Big Mitt the Taker

So on the topic of taking. . .

Where "BIG MITT" really pisses me off is the smug, self-righteous way he takes credit. . .

For being born on third base being proud he can hit a single.

Objectivity vs. Mitt Romney

Now, first off, let's be clear: Obama was Goldman-Sachs' pick for president last time-- he's proven to be a fraud, now the big banks are running against his record supporting an even more vile candidate, and it's looking more and more like Romney will win. Watching the debates it's pretty clear why. Both men are running on platforms mostly comprised of fantasy and mythology, and the voters are choosing on the basis of which dream they'd rather dream rather than any basis of choice rooted in objective reality. Of the two delusional visions to choose from I find Romney's much more vile-- and it's worthy to point out some of the reasons his delusions are much more dangerous, at least in the near term.

First-- Romney's claim to fame, his resume, if you will-- is all based on the notion that he's some kind of businessman. He's got the talent for "making money" -- that's American, that's business oriented, that's practical. The fact is, however, he's no talent for making money at all. Now, sure as shit he's got a prime set of sticky fingers and he's pretty fine at taking it. . .but as far as I can see he's never, ever, created any real value on his own. This is an important distinction, and I'm surprised that more "pro-business" folk can't figure that out-- in fact Romney is very anti-business-- at least of the "creating value" kind, which, of course, is the only kind we of average non-richer-that-god sorts have available to us. Leveraged buyouts, offshore accounts, special access to legislators--ability to buy off regulators--key to Mitt's wealth. . .this is exactly the kind of behavior that has crushed small business: it's destroyed the economy, it's destroyed access to credit, it's increased costs of doing business(and promoted regulatory burdens--stuff the Mitts can ignore, but the little guy can't)-- and most dangerously and importantly, it's destroyed to competitive marketplace. You can't compete with Mitt. He's a taker, and he'll pay a buddy to write a law so he can buy you out, saddle you with debt, steal the companies value, bankrupt you, and personally claim the loss against his profits.

Let's be clear-- if you're a creator of value-- you're screwed in this economy-- and while the Mitts run the show(think big grabby hands when you think Mitt, it's a useful image) forget getting ahead. You could do something unbelievable amazing, like create a pill that magical cured cancer, aging, and loss of libido in one shot-- and you still couldn't make the kind of money Mitt's got. Why? 'Cause you're not going to get to go to school to learn the skills unless you pay off Mitt. You'll need to do your research at Mitt's company. Mitt will own the rights to your research anyway--as you're working for him, of course. Even if you could figure a way around that he'll just steal the research from you-- you can't afford to sue against him-- out of luck once again. Even if you got a Lesser Mitt to back you you'll still lose, as you'll pay more taxes, be forced to deal with more oversight, and eventually the Big Mitt will run you underground. No offense, nothin' personal, just business, right? Hardly. . .Mitt's business plan is no more brilliant than that of the average carjacker-- and that's written large in his life and his campaign-- from avoiding military service, to tax evasion and offshore accounts, to his double dipping business practices, his scammy relationship with politics all the way along, his sleazy peer-group--to now how he's run his campaign-- bullshit, deception, and expediency all the way through.

So, with that skillset, how you figure he'll handle the reins of the US economy?

By the way. . .

So a friend the other day called:

"Hey Jay, enjoy your recent posts, but don't you think you're really being a bit hard and extreme in your judgements about personal culpability? I mean, you're making some pretty heavy comparisons there. . ."

Well, I don't know. Let's look at it:

Frankly, it really doesn't matter a great deal what my judgements are. No one really cares and my opinions don't matter very much-- unless -- unless -- they're in some sense prescient of the attitudes of future generations. Then they may matter a great deal. I think, in fact, they are. Personally, I expect-- looking at the mess we're handing the future that my attitudes are actually pretty moderate and I try to keep a responsible level of objectivity with them. In fact, I'd suggest that forty or so years from now a guy like me struggling to survive in a poisoned, dying, brutal world will have a lot harder time having any sense of justice or moderation in his judgements at all. . .and frankly I anticipate--fear even--simple blind vengeful rage. Those people are going to wonder how the hell, how the hell, we made the choices we did. They're going to wonder where our courage was, and how we allowed events to unfold as they are. Those of us left are mostly going to try to plead ignorance('cept me, nah, it was obvious) but that's going to be a pretty weak defense especially falling on ears listening for a damn good explanation. And it will have to be a good one indeed, as the expectation from the historic evidence will be clear-- we were just too busy feeling smug about ourselves, stuffing our faces, indulging in wishes, and not giving a shit. So yeah, I think there's a very good reason to think about how our actions right now might be judged by future folk. . .

