Moderates United

Res Publica versus Rule of the Demos.  With regard to the former, if my history is not mistaken, what amounted to the Constitution of the Roman Republic was literally written in stone.

I had not really thought about this very obvious point, but America–as many have taken pains to point out in recent years–is by design a Constitutional Republic, not a mobocracy, which is how the framers of our Constitution viewed the Athenian Democracy.

Thus, Republicans in the name itself are truer to our Constitution than those who foster the rule of the Demos, the People, the mob.

Keep in mind that the word Demagogue has the same root, demos.  Democracy and Demagogues go hand in hand.

And in reality, of course, the rule of the “people:” is almost always practically rule by an oligarchy which has simply duped enough people.  Thus the “People’s Republic of China” is neither ruled by the People nor a Republic.

Many people get confused by the first Buddhist precept, that of duhkha, which is normally translated as “suffering”.  This is not really accurate, at least according to my understanding.

What Buddhists want to point out, at root, is that unlimited emotional space and expansion is possible, and that only varied forms of ignorance and emotional and cognitive dysfunction prevent us from realizing this fact.  I realize the name for these dysfunctions, which are categorized and placed in lists in various ways by different traditions, is Klesha.

Karma, to put it another way, is the outcome of the operation of Klesha.  Klesha is how and why you screw up, and Karma is the outcome.

But again, at root, the notion is that our natural state, the state God (the universe, the Law, or whatever name we want to use) intends for us, is one that is completely happy in ways which transcend the normal notion of happiness as something close to and not exceeding having all the things and love that we want.

Reaching previously unknown emotional states is strange, but fun.  I remember Annie Lennox singing about a “new emotion”, and wondering how that was possible.  It would be like a new color.  They have all been catalogued.

But all of us are capable of feeling emotions that are new TO US.  And for that matter, there is no reason not to suppose all emotions are unique to people, times and places.

Think about this, actually: even at the best restaurant, is every meal EXACTLY the same?  Not if you pay attention to detail.  Think about the sky: does it ever repeat exactly?  No.  Is the lawn of this year the same as last year?  Of course not.

Even machines, I would argue, are not exact.  There is always room for randomness, for chaos.  Can I say God is a pirate, too?

Ah, ramblings of a confused soul.  Thank God I am confused.  I knew everything before.  With a nod to
Bob Dylan, I will say that I seem to be getting younger.

I read a line from Tarthang Tulku, in which he said roughly “in the West you have psychology; in the East we have Karma and Klesha”.  Karma, of course, is a word we are all familiar with, but I had to look up klesha.  Then, being me, I got to thinking.

Karma literally means action, to do.  It simply means “what you do”.  Implicit within this notion, though, is the idea that actions have consequences.  If you are cruel, the problem is not that you offend God–God doesn’t care, because he has given you an infinite number of lifetimes to get smart, and an infinite amount of joy when you do–but rather that you hurt YOURSELF.  This is essentially the claim I have made in my own ethical system is that the punishments for “sins”‘ are INHERENT within them.

Take a psychopathic serial killer.  They are scarcely human.  They live their daily lives filled with rage and fear, lusts they can only rarely satisfy, and completely disconnected from most or all of the world.  They are alone, even if they have partners.

Take a more subtle sin, like marital infidelity.  If you are psychologically normal, all of the positive moments will likely be balanced with anxiety, and disconnection both from your partner, and from that part of yourself that is capable of innocent joy.  You become little more than an animal in rut.

I would contrast the relatively lax Hindu/Buddhist approach with that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the first case, you exist in an infinite amount of space and time.  If you fail, get back up and try again.  You have as many chances as you need.  In the latter religions, though, there is an anthropomorphic deity conceived more or less as a father. 

In the case of the Jews, he intervenes actively DURING your life, to variously bless and curse you, not just according to your piety, but also sometimes simply by whim.  Your only recourse to get the best deal you can is to follow the Law very diligently, and to fear God.  There is in fact a saying, if I am not mistaken, that “the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom.”

In Christianity, you nominally have a loving God, as “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  Ponder this.  God controls everything.  He controls the movement of the stars, the tides, the seasons.


Yet we are to believe both that he only had ONE son, and that he needed that son to be killed in lieu of sacrificial goat, sheet and chickens so that he could assuage his own anger at the sins of his “people”.  I do not think atheists are wrong to point to the fundamental craziness of this notion, even if in their case it is frequently a constitutional sadism that motivates them, and not a concern for truth.


Further, this God is quite content to condemn for ETERNITY people who violate his laws.  The role of grace in redemption, of course, has as a theological point no doubt gotten many people killed in many wars over the centuries, in what, also, can only be seen as craziness when located within a religions nominally devoted to love and non-violence.  But what kind God, given infinite freedom, would structure a universe in such a way?


