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I tend to think in images–well, gestalts, of which images are a part. I try to use all my senses in processing things. It is challenging for me to think of any culture without feeling the food they eat, and what their homes must smell like.

Anyway, it came to me that the way through the desert has been blocked. For the better part of a century very motivated people have been making progress through an unmarked space, generally devoid of life. Imagine an armored army flanking an enemy which can’t see them. They travel where no one is, so that when they arrive opposing them will be hard.

This is the essence of the Fabian strategy. Fabius Maximus never actually kicked the Carthaginians out of Italy. He just kept them from winning.

What we must understand, here, is that Shaw and his co-conspirators did fully plan to win, but what they saw is that movement which is invisible can easily be forward, if unchecked. It is hard to measure economic subversion. It is hard to measure political subversion.

Moreover, most people simply do not have the capacity to recognize that there are people capable of evil who are nonetheless genteel, and even jovial, as in Shaw’s case. The prospect of the mass murder of social undesirables made him chuckle, apparently. This means that horrible people, who plan millions of acts of violence which would them a death sentences if done without government sanction, can make progress in open view.

Let’s take one simple example: Bill Ayers and his crowd of cowardly sociopaths wanted to kill some 10% of Americans. Mao said that roughly 10% of the population can’t be “reeducated” (morally murdered, and emotionally gang raped), so they figured they would have to organize death camps of the Nazi sort somewhere in the Southwest.

Bill Ayers is a free man, and he has been teaching our children for 30 years or so. Consider that.

At the same time, this path requires generalized complacency. The complacency is gone. The Left may not want to admit it, but a very segment of the United States population is now permanently radicalized against the Fabian agenda. Their days of slow, steady progress are at an end.

The way is blocked. From now on, they will have to offer justifications of their actual agendas, which is much harder than lying about it.

Intuitions can be wrong, but that is what I see clearly.

I will sometimes have to wait for something somewhere. If I have nothing to read or do, I like to pretend I am Sherlock Holmes and try to see everything in my space, and make as many inferences as I possibly can. Everywhere you could possibly be this will work.

Why are there water stains on the wall? Which way does that vent blow air? Why is the dirt unevenly distributed? Why is that cover on the wall? What did that do? Why are there two plugs into one TV? Why are there two colors of brick? What does that chimney do? Why are the ceiling tiles different colors? Why are they bowing?

Why do leaves on trees have different shapes? Is the bark the same color on both sides? How many leaves to a group? Do some seeds have better shapes for sprouting? Why is this rail here and not there? How else could this room be arranged? What would be the benefits and negatives? What is missing from this room? What did it used to be? Can I infer anything about previous owners?

Maybe it’s just me, but I can virtually instantly make my brain very active anywhere, if I so choose. Now, I have plenty going through my brain normally anyway, so this is often not the best idea, but I do think it warrants consideration. Periodically changing your perceptual focal point is an integral component of my moral philosophy.

I was talking with my oldest tonight about the ancient Greeks, and how they were always fighting one another. One city-state would take another, then the next generation it would reverse. Some peoples stayed enslaved; some people were always strangers in that strange land.

Further: this is the history of humankind: stupid, counterproductive theft. You can’t live on what you have, so you go take the stuff someone else created. You don’t want to work, so you take their people, because you can. You kill because you enjoy it, and it’s just the fighters bill come due when you finally fall. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, the Germans, the English, the French: anywhere you look in history you see this pattern. Who killed Ali, the third (if I’m not mistaken) Caliph? Other Muslims. Who killed Caesar? His rivals.

I saw today where the Dalai Lama supposedly reduced his creed to kindness. If this is true, I disagree strongly. The strong have to protect the weak, and that requires being very UNkind at times. To attempt to be nice all the time is to need to live alone in the jungles or a mountain cave. For those trying to accomplish actual, sloppy, useful Good in this world, your hands will get dirty.

It occurred to me too that the Greeks are still at it. They are still waging internecine warfare with one another. Rather than identifying themselves with polei (polises? Something else?) they identify with their group, normally a union, and the Socialists more generally. They then wage literal, violent warfare against all who would stand in the way of their vision of more for them and theirs, and less for everyone else. Screw the long term. Screw everyone else: if they win their battle, they are so stupid they fail to understand the war is not over, and never will be as long as, in aggregate, they are pursuing economically ruinous policies.

While they squabble among themselves, the IMF is carving them up. That is what it was designed to do, and it has been effective. Keynes was very certainly a brilliant man; he simply put his intellect to the service of evil.

Selfishness leads to vanity. and vanity leads to folly. It is not too hard to tempt stupid, morally weak people into self destruction.

What is 11% of a lie?

Koanish, but not really. Popped in my head, and looked like an appropriate, if perhaps unclear to some, definition.

