Author: White Whale

Aka “Supply Side” economics.

I watched the debate.  I watched it highly biased in favor of Trump, who I truly believe will ACTUALLY implement the policies he has advocated, if he can get in the White House. He talked like a working class joe, which he more or less is, even if his work is at a much higher level, and in contrast to Hillary sounded both much less erudite and much less smug.

As he more or less noted, most of our problems have been created by allegedly erudite, smug assholes with degrees from prestigious universities and ZERO experience solving actual problems in the real world.  That is something Trump has done his whole life.  He figures the situation out, develops a plan, executes it, and reaps a profit.  When his plan doesn’t work, he recognizes it, develops an exit strategy, and executes that.

A meme circulating among the left is that if Trump had just invested the money he inherited, he would be much richer.  This may be true, but he would also be vastly less experienced as a human being.  His business experience is infinitely larger than that of Hillary, who has been in politics her whole life.  She doesn’t get “little people”.  They are an abstraction to her she practices appealing to rhetorically, but for which she has no practical use, and no interest in, outside the election season.

To my main point: somebody needs to do the fucking job of defending traditional economics.  Supply side is already propaganda.  Historically, the policy of government was to just let economic fires burn themselves out.  And it WORKED.  You know the Great Depression of the early 1920’s?  Neither do I.  It didn’t happen.

Not until you get to aggressive government activism–to Keynesian policy–which was started by Hoover, and put on steroids by FDR, do you get massive, long term failures.

It is worth recollecting that Keynes was a fascist.  Mussolini called his policies “pure fascism”, and he speaks at the end of his “General Theory” about using his methods for the government to get de facto if not pure control of all the means of production.  He had room in his world for compliant massive global corporations, as indeed do all Democrats, but not for a forest of thriving independent small businesses.

The core idea behind tax cuts is that it frees up money for investment.  You cut personal and corporate taxes, you lose money for a year or two, then because the overall economy has expanded, you get more money at lower tax rates.  Win/win: the people get jobs and better paying jobs, and the government can stay the same size without borrowing money.  In a yet better world, the government would shrink, which would allow even fewer taxes to be needed, and more economic prosperity.

This fact is hidden by the clever and completely cynical ploy of tying government spending to overall GDP.  Why?  Do we need more government the bigger we are?  No, of course not.  What this trick actually does is convince ignorant and stupid people that the destiny of government is to grow forever.

None of these things are controversial among non-lunatics.

There is an excellent chart somewhere on the internet which shows that in both the case of Reagan and Bush overall revenues went up after the tax cuts, but I can’t find it.  That is the sort of thing the left wing pukes at Google like to hide.  Why, I don’t know. It shows their ideas about tax policy are wrong, and why they want to be wrong, I don’t know.  Vanity and habit I suppose, the twin goblins that hover continually around all mediocrity.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/12/federal-spending-by-the-numbers-2014

This covers the Bush years.  The cuts really took effect about 2003 or so.  The government took in 2.2 billion or so that year.  Next year, slightly more.  2005 we took in 2.5, 2006 2.7, 2007 2.8, and 2008 2.7 again, but recall a recession hit that year, one brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble that was largely the work of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Had the bubble not had the de facto underwriting of the government, sane loans would have needed to be made, and the bubble never would have emerged. The high risk lending never would have happened.  Government–specifically, BAD government–created that crash..

But as far as lower taxes creating more tax revenue as a result of economic growth: THIS IS WHAT THE THEORY PREDICTS AND IT IS WHAT HAPPENED.  Again, you can do the same experiment with Reagan.

“Supply side” economics is simply economics.  It works.  And I watch people like Hillary repeat these childlike mantras about the supposed failures of these policies, and I am forced to recall most people are fucking idiots when it comes to economics, and have been brainwashed into believing things that are completely batshit insane.

Darkness is quiet for the eyes.

Relaxation is quiet for the body.

And most of us don’t use our taste or smell very well anyway, do we?  In any event, continual noise is not a large problem.

