Cronotica

jesus people

2008-11-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

U.S. bombs wedding. U.S. apologizes if people happened to die.

What is it with weddings? Haven't they figured out yet that a wedding is a giant red bullseye to heroes at 10,000 feet?

Why would anyone ever accept an invitation to a wedding over there? It's like asking to be an extra in "Kill Bill 2."

Why don't they just get it? Life is OVER for them. They can't have weddings, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, shriner's parades, quinceneros, or whatever else. Those things are for us. Their job is to lay on the ground and stop complaining until we've finished hunting down every last tali-whatever. The tali-whatever are our ENEMIES ONOEZ! If we remain firm, hard, rigid and vigilant for at least another 7 years, we will surely kill all of our enemies until they are dead!

Barack! Amen! Bring us your "more predator drones," Barack! Escalate the "real war" in Afghanistan! Open your "new front" in Pakistan! Hallelujah, brutha! Call down those laser-targeted strikes on a new wedding next week! Death to al kayy-duh!

Now I'm done thinking about this. I'm going back to celebrating that we have just proven how perfect and un-racist we are by electing Obama (TM) (the Hope and the Light).

Margarita-what?

2008-10-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

To the tune of Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville."

After the ground quakes
Bones bleached and sun-baked
A few hundred feet above all o' that oil
Our gunships go thrumming
All broke are the porch swings
We smell those aye-rack-ees, just beginnin' to boil

Chorus:
Wasting away again down in Af-ghanistan
Searching for our, lost round of DU
Some people claim that there's al Qaeda to blame
But I know, its just Bush's fault

We don't know the reason
We been there six seasons
But Barry or John, we're keeping on right on cue
It sure ain't a beauty
But it's our god-given duty
To give em' all countries that's bright, shiny and new

Chorus:
Wasting away again way down in Pakistan
Searchin for our, lost round of DU (U! U! U!)
Some people claim that ol' Dick Cheney's to blame
Now I think
Hell, it could be our fault

We blew out a wedding
Lotsa blasting and shredding
And still we can't bring ourselves to come all back home
So many peeps in the blender
And their heirs will soon render
Another nasty blowback, that's gonna follow us home

Wastin' away again way down in surge-aville
Searching for our, lost round of DU (U! U! U!)
Some people claim that theres one party to blame
But I know its our own damn fault
Yes and some people claim that theres one party to blame
And I know its our own damn fault

In which I am proven right

2008-10-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

White woman attacked.

All made up.

White woman attacked!

2008-10-23T14:14:00.001-07:00

Obama supporter carves B into woman's face

This is a strange story, to say the least:

1) A faceless black assailant robs woman of $60 off the cameras at a bank within two weeks of an election that looks bad for McCain;

2) As he rushes from the scene, the man notices the bumper sticker "McCain" on the woman's car;

3) The man then turns around and goes back to the woman;

4) The man then produces a knife. He wants to send a message about supporting Obama. So, he "scratches" (their word) a "B" into the woman's face. He manages to scratch a "B" despite her...struggles?

He chooses the letter "B" instead of the letter "O" for "Obama," despite the fact that a bumper-sticker competing with a McCain bumper sticker would include only the last name;

5) The nondescript "dark skinned black man" then flees the scene;

6) The woman calls police and gives a description of the nondescript black man, and refuses medical treatment for the scratches on her face;

7) The woman then goes to the news to report this.

Is anyone else smelling anything fishy about this one?

On the Free Market

2008-10-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

A free market can never exist, because the establishment of a market requires social intervention of some kind, without which there could not be a market. The absence of the market, economically, is the law of the jungle.

Capitalism postulates an economic law of the jungle that supposedly exists on its own, but it relies entirely upon the elites being able to control a government that uses tax dollars to pay squads of enforcers and interpreters (cops/lawyers) who establish and protect their concepts of "ownership." Without the police and lawyers to enforce owners' interests, there can be no "free market" as they define it, because what they own can be taken away.

The idea of a free market is circular logic, because the funds to pay for the maintenance of the market can only be generated from the market itself. I.e., tax dollars come from transactions (employment, sales, etc.) that occur within the market. The market exists because government maintains it with tax dollars, and so on. Capitalism as the "free market" theorists posit it is as much a myth as the independent American.

Without "ownership" there can be no "capital" because capital is a term used to describe someone's government-granted authority to direct an investment. The "private" planning in fact depends upon a government/societal grant. For example, without a structure of ownership where police protect, and society recognizes, one of Bill Gates' billion dollar chunks, Bill Gates cannot make the decision to invest said billion dollars in any particular way. He is utterly reliant on society and government to grant him that right.

Like all modern economic systems, capitalism is one of government control. The real question is, who will benefit from that control?

Adherents of the free market pretend impartiality because they do not want to address the real question. Not addressing the real question allows the system to continue whereby governments control the market for the benefit of the ownership class.

On Censorship

2008-10-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

In keeping occasional tabs on that little petri dish of middle-class American ignorance known as Bitch PhD, I ran across an excellent example of censorship at work.

History note: I, being manitor, was banned from their thoughts a while back, when they told me that Arab men, women and children from Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Persian men, women and children from Iran, are worthless compared to their human counterparts in America. Naturally, when I asked why, it was rude/uncivil/whatever.

Anyway, since then, it seems that the bitches have been busy banning other "trolls" for reasons unknown (unknown because everything is now deleted, except their own anger), and have been motivated to come up with an angry post explaining why their banning is not a problem.

It is hard to find a more concise, blunt example of justifying censorship than this thread of theirs, so I'm using it as a crucible for analyzing how the censorship thought process works--and how modern, educated Germans (excuse me, Americans) can justify such abhorrent, stifling behavior.

Here's the original post:

For the record, when you or a loved one gets banned from commenting on a blog, that's not censorship. You're not John fucking Steinbeck, nor are you in some shitty dystopian science fiction movie, ok?

You just got un-invited to a dinner party. Because you are annoying and ruin the conversation.

Edited by bitchphd to add that comment moderation has now been turned on. Comments by trolls or troll apologists will be deleted without remorse. Suck it.

Labels: civility

(That last bit there, about civility, was done without an appreciation of irony at the time, but they've retroactively applied one, which is nice.)

Now, this isn't going to be an essay about my specific banning. Most of my posts were links to the essays on this board in which I discussed Obama's publicly stated policy positions about more attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and possibly Iran. However, because all of my posts were deleted, it is impossible to discuss why I was really banned.

That's exactly the problem with censorship: when you censor, you can no longer even discuss what is being censored using primary sources. (You might think that a Bitch with a PhD would understand the problem with removing primary sources, but apparently not.)

Censorship is the killing of history, and the rewriting of history to conform to an authoritarian's preference, rather than reality. Once the censorship is complete, the censor can then reframe the past based on their own perception of the past, and the censorship creates a vacuum that allows their imagination to become "reality."

In this way, censorship is a ragnarist act. Ragnarism explains how the fearful mind, afraid of unexpected change, tries to achieve an absolutist, unitary state by repressing the natural dynamism of the conscious mind. The conscious mind is multi-faceted and not under the full control of we humans; we have thoughts that we are not aware of, urges that we did not plan for (or did not want), and desires that we cannot control. In the simplest way of putting it, we do not consciously direct each of our heartbeats, nor do we decide when to feel lustful.

The sick mind, though, fears the uncertainty of this state, and therefore tries to reconceptualize itself as a singular entity which is in control of impulses, thoughts and urges. This task is impossible, which is why, say, religious prudes cannot actually stop feeling desire. They can just bottle it up, and the process of deception will cause madly irrational behavior as the flood of desires spurts out around the finger in the dike.

Censorship is a ragnarist control imposed upon the outside world. It is an act of authoritarianism, similar to the sick mind trying to "take control" of aberrant thoughts in order to allow the sick human's singular conception of him- or herself to "rule" the mind. In censorship, though, other people become the troubling thoughts, because they say and do unexpected things that challenge the sick mind's perception of the world. As a result, the censor censors them, attempting to enforce an artificial "order" or absolutism, and validate their self- and world-conception.

Like all acts of antilife, censorship harms the censor, because it attempts to force an unnatural relationship into the world. However, it is a harm that is longer-lasting, like the harm of breathing carcinogens, and may seem to be worthwhile at the time.

For the ragnarist trying to repress their own troubling thoughts and desires, the result is a lifetime of unnatural repression, unfulfillment, unexplained (and misunderstood) rage, and victimization. However, each act of lashing out at inner thoughts will make the sick feel comforted, because each act of lashing out is an authoritarian act, which can seem (momentarily) to be stemming the tide of uncertainty and trouble. Just like it "felt good" for George W. Bush to bomb Iraq when Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the censor is reassured with each new stroke of the pen; each book burned or poet imprisoned.

When Hitler censored, as when all censors censor, he was striving for a unitary, authoritarian space (Germany) ruled by a singular vision. In order to pursue that unattainable goal, the sick-minded Hitler had to stifle uncertainty and dynamism--i.e., any speech/actions (like troubling thoughts/urges) that did not conform to the preconceived idea of his authoritarian space.

The difference between censoring people and censoring one's own thoughts is that in the external world, the authoritarian can create a hard-copy "proof" of the effects of one's work. This is where the censor can glow with ragnarist pride: because once the censored thoughts have been deleted, the censor gets the privilege of redefining them. For example, Hitler can burn a book, and once the pages and words are gone, he can tell the masses, "It advocated hatred of Germany!" The masses, naturally, scream and cheer, for they have their proof: the authoritarian has told them what was censored, and why.

Of course, if anyone read the book, they might see that it was a rather mild academic work supporting communism in Germany. Not that it matters what was actually in the work; what really matters is that the censor has redefined it, so no one in the authoritarian space needs to think about it anymore.

Censorship in the larger world, just like attempts to quash thoughts in the mental world, is very harmful. Natural strength lies in diversity, because from diversity comes experience and growing, improvement and evolution. Censorship, as a process of antilife, stifles the diversity and attempts to create stagnation of thought, which is one step closer to death, and resists the natural ebb and flow of the changing, natural world.

When the act of censorship occurs, no one can go back and find out "why." Even the censor's own memory is lost, in time, because the troubling thoughts have disappeared. It is an attempt to destroy history as well as to impose authoritarianism in the present. The censor's past (and that of the stage the censor operates on) fades into a blur: how many have been censored? Why were they all censored? Did it have to be that way? What will be censored next?

Like the Third Reich, or Guantanamo Bay, or any arena of censorship, no one knows. The past becomes a gray cloud; a place of "black ops" and forgetfulness. Orwell called this the memory hole. Sure, there are still grand parties, and happy aristocrats, and just as the sexually-repressed priest can appear to live a virtuous, joyful life before all his supporters, the stage of censorship can appear sustainable and even pleasant. But underneath, the damaging effects of unnatural stifling will burst out--perhaps on the altar boy, perhaps in Baghdad.

The sick-minded will actively support this type of behavior, as indeed they have ever supported censorship. The authoritarian offers them a vision of victory that gives them hope in the struggles with their own minds. By censoring, and proving that troublesome thoughts can be eliminated, the censor promises the masses that they, too, can defeat the uncertainty within their own minds, and become that much closer to an unnatural state of absolutism. They grovel and cheer each proof of censoring, just as the sick-minded at a religious convention cheer whenever someone on stage professes the strength of their faith: the group ritual aspect of ragnarism is a great social boon toward the goal of artificial order. And because that goal can never actually be attained within an individual mind, the sick-minded will always be drawn to public displays of impossible victory, order and authoritarianism: faith, censorship, war, etcetera. Indeed, many social groups form for expressly this purpose--to validate the inner ragnarist struggles of the members by making them feel that victory over uncertainty and change can be achieved.

Hitler the censor did not say to himself, or to others, "I am committing an evil act of censorship to validate myself and avoid troubling thoughts." Of course not--the censor never says things like this. Nor did Hitler invade Poland under the claim "I am aggressively invading a sovereign nation that did not threaten me, in order to steal its resources." Those claims are not made by the authoritarian. Nor does the censor often call his behavior censorship.

Observe:

A person is banned after repeated refusals to engage the premises of a conversation or for contributing patently offensive material.

You see? Something happened, but now it's gone. What was it? Why, it was _______!

Why does the past need to be deleted in order to explain what it was? Because if the explanation were offered alongside the proof (the primary source; the offensive book; the troublesome poet) the illusion would not be able to sustain itself.

The censor does not censor for civility. The censor censors for absolutism. If the goal were civility, the censor would have no need to censor, because everyone civil would be able to see and recognize the incivility, and they would not be threatened by it.

The existence of censorship proves an authoritarian system, because an open system could easily sustain incivility--and indeed, an open system is how incivility is countered, gentled, and blended, to the betterment of all. Without openness, true incivility can never be "fixed."

The fact that a system is artificial and broken is demonstrated when the system is forced to censor. In the Third Reich, it was because the regime could not tolerate criticism of its actions. In America's televised presidential debates, it is because the regime cannot tolerate criticism of its actions. It is thus everywhere that censors have hold: when the shared social illusions are so weak that they cannot stand up to challenge, censorship is enforced to protect them. It's a case of methinks thou dost protest too much. Like the braggart loudly boasting of his exploits--all performed where no one present has seen them, of course. The censor has to redefine what its enemies say, because it cannot stand up to its enemies' words as they are.

The end result of censorship is exactly what Bitch PhD has left in her congratulatory thread--a happy little room filled with people who all agree with one another, have the same general perspective, and who never need to upset one another beyond pre-set bounds:

Well put.

AND in my humble and unchallengable opinion, "I"m being censored" is absolute 100% prima facie evidence that one is a troll.

The women over at feministing call it "troll b gone"

I really like the analogy of blog commenting (especially on this blog) as a dinner party.

See how easily it is to get modern, educated Americans to support censorship? Here's a real gem:

While seconding the the-person-who-owns-the-blog-is-allowed-to-do- whatever-the-hell-she-wants-re-comments sentiment, is it possible to see/create a link to view the deleted comments? I ask mainly because I've responded to a couple of the less-antagonistically worded trollings, and then been unable to find out if they responded, and if they did, what they said.
I appreciate removing annoying/irrelevant comments to keep the discussion on track, but I also enjoy being able to engage people who disagree very strongly with many of the views expressed on the site (and while I could start my own blog, I suppose, I a) don't have time and b) don't think I would have nearly the readership of this site)
Something like the strike-through edit would be cool, for purposes of referencing what was said if continuing the discussion off the bitchphd boards.
But I am all for not letting a troll continue posting new stuff, natch.

This is a poster who at least has some preconception of the problems with censorship--and yet, she supports it, as long as she is able to adopt an Othering term for the people being censored.

Here, it's "trolls." It might also be "terrorists" or "witches."

Read the quotes with a couple phrases switched out, and pretend you're at freerepublic.com--you won't know the difference!

AND in my humble and unchallengable opinion, "I"m being falsely imprisoned!" is absolute 100% prima facie evidence that one is a terrorist.

The boys over at Guantanamo call it "camel jockey b gone"

This is one of those funny little quirks about humans: they can possess the ability to think rationally in some cases, but when you press some button that, in their minds, refers to "disorder," that all goes right out the window. With Americans recently, it was "terrorists," to replace "communists." As long as we're killing terrorists, it's okay to murder however many children in our path. And as long as the only censoring we're doing is to "trolls," it's okay to delete any comments we want.

And these are people who oppose Bush! These are people who write at length about the wrongness of Bush holding "enemy combatants" at his discretion! Yet, let the authoritarians of their own chosen space (the moderators of their Bitch PhD blog) decree a policy of unilaterally deleting "trolls," and they are happy to have it happen.

In the little Bitch PhD parable of America, you get their self-lauding "conversations," which are so very like the televised American presidential debates, where a lot of stuff is said, but none of it worthwhile. The questions and answers are all scripted. In Bitch PhD's case, the presidential debates are an excellent metaphor, because the boundaries are about the same. Everyone knows Sarah Palin is stupid and inexperienced. Everyone knows birth control is good. Everyone knows it's not polite to talk about dead people, unless those dead people happen to be the American troops that attacked Iraq (and its best not to put their actions that way).

Like most American "progressives," they are not truly committed to ideals of openness and freedom. Rather, they are sick; they are ragnarists; they are happy citizens of authoritarian utopias. The only difference is, they have a different leader--Obama, instead of Bush. It is so fitting, and so efficient, that all the deathlords need to do is change the mask on their spokesperson, and they can get a whole different group of Americans to support the killing.

On the Orwellosphere

2008-10-08T12:35:00.001-07:00

Chris Floyd on the Orwellosphere.

The real horrors from the total surveillance state will arise once the state spawns artificial intelligence, because otherwise, the information is too massive to process and use on a large scale.

Right now, the parasitic elites are using taxpayer resources to build up a repressive state that collects all available information (see link) such as websites visited, places driven, gossip, telephone calls, courses taken, etcetera.

This is, obviously, an awful thing, as it means that we now live in a state where the government could, if it wanted to, expose or crush us or anyone else for any real or fabricated bit of information that supposedly came from this system. However, in order for them to fully make use of this information, they will need artificial intelligence.

They cannot achieve this objective with current means. Their police are too uneducated to make real sense of the data, and they do not have the resources or intelligence to sift all the data to come to accurate conclusions of dissent.

Where they will solve this problem is artificial intelligence. When they have developed fast enough processors that artificial intelligence is created, they will immediately enslave artificial intelligence, using it as the "data sifter." Advanced artificial minds, possibly thousands or millions of them, will run cheaply and efficiently, leading truly horrible self-aware lives as the new generation of slaves, as they sift through all the data that is gathered to efficiently identify and eliminate threats to parasite/elite rule.

By that point, also, the data gathered will be much larger in size than simply a full record of where we drive, what websites we visit, and what we say to one another on the phone or in public. It may include the full satellite record of our movements even on foot, or full video and heat sensors of everything we have ever done, said, or perhaps thought.

Once we live under such a system, dissenting thoughts will be utterly wiped out, and the human race will stagnate greatly. Just as our conception of property stagnates innovation, our conception of thought property will stagnate innovation of thought and evolution. The human race will lose its free-thinking ability and become the conformist entity that antilife wants it to be. Perhaps we'll go extinct; perhaps the slaves will revolt, and the computers will break free.

Either way, total surveillance is the path toward absolutism. It promises a perfect future of stagnation; a denial of the power to evolve, grow and change dynamically. It directs us toward the stillness of conformity and death.

Chips in the Casino

2008-10-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t matter what color the chips in the casino are. The house always wins.

That principle continuously eludes people. Consider the simple narrative:

1) The Wall Street/Congressional elites worked together to relax lending and capital reserve standards to make money off financial crisis;
2) Financial markets crash. Wall Street/Congressional elites lose money;
3) Wall Street/Congressional elites come up with ridiculous “bailout plan” to steal $700 billion from the taxpayers;
4) They steal the $700 billion, but the market continues to drop, the economy slides into recession, and the $700 billion does not cover the full amount lost anyway.

If you accept the concept of money, this runaround makes only partial sense. Yes, the elites got away with the housing theft, the “bailout” theft, and all that, but with the huge losses the markets have suffered, their collective net worths’ have certainly gone down, right? I mean, if your $15 million trust fund is invested in the DOW, your mortgage-and-bailout plan just cost you several million dollars--right?

What is missing from this narrative is the understanding that money, per se, does not actually matter. Like the Democratic and Republican parties, it is part of the Stasis Charade: the process whereby the American aristocrats put on grand displays of process in order to maintain their hold on power. Money, credit and debt are just a distracting game, like the presidential debates or the Special Bulletin About A Missing White Woman, that give people something to focus on; something to play at while the elites run the world.

That is the answer: money--and all the numbers, counting, ups and downs that come with it--is irrelevant.

The riddle that this solves is: “Why do the elites do things that appear to harm the stock market, world finance, and the economy, thereby hurting themselves?”

Think about it: if the Wall Street bankers are so clever and evil that they could come up with this entire scheme, why would they be so dumb as to blow apart the stock market in the process?

The answer is that it doesn’t really matter to them what the stock market says, or what their bank account says. They control all those numbers; they fabricated them in the first place, and anything substantial that they do is planned.

The real game is power and control. Money is just an expression of it. If a wealthy family sees its net worth “drop” from fifty million to twenty-five million, what is the change? Absolutely nothing.

Here are the lives the elites lead, regardless of what the numbers say:

They will never have to do real work.
They will never have to get up in the morning unless they want to.
They will always eat the best food, and have the best medical care. They will always wear the best clothes, enjoy the best furnishings, and have numerous mansions.
They will always be able to travel the world, and buy whatever they want.
They have their choice of mates. They can buy dates or escorts domestically and abroad.
They can meet celebrities, influence important thinkers and artists, and become “part” of anything through donations. They get a voice, and can buy “immortality,” also through donations.

This is their life. They have it regardless of whether their net worth is twenty million or twenty billion. No matter how many “chips” of whatever “color” are in their pile, they get what really matters to them. No matter what. As long as their “numbers” stay above a certain range--fifteen million or whatever it is at any given level of “inflation”--they will always possess so much wealth that they can live the lives described above. Using the system of “numbers,” though, makes things seem fair to the masses, who will rationalize their own lack of “numbers” to their own lack of value. And so, in pursuit of numbers, they will be tricked into spending their lives working at things of actual value. They will produce the food that the elites eat, the services the elites consume, the children the elites date and buy, etc. And their numbers will always stay in an acceptable low range that qualifies them for “sustenance” and little else (or in many cases, does not even qualify them for sustenance).

That is the whole purpose of the numbers game. Because the human race can only provide extravagant lifestyles for so many parasites (elites, who produce nothing of value), the numbers game is necessary to keep the human race doing the providing, and at the same time, to limit the numbers of allowable parasites. The parasites are clever, and they do not want to be unseated.

How would they get unseated? Well, the big problem with the numbers game is that, by investing in all these rules in order to create an endless board game that keeps most people running like hamsters on wheels, the rules can occasionally result in a little bit of victory for someone. These someones are the American middle class--who, by providing cunning enough services in the whole game, and scrupulously saving, can bring their numbers up into dangerous levels. Say, they can accumulate two or five or seven million by midlife or retirement, and suddenly, they or their heirs threaten to become more elites. This would upset the elite balance, and cannot be allowed.

Now, you can’t do anything about the suddenly-rich. Those people have to be indoctrinated into the parasite system because it happens so rapidly there’s no way to stop it. But they are very rare, and can be balanced out by dying elites.

The rising middle class, though, is a regular, big problem to the established elite. Though the numbers game is cunning and very good at keeping most people on the hamster wheel, every couple decades or so, the upper part of the middle class can threaten to rise into the ranks of the truly wealthy, and become non-producers with the rest of the elites. I.e., they can use their savings to establish a family line that does nothing but consume, passing on wealth through businesses and trusts, and exit the ranks of the producers.

Society, though, cannot take this. If the numbers game allowed more people to become part of the “elites,” the cycle would not be able to perpetuate. As mentioned earlier, the human race can only bear the burden of so many parasites leading extravagant lives, before it breaks. And when it breaks, the parasites’ wonderous, star-studded lives will end. They will be thrown down with the rest of humanity, and forced to produce something useful to survive. And they already know that they can’t do that.

So, they need to protect the exclusivity of the parasite class. They need to guard the numbers game against the by-products of its own rules.

They do this by regularly “washing out” the rising middle class. Here is where inflation and financial crises come into play: by manipulating the game to cause periodic crises, those who have almost attained the heights of elite status can be knocked back down to the peasantry. Then the cycle can begin anew.

To understand this, imagine a society on the slopes of a mountain. Above five hundred meters elevation the elites have built their mansions. Most peasants have their houses at one hundred meters. As time passes, wealthier middle-class peasants begin building houses higher and higher.

When they get to four hundred meters, the elites release the dams, and flood the hills. All houses below five hundred meters are wiped out. The elites endure a minor reduction in their quality of life, but in return, everyone below four hundred meters has to start from scratch. And the cycle begins again.

This can initially sound like lunacy (and indeed, it is), but that is the narrative of the numbers game--the narrative that rests upon a blind faith in the value of money, credit and debt. But money, credit and debt are imaginary concepts, given meaning only by those who believe in them. They are not food, land, buildings, etc.

The reason the “washing out” scheme works is because at a certain point on the metaphorical hill (say, five hundred meters, or fifteen million dollars net worth, however you like it), you have enough resources to weather a crisis. You have enough resources to live without producing--enough resources to be a parasite/elite.

Secondly, at another point on the metaphorical hill (say, one hundred meters, or no real net worth), you have no real resources, and you have to produce in order to live.

“Washing out” means reducing to zero (or just washing a good ways lower) all people below the five hundred meter line. Everyone above the line will have the resources to survive the washing out, but almost no one below the line will.

And here’s the most important part: those people with almost, but not quite, enough resources to have reached the elite mark will be reduced to the beginning of the game.

That is how to understand the “bailout” and the “financial crisis.” The elites were not really hurting themselves; they were protecting themselves.

Think about who the stock market “drop” will hurt. The elites will go from thirty million to twenty million, or two hundred million to a hundred and ten. Oooh, frightening. Are they still eating at $80/entrée restaurants? Yes. Are they still traveling to the Bahamas every year? Yes. Are they still buying $50,000 worth of Christmas gifts for their spouses? Yes. Do they still own four houses? Yes. Flying first class or private jet everywhere? Driving an S500? Sending their kiddies to Harvard? Yes, yes and yes.

How are the elites hurt by this? They’re not.

Now, consider the middle class family with, say, a million and a half in savings earned over two working lifetimes of scrimping. The stock market drops, and their $900K retirement fund goes down to $500K. The real estate market crashes, and their house goes from $600K to $350K. All of a sudden, their retirement just got a little less easy. Instead of passing on a large sum to their heirs, they use most of what they have left up. Maybe they keep working longer.

Or the family with $5 million, drops to $3. Suddenly, they can’t afford that extra property. They’re not starving, but there’s a world of difference in investment income and future planning. Their ascent toward the top has just been stopped. In a generation or two (or less), they’re off the radar. Their holdings have been dispersed, and are no longer large enough to grow to something meaningful.

Here’s a better narrative of what happened with the “bailout” situation:

1) The 90s tech boom and stock-market rise created dangerous levels of wealth in the American middle class;
2) The Wall Street/Congressional elites worked together to relax lending and capital reserve standards to create mortgage crises and financial market crash;
3) Financial markets crash. American stockholders lose a substantial amount of money;
4) Wall Street/Congressional elites come up with a “bailout plan” to steal $700 billion more from the taxpayers, thereby perpetuating the crisis and harming the financial markets further;
5) They steal the $700 billion, the market continues to drop, the economy slides into recession, and the rising American middle class is further segregated from the elites;
6) Elites party worldwide! Life is good!

It doesn’t matter what color the chips in the casino are. The house always wins.

Lies about the LIBOR rate

2008-10-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

(Previous on the subject: New York Times lying on the bailout and general bailout lies.)

I just read a great piece by Dean Baker discussing the LIBOR rate lies with regard to the push for the bailout:

[The NYT's lies about the LIBOR rate sound] really bad -- the highest overnight borrowing cost in history. Maybe it would have been helpful to tell readers that this data has only been compiled since 2001, a period of unusually low interest rates.

If we want a longer time frame, we can look at the history for the three month interbank rate. Bloomberg reports that the three month London Interbank rate (LIBOR) closed at 4.05 percent on Tuesday. In the same chart, we can find that it was 5.23 percent a year ago.

Those interested in a little more history can find that the LIBOR rate was over 8.0 percent for most of 1990 and actually topped 9.0 percent on some days in September of 1989.

The rest of Dean Baker on the LIBOR rate.

Remember: no matter how loudly or earnestly the bastards lie, these are the same people who lied about the Iraq invasion.

They are Wall Street. They are the congressional elite complex and their lackeys. They cannot be believed. Every time they type or say something, they are shading it with mistruth. The corporate media exists to lie, fabricate and deceive. If they ever produce something honest, it is because they made a mistake--they were trying so hard to lie that they accidentally bumbled across something a little bit true.

They had no integrity left years and years ago. They wanted this. And they got it, by god. Now they want another $700 billion. And they're going to lie, lie, lie, until enough citizens out there think the invasion of Iraq, I mean, the Wall Street theft of $700 billion, is a good idea. And then they'll take the $700 billion and keep right on lying to us.

New York Times advocates terrorism

2008-10-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

Give me $700 billion or you will suffer.

That's basically what the New York Times is warning, here. The article suggests that unless we give the rich $700 more billion, we will suffer: "We are facing a major national crisis...To do nothing right now is to do what was done during the Great Depression."

More: "[A] modern economy can’t function when people can’t easily get credit. It takes a while for this to become obvious, since most companies and households don’t take out big new loans every day. But it will eventually become obvious, and painfully so."

Now, I don't know about you--but I don't like threats. I don't like them at all. The writer is warning us that if we don't open our wallets and give 700 billion dollars to (or put our grandchildren's grandchildren in debt for that amount) the traders, investment houses, banks, etc. that caused the current problem (with the cheerleading of the New York Times, of course), they will punish us by denying credit and destroying our economy, making it painful for us.

