Author: White Whale

 I think I am in a position to say something reasonably intelligent about President Trump.  I think he is a guy with above average intelligence, but he is not a 4-D chess player.  He is a gambler, and someone who has good instincts and–most of all–the willingness to trust them.  Sometimes he is miles ahead of everyone.  Sometimes he is flat out wrong.  But he is guided by his gut, not so much linear logic, or the expansive intellect of a Gary Kasparov, who after all only played 2-D chess. (come to think of it, what WOULD 4-D chess be?  Time was already included.  I see 4D but we should be using 3D if anything).

I think Trump’s plan for the election was simple: win by more than the margin that the Democrats could cheat by.  And it was not a bad plan.  They had to do all sorts of funky stuff they had contingency plans for, but did not want to execute for the obvious reason that it made their fraud obvious.

There was no Blockchain coding.  And there are not and never have been any mass arrests planned.  He could maybe have done more, but we are seeing now that honesty and transparency are–for obvious reasons–roundly opposed wherever Democrats run things, and even in States like Georgia, where Kemp seems to be a bought and kept man, who is right now returning favors he owes people whose names we do not know.

Here is the thing, Trump walked into a “room”–think every room he entered anywhere in Washington–filled with lifelong schemers, who understood every detail of the system, every trick, and who were talented liars.  He needed someone honest to watch his back, but found nobody.  Nobody I can think of.  Flynn was the obvious candidate, and that is why he got attacked and taken out.  Mike Pence is an honest, competent guy, but he didn’t know any more than Trump.

So virtually every person in every meeting EVER in his Presidency, Trump is facing people telling him stories.  Some he believes, some he doesn’t believe.  But he is not in a position to doubt ALL of them.  Some people he has to trust.  He needs a Director of the FBI, and Comey was an obvious crook and liar and incompetent.  Who to pick?  This guy?  OK: is he solid?  Can we trust him?  You bet, boss.  So Christopher Wray goes to the FBI.  Repeat many times, and you get his many mistakes.

How does anyone deal with something like that?  Trump is a smart guy, but he is dealing with people on their own terrain, who have been expecting him, planning for him, and who obviously ambushed him with bad ideas, and incompetents everywhere.  

Here is what I believe: if Trump were one of them, it would make no sense for him to still be fighting the election.  As Joe Biden said, they have a well oiled, fantastic, highly functional voter fraud system.  They don’t have to corrupt every city in PA to win.  They just need Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Lancaster.  The rest can do what they want.  They will never catch up.  And since Democrats run those cities, the fraud never would have been detected.  No serious arrests would ever have been made.  All the groundwork was there to create their own little Venezuela, which clearly would include gun grabs made possible by rigged elections at all levels, and in all places, including the judiciary.

No, there was no reason to upset the apple cart.  Even if they want an armed insurrection, they easily could have figured out how to do that without the world seeing their fraud system.  That benefits the power elites not at all.

So what I see is a guy who loves his country, who REALLY wants to help us, and who has been surrounded by traitors since Day One.  William Barr is obviously one himself.  He hasn’t done shit.  He has done just enough to not get fired, and to make some people think he might be honest, but nothing close to what he WOULD have done if he actually were honest.  He is more or less controlled opposition, opposition which really didn’t oppose much.

No, what Trump has shown is that an ordinary guy can make a HUGE difference if he is doing nothing more complicated than TRYING.  Get that?  Actually trying to do the job honestly.  Not working to satisfy an endless array of disgustingly greedy pigs trying to feed at the trough, but actually trying to make things better for American workers and small and even large businesses.

Trump has shown the essential simplicity of the office, and by extension, how horrifically corrupt the White Houses have been for many many years. 

Trump is to be commended.  This has not been an easy battle, and a less confident man–being betrayed for the fifth, tenth, thirtyeth time–would have thrown in the towel.  

But we NEED him.  He is indispensable in my view.  I really hope our system is not so broken that he cannot hang onto the White House in the honest, just and legal way that he earned when he won the election.

And THIS TIME he will be much more equal to the smiling faces all around him.  One can hope and pray.

 I feel quite sure there exist people who, even now, if they decided they wanted Trump to be reinaugurated, could make it happen without much trouble.  Few phones calls, to a few key State and national politicians, and a few journalists and POOF Bob’s your uncle.  That is the sort of world we live in.  It is curated according to the objectives and ideals of people who live in as many $25 million estates as they want.

