Keep it simple make it fun (KISMIF)

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “Thank You”, it would be enough. —Johannes (“Meister”) Eckhardt (13th-14th century mystic)

I won't be celebrating “Turkey Day” as the radio announcers call it. I'll be observing Thanksgiving. I can't see myself celebrating when the troops in Iraq are undergoing hardships. It will be a somber time of reflection for me, out of respect for the dead on both sides. The turkey is safe from me; I don't eat animals, and I plan on a simple meal for myself. The kids will get something a little more festive.

In happier times, I would enjoy the day more, but not to excess. A day set aside for showing gratitude has turned into a day of gluttony for many. My personal observation of the shopping frenzy over the past week is that a lot of people are really overdoing this and spoiling the holiday. It will turn into a day of disappointment, because no amount of (over) consumption will lead to personal fulfilment. I suspect that ignoring this fact is what causes the “holiday blues”.

It's too late for us. Save the kids

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stood still
Silent running, Mike + the Mechanics

As an exercise in analyzing media propaganda, I was going to comment on the spin that followed the release of a video recording the field execution of an Iraqi soldier, until I came to the conclusion that we are so far gone that at this point we need to focus on salvage operations—salvaging what was good in our culture and our people, before the people in charge destroy the rest of it and us.

With that in mind we can start by saving our children, and particularly our sons, who are draft-bait.

The vast majority of American children do not have any of the skills they will need to survive the end of this Age. Not only do they not have the skills, but they are essentially forbidden to acquire them. Federal monies for schools and federal regulations make it impossible for the states and local school districts to have any real autonomy. You could not get teacher certification without going through a training program based on the orthodoxy of Dewey and Bloom, which are also required for school accretidation.

Sad to say, the very nature of what education is or what it should be isn't clear. It's doubtful that it ever has been clear. In most civilizations including our own, formal education began among economic classes with little incentive to learn anything practical. Classical Chinese education revolved around memorizing Confusianistic texts, which left the country being run by hopelessly ineffective Mandarins who stood by paralyzed while the country was overrun by foreigners from much smaller countries.

Until relatively recent in history, education in the English-speaking countries consisted of being handed lists of books to read. You got your degree when you crossed them all off. Typically the lists covered Plato, Aristotle, a few Roman Orators, and some largely fictional English history (starting from King Arthur). Surgeons for the royal armed forces were recruited from among butchers, because educated people didn't know anything about human (much less bovine) anatomy.

So we started with a system that was wildly impractical. In the 19th century, degrees from German universities carried some prestige among Americans because you had to actually pass some exit exams to get one. From about that time until John Dewey completely took over the educational system was probably the Golden Age of American education.

Follow this link to find out what happened next.

It's hard to pull a definative quote because there are too many horrors to choose from. I'll just take the first line and leave it at that:

“I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.”

Sorry, Mr. Dewey, but I don't want to participate in your social consciousness! John Dewey was an author and signatory of the Humanist Manifesto, a document of Anglo-marxism promoting the equality of slaves.

Dewey intentionally turned schools public and private into indoctrination camps. The marxist Benjamin Bloom furthered Dewey's work, developing the abomination currently known as “Outcome Based Education” (also known as “Mastery Learning” and “Performance-Based Education”). Students are expected to conform to certain “outcomes”, meaning they are expected to have certain state-approved behavior patterns and beliefs. Failure to demonstrate the expected behaviors and beliefs results in “remediation”, possibly followed by “interventions”. For example, students in Oregon (a major OBE hellhole) have been denied high-school diplomas for refusing to participate in marxist “education through labor” programs designed to teach the prol's their place in life.

Actual knowledge starves while attitudinal conditioning gets all the attention. Even knowing something is not enough; students should (or at least, have the potential to) not just know but know how. American students don't learn how to do anything useful (oh they learn plenty, and if their parents only knew...) in school. Europe is not much better, and Australian and Canadian schools are following the American lead down the OBE path of destruction.

Many parents are extremely confused about these issues. They see their kids doing their homework and think that everything's OK. They need to take a closer look at the homework. I'll explain why in an upcoming installment.

Field executions

The URL is far too long, so a quote will have to do: (AP)“...The shooting Saturday was videotaped by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said three other previously wounded prisoners in the mosque apparently also had been shot again by the Marines inside the mosque.”

My heartfelt condolences to the next-of-kin. May your brothers and sons and fathers make their way swiftly to paradise.

I realize that when Moslems are killed in battle, the next-of-kin want the bodies to be buried within 24 hours with their heads pointing towards Mecca. I am sorry for the disrespectful way in which the coalition has handled this.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between malice and stupidity. There is an old saying something to the effect of "never ascribe to malice what is more simply explained by stupidity".

