Moderates United

Since the Vietnam era, the power of the Executive to commit US ground and other forces to combat has steadily been allowed to increase, despite the clear and principled decision of the framers of our Constitution to place the power to declare war in, and only in, the hands of Congress.

The idea was that wars need to be paid for, and Congress manages the money.  Wars need to be led, and someone needs to be in charge.  But the person in charge, who may want the war, needs to be subordinate to those who are not in charge, but have to pay for it.

With regard to Syria, to the extent we have a national security interest, it is staying OUT of Syria.  Would it not be INTERESTING if one or more of our top generals, if they receive orders to deploy combat troops, tell Obama to his face that they will do so only upon receiving a declaration of war from Congress.

Now, by law, soldiers–including top officers–only have obey lawful orders.  An order to initiate a war without Congressional approval is, therefore, an order which soldiers are not required by law to obey.  Clearly, they could be sacked, but the political value of the exercise, in getting Executive power back in line with the Constitution, would be quite valuable, particularly if they made their case publicly, either directly, or via managed leaks.

Our troops have done enough.  They have suffered enough.  Obama lies about everything, of course, but he campaigned for peace, and it is impossible to say that if Iraq was NOT a justified war, how Syria comes within a hundred miles of meeting the standard.

We are not the errand boys for the Saudis, despite how beautiful our President may find the call of the Muezzin.

One potentially interesting way to approach this issue–which at root is about the right of the American people to ask basic and appropriate questions about leaders, even and perhaps especially when Congress and the courts lack the integrity and balls to do their jobs–would be to circulate a document along the lines of a petition, asking current and former judges if they would accept as evidence in court what Obama has thus far providef. My strong assuption is that virtually none of them would.

We are in an informational war. This is how you create and deploy informational weapons

Lord, grant me a lifetime of interesting problems, and the courage and cunning to solve them in interesting ways.

We have multiple words for doing something wrong–error, mistake, omission, oversight–but how many do we have for doing something right?  Is there a one word opposite of error?  You can’t say “making a correct”.  But the act of doing something correctly–even though we assume this is what will always happen–is in fact the result of mindfulness and care, and is every bit as much an act as screwing up.

My initial proposal was rorre, which is error backwards, but that doesn’t work.  I looked up “to do” in Greek on Google, but since all the results come up in what I think is called Cyrillic script, I can’t read them.  Eu- plus “to do”, or “to make”, would be good.

Having done a lot of coursework in various languages–Chinese, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, all for at least a year (with the exception of French when I got caught sneaking into class at a school where I was not enrolled), I can say that some things are easier to say in some languages than others.  German lends itself to abstraction.  English–with its HUGE number of descriptive adjectives, and overall massive word count–to observation.

Any and all generalizations of that sort are obviously provisional, and very limited in their utility, but that has been my experience.  That is perhaps why I derive such childish pleasure in inventing new words.

Vaguely related, I was thinking about the word “hypothesis” the other day.  Hypo means, “under” at least in words like Hypoglycemia, hypodermic, etc.  Hypothesis then refers to a thesis that is small, or less than a thesis.

Being me, I of course instantly added hyperthesis, for something larger than a thesis.  Here is an example “Richard Dawkins is slavishly attached to the hypertheses of materialism as a final explanation for the nature of reality, and to the use of unmodified Darwinian Natural Selection as the exclusive mechanism of speciation.”

To this I can add “it would hypobolic to call such unfounded and empirically indefensible ideas asinine and unhelpful.”

I deal often with serious things, but I like to play as well.  This is nerd play, yes, but play it is.

In reference to this news story, we need to be clear that, if trained by US, or NATO, the rebels absolutely DO have both access to chemical weapons, and the skill to use them.  Since Syria is claiming the rebels launched the missiles, this would not even be a false flag operation.  I discussed all this at length, roughly in December.

What seems to have happened is that Libyan arms, including chemical weapons, were covertly transported to Turkey, and then to Syria, after weapons training by Western agents. 

Given that at least half of the “rebels” in Syria openly sympathize with Al Queda, and given that Assad is not causing the United States any serious problems otherwise, the only credible reason to support the rebels is to lead to an outcome similar to what happened in Egypt: the installation of an anti-Western, Islamist government.

Given that this outcome very definitely is NOT in our interests, this policy is plainly both treasonous, and morally noxious.

Congress needs to get to the bottom of this.  People are very literally dying because of what Obama seems to be doing, and many more will in the future.  We SHOULD NOT, SHOULD NOT commit ANY troops to this conflict.  It is an abuse of our soldiers, and a waste of our money.

I was reading this link yesterday (which, by the way, I found on aldaily.com, which posts some interesting things from time to time; being an academically focused site, it of course leans left; still.  . ) about a meeting of some of the most determined atheistic proselytizers on the planet–among them Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett–and the whole congeries felt to me like Nazi scientists discussing how to further understanding of German racial superiority, and Jewish inferiority.

