Author: White Whale

I have in recent weeks been running up again and again against incompetence, laziness and stupidity.  I am tempted to say our real crisis is mediocrity, but I’ve dramatized enough things recently.

What I am trying to guide myself into is a habitual reaction, in running into people who have no pride in their work, is focusing on how I can improve my game, how I can become MORE competent.

As I have said often, Dale Carnegie was quite right, that most people, even when entirely to blame, even when they are fucking up royally, and when they KNOW they are fucking up royally, still just want to protect their egos by being stubborn and vindictive.

You may never have put these two words together, but Carnegie was a cynic.  He didn’t think a lot of people: he thought very little.

Yes, with encouragement and regular praise, the mediocre can become average, and the average can become above average.  But solid people don’t need molly-coddling or nursemaiding, and they thrive on criticism, when it is accurate, because they are always wanting to improve.

Carnegie himself, in my view, WAS a solid person.  His task, as he put it, was to create a PRACTICAL guide, and he did do that.  It remains a field guide, one which I sometimes use, but sometimes fail to use due to my own lack of patience, and for which I often pay the price.

The truth is, sometimes yelling works, and sometimes that is the ONLY thing that will work.  But it is a poor long term strategy outside the military, and perhaps not even there.  A better strategy is to figure out how to be surrounded by competent, motivated people.

So, net/net, I need to redirect my yelling at others at myself.  There are many ways I can become better, and I need to find all of them.

As we saw recently in the case with the baby in Britain–where the National Health Service more or less declared sole sovereignty over the life of an infant with severe health issues, by declaring that EVEN THOUGH THEY COULD PAY FOR IT, the parents could not bring the child to America–when the government is in charge, the government is in charge.  This should not be a challenging or controversial statement.  Those who want more government merely nourish pipe dreams of universal morality and compassion among career bureaucrats.  This level of delusion is quite astonishing, and only possible for the historically ignorant.

For the rest of us, that is slavery.  The government declared the baby belonged to it, not the parents.  That is the government interfering in a very personal matter in a way which helps no one but the government.  They wanted to make sure nobody got the bright idea of trying to get healthcare in any way which they did not directly control.

Single payer equals single decider.  It might get sold as “you get to keep your doctor”, or “you will get choices of doctors”, but once the government has sole control, that is up to them.  They might give you choices this week, then next week decide, for really any reason, good or bad, that you have to see one doctor or another, or that you can get treatment for something, or not get treatment.  They might tie the decision up in committee so long you die of a treatable illness.  There is nothing to prevent this, inherently.

In any realm of life, when you depend on the government, they have you by the balls, and they know it.  That is why the traditional principles of the Democrats fell away easily and thoroughly a hundred years ago or more in the big cities, when they realized that the bigger and more powerful they made the government, the more favors they could grant, the more graft they could commit, and more loyal the voters who benefited from the system would be.  They create a gravy train, get as many on it as possible, then work year on year to make it bigger and better, for them and theirs.

There is no economic or moral argument for Single Payer.  Quite the contrary: it is bad economics and bad morality.  Clearly, people who get something truly for nothing are net beneficiaries, but all those paying for it lose, on balance.

There is room for discussion on the scope of Medicaid, which is simple charity.  But there is no room for discussion in how those who can afford to do so should self insure: all of it should be left up to them, and the government should act only to protect competition.

It is time to repeal Obamacare, particularly the requirement that insurers accept people who are already sick, and that they issue policies with minimum coverages.  Rand Paul’s proposal is excellent.

Para: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/para-

Nous/noos/no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous

To be paranoid is literally to be next to that faculty which enables the perception of truth.  You are outside of it, but related to it.

I am going to offer a bold statement: with the exception of innate or traumatic organic defects in the brain and nervous system, all forms of madness derive from trauma, and those which are seemingly inexplicable derive from developmental or subtle emotional traumas, which divide the person through dissociation.

In my own case, I have very high delta brainwaves throughout my brain.  They are everywhere.  I researched this and found little, but speculated to the person administering the neurofeedback that that was the neurological evidence of dissociation, and he corroborated that.  Delta and theta are apparently what appears when the “mind”–which is scarcely a unity–enters a dreamlike state.

And the thing with the nervous system is that dissociation is a lot like a circuit breaker.  Once it is triggered, it must be reset or it stays off permanently.  You only have to trigger it once–push something to and past complete overload–and the neurophysiological system is permanently altered.  With regard to all subsequent traumas, dissociation becomes a resource.  They don’t hurt as bad. That primal terror does not reappear, at least in waking hours, and if the trauma is very early in life, does not appear for many decades.

There are many factors involved in the so-called “Midlife crisis”.  Certainly, I think the relentless drumbeat of consumerism and the promise that something better is always on the other side of the fence, plays a role.

