UncleBob's Treehouse

Male and Female Omegas

2012-02-01T14:10:00.000-05:00

It was from the Vox Day site that I found links to Roissy and Alpha Game, which are rather cynical about the relationships between the sexes. Men who are utterly unpopular with women are referred to as "Omegas." They're generally described as guys who are too nice to women.

That's not my definition of an Omega. An Omega is a guy with no job, who lives on welfare or disability, is so physically digusting no women would have anything to so with him, and whose only sex is with whores, if he can find one to do him.

They're the kind of guys who wander around asking for cigarettes or money, usually claiming they need bus money.

Then there females Omegas. They are unmarried, have children out of wedlock, live on welfare, don't have a job, and are lucky to have a car. They never understand why no guy is interested in them and in fact blame their problems on men.

These sites don't refer to female Omegas as Omegas, but they exist.

Actually, any guy who gets involved a woman who has children, so he raises her children, is a cuckold -- a bird that lays its eggs in another nest so the birds will raise the chicks as their own. It's a word not used today, but it should make a comeback.

A Society Without Wise Elders

2012-01-29T12:38:00.012-05:00

Of the current crop of Republican President candidates, all of them, except for Ron Paul, are whores and puppets for international Bankers and International Corporations (I call them Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations).

It doesn't matter if Obama is re-elected, or if Romney gets in, or Gingrich, or any of the other sleazes. Nothing will change, since there isn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them. No matter who is elected, there will be only minor, cosmetic changes. And the believers in politics will be stunned at this, as they always are.

All of the naive were shocked when Mr. Hope and Change turned out to be a continuation of George Bush, but I wasn't. None of the current crop are adults. And that's the problem. A huge problem.

What makes Paul different? For on thing, he's a doctor, whereas all the others have become rich sucking at the public tit and avoiding real work. Paul also understands the importance of political and economic liberty. The others pretend they do, but in reality they don't.

Paul is actually an Elder, which every society needs and which we barely have. The Elders have always been mentors and teachers of the young. Where are they now? They barely exist.

Although I am not Catholic, at least the last few Popes have been Elders -- teachers and mentors. Among Protestants, who is there? Obese blasphemers like John Hagee?

We no longer have Elders either religious or political. They barely exist in grade schools, middle school, high school, and college. There are some, but not all that many.

When people want to destroy a society, the first thing they do is kill the Elders. Then that society is lost. There's an old saying about it -- "kill the head and the body will fall."

I cannot remember having one mentor -- Wise Elder -- growing up. Most people cannot remember any, either. Much of the time those who pass themselves off as Elders are fools who don't know what they are talking about.

Robert Bly once wrote a book about a society in which there are no Elders. He called such a society (and the book) The Sibling Society. There are few adults and even fewer Elders in such a society. Many people are semi-adults. That's why Bly called them "siblings."

One of the reason for the destruction of the Elder system is the expansion of the State. The State, with its lies and mass murder and theft, is now supposed to be the omnipotent Wise Elder -- a mother and father that know all and give all. Those who believe this always find out how deluded they are.

How do you tell a real elder from a false one? The easiest way is that a real one is a voluntary mentor. I am reminded of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. A fake one uses force and fraud. I am reminded of the drill sargeant is Full Mental Jacket.

The difference between voluntary and force and fraud is one of the most important distinctions there is. Alfred North Whitehead, in his book, Adventures of Ideas, had this to say about the difference between persuasion and force: "The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force...Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals..."

These problems most people only vaguely understand, because we lost our Elders so long ago. These days, some people never completely grow up. And because of it society goes backward, and becomes more and more coarse and degraded. And one of the reasons is because we're being ruled by children.

The Memory Palace

2012-01-27T12:33:00.004-05:00

It was as far as I know the Greeks who came up with the idea of the Memory Palace. The first time I ran across it was in Thomas Harris's book, Hannibal, in which Hannibal Lecter had built an extensive Memory Palace during his incarceration.

At the end of the novel Harris recommended two books: The Art of Memory and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, the latter of which is in the public domain and therefore available online for free.

The Memory Palace is based on the idea of associating ideas with each other, and then placing them in a building. It doesn't necessarily have to be a building, though. I use a forest, specifically a grove of trees.

I have found it works very well.

One of the favorite pictures is Gerrit Dou's Astronomer by Candlelight (actually I'm fond of all of Dou's paintings). How do I remember his name and the name of the painting? It's the first thing I put in my Memory Palace.

The sign to the grove has "Play" written above it. Why "play"?

What the astronomer was doing was playing. It was very serious play, but play none the less. You can see the absorption on his face.

Since that particular grove is "Play," the next thing I put in it is Stuart Brown, who studies play. The first video of his I saw was about a polar bear encountering a sled dog.

Usually the dog would have been gone in less than a minute, but the dog did a play bow...and the bear starting playing with him. Then he wandered off and the dog lived.

That "play" studied by Stuart Brown is associated in my grove with comedy improvisation, which is play, and is based on "Refuse no offers."

I have seen improvisational comedy, and at first thought it was staged. They do practice, and they have to have natural talent, but they are improvising.

When someone says something, the other person accepts the offer, and builds on it.

These three things, all in one place in my memory, all associated with each other, are things I will never forget.

It's too bad the Memory Palace is not taught in school. The public schools are bad enough as it is. It would be a wonderful addition to education. Real education, that is.

The Real Purpose of the Military

2012-01-22T13:37:00.019-05:00

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” - Cicero

Lincoln: Ha ha! I finally got the South to attack Fort Sumter and kill a mule. Now I'll start a four-year war, kill over 620,000 Americans (equal to over five million in 150 years) claim it's to keep the Union together or free the slaves, but it will really be about money. It'll be about the New England Yankees economically exploiting and crushing the South! I am so smart, being a lawyer and all -- the kind of politicians that will probably destroy American someday. Not that I'll be around.

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Lincoln: What?? I'm the Emperor Lincoln!

Officer: Not any more. You're not even President.

Lincoln: What's the charge?

Officer: Treason.

Lincoln: What?

Officer: The military is to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. You're a domestic enemy.

Lincoln: What are you going to do, hang me?

Officer: And turn you into a martyr? I don't think so. You can spend ten years in prison thinking about your crimes. When you truly repent and give a public announcement, then you'll be released.

Lincoln: This is outrageous!

Officer: No, it's patriotism.

Woodrow Wilson: I'm going to get involved in a European war the Founding Fathers warned us to stay out of so I can impose the lunatic leftist dream of democracy on them!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

FDR; I'm going to attack the Japanese for ten years so they'll attack us and I can start WWII and gave Christian Eastern Europe to the atheist Commies for 50 years!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Truman: I'm going to get involved in a land war in Asia and lose tens of thousands of Americans even though it's not in our national interest in the slightest!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Kennedy: The fools think my administration is Camelot! Stupid sheeple! I'm going to get involved in another land war in Asia!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

LBJ: I'm going to escalate the land war in Asia and start the socialist Great Society!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Bush I: I'm going to start a meaningless war!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Bush II: I'm going to start two meaningless wars and enrich the international bankers and international corporations at the expense of everyone else! And it's because God chose me!

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Obama: I'm going to...

Military officer: You're under arrest!

Diary of a Pug

2012-01-19T15:41:00.000-05:00

7:59 am: ZZZZZZZ snore zzzz snore zzzzz

8:00 I'm awake! Where's Food Guy? There he is! I'm sleeping on him! WAKE UP, FOOD GUY! Give me food! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

8:05: Oh boy gobble gobble Food! gobble gobble I love food! It’s great! gobble gobble I don’t know what kind it is! gobble gobble I never know what kind it is, but it’s FOOD!!!gobble gobble And it’s great!!

8:13 Ahhh…nothing starts the day like peeing on a tree! Or is this a fire hydrant? Maybe it's someone's leg.

8:15 This is good to sniff! And this! And this! And this! And this!

8:17 This looks like a good place to poop. I think I’ve pooped here before. Not too sure about that, though.

8:23 This is good to sniff! And this! And this! And this! And this! And this! And this!

8:25 This is amazing! I stand at the door and stare at it, and Food Guy opens it! The powers I have! Us dogs are amazing!

8:28 I think I’ll run back and forth through the house while Food Guy chases me! Look, I’m spinning in circles and he’s laughing! I think I’ll stand on my hind feet and dance! This is fun!!

8:30 I'm a pug and I'm happy happy happy! But boy am I pooped! I need a nap on the couch!

8:31 ZZZZZZ snore ZZZZZ snore ZZZZ

Noon: I’m hungry and I have to pee. Where’s Food Guy?

Women's Blind Spot

2012-01-13T13:08:00.010-05:00

"Crime is common. Logic is rare." -- Sherlock Holmes

Many years ago I read an article stating that any woman dating a man should ask his friends what he's like. I thought that was good advice, because men can see through other men very rapidly. Many women, on the other hand, can't see through men at all.

In my entire life I have never seen a woman ask another man what the man she is dating is really like.

In college I knew a guy, who was an acquaintance and not a friend, who I did not like. He never did anything to me, but I was getting red flags on him -- sort of an intuitive gut feeling.

He was a friend of a friend, though, so I got the story on him. He was the only guy I ever met who would go out of his way to manipulate and lie to women so he could have sex with them.

He'd target women who were less attractive than he was, lead to them to think he was their boyfriend, have sex with them for a few weeks, then dump them. He said he'd tell them "what they want to hear." He talked about marriage, lots of kids, having a home. It was all bullshit. He was the only guy in my life I've met who did this.

The women were always stunned. They had deluded themselves they were special. And I guarantee you that if my friend -- or I -- had told these women was this guy was really like, they would have never believed it. They would have thought we were trying to break them up, for whatever bizarre reason they could concoct in their fuzzy-minded heads. (I am reminded of an old Persian saying: Never come between a woman and her delusion.)

Many guys, although not all, will sleep with an available attractive woman, but they won't lead her to believe he's considering her for a serious long-term relationship. This guy did, dozens of times.

I've also met female versions of this man. He, and the women, have all ended up alone, unmarried, with no children. The women have cats as surrogate children. All of them have royally screwed up their lives, and I have no sympathy for them. How did this happen?

My experience has been excessively promiscuous people are narcissistic, i.e., self-centered, exploitative, manipulative and lacking in empathy. They're also irresponsible and cowards -- hence the phrase "selfish and irresponsible." They're very insecure inside, covered up with that Machiavellian narcissism.

They use people, don't know it, and in the long-run end up alone. All of them were the kind of people who had sex simply for their own enjoyment, with no concern for the other person. It was always about them only.

But why are so many people unable to see through them? In the case of women, who generally ruled by their feelings more than their reason, a manipulative, exploitative guy can connect with their feelings and thereby get them to connect with him.

The fact that so many women are ruled by their feelings and therefore irrational is why they traditionally have been denied the vote. It wasn't an oversight by the Founding Fathers. They did it on purpose.

Any parents with any sense, who have any understanding of their daughters, might look at them and tell them that girls tend to be more susceptible to their emotions and therefore might want to watch out for those charming, friendly, exploitative, manipulative types. If they don't listen...at least you tried.

In fact, Roissy's Ninth Commandment is "Connect with Her Emotions": "Set yourself apart from other men and connect with a woman’s emotional landscape. Her mind is an alien world..."

Sound sexist? Guess what? I don't care. The truth is the truth.

I remember only one girl saying anything bad about this guy. She said he had "a sneer on his face when he tried to smile." And it was true. That sneer was because, ultimately, I don't think he liked women. And the promiscuous women I knew, I think that they really didn't like men (the biggest red flag or this is "Men are responsible for all the problems in the world").

Women's blind spot is they are are ruled by their feelings, are not rational, and fall for a guy who can connect with their feelings, even if he is a lowlife.

Forewarned, as always, is forearmed.

Quacks Treating "Mental Illness"

2012-01-10T12:33:00.005-05:00

It's a cliche but like cliches it's true: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And "good intentions" are even worse when the possessor is blind and arrogant. The word for that is "hubris."

Hubris applies even to doctors. After all, there does exist the saying, "What is the difference between God and a doctor?" "God doesn't think he is a doctor."

I am not a fan of doctors, especially the type who is caught in AMA groupthink. I am especially not a fan of those who treat "mental illness."

Even in the recent past the treatments were horrendous. They still are today, for that matter.

Think lobotomies. Not so long as they considered a panacea for all mental illnesses. Walter Freeman, who created lobotomies and only died in 1972, lobotomized thosands of people. About 3400, actually.

He refined it to using an icepick through the eye socket, tapped in with a hammer.

His procedure did no good whatsoever. Many of his patients died of cerebral hemorrages. Some he operated on two and three times. So why did people allow it? Because they trusted him as a doctor?

Then there was Ewan Camerson, who used electroshock treatment (ECT). He used it to annihiliate peoples' personalities and then tried to install a new one using recorded messages played through earphones.

Some of his patients forgot their own names. One forever got lost in his house, looking for his mother who had died decades ago.

Both Freeman and Cameron should have spent their lives in prison, but did not.

Things are better today...maybe.

Let's take psychiatric drugs. The SSRIs are associated with increases in murder/suicide, and the literature warns about it. The soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan having been killing their spouses and themselves, and all of them have been stuffed to the gills with anti-depressants.

Most of the school shooters have been on anti-depressants. The women who have engaged in bizarre murders of their children -- such as Susan Smith, who rolled a car with her kids into in a lake -- were on anti-depressants.

In the past murder/suicide was overwhelmingly a male thing, but now with these anti-depressants women have achieved par with men.

These days no patient would allow any doctor to lobotomize them or annihiliate their personalities with ECT. But tens of millions of people seem to have no problem with chemical lobotomies.

I recently had a retired doctor tell me that he told his patients to stay away from doctors. "You know when you need to see one," he told me. "Otherwise, stay away from them."

I know a woman from college. She was bright, funny and a ditzy flirt. She was diagnosed as bipolar at 25 and put on a cocktail of psychiatric medications. After 25 years she shows signs of paranoia and delusion, and stilll suffers from anxiety and depression. Her memory is shot.

How exactly have any of these psychiatric drugs helped her or anyone else?

Why do doctors do these things? Some claim they're evil, or it's about money. I'll allude to what I wrote in the first paragraph: they want to help people, only they don't know how. They get confused by their ego, and power, and yes indeed money. "I have all these things, so I muust know what I'm talking about." Nope.

A good doctor is humble, always willing to admit his wrong, and always willing to learn.

In the long run, the use of psychiatric drugs will change, once there are enough murder and suicides -- and lawsuits. Then they will go into the garbage heap of history, along with lobotomies and ECT.

Leftist Libertarians as Potential Mass Murderers

2012-01-04T12:33:00.013-05:00

Some libertarians like to pretend they are neither right nor left. Maybe some are. Most, however, are either rightist-libertarians or leftist-libertarians.

The easiest way to tell them apart is their view of "Martin Luther" King, whose real name was Michael. The right sees him for what he was -- a plagarizing, woman-beating, whore-mongering Communist adulterer. The left thinks he was a good guy (which reminds me of what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote: "Leftists don't merely misunderstand human nature; they don't understand it at all").

Since leftists all all stripes don't understand human nature, they will of course have whacko ideas. One of those ideas that leftist-libertarians have is the idea of open borders, since they believe borders are "artificial."

That belief is the depth of silliness. What isn't artificial? Clothes? Houses? Cars? Domesticated dogs? Beaver dams?

These people can't even tell the difference between "natural" and "artificial" -- not that is matters.

Leftists also don't believe, in varying degrees, there aren't any significant differences between men, women, races, cultures, religions, ethnic groups.

Such beliefs are ideology -- and I mean this in the sense that Russell Kirk defined it: a set of simple-minded beliefs that people believe apply to everything, even if they clearly, obviously don't.

Kirk wrote that ideology is "a dogmatic political theory which is an endeavor to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines." What he wrote explains why deracinated "intellectuals" believe things no one with any common sense or experience in life would believe: get rid of government and borders and Utopia will blossom.

Since what leftists believe is their religion (and atheism is a religion) they can't change their minds (and that reminds me of the saying, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result").

Imagine if we did have completely open borders. We wouldn't have peace and free trade. There would be war and genocide. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never heard of the Hutus and Tutsis, the Europeans and the American Indians, the Romans and the Celts...or any other ethnic group that has tried to share the land with a different one, throughout all of recorded history. And, I'm sure, before.

Imagine Jews, Christians, Muslims, whites, blacks, browns and Asians all trying to share the same land...say in America. In the hallucinations of leftists all would get along, united in their love and SUVs and DVD players. In reality they'd kill each other until one tribe expelled all the others. It's been the history of the world. As the War Nerd so perceptively wrote, "When one tribe encounters another historically the result has been genocide."

Some libertarians quote Murray Rothbard, a good economist but a poor historian. He used the examples of Ireland and Iceland as "anarchist" societies. He didn't know much about them, and neither do his followers.

Iceland was an island of bloodshed and slaughter. And as for Ireland, I have forgotten more about than area (being that my ancestors are Scots-Irish) than Rothbard ever knew. For hundreds of years the area around Ireland, Scotland and Northern England was a land also of murder, theft and slaughter. The people were called Borderers, or reivers. They were probably the most fierce and war-like people in the history of the world. And they are my ancestors.

The only way there can be open borders is if the federal government overrules the states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, and people. And why do they do it? To enrich the 1% at the expense of the other 99% by driving wages down to rock bottom. To impoverish everyone so the superrich and become even richer.

That would be funny if it wasn't tragic -- the idea that libertarians, who supposedly hate the federal government, unwittingly support it. That's what the self-delusion of ideology does to people. It warps their brains and makes them unable to see reality.

The Wannabe Ninjas

2011-12-14T15:14:00.001-05:00

The time: right about now. The location: these days, just about any place in the United States. The characters: an accountant, a Chevy Cavalier, a poodle, and several police dressed completely in black, just like ninjas in a cheap kung fu film.

Wannabe Ninjas: BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Accountant (getting out of car): What the heck is this? (He looks down and counts all the holes in him.) You idiots just shot me 54 times! I'm not going to survive this, you know! And I've got a wife and two young daughters!

Head Wannabe Ninja: You're a drug dealer!

Accountant: I am not! I'm an accountant! See the horn-rimmed glasses, the pocket protector and the tidy little mustache? You've got the wrong guy!

Assistant Wannabe Ninja (whispering to Head Wannabe): He's right. We're in the wrong neighborhood. Hell, we're in the wrong city!

Head Wannabe: Doesn't matter. I say he's a drug dealer and that's all that counts. None of you guys worry; nothing's going to happen to us. We're cops and we're above the law.

Accountant (looking in car): You shot my poodle.

Head Wannabe: He tried to attack us.

Accountant: Seventeen years old, blind and toothless? I don't think so.

Head Wannabe: I say he tried to attack us! What do you guys say?

Wannabes: We all have toothmarks!

Accountant: Look at all the holes in my car!

Head Wannabe: You tried to run us over.

Accountant: The car's broke! I was waiting for a tow truck!

Head Wannabe: I say you tried to run us over. What do you guys say?

Wannabes: Look at the tire marks all over us!

Accountant: You guys are a joke! Where's your warrant?

Head Wannabe: Warrant? We ain't got no warrant! We don't need no warrant! We don't have to show you no steenkin' warrant!

Accountant: Let me see your badges!

Head Wannabe: (BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!) We don't need no steenkin' badges either!

Accountant: Ack! Gack! (topples over, exits)

Assistant Wannabe: He's dead, Jim. What are we supposed to do now?

Head Wannabe: Cuff him! Can't take any chances even if he is dead! It's the rules!

Assistant Wannabe: What about this dead dog?

Head Wannabe: Cuff all three parts of him.

Assistant Wannabe: Think we should put a gun in his hand to make it look like a good shoot?

Head Wannabe: Naw. Ain't nothing going to happen to us anyway. Why waste a good throw-down?

Assistant Wannabe: Think we should at least put drugs in his car? I mean, he was innocent, you know. We might get into a ittle trouble here.

Head Wannabe: Nope, don't worry about anything. Nothing's going to happen to us as long as we say he tried to run us down, or we thought his cellphone was a gun, or he made some kind of threatening move like blinking an eye.

Assistant Wannabe: God, I love the War on Drugs!

Head Wannabe: Me too! Hey guys, isn't this great!

All the Wannabes: (firing machine-guns into the air like a gang of drunken bandits): Yay!

Why I Despise Politics

2011-10-19T16:19:00.001-04:00

"Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. This is a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color."
—John Mason Brown, "Through These Men" (1956)

People, individually, can be just fine, but in groups—or as I like to call them, herds—are stupid, deluded, infantile, and murderous. And that's a fact. This is nowhere more evident than in politics, which more than anything else is a herd phenomenon. The enormity of these bad qualities is so destructive I wish politics didn't exist.

I've met "conservatives" who called Bush "my President" (in 1938 they would have been saying "mein Fuhrer") and who were convinced Obama was a monster who was going to give America to Muslims. Then, of course, I've met "liberals" who thought Bush was the anti-Christ and Obama was the Messiah.

Both groups are overflowing with fools. There's about a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Obama. They are, after all, professional politicians, who are lower than child molesters and serial killers, because they've killed and maimed hundreds of millions of people throughout history.

And yet, some people—far too many!—worship their political party and the politicians in it. Why in the world some people seek a leader to worship is beyond me. But when they do, they automatically see those of a different party not merely as mistaken, but as evil. And that is what John Mason Brown, among many others, has noticed.

Herds seek herd leaders. I suppose, and even though politics is based on force and fraud (and the worst get on top, as Friedrich Hayek noticed) the herd can't see this and instead idealizes and worships the worst people, the ones who century after century have started wars, taken away freedoms, destroyed societies. Talk about self-deluded!

There is no grey in politics, only the belief in black and white, good and evil. When one herd of people sees itself as good—and such goodness in a herd is utterly impossible—they are going to project all their unacknowledged badness onto another herd. "Conservatives" do it to "liberals" and "liberals" do it to "conservatives."

Politics by its very nature sets people at each other's throats. You'd think people could easily see this, considering the political wars of the 20th Century costs the lives of 177 million to 200 million people, but even with that unbelievable slaughter they still can't see it.

Perhaps some people's lives are so empty and boring they seek the quickest fix for it, which is politics. Maybe they find it exciting. I sure don't. It'd be a lot less trouble for the world if political junkies were instead heroin addicts.

After all, Chris Hedges, in his book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," wrote: "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble."

I think a good example of this quick-fix excitement is in the movie, "The Triumph of the Will," about how Germany responded to Hitler. There is a scene, right at the beginning, in which Hitler is standing in an open car as it travels down a road with thousands of worshipping, smiling people on both sides.

They are clearly worshipping Hitler. And Hitler has a smug, satisfied smile on his face, one that says, "They love me!" Just like that, one of the worst leaders of the 20th Century drives by them, and the herd turns into grinning, worshipping morons.

Maybe that's the problem with politics. It's too easy for people to get excited by it, to exalt themselves and their herd, to cast their problems onto innocent people. If this is true—and I think it is—then politics, by its nature, appeals to the worst in people. Try as hard as it can, politics cannot appeal to their best.

That is why I wish politics didn't exist.

Pledging to the Monster

2011-10-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

Several years ago I discovered the Pledge of Allegiance had been written by the Nationalist and Socialist Francis Bellamy, in 1892. (The phrase "Nationalist Socialist" is better known by the word, "Nazi.") Before this leftist's drive to support himself by selling a flag to every classroom, the flag was almost never seen in schools.

Bellamy, being a fascist, wanted to collectivize the entire nation. To this end he resurrected the Roman salute for school children--the same one as the Nazi salute--until the beginning of World War II put a permanent end to it.

Since every individual state was originally a "free and independent" nation, when children said the Pledge of Allegiance, to which entity were they pledging allegiance? The entire country?

I doubt it. It is the federal government that drafts teenagers and starts wars, that levies crushing taxes and runs up deficits. Not the individual states. I've never seen, and can't imagine, Illinois or Montana declaring war on some nation halfway across the world.

Since the country and the federal government are different things--indeed eternally opposed to each other--when people say the Pledge, they are pledging allegiance to the federal government. Not the country.

Since the federal government is composed of people, those saying the Pledge are in reality pledging allegiance to those who have control of it. So, when people are wounded or die in wars, they're fighting for a handful of people in charge of a disorganized criminal enterprise that believes it should rule the entire country. I don't see why this isn't the same in every country.

When I look across the world, at what the US administration is doing, the main thing I see is an empire not of colonies, but of military bases. Over 700 military bases in over 140 countries. Deny the US is an empire all you want,
it still is.

This empire is the main thing. There are other, secondary concerns. I see us involved in two wars about the export of leftist delusion of democracy to the Islamic world, securing oil supplies, and protecting Israel. When you look at this fruit, and follow it back to the tree, I find an administration full of oil men, and Christian Zionists and Zionists, ones who want to secure oil supplies for the US, and protect Israel because they believe it will bring Jesus back, or because it is a land for displaced Jews.

The aforementioned are the things for which soldiers are dying. It's not worth it. War, as Smedley Butler noticed, is a racket--those politically connected gain more power and money; those who are not, die in wars. "It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses," he wrote.

We can drill for our own oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Canada has one trillion gallons of oil in tar sands. The evidence is now that oil reservoirs are refilling themselves, since it appears oil is created deep in the earth, and has nothing to do with decayed prehistoric vegetation.

As for Jesus coming back, this belief is based on a very few phrases in the Bible. Even if He does, I don't see how it's going to come about through war and destruction, unless Biblical prohibitions against murder have suddenly been suspended.

As for Israel, it can defend itself on its own dime, not mine. Personally, I don't think the US, no matter how assured its convictions or pure its intentions, is going to put an end to war in a place where there has been war for 4000 years.

A lot of people are blaming the neocons--leftists masquerading as rightists--for the mess we're in. I do, too. They're enormously deluded people, and they're certainly cowards. But the problems go further back in time.

I do know the switches were set wrong in the 20th century when Woodrow Wilson--about whom John Maynard Keynes wrote, "He thought he was Jesus Christ"--got the US involved in World War I, even though the exhausted European countries were on the verge of stopping the war.

Wilson, whose ignorance about the world was prodigious, said he wanted to make the world "safe for democracy." That sounds familiar, even today.

Richard Maybury, in his book, World War I: the Rest of the Story, points out the US started to become a world empire in the late 1800s, when it appropriated the Philippines from Spain. Supporters claimed we were going to "civilize" the place, a claim I'm hearing today about Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. I guess we're going to impose abortion, feminism and gay marriage on them.

Taking the Philippines was the first misstep to world empire by these utopian fantastists, but there were mistakes by them before that one.

Before the Philippines, Abraham Lincoln had put an end to the "free and independent" states with the War Between the States. It wasn't a "civil war," because a civil war is about two or more groups fighting for control of the government. Since the South was trying to secede, it was, quite correctly a war between the states, and not a civil war.

You can make the argument the problem goes back to dumping the Articles of Confederation, the loss of which led to the creation of the federal government. It turns out the critics were right: the federal government has turned into an ever-growing, ever-menacing Leviathan.

The late, great Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his amazing magnum, Leftism Revisited, claims the problem runs back to the French Revolution, with its belief in democracy and equality. "For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution," he wrote.

Whenever the problem started, I do know it's been going on for a long time. Here, since right after the founding of the country. It's only now coming to fruition.

I do know this: we have a mere handful of people, ones who cannot tell leftism from rightism, running the US government. Unfortunately, enough people think the federal government represents the country--which it does not--so they follow those running it. It's now clear to me what the word "sheeple" means. The sheeple don't realize they're the ones who are going to be sheared and slaughtered.

The problems get worse because of the enormous power the President now wields. I think we'd be better off if the office didn't exist. Certainly a handful of trouble-makers are leading the US down the road to Hell, but it gets much scarier to realize that merely one man can do it.

Politically, the problem is leftism, a pseudo-religious crackpot cult that has a belief in the creation of an earthly utopia through government violence. Unfortunately it's now infected the right. Because of this, the neocons, who claim to be conservatives, are instead leftists. Democracy, which the Founding Fathers despised, is leftist. As Kuehnelt-Leddihn pointed out, you can't have the equality of democracy and liberty at the same time, because under liberty there are always natural elites. In a democracy, the envious mob always want to bring the elites down.

Ultimately, the problem is imperfect human nature. Theologically, as far I'm concerned, the problem is hubris. It's the sin of Satan: the lust to rule, the lust to destroy, and the lust for attention. It's the problem of every politician, and therefore the problem of every government.

We'd be better off if the entire federal apparatus didn't exist. Too bad it's not in the Constitution that every 50 years the federal government has to be dissolved and started over from scratch. It wouldn't be perfect, but then, what is? I certainly could live with it. Ideally, and easily, we could live without the federal government at all.

If the federal government has to exist, then it, right from the beginning, should have been dissolved every 50 years. There would not have been a War Between the States, the Spanish-American War, World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam...or 9-11. There would be no world empire meddling in the rest of the planet, bringing blowback our way not because of our values, but because of the federal government's actions.

It is because the always-swelling federal government has, like a cancer, metastasized into every individual state, and now across the world, that New York City, in the state of New York, was attacked on 9-11. It wasn't that individual state's fault it was attacked. It was the federal government's fault.

In the long run, the federal government will be dissolved. All in the past have fallen, without exception.This one will, too. The country will survive. At what cost, I don't know. I hope not a bad one.

In a little over 200 years, the federal government has gone from non-existence to taking over the country, and is now trying to take over the world. It's turned into a monster. And no one in his right mind should pledge allegiance to a monster.

Life, Liberty -- then Property

2011-10-17T14:19:00.002-04:00

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -- Adam Smith,"The Wealth of Nations."

The Constitutional phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from the writings of John Locke, specifically his long essay, “Concerning Civil Government,” although Locke wrote (and I paraphrase here) “life, liberty and property.”

I have been unable to find out why Locke put those qualities in the order he did. I doubt it was purely coincidental, since without life, liberty and property mean nothing.

What I find interesting it that Locke put property in third place, after life and liberty. This means that life and liberty are more important than property (which he defined as “mixing” your labor with something).

Locke’s sequence makes a lot of sense to me, considering the fact one of the most serious problems this country had when founded is that some people were slaves, i.e., someone else’s property. Their rights to life and liberty were ignored, and in fact the courts (including the Supreme Court) ruled for some 150 years that slavery was legal and that slaves essentially had no rights.

In fact, the Supreme Court (and the lesser courts) consistently ruled that property was more important that life or liberty. These appalling rulings of course led to violence and death – and a lot of it.

During the early 1900s there was a lot of violence between “capital” and “labor.” I am especially reminded of Matewan, in which coal company “police” evicted families from company housing (the miners were also paid in scrip, which could only be spent in company stores).

The chief was police, a 28-year-old ex-miner named Sid Hatfield, told these armed men they were under arrest. They told him he was under arrest, and violence broke out – the mayor was shot and killed, and Hatfield killed two of the “police.” Armed miners killed five more of the “police” and the rest retreated.

Over 20 miners were put on trial – and all were found not guilty by a jury of miners. This kind of violence was endemic in those days, all of it caused by the courts ruling that the “property” of the coal companies was more important than the life or liberty of the miners.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that courts often don’t rule correctly until violence forces them to. This is incompetence at its worst.

Locke believed in Natural Rights, and so do I: the law is discovered (like the laws of physics and chemistry are discovered), and not created. Natural Law works: created law is Political Law, based on force and fraud.

When the difference between discovered law and false created law is understood, it’s possible to predict the future, if only in a general way. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Movement are eruptions based on people finally starting to understand, even if imperfectly, that the State is not their friend.

I also wonder how long it’s going to take the courts to do the right thing: declare the Federal Reserve Bank illegal, along with corporations (which are creations of the State), which exist only to crush competition and exploit suppliers.

When courts rule that property is more important than life and liberty, then people are not people, but things to be exploited and enslaved, and if need be, killed. Unfortunately, this has been the history of the world.

The Amazing Wackety Wackety Money Machine

2011-10-12T15:17:00.001-04:00

Alan Greenspan: Wackety! Wackety! Wackety!

Pizza Deliverer: Hello? Did someone here order --- AHHH!! What the hell are you?!

Greenspan (chuckling): Scary, ain't I?

Deliverer: Dude, you look like an reanimated corpse! Kinda like that guy with all the knives in "Hellboy!"

Greenspan: Been like this all my life. Even Ayn Rand said I looked like an undertaker, and she was pretty much a catastrophe in the looks department herself. But I have some consolations. Like this! (points to machine) Know what this is?

Deliverer: I have no idea.

Greenspan: It's the Federal Reserve Bank printing press. See, I turn the crank, it goes wackety! wackety! wackety! and billions of paper dollars just pour out into these laundry baskets here. Then we put the money into helicopters and dump it onto crowds of people.

Trolls: ARGH!

Deliverer: Jesus! What's going on here? A zombie and now monsters!

Greenspan: These guys deliver the baskets to the waiting helicopters. I find it poetic justice that monsters are destroying the value of your money. (Chuckles again) But then, for all practical purposes, the Federal Reserve is a monster since has it destroyed about 98% of the value of your money since it was created in 1913.

Deliverer: That doesn't sound right, dude.

Greenspan: It's not.

Deliverer: Then why do you do it?

Greenspan: Oh, I'm kind of a weakling when pressed by politicians. Politicians and the public and corporations just love easy money. The public is so stupid they think they're getting richer when in reality their wealth is being destroyed by my inflating the money supply. Also, politicians want to stay in office by promising jobs and all kinds of benefits to the retards that up the mass of voters.

Deliverer: Sheesh! The things you learn delivering pizzas!

Greenspan: Then there's the allure of money and fame. You'd be amazed at the number of people who are seduced by money, fame, power, sex. Especially politicians, who are sort of a subhuman form of life, anyway. Unfortunately, in my case, being over 80 years old, the sex angle doesn't work on me anymore. The only crank that works for me these days is the one I'm turning on this here printing press.

Deliverer: How in the world do you get away with this? Sounds like you're a counterfeiter.

Greenspan: I am a counterfeiter. Kind of funny, isn't it? People think the government is their friend. It's not. It benefits only those who have captured it. You know what inflation does? It transfers wealth from the majority of people to a very small minority. The rich gets richer and the poor get poorer. That's what the purpose of government is, and unfortunately it's ultimately the peoples' fault for letting us get away with it.

