Author: White Whale

It seems to me the white guilt movement uses the ideas and tactics of the Christian Churchbto denigrate, humiliate and shame individuals, but in so doing create a mediated means for them to be absolved, temporarily at least, of the shame those who run this operation do so much to inculcate. They create the disease so they can gain the power inherent in being able to administer the cure.

This is no more humanistic than Christian efforts to paint us all with Original Sin, and then claim sole ownership of the means to redemption, as the Catholic Church did and does.

It is all a very old story, told by cynics to nubile minds, and all with an Empire as an aim.

I was reading a brief commentary by Jack Kornfield on how amazed visiting Buddhist teachers were at the pervasiveness of self loathing/ hate among Western students. This feeling–which feels a bit like a continual intrapsychic attack for me, a stream of pain I cannot escape which seems related to shame–warrants sociological analysis.

In a society like our own, where normative standards of behavior have largely rejected, where “doing your own thing” constitutes a value of sorts–it is hard to attain a sense of dignity and personal honor and self respect. It is certainly true that the pressure to conform is creatively limiting in many ways, but what it does grant are clear standards which, having been attained, enable and foster self respect and a sense of honor and belonging.

Conversely, it seems obvious that where no clear standards exist, they must be invented within a dub-group–Leftism being the most obvious but certainly not only example–and where they neither exist in a group, and cannot be plausibly invented as personal myths by the individual–there must be a residual sense of isolation and disconnection which, from clear biological roots, must be felt as a latent or explicit sense of shame, for “crimes” unknown, uncontemplated, and certainly never committed.

We need myth, which I might here define as unchanging, deeply held, ideas about the nature of how to live, and modern Science really doesn’t see this. Science is a marvelous system for description, and for building useful things.

But what we really need is something prescriptive. We have that, of course, in psychology to some extent, in the interesting notion of “mental health”, which is defined quite narrowly compared to most other cultures.

But I co ti he to believe that any foundation built on anything but incorporating God, Connectedness, and an honest treatment of the soul as something which survived the death of the body, will be futile. Projects without these elements need to be built on self deception or cynical pessimism.

I also continue to believe it most useful–and, of course, I hope most accurate–to view humanity as at the BEGINNING of the interesting and generative phase of its existence, and not as a somnolent dying last glimmer of a failed idea.

And I would add that the so-called Singularity–even if it proves technically possible, which I very much doubt, since I think the locus of consciousness lies outside the brain–is no solution at all as to the point and purpose of life. Will human/machine hybrids love more deeply? Is that even a question being asked?  Will the great thrill of connection with Life as a whole be somehow more likely if one merely gains the ability to recite all of Shakespeare easily?

Few thought. I do t feel like working, so I am doing this. Back now to my ladder.

Is there any need for elites to be elitist?  Would this not depend on the answer to “elite in what respect?”, and does the answer to that question not depend on a foundational understanding of life, which guides one in one direction or another?

Islamist might best be understood as monocultural supremacism.

The opposite of the idea that there is One Big Unchanging Truth is not “There is One Big
Unchanging Truth and it is that there is no Big Unchanging Truth.”

Being confused about this seems to me to be close to the heart of our philosophical troubles over the past few centuries, which themselves underlie all the solvable political problems which never get solved.

The opposite is that there are, at any given time, knowable absolute truths, but that they are confined to time and place, which is to say SPECIFIC problems, for specific people.

I am tempted to say that prior to evaluating any aspiring philosophers ideas, one needs to know how they use their body, how much physical tension they carry, what types of brainwaves predominate.  In our present era there seems to be a strong correlation between high intelligence and stupid counterproductive beliefs.  Our culture, outside the realm of science, has largely lost the ability to select for the best and the Good.

This is not the fault of the masses, but rather that of confused and confusing intellectuals.

I have obviously talked about this many times.  I started this blog to do an in-depth analysis back I think in 2008.  Shit, I’ve been blogging nearly ten years.

In any event, after lots of wasted time dealing with irrelevancies, I have finally simplified my argument.  I have shared this simplification before, but thought I might again, given how much shrieking I hear in the air.

The primary Greenhouse Gas is water vapor.  It absorbs a very broad spectrum of infrared radiation, and does so at relatively low altitudes.  Adding CO2 near the surface does nothing, since that energy was going to get absorbed anyway.

Where CO2 has a marked effect is in the upper Trophosphere, and the much thinner air perhaps a mile up.  It can only absorb about 10% of the radiant spectrum, but that is still a lot of energy.  Without its effects, Earth would freeze and life would be impossible.

The entire argument for Anthropogenic Global Warming rests on the ideas that this layer of air can be heated enough that it warms the air below it, which warms the air below it, which warms the air at surface level.

Now, it is well known that as CO2 concentrations rises, the relative impact of each PPM diminishes.  For every doubling of CO2, the relative effect is cut in half.  Double CO2 once you get one unit of warming.  Double it twice you get a half unit of warming, for 1.5 units.  Double that, and you get .25 units, or 1.75.

It is easy to see that there is an asymptotic function here, where somewhere along the line CO2 really just doesn’t matter that much.

This link deals with this helpfully: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/10/the-diminishing-influence-of-increasing-carbon-dioxide-on-temperature/

As they point out, most of what CO2 COULD do it is already doing.

But the core point I want to make is this: in the same way that air does not easily heat water, due to their very different densities, the thin air where CO2 operates cannot easily heat thicker air below it.  This means that the AGW hypothesis REQUIRES considerable heating in specific places for any effect at all to be registered at ground level, and as it happens we have highly accurate satellite data for those regions, and have for at least 3-4 decades.  Those regions are not warming any faster than the rest of the atmosphere, which means that the AGW hypothesis has been falsified.

