Author: White Whale

I would make the simple case that he wins, then all is forgiven.  No prosecutions will be forthcoming, and a nationwide review of our voting process will be undertaken, and sane measures–like those used in Mexico, which include paper ballots as hard to forge as money, the right for representatives of all concerned parties to be present during counts and as needed recounts, photos of the ballots, and of course the same law that exists everywhere else in the world: the necessity of verifying your identity to vote.

If he loses, then lawsuits galore, and prosecutions as possible.  Now, sane people recognize that our misnamed Department of Justice has been corrupted.  We have the Attorney General in effect pleading the 5th to CONGRESS.  She is not going to prosecute the people outed by James O’Keefe’s sting videos, despite the fact that multi-state voter fraud is clearly a Federal crime.

We can in no respect depend on these people to do their jobs in a national election.  They will do everything they can, on the contrary, to press Trump to concede, even if the evidence is massive and clear.

But not all Democrats are corrupt.  I at least choose to believe this.  At the State and local levels there likely remain judges and prosecutors still willing to do their jobs; governors who care about election integrity.  No matter who promises what, the on the ground troops cannot depend on avoiding prosecution, and cannot depend on there being no investigation–as they have been able to in past years–and so cannot depend on staying out of jail.  And for serial or serious offenders, its one count per vote, or so I understand.  Long, long sentences are possible. And the higher ups cannot depend on the people downstream not turning on them en masse.  Me, I would make deals all the way up the line to get to the kingpins of corruption.

And even in a complete failure of our system, if I were him, I would sue PERSONALLY all people suspected of voter fraud.  Some investigation will happen.  Some consequences will occur.  And again, you put the squeeze on these people, then work your way up.

I just don’t know what people who are capable of this level of deceit can claim to believe.  Yes, some people are sick and crooked, and ethically “unavailable”.  But what ordinary, sane, morally normal person would be OK with being on the side of people who shit on our ideals of election integrity, fairness, and that comfortable manner of affluent and safe living that we call the American Way?  Do you hate your kids?  Do you WANT to live in a world where large corporations rule everything and everyone is on the take, openly, as will more or less be the case under Queen Hillary?

I voted for Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.  I am going to admit it.  I was conventionally indoctrinated, and as I believe Disraeli said, if you are not a Liberal when you are young you have no heart.  He also said, if you are not a conservative as you age, you have no brain.

Whenever blogging–endless typing on some site on the internet–became a thing, I was instantly hooked. I have so many words, so much to say, so much need to connect in a safe and ultimately disconnected way.  I stumped for Al Gore in 2000.  I thought the environment was by far the most important issue.  Not just global warming–which I vaguely recall believing in–but resource depletion, the pollution in our water and air, and the unsustainability of our lifestyles. Overpopulation. I recall being a member for a period of time of Paul Ehrlich’s Zero Population Growth.  His arguments made sense to me then.  Greenpeace.  That one where they buy up land so it won’t be developed.  Rainforest depletion (The Amazon is the lungs of the world”),

Around 2001 I ran across a column by Thomas Sowell where had a summer bibliography of conservative books and I decided to read a few.  My first few were Paul Johnson.  I read Modern Times, Intellectuals, then “History of the American peoples”, as I recall the title.  After that, it’s a bit fuzzy, but I know I read Peter Bauer and Sowell himself, and Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in one lesson”.

Imperceptibly, I became a conservative.  I know by the time Greg Glassman from CrossFit sent me a copy of Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit” (on his own nickel: at his best, he is extremely generous) it was a done deal.

The foundation had been set in the early 1990’s, whenever the Rodney King thing happened.  I was working as a temp in a mailroom and a legal journal came through for one of the corporate attorneys that made the case that the verdicts had been justified in the Rodney King case. In the course of the argument, he pointed out all sorts of things that had been neglected in the presentation to the public by our fucking media.

Did you know he was travelling at high rates of speed, up to 100 miles an hour, as I recall, while leading police on a many-mile chase, and that he blew through multiple red lights?

Did you know he had a couple passengers who were arrested without incident?

