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We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.

When people say we are broke, the problem is not current cash flow. It’s not that we can’t pay our bills. We can always print or borrow money to do that. That’s what we’ve been doing since the New Deal.

The problem is that in, say, 10 years, we will–on our current trajectory–be paying out more in benefits than we earn as a nation. As he points out later in the piece, what can’t go on, will stop.

Now, I don’t know and really don’t care exactly how numbers like $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities are calculated. What they are doing is multiplying an annual deficit by an arbitrary number of years. The important fact is that we will be spending more than we take in, and doing it year after year after year for decades. When the interest is added in–and the rates we have to pay will continue to increase as we add debt, if the notes aren’t bought by the Fed, which can be inflationary, depending on how they do it.–we will at some point have to go into draconian taxes, or massive inflation. This is the rough process by which Argentina imploded, albeit over a much shorter number of years. You can live well on credit for a time, sometimes a long time, but bills come due.

Social Security is and always has been not just an “intergenerational Ponzi scheme”, as Reagan called it, but one which had as a principle intent the socialization of retirement in particular, and private savings in general.

The net is that we have to radically alter our trajectory. Not only that, but in my view we need to implement something like my plan, which could be viewed as democratized, planned hyperinflation. We need to get the house in order. We need to relocalize our economic and political life, then load up the financial guns, and slay the dragon, once and for all. It can be done. It’s a question of will and knowledge. Knowledge will feed will, so the more truth we see floating around, the more likely our story will have a happy ending for the foreseeable future.

Here’s his latest.

Thesis: rich people are driving the Tea Party, and they are selfish and self indulgent. Inference: we should hate them.

“Evidence”: taxes were higher under Clinton and we balanced the budget. Oh, and that the super-rich are just bad people. Let me underscore that. They are nothing like you–whoever you are plebian scum if you are a Teabagger, and bless your heart if you agree with me, as any sensible person would–and me, guru to the world.

Commentary: Krugman rarely goes more than 2 columns in a row without demanding a stimulus of some sort, which is equivalent to a demand for deficit spending. What he wants, in other words, is to borrow money from the Chinese and wealthy elites, and raise taxes on people who make money in America.

Contrary to what he leads people to believe, the super-rich BENEFIT from our deficit spending. They lend us the money. Not infrequently, they create the money to loan us from scratch, via their close pal the Fed.

The people Krugman is demonizing pay the vast bulk of taxes ALREADY. The top 10% pay some 70% of the taxes, and that percentage WENT UP under Bush. The rates went down, and actual net dollar receipts WENT UP. This is what is predicted by Supply Side (aka Anti-Keynesian) Economics. The deficit went up because WE SPENT MORE MONEY. If I’m going too quick, just reread what I wrote. Prior to the tax cuts, they just kept their money elsewhere, or they didn’t invest it at all. And it is worth reiterating that 40% of Americans pay no incomes taxes at all.

What we need are jobs. Only the private sector can create sustainable jobs, and if Krugman were anything but a hack he would publicly admit it. Krugman very literally uses every chance he gets to use his bully pulpit to propagate ideas which are not only not helpful, but DAMAGING to our economy. We got to where we are by listening to devious people like him.

The reality is that American businesses are sitting on a huge pile of cash. They COULD invest it in sustainable private sector jobs, but only if they can be assured that our President isn’t going to run us off the Left side of the cliff. They lack that assurance currently, as Jack Welch, among many others, has recently commented. I was talking with a very successful financial advisor yesterday, who said the same thing: the people with the power to hire people are scared.

Krugman, of course, wants to make this into an us versus them debate. It is the angry rich–who are in a world of their own–and everyone else. The common folk, like him. Well, not exactly like him–somebody has to be IN CHARGE–but you get the basic idea.

The reality, again, is that the Tea Party is Main Street. It is common sense. It is recognizing that you can’t tax your way into prosperity, that you can’t denigrate business and create jobs at the same time, and that we are going bankrupt rapidly, again as a result of policies Krugman advocates every chance he gets.

He mentions D’Souza’s claims about Obama, but he makes it clear that only THEY could possibly give them any credence. People like him–and his sophisticated readers–can simply go pish posh, who could possibly be that dumb? It must be racism. It must be that “Angry White Male Syndrome” (AWMS: you heard it here first), which will presumably be in DSM-V, and which is just hate, hate, hate. And since you can hate the haters, this is a win-win situation. You don’t have to understand them, since they are “haters”. You can just let lose with every pet prejudice and latent vicious impulse you want, and you will be FULLY justified. If you ever doubt yourself, just top off at your local ideological gas station.