IF–and I am obviously speaking counterfactually here–AGW was in the main a truly scientific idea being advanced by honest scientists–there would be no land based measurements used at all.  The entire focus would be on the one place where we have good data, and which is critical to the validation–or as it happens, the empirical falsification–of the hypothesis.

I won’t go into all the methodological problems with land based data, but will simply note that for much of the Earth NASA simply invents data.  They don’t have many thermometers at the poles, or for most of the Artic and Antarctic circles.  They can’t measure the ocean temperatures very well.  They have no reliable means of correcting for the heat island effect for the many stations they have that actually are accessible.

So you have on the one hand satellite data which is highly reliable and relevant, and on the other ground data which is completely unreliable, and irrelevant.  Even if there is warming, there is no clear means of teasing out CO2 induced warming from other sources.

The ONLY reason they continue with this nonsense is that you can use statistical models to create any data pattern you want.  This is at least as old as Michael Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, which was created using algorithms intended and programmed to create a specific result.  Anything that conformed to their goal they weighted, and anything which did not got minimized or deleted.

If I might amend Mark Twain: “Lies, damn lies, statistics, and Global warming”.

Trump unquestionably did the right thing.  The open question now is why so much of the rest of the world is so fucking stupid.

Global Warming was THE path to global government. It has been the plan for over twenty years. It is hard to imagine a plan B, but we all need to stay alert.

It seems to me the prerequisites for emotional depth are solitude, silence, and time. I was tempted to add pain, but pain comes out in any long enough contemplation of the human condition.  So, too, does joy, if the person is wise enough to attach themselves to a useful tradition.

Is it any wonder, though, that so many people in modern America are so superficial?

Is it not obvious that Trump cannot trust his own government to keep his secrets?  He is literally going to need to engineer means of conducting foreign policy which do not touch most of our intelligence and diplomatic apparatus.  As Head of State, and Chief Executive of the United States of America, he is granted wide latitude in how he does business, and trusting people who leak everything he trusts them with does not need to be part of his job description.  Nor should it.

Our media are so concerned that he is sharing secrets that they release all the details on the front page.  Am I the only one who sees the problem here?  I don’t think so.  His approval ratings are astonishingly high, considering the 24/7 media hate campaigns being waged against him.

I will add that if Sean Hannity is forced out at Fox, I will start watching and listening to him wherever he goes.  I think Bill O’Reilly and him could do quite well somewhere, perhaps the network where Mark Levin and Michelle Malkin are broadcasting.  I would pay just to support the concept of a press not dedicated to daily lies supporting global fascism.  We need that, and have far too little of it.

It is an odd fact of our present hour that many people have rejected the Western tradition of not just valuing reasoned discourse in practice, but even of principle.

I read first person shooters are good for your brain, and have overcome my initial scruples and started playing Call of Duty.  The two I have are Modern Warfare 1 and Modern Warfare 2.

Released in 2007 and 2009 respectively, the enemies in the first one are Russians and Syrians (the guy we are looking for is named Al-Assad, and at a certain point he detonates a nuke he allegedly got from the Russians), and in the second one the Russians invade Virginia.

It is odd to me that these two countries specifically would have been chosen back then.  The Iranians, the North Koreans, and even the various Al-Queda groups in Iraq and Afghanistan would have made more sense.  We were fighting them then, and the possibilities were and remain considerable.

When the story of the modern era is told honestly–if it ever is–we may all wonder how we were collectively so stupid.

https://newrepublic.com/article/142821/nazis-made-art-fascist

As I have pointed out to the point of tedium, National Socialism, and actual Fascism, both spring from utopian impulses.  This makes them Leftist projects.

True conservatism, “rightism”, is the process of valuing and where necessary returning to the old. In France, from whose revolutionary “Assembly” we get the term “rightist”, it implied Monarchism.  There had been a king, the king was overthrown and killed, and they wanted–and got–one back.  This is conservatism.

NOTHING that contains the word “new” can be called “rightist”.  Yes, Hitler through and with Wagner invoked the old Germanic myths, but they had not been present when he came into the world, and they can’t possibly have meant exactly to old German tribes what he made them mean in his modern Germany.

His Aryan–which is a Sanskrit word–was the result of philological study which indicated it was POSSIBLE that his neck of the woods was the original homeland of those tribes who became the creators of the Sanskritic, Greek, and Latin traditions and cultures.  They were the Urheim, in other words, of most of the best ideas of the world.  This was his myth, his claim.

It is astonishing to me that in a world where we are being told gender specific pronouns are wrong, that concepts of gender dating back to the first births of human consciousness–being based, as they are, on measurable differences in brain structure and of course biology–need to be discarded, and that all received views of our common culture are outdated and harmful, that those who seek to preserve some connection with our past would be conflated with the utopian projects of the Nazis.

That this is propaganda is obvious.  That the author does not see this is equally obvious.

I wonder sometimes about what I am beginning to think of as “the mind in the air conditioned world”, which is so soft that it sees almost nothing, all while spewing words like a waterfall of acid.  So many are unconnected with the world, with reality, with common humanity, which is not common to them at all.

So many, so active on the stage of public affairs, are Sophists, while believing they are scientists.  Nothing to them is true, which makes their words the only truth they care about.

It is scary, and very hard for me to comprehend.  I have said to people often: I do not know how you function with your brain in such a small box.