I think we have both going on here. Given a number of field executions recorded on-camera by different reporters on different days, and assuming that for each one we know about there are at least a few we don't, we can safely assume that coalition troops were at least under orders to produce some bodycount, or perhaps even given orders not to take prisoners. It has happened before, and there was a lot of propaganda before the assault on Fallujah that a high body count was considered strategically desireable, to break the spirit of the resistence.

That part is malice.

Carrying out field executions on-camera, on the other hand, is stupidity. I realize that the coalition leadership is intentionally provoking violent conflict to satisfy some sort of “clash of civilizations” type of culling of the herd, but it would make more sense for their atrocities to appear on Arab-language television, not on NBC. They're supposed to be breaking the wills of the Iraqis, not the brainwashed Americans who think we're dropping love-bombs. I expect damage control and spin from all the usual suspects over the next few days; the AP story was significantly altered within a few minutes of my having downloaded the first story.

My guess is that they were trying to get “heroic” videos for propaganda purposes, but their stunt backfired badly when the right hand didn't quite realize what the left hand was up to.

That was the consequence of another attribute of the coalition leadership: conceit.

Defend our soldiers!

Acording to hearsay, during the Battle of Stalingrad, local soldiers were motivated to hold the city by way of mass executions of their peers by the soviets. I have learned to treat big numbers with healthy skepticism but the number thrown around is about a million Russians and Ukrainians executed by the soviets.

Whether the number is accurate or not, the soviets were definitely known to be cruel to the soldiers under their command. Aleksandr Solzhinitsyn wrote The GULAG Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULAG) based on his own experiences as a soldier who was arrested and sent into the GULAG system. Many of the stories he documented were of other soldiers who were swept up in the mass arrests and executions—along with various sorts of intellectuals such as artists, writers, scientists, and engineers.

Our own polcymakers have much of the same attitudes towards military men as the soviets did. that Dr. Henry Kissinger referred to American soldiers as “dumb, stupid animals”. He's actually still active in some high-level policy discussions, but more to the point their actions, behaviors, and public statements indicate that current policymakers' attitudes towards military men are about the same.

It seems to me that many cultures treat their soldiers badly, and some more than others. There is some tradition of soldier-abuse in the English-speaking countries, much of it related to the military courts. The English “Star Chamber” was abolished in 1641, but the name lives on to refer to the British propensity for secret or rigged military trials.

The British Articles of War imposed a mandatory death sentence on British officers who “failed to do their utmost” in the service of the crown. The interpretation of “utmost” was left up to the judgment of armchair warriors who had nothing to lose. In practice, they had men shot for an orderly retreat from a hopeless position to spare their soldiers a massacre, lapses in judgment, poor strategy, or losing.

Ignoring questions about the value of human life, does this policy make sense from a coldly-practical point of view? High-ranking officers have to be recruited and cultivated. You only want smart, capable, effective men in these positions. Who with brains would agree to take such massive risk if his predecessor ended up in front of the firing squad because a government bureaucrat didn't agree with his handling of the situation?

If British politicians are hard on the officers they didn't spare the troops either. 346 British soldiers were shot during WW1, 306 of them for breeches of military discipline such as falling asleep at their post or reacting to the effects of severe shell-shock. Some of them were teenage boys, one as young as 14. They were shot at dawn by their own comrades who were ordered to do the deed; what impact do you suppose that had on morale?

American soldiers were apparently a little less expendable, fewer of them having been executed (that we know about!), but the “founding fathers“ showed their own contempt for soldiers by paying the soldiers who fought the American Revolutionary War in fraudulent banknotes. This is the origin of the expression “not worth a continental”.

I suspect that you would find worse atrocities in the American Civil War. Contrary to modern historical spin, the war was extremely unpopular and widely considered fratricidal. The stakes were high enough that Abraham Lincoln ordered hundreds of secret arrests, trials, and imprisonment or executions of dissidents, while anti-draft demonstrators were massacred; it is reasonable to suspect that there were numerous unrecorded field executions to keep the troops motivated. Maybe he justified his crimes under the exigencies of international banking under seige.

The World Wars were complex, and massively propagandized, so I will skip commenting on the American experience of them here and jump ahead to Vietnam. Why did we lose over 50,000 troops over a country with no strategic value to our security or our economy? What were we trying to accomplish—were we supposed to defend our strategic rice fields? Wasn't a major goal of the war to increase the value of Lady Bird Johnson's Martin Marietta stock?

