Moderates United

What if we took that iconic Cruz image as the rebel and applied it to all three?  What if we inverted true conservatism to be rebellious (which it is, by the way, now)?

I am available as a free campaign consultant, I will add. I’m also available for an exhorbitant salary with lots of  perks and a smoking hot secretary.

I’m still waiting on my Koch/petrodollars for opposing the warmists, but I haven’t checked my mail yet today.

I’m half serious, but of course it’s hard to tell if I’m 5′, 10′ or 50′ pole material. Or if I’m completely radioactive and never need to turn the lights on, since my way is already lit.

What if Paul, Cruz, and Walker–and I’d be happy to add Ben Carson to this mix, if he chooses to run–pooled their money and made “vision ads”, in which they take turns talking about issues that maybe each in turn considers vital to their vision.  They can decide which is which, but what if, for example, they had the audacity to publicly question the Fed?

Blurry image slowly becomes the New York Fed.

Paul speaking: what if I told you that the biggest banks on Wall Street own 100% of the stock in the Federal Reserve, and that they control everything it does?  What if I told you they had been gifting themselves $50 billion a MONTH in free money, which will one day cause the price of your food and gas and education to go up?  What if I told you NO ONE in our government even KNOWS what they are doing, much less has the ability to control it?

Cut to all three: Paul: does this make sense to you?  Cruz: Does this seem fair to you?  Walker: why would anyone object to changing this?

Paul/Cruz/Walker: change you can BELIEVE in.

You get the gist.  The Fed is a big bite to take.

Or education.  They could focus on the importance of education, typically a reliably leftist talking point, and discuss how well the charter schools in New York performed, how public schools RIGHT NEXT TO THEM performed only a fraction as well, and how de Blasio closed them.  Why?  Teachers unions.  And race should absolutely be included in this.  All the faces would be black.  You would have happy, successful black faces, and bleak, discouraged faces.  In point of fact, this is the REALITY.  Democrats don’t give a shit about blacks, per se.

Or take on ghettos directly.  Why do we still have large economic underperformance zones?  How do we fix it?  Charter schools.  Tax credits.  Remove incentives to have kids out of wedlock and/or improve incentives to have kids in wedlock.  These are fine lines to walk, but frankly the suffering is quite real, and something DOES need to be done about ghettos.

Or the economy.  National banktupcy is not going to help anyone.  You get the idea.

Before the primaries start, they could start establishing a high ground, a positive vision, and could choose to focus solely on actual policy differences once the slugging does start.

Be different.  Why?  Because you can’t learn anything being the same, and if you’re not learning, you are decaying.

I had a dream the other day where these three put out a campaign ad together, where Rand and Cruze were doing pro Wrestling moves on one another, while Walker looked on.  You want an attack ad?  Here’s an attack ad.  PILEDRIVER!!!  I think they were wearing suits, but don’t remember.

Then one put on a magicians outfit, and poured some liquid in a bowl, which was bluish green, they shook it, and it was magically clear.

I woke up fully convinced this was a good idea, and I should share it with them.  Then I had a cup of coffee.  Coffee is a great thing.

Still, this morning I got to thinking about it: why NOT do things which have never been done?

As men who can credibly claim they might make an actual difference, why not put out a campaign ad together?  Not one of them can do a damn thing of the GOP Establishment chooses to gerrymander and play games, giving somebody like Jeb Bush the nomination.

I would submit there are three contests.  The first is between the credible Conservatives and the GOP’s history over the past 80 or so years.  The second is between them.  And the third of course is between them and the Socialist press and their candidate.

And the magic trick, of course, represented symbolically the rhetorical tricks we see in every election, the rabbit from the hat, the massively expanding the national health insurance system while cutting the budget.  OOH’s and AAH’s all around.  Then amnesia.  

It is true one sometimes must drink from the River Lethe to avoid nausea.  Most, though, do it because they are like little children being led through a maze, and will go wherever they are told, and believe what they are told to believe, and forget whatever has not been on their magic Reality Screen in the past week.

