Moderates United

Worry is productive up to a point.  It is the emotional energy that leads to planning, if planning is going to happen.

But particularly right now it is easy to look at a beautiful sky and to feel good and say to yourself (if you are me, or someone like me) “oh, but it can all be taken away.”  This is true.

There is another truth, though, the moment you say that, IT’S ALREADY HAPPENED, AND YOU WERE THE THIEF.

It is a truism, but if you want to live efficiently, live as if each day were your last. The next one is another world, another century, another you.  It doesn’t matter.

And here is the miracle: quite generally, the things we fear do not come to pass.  Some do.  Communism happened, and continues to happen in China and Cuba and North Korea, and elsewhere.

But even there, there must be hidden miracles in every day for those who learn how to look for them.

Don’t shrink in fear.  It’s easier said than done, like most things, but it’s a good goal.

The best way to learn to face death without fear is to learn to face life without fear. Death is just the last thing on this trip, before the next thing, on the next trip.

I think my arguing thing is about expended.  It was always an outgrowth of anxiety, and I’m beginning to deal very effectively with that trauma based anxiety.

I don’t know if I will post less on here, but it seems unlikely I will post more, and I may well stop for a while.  Dunno.  Feeling it out as I go.  I never do well making promises in any event.  If nobody but me is hurt if I don’t keep them, then fuck me.  It’s not a great philosophy, I will admit, but shit we don’t all wake up in life having figured it all out, either.  Some of us muddle, stumble, ramble and roam, and finally get to the end of the road and don’t have a fuck where we are.

I guess being lost is a skill, in that you can get used to it, and in any event being lost is more or less a prerequisite for going places you have never been and don’t have a map for.

There are, to be sure, lots of maps out there, but most of them are bullshit.  If you have not figured that out yet, pay closer attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07WfDVN1asc&t=4s

Here is the thing: if you require LARGE experiences to feel alive, you are stupid.  Coarse.  Undeveloped.  The goal is this sort of thing every day.  Just feeling good, feeling alive, feeling connected to life, and not even necessarily in any lasting way to anyone.  Just life.  Your life: they only one you have right now, as far as any of us can tell (I’ve had some odd experiences, but not getting into that right now, possibly ever).

All the hippies were chasing big thrills, big highs, big Samadhi’s.  As George Harrison put it, presumably referring to a personal LSD or other drug experience, “feeling every atom in your body alive”.

I have no complaint with this.  But how do you reintegrate that into ordinary life?  Is it not smarter, wiser, and more practical in every way to gradually move your life, your ordinary life, in that direction?  You get a lot more special moments.

This whole focus on “enlightenment” is really silly, I think. There are countless enlightenments, and none of us are smart enough to really be able gauge the caliber and depth of any claimed enlightenment on the part of anyone else.

Particularly superficial, in this regard, in my own view, are the many  Zen stories where someone was sitting next to a stream or something and “achieved Enlightenment”.  No, they just upgraded a qualitative level.  That’s good, but that’s not the end of any story I personally want to hear.

Tantra just says that God is everywhere.  You can’t look anywhere and not see God.  You can’t feel anything and not feel it in God. Or creation.  Or reality.  The terminology doesn’t really matter.  You go out to God through where you are. 

The alternative is for God and “enlightenment” to be Out There, somewhere.  Over some mountain.  At the end of some endless path.

Why not reach out and arrive home, right where you sit?  That’s my vote.

Most, not all, of this whole thing is a hoax. It kills some, but many millions of Americans have already had this thing and not even known it. As long as there are enough hospital beds, then the risk will never get any LOWER. The risk is not zero, and may even be high, but it will never get LOWER. There will be no vaccine in the next twelve months, and if we stay locked down it will be Mad Max. Count on it.

Thinking about all this, at the same time the earnings of many Americans have plummeted to zero, or something close to it, the earnings of all our GOVERNMENTS have also plummeted to something like half of what was coming in.  Some people are still paying payroll taxes, but not more than two thirds of the country, and probably a bit less than that.

At the same time, our governments are spending money like crazy to prevent hunger and riots from the situation they have created in response to this non-disaster.  THEY are the disaster, and it will get worse.

We are at the moment more or less inflating our way out of this.  Trump has mobilized the Fed to–perhaps for one of the first times in human history–use manufactured money to help ordinary people. Usually it is used only for power elites to help them keep power.  The power elite gets the benefit–first shot at spending the money–and the plebes get the result, the loss of value of everything they own, and everything they earn.

As Keynes noted just slightly over a 100 years ago, not one person in a thousand (or was it a million?  It may be even less than that) understands what is happening to them.

But to keep the boat afloat massive government expenditures are needed, at precisely the same time government REVENUES are tanking.  And we can expect a substantial recession in the wake of this clusterfuck, which will last proportionately longer the longer we drag this out.  Every week makes it exponentially worse, I suspect.  One failure leads to another failure.  House of cards.  Dominoes.

So maybe this is the time for my proposal or something like it (I will note I longer believe all the ideas in that piece are good ideas, but the gist of it I continue to believe in strongly.  Everything I wrote would benefit from the touch of an HONEST economist, if one can be found).  Follow the logic of the situation: we are already engaged in mass money creation, which over some period of time will lead to mass price inflation, which will dilute the already meager earnings of most of us.

