Moderates United

It occurs to me that the present reality that true Liberals will be called racist no matter what they say is actually an opportunity as well. Logically, if you are going to be accused of a thought crime no matter how harmless–or obvious–the comments you make are, why not take full  advantage of this and start going for broke?

I think it is time we start calling ALL the alleged victories of the Left what they are: failures.

The civil rights legislation passed in the 1950’s under a Republican Congress, and again in the 1960’s under a Democrat President, and against the howlings of a great many Democrats, failed.  The efforts of leftist agitators to bring about the full equality of blacks in this country have clearly and beyond any shadow of a doubt failed.

Just look at the ghettos.  If you want to use another word, I would be curious what it is.

As I think about it, the efforts of people to use the power of the State to coerce opinions, and compel behavior are not different in principle than the efforts of the French Revolutionaries to remake society in their image (really, their vision of who they would have been, had they been actually decent human beings, a counterfactual); or the later efforts of the Communists to do the same thing.

Human society is a complex system. Complex systems respond to incentives and dominant tendencies.  They do not respond to fiats, or efforts to compress them flat, and then rebuild them anew.

For a long time, all Federal money, and much State money, flowed to unions, and for a long time, unions were allowed by law to ban blacks qua blacks, regardless of their individual merits.  That needed to stop, since it used taxpayer money to deny equal rights to people who may have otherwise been qualified.

But for the same reason I, as a private citizen, should be free to hire and fire people based on my perception of their worth, private companies in my view should have been left free to hire and fire–and serve or not serve–anyone for any reason they chose.

Now, you say, this is ridiculous.  How can anyone justify not letting blacks dine at Woolworths?  It is insulting.  It is degrading. Yes, it is.  It was.

Today, blacks can eat anywhere they want.  Are they better off as a group, in the North or the South?

Here is the problem: blacks were freed by law from the necessity of insisting, face to face, on the propriety of their demand to be treated with dignity.  They were freed from the social necessity of deserving respect as a price of demanding it.  Rather, they were told that they deserved respect, period, and that all of their sense of self worth was supposed to be intrinsic, supposed to be the result of having been born black.

This simple transition has had incalculable, and horrific, effects.  The problem with the ghettos is not that blacks are kept down by law.  The fact is much more insidious: they are kept down by a culture which prevents rising, which prevents the urge, the need, the passion to raise themselves to the levels of personal integrity, diligence, erudition, perspicuity, and civic mindedness which would COMPEL respect, not by force of law, but by force of personality, force of presence, force of success in the face of odds.

Compare, if your stomach will take it, Frederick Douglass with Jesse Jackson.

Here is something on Douglass:

He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Would not a Civil War era Southerner, touring a typical American ghetto, not find his arguments that blacks were inherently unable to care for themselves amply vindicated?  Given free schooling, access to preferential grants and scholarships, and in many cases free housing, what have they made of it?

Here is the thing: when you deny someone the right to their own struggle, to making their own way in life, you deny them the right to grow as people.

The way to deal with a Woolworths is to educate yourself, train yourself, rise “above your raising”, and then go talk with the owner of the store, and show him you are no different from–and ideally in actual fact BETTER THAN, more educated than–the white people he does serve.

And if he doesn’t relent immediately, then form black businesses, black schools that are GOOD, and a community consistent with your own dignity.  And if you can’t do that where you are, go somewhere where you can.  Overt racism was confined largely to the South.  This is a large country.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.  This is advice white people take in stride, and see the value in.

But far too many white leftists have felt, and continue to feel, the need to tell black people that they don’t have to do anything, that they are “good enough”, no matter how they behave, no matter what decisions they make.

This is a covert way, a very subtle way, of also telling them they are stupid and inferior.  It implies that better is not possible.  It implies that without the guidance of white Leftists–and some small number of token black people raised up in white leftist propaganda factories–you truly ARE nothing.  You truly ARE less.  This is not said, of course.  But it is clear.

And I look around me, and I ponder and ponder: how did this happen?  This is how it happened.

And I would apply the same logic to gays today.  It is not their right or privilege, and it is not helpful, to launch hateful attacks on Christians. They do not change minds.  They do not win hearts.  They certainly do not win respect.  Merely public fear, which prevents actual reconciliation, actual social growth.

The means that are chosen show clearly the moral and human advancement of those using them.  To use violence, to use coercion, is the opposite of building humanity as a whole.  It does not matter what the assumed urgency of the goal is.  There is only one way to do the thing correctly.  Everything else tears down the actual bonds of friendship, the actual bonds of community and mutual admiration.

We are told that an insult–or even a mere insensitivity–hurts people.  That may be true, but only weak, degenerate, childish people.  For mature, serious men and women it incites them to better efforts.  It grants them the opportunity of enduring insults with pride and grace and dignity.

And we make people weak, degenerate, and childish by shielding them from the honest opinions of others.  We weaken our society.  We build decadence.

And we ARE decadent, in many respects, although of course there remain many positives.  We have lost the generalized drive to understand our world, and take our educations seriously.  We have lost the civic pride to understand the issues facing our nation, and to make informed decisions based upon that knowledge.  We have lost pride in and respect for our Constitution, which has no equal anywhere in the world, either now, or at any point in human history.  In our zeal to, as many assume, “correct” wrongs, we are failing to protect the actual law, and more importantly the principle of equal rights=equal responsibilities that undergirds it.