And I’m still not completely convinced that something that pushes boundaries could not work wonders to pull in the Jon Stewart generation.  They love novelty.  They simply hate the work and difficulty of educating themselves and thinking things through.  This of course bodes poorly for democracy, but until somebody can figure out a solution, they have to be addressed.

Oh, and I decided to post this, despite my blogging fast, since Rand is announcing today, and my ideas come and go so fast I forget them, and Facebook was not the place for this.

I am going to need to avoid conflict for a while.  Nobody normally battles me here, and I’ve taken to avoiding it elsewhere, but I still bring a very aggressive energy to the whole thing.  I have naturally high levels of testosterone, and some part of me returns to conflict because it knows it.  One thing I brought out from my last week-long was that my parents argued a LOT when I was little, and it bothered me a great deal.  My father, when I was older, also liked to regularly demonstrate his superior intelligence. Not too fucking hard for someone in their 40’s, roughly, to outsmart a 12 year old.

Much of this work has to be seen, I think, as compensation for that.  I am finally WINNING.

And I want to be clear that I am not backing off my ideas.  I believe nearly everything I write (but feel under no constraint to believe everything, or to be fully consistent).  But my motivation is not good.  It is far too close to the obsessiveness I regularly criticize in those I consider my ideological–if not personal–enemies.  On that note too, I would say that I try my best to attack IDEAS. Yes, I constantly talk about leftism as a sort of cult, which I think it is, but it is a cult with a creed and a practice, and those are my targets of attack.  I don’t want to get into the business of abstract hate.  They can have it.

Long story short: I am going to put myself on a blogging fast until April 15th.  That’s day of some historical importance.  Lincoln died that day, the Civil War (arguably) started that day, and that is the day the Titanic sank.  It’s known for some other disaster, too, which is momentarily escaping me (kidding).

This is an outlet for energies I need to learn to channel into other directions.  This is part of my work, my job on this Earth.

 

I went to the pet store and found this: http://www.chewy.com/dog/orijen-adult-grain-free-dry-dog-food/dp/29726

I paid a lot less than that.  No wonder the shipping is free.

May be worth your while.  Logically good nutrition will help dogs be healthier too.  Most more diligent people than me will have realized this, of course, but my big AHA was realizing that just because the manufacturer says it provides a balanced diet, and the vet agrees, is no different than the labels on Grape-Nuts and the approval of a medical doctor.

Money talks and bullshit walks.

What if Nixon had said that he had destroyed the missing tape, because it was all personal stuff, of no interest to the public?

Even discounting the national security implications of being off-grid, when Hillary chose to make her home server her primary work server, she chose to make everything that happened on it the property of the people of the United States.

She is telling all of us fuck off, and that she considers herself a step above us both in rank and privilege.  There are her standards, and there are the standards of the plebes.

Such elitism is a common trait in most alleged egalitarians.  It is a ruse, nothing more.

When it comes to gays marrying, I don’t care.  It is only when it comes to kids that I think there needs to be some careful ANALYSIS and discussion.

Here is the question: does an empirical basis exist for claiming that children who are raised by two women or two men are equally likely to thrive as those raised in a conventional home?  A “conventional home”, of course, nowadays includes divorce in a great many cases, among both gays and heterosexuals.

It has long been my belief that a great many homosexuals, perhaps the majority of them, are “gay” because of some traumatic sexual event in their childhood or youth.  They are 12, their parents are fighting all the time, they don’t have any friends, and a 19 year old seduces them, and the homosexual pattern–which was previously not there, becomes imprinted.  The gayness and premature sexual experience–which is almost definitionally traumatic, even if it is never consciously processed as such–go together.

We know that gays, bisexuals and transgendered people abuse drugs and alcohol at higher rates than the population as a whole: http://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/substance-abuse.htm  They don’t provide a number, but anecdotally I suspect it is significantly higher.

