Category: Uncategorized

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5etFfRefGhk

In general, I avoid self disclosure, as I am not an exhibitionist. It may seem at times like I am sharing, but most of the time I’m not. There is a lot at play that is invisible, and which I intend to stay that way.

This I will grant: I am extraordinarily sensitive, to the point that I have to tame the flood by willfully limiting the flow. Having done this my whole life, I am good at it.

As I put it to someone once, though, I feel like I am a 12 cylinder car operating on 3 cylinders. The difference in performance is pain tolerance. I have a very high pain tolerance, but imagine being able to see and feel the pain of everyone you meet. Being able to feel their joys, too, would not counteract this.

I truly believe that I am capable of walking into a room and feeling EVERYTHING in there. I am not strong enough to do that.

I’m not sure why I am sharing this, but it feels right.

Meaning is emotive. It represents the capacity to convert work and difficulty into flow, love, and direction.

Truth is the reason you do it, cognitively. You can have a sense of meaning, without being able to, or needing to, explain it.

What both do, though, is simulate order. Your world is never fully orderly, internally or (of course) externally, by which I mean there is never complete congruence between will or desire and outcome. There are always rough edges, and breaks in the texture.

As I look at a life of freedom, it is a mystery. You can do anything you want. Think about that. You can go left, or you can go right (to borrow a dialogue bit from Battle:LA). You can walk into a bookstore and buy ANY book in there. You can walk into a clothing store and buy anything in there. You can drop everything, and join a commune. You could defect to North Korea, so that someone will always tell you what to do, and you will be more or less fed and housed.

Freedom is a seamless ocean, in constant motion, which is limitless in its possible permutations.

This thought tends to make peoples heads explode, so they need to retreat into codes of behavior, moral systems, religious systems, philosophical systems.

What a sense of meaning provides is a direction of movement. This is the most important element phenomenologically. It is the task you feel compelled to accomplish, because it needs to be done.

What a truth system does is determine the limits of the meaning system, the boundaries. You do this, but not that. It provides the principles by means of which the chaos of freedom is tamed, roughly.

These are out loud musings. I’m not sure if this makes sense or not, but it feels like this is about the right direction for this line–wave, cloud, funnel–of thought.

As I see it, there are two classes: the people who create money, and the people who create real products and services. The real conflict is between the two. Our national debt–that carried by the Federal, State, Local governments, and that carried by private businesses and individuals–is symptomatic of wealth transfer. Most of the money created to enable those bonds of debt represented wealth transfer.

The associated price increases are merely the effect of this transfer. Inflation, per se, ought in my view to be seen PRIMARILY as wealth transfer, and only secondarily as price increases.

The key point to be grasped here is that even if the wealth is moved from the people to the government–which has plainly happened in the U.S., which you can readily see if you just look at the land and buildings and things generally owned by the Federal government–it does not benefit the “people” in aggregate. It hurts them. It is EXACTLY the same problem as that criticized by leftists in claiming that “the rich” steal from the poor.

Key point: it is possible to sustain the moral dimension of leftist critiques of our class system, but only if the correct targets are selected. As things stand, ALL of their policies instead still support elites at the expense of the common man.

I don’t remember if I’ve said this, but my financial system proposal could very easily be framed as a Capitalist Revolution. What any Marxists reading this need to understand is that the task is not to make everyone a worker, but to make everyone a Capitalist. When you are a Capitalist, you have the money to determine your own destiny. This is what we want.

That is, in any event, and in my view, what GOOD people should want for their neighbors. I want to be happy, and I want you to be happy. What makes me happy may not make you happy, but that is fine, provided we are both free to follow our own muses. Moreover, with both of us creating our own experiences according to our own inclinations, we can learn from each other.

It has always seemed a species of madness to me that so many intellectuals want to immersed in tyranny, and that they spend so much time and effort talking about “Liberating” people, when they know full well that such liberations involve mass murder, mass torture, and the eradiction of personal freedom and creativity.

First off, I think we should leave it to the Left to use petty issues to castigate their opponents. Obama’s vacations are not the issue: it is what he does when he is in office. We should be grateful when he leaves, since every time he does, he stops making things worse.

