Moderates United

I had a post censored at the Huffington Post, which I will post at the bottom.  More importantly, though, I wanted to discuss what this, to me, symbolizes.  You will note in reading it that the closest I come to being abusive is referring to “lefties”.  Compared to what I am called dozens of times daily when I am actively blogging on the left wing sites, this is extremely mild.

At issue, I’m sure, is the fact that I challenge their world view.  The simple reality is that OF COURSE the demographics of this election show that Democrats have created a de facto coalition that is likely to continue to win them the White House.  They have promised stupid people stuff, and delivered enough of it to get them to the polls.

But this does not affect the TRUTH that we are accruing some $5 trillion in added debt annually, right now.  That is $42,000 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, RIGHT NOW.  Now, Democrats are exultant.  They are happy.  They see themselves winning forever, and are ecstatic that the Republicans might make a turn to the right.  That will get them even more votes.

But it won’t prevent an economic catastrophe.  The truth is the truth.

And to the point, I would submit that totalitarianism STARTS with simple but meaningful lies.  It starts with people like Arianna Huffington–intelligent, educated, capable of rational thought–LYING about the future.  She could put up stories about our debt.  She could deal responsibly with it if she wanted to. 

But she doesn’t want to.  She doesn’t want to hear it.  She wants to flush me down a memory hole.  She wants to make me an unperson.  I’m like the person on The Truman Show shouting out “it’s not read, Truman”, and being grabbed and removed.

Now, OF COURSE this is not how she thinks.  I don’t know how she rationalizes it–likely simply by labeling what I say fabrication without doing even rudimentary investigation–but the reality is that if we get something like 1984–and that appears the way we are headed–it will be because people like her claimed rhetorically that they feared totalitarian rule, that they feared Big Brother, that they wanted what was best for America, but DID THE OPPOSITE. 

Is government getting bigger or smaller?  This is a simple question.  If it is getting bigger, then we are getting closer to Big Brother. 

More importantly: are the LIES getting bigger or smaller?  Will Benghazi be successfully flushed down a memory hole?  Will Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glenn Doherty, and Tyrone Woods be made unpersons?  Will we lie in our public propaganda forums about the true extent of our problems until our only option is a plan like mine, and one which will likely not be proposed?

1984 is an ascent of the demonic.  It is demons ruling the world.  And the first step, the very first one, is when you CHOOSE to lie to yourself.  The cruelist sadist on the face of the planet had at some point to deny to him or herself that she felt emotional pain, and that it mattered.

The reelection of Barack Obama is in many respects symptomatic of the triumph of the lie.  America has told itself its first big lie.  That cannot be good.

I will add that, embarrassingly, I have never read 1984. I am reasonably erudite, so this is a large gap.  I just read the summary this morning, and realized that Orwell, also, concluded that sadism is the dominant element in totalitarianism.  Believe it or not, I had reached my conclusions without familiarity with his work.  I have only read his essay on the English language.

I do wonder sometimes what it would be like to be tortured.  In a totalitarian regime, the only honorable response is to be killed (although in some cases suicide might be acceptable).  Everyone has a breaking point in torture.  I don’t doubt that.  Where it is will vary, but once you exceed it, where it was becomes irrelevant.  And of course mind control techniques will have improved since Orwell’s time.

My feeling is that minds are machines.  They can be broken.  But spirits do not inhere fully in our bodies.  I believe we are duplicates of something much more perfect up above, and as long as in our free will we adhere to good principles, what we are forced to do does no permanent harm.  That is my hope.  It is what we do with our whole being that is wrong that permanently harms us.

And even permanence is an invalid concept.  I posted some time ago a vision, a myth, of what would happen if the Fascists took over the earth, and implemented their sadistic regime.  It would be awful for 100, 200, 1,000, or perhaps 10,000 years.  But it would wane.  The world of the Hunger Games was destined for perhaps 200 years of existence (note: I have no idea what happens in the second two books, but let’s assume there was only one book), because the people of Panem had nothing to live for, other than their cruelty and sybaritic pursuits.  Some other social order would have taken over, that may have been as bad or worse; or better.