There are people who could wake up one morning and decide they want to own an island in each of the Seven Seas, even if they can’t name them.  They make a phone call to their guy or gal, and a week later it is done.  They could even pay a cook $150,000 a year or more simply to hang out in the event they show up.  They could put a household staff in there they pay cumulatively $10 million a year, and never visit once.  They may forget the next week they even did that.

These people, I am quite sure, run this and most other countries.  They use the rhetoric of freedom when it suits them, and the rhetoric of Communism when it suits them.  They had their claws in the Soviet Union, and most likely even now own Cuba and Venezuela.  There are people Maduro can’t afford to piss off in any way, and he knows it.

And I was working today in a place which feels tainted with wealth.  It is most likely a small project of a very, very wealthy person, who has made it nice since they visit once in a while.

And I was asking myself: what sorts of purposes animate people like that?  What I FEEL is that they need something powerful and external to give them a sense of meaning.  It has to be something that changes them, that alters them, that acts on them.  Drugs and sex are the obvious candidates, but what I feel is that cruelty–the pure abuse of power for its own sake, of the sort Sade advocated–must come to the fore for many of them.  It is a drug like no other.  

And it is a drug that grows in you, washes over you like a wave, and leaves you weaker, more spent, and blacker.  But if you keep taking hits, it doesn’t matter to you.  And like any drug, surely the dose has to grow stronger with time.

Your money buys your habit, and it also protects your habit.  You can buy everyone around you, and in a great many cases, get law enforcement and politicians, over some period of time, to join you.

If you can have anything, you only want those things that breed those powerful, all encompassing feelings.  Regular sex will not do.  Good food will not do.  Not for many of these people.

I will share something I have kept to myself for some years now, and will even now share only the broadest outlines.

Some years ago, I was doing a personal growth retreat somewhere, and one of our assignments was listing out destructive patterns in our lives.  I happened to look at a guy behind me–I don’t remember why–and if I read his note right it was “pimping children”.  Now, he was someone in a position to do that.  He was writing all this calmly, and I could feel he was dissociating.  I do it too, and know what it looks like and how it “feels”.  You just check out.

I found out later that he was connected to some very, very powerful people, names you would know.  My experiences with him were that he was kind, and that he was a decent person.  And I feel that for the most part he was.

But I think he was raped as a child.  He never said it.  He somewhat implied it, but it was unclear.  That is 100% what I felt, though, and I am pretty good at that sort of thing.  

With that sort of thing in your past, you have multiple personalities.  And the nice personality would have been quite able to coexist with the one which disappeared and did that sort of thing.  There are countless cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder that are subclinical in most contexts.  I suspect many pedophiles are like this.

And of course I thought about saying something, to him or to the police.  But what would he have said?  This was all supposed to be private and he could easily have denied it.  No good would have been served.  He was there to help deal with his “issues”, and me ambushing him would have changed nothing.  And what would the police do?  I had no names or dates or specifics. And more importantly, I had every reason in the world to suspect that the people involved would have long ago made sure the police in the relevant jurisdictions were on their side.  I would be naked in the face of powerful attorneys, on hostile ground, facing essentially infinite wealth, with no one behind or beside me, in defense of I knew not who.  No names.  No faces.  I am reckless, but not that reckless.  So I have said nothing until now.  That was about ten years ago.

And I mention this since these people–the ones he did the pimping for–are the ones who planned the COVID outbreak, in my view.  They planned the masks as a method of social control.  It may well be true that the virus was supposed to be released in October or November, and WAS–my youngest claims to have had it last November–but it never took.  So they released it in China again, made sure the Chinese enacted a response that could be copied, and then they made sure their people led the policies here.  Fauci, obviously, is one of their guys.

This whole thing–perhaps a hundred thousand excess dead in the United States alone–was to kneecap Trump in a variety of ways, most notably by making election fraud easier, but also by ruining the economy and creating a talking point that he had not “done enough”.  It also allowed Biden to minimize his foot in mouth time.

These people are real.  They exist, in my view.  I met, not one of them, but one who interacted with them.

Lin Wood recently said that Trump should declare martial law and a new election if he can’t get justice in regard to the election.  Without expressing my support for that idea, I will say it would not unduly bother me.

Here is the thing: we are on a path where the lines get moved in closer, month by month, year by year. If Trump can’t get justice, we have no guardians.  The Constitution, practically, means nothing.  No one is protecting us, or at least no one with power, integrity, and courage.

The FBI is gone.  The CIA is gone.  The DoJ is gone.  The State Department seems to be gone.  The list could be expanded to include nearly all Federal agencies, and that is before we start with corrupt STATE agencies and CITY agencies.

If there is no bang at some point–if the issue is not forced, one way or another–then our future is the frog in the boiling water.  

