Author: White Whale

I don’t think Trump has nicknames for either of these two banditti yet.  He should come up with something. I think it helps him psychologically.

Nasty Nancy is my vote for her.  Chuck I’ll need to think.  “That unfunny fat chick’s first cousin, once removed” is probably not ideal.

Chuck the Huckster?  Getting warmer.  Two buck Chuck?  Chuckie the Clown?

Here is the thing: unless Trump wilts like a hothouse flower in wintertime, he’s going to win.  He can win, certainly, and with all the political capital he has risked on this shutdown, he literally has nothing to GAIN by not declaring an emergency.  There is literally no upside.  The Democrats will mock him relentlessly and even his most fervent supporters will be deeply disappointed, and can be counted on to be disengaged in 2020.  Flip side, all he risks is the condemnation he gets every day any way, and perhaps some lawsuits, if he declares an emergency.  It’s not ideal, but everyone on all sides of the issue knows he tried really hard to get this done by legislative means.

But Nancy will be in a daily pissing contest with him for the next two years, and he needs to figure out better ways of dealing with her.  She is an amoral psychopath who is well funded, but he is charming and she is not.  She is roughly as charismatic as Hillary, which is to say one thinks of wet dogs, children crying and unpaid housekeepers when one sees her speak.

It will be interesting.  Everything around Trump is interesting.  I just hope he trusts his gut and ignores the counsels of failure which are presumably circling around him.

I am listening to a lecture series on Particle Physics.  I did not have the faintest clue how complicated it is.  I remember electrons, protons and neutrons, knew there were quarks and neutrinos and positrons, but that was about it until the Higgs Boson made the news.

But no, it’s a WHOLE lot bigger than all that.  There are hundreds of particles.

The part I keyed on, though, and which I cannot say I understand fully, and which I would likely need to read the math for to even approximate a good understanding (which won’t happen since I don’t do even Calculus, which is a regret of mine I will rectify some day), is something called quantum fluctuation and Renormalization.

As I understood the lecturer, the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle allows particles to be created from nothing.  They can only be created for infinitesimally small amounts of time, and the larger they are, the smaller that amount of time, but this process is apparently continuous.  We can’t take a picture of an atom, but it might be happening millions of times a second in every atom in the universe.

The math on this within a quantum level electromagnetic field is so difficult that physicists, rather than try and figure out what was actually happening, decided to take observed electrical charges for electrons and protons, and more or less “rig” the math backwards to get the result they wanted and needed, which is to say the observed quantities of +1 for Protons and -1 for Electrons.

But again this gets to the Quantum Vacuum, which I understand is normally derived a different way, although not having read the math, I am reduced to repeating my understandings of what the  actual physicists have said.

This notion, that “there is enough energy in one square meter of ’empty’ space to boil every ocean on Earth”, as Richard Feynman put it, is in the middle of everything, literally.  All physics depends on it.  All physics assumes it.  But they have no idea what it might mean for matter to appear and disappear spontaneously. 

In the lectures he used the example of scientific progress by noting that Tyco Brahe created a large mass of raw data, Johannes Kepler created rules which described but did not explain it, and Newton created laws of physics from which Kepler’s rules could be derived.  Now, we still don’t know how gravity works, so there are still large pieces missing, but this is the pattern.

At this moment, we observe that Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle “works” as an explanatory tool, but I am not at all sure we have even reached a Newtonian level of understanding of what it means for things to simply appear from nothing.  How does that work?  What does it say about our universe?

Can we even say matter exists, when what is visible, what is “above the surface” of the fluctuations, depends entirely on a substrate which is the opposite of solid, permanent, and “real”?

As the lecturer noted, there is no way to know the “real” charge of an electron or proton.  It’s impossible. We can simply measure what’s left once the quantum fluctuations have been factored in and out.

This is very interesting work, and these are very interesting ideas.

I read recently that there has been a 20 point upswing in support for Trump recently among Hispanics.  If you think about it, this makes a ton of sense.  Who is affected most by 50,000 Spanish speaking people a month–or whatever it really is–sneaking across our border? 

Answer: the Spanish speaking people who are here legally.  These aliens are not going to go anywhere but Spanish speaking neighborhoods, which means they are mainly going to create problems for people in Spanish speaking neighborhoods.

Nancy Pelosi has a castle with a moat, for all intents and purposes, in San Francisco, apparently Napa, and no doubt Washington D.C.  Same with Chuck Schumer.  The plebes don’t get within a mile of them. The border problem might as well be something happening in Swaziland.  It’s an abstraction to be used–like everything else in their emotionally and morally poor lives–for political, which is to say personal, gain.

