Author: White Whale

I would like to introduce a radical thought: taxes are a fee we pay for services rendered, and are not different in principle from any other purchase, other than that we cannot opt out, and we cannot choose another service provider.

The service provided is the service of government, which includes protecting our nation, providing regulations which in theory protect the peace and prosperity of the American people, and punishing people who are violent, foreign and domestic.

In practice, though, the feedback loop between what the people actually want and believe they will benefit from, and what government actually provides, is quite long, and highly distorted by the fact that some people can use government to benefit themselves at the expense of others.  People who pay no taxes are still allowed to vote for people who promise them the money of the people who DO pay taxes.  Corporations are able to create government run monopolies of various sorts, and various differential treatments that give them big advantages, which they then use to make sure the politicians who help them stay in office.  Self evidently, this is not the business of government, but given sufficient power granted to the government, such abuses are nearly inevitable.

In an orthodox education, it is easy to imbibe the assumption in the air that government exists for itself, that there is no alternative to massive government, and that the steady metastasis of government year after year, decade after decade, century after century, is inevitable, and constitutes “progress”.

I will assert, again, that the proper alternative to government is moral education.  People who are naturally respectful of others do not need restraint, and do not need hordes of laws telling them what to do, and do not need to pay for hordes of bureaucrats and police to enforce those laws.  Only bad people need laws.

Globally, free markets and liberal governments work to remedy all the causes of violence between nations.  They enrich everyone, enable feedback from the people to the governments, and allow people freedom to live as they see fit.

Only mentally ill people seek power over others, for any reason. Globally, if we were to focus on moral and psychological health, we could and would live in peace.

I am presently undertaking a course of Neurofeedback, and am increasingly inclined to believe that it constitutes something close to a scientific approach to mental health, at least within broad limits.  What if it were made accessible universally?  Assuming I get the results which seem likely, I am going to get the gadgets and start offering it for free to addicts and others.  My sense is that in tandem with Kum Nye–a sophisticated method for achieving very deep calm and relaxation–it would be a fantastic combination for all of humanity.

Science is a method, not a conclusion.

If you live in a small place everything gets larger. If in a large place, then everything gets smaller.

This can be read on many levels.

I feel that one reliable marker that one has reached the deepest, most difficult inner content to process is that one feels an immediate need for universal compassion, and to save the world.

I will use my Hoffman rules and use I here.  What I have found, for myself, is that those of us blessed and cursed with a lot of emotional baggage, with unprocessed grief and trauma, confusion about what love is and how one finds it, who early in life start reading self help and psychology, and spiritual and even religious texts obsessively, quite often realize at a certain point that we have learned more catch phrases, bits of psychological “insight”, and the outer trappings of wisdom, that we can get away with lecturing others.

More: we–I–being gifted with a high degree of intelligence, developed the ability to seem wise, even while the concrete details of my life–financial, social, romantic–went poorly maintained or even completely unattended.

In my own case, I think I have been able to continue past this realm of self delusion, and am now confronting the facts, the actual facts, of who I really am.  And it is hard.

It is far easier to put on a benevolent face, and be the voice in people’s lives that “get” them.  It is far easier to use what in most cases really is at least some real insight, to offer “compassion”.

Here is the thing, though: for a great many people “compassion” is really an aggression.  As even Rousseau recognized, in adding this word–to our great detriment, in aggregate and over time–to our political lexicon, compassion is inherently a claim of moral superiority.  It is pity, more or less, and we only pity the helpless and our inferiors.  And in pitying them, we unconsciously allow the expression of a latent sense of superiority, which in comforting conflicted egoes creates a sort of salve that makes life easier.

It is, in other words, easy to get addicted to compassion.  It is an easy drug.

But what this does is distract from the continuation of honest inner work.  An addiction to compassion per se is not my personal issue, but the idea of saving the world IS a problem for me.  Me against the world.  Heroic struggles, and uncomprehending masses.  It is romantic and attractive, and I am not saying that I don’t have ideas which might help large numbers of people, but what I am saying is that my focus needs to be on healing myself, because right now I remain utterly compulsive, and that is not a position from which organic, flexible, useful thought usually proceeds.

And this morning I cannot help but think of Tamerlane, for some reason.  I recently bought an inner Asian cookbook titled “Samarkand”.  I have long felt a kinship with inner Asia for some reason.  Perhaps I spent a life there too.  In a meditation the other day, I felt this coldness of a tribal warlord, but of course that might have easily been the part of me which does not respond to compassion or warmth of any sort; which was crushed and killed, long ago, but within which a spark remained that I am in the process of reigniting.

