1. BHO can do anything, right? Then he can expand the Gregorian calendar 50% to 18 months. The Catholic Church reformed the Julian calendar, so why not BHO? The existing month names will be jettisoned, as they refer to Roman (“white”) gods (e.g. January) or numbers (e.g. October).  The new calendar’s months will form an acrostic of “B A R A C K H U S S E I N O B A M A”. The names of each month will come from the 18 most oppressed people-groups across the Earth. These groups will be revealed by BHO and the names chosen by a special subcommittee of the U.N.  An example: month 1 might be named “Biafra”, after the Nigerian secessionist state of the late 1960s, mostly peopled by the Igbo.  This will garner huge support not only from blighted peoples but from Europeans and Americans suffering post-colonial and / or “white” guilt.

2. Federal income tax rates will be left as they are, so as not to lose the essential middle-class vote.  Not lowering the rates to account for the longer fiscal year will cause many individuals and joint-filers to slip unnoticed into higher tax brackets.  The IRS will continue getting paid through withholding and at a higher clip.

3. The extension of the year to ~550 days will have the effect of lowering life expectancy in the U.S. to 50 years for males and 53 for females.  No one will qualify for Social Security retirement benefits, nor will most qualify for Medicare benefits.  Both programs will be flush with cash in the near-term and thus these positive balances will be allocated for other uses.

4. Due to the inherent unfairness the calendar reformation will have on the young, the voting age will be lowered 50% to 12 and the drinking age to 14.  Tweens and teens will undoubtedly appreciate this move and show their support at the polls.  Children in most states will be allowed to drive and begin work at age 10 & 2/3.  Note that the age at which children graduate from state-run public schools will remain roughly 17-18.

5. Finally, due to the extension of the year, effective terms for elected representatives and executives will increase by 50%.  This will serve to ensure the President’s new plan is endorsed by legislators and the populace has appropriate time to adjust before the ensuing elections.

It will only be a matter of time before the world adopts such a well-conceived and eloquent plan.

As I consider the question personally, my answer is “I want to be as free as I can be, as God would have me be.”

I know at a very deep level He wants me free, wants my family free, wants our neighbors free, wants the world free.  He is clear on this – at least to me, when I am quiet enough to listen.  Men and women – sometimes speaking for themselves, sometimes for another – do not always want to do the hard, right things freedom requires, the most important of which is pursuing the will of one greater than themselves.

This question startles me.  How free do you want to be, America? But I don’t think it can be asked this way solely.  It must be asked of individuals: How free do you want to be, Americans?  Together, these appeal to the collective and to the individual.  This is what statists get wrong time and time again: they appeal only to the collective and forsake the individual.  They must.  It is rather a fundamental tenet of statism: the individual must be destroyed for the collective’s sake.

It seems to me the questions that might stir the good and right in individuals – embolden them, pushing away the despair – are all rooted in this simple question: How free do you want to be?

It is a Reaganesque sort of question, isn’t it?  When a politician, effusing humility, asks this question – makes it a strong theme, the statists will have no answer but to defend the state and shame the individual.  When a politician makes this question resonate, the shame will evaporate.

What is also evident is that, without its new superstar in the lineup, the Democratic Party is a second-division ball club. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are not terribly formidable. Last fall, the Congress they ran had an approval rating below Vice President Cheney.

Why then is the Republican Party agonizing publicly over what it is supposed to do? If history is any guide, the pendulum will swing back in 2010.

I do not want this. Follow me here.

We are at an interesting and I think unique juncture, pregnant with possibilities not relevant in previous years. We have 2 major political parties – the only show in town – which have skewed way toward tyranny on the truly relevant scale: the level of authority of the Federal government.

An argument, internal to the Republican party and always resident, has made its way to the fore of discussion – taking up quite a bit of bandwidth. This is the argument put forth by social liberals & “moderates” (a euphemism for people who shouldn’t be voting until they can form a cogent position) that social conservatives within the Republican party are driving away potential voters with their strident views on social policy. I agree with this argument. I say this as a social conservative.