In what meaningful respect was the Soviet Union–and particularly that ideal of the Soviet Union, as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, where everyone but a small elite was the proletariat–different morally from Pharaoahonic Egypt?  Lenin was in fact preserved in a major public monument in a prominent public space.  He was embalmed using 20th century technology, and placed on display in a pyramid of sorts.

In both cases you have masses of slaves operating as cogs in a massive centrally planned economic machine.  You have reminders everywhere of the power of the rulers.  In Egypt they are carved into stone, and in the Soviet Union they are posted on walls, broadcast on the radio, and yes, shown in  public monuments.  Pictures of the ruler are everywhere in the Soviet Union, and he is more or less worshipped.  Failure to do courts arrest, torture, and/or death and/or exile.

I would stipulate that high/low is a primitive construct, one rooted in ancient biology, and made vastly worse by the capacity for abstraction unique to humans.

It is circles we should seek.  A church has a high/low, and a front/back.  There is an authority implied by the masses facing one way, and a ceremonial superior facing back, from an elevated place, where they claim to act as God’s agent.

Egalitarianism uses the circle rhetorically, but intends the church.

I think most of us can accept the myth–and I intend here a deep symbolic reality which I lack the historical knowledge to tie certainly to known physical realities–of primitive tribes around the world sitting in circles and talking.  Perhaps there is a Chief, and perhaps he sits in a place of honor, but he is in the same circle.  Once there is a Lord, and he faces outward, then primitive simplicity has been lost.

The circle is my own vision for the future.  If you think about it, the internet is in some respects an endless series of circles.

There is a profound difference between “I have a path”, and “you must follow my path.”

I might say we all wonder through the woods in our own way.  We cross the endless eddies and currents of the sea in our own way.  A path is an evolving thing.  You can feel it being created, but you are not exactly the one doing it.  That is why, while you have influence, it is more like it is being made for you.

It seems to me that the universe is an endless concatenation of Rube Goldberg devices, where many critical junctures are Schroedinger’s Cat sorts of indeterminacies, that only come into being once a decision is made.

And it seems to me that the path of wisdom, and the fundamental method for dealing with and embracing change, which is our main task in this life, is treating this universe as interesting.  How UNEXPECTED.  I did not see that coming.  Well, this is interesting.  Where is the opportunity?  How can I surf this wave and enjoy it?

People who need you to do what they are doing have not, at root, found their OWN path.  They have not connected experientially with the ebbs and flows of life, and learned to interact with them in creative ways.  The compulsion to push others should likely, at the end of the day, be seen as a covert method of pushing oneself into something you don’t want either.  It is a way of pushing away fear.

I find myself speculating on this with difficulty, because I have never felt, as far as I can recall, any need to force my views on anyone else.  I persuade continually–indeed I argued continually about everything for many years, and still do sometimes–but I certainly don’t want to be copied.

It occurs to me Trump is having fun in this campaign.  Like most people, I instinctively like and tend to trust to a certain point people who know how to have fun.  It implies at a minimum they are not OCD ideologues, and at best a generosity of spirit and outlook, that I think does genuinely characterize Trump.

Obama comes across as a sour-faced scold, does he not?  Whatever the words he is given, he always turns them into a lecture about how bad you are and how good he is.  Trump is more like “life’s great!!!  Come join me on the podium.”

I was pondering today that final healing from the sorts of wounds that get expressed as addictions requires understanding the part of you that pushed you into those behaviors.  It is not mental understanding.  It is not describing what happened.

What it is is finding a qualitative gestalt within yourself, an array of sensations and feelings and thoughts, all conjured together in a sort of knot in your nervous system, contacting this gestalt, and doing Kum Nye with it: you contact the whole thing, enter into it, merge it with the breath, and expand it.

What I felt tonight doing my practice is that this part is inherently something that has had internal violence done to it, over and above the violence that created the initial traumatization.

