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When he put out Shutter Island and Inception back to back, it got me thinking. Then I read where former KGB Commander Vladimir Putin called him a “real man”, for some extra effort to get to a “Save the Tigers” conference.

So I read through his filmography, and it is pretty obvious that he has committed himself romantically to radical politics, and social subversion. A credible case could be made that he is a Communist sympathizer.

All film is propaganda, to some extent. All art is intended to influence you in some way. Much of it is banal, some of it is profound; when profound, it can be so because it operates on you at a deep, unconscious level, for good and evil.

The point of Shutter Island was that your sense of sanity is precarious. You can be a lunatic and not know it. More insidiously, that you can be called out as a lunatic by authorities, and be forced, more or less, to comply with their diagnosis.
One thinks of the abuse of the Soviet and other psychiatric systems for the “treatment” of political dissidents, whose mental defect was pointing out self-evidently true facts about the monstrous systems within which they were imprisoned.

You identify with his character, then you learn that you are mad. I only saw the movie once, and my first reading was that a credible case could be made that his character was not in fact mad, but was made so by a carefully contrived set of circumstances and drugs. The author claims no, but to my way of thinking if he was trying to mess with peoples minds, why stop once he got out of the book and off the screen? I’d have to watch it again to make a confident diagnosis.

The point of Inception is that your dreams are not your own. The State–or anyone–can come into your mind, into the most private parts of your self, and control or at least influence them.

Both of these movies are thrillers, on the surface, but particularly in a theater, when you are deeply absorbed in them, they will also have effects that linger, that introduce ideas and doubts about who you are, and a following increased tendency towards decreased trust, increased alienation, and openness to the influence of others.

This case can be made with regard to virtually every movie DiCaprio has made in his whole career, which I am not going to take the time to do. No wonder Putin admires him.

This article from a few months ago caught my eye. I don’t know how reliable the inference is–“beware the single study”–but it got me thinking.

Meat, when it is meat, is dead. The animal or enemy has already been killed. For this reason, it would seem logical that we have something hard wired in us to recognize that, to react on a bioloogical, mechanical level. You have on the one sided the capability of arousal in combat, then the following relaxation upon victory. No doubt an addiction to this basic process has fueled and even caused many wars. Churchill said, echoing many others, that “nothing is as exhilirating as to be shot at without effect.” He himself had killed at least five men, and likely quite a few more, particularly once you factor in his stint in the trenches in WW1.

Anyway, me being me, that made me think of the Tibetan Chod tradition, and Tantrism more generally. As I understand the matter–and I am no expert, and one would expect much of this to be orally tranmitted–the intent is to combine morbid settings with unconditional love. You sit yourself in a graveyard, with bodies, and offer the spirits your own love and self. Tibetans use human bones for many of their instruments and in amulets and other things.

There is a conflict in all of us between the self that in many respects is like a dog seeing meat, and our potentially higher spiritual selves. I do not deny much of who we are is the result of our biological–which is to say evolutionary–heritage. This is the machine-like part of us. This is the part that responds to meat.

But in my view we are also capable of what I call non-statistical coherence, which is to say we are capable of choice, since our minds and brains are not the same thing. We can present to ourselves images that once evoked one pathway–meat satisfies a lust to kill–and consciously overlay that pathway with another, in which we ourselves become the meat, for spirits. This, at any rate, appears to be what is intended with this practice.

I have read other treatments of it elsewherer–as usual Wikipedia is both available and not very good–in which it was emphasized that unless you had the power to love deeply and without reservation all beings, then this practice could destroy you. You must have the inner light to avoid being taken by the darkness you consciously embrace.

This is a bit out there, but hell I have fun. Do with this what you will.

I have likely said this before, but I can’t remember where.

Psychology doesn’t really have a term for a good person. They have labels for what in moral terms would be labelled evil–antisocial personality disorder, or sociopath–but nothing comparable on the side of Goodness. It was contemplating this fact which got me interested in the concept of Goodness.

You have well-adjusted. You have psychologically normal. You even have a pyramid of self-actualization. But we can see readily enough how to be more evil; nothing comparable exists, as far as I know, on the plus side.

As an example, I was reading the back cover of some book about a serial killer. Profilers recognized 12 levels of evil. This guy was 13. Some badass stuff. [“What did he do?”, people who bought the book asked. “How did he torture people? Did he eat them? Did he make other people eat them? What was his favorite tool?” This is the cultural world we live in].

Anyway, how would we create 13 levels of love? I have defined evil as taking pleasure in the pain of others. I have defined Goodness as taking pleasure in the happiness of others.

You cannot achieve a goal you do not have, and it seems to me we NEED something like this, and the “science” of psychology has not to my knowledge created it; nor, given the materialistic and evolutionary paradigm within which most of them operate, is it in my view likely any time soon.