Why not go all the way?  Use the Fed to pay off all debts, public and private, including US Treasury debt, including all State debt, and balance all the books everywhere.  No debt anywhere.  All cars, houses, boats and corporate debts gone.

Then dissolve the Fed and reset the currency.  Revalue the dollar and NEVER CHANGE IT AGAIN.  Not the gold standard.  Gold can be created.  And historically governments always cheat.  They lie about reserves.  Banks, if they can, lie about reserves.  And we have the physical problem of getting and housing the gold.

Now, precisely how we do this is a technical problem I’m not qualified to solve.  But that it can be solved, I have no doubt.

I won’t say this is the only way out of this.  We can muddle our way through miserably and slowly, watching business failures and eventually bank failures.  Life could be a complete shitshow for most Americans for a long time.

But this proposal has a moral element too: the banking system has been stealing from all of us for a very long time.  Total money in existence has QUADRUPLED since 1980, when the Fed got the last constraints off its back (in my view, after engineering the inflation of the 1970’s to create the rationale for that law).  That means ordinary Americans should be roughly four times wealthier than they are.  The excess went to yachts and mansions, and country clubs, and the best whiskey, wine and women money can buy.  Or children.  This does seem to be part of it, nauseatingly.

My proposal would simply RETURN the wealth to ordinary Americans.

Certainly, this qualifies as a dangerous and potentially calamitous situation.  This idea warrants serious consideration.

I don’t do
Revelation much but

I do it all the time.

Most of us are
like that.

We need to add this to our lexicon of phrases.

New York went from 6,300 COVID-19 deaths to 10,000 by adding 3,700 “presumed”, but untested, cases.  No doubt someone thought 10,000 was a more impressive number for the tabloids.  And they are all tabloids, now, aren’t they?

Nationally, we went from 30,000–which presumably included the higher New York number–to 40,000, through the same magic of assumptions.

Neil Ferguson, in his latest–as of what, three weeks ago now?–said that 10,000 of the 20,000 Brits he expected to die were going to die of something anyway in the next year.  Should those numbers really be added?  No, I would argue they should not.  We should not be counting straws, but hay bales.

And the biggest hay bale, right now, is the one being loaded by our sundry governments onto the backs of the already poor, the already miserable, the already marginal.

If this thing does produce a spike in divorces–as I think many expect–that will create yet more economic trouble, and yet more troubled and unhappy children who in turn will create a yet more troubled and unhappy society.  Water flows downhill, and troubles tend to multiply.

Whatever else it is, a marriage is a useful economic arrangement, a division of both physical and emotional labor.  The latter falls disproportionately in most cases on women, but it does not diminish if and when they find themselves single mothers.  On the contrary, everything is compounded.

I judge people continually.  That should be obvious.  But I also don’t judge them.  As a general rule, I understand why people do what they do, and consider it an immutable rule that nobody does anything, ever, which is not emotionally logical to them at that time, which does not seem to make sense.

Life is complicated, and freedom can often seem a curse.  But freedom is the space within which problems can be corrected, over some time domain, after much trying and much failing. It all has value.

To live in a box is to be condemned never to get much larger.  Much of humanity, for much of history, has lived in boxes.  We need to protect the prairies and mountains of human potential.

This phrase popped in my head.  I think it well describes the attitude of the Left towards whatever demographic they happen to be kissing up to at that moment to keep the path open to the riches and power they crave and live for.

I really think a lot of State and local governments, and the police forces through which they exert direct control of the masses, are losing a lot of goodwill right now.  It is a quantity they have assumed and counted on for some time, but if this thing goes on much longer, guns will be met with guns.

This is not my recommendation or hope.  We are in my view far from needing to shoot anyone over anything.

I am just saying that never before in American history have people been prevented from working, prevented from earning a living, and at that over such a trivial nuisance.  When the Spanish Flu hit, everyone KNEW it.  It got into nearly every life in America.  And even then nothing like this was attempted.  Bars were closed after 6pm, but left open during the day.  Businesses had restrictions, but not closure orders.  People have to eat, and they have to get paid to do that, and they have to work to do that.  This is not rocket science. 

This thing, by my count, has increased the April mortality rate in my State by 4%.  It was invisible in March, and will likely be invisible again by May.  For that, we are ruining tens of millions of lives.  Anger is inevitable, and need to be factored into all calculations.

And I will comment again, that the use of force eventually always produces an equal, opposite, and possibly superior reaction.  The use of force by extremist citizens will provoke violence by the government.  And vice versa.  Do we really want to live in a world where all the cops need to be looking over their shoulders all the time, even at people they once trusted, and who once trusted them?  Where people who once supported them now want to murder them?

That’s where we are heading, if things do not diverge rapidly from this disastrous course.

I am by nature mostly pro-cop, while recognizing that a percentage of them are no damn good, and that this is well known by all the people they work with.  But cops in general have not acquitted themselves all that well in this thing, most notably in California.  I read some Michigan cops are refusing to enforce some bans.  That’s good.  I would like to see more of that.

As I noted, I personally watched a young cop tell a young couple they couldn’t play tennis.  Stupidity flows downhill.  What makes societies work is local intelligence, local restraint, and the exercise at the ground level of common sense.

Anybody who is “just following orders” is doing no more or less than the Germans did under the Nazis, with much less justification.