That is my honest view, for what it is worth.

 You know, Donald Trump, as I have said, has made it clear that much of the $3 trillion or so Leviathan which in theory reports to the American people via the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, really doesn’t.  They do what they want, and if they break laws which might have been enforced, they do so secretly, and/or in places where they know they incur no real risk.

But COVID-19–rather, the response to this not very dangerous disease by our sundry governments–has made clear how STUPID and complacent and ignorant and lazy the American people are, as well as those of most other nations around the world.  New Zealanders and Australians, to the extent they are putting up with their government’s bullshit, MAY be worse than us.  But they have no guns, and no Bill of Rights.

But what good is a Bill of Rights if governments just need a GOOD EXCUSE?  I can see the Constitutionality of tyrannical powers granted for SHORT PERIODS of time, but not a year.  Not more than a year, which is where we are headed in many places.

Keep in mind that the excuse of emergency has ALWAYS been one of the best methods for tyranny.  The mass beheadings in France?  Mostly committed by the Committee for Public Safety.  Hitler’s big power grab?  Legislation enacted for public safety.

I really think the Supreme Court could and should rule on the entirety of the COVID lockdowns.  Yes, there is a separation of Federal and State power, but the Constitution has often been used to compel States to offer rights to their citizens.  This was the point of the 14th and 15th Amendments.  We fought a war over States rights, and regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, it is pretty obvious which side won: the side that would allow the Supreme Court to tell the Governors of this country to knock this shit out, if they have not sought and received explicit Legislative approval, which is to say approval from folks much more directly responsive to popular opinion.  If people WANT to be locked down, then by all means this is the right thing to do.  It is their right.  But if they DON’T–and this is the likelhihood for most–then these constrictions and restrictions violate, in absolute terms, the Constitution, and specifically the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to assemble.  The right to assemble exists for historically solid reasons.

I lived overseas in Europe in high school for a year.  When I got back I went around thinking that all Americans were stupid, and emotionally immature.  I was, at that time, stupid and emotionally immature, and am not as much farther along now as I had hoped to be.  But I was not wrong.  There is something about hours of television from the earliest age, the food we eat, the way we structure our communities, and our work, that makes us stupid.  

What is being done to us should not be possible.  Our leaders should not have allowed it, and the People writ large should not have allowed it.  This whole thing confuses and puzzles me daily.

But as I said in the last post, for some reason emotionally it is not hurting me the way it used to.  I may just be finally growing into the man I have always hoped to be.

 I have been having occasional blessed moments where my brain is free of the fog of thinking about politics, culture, and history.  Where I am free.

As I have said, the goal is to rid myself of this thing, at least for a time.

For the time being, though, what I am finding is that I feel an OBLIGATION to share what I think and feel, when I seem to be the only one thinking and feeling specific, relevant things.

Where are our serious public intellectuals?  The Headless Ones did their best to destroy Jordan Peterson.  Milo has been disappeared.  Ben Shapiro is not bad, but he’s not great either, especially on culture.

What we have is a horde, a large mass, of lunatics, and a handful or two of public people who are not barking mad.

In such a world, it seems selfish not to try and contribute.  By my math, there should be many tens of thousands of people as smart or smarter than me, but it would seem most of them succumb early to one disease of emotional distortion or another, making their thoughts rabid, irrelevant, or so small and specialized that only a few ever see them.

I had a flash the other day of only worrying about football.  Or cars.  Or chasing women.  Or anything other than what I do, which is try and head butt the most complicated problems confronting humanity and knock them back on their asses.

It is tiring being me.  Yes, that is me channeling my inner martyr.  Truth is, I like being me too.  It’s a complicated relationship.

But I did want to say I am getting more and more moments of calm.  Despite everything going on, I found myself working well yesterday, and with a smile on my face, most of the day.  That just doesn’t happen with me.  Everything has always been a difficult act of will.

I am opening up.  To what, I cannot know, but it is a good thing.  Good for me, and perhaps one day good for you.

 it turns out that social media, smart phones, overwork, weakened family structures, sensory overload, and an obsession with speed and specific efficiencies have all made Americans stupid.

I would say in general that speed makes stupid.  You have to have time to smell the roses.  If you don’t, you forget what roses smell like, or why you would want to smell them.  This, in turn, makes your brain shrink.  Curiosity is essential for well being, and curiosity often involves time.  People in general have the time but the habit is encouraged early and often to run around like a chicken with your head cut off.  You may have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but still feel an obsessive need to pass the person who is merely going the speed limit.  I’ve done it many times.

