Never have we, in my lifetime, had a more racist President. Racism means that one assesses and judges a man by the color of his skin. One doesn't look at a person's talents nor his character. Only his skin color matters. Skin color is the first and only means that one ought to use to know how to treat a person - says a racist.
Today I read an article with this headline: Obama Seeks Ideas on Reducing Black Joblessness.
What's wrong with this? First of all, it doesn't recognize how jobs are created. Jobs don't know race. That's a matter arbitrarily imposed on the issue. From this question, I wouldn't be surprised if Obama came up with the solution of enslaving blacks. After all, all slaves had a job. They didn't get paid with money and didn't have freedom, but they did have food and a place to stay - you know, government-level for providing stuff. Sounds perfect.
Because Obama singles out blacks, he treats them as a collective. What does this mean? It means that blacks, since he's using his bully pulpit to lead on this matter, are to be treated as part of this collective. Now, you and I know that in any group, there are good people and bad, talented people and people with little or no talent, meritorious people and those who aren't worth a damn. But, if Obama is asking us - all of us who are listening - to treat blacks as a collective as he is doing, then in order to protect ourselves, we will be forced to judge them all by the lowest common denominator. So, in effect, looking at a black, one has to say to himself (given Obama's lead here) that you can't trust them to do what you want? Why? Because there are some in this group that cannot be trusted - or should I say, can be trusted to be lazy, steal from you, not be a man of his word, etc. - and since we can only use skin color as the way to judge these people, then for our own self-protection we must avoid them.
This is the vile and evil nature of a racist. And make no mistake, Obama is a racist or he would never say something like what he is saying. Every day he opens his mouth, he makes life more difficult for all blacks. And this is why they need to kick his ass.
As for me, I reject Obama entirely because I reject collectivism entirely. A collectivist always destroys the best of men in favor of the worst of men.
The valid alternative to Obama's hideous racism (and John Lewis's and the Congressional Black Caucus's too) is Individual Rights - where every man is recognized as the owner of his life and is free to make it what he wants. What benefits blacks is the same for all people, not to minister to their neediness but to protect their individual rights and yes, I mean only the NEGATIVE rights.
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
JUDGMENT - The Missing Moral Principle
Who is the Ragnar Danneskjold* of our time? Who is calling the destroyers of value to account?
We live in a time of a giant sucking sound. The WEST is flushing itself down the toilet.
Why? It cannot pronounce moral judgment. When I say "it," I mean that the culture is in such a weakened state that a strong pronouncement of moral judgment to true matters up would be shouted down as unseemly. Given this state, the strong pronouncement will have to be yelled through a din of naysayers. Someone will hear it anyway. I promise you, I will hear it if it can be heard.
I dedicate this piece to Bosch Fawstin. He's fearless, especially in his fingering the contradictions and inhumanity of the Muslims, and I love him for that. I really liked his entry into the Twin Towers Goes Global contest. Maybe now they can get why people don't want the Ground Zero Mosque.
Along this line, I've been thinking of all the "brands" that are being diminished because the people who speak for and work to enhance those brands will not pronounce moral judgment against Obama who, highly associated with them, is taking them down with him.
Here's some: Democrats, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Oprah, Unions, Blacks in general, and the USA. (The only one I care about supporting is the USA. The rest will have to earn my respect one man or institution at a time.)
Wouldn't it be something if a leader from Harvard came forward and said that he now sees, with Obama as its currently most famous product, the enormous cost of Affirmative Action? OR wouldn't if be astounding if a black leader came forward and said that it's time for blacks to stop acting like a "pack" that "goes along to get along" and call Obama to account for all of his violations of human freedom, the most precious of conditions for the people who knew and tell the stories of slavery? Wouldn't it be amazing if a Democrat denounced Obama for enacting policies destroying the economy stating that it is time to call him to account regardless that he is black? Or gosh, wouldn't it be something if someone would stand up for America and apologize to "the best within us" for "forgetting who we are," by letting Obama, our President, besmirch the ideal that quickens the beat of the human heart around the globe?
All of us are going to pay dearly for "going along" with Obama - the Con. Every brand associated with Obama will pay. Oprah has never been held as high as she was before she endorsed Obama. (It's interesting about Oprah. People loved her and were always talking about her when her program was geared to all people. Who is she now that Obama favors blacks over whites in instance after instance and she says nothing? Swiss cheese?)
Harvard and Columbia are being drug through the streets insofar as providing a solid education for real values. They are gaining the reputation of being an intellectual hot house that doesn't know what goes on in the real world.
Chicago and Illinois have been corrupt for a long time, but now they have taken on a real and dangerous quality that they didn't have before. Why? Obama thrived there.
America granted grace, which I don't think has been an entirely good thing since freedom is its own reward, to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. That's over. I called the grocery clerk to account where before I would have let her slide.
The thing that is so clearly missing in the public arena of our era is judgment. No one will pronounce it. No one will take action for a proper standard. No one in Congress is making a dent on the corruption that is overtaking our government. It is simply missing.
In the ever-present choice of wings or spine, we've chosen wings.
Where is the spine. It doesn't exist in this soupy, slurpy world of words. Just words - words that mean nothing except to have you think they do. For every statement coming out of Obama's mouth, we have a video or audio clip of him saying the opposite. Insanity reigns. Obama, the Con, spins more words tonight in his Jobs Speech. Words, just words. Except they are costing us not only our treasure, but our moral vitality.
Obama may paint a socialist utopia, but we all know that it shall not happen. Never has, never will. Why would it? No one gives a damn. And, no one does because the government won't allow it. Who can care when you are regulated from morning 'til night and this plague is spreading faster than we can get rid of it?
All will stop when someone with a voice that can be heard pronounces moral judgment - the judgment that gives one's moral vitality a bracing jolt!**
Who among us possesses THE VOICE THAT CAN BE HEARD? That is who we are waiting for.
*Ragnar Danneskjold is a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He was a pirate for justice. He calculated the amount a businessmen deserved from his production and trade, because he earned by trading value for value. Then he would attack ships which the government used to transfer wealth from America to People's States around the globe. (Sound like Obama?) When he got the wealth on board, he took it to a place where it was held in account for the producer of it. It became available to him when he chose to take his power back, go on strike and renounce being a sacrificial lamb.
**Ayn Rand is the only one in my lifetime that has done this. And she did it the hard way. She earned it.
We live in a time of a giant sucking sound. The WEST is flushing itself down the toilet.
Why? It cannot pronounce moral judgment. When I say "it," I mean that the culture is in such a weakened state that a strong pronouncement of moral judgment to true matters up would be shouted down as unseemly. Given this state, the strong pronouncement will have to be yelled through a din of naysayers. Someone will hear it anyway. I promise you, I will hear it if it can be heard.
I dedicate this piece to Bosch Fawstin. He's fearless, especially in his fingering the contradictions and inhumanity of the Muslims, and I love him for that. I really liked his entry into the Twin Towers Goes Global contest. Maybe now they can get why people don't want the Ground Zero Mosque.
Along this line, I've been thinking of all the "brands" that are being diminished because the people who speak for and work to enhance those brands will not pronounce moral judgment against Obama who, highly associated with them, is taking them down with him.
Here's some: Democrats, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Oprah, Unions, Blacks in general, and the USA. (The only one I care about supporting is the USA. The rest will have to earn my respect one man or institution at a time.)
Wouldn't it be something if a leader from Harvard came forward and said that he now sees, with Obama as its currently most famous product, the enormous cost of Affirmative Action? OR wouldn't if be astounding if a black leader came forward and said that it's time for blacks to stop acting like a "pack" that "goes along to get along" and call Obama to account for all of his violations of human freedom, the most precious of conditions for the people who knew and tell the stories of slavery? Wouldn't it be amazing if a Democrat denounced Obama for enacting policies destroying the economy stating that it is time to call him to account regardless that he is black? Or gosh, wouldn't it be something if someone would stand up for America and apologize to "the best within us" for "forgetting who we are," by letting Obama, our President, besmirch the ideal that quickens the beat of the human heart around the globe?
All of us are going to pay dearly for "going along" with Obama - the Con. Every brand associated with Obama will pay. Oprah has never been held as high as she was before she endorsed Obama. (It's interesting about Oprah. People loved her and were always talking about her when her program was geared to all people. Who is she now that Obama favors blacks over whites in instance after instance and she says nothing? Swiss cheese?)
Harvard and Columbia are being drug through the streets insofar as providing a solid education for real values. They are gaining the reputation of being an intellectual hot house that doesn't know what goes on in the real world.
Chicago and Illinois have been corrupt for a long time, but now they have taken on a real and dangerous quality that they didn't have before. Why? Obama thrived there.