Deliverer: Doesn't seem like you should be telling me this stuff. Aren't you afraid something bad might happen to you if I went out and told everyone?

Greenspan: Nope, not at all. There are thousands upon thousands of people yelling about what I'm doing, and no one's listening. The public won't pay any attention until the money completely loses its value and collapses, as all paper money does when it's not backed by gold and silver. In the meantime, I'm being celebrated as the greatest head of the Fed ever. You know what? I'm the worst. The dollar has lost 30% of its value under my watch. And even though I should be put on a horse and given a last cigarette before the horse's rump is slapped and I'm allowed to dangle, not a damn thing is doing to happen to me.

Deliverer: Damn! You've got a great job! You can be a big-time criminal if you are part of the government, violate every one of the Ten Commandments, slaughter, lie, steal -- and people praise you!

Greenspan: Yep, you got it. That should be in the Bible. (Looks pensive) Now that I think about it, it is.

Deliverer: Say, do you mind if I take one of these baskets of money?

Greenspan: Go right ahead. Not too long in the future it might take a basket of money to pay for a pizza, anyway. It happened in Germany before World War II, when the government hyperinflated the money supply to the point it was completely worthless. Everyone lost their life's savings.

Deliverer: Hey, thanks, Mr. Greenspan!

Greenspan: Don't mention it.

Deliverer: Bye, Mr. Greenspan!

Greenspan: That's what you think. What I've done to the country will be around for a long, long time.

Trolls: ARGH!

The Loss of Our Ancient Wisdom

2011-10-10T18:00:00.000-04:00

The human race possesses knowledge but little wisdom; what little we possess we ignore, because we think we know so much. It’s what comes from self-delusion and arrogance, the two main flaws that create the blind leading the blind.

Much of that wisdom is contained in mythology, the painfully distilled experiences of the joys and horrors inherent in being human, in the form of stories that entertain and educate.

We’re in the process of forgetting those stories. We’re already regretting it.

At one time in the not-so-distant past, Americans know their Greco-Roman myths, because they were aware these stories were one of the foundations of Western culture. These days, with these stories so unknown, many Americans don’t even know where they came from.

Let’s use, for an example. Hermes. Hermes was the original name of the Greek god, although most people today know him by his Roman name, Mercury.

Hermes was, paradoxically, the patron of both merchants and thieves. Some might argue merchants are thieves, but it’s not that simple.

None of the Greek gods were simple. They were as complex and contradictory as people, which isn’t surprising, considering that while the Greeks gods don’t exist, people certainly do. The Greek gods are just illustrations (or archetypes) of kinds of people and their relationships.

Hermes, in his not-so-admirable aspects, although likeable and charming, was a liar and a thief. What does that tell us? Although someone may be charming (which means "to cast a spell") it doesn't mean he is a moral person -- think of the charming, likeable rogue Bill Clinton.

Hermes did something very note-worthy and very disturbing -- he broke Ares (Roman: Mars) out of a bronze vessel he had been imprisoned in for a year.

Ares, the Greek god of war, was a coward, a whiner, and a mass slaughterer who loved death and destruction (two of his offspring were named Panic and Terror). He was also incompetent, as war-lovers are always incompetent -- Saddam Hussein, for a good example, ordered his generals to capture hundreds of American soldiers and tie them to the front of Iraqi tanks.

Hermes, in his better aspects, was the protector of merchants. Zeus, law-giver and enforcer of oaths, who ruled not only through force but also through wisdom and justice, ordered Hermes to clean up his act and not only protect merchants, but also travelers. He was also charged with promoting trade and negotiating treaties.

The story of Hermes is a profound myth. There is a saying by Bastiat (and it's a mighty important one): "If goods do not cross borders, armies will."

Hermes, when a liar and a thief - and when he protected thieves - unleases war on the world. In other words, when ther is no just, fair, free-market trade, war is very likely to erupt.

When there is just, fair, free-market trade, Ares ends up bottled for years. When merchants and traders are liars and thieves, Ares is let loose to walk to and fro up and down in the world.

Unfortunately the United States does not have just, fair free-market trade. It has instead globalization -- managed trade -- which enriches a vanishingly small minority at the expense of everyone else.

Many "merchants" have turned into liars and thieves, and the court intellectuals who support them (and banksters) haven't turned into liars -- they always have been liars, in addition to being whores.

The United States considers itself to be Zeus -- the fair and just lawgiver imposing order on the world. Since the West is Christian -- even if nominally -- the United States perceives itself as the indispensible nation, the shining city on the hill, chosen by God.

Yet Zeus punished blindness and arrogance -- what the Greeks called Hubris. It was always followed by Nemesis.

For that matter, Pride, (the worst sin in Christianity and the same as Hubris) is always followed by some kind of destruction: "Pride goes before a fall, and a haughy spirit before destruction."

The ancient Greeks believed in prophecy. (Apollo, the first person Hermes stole from and lied to) was among his many talents the god of prophecy.

It's no wonder the Greeks believed in prediction. The future -- if you have some understanding of human nature -- isn't that hard to foresee.

The international merchants of today (I call them Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations), with their stealing and lying, are going to again unleash Ares. As to whether or not this unleashing will be in the U.S. or without, that remains to be to seen. Perhaps, it will be both inside and outside.

But he will be unleashed, in one degree or another, as lying, stealing and Hubris always does.

Modern Day Molochs

2011-10-06T15:17:00.000-04:00

The Greek word, "sophrosyne" ("seh-FROS-eh-knee") is the opposite of another old Greek word: hubris. Hubris, or as the Bible puts it, "pride," is, I believe, the only true crime that exists, because it is the basis of all other crimes.

Hubris is conceit, arrogance, grandiosity, the belief that one is god-like and can transcend human limitations, usually through violence. Hubris devalues other people into mere things. It is the sin of Satan, as described in the Bible.

Sophrosyne can be described as understanding the limitations and imperfections of human nature, of "knowing yourself," of doing nothing in any great excess. It's a type of "humility," if humility is understood as an awareness of the flaws inherent in people. It reminds me of another Greek word, "metanoia," which means to "change the heart and mind, to turn around and go the other way."

Hubris always leads to scapegoating, which the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck correctly identified as the "genesis of human evil." He was right, but did not point out it's based on hubris, and that scapegoating always leads to human sacrifice.

That's the sequence as I see it: hubris to scapegoating to human sacrifice. The Greeks saw the sequence as koros (stability) to hubris (arrogance, insolence) to ate (madness) to nemesis (destruction). I think it's more accurate to say that right after hubris comes the belief in the fairy tale of pure good and pure evil, splitting everyone into all-good or all-bad. That leads to ate, to madness, to scapegoating and human sacrifice. Then nemesis follows.

Scapegoating is when one person or a group projects problems onto another person or group, then tries to destroy them. One side says, "Since we are good, then you must be evil. Being evil, you are the cause of our problems. If we destroy you, evil will cease to exist and our problems will disappear."

Scapegoating requires splitting groups into pure good and pure evil, into grandiose and devalued. That splitting -- indeed that belief -- in pure good and pure evil automatically leads to scapegoating and human sacrifice.

In the 20th century, the best-known practitioners of scapegoating and human sacrifice were the Nazis and socialists. They weren't the only ones, just the best-known. All societies do it. The U.S. did it to alcohol users during Prohibition and does it today to drug dealers and sellers.

You can see the sequence I outlined in any serial killer. Or, in any murderer. They start out stable, then, somehow hubris afflicts them. Then comes the split, with them as good and someone else as evil. They project their problems on the other person, then scapegoat and kill them, engaging in human sacrifice. They do it in the hope they can become "whole." Since it doesn't work, they have to repeat their crimes. That makes serial killers serial scapegoaters.

On a much larger scale, with the Nazis and the socialists, each projected their problems on to others, then scapegoated and sacrificed them. Historians estimate 177 million people died in wars in the 20th century. I've seen estimates of up to 200 million. All scapegoated, all sacrificed, because of hubris -- we are good, and you are evil. You are the cause of our problems, so we must destroy you.

The function of the scapegoat, according to Rene Girard, a French Catholic academic who did his work in the U.S., are two: social cohesion, and the attempt to renew society by doing violence to the scapegoat. He wrote two works, Violence and the Sacred, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

Both the Nazis and socialists thought if they scapegoated and human sacrificed their opponents, then a new, better society would arise. The U.S. tried the same thing with alcohol and drug prohibition. Get rid of alcohol, and drug sellers and users, cast all problems onto them, see them as evil, then once they are eradicated, a new, better society will arise. Only it won't. It never will.

All, like serial killers, do violence to the scapegoat in an effort to become whole.

Scapegoating and human sacrifice, which is always through violence, will never create a better society. Yet all societies continue to try it, to no avail. None are even aware of what they do. All approve of it and consider it a good thing.

In the U.S., you can see this scapegoating and sacrifice in any election. A politician who fails is scapegoated and then sacrificed by being voted out of office. A better country -- especially a better economy -- is supposed to result. If things get too bad, politicians can be sacrificed the way Mussolini was. All politicians would do well to keep Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery," in mind.

The novel that most clearly shows the sequence of hubris to scapegoating to human sacrifice, and the function of the scapegoat, is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In it we have her god-like heroes, whose problem are due to "looters" and "parasites," all of whom Rand describes as subhuman. Her heroes are all-good; the villains, all-bad.

Rand, by casting all problems, all evil, onto her villains, has them function as scapegoats that must be sacrificed to assure the creation of a better world. Her heroes withdraw into Galt's Gulch to await the destruction of all evil through violence and death. Then, they plan on returning to a fresh, new world. It works in fiction. In real life it wouldn't.

Girard believed one of the most profound importances of the Gospels is that for the first time in history a voice was given to the victim, to the scapegoat. To a lesser degree, a voice was given to Socrates, who along with Jesus, are the two most important deaths in Western culture. But for all practical purposes, it was the death of Jesus, detailed in the Gospels, that showed the function of the scapegoat in society, and how scapegoating leads to human sacrifice.

The fact this function was brought to light in the Gospels is why Girard titled one of his books, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

In no other literature I am familiar with has scapegoating and human sacrifice, for society, been considered a bad thing. Only in the Gospels. In my opinion, the fact the scapegoat function was brought to light, and finally seen as a bad thing, was supposed to put a permanent end to hubris, scapegoating and human sacrifice.

And it did work, for a while. But today, we seem to be going backward. You need look no farther than a nation that claims it is good, has God on its side, has a leader who, afflicted with hubris, believes God chose and talks to him, and who believes he has the right to murder thousands of innocent people on the other side of the world. By scapegoating and sacrificing them the United States shall be made "whole." This is hubris, to be followed by nemesis.

The worst scapegoating and human sacrifice of all is war. We may shake our heads over primitives who rolled infants into the fires in the belly of Moloch, but they didn't incinerate people with nuclear weapons or firestorms, as was done at Dresden. Who exactly are the true primitives? Do we not believe in scapegoating and human sacrifice, to save society, to make it "whole," just as much as people thousands of years ago?

There are five archetypes I have identified that are associated with all societies' attempts at scapegoating: the Mob, the Leaders, the Exaggerated Threat, the Scapegoat, and the Human Sacrifice. I got these from my readings of the Gospels, all of which contain some of the most practical wisdom I have encountered.

Jose y Ortega Gasset referred to the Mob, which is Mass Man, as "without direction, self-satisified, and preoccupied with his own well-being..." In fable they are known as the Sheep, the ones at the mercy of the Wolves. Today, they are often called Sheeple -- part sheep, part people.

Jesus' threat to the leaders of his time was exaggerated by them (even though they truly believed it), so they were able to convince the mob to unite, turn against him and call for his death. The end result: he was scapegoated and sacrificed. "...it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not," said Caiaphas, fearing the Romans.

What existed then, still exists today. It'll exist in the future, too. The U.S. was attacked on 9-11. The threat was, as always, exaggerated by our leaders, who apparently truly believed that Islam could conquer the world or Saddam Hussein would fly Drones of Death across the Atlantic. Fearing a mortal threat, and believing their leaders, the mob, mass man, united, as they always do when they perceive a threat. Seeking a scapegoat, everyone first fixated on Osama bin Laden (and exaggerated his threat, turning a man in a cave into an Evil Genius), then later turned to Saddam Hussein. Finding and destroying these scapegoats was to allow the creation of a new, better, safer United States, even if it cost us our liberty.

Obviously, our opponents are doing the exact same thing to us. That's why they refer to the United States as "the Great Satan." Each group says God is on their side and the Devil on the other. Each group scapegoats and wants to sacrifice the other to save themselves. Nothing good can come from this. It never has in the past. It never will in the future.

The exaggerated threat, the irrational, emotion-driven mob united by the leaders, the scapegoat and the human sacrifice through violence, cannot create a better United States, only a worse one.

The first step is overcoming hubris, scapegoating and human sacrifice is to be aware of them, and to understand they never work for any society that tries it. Girard was right about that. If it did work, then there would not be millennia after millennia of war. As long as this law -- if it is a law -- remains hidden, it cannot be dealt with. And until it is dealt with, the human race will do as it always does -- repeat the story of Satan over and over.

Prohibition Did Work...Sort of

2011-10-06T14:29:00.000-04:00

Several pundits (among them William Bennett and Ann Coulter) have claimed Prohibition worked. They’re right. It did work…sort of.

Alcohol consumption dropped by 50%, cirrhosis of the liver by 63%, admissions for alcohol psychosis by 60%, and arrests for drunk and disorderly, by 50%.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we got organized crime. There is even worse news; what we got was a lot more awful than organized crime (contrary to the myth, not all of it was Italian. A lot of it was Jewish and Irish).

Since I’m neither of the former and a lot of the latter, I’ll concentrate on the Irish.

Prohibition gave us the Kennedys.

Joseph Kennedy made oodles of money during Prohibition. No Prohibition, no rich Joseph Kennedy. If Joseph Kennedy had not been able to make a mint during Prohibition, JFK would have never been President.

If JFK had never been President, then would not have been Vietnamese war, which Kennedy started. (There wouldn’t have been the Bay of Pigs, either).

Kennedy would not have been murdered by Oswald, thereby allowing the appalling LBJ to take office. No Johnson in office, no escalation in Vietnam and no misnamed “Great Society.”

Johnson, the weasel, then bailed out after finishing JFK’s term, dumping the whole mess into the lap of…Richard Nixon. Nixon, while he ended our involvement in Vietnam, also took the U.S. of off the gold standard, allowing the Federal Reserve Bank to inflate without any brakes, which is why the dollar is now worth about what a penny was in 1900.

Without Nixon as President, there would have been no Watergate. Without Watergate, Nixon would not have resigned, allowing in Ford. After Ford lost the election, we got…Jimmy Carter!

Woo hoo! This is getting better and better! What next? After Carter allowed the dying Shah into the U.S. we got the Iran hostage crisis, the failed rescue attempt, and a lousy economy.

That lousy economy put Reagan in office. While I believe Reagan was a lot better than everyone who came after him (and a lot better than many before him) he did one unforgivable thing: he made “Undertaker Al” Greenspan head of the Fed, allowing this incompetent buffoon to run rampant for some 20 years, enrich his friends and devastate the United States economy.

After Greenspan we got Helicopter Ben, who while worse than Undertaker Al, isn’t going to have 20 years to complete the destruction of the United States.

Oh yes. Who else? Both the Bushes, 9-11, the wars in the Middle East, bailing out Wall Street and the bankers…did I forget anyone? One other person: Barak Obama, the worst President ever (and that’s saying a lot, coming as he did after Lincoln, Wilson, and LBJ).

If we hadn’t had Prohibition, this entire time-line would have never been. Would it have been worse? There is no way to tell, but I suspect it wouldn’t have, not after a catastrophe like Prohibition.

I consider Prohibition and other social engineering schemes to be utilitarian in their essence. That’s not a good thing, to put it mildly. Daniel Bartels, of the Columbia Business School, found that those who “endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism – the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences – tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.”

Why am I not surprised by this? Perhaps because those who think they are so intellectually and morally superior to others believe they have the right to shovel millions of people around like heaps of wet concrete?

Perhaps our well-known pundits lack the education, imagination and open-mindedness to understand what happens when the government sticks its nose into what is none of its business. That doesn’t me, either.

War as a False Religion

2011-10-05T14:56:00.002-04:00

The last several years of wars have been enlightening to me about how some people react to them. The last few wars the U.S. was in – the first Iraq war, the "wars" on Serbia, and Panama – were so short I couldn't draw any conclusions. We haven't been in such a long conflict since Vietnam – and for people born since then, for all they know about it, it might as well have been the War of 1812.

I was a kid during Vietnam, too little to pay that much attention. I do remember the now-in-Hell ghoul Robert McNamara, who'll be washing several million gallons of blood off his hands for a long time to come. He was such a catastrophe, and so incompetent, he made Rumsfeld look like a tactical and logistical genius.

I also remember the power-mad Lyndon Johnson, who, if I had a time machine, would gladly replace with Barak Obama, who would be a decided improvement. LBJ, a pathological liar (as all true politicians are), said he would get us out of Vietnam and instead escalated the war. Then after his first term he ran away, dumping the war in Richard Nixon's lap. Close to two-thirds of the casualties in Vietnam occurred during Johnson's administration.

But now, I've had some some ten wars of war (and will have several more for observation), so I've had plenty of time to think about the effects of war on some people. The conclusion I've come to is that war is a religion.

Admittedly it is a false religion, but it is a religion nonetheless. The word "religion" means "to tie, fasten or bind." That is exactly what war does to some people – it brings them together into a community. It gives meaning to their lives. And that makes war a religion, albeit a ghastly one.

Robert Nisbet, an influential conservative sociologist – and "conservative sociologist" almost sounds like an oxymoron – wrote in his book Community and Power (republished as The Quest for Community), "The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the 20th century...one of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade."

The book, indeed all of his books, is about the alienation that comes from the loss of community. Such loss always happens with the expansion of the State. As it expands, it destroys all the intermediary institutions such as religion, neighborhoods and families. Finally, what could be left is nothing between people and the State. There are various names for such a condition – fascism, communism, Nazism. The State becomes everything, and people become absorbed into it. Think of the Borg.

Writers such as Erich Fromm and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn have pointed out many people want to be absorbed into a group as an escape from their alienation. It gives them a sense of community and security. Nisbet adds there is something else – such people don't give up their individuality in such groups, but instead exalt their selves, as they now believe they are part of something they think is much larger than they are.

They become, as I call it, "a community of gods." They believe the group itself is god-like, or blessed of God, so they partake of that "divinity" by being part of the group. They are literally worshipping their selves, a worship that always means those outside of the group are devalued into sub-humans whose murders are considered justified, necessary, and dismissed as "collateral damage."

As Russell Kirk noted, "the monstrous self is the source of all evil." The Nazis, the communists, and the fascists were that monstrous self writ large. I believe this is why Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote, "'I' is from God and 'We' is from the Devil." That "We" can only be of the Devil when the State destroys the intermediary institutions, and the only "We" left is the combination of the people and the State.

During long-term warfare society becomes militarized and in doing so damages, destroys or absorbs such intermediary institutions as churches. Then we end up with disgraces such as Jerry Falwell claiming "God is pro war," which of course means God supports only the wars of the United States.

When the interests of religion and the interests of the State coalesce into supporting the same unjust wars, what we have left is no true religion at all. The State instead becomes God on Earth. War then becomes the fist of that god, one to smite the "wicked."

"When the goals and values of a war are popular," writes Nisbet, "both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community."

In short, war can give meaning and community – and the intoxication of blood and power – to some people's lives. That makes it a religion, a false one based on hubris and being drunk with power. Power does more than just corrupt; it intoxicates. In The Lord of the Rings, it was that power that turned Smeagol into Gollum. The same thing could happen to people in reality.

Always ignored, of course, is what war does to those on the receiving end. If not ignored, then rationalized. "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them," noticed George Orwell.

This meaning and community – this religion – is a false one, destined to bring disillusionment and destruction to those who believe in it. War is a false god. Perhaps sometimes war is unavoidable, but it is an idol that can never give true meaning to a peoples' lives.

American Christian Fascists

2011-10-01T14:42:00.002-04:00

If fascism ever comes to America it won’t be through insignificant groups such as American Nazis or the KKK, both of which together could field a couple of softball teams. It’ll come through “Christians,” specifically the blood-thirsty ones who support war.

This kind of Christian supports the State, and Israel and wars, because they think by doing so they can get Jesus to come back and slaughter all the “infidels” (first those infidels were the Communists, now they’re Muslims). They won’t be around to watch any of this, because they believe they’ll be wafted to Heaven in the Rapture. They believe they’ll be watching the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse romp all over the world from on high.

Look how popular those “Left Behind” novels are. Tens of millions of copies have been sold.

These people are of course completely deluded. The belief in the Rapture is profoundly anti-Biblical, not that it’s stopped anyone in the past from using religion to slaughter people.

Yet because these people support the State, and there are millions of them, they are one of the main political groups that support the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also support Israel uncritically, although they rarely mention they believe most of the Jews in Israel will be slaughtered and the rest converted to Christianity.

Most people I know who think about these things believe the wars in the Middle East are about oil, Israel and empire. Roughly speaking, I’d say that’s true. Many people howl about the political influence of the Israel lobby. But how many people know about the influence of the Christian Zionists (aka American Christian fascists)? Without them the “Israel lobby” couldn’t do anything.

When Jesus went though his Three Temptations he was offered political power over all the kingdoms of the world. He refused it. Clearly political power is Satanic. Therefore any “Christian” who supports the wars and slaughter and stealing of the State is under the influence of Satan. Even Martin Luther referred to the world as “the Devil’s playground.”

In fact Jesus never supported the State even once. I get the impression he was more of a libertarian than anything else. How some “Christians” can support the State is beyond me. The only thing I can conclude is that they are not Christians. After all, as Shakespeare wrote, the Devil can quote Scripture.

The State always goes after the politically weak and insignificant. It went after David Koresh. Then there was Ruby Ridge. But the politically powerful? They are kowtowed to. That’s the way it is with these Christian fascists. They have political power. And that’s a shame.

I wonder what’s going to happen when Jesus doesn’t return? Will these people change their minds – or instead redouble their efforts? I suspect they’ll redouble their efforts. Few people can afford to give up their religion, even if it’s utterly wrong.

So I believe we will be involved in these wars until we run out of money and the American Empire collapses. The country will survive, but the federal State will not. And I can’t say I’m sorry to see it go, considering what it’s turned into – a war-mongering, stealing, lying behemoth.

These kinds of completely self-deluded people were noticed hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Erasmus, a contemporary of Luther, referred to the average Christian of that time as “enslaved by ignorance and blindness.”

I couldn’t agree more with his assessment, not only of his time but for today.

How to Assemble a World Domination Kit

2011-09-30T14:28:00.001-04:00

According to the 1990 movie, Spaced Invaders, you insert Tab A into Slot B. If that doesn't work, you can look at the archetypes in the movie. They give instructions that, in the Western world, run back to the Bible, and before that, the Greeks.

People used to educate children with classical myths, fables and fairy tales. They still do, but not as much as they should. If they did, everyone in boot camp would know what a Myrmidon is.

Today, what has for the most part taken the place of the aforementioned trio are movies, books, cartoons and comics. The same archetypes, themes, plots and wisdom that existed thousands of years ago in an oral tradition still exist today in cartoons, comic books and other entertainments. This is why I rarely say anything bad about them. A few thousand years ago he was called Ulysses; today he's called Luke Skywalker. Both are the archetype of the Hero on a Quest.

For an example of ancient wisdom that has made its way into cartoons, the Greeks noticed the sequence of koros (stability) to hubris (grandiosity) to ate (madness) to nemesis (destruction). Hubris, the god of arrogance, lack of restraint, and insolence, was followed by Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance.

The Hebrews wrote something similar: "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Then we have the comment Jesus made in Luke: "For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled..." (He also made a telling comment about "the narrow path to life" and "the broad path to destruction.") Later, foolish pride became one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Pride, or more correctly, hubris, was the sin of Satan. He started out as an angel (stability), then became afflicted with hubris (thought he could be God), then became insane (wished to destroy everyone). The story should ultimately end with either nemesis or metanoia (to change the heart; to turn around and go the other way).

In real life, the archetype of Satan is illustrated by people like Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot. In Shakespeare, it would be someone like Richard III. In movies, it would be (as humor) Dr. Evil, or any number of James Bond's villains -- Goldfinger, or Dr. No. In comic books, it would be Lex Luthor. In cartoons, it would be Brain (of Pinky fame) or Simon bar Sinister.

All of these villains are the same -- grandiose, hubristic, satanic. And ultimately, incompetent. Looked at this way, those who created Pinky and the Brain are just as wise as the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. What was in Shakespeare then (who in his day was pop culture, as movies are today) is now in cartoons today. Brain, for example, started out as a lab mouse (stability), was afflicted with hubris (thinks he can conquer the world, becomes insane (keeps trying to conquer the world), then is whacked by nemesis (conks his head). This sequence also applies to all the villains mentioned above, which is why SPECTRE (or for that matter, KAOS) never Conquered Over the World.

I've had teachers tell me children should be forced to read "classic" literature. I tell them the kids should watch Pinky and the Brain and then have it explained to them how it relates to ancient Greek myths. They don't believe me, which is why I would tear down the public schools, then salt the ground. Then I'd pepper the teachers, since a lot of them are pretty bland.

How does all of this relate to the movie, Spaced Invaders? In this comedy, we have five loony dwarf Martians, soldiers for the aggressive and expansive Martian empire, who land in the idyllic, Ray Bradburyesque town of Big Bean, Illinois. (And being originally from Illinois -- as is Bradbury -- I had to smile at the small-town life portrayed in this movie.)

Our intrepid but goofy warriors believe they are joining an invasion force of Martians. In reality, they are responding to a Halloween night broadcast of "War of the Worlds." They don't have a clue. Actually, neither does anyone in the town. And that's before the Martians show up.

Our Martian friends turn out to be soldiers who really don't want to fight. To make sure they do, all Martian ships have an enforcer drone, a very sinister spiderish-looking thing, that appears to be wearing a shower cap, and which can powderize those who might take exception to poorly-thought-out invasion plans.

Predictably, all sorts of comedic mayhem breaks loose. The children think the Martians are in costume, and take them trick-or-treating. The farmer, Old Man Wrenchmuller, along with his trusty and remarkably intelligent dog Jim (who can change the film in a camera -- offscreen, of course) attacks the Martians in his barn with the time-tested cartoon tools of dynamite and mousetraps. Now that I think about, the dog was the brains of the duo.

One trick-or-treater, Brian, is not only dressed like a duck, but sounds exactly like Daffy when he talks. Then we have Vern "Zorro" Pillsbury, who ends up with a Martian brain-zapper stuck on his head. Oddly, this is not such a bad thing for him.

Fortunately, in the end, everything turns out well for everyone. It's a zany and unbelievable movie, full of silly quotes such as, "How can they not know we're Martians? We're little green men with antennae!" and "Prepare to die, earth scum!" There is a also a lot of fancy advanced Martian technology, never seen but often referred to, such as "Doughnuts of Destruction."

This lunatic movie also contains wisdom that is thousands of years old.

The first universal truth it teaches is that people are imperfect. Martians, definitely so. If there is life on other planets, they're not aliens billions of years advanced over us, as Carl Sagan postulated in Contact. They'd be knuckleheads, just like us. Lovable ones, to be sure, but knuckleheads nonetheless. Everyone in the town is imperfect, from the idiot sheriff who catches the alien craft doing 3000 mph and yells at it, "you might get the chair for this" to Wrenchmuller having a dog smarter than he is.

The second truth is that some people, however imperfect, are smarter and wiser than others. Only one Martian has any sense, and that is Blaznee, who wears a bomber jacket, aviator glasses, and sounds like a Barsoomian version of Jack Nicholson.

As always, the State is no one's friend. An example:

Martian Political Officer: "I have assumed command. This battlegroup has consistently suffered the greatest casualties of any attack force in the fleet. For this reason, His Majesty has sent me to take direct control of our attack on the Arcturus system. To ensure our complete success, all ships throughout the galaxy have been equipped with enforcer drones, to remove any weak links in the command chain. Any deviation from the Master Invasion Plan will result in immediate disciplinary review. "

Martian Fleet Commander 3: "This is outrageous! The tide of battle can change in seconds, making battle plans useless. I'll not sent my boys out to Arcturus with an Enforcer Drone breathing down my neck."

[Enforcer Drone vaporizes Martian Fleet Commander 3.]

Martian Fleet Commander 2: "I will."

Martian Fleet Commander 1: "Me too, no problem."

All States are not only based on the threat of violence and violence itself, they are also always handicapped by bureaucracy.

The eternal archetype of the horror story is Order invaded by Chaos. That's what exists in this movie. Big Bean, for all its wacky inhabitants, is essentially a civilized town. The Martians, however accidentally, initially bring mayhem to the place. The humor, however, transforms the horror into something funny. Still, the archetype is there: civilized society is just a thin veneer, easily damaged by war and destruction.

Some more wisdom from the movie: empires are not good things. The Martian empire is sinister. Ultimately, all are.

I am not familiar with any old story, no matter what the shape it takes, that has anything good to say about empires, Martian or otherwise. The old poem that springs to mind about this is Shelley's "Ozymandias":

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

How does this movie teach us to Assemble a World Domination Kit? First, gain control of the State. Second, threaten everyone with death, and rub out some people as an example. Third, start wars and become an empire. Dang, that sounds just like Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung!

Unfortunately, one eternal truth that doesn't exist in this movie is that all empires fall. They all withdraw.

What am I supposed to make of all of this? How about: true artists are wiser than Ph.Ds from Yale and Harvard? It was those "the Brightest and Best" boys from such colleges who started the Vietnam War. Now, they're doing it again, only this time a lot worse. Now they've started War III, and plan on turning the United States into an empire!

Good Lord, have these morons no understanding of history? They certainly have no understanding of wisdom. Maybe I should send all of them a copy of Spaced Invaders, along with a detailed explanation of what it means. I'd even use small words, so they can understand it.

Nah, I'd be wasting my time. To quote Oscar Wilde, "The truth cannot be told so as to be understood but not believed." They'll never understand, so they'll never believe.

The Lust for Money and Religions of Hate

2011-09-29T16:08:00.000-04:00

The United States is a empire. Some cheer that fact. I'm not one of them, and I consider such people deluded, since all empires fail, and it's going to happen to the United States , too.

There are several reasons why all empires fail, but there are two that stand out: the financialization of the economy, and an intolerant "us vs. them" religion.

Those two reasons brought down the British, Spanish and Dutch empires in the last several hundred years. If you want to go a little further back, those reasons also brought down Rome . Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, went so far as to blame Rome 's collapse almost completely on an intolerant Christianity.

Developing countries start out as agricultural nations, then they become industrialized, then in their decline the economy is mostly "financial services." Sound familiar? It sure does, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, the people who are supposed to have the smarts -- whom I refer to as "high-IQ idiots" -- spout nonsense from their offices at Harvard and Yale and Princeton about how this financialization is the "new economy" and how it will enrich all of us, instead of the truth -- that it will impoverish all of us.

This financialization always follows the same pattern -- the outsourcing of industries, shuffling money around instead of making things, massive debt, the devaluation and manipulation of the currency, and stagnant or declining wages. This is exactly what has been happening in the U.S. And I'm going to repeat what I just said -- the court intellectuals tell us these bad things are somehow going to make us richer.

It never has in the past, it won't now, and it never will in the future.

(As an aside, I'm amused by "libertarians" who worship Wal-Mart as 'free market' and cannot see it for what it is -- an example of corporatism and the financialization of the American economy).

The second sign of national decline is an intolerant, "us vs. them" religion, as exemplified by the Evangelicals who believe in the Rapture, support Israel, and look forward to the slaughter and destruction of Muslims as signs of the End Times. (Before Islam, it was Communism, before that the Nazis, before that . . . ad infinitum, ad nauseum).

As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, ". . . while religion has generally served humankind well . . . there have been conspicuous exceptions . . . bloody religious wars, malevolent crusades, and false prophecies."

These End Times beliefs, which fit all of the last eight words in the above paragraph, have never been part of traditional Christianity, and have only gained credence in the last 150 years, in large part due to the malign influence of people like John Darby and Cyrus Scofield. These days, one of the main proponents of these perverse doctrines is the Elmer Gantry huckster and ravening wolf John Hagee, along, of course, with his simple-minded sheeple followers.

This type of close-minded fundamentalist religion generally arises when the believers think their society is under assault to the point of extinction. These people unwittingly believe in the archetype of the horror story -- Order attacked by Chaos. Yet in their delusions, they support Chaos -- they somehow think supporting war, slaughter and destruction (approved by their God) is somehow going to bring peace.

In other words, the financialization of the economy, and the resulting impoverishment of the middle classes, feeds into fundamentalist religion -- because it gives their troubled members great comfort to believe in a coming better world.

As Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby write in Fundamentalism Observed, "Fundamentalisms arise in times of crisis, real or perceived . . . the crisis is perceived by those who fear extinction as a people."

As I see it, the financialization of the economy is based on greed, and fundamentalist religion is based on self-righteousness. Both are based on what I consider the only true crime -- hubris, which I like to define as cheerfully and without guilt seeing millions of other people as disposable pieces on your chessboard.

Hubris, as the Greeks noticed, is followed by Nemesis. I see it exactly the same as the Biblical saying, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

In a nutshell, the arrogance and blindness of hubris and overweening pride always leads to some kind of a collapse. It doesn't matter at all how convinced people are that their economic policies and their religion are absolutely true. Reality always trumps their falsehoods.

We can of course save ourselves economically. It's not hard. The financialization of the economy is not free market: It's corporatism, using the State to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of everyone else. So all that is needed to fix that problem is a return to the free market.

The perversion of religion is a bit more difficult. The dangerous simpletons who believe in it generally have to learn their lessons in the School of Hard Knocks (would that it happen only to them and not the innocent). The rabid fundamentalists of the now-defunct English, Spanish and Dutch empires are long gone, along with their empires.

So, there is a good chance that when the American empire comes home and we return to the free market, these people will be relegated to the lunatic fringes as the Bible Thumpers and Holy Rollers that most Americans have traditionally perceived them. To expand on what I wrote before, get rid of the Chaos of the American empire and statist economics, then fundamentalism will greatly diminish, and Order will return.

