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I think it is worth noting that this blog is one where I allow myself idiocy. If I were sufficiently erudite, I would render this as “let the reader beware” in Latin.

There is a continuum between genius and idiocy, and only if we were omniscient could we be certain of starting and ending in the right places. As things stand, sufficiently deviancies from normal can in the same day get classified by others as both brilliant and stupid.

There is a sort of rubberband effect. Dwell enough in qualitative diversity by allowing open musing–musing which may well be largely stupid–and you tend to create the motion and perceptual space to go somewhere new, somewhere that may well be quite intelligent.

Thus, I am often typing faster than I am thinking. I am a very good typer, and sometimes I just watch the screen to see what comes out. In effect, I am trying to channel my intuitive side.

Sometimes this results in things I am very happy with–this happens more often than not–but sometimes I quite literally could not explain what I just wrote.

My not unreasonable hope is that this blog mostly appears “intelligent-ish”, but please keep in mind that the angel of idiocy is floating around, and it takes time to know when you have been infected. This applies to all of us, certainly me.

Some interesting statistics on Right to Work versus Forced Unionization states. From Human Events, week of March 21, 2011:

Among America’s 22 RTW states (including Florida, Georgia and Texas) ,non-farm, private-sector employment grew 3.7% from 1999 to 2009, while it shrank 2.8% among America’s 28 forced-unionism states (e.g. California, Illinois and New York).

During those 10 years, real personal income rose 28.3% in RTW states and sank 14.7% in forced-unionism states.

In 2009, cost-of-living-adjusted, per capita disposable personal income was $35,543 in RTW states versus $33,389 in forced-unionism states. Americans in RTW states enjoyed more freedom, plus this $2,154 premium.

Just as minimum wage laws create higher rates of unemployment, so too does forced unionism create an overall lower standard of living, for the same reason: by forcing corporations to pay higher than market wages,they necessarily force less hiring, and less business expansion. In aggregate, this causes economic harm. Self evidently, the people that actually have jobs with the unions benefit, as long as they stay employed. But even they increase their risk of getting laid off, and benefits cannot be paid forever.

None of these things are complicated. People that take the long view, and who try to balance the interests of all concered are few and far between, though. Most people want something for themselves, and could care less about others. In the long run, though, this always rebounds to their own personal detriment. You can only get things by force so long. At some point the well runs dry, and it doesn’t matter than how well honed your protesting and extortion skills are. If the jobs aren’t there, the terms of employment are not negotiable.

Posted the following on the Blaze. Hadn’t thought about this topic in a while, but thought I’d pass along some thoughts I had many months ago, but don’t think I ever posted. I am leaving the link in there, since it would otherwise be hard to find.

I must have run out of room on the second link. It is here: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2010/11/tower-7-thoughts.html

To the extent of my knowledge, I am the only person to have proposed that United 93 was supposed to hit Tower 7. It is in my view stupid to assume that the explosives hypothesis is inconsistent with the consensus reality of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings and fields. They are fully compatible.

Moreover, it is quite possible to separate out the hijackers from the demolition entirely. It is possible someone knew of the plot–say Iranian intelligence agents, or whoever funded the operation through a cutout–but did not tell the hijackers of it. There would be many benefits to this, not least of which would be informational security.

Thus, there would be no reason you could not have radical Islamists, very committed to their cause, crashing their planes, and not knowing that they were funded by people who were indifferent to Islam, or to their version of Islam; and that those same shadow-people could not have set up a parallel operation, to ensure maximal trauma to the American people and economy.

As far as that goes, there was apparently short-selling in some markets. Given the capacity to imagine such cynicism, you could envision someone directly and consciously engineering this operation for profit.

There are many possibilities. What seems clear, though, is that Tower 7 was brought down through explosives.

I’m listening to an excellent series from the Teaching Company (btw, if I have not recommended their products on here before, and I can’t recall having done so, then please start spending “thirty minutes a day in the best classrooms in the world”, as their marketing pieces has it; they are free in most libraries, and most well worth the money if your library doesn’t carry them) by Robert Greenburg, on “How to listen to and Understand Great Music”. He does a good job of not just explaining but dramatizing things.

To the point here, we are now up to the Baroque Age. Baroque is a Portuguese word for an irregular pearl, one with various bumps and what would normally be called imperfections. It was intended at the time as a pejorative, and only recovered, presumably, as an acceptable description after everyone had forgotten what it meant.

