Moderates United

To define sanity would it not be necessary to have a COMPLETELY accurate understanding of reality?

Oi, how far are we from that? I watch people who work jobs they hate for twenty years. I watch people work jobs they hate for money. I watch people prostitute themselves for money. I see many things, most of which do not get commented on here.

How many quiet, submissive people–who make no trouble for anyone–are nuts?

Me, I’ll walk into that darkness with a lot of tests in my past. I have not looked at any veils and wondered helplessly what was behind. I test what can be tested. I may be a fool, but I am not a passive or indifferent fool.

I feel at times like a relic of another age. I decided today not to apologize for poetry. My temperament produces it, even if I don’t carry it on my sleeve, or feel a need to be shouting it from rooftops.

People often don’t know what to do with me, if I show my true colors. I have a vast internal space, filled with prodigious quantities of what I think are interesting events: circuses, tragedies, villains, heroes, wrapped in an alternately luminous and spectral fog, coalescing and dissolving continually. Strange things flow from this mist at times, and I quite often let them. I try to be rational, but very certainly am not ruled at all times by reason. There are higher, more accurate knowings, even though reason is the shovel that moves the most dirt.

Romantically, I don’t think most women know what to do with this. I have met only one woman I can remember who seemed to be able to see me, and not react with confusion and unease. I don’t walk the paths other people do. I am out in the desert, or exploring a foggy bog, or on a boat in the North Sea discovering new islands. Particularly when I am still, I am in constant motion.

That will do for now. There is something I am trying to see–and a decision I am trying to make–but it isn’t coming to me just yet. I will keep moving.

I remember thinking in high school that the people we called leaders simply figured out which way the wind was blowing, then got in front. This is a politician. This is not a leader.

A leader is someone who has a clear vision, a deep and uncompromisable integrity, and the capacity to influence people.

Do you go where the people are, and go in the direction they are going; or do you speak of what you believe, and ask people to come to you?

The first is the talent of the rootless fool, and the other that of the genuinely good person.

In life you must compromise all the time on the outside, but you do not have to compromise on the inside. Memory is the tool of the great.

Is our President a liar or not? Does he occupy the highest office in the land legally, or should he be impeached and removed? The consequences of the answers are large, but the questions themselves are simple enough.

The situation is analogous to this: Obama is driving 15 miles over the speed limit in his convertible. A cop pulls him over and asks for his driver’s license. He hands him a photocopy of a driver’s license, with a face like his, but unclear. The actual Driver’s License number has been whited out.

The cop, understandably, demands more verification. Obama smiles at him, and hands him the phone number of a top DMV official, tells him to call her. He does, and she confirms that Obama is in fact a licensed driver. “Can you tell me his Driver’s License number, so I can run him for warrants and status?” “No”, he is told, “but he is certainly legitimate.”

Obama drives off without asking permission. The cop stands there confused for a few moments. A State official has vouched for him, but the evidence he has provided does not come close to what would be demanded of an average citizen, and he has no way of knowing if that official is simply protecting a political patron in exchange for a favor, or for partisan political reasons. He has no idea if Obama is even licensed to drive, with certainty, since he has no independent way of verifying the claims made.

He goes back to his office to try and pull the original driver’s license and is told by his supervisor he’s nuts, since the evidence is plainly complete. The cop scratches his head, realizes something is going on, finishes his other work, goes home to have a beer, and watches a basketball game.

This is where we are today, except that the next day the cop made another effort, and was told he was nuts once again for his efforts. Is asking of Obama the same thing asked of everyone else nuts? Why? How?

When new people get hired at ANY company, their Driver’s License and usually Social Security card get photocopied for the records. Mine always have been. If a contract–say with the government–included legal language that “natural born birth to be verified prior to employment”, then they would be. I deal with large contracts and large companies, and they leave no detail unaddressed.

This situation is farcical, and in my view anyone who is NOT a “birther” needs to have their heads examined. The task is not to get Obama disqualified; the task is to show how thoroughly and inexcusably our political-media complex screwed up on this fundamental and reasonable request: that Obama provide the same basic elements of identity verification required by relevant laws, in this case proving “natural born” status to a degree acceptable in a neutral and competent court of law.