But what is the relation of universal bloodlust and greed, and universal compassion, and thirst for the political power to “deliver” it?  The Communists used the rhetoric of compassion, in my understanding.  Certainly, the French Revolutionaries did, and in the case of the Communists this was the latent if perhaps unexpressed word behind calls for “justice”.

Compassion is an outgrowth of empathy in healthy people, but when used as a means of avoiding inner psychological conflict, and particularly when expressed as an ABSTRACTION, it can as easily become a means of violence and attack as the simple impulses of a Tamerlane–who I will note does need to be named as one of the most prolific murderers in human history, particularly as a lesson to those who think the West is somehow uniquely bad.  He caused the deaths of some 17 million people, which was about 5% of the worlds population at the time.  He eclipsed, in other words, Hitler.

Be that as it may, we might usefully describe the Left as it exists today as an organized band of bandits who want to conquer the world in the name of an idealized compassion, which they do not in fact feel.  They do not care about what happens to the people who they are trying to help, and have demonstrated, in fact, that they are quite willing to INCREASE the suffering of the people they claim to want to help, if it furthers the cause of their own increase in power and authority, and political and social superiority to those they claim to feel sympathy and empathy for.

Doing inner work, honestly and over the long term, is difficult work, and the distractions are nearly infinite.  This is merely one of the most obvious, at least to me.

I was reading this treatment of the rules concerning Sabbath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activities_prohibited_on_Shabbat

I would have been happy in such a world.  I am disputatious by nature, and love complex systems.  And I do feel I have been a Jew in at least one life, perhaps more.  I feel I have had many lives.  There is much within me.

But the point I wanted to make is that I have been experimenting with making Saturday the day of rest, and I have realized that it makes a WORLD of sense. I  have been working hard recently at my day job, and come Friday I am physically and emotionally worn down.  Calling it quits from 5 or 6 PM Friday through Saturday, even though it feels odd, works really well.  Sleep in on Saturday, not Sunday.

And if you think about it, 6 days of work is really not that onerous.  Work is really a big part of life.  What I am finding is that Sunday makes a fantastic entry point to the week.  Plan everything, get everything ready, get yourself ready.  Clean the house, sort out all the small details you would otherwise worry about during the week.  Most people do this on Saturday, but my take is I am TIRED on Saturday.  It is much more burdensome than doing it after laying around for 24 hours.

And what Jews are really taking a break from is CREATING.  Logically, this means that on all non-Sabbath, non-holy days, they are meant by their maker to be creating.  Create 6 days a week, then rest.  I like this.

I am of course breaking my own rules in typing this today, but it felt appropriate.

I have a lot more things I am working on, new approaches I am taking, but all in good time.  I am never still for long, and am nearly always trodding new ground.

My world is undiscovered.  Knowing that, all can be new.

I see no reason Trump should not pursue criminal charges against Hillary and Bill Clinton.  If the investigation into the Clinton Foundation has been ended for some reason, it needs to be begun anew.  And Bill Sessions needs to evaluate all possible criminal charges which could be brought against Hillary.  The evidence is the same.

I think Trump needs to understand that no matter what he does, he will be attacked.  He needs to at least get the satisfaction of fighting back, and of sending warning shots over the bows of the people betraying him and their country that they are not only not above the law, but that he is quite willing to use the laws in effect to send them to jail.

As things stand, my understanding of the whole Russian thing remains as follows.  Some Baltic state, I think it was Estonia but won’t swear to it, created what amounted to a blackmail dossier on Trump, which was at some point scooped up by British intelligence, then shared with American intelligence.  This dossier had no merit to it, and consisted in little but unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable rumors about things which (like pissing on a bed) were not even illegal.

This dossier, though, was enough for the Deep State to get authorization to initiate blatantly fascistic surveillance on Trump and his associates during and after the campaign, despite the fact that no wrong doing was ever found.

At some point–from what I read, perhaps immediately after Hillary lost the election fair and square–a political decision was made to claim that the Russians were the ones who hacked John Podesta, a claim without substance or even the flimsiest of evidence.

This claim was “buttressed” mainly by continual speculation by the complicit media, which first called it possible, then treated it as obvious, then finally came out as outraged about something which it never had any evidence happened in the first place.  This has all been made clear in recent days by the testimony of people who were and are in a position to know.

The only “evidence” of wrong-doing was the fact of an investigation, but as mentioned, that investigation was launched on the flimsiest of pretexts and ITSELF constitutes a cause for outrage.  Sitting Presidents should not be using the organs of government–particularly intelligence agencies not allowed by law to operate on American soil–to spy on their political opponents.  Nixon did nothing that extreme.

