of you”. It can mean “I am your superior, you do what I say”.

Jesus taught, if memory serves, that his followers were to be “as innocent as doves, and as clever as serpents”. To my mind, that would mean the capacity to convey a greeting like that with perfect sincerity, but also to hear, really HEAR, what is said in return.

I have always liked the Hindu “Namaste”, which means I salute YOU, where the YOU is the spark of the divine that lives in all of us.

As far as Americans, what can we infer from our system of greeting? Hello: you are in the room, and I acknowledge your presence. Of course, it CAN also mean, as Louis Armstrong sang, “I love you”.

For myself, when I ask people how it’s going, I always try to give them a chance for an honest answer.

If we are all ships drifting in their own directions in the dark, then attention is the light that allows us to see one another, and be less alone.

During the Vietnam War the argument made beginning in 1968 was that we would lose because we would quit—we didn’t have their “staying power”—and yet we lost because and only because we quit. The task was to convert the war from an unconventional war, which we were supposedly bad at, to a conventional war, which we excelled at, since that type of war rewarded precisely what we were good at: logistics, organization, and material superiority.

Gen. Creighton Abrams did that. The war that was lost was a conventional war. This is incontrovertible historical fact.

Our relationships with the past are interesting. As time passes, do we not with some bittersweet regret remember “then”, and “her”, or “him”? Is it pleasant to contemplate past happinesses? Perhaps those with better imagination than me can readily call to mind halycon days, and friendships rewarded.

I do sometimes feel a deep sense of happiness and awareness and connection, but then it vanishes. It is so penetrating that I feel all the more superficial when it passes.

But always I seem to be here, where I am, in an eternal moment, and when I capture that cognitively, I remind myself that happiness is only rarely experienced consciously. When you are having your best days–your truly best days–you are often unaware.

No doubt many of us remember idle days by the lake or ocean, or on a boat with friends, or out on the town, laughing like fools. This is one type of happiness.

Yet, a deeper form of happiness is the work of creation, and that quite often feels momentarily like pain. When done, though, when one can stand back and look at the finished product, there is a satisfaction that is far larger and comprehensive than any momentary thrill at a bar or sporting event.

Happiness, in my mind, is building, building, building: more complex internal forms, created through choice, effort, introspection, and action. It is not linear. You cannot be happy if you are simply rich, and get the chance to indulge your taste for wine, women and song every night. There is room for that, but that is not the best.

So I wonder when I look back on my life, when I am much older than I am, what I will REALLY regret. It will likely be my many self indulgences, and not the work I have done for myself and others.

I don’t think many people outside the financial business in some form have heard this term, but it is in effect the way in which the Federal Reserve signals their intentions with regard to monetary policy. Concretely, it is the rate set by the market for banks with excess capital to loan to banks that have come up short at midnight, so they can balance their books.

Presumably, an hour or two after the bank closes, they know how much money was taken out, how much is needed to meet either reserve requirements, or simply to stay in the black–much of this is I think somewhat intentionally shrouded in mystery–and thus how far they fall short. Presumably, there is some sort of “exchange” provided by the Fed, whereby the big banks signal they have money to lend, and other banks signal they need money. The whole thing presumably happens electronically and instantly. I believe the Fed does charge some sort of nominal fee for this (and for debit and credit card processing, if I’m not mistaken; at least that is on the drawing board as a proposed expansion in their power, in my understanding). To expand on that last point, the Fed, by design, does not depend on ANY tax revenue. They are fully self funded through fees such as this. The point and purpose of the Fed has never been to make money for the institution itself, but for its member banks. Since there is functionally very little difference, the charade works.

Be that as it may, the Prime Rate is tied to the Federal Funds Rate. The Prime Rate, in turn, to the extent I can determine–and my research has been far from exhaustive, but I did hit the “usual suspects” in Google, including Wikipedia–is set 300 basis points (3%) above the targeted Federal Funds Rate, which matters for variable interest rate loans.