Unless we believe his paternal grandmother is nuts, then he was probably born in Kenya, his COLB submitted some time in the next year in Hawaii, and a birth announcement released within a month or so of his birth. We can’t even be sure what exact day he was born on. Even if the COLB provided is valid–and if it is why can’t we look at it, and why are identifying marks like serial numbers missing–that still would have been paperwork generated on the basis of believing the word of the parents when they filed for it.

His father spent his life agitating for Communism in Kenya, dying a drunk, broken man when the Kenyan people rejected him; his mother spent her life in Indonesia, working to improve their lives. Neither of his parents seem to have liked America very much. Neither did any of the other adults who raised him until he headed for California.

Our Founders were not stupid, and regardless of their other political differences–and they were sundry, well expressed, and deeply principled–would have been unanimous in their disdain for the mental febrility which enables the reasonable to be trumpeted as lunatic, and common sense to become a sign of extremism.

I think the planning phase of the battle for the future is complete. We have some sense of the scope of the problem, which analysis I have tried to further to the extent of my ability. Genuine Liberals have been losing since Calvin Coolidge, but I think many people are realizing this.

We are still losing. What happened last November was a sort of stopgap. It slowed the slide, but did not stop it, and certainly did not reverse it. If we look at the extent of the cultural damage Leftism has caused in our nation, it is comparable to the national debt, and if we could measure it, the damage done annually to our cultural future is probably analogous to that done by Obama, the Democrats, and the complicit non-Liberal Republicans.

We are not even at the end of the beginning. We have a long road ahead, but difficult times and hard fights make for interesting, useful lives.

A few people have told me in just the last few days how they hated their kids in their teens. This seems sad to me. It’s hard to say what the future holds, but for now I have a very good relationship with them, and thought I might put a few thoughts out there.

Your kids need to know they will be responsible for themselves some day. That you will be gone, and that their sense of freedom and control of their lives will depend on their ability to work. I have been telling mine this since a very early age.

I have been telling them they will fail, and likely fail often, and that this is the way life works. It’s perfectly acceptable, as long as you keep showing up.

I tell them that pain and sadness are a natural part of life, and that they should not be rejected; nor should they be encouraged. Self pity is the worst and heaviest weight that could ever hang on their neck, and to avoid it at all costs.

I tell them it’s OK to break the rules, if they know why the rules exist. If you see a buttom which says “don’t push this”, then don’t push it. If you know that that button used to control something, but doesn’t now, then you know what will happen, and that rule is outdated and no longer useful.

In my view, this helps to teach the idea of consequences. I will periodically ask them why, say, it’s against the rules to run a red light, or to speed. Why is it against the rules to be tardy, or to be talking in class while the teacher is trying to teach? Why can’t you run at swimming pools? We discuss and evaluate different rules. As one example, I have told them I see no problem running red lights late at night, if there is no one around. This is not a safety hazard, and in my view it is not a moral issue. The law and morality are two different things. Segregation was the law. You have to be able to think about these things in higher ways.

My hope is that the explicit permission to break stupid rules will help curb rebelliousness. My oldest actually asked my permission to break a small rule–that prohibiting the chewing of gum in school–to earn detention, since it has never happened before. I said it was fine, but it hasn’t happened yet.

More generally, this line of thought ties into another post I wanted to make. I am still reading–it comes into and out of my hands regularly between other books–Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion”, and in one of the essays he discusses population growth in the Third World (it dates from the 70’s-80’s timeframe).

One point he makes is that in most developing nations, children take care of the parents, so there is ample reason to have a lot of them. There is also ample reason for the parents to make sure the children are raised to be economically independent and successful. Love and nurture is not so important as making them tough and agile.

Let’s be blunt and admit that by and large we raise soft, self indulgent children in our culture. We train them to be DEPENDENT.

I was thinking about this. In large measure, we, too have a system in which the children take care of the old, but they do it through the medium of so-called Social Security and Medicare. Our generation is bearing the burden of the bills of the previous two generations. That’s how the system works. For perhaps two years they tried to save the money, then poof the veil was torn, and the money taken.

But the key difference is that the kids don’t care for the parents: the government does. We pack our old into government-subsidized rest and nursing homes, pay their medical bills, and in almost all cases get them out of our homes. If they have provided for themselves, they get their own homes. If they haven’t, the children and grandchildren pay taxes to the government, who then doles them back out to the parents.

