Category: Uncategorized

Sitting there, eating frozen yogurt with my littler people, in a really nice strip mall in a nice section of town. Stream of consciousness: this is too nice, something bad is bound to happen. I hope we don’t get attacked by zombies, ha, ha.

It’s a joke of course. Preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Reading Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.

So of course I zone out like I do, and start thinking about the disconnection between all the things we consume and who creates them. Everything we do is made somewhere else. We don’t make shoes, clothes, food, highways, computers, cars, or anything but some very small part of the economy.

Maybe you are an electrician: you wire some very, very small part of the world at large, and not normally your own home. Electricians never get their own ceiling fans installed, just as plumbers never get the new kitchen sink in. They are too tired from doing it for other people, for money.

In a subsistence economy, life is simple: once you have enough to satisfy the needs of life, you are done. You can relax. For us, though, how do we know how much is enough? When do you stop, and why? If we were content with the medicine of the 1970’s, we would be having no issues with healthcare costs. If we were content to live solely in homes the size of our grandparents, we never would have had the housing boom and bust.

I feel sometimes this vague dread in really nice places–air conditioned, beautiful, and everything is plentiful and everyone is attractive. It seems artificial, like it is hanging on the edge of a cliff, like it can’t endure. Yes, we can get this happy, happy, happy world for some short period of time, but if it can’t last, then it is doomed. Death follows life just as taxes follow income and lies follow excessive regulation. Order is followed by disorder.

The zombie myth “holds” this anxiety, I think, for many people. It is the disaster over the turn of the hill that we just can’t quite see yet. Zombies are unreal enough that we can project onto them this fear without consciously connecting it with our own innermost thoughts.

This is simply one path through the zombie forest, but I think an interesting one that might at some point benefit from more exploration.

Did John Maynard Keynes or Paul Krugman ever run businesses? No, of course not. Keynes made his fortunes as an academic and currency trader–he understood inflation quite well, which is the only thing that permits profits in currency trading–and Krugman has been a lifelong academic.

The latter speaks to the psychology of business. He rejects the idea that a socialist-in-chief who has passed a law–Obamacare–for which it is impossible to budget, but which–along with the tax increases that will be necessary at some point, if not this year–will certainly be expensive.

Does he even know what a profit and loss statement is? Or that business owners, not unreasonably, prefer not going bankrupt? Krugman simply doesn’t care. They are an aggregated, undifferentiated mass for him. Treating people as abstractions in this way is no different in principle that claiming that general statements could be made about “the Jews”.

I will grant that he is not motivated by literal bloodlust–although at some point he could perhaps be made to feel the attraction, especially if mass death were also abstract due to his physical distance–but he has no love for the people who take the risks to create the companies that create the jobs that create the wealth in this nation. This is because even though he arrogates to himself the right to speak for “the people”, he has never been one. They are the ones down there on the street: why sully himself?

He is a smug priss. I don’t like him. I don’t like anyone who inserts ideas of hatred, or ideas that lead to poverty into our national dialogue.

I have not run the numbers, but I suspect we could confiscate the wealth of the wealthiest 10,000 Americans and it wouldn’t pay our bills for a month. And it would, of course, lead to the eradication of millions of jobs, and very, very deep depression, from which we would never emerge; at least, until private property rights were again respected, as they had to be, to some extent, in China and elsewhere, for any development to happen at all.

We do need to raise taxes. Far, far more, though, we need to cut off the oxygen to the cancer that is the swollen horde of taxpayer funded parasites in the Federal Government. We live in its shadow–but the sun is still out there. We need to find it.

I saw the last Harry Potter. I really enjoy these movies. They work well on deep mythic levels. Here, we even had a resurrection.

Clearly, a fictional series that succeeds this much has tapped a cultural nerve. This is a complex phenomenon, but I wanted to submit what I view as the primary component.

Joanne Rowling (surely we can admit by now she is a girl?) created an intact culture. The word “muggle” serves the same role as Goyim, or its countless equivalents in culturea the world over. We are told implicitly–it is explicit, but the full terms of the deal never discussed–by cultural relativists, most of our thought leaders, that the cost of global peace is the sacrifice of our identities. Consumerism is a gradualistic way of accomplishing that goal; the rejection of religion–normally the core component of any sense of identity–a more direct one.