America granted grace, which I don't think has been an entirely good thing since freedom is its own reward, to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. That's over. I called the grocery clerk to account where before I would have let her slide.
The thing that is so clearly missing in the public arena of our era is judgment. No one will pronounce it. No one will take action for a proper standard. No one in Congress is making a dent on the corruption that is overtaking our government. It is simply missing.
In the ever-present choice of wings or spine, we've chosen wings.
Where is the spine. It doesn't exist in this soupy, slurpy world of words. Just words - words that mean nothing except to have you think they do. For every statement coming out of Obama's mouth, we have a video or audio clip of him saying the opposite. Insanity reigns. Obama, the Con, spins more words tonight in his Jobs Speech. Words, just words. Except they are costing us not only our treasure, but our moral vitality.
Obama may paint a socialist utopia, but we all know that it shall not happen. Never has, never will. Why would it? No one gives a damn. And, no one does because the government won't allow it. Who can care when you are regulated from morning 'til night and this plague is spreading faster than we can get rid of it?
All will stop when someone with a voice that can be heard pronounces moral judgment - the judgment that gives one's moral vitality a bracing jolt!**
Who among us possesses THE VOICE THAT CAN BE HEARD? That is who we are waiting for.
_______________________________
*Ragnar Danneskjold is a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He was a pirate for justice. He calculated the amount a businessmen deserved from his production and trade, because he earned by trading value for value. Then he would attack ships which the government used to transfer wealth from America to People's States around the globe. (Sound like Obama?) When he got the wealth on board, he took it to a place where it was held in account for the producer of it. It became available to him when he chose to take his power back, go on strike and renounce being a sacrificial lamb.
**Ayn Rand is the only one in my lifetime that has done this. And she did it the hard way. She earned it.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
"Need" as the Ultimate Justification
I believe the liberal mind is a more socially accepted version of the criminal mind. Both justify taking other people's money and property for their purposes.
The human condition at bottom is that one must traverse the gap from "need" to "value produced" which satisfies the need. The need is generated by a living organism using its energy to maintain its life. That process, life, gives rise to needs which must be fulfilled if the life is to continue.
The blue arrow is "the gap." To mature as a human being means that one is able to navigate that gap and provide for his needs in a way that works while at the same time doesn't undermine his continued ability to provide for his needs.
The criminal mind and the liberal mind emphasize "need" as a lack - ultimately a lack of stuff or status. They think it unfair that the needy are not provided for. They believe that it is fundamentally unjust that everyone is not provided for - that it is some kind of cosmic injustice and that the world, because of this, is basically unfair. Because this is unjust, they say, they feel justified to correct this injustice and that is why they can, with a straight face, advocate taking your stuff, destroy a country such as America that has a system that allows people to traverse the gap of being human and create value, giving away other people's values (money) to poor people and poor nations, etc., etc.
Every time they open their mouths, they reinforce the "goodness," the "appropriateness" of being needy. When Obama brings some poor person or crippled person or in some way needy person onto the stage with him, he wants to hear about their neediness - the more needy the better - and he adds importance to their being needy. (I find this embarrassing for the person he is using.) He gives them his ear and kindness, attention and ultimately some money or goods. The one thing he doesn't do is talk about how they resourcefully went from need to results that satisfied their need. To focus on that would mean he would have no reason to exert his power over us and take our stuff.
Because Obama and Michelle, the current point people for this view, and the rest of the liberals do this, I consider them and their kind the embodiment of evil in mankind. (I'm not talking about evil in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments manner. Because man possesses volition, he chooses his course of action. He can choose to get across that gap, using his talents and mind to do that or not and this is his fundamental choice - to live as a human being or not.) There is nothing evil about having needs. We all have them by virtue of being alive. Granting them ultimate status and holding them aloft rather than supporting getting across the gap - by being creative and productive - is evil.
The ultimate joke, though, is on those that hold aloft need as the ultimate in importance. Although evil appears potent because it counts on fear and causes havoc in human lives by destroying their values and it always seems pleasurable in the short run, it is ultimately impotent. That is because it is not about developing the means for producing real value and satisfying needs. To continue, the mind besieged by evil must feed off the people who do traverse the gap since they are the ones who know how to get from need to value produced. (Frederick Douglas made clear that taking care of the needy for its own sake provides nothing lasting: "A man, at times, gets something for nothing, but it will, in his hands, amount to nothing.")
When I hear/see Obama, Michelle, the Pope, mother Theresa when she was alive, Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, Weiner, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and thousands of other such people, I see evil incarnate. They foster a world that doesn't and cannot work, and they work to create parasites wherever they go. There is nothing more hideous that that. (If you think Mother Theresa was humane, she had millions of dollars and would not spend a frickin' dime on having the dying people she cared for have some measure of comfort as they went through the dying process. She could have conditioned the air because she could have easily have afforded it. Why? Because she thought suffering was the way to becoming whole - and holy, i.e., coming to know god. Source: The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens.)
The criminal mind is always justified to commit his crime. Why? Because to his mind, the world is not just and did not treat him fairly for him to properly mature when he was dependent on others. To him, this shouldn't be. (I wonder if some portion of humanity is pissed because their God or their ancestors' God threw they out of the Garden of Eden? There everything was provided. Now they must work for the values they need.) He stays needy rather than find a way to clear away his fears and his grievances such that he become a value producer.
A person stuck in need ends up hating the good (value production) for being the good. (The good is value production and virtue is action which produces value.) Hating the good for being the good is envy and this mental orientation is sourcing the destruction of values now upon us.
So how do we get through this? Create and produce value. In everything you do. You will love it and will feel so nourished by it.
The human condition at bottom is that one must traverse the gap from "need" to "value produced" which satisfies the need. The need is generated by a living organism using its energy to maintain its life. That process, life, gives rise to needs which must be fulfilled if the life is to continue.
The blue arrow is "the gap." To mature as a human being means that one is able to navigate that gap and provide for his needs in a way that works while at the same time doesn't undermine his continued ability to provide for his needs.
The criminal mind and the liberal mind emphasize "need" as a lack - ultimately a lack of stuff or status. They think it unfair that the needy are not provided for. They believe that it is fundamentally unjust that everyone is not provided for - that it is some kind of cosmic injustice and that the world, because of this, is basically unfair. Because this is unjust, they say, they feel justified to correct this injustice and that is why they can, with a straight face, advocate taking your stuff, destroy a country such as America that has a system that allows people to traverse the gap of being human and create value, giving away other people's values (money) to poor people and poor nations, etc., etc.
Every time they open their mouths, they reinforce the "goodness," the "appropriateness" of being needy. When Obama brings some poor person or crippled person or in some way needy person onto the stage with him, he wants to hear about their neediness - the more needy the better - and he adds importance to their being needy. (I find this embarrassing for the person he is using.) He gives them his ear and kindness, attention and ultimately some money or goods. The one thing he doesn't do is talk about how they resourcefully went from need to results that satisfied their need. To focus on that would mean he would have no reason to exert his power over us and take our stuff.
Because Obama and Michelle, the current point people for this view, and the rest of the liberals do this, I consider them and their kind the embodiment of evil in mankind. (I'm not talking about evil in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments manner. Because man possesses volition, he chooses his course of action. He can choose to get across that gap, using his talents and mind to do that or not and this is his fundamental choice - to live as a human being or not.) There is nothing evil about having needs. We all have them by virtue of being alive. Granting them ultimate status and holding them aloft rather than supporting getting across the gap - by being creative and productive - is evil.
The ultimate joke, though, is on those that hold aloft need as the ultimate in importance. Although evil appears potent because it counts on fear and causes havoc in human lives by destroying their values and it always seems pleasurable in the short run, it is ultimately impotent. That is because it is not about developing the means for producing real value and satisfying needs. To continue, the mind besieged by evil must feed off the people who do traverse the gap since they are the ones who know how to get from need to value produced. (Frederick Douglas made clear that taking care of the needy for its own sake provides nothing lasting: "A man, at times, gets something for nothing, but it will, in his hands, amount to nothing.")
When I hear/see Obama, Michelle, the Pope, mother Theresa when she was alive, Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, Weiner, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and thousands of other such people, I see evil incarnate. They foster a world that doesn't and cannot work, and they work to create parasites wherever they go. There is nothing more hideous that that. (If you think Mother Theresa was humane, she had millions of dollars and would not spend a frickin' dime on having the dying people she cared for have some measure of comfort as they went through the dying process. She could have conditioned the air because she could have easily have afforded it. Why? Because she thought suffering was the way to becoming whole - and holy, i.e., coming to know god. Source: The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens.)