It appears they suffer disproportionately from emotional problems:

Several large population-based public health studies are discussed in the November American Psychologist (Vol. 56, No. 11) by Susan Cochran, PhD, an epidemiologist in the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health, who authored or co-authored many of the studies. Specifically, the studies find:Higher rates of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder and substance use or dependence in lesbian and gay youth.
Higher rates of recurrent major depression among gay men.
Higher rates of anxiety, mood and substance use disorders, and suicidal thoughts among people ages 15 to 54 with same-sex partners.
Higher use of mental health services in men and women reporting same-sex partners.

She does on to say that she doesn’t want this data to be used to claim homosexuals are inherently unhealthy.  I don’t believe this either.  Correlation and causation are two different things.

What DOES make sense to me is that if gayness is the result of trauma, then OBVIOUSLY it is connected with being traumatized.  The trauma comes first, then the gayness.  My personal opinion is this holds for many.  It is impossible to say how many.  Some kids are clearly, obviously, beyond any reasonable doubt born that way, and those are obviously going to be much, much happier openly expressing their sexual preference.  These people do not concern me either.

But it is so hard to know what the truth is: everyone wants to cover for them.  You can’t do a study asking about traumatic sexual experience and the emergence of sexual identity because the Gay Police will come after you.  You can’t publicize negative facts too well or too loudly, because even if true, that would be “discriminatory.”

This is how differential rates of nearly everything negative about blacks has been kept hidden.  They have higher rates of damn near everything: poverty, jail time, violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, single parenthood, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, etc.

But when you correct for the kids who grow up in two parent homes, POOF, the difference disappears.  Crime rate is the same as two parent white families, and crime rate is the same as ONE parent white families.  The large difference comes from there just being a lot more two parent white families.

Turns out is has NOTHING to do with race and everything to do with proper acculturation.  Logically, if race has nothing to do with it, then neither does racism.  And logically, with such a strong finding, public policy that was intelligent would focus on creating more two parent homes.  This is cheap for the state, and better for the kids in literally every way.

It is easy to abuse the weak and helpless, and you cannot be more weak and helpless than an unborn child.  And I’m not talking here about abortion, but about children who have not been born yet who will or might be adopted by gay couples.

Out of the gate, we can assume that any prospective gay couple is more likely to be suffering mental health issues and substance abuse issues.  Obviously, there are extremely well adjusted couples out there, who would make superb parents, particularly in comparison with a dysfunctional heterosexual home, which is most of them.

But in working across large populations, we will have put children at increased risk of unhappiness before we even factor in the importance of gender roles in developing a healthy ego.

Read this: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/

Keep in mind that the socialist project is about eradicating ALL differences, which would include our ancestral, instinctive distinctions between male and feminine.  They have, in my understanding, stopped using gendered words in Sweden.  This is the direction this goes.

What is won, deleting all our cultural knowledge, everything which has come before?  I ask you.  What takes its place?  What happens when everyone is transgendered and genetically engineered to be identical?  Does the world become more interesting? I don’t think so. I think it becomes awful.

As I say in my Sade piece, the Sadeist curses God for making every tree just a bit different, and the only solution is to burn them all and place their ashes in neat little, identical piles.  It is lunacy.  It is eradicing all reasons for living, all interest and savor and DIFFERENCE, which is valued rhetorically, but not in reality.  When a leftist calls for diversity, what they really mean is “Hate whitey”.  That sounds awful, but I view it as the truth.  Somebody needs to speak the truth.  I could find dozens of quotes supporting this with a five minute search.

The alternative is GENUINELY embracing difference.  You don’t do this when you take a cudgel to everyone who doesn’t even go so far as to disagree with you, but not agree with you immediately.

I won’t be buying an Apple product again, and it won’t be hard for me to shop less at Wal-Mart, or watch less sports.  Fuck them.  People are selling their souls for Wonder-Bread.

Nobody thinks deeply any more.  Nobody looks deeply at the root principles that are ACTUALLY in play–they assume the ones stipulated are sincere, which they are not.