And no, and in that context, I don't think my positions are that radical at all.

Pants on fire. . .

So, tell me.

When is the last time in a presidential election where the "biggest liar" lost?

Just askin'

Tao of the Ninja Mennonite: VI-- continued.

So, yeah, authenticity. . .

It never ceases to amaze me, looking back, at how much impact my sailing books have had. Hey, they're really shitty books. I didn't really expect anyone to read them. They're self-published, of course, as no nautical publisher would consider having them-- as there's absolutely no commercial appeal-- I wrote them largely for my own benefit as a means of gathering my own thoughts-- and in general they were waaaaay ahead of their time. I promise you, writing about the virtues of engine-less sailing in a world of .80 gasoline in the middle of the dot.com boom was lunatic fringe material. "Sailing with Purpose" was written by a 27 year old kid trying to figure out how to live a life of authenticity, full aware that the choice to take on such a project would cost dearly-- and of course it did. I've no regrets, and no apologies for the fact that, well, that's a book written by a kid, in a kinda flip style--albeit a very earnest one-- desperately trying to figure that game out. The others followed in their footsteps in a pretty dang unvarnished, minimally edited representation of my thoughts over that decade and some of sailing. This blog is pretty similar, in fact, as I've come to believe it's vastly more valuable to be real, even if that exposes one's defects-- than slick. It's vastly more persuasive as it's authentic-- or as follows alienating. Which is fine. There are people out there who chose values(or more accurately rejected them) that make them my enemies and they just didn't know it until they read my stuff. May as well make that all clear. In fact now, rather than "sailing"  I feel exactly the same way about my experiments in "sustainability" -- or more precisely our failure as a culture to achieve such in a necessarily timely manner-- I unapologetically intend to bear witness to our utter failure and absolute personal culpability for the destruction of planet earth. . .This also is waaaay ahead of its time-- people are still pretending it hasn't happened-- or are busy capitalizing on selling bogus solutions:  I intend to provide the generations of future with a very precious gift-- perspective. They, those kids of ours, are going to be forced by scarcity to make the most horrible of decisions and I fully intend to declare that they've every right to lay the blame where they need to, squarely on us-- squarely on me. I understand that this "bearing witness" will provide them very little comfort-- only justification for what actions they'll be forced to take. It's the best I can do. It's not enough for our crimes, of course. But it's something, I guess.

Ok, so objectivity-- or the complete lack of it-- and why it was so easy for us to murder our own children.

Just after graduating from college in the early 90's I had the lovely experience of working for the Juvenile Justice system in Boise-- and boy was that informative. I grew up in a reasonably sane, reasonably caring home and I really had no experience of the hell that so many kids start their lives in. I had no idea as to the pervasiveness of child abuse, sexual, physical, or mental-- or the full meal deal often-- but I learned a lot about it pretty quick. There's a lot that can be said about it, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll narrow it down to one hard, shocking, keen observation...

Child abusers "love" their kids.

No shit. They really do. At least from their "subjective" experience they do. They "feel" they do. They "feel" good about it. They very often feel that their abuse is even morally justified, and their abusive behavior in the best interest of the child. The obvious real objective evidence of a busted up kid bears not at all on their "perspective." Why should it? As a culture we value our subjective states of being ahead of our objective experience-- pedophilia and child abuse are just another manifestation of that indulgence. If you feel that that you're behaving in a moral fashion, well that's good enough, right? No reason to investigate the actual real practical ramifications of one's actions-- certainly no reason to hypothesize about the unknowable unintended consequences either. And what you see is what you get-- not just a culture full of child abuse but spousal abuse, abuse in our workplaces, environmental abuse-- exploitation, domination, tyranny in every kind of human relationships, violence everywhere-- notably excepting the kind where you get punched back-- well, of course getting punched back subjectively sucks...

And ultimately you get a dead planet...

You get a miserable one long before that...

Why should we be surprised? Demanding others accept the validity of our subjective experience above the knowable, observable practical reality is violence-- and why there is not, cannot be, and never will be such a thing as a peaceful religion...

Clearly, if we can demand ourselves to be "objective" for a moment, the act of choosing for our own momentary "subjective experience" ahead of the objective, real, measurable greater good always tends to a future of conflict. In a world with more space, and more abundance, the immediate nature of that conflict can seem subjectively remote-- but the trend is relentlessly reinforced. As time progresses, it becomes more difficult, costly, and even fatal for those who value humanity to choose against the societal "suicide pact" as time progresses, many who try fail, and the trend is yet again reinforced. Eventually it's only the most heroic that can stand against such values-- and they are beset even by those who would publicly claim to share their core values-- subjectively, of course, rather than objectively--

This is why it is so critical today to declare-- an action is good if and only if it is in fact good... and this good is always a measurable quantity. 

to be contined as well, as I've wrenches to spin. . .