It is time to revision the past, based upon an honest appraisal of the present.  The hammer–and Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade, and this gay marriage decision and many others have been hammers–has failed.

With regard to Roe v. Wade, I will say simply that that issue, too, should have been negotiated.  In their defense of “women’s bodies”, the left has forgotten that babies have bodies too.  The polarization that has happened–always the result of abusive propaganda (and there is no other kind, if we consider the abuse of truth as always damaging)–has prevented discussing the whole thing humanely, socially, away from the intruding eyes of ubiquitous would-be Governors of the Public Morality in the government.

This Planned Parenthood scandal should surprise no one.  Once one grants in principle that a baby has no more significance than a kidney stone–and this is the plain, necessary conclusion in conflating the baby with the woman–then babies are nothing more than objects to be disposed of.  We would not grudge a market in kidney stones, so why not cut up baby cadavers, or their parts?

Superficiality is common enough.  When one goes deep enough, is silent and reflective long enough, one comes face to face with one’s own demons, one’s own flaws and traumas and unresolved griefs.  I know this far better than most.

But not only can and do people survive this process, they in fact THRIVE in the long run as a result.  Nothing that you run from ever gets farther away from you.  It is always there, like your shadow.  It may be that light makes shadows deeper and more ominous, but with enough light, they disappear entirely.

We need a revolution in consciousness.  I say that with respect to every level of our personal. social, and political lives.  It is time to start speaking truths.  It is time to start caring about decency and GENUINE mutual respect, not that hollow shell which fear and the law compel on the unwilling.

http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/news-wire/2015/07/10/hobby-lobby-ruling-implemented-firms-that-object.html

Companies that object to paying for contraceptives (I don’t see elective abortion on here, but am not going to research it) don’t have to.  The contraceptives will be paid for with magical fairy dust.

One is tempted to assume that Leftists really do think you can get $3,000 for a piece of shit car missing two tires and a windshield.

Because this may not be obvious to some–most people seem to fail even now to grasp the basest rudiments of economics and business–obviously the insurance companies will pass these costs along in premiums, probably spread among all insureds.  Ultimately, Hobby Lobby will still be paying for contraceptives.  I think 5/9ths of the Supreme Court should be put in stocks and have rotten fruit thrown at them.  They are abdicating their roles as defenders of the Constitution, and at that implementing bad policy, which will hurt far more people than it helps.

I was dreaming I lived in a post-apocalyptic world last night.  Logistically, it was harder.  It was harder to find stuff.  Nothing was handed to me.  But the bartering and planning and scheming were not that uncongenial.  Sometimes a lack of given-ness can be exciting.

I am changing.  I am finally starting to be able to enter this realm of qualitative change, to get at things on a deep level and move them.

And the more I do so, the more I realize that the WORLD needs qualitative change.  We see everywhere that we need to “love” one another, which means something different for every person saying it, but usually comes from a place of emotional lack, and not supersufficiency.

We see that we need to “change” before it is too late.  Obama’s propagandists skillfully played on this obvious meme.

But I will double down and say that the PRIMARY chance we need to see, the one that will actually make a difference, is a qualitative generalized shift in how our cultural elite view the cosmos.  As Chesterton said, it is not a question of if one’s view of the nature of reality matters, but if in the long run anything else does.

There are no serious competitors to quantum physics for First Prize in the Reality Contest.  Physicists have tried and failed.  The Higg-Boson will not alter the facts of non-locality, and wave/particle duality.  String Theory was an expensive and fairly embarrassing failure.

It is time for the best minds in the center of the field to start admitting that we have NO IDEA what is “really real”, and that our best guess is that consciousness and what we call “matter” dance in an interactive process, and that at the bottom of the line of turtles is an endless soup of realities waiting to be created.

It is time for our best minds to grant that a MODEL of reality which does not match up with measurable events is WRONG.  When someone says that Robert Jahn is–or was–doing bad science, that he is an embarrassment, that person has a professional responsibility to actually study his data.  This did not happen, which is manifestly egg on the face of every clown who claimed to be a “scientist” and to take the empirical method seriously.  You can’t simply say “this is impossible”.  That is what the Church did when informed about the heliocentric model.  Nothing could be imagined that would be further from the spirits of honest empiricism and free inquiry.

We do need to change as a world.  We don’t need to recycle, or buy Priuses–both in my view are by and large both expensive and more than a little silly (recycling most products takes more energy than it saves; and Global Warming isn’t real)–but we DO need to integrate new, primary visions of the nature of reality into our central discussions.  Psi and the survival of death and the interconnectedness on a primary level of all life need to be taught at a university level to all students.

And we need, as I said yesterday, bold economists to start pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.  Absent fractional reserve and central banking, we would have no booms and busts, a steadily increasing standard of living, and eventually no unemployment, no poverty, and no issues with health care, the world over.