The question I ask myself is: what is the psychological effect of this system on the institution of parenting? Clearly, we have had some astonishingly dumb psychological ideas float through our world, like the primacy of compassion over justice and moral clarity. These have had their predictable effect.

But over and above that, the parents know the children HAVE to take care of them,and will take care of them. This is compelled by the force of law, and will continue until national bankruptcy or massive, necessarily unpleasant (except for my proposal, whose pain should be short) reform.

Do the parents, then, have to care about the success of the children? One sees many, many cases of kids coming back home to stay. If you look at, say, the Chinese, they are stern because their children will one day, in effect, be their parents, and they want them to be equal to the task. They are making an investment that will pay dividends down the road.

We have no such system. There is no system of accountability. I look around me, and it seems to me that where we should have walls, and lines and roofs and bunkers, and a skyline of an intact city, what we have are shimmering heatwaves, ephemeral, solid looking, but impossible to touch. Nothing is real; everything is illusion.

This situation is maddening, and that is why our kids are poking holes in themselves all over their bodies and listening to music that talks about suicide and violence.

Life is logistics. There are emotional and mental logistical tasks, in addition obviously to physical logistics. We are managing these things with stunning stupidity, short-sightedness, and complete failure of courage, in all too many cases.

Our primary need is a sense of meaning, particularly one shared in community. This consists in a way of living which gives us a structured identity, a path to follow, and pleasure in both the large and small things in life. Unhappy societies can be very structured, but if they are unhappy, on balance, they are lacking in qualitative order, which is to say a genuine sense of meaning formation.

My dryer has been working only sporadically lately. I could get it fixed, but I also need the AC in my car fixed, and cash for some projects coming up. So I decided to run some clotheslines in my bedroom. I have to say, I really like it. It makes me feel oldschool.

All of these devices–blenders, and refrigerators, and toasters, and wafflemakers, dryers, dishwashers, clothes washers–have they made our lives THAT much better? As I understand it, many women used to go down to the creek together to wash clothes and talk. Nowadays they throw them in the laundry, and have a highball and smoke while watching the soaps.

I don’t have time to get too far into this, but will simply say that both Capitalism and Liberalism are very equal to the task of critiqueing progress for the sake of progress. No idiotic and disproven ideologies like Marxism need be added to the mix. Our system, done properly, is entirely scalable. We just have to plug the leaks I described here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Propaganda has as its purpose the creation of conditioned reflexes. If I say jump, you say how high. If I say hate, you hate. If I say love, you love. As Jacques Ellul pointed out, broadly speaking it is intended either to get you do something, or accept something. He called the former agitation propaganda, and the latter integration propaganda.

In Communist societies–Internationalistic Fascism–and in Nationalistic Fascist systems, you agitate against the status quo until you get your way; and then you tell everyone how wonderful and perfect and lovingly kind and well tempered, wise, and thoughtful the leaders are.

Our nation, and the world generally, has been exposed to effective propaganda for over a century. Many have been “taught” that wealth is theft, that stable moral systems are anachronistic, that government can play the role of ersatz parent and community, and that “rightists” lie.

Given this last theme, meme, it becomes easy to invoke the conditioned response of hate. The creation of on-demand hatred for any group whose existence is imcompatible with generalized tyranny and oppression of the society by an oligarchic elite is very valuable. For example, the Tea Party instantly, and with no evidence, became synonymous with racism. Racism is bad, therefore they are bad, therefore all correct thinking people will consider them bad, and hate them to the extent they want to consider themselves moral. The more hate they feel, the better they are as people and as group members.

The issue with the birth certificate–which does not seem to exist–is that to my mind it represents the triumph of a political discourse in which up is turned to down, right to wrong, and righteous indignation to vitriolic wickedness.

I used to get carded at bars. I had to provide my birth certificate to get that driver’s license. I have to show it every time I fly somewhere. I have to show it when I get pulled over by a cop. If I want to work for even a mediocre security company, I have to get finger printed, my record checked, references checked. To get hired anywhere you have to provide two forms of identification: normally a drivers license and a social security card.

Asking for verification of someone’s identity is, in short, not rare. And these routine investigations are a fraction of the scrutiny anyone who gets a security clearance faces. Investigators go back and interview your friends in high school–I know people who have gone through this process. They interview family members. They talk to employers. Nowadays, they would scrutinize your posting on the internet and twitter. They look at where you have traveled and when. For very sensitive positions, you get regular polygraphs.