And I was pondering a concept of Hyperreality/Subreality.  Hyperreality was written about by someone.  Whatever they wrote, I have not read.

But in my meditations I will sometimes find myself reliving moments in video games.  Is that not odd?  I often also find myself reliving movies.

In important ways–even before Virtual Reality, which will make all this much worse–did many of us not have a duality between our “normal” world, and our virtual world?  Is it not reasonable, as I have proposed, to view the gigantic TV most people have in a central place in their home as the closest thing to an altar and object of honest religious worship they have?

And video games can be played on that same TV, but they are interactive.  And you “relive” the same moments over and over, as you try and get through some particular challenge.  Back when I played video games–it’s been 3-4 years now that I have not–I would sometimes go through the same scene 100 times before I managed to get through.

I think it was this that U2 was singing about in “even better than the real thing”.  Is it not possible some people would prefer the recorded sound of rain to the actual thing?  I remember someone telling me many years ago about a group of kindergartners in front of whom a man with a guitar performed.  They fidgeted continually.  But when a recording similar to his music was played, they listened raptly.

Are we conditioning people to be more comfortable with things than people, with simulacra rather than the real thing?

Movies feel more real than our real lives, for a time, do they not?  That is their point, is it not, to pull us out of our lives, to make us forget our lives, to take us to some distant place and time and to a completely different set of problems which are solved (in most American movies) in front of us.

But obviously they feel more real, but they are less real.  They are played out in two dimensions, and will play precisely the same a million years from now, if that technology and people to view it last that long.  There is nothing organic, adaptive, vulnerable and changing in it.  There is no life and death.  It is literally a projection on a screen of a seeming time involved media, but one which has already been determined in its totality.

Now, that may be how life works too.  Certainly, many have argued it.  I had a premonitory dream the other day which was quite odd.  I have had others too.  Nothing worth talking about here.

But lived life is interactive, our self and the world.  I believe they are energetically interconnected, that we are star stuff and in movement with it.

And I feel intuitively like there is a profound difference between a movie, which will always be the same, and for example live theater, where good actors are consistent, but never perfectly so.  Every performance differs in subtle ways, and mistakes are always possible.  No mistake, other than a mechanical malfunction, is possible with a film or video game.

How does all this make people less vibrant, less aware, less willing to take risks, less willing to think for themselves?  Perhaps it is the twin features of passivity and having defined worlds which cannot be altered.

I’m not sure what I mean by that.  Ponder it yourself, and see what you get.

But I do think most people are overwhelmed.  There is too much.  This is another thing.  I think they want someone to tell them what is TRUE, and they want to believe it.  There are too many kinds of ketchup.

This would again be the latent attachment to the masks.  Masks are a simple, easily comprehended narrative.  They fend off chaos.

And in that regard, when I was thinking about that yesterday, I kept having Rene Girard’s phrase “mimetic contagion” appear.  I read most of his books, but cannot say for sure I ever felt confident I understood him.  I am not sure he understood him.  I think he talked out loud, in the hope that sense would eventually emerge.  Certainly, I do that.

But in this context, it would mean “alternative ideas”.  For rigid personalities, alternatives seem like attacks, don’t they?  Alternatives, other ways of being and thinking and doing, risk throwing the person into an existential crisis, into acute panic and confusion and terror, and thus must be protected against.

This is most likely the root of Fascism, in all its forms, including the Communistic variety.  This would make masks–when worn by the zealots–more or less directly and literally Fascistic symbols.

I will make one last comment regarding Girard.  I have likely made it before, but shit, every post I make may be a repeat by now.  But as I say, even if my “performance” is derivative relative to past performances, it will never be a precisely repetitive act.

A guy I knew at Chicago who had audited a class briefly with Girard when he was still teaching at Stanford, said that Girard once pronounced (in his view pompously and incoherently) that “The Rejection of the Rejection of the Other has begun.”

He had no idea what he meant.  He thought it was nonsense.  But it is really pretty obvious, I think.  For most of human history–as most modern academics in the Humanities are eager and even desperate to point out ad nauseum–most societies had an in-group and an out-group.  As should be familiar, the term the “Other”–with a capital letter of course–became a sort of coin of that realm perhaps three decades ago.  In a book I would have needed to read to pass my Doctoral qualifying exams, Johannes Fabian referenced it in “Time and the Other”.  It was likely old even then though.

But the idea was that the same aggressive, irrational, exclusionary energy that was once devoted to making sure blacks used the “correct” drinking fountains in the Jim Crow South was now being dedicated to excluding, demonizing and attacking anyone who might be thought to support that sort of thing.