What I’d like to see is social conservatives leave the Republican party. Keep reading, please.

I would like to see social conservatives form their own party, as I would fiscal conservatives, social statists and fiscal statists. Then form coalitions as need be – even if on each and every vote. Get rid of seniority perks, and all the trappings of elitism.

The principal argument against this is that Democrats would capitalize on this schism by unifying even further. I’m afraid I don’t have a reasonable argument against this position at this point, though I am ruminating.

Another argument is these groupings exist within existing parties as caucuses. My argument is that these are helpful, but the existing structure encourages party members to vote the party line far more than consider the merits of legislation.

On second thought, this really won’t work, as it presumes too much from humans. “Family” of whatever stripe runs just too thick in the blood of humans for reason to override. In this case, amend the Constitution to set term limits at 1 for all elected positions and increase the House terms to 3 years. And if we do legalize human cloning, please clone Ron Paul at least 546 times. Beginning in about 25 years, things should settle down.

~-~

My account on the social networking website, facebook, was disabled this past Monday, without notice. Here is a brief conversation which details the event.

Friend: “S—z told me you got booted from Facebook for being an Obama fan, but have been reinstated. What is the deal with that? Are they discriminating against people?

Should I not be associating with you for fear of being kicked? ”

Me: “Yeah – they told me to like totally cease and desist from my love fest for the O man.

“What transpired was I attempted to log in to facebook Monday afternoon and found the account was disabled. I sent them a short email. Static for 3 days.

“In the interim, perhaps 3 or 4 people besides myself wrote facebook and read them the riot act re: free speech, tolerance of views not your own, etc. My wife went so far as to say they needed to apologize to me.

“Me? I’ve been distracted with work stuff, so I didn’t get as upset as I might otherwise.

“In the end, I received an email yesterday stating the acct was disabled “in error” and they did apologize for the inconvenience. I would have liked an explanation, but hey, these are their bytes. I grok this.

“My guess is someone – one of my more Barack-loving friends – wrote facebook and said I was a threat to the future of Fabian socialism. A facebook employee reviewed it and, being the young skull full of mush he or she is, disabled my account. This would have be the “error”.

“It was kind of eerie. One flip of a bit and I was gone. My wife’s profile said “married”, but not to me. My posts on others’ profiles were gone, as were their links to my pics, notes, links, videos, et al. My presence in my family’s photos was eliminated.

“This is the future – where your digital existence can be erased in a New York minute by a pimple-faced ne’er-do-well with an axe to grind.

“Welcome to 1984.”

An influential Democrat who was also one of the world’s top-ten, highest-paid hedge fund managers last year thinks he knows which book is at the top of the White House reading list this spring: Animal Spirits, the powerful new blast of behavioural economics from Nobel prize-winner George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller.

Judging by the upbeat economic message we have been hearing from the White House, the Treasury and even the Federal Reserve over the past six weeks, that is a shrewd guess. The authors argue that “we will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature”. Our “ideas and feelings” about the economy are not purely a rational reaction to data and experience; they themselves are an important driver of economic growth – and decline.

Since mid-March President Barack Obama and his team have mounted a sophisticated effort to brighten those “ideas and feelings”, reassuring the nation with “glimmers of hope across the economy” and the assertion that “we’re starting to see progress”. The much bally-hooed stress tests – whose comprehensively leaked results were fully unveiled after the markets closed on Thursday – are both an important example of this confidence-building campaign and its toughest challenge.