But man’s life has been brutish and short for most of our millions of years here, and brutish and short for most of recorded history, in ways related to famines, wars, pestilence, and the like.

It is courage that matters, heart (coeur).  We cannot directly control the future.

But FUCK YOU Arianna.

Speaking
as a principled conservative, I would say our biggest failing in this
election was picking a moderate for President. Still it may work out for the best.  After four more years of
Obama, after four more years of economic decline, substantial and
noticeable alterations in our healthcare system for the worse, rising
insurance premiums, skyrocketing debt (his first four years were just a
warmup), debt downgrades, and misery that is worst among Obama voters,
an actual conservative is either going to look like a tonic, or our
future is national bankruptcy and preventable and foolish economic
devastation.

Lefties are skilled at polling. I noticed that
long ago. Rather than ask “what is right”, they ask “what do our voters
want us to tell them”. If you do this long enough, you get good at it.

But the truth is the truth. Among the truths not told on this website,
and very few other places, our national deficit, if we used the
accounting methods in universal use everywhere else, including State and
Local governments, is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR. We
borrowed outright 1.2 trillion (again, a warmup), but we accrued
liabilities to Social Security and Medicare for which we have NO funding
reserved to the tune of another $4 trillion.

I literally could
not look myself in the mirror if my politics focused on winning
elections, and not on sober and coherent analysis of our actual
problems, and on a sense of responsible custodianship of this once-great
nation for my children.

I say let them expire.  The amount of money we are talking about, the amount of drag on the economy, is insignificant next to the twin facts of the pending implementation of Obamacare and the simply fact that Obama is President.  We must accept that things have to get much worse before they can get better, and we have to ensure that no Republican is standing anywhere close to the shitpot when it finally tips over.  There needs to be a crowd of Democrats, proclaiming their wisdom, and how they “just don’t understand it”.

We need to be clear: Obama is buying votes, and he is getting his money’s worth.  I saw a black couple in the grocery store tonight, in a fine mood, locating all the WIC products. They obviously voted for Obama, and will vote for his designated “continuer of the gravy train”.  But they looked to me like working poor.  Long term unemployed have a different look.  When these two lose their jobs–and people at the lowest level are usually the first to suffer–and the Bush tax cuts are ancient history, Obama is President and the Republicans haven’t done jack shit in two years, MAYBE, just MAYBE, they will listen to someone saying “taxes don’t create jobs in the private sector, they TAKE them.”

Self evidently, we need an informational, a truth telling, educational offensive to put this idea out there. It is being effectively disrupted now, but as I said suffering has a way of opening eyes, and Obama is not in FDR’s position.  Bush was no Hoover.  Unemployment under Bush was under 5% for virtually all of his time in office, whereas Hoover got his crash in his first year, leaving three years of increasing difficulty easy to blame on him, even though he did many of the same things FDR did, and started the New Deal in all but name.

We also need to get Obama on record, telling us what the “fair share” of the rich is.  He is slippery and dishonest, but if I were Boehner I would tell him “look, we’ve got the votes, but I have people asking basic questions.  Answer them and this is done.” 

We need smart people in the drivers seat.  I don’t think we have them, but maybe they will emerge over the next while.

Few thoughts. I think some Aikido is in order for the near and mid-term future.  Oppose nothing, but redirect it.

Perceiving the new is much like being in a completely dark room, where you can touch the wall, but in which you have gone around the perimeter many times, and now realize you must venture away from the relative clarity of having SOMETHING to orient you, into the unknown.  I have done this often, and as I have said several times, what I do is go in circles in this room, looking for new clues. 

That is my long way of saying I have said what I am about to say many times, but think this way is slightly different.

Morality, as a system for decision making, is inherently an individual attribute.  Even when diluted, as in committees, each individual must decide to consent to or reject any given proposal.

A coherent moral philosophy is one which, deployed generally, will work INEVITABLY to build a more prosperous, more harmonious society.  It will support a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

The nature of Socialism is that moral activity consists in working to gain the power to force people other than you to relinquish what they have.  It breaks society into three components: producers, those who produce government, and those who consume the output of both.  None of these groups are improved morally by their work. 

