Author: White Whale

I hear that according to a Congressional Act dating to 1992, all records concerning the Kennedy assassination must be made public by October of 2017, unless specifically blocked by Trump.

This would seem to be a no-brainer: the CIA is actively trying to overthrow the democratically elected leader of THIS country, which makes them his enemy, which makes anything that weakens them good.  It is hard to see how anything vindicating the CIA would be contained in those files.

Alternatively, depending on how desperately they want those files suppressed, he could use this as a weapon to force them into a MAJOR house-cleaning, one which would happen long before the October deadline.  We need an agency that works FOR America, and it seems to me a lot of heads need to roll to make that happen–and in the process they need to just be retired, not allowed to hire on immediately with a private corporation that seeks the same ends, but funded by foreign governments and who knows who.

It is interesting that Obama had the opportunity to allow–apparently it happens unless stopped, which means he stopped it–the release of the files on the Bay of Pigs invasion.  All accounts point to a feckless and cowardly JFK abandoning his soldiers on the beaches of Cuba at the first sign of resistance.  The historians I read argue that the Russians saw this and concluded he was a pussy, and this is what created the Cuban Missile Crisis, which far from being a sign of his genius and leadership, was the outcome of more or less secret failures he had been able to suppress.

By law the cycle is 25 years.  However, it does seem to me that the President ought properly to be able to order the declassification of anything he chooses, at any time he chooses.  He runs the intelligence agencies.  The law simply states that there will be an automatic declassification.

If I am right, this might be an interesting project for Trump: combing through secret files and determining what will most embarrass the people trying to embarrass him right now, and releasing that data, or holding it, subject to them acting like fucking patriotic Americans.

What he could do IMMEDIATELY is put somebody intelligent that he trusts on the project of reading through these files, which could contain very, very explosive information, and figuring out some combination of what is right and what is practical.  Those decisions would depend on the details.

And what if the CIA WAS in some way behind the assassinations?  That would mean they have been involved in internal regime change since at least the early 1960’s.  Surely that is something Trump would want the American people to know, especially since that same CIA was capable of hiring, in 1977 or so, a John Brennan who voted for the Communist in 1976.

When people react not with rage and anger to the purposeful, planned murder of innocents–murders called for publicly by people known to the government, and supported by large numbers of the Muslim community–but with calls for “love”, and “can’t we all just get along”, then these are the people I identify as nice but useless.  They are also on the path to evil.

I talked about these things about 7 years ago in this piece: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Website–Sybaritic%20Leftism%20and%20Cultural%20Sadeism.pdf

As I said, the main problem is not primarily that people choose the decadence implied in asking the government to take the risk of living out of their lives, but that such people have no means of defending their system from those who want to crash and destroy it.  They can’t even bring themselves to stop bringing such people into their countries.  The whole thing is ludicrous, and based on emotional weakness, and sloppy thinking–thinking which in important respects rests on the ideas of humans as finite animals in an infinite universe, one in which everything comes to nought, no matter how hard we try.

Ideas have consequences.  This is why serious people have to honestly question their own first assumptions, particularly when it is OBVIOUS that they are emotionally rooted.

There are no atheists out there who consistently reconcile their positions with the best data available.  This is impossible, because the best data implies some form of theism, and requires of anyone honestly committed to the scientific method at least agnosticism.

No: it is a belief system, one which, once adopted, becomes prey to the same Confirmation Biases they can see in everyone but themselves.  What makes it impossible to escape is that they conflate their dishonesty with honest science.  Atheism then becomes not a scientifically defensible position based on science, but becomes SCIENCE itself, and all dissent inherently ignorant and psychologically rooted.

Their motto is “anybody but us”.

Unanswered, because unanswerable in a formally post-rational context, is the question: has human civilization advanced in the last 1,500 years?  If not, then Muslims following their religion scrupulously–and the rules are set out VERY clearly and are not supposed to change, ever, for any reason, until the end of time, at least formally–are no different than those who believe in universal human rights, the importance of an accountable government, and the value of political and moral freedom.

The man who beats his wife for disobedience–or even to prevent it in the first place–is EXACTLY equal to the children marching in the streets for his right to do so.

The man who participates in a gang rape of an infidel woman, as he sees it, is EXACTLY equal to a feminist who argues for women’s rights.

There is no difference, because where no morality exists, no progress is possible, and no basis for judgment exists.

It is a short step from here, to labeling residual efforts at morality “false consciousness”, and then formally embracing evil as a creed, as all hard core Leftists–what I call Cultural Sadeists–tacitly and not infrequently explicitly, do.

All of this is only made possible by bad ideas, advanced by mental and emotional defectives, and amplified by well funded sociopaths.

