Moderates United

I have heard of this book, but am only now actually reading it.  This man’s views are nearly identical to my own, at least with regard to his diagnosis of the cultural cancer of Leftism.  Much of what he has said thus far is virtually identical to conclusions I reached on my own.

The great thing about having your own blog is that from time to time you get to channel Calvin.  No, no, Calvin and Hobbes, and neither John nor Thomas.

Self evidently, I consider Socialism to be a literally and figuratively bankrupt system of thought and practice, as seen practically, theoretically, and morally.  It has nothing as an ideology to recommend it, and its only virtue is comprised entirely in the word “charity”, which no conservative rejects as desirable, and which it delivers more poorly than private and personally directed charity.

Having said that, what Bernie seems to be tapping into is a sense that America should be more prosperous, that our parents and grandparents worked less than we did, and enjoyed considerably more economic security.  In my view, this is unquestionably true.

On a superficial level, of course, we have much more stuff.  We have mePhones, larger houses, bigger cars, take more vacations, eat out more, etc.  On a slightly deeper level, we see that the average debt for most Americans has exploded since the inflation (caused by the Fed) of the late 70’s.  What was once fiscal prudence becomes stupidity when money is steadily losing its value.

But to ultimately solve this problem, that of individual economic productivity per capita skyrocketing, while actual purchasing power remains stagnant or even declines, one must reference the devaluation of our currency.  The overall money supply has increased roughly 5-fold since the Fed got rid of the last fetters limiting its freedom of action around 1980.

Can any sane human being question the connection?  If more proof were needed, look at the increase in the holdings of the world’s largest banks: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html

In the time I am allocating to this, this is the best link I can find, but it seems obvious that pari passu with the increase of M2 I think we will find an increase in the net holdings of the world’s banks.

I have tried to explain this many different ways, but I continue to fail.  It seems both horribly obvious, and extraordinarily significant, but I am surrounded by imbeciles.  Yes, that was a minor concession to self pity.

I will keep on keeping on.  It’s what I do.

It’s funny: I did my own astrological chart some time ago, and somewhere in there–obviously in different parts of the chart–I was compared both to Leonidas, and to Cassandra. I feel that.

As calm begins to penetrate deep within me, I see how insane it is to want to be a warrior.  To be a warrior is to be a worrier.  It is to be constantly vigilant.  It is to be constantly thinking about the tricks your enemies can play, and how to play tricks on them.  Courage in the face of superior intelligence is wasted.  The life of a true warrior is the life of the mind, of thought.  This applies from the level of strategy to the decision whether to thrust left or right, flank left or right, in individual combat. Intuition does play a role, but only after all other cards have been played.

In life we mostly do not get what we want.  To be a warrior is better than to live in helpless fear, or in the complacency of willed ignorance.

There is something beyond this distinction.  That is what I am presently looking for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/business/donald-trump-unions.html

I have said this before, and will say it again: Trump’s politics would have been unexceptional, and Democrat, in the 1960’s.  Who started the Vietnam War?  Democrats.  Why?  They wanted to protect America from Communism, and in the war for allies and credibility, some shooting appeared needed. And in point of fact, we won the war, then pissed it away after the phase transition happened in the Democrats from people who loved America and thought differently, to people who did not love America, did not love democracy, did not operate according to consistent standards of common decency, and who lied nearly as often as they talked.

That happened about 1972, which was about 44 years ago.  The Democrats kept some hold-outs through the 1980’s, and I think have a few even now in State and City governments, but by and large, they have ingested Soviet era memes about “fairness”, “imperialism”, and the rejection of patriotism (even though the Soviets were very patriotic).

How else to explain a party which supposedly looks out for the Little Guy, the Working Man, being so eager to welcome and support at taxpayer expense millions of new competitors for jobs which are already scarce, and whose wages have been stagnant for some time.  To the extent of my knowledge, not even the Keynesian lunatics reject the law of supply and demand, which obviously applies to labor too.

How else to explain the refusal to call Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism?  If you shout out an imprecation to your God before beginning the senseless and gratuitous slaughter of non-combatant civilians, what sound mind can but conclude that your religion played a role?  What person, reading the news, can but conclude that Islamic Fundamentalism–the proper term, since so-called “radical” Islam has merely taken the step of reading their holy book literally, and taking it at its 7th century word–has made major in-roads among Muslims the world over, making all of them–and particularly young men–prospective mass murderers?

Given the actual genocide being conducted against them, why is Obama allowing virtually no Christians or Yazidis from Syria and Iraq to enter this country?

And if rejecting refugees is wrong, what are we to make of the refusal of the Gulf nations to accept any of these “refugees”?  Is that racist?

