Author: White Whale

It hit me that sentimentality, which appears to be an overabundance of emotion, is really a lack.  It is to honest and mature emotionality what so-called ADD/ADHD is to healthy attention. Why do they give uppers to kids who are already bouncing off the walls?  Because their excessive activity is related to the inability to focus, which is related, effectively, to inner dullness and lack of energy.  You put them on speed, and they become normal.  They have to be accelerated to get there, not slowed down.

Likewise sentimentality, which surrounds us, is a lack of substance.  When I see something like “love is all you need”, or whatever they spelled out at the Superbowl, I see vapidity.  I see cotton candy.

We have become a nation which loves to have its emotions manipulated.  It has perhaps always been so.  I don’t know.  I haven’t lived in any other time, that I can remember, but as just one example I just watched “Slumdog Millionaire”, and it could not have been a more American ending.  Yes, it was set in India, but it was sugar coated.  Their movies may well be like that too–everybody loves a happy ending–but it seems to me the task of a genuinely Liberal culture is meeting and understanding life on its own terms.

For every hero there are many losers.  I cannot look at the poverty in India and not think that from 1948, when they got their independence (thereabouts) until 1990 or so, they pursued socialist programs to elevate the poor. These efforts were miserable failures.  About 1990, they got the government out from the middle of everything, and implemented free market reforms.  As they said in that movie Bombay became Mumbai.

China pursued a Communist agenda over roughly the same time frame.  They pursued it much more vigorously.  Far, far more people died, were tortured, were imprisoned for political crimes, and were forced to live lives of abject fear, and in the end, they had to implement some free market reforms.  China now is much more akin to a Fascist economy than that of Communism.  They retain, of course, a disdain for Fascists, because truth, common sense, the OBVIOUS, are all punished very vigorously.  This is how the mediocre protect their infantile egos, and of course their police-backed claims on absolute tyrannical power, which is used against the People, and contrary to most of their interests.

But Socialism appeals to sentiment.  Wouldn’t it be NICE if. . . .

Mature people deal with the world as it is.  Fools hyperventilate about how it should be, act as if it were the way they think it should be, and are stupid and craven enough to be surprised when water, again, flows downhill.

Here is a table on corn subsidies: http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

Here is an article on corn subsidies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

In the US, sugar tariffs and quotas keep imported sugar at up to twice the global price since 1797,^[25][26] while subsidies to corn growers cheapen the primary ingredient in HFCS, corn. Industrial users looking for cheaper replacements rapidly adopted HFCS in the 1970s.^[27][28]HFCS is easier to handle than granulated sucrose, although some sucrose is transported as solution. Unlike sucrose, HFCS cannot be hydrolyzed, but the free fructose in HFCS may produce Hydroxymethylfurfural when stored at high temperatures; these differences are most prominent in acidic beverages.^[29] Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to HFCS in the U.S. in 1984.^[30] Large corporations, such as Archer Daniels Midland, lobby for the continuation of government corn subsidies.^[31]

I had not been aware of the sugar tariffs either.  In the grand scheme of things this is not all that important, but it is consistently stunning to me that the Left is not better able to pick targets which are actually guilty of colluding with the government, and forming a genuine common cause with conservatives.  Most of that problem is that they do not grant us the status of being human.  They project their own failings onto us, and everyone else unlike them who happens to wander into one of their caves. 

As with most things, I am seeing rank imbecility on all sides, but mostly the Left, on this issue.

The Constitution contains many checks and balances, and more or less compels the necessity for the negotiated settlement of differences.  It is not a winner takes all system.  It is a system which by design makes it hard for aspiring tyrants to make much progress unobstructed by their opponents, which is the principle reason why aspiring tyrants–the Left produces nothing else–see it as passe.  The dislike it for precisely the traits which make it invaluable.

