Watching The Detectives

I’ll never believe that there’s not a human mind behind the bots. Bots are but tools, and tools can never exceed their function. Granted, this human mind behind it all may be fallible. It might be benign or outright evil. The information gathering on American citizens that is taking place as we speak is unprecedented. The soon-to-be required disclosures of moneys contributed to political candidates by anyone in one's employ before one can be considered for a government contract is just one such example. Another is the proposed questionnaire for people who are applying for a passport. (Who, but the very young, can possibly remember every job one has ever held and one's boss’s name and telephone#; the addresses of every place one might ever have lived; details about family members; people present at one’s birth, etc.?)

If you can’t fill it out, you might be denied a passport. If you fill it out wrong, you can go to jail. It’s all at the bot’s discretion (or so they’d have you believe). What is the purpose of all this information gathering? For one thing, it may make you aware that you yourself aren’t all that sure about your own birth. How then can you be so sure about the birth of another? So let’s just declare everybody that’s already here ‘legal’, and the immigration problem is solved, even without having to resort to using bad-ass words like ‘amnesty’. It also conjures up visions of 'Berlin' walls (to keep people in).

I have nothing but contempt for our present leadership. Republicans don’t have a clue of what they’re up against – or they’re complicit.

There are bots at work on Facebook too. I find, any comment I try to post using the names ‘Obama’ or ‘Soros’ is immediately scrubbed from the site. The bots know their job very well. But there’s someone behind it all who tells them what to do.

‘After the next great war, the picture of Obama’s swearing in (as U.S. president) will be the second one – not the first – the one that does not include the Bible’. – censored by FB.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Facebook Lynching

In today’s America, every idea openly expressed that does not strictly conform to a government-approved template opens a cut that bleeds. I guess we still have it better than the people in some countries where they come after you in the dead of night with handcuffs, knives and guns.

In America, they de-friend you on Facebook. Make no mistake, this is our version of jihadists slitting throats – and, in some ways, even more hurtful. (Drew, Steven, Dawn, Tom, Jim, Linda - you know who you are.) You might say that those who would do this were never real friends in the first place. And you might be right. I still see any number of people from my high school and college days who never managed to shed their ‘hippy’ mindset, though most have since washed and upgraded their wardrobes. Most are competent in their professions, conservative in the management of their assets, and responsible toward their children and/or clients. When it comes to politics, however, we are apt to disagree.

I know I’ve changed my stance. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. I feel I’ve grown. At the same time, I do not hold it against anyone who might still be wed to the Leary trope. I’ve even been known to play along should anyone launch into his/her obligatory anti-Bush rant. It would never occur to me to leave feeling insulted, much less with the burden of murderous intent.

Since Obama’s election, we’ve become more divided than ever. This is a fact. I see it in my own life. As the popularity of my blog increases and the news of it reaches into various corners of the web, the defriending has begun. Some have even gone so far as to change their e-mail addresses. This points – not so much to what I am saying, but – to a growing insecurity on the part of the offended. I won’t go so far as proclaiming them ‘revolutionaries’. I know of no one who is. Most live respectable lives. They mean well. It’s just that they can’t seem to let go of something they obviously hold as sacred; that, at one time, may have defined their youth. It’s precious to them as an old, faded image on a photograph might be.

The realization that the world has changed, threatens the sacred nostalgia of the sixties and seventies. Even more ominous is the suspicion that it hasn’t exactly worked out. They might even be finding themselves without a job with no good prospects in sight. But they are likely to blame themselves – or Republicans. I find it telling that Charles Manson has finally broken his silence after 20 years, just to speak in support of our president’s 'global warming' initiatives. By doing so, he closes ranks with the likes of bin Laden, Castro, Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Mugabe - all of whom say essentially the same thing. One might have though all these silent years had produced a rarified wisdom beyond contrition; which just goes to show that a common monastic discipline is no guarantee of acumen. It’s illuminating to see just who all belongs to the active sponsorship of this baseless farce.

It’s never easy to fess up and say we’ve been wrong. It feels much more heroic to double down, even if it means going down with the ship. Many of the people I’ve known are quite willing – now, in the autumn of life – to take it all down with them. It fits in well with the label that’s come to be attached to us: the ‘me generation’. Narcissism is a tough nut to crack and I don’t really blame anyone who is unable to do it. (By the way, did you happen to hear that the author of “Three Cups of Tea” neglected to label his bestselling book as ‘fiction’? These people have become so desperate, even to the point of being dangerous – especially to themselves, I tell you.)