To be clear, if this were a debate, D’Souza’s proposition carries with no opposition, as unrecognized, unrefuted, and still quite viable.

All in all, if Mr. Krugman were capable of shame, this would be a good time to feel it. Since that proposition is quite dubious, let me suggest that he debate the actual people who oppose him, rather than cast them as cartoons, and use those crude caricatures to divide us one from the other, and all of us from anything even approaching a reasoned, dispassionate analysis of our problems.

I try to never diagnose problems without offering solutions. While identifying problems is the starting point, focusing on them and not solutions is a species of whining, which is against my code of conduct.

If, as I posit often, the development of Goodness revolves around the rejection of self pity, the cultivation of perseverance in the face of difficulty, and an unrelenting commitment to understanding, then our art should focus on developing these traits.

Obviously, most hero films involve the first two. To them, though, I would add an emphasis on developing a sense of nuance, of place, of context, of empathy. I would add a focus on beauty and the spiritual.

One of my favorite film directors is Andrei Tarkovsky. As an adult ready to understand what he was trying to do, I have only seen two of his films: Nostalgia, and the Sacrifice. There is a passion for beauty and transcendance in both of them that lingers. I think he was half mad, but only such people can see deeply enough to be lastingly useful. I like to think of myself as useful, and sometimes I think I’m a bit off my rocker, but it’s hard to say. I’m distinctive, I will say that.

Anyway, I’ve posted a few thoughts on art and architecture here, here. I know there are more, but I can’t find them at the moment. I am overwhelmed sometimes by how much I write. What’s on here is a fraction of what I have that I haven’t posted.

In response to criticisms of media violence, we see several threads of argument. One is that the 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of expression. This is true, but as the most articulate advocate of the freedom of speech–John Stuart Mill, in “On Liberty”–pointed out, the freedom of speech includes the freedom to condemn the “speech” of others. As long as no one is trying to ban Horror films, this argument is moot.

Let me offer a thought experiment, though. We have the technology to build virtual worlds. What if one use to which computer software is put–and I have no doubt this thought has occured to some minds, so I don’t think I’m giving anyone any ideas here, hopefully–is the creation of software in which you torture, virtually, other people? What if you could input a picture of someone you hate, say a boss or ex-lover, and put a blow torch to her, or cut her with a knife, or chainsaw?

Should such software be banned? What if you can do it in 3D, or virtual reality? One can readiliy imagine the harm that would come from this, and I can see no good.

Another argument used is “it’s not like people will watch this then go out and kill somone”. This simply isn’t true. It is not common, but it happens. In that link, you will read about a teenage boy who was a huge fan of the show Dexter, and who strangled his ten year old brother because he wanted to be like him. Ponder that for a moment.

What I think we can see there, first, is that the real message of the show is violence. Yes, it is violence against the “wicked”, but so were, ostensibly, the pogroms against the Jews. The question is “are you starting with the desire for justice, or the desire to harm others, and a need to justify it”?

Justice, so called, is in many respects a socially sanctioned expression of hatred. If someone kills someone you love, you want pain inflicted on them. If the State–which is supposed to be dispassionate, as it has not suffered directly–does not do it, then people take the law into their own hands. I think one could, with study, readily perceive the growth of vigilante films pari passu with the triumph of Leftist silliness in the court system.

Think about most action movies. Do we not have to establish the evil bona fides of the villain early on, through some horrible act of violence, and then the cowardice, incompetence, and general uselessness of the State, so that we can root for our hero? Think Dirty Harry, or Die Hard, or any Rambo movie. The pattern is formulaic, and playing in pretty much every theater in the world year round.

Do we really want to see “justice” done, or do we simply want a good excuse to see people getting blown up? Clearly, the element of the hero, who triumphs againsts all odds (generally through what the realistic of us would readily recognize as a ridiculously improbably deus ex machina miracle delivered for dramatic effect) is in many respects salutary. Americans are not physical cowards, and we have countless role models for this. Yet, in the end, is this really helpful?