In other words, that was roughly the  period when the usual lunatics started calling racist everyone who disagreed with them about anything.  They were in their view the certified keepers of black destiny and well being, and ipso facto anything anyone said against them meant they supported lynchings and white supremacy.

As we are seeing, this is not even remotely hyperbole.  It SHOULD be.  No one should be that emotionally disconnected and stupid, but most of our “best” academics in fact are.  And most politicians are happy to use these narratives for their own enjoyment, power and profit.

I continue to believe we need formal methods for redeveloping emotional intelligence, methods which are organic, honest, and widespread.  I have my ideas, but this does not feel like the time.

I continue to pray daily that the System, writ large, does not fail us badly yet again, that all the death and misery spent protecting this nation from irrational tyranny is not wasted by people with soft hands, weak minds, and an utter contempt for the people they claim they want to help.

 Like anyone reading this, I continue to see people driving alone (windows up) with masks on.  I see them walking outside with masks on.  I see couples, who presumably live together, walking outside together with masks on.

I was looking at one the other day, and it occurred to me there is a much deeper psychological symbolism involved.  Self evidently, it is not REALLY to keep from scratching their noses and faces.  Most likely, they do it more.

No, it feels like EMOTIONAL protection to me.  That is how it seems to me.  They are protecting themselves from PSYCHOLOGICAL contagion.

This whole thing is madness.  It is so obviously madness, that I think by now everyone has to sense it on some level.  They will have all run into people like me saying “IT’S NOT REAL, TRUMAN!!!”

But they put that mask on, and all is right with the world.  

“Our Governor loves us and cares about us, and we can trust him to do the right thing.

I love you, Big Brother.  No really: you keep me safe from this terrible illness, and I don’t know what I would do without you.”

And if you wear that mask, that evil creature Donald Trump can’t get you.  HA HA HA: you are beyond his foul reach.  Nice try, Orange Man.

No, calm, calm, calm with the mask.  You can’t breath as well, but by now that is a desirable feature.  You are used to it.  Not having the mask on feels weird, scary, unsafe.  So WHY NOT wear it in a car, even though no science or scientist anywhere EVER said it made sense?  It has become a security blanket, and people who violate this tacit code have become enemies and terrors.

I think this is close to the truth.  And if that looks like madness, you are right.  It has become serious mental illness.  But what else animates ANY anti-Liberal regime?  You have to be sane to manage freedom.  Thus a key goal of aspiring totalitarians–who themselves are nuts–is to pull everyone over the edge into the void with them, where power relations become the only reality, and everything else fades away into black.  Darkness within darkness within darkness.  That is one too many.

 The people that we hate are those who turn the world into us versus them.  We don’t do that.

 Trump could offer a pardon and $10 million to anyone from either party who comes forward with solid evidence of how this thing works. He can also promise to praise them as heroes. 

And he should keep those promises. Not everyone who is corrupt is happy about it, and the blackmailers are clearly in a position to twist the knife. There may be multiple people out there losing sleep right now. It is not my impression any of this is a closely guarded secret within the clique.

It has simply been the case that for many years Republicans have turned a blind eye to Democrat shenanigans, and they for their part no doubt figured if they didnt get too greedy the extent of the operation would never see the light of day.

But they DID get too greedy. They had no choice this time.

 You have to wonder if Michigan Republicans—and of course those in many other places—might not have made a deal with the Devil (I speak metaphorically while keeping an open mind) to get elected in a State where fraud rules, and now fear discovery. Kemp in Georgia is pretty obviously in that boat, and where is one there are often many. Half the legislature may have needed the goodfellas of Atlanta.

I would venture to say that any Republican at any level who is not disgusted and infuriated can almost be assumed to be on the gravy train for that reason. This shit is crazy, and OBVIOUSLY so.

 When you close restaurants, is it unreasonable to suppose you push most of us into fast food, which in any event is designed mire or less consciously as a stress reducing drug?

I have seen no numbers, but is it unreasonable to suppose, with gyms shuttered, living like prisoners at the mercy of distant  tyrants immune from their own edicts, that America has gone from fat to fatter? This, even though we KNOW obesity itself is a risk factor? 

Our “ leaders” are making us fatter, dumber, more fearful, vastly less prosperous, and more depressed, all in the face of a bad flu that has made no impression at all in the national death rate, and the worst effects of which can be almost completely avoided with readily available supplements and safe medicines. You know HCQ, but look up Ivervectin too.

Madness. Crime. These are not even remotely hyperbolic words. They are descriptive.