The President nominates Supreme Court Justices.  The Senate confirms them.  Nothing is preventing Obama from nominating whomever he likes, and nothing is preventing Republicans from using their control of the Senate to block his nominations until after the next President is inaugurated.  There is no timetable given in the Constitution of which I am aware.  The only impediment to being completely obstructionist is the likelihood that at some point the same tricks will be played on those serving as obstacles.  Given how blatantly Obama has abused the law, one wonders what anyone can say when a conservative does the same things.  They certainly cannot say there is no precedent.  Obama governs as if there will be no after, as if Democrats will rule forever, and the hens never come home to roost.  Given how patently imbecilic much of this nation is, he may be right.  But of course, it is quite possible he is wrong, too.  Trump appears to me the favorite in both the Primary and General Elections.  Too many people are too pissed off about too many things.

This is the rough and tumble of political systems which attempt to reconcile differing agendas and positions peacefully.  The alternative is violence in the streets, or the use and abuse of the police and military to suppress dissent, both of which of course have been common throughout history.

I saw an interview with Norman Lear where he was saying Donald Trump is the middle finger directed at the media elites, and the PC fascists, but that he had no staying power.

Why?  Where does the anger of 40 years or more of being ridiculed for speaking common sense go?  How long can you shit on anyone and expect them to take it with equanimity?  How rationally can you expect them to adopt your positions when your only argument is shouting them down and insulting them?

The vicious tactics of the Left can and have achieved silence among many, but they have not bought agreement.  They don’t debate. They don’t negotiate.  So the only persuasive force they can wield is getting physical power over their opponents, and beating them with it, in the same manner cavemen once beat each other with cudgels.  The essence of their strategy appears to be getting Political Correctness the force of law.

And can we not see something like a Cultural Revolution on the horizon?  Are todays students really that different than those of Maoist China?  Are they reflective?  Inner directed?  Capable of exercising independence of conscience?  No, they are none of these things.  They are completely unable to recognize that genuine compassion and viciousness are incompatible, and that the only ones capable of reconciling them are those who are interacting with ideas and not actual human beings; who are using an ideology to form a tribe based upon Other-directed violence, which is the oldest game in the human biological playbook.  It is atavistic, and should be recognized as such, but of course that would require a return to reason.

So we see everyone on the Left saying vicious things about Scalia, in a demonstrable COMPLETE lack of understanding as to why decent people defend the Constitution.  They conflate civil rights with the expansion of an omnipotent and omnipresent government, when in fact virtues like respect, peaceful disagreement and coexistence, and the like, are negotiated not by the government, but by people, and that to the extent the government gets in the middle, it delays the process.

You can always point guns at peoples heads.  Violence works for a time.  But it has a shelf life, and violence breeds violence.  Trump is the electoral expression of a vast rage which dim-witted narcissists cannot comprehend because they are not capable of even the rudiments of empathy, despite their obsession with “helping people”.  We are breeding vicious children, packs of wild dogs, controlled by the whistles of propaganda and situational conformity, and as Malcolm McDowell recently said, we are not all that far from a Clockwork Orange.  Such pride the children of the “Love” generation must take in their accomplishments.

Can we say now that it was crazy to see a “communist conspiracy” to dumb down America, alter her educational and news establishments, and begin a gradual process of indoctrinating and then dominating her people?  Exhibit One: the election, not once, but twice, of an unvetted man about whom we know almost nothing who on his own admission has been surrounded by Communists–in the case of Frank Marshall Davis, one with a literal CPUSA card number–all his life, in infancy, in childhood, and by his own choice as an adult.  How many Americans even now know the name Valerie Jarrett?  Most Americans think they are doing well if they can come up with the name of the Vice President.

Can this execrable ignorance be anything but the result of long term, conscious policy?  Of course not.

Harvard now tells us that water fluoridation does next to nothing to prevent dental caries–those have been reduced by affluence, and the following access to dental care, better hygiene, and greater awareness of the importance of caring for the teeth–and seems to make us dumber: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/

In a meta-analysis, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and China Medical University in Shenyang for the first time combined 27 studies and found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children. 

Is this paranoia?  Well, it IS Harvard, and we are not talking about the economics department, or any of their lunatics in the Humanities.  This is the word of THE MAN.  This is the center of the mainstream.