The one thing I can say, though, beyond all doubt, is that the American empire will collapse abroad and come home. I just can't say when. But I don't think it will be all that long into the future.

The Land of Let's Pretend

2011-09-28T15:11:00.000-04:00

The pleasant thing about good fiction is that it does all the intellectual and imaginative heavy lifting for me. I can take advantage of someone else's work and thoughts, for just several dollars. They can spend a year or more creating a novel, and I get all of it for a few bucks. It almost seems unfair to them, since most don't end up like Stephen King, who once bought a radio station so it would play the music he likes, and the purchases didn't put a dent in his wealth.

That's the funny thing about ideas: if someone has some, and shares them with me, it's an increase, because then we both have them. It's not a zero-sum game, or a pie when if I take one piece there is one less for the person who gave it to me. It's more like they give me a huge pie, one they've baked for years, and not only do I have it, they still have it for themselves.

A good writer can create an entire world, one I can move into and take advantage of. He does the creating and all the work; I do the enjoying. All I need is a little imagination and knowledge to discern whether his world makes sense or not. Imagine how slow and cumbersome the world would be if all of us couldn't share ideas and inventions, and had to do everything on our own. We wouldn't have progressed far beyond drawing bison on cave walls.

Not all fiction is good, unfortunately. The good stuff is based on what the world would be like if human nature is taken into account. Writers engage in a "what if" scenario and try to predict what would happen if their ideas were implemented in reality. Sometimes we get Karl Marx, who was a fiction writer, and an incredibly bad one at that. He took all the bad in human nature -- which he thought was the good stuff -- and thought its expression would make a Utopia.

Other times, we get Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors.

Stephenson writes massive, lovingly detailed novels such as The Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Both are fine science-fiction novels in which he deals with extrapolations of what the world would be like, among other things, if all governments collapsed. Do I think the future would be exactly as Stephenson imagines? No, I don't. Predicting the future exactly is impossible. But in general outline, I believe Stephenson is right.

The Diamond Age, published in 1995, won the Hugo Award, science-fiction's highest award, in 1996. It deals with many of the same themes as Snow Crash -- ubitiquous nanotechnology, encryption, and the collapse of governments and nations and their replacement by racial and cultural tribes (which he calls "phyles").

He correctly zeroes in on really the only way to permanently collapse all governments -- starve them of their lifeblood, money. Not revolution, not taking over governments and shrinking them -- just starving them to death. He doesn't engage in libertarian fantasies of "somehow" the State just disappearing, or it "somehow" being reformed through legislation and then everyone living in a libertarian Utopia. He just kills them off by starving them of the main thing they are interested in -- Other People's Money.

In both novels, this collapse happens because of advanced technology, specifically encryption. Everyone, and every business, is is able to hide their finances from the prying eyes and fingers of the tax collectors, which cannot break the codes because they are complex beyond the ability of the most powerful computers. Without taxes, without money, all governments collapse. That's one of the main reasons today all governments are so terrified of encryption: maybe if they had a computer the size of the universe they might break one encrypted message.

To make things more interesting, he also throws in the collapse of nations. For the very large ones, those with many different tribes, I suspect this would happen. In fact, there is a great diaspora of tribes throughout the world, briefly alluded to, not because of the collapse of large governments, but because of the collapse of countries.

What takes the place of all these collapsed governments and countries? Do people suddenly turn into what I call "disconnected libertarian atoms" and move around the world in a Utopia of No More Borders, the way open borders crowd thinks? Not on your life.

Instead, they do what they've always done in the past, do now, and will do in the future -- they form cultural and racial tribes. Some of the tribes are large and powerful because they are intelligent and work hard; others are small and weak because they are lazy. Some tribes are "artificial," that is, they are composed of people who got together because they share common interests. There is even sort of a Nerd/Trickster phyle, of which most of the world is terrified because the members move around the world as individuals, and no one can tell who they are. Most, however, are tribes that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years.

All tribes have sentries to guard their borders from intrusions by other tribes. These sentries aren't people -- they're nanotechnological guards, literally curtains of floating microscopic nanobots which guard against the incursions of other, dangerous nanobots sent from other tribes.

Stephenson is taking old ideas of tribes and sentries, projecting them into the future, and dressing them up with a lot of fancy (and so far non-existent) technology. He's taking some very old stories and imagines how they would be told in the future. He's taking human nature into account.

People will always form racial and cultural tribes; there is no way around it. And these tribes get along very well as long as each stays on its own territory and engages in trade with the others. The ending of the novel is about the violence that happens when one huge phyle attempts to move smaller phyles off of its traditional territory.

Curiously, in his societies those who do not belong to tribes are invariably criminals, an illustration of Aristotle's comment, "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." In Stephenson's mind, such people are beasts, and even though he does not come out and say so, he obviously does not believe in the leftist/leftist-libertarian fantasy of everyone in the world holding hands and living in a Barney the Dinosaur episode.

Stephenson is not explicit about the distinction between the Political Means of States (theft, murder, etc) and the Economic Means of Society (liberty, free trade). But he clearly does know the difference, and it shows in his novel.

Each phyle is self-governing; there is no State, per se. But those who do not conform to the customs of the tribe suffer the fate of being expelled. And they are given a lot of leeway before this happens. Those who are murderers, muggers and thieves are executed. There are no prisons mentioned in The Diamond Age, although jail is. Expulsion or execution -- there appears to be little in between except an occasional caning as a warning to change your ways. The worst, violent criminals -- those who belong to no tribe -- end up executed. In fact, the book starts off with the execution of a tribeless armed robber who badly injures one of his many victims.

Like most (if not all) good writers -- and especially science-fiction writers -- Stephenson is rather anarchist/libertarian. Yet, because he takes human nature into account far more than leftists do (who I doubt take it into account at all), he's somewhat conservative. I can't remember who said it (it might have been T.S. Elliot, but I can't find the quote), but whoever said it, made the comment that all the greatest writers have been conservative, in the sense of understanding what Russell Kirk called "the permanent things."

Stephenson understands that people will always form themselves into tribes. It's human nature. It's one of those "permanent things." In that sense, he is "conservative." J.R.R. Tolkien was the same way: he's best known for creating the tribes of Men, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, all of whom stayed on their own territory, and because of this, got along just fine with their neighbors...with the exception of the Orcs, who didn't respect anyone's territory.

I suppose you can say that Stephenson is a conservative libertarian. At least he appears to be one from his novels. He understands there are bad people --tribeless Orcs, if you will -- who will trespass on others. He clearly does not believe in the borderless Utopian fantasies of some libertarians. He understands that as important as the individual is, we are group beings, and will always form ourselves into tribes who will always occupy a certain territory. It's perhaps the main reason the Iraqi tribes are trying to throw the American tribes off of their land.

This tribal characteristic of human nature is something the open borders crowd will have to come to terms with, contra their borderless, tribeless fantasies of disconnected individuals united by nothing but the free market. Those who do deny it are idealists courting tragedy.

Morris Fishbein, Enemy of World Health

2011-09-27T14:10:00.000-04:00

Dr. Morris Fishbein (1889-1976) originally studied to be a clown. Realizing he could make more money as a doctor, he entered medical school (where he failed anatomy), then barely graduated. He never treated a patient in his life.

Why is he so important? Because he became head of the AMA, a position that he used to enrich himself and crush legitimate therapies out of existence. He appeared to be motivated solely by money and power.

As head of the AMA (and editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1924-1949), he decided which drugs could be sold to the public based only how much advertising money he could extort from drug manufacturers, whom he required to place expensive ads in the JAMA. There were no drug-testing agencies, only Fishbein. It was irrelevant if the drugs worked.

Fishbein was a shakedown artist. Yet, today, there is a Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago.

The AMA, a State-backed guild which today has a near-stranglehold on the medical profession, was founded in 1847 merely as a social and scientific organization. Its original purpose was totally appropriate. It was in their private (and the public's) interest for practitioners to get together to trade knowledge, and, for all the outward seriousness of the organization, to have some fun. The original purpose always seems to get lost, though. Some members always want to use the State to reduce the supply of practitioners (which increases income) and eliminate competition (which also increases income, and, much more seriously, reduces innovation). This happened with he AMA, which is why it is now a danger to the health of the American people.

In 1900, while attending the annual AMA convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, three doctors came up with the always-destructive but all-too-human idea of using the AMA as a front, in order to form a closed corporation for their financial benefit. A constitution, bylaws and a charter were created which appeared to give the members of the AMA a say in the activities of the corporation, whereas in reality the three directors had complete control. These three formed smaller political machines in every state, which they controlled through the main corporation.

In 1924, not surprisingly (perhaps inevitably) one of the directors became involved in a scandal and had to resign. He appointed Fishbein to take his place. Fishbein ultimately took control of the AMA, and by 1934 owned all of the stock. In his new position he was able to assume dictatorial control of the state licensing boards and made it as difficult as he could for any doctor who did not join. He, and the three doctors who formed the corporation, were little more than extortionists, ones who made millions by using the power of the State.

The AMA, which started out as a legitimate organization, rapidly became crooked. And Fishbein was the main cause.

The worst of Fishbein's sins was his destruction of Royal Rife.

I don't know if Royal Raymond Rife was legitimate or not. I believe the evidence leans towards his being a once-in-a-century genius.

He was born in 1888 in Elkhorn, Nebraska, and died in 1971, at age 83. He grew up with a passion for microscopes, microbiology, and electronics.

He was brilliant. There can be no doubt about that. He invented technology still used today in optics, electronics, radiochemistry, biochemistry, ballistics, and aviation. Some of his many inventions included a heterodyning ultraviolet microscope, a microdissector, and a micromanipulator. He studied at John Hopkins, received 14 major awards, and was honored with an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. He worked for Zeiss Optics, the U.S. government, and several private employers, the most notable of them being Henry Timkin, who made millions manufacturing roller bearings.

Most people have never heard of Rife.

By 1920, Rife had built the world's first microscope that was strong enough for the him to see a virus (he sometimes had to painfully adjust his microscope for up to 24 hours to get the specimen into focus). By 1932, after 12 years and five microscopes, he perfected his technology and had constructed the largest and most powerful of them, which he called his "Universal Microscope." It had almost 6,000 different parts and could magnify objects 61,000 times their normal size. With this two-foot-tall, 200-pound microscope, Rife became the first to see a live virus, and until recently, his microscope was the only one which could do this.

Modern electron microscopes, although more powerful than Rife's invention, instantly kill the viruses they are focused upon. Rife's microscope left the viruses alive, so they could be studied.

Rife's genius was first introduced to the public in the San Diego Union newspaper in 1929, and was followed by an article in Popular Science in 1931. Articles describing his great scientific breakthroughs appeared in the established scientific press in for the first time in late 1931 in Science magazine, as well as California and Western Medicine.

In 1944, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, published a detailed article about Rife in their national journal, with his microscope the focus of it. But what was revealed to their readers was not only Rife's microscope, but how he was able to destroy disease-causing pathogens.

As far back as 1920, Rife had identified a virus that he believed caused cancer. He called it the "BX virus." He made over 20,000 unsuccessful attempts to transform normal cells into tumor cells. He failed until he irradiated the virus, caught it in a porcelain filter, and injected in into lab animals. Using this technique, he created 400 tumors in a row.

He began subjecting this virus to different radio frequencies to see if it was affected by them. He discovered what he called the "Mortal Oscillatory Rate" (MOR) of the virus. He successfully cured cancer in his 400 experimental animals before he decided to run tests on humans.

What Rife was doing was using resonance to kill the virus. Everything vibrates at different frequencies. If the resonance is correct, it can be used to shatter, just as a singer can use it to break a wineglass. By finding the proper resonance, Rife was able to shatter the virus. This is why he called it the Mortal Oscillatory Rate.

Rife claims he also discovered the frequencies which destroyed herpes, polio, spinal meningitis, tetanus, influenza, and many other dangerous, disease-causing organisms. All told, there were over 50 infectious diseases that he apparently discovered cures for.

How did Rife do this? He painstakingly obtained the MORS by tuning the dial of the frequency generator while observing the sample pathogen under his microscope. When a frequency was discovered that destroyed a particular microorganism, its dial position was marked. The actual frequencies were determined later after his experiments.

What he did, he apparently did intuitively and unwittingly, and it is doubtful he completely understood the theoretical method he utilized. For one thing, there was at that time no theory to explain what he was doing. (In doing research for this article, I have come to the conclusion that Rife was so far advanced over currently available theories that he could not explain what he was doing.)

In the summer of 1934, one of Rife's close friends, Dr. Milbank Johnson, along with the University of Southern California, appointed a Special Medical Research Committee to bring 16 terminally cancer patients from Pasadena County Hospital to Rife's San Diego Laboratory and clinic for treatment. The team included doctors and pathologists assigned to examine the patients - if they were still alive - after 90 days.

Some of the other scientists and doctors Rife worked with were: E.C. Rosenow, Sr. (longtime Chief of Bacteriology, Mayo Clinic); Arthur Kendall (Director, Northwestern Medical School); Dr. George Dock; Alvin Foord (pathologist); Rufus Klein-Schmidt (President of USC); R.T. Hamer (Superintendent, Paradise Valley Sanitarium); Whalen Morrison (Chief Surgeon, Santa Fe Railway); George Fischer (Childrens Hospital, N.Y.); Edward Kopps (Metabolic Clinic, La Jolla); Karl Meyer (Hooper Foundation, S.F.); and M. Zite (Chicago University).

At first, the patients were given three minutes of the appropriate frequency every day. The treatment consisted of the patients standing next to one of Rife's generators, which irradiated them. It was much the same as standing in front of a large fluorescent light. The researchers soon learned this was too much of the treatment. Suspecting the human body needed more time to dispose of the dead toxins, they reduced the time to three minutes every third day.

After the 90 days of treatment, the committee concluded that 14 of the patients had been completely cured. After the treatment was adjusted, the remaining two of the patients responded within the next four weeks. The total recovery rate using Rife's technology was 100%. The treatment was painless, and the side effects, minimal, if any. Except for building the generators, the total cost was a little electricity (today, the cost of treating a cancer patient averages $300,000 were person. That's a lot of money, and the cancer industry is big business.)

Rife wrote in 1953, "Sixteen cases were treated at the clinic for many types of malignancy. After three months, 14 of these so-called hopeless cases were signed off as clinically cured by the staff of five medical doctors and Dr. Alvin G. Foord, M.D., pathologist for the group."

In 1937 Rife and some colleagues established a company called Beam Ray. They manufactured fourteen of Rife's "frequency instruments." Dr. James Couche, who was present at the clinic, used one of Rife's machines with great success for 22 years, long after the AMA had banned it.

Then, to Rife's, and the nation's great misfortune, Fishbein heard about Rife's frequency machine.

Fishbein sent an attorney to make a token attempt to buy out Rife. Rife refused. Although no one knows the exact terms of the offer, it was probably similar to the one Fishbein made to Harry Hoxsey for his herbal cancer remedy (which Fishbein, in court, had to admit worked on skin cancer):

Fishbein and his associates would receive all profits for nine years and Hoxey would receive nothing. Then, if they were satisfied that it worked, Hoxsey would begin to receive 10% of the profits. When Hoxsey refused, Fishbein used his political connections to have Hoxsey arrested 125 times in a period of 16 months. The charges (based on practicing without a license) were always thrown out of court, but Fishbein harassed Hoxsey for 25 years. The only good thing that came out of it is that the scandal forced Fishbein to resign.

Fishbein then offered Phil Hoyland, an investor in Beam Ray and an electrical engineer who had helped build the frequency instruments, legal assistance in an attempt to steal the company from Rife and the other investors. A lawsuit ensued.

The trial of 1939 put an end to the proper scientific investigation of Rife's frequency machine. Rife, who was not as resilient as Hoxsey, became unglued. Unable to cope with the savage and unfair attacks in court, he crumbled, turned to alcohol, and became an alcoholic. This, even though he won the case. Unfortunately, the legal bills bankrupted Beam Ray, and it closed down. Fishbein used his power within the AMA to halt any further investigation of Rife's work.

In 1950 Rife joined up with John Crane, who was an electrical engineer. They worked together for ten years, building more advanced frequency machines. But in 1960 the AMA closed them down. Crane was imprisoned for three years and one month, even though fourteen patients testified as to the effectiveness of the machine (the forewoman of the jury was an AMA doctor). Rife died in 1971, from a combination of alcohol and Valium. He had spend the last one-third of his life as an alcoholic.

What happened to all of those who had supported Rife? By 1939 most of them were denying they ever knew him, even though 44 of them had honored Rife on November 20, 1931 with a banquet billed as "The End to All Diseases" at Dr. Milbank's Pasadena estate.

Arthur Kendall, who worked with Rife on the cancer virus, accepted almost a quarter of a million dollars to suddenly "retire" in Mexico. This was a huge amount of money during the Depression. Dr. George Dock was silenced with an enormous grant, along with the highest honors the AMA could bestow. Everyone except Dr. Couche and Dr. Milbank Johnson gave up Rife's work and went back to prescribing drugs. Johnson died in 1944.

The medical journals, supported almost entirely by drug company advertising revenues and controlled by the AMA, refused to publish any paper by anyone on Rife's therapy. Generations of medical students graduated without hearing of Rife's breakthroughs in medicine.

And what happened to Rife's decades of meticulous evidence of his work, including film and stop-motion photographs? Parts of his instruments, photographs, film, and written records were stolen from his lab. No one knows who was behind it. No one was never caught.

Rife's documentation for the cancer clinic was lost when he lent them to Dr. Arthur Yale a few years later. Barry Lynes, who reintroduced Rife's work to the public in 1986, in his book The Cancer Cure that Worked, wrote, "Documents show the clinic existed and succeeded in curing cancer. And doctors who continued treating seriously ill people with success because of what the frequency instrument accomplished in 1934 tell the real story, as do signed reports from cured cancer patients in later years."

While Rife attempted to reproduce his missing data, his virus microscopes were vandalized. Pieces of his Universal Microscope were stolen. Earlier, arson had destroyed the multi-million dollar Burnett Lab in New Jersey, just as the scientists there were preparing to announce confirmation of Rife's work. But the last blow came later, when police illegally confiscated the remainder of Rife's 50 years of research.

Fortunately, his death was not the end of his electronic therapy. A few humanitarian doctors and engineers attempted to reconstruct his frequency machines and keep his work alive.

But do these modern machines work? I don't know. Modern reseachers are trying to replicate the life's work of what may been one of the greatest geniuses in history.

If you'll look at the reviews of Lynes' book at Amazon.com., there are people who swear by Rife's machines. A doctor I know (who lives outside the U.S. and wishes to remain anonymous) told me, "I have a feeling the Rife machines that are now available to us do not have the correct frequencies...the machines I've experienced have limited settings and transmit a general range of frequencies." But she uses something similar, specifically the LISTEN and the much more advanced BEST machines, invented by James Clark.

She told me several of her case histories, one of which I will reproduce here: "[I was treating] a nine-weeks-old baby that was blue and dying...doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her. I found Ross River fever (mosquito transmitted) and the baby began to respond within two hours of giving her the frequencies, and went on to make a full recovery, just after one treatment. The parents did demand a blood test for the baby to confirm the Ross River virus - which it was! There was nothing the doctors could have done about it. I used to think that somehow the electromagnetic frequency gave the body the right information to deal with the virus. We now know how this works - due to Sharry Edwards, (another practitioner in the States I've studied with, who uses low-frequency sound for healing). She has access to great lab equipment, and last year applied the frequencies representing various parasite, bacteria and viruses to blood containing these pathogens. Under a special high-powered microscope, she observed that the frequency shattered the "mask" - the protein DNA that the pathogen would cloak itself with - and expose the invader to the immune system, would would immediately attack and destroy."

This is essentially what Rife discovered over 80 years ago. We are 80 years behind where we should be, because of one despicable man, Morris Fishbein, who used the State to halt the advance of medicine, and to line his own pockets.

The LISTEN and BEST machines are legal in the US...but not totally. Said this doctor:

"Practitioners in the States do not use the 'imprinting' facility of the machines - that is, broadcasting the frequency. Since this broadcasting is not permitted by your laws, the device is added to the machine when we buy them."

In other words, it is illegal in the U.S. to use the machines to attempt to cure disease. The proper parts aren't even on the machine. It's illegal for a doctor to even suggest such a cure is possible.

There are other instruments (and other inventors) who, past and present, have discovered the same thing Rife did. Gaston Naessons, Hulda Clark and Antoine Priore have invented similar instruments. All suffered persecution at the hands of the State. Are they legitimate? All I can say is that they had an enormous amount of support from their patients.

What would have happened if Rife had suceeded, and Fishbein had failed? If what Rife was doing actually worked, there would be a lot of people who would have not died of cancer. A lot of the medical profession would have ceased to exist. It certainly didn't take a doctor to operate Rife's machines.

Scientists and researches could have devoted more time and money to things we are far behind on, like growing organs and limbs. The hundreds of billions of dollars that has flowed to the unholy alliance of the AMA, FDA, drug industry and the State, would have never been.

The cure for these problems? Remove the State backing from the AMA and FDA, and unleash the power and creatively of the free market. Many people have been brainwashed into thinking the State protects them. The truth is the exact opposite.

Bad Daddy and Bad Mommy

2011-09-27T13:27:00.000-04:00

Everything has a story. Indeed, perhaps everything is a story. Too bad
cabbages can't talk, or mountains. I'm sure they'd have interesting things
to tell us.

Not only are there stories, there are stories behind those, and even ones
behind them. How far back do these stories run? Is there an infinite
regress? Perhaps. Maybe it's stories all the way back -- and all the way
forward, all the way up, and all the way down. It could be they never end.

Let's take society today, and the wars in which we are involved. There are
many stories to explain them. The three I hear are: Oil, Israel, and Empire.
They may be true, or they may be not true, or they may be partly true. Are
there other stories about what's going on? Stories that might help explain
the U.S.'s march into Empire?

What I find interesting is that today we hear much of the Mommy State at
home. That's where Mommy has traditionally been: at home. Where has Daddy
been? Out working. Could it be Daddy is still out working, abroad? Could it
be we have the Mommy State at home, and the Daddy State out working in other
countries, to protect Mommy at home? Could that be why George Bush truly
believes the best way to protect America is to impose democracy abroad?

Events never make any sense unless you take human nature into account.
Societies, which comprise individuals, are expressions of that nature. All
societies are derivative of it. Understand human nature, and you will in
some measure understand the societies that people create. As such, it must
always be taken into account, for want of better words, that all people
contain "masculine" and "feminine" aspects. Perhaps "archetypes" is a better
choice.

These archetypes always project themselves into society. In fact, they're
some of the major influences in society. That's why we end up with such
terms as "the Mommy State." It's just Mom writ large.

Generally, Moms are overwhelmingly concerned with safety at the expense of
liberty. Ruled by their feelings, they are only vaguely familiar with
reason. Those ruled by their feelings can only see the short term. To be
totally accurate, I should say these are the worst characteristics of Mom.
In other words, we're dealing today with Bad Mom, now enshrined in law.

It's why we get weird things like kids being arrested for drawing "violent"
pictures in school, or getting expelled for bringing fingernail clippers. A
misguided desire for "safety" -- in this case a non-existent safety --
trumps freedom. We no longer have a Good Dad at home, in society. I haven't
seen him for a long time. Instead, Bad Dad is out meddling in other
countries.

Unfortunately, Bad Dad wants to do something very strange: he wants to
impose Bad Mom in other countries, in the form of democracy, by violence.
That seems reasonable to him -- kill people until they give up. Under
democracy, everyone is supposed to be equal, like little kids in a family.
It's leftist, and if one word can describe Bad Mom, it's leftism.

Bad Mom at home, and Bad Dad abroad. Uh oh. This is very, very lopsided, and
very, very dangerous. My impression is that description applies to all
Empires: Mommy and welfare at home, Daddy and warfare abroad, to protect
Mommy. If that's true, welfare and warfare are opposite sides of the same
coin, and always will be. The clearest and best-known example of this is the
Roman Empire.

Those who whine we should have welfare at home and not warfare abroad, are
deluding themselves, just as those who claim we can have warfare without
welfare are deluding themselves. Think of the Borg (which, by the way, had a
Mommy Queen has a ruler). These days, the first kind call themselves
liberals, and are almost always Democrats. The second claim they are
conservatives, usually Republicans. There's about a dime's worth of
difference between them.

What we've got then, is Bad Mommy attempting to take over the US at home,
and so far doing a pretty good job of it. Another way you can describe it is
as the Evil Feminine of leftism. It's what I mean by saying our country --
our culture -- is lopsided. Here's Mom in the home. But where's Dad in the
home? He's almost nowhere to be found.

As New Agey as it sounds, I don't think people or societies can be whole
until they find the right balance between the Feminine and the Masculine. I
think it's the reason men and women seek each other out; they're trying to
find in the other what each lacks. It might explain why Kings always have
Queens, and why Presidents always have a First Lady. The mass of people
demand it of them.

I find it interesting that during World War II Russians were supposed to
defend the "Motherland," but Germans were supposed to fight for the
"Fatherland." Russia was Communist -- a perfect example of the Bad Mother.
The Germans were Nazis, perfect examples of hierarchy, bureaucracy,
rationality, and suppressed feeling -- many of the characteristics of the
Bad Father.

Roughly speaking, you can say the masculine is competitive, the feminine
cooperative. The masculine is rational, the feminine emotional. Each has
good and bad aspects: the masculine can be violent, the feminine deceptive
(it's the reason men tend to kill violently, while poisoners are almost
exclusively female). It might explain why the Communists were far more
deceptive than the Nazis.

Most unfortunately, these masculine and feminine archetypes can move whole
societies in ways in which they are unaware. Some people, of course, can see
it. But there never seems to be enough to stop it.

How did we end up like this? I don't quite know. Perhaps it was because of
the mostly deluded belief in the oppression of women by men, and the attempt
by "feminists" to shame men and make them feel guilty. Somehow, they
retreated in the face of this, to the detriment of society. So, this
lopsidedness, this unwholeness, with Bad Mommy at home, and Bad Daddy
abroad, will in the long run cause nothing but trouble.

We are, all of us, well aware of Bad Daddy and what he has done throughout
history: violence and wars. But Bad Mommy, with her deception, destruction
of liberty for a false safety, and irrational belief in subjective
"feelings" determining what is right, with little recourse to objective
reason? We are in deep denial about that Feminine Evil. We are still in
denial about the Masculine Evil, when we see it as protecting Bad Mommy when
she is attacked. Some are not only in denial, they support it.

Bad Mommy, at home today, is trying to coerce everyone "for their own good."
Most of it means trying to destroy the good masculine, the Good Dad. It also
means trying to feminize little boys, a sure prescription for disaster. If
you don't believe me, how many men today can actually give a description of
what it means to be a man? We've not only lost Tarzan, we've lost Cary
Grant. Ward Cleaver? Forget it. That's how far the problem has progressed.

Supposedly "feminism" was to correct the excesses of the masculine. Perhaps
it was, at first, a hundred or so years ago. But today, the Evil
Feminine --leftism -- does little more than proclaim its superiority over
the masculine. It's why the US, in little ways, becomes more and more
socialist every day. And socialism, in all ways, is abusive. And we thought
Communism and socialism was gone? Hardly.

If things continue in the US as they are now, we aren't going to end up with
fascism or Nazism or Communism. But we will end up with a "soft" socialism,
one that smothers everyone and takes all the fun out of life. Wear your
seatbelt, lose weight, don't smoke or drink, don't read "bad" things that
will "damage" you. Instead, just be a little kid scolded all the time.
Little kids also expect privileges -- they don't want to work, they want
rights without responsibilities. In the long run, a society composed of
children won't stand.

The archetype of the horror story is relevant here. Being universal, it is
always relevant. It can be described in several ways: bad attacking good,
the unholy attacking the holy, chaos attacking order. All are different ways
of describing the same thing.

Both the Feminine Evil and Masculine Evil are a perversion of the good. As
such, they fall under the archetype of the horror story. Each will only have
a bad effect on society. An added problem is when people can't see them as
evil, and instead defend them as good.

A definition of evil is in order, too. It can be described as what C.S.
Lewis called "bent" good. This implies a continuum from good to evil, which
I believe. Otherwise, you end up with pure, unadulterated good and evil,
both of which are exactly what people are not.

When evil is analyzed, the first thing found is political power, the desire
for power over others. The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote, "I define evil,
then, as the exercise of political power---that is, the imposition of one's
will upon others by overt or covert coercion..."

Since the definition of the State is the Political Means (as opposed to the
Economic Means of society), this means the State is an evil thing. The
second thing found is some sort of stealing, be it a person's belongings,
their freedoms, or their lives. It can be, as Peck wrote, either overtly or
covertly, either openly or by deception.

Stealing means to take what is not yours to take -- and that taking is what
makes people or things "unwhole." Another trait is self-deception, or
rationalization: you convince yourself what you are doing is right. All of
these traits might be subsumed under what the Greeks called "hubris," and
the Bible, "pride." Both are the sin of the mythical Satan, the prideful
fallen angel who lusted for power over others, and who wished to replace God
and rule in his place.

When will the U.S. find its way back to the right balance between the good
masculine and the good feminine? Probably when things go so far they break,
when we become so Mommy socialist at home and Daddy Empire abroad that both
collapse, and finally, we return to our senses. It is indeed sad. Entire
societies can teeter on the edge of a cliff before they go "whoa!" and turn
around. Until we turn around, we appear to be heading into a socialist US in
which people are both children and slaves.

But always, in the long run, reality will trump ideology. Fantasies, as
always, evaporate.

Resistance is Futile, Underpeople!

2011-09-24T13:51:00.000-04:00

Resistance Is Futile, Under-People!

"Under-People" is the English translation of the German word "Untermenschen," made famous by Hitler in Mein Kampf. And of course, if you've got Untermenschen, you've got to have Ubermenschen, too. At least in fantasy.

And fantasy indeed is what we're dealing with in Thomas P.M. Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Map: Peace and War in the Twenty-First Century. Only, the Over-People are what he calls "the Core," and the Under-People he refers to as "the Gap."

If you've watched Star Trek: the Next Generation, you'll realize the Over-People Core are the Borg, and the Under-People Gap are all those unassimilated races who puzzled the Borg Queen so much. "Why do you resist us?" she complained. "We only wish to improve the quality of your lives."

Unfortunately, her idea of an improved quality of life meant everyone belonging to a hive-mind, never questioning orders (because they couldn't, having been transmogrified into unconscious Borg drones), and engaging in an Orwellian perpetual war for perpetual peace, to protect the Borg from all those war-mongering aliens who were plotting to attack the Borg Cubes, but somehow never did, except in self-defense. Obviously, a little dab'll of pre-emptive war will do ya, not only for the Borg, but the U.S.

The Core refers to the West, with Japan tossed in. The Gap is what Richard Maybury calls Chaostan, that section of the world--about one-third of it--that never developed Western values. It's everything that isn't the West.

Maybury, much more realistic and clear-headed than Barnett, subscribes to the views of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington: Stay out of the world's political problems and just trade with them, understanding that only the free market will improve their lot. Barnett, an unwitting believer in the old saying, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions," thinks we should Borgify the non-West, using the Big Giant Fist against their recalcitrant Gap heads. That'll drag them into the 20th Century, all right, he tells everyone.

He considers it bringing "freedom" to them, but I prefer the much older and wiser views of Aristotle,Aesop and Jesus: All tyrants call themselves benefactors.

Barnett uses non-Borgian terms, but it's still the same tune, just different lyrics. He thinks the Core should invade and conquer the Gap, and force it to conform to the West's--or rather his--values.

Barnett's ideas are what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in Leftism Revisited, called "false but clear," like Marxism. And like Marxism, Barnett's Core/Gap ideas can be taught to a ten-year-old in about five minutes. They're about as valid as Marxism, too.

For some reason I can't quite fathom, many people fall for the simplistic view of splitting things into either good or bad, with nothing in between. Of course, they always consider themselves good (Core) and other people bad (Gap). Since they consider themselves "good," all badness must lie elsewhere, with others. Then the "bad" must be eradicated or changed. In Barnett's world, the Core must assimilate the Gap, otherwise the Gap will destroy the Core, just the way all those wogs of the galaxy (say, humans), have to be Borgified, even if it's unnecessary.

This either-good-or-bad, either Hero or Villain view of things is bad enough when an individual perceives the world that way, but it's a catastrophe when it afflicts groups. While individuals can think, groups cannot. They can only feel, and given the chance, they will invariably engage in Dionysian orgies. Watch Triumph of the Will sometime.

Of course, in Barnett's mind, the Western Core is the good group, and the Gap, populated by all the Fuzzy Wuzzes of the world, is the bad group. This is a modern-day version of Kipling's "the white man's burden," jazzed up a bit with some pop-culture terminology. It didn't work in his time, either.

Since individuals can think, but groups cannot, it is one of the reasons why Kuehnelt-Leddihn said, "'I' is from God, and 'We' is from the Devil." The hive-mind "group" is the basis of fascism in all its forms, whether you call it fascism, Communism, or Nazism.

As Mussolini wrote in 1932: "The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad . . . For the Fascist, everything is within the State and . . . neither individuals or groups are outside the State . . . . For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative . . . everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

Barnett must have read Mussolini. I hope he has. If he has, does he think the definition of fascism does not apply to his ideas? Apparently not. He also appears to disbelieve that "War is Peace" applies to his writings. Or "Lies are Truth."

In Barnett's cheerful little fantasy, the idea of the wogs fighting back doesn't really count for very much. I suspect he's as puzzled as the Borg Queen, wondering why they don't welcome us with open arms and flowers strewn in the path of our tanks. If we have to, he tells us, we can whup 'em but good with our advanced technology. We sure whupped the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians good, to the tune of 2.5 million to three million dead. Afterward, we and our technology went home.

Perhaps Barnett is just today's version of Robert McNamara, the megalomaniacal high-IQ idiot who was the architect of the Vietnam Non-War. Only in this iteration, he wants to extend war to the entire world.

Perhaps the main problem with all empires is that they are invariably welfare/warfare. They're two sides of the same coin; the first can't exist without the second, no matter how many people would like to see the former without the latter. You can't have the fascist Borg Cube/Womb without wanting to protect it, even if the threat is non-existent.