Martin Seligman does good work, but when I read his books something is always missing. I know he is an agnostic tending towards atheism, because he said so, but that basic trait also comes out in some intangible trait of his thinking that I feel rather than deduce.

I like Mihaly Csikscentmihalyi [close], too. Perhaps one could combine the experience of Flow with loving-kindness. That would be getting close.

A whole bunch of posts are going to show up quickly, since I am taking off voice memos. Some of them I will admit up front I’m not going to be happy with, but something decent today is better than something great tomorrow, and much, much better than something that never comes into existence because someone is being a perfectionist.

The two greatest personality traits you can possess are an enjoyment of work of all sorts; and empathy, which combined with the spirit of not avoiding work, will lead naturally to generosity in most cases.

Two people like this, married, will stay married and be happy. If there was a secret to our grandparents happy marriages, this was likely most of it. They expected life to be work, they suffered enough to be empathetic, and they combined the two when they committed to their spouses.

I read this article, about how little looting there has been in Japan. Does it not say something rather unflattering about us that we would find this noteworthy?

It is often remarked upon that the need to belong to a group causes conflict. There is always, in academic terms, an existential Other, upon which violence can and always has been visited. Western Colonialism–but not, I might add, Eastern and Islamic and many other colonialisms–has been deconstructed along this pathway.

It should be noted, though, that even if the us/them template enables violence (a good example would be the Islamic distinction between the House of Peace and the House of War), it REDUCES it within the group. Both outcomes follow upon a closely followed, reasonably well thought-out cultural identity. Even if you hate and want to kill the proverbial people on the other side (of the border, the street, the river, the fence), you trust and support those within your group.

Violence is very common in Mexico, but not, I suspect, within families.

The interesting outcome, then, of multiculturalism–which we might usefully define as “Anti-Western culturism”–is that violence, rather than being channellized and directed, becomes generalized. If there is no Other out there, then he is now your neighbor. You think sometimes of killing him, don’t you? If not him, then some person in a movie who has been plausibly painted as deserving it.

I have approached this rough insight many ways. Normally I come at it sociologically and psychologically, but I think it would not be unwarranted to call this approach anthropological.

I will append this by commenting that Leftism is a tribalism. It creates, ex nihilo, a group, a faction, a cult, within which you can take your part, and with the decoder ring and membership card you get permission to HATE as much as you like, as long as–what?–as long as that hatred is Channellized and Directed at the right people.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde, non?

There are no dichotomies in nature. The sun is not the opposite of the moon. Yes, one is a lifeless rock, and the other a million nuclear bombs going off every moment, but both consist of matter; both are visible from Earth; both obey the laws of physics, circling endlessly.

Black is not the opposite of white. Neither exists, in truth. Both are artifacts of the way human eyes process light. Black is a body which does not reflect energy in frequencies we can see, and white is all of the colors meeting the EYE at once. Both, in sum, are properties of our hard wiring, not the universe.

For survival–and I don’t question there is some part of our organism which takes as its primary role that of ensuring our survival and reproduction–it is useful to draw distinctions in binary ways: safe/unsafe; friend/foe; edible/inedible; useful/useless.

In a final sense, though, all of these distinctions are illusions. In human society, quite often we make them true only by treating them as true. If you hate people, they will grow to hate you. Yet even if one of you kills the other, this does not mean that in any ontological way you were opposed: merely that one or both of you developed a pattern consistent with a perception that was not intrinsically accurate. Had one of you thought differently, and done things differently, a different outcome would have been achieved.

I want to be clear, though, that being nice is not the alternative to being cruel and vindictive. Being PERCEPTIVE is, and sometimes generating peace will involve violence. Sometimes love is expressed through indifference. Sometimes hate is expressed through what is called, wrongly, love.

It occurred to me today that there is a parallelism between the tactics chosen by the Arab descendants from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and those of Leninists.

Both are based upon hatred. Both have as their goal not the alleviation of the suffering of the people upon whose behalf they conceitedly believe they can speak, but rather the destruction of some hated Other.

The refugees will send their children from Gaza and the West Bank to kill civilian Jews. That the children die in the process does not faze them. It does not bother them that the policies of aggression and terrorism they choose FORCE the Israelis to be restrictive in what they tolerate. They don’t care that economic opportunities are rare in war zones, and that they are creating the war zone. They don’t care how many generations of their children are born into conditions of relative poverty, political instability,and violence.

It is possible to make peace with people who have rational objectives. It is not possible to make peace with people whose only desire is your destruction, and who are quite willing to commit social suicide to accomplish that aim, who are willing to sacrifice the next 10 generations of their children to get back at some hated Other, who has wounded their very profound vanity.