The characteristics of this style were ornamentation–busyness–and order. On Baroque buildings, you have huge amounts of filigree, lots of little pieces doing curly-cues, and spirals, going here and there. Yet, looked at as a whole–Versailles is a good example–everything was balanced and ordered. What is on the bottom is on the top, and what is on one side is on the other.

Nature, in this understanding, obeyed rational, knowable laws, and thus the manifold complexity of nature answered, ultimately, to squares and triangles (I will note that the Writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker early on expressed his terror that this might be the case).

Within this line of thought, parts of Nature could be sees as flawed. As Greenburg puts it “there is a general belief that through thought humankind could order and dominate their world”. As he puts it, this passion for order extended to a “negative view of God’s own Nature.”

Here are some very illuminating quotes he offers in support of this thesis:

Malebranche: “The visible world would be more perfect if the seas and lands made more regular features, if the rains were more regular; if, in a word, if we had fewer monstrosities and less disorder.”

French Catholic Missionary, describing Niagara Falls: “Falling from a horrible precipice, foaming and boiling, after the most hideous manner imaginable, and making an outrageous noise, a dismal roaring, really more terrible than thunder.”

English traveller of the 17th Century, describing the Alps: “Hideous, uncouth, monstrous excrescences of Nature.”

This is all very interesting. Here is what I will submit: to the “Baroque”–the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment–is opposed not Romanticism, but the “uncarved block” of Lao Tzu. I have discussed this in a number of places, but this is a critical point.

The Chinese word/phrase normally translated as “Uncarved Block”–“P’u”– is composed of two characters, in my understanding. The first–and I quote here from “The Tao of Pooh”, which I am assuming got this right–“the ‘radical’ oor root-meaning one is that for tree or wood; the second, the ‘phonetic’ or sound-giving one, is the character for dense growth or thicket. So from ‘tree in a thicket’ or ‘wood not cut’ comes the meaning of ‘things in their natural state'”.

In Baroque ornamentation, what we have represented is the complexity of nature. A lawn of grass is endlessly complex, looked at under a fine degree of detail, but encased within carefully maintained borders, and planted in patterns of varying complexity, as in Baroque gardens, it can be made orderly on a perceptible scale.

Yet this “order” requires constant maintenance. The King must pay people to keep the weeds from the walkways, and artisans to repair architectural dtails damaged in storms. Forests require no maintenance. They endure.

In our own nation, attempting to tame wildfires actually made things worse, by tampering with the natural process of periodically clearing the floors for new growth.

As we have learned with Chaos Theory, simply because systems–such as uncut forests–appear disorderly, does not mean they are. All sorts of algorithyms can be applied to water flow, rainfall, tectonic action, resulting in clear statistical patterns.

Herein lies the foundational difference between Socialism and Liberalism: our foundational myths. One can, I think, usefully contrast the classical French Garden with the English Garden, which was consciously intended to appear completely spontaneous and natural. One can contrast French autocratic tendencies, with British Liberalism that survived in vestiges until after the Second World War.

One can contrast the “fatal conceit” that human society can be construed as an Alp or Niagara Falls, or rainfall, and tamed; with the vision (does that semi-colon improperly tame the English language? I honestly don’t know) that spontaneous order is natural, and enforced order unnatural, using excessive energy to achieve nonsensical goals.

Do you flow downhill, or pump water uphill, and call that order?

At its root, it has long seemed to me that the doctrine of egalitarianism is an aesthetic doctrine. It is morality as art; virtue as performance. As such, it answers to a process, but not an outcome.

If Versailles becomes overgrown with weeds, we are told–as it must millenia from now, if not sooner–then at least it existed once. Nature was conquered.

But was it? And what is the cost of building a Versailles? What was the cost, then, to the French people? Wars and taxes, was it not? That is my understanding of the history. And in the end, was it not the mass murder and tumult of the French Revolution, followed at length by the mass murder and tumult and naked conformity and dullness of Communism? Do we not still face would-be Versailles builders, who aim to sculpt human societies according to their aesthetics, which find in greatness and grandeur excess? Which would rather contain human life within very, very tight boundaries, then ornament what is left with artificial filigree?

This metaphor is very interesting. If we consider World War 1 as a figurative Niagara Falls, then symbolically it is fitting that from that disorder returned order. Yet Hitler concluded his own peace treaty after conquering France at Versailles as well. Hitler answered to the Niagara Falls vision of reality, an eminently Romantic one.

The Alps are neither great nor hideous: they are what they are. We are what we are. If we are to change, our first task is to determine our starting point, and that is much harder than might seem obvious. To “do nothing”, the Taoist sense, is not to do nothing, but to understand this foundational reality, and take it seriously.