Tao of the Ninja Mennonite: VI

Obliquely following on the last post-- it's difficult to be currently aware of the unprecedented loss of arctic ice this summer it engendering a certain sense of impending dread. It's difficult locally to be much optimistic about this islands future if one has been paying much attention to the "geothermal" issue and taking note to the blatant lack of integrity shown by both the "for" and "against" camps. There's a lot of stuff in flames around the world this morning and it's obvious that my personal angst is shared by a lot of people.

Yet I can hear it: But hey, don't be so negative, Jay! The new Iphone is available today, that will save us all! Or some such new and shining thing or approach-- maybe not Iphones but new generations of solar panels, or new political moments like Occupy Wallstreet, or new approaches to taxation carbon credits, or any of the rest of it. But none of this "new" stuff really heartens me much, especially some of the touted "new paradigm" airy fairy stuff some spout-- as I know without a doubt the core issues facing humanity and the planet are not "epistemological" in nature-- neither are they ecological, or political, or technological. They are in fact moral issues first and foremost: issues of basic human integrity, honesty, and objectivity. Shallow minds like to shrug off our current woes as some inevitable result of human nature. This a broadly held but remarkably ignorant world view, as it's all but self-evident that if within the human mind there didn't exist the basic capacity for honesty, objectivity, and cooperative benevolence--  humanity would have never survived our pre-historical existence and our species would have been stuffed out as yet another failed evolutionary experiment a million years ago. Bullshit-- it's our obvious and unique innate capacity honest objectivity that makes us human-- this is the core of human nature itself -- not intelligence, nor language, nor thumbs: all of these we share with plenty of our earthly co-inhabitants. No, it's the ability to look at the world objectively(at least as objectively as the physical constraints of the universe allow it to be possible) to grasp the systemic import of that objective knowledge, to manipulate it conceptually, and to act in a manner that has the ability to enhance the global systemic viability-- this makes us human. From that realization of the evolutionary role of the human species--and why it might make sense for such ecological capital to be invested in one species-- it can be seen as core to "human nature" the ability to enhance, consciously, systems that otherwise would be constrained to much slower and perhaps less viable processes. Of course this terminology I use, "larger systemic viability" is me speaking the perspective of a modern, educated, atheist-- observing the emergent phenomenon of evolutionary processes and biological determinants-- paying a certain respect to the appearance of a teleological nature of the whole. Others from other times might be comfortable with simpler concepts of "God's Will" or even the Tao-- but we would hope that as we go along our innate objective "human nature" would guide us to worldviews with ever higher levels--or depths-- of objective understanding. While it may be colloquially cute to speak in these more primitive terms, and while without a doubt there's knowledge to be inherited from such world views-- for a modern mind to hold such concepts as equally as valid as the informed modern secular view, is, well, nothing short of retarded. To deliberately do so in the face of evidence to the contrary is at its core-- inhumane.

And is core to the root of our current moral crisis.

Why? Because if we can accept for the moment my assertion of the innate nature of humanity's capacity for rational objectivity-- it certainly is reasonable to suggest that as with all of our other innate capacities-- the ability for language, or mathematics, or even perhaps music-- our objective nature if not appropriately stimulated, or if deliberately stifled-- may not develop. And this is critical, as objectivity is central to moral behavior. In fact, it's very reasonable to argue that the first and foremost, and most humane moral task of any evolved human being is the utter commitment to be honestly, authentically objective. For without this, whence comes the criteria for any subsequent moral judgement? Moral judgments obviously cannot be made effectively constructively from incomplete or inadequate understandings of reality-- less so from fantasy or delusional word views-- rarely if ever from reality based on the wishing of things being a certain, often purely preferential, way.

To be continued... in the meanwhile

Tao of the Ninja Mennonite: V

Well, it's time someone point out the fact that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist, after all. I mean he really is.

The conversation kinda came up over on the forum(yup, that's the right link, you'll need to roll through it) where the various virtues or lack of our current system, culture, all that were discussed a bit. And the fact that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist has only a bit to do with his fetish for holy underwear, believing God is an alien from Kochab, that he gets not only 70 virgins upon his transmigration but a whole fucking planet to rule--calling his wife from her tomb is purely optional, however-all that horseshit. It has only a bit to do with Mormonism in general, although it's ideal as an unique American kind of religion-- a cross between the weakest feel good version of Christianity, homeopathy, and multi-level marketing. Nah, demonstrating that he's the Antichrist comes down to a very simple observation.