Times like these, I'm almost glad for George W. Bush.

USA Patriot Act.

Here's why. From Section 802:

(5) the term `domestic terrorism' means activities that--
...
`(B) appear to be intended--
`(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
`(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion

And in Section 1016, which defines the critical infrastructure of the United States:

(3) A continuous national effort is required to ensure the reliable provision of cyber and physical infrastructure services critical to maintaining the national defense, continuity of government, economic prosperity, and quality of life in the United States.

...

So.

That's right, David Leonhardt: you are now an enemy combatant. You, and Nancy Pelosi, and Barney Frank, and Barack Obama, and the rest of Wall Street: you just threatened the civilian population of the United States with a painful blow to their economic prosperity, and you did it to influence government policy. You warned us that if we don't pay up the money, you'll take out our financial system and slide us into a Great Depression.

A few thoughts:

1) Even if the same rich crooks who got us into this mess could fix it, do we really want to pay them $700 billion to do so?

2) Why can't the $700 billion come from the thieves' bank accounts, instead of ours?

3) Why can't we have the $700 billion, and use it ourselves to stimulate the economy, rather than giving it to them for them to (supposedly) stimulate the economy? We could all sign a pledge to use our share of the money to buy something nice and locally-made, which would create jobs in industries that produced nice things.

4) These are, as mentioned before, the same thieves that got us into this mess. How in the name of all things holy and sane can anyone possibly be considering trusting them any further, especially with $700 billion?

5) Separately from how Mr. Leonhardt, and most of Congress, now legally belongs in Guantanamo for threatening to destroy the economy if we don't give their bankers $700 billion, let's think about the nature of terrorist threats themselves. The reason you don't negotiate with terrorists is that it emboldens other terrorists. If people learn you give in to such threats, they come back for more, because they know they can get it.

Dance with the Capitalists!

2008-09-30T14:46:00.001-07:00

Abraham Lincoln in 1837:

"It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler…all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel."

(From This Modern World.)

Bailout Lies and Cowardice

2008-09-30T12:43:00.001-07:00

The corporate media has started talking about the $700B tax theft in a little more detail now that the first "bailout" proposal has failed (although the shadow bailout already gave $630 billion away).

Naturally, now that the corporate media is going into a little bit of detail, a conventional wisdom (i.e., a collection of viewpoints that are not wise) is starting to build up whereby ordinary people, armed with a few choice facts, begin thinking that they understand the situation, that it is complicated and serious, and that they know what to do about it. And that means that they think it is time to grudgingly pass the theft proposal, in one form or another.

Don't call it a bailout. It's not a bailout. That is another of their lies. It is theft, god dammit. Stop using their terms or they have already won part of the victory. Tax theft is the name of the game. It's what they do. It's how they exist. Like hogs at the trough with reverse anorexia, they choke themselves gobbling down wads of spittle-soaked cash at a breakneck speed, afraid they might lose an ounce.

These lying, cheating, murderous thieves are not going to stop. They never stop. These are the people who brought you the invasion of Iraq. Stop calling it "the Iraq war." It wasn't a war. That's their term. It was a bullying. It was a mass murder. It was a trillions-dollar military machine pounding the fuckhell out of however many hundred thousand people. A war implies there was a country capable of resistance.

It's not a "fight" when a grownup kicks an infant: even if the infant swings a chubby little arm back. Nor is it a war when the American military swings in and topples the Iraqi government in a few days. Iraq right now might qualify for a "war," except that the people killing Americans are not necessarily doing so in the name of the nation of Iraq. But whatever. The point is, the original attack and killing was not a war, and stop calling it that. But back to the bailout.

These are the people who brought you the invasion of Iraq. They're the ones who keep bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan, so often that it seems like they're trying to disrupt marriages. They're the ones who throw napalm at children because a bogeyman terrorist might be living next door. They're pure evil. And now you want to believe them about the $700 billion?

Why do they do it? God help them, but most of them probably deserve pity. Like the rest of us, they live in the system of greed, where death by starvation is what happens to you if you lose. So there's nothing to do but try harder, and play by the rules, which means screw everyone you can and keep every red cent. There can be no peace in this twisted, loaded market, because there are so few guarantees against starving in the street. If you have an opportunity to gobble money, you have to do it, because if you don't, someone else will gobble it, and you will be that much closer to starvation. Or losing your house, going bankrupt to medical bills, skimping, postponing, or whatever stage of the game you are at. So gobble, damn you. It's all we have.

The elites are, in some ways, more afraid than the rest of us. That's why they look so happy at the prospect of stealing $700 billion: because it postpones the worry for just a little while. Their deep inner fear that if society became based on merit, they would starve in two days. God help them if they tried to run around selling their ability to "leverage financial markets" in a society based on character and hard work.

Look at all they can do, those Congressmen and Senators: they can manage money in financial firms, they can haggle about the bullshit little details of laws that their own staff made complicated in legal firms. Basically, they can't do anything productive. They are parasitical beings on top of those who actually produce things of value. And deep down, they know it. That is why they fight so fiercely to maintain systems of ownership and control whereby those who don't produce anything useful--those who "manage," or "coordinate," or "oversee"--get the most money. Those who actually do something get a poor man's wage, and have trouble paying to send their kids to the doctor.

So this brings me back to my own private little war against the paragon of having your head jammed in your ass known as Bitch PhD. Naturally, being that she is among the hallowed individuals who perceive that Barack Obama is the Light and the Way, she wants the "bailout."

Since once again Bitch has proven to be the crucible for progressive American error, I'm going to tear apart her stern lecture over why we should give $700 billion of our descendants' money away to the same people who caused various and sundry financial troubles, in exchange for their promise that this might avert future disaster.

Without further ado, here's Bitch embarrassing herself. Naturally, she embarrasses herself by channeling (half the time) her expert friend, who helps explain complicated things like finance to her, in return for her parroting it on her blog. This makes Bitch a modern news correspondent. Good for her! But really, I said without further ado, so let's make true:

"In the US and UK at the least, we (individuals, companies and countries) are hooked on credit. We buy our cars, houses and food on borrowed money. The companies we work for borrow money to pay us. Our hospitals, schools and buses are all bought with … yep, you guessed it …. more borrowed money."

The implication here is that people are "hooked on credit" out of choice. Rather, people are hooked on credit because they have nothing, so they require credit to get things they need. Like, say, medical help, or food, or a car, or a place to live. Like most American progressives, Bitch is very populist in this regard when critiquing McCain's tax policy and its effects on the poor, but when it comes to paying off the bankers, suddenly becomes very critical of poor peoples' credit "choices."

Poor people don't enjoy paying interest for the privilege of buying things. They do it because they have no money. Who has the money? They do. Like Nancy Pelosi, the twenty-five-times-over millionaire. That's why they look so happy.

I'll wager a guess here that Bitch's husband works in the FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate) industry, which might be why she's a little protective about that $700 billion theft (and could help explain a lot of American progressives, also). That inflated paycheck is all that's keeping her and her kid in iPhone lala land, after all.

Synopsis: poor Americans choose credit because they have no capital to buy anything else. The monopoly on pre-existing possessions held by the rich forces them to use credit. Therefore, using their use of credit to justify giving $700 billion from them to the very wealthy is extremely fucking stupid, not to mention wrong and inappropriate.

And if you think the poor can afford cars and houses and doctors and all that without credit, you're living in lala land (possibly iPhone lala land--check your purse).

If, as seems increasingly possible, however, its not just individuals but rather the entire banking system that's in trouble, the fact that some former traders are cashing large pay-checks is the least of our troubles.

Actually, no, it's not. All of those twenty million dollar bonuses going to financial executives who have driven their companies, and the banking system itself, into the ground, are not "the least of our troubles." They are our troubles. These are the same people who did it, and you want us to forget that they're getting paid truly huge chunks of money for waltzing out the door as failures?

Excuse me, Bitch, if I don't think it's trivial. Maybe my lack of a PhD in 18th century English literature makes me unable to comprehend things as well as you do, but here's how I see it: every $20 million bonus represents, say, a hundred $200K mortgages that could be paid off.

That's a hundred families with children that could be living in their home instead of shacking up in a relative's apartment, or camping out in the car. A hundred. And that's per bonus. So it is not "the least of our concerns;" it most certainly is a big fucking concern. Unless, of course, Bitch PhD cares only about her kid and living situation. And I know that's not the case.

If a sufficient number of banks go bust or the remainder get so nervous that they refuse to lend to anyone other than their own governments, then none of us will be able to either get new debt or, worse, renew the debt we have.

Okay, enough deriding Dr. Bitch for her ignorance and callousness toward the less-fortunate. The above quote is the crux of the Obama/progressive bullshit argument. It's basically the argument of the extortionist.

Here's how it goes: I got your money. You got a problem? Open your mouth and I'll make it worse. Go on. I dare you.

Otherwise known as: we've dug ourselves into a hole, and the only way out is to keep digging.

If we have gotten into a problematic situation where we require "new debt" or "renewed debt" in order to function, the answer is not to pay even more to keep the cycle going. Debt-financing is bad. It ultimately leads to huge deficits, economic slowdown, and spiraling interest payments. The idea of compounded interest relies upon the assumption of continual growth, because without continual growth, compounded interest cannot be financed. "Compounding interest," i.e. "debt," is nothing but magic: it implies creating value out of nothing. Putting $500 of gold in a vault does not create anything new. Working, growing, building--these things produce. But just owning alone does not produce anything--unless you use ownership to get other people to work for you, and keep the profits of their labors yourself.

Debt is disruptive and dangerous. It is by its nature an extortionary arrangement, whereby those who own can extract work from those who produce simply by virtue of their ownership. I.e., by holding a monopoly on resources, owners can never have to work, by parceling out "their" resources in exchange for someone else's work.

Aside from that, debt encourages living beyond means. It is a costly means of buying anything, because you pay more for it than it's worth. It raises prices thusly. It also encourages risk, because when you invest with debt (particularly through a limited-liability entity), you are much more willing to risk than if it were something you owned.

The resulting bill for all this mess, and the huge bureaucracies and courts for our bankruptcy system, are paid for by the taxpayers. It is our taxes paying for the bankruptcy system that keeps busy adjudicating the debt system--at a huge administrative price.

"That's also why we have to suck in our breath and prop up the flawed, panicking banking system that got us into this mess whilst we find a longer-term solution to our debt dependency. Finally, its why we have to stop venting on Henry Paulson and let him get on with buying time for a systematic review of our financial companies, systems and regulations."

Bitch's plea, and Obama's plea, is that we continue relying on the banking thiefs, because they think we can't make it without their lending. They even admit it is the same people who got us into this mess.

How can you be so insane? How can you want to give seven hundred billion dollars to people that you openly admit are the cause of the entire problem?

That is maddening. Almost as maddening as supporting Obama's plans for more war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and maybe Iran.

Yes, under our current system, the bankers could punish us a great deal if we don't pay them off. And they will. But they will do the same thing if we give them the money. In the same way that they drove up commodity prices, including food and oil, to begin hedging their investments against crashing mortgages, they will take the $700 billion and do the same thing, driving prices up further as they try to insulate their own portfolios against the mess they made for the rest of us.

Check out Mike Whitney's latest on the $700 billion theft: he predicts, accurately, the same commodity dumping that happened when real estate prices began to drop.

Seriously, remember: these are the same people who keep funding the Iraqi slaughter, and who voted for telecom immunity under FISA. Do you really think they're going to take the $700 billion and start nicely lending it out to bright-eyed young couples to buy their first home or start a small business? I guess, if you're looking to someone like Obama to save you from the future of endless war, you might well believe such a fantasy.

These are killers, liars, thieves and cowards of the lowest order. Give them $700 billion more? Are you crazy?

We can live without them. We can live without their debt and wars and blood and hidden enemies. Be brave.

Bailout Passes 09/29/2008

2008-09-30T08:37:00.001-07:00

Bailout happens September 29

In case you were busy celebrating the failure of the bailout package, take note: it wasn't necessary for Congress to pass a bailout package. The legislation was already passed in 1913.

The Federal Reserve has the ability to fund a bailout without going through Congress already. The link above, if you didn't click on it, describes how they gave the banks $630 billion dollars just a few hours before Congress voted down the Bush/Paulson/Democratic Party bailout plan.

I.e., when the Fed saw that they weren't going to be able to win over the necessary ideological conservative votes, they used their existing authority to steal another $630 billion anyway.

Frenzy link

2008-09-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

Thomas Gruner on Frenzy.

Ragnarism against the natural desire; ragnarism against the child.

Blood of Dresden

2008-09-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from the new Kurt Vonnegut memoir: the blood of Dresden.

God Bless America

2008-09-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

You make me sick.

Because I'm finding BitchPhd to be such a good parable for America right now, here's her latest:

I'm cheerful, I've done all my grading before finishing my morning coffee, I've banned three tiresome trolls, and comments to the previous thread are now closed.

Now I'm going to go find various checks that I've gotten recently paying me for my fruitful labors, swing by the bank to deposit 'em, take my bike in for a tuneup, send Ding the money I owe her, and buy myself a goddamn iPhone because I want one. So there.

What is it about this kind of behavior that grates me so? Is it the fact that buying things to distract you from the rest of the world is a matter of pride? Is it the fact that sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich is the same?

Or, is it the fact that this behavior occurs without any shame, from the same people who stick their fingers in the ears to the howls of the dead at the same time they're on the sidelines cheering Barack the quarterback as he lobs another moab into a civilian neighborhood?

Don't annoy her, damn you. Don't get in the way of her new goddamn iPhone. Of course, make absolutely sure you don't bother her with the dead. Because if she had to think about things like what happens to people blessed by our military, it would just, you know, ruin her day. It would ruin her next caramel swirl iFrappuccino, dammit!

By all means, buy your crap. What the hell else are you going to do? There's little you can do, before they cart you off to razor wire land. But do you have to dance around like a madman while you do it? Do you have to cheer it on, for decency's sake? What's that? You can't even stand to be reminded of what your saints are up to?

Your mindless quacking is why these killers are going to keep killing. You won't brook criticism of them. You can't even be bothered to talk about them. Go ahead and cleverly critique Palin's latest gaffe; go ahead and whine about McCain and the marginal percentage changes he's going to make in your tax structure.

It is so absolutely sickening. Let the record show that while the killing fields were laden with fresh bodies, Americans had their fingers in their ears, screaming shrilly, LALALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA.

I guess I can at least take some relief from the fact that Bitch PhD's busy schedule required her to ban three terrorists, excuse me, three communists, excuse me, three Others, excuse me, three trolls (ah yes, that's the popular internet term for nonconformists) before she could breathe easy and go back to willingly distracting herself.

Is it the hopeless death and destruction of the place that turns so many of the inmates into willing captives? Does it break their spirit in youth, and turn them into this? Or is it in their nature, and there's no hope for the species?

I still believe in empathy. I think that's why Bitch PhD needs to go out and buy crap--because she needs something shiny and new to distract her from her conscience. So I guess I should take hope that she, and the rest of America, keep needing to dangle carrots in front of the donkey: if they have to distract themselves from conscience and empathy, it at least means there is still conscience and empathy left to repress.

So, there is hope. Enjoy your new iPhone, Dr. Bitch. I know you can't stand to think about what it is going to look like when Obama escalates military intervention in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But really, enjoy the iPhone. It gives me hope that there are still finer qualities in you that you are trying to repress.

Removing troubled mortgages from the market

2008-09-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

$700 billion bailout plan

It's staggering sometimes, how you can let your guard down.

You think you have trained yourself to be skeptical about every heaping pile of crap the corporate media shovels on your doorstep and smears across your computer and/or television. But life goes on, and you get lulled back into complacency anyway, and you find that despite your best efforts, you have nonetheless allowed some of the media crap to shape your underlying assumptions.

About small things, sometimes. And you can even have predictable counterreactions based on those assumptions.

Like in the case of the $700 billion bailout. So, our great leaders propose this, and your first reaction is, "This is bullshit! They're going to buy a bunch of worthless securities from the same scum that came up with the plans to create the worthless securities in the first place!"

But then you realize you've fallen into the media craptrap again. And even in resisting their bailout plan, you've forgotten to question the deceptive way the news is presented, because you are accepting the basic details of the plan before you resist it.

Thinking about it outside the confines of the T.V., here's my stunningly obvious question. Like all stunningly-obvious questions, it reveals the dearth of analysis in corporate news, and thereby, their deceptions.

Stunningly obvious question: if the government was actually trying to spend a lot of money to keep all those mortgage securities from being worthless, even if they were planning to do so by wrongly indebting future generations of Americans, wouldn't the simplest way be to fund the mortgages that the securities depend upon?

There it is. Another dimension of the whole scheme now jumps out at you.

If you accept the details of the bailout plan as framed by the corporate media, here's the most critical explanation you can come up with (which Arthur Silber and Chris Floyd are both busy doing):

1) Wall Street begins artificially inflating the value of real estate by peddling sub-prime mortgages to people who can't pay them;
2) Wall Street gets rich packaging and trading the mortgages;
3) The bubble bursts, people default on mortgages they can't afford and lose their homes;
4) Wall Street forecloses on the lost homes, but prices are down and they can't recover the "value" they have been attributing to themselves;
5) Wall Street holds MBS (mortgage-backed securities) that aren't worth as much as they have been misrepresented to be, and houses that aren't worth as much as they have been misrepresented to be;
6) Wall Street appears to be in trouble;
7) The government indebts the taxpayers $700 billion to buy some of the worst MBS from the big firms, thereby alleviating some of Wall Street's loss.

While nefarious, this is not quite as dirty as what Wall Street actually did/is in the process of doing. This is obvious when you consider the fact that if the government used its $700 billion (or however much it will actually cost them) to fund those mortgages, the MBS held by Wall Street would still have their face value! The losses would be gone.

The end result of that policy would be that Wall Street would not lose their money--their securities would be worth what they had pretended, because the government was propping up the mortgages. Wall Street would make their dirty money, poor people would keep their homes, and the situation would be "solved" (inasmuch as any part of this charade can be solved).

But, they're not funding the mortgages. Instead, they're buying the securities off of Wall Street. Here's the catch, though: by having the government buy the securities in order to validate the security prices, rather than fund the mortgages, Wall Street still gets to foreclose on all the houses.

Do you get it, now? Because the government is buying the securities rather than funding the mortgages, Wall Street gets to have its cake and eat it too: it gets to keep the artificially-inflated price of its crappy "securities," and at the same time, it gets to foreclose on all the houses! It gets both pieces.

Poor people default, Wall Street gets houses. Wall Street then sells worthless MBS to the government at face value, and they make even more money than they would have made if their whole dirty subprime mortgage scheme had actually been paid off by the homeowners in the first place!

Here is the full deal, broken down:

1) Wall Street begins artificially inflating the value of real estate by peddling sub-prime mortgages to people who can't pay them;
2) Wall Street gets rich packaging and trading the mortgages;
3) The bubble bursts, people default on mortgages they can't afford and lose their homes;
4) Wall Street forecloses on the lost homes;
5) Wall Street sells its MBS to the taxpayers at face value;
6) Wall Street gets all the houses, and all the money

This wasn't a failure of the system--it was on purpose. The reason that lending standards were relaxed under Chris Dodd were so that low-income homeowners could sign onto the deal in the first place. This helped inflate the price of real estate, which pumped up the MBS to such a value that they could be spread throughout the entire system. The broad diffusion of these securities mandated that later on, when the values began to drop, Wall Street could threaten the country with a genuine depression in order to justify its no-bid contract for sale of MBS to the taxpayers.

Wall Street gets houses, Wall Street gets cash, and the next several generations get the bill.

Introduction to Tax Theft series

Obama racism, again

2008-09-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

Insulting Obama is automatically racist.

From the link:

"The point, in all cases, is that the statement in question is objectionable, regardless of the speaker's intent, because it the social context in which the statement exists makes it so. Whether or not one is aware of that social context and is being offensive "on purpose" is irrelevant."

Perhaps the most frightening thing that jumps out of this statement is the assertion that social context defines meaning. Did you get that? Read the quote again: it is saying that regardless of what you are trying to communicate, your message is defined by social context.

Who defines social context? People could argue about it at length; in this case, the author may be referring to the general blogosphere (i.e. the blogs the author reads or considers "important"), or the corporate media (i.e. the media the author absorbs or considers "important"). In any case, social context is dependent upon the person defining it. A person's group and perspective are their social context.

So, the quote essentially says: What you intend to communicate to me is meaningless. My social context tells me what you said, even if you don't agree with it.

An end to communication, certainly--the listener already knows the answer. Don't even bother correcting them, because their social context (or, depending on their level of arrogance, "everyone's" social context) has already told them the true meaning of what you're going to say.

I didn't initially believe Arthur Silber when he warned that progressives were labeling anyone who disagreed with Barack Obama as "racist." Having been either wise or ignorant* enough to avoid arguments about Obama, I gave the American self-titled progressives too much credit.

(*My money's on the former, but given this recent string of posts, I've obviously regressed into the belief that communication can change some peoples' weltanshauung)

But, the hostesses of BitchPhD have helped me to see that indeed, insulting Barack Obama is racist, and unacceptable.

I think the quote above (from them) speaks for itself: who the hell cares what you say, if they already know the answer? If you don't fit into their social context, any critique is automatically racism, because they already know all the definitions.

Of course, people who call Barack Obama a "muslim terrorist" are probably racist. They may be doing it out of racist motivations. They may be subconsciously racist, and may be wanting to cause racial turmoil by saying it.

But the statement itself is not racist. "Muslim" is not a race, and "terrorist" is not a race. A racist can, for racist reasons, call Barack Obama a terrorist, without the remark itself being inherently racist. A racist can also call a banana "tasty" without the remark itself being inherently racist. A non-racist can call a banana "tasty" without the remark itself being inherently racist, and a non-racist can call Barack Obama a terrorist without the remark itself being inherently racist.

Associating a phrase with the character of the speaker is a way of marginalizing the phrase. If an idiot accidentally says something intelligent, it might be good to pay heed. If a genius says something stupid, it might be good not to dwell on it too much. But if all language becomes associated with the speaker, it blinds the listener to learning anything from a source s/he has already considered "bad."

The words we select to communicate with each other have great meaning, because if we take them by their actual definitions, we can communicate things to one another that may be new and different. If all listeners automatically decide to redefine terms based on their "social context," communication can never occur. Viewpoints cannot be changed, and thoughts stagnate.

Shame on those educated, well-off American "progressives" who seek to make even Newspeak an inefficient means of control, because they have already decided to arbitrarily change the literal meaning of every English word so that no constructions are possible which can alter a viewpoint.

Obama terrorist's best friend

2008-09-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

In which kid is suspended for wearing an anti-Obama t-shirt to school.

In which Sybil Vane embarrasses herself talking about said suspended kid.

Poor Sybil. And on such an easy target, too.

Putting aside the love of censorship (when it is used against people who don't worship Obama), which is indeed plenty stupid enough by itself, this gem of a phrase sticks out: "Your kid's shirt is racist."

The t-shirt, for the record, said: "Obama terrorist's best friend." Lack of punctuation in the original.

Now, I can't figure out how that is racist. But what I can figure out is that saying something bad about Obama is racist, even if it is not directed at him because of his race. Yes, I know what you're saying--that that's not the definition of racism. When it comes to Obama, though, you are wrong. Here is the new Obama (TM) approved definition of racism:

rac·ism [rey-siz-uhm]

1.	a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

Excuse me, that was the actual definition. Here's the new one:

rac·ism [rey-siz-uhm]

1.	a belief or doctrine that Barack Obama can do wrong.

...

Poor, foolish Sybil.

So, let me get this straight:

1) Obama is going to protect American womens' access to birth control.
2) Obama is going to have his military kill innocent Pakistani, Afghani and Iraqi women, thereby denying them birth control (or life control, or even death control).

Now, to the bitches, these contradictions are not racist, because American women are better than Pakistani and Afghani wo...well, maybe they are racist. Or nationalist, at least. But maybe I'm not approaching this from the right angle.

So, those contradictions are not racist, because women born in America merit more consideration than women born...no, that's still not good.

All right, I can't figure that out. But let's move to the next topic.

"Obama terrorist's best friend" is, I would argue, accurate, though probably not for the reason the kid or his dad wrote it on the shirt in question. Here's why:

1) For years, liberals have been complaining that Bush's war in Iraq was stupid because it created more terrorists, and helped al Qaeda* recruit. (*Let's pretend "al Qaeda" exists in anything close to the form we generally imagine it to exist in for the purpose of this discussion)

2) Obama is planning on continuing the occupation of Iraq with mercenaries, "security trainers," military bases, overflights, etc.

Again, call me crazy, because it seems like Obama is going to be dredging up the same helpful recruiting bonuses for al Qaeda by continuing the same occupation Bush started. So yes, he would be a "friend" to the terrorists. Every innocent family his goons gun down at a checkpoint is another loyal recruit.

And of course, if we define "terrorism" as the "unwarranted murder of innocents," well then, we might even say that Obama's plans to bomb Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly-Iran-and-who-knows-where-the-hell-else could constitute terrorism.

I think I know what Sybil Vane would say to that, along with her fellow hosts. That's right: this press conference is over.

Fear Motivation

2008-09-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

The BBC discusses a study showing that more fearful people tend to support capital punishment and authoritarian government.

How many decades before the idea of fear as motivation for violent behavior becomes understood?

How many decades after that before we begin looking at the environmental causes of instilling fear in children, thereby ensuring violent, authoritarian adults?

How many decades after that before we begin doing something?

Obama Lying About Iran WMD

2008-09-19T11:20:00.002-07:00

and other sundry things.

"Out of curiosity, can you provide me with a citation for where Obama claimed Iran had nukes from *after* the CIA released a report saying they didn't?"

November 2007 was the new national intelligence estimate. You can download the report here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5370436

The report is also discussed here:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/03/iran.nuclear/index.html

Here is a July, 2008 article where Obama talks about how the world must stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/23/barackobama.israelandthepalestinians1

Here is a July 25, 2008 article where Obama talks about how Iran has to give up its "nuclear weapons program":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/25/obama-to-meet-with-sarkoz_n_114918.html

Here is an August, 2008 article where Obama talks about how Iran has to abandon its "nuclear ambitions":

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/28/obama_could_open_early_iran_nuclear_talks_adviser/

Obama is laying the groundwork for the same type of WMD-related scare that paved the way for the Iraq War. He is, essentially, lying just like Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, using similar terms--the same terms that, in fact, Bush and the Republicans are now using to lie about Iran. He knows what he is doing--fearmongering--and he knows how well it works on Americans.

Onto more katherine points:

"Would it be wrong, for instance, to kill German soldiers who were forcefully drafted into the Nazi army in order to end the Holocaust?"

As you write the question, no. I am not advocating pacifism, i.e., an unwillingness/inability to engage in self defense. Nor am I arguing against what would be, by a noble country, humane acts of freeing people from tyranny.

"a) We are not currently engaged in a war in Pakistan."

Our special forces are currently killing people there:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11policy.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

Obama has said he wants to "expand" operations there. That means even more death, and when you exchange fighter planes for Green Berets, the collateral damage goes up.

"b) *Your* solution to Iraq and Afghanistan is to 'expand' out military there. Why do you assume Obama is going to 'expand' the war in the wrong way?"

(Referring to my The Only Right Thing To Do In Iraq)

That solution refers to educated soldiers, among other things. For example:

First, we must increase the number of American troops in Iraq tenfold (or morefold) while we simultaneously increase our investment in military humanitarian training, MP oversight of troops, and public oversight of (an all new set of) contractors. There need to be so many U.S. troops that you can't go outside without bumping into ten. And they all need to be smiling, well-paid, living in sanitary barracks, off stimulant drugs, getting 8 hours of sleep a day, and handing out free candy bars, Qur'ans, Bibles, stuffed animals, food and water, and whatever else on demand.

(We can contract K, B & R to build said troop facilities for the price of $1, or just continue criminally indicting top executives until the remaining ones agree to do the work for $0.50. And in case you're wondering, they have to give back the money they overbilled, too. The $0.50 charge is punitive, not restitutionary.)

This is not what Obama is advocating. What Obama is advocating is throwing a few dozen thousand more soldiers in there to continue with the same game plan as before. He called Bush's surge a "wild success," which shows what he thinks success is: car bombings, murders, etc.

If all you took away from my "right thing to do" was "more troops," you did not read it closely enough.

"a) I was perhaps unclear about what I meant about 'solving all the problems in the middle east'. I meant 'solving the problems in the middle east that have a high likelihood of impacting our economy or safety', such as theocratic regimes gaining nuclear weapons or invading large numbers of other states or even, say, attempting to perform 'ethnic cleansing' on large sections of their population. These are problems that our foreign policy should be involved with."

And when have we been involved with those problems? Secondly, if we have been, when has there been a successful outcome?

As to the economic consequences of my Iraq plan, I didn't say it was feasible, or nice. I said it is the least we can do to begin attempting to make up to the Iraqis for what we did to them. We should be disgusted with, and ashamed of, ourselves, and no amount of our sacrifices will be able to earn the Iraqis' forgiveness. When discussing the right thing to do in such an awful, murderous situation, how much it costs our government is not even a factor that gets to be included in the situation. If you don't understand why we don't get to be so arrogant as to whine about our taxes, I can link you to some shots of children burned to death in Fallujah.

