Brother's monologue, the Lazarus Man, cont'd.

Brother paused, the rheumy, bruisy whites of his eyes showing a faint yellow, the yellow of Catholic-school bricks.  Behind those eyes were the Medusa's hair in torment.

"They only had that night to put the fix on. Peter and Judas, He chose well - two of the bravest men in history. Peter took the physical torment - and Judas took the spiritual. Judas fingered him, and the Romans didn't know any better - and it gave the rest of them time to get away. Peter got sifted back into the story, himself denying the Lord three times - that was added in, to cover Peter's absence in the Big Fix."

"And Judas? He hanged himself on the tree, sure. And his last words - My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? were immortalized as Jesus's, in tribute to Judas's bravery. But first, he divided his possessions among the disciples."

A teacher in the back of the lounge was quietly sobbing. Brother paused, surveying the absolute quiet with attentive scrutiny, as though testing a machete's blade with his thumb; and then continued.

"His possessions. His notes. Judas - he was Jesus's biographer. He was "Q." All the Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels, were by the hand of Judas, divided among the disciples, copies - sent out, that survived, even survived the great massacre of The Twelve. They just barely survived, through the narrow escape of a very few minor followers, survived by luck and a lot of running.."

"Think! Why were the Four Gospels written by nobodies? Not even members of the Twelve, but lesser disciples? For they were the ones during The Scattering, each writing as though he were the sole survivor, to cover up The Greatest Betrayal Ever. They all only differ in the ending - how much was added after the Night of the Desertion."

"Completed in partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, Gregorian Academy, the Vatican. That's what independent thought, and education gets you - that's what you want? It's best when the true intellect of mankind is few and far between. That, I am proud to say - that was my finest hour, when I submitted nine years of work, and was expelled. From there to here, is the rest of the path. And I am proud to bear the title of Student."

He ruffled his paper, went back to the NHL box scores as though he'd just recounted the Flyers game.

A Review of the Movie, "Lazarus Man"

The award-winning movie "Lazarus Man," starring Barack Obama, typified the American mindset of the early century.

One of the pivotal scenes of the movie is described below.

---

Teacher's Lounge. Barack Obama is an idealistic young history teacher for Eighth Grade students. He is bewildered by the apathy of the teaching staff, and the absolute, immobile stupidity of the classes. He is speaking with one of the senior teachers.

O>I don't get it. You sit there and read the paper during every class, and give them nothing but thinly-veiled contempt - let them drift in and out of the room, talk, fight. You make no pretense to teach them. Why do they hate me more than they hate you?

It's because you suck as a shepherd, Obama. You bring the sheep out in the meadow, and torture them for your own selfish entertainment. At least get under a tree, get drunk and fall asleep. That's what good shepherds have done through the ages.

O>But I want to DO something - to make a DIFFERENCE in their lives.

Obama - you have come face to face with the soul of your species, and you don't like it. You don't like reality. THEY are reality. All a sheep really cares about is being next to the ass-hole of the nearest sheep. Anything else makes them scared.

O>But I was NOTHING like them when I was in school!

That's because you are a mistake, a genetic aberration. All of this shit about fresh-faced, eager young students looking for knowledge - those are the occasional and rare, the little blips that the race sends out every once in a while, to ask a question. The question is - "ARE WE INTELLIGENT BEINGS?" The answer is "NO." And you won't face reality for long enough to understand that. So you torture the sheep.

Every class has one or two of them, like you, every few years. The other students usually beat the shit out of them, for a good reason. They are dangerous to the herd. They might grow up and be like YOU.

O>I can't stand it. So we're supposed to sit back and produce ANOTHER generation that grows up, becomes miserable, gets drunk, lives for nothing, beats their wives and kids? Like we don't care?

As opposed to what, Barama? You have just described the character of our species - it's no difference than pointing out that sheep live in herds, bees in hives, that lions eat herbivores. That's what we do, by and large. It's the caring part - that's an alien idea, as foreign as though it came from Mars. Ask your class. Go ahead, you got balls? Ask them how to be a better teacher. They'll tell you to read the paper and leave them the fuck alone.

---

All you really are, Barama, is a spore of a bad idea, a terrible idea - that stuff that we teach right out of Civics 101, that Tom Jefferson horseshit. It's a lot better that they associate him with President's Day Sales Events, and Mount Rushmore, than the crap that you're peddling, that you have in your head.

You serve a useful function to society. You encapsulate those with the potential for bad ideas - your fellow fresh-faced idealists - and protect the herd from them. Think of your "greatest inspiration," your favorite teacher. He or she did society a favor. Look what happened to you. Look where YOU wound up with, you with your best ideas.

O>But I'm here to teach! To give somebody a chance!!

Whatever got you here - it protected the herd. You didn't go to a place where you could cause the greatest damage. People like Lenin and Hitler - they caused some serious damage to the herd. Not you. Thank God.

Every time, some fucker with a vision, some idealistic-minded asshole, gets up there - and usually he's psychopathic enough to snare a shitload of people in his delusion - a Believer. Every time some fucker like you gets into a dangerous position, the species takes a hit.

---

That's why Jesus walked on the deal. Took a dive. Willingly walked into the Wheel of Karma - more like a sawblade.