The high and pointless body count in Vietnam was the result of Pentagon budgeting. Just past the height of our industrial prime, Pentagon planners were sacrificing drafted men to spare equipment and weapons. That's why they want a military draft again.

We lost that war. There are two popular theories regarding why we lost that war. Both of them are wrong.

A theory that is popular outside-the-beltway is that empires either can't or don't know how to fight guerilla wars. The theory inside-the-beltway is similar: that empires fare poorly in guerilla wars because they aren't ruthless enough. If only they would be ruthless enough, they could break the collective will of the target population. And the only thing stopping the Empire from being more ruthless is lack of cooperation from its own population. The Nomenklatura consider us to be fat, lazy, and soft. They want to toughen us up and harden our hearts.

They don't want us to feel sympathy for the soldiers who are fighting their battles for them. The excuse of toughening up the troops makes it easier for the policy people to cut benefits to soldiers, ban photography or video at military funerals, lie about the casualty rates, overextend and overtax the troops, allow low-ranking soldiers to take the blame when high-level orders to torture and humiliate prisoners of war were exposed, let soldiers take the blame for unpopular wars as if they had any say in the matter, and pay for persecution, harassment, and ritual humiliation of soldiers through government grants to activist groups that are hostile to them. Your first clue that things are not as they seem should have been that a lot of American antiwar dissent attacks the soldiers but praises the government that sent them. Jane Fonda is more welcome in Establishment circles than the soldiers she demonized.

The real reason that we lost Vietnam, and are losing Iraq, is because our rulers are far too corrupt to be effective. During Vietnam, they sent wheat and strategic resources to the Soviet Union to keep it propped up; had they put an economic embargo on the country instead, it and all of its allies would have collapsed. The Soviet economic and foreign policy models were fatally flawed, but our politicians were keeping them going anyway for the sake of the investment bankers who had originally sponsored the soviets to seize Russia's mineral wealth.

I am not a moral person; I simply favor harmony over brutality. If the US-British invasion of Iraq would have been the “surgical strike” that was promised, and if the colonial masters who were put in charge of running the occupation had been competent, I would have considered going over to work on rebuilding the infrastructure. But a quick Google search on their names revealed that every single one of them had the wrong background to get the job done. Putting members of JINSA in charge of Iraq was like putting the Turks in charge of the Armenians: a recipe for malice and sabotage. I knew it was going to turn into massacre and plunder, and I realized that the Iraqis would not fall for staged photo shoots and poorly-contrived Photoshop photomontages that were instantly recognizable as fakes.

It's important to remember that Iraqi prisoners-of-war, even if they are not wearing uniforms because they are not working for any standing government (someone already saw to that), are soldiers too. The constant demonizing of Iraqi soldiers by the sadistic, malicious American press is not only encouraging the cruelty that was already planned for them, but also cheapening the lives of soldiers in general.

Iraq was a lost cause not because our politicians have been too kind to the soldiers, but because of the unworthy character of the people who were in charge. The people in charge won't admit their own character flaws, incompetence, and corruption: instead, they will blame their failures on the people under their command for not having enough resolve (to the last man!), and will keep escalating the abuse. It will eventually turn into the GULAG Archipelago all over again.

These are our brothers and sisters I am talking about. Our sons and daughters. Don't heed the government propaganda; defend our flesh and blood.

Good cop/bad cop: Kofi Annan

Kofi Annan is adored by the Globalist/Interventionist Left for having declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. Of course he only made this pronouncement months after the invasion was already a fait accompli, and it was not accompanied by any indictments for violations of international law.

Is that man really a friend of peace and justice?

I'll let you decide for yourself. Please consider the evidence: as the highest-ranking official in the United Nations, Mr. Annan presided over the economic embargo that impoverished Iraq, causing widespread squalor, malnutrition, and a medical catastrophe that significantly reduced the population of Iraq.

He promised the Iraqis that they would not be invaded if they cooperated with UN disarmament staff, knowing full well that the invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion. He left them helpless and wide open to invasion, and then did nothing but shed crocodile tears for them.

Installing a puppet government in Iraq, gutting its economy, and seizing the petroleum was planned before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I remember clearly that there was already a good deal of anti-Iraqi propaganda circulating in certain circles at least as far back as the late 1980s. As long as the Soviet Union did stand, Iraq was considered strategic enough that Washington officials did not yield to pressure to strike. The Iraqis were lead on to believe that they had an alliance with the USA. When the Soviet Union collapsed, priorities shifted suddenly and the Iraqis were stabbed in the back.