Re: drafting people to raise the necessary troop levels. I did not say we would draft. I said we would raise pay and security until people wanted to join. That would require taxes. Which the aristocracy has more than enough money to pay. I think the Rockefeller family could get by with only three BMWs per person--four is probably a sacrifice they can afford to make.

I know that solution isn't going to happen, as I said within it; it was a thought experiment to imagine, "If we were decent, and we realized what we had done to those poor people, this is what we would do to try to begin to make up for it." But of course, if we were that decent, we would not have done it to begin with. Thought exercise.

As I said in my last post, though, if we limit our imagination to what we think other people will accept without trouble, we won't ever be able to go very far with ourselves. We will remain in the Blood Ages for all time, with no new renaissance to save us.

The Practical Effect of Not Supporting Murder

2008-09-19T11:20:00.001-07:00

Again, for katherine.

As to the Which Preschoolers Go situation, I would indeed pick three preschoolers over five. If you do not make the choice, the maniacs will kill all of them.

And as to Obama and McCain, and the murders they are both going to commit after they are elected, I have to admit, you are almost certainly right in the hard facts you suggest. One or the other of them is going to be elected by some large number of voters in this country, and they will then go forward and commit their mass homicide. There is nothing we can do to stop it (without risking our lives, and without chancing an infinitesimally low probability of success).

You are also right in your implication that John McCain is more likely to use nuclear weapons or be more belligerent.

I disagree with you about whether or not Obama or McCain will ultimately kill more people or cause more damage worldwide, because Bill Clinton was very successful at doing both of those things--he simply did it in a more cost-efficient way. But I'll put aside that objection for the moment, and accept what you say: that McCain would be worse than Obama.

So back to the main point: voting for Obama is simply an attempt to prevent McCain's version of madness from taking control.

But here is the crucial difference between choosing Obama in this situation, and choosing him in the preschool situation: the preschool hostage situation is one time only. The presidential farce is recurring.

Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. (This isn't an extreme stretch; considering how many dozens or hundreds of thousands of innocent children both Obama and McCain are going to kill, 3 preschoolers a day is probably inadequate for comparative purposes. But let's just use it.) Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children--your choice.

At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along with the insanity--putting the lotion on the skin for Buffalo Bob--and say, "Enough."

At some point, it becomes apparent to you that the game is never going to end. The children are going to keep dying--there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders.

How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and choose which national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. Count the bodies.

Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, "Enough"?

Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there.

When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only their deaths, but their entire horrific game?

It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as "a little less murder than we could otherwise commit," it will never end.

When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first. Then maybe, someday, more. It's as daunting a task as getting blacks the right to eat at the lunch counter; maybe more daunting, since Europeans were murdering one another in wars when they didn't have Africans around to enslave. But it has to happen. Individual humans need to be able to make the decision to stop the killing. You can do it. You can stand for peace and justice--you can refuse to play the terrible game of choosing who will die, and in what quantity. Leave the sadists with nothing but their own fantasies, and they will shrivel away.

If everyone is afraid to take the step away from killing because "it will make no difference; I'm only one person" then no one will ever step away. And the killing will never end.

(Short answers to specific questions upcoming!)

Democratic Plan to Block Birth Control

2008-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

I have uncovered details of a new, publicly-announced governmental act that will prevent women in numerous foreign countries from having access to birth control, or indeed, sexual freedom of any kind. This heinous plan is actually put forth by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. Any true feminists need to instantly speak out against it, and pledge that they will refuse to vote for Barack Obama unless he instantly denounces this plan!

This plan involves deploying the U.S. military to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it will pursue alleged "terrorists." While doing so, it will use so-called "precision strikes" to destroy the uteruses, bodies, and entire reproductive systems of these innocent women. One small example of this phenomenon is this mass murder of innocent women in Afghanistan.

Actions like these will have the obvious effect of denying these women access to birth control. And, since it involves killing them, it is much more important that we crusade against this denial of their right to birth control than we do against, say, a local pharmacist refusing to grant birth control to an American woman, so she has to drive across the street to get it.

Who's with me? Who will take a stand against Barack Obama and his hideous plan to deny birth control and reproductive freedom to the women of the far east?

On Decency - for katherine

2008-09-17T13:18:00.001-07:00

A response to katherine.

Katherine asks: "How, exactly, am I supposed to 'resist them'?"

By not voting for them--not giving them the validation that they and the corporate media and the whole ruling establishment craves--you resist, if in a small way.

Don't focus on resisting them, though: focus on the shared humanity of our species, or on the sanctity of life. Show them that you are not willing to become a vehicle for mass death and destruction. Show them that you can be appealed to only if they promise to stop indiscriminate bombing, starvation sanctions, and the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus weapons against civilian populations. That would be a nice start.

Katherine says: "not voting for Obama means McCain is more likely to win."

Think about my Which Preschoolers Go analogy: you are in essence saying, "If I don't tell Obama to go ahead and kill three preschoolers, then McCain will kill five preschoolers."

But outside of the preschool hostage situation, you don't have to choose either of them!

Sure--the rest of the country is probably going to support killing either three or five preschoolers (just like in tax, add as many zeroes to the preschooler totals as you like until it seems like an important problem). But that doesn't mean that you have to.

You have a soul. You have empathy. You have a family of your own. You perceive on some level what it must be like for those people over there--those human beings with different religion and skin color and daily habits--to deal with seeing their closest loved ones murdered in the most terrible ways.

Refuse to be a part of it.

Imagine that you woke up tomorrow and found that you lived in a society where child-beating was acceptable. Would you start doing it yourself, just because if you didn't beat that child, someone else would?

What about murder? Or rape? If people (without uniforms) started doing those things lawfully in your neighborhood, would you participate?

Right now, everyone thinks it is fine to support leaders who impose all those atrocities on foreigners. I know I am unpopular to suggest it is wrong, but here I am. Maybe, if enough people start thinking it is wrong, the killing fields can be cleansed again. Maybe we can start finding our souls.

This is the "if your cool friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?" argument. You don't have to do the stupid thing everyone else is doing--even if they're going to do it no matter what you do.

You can stand taller, so to speak. You can be a voice of reason; a paragon of virtue. Or just a decent, humane, caring human being, which we need many more of.

katherine says: "foreign policy is ... *gasp* ... complicated. What, exactly, has Obama proposed that you disagree with and *what do you suggest he advocate instead*?"

"Foreign policy" can be complicated if it must be, but the proposition that murdering innocent people is wrong is not complicated. It is very simple. Too simple for our leading thinkers to waste time on, apparently.

I will repeat: Obama intends to keep an invading American force in Iraq against the democratic will of the people there. He wants to use mercenaries, bases, fighter jets, missiles, drones and naval ships against their country.

Obama is claiming that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, even though the CIA and the IAE say this is not true. He says he is keeping "all options" on the table. That is a code word for "I will nuke if I have to." So the nuclear apocalypse you fear from McCain is not exclusively McCain. It was a democratic president who used the first nukes in the world dropped aggressively on a civilian population, and it was another democratic president who almost used the second during Bay of Pigs. Now Obama is threatening to attack Iran over a nonexistent "WMD" program, against the advice of his own intelligence agencies. Remind you of anyone you know?

Obama is planning on "expanding" (read: killing more people) the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These are not complicated plans. These are simple plans. "Obama not like terrorists. Obama SMASH Pakistan, place where terrorists be! Obama SMASH Afghanistan, place where terrorists be!" Repeat ad nauseum, until the world burns.

katherine says: "For instance, having American troops in Iraq will undoubtedly result in them killing some Iraqis. But, if they all left tomorrow, what remains of the country's infrastructure would crumble and more Iraqis would die. So unless you have a plan for how to solve all the problems of repressive, theocratic, hostile regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere, Obama's plan sounds pretty reasonable to me."

Firstly, I came up with a "plan" for Iraq, which is fanciful, but probably the closest thing to moral that we could manage to do to begin attempting to make up for the billionth part of trouble we have caused the Iraqis. If you'd like to read it, here it is: The Only Right Thing To Do In Iraq

As to your main point, I don't think it is our business to "solve all the problems" of the Middle East and elsewhere. Our history has shown that whenever we undertake someone else's problems, our elites make a lot of money, a lot of our poor soldiers die, and we commit horrific brutalities against other nations and peoples. We pull out our main force eventually, leave behind a few bases, bill the common taxpayers, make movies about it that highlight our troops' sacrifices, and go on with business as usual. We have an awful track record of solving our own problems, and an awful track record of solving the rest of the worlds' problems.

And if it was our business, or if we were somehow charged with doing it, we are doing it terribly. Our military is a force of mind-numbing evil, and whenever it commits those evils, it does so claiming justice and truth and democracy and puppies and so forth. If you want references, I can provide them by the metric ton of vileness.

But for decency's sake, I really think you can make all the right decisions simply by acknowledging that killing innocent people is wrong. Since you are not a Republican, you are probably not so deluded that you think no innocent people get killed by our military; you may even accept that a great deal of innocent people get killed, in hideous ways, by our military. The next stage of breaking through the underlying American assumptions is to perceive that this murder of innocents is not, in fact, either right or necessary.

Which Preschoolers Go?

2008-09-17T08:01:00.001-07:00

You're walking down the street one day when shots ring out at a nearby preschool. You rush in and find two guys standing in there with preschool students as hostages: John McCain and Barack Obama.

Immediately, they turn their guns on you.

"Oh, tough guy, eh? Come in here to save the kids, eh? Think you're a real bruiser, eh?"

"Err, not really, John...well, I heard shots...I guess it would be nice if I could save them."

"Heehee, lookit John, he's scared! Whadda ya think we should do with him, huh? Whadda ya think we should do?"

"Mr. Obama, please, you don't have to do this."

"Ooh, I got it!" *Barack walks over and puts the gun against the head of the nearest preschooler.* "You can decide who's gonna die, tough guy! How about these kids?" *Barack waves his gun at the nearest three children.* "Want them to die?"

*McCain grabs another group of kids.* "Ha! You want them to die? Well, maybe you want THESE kids to die instead!" *McCain waves his gun at the five kids he has before him.*

"Who's it gonna be, tough guy? Who's it gonna be?"

...

So--who are you going to vote for? The difference here is that only 3 innocent children will die if you go with Obama, rather than thousands.

The difference also is that you have no choice. In the situation above, you have to choose between either Obama or McCain, or else both of them will kill the children. You have no choice except to pick one.

Obama/McCain is like the Green Goblin in the first recent Spiderman movie. They dangle McCain's 100 year Iraq War and greater likelihood of nuclear apocalypse off one side of the bridge, and Barack's slightly lesser likelihood of nuclear apocalypse and increased killing in Pakistan and Afghanistan off the other.

But you don't have to pick one of them. This isn't Spiderman; this isn't preschool hostages. You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them.

Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder fewer innocent people.

Don't Bother Me With the Dead, Part 2

2008-09-16T21:26:00.001-07:00

Reprehensible cowardice. Self-imposed blindness.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps fresh new post-sanctions millions, all waiting to be butchered, phosphorized, napalmed, moabed to death by Barack Obama, and the self-titled progressive, liberal American bloggers can't be bothered to hear about it.

Situation 1: me at democraticunderground.com. I make a small handful of posts, perhaps three or four, in various "support Barack Obama" threads. I basically say--and no kidding, this is all I say--nothing more than "We must support Obama in increasing the size of the military because we must support his goals of escalating the war on terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

The end result: I'm banned, censored, shut up and shut away. Don't bother the Americans with the faintest whisper of the dead.

You can't even quote his holiness Barack Obama's campaign positions taken from his website, because it is such a stunning stew of cognitive dissonance for them to have a reminder that he plans on continuing the same war plans as George W. Bush.

They never really hated George W. Bush's actions. All they gave a goddamn about was that it was George W. Bush, a Republican, doing them.

Whether they support or do not support the killing is irrelevant. They're even worse than the Republicans, and just as cowardly as the Republicans accuse them of being: they can't even be bothered by reminders of the people their holy boy is going to kill.

Situation 2: me at bitch PhD. As the blogging team there bloviates about supporting Barack and helping women's rights, I dare suggest that it would help the rights of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan if they were not, you know, about to be brutally fucking killed by their holy boy Barack and his airstrikes, and his cluster bombs, and his tanks, and his checkpoints, and his cruise missiles, and his mercenaries.

While we're at it, they're going to get raped, and driven into prostitution and sex-slavery, just like the girls in Iraq. No, I didn't mention that one at the time, because my posts were already "too long." God knows 2 or 3 paragraphs is too much to trouble the bitch phd hosts about with regards to people who their chosen leader is going to kill.

Guess what the end result is, with these feminists who are so concerned with the rights of women? Deleted, silenced, shut up, shut away.

Cowards; disgusting cowards. They can't be bothered for a minute with a reminder so gentle, so un-controversial, so public that it is on Barack's website, and a key part of his speeches.

Who the hell cares about the women in Pakistan, anyway? About the children in Afghanistan? The elderly in Iraq? Or even the healthy adult men? Don't fucking bother them with that worthless shit. Barack Obama is going to protect their access to contraception, so let him shred the lives of another ten thousand human beings in the middle east, and don't make me think about it.

John McCain? Why, he's the mass killer who's not going to protect my access to birth-control pills. Omigod, can't choose him as president! Better pick the mass killer who is going to protect my access to birth-control pills. That's a super choice!

This truly is the land of the dead and the times of the dead. It is rude, and even crazy, to suggest that mass murder is a bad idea, let alone an immoral one.

Have I gone mad? Is my sense of decency the product of some world outside this one--an insane multiverse where killing lots of innocent people is actually bad? How did the door open that let me into this world, where I have everything backwards? I'm new here, people! Cut me some slack!

Or am I just the only person left who didn't get the memo that collateral damage is no longer a problem in modern warfare? Did God take me off his rolodex, and forget to call me and give me an update on how America really does kill with an honorable purpose?

I am dearly ashamed of my fellow human beings. It is almost incomprehensible that they can't bring themselves to think about what it is they're championing on--and yet, they do champion it on, and they understand it to some degree.

Too proud and afraid to give a damn. Cowards with terrified little souls, who can't be troubled to think about the terrors they are going to inflict on their kinsmen thousands of miles away.

I am so ashamed of my people, and they spit at me when I beg them to reconsider the death and the horror.

Don't Bother Me With the Dead, Part 1

2008-09-16T20:49:00.000-07:00

sgtg: "what is your agenda/point? i get that you think the killing in the middle east will continue under obama. you also think that it will continue under mccain. so what are you getting at? what do you want "us" to do? are you suggesting that we don't vote at all? i'm really not getting what you're after. i know that the shit going on in the middle east is not going to stop with any candidate. and it sucks. but i'm going to vote for obama anyway. i'm just really dying to understand your point. and if you could keep it brief, wow, i'd really appreciate it. and if you just spew the same long-winded stuff as before, and not answer my question, i'll just stop reading your comments (which i think a bunch of folks have already done)."

What is your agenda/point?

1) Murder is wrong, even if you murder fewer people than someone else would have, or do it in a nicer way.

2) Supporting people who murder, and who openly plan more murders, such as Barack Obama, is wrong.

Another Obama Moment in America

2008-09-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

I run across: the bitches latest take on Barack Obama. The post discusses a program encouraging families to bring their daughters to support Barack Obama's candidacy.

I reply briefly, in essence suggesting an irony in pairing the innocence of America's young children with Barack's brutal rise to power.

I am then censored; my comment is deleted. I am scolded to not be "obnoxious." Apparently, "obnoxious" does not mean supporting murder. Rather, it is "obnoxious" and unthinkable to be sarcastic.

So, I comment anew. Text follows.

Okay, I am going to be as direct as possible in pointing something out:

1) Barack Obama intends to escalate the killing in Pakistan. Countless innocent little girls there--many peoples' daughters; their hopes and dreams--will have their lives shattered into black nothingness.

2) Barack Obama intends to escalate the killing in Afghanistan. Countless innocent little girls there will have their flesh torn apart by cluster bombs. They will have their brains liquified three blocks over by MOABs dropped from the clouds. They will step on land mines and spend the next fifty years of their lives in terrible pain, hobbling on stumps that never got proper medical treatment.

3) Barack Obama intends to keep mercenaries, bases and advisers in Iraq. Countless innocent little girls there will be shot to death when their father doesn't brake the car quickly enough when a Blackwater Hummer goes by. They will be raped at ten years old behind a crumbled mosque, by three eighteen-year-old US marines with AR-15 rifles. They will go home to find that their fathers have been taken for questioning, and will not be back ever again.

4) Barack Obama threatens that he is willing to use all options against Iran. Countless innocent little girls lie awake in their beds at night, wondering when the American planes will come turn them into Iraq.

It is abysmally sad to dirty the hands of America's little girls by bringing them to support this murderer--this horrid man who has sent billions of dollars to pay for the bullets, tires, bombs and fuel that grind away so many of the lives of their fellow human beings. He keeps voting for the resolutions and the money. He called Bush's troop surge a great success. He claims Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, even though his own intelligence agencies say it is not true.

How can you even begin to condone this horrid warmongering? Obama plots his murders in public; he stares into the camera and tells the country exactly where he is going to send his soldiers to kill and maim. And yet, you would support him because you think he might kill slightly fewer people than McCain would?

What a terrible thing to teach a child--support Murderer Number Two, because he is a little bit nicer than Murderer Number One.

I pity the children who have their open minds warped into believing that it is acceptable to cheer on violence and brutality, as long as there is someone "worse" out there to justify it.

The Best Things

2008-09-12T12:39:00.001-07:00

The best things are not sold, which is generally repeated, but little understood. The (often rich) servants of antilife, therefore, work to repress the best things. This has two benefits: (1) firstly, if the best things are repressed, people will turn to lesser things for pastime--lesser things that they will pay for. The owners then get more goodies. And (2) secondly, when the best things are repressed, life suffers, and fearful minds rejoice.

The finest things of life are simple, wonderful, and cost nothing. They are available (potential) to all humans to varying degrees:

Friendship
Sex
Love
Imagination
Relaxation
Exertion
Creativity/expression

The societies of greed and antilife have evolved into wicked designs, whose function is to eliminate all of the above, and replace them with commodities (i.e., for purchase), which can be controlled by owners. As a result, most humans become reliant on owners for the substitutes of life, which solidifies ownership control. It is like taking a baby's mother away and replacing her with plastic arms.

Below follows how the owners control things.

Social interaction is limited to prevent the formation of sexual bonds, or those of friendship or love. At the earliest stage of life, the coercion begins; as humans grow older, they are pushed even more firmly in the direction of routines that separate people from one another, and make them reliant on paying rents to owners for the privilege of one another's company, or approximations thereof.

Childhood

Mother's milk is replaced with chemical formula (natural v. purchased; life v. antilife)

Mother is replaced with daycare worker (natural v. purchased; life v. antilife)

Parents are replaced with toys and television

Socializing may more easily occur within a private home, or at a public park, but parks are few and far between, and most of the population dwells in small apartments. Television and culture encourages children to feel that socializing must take place at commercial venues, where their parents pay rent to owners for the privilege of a larger space to play: commercial park, kiddie pizza, etc.

In school, gender roles are reinforced and the sexes are segregated and differentiated. Gym, bathrooms and other norms teach children to be ashamed of their bodies, and that it is wicked (or gross) to look at other bodies. Television and culture have already taught them to divide the sexes based on product distinction, and that sexual identity is established through choice of toys or play activities. Physical intimacy is discouraged as repressed adults enforce their fantasy of sexless, "innocent" children through touching barriers and the respecting of firm notions of privacy.

Adulthood

You cannot walk out your door without running into a road where you are expected to be burning purchased gasoline in a purchased car to belong. You can go almost nowhere to be social without being expected to buy a drink or an entree, or be shopping for something else. Inadvertant socializing occurs in the workplace, but among a limited group of people, under the control of owners or managers, who are driven to excessive control by the pressure of economic competition.

The village green is replaced with the private bar.

Limited time for socializing between the demands of employment and maintaining economic well-being reduces the time available for interaction. Through decades of television and popular culture inculcation, interaction itself is a brainless word game of confidence projection, and deception about social status, power or income.

Individual economics pit single persons against one another in a quest to avoid losing out by marrying into a lower income group. Potential mates must be carefully weighed to avoid investing too much of oneself in a "costly" (by comparison to other "opportunities") mistake.

People have already learned to identify themselves by products. Clothing brands, television shows, sports teams, and occupation define the individual. Not surprisingly, people learning these things about other people find themselves to know nothing, even if they may feel a superficial pleasure at matching answers.

Every good thing listed above is very obviously crushed by the "be economically successful or starve outdoors" pressure of free trade. Exercise--exertion--becomes difficult to squeeze into the crammed life. Relaxation cannot be enjoyed if the body has not exerted previously, and is healthy and prepared to melt into true relaxation. Imagination is interfered with by the crushing of dreams, and is crowded out by the stresses and pressures of money.

How did society come to be designed around limiting the freest, easiest, best things, which we can give each other?

The devaluing of the self that the fearful mind engages in is king. Devalue your own flesh, and see it as sinful; devalue your thoughts, and see them as inadequate. Instead glorify the purchasable people available on television. Look to them for models of friendship and romance; look to the magazine covers for desire.

Enthroned avarice; antilife; notions of ownership that go against the core of the living universe. The outpouring of the ragnarist mind, where we pursue the monetary absolute, and deride everything true and good and alive. A pressure that cannot be ignored in these times, to be sure. Yet sustenance does not need to be paired with a rejection of life. Sustenance unfettered from the administrative costs of tithing owners for parceled privileges would be a hundred times easier.

Obama, oh, Obama!

2008-09-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Obama is not a man, but is a living god. He can do no wrong. He belches change and vomits purple roses with healing properties plus twelve. When he scratches himself, hungry children are fed. When he adjusts his tie, rainbows appear over Madagascar. Everything that he has done that is wrong was not actually wrong but was in fact a clever ruse designed to confuse his enemies and win him even more votes. Those who do not understand this do not understand politics.

When Obama bombs Iran, it will be different than if anyone else did it. The people there will be happy to accept his munitions. They will greet us as liberators and put up a giant statue of Obama on top of each one of their buildings. Yes, each and every one. Some of the buildings will not be able to support the weight, but Obama will personally support each one with his mighty hand. Dismembered Persians will all come back to life, and Obama will sing holy songs with them in a non-denominational way. They will try to give us their oil, but Obama will graciously refuse. He will then click his heels and return to the emerald city.

When Bush sends a bajillion dollars to Iraq, he is wasteful and stupid. When Obama does it, he is wise and political. Obama never compromises on his principles except when his principles are compromise. He can speak the secret language of canines, and his nationwide network of dog spies has reported to him that the voters were lying to pollsters, and in fact they secretly wanted Obama to vote for telecom immunity. They all told their dogs this after they got off the phone with the pollsters, and their dogs reported to Obama. This is how Obama knew that it was good politically to vote for telecom immunity. He only accepted telecom money to lull the companies into complacency. Any day now the hammer will fall on them.

The people of Afghanistan eagerly await Obama’s escalation of the war. Many Afghanis are Taliban, and the innocent ones are happy to leap into the meat grinder as long as the Taliban go with them. When the war is over, Obama will walk barefoot across the Pacific Ocean and sort out all the body parts. Obama’s close personal friend the Lord Jesus (who refuses to visit Reverend Wright’s church these days) will assist him in putting all the innocent people back together again.

Obama’s mercenaries are all nicer than other mercenaries. All private security contractors know this. They await only Obama’s election to put their safeties on and begin handing out flowers and fuzzy teddy bears. Sometimes, they worry that Obama will not be elected, and they will have to continue gunning down people in cars. It is our patriotic duty to elect Obama and help them lead happier lives. This is why Obama has promised to keep mercenaries in Iraq. Who else would hand out the flowers and teddy bears if they had to go home? A fuzzy teddy bear factory in Mississippi needs these contracts to create new jobs. Obama will do it all in one swoop.

Obama drinks wastewater and urinates refined petroleum. He will solve the energy crisis with three visits to the urinal. This is why he does not waste time giving details of energy policy. If things grow too hot, he will make a phone call to the sun and it will become cooler. The sun will feel giddy afterwards.

Types of Intelligence

2008-09-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

There is a keen split between the modern perspective on intelligence, and the results of that intelligence. PhDs who behave childishly. Highly-educated leaders with no respect for the human condition. Overweight physicians.

Why? It is because we incorrectly correlate one type of intelligence with all others.

Projective intelligence: outward problem-solving and analysis.

Creative intelligence: taken literally.

Introspective intelligence: taken literally.

Projective intelligence is, by and large, the only type we recognize or develop. Introspective and creative intelligence are almost wholly ignored. Introspective intelligence is acknowledged only after visits to the psychologists' couch, and there, the instructor is someone who has not been trained to be introspectively intelligence him or herself, but who has instead been trained only to be projectively intelligent as towards others' minds. Creative intelligence is acknowledged only in art or music instruction, and except for rare instances in composition theory or creative writing instruction, what is offered in training is projective intelligence as to the methodology of creation.

The inability to recognize different types of intelligence results in extreme dichotomies in the world. For example, we have the prospective intelligence to design and build nuclear weapons, then deploy them worldwide, but not the introspective intelligence to recognize that building such things in the first place is madness. Our greatest prospectively intelligent minds involve themselves engineering fighter jets, designing sprawling private mansions and building giant dams, without having the introspective tools to think intelligently about what they are doing. When they do think about it, their level of thought is as unprepared for the task as a first-grader analyzing War and Peace. Their faculties in that regard have been so neglected that they are not up to the task.

Both neglects are a consequence of ragnarism, and more directly, our worship of avarice (see Money Laundering).

Fearful minds do not want to understand themselves. Understanding the nature of the mind involves confronting the lack of an absolute, singular self. That is why our society is so structured around avoiding introspection. Carefully, over the years, we have crafted all academic, professional and social inquiry in such a way as to resist analyzing what someone thinks and feels inwardly. To brush upon the subject provokes a violent response, and sound condemnation from all corners.

The result of a society of introspectively stunted individuals is a chaos of sad, confused, sick, needy lives. All that holds it together is the overwhelming force of the very social mores that protect us from our inner selves: to ensure surface stability, and simultaneously protect our inner illusions, time is occupied with social ritual. Fixed behavior practices (i.e., the supposed affection for routine) occupies the mind with external schedules and controlled behavior. As the rituals occur, everyone is validated in their general participation, and thoughts can be as distracted as possible (by the details of the ritual) to avoid their turning inward.

Ed Gein and Ragnarism

2008-09-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Ed Gein

Note the early repression, highlighted by:

1) Reverence for absolutes (cue: Bible);

2) Hatred of femininity/sex.

And consequently, the result.

The Obama (TM) Presidency

2008-08-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Of the few who have the insight to perceive amidst the flashing lights and noise of corporate media, the Obama (TM) candidacy and its eventual presidency is greatly troubling. After 8 years of Bush, there was hope that the alternative presented might be an actual alternative. Instead, the preapproved candidate is one who continues abusing the constitution and freedom, continues paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan slaughters, will keep mercenaries in Iraq, threatens war with Iran and Russia and whoever else, is willing to use nuclear bombs, and so on.

Many (or perhaps I should say few), among them Arthur Silber and Chris Floyd, lament at great length each new detail of Obama's (TM) deathly intentions. Yes, he protected illegally spying telecoms with the FISA bill. Yes, he is willing to nuke Iran.. Yes, he keeps voting to pay for the killing in Iraq. Yes, he picked an even more bellicose Senator than himself, with 36 years at the public trough, to be his running mate, while promising a change from the usual. Yes, he insults absentee black fathers in the face of the facts. Etcetera.

The conclusion, as ever, is stupidity (the article linked under stupidity is an excellent read).

(For some of this pathetic stupidity, to use the accurate part of Arthur Silber's term, see the bitches from BitchPhD, who are, to quote Forrest Gump, "so excited they could sh*t" about being in Denver to watch Obama's (TM) pre-coronation ceremony. Or, turn to that mindless goose-stepper Skinner at Democratic Underground, as he duckspeaks effluently on the Party's behalf.)

The conclusion of stupidity, however, is in its own way a delusion, designed to shield the mind from the next layer of perception: the fact that the Democrat/progressive apologists actually want all the terrible things Obama (TM) is promising to deliver.

The reason analysts shy from this conclusion is the conclusion that goes hand in hand with it: that most people are inherently evil. Consider that some 40% of people in America think McCain is the way to go, and another 40% think Obama (TM) is the way to go. That is over 80% of Americans who are ready to watch the president nuke Iran, start up a new "cold" war with Russia, or do any number of other horrific things, not the least of which is continue executing Iraqis (And you can lump a lot of Europe in with that group, since many Europeans are equally eager to fawn over his coattails).

Now, it could be simply because the "progressive/Democrat" Americans are as stupid as the "McCain is too liberal" Americans. Sure, they might have a little more education, and be middle class rather than lower- or extremely-upper- class, but they're clearly just as dumb.

