Author: White Whale

I am day drinking.  I might make Sundays the day for it, and swear off more than one or two anywhere else, but it is interesting and, I feel at the moment, productive.

Ponder for a moment the emotions latent within a single person interacting with the world at home via the internet, TV, and movies on DVD.  It is overwhelming, and it is small wonder that so many of us shrink our perceptual domains so much.  The world is large, and it is all in our rooms.

This morning, after taking my dog on a long walk, where I listened to and failed to find several woodpeckers, watched robins chasing squirrels, watched tall trees gently dancing in the wind, and felt how beautiful this world can be (bon mot: Beauty is fleeting, but eternally refreshed), I spent half an hour watching Alex Jones talking about pedophile rings after talking with an ex-Seal Team 6 member who is saying that based on information conveyed to him privately that most of what Alex has claimed to be true is in fact true.

Then I watched Sunset Boulevard, which had long been on my to-do list.

There is a feedback loop here, in that the plot of the movie revolves around a certain latent insanity in the movie business, but that it itself was a movie, one which talked about how so many of the makers of our popular culture are in some respects insane.

And I can only process, myself, so many emotions while drinking.

I say process: of course, anesthesia is coming short of a full reckoning, but in my own case my own feelings are so powerful that I need an intermediate or softening step.

Look at all of us, with our TV’s, our news, our video games.  No one can possibly process the world.  We are not strong enough.  We are not evolved enough.  Everybody falls short, and goes into belief and abstraction.  We create filters.  We dissociate, then call the remaining sense of outrage profound.

One can never know–I can never know–if I speak for others.  We cannot read one anothers minds.  But I continue to believe William James basic insight that introspection must be one tool for figuring out what applies generally.  It is that, lab rats and white coats, and some combination of the two.  That is all we have.

We are not meant to care for the world.  The world is much too big.  I only recently memorized all the countries in Africa.  The NAMES.  That is all.

All order must of necessity be local.  There can be no other kind.

But I see, and feel, those who would make of information technology, of computers, of AI, something bigger than all of us, which CAN see and know and thus “feel” through distancing and analysis all of it.

We can build a perfect world, we are told implicitly, if we can just build monsters which CAN process all of this, which have no human limits.

And thus some of our best minds dedicate themselves to a world where humans really have no place, where souls are not a recognizable category, where “life” is merely an accidental machine which has yet to be fully analyzed.

Where, to be clear, their fears, and doubts, and confusions, disappear into an abyss of perfected matter.

Goethe said that nothing human was foreign to him.  I am no Goethe, but I understand why he would say this.  We all operate according to simple codes, which in cases of profound dysfunction proceed from an existential premise that none of us are loveable and life has no purpose.  This “premise” proceeds, in turn, from primitive realities, from truths such people cannot remember.

A perfected world is small.  Many, many people see this, without perhaps being able to articulate the reason.  This is the root of “Keep Austin weird”.  Keep Portland Weird.

Local knowledge must be in the hand of local control.  This is the essence of Liberalism as I define and embrace it.

I see sometimes in my reveries screams from the future, saying “save us, save us”. I am but one man, perhaps half a man, if you factor in all the ways I don’t work properly, but I do what I can.  It is small, but all I can do.

Was John Brennan the “high level” leaker?

We need to be clear: the allegations supported by evidence are that the CIA attempted to either throw the election to Hillary, or to at a minimum delegitimize–which is to say destabilize, which is something they have long experience doing in OTHER nations–Trumps government.

That is huge.  A large, well funded agency with many decades of experience in covert operations has turned rogue, seemingly from the top down, and it working AGAINST American democracy, not for it, which is its mandate.  An agency founded to FIGHT Communism was seemingly being run until recently (I don’t know if Brennan has yet stepped down) BY a Communist. I continue to fail to see how anyone capable of voting Communist in 1976 would ever fully change their mind.

One other point that hit me the moment I woke up this morning: all parties involved know that most electronic communication is vulnerable.  As Trump pointed out, the only secure communication is courier.

Connect that dot with the fact that Obama and his intellectually mangled and profoundly ugly handler Valerie Jarrett chose to remain with walking distance of many of the seats of power.  Could they not from there play an old fashioned spy game of sending and delivering messages, and even old school stuff like dead drops, microdots and the like?