As Samuel Johnson pointed out centuries ago: “God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over.” The job of justice is not determining whether someone is fundamentally good or evil. In some cases, the evidence seems pretty clear, but one can never know who someone “really” is. Most all human beings are a mixture of good and evil. In my view, the BTK murderer got himself caught on purpose. He had two selves: one with a conscience, and one committed to cruelty.

I really like Spider Man 2 in this regard. The “villain” is both good and evil. [side bar, I really like it too for teaching the rejection of self pity, and doing what is right no matter what].

Cartoonish violence teaches cartoonish understandings (ironically, actually, Spider Man was not cartoonish in that regard). It teaches us us/them, good/evil dichotomies, when we really don’t see them in the world.

The inversion of this, of course, is to treat everyone as good, and ignore the reality of evil. Both approaches are wrong because they don’t conform to visible reality. Evil exists. So does good. Decisions must always be contextual, and oriented around maximizing good, and minimizing evil. Sometimes overwhelming violence is needed to, paradoxically, minimize violence. Sometimes gradualism is the only viable approach. Dialogue is always preferred, but it only works with people who are amenable to reason.

In my view, justice is a pragmatic question: how do we minimize violence, and maximize peace, consistent with all men being equal before the [God’s, if you will] law?

One final point: evidence is clear and incontrovertible that media violence has three general effects on most people and particularly children. The following points are taken from the book “Viewing Violence”, by Madeline Levine.

1) It encourages aggression. Kids watch pro wrestling, and try the moves on each other, occasionally with tragic consequences. People are more prone to the fight or flight response, to avoiding the dialogue and negotiation response. In the Dexter case, it led directly to literal murder.

2) It promotes desensitization. One cannot post long on shared message boards without noting the emotional flatness and lack of nuance from many posters, particularly young kids. In my view, by age 13 or so, if empathy has not been learned, it may never be learned. And watching death after death after death, and gruesome murder after murder (CSI, NCIS and many others) causes children to withdraw their natural sympathy to the pains of others. There is a part of your brain that processes media violence as real violence. It doesn’t distinguish. Many soldiers, after seeing combat for the first time, comment “it was just like the movies”.

And in point of fact, many video games use technology quite similar to that developed to teach soldiers to overcome their innate tendency to sympathize with the human beings they were pointing guns at. In many of our wars, men would literally be in life or death situations, and unable to bring themselves to cause the death of their enemies. Realistic simulations fixed that. They no longer thought of their enemies as human beings; they became simply targets.

In combat, you can’t think of people as people. But the reality is that if those soldiers sat down together, in many cases they would find common ground. They would find that the reasons their enemies offered for fighting made sense to them, and that given that person’s circumstances, they might well made the same decision.

Be that as it may, we are teaching children to blunt and even eradicate their natural moral restraint. For it, we all too often substitute slogans. “Tolerance” is the moral restraint of those who lack all other reference points.

3) Long term exposure to media violence causes increases in the rate of depression. I think this can easily be linked to the desensitization. When you are exposed daily, hourly to scenes of horrific betrayals of trust, how can you be open to those around you? How can you have faith in the fundamental decency of others, when you have seen what is possible?

This in turn causes social isolation, or blunted, superficial relations with others, which cause the sense of aloneness to be even more pronounced. This is the root of school shootings, which seem largely to have declined through more aggressive attention to the signs, rather than through a decrease in the desire of troubled young kids to engage in them.

Have you been that person flipping through the channels at 3 in the morning, with nothing but violence and sappy comedies to choose from? Have you not felt that sense of cardboardness, of unreality, of plastic, of detachment? This is the sentiment, too, of porn, which is related to this whole complex.

Net, net: it is abundantly clear that most of the media most of our children consume is not only not good for them, but actively working to build a society of detached emotional robots. Even if someone wants to claim that what they watch is not bad for them, should we not be asking what is good for them? Should we not be using the time people spend consuming media to build them up, to focus on a better world?

That is my opinion.

Edit: I’m reading through this for the first time since I wrote it, and it is meandering even for me. I feel like I live in a forest, a whole, but with speech I can only walk a path. I feel the big picture I am trying to convey, but in this case at least my words didn’t quite do it justice. As with much of what I write, this needs to be looked at as a sketch, as a bigger thought in progress.