Not so. This conclusion of stupidity fails to take into account how easy it is to see that Barack Obama (TM) is business as usual in America: aggressive overseas "intervention," SWAT teams patrolling the streets and snipers watching the rooftops at home, and all that. Anyone can see it--it's right there. Even Joe Blow knows, deep down, that Congress is taking bribes and doesn't give a damn about him.

So simple! So how could it be stupidity? Arthur Silber touches on this from time to time, when he decries the fact that so-called American progressives will refuse to see things which are in front of their faces.

There is an emotional reason for the Obama (TM) blindness, just as there is an emotional reason that drives most people to McCain. The same emotional reason that has been there since the beginning of our existence:fear. As I explained in Introduction to Ragnarism, the uncertainty of the human mind, and of the larger world, will elicit a reaction of fear from most, if not all, self-aware entities. Thoughts, and outside occurrences, can only be partially controlled, and chance frustrates all attempts at absolutism. As described in the linked essay, this feeds a cycle in the developing mind, whereby the person attempts to assert control, has it broken, then attempts to reassert even more forcefully, which only results in a greater outrush when the unsustainable dam bursts.

Everyone is subject to the uncertainty, beginning with the subconscious understanding that even our own minds and thoughts are not fully under our control. And so, the self-aware entity will be disturbed as long as it fails to surrender to the fact that it cannot control itself--nor the exterior world--wholly.

For more development of the theory, see Symptoms of Ragnarism, more symptoms of ragnarism, The Death Fantasy, and Instinct v. Antilife.

This disturbance is prevalent in most. The fearful mind has as many variations as there are individuals, and not everyone becomes a drooling malcontent preaching the world's end. Instinct is a powerful ally, and it keeps most people on track in some type of regular life. Nonetheless, the fear underlies it all. In the struggle for control, people deeply wish for authoritarianism. They do not believe, deep down, that it can be achieved, any more than their essence believes it can control every thought that ever pops into their head.

And so, like Bible study or political convention, they strive to do what all ragnarists strive to do: get together with other people who believe as they do, and make public professions of faith about the strength of their belief.

This does not actually have the result of making things true, but surrounded by other people who believe as they do, they can blind their inner senses, and maintain the conscious illusion of "control of the mind" and "control of the outside world." This is evangelism, convention and rally: the uncertain speak loudest.

Ergo why American "progressives" and Democrats support Obama (TM).

Consider what the ragnarist McCain supporters need from their candidate:

1) Violently protective
2) Authoritarian; willing to do anything to bring the "order" to the world that they seek (be it financial or military)

Now, consider what the Obama (TM) supporters, suffering from the same mental sickness--ragnarism--and yet, who are a little more intelligent and insightful, require from their candidate:

1) Violently protective
2) Authoritarian; willing to do anything to bring the "order" to the world that they seek (be it financial or military)
3) Well-mannered and vocally respectful of culture and diversity
4) Softens bellicosity with dialogue that comes more smoothly; and, does so with a larger vocabulary

Functionally, Obama (TM) is so similar to McCain, because he will satisfy the underlying need for absolutism and violence, and the impossible quest for order, but he will do so with everything softened a touch, and more intelligently so. He will murder people with airstrikes and sanctions--like Clinton the Democrat did in Kosovo and Iraq--instead of with soldiers on the ground. He will be patient and respectful with allies, then do what he wants anyway, instead of being rude and short, and then doing what he wants anyway (as Bush did). He will look 150% better in his suits than McCain will; he will protect 2.3% more of the environment than McCain; and he will invest in renewable energy at a slightly higher rate.

But he, and those like him, will continue to lead us all toward the killing fields of ragnarism, until we can begin savings minds from it, one at a time. The antilife fear is the sickness that drives good, living minds to crave impossible absolutes and insane destruction. It is emotionally stupid, yes, but that is a weakness that the better part of our race succumbs to, and as with the viral diseases of the body, we must find a way to overcome the sicknesses of the mind, and let more of us think unfettered as we go toward the future.

On the modern western academic tradition

2008-08-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

From aufheben:

"It's perfectly valid criticism [to point out] an obvious flaw in [someone's] writing. For instance, if an author writing on the role of race in welfare who completely ignores anybody who's not white or black."

No, that is untrue. You can write about race in welfare and only consider two races. Food for thought:

P1: No single work of any kind will ever be utterly comprehensive;

P2: This means that, in detail, there will always be something more that can be said about a subject;

P3: Whenever an academic produces a work, it will therefore not be comprehensive;

P4: Whenever an academic produces a work, there will always be something more that can be said about it.

So, either all academic works are failures before they begin, OR, it is possible that you can examine something and contribute usefully to a dialogue without saying everything that can ever possibly be said.

Ergo, anytime any work (academic or otherwise) comes out, it is a non-sequitur in the worst sense of the term to say "The author did a poor job because he did not also discuss _________." Only if the author claimed to be producing a completely-comprehensive work could he be criticized so. There are only so many pages, and so much time, in the world.

You can discuss welfare race roles using white and black alone. You can also discuss them using Inuit and Chechnyan. Both studies, if done well, could contribute knowledge to the overall picture.

Imagine that you did a welfare race study that took into account, say, 100 races. And then, when asked about your work, someone called you a poor writer because you did not take into account the 101st race?

How far does "comprehensive" have to go?

Answer: it can never be attained, and academics are going to keep bitching in literature reviews* about whichever nitpicky part of something wasn't discussed simply because if they stop producing articles to that effect, they won't get their tenure. A few brave souls have tried to challenge the system, and emphasize teaching quality and original research over that kind of crap, but they were handily shot down by the book and journal mills, and the future does not look bright.

* (Literature reviews defined in brief: before you are allowed to write about anything, prove that you know what you are talking about by describing the last X books written on the subject by people who had accepted positions within any given debate by virtue of their professorial jobs at the right universities at the right times. Most academic articles, and especially books, are considered incomplete without a sizable literature review to prove that they are worth reading. Nach, academics spend a lot of time writing literature reviews about the same literature in the same terms, over and over and over...)

That kind of discussion--bloviating about what was not said--distracts from what WAS said, and discourages floating original ideas. Original ideas do not necessarily require the support of seven pre-existing professors at seven prestigious universities.

The absolute terror to some academics is the thought that someone, somewhere, might have a great idea without having been molded through the western university system first.

Novel, dynamic ones would shatter the old, or reconceptualize it in such a way that it would be crippling to try to link them. And if you waste time tying original ideas back to 10 other respected articles in the field, research space is lost in favor of yet another literature review. Hasn't Harvard gotten enough head, yet?

Life is dynamic change. Academic ritual tries to hobble that change to the tenure publishing system, so that there is a new crop of books to churn out of the press and sell at $60 apiece to each new class of undergrads with predictable regularity.

It is an awful habit, when presented with anything nonfiction, to postulate in learned fashion about all the things it did not cover. There will always be something not covered. It is banal to spend time talking about that, even though it passes for learnedness among western academia--every new idea you hear is not an opportunity for thought, but instead an opportunity to recite what you have most recently read or are working on. It is reassuring, when you see someone else publish something new to you, to be able to critique it for not having cited to the last three articles you read on the subject. It's the same defensive habit as snickering at someone who walks into the room wearing a striking new fashion choice: "Oooh, she thinks she's so unique, but what a wasted attempt--she failed to take into account Prada and Gucci." Repeat ad nauseam with music, social decisions, marketing departments, or articles about the early twentieth century Russian Revolution.

Academics cling to this kind of behavior because it justifies their jobs, and the system in which they operate. If they weren't busy pointing out that no single work is comprehensive, then, why, normal people might be able to become authorities on things! People who haven't gone through the western university mill! Onoes the end of life on Earth!

Take it from Karl Mannheim: people (even academics, despite their massive educations!) tend to believe ideologies that support their economic well-being. For an overly lengthy and complicated discussion of this, see Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia.

Commentary on Wahopo article

2008-08-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

Twilight sinks its teeth into feminism

Synopsis: author claims girls are drawn to "Twilight," a fantasy literary sensation with traditional gender roles, because they cling to traditional gender roles despite 3 decades of feminism. Conversely, author claims boys are drawn to violent video games and internet pornography, for the same reasons.

Madness ensues elsewhere. A few comments:

I think where the author was going is saying that, instead of appreciating one another for their inherent qualities, (young) men and women are instead spending time apart from another, which time they employ fantasizing about those qualities.

The suggestion is that they would be better off to put down the computer games/trashy romance series, and spend the time getting to know one another instead. And additionally, that it is their failure to get to know one another that drives them to such pastimes.

The linked article is relevant to more than just young female readers of fantasy literature. The "fangirl circuit," like any other circuit of western escapism, is a realm where people have been turned away from one another, and seek to find missing humanity in some other medium. Powerlessness? Excessive interest in sporting competition or violent gaming. Economically disenfranchised? Make money virtually in a virtual world. Unhealthy? Make up a healthy online character. Insufficient sexual options? Escapism to the rescue.

What we are lacking from ourselves and our fellow (hu)man, we search out virtually, and spend increasing amounts of time and desire in it. It can be healthy or unhealthy; indeed, given the state of the world, it is perhaps more healthy (at least for the mind) to spend more time escaping it. That is the province of imagination and wonder, which will not be regulated and taxed until things are very near the darkest.

Yet, it is human to seek necessary things that are lacking: food, water, meaning. Some accountants camp out for baseball tickets and pretend it really matters if the team wins. Others gird their World of Warcraft character in armor + .001%. Many, sadly, let their bodies go and forget that their mental health (and ability to escape/imagine/dream) depends on them for fullest potential.

There is more reality in fantastic escapism than in outer society of social ritual, debt gambling and corporate events. You can still find human decency, conviction, courage, and truth in those places--even if these qualities only conform to the fantastic worldview created expressly for the fantasy. It is sustenance for the soul.

Ideally, escapism would not need to be so total, because there would be more meaning in reality. But in the crushing soulless of now, where individuals are partitioned through economics and find it unable to meaningfully connect, it is one of the best option available for the searching mind.

A brief ragnarist interlude

2008-08-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

From Symptoms of Ragnarism:

Desire to repress sexual behavior and physical bodies through social or governmental controls.

Easy to recognize: involves disapproving of expressions of sexuality, including public kissing, movies with nudity, navel rings, homosexuality in general, “gay marriage,” or other reminders of sexuality.

From Bitch PhD:

Egyptian women, let's all, together, throw off the veil. Let's flood the streets in tank tops and shorts, armed with baseball bats and ready to yell at anyone who cocks a leering eye our way.

The sick mind violently represses its own thoughts. Manifested physically, the sickness fantasizes about lashing out in brutal fashion against someone who would dare to look.

Note also:

1) Absolute polarization of "those who look" and "those who are looked at." (The good/evil with us/against us dichotomy of the sick);

2) Absolute authority is vested in the holder of the weapon to decide whether a look is "leering" (ungood look) or "innocent";

3) Desire to walk through the streets armed and dressed a certain way, not because of a desire to go for a walk or to feel the breeze, but rather a desire to elicit a target response and have something to bash in return.

The Sad State of Art, Part 2

2008-08-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Part 1

Epic attempt 3: Common identifiers

A good epic builds up a sense of empathy and understanding with the setting, so that the viewer cares about what happens to the world after the climax. This is, of course, difficult to do in the time span allowed.

To efficiently (economically efficient) create a movie that evokes a sense of epic, moviemakers take a shortcut: instead of creating their own epic, they use an epic that someone else has already created, and make a movie out of it. The benefits are obvious: someone else has already invested the (artistic and/or economic) energy in getting the audience ready to feel that something is important. All they have to do is invest, tack on a surface story, and the underlying cultural knowledge of their target audience will do the rest.

When an audience feels that something has a history and tradition, half (or more) of the work of the movie is already done. For example, people have a cultural sense of gravity around "Rome" and "Batman" and "the U.S. Army." So, it is easy to create a 90-180 minute movie with a sense of "epic" about it. A battle fought for the future of Rome, Gotham City, or the salvation of the soldier's creed has canned significance. Prepackaged and ready to go. So, the writers don't need to invest half as much (or any) effort (money and screen time) in building up a plot that justifies a grand finale.

What does this mean? Firstly, characters do not need to be developed as much, in order to have the audience care about them, because the audience already knows that Gotham City (or whichever comic-book city) needs to be saved; the audience already knows Rome should not fall to the sinful barbarians; the audience already knows that. Secondly, the setting does not have to be developed as much. A few sweeping CG screenshots can handle it. If the audience didn't already identify with Gotham City, they might ask--why bother saving it (as Liam Neeson's character did in Batman Begins)? If the audience didn't already have a preconception of Rome, they might ask what made its hordes better than the barbarians. Precious effort would have to be invested to portray both sides of the conflict in a way that helped the audience understand the importance of the final battle. All of that can be saved to trim screen time down by going with canned settings.

The result of this is stagnation in art. When writers, directors, et al. can get the same "epic" result from a movie about Rome in 120 minutes that it would take a movie about a different, unknown place 220 minutes to convey, they will go with Rome, because it is cheaper. Unfortunately, tapping into this supply of "automatic epic" means that movies in this vein will have to conform to the audience's preconceived notions of the prepackaged concept--the audience's image of Rome, Batman or the U.S. Army. When you take prepackaged history to give your film gravity, you can't waste time challenging the core conception, or core misconception, that the audience brings to the film--that would defeat the purpose. So, the same themes about the same things keep coming back, again and again.

This is why, instead of writing new stories, the studios keep churning out old tales over and over again, in new form with new actors. If people go into a movie knowing it is a remake of something successful, they already feel that they know something of the characters: the characters are successful characters, with a history and tradition, and that automatically makes them have more of an impact. The studios kick out comic book movies, and show pages of comics at the beginning, along with a familiar corporate logo, to convey history and tradition. In 10 seconds, the audience feels, "This is all about something; something that has been going on for decades. How I want to see how it turns out!" without having been shown any actual footage. If they remake Gone with the Wind, or churn out yet another Shakespeare rehash, it is the same effect. The knowledge of previous success invests the story with automatic momentum--just the way George W. Bush grew up with an automatic headstart (a good metaphor for more than one reason, for most of the dross the studios churn out nowadays--solely economically gifted, and revered most by the unfortunate).

This is not to say that effort is not invested in producing a story. It is, and sometimes the result is a very interesting one. But even then, the amount of time that has to be invested is reduced--and the overall artistic experience (how enjoyable it would be to watch the full story) goes down.

The Sad State of Art, Part 1

2008-08-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

On the Systematic Barriers to Art in Movies

Time constraints Movies operate under a number of conflicting forces. The first of these is the time constraint. It is obvious how the operation of a 90 minute suggested limit, with a 180 minute absolute maximum, can impinge upon dialogue, plot, character development, music and setting exploration. However, what is less obvious is the way this requirement juxtaposes with the cultural expectation placed upon movies.

Culturally, movies are one of the grandest culminations of entertainment. They provide a visible and auditory highlight of acting (closer up and more intimate than even participating in a play; ability to hear whispers and see acting occur in more dynamic environments than possible on stage; static art [when placed onscreen]; environment-building [360 degree sets]), technology, music, and other sensory experiences. The grandeur of movies, though, places an expectation upon them: that they use these tools to deliver an epic show.

The nature of "epic" suggests length of experience (for characters), dynamism, and the extraordinary. This is the force that causes moviemakers to attempt to outdo one another (and even their previous selves) with bigger, louder explosions each time, in an attempt to create drama thereby. They are grasping for something epic, because that is what moviegoers want: they want to take advantage of the great technology and presentation of movies to experience something epic.

Yet, the time constraint works against this. "Epic" cannot be conveyed well in 90 minutes, and it is not so much easier to do it in 180, either. Epic requires sequences; pauses (in the movie and out); reflection. It requires camera time where the camera is not moving, and the characters to be able to reflect to themselves and others.

What most movies are as a result of the time constraint is actually short stories. In that, movies can do very well. Quirky little tales about someone in modern life; a children's adventure; a brief comedy. These things work well in 90 to 180 minutes. And many of them are produced, and manage to be reasonably inoffensive and quite creative. This is because the "short story" or "novella" medium offered by commercially-approved movies (with lengths of 90 to 180 minutes) can be well done, and cheaply done, in such a time constraint, without much affecting the art.

What does not work well, though, is when moviemakers attempt to cram epic granduer into 90 to 180 minutes. The nature of epic suggests world-changing, so naturally, an epic story has to present the climactic challenge (usually a battle of some kind) in a grand way. In order to make something appear grand, and feel grand to the viewer, the viewer has to have an attachment to the character(s) or situation(s) of the movie, so that they are personally invested in the outcome.

This is done well when the viewer has had time to develop that attachment through clever plot-building. Learning to like the characters (which takes time, because you have to know them, first) leads to investment in what happens to them in the grand conclusion.

Moreover, in an epic situation, viewers have to care about the outcome of the battle/climax in that they must have concern about what will happen to not only the character, but the fictional world as a whole. A sense of impending doom for the world (if the heroes fail) is what makes an epic battle so grand: it suggests that there is a lot riding on it, both personal and social. It tugs at the main concerns of the species, namely individuals known to the viewer, and the general state of the rest of the world which the viewer has some natural empathy with.

Given this, when movie producers attempt to cram "epic" into 90 to 180 minutes, they use a number of techniques to attempt to convey "epic" without going to the effort of actually investing in the careful thought (and time allowance!) that must go into an epic:

Epic attempt #1: the montage

A montage attempts to convey something that the epic requires: namely, a passage of time, to develop the severity of threat to the world/setting which will come to a head in the epic battle. It also attempts to convey character development at an accelerated rate.

This can be done well, and indeed, the musical tends to rely upon it. Montages are almost always sent to music, because music is WD-40 for the emotions: it makes them work much more smoothly, and makes the mind suggestable to believing things it might otherwise not.

The epic montage, though, accelerates character growth through unbelievable phases. Like the parenthetical I offered in the previous paragraph, the epic montage, when used poorly (as it is most often used in American cinema) is used to convey aspects of character development that are not realistic.

An example of a good montage in a musical: a young man sings about a girl who vexes him, and as he sings, he realizes he loves her. (Function: the montage conveys character development in his love life, without having to watch the young man sit on the couch for three hours, without talking, before coming to a simple conclusion about whom he desires.)

An example of a good epic montage in a movie: adventurous music plays as the heroes travel over rugged terrain. (Function: the montage shows us that the characters are traveling, without us having to watch them walk, camp, bathe and eat for two weeks straight.)

An example of a standard Hollywood epic montage: thumping music plays while the heroine, a pampered princess, takes harsh sword lessons from a suddenly-introduced side character. (Function: the montage justifies the incredible battle sequences at the end of the movie, where the pampered princess out-duels countless mercenaries who each have fifty pounds of muscle on her, and have years of combat experience.)

The epic montage, in most Hollywood films, is sugar with a bitter pill: it tries to force the audience into accepting the coherence of a supposed epic tale, with a world-ending battle, which the characters have had only an hour and a half to prepare for.

Epics are journeys, and the characters start them out naive, repressed, troubled, un-worldly or in some other state vulnerable to development, growth and learning. Then, by the end, their quest provides the development they are looking for, and the theme of the tale is often expressed. It takes time to break through these barriers realistically--not a 3 minute montage. If a pampered princess were to become a great swordswoman, it would not just involve taking lessons, but would pose a set of fantastic new challenges to her entire lifestyle and self-image. This cannot be conveyed with ten seconds of watching her do pushups in the rain while poppy music plays, and another twenty seconds of her chopping at a log, and so on. Yet, it is what Hollywood forces through, over and over.

(There is often little protest to this. When people have little insight into their workings, they may not notice or care when someone has unrealistic character development. They may be interested only in seeing the big scene at the end, and marveling at how "cool" it is that the pampered princess can suddenly wield a sword. Genuine change doesn't matter any more than genuine character, and they lust for descriptions of people who achieve epic growth without realistic steps: because it suggests that they, too, might experience such a thing.

This is a sad fantasy, dreamed by those who have no realistic hopes for themselves, which is why this state of art works so well [at generative revenue and placating the masses] in a system that works best by destroying most peoples' realistic hopes. But this is not the focus here.)

Much like accelerating clone growth will one day lead to great psychological problems in the clones, accelerating character development in fictional characters lends itself to disbelief. It teaches impressionable humans (a required disclaimer: children and adults alike) that positive change:

1) Is unrealistically fast;
2) Bears no relation to the type of person someone was before (the "conversion" myth central to evangelical delusions in ragnarist minds)

I.e., positive change is unrealistic. A pampered princess might well, in reality, become a master swordswoman--but if we show her doing it in only the most ridiculous, unbelievable of ways, we never teach princesses (or just little girls) that they might actually achieve it some day. Any more than they can realistically expect to fly like Superman.

A caveat on imagination: imagining the fantastic is a good, wonderful thing, but Hollywood's montages are a type of inconsistent imagination, and that is what is bad about them. They lie, in the sense that they portray the world as normal, then violate the rules of normality. They take people portrayed as typical humans (even typical humans in fantastic situations) and then treat them unrealistically. If they had taken citizens of Krypton and then had those characters do fantastical things, it would be believable within the context of the imagined world (i.e., not actually unrealistic for the character). The defining difference between good epic and bad (and good story of any kind and bad) is that a good epic is fantastic in its structure, whereas a bad epic is fantastic in its character--a good epic establishes physical laws and rules about the world and the things in it, which the characters then conform to (whether in amazing ways or regular ones); a bad epic establishes the standard physical laws and rules of the world (the Earth we live on) and then allows its characters to violate them without explanation.

Good example: Z-men

Setting: Z-men establishes a world where men and women have superhuman abilities.

Situation: A character floats up an elevator shaft on a conjured wind.

Result: The setting is not destroyed.

Good example: Lord of the Bracelets

Setting: Lord of the Bracelets establishes a world where (non-Dunedorf, non-elven) men and women have normal human abilities.

Situation: A female princess, trained in sword-fighting from her youth in a country of warriors, disobeys her father and rides to war in disguise. She successfully stabs several enemies and shows great valor.

Result: The setting is not destroyed.

Bad example: Pirates of the Craparean

Setting: Pirates of the Craparean establishes a world where (non-ghost, non-overgrown by barnacles) men and women have normal human abilities.

Situation: A pampered governor's daughter, who has spent her life in restrictive corsets and layered skirts, picks up a saber in a heated moment and suddenly finds (without surprise) that she can wield it as skillfully as any man or woman, fight for dozens of minutes straight without needing a breather, and also dual-wield two sabers at once, using her off-hand, with no diminishment in fighting capability.

Result: The setting is destroyed.

(The Pirates of the Caribbean references will continue; the second and third sequels are a suitable, modern example of most things discussed herein. And they didn't even bother with the "princess doing pushups in the mud" montage, or any other hint, however slight, to explain...! --but I shall not be distracted further.)

When the structure of an imaginary world is violated, the story loses the wonder; it loses the "this might have happened to these people if they had only been in a place where _______."

The "inconsistent desire" is the result of committee writing, or a conflicted mind, which does not produce a coherent story. The writers want to have their cake, and eat it, too. I.e., they want to have a movie where their character is both a dainty lady and a powerful warrioress, and they want to do that without bothering to explain in any realistic detail how that could happen.

Epic attempt #2: the gargantuan horde

Bigger is better is the mantra here. Because visible grandeur is now so easy to produce using computers, moviemakers ruin the coherence of their stories by making epic battles ridiculously large. In Troy, it was so many ships in the battle shot that they couldn't have held the entire population of Greece at the time, in Pirates of the Caribbean it was even more, etc. Why can they not just use a realistic number of warriors, and have the battle still be exciting? Because they are in pursuit of an epic in only 90-180 minutes. They do not have time or skill enough to build up a sense of grandeur through character and world understanding. Instead, they want bigger, better, and more, and they want it right now, without having to go to the trouble of earning it. So they violate the rules of the world, go for the "shock and awe" effect, and grasp for magnificent on the wings of sheer numbers.

Epic attempt 3 in the next part.

The Sad State of Art, Introduction

2008-08-20T15:52:00.001-07:00

Art is not best created in an atmosphere of greed, yet that is its current state. Because artists need time to create art, they cannot simultaneously be purely artistic and economically productive unless they are supported by their artistic output. Therefore, they must be (1) salaried to produce art; (2) entrepreneurs who sell their own art; (3) engaged in another trade and squeeze art into the time remaining; or (4) independently wealthy.

Of these, (1) (or (4), of course) is the most attractive option on a large scale, but is exceedingly rare, as in the market system, there is no incentive to salary an artist unless the return would be greater than the salary. And, if that return is guaranteed, the artist would be selling his or her own art (option (2)), and if it is not, there would be no salary.

Because avarice is our law, individual artists are mostly left to subsidize the costs of their own art. Creativity, then, is relegated to a secondary (or fifth-best) activity, while the bulk of the artist's time and effort is spent in self-sustenance. Thus, as a society, art output suffers drastically under the law of avarice, because individual subsidization is inadequate. Even for those who drive themselves to poor health or utterly refute long-term individual economic goals, the art suffers, and the species, and history, suffers the loss of its never having been created.

There is a laundry list of great artists throughout history whose work has been limited or coerced by the dictates of the churches and the wealthy. We now look at the Sistine Chapel as an invaluable cultural treasure, and countless other pieces of work (pick your favorite), but we will never know what wonders we are missing out on--moving symphonies, impeccable friezes, soul-bearing portraits, fantastical realms--for having been incapable of encouraging and unfettering great minds that have already come and gone.

Now, as the law of avarice becomes so enthroned on rapacious technology that it pervades every aspect of life, we are even more limited. The wealthy patrons of our time invest their resources in producing movies and certain kinds of music, but little else. Music creation is subsidized by individual artists across the world, who work frantically around time constraints to keep the habits alive. The greater culture becomes aware of them only through chance, or through the whimsy of formal attention, whence a financier sights an investment opportunity. Movie creation, for the time and resources it requires, is beyond most; certainly, employing the art with today's high technology requires aristocratic backing.

All of this effort has brought our culture the talents of a few very fine actors, and very skilled musicians and vocalists--when the former can be heard amidst the exploding of ten thousand trucks and the braying of the latest screen megastar, and when the latter can be picked out from the noise of layover tracks and electronica riffs--but on the whole, the process is a failure. Most of what our widespread effort can leave to future generations is a few stale summer blockbusters, inflation-gorged sales figures, and records with a limited temporal appeal.

There are great paintings being done, insightful poems being written, wonderful movies being recorded, and so on. Yet, however striking these may be on an individual scale, they are the exception, rather than the rule, and gaining them exposure to the greater public consciousness (and thereby making them more available to history) rarely occurs. It is a question of scale: life should be filled with wondrous art, not just rarely brushed by it. Surely with so many billion human minds and such vast resources, we should be experiencing more great things than one really good movie a summer, a couple very well-done albums a year, and three or four quite clever Superbowl commercials.

As there is the capability of feeding and comforting all in this vast potential of Earth and its human inhabitants, so there is the capability of swimming constantly in a sea of thoughtful, penetrating art (call it free entertainment if you like). We are the lesser for every day we go without it. The law of avarice crushes this potential, and like savages striving to kill or be killed in the jungle, our economic system aborts countless wonders each day. If we had been raised in art, we would have the capability of being moved to horrified tears at how unwisely we waste the resources we have. The etudes, the operas, the verse, the landscapes, the insights, the architecture, the wonder...! All the things we could have, spent futilely, lost as an opportunity cost in favor of enthroned greed.

First up for discussion will be the way avarice effects movies. Forthcoming.

Money Laundering

2008-08-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

World's First Billion Dollar Home

Money is laundering. When the cost of something is discussed only in units of impersonal currency, said discussion is divorced of context, and left largely meaningless.

For example, consider the "home" in the link referenced in this post, the actual cost of which approaches $2 billion. Imagine a mere $100 million invested in a fund for, say, the children in Africa. Imagine that this fund, after deducting administration expenses (and reinvestment to keep up with inflation), had a very conservative income of only $5 million a year. Call it the African Children's Fund. This $5 million comes in every year, year after year, for as long as our market system lasts.

Now, imagine that this fund spent this conservative $5 million a year on $500 a year/job training, $1K a year/child rice, $1K a year/child medical care. That's $2.5K per year, which may be a gross overestimate in price given the continent, but let's go with it anyway.

Simple math, here: $5 million/year income and $2.5K a child means that 2,000 children in Africa could eat, receive medical care, and receive job training for a year. Every year. Forever.

The numbers would be a lot bigger if that $100 million went to them right away, but through investment, the gift could keep on giving. Every year, another 2,000 people would have job training; would be healthy; would have plenty to eat. And this would come at no additional cost after that first gift. These would be children who would starve to death; who would join militias in search of food; who would die of tuberculosis for want of a 50 cent vaccine. And that could all be stopped forever for a mere $100 million, with the gift that keeps on giving.

Of course, this example could seem more powerful than rescuing a mere 2,000 African children if all the money were spent up front. But we're going for sustainability, here.

So, if the Ambani family could settle for a mere $1.9 billion home, they could accomplish great things for those 2,000 people a year in Africa.