Did you know that he refused to obey orders when he got out of the car, and instead lunged at a cop?  That he was a large man, at least 6’3″, and 280 or so?  Did you know they tasered him twice?

Did you know he blew roughly a .20 on a breathalyzer?

Did you know that virtually the ENTIRE beating caught on video was ruled defensible by the prosecution?  It was only the last few hits, after he was seemingly subdued, that were claimed to be objectionable.

Office in Charge on site Stacey King–who did eventually go to jail in the retrial, which most practicing attorneys thought constituted unConstitutional double jeopardy–said they thought about shooting King.  Oh, the howls you heard.  But they thought he was on PCP.  A guy that size, feeling no pain, super strength, enhanced aggression: he could easily kill somebody, and they had already tasered him twice to no apparent effect at all.

You read the whole story, and it was only due to the PROFESSIONALISM of the LAPD that King wasn’t shot and killed after acting like that.  Far from abuse, he was lucky he didn’t die.  This says nothing about other cases, or the overall tone of the LAPD–the only friend I have stayed in touch with from college went to work there, and he said after a couple years of working South Central there was no way not to get cynical, seeing the same stupid shit day after day after day, and he didn’t like who he was becoming so he left–but in that PARTICULAR CASE, the LAPD was in the right.

I tell this story at some lengthy because I remember that vividly as the time when my faith in the media died.  I realized they were LYING, and covering up important truths, just to get viewers, just to construct a simple but false narrative.

And people DIED and were seriously hurt because of their lies.  Lying by the professional media is not a harmless crime.  Real people suffer the results.  They have an ETHICAL and PROFESSIONAL obligation to speak the truth, all the truth, as best as they can determine it.  And they have FAILED.  They continue to fail.

There was a time when even Democrats would have been appalled at the naked, continual, and strident advocacy of modern journalists, in defense of a woman who makes Nixon look like Mother Teresa (don’t keep that image in your head too long).

Everybody out there, but particularly the Left:  look in a fucking mirror, and ask who our nation becomes if you keep bullying, lying, cheating, stealing, in the service of “nobility and truth”, your versions of which you cannot define practically, and cannot defend philosophically.  Do you, can you, get the problem?

As for myself, what I perceive is that wherever I have landed ideologically, I have felt the need to have strong and continual opinions.  When I was a Democrat, I was a strident Democrat.  As a conservative–I won’t say Republican–well, you read this, don’t you?

But the pattern of obsessive, aggressive engagement is the same.  That is what I want to start addressing.  I have done the work to develop my ideas.  This obsession no longer suits my needs, no longer arises from decisions I didn’t make and find myself unable to undo, so I hope this pattern loosens soon.  That is my aim and intent, with the goal of being more actually, practically useful.

I was obsessively worried about Democrat propaganda operations against Bush for a long time.  Then I was obsessed with Obama, with the patent efforts to install a Leftist regime. If Trump gets in–and he should–I will be much less worried.  And if Hillary gets in, well, we Americans have sold our birthright for a day old biscuit and a cup of bad tea. That sort of stupidity cannot be countered or undone.  My practical task would then simply be learning how to live in a monolithic and monochromatic State as well as I can.

Two days ago, and the day before that, I had qualitatively very odd dreams (more odd in some ways than those I have described in the past 2 days).  I felt a sort of disconnection or madness. Now, I don’t think I am going crazy.  I think I have been crazy and am very, very slowly going sane.  I have a very clear tactile–sort of, I get images that also have a feeling, a felt sense to them–“thing” that I can’t describe.  Some elements of my consciousness I can’t begin to put in words.

Be that it may, here is an image that works for me.  I have been rewatching my Tarkovsky movies, and his images of moving water I always find soothing and meaningful for me.  Imagine a smooth stream of water flowing out of a source smoothly into a stream.  Now imagine placing a large stone in its path.  It may be that the water flows at the same rate, but in very different ways.  Now imagine that water flowing that way for many years, with erosion on the sides of the stream, moss building up in some places, and the whole stream quite habituated to this whole arrangement.

Now imagine that stone is removed.  My god, the whole system will be in shock.  What just happened? New patterns of erosion will begin, the moss will need to adapt.  But water is the most adaptable solid substance on Earth.  It will develop new pathways.