In the movie “Because of Winn-Dixie”, we see a powerful metaphor for what I at times call the tragic sense of life in the Littmus lozenges, which we are told somehow capture both the sweetness and sadness of life. They were created by a sad veteran of the Civil War. We are told they “taste like music”, and they lead Opal to the conclusion that we seem to lack the ability both to share pain as well as joy any more. Perhaps that is the best single definition of community: the capacity to share with little restraint our griefs and our exaltations.

Pain and pleasure are linked. Somehow, the latter is the greater for having suffered the former. I think it is not just the contrast–the pleasure of slaking a great thirst. That is superficial. Rather, as I have said often, pain is not cumulative. We can only take so much before becoming numb to it. What pain does is alter us qualitatively, and it can force us both in the direction of greater personal integration, love, and Goodness; and in the direction of cruelty.

The difference is in what I term a Meaning system. This is the Why in Nietzche’s famous aphorism “A man with a strong enough Why can stand any How.” Parents will suffer greatly for their children. Patriots will suffer for their nation. The faithful will suffer for their religion. Christianity is a Meaning System. So is Communism. If one looks at the sufferings entailed by Communist revolutionaries, it becomes clear that their “faith” was quite sincere, even if their thinking was foggy beyond belief, and arguably based on a need for the expression of cruelty–or at least power–at least in many cases. Frankly, the same likely obtained for substantial periods in the history of the Western Church as well.

What do you do when you believe nothing? What do you do when you believe that death is the end, life is pointless, and morality a lie told by self serving elites to secure for themselves greater comforts, indulgences and priviledges?

That is the question I wanted to address here. Consider the business of Kink.com. Here is New York Times piece on it. If you want to be thorough, go the site, although I will caution you the images are INTENDED to be disturbing.

It is a site dedicated to the intentional infliction of pain and discomfort. BDSM stands for bondage, domination, sadism and masochism.

If you read the piece, the people who work there are outwardly normal. They work 10 to 6. They have a 401k. They sponsor events and tours. They offer health coverage, including vision.

And they spend their days tying one another up, whipping each other, and performing sex acts that are intended to be painful in a way that explicitly excludes even the possibility of the expression of affection during the act. In the end, do they like another? I would suppose so. How this works is the interesting question.

In my view, BDSM is an “ersatz sacred”. I feel it is experienced by its practitioners–at least the non-sociopathic ones, and I am not accusing most of the people there of being evil–as, paradoxically, liberating. It alters their qualitative gestalt. It takes them to places which are non-mundane. It takes them, perhaps, to that place experienced by soldiers in war, who hate the war, but nonetheless find that it changes them in both useful and harmful ways. Certainly, there is nothing else like it. It makes them feel “alive”. It ties in to the sexual instinct, which is one, in the end, of procreation, of generation.

It is a way of solving the problem of meaning in suburban American style: by taking a pill. I want to be clear that war, while psychologically engaging for some, is wrong. Likewise, while I don’t view this as a moral issue since it is consensual and no one is (normally) permanently hurt, I do think that it is psychologically unhealthy.

In my view, we are both material and spiritual beings. We possess both natures. Our material nature is the product of our evolution. Men have a need to be dominant. Women tend, at times, to want to be submissive, to be dominated. Obviously, the roles can be and often are reversed, but I think this is a basic tendency. The women who want to be dominant are likely to be inverting a normal tendency to be submissive, or are doing what their man wants. Or perhaps they are just narcisstic and cruel, and using the need of others for submission to express what would otherwise be latent tendencies.

It’s impossible to make accurate general statements across large populations, but I do think these are some of the factors in play.

More generally, I think this basic pessimism, this basic sense of meaninglessness, of purposelessness, is expressed throughout the Horror genre. Many of these films are filled with explicit, very graphic torture, rape, murder, mutilation, and–I would suppose–the totemization of the remains of the victims.

Now, a good friend of mine watches a lot of these movies. She is a particular fan of the Saw series. She has had her share of trauma in life, like the rest of us. They do not seem to bring out bad traits in her. She is a generous, warm person. Yet, she watches these movies. I have asked her why, but she is not really sure, I don’t think. Somehow, it “works” for her.

In assessing these things, my innate tendency is to be judgmental, to ask what conceivable good could flow from watching people having their face burnt off with a blowtorth, or watching a naked, chained woman hanging upside down have her throat slit. These movies are most popular with kids in their teens and early twenties.