All that was needed was the causa belli. April Glaspie was recruited to deliver it. Her meeting with Saddam Houssein was discretely recorded by the Iraqis and transcripts (follow the link if you haven't read them) were delivered to the foreign press; the one I linked to is the version supplied by the New York Times, which is not known for its sympathy to Iraq; it contains more qualifiers in key sentences than other versions. As for alternative explanations for what happened, evidence of a setup is collaborated by other evidence including an interview with Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly two days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and a Washington Post story confirming that "an Iraqi attack on Kuwait would not draw a U.S. military response". In any case they're not worth pursuing because it really doesn't matter whether Glaspie acted out of stupidity and incompetence, or malice.

While Mr. Annan might possibly be able to claim catastrophic incompetence for not being aware of US Realpolitik, how could he not have been aware of the bellicose tone of Committee on Foreign Relations reports? What about policy documents and a letter to President Clinton openly advertising their intentions to lobby for an invasion? The letter is signed by the authors and they even have it out on their website. Is he completely illiterate?

Maybe Kofi Annan is not the man the Globalist/Interventionist Left want to believe that he is.

There is an old trick used in many different cultures. In the USA it is called “good cop/bad cop”. If you take someone prisoner and want him to cooperate with you, one approach is to have two different interrogators interact with him. One of them tortures and threatens him. The other one doesn't do anything rough. He even seems sympathetic, and listens to the prisoners' concerns.

If the two collaborators are patient enough, the prisoner's resistence will break down. Oddly enough he will tend to continue resisting the “bad cop”, but will start developing a relationship called “Stockholm Syndrome” with the “good cop”. He'll start confiding in the one who seems to be sympathetic, and cooperating when asked to do something.

The important thing to remember is that the one who appears sympathetic isn't your friend. He's in league with the one administering the beatings and torture. In fact if you outlive your usefulness by telling him everything he wants to know, he won't stop the executioner from taking you away.

Watch new blog...

In the interests of keeping my blogs more focused, I am spinning off all advice and insights onto a new blog, Atar's Advice. It's still under construction, but posts should start trickling in later today. Enjoy.

We need a word...

In recent years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with the restrictions of the English language. When the Norman French invaded the British Isles, they imposed their linguistic chauvinism on the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes and Kelts. Keltic languages like Cornish essentially disappeared while Anglo-Saxon became the “vulgar” language. To this day English-speakers do not use Anglo-Saxon roots to build new words. We used to use Greek and Latin roots (occassionally mixing them up in nonsensical amalgamations), but around the 1960s or so, young Americans and British decided they already knew everything and refused to learn “dead languages” (the fact that Greek is still spoken seems to have been lost on them).

So in fact it is truly the English language which is dead. It continues to change, but this does not seem to be evolution so much as decay. The kind of English used in newspapers (even and especially ostensibly respectable ones), on television, and even on big corporate websites on the internet is brutishly anti-intellectual. I don't believe that language limits thought so much as that language reflects the actual level of thought. In any case it doesn't seem to matter much whether the concept is missing for lack of a word, or we can't make up a word for lack of the concept.

The same duality that infects “Western” thought in general limits the English language. At best we have ideas that come in pairs, instead of higher multiplicities.

For example, we have the word “egocentric” to describe a viewpoint that is restricted to one's own needs and desires. We have the word “altruistic” to describe a viewpoint that is centered on the needs and desires of anybody but one's self. These words are frequently considered to have opposite meanings—as if “self” and “other” are opposites. Maybe if you put two people together they cancel each other out!

This is the kind of mental dysfunction which is destroying the Western world.

Here are some more problems with the words we do have: the word “egocentric” is too narrow in scope. It basically means “selfish”. What do you call it when a young child or immature adult (and we seem to have a lot of those anymore) who ignores the perspectives of others not through a conscious decision or intentional malice but simply out of ignorance? For example, Piaget did something like the following experiment:

1. Sit face-to-face with a small child who can talk.
2. Show the child a ball with two colors, one covering each of two hemispheres. Point out that the ball has two colors.
3. Hold the ball in front of the child's face so that only one of the colors is visible to him (her), and the other color is facing your own direction.
4. Ask the child what color you are seeing.

Result: small children will usually answer as if you are seeing the same color that they are seeing. They fail to imagine other points of view than their own. They're not being malicious; they simply haven't reached a certain level of understanding yet. Unfortunately, some never will.

WE DO NOT HAVE A WORD FOR THAT LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING. We don't have a word for either being able to switch contexts on cue, or not being able to. I have heard the word “rational” used that way, but that's wrong: rational means something like you can follow a logical argument such as “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefor Socrates is mortal”. We need a word that specifically refers to being able to correctly handle different perspectives with regard to time, space, person, and other common variables with regard to perspective.

