Moderates United

Roughly six months ago, I was driving down the road, and saw a dog weaving in the traffic.  It was dark, and it seemed obvious to me that it was going to get hit.  I stopped in the middle of my lane, put my blinkers on, got out and grabbed it.  Some people across the street saw me, said it was theirs–they had a leash with them–and I handed it over.  I then went on my way, after realizing the dog had been covered in shit, and now so were my arms and shirt.  About 4 blocks later, a girl rear-ended my car.  There was no damage, I got out, yelled at her to pay attention–rightly or wrongly, I accused her of texting–and then went on my way.

Today, I rescued another dog in exactly the same spot, a beagle with a very pleasant disposition.  Later in the day, I saw another rear end collision, ALSO in the same spot I was rear ended.  The driver got out, and yelled at whoever hit him. There did not appear to be any damage.

I have never seen a rear end collision anywhere else I can think of–at least for many years–and certainly not on that road.  I have rescued other dogs, but not from a road.

As I share often indirectly, and occasionally more directly, I do believe there is a structure and order to events that is much deeper than we can conceive, and certainly than we consciously realize.  These are small things, but most of what makes life interesting is small.

And I will add that it is not necessary to understand things to record them.  A common flaw, I think, among many scientists is to nearly consciously avoid all measurements and data points which do not readily fit into a preexisting paradigm.  Information which does not fit the Procrustean bed of their biases is not tortured into submission, usually (although in some cases, like the ClimateGate scandal, it clearly is): it is simply ignored.  Much cleaner that way.  You don’t refute the heretics, you lock them up or out.

I can’t recall if I have mentioned this here, but I get an email every week from an Australian lawyer named Victor Zammit, in which he assembles together various interesting stories and facts to do with the evidence that our minds and bodies are quite severable, and that in fact it is most appropriate to view our bodies as extensions of our spirits, and not the converse, as is commonly believed.

Here he talks about materialization mediums: http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/chapter10.html

Few people realize that there are mediums active today, and have been since the golden age of Spiritualism perhaps a 100 years ago, who can literally bring spirits into bodily form of such substance that they can speak in their own voices, and touch people.  People reunite in physical form with their loved ones, and this happens many times a year around the world (or so it seems credible for me to believe).

At what university are they researching this? None that I know of.  Why would they, when it “can’t” be true?  Why? Because they have curiosity, a concern with a better understanding of the actual human condition, and integrity.  Such people are regrettably rare, nearly absent.

If you want to get the email–which nearly always has something of interest, at least to me–you can enter your email at the top of this link: http://www.victorzammit.com/week20laugh/

He has also assembled a book of evidence. It is free, and contains many, many links to further resources for data gathering.

I have mentioned this before, but I have often had my comments censored, not just on left wing websites like the HuffPo or Daily Cause, but also on allegedly conservative sites like frontpagemag.com (where I have had innocuous, posted remarks removed), Breitbart, and others.  This one was posted on Breitbart, in response to an article praising someone who attacked a “birther”.  It went into moderation, which is normally a bad sign for me, so I’m reposting just to make sure it winds up somewhere.  Here is the link:  http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/03/16/Pollak-Takes-On-MMfA-Birther-Lie-The-Next-Words-Out-Of-Your-Mouth-Should-Be-Im-Sorry?utm_source=BreitbartNews&utm_medium=facebook#comments

This issue is extraordinarily simple, and twofold:  first, the
Constitution requires that Presidents be “natural born”, which was
intended to mean both parents born in the United States.  This means
that Obama, who claims a Kenyan father, was likely not eligible on that
ground alone, and that the Supreme Court or Congress should have
rendered a decision.

Secondly, what he has provided as evidence
for his birth in Hawaii would not stand in a court of law anywhere in
this country.  He couldn’t use it to get a driver’s license, much less
use it for anything more serious.

Members of the military who
enlist, without any special clearance at all, have to provide more
evidence than he has.  We KNOW he was listed as an Indonesian citizen
when he lived there.  What seems clear is that he cannot plausibly
account for a Connecticut Social Security Number.

You people who
claim to value truth do not speak for it, or for me, when you denigrate
those still possessing the courage to describe plain truths in front of
all of our eyes.

