Author: White Whale

There is no evidence of actual vote tampering by the Russians.  Indeed, all the fraud which seems to have happened favored the Democrats.  We know that cheating is and more or less always has been a part of their strategy.  If nothing else, O’Keefes videos made that obvious.  The recount in Michigan seems to have been stopped in part to avoid disclosure of the sheer extent of Democrat fraud.

So the allegations must necessarily revolve around Russians working to create narratives which favored Trump relative to Hillary.  If we are to concern ourselves with organized propaganda offensives, then, why would we not stop to ask how it was that a horrible human being, failed leader, and blatant crook like Hillary was supported so aggressively that she was even in contention for the Presidency in the first place?  Is it not possible foreign powers worked hard to ensure their narratives were on the nightly news every night?  Did not the Saudis fund something like 20% of her campaign?

It does seem like the world is shrinking, that people’s capacity for attention, for memory, for critical and logical thinking is decaying.  How else to explain the monstrosities being presented as credible ideas, and the patent willingness of imbeciles in large numbers to swallow and regurgitate them reliably?  We literally live in a world where they can change their story 180 degrees, one day to the next, and half the country fails to even notice.  One would think DoubleThink would be something you had to force on people, that you had to break them so they would accept it.  No, it turns out all you have to do is teach them the importance of being a member of the herd, and to blindly trust the leaders of that herd.  As long as they are surrounded by people mouthing and agitating the same idiotic and contradictory propaganda, they feel not just OK, but SUPERIOR.

What, really, is the point of pointing out that the many networks and publications who lied to get Hillary elected do not somehow constitute credible sources now that their lies have been exposed?  Does any sane person need to be told that?  No, of course not. And the rest can’t be told anything.  Regrettably, “the rest” constitutes a rather large number.

I will comment here simply that the current head of the CIA was a Communist in 1976, not too long before the CIA hired him.  He was asked to choose between Ford and Carter, and chose instead the Communist.  Ask yourself: is Communism an evanescent thing among diligent, disciplined, intelligent young people?  Was Communism an obviously desirable alternative to what we might broadly call “Americanism” in the immediate aftermath of the chosen loss of the war in Vietnam?  Did good things happen to the South Vietnamese, or the Cambodians?

What seems more likely: that Brennan had a moment, then became a solid and staunch believer in the American Way; or that he had an epiphany, that he could undermine the “American Way” THROUGH the American way, by becoming a Fifth Columnist?

Fuck the CIA.  With luck, Trump will eviscerate them.  Me personally, I would fire everyone promoted under Obama, fire Brennan, fire everyone he ever so much as had coffee with, and put in place career military whose loyalty to America, our Constitution, and our ideals, was beyond doubt.

I have not forsworn booze yet–at least since the last time I did–so I have decided to get drunk tonight, because it is raining.  Rain always makes me want to drink.  Perhaps so I dissolve in one of the streams.  When the drunk Russian in Nostalghia says the flooded church feels like Russia, I feel Russian too.

And it hit me, sitting on my couch, that the core malady of addicts of all sorts is the inability to find genuine deep solace, comfort and sense of safety in any other human being.  Your drug is your friend.  Your drug is reliable.  Your drug won’t let you down.  I’ve said this before, but perhaps not this way.  Or perhaps exactly this way, and I”m mimicking the drunken O’Malley brothers (the one about the two men at a bar finding all the things they share in common)

I will add I had an unpleasant truth intrusion tonight, something which I recognized immediately as absolutely valid and relevant, but which hurt me.  And it occurred to me that in a healthy person the ego expands and contracts regularly.  Not even that: the sense of self expands and contracts.  Sometimes you are acutely aware of being you–and fine with that fact, in a healthy system–and sometimes your sense of self fades completely as you partake in larger wholes.  It is an organic, natural, adaptive process.

When spiritual teachers speak of eradicating the ego, the intelligent, sane, useful ones (a minority in my view among those who aspire to claim your mind and allegiance) intend learning to loosen what amount to spasms in the emotional and perceptual body.  What came to me was a spasm, a holding, a clinging which held on in no small measure because it was unseen, unrecognized.

It came to me too that the “shadow” self has no need to hide.  It is always there, influencing your thoughts, your decisions, your actions.  What can happen, with diligence, commitment, and honesty, is that you learn to see it standing behind patterns you know intimately, and which you have to learn, once you have seen this goblin, to see differently.  Perhaps you are not the saint you thought you were.  Perhaps you are not innocent of bigotry and hate.  Perhaps some part of you wants to set fire to everything you see, but your smile at everything and everyone has blinded you to this fact.

I am a cynic in many ways, but under that cynicism, I see why people go mad, why most people stay mad, and on some level what it means to be human, living in the “human condition”.

Open the door.

Oh, Lord, may those I want to serve always need me more than I need them.  May they never go anywhere, become free, or cease in their desire to be helped.  May they be ever helpless, and may they always look to me as the God I aspire to be.  Amen.