“Drink is the work of the cursing class”. That’s what we’ve come to. It was funny when there was a choice between work and drink. For large segments of Britain, it seems, there isn’t. They are destined to be unemployed.

I ask again: what is more humane, giving people the opportunity to work at lower wages than many around them are getting; or forcing wages up and jobs down, such that those who have jobs are paid better than they would have been, and the rest forced to languish helplessly?

Helplessness is always a cancer. It eats away at the soul. In many respects, these British riots are logical. They are logical to the extent that a social order which compels upon them dependence must expect that the only way for them to express anger will be abstract, and at the world, at the invisible forces which have been forcing them to kneel their entire lives.

In my view, no person consciously chooses life-long dependence, except the very worst. Yet, people who for the duration of their lives are given no option are bound to feel the need to express their energy in some way. If it can’t be expressed positively, through work, through community service (no doubt run “benignly” by the State), then it will be expressed through crime.

We need to be clear that the growth of a generalized prosperous middle class is disastrous for socialists. It undermines their very reason for being, and their political commitments are not just their source of political power and income, but also their very reason for living, for working. “Protecting” others gives them something to do, which they otherwise lack. Hating or disbelieving in God, they need someone to need them, to protect them from their nihilism.

And so they have assiduously engineered permanent underclasses. They take away the jobs, but assure unemployment. Their consciences are clear, even as they are ruining millions of lives.

I posted this Judas Priest video some time ago. Consider the lyrics, and dominant emotional tone. This was in 1980.

I have every song Hank Williams (Senior, of course, although I do like much of what Junior did) ever recorded. This song, Fly Trouble, does not seem to fit his oeuvre (can you use that word for a country singer from Alabama?). It’s really perky, there’s no heartache, and it’s just not like most of his other songs.

I was listening to it tonight, though, and remembered a point Dale Carnegie made in his excellent “How to stop worrying and start living” about how people can often endure great difficulties without complaint, but then get worn down by the littlest things, with insects being a conspicuous example. You work all day in the fields, come home bone tired to the most basic food, sleep in a hot room, and yet it is the flies that finally cause you to snap.

A month or two ago I was talking with a man who spent his career in the Marine Corps, about the difference between Parris Island and Camp Pendleton, both of which host basic training classes for incoming Marines. In his opinion, the salient difference was sand flies. May have been mites. Little bugs that get on you and itch. They have them in Parris Island, and not in California.

You aren’t allowed to swat them away. You aren’t allowed to kill them. The drill instructors treat them like Hindus treat cows. This man said he had once seen a recruit forced to search for several hours for a bug he had killed, that had fallen in the sand (so that it could get a proper burial, as I recall; beer was involved, so this may be slightly off).

Old Hank knew what he was doing. Damn flies can, in the right circumstances, do as much damage to your emotional well being as your woman cheating on you. Maybe more, depending on the rest of the context.

Dale Carnegie framed it as “don’t let the little things get you down”, and that is sound advice. There’s always some little, unexpected, annoying thing. Be a big wheel, and just roll over it.

Some evenings, and sunrises, the air is just perfect, and the light shines off the leaves of trees, that are moving gently in the breeze, and I get this sensation, that I sometimes call “mystery”. Something is there, but I can only feel it. It is hiding, but feels like someone I have loved forever, and who has loved me forever, giggling unseen behind a bush, or perhaps floating somewhere in the air.

I mention this, because this is something worth catching. For me, it seems to follow long, hard work, fear, anxiety and the like. Then quiet.

To have the peace without the storm would be like living in California, and we can all see where that has led. Sorry, couldn’t resist. I have in fact lived in California, for what it is worth.

Can one mock the sublime? I think not: it is immune to irony and contradiction. It is merely often ignored. That is the fate of heaven.

For their part, I think angels can plainly see how stupid we all are, and yet still wait for us.

I’m in a remarkably good mood. I don’t know why. But, really, is there RATIONAL exuberance? By definition, you have left the lines, at least as I see it.

Few wandering thoughts, that can’t even cross from A to B, but which perhaps might lend some color to the ones that do.

See, I find that funny. I am a quirky sort, and no one who knows me can fail to see it. Still, I have fun.

