Saturday, January 30, 2010

Genius

It is astonishing to think about the nature of genius. An example is Newton's "Principia" where he lays out the laws of space-time and gravity. Newton developed a basic system of formulas which still work to explain much of physics. The calculation for Mass for instance is M=FA, Mass=Force(Acceleration). However, when I thumb through my copy of the "Principia" I barely understand any of it. I peer into a barely intelligible world. This was written in 1683, 327 years ago!!

This is true of many of the great works of genius. "The Origin of Species" is almost never read, even by Darwinists or anti-Darwinists. "The Federalist Papers" are almost never read even by Constitutionalists.

We need to regain a belief in the responsibility of informed citizenship. It is easy to get bogged down in the time constraints and pains and sorrows of the everyday. But, in my opinion, it is essential to occasionally stretch ourselves into a place in which we might understand something in a new light.

The nature of genius is immortal thought and it can leap across the ages and enter our mind and heart if we allow it. The mind of the genius becomes a conduit for the transmission of the mind of God, to the mind of Man.

We ought to respect great works of genius even if we don't always agree with them and read them more often. I am just beginning "The Origin of Species" even though I know that some aspects of Darwinism have come under serious assault by my fellow "Conservatives."

Debt is Destiny

Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Constitution

My mind is animated by the spirit of the federalist and anti-federalist writers that I have read. One can quite clearly see the crisis, both political economic, that they were dealing with in 1787 through the urgency of their eloquence and the power of their writing and speaking. There is a passion in their pens indicative of that within their minds. We often forget that they were living in the beginning of the Romantic Era. It is not purely Enlightenment ideas that are reflected in the Constitution and the Declaration but Romantic as well. They have a sense, especially the Federalists, of the dangers and possibilities of passion in both the heart and the mind, Madison most notably.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Roubini

Here's a guy who was largely right about the current crisis in the economy so listen up. I don't agree with him on everything he says here but I've never met a clone of myself (yet) :)

He fails to explain how the contridictions in his prescription for the run and medium run can be reconciled when the short run is simply the path into the medium run. Economic policy cannot be turned on a dime as he seems to suggest....but he's generally a truth-teller and we don't have that much in economics nowadays. here it is (and it has a few questions to Roubini from various persons who are supposedly informed, or not)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmI3U_rVYA8&feature=featured

Monday, January 25, 2010

Wisdom

"I close my eyes in order to see."

Paul Gaugin

another great website www.loa.org and www.civilwar.org

Friday, January 22, 2010

a great website

One excellent site I am on more and more is www.cominganarchy.com I am beginning to post a little bit there as well, or should I say, respond to posts.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Off the top of my head playing around with words

Clearly it is time for a new direction in this country. Clearly, we can do better.For What does it profit a nation to attempt wild feats of nation-building in far off lands without being able to set our economy straight at home? What have we become as a nation? Are we simply a jumble of interests, or a nation interested in preserving the liberty of our people? That is not only the great question of this election, it is the great question of our time. And it is our time and our honor and responsibility to make that choice.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

To Make Gentle the Life of This World

This is a video many of you have seen however it is the best tribute I think for Martin Luther King on his holiday. This speech has a very special place in my heart and when I hear the words of Aeschylus I pray for strength and calm and compassion and courage and gentleness in the storms in my own life and in the storms just over the horizon for this nation that is bound to me by history, thought, and emotion. I love wisdom, gentleness, and this country. This speech is also a tribute to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9yX0Zv1tZU

Friday, January 15, 2010

A Report From Russia

Many of my views on foreign policy are based on the view that Russia is still controlled by the same structures that dominated the Soviet Union.

Please listen to this insightful interview from Moscow for more information about this idea. Don't pay attention to the video, I have no idea what it is. Just listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDCkNDrLMgs

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

The Future of the Past

The cultural struggle today is an effort to preserve the mind and thought. The reason for the disquiet of so many Americans is not primarily economic, it is cultural. It is the sense that the tie to the past has been cut and we are hurtling toward a dead future in which all the generations of the past, including our own, will be forgotten forever. This is exacerbated by the all too evident truth that there is not only a lack of knowledge about the past among the young but a disdain for its pursuit. For a film representation of this of this disquiet I speak of see the thoughtful and allegorical movie "Children of Men."