I think for some people, these things work cathartically, they recognize and release inner psychological torments they are unable to bring out in the open. As a society, we do NOT share our pain well; nor do we share our joys well. This has the effect of isolating us, which in turn causes more pain.

My next post will be on media violence, so I will try to draw this one to a close–slowly, like a Baptist preacher.

Thomas Mann, in his book “The Magic Mountain”, has a scene that has stuck with me. I think it was a dream of the “protagonist”, if we can call him that [interesting unrelated note: Milton Erickson said that he knew he would find some way to commit suicide after reading the first chapter]. In this dream, he sees a magical kingdom, where everyone lives in harmony and peace. As he penetrates to a temple high on the mountain, which is clearly the sacred center of the social order, he finds priests sacrificing children. If it unclear, sacre fice, is literally “an act of the sacred”. How do we explain this dichotomy?

When I was in graduate school at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, I tried to convince one of my professors to let me write an essay on the religious aspects of serial murder. In some strange way, I think I foresaw the emergence of the modern “serial killer as hero” motif, seen throughout modern media. Dexter is perhaps the most obvious example, but Mr. Brooks was never punished, nor was Hannibal Lector. In some way, many of these films root for the bad guy. Saw is another obvious example. Or Freddy Krueger. Or Jason.

Vampires are another example. How do they survive? They are “dead”–they lack an inner vitality of their own–and are thus forced to survive from the lifeblood of others. This basic fact can be obscured through ruses–as in the Twilight series–by them living off of animals, or artificial blood, as in “True Blood” (I think that’s the set-up; I haven’t watched it). You can make them “good”. Dexter only kills bad people, but all the ads work up a tension between his proclivity for murder with his fatherhood. Always, the ads have scenes of death.

To be clear, even if you are a “good” serial killer, and even if you are a “good” vampire, you are not well. You are not healthy. You are not fully human.

In the ritual process as envisional by Victor Turner, you in effect create a different sort of space and time, which consists in three states. You separate from ordinary time, and from the normal communal order. You then go through a transformative process, and finally you return, different. The most obvious example is the rite of passage seen in many societies, in which young men, especially, must undergo ordeals which not all of them survive. A good example would be the scene in 300, where Leonidas kills the wolf.

Serial killers undergo something like that. When they are about to commit a murder, they in effect enter into a fugue state, an altered state, a state outside the realms of society, decency, and restraint. They commit their murder, as animals. Then they return. It is a common habit of most of them to retain something to remember the act with. Sometimes it is a picture. Sometimes, it is a piece of the victim. Then they are back to their “normal”, social selves. the “he was so quiet” selves, the “he helped me mow the lawn”, and the “he helped with the “Walk to Cure Cancer” selves.

No society founded on the principle of all killing all could survive, as Hobbs pointed out long ago. Yet, many people still have bloodlust. In our own history, public hangings drew people from near and far. The rule of the guillotine was a huge success, among the mob, in France.

How do we balance this? This is the question that plagues me. We are at a stage in our history where technology is evolving at such a rate that even small groups of determined people can inflict enormous damage. Moreover, most of our public thinkers can think of no alternatives between doing what we have always done, and enacting a global tyranny, that constricts behavior through naked force.

It seems to me that what we need is a transformative force that channels our material selves into our spiritual selves. Specifically, we need an ideological foundation for qualitative movement that is positive. We must be able to turn pain into meaning, and meaning into joy and joy into love. You cannot be still. You are always moving either in the direction of hate, or the direction of love. I have called Love an aggression, and this is what I mean. It is what counteracts darkness.

You will note that in all this I have not spoken of metaphysics. I have confined myself to the visible. Here is what I believe: I believe that the material world is a foam that floats on the surface of an infinite ocean of potential reality, which contains all possible spiritual, physical, emotional and mental forms. I believe we are all connected, and that our selves exist as discrete forms first and foremost in the unseen world, and that we in effect “drive” our bodies. We are hybrid beings, much as Descartes posited, except that self evidently there is flow in both directions. I have called Consciousness “Non-statistical coherence”. It is what alters the flow of the material world in non-determined ways. We are free to the extent we use our consciousness to sculpt events, and determined to the extent our bodies do the driving.

Love–a sense of connection to others, and in effect an expansion of your self–is not of this world. It is a spiritual force. Evolutionists have had trouble pinning it down since, in its highest expression, it did not arise here.