Well, I just had $900 land in my lap, which I am going to take as validation I am not wasting my time. How does $900 fall in your lap?  Well, it’s not bad being me.  I have built a lifestyle congenial to my monomanias–by necessity, by chance, and by dint of a lot of hard work combined with not inconsiderable intelligence, talent and agility.

To continue:

All these groups of people are not monolithic.  The people opposing civilization in the name of humanity are not all alike. They all have their own needs and desires, prejudices, prides, hopes and dreams.

All complex systems are inherently unstable in some ways, and more importantly they are built on dominant principles, dominant habits, dominant tendencies.  They are refreshed continually, minute by minute, day by day.

If you can take away one dominant assumption–and I would argue the important one  is the pure materiality of humankind–then the whole thing can transform IN AN INSTANT, historically speaking.

All American leftists believe they are the best hope of minorities.  What if they realize this is not only not true, but that they have become in fact their worst enemies (with friends like these. . . )?

The globalists have convinced themselves that humanity needs them.  What if they realize that neither global warming nor overpopulation, nor pollution are in any respect existential crises, and that in fact people can be taught, in conditions of freedom, to consume less, and over time either reduce global population, or reconcile our populations with environmental homeostasis?

And returning to basic metaphysical assumptions, there are any number of further areas of research that can and should be pursued.

Survival of death is an hypothesis which has already been tested at a university level, by Gary Schwartz, at the University of Arizona.  That work continues in the affiliated–but chronically underfunded–Windbridge Institute: http://www.windbridge.org/

They use all the methods of science–like a double-blind protocol–and still consistently achieve positive results.  I’m sure there is a standing invitation for charlatans like James Randi to attempt to replicate their results–they have nothing to hide–but what you realize quickly in studying the antics of these Materialistic Radicals is that once the science in any given field advances to the point where they literally have NO methodological critiques to make, they simply ignore them as if they didn’t exist, and if they do speak about them, they either choose the weakest evidence and treat it as the strongest, or they make shit up outright.  What they always do is ignore the most compelling evidence, for which they neither have an answer, nor the forthrightness to admit it.

Another university level project that should have generated a lot of interest and following research that did not was the work of Robert Jahn.  The New York Times, as usual, delivers its hit piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html?pagewanted=all

The simple, glaring, inescapable, methodologically irrefutable fact is that he demonstrated beyond any scientific doubt (certain levels of probability against chance will in any other field generate the term proven, or some synonym of it, as in “what we know”) that the human mind can influence physical processes.

But nobody would publish it.

Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist, has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. “We submitted our data for review to very good journals,” Ms. Dunne said, “but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?

To be clear, “peer review” is SUPPOSED to be about professionals analyzing the METHODS being used, to assure they are rigorous and comply with general standards.

But what happened here is that their RESULTS were analyzed, and found unacceptable.  No one would review their actual data.

It is important in this respect to comment momentarily on peer review.  Peer review is an utterly broken system.  The presence of peer review means nothing, and the lack of peer review means even less.

As they say here:

If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market.  Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws.

Here is the New York Times itself on the same topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/health/02docs.html?pagewanted=print 

There are a range of topics broadly discussed under “psi” dealt with at length by Dean Radin here and here.

And then we have the possibility of a revolution of consciousness where our financial system is concerned.  I personally have sent out 240 emails to economists at major universities concerning my understanding of the fatal flaws of our financial system, and how to correct them. That’s not much–I am just one man, and just sleeping through the night has been a major challenge for me for years–but I am not alone, I don’t think, even if I seem to be the only one saying what I am saying.

What if bold Economics students started asking fundamental questions and following up on them with genuinely open, new analysis?  There was quite a stir a few years ago, when some World Bank economists got vaguely into my zip code:

The Chicago Plan Revisited is an IMF report from 2012 by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof. The focus of the study is the so-called Chicago plan of the 1930s which the authors have updated to fit into today’s economy. The basic idea is that banks should be required to have full coverage for money they lend. Under this proposal, banks would no longer be allowed to create new money in the form of credit in connection with their lending activities. Instead, the central bank should be solely responsible for all the creation of all forms of money, not just paper money and coins. The advantages of such a system, according to the authors, are a more balanced economy without the booms and busts of the current system, the elimination of bank runs, and a drastic reduction of both public and private debt. The authors rely on both economic theory and historical examples, and state that inflation, according to their calculations, would be very low.

I of course reject the need for a central bank, and the power that intrinsically goes with it; and I see no means of getting from a condition of universal debt to a condition where there is NO or little debt, without something like what I proposed.  But one can dream.

And finally I have my church.  I am on the verge of getting some traction on that.  I will post more on that.  First, I want to write something I will modestly call “A Manifesto for a New World”.

I want to take this thing to colleges and universities.  Most college kids have literally never been confronted with the actual ideas underlying what are called conservative economic and political ideas.   They have been fed cartoons, and cartoon characters, Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Do-Right, with grandma being tied to the train track, where only the saviors of the Left can save her.

I would ask simply: how is grandma doing in Venezuela?  How about Greece?  About the same as everyone else, with the pains of age, I would expect.  All basic, honest economics STARTS with asking what the effect of a given policy will be across all populations, and across time.  Communism works great for a small power elite, and it screws everyone else.  If you only listen to the propaganda, this is easy to miss.