WAS reading the Wikipedia entry on psychiatrist M. Scott Peck the other day and imbibed of this well-written and fascinating exposition of Peck’s writings on the subject of evil:

Evil

Peck discusses evil in his book People of The Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil. Peck characterizes evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection (sin) and its consequent guilt. This syndrome results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims (often children), which is the paradoxical mechanism by which the People of the Lie commit their evil. Peck argues that these people are the most difficult of all to deal with and extremely hard to identify, consistent with the characterization of evil in Christian theology as hiding in the light. He describes in some detail several individual cases involving his patients. In one case which Peck considers as the most typical because of it’s subtlety, he describes Roger, a depressed teenage son of respected well off parents. In a series of parental decisions justified by often subtle distortions of the truth they exhibit a consistent disregard for their son’s feelings and a consistent willingness to destroy his growth. With false rationality and normality they aggressively refuse to consider that they are in any way responsible for his resultant depression, eventually suggesting his condition must be incurable and genetic.

Some of his conclusions about the psychiatric condition he designates “evil” are derived from his close study of one patient he names Charlene. Although Charlene is not dangerous, she is ultimately unable to have empathy for others in any way. According to Peck, people like her see others as play things or tools to be manipulated for their uses or entertainment. Peck states that these people are rarely seen by psychiatrists and have never been treated successfully.

He gives some identifying characteristics for evil persons. Discussed below are Peck’s views.

Evil is described by Peck as “militant ignorance”. The original Judeo-Christian concept of “sin” is as a process that leads us to “miss the mark” and fall short of perfection. Peck argues that while most people are conscious of this at least on some level, those that are evil actively and militantly refuse this consciousness.

An evil person:

• Is consistently self deceiving, lying to themselves about their important (non-trivial) faults (eg. performance as a parent) in order to maintain a self image of perfection
• Is willing to psychologically destroy others rather than face their own faults
• Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else (“their insensitivity toward him was selective”)
• Abuses political (emotional) power (“the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion”)
• Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so
• Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency
• Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoat)
• Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character disorder.

Using the My Lai Massacre as a case study Peck also examines group evil, discussing how human group morality is strikingly less than individual morality. Partly he considers this to be a result of specialization, which allows people to avoid individual responsibility and pass the buck, resulting in a reduction of group conscience. Peck also considers how people in groups generally regress psychologically and are thus more able to generate and maintain group self deception, a risk factor for evil.

Though the topic of evil has historically been the domain of religion, Peck makes great efforts to keep much of his discussion on a scientific basis, explaining the specific psychological mechanisms by which evil operates.

Ultimately Peck says that evil arises out of free choice. He describes it thus: Every person stands at a crossroads, with one path leading to God, and the other path leading to the devil. The path of God is the right path, and accepting this path is akin to submission to a higher power. However, if a person wants to convince himself and others that he has free choice, he would rather take a path which cannot be attributed to its being the right path. Thus, he chooses the path of evil.

Political Implications

Sounds to me he is equating evil in individuals to what is termed today malignant narcissism – in its most extreme form, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Highly interesting, the political implications. Don’t many politicians – and the policies derived – seem highly narcissistic? To wit, some have somewhat compellingly argued Barack Obama may suffer from NPD.

Insofar as our President, apparently quite a few people are wondering as much.

Search on Google for “Obama narcissism” (without quotes). This means that you’re searching for pages that have both the words Obama and narcissism.

1,280,000 pages result! (note: this was the result from a search performed 3/24/2009. When I performed the same search just now, “about 385,000″ results. Were 900,000 pages duplicates or false-positives which Google has automatically or manually removed? Or is something else going on here?)

Clinton + narcissism generates 120,000 (3/24/2009 figure. Today that figure has increased to “about 176,000)

Bush + narcissism yields 330,000 (3/24/2009 figure. Today it has increased slightly to “about 335,000″.)

Reagan + narcissism = 78,000 (3/24/2009 figure. It has increased to “about 85,100″.)

Interesting that Bush includes both Bushs, encompassing 20 years of either Presidency or Vice Presidency. Obama has been in office for but 3 months.

Bill Clinton – also talked about at times as a narcissist – was President for 8 years, yet has 1/10th the hits as Obama (3/24/2009 figure. Today it’s still a striking 1/2.)