We live in layer after layer of delusion.  Inanity.  Sophomoric imbecility.  Common sense isn’t.  Common decency isn’t.

I have met the spirit of this world: it is hunger.  Hunger.  The great Satan is that animal spirit which seeks to devour to satiate itself, to survive.

What each of us needs to realize is that we are prey.  We will always be hunted down and killed.  Always.  We can learn how to forget this, but we cannot avoid this.

The sense of being pursued is terrifying.  We are animals, and we feel just what animals do, when a lion, or tiger or bear is chasing them, trying to kill them, trying to rip them to pieces and eat them.

Me, I am in the process of making my peace with this energy.  I have felt terror most nights for the past 2-3 years. I  shake like a leaf, but there is nowhere but numbness to hide, and that is not a good spot.  I have to face this fear.  I have to accept the cup that it offers, and allow it to work within me while not becoming one with it.

It is possible to enter terror, to learn its ways, to feel its texture, and to allow it to dissolve.  And my feeling is that once this terror dissolves, very little will ever frighten me again, other than immediate and physical threats, which is what fear is actually for.  That is its purpose, not torturing your days and nights with a cloud that can only be penetrated with will-power, and only worked in with major effort, courage, and strength.

I have chosen a difficult path.  But it is an honorable one.  

I feel very acutely that all these words on this blog, on my website, and elsewhere, represent a sustained effort to begin something I have not yet begun.  But I think I am ready, now, to start.  At least, I can see the starting line.  That is progress.

I find it remarkable what working a long day, getting drunk, and then getting a really, really good night’s sleep does for me.  I put down a fair amount of alcohol last night, and today I get up and out of five games on Lumosity, get Top 5’s on 2, and blast through my record on a third.  My score was 50% higher than my previous best, and I’ve been playing it for many months now. [edit: they may have changed the scoring system; the point, I think, remains.]

It is an interesting thing, watching myself playing these games, how some internal emotional process interferes with me, makes me guess wrong, hides answers from my mind.  That process was simply muted today.  It is likely still in bed.

And I am increasingly persuaded that the first task for most people, the very first, the sine qua non, of goal achievement, is learning to accept the idea of success.  This is quite impossible for most people.  They are quite unable to conceive being unusually good at anything that did not come naturally in childhood.

I suspect not one person in 100 comes even remotely close to utilizing their full talents, what they might have been, could have been, if they had been able to love themselves enough to honestly seek out the fulfillment of their potential.

Most of us have been hypnotized to stop at a certain point, to succeed up to THERE, and then to stop.  To go farther is to invite jealousy, the attention of others, the responsibility that often goes with talent, the encounter with the unknown.  It is to let loose hidden fountains of creative energy that you cannot fully direct or predict.

I was watching an interesting interview with Gabor Mate where he was talking about “the myth of normal”.

It is a human tragedy that our society values conformity to an economic system over personal growth.  What do most of our “human development” “experts” talk about?  Making more money.  Becoming better at your job.  This is our mainstream culture.  Most people are focused on more money.  If they are not focused on their career, they are buying lottery tickets, and dreaming of what they would do if they won.

This is stupidity.  As is no doubt obvious, I am an ardent supporter of that combination of free markets and property law that gets called “Capitalism”, but as I have said many times, Capitalism, so called (again, I will note this was Marx’s term for a system he detested, which he did not describe accurately, and which does exist today in the form supposed by most) is merely an economic system within which moral narratives operate.  You can be Capitalist and live in an old bus, sweep floors for a meager living, and spend your ample free time meditating in nature.  We could all choose to do this.  We could all choose much lower standards of living in exchange for a richer culture, richer connections with others, and richer connections, more fulfilling connections, with ourselves and our true inner natures.

What we need to make this happen is to liberate time.  And that cannot happen until people recognize that wealth is being systematically siphoned away from the producers to the bankers.  This is not a flaw in “Capitalism”, and the solution is not an idiotic assault on “corporations”.  The problem is precise, and the solution is precise.

I have decided to start giving public talks.  You can choose the topic, but to my mind the most important one is the nature of our monetary system, its defects, and how to correct it.  Many billionaires benefit from this system.  Some of them are no doubt psychopaths.  But perhaps some of them have deluded themselves that they are working to create a more just world, without having any moral tools other than coerced conformity–which they call the justice of equality–to do so.

I wonder if I will be shot if I get to a certain point, but that could only happen if I am relevant, and achieving relevance would be a good life outcome.  This is not my first time here, not your first time here, and we all get as many chances as we need.