How about this old lady in Cuba?   You may see joy and exuberance there.   What I see is a street performer trying to earn a little extra money to buy things her Socialist government cannot and will not provide.  What I see is another form of the universal prostitution which Castro’s horrific regime forces on all the women, in a land which was supposed to be freed from the terrors of “sexism” and every other -ism, except Communism.

Cuba has long been known for its sex trade, and I suspect all that the relaxation of travel restrictions have facilitated are sex trips.

Here is a link on that: http://naughtynomad.com/2013/10/26/sex-in-cuba-5-tips-for-hooking-up/

If you’re the type that pays for sex, you’ll be in a heaven. I honestly can’t think of a country where prostitution is so ingrained and pervasive in the culture. “You fuck, you pay. That’s Cuba,” one local guy told me on my first day.

Is this what American Leftists want for the Cuban people?  For Cuban women?  To make them impoverished college graduates who have to sell their bodies in order to eat anything but rice and beans?

I will end this rant–which I personally need for my own personal development–with some books that anyone who wants to consider a “conservative lifestyle” (why not be radical?) should read.

I will start with the books that made me a conservative (I am going to shift after this to what I actually call myself, which is a Liberal.)  .

[Actually, a word on that: socialism is Pharoahism.  If we think of the political arc as starting on the right, rising up, then lowering again on the left, like a rainbow, then we went from kings who took their authority from God on the right, to Liberalism in the middle (this blog is titled Moderates United for a reason), and now are in danger of completing the arc to Pharoahs on the left who take their authority from some combination of “history”, “necessity”, and “science”; the results are the same.  Only Liberalism, which is to say a system based on Constitutionally protected freedoms and rights, can really claim to complete history.  Everything else belongs in it].

My conversion began with an editorial by Thomas Sowell on summer reading, where he listed a bunch of books.  The first three I read were all by Paul Johnson:  A History of the American People, Modern Times, and Intellectuals (this last really underscores what hypocritical SHITHEADS most of the important intellectuals of the past 150 years or so have been).  Then I read Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit“.  That did it for me.

Some I would add are Sowell’s Basic  Economics (if you still don’t understand why raising Minimum wages does NOTHING to raise standards of living; or why rent control doesn’t work); Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which demolishes Keynesian economics beyond any hope of redemption; and Peter Bauer’s Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion .

I have not read it, but anyone who still thinks welfare states do anything but breed dependence, depravity, crime,  hopelessness, and chronic unemployment, should read this: Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom.  He records there substantially all the same ills we see here in black ghettos.  Public policy and left wing ideas are everything: race, if not quite nothing, is very little.  We can say this because all the same stuff happens over there in purely white neighborhoods.

Beyond this, just look at the books that pop up on Amazon or anywhere else.  The words have been said.  The ideas and their outcomes have been tested and found wanting.  They are flawed at the theoretical level, and fail at the practical level.  What works in our world is largely the result of free markets, property rights, internalized moral codes and political Liberalism; and what does not work, especially in the most advanced countries, arose precisely from those times and places we deviated from those principles.

Anyone who claims to value decency, to value truth, to want to elevate the human spirit and mind, to improve society, to provide solace to the hurting, MUST DO THE WORK OF THINKING.  And it is impossible to think clearly when large oceans of facts are unavailable.  It is no use comparing one abstraction to another.  You have to compare deployed–used, tried–abstractions, to concrete, measurable, physical, outcomes.

If everyone did that in the political domain, things would straighten quite quickly.  But they don’t.  This is my modest or audacious–as you see it–effort, today, to change that.

It occurs to me that arrogance consists precisely in the suppression of diversity of thought.  It precludes, most notably, the thought “I could be wrong”.

Arrogance reduces, formally, the complexity of an intra-psychic system, and thus intrinsically reduces its systemic capacity for accurate perception.

It is, as de Bono argued, a “mistake in the future”.  That is why.

Let me quote William James quoting Chesterton again.  It’s been a while:

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called “Heretics” Mr. Chesterton writes these words: ‘There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most important and practical thing about a man is still his view of the universe.  We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his philosophy.  We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemey’s numbers, but still more important to know enemy’s philosophy.  We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.'”

This is the first paragraph to his excellent series of lectures packaged as “Pragmatism”.  I adore and admire James on many levels, but first and foremost because he is sincerely trying to solve real problems, and is thus able to offer clarity of exposition and thought.

Our enemies are those of civilization.  Our enemies are those who want a complete break from the cultural history–and in some cases the very existence–of the human race; who want to reject all the solutions which have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to the problems of existence: who we are, what to do and why, and how to understand our universe.

Evolutionarily, it seems obvious that we need and crave answers to these questions.  Existentially–introspectively–it is even more obvious.

We are told, by the dominant culture in the Academy–I am here reifying, with in my view regrettably little deviation from the actual reality, the sum output of both the Arts and Sciences of universities the world over–that we are unimportant animals who somehow achieved consciousness through a process of random change, combined with random environmental circumstances favoring that adaptation, across many millions or billions of years.

