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What if you had a magic lantern, and were granted any three wishes you liked? Me, I thought about improving the world, but I suppose I could have put some personal stuff in there.

The thought I wanted to pass along, though, is this: simply because you effect, by magic, some change in the world, does not mean you get what you intended. For example, say you wanted to end poverty. Poof!!! Everyone now lives in a 5 rooms mansion. Now, the struggling working family that was held together in part by economic necessity falls apart. Divorces abound. Nobody has to work anymore, so nobody knows what to do. People start having mass orgies in the streets, which are effective for a time, but which grow tedious. Eventually, people retreat to their mansions, and drink all day. Many take up drugs. Everything decays.

Or say you determined everyone should be smart. Poof!!! It happens. What now? What have you done to dumb people? They are no longer who they were before. They don’t recognize themselves. Could you not argue that in some important respect you have killed them?

Is this a stupid argument? You decide.

As I look at the world, though, I never see lines. I see patterns, evolving over time. If you have ever seen a fractal generate, that, in my view, is the most accurate picture of how life actually works. You have an initial input, but where it moves from initiation is something you just have to see, and which is very hard to predict.

Net, net: I am not certain that an omnipotent person granted three wishes would NECESSARILY improve the world, even if that was their intention. I think this is roughly what Lao Tzu had in mind when he said he didn’t think the earth could be improved. Obviously, you can buy a hungry man some bread and wine–and in some cases you should–but you are not improving the “world” per se. You are doing your job. You have taken an abstraction and generated a concrete reality. Those realities are what matter.

Few thoughts. I’m watching Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, and these thoughts popped in my head. I’ll likely have more to say after a bit.

If personality–identity–is a chaotic system defined by “strange attractors”, I will submit that what we choose to persevere in, and why, is the most important definition of who we “are”. This means the most important part of you is not particularly what you do, but what you do voluntarily that is hard.

The foundational idea of America which appeals most to me is not that of liberty. Liberty is a means to an end. The end is perfectability, progress.

What liberty enables is correction, learning. It enables self organizing systems to organize. Tyranny prevents this.

Our early Presidents were slave owners. I think even Adams owned a slave at one point, although if memory serves he freed him. But our system organized morally. We fought a war in which some 650,000 Americans died, and a multiple of that lived with physical and emotional wounds for the rest of their lives, in no small measure so that slavery would be ended. Saving the Union was the stated goal, but the Union would not have needed saving had the Republicans not brought the issue of slavery to the fore, frightening Southerners.

This notion of perfectability is the entire reason that political regressives have been able to get traction by calling themselves “progressives”. The basic idea is already in our genes, which tend naturally towards idealism.

I believe strongly that Americans are basically decent people, who are simply starved in our disinformation age for accurate and contextualized facts. Give them the facts, and they will make the right decisions.

Isn’t just a town in northern Michigan.

Wow, the complaints on this debt deal. Let’s contexualize this a bit. First, the left more or less owns the New York Times, Gannett, and all the newspapers–including USA Today–Gannett owns. They own CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CBS, NPR, and virtually every teacher at any level in the country.

Further, when George Bush was running up his then-record amounts of debt, both Houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. It was their profligacy that in large measure got Obama elected. The thought among many, no doubt, was “how could he be any worse”? Those people are sadder and wiser now.

So are the Republicans. Reality is, the only way Republicans got elected in 2000 and 2004 was by more or less accepting leftist propaganda narratives, and more or less committing to bigger government, which they did in fact create.

In my lifetime, this is the first time there has been a large, vocal, and active conservative insurgency that is not likely to go away. The Republican class of 1994 faded away in no small measure because the left had all the informational gateways under control. Rush was out there, but we didn’t have a dozen good conservative voices out there as alternatives. There was no Fox news. There was no Drudge Report.

People are learning. This is why they are so mad. Yet, the situation is a bit like an alcoholic quitting drinking, then deciding to run a marathon in two weeks. Simply because you realize your condition is unacceptable one day does not mean you can radically change it in the next. Change takes time, especially when most of the media that most Americans consume is run by talented propagandists.

All we controlled this time was the House. As bad as this deal was, it was still much less than this President wanted. They are gnashing their teeth on the Left, too, which surely means something good has happened.

So if you’re mad, get active. Get active in the organizing process. Go educate people. Find an even more conservative candidate you think can win. Contribute to Michelle Bachman or Tim Pawlenty or Rick Perry (let’s hope he runs), or Herman Cain, or Ron Paul, or whoever seems sincere to you, and serious. Channel your anger, and be creative with it.

The best has just begun.

Intelligent plans request perfection, but do not demand it.

This occurred to me today. Perfection is being demanded of me.

I proposed somewhere a while back that inflation be defined as “wealth transfer via money creation.” It is a an “unnatural”–which here means unnecessary–shift in who owns waht. As I see the matter, the actual increase in prices FOLLOWs the primary element of property transfer.

The other day I was rereading my Keynes piece,and feel I need to rework the first part. As I now see it, price increases need not attend “inflation” as I have defined it.

The most important element for prices in inflation is the use of credit by our banking system. Nobody is borrowing money right now, which is why–despite what I recall as trillions in wealth transfers to members of our banking cartel, both domestically and abroad–we are not seeign price increases. But the wealth transfer has been accomplished. Claims have been staked on businesses, banks, and governments that cannot easily be undone. All of this happens in the darkness, which is one reason why it is critical that we at a rock bottom minimum audit the Fed.