The criminal mind is always justified to commit his crime. Why? Because to his mind, the world is not just and did not treat him fairly for him to properly mature when he was dependent on others. To him, this shouldn't be. (I wonder if some portion of humanity is pissed because their God or their ancestors' God threw they out of the Garden of Eden? There everything was provided. Now they must work for the values they need.) He stays needy rather than find a way to clear away his fears and his grievances such that he become a value producer.
A person stuck in need ends up hating the good (value production) for being the good. (The good is value production and virtue is action which produces value.) Hating the good for being the good is envy and this mental orientation is sourcing the destruction of values now upon us.
So how do we get through this? Create and produce value. In everything you do. You will love it and will feel so nourished by it.
The torch represents the value you seek to produce that
lights your way. The stiffened arm is your moral strength
to get on with it and produce the result!
lights your way. The stiffened arm is your moral strength
to get on with it and produce the result!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
In Defiance of the Law of Cause and Effect
How many times have we heard this same refrain? Act against your nature, people! Our President pretends that somehow, when people have a purpose and build their life on it, they won't chose to act consistent with that purpose - that they can be seduced into changing their purpose - or more like this, "because of me, my charm and my idealism, you will want to change". It garners no credit for anyone to believe (and hope) for such a magical "transformation." It isn't generous. It isn't intelligent. It's stupid. Why? Because it defies a law of nature.
What law? The Law of Cause and Effect!
Listening to John Allison III of BB&T fame,(a recorded speech I possess) he said it this way. The Law of Cause and Effect: Everything in nature has a nature and it acts consistent with its nature. Tigers are tigers, stones are stones and people are people.
So what is the nature of a person? At root, a person is consistent with his purpose. One cannot operate for a minute without a purpose of some kind. An idea that comes into one's conscious mind is the event which unites spirit with body, mental with physical to cause a result of some kind.
Suppose a person laid in bed until he had some idea that he wanted to get up. He can say all kinds of things to himself - like, "I've got to get up because I've got to go to work. Yah, no one should have to work and because I have to, life is hell. I'm consigned to the burden and drudgery of life" - in other words, he may consider himself completely at the effect of, a victim of life. Of course there are zillions of positive reasons for getting up too.
No matter, what had to happen - regardless of the reason - was that an idea had to pop into the person's head and that became his purpose for the next few minutes or hours or longer. Whether he's willing to be responsible for that is another matter in this discussion. One simply could not operate without a purpose - at even the most rudimentary level above the automatic functions that the body provides so long as it lives.
But, creating a purpose for which one lives his life is more than a momentary undertaking. That goes far beyond waiting until one is struck by an idea or a feeling. It is something that one can create in the largest sense and generated from one's loves and one's ideals for an eminently fulfilling life. Or it is something one can create from the unquestioned beliefs he got from his childhood - but to the same scope. It can provide motive for a moment, a month or a lifetime.
A purpose sets the aspect of one's personal nature - his character. And this doesn't change in the broadest sense. It is possible to change it, but not without a lot of serious self-examination and work extending oneself into new, uncharted areas of his life.
When any leader has gotten to where he is, by virtue of his purpose and by enrolling, willingly or unwillingly, millions of followers, and further, when his purpose is rooted in the soil of centuries, that person is not going to change. To pretend otherwise and enroll the American people on that idea is immensely, horrendously disingenuous. (It could only be done with such people who defer to faith as a valid mental action, be it in a specifically religious form or in a modern mystical form. Anyone who lives in and is oriented to the real, everyday world and is working to manifest their larger and long-range purposes and have some capacity to integrate ideas and the events of life, simply would not buy this idea. One has to revert to the "magical thinking" of childhood [a stage in an individual's development] in order to consider this a real possibility.)
And yet, this is the foreign policy of this Administration that we are asked to swallow.
The cartoonists are reacting. (I got these from Sultan Knish's blog.)
What law? The Law of Cause and Effect!
Listening to John Allison III of BB&T fame,(a recorded speech I possess) he said it this way. The Law of Cause and Effect: Everything in nature has a nature and it acts consistent with its nature. Tigers are tigers, stones are stones and people are people.
So what is the nature of a person? At root, a person is consistent with his purpose. One cannot operate for a minute without a purpose of some kind. An idea that comes into one's conscious mind is the event which unites spirit with body, mental with physical to cause a result of some kind.
Suppose a person laid in bed until he had some idea that he wanted to get up. He can say all kinds of things to himself - like, "I've got to get up because I've got to go to work. Yah, no one should have to work and because I have to, life is hell. I'm consigned to the burden and drudgery of life" - in other words, he may consider himself completely at the effect of, a victim of life. Of course there are zillions of positive reasons for getting up too.
No matter, what had to happen - regardless of the reason - was that an idea had to pop into the person's head and that became his purpose for the next few minutes or hours or longer. Whether he's willing to be responsible for that is another matter in this discussion. One simply could not operate without a purpose - at even the most rudimentary level above the automatic functions that the body provides so long as it lives.
But, creating a purpose for which one lives his life is more than a momentary undertaking. That goes far beyond waiting until one is struck by an idea or a feeling. It is something that one can create in the largest sense and generated from one's loves and one's ideals for an eminently fulfilling life. Or it is something one can create from the unquestioned beliefs he got from his childhood - but to the same scope. It can provide motive for a moment, a month or a lifetime.
A purpose sets the aspect of one's personal nature - his character. And this doesn't change in the broadest sense. It is possible to change it, but not without a lot of serious self-examination and work extending oneself into new, uncharted areas of his life.
When any leader has gotten to where he is, by virtue of his purpose and by enrolling, willingly or unwillingly, millions of followers, and further, when his purpose is rooted in the soil of centuries, that person is not going to change. To pretend otherwise and enroll the American people on that idea is immensely, horrendously disingenuous. (It could only be done with such people who defer to faith as a valid mental action, be it in a specifically religious form or in a modern mystical form. Anyone who lives in and is oriented to the real, everyday world and is working to manifest their larger and long-range purposes and have some capacity to integrate ideas and the events of life, simply would not buy this idea. One has to revert to the "magical thinking" of childhood [a stage in an individual's development] in order to consider this a real possibility.)And yet, this is the foreign policy of this Administration that we are asked to swallow.
The cartoonists are reacting. (I got these from Sultan Knish's blog.)
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Cold Heart of Obamacare
If this passes, you, your parents, your friends and the same for me will likely die by Obama and the Democrats’ hand. This bill cannot and will not improve health care for people – above all the poor. It’s purpose is to end the control that you have over your own life. Call your Representative and Senators and up the ante with them. Whatever it takes to stop this incredible injustice must happen now.
We know that freedom provides for an abundant life. Government control, on the other hand, causes the opposite. This bill is definitely a program to control, control, control you to death. SCB
The Cold Heart of Obamacare
by Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
_____________________________________________________
Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.
To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.
Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.
Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.
In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients — without actually seeing them and their condition — will mean, as Tanner notes, that "every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: 'Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?'" (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)
President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.
Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in "Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care" (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): "Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.
"Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn't work change much too quickly for policymakers to dictate clinical practice." Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:
"If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions."
If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care "reform" measure to send to the White House for President Obama's signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.
Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor and, of course, haven't the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America?
Another doctor whose byline in the New York Post I try never to miss is Mark K. Siegel, a practicing internist and an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. In "Destroying the Doctor-Patient Bond" (New York Post, Aug. 3), he points to Section 123 of the House bill that "establishes a Health Benefits dvisory Committee, chaired by the surgeon general, which makes recommendations to the HHS secretary on what should be covered and what shouldn't.
"These rulings from on high," Dr. Siegel warns, "are problematic, since useful treatments or tests for one patient are not appropriate for another. Appeals are bound to be time consuming and largely ineffective. This is the government interfering directly with the practice of medicine."
Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in"? Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?
Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast-cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people's lives for money."
Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.
I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.
We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.
___________________________________________________
Hentoff, Nat (2009, December 6). The Cold Heart of Obamacare. Retrieved December 7, 2009, from The Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11024
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Lost People of America
I remember reading Ayn Rand and hearing lots of questions as to whether a person should find a Galt's Gulch or create one to live in. There were a series of questions of this type which are related to this line of inquiry: "Should one accept Social Security or should one go to a government school or accept money from the government in any way?" Later Rand was glad that Alan Greenspan, one of her proteges, had the opportunity to curb inflation and buy time by becoming the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.
She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.
In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.
One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.
image by ukyo_freak
These traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.
Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.
All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.
A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."
I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.
This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.
Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.
History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."
This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.
It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.
This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.
But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?
