Weird People, Wierder America

In high school I was in a debate club, I never participated in competitions but I did enjoy argumentation and of course winning. Later I'd abandon this niche for something a bit more broad; business but I later rediscovered the joy I get from debates when I started studying politics and religion. At a certain point this hobby of mine takes my time as with any fun hobby. I ended up researching stuff I really didn't have in some cases the time to research.

Winning arguments and forming axioms consequently led me on the idea of studying US government history to more depth. Doing this I found that my logic worked best throughout American history with the likes of Benjamin Franklin. I call myself a Jeffersonian only because Ben wasn't a President so he never had a chance to codify a lasting mandate.

This ideology of Jeffersonianism took several hits from both the left and right of it, eventually being tied to slavery and Jacksonianism. In truth it was about individual rights but history of the victors has a way of playing with the truth. For example Democrats today and leftist historians revised thoroughly the history and motivations therein of the civil war. If you listen to them they would concede that yes the South (rather than democratic party) had slaves and that Republicans over the 70's would become the party of plantation owners and old money.

If you listened to their Republican rightist counterparts you would hear that the Republicans of the 1800s were anti-slavery. No they weren't in truth the North had slaves as well, probably more people in the North had slaves, the difference being they named them house keepers, field workers and so on. In the south the name of this class of people was just slave... the south got the shaft for their honesty. I again state that the civil war was as much about slavery or the ending of as it was about climate change. But these rightist historians would have you believe the modern Democratic party is the southern Democrat...

I submit instead that ideologies endured certainly but the paradigms either side presents are aberrant reflections of each other.

The truth as it were is not something anyone can ween from the facts presented, what we have are of course just and right facts, and so I will share another perspective using them.

Words matter so I'll begin with defining words so we can be on the same page here:

1. Nazism used as it is today carries two connotations with many contexts. However the usage of it as a short cut to describe someone else can be attributed to a desired intention; rather than a helpful way to understand as the short hand usage might suggest.

The classical short hand use of Nazism is to refer to the state or a political group's usage of force to silence various ethnic groups and ideologies.

The neoclassical use of Nazism assigns motivation and states that pathos or a lack of ethos or both is in play.

One definition of Nazism aims to define action and the other aims to define thought.

Asserting now that the individuals at the woman's march (the all of them) and the other example of the Berkeley violent riot hold the neoclassical definition true or at least employ the method to some degree many things become acceptable or even expected as a result.

For example microaggression, it is a part of the definition of neoclassical Nazism refined and distilled into its core precept. That the opposite of your view is motivated by pathos. The logical question of a person who follows that mode of thought is of course "then what?"

If a person is led to believe that an argument formed and-or is argued from a position of pathos is by default invalid what is left behind is the question on how to fix it.

All of these things are very methodical and rely on several fallacies about human nature. As humans we want solutions, we also have an ego that implicates itself in our mental and physical endurance. We could see the consequences and attribute them to our actions but not see the mistakes involved and certainly not the ignorance; how can we know what we don't know?

A quick digression to answer that last question would normally be education, but this time I'd suggest self-education on matters of human nature, history and civics.

To continue... there is a level of manipulation going on however as complex as life is this could just be a set of consequences that have more greatly led to unfavorable outcomes against civil discourse and learning.

The seeking of how to correct a person who is now established as using pathos to argue leads to the most worrying part for me personally. It's one thing to see for example an Albanian man who outs his cigarette on a child's face because his skin complexion is many shades browner than his as sinister. But if a person says Afro-Americans shouldn't have more or less rights than any other American is being viewed as sinister then we have a shutting down of communication and an ending to debate because of what happens next... the solution. 

And it isn't so much what is being said, the distinction between the Albanian example and the Afro-American example is one involved physical injury and the other dealt with words.

The solution no matter the names used over history for when diplomacy and debate fail is war... it can either be a one sided affair or something prolonged. The Jews for example were at war with the Nazi party, a war which the Nazi won with little resistance until Allied forces responded.

The solution for those who follow this idea of microaggression is macro-aggression; the use of evil to combat evil and make no mistake war is evil. A person who believes in microaggression actually believes that they have been assaulted, in a normal world the savvy observer would say that person then cranks it up to 11 which is the use of physical violence, intimidation and well... some pretty evil stuff to silence dissent or opposition.

If this observation is true and the debate is over then it would have only have been if the perspective I am presenting holds any truth that both definitions of Nazism are held to be true at the same time. It may be that the reason people can believe in neoclassical Nazism is out of concern of classical Nazism.

In other words the ones destroying a Starbucks in the name of Anarchism or the ones burning a Berkeley building are the result of a layer cake of weird incentives, noble but weird intentions and weirder values.