To put it in a perhaps strange way, we need funny hats. We need funny shoes. We need some way of saying this person is this and not that. We have to be able to differentiate one another. “Emo” is simultaneously a recognition that our culture is dying, and a solution to that, by creating what we call a “subculture”.

Hogwarts is a subculture. It is quirky and appealing, and the fact that it “breaks the rules”, by existing unapologetically by its own rules, is cloaked by the fact that it is filled with fantastic and unexpected elements. Rowling shows great creativity in distancing them from us in this way.

We see, there, what we want, here, but cannot find. In my view, culture develops naturally and organically, if not STOPPED. There is the problem: all incipient cultural formations that exist outside of the leftist egalitarian creed to which so many of our thought leaders desperately cling–and that is the word–are opposed by them.

The war of one against the other is to be replaced, in their view, with the permanent victory of one class over another, with peace maintained by violence and thought control. Few lack the vision to see this clearly, but not all. Those are the nasty ones.

We also need this concept of Evil and the noble crusade. By combining all of these elements, Rowling surrepetiously–likely unconsciously for her as well, since whe appears sentimentally attached to purported humanitarian activities–inserts back into our shared mythic life medicine many, many people desperately need.

Be thou an oasis in the darkness.

Down the rabbit hole:

No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

For any reader I may have who do not salivate at the prospect of a permanent eradication of unemployment at the cost of permanent poverty and a totalitarian government enforcing it–like Krugman must, as it is otherwise hard to see how anyone with an IQ over 100 could be so stupid–I suggest education.

Start with Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

Then read either “The Fatal Conceit”, or “The Road to Serfdom”, by Friedrich Hayek.

Then read “FDR’s Folly”, by Jim Powell.

Then read anything that appeals to you from Thomas Sowell or Paul Johnson, both of whom have written a lot of books.

Here are the net truths: the ideas proposed by Krugman will cause economic malaise; they will hurt the poorest Americans the worst; they will decrease our economic and political liberty; they support totalitarianism; and they are supported by totalitarians.

There is nothing nice about this man or the empirically discredited notions he spends so much time–and let’s be clear, makes so much money–hawking to ignorant and gullible people.

Presumably you know Oxy- stands for Oxford. Why ask dogs not to bark, cats not to meow, or leftist hacks not to propose salt water for our economic thirst?

Here he goes again: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0713-L15

“The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. ” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

This whole idea depends on this magical fantasy that governments have money. They don’t. They have the power to tax, the power to borrow, and the power–in most nations, not this one–to create money.

Always, always, always, the government is in the end either we the people–meaning we self-fund our own services–or We the Technocrats, who arrogantly choose winners and losers in an anti-free market fashion, which in aggregate does horrible damage to the private sector, which is the only sustainable source of wealth production and job creation.

Paul Krugman causes human suffering. He causes unnecessary human suffering: broken homes, chronic unemployment, depressed wages, bankrupt businesses.

If only he were capable of shame; but alas human history–particularly recent human history–is filled to overflowing with sanctimonious, destructive assholes like him.

I visited a reproduction of the cabin Bill Monroe spent his latter teen years in, and which was quite common in his day, and not entirely uncommon to this very day in some parts of the country, even if they now have more rooms. His mother died when he was eight, if memory serves, and his father when he was 16. That sort of thing used to be common even in this nation, prior to the advent of all of the benefits of a largely free market economy.

The cabin belonged to his Uncle Pen, who himself had had two children, both of whom died, and after which his wife left him. He lived all alone until Monroe came along, and played the fiddle every night.

The thing was one room, and of course the privy would have been in the back and consisted in a structure built over a hole in the ground, presumably without toilet paper. The cablin was cooler than I would have supposed, since the walls were quite thick and without leaks.

They ate fatback, molasses and corn cakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

This is the song about him: Uncle Pen. This music is very energetic, since it is intended for sad people leading hard, uncomfortable lives, and just trying to make their way in the world. They would often play all night long.

Most of the world still lives like this, and the policies designed to help them have, in aggregate, made things worse. For much of the world, you could take this basic poverty, make food unreliable, and add political oppression enabled by foreign aid.

Anyway, here are the lyrics:

Oh the people would come from far away
They’d dance all night till the break of day
When the caller hollered “do-se-do”
You knew Uncle Pen was ready to go

Late in the evening about sundown
High on the hill and above the town
Uncle Pen played the fiddle lord how it would ring
You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing

He played an old piece he called “Soldier’s Joy”
And the one called “The Boston Boy”
The greatest of all was “Jenny Lynn”
To me that’s where the fiddle begins

I’ll never forget that mournful day
When Uncle Pen was called away
They hung up his fiddle, they hung up his bow
They knew it was time for him to go

I have been seeing over the past several years cases of “conservative” who either don’t understand what it is the creed stands for; or who are active fifth columnists, who are adopting the mantle of conservatism in order to disrupt it.

It is important to grasp that for Leftists their politics is their way of life, their source of meaning. It is as inconceivable to them to listen openly to other voices as it would be for an Italian to pretend he was Chinese. Their entire sense of self, the part of us that holds our worlds and our lives together, depends on conformity to the notions that: “liberals” help the poor and downtrodden; that they are good for the economy; that they are the ones who support freedom; and that they have helped the world in aggregate, through economic aid, and by opposing wars of “oppression” and capitalist “exploitation”.

All of these notions are wrong. For years I have asked them in their own blogs and websites to justify themselves, and they can’t do it, in the face of determined, principled and informed opposition.

What they can and do do is disinform and sneak around. They engage in character assssination, and censorship. They engage in the social terrorism of demonising and protesting violently anyone and anything their leaders upload into their soft heads as “not like us”. They oppose all “alterity”–to use an academic term ironically and quite accurately–whatsoever.

Now, I have a strong personality. But it never migrates by default to insult. Yes, I can and do make general characterizations like those above regularly. These are not prejudices. They are “judices”, if I might coin a term, which are based upon intimate and sustained familiarity with the breed since before I entered college.

And you can speak usefully of the breed, in a way you cannot, for example, speak of African Americans, because conformity to a core ideology DEFINES it. If you don’t subscribe to that ideology and worldview, then I am not talking about you.

In any event, I am blocked currently from posting at Pajamas Media and Front Page Magazine, and as I mentioned just had a comment removed from Forbes. With regard to Front Page I believe David Horowitz made a serious error hiring David something, who seems to have de facto control of the blog. The guy spent his entire college career as a hard core Leftist, wrote a dissertation on David, and then somehow had some sort of epiphany which led to becoming a conservative. I don’t buy it.

PJTV, no idea what the issue is. I have never posting anything insulting or vulgar–certainly not of the sort that is to be seen regularly on there. I suspect there is someone editing the blog who is either really wobbly as a conservative, or an outright leftist. I knock heads when I debate. It’s a full contact sport, but it never, ever devolves solely to personal attacks on my part. That is always a species of idiocy to me, and I leave it to my opponents, who as a general rule start and end with it.

Yesterday or the day before I was very disappointed to read an article on the lightbulb controversy by Jonathan Seidl–at “The Blaze”–that was more or less an open apologetic to the leftist view on this. Yes, Republicans were involved, but the crop in office had just been handed a decisive defeat by Democrats in 2006.

This lightbulb law is a patent infringement in free markets in America. What that means is that powerful corporations–GE in particular–are using law to accomplish de facto monopolistic power that a truly free market would not have given them. We the consumers lose. The law is not necessary. If the bulbs make economic sense, they will sell themselves. If they don’t, then we are being forced to buy an inferior product at inflated prices.

Further, these things generate mercury vapors when broken. They have to be recycled by professionals. What this means is that this law is going to enable gangsters–a lot of waste disposal companies are run by Teamsters, who are largely run by gangsters, especially on the East Coast–to vastly expand their business, and probably rationalize the Federal Government imposing a law REQUIRING us to recycle.

No true conservative would fail to see these things; or to oppose the basic idea of the Federal Goverment interfering in our liberty. There is no difference between this, and mandating the level of nicotine in cigarettes, the alcohol in booze, the type of breakfast cereal we can buy, the kind of fans, and dryers, and washing machines, and hair dryers, etc, etc, etc we can buy. NONE of this was granted them in the Commerce Clause. They arrogated it to themselves, and cowardly politicians and judges–my contempt for the Supreme Court is in general quite profound, and greater than that of politicians, since the Justices (so-called0 do not have to worry about reelection, and are granted time to think about the consequences of their decisions–have let all this stand.

The net with regard to this post is that “by their fruits shall you know them”. If it looks like a chicken, and runs like a chicken, it is probably a chicken. We live in a sea of fools and cowards. I say this not JUST because I am being irritable–that I am, for cause, some well beyond the business of anyone reading this–but because on balance, from where I am sitting, that is the disgusting reality.

I had what was for me a hard day. By many standards, it was easy. Still, I have had a bit of whiskey. More substantive, abtruse ideas occurred to me today, but I will content myself with this one idea.

What is a perhaps manageable but for mr obligatory element of existence is imagination. Specifically, I see, often, how things could and should be. I see what should have been, and was not. I see, in so many words, the aborted children, whose lives were not just ended by abortion, but by failing to conceive them in the first place. I see the people who died, and were thus unable to father or mother anything. I mean this primarily figuratively, but literally as well.

I see the human waste brought about by gratuitous wars, and by murderous economic policy, of the sort visited by the vicious Leftist West on the Third World lo these last 60 years or so. I see the unnecssary dirt floors, and the unnecessary political murder, torture, and incarceration. I see flippant, grandiose, self congratulatory snf utterly reprehensible Western academics eating Thai food, feeling morally superior for their “stances”, but feeling NONE of the sufferings their idiotic ideologies actually lead to.

It is one thing to feel the pain of the world: another again to see it against the backdrop of what was possible, and willed out of existence by stupid and greedy people, none of whom were Capistalists, and all of whom arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of people they neither understood nor actually cared about.

Ironically, the author was an Argentinian. The Argentines are among the most economically stupid people this world has yet produced. Their collapse was preventable, with a shred of discipline and common sense.

Yet, it is to them we must look as we contemplate the specatacle of such an idiotic and short sighted America. I can’t blame him for deleting me, of course: he is stupid, and no debate would have gone his way. Hard to make a living if you are handed your ass in a public forum discussing your own column.

What it is essential to grasp is that the Federal Reserve—which might more accurately be described as “the private banking cartel to whom we the American people have entrusted the control over the value of our money and investments”—can only solve problems it creates.

On Bernanke’s own account—given here http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm –the Federal Reserve played the pivotal role in the crash which began the Depression, by first inflating the currency, then deflating it.

This article is misleading, however, in that he uses it to take shots at gold. Here is the simple truth: if money is tied to gold, and gold is in finite supply—which it manifestly is—then inflating the currency is much harder.
Keynesian socialists hate this, because the essence of their Fabian strategy is the price derangement that follows both inherently unproductive “stimulus” spending, and coupled—as today—with inflation.

What needs to be understood about inflation is that it is not primarily an increase in prices. It is an increase in the money supply, which is to say money that COULD be spent. We don’t know where the money Bernanke is printing is going. Virtually everything this moral midget does is hidden from us. Prices only go up when money is competing for money. If he’s sending this money to foreign banks, who are keeping it on their shores, then we will see no price inflation at all.
What you have to grasp, though, is that money creation is inherently and necessarily wealth transfer. If I give you a check created from nothing, and you go buy something, I just took that something from the economy as a whole. I allocated wealth to myself.

My series on the topics of monetary policy, the Fed, Keynes, and my fix for it all is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Edit: Fontevecchia is the guy’s name. Me, I don’t mind putting on waders and heading out into the shit to meet the enemy on his own ground. If you are offended by the smell of manure which cannot even be used as fertilizer, avoid this name.