You like history, Obama? Here's this for you. All the contemporary Gospel literature was about the return of the Line of David. Jesus came down, and had the choice - go ahead with the plan, or face the reality of what He really created. He took the Dive. He walked on us. The whole rest of Christian literature is all about papering over that fact. He dumped us.

"All the New Jerusalem stuff? Not here, not on this planet, not with this mis-begotten species.  It's all right there in the Bible, see?  They had to do a little creative revision to get the story out that Jesus still loves us.  They spun the Temptation by the Devil, and the story of the Three Tabernacles, out of the Gethsemane story.  That's when he walked.  The night before.  It's all one story.  He thought about becoming the New David for all of us - and he said, 'fuck it.'"

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Doug French on the Bubble

It's hard to be blindingly cynical every day.  Read Doug French on the Bubble Economy in Mises (see also You Can't Print Prosperity for yux) - he'll carry the water today.

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PS: How long do we have? Bill Sardi says until Tuesday. That's the big melt-down for him. I'm still going for October 17th.

Sardi, French, FDIC

On Animadversion

An excerpt from a letter.

Thank you again for a wonderful essay, "Is There a Natural Anti-Liberty Mindset?" You draw near enough to a certain human skill which intrigues me deeply, that I thought I should share my observations on this common interest with you.

There is a certain capacity of the human mind, a fundamental skill of civilized survival, which I call "animadversion." It's a Latin word which has not been brought into English inaccurately; we use it as a pale shadow of its original meaning. It is the facility of drawing one's attention to an issue of interest for further scrutiny under the full energy of our reason, and all our intellectual skill. This psychological process is a necessary precursor of the application of reason to a particular item worth study.

We hint at it in concepts such as "distraction" and "inattention" and "concentration." I believe that it is a skill which is taught in all fine schools and by all fine teachers; and is generally not refined in American society, but perhaps indeed suppressed.

The principle comprises the finding of something worthy of the application of reason and common sense, and the perseverate ability to see it through until reason is exhausted, and the desired conclusion is discovered.

Ayn Rand was a dogged and fierce advocate of this process, and imbued it with a moral necessity in Atlas Shrugged and in other places. She ties it closely with the moral elements necessary seen in good character.

You refer to a thing called an "anti-liberty mindset," and consider whether it is a manner of thinking which is innate or learned. I would suggest that such things derive from a simple psychological process that is the enemy of animadversion; that is, the ability to halt the process of rational thought upon encountering a certain signal, like a "Stop Command" of a Turing calculating machine - Halt and End, do not proceed in thinking, you are done.

This facility is regrettably an element of many dogmas, and is eagerly trained in American society. If we are careless in a certain matter, is someone likely to be harmed? There are areas in which we permit ourselves persistence of attention, such that we might come to a more clear conclusion, and others in which we stop and go no further. It nears the concept of "denial," but is not exactly so.

Sometimes this occurs from simple intellectual flabbiness, the weakness and inexperience in the skill of following a thought through independently, regardless of consequences or approbation. Sometimes we see it in the other extreme, which is the conscious choice to distract the attention to other matters at hand.

There is something sluttish about this passivity, to be intellectually defiled and deviated with the feeblest of consent, the rational equivalent of "boredom sex."  CS Lewis made great use of this characteristic of humans in "The Screwtape Letters," which are fictional examples of correspondence between devils, and using it as a manner of frustrating moral growth. A great, but insanely depressing read.

Our culture has refined intellectual passivity to the point that many people seek intellectual thralldom, disguised as "relief from stress," i.e. the stress of being intellectually alive. We get high, we gamble, we watch the Idiot Box or the InterSewer.  We substitute intellectually vacant memes, mantras which we do not even have the character of will to repeat ourselves, preferring to receive them on the broadcast media.

Death Panels, Chandra Levy, Miss California, Tea Parties, Global Warming. These are all things which many people in our culture simply receive as pre-packaged thought bullets to be attended to. We are even encouraged to take these things up and arrive at the pre-directed conclusion which is expected of us, having become incredibly skilled in media nuance.

Michael Vick has a job with the Eagles - good or bad? We search our database, struggling with connotations and nuance. I have a dog, and like dogs, therefore I am supposed to say "BAD!" in an energetic and outraged fashion. Angelina Jolie, and what of her? Good or bad?

This suffices for intellectual life for many members of our civilization, as near to being on life-support as anyone might wish to be. I would have the plug pulled, myself.

I would say that the capacity is perhaps innate - no more foreign to us, than the ability to draw our attention to things of greater urgency that suddenly present itself. A hominid lost in thought during a tiger attack, is a hominid less likely to survive. We have psychological conditions, such as "obsessive-compulsive disorder" where a person's ability to turn their attention this way and that under their own volition, has become impaired.

But it is only a primitive skill, which needs refinement - or expungement, as our society earnestly strives for. Stubborn attention to detail is not a particular hallmark of American civilization, and greatly to its detriment. I recommend reading some of John Taylor Gatto's writing on teaching to see an exploration of the matter; and also "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" by Postman and Weingardner - and old and deeply flawed book, but containing brilliance nonetheless.