We are told our consciousness has no inherent value, that it ends with the cessation of those electrochemical reactions we call “life”, and that as we gaze out into a universe with stars cast about like grains of sand on a beach, there is really no reason not to feel an endless aloneness and sadness (which of course are instincts arising from our hereditary social instinct, itself conducive to survival: nothing more.)

These “facts”, as they are called, create in many individuals substantial psychological reactions away from the “self”–which cannot well contemplate its final destruction absent mediating and ameliorating considerations–to a “society”, which insensibly acquires a sort of ontological firmness that quiets such minds.

“I survive”, it can tell itself, in the “life” of society.  If I improve society, I survive in that improvement.

Then some wonder about the survival of humanity itself. Logically, self evolved, self sustaining chemical processes which need food, shelter, and society to survive are vastly inferior in their capacity for life than, say, virus colonies, or better yet, Earth–Gaia–herself.  If “I” am equal to dirt, if I came from and will return to dirt, then why not see my–secure my–future in the future of Earth?  No humanity at all is needed in this vision, and in fact detracts from it somewhat.

These people exist, and I think there are some in high positions in the Obama Administration.

Roughly, this worldview, based upon conflating life on this planet, in this dimension, with existence outright, which sees and feels no connection with the notions of our forebears of heavens and hells, and transmigration (a belief found the world over), is what is fucking everything up.

Concretely, who are these people?  I will offer what can only be a guess, but one which makes sense, and seems not to conflict with any observable reality:

1) The Power Elite.  I will differentiate two types:

A) the merely greedy.  Here I would include JP Morgan Chase, the people who run the Fed, the people who run the European Central Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements, which few have heard of, but which is the place all the money-creators sit down to discuss what they–perhaps 100 people–are going to do with the global economy (and who do so in secret, with ZERO accountability to any government or–God forbid–the people who are affected by their decisions.)  Compared to a pure hunger for power, mere greed is practically a virtue.

B) The political and greedy. This would include George Soros, the Rockefellers, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and most of the people who we think would be part of the Bilderbergs.  Paranoia aside, the so-called Bilderburg group clearly 1) exists; 2) consists in the power elite; and 3) meets in complete secrecy.

Does George Soros continue to amass wealth?  Of course.  Is he an atheist?  Duh.  I sincerely doubt one person of genuine religious commitment of any sort can be found among the 500 most powerful people in the world, and honestly I think I would include the Pope in that assessment.  No honest Christian could sit comfortably on a throne, with hundreds or thousands of tons of stolen gold under it.  Christ himself would probably kick him in the balls, even before contemplating the role of the Church in massive pedophilia.

The fact that all these people buy into the world view I described above is of enormous consequence.  These are the people whose psychopathologies push them into de facto sociopathy, and who I term Cultural Sadeists.  They are few in number, but enormously important because they have large quantities of money, and an obsession with a global government, and global power.  They do not recognize our common culture as any sort of restraint on their behavior, and do not consider decency to be an important consideration in their quest to “save the world”, either from disaster, or from humanity itself.

Lenin and Stalin (and all their offspring the world over), of course, considered their work of utmost intrinsic importance: they were forging a new world order, the next age of humanity, a golden age, the perfection of science as applied to human social organization and individual human behavior.

That hundreds of millions died painful deaths for nothing seems lost on those who have nothing else to live for.

2) The foot soldiers.  These are the academics and those working in the media who were influenced by academics.  Most of these people, in my personal experience. are somewhat neurotic, and in constant search of experiences. They want to “live life”, because they believe this is all they get.  They (in most cases) truly believe that their views are consistent with compassion and decency.  They love the same animal rescue stories, and stories of profound compassion that the rest of us do.

They love their puppies, do their best to raise good kids (if they take the momentous political decision of choosing to reproduce), but are constrained by their lack of a genuinely positive vision of the future.  They don’t see this, of course, because it, again, is all they have.

They work hard to further what they view as the cause of human progress, but are forced to reject on an unconscious level all those who tell them they truly are working for nothing, and that the end result of all their efforts will be famine and misery, and the empowerment of the very sorts of people they thought they were opposing.

3) The compliant.  This is your neighbor who has been taught to view those who oppose Obama as racist, who genuinely believes we can spend our way into prosperity, and who genuinely believes you can have something for nothing.  These are the kids who believe Bernie Sanders when he says that we can have free healthcare, free universities, much higher minimum wages, and all without any consequences of importance.  These are the people who think the Greeks have done anything but bring ruin on themselves for acting like self important, self indulgent children.  These are the people who do not remember that Chavez promised the Venezuelans the same things.  These are the people who do not know that these promises have been made many times, that many nations have listened to this siren call, and all eventually either fallen into ruin, or changed paths.

So what to do?  Me, I dream of a revolution of sorts, but not a violent one.  I dream particularly of our university level kids starting to ask fundamental questions about the dominant metaphysics.

Example 1: I would like to see Biology students replicate the long term successes of Cleve Backster, and then start to ask honest, SCIENTIFIC questions about what it all means.  To be clear, he was a man of impeccable professional integrity, who demonstrated his results for anyone who asked over the course of decades.

This might actually be a good case study of the power of negative hallucination–which we might call the triumph of prejudice over empiricism–at work.

We read in his obituary: “Scientists, however, were less convinced. No one could reproduce Backster’s results.”

