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It seems to me the only real security in this world is found in a code you can “cling” to–a word taken from one of our Presidents more memorable and unintentionally candid phrases.

You can’t depend on people. They will let you down, and they will die.

You can’t depend on material things, as they are in constant movement. Fortunes are both made and lost, although large ones seem relatively durable, which is presumably why the rich spend a lot of time protecting their wealth, which is understandable. It is also unfortunate, as it enables an alternative to a life of real risk, and the corresponding need to develop a moral code.

I would say you can’t even depend on God, at least in the short term. Are prayers always answered? If I pray to live forever on this Earth, will it happen? If I pray that nothing bad ever happen to me until I die of old age in my bed, can I be sure that will happen? Has every soldier in war who prayed for safety made it through alive and in one piece? Of course not.

As I see it, this world does have structure. There is a sort of “God’s Law”, or Divine Providence, or “Will of Allah”. This structure is founded on the basic process of perception, in how we relate to others.

As I see it, our task is to build others, and in so doing build ourselves, such that we can live happily. One could call this love, although I tend to eschew the term as over-loaded with baggage. Yet, can we make of love a commandment? I don’t think so. There are times when you are so hard pressed that love is the last thing on your mind.

Love is a type of aggression in the battle of life. It is an expansion. It is for times of plenty, where plenty is defined according to how qualitatively rich you are. For some, they can live in utter poverty, and still have plenty of love to share around. For others, they can live in the lap of luxury and think only of themselves.

The root of qualitative expansion is a sense of safety. Safety, in turn, depends on a secure defense.

Psychologically, I believe the most robust fortress possible can be built from the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and constant perceptual motion, all of which values are well familiar to anyone who reads what I write.

On my arm, I have a tattoo which says, in initials, “Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses, and never quit”. Those are contained in what I call the Qualitative Cross, where the vertical axis represents Quality (roughly what I called Li a few posts ago) and the horizontal represents Quantity, or Chi.

This tattoo is a sort of protective amulet. When I want to quit, I remember that quitting in a noble cause is simply not allowed. It is against the rules. It doesn’t matter how hard the slog is: that is the rule. This is of great defensive advantage.

Likewise, when I find myself involuntarily counting the reasons I should feel sorry for myself, I limit the scope of my possible dialogue by removing whining, complaining, and excuse making (that set of three, by the way, was given to John Wooden and his brothers by their father, who must indeed have been the remarkable man Wooden said he was). Then I just sort of look through my emotional “body” for traces of resentment and rejection of what is, and cautiously isolate them as contaminants.

Perception is how you overcome roadblocks. It is how you overcome crappy thinking. Creation, you see, is a type of perception, too. It is seeing what could be there, but isn’t, yet. This keeps you moving, and gives you the direction in which to move.

Most evil in this world comes from lacking a core. It was Ibsen, I think, who pointed out that when you peel an onion, there is nothing in the middle. Unlike, say, peaches, there is nothing in there. There is no seed to further growth.

Likewise, evil is lacking a defense. It is lacking a core principle, which is valued more than life itself, and which thereby makes life bearable and even pleasurable.

Sadism, then, on this reading–and I am in part thinking out loud–is simply operating from a realistic assessment of defenselessness, and deciding that the best defense is a good offense. Rather than using love, though, the evil person will use power. Rather than feeding on love, they feed on fear.

I think that’s close to the truth. Stuff to do.

Peace be upon you. And also upon you. This is said in every Catholic Mass. It is said as an every day greeting by Arabs and–through the contraction Shalom–also by Jews.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that there are countless ways of actually saying this. The intent is to convey love, acceptance, warmth and a more general sense that we share the wars of this world together, and thus share a deep desire for the tranquility of social harmony and rest from unnecessary battles.

Yet, this greeting can mean “I want to kill you, and take your place”. It can mean “I am profoundly jealous of you”. It can mean “I am your superior, you do what I say”.

Jesus taught, if memory serves, that his followers were to be “as innocent as doves, and as clever as serpents”. To my mind, that would mean the capacity to convey a greeting like that with perfect sincerity, but also to hear, really HEAR, what is said in return.

I have always liked the Hindu “Namaste”, which means I salute YOU, where the YOU is the spark of the divine that lives in all of us.

As far as Americans, what can we infer from our system of greeting? Hello: you are in the room, and I acknowledge your presence. Of course, it CAN also mean, as Louis Armstrong sang, “I love you”.

For myself, when I ask people how it’s going, I always try to give them a chance for an honest answer.

If we are all ships drifting in their own directions in the dark, then attention is the light that allows us to see one another, and be less alone.