You offer the wonderful paragraph:

"Is there a natural anti-liberty mindset? No, there is not. Children want to ask questions, to explore, to experiment, and to think. People truly want charity, or as that word is also understood, kindness and love. In such an environment, liberty flourishes. But there is an artificial anti-liberty mindset promoted incessantly by all things state, and by all things political. It can be rejected, combated, and I hope, destroyed. The first step is to recognize that the anti-liberty mindset is not natural – in spite of the state’s sustained and subtle messages to the contrary."

I'm sure that you understand FAR more than I do the utilitarian purposes of installing these mind-stops into people, well-demonstrated in the military. Humans, left to their own devices, do very human things, such as run away in combat; a tendency which leads to poor outcomes in military things. The Italians and French now bear the banner of this egregious habit, and the military strives to suppress it. Thankfully, the groundwork has been well-laid in the first eighteen years, making the advanced training much easier.

It is perhaps ironic that the very first thing which MUST be learned in military training is how to surrender - completely, abjectly, totally surrender.

The capacity to turn one's mind away without a struggle is the very antithesis of Libertarian understanding of civilization and humanity. Rarely is it clearly spoken of - although Ayn Rand brought it forth at the very start of her writings, and called it "Anti-Life." I think it deserves further discussion, as one of the most profound ideas which have harmed mankind.

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Upon the void

terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.

And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.

There is beauty here.

On the Tragedy of American Economic Ignorance.

Our country is burdened with an understanding of economics at a level of sophistication as that of the Four Humours in physiology.

Dollars go around, from butcher to baker to candlestick maker, and from every transaction of funds some magic sprinkles come forth and drives "the economy."  Interesting, this approach suffices for Governmental understanding; every transaction carries for the potential for taxation elicited from every exchange.  No real economic sophistication is needed from the Government side - just tax every transaction, and act to maximize the rate of transactions.

There is no concept of an actual value being produced - and again, from a Government revenue standpoint, there is no need to do so.  Wasteful spending and useful spending are the same.  The FAILURE to spend is a great wrong from the Government's distant vista upon the scene.

The quantity of exchange is equal to the amount of money in motion times the velocity of that money.  The quantity of exchange is usually unaffected by the money supply.  In the instance that there is insufficient money in circulation, to the degree that it has an impact upon transactions, one would see the slowing of transactions, and the increase in the value of money, that would be, deflation.  This is a normal course of the slow improvement in productivity by means of innovation; it is rarely seen in its raw form.  In this case, other fungeable assets would be drawn in to act as money; also, the value of credit would increase.  When sufficient money exists, the incremental profitability of credit would drop to below zero, and credit would usually be avoided. 

In the situation where there is an abundance of money, its velocity is low, although the total exchange number is unchanged.  The value of money is low; the value of credit is low, and borrowing is cheap but fruitless.  The incremental profitability on borrowing is almost universally negative.

From a Government position, increasing the supply of money acts as "fool's credit" - the longer you hold it, the more you lose.  Therefore, the rate of increase of the supply shows an increase in the quantity of exchange, and makes "the economy" appear to improve. That is why Governments claim that economic slowdowns are due to "sluggish business" - savers are saving, supposedly because the supply of money is contracting, and money is itself an investment which accrues value. Simply arresting this process brings one effortlessly out of a depression. A splendid, elegant,wrong and noxious answer.

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A Small Essay Endorsing the Killing of Grandma

In the spirit of Swift, I wish to offer the endorsement of the principle now under earnest debate in the American public and press - the killing of Grandma.

Euthanasia involves the deliberate termination of an innocent life. We use the supposition of "innocence" to distinguish this act from lawful homicide, which is the express provenance of the criminal court system.

Using the principles of "innocent until proven guilty," therefore, one is led to suppose that Grandma's termination is a "mercy killing," not some sort of State administered punishment.

Let us assume, for sake of argument, that Grandma is about seventy years old. She would have been born in the period of the Great Depression I, around 1935-1940 and grew up with three major influences in her young life; the Great Depression (I), World War II, and the Cold War. Grandma knew of matters such as civilization, and its ability to cause and cure suffering.

She was then given as an unmerited gift, great abundance, success and opportunity beyond her wildest dreams. Women of her childhood had little opportunity; she had more than even the children of the wealthy did in her parents' generation. She was educated, dressed, and respected in a manner unheard of in her parents' generation.

And regrettably, it spoiled her. Grandma caught perhaps a glimpse in her youth of a future based upon the pillars of Prosperity, Freedom and Abundance - and then spent the rest of her years of ability spurning the future, and spending it into penury. "I'm Spending My Children's Inheritance!" read her bumper sticker (no longer seen, as it might provoke vandalism.)

She allowed her country to do things and become things which were shameful, shocking and sorrowful in earlier days. She crafted a system for medical care and financial support for her retirement - and then pulled up the gang-plank for later generations, which would be spent into penury by waste and abuse.

She shrieked about "Government involvement" and then cashed her Federal Paycheck.

She raised two generations of snot-faced descendants unschooled in the ways of the Republic, the manners of civilization, and like her, immersed in selfishness and greed.

And now, her uncivilized and irrational crew, illiterate and innumerate, cannot understand anything of the law but what is told to them by lunatics on the radio, such as Father Coughlin, only without even HIS scruples.