Underpinned: Trump

I think there are two types of Anarchisms, constructive Anarchism for example and destructive Anarchism.

I think most people want constructive Anarchism but the devil is in the details, it then becomes destructive very quickly. This isn’t to say that Anarchism in itself is inherently destructive; it’s actually that most present systems are so involved in society that it’s scandalous.

Case in point: Even something simple like protecting our border; we have roughly 92 million people of working age that are unemployed. The leader of Ecuador decided to weigh in on our President-elects call for mass deportation of violent criminal illegals in a way that was on the American lefts political talking point bulletin board. He conflated illegal immigrants which should be deported as well in my view with what Trump intends to do. Now I don’t know why or to whom he was speaking but it was obviously meant for the ears of the American people as well. He then said Americans economically rely on illegals to function financially. The reality is that we have possibly six times the amount of unemployed citizens as we do illegals. Even if we deported all the working illegals and employed all the unemployed citizens we’d still have a real number of about 16% unemployment rate. That’s assuming the number of illegals working is near 15 million.

The whole issue in the case above has now spun out whack anyway since those people have put roots into America. They’ve dropped seeds as well and those seeds have taken root as well. There is a right answer but no easy answer and of course there is a wrong answer that has very real long term problems that can aptly be described as scandalous.

I can honestly say I chose well to throw my chips in on the right side of politics, I disagree with much of the Rights social programming, this idea that porn is denigrating and stigmatizing precludes said denigration and causes stigmatization. Now I’m not advocating porn, the same thing is applied to violent movies and games, the thing the political left did was get ahead on these topics to redefine what “progressive” can be interpreted as. The reality is that the ideology just doesn’t sell well. It’s too pro-elitism. In fact the reason they lost this election so badly and everyone before it for the last 6 years is because of *drumroll* arrogance. It’s the same arrogance that they capitalized on when the right had gone after the culture back in the 80’s. It wasn’t that the left simply had the wrong message and it wasn’t that they thought people were interested in the message. No it’s simply that they didn’t think it mattered, they had an agenda, and said to the electorate; deal with it.

The culture always defeats policy is what I’m learning, culture is very important but business is what makes culture and government can augment business… it’s a cycle fueled by unpredictable consequences, the only good thing I can note is the irony that’s usually involved.

Case in point the government invests tax dollars into research for driver less cars… okay now companies are putting out driver less cars… that will remove actual drivers who pay taxes from the work force, it’s delicious.

To be fair about it though, driving was one of the last I could say real jobs out there, anyone could get into it and you get back what you put in.  I think the immense pain this “investment of tax dollars” will bring is a direct result of both arrogance and ignorance.

I talk to cabbies who are vehemently pro-Obama , I wonder if they will blame Trump when the replacements start? Actually no I know they will.

Finally, I'm not sure if anyone protested Obama's inauguration, I'm sure someone somewhere did... anyway it appears to me one of two things are true.

1. The protestors are very fringe but have a very large microphone.

or

2. The fringe of the left is very popular.

To those sympathetic to either I say... pick your poison wisely.

In the end I'm left wondering why this whole situation feels familiar... I feel like I'm watching a national level moment of good parenting. On one hand you have a parent leading the family along and you have two good children one reluctant but going about her own business, the other eager and willing and the last being totally childish; kicking and screaming and falling to the ground forcing the parent to pick him up.

I'm beginning to think that not only is Trump attempting to fix politics by getting rid of the processes that leads to an "establishment". Not only is he attempting to "make America great again" (and all that means) for the American people. But he's also scolding entities that for too long have gotten away with the same old games.

These issues I am reading about; the potential first amendment struggles various bruised news outlets, their proxies and backers are expecting is really just bellyaching that the tools they used to win every argument before seem largely ineffective. From Beyonce to not giving air time to people they libel when they request to be interviewed and have an opportunity to defend themselves; nothing seems to work against a parent who has put his foot down.

The DNC Introspects And Finds Russia

As a fan of some pretty prolific writers and debaters I have some experience in language and the accompanying tools under my belt. With much of this Russian Hacking flag waving nearly everyone seems to agree that there is no argument about the question being asked, and in fact the divide seems to be about the answers. Below you will find a conversation between me and the talking points of others in a normal assembly of how the conversation breaks down. Mind you this is a synopsis as normally the conversation collapses to baser content and some self-evidentiary use of red herrings, ad hominem and/or ad populous.

Myself (M) – “Wow, Trump won.”

Concerned Citizen (CC) – “Yea, but the Russians hacked and tried to influence our election.”