But what I wanted to say was that I don’t think he is as recreationally oriented as we think. Yes, he golfs, but when I look at him in my mind at Martha’s Vineyard, what I see are a group of men gathered around a table mapping out a strategy, in exactly the way military leaders would. We don’t know who the other men are, but we can guess readily enough the sort of men (and women) they are.

What they are producing will appear to them the work of genius, and to the rest of us like crayon scribblings with dabs of feces.

The point, though, is that when he is on “vacation”, he can surround himself with people he would not normally invite to the White House. That is why he has to leave so often. He’s not lazy, except in his thinking.

I will add that this “bank” he is apparently going to propose was done during the Great Depression, and didn’t work then either. It will be another “stimulus” wrapped in the external trappings of being a business, which of course it won’t and can’t be.

Actually, I will add as well that when we hear infrastructuretechnologyeducation what we need to transpose in their place is ineedtogetmoneytomybasetogetreelected.

This is very simple propagandistic use of business terms to convince us to buy things we don’t need.

Mexico could probably use infrastructure. We have a national highway system that works well, and is not impeding our economy in the slightest.

We create new technologies constantly, in the private sector.

We spend more than 3/4ths of the world on education already, and much more than almost every nation that is beating us. The problem isn’t money, it’s how things are structured. What we need is competition among schools, to give children choices. Vouchers are a self evident and simple way of doing that.

What I find admirable about Glenn Beck is that he has performed a very simple, and invaluable role: he has seen work that needed to be done, and gone after it. Is he THE man for the job? Of course not. No one is. George Washington was not the man for the job, and he unquestionably spent many nights in deep despair.

The people who make a difference in this world are those who see work that needs to be done, look to see if it is getting done, and if not, step in and start. You will never be good enough. You will never be smart enough. But if you are there and start, miracles can happen.

As Teddy Roosevelt put it (and I do disagree with Glenn in his analysis of TR, although I will grant that his large ego, which put Wilson in the White House, was enormously damaging in 1912): “Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now.”

Those are words to live by. That is all this blog, and my other website, are: efforts to create at least one place on the internet dedicated to dealing seriously with questions of moral relativism, and in thinking through all important aspects of our current cultural and political life. Better thinking always leads to better doing.

I don’t get out much on the internet–I tend to go to the same places–but I don’t know of any blogs or websites quite like what I have created. This is what I did, with what I had, and what I will continue doing, with whatever I have in the future.

Ann, I’m single. Just sayin’.

Few stats: legs long enough to reach the floor.

Have both hair and eyes.

Have a nice bass boat. It’s out for repair, but Junior says he’ll have it back any day now, in time for the competition.

Rent my very own residence.

No tattoos visible when I’m wearing my suit. I looked quite gentlemanly last week down at the courthouse. I really think it helped.

They tell me my road will get paved next year.

Well, if that doesn’t do it, nothing will. Drop me a line. I’m sexy: trust me.

P.S. Oh, and if you could spot me a C note until next Friday, I’d love you forever.

As I view the matter, IQ measures processing capacity, your ability to manipulate spatial, numerical or verbal data accurately and quickly. The person with the high IQ finishes the math test first. They are the first to assemble the something that needed assembling. They know facts and figures about the world, and they tend to use grammar correctly.

All of these things are important. In general, given equal characters, the smarter person will always accomplish more than a dumber person.

At the same time, IQ does not imply a capacity for imagination. Einstein himself said that imagination is more important than intelligence, and the reason he said this, in my view, is that the most useful thinking operates not on existing information, but potential information, paradigmatic information.

IQ enables you to easily navigate existing trails. You can go farther, faster, with less trouble. But it does not necessarily allow you to go traipsing miles back into the bush, just to see what is there. That is a personality trait, one which implies courage, curiosity, and the capacity to imagine LACK, to realize that all the things we “know” may pale dramatically in comparison to the things we SHOULD know, and have been too arrogant, too paradigmatically fixated, to even pursue, much less find.