JJ Grey has a song, “Everything good is bad”, and on some level I think most of us have felt this.  If you have been married a long time, the odds are overwhelming you have at least thought about infidelity.  JJ Grey himself–who I have seen, and who is a fantastic performer–is also, as they say, a “recovered” alcoholic.

At some point he could not stop himself, or, at any rate, he didn’t, regularly.

I think there is such a thing as “self enabling”.  In some cases, of course, there is some sycophant who secretly takes pleasure in your self sabotage, but I also think that only augments something already there.

Let us say as an example that you decide to give up cookies for one week.  White sugar, calories, self discipline, etc.

Two days in, the temptation becomes overwhelming, and some voice comes in your head and says “it’s no big deal.  It’s only a couple cookies”.  We all know this little devil on the shoulder.  Or most of us do, in any event.  We all mostly get by, but fail often in small things.

What is this?

What I would suggest is this is poorly regulated biological drives, combined with insufficiently developed self calming capacity directed by the frontal cortex.

Our addictions–and addictions can be very, very small, like binge watching Netflix–connect our sense of self with our more primitive gut intelligence.  The gut is the energy behind everything nasty and everything good.  It is a primal force, which has to be channeled, and which is mostly, but not entirely, channeled by most modern Americans in positive ways.

Freud told us that sex was the primary drive.  But so many people are having so much sex, and it is not making their lives much better, and seems in a great many cases to be alienating them from themselves, and from others.

Given the current obesity epidemic, over and above the abysmal stupidity of the anti-fat movement, it is not hard to argue that as a culture we have switched from the sex drive to the gut drive, instinctively.  It is more primal, and better at helping at least immediate self regulation.  It, too, has a hunger, and unlike when we speak of “sexual hunger” this one is literal.  Gut imagery underlies much of our speech and thought.

“We”, as emergent properties of the complex interaction of many nervous system inputs–which would in my view include spiritual inputs as well–have as our task moving from matter to spirit.

I would like to suggest that the main point of life on Earth is learning to choose the Good, which is to say what we choose from our higher Selves, and choose consistently, and do so calmly and reflectively.

When you DECIDE something, really decide it, the process is perhaps not easy, but is automatic.  You don’t have to choose repeatedly.

For myself, I can imagine a world where sticking to a diet and exercise and work program is easy.  I decide what is good for me, and lose along the way that competing voice which tells me that this choice–like every other choice–has forgotten some other part of me which feels the need to make itself heard through what we call self sabotage.

Ponder this conception of self sabotage.  For me, I was watching a war in my dreams last night between the bad Transformers, and the good ones, led reasonably enough by Tony Stark.  I of course wanted the good ones to win, but as an adult in the waking light, I realize that the bad ones are me too.  They are parts of me trying to get a voice, and which having obtained a voice, will become allies.

The word integration is overused, but it certainly includes incorporating–look twice at that word–our own evil, with all the energy for good it held hostage.

I do believe there is a teleological element to life, that this world in some respects is a breeding ground for choosing beings.

And the point is not to punish evil doers, but to herd all of us gradually in the direction of good.  Without negative–and positive–feedback, the system does not work.

Here is a mantra I have decided to use for myself “Everything good is good”.  You need this idea of goodness to support yourself in your own decisions.  The idea is invaluable.  Do you not think it has to compete with the idea that self denial is bad?  That we are basically animals characterized by anxiety in a herd much too large for us to compass, and that anything which meliorates any sense of unease for any period of time is defined, by our culture, wrongly, as “good”, and perhaps even “god”?

These are some deep ideas.  I offer them to you in the hope they nurture your spirit.

Let us say US intelligence DOES have incriminating information about Trump–or for that matter any OTHER person they want to influence, which for example could include members of the Supreme Court, the FBI, and of course Congress: would they need to identify themselves in any way?  Could they not pretend to be anyone they wanted?

Could the whole Russian campaign be a false flag intended to make Trump himself believe that someone who might be sending anonymous notes is Russian, when in fact it is John Brennan, through many intermediaries?

Again: walls need to be put in place, if this is technically possible, which protect civil rights, and they need to be guarded by honest people.  This may be hopelessly naive, but perhaps we could hope that rival spy agencies will spy on one another, and that the patriotic one wins.

We know our intelligence agencies  (we apparently still have some whose names we are not allowed to know, just as the existence of the NSA was for a long time classified), certainly including the CIA (which literally has and had no legal warrant for eavesdropping in the USA–other than, of course, their political support of Leftist causes), placed global surveillance on Trump and those around him, extending a currently unknown distance. [This itself, and possibly law breaking involved in it, would in my view be properly a topic for Mueller].[Sorry for this sentence: it demonstrates well how my wandering mind works, often]

Here is my thought: what if they found something to blackmail Trump with?  They keep talking about the Russians blackmailing us, but what if they are blackmailing Trump right now?  In addition to the opposition of the Republicans, the Democrats, and the media, this will make it nearly impossible to accomplish anything.