So what we're stuck with in Barnett's confabulations is bringing welfare to the world through warfare. In essence, "We're going to kill you to save you," is what he's saying. I'm sure I'm not the only one going, "Huh?" It's exactly what people are accusing those "Islamofascists" of doing: murdering us to convert (and therefore "save") us.

Of course, we're going to kill about 10,000 of them for every one of us they kill. Not that our soldiers' deaths really count, since they're drones sacrificed for the good of the Hive. I suppose that's why the last few American Presidents paid no attention to the deaths of American soldiers. As for the "enemy," they're just Under-People, so who counts how many of them we rub out?

I have for a few years thought the main problem of the human race--the main sin, if you will--is hubris, thinking one is god-like, believing one has the power to move millions of people around like pieces on a cosmic chessboard. Barnett's book has not disabused me of that notion, only confirmed it.

Barnett obviously believes he is a prophet, maybe even a messiah. But how do you tell the difference between a false prophet and a true one? Maybe true ones don't support mass murder, destruction and theft, even if it's for the "good" of those on the receiving end. Whatever happened to "Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called children of God"?

The book reminds me of Pinky and the Brain. Brain is the charismatic but slightly daft--or maybe just insane--leader who wants to conquer the world, although he never said he wanted to conquer it for its own good. Then we have Pinky, his essentially brainless follower, who worships Brain. Pinky, who in my opinion represents Mass Man, is ruled by his feelings, too.

Scary to imagine a cartoon about two escaped, mutated lab mice applies so neatly to the real world. Like Barnett, Brain is eternally optimistic, always thinking that if he didn't conquer the world today because he conked his head, well, there is always tomorrow.

Or, as it was best said by Terrill, the murderous idealist Redleg in Clint Eastwood's great The Outlaw Josey Wales: "There ain't no end to doin' right."

The Men in the Jungle

2011-08-14T22:59:00.001-04:00

What a book for a 13-year-old to read. Norman Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle, that is.

Spinrad published it in 1967, when he was 26 or 27 years old. He says he is an anarchist, but in this, his second novel, he comes across about as conservative as Joseph Conrad is in Heart of Darkness. Spinrad's novel, not surprisingly, has a lot in common with it.

I originally started reading science fiction because of the sense of wonder and awe that I felt from it. I certainly didn't get any of those feelings from The Men in the Jungle, which is about how power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts. It's also about murder, cannibalism, genocide, slavery, and rape.

This novel remains the bloodiest, goriest, slice 'n' dice novel I have ever read. Even today, I have never read anything that even comes close to the horrors in this book. And yet, oddly, enough, I can't say it is a horror novel, just a science-fiction one.

Horror can be defined as evil attacking good, or chaos attacking order. None of those definitions really apply to Spinrad's novel. There isn't any good in it, or any order for that matter, not if order means "harmony." It's more like bad attacking evil, or chaos attacking something even more chaotic.

The novel is set some few hundred years in the future, on the planet Sangre, which had been ruled for the past 300 years by the Brotherhood of Pain. These several thousand human monsters enslave some 15 million people, torturing them for fun, eating them since there are no animals on the planet, and raping the specially-bred hot babes. There's nary a word about young boys and children, though. Maybe even that was too much for Spinrad,

It's all "fun and games," as one of the novel's character comments.

The whole planet is as close to a Hell as I have ever read, far worse even than Dante's Inferno.

The Brotherhood of Pain lives as the Marquis de Sade philosophized: self-willed, with unfettered free choice, committing hideous and irrational acts in their attempts to live as gods, lacking any moral sense in relation to other people, and, of course, sadististic and murderous. Nihilists, really, ones who worship themselves. And, as Russell Kirk so perceptively noticed, "the monstrous ego is the source of all evil."

Into this mess drops one Bart Fraden, along with his girlfriend, the improbably-named Sophia O'Hara, and his partner, Willem Vanderling.

Fraden sees the revolutionary potential on the planet, which he plans on exploiting to take the place over. That's not what exactly happens.

I won't spoil the novel, but I will point out what Spinrad is saying.

One, there are no good Revolutions, and I mean revolutions with a capital R. That is the kind of revolution in which people think they can destroy a society and rebuild it from the bottom up. The Nazis and the Communists tried it, and it lead to the deaths of some 100 million people.

Two, society is but a thin film holding down a lot of nasty human nature. When societies are destroyed by revolution, what you get is not all the inherent goodness of human nature popping up, but oftentimes a lot of destruction and genocide. Think the French Revolution, in addition to the Nazis and the Communists. Also think Pol Pot and the "Cultural Revolution" in Red China.

Three, those who direct violent, bloody revolutions almost always lose their souls. They become corrupted and intoxicated by the blood and the power, and after that happens, find it nearly impossible to repent. Dostoevsky, in his The House of the Dead, put it this way: "Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

That's Sangre, alright.

Dostoevsky also noted that humanity's worst failing was a "constant lack of moral sense." To this I'll add that people rationalize they do have a moral sense no matter what perversion they use it for, because when people do evil they must convince themselves it is good, and people can deceive themselves into believing anything.

One of the most horrible thing about The Men in the Jungle is that the ghastly society destroyed is immediately, literally in the blink of an eye, replaced by something much worse, what Kirk called "Chaos and Old Night."

Those three characteristics above I would call "conservative," in the sense that true conservatives believe in flawed -- sometimes terribly flawed -- human nature, as opposed to liberals, who usually believe in the essential goodness of human nature, almost always to be developed by the government. However, it is the "government" that has bought three centuries of horror to Sangre. On this planet, our own Earth, it has also always been government which has murdered the largest number of people throughout history, without fail. One only needs to be The Gulag Archipelago to understand that.

After all, ultimately, all government is based on brute force and fraud.

The Men in the Jungle is a horrible and awful novel, not in the sense it is poorly written, but because it is about horrible and awful things. In a word, people.

The whole novel can be summed up in the dying Kurtz's last words in The Heart of Darkness: "The horror! The horror!" When it comes to the bad people can do, truer words were never spoken.

Smart and Lazy...Mostly Lazy

2011-08-12T21:21:00.002-04:00

The writer Jerry Pournelle writes that conventional wisdom among the military used to judge officers by two variables: by smart and stupid, and by active or lazy. Of course it's an oversimplification, but I have found using those variables is a good rule of thumb.
The list would be like this:

Stupid and Active

Stupid and Lazy

Smart and Active

Smart and Lazy

The active and stupid are to be eliminated. That combination is so obviously dangerous it doesn't really need to be explained. But if it does, let's just say they'll get many men killed in battle, or even in training.

Lazy and stupid are the heart of the army, the kind who work their way up from the bottom. They are most of the officer corp. They aren't dangerous, because they want to do as little as possible.

Smart and active make good staff officers, but aren't to be promoted, and they are never to be given supreme command. They're always coming up with bright ideas, but that doesn't mean they're good ones.

To my surprise, the highest command goes to the smart and lazy. They come up with good ideas, but get others to carry them out.

As best as I've been able to discover, it was Count von Bismarck who discovered these variables, when he realized the two most importance things in soldiers were their intelligence and their propensity to take action. Things got simplified over the years to "smart" or "stupid" and "active" or "lazy."

I was a bit surprised, since I'm smart and lazy. My idea of a good time is to sit in the backyard in a lawnchair as the sun goes down, smoke my pipe and watch my pug (who is very stupid and very active) run in circles. Or to spend an hour soaking in a bath. My idea of sports is fishing. Yet I'd make it to the top in the military? Hard to believe. But then, I did try to build a robot when I was 12, figuring if I succeeded it could do my housework.

I operate on the assumption the military, having been around for thousands of years, knows what it's talking about. Since human nature doesn't change, you can take those variables and apply them to other fields. What about politics? If you do, you'll encounter something pretty scary.

George Bush was stupid and active. And as the years of his Presidency went by, he got dumb and dumber. Is this what political power does to people? Make them stupid, make them think they can get away with things no one in his right mind would think he could get away with? Make them lose their conscience? I am reminded of the saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I think a better saying is, "Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts." Bill Clinton became stupid and active, and almost got booted out of the Presidency.

As for Barry Soetero, he is also stupid and active. As hard as it is too believe, he's worse than Bush.

Such stupidity and activity has lead to the U.S. being involved in six wars, and the severe damaging of the economy.

Apparently almost all politicians are stupid and active. That's why they cause so many problems. An example of a man who is smart and lazy (lazy as a politician) is Ron Paul, who is an exemplar of what every politician should be.

Hitler, for example, was a consummate politician, one who was described as half-genius, half-insane. Half-genius and half-insane makes him stupid and active, so it's not surprising when he was in the military his commanding writers wrote of him that they could not detect in him any qualities for being an officer. Although people think he never made it beyond corporal, he really never made it beyond private, first class.

I once wrote an article a few years ago about what I would do if I was the King of America. I'd gamble, chase women, drink wine, grow roses, and do several other things, almost none of them political. I'd get rid of most laws and let the free market take care of itself. In other words, I'd actualize my smart and lazy self even more than it already is. And I'd make a good king.

The problem with politics is that it always attracts the active, whether they're smart or stupid. The public is the one that pays for their activity. If we have to have politicians, we need lazy ones. The best, of course, would be lazy and smart.

Don't look at me, though. I'm not interested. I am, of course, much too smart – or is it lazy? – to fall for the con job known as politics.

Death by a Bazillion Little Lizard Bites

2011-08-11T20:17:00.000-04:00

Fairy tales, fables and myths have outlasted almost every other kind of story, and certainly will outlast heavy tomes written by Ph.D.s from Ivy League universities, because they're easy to understand, and make their point simply and clearly. Here's an example:

This is a story with which everyone is familiar, even unto a four-year-old child: a village is menaced by a dragon, so the hero rides out, slays it and saves the village.

True, it's a simple story, but, in different versions, it's the basis of many stories all over the world. Look at the great Japanese film, The Seven Samuri: the village is menaced by bandits, so the villagers hire samuri to slay the attackers. Village, Dragon, Hero. See? Simple!

Now imagine what people would think of this story: the kingdom is under attack by what the inhabitants think is a dragon. None understand the reason the dragon is attacking them is because the king, his advisors and their soldiers have been kicking the dragon for 50 years.

So the king sends his soldiers out to kill the dragon. What they find is not a dragon, but some tiny and not very dangerous lizards. Still, the king uses up his soldiers and the kingdom's wealth chasing the lizards all over the world so they can kill them in order to impose democracy on them.

At the same time, the king and his advisors throw open the borders of the kingdom so tens of millions of lizards can move into the kingdom and eat up the kingdom's wealth, impoverishing the people. The lizards want to kill or expel the people in the kingdom, so they can take over the land, somehow thinking the wealth will still be there even after they've devoured every last scrap of it.

Could not even the youngest of children see though this? Of course they could.

The moral: the real attacks in any kingdom come from the inside, from the king and his advisors, not from the tiny little lizards outside, that everyone has magnified into being a dragon.

Open Borders Equals Tribal Warfare

2011-08-10T19:37:00.000-04:00

I am a libertarian, but I am a right-wing or conservative libertarian. That means I believe mankind is limited and imperfect. The best of religion has always known this; politics, unfortunately, almost never.

The Left, whether libertarian or not, doesn't really believe humans are limited, even if they don't know they believe it. That's the worst kind of ignorance there is. As Plato pointed out, you can be ignorant and know it. Then there is what he called "double ignorance": you're ignorant but don't know it.

Leftists refuse to believe mankind has an animal nature that most people cannot truly overcome, and they also believe people have complete free will, which they do not.

I make the distinction between "will" and "behavior." "Will" is what is inside you. If people had complete free will, then they could make themselves into anything they want, and be happy with it. Serial killer, rapist, murderer, mugger -- if we had complete free will, we could be any of them (or all) and be perfectly happy. But we can't.

If we had complete free will, then any socio-political-economic system would work, because people could make themselves into whatever they please. But we can't, because we don't have that kind of power over ourselves. We never will.

People, although they are lot more than animals, do share certain traits with them. We are social beings who group ourselves into family and tribes, just the way all social animals forms packs. Those libertarians who think we are merely individual atoms disconnected from everyone else are showing a profound lack of understanding of human nature. Perhaps, they are showing a complete lack of understanding of it, which is probably the main characteristic of the Left.

These days, most tribes have grouped themselves into huge units known as nations. There is no way around it. If people weren't like that, then they wouldn't do it.

Since we form ourselves into tribes (nations), any one nation is going to view with great suspicion when large amounts of the members of another nation moves onto the first nation's land. This is something that anyone of the Right understands.

The Left, including left-libertarians, do not understand this, because they unconsciously believe everyone has complete free will. They believe that all tribes can share the same land and get along, because they naively think everyone can change themselves on the inside (in the snap of a finger!) and get along with everyone else.

Toss into a huge salad every religion and ethnic group, and the open-borders crowd truly believes hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of people will respect everyone else as an individual and not judge them as members of their tribe. The open-borders crowd, including left-libertarians, believes in multi-culturalism.

Unfortunately, multi-culturalism is the wrong name for what it really is -- multi-tribalism. And tribes, when they are large enough and trying to share the same land, fight in an attempt expell other tribes. Anyone who does not believe this, just look around the world. Every war there is, is one tribe against another, one religion against another, one ethnic group against another.

If we were truly individuals, and nothing else, we would not need families, fathers, mothers, and friends. We would have no desire to gather together at theaters, stadiums, clubs. We would be as independent as cats.

It is the Left that has always believed human nature either doesn't exist or is infinitely plastic. It is for that reason they have consistently tried to social-engineer people into being what they cannot be. The open-borders crowd, including left-libertarians, are trying to social-engineer people being what they want them to be. Under the veneer of their "libertarianism," do they do not a lot in common with leftist totalitarians? Don't they in fact hate their society, and wish to see it destroyed, thinking that somehow, magically, all the inherent "goodness" of human nature will shine through?

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine there were no borders whatsoever in the world? What would happen?

In the fantasies inhabiting the left-libertarian mind, people would freely move around to where the jobs are, and everyone would get along almost perfectly, united by their love of SUVS and DVD players that the free market produces. Abracadabra, people would give up ages-old tribal, religious and racial hatreds. In the real world, however, one tribe would attempt to impose its will on another, and murder and expel the members of it. That's why open borders equals tribal warfare. That old saying, "Good fences make good neighbors," is true.

There is another aspect to human nature to which I have given a great deal of thought for the last few years: hubris. All tribes have, almost without exception, considered themselves to the Chosen of God; almost all have called themselves "The People" or "The Humans." This means anyone outside the tribe is non-people and non-human.

Hubris is part of our limited and imperfect nature. It's why humility -- which is founded on a self-awareness of our imperfections -- has always been considered a virtue.

But, only individuals can be humble, not tribes. How many nations in the world have admitted the horrible slaughter they have visited on others? Or if they admit it, justify it? Almost all of them.

What answer does the left-libertarian open-borders crowd have to the problem of fighting tribes, with each considering themselves the Chosen? They have no answer, other than that the free market will make everyone get along. They wish to destroy the nations of the world, even if they don't know it.

The ultimate problem of the open-borders crowd is the hubris of which I just wrote. Anyone who thinks they can destroy nation, state, and neighborhood, and replace it with their vague understanding of the free market, is showing the arrogance and ignorance that has almost exclusively been the province of the Left.

Because the left-libertarian open-borders crowd doesn't believe in human nature, and believes people have complete free will, they also believe in Utopia, or Heaven on earth, which all religions have considered blasphemy, and for good reason. You need look no farther that the 20th century, in which perhaps up to 200 million people lost their lives in the attempt to bring this Heaven to earth.

There is no surer way to guarantee a Hell on Earth than to to shovel people around like lumps of concrete.

In the case of the open-borders crowd they believe the free market -- which they misunderstand -- will bring this Utopia. We only need to destroy all the nations of the world. And exactly how will this destruction bring peace?

But the open-borders crowd doesn't know any of this, and won't believe it, being, of course, afflicted with that double ignorance of which Plato so wisely wrote.

The Bravery of the Yappy Little Dog

2011-08-10T16:56:00.001-04:00

When I was in college and driving a taxi, I learned quickly that whenever a Little Old Lady invited me into her house or apartment and then immediately closed the door behind me ("Ha ha! Now he's trapped!"), it meant I was going to be forced to drink a glass of buttermilk, eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to be washed down with the buttermilk), or carry a broken motorized wheelchair – equipped with 200 pounds of dead batteries – outside to my car.

Once, while trapped in an apartment full of flowered slipcovers and potpourri, a very fat cat waddled over and pawed at one shoe until he pulled the loops out of the laces. Then, after repeating the process on my other shoe, wandered away, leaving me standing there with two partially-untied shoes. I was in awe of this awesomely talented cat. "Oh, he does that to everyone," the Little Old Lady explained, as if that made it okay that the cat had mangled my shoelaces. If he had retied them, then I would have really been impressed.

Another time, two of those little yappy dogs, the ones the size of softballs, charged over and latched onto my pant cuffs (one dog on each cuff), growling and tugging all the while. I lifted one leg off the ground, with a dog attached and dangling in the air, still growing. "Oh, he does that to everyone," the Little Old Owner told me. It was like being attacked by tiny little canine versions of the twins in The Matrix Reloaded.

If I had given those dogs a smack, they would have run yipping away, probably to hide under the owner's bed. Instead I just stood there with the dogs attached, praying there would be no buttermilk involved.

Those little yappy dogs remind me of armchair-warrior chickenhawks who write abusive emails to me. People like them never say anything to me when I'm in what we hacker-types call "the meatbody." But when they hide behind an email address, safe a thousand miles away, then it's "grr! snarl! woof! woof! grr! snarl!" One guy even made fun of my squinty (but cute) little eyes, as if that has any relevance to anything.

To me it is curious that these people think they are brave and patriotic, and I am a coward and a traitor. I think it's the other way around. If I was to define their beliefs in a few sentences, it would be these:

"It is patriotic to not criticize whatever our leaders do during wartime. It is brave to join the military and not question what they are doing. We should go where we are sent, and if we have to, fight and die. We must stand as One."

That is not my definition of bravery or patriotism. It's my definition of fascism. Here are some of Mussolini's writings: "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people."

And here one is probably his most famous sayings: "Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people."

The late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who has influenced me more than I can possibly say, wrote in his magnum opus, Leftism Revisited...that there is a continuum with anarchy on the Right and communism, socialism, democracy and fascism on the Left. Even though most people think fascism and national socialism (Nazism) are "Right," they are not. They're Left.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn referred to himself as a (Catholic) "anarchist of the far Right." He also wrote, with absolute accuracy, that "'I' comes from God, and 'We' from the Devil" (as in "My name is Legion, for there are many of us").

"We" is the one word that best describes the Left. "We" as the State, a nation of people all thinking and acting as One. But just as the body is ruled by the head, a nation is always ruled by a small group of people who lead the sheeple around, often to their deaths. The blind leading the blind, as the saying goes.

The Devil as "We" explains some of the bizarre happenings of the 20th century, such as brave, patriotic Germans and Russians slaughtering each other at the Battle of Stalingrad, in which more soldiers were killed than America has lost in all of its wars combined.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn points out, and I agree completely, that religion is on the Right, and atheism on the Left. There are atheists and agnostics on the Right, but all are sympathetic to religion. The rabid hatred of all religion exists only on the Left. (This is one of the reasons why Objectivists do not understand that Ayn Rand's militant atheism puts her squarely and permanently in the Leftist camp). Both Hitler and Stalin were atheists. Hitler intended to not only eradicate Judaism, but also Christianity, which he called a "Jewish religion."

When religion moves over to the Left it loses all legitimacy. It cannot support the "We" of the Devil and call itself true religion. A combination of fascism and this false religiousness leads to "God and Country" and "Gott mit uns." People think such combinations are patriotic and Godly, but in reality it's Satanic. Religion and the Left are absolutely and eternally opposed to each other, no matter if you call the Left communism, socialism, fascism...or democracy.

If you think the above is not backed up by the Bible, remember that Jesus never said a good word about the State, and insulted and abused its minions. His opponents – the combination of supporters of the State, pseudo-intellectual "elites" and the perverters of the "organized religion" of his day – are the ones he referred to as murderers, liars, thieves and hypocrites. And his death – like Socrates – was at the hand of the State, the mob, the "We."

The same kind of people who existed in his time exist in ours. The same kind of trouble they caused then they are still causing now. Today they are Leftist empire-building neo-pagans creating amoral philosophies out of their heads, ignoring a few thousand year's work of Rightist theologians and philosophers who spent their lives discovering Natural Law – laws built into human nature and the universe. An example: all empires collapse.

Every primitive tribe in history has called itself "the People" or "the Human Beings." Every one of them has believed God has smiled on them, only them, and no one else. When these tribes get big enough to be called nations, they still believe that God smiles on them, only them, and no one else. No matter how much they break His laws by murdering and stealing (even if it's justified as war), they still think He smiles on them and protects their soldiers. All it needs is just a little prayer to push things along.

I don't believe in these ideas one iota. German soldiers marched into battle with "Gott mit uns" inscribed on their belt buckles. Not surprisingly, these pagan talismans didn't do a bit of good to stop artillery and machine gun rounds.

Patriotism can be Rightist, to support liberty and freedom. It can also be used by Leftism, to support the State, which always claims it is the same thing as the country. True patriotism is supporting freedom in your country, not slavery. The false patriot supports the "We," the State.

Obviously there are Christians, Jews and Muslims who sincerely and completely believe that God supports them, has given them eternal title to some speck of land, and will slaughter the other as apostates. Personally, I think they're all nuts, and I plan on staying out of the whole fight. After a thousand or so years of war you'd think those involved might get it though their heads they're doing something wrong.

Why do people have this eternal tendency to be collectivist, to be, as Norman Mailer has claimed, naturally fascist? Is it the desire for security, even at the expense of liberty? If it is, it won't work. Benjamin Franklin was absolutely correct when he wrote, "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." And they'll lose both liberty and safety.

The "security" of the State leads only to chaos. As Proudhon wrote, "Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order." For one thing, the "security" of the State leads to a crushing, Brazil-type bureaucracy, in which everyone is reduced to a cog – and, worse, a slave, living eternally in fear.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, again in Leftism Revisitedwrote that, "viewed from a certain angle, we are all subject to two basic drives: identity and diversity." Identity he calls "a herd instinct, a strong feeling of community that regards another group with hostility." He believes "identity and its drives tend to efface self, tend towards an 'usness' in which the ego becomes submerged." This quote helps to explain humanity's natural desire for fascism.

Erich Fromm, a confused socialist with occasional flashes of brilliance, wrote in his book, Escape from Freedom, that people will, in order to escape the (Rightist) burden of freedom and responsibility, even turn to (Leftist) dictators. They will bring their freedom to them and lay it at their feet. "The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton," he writes, echoing Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self."

In the famous "Grand Inquisitor" scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has the Inquisitor say, "For centuries...we have been wrestling with...freedom, but now it is ended and over for good." He was commenting on the fact that many people want to give up their freedom to "authority." The Inquisitor goes so far as to claim, "they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet."

The quotes above is why "We" is the Devil. And the "We" are always led around by their noses by a tiny group who use, to quote Dostoevsky again, "miracle, mystery and authority" to wow the masses.

If patriotism can be used for Rightist or Leftist purposes, so can courage. Contrary to what most people think, courage is not rare and almost priceless. It's common, and built into us. Everyone has the ability to be brave, and everyone can easily be a hero.

When bravery is used in the defense of freedom and liberty, it is always opposed to the State. When bravery is used in defense of slavery, it is always used to support the State. (When I saw "State" I don't mean the always-minimal government based on Natural Law; I mean what is created when government ignores the Law and starts making up fake "laws" on its own.)

One subset of the Leftist pseudo-brave is the Little Yappy Dog. These are the armchair-warrior chickenhawks who avoid military service but expect others to serve in their place. They yap and yap and yap, gang up on those who disagree with them, and call them traitors, cowards and Leftists. The irony is that the Little Yappy Dog is the traitor, the coward and the Leftist. And when kicked, they always turn tail and run. If they have beds, they'd hide under them.

The Militarization of the Police

2011-08-10T10:22:00.000-04:00

About 20 years ago in my hometown the police quietly and at night pulled up about 50 marijuana plants from a woman's backyard. They bagged them and disposed of them however the police dispose of such things.

The next morning an outraged elderly woman called the police and complained some hooligans had sneaked on her property the night before and pulled up every one of her okra plants. And then absconded with them!

The police were embarrassed, but came clean and admitted their mistake. They compensated her for her plants, the newspapers had a good laugh, and the whole thing was forgotten.

According to Google, marijuana and okra bear a strong resemblance to each other.

I assume the police were sending a message to whomever they thought was the grower: we know who you are, so quit what you are doing, or next time you will get in big trouble. Call if a friendly warning.

That common sense among the police is evaporating.

Now imagine how that raid might have gone down today: cops dressed in ninja-suits, with machine guns, crashing through the woman's doors and windows in a pre-dawn raid, throwing concussion grenades throughout the house and macing and tazering and cuffing the poor old lady after tossing her on her floor from her wheelchair, and shooting her incontinent Pomeranian as a potential threat. And maybe shooting her, too, if she didn't die from a stroke or heart attack.

My, how things have changed in 20 years. Officer Friendly has turned into the Gestapo pointing a Heckler and Koch submachine gun into the face of a six-year-old Elian Gonzalez. How can a man like that live with himself? The only way is if he rationalizes and deludes himself that what he did is honorable. Which it isn't, in no way. Obviously, self-delusion knows no bounds. Personally, I would have never done what he did. Had that order been issued to me, I would have quit.

What the heck has happened here? Whatever happened to Mayberry and Andy and Barney asking for permission to put his one bullet in his revolver? How has the line between the police and the military become so blurred? Or better yet, degraded and eroded? There must be an explanation.

Could it have anything to do with the War on [Insert Whatever]? Whenever people say, "There ought to be a law" what they're saying, even though they rarely understand it, is that ultimately the police should be allowed to stick a gun in someone's face – or even kill them – to make them follow the law, no matter how stupid or immoral that law is. "Declaring war" on whatever is currently illegal means militarizing the police and demonizing lawbreakers. Unfortunately, that demonizing always slops over onto whatever innocent citizen who happens to get into the way. Everyone becomes guilty, no trial involved.

War always creates an "us versus them" mentality, always among soldiers, and now among the police, when we pretend government can declare "war" on domestic "problems." That's the price we are always going to pay with, "There ought to be a law": the "lawbreakers" are always the bad guys deserving of death, even if that "bad guy" is merely smoking a joint to overcome the nausea of chemotherapy.

Of course, brutality always follows this dehumanization. "The War on Drugs," or on obesity, or tobacco, or firearms, always involves dehumanizing the target. It's an unavoidable part of human nature.

Do we really want to create police who dehumanize and demonize the public? That's the path to creating better killers, not better police. When's the last time they were referred to as "peace officers"? And since when have "peace officers" been issued fully automatic M-16s? And bayonets?

This dehumanization and demonization will always happen when the line between the military and police disappear.

The problem has been going on for longer than it appears. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, writes there is a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of human life. He claims in World War II, only one in five soldiers fired their rifles.

By the time of Vietnam, he says, this percentage had been raised to the point where only five percent didn't fire their weapons. Perhaps this is a good thing from a military point of view (and I'd argue this is debatable), but in the long run it is terrible for society.

This change was created by desensitizing soldiers to killing, by teaching them the enemy is not human, by teaching them to not think but instead follow orders without question. When the police become militarized, and are trained with modern military techniques, they're being taught the same thing: those defined as "perps" are not human. That's how a grown man can stick a machine gun in the face of a six-year-old boy. He's not thinking; he's just "following orders."

Writes Grossman, "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."

Militarizing the police, and the attendant dehumanization and demonization of the public, and "there ought to be a law," is not the path to a better society. It is the path to the public being the enemy, including those who say, "there ought to be a law" (and how shocked they will be when it comes their turn to be brutalized!). It is, ultimately, the path to tyranny.

21st Century Paranoid Guy

2011-08-07T10:38:00.003-04:00

I recently received an email which read, in part: "Charles Lindbergh was a traitor who tried to sell out his country to the Nazis just as many leftists today would sell us out to the Islamo-Fascists."

The letter was in response to my review of Philip Roth's libelous (and boring) novel, The Plot Against America, an odious attempt at an "alternate history" in which Charles Lindbergh became President in 1940, kept America out of World War II, and turned the U.S. into the American version of Nazi Germany.

To be accurate, I will refer to this writer as "21st Century Paranoid Guy."

It only took several seconds to understand what the story was behind Paranoid Guy's screed. Fortunately, I understand his point of view. Too bad he doesn't understand mine. I call this Scott's Law, after a friend who told me, "The smart understand the stupid a lot better than the stupid understand the smart."

It explains why I understand Paranoid Guy but why he will never understand me.

What PG is saying is, "If Charles Lindbergh had become President in 1940, he would have kept us out of World War II by appeasing the Nazis, and they would have conquered the world!!!"

He's also saying, "If Lindbergh or someone like him was President now, he would keep us out of World War III by appeasing those Islamo-fascists, and they would have conquered the world!"

I like to call this "the Pinky and the Brain Fallacy." (Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?" Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky...try and conquer the world.")

The fact he uses the word "Islamo-fascists" makes me suspect he reads that vast intellectual and moral wasteland of misspelled insults known as Free Republic. It's one of their favorite words there, along with "Muslimes" and "nuke."

It's a shame PG doesn't understand history a bit better than he does. His view is, to be charitable, very simplistic. So I'll help him out here.

Throughout all of the 20th century, and even now, at the beginning of the 21st, there have not been separate wars with different names like "World War I," World War II," "the Korean War," "the Vietnam War," and "Infinite Justice" or "Enduring Freedom," or whatever it's being called now.

Instead, we have had is one war, with breathers in between.

World War I was just another in a long line of European wars. Before the U.S. got involved, it was almost over. European wars were, as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams warned, none of our business.

What essentially got the U.S. into World War I was the sinking of the passenger Lusitania, by a German submarine. The reason it went down so fast is because it was filled with munitions for England.

Munitions on a passenger liner? Who would do such a thing? Why, governments, of course! The reason? To get the U.S. in the war on the side of England, which was agitating for our help.

The German government had placed full-page ads in the Eastern newspapers, warning people to stay off of passenger ships. That's something you won't find in most history books.

After WWI was over, Woodrow Wilson went along with the crushing reparations against Germany, allowing Hitler to rise to power. At first, many people praised Hitler, including Churchill and Gandhi, until the world realized what he was.

The Great Depression, caused not by the free market but government interference in the economy, spread throughout the world, including to Germany. That certainly helped Hitler's rise.

World War II was a direct result of World War I. If the U.S. hadn't gotten involved in World War I, there wouldn't have been a World War II. Even if there had been a World War II, there was, again, no reason for us to get involved. If the National Socialists of Germany and the International Socialist of Russia wanted to slaughter each other, well, exactly whose side should we have been on?

Unfortunately, FDR wanted the U.S. to get involved. Roosevelt, who was a bit of a fascist, and certainly pro-Communist (he called Stalin "Uncle Joe"), apparently wanted to share the world with him. Why else would he have delivered Christian Eastern Europe to this mass-murdering Communist atheist?

There is substantial evidence that FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. If he wasn't agitating for war against Japan, then why did he cut off Japan's oil, when it had no domestic supplies? Why did he send the Flying Tigers against them in China, if not to provoke them into attacking us? Perhaps he didn't want Uncle Joe to have to fight a two-front war against Germany and Japan?

The U.S.'s getting involved in WWII on the side of the Communists against the Nazis is what allowed the USSR to grow so strong. And our mistakes in China allowed the Communists to come to power there.

Both those mistakes led to Korea and Vietnam.

After World War II, many of the Jews in Europe moved to the just-founded state of Israel, most of them did not know they were now living in an area that had been at war for four thousand years.

The U.S.'s unqualified support of Israel, no matter what it did to the Palestinians, and our attack on Iraq when it didn't attack us, along with our blockade of that country which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is what caused the attack on 9/11.

9/11 wasn't because we are "good" and they are "bad." It was an attempt to draw the U.S. into a guerrilla war in the Middle East, in order to drain us of blood and treasure, so we would leave the area, the way the USSR left Afghanistan.

Since 9/11 was a criminal offense by a small group of people, it would have been easier and more effective to hunt them down and kill them, not invade two countries and turn most of the world against us. A world that was mostly sympathic toward us after 9/11.

Now, in 2011, we are still involved in wars that have been going on since 1914. Include the history of the Middle East, and we're involved in a war that has been going on for millennia. It's one we're not going to end, no matter what the fantasies of George Bush and others in the administration.

The world of Paranoid Guy is not the real world. It's not as simple as, "they're going to conquer he world!!!"

Why do I call him "21st Century Paranoid Guy"? Because he's paranoid those "Islamo-fascists" are going to conquer the world. Personally, I can't figure out how they're going to do it, since all 22 Islamic countries in the world have a combined economy about the size of Spain.

I suppose he thinks they're going to move to America and Europe and take over both. Well, that problem can be solved with some immigration reform. But the world is never going to see Muslim armies, navies and air forces attacking the Western world. It will never happen. We're only about a thousand years ahead of them, and they'll never catch up. They're inbred, for one thing -- that's what happens when people marry their cousins for the last few thousand years.

Paranoia is an easy thing to exploit. I'll use a quote from Hermann Goering to explain how to manipulate the public: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." His quote was directed toward 20th Century Paranoid Guy, the same guy (who was about 75) whom I overheard say, "If we don't stop those Iraqis over there, we'll have to fight them over here!!"

In other words, tell people they're being attacked by someone who is going to conquer the world!! and they'll become paranoid, get the vapors and lose the ability to think rationally. That's why I get letters telling me if Charles Lindbergh was President today, Islam would take over the world.

Whoa, talk about an alternate history fantasy.

I seriously doubt Lindbergh, who flew the P-38 Lightning in combat in the Pacific theater, would allow anyone to take over the United States. He'd certainly see through Barak "Open Borders" Obama.

And I'm sure he'd understand this quote by Joseph Goebbels, a quote about which Barak is clueless: "This war is a defensive war. It was forced upon us by our enemies, who wish to destroy our nation. The only thing we cannot afford to lose in this war is our freedom, the foundation of our life and our future. No one has the right to complain about limitations on his personal freedom caused by the war."