The battle to preserve mind and thought is in a great way about preservation of the past since it is a practical impossibility to preserve the ideas, art, philosophy, psychology, history, ethics, metaphysics, and theology for the future without their conveyance from the past into the future using the present as the great conduit of knowledge.

Too often when one hears the term "preservation of the past" one believes this to mean a glorification of the past and all its ideas, philosophy, art and so on. This is anything but the case. It is as essential to preserve those elements of the past we are in strong opposition to as it is to preserve those of which we agree. This is not only out of respect for pluralism and the opinions of others. It is out of a recognition that it is just as often that our opinions and views rest upon oppositions as they do upon advocations. It is at once true that our advocations are often strengthend by our oppositions. A passionate advocate of Keynesian economics ought to read as much Milton Friedman as possible. All seeking to prevent genocide ought to read "Mein Kampf" or Mao's "Little Red Book."

I do not advocate an open mind. I advocate a mind ready to devour every piece of wisdom and knowledge it can reasonably consume. I advocate a mind with an open mouth to greedily gobble up and suck up knowledge and thought. Then closing that mind and chewing on the ideas that it has taken in before opening again. This is the essence of education.

I have dedicated my life to the preservation of the past and the conveyance of that past into the future. This is the only way that there will be a future worth living in. This will allow people of the future to do their own devouring and thinking. It will allow them to form their own beliefs in advocation, opposition, or innovation of those of the past. It will give them the tools to be free citizens in a democratic republic. The preservation of knowledge can save our nation.

To preserve the past is to rescue the future from the tyranny of an ignorant dark age that the present state of our culture and society ominously portends.

Russia Under the New(old)New Regime

Russia is more dangerous to the West today because it is viewed as having no ideology. This is incorrect. Russia still has a highly statist ideology. It is, however, much more difficult for the West to understand than was communism. Unlike communism, the ideology now in ascendance is largely Russian or slavic in origin. It is much older than communism. It is the idea that Russia is the "third Rome." It is the inheritor of both the legacy of the Western Roman Empire(Rome) and the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire(Constantinople). This makes for an ideology vast in scope and in geographic ambition. To Russians, geography and history are inextricably linked.

Communism, perhaps, was only a sub-idea which rested upon this far vaster and older set of ideas. Many in Russia view themselves as being in the same position as Constantinope circa 1200 AD, caught between maurading West European crusaders and Jihadi moslems.

The new(old) ideology in Russia is a dangerous and potent combination. Related to the idea of the "third Rome" is the Russian idea of the ideal leader. In Russian this leader is called the "gosudarstvennik." It means literally "man of state." To Russians, the State is not just the government. It is the entire culture, society and slavic civilization. The State is an expression of all these things. The "man of state" is not only the Russian leader. He is the defender and upholder of an entire civilization, the "third Rome" stretching from Central Europe through Central Asia to the Pacific.

To Russians, a "great power" is not only a strong unified state acting abroad, it is also unified completely internally as well. Therefore, any federated government and rival checks and balances within Russia opposite the "man of state", are weaknesses and a threat to Russian Civilization. These common features of Western democracy are thought of as treason in Russia in that a disunified Russia is more vulnerable to Her enemies. This unification of internal and external policies is reflected in two concepts called "the dictatorship of the law" and "derzhavnichestvo" roughly translated as "great powerishness." "Dictatorship of the law" means that though the "man of State" is de jure subject to the law, it is he through the executive branch that interprets the law, not the judicial or legislative branches. In this way the man of state can quell internal enemies. This strengthens Russia externally as well, in her status as a "great power."

The last concept of Russia's ideology is centralization. The top of the government gives the orders. Thoe orders are followed exactly on the way down the levels of governement. This is called "vlastnaya vertikal" or "power vertical." To the Russian mind it is made necessary, paradoxically, as an antidote to weak, corrupt and inert public administration. Therefore, centralization is not seen as empowering the beauracracy but as checking it and curbing its abuses. It is the cultural leader, the "man of state" who fights the enemies of civilization internally and externally and ensures that Russia remain a great power.