It is hard, often, not to see Islam as lending itself to the mindset of the slave, of someone BORN to take orders from others willing to do the work of thinking and perceiving. This need not be the case, but from the outside looking in, it appears that those people born every generation capable of innovation and creation are shunned and discouraged by those operating with the minds of slaves.

As I have often said, that life orientation I have called Cultural Sadeism likewise has as its aim punishing cultural Others, and not the objective alleviation of material inequalities, or shortages. Cuban leaders live well; the rest of society does not. None of them approach the wealth we take for granted here.

Logically, if the yes/no operator is symptomatic of the mechanical part of our existence, and if it is the primary tool of, say, dialectical materialism, then we can assume that all cultural systems based upon it are inferior with regard to perception, and correspondingly evil–if not always visibly, in the latent corruption which must attend an unwillingness to learn, to adapt, and to grow continually.

There was once a little boy given the responsibility to make sure that everyone he knew was treated fairly. Just for fun, he would often call out “Here’s a racist, here’s a racist”. Concerned citizens from all around would come running, only to realize that his accusation was without merit. Again and again the little boy would call out “here’s a racist, here’s a racist”. They would come running, and he would say “pay me more money, pay me more money”.

After a while, the people told him to shut his goddamned mouth and leave them alone. He never did learn his lesson, but his cries were heard no more.

The end.

This one is out there; I know it. I am simply going to send an idea out there in the world to make its own way, or perish. It occurred to me some time ago.

Within the context of my sanity, I will note that my method is to never preemptively exclude ANY options in terms of explaining what I see, until I can convince myself they are not possible, or that the bulk of evidence points in another direction; even then, I keep all options open. In my view, that is the approach best calibrated to net, over time, the largest percentage possible of truth.

In my view, Obama is a Marxist who was a good friend of Bill Ayers, and who wants to implement global tyranny in the name of the “People”; and who was raised by people who recognized no moral boundaries. I think his mentor Frank Davis gave him drugs, advice on sex, and may well have molested him. Nothing in Davis’s moral inventory, as expressed in his book Sex Rebel: Black would have precluded it. Obama is nothing like the nice person his myth-makers have made him out to be.

That is the background. Here is the idea: what if both the earthquake in Haiti, and that that just happened in Japan were artificially created, using weapons deployed covertly by corrupted members of our military, or mercenaries hired by people supportive of the Obama cause?

The only reason this even occurred to me was this statement, in which Obama talks about an earthquake in Hawaii that never happened. Now, Obama is not overly bright, but even he should know that there was no earthquake in Hawaii. But what if one was planned?

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, it happened at a really convenient time, politically. Congress was in the throes of the discussion on the Health Insurance Mandate, and Democrats were on the defensive. I remember the daily discussion shifted INSTANTLY from that to Haiti, for many weeks.

That is what is likely to happen now, right after Scott Walker dealt Obama’s supporters a hard shot in the solar plexus. That WOULD have been the discussion, but now for the next three weeks it will be Japan, and possibly Hawaii.

When I google it, I get comments suggesting that earthquakes can certainly be triggered by properly placed explosives, possibly even explosives short of nuclear weapons. The fault is already there–it just needs some help slipping.

Some say radio waves can do it. That seems unlikely through the ocean though.

We have people out there, in my opinion, worth 2-5 times what Bill Gates is. They have no reason to advertise this fact, which is why we don’t know who they are. The money to get this done could be allocated privately. You could buy a sub, and plant 50 tons of high explosive in a carefully chosen spot. It blows, the earthquake goes, and there would be little to no evidence.

I know this is Alex Jones-style thinking, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. If I have any readers with any potential to research this possibility, I would encourage you to do so. Otherwise, I will forget about this, and go about my life. If you can’t do anything about it, don’t worry about it. That’s my mantra.

Edit: as I think about it, this will likely have a ripple effect (please forgive the term) on the world economy. The largest net beneficiary will likely be China. We could perhaps suspect them as well. We may also benefit. We will see enormous production disruptions for at least weeks, and maybe months. (I am thinking here about possible damage to all of Japan’s power generation plants, particularly the nuclear ones). This is going to cost an enormous amount of money to fix; and even more money in lost revenue.

I don’t like to think things like this. Neither do I like to read history. But people were put in boxcars in Russia that went up north in the dead of winter, frozen, then stacked like cordwood.

In the German gas chambers, someone had to stand above the showers and throw gas tablets into the solution that produced the gas. One of them would regularly say “Hier ist etwas zu fressen”, or something close to that, which in the German means “here is something to eat”, where the word for eat is the word normally used when animals consume food. It is “essen” for people. People did that day after day after day. When the gas had done its work, the victims were frozen in horrible and contorted positions.

