Category: Uncategorized

I always have quite a few thoughts floating around. I drink more than I ought to in no small measure to stop my brain from racing around.

Saw the Transformers movie yesterday, and had a few comments. First, I think there is a before and after element to it. The before, the first part, had what seemed to me to be more or less open homosexual propaganda. This is common in Hollywood. A good example was the kiss in “Remember the Titans”, which never happened, and which was entirely superfluous to the actual storyline.

In this case it was quite obvious, at least for anyone accustomed to thinking symbolically. Most of it had to do with references to oral sex. First, the hot girlfriend says she’ll give him a “job” when he gets home. Then she brings him a glass full of licorice, which is vaguely phallic, and she walks out eating one. Then we shift to an elevator where you have one man eating a banana, and another slurping on “special” milk. Then he pulls him into the bathroom, starts talking about “Deep Wang”, and Deep Throat, and pulls his pants down. Finally, they tumble out of the bathroom stall, where one has his pants down. John Malkovitch, of course, says he doesn’t care.

What I think needs to be said about scenes like these, is that they tend to disappear from awareness. In part two of the movie, we get lots of heroic scenes, American soldiers performing well, and carefully placed shots of the American flag. This is all well and good.

But you have mixed the subversive in with the openly–what shall I call it?–the culturally common; the shared reference points, at least for most of us.

A principle means of seducing minds is combining what those minds do not accept with what creates powerful positive affects. Most people, unconsciously, will take that movie as a whole, and simply short-circuit the memories of what is incongruent with what they do accept. But it is still there. Actually, as I think about it, I had forgotten about John Turturro’s more or less openly gay valet, Dutch. Again, Dutch is given pivotal roles in several scenes.

Another scene I didn’t care for was when John Malkovitch was sparring with Bumblebee, and, with a gun pointed in his face, merely laughed. This is a species of sociopathy, like that exhibited by Kevin Bacon’s character in the latest X-men movie, who just laughed after two of his soldiers were killed, and he himself, one would have thought at that point in the movie, was in imminent danger.

These scenes act in an almost hypnotic way to implant images and ideas which, to the extent they are processed, are processed as humorous.

I went through a phase of interest in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. My final conclusion was that very little of what they did was original, with most of it apparently having been copied from Milton Erickson.

What they did do, though, is create terms for demonstrable phenomenon, and the one I wanted to mention here is pacing and leading. People trust people like them. Logically, then, if you want to manipulate someone, you must first convince them you understand them, are like them, and that they can trust you. Since it is unlikely all of these things are actually true, you modify your behavior–your breathing, body patterns, choice of words, vocal inflection–to more closely match that person. They call this “pacing”.

Having established rapport–connection–you can commence the download. You subtly change, and see if they follow. They start at Point A and you want them at Point B. So you go find where their Point A is, then lead them to Point B, gradually, gradually, with no breaks in the line.

In practice, of course, as with formal brainwashing, this is often done an inch at a time. You travel that inch over and over, until it becomes a part of their identity, and then you add another inch, and repeat the process.

What is the message here? That open sexuality–including homosexuality–is as American as apple pie. This is not, however, our history. This is a qualitative change.

For my part, I am quite willing to admit that some men and women are “born that way”. This does not bother me. What bother me are proselytizing homosexuals, and those who are unwilling to accept that some people find their lifestyle morally objectionable. Why does it matter to people in San Francisco that people in Roswell Georgia find their behavior immoral? They are in two different places.

Satanism: this should be obvious, but what I have termed Cultural Sadeism is functionally identical to Satanism. It is constituted in the decision to abandon coherent and enduring moral principles in favor of pragmatism in a power nexus predicated on violence and the threat of violence.

In Transformers, you have Patrick Dempsey as a Cultural Sadeist. The scene where all the rich, seemingly sophisticated folks are leaving the club, completely unconcerned about the fate of the girl in the car, is one which in some circles has become deeply embedded as emblematic of Satanism. There have been a number of books penned arguing that Marx was a Satanist.

Personally, I doubt he believed in God, but to the extent he did, he likely shared the rage of Sade at creation, and wanted to burn it to the ground. Death for someone existing at this level is in the end egalitarianism with the Earth.