Likewise, what happens when you have chronic anxiety across a lifetime, and it disappears, perhaps not suddenly, but steadily?

The essence of Kum Nye is developing relaxation.  In at least the tradition as represented by Tarthang Tulku, there are three phases of spiritual development: relaxation, mindfulness, and concentration.  For many years it was called Kum Nye Relaxation.  And those are the books I have, one of them dating back to the mid-1980’s, when I purchased it from a New Age bookstore in Rancho Bernardino, California (I had both, but one ironically enough was destroyed in a water accident of some sort, the nature of which I forget).

It was later renamed “Kum Nye Yoga”, over the objections of Tarthang Tulku, I guess in an effort to appeal to a wider market.  But it is relaxation.

And you three layers of relaxation (they like to do things in threes): superficial relaxation of the sort you get laying next to the ocean, or getting a good massage, or in the early stages of yoga (which likely has some similar conceptions as far as relaxation; or if not the conception, likely the reality as Savasana is pursued with increasing success); Kun Zhi, more about which in a moment; then deep relaxation which is the BEGINNING of authentic spiritual exploration.  That is where you can being to learn.

Kun Zhi means “heavy ground”, if memory serves. What it represents is all your compulsions, your anxieties.  When you are silent, and things begin popping up in your mind, those things are being pushed by something below them.  And that something has something below it.  And that something has something below it.  You are digging, and this can take a long time.

I was having lunch with a friend the other day–the one who thankfully always listens to me, no matter how weird I am–and talking about how I feel I just need to go through one more gateway and then I am at bottom.  And she smiled, and then started laughing.  And I started laughing too.  She said “you’ve been telling me that for two years and I still have no idea what you mean”.  And I know it’s true.  I don’t speak like most people.  My attention is not drawn to what draws most people.  And I have to admit I am comical at times.  I don’t deny it. If it wasn’t Tao, no one would laugh.  Now was THAT self important?  I don’t know.

My belly button does still seem to be there, so I have that going for me.

But I picture this vast sky, then a thick Earth that we dig in.  We dig and dig, and underneath the Earth is more Earth.  But eventually, a hole appears, and you fall into a new sky.  That is the task.

And last night I’m dreaming half the night about an Apocalypse.  Not so hard this election cycle.  Some people were going to live in the “cages down below”, some try to evacuate to the Coast, some to shelter in place.  Confusion, mass death, no good answers.  And where is my family?  Where are the people I know?  Where is certainty and affection?  How do I find them?  They are lost, in a hopeless immensity of humanity.

Certainly, I do think a mass disaster would be like this.  Some families might be split up, never to reunite.  How sad!!!

But on a deeper level, you have to go mad, if you are mad, to go sane.  You have to let go of what you knew, of the order you crafted on the basis of horrific bone-deep wounds.  There will be completely random, unfathomable, uncontrollable movement, and mourning and sadness.  There is no other way.

There is no other way.  That is my view.

I had an odd night last night, even for me, and that is saying something.  I spent half of it dreaming of an apocalypse, about which more in the next post, and the later hours of the morning processing another visit from what I called a demon in my last post about my dreams, but which I now realize is something else.

I don’t know what percentage of the populace has lucid dreams–I’m sure there is a statistic somewhere–but I know it is less than 100%, so this may be hard to relate to for some.  I have been having them so many years that my main interest is in what they can show me.  I can and often have pushed my dreams one way or another, but I am increasingly learning just to listen, to interact, to actually HEAR or FEEL the message being given me, and stop being such a stupid cow.  It’s not about what I can do or avoid, or run from or attack.  I have changed my mind in this respect since my last post on this.

Imagine if the very essence of fear could be embodied.  Imagine it as a swirling pattern of electrical energy that when it approaches fills you with dread and shivers and terror. That is what appeared next to my bed last night, in what otherwise appeared to be a waking state, in my room.  It was a lucid dream that simply happened to include this energy. The first time it happened I awoke.