I have said on a number of occasions that I don’t think Christ himself would be a Christian, as the faith exists today.  I think that early on it was perverted for purely political, power-mongering purposes.  It is an interesting apparent fact that Christ’s Mass began to be celebrated during the existing pagan Roman festivals, one of which was the Saturnalia, and the other of which I don’t feel like looking up.  But December 25th, the exact date, was chosen because that was an important holy-day of the Mithraic cult.


In Islam, everything is absolutely black and white, right and wrong, and social conformity an absolute value.  It is an effort more or less to automate human society.  One could in fact see parallels between the industrial age, with our factory whistles and daily grinds, and the call to prayer for all men sounded five times a day.  This is the reason that Muslims have culturally been so uncreative.  Aside from some very interesting geometric patterns, they have contributed very little to any realm of human knowledge or art.  As I have pointed out, Israel, with roughly 1/100th the population, easily eclipses the number of patents generated by the entire Muslim world (or perhaps it was the Arab world, but the point is the same).


In the end, what I want to argue for is a merging of science and religion, to the benefit of the FORMER.  Religion knows things that “science” (and it is always dangerous to assume it to be a unified thing, rather than the collective output of millions of people of varying levels of talent and integrity; and much more dangerous to reify it and conflate it with “reality”, as some poor thinkers do) does not.   Scientists, for their part, can help to make plain what is wheat and what is chaff in religion.  What beliefs appear to survive critical scrutiny, and which do not?  

It is my considered view that most of Buddhism is scientific in the formal sense that their claimed chains of cause and effect can in fact be observed and–to the extent it is possible with any subjective human state–measured.  This will be the path of actual human progress, and will depend entirely on not letting Fascists like Barack Obama and whoever backs him dominate the world.

From here: http://clashdaily.com/2013/10/bombshell-ex-cia-agent-claims-obama-killed-breitbart-clancy/#CvdAB6Z4s2AXZscf.01

Here is the meat of the thing: “Lastly, he
revealed that Obama’s administration was made up of Marxist Muslims who
all take their orders from Senior Adviser to the President, Iranian-born
Valerie Jarrett. Dr. Garrow said that
it is well known to intelligence agencies all over the world that Obama
is a foreign plant who was placed on the path to the presidency by
ultra-rich Saudi nationals This is why, Garrow said, that all of Obama’s
education records have been permanently sealed.”

We have no
way of knowing if this guy was actually an agent, or if he is just a
nut, but we KNOW beyond any doubt that Valerie Jarrett is 1) Iranian; 2)
the child of Communists; 3) privy to all our secrets; and 4) very
important from a policy making perspective. I have said this before,
and will say it again: there seems no doubt Eric Holder acted on Obama’s
orders in the Fast and Furious operation, and it seems clear that they
KNEW beyond any reasonable doubt that their policy would get innocent
people killed. Given that they were capable of doing it anyway, in the
name of imposing gun control, what AREN’T they capable of? 

Also, can we explain the attempted war with Syria as other than something the Saudis wanted, for their own purposes?  Have you forgotten yet that even NOW Obama is arming people who cut the arms and legs off of little girls?

Please read this: http://www.zimbio.com/Stanley+Ann+Dunham+Soetoro/articles/1QoEw1BV74X/President+Psycho

The formatting is terrible, but this is, I
think, a pretty good guess at the truth. Things I did not know were
that Obama’s grandfather, who raised him from age ten through adulthood,
had severe emotional trauma stemming from finding his mother
dead from suicide, and then being abandoned by his father. I did not
know that his “nanny” in Indonesia was a transvestite. I had not really
thought through the psychological implications of his mother being
named Stanley, after her father. I did know that he is likely a
homosexual (there is a picture in here of him apparently holding hands
with another man, who himself appears gay), that his mother posed nude
for a black Communist photographer who is also likely his real father,
and that most of his actual history has been scrubbed. I will point out
again that beyond any doubt two gay men at his church, one of whom he
was apparently quite close with, were killed “execution style”, to use
the police description, and no motive or suspects were ever uncovered.
If you consider that it is at least possible that there are those around
him willing to commit murder, you have to realize that the shut down is
small potatoes compared to what he is willing to do to enact his
radical agenda, and that his actual mind is a bag of cats.

Actually, I will add that if his mother is the Ann from Davis’ memoir “Sex Rebel Black”–which seems very plausible, particularly since it seems clear beyond debate that it is her in the pornographic images Davis published in sex magazine–then she was having threesomes with a married couple when she was, if memory serves, 14.  We need to keep in mind that that is aberrant behavior TODAY, symptomatic of severe emotional disorders and a pathological need for love that is not present in the home.  In the early 1960’s, before the sexual revolution, before interracial relationships became more common, this was SEVERELY aberrant.  This is the level of emotional disturbance that, given an only slightly different expression, gets people put into psych wards.