And note, too, the use of iconic American symbols in the movie–the destruction of Abraham Lincoln, and the use of the reflecting pool to initiate the process.

Note, too, the location of the final conflict: Chicago, Obama’s old stomping grounds.

Few thoughts.

It occurred to me today that while it is a commonplace to talk the government-facilitated transfer of wealth from the rich to the “poor”, it is uncommon to point out that the same transfer creates tens of thousands of well-paying jobs in the public sector.

The wealth transfer that matters is not from the “rich” to the “poor”, but from tax-payers, to tax-consumers; from the private sector to the public sector.

Obama has increased the number of Federal employees by hundreds of thousands. All of these jobs have to be paid for by private employees and employers. This fact is inescapable.

The net reality, therfore, is that Obama has caused a large sucking motion from the private sector to the public sector; from the economically creative, to the economically consumptive. “Consumptive” is a good word. It is an illness.

Few thoughts on a whiskey night.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0803-L17

Krugman must literally have people coming in to his office telling him how to spin things. It is in my view impossible that he could be this consistently stupid.

My focus is on solving problems, but I certainly not innocent of intellectual estheticism. In this case, it is interesting to observe the texture of what he is doing, how he is massaging the facts. What he has done here is invert the actual facts in a quick, even deft way. This is in some respects one of the more clever columns I have seen from him. The flat earth analogy is one I had thought of, too, although I prefer my cyanide analogy.

What you have to do is pull these words from the page, lift them, and imagine them floating. Now, pull up in your mind the actual numbers.

Contrast, for example, the “projection” that we will achieve record tax revenues in 2014–which will necessarily involve something on the order of record tax increases–with the claim that

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation.

Despite the supposed “victory” of this debt ceiling negotiation, radical tax increases are already on the way. They can’t be stopped at this point, even by an Act of Congress, until 2013. Nothing ending Obamacare, which is the source of these projected increases in revenue–all of which plus borrowing will be spent immediately–can get through the Senate right now.

What made the Democrats feel like their fingernails were being pulled out was a drop, a tiny drop, in an ocean of blooming debt. If you want an analogy, how about the BP spill getting bigger, and Democrats calling for the leak to be expanded. We are not only going in the wrong direction, people like Krugman are calling for us to go FASTER. This is not insanity: it is wickedness. He is trying to engineer the wholesale destruction of the international economy. What motivates him I will leave to others.

The simple reality is that the increase of some $9 trillion over the next decade is a BEST CASE scenario, absent large change of the sort I expect to see in 2013. By that time–2020–we will be paying some $1 trillion in INTEREST annually. In looking at that number, keep in mind that until very recently an entire budget of $2 trillion was a lot. Look at that tax table.

This money, in turn, will either be borrowed, or taken in taxes. Taxes, in turn, not only damage economic productivity, but they are unnecessary, when used to support unproductive government, which is most of it.

Note in that regard the use of the phrase “business of government”. As Calvin Coolidge said “the business of America is business”. The business of America is NOT government. The more of it we have, the farther we are from the ideals of our nation, and noble ideals they were and remain.

What Leftist propagandists literally do, in my view, is make lists of catch words they know appeal to conservatives–and persons of common sense more generally–and consciously insert them in ironic and inappropriate ways to make the indefensible appear sound, and the idiotic appear wise.

Obama is not a centrist. He is a cynical pragmatist. He knows that as long as he stays in office the march towards overturning the Constitution and political liberty continues. To stay in office, he has to pretend to be a moderate. Yet, all the while, whether he is golfing, fete’ing himself, watching videos of his speeches, or watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, his people are pushing his agenda. We are being bankrupted. Money is changing hands in shadowy ways to shadowy people, for purposes we may never uncover.

Krugman: I can see why you are flighty and nervous. In another day and time you would be a chain smoker on TV. Question is: where will you be 20 years from now? You assume you will be a part of the New World Order, but you are dealing with people lacking consciences. How can good come from the destruction of truth in any form? It can’t, and it won’t. You have your use now, but do not assume you have any value to anyone past your immediate expediency.

Why not work to create a world you would want to grant to people you care about–I have no idea if you have children or even like women–and why not care about ALL of humanity, rather than a small elite?