We read in the Wikipedia article:

 Backster’s “Primary Perception” theory was a subject of the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters.^[18] After all human and environmental stimuli that could alter the results were removed, they reproduced Backster’s experiments with the dracaena plant, yoghurt, saliva and eggs. After getting negative results, they performed a final experiment using an EEGinstrument, which is more sensitive than a polygraph, connected it to a plant to check whether it would “see” eggs being catapulted randomly into boiling water. The instrument registered no change in the plant and the myth was considered as busted in that episode. 

Here is the actual episode.  Forward, if you are in a hurry, to roughly 3:45.  Keep in mind, that plants have no nervous systems, therefore it is simply POSTULATED that they cannot react systemically.

First, they spray it with a fire extinguisher.  HUGE reaction.  Not what would be anticipated in an orthodox scientific model, which cannot easily explain that result.

Much more telling, one of the researchers, after establishing a good baseline, just THINKS about hurting the plant: again, HUGE reaction.

In their words: “I’m not saying I believe this, but it’s hard to dispute the ink”, and “It boggles the mind”.

To recover their world view, they then successfully fail to replicate a set of experiments where he himself often failed, and call it a day.  They call the whole series of experiments a failure, despite the fact that it clearly wasn’t.  They produced results inexplicable within current biophysical paradigms.

You can WATCH it.  You can see it.  This is EXACTLY what Backster–who if you read his book was clearly a meticulous, very careful researcher, who was not contracted by top law enforcement agencies for continuous training because he was flighty or in the least unreliable (his actual field was lie detection)–reported across decades and thousands of experiments.

If you take this one example as illustrative, this is what has been done both with ALL his work, and all that challenging dominant paradigms generally.

In the most unscientific fashion imaginable, his work is either “debunked” at a theoretical level, which simply asserts his results are impossible; or, when replication is attempted, positive results are ignored–as here–or his own experimental framework is not followed, which is categorically antithetical to the spirit and methods of actual replication.

He details at length all the games people played with his work, and shows exactly where the people who claimed to be unable to replicated his work did not follow his protocols.  And replication was only attempted in one series of experiments, in my understanding, by the Establishment, prior to his entire universe of discovery being swept under the rug (with a huge sigh of relief: those tasked with refuting his heresy did a superficially acceptable job; had he been an academic, they simply could have found a pretext to fire him.)

Why?  That is not science.  That is not truth-seeking.

Field concepts have never been refuted.  They have merely been found unnecessary, and ignored.

Here is an interesting article: http://www.marcobischof.com/media/art/art_3d141900af22a/Holistic%20Biophysics.doc

I would encourage any readers I may have who are working in the fields of physics, biochemistry, or biology to read it.

This, to me, is high reality.  Regrettably, mundane reality–the one within which I pay my bills and meet my responsibilities–calls.

Net: what we need truly is a “revolution in consciousness”, a phrase which, if I could get a nickel every time it is used would made me rich in short order.  What I mean is not that we need to start dropping acid (or its modern day analogue, Ayuahuasca ), but that we need to start taking science SERIOUSLY.

You don’t need to be hippy-dippy to be curious.  You don’t have to smell of patchouli and like the Grateful Dead (I don’t, but I did dream I met Jerry Garcia the other day, as well as Robin Williams) to do HONEST, SERIOUS, scientifically rigorous research.

I make token efforts from time to time to get Marco Bischoff’s Biophotonen translated to English.  It is quite expensive, and he won’t answer any of my emails.  That would be a nice project for some forward-thinking, genuinely ideologically diverse university press.

I meant to say more.  And I will.  But not at this moment.  I must live for the time being in the world of Time.

Last word: I have been feeling that we need to rekindle the exploratory spirit of the 1960’s.  We–this is my feeling, and I am a psychic sponge–assume we live in a stale period where the best you can hope for is a great idea and a great start-up, and the leisure to spend your life learning Japanese archery, or going on tours of places like Armenia or Nepal.

No: DREAM BIG.  Dream of changing the world, not by helping orphans somewhere, typically ones created by bad public policy, or wars in which one or more parties are either radical Islamists or some variant of Communist.

Dream of a peaceful world, one in which we KNOW that we are connected on an energetic level with all of creation.  Dream of a world where you don’t die, where everything you do and see and experience and feel and accomplish aggregates, where you stay with you, where you can look forward to unending growth and security.

Everything that can be said about the political failings of Socialism has been said, and most of it was said well 70 years ago.  There is no lack of verbiage. There is no lack of books. What is lacking is receptivity, and the core problem there is that Socialism is a good answer to the problems of dis-individuation created by inaccurate, scientifically impeachable, and just plain WRONG accounts of the nature of reality.

Correcting these manifest, indefensible errors is where the emphasis must be placed.  And they must be corrected WITHIN the “Academy”.  We need bold, original, fearless spirits to risk ridicule and being ostracised.  We need “menschen” (which self evidently includes women, in whom I actually place slightly more trust).

And to be clear, I see no return to orthodox Christianity, or any other religion.  There are many positives embedded in the practices, and symbology, and social forms created by religions, but what I am preaching is liberation, not confinement.  What I am preaching is the merger of the best insights of our past, with our present technological capabilities.