If I were Trump, given that Obama has vowed to work to vitiate the results of a fair election which no one has seriously suggested was interfered with in any substantive way, I would surveill him.  I would watch who comes and goes, particularly.

I will wonder out loud if John Brennan–who we can all safely assume is highly intelligent in ways neither Obama nor Jarrett are–is wondering why the fuck he ever allied with them in the first place.  That was a dangerous and in the event stupid bet, or that seems to be how it is trending.

I see that some one hundred or more art house theaters are screening 1984 this coming Tuesday, in protest, as they say, of the assaults on free speech constituted by the Federal Government cutting public support for private art projects.

I read many things that make my head hurt, but conflating the defunding of what has for decades amounted to left wing propaganda, with actual restrictions on speech–of the sort, oh, I don’t know, which AmerSoc is inflicting on college campuses and on city streets daily in the name of free speech–is completely imbecilic, intellectually half baked, emotionally stunted, and profoundly delusional and dangerous.

How do left wingers reach a point of such complete intellectual depravity that they are able to view anyone but themselves as the originators and supporters of the ideas of tyranny and totalitarian conformity which are presented in the book and movie?

We want smaller government.  They want larger government.  Do the math.

I was watching CNN at lunch. I can take it in small doses with the volume turned all the way down.

And it occurs to me that where this manufactured controversy–dependent entirely on journalistic errors of both commission (lies) and omission–is certain to be regarded with resentment and anger is among career military and particularly officers, and particularly high ranking officers.

Flynn is a decorated combat veteran who served his country faithfully–so faithfully, in fact, that Obama canned him for trying to do his job with integrity and competence–for 30 years.

Now the fucking Democrats–who plot treason nightly in their beds in lieu of counting sheep–are trying to string him up in a political lynching that has nothing to do with integrity, protecting America, the rule of law, or anything but naked political opportunism which seeks to ruin him for short term gain, then forget about him, his sacrifices, and the truth as they move onto the next political hit job.

All of this obvious to people who think, and particularly to those who could easily see what is being done to him being done to them.

It has become obvious that we have anti-American moles throughout our government, but anyone who wants single party rule HAS to have the support of the military, and the Democrats seemingly cannot get their fill of insulting, belittling, undermining and attacking them.

If an idea is implemented by someone who is incompetent and operating on the basis of a bad plan, you cannot blame the idea immediately.  If someone utterly unskilled in home building builds a home that falls over, you cannot say that it is impossible to build a home. What is needed is competence, diligence, and a good plan, which is to say good ideas.

It is not idealistic to dream of a better world, but part of the dreaming must involve clear ideas of better. In my own view, a better world would involve the progressive reduction of trauma, anxiety, compulsion, and related psychological disorders. On all scales this would translate to more harmony, peace, and sustainable prosperity.

The reason all past utopian projects failed is that they depended on abstractions and not qualities of being, qualities of INDIVIDUAL emotional health and balance. For the Nazi the Nation was everything. For the Commies the STATE was everything. In both cases power was centralized because there were–and are–no good ideas which work on the individual level, and which can thus be freely spread and developed organically in complex local and extended orders.

But another way, they had no way to enlist human nature in the service of genuine social improvement and skilled use of freedom.

If however we retain a coherent understanding of individual psychological and thus moral improvement, then without the State doing ANYTHING, growth is inevitable, if enough people do nothing more than internalize the idea that growth is good for them and everyone they know.

I must observe, admitting I am sometimes a bit comical unintentionally-/that I am often at my most productive intellectually when there is work to be done. My money making today will consist in climbing a ladder more or less continuously for the next four hours or so. It’s good, well paid work, but I still know how tired my legs will be. They tree trunks, but they are also supporting a large tree.

Be that as it may, when I say seemingly cynical things , like “those who are already down get kicked the most”, I am speaking from personal experience. I am speaking from my own life, and on the basis of not-inconsiderable erudition. Human society and human history are filled with horrors. Unspeakable acts are occurring at this very moment in hundreds of places in this world of billions.  To claim otherwise would be ludicrous and naive. And to be naive is, in the practical solution of real problems, to be on a continuum between useless and part of the problem.

But where a cynic would say THIS IS HOW LIFE IS, a realist would say “this is how life is NOW, in far too many places, but better is possible.

And who can deny this? Are we not better off in nearly all ways than we were 500 years ago?