On the contrary: you betray a frankly nauseating lack of integrity, and clear signs that leftist propaganda works on you.

Just because watching baby seals get clubbed to death (or, incongruently, polar bears who eat baby seals drowning) makes you cry does not make you a good person.  Emotions, per se, are not positive goods.  They are nothing.  They are of no more intrinsic significance than breathing.  We need them. They serve many positive functions.  But you are not what you feel. You are what you DO.

What is important is action, and quite often the most important action is perception, thinking, seeing.

Consider for just a moment how much productive energy is locked up in dark cages in our world by bad ideas: by “defunct” economists like Keynes; by ideologies like socialism, which decry wealth accumulation, but rely on it for power. 

Just imagine how liberating it would be if we could get accurate information dispersed and understood by the entire world.  The world would bloom instantly.  But we can’t: too many powerful forces of habit, evil. sloth, arrogance, and simple stupidity oppose us.

In large measure, much of our difficulty lies in the emotionally immature position that feelings are perceptions.  They are not, or at least not necessarily.  Virtually all great errors have been accompanied by strong positive feelings. And this can include, of course, an excessive reliance on what you call reason and/or science.

I have a specific, personal reason for posting this, which I am not going to share, per my own habit.  It’s incomplete, but I feel better.

Two data points:

One, a prominent advocate of gun control buys an AR-15 for himself, with high capacity magazines he publicly opposes, and only reverses himself when news gets to the media: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/09/Gabby-Giffords-Husband-Buys-AR-15-Announces-He-s-Not-Keeping-It-After-News-Leaks-Out

[Note: if anyone has any doubt CNN is a propaganda front for the Left, read their treatment of the same story here: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/11/gabby-giffords-husband-buys-assault-weapon/ ]

What clearly happened here is that Mr. Kelly got to thinking: Hmmm.  The AR-15 really IS a good personal defense weapon, and if I’m successful, I won’t be able to get one later, so best get one now.  Now, I KNOW I”M a good person, so this isn’t an issue.  It’s those OTHER people we need to worry about.

Fuck Mark Kelly.  He clearly, literally, beyond any reasonable doubt thinks he is BETTER than most Americans, and thus deserves a different standard of treatment and privilege.

As Christopher Lasch put it, modern “liberals” (his word, which I would not grant) have all the vices of aristocrats and none of the virtues.  Remember, in feudal England, aristocrats had a monopoly on effective weapons as private citizens.  This meant that the ruling elite, and the army they controlled, was always better armed than any private group which might seek to oppose them.  There were no “well regulated” militias that were not the house army of some aristocrat, and when conflict happened, it was invariably between groups of aristocrats, and not between anything like “the people” and their government.

Data Point: Cass Sunstein, who carried the ballot in my head as to who in this world I would most enjoy kicking in the groin.

Here is his review of a book advocating what I am going to call “Soft Nazism”  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/?pagination=false

I’m not going to take the time to address all his errors and conceits, but will address his three principle arguments: 

1) people are sometimes stupid.  Measurably, they make cognitive errors.  This is true. But why does he assume that the same does not apply to him?  Why does he assume that the patina of science conveys, necessarily, a greater understanding?  Marxism purports to be “scientific”.  Freud considered his work “scientific.”  And in the modern world it is easy to trace very large errors, such as the generalized recommendation of a low fat diet, which has made America fat, because it is bad science and has always been bad science; and the conjecture of global warming.  All of the models have plainly been falsified multiple times by actual events.

2) People are short-sighted.  Again, this amounts to the claim that people who think they are superior actually ARE.  He worries about the environment–which is doing quite well–but says NOTHING about the trillion dollar annual budget deficits we are running, how they will bankrupt our nation, and put not just grandma on dog food, but the grand kids too.  HE IS SHORT SIGHTED.  Again, patent stupidity is not a good argument in favor of greater control in the hands of he and his.

3) Finally, when you get to things like smoking, you get to the highest level of idiocy.  People like him want to put everyone on the public dole.  Smoking is bad because the government has to pay for the health costs related to smokers illnesses.  They insist on taking care of people who are not asking them to, then insist on regulating their behavior because now that they control them, their behavior is expensive.  Just a couple weeks ago some Japanese PM was telling old people to “just die”.  Their crime?  Existing at public expense.