With respect to Trump’s announcement of a shut-down hiatus, I of course am left to guess like everyone else, but I think it had two components.  One, he was hearing a lot of stories of really good people, like the Coast Guard, having to go to food banks and rely on friends and family.  Unlike substantially all Democrats, apparently, he felt genuine concern and compassion.  For this reason, I think it is unlikely he will force this on them again. 

Secondly, the press was doing its best to make hay of the coordinated propaganda offensive they were able to undertake with an utterly corrupt FBI with respect to Roger Stone.  He quashed most of that momentum.

It is most likely he will go ahead and declare an emergency.  Tens of thousands of people pouring across our highly permeable border a month qualifies, and no Democrat lawsuit is likely to overturn that.  This is the cleanest solution, I think.

But I think Democrats are mistaken if they think that the legal Hispanic vote is reliably Democrat.  The open question, of course, is how much voter fraud they will be able to get away with in 2020.  I really hope Trump has a plan for this.

Mao’s famine was in the early 1960’s.  That means many are still alive who remember, and that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese born since who carry in their body epigenetic memories of this trauma.

Remember when parents used to tell their kids “eat your food because there are starving kids in China?”  Communism.

Band-Aid for the starving in Ethiopia?  Communism.

Communism is raids in the middle of the night, shots to the back of the head, secret police, starvation to the point of eating children (both Ukraine and China, at least, and presumably elsewhere), families being broken up at gunpoint, pointless and bloody wars, fat Commissars and Captains, endless tears, and silent cruelties of every sort.  Decent people avoid it like the plague, and those who do not, are not decent people.  Cut them no slack, and pull no punches.

So I stayed up half the night watching this silly movie, drinking maybe a tad (a pint) of vodka.

My one little thought.  I’m not proud, but perhaps I pulled something out of it.

I think I might have been one of the first to say (sober edit: it came to me, but somebody said it two thousand years ago for the thousandth time) “the best way to win a fight is to avoid it/to not be there.”  I think here of the Seven Samurai.  The samurai who avoids the debacle never even enters the door.  He says “some kind of bullshit is going on here, and I want no part of it.”

Agent 97, or whatever her name was in French, sees a step or two ahead.  What if she saw three steps?  Four?  Five?  Twenty?  100?  She would never be in danger.  She could live a calm, peaceful life that never involved guns, shooting anyone, or violence.  The far off winds would tell her, always, when to move, and when to change.

I think all of us get whiffs of when to be ready to adapt, and I think most of us ignore them.

If you think about it, current politicians should be banned from giving paid speeches.  When you are making $50,000 for a speech, that amounts to a legal bribe, when the entity paying for the speech wants something from you.  Nobody is worth that much.  This is a big part of how the Clintons became wealthy legally (to which, of course, must be added their de facto use of the Clinton Foundation as a piggy bank).

Former politicians should be banned from such activity for five years.  Perhaps they could accept a delay between political favors and recompense, but five years is likely more than most would be willing to wait.

People go to the House and the Senate and the White House from jobs paying $200-$300,000 a year, and wind up worth $20-$30 million within 10-20 years.  As a business proposition, as a pursuit solely of money and power, this is one of the surest bets going.  There are many, many forms of legal bribery.

We need to denigrate the national government as a whole in its overall role, and importance, and perhaps one step might be to diminish immensely the perks of office.

Let us suppose this universe is a vast, interactive, consciousness driven field, as many mystics have said. 

Let us suppose our souls, some part of our consciousness, survives death, as many have reported, and for which considerable empirical evidence exists.

What is the effect of spending your life playing video games?  Kids who start at 3-4, and wind up playing 8-10 hours a day for years on end?

I think I met the spirit of one of these kids last night, and they are insane.  They are monsters.  They have lost all their human traits.  They can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality in any realm.  They are not quite human, and not quite animal.  Most of all, they are confused, when it comes to the matter of inner truth.  They have spent no time in introspection, no time in silence, no time in quiet, receptive listening.  They are ill equipped to die, but die some of them undoubtedly do, in car accidents, cancer, suicide and all the other travails all of us are subjected to.

This world is insane, more than it used to be, perhaps.  Every piece of information any sane intelligent person could need to make informed decisions, and to form accurate perceptions is out there.  In abundance.  Nothing is lacking.  Closely held secrets from ages past are being shouted from the rooftops, and I think Revelations said it would be. 

But without open ears, an agile mind, and a receptive, heart, it is all waste.

Returning to Robert Mueller, I don’t know who he thinks he is, but whatever that self image is, I am completely convinced it is inaccurate to the point of farce.  I seriously doubt he sees himself as what he is–a political tool for corrupt elites.  No doubt the word justice crops up in his mind, and something like diligence and thoroughness.