The other day, I saw something new at our local Whole Foods Market. They were selling emu eggs. These are large, dark-green spheres, each one said to be capable of making a six or seven egg omelet. They cost about $30 a piece. I was warned that it is quite difficult to crack them. I immediately thought of the baby emus whose first task in life is to manage their escape. I’m quite sure not all of them make it.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Peter Koelliker replied to comment from John Batchelor

I take it you have watched Trump’s show. I have not. Therefore, your references to his show escape me. I base my assumptions on what I do see: Trump Towers in New York and Trump Casino in Atlantic City.

Given our current economic conditions, his claim that he still has enough money to manage a presidential campaign also speaks volumes. In addition, I hear what he says. I have heard nothing, since embarking on his quest for the presidency, with which I disagree. What he said previously, is of no importance to me since it was not said as one who would hoodwink the public in a political sense. From now on, I will pay attention.
-----------------------------------------------
It is now generally accepted (mostly by conservatives) that raising taxes does not necessarily translate into more revenue for the government; that, in fact, what the government collects is likely to stay the same as a percentage of GDP no matter what the tax rate is. This is not fantasy. It can be documented by historical example. Therefore, the emphasis should be on growth.

If our problem is that government does not have enough money to pay its bills – as we are told – then lowering taxes across the board would seem to be a significant part of the solution. Yet current policy makers insist that we go in the opposite direction.

There should not even be an argument about this. The same percentage taken out of a smaller pie will result in reduced intake by the treasury and vice versa. The fact that we cannot agree means that something else is at stake: social engineering in the form of the redistribution of American’s wealth as to achieve total equality (both domestic and globally).

Our politicians are loath to tell us of their true intent; our universities fail to educate. So we are sent out into the street to protest the mere possibility that our neighbor makes a dollar more a week than we do. This is considered ‘unfair’. Everyone should have the same after all. The next step is for all of us to start wearing matching uniforms.

It bugs me no end when politicians use this canard to bat around. Why don’t they just tell us outright that they want to make us all the same, discard all pretense of actually balancing the budget and raise the debt limit to infinity? This way, all of us would be cured of the compulsion to compete and concentrate on simply staying alive.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
“How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here”

--Pink Floyd

Circuses and Rights During Wartime

Interesting how Congress has been reduced to gimmicks. Interesting how appearances are used to overshadow fundamental differences that are said to exist between Republicans and Democrats. Perhaps the lesson here is that there really is no difference; that it’s all a part of the same dysfunctional, irrelevant stew - or worse. The only voice that matters is POTUS’. Without cut-out POTUS, no one would be there, dressed in finery, kissing and hugging; beaming and patting backs. It’s a carnival barker‘s paradise put on every year for the amusement of themselves, and so-called political pundits. “…and let’s all meet afterwards for drinks.”

The public remains the foil. All that will be said and done will be tailored to appeal to TV couch potatoes. Remind that last year’s theme was ‘focusing on jobs‘ (like a laser). What happened to all those jobs? Fool me once…

The most memorable of these presidential high-performances (in my lifetime, at least) was back when LBJ announced he won’t be running for a second full term. Now that was news! It sent shock waves throughout the nation. Dare we hope for anything of substance?
------------------------------------------------------------
Make no mistake about it, yesterday’s bombing of the airport in Moscow was an attack on all of us. We diminish what happened when we ask why? The fact is, we do not understand the motives of terrorists. In last night’s interview with Stephen F. Cohen the word ‘Islam’ was mentioned exactly once.

The word ‘terrorist’ explains nothing - no motive; no philosophical or historical underpinnings - only nihilism. Seeking explanations under such conditions inevitably brings us back to ourselves. We are at fault - the enduring mantra of narcissists.

There are infinite explanations for why this may be so. The most plausible both start with ‘p’: ‘poverty’ and ‘politics’. There are infinite reasons that argue against both. This whole terror thing has become a (war) dance. The terrorists lead; we follow. We screen ourselves before getting on an airplane. The terrorists change tactics. They target innocents waiting for loved ones to arrive. We increase security perimeters. The terrorist target public places. We put up cameras on street corners. They send mail bombs consisting of wires, then powders, then liquids…

There is no winning this. We must be persuaded to lead. We must fight fire with fire. We must do as they do. Only, we must be smarter about it. We must lead. It does us no good to chuckle about Mr. Putin’s embarrassment as he chuckles about ours. We’re all in this together. We must work together - not celebrate momentary relief that it wasn‘t us (this time).