I watched this movie a couple of weeks ago.  As I wake up this morning, I realize that the real theme of the movie is solitude.  I say this because the version I saw came with an alternate ending where the main zombie just wanted to get his girl back.  Will Smith gives her back, the zombies leave, and he heads to Vermont with the girl and the boy.  They quietly hope he is wrong and she is right, and they drive into the rising sun.

There are also four short animated features, each grimmer than the last.  In the first, the last girl alive in Hong Kong writes a suicide note then jumps off a bridge.  In the second an escaped convict finds himself trapped in the prison he just escaped.  In the third (or second: I may be confusing the order, and my memory is a little hazy) Latin American troops gun down both the medical personnel and the people they are treating.  Three kids watch it, and as I recall, one of the kids winds up infected too.

In the last and to my mind worst, a young girl in India is ordered by her father to go to a shelter they have, but she defies him and goes to see a young boy she is in love with.  She comes back eventually, and her father will not let her in, since he fears she may be infected.  They tell her they left her food, and will let her in in 48 hours if she is not yet infected.  She is infected, and slowly goes mad with hunger.  At some point, the door opens, and she sees only ghouls in the vault, and kills and eats one, her father.  Then she goes to find her boyfriend, who is also hungry, and brings him back to the vault, where they kill the rest of the family.

To my mind, this whole zombie thing relates to the regression to a primitive social state while still within an outwardly normal social context.  We Americans–but to some extent much of the West, and perhaps even the world–feel primitive rages, the compulsion for ritual activity that is driven by neurological knots, feel isolated and alienated because we have not yet graduated to higher spiritual states, and no longer have access to ritual mass death, mass hate, mass violence, as seen in wars and true bigotry.

To comment on the specific metaphor, I think a young Indian girl radicalized to left wing politics by indoctrination by her professors would fit this metaphor well.  She no longer loves in any traditional way.  She no longer feels affection for her family, her people, her country.  She no longer exists as part of a whole.  Her mind is warped, her nobler emotions blunted, her sense of anger and violence sharpened, and her capacity to attack her own family at the core of its being well developed.

To return to Will Smith, ponder someone fully alienated in New York City.  They are surrounded by people all day long, but they feel alone.  There may as well be no one on the street.  Perhaps they can trust their dog.  We all get that, I think. This is why “I am Legend” could easily end differently.  A number of other endings would have worked just as well.  What if Will Smith had become a zombie with his dog and taken to still roaming the streets, but only at night?  He would have adapted, but kept his dog. That actually would have been more congruent with the animated endings.

I read in the Old Testament something like “with wisdom comes sorrow”, but I increasingly feel that pains have textures, and pain is rarely pure, rarely unmixed with joys, and sensations and feelings which are simply interesting, new, different, if we allow them through in their pristine purity.  This is perhaps one root of masochism, although of course there are others I won’t get into here.

And the other day it occurred to me that observing my emotions was like watching fish in a large tank.  They swim around, but they don’t affect me.  And I felt, why not expand the tank?  Why not allow my emotions range within a wider and wider universe?  They sparkle and change.  What they are one minute they may not be the next.  I don’t control them: I can merely control my focus of attention, and in some cases suppress awareness of what I am feeling, or substituting one emotion for another: perhaps anger for sadness, obsession for helplessness.

I am those emotions, and I am not those emotions.  The I can travel back and forth, and this traveling itself is a form of spiritual growth.  But I do feel the image of emotions in motion at a distance–as opposed to being frozen in amber, in an eternal static form of the sort engendered by true dissociation–is growth as well.  One can enter the “amber” as well, but what it is is a hologram that always enacts the exact same thing, in the exact same order, eternally.

So much of life is softening what is hard, finding new motion in old circles, and realizing how much larger we are than is immediately apparent.  The tacit notion that we are all machines exists at a primitive level, it is bred into us from an early age, and it is both quite pernicious and quite superable.

Psychologically, do we not need to bond with people, places, and things for optimal well being?  I would argue that a certain amount of “nestedness”, when combined with a general openness to the new in all forms, is precisely what most modern people are missing, and that efforts to denigrate possessions, a la John Lennon, are misguided.  Clearly, in the developed world we need less than we have, but only in order, I feel, to value what remains more.  We need some things.  Native Americans had them, and so do all “primitive” peoples.  They don’t own “nothing”.  They just don’t have ten room mansions, and 4 car garages; and some of what they do have, particularly ceremonial items, is sacred to them.

I just waded my way through an old Soviet era silent film called “Earth”, by Aleksandr Dovzhenko.  He had been cited by Tarkovsky as an influence, and as with Bresson and Antonioni, I felt the need to check him out.  I described it to my kids as quite possibly the most pretentious things I have ever watched.