And this was Obama’s mother, who abandoned him at the age of ten, more or less for the rest of his life, after which he was raised by her father, himself beset with apparently severe, unprocessed trauma, and who reintroduced Davis back into Obama’s life as a formative influence, and figurative “Big Brother”.


Consider the “shut down” in this context: Obama views Obamacare as just one step, one checkmark on a list that includes confiscating our guns, getting direct control of energy production, and eventually doing away with Congress.


There will be no better time to stop him than now.


Finally, consider that Obama has been in office five years, and even though I have studied his history as well as I can, I did not know some of these things.  What does that say about our press?

I have seen the view expressed that Obama is behaving like a child, throwing a temper tantrum, in shutting down all these parks.  I would submit that this is not the best analogy.

As I noted a week or something ago, an ineluctable feature of the concept of paternalism is the possibility of bad parenting.  What Obama is doing here is acting like a father, when asked why a given rule exists, saying “Because I told you so.  Now go to your room.”  An opportunity for connection, for growth in the relationship, has been lost, due to arrogant narcissism.

Obama is not punishing the Republican Congress for thwarting his will: he is punishing the American PEOPLE, seemingly because he feels betrayed that his ideas even have to endure discussion, much less rejection.  In closing these parks, in taking away from the American people public land that it paid for through taxation, and which requires ZERO cost to keep open, Obama is playing the part of a bad parent who does not feel they need to explain themselves, even when they are acting abusively.  He is acting out, but from an assumed position of moral authority.

Obama has no moral authority.  He has not earned respect.  That is what makes this the behavior, quite literally, of an aspiring totalitarian, who views his subjects as children, to be disposed of as he sees fit.

Obviously, of course, Obama calculates that the craven, complicit media will cover him, and help him blame the Republicans.  But two factors work in the Republicans favor: 1) Obamacare is imploding as I write;  it is a failure, and a manifest one; 2) These park closings affect a lot of people, and they are indefensible.  I am already seeing scattered showers of semi-professional journalism that is almost approaching the top of the hill where they can see actual integrity on the next summit.

I will repeat that I think the longer this lasts, the more likely the Republicans are to turn this to their advantage, particularly if they make CRYSTAL CLEAR to anyone who will listen that the money has been appropriated for any number of programs that Harry Reid simply will not allow to a vote.  This will place Harry Reid in the position of shutting down programs that don’t need to be shut down, purely to protect a program most Americans didn’t want a year ago, and which they are finding out now they REALLY don’t want, because it is a clusterfuck even before the business mandate kicks in.

This thing could really, really sour for the Democrats, really really fast.

I seriously think that if the Republicans play this right–and they almost never do, so it’s hard to get hopes up–but if they don’t screw up, we have a good shot at retaking the Senate in 2014, and putting an actual conservative in the White House in 2016.  

When was the last time you felt true delight?  With this word, I intend a combination of happiness, surprise, and excitement, an engagement with reality that is very pleasurable.

It’s quite rare for me, but I do think that with my continuing Kum Nye practice, my experience of this emotion will increase.  I felt it yesterday, doing a very basic exercise.  It involves sitting, imagining two clocks in front of you, putting your right hand at 9, and your left at 3, then doing three very slow circles, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, while rotating your neck in the same direction.  You do 3, very slowly, sit for a couple minutes, then do 3 in the other direction, and sit for ten minutes or so to feel what happened.  (I describe the exercise, because I suspect I may have readers who think Kum Nye is “nothing but” Vipassana meditation.  It is much more.  It involves not just observing sensations, but actively stimulating them in constantly varying ways.)

While doing the circles, I contacted this extraordinarily rich energy, filled with life and vitality, and it felt like the first time I saw snowflakes.

All of our problems have solutions, including that of ennui.

Any casual student of history should know that the universal defense offered for Nazi atrocities at Nuremburg was “following orders”.  Had there been a reckoning of the even larger number of crimes committed by Communists around the world, it seems quite likely that they, too, would have justified their willing and often enthusiastic participation in crimes against humanity by pointing to the fact that someone higher in the hierarchy told them to do it.

This defense did not work in Nuremburg, by and large.  We all know the basic difference between right and wrong.  We know it is wrong to kill innocent people, wrong to torture them by starvation or electrocution, or horrific living conditions.

But one can say this while also admitting that failure to follow orders in many of these regimes would have meant death or torture.  What one cannot say, in our present era, is that members of our law enforcement community face death or torture for failure to follow unethical orders.  The worst that can happen is they lose their jobs.

I often see people say that a totalitarian state could never be brought about in this country, as the enforcers would rebel.  Would they?  I wonder.

Consider this case.  You have harmless old ladies being tacitly threatened with guns.  You have conversations about what constitutes “recreating” that would be farcical, even comical, were the abuse of power not so blatant.