How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?
Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?
Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?
This question shall be taken up in a future post.
image by Cotter158
She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.
In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.
One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.
image by ukyo_freakThese traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.
Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.
All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.
A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."
I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.
This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.
Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.
History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."
This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.
It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.
This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.
But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?
How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?
Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?
Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?
This question shall be taken up in a future post.
image by Cotter158
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
What is War?
With the al-Qaeda trials moved to New York City and the United States not dealing with these killers as a military matter, we find ourselves carrying out a purpose that is based in denial: denial of the nature of human being. A lot of questions are raised which you can read about here. Is this the ultimate exposure of the anti-life nature of the Obama presidency? It may be.
What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.
War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.
Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)
War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.
The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.
It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.
People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.
I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.
The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.
Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.
It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.
Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.
Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.
(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.
These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.
Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.
What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.
War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.
Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)
War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.
The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.
It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.
People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.
I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.
The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.
Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.
It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.
Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.
Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.
(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.
These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.
Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The Necessity of Wandering in a Desert for 40 Days and Nights in an Age of Abundance.
America seems to be in a phase of self-hatred. It has been going on for 40 years, starting small and growing into the current crescendo. Out of the 60s came people who thought America was a bad place - all dominating and treating people badly around the world. These stories have advanced to absurd proportions and at last, we have elected a president who is an expression of what I call, the American Distortion. President Obama holds up as the ideal before the United Nations "No nation should dominate another." (Since domination appears to occur quite naturally among all life, there's nothing like trying to create an anti-life vacuum. This is soooo Obama.) He then apologizes for America's dominance. He doesn't see much of anything that has been accomplished by America as a great thing. He, as I have said before, prefers sores to pick which naturally blinds him to accomplishments. So far as I can tell, he considers everything that America has produced a product of an evil system which causes evil men. He then feels perfectly justified taking property from one and giving to another, rearranging businesses to his liking and all of the kinds of actions that despots and tyrants throughout history have taken. (Hmm. Did he include himself as a product of America?)
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Friday, November 13, 2009
Race, Politics and Glenn Beck
Today, Glenn Beck was awesome. He struck a note with me that needed striking. In fact I think that note needs to come from a gong hanging from a tall tree's limb to be heard throughout the country.
When Obama ran for office there were many concerns and ideas running through the culture. The two basic ones were political freedom/slavery and race.
I've always been a devotee of political freedom. It's the only thing about politics that I care about. All issues can be solved in those terms. Is the government increasing its hold over our lives or do we have the full measure of freedom that we need to live as human beings and that we ought to have? That is and always will be my question.
My relationships with my black friends has always been one of mutual respect and fun with some inspiration thrown in. Whenever there is a story about overcoming slavery and gaining freedom, I'm all in, often inspired and moved to tears.
I've always felt a common ground with blacks because of my anti-slavery, love-of-freedom values, but hearing Obama speak the strains of slavery in his messages of socialism, I wasn't so sure. When 95% of blacks voted for Obama, I was no longer sure what was going on. Did I have a common value of freedom with them or not?
No one said anything and my interracial relationships near me have gone quiet. Although I've communicated with blacks who I'm clear are solidly against socialist slavery and for political freedom, they are people I discover on the internet. I'm glad for these relationships, but they don't replace the friends I had.
Beck's program today pierced that desert of silence. I saw there a studio full of people who are Americans first and who are not afraid to speak against Obama and the Democrats as they seek to increase slavery and reduce freedom. I heard a number of them struggling with the hyphenated African-American designation. They are Americans first and they don't want some hyphenated name diminishing that. I heard them hating it that people in their culture deride knowledge and speaking good English.
I was left clear that we are into waters that we do not know how to navigate. And I was left clear that there are some courageous blacks willing to speak for the deep and enduring values of our larger, common American culture.
I was left heartened that the Democrat progressivism/socialism agenda lead by a black man is not sitting well with some of them. Given the results that government programs have had on their families and children, trapping them in ghettos of poverty and ignorance, they are not enticed by Obama's smooth words and Mr. Cool. They know bullshit when they see it.
Bottom-line I was left with that when it comes to ideas and discerning truth and value, there is no such thing as color. Beck's was the first post-racial program I've heard. I only wish Obama could lead as well.
I thank Glenn Beck today. It was an opening in what has seemed to me like a monolithic, impenetrable Obama-barrier.
Here are videos of the program. I got them from Fox News. He bills this as Part 1 of his series on black conservatives. What I hear is a series on black people who have different views and can speak out. I didn't parse their words for whether they were strictly conservative or not, whether they stayed on or went off the tracks.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
When Obama ran for office there were many concerns and ideas running through the culture. The two basic ones were political freedom/slavery and race.
I've always been a devotee of political freedom. It's the only thing about politics that I care about. All issues can be solved in those terms. Is the government increasing its hold over our lives or do we have the full measure of freedom that we need to live as human beings and that we ought to have? That is and always will be my question.
My relationships with my black friends has always been one of mutual respect and fun with some inspiration thrown in. Whenever there is a story about overcoming slavery and gaining freedom, I'm all in, often inspired and moved to tears.
I've always felt a common ground with blacks because of my anti-slavery, love-of-freedom values, but hearing Obama speak the strains of slavery in his messages of socialism, I wasn't so sure. When 95% of blacks voted for Obama, I was no longer sure what was going on. Did I have a common value of freedom with them or not?
No one said anything and my interracial relationships near me have gone quiet. Although I've communicated with blacks who I'm clear are solidly against socialist slavery and for political freedom, they are people I discover on the internet. I'm glad for these relationships, but they don't replace the friends I had.
Beck's program today pierced that desert of silence. I saw there a studio full of people who are Americans first and who are not afraid to speak against Obama and the Democrats as they seek to increase slavery and reduce freedom. I heard a number of them struggling with the hyphenated African-American designation. They are Americans first and they don't want some hyphenated name diminishing that. I heard them hating it that people in their culture deride knowledge and speaking good English.
I was left clear that we are into waters that we do not know how to navigate. And I was left clear that there are some courageous blacks willing to speak for the deep and enduring values of our larger, common American culture.
I was left heartened that the Democrat progressivism/socialism agenda lead by a black man is not sitting well with some of them. Given the results that government programs have had on their families and children, trapping them in ghettos of poverty and ignorance, they are not enticed by Obama's smooth words and Mr. Cool. They know bullshit when they see it.
Bottom-line I was left with that when it comes to ideas and discerning truth and value, there is no such thing as color. Beck's was the first post-racial program I've heard. I only wish Obama could lead as well.
I thank Glenn Beck today. It was an opening in what has seemed to me like a monolithic, impenetrable Obama-barrier.
Here are videos of the program. I got them from Fox News. He bills this as Part 1 of his series on black conservatives. What I hear is a series on black people who have different views and can speak out. I didn't parse their words for whether they were strictly conservative or not, whether they stayed on or went off the tracks.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Saturday, November 7, 2009
To John Lewis - for the 2nd day in a row.
To The Honorable Representative from Georgia, John Lewis:
NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.
Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.
I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.
But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.
No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.
Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.
Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.
Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.
By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.
Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.
And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.
There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.
Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.
Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.
NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.
Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.
I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.
But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.
No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.
Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.
Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.
Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.
By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.
Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.
And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.
There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.
Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.
Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Fear-based Government
Never have I seen such a fear-based Administration and government. The US Government has truly become public enemy #1. Give a man motivated by fear a gun and trouble is likely to ensue. The fact that the government is the final authority and possesses and uses guns as its ultimate and distinguishing characteristic, means that we are in big trouble.
Anyone who understands freedom and the abundance it provides for all those who participate must realize that we are on a path which is 180 degrees from that course. We have gotten a man and wife in the White House which have a score to settle. That score is based in hatred and hatred is based on fear. Instead of seeing an expansion of freedom such that we all can continue to learn what life requires and which nourishes us, we are seeing rules and regulations on everything. Instead of men welcoming disagreement in order to learn more about how life works and what is true, this Administration is refusing to talk to or about anyone who disagrees with them. This, I assert, implies massive fear.
It's funny to watch Obama pretend that Fox News, e.g., is not even a news organization. This guy is massively out of touch with reality. Further he is counting on the dumbbells of this country to give him the approval he needs. No one who is interested in life and living a good life can afford to live this way. Obama thinks he can. Hmmm. Is he that stupid? I don't think he is innately stupid. I do think, rather, that fear will make one stupid. Fear of people asking questions and perhaps doubting that he is really The One must be terrifying.
Clearly we are in a battle: Freedom vs. Tyranny. Barack Obama is the first snake oil salesman of the 21st century. He has the pleasant manner and the "sweet" family that keep a lot of people lulled into an "everything will be ok" state of mind.