George Lakoff, in some book or other, argued that people could be defined with metaphors. No, wait: he argued that OTHER people use metaphors to define people. Those are the people he called THEM. They are definitionally wicked because they tend to use terms like “them” in spooky ways.

Anyway, Republicans were supposedly operating on a metaphor of government-as-father. The idea was that fathers–in Republican gender constructions, which is to say in terms so insufficiently ambiguous that they still possess meaning–were the disciplinarians, who valued structure and order over nurturing. The figurative breasts, of course, were what he presumably called “liberals”. His people, whatever word he used.

At the present moment, I have been fermenting for several weeks in the dank stink of overprotective regulation. I have been reading the OSHA site, getting drug tested, filling out form after form, and wondering how anything gets done at large corporations, when you have to develop a Quality Control process for crapping, sneezing, and masturbation (allowed during lunch and after 5pm, but only is the door is secured properly, you use an approved lotion, you use your non-dominant hand on occasion to prevent repetitive movement injury, you indicate your status on your calendar, and that you report the out-come of your efforts to management within one hour using the proper form).

I look at this, and if we are going to call this Maternalism, then it is the protection of a psychotic mother who never wants her child to leave the house. Freedom is when you get to do what you want, when you want, within reasonable limitations.

To my mind, the Department of Labor is an affront to the notion of the Constitutional restriction of the powers of the Federal Government. Governing commerce is little more than making sure no States implement tariffs, and arbitrating any disputes that may arise between sovereign governments. It is inconceivable to me that any rational mind can look at the massive bureaucratic apparatus that has been created to “protect” us, and not see it as having the power to limit us to the little black cages Max Weber saw as the ultimate outcome of a process he termed (ironically, in my view) Rationalization.

If we want to live as machines, then the ultimate in efficiency is for humans to create sentient machines, then die off. What the “Maternalists” want for us is perfect security, which can only occur in conditions of complete tyranny. They want to make it impossible for anyone to make a mistake. Always, always, always, though, it comes down to the judgement of individuals. If those individuals are competent and motivated, they will usually make the right decision. If not, the process involved won’t prevent stupidity.

I referenced psycholanalysis since in my view important things are happening. I’m circling around this issue since I am still working it out, but please just keep that word in mind as a code word for breaking through my deeper meaning here.

If we define mothering as the actual development of a sense of place, safety, and a feeling of being valued and loved, then socialism is the opposite. It is the substitution of rules for freedom, and command and control for individual judgement. It is, in a formal sense, Paternalism, and quite free of nurturing.

Witness, for example, the hue and cry that attended George Bush’s efforts to deploy social program spending through churches. His intent was to put a human face on the government, one which had an actually useful belief system meant to provide meaning to human life. Governments do not deploy meaning. They deploy money. Money does not make one happy.

Who raises our kids? Stay home moms seem often to view their kids as science projects, then they lapse into an evanescent world in which thoughts can be Twittered, and in which the actual mother is the media. Working mothers have kids who do this even quicker.

Our media world is cold. Computers do not talk. Television characters do not recognize you. Perhaps that is why social media is so popular: we are alone with our devices, and feel less alone when communicating through them with others who are also alone.

Where does the nurturing in our modern world come from? Where is the old fashioned connection, respect, and bond that was present everywhere until our lunatic modern world evolved?

We feel both connections that are there, and connections which SHOULD be there, but which aren’t. That latter induces anger, and we see hateful, vicious, evil anger expressed across our media complex. There is a Hello Kitty skull now, if I’m not mistaken.

Therapeutically, people do not suffer from Prozac (or whatever it is they use nowadays) deficiencies. Rarely do they suffer from not talking enough, or benefit from talking more. What we need is a common culture, or at least the permission to exercise the cultures we do have in public.

Socialism–the intellectuals doctrine and expression of the moral idea of egalitarianism–is a type of madness, and creates insane people.

I will add that I don’t view the countries of northern Europe as socialistic. If compliance is not compelled, that is still a type of Liberalism, although I still tend to label most versions “Sybaritic Leftism”, since there is almost always a component of moral relativism, which is to say cultural destruction.

One final note, not entirely related, but not entirely unrelated either. In classical Chinese culture, respect for one’s elders–filial piety–is very old, and very deeply rooted. Consider in that regard how much worse that made the Cultural Revolution, led by Anita Dunn’s hero, Chairman Mao, in which hordes of brainwashed and psychotic children–young kids, 10-12-14–would attack torture, and kill venerable old men, for no crime other than not being young, and not being ardently Communist. The children in a classroom, say a 6th grade classroom, would literally rise up against their teacher, take them outside, and beat them until they died. This is what that great leader Mao wanted, and no doubt something Obama’s former Propaganda Secretary admired.