During the Vietnam War the argument made beginning in 1968 was that we would lose because we would quit—we didn’t have their “staying power”—and yet we lost because and only because we quit. The task was to convert the war from an unconventional war, which we were supposedly bad at, to a conventional war, which we excelled at, since that type of war rewarded precisely what we were good at: logistics, organization, and material superiority.

Gen. Creighton Abrams did that. The war that was lost was a conventional war. This is incontrovertible historical fact.

Our relationships with the past are interesting. As time passes, do we not with some bittersweet regret remember “then”, and “her”, or “him”? Is it pleasant to contemplate past happinesses? Perhaps those with better imagination than me can readily call to mind halycon days, and friendships rewarded.

I do sometimes feel a deep sense of happiness and awareness and connection, but then it vanishes. It is so penetrating that I feel all the more superficial when it passes.

But always I seem to be here, where I am, in an eternal moment, and when I capture that cognitively, I remind myself that happiness is only rarely experienced consciously. When you are having your best days–your truly best days–you are often unaware.

No doubt many of us remember idle days by the lake or ocean, or on a boat with friends, or out on the town, laughing like fools. This is one type of happiness.

Yet, a deeper form of happiness is the work of creation, and that quite often feels momentarily like pain. When done, though, when one can stand back and look at the finished product, there is a satisfaction that is far larger and comprehensive than any momentary thrill at a bar or sporting event.

Happiness, in my mind, is building, building, building: more complex internal forms, created through choice, effort, introspection, and action. It is not linear. You cannot be happy if you are simply rich, and get the chance to indulge your taste for wine, women and song every night. There is room for that, but that is not the best.

So I wonder when I look back on my life, when I am much older than I am, what I will REALLY regret. It will likely be my many self indulgences, and not the work I have done for myself and others.

I don’t think many people outside the financial business in some form have heard this term, but it is in effect the way in which the Federal Reserve signals their intentions with regard to monetary policy. Concretely, it is the rate set by the market for banks with excess capital to loan to banks that have come up short at midnight, so they can balance their books.

Presumably, an hour or two after the bank closes, they know how much money was taken out, how much is needed to meet either reserve requirements, or simply to stay in the black–much of this is I think somewhat intentionally shrouded in mystery–and thus how far they fall short. Presumably, there is some sort of “exchange” provided by the Fed, whereby the big banks signal they have money to lend, and other banks signal they need money. The whole thing presumably happens electronically and instantly. I believe the Fed does charge some sort of nominal fee for this (and for debit and credit card processing, if I’m not mistaken; at least that is on the drawing board as a proposed expansion in their power, in my understanding). To expand on that last point, the Fed, by design, does not depend on ANY tax revenue. They are fully self funded through fees such as this. The point and purpose of the Fed has never been to make money for the institution itself, but for its member banks. Since there is functionally very little difference, the charade works.

Be that as it may, the Prime Rate is tied to the Federal Funds Rate. The Prime Rate, in turn, to the extent I can determine–and my research has been far from exhaustive, but I did hit the “usual suspects” in Google, including Wikipedia–is set 300 basis points (3%) above the targeted Federal Funds Rate, which matters for variable interest rate loans.

To get to the point, as I got to pondering just what was happening, it occurred to me that they can only “target” a rate by influencing the capitalization of the large banks in the system. As an example, there are perhaps ten large banks in New York that together own stock in their local Fed. Those banks provide substantially all the members of the Board of Governors, and for all intents and purposes those banks ARE the Fed. There is no provision against collusion and favoritism since 1) the Fed is almost entirely unregulated, and beyond ANY direct control of Congress or the People; and 2) since collusion and favoritism were THE POINT of setting the thing up to begin with.

Given this, what has to be happening is that as demands for money exceed the money in the proverbial vaults of the big banks on Wall Street, the Fed simply performs open market operations to provide the needed capitalization. Phrased another way, let us say JPMorgan Chase, certainly one of the members, is running short on cash for loans. They make a call to their buddy across the street, and ask for some money. The big ones, in the middle, presumably have a more or less revolving line of credit. The actual decisions seem to be made in Washington, by what I think is called the Open Market Committee, but many of these decisions are no doubt pro forma, where only a few billion are concerned.

Anyway, the money is created. As I described in my piece on Money Creation, the Fed writes a check, say for some bonds issued by JPMorgan Chase, and the money is now in their accounts.

This is the only way they can assure that sufficient liquidity is maintained so as to hit their targeted rate. That has to be how it works, and if someone wants to object, shoot me an email. They only have three tools for monetary policy–besides the court of public opinion and thus professional investor opinion: the Discount Window, Reserve Requirements, and Open Market Operations.