Believe me, it is not OK and it will not turn out well. And at the rate that things are happening, it will not take long for the consequences of this horrendous, people-fearing, Democratically controlled government to become apparent.
The wealthy people may be able to get out of the country and not be controlled by this tyranny. But for the middle class and the underclass, this promises to be one huge concentration camp, border to border.
Sounds horrendous, doesn't it? If you show me one fact, one marker, that the direction of this government is any way other than toward tyranny, I would like to see it or hear it. I assert that the people who are still believing that this Administration is acting in their interests are asleep - deeply asleep. They are deeply invested in not rocking any boats. They hate conflict and argumentation, even disgruntlement. Their wallpaper patterns consist of babies, kittens and puppies. Or, as Rand once said, their lives "are about baby blankets and hams." They would rather ride blithely in a boat headed for the falls than jump overboard and, even though difficult, work to get to a solid bank.
The solid bank IS one's knowledge of how the world works. Not how one hopes it will work. Not how one prays it will turn out. I mean how the world works. It means being grounded in how human being operates, what political freedom is and why it is important that the political system be consistent with the possibility of human being, not the control of human being. (If you think that control of human being is the way of the future, you need to get your ass on a psychologist's couch to see if you can discover why you think that.) One must have, one way or the other, the philosophical/moral basis for the requirements for a society such that a man can freely live in it. And during these trying times, that knowledge cannot be implicit. It must be conscious and explicit. Otherwise, you don't really know and know that you. Without that, one is destined to drift, float and go over the falls. Without that there can be no access to the will to speak out, to resist and finally take the action which can, if successful, save yours and your loved ones' lives.
Do you think this is a dire message? Your god-damned right this is a dire message. Do you think I'm typing this up because I want to be ostracized as a pariah? No, I'm not. I am saying this because I'm a canary in the coal mine. I understand these things. The value of freedom and the morality that works for freedom has been something which was awakened by my father when I was a kid. I could see that he cared about such things and got disgusted when people didn't act according to the principles which honored people in their rights and as a person. He could get morally outraged at injustice. I liked that. I admired that. I became that.
I know what freedom is. I am very aware of it vs. when it is not present or being threatened to be taken away. I worked for 40 years to increase the distinctions I have around this topic. I am not one who is going to blithely slip into a life where those distinctions are missing. It's not me.
If you lived on a desert island, you would be free because there would be no one else on the island. A free country, a political system whose value and organization is for freedom, is living as free in society as one is free on a desert island. In a free society, people recognize and honor the right of every person to live his life. Nothing impinges upon him other than the principle by which he chooses to live which is, to honor the right of every man, woman and child which includes him, to be free of everyone else. He can do anything he wants except initiate force against another person or his property. A free man can interact with any other man so long as he can obtain the agreement of that person for such action. A lot of this is in the unsaid that governs society, but really it's quite simple.
But now, people are primarily scared. The big motivator is fear. The blacks have been buying the victim conversation for decades and that is a fear-based conversation. Many women and gays have been generating a fear-based conversation too. With all education controlled by the government, we are now realizing that our children have no knowledge of core values. Consequently anytime their actions are threatened or something isn't magically on the table before them, they have no interior to which to repair. All they have is fear - and then the sob stories.
So we have many millions of people who are hanging onto Obama as some kind of hope. Hope for what? Their good feeling won't be interrupted? Crumbs and chump change? What exactly? That their race will have some power and won't be a barrier for them? What is it? I don't see that hope.
We know that government health care will produce a poverty of health services and care. If that comes to pass, right now we are on the mountain top insofar as the kinds of health care that an average person can obtain. The wealth of health care that we now have will be going the way of the vinyl record. Fear shrinks life. Love expands it. Tyranny and fear go together. Freedom and love go together. Tyranny and poverty go together. Freedom and wealth go together.
American freedom and wealth is about to end. It has been easy for a middle class person to live well in the United States. Eighteen months ago, I was commenting on this very fact. That is ending and it is soon going to be hard. A year from now, that will be apparent to more people although I have to admit that I am experiencing it now.
Architecture, especially so for my small business, is one of the first things to be affected by the larger economic picture. I can tell you with certainty that nothing is happening. One thing that is happening is that people who have wanted to build are still wanting to build. As this drags out, they look for the slightest clue that it would be good to move forward. So if there is any easing, I expect it to be a boom, at least for a short period of time. It could be that in 2 to 3 months I may be working as much as I can physically work.
With the kinds of things going on with the government now, I will have to have everything be put in a form that can have some power in the dry period that will inevitably follow. Damn it, I wanted a flat screen TV. That, however, may not be the thing to be buying. I don't want to be one of those dunderheads that go with the flow and wake up one day shocked within an inch of my life. I know that experience. Not good. This clearly is going to take some thought.
We are in and heading for the eye of a fear-based hurricane. Do what you can to stop it. I think stopping the government from instituting government health care, a bureaucrat who is designated to sit between your mind and your body, would put an enormous crimp in the Democrats' push for total power. I think Government Health Care means that the government, not you, owns your life. It means that you do not possess the right to your life for the simple reason that you will be unable to act in your own interest when it comes to your body. You will get the chump change. The choices that would have been possible under freedom won't be. Simple as that. Only the government's interest will matter in that world.
The Cap and Trade bill definitely needs to be defeated. That will tax you unto death. Thousands of dollars in higher prices caused by the government's tax on energy will change your life. Man's role in the climate is not understood. Frankly, I don't think it amounts to much in the face of the enormous forces of a much larger system in which we and our planet lives. Read Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer for a scenario that will place the earth in a much larger context than the global "warmist," "climate changers" have. I think Al Gore is an idiot. He's a person whose purpose is to accumulate wealth via political means.
The five primary arguments I have against the global "warmist" positions are these: 1) The science is not there. Al Gore and the desperate global warmists are not careful about the facts and they are only interested in pushing people to a conclusion that will get them the control they want. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I was appalled at how disrespectful it was to a thinking person. It was really not about the earth at all. It was about getting the audience to like Al Gore. (Now isn't that an interesting motivation for a politician? Oh my, I should be surprised. Sounds like someone else I know.)
2) Environmentalists lie - boldly and outrageously. They lie about polar bears, for one thing. They also lie about a lot of other things. Many of these lies have been documented. They are not about the Environment. They are about religion. This is not the first time in history that the earth and nature has become the touchstone of a religion. People live on the earth and need the earth as a resource to maintain their lives. But, their lives are not to be sacrificed for the earth or nature. That would turn the whole way things work upside down. But this is the way an Environmentalist thinks. He would rather save a 2" fish than provide food for people. Something wrong here. When I see him be the first to lay down his life for a fish, he will have some credibility. Until then? No.
Another very interesting fact is that private property owners take care of the environment much better than government ever has or will. One of the reasons is that government, as it now operates, is set up on a double standard. Everything you cannot do, they can. I've read articles about tree farms and such and the private farms are far better than the government owned lands. People generally love their property and they do not go around with the intent to harm it. Also, property is an investment and it works to maintain its value. On the other hand, the government could care less. It is oriented toward power and political spoils, not real life and real property. (Of course if you organize a march on Washington with a million or more people, you might get their attention to do something. Not necessarily though.) The great devastation of land is in the public lands. Since no one owns it, the thing to do is get as much as one can while he has the access. Or to pass a law such that it cannot respond to the natural laws that govern it. There is no future that one is worried about. The future for someone with access to public lands is far more dependent on one's ass-kissing ability than one's nature-caring ability.
3) Resources never go out of existence. They are always in a process of transformation of their form. Today's trash is a potential resource tomorrow. (Actually it is a resource right now, but until we have worked out how to use it, it is in a latent form.) E = m times c squared. Energy and mass are intimately related. One transforms into the other. As we are better able to control this process, we will be able to make these transformations ourselves. There is no need to be "spiritually" worried that we are going to run out of resources. Not possible.
I think that eventually all the manufacturing may be located on other planets and asteroids. Earth, where we live, will be a country club.
4) Pollution is not something that is necessarily damaging. In a free society, pollution becomes a problem if it damages someone's property - their body or their farm, if you get my point. No one gets to dump their weekly trash on my side of the fence, the property line. If I think that factory X is polluting my property, all I have to do is show that to be true. I do that by discovering the facts that show that. Until one has discovered those facts, there is no evidence that Factory X is polluting my property. (In today's world, people try everything but the facts to get people to stop doing something. The tools are sob stories, social pressure and unearned guilt. That's the tools we now use. Nasty tools. They don't work and we don't learn anything about how things work except how to better use those tools which makes our social world an increasingly nasty place to live. Not good.)