Everything in this universe is in motion, including our culture.  It is both right and prudent to ask what direction we are going, and if that is in fact the best direction.  One must have a principle by which to make these evaluations, a stated goal, and that is what everything I write is oriented around.  This is the essence of my word Telearchy.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but am trying to ask important questions that affect ALL of our happiness. If we destroy every vestige of meaning and purpose, EVERYONE suffers.  Gays suffer.  Blacks suffer.  Mexicans suffer.  The poor suffer (and are suffering).

You don’t get graded on the extent of your self delusion.  You get graded on your competence–at least in a sane world, one which many are doing their best to usher out, unceremoniously.

Here is the question Pence and the Arkansas governor need to be asking critics: do they believe the State should have the power to force Amish to make gay wedding cakes featuring male genitalia, or risk losing their business or even winding up in jail?  Yes or no.

Would they then also be OK with forcing gay florists to cater a convention of Christians discussing the wickedness of sodomy?  The logic is identical.  How can one separate the two, other than by counting who has more aggressively marshaled public outrage, with large, loud marches being one of the principle ways Hitler ascended to power?

Do we still negotiate difference, or is shouting and violence our future?

I wonder if dog nutritional guidelines are based on the idiotic and never-empirical FDA guidelines.

I wonder how much, if any, actual research has been done into optimal dog diet.  When you look at the huge spread of ideas even with regard to people, you have to assume very little.

Historically what would they have eaten?  I would think, after domestication, whatever the humans around them ate.  If one buys into the Paleo diet, then–as I somewhat do–then dogs ought to eat Paleo (meat, veggies, some fruit, some nuts and fat, no sugar or bread).

My two are getting older, and one has a nasty cough that is seemingly related to some aspect of aging I didn’t really understand.  She is on blood pressure meds and a diuretic, but her cough just got worse, and I’m wondering if it’s because I changed dog food.

It occurred to me this morning that the root anger and fuel of so-called Progressivism is precisely the fact that they don’t believe progress is possible.  They don’t believe in moral hierarchies, that some people are better than others, that some moral choices are better than others.  This is implied, for example, in the assumption that ONLY racism could have caused blacks to fail to thrive after all the formal restrictions on their access to the wheels of power and success were lifted.

I well remember listening to a series on Existentialism and the lecture on Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, how the implied belief was that all belief in individual moral progress was an illusion.  Once one grants this–and it is a common outcome for atheists–then an existential crisis happens.  One way out is to embrace radical politics–politics being an earthly and empirical religion–which focus on an abstraction: SOCIAL development.  And in what does such development consist?  Leveling and homogenizing.  It consists precisely in a manic need to deny that some people are better than others, that they are more diligent, honest, knowledgeable, competent, compassionate, loving, empathetic, etc.

Goodness as I understand it and so-called Progressivism–which I normally term Regressivism–are literally antipodal.

And to be clear, nobody–least of all me–wants to countenance physical suffering from poverty, or the violence of hatred.  This is not the point I am making.  The point I am making is that countries like Cuba are the end game of the leveling and homogenization process.  In Cuba everyone is poor, has no opportunities for improvement, no good outlet for creative energy, and is watched relentlessly by a vast horde of informers.  If they step out of line, they might get locked in a tiny little box, too small even to sit comfortably in, with a little bitty slit for air, and left there for a month.  Their ordeal will leave no physical marks, and the government will deny using this “soft” torture, as the Soviets called it.

There is no substitute for doing your own thinking and forming your own opinions, and the proven methods of getting closest to the truth are gathering as many facts as you can, forming patterns from them, and then performing logical operations on them as dispassionately as you can, then determining how you FEEL about what you have, you think, uncovered. I obviously have plenty of room for feelings.  I talk about them all the time.  I simply think that the capacity to integrate them into an overall perceptual strategy is essential if you are going to avoid being wrong in large ways over long periods of time.