In my view, this was the message of Christ. I don’t think Christian theologians conveyed his message accurately. What he intended to teach was the rejection of self pity through service and personal sacrifice, and as expressed in love. His crucifixion was not his sacrifice, it was merely the culmination of it. It was the necessary consequence of speaking a higher truth in a fallen world, and he knew it. And his resurrection showed that the Truth cannot be conquered, in the end, even though it can be made to suffer.

My vision, my ideal, my hope, is that we can build ourselves up such that all of us are willing to sacrifice for one another. Leftist politics have as their aim tearing individuals down. What I want is a politics and cultural revolution that is so sweeping that any adult in this nation could be President and do well. I want us to aggressively pursue what is best in us, and to not stop until we can live happily in peace, the world over. This has never happened, as far as we know, but simply because something has never been, does not mean it cannot be.

The foregoing was quite a bit of thinking out loud. I had to get that off my chest. Hopefully it makes sense to anyone who reads it.

Roughly 8 years ago I came into the office and found a bullet sitting on my desk. It wasn’t in the case; it was just the lead. I shrugged my shoulders, and went to work. When I told a co-worker about it, she said she would be freaked out. I thought about it, and decided that it was indeed a mystery but since no one was threatening me, and I had no enemies I knew of, I wasn’t going to worry about it.

I kept it, though, as an interesting symbol of the mysteries we encounter in life. It’s in my car. Not all questions are answered. Not all confusion is healed. Rather than sitting at the apex of knowledge, I think we ought properly to view ourselves as scarcely better than the insects. We quite literally have no way of knowing what we don’t know. This plain fact is easily missed in our current age.

It would in fact come as a disappointment for me to learn just how that bullet came to be sitting on my desk. I would say “oh, yes”, and it would all make perfect sense. But how dull that would be. I like a life where I don’t understand everything, and know I don’t.

Mystery builds room for creation, for speculation, for movement. It is that place where we build what comes to be “really real” in our persons, and in our social orders.

One more, then it’s off to some thirties pulp fiction.

I submitted this to someone tonight: Propaganda is when the number of adjectives so exceeds the number of verifiable facts that one reaches the end of even lengthy pieces unsure of what has been said, concretely, other than “I disapprove.”

Remember, propaganda has as its purpose the closing off of dialogue, the prevention of self organizing shared perceptions that are based on ideas which did not originate with the propagandist. Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.

Manifestly, no skilled propagandist could get away with saying they sky is green. Our every day experience invalidates that. They would lose their audience immediately. What they do, therefore, is tell the truth, but then sculpt it. The less truth they use, the better, so the more naked, unverifiable assertions, the better.

What they do is say “the sky is sad today”, or “the sky radiates hope today”, or “even the sky agrees with the Chairman’s joyous new plan to cut food rations in half.” You take a fact, and modify it in any way you want, even the most implausible, if you think you can get away with it. In a condition of a controlled media, largely you can get away with it. Obviously, the people know what you are up to, but if it is everywhere, they are influenced over time without realizing it, and if you don’t get too greedy, you can go far.

This is the role that adjectives play. The Tea Party is “racist”. Why is it racist? Because that is the STARTING point of all leftist narratives about it. How do you disprove racism? How do you answer “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Those predisposed to believe the narratives that they download from their preferred ideological docking station, are quite willing to accept unverifiable truths. It is not a question of physics. It’s not a question of chemistry. It’s not empirical in any way. It is an INTERPRETATION, one that in academic terms is essentializing, which is to say prejudicial to the aggregate, and indifferent with respect to individual differences and particularities. The quality supposed becomes an immutable fact.

The question becomes not “is the Tea Party movement racist”, but “How racist, and can they be stopped?” When you become used to living in seas of adjectives denuded of even a nominal effort at impartial factual analysis, then the importation of ideas like this is seamless and complete.

Those living in propaganda are for this reason something less than human. Not only are they not morally sovereign, in most cases they don’t want to be, and their lack of intellectual freedom is processed, itself, as freedom. Some people are born for cages, and given their shot at the wild open skies, will choose the oppressive gloom and certainty of a cave without hesitation.

This is the bulk of Obama’s dogmatic base. They are for all intents and purposes automotons, and it is precisely because this is a desirable state for them that they won’t listen to the imprecations of reason. In important respects, Leftism is a cult.