Then I realized “I can deal with this”, and fell back asleep, sensing it was still there.  And there it was, 6 inches from my face, to the side, as that is how I usually sleep.  And I looked at it, felt the fear and dread, tracked it across my back and in my chest and throat, and then pushed my hand into it.  I decided to learn from it what I could.  It roared at me energetically–it showed me teeth, but I couldn’t feel any–and  I decided I could deal with it, and persisted.

I tried to send light through my hands and forehead.  I have been able on rare occasions in dreams to do that, but not tonight.  But I was able to summon curiosity with regard to more or less pure fear, and upon contemplating when I woke up, this is what I have decided.

There are three grades of fear, 2 unhealthy, one healthy and in any event unavoidable.

Level One Fear actuated by actual external events which are real–or which seem real physically–and which serves as an effective alarm system, and more or less intuitive extension of our normal perceptual apparatus.

Such fear in general, if managed, makes us MORE effective in many life and death situations.  Effective combat soldiers elicit it and welcome it. One Navy SEAL acquaintance of mine who is very active in parachuting and wingsuiting says he’s only scared before, during and after the jumps.  Some years ago, I suggested to a guy creating a breaching course (the process of blowing doors open) that they do calisthenics before each drill to simulate elevated heart rate, and he said it was worked extremely well.  They need that adrenaline to perform at their peak.

But such fear only appears in response to ACTUAL threats.  This is the key point.

Level Two Fear is fear of the emotion of fear.  I will need to sort this out in coming days, but this might have something to do with PTSD.  I’ll need to think about it.  Now, I see no compelling reason to ENJOY fear.  I don’t go to haunted houses (real or pretend), or watch horror movies, or do dangerous things that frighten me.  It does seem to me all of those might be ways, though, of dealing with an on-going anxiety–I am going to say here, although I may change my mind, that anxiety is the fear of a variety of emotions, the fear of what COULD happen that will invoke some unpleasant emotion, of which fear is one example.

Let’s expand on that a bit.  You feel social embarrassment.  You fear financial ruin.  You fear professional failure and unemployment.  You fear nuclear war.  You fear being mugged or raped.  You think–frontal cortex–about things which COULD happen, and these thoughts are presented to your limbic system as real, and it reacts accordingly, as if they were actually present threats, and you go into level one fear, which is the same as if the threat were actually present and happening.

Now there are no limits to the imaginative capacity of the human mind.  There is no reason you could not feel fear of everything at all times.  And particularly dealing with trauma–my own issue–hyper and hypoarousal are defining symptoms.  You KNOW what is possible.   You KNOW what it is like to feel fear that is so vast that it pops all the circuit breakers, and pushes you into a sub-human condition where your social systems are off-line, where even the simplest work is difficult, where almost anything can trigger a return.

Level 3 Fear is the Panic Attack.  The fear of the fear of fear.  Level 2 fear–chronic anxiety–thinks about the possibility of revisiting that primal event that took you off-line.  It is like fearing being mugged, but with the added insidious element that it recalls an onslought of feelings that pushed you far past your limit.  How will you deal this time?  How COULD you deal this time?  So this anxiety triggers flashbacks, and those flashbacks validate the anxiety, in a self reinforcing loop.

I think that is what happens.

And for people who cannot remember any traumas, the clear possibility of Developmental Trauma Disorder explains it.  Such a trauma could literally be as basic as a baby crying wanting its mother, the mother being in the bathroom, the baby escalating, the mother still not coming, then the baby going into panic mode.  My sense is if that happens ONCE–and my god babies cry a lot in their early years–then that seed is now planted.  Imagine how it is for the children of genuinely neglectful or even abusive mothers or fathers?

Once one ponders such things, the value of having an extended family at home appears much more obvious, at least to me.  If there are 3-4 women there, each of whom has a warm relationship with a child, that child will never suffer in that way.

And practically, I see pictures from around the world–Calcutta, Haiti, all around Africa–of children and adults laughing and smiling in physical conditions that would put most Westerners into prolonged depressions.  You cannot put a price on early childhood attachment.  It literally focuses and directs an entire lifetime.  Problems in this period cannot easily be corrected by therapy.

This post is not quite coherent.  I like to think I know when I am being coherent, and that feeling is not present.  But it is a starting point for later work.