So now I read Mueller is investigating possible obstruction of “justice” in an investigation that never should have been initiated in the first place, and which, again, ITSELF should be investigated as the patent politicization of the law enforcement and intelligence gathering activities.

So we have the investigation of the “crime” of obstructing an investigation that never should have been launched in the first place.  You cannot by definition obstruct justice which was not happening in the first place.

In my view, if Mueller wants to surround himself with Democrats–which betrays partisan intent, which is antithetical to justice and professionalism–he should be fired.  He is not, in my understanding, a Kenneth Starr, who cannot be fired.  He is simply someone hired for a specific job.  If he construes that job as creating trouble for Trump, as leaking innuendo and rumor to create headlines for the hacks running most of the media in this country, I see no reason he should keep his job.  Sessions can fire him.

Ponder the stupidity of the Americans eating all this shit up.  Anyone that dumb will not be convinced even if Mueller spends the next year creating headlines at MSNBC and still turns up nothing.  Those people are gone.  Trump can’t speak to stupid.  They are gone.  Their cognitive sovereignty is muted and in most cases absent.  They believe what they are told to believe, and lack the critical faculties to do otherwise.

Here is the thing: media coverage for Trump will NEVER EVER EVER turn positive.  Not going to happen.  They would slime Mother Teresa.

I was watching a video today of Matt Bevin, who is the governor of Kentucky, making a video he posted on Facebook, where he calls out media coverage specifically.  He shows what he said, then shows in their own words how “journalists” covered him.  The bias and mean spiritedness are blatant and undeniable.  You can look him up on Facebook.

Trump needs to create something similar, which puts together videos detailing both his policy decisions, and showcasing media bias in their coverage of him.  Tweets are not enough.  He is the President, and he can do much, much better.

But I really think, and I’ve said this more than once, that until traitors start going to jail for breaking their oaths, the leaks will continue.  And I continue to fail to see a downside to the immediate prosecution of Bill and Hillary for crimes too numerous to mention.  Are we a fucking banana republic, or are we a nation of laws?  Trump was elected to prove it was not too much to hope that we were and remain the latter.

Can we just call it what it is?  Political MADNESS.

It is not even a rhetorical strategy.  It is an excuse for exclusionary political violence, used before, during and after the fact.

I am clearly not the only one who can easily envision many of todays crop of young, indoctrinated psychopaths administering Khmer Rouge style torture chambers, and mass executions.  They are literally INCAPABLE of seeing dissenters from their tribe–I don’t and can’t say ideology, because their ideas and goals change in demand to what their leaders want and need from moment to moment–as human, much less people with whom they could discuss, debate, and negotiate.

In my own self I have found very deep illness can hide behind a functional facade, but in the case of many of these people, even the facade is fucked up.  They wear their crazy as a badge of honor.

Impeachment is the opiate of the media.

“Tomorrow, Fascists and communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils. I realise that though there are no political affinities between us, there are plenty of intellectual affinities. Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralised and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.”


Benito Mussolini


I have been saying the same thing for some time, as of course have many others.  Perhaps it is time for all of us who combat illiberal creeds to revisit the founder of Fascism, he who knew it better than any.


Allan Bloom recounts a leftist rally where a speaker trotted out the usual suspects (The time to act is now!!  The time for discussion had passed!!), and received continual applause until he noted the speech had been made by Mussolini.


It is farcical that people claiming to oppose fascism would don the black clothes if the ACTUAL Fascists. This is the thing: I doubt one in ten of these lunatics could give a passable account of the history of actual Fascism, or even National Socialism. They simply follow orders, and of course the Nazis did neither more nor less.

We speak by rote about psychosexual pathology, and we don’t mean erectile dysfunction. We mean relating to the other sex (or same).

I did not come up with the idea of the gut being an almost separate consciousness within us–neurologically, almost certainly to a much greater extent than the sexual instinct–and if we are to take this seriously, we need new words. I love to invent words the way women and gay men like to play dress up. Yes, all of them.

I was pondering this feeling within me which is easiest to call self loathing, and it really feels more to me like a chronically suppressed need for violence, to attack. Unexpressed anger easily becomes anxiety, and anxiety can easily be seen as intrapsychic violence.

We are social beings, but are we perhaps born somewhat like wolves, who instinctually want to hunt and eat in packs, or what we would call tribes?

What could be the fate of wolves born without packs, with the same hunger?

The need to feed is coeval with the survival instinct. It exists far down. Do we have instincts to eat a certain way? Are we born enjoying the feeling of killing our food and sharing it together?

To me, these are interesting questions.

Back to the ladder again.