To get to the point, as I got to pondering just what was happening, it occurred to me that they can only “target” a rate by influencing the capitalization of the large banks in the system. As an example, there are perhaps ten large banks in New York that together own stock in their local Fed. Those banks provide substantially all the members of the Board of Governors, and for all intents and purposes those banks ARE the Fed. There is no provision against collusion and favoritism since 1) the Fed is almost entirely unregulated, and beyond ANY direct control of Congress or the People; and 2) since collusion and favoritism were THE POINT of setting the thing up to begin with.

Given this, what has to be happening is that as demands for money exceed the money in the proverbial vaults of the big banks on Wall Street, the Fed simply performs open market operations to provide the needed capitalization. Phrased another way, let us say JPMorgan Chase, certainly one of the members, is running short on cash for loans. They make a call to their buddy across the street, and ask for some money. The big ones, in the middle, presumably have a more or less revolving line of credit. The actual decisions seem to be made in Washington, by what I think is called the Open Market Committee, but many of these decisions are no doubt pro forma, where only a few billion are concerned.

Anyway, the money is created. As I described in my piece on Money Creation, the Fed writes a check, say for some bonds issued by JPMorgan Chase, and the money is now in their accounts.

This is the only way they can assure that sufficient liquidity is maintained so as to hit their targeted rate. That has to be how it works, and if someone wants to object, shoot me an email. They only have three tools for monetary policy–besides the court of public opinion and thus professional investor opinion: the Discount Window, Reserve Requirements, and Open Market Operations.

By design, the Discount Window is always above the targeted Federal Funds Rate, so it is irrelevent. For all intents and purposes, it is an irrelevant tool, even though in the past it was much more important. The Fed stated on their website somewhere that that decision was made since some members were complaining that doing to the Discount Window implied undercapitalization and thus financial weakness. Yet, the same objection applies to the Federal Funds Rate, which solves the same problem.

Likewise the Reserve Requirement has historically been unimportant, since they never change it. It has been 10% forever, it seems. Practically, I’m not sure most banks even keep that much, though. I suspect they simply loan out everything they have (or can), then “fix” any shortfalls nightly with loans from other banks. The interest rate right now is right around 0%, which is an attractive number.

Interestingly, though, the Federal Reserve–in joint extragovernmental negotiations with other central banks–has recently announced a long term decision to require all banks to have higher reserve requirements. This will have a deflationary effect.

Particularly since our current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, argued convincingly in 2004 that one of the causes of the Great Depression was inflationary policy followed by deflationary policy, this is interesting. Obviously, details matter, but one wonders if the same rough template is not there.

Be that as it may, that leads us to Open Market Operations as the only conceivably relevant tool. What does this mean? That if the loan business is slow, then the Fed isn’t doing much. But if banks are actually making loans, then what the Fed’s job is is to “top off” the funds of the already superrich, superpowerful transnational banks as needed. This is unfair, since it benefits those within the system (a non-free market system, since it has a charter from Congress not that unlike the charters handed corporations like the British East India Company), and by extension, by not handing out the same benefits to all, works to the long term detriment of everyone else.

I have been opposed to the “audit the Fed” idea in the past–in my view, we simply need to do away with it–but as I ponder the sheer extent of what we don’t know about what they do–what sort of buddy-buddy deals they cut with the movers and shakers who are plugged in to their world–I think that might be a good start.

How much money do they move out of the country? Who do they give it to? Are we capitalizing JPMorgan Chase to make loans to other countries? Why couldn’t the Fed buy $10 billion in bonds from them, after which JPMorgan Chase goes to developing nations throughout the world, and loans that money out? To be clear, these are not tax dollars. We are not on the hook for them, but assuming JPMorgan Chase turns a profit on them, they are that much more powerful domestically, in all the ways that unimaginable wealth can generate.

Once you grasp that there is NO LIMIT to what the Fed can do, very little reporting on what has been done, and NO REGULATION on any of it, you begin to realize what a profoundly anti-democratic, anti-Liberal institution it is.