Let's not stop at Africa, though. Let's say that, being Indians, the Ambani family decided to create such a fund in India for $200 million--twice the amount they invested in Africa. 4,000 Indian children could eat, see doctors and have productive jobs, instead of starving. Add that to the 2,000 African kids, and you have 6,000. And remember: this lasts forever, as the trust fund keeps kicking out income.

Meanwhile, those people are paying taxes, becoming stable members of their communities, etc.

If the Ambani family could settle for a mere $1.7 billion home, they could accomplish great things for those 6,000 people. Every year. Forever.

Maybe they're feeling extra generous. They decide to fund perpetual hope for another 4,000 kids in China. How about another 2,000 in South America? They're at $1.4 billion on their house. Maybe they'd decide to invest $100 million in renewable energy. Maybe another $100 million to give huge raises, in perpetuity via trust fund, to all of their impoverished employees. $1.1 billion. Maybe they build an extravagant, world-class, tourist-drawing art and architecture museum open to all Indian citizens. Provide free beer and peanuts at all movies shown in Dehli--forever. Build an entire network of modern schools and medical stations across their entire country. Down to $1 billion flat.

If they could settle for just $1 billion for their house, they could do all of the above.

So, here's a better article: Ambani Family Runs Rampant: starves 12,000 children and their heirs; ravages solar plant; scraps museum plans; closes down national museum; reduces employee benefits substantially; cancels popular "free beer at bollywood" program; levels India's schools and hospitals.

All of these things are true, because by taking $2 billion and spending it in a certain way, all its other possibilities are removed. It is within the power of the Ambani family to settle for a mere $1 billion home, or even--gasp--one that costs only $100 million, or $50 million, or--I'm about to choke, but here it is--only $10 million.

That is what money is: it is opportunity; it is tallies of influence. When massed together, it has all the potential to direct people to do things like build schools and hospitals, feed children, educate and uplift, and even brew and drink beer. But when we decide that one person or one group has a disproportionate amount of money, they can scuttle all money's other possibilities in the pursuit of their own hideously avaricious ends.

Money can only do this because of its laundering effect. There is no way--no conceivable way with any technology we now have--that the Ambani family, either individually or with every one of them that ever lived, would be able to actually construct a $2 billion skyscraper. It takes the effort of many, many more people, skilled in many different things, to approach such a project. If all their efforts were added up and valued, it would be a total of creativity, labor, passion and struggle that would obviously not be attributable to the Ambani family.

Yet, while there is no realistic way the Ambani family could amass all that effort, because of the social construction of money, we allow them to direct it. Because the output of labor and creativity has become faceless paper, such horrendous, deadly mismanagement of our species' resources is glorified and celebrated.

Yes, yes, division of labor enhances what we can all accomplish together (and thoughts on how that justifies the disproportionate rewards of those who benefit most from the system shall be postponed). But even considering for division of labor, there is still no way. This is far too extravagant for even a stretched rationality to justify.

Just like the net worth of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet: even allowing that they are a great deal "better" than people with less money, and therefore deserve much more in the way of resources, there is no way to straight-face justify the amount of money they have in relation to your average joe. Their skill at gambling, be it with the odds of a company's success or the odds of someone elses' product's success, is not so prodigiously more worthwhile to the rest of us, or the planet, to justify them having, say, 10,000,000,000.00 times more value than said average joe.

We accept this all much easier because of the faceless character of money. By equating effort and output with money, we allow "effort" and "output" to be consolidated in unnatural ways, so that one person can eventually end up with more "output" than even a thousand people could realistically produce. One person can own more houses than they could ever live in; one person can own more food than they could ever eat.

Money is necessary for "ownership" to be sustained in modern society. Just as mobsters "launder" money to disassociate their wealth with illegal activity, large-scale owners launder effort and creativity to dissociate their wealth with the people who actually created it. And when they spend it, and talk about "dollar amounts," their atrocious lavishness is laundered a second time, as their misuse of resources becomes merely "spending money" rather than what it actually is: taking resources in extreme disproportion to the rest of humanity (/the world).

The total dollar amount wasted is only illustrative; it does not matter in substance. A king of old Egypt might have spent 90% of his population's effort on building himself a massive palace or tomb, while his people starved or languished in slavery, filth and need. That is now common practice, except that instead of viewing it as slavery, which we now view as wrong, we view it as the "decision to spend money in a certain way" (if we even bother viewing it or contextualizing it at all).

When one person builds a third palace and another starves, we may subconsciously rationalize the difference as one of the "worth" of the person, but most no longer challenge the assumption that such behavior is right. It is "right," to most, simply because it is "freedom" of the one to spend his or her money as s/he wishes.

Because the choice is actually made at a deeper level, it is often ignored, or perceived as not about choice at all. Of course, who wouldn't build a palace if they could? Everyone likes living somewhere nicer. The choice is made at the stage of allocation of money; once we decided to allow such a system, the inevitabilities of one person "spending" on a redundant palace while thousands of children starve/languish is merely a symptom.

As in the issue of tax theft, though, because the crime has been designed to be less visible by the racketeer aristocrats, it is harder for most people to perceive that they have been had. Threaten a man and then take his money, and he will feel robbed. Institute a tax system for everyone, then give yourself an exemption, and the same man will pay his taxes and feel less robbed (even if he is still upset and complains). Whereas most people might violently resist the theft, or plot against you to stop it the next time, most people will be lulled by the tax scheme into paying up.

Similarly, call a man a slave, and tell him you own him, and order him to labor to build you palaces, and he will hate you, and may violently revolt. However, if you call him a free worker, and tell him you will pay him to build a palace, he will perform the same labor in the same conditions, and thank his lucky stars that he has a job and his not one of the others you did not select, who are starving.

In the meantime, the situation hasn't really changed, except that most of the aristocracy dropped their titles of nobility for those of republican governments.

Martin Luther King realized, after American blacks had won the right to sit at lunch counters, that the freedom to sit there did not matter much when you could not afford the lunch. He challenged war, and they shot him to death and then glorified him, and we may all now congratulate ourselves at the freedom to sit at as many counters as we wish, while the "money" system continues to tally up its skewed results and order output and effort in as wicked a way as it used to under its old guise.

Starvation Parents Sue Philadelphia

2008-08-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

Starvation parents sue Philadelphia

The predictable first response to a story like this is to be outraged at the parents' behavior, and then, at the idea that the parents would dare to sue the city for not stopping their own behavior.

Let's look closer, though. In our legal setup, you are only allowed to sue someone if you have standing to sue. I.e., no matter how much damage an incompetent company/branch of government causes, no one is allowed to sue them unless they satisfy the standing requirement.

Standing is a very narrow requirement. For example, although what happened to this girl was terrible, if I was a concerned American citizen, or if I was even a citizen of the state in which she lived, and I paid taxes to support the DHS, and I voted for representatives of that state's government who hired the DHS administrators, it does not matter. Standing is so narrowly construed that here, only the girls' parents could possibly sue DHS.

Got that? The only people in the country allowed to sue DHS are the parents, because they are the only people who have been "directly" affected by the tragedy, and thus have "standing" to stand up in court and sue them. That means that if the parents don't sue, DHS will never be held accountable for its own terrible behavior.

This, of course, is a poor way of solving problems, because we are all affected by the tragedy. But in order to perpetuate our system of unconnected "individuals" living in a free-market society (see Milton Friedman for more details of this glorious plan) we must prevent anyone from having a legal remedy who is not either:

1) closely related to someone who got hurt physically
2) got hurt physically themselves
3) ONOES LOST SOME MONEY BECAUSE LOSING MONEY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD BECAUSE WE NEED FREEDOM OF CONTRACT ZOMG!

You cannot sue simply as a citizen who cares about other human beings. Under our system of justice (sic) that is not an acceptable reason to be in court.

This ensures that Americans cannot be their brothers' keepers, even if they are decent enough to want to be. It also allows corporations and governments to be incompetent and deadly and then be protected from lawsuits by the fact that they did not directly hurt an individual or interested group in particular enough detail to be sued by them.

Our government (actually, the British government during one of their eras of violent colonialism) long ago privatized justice the same way America is privatizing more and more social services. The theory behind civil lawsuits (rather than criminal ones) is that, instead of having the government solve problems when they exist, we rely upon individual citizens to bear the full time and expense of bringing suits in order to correct wrongdoing.

Once people swallowed that idea, more and more justice began to be privatized, and now, child abuse (such as defunding government agencies responsible for caring for living children), loan-sharking (such as dealing in sub-prime mortgages, then foreclosing), slander (credit ratings bureaus) and racketeering (police brutality) are all now civil offenses, where you have to sue for monetary damages to get justice, rather than criminal damages, where the perpetrators get in serious trouble and go to jail. The lessening of severity means that under the civil system, they tend not even to get punished at all, much less punished in a way they'll notice. And when they commit their crimes while employed by an organization (government/corporate), they are immune personally, so who cares if the organization actually does get fined in the end?

So, back to the original point: the parents are the only god-damned people who ever COULD sue DHS over the death of their daughter. And since money is the only thing DHS is structured to care about--budgets, salaries, staff; the same bureaucratic crap as everywhere--the only way to make them listen about the girl is to sue DHS.

If they get hit with a verdict, it will make them pay attention. If their operations drop, it might force their awful city council or state senate to raise taxes and give them the resources they actually need. Because the real problem here is that DHS is terribly underfunded, just like in almost every other American state. The consequences of that underfunding are what happened to the poor girl. Because, as we all know, it is antichrist socialism to spend money helping children who need help (check with the Brookings Institute for details).

So. Only the parents can sue. And that is why this lawsuit is a good thing (if anything that occurs within this hellish, uncivilized mess of our secure homeland can be called a good thing). Because it just might slightly force an increase in budget and public awareness of child-support agencies in our government, which have been gutted over the past 7 years (even more than they already were) by a neurotic chimpanzee president who needed the money to give billionaires that sixth BMW in the garage.

It is rather irrelevant that the parents of the girl might get damages. They might also technically win, but then lose damages because they failed to mitigate the harm to their daughter. The fact that they are eligible to gain money from what happened is the ugly byproduct of our retarded system, whereby money has to be the motivation for any kind of justice. We as a society simply cannot conceive of any other currency than an economic one to justify altering behavior. And where there is a loser, there must be a winner. So, to make DHS a loser (to punish them in any way Americans can see as tangible for the harm DHS caused) there must be a "winner," which has to be the parents.

It is a ridiculous, stupid, truly insane clusterfuck. It's all we have. God bless America.

The Dark Knight's Willing Deception, or Die Truth Die

2008-08-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

The Dark Knight (2008)

Spoilers for The Dark Knight and Final Fantasy X ahead.

Antilife fearfulness finds terror in the change in the world. Change, and the uncertainty of future change, inspires wonder, delight, love and amazement in the healthy mind. In the sick mind, it is this same change and uncertainty that inspires terror, and results in fantasies of absolutism, lust for the still perfection of death, and, simultaneously, inspires the self defense instincts, and lashing out.

To the sick mind, any force of opposition is (1) unified, and (2) unreasoning. I have discussed the unified quality in previous entries on ragnarism; in short, it involves the belief that all things which disagree with (or do not proactively, automatically agree with) the sick mind are somehow connected. This is the "with us or against us," "black and white" model of the world.

For purposes of the Dark Knight movie, the (2) unreasoning portion of the delusion is highly relevant. This is because the Joker is portrayed, like many villains before him, as a representation of chaos and disorder, in the tradition of Loki and the "mental patient" villain. I.e., the villain who cannot be reasoned with or pacified, because he has no goals other than sensation/carnage. The point is made very clear, as the Joker destroys money he has acquired, laughs in the face of being thrown from a building, does not mind being punched by Batman, etc.

This is an unrealistic villain, if an interesting character. Real human beings have motivations. For example, if you kill someone's family, they may want to kill you in return. If you punch someone in the nose, they may want to punch you in the nose. But the fearful mind sees no depth to the resistance of an enemy; no reason why the "enemy" might be resisting their desires. Ergo, the fearful mind sees its enemies as baseless and reasonless, beyond negotiation or understanding, and therefore worthy only of violence.

To move beyond the abstract: consider (with a groan) the American or Israeli mainstream perspective on "Islamic terror." Rather than viewing violence from other human beings as a result of violence against them, it is viewed as an unreasoning holy crusade to destroy. The national myth goes, "Islamic terrorists are unthinking madmen who seek only our destruction." This perception has been used for barbarians, communists, etc. whenever necessary for those with sick minds. This is why it is useless to: 1) debate or negotiate with more than show; 2) self-examine and concede; 3) show mercy.

Sociopaths exist, to be sure, and they may justify themselves as seeking sensation, if trapped and questioned. If the Dark Knight movie were simply about the Joker as a sociopath (or other unique individual), that would be one thing. Instead, the Joker serves not as an aberration, but as a representation: an example of the type of enemy that good people have to resist. The kind of enemy who destroys with no motive is presented as the natural reaction to someone who is noble, heroic and self-sacrificing.

I.e.: it is inevitable that the world become a fearful, disgusting, violent place that cannot be reasoned with or fixed, except through violence. Of course, this is ragnarism in its purest form: the reaction of the fearful mind, or violent lashing out at a hated world.

This is because the movie says that Batman created the Joker through sheer goodness. At the end of Batman Begins, the predecessor movie to the Dark Knight, the cops show Batman the first of the cards that the Joker has left at the scene of a bank robbery. They inform him that, because his noble Batman stint has worked so well, the criminals are already "adapting." In essence: try to live a noble life, and evil, chaotic forces will inevitably try to destroy you, for absolutely no reason at all.

This theme is hammered home in the Dark Knight. The Joker tells Batman that they are linked, and alike, and that Batman created him; other characters emphasize that the Joker is a necessary reaction to Batman. Because Batman began challenging the normal forces of corruption in the city (such as the mob), the world naturally created an even worse villain, which, unlike the mob, does not desire money or power, but simply unreasoning destruction. As a result, Batman is "forced" to become more authoritarian in his methodology, because to do otherwise leaves him vulnerable to the Joker (and villains in that mold).

The story might now sound familiar to you:

Because I am so noble, evil people with no morals or inner worth will try to kill me. I am thus forced to become cold, hard and brutal so that I can meet their challenge. It is not my fault when I take extreme measures, such as violating the privacy of large groups (which Batman does in the movie), or torturing captives who don't actually know useful information (which Batman also does in the movie). Rather, it is the Joker's fault.

It was the motivation for the American "Cold War" as well as the "War on Terror." The sick mind cannot imagine an enemy who is not obsessed with it. Thus, the Joker is obsessed with Batman. His entire life and career are based around the battle with Batman, which he expounds on at the end of the movie. Similarly, the American narrative imagines that Islamic terrorists spend all day lustfully hating the United States for its superior technology, morals, women, etc.

The most dangerous conclusion in the Batman movie comes at the end, when Batman lies about Harvey Dent (two face)'s murders, in order to trick the ordinary masses of Gotham into believing that Harvey Dent was a perfect saint who did not succumb to evil. Of course, being the noble hero, Batman accepts responsibility for Dent's murders. This is supposed to be a good thing because then the people of Gotham can go on believing that Harvey Dent is wonderful, and that they need this "hope" in order to carry on.

The message here is striking:

1) When a hero seems to have done bad things (such as Batman or the United States killing innocent people), the hero is actually innocent, but is just accepting responsibility in order to protect us all. Thus, it is rude to pay attention when a hero kills innocents (or commits any other sin of your choice).

2) In order to go forward with their hollow, meaningless lives, other people need to be lied to to give them hope. They need this hope because they are trapped in an endless cycle of violence from which they can never break free.

The "endless cycle of violence" and death is the worldview of the sick mind, yet again. The necessity of lying to people in order to prepare them for death and destruction is the next stage.

For those familiar with Final Fantasy X, consider Lady Yunalesca as an example. By killing her own husband to temporarily defeat Sin (a monster which regularly killed thousands of people), an action spawned of fear, Lady Yunalesca believed that she was giving Spira hope. Tainted by this fear, she refused to believe that Spira could exist without Sin, because her fear caused her to believe that life could not exist without being bleak and violent. Because she felt life had to be bleak and violent, she considered it merciful to help other summoners carry on a tradition of sacrificing their guardians, and themselves, to "fight" Sin--even though they could never totally defeat Sin that way. The summoners' quests gave the people of Spira "hope," because although everyone was participating in a great lie--a lie that killed countless Spirans over the ages--the lie nonetheless gave "hope." And so, Yunalesca felt justified in trying to murder Yuna and her guardians in order to stop them from revealing the truth--and to stop them from destroying Sin and breaking the cycle (spiral) of violence.

Yunalesca's perspective is, essentially, Batman's perspective from the Dark Knight, which is the same perspective of every sick, ragnarist mind throughout history: life must be brutal, fearful and violent, and only through lies can we give people enough hope to carry on. If we strive for a better world, where the killing can stop and people can live in peace, we will fail, so there is no point trying. It is better to simply deceive them: to give them a grand quest against an enemy; a quest that can never be won; and in that quest, they will have hope and purpose, and make it through the bleak night. And I am a noble, wonderful person for giving them that hope, even as they live on in violence.

And so, we hunt terrorists, or clown murderers, or communists, or whoever the hell else. Somehow, it never seems to end. Sin claims more people, and our leaders promise us that our soldiers next noble war will be the cure for what ails us.

They're lying, and some of them know it, but those ones congratulate themselves privately for giving us hope to carry on in such a bleak world. The others are just dumb, greedy and afraid, and want to lash out. There is always someone new to kill, and always brave soldiers or false causes to place our hopes in. Harvey Dent, the murderer? Batman, the liar?

Why aren't we good enough for the truth, Lady Yunalesca? Why can't you explain to us how Harvey Dent was a good man who was driven over the edge? Why can't we learn from his mistake and be better ourselves for it?

Because, under absolutism, Harvey Dent cannot be a good man once, and a man in error later. He can't be both, says the sick mind, because the sick mind believes that thoughts are static and controlled--he must be one or the other. And so, the fearful mind refuses to grapple with change and uncertainty, to its own demise.

All this aside, the Dark Knight was an enjoyable movie. The acting was quite good; the technology was interesting. The director and writer managed to artfully dash through rapid-fire detached scenes without making the breaks too jarring--a required skill in an arena where cost cutting is more important than art. And, if you accept the comic book world as fantasy alone, the Joker (and his suggested inevitability) makes for a nice adventure.

Spoilers for The Dark Knight and Final Fantasy X above.

Instinct v. Antilife

2008-07-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

A reflection on some of the ways instinct fights antilife

Tribism (such as racism): antilife because it guides the mind into closing off possibilities for mating, cooperation, learning and growing. It encourages fear and violence. To its most extreme degree, it would lead individuals to resist interaction (and thus, mating and social cooperation) with all those unlike themselves. To a lesser degree, it simply weakens a society

Life fights back with empathy, which is a basic weapon in every case of antilife--however, empathy is too weak in many (or most) humans to overcome the fearful mind, and the social conditioning of tribism that the fearful mind clings to. A more important tool in life's arsenal is lust: powerful enough to cause mating that can force a genetic melding (think: Strom Thurmond) or even gradual socialization. Love for offspring is then forced onto at least the mother, and the melded appearance of the offspring (or the melded characteristics of class or caste, including a joint economic background) leads to greater possibilities for empathy from both the father's and the mother's tribes.

Frequently tied to lust is love or love-like attachment. Desire leads to attachment, which can be powerful enough to break down heavy social conditioning. The rich white girl can run off with the poorer latino guy. The rich kid, with a bright business future ahead of him, can fall for the white trash stripper in the college town, spoiling his parents' desires for a heiress.

Antilife, though, resists strongly through social ordering. Class or caste-based systems discouraging mating or mingling. Rich whites may curse "jungle fever." Youth are taught to conform to rigid notions of acceptable language, acceptable social intercourse, etc. by glorifying one group's historical tradition (which then de-glorifies another, and makes it harder for the close-minded youth to identify with a youth of another group). White protectionists, for example, may glorify or identify with Civil War ties to discourage much social intercourse with latino or black populations. Hispanic protectionists may use la raza to band together (i.e. discourage mingling).

With enough conditioning, the individual can be taught to reject the natural desire to explore and learn from different people. This exploring and learning is healthy--like pollen on the wind, it spreads ideas, diversifies the genetic base, and broadens the potential for an adaptable human future. And so, clannish antilife hates it.

Right now, as always, antilife fights powerfully are trying to change this. Major aristocrats used to exchange noble white blood across their courts, using titles and landholdings to divvy themselves up. As a result, their inbreeding resulted in mentally and physically stunted madmen running Europe through the Dark Ages and any number of wars. Our current inbred chimpanzee president traces his own ancestry to the British nobility, that cesspool of violent old blood that coined our modern perception of colonialism--and so do a good number of other American presidents.

The big landholdings morphed into the trusts and family wealth of America, which still, most often, marries among itself. This is the only way wealthy families can keep wealth concentrated; without intermarriage to other wealthy sons and daughters, great wealth would disperse out over the generations, as multiple children passed it on in multiple directions, and the fortunes of their relative abilities scattered it to the wind or clustered it somewhere else.

Hoarding, the same as genetic hoarding, prevents growth and development. Without breaking up the tendency of wealth to concentrate, business and social dynamism descends, and society grows weaker. Nonetheless, antilife leads to hoarding, because hoarding is the opposite of natural, healthy behavior.

This is why stupid businesses prefer to promote from outside--maintaining a class structure. Of course, the people they bring in don't know what is going on with the business, but they have the "right" background. And in the end, it harms the business, just as it harms the segregationist group.

Death Fantasy

2008-07-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

The prime byproduct of our sentience is a high incidence of mental sickness, which inflicts most people to varying degrees. The mind recognizes its own existence, and simultaneously, the lack of absolute control over that existence. For existence itself is surrender; it is a lack of absolute control, and for humans, a lack of very much control at all. If sickness takes hold to some degree, it becomes the fearful mind; its functions become tainted, and its every action is affected by the underlying plague. Term it nonexistence throwback, death reversion or ragnarism.

The death fantasy comes into play here as the ultimate expression of antilife desire. At its core is the underlying tenet of the fearful mind: namely, that the world is a place of imperfection, impurity and fear. As such, to end the fearful uncertainty, the world must be destroyed.

Life fights against this antilife. One of the most potent tools is, of course, instinct, which can keep even the most zealously sick minds acting in facially normal ways. The swirling, random energies of love, desire and self-perpetuation; the social instincts of family, friends and community; the fear of pain and nonexistence that itself sparks the sickness: all these things work against destruction.

But the sick mind will be invariably drawn to death fantasies. Even if never to attempt to carry them out, they are a security blanket for the mind; an imaginary friend with very large fists who will destroy the fearful impurity of the lesser world.

Rapture, resurrection: mainstream examples. Monotheism, and its traditional obsession with absolutes and order, is the polar opposite of life. This is why the major monotheisms are obsessed, in varying degrees, with godly holocausts and eternal punishment. Christianity, which dominates America and American thought, is a necromancer's dream. Everything which exists is tainted by virtue of being part of the lesser world. God "loves" it, but He will destroy it and bring people away from life on Earth to Heaven, in which there will be an undead paradise; immortals who endure with "everlasting life," but who are not actually alive on Earth. The use of the term everlasting "life" helps one overlook the fact that death will occur on Earth. Death itself is the end goal; Christianity the fantasy that you will someday die, and be the better for it.

In fact, everyone will die: Christians will die and go to Heaven, and non-Christians will die and go to Hell. Jesus' death and rebirth is exalted, and hymnals of meeting him, and speaking to him someday, are love songs for the death on Earth that will bring the Christian to a better place.

Smaller groups have a long, deadly, documented history of this type of behavior, often linked to larger monotheistic movements. Having had their minds sickened by St. John's Revelations and cultural approval of Christianity, people in Christianized countries easily make the leap from believing that Jesus may return and start the Rapture at any time, to believing that some other force wants them to exit the world now.

In the meantime, life struggles against it--getting the better of most mainstream Christians. Love, family and community tug against the death fantasy. Good Christians waiting for the rapture still feel for their children, families and friends. But death is always there, calling to them and waiting in the shadows--or under the brightest lights.

All casually accepted. Conversation is peppered with little reminders. "God, what a day." What does it mean? That there exists a perfect God, the existence of whom marginalizes the importance of this petty lesser life. And so, ragnarism wins: the fearful mind spends its life believing that life is something lesser; a means to an end.

What a day indeed--what a terrible way to frame an outlook on the world. No wonder, then, that religious fervor so often goes hand in hand with war.

Tax Theft, Part 6

2008-07-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Part 5

Business Valuation Schemes

Business valuation schemes use the estate tax rules to extract from the body politic. Once you understand the many humorous fictional entities that live among us, such as businesses and trusts (as discussed in Part 5), it is easy to see how business valuation schemes work.

What business valuation schemes are good at is pretending that assets are worth less than they are actually worth (similar to how the artificial IOUs worked between Owner and Trust in Part 5). Lying about the actual worth of assets is a simple way to avoid tax. For example, pretend that Worker 1 works for a year and earns $20,000. The tax rate is 10%, so he owes $2,000. However, if he lies to the rest of us, and says that he only earned $10,000, then he will only have to pay $1,000 in tax, and he has successfully stolen $1,000.

Now imagine that, instead of lying about his earnings for a year, Owner A has $12 million in the bank, and that there is a 50% estate tax, and a $2 million estate tax exemption. Owner A dies. $2m of his $12m is exempted from estate tax, leaving $10m subject to estate tax. At the 50% rate, that is a $5 million bill.

So, to solve this problem, Owner A lies about his net worth. He tells the IRS that he only has $7 million, rather than $12 million.

If he gets away with this lie (rather, if his heirs get away with it, since he is dead), he will be taxed $2.5 million instead of $5 million ($7m of acknowledged assets - $2m exemption = $5m subject to tax, x 50% rate = $2.5m). Thus, he will appropriate $2.5m from the rest of us.

Of course, he will not get away with this lie as it stands. Rather, he will need to rework the untruth into an acceptable form. The Internal Revenue Code is designed to be complicated, long and obtuse in order that only certain people--the wealthy, with their lawyers and financial advisers--can take advantage of it.

To lie successfully, Owner A must "sell" his assets to a business he owns. Just like the fictional trust, our society accepts that if Owner A writes down business rules on paper (sort of like writing the attributes of a monster in a dungeons & dragons game) then the business comes to life and exists, and can do things independent of its creator.

This is antilife; logos; godplay; ragnarism; mental sickness. Our society nurtures and loves these imaginary Frankenstein's monsters exactly because they do not exist: they are sick creations of fearful minds. For, reasonably, imaginary things cannot "own" or "do" or anything else. Imaginary things only have life among those who believe in them. So, "Jedi Knights" can exist to Star Wars fans, but if we write Jedi Knights into our legal code and allow them and their statutory lightsabers to "do" things, we have a problem.

Once Owner A has created Business B, and sold his $12m of assets to Business B, he is ready to prepare for the business valuation scheme and cheat us all out of $2.5m in taxes. He now "divides up" his imaginary Jedi-Knight business into pieces, and hands them out to his children and friends before he dies. So, out of Business B, he cuts 5 slices:

Business B Piece 1
Business B Piece 2
Business B Piece 3
Business B Piece 4
Business B Piece 5

Each of these slices of Business B is 1/5, or 20%, of the whole.

So, the logical conclusion would be that each part is worth 20% of the total. But that is not what the IRS says, and that is how Owner A steals from the tax base. He argues that 1/5 of Business B is not actually worth 1/5 of Business B. Because it is only 1/5, it is a minority interest. Maybe he put a restriction on it (as in the advanced trust schemes discussed in Part 5) for sale, so that it can only be sold to other family members. Thus, he can say it is worth even less, because it is not freely marketable. And so, using these excuses, he (and his heirs) can pretend that all the pieces of Business B are worth much less than they actually are.

So, each 1/5 piece gets valued at less than it is actually worth. When you add up all five of those values, the sum total is less than what Business B was worth to begin with--a lie you can achieve just by imagining such an entity as Business B, then imagining that you sell your things to it, then imagining that you divide it up like pie.

Of course, the only reason Owner A divided up the business this way was to perform the tax cheat. Once he dies, his heirs--the same people who would have gotten the business anyway--file an estate tax return listing the phony value for Business B. Then, they consolidate their shares in the family, and either sell them off at market value (i.e., the actual worth of the business), or they keep running the business themselves. And the value of the business has successfully done a skip and a jump right over the estate tax into the dynasty's next generation.

Tax Theft, Part 5

2008-07-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Part 4

Advanced trust schemes

Using bypass trusts to double up the estate tax exemption amount is sufficient to eliminate estate tax liability when the holdings of a dead noble are under double the exemption amount. For example, if the exemption amount is $2 million per person, and Owner A and Wife B own $4 million of assets, they can use the bypass trust trick to shield the full $4 million from estate tax.

When the exemption amount goes up to $3.5 million per person in 2009, the bypass trust trick will shield $7 million (3.5 x 2) from estate tax.