We lack the word because apparently most of us lack the concept. The day before yesterday I heard political commentary on National Propaganda Radio that stabbed my very soul. The speaker was talking about how for every Iraqi insurgent killed, several more rush in to take his place, so according to his analysis “we” are not killing them fast enough. His entire argument rested on the assumption that it was a moral outrage for them to resist an unprovoked foreign occupation which had resulted in the deaths of at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The fact that there are actually people who rely on National Propaganda Radio for their news suggests that a great many people are incapable of considering someone else's point of view. They are stuck in the extreme egocentric point-of-view of a small child—a particularly spoiled and arrogant one at that.

Lack of this ability to consider other points of view infests all our political discussions.

Now let's be quite clear: the Right is very egocentric. The Left is very egocentric, but postures as altruistic and expects the rest of us to actually be altruistic.

So here is our choice:

The Right: to put our own interests first without the slightest nod to anyone else's needs and desires. It is impossible to live by this code without contention and war.

The Left: to live for the needs and desires of strangers, some of them openly hostile to us, without the slightest regard for our own needs and desires. To fail utterly at this because it is impossible, and so to live a life of massive hypocracy or die of starvation and exhaustion from trying to live up to impossible goals. It is impossible for everyone, or even some fraction of us, to live by this code without contention and war.

Where is the choice that says: I will live my life for myself, but I will take into consideration the desires and needs of others and resolve conflicts-of-interest, so as to avoid conflict that will harm all of us and try to achieve an optimal win-win situation? Meaning: I will live by a code by which all of us can live without contention. WE DO NOT HAVE A WORD FOR THIS.

We almost used to: the word was “Liberal”. Unfortunately, even the concept of the Classic Liberal was deeply flawed by ideological legacies from people like John Stuart Mills who called themselves “Liberals”, but who subscribed to notions like “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”, which are incompatible with the concept I just described. I'm not looking for “the greater good” as it is often called; I am pursuing my own self-interest qualified by the needs and rights of others. Trying to equate those different concepts is an intellectual fraud.

Since about the 1910s, the word “Liberal” has been usurped (more so in the USA than elsewhere, although the American misuse is spreading) to refer to a grab-bag of Socialist and Marxist concepts. Senator Patty Murray is a Marxist-Socialist-Feminist, not a Classic Liberal, but we've lost the word “Liberal” to her kind.

What about the word “Libertarian”? Again, the problem of excess baggage, in this case political baggage. I don't want to talk about party politics, I want to talk about a characteristic of people in general regardless of political affiliation if indeed any. It doesn't help that the Libertarian Party is not particularly ideologically pure, and that ostensibly Libertarian-affiliated institutions such as Cato Institute seem to be completely incompatible with the ideals of lay Libertarians; many Libertarian institutions are not Libertarian; they are Fascist.

We are not just missing a word for some frivolous idea: we are missing a word to describe a critical threashold in mental development. If we fail to achieve that threashold—as I predict “we” collectively will—then our civilization will be destroyed, as is already starting. But I am not completely pessimistic: some of us may cross the threashold to live another day.

Front-man

In the year 1086, Japanese Emperor Shirakawa abdicated from the throne ostensiby to pursue a life of contemplation. By doing so, he greatly reduced his exposure to assassination and unpopularity...while continuing to rule behind the scenes through what the Japanese came to call “Insei” (loosely: rule from the former Emperor's home).

"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes" --The character “Sidonia” from Benjamin Disraeli's novel Coningsby

I figured that out long before I'd ever heard the Disraeli quote. Why would anyone with brains risk being a target of criticism and hatred when it would be so much easier to be either an adviser to the nominal head of state, or to supply advisors to the nominal head of state? That way the nominal head of state takes the blame for problems, and when (s)he is replaced, you or your agents can simply re-align yourselves with his (her) successor.

This is why I did not trouble myself about the recent US presidential elections. I suppose it does matter a little in terms of personality and effectiveness, but not so much that those “behind the scenes” don't ultimately get their way.

The nominal head of state—the front-man—is one aspect of the larger issue of secret government. Hundreds of pages of detailed legislation such as the so-called “Patriot Act” (in reality the Treasonous Act) suddenly show up in Congress before there had been any time to set up congressional committees to write them indicate that there is a great deal of legislative process that has no transparency whatsoever to the public.

There is more than just one layer of indirection. The think-tanks which produce legislation and policy behind the scenes are not the real power behind the throne either. The real power belongs to the people who pay the salaries for professional policy wonks with no visible means of support. The people in charge are completely invisible to the rest of us.