What is going through these Park Rangers minds?  Do they not understand that they are participants in a political theater that has as a large part of its aim the eradication of a fundamental American freedom, that of choosing how and when we buy health insurance? Are they stupid?  Unprincipled?

At what point do members of our military and LEO communities rebel?  Do they?  ARE THEY NAZIS?  Will they one day commit crimes because someone told them to?  I don’t know, but it is discouraging how many are following orders to do things which are patently wrong, and almost certainly illegal.

Thomas Sowell always has good insights.  I wish he would respond to my Blueprint for a Capitalist Revolution, but I am of course one of thousands that has opinions expressed repeatedly, and most of us are stupid.  I will say that I understand fully that my plan will cause economic chaos for six months or a year.  So, too, will our inevitable default.  There is no conceivable scenario by means of which we are able to pay Social Security and Medicaid at current rates 10 years from now.  We needed massive budget cuts, and increases in FICA taxes years ago.  And in any event, our system is unjust, immoral.  Most of us work to make a very few rich, without their having produced any real goods or services at all.

Be that as it may, this is a good sentence:

If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of
the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four,
that would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things
that require mathematics.

We need to understand that the Democrats are vastly overplaying their hand.  Daily, now, Obamacare supporters are finding out that their premiums are going up DRAMATICALLY.  This is now not in the realm of rhetorical possibility.  It is not Us versus Them, our common sense versus their “experts”.  It is reality.

Of course, my own premiums have roughly tripled since Obamacare passed, but there are many out there who seemingly have held out hope that these Exchanges would fix all that.  They are making it worse.

And we are seeing veterans ARRESTED for visiting public parks, parts which in theory belong to the Demos of the Democrats. We are seeing priests threatened with arrest for performing masses for FREE.  We are seeing Park Service personnel put in OVERTIME to shut down open air monuments to an American history which Obama not only does not own, but most of which he holds in disdain.

These are high explosive rhetorical rounds that can be brought to bear for a full broadside not just against Obama, not just against Democrats, but against the Leftist project outright.  We are at a point where the American people are PISSED off, and all that needs to happen is a clear message–LEADERSHIP–coming from Boehner and senior Republican leaders.

This is not about a budget negotiation.  This is about competing visions of the American future.  Do we want to live in a nation where the government thinks public parks belong to it, that we can only visit them when it deems fit?  Do we want to live in a nation where our leaders can openly lie about the outcome of laws, and get away with it?  Obama said premiums for most would stay the same or go down.  As far as I can tell, this hasn’t happened for ANYONE.  How could it?  More service is being provided. More people are being covered, a great many at taxpayer expense.

Folks, the whole thing is simple: simple message, said by everyone, repeated often, that in our case happens also to have the salutary added benefit of being true.

Here are examples: Obama lied when he said your premiums would stay the same.  He lied when he said you could keep your doctor.  He lied when he said you could keep your plan.

Obamacare will make all our problems WORSE.  This is the simple message.

I was allowing myself to daydream a bit, about what might be possible if the totalitarians fail, and we are able to implement something like what I have been calling a Capitalist Revolution, which would create both prosperity and leisure for all.

I travel a fair amount, and have commented more than once how homogeneous America is becoming.  I would suspect a Best Buys in Fairbanks, Alaska looks a lot like the one in Miami, Florida.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this: economies of scale make things available for purchase by more people.

At the same time, I got to dreaming about the other direction: what if we take the logic of internet niches and reapply them to physical locations?  What if internet virtual communities become actual communities?  What if groups become so insular that they redevelop their own languages, their own argots (more than has already happened virtually)?  What if every city is filled with dozens of unique enclaves that have a passionate interest in X, Y, or Z?  What if there are “family zones”, complete with wonderful playgrounds–complete with monkey bars and merry-go-rounds because we are no longer pussies? (I will note that as a child we played tackle football on asphalt, back
in the era when a nurse was on staff and one or the other of us saw her regularly, but never for anything more serious than a skinned knee; we also took turns seeing if our
friends could throw us off the merry go round, and if we could knock our
partner off the see-saw.  None of this would have been allowed today at
most schools)

Can we not reimagine Home?  Can we not unleash creative potential through freedom to create culture, create belonging, create community spaces in new ways that satisfy our current emotional needs?

There are so many positive possibilities for the future, that it is really sad that so many people are so unimaginative, and so angry, and so self important, that they insist only doom and gloom stand before us, with tyranny a kindness by contrast.

No matter what their rhetoric says, Leftism IN PRINCIPLE levels interesting differences.  It levels curiosity.  It levels everything that makes life worth living.  It is a prison, not least for its most ardent advocates, who simply lack the emotional skill to see how stupid they are, how dull, how insipid, how denuded and empty.