You can make the argument that the Internet was less highly utilized in Clinton’s era than in Obama’s, but this argument doesn’t hold well in contrasting with Bush, particularly considering the 8 years v. 3 months of service.

Clearly, many people are on to this presumption. I guess the inevitable question is “what to do with this information?” It does help process his intentions.

I am left to wonder if his psychological history is embedded in his school records and the other records (notably medical) which he has not released. Recall McCain released thousands of pages of medical records and Obama released a single page summary, a mere 276 words long.

Dr. Ali Sina (or someone purporting to be the same) has gone so far as to produce a video based off his earlier piece on his perception of Obama as having NPD. “Ali Sina” is a pseudonym for an Iranian ex-muslim living in Canada. His site has a collection of the most well-reasoned essays I have seen regarding Islam in light of empirical truth. I cannot determine in what subject he holds his PhD. He writes quite well.

I am somewhat taken aback by the difference in page hits regarding “Obama narcissim”, 3/24/2009 and today. Can someone please offer a reasonable explanation for that discrepancy, particularly considering the consistency of the other searches?

She started reading a novel several weeks back and, as we lay in bed, she’d communicate passages she found fascinating in their parallels for today. That novel is Celia Garth: a Story of Charleston in the Revolution. I believe she was turned onto it by a friend who’d read it several times as a youth. Here’s a brief synopsis from a reviewer on Amazon.com:

In Celia Garth, we follow the life of a 20 year old seamstress. Celia goes back and forth between a Charleston townhouse and a plantation on the outskirts of town, and we receive a look at what it was like to live during the Revolution. The book ties in many historically documented facts including Francis Marion and his men, the British bombardment of Charleston, the siege of Charleston, British atrocities to plantations, the rebel spy network, actual battles and many famous military leaders. It is fascinating to read how Charlestonians were forced by Patriot troops to give up all their food supplies (except for rice), causing townsfolk to starve. Life was definitely not easy.

Something else my wife noted to me was how King George effectively bought the allegiance of Charlestonians, in part with threats of confiscation of property and destruction of their livelihood. These people, the Torys, were unable to openly revolt, as they were established: they had families, children, businesses. My wife noted the parallels today with the spread of socialism: how the established are effectively being bought-off through the fear of what will happen if they do not go along.

In Celia Garth, it was the single people – particularly the unmarried and unestablished men – who could actively revolt. Such is why is was very encouraging to see so many young people (upwards of 5000) at the recent CPAC gathering. These are our potential revolutionaries.

So back to my wife’s reading this book. She was on to something. I happened across an essay this morning titled If You Liked King George, You’ll Love Barack Obama. The author goes into the history of the Stamp Act and other efforts of the King George III government to control the flow of information in the Colonies. He then describes the current threats to the free flow of information via the “Fairness Doctrine” and the principle of “localism” and community review boards.

So, where is there a whiff of the tactics of King George in these modern actions? President Obama has announced that he opposes the reestablishment of the “Fairness” Doctrine. He has made no public statement on the other two ways of controlling the new media, especially talk radio. There are good reasons to believe that President Obama supports one or both of these other routes.

Both would censor the broadcast media who criticize the government the same way that King George sought to censor print media, by threatening their licenses to operate. That’s the clear and dangerous parallel between 1776 and 2009.

But if there are too many Americans who don’t know who King George was and what he did to control “his” colonies in North America, we are in even deeper trouble than just restriction of free speech on talk radio.

My wife was on to something alright. It’s called history. I’ll let you know when she spots our Tom Paine.

Note: cross-posted at TIFI.net

What I’m looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world’s economy to regain its footing. And you know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. It bobs up and down day to day, and if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.

One could hardly call a 30% slide in the major equities indicies since he started revealing his policies “day-to-day gyrations”! Were I in or nearing retirement age, looking to withdraw investments, I would be horrified by what I see. If in fact the markets were “gyrating”, I would concur with our President; you can’t look day to day for long-term estimations. But the temerity to suggest this profound slide is anything less than a real situation – the nerve!