But consider what a revolting, nauseating flip of the old system this was. It is evil in and of itself–self evidently, as if this is even worth saying, it accomplished nothing good anywhere–but even more horrific when one considers the esteem with which traditional Chinese society taught their children to view their elders.

What the intellectuals who run our universities and who surround our President want is nothing less–in the long run–than the sociopathy of children who never socialised, and never bonded with any mother.

In this regard, I will add one last thought: it is a strange contradiction that the entirety of Socialist theory is oriented around means, but not ends. They obsess about means of subversion, but literally cannot see that the long term outcome of their morality is to deny everyone else their right to live as they see fit. They want the death of moral agency, which I have said often. They want everyone to be forced to commit moral suicide, to renounce who they are–if they have any remaining “stains” of identity (male, female, professional/worker, Jewish/Hindu, Californian/Tennesseean, etc.)–and march in lockstep as ordered.

You can talk to nice people who espouse these ideas. The point I am making is that they don’ think through the logical and necessary outcomes of the policies they espouse, and that this in itself constitutes a major moral failure.

This is disingenuous even for him.

First, though, I have not explained recently why I single out Krugman. The reason is simple: as the messenger of economically disastrous–and lunatic– policies, as a “thinker” (actually, why don’t we insert “ideological activist” within those brackets?) who has a wide audience, he is arguably the single most dangerous non-politician in the country. Certainly, his name needs to appear on a short list that includes George Soros, and the elitists Obama has gathered around him to do everything they can to impose through fiat what they cannot get legislated.

If the task is job creation, the private sector does that. Is it smarter to take their money, spend it on pet projects favored by people who have never had jobs, then hope it trickles back to them; or does it make more sense to make more capital available to the people who use it to fund business growth and the jobs that go with it? Your answer literally speaks to your capacity for the use of reason.

I want to be clear: if the task is to eradicate all competitors to the Ivy League-ish, Fabian, morally weak but intellectually dogmatic people who think they are privy to a uniquely valuable understanding of how the world “really works”, then Keynesian economics works. The task JMK set himself was eroding private wealth and economic and personal liberty, under the cloak of helping increase private wealth and liberty. You see, these people are liars and liars lie. That’s what they do. That is the sort of statement that has become difficult to make in our post-rational age.

Anyway, Keynes–strike that, Krugman–hits all the usual suspects: tax cuts, war with Iraq, deregulation. These have by now become for synchronized leftists become little more than trigger points. They spasm when he says how high. They lie when he says tell the truth. They are perfectly trained.

But in the world most of us occupy, in which fact and reason are studied judiciously to develop statements which conform well to visible reality, Krugman is simply wrong.

The Bush tax cuts increased dramatically the share of taxes paid by the rich. They weren’t tax cuts at all. That demographic paid more. In most cases, presumably they paid more because they made more. They made more since they engaged in more economically productive activity. That activity is what creates jobs.

Net revenues to the government also went up under Bush. None of the irrationalists who want to pretend Keynes was other than deviant moral monster (exhibit A is his close relationship with George Bernard Shaw) ever take not of what actual receipts are. Deficits go up because WE SPEND MORE MONEY. If you increase you income 10%, and increase your spending 20%, is it the part of reason to argue that the increase in income was bad? Of course not.

War on Iraq: yes, it was expensive. So too has been the War on Poverty. The difference is that we won in Iraq, and we have been losing the War on Poverty since it was launched. I see no way of believing, on the contrary, that it has not played a major role in the IMPOVERISHMENT of large segments of our nation. Where two parent families were the norm, now they are gone.

Krugman won’t discuss this. Of course, he could: he seemingly has no moral compass or particular attachment to actually helping improve the lives of ordinary, normal people, so no doubt he can spin failure into genius, and horror into excitement.

Finally, the Great Recession. How did it start? The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Significance? They backed a very large segment of the mortgage-backed securities whose belated devaluation by the Credit Rating Agencies provoked the cash flow crisis that created the larger problem. The whole reason the Credit Ratings Agencies were able to pretend that securities of unknown and unknowable value were golden is that they were backed by, what? The full faith of the Federal Government. Bail-outs were promised to all.

The government ENABLED the crisis.

I will frankly never really understand how people like Krugman look in their mirrors with other than naked self loathing. He is not working to help the lives of anyone. He is protecting a fundamentally corrupt system–characterized by Central Banks who are only too happy to support his frequent calls for more spending, since they can print the money to make it happen–while offering nothing that will help John Q. Average on the street.

It is not obvious, but the end game of the socialists–the nihilists–who push so hard for the eradication of American culture is the end of all other cultures as well. They don’t want Mexicans to behave like Mexicans (as if such a diverse nation could be reduced to some uniform set of behaviors in the first place), or African Americans like African Americans. Everything must be the same.