And we are asked to argue for Grand-ma's life by those who cannot tell the difference between an Extermination Panel and an end-of-life conversation with a physician?

Mene, mene, tekel, uparsim. You are what you bring forth, grandma. The petard upon which you are hoisted, is your own. If you have now a State which will endorse euthanasia - in a generation which accepts military torture and the killing of civilian noncombatants - you should perhaps fear what you have wrought.

(PS:  No Grandmas were actually harmed in the writing of this essay.)

pro-euthanasia

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Ovine Thunder

The loathsome Teabaggers are at it again, pretending that clamans turbae is somehow an element of American government. Remember, the Crowd and its mind and manipulation was one of the stunning tools of Lenin and Hitler, indeed.

Simpering about in petulant premise that yowling pre-purchased slogans constitutes protest, they wander into Town Meetings and such, acting the faithful stooge the same as many Baby Boomers did, when they "protested" in a manner prescribed and underwritten by that leech upon the Left, the Soviets. Bought and paid for then, the signs pre-made for them, the phrases pre-packaged and sold, they pretended that they were acting independently - but as an interchangeable mob.

It is a horrible thing to see, when Americans consider being a stooge to be the summit of their capacity as citizens.

And nearly all the man, every one of them, would trade their protest over "healthcare" to become a functionary on a "neighborhood life panel," which will speak forth The People's Vote on the end-of-life decisions of its citizenry, ne'er mind the doctors or hospitals or family, We! Love! Life! and will spin out the mortal skein past Atropos' grim hand, for the wreck of brain-dead citizens, derelict of soul. It will be The People's Vote! Yes! That way, we keep Government Out Of Healthcare!

As essays before have shown, the Average American has become a herd animal - defined as he who gets nervous if not in full view of the ass-hole of the neighboring herdmate. Packed in to the center, that's the key, that's the safety; out on the edges, that's where the wolves can see you. Hardly the mind of patriots.

It is not necessary to speculate upon a puppetmaster; perhaps it is in the Mind of the Herd itself, the Group Consciousness.

"Controlling Grandma's Life!" HAW! The Great Depression II has only begun, and if Grand-Ma starves to death on a Plains hovel - as happened to thousands during the Dust Bowl - is that a better death? They chase moonbeams, and will not see what is plainly before them.

Such crowds offer the pretense of independence and spontaneity - but rather, they are most closely akin to the "All-Textile Workers' Spontaneous Demonstration of Support for Peasant Soviet Power!" Bullshit, that is.

Not even the bravery of the Light Brigade; more like a stampede of sheep herded by a clever dog.

You had me at "DUH!" When Americans chose stupidity over independent thought, that was the Cardinal Sin of a citizen. It should be our Official American Slogan. DUH.

teabagger

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die Errinerungenslied

Perhaps now is the time.
Seamus Choice, then, pestered me, that walleyed stoat, in his excursy into things of dream and lyric marvel. Maybe the run of Quamalth Av through swerve of shore and Ben Dabaigh, bringth us naigh up to Lake Street, where Monkey Suit Murphy adds his nacent follicle to the Song of Deborah that calleth nach from Aoidē. Such things. Earwicker. Ha. Of the Hullen of Cu, werd id ast vergass, to find at least the cycle of remembrance.

What creatures are we? Neanderthal and Cruans.

From Correspondence.
I strongly agree with the idea of libertarianism prevailing under evolutionary pressure. Whatever folks might say to fuss about the history of evolution, this is a matter of early anthropology, and it's reasonable to say that the more successful tends to prevail.

I'll go with the "really slow murder rate" still. I think of the issue of aggregates of advanced mammals as "pack vs. herd." Packs collide aggressively for dominance; herds just freely merge and separate. The hypothesis I offer about "Homo sapiens cruans" is that we were pack-type animals, like wolves. We see other tribes as threats, and fight them. This was the mechanism of our separation into what we later called "races." When packs aggressively collide, they would tend to act like little genetic islands.

I imagine that Neanderthals were mostly like herd animals - they were constitutionally blind towards the "us vs. them" concept, which is a big lose when colliding with people who act on the pack structure.

So, the Neanderthals were perhaps more "socialist," as the wildebeest and sheep and other grazing animals are more socialist. They are attuned to move in bulk, and have simple societies. Modern humans were more predisposed to acting in small packs; and for humans, this appears to be a huge evolutionary advantage when leaving Africa and going out into unsettled terrain, as was hypothesized to have occurred 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Pack animals collide and separate; and when there's a whole Earth to be populated, rapidly "subspeciate" into tribal and racial groups.

When the Earth was carpeted by human settlement, the pack approach continued. The genetic predisposition towards tribalism remained. (The Neanderthals had already long ago got put out of the running.) Perpetual conflict and tribalism gave way to methods of interrelations between tribes, more so in other places. The ability to suppress the tendency to scrap with foreigners gave way to the need to trade with them. Civilization and commerce have always been intertwined.

With good or bad elements, we are left with the ultimate endpoint of tribalism - "the tribe of one," the individual. Many schemes have been put in place to aggregate humans into herds, and move them about as though they were interchangeable. This doesn't work for our species.