I doubt 21st Century Paranoid Guy understands it, either. Heck, I know he doesn't!

A Mass Revenge Killing

2011-07-28T11:03:00.002-04:00

In some very important fundamental ways I do not think people are all that hard to understand. Why they murder, for one.

I do not have to read Anders Breivik’s 1500-page manifesto. I’m not going to, either, not with that length. I don’t need to read it, for that matter.

People murder for one reason: revenge. Revenge is an attempt to replace feelings of shame and humiliation with feelings of pride and self-respect. It is primitive, destructive and violent but historically it’s been the main response to perceived injuries.

The first recorded murder in Western mythology is when Cain slew Abel. Why? Because God rejected Cain’s sacrifice and accepted Abel’s.

“Unto Abel the Lord had respect…unto Cain the Lord had not respect.” So Cain, humiliated, attempted to replace his feelings of shame and humiliation with pride by murdering his brother, on whom he (inaccurately in this case) blamed his problems. It was revenge.

For that matter, the first recorded war in the Bible comes right after Cain and Abel, when Dinah’s brothers slaughtered the entire tribe of the man who had seduced Dinah. It was to them a matter of honor and pride and in their minds it could only be restored by wiping out all the men and taking all the women and wealth.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent 35 years interviewing thousands of prisoners, said he always heard the same story as to why they murdered or brutally assaulted people. What he heard, every time, was “He dissed me” or else humiliated, mocked, insulted and ridiculed the prisoner’s children, wife, parents, friends.

Gilligan one day realized what he was hearing, over and over, was the story of Cain and Abel: the feelings of humiliation followed by revenge manifesting itself as murder. (Gilligan also said, “The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps.”)

John Douglas, the retired FBI profiler of serial killers and mass murderers, stated that every serial killer or mass murderer he encountered was an “inadequate” type (i.e., he felt unbearably humiliated) who covered it up with grandiosity (like a 1500-page manifesto) and sought revenge on those he believed caused his problems.

Wrote Douglas in The Anatomy of Motive about one mass murder: “…this crime…[was] a kind of revenge…it was retaliation for some perceived wrong – real or imagined – perpetrated against the killer” (in another case, a teenage school shooter said, “The world has wronged me, and I could take it no more”).

Breivik murdered those people for revenge because he believed they were the leftists destroying his country through multiculturalism and mass immigration of non-Norwegians, and he could no longer tolerate it. (One thing he did write that I read is, “Multiculturalism IS as evil and racist as Nazism and as brutal as Stalinism.”) I believe he targeted them instead of Muslims because he decided it was easier and more effective to kill the head than try to kill the body.

After all, can you blame Muslims for wanting to get out of their failed nations and come to the West? I wouldn’t. Apparently Breivik didn’t either. He targeted the people who let them in.

There is what I call the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. I’m sure Breivik is fanatically convinced leftists are murdering his country, so he completed the cycle by exacting revenge on them. And I’m just as sure he believes what he did was fully justified. He probably always will.

People who murder think revenge is justified because in their minds it’s self-defense – they kill the people who they believe are trying to kill them. They’re trying to restore their honor and self-respect by eliminating those who they believe are trying to murder them – or their self-image. Or their country.

What surprised me was the fact Breivik allowed himself to be taken alive. As Gilligan has noticed, “One of the most common fantasies I have heard from many of the most violent prison inmates is the scenario of going to their deaths in a hail of gunfire while killing as many people as possible before they die.” (Seung-Hui Cho, anyone?)

Apparently Breivik wants to stay alive to speak his piece, since terrorism is a political statement. (As an aside, I’m hardly the first to notice that if one person kills another he is a murderer; if he kills one hundred he is evil and a monster, but if he kills 100,000 or a million he is a hero and a patriot.)

Leftists, of course, will never understand the truth of things. They never do. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn observed in his Leftism Revisited, “Leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all.”

What we’re going to hear from the Left is more demands for gun control, education, tolerance. What are they going to do about the steroids Breivik used and the music he listened to in order to motivate himself? Ban them? Good luck. Nothing leftists do can work. Left-wing fantasies never do.

Leftists never listen to those who disagree with them except to demonize them. I am reminded of what Chris Stout wrote in The Psychology of Terrorism: “The first stage in the development of terrorism begins when intolerable life conditions cause suffering that produces…a malignant alteration in the personality caused by the repeated failure to respond to overwhelming trauma.”

Breivik wasn’t evil or crazy. He was cold-bloodedly rational, lacked empathy and considered his enemies so dangerous, subhuman and evil they had to be eliminated. He had changed into a killing machine seeking revenge because of the trauma of seeing his country destroyed before his eyes. I’m sure he got a lot of satisfaction out of what he did. After all, in his own mind, he restored his self-respect and was trying to save his country from what he defined as evil.

Those who do not see what Breivik did as a warning shot against mixing different tribes on the same land are ignoring what is before their eyes.

I can’t predict specifically predict the future for Europe. But I will quote Gary Brecher (the War Nerd): “Traditionally, when one tribe runs into another the result has been genocide.” The leftists and the multiculturalists and the immigration enthusiasts won’t understand this until it’s too late.

I’ll close with another quote from Gilligan: “Those who have interviewed contemporary terrorists…have concluded that a primary motive for such behavior is humiliation -- not necessarily personal or individual humiliation, but rather the sense of collective or national humiliation that is felt when the religion or culture at the center of their collective identity has been seen as inferior and subjected to insult and contempt.”

Open Borders Are Not Free Market

2011-07-24T14:51:00.000-04:00

I’ve never been able to come up with a completely satisfactory definition of “the free market.” It’s always been eluded me.

I don’t think I will ever go able to come up with one that satisfies me. It is a fact, and not an opinion, that the map is not the terrain. All theories are convenient fictions used to describe reality, but none are reality itself.

It isn’t a problem for me for that being unable to formulate a comprehensive theory to describe everything is impossible. To understand everything is, theologically, to know the mind of God, which is beyond human abilities.

The closer the theory describes reality, the better it works. But no theory will ever be able to describe reality perfectly. At first, I used the word “theory,” which is the most commonly used one. Then I switched to “model.” But perhaps “theology” is the best word.

Why the word “theology”? Because any endeavor to understand reality is the attempt, ultimately, to understand the mind of God. By the way, I don’t care if you use the word “God” or “the Absolute” or “science.” It’s all the same thing: the attempt to understand the whole of reality.

I studied the neo-Keynesian synthesis taught in college. I dismissed it as dangerous nonsense believed only by what I call high-IQ idiots, the dumbest of which come from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and then go to work for the federal government or else regurgitate what they have learned by teaching college. None have any practical experience in business.

Monetarists out of the University of Chicago are better but still dangerous. Fortunately they’re not as dangerous as Keynesians of whatever perversion.

The closest economic theory I have encountered that describes reality with much accuracy is the Austrian School. But I have my disagreements with some its more vociferous and confused supporters.

Let’s say the “free market” is what occurs when the government only protects “life, liberty and property,” as John Locke suggested, and which made it into the Constitution as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

What automatically springs up is the maximum of political and economic liberty – what is commonly defined as the free market. This is a very good thing for maximizing people’s well-being, although some people prefer security, not understanding they always give up their liberty for it. They don’t get their security, either.

There is no such thing as economics per se. Economics is inseparable from political science, and in wiser days it was called “political economy.” It’s also an inseparable part of the law, since under that minimum of law protecting “life, liberty and property” we get the maximum amount of liberty.

Those three things –- economics, political science, and law – also cannot be separated from religion. All religions agree people should not murder or steal or lie, and without religion I doubt there would be anything except a wolves-eats-sheep society. With no religion, contrary to the delusions of atheists (and John Lennon, too), you’ll get not much more than chaos.

So you can see my problem in trying to define the free market. It’s not just economics. It’s also politics, law and religion. But it gets even more complicated. It’s also tribe.

Let’s look at the relationship of open borders to tribe. Are open borders part of the free market? The open-borders libertarian crowd claims that it is. They operate on the assumption the free market will turn all immigrants into Americans who share American values – whatever the hell they are these days.

How do you define tribe? Essentially, an extended family that have many traits in common. It can be race, religion, ethnic group or nationality. But they always must have certain core beliefs in common.

Open borders, however, aren’t part of the free market. Let’s do a thought experiment – a rather extreme thought experiment – and imagine a country of three tribes: Wahabi Muslims (the ones responsible for 9-11), Zionists, and fundamentalist Christians. Now imagine them trying to share the same land.

Some will claim such a hypothetical example will never happen. True. But it doesn’t matter. Let’s quote Ludwig von Mises: “There is no such thing as too much of a correct theory.”

If the belief in open-borders is a correct theory, then there can be no such thing as too few borders. If the theory is completely correct, there should be no borders at all.

So what would happen with the example I just created? Would all of those people be turned into Americans, united in their love of DVD players, wide-screen TVs and SUVs?

Nope. There’d be violence and murder as each tried to expel the other from their land. As Gary Brecher (the War Nerd) has written, “Traditionally, genocide has been the result when one tribe encounters another.” It’s been the history of the world.

The free market makes life better. Open borders makes things worse. Ergo, open borders are not part of the free market and political liberty.

“Economics” is not based on empiricism. You can’t do repeatable experiments in a lab, which is why it’s not a hard science. It is historical in that you can look at what has happened in the past, such as what inflation has always done.

Yet even history doesn’t always work. Historically it’s possible to see what the oversupply of money does, but you can’t always tell about the demand, or velocity, for money.

That’s why economics is based on rationalism, as von Mises commented. But in order for it to be a comprehensive, rational theory it must take human nature into account – the differences in race, culture, religion, intelligence.

My conclusion? The free market must take into account the tribal nature of mankind. That is the application of the “correct theory” of which von Mises wrote.

Since open borders (i.e., the unimpeded free movement of labor throughout the world) do not work, and in fact is immensely destructive, this means, contrary to the hallucinations of anarchist libertarians, there will always be some kind of government.

A cohesive, workable country must be overwhelmingly of one “family” that shares certain traits in common.

The only way open borders (or no borders) would work is if everyone in the world was of the same race, same language, same religion, and shared the same culture; specifically, the belief in the smallest possible government with the maximum of political and economic liberty. Otherwise, it would never work.

Leftists, who truly are fuzzy-minded (as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited, leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all), believe that all cultures can learn to co-exist peacefully.

How they believe this is beyond me, considering Jews don’t believe in Jesus at all, Christians see him as the Son of God and consider Muhammad a psychotic child-raping false prophet, and Muslims consider Jesus a mere man and Christians who believe in the Trinity as polytheists. The idea these people could share the same land peacefully and productively is something only a mentally-stillborn leftist could believe.

The free market is based on economics, political science, law, religion, and a culture with shared views. Those five pillars must support the minimum number of laws to obtain the maximum amount of political and economic liberty.

The only place where those five things coalesced to discover political and economic liberty is the Christian, European “West.” It came from no place else in the world, and for that matter, isn’t taking root beyond its birthplace. It’s not going to, either.

Unfortunately, these five pillars are close to collapsing. Mainstream economics is a dangerous joke, as is much of political science, law, religion and culture. They’ve all been degraded. Since all of those things are so severely damaged, and since all of them are essential pillars of society, I see no way around a coming collapse of some sort.

What passes for economics today is dominated by blundering neo-Keynesians; the law is about lawyers suing those with money to transfer it into their own pockets; a lot of political science is leftist looniness; a politically-noticeable number of “Christians” believe Jesus is going to come back, rub out all the Muslims and kill Jews until they convert to their perverted version of Christianity; and “Western culture” (sic) has become multiculturalism (actually multitribalism) which is going to lead to nothing but conflict, destruction and backwardness.

It won’t be the Dark Ages, but it won’t be much fun.

So even though I cannot come up with a fully satisfactory definition of the free market, I do know enough about it to know that its loss is a terribly dangerous thing.

Science Fiction Writers Should Rule the World

2011-07-24T13:57:00.002-04:00

I’m not a science fiction writer but I am a fan, and have been since a few months before I turned 12. So I’ve been familiar with the genre and the writers for a quite a while, and so have decided that science fiction writers should be in charge of the government. I’m not kidding about that, either.

I hold nearly all politicians in contempt and suspect most of them are intelligent psychopaths (dumb psychopaths end up in prison). There are some exceptions, of course. Ron Paul is one of them. But most politicians are self-aggrandizing liars, murderers and thieves. Oh, I forgot – they’re also drunks and sexual perverts.

Is there anything lower than a politician? A serial killer? A child molester? The damage they’ve done is a drop in the ocean compared to the millennia of wreckage left by politicians -- and most politicians happen to be lawyers, which is why lawyers should be forbidden permanently from holding any political office.

Government has killed more people in history than everything else put together. I’ve read estimates that in the 20th Century anywhere from 177 million to 200 million people were killed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – another name for the State.

All governments are based on force and fraud, without exception. Force and fraud, the two things that sent most people straight to Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Why should science fiction writers rule? Because they are far more intelligent, sensitive, imaginative and empathic than politicians or the average joe. Most of them have libertarian sympathies, which is a prerequisite for good rulers.

Libertarianism – or classical liberalism – believes in the smallest necessary government (except for the anarchist libertarians, who are leftist fools). If the purpose of government is to, as John Locke wrote, protect “life, liberty and property” then what automatically springs up is political liberty and the free market. And that maximizes the well-being of everyone.

Politicians always try to expand government, and for that matter, so does much of the Herd. The Herd, unfortunately, isn’t merely dim-witted. It has no brains at all.

This Blob-like growth of government is why it always collapses. It gets too big and destroys or absorbs everything in its path, like the Borg. There in fact hasn’t been a government that hasn’t collapsed.

The first science fiction novel I remember reading is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars. It’s not exactly a libertarian novel but the Bad Guys are the power-mad rulers who want to conquer the planet and the Good Guys want freedom for everyone. I can’t tell you the effect this novel, with its swordfights and “radium pistols” and flying ships, had on my 11-year-old sensibilities.

There were other stories. Eric Frank Russell’s …and Then There Were None, a very funny story about a society that keeps its freedom by figuring out a fool-proof way to avoid being conquered: they just ignore their wannabe-be conquerors. In fact, they end up absorbing those who want to conquer them, just the way early America absorbed the Hessian mercenaries who wouldn’t go back to the Statist hell they came from.

There was A.E van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher, with its famous line: “The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free.” I still remember the frustration I felt that there were no Weapon Shop pistols, which threw up an impenetrable energy field about the owner and would not fire unless he was attacked. Imagine what that did for crime. Most especially, the crimes committed by the Empire, which, not surprisingly, hated and feared the Weapon Shops.

There are many others. James Hogan. Jerry Pournelle. L. Neil Smith. Neal Stephenson. I’m sure there are others I’ve never read, maybe even heard about.

When people are imaginative they have the ability to empathize with other people, to put themselves in their shoes. That’s why Stephen King is so popular: he can put himself in all of his character’s shoes.

I doubt a literal-minded person could easily sympathize with others, especially the more different those others are. I am reminded of something I read: the stupid don’t learn from their mistakes; the more intelligent do; and the smartest of all learn from other people’s mistakes. And you’ll certainly have a very difficult time learning from others unless you have some imaginative empathy.

Imagination, when united with reason and sympathy, is my definition of creativity. And creativity is what advances all societies. And no society can go anywhere unless it has small government.

And who else besides science fiction writers are imaginative, reasonable and libertarian?

The world has given other types of government its chance. Kings, constitutional monarchies, republics. They’ve all degraded. It’s time to try something different. Just don’t ask me what kind of government we should have, because I don’t know. I just know who should be in authority.

It’s too bad those damn Weapon Shop pistols don’t exist. We wouldn’t need anyone to rule.

Buying Weapons and Weapon Stocks

2011-07-10T13:48:00.003-04:00

“The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free” –“The Weapon
Shops of Isher,” A.E. van Vogt, 1954

Some years ago I was talking with a woman I know who told me that while she was for people owning weapons she could not invest in weapons stocks. Since she said she could not buy weapons stocks for religious reasons I let the matter drop.

I didn’t want to upset her by telling her she was already investing in weapons stocks. When the U.S. government takes people’s money though taxation, it uses that money to design and manufacture weapons. The taxpayers have no say in the matter. My friend’s tax money was being used to produce weapons of war whether or not she wanted it.

Weapons are neither moral nor immoral. They are amoral. A weapon will lie harmless and inert until the end of time unless someone uses it.

Weapons, like all machines, are examples of Cooper’s Law: “All machines are amplifiers.” All machines amplify our natural abilities, for good or bad. All machines are amoral – there is no good or bad inherent in them, no morality or immorality. The terms “good” or “bad” cannot be applied to any machine. “Goodness” or “badness” is only in the use to which people put machines.

Weapons can be used for good or bad -- to defend or to murder. It depends, as always, on the characters of the people wielding them. There are some countries, such as Switzerland, that buy American military weapons but have avoided war for hundreds of year (the Nazis did not invade Switzerland because they knew they’d be slaughtered). Then there are countries whose governments use American weapons for immoral purposes -- against their own people or against people in other countries.

To say it is moral to not invest your money in weapons stocks while ignoring the fact your tax money is, in my opinion, is a distinction that will not bear much scrutiny. A person who is totally consistent about not letting their tax money used to buy weapons would refuse to pay taxes. The only way to do that is to live in a cabin in the woods, be completely off the grid, and be totally self-supporting.

You can of course make the argument that by not buying weapons stocks voluntarily you at least have some say over where your money goes. I think that really is the point: having some control over your life.

But the amount of money that anyone invests in weapons stocks has no effect on the amount of weapons produced. Even if no one invested in weapons stocks the government would still produce whatever weapons it wanted. So what the argument is about is not effectiveness, but having some control over your life and property (and your money is your property) and feeling good. And I understand that.

John Locke, the British philosopher, came up with the concept that the purpose of government was to protect your “life, liberty and property.” That phrase made it into the Constitution as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I find it enlightening that some people, even if they cannot articulate it, are almost instinctively offended the government is violating their life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness by taking their money and spending on things those people despise, be it abortion, war weapons, or support for other countries. (If Americans today had the understanding of their ancestors, they realize what Thomas Paine meant when he wrote in Common Sense, “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”)

There is something else to consider: people who do not make as much money as possible can do little or nothing. But the more money people make the more ability they have to do good things. Even if they make that money from weapons stocks.

I think what my friend was arguing, vaguely and intuitively, is what Franz Oppenheimer in The State and Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy the State called “the Political Means” and “the Economic Means.”

As Nock wrote, “There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.”

The Political Means is stealing – it’s what all States do (only they call it “taxes”). In fact, without it, they’d all collapse. The Economic Means is the free exchange and trade of the free market. My friend didn’t want her money stolen by the State; she wanted to choose what she did with it. She was frustrated the State was spending her money on things she despised and not what she approved. It outraged her.

One of the problems, as always, is the growth of the State. The Founding Fathers did not believe in standing armies. And they would be appalled to find the federal behemoth about 50 times bigger than they ever envisioned it.

One definition of maturity I’ve read to accept things you cannot change. I cannot change what the State does with my money. No one can. I can, however, do good things with profits, no matter from where I get them.

It’s Not All That Hard

2011-07-06T13:13:00.001-04:00

"The opposite of war is not peace; it's creation.”– Jonathan Larson

Back when I was in college (close to worthless then and even closer now, except for the hard sciences) I realized none of my classes that I was really interested in were logically connected to each other so that I could come up with an accurate model of how the world works.

All people have a model in their heads of how the world works. Perhaps I should say “theory” instead. No matter what word I use, none of them, no matter how accurate, are reality itself (“the map is not the terrain”). But the closer to reality the theory, the better it works.

The further from reality the model is, the worse it works. You can look at entire failed countries (which means failed cultures, which means the people have poor models in their heads) and see it’s because they don’t follow models that work. Those successful and unsuccessful models always include religion, law, economics and political science.

Economics, political science and law (my main interests) were listed as separate disciplines (in reality they’re not) so I ended up with masses of facts, half-truths and outright lies that of course didn’t make much sense. What I was taught were awful maps that led me into dead zones (for that matter, the United States and most of the rest of the world staggered into those zones, too).

I was taught neo-Keynesian economics (gobbledygook), that politicians give serious thought to the bills they pass (har!) and that law is what the government passes (not even close).

Is it any wonder what I was taught didn’t make much sense? It wasn’t logical, and as Henry Hazlitt wrote in Economics in One Lesson, “…[false] theories…are never held with logical consistency…”

I don’t exactly remember how this happened, but over time I realized that with political and economic liberty there was wealth and happiness, and when those two things did not exist there was poverty, disease, starvation, war, slavery (I’ve always found it significant in ancient cultures Heaven was a place of “milk and honey” and where “the lion would lie down with the lamb”).

I know I was influenced by books I read – books I never heard about in college. Some of them are quite old. The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, which is a pamphlet. Common Sense and The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane.
The Mainspring of Human Progress by Henry Grady Weaver. Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine. The State, by Franz Oppenheimer.

I have all these books in paperback, but the texts are so old they are in the public domain and therefore downloadable for free on the Internet. Yet I had never heard of any of them in high school or college. But I surely heard enough about those nitwits out of Harvard, Yale and Princeton who tortured me and the other students with their inept and boring 300-page semi-Marxist economics textbooks.

(Parenthetically, I proficiencied both Intro to Macro and Intro to Micro Economics because I knew the classes would be excruciating – which is exactly what Intermediate Macro and Intermediate Micro turned out to be. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be proficiency them.)

Things finally started to make sense – and college had nothing to do with it, except for the disappointment it provided and therefore an inventive to get a real education.

I realized the laws of political science and economics (actually it’s political economy) can be discovered just like the laws of physics and chemistry. This put me in the Natural Law camp – just as every one of the Founding Fathers were.

The term “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from the British philosopher John Locke, who originally wrote, “life, liberty and property.” They are our natural rights, he said. We are born with them.

Those Natural Rights are what this country was founded upon. The purpose of “government” was to protect those three things, and nothing else. When those three things are protected, what springs up automatically is the free market. Always. It’s a law of nature, one that can be (and has been) discovered.

As Samuel Adams wrote, “The rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second to liberty, third to property; together with the right to support them and defend them in the best manner they can” (the latter being enshrined in the Second Amendment).

This was a revelation to me. I suddenly had a model of how the world worked. You could have freedom and creation and progress, or you could not have freedom and go backwards, possibly into an abyss.

Law, economics and political science, I realized, were the same thing and not separate disciplines. Understanding the basics of them is not that hard. Almost everyone can do it.

Richard Maybury, for example, has suggested there are only two laws that all free, successful societies need to follow: “Do all you have agreed to do” and “Do not encroach on other people or their property.” It can’t get any simpler than those two laws and even a child can memorize them.

When “government” goes beyond protecting life, liberty and property it always destroys. It’s as simple as that. The bigger the government the more people, families, neighborhoods, education and everything else is damaged. In other words, our life, liberty and property are always damaged by the growth of “government” when it goes beyond protecting those three things.

I define government as protecting life, liberty and property. When it goes beyond those things it turns into the State. Albert Jay Nock, in Our Enemy, the State defined the first as the Economic Means (trade) and the second as the Political Means (stealing).

It’s entirely possible that even “government” is not necessary (well over 2000 years ago the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament warned the Hebrews to follow the Law and stop their whining for “government”). If people always followed the Law (discovered natural law) voluntarily it wouldn’t be necessary.

In fact, if most people didn’t voluntarily follow most natural laws,
society would collapse no matter how oppressive the government was.
Or, as Isabel Paterson wrote, “The percentage of positively malignant,
vicious, or depraved persons is necessarily small, for no species could
survive if its members were habitually and consciously bent upon
injuring one another.”

If government is necessary then what remains is to discover how to keep it within its proper limits. So far, no one has figured that out. The Founding Fathers tried by splitting the government into three parts. They meant to make it weak and ineffectual to limit its power (they also had no use whatsoever for the left-wing delusion of “democracy”, something most people today don’t know).

They make some mistakes. They forgot to write that one of the purposes of government was to protect our property, didn’t get rid of slavery, and didn’t forbid a central bank (which always inflates the money supply, thereby stealing your property, which automatically damages your life and liberty).

These days the United States sometimes follows Natural Law and sometimes follows false law. Unfortunately, it’s got to the point where the federal State makes up one-third of the economy and one percent of the people have used the Political Means to steal 40% of the wealth.

I sometimes do a thought experiment and imagine what this country would be like if the federal government did nothing but protect life, liberty and property.

We’d be far wealthier than we are now. Economists I’ve read estimate the average income today would be over $90,000 a year. We wouldn’t be involved in three wars; we wouldn’t have troops in 144 countries; the federal State wouldn’t take up one-third of the economy and the dollar wouldn’t have lost 99% of its value since the creation of the illegal Federal Reserve Bank (which is not federal, has no reserves and is not a bank). We wouldn’t have the misnamed “War on Drugs” and we certainly wouldn’t have the godawful TSA.

The fact we don’t have many of the good things and instead have many of the bad things comes from breaking the law. Or perhaps, I should write, Law.

My 99 Cent Amazon eBook

2011-06-29T11:16:00.001-04:00

I took 28 of my articles and published them as an Amazon eBook, for 99 cents. I wonder what will happen.

A Planet Full of Doofuses

How to Deal with All Politicians

2011-06-23T12:44:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a large, peaceful, free, very prosperous village. One day, a horde of quite brutal and even smellier barbarians rode into the village, stole some of the girls and gold, and otherwise made merry by killing and destroying, then rode away.

The villagers fought back, only not that well, and did kill some of the barbarians, but lost more than they slew.

After the attack, battered and bruised and bleeding and wondering how to meet this new menace, the villagers held a meeting and asked for suggestions.

The Wise Old Man of the village, who was pretty smart, and had traveled far and wide, and thought a lot and learned much, made one suggestion: “We have to kill every one of them.”

A murmur ran though the villagers. “Many of us will die!” one cried.

“Indeed,” said the Wise Old Man. “But I will tell you what will happen if we don’t rub out all of them. Sooner or later, these barbarians will get tired of raiding us and losing their body parts. So what they will do is conquer us.”

The villagers fell silent, waiting.

“They’ll enslave everyone,” the Wise Old Man continued. “We’ll spend our lives working for them until we drop dead. They’ll rape our daughters, sometimes our sons, occasionally our dogs, and they’ll build castles with prisons and torture chambers. We’ll spend our lives being tortured and impoverished.”

“How can you be so sure this will happen?” one villager asked.

“If you’ve been around as much as I have,” the Wise Old Man said ominously, “and seen what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t ask that question.”

“What will happen next?” another villager wondered.

“These thugs will set themselves up as royalty,” the Wise Old Man explained, “and we’ll be their slaves. They’ll tell us they are our protectors, as tyrants always do (as Plato and Aesop and Jesus noticed), but in reality they’re just cruel, blood-thirsty, power-mad tyrants. They’ll even tell us God put them in power.”

“Blasphemers!” blurted a villager.

“You got that right,” said the Wise Old Man wryly.

“It sounds just awful,” a villager said. “How long will it last?”

“Until we rise up,” said the Wise Old Man, “and vlad them on sharpened poles. If we don’t do that, our enslavement will last forever.”

“This is terrible!” chorused the villagers.

“It’s even worse than it sounds,” explained the Wise Old Man. “Someday, people will even rationalize their slavery as a good thing. The naïve ones will call it ‘patriotism’ and the big mouths that support our enslavers will be called ‘court intellectuals.’”

“You sure do know a lot,” said a villager admiringly.

“Someday,” the Wise Old Man said, “I’ll tell you about the difference between the Economic Means and the Political Means, or why the growth of ‘government’ always destroys the culture and the country and always leads to collapse. But what really works best is telling stories like what I’m doing now. Show, don’t tell, I always say.”

“What did you say these people call themselves?” a villager asked. “Royalty?”

“At first,” said the Wise Old Man, “but in the long run they’ll call themselves politicians.”

“What an awful name!” the villagers gasped in horror, some clapping their hands over their ears. Even some children started crying.

“The worst name there is,” the Wise Old Man said. “Mass murderers, warmongers, torturers, liars, thieves, counterfeiters, cowards, traitors, sex perverts – and they always claim they’re doing good things for us. What can possibly be worse than a politician?”

“Uh…” said the villagers. “Well, if you put it that way…nothing.”

So the villagers armed themselves, and practiced and practiced, and next time the barbarians rode into the village the villagers slew every one of them, losing many of their own in the fight. But they won.

So the village continued on, large and peaceful and prosperous, and every time a barbarian horde got it into their heads to raid the village, the people of the village, armed to the teeth, killed every one of them.

And so the villagers lived peaceful and free and happy and rich forever after.

The Wannabe Ninjas

2011-06-19T15:07:00.003-04:00

Five Minutes After the Rapture

2011-06-19T15:05:00.001-04:00

Ralph: Dum de dum dum, dum de dum dum.

Sam: Hey Ralph, look at all this stuff lying all over the sidewalk.

Ralph: Weird…clothes, shoes, socks, keys, wallets…some guy’s dental fillings…a glass eye… an artificial foot…somebody’s heart transplant flopping around in the street…a busted-open suitcase full of martial aids…what is going on here?

Sam: Maybe it’s the Rapture. I heard about it from some guys used to go to tent revival meetings, fall over backwards and start twitching and babbling. One even told me his cowboy boots flew off.

Ralph: Yeah, speaking in tongues and “getting saved.” Hillbilly kitsch.

Sam: Look, a brand-new Lamborghini!

Ralph: What’s this in the front seat…a $2000 custom-made suit, a toupee with a three-inch pompadour…wallet full of credit cards…we hit the jackpot! It is the Rapture, and now we get all this stuff!

Sam: What ID is in the wallet?

Ralph: Reverend Billy Joe Bob Hargis. Look what else is here…a gross of cute little multi-colored condoms, a notebook with dozens of call girls’ telephone numbers, some amyl nitrate, a copy of “Gay Boy Toys” magazine with the pages stuck together….

Sam: I remember reading about this guy’s house in the newspaper. Cost $20 million, a pool, helicopter, all the trimmings.

Ralph: Damn! And now it’s ours! Hot diggity dog!

Sam: I heard he’s got a safe in his house with millions of dollars in contributions he never reported to the government.

Ralph: The sheeple sure are suckers.

Sam: Buncha brain-dead zombies who believe in Jesus-the-Terminator, who’s going to bring slaughter and destruction to the world because they think that’s how he’s going to save it. That’s Christian?

Ralph: I always remember Jesus putting down the corrupt and the hypocritical and the greedy and the perverted. Ah, forget them nuts, they’re all gone now. Think of all the porn and guns and booze I’ve heard this riff-raff has in his mansion! Not to mention his collection of women’s underwear!

Sam: You know those Evangelical preachers. Either they’ve got videos of themselves with two 12-year-old blonde girls, or else it’s meth and man
ass.

Ralph: This is great! God really did take those crap-for-brains fundies, the ones trying to return us to the 13th Century. Thank you, God, even if you never did get me the pony and flame thrower I wanted for Christmas!

Sam: Fanatics of whatever religion, they’ve done nothing but impede progress. All think they’re right and anyone who disagrees with them is evil. Especially when they get political power, that’s a sure-fire recipe for disaster. And that’s with a capital D.

Ralph: Yep. Religion, politics and war – the three legs of Satan that he uses to walk to and fro and up and down in the world.

Sam: Dibs on the driver’s seat! Vroom!

Reverend Billy Joe Bob Hargis: You call this the Rapture?

Satan: For those left behind it is. You want an ice cube?

Yay for Fido!

2011-06-19T15:02:00.006-04:00

The year: 2084.

The place: any city in the USA.

Characters: Father, Daughter, Baby, Fido and a Few Shadowy Characters.

Father parks his 1986 Yugo at a curb and exits the vehicle with Daughter, Baby, and Fido the Chihuahua.

Police Officer (emerging from the shadows. He is a clone, as all the police are in 2084. He has a narrow head and squinty lop-sided eyes and bears strong resemblance to George Bush): Hold it right there!

Father: What? What did I do?

Officer: I have to search all of you and the car for a bomb! It's a new Global UN law passed this morning.

Father: I haven't heard a thing about it.

Officer: That's not my problem. I have a job to do and orders to follow.

Father: Orders to follow, huh? (He places his left forefinger under his nose, shoots out his right arm at a 45% angle, and goosesteps in circles.) Sieg Heil! Actung! Verboten!

Officer: Huh?

Father: Adolph Hitler? Nazis? Stormtroopers?

Officer: Huh?

Father: Forget it. I'm a comedian practicing a comedy routine.

Officer: Whatever.

A police van screeches around a corner. It stops and four police officers jump out. They remove the tires from the Yugo, place the car on concrete blocks, put the tires in the van and screech away.

Father: What was that about?

Officer: We have to search your tires for bombs.

Father: Those are brand-new tires! They might even have rubber in them! It took me a year to save for them! The economy's been bad for 80 years, you know, what with the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and all those other places I can't remember! I think you guys just stole my tires!

Officer: Complain to the government.

Father: This is outrageous!

Officer: I'm just keeping the country safe. (He squints at Baby.) There could be a bomb in that baby!

Father: Right.

Officer: I have to check. (He grabs Baby and prys open its mouth.) You got a bomb in there?

Baby: Gaga googoo.

Officer (upending Baby and shaking it up and down): Cough it up!

Baby: Wah!

Officer: I guess you're okay. (Hands Baby back to Father.)

Baby (glaring at Officer): Pfffttt!

Father: Baby!

Baby: Gaga googoo!

Officer (squinting at Fido): There could be a bomb in that dog!

Father: It's a Chihuahua!

Officer: Plenty of room for a bomb. He needs a body-cavity search!

Fido: Yikes!

Father: This is ridiculous! It's insa -

Daughter: Daddy!! Look at what the bad man is doing to Fido!

Father (placing his hands over Daughter's eyes): Don't look, honey!

Fido: (eyes bugging out like poached eggs) URK!!

Officer: Dang! (shakes hand) He's stuck!

Fido: (bouncing up and down like a yo-yo) YEOW!

Officer (shaking hand harder) There he goes! (Fido does a somersault through the air and lands in Daughter's arms.)

Fido (glaring at the Officer): Grrr! GRRR! GRRR!!

A man walks by wearing a three-foot tall turban. There is a loud ticking sound coming from it.