5) The free market responds to change the fastest of any human invention ever. It is constantly changing and the entrepreneur is always on the lookout for how better to meet the needs and wants of potential consumers. If the climate changes, the last thing we need are rigid laws decided by a bunch of politicians sitting in Washington or State Capitols trying to figure out how to change the laws so they and their backers can make a buck. This is corrupt. The free market, if free, will handle the changes we are always dealing with and seeking to provide for and it will do it magnificently and quickly. That is inherent in its nature. Nothing to fear. It is imperative to separate economy and state.
There are many areas to fight the current government. The control of speech is one area. Net neutrality is an attempt to place the internet under government control rendering it unable to respond to what people want. Obama's czars have various plans for controlling talk radio, disagreeable cable channels, etc., etc. All of this is very bad for us because it makes it much harder for us to get information and adjust our view of the world as we need to do for our survival.
Do what you can to prepare. The very best thing you can do is school yourself as to why fear doesn't work and you should give it up. I'm 69 years old and I would give up Medicare in a nanosecond for a free market in health care. I guarantee you I would be far more likely to get the health care I need if the market is free. Government control of health care will, if it comes about, strangle health care. If government saw to it that freedom increased, there would be nurses in drug stores and grocery stores taking care of most of the basic questions we have about health care. Health care would be abundant. Instead, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company trot out some sob story (what I call sore picking) which they think is sufficient reason to put the noose around the nation's neck. What a Carnival of Arrogant Asses we have in Washington.
Anyone who understands freedom and the abundance it provides for all those who participate must realize that we are on a path which is 180 degrees from that course. We have gotten a man and wife in the White House which have a score to settle. That score is based in hatred and hatred is based on fear. Instead of seeing an expansion of freedom such that we all can continue to learn what life requires and which nourishes us, we are seeing rules and regulations on everything. Instead of men welcoming disagreement in order to learn more about how life works and what is true, this Administration is refusing to talk to or about anyone who disagrees with them. This, I assert, implies massive fear.
It's funny to watch Obama pretend that Fox News, e.g., is not even a news organization. This guy is massively out of touch with reality. Further he is counting on the dumbbells of this country to give him the approval he needs. No one who is interested in life and living a good life can afford to live this way. Obama thinks he can. Hmmm. Is he that stupid? I don't think he is innately stupid. I do think, rather, that fear will make one stupid. Fear of people asking questions and perhaps doubting that he is really The One must be terrifying.
Clearly we are in a battle: Freedom vs. Tyranny. Barack Obama is the first snake oil salesman of the 21st century. He has the pleasant manner and the "sweet" family that keep a lot of people lulled into an "everything will be ok" state of mind.
Believe me, it is not OK and it will not turn out well. And at the rate that things are happening, it will not take long for the consequences of this horrendous, people-fearing, Democratically controlled government to become apparent.
The wealthy people may be able to get out of the country and not be controlled by this tyranny. But for the middle class and the underclass, this promises to be one huge concentration camp, border to border.
Sounds horrendous, doesn't it? If you show me one fact, one marker, that the direction of this government is any way other than toward tyranny, I would like to see it or hear it. I assert that the people who are still believing that this Administration is acting in their interests are asleep - deeply asleep. They are deeply invested in not rocking any boats. They hate conflict and argumentation, even disgruntlement. Their wallpaper patterns consist of babies, kittens and puppies. Or, as Rand once said, their lives "are about baby blankets and hams." They would rather ride blithely in a boat headed for the falls than jump overboard and, even though difficult, work to get to a solid bank.
The solid bank IS one's knowledge of how the world works. Not how one hopes it will work. Not how one prays it will turn out. I mean how the world works. It means being grounded in how human being operates, what political freedom is and why it is important that the political system be consistent with the possibility of human being, not the control of human being. (If you think that control of human being is the way of the future, you need to get your ass on a psychologist's couch to see if you can discover why you think that.) One must have, one way or the other, the philosophical/moral basis for the requirements for a society such that a man can freely live in it. And during these trying times, that knowledge cannot be implicit. It must be conscious and explicit. Otherwise, you don't really know and know that you. Without that, one is destined to drift, float and go over the falls. Without that there can be no access to the will to speak out, to resist and finally take the action which can, if successful, save yours and your loved ones' lives.
Do you think this is a dire message? Your god-damned right this is a dire message. Do you think I'm typing this up because I want to be ostracized as a pariah? No, I'm not. I am saying this because I'm a canary in the coal mine. I understand these things. The value of freedom and the morality that works for freedom has been something which was awakened by my father when I was a kid. I could see that he cared about such things and got disgusted when people didn't act according to the principles which honored people in their rights and as a person. He could get morally outraged at injustice. I liked that. I admired that. I became that.
I know what freedom is. I am very aware of it vs. when it is not present or being threatened to be taken away. I worked for 40 years to increase the distinctions I have around this topic. I am not one who is going to blithely slip into a life where those distinctions are missing. It's not me.
If you lived on a desert island, you would be free because there would be no one else on the island. A free country, a political system whose value and organization is for freedom, is living as free in society as one is free on a desert island. In a free society, people recognize and honor the right of every person to live his life. Nothing impinges upon him other than the principle by which he chooses to live which is, to honor the right of every man, woman and child which includes him, to be free of everyone else. He can do anything he wants except initiate force against another person or his property. A free man can interact with any other man so long as he can obtain the agreement of that person for such action. A lot of this is in the unsaid that governs society, but really it's quite simple.
But now, people are primarily scared. The big motivator is fear. The blacks have been buying the victim conversation for decades and that is a fear-based conversation. Many women and gays have been generating a fear-based conversation too. With all education controlled by the government, we are now realizing that our children have no knowledge of core values. Consequently anytime their actions are threatened or something isn't magically on the table before them, they have no interior to which to repair. All they have is fear - and then the sob stories.
So we have many millions of people who are hanging onto Obama as some kind of hope. Hope for what? Their good feeling won't be interrupted? Crumbs and chump change? What exactly? That their race will have some power and won't be a barrier for them? What is it? I don't see that hope.
We know that government health care will produce a poverty of health services and care. If that comes to pass, right now we are on the mountain top insofar as the kinds of health care that an average person can obtain. The wealth of health care that we now have will be going the way of the vinyl record. Fear shrinks life. Love expands it. Tyranny and fear go together. Freedom and love go together. Tyranny and poverty go together. Freedom and wealth go together.
American freedom and wealth is about to end. It has been easy for a middle class person to live well in the United States. Eighteen months ago, I was commenting on this very fact. That is ending and it is soon going to be hard. A year from now, that will be apparent to more people although I have to admit that I am experiencing it now.
Architecture, especially so for my small business, is one of the first things to be affected by the larger economic picture. I can tell you with certainty that nothing is happening. One thing that is happening is that people who have wanted to build are still wanting to build. As this drags out, they look for the slightest clue that it would be good to move forward. So if there is any easing, I expect it to be a boom, at least for a short period of time. It could be that in 2 to 3 months I may be working as much as I can physically work.
With the kinds of things going on with the government now, I will have to have everything be put in a form that can have some power in the dry period that will inevitably follow. Damn it, I wanted a flat screen TV. That, however, may not be the thing to be buying. I don't want to be one of those dunderheads that go with the flow and wake up one day shocked within an inch of my life. I know that experience. Not good. This clearly is going to take some thought.
We are in and heading for the eye of a fear-based hurricane. Do what you can to stop it. I think stopping the government from instituting government health care, a bureaucrat who is designated to sit between your mind and your body, would put an enormous crimp in the Democrats' push for total power. I think Government Health Care means that the government, not you, owns your life. It means that you do not possess the right to your life for the simple reason that you will be unable to act in your own interest when it comes to your body. You will get the chump change. The choices that would have been possible under freedom won't be. Simple as that. Only the government's interest will matter in that world.
The Cap and Trade bill definitely needs to be defeated. That will tax you unto death. Thousands of dollars in higher prices caused by the government's tax on energy will change your life. Man's role in the climate is not understood. Frankly, I don't think it amounts to much in the face of the enormous forces of a much larger system in which we and our planet lives. Read Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer for a scenario that will place the earth in a much larger context than the global "warmist," "climate changers" have. I think Al Gore is an idiot. He's a person whose purpose is to accumulate wealth via political means.
The five primary arguments I have against the global "warmist" positions are these: 1) The science is not there. Al Gore and the desperate global warmists are not careful about the facts and they are only interested in pushing people to a conclusion that will get them the control they want. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I was appalled at how disrespectful it was to a thinking person. It was really not about the earth at all. It was about getting the audience to like Al Gore. (Now isn't that an interesting motivation for a politician? Oh my, I should be surprised. Sounds like someone else I know.)