What if they further have incriminating evidence against nearly every member of Congress?  It is hardly a stretch.  We have the capability of seeing and hearing nearly everything, and it would be a rare individual who never in their life did something they would not want on the front page of a paper.

This might be why, other than his congenital commitment to principle. Rand Paul continues to be one of the only ones willing to ask hard questions, and to pursue conservative causes honestly.

Certainly I think Trump has done things we still don’t know about that would make for, shall we say, an unusually busy news day.  At the same time, the people who put him in office (I do think Trump won the vote honestly, although I also think hacking the election is something that is current project of US intelligence)  GET that this system is broken, and getting every year worse, and trending to the end of US sovereignty.  We would–and have–forgiven nearly anything.  If framed as political blackmail, I think truth telling might well work, particularly when combined with criminal charges against those responsible.

And let us assume that Obama was the illegal immigrant, here on a long-expired Indonesian student visa, an ardent homosexual, and son of Frank Marshall Davis.  Do you not think that they had him by the balls, even if he was in any event inclined to their cause?

Ponder carefully a largely unsupervised intelligence apparatus capable of gathering instantly a nearly unlimited quantity of highly personal data on any human being on the planet who has spent any time in our networked world.

Do the math.

In my view, our future depends on honest patriots–honest idealists and visionaries–within our system.  Part of my writing, here, is trying to build support for alternative futures, other than a global totalitarian state framed as our friend and family.

All of us have been poisoned by a system which teaches us to distrust our best ideas, to distrust our instincts, and to elevate a vapid niceness to a God we place on high, to be used as needed by the psychopaths among us to render us defenseless, and helpless.

It might be useful to see most addictions as “life abcesses”.  Addiction is merely an outer form, the one taken by the pain which cannot be felt and cannot be expressed in a healthy way.

The word recovery seems to indicate that everything was fine, then you hit a bump in the road, and now you just have to “get back on track”.  No: in a great many people things simmer and fester for long periods of time before they erupt in measurable anti-social or self destructive behavior.

I am in my middle age, and am only slowly feeling what happened to me all those years ago.

There is no addiction recovery.  There is a reinvention of self.

And there is no healing.  There is a release from a cage.

A different vision, for some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaEJzoaYZk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvUI-s4Azw4

I have long identified with this woman.  Oh, but more is possible than the slums and clouds of Dublin.

Sometimes I watch troubled clouds drift over me and rain.  Sometimes they thunder and lightning.  Sometimes I feel relative peace. I try to feel the sun.

But I feel at the moment that I would not exchange anything for my pain, for my visions, and for what wisdom they produce that may prove useful.

I am a Mountain Goat butting the heads of all who would oppose this.  I won’t quit, and you won’t break my skull or horns, or equal my skill in the mountains, or capacity to see and appreciate the sun in the higher altitudes.

The acceptance of pain is a blessing.  Because pain is nothing more or less than a teacher.  It is not an end.  I am not a masochist.  But I am one who watches, and to the extent I can manage, sees.

Learn: this is our shared destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_pkgi-qdyQ

About 3:40 Levine starts talking about the traditional Buddhist paths to surrender.  And he talks about surrender near the end, but for my own purposes I would call it “the end of continual struggle with a self sustaining victory”.

The four means he discusses are ecstatic sex, long term meditation, death (e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead and what might be called “Death Yoga”), and trauma.

Pondering this, and my own experience, and my INTERPRETATION of my own experience, I was wondering tonight if trauma could not just be a part of a spiritual path, but an INTEGRAL part of it, a planned part of it, a chosen suffering which was a necessary precondition for creating the struggle and the strength to do and become interesting.

What if people have horrible things done to them do so as a matter of a life plan which is intended to point them in the direction of Enlightenment, of a break from the compulsive attachment to this world, this way, this place, this time?

What, I was wondering, is WONDERFUL about feeling unloved, abandoned, and under constant emotional attack?

It is a bit different, I suppose.  It creates what we might call after Churchill the “Solitary Tree” mindset and aptitude. It forces creativity.  Over some time horizon it creates a capacity for the recognition from one’s own experience the suffering of others.  I have felt what most people have felt.  I can relate on some level to most of the people I meet on an empathetic level.

It creates grit.  Nobody who is worth a shit is without courage and determination.  Those qualities can come in many forms, and for some go unrecognized.  But those with those qualities, I feel, recognize their own.

I am someone capable of jumping into the abyss. I am not sure what to expect, but it is far from clear to me that the abyss can take from me more than I can take from it, or that I have more to fear from it than it has to fear from me.

Can one take nothingness from nothingness?  Is this not the definition of creation?

Few thoughts. I’ve had a few, but am far from drunk.  I’m now actually going to go hit my journal.