If assholes like Cass Sunstein were not trying to “save” smokers, then it would not matter how long they lived.  How is it any of his fucking business, if these people are paying for their own insurance?  It only becomes his business when he takes over the insurance business.

And do we really want to equate the value of lives with economic productivity?  There is, again, no reason to to that if all expenses are being carried in the private sector.  People make their own determinations as to what their lives are worth, and those of those they love. 

But assholes like Sunstein quite literally PUT VALUES ON LIFE.  They’ve done it all across Europe.  If the cost of keeping someone alive is more than their economic value, they are denied life saving, or at least prolonging, treatments. 

This is treating people like cattle.  If economic utility is the principle value, then we ought to cut the poor off from food, because they cost more than they earn for the State. 

But of course, if they did not pretend to be “compassionate”, people like Sunstein would never get to the power positions they yearn so desperately to abuse.

In that order.

It is astonishing to me how so few questions are seemingly being asked about the first Pope to abdicate voluntarily in something like 1,000 years.  He’s not the first to get old in the office.  He’s not the first to see declining health: on the contrary, this is the RULE.

This article by Christopher Hitchens is a must read for anyone claiming to be genuinely curious about how the world works: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/03/the_great_catholic_coverup.html

I was once socially retarded.  I am better now, much better, but I still make mistakes.  Recently I inconvenienced someone as a result of some inaccurate assumptions I had made, and felt bad about it.  Actually, there are two errors I have in mind, the details of which are irrelevant.  Sorry doesn’t really rectify the “imbalance”, but at the same time beating yourself up doesn’t, either.

Psychologically normal people feel guilt when they screw up, but I would argue there are two ways to feel guilt.  The first is to exaggerate it, to really beat yourself up, but not address the underlying psychological cause of the error.  I would suspect that the people most riddled with guilt are the ones most unwilling to delve deeper into how their psyches ACTUALLY work.  Woody Allen?  Likely a sociopath, whose obsession with guilt masks a lack of actual conscience.  He obsessed for a period of time over guilt for the very simple reason that he didn’t actually feel it.

The second approach is to recognize that it is good that our unconscious incents us to do the right thing by providing negative feedback, but the more important task is to grow out of our ways.  In the case I mentioned initially, my default assumption was that I could hitch a ride with someone who was already going my way, and thus might not need a rental car.  This was an invalid assumption, and one based on the idea that I might not need to be self sufficient.

Because I DID need to be self sufficient to avoid inconveniencing someone, what I see now is that self sufficiency in many respects is an act of generosity.  To the extent you do not NEED others, you are in a better position simply to enjoy their company, and value the experiences as it unfolds.

I will have more to say on this topic, but this was on my mind today, and I wanted to let it go.  I have found that processing things makes them go away.  That leaves room for more insights.

Is there any difference between a terrorist who is plotting, we think, to blow up a bridge, and a bank robber who killed two people in a stick-up, and who is evading law enforcement?  Yes, the first is not yet a criminal, but the second is.

How many people did Osama Bin Laden kill?  As far as we know, none.  He was sitting in a cave somewhere.  The actual murderers, at least on the planes, all died.  Bin Laden was COMPLICIT in the murders, as was Ayman al Zawahiri (whose location we knew in the Bush era, as well as Bin Ladens), but he didn’t actually kill anyone we know of directly.

The people we call “terrorists” are not in most cases actual murderers.  They are aspiring murderers.

Yet, what has happened is that post-9/11 (which as I have shown clearly included as-yet-unidentified coconspirators) is that we have created this legally unique category “terrorist”.  And to pursue this legally unique category of person we have perverted our laws in all sorts of ways.

Obama would never have said he had the right to kill, say, a serial killer in a drone strike.  He would never have said he could kill a gangster in a drone strike; or a serial rapist, or bank robber, or wife beater, or pedophile.

But we have been CONDITIONED to view terrorists, and the threat of terrorism, as unique.  OF COURSE, nuclear terrorism, and biological and chemical terrorism are different than ordinary crimes.