By design, the Discount Window is always above the targeted Federal Funds Rate, so it is irrelevent. For all intents and purposes, it is an irrelevant tool, even though in the past it was much more important. The Fed stated on their website somewhere that that decision was made since some members were complaining that doing to the Discount Window implied undercapitalization and thus financial weakness. Yet, the same objection applies to the Federal Funds Rate, which solves the same problem.

Likewise the Reserve Requirement has historically been unimportant, since they never change it. It has been 10% forever, it seems. Practically, I’m not sure most banks even keep that much, though. I suspect they simply loan out everything they have (or can), then “fix” any shortfalls nightly with loans from other banks. The interest rate right now is right around 0%, which is an attractive number.

Interestingly, though, the Federal Reserve–in joint extragovernmental negotiations with other central banks–has recently announced a long term decision to require all banks to have higher reserve requirements. This will have a deflationary effect.

Particularly since our current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, argued convincingly in 2004 that one of the causes of the Great Depression was inflationary policy followed by deflationary policy, this is interesting. Obviously, details matter, but one wonders if the same rough template is not there.

Be that as it may, that leads us to Open Market Operations as the only conceivably relevant tool. What does this mean? That if the loan business is slow, then the Fed isn’t doing much. But if banks are actually making loans, then what the Fed’s job is is to “top off” the funds of the already superrich, superpowerful transnational banks as needed. This is unfair, since it benefits those within the system (a non-free market system, since it has a charter from Congress not that unlike the charters handed corporations like the British East India Company), and by extension, by not handing out the same benefits to all, works to the long term detriment of everyone else.

I have been opposed to the “audit the Fed” idea in the past–in my view, we simply need to do away with it–but as I ponder the sheer extent of what we don’t know about what they do–what sort of buddy-buddy deals they cut with the movers and shakers who are plugged in to their world–I think that might be a good start.

How much money do they move out of the country? Who do they give it to? Are we capitalizing JPMorgan Chase to make loans to other countries? Why couldn’t the Fed buy $10 billion in bonds from them, after which JPMorgan Chase goes to developing nations throughout the world, and loans that money out? To be clear, these are not tax dollars. We are not on the hook for them, but assuming JPMorgan Chase turns a profit on them, they are that much more powerful domestically, in all the ways that unimaginable wealth can generate.

Once you grasp that there is NO LIMIT to what the Fed can do, very little reporting on what has been done, and NO REGULATION on any of it, you begin to realize what a profoundly anti-democratic, anti-Liberal institution it is.

I get his columns from time to time. Since he is an important element in the leftist propaganda machine, I think it worth taking a moment or two from time to time to deconstruct the patent idiocies, and subtle deceptions which characterize his work, and which characterized his ideological forebears: John Galbraith, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Robespierre, and the Marquis de Sade. The task is to leave the world in flames, but since most people find that idea objectionable, for whatever reason, they have to be sneaky.

The task which Keynes set for himself was the transfer of all wealth, power, and means of production to the State. The means of doing this was, proximately, investment in public works projects which caused long term economic harm, in ways I have discussed over the last week or so.

In this weeks column, he is arguing against German cuts in spending. As he says (to them, in an imagined debate which will never happen):

budget cuts will hurt your economy and reduce revenues.

Let’s ponder that for a moment. He slips things like that in. Skillful illusionists draw attention to one place, while the movement happens elsewhere. The spirit behind it is very much Nancy Pelosi’s “unemployment benefits create jobs”. No they don’t.

What he is saying is if the German government spends less money, they will collect less in taxes. Let me repeat that: if they spend less money, they will collect less in taxes. This means that he is positing that for every dollar spent, some amount at least equal to that amount comes back, and presumably more. Moreover, that this process is sustainable. That we should be doing this year over year.

Logically, if deficit spending pays for itself–it one dollar spent yields one dollar in the coffer–then deficits would not be deficits: they would be funded. This would imply private sector job growth, though, which is not attained through government spending, as I will discuss in a moment.

It is reasonable to suppose, though, that as you spend more, you get more back.

Let us say this supposed “ricochet” effect is real, which to some extent is indubitably the case. $100 billion collected and spent gets $80 back. $200 billion collected and spent gets $150 billion back. In the second case, tax receipts have in fact increased. His “theory” has been proven true. Yet in the first case the net debt increased $20 billion, and in the second it increased $50 billion, AND THIS PROCESS WILL CONTINUE INDEFINITELY AS LONG AS MORE IS SPENT THAN COLLECTED. Moreover, the amount of taxes that need to be collected to maintain a steady state condition will go up steadily as interest payments on the national debt.