You cite some countries which are profoundly non-Socialist; in fact, anti-Socialist - USSR and Cuba, also North Korea - which are (or were) ruled over by absolute Alpha Males, with the power of life and death, terror over the lesser animals.

I offer that tribalism no longer acts to our benefit; and herd socialism is simply not in our animal nature, in the way that the lion cannot lie down with the lamb (or like Woody Allen said, the lamb will not get good sleep.) It is only with a new principle, which does not see us as mere elements of tribe or herd, but unique individuals, that can lead to our advancement and prosperity.

A big yes on this: "As a prediction, if there comes a new species of humans even more bent on commerce, they will eventually replace us." We're trying to prevail over genetic predispositions by intelligent behavior - and if we can hold out long enough, eventually the genetics will succumb, given a few tens of millennia.

Bill Bonner and his ugly truths.

Bill Bonner writes such awful stuff. The only thing it has going for it, is that it's almost certainly true. Other than that, it's got no value.

Household debt as a percentage of disposable income hit a low of about 2% just at the end of WWII. It’s been going up ever since. By 2005 it nudged against 15% – seven times higher than it had been 60 years earlier. Household debt represents spending that has been taken from the future. But you can’t take an infinite amount from future earnings. You reach a point when the future can’t handle it. As more and more future earnings are absorbed by past consumption, pretty soon there’s not enough left to live on. At some point, so much of earnings are devoted to paying the interest and principle on past borrowings that the poor householder cannot to pay his expenses. And imagine what happens if his disposable income goes down.

I'm turning him in to the Happy Thought Brigade.

Das Großenkreuz der Physik.

All you ever need to know about classical physics,

is included in this one little expression.

The first is in one dimension, the second is in R3:

This can also be called The Great Chi of

Classical Physics.  Absolutely everything in

the "first year physics" course can be so described.

physics, momentum, gradient, energy

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How American Healthcare will die.

The simple assumption underlying America's approach to healthcare is that the market price is wrong. In any market where one adjusts prices for these sorts of reasons, there is either a glut or a deficiency. Here, if the assumption that the market price is too high, one will produce deficiencies.

The underlying assumption, which is not entirely wrong, is that there is a price-fixing cabal which is driving the prices up "faster than inflation." This is an assumption which discards other reasons for price increases - that efficiency is lowered opposite the general trend over time where innovation decreases costs; or that inflation drives prices up artificially. The cabal might well be the government-industry tangle which has been forced upon the healthcare market. This is getting treated with Steroids now, being bulked up.

One element which I believe to be central is that "inflation" and the "healthcare CPI" are one and the same. There are other things in the artificial "CPI index" which cause it to be reported as abnormally LOW. Several economists, such as John Williams on Shadowstats, believe that inflation is actually MUCH higher than reported. Until 2009, the decade's inflation rate has been about 6% - which brings us to about 60% in constant dollars to what we had in 2000.

And efficiency IS lowered - not because healthcare is a free-market commodity, but precisely the opposite. Few people realize that much of physicians' reimbursements are set by Medicare already. The private insurers then negotiate reimbursement as a Percentage of Medicare. Doctors salaries are adjusted politically by measure of the mean state income and "costs" in the various states.

We pretend that lowering price and raising demand will force the innovators to improve quality. The system is seen as burdened by overhead and profit-taking. Overhead cannot be signficantly improved until such things as internal auditing, measuring and "efficiency charting" are reduced. That will not happen.

It takes a certain bit of punitive and harsh attitude to ram changes through at the expense of a certain sector. There is certainly that sort of ire against American healthcare now, and it has been simmering for a long time.

Unfortunately, "punishing healthcare to make it better" is likely to fail.

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healthcare, economics

If Fascism is Love, is Mentoring Hatred?

John T. Gatto has a dreadful impertinence, an intellectual Tourette's syndrome, blurting things like this out:

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody.

Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto

Perhaps this explains why our society is all so fragile about the risks of sexual predation of children - deferring the issue of intellectual predation.

I've wondered so long about why my education didn't get me further - it wasn't intended to.

1. The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong."
2. The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
3. The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
4. The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study.
5. In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth.
6. In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched.

Perhaps that is what is so disquieting about President Obama - he was the ultimate achiever within the system, and White folks don't know what blue contacts are for, exactly, nor what an Oreo means - but somehow fear them nonetheless.

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What is wrong with these Libertarians?

They are the oddest of fellows - these libertarians, and the anarchists, the minarchists. Has something gone wrong with their mental biochemistry, that makes them embrace such odd perspectives? Aren't these the sort of radical whackadoodles that Mother warned about?

One can easily forget, now that the public is offered uninterrupted strains of normative and abnormal behavior, all but with subtitles on how to behave - that how people think is exactly that and no more - how people think. We seem to allow whoever wishes to assert authority, the prerogative of confrontation - to demand a person demonstrate that their beliefs are conformist, benign, permissible.  Queer beliefs, literally and figuratively, are permitted. but one must accept one's queerness - the ultimate arrogance shown in the Stonewall Riots, when Americans stood up and said - I am who I am, what of it to you?