The Yeltsin years of the 1990s are considered the reason most Russians support the new authoritarianism. Yeltsin's attempt to loosen centralization led to the collapse of Russia's external power and Her humiliation. Vladislav Surkov, the Russian philosopher/propagandist, has put a philosophical color on this desire for centralization. Sysnthesis of ideas is extolled rather than the analysis of one idea. Idealism is celebrated over pragmatism. Images are more important than logic, intuition over reason and the general over the particular. These ideas reflect the reality of government in Russia. That is that centralization, a strict ideology in pursuit of common goals and the reliance on strong and powerful personification of the leader to wield the power of the "man of state" are all desirable and necessary to uphold "culture" and promote Russian power.

This ideology is remarkably similar to the Wilhelmine German ideology of "kultur" that was even more distorted and perverted by the National Socialists. Putin views these ideas as upholding "sovereign democracy." This means that the state is democratic, however the state has the right to determine what that "democracy" means in practice without, necesessarily, adhering to notion that Western countries might perceive as democratic.

In addition to all this ephemeral ideology there is the specter of Russian natural gas reserves and the giant state-owned Gazprom. Gazprom is used as a geopolitical weapon by the Russians. It buys smaller Western energy companies, especially in Western Europe. It uses the technology and expertise of these companies to find more gas fields. It does this by taking advantage of Europe's relatively free market in energy production, using the backing of the Russian government to the utmost. Once a new gas foield is found it offers western energy companies a share in the venture. It then slowly but effectively manipulates them for the benefit of Russia. The goal of Gazprom is to deal with each EU country on a bilateral basis, causing each to be as dependent on Russia for gas as possible. This is much easier than dealing with a unifed EU that has a clout at least equal to Russia's

Another goal of Gazprom is to buy as many "downstream" energy facilities, like refineries, as it can in Europe. This allows Russia to control both the flow of gas and how it is distributed. A coming difficulty for GaZPROM is that it is going to have trouble supplying its market. Russia has been so successful in inceasing Europe's gas dependency on Russia that its customers are far more numerous than its potential to supply gas. This is exacerbated by Gazprom's move into the east Asian market.

The intriguing and dangerous question is what does the Russian government intend to do about Gazprom's coming inability to supply Eruope with gas.

In this inadequate and brief description we see that the narrative about Russia that was built in the West in the 1990s was largely fictitious fantasy based upon our hopes of what Russia was becoming as opposed to what it was, has been and is. It is a highly aggressive state who sees the United States as it strategic adversary and likely enemy. It centralizes power internally in order to more fully and deliberately project power externally. It aligns itself with nations from China to Iran to Venezuela who have the same ideological, anti-democratic and anti-American ideas as itself. Russia uses power much more effectively and deceptively than did the Soviet Union. It uses and penetrates markets in order to get ready cash. It uses gas and oil as a weapon. It outwardly fights Islamists while with the other hand embracing Islamic terror states like Iran. It used and uses false and phony opposition and ruling parties in eastern Europe to maintain a deceptively large amount of control over its former satellite states. It does this because, other than with the notable exception of Poland, the internal security services of those nations are still controlled by old KGB structures that were never rooted out.

Most of all, it takes advantage of the still pervasive anti-Americanism in the world and the growing conspiricism/cynicism of the American people for its own ends.

President Bush was a certifiable disaster in his Russia policies. He propped up Putin at every turn. Lets us hope that President Obama pursues a wiser policy of active opposition to Russian authoritarianism at home and growing agressiveness abroad.

here's a clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6suIQ6TPlo




Monday, January 11, 2010

Singing while cooking

I do alot of cooking and I enjoy singing off key and poorly while I cook!!! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnz7kf1mgmo

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Pornography and Propaganda

The cultural conflict in the world today is not between the word and the image. It is between the literate image and the illiterate image. The world is made of images, it always has been. The problem is that our world is increasingly made of illiterate images. These are images that are not designed to express any thoughts, only emotions. Or they can be images designed to express neither any thought nor any emotion and are only designed to titilate. The former is called propaganda. The latter is called pornography.