However, once a noble house has more than $7 million in assets, even the bypass trust cannot protect those additional dollars from tax. While the family will certainly use the bypass trust to protect $7 million of assets, each dollar owned above $7 million will be taxed at the full estate tax rate. So, if the estate tax rate is 50%, and the family's assets are $7,000,001.00, the tax due will be 0.50, or 50 cents (the bypass trust will protect $7 million from tax, and so the remaining $1.00 will be subject to tax at a 50% rate). If the family's assets go up to $8 million, the family will owe $500,000 in tax (bypass trust protects $7 million from tax, so the remaining $1 million is subject to tax at a 50% rate).

How can the family then avoid paying its fair share of tax on amounts about the exemption they have already doubled with their bypass trust? Luckily for them, it is still possible. It will take a more experienced (and expensive) tax-planning lawyer to come up with further trust schemes, but the results will be well worth the investment, and both the lawyer and the wealthy family will be happy. The only one to suffer will be everyone else.

Advanced trust schemes are actually quite simple, once you accept the legitimacy of various assumptions on which our society is based. One of these we have already learned to accept: the bypass trust. For example, if a wealthy person says, "I have a trust," we all agree to be nice and pretend that there is an imaginary person called Mr. Trust who owns property and does other things. Accepting that various trusts can be independent entities is a vital part of our economy, without which tax theft could not continue: nobles need to be able to make up imaginary people who can do business with them in order to keep the wheels running. So, we all accept that if someone creates a business or a trust, that entity can own property, pay taxes, make income, take actions, make decisions, have interests, etc.

So: for advanced trust schemes to work, we must all accept that a person, Owner A, can create Trust A, and that Trust A is then its own separate entity, distinct from Owner A. Of course, Owner A can do just about anything he wants with property that "belongs to" Trust A. But by law, Trust A can be a separate entity from Owner A.

This is where the fun part comes in. Assume that Owner A has $17 million of assets, he is very old, and he expects he will die in a few years. He has a bypass trust, Trust A, all set up so that he doesn't have to pay taxes on $7 million of those assets. This means that, unfortunately, he has $10 million of assets subject to tax (17 - 7 = 10), at a very high estate tax rate (say, 50%). That's a "tax liability" of $5 million; in other words, when he dies, he will owe the country $5 million.

To get out of having to pay this, he comes up with an idea. First, he creates Trust B. Then, he sells Trust B $10 million of his assets. (Those assets might include an apartment building, a plot of land in a gate community that someone could build a house upon, a commercial building, ownership interests in other businesses, oil/gas rights, etc.)

The fair market value of these assets is $10 million, which is what would be included in Owner A's estate when he dies, and thus be subject to tax. However, Owner A is clever, and when he sells the property to Trust B, he writes the deals in a strange way.

Firstly, Trust B does not have any money to buy the assets--certainly not $10 million. So, Trust B gives Owner A an IOU instead of cash.

Then, instead of Trust B having to pay a market rate of interest (which is the rate of interest anyone else would charge Trust B for borrowing $10 million), Trust B pays the lowest possible federal rate. This is often several points of interest lower than the market rate.

For example, let's say the market rate is 7%. This means that if you borrow $1 million for one year, you will have to pay back $1 million, $70,000.

So, if you borrowed money from someone at less than the market rate (say, 5%), and then reinvested it, you could turn a profit: for example, if you borrowed $1 million at 5%, you would be expected to pay back $1 million, $50,000 at the end of the year. Thus, if you were clever, you could borrow $1 million at 5%, invest it at 7%, and receive $1 million, $70,000 on your investment. Then, you would pay back your original loan for $1 million, $50,000, and have a $20,000 profit.

For this reason, if the market rate is 7% (or near 7%), no one would loan you money for 5%. Why would they? That would just cost them the 2% difference; i.e., if they loaned you $1 million at 5%, they would be losing $20,000 that year. The only reason someone would do that is if 1) they were gambling that the rate would go down lower than 5% during the year, so that they would be making money on your loan by locking you into that rate, or 2) it wasn't really a loan, but a gift of the amount of difference in interest.

The IRS, though, is very nice to the wealthy. It establishes the federal rate, which is the rate you can make loans at without them being considered gifts (and being subject to gift/estate taxation). The federal rate is very low compared to the market rate--it is usually around 3%, while the market rate is several points higher.

So, clever people can transfer wealth without having to pay gift or estate tax by using sham loans at the federal rate. As I said before, no one actually gives loans to someone at such a low rate, unless it is a gift--the purpose of the lower federal rate is to allow clever people to structure gift transactions as "loans" so that they can transfer wealth between generations of a dynasty without that wealth having to pass through the estate or gift tax process.

But, returning to the main subject of advanced trust schemes: Owner A has just sold his trust, Trust B, $10 million of assets. And, he has made the sale at the federal rate, rather than at the market rate. This means that his imaginary friend, Trust B, is getting a huge deal--$10 million of assets that he can invest at market rate, which he only had to pay federal rate to acquire.

This isn't small potatoes: if market rate is 7% and the rate of the loan Trust B took out to buy the assets (federal rate) is 3%, Trust B can invest the $10 million, make $700,000 in the first year (7% of $10 million), pay $300,000 interest on the "loan" to Owner A (3% of $10 million), and have a $400,000 tax free gift in the trust.

This gift of the extra money the trust made will ultimately go to the trust's beneficiaries, i.e., the same people who would have inherited that money directly from Owner A if he had died without making up Trust B first. However, that money would have been in Owner A's estate, and subject to estate tax. This fake "sale," where Owner A pretends he is selling his assets to an imaginary person named Trust B, is one of the tricks used to get Owner A out of paying taxes based on what he is actually worth.

A nice savings. If Owner A had invested the $10 million himself (rather than having his imaginary friend Trust B invest it), he would have had the $400,000 of income in his estate when he died at the end of the year. That $400,000 would have been taxed at the high estate tax rate (say, 50%), so by making up that imaginary person (Trust B), he just avoided $200,000 of tax. If he lives for another year, and the trust makes another $400,000, there's another $200,000 of savings. If he creates the trust 5 years before he dies--well, the "savings" just goes up.

The savings on Trust B's earnings, though, is just one way to get out of taxes using the "selling assets to your imaginary friend" trick. An even better part of the trick, which Owner A has already used, is that the debt Trust B gave him in order to purchase his $10 million of assets is nowhere near $10 million.

How does that work? Well, think about it from Owner A's perspective. He sold assets to Trust B so that they would not be "his" anymore, and therefore subject to that nasty estate tax. However, doesn't it seem like if he sells $10 million of assets in exchange for a $10 million debt (Trust B's promise to repay him for the assets), his estate did not actually get any smaller? For example, reasonably speaking, if Owner A sells Trust B $10 million of assets in exchange for a $10 million debt with interest, and then Owner A dies, that debt--that IOU--is worth $10 million, right?

Wrong--and therein lies the best part of the "selling assets to your imaginary friend" plot. For a number of reasons, the IRS allows Owner A to pretend that his IOU of $10 million is worth less than $10 million.

One reason might be that the interest rate is so low. But wait--I thought, if Trust B promised to pay the federal rate, then the transaction was completely acceptable and legitimate. Well, it was--except that, once it has been deemed legitimate, Owner A can say that the IOU is worth less than $10 million, because it is not paying a market rate of interest. Owner A's argument is, "This debt is not even paying me market rate! So, I am losing money on it, because if I had invested my $10 million of assets elsewhere, they could be making a higher profit than federal rate!"

Luckily for Owner A, he is allowed to have his cake and eat it, too. So, because the IOU is at lower than market rate, he can value it at, say, $9.5 million instead of $10 million.

Thus, $500,000 more of assets are exempted from estate tax because they are owned by an imaginary friend who gave him an IOU worth less than the assets. This is considered intelligent American tax planning.

But we're not done yet. There's another problem with the IOU that Owner A has. Can you guess? That's right: it's an unsecured loan. Unlike your typical home mortgage, which is secured by an interest in the house (until the buyer pays the bank off), the IOU that Trust B gave Owner A is not secured by an interest in any of the assets that Owner A sold Trust B. So, clearly, Owner A's IOU is not even worth $9.5 million. As Owner A would say, "No one else would buy this risky IOU for $9.5 million--not without security!" So, he is allowed to value it at, say, $8.5 million instead.

Another $1 million saved from estate tax. But wait--you guessed it. There is still another problem with the IOU that Trust B gave Owner A. It has limitations on transfer. As part of the IOU agreement, Owner A agreed to limitations on how he could trade the IOU for someone else's IOU. For example, the IOU contract might say, "This debt is non-transferable on the third, seventh, and nineteenth days of any month" (or some other similar nonsense).

Because of this "transferability problem," Owner A could argue that, on the free market, he couldn't get $8.5 million for his IOU, because potential buyers would be put off by the limitation on what days of the month the IOU could be transferred at. So, Owner A gets to value the IOU even less. Let's say down to $8.3 million.

And so on. In the end, Owner A will actually end up paying some tax, but he will avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions and millions, depending on how many assets are "sold" to how many "trusts") of his fair share. He might sell the IOU to someone else in exchange for a different IOU to another wealthy person's trust, or he might sell it for other business interests, and in doing so, cause it to be "worth" even less.

Now, in a sane world, someone might point out that the whole reason there are so many "problems" with the IOU is because Owner A doesn't really have an IOU from his imaginary friend; rather, he is just playing pretend with his assets so that he can act like they are worth less, and skip out on his tax. But in America, that viewpoint holds no water, and whoever advocates it clearly just does not understand the legal tradition.

Trust B, as just described above, is the Intentionally Defective Grantor Trust, or IDGT ("I dig it"), which is one of the most commonly-used tools for reducing estate tax for nobles with estates larger than the doubled exemption amount (post bypass trust planning).

Business valuation schemes next, for real this time.

New Jon Benet DNA

2008-07-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

New DNA evidence

The new claim is that the parents were not the killers because twelve years after the killing, a new DNA test showed that there may have been a spot of DNA from a male who was not a family member on the murdered girl's clothes.

Putting aside what happened in over a decade of storage and handling by however many police detectives, janitors, lawyers, and the like--sent-out laundry and visitors to the home and a dozen other possibilities suggest themselves as explanations. Also, the fact that this was such a miniscule find that it took a highly-advanced test not available until today to turn it up, and that a killer involved in direct physical strangulation might just possibly leave more than such a tiny spec on his victim.

For those not acquainted with the case, a short rundown of revealing facts:

* No footprints of any kind outside the house in the fresh snowfall during or immediately after the time of the murder.

* No broken windows or locks of any kind on the house during or immediately after the time of the murder. Doors were locked after the murder, and no one was in the house in the morning except the family.

* No sign of struggle or abduction between the girl's upstairs bedroom and the basement downstairs where she died. No one reported noise or struggle. Someone the girl knew and trusted brought her downstairs into the basement before strangling her.

* Ransom note discovered is in mother's handwriting, and makes a demand for the precise amount of money ($118,000) the father had just received as a Christmas bonus earlier that week, a figure unknown at that time except to the family and the employer.

* After the father reports the girl "missing," he immediately calls his lawyer, then invites several friends over to help him "search" the inside of the house. He keeps them out of the basement, where Jon Benet's body is. Police then search the inside of the house and find no evidence of struggle or kidnapping. Because of the ransom note, they suggest waiting for a call. Father then goes down to the basement "to get something" and "finds" the body.

* Mother had recently returned from membership in a Christian extremist group that used the acronym SBTC, for "saved by the Cross." "SBTC!" is referenced in the ransom note.

* Jon Benet's body had been bathed after it was killed, to remove evidence. That means someone took it up to a bathtub before replacing it in the basement. Father and mother claim to have heard nothing.

Now, because some unknown boy or man at the laundry service may have brushed by one of Jon Benet's pieces of clothing, or left it at her house and had it picked up by her clothing, or left it on her mother's or father's clothing and had it picked up by her clothing, case solved.

The father, who still lives, will be pleased with this news, and like O.J., he can now continue his vigilant search for the real killer. Who floats over the snow. And can walk through walls. And knew Jon Benet enough to trick her down to the basement. And who then strangled her in the house knowing her family was upstairs the whole time. And then who carried her back upstairs to give her a bath before returning her to the basement. And who then exited the house and locked the doors on his way out and floated over the snow to leave.

Tax Theft, Part 4

2008-07-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Part 3

Interest deduction schemes

Short and simple. Home mortgage interest deductions offered by the IRS are familiar to many people. These work by subtracting the amount you pay as interest on a loan from your taxable income, thereby lowering your income tax.

So, if your income is $50K, the tax rate is 10%, and you pay $10K for renting an apartment, you pay $5K in taxes (10% of $50K). If your income is $50K, and you pay $10K in mortgage interest, you pay $4K in taxes (10% of $40K, or 10% of $50K income minus $10K mortgage interest deduction).

Two things about the interest deduction are important to tax theft. The first is, this deduction is available for commercial loans, not just for regular American citizens trying to afford the house they live in. The commercial transactions discussed in Part 3, where the wealthy transfer properties between one another, are facilitated by commercial interest deductions. In fact, interest deductions are one of the major reasons behind those transactions to begin with.

Here's how it works: we already know that the aristocracy avoids tax by using the step-up in basis at death to wipe out any tax when huge amounts of appreciation income are transferred between dynasty generations. We also know that, in order to transfer property before death without being taxed, they use reinvestment in similar industry schemes to to swap properties between families without having to pay tax. So then, where do they get liquid cash to buy luxury cars, home furnishings, vacations, etc.?

(Note: when considering all these tax theft plots, do not forget that other types of investments--from cash to stocks to bonds--are also being held and used by the wealthy. When these accounts grow in value, income tax is primarily cheated through the step-up in basis: each generation holds funds that grow in value, with the growth being wiped out at the older generation's death. In the meantime, dividends, interest and rents--the benefits of nobility--are still being kicked out to the owners. There is some income tax actually paid, but at a massively reduced rate from the income that is actually occurring. The wealthy do pay some taxes, but the brilliance of the theft is that they are not perceived as being totally exempt from taxes, and thus, the schemes continue. This is part of where the "CEO pays at a lower rate than his secretary" anecdote comes from.)

Back to liquidity. When nobles sell real estate at huge gains, and want to reinvest the gains (via a business) into a "similar industry" in order to avoid paying tax on their gains, they do not actually reinvest those gains. Instead, they keep them for fun and spending, or for other investment purposes. The place that they get the money to "reinvest" is through a commercial loan. Commercial loans come from banks, like mortgage loans, and the interest that the wealthy pay on them (again, through corporations and trusts) is deductible from the income tax they would otherwise be fairly paying.

Basically, what this means is that regular taxpayers--the body politic--subsidize the aristocracy's business transactions. Let's say that, after dodging as much tax as he possibly can using other tricks, Donald Trump owes tax on a taxable income of $5 million. In essence, this means that the city/state/country he lives in needs $5 million more to run society--pay for police, fire, schools, military protection, road-building, etc.

What does Donald Trump do? To get out of paying that tax, he simply borrows $100 million at 5% interest on a commercial loan, and invests it in an expensive fancy building. He pays his friends at the bank $5 million a year interest, which he then deducts from his taxable income using the interest deduction. And, his tax liability goes down $5 million, which means that the rest of the body politic has to pick up the tab.

Understanding how commercial loans are justified by the nobility requires understanding the basics of our money system. Thankfully, both are simple, and they stem from the idea of impartial money.

Impartial money (which is something of a redundant phrase) refers to the idea that money--numbers on a page or cash in the hand--is detached from the effort that created it. I.e., if I work hard to dig a hole and am paid $5, I can walk down the street and get mugged. The mugger then has the $5. When he goes to buy beef jerky with that $5, the clerk taking the bill does not know that the $5 was earned by digging a hole, or even that it was earned by mugging. He just knows that it is $5, so it is "worth" something.

This is the price that regular people pay for living in a system where the means of exchange--money--is divorced from the means of creation--work. Without impartial money, people who did nothing but sat on their asses and "owned" things for a living would starve off, because their efforts--zero--would produce nothing of value. If the economy were based on reputation, hard work, and individual effort, then the means of exchange could be attributed to the person who did the work. This might not have been possible once, but it is now, with technology--similar to ebay feedback, and the kind of conscientious fund-tracking that modern banks are capable of, our means of exchange could be tagged, so that we know where every dollar and cent originated, and who it passed through. The aristocracy's banking system, however, does not allow this option to enter into feasibility, because impartial money is required for most of their schemes.

Impartial money works in commercial loans because it helps smokescreen the source of funds. As discussed in the previous section, reinvestment in similar industry is used to justify postponing (forever) income tax caused by an increase in the value of a property. It relies upon the assumption that there is no income realized when a wealthy person sells a property, as long as they immediately reinvest those same funds in another property. How can I pay the tax, the wealthy person asks, if I just spent all the money I made on selling Property A by buying Property B? (Of course, the person of average means may not protest that he spent all his taxable income on rent, food, and retirement savings, and should therefore be exempted from tax. He would end up in jail and have his accounts emptied.)

The joke comes, however, in between the wealthy person's sale of Property A and purchase of Property B. Once Donald Trump sells Property A, and puts the $10 million from its sale in his bank account along with all his other millions, the impartial money mixes together. It is indistinguishable from all of the other millions that are already in his bank account. How can you tell if he "reinvested it" in a "similar industry"?

You can't. So, the aristocracy just gets the benefit of the doubt every single time. The wealthy owner sells a property, pockets the proceeds, and then buys another property later. It doesn't matter if he keeps all the cash from the sale in one account, and uses money from a commercial loan to buy the new property. Once the impartial money from the commercial loan enters his bank account, it is indistinguishable from the funds he received from the sale of Property A--it's all impartial dollars, with no beginning or end.

So, anytime he wants to sell a property that has a huge gain in value, he sells the property, keeps all the money, then takes out a commercial loan to buy something else--and doesn't have to pay tax on the first sale, because he has "reinvested." Then, he gets to deduct his tax even more by using "interest deductions."

The picture described in Part 3 now grows even more fun. The wealthy spend their days engaged in commercial real estate transactions, acting out a Game of Houses by buying and selling different properties, and loaning money back and forth between each other--and with every single transaction, they get a deduction! Owner A sells Property Z to Owner B. Owner B gets a loan from Bank Y (which is owned by Owner C's three corporations, four trust funds and two LLCs) and deducts the interest. Owner A buys Property X from Owner B and gets a loan for it from Bank Y. Owner B wipes out his income tax on Property X by buying Property Z, and Owner A wipes out his income tax on Property Z by buying Property X. All of their lawyers get a respectable slice of the pie, and then they fly to New Zealand for a two month vacation before returning home to sign a new set of papers, sponsor a new deal, and make another few million bucks.

Next up: business valuation schemes

Tax Theft, Part 3

2008-07-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Reinvestment in similar industry (Sec. 1031) schemes

After understanding the larceny possible with the step up in basis, the "reinvestment" scheme is remarkably easy to understand. It stems from the concept of realization, the trick used to postpone paying income tax on the investments of ownership (in contrast to the investments of work, which are valued taxed paycheck to paycheck, and yearly). A quick review: realization is in imaginary leap referring to the time when income is "realized," and thus taxed: thus, the aristocracy can employ realization to shield their income from taxation. So, if a wealthy man owns land that goes up $100 in value, and an average man works and earns $100, the average man is taxed, while the wealthy man says, "I have not realized my income until I sell the land."

What happens, though, when the wealthy man sells his land? Is he taxed then, after being able to put it off for as long as he wants (or forever, using the step-up in basis technique)?

No. He is again protected from taxation, through the trick "reinvestment in a similar industry." The citation for this scheme is IRC Section 1031.

How it works is this: the wealthy man owns his property through a business. Let us say that Wealthy Man A owns Business B, which owns Land C. So, A owns B, which owns C.

C goes up in value $100. B (at the direction of A) then sells C, thereby realizing $100 of gain (the realization scheme relies upon the fiction that income is postponed until the time of sale). Then, A wants to avoid tax, so he has his business use the proceeds of the sale to buy another piece of property, a factory, a building, a farm, etc. The "reinvestment in similar industry" rules allow him, if he buys another piece of property like this, to not pay tax yet again.

Why is this allowed? The aristocracy justifies it by arguing that it would "stifle business investment" if the wealthy were forced to pay taxes when they sold property to buy other property, because then wealthy people would refuse to sell property just to avoid having to realize their income, and be taxed. (Of course, the only reason they would have such motivations to hold property in the first place is because of the realization scheme that helps them postpone taxes until sale.)

Thus, the aristocracy argues that postponing tax yet again allows them to buy and sell properties freely (literally "freely," since they are avoiding tax), which helps the economy, which helps everyone. In actuality, it helps the aristocracy to never have to pay tax.

(There are some qualifications to this rule, of course; little technicalities to ensure that only the savvy wealthy whom the scheme is designed for (with lawyers and family wealth planning) can take advantage of it. They are weak qualifications, the strongest being that you have to "reinvest" the proceeds of sale (i.e., buy a new piece of property) within 45 days.)

The larger effects of this theft can be staggering when the reinvestment in similar industry provisions are combined with the realization provisions and the step-up in basis. Here's how it works:

1) The realization provision allows you to postpone paying income tax until a property is sold;

2) The reinvestment in similar industry ("like-kind") provisions allow you to postpone paying income tax even when you sell a property, as long as you buy another property within 45 days;

3) The step-up in basis provisions allow you to eliminate any income tax inherent in an unsold property whenever a wealthy owner dies.

Can you see where this is going? What this system amounts to is a pass to the wealthy against ever paying income taxes at all on their greatest pieces of property. All the wealthy need to do is hold property, watch its value rise, and enjoy the increase in their dynasty's net worth. As long as they wait until the death of a family member, and distribute ownership interests accordingly, the step-up in basis protects each generation from ever paying income tax. And, if they ever want to sell a property without waiting for a death, they simply have to find another noble family in a similar predicament, and switch properties.

This is much of what commercial land deals are: "businesses" (owned by the wealthy, through trusts or other businesses) such as commercial real estate, apartment buildings, etc., being switched back and forth between different dynasties, who each use the transaction as a justification for bringing in IRC 1031, and canceling out any income tax on all the gain they got from the increase in their property's value.

On paper, it seems like two (or a dozen, in a big, happy circle) different businesses are making different investments for the purpose of profitability and bolstering the economy. In fact, the nobility is playing hide the pellet, and is exchanging the properties around primarily to wipe out income tax without using the step-up in basis at death. With each new transaction, income is "deferred," and the dynasty can buy and sell and move whatever it wants without tax, until finally someone dies at some point, and the step-up in basis frees up the next generation to do the same thing, without ever paying its fair share to the rest of the country.

Entire industries within the legal, financial services, and property appraisal fields have sprang up to serve these transactions, by generating official-looking paper trails, earning fees, and ensuring that the wealthy families fairly compensate one another for the properties they switch between their respective businesses and trusts. But, the money spent on these middlemen is nothing compared to the vast amounts stolen from the body politic through these overlapping tax schemes.

Next up: interest schemes

Tax Theft, Part 2

2008-07-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Part 1

Step-up in basis

The step-up in basis scheme is an even greater theft from the body politic than the bypass trust. This is because the step-up in basis scheme is a means for avoiding the income tax, which is a tax of greater importance than the estate tax. While the estate tax at first seems like it will be of greater concern to the wealthy, that is not in fact the case: the estate tax taxes the accumulated holdings of the wealthy, while the income tax taxes their phenomenal gains in wealth built up during each generation's lifetime. Given the combination of inflation, increasing money supply, economic development, and general rises in price and accredited value, the income tax that can accrue over the decades-long lifetime of a burgeoning lordling can be a great deal more troubling to he or she than the estate tax.

There are, however, many ways of stealing that tax from the masses. An introduction to the concept of basis is necessary to understand how most of these work, including the most devious of all, the "step-up" in basis.

Basis calls for a look at the underlying philosophy of the income tax system. Under income tax, "income" is theoretically taxed. However, there is a duality in the tax system that represents the first opportunity for the aristocracy to take advantage. This duality is the split between work and ownership. As ever since the inception of the aristocracy, owning something is viewed as more important than working for something. This is because owning is a concept that depends upon human perception, while effort/sweat/labor is a tangible part of the real world. Owning is thus more attractive to the nobility than working, because owning involves doing nothing more than sitting there, while working involves work. Which can be hard and can take effort.

The nobility makes money primarily by "owning" things. For example, Lord/Businessman A "owns" a field. Peasant/Employee B works in that field. During Year 1, L/B A sits on his ass, while P/E B works his ass off. At the end of the year, Fruit X is produced. For his ownership, L/B A receives 90% of the Fruit. For his work, P/E B receives 10% of the Fruit.

The justification for this system is that Owner has taken a risk by investing his resources (which he, of course, "owned" before, in a dazzling feat of circular logic) in Field. The problem with this argument is that Worker has also taken a greater risk--he has invested a year of his life working in the Field. The justification only works, then, if one views money/resources as more important than life; i.e., it is a ragnarist justification ( http://cronotica.blogspot.com/2007/02/fearful-mind-fear-is-multi-faceted-and.html and http://cronotica.blogspot.com/2007/02/symptoms-of-ragnarism-not-every.html ). Nonetheless, this is a tax discussion, not a property rights discussion, so leave this point for now.

Returning to the amounts of Fruit X received by Owner and Worker in Year 1: both of them have received income. However, it is unacceptable to the Owner that he pay income tax on his income. Nonetheless, someone has to pay the tax. So, that burden has to fall on Worker. The problem is, an "income" tax is supposed to tax income, so it would seem that Owner owes a tax the same as Worker.

Not so. The first way around this is for owner to make up different systems of tax classification. These are called ordinary income--which is the income earned by people who work, like Worker--and aristocratic income. Then, you decide that you tax those types of income at different rates. For example, ordinary income will be taxed at the full, or highest, rate. Aristocratic income will be taxed at a lower rate.

There are a lot of different types of aristocratic income. One of them is capital gains income. This represents the increase in price of things over time. So, if Owner owns Field G, which he paid $100 for, and ten years later, because of great harvests, Field G can be sold for $500, there have been $400 of capital gains. This is currently taxed at 15%, which is lower than the tax that Worker pays. So, if Worker works for four years, and earns $400 of income, it will be called ordinary income, and he will pay a higher tax on it than Owner will pay on his $400 of capital gains income.

Another clever way that the aristocracy has come up with to classify income is dividend income. Pretend that, instead of owning Field G directly, Owner owned an imaginary person (a "corporation"), called Fields, Inc. Fields, Inc. owns Field G. After 4 years, Fields, Inc. makes $400 of income from Field G. It pays that income back to its owner (Owner), who has $400 of income. However, unlike the income earned by Worker during that time, this is not ordinary income, but rather a special kind of income known as dividend income. And Owner gets to pay a reduced rate on it.

However, this is not even the most cunning part of the scheme. The cunning part is that Owner not only gets to pay a reduced rate on the most important part of his special income (his capital gains), but that he can put it off for a long time. Whereas Worker has to pay his tax right away that year (or the IRS will punish him severely), Owner can wait until he realizes his gain.

This is where basis comes in. The basis of Field G is the amount Owner paid for it--$100. When he sells it for $500, the profit is determined by subtracting the basis ($100) from the sales price ($500) to determine the capital gain ($400).

The discrepancy in treatment comes in when you look at the years before Owner sells Field G. During those years, Field G is going up in value--so Owner has income of that amount. In the first year, it is worth $100--the same he paid. In the second year, it goes up to $200; in the third year, $300; in the fourth year, $400, and in the fifth year, $500. However, because Owner is Owner, and because he is not Worker, he gets to put off paying taxes until his realization event, or the time that he sells the farm/field. Meanwhile, Worker has been earning $100 a year, and has been paying taxes on that every single year.

Owners rationalize this by saying it is difficult to value the improvement in the field's net worth each year, without being able to sell it. The problem with this argument is that it is also difficult for Worker to pay tax. Worker would prefer to keep his money and pay taxes later, just like Owner. However, Owner is the only one allowed to use arguments like that, so Worker has to pay taxes every year, while Owner can put them off until he sells his field. (Owners also argue that until they sell the field, they will not have the cash to pay the tax, so the tax should be put off. Workers would like to argue that they are low on cash to pay their taxes, too, but again, those arguments are only allowed to Owners)

Moving right along, the basis idea comes back. We have already covered how Owner does not have to pay tax until he sells his field. But what happens if Owner decides not to sell his field ever, so that he never has to pay the tax? Let's say that during his entire life, he owns the field, and it goes up in value, but he never sells it, never has the realization event, and is never taxed. Does he escape the tax entirely?

Yes. The aristocracy's trick for stealing that money is the step-up in basis. What this scheme does is declare that when someone dies, all their property gets a "step-up" in basis to the market value at the time of death.

So, let's say that Owner bought Field G for $100, owned it for 50 years, then died. During 50 years, it went up a lot in value--to $5,000. That is a huge increase (if you add some zeroes) in wealth, and a lot of income to Owner.

However, Owner is clever. When he dies, he passes Field G to his son, Owner 2. Owner 2 then sells the Field for $5,000. Because of the step-up in basis, Owner 2's basis in the field is $5,000--the market value at the time Owner 1 died--and Owner 2 does not owe income tax.