Think about it: when something horrible happens, especially when you are a kid, and especially when it was done by cold and thoughtless, or even intentionally cruel parents or other people supposed to protect you, you still have to function.  You still have to show up to life, even though it terrifies you.  You have to go to school.  You have to be a good boy or girl, and continue to do what you are told.

How do you do this?  Push the pain back in the hole.  This is violence.  This is a separation made necessary by the need to survive.

You know what?  That is exactly what Tom Waits is talking about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw2MjRcVO4g

The Devil: he has a string in all of us that can be plucked, and it is a long time before it stops vibrating. For some, it never does.

Healing, then, is done with compassion.  It involves communicating to this part that as imperfect as your psychological command and control structure is, as imperfect as agency necessarily is when dissociation is present, that you will do your best never to act out in anger to this part, and to include it in your thoughts and prayers, to take it with you wherever you go, and to spend time with it, talking.

I am in the final stages of this healing, and I’m trying to figure out how to approach it.  This is what makes the most sense to me at the moment, and I thought I would share.  I hope it does someone some good.

It seems to me that tolerance is a mid-point between enmity and understanding.  You don’t speak of tolerating people you love.  There is a continuum between close friend and enemy.  Somewhere in the middle a modus vivendi can be crafted by the wise.

And as I ponder it, it seems to me what the word is INTENDED to connote is a situation in which the behavior of someone is mildly or greatly bothering you, but you choose to tolerate it, to put up with it, to let it be and let it go, because it is either not worth making the fuss, or because on a level of principle you have decided not to allow your own feelings about something to cause you to react with social or physical violence.  Putting up with flag burners as a matter of principle would be an example.

Here is the key point: if there is no internal friction, that is not tolerance.  And in this regard I would differentiate psychologically mature tolerance from the childlike and irresponsible version on full view in Europe and large segments of America.

Tolerance is “I have feelings and habits, and you have different feelings and habits, but we can still get along in peace.”  This is mature.  This is Liberal.

What the Left–what paid and professional agitators funded by that demonic wart George Soros and his ilk–do, is they say “you don’t get any feelings.  If you object, we will shout at you, insult you, attempt to marginalize you, and throw hate at you.”

Anyone who accepts this proposal is displaying a profound lack of psychological boundaries, of mature defenses, of personal agency, of moral discipline. You have submitted your own ego to the control of mutable Others.  This, again, is what happens with the headless ones, as I call them.  It does not lead to genuine tolerance, real peace, or any form of meaningful happiness.

OCD is anxiety with a terminus. It is a way of regularly grounding the Lightning.

Could we call leftists Hydrophobes?  They are afraid of the concept of purity, and of deep feeling, and it is a synonym for rabid.

I was listening to The Doors the other day and noticing Jim Mortison talked about freedom a lot. Most of the counterculture did back then. They don’t now. Rather than doing their own thing, they all do the same thing and feel entitled to demand the same if he rest of us.

If I were President, I would schedule a low key, informal meeting of the worlds leaders, and see if we couldn’t figure out some map to a future all of us would want to live in. The people “planning” our future don’t like most of us. I like America, but see no reason to pick fights. How can we all get along together? How can world leaders build effective and real friendships?

I am increasingly realizing that pendulating my own trauma is quite necessary–in and out, in and out–but that dealing with other peoples emotions requires some complex, intuitive coming in and out too.

There is benefit to sympathy, to feeling what others feel. But we also live in a world where something is tugging on this sense continually, every day, and most moments of that day.  If you look, you can find, as you choose, something to gratify, horrify, sadden, or gladden you, each and every day.

To my mind it is superficial to focus ONLY on the positive.  And it is masochistic to focus only on the negative.  It is possible to process both, without a large distance, but with some distance.  You see it, you acknowledge it, but you are not compelled to feel the obvious feelings.  Your feelings are your own.  My feelings are my own.

Maturity–boundary protecting–in this world requires the ability to recognize, to see, to process, to not overlook, what other people are feeling, without also getting caught up in it.

I saw this clearly today.