2) Environmentalists lie - boldly and outrageously. They lie about polar bears, for one thing. They also lie about a lot of other things. Many of these lies have been documented. They are not about the Environment. They are about religion. This is not the first time in history that the earth and nature has become the touchstone of a religion. People live on the earth and need the earth as a resource to maintain their lives. But, their lives are not to be sacrificed for the earth or nature. That would turn the whole way things work upside down. But this is the way an Environmentalist thinks. He would rather save a 2" fish than provide food for people. Something wrong here. When I see him be the first to lay down his life for a fish, he will have some credibility. Until then? No.
Another very interesting fact is that private property owners take care of the environment much better than government ever has or will. One of the reasons is that government, as it now operates, is set up on a double standard. Everything you cannot do, they can. I've read articles about tree farms and such and the private farms are far better than the government owned lands. People generally love their property and they do not go around with the intent to harm it. Also, property is an investment and it works to maintain its value. On the other hand, the government could care less. It is oriented toward power and political spoils, not real life and real property. (Of course if you organize a march on Washington with a million or more people, you might get their attention to do something. Not necessarily though.) The great devastation of land is in the public lands. Since no one owns it, the thing to do is get as much as one can while he has the access. Or to pass a law such that it cannot respond to the natural laws that govern it. There is no future that one is worried about. The future for someone with access to public lands is far more dependent on one's ass-kissing ability than one's nature-caring ability.
3) Resources never go out of existence. They are always in a process of transformation of their form. Today's trash is a potential resource tomorrow. (Actually it is a resource right now, but until we have worked out how to use it, it is in a latent form.) E = m times c squared. Energy and mass are intimately related. One transforms into the other. As we are better able to control this process, we will be able to make these transformations ourselves. There is no need to be "spiritually" worried that we are going to run out of resources. Not possible.
I think that eventually all the manufacturing may be located on other planets and asteroids. Earth, where we live, will be a country club.
4) Pollution is not something that is necessarily damaging. In a free society, pollution becomes a problem if it damages someone's property - their body or their farm, if you get my point. No one gets to dump their weekly trash on my side of the fence, the property line. If I think that factory X is polluting my property, all I have to do is show that to be true. I do that by discovering the facts that show that. Until one has discovered those facts, there is no evidence that Factory X is polluting my property. (In today's world, people try everything but the facts to get people to stop doing something. The tools are sob stories, social pressure and unearned guilt. That's the tools we now use. Nasty tools. They don't work and we don't learn anything about how things work except how to better use those tools which makes our social world an increasingly nasty place to live. Not good.)
5) The free market responds to change the fastest of any human invention ever. It is constantly changing and the entrepreneur is always on the lookout for how better to meet the needs and wants of potential consumers. If the climate changes, the last thing we need are rigid laws decided by a bunch of politicians sitting in Washington or State Capitols trying to figure out how to change the laws so they and their backers can make a buck. This is corrupt. The free market, if free, will handle the changes we are always dealing with and seeking to provide for and it will do it magnificently and quickly. That is inherent in its nature. Nothing to fear. It is imperative to separate economy and state.
There are many areas to fight the current government. The control of speech is one area. Net neutrality is an attempt to place the internet under government control rendering it unable to respond to what people want. Obama's czars have various plans for controlling talk radio, disagreeable cable channels, etc., etc. All of this is very bad for us because it makes it much harder for us to get information and adjust our view of the world as we need to do for our survival.
Do what you can to prepare. The very best thing you can do is school yourself as to why fear doesn't work and you should give it up. I'm 69 years old and I would give up Medicare in a nanosecond for a free market in health care. I guarantee you I would be far more likely to get the health care I need if the market is free. Government control of health care will, if it comes about, strangle health care. If government saw to it that freedom increased, there would be nurses in drug stores and grocery stores taking care of most of the basic questions we have about health care. Health care would be abundant. Instead, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company trot out some sob story (what I call sore picking) which they think is sufficient reason to put the noose around the nation's neck. What a Carnival of Arrogant Asses we have in Washington.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Is it Race or Class? Both Collectivist!
I read this article by Sultan Knish. You can go to the website by clicking on the title of the article below which is a link.
I think this interpretation of the Gates episode makes the most sense of any I've read. The issue of race which Obama seeks to keep in place covers a much deeper power issue - not the earned power, be it economic or intelligence, of individual citizens developing themselves, but the political power of a some individuals over others. Obama has, in every way he can, manifest the trappings of an imperial presidency. The one thing he cannot see and will have to learn the hard way is that he has to earn it - not by rhetoric, but by results which work. He's not merely weak in this area, he eschews it as necessary. Why? He won.
Race, Class and Henry Louis Gates in Obama's America
In the wake of the Gates arrest heard 'round the world, the media, Obama and of course Henry Louis Gates himself, have done their best to position this as a black and white incident, the collision of two men divided by race. But in fact the arrest of Henry Louis Gates was not about two men divided by race, but two men divided by class.
Henry Louis Gates was not arrested because he was black. He was arrested because he was a famous man who felt entitled to tell off a middle class police officer, warning him, "You don't know who you're messing with." Those are not the words of a powerless victim of America's racial oppression. They're the words of an important man who was warning the low paid city employee he was dealing with, that he was too prominent to be touched.
And indeed the remaining narrative, which moved from a media firestorm over a simple arrest, to a supportive statement from the White House, proved Gates right. Crowley indeed didn't "know who he was messing with". He was messing not with a black man, but with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.
Had Gates been arrested because he was a black man, there would have been no media response and no attention from the White House. Had Henry Louis Gates been a plumber or an associate professor whose name wasn't listed in Who's Who in America, with three names, and a list of titles and awards long enough to choke a whale-- his arrest would never have made the news. Nor would Gates have acted the way he did.
Once arrested, Gates and his defenders cynically used race as a smokescreen to conceal the real issue, which was class. Henry Louis Gates was not the victim of racism, he was the beneficiary of it. And all the media's huffing and puffing about race in America cannot successfully transform a wealthy and prominent man who felt free to warn a police sergeant, "You don't know who you're messing with" into a victim.
Gates' arrest elicited sympathy from Obama, not because Gates shares a race with him, but because Henry Louis Gates shares a class with him. Like Gates, Obama has cynically done his best to exploit a racial guilt that has nothing to do, not only with him, but not even with his ancestors, to provide cover for his arrogance and sense of entitlement. Like the collision between Obama and Palin, the collision between Gates and Crowley, was a blatant clash of class, not race.
So too when Obama felt free enough to complain to his fellow upper class elitists at a San Francisco fundraiser about the middle class and lower class folks, "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion", it was not a racial complaint, it was a typically upper class liberal complaint. That same sense of class entitlement would feed the Obama campaign's fury against Sarah Palin for stepping outside her class, and proceed to portray her as ignorant white trash. So too Obama's media cult and Gates were eager enough to portray Crowley as thuggish and racist, only halting when they realized that their narrative had been disproven and was actually producing a backlash.
When black officers blasted Gates and in turn Obama, it ripped away the mask of race, and revealed the underlying issue of class. It was no longer one white man and one black man, but the middle class hardworking police officers pitted against the wealthy and powerful Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama. And that was a dangerous narrative, particularly after Obama had run up a tremendous deficit bailing out Wall Street banks and car companies.
Obama's condescending gambit of a beer summit was meant to appeal to what he thought were the sensibilities of the middle class white men he had offended. Of course that in turn served as a forum for Elizabeth Gates, Henry Louis Gates' daughter to pen an essay snidely commenting on Crowley's daughter's eyeliner, "she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes", again a comment denoting a class putdown, rather than a racial putdown.
In the famous photo of Crowley helping Gates walk, Americans may have seen compassion, but Gates only saw a lower class city employee providing service to a prominent civic figure. It is how Gates truly saw the conflict all along.
While American liberals insist on exploiting the arrest to argue that race remains a serious issue for Americans, the fact that large numbers of Americans were willing to vote for a black man into the top post in the nation suggests otherwise. It is not race that haunts America, but class. Yet what class is Henry Louis Gates?
Gates is not a captain of industry. He did not make money or gain fame inventing anything that people needed, or marketing a product that millions of Americans want. Instead Gates is a racial profiteer. A cleaner more academic version of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, running an institute named after W.E. Du Bois, a well known Communist who supported virtually every atrocity the USSR carried out, and was even willing to back Imperial Japan's massacres in China, in the name of race.