Clearly, many bad ideas have been and continue to be presented as good ideas.  Socialism and the political tolerance of political intolerance come readily to the fore as obvious examples.

But what we have not tried yet is GOOD ideas combined with global technology. And who is to say this marriage is impossible? Not a realist, although he might view the odds as being as abysmal of those of the Patriots at the start of the 4th Quarter in the most recent Super Bowl, or that Donald Trump would beat Hillary.

What are good ideas, you ask? Read my website!!!!!!

It is an odd fact of human life that the time you are most likely to be kicked is when you are already down. Small wonder that those who taste this early in life develop a hunger for power which can d more powerful than their attachment to life itself. Get rich or die trying.

And clearly some people have it easier than others. Those who have not been kicked in the head do not spend much of their life energy looking over their shoulder, leaving them more free for effective work and healthy relationships.

But pointing to relative privilege, OBVIOUSLY, doesn’t raise anyone. Acts of self hatred and self abnegation do not heal in others patterns of trauma, developmental deficits, or give them access to better opportunities.  If they have an educational deficit, for example, as is common in most cities and many rural areas, what helps is education tailored in an intelligent (which is to say SINCERE) way to their actual needs. Charter Schools are useful.

Checking your privilege is only useful for building an unwarranted and factually sanitized sense of self importance. Who needs the germs of facts–which promise only the diseases of confusion and self doubt–when a system has been perfected for perennial and effort free moral superiority?

Enough preaching. This started as a personal note. Preaching, clearly, is one of my best and most cherished defense mechanisms.

You can hate yourself for hating yourself. This was the observation I wanted to make.

From a neurophysiological perspective, trauma acts to create social isolation by taking the relevant social parts of the brain off-line. This gets processed as a sense of banishment and feeling hated. It FEELS like you were cast out for a reason.

But you can then get attacked by your residual social brain, which sides with what feels like the “masses” who cast you out for crimes unspecified. You are first convicted, THEN you put yourself into a perennial trial a la Kafka, who likely suffered from something like this process (Der Prozess).

It is all very interesting, and I do feel interest, curiosity, and relative kindness–of the sort you would afford a stranger–are the path back.

As I have often remarked, we live (I am making a likely mostly but not completely accurate generalization about my five readers) in an era of muted emotion and compensating hyper abstraction .

In many of the best paying professions, “dispassion”, so-called, is a positive asset. Such people have cool heads, analytical ability, “objectivity” (which tends to turn both observer and observed into objects, into things).

What if the main ACTUAL product of most of news media–one developed in response to observations about what sells–is EMOTION?  What if people tune into MSNBC, or Fox, or any of hundreds of other sites, for a dose of daily FEELING? Happy, sad, self-congratulatory or mad: all if it counts. Such media offer portals into forgotten dimensions of human experience.

Think about this systemically: would a system based on feeling not inherently work itself into radical antipodes who NEED each other?

Self evidently, I argue for conservative positions consistently. I view them as better because defensible in depth. Emotion is not needed. But have we been infected?

Abstraction as a pervasive problem was pointed out decades ago by others. I believe Jacqued Barzun talked about it. But would it not logically affect all cultural systems?

Interesting idea.

It seems to me that dissociation might usefully be thought of as Affective Amnesia. The sense of self, of embodiment (to use a term common in Kum Nye), is just that: a sense, a feeling. When your feelings get turned ass over teakettle you lose your self. You are adrift, neither here nor there, belonging nowhere, not even where you are.

I feel this. And it is a good feeling. It is painful, but as I have said before, so is thawing a frost-bitten limb.

My true self, which was damaged badly before I could talk, is very very perceptive, and extremely persistent and agile. I can only be glad I am slowly and with great difficulty edging my way back in that direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvAv-114bwM

NO ONE who studies the data can but conclude that Tower 7, at least, was the subject of a controlled demolition.  I see no wiggle room, no gray area.  Towers 1 and 2, possibly, although even there the preponderance of evidence supports controlled demolition.

But Tower 7 can only have come down in one way.  That this BLATANT FACT was intentionally ignored–and as he points out, these are highly competent people, so that too is the only real possibility–speaks volumes to the state of the American government, and what in recent days has been called the Deep State.

We don’t know who these people are.  We don’t know what they want.  But they clearly represent an existential threat to freedom, and in my view are our most important and dangerous enemy.