M – “Oh? That’s pretty big, did it succeed?”

CC – “I don’t know, but they did it to get Trump elected.”

M - “That’s a pretty bold statement considering you don’t know, but why don’t you know?”

CC – “Well it’s obvious they hacked, look at the DNC and the Podesta e-mails, those were what caused it.”

M – “Yes, okay but if it’s obvious then what don’t you know?”

CC – “There is some top secret stuff that can’t be revealed to the public, the intelligence community would have to burn its sources which is why the Russians are denying the hacking; to get them to do that.”

M – “Okay, but regardless of the source was the information true?”

CC – “That really isn’t the point though, the Russians hacked American data and that information by default is illegally got.”

M – “So has the DNC or Podesta come out to denounce the information on veracity?”

CC – “Like I said it doesn’t matter the information was bad because of how it was claimed.”

M – “But you said you don’t know the motive, there could have been information there that was flattering to the DNC and/or Podesta but there wasn’t; is that the fault of the Russians?”

CC – “You’re missing the point, the Russians hacked out data, that’s why the President responded the way he did with sanctions and kicking out their ambassadors.”

M – “The Chinese hacked about 20 million Americans for information used to black mail some of them, shut down our White House computers and have been generally nasty for a while now, other groups do it too… so why now start a new policy to something so minor as telling the truth?”

That is the conversation generally… as I said no one I talked to lasted that long, usually the conversation gets derailed into another topic but the totality of the conversations I’ve had with different people sounds like that.

No one argues the question on: “is the information truthful?” They argue a separate question: “Where did the information come from?” It seems to be the answer to the question I pose (Is the information truthful?) that people have an issue with is why the conversation goes everywhere else. Since if the information is truthful then two points must logically be made.

One – The source and the method doesn’t matter, unless we no longer protect source identity.

Two – The voters were accurately educated before making their decision.

The only reason  for reluctance to recognize that answer as a possibility is because the arguments against it sound infantile, boiling down to: “why me?” – A perfectly legitimate question, the answer to which is deep and varied; from a heavy baggage carrying candidate that had to defend arguable policies to yes, informed voters.

In Focus: Diane Feinstein's End Game

We all know what enhanced interrogation really means, we all know that it isn’t something to be exactly happy about doing. No one wants to have to water board another person after all. But it is ahistorical if she’s trying to say the CIA and Military acted without the people’s approval to do these things. I can say they had mine; my perspective was and is that those individuals lost the right not to be interrogated the way they were when they sided with the people who took away the right of 3000 people to have a peaceful life on 9/11. But where is this woman going with this? What’s her end game?

Feinstein is dangerously close to being at Henry Kissinger level, Kissinger in my eyes is a scavenger picking the carrion of our dead soldiers and quenching his thirst on our living American warriors’ blood and sweat. When people say things like what Diane did it’s to put people on the defensive, that’s the whole goal but when I see things like this on instinct as a gut reaction I go on the offense but before I speak I do my research and in this case what I found was motive and precedence that could explain Diane’s possibly ill guised actions. And I say ill guised because after you consider another event that happened this week then you realize what is really going on here.

Immediately if you are a conservative you’re thinking well this is supposed to distract from the Gruber case, no it isn’t that’s not the point. Everyone is still watching that and nothing will change regardless what Diane says. While it may work as a boon for her party with a niche group of the population the average American is more interested in what’s in their wallet and Gruber’s case has been explained enough for us to not care what Congress says to him, we expected the government to take action on the AHCA repeal with or without Gruber, if they don’t there will be a constitutional crisis at a level not seen since the years before the civil war.

But I digress Feinstein has a special interest and as I mentioned before about bad policy crafting the second person needed to craft a bad policy about what she intends is a useful idiot aka the person who wants to do the right thing. The special interest is vested in her husband who is heavily invested in Chinese firms and has scored in the past hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts in part thanks to the hard work of his Mrs. Feinstein and the tax payer to fund legislation that funnels money to those Chinese firms.

The event that happened this week was that Congress completed a 1.1 Trillion dollar spending bill… The bill will be hated for now and rightfully so because concessions were made after the voter had established a mandate on Congress to act in reversal of the Democrats and Presidents agenda. However it will be later lauded for having been fiscally responsible, that’s just the ebb and flow of the news cycle. The issue for Diane and the reason for her release is that the bill did not have a resolution in favor of China with regards to IMF control.  What the Chinese wanted from the spending bill was for America to allow a governing board change from 5 to 10 positions, presently there are 24 total so this would allow for stronger representation by China and Russia in the IMF.  The new top positions would then be appointed by the current members and China, Russia and the olive branch Korea. -The focus is on China reader, stay focused, Korea doesn’t matter because the Chinese can exert military pressure on them to make favorable appointments- It wouldn’t be the Chinese without a second distraction from the point of this power play and the second distraction is that there would be a quota increase from developing countries into the fund by 6% and a decrease 6% from the largest contributors. The numbers stay around the same but the end result is China asserts an incredible amount of control over the value of goods in America.