Father: Did you see that? I think he's got a bomb in his turban!

Officer: Since when are you a trained police officer?

The man rounds the corner. Seconds later there is a gigantic explosion. An axle with two tires on it lands in the street.

Father: Look! Two tires! Can I have them?

Officer: Don't get smart.

Father: Can we go now?

Officer: I guess. You better watch yourself. And the dog, too. He better watch himself...or you...er...you know what I mean.

Father, Daughter, Baby and Fido cross the street. Fido is walking upright on his front paws like a circus acrobat.

Fido: Ouch! Ouch! Ooch! Ooch! Ouch! Ouch!

All step onto the curb across the street. An Officer appears from the shadows.

Officer: Stop right there!

Father: Now what?

Officer: I have to search all of you for bombs!

Father: The guy across the street just searched us!

Officer: He's Homeland Security for the south side of the street! I'm Homeland Security for the north side!

Father (putting hands on head): It's a madhouse!

Officer: Huh?

Father: Charleton Heston? Planet of the Apes?

Officer: Huh?

Father: Forget it. I'm a comedian practicing a comedy routine.

Officer: Whatever (squinting eyes) The dog's first!

Fido: ARRRGGGH!

Officer: What the -- yikes! Oh no! Wait, stop! Help! Mommy! Daddy! HELLLPPPP!!!!"

Father: Wow! I didn't know he could do that!

Daughter: Yay for Fido!

Fido: Burp.

The Twisted Mind of Philip Roth

2011-06-19T14:59:00.000-04:00

I don't know how the churlish and ignoble Philip Roth remains upright, the way his moral compass is spinning so madly. The author, who made his name with the more-than-a-little-semi-pornographic "Portnoy's Complaint," which titillated a 12-year-old me and my classmates so much the teacher confiscated the book, has now with his last novel (I hope), "The Plot Against America," used this farrago of vitriol to spin himself right into a place where good is evil, and evil, good.

I'll wager that George Orwell would have seen Roth's book as an example of Lies are Truth, Ignorance is Strength and War is Peace (and in Roth's case, Cowardice is Bravery). The novel is odious, libelous and just plain disgusting -- especially the grotesque and sickening comments about a murdered baby. Maybe we need a neologism: "libelodious." More cheerful is the idea of using Roth's name, as in "He Rothed him," meaning "a truly dishonest and reprehensible man told blatant and transparent lies about a good man."

The man libeled is Charles Lindbergh, who was about as close to a true hero as America produced in the 20th century. Roth libels him as a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite, and a crypto-Nazi just waiting, faster than an eyeblink, to turn into the hillbilly version of Hitler.

Roth also libels America, which he apparently believes is always on the verge of toppling into a kinder, gentler Nazi Germany. Actually, he libels everything west of New York City as a horrifying, undifferentiated mass of drooling, gap-toothed, tobacco-juice-spittin', banjo-playing, five-year-old-girl chasin' troglodytes jes' awaitin' to lynch Jews from the nearest tree.

The focus of evil in Rothworld is Kentucky, a place which to him takes up 90% of Flyover Land. I get the impression Roth truly believes that if he was to ever leave Brooklyn, everyone west of it would have eyes about an inch apart, and drag their knuckles on the ground when they weren't picking their noses, farting in church or hitching their crotches up in public. I guess he believes Kentucky is the breeding chamber for those hundreds of millions of Morlocks overrunning America.

"The Plot Against America" is actually an excruciatingly bad science-fiction novel, of a sub-genre called "alternate history." Roth should have stayed with his specialty, "autobiographical pornography written by a dirty-minded neurotic Jew who cruelly verbally abused his ex-wife and her daughter, was a drug addict, and checked himself into and out of mental institutions."

In Plot, Charles Lindbergh beats FDR for the nomination in 1940, and becomes President. Now would have happened if this eminently sane event had come to pass? Lindbergh, a true patriot who was an anti-interventionist in the mold of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, would have kept the US out of World War II. There would have been peace, Roth forbid.

Instead,in Roth's confabulations, Lindbergh instantly turns a compliant America into the Hillbilly Reich, the inhabitants of which immediately start whoopin' and yeehawin' because they don't have to send their sons to die in another European war, and instead let their anti-Semitic bloodlust, which Roth thinks is in their DNA, take control of their 70 IQ heads.

Roth will have none of this peace-mongering. He writes of FDR, who really was a semi-fascist and pro-Communist, as a great President unfortunately voted out of office by people who should have been grateful he was going to get them disassembled as cannon fodder by the hundreds of thousands.

He also cheers Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson as great presidents. Apparently, Roth has no education at all.

As for FDR, he maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor by cutting off their oil and sending the Flying Tigers against them in China. There is substantial evidence he knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked -- indeed, he moved the fleet there from the safety of California -- and wanted war with Japan so Stalin (whom he called "Uncle Joe") wouldn't have to fight a two-front war against the Germans and Japanese. If Roth knows about any of this, I'm sure he doesn't believe it. Or if he does believe it, perhaps he agrees with it.

Lindbergh, who was a fine writer and speaker, is portrayed as having even less ability to speak than the stumble-tongued George Bush. He starts a program with the improbable name of "Just Folks," in which Jewish city boys are sent into the country to be Nazified. One of Roth's relatives returns from this hillbilly Dante's Inferno with a taste for ham and bacon, the Devil's Food, which, Roth, gasping in horror, claims destroys his ability to draw and also makes him enjoy picking tobacco and milking cows. Another is forced to move to Kentucky by the federal government, and almost instantly becomes so retarded he can do little more than intone, "Do you like cookies and milk? I like cookies and milk."

Still another, a mother, is murdered -- it's hard to write this with a straight face -- "alongside a potato field" in the Hell-on-Earth know as -- brr!-- Paducah, Kentucky! Leaving her poor son with no parents at all!

Roth also spends an entire chapter on his cousin, who lost part of his leg in the war. He spends that chapter writing in exquisite detail of his cousin's swollen, oozing, scabby, and -- to Roth's oh-so-delicate little-girl sensibilities -- horrifying stump (this is when he's not telling us about his cousin's masturbatory spraying of semen all over the place as he watches little girls though a basement window). The chapter title? Not surprisingly, "The Stump."

Roth is not only terrified of the Midwest, which in his mind starts one millimeter west of the Hudson River, he also swoons in horror at Catholicism, with its "witchy" nuns and "mortician-like" priests.

And, I'll have to admit, I've never read a novel in which all those Catholic Nazi hillbillies infesting Kentucky join the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, then break out the kerosene-soaked crosses they've been hiding in their basements, which they hurl at anyone who they think looks like a Jew.

There are even anti-Semitic riots in St. Louis, a place in which I have lived, and where the only semi-riots occurred when the German consulate hung a Nazi flag outside their window, and the gathered crowd got so upset the police had to be called. But Roth does not know these things, having created history out of his head.

The novel is preposterous and surreal to the point of hilarity. Anti-Jewish pogroms in Cleveland? What next, death camps run by the Simpsons, with Lisa as She-Wolf of the SS?

I won't give the ending away, except to say that a cackling Roth gets to engage in his version of genocide against all those inbred 'Tuckians. I'll also say he has gotten the truth backwards and upside down, and in doing so has written a truly repellent anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-human novel, one of the worst I have ever read. If he's got the ability, the man should be ashamed of himself.

At the end of his career Roth shows himself to be as he started it -- paranoid, hate-filled, envious, narcissistic, utterly self-absorbed and utterly self-deluded. As a novelist he will be forgotten. As a decent and honorable man, he never was one.

How to Prevent Yourself from Being Brainwashed

2011-06-18T12:20:00.004-04:00

Since it is the nature of people to understand stories more easily than most anything else, I will tell one. Let's call it a fairytale.

Once upon a time, not so long ago and not so far away, there was a large, prosperous village than unfortunately had an idiot for a king. Unfortunately, his advisors were idiots, too.

Down the road a bit was another village, one that was tiny and poor and not a threat at all to our large, prosperous village. Somehow, the Idiot King, along with his idiot advisors, got it in their heads the poor, tiny village had a insane homicidal maniac for a king. Along with that, many of the people in the village were also supposed to be insane homicidal maniacs.

"They are evil and are going to attack us for our goodness," exclaimed the Idiot King. "We have to attack them first in self-defense. How do we get the public to march off to war?"

"We will use propaganda," said one of his idiot advisors. "The techniques have been around for a long time and even an idiot could use them."

"Really?" asked the Idiot King, who was generally quite incurious about most everything. "Then it should be easy for us."

"There are four main techniques for successful propaganda," his advisor explained. "First, we have to stress emotion over logic, but convince people they are being logical."

"Works for me," said the Idiot King.

"Then," the advisor continued, "we have to demonize the enemy, but convince people the enemy really is evil."

"That's because they are!" frowned the Idiot King.

"Third," said the advisor, "tell people that by destroying the enemy the world will be safer, and will lead to a better world for us and them."

"It certainly will!" exclaimed the Idiot King joyfully.

"Fourth," the advisor continued, "idealize yourself, your country, your government, your military. By idealizing yourself and devaluing the enemy they can be transformed into evil monsters 'attacking us for our goodness.'"

"The things you can learn just by listening," the Idiot King said admiringly.

So the Idiot King and his idiot advisors told the people of the village (many of whom were idiots themselves) that the tiny poor village down the road was inhabited by monsters!! Evil, insane homicidal monsters who would go to any extreme to attack our large prosperous village and destroy it.

So of course many of the people of our large prosperous village grabbed their pitchforks and clubs and axes and marched down the road, attacked the poor tiny village, killed the King and many of the inhabitants.

Many of the inhabitants of the poor tiny village fled into woods, and when they caught one of the invaders of their village they killed him.

"This is really surprising," commented the Idiot King, puzzled. "I thought they would welcome us as liberators, throwing flowers at us and maybe even the women showing us their boobs."

"You'd think so," said his advisors, just as puzzled.

One of the inhabitants of our large prosperous village was a four-year-child who had no home so he slept with the village dogs to keep warm. Though this child was poor and homeless, an idiot this child was not.

"If the Idiot King has asked me," the child told his dogs, who listened attentively, "I could have told him his attack wouldn't work. For one thing, you can conquer a country on horseback, but you have to dismount to rule."

His dogs nodded their approval.

"If people weren't sleep-walkers," the child said to the dogs, who looked impressed, "they'd never believe anything their government says."

"Uh huh," chorused the dogs.

The child thought for a while, then said, "If people want to prevent being brainwashed and falling for propaganda, perhaps they should use logic over hysterical emotion. Perhaps knowing some logical fallacies might help."

"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," said one of the dogs.

"'Because of this, therefore that'," said the child. "Just because something precedes something doesn't mean it causes it. You must analyze the situation and discover what the true causes are."

"Yep," commented a dog.

"Perhaps," the child said pensively, "we should never allow ourselves to demonize anyone. There is no one in the world who is pure good or pure evil. Unfortunately, in politics, everything is with good or evil, with no shades of grey."

The dogs smirked, knowing they were better than humans in that way.

"And never believe in Utopia," the child said thoughtfully. "It's always based on the belief in getting rid of those evil people. 'The butcher is held in great esteem in Harmony,' I read somewhere."

The dogs listened in awe.

"Never idealize your government, your country, or your military," pondered the child. "All such idealizations are hubris, and hubris is always followed by nemesis—destruction."

"Pride goes before destruction," one of the dogs added. "And a haughty spirit before a fall. That's in the Bible somewhere."

"Someday people will smirk at people who in the past believed in witches, monsters, dragons, and so on," the child finished. "But they'll be no different than we are, because, if brainwashing and propaganda can be defined in one sentence, it's convincing people monsters are attacking our village, so we have to kill them."

"You're pretty smart for a human," one dog said.

"Like anyone's going to listen to a four-year-old child," the child observed.

"Or a dog, for that matter," said one of the dogs sadly.

The Good, the Bad, and the Half-Asleep

2011-06-18T11:31:00.002-04:00

It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you’re ignorant and know it, and when you’re ignorant and don’t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don’t know it usually think they’re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else (as
Rousseau wrote: "One is misled not by what he does not know but by what he believes he knows").

This ignorant-and-don’t-know-it is what makes the afflicted so dangerous. It’s as if they’re using arrogance to cover up stupidity.

Someone not knowing they’re ignorant is a fugue state – the person is in a deluded, half-asleep state but unaware of it. Many people know they’re not totally awake, because to be totally “awake” you’d have to know everything, to know what theologians call the Mind of God. For humans that is of course impossible.

People who understand their limitations and ignorance can be considered humble in the true sense of the word: not debasing yourself, just understanding how limited you are and how easy it is to make mistakes, which is inherent in being human.

The Greeks defined humility as Sophrosyne: "Know thyself," and "Nothing in excess." The more one “knows thyself” the less susceptible to propaganda he’ll be, and believing in Pure Good and Pure Evil always leads to excesses, because it invariably leads to dehumanizing “the Evil” as subhuman or nonhuman monsters.

On the other hand people who are ignorant and don’t know it, and instead think they know what they are talking about (and what they are doing) can be considered arrogant, or afflicted with what the Greeks called Hubris, and the Bible, Pride.

These days, the term for Hubris or Biblical Pride is “narcissistic grandiosity.” It’s only been noticed in the last century that people with this affliction split things into “all-good” and “all-bad,” into pure good and pure evil.

I have met some of these people and the havoc they wreak is astonishing. All have certain traits in common. The main one is, “It’s always someone else’s fault, never mine.” Another is that they never notice the trouble they cause.

When you get groups of people together they always, under stress (say, an attack such as 9-11), regress to narcissistic infants. They, or their tribe, or their nation, is all-good, and those they define as their opponents or enemies are all-bad. And there the problems start.

Since no one, or no tribe or nation, is all-good, or perfect, whatever flaws they have are projected onto their opponents. The word for this is “scapegoating,” which comes from a practice by the ancient Hebrews in which they projected their sins onto a goat and then drove it into the wilderness, believing their sins would disappear.

An example not so long ago is when the perpetually confused George Bush referred to the Evil Ones who attacked us “for our goodness.” Then the “Evil Ones” returned the favor by calling the United States “the Great Satan.”

In politics everything is either good or evil, with no shades of grey (just as in politics people are never murdered – they are collateral damage, obstacles to be removed). When the belief in either-good-or-evil is wedded to the force and fraud inherent in politics, along with the infantile narcissism and simplistic thinking inherent in the Mob, it is no wonder politics has slaughtered more people than everything else in the world put together.

As deluded as an individual can be, groups – tribes, Mass Man, the Mob, whatever name you call them – are truly the problem. As Jules Monnerot wrote, “There is no such thing as a collective critical facility.”

Jacques Ellul, Monnerot’s contemporary and author of “The Technological Society,” wrote, “Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can be easily set into motion.” This can only happen when people are not aware of what propagandists are trying to do to them.

The Masses are ruled by their feelings; they follow leaders not principles; and they are susceptible to the most simplistic propaganda in which they see their in-group as Good and the out-group (always insane homicidal maniacs) as Evil.

In the 20th Century, the two worst scapegoating philosophies were Nazism and Communism (and contrary to the accepted wisdom, Communism was ten times as bad as Nazism). The estimate of war deaths in the 20th Century range from 177 million to 200 million people, almost of them due to those two ideologies.

In Nazism, there were the all-good Aryans and the all-bad non-Aryans. So genocide was committed against the non-Aryans. In Communism, there were the all-good Communists and the all-bad non-Communists. And again -- genocide.

This “all-good” and “all-bad” split applies to religion, at least to the more primitive, dangerous, fundamentalist monotheistic religions, the kind which thinks there really is a Devil. Of course, since one is convinced they have God on their side, their opponents must have the Devil on theirs (in fact, be the Devil), so it’s okay to rub out all of them.

Religion at least has a decided tendency to oppose Hubris; wisely, they consider it the worst of all sins, since it is the basis of all others. There is no such tendency in politics (which celebrates war, i.e., mass murder), which is why politics has caused so much trouble throughout history.

On the libertarian side, the only narcissistic ideology is Objectivism, which is a political/religious cult. It splits people into Rand’s perfect all-good heroes and projects all problems onto her sub-human “looters” and “parasites.”

I consider it a law of human nature than when people split things into an all-good and all-bad, pure good and pure evil, it’s automatic that the unacknowledged flaws of those who define themselves as good will be projected onto those they define as evil, with, at the worst, an attempt at genocide against them.

Unfortunately, it’s been the history of the world. It’s what comes from people being half-asleep and not knowing it.

The Narcissism of Politics

2011-05-12T11:21:00.000-04:00

“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason,
and invective for documentation than in politics. This is a realm, peopled
only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray
is a forbidden color.” John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)

I sometimes entertain myself with a thought experiment in which people are evolved from dogs, with their sunny goofy manic natures. We couldn’t be any worse than the genocidal primates we are now.

Would intelligent dogs be as narcissistic as humans, splitting things into a non-existent pure good and pure evil? I don’t know. Would they believe in the force and fraud of politics? It’s impossible to tell, because there are no intelligent, self-aware dogs.

Would dogs have a “Garden of Eden” myth in which the first thing they felt when they became self-aware was shame because they were exposed? Would they have a “Cain and Abel” myth in which murder was bought into their world because of feelings of humiliation and the desire for revenge? Who knows? We can only imagine.

Still, I just can’t imagine dogs going to war. Cats are a different story, like the Kzin in Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” series. They might do it out of pure feline carnivore meanness.

Not only is politics based on force and fraud, it is also, as Brown pointed out, based on the belief in pure good and pure evil. It’s why
so many of the people who supported a buffoon like George Bush and thought he was a great President were horrified that Obama was elected to office (“He’ll destroy the United States!”) and why those who supported Obama were shocked to discover he was just a continuation of Bush, only a little worse.

When it comes to politics, the mass of people never learn, because the mass of people cannot think, only feel; they don’t follow principles, only leaders. And they are always convinced their guy is Good and his opponent is Evil.

After splitting everything into pure good and pure evil, the next step is to see yourself (meaning your political party) as the Good Guys, meaning you have to project all badness onto the other party. It’s why I encountered people who said Bush was a psychopath, or evil, or stupid – and why I encountered people who said the same thing about Obama.

In reality there’s about a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Obama. Neither is evil, just incompetent (I am reminded of what Napoleon said: “Never attribute to evil that which can be explained by incompetence”).

I don’t think it’s particularly hard to manipulate mobs of people. Tell them they’re under attack by evil people, tell them they’re good (the way Bush said the United States was attacked for its goodness by the Evil Ones), and watch them regress into simple-minded narcissistic infants and then march off to war.

I see as incredibly dangerous any philosophy that defines the world as good versus evil – Nazism, Communism (which was ten times as bad as Nazism), or, among some libertarians, Objectivism.

It’d be a far better world if politics didn’t exist. But even the existence of politics isn’t the real problem. The real problem is the narcissism of human beings and their tendency to split everything into pure good and pure evil, with the result of projecting “evil” onto people and attempting to destroy them through force.

Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis

2011-05-05T11:17:00.002-04:00

“The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior.” ~ Donald Klein

There is no light on human nature more pitiless and perceptive and accurate than mythology. Through hundreds if not thousands of years all the dross was burned away, leaving some very acute observations about human nature.

Unfortunately mythology is not taught in schools or the churches or by parents. Too bad, since there is wisdom in the stories, wisdom that doesn’t exist at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, places that produce “the Best and Brightest” now busy destroying the United States.

The ancient Greeks outlined this sequence: Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis. They argued about what exactly each word meant. Scholars still argue today.

I’ve heard Koros described as a kind of greed -- and had those ancient Greeks been Christian, they would have called it one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I’ve also heard Koros described as what happens to people of unsound character when they gain great wealth and power (meaning, more than anything else, political power, which ultimately is the power to “legally” kill people).

Examples (which are another name for stories) work best. I consider George Bush, who started two unnecessary wars, to have an unsound character. An ex-alcoholic who was never treated for it (which makes him a dry drunk), who is apparently brain-damaged by that alcoholism, with rumors of past heavy cocaine use, who never had a legitimate private-sector job in his life, who was (is?) on psychiatric medication, who believes he is a Christian who is “saved”…and he became President.

To use just our last three Presidents (Obama, Bush and Clinton) as examples, they are portraits of what Friedrich Hayek meant when he wrote his famous article, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It’s also why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the leftist delusion of “democracy” – again, the worst get on top.

A man or woman, a weakling of unstable character, who gains great wealth and political power, then next suffers from Hubris -- another name for the towering, grandiose Pride that afflicted Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Hubris is arrogance, moral blindness, wanton violence, which creates in the afflicted the ability to cruelly and brutally humiliate people without any qualms – the way Herod and Caligula did. They always rationalize as a necessary thing how even the innocent suffer terribly, which is why there exists the ironic observation (which both Jesus and Aesop noticed) that all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

The Greeks, with their usual intelligence and perspicacity, banned representations of brutal public humiliation from their theater as obscene – and the original definition of obscene meant something that should not be shown in public.

Not so surprisingly, the root words of “obscene” and “humiliation” both mean “dirt” – to treat someone as dirt. Humiliation also means “to mortify,” which means to “make dead,” not necessarily physically dead, but worse, dead in psyche, as in the walking dead – zombie or vampire, which is how those whose souls have been murdered by vicious humiliations describe themselves.

I am reminded of the sociologist C. Wright Mills when he wrote about what he called “crackpot realists” -- fools who are convinced they know what they are doing but don’t, and instead destroy in their attempts to save. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (and currently Van Jones) are fine specimens of that.

Seeing wrong as right is Ate -- madness. When a politician starts unnecessary wars in which they become even richer (again, the greed of Koros), in which tens of thousands of innocent people are killed and many more impoverished, and the instigators claim they had the “time of their lives” (as both Bush and Clinton said), that is Ate.

Bush was far more arrogant than Clinton or Obama (he was, after all, referred to as Smirk). The more arrogance one shows, the more it is covering up feelings of humiliation. As the psychiatrist James Gilligan so perceptively wrote, “The most dangerous men in the world are the ones who are afraid they are wimps.”

It has been noticed for many years by many people that bullies cover up their cowardice with braggadocio – arrogance on top hiding their feelings of humiliation. When such people gain political power millions can die because of their attempts to replace shame with pride (Hitler had one testicle, Stalin had badly pocked skin, fused toes on one foot and a withered arm, and LBJ escalated in Vietnam because he was afraid his critics would consider him “chicken” if he didn’t).

Now we come to Nemesis. Nemesis is the goddess of fate and retribution. You can use many other names: revenge, vengeance and retaliation, payback…perhaps even justice. (As an aside, the Greeks called justice Dike, and it exists because of the criminal acts created by Hubris.)

I find it significant that Nemesis means “fate.” That means cause-and-effect, although I believe it is more accurate to define it as a cybernetic system, specifically a positive feedback system: humiliation leads to revenge, then those who are the objects of revenge seek revenge in turn, and so in, an escalating spiral of death and destruction.

Humiliation doesn’t always have to lead to revenge, if the object of humiliation can maintain his or her innocence, as in such stories as “Cinderella” and the first Harry Potter novel (in both cases they are stories that illustrate the saying, “Living well is the best revenge”).

But when it comes to groups of people – ethnic groups, religions, nations – immunity to feelings of humiliation can never be maintained and revenge will always happen. Mobs cannot think, only feel; they never follow principles, only leaders, and they always fall for propaganda that portrays them as innocent victims and their attackers as evil, subhuman monsters bent on death and destruction.

Osama bin Laden said the Islamic countries in the Middle East had been humiliated by the U.S. for 80 years, and that the revenge of 9-11 was “a copy” of what the U.S. had done. Then the U.S. sought revenge for the humiliation of 9-11, and now those the American government is killing in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting their revenge by killing our soldiers in return. Those who are blinded by political fanaticism cannot see this (because they perceive all political problems as Good versus Evil), and as long as they are deluded, they never will be able to see the truth of things.

In a nutshell, when you brutally humiliate people and make them suffer cruelly, and don’t even know you’re doing it, and instead of relieving their suffering you see it as something good and necessary, you’re going to be pretty damned surprised when the people you are oppressing and exploiting and killing rise up and kill you back. You’ll be outraged and consider it ingratitude; they’ll consider it justice.

When unsound people (meaning about 98% of all politicians) get political power, they always seek to expand it. This is why the State throughout history has always expanded its power, always at the expense of people and society.

There have been quite a few people throughout history (Marcus Aurelius for one) who have been able to handle political power. Unfortunately, Clinton, Bush and now Obama don’t belong to that admirable group. Those who consciously seek political power are avaricious, self-deluded weaklings and can never handle it properly. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I prefer the sayings, “Power intoxicates and immunity corrupts,” and “Power is the horse that evil rides.”
As Dostoevsky put it in The House of the Dead, "Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible."

The opposite of Hubris is humility, or what the Greeks called Sophrosyne. It can be described as “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself,” meaning having a clear understanding of your character, your strengths and limitations. It means treating people with respect, not brutalizing and humiliating them, and when it comes to relations with other countries, to, as our Founding Fathers advised, trade with them but otherwise leave them alone.

Unfortunately, if you flunk history (which so far has always happened), you have to go through the whole mess again. The U.S., which has the whole of history before it, is ignoring all its successful lessons and is instead repeating all its failures.

Ayn Rand, Proto-Fascist

2011-04-23T11:14:00.000-04:00

What a philosophy claims and what it delivers are often two different things. Marxism was supposed to create a heaven on earth but instead created a hell. I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, would also create a hell on earth.

Rand divided people into two groups: her perfect John Galtian heroes, and everyone else – whom she described as “sub-humans” living in “a hell.” She projected all “evil” onto her “looters” and “parasites” and reserved all goodness for her heroes. Such a division does not exist in real life.

In fact, this division into human/sub-human is one of the foundations of all wars. This all-good/all-bad split is also the basis of all propaganda, which is why Atlas Shrugged is in many ways a vast propaganda tract. (A good current example of propaganda was when the terminally addled George Bush claimed “the Evil Ones” attacked the United States “for our goodness.”)

Rand apparently truly believed when the world collapsed after her two dozen or so heroes withdrew into Galt’s Gulch, they would emerge to rule over the ruins. Would they rule benevolently and establish a permanent free market?

The answer: no.

The only true, eternal social division that exists is between the “elites” (I use that term neutrally) and the “masses.” I believe it is far more fundamental that “left” and “right.”

I’ve heard this split defined as “ranchers” and “cattle.” For thousands of years, way back to Jesus and Aesop, it’s been called “wolves” and “sheep.” Vilfredo Pareto referred to the elites as “wolves” and “foxes.”

The purpose of the elites is to maintain their economic and political power – to maintain what James Burnham in his book The Machiavellians called their “power and privilege.” This means using the power of the State to exploit the masses, which are mostly inert until pushed too far by the elites’ lust for blood, power and money. Then many times there is violent payback.

All politics is based on force and fraud. As such, the elites will always use those two weapons against the people to maintain their position – force is violence and fraud is lies and propaganda. All States are founded on, and run on, lies and violence.

Could Rand’s “perfect” elites be trusted to rule? No. They would use their political power to exploit everyone else to enrich themselves. Her perfect heroes are purely fictional – they don’t exist in real life.

This exploitation of the masses by the elites using the power of the States has been the history of the world. Even if Rand’s heroes established the free market their descendents would overturn it.

I am reminded of Lord Acton’s saying: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I prefer the saying, “Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts.”

As Dostoevsky put it in The House of the Dead, "Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible."

Political science (perhaps political economy is a better term) should start with how things are, not how scholars and writers want things to be. By starting with how things are, political economy becomes a science, and being a science, cures or prescriptions can be formulated.

In physics and chemistry scientists start with how things are. Yet, in economics and political science, thinkers/tinkerers often start with how they want things to be, or how things will be if their prescriptions are followed. It’s why there exists that old saying, if you took every economist and the world and laid them end to end, they’d all point in different directions.

Rand did not start with how things are. She started with how she wanted things to be. Like all leftists (and she was in many ways a leftist, in addition to being a narcissist) she did not understand human nature, which is why she thought a vanishingly small minority could rule over humanity, permanently establish political and economic liberty, and not become corrupted by unlimited power.

This is why there is a very strong probability Objectivism would turn into a fascist State.

How to Create Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, Rapists and Abusers

2011-04-07T10:59:00.002-04:00

First, start with a boy, because males are the ones who are really responsible for the truly awful violence the world.

Then, from the day he is born, physically and emotionally abuse him. Especially have his mother and other females do it. The men can also engage in it or not protect him.

Continue it throughout his childhood. Emotionally and physically abuse and humiliate him. A lot.

Do it though middle school. The kids there, especially the girls, can ignore and humiliate him. Continue it through high school and until he graduates.

Then, make sure there are no good jobs available to pay a middle-class wage. Impoverish them.

Make sure there is no place to turn unless it’s prison. Give them psychiatric drugs, aka murder/suicide pills.

Blame everything on them. Make sure leftist feminisms says, “Men are responsible for all the problems in the world.”

Then sit back and watch what happens.

There is a very good chance that many of them will become serial killers, mass murderers, rapists, and abusers, almost all of it directed toward women.

All violence, to the violent, is an attempt to achieve justice, no matter how warped it is, since to them revenge is justice. All violence is in fact revenge, an attempt to replace feelings of humiliation with feelings of pride, defined as self-respect, self-love, self-esteem.

The State as Morality Play

2011-04-06T11:54:00.002-04:00

I look at life in the aggregate, that is, when you include the whole human race, as a tragicomedy. I don’t look at it as morality play, which I define as seeing life as a contest between Good and Evil. In fact, life is a tragicomedy because so many people see it as a morality play!

Here is an example. The State has defined drugs as “evil.” So now we have the “War on Drugs,” (a morality play) with all the attendant tragicomedy (trying to control supply and demand through violence). This “war” is an attempt to get rid of Evil and replace it with Good. It’s an impossibility.

Another example: the United States on 9-11 was attacked for its Goodness by the Evil Ones, as the permanently addled George Bush apparently truly believes. The two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are morality plays, with the ensuing death and destruction.

The most pernicious aspect of the State, besides having a monopoly on “legal” violence, is that is tries to define everything as a contest between Good and Evil. That is in fact the essence of politics, and, for that matter, propaganda.

Unfortunately in politics, unlike as is in life, there are no shades of grey. Everything in politics is black or white, good or evil. Isn’t that what all war is about – morality plays about good versus evil?

Whenever people say, “He/she/they did that because they are evil,” I automatically know they support some kind of war – as long, of course, as they don’t have to fight in it.

Whenever people think there are political solutions to things (which don’t exist), they are instantly falling into the trap of supporting war – death and destruction. And it’s because they believe in Good and Evil – with them of course being Good, and the people who disagree with them being Evil.

The essence of this morality play is that when people define themselves as Good (which means self-righteousness) they don’t see any problem with abusing, humiliating, imprisoning and murdering those they define as Evil. It is, after all, to get rid of Evil and replace it with Good.

Spinoza once said they most people define evil as what they don’t like. He was right. And because of that, people who unwittingly see life as a morality play have turned it into a tragicomedy.

The Arrogance of Empire

2011-04-04T11:37:00.001-04:00

After thinking about this for several years, I have concluded brutally humiliating people is the worst problem in the world. It is, however, the reverse side of the coin. On the other side is hubris—arrogance, moral blindness, wanton violence.

Hubris always leads to humiliating people. And I do mean always. Then it's followed by revenge. This observation is not new with me; it's why the ancient Greeks said the Hubris is fated to be followed by Nemesis—vengeance. It's also the story of Cain and Abel, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, Stephen King's Carrie, John D. McDonald's The Green Ripper, and Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination. It's one of the oldest stories in the world: revenge on your oppressors.

The United States, which is now an empire, is following the path of every empire in history: attempting to impose its world-view on other countries, under the guise of "civilizing" them. As both Aesop and Jesus noticed, all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

Attempting to impose your views on people, by force, is brutally humiliating them, even though it's done unwittingly and for "good" purposes. It's ignoring the wisdom of that old saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Shame rather than guilt appears to arise when a person finds himself condemned to an identity he wishes to repudiate but cannot," wrote the psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

Traditionally, hubris, or excessive pride, has been considered the worst problem in the world—and it is, because hubris comes first, humiliating people comes second. But I cannot separate one from the other. As I said, they are the obverse and reverse sides of the same coin.

When people in other countries are condemned to a humiliated identity they wish to repudiate—say, as uncivilized backward wogs who have to be slaughtered and dragged by their corpses into the 21st Century— they are going to regain their pride and dignity by killing us. That is, they are going to humiliate us the way we humiliated them—by violence, destruction and murder.

Humiliation is bad enough when one person does it to another. Add political power and advanced technology, and you end up with the saying, "Power is the horse than evil rides."

I do not understand why this tragic flaw exists in human nature, as exemplified by the saying, "I'm going to beat some sense into you." How can the U.S. "beat" sense into other countries by slaughtering innocent people? It's the same with the misnamed "War on Drugs": we can "beat" sense into people by imprisoning them for years? Or "beat" sense into children by abusing them? Just astonishing.

I do know this flaw has something to do with power: "Power is the horse that evil rides." Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I think a better saying is, "Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts."

Since power corrupts and intoxicates, the bigger and more powerful the State gets, the worse it is for everyone. Hubris plus the State, and you're looking at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trampling over everybody.

Patriots, Sheeple, Traitors

2011-04-01T11:37:00.001-04:00

Roughly but still accurately speaking, I divide people into three groups: patriots, sheeple, traitors.

When a country has been around long enough, the traitors take over the government. That has what has happened to America. They comprise politicians, corporations, banks, and churches that support the government and its policies. They use the power of the State for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else.

The sheeple are the mass of people who don’t particularly know what’s going on. Sometimes they think they do, but don’t, not really. They often tend to think the people in the government know what they’re doing.

The patriots are always the opposition party: they oppose those in power and their exploitative policies.

What I’ve outlined is a variation of elite theory: the only politics worth examining is the relationships between the Elites (the term is neutral) and the Masses. The people who study these relationships are usually known as Machiavellians, since Machiavelli founded the discipline with the publication of “The Prince.”

However, what he noticed is not original with him. You can find his observations in Aesop and most especially in the Bible, specifically the Gospels.

In those days there were the Traitors: the Romans and the rich, politically-connected Jewish elites who were their go-betweens in Palestine; the Sheeple, who were the mass of men; and then the Patriots (who are always the opposition party) who was exemplified by Jesus.