The science, they felt, was self evident.  No doubts existed in their minds.  Nor were there any outstanding moral questions: Jews (for Nazis), and humans outright (Dennett, Dawkins, et al) were nothing of intrinsic worth.  Jews were subhuman (Untermenschen) and this lot has discarded the notion of human worth outright:

A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few—but only a
few!—contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate
the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing,
continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and
sometimes even the soul.

Or Francis Crick’s famous:

“ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

What is NOT possible within such a worldview?  Dennett calls us “moist robots”.  Ponder this: do we feel empathy or remorse when we send an old toaster to the dumpster?  Only if we worry about trash.  Does it send our moral sense tingling when an old car is crushed for scrap?  Or an old computer disassembled for scrap parts?

Why would vivisection on humans be wrong on their account?  We are, after all, nothing but machines, and morality an artifact of evolution.  Humans have no innate dignity, no innate rights.

Let me reframe this: they are not Nazis.  Nazis at least respected Germans, and Nordic peoples generally.  They are WORSE than the Nazis, by far.

Quite clearly, what they envision–all being radical leftists–is a society in which all humans but an aristocratic, technocratic elite (among which, of course, they will be priests) will be made equal by some combination of force and deception, and live out their meaningless lives under the benign protection of their betters.

I will note in this regard that even people who, in PRINCIPLE, view all humans as meaningless and temporary assemblages of matter cannot help but view THEMSELVES as somehow different.  This is why they are crusading for this insane idea.

We have known for the better part of 50 years that their “common sense” materialism does not best fit the data.  It is a false idea.  Everything, clearly, is interconnected in ways we can MEASURE.  No “spookiness” is required.

For instance, Ganzfeld experiments have consistently yielded results of such statistical significance that they would EASILY qualify any drug for sale in the United States.  So too have experience on psychokinesis.  (You can read about these things in Dean Radin’s “The Conscious Universe” ; I will note, as well, that you cannot trust sites like CSICOP and SkepDic, for one simple reason: THEY LIE.  They lie like motherfuckers.  They like true pieces of shit who derive sadistic pleasure from the looks they see on peoples faces when they tell them their brother is dead, when he isn’t.  I say this from considerable experience with them.  They only value science which conforms to their emotional needs.)

To put it simply, their view of the world is plainly based on EMPIRICALLY WRONG foundations, and their conclusions simply dreadful, and unnecessarily so.

Much of our academic elite has been overtaken by an evil ideology, which does not best explain the world, and which permits the commission of acts we don’t even want to begin to imagine, but for which Dr. Mengele was only the start).

This designation is familiar enough to students of totalitarianism.  It is a catch-all phrase, which can be used to justify the detention, torture, and murder of substantially anyone who is unfortunate enough to draw the ire of a member of the power elite.

What I think we need to make crystal clear is that the word “terrorist” has been  used as a backdoor way of creating this category in the United States, with the drooling support of intellectual midgets like John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

Terrorist=enemy of the state, whose rights are no longer protected.

The most recent National Defense Authorization Act allowed the President to declare ANYONE, including Americans who have been charged with no crimes, terrorists, and their rights as Americans–Writ of Habeas Corpus, the right to trial by jury, the protection from forced self incrimination, and others–vitiated.  Ended.  Gone. 

Via NDAA, citizen becomes terrorist becomes enemy of the state.  And not unsurprisingly, Obama stated clearly that he feels he has the right to kill Americans, even when they have not yet committed a crime, nor are an imminent threat to do so.  He recanted publicly following Rand Paul’s filibuster, but given horrific crimes like Fast and Furious, and Benghazi can anyone doubt his compliance with the laws of our nation is merely a matter of rhetoric and political convenience?

than our ancestors did.  This popped into my head as I was sitting down to do my practice.

Think about life on the prairie.  All work, virtually no play after a very truncated childhood. No leisure.  No time to ponder life, the universe, and why everyone thinks 42 is funny (I have made and responded to that joke often, but as I look at it, does it not replace humor with a much deeper fear that life truly doesn’t have “meaning”?)

Oscar Wilde pointed out some time ago that most of what we call culture was for most of history created by people liberated from the need for grinding labor as a result of the use of slaves.  Now, if we look, say, at the church, their “slaves” were vassals; but the point is the same.  An elite was able to win the time to be formally creative at levels beyond folk culture (which, it must be said, may in many times and places have been superior to the dominant, “official” culture–bhakti versus brahmanism in India, as an example) because other people did the work for them.  There was a class structure, of the Marx condemned, but without any really piercing moral insights.  He was merely describing, as he saw it, structures no different in principle than a careful dissection of the gills of a fish, or the reproductive system of a flower.

Wilde pointed out that machines could be the new slaves, and used without ethical problems.  As I have described often, we would have achieved general leisure by now, and more or less complete class eradication, had the system of fractional reserve banking–and the central banks which support it–not been empowered by law to steal from the productive without creating anything itself.