He’s a politician, so I understand he’s going to spin things. He’s not going to take ownership for what is decidedly a reflection of the sentiments of investors on his policies and those of the Congress. But he could at the very least call a spade a spade, admit the markets are way down and that he is concerned enough to share in the pain of those affected. Brushing aside what people know is a real problem is tantamount to extreme arrogance – and in the position of President, quite moronic.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about his policies and the markets yesterday:

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year’s fourth quarter.

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama’s agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital — financial and political — to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his “stimulus” spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama’s ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

The President is not a stupid man, but his actions are moronic. Moronic is generous. If I don’t believe them so, I am then forced to look at other explanations – the many conspiracy theories floating around. There are reasonable estimations that he is doing this in order to collapse markets and transfer assets from the private sector to the public. That is, nationalize on a sweeping scale – convert the U.S. economy to a European Socialist model (or beyond).

As I said, calling his policies moronic is charitable.

Note: cross-posted at TIFI.net

Schock is an interesting fellow. 27, elected in a marginal Democrat district that went for Obama, and yet he is very solidly conservative in his values and voting record. He had similar results as a state representative, winning by a good margin in a Democrat district. So how does he do it? Seems like a combination of earnestness and hard work. People believe he’s acting in their best interests. They trust him. He has an interesting how-to for Republicans on his website (cheekily titled “A Schock to the system”). Perhaps not surprisingly, in it the words of another rising Republican star appear:

Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia is the House Chief Deputy Whip (the Number Four Republican leader) and has hosted events for Schock’s campaigns and said, “Aaron Schock is the role model for what our party needs to do to win back the voters we have lost in recent years. He will re-energize our party in Congress and I strongly support his election.”

Watch this guy. If he can keep the energy and stay clean, he may be the future.

The professional politician makes his way in the world (produces his income) by holding elected office. The archetype of this sort is the current Vice President, Joe Biden. Biden was elected to the Senate as a young man and stayed in that position for three decades before becoming VP. He had a brief stint as an private attorney, but since then has been on the public dole. He is somewhat infamous for not having made additional income either through industry or investment, relying instead on the promise of a future pension, and for his relatively paltry gifts to charity, per his tax records. I believe his argument in the latter case is his service to the people through his role as a legislator more than compensates for the apparent lack of charitable giving.

The elite politician, on the other hand, doesn’t need the office for financial remuneration. He or she holds office rather for the elements of power. The archetype of this sort is Nancy Pelosi, the extremely wealthy congresswoman from California.

Both of these types of politician are problematic in the same way, but for different reasons. Both will reflexively compromise integrity and values: the professional for money, the elite, for power. As I said, sometimes they cross categories. A lowly professional politician, such as Bill Clinton, through years of “service”, can through his connections become quite wealthy and thus, an elite. This crossover is perhaps the most disgusting of the realms of politics, as it often exposes the shameless graft, influence-peddling, and corruption that can and does take place at very high levels of government. What’s the difference between (former Illinois governor) Rod Blagojevich and any of his Chicagoland political cronies? He was caught.

Another, perhaps more palpable issue for conscientious Americans is the isolation of the legislator from the citizen. While it is quite possible the professional politician will become disconnected from the realities of life for average Americans, through the many insular perks which come with the job, it is almost guaranteed the elite politician will be disconnected from these experiences. George H. W. Bush famously marveled at an electronic supermarket scanner – a technology that had been in place for years – and the image of this hurt his perceived connection with the public. That this story was reported out of context is less important than the fact his connectedness with the average American was injured. Where is the public outrage at the obvious insular world in which many of our politicians live? Stymied, I suggest, by a largely sympathetic & incestuous newsmedia which does not wish to show our (liberal) representatives in a poor light.