It has always seemed interesting to me that Communists change their names. Lenin was Ulyanov. Stalin was, if memory serves, Shakashvilli. Ho Chi Minh’s real name was Nguyen Tat Thanh. Pol Pot’s real name was Saloth Sar. And on it goes. You convert to the cult, and just like in the Moonies you get a new name.

One wonders, in that regard, about the significance of our current President choosing to use the name of a man he only met once in his life, and not his maternal name, or the name of the father who actually spent time with him. What provoked the need to learn more about his fathers dreams, and to carry them forward?

Wait, where did you go, audience? Oh, right, I don’t know if I have one. C’est la vie. I’m very much an inner directed personality.

When the pretty girl marries the surgeon, that is eugenics. They have cute, smart kids, who go on to successful careers and marry similar people. For political correctness, let me add “when the pretty boy marries the surgeon, who may or may not be male, female, other, and who may be of any ethnicity, nationality, or religious creed (except Christian). Conscience clear now. Let’s proceed.

Two posts ago I talked about raising the average IQ of persons of African descent in this country. This would necessarily involve, immediately, ensuring to the extent possible adequate nutrition and intellectual stimulation in the formative years. Research on how to optimize this process would be useful. It would include vitamin intake and, presumably, not living in a war zone, which would involve more effective policing, which would mean, in the short term, more blacks in prison.

Now, for the life of me, I don’t know how ANY kid can grow up in the ghetto psychologically normal, much less optimized to participate in a society based on advanced social skills, including personal restraint, interpersonal trust, and the capacity to digest and use various forms of knowledge quickly and seamlessly.

Conservatives often tend to take this “lift yourself by your bootstrap” approach. Sometimes this works. Most of the time, if remediation of social ills is the task, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work in aggreggate, since most people are average. Only above average people lift themselves by their bootstraps. Depending on everyone being above average is planning on failure, by definition.

Conservative will further ask the question: why care at all? Why not let them rise or fall according to their merits? To my way of thinking, helping the less fortunate is the right thing to do. I think that compassion has often been used rhetorically by Leftists to gain power which they didn’t use to help ANYONE but them and theirs, but that fact does not negate the desirability of caring about our fellow men and women. This is a moral argument. I will not judge those who do not agree. All that is NECESSARY in this society, in my view, is that those who judge others do what they can to bear their own burdens. Most conservatives I know meet that criteria.

Be that as it may, the topic awaits. What if women who got pregnant outside of wedlock were given the option of, say, giving the child up for adoption, and getting child welfare payments anyway for life, if they would just get their tubes tied. No more kids. Sexual freedom. And if they elected not to get their tubes tied, then they get nothing for any future kids, and extra visits from Child Protective Services to make sure they are taking care of them.

What if men who got a woman knocked up and didn’t want to hang around could avoid child support payments, if they got a vasectomy?

In both cases, we would in effect be paying people not to have kids, just like we pay (or used to pay; I need to check if this is still going on) farmers not to grow corn. The kids wind up on the dole one way or another anyway, and it is precisely the non-producers–the ones who are not working 3 crappy jobs to make ends meet–who do most of the reproducing. Over time, this would have a salutary effect, and it would be fully voluntary. In the long run, I suspect it would save us a lot of money too.

Conversely, what if we paid parents in some low income neighborhoods extra money in child welfare checks if they got and stayed married?

This may already happen, but what if unwed mothers got more money the more education they received?

However we do it, in the long run much of social and personal structure is based on very simple pain/reward, carrot/stick calculus, and given this, our policies must explicitly reward desirable behaviors, and discourage undesirable, self-destructive behaviors.

Some of my conservative friends would be horrified (hell, may BE horrified, if any are reading this) how much place I am giving for the provision of social services.

The simple reality is that I am quite aware of all the suffering in the world, and I see no reason for unnecessary suffering. The problem we have faced for 50 or more years is that the self appointed guardians of the poor are power drunk fools who have made everything worse for everyone. They have not solved the problem, and they have run up massive bar tabs (Mr. Speaker, I’d like another shot of Self Importance when you get around to it) doing it.

Random thoughts. I need to chill before I go to bed. My damn brain runs 24/7.

Perhaps the most pernicious element of Socialism is its attack on culture, per se. If a just society is defined as one in which everyone is the same, in which all distinctions of class, national identity, ethnic background, religion (which of course is to be destroyed root and branch), or any other differentiator are gone, then culturally nothing is left. Everything is left to the winds. All that is stable is the State, which is omnipotent, and everywhere.