Obama is in charge of all these people, and has access to things no single one of them–or very few of them–has access to in full. He is the head guy. He makes the decisions, in large measure.

Our Founding Fathers had a very simple reason for demanding the President be natural born: they had invested that position with a lot of power–power which has increased exponentially since their time–and it seemed that in a nation our size, it should not be overly challenging to find someone born here of American parents. Plainly, the concern was divided loyalties, like you might find, for example, in someone born in Kenya, with a Kenyan national father (and mother who would soon abandon American permanently).

When you are fighting a war–and we are in a war for our national soul on many levels–you do not win by letting your opponents dictate the time and place of battle. You win by boldness, creativity, and speed. You strike like lightning where they can’t find you or see you. A long, drawn-out battle is usually the sign of incompetence.

Traditional Liberals–Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill Liberals–are right. Our opponents–who can be equally well described as monarchists, since they want a return to an older way of living–are wrong. Why then have Liberals been losing for the better part of a century?

They are cowed by intellectual cupidity of the Leftists, who want to own all minds, all thoughts, all public speech, and who have developed effective tools for doing so.

They are afraid of being called names. They are afraid of public mockery. They believe, in short, that some part of the Leftists project must be worthy, and that these people cannot be as awful as they seem. Reality: they are. They are ruining our country and our world. They bring poverty, hate, discrimation, torture and murder wherever they go. They hoped openly for a civil war in Iraq, just so they could score political points. They wear T-shirts of a man who apparently got sexual excitement from murder (and of course rape), and who wanted to nuke New York and as much of the East Coast as he could. According to plausible accounts, the real reason Krushchev removed the missiles was that he was afraid the nuts running the place would use them, and start a war involving the Soviet Union.

What does the term Birther signify, in reality? Someone who is dissatisfied with a political establishment that is willing to open the vault to our national security apparatus without so much as a phone call to check references. We don’t have the faintest idea who Obama is, and the birth certificate is the clearest symbol of this. WE LITERALLY DON’T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE HE WAS BORN.

Republicans lost the budget battle, in my view. They lost because they were afraid of the political points the Democrats would score. How is it going to get easier in 2012? 2013? Hopefully we can put a Republican in the White House, but the propaganda machine will still be there. They will still be telling us about the starving little old ladies, and ignore how many more starving little old ladies there will be when we file national bankruptcy.

We have to tell the truth, tell it openly, and as fully as we can.

Here is what I think Donald Trump should do: offer a $10 million reward to anyone who can furnish an authenticatable Obama birth certificate. No takers? Try $20 million. $30 million. In my view, it doesnt’ exist, and never has. This does not prove he was born in Kenya, but it certainly means that he has no way of proving he was born here. It seems clear enough what the courts should do with that information. What they will do, of course, one can only guess.

Bottom line: what most Americans don’t realize is that they have been brainwashed into believing Obama was a credible candidate: that he was actually intelligent, actually principled, and actually capable of leading anyone anywhere. He is none of those things, and people have failed to realize it simply because THE MEDIA HAS COVERED FOR HIM.

Once people realize the extent of the cover-up, the extent of the failure in due diligence, they never go back to blind faith again, and that can only work to the benefit of those who are actually telling the truth, and to the detriment of the liars and partisan activists in disguise.

I like to periodically remind any readers I may have that inflation is wealth transfer. It only results in actual price increases when it enters circulation.

Many, many commentators keep saying we are on the verge of hyperinflation. I don’t see it. What people have to grasp is that in Weimar Germany, the government controlled money production. Same in Argentina, and modern Zimbabwe and China.

Our government does not control money production. Theoretically, all excess money they spend is borrowed, so it already existed somewhere.

The hyperinflation of the 1970’s was, in my view, created by the Fed with the intention of getting increased freedom of action. They got it. Prior to 1980 or so, the Open Market Committee could only buy US Treasury bonds, as I understand the matter. After that–in the name of getting the “tools” to control inflation–they got carte blanche, a platinum diamond credit card with no limit that never needs to be paid back.

