Author: White Whale

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it put this way explicitly, but it is blatantly obvious that a functioning corporation acts as a permanent stimulus which, rather than costing tax dollars, pays them in.

Keynesian “stimulus” packages can only be necessary even in ( demonstrably moronic) theory when there are an insufficient number of corporate stimulators.  When the private sector is suffering, for example, because FDR following Hoover (but without any of his native intelligence) tried to be smart and direct it.

Tax cuts stimulate the job creation process.  Jobs, in turn, stimulate the economy, which increases overall income, which increases the overall amount of tax collected.  This happened under Reagan, and again under George W.

Why do so many people not know this?  Because a sizable part of our public intelligentsia is batshit insane.  Insanity teaches little but mouth breathing, indignation, and dogma to be repeated verbatim.

It occurs to me to comment that the reason there is a close association between left wing politics and acting—besides the obvious connection of infantile sentimentality—is that LEFTISTS ARE ALWAYS ALREADY ACTORS.

Lenin was an actor, who pretended first he was s nationalist, then a moderate. Obama was an actor who pretended to care about black Americans and the undertrodden generally. He was an actor of the script reading variety. Little talent, less caring.

When it is always about power, and the rhetoric is nonetheless benign, they are lying, and an actor is someone who lies for a living. Perhaps we might term actors proto-politicians. The reasons Kevin Spacey took to his role in House of Cards seem obvious enough.

In his own way, I might add, he WAS Kaiser Soze. Life is filled with circles, and perhaps much acting leads back to basic truths.

What do you believe? Simple question. If the answer involves a posture, you are lying to someone.

To be a dissident is to be declared legally blind.

“You don’t see what we see”, they say, “therefore you are both blind and evil.”

In a very real sense, this whole boondoggle represents a highly organized campaign to weaponize weather and subordinate it to ideological ends.

I’m looking at this whole “global extinction” thing and EVEN IF I believed the IPCC this whole thing is several orders of magnitude beyond their current best guesses, which themselves have had ZERO predictive value once we make the simple observation that they can only be made to work using fudged numbers applied to woefully incomplete and unreliable land based measurements.

The warming has to start in the sky. It HAS to. This is the CORE hypothesis. It starts about a mile up and if this were REAL science that would be the focus.

It isn’t. Ergo and QED.

Wild but interesting night.

I am struck with the notion that it must be exceedingly rare for the notion of growth to occur to sentient organisms.  Growth is, in effect, a chosen disequilibrium, when biological systems–all physical systems, really–will always gravitate towards homeostasis naturally.

True growth, qualitative growth, is always towards the unknown.  There is, yes, the growth in skill, for example playing piano or throwing a football.  These are known pathways. 

Growth in the self, though: one cannot possibly predict what will happen, or precisely how it will feel.  Such a thing can only be motivated by pain, which is to say an existing disequilibrium.  Perhaps this is an induced disequilibrium, such as the tenet that life is pain, as exposited by the Buddha.

I will comment, though, that often growth, too, is pain.  The path, though, is towards a new equilibrium.  Or perhaps not.  I cannot know.  Perhaps the words are “higher participation.”

I saw my kids today, and it occurred to me that as they grow, it is necessary to regularly renegotiate your relationship with them.  I want to think of them as they were then, but that is not how they are now.  Their job is to individuate and grow off in their own direction.  My job is to recognize and support this, to remain in emotional touch, but nothing close to emotional control, or even a strong desire to influence, if they are not asking my advice.

Life is a dance, and you can’t dance if you never move your feet, or pay attention to the people you are dancing with.  It’s beautiful and sad, and although there is much wisdom most of us will never see, there is, if we wait and look and hope and prepare, much wisdom we WILL see.  This is the seasoning of aging, of separating, and of renewing.

I’ve been having chaotic dreams lately.  Last night I dreamed I was in one of the Apollo capsules, hurtling towards Earth, confined, filled with vertigo, and terribly grateful land on Earth and lean on a fence post to recover.  Yes, I know they did not land on the Earth.  It was a dream.

Or in halls filled with zombies.  They kept turning me into a zombie, and I kept turning back.  Crowds and chaos everywhere.

Vivid dreams.  Through my work, I am slowly descending from 30,000 feet into the stormy clouds below.  This is painful–I feel like I am on a rack sometimes, being stretched in horrible and grotesque ways–but it is progress.