If this image is appalling, then we must envision the alternative: the acceptance, in principle, of individual and cultural variety. More: that such variety is not just a species of injustice, but the very fruit and flower of what is most noble and best in human beings. Our identities are what we offer the wider world, what we use most efficiently to enrich others.

Given this, with respect to racial integration, what is needed is not the eradication of cultural differences, but their reconciliation in countless individual encounters, in improbable friendships, surprising commonalities between strangers, and an underlying theme that we are all alone together, and may as well make the best of it. This requires neither giving up our identities, nor asking others to do so.

So often, it seems to me that the valorization (acadamese for valuing) of the Other is not intended so much to exalt or respect the Other, so much as to denigrate US. Once WE are gone, then that same hammer will come crashing down on everyone else. There is no genuine tolerance in this, no reaching across cultures such that we both grow. It is a zero sum contest, in which many of those playing it want US to lose.

When I say US, I mean old fashioned Liberals, for whom the Constitution is the most brilliant political document ever written, and who value personal autonomy, a sense of moral structure (which they refuse on principle to impose on others), political freedom, economic freedom, and a modest but very real and very deeply felt patriotism.

Some random, disconnected thoughts on race.

I think in many ways a genuine meeting of the minds never occurred with respect to the issue of race. What happened was that through a process of intimidation and exclusion, a coterie of mavericks, thought police, and thugs made it impossible to HAVE a rational discussion, with the result that general adherence to the ideal of perfect tolerance and open mindedness is a thousand miles wide, and an inch deep.

Under the surface, I think black people retain all sorts of doubts about white people, and white people retain all sorts of doubts about black people. This is the main racial divide. If you look at crime statistics, they are not random with respect to race. On the contrary: with some 12% of the population, Americans of African descent make up some 40% of our prison population. That is a significant number. There are more than 3x the number one would expect based on their demographics. As an example, roughly 16% of the population, and the prison population is Hispanic. It’s a match. Caucasians commit crimes at rates lower than one would expect.

Nor are crime statistics consistent with respect to income or class status. Most American poverty is in the Appalachians and similar areas, where they have drug related problems, but nothing like they do in big cities, and where crime rates are really quite low.

We need to ask big, bold questions like: if African Americans have lower IQ’s than European and Asian Americans, on average (which is a fact, albeit one which can be spun many ways), then how do we better integrate them into an information economy? IQ’s are malleable, particularly across generations. How do we start that process? How would we pursue that process in a democratic, voluntary way? What would such programs look like?

Leaving that issue aside, let’s look at another angle: if my experience is that if I am going to victimized in a large city, it will be by a black male, aged 15-40 or so, then it is quite pointless asking me to drop stereotypes. What happens, instead, is people keep their mouths shut, and simply move to the suburbs. Problem solved. There, in their little hideaways, they are quite content to be told not to discuss racial issues. They have rendered them irrelevant.

But no African Americans have been helped thereby. On the contrary, the tax revenue that could have been used to make the city a nicer place–let’s take Detroit as an example–has vanished. Who has suffered in that process? Not the suburbanites.

What is needed in the cities is economic growth. That growth will only happen if people feel safe in their persons, their property, and from confiscatory taxation.

Step one, there, is to be able to say: I don’t feel safe in many areas of Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and those are mainly the areas that are mainly black. Who can say that in the current climate? Who is going to speak up for African Americans and–rather than deny the problem and accuse the person of racism–actually start to implement solutions to address the problem. Who are the victims of crime in black neighborhoods? Other black people. Does this hurt suburbanites? Not at all.

Can anyone blame people with the means to do so for moving away from such problems? Of course not. Yes, political firebrands love to paint them as evil, nasty, racist, and generally bad human beings. But they are simply reacting with common sense to a problem that has been created by an inability to have a rational conversation about realistic, actionable solutions. You can’t solve a problem you can’t recognize.

What I want for all Americans, and the whole world, is a life of peace, prosperity, and confidence in justice before the law. The question is not and never should be: “what sorts of statements are allowable?”, but rather, “what is the problem–who is suffering–and how do we most quickly make this problem disappear forever?”

Those who refuse to allow the debate to be framed this way are, by this act, demonstrating contempt for the lives of the very people they claim to be protecting.