It is commendable that we are now getting some reporting, and even that little is scary enough. Much of the “quantitative easing”–which we might define, as I have, as “primary inflation”–seems to have gone abroad. How this was intended to support the domestic economy is of course a stupid question: it wasn’t. It was intended to keep the interest on our national debt at an artificially low rate, enabling further indebtedness.

What the long term plan is, I have no idea. Certainly, it includes the aggregation of huge sums of money by individuals and institutions. This is beyond doubt. More generally, though, there is no need for conspiracy theories: that there COULD be a long term plan outside the control of the American people is sufficiently objectionable to call for the elimination of the Fed. And not just the Fed, but all central banks the world over.

In the unlikely event we can make this happen, your children will thank you, regardless of where you live.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge.

Along with If, you will always find this somewhere in my environment.

Plainly, not all the people I would describe as “leftist” are bad people. This realization is the reason I felt the need to coin the term “sybaritic leftist”. These are people who are fundamentally nice, and who naively assume this means other people will be too. They are the Eloi of Wells. Things can work out well for them for long periods of time, provided there are hard men with guns not too far away. Such has been the condition of Western Europe over the last half century.

What I meant to say, though, is that such people think they have to choose between idealistic “liberalism” (not a word I grant them in general), and hard-nosed conservatism. Do they pursue the impossible dream, or do they take their place with fundamentally uncompassionate people who make things work? Do they keep their romantic dreams, or face life as selfish individualists?

The naked reality is that this is a false distinction, and the primary fallacy that enables leftism to survive with a history of constant failure.

Once one grasps that there is no linear relationship between intention and ooutcome, then studies history, it becomes abundantly clear that the romantics–the self described anti-individualists, at least in the political sphere–have in fact been making things WORSE for the very people whose welfare allegedly animates their sympathies. Were the Nancy Pelosi’s of the world to do NOTHING for the next ten years, the populations they are trying to help would thrive. They are holding them back.

Thus in my view conservatives hold both the practical and the moral ground. The only thing leftism can successfully generate are feelings of patronizing moral superiority, unanchored by accomplishment, but for all that feeling no need to prove themselves. In certain social spaces, to be a “liberal” is to be good, and vice versa. That you need do nothing but conform to win this feeling is a powerful incentive to take this mind-altering drug.

Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Spinoza

I have been more or less arguing this for some time. You can have “peace” in totalitarian states, in the sense that no one is openly hurting or killing anyone else. For example, in Cuba the rate crime of sujugated citizen against other subjugated citizens is no doubt low, since there are eyes on every block watching everything.

Is this peace, though? Of course not. You can generate apparent tranquility, as defined as lack of movement, by locking someone in a cage which physically prevents them from moving, as many Communist regimes did, with their so-called “soft” torture.

“Peace” is properly an outflow of energy, of the seemingly contradictory combination of relaxed energy, of joy, of happiness, of generosity, of devotion.

Again, people want to make a continuum more or less between war and tedium. Either you have a grand cause or you are bored and boring. This is the whole point of leftism: justifying war. It grants energy to the terminally “ennui’ed”, if I might be permitted something new.

I will never forget Hitler’s account of what happened when war was declared (in 1914, I guess it was): jubilation. Everyone was elated, happy. There had been this grand malaise in the air, and here it was lifted. Like everyone else, he rushed to enlist.

My whole project with regard to Goodness has to do with pointing out that not only is its end of the continuum–the other end–not tedious, but that it is infinitely MORE INTERESTING, and more creative. Sex is fun: love is more interesting. Power scratches the itch: love heals. Violence engages: Goodness expands.

The identity you create through conflict is hard and jagged; that created by Goodness is soft and light. It can go anywhere, through anything, to the highest highs, and when needed, to the lowest lows. You are free.

As I said, we need to accept the best Republicans can do. This deal looks like they leveraged what pull they had frankly better than I expected. This is a good deal, that sets the stage for something serious down the road.

We need to be clear, though, as to what is being proposed. As I understand the matter, we are cutting not quite $1 trillion in DISCRETIONARY spending over the next decade. What needs to be undestood is that in establishing budgetary projections, certain things like Medicare and Social Security simply are not budgetted. They respond to demographics, not acts of Congress. It is therefore called “non-discretionary” spending, and of course has long been called the “third rail” of politics, since grumpy old people vote, and everybody else wants something for nothing.

We will further vote at some future point on whether or not we might perhaps actually consider sort of touching the third rail. Much easier: sending a Balancd Budget Amendment to the States. That commits no one to anything. Ergo I assume the $1 trillion is it.

Therefore, in exchange for what I assume is the increase to whatever it was Obama wanted–$14.x trillion–he gets to borrow something over a trilloin NOW, in exchange for cuts projected over a decade in which our overall increase in indebtedness will “only” be 6-9 trillion dollars, versus the 7-10 that had been projected. This, assuming no major economic disruptions (as for example a bond downgrade, or the implementation of Obamacare).

Now, I am not complaining. I think the Republican leadership got what they could. Politics is the art of the possible, not the impossible. The task of changing politics, logically then, is changing what is possible. That is the task for GOP organizers and thsoe running for office in 2012, and those who support them.