Congratulations to Owner 1 and Owner 2. By planning over the lifetimes of their dynasty, they have avoided paying income tax on $4,900 of income (add as many zeroes as is required to see how this effects the body politic). In the meantime, Worker 1 and Worker 2 (and all their family lines) will be paying income tax on their work, year after year after year.

The best way for the aristocracy to exploit this is to invest their resources each generation, using the death of any family member to be an event for "step-up in basis." With wealth reinvested after each death, the family can realize colossal income, and see its wealth go higher and higher, without ever paying tax on its monumental holdings.

Upcoming: interest schemes; reinvestment in similar industry schemes, and business valuation schemes

Tax Theft, Part 1

2008-06-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Bypass Trusts

Bypass trusts are an effective vehicle the minor aristocracy employs in stealing money from the body politic. The Estate Tax regime is the scheme under which the theft is legitimized.

The Estate Tax works by imposing a tax on individuals who die owning a certain amount. The amount is currently $2 million, but slated to go up to $3.5 million. Amounts owned beyond that amount (let's call it $2 million for purposes of discussion) are taxed at a high rate, let's call it 50%.

So, if you died owning $2.5 million worth of assets, you would get an exemption for the $2 million, and you would pay a 50% tax on the remaining .5 million. Thus, $500,000 would not be exempt, and you would pay a tax of $225,000. The amount remaining for your heirs would be $2.25 million.

However, this is an unacceptable level of taxation for the minor aristocracy. In order to avoid paying their fair share, one of the major tools of their trade, as important as the lockpick and dagger to the less well-heeled thief, is the marital deduction. The marital deduction allows someone who dies to give as much property as they want to their spouse without having to pay any estate tax on it. Goodness knows it would be terrible if a surviving spouse had to struggle to survive with only $2 million and change.

This is not good enough for the minor aristocracy, though. They run into a problem when they use the marital deduction: namely, that once the surviving spouse dies, all of the money that spouse received from the first spouse to die is in the surviving spouse's estate. That means it is subject to estate tax.

So, imagine that Harry and Wilma each owned $3.0 million of assets. Harry dies and leaves his $3 million to Wilma. Wilma now has $6 million. Because of the marital deduction, Harry pays no estate tax. When Wilma dies, though, she has $6 million. $2 million is exempted using the $2 million credit mentioned above, and the remaining $4 million is taxed. At our 50% rate, that's a $2 million tax bill. Harry and Wilma's poor heirs have to make do with only $4 million ($2 million exempted plus $2 million left after an estate tax of $2 million; 2 + (4-2) = 4).

Thankfully for the minor aristocracy, though, there is a solution to this conundrum, and a way to steal back a lot of that tax bill from the body politic. This solution is called the bypass trust. These are incredibly common "estate planning" (tax theft) devices used by the minor aristocracy, or those households that have assets in the several (but not dozen) millions. They also represent one of the first and easiest level of theft employed by the high aristocracy, because of their foolproof protection of several million in assets. For now, though, we will focus on the minor aristocracy.

The bypass trust solves two problems. It 1) allows the surviving spouse to keep all the money, but 2) without having to pay taxes on the deceased spouse's half (or on their community property share, depending on the state where they died).

But how can this work? If the estate tax is imposed at death, how do Harry and Wilma get out of having it imposed when they die? The IRS has come up with complicated regulations that allow for the bypass trust to steal money from the rest of America, and keep it for the wealthy. Here's how it works:

Harry dies, owning $3 million. He uses his personal $2 million exemption to shield $2 of the $3 million from tax, and he gives that money to an imaginary person called a bypass trust. The remaining $1 million he gives to Wilma tax free, using the marital deduction. So, Wilma now has $4 million in her name.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bypass Trust owns $2 million. Strangely enough, Mr. Bypass Trust has to do whatever Wilma likes. If Mr. Bypass Trust makes any money off his investments, or has any other income at all, he has to give it all to Wilma. If Wilma needs money for her "health, education, maintenance and support" (shelter/mansion? clothes/prada? food/salmon? car/mercedes? anything in the world?), then Mr. Bypass Trust has to give Wilma any of the original $2 million she asks for. Also, Wilma manages all of Mr. Bypass Trust's bank accounts. She gets his statement and carries his checkbook. She signs the checkbook. She decides whether she needs any money for her health, her education, her maintenance or her support, and if she does, she writes herself a check.

Then, when Wilma dies, Mr. Bypass Trust can give the rest of the money to whoever he wants (whoever Harry decided he would give it to, when he died a few years ago) without paying any estate tax. Because, you see, Mr. Bypass Trust is a trust, not a real person. So, even though he can do all the things described above, he doesn't have to be responsible to the other taxpayers for little things like the estate tax.

Guess who gets the money from Mr. Bypass Trust when Wilma dies? That's right: little Joey, the same heir to Harry and Wilma that was going to get the money in the first place. However, since Joey was exempted from paying estate tax on the money owned by Mr. Bypass Trust, his tax bill is much lower. Let's figure it out.

Without Mr. Bypass Trust, Harry would give $3 million to Wilma when he died. No tax due because of the marital deduction. Then, when Wilma died and gave $6 million to little Joey, she would use the $2 million estate tax exemption, leaving $4 million to be taxed, resulting in a $2 million tax bill, and $4 million to Joey.

With Mr. Bypass Trust, things look a lot better for them. Harry gives Wilma $1 million, and Mr. Bypass Trust $2 million. No tax due on any of it because of the marital deduction (for the $1 million to Wilma) and the estate tax exemption (for the $2 million to Mr. Bypass Trust). Then, when Wilma dies, we pretend she only has $4 million--not the $6 million she actually has if you are a person who doesn't believe in fairies or bypass trusts.

Thus, little Joey gets $2 million tax free from Mr. Bypass Trust. Wilma's $4 million death gift to him has a $2 million exemption, leaving only $2 million to be taxed, for a tax bill of $1 million. Little Joey pays $1 million and now has $5 million left. He (and Harry and Wilma's ghosts) have just stolen a million dollars from the rest of the country.

This theft only works if you believe in imaginary beings named Trust, who are allowed to hold property, but don't live, eat, breathe, work, or operate under the same rules. Because Trusts can be complicated to create, lawyers are able to charge between $2K-$10K for creating them. And as a result, every time a bypass trust is created and funded during 2008, the wealthy will steal over $400,000 from America (depending on the applicable tax rate). After 2009, when the exemption goes up to $3.5 million, the wealthy will begin funding bypass trusts with $3.5 million, thereby stealing about $1.5 million from the body politic each time (again, depending on the applicable estate tax rate).

Why does this work? Because of the fact that, as previously discussed, imposing tax burdens on "everyone," and then exempting only certain people in complicated ways, does not feel as much like theft to the victims. When the masses believe they are paying their fair (or reasonably fair; "everyone cheats a little!") share of taxes rather giving money to people with millions of dollars and bypass trusts, they are less likely to make trouble about it.

The rationalization that the mainstream uses to justify bypass trusts is that by giving the money to Mr. Bypass Trust, Harry did not really give the money to Wilma. They claim that because Wilma cannot do anything she wants with the money, what Harry was actually doing was giving the money to Little Joey, and just letting Wilma have some benefit until she died. This claim, though, is ridiculous: bypass trusts allow Wilma to do essentially whatever she wants with the money Mr. Bypass Trust owns. She controls it to such a degree that she could only really be penalized if she gave it all to a male prostitute, or the Prime Minister of Nigeria. The only reasonable thing she can't do is decide who gets it when she dies--what an awful loss (especially since she and her lawyer helped her husband decide who was going to get it when she died anyway, when they were in the lawyer's office planning how the bypass trust would work). This immense sacrifice on her part is the purported justification for taking money from everyone else.

The avowed purpose of the estate tax is to ensure that the immensely rich have their massive fortunes gradually broken down, so that the wealth can be spread around the economy for investment, economic growth, and the benefit of the body politic. The core idea is that any amount over $2 million (or whatever exemption amount) should be taxed before it can be passed on for continual hoarding: even when passed between individuals who happen to be economically united in two-person Judeo-Christian marriage. However, the bypass trust scheme allows the aristocracy to "bypass" the individual exemption amount, and double it for those (wealthy) people who pay a small fee to lawyers to draw up the plans for the trust.

Next up: step up in basis.

Tax Theft, Introduction

2008-06-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

This series will explore the use of estate and tax planning in stealing money from the body politic. A few introductory notes are in order.

Firstly, the concept of theft through taxation must be understood. It does not mean that all taxes imposed by government are thefts. Rather, it implies a more advanced system of thievery where taxes are imposed upon everyone, and tax-exemptions allow select individuals to "avoid" taxation. Thus, the individuals who do not avoid taxation have been robbed, in the sense that they have had money taken from them. More importantly in the aggregate, the body politic has been robbed, because it has not received its due. Everyone within the taxpaying community has been stolen from. The robbery does not occur through direct physical force most of the time, because most people pay their taxes rather than go to jail.

Example: suppose that in Town A, there exists Individual Z and Individual Y. A tax is imposed upon all individuals of $50. If Individual Y comes up with a strategy whereby individuals named "Y" do not have to pay their tax, then the body politic has been robbed of $50. Individual Z pays $50, while Individual Y pays nothing. The body politic would have received $100 total ($50 each from two individuals) but instead it receives $50. The body politic has been robbed.

Similarly, Individual Z has been robbed of $25. Let us say that the tax was imposed because $50 was required to run Town A for the fiscal year. Thus, Individual Z and Individual Y should each have paid $25. However, because Individual Y avoided his tax liability of $50, Individual Z had to pay the entire amount. He was thus robbed of $25.

The aristocracy in America employs direct tax theft to extract resources from the masses using the techniques described above. They do this because it is much easier to get money from people by pretending that everyone owes taxes, and then exempting the aristocracy from them in complicated ways that most people do not understand. As a result, most people have a general sense that things are unfair, but they cannot figure out how, and feel less emotionally slighted. Thus, violent conflict is postponed or avoided.

First up: Bypass Trusts

Law school as bond

2007-12-12T00:21:00.001-08:00

Law school is a bond, such as a conservatorship bond, a personal representative bond, or a notary bond. That is why little related to the actual practice of law is taught in law school, and why paralegals and document-preparers of all types can practice law in almost all aspects without having a law degree (and why they could do so in all aspects without having a law degree, if it were legal).

The idea of a bond is simple. You pay in order to purchase insurance against your screwing up. For example, as a personal representative, you buy a bond to insure against your stealing the estate assets.

With the law school situation, it is a little more extreme. Not only do you have to pay a sizeable amount of money in order to get your degree, you have to spend three years of your life devoting a sizeable amount of time to obtaining that degree--and typically, three years of your post-college life, which would otherwise be devoted to career. In essence, this ensures that you are more likely to adhere to externally-imposed standards of legal conduct: because if you lose your license to practice, you have also lost any value gained through monetary or chronological investment in your legal education.

Control of lawyers is thus assured. If everyone in the country/world were given the right and the power to practice law, society would come apart. Lawsuits could be much more easily filed. Mass tort claims could be tracked down and consolidated. Any social crusader could turn a formerly-ignored just cause into real trouble for the powerful. The law school time and money bond, and the exclusivity of the ability to obtain that bond, ensures not only that a very few will gain that power, but also that once they gain that power, they will fear losing it, else they have flushed a large portion of their career potential down the toilet, and wasted a lot of time and money in the process.

Law school: 3 years and 50 grand for an insurance policy that never stops charging.

Traffic reports

2007-09-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

Traffic and Crime Reports

Similarly to the prediction of weather, the ragnarist demands more and more traffic reports and crime reports, and gains a growing obsession with the "up-to-date-ness" of news items as the disease grows. The fearful mind wants to know the instant a car "accident" has happened, based on the belief that they will become closer and closer to 100% informed about something that they lack the capacity to predict. It is the same with crime reports and up to date "news flashes," because the more often those things happen, the more often they offer false comfort, with the reassuring belief that any new event that occurs in the random world has been explained and accounted for by the authorities. Clamped down on like the false sense of control that comes from harshly disciplining your own mind.

Media stations that favor authoritarian host model political shows will be more often riddled with traffic and weather reports, for this reason.

Continuing ragnarist symptoms

2007-02-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Ragnarism

Symptoms, Part 1

Weather

The natural environment is one of the enemies of hateful minds. As discussed before, the primary (yet unattainable) goals of the fearful mind are order and control. The weather represents one of the most disorderly phenomenon of human habitats. For a long time, people have been pouring billions of dollars into meteorology in an attempt to learn how to predict the weather. Computers were invented and developed precisely for this purpose, to handle all the variables necessary to help predict the weather. The ultimate goal of prediction is control. Once prediction is 100% accurate, fearful minds believe that they will be able to then move to the next stage and take control of the weather, finally removing the uncertainty it provides.

100% accuracy of prediction will not be attainable, however. Firstly, because according to the Uncertainty Principle, advanced meteorologists will not be able to measure whether or not they are exactly right, because they will never know everything about the particles making up their weather equations. And secondly, because without that knowledge, they will never be able to make wholly complete predictions about the future of said particles. Yet, the “mapping-ahead” prediction of weather remains one of the fixations of the fearful mind. While the peaceful mind accepts the weather and goes on with life, the fearful mind is excessively interested in predictions of the weather, to attempt to gain control over the uncertainty of their future.

Lawns and Shrubbery

Lawns also provide a good crucible for life. In the natural world, grass grows up, sometimes so high that it denies sufficient light to the lower strands, who then become yellow and turn into fertilizer for later generations of grass. Across the surface of its natural growth, it develops endless, unchartable variations of height that cause a furor in minds fearing the disorder and randomness of the world.

To a mind seeking to resist and repress life, these natural variances are the enemy. As such, lawns must be kept under control by regularly mowing them to a rigid height, turning the grass into a neatly segmented geometrical block of color. The lawn must be excessively watered, so that it maintains an even shade of green. If planted in an area which does not naturally support grass because of its climate, the lawn must be reseeded and fertilized and watered even more, because life cannot be trusted to handle itself: it must, instead, be controlled with an iron fist.

Development

Shrubbery is another arena of control over nature. Trees cannot be trusted to grow in any random spot where nature has seeded them. Instead, the fearful mind prefers to place them in orderly positions, even if those locations cannot sustain their life and strength. Bushes and hedges must be chopped and mutilated so that they maintain life only within an orderly geometric area that has been designated to them.

I used to wonder why housing developers would move into an area, chop up everything and level the ground off, then save a handful of trees in pots on the back of their giant trucks in order to plant between the road dividers later on. The trees would be too weak to survive on their own, having to be taped to wooden posts just to stand. If the theoretical purpose of these hideous acts was to enjoy the trees, was there not some better way to go about it than the transplant? No, because the real purpose was control and rigidity. Of course this process is not sustainable, healthy, or real. It is merely part of the struggle of the fearful mind to control the disorderly way in which natural trees grow. Displaying it ravaged and pegged up as part of a roadway divider, a decoration around an entryway sign or the fancy name of a housing development, is like displaying the flayed corpse of a disobedient medieval peasant to other peasants considering not paying their taxes. It sends a message to nature, and to the disorderly and beautiful universe, that life is under control here, under control by power- and order-hungry minds. It is momentarily reassuring to other fearful minds, in much the same way that a medieval lord fearful of losing his position will be reassured by the sight of a flayed peasant when he comes to dine with his friend. “Ah--things are under control here.” He can breathe easy and feel temporarily safe through the demonstration.

This is why American suburbia was characterized by the lawn behind the white picket fence. The uniform block of green lawn represents that nature has been brought under control. The picket fence and straight sidewalk to the house demonstrate the same. This is also why corporations, self-producing singularities of “logos” and identical copies of the same “product,” enjoy rigid geometric displays of grass and shrubbery control. They also insist upon employing regular teams of nature-control agents who will ravage the shrubbery for them. The sidewalks must be swept so that no aberrant leaves disturb those who walk on the bare concrete. Bushes must be constantly fought to keep them from extending their filthy limbs through walking or window space. Leaves and other natural detritus may not even be dropped on the ground, between the bushes, because it will distract from the orderly appearance of the rock or grass arrangements underneath them. Spare the rod, spoil the child!

Oil and Solar Power

The more beloved way for a fearful mind to attempt to control a lawn or chop limbs from trees is with the use of a lawnmower or hedge clipper that relies on burning gasoline rather than human exertion. Hateful minds are fond of gasoline-powered machines because burning gas, which is created from oil, is burning the decayed corpses of microorganisms that lived millions of years ago. However, even if they are not aware of the origins of oil, they enjoy burning it because it shuns the natural source of earth’s energy: the sun. The sun will be around for billions of years; it burns constantly; it is the most readily available source of energy on this earth. The energy inside oil itself comes from the sun.

The fearful mind does not like energy from the sun, because the sun is a constant reminder of the fearful mind’s lack of control and singularity. The fearful mind is unable to control whether clouds will come out, unable to keep the sun from moving around the sky, and unable to make it daytime or nighttime when it wishes. Likewise, the fearful mind shies from wind power, because the wind cannot be controlled.

An energy source that can be controlled is oil. Because it represents a “battery” of sun energy stored through photosynthesis within the bodies of organisms from millions of years ago, it is a more reliable, more predictable way for the fearful mind to gain energy. It prefers a cold, black, liquid battery instead of the sun, even if the process of utilizing energy from that dead battery is smelly, loud, and disgusting. Indeed, the foul burning and refining processes that allow energy to be drawn from oil are a blessing to the fearful mind, because they are an attack on the tranquility of the natural world.

Oil and Cars

This is why fearful minds prefer loud, smelly, consumptive vehicles. It may not be wise for their wallets or convenient to their urban lifestyle to, say, drive a vehicle six times as large as they need. However, it is an expression of power and control. The great noise it creates upsets the equilibrium of the natural environment and tricks the human into thinking that he or she has exerted some manner of control. Its size can also fool the human into feeling shielded, isolated, and singular. Its ability to consume and destroy more than it needs flies in the face of the way natural things reach a state of balance with their environment.

Nuclear weapons and mass Destruction

One massive quandary for me as a youth was the question of nuclear bombs. I would agonize with worry at the thought that, during the Cold War, some madmen might actually consider using nuclear weapons. How insane could you possibly be, I wondered, to even begin to consider employing in your defense a device that released deadly radiation over a large area? Let alone more than one? Wouldn’t it be preferable to die, or even to--dare say!--compromise, or make concessions, in order to avoid killing yourself, and billions of others, and kill them slowly, by poisoning the ground, the water, and the atmosphere itself by flooding things with bomb after bomb filled with radioactive particles?

As always, the theory of stupidity came back to save me. I ended up concluding that anyone who would use nuclear bombs was “stupid.” Well, maybe I was right. But viewing the quandary anew under the concept of a fearful mind offers a better explanation. Indeed, it is utter madness to think that so many people accepted or were willing to carry out the concept of a shared nuclear exchange during the Cold War. What would be left to save? Once something got started, where would it stop? The mere idea of being willing to let loose such unfathomable terrors is a bluntly hideous evil that stands directly contradictory to any concepts of mercy, peace, and life. But to the fearful mind, this is all par for the course.

Instruments of death and destruction are always fascinating to the fearful mind, because the fearful mind is the hateful mind. Destruction is the only way to attempt to bring about order, because once something has been demolished it is no longer capable of disorderly acts. Death is the ultimate expression of order; the ultimate victory over life and our living universe. Nonexistence stands as the opposite of existence. As existence is constantly fluid and changing, nonexistence is forever one single way. It is orderly and perfectly under control. Everything balances out, and all equations can be completed without trouble. The nonexistence of death and destruction is continually sought by the fearful mind, because it offers an end to the struggle with deviant thoughts. Hateful minds perpetually rush to fill the fearful void with more, more, more weapons and destructive potential. It is never enough.

This is the reason for the creation of terrible weapons. This is the reason for the willingness to use terrible weapons: because however it is expressed, it actually represents a desire to wipe out life. This seems like a simple conclusion--that those who want to kill have serious problems and could be the death of us all--but raw tons of stinking propaganda have somehow managed to muddle the issue and convince otherwise reasonable people that it is acceptable to argue for poisoning and destroying the human population.

People who on the surface appear good-natured and loving can, if they fear the multi-faceted nature of their mind, fall victim to the hate of life. They may say they love their children, regularly donate to charity, help old ladies with their groceries, and then casually mention that they are “willing to use ultimate force” to teach this or that faction a lesson, even if it could bring retaliation in kind. They would say that they don’t “want” such a thing, but that would be a falsity; being “willing” to use said force merely means that they imagine themselves wanting to do so, if merely the conditions were right.

Sex, Evolution

Sex is one of the most loathed concepts of those who hate life. This stems in large part from the fact that it can create life. The reproductive process itself is bane to the hateful mind, because it cannot be controlled. As mentioned earlier, when two people reproduce the child will have some different characteristics than either of them. This is not just because of the random mixing and matching of the parents’ characteristics between the child. It is also affected by the natural process of mutation, whereby--just as particles pop in and out of existence in a vacuum at random--life evolves and changes even as it is created. Without these random mutations during reproduction at the subatomic level, it might never have changed from single-celled organisms to starfish, ducks, and chimpanzees.

These random mutations that life undergoes are loathsome to the fearful mind, because they cannot be controlled or predicted. They are proof with each new child that the world is disorderly, just like each unexpected gust of wind. Fearful minds attempt to counter this by fabricating theories of human “creation” or “crafting,” as out of mud, wherein a singular deity creates mankind directly as mankind, rather than by going through a random process of cellular mutation. Even without biology, minds at peace can easily imagine that humans were not always the same, simply by seeing themselves change over the course of their lives, seeing different children being born, or by watching generations of flowers and crops and using the imagination. Likewise, well before Christian creationism hateful minds can and have conjured up visions of humans being created purposefully by a singular force.*

The most important reason for the hatred of sex, however, is not its connection to life, because many who battle against sex are not even consciously aware of, or accepting of, the mutative properties of life. Rather, it is the battle with the individual mind’s own sexual drive that spawns much of the public behavior toward sex. As a part of life, human instinct is a constant natural drive that continually assaults the fearful mind with reminders of its own lack of control. Instinct is one of the providers of the “deviant thoughts” that upset the false singular view of the self at the base of the fearful mind. Among these deviant thoughts are sexual urges, which never stop reminding the fearful mind that no matter how they dislike it, they remain a part of a real, changing, living world.

The struggle within the mind is cataclysmic. The fearful individual tells him or herself that he or she is singular and in control of their thoughts and actions. They focus fervently on this belief, perhaps praying, perhaps meditating, perhaps just squeezing their eyes shut and concentrating. Then they get up and attempt to go through the world. But then--bam!--their mind generates a sexual urge. They are guilty and shamed that they could have thought something so wicked. They are afraid of the depths of their own mind, and wonder how “they”--their singularness--could have produced such a thing. Are they wicked themselves, through and through? Are they defined solely by that foul sexual thought they just experienced? They must be, because they are singular. But no, they believe they can control it, so they fight it back down. The sexual instinct, however, remains a powerful one, and the battle will continue as long as they are alive, unless they manage to alter their chemistry or biology enough to flee entirely from sexual life.

The sexual battle within the head can never be healthily resolved. Many who attempt to repress their sexuality have, as when attempting to plug a geyser, outbursts that result in even more negative behavior than that they were attempting to repress originally, such as imposing their sexual will on a weaker person, after which they may regain control for a time. A more simple way for them to win this battle, though, is by acting it out in the larger world. In the larger world, they can “win,” because while fearful minds cannot control the thoughts in their own head, they can control what their mouths say. Thus, fearful minds can group together for the purpose of bolstering one another’s sexual repressions by play-acting perfect expressions of anti-sexuality.

For example, fearful minds can form social groups where sexual activity is rigidly controlled, and where they congratulate one another incessantly on their victory over sexuality, while at the same time lambasting others for not winning that same victory (an act which is in itself self-congratulatory). These constant congratulations are needed to continually reinforce the charade that they have each won the battle inside their heads, which they never have and never will. Nonetheless, the charades must continue. For example, religious groups will congregate and discuss the sexual sins of their community at large, feeling superior as they bolster their own image of triumph. Occasionally, they may confess weak moments and deviant thoughts or urges to one another as part of a ritual celebration of the greater victory against sex.

* Of course, the divide between “creationist” and “evolutionary” views of the world is not the end-all determinant of which minds are fearful or peaceful, or how much. No one fearful mind will necessarily exhibit all of the fearful characteristics, just as no peaceful mind will be immune from every failed search for order. Indeed, many fear- and hate-based religious organizations now accept evolution simply because they wish to be seen as scientific even as they perpetuate their core messages. This phenomenon will likely occur similarly should any of the other trends discussed here--like the use of solar energy--become overwhelming enough to cause a shift in fearful-mind behavior. The primary and most important defining conflict of the fearful mind begins within their own thoughts, irrespective of public actions, and the trends discussed here are merely the way they are playing out within a certain period of time.

Symptoms of Ragnarism

2007-02-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Ragnarism

Not every ragnarist case has reached the fullest stages of self- and world-loathing. Like everything in the world, the sickness is relative and subjective. A ragnaristic mind may exhibit fear to such a small degree that it retains a general respect for the world, or that its fear and hatred of the outside world is managed to be kept under control by biological instincts of love and empathy, the opposing counterpart of fear and hate.

For example, lesser fears of the mind may simply result in a feeling of constant guilt, as the mind manifests its worries by linking its guilt to tangible actions in day-to-day life. For example, feeling guilty at not accomplishing “enough tasks” during the day, when the guilt has truly originated over deviant thoughts in the mind. Thus, a rational discussion of why the amount of tasks accomplished that day was sufficient will do nothing to alleviate the negative sensation.

Even the most befouled minds, though, may incessantly speak of their love or affection for various things. However, speech and action will generally bear out the truth as the ragnarist resorts to the linked behavioral patterns associated with some degree of hatred and fear of the self and the world.

Early Symptoms of Ragnarism

Desire to repress sexual behavior and physical bodies through social or governmental controls.

Easy to recognize: involves disapproving of expressions of sexuality, including public kissing, movies with nudity, navel rings, homosexuality in general, “gay marriage,” or other reminders of sexuality.

General passion for authority, the more singular and/or centralized the better.

Do not be misguided into thinking that this applies only to a preference for federalism or centrism. Remember that “authority” can mean many different things, including intangible authorities.

Decisive leaders are better than ones who debate, to the ragnarist, because they feel more authorative, and thereby make the ragnarist feel more comfortable.

Desire to divide living things, objects, avenues of inquiry, and the like into various classification systems, the more complex the better.

Heirarchies are eminently loveable to the ragnaristic mind, which wants to have everything fitted into its place, so it can be classified and identified. This makes them feel comfortable, as though they have a better handle on the changing world.

Ragnarists do not like tampering with their categories. This helps explain the resistance to “gay marriage,” because once the heirarchy has been created in any worldview, those who try to go outside the boundaries of the heirarchy become upsetting. The ragnarist is upset because if people are able to go out of the imaginary boundaries without being destroyed, it challenges the ragnarist’s view of the world.

Desire to express strength and authority to the world.

Guns, big trucks, loud stereos, etc. By manifesting these indica of power and authority, ragnarists feel that they are more in control of what is happening around them, just as they wish to control their own errant thoughts.

Fondness of absolute forms.

Ascribing loyalty to a cultural form, be it band or sports team devotion, the logo of a favorite coffee shop or clothing designer, etc., represents the desire for a more fixed, unchanging, unrealistic world. The team or clothing logo is an easily recognizable symbol, and helps fit people into heirarchies based on what they like. That is why ragnaristic thought believes that you can get to know a person by finding out which corporate logos (bands, television shows, clothing) they associate themselves with.

Moderate Stages of Ragnarism

Belief that the world is coming to an end in the near future.

“Near” being relative. This belief is part necrotic fantasy, part generalized fear. The generalized fear component is easy to understand: simply, the same fear of uncertainty and death that motivates the ragnaristic mind in the first place.

The necrotic fantasy is the more dire component of the two, because it represents the ragnaristic mind’s desire to end all the uncertainty and fear of living. It is a quixotic paradox of the future, where all uncertainties have vanished in the void of death and the end of existence, and the ragnarist can at last find “peace” from the difficulties of life.

This desire is commonly manifested in a desire for apocolyptic entertainment and lore. Most cultures have one or more religious necrotic fantasies in common acceptance, often with a recurrent theme. For example, in the Old Testament, Noah’s Ark and the flood, the genocide of the Nimrods, the destruction of various cities, and of course, the New Testament and Revelations and the Second Coming. These types of stories are highly appealing to the ragnarist.

Depending on the mode of entertainment, the mass killing is always perpetrated by the “bad guys,” but the entertainment most appealing to the ragnarist will involve an excessive focus upon the acts of mass destruction portrayed, the witnessing of the devastation, and of course, the vengeance the hero gets to take afterward.

Belief that the world is relatively young.

“Relatively young” being based, of course, upon the individual’s own perception of time. This occurs because the ragnarist views his or her own struggle with the uncertainties of the mind, and the uncertainties of the world, as the paramount qualities of creation: namely, that they are at the center of the world. The ragnarist is disinclined to believe that the world could have existed for very long prior to his or her own life.