It seems to me that mental health might be defined as “the capacity for tranquility”. In some of my best moments I am doing nothing whatever. I can spend an hour just watching the sky. I am endlessly fascinated by clouds and wind and light. There is nothing unusual in this, of course, until you get to our contemporary society.

I wonder how long the perceptual lines can be when children are acculturated to expect constant change from the time they are infants. They grow up in front of TV’s, and migrate to text messaging. From what I hear, most college students anymore have attention spans measured in seconds, not even minutes.

Fractionalized attention could possibly be argued to be useful economically–although I would dispute even that–but it is absolutely inconsistent with the deepest and best human states, and the mental health the capacity to reach such states implies.

I think a lot about inflation, because it is the primary leak in free markets, and the primary reason the developing world has not developed much further, and the primary reason we are in such debt.

So often, we see inflation talked about as something that just happens, like a storm sweeping in from the prairie. It isn’t. It is the result of conscious policy decisions by specific people. We need to be clear, as well, that inflation ALWAYS has winners. That most people lose does not obscure this fact. It is, in fact, a zero sum interaction.

As I have said often, in fact, most of what the Marxists accuse “capitalists” of in general–which is not accurate–is in fact true of those with the power to suck wealth out of the system without creating anything. Industrialists create things. Investors using their own money enable the creation of things. Inflationists use a legally priviledged place within the system to get without giving. I discuss all of this on my other site.

The point I wanted to make here was that inflation will not, in my view, happen in this country without confidence. Until people are confident in the future, they will not borrow money. American businesses are amassing record amounts of cash, that with another President, and without looming massive tax and regulatory increases, would be spent.

My reasoning is simple, and I have discussed it previously. Most price and following wage inflation comes from the fractional reserve system. $1 in what I have termed primary inflation, from the Fed, can be turned into much more. I forget the number, but it is about $28 if memory serves. With 10% reserves, you get 90% created, then 90% of that, and 90% of that.

Self evidently, this process is not always completed. Banks, like anyone else, have to get customers, and if people are self financing–as in the modern environment–then they can’t create much money at all.

Obviously, these facts, too, are why it is hard to track inflation. You would have to know about every disbursement of money from the Fed, and every loan made by every bank, and even then money flows around. It might be stored overseas, then come back, then leave again.

And over and above all this, you have normal market factors. The obvious example is oil. If oil goes up, everything goes up, since everything you buy has to be transported. This is not, properly speaking, inflation. It is price fluctuation in response to market conditions.

All of this is enormously complex. If we accept the existence of the Fed and the fractional reserve banking system, then we must accept the need for economists. I do not, and I do not.

If we had stable money, then ONLY supply and demand would affect prices. We would not need to concern ourselves with a variable prime rate, Fed policy, or inflation. There would be no inflation. It would be mathematically precluded from the system.

At some point I am hoping to attract some of the more clever Marxists out there. My deconstruction still enables you to feel righteous anger, but to direct it in the right direction, and to pursue actually helpful policies.

Please keep in mind that the Federal Reserve, while it is theoretically an independent entity, is actually owned and controlled by private banks. They “buy” stock, as I understand it, but it is non-transferable stock. In effect, you have to be invited to the party.

For example, sitting in one of the three primary seats on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York–the most important one, by design–is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. I was reading on CNBC today that JP Morgan doesn’t expect the Fed to raise interest rates any time soon. How could they know this? Well, in large measure because it is their decision.

The point I wanted to make, though, was that something on the order of a trillion dollars was given out to US Treasury bond holders, which no doubt included preferentially Federal Reserve member banks, who not surprisingly are posting large profits. This money was created for the purpose. What they are doing with it, we have no idea, but how hard would it be to buy up blocks of stocks, then dump them to create market disruptions, and then bargain buying, or politicaly instability?

That this is illegal would not matter if the discussion were held at a Federal Reserve meeting over tea and crumpets. None of these meetings are open to the public, and the Fed has no serious reporting requirements.

As I say often, it doesn’t matter if conspiracy theories like this are true or not: what matters is that if they COULD be true our system has serious flaws in need of fixing.

We need to end the Fed. http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

This plan will work for Europe and it will work for Japan.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200

How are we lunatics? Let me count the ways.