Bernanke and his cohort vote, say $100 billion in spending. They write a check to JP Morgan for half that, and the other half to Goldman Sachs. These groups had been holding US Treasury notes as a port in an economic storm, but now want to expand globally. They are able to sell the notes at whatever the Fed, which is them, is willing to pay–remember nobody audits these transactions, so there is absolutely no need to fear accusations of collusion–and then take that money and spend it anywhere they want.

We will only get inflation in this country if they choose to spend it here. My guess is they are buying up Japan at the moment, swathes of India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, or whatever else floats their boat. You get this huge, global transfer of wealth, and it is largely invisible. Nobody tracks them. Nobody can track the nexus of interaction between the Fed–which they control–and the member banks.

To be clear, the head honcho at JP Morgan sits–or sat–on the very committee that votes money for his bank. This is patent conflict of interest, but no law prohibits it. This is utterly and completely ludicrous.

When leftists tell us that “Wall Street” controls whatever, say 70% of our national wealth, this is the mechanism by which they do it. I have made this point repeatedly, and will continue to do so. For any new readers I may have, my series on this topic is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Marx liked to call “capitalists” parasites: they were supposed to benefit without effort from the work of the actually laboring class. This was stupid then, and is stupid now: someone had to create the factory, staff it, and run it. Someone has to decide what to produce, and how much, and where to sell it. All of these things have to happen. They have to happen in Socialist economies and in Capitalist economies. The only question is if these problems will be solved competently or incompetently. It would seem hard to find a better means of getting it done right than to personally motivate the people making the decisions, something which is absent in Socialist systems, in which mistakes are not punished, and in which sinecures for the inept are the rule.

Capitalists, as a class, then, provide a needed labor and service. The people who are the actually parasites are those who create money from nothing. By so doing they claim ownership of the products of other peoples labor, but add nothing of value of their own. This is morally wrong, leads to diminished income for most of the people, and needs to stop.

Hopefully this is clear enough. I am the only person saying exactly this, this way, that I know of. Please ponder what I am saying. I have thought this through with as much care as I could, and gone to great pains to expose myself to criticism, which has been slow in coming. The only critiques I’ve heard have been based on complete misunderstandings.

I have said before and will say again that the right and the left need to make common cause on this issue. If they object to the accumulation of great wealth, so do I, to the extent it is the result of unearned income. I have no problem with Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. My problems are with the people you have not heard of, like Jamie Dimmon , who himself is no doubt just a front man for people’s whose names some could guess, but which we really don’t know.

If you think about it, we have no way of knowing with certainty that $100 billion or more of the latest round of money printing didn’t end up in an individual’s pocket. How would we find out? We have no idea how much money was created, or where it went. Again, this situation is patently farcical. No serious economist should fail to see this.

Even though George Jones (“He stopped loving her today”, “These days I barely get by” among others), Hank Williams (“First Fall of Snow and many others) and other country artists give her a run for her money, I have long felt Sugarland’s–Jennifer Nettles’–song Stay is the saddest song I’ve heard. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to cry. I can feel her pain. She is a very open person, and I can feel what she feels. This is why they are as successful as they are. She puts what she has out there.

I don’t know the story behind this–I did some basic research, but nothing exhaustive–but I cannot help but feel that that amount of emotion has to be autobiographical. That kind of pain is shattering. It leaves a mark; but having survived it, one becomes better able to be confident in feeling deeply. To have suffered deeply is to have learned, if you do not reject that pain, if you choose to move beyond it, to get back up off your knees, and decide to live–to move–again: to reject helplessness, and the watery emotions that flow over you like a suffocating river.

Stay was not their first hit, but I cannot help but wonder if it was not the emotional basis for what has become a very first-rate career; if it was not latent and simply unwritten early on. So much that is good flows from conquered despair.

I have said often and will say again that one cannot assume that people that are “lucky” have good “karma”, and those who suffer bad. We are here to learn, in my view, and there are many ways to do that, but the principle one is to learn to transcend the many attachments to ways of feeling and being that cause us such misery.

Here, she has located her entire emotional life in a relationship which is cruel and random. She has lost herself in need and desire and lust. Her pain flows from a chosen “medication”, a chosen behavioral gestalt, that hurts her.

Could we not view ourselves–many of us, at any rate–in many respects as incompetent pharmacists, dispensing lifestyles which cure none of our diseases of mind and emotion?

To see is to make good; to be blind is to be hurt repeatedly, the blows inflicted from a darkness beyond.