I swipe several quotes from an essay Personal Choices Under Corporate-State Rule, written by a nutcase who renounced his US citizenship out of free will and sound mind - if that, by definition, is not a paradox:

• The State can only survive as long as a majority [of the citizenry] is mentally programmed to believe that theft is not wrong if it is called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping is not wrong if it is called arrest, that mass murder is not wrong if it is called war. ~ Bill St. Clair
• It is time for people to understand that governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions, in which a self-respecting honest man cannot and must not take part, and the advantages of which he cannot and should not enjoy. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• He or she who supports a State organized in a military way – whether directly or indirectly – participates in sin. Each man takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes. ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

What is wrong with these people?

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Wicked, wicked reality & the Guru.

And wicked, wicked Mogambo Guru for harshing my buzz horribly, with his column, Nixon and Exchanging Dollars for Gold.  He's gone and crapped up my average-American moonbuzz that "I'm doing just fine," when actually, the government is pouring the same stuff into the economy as it pours into trade-in clunkers to make them never run again.
He quotes the equally-wicked Bill Downey, who offered the following comparison, of "How Much things cost on Aug 15th, 1971" to what they cost today:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average 890 or 25 oz. gold in 1971, versus 9,000 or 10 oz. gold today.  40%
  
• Average Cost of new house $25,250 or 721 oz. gold in 1971, versus 250,000 or 277 oz. gold today. 40%
  
• Average Income per year $10,600 or 302 oz. gold in 1971, versus $70,000 or 77 oz. gold today. 25%
  
• Average Monthly Rent $150 or 4.3 oz. of gold in 1971, versus $824 or 1 oz. of gold today. 23%
  
• Datsun 1200 Sports Coupe $1,866 or 53 oz. gold in 1971, versus $28,400 or 31 oz. gold today. 60%
  

There's a bunch of reasons why these things can change. Stuff such as houses can be made relatively cheaper per-unit, either by technological improvements in construction (allowing them to be performed by drunk illegals rather than union carpenters,) and also decreasing the quality of the stuff used. Ditto rental units.

The reason that Detroit took the Final Suck, IMHO, is that wages decreased faster than the cost-per-auto. The 'bama's would agree with this, but shooting one's self in the foot is not the solution.

The major reason that the Washington Whorehouse hasn't gone off the rails before - say, during Cap Weinberger's FuckAmerica policy when we deceided that Military Keynesianism was the way to go - was the silent boom in certain areas, including computers and information technology.  Were Washington not leeching away the value as fast as technology could improve it, we'd be sitting on a pretty high place, indeed.  The Dow might actually be 9,000 but with real money!

Back around 1980, Americans realized that the jig was up on pooled capital investment, and bailed out of bank savings accounts.  They were persuaded that Equity Rocks!  which it does, when you want to put money at higher risk.  Even with thirty years of Government policy of driving capital out of the long-term investment market - like dull old corporate bonds - IT managed to accrue enough capital - by playing with IPO's and such things - to blast into the stratosphere.  (If you don't believe me, whip out your old Atari from 1990 and play with your grand-son.)

But we got deluded into thinking that the IPO shenanigans CREATED wealth, not just shuffled it into productivity.  The "dot-com-bust" showed that capital could be mal-invested even when the streets were paved with gold.  Note that the "dot-com-bust" didn't stop computer technology, did it?

The ONLY thing that vaguely resembled the accumulation of wealth through innovation in manufacture - the computer industry - hasn't shown up its true effect, which was a forty-year boom equivalent to the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution.  That's because we've pissed away the productivity into Governmental crap, including military bases on any place that shows up on a satellite map.  We burn off 50% of today's crude oil imports in the Department of Defense.  What's that do to the price?

Anyhow.  When the IT boom matures, we're in for the rolloff-bust of a lifetime.  It may nbe a short lifetime.  This explains why many societies become comfortable - and then abruptly collapse.  They come across some innovations which are cash-cows for financing an increasingly nonproductive society.  When the cash cow suddenly expires (or matures), there isn't any money tree any more.  Kabam.

You don't believe me?  Here's DEPRESSING.  The world lost the recipe for making Concrete, for God's sake, between the end of the Roman Empire, and about 1600.  Feeble, eh?
PS:  The Guru's such a mean grump, I've decided to send him a picture that will turn him into a foolish optimist.  Just wait....ah, here it is.

military Keynesianism

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More Fountains of Gibberish from the Journal

Lord, Lord, that human blowsack Karl Rove weighs in at the Wall Street Journal

Americans are now seeing the damage that polls and focus groups can inflict on White House decision-making. President Barack Obama is no longer shaping the public dialogue on health-care reform. Instead, he is losing control of his agenda and resorting to rhetorical tricks and evasions.

What in hell's that supposed to mean? Obama is turning healthcare reform into nonsense by listening to Americans, and Americans should do something about it? In the first paragraph, his own argument bit itself in the ass, and died.

Tax-and-spend liberalism doesn’t work, no matter how pretty its package.

When it's wrapped up like the Bush Administration, even the dog won't play with it, either.