But as Rand Paul has pointed out clearly, the question is not if we can act in the face of impending attack.  The question is if the President can kill someone upon whom the label “terrorist” has been hung, when no threat is imminent.

Consider the drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Generally, we use them simply as ways of assassinating leaders who are otherwise rarely seen. It is not different in principle than the use of a sniper to take out an enemy commander in warfare.

What Obama has tacitly done, through what he has not said, is that he thinks that if he can plausibly call someone a terrorist, that person becomes a special sort of criminal, such that even if he or she is an American citizen, the laws of the United States do not apply to them.

Put another way, Obama is using the abuse of language that the “War on Terror” has facilitated to create room to take concrete steps to become a dictator with the power of life and death.

To be clear, a terrorist is not different IN ANY WAY–ANY WAY–from any other sort of criminal.  They are not different than the kid who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary, or Jeffrey Dahmer.  Yes, their desired body count may be higher, but this is not a difference in principle.

Particularly once you consider that SOMEBODY got away with their participation in 9/11 fully undetected, one has to see the logic of “terrorism” as logic intended to facilitate large land grabs.

In that spirit, I will resurrect an old ghost, the “Report from Iron Mountain “

The heavily footnoted report concluded that peace was not in the
interest of a stable society, that even if lasting peace “could be
achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of
society to achieve it.” War was a part of the economy. Therefore, it was
necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy. The
government, the group theorized, would not exist without war, and nation
states existed in order to wage war. War also served a vital function
of diverting collective aggression. They recommended that bodies be
created to emulate the economic functions of war. They also recommended
“blood games” and that the government create alternative foes that would
scare the people with reports of alien life-forms and out-of-control
pollution. Another proposal was the reinstitution of slavery.

Now, nobody wanted to claim this.  No surprise.  Someone who apparently was involved in the writing claimed it was satire.  My questions are these: 1) is it funny?  The answer would appear to be no.; 2) if Lewin was the author, why did he take five years to claim authorship when the book was a bestseller?

The claims of John Kenneth Galbraith are plausible, and if you pay attention, you will note the ideas with regard to government are not that different than those in Orwell’s 1984.

Consider in this spirit the “War on Terror”.  I supported it.  I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I supported spooks helping out in Thailand,and the Phillipines, and Indonesia, and Malaysia and elsewhere.

But where are we?  We are at declaring American citizens can be killed and detained without trial or even a writ of habeas corpus.  We have had NO attacks of consequence on American soil in 11 years, and yet have spent TRILLIONS of dollars.

I’m done.  We need to downsize both the welfare state and the military, and live within our means.  We need further to generate bipartisan UNDERSTANDING of the fundamentally and horrifically inequitable role the Federal Reserve plays in siphoning the productive energies of Americans to the merely parasitic, both directlyh, and more importantly by propping up the foundationally unjust fractional reserve banking system.

“.

Last night I dreamed I was a drunk Indian, passed out on a train bound for I knew not where.  Imagine this feeling they must have felt: everything they knew, everything they loved, gone.  Families split, land gone.  What we did to them was not that different than what the Communists have done to the populations they have conquered the world over.  As an ideology, Communism is much worse than Christianity, but in terms of the practical effects, the reservations were not different in principle, at least for long stretches of time, than concentration camps.

This morning I was meditating, and it popped in to my head than many of us have a form of Stockholm Syndrome.  We KNOW, on some level, that the process of (purportedly) “rationalizing” everything has the effect of diminishing the quality of our lives.  We KNOW that the phrase “there’s a scientific explanation for that”, offered reflexively by the intellectually compulsive, acts to diminish the quality of our experience.

Now, as I have said often, I offer no objection to science and empiricism per se. I believe that the facts of non-local communication between consciousnesses, and the survival of physical death by consciousness can be empirically verified.  These hypotheses can be offered up to experimental test, and pass.

What I mean is that many people see no means of escape from the iron bars of materialism apparently linked to “rationalism”, so they willingly cooperate in their own intellectual and emotional enslavement to a fundamentally pessimistic and flawed creed.  They become apostles of scientism.