Let me put it this way: our Defense Dept. network was hacked some years back by a person in Russia using the most basic computer imaginable. It was not the processing speed which did it, but the creativity and persistence of the person operating it.

Tools matter, and intelligence is a tool, but the spirit operating that machine–and I do conceive of the brain as a machine, but one which I in a spiritual form operate–is what matters most.

Is declaring a given law “unConstitutional” anything other than a veto? Prior to Roe v. Wade, many laws existed limiting access to, or prohibiting outright, the murder/destruction of unborn fetuses.

All of those laws were vetoed, after they had been passed by duly elected representatives of the people, and signed into law by their Executives.

Again, I think a two thirds vote in Congress should be able to wipe any ruling from the books, and the President should have no say in it. As the most diffuse, heterogeneous body in our system of government, the bulk of the power was always intended to rest with Congress, particularly in domestic affairs.

I think a few words on “Evolution” are in order. First, the parentheses: they are there because few dispute that change over time happens. There is no reason not to assume some sort of familial relation at some point in the distant past between Homo Sapiens and, say, the Neanderthals. Just look at a chart of dog breeds and will readily understand that selection, per se, has long been practiced and understood the world over.

What is at issue is the hypothesis that life came into being through Natural Selections, Darwin’s actual big idea, and that the diversity of form plainly evident on Earth was likewise the result of what might be termed “Change plus retention”.

We hear the argument about the monkeys and Shakespeare. This is not a good argument, because what the Natural Selectionists will argue is that once a monkey types To Be, that phrase is retained. When they type “or not to be”, that, too is retained. Given enough time, this retentive/memory mechanism will not only produce Shakespeare, but be CERTAIN to produce Shakespeare.

In the wild, this amounts to what a later theorist called “survival of the fittest”, where fitness is always context dependent. Woolly Mammoths did great in the cold, not so much when things warmed up (at least as I understand it).

Intelligence, on this analysis, is a positive adaptation, one with clear survival value, hence me typing letters on a globally networked electronic tool.

The problem they have, and it is in my view an insoluble one within their paradigm, meaning necessarily that some necessary component is missing, is that of complexity. Darwin himself saw and understood the problem that a system like the eye creates.

The eye operates as a finely tuned machine, but one which only has ANY value when the parts are taken in aggregate. The same can be said of the cell itself, the basic unit of life. The same can be said for MANY biological systems.

Necessarily, Natural Selection is linear. The example given is of a countless series of digits on a large lock. The first digit is 7. After you try the other 9 digits, you hit it, and the change is retained. Then you go to lock number 2. That number is 3. You get it, then go to lock 3, which is a 2 also, etc.

Aesthetically, this is a very pleasing conception for some. It conveys an “intelligence”–an order–to Nature, without the need to posit anything like a God.

Yet, if we look at the actual fossil record, and life as it exists today, what has happened both in the past and now is that digits are getting dialed in simultaneously, such that 72257 suddenly appears, without warning. The piece is of a whole, with no antecedants. That is all that an eye or a cell is: an unexplainable statistical aberration whose regular occurence cannot be explained with a linear model.

In my view, field theories of life will need to be reincorporated into the so-called “life sciences” in order to resolve this conundrum. In my own view, “evolution” plainly happened, but that there is sticky property to the universe such that information, once developed, is maintained in a sort of record depository in the sky.

One book that I thought dealt well with this topic was “Science and the Akashic Record”. I cannot support the authors politics, but this book was in my view useful, even though I did not share all his conclusions. I have read many books on the topic. That one comes to mind first. Michael Behe, of course, is perhaps the best known. I have not read his books, since I already accept his premise, and have seen no intelligent counterarguments. As with all important topics–at least to me–I have done this debate many times in many places, and am confident in my views.

Rick Perry, in short, is on solid ground noting gaps in the Darwinian account of the genesis of life. Personally, I would support the right of Texans to teach Creationism as an alternative viewpoint, after discussing the Darwinian view, but what I most want to see is, first, the scientific gaps noted; and longer term what is really needed is actual SCIENTISTS chasing what I believe will be a culture altering paradigmatic shift, one that will attened actually figuring out how life works.