See, the whole Christian tradition--back in the day, was largely a reactionary one against the heavy legalistic nature of Judaism-- and rather than a whole book of rules or books of rules and castes of privileged interpreters of the rules was posited a very simple set of  principles:

1) God has a plan and a "will" to be expressed in Creation.

2) It is man's proper role to fulfill that "will." To choose against God's will is, frankly the definition of a sin.

3) The messianic message was one of demonstrating the Christ-manner of fulfilling God's will. It is, in fact a lifestyle of attempting strive for that fulfillment, which is always the greatest, most important systemic "good"--and in fact often requires personal sacrifice for that "greatest good."  And of course that stunt on the cross a pretty good example of all that, in fact.

3a) For those whose eyes are glazing over already-- hey, I said "GREATER GOOD." The "Christian" lifestyle was one of deliberately manifesting "god's will" by seeking that "greater good."  As if God's will could be anything other than the greater good, right?

3b) And hey, sometimes the "personal good" has to give a bit to serve that greater good, right? Sometimes it's nice to share.

3c) Of course--to deliberately, systemically seek the "personal good" over the greater good of "god's will" is core to the "Christian" definition of evil.

Now you sure as hell wouldn't know this looking at the modern church-- which is pretty damned evil--but from this perspective it's pretty easy to see where early Christian traditions of aiding the poor, vows of poverty, communal-ism came from. And it's also easy to see where tasty biblical zingers like "it's more difficult for a camel to crawl through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven"-- as well, it's pretty tough to amass a big pile of dough seeking the "greater systemic good"(read: utterly impossible.) Or, of course "give on to Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's" which, certainly, translates to "Caesar can kiss my ass." There's more; lots more. In fact the whole New Testament is loaded with that kind of stuff and in fact very sparse about telling people what to do with their weenies-- ah, but that's another topic.

So now the Antichrist stuff:  Back in my Bible School days it was often impressed on me by scholars who had some understanding of translation that the "anti" part of "Antichrist" wasn't a very fitting translation, as it suggest an almost Zoroastrian god vs. devil slapdown kind of confrontational character. Not at all, many insisted-- and it would be much more accurately translated as "instead-of" rather than "anti." And indeed, the "Instead-of-Christ" has a very important connotative difference, and in many ways more insidious. And what would that Anti/Instead-of-Christ stand for? Well, of course against or at least as an alternative the the Christ message-- again, man's role is to personally fulfill god's will by aiding all creation find its teleological expression of the greatest good-- the alternative probably would be something very much like "seek the personal good and fuck everyone else." Now let's not be to silly about seeing how this all works out-- as very often such a person wants to fuck over other people and feel good about it(personal good)--even self-righteous and entitled about it-- so it's very nice to wrap the whole thing up in some pseudo-bible-babble where once can pretend to believe that it's actually God's will to give you a whole pile of toys and other people nothing and that's ok because it's in God's plan for some people to go hungry. Never can know god's will really-- pass the steak sauce? Sure, all that sounds very silly and self serving phrased that way-- but hey, that's what makes the modern church go round--sermons based on that kind of language caters to a crowd who can offer up way better tithes that them "smelly serve poor kinds."

So how does this in fact make Mitt Romney the Antichrist? Because I suggest to you that he's taken the "all about me" alternative anti-christ message further, more indulgently, more profoundly, and more successfully than any human being in human history--and if he wins the presidency, he'll effectively taken the "antichrist" gospel to the highest level of success and power possible on planet earth! -- and if that doesn't in fact make him "the man!" I really don't know what rates. And that is, in fact, a little freaky. 

Especially because ol Captain Holy Underwear believes in a literal apocalyptic battle and has the power to initiate it in his hands.

I know, I know. . .Mitt Romney?

Very little around here, for sure, busy, busted finger-- thank a hydraulic ram for that.

Anyway, to my mind, how bas-ackwards is Mitt Romney?

Well, if you look at it, he'd be a conservative, morally, if he were running for Pharaoh.

Ya might want to think about all that. I'm not kidding.

A Reminder:

Checking out the news this morning. . ."both" sides. . .

Hey, sticking one's head up one's as so hard and far that it forces a smile isn't optimism.

J. Free Band, May 2

We'll be playing the Black Rock Cafe at 6:30 or so Wednesday, May 2. We're sounding better than ever, have a full show of fun original tunes, look forward to seeing you all there!