If I had to take a guess, I think he in political sympathy with James Comey, who has also been a lifelong Democrat, and emotionally I think he sees this as a dick measuring contest which he intends to win, by hook or by crook, so help him God.  There’s an oath for you.

I don’t know how the center holds in the face of such determined lunacy.  I really don’t. And for that matter, by and large the center HAS broken.  You have the Left, and you have the rest of us.  This blog was created to help foster moderation, but it is hard to see how that is even possible any more.

I think Trump needs to start pro forma pardons of all people prosecuted by Robert Mueller until he either produces evidence which all sane people now know does not exist of “collusion”–the ‘evidence” for which was produced by Democrats and ingested eagerly and uncritically by an FBI which worked as a de facto operative for the Democrat Party, and which continues to do so.

Unless CNN can plausibly claim they have been camped out at Stone’s house for the last month–which I very much doubt–they were tipped off by the FBI, and that, in turn, can ONLY have been help them engineer within public perception a political effect intended to harm Trump and help the lunatic Left.

This leads to the necessary conclusion that OUR NATIONAL COPS ARE POLITICIZED AND FULLY CAPABLE OF TAKING POLITICAL PRISONERS.

To be clear, Stone may have stepped in a small way over some minor edge, but we have seen dozens of examples of similar malfeasance by Democrats that has been ignored, over and over and over.  This is straight up a political prosecution, intended to damage the sitting President.  Full Stop.

I don’t know how we purge the Deep State, but defanging Mueller by vitiating all his convictions would be a good start.  He is plainly a walking, talking violation of the 4th Amendment, which was specifically intended to prevent cops from mucking around in every last detail of people’s lives, searching for crimes, rather than having probably cause to suspect specific crimes, and offering to judges good reasons why they thought what they did.  Absent this fishing around, Manafort never would have been indicted and prosecuted.

The whole things stinks of creeping fascism.  The stink is palpable, and I will ask openly: what the fuck did Mueller fight for in Vietnam, if he is so willing now to crap on the graves of our Founders and the Constitution they enacted and enabled?  He believes nothing.  He is an amoral asshole.  I don’t know if he’s on somebody’s payroll, or if he just got into the habit of lying back when he was covering for Whitey Bulgur and just never stopped, but that he needs to leave Washington is abundantly clear.

Trump is innocent.  They have nothing.  And politically, I don’t think he would lose much if anything with these pardons.  Mueller should have wrapped up a year or more ago.

For more than one reason, but particularly with reference to his AWOL convictions in the Marines and his demonstrated habit of mendacity, can we call him Chief Running Bull?

1) We can afford it.  We sent twice the money Trump is asking for in aid to Central America without batting an eye.

2) It will help.

Here is the thing: a house with a fence around it is more secure than one without a fence, even if that, say, 4′ fence can be easily climbed.  You hear people climbing it.  You see people climbing it.  And middle aged women aren’t going to climb over.  3 year old children will not climb over.

Imagine a house with 6′ walls on three sides.  Is that house still not more secure than a house with no walls at all?  Of course it is.  The walls are not unscaleable, but it adds a layer of difficulty. You see the people when they are climbing over.

And this is more or less what Trump is proposing.  He is not proposing a wall which cannot be defeated by anyone.  He is proposing a wall which is much HARDER to defeat than open ground.  Such walls will limit how many people try to cross, and how they try to cross.  It won’t stop drugs, or human trafficking, but it will slow it down, and THIS IS GOOD.

Marginal improvements, self evidently, are still improvements.

The core issue, obviously, has nothing to do with policy.  This is a pissing contest.  Trump wants it, so Nancy Pelosi and Chuck “the corpse” Schumer want to oppose it through every cheap trick they have learned in lifetimes of cheap tricks, nasty lies, and enthusiastic corruption.

I had hope for a minute that Trump might be able lay off, say, 25% of the Federal workforce.  Do you know it is nearly impossible to fire these assholes, even when they make fat money and do something close to nothing?  This situation is unbelievable and presumably changeable somehow.  Perhaps it will take Congress to fix this, but if you can’t fire dead weight, you accumulate it.  Simple principle.

It does seem likely, though, that more and more people, the longer this thing goes on, are going to question what the hell the government actually does, when it employs nearly a million people who are not “essential”.  I haven’t noticed anything bad.  Have you?  Can’t we just keep this up indefinitely?  It’s not hurting me in any way that I can see.  Perhaps I am missing something.

But this pissing contest is Trump’s to lose, which means there is no reason that Pelosi will not cave at some point, perhaps after the EBT payments start getting affected in a few weeks, or so I read.  Again: these are hard core Democrats, who vote for a living, or something close to it.  What can Trump lose by “losing” votes he never had to begin with?  That’s all on the Democrats who, to be clear, are also pushing policies which in the long run will hurt the working poor in the United States.