If you would like to host a talk, please email [email protected].  Depending on where you are, I may need some travel money, but I don’t plan to charge for the talks themselves.

My comment never appeared on that “Birth of a Nation” post.

I look around me.  It’s something I do.  I watch and talk with actual, physical human beings.  Given the nature of my work, it is not uncommon for me to share space on the service elevators–often after-hours–with janitors and security staff, many of whom are black, and many of whom are Hispanic.  If they are friendly, I talk with them.  I suspect in the course of an average week I rub elbows and talk to more working class people than the average Democrat politician does in any non-election year.

And I like to hang out at bars and talk to people.  It’s one of my hobbies.  I was in a bar frequented by Ford workers last night.  I was in a bar with scaffolding installers from what we call BFE (Bumfuk, Egypt) around here the night before.  I ask people questions about their work, their pay, and their lives.  Give them a couple beers and just about everyone, in this country at least, wants to tell you their life story.  I find all this very interesting.

And it seems to me that the alleged malady of  “racism” is a construct created by and for a power elite.  It is useful.  Any time you can say you will do something for someone that they can and should be doing for themselves, you win.  Step one, obviously, is convincing them that they CAN’T do for themselves, that they need you, and there is no other way.  Put alternatively, the Democrat power platform depends on the helplessness of minorities.  It depends on lies.

The average person is confused. This is a confusing world.  I’m really fucking smart, and I get confused myself.  How the hell is an average person supposed to sort everything out?  I ask them to, I expect them to, but in the end I can’t be surprised when they fail.  So many people benefit from bullshit, from confusion, from twisting partial truths to more or less complete lies.

What do college kids, and college professors who are themselves overgrown kids, get from this obsession with race?  Relevance.  And what I keep calling an Ersatz Morality.

When I say Ersatz, I mean fake, substitute, unreal.  It is not a moral code which admits right actions and wrong actions.  All it admits is people who agree with the day’s propaganda, with the daily kos (cause), and people who don’t.  Such a morality cannot animate an inner directed person.  It cannot animate an individual conscience.  It must be continually renewed, replenished, altered, and avoided for a time when it leads to open contradiction. Once that gap has been closed, it becomes safe again.  The True Believers accept the necessity for this process.

Oh, I need to go to bed.  I am tweaking my own outrage patterns, my own outlets, my own places I go to hide.

I am not innocent in all this by any means.

What I dream about, put simply, is a world where the truth is valued above group membership, above convenience, as a goal and aim in itself, as something with intrinsic merit.  We do not presently live in that world.  Indeed, much of the “college experience” has as its aim the stigmatizing of the very notion of truth, and the following process of rational, fact seeking exploration.  They want truth to be like a pack of cigarettes: they give you the smoke, and they give you the light.  What else could you want?

My marathon continues.  127 hours of listening, and I can usually only handle about an hour at a time, with focus.  I’m a bit more than half way through, I think.

I do feel, though, in listening to the constant fluctuations in fortune, that this is a history that would be useful in teaching kids in our present society about life.  Sometimes tyrants win.  Sometimes they lose.  Quite often one tyrant is replaced by another.  War hurts and impoverishes everyone.  Sometimes taxes are punitive, sometimes they are low.  Sometimes you can do and say as you please, but most of the time saying the wrong thing will get you killed or imprisoned.  This is most of humanity, for most of history.

Christianity is replete with violence. I was reading about some poor woman, a virgin who taught math, who somehow fell afoul of, if memory serves, the man who became St. Cyril.  They grabbed her in the street, stripped her naked, hacked her to death in a Christian church, scraped the skin off her bones, and threw her bones in a fire, in what amounted to a human sacrifice.

I read about a revolt of the Samaritans, in which 20,000 were killed, and 20,000 sold into slavery.

I read about a Persian king who invaded Jerusalem and Palestine and either killed or allowed to be killed 90,000 Christians.

It is a monstrous and absurd fact of modern American history that our children are led into believing that the fate of the slaves in the South was something other than what was done to other human beings in virtually every country on Earth 150 years ago, and for recorded history all the way back before that. They are led to believe that our wars are somehow different than the wars going back through time.  To the extent they are, it is because they are notable for lack of atrocities, absence of rapine, and for no notable effort at gorging our coffers with the fortunes of others.

Soviet era propaganda, and that is what we are dealing with, only works with historically ignorant, and damnably stupid and complacent people.  But that is most Americans.

I would add this book to those I believe should be read by ALL Americans.  Kids could read 10 pages a week throughout high school, until done.  I don’t think even the most feeble minds could escape learning some obvious lessons, and it would force them to encounter and learn to process actually skillful and rich prose.