There is a lot you can learn about human nature from the Bible.

While proper government is a good and necessary thing, the State, if anything exemplifies the Seven Deadly Sins: excessive pride, greed, murder, theft, etc. Anyone who supports those things, though the power of the State, belongs to the Traitors, be they politicians, corporate executives, or religious leaders.

Those who are opposed to the policies of the State, when they are used to support murder, theft, greed, lying, etc., are the Patriots.

A Bite of the Apple

2011-03-31T12:15:00.000-04:00

There are many interpretations of the myth of the Garden of Eden, and I have mine.

In some versions of the story, what gets Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden is the fact they refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Adam blames Eve for making him take a bite of the apple (actually the word "apple" is never mentioned; it's just called "fruit"), and Eve blames the serpent.

What they're doing is scapegoating each other, and as M. Scott Peck pointed out in his book, People of the Lie, "Scapegoating is the genesis of human evil." And he's right.

Scapegoating is when people say, "I am good, and because I am good, I must project my imperfections elsewhere. Let's try you. That makes you evil and the cause of my problems."

It doesn't sound like much, but it is. The Nazis did it, and the Communists did it. In the 20th century I've read estimates of anywhere from 177 million to 200 million people dead because of State-sponsored scapegoating.

Today, you can see this scapegoating even in the United States. George Bush claimed we were attacked because "we are good and they are evil." Since "they" are evil, of course they have to be killed. All this ignores the horrible things the United States has done to other countries, such as blockading Iraq for ten years and leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including children and infants.

Another interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden is Innocence to Experience, and Unconsciousness to Consciousness. They are related to the scapegoating.

Adam and Eve are unaware of the difference between good and evil. They are innocent of it--unconscious of it.

Curiously, the story doesn't even suggest that evil doesn't exist, just that Adam and Eve aren't aware of it. When they eat the fruit, they then become aware of evil.

Before they eat the fruit, they are in the position I call, "I didn't know that." Evil exists, but people aren't aware of it. The example I use is to tell people that when the U.S. invaded the Philippines in 1898, they killed about 200,000 people, and lost about 4000 troops.

Usually people tell me, "I didn't know that!" They are Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit: evil is there, but they're aren't aware of it.

The next comment I often hear is, "I don't believe it." This usually means they do believe it, but don't want to admit it. This position isn't in the story of the Garden of Eden, but you might call it, "Taking a bite of the fruit." People are nibbling a little bit of it, and are starting to lose their innocence and become conscious of evil.

The next comment I often hear is, "Well, I agree with it." These are the people who say, "We had to kill 200,000 Filipinos, or a few hundred thousand Iraqis."

These are the people who have eaten the whole fruit. They know good and evil, but the "good and evil" they know is the limited kind that Adam and Eve knew, the kind that got them kicked out of the Garden and bought evil into the world.

These are the people who are essentially saying, "I agree with it because we are good and they are evil." That's what makes it okay, to them, to murder hundreds of thousands of people. They're scapegoating them, just the way Adam scapegoated Eve, and Eve, the serpent. It's what brings evil into the world.

A comment I occasionally hear from people is, "Yes, I know we've done bad things." That position isn't in the story of the Garden of Eden, either. But these are the people who take responsibility, unlike Adam and Eve. It's a position that moves beyond scapegoating, moves beyond saying, "I am good and you are evil and therefore are the cause of my problems."

It's a position that realizes there is no "good" over here and "evil" over there, with nothing in between. In reality, if it's anything, it's a continuum. Seeing good and evil as either white or black always leads to scapegoating, and therefore looses murder and destruction into the world, because people--and especially nations--are always going to claim they are the good guys and other nations, the bad guys.

In the story of the Garden of Eden there is a angel with a flaming sword baring the way back in. People usually interpret this to mean we can't go back to the happiness of the Garden of Eden.

I have another interpretation. The flaming sword is a warning not to return to the folly of Adam and Eve, of denying responsibility for what we've done. It's as good of an interpretation as any other, and to my mind, a better one. It's saying, "Don't go back to denying responsibility for your actions, don't go back to ignoring evil, don't go back to rationalizing it as a good thing."

Stephen Mitchell put it this way: "The clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good."

As far as I'm concerned, the Garden of Eden would be a lousy place to live.

Forgiving You Enemies

2011-03-27T13:47:00.001-04:00

Love your enemies…turn the other cheek…these sayings make no sense. Yet, they do.

There is what I call the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. It’s a self-adjusting feedback loop, what I’ve heard called a cybernetic system.

All murder is caused by feelings of humiliation, which engender the desire for revenge. It’s an attempt to replace humiliation with pride. It’s the story of Cain and Abel and what the ancient Greeks called Hubris followed by Nemesis.

Hitler in Mein Kampf, spoke of the “shame” and “humiliation” of Versailles, after Germany had been crushed by the Treaty after World War I, even though the other combatants were just as guilty as Germany. Germany just happened to lose the war.

Hitler was bought to power by his promises to restore Germany’s “pride” and “honor” – and he did. And that led to World War II, which is still going on today.

Had the victorious allies forgiven Germany after World War I instead of seeking revenge, there would have been no World War II. That is what is meant by forgiving your enemies and turning the other cheek.

The first recorded war is the Bible was over the “rape” of Dinah. Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, is “dishonored” by Shechem, a prince. The reason I write “rape” is that is doesn’t appear to be rape (the word is not used in the original texts): she moves in with him and they wish to get married. Jacob approves of this.

Jacob’s sons, however, do not. They consider their sister a whore and so to restore the family’s honor they kill Shechem and his entire tribe. They feel humiliated and so restore their “honor” by slaughtering an entire tribe of innocent men. They also kidnap the women and children and steal everything of value.

This story clearly came from a shame-dominated culture, as compared to the West, which is a guilt-dominated culture. This is why in shame-dominated cultures you read of such bizarre things as Palestinians killing their innocent daughters after they’ve been raped (there is at least no evidence Dinah was murdered by her brothers).

Jesus, then, was speaking to people from a shame-dominated culture, who would have blamed all their problems on other people, as those in shame-dominated cultures always do. He was being hyperbolic, as he usually was, but his point still stands.

He was telling people how to break the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. One way is to give up shame-dominated ethics (which does exists in the West), and that means to not see insults where they don’t exist. How, for example, were Dinah’s brothers exactly “dishonored” when she and her father didn’t think so? They were imaging the whole thing, which is the main flaw of shame-dominated cultures.

Another point is to not seek revenge, at least on a mass scale, which leads to war. Osama bin Laden called 9-11 “a copy” of the humiliations the United States had been visiting on the Middle East for 60 years. It was revenge, pure and simple. Then the U.S. sought revenge by invading Afghanistan and Iraq – and probably 99.99% of the people they killed were innocent. So then the survivors still seek revenge on us.

That’s why I call it a feedback loop, a cybernetic system. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t kill the guilty if you have to; the problem with revenge is that it’s almost always indiscriminate (as in the slaughter of Shechem’s innocent tribe).

I suspect Jesus was being somewhat ironic, which means he was amused. He knew he was dealing with shame-dominated people who imagined insults and would have sought revenge on the innocent (he actually called them sheep). That’s what he told to them to “change their hearts and minds” (often mistranslated as “repent from your sins”).

It’s very difficult, sometimes impossible to forgive someone who does something terrible to you or those close to you. Who can forgive a serial killer? Yet a serial killer is but a drop in the ocean compared to the lack of mass forgiveness that causes wars.

In the 20th Century alone it’s been estimated that 177 million to 200 million people died in wars – and all of them were started for revenge.

The Cycle still goes on.

How to Deal with Lunatic Mass Murderers

2011-03-26T11:26:00.001-04:00

School Shooter: BLAM! BLAM ! BLAM!

Student: Ohmigod! There's a school shooter outside the door! He's going to break in and shoot all of us!

Armed Student: Ain't gonna happen. (Whips out .45 semi-automatic pistol)

Liberal Nitwit Student: Hey! It's illegal to carry a handgun! I'm calling the police!

Armed Student: Go ahead. The one hundredth call isn't going to make them show up any faster.

Female Student: Shut up, you liberal moron or I'll punch you!

Liberal Nitwit: Okay.

Armed Student (jumping behind door): Don't anyone look at me so he won't know I'm here.

School shooter (crashing through door): Ha ha! Everyone up against the wall so I can shoot all of you! I have a pistol and enough magazines to hold 100 rounds! I'm going to shoot all of you two and three times and kill 32 of you! Stupid liberals will blame it on the tool instead of the fool! Others will blame Stephen King because I read his novel, Rage. I'm going to get revenge on all of you for abusing, bullying and humiliating me all my life! Ha ha ha! I don't have any friends and have never had a girlfriend! I'm a virgin and have never even kissed a girl! I was molested by a homosexual pedophile! I was raised poor in a high school with snobby rich kids! My life didn't turn out the way I wanted even though I'm only 23! I'm on murder/suicide pills, aka Prozac. So I'll get rid of my hate and rage and envy and go out in a blaze of glory! You ignored me in life but you won't ignore me in death! Now up against --

Armed Student: BLAM!

Female Student (putting hands over eyes): Yuck!

Armed Student: Those point-blank headshots are messy. Anyone have a shovel? And a bucket?

Liberal Nitwit: That was cold-blooded murder! He'd been horribly abused all his life by us! This whole thing is straight out of Carrie!

Female Student: I’m sorry he was abused and humiliated, and no one should ever be treated like that, but it's too late now to fix that particular problem! And I told you to shut up! (POW!)

Liberal Nitwit: Ow! My eye!

Student: Where are the police? We called them 45 minutes ago and they're still not here

Armed Student: Now that this potential mass murderer is dead they'll show up. It'll be just like Columbine, where they hid until the shooting was over and everyone was dead.

Cop (bursting through the door, dressed like a ninja): Everyone on the floor with you hands on your heads!

Armed Student: The shooter is dead. He's right there in front of you.

Cop: Who shot him?!?

Armed Student: I did, with my .45. I just saved 32 lives.

Cop: On the floor! You're under arrest!

Armed Student: Is your name Richard Cranium, by any chance? We're the victims here, you know.

Cop: My name is Officer Dim, not Cranium! Now all of you on the floor! All of you are under arrest!

Students (chorus): This is ridiculous! We called you people over 100 times, you show up after the guy's dead, and now you want us to get on the floor with our hands on our heads!

Cop: That's right! All of you on the floor, now!

Female student (grabbing cop's M-16 out of his hands): You're worthless! "Peace officer," my butt! Get out of here!

Students (chorus): Get out of here! If we had depended on you dumbass cops, we'd all be dead by now!

Cop (running out of room): Mommy! They took my penis!

Student: You know, I feel a lot better now. Free and brave, like I'm not a brainwashed sheeple anymore!

Armed Student: That's the spirit! Like Thucydides said: "Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave." You can't be brave or happy unless you're free!

Student: I never thought of that! And it's so simple!

Armed Student: Never learned that in public school, did you?

Female Student: Yay for armed students!

Student: And disarmed fake cops!

Armed Student: And yay for Americans! And how Americans are supposed to act!

The Permanent Cure for Babbling Women

2011-03-26T11:10:00.001-04:00

Woman: Babble babble babble babble.

Man: Can you please not do that?

Woman: Babble babble babble babble.

Man: You’re being very disrespectful and violating my boundaries.

Woman: Babble babble babble babble.

Man: You’re going to force my hand.

Woman: Babble babble babble babble.

Man: Okay, you asked for it.

Women: Babble babble babble babb --

WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP

Woman: Wah! You spanked me!

Man: Are you going to be quiet now?

Woman: *Sniff* Yes.

Man: Good. Now fix me a sandwich, get me a beer, then draw a hot bath for me.

Woman: Okay.

Man: Ah….peace and quiet…blessed relief!

THE END (or is it THE BEGINNING?!?!)

Hubris Followed by Nemesis

2011-03-25T12:33:00.000-04:00

The worst problem in the world – the one that causes more violence than anything else – is the revenge created by feelings of humiliation.

Thousands of years ago both the Greeks and the Hebrews noticed that pattern. The Greeks called it Hubris, the god of arrogance, lack of restraint, insolence and wanton violence, followed by Nemesis, the goddess of fate and revenge. The Hebrews wrote, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Later, grandiose pride became the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, because it is the basis of all the rest.

Hubris originally meant to brutally humiliate and denigrate someone in public (it still means that) and the Greeks banned it from the theater as obscene. It was fated to be followed by revenge.

In other words, brutally humiliate someone because of your arrogance and moral blindness, and those you humiliate will kill you. It’s an attempt to replace feelings of humiliation with feelings of pride, by humiliating those they see as their oppressors.

Even today, the U.S. government repeats the pattern. After nineteen fanatics flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the American public was told by the U.S. government that these mass murderers hated us for our goodness. They hate us for our virtues? No. It was the attempts of the U.S. government to rule the world, to have troops in 144 countries, to attack, shame and humiliate countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, and Serbia, when none of them had attacked us. Some three thousand Americans were unwittingly sacrificed to the gods of Hubris and Nemesis.

Osama bin Laden called 9-11 “a copy” of what the U.S. had been doing to the Middle East for 80 years, humiliating and abusing the countries there, overthrowing their governments, installing repressive regimes and allowing them to crush their people. 9-11 was pure, simple revenge – not, as the terminally confused, arrogant and morally blind George Bush thought, because they were the Evil Ones attacking us for our goodness.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent almost 40 years interviewing murderers and those who brutally battered people, when he asked them why they did it (and he interviewed thousands), heard, every time, “Because he disrespected me [or my wife, parents, children, friends, girlfriend].”

One day he realized what he was hearing was the story of Cain and Abel: “Unto Abel the Lord had respect….unto Cain He had not respect.” Cain, humiliated, sought his revenge on the innocent Abel, in a misguided attempt to salvage his pride and self-respect.

The feeling of humiliation followed by revenge is a staple of many novels. Take the influential The Count of Monte Cristo, or Moby-Dick. Or Stephen King’s Carrie. Or John D. McDonald’s The Green Ripper. Or Amadeus. Or Othello. Or the Iliad. Or the first war recorded in the Bible.

This problem of feelings of humiliation followed by the desire for revenge is part of human nature. It’s not going to change. The best we can do is minimize the problem, by not humiliating people, by treating them respectfully.

For one thing, when it comes to the U.S. government, it’d help is it minded its own business and not that of other countries.

The Only Way for a Women to be Truly Happy

2011-03-25T11:16:00.002-04:00

“You horrid beast!” she cried, beating impotently on his muscular hairy chest with her tiny fists. “You, cruel, evil, lecherous, violent…male!”

“Shut up, wench!” he snarled and began to ravage her.

“Oh oh!” she cried in ecstasy, her clothes falling off. “I love you -- you, you – manly man!” She had finally, after decades of searching, found true happiness.

He grinned. He understood women. Men were masters and women were slaves. Now, she understood it, too. And she was happy.

I Encounter Some Vampires!

2011-03-23T11:03:00.002-04:00

While there does exist the occasional psycho lunatic who really does drink people’s blood, these people are so rare it’d take several lifetimes to meet one, unless you go out of your way by becoming an FBI profiler.

What are much more common are what I’ve heard described as “emotional vampires,” and I’ve met several of these. They’re known as Personality or Character Disorders, and fall under various headings such as Antisocial, Borderline, Narcissistic and Histrionic Personality Disorder.

They all have certain traits in common. The main one is: it’s always someone else’s fault. It’s never their fault. This trait has been noticed for thousands of years, which is why in the story of the Garden of Eden Adam says, “The woman made me do it,” and Eve says, “The serpent made me do it.” It wasn’t their fault. It was someone else’s.

Because it’s always someone else’s fault, they always portray themselves as victims, even if they don’t realize it. In fact, they can be quite good at convincing people they ARE victims. Because of this, if you first meet someone and they try to pluck at your heartstrings with stories of the awful things done to them, immediately put your guard up.

Think about it this way: what kind of person would immediately tell you such intimate details of their life? And if they do it to you, don’t you think they do it to everyone?

They lie. Oftentimes they don’t even know they’re lying, because to successfully lie to someone else you first have to successfully lie to yourself.

They can be quite charming and manipulative, to the point you don’t even know you’re being manipulated. If they’re telling you stories about the awful things that happened to them, the first impulse of many men is to protect them and fix them.

Ha ha! Suckers! You’re being manipulated! They don’t want to be fixed! They want attention and to suck your innards dry, then cast away the empty husk that used to be your life!

They can make you feel special. You’re not. You’re interchangeable with the rest of the suckers. Again I’m going to repeat: if they’re telling you intimate details of their lives, why wouldn’t they be telling them to everyone?

They are deficient in gratitude, not to mention guilt, not to mention empathy. Since to them it’s someone else’s fault, why should they feel guilty or grateful or empathic? That’s why they never say, “Thank you.”

The worst emotional vampire (she appeared to be Borderline/Histrionic) I ran across some years ago told me, in the first hour I talked to her:

“Men are responsible for all the problems in the world.”

“Some of my relatives tried to molest me when I was in my teens.”

“None of my relationships work out because all the men have baggage from past relationships.”

“None of them will accept my career.”

The best one of all was…”This is about me, not you!”

Nothing was her fault. It was always men’s fault. And if it’s someone else’s fault, then it’s okay to emotionally abuse them. And sooner or later (and usually it’s sooner) they start to emotionally abuse people. Sometimes it becomes physical abuse.

If you meet someone who immediately becomes intimate (by telling you intimate details of his or her life), who immediately treats you as if you are special, who makes you want to immediately protect or fix them, and blames their problems on other people, STAY AWAY!

I’m going to repeat this, too: for many men their first impulse is to fix, protect and save a woman like this. You can’t do any of those things for her. She’s not so easy as a flat tire.

Some people unfortunately fall in love with these people, ignoring the warning signs – which are always bad feelings about them; anxiety, tenseness, and guilt (wondering if YOU have the problem and not them). The reason you’re having those bad feelings is because your soul is being sucked out!

These people are relatively common and wreak in the lives of every person they come into contact with.

This is a free warning, courtesy of UncleBob!

Why Women Who Own Cats are EVIL!!!

2011-03-22T12:20:00.002-04:00

The animal a person owns is an expression of their personality. For example, almost every pit-bill owner I’ve known as had an attitude problem and a low IQ – just like the dogs.

I, on the other hand, am a pug person. Pugs are playful, funny, and an exceptionally affectionate breed. The only way in which they do not mirror their owners is that they’re aren’t the smartest dogs. In fact, “pug” and “intelligent” is an oxymoron.

It’s pretty much become a cliché that a single or divorced middle-aged woman without children, and with more than one cat, is a red flag -- the woman is someone for a man to stay away from. Why?

Because the cat is an expression of her personality –EVIL!!!!

Cats are cruel, narcissistic, selfish, inconsiderate little monsters who torture and eat helpless little things. Guess what? So are the female owners of these heinous beasts!

Even one cat is a red flag. Two and you’d better run away as fast as you can. You’ll save your soul from being eaten.

A cat is a walking personality disorder – “it’s not my fault; it’s yours!” Cats only pretend to be affectionate. In reality, they just want to use you. They believe you exist to serve them, just like people with character disorders.

No one has ever claimed dogs are the servants of the Devil. But cats? Yes. Black cats? Evil! Witch’s familiars? Cats! The symbol of Halloween? Cats!

Do dogs climb trees and eat baby birds? No. Do cats? Yes!

Women with cats, without exception, are cruel, evil monsters who want nothing better than to slowly torture you to death! And heartily enjoy it while they’re doing it!

You have been warned.

A Guide to Avoiding Crazy Women

2011-03-21T13:05:00.002-04:00

Some years ago I met a woman who was like no woman I had ever met before. I knew within about three hours there was something quite wrong with her, but I did not know exactly what. I ended up seeing her for a few weeks and in that time came to some conclusions.

After much thought, I was able to formulate Bob’s Guide to Avoiding Crazy Women.

The first red flag: if they start talking about how they were sexually abused when younger, stay away. I mean if they start talking about it within the first TEN MINUTES of meeting them.

That’s what this woman did, and I realized she was portraying herself as a victim. Then, not too long after the abuse stories, she told me that men are responsible for all (or maybe she said almost all) the problems in the world.

That’s the second red flag, because she was again portraying herself as a victim. When anyone – male or female – does this, they are full of hostility toward the other sex.

Since these people portray themselves as victims, they believe they’re always in the right, which means YOU are always in the wrong.

They have no sense of your boundaries, which they are always violating. On the other hand, they are excruciatingly sensitive to you violating their boundaries, to the point they imagine it when it’s not there.

She once told her she thought she was a stopgap to me, on my way to another woman. The idea had never occurred to me, and wasn’t true in the slightest. In fact, when I tried to protest, I couldn’t get a word in. Again, she was portraying herself as a victim – this time of me.

People like this are known as “character disorders.” To them, it’s never their fault; it’s always your fault. They don’t even know they’re doing it, and if you point it out, it doesn’t register. That’s why therapy doesn’t work on these people.

One of my friends got involved with a woman like this, because she hid what she was for a few months. It took him quite a while to get her out of his condo, and for a while ended up drinking a bottle of wine a night because of the stress. I told him he was an abused man.

Incidentally, most men who are abused by women don’t even know they’re being abused! It takes quite a while for the fact to penetrate.

Another bizarre thing about people like this is that they lack empathy, and don’t even know it. It’s why they wreak havoc in people’s lives, and especially in intimate relationships. It’s because your feelings don’t count. Again, they don’t do this on purpose – they don’t even know they’re doing it, and when it’s pointed out, still can’t realize it.

These people unfortunately can’t have real relationships, since other people, since they believe, even if they don’t know it, that other people exist to serve them. In a phrase, they lack respect and consideration for others.

Monsters, Love and Humiliation

2011-03-20T13:45:00.001-04:00

The word “monster” and “demonstrate” come from the same root word: both mean “a warning.” I find that curious. A monster is a warning. But of what?

When I found out about the connection between those two words, the first word that occurred to me was “Frankenstein.” Frankenstein (he had no name in the novel or any of the movies) was a monster, but was a sympathetic monster (and here I go again: the “path” in sympathy is related to the word “pathos” and means “to suffer with”).

Frankenstein didn’t want much more than a friend; he wanted to be part of a community, even if it was just him and the blind hermit. He was rejected and humiliated by everyone except the blind man, who couldn’t see him. Everyone else was horrified by him and wanted to kill him.

What then, is demonstrated by Frankenstein? Brutally humiliate someone, especially in public, and what can happen (and often does happen, if history is any guide), is revenge. Whatever love Frankenstein had was turned to hate and the desire to revenge.

Frankenstein belongs to the class of monsters known as the Undead, along with zombies and vampires. Where did the idea of these undead monsters originate?

I don’t know, but I suspect they somehow based on real people, people who described themselves as the living dead, or zombies, or vampires.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who interviewed violent prisoners for almost 40 years, noticed a curious thing: those who committed the worse crimes, say, brutally murdering and mutilating their victims, invariably described themselves as “dead” before they committed their crimes.

They didn’t mean biologically dead; they meant dead inside. They often described themselves as zombies, vampires, robots, monsters. They said their “selves” had died long before they began killing people. They were in fact the Undead long before they began making others dead.

There is a lot to be learned by looking at what words really mean. The word “mortify” means “to make dead by humiliation.” In other words, if you want to make a monster, brutally humiliate someone, especially in public.

The ancient Greeks consider brutally humiliating someone in public to be obscene, and they banned it from their theater. In fact, the original meaning of the word “hubris” meant to humiliate or abuse someone in public.

Hubris was followed by Nemesis, which is revenge. Brutally humiliate someone in public, and you are then fated to suffer revenge. If you want to see a demonstration of how to create a monster, brutally and cruelly humiliate people, and if it goes on long enough, they die inside (this mortification transforms them into zombies and vampires) and then they seek to wreak destruction on people. Isn’t destruction what all monsters seek?

The sad and puzzling thing about the townspeople is they never realized their treatment of Frankenstein – rejecting, humiliating and trying to destroy him – is what caused him to seek revenge. If they had accepted him there would have been no problem.

Whenever monsters – of course they are always people -- start roaming the earth, maiming, murdering and destroying, it is a demonstration that something has gone wrong with other people so that they mortify the innocent, transforming them into the Undead who seek revenge on the living.

The Crackpots Who Rule Us

2011-03-16T12:03:00.001-04:00

For many years I have been wondering about the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. With a nod to C. Wright Mills, I have decided many those who gravitate towards the State are merely crackpots. Or as Mills termed them, “crackpot realists.”

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld struck me as prime examples. They appeared to be competent (merely competent) running large corporations. Their expertise didn’t translate into being statesmen. In fact, their marginal abilities to run large corporations (themselves creations of the State) didn’t translate in the slightest into running the government. In those positions they became extremely dangerous.

Although I can’t read their minds, I suspect Cheney and Rumsfeld would consider themselves “conservatives.” Yet leftists can be just as big of crackpots, and if history is any guide, much worse.

Van Jones – a buffoon if there ever was one – is clearly a Communist, which means he is automatically a crackpot. One of the main differences, in my view, is that almost all leftists can’t manage any business, although they are convinced they have the ability to run everyone else’s lives.

These crackpots act as if they are the grownups, which makes everyone less then grownup. Yet grownups are supposed to have some understanding of human nature. I have never seen it from any of these men. They are in fact fools.

I am reminded of the first Bush, who when he finally made his way to a grocery store, was amazed to see a barcode scanner. Clearly our ruling crackpots don’t get out much.

Being fools, they are unread and therefore uneducated. They are unaware of the simplest facts of human nature, to wit, you don’t humiliate people, and you certainly don’t humiliate countries.

There were quite a few people who predicted some kind of blowback against the United States, blowback that culminated in 9-11. Osama bin Laden said the attacks were “a copy” of the humiliation the United States had been visiting on the Islamic world for some 60 years, overthrowing governments, installing repressive regimes, and crushing popular uprisings.

9-11 was a demonstration of what the ancient Greeks called Hubris followed by Nemesis. The original meaning of Hubris was to humiliate someone in public, and the Greeks banned it from the theater as obscene. Nemesis is the goddess of fate and retribution.

In other word, humiliate someone (or countries) and the oppressor is fated to suffer revenge. And revenge, in the simplest of definitions, is the attempt to replace humiliation with pride by humiliating the oppressor.

The worst thing you can do to anyone (or any country) is to strip from them their pride and dignity. That stripping of those things from Germany after World War I (and Germany was no more guilty than any other combatant) led inexorably to World War II. And World War II, for all practical purposes, is still going on.

Do any of our crackpots understand these truths about what happens when people and countries are humiliated? No, they don’t, even though this fact was noticed by the Hebrews, the Greeks (Aristotle noticed it), and the early Christian fathers, such as St. Augustine and St. Aquinas. Not to mention all the modern researchers who have written about it.

Our crackpot realists, most unfortunately, appear to be bound and determined to humiliate everyone in the world. It’s not so much that they will be the ones who suffer Nemesis. It’ll be, as always, the innocent public.

Humiliating People to Death

2011-03-15T10:48:00.001-04:00

Certain episodes stay in my mind.

When I was 16 years old I was walking down the street one Friday night, heading toward a party, when I saw a girl I knew from high school walking toward me. I did not know her personally, but recognized her, as she recognized me.

She was walking her dog. I had mixed feelings about that: surprise and pity. I was going to a party, and knew I was going to have a great time. She, on the other hand, was walking her dog on a Friday night.

She was not an attractive girl. She was fairly tall and chunky and even plastic surgery wouldn’t improve her looks all that much. And even if she lost weight, she’d never have a nice body.

As she got closer to me, I saw something in her eyes that really surprised me to the point of shock: fear. A lot of fear. I intuitively knew the reason why: she thought I was going to humiliate her.

I was so disconcerted by the fact she was afraid of me I walked by her without saying a word or looking at her.

I doubt anyone had ever purposely humiliated this girl. But she knew what she looked like, and was never invited to parties, and had ever had a boyfriend, and had never even been kissed. That’s pretty bad.

In college I knew a girl who one evening, for some unknown reason, told me that in seventh-grade she had been ostracized. She showed me a picture. A little overweight, with glasses set crooked on her face. But not bad; even kind of cute.

But she had been ignored and ostracized. Over the summer she became the proverbial ugly duckling blossoming into a swan. She got taller, lost weight, got contacts. When she got back to school all the kids who had ostracized her wanted to be her friends. She ignored every one of them.

Hers was a case of feeling humiliated followed by revenge. That’s generally what happens. In fact, it’s so common it’s a law of human nature. Just look at the story of Cain and Abel: Cain feels humiliated, so he gets revenge on his (innocent) brother.

The word that means overwhelming humiliation, namely, mortification, comes from Latin roots that mean "to make dead" {mortis, dead, and facere, to make). This is an old truth that is true today, and it’s a universal one: overwhelming humiliation can kill people.

I don’t mean mortification kills their bodies: it kills their selves. The evidence is so overwhelming I don’t even have to quote anything: all know that the overwhelming humiliation of children, for all practical purposes, kills their selves. And how do you resurrect a dead self?

Then they become adults they end up in prison after committing various appalling crimes, ones committed to get their revenge on “society” and to regain some sort of pride and self-respect.

I remember reading a comment from one teenage school shooter: “The world has wronged me, and I could take it no more.” The feeling of humiliation followed by revenge, which is in a sentence the attempt to replace humiliation with pride – and doing it by violence.

It puzzles me how this truth about humiliation followed by revenge (or as the ancient Greeks described it, Hubris followed by Nemesis) is so little-known. The humiliation of Germany after WWI (and England and the other countries, including the U.S., were just as guilty) led to the revenge know as World War II.

9-11 was revenge on the United States for supporting repressive regimes and overthrowing governments in the Islamic world for some 60 years. Yet, not so mystifyingly when you understand propaganda, it was fed to the American people as an attack by the “Evil Ones” on our “goodness.”

When you understand that natural law of humiliation followed by revenge, you can predict the future. It ain’t hard. And when people flunk their history lessons they have to keep going back to class until they pass.

The Interdependence of Selves

2011-03-14T10:49:00.002-04:00

I have no idea who first noticed it, but psychologists, philosophers and theologians have written about it: the interdependence of selves, the fact that to seek our own well-being we must seek the well-being of others.

One of the earlier philosophers who did notice this was Spinoza. I’ll quote at length:

Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving
their own being than that they should all be in such harmony in all
respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one
mind and one body, and that all together should endeavor as best they
can to preserve their own being, and that all together should aim at the
common advantage of all. From this it follows that men who are
governed by reason, seek nothing for themselves that they should
not desire for the rest of mankind…”

I’ve heard that passage described as “one of the most remarkable remarks in all [Spinoza’s] writings.

In other words, to seek well-being for ourselves, we have to seek it for others. As such, the difference between “self-centeredness” and “benevolence” doesn’t really exist, because all of us are interdependent on others.

This doesn’t mean we should “live for others.” It means, as a famous saying tells us, “to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That Golden Rule exists in some form in all religions.

It is a fact, this is, the nature of reality, that our selves don’t exist independently. They only exist in relation to other selves. You can’t have a husband or wife self without a spouse, or a mother or father self without a child, and so on.

The example I often use about this interdependence concerns the prevention of violence and murder. Nearly all violent assaults and murders, as psychiatrist James Gilligan (and many others) has written, is essentially caused by people feeling humiliated (“The most dangerous man is the one who thinks he is a wimp”). Then they seek revenge, which is an attempt to replace feelings of humiliation with pride.

Gilligan noted, after interviewing many prisoners, that what he was hearing over and over was the story of Cain and Abel: I feel humiliated, so I’ll get revenge by killing you and so restore my self-respect.

If you want to damage or destroy your own well-being, then mock, ridicule, insult, humiliate and disrespect other people. Then, sooner or later, they will get revenge on you.

The ancient Greeks described this process in detail. Hubris originally meant to humiliate someone in public, and they considered it so obscene it was banned from the theater. Hubris was always followed by Nemesis, the goddess of fate and retribution.

Humiliate people, especially in public, and you are fated, sooner or later, to be the object of revenge. To avoid this, treating people with respect (what the Greeks called aidôs) avoids revenge. So, by seeking to preserve their well-being you preserve your own.

For that matter, by humiliating other people, you’re automatically not seeking your own well-being regardless of the effect it has on others. Those who seek to humiliate others have problems with the effects of Hubris on themselves, or what the Bible calls Pride. Both the Greeks and Hebrews considered it a type of insanity, and if you’ll read the Old Testament many of the stories and sayings in it are about the destructive effects of an excessive, grandiose pride.

William Blake once wrote, “Shame is pride’s cloak.” You can just as easily say, “Pride is shame’s cloak,” although I think “humiliation” is more correct, since shame is when you think you deserve it and humiliation when you do not.

Blake’s comment has been observed many times by other people: pride on top, masking feelings of humiliation underneath, although the definition of that kind of pride is more grandiosity, or excessive pride. It’s the kind of excessive pride that seeks to humiliate others: Hubris followed by Nemesis, or pride going before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Jane Middelton-Moz, who writes on shame and guilt, believes an excessive amount of both are the cause of almost all dysfunction in families (humiliating people, especially children, can just as easily make them feel guilty as humiliated, although with guilt they seek to hurt themselves, and with humiliation, others).

There are people who do attempt to live as if they are independent of others. They only think they are, and the havoc they wreak in their lives and on the lives of others is incalculable.

They’re called “character disorders” and what all have in common are certain characteristics: it’s your fault, never mine; they believe people exist to serve them, and they try to do this by domination, manipulation and control. All of them are afflicted, in varying degrees, with Hubris, or Pride.

Whether it’s humiliation or undeserved guilt, seeking to impose it on others almost always comes back on you. What goes around comes around, to use a very perceptive American saying.

Why High School is Bad for Many People

2011-03-12T11:53:00.001-05:00

It’s been many years since I was in high school, but even back then it dawned on me that high school fulfilled the purpose it was designed for – and it was a purpose in which I and many other students were not included.

First and foremost, the purpose of high school is to produce athletes, and after that, to produce students who make high grades.

It is a sad fact that the word “athlete” means “dumb jock,” and for all practical purposes it’s one word: “dumbjock.” Very few of them could
make it as professional athletes, so they joined the military and then became police officers.