First off, I am not rescinding my support for the deal just cut. But we need to spend the next two years EDUCATING people. No rational human being capable of the most basic thinking can possibly rationalize what Obama is trying to do. It’s impossible. You can say that it would be great if it coudl work, but it can’t.

Look at that chart. First, notice that Obama is the first President to ever try and spend more than $3 trillion, and he is doing it not just once, but forever, on these projections.

Note further that the revenue projections for 2011-2016 require collecting a lot more than we EVER HAVE.. What you will note is that in 2016 they have us collecting $3 trillion in revenue. This is a 50% increase over 1998, in inflation adjusted dollars. They have us spending $3.5 trillion, which is nearly a 100% increase over 1998.

Put another way, if we had Clinton era levels of spending, then with their revenue projections we would have a balanced budget and could start paying down our debt.

Yes, George Bush added a lot to our debt, but Obama is doubling down.

We are not in imminent danger of crashing, in my view, but we damn sure better get our hats on straight and take care of business.

Edit: I will add that the, say, $8 trillion our debt was supposed to increase, and the 7.9999 trillion it will be reduced to with the debt deal, comes from these numbers. If their revenue numbers are wrong–if, for example, the massive 2013 Obamacare tax increases knock us on our ass–then the deficits will be higher.

Through 2016 I count 4.6 trillion, I think it was. This also assumes demographic projections are accurate, which is to say estimated healthcare and Social Security expenses.

Truly, this is lunacy. That many nations have found themselves in the same place–many going over the cliff–does not change this.

We are better than this. We are much better than this.

Tarkovsky had a remarkable ability to balance and oppose images. As I think about it, the wife rolling on the floor in despair has to be balanced against the man rolling in the proverbial clover. His “happiness”, in his dream world, is bought at the expense of hers and their daughters. And then, it is plastic. He winds up back in bed, where he started. Bed, rolling, rolling, bed. There is sleep, too, in the middle, that was not there in the beginning, nor in the end. There is a deep structure in this thing that he likely mapped out.

The dog, in my view, goes with the daughter: a source of love and happiness he fails to see.

Finally, I wanted to note that this movie likely killed not just Tarkovsky, but many of the people on the crew. Many if not most of them got cancer from the literal poisons in the place they chose to film this movie. The drifting white flakes, that added so much atmosphere, were toxins that just happened to be there.

One could go in many directions with this symbolically. It is the first film I know of that killed most of its participants.

Rather, though, I think I will go back to the film itself. Water is a very common thematic element in Tarkovsky. There were a number of scenes in Nostalghia in which it was prominent, always or often in decaying, decrepit structures, whose roofs no longer protect against it.

Water can mean many things–and the beauty of unexplained art is that I can come up with ones he never intended, and derive use from that process–but here I think it is the intrusion of doubt. It connotes a sensation of sleeping, and not living. It is a dreamland, where what we hope comes into being, as does what we fear. It is mutable. It flows, and it collects.

I’m speaking out loud. I think I would need to watch the movie again to pull more out. I do think the film could be described as a symbolic polyphony–polysymbolism, perhaps? Richly textured, mythic.

Ah, life calls.

It seems to me the bits of cloth Stalker uses to find traps might be seen as metaphors for worry. Always he throws them out, and never do we see a trap. One readily imagines what would have been possible with modern American special effects artists.

As I recall, Stalker did make reference to losing people, so presumably he had seen actual traps, but for us, the viewers, it is suspense which never results in actual danger. For all we can tell, all of them could have walked straight to the room.

And he is accused of meandering by one of them. I forget the details of the dialogue, but let’s approach this metaphorically.

Do you want to know the truth about life? What is really real? Or do you dread it, fearing meaninglessness, and complete collapse? Do you believe others should believe things, but find yourself unable to do it yourself?

You are circling. And you will necessarily create these elaborate cognitive traps, which segment one part of you from the other. You will create thought rituals, which you do not even recognize. What you will never to do is put what belief you have to the test.

And so you wait, which we are told is the “condition” of “modernity”. In reality, cultural modernity is a creation of monied intellectuals, people paid well preach hopelessness. Our universities are filled with them.

Questions as to the meaning of life necessarily begin, when done properly, wwith questions about the context within which we live. Are the brain and soul the same thing? Does consciousness cease with death? Are we connected in non-physical ways? Is there a consciousness underlying this universe? Since these are questions about reality, they are NECESSARILY empirical questions. These are not philosophical questions. The question, then, is one of tactics, and not aim.