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The WSJ also offers the following gloomy graph, shown at the right. It describes the future gap from 2014 until 2029, as though it were are real as "borrowing from our children and grandchildren!"
Don't worry, folks. We'll be mighty well into the Euthanasia Bandwagon by the time 2020 comes around, if that's the picture of "healthcare" after the next few years.
We seem to have a bit of the "second train" paradox. You're tied to the railroad tracks, it's 9:55, and a train comes every hour, on the hour. You absolutely don't need to be concerned about the 11:00 train, nor the noontime express; by then, there is nothing worse that can happen to you.
Assumpsit global warming. By then, what are the chances that our economy, now in ballistic free-fall, will even be able to sustain carbon emissions? Don't worry about it.

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Arthur Laffer writes some interesting commentary:

The health-care wedge is an economic term that reflects the difference between what health-care costs the specific provider and what the patient actually pays. When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase. Mr. Obama’s health-care plan does nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received. Instead, it’s like a negative tax: Costs rise and people demand more than they need....
Thus, health-care reform should be based on policies that diminish the health-care wedge rather than increase it. Mr. Obama’s reform principles—a public health-insurance option, mandated minimum coverage, mandated coverage of pre-existing conditions, and required purchase of health insurance—only increase the size of the wedge and thus health-care costs.

What he has to say is regrettably true. Healthcare will follow the path that college loans have taken over the last twenty years - driving college "costs" through the roof.

Rupert's Rag seems to dwell on everything BUT the coming crisis. Most folks - except Laffer - are worrying about the Second Train.

By this fall, nobody will care - the first train's a comin'

Kristos, or Kronos?

The longer I live, the more that the Little Rabbi amazes me, and that his words have persisted untouched throughout what we consider to be Western Civilization. If the Apocalypse comes, like Jefferson, I fear for my country. For about all we have done is pray to God that he punish and destroy his other children, which makes us no more honorable than Cain, nor virtuous than Kronos, Saturn in the pantheon of evil, painted below left in Goya's bleakest days of painting..
The little Rabbi over and over reminded us that there is nobody, there is nothing too small for His God. In fact, they are the ones most in need of Him, and precious to him.
I show a close-up of the American Girl who suffered. photographed by Dorothea Lange, and shown in the last post. If there is indeed a God, then He knows her name. Does he know the rest of us?
And who is our God - Christ, or Chronos?

Zehn Wöchen davor.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit-and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.

John Steinbeck

And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

---

By God, say I, we have forgotten it, all of it, and that which Santayana always prophesied came true. I feel like a fox gone to lair with the danger, ten weeks now until the great depression, die Zauberflaute comes off the horizon like a wrathful God. We cannot run, and neither can we hide. It is terrible, what is to come. I think I have put the basics together, apart from being a survivalist. But it comes.

I feel oddly like die Fastenzeit kommt, times two - forty days in the desert, and then forty more. The second of what may be as many as fourteen economic earthquakes is on the way; we have only seen the first. WE will be serious, only for a little while, on the next crash. In 78 days, 2,106 hours, 126,360 minutes, then we will be a different people.

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One lesson learned is that oranges must not be destroyed, nor pigs slaughtered, in front of the hungry. We now, much more clever in such things, hide it nicely in such things as the "Cash for Clunkers" CAR Allowance Rebate System (CARS)

• Your vehicle must be less than 25 years old on the trade-in date
• Only purchase or lease of new vehicles qualify
• Generally, trade-in vehicles must get 18 or less MPG (some very large pick-up trucks and cargo vans have different requirements)
• The program requires the scrapping of your eligible trade-in vehicle, and that the dealer disclose to you an estimate of the scrap value of your trade-in. The scrap value, however minimal, will be in addition to the rebate, and not in place of the rebate.

That last part, that's where the pigs are slaughtered. The purpose is to raise the price of vehicles, along with sales, by creating an artificial shortage of used cars.
My friend's car, which burns a quart of oil every 100 miles because the rings are shot, does NOT qualify.
A one-year-old HUMVEE which someone can't make the payments on, DOES.

The goal is to kill all the rolling stock of used vehicles - but quietly slaughtered, must less messily than horses. I pay to relieve the lessee of a car which he cannot afford, the cost of unsaleable pigs, which in modern terms is a Hummer or F-350. I watch the slaughter, which I have paid for.

Zehn Wöchenen davor. My people came here out of the Dust Bowl, suffering. They stayed, and did what they thought they could do, to prevent another great depression, but it came back. It is coming.

They knock at this door. This time?

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Land of the Famous, Home of the Handsome.

One of the reason that this country's on the Express train to hell, driven by the mass of the citizenry, Cons and Libs alike, is the worship of the Nobility. Here in America, it's not Charles and Di, but Brangelina.

A Republic simply flourishes without a pecking order, a social rank. If the President is merely "Mr. President," as that low-brow radical Washington started off the tradition with, and if public servants are, well, public servants, then the Republic is in good stead.

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I offer the following from correspondence. The following is in response to an opinion piece on the evils of Socialized Medicine.

You offer a powerful MORAL article about socialism. Consider also the one that makes it more attractive to Americans - the esthetic argument.

We propose to give to the beautiful, by means of theft from the ugly. America is a celebrity-based society, and we worship the beautiful people. This even extends to beautiful things, such as the polar bear, which is in danger of extinction, and the dolphin and the tiger - all aesthetically-selected creatures, not the horsetail and whipworm and sea cucumber, which may well be in the same danger, but are ugly-ass suckers.