For me, although I think many are this way, trauma always feel like I want to rest, to sleep, to get past the overtiredness, but sleep never does the trick.  The tension, and the fatigue the continual hyperarousal creates, never goes away.  I want to nap for ten years, but ten years would not suffice.  I would wake up the same.  A lifetime would not suffice.

What I am doing now, I am sometimes sleeping 12 hours, but waking up feeling that through the fight something has diminished, and this is good.

And to be clear, I am not even remotely depressed.  I am working directly on my brain, and it is yielding new, better patterns.

This is the term the Warmists would use, if they were not trying to hide the failures of their predictions by making ordinary weather always an indicator they are right: hot, cold, unusually mild: all smoking guns that we need a world government, and absolutist control over energy production and much private consumption.

I wanted to comment briefly on “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”.  Eva Kor, I believe her name was, said repeatedly that her main goal was to release not her memory of the events in her mind, but in her body, and her emotions.  Well, she didn’t say it quite like that, but that was my reading into it.  She wanted to seize power, to control who she was and how she felt every day.

And she was contrasted explicitly with other women who went through what she did, and who seemingly felt the lifelong misery they were enduring to be a form of faithfulness to the memory of those who were lost.

In my own view, this goes deeper, to a sense of a need to be faithful to who you have become, to who you “are”, and if that person suffers daily from traumatic memories, from chronic and spasmodic terrors, from wincing in remembrance, from nightmares, and hypervigilence, then continuity requires us to hold on to those things.

There is fear.  This is a normal and healthy thing.  It keeps us safe.  It tells us something isn’t right, or that an unusual degree of care and attention is needed.

Then there is the fear of fear, which for the traumatized is a quick falling off a cliff into a repetition of a sense of utter horror and helplessness.  Small fears set off the whole cascade.  You get triggered, and rightfully fear getting triggered, so you become smaller as a human being.  You avoid anything which might  set off the chain reaction.

[I will note that as someone who has a lot of trauma in him, I get the fear of being triggered.  But I do not try and pretend that the world owes me a duty, or that I can live anything even approximating a good life when I attach my own mental health to the compliance of others, who for their part are very likely to be codependent enablers, and thus people who benefit psychologically from my dysfunction, fear and pain.  Fuck those people.  I got this.]

Then finally there is the fear of the LOSS of fear, of a moment when you realize that something that just happened would have triggered you in the past, but now doesn’t.  That you are “healed”, or at least non-symptomatic, and this feels unfamiliar and strange.

Sebern Fisher talks about this a fair amount in her book.  Patients lose the sense of who they are, when they no longer live with chronic fear as a constant companion (which strangely enough, is the correct word).  For this reason, she never tries for too much change, too rapidly.  But that is a fantastic thing, is it not, when too-rapid change is a real risk, particularly when compared to the more general theme that certain traumas really can’t be healed, but merely managed?

I of course can’t speak to the experiences not just of the Holocaust, but in some respects the worst part of it (although the children were apparently fed better in better housing, when some poison or disease was not being injected into them by a psychopath), but I can’t help but feeling 1) that the dead family members would vastly prefer healing and relative forgetting; and 2) that the deeper fear is the Void, of losing all relative bearing, of not knowing any more who one is.

When you think about it, is it not ODD that a religion from 3,000 years ago, that originated in a specific land, and was oriented around specific places, would endure thousands of miles away from its home, in lands of radically different nature?  Obviously, Judaism gives something to its followers that is more powerful than the price they have always paid for being different.  It gives them a clear sense of self, and a powerful means of organizing their lives.  It is a powerful tool for dealing with existential angst, the confusion of life, and the pain of life.

As a tool, though, religion–all religions–can also be constraints and cages.  The Self is larger than any religion.  The Buddhists of course speak of Anatman, or Anatta, but what they really mean is that what we call our self is really a bit ridiculous.  We have understood nothing.  That, in any event, is my belief.

This Eva, I think, intuited much of this.  She said “I am willing to be the person who walks outside the gate, and I am going to call this process forgiveness.  You call it what you want.  It’s my business, not yours, my life, not yours, and I am simply trying to point out this is an option.  Beyond that, stop the talking, I have a house to sell.”

My two cents.

Today I am not going to try and excel.  I don’t normally, I don’t think, but today I am going to try to find my middle.  Healthy excellence comes from the middle, eventually.  This I believe.

I also believe many of our heroes are compulsive, and not in control of their own lives.  To be human is precisely to differ from a machine.  We were not meant to be great, but to be healthy and happy.  Greatness may from time to time be needed, but should never be sought.

These are my words, for this moment, on this day.