And I was watching a video about how sugar alters consciousness on Victor Zammit’s weekly report, and it occurred to me that the government has been underwriting in the form of corn subsidies the very addition of high fructose corn syrup to our food that he claims alters and clouds our minds.  Why do these subsidies, so damaging to the public health, continue?  I mean this over and above the question as to why taxpayers are being used to give money to people who are otherwise engaged in for profit businesses?  If they need the subsidies to survive, then they are not producing something valuable at a price people are willing to pay.  Failure is the price of success in “Capitalism” (I never allow myself to call leftists Liberals, but I will grant Marx his use of the term Capitalism from time to time.  Like “Descendants of the refugees from the war of 1948”, being more precise is cumbersome).  You cannot have the latter without the possibility of the former, in a free system.

And did Truman and Eisenhower allow China to “go red”  Clearly.  Could we have reinvaded North Korea and then China–when it was lucky to put shoes on the feet of its soldiers, and a gun in every other hand–and prevented countless millions of deaths?  Clearly.  That would have been a humane policy–even if we had used nukes, and killed hundreds of thousands or even millions–as could have been foreseen then (as indeed Churchill foresaw in 1918 in calling for massive support for the Whites), and as is obvious now.  We could have avoided the famines in China, the famines in North Korea, the Vietnam War (in all likelihood), the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and countless billions of ordinary lives lived in misery and poverty under the hands of oppressive tyrants.

This is common sense.  This is common decency.  It is precisely the refusal of the Left to accept the outcomes of its policies, of its refusal to learn, and to apply the concept of universal human rights honestly and sincerely to all, which forces it into positions of truculency, anger, obfuscation, propagandizing, sloppiness, laziness, and ubiquitous fear of discovery.  It forces the cultivation of all the qualities that all civilized societies the world over have considered odious.

By and large, the John Birchers were right.  If they saw a Communist conspiracy under every tree, we know now they were largely right.  The Soviets spent 4 rubles undermining values and attacking cultural institutions for every dollar they spent on the KGB and all its frolics.  They told us this, just as the North Vietnamese tell us that the support of people like Jane Fonda–who they name by name–was critical to them hanging on in the face of massive and humiliating battlefield losses, and ultimately winning only as a result of our craven and disgusting retreat after having achieved tactical victory at the cost of 56,000 or so American lives.

Listen to this, because: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho8ZSzKbiMc

It is interesting to me to contemplate that all this pacific music which to most contemporary ears is foreign and boring, was a creative reaction to the virtually incessant warfare in Europe since time immemorial.  You can say the Romans pacified it, but only parts of Europe, and there was always continual warfare on the boundaries, always “Scythians”, or Vandals, or Franks, or Germans, or Lombards, or Burgundians, or others causing mass violence.  Most of the cities in Europe have been sacked at some point, their inhabitants sold into slavery, and their goods stolen, then in a great many cases been stolen back, or stolen a second time by someone else.

I will reiterate that one learns something about the human condition listening to Gibbon.  Even the graduates of our allegedly best schools–I can’t honestly say “best educated”–know very little of history.  They cannot place our current era of peace, judicial impartiality, human rights, freedom, and economic prosperity, into anything approaching a sane context.  They repeat stupid things said by stupid people.  Every time they open their mouths they subtract from the sum total of human knowledge (I borrowed that from an early 20th century Republican, whose name escapes me).

But listen.  There is solace in war, refuge in conflict.  There is a place for churches, or something like them.  They have no ready substitute, certainly not arenas of political theater, which can only be satisfied with violence.  There is nothing new in that.  It is the oldest story we know.  Perhaps there was a time before violence, but that was before people felt the need to record the deeds of war, which is more or less what history is.

I am feeling that in order to feel genuine hope, you have to be capable of despair.  One of the mistakes people make, which I have made, is thinking that if they allow a “negative” emotion to gain traction that it will suck them in and devour them.

This probably does happen sometimes.  But if you develop emotional agility, which is the practice of feeling, of anchoring emotions in prior sensations which you can tell are mutable, then you need not become stuck.  You can allow deep shadows to infect you, and then pass over you.  They have no claim on you.