This is why we see so much propaganda today from all political persuasions. It is also the reason for the explosion of pornography that we see. The image is being systematically divorced from thought and rationality. When I say images I do not mean pictures. Images are either words or pictures or a combination of both. Images create words and words create images when it is Man's rational core being appealed to. The world is incresingly losing any devotion to thought or reason and therefore such images are a rare, dying delight.

We are awash in the illiterate image.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXENYy3HL78&NR=1

Friday, January 1, 2010

songs to myself

The human brain is the most complicated matter ever discovered in the universe. We still feel the fallibility of that mind anytime we try to grasp complex subjects. This is because, perhaps, of humanity's growing hatred of itself, as expressed in the mass death over the last 100 years and probably that the mind, no matter how complex is still a creation. A creation finds it exasperating to try to grasp its creator and that is generally what we strive for when thinking deeply.

The truth is that the more important part of ourselves we never fully grasp, that is the gap between our rational and our emotional self. It is not either one of these two but the gap in between, the communication in between, that largely makes us who we are. It is this lack of communication within our selves which is in crisis today. There is certainly not a lack of communication between people. But the quality of that communication depends initially upon the conversation within one's own head and that is the conversation that is lacking in many, especially young people. The generalization of our society is the teen or 20 something sitting in a room full of the latest communication technology in which he or she can communicate with a peasant in China. But often they have nothing to say other than something about shopping or entertainment because they have not taken the time to simply have a conversation within themselves first, to sit and think quietly. This enormous gap between our ability to expand our communications around the the world and the quality of the content of that communication is related to the division between the image and the word that I write of. The Declaration of Independence was written with a quill pen on parchment paper. We must not only increase communications among people but within ourselves, within the gaps in our self. That can only be achieved by utilizing the technology between the ears.

It is these separations within us that differentiate us and make us us and this is represented by the separations between different individuals. When building a fire, the flames are fueled far more by the air between the logs than they are by the logs themselves. The heat and the light always pass through the gaps in the wood seeking the oxygen that exists there.

All of our political rhetoric on both the Left and Right is largely the affectations of braying jackasses. The tripe about revolutions and reactions and the like that I indulge in myself is largely a way to get a reaction for others. The more important thoughts we have about life in general are the ones we keep to ourselves. Those are the ones we will generally act upon when action is necessary. The affactations we will dismiss in the first "emergency" as Bush forgot about his "belief" in free markets in the emergency in 2008. Almost all politicians today engage in almost no introspective thought. Every thought they have is designed to be presented as an image to the public and not as a policy designed to properly manage the affairs of the nation.

It is this tyranny of the image which concerns me most about modern life. We have forgotten that within every image is a story, and within every story there is a text. At the heart and essence of a picture are the thoughts that the image creates within us. Those thoughts are made of words. Deficiencies in words and language will always lead to the decline of thought. Images cannot substitute for language because images depend upon language to give them meaning within the human mind. Every great film is not only a moving image, it is a moving, breathing, living thought. It is a living Idea that depends not only on images but on language and music. This is the reason that every great film maker, and generally even great actors, are highly literate people. Quentin Tarantino, in my opinion one of the great film makers of our age, is also one of the best writers of his generation. Examine the opening scene in his latest film "Notorious Basterds". It is visually and literally brilliant. The dialogue creates an image in the mind of the viewer that is both enhancing and seperate from the image actually on the screen.

The tyranny of the image has hijacked our politics. It has led to an acceptance of an almost unbelievable lack of coherence in our political life, our economic life, and even our daily lives. The prevailing pattern of our age is confusion. A mishmash of images dominate our lives uncoordinated by any pattern formed by the thought that the written word concretizes.

One word can open up a thousand images and ten thousand thoughts in the minds of countless individuals. Think of a word like "love" or "hate" or mind or democracy or even sun or moon and think of the images that are created. It is really the word that it is the great picture painter, not the image. The image fixates our mind on that image. The word invites our mind into a diverse world of images abounding and dancing the playful dance of the active intellect. If one word can do this, think then of what a great book can do. The image without the word is an ephemeral, dying picture destined to be forgotten. The images created by words are the joys of memory and thought that are one of the great pleasures of being human. In the beginning was the Word.