The simple, ineluctable fact of the matter is that only people in the private sector create jobs which pay taxes in a sustainable way. You can borrow and spend money, and create illusory wealth, but all that is happening is you are getting back some percentage of what you spent, that is LESS than the total.

Take unemployment benefits. You have Hans Schmidt sitting on his duff, collecting a check every month. He uses that money to buy groceries, pay his rent, make his car payment, and to buy beer. These benefit the grocery, landlord, car and beer businesses, AS LONG AS THE MONEY KEEPS COMING. Cut off the money, you put pressure on all those same businesses, to the extent that they depended on Hans getting his check for the government.

But if they depended on that check, then they were never really independent, sustainable enterprises in the first place. Just like Hans, they are really dependents on the government, aren’t they? The government is a big old Sugar Daddy, that will feed you as long as you play ball.

This is not health. This is illness. It is unsustainable. And Keynes/Krugman don’t want it to be sustainable. They want it to collapse, eventually, from the weight of the contradiction.

The Germans recognize this. The Tea Party movement in this country recognizes this. Adam Smith was on the mark when he said, roughly: “what counts as common sense in personal life can scarcely be unwise when deployed more widely.”

You can’t spend borrowed money forever. How hard is that to understand? You can’t live beyond your means forever. You can live well, for a time, but bills come due.

It’s not commonly known, but interest payments on our national debt will surpass our expenditures on national defense within ten years.

Krugman keeps invoking the era in which Socialists finally got their way here–the late 30’s. Obama was supposed to be FDR. It hasn’t worked out, but a playbook predicated on deception can only have so many plays. Go too far, and people get wise. That is what has happened here, and apparently there.

This is what we need to do, in my opinion. This is the counter to the schemes of fools, liars and villains.

What we need in Congress, in the White House, and in the Supreme Court are leaders. True leaders have three qualities: vision, moral courage, and the ability to get things done in groups. The first two qualities help with the third.

Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of our current political system–and by and large this has only rarely not been a problem through our history, so this is nothing new–is that we do not ask of our elected representatives what their long term vision is. What do they want for their grandchildren? How do they expect to get there?

What we see is short sighted political grandstanding. Shots lobbed at others through the press, then responded to in the same way. Nobody anywhere is sitting down, it seems, developing a vision consistent with political freedom and economic viability, and then executing it with moral courage.

By and large, our “leaders” are a bunch of clucking chickens going wherever their seed gets thrown. They’ll do “whatever it takes”, to get reelected.

All of us, as individuals, need to ask ourselves what we want for our grandchildren, and we need particularly to ask the same of anyone who wants to speak on our behalf, and control in part the enormous sums taken from us in taxes, and borrowed from our grandchildren on our behalf.

It seems to me one of the most salient cultural facts of Europe, today, is that fewer and fewer people are choosing to reproduce. As Mark Steyn has noted, this will over time lead inevitably to a shift in the direction of nearly univesal Islamic hegemony on their continent. More subtly, though, it allows Keynes “in the long run we are all dead” philosophy to intrude, such that people don’t CARE as much about the future, and instead focus on the here and now, and what pleasure they can get from this life, now.

I listen to a bit of everything, but most days you will find me listening to country during the day, and classical when I get home–really, I should say when I finish my work, which continues here–and pour myself one of those wonderful, cold beverages that I find make life so much more enjoyable.

Many people don’t get country. Many of the songs are sad to the point of being painful. As an example, I have George Jones “He stopped loving her today” as my ring tone. If you haven’t heard that song, I suggest you take just over 4 minutes and listen to it.

This song is intended to make you cry. It is intended to cause a welling up of sympathy and awe and grandeur at the mysteries of life, love, mourning, happiness and redemption.

Can you not picture this sad man, who knows he needs to let go, and just can’t figure out how to do it? It’s a mistake. It’s a pathology. Yet there it is. Are we not all like that, in our own individual ways?

This is the point of the best country music (and it doesn’t get better than George Jones): to teach you to release these feelings, to integrate them, and so perhaps if you are going to fail, to fail knowingly.

And it is cathartic, too. Did you not notice how the host was smiling as he pointed out there wasn’t a dry eye in the house? Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit bad in the morning I’ll listen Hank Williams “Alone and forsaken”, or “I’ll never get out of this world alive”. Both make me feel better. The latter always puts a smile on my face. Note the music is somewhat upbeat. He’s just sort of throwing up his hands and smiling rather than crying.

The point of tragedy is to strengthen your moral and emotional senses. The point of feeling pain in a ritualistic, theatrical setting is to prime your emotional pump. How can you love deeply if you are afraid of emotional pain? How can you walk through the world, open both to its pain and wonder, if you are constantly shrinking from it?