Producers reliably resent the efforts of people to take from them the fruit of their labor.  There was a time when landed nobility was born into wealth that had been stolen a long time ago from someone else.  That time has long passed.  In our own nation, the OVERWHELMING bulk of millionaires are self made, and could not have succeeded without creating many jobs, and the ability of many families to pay their bills.

Those who want the stuff of others are taught to feel resentment at their superior success and position, to view private property as negotiable, to view government as the vehicle to personal economic advancement, to view hard work as ignoble and unnecessary and to feel strongly that they are ENTITLED, regardless of the content of their characters, to a certain standard of living, which is not something that entered any traditional tribal society ever in human history.  Old people and the sick did less, but able bodied people were out hunting, out on the farm, or making things, and who possessed all the self respect that came with their usefulness.

Finally, the socialists themselves reliably develop a sense of moral superiority that comes from the aggressiveness with which they are willing to take the stuff of the first group and give it to the second.  Necessarily, this involves the creation of a social gap between themselves and the other two groups.  They think they are better than BOTH.  This leads to arrogance, and it leads to HUGE decreases in actual empathy.  Their job is to give stuff to the poor, not to understand them.

I put forward above a list of moral virtues which would by definition be built by any useful moral philosophy.  To reiterate, that list (obviously partial) is a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

Without exception, Socialism damages all of these.

As I ponder this, it seems to me that my whale dream, and synchronicities of a few weeks ago, was telling me something different than what I thought.  What it was telling me is that NO amount of factual dissemination will make a substantial dent in the willed ignorance with which we are increasingly surrounded.  People have grown to WANT to be lied to. I  see this in debates on the internet.  You can present the most closely reasoned, OBVIOUS facts (example: we can’t increase our national debt $5 trillion a year forever, which is what we are doing), and you get just silly responses, like “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.  And until we face a generalized collapse, that will likely remain the case.

What it was telling me is that I have to focus on the deep, on the cultural, on living in very large, open spaces.  We can’t go backwards.  We can’t recreate the 1950’s (which we look to as the last relatively innocent period of our culture, but which of course was also filled with fears of nuclear war, Sputnik, the mass abuse of children by Catholic priests and others, and segregation, among other things).  We can’t recreate the honor and civility that characterized our culture at its best in the preceding years. We can’t forget that we fought a Civil War, in which 20-30 million lives were ruined permanently.

Death and destruction have been the lot of humanity for most of recorded history.  Most of history consists, in fact, in wars: in wars, with all the unthinkable things which attend war.  People assume the worst happens on the battlefield, and in some respects that is true, but so much more follows.  I was just reading the other day about how the Soviets raped millions of women when they reconquered Eastern Europe.  Such people are never put on trial.  They finish their service, then go home to their wives and children, and not infrequently abuse them too.

What we need are things that have never been tried before.  My Goodness Movement is a stab in that direction, but it needs a lot of work.  The only off-the-shelf available movement forward that I see currently is Spiritualism.  There are mediums out there, today, who can manifest dead spirits such that they can talk and even touch people, or so it is reported.  People like David Thompson and Kai Mugge and others, can reportedly literally make your grandfather come back and talk to you.  They are, of course, untested by scientists because most scientists are idiots.

If I have not mentioned his site before, I would encourage folks to visit the website of Victor Zammit: http://www.victorzammit.com/

If one were to SERIOUSLY want to evaluate the evidence of the after-life, he is a very good initial resource.  Of course, the people who most need to do so are least likely to do so.  They have perfected the fear of the unknown to such an extent that they think they are open-minded and scientific.  I see no fundamental difference between fundamentalist materialists and socialists who want to destroy the world to perfect it.  It is the same breed of mania.

In the end, though, we must come to a generalized understanding of the spiritual nature of our world.  Once we do that, all the pieces fall into place.  My work will be long term, likely difficult, and quite possibly unsuccessful.  I saw a good quote the other day, though: falling down is life; getting back up is living.