Either with forethought or out of sheer ignorance of the depth of passing a spending bill with those concessions Republicans dodged the bullet that would have sent and rightfully so every sensible American to grab their fire arms once the fact that they essentially sold America sunk in.

Now I understand that this post has been rife with mention of armed rebellion, but such is the state of the union. Diane Feinstein owes Americans an apology for her inconsiderate march to profit.  But I can’t hold it against her though, she’s a politician, she isn’t interested in the truth; she’s interested in legacy and wealth.  

Al Sharpton in Focus

The sinister Al Sharpton is a little man with a simple ambition so this will be brief:

Martin Luther King did the most damage to those of a darker complexion in America than three hundred years of slavery ever could have done. King died a martyr and either he created for himself or had created for him an elevated status to where he can only be accountable to god. This means criticism of King has been subverted by faith and as a result King in death achieved the status of a Monarch... a King. And when criticism and rational argumentation is by and a large no longer considered seriously anything becomes possible. Even something like Al Sharpton who is a phoney, a con artist, a scammer, a liar, a charlatan, a smile in a cheap suit and a really bad person  who can accumulate credibility by putting actions, words and ideals in mouths of an entire demographic in the name of a dead man... if this sounds familiar reader then we probably agree.


We live in America we have no national 'community leaders' that are not in Congress or in the White House.

Vetting Obamagration

I could simply say that Barack Obama has broken the law by unilaterally taking an action outside of crisis that will have long term implications on three hundred million American citizens. However the reason my posts are at length is because I hope for my readers that whatever I type isn't enough detail; skepticism till it hurts is my motto and I want to give as much of the context and my argument as possible with each word.

I covered wage stagnation before and the effect this will have in raising the minimum wage argument in the coming years. In short raising the minimum wage on a national level is the most damning thing that could happen to Americas global competitiveness, more businesses will flee this country because the incentive will be to go to where opportunity is and it wont be here. There are varying data points that could change this though but the end result are determined by one thing and one thing only: the consumer. If the consumer can shoulder the burden without inflation then we will be fine however you don't have to be a cynical thinker know that isn't a trend when these sequence of events start to roll.

Let's throw away the constitution for a second, and look at the common sense solutions using history as a back drop. I think this is the problem for most Americans that support the argument that the President was right to act alone and that it was legal, the problem is that those Americans may not have historical context... the further problem may be that they have no respect for the context. The boogie man of all rationality is that even if you are right the other side has faith in their position. Historically and as a consequence the moment one man tells a thousand others what to do with force to ensure his dictate is done that man has become a tyrant, this is simple definition. The natural state of men has two fronts we will seek to do things that advance us and what advances us has values assigned to them that are unique to the individual. Becoming a slave for instance is not something people normally want, enslaving others is something some people could want. How we rationalize that situation is to say that the want not to be a slave ought to be considered when willfully attempting to enslave someone else.

Since no force is used to back that consideration up a person can get away with enslaving others, in the case of those in positions of legislative and executive powers the temptation is always present. However we have laws already established that prohibits slavery in the United States so no matter what is done to enslave people it must not be called enslavement.

In the end the President of the United States broke the law intentionally and with premeditation. He also aided and abetted people who trespassed into the United States which makes him an accessory to a crime. Since any American who stands up and acts against his executive action would lose their job or face other punitive measures then by definition he is a tyrant.

Wagging the Dog

The President must have it out for me, I mean I can’t speak for the American people but I sure don’t like the idea of wage stagnation for the next twenty years. In twenty years that the average American will be making exactly what their grandparents made. For those who don’t know the average American now is making as much as the average American made in 1988. Oh and the average was getting better because policies enacted back then stymied government growth to a pace so that it didn’t impede with private growth. This policy of an economic parallax where government was in the background but always present made for what can only be called the roaring 90’s. What ended that was when government no longer recognized how easily it could derail the American financial train and then individuals convinced others of their wonderful ideas.

Milton Friedman observed of the individuals behind how bad policy comes into play that there are two kinds; the kind who has noble intentions and the kind who has a special interest in policy. For the layman I’ll put it like this respectively you have the useful idiot and the bad guy aka the conman in a cheap suit. Many people in congress bought into the idea that every American should have a home of their own; the sweet language was more precisely that all Americans should be able to pursue the American Dream. The one who used the line was Bill Clinton and for that he became the darling of the little guy, he could do no wrong. The Congress was convinced by other Congressmen that were of the special interest group and while few did object the end results speak for themselves in 2008.