Our emotional, spiritual “bodies” (for want of a better word) need exercise too, and the best Country does that. If you want some practice, listen to this song. It will get you. And that’s a good thing.

It is perhaps a truism in some circles, but it has been said that the net effect of the Sexual Revolution has not been to elevate women, but to denigrate them, to bring them to the level of the man.

It seems intuitively obvious to me that women are capable of much greater enjoyment of sex thaan men. They have more refined senses than men do. If the moment of “ringing the bell” is a few moments for men, the after-tone for women seems to go much longer.

The ultimate aphrodisiac for women is trust rewarded. I wrote this in my notes a few months ago, and I believe it is true. I think for most women who are honest with themselves, the most satisfying moment is when they are lying in their lover’s arms, feeling warm and protected, vulnerable and safe.

For men, I think the greatest aphrodisiac is simply physical beauty, of the sort that for whatever reason appeals to them as individuals. The greatest guarantor of long term happiness, though, is acceptance. In their own way, men are vulnerable too, to the covert attack on their sense of self embedded in rejections of various sorts.

It seems to me that pornography is a means for systematically deducting trust from sexual relationships. It is a vehicle for converting love into lust, and complex human feelings into manias and compulsions. It appeals directly to what is worst in men, which is the objectification of women–treating them as other than individual beings, with needs, hopes, and the potential to love–and the avoidance of the fear that attends risking rejection through emotional openness and attachment.

Self evidently, we are all born with a sexual instinct that needs to be expressed for us to be happy. It does not seem to me that it has to be expressed impersonally, and with many partners. This is the point of marriage. Not all marriages work out, for a variety of reasons, but this basic vehicle balances both the need for sexual expression and the need for safety.

Is it the only vehicle? No. If everyone were honest, if everyone were emotionally mature enough to see other people as they are (and as importantly as they want to be), then over time marriage would be less important. Yet, the importance of committment between individuals would not diminish. You can’t trust people who are “here” one day emotionally, and gone the next. And the more times trust is violated, the harder it becomes to achieve satisfaction even in a sexual relationship.

We see the argument that to “repress” sex is unnatural, that optimal health depends on expressing it as often and in as many ways as possible. This argument neglects the emotional consequences of such behavior. For women, I think they lose a part of their identity, that of the loving woman, caring for her loving man. It is perhaps a cliche, but I think it is hard-wired into them. For men, they lose the sense of being reliable, sturdy, “there”, especially for a family, which in the end is the point of sex.

For that reason, I developed the notion of “qualitative repression”, which is the suppression of our higher, more refined instincts in favor of our more primal, more animalistic ones.

I would submit that having and raising children is one of the most satisfying experiences which is possible on this world. I don’t think any career or personal success can equal it, although of course those things are desirable. The pursuit of sex, qua sex, diminishes the capacity to do this well, and for many eliminates entirely the desire to have–and take responsibility for–children. Constant sexual “movement”–either a roving eye, or roving genitalia–leads to divorce, and unhappiness for those who stay married. The other side of the fence is always greener. Yet when they get there–having suffered in the meantime–I think many find it is just as brown, and possibly worse.

Trying to find fulfillment through sex leads, in my view, to the collection of invisible scars. It leads to “experimentation”, which amounts in the end to the substitution of quantitative variety for qualitative variety. Why not group sex? Why not bisexuality? Why not sadomasochism?

Qualitative variety would be different senses of love, engaging with all your senses open, trying to see another human being as they are and want to be.

I believe innocence, potentially, is as natural as sexual expression. The two combined are heaven on Earth, and heaven seems to be receding. Bringing it back (or, perhaps, bringing it here for the first time in human history) requires understanding that what we are doing, on balance, is not working, if by “working” we understand qualitative fulfillment and genuine contentment.

As I see it, the Tea Party represents the resurgence of classical Liberalism, which is based on self restraint, personal responsibility, and civility towards fellow citizens.

At the same time, I think we need to be careful to not just look backwards, as for example to the world of our Founding Fathers, steeped as it was in institutions such as slavery, and the exclusion of non-property owners from participation in the democratic process.

The United States was founded as a place where MORAL progress was possible. We ended slavery. Everyone got the vote. We have acted on many occasions to combat tyranny and oppression.

And we can do better. We need to remember this, and consecrate ourselves to the motto “the best is yet to be”.

My answer to the “how” is Goodness, as I define it, but the beauty of our system is that all of us can come up with our own answers, and compare them. That is the task now, to generate new ideas, new forms, new directions, based on very old principles.