I am seeing more coverage of negative stories about Hillary, and it occurs to me that in the current circumstances, mass voter fraud might prove very, very dangerous.  Some people involved have likely been doing it for decades, and if Hillary wins in questionable circumstances–and polling data shows CLEAR Trump momentum, even the doctored ones–then there WILL be an investigation. They were able to count on Mitt Romney backing down, since he was and is a genteel loser, and a member of the system.  John McCain, who has shown that loyalty no longer remains one of his virtues, likewise.

There is no reason not to believe Trump when he says he will demand an investigation.  Such an investigation, if conducted honestly–and not all segments of our system are broken, I am sure, as there remain likely even honest Democrats willing and able to do their jobs honestly–would result in arrests and convictions.  These people really do risk jail time, this time.

And who would want to go to jail for such a horribly flawed candidate?  Obama was able to read his teleprompter with such seeming sincerity that he set people on fire with enthusiasm.  Hillary can’t manage even that.  She is a frumpy, sick, career liar, abuser of women, foreign policy failure, and Wife of Bill, which we now know is a badge of shame.  And according to John Podesta, she always has an unpleasant odor about her, like she doesn’t bathe enough.

Who, now, will set themselves on fire for her?  Who, now, can say jail time was well worth investing her with our highest office, when we KNOW that nothing important will change, except that we might get the nuclear war most of us have dreaded our entire adult lives.

Unless something has changed, the Democrat Governor of Virginia–I believe him name is Terry McAuliffe, who is also the person who donated so generously to the political campaign of the wife of the FBI agent who supervised the investigation of Hillary–granted voting rights to convicted felons unilaterally and in defiance of Virginia law, after which the Supreme Court of Virginia told him he did not have the right to do that, and he is currently ignoring them. [He is, in other words, either refusing to uphold his oath of office, or breaking the law outright.]

None of those votes have legal standing.  Hopefully, Trump will win in a landslide, but if he does not, the legitimacy of those votes can and should be challenged, if the vote totals are within the margin allowed by the votes potentially cast by people not legally allowed to do so.

This is common sense.

And the law.  Let’s not forget that we are theoretically a nation of laws, even if evidence for that claim becomes scantier year by year, and as institutions are infected by contact with people like the Obama’s and Clintons.

I really think it has been best until now that the professional, which is to say the mentally and emotionally disturbed, Left, has been able to assume Hillary could coast to victory easily, could schedule nothing for ten days before the election and emerge the clear winner.

It literally feels to me like now orcs are on the march in hordes, issuing from dark place.  They will be enraged beyond belief, like wild animals, if, as appears likely to me in the absence of massive and undetected voter fraud, Trump becomes the clear victor.

I talk about my dreams from time to time.  Most of the time I am able to interact with even unpleasant dreams in a fairly conscious way.  Sometimes I will have what they call Lucid Dreams, where everything feels as real as this world.  I have had a few that literally, in every respect, felt like waking life, felt like I had somehow been transported to a field somewhere in the night, and stood there in rustling grass, feeling the breeze and smelling the night, and was able to think, there, that “this is a dream, but it does not feel like a dream.”

Many of those who believe that our spirits and body/brain are severable, that they are separate, even if for a time related, things, believe we do travel in another dimension at night.

Well, and I am using this as a method of processing this experience, a demon attempted to attack me in my sleep this morning.  It was a lucid dream, and some wild animal got in.  As I always do, I immediately confronted it, and it disappeared and I awoke.  My heart doesn’t race.  I don’t have nightmares, because I can control them.

But facing–attacking, moving towards instantly and with no hesitation–demons denudes them of their power.  Their power is in terror, and in hiding in the shadows and whispering.  Faced, looked at, they disappear.

Self evidently, I do read books on psychology and neurophysiology, and see no reason to reject the importance of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex, or whatever.  But I do also believe this world is a sort of projection, an illusion, a collective dream, and that much of what we imagine is unreal.

And I do believe in a demon haunted world, literally.  I think people who are good people can protect themselves, but I also believe we need to avoid complacency and weakness, and we need to daily do what we can to feed and build what is good in this world.