Ultimately, I think much of the darkness in our world begins with the moral pessimism that comes with assuming we are machines whose apparent consciousness is a lie.  Our “life” is a lie.

You can attack the senselessness that comes with internalizing this truth by, as one example, focusing on a supposed “Singularity” in which our machinery is perfected.  You can pretend that “society” exists, even if individuals don’t.  But none of these are good solutions.  They lead to unnecessary restrictions of spirit.

It occurred to me the other day that horror movies are likely tonics for many people.  Once you get used to the basic idea of people being tied down and tortured, having their arms ripped off, of monsters in the dark, I think people MUST get a taste for it, since there are now thousands and thousands of titles, when once–25 years ago–movies like Halloween were aberrational.  There were very few of them, at least as far as I could tell. They certainly were not culturally prominent in the way they are now.

I think people learn to manage anxiety by feeding it.  I think these sorts of movies become addictive, because it is how you calm yourself down.

And I think the blackness inherent in all these movies helps people forget what they are forgetting.  We are in the process of killing everything good about America, and these movies act to cover up that fact.

Barack Obama’s motto is “Backward” (his cipher is quite simple: just invert everything he says to get the truth): back to the bad old days of the commissars, economic malaise, and pervasive despair.  So be it.  It is up to those still alive to move forward, and work to build something new, a new home, where people can be enticed to live.  There is no easy or quick way to do this, but it is the only game in town worth playing.

Political Correctness is servility.  It is granting in principle and practice that you do not have the right to your own perceptions and following opinions.  You accept limits in both speech and behavior that you do not determine.

We are a horribly uninteresting society, in many ways.  We lack genuine eccentrics.  That is why people feel the need to dress in strange and ridiculous ways.  They lack any means of differentiating themselves on the inside, so they do it on the outside.

The problems were likely the result of garden variety incompetence, of excessively ambitious aims and too little time, but the possibility must be considered of sabotage, of infiltration of the Romney campaign by leftist agents.  None of the PIN’s worked.  Did somebody upload the wrong file on purpose?  Were computer hackers at work, having been granted system access by an insider?

I had a dream some time ago of leftists going through Navy SEAL training, in the long term pursuit of winning leadership roles, and the following possibility of supporting leftist aims in taking over America. What I think people fail to grasp is that once you have undergone the decapitation ceremony, you are cursed to conformity.  You can do nothing else.  It is your life.  This is why Whittaker Chambers–a name far too few people know–put his money in the long term on the Communists.

As Sergei Nechaev–perhaps the original Nihilist (it is a Russian term)–put it:

 The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no
business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.
Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the
single passion for revolution.

They have not quit.  I see no reason to believe this.  They have nothing else.  If you go study philosophy at virtually any university, if you are not a devout Christian, Jew or the like, you will come out a leftist (if you are not an Objectivist).  That is the virtually invariant result: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Our shared Meaning System has been systematically broken by both stupid and malignant people. This has consequences.

One of our principle tasks on Earth, I believe, now, is to separate our emotions from our external circumstances.  This requires the growth of spiritual capacity to send out, rather than receive in.  I have been given an excellent reason and opportunity to practice this.

As far as the election, I would like to share some further thoughts.  Obama was voted for overwhelmingly in the ghettos.  The ghettos will be the places hardest and first hit by the coming economic downturn, and no amount of unfunded welfare spending will do much to seriously alleviate the suffering. One could argue that this is unfair.   One could argue that these people were tricked and lied to, and that why wouldn’t you vote for the guy who gave you a free telephone?

I would submit the following: they have been promised the equivalent of free telephones in two year cycles for the last 40 years, and have not learned.  Since the War on Poverty began, things in aggregate have changed little, and arguably changed for the worse.  Culturally, two parent homes are virtually unknown, and this creates all sorts of self perpetuating social pathologies, which include crime, but also lack of self sufficiency and sense of personal responsibility, which in turn create a sense of helplessness, anger, and sadness.

The situation is like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football.  Every two years they are promised the world, and every two years they are given virtually nothing.  You can buy a phone working for minimum wage within a couple of weeks.  But their greed, their desire to get something for nothing, has trumped over a VERY long period of time common sense and personal integrity.  As JJ Cale put it “you’d be surprised at the friends you can buy with small change.”