That is something which Gates has in common with Obama. Neither of the two men honestly came by their fame, fortune and positions. They came by them by exploiting racial guilt, not for any larger benefit, but for their own class standing. Behind all the twaddle about role models, is the elitism of two men, neither of whom have worked for a living, but who built up images of themselves as representing a race, in order to partake of the benefits of a class.
The rise of Obama, like the rise of Gates, is a story not of race, but of political parasitism. It is also the larger story of an America in which hard work no longer matters, in which it is safe to sneer at the middle class values of a Crowley or a Palin, because they represent an old fashioned dedication to achievement and duty, that is no longer meant to be relevant in the "New America".
In the "New America" you don't get recognized for hard work. You get recognized for being the squeaky wheel. For turning yourself into a brand. For finding an identity and marketing it for all you can. Race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity are only counters in a larger game of media politics that everyone can play, but only a few can succeed at.
It's not about the 9 to 5 anymore. It's about the 12 to 3 in a four day week. It's about the triumph over the middle class by people who excel at talking, but not at working. It's about playing divide and conquer with a multicultural America, certain that no matter how it goes, you will always pocket the winnings. It's not just about class, it's about the new class. The one that doesn't earn money, but has it transferred over from the coffers of the taxpayer. It's not about America. It's about the New America. It's about the Obama's America.
And if you're "unfortunate" enough to still believe in hard work and doing your job as best as you can, you don't belong in it anymore. Here have a beer. Then help Henry Louis Gates, Jr, down the stairs.
___________________________________________
This picture has been circulating on the web today. I found it on an NBC website. While I'm sure that some people see this as appropriate in the "Royal Style," I see it as bad taste. It is one more indication of Obama's desparate need to possess the trappings of importance.
A couple months ago I saw a video where O was going for burgers and fries. The limo pulled up, he got in and the first thing he did was throw his feet on the seat opposite as would an unknowing or disrespting child. I was offended to see a 47-year old adult do such a thing. I'm one of the taxpayers that own that limo. I wouldn't want him coming into my house treating my stuff that way and I didn't like it he treated "my" limo that way. This attitude is endemic to his presidency, if not his life.
What am I learning from all this? Disgust is more formidable than fear to move beyond.
I think this interpretation of the Gates episode makes the most sense of any I've read. The issue of race which Obama seeks to keep in place covers a much deeper power issue - not the earned power, be it economic or intelligence, of individual citizens developing themselves, but the political power of a some individuals over others. Obama has, in every way he can, manifest the trappings of an imperial presidency. The one thing he cannot see and will have to learn the hard way is that he has to earn it - not by rhetoric, but by results which work. He's not merely weak in this area, he eschews it as necessary. Why? He won.
Race, Class and Henry Louis Gates in Obama's America
In the wake of the Gates arrest heard 'round the world, the media, Obama and of course Henry Louis Gates himself, have done their best to position this as a black and white incident, the collision of two men divided by race. But in fact the arrest of Henry Louis Gates was not about two men divided by race, but two men divided by class.
Henry Louis Gates was not arrested because he was black. He was arrested because he was a famous man who felt entitled to tell off a middle class police officer, warning him, "You don't know who you're messing with." Those are not the words of a powerless victim of America's racial oppression. They're the words of an important man who was warning the low paid city employee he was dealing with, that he was too prominent to be touched.And indeed the remaining narrative, which moved from a media firestorm over a simple arrest, to a supportive statement from the White House, proved Gates right. Crowley indeed didn't "know who he was messing with". He was messing not with a black man, but with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.
Had Gates been arrested because he was a black man, there would have been no media response and no attention from the White House. Had Henry Louis Gates been a plumber or an associate professor whose name wasn't listed in Who's Who in America, with three names, and a list of titles and awards long enough to choke a whale-- his arrest would never have made the news. Nor would Gates have acted the way he did.
Once arrested, Gates and his defenders cynically used race as a smokescreen to conceal the real issue, which was class. Henry Louis Gates was not the victim of racism, he was the beneficiary of it. And all the media's huffing and puffing about race in America cannot successfully transform a wealthy and prominent man who felt free to warn a police sergeant, "You don't know who you're messing with" into a victim.
Gates' arrest elicited sympathy from Obama, not because Gates shares a race with him, but because Henry Louis Gates shares a class with him. Like Gates, Obama has cynically done his best to exploit a racial guilt that has nothing to do, not only with him, but not even with his ancestors, to provide cover for his arrogance and sense of entitlement. Like the collision between Obama and Palin, the collision between Gates and Crowley, was a blatant clash of class, not race.
So too when Obama felt free enough to complain to his fellow upper class elitists at a San Francisco fundraiser about the middle class and lower class folks, "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion", it was not a racial complaint, it was a typically upper class liberal complaint. That same sense of class entitlement would feed the Obama campaign's fury against Sarah Palin for stepping outside her class, and proceed to portray her as ignorant white trash. So too Obama's media cult and Gates were eager enough to portray Crowley as thuggish and racist, only halting when they realized that their narrative had been disproven and was actually producing a backlash.
When black officers blasted Gates and in turn Obama, it ripped away the mask of race, and revealed the underlying issue of class. It was no longer one white man and one black man, but the middle class hardworking police officers pitted against the wealthy and powerful Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama. And that was a dangerous narrative, particularly after Obama had run up a tremendous deficit bailing out Wall Street banks and car companies.
Obama's condescending gambit of a beer summit was meant to appeal to what he thought were the sensibilities of the middle class white men he had offended. Of course that in turn served as a forum for Elizabeth Gates, Henry Louis Gates' daughter to pen an essay snidely commenting on Crowley's daughter's eyeliner, "she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes", again a comment denoting a class putdown, rather than a racial putdown.
In the famous photo of Crowley helping Gates walk, Americans may have seen compassion, but Gates only saw a lower class city employee providing service to a prominent civic figure. It is how Gates truly saw the conflict all along.While American liberals insist on exploiting the arrest to argue that race remains a serious issue for Americans, the fact that large numbers of Americans were willing to vote for a black man into the top post in the nation suggests otherwise. It is not race that haunts America, but class. Yet what class is Henry Louis Gates?
Gates is not a captain of industry. He did not make money or gain fame inventing anything that people needed, or marketing a product that millions of Americans want. Instead Gates is a racial profiteer. A cleaner more academic version of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, running an institute named after W.E. Du Bois, a well known Communist who supported virtually every atrocity the USSR carried out, and was even willing to back Imperial Japan's massacres in China, in the name of race.
That is something which Gates has in common with Obama. Neither of the two men honestly came by their fame, fortune and positions. They came by them by exploiting racial guilt, not for any larger benefit, but for their own class standing. Behind all the twaddle about role models, is the elitism of two men, neither of whom have worked for a living, but who built up images of themselves as representing a race, in order to partake of the benefits of a class.
The rise of Obama, like the rise of Gates, is a story not of race, but of political parasitism. It is also the larger story of an America in which hard work no longer matters, in which it is safe to sneer at the middle class values of a Crowley or a Palin, because they represent an old fashioned dedication to achievement and duty, that is no longer meant to be relevant in the "New America".
In the "New America" you don't get recognized for hard work. You get recognized for being the squeaky wheel. For turning yourself into a brand. For finding an identity and marketing it for all you can. Race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity are only counters in a larger game of media politics that everyone can play, but only a few can succeed at.
It's not about the 9 to 5 anymore. It's about the 12 to 3 in a four day week. It's about the triumph over the middle class by people who excel at talking, but not at working. It's about playing divide and conquer with a multicultural America, certain that no matter how it goes, you will always pocket the winnings. It's not just about class, it's about the new class. The one that doesn't earn money, but has it transferred over from the coffers of the taxpayer. It's not about America. It's about the New America. It's about the Obama's America.And if you're "unfortunate" enough to still believe in hard work and doing your job as best as you can, you don't belong in it anymore. Here have a beer. Then help Henry Louis Gates, Jr, down the stairs.
___________________________________________
This picture has been circulating on the web today. I found it on an NBC website. While I'm sure that some people see this as appropriate in the "Royal Style," I see it as bad taste. It is one more indication of Obama's desparate need to possess the trappings of importance.
A couple months ago I saw a video where O was going for burgers and fries. The limo pulled up, he got in and the first thing he did was throw his feet on the seat opposite as would an unknowing or disrespting child. I was offended to see a 47-year old adult do such a thing. I'm one of the taxpayers that own that limo. I wouldn't want him coming into my house treating my stuff that way and I didn't like it he treated "my" limo that way. This attitude is endemic to his presidency, if not his life.
What am I learning from all this? Disgust is more formidable than fear to move beyond.
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