This is war. All is fair in love and war. In war, conventional niceties go out the window. We must do what they do. We must blow up their stuff. We must not play footsies with nations who sponsor terrorism - as Putin continues to do wit Iran. We cannot continually appease and change the language to reflect a fiction.

We must begin to close their mosques, bar them from our shores and send home those who are already here. Sure, it’s unfair. Many good people will suffer inconvenience. But aren’t we inconvenienced by them. Never once have anyone of us heard anything even close to condemnation from their side. Their silence makes them accomplices. Change must come from within. Perhaps once they are back home, they will change things. Why is the onus always on us - to change?

Muslim countries routinely attack Christians and Jews. In some, Christians and Jews are prohibited from even being there. Fine. It’s their turf. I know many families who wont allow smoking or guns in their homes. It is their right.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Nothing Left To Cut

Must be nice for grown, well-dressed men to sit around a long shiny table and wax importantly about worn swatches of their academic expertise, trying to get all the pieces to fit. No matter how much cutting they do, I can guarantee, they will come up short. We’re essentially broke, but let no one even whisper it. They are now down to trading IOU’s in the burnt patches. We’ve long since scraped economic and political bedrock; there’s basically no where left to go.

A while ago the bankers tried the same thing. And it blew up in their faces - as it should.

It’s like having entered a cul-de sac. Only the turning radius of the car we’re driving does not permit us to turn around. The only way out is in reverse.

It’s always difficult to give a shape to something. It’s even harder to abort. There are always egos involved. Sometimes a lost driver will drive hundreds of miles before admitting he had taken a wrong turn back in Omaha. All the issues on the table right now involve destruction - everyone is crying out to be saved. And there are only so many lifeboats.

There are basically two camps at work here. One seeks to promote the illusion that nothing is impossible - that gravity can be reversed; that ice can be made not to melt or water not to freeze. (Stranger things have happened: Just this week, NASA scientists announced they had found a life form that lives on arsenic.) The other seeks to return to an acceptance of traditional cures - like bloodletting. The cynic says it’s already gone to far, that nothing we can do will fix it; that the patient will die in any case. So, let’s just grant him a pain-free passing.

Every one of these points is debatable. Time, however, remains the rub - and it’s egos that time has a habit of suffocating. We should have thought of all that before - while there still was time. Not too long ago it seemed a good idea to kill the economy in favor of votes; as it was a good idea to kill God. Now, we find that all the things we’ve killed off - all that lies scattered in ruins around us - still has the capacity to sting.

The only answer, of course, is to keep cutting; to stay abreast of the rapidly spreading disease. Often, taking a knife to a cancer has the effect of making it more aggressive. …we cut more and more until there is nothing left to cut.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Kanthapura

The hard Left is not only anti-American; they’ve now ratcheted up the stakes and revealed themselves as being anti-human as well: Anything non-human must be preserved and protected at the expense of individuals. To the Left, humans are evil interlopers on a near-perfect planet. It is no wonder that they support abortion, eugenics and land grabs.

There’s something sick in this and the sickness has now spilled over into our politics. Except, they think we’re sick as well. We are often all too quick to accept their premise, after which point they’ve already won the argument.

Environmentalism has become as potent as Islam. When one flies internationally these days, the screen on the back of the seat in front of you shows the aircraft’s progress across the oceans and over the landmasses. The maps fail to show borders. Often there’s a disclaimer, saying that the maps are non-political; that national borders are deliberately omitted. There are so many border disputes at the moment, the airlines thought it best to avoid the issue entirely. Instead, only the locations of towns are given. These then can be seen as city states while the land around them is a kind of no-man’s land - fly-over country - to be randomly allotted to service the cities as is deemed appropriate. Nations are no longer willing to defend national borders. And indeed, the whole concept of national borders is rapidly growing irrelevant.

What is growing in importance is ideology. And ideology knows no borders. It has long been a dream of the Left to erase all borders and become global. The promise is peace. Unfortunately, conflict will never disappear. There will always be killing. In fact, in the absence of borders, wars may become even more virulent and deadly - as in civil war; pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, etc.