Put simply, they should know better than to trust people like Barack Obama. Obama is not even black.  I have never thought of him as black.  He is a white academic intellectual leftist. He just has a better disguise than most.  The wearing of masks is, of necessity, a leftist specialty, but he has done it better than most.

We will just have to see what happens.  I am done worrying.  I am going to dedicate my life to hard work, and hope for the best.

I believe in reincarnation.  I believe that plentiful evidence supports it, although I have no inkling what or who I may have been before, and really don’t care.  I would submit that in most lives, no major decision points are reached.  You are born, work, reproduce, work more, age, then die.  Your spiritual standing likely improves a bit, but not much in most lifetimes.

Occasionally, though, you live in a time where decisions have to be made.  You have to choose up or down, and the consequence of choosing “not up” is not the same as not having been asked to choose.  When you encounter light, you either embrace it or reject it.  There is no middle ground.  To be shown the path forward is simultaneously to see its opposite.

What you are asked to do, you either do, or reject and resent.  The universe is fair, but sometimes it asks something of you.  Sometimes you need to be determined to do the right thing, instead of just floating along, neither good nor bad, neither decisive nor indecisive, neither helping much nor hurting much.

This is one of those times.  You can’t not make a decision.  If you have chosen to reject knowledge, you have rejected truth, and you have rejected light.  I say this not as a dogmatic anything.  I say this not as the adherent of any religion. I don’t even say this in a spirit of hate, although anger is certainly close to the surface for me because of all the preventable suffering I see coming.

I say this because I believe it is true, and truth is something that should be shared.

This one looks relatively straightforward.  Obama wanted to get through the election, and he did.  Now he is housecleaning, to avoid having someone FORCED to resign under his tenure, which would look bad politically.  What we can infer, I think reliably, from the timing, is that not only does Obama have an enemies list, but he is also actively gathering dirty little secrets he can use to blackmail people.  These are pretty basic Communist tactics.

What I would submit, though, is that IT DOES NOT MATTER that Hillary and Petraeus resigned. They still need to be forced to appear before Congress to answer questions.  Their jobs are no longer on the line, but four men are still dead, and we still need to answer basic questions about our foreign policy, and we need to know what Obama knew and when.

Hopefully, Congress, Obama does not have dirt on all of you, and hopefully you still have a pair.  Do your fucking job.

I drink too much, usually Very Old Barton 100 Proof.  One thing I like about it is the quality is very uneven. Occasionally it is magnificent.  I drink because knowing that I can soothe the pain of emotional and perceptual risk taking helps me take those plunges daily.

Tonight, though, I would like to offer you a drink from a bottle at the very back of my shelf, one covered with dusts and cobwebs from lack of use.  That bottle contains hope.

Hope is dangerous, of course.  Frustrated hope is an easy cause of self pity, and anger at the world.  I would submit, though, that hope is a dish best served cold (unlike revenge: served cold it is a crime of calculation and hate, rather than passion).  You can think about the world, and see reasons things could work out, without passionately attaching yourself to them.

What I will submit to you are some observations which permit one, if so inclined, to view the reelection of Obama as a blessing.

First, we need to understand Romney was not going to balance the budget.  Paul Ryan, who is considered by all far to the right of Romney, doesn’t do so until 2040 in his plan, which has already been labeled “right wing social engineering” by Newt Gingrich, and of course much worse by the Left.

Romney was VERY unlikely to have been able to repeal Obamacare with a Democrat-controlled Senate, but he would have been demonized for the effort.  He would have been accused of being at war with the poor, and even the middle class.  And people would have been stupid enough to believe these attacks.

Had Romney been elected, companies would have started hiring immediately.  Because Obama was reelected, they have started laying off.  We consider the first outcome good, and the second bad, but is this really the case?  Superficially, of course, having a lower unemployment rate is better than having a higher rate.