The sixteen-hour operation to separate the Siamese Twins, that's one of the greatest mediamedicine shows, costing - somebody? - hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we pool our money, we can pay for these blockbuster shows, at the expense of the rural Alabama kid with Down's Syndrome, and HER need for surgery on an annular pancreas.

The paradox of Socialism is that the "somebody" who pays for it, is usually the powerless. Not the Park Avenue tobacco heiress in her endangered-species furs; no, that's the bait. The switch is to the "citizen." Socialism depends on there being a lowest-rank called "citizen." It's society's loser. In the Soviet Union, you were called "citizen" when you were convicted of a felony - no more "comrade" for you!

It means the sacrifice for the Visible by the Invisible, the Named by the Nameless, the Party Member by the prole. The nobility, in what ever form that society creates it, has a RIGHT to be free of need; and it is the prole who fills that need. Some folks like Jefferson and Madison found that sort of thinking revolting - literally.

And it is always uncouth and Philistine to say - screw the famous! F-off and die, you powerful! Why is it my duty, to care for the rich and famous - why is Katie Couric's brother or Oprah's postman's son more important than my alcoholic brother who lives in the trailer, whom I support?

That's an aesthetic approach to socialism.

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All we ever do is change the measure of ranking. Gay men who smoke, in San Francisco, have not changed in their social loathesomness from 1950 to today. Think of that!

We are always proud of our "changes in tolerance," i.e. our shifting of the social order. But few even question the fundamentals of social order itself.

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson

I can never pass by Jefferson with simply one quote. We now live in tyranny, the Golem our own creation; with the blame upon our selves, and no excuse that we are unwarned.

• I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
• If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
• Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

TweakAmerica! The Miracle of the Recovery of 2009

Hey tweakers! This recovery's for YOU!

Methamphetamine is a slam-dunk beauty of analogy for this here economic recovery.

Let's run through a few facts on both, which are damn useful.
Methamphetamine is a stimulant drug. The body has some natural regulation on its functions and states, and alertness is one of these systems, coordinated by the RAS (reticular activating system) of the brainstem. When your body sends out signals of fatigue at the end of heavy use, you get snoozy, and will go to sleep, no matter what.

The Frontal Lobes, the site of rational analysis, gets pissed-off sometimes at the rest of the brain for bringing out compelling signals which make the frontal lobes feel like they're being bossed around. Even the focus of will cannot shut out the demands of the rest of the brain - ask anyone who's fallen asleep driving, and survived.

The frontal lobes takes on an idea similar to Socialism regarding the rest of the neurons, and figures that it ought to be boss - that there is an entirely RATIONAL approach to body management, which should preponderate over the largely-irrational other parts of the brain, which work mainly on urges.

Thus, the miracle of meth. Just about anyone in good health can work a 16-hour shift, stay up and party all night, and stay awake a good part of the next day, with or without meth. But the tweaker can do some meth along the way, work ANOTHER 16-hour shift AND party the next night, AND wake up again..... for a long god-damn time.

The Reticular Activating system is all fuddy-duddy and conservative about this stuff, and calls for a snooze FAR before the body's run completely out of fuel. It's like topping off the tank every time it reaches 3/4 full, and the frontals luxuriate over their new-found power.

Unfortunately, the Lockeans are just as right on brain chemistry as on politics - power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What about the overwhelming exhaustion? Later, deal with it later. Methamphetamine is simply life on brain credit. Every day of tweakin' is a day without "depression," the slow-down when nothing much happens. And what you don't maintain, you burn out. The "meth system" of excessive activity was designed as a temporary override during emergencies; meth just locks it on, full-time.

What we're doing to the economy, is actually identical to what the tweaker's brain does with meth.

We pretend that we're smart enough to jam it into overdrive for a while, using credit the same as crystal. When we had our "credit crisis" recently, it was simply the same as the tweaker's going "over the top" into the slide and crash which accompanies the meth binge after a week or two of non-stop power use. The edict "don't save money, spend it!" is just the same as "don't sleep when you can tweak!"

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The actual Meth Economy itself is pretty similar to the stimulus, too. On classical terms, meth boosts the economy. People working relatively unwanted jobs - those with crappy pay and low skills, which shows that they are marginal jobs barely adding any product for commercial transaction - create a flurry of activity in the economy, which allows them to work long shifts at the meat plant, at the price of their physical well-being, but f**k it, it's money. The dollars spin around inside or out of the USA, for meth manufacture, rolling hundreds of thousands of dollars through hands which have formerly worked at twice minimum wage. In classical Keynesian terms, the meth economy IS RECOVERY writ large.

However, when one looks at commerce as the bringing of a useful product to market, it sucks. Nothing about meth manufacture, distribution, sales or use puts a warm blanket on a kid, or a hot meal, or a better roof over their heads. That's the measure of "useful" in an economy. Meth simply drains what could have been gainful production, and rolls it into the shitter.

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So, what's the fate of the green shoots we're seeing? They're just the product of increased productivity as a result of continued spending of investment capital into malinvestments, caused by an overly optimistic assessment of the economic future. In other words, we just lit off another chunk of meth, and we're READY TO ROCK AGAIN! for the second show. But as for sustainable economic recovery?


Smile when you ask that question, bubba....