Evil happens in this world. This is undeniable. It is the job of those who want what is good in this world to stay awake and alert, and realize that if anyone anywhere can hurt someone else on purpose, then all manner of means for doing so are possible.

For education. Get written up for anything three times and you lose the priviledge of going to school.

I would go farther than some of my conservative friends in agreeing that public education in some form is an acceptable level of socialism (I will note in passing that public education was a demand of many socialists in the 19th century, until they got it). I think it offers a pathway for the diligent to raise themselves up, to our collective benefit. It keeps class barriers from being impermeable, and in my view is an important part of at least the modern American dream.

At the same time, the right to education comes with responsibility. I believe everyone in America has the right to own a gun, of any sort up to and including assault rifles, but not the right to use them to impose their will on anyone. If they do that, they forfeit the right. They also forfeit the right to participate in our electoral process, which is both prudent and just.

Likewise with education, kids should have the right to attend, but only to the extent they value what would have been clearly a priviledge in almost any other time and place in human history. For context, please read Doris Lessing’s useful Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

If a kid EVER threatens, much less hurts, another kid, and for which there is compelling evidence, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it twice, he should be permanently expelled and referred to the police.

If a kid is disobedient or talks back to teachers three times, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it three times twice, he never gets to come back.

Correllated to mental capacity, which is to say given demands appropriate for a child’s capabilities, if a child gets 3 F’s in a year, he forfeits a semester of school. If he gets 6 overall, he no longer gets to attend school. He simply is not trying.

We don’t owe kids schooling who hold it in contempt. We are paying for them to sit in a chair they don’t value, to learn things they aren’t learning. They graduate stupid, and many around them graduate knowing less than they ought to have owing to the kids who either slowed them down, or who made going to school a frightening experience.

40-50% of kids drop out of most inner city schools. The numbers are similar in many rural areas. The difference is that most kids in rural areas can get work on farms.

I have to wonder if some high percentage of those drop outs–I’m going to go with half–have to do with the fact that the kids are walking into uncontrolled war zones.

We see stupid people citing compassion as a reason to give kids a second, third, twenty-fifth, 87th chance. Bullshit. The compassion needs to be given to the kids they are terrorizing, putting ourselves in the shoes of those who did not create the problems, but are suffering from them. Juvenile criminals become in my view very early matters for the police. If they are going spend their lives in jail, the earlier it starts, the fewer people they hurt.

The larger compassion, of course, also needs to address the bigger picture of why those kids became criminals in the first place. Why would that be? We had no large problem with juvenile criminality 80 years ago, outside of isolated urchins who lacked families. People everywhere made do with half of what our poor today take for granted.

The reason for this was that kids grew up in two parent homes that read the Bible. This sounds so simple it sounds stupid. But that is the reality. They were not immersed from an early age in media which glorifed violence, and which discouraged self restraint, and personal responsibility. We lacked, then, a cult of the victim. If you screwed up, you screwed up. It wasn’t society.

To the extent society IS to blame though, it is to blame for failing to teach useful lessons. Teaching people to feel sorry for themselves, and to blame others is not useful. It is teaching people to fail in their emotional and economic lives at the same time. It it teaching them to hurt others rather than discipline themselves.

This policy would enormous differences, in my view, immediately. It would reduce inner city dropout rates, if I am right, by 10% within the first year.

Anyone out there who claims to care about humanity, consider this, and the means by which I reached my conclusions.

Here.

I read it, and thought “my God, this man actually sounds like he’s describing problems which actually exist. I don’t remember him ever doing that.”

But of course the pattern for good propaganda is truth, truth, truth, half truth, lie, truth. No good propagandist tells the truth less than 95% of the time. They just pick and choose which truths they want to include, exclude those that don’t help, and spin their choices such that the facts are correct, but the interpretation is not.

Good jobs disappearing. True.

Solution: more unions and Obamacare. Patently false.

Citoyen Krugman: are you capable of grasping that interest payments on borrowed money are a net drain of wealth? That given less wealth, there is less wealth to distribute in ANY fashion? You help remind those who forget that Ph.D often stands for “Piled higher and deeper.”

The foundational problem we face is this: the product of our labor and creativity is stolen from us through the process of inflation. People don’t get this. Nobody seems to be capable of stepping far enough outside the consensus reality to get this.

I am not now, nor have I ever proposed going back to some past time or system. What I am proposing has never been done. Sooner or later I’m hoping to find an economist with the courage to wrestle seriously with what I have proposed.

Once again, it is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I go through phases of trying to solicit feedback. I’ve sent it to at least 20 economists and several business people, with no luck. If you know anybody, please send it to them. If I’m an idiot, tell me why.