And gold sometimes requires polishing before it does.

Just putting that out there.  Much of our country needs nursery rhymes to reconnect with its sanity.  There was a time before. . . .

I saw some idiotic piece a while back by Deepak Chopra about Trump embodying the American shadow.  Let me ask a simple question: who is committing all the acts of violence?  Who paid people to provoke violence, to start riots?

Scott Adams breaks it down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h8wZBxDuhQ

In all previous elections, particularly the last two, the Republicans have been content to let lies stand, to allow themselves to be pushed around, in all likelihood to allow voter fraud, to ignore media bias, all of which are working to enfeeble Americans intellectually, and to allow big lies to take root in the consciousness of millions of people.

What Trump (with a lot of help from Wikileaks)  has done is throw a bright flare up into the sky, allowing us to see this darkened landscape clearly, and realize just how bad things have gotten, to see the money changing hands in the shadows, to see our elected and appointed representatives looking the other way where crimes against America are concerned, to see the nexis between Republicans and Democrats that is working to vitiate our Constitution and with it the protection of our liberties.

Far from being a shadow, Trump is bringing light, which is SHOWING us the ugliness, the hatred, the intolerance, the violence of the Left.  He is the result of anger, but RIGHTEOUS anger.  There is such a thing.  He is Jesus taking a whip to the grifters and thieves outside the holiest shrine in Judaism, who made a carnival of what should have been a solemn and serious place.

We may survive.  We may develop means of ACTUALLY caring about the less fortunate among us, and raising them up without feeling the need to tear anyone else down.  We might develop–no, the information is already there–we may be able to DEPLOY methods generally around the world such that all peoples become happy in peace.  This is what we want.  Peace is not the absence of violence: prisons in general are quite free of violence, as are graveyards.  Peace is a system in motion in which all the components interact harmoniously, effectively, and which works to generate increasing informational capacity manifested as joy.

Dan Siegel, in his book Mindsight, defined mind thus:

the mind is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.

Now, as far as I can tell he is an atheist–so he seems in the book, although his views may have evolved–so he is simply using Complexity Theory to describe mind as an Emergent Property of processes happening throughout the nervous system, and between our nervous system and those of others, and even our environment.

What I would suggest is that in  important respects the regulation of the flow of energy and information is also the task of human culture.  Culture plainly is a part of mind.  It directs the flow of energy and information.  We see what we are conditioned to see, and fail to see what we are conditioned not to see.  We do what we have been conditioned to do, and avoid what we have been conditioned to avoid.

I have argued in the past that Free Will mainly consists in what we pay attention to, and it consists in what I have termed “non statistical coherence”.  Much of what we do every day is automatic.  We are on autopilot.  That is not free will.  But I feel there is something that we can allow emerge, a light that appears spontaneously within us, which brings with it the capacity for more.

Wealth is the Emergent property of the confluence of the rule of law, free markets, enforceable contract law, and property rights.  We have solved the problems of how to generate wealth, and if you think about it, wealth is really a form of energy: it is sufficient food for our bodies, and in the modern world the ability to light our homes, to heat them, and to cool them.

Information is what directs the flow of energy.  And here is the point I wanted to make: the destiny of individuals as well as societies, is to transition from mere survival, to inner, non-material growth, which is to say quantum increases in informational complexity. Our destiny is to move from a wealth of things to a wealth of being, with the sense of being increasing as a result of greater awareness, which is to say informational richness.  We see more.  We feel more. We taste more. We smell more.  We hear more.  And we sense more intuitively.

It seems to me very wealthy, very powerful, outwardly intelligent people worry about resource depletion on this planet, about overpopulation.  Seemingly, their solution is the use of blunt force trauma to coerce humanity into a path of reducing resources by being dead, and by a vastly diminished quality of life.

But this is stupid.  As I have likely shared, the spiritual technology exists for all of us to live in grass huts and be happy.  We can combine the best of technology for getting physical things done, with the best of spiritual technology to make it all worth it, to build a sort of heaven here on Earth.

It is possible.  But only if we are not fucking idiots in large enough numbers to survive all the attacks on morality, decency, humanity, and liberty.