What is needed for a better future is a generalized scientific understanding that we are spirits in bodies which act like machines, and that economic prosperity can and should be achieved.  Given the ethical growth that would attend a generalized rejection of atheism, the actual need to consume material goods would reduce considerably.  Given, then, an acceptable economic system, we could both easily satisfy material wants, and do so in the sustainable way that leftists want to impose by darkening the world through authoritarianism.

We can get everything we want, if we are intelligent and principled.

I have begun to practice Kum Nye more seriously, by subscribing to the linked program. I will have much more to say about it in a day or two (some posts I keep in my head for a while; I don’t know why).  I do a 45 minute or so series of exercises once a day, then sit still for 5 minutes three times a day, and simply scan my body and emotions to see what I feel (in addition to a few other things).

[First off, I am going to say, slightly off topic, that this five minute thing is really helping me relax through the day.  I set my phone alarm for 9am, 3pm, and 6pm.  When it goes off, I drop what I’m doing (usually working), and go sit in my car quietly for a timed 5 minutes.  All you do is focus on the body, what you are feeling.  You don’t try to direct it, or organize it in any way.  Just feel i

What I am seeing come up, first, is anger, latent, hidden anger.  What I am seeing come up next is how superficial my emotions have been.  This latter element is bringing into yet more clear relief how superficial our culture has become.  Left and right, agnostic, Christian, atheist, rich, poor: all of us have been infused via movies, music, the internet, and TV with emotional superficiality.

What is pornography, but an attempt to bypass the emotional intimacy that is the most interesting part of our sexual appetite?  Even Casanova said that the most interesting thing was not treating a seduced woman like any other woman, but reveling in her uniqueness, what made her special.

And is pornography–and I would include here all portrayals of sex as an act of possession and conquest– not ubiquitous?  Are we not taking a course culture and making it worse?  I have dreams–de facto nightmares, although it is revulsion, not fear, that I feel–where sex acts become a regular part of primetime programming, where children are exposed to everything virtually from birth; where the ethos of the Simpson’s manifests literally.  We are already largely there.

One sees people who try to be “deep”.  You can see them, buried in Erica Jong, or “Into the Wild”, or Dostoevsky.  They major in Liberal Arts: English, Spanish, Philosophy.  And they wind up having huge nose rings and working in bookstores or restaurants. They have little to say, but they strike a pose. 

I remembered reading some time ago, in “Meetings with Remarkable Men”, who the Turkish (roughly) writer G.I. Gurdjieff, writing in the 1920’s, roughly, thought all modern literature decadent.  The other day I was reading the liner notes for a series of compositions based on his music, and came across this:

Although artists, writers and musicians flocked to him, he was often contemptuous of the “self expression” that characterized Western creativity and sternly warned his followers against “loving art with your emotions”.  For him, most modern art was all surface activity: subjective, uncritical manifestations of the personality, egotism unchecked.

Ancient art, on the other hand, had, in his estimate, an “objective”character that transcended petty likes and dislikes.  It was concerned with the preservation and transmission of knowledge.

Now, this “knowledge” was not how to treat man as a machine, and life as accidental and meaningless.  Modern art–and modern life more generally–is driven by the victory of the “man as machine” story.  How can one but be emotionally superficial, when the cost of depth is despair?  Have we not all seen the effects of modern “liberal” education?  It breeds brooding, angry, self absorbed creatures, whose moral engagement with life is through radically destructive politics.  They are driven to hate, and their politics justifies the hate.  They are not driven to love.

My oldest is currently reading Wuthering Heights.  Where in that novel is what Gurdjieff would call “knowledge” transmitted?  It isn’t.  It is entertainment, not altogether different in principle or effect from “Fifty Shades of Grey”. It is meaningless.  It is just a story.

And that sort of thing qualifies as deep.  I posted some time ago about speaking with someone who thought “life is a joke”, who was very consciously trying to read all the important literary works of the last 200 years or so.  I would argue that most of the work in that period is decadent.  The triumph of Scientism as a CULTURAL phenomenon has led to the mechanisation of the rest.  Modern artists are fish out of water, gasping for air.

And as I say relentlessly, NONE OF THIS IS NECESSARY.  ATHEISM DOES NOT WORK AS THE BEST EXPLANATION OF HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS.  Materialism has been falsified outright, but nobody wants to admit it, within the hallowed halls of our actual churches: the science departments of our major universities.

Spirituality is nothing more or less than becoming more aware, which means being able to first relax, then go deep into places unsuspected on the roller coaster of most lives.

It  has perhaps always been largely so, but countless lives are being wasted even now, due to pervasive stupidity of our cultural and political elites.  So much more is possible.

I counted books that seemed to have sadomasochistic themes by no less than 7 authors at Target the other day, many of whom had 3-4 books.  To be clear, as I understand the matter, these books deal with men who like to tie their women up and stick butt plugs in them, who are emotionally both dangerous and shallow.  The success of 50 Shades of Grey has inspired many imitators, or driven up sales of similar work.

It is difficult sometimes to be sanguine about the future of our culture.  Still, one never knows what may make a difference, and our field of endeavor is our lifespan.