What prompts this post specifically was a meme stating in effect that the problem is not Hillary or Bernie, but that Americans are willing to vote for someone promising free stuff to everyone, and someone who lies nearly as often as she talks, and who by all credible accounts belongs in the same jail cell any senior member of the military would have found themselves in had they done a fraction of what she did.  Her crimes are many times more egregious than those of David Petraeus, and he is still paying for them.

This meme, of course, reminded me of my email that got attributed to Vaclav Klaus, in which in 2008 I said the same thing.

Maybe we are past the point of no return. This possibility has to be considered.  We are stupid as a people, and propaganda has made open inroads in all our universities–most strongly in our allegedly best universities such as Harvard and Yale–making future growth of effective propaganda likely.

Then I read that technology is decreasing the social skills and particularly the capacity for empathy among our young, which makes them crave propaganda like they crave media, and that odd state between connection and isolation which never really changes or risks anything important.

Maybe all the work I have done, or thought I did, has been for naught.  Maybe I have wasted my time.  Maybe our destiny is nuclear war, or pestilence, or the triumph of the fascist globalists.  Maybe I will end my days in a concentration camp, or worse.  Maybe one day the unthinkable will happen, and we will all get pits in our stomachs as we wait for the missiles to hit, or the fall out from a nuclear attack 200 miles away to hit us, changing all of our lives irrevocably.

We will all die.  This is a certainty.  The Transhumanists do not understand the human part of their equation.  They do not and never will reduce life to a mechanical process.

You have to have courage in life, and courage is the proper response to despair, to an honest appraisal of the situation.  You have to look out there, see life as it is, realize that bad things have always happened and may well continue to happen, but still, with all this in mind, put on an honest smile and thank God for a good fight.  What else can we ask for?

I continue my healing process.  I think I’ve kicked my drinking habit, and of course some of the things I was hiding from with it are coming up, and I am having to face them.  But I am doing it.  It is working.  It is not just that I am no longer regularly drinking to excess, but that I don’t feel that compulsion any more.  That is huge.

You cannot read history like I do and realize that complacency tends to result in failure, in defeat, in outcomes which are unpleasant, and often irreversible.  You cannot fail to realize that falls, when they come, are often rapid, and unexpected by the masses, even if there have been many Cassandras crying to the winds, who did not listen.

For my part, I have felt as much fear as I think it is possible for a human being to fear.  Picture your worst fear–spiders, heights, psycho killers, confined spaces–then distill it to an essence, a black oozing essence, then inject it into your arm, or better yet your heart.  This is what I have felt night after night for a very long time.

And what I have realized is that we instinctively keep fear at arms length.  We don’t want it.  We recoil from it.  Certainly I did.  It was out there, coming at me, infecting me, seeping through my pores, infiltrating every breath.

But there comes a point where you stop pushing it away.  It is too tiring, and it always wins anyway.  And when you let it come close, you realize it is not uniform.  It has textures.  It has a pulse.  It ebbs and flows.  It has an intelligence which can be communicated with.  It is a sort of living thing, with which it is possible to develop a symbiotic relationship.

I don’t ever want to be without fear.  It is my friend. It warns me when something isn’t safe.  I would no more want to be without fear than to be one of these unfortunate souls who cannot feel heat, and who not infrequently burn themselves accidentally.  Nothing warns them.

And when you accept it, it can flow through you, but what I am increasingly realizing is that this is the root of courage as well.  Fear and courage are not opposites.  They are brothers.  Courage is the result of no longer pushing fear away.  If you do not push it away, you accept it, and in accepting it it loses its power.

I was contemplating the difference between a circle, and, say, a preacher and his or her congregation.  In the one case you have a flow; and in the other, a Here and a There, a going out and a coming back in; a right and a response.

Then I was imagining a world without bowing, where everyone was equal, a true social egalitarianism, one uncoerced by psychpaths.  There would be no need to bow, no need to acknowledge inferiority and superiority (which have always obviously continued to exist in Communist societies, which merely make class permanent by lying about the existence of class distinctions).

Then I thