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As I understand the matter, if you or I took a form–let’s say my birth certificate, which I have in my personal possession (actually, I thought I had lost it at one point, and was easily able to get a copy from the State I was born in)–and scanned it, there would be one layer. It would be a simple document.

Obama’s supposed birth certificate has nine layers. In one of them, something impossible for humans happens: perfection. Here is the treatment of the topic.

As I have been at pains often to point out, my concern with this issue is not primarily politically. If Congressional or other investigators are not able to find it to be fraud conclusively, it might well hurt Republicans.

My primary concern is with morality and following truth telling. And I am not talking about Obama telling us the truth. Manifestly, he is a calculating and utterly cynical liar, who doesn’t even CARE what the truth is. Whatever serves his purposes always works best for him. That was the essence of the Alinskyan creed he lived and taught.

What matters is that the American people tell ourselves the truth, and more importantly, that our supposed “leaders” demonstrate that they actually adhere to the best, most noble traditions of our nation. We have produced some damn fine people. That is why we are the most powerful nation on Earth.

So why put up with a patent lie? Why not at least investigate whether or not our President, for naked political purposes, committed an impeachable act of fraud? Why not? Are you mental defectives or simple cowards? Or do you simply not hold principles in high esteem any more, and therefore relate to Obama’s cynicism in very ugly and politically pragmatic ways?

It is worth noting what Social Security is and isn’t. What it is is a system in which 12% of every paycheck we get is deducted and handed to the Federal Government. This goes to pay the salaries of some 60,000 Social Security employees, who at some point will give you some of your money back–if you live long enough–and additional money taken from current receipts from your children and grandchildren. Many people contribute their entire lives, and never get anything back; many people, who live long lives, get back much more than they put in; and people retire independently wealthy get money regardless of whether or not they need it.

Social Security is not, in design, a wealth redistribution scheme. Yet, in practice, it is, but not in a rational way (I will bracket for now whether such schemes are morally defensible in the first place). What happens is that Congress periodically votes increases in the Social Security benefits that have not been paid in by the generation drawing them. You were getting $600/month, now you get $800/month. Where does the money come from? We borrow much of it, and the rest comes from the 12% taken from the checks of following generations.

It is not rational, because every generation the expenditures go up, without any expectation that our economy will grow sufficiently that our kids and grandkids will be able to meet the burden. Payments go up because it is politically convenient, primarily but not exclusively for Democrats, to pretend that this can go on forever. To paraphrase Keynes: “in the long run, we will no longer be in office”.

Medicare is roughly 3% of your check. The way Medicare works is that money is taken out of your check, used in part to pay for the 64,000 Health and Human Services employees, and your contributions grant you access to government funded healthcare when you reach a certain age. Self evidently, they don’t pay for everything, but they pay for a lot.

The simple reality is that when you get older you get sicker. This is inevitable. We all die, and most of us die of something that plagued us for some period of time before killing us.

In the past several decades, all sorts of medical treatments have come about that do not really have a significant effect on life expectancy–which is mainly tied to your diet and lifestyles choices–but which do something, and which people therefore consume. Medicare pays for much of this.

One way to think of this is that the cost of medical care has inflated because there are more things you can spend your money on. If a store offers only hot dogs and ice cream, they will only sell to people who like those things. If they instead offer every type of food under the sun–Italian, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, German, Chinese–then more people will go in there. As more people go in there, they expand. This is all that has happened with healthcare costs, which have gone up a LOT without much decrease in mortality. Stupid people, who do not understand basic economics, blame this on profiteering, as if such an explanation were tenable in a free market.

So the cost of Medicare keeps going up, too. Again, the increase in costs is delayed and deferred, not paid. HHS is roughly 25% of Federal outlays. Think about that. We have funded a massive insurance complex that does not even remotely pay for itself, which does not ask people if they can afford to pay for their own healthcare, and which keeps ballooning benefits by borrowing money from creditors, and from future generations, who will inherit a bankrupt nation in the not-too-distant future.

To this must be added demographics. Put simply, there will soon be a lot more old people than young people. The Baby Boom was just that: an explosive rise in birth rates, that followed WW2 and ended about 1960 or so.

On our current path, if we keep offering the benefits we have been offering to a pool of people that will keep growing and growing for several decades to come, the total benefits paid out will cause major harm to our economy, and likely a general impoverishment that is preventable and unnecessary.

I like to pretend from time to time that conservative economists have called things largely correctly, and that we actually do live in a nation with free markets. Compared to many other nations, this is true, but the simple reality is that no nation in history has had what I would label a proper monetary policy.

Monetary policy is where people glaze over and stop paying attention. The simple reality, though, is that we could have our cake and eat it too, if we were not being robbed blind by the monetary cartel.

Put simply, if we had a rational money system, we would not need Social Security, or Medicare, because we would eliminate poverty in short order. The simple reality is that many people benefit from the current system. There are many who want poverty and (generally alleged) racism to continue, because it puts money in their pockets. You can impoverish a nation, but that effect will never include everyone.

Further, of course, the masters of money benefit hugely from the status quo. It is not so much that they use poverty to amass their own wealth–few understand what they do, so there is no need to lie cynically about it–as that they are heartless bastards who could care less about the effects of their greed on the world at large. Too much is never enough.

My treatment of monetary policy is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

This, too, I noted a while back, but will likely treat a little differently. I write so much I can’t remember what exactly I wrote where.

It seems to me that the constant search for various sorts of emotion–one might almost refer to such people as experience collectors–is an orienting gestalt, or what I have termed a meaning system. It is a way of answering the question: what should I do today and why? Your answer: seek out new experiences and emotions, since that is the point of life.

The problem with this way of living is that often the best emotions come unbidden, when we are trying to do something else entirely. It takes a lot of skill to properly consume experience–to feel the feelings you think you are supposed to be feeling, and which in my estimation most people don’t–and so you get yourself to some experience that should be exhilirating, and it doesn’t measure up. Very little in life can measure up to, as Paul Simon put it in Kodachrome, “our sweet imagination”.

Moreover, this is not really a principle that can guide your life, particularly in conditions of conflict. If feeling is what you want, then is the feeling of comfort and safety not preferable to strenuous exertion and danger, at least if choosing the latter implies a moral decision, as in participating in war? At what point do you fight, and why? Because it feels good? There was a soldier portrayed in the Russian movie Company 9 who talked about the value of war. He was killed. Was his death meaningful? The war was lost.

In my view, you have to have principles with some actual content–which as I say often necessarily includes the integrity to regularly compare stated aims with actual results–or you will wind up lost and unhappy.

I’m taking some notes off that I left myself, and one thing I know I have mentioned, but will mention again slightly differently is that it is far better to acknowledge to yourself what happened when you violate your own chosen moral standards, than to rationalize. It is better to live in conflict than to achieve a false synthesis at the cost of constant compromise. Such compromise amounts to changing who you are, invisibly, at the cost of losing your sense of self, also invisibly. You feel lost and angry, but you forget why.

My first principle is the rejection of self pity. It is worth noting, though, that pain and self pity are two different things. You can be miserable, and not feel sorry for yourself. You can also MAKE yourself miserable through self pity, in conditions most people in the world would envy.

There is a phenomena, though, that is not quite either, which I diagnose in myself, which is blocking happiness. True pleasure is spontaneous. It opens you. It is necessarily generous, helpful and kind. It consists in the capacity for wonder and enthusiasm. Goodness and the capacity for this sort of pleasure are synonymous.

But often we stop ourselves, for fear of being giddy, or too open. I say we: certainly I, although often I do NOT stop myself, and am known at times for being an enthusiast.

What is this called, though? It’s not pain and it’s not self pity. It is a failure of happiness. You can label it protective, but that describes what it tries to do, not what it IS.

Is fear the right word? We think of fear as a presence of anxiety and tension, but could it not equally be seen as an ABSENCE of grace and pleasure? Can we not look more productively to what did not happen, as opposed to what did?

A question I ask myself from time to time is: whose life am I living? Am I living my own life? We all encounter objections, from time to time, to who we are. How willing are you to articulate who you are and why?

I sometimes place myself imaginatively in people’s positions, historically. Today, I have been trying to imagine sitting in a boat, rowing, for a month at a time, eating fermented milk that tasted nothing like yogurt. You wake up, row, then pass out at some point from fatigue, sitting on a not very comfortable bench. The night, perhaps, is spent floating. Then you do it again. You never change your clothes, and of course deodorant has not been invented yet.

Eventually you make it, say, to Paris. You and yours invade, and everything is possible. You can take anything you see. You can take any woman you see. She can be your wife, or you can simply have your way, then it is done. You take jewelry, religious icons, clothes, and food. You take slaves (derived from “Slav”: Russia is derived from a Viking word).

The raid ends, then you and your compatriots, possibly bolstered by some women and shackeled human beings, sail/row back to Norway/Sweden/Denmark. You spend the winter months doing little.

What sort of life is this? Is it a good life? An ironic and obvious question I ask myself from time to time is: “should the Scandinavians pay reparations for the Viking Age?”

History needs to be viewed from a detached perspective. None of us are innocent. None of us are free, absolutely.

Personally, reading history makes me sad. One can see so clearly what could have been done, and wasn’t. Ah: it is what it is.

The orthodox narrative as far as the Vikings is that they forced loose collectives to become kingdoms. Louis the Sixteenth descended from a line that began, if memory serves, after the first sack of Paris.

Anger and greed are always on the menu. Everyone reading this, in all likelihood, should count themselves lucky. We can still end life on earth, but damn if we haven’t achieved a lot of peace in the meantime.

Enter yourself in history, and see what was done, by whom. Saintliness is in rare supply, and the obvious and gratuitous satisfaction of other desires on ubiquitous display.

I’m increasingly persuaded that happiness is impossible if you do not enjoy work of all sorts–if you do not view work as enjoyable creation.

Personally, my work sometimes involves hard physical labor, with streams of sweat pouring out of me, dripping everywhere I go. I follow it with whiskey and very, very good sleep.

But–and I recall having mentioned this before–I get angry sometimes. Something is supposed to work, and it doesn’t. I was yelling and cussing in the middle of last night. The problems usually don’t even have the courtesy to be big things, but insist on being small and hidden, laughing like little gremlins or leprechauns at you.

This is in your head, of course. The question remains: what do you do when your work seems to fight back? Do you get angry, or do you realize that a golden opportunity has been granted you, in the form of a gauntlet thrown down, challenging you to maintain your cool and solve the problem?

I calmed myself down, and went back to it. It seems to me most of life is like this, though. If you can learn to enjoy the process of altering mind and matter through concerted effort, then most of what you HAVE to do, you will WANT to do.

Famously (to me, at any rate, since this is one of the few things he said that made absolute sense to me, so I quote it a lot), Freud said that the keys to happiness were “love and work” (or maybe “Work and Love”; it certainly wasn’t “flippancy and cigars”). It seems to me you love the way you work. The two are related. Love is always at least half what you give. Giving is work. Therefore you relate to others the way you work.

How do you do this? Are you patient, observant, flexible and persistent? Do you try to force things? Do you go hard, then stop? Are you lazy and complacent?

I can’t resist adding as well, that needing someone is not at all the same as loving them. You need food and water. Only weak people look first to using other people to help them maintain their intrapersonal and social homeostasis. What is desired is the capacity to exist independently, first; only then can you see other people as they are, and do for them what needs doing, and not what is most emotionally convenient for you.

I just watched an enjoyably witty and unpredictable movie targeted largely at teenagers called “Bandslam”. It is funny how the effect differs when you watch a movie that disrupts cliches. Generally speaking, of course, qualitative alterations are to the negative. Some consider it clever when the bad guy wins.

But here, it was all to the positive. Particularly if you have teenagers, I’d encourage you to watch it with your family. Some scenes may not be appropriate for kids under 13–I can’t remember–but older than that should be fine, at least in our day and age.

It got me to thinking, too. We live our lives in programmed ways. We watch movies, hundreds of them, in which the details vary only slightly within templates that are virtually indestructible. Our work is routinized. Most of us could drive to work in our sleep.

We tend, I think, to think of the future as having a track, of the present being on a line that is moving inexorably forward on that line. All that needs to be done to diagnose the future is a determination of the present. For Marx, all signs pointed to revolution. To Malthus and thousands of his followers today, to starvation. They tell us that we will all die if we don’t stop reproducing. To progressives, to further government control. For those worried about our debt, to financial chaos.

Yet, I would suggest the present is much more like a tornado, moving about unpredictably, going this way and that. Countless futures die in every moment, and countless more are born.

We do not live in lines: we live in the present. That is the only place we can ever be. And the best way to ensure a good future is to make our present the best it can be.

I’m a big fan of John Wooden, and he believed, with Cervantes, that the real enjoyment was in the doing, not the accomplishing, in the journey, and not the goal. His most enjoyable moments, if I’m reading him rightly, occurred daily, after well orchestrated and executed practices. He could see the future in his practice gym. That is where the games were won.

There was no golden past. Nothing was ever perfect, anywhere. If we had footage of our Founding Fathers arguing in the Continental Congress over everything, we would have doubted the possibility of the survival of our nation.

All we can do is look to today. Here is a poem I first read many years ago in Dale Carnegies excellent “How to stop worrying and start living”:

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

Love,
parcelled out in ounces,
stored in sanitized bags
in the freezer:

This is where Rage against the Machine gets its name from.

Can we not agree that some species of madness are therapeutic in a land where the ground has grown soft?

Do we need boats, or snowshoes? Can a compass without magnetism work?

Whither the suspense: sleep or confused engagement?

Edit: do you the reader ever think like this? Do you believe that reason can operate without a wide net? Can lines ever be trusted without consulting circles?

If all this sounds like bullshit, move on: I’m not talking to you.