Stylistically, with the long shots on nature, on apples, on fields of grain, on scenes of people doing ordinary things, one could clearly see echoes of this work in Tarkovsky.

But it was also a propaganda film.  To the extent it had a theme, it was the overtaking of “old” ways by new motorized farming, as exemplified in a tractor, and which itself symbolized the end of personal land through coerced collectivising. The chief exemplar of the new way, the aspiring Commissar and de facto bully, was played by an actor who made him look like a serial killer who had simply not been caught yet (and who was himself killed, by a “reactionary”, which is to say someone who did not want his land stolen by a snarling bunch of bullies).

You get, although this was not the intention, the patent jealousy and vindictiveness that was barely under the surface, if concealed at all, in the Soviet project.  All the riff-raff get to go steal from the rich farmers.  It would be as if in the modern day members of the poorest neighborhoods got to simply walk into the homes of the richest and take whatever they wanted.  This was a Soviet theme, and it was a Nazi theme.  Both played to the worst human instincts.

And this film was of particular interest in that it came out in 1930, some three years before Stalin starved millions in the Ukraine to punish them for not cooperating with what amounted to an effort to industrialize and thus dehumanize, the agricultural sector.  Where you had a plot of earth, however small, to call your own, now you were just one of many working on what for all intents and purposes could become an endless field.  You did not keep the fruits of your labor, and could not call anything your own.  You became a cog in an endless machine, one not operated for you, or really for anyone else.  It was simply one more way of causing you pain, which is the true purpose of all Leftisms.

It is odd that Marx saw clearly the alienation which mechanizing work brings, and yet such a process was ubiquitously undertaken in his name, at least within the Soviet sphere of influence (Cambodia and Year Zero is another story).

I feel keenly the emotional retardation and shortsightedness which underlies totalitarian impulses.  All these people–all the Communists, all the Nazis, all the Fascists in Spain and Italy–make reasonable decisions given their world views.  As one example, many people who believe in Global Warming would, if they could, have anyone who disagrees with them literally put in jail.  People who are surprised at the sundry leaks which have sprung up in their propaganda bubble want to criminalize all those who report news they have not doctored, reviewed, or been given the chance to suppress first.  Goebbels and Lenin certainly would have appreciated the irony of the people doing the lying and indoctrinating accusing everyone else of it.

All you have to do to generate authoritarianism is combine absolute certainty with political power.  The rest follows naturally.  “Errors” are punished, and nothing wrong is seen in this, since they are after all mistakes.  That true errors cannot be detected in such a system is a thought which is foreign to the system. One must elevate ones thinking a level or two, which is where true Liberalism makes its appearance.  Rule by authority is a rule by arrogance, and arrogance, as de Bono points out, is always an error in the future.

It is also odd that such atavistic emotions and thoughts should be so common among people educated in a world which exemplifies the alternative to the various Fascisms, and who are STILL too stupid to see what is literally everywhere in front of them.

I get psychopathology.  I have felt most of the emotions which underlie it, and grown beyond them.  But I continue to be puzzled at how so many people can be so stupid for so long.  No important truths are more than a Google search away.  The books are on the shelves, the documentaries on Netflix and elsewhere on the internet.  The knowledge is readily available.

One can hope that sanity somehow finds its way back into the addled minds of those who educate our young.

It is odd that the one nation most obsessed with a recent racist past is importing in large numbers the one ethnic group among whom admiration remains for the Nazis and anti-Semitism.  It is odd that their stand “against” racism is creating a climate of hate and fear among what Jews remain in Europe.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, if you fail to learn the lesson the first time.  Outer forms do not matter.  Structures in hidden motion do.

I’m  not sure how my description of some of my experiences sounds, but I would like to suggest that if they allowed themselves, most addicts would experience similar things.  That is the POINT of addiction: to keep such things contained, at bay, in a box or a drawer that, with the help of sex/work/weed/heroin/booze they can keep closed.

I am not unusual.  Where I think I might be a bit unusual–and “fake modesty” is not yet on the Verboten list, but I still see no reason to practice it–is in the extent of my ability to contact negative experiences, and not just stay with them, but to enter into them.  I feel fear often, but I do not fear fear. It is simply a color in my day, which I see and acknowledge, and which I am in the process of mastering.  I rub elbows with it, I dance “cheek to cheek” with it, to borrow a metaphor popular with the main Kum Nye teachers.

So many people endure wounds before age 5 that never get healed. I can’t guess at the number, and I doubt very much most professionals can do more than hazard a best estimate.  This is so hard to measure, and the very notion of Developmental Trauma, although intuitively obvious, has only really entered the mainstream, as far as I can tell, in the last 20 years or less.  Prior to that, it was assumed that absent the COGNITIVE ability to form memories, that environment mattered little.  This seems at least to have been the de facto notion, although even on the face of it it is stupid.  We are animals, and even dogs remember who kicked them.