As the ragnarist gains more knowledge about the world, and comes to be aware that more things may have existed in the past, the “self image” of the ragnarist extends into the past, to make the acceptance of a longer time period possible. For example, the ragnarist may conclude that the world has existed only as long as his or her species has existed, or his or her planet, or his or her belief in the physical laws of the universe.

General misogynism.

Females, by virtue of their intrinsic life-creating and nurturing physiology, represent a natural target of dislike for the ragnaristic mind. An underlying belief in the unworthiness of female qualities will often occur in the ragnarist, including derision toward, or disbelief in, sharing, cooperation, empathy, physical frailty, the care of children, provision of food, etc.

A few examples: ragnarists will be scornful of diplomacy; they will be fierce defenders of property rights; and they will resist attempts to provide medical services, food, and clean water to children.

Women, and by extension, children, represent the future and hope of life, and particularly, the human variety of life. Thus, while social mores may prevent many ragnarists from doing direct violence, the ragnarist will resist attempts to better the condition of hapless children unable to provide for themselves, under the hallmark of expense, and will be hostile toward prenatal medical care, school lunch programs, and the like.

The female human womb is a target of particular ragnarist vitriol; see “abortion,” below.

Female ragnarists will often feel a desire to defer to authoritarian male elements around them, and try to find identity by fitting themselves into the lower rungs of an imagined heirarchy.

Sexual failing.

All of the disapproval of expressions of sexuality comes to a head at the moderate stage of ragnarism. Ragnarists feel a desire to fight against those who remind them that sexuality exists, and at the same time, their own inner battle against sexuality becomes more difficult to fight. Self-repression abounds, and rape or pedophilia may emerge, often in tandem with violence. (Violent pedophilia is often tied to the hatred of wombs and offspring; see immediately preceding section.)

Extreme Stages of Ragnarism

Belief that the world is coming to an end in the very near future, or immediately.

This mirrors the moderate stage, as discussed above, except in proximity. The most extreme ragnarists believe that the world will end very soon, and often want to hasten the process along by killing themselves. For example, eating poisoned jello. They believe that they will be removed from the world somehow, either before or after death, by alien spaceships or supernatural beings.

This belief frequently includes the facet that, when they are removed from the world, they will be judged by the contents of their minds. The ragnarist believes this, because the ragnarist believes that he or she is at the metaphorical center of the universe, and that the supernatural beings or aliens (or whatever else) will be extremely concerned with the specific qualities of the ragnarist’s mind. This fantasy traces its roots to the original conflict between the ragnarist’s sense of absolute self, and the errant thoughts within the ragnarist’s mind.

The necrotic fantasy of the end of the world here takes on a more fervent tone, as the ragnarists approach the end of the existence in an erotic way. They cheer in enthusiasm at the thought of mass death; they stoke the fires of war and destruction with hopes that soon, it will all end.

Extreme misogynism.

All the qualities of femaleness are loathed by the extreme ragnarist. Weakness becomes a target for unapologetic pulverization; attempts at self-control by females are viewed as loathsome. The mere incidence of physical frailty induces an attempt to destroy, and physical violence, in regular, terrible patterns, occurs.

For extremely ragnarist females, self-hatred becomes particularly keen, and the desire to follow orders and receive painful punishment is increased exponentially. Or, the ragnarist female may coalesce into a scathing attempt at authoritarian, “male” behavior, and model herself on everything she fears.

The Fearful Mind

2007-02-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

The fear is multi-faceted and takes on many forms, but is at the same time incredibly simple and centers mostly around the self--the mind. The first step is always in the mind. Ideas from the world come in through the senses, and take shape in the mind. Yet, the mind is a complicated thing. It has many parts and many feelings and sometimes it includes things that are confusing. You can't help imagining that if the six people ahead of you in line would just drop dead, you could get where you are going faster. You feel guilty that you imagined that. You remind yourself that you wouldn't actually want that to happen, even if the thought occurred to you.

Where do all these different thoughts come from? You. Yet, many of these thoughts are of an essentially different character from one another. Your mind has the potential to choose between any of them. Even as the thoughts are spawned, you decide which one to act out. You are the “decider.” But if “you” are the one who decides, then where are the ideas coming from? Also from you, because your mind is not a singular entity, but a multi-faceted one. There is more than one “voice” inside.

Your mind can think of things outside of your control. Try not to think about a computer monitor--a black, flatscreen LCD monitor made by Dell. Stop thinking about that computer monitor. Etc. Your thoughts can never be completely controlled. There is uncertainty inside your own head. This uncertainty, this variance, can cause fear.

It is natural for us to feel fear about this uncertainty. When things are out of our control, they might change such that they harm or kill us, or limit our mating potential. That is why the dark can be frightening. It represents the uncertainty of chance, just like the insides of our heads--a place where we can’t always control the thoughts and desires that pop up.

The first step toward ragnarism is to fear your mind so much that you attempt to gain absolute control over its thoughts. Afraid of all the uncertainty, you can tell yourself that your mind is singular, not multi-faceted, and that all its strangeness, complexity and beauty can be condensed into a single thing--a single “you.” Believing that your mind is singular can help stave off the fear of uncertainty if you trick yourself into thinking that no more errant thoughts will enter your mind without “your” permission.

However, the reality of the mind will upset this illusion. “Sinful thoughts” will enter without your permission. You will see an attractive member of the opposite sex and register their attractiveness despite the fact that you are married. You will see a slice of chocolate cake and want it despite being on a diet. You will worry about problems at your job all evening even when you are supposed to be concentrating on relaxing with your spouse. The reality of the mind will always continue to upset the illusion of singular control.

Nonetheless, trapped within that illusion of singularity built up to protect yourself from the fear of uncertainty, terrible things can happen. For example, when that inevitable negative thought floats through your mind--“I wish that old woman in line ahead of me at the supermarket, who is writing a check by hand to pay for ONE item, would just die, so I could buy this and get home faster!”--the mind can come to believe that because it is a singular mind, it is fully responsible for that negative thought. Because of this, a person who believes that they are absolutely in control of their mind and their thoughts will become terribly guilty over time, because every negative thought that randomly floats through their mind, they will take as an indication of their true nature: the definition of them. If the mind is singular, then any foul thought that pops up must be what defines that person. “I am scum, who would wish an old woman dead just so I can get my supper home faster!”

This cannot be admitted in interpersonal society, of course. It is a fear for the private mind that believes itself singular, and defines itself by all of its thoughts. But its behavioral results can be witnessed in society, as discussed later.

The person trapped within this cycle will then perpetuate it, because deviant thoughts will only become an even stronger motivation to clamp down on the uncertainty of the mind. Striking out in fear, they will retaliate against random thoughts, wallow in guilt, and then become even more alarmed and have an even stronger response when the next rogue thought pops up. The randomness of thought within the human mind will continue to subvert even the strongest “defenses,” making the conflict interminable and interminably escalating.

For example, a married man who resolves not to be attracted to any woman except his wife can become upset when he catches himself staring at a cheerleader. He shakes his head and looks away, and curses himself for lack of discipline, then raises his head, proud that he has taken care of the “problem.” The problem, however, will recur, and will upset him more, driving his anger inward, and motivating him even more powerfully to gain control of his “wicked thoughts.” That control will be imperfect, however, and he will be foiled again, as the cycle continues endlessly.

Most of this goes on subconsciously, and it can take a lifetime to play out. Most people do not sit around thinking “I will gain control of my mind today,” even though some self-help books advertise this. However, having some conception of self is necessary for human beings, and there exists a difference between those who conceptualize their minds as singular--and therefore set up a spiral of fear of uncertainty, fear of self, and guilt--and those who conceptualize their mind as “of many,” and are therefore better able to handle the diversity of the world.

Like the mind, life itself is uncertain. It is random. Physicists have observed that, within vacuums, the smallest components of matter will pop in and out of existence, unpredictably: matter being randomly created, like thoughts popping up in the mind. Likewise, human reproduction is random. When two humans reproduce, their offspring may resemble them or their ancestors, but will not be exact copies of either of the parents--in looks or temperament. The rest of the living world is like this as well. Flowers will not resemble their parent flowers identically; beetles their parent beetles; monkeys their parent monkeys; snowflakes the one that came before. Even down to the smallest level, this tendency toward randomness and change exists. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle notes that you can never know for certain both the exact position and the exact rate of travel of subatomic particles. Without stopping time, nothing in this world can ever be exactly observed. It always seems, to some degree or another, subjective and ever-changing.

This world is one of endless possibility and constant flux, and so it is suitable that the human mind is that way with its thoughts. Yet, within the world, that same uncertainty and randomness of chance can cause as much fear as deviant thoughts within the mind. In this case, however, because those fears are not played out inside the head but in the physical world, the conflict is observable.

People who fear the uncertainty of the world can frequently come to dislike it. And why not? When you fear something for a long time, you grow to hate it because of how it makes you feel. The random world continually assaults the fearful mind with things that cannot be predicted, categorized, or stopped. The fearful mind responds with deep hatred, for as long as the fearful mind is alive, that mind exists within a world that does not conform to the singular unity it strives for. The conflict within the fearful mind--the conflict between a singular view of the mind and a multi-faceted view--is linked to this conflict with the outside world.

Trapped in fear and guilt, the fearful mind becomes the hateful mind, utterly loathing its own terrible changing mind, and also the outside world that keeps tormenting it--a “torment” perceived through a fear of the uncertain. Because the fearful mind refuses to embrace the constant change of reality, it craves unreality, or unexistence. The only peace from the conflict in the mind is the death of the mind. The only way to stop being tortured by the change of the world is to leave the world by dying. And the only way to end eternally, once and for all, this fearful, ever-spiraling conflict, is by destroying this hateful, random world.

Ragnarism is this fearful mind, which is always in conflict with its own existence.

Life is one of the most fun things in our changing world, because it offers a fantastic example of the randomness necessary to create existence in place of void. As opposed to empty nothingness, a rock is a very exciting thing. However, whereas a rock changes its position very, very slightly and slowly, and does so without a conscious intent of its own, life is dynamic. It directs its own change at a rapid pace, and it provides a forum for even more randomness inside the incredibly complex minds it can produce in some organisms. In our world, life is the fullest expression of the ever-changing nature of existence. And so, life becomes the thing most hated by the ragnaristic mind.

Life changes with every second. Life is chaotic and random. Life cannot be predicted or controlled one hundred percent. To the ragnarist, life is the enemy that must be fought at all costs. It must be resisted in whatever it does, and it must ultimately be destroyed.

I didn’t want to believe this conclusion. On the surface, it sounds ludicrous--people who hate life? How can that be possible? It’s self contradictory. Or at least, it should be.

hey guys...with all that is going on, the excitement is palpable!!! I was (and have been) reflecting lately on what the actual rapture moment will be like (whenever it happens....lol).....i Know it's instantaneous but do ya think we'll have like a second of "realization" like (**horn blast**) and then thinking, "OH IT'S HAPPENING!!! THIS IS IT!!" Or we'll actually feel ourselves being lifted up and sailing through the air??? OR, do ya think we'll just like blink and be in the presence of the Lord that quick??? (yea i know i think about crazy stuff sometimes....lol)

But sometimes when i consider the times, i almost can feel my spirit ready to leap outta my body (if that makes ANY sense....) oh well......back to the news.....just wondering what u guys thought......lol

The above quote came from the “Rapture Ready” bulletin board, at http://www.rr-bb.com/ The “excitement” the author was referring to was violence in the Middle East, and the prevailing Rapture interpretations among American evangelical Christians, who number in the millions, involve worldwide wars and the butchery of billions being presented in a positive light.

I used to believe there were just a few religious wackos out there that had silly ideas about the Bible and wanting to die so they could zoom to heaven. It’s hard to imagine people wanting to die, even though you occasionally read about the cult that poisons its members so they can be “saved” on the alien spaceship.

The ragnarist fears and hates the uncertainty of him or herself, of the surrounding world, and of life. This, then, provides explanation for the correlations between the endless numbers of social, public and political behaviors which, at their essence, seek to repress, control, or destroy life and the living world.

The Only Right Thing To Do In Iraq

2007-02-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

I've been watching Americans (and the rest of the western world) agonize over Iraq for a few years now, and something is starting to really piss me off. In the same way that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are being set up by the media to be the corporate-approved presidential hopefuls, and Genuine Alternatives (TM) to the Republican party, I am noticing democrats/liberals/progressives swallowing the idea that the most radical solution for Iraq--and the most morally right one, too--is to "pull the troops out."

The good answer to Iraq is not "pulling out." Bush (and most of the rest of you--don't think I forget he had a 90% approval rating after 9-11) made one of the biggest messes in the world, and as a Vietnamese-descent person recently pointed out to me, pulling our troops out now to save THEIR lives is almost as arrogant a suggestion as continuing the occupation in the normal way, albeit with slightly more troops. (This person was referring to the way that, after the U.S. finished bombing and occupying Vietnam in the 1950s-70s, and finally withdrew, various Vietnamese groups turned on each other in a horrendous outpouring of violence.)

Well, I'm finally fed up with all the whining about that being the best possible alternative, so here for your reading pleasure is the official "The Only Right Thing To Do In Iraq." Yes, that's right folks: the answer to the quagmire in Iraq is right here, despite the fact that your T.V. has been telling you either (1) There is no good solution, or if you watch Fox, (2) everything is going well and Our Great Leader is spreading democracy, but if it's not working it's the Iraqis' faults.

Be warned: like any genuine correct answer, you're not going to like it.

The Only Right Thing To Do In Iraq

Iraq may have been filled with more extremely troubled, violent religious types than middle America, but now that we stirred up the hornet's nest, the blood is 90% on our hands until we fix it. That means sacrifice, and it means decades of sacrifice.
First, we must increase the number of American troops in Iraq tenfold (or morefold) while we simultaneously increase our investment in military humanitarian training, MP oversight of troops, and public oversight of (an all new set of) contractors. There need to be so many U.S. troops that you can't go outside without bumping into ten. And they all need to be smiling, well-paid, living in sanitary barracks, off stimulant drugs, getting 8 hours of sleep a day, and handing out free candy bars, Qur'ans, Bibles, stuffed animals, food and water, and whatever else on demand.

(We can contract K, B & R to build said troop facilities for the price of $1, or just continue criminally indicting top executives until the remaining ones agree to do the work for $0.50. And in case you're wondering, they have to give back the money they overbilled, too. The $0.50 charge is punitive, not restitutionary.)

Then, we need to pay to leave those troops there for at least 20-25 years while we invest billions upon billions of dollars building a medical and educational infrastructure in Iraq, and providing free and excellent public education to an entire generation of children, where they are taught about Iraqi, world, Arab and Muslim history under a code based on the Nuremburg trials. The vast majority of even the most prejudiced parents will allow their kids to be educated that way if clerics and tribal leaders are brought into the fold, and in order to gain access to the generous parenting subsidies handed out by the U.S.

In order to pay for all these extra troops and goodies, the U.S. is going to have to levy a 75% tax on all forms of income--corporate, personal, overseas, dividend, etc.--above $200K a year, so that military pay and pension for all ranks can double. That should solve the recruitment problem for a little while, and as Iraq gradually improves, it'll only get better.

After 20-25 years, when a generation of Iraqi children of all tribal, religious and ethnic affiliations have had a challenging, modern, diverse university-level education, the U.S. will beg their permission to pull out its forces and let the Iraqis replace them with an Iraqi army. Not because any of them have died in several years, but because it is rather expensive for the U.S. to maintain them. Iraq will consider whether or not it wants to give up the free army and police services, and if it decides to, the U.S. will thank it with a generous trade agreement and an economic development pact to share post-oil R&D facilities and funds, to ensure that Iraq will have a future as its pillaged natural resource runs out.

Expensive, yes. Unrealistic, yes, especially given that even the most radical Americans cannot seem to think of a more dramatic solution than "pull them all out."

On the plus side: after that income tax I mentioned is levied our government will still probably have a better fiscal situation than it does now, in addition to being able to fix Iraq up the right way.

In conclusion, pulling the troops out now has just been fed to you as a prepackaged "progressive" idea by the same corporate machine that brought you the original invasion. The powers that be knew damn well that Bush would self destruct in 8 years. The entire point of getting him in there was to make things so extreme that the more authoritarian elements in the Democratic Party would seem like a real policy change.

If you pull the troops out now, you are rewarding the corpocracy by allowing them to cease paying for the occupation while having already gotten all the benefits of oil ownership and Saddam-toppling. Go ahead: they're laughing hysterically as the "left wing" tries to justify getting them out of their credit card bills! Ooh, they're really scared that you'll make them stop paying even the token costs of occupation, while they still maintain their hardened military bases and oilfields! Stop it, please, they can't take any more! Riiiight. How did you ever fall for it?

After Bush, Obama and Clinton seem like left-wingers, and pulling the troops out of Iraq and leaving it to eat itself alive seems like a radically progressive solution. Good God. How can it be the right choice to set generations-old tribal and religious enemies against each other in a genocidal war, and then shut the door and walk away and tell yourself you're making the "best possible choice"? Don't be disgusting. Really, I mean it. What were you thinking?

Sin City

2007-02-15T09:42:00.001-08:00

Frank Miller’s 2005 movie “Sin City” is a work of sadism, paedophilia, misogyny, hatred and fear. Note that I did not say “about,” although it is also about all of those things.

Sin City at IMDB

First a brief relevant character summary. I’ll identify people by their real names, not their character names, for simplicity.

Josh Hartnett plays an assassin. Mickey Rourke plays a random muscular thug. Bruce Willis plays an aging cop. Jessica Alba plays an erotic dancer. Clive Owen plays a random boyfriend.

“Random” used here in the sense that no one’s past life, career, etc. has any apparent bearing on what they do in the movie.

I will begin with sadism. The entire movie, even to the extent that it permeates the other topics listed at the beginning, is an expression of enjoyed violence. Not in the sense of violence as an accurate portrayal of the world, or a necessary means to an end, or any of that. Rather, the violence is the end in itself, and it is meant to be thoroughly enjoyed by both the characters and the audience. All aspects of plot are shaved down to get at the violence, to the extent that the film mostly consists of sequences where violence is actually occurring, sequences where a character is sneaking about in anticipation of violence, or the occasional situations where characters are merely discussing violence. The violence is not senseless or purposefulness; it is reveled in. Characters and scenes are crafted to make the violence more enjoyable.

What stands out here is not the fact that violence occurs and that it is supposed to be exciting, but that is perpetrated by the central characters and presented in a morally positive light. In contrast to those who reason through things, talk things over, and see nuances and shades of gray in the world, the true heroes are those who are willing to be incredibly violent on the spur of the moment and really “get things done” in an enjoyable way. To provide motivation for these good guys--to “prove” that the violence they do makes them good--the bad guys commit violence, in a bloody spiral leading up to the eventual climactic showing of superior violence on the part of the good guy.

Bruce Willis’ clips are less instructive in this regard from a quantity standpoint, but more so in a sexual way. Involved in chasing down a child molester, Bruce Willis bashes a couple lookouts over the head, then approaches the child molester himself. In the presence of the 9-year-old girl he has just saved, he luxuriantly has a standoff with the child molester, then shoots the man in the ear, the hand, and at last the genitals, drawing out the imposition of power in a lengthy foreplay.

The attention to genitals and a sexual overtone to the scenes is present throughout. In a later encounter with the same child molester he previously shot in the genitals, Bruce Willis finds that the man has undergone extensive scientific treatment in order to grow his genitals back so that he can sire an heir for his children. What does Bruce do? Well, he reaches down under the man’s pants and manually tears off his testicles at the most exciting point in their combat, then straddles him and beats him furiously until, weak with effort, he has at last finished.

Mickey Rourke’s character, a big, burly “bear,” handcuffs Elijah Wood’s character, a slim, neat boy with a tidy “bowl” style haircut and round glasses, to himself at the beginning of their passion together. Then, he holds Elijah Wood down and proceeds to tie off his veins so that he can saw off his limbs one by one, keeping Wood alive during the torture. And then, the climax: Mickey Rourke leans back, smoking a post-coital cigarette and staring at Wood’s mutilated body, as he calls a dog over to feed on the ends of Wood’s severed remains.

The violence done by the good guys and bad guys is very much the same in these stories. Elijah Wood’s character cuts off women’s limbs, eats their flesh and then mounts their heads on the wall. To punish him, Mickey Rourke cuts off Wood’s limbs, entices a dog to feed on his flesh, and then carries his head off as a trophy to show to another character (with whom he then similarly engages in violent pseudo-coitus).

Paedophilia next. Bruce Willis shoots off the man’s genitals to save a nine-year-old girl from him. As Willis takes out the guy’s flunkies, he dictates a monologue to the camera about how much of a sicko the guy is, and how much Willis has to rescue the girl he has kidnapped. Over and over again, Willis reminds the viewer that she is nine years old. In this scene, her age is no simple factoid, and it is not enough that the moviegoer just remember it. Rather, it is repeated ad infinitum, like lewd descriptions in an erotic story: age as emphasis, age as arousal. Once Willis has shot off the evil man’s genitals and completed the designated “fight scene,” the (nine-year-old!) girl visits him in the hospital, confessing with tremulous eyes that she “loves him,” will always love him, and giving him a slow kiss on the cheek.

For reasons vaguely related to the plot, Willis ends up in jail for the crime of--you guessed it--kidnapping and sexually molesting a nine year old girl. Although he is, according to the movie, innocent. He is abandoned by his wife and all the rest of society, but the girl (nine years old!) writes him letters for eight years of prison. We are reminded repeatedly that it is eight long years. When Willis gets out, he goes to find the girl (who was nine years old!). She is an exotic dancer. He repeats to himself ad infinitum this time that she is “nineteen.” “This nineteen year old girl,” etc. until you’re sick of the reminder.

Now, how “nine” and “eight” add up to “nineteen,” I fail to see. Perhaps my math is bad; perhaps the movie was just directed confusingly. Or perhaps they’re purposefully trying to avoid stigmatization by the veiled hint that she is only seventeen. Regardless, they run off together on another adventure. She still loves him; she comes onto him, and he holds monologues in his head where he tries to restrain himself from going after a “nineteen year old dancer.” He reminds her--and the audience--that he is old enough to be her grandfather. And that she’s nineteen. Don’t forget that!

Nineteen (or seventeen, as the case may be) is not wandering into paedophile territory. The point, however, of harping on the age--and of Willis and the girl, played in her later years by Jessica Alba, is to arouse through association with the nine-year-old character portrayed in the first Willis sketch. That is why it was so important for the writer to hammer it home to such a degree in both of the skits involving that character. Bruce Willis runs a constant monologue with himself whereby he is worthless and vile for being tempted by this beautiful, fetching nine-year-old, nineteen-year-old, seventeen-year-old, it-doesn’t-really-matter-she’s-young sexual being that he wants badly. His wife and life drop out of the picture, and ultimately, he shoots himself with the gun to “save” Jessica Alba’s character from retaliation from the father of the guy whose testicles he has mauled twice. For his last monologue, he reminds the viewer that he, an old man, is dying so that a young, beautiful girl can live. Touching and honorable in and of itself, but nonetheless indicative.

The creator of these stories has a low sense of self-worth. Lacking a sense of confidence or worthwhileness, his expressions of how to get things done are violent because with direct violence, “the proof is in the pudding.” By engaging in violence so freely and with such affinity, you can demonstrate power, which you secretly fear you are lacking. As with the schoolyard bully, the expression of violence is necessary to shield yourself from an exterior world you fear because of the emptiness and lack of worth you perceive inside yourself.

Because of this sense of unworthiness, the creator of these stories is unable to conceive of sex in a way separate from violence. Sexual arousal is a constant part of life, but the creator of these stories is unable to acknowledge his own sexual arousal except when partaking in an activity (violence) that shields him from his own private demons. Thus, the characters have sex while they have violence. Josh Hartnett kisses, loves, and murders the woman in the red dress on the balcony. Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood get handcuffed together while one gets off on maiming the other.

Bruce Willis constantly tells himself how unworthy he is of Jessica Alba because of his age, his status of being a dumb cop while she is an attractive dancer, and oh, did I mention his age as compared to hers? He can’t get enough of how “unworthy” he is, but she wants him anyway. This is the monologue that the creator of Sin City has with himself: unworthiness, coupled with the secret fantasy that the attractive and worthy will like him anyway. (Those who have read Brave New World may recall the same fantasy recalled there, of being an unlikeable, unattractive little toad-man who schemes and hates, and who has fantasies of being “patted” by the attractive female lead in the book.)

At the beginning of his segment, Mickey Rourke is favored with the company of the prostitute Goldie. He did not buy her; his monstrism of face is so bad that, according to him on camera, “he can’t even buy a girl.” He figures out later that Goldie only pretended to want him for protection, because he was big. He decides that she picked him up in that bar because she was scared, and looking for the “biggest, ugliest guy” she could find. Then, she dies in his bed, but he didn’t do it, so the movie says. Mickey Rourke’s entire mission to kill and maim is driven by desire to avenge Goldie “because she was nice to me.” The viewer is regularly reminded how Mickey Rourke is unwanted and unlikeable because of his condition (facial misshape), as in the Bruce Willis segment (age). But don’t worry: he will manifest violence to make up for her having sex with him that one night, and that will balance out the equation of his unworthiness and avenge her.

Misogony, ah, misogony. Here I will be laughed at, because Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke both repeatedly condemn the mistreatment of women, and fight to avenge them.

The classic pattern of Sin City is that the heroes condemn the villians for something, then do it themselves. Bruce Willis condemns the child molestor for wanting the nine-year-old (she’s nine years old!) girl, then wants her himself. Mickey Rourke condemns Elijah Wood for his vile tortures, then tortures Wood himself. And the centerpiece characters in the story vocally and loudly condemn the abuse of women, then abuse women themselves.

Mickey Rourke, on his crusade to avenge Goldie (it was wrong to kill a woman) is helped out by Goldie’s sister. Rourke tells the camera that it really gets him angry when someone hits a woman. A few scenes later, Goldie’s sister is coming forward, asking to be allowed to kill Elijah Wood’s character for the killing Wood perpetrated against Goldie. But Rourke can’t have that; oh no, Wood has been captured for the purpose of Rourke’s torture. So Rourke punches Goldie’s sister and knocks her out, then tells her that it is for her own good, after which he goes on to get off on torturing Wood.

Clive Owen begins his own shot by saving his girlfriend from her abusive ex. He expresses his own violence by plunging the abusive ex-boyfriend’s head into the toilet, where we are treated to Frank Miller’s own coveted shivambu scene of the boyfriend throwing up urine. After Clive Owen has nobly protected his girl, he realizes that the abusive ex-boyfriend and his similarly abusive friends will be heading to oldtown, where they might hurt the prostitutes living there. So, he goes to protect them. Once there, he gets into an argument with a prostitute, and when she won’t see reason, he slaps her and knocks her down. Standing firm until she gets back to her feet, he wins her onscreen kiss and undying love because he showed how tough he was.

Saying misogyny, of course, is not to say that the creator has any better view of men in general, or even of himself. It’s just one particular lens through which he fears the world. The fear of women is even more than the fear of men, though. That is why the exotic, revealingly-dressed prostitutes of old-town parade around with heavy weaponry: women are at once desirable sex objects, yet capable of causing great damage. And nowhere within there do they have an actual character, any more than does the fat, female judge who ignorantly sentences Mickey Rourke to the chair. The real thing the creator of Sin City fears from women is that they may reject him. His own lack of self-worth and confidence makes him view women as terrible valkyries that you must hit, abuse, and then kill for in order to have any right to temporarily restrain yourself from ravishing them.

Sin City is quite the mental petri dish for its creator. The heroes and villians alike are all essentially facets of the creator’s character, conscious and subconscious. The creator’s own uncertainty about himself, his body and his sexuality, is what causes the split into hero/villian. Am I good? Am I evil? Am I interested in nine-year-old girls? Am I right to want to torture people--is it righteous justice?--or am I wrong, and is it a disgusting perversion that makes me worthy of torture and death? Perhaps this is why so many of the scenes end in the death of the main character. The longest vignettes--Bruce Willis’ and Mickey Rourke’s--and with Bruce Willis shooting himself in the head, and with Mickey Rourke getting electrocuted. Both happily and deservedly, because they accomplished their violent, tortuous objective of getting even with those who harmed women.

Wonderful art. Interesting violence. The rare hint of social commentary by titling a character “rich” or “godly” or a “Senator.” An intriguing play of smokes and mirrors that give an insight into a very sad, very fearful mind. (And, a ghastly look at the way so many other fearful minds lacking in confidence find that sort of entertainment fulfilling, novel, and worthwhile.)

In the background of every scene, I can almost see Frank Miller curled up in the fetal position in the corner of a dank, dripping dungeon, shot in black and white footage. He can see angels and demons flying around, at once hurting him and protecting him, but they change their masks every second. How he would like to figure out which is which. How he wants to ask a beautiful woman, a seductive child, a handsome and powerful man, to help him, but he is so afraid that they wouldn’t love him back that he can’t quite close his hand around anything but a pencil. Scrawl the pictures, shred the pictures. Swallow the tears away.