But it is the height of idiocy to derive necessary conclusions from false premises and consider oneself clever, as most modern intellectuals do.

They view their plight as inescapable. This is risible foolishness. There they lie, thrashing about, complaining of thirst, surrounded by water.

I really enjoy the films of Andrei Tarkovky. They are deep in the best sense, and invariably invoke hours of–what is the word?–not soul searching, perhaps viewing. I watch the world for some time through the prism he has given me, I see how things play out from past to future, I see farther out than I have, the world fragments and reassembles. This was, I think, his intention.

One thing I think I need to mention right up front is that we all must learn to defend our beliefs. It is the hardest thing in the world to be forced constantly to invent some new disease in response to the latest pessimism. You read Nietzche, or Sartre, or even Glenn Beck at his most pessimistic. You surround yourself with violence and conclude that peace is impossible. You can’t imagine life after death, or a just God.

It is important to create your world view consciously. This is a lot of work, but work that anchors you, and gives you hope for the future. You may not know what is going to happen to you, but you can speak with some confidence about who you will be.

Here, I will not summarize the movie. The plot is on Wikipedia, but to really get what he is doing you must watch the movie. He was a truly amazing cinematographer. Many of his long shots feel like they could be framed and hung on the wall as art. He has in there a monologue about music: I get the sense that his movies were in part created as visual symphonies, where different shots constituted different melodies–or similiar melodies, repeated with suitable variation.

To my mind, the most significant detail of the movie was that the flowers had no odor. Is odor not the most characteristic feature, other than color, of flowers? “Would a rose by another name not smell as sweet?”

What the Zone is, then, is a half-world, a retarded world. Yes, it grants wishes. But what really matters, it cannot provide. Why did Porcupine plow the flowers under? Their possible, but unrealized, full beauty tormented him. Despite their color, they were plastic, unreal: like him.

The Zone is a romantic view of the world, a world of unrealized yearning. Yes, you move from dingy browns and greys to greens when you go there. This is the romantic quest for “truth”. It is the quest of Tolstoy, who damaged many lives in his rolling around moaning, looking for some thing called “truth”, which of course doesn’t exist. Stalker does this to his own wife, and more or less abandons his own child.

The room doesn’t get you this thing called truth. It just gets you things. In my own terms, it cannot change your world qualitatively, only quantitatively.

For this part Stalker wants to believe in this thing called truth, but cannot stand the idea that he would not find it in the room. He wants someone else to find it for him, and bemoans their failure.

He is in despair, and yet magic is in the very next room, in the form of his child. A truth, a useful truth, is in the next room, for her part despairing too at her abandonment. Everyone loses when stupid people chase “truth”.

One could, I think, lay the nihilism that led to the Russian Revolution at the feet of truth-seekers. This is a Russian disease.

Now, I want to be clear about what I am saying. I am not saying there is no truth, that nothing is true. What I am saying is that it is not a thing, but a quality of how your mind-body-spirit complex interacts with the universe, and the people around you. There is no “thing-ness”. You can’t get truth. You can’t buy truth. You can’t read truth. You express it. Perhaps that is the best way of putting it.

For myself, I have cleared all the underbrush in my intellectual life. I have only three core beliefs, and everything else is contingent, and subject to alteration.

I believe you should never feel sorry for yourself.

I believe you should persist in the things that matter to you, and that what you persist in defines you.

I believe that as you persist, you should be thinking, perceiving, and SEEING the effects of your actions on both yourself and others, and calibrating them in the direction of happiness.

Tarkovskky called Stalker a tragedy in intent. The hamartia of Stalker was selfish sentimentality, and the cost was great and unneeded pain for him, his wife, and to my mind most importantly, his magical child.

One sees so much stupidity in this world. It makes me sad. Sometimes I am the stupid one. I try to fix this constantly. That’s all I can do. For all that, I have many, many very happy moments. We are surrounded by beauty and the capacity to do good in this world. What else can we ask for?

As I see it, the Room could only work for those who didn’t need it. Who knows: maybe it is out there at this very moment. I will not look for it. It is is irrelevant. It can’t give me anything I need.