Hard to know how personally to take it, but there are a number of sites where my comments just won’t show up. Most recently, the Mail in the UK, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC (no surprise on that last: I was noting that GE owns them, and that GE sits on the Federal Reserve Board of New York, or did until recently; Warren Buffet, of course, is also heavily invested in GE, which has seen a very good ROI out of this President, and the Dem’s more generally). Of course, it may just be shitty software. For my part, I need not render a firm conclusion at this point. [Many posts have now appeared that were posted after my own, so I must infer that the likelihood is it was not allowed through. Why, I don’t know. The text below is a cut and paste. If I worried about things like this, then I suppose I would worry about this.]

Be that as it may, I posted the following, in response to this article:

This was all predicted in Clockwork Orange, was it not? Can those with perception not see the bloodlessness and vampirism that follows the rejection of coherent moral and cultural narratives?

For my part, I have invented terms for all these things. Thinking new thoughts is always easier with new words.

If you click on the Political section of this link, you will see my treatment of different political orders, of which I recognize four. This is original, as far as I know: http://www.goodnessmovement.com

I also define Goodness in a way which I think could survive the PoMO critique of someone sincerely trying to improve the world, and/or to perceive/think clearly.

To the extent this trauma causes you to ask how the worms got into the middle of your cultural order, it will be useful. It is far better to realize you are falling, than to wake up one day on the ground, not knowing how you got there.

The mere fact that this bothers many Britons–apparently most–is positive.

I was reading this rare example of writing we can reasonably assume to actually be that of Obama, and it dawned on me that there are structural similarities between the current war on the war on the debt being waged by the parrot-(rhymes with robot)niks, and that waged by them against efforts to counter Soviet military power.

In both cases, you have a factually ungrounded argument, that appeals to naive young idealists, who simply cannot believe that what appears to be the truth, can in fact be the truth.

In the case of the debt, we are looking at financial collapse, of a sort common enough in history. They happen all the time. Such a collapse–and no amount of tax increases will prevent it, and may well hasten it–will hurt the poor and middle class the worst, PARTICULARLY if it is called a “revolution”. This is what happened in France. It is what happened in the Soviet Union. It is what happened in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Yes, you can take people’s stuff. But it lasts a blink of an eye, then you are sifting through rubble looking for morsels of stale food.

The poor and middle class will not have comfortable country homes, the ability to stockpile food, or–the simplest remedy–to just move somewhere better. They will not have cushy jobs in the new government, which arrogates to itself more than enough, while others starve. Given a sizable enough collapse, starvation is conceivable even in America.

Likewise, the anti-national defense movements seemed predicated more or less on the subversion of our national sovereignty. “Better Red than dead”, they said, which also implied “better red than wealthy”, “better red than capitalist”, and “better everyone poor than anyone rich”. These things all go together.

The cynics of course knew the goal was ending American autonomy, but among them were many stupid children who thought negotiation with the Soviets was both possible and desirable in conditions other than national strength. Reagan did sign agreements with them, agreements which followed the development of good negotiating positions brought on by credible military capabilities.

If we alter “Standing against Militarism” to “Standing Against National Defense”, we get an acronym describing the actual intellectual and moral foundations upon which leftists want to erect their utopian palaces.

Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22krugman.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0727-L17

I’ll pull out two comments:

In particular, cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of weak consumer demand.

What we need to read here is “cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of considerable uncertainty with regard to our regulatory future, our tax future, and our overall economic conditions that are resulting from that uncertainty.” Reading fools like Krugman, you would think people were banging on the doors of Colonel Sanders, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison to DEMAND the products that made them rich. This is stupidity of a depth possible only for someone who has never run a business, or had a real job. Krugman doesn’t even seem to have had the high school job at Burger King.

For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great.

I do know my 1930’s history, and what happened is the Fed inflated our currency in the late 1920’s, the DEFLATED it very consciously, beginning just before the Crash it more or less caused, and continuing roughly through the first year of FDR’s tenure. No one is calling on the Fed to pursue deflationary policy, and cutting government spending does not constitute deflation by any rational definition.

The naked fact is that we will be paying some $1 trillion JUST IN INTEREST a decade from now, which will constitute what was as of a couple decades ago our ENTIRE BUDGET, and as of a tad over ten years ago HALF our budget.

These leftists are so stupid they assume that businesspeople are unaware that at some point tax increases will be necessary. They are planned for 2013 already, and amount to something on the order of a 30% hike. By 2016 the plan is to collect $3 Trillion in taxes annually (and self evidently spend much more than that).

None of this is complicated. Taxes deferred are not taxes avoided. In fact, the longer it takes to pay them–as with any debt–the higher the eventual cost. This basic phenomena is familiar to anyone running a business or a household, and will in my view not be lost on the bulk of voters next year, Krugman’s avid propagandizing notwithstanding.