And this leads to emotional withering.  The aesthetic contemplation of scientific truth is in no way equal to, much less superior to, the notions that we are all intrinsically connected, that our lives have a purpose beyond simply living and dying, and that, importantly, the quality of our emotional experience is every bit as important as the quality of our rational thought, and scientific accuracy.  Call it Yin and Yang if you like: a WELL LIVED life includes both.

We have lost this sense of wonder rooted in the very soles of our feet, that goes far beyond mere pleasure to PARTICIPATION.  There is no room for it in modern Scientism.  It is “irrational”.

I was accused at one point of being a Romantic. In some ways this is true, but I am not attracted to the great and heroic, at least perhaps the way I once was.  I am attracted to the mundane and true.  I am attracted to belonging, and common culture, and peace.  I am attracted to sufficient wealth that life can be made an art form.

I am attracted to the effective use of reason as a TOOL within a broader world view, one which seeks to reach the level of myth in helpful and nourishing ways, but not the fetishization of “logic”.  [I will note, in that regard, that my model for philosophy is the geometric proof; this remains the case, but as I have said, philosophy is what you do on the way to something else.]

I was going to post this on Facebook, but it keeps growing.  Michael Yon shared a Spiegel article, in German, which I translated in part.  Here is the original: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bericht-von-amnesty-international-entlarvt-foltersystem-im-irak-a-887470.html

My German is not great, but the gist is this: “ten years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, countless men disappear in the jails of Iraq every year.  . .According to Amnesty International, they can be no talk of an improvement in human rights, even though the United States pushed that as a reason for the invasion.”  The abuses include torture of women as well as men.

It’s true: we did.  I did.  As I think about it now, two data points seem important: first, we cared about a nuclear armed Iraq–and plainly at some point Hussein was going to build nukes (he said so when arrested)–because it would destabilize the Middle East, and thus our supply of oil.  Virtually none of the people chanting “no blood for oil” were able to make this connection.  I know this, because I debated them.  They thought the “corporations” were going to take the oil.  Certainly, Halliburton and others did quite well, but at no point did I see any plausible reason to believe they were the CAUSE of the war, but rather simply in the right place at the right time.

The intelligent policy would have been to devote the same energy to the development of energy independence we devoted to this war.  I can see that now. Yes, green jackasses would have opposed this, but they oppose anything that smacks of anything but self destructiveness, which is why James Lovelock, arguably one of the god fathers of the Green Movement, now opposes them, by and large.

Secondly, once you realize that a larger conspiracy was clearly in play, which may well have included Americans, it throws the ENTIRE War on Terror into question.  I will post on this concept of “terrorist” in another post, but consider this: if you are anyone you know wanted to cause terror, and was willing to die or be jailed for it, how hard would it be?  You could just drive a truck into a crowd, pull out a gun and start shooting, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”.  It would not be hard.  Given this, why have there been so few attacks, if this is truly a large problem?  Is someone arguing that the drone strikes in YEMEN are somehow keeping American lives from being lost?

I don’t see it.  What I see is the amorphous threat of “terrorism”, which is so vague that it is portrayed as omnipresent, being used to justify the development of police state apparatus.  If terrorism is possibly everywhere, then Big Brother needs to be everywhere.  We are colluding in the murder of our freedoms as specifically outlined in the Constitution.

Imagine if George Bush has said he thought he had the right to murder Americans in America.  My God, what would have been the reaction from the Left?  Now, I see we need to oppose ANYONE, from any Party, who says he or she has the right to do ANYTHING not granted them by law.

With regard to Iraq, I am not quite willing to say we made a mistake, but certainly that that war distracted us from much more important issues, and that it was likely not the BEST strategy to have pursued.  Imagine if we now were free from the need for foreign oil.  Would that not free up many resources for other productive purposes?

As I see it, we have no good way of preventing Iran from getting a nuke.  The military logistics of anything short of a full scale invasion are, I suspect, insuperable.  We could at best delay them.  Given this, as I said some time ago, we need to grant them the right to have a nuke, and make is crystal clear that if they use, or even credibly signal the use of, nukes, we will fry them, and their civilization will fall back into the Stone Age.  No Mahdi will save them.  In their hearts, they know this, not least because this idiotic belief is not even contained in THEIR OWN TEXTS.  It is a modern invention.