So, then, one of the main purposes of high school was to produce not-too-bright rule followers, ones with police and military mentalities. The athletes, far more than any other group, got the attention, the crowds, and the newspaper pictures and articles.

For some of them – the Al Bundys and the Hank Hills – being a high school athlete was the high point of their lives. After that, it was just treading water.

Those who studied and made high grades, while they did not get nearly the attention the athletes did, still got praise and awards. Every high school has its valedictorian. They may have had fairly high IQs, and good memorization and analytical skills, but lacked creativity and originality. I always considered them to be potential corporate drones, programmed to spend their lives in cubicles.

Those were the only two groups that high school is designed to create. Athletes and grinds. Sports entertainers, soldiers, police officers, and corporate drones. No one else ever received any kind of support, and as far as I can tell, still don’t.

There was another group, which was pretty much invisible. They were the nerds. I was friends with a few of them, and one I knew since I was six years old became a scientist. Others became engineers. But in high school they were invisible, spending their time hanging out with the chess or science club, and never being invited to parties, since most kids never knew they existed.

The group I belonged to was the party kids. In my day, they were called freaks, and we were not invisible. In fact, we had to keep an eye out for the police. I ended up in jail twice, innocent both times.

We had hair down past our shoulders, and spent our weekends cruising, going to parties, and drinking and smoking dope. It was in many ways a cross between “American Graffiti” and “Animal House.”

Very few of us were intellectual, and those of us who were (which I was and kept hidden), found an overlap with the nerds. That’s why I realized I was about two-thirds freak and one-third nerd. I could easily move between both worlds, and when I was a junior I would before school play chess with one nerd in a science lab.

Had I been raised in another part of the country, I would have ended up being a long-haired, dope-smoking, science-fiction-reading, Twinkie-eating, computer-programming freak-nerd. Since I was not raised in another part of the country, I was all of those things except a computer programmer, since we had no computers where I lived, unlike, say, in Seattle.

To this day I still find it amazing that our culture praises those who contribute little to the advancement of society – athletes and actors -- and ignores and in many ways denigrates those who contribute a great deal, e.g., scientists and engineers. You just about have to be in a wheelchair, like Stephen Hawking, before anyone knows who you are.

The media, politicians and researchers howl about our educational system’s inability to produce graduates proficient in math and science. Has it ever occurred to them the schools are not set up to produce critical thinking, educational excellence, and good character? That they are set up to produce anti-intellectual athletes and corporate worker bees?

What can be done to fix these problems? Our socialized schools are ossified with bureaucracy and red tape. How do you “reform” that? You can’t.

Schools can try to force students to take more classes in math and hard science (and will try), but when it comes right down to it, they’ll still be designed to produce athletes and valedictorians, not mathematicians, not engineers, not biologists, not chemists, not physicists.

Most of all, they are not designed to produce smart, truly educated people.

The only cure I see to this problem is closing down the public schools and allowing private schools to compete with one another. In the not so long ago, there were no public schools, and America produced people like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and George Washington.

With competition, public schools that imitate the public schools will go out of business, and that is a good thing. It’s no loss at all. Trial and error, and the creativity that comes with liberty and the free market, will quickly show what works and what does not work.

If there are schools for athletes or those who want to make high grades, it’s a wonderful thing. But there should also be schools for those who are not interested in such things, and have more of an interest in the life of the mind.

Not only will the students benefit from such schools, but, in the long run, so will society.

My First Novel

2011-03-11T12:23:00.002-05:00

"Shut up, maggot," evilly cackled the sadistic guard as he ground our hero's face into the dirt with his jackboot. "You're only alive because the State wants you alive!"

I'll write another one tomorrow.

The Shame of Multiculturalism

2011-03-10T10:58:00.004-05:00

The title is a pun.

Some years ago I was standing in line in a grocery store. The guy in front of me, who was at the counter, was some Asian guy with an accent, which meant he was an immigrant.

He had a cart full of soda cans. They must have been 200 of them. I was mystified why he had so many.

The check-out clerks, who were two men who must have been in their 70s, were having some problems with the cans. They were jumbled together in the cart, and many of them were different prices. They were having some difficulty getting everything straight.

Then this immigrant said something that amazed me.

“You’re treating me like I’m some kind of criminal,” he said bitterly. He said a few other things, all in the same vein.

I’ll be damned, I thought.

“You’re in the wrong country,” I told him. He looked at me and didn’t say anything, possibly because I was a foot taller than him and had 50 pounds on him. If he had been stupid enough to raise his hand he would have found himself unconscious on the floor. I’m sure he didn’t understand raising your hand to someone is assault (legally, assault is “I think he’s going to hit me” and battery is “He did hit me”). All I had to do is claim I thought he was going to hit me because he raised his hand and I would have had two clerks to support my claim. And probably store tapes.

“Those men are only doing their job, and you’re imaging things,” I said. “Don’t insult them again, because when you insult them, you insult me. I don’t like you, you’re a disgrace to my country, and you’d better not piss me off anymore than I’m pissed off. You do your business with them and then you leave.”

He didn’t say another word. He completed his business and then he left.

The clerks told me he came in occasionally and bought lots of soda. They knew he was upping the price and selling it in his little store, which had to be in a black area.

I knew what was going on in the mind of this guy. Asian cultures are more shame-based than Western cultures, which are more guilt-based. This deluded dwarf thought these clerks were trying to humiliate him. They weren’t. He was imaging the whole thing.

When you live in a shame-based culture, you think your problems are always caused by someone else. That’s why “saving face” is so important.

Arab culture is also shame-based, which is why there are stories of raped women being murdered by their families. They have “dishonored” the family and pride must be restored by expunging the sin. It doesn’t matter they were innocent victims. “Honor” is more important.

In a neighborhood I lived in many years ago there was a Palestinian man whose apartment was bugged by the FBI because they believed he was supporting terrorist groups.

When the FBI listened to the tapes one day, they found something horrifying. The man’s daughter, who was pudgy and unattractive, was dating black guys. The parents were humiliated.

So they killed her. I heard the tapes on TV. The mother held the daughter and the father stabbed her to death. “Die, die, my daughter.” Then screams, “Die, die.” Silence.

Of course, both father and mother spent the rest of their lives in prison.

Liberals and deluded libertarians fool themselves into believing all cultures are equal, which is why liberals believe in multiculturalism and “libertarians” think the free market (which has never existed) will trump the cultures of these people and unite everyone in an assumed love of SUVs, DVD players and Nikes. Oh, yeah – and Gameboys.

These people are as deluded as can be, thinking materialism will trump culture and religion.

Some people think, well, their children will grow up to be Americans. Then why do the children of Muslims in the West turn out to be radicals who go to the Middle East to fight?

You want to know why? Islam is a backward religion over a thousand years behind the West. These kids know this, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, and they’re humiliated. So they seek revenge by attacking the country and culture they were raised in.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once wrote that leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all. Unfortunately, the same applies to quite a few libertarians – the kind who think the free market is a panacea that will cure all.

The United States as Mad Scientist

2011-03-09T10:52:00.001-05:00

My clearest first memory of a Mad Scientist was in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Fighting Man of Mars.” I think I was about 11 when I read it, and I must have read it 20 times. I never got tired of it for at least two years.

The Mad Scientist went by the name of Phor Tak, and when he wasn’t cackling (and in the novel he really did cackle) he was inventing a weapon that would disintegrate metal but not flesh.

I sometimes can’t remember what I had for breakfast but I will always remember Phor Tak cackling “Heigh ho” and shrieking about getting revenge with his disintegrator ray gun.

The day came when I realized that all countries that become strong enough turn into empires – which the United has done – and they spend inordinate sums on developing weapons that some people just might consider insane. Heigh-ho!

Depleted uranium? Cluster bombs? What sort of fiendish intelligence came up with such things? They’re worse than what Phor Tak ever conceived.

Phor Tak was sane compared to what I see now. He just wanted revenge, something not so hard to understand. But bombing countries back to the Stone Age to improve them? Now that’s insane, if you define insane as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Phor Tak just wanted to attack and destroy the few people who did him wrong. But since WWII here is a partial list of the U.S. has done to the world, and what did any of these countries do to us?

Attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments.

Invaded some 20 nations.

Helped crush more than 30 populist movements which were fighting against oppressive regimes.

Provided support to brutal dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan, Zaire, Chile, Haiti, Nicaragua, Greece ,the Philippines, South Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and, of course, others.

I know why the U.S. has done the things it did, and still does – to “stabilize” the world,
to make it “safe,” to “put an end to evil.” Both Jesus and Aesop saw though that nonsense – both pointed out all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

What’s fun in fiction is often a horror in real life. I sure wouldn’t want to live on Mars – or as Burroughs called it, Barsoom. I wouldn’t want to live in Middle Earth, either.

The problem with being insane and not knowing you’re insane is that when you do horrible things to innocent people, and they get their revenge on you – these days called “blowback” – you never see it coming and don’t understand why it happened. You’re reduced to babbling nonsense about how they’re evil and attacked us for our goodness.

Now that I think about it, maybe I would rather live on Barsoom.

Meaning, Importance, Community

2011-03-08T10:58:00.001-05:00

Everyone seeks community according to their desires. Such community could be as small as two married people or two friends. Not many people can live totally alone as recluses. Those who are truly isolated are defined as schizoid, which is listed as a mental/emotional disorder.

It’s not just community people seek; there is also meaning and importance, the feeling of being truly alive, of having weight to their lives, of being connected to something larger than themselves.

People have to feel emotionally connected. Unfortunately, this can be a good or bad thing, depending on what they’re connected to. If only it was a good thing! But it’s not, because people are inherently flawed.

The word “religion” means “to tie together, to bind.” In other words, to connect. To have community, meaning and importance makes people feel truly feel alive, satisfied and peaceful. The true meaning of that word, “religion,” is why I believe everything is a religion, for good or bad.

Community is so important to that one of the worst things that can be done to people is to ostracize them, to “shun” them. To cast them out of their community. Is the purpose of this not to humiliate people, to take away the meaning and importance in their lives?

John D. McDonald wrote that people are “herd animals, social and imitative.” This fact is why people are so sensitive to being ostracized, ridiculed and humiliated.

One of the main, if not the main, destroyer of community is the State. When I say “State” I specifically mean the unholy marriage of big government, international corporations and international banks.

While I believe in the free market, I do not believe in “capitalism” as defined in the Marxist sense. That kind of “capitalism” is exploitative and abusive, and attempts (quite successfully, too) to use State power to impose a mass culture on the world. This is why you’ll find McDonalds and Wal-Mart in nearly every country of the world.

This marriage reminds me of the Ferengi, who see profit in peace – and profit in war. And international corporations and international banks (both creations of the State) find their profits as much in war as peace.

This imposition of a mass culture by the power of the State destroys communities, because there is an inverse relationship between the size of the State and society, i.e., community.

The larger the State grows, the more community – indeed, civilization – regresses. Ironically, those who believe in the State do so because they want everyone, in fact the whole world, to be one big family. What they believe, and what happens, is exactly opposite.

The State attempts to destroy those naturally-evolved communities – neighborhoods, families, religion – and replace them with its own concept of community and meaning. This invariably means worshipping the false idol of the State, and being absorbed into it.

As I’ve said before, the purpose of the State is to turn people into cogs in a machine. Organic cogs, as in “Star Trek’s” Borg, but nonetheless machines. And if the main inherent characteristics of the State can be described in one phrase, it’s the Seven Deadly Sins.

The end result of this absorption (which will not continue to its conclusion – it never does) would be a vanishingly small minority of people with all the political power and wealth (which they stole through political power) and nearly everyone else in the world impoverished.

In many ways, the purpose of the State is to destroy community and therefore to impoverish, humiliate and degrade everyone. Then, of course, comes payback from the oppressed – revenge.

It’s been the history of the world, without exception.

On Not Saving the World

2011-03-07T10:55:00.005-05:00

I don't think it's possible to "save" the world. I don't think it's a good idea to even try. Usually – perhaps always -- it involves wars, coercions, and other destructions, courtesy of the State. "Saving the world" is just a rationalization for trying to conquer it, usually so the State can try to remake things in its image. As both an Aesop's fable and the Bible points out, tyrants always call themselves benefactors.

The closest anyone can come to saving the world is to stop trying to club people into being good, and just leave them alone to work out their problems. Any help they want they can ask for. George Washington had it right in his Farewell Address: trade with the rest of the world, but otherwise stay out of its political problems. But certainly don't try to "save" it. Such good intentions, as the wise old saying teaches, are the road to Hell.

A current example of trying to save the world? Our attempt to "save" Iraq, in order to impose the left-wing, anti-American delusion of "democracy" on it. It has resulted in thousands of American deaths, and many more wounded, some permanently. It has cost tens of billions of dollars, with more to come. It has caused the deaths and wounding of tens of thousands of Iraqis. We even had a bunch of sadistic, dim-witted white-trash hillbillies making piles of naked prisoners -- and taking pictures of it. That's saving Iraq , all right. God forbid we try to save the rest of the world using the same methods.

However, I think it's possible to save individuals -- family and friends. What Edmund Burke called those "little platoons" of family and neighborhood. A famous saying about this is, "No man hath greater love than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends." There's not a word in that saying about laying down your life for country (which almost always means the State) or "society" (whatever that is) -- just your friends (and that also means your family). Excluded is "saving" the world, which always backfires anyway.

Saving friends and family is something good artists understand, even if only intuitively. The inability to save the world is something politicians, court intellectuals and "You fight and I'll watch" armchair warriors don't, no matter how many times reality smacks them in their faces. Because of this, I'll pay more attention to an accurate movie than to some pompous twit with three names who has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard or Yale.

The last movie I watched that dealt with the ability to save a few people, and the inability to save the world, was Donnie Darko. This movie, which has become something of a DVD cult classic, works on several levels: it's a science-fiction alternate/parallel universe story, a brutal but accurate satire on public high schools, and a tale about a (maybe) disturbed teenage boy redeemed by love.

The satire I can write about without spoiling the plot, but not the rest of the movie. Public high school is portrayed as a dungeon. Kids snort coke in the halls and carry switchblades. One good teacher is fired; another tells Donnie he cannot discuss religion because "I could lose my job." The principal is a clueless bureaucrat ("We're losing these kids," a new teacher tells him. "I'm sorry you've failed," he responds, as oblivious to reality as a stuffed bird under glass.). Another of the teachers is a human version of fingernails on a blackboard. The writer and director, Richard Kelly, said these things were based on his experiences in high school in the '80s.

Now I'll have to spoil some of the plot to explain the rest of the film. It doesn't matter, because the movie doesn't make much sense with just one viewing. It makes the best sense if you read the fictional book (available online) mentioned in the movie -- Roberta Sparrow's "The Philosophy of Time Travel."

Donnie is a teen-age boy, about 16 years old (the movie never gives his age), who has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. I wonder about that, though. Mostly he is highly intelligent, and has the added ability to see all the emperors who have no clothes. Put a kid like that in a bad public high school, and is it any wonder he's considered bonkers?

Here's where things get really weird. Donnie is in bed one night when he hears a voice. He goes outside to find a six-foot-tall black rabbit (named Frank, and he’s obviously some very strange version of a pooka) waiting to talk to him. As he's talking to Frank, a jet engine falls through the roof of the house into Donnie's bedroom. Had he not been outside talking to the Frank, he would have been killed.

Here's where I have to spoil the plot for everyone. When Donnie got out of bed, the universe split off into a parallel universe. Everything that happens after Donnie gets out of bed is in a parallel (or as it's called, a Tangent) universe. The problem with the Tangent Universe is that it's not supposed to exist, and unless Donnie (and only Donnie) can merge it back into the Primary (or original) universe, the world will be destroyed.

Yet when Donnie is informed the world will be destroyed, he says, "Cool." He doesn't care, because it means nothing to him. Why, then, does he spend the rest of the movie trying to make things right and merge the Tangent Universe back into the Primary one?

He does it to save a girl whom he has just met, with whom he has fallen in love. Unless he merges the two universes, she dies. At the end of the movie, after the universe is put right, Donnie is back in bed again, with the jet engine falling toward him. He doesn't get out of bed, because if he does, the Tangent Universe splits off again, and the whole mess starts anew. The woman he loves will die. He'd rather die than her. Yet, for the first time in his life, he is at peace. It's the first time in the movie he smiles.

Donnie's died to save one woman, out of his love for her, not because of some non-existent "love" for humanity.

That is the main message of the movie -- you can save a few people, especially the ones you love, but you cannot save the world. Change has to be done one person at a time, not the whole world at one time. The "whole world at one time" is the fantasy of lunatics, whose hopeless attempts at change always involve war and destruction.

Even though Donnie technically does "save" the world, it's still a mess, consumed with violence and lies. It's not "saved" at all, except in the physical sense. The only thing truly saved is his girlfriend. For that matter, Donnie is also saved from his problems by his love for her. And even though Donnie doesn't survive (at least in our fallen universe, the Primary one), it is still very much an uplifting film.

It's a shame that an obscure film-maker in his first film has more of an understanding of reality than the crackpots who almost always make their way to the top of the dungheap known as the State.

Advanced degrees, decades of experience and high salaries (on the public dole, of course) -- who needs them? The track record of those kinds of people is ghastly, with bloody wreckage strewn across thousands of years. They'd be better off -- and us, too -- if they bought an $25 DVD player and watched at least one funny, poignant, perceptive -- and wise -- movie.

On Forgiveness

2011-03-07T10:54:00.005-05:00

That archetypical dysfunctional family, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, explains how evil and then murder came into the world. That myth covers the relationships between self-consciousness, the knowledge of good and evil, shame, humiliation, projection (scapegoating), envy, hate, the desire for revenge, and murder.

Yet it doesn’t cover forgiveness, which breaks what I call the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. That didn’t happen until the New Testament, in the sayings of Jesus. There’s very little forgiveness in that festival of hate, cruelty and slaughter known as the Old Testament.

The dynamic, as I see it, is this: feelings of humiliation/shame lead to the desire for revenge, leading to murder. It’s a cycle, one that societies try to break by the creation of justice systems, so that people don’t seek revenge themselves. Not that they don’t try anyway.

Forgiveness breaks that cycle, stops it in its tracks. If it’s not broken, people end up as Robin Casarjian wrote in her book, Forgiveness, “…[they] get lost in anger, resentment, guilt, and shame… [become] emotionally stuck and disempowered,”

One of the more unfortunate things about the New Testament (and any translation) is its mistranslation. There is an old saying, and it’s a true one: all translators are liars.

The phrase, “You must turn away from your sins” is misleading. It’s better translated, “You must change your heart and mind.” The word used is metanoia, a Greek word meaning a radical transformation of your heart and mind (maybe heart/mind is better).

For that matter, the word “sin” comes from the word hamartia, which comes from archery and means “to miss the mark.” The admonition, “You have sinned greatly” is better translated as “You have missed the mark,” and that translation exists in modern versions of the Bible.

In other words, to forgive actually requires a metanoia. And as we all know, it’s exceedingly difficult. Who can forgive someone who has committed a horrendous crime against your or your own? That’s the problem.

Forgiving something that happens to you personally, especially if it’s really bad, is the hardest, sometimes verging on impossible. The real problem, though, is the desire for revenge on a mass scale.

I use the example of 9-11. Contrary to the delusions of Bush et al the attack wasn’t because we are Good and our attackers were Evil. It was revenge against us for the United States supporting repressive regimes in the Middle East for the last 60 years.

Muslims in the Middle East felt humiliated by the United States and sought revenge on us. Now we’re seeking revenge on them, and we’re been in two wars for longer than we were in World War II. It’s the Cycle of Murder and Revenge.

I don’t exactly forgive our attackers for 9-11. If I had my way, I’d kick every Muslim out of the Western world. But I understand why they did it, which requires cultivating empathy -- which I believe requires imagination. There is no anger in me, just an understanding of why they did what they did - and understanding something is pretty close to forgiving it (“Forgive us out trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”).

I certainly wouldn’t have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, leading to the deaths and wounding of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis. That’s a lot of dead people for seeking a revenge that won’t work.

Who do I blame these problems upon? More than anything else, the U.S. government, humiliating, abusing and exploiting the weaker countries of the world (try reading John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hitman sometimes).

Do I hate the government? No. Why? “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Not knowing what they do…World War II was essentially caused by the Treaty of Versailles, and the crushing reparations against Germany (no more guilty in WWI than England) that lead to Germany’s humiliation and the desire for revenge against the victors.

I’ve read estimates that the number of people lost to wars in the 20th Century ranges from 177 million to 200 million. And it not almost all war about feelings of humiliation leading to revenge.

As bad as serial killers are, and rapists, and all the terrible things that people do to people (and it is oh-so-hard to forgive these things when they happen to you) they are but a drop in the ocean compared to the unending wars of mass murder and mass revenge that plague humanity.

Affecting the Inside from the Outside

2011-03-06T14:04:00.001-05:00

It is a curious and not altogether beneficial fact of life it appears we have more unpleasant and therefore dangerous emotions than pleasant ones.

Most if not all of the trouble in the world is caused by the Seven Deadly Sins. Most people can name some of them if not all of them. How many can name the Seven Heavenly Virtues? Very few.

The capacity to feel all those things, pleasant or unpleasant, is inborn in us, and the fact those unpleasant ones are part of our make-up is why all religions consider humanity to be decidedly imperfect. Fallen, to use a description common to Christianity.

Envy, hate, greed, excessive pride…we’re born with the potential for all of them. What “actualizes” them, though, is what comes from the outside to the inside.

I have been unable to find a word to describe people being affected from what comes from the outside of them to the inside. “Feelings” describes what we feel on the inside; “emotion,” what we show. Yet there is no word, as far as I know, to describe what comes from the outside of us to affect us on the inside.

I thought the ancient Greeks, with their usual perspicuity, would have a word, but so far have been unable to find it.

Yet how we are affected on the inside by what comes from the outside is a profoundly important concept, especially when it comes to shame.

Guilt is when you violate an internal standard; shame is based on what others think of you. The Greeks did notice that respect – aidos – is the opposite of shame. If people are respected from the beginning, there will be little shame in them.

Shaming people when there is no need to shame them is a horrendous problem. The Greeks noticed that when they made Hubris – shaming and humiliating people – followed by Nemesis – retribution. Shaming people is fated to be followed by revenge.

They considered this shaming and humiliation of people to be so unacceptable they banned it from the theater as obscene.

The ancient Hebrews noticed the problem, too when they had Cain murder Abel because he felt shamed and humiliated – the first recorded murder in history.

All of us are affected by what others do to us because none of us are “independent.” Our “selves” are interdependent with other people. You can’t be a father or mother without children; you can’t be a husband or wife without a spouse. You can’t have a “mother” or “father” self,” or a “husband” or “wife” self without someone else. We don’t have one unified self, although there is something in us that gives us the illusion we do.

Although it is certainly not cut-and-dried, or unalterable cause-and-effect, the fact remains it is overwhelming true that when people are disrespected, humiliated and shamed long enough, they will react with violence – revenge.

This revenge includes not only murder, as exemplified by Cain and Abel, but mass murder, as in 9-11, which was simple revenge. You might call it Cain and Abel writ large.

This problem with lack of respect – or humiliating and shaming people – followed by revenge is going to get worse. The bad economy exacerbates it, since many employers think it’s acceptable to mistreat employees. Then one day some guy (and it usually is a guy) walks in with a pistol and decides to go out in a blaze of glory, taking several people with him.

And what happens? The talking heads in the media pontificate but never have a clue. The employers are similarly clueless.

The Greeks understand. So did the Hebrews. So did the ancient Christians. But today? Some, but not many.

The State Degenerates our Humanity

2011-03-06T13:55:00.002-05:00

I am not one to believe our physical, emotional and intellectual development is either all genetic or else all environmental. I’m not even one to say we’re half and half. Nor will I say we’re 60/40, as in “We’re 60% genetic and 40% environmental.”

Believing our development is strictly based on genes is a belief in a determinism so complete it can lead to horrors such as Nazism, with its insistence that some people are born so inferior they have to be eradicated. Claiming our development is completely due to the environment can lead to other horrors such as Communism, because of its belief all of us are infinitely plastic and can be molded into gods – once you get rid of the people who cannot be molded.

This nature/nurture controversy has led to many furious debates not only in the past, but today. These arguments will exist in the future. There is a third alternative, one that I believe is much more fruitful than the simplistic view of “We’re mostly one or the other.”

The third one is known as fetal programming, which I heard about it several years ago, but hadn’t given much thought until I recently met a woman who has a Masters degree. Okay, lots of women have Masters degrees. But one brother also has one, in Mathematics. Another brother is a TV, stage and film actor. Then there is the sister who designs jewelry and sells it. I told her, “You do know of course the existence of your family is nearly impossible.”

She told me she came from a big happy family, and that got me to thinking about fetal programming. In short, and oversimplified, fetal programming is the theory that hormones released by the mother during pregnancy have a very powerful effect on the fetus.

My view, long before I had heard of fetal programming, is that a happy pregnant mother will release “good” hormones which wash the developing fetus, and an unhappy mother will release “bad” hormones. Her happiness in turn is dependent on her husband’s happiness, which of course will affect her. His happiness will be strongly influenced by a job he likes, and making a good living from it.

In other words, a happy family will create babies that from conception are the best they can be in body and brain, because of the optimum influence of hormones.

Here is a quote I ran across about fetal programming, and darn if I can remember where I got it: “A comprehensive number of epidemiological and animal studies suggests that prenatal and early life events are important determinants for disorders later in life. Among them, prenatal stress (i.e. stress experienced by the pregnant mother with impact on the fetal ontogeny) has programming effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis, brain neurotransmitter systems and cognitive abilities of the offspring.”

In a nutshell, if you want happy, smart, healthy, talented kids, make sure the parents are happy. There are other very important determinants, such as nutrition and the environment after the children are born. Conversely, it’s not hard to create unhappy, not-so-bright kids prone to various sicknesses.

What I find disturbing is the destructive influence of the government on fetal development. I don’t find it such a bad thing if the government would confine itself to telling mothers to watch what they eat when pregnant, and to not smoke or drink, but apparently government officials don’t have the slightest clue about how destructive the government can be to families and children when it goes far beyond those simple commonsense things.

Here’s what I mean: wages in the United States stopped going up in 1973 and have been flat since. In many cases, they have been declining. As hard as it is to believe today, at one time a high-school graduate of a husband, on 40 hours a week and on his salary alone, could provide a nice house, a car, and raise several children with his wife. Those days have been gone so long most people don’t even know they ever existed.

Here’s an example of those days long gone: I know a retired man who bought his middle-class house in 1969 for $14,000. He was a high school drop-out and worked all his life as a carpenter. In 1969 he was making $14,000 a year, which meant his house cost one year’s salary. His mortgage payment was $141 a month, for 30 years. Try to find something similar today.

These days, both husband and wife have to work to maintain a middle-class existence – and they’d better have graduate degrees. When a baby is born it is, as soon as possible, given to a day-care center so the mother can go back to work. Then it’s sent to public school, unless the parents decide to homeschool. That means the wife has to quit work, which means they’d better go live in a cabin in a rural area and grow a garden…which is not such a bad idea.

The ogre Karl Marx and his demented modern-day followers (say, the buffoon Van Jones) consider destroying families and babies being raised by strangers to be commendable, but one thing they failed to predict is that in less than ten years we have had over 80 public-school shootings.

These shootings now have a shorthand label, and everyone knows what it means: “going postal.” It not only happens in schools, but workplaces, and even in public.

One of the reasons why these shootings happen? In two words, unending stress. People end up with adrenal glands the size of golf balls.

Then we have the high school dropout rate. What is it in some places? Forty percent? Yet I’ve read of high school principals in such districts making $100,000 a year. You might as well burn the money. It’s just tax money, anyway.

The State, in its attempt to “help” families and the economy, has instead damaged them, sometimes severely. The economy is badly damaged, pace court intellectuals, and has been for over 35 years. This damage was, and is being done, by government interference.

In attempting to help families, the State has damaged them. Just as it has damaged, and sometimes destroyed, neighborhoods, towns, and cultures. Grotesquely, the people who promote these policies can never see the bad effects, and instead convince themselves there are only good ones.

Is it not possible the unending stress that affects people also affects the fetus, right from the moment of conception? That it affects body, brain and character, throughout its entire life?

I have wondered for a long time what happened to the polymaths we had in the past. In our time, the only one I can think of offhand is Freeman Dyson. Where are our Thomas Jeffersons, our Ben Franklins, our Adam Smiths, our Isaac Newtons? Is the loss of these people because of environmental causes, or genetic causes? Or is there a third, better, explanation for it?

Back in the 1930s the dentist Weston Price travelled the world studying “primitive” cultures. He found some very disturbing things. When people ate “modern” processed food the children ended up with bad eyesight, crooked teeth and other life-long ailments. When they did not eat processed food their children had none of these problems.

Price called his book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.” Now, it looks as if this one should be written: “Stress and Character and Intellectual Degeneration: What the Government Does to Us and our Children.” What exactly are we dealing with now? PTSD right from the moment of conception?

Some fetuses are of course constitutionally stronger than others. But what about those who are not?

Utopia is not an option. But a better world is, and a better country. If the U.S. had not strayed from its original path, we’d have a small government, stable money, a growing economy, and many high-paying jobs. And stronger families.

Instead, we have a massive and ever-growing federal government, appalling deficits, unending wars with the attendant lies and propaganda, inflated money that has made the dollar worth a penny compared to its value a little over 100 years ago, an unemployment rate of over 10%, and the hemorrhage of tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our wealth to our enemies in the Middle East and Asia (it was Saudi Arabians who flew those planes on 9-11, not Iraqis).

None of us are islands. We’re all connected to something. We are part of families, nuclear and extended; neighborhoods, and the other things I listed -- towns, cultures, countries, economies. These things should exist to support the most important thing, the family. For the most part, they do not, contrary to Hillary Clinton and her imaginary village.

Conservatives and libertarians are right in their beliefs that things should be bottom up, from what Burke called our “little platoons.” Those who believe things should be top-down, from the government down to you, have it exactly backwards. They are the ones trying to degenerate and destroy everything, including children. And, as far as I’m concerned, fetuses.

The Bible (which I see as excellent practical wisdom even more than religion) tells us the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. If only it was not so.

Love is a Drug

2011-03-06T13:53:00.003-05:00

Not only is a love a drug, many things are drugs, excluding drugs, of course. Speed is a drug, that is, going fast, not the amphetamine.

Because love is a drug, it can be used by those who consciences are impaired to manipulative people. There is even a term for it: “love bombing.” It means simply overwhelming the person with affection. Cults do it, which is why they can be so effective.

Love bombing works in personal relationships, too. The people who use it are very often predators, who drug their prey with “love, admiration, validation, affection, flattery, laser beam attention, responsiveness and sexual and non-sexual touching.” They hang onto your every word and create a sense of instant rapport, connection and intimacy. These abusers play to your ego needs.

I tried to cover all the bases. If I left anything out, it doesn’t matter. You get the picture.

Many people are seduced by this kind of behavior.

I got the term “emotional bullshit” from a book of the same name: Emotional Bullshit, by Carl Alasko, PhD. He’s the one who came up with the Toxic Trio, although denial, delusion and blame are already well-known.

Denial says: There is no problem. Everything is okay. You’re exaggerating. The issue doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant. (So I don’t have to change anything.)
Delusion says: Let me tell you what’s really true. Don’t believe what you see. Believe me. (The imaginary world I’ve created works for me.)

Blame says: You’re the problem. I was forced to do it; I had no choice. Or, it just happened. Destiny willed it. (No one understands my true motives. Your accusations only make things worse)

I knew a woman who I suspected (and still do) was a borderline, meaning Borderline Personality Disorder. She was always right; the guy was always wrong. She blamed her problems on men. She imagined things. She demonstrated denial, delusion and blame. She had no idea she was doing it.

I’ve also found: listen to your feelings. If you feel something is wrong, then there is. In other words, if there are red flags, pay attention to them.

The State, Hubris and Obscenity

2011-03-04T11:10:00.003-05:00

Richard Weaver once pointed out the original sense of the word “obscenity” meant something that “should be enacted off-strange, because it is unfit for public exhibition.”

He wrote “they included intense suffering and humiliation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from the theater.”

The Greeks definition of obscenity also fits in with their definition of Hubris. For all practical purposes, they are the same thing.

Hubris is the goddess of “arrogance, moral blindness, insolence, wanton violence.” It’s followed by Nemesis, the goddess of fate and retribution.

The original meaning of Hubris was to humiliate or shame someone. The worst way to do it was in public. It was considered so offensive it was deemed obscene, which is why it was banned from the stage True obscenity, then, is degrading, humiliating or shaming someone in public.

Shaming, humiliating and degrading someone, especially in public, is followed by revenge -- which, in a word, is Nemesis.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent some 35 years interviewing inmates imprisoned for murder and brutal assaults, when he asked them why they committed their crimes, always heard the same answer: “He dissed me” or the prisoner’s wife, girlfriend, children, parents, friends.

One day he realized what he was hearing over and over was the story of Cain and Abel: feelings of humiliation followed by revenge. The shortest and most accurate definition of revenge I’ve heard is the attempt to replace shame with pride.

The Greeks not only considered Hubris the worst crime; they considered it the only crime, since it is the basis of all other crimes. At one crime Christianity understood this: scholars placed Pride (another name for Hubris) ahead of all other sins and made it the only true crime, the mother and father of all others.

When it comes to those who run the State - corporations, “government” and banks -- they can never seem to figure out that shaming, humiliating, abusing and exploiting other countries leads to blowback against the United States. That was what 9-11 was – revenge against the U.S. because of its 60 years of supporting oppressive regimes in the Middle East. It wasn’t, as the terminally confused George Bush believed, because they were the Evil Ones attacking us for our goodness.

When it comes to history there is only one story, always repeated: the attempt of the State to expand its power until it absorbs everything -- and the people who have captured the State mostly do it because of their lust for money, but always operate under the guise of humanitarianism. This expansion invariably means people suffering and being humiliated in public. Then, always, comes revenge.

In other words, the expansion of government always results in the expansion of obscenity – shaming, humiliating, abusing and exploiting people, both abroad and at home. Unfortunately, the “modern” minds of many do not understand common-sense concepts noticed thousands of years ago, in more cultures than one..