But I think too that many people enter dissociated states early in life, and only far into life realize that other feelings exist, that they do in fact have opinions, that some pleasure is in fact possible in life, that they have an innate and unexpressed personality.

I will again offer the no-doubt traumatized David Byrne, and his take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qCl6KyOy34

I have long noted a pattern in myself where I will get in a mood to study what might be termed “liminal knowledge”, things on the threshold between consensus reality, and the utterly ridiculous.  I’ve read Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, and the earlier versions, like those of Eric von Daniken.  I’ve read half a dozen or more books on UFO’s, watched the interviews with astronauts like Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper talk about their reality.

I’ve read up on the Illuminati, looked at the evidence that Aleister Crowley may have been Barbara Bush’s father, learned what I could about satanic pedophile cults, been freaked out by Eyes Wide Shut, read a book or two on Jack the Ripper, etc.

It’s a long list, because it has been a long term habit.  It’s not something I do every day.  It’s a phase that usually lasts a few days, and happens perhaps twice a year, although since the Obama years it has been happening more.  It is still stunning to me both that he was elected, and that he pulled his charade off.

Now, I do think human beings are secret keeping creatures, and I do think there is an ocean of things the Federal government does not tell us about.  Given that they are using handheld surveillance drones the size of toy cars in promotional videos for the Army, where do you think the cutting edge is currently?  Likely we don’t want to know.  We would be happy to see super advanced technology used on our enemies, but once it exists, it can be used on anyone, and I count myself among the tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Americans who do not trust large segments of our government.

Having said all that, I wanted to comment on the FEELING of conspiracy.  It is a feeling that there is something hidden, something dangerous, and something important.  You don’t know what is is, or how to find it.  It is just a sense, what we call paranoia.

This word, apparently, comes from the Greek word for madness, and translates literally as by or beside one’s mind.  Out of one’s mind would be close to literal.

It seems to me there is a close overlay between this notion, this feeling, and unremembered primal trauma.  In my own case, clearly something highly traumatizing happened to me, likely repeatedly, when I was very young.  I think it was as simple as my mother screaming at me when I was crying too much, leaving me both in strong physical discomfort, and terrified of my primary care-giver.  That would pack quite a punch, and if you think about the process of parenting, how tiring it is, my intuitive sense is that my rough problems are really very common, and misdiagnosed often in the many, many offshoots possible, which include anger issues, depression, and anxiety.

So I think that when I have turned, historically, to liminal topics, it has been this unspoken part of me reaching out for recognition.  This does not mean in the slightest that there are no conspiracies–MIT Ph.D in what amounted to Rocket Science and astronaut Edgar Mitchell has publicly alleged a conspiracy with regard to UFO’s as one obvious example–but I do think my own history has tended to point me, and people like me, in that direction.

When one has no cuts in one’s soul, it is easy to be complacent, and to assume all is well, because you are told all is well, and you have no reason to distrust those in power.  Those who have been cut know all too well what secrets can be hidden, and what human beings are REALLY capable of.  It is an ugly, ugly sight, and even in a lifetime spent living well, and pursuing goodness, I don’t think any life is truly complete without recognizing and seeing the evil all of us are capable of.

It has long seemed to me that the people like Ray Kurzweil, who ignore the data supporting the existence of a soul, and who dedicate themselves to the dream of infinite intelligence, are people with major unprocessed emotions, who find themselves distant from the flow of actual human life, from the joys of being alive, from spontaneity, from dance.

Of what benefit would it be to be able to conjure any fact instantly, speak any language, solve any problem?  All the problems would be solved quickly, presumably, except the purpose of life.  That is a feeling, a touching of mystery, of the infinitely large.  I fail to see how a computer could help with this, with the task of touching the deepest root of LIFE.

It is a chimera, a delusion, a hoping, one cherished by people UNWILLING to solve their own emotional problems, now, using the ample knowledge which could be made available to them.

All the mystics, the mushroom eaters, the LSD trippers, the Ayahuasca adventurers, the St. Johns and the Rumi’s and the Nagarjuna’s say that knowledge can be contacted directly, that this Source is infinite, and that everything knowable can be made to appear before finite eyes.  This is the essence of what the Singularitarians want.  It is an eminently religious quest, based on a religious sentiment they find themselves unable to to indulge in a healthy way due to metaphysical errors their emotional constipation makes them unable to avoid or rectify.

I wonder sometimes about this alleged global civilization that built many extant monuments some 13,000 years ago, or thereabouts.  It is obvious, for example, that the Incan ruins have multiple architects.  Small stone construction which is not hard and which is found everywhere, is assembled on top of enormous stones which are fitted together with unbelievable precision.  It is not hard to conclude two different civilizations built two different layers.