I was watching this today in my mind, in a clear sky that was raining, and it occurred to me that what we want is negotiation. What we want, really, is the reconciliation of varying truth and behavioral narratives (truth and behavior can be separated, as in ritual).

What do we do when we negotiate a price? We compare two different desire sets, and reconcile them in such a way that in a condition of freedom both are satisfied. Is the negotiation of culture any different?

Why is American culture so ubiquitous? Simple: to many people, it has value. We are the ones who solved the problem of self government, even if we are being overrun at the moment by fools. We don’t have to compel our culture: it sells itself.

Buddhists never used the military to spread their creed, but there it was: all over Asia, including Central Asia. The Mongolian hordes fell in love with Tibetan Buddhism, and–uniquely for them, as far as I know–left the Tibetans alone, and implemented Lamaism in their own social order.

In negotiation, you can still be you, and I can still be me. In socialism, this is against the rules. No one can exist with an identity not prescribed for them by the pseudo-scientists who have gained control of the system through brutality and lies.

Obama was apparently mocking Republicans for wanting to actually protect our borders, and for their reservation about rewarding 11 million criminals for their behavior. I posted this in response to an article about this. I suspect it won’t make it through the filter on the leftie place I read it, so figured I’d post it here, since I took the trouble to write it.

I’m making changes in my life. What was good enough last year is not good enough now. What seems to happen when you look down the road, and not at your feet, is you see all the constraints and webs of habit that have been bedeviling you, without your conscious awareness.

I realized this morning several things. First, failure which is unaccompanied by self pity is a means for generating detachment of precisely the sort the Buddhists, Taoists and others advocated. Any trauma, that you confront honestly, and which you do not contexualize as unnecessary–as if any life event could be called that–helps you grow. You become deeper and richer in the ways that matter. You become more invulnerable to the shocks to which the flesh in prone.

What also occurred to me is that we contextualize happiness. We view it as the outcome of certain sorts of experiences. I was doing my morning exercises, listening to music, and suddenly felt happiness. It just came to me. I don’t know why.

And this is the point: happiness does not NEED a point or purpose. I think we often feel it, and reject it on a preconscious level as contexually inappropriate. Why would driving to work make you happy? Why would doing another report make you happy? Why would being at work make you happy? Why not?

I spoke several posts ago about negative hallucinations. I think we have happiness negative hallucinations, in that happiness is there, it is present and possibly expressable to our conscious awareness, but we repress it, thinking it can only happen when you’re having sex, or on your boat, or shopping, or winning something.

It is, I think, accurate to say that to the precise extent you make happiness an end, it disappears. That is why so many members of the Me generation, and their kids, are on anti-depressants.

Think about how you conjure a Patronus in Harry Potter: you think of a happy, powerful experience, and you give external expression to it in the form of light. You do not find something out there: you take something inside, and move it outside.

I read a Sufi story once where he was talking about the innate justice of wisdom which, as he put it, could not be given to the unworthy, nor withheld from the worthy.

This feeling of Windhorse, which I have described on here somewhere, likewise can neither be withheld nor given. I saw that yesterday.

One more Harry Potter example (clearly, Joanne Rowling’s success arose in no small measure from her capacity for myth-making): the mirror of Erised. The Sorcerer’s Stone could only be released to someone who did not want to use it selfishly.

Life, likewise, in the sense of pleasurable, deep experience, can only be released to those who are not trying to consume it like famished wolves.

This probably sounds deep, and maybe it is, but I will point out that I am still often a screwball. There, now the mood is gone.

Or maybe that was the path forward. You decide. Good luck!!!!

Edit: I just noticed the I in Self Pity is too big. I was going to correct it, then realized that is a completely accurate statement. Think about it.

Self pity is our worst enemy. We are all born with empty backpacks on our backs. Self pity is systematically placing stones in it.

The other day I was sitting somewhere feeling the potential for self pity. Whatever it was (superego as editor: chasing women in the wrong place), there I was. I saw the self pity welling up like a wave, the “it’s not fair”, the “this should work”, the whatever made me feel sorry for myself.

I watched it, then let it go. I visualized a drain, in which all those dark waters simply disappeared. Lo and behold, they did, and there I was listening to some songs I put on the jukebox by Sugarland and the Ting-tings (and some more macho bands, but frankly I enjoyed those two the most). It was calming. It was nice.

If we could all live like that, the world would be a much better place. Let it go. Let the resentment go. Let the self importance go. Let the anger go. What good does it do you, much less anyone else? It is a damn anchor, sinking you down into the black water. If you want to float, you need a boat, and boats don’t need heavy weights.

And if you are under water, step one is to look up, n’est pas? Oxygen will be along soon enough, if you swim where the light is.