How does one fight such a war?

I have recently read “Kanthapura”, a novel by Raja Rao. In it he describes a winning strategy. He details how Gandhi’s influence on the grass roots built an invincible army against which the Crown could not win. The secret was peaceful resistance - with an emphasis on ‘peaceful’.

Most trouble in the world originates with ego. Take ego out of the equation, and one literally becomes invincible. This is a lesson the Tea Parties should take to heart, for the fight is drawing near. As the concept of borders crumbles and the emphasis shifts to ideology, the great armies that have so heroically defended us in the past become increasingly useless. We will need to depend largely on ourselves for survival. Rao’s Gandhi may have shown us the way.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

The Meaning of 'Destroy'

This backyard exercise by the president reminds me of French film, “Joyeux Noël” (‘05) about the WWI Christmas truce of December 1914, depicted through the eyes of French, Scottish and German soldiers. One minute the adversaries are cowering in trenches, shelling the b’Jesus out of each other; the next, they are singing Christmas songs, drinking and eating together; and, later, burying their dead. It was based on a true story and had a tear-jerker of a plot, showing the futility of war. Naturally, liberals liked it and wondered why the whole world could not be (re)painted in sad and pretty colors.

POTUS is waging a PR blitz throughout the country. People say they like him personally; they just don’t like his policies. This is a cop-out and a win for a president who wants to destroy our nation. It will gain him more time to do it.

Let me just take a moment to define the word ’destroy’. ’Destroy’ in war means killing and breaking things; in politics it means rendering the opposition impotent. It does not mean change, improve, or compromise. It does not mean win-win. It does not mean working together as a unit to make things better for all.

To destroy means tearing down a house for the purpose of building a mosque in its place. Destroyers have no regard for the destroyed. If the destroyed happen to still be alive, their utility is exploited; they are enslaved. My grandfather was a medical doctor in his time. When the Russians killed all others, they spared his life only because they needed his services. He became a slave. Not only black people have had the singular experience of having been slaves.

I have seen enough to know that Obama does not like any part of this country that elected him to the highest office in the land. Perhaps the ultimate fault for this situation - and it is a situation - lies with the people who could not think far enough out of the box to anticipate 9/11. And with those who elected him as a remedy for some unspecified ailment; and he turned out to be poison. We’re like babes in the woods. We haven’t learned yet which mushrooms to pick and which berries; and which ones to leave be. Someone along the way should have taught us what to look out for.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

The Glass Bead Game

I suspect many of us don’t realize how truly lucky we are. First, we are living in extremely interesting times. I could say ‘perilous’ but that would attach subjectivity and skew what I’m trying to say. Second, we enjoy this space to air our views which are then read by a good many people. This puts us in the high upper percentile of the world’s millions who, for the most part, do not possess the means even to access a daily newspaper. They react to the vagaries of their rulers in predictable but ineffective ways even as they must watch the inevitable tragedy unfold before their very eyes. We are pretty much in a similar position, but we are able to shout (as the ancient sad tale, Antigone, teaches us to do). It is still uncertain whether or not our shouting will actually change the course of history. Experience tells us it won’t. But we are blessed to be shouting nonetheless. It is the only thing left to us.

I was brought face to face with this dilemma when my computer crashed last week. Suddenly, my shouting days were over. I felt as one with a noose already around my neck and tightening - unable to make myself heard. The network news no longer interested me. I had no desire to open a newspaper or listened to the radio. What good was any of that if I could not respond? I might as well have been living in a grass hut on some distant seashore, counting the waves crashing on the beach; or, in the shadow of some great impenetrable mountain.

Don’t assume for a moment that this shadow play we are witnessing - much of which, by its very nature, remains hidden - is composed of random coincidences. America has entered a political era in which it has likewise left behind a tradition and a certain skill. The battle ground has up until now been in academe, the various university outposts of which, in times of war and barbarization, have become little islands of rationality where the better minds of the opposing parties cautiously seek each other out and grope their way toward reconciliation. We, at ground level, only sense the fallout of what has been decided to date.

Whereas we feel unjustly excluded from this elite world, where it seems decisions are taken without regard to us, we must nevertheless conclude that the Left has won the struggle against conservatism - and by a decisive margin. How it will ultimately translate into our lives is still anybody’s guess.