But the reality is that the largest challenge we face, that of staying solvent in an ocean of accelerating debt accumulation, would not have been affected in any meaningful way by Romney’s election.  On the surface things would have been better.  People like me would have been happy, and felt better about things.

In the long run, though, it would have delayed the reckoning that MUST happen if we are to have a future.  What I would submit is that whatever gets us to national awareness of the crisis we ALL face–those on food stamps, and those living in mansions on the hill–is more desirable. I think we can get to that reckoning faster under Obama, and a lot of Democrats in Congress.

What we will see over the next year is a gradual decline in our standard of living.  I don’t think banks will be lending enough to turn Bernanke’s QE3 to actual inflation, but many companies will be battening down the hatches in the knowledge that Obamacare is coming, along with taxes, and regulations nobody understands, and which will be implemented by bureaucrats in fully unpredictable ways, and likely in uneven ways.  This will lead to steady increases in unemployment.

In the last year we have seen growth since companies wanted to grow, and were waiting because they feared Obama, but finally just said “screw it”, and started hiring.  Those companies will likely gradually shed many, but likely not all, of those jobs.

In 2016, after 2 years of more or less full implementation of Obamacare, insurance rates will continue to be very high, and much higher than they were before the law was passed, a burden that will be felt most by the middle class.  Tax rates will be much higher too; and yet, borrowing will be astronomical.  We may borrow $3 trillion ON the books to fund the increases in Medicaid and the subsidies to be paid for those not on Medicaid.

All of the misery that this will cause cannot be blamed on Republicans.  In this election, many people believed Obama, that he had credibility when it came to job creation, that Romney would favor the rich, that Obama was the champion of the middle class, etc.  All of these were lies.

If Republicans are intelligent, they will begin creating advertising campaigns NOW to start putting the idea out there that you can’t borrow your way to prosperity.  You can’t borrow forever and not wind up in disaster.  You can’t get enough money out of the rich to fund EVERYTHING.  I actually think cartoons targeted at kids would be useful, and very simple presentations for adults.

The ONLY winning strategy, the ONLY way out of this without going the Argentina route, is to develop generalized public awareness of our problems.  People pay attention when they are hurting, not when they are comfortable.  Obviously, things would have been better if they had paid attention before this unnecessary decline in our economic well-being, but they didn’t, and they didn’t because of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign by the Left.  The Right–and I just realized that I should not call this group “Republicans” any more–needs to create an informational campaign that is far reaching.  We should be visiting schools and talking with teachers to help them understand our world view, and the actual problems our nation faces.  EVERYONE faces the same problems: it is just that some are facing them honestly, and some will be blind-sided because of their chosen ignorance.

We should be doing outreach to black leaders, and helping them understand how Republican ideas on job creation–lower taxes, reduced regulation, and in my view programs facilitated by the government like Kiva, in which the suburban middle class donates money to urban business start-ups, in exchange for tax relief, possibly even in the form of credits–would help their communities more than Democrat ideas.

Fear is darkness.  It is a useful, even necessary emotion, but you can’t live that way.  We must always tell ourselves the truth, but there is a point where you just have to say “sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.”

Practically, there is little most of us can do over the next years.  Unemployment will go up.  We will have to deal with that.  Our insurance rates will go up.  We will have to deal with that.  Healthcare will start to get worse.  What took one week will take three weeks.  But they have survived not too badly in  Canada and elsewhere.  It is not as good, and this solution will not truly correct any of the defects in the system, but we will have to deal with it.

In the end, a bit of inconvenience and pain is, as often as not, a useful tonic for all sorts of ailments, notably self pity.  What will happen need not have happened, but it will.

And in the end, we can hope–I truly believe this–that America might wake up. In the story I just posted, he complained about the inability of the cashier to make change in her head.  But the truth is that that same cashier, if he had dropped his wallet on the way out, probably would have run after him to return it.  If he had a flat tire, she would have called AAA for him.

And in general the only hate crimes tolerated any more are leftist attacks on conservatives, and those are mainly verbal.

We have Islamists to fear, of course, and many other things.  But “a life lived in fear is a life half lived.”

This is our chance to become braver, more cheerful, more positive.

Have at it.