Now let’s not fool ourselves, everyone knew the housing bubble was going to happen from as early as 2003, and it was very clear to even the average Joe like me by 2005 sadly  no one in government had the courage to raise the issue. And here we come to it, why didn’t Bush do something, anything, an executive action let’s say? The answer is because he couldn’t so my eyes my scrutiny falls the failure of the Republican and Democrat Congress since both had their shot to stop it between the Clinton and Bush administrations.  2008 was caused by Clinton and his special interest cronies like Andrew Cuomo, Fanny and Freddie and so on as well as senators and congressmen but not by the President Bush, the law was passed all he could do was enforce it, Clinton was the one who could have vetoed it.

Bush doesn’t get off scot-free here though, he could have taken the law to the courts, maybe they could have issued an injunction until they reviewed the constitutionality of taking tax dollars to pay for mortgages by giving tax dollars to private companies: there is a constitutional issue there.

Now we look at the modern day President and I’m certain he has it out for me, where Clinton at least pretended that he wanted to help me but was really just lining his pocket and securing his families future at my expense it felt alright because I knew I was conned, I could look out for that next time. Bush I hold no grudge against because he was just doing his job but he didn’t try hard enough in my opinion to do the right thing. Now we have a President that wants to hurt me maybe worse than Clinton has since he is responsible for the average wages falling back to 1988 levels. This President who has two years left in office and has just signed a piece of fiat that says essentially American Citizens are not even worth the 1988 values of what we are being paid. There is a federal minimum wage though and that’s where this is going, because the only thing that can offset minimum wage increases is inflation and inflation makes the point moot. I’m sorry I skipped a step, by making legal so many people over night the President has created an issue for the minimum wage since average wages for the common man are about to take a nice dip. He will then be able to blame Republicans for it for the next two years because anyone with common sense knows money doesn’t grow on trees and printing money will only result in a Weimar Republic repeat with the American Republic… just so we are all on the same page, after that there was another world war.

Constitutionally there needs to be an office of the President, but I have concluded that that office holds much too much power for one man; this isn’t a particular problem with the constitution because the amount of power the President’s office has vacuumed is unconstitutional. The issue is that historically Congress when met with a President of the Jacksonian or Lincoln-ian type is supposed to reassert itself. Grave things happen when Presidents run amuck, for example reader, grant me an open mind with regards to that history is written by the victor and so when I say that the Civil War was a result of executive overreach your sensibilities should flare but I beg you to hold  off on your first reaction… You know what; I’ll do a throat clearing: I do not agree with any form of enslavement and I also don’t distinguish between individuals based on race, I do however generalize individuals based on culture, and that is surmised usually based on nationality, history and actions.

There are news agencies that will say well past precedence shows that the President is within his power to do rewrite law for a crisis like immigration. Some of the issues this brings up are then what isn’t a crisis, something is always a crisis to someone somewhere and another issue is of course he has past precedence to do a lot of things but that doesn’t mean it’s constitutional. If we ran society that way then all someone would have to do is murder someone in a new way then get away with it then the next time someone murders someone that way it’s okay because the last guy got away with it.

Back to the point if Congress had intervened on constitutional grounds in Lincoln’s time then an argument could be made that there would never have been a civil war, instead the majority went along with it. There are just too many angles to show here; the whites of the south that wanted no war the whites in the north that were worse than slavers and vice versa are just examples of the contextual complexity here. But in the end there was war because Congress failed to represent the people. The thing about megalomaniacs and dictator types is that they really don’t recognize that they are megalomaniacs and can rationalize dictator like actions. Lincoln for example gave the game away in his Gettysburg address when he said that government was “of the people, for the people and by the people.” If that were true then why was there a Civil War, it was a demagogues line; it’s as the saying goes the tail is wagging the dog.

To me these are truths about Lincoln but people tend to remember him better, I don’t know why, oh wait that’s right, he was a champion of the little guy so he could do no wrong. In the end Lincoln created a vacuum a hundred times greater than anything Jackson attempted and he killed over five hundred thousand people to make it happen. The thing is unlike with Jackson Congress never moved to plug the vacuum and a now seven score and nine years later we have a President that not only is wagging us but is taking us for a long walk off a short pier. My opponents on these issues spend so much time rooting for the underdog, I think it’s time they realize there is no audience in life and they need to start rooting for themselves.