Metrics

We do not have an economic crisis. We have a crisis in leadership. The ‘bad’ economy is merely a symptom of the crisis in leadership world-wide. The economy is not fragile. It is not failing. It is telling us precisely about the state the world finds itself in.

If you use a thermometer to check your child’s temperature and find he has a fever, a reasonable response should not be to blame the thermometer; to pack it in ice or throw it down in a rage. Yet this is exactly what we’re doing. The economy is merely a metric - a tool - a device to measure the relative health of a nation(’s overall policies). A tool can never exceed its function. As policy is always contingent on mercurial political demands, the economy can be said to reflect the relative soundness of political realities as well.

In an effort to build (false) constituencies, politicians have taken the value out of work. They’ve taken winning out of the game. They’ve taken the truth out of history. They’re taking the killing out of war. They’re taking the people out of governance. In doing all that, they’ve taken hope out of the future. What they’re attempting here amounts to no less than a man-made contingency operation; attempting to change the world into what it has never been before – into what it can never be. It’s no wonder alarm bells are going off everywhere you look.

If it were merely theft, it might be a blessing. The thief is caught and punished. The victim either writes off his loss and begins again, or he is in some way compensated. Either way, there is closure. What we’re witnessing at the G8 summit in Toronto is not theft. It is trying to change the way things actually work; it is trying to upend the laws of gravity. It is going against nature without the temperance of conscience, without an understanding of trespass onto the sacred ground of reality.

You don’t go about building a machine in which every module is wholly dependent on every other. You build it so that failing modules can be easily swapped out. You don’t build an oil tanker (or submarine) without breaking it up in to compartments. If one should be breached, it can be sealed off and the rest of the ship survives. “Too big to fail” spells disaster and worse. In fact, if “too big to fail” should become the norm, we will no longer be able to tell what is disaster and what is not. There will no longer be anything to compare. Every traditional standard loses its meaning. What is is. No further argument is possible. This, plain and simple, is the definition of tyranny.

The reason America’s economic metrics are bad is not because of some vague notion of the failure as relates some equally vague academic construct. (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”) It is a failure that originates and is maintained by the people themselves. In our set-up it is the result of people rebelling against a self-serving, wrong-headed, oppressive, ruling class. The people themselves produce all the metrics needed. Governments ultimately serve at the will of the people. Without their acquiescence, government is illegitimate. The metrics tell us that this has now become the case.

Paradox

Perhaps one of the failings of language is – and there are many – that words are perhaps not sufficient to explain paradox. Let’s just say that ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are two sides of the very same coin – like heaven and hell; life and death; etc. Again, the illusory difference emerges in where we choose to place our focus.

A holy man wandering the plains of India toward Varanasi on the Ganges, begging for his sustenance along the way, has totally abandoned politics. That is to say, he has ceased to think of himself as a separate and distinct corporal entity. He is nothing; he is also everything - and quite without bias toward any one thing that can be assigned a name. In this way, he has become like a newborn that has not yet learned to distinguish itself from what it sees. It’s interesting that the first thing we do when a baby is born is give it a name.

Alan Watts speaks of man’s internal and external organs in an effort to blur the basic rhetorical divide that gives rise to the political “I”. As the child grows and learns the names of more and more things, so also increases the distancing and fracturing that some vital part of us always feels compelled to call home. Politics is the process by which we count our possessions; by which we seek to validate our right of ownership; by which we work, litigate and fight for what we say belongs to us. The holy man has found a shortcut that bypasses all the strife, all the exertion, all the pain associated with political maneuvering. He has learned that by simply letting go, all things automatically come back to him.

I agree that the “wizened curmudgeons” in the ivory towers of our universities are doing us irreparable harm. This is only because they have become shamelessly political and we were foolish enough to place our emphasis on their degrees and rhetorical skills. But, short of killing them, they will always be with us. It is we who have afforded them undue importance. We were told that one of Obama’s many virtues was that he was a constitutional scholar at University of Chicago Law School. That was enough to disarm many of us. Now, as the rubber is hitting the road we realize how little academic titles actually mean. The University of East Anglia e-mail revelations should only broaden our doubts.

All this stuff, however, is self-correcting. We just happen to be coming down from the apex of a trend that was never sustainable in the first place.