But ponder a global civilization in many respects superior technologically to our own.  Could they not build structures they knew would endure thousands of years, then destroy their tools?  Could they not return to a very, very simple life of hunting and gathering, of story telling, of group dances, of profound meditation and spiritual mastery, then one day simply choose to die off en masse and inhabit another realm of existence entirely?

Why not?  I go places educated people are not supposed to go, but fuck educated people.  Jesus fucking Christ so many of these people are demonstrable retards, unimaginative, and unable to evaluate evidence which contradicts in any way their indoctrination, their intellectual crippling which they farcically enough think makes them MORE and not much LESS qualified for anything to do with real life.

I will always dream my dreams, and do my best every day to see what is in front of me.  When I am in a new place, I will sometimes spend 15-20 minutes just logging every detail.  I watch trees for 5 minutes at a time.  I look at how rooms are wired.  I notice holes in the floor and ceiling.  Life is endlessly fascinating.

My work continues, and I continue to have ideas and visions I am not sharing.  All in good time.

What do you think it feels like to finally give up on trying to heal and grow?

Answer: it doesn’t feel like anything.  That hunger and drive simply disappears, and is replaced by as many other thoughts, activities and feelings as it takes to forget.

All of us have, regularly I think, experiences of amnesia, where we were doing one thing and find ourselves doing something else.  It is a type of hypnosis.

And sometimes some part of us WANTS to forget.  I coined the word Forgession some time ago to connote the process of forgetting, of forgetting what we want to forget, and forgetting that we forgot.  It all disappears, from all but the innermost recesses of our psyches.

Memory is a strange thing.  It endures everything, but it is sometimes hidden for a lifetime.

I will add on a related note that I think our nature is to grow, to expand.  The only “growing pains” are those of growing beyond restrictions within us.  As one lecture I listened to put it, we go through many pairs of increasingly large shoes before we reach adulthood, and of course spiritually this process never stops.

And often these limitations only become clear when we are on the brink of something new.  They were latent, part of the landscape, assumed, until something different became possible.  And the juxtaposition of the small within us, with the imagined largeness at the next stages, creates cognitive and emotional dissonance.  Because you do not transition instantly from the one to the other.  There is faith needed in the middle.

I think most people naturally enough assume that any AI capable of destroying humanity would evolve within the Defense community, but why would this be so?  Everything is connected.  All AI is almost inherently AI on the internet, and anything on the internet can be hacked, and hacked quickly by a sufficiently developed intelligence.

All lives are wasted, but all lives are precious.

I speak abstractly.  I feel this, but I cannot see it yet.

Where are the pathways in the dark no one sees, and how do we find them?  Having found them, do they matter for more than a moment?  These are mysteries.

Whuman does Murller still have a job. We know the Russisn story was concocted and that there was never any evidence for it. Other than investigate Seth Rich’s murder, which the FBI should have done anyway, what can he do but dig for dirt?

Here is the thing: EVERYBODY has something to hide. All of us do things were not proud of. All of us benefit from some privacy.

This is why the saying, most recently heard on Harry Potter, that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is so insidious.  If you dig long enough on virtually anyone you will find mistakes, weak moments, neurotic habits, latent psychopathologies, and risks taken in the confidence of secrecy.

It is thus no sin and no shame to simply say “my business is my business”. Period. ALL Mueller could have in mind is sifting through Trumps trash to find something, anything, to damage him with.

This is ludicrous, given that the only evidence that has ever existed is the investigation itself, and a dossier created by an anti-Republican dirty tricks squad.

Mueller should be fired tomorrow. He never should have been appointed in the first place. Trump simply needs to say “there is nothing to investigate. Obamas people confirmed it,”

I recently checked out some Hercules Poirot mysteries from my library, and am immensely enjoying them.  I have never been much into the mystery genre, but it seems to me that on a mythic level it engages our innate sense that life is a mystery, and that a conscious life is one in which patterns are assembled from clues which are often small.

It continues to baffle me that Joanne Rowling is a de facto Leftist, because she was and is a very good psychologist, one able to work at a mythic level.  This is the underlying reason for her phenomenal success.  It would not be overstating the case much to say that she created a secular religion.  Not infrequently, I see the Deathly Hallows on cars in the place a Christian fish or cross might have been.

One aspect I would invoke is that Harry got many clues from Dumbledore, but he was never told how to assemble them, or how to find those that were still missing.  So much of life is like that.  We have the sense that there is something in front of us we should be understanding, something we should be seeing, but quite often progress consists in simply taking swings in the dark and hoping for the best.  And the best is sometimes what we get when we do.

And it seems to me that mysteries exist on many levels.  There are mysteries within mysteries.  Perhaps spiritual growth comes in graduating to higher and higher levels of incomprehension.