Burt Prelutsky appears to have a simlar concern about the cloistered representative:

I almost felt sorry for Tom Daschle. I, for one, believed him when he said he hadn’t realized he had to pay taxes on his car and driver as a private citizen. After all, he’d had a tax-free car and driver when he was a senator. What I would really like to know is why my tax money is going to pay for cars and chauffeurs for our public servants. After all, the more isolated these weasels are from normal life, the more they see themselves as royalty. Here in L.A., we used to have a mayor who lived on a hilltop in the San Fernando Valley. He commuted downtown to City Hall by helicopter. Do you think he spent a lot of time worrying about potholes on the street and traffic on the freeway?

The argument, of course, is that these people get a lot of work done going to and from the job. But why would anyone buy that malarkey when we know how little work they actually do when they reach the office? Most of the actual work is done by their staff, while they, themselves, concentrate on raising campaign funds so they can continue living like King Louis XIV.

Such is why my favorite politician – the only one I really ever trust – is the citizen-legislator. This is the sort who has had a successful career as something other than a politician. He or she made his or her way in the private sector long before entering the public. This politician often bucks the system, escehwing many of the unadvertised (and questionable) perks, and chooses to remain as loyal a representative of his or her constituents as is possible.

This is not to say I do not admire more traditional politicians who hold views similar to my own. But I am always somewhat less disposed to trust them. Congressman Eric Cantor is a good example of this category of politician. We see eye to eye on many subjects and yet, because he is more a traditional career politician, I am less likely to believe he is acting in my best interests. There’s a very good article on his recent prominence in the New York Times, no less.

As for the citizen-legislator, several names come to mind. Probably my favorite is Tom Price of Georgia. Here’s a snippet from his House bio page:

Congressman Price received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Michigan and completed his Orthopaedic Surgery residency at Emory University. Price established an orthopaedic clinic just north of Atlanta. After nearly twenty years of private practice he returned to Emory University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor. Before coming to Congress, Price was Medical Director of the Orthopaedic Clinic at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, teaching resident doctors in training.

Price is active in the Atlanta community, is a past President of the Roswell Rotary Club and has served on Boards of the North Fulton Chamber of Commerce, Orchestra Atlanta, the Arthritis Foundation, and the North Metro YMCA. He is a member of the Georgia Ensemble Theater, Roswell Clean and Beautiful, and the Chattahoochee Nature Center.

Like Ron Paul, he’s an MD. Who are you more likely to listen to on the issue of health care, a couple of MDs or a littany of elite and professional politicians? So why are we so eager to accept the machinations of the latter?

Other favorites of the nearly citizen-legislator category: Paul Ryan of WI, Mike Pence of IN, Jeff Flake of AZ, and Michele Bachmann of MN. From Bachmann’s bio:

Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, live in Stillwater where they own a small business mental health care practice that employs 42 people. The Bachmann’s have five children, Lucas, Harrison, Elisa, Caroline, and Sophia. In addition, the Bachmanns have opened their home to 23 foster children, which has inspired Congresswoman Bachmann to become one of Congress’ leading advocates for foster and adopted children, earning her bipartisan praise for her efforts.

Again, here’s a citizen with real-world experience in running a small business, with elements of the health care system, and with very difficult societal issues such as adpotion. Who do we want to listen to when it comes to adoption and foster children – politicians who have sat on committees, signed legislation, etc. or people who have actually done the hard work of being in these kids’ lives?

I realize there are a lot of good legislators (like Cantor) who fall into the more traditional class of politicians. So, I am wary of playing up the notion of the citizen-legislator too much. But even with the traditional politicians, there are signs that some of them are likely connected to the reality of the average American. On Cantor’s bio page:

The Cantors have three children, Evan, who is currently attending college, and Jenna and Michael, both of whom attend Henrico County Public Schools.

I think conservatives would be well-served to not only lean upon their citizen roots, but make this a – or the - centerpiece of their proposal to connect with the voting populace in 2010.