I may be preaching to the wind.  If so: wind, please carry my words as far as you can, in whatever form you can.

In chaotic situations in which existing power structures are overthrown, the meanest sons of bitches in the room always end up in control.

I was at the grocery store checking out last night, and saw a woman with one of those long sticks which I assume meant she was blind.  She was holding and loving on a little baby.  There was a bagger standing there with a cart, and they were apparently waiting for something or someone.

And I wondered how much courage it must have taken to be in that space alone with a child, and then how much courage it must have taken to be a blind person, bringing a new life for whom she was responsible, into the world.  Nowadays, many woman with all their faculties intact fear to do so.

What fears must have come to her?  Must she not have thought at times “this will never work”, or “what business do I have bringing this child to me?”  or “how CAN this ever work out?”.  Then I thought she must just be taking it one day at a time, and sometimes, sometimes, entire lifetimes can be lived one day at a time, and disaster never visits.  No calamity comes calling.  Everything that is feared stays outside the door, and leaves you in peace.

And then the man I assume is her husband came back.  And he TOO had a cane. He had a smile on his face, and seemed confident.  He said something to her, then something to the bagger, and then walked off tapping his cane, seemingly knowing exactly where he was going.  The bagger followed him, and I assume he must have been the one pulling things off the shelf.

And I pondered the faith necessary for this blind couple to do something as simple as go to the grocery store with their baby.  They can’t see anything.  They depend solely on their ears, their canes, and the goodwill of those around them.

Amazing, to me, and it shamed me, honestly.  What business do I have being such a coward?  What soldier enters the field of battle assuming defeat?  It is undignified. Unbecoming. It is, in a word, wrong.

So I started allowing myself positive thoughts.

I will try and post that in my next post, but thought I’d share in this vein an amazing story about Helen Keller.  I will editorialize in advance that what tragedy does is FORCE A CHOICE.  Left to our own devices, most of us will never delve too hard, or ponder too long, the mysteries, beauties, and terrors of life.

When we are confronted with existential difficulties, ones which challenge our very sense of self, and habitual mode of making our way through this world–of living–then we go up or down.  For those who go up, they rise much higher than they otherwise may have.  For those who go down, there always remains the possibility of going up, even if they fight this idea, and the people proposing it, tooth and nail with all the fury they possess.

Anyway, those who know me well realize I am a conservative hippy.  My mind compels me to read history and economics and learn from them.  My heart compels me to dream new ways of being.  So why not Jean Houston?

Today is the 47th anniversary of the death of Helen Keller. As some of you know that as a child, I met Miss Keller. One day in our school in NYC, P.S. 6, our teacher informed us that we were going to meet Helen Keller, the great woman who had become deaf, blind, and mute before the age of two. In preparation for meeting Miss Keller, Miss O’Reilly read to us the powerful passage from Helen Keller’s autobiography that tells of how until she was six years old, Helen had no concepts whatsoever. There was little that could break through the imprisoned flesh to the potential mind within. Her teacher Annie Sullivan tried in vain to help her understand words through hand tappings. Finally, in desperation, Annie pulled Helen out to the ivy- covered pumphouse and held her hand under the water while she tapped out repeatedly into the other hand W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R. 

Helen writes that her whole body became still. Suddenly she understood what Annie was communicating to her. That word water broke into her sealed mind like the sun into a frozen winter world. It was her mental awakening, and she learned the names for thirty things by the end of that day. Before that supreme event there had been little in her life but body functions and rage. Helen Keller, of course had gone on to become the great educator, champion of the disabled and disadvantaged, and friend and inspiration to so many people the world over. 

After this preparation, Miss O’Reilly took us to the Cosmopolitan Club in the east 60’s where Miss Keller would be meeting us. Miss Keller was led out by her associate and companion, Polly Thompson. She was in her late sixties at the time, a large handsome women, quite tall, I remember, and utterly radiant. Her eyes saw nothing and yet were seeing everything. Her smile was a beneficence welcoming the world. I had never seen anybody so full of presence and joy in my life, even though I had been exposed throughout childhood to professional comedians who were always laughing. Helen Keller’s joy was of another order entirely. 

When she began to speak, I heard the voice of a prophet, a pythoness, whose strange inflections and pronunciations were those of someone who had never heard speech. After she had finished, I was so deeply moved that I knew I had to speak to her. Mind you, I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but I knew I had to speak to her nonetheless. When Miss Thompson asked if anyone had a question, my classmates squirmed and looked sheepishly at each other. But I found myself raising my hand and going up to her. Miss Keller placed her entire hand on my face in order to read my question. Her fingers read my expression, while the center of her palm read my lips. Still I did not know what I was going to ask. Her hand did not move from my face. Finally I blurted out what was in my heart, “Why are you so happy?”

She laughed and laughed, laughter rising from another dimension of sound–the laughter of a sequoia or of a whale.

“My child,” she said, her voice wandering between octaves. “It is because I live my life each day as if it were my last. And life in all its moments is so full of glory.” [emphasis mine]

As her hand lingered on my face for a moment, I felt as if I were lifted into her radiance and that some kind of charge passed between us. When, years later, I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I understood the nature of that charge. For there on the ceiling was the famous painting by Michaelangelo of God reaching out his hand to touch the outstretched hand of Adam. In my case it had been the touch of the blind goddess to the little Eve.

Helen Keller was a Socialist, Big S, and quite open about it.  I will say that I may have been in that era too.  There manifestly WERE many, many horrible abuses, of the sort we see today in China.  You had a rich power elite whose sole concern was profit, and they worked people like slaves and cared not at all when they died or were permanently harmed.

Back then, it was not yet obvious that the French Revolution was not a one-off. It was not yet obvious that nothing good can be built from a foundation which rejects “bourgeois” virtue, common decency, and all ties with the past.

A paucity of diverse ideas is intrinsically a paucity of ideas, period.  As a general rule, the suppression of ideational and ideological diversity serves solely to protect vanity, and not to advance the human race or any specific cause, noble or otherwise.

Put another way, Complexity always best serves the cause of truth.

I am speaking formally, of course.  From within the fold of ideas ALL OF US think some are stupid and some intelligent.  We cannot do otherwise.  But looked at in the abstract even apparently stupid ideas, even the ideas of people with missing teeth who live in broken down trailers CAN have value, if only in stimulating latent perceptions in the rest of us, in recalling to us, or summoning to our awareness, notions which otherwise would have gone missing.

You can never know what possible idea is missing from your current inventory.  This is an absolute principle, and applies particularly to–is most useful to–the most intelligent among us.

This is good: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259450/historical-ignorance-walter-williams

Money quote:

The War of 1861 settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American lives. We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.

I started to do a post on this topic the other day, but I was tired and I ultimately decided against posting what I had,  as some of my metaphors were unhelpful.

Here are a few facts, though.

1) There were four slave-holding States which fought on the Union side, and Lincoln made no concerted effort  to change this.  In fact, they were specifically EXEMPTED from the Emancipation Proclamation.

Further, that Proclamation–which he knew would infuriate the South and make them fight harder–was delayed as long as possible, and only issued to prevent Britain (and possibly France) from supporting the South, whose cotton was getting harder to obtain through the blockades.

2)  Lincoln, in my understanding, was on record often as saying that he was quite willing to tolerate the continuation of slavery in the South as a condition of preserving the Union.  As I recall the matter–and my memory is good, but far from perfect–it was the Radical Republicans who were elected around Lincoln who were feared, and whose ascension ultimately led to their decision to secede.

Underlying all this, of course, was the many decades old debate, at that time, about who should decide if newly admitted States would allow slavery, or not.  Lincoln took the position that no new slave-holding States should be admitted and that this was the purview of the Federal Government; in the famous debates, Stephen Douglas took the position that all moral questions–including that of slavery–ought to be decided by the States.

It was the de facto political victory of Lincoln and his Republicans which caused the South to despair that over time their ability to defend themselves in Congress would evaporate, and everybody was already beyond pissed anyway.  That’s what pushed the South Carolinians into their assault on Fort Sumter.  Even then Lincoln did not need to respond with a national call-up of troops, but he did.  On April 15, 1861,. if memory serves, which I count as the ACTUAL beginning of the Civil War.  Until then, other options were possible.

All of the bloodshed and tears and pain and hunger, the rapes, beatings, and premature deaths, inflicted on soldiers and civilians and slaves alike, provoke little or no reaction today.  But the first modern war was fought to suppress the rights of States which JOINED a Union, to LEAVE that Union the same way.

Of course one can echo Samuel Johnson in asking “Why is it the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves”, but one cannot easily miss the fact that that war was fought mainly for the right of secession, and that what was invoked on both sides was State’s Rights, with one side declaring them, and the other side calling them traitors.

Nowadays, it is easy and fashionable to project our present hypersensitive selves back to that era, and applaud Chamberlain (I have stood in that spot, and it provoked powerful emotions) for his spirited defense, which we assume was in defense of Kunta Kinte and the Underground Railroad.  But this is mistaken.  You cannot use todays mores to assume anything about those of yesteryear.

Here are his words:

I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery.

Treason. Traitor. These were the words the men of the North used against the rebels of the South.  They did not spite them their slave-holding.  They spited them their LEAVING.

When you really get that, and really get that slavery was never really an economically efficient system, and that without a Civil War would over some period of time–perhaps 50-75 years–have given way under social, political, and economic pressures to a gradual and authentic increase in the liberty and status of black people, one must conclude–this is my opinion–that the Civil War was not worth it.

And as I say often to those who say “but the slaves were FREED”: no, no they weren’t.  They were converted from actual property to serfs confined to small patches of dirt they worked on without rest for a pittance, all while under constant danger of attack from Southerners infuriated by the devastation of the war.

Removing the Confederate Flag will not bring the absent fathers of young black kids home.  It will not win their mothers high school educations, or the will to work hard where it has been indoctrinated out of them.  It will not make the scraps from the table that the Democrats throw from time to time equal to a dignified or comfortable existence. It will not win them self respect, or the respect of others.  Some people want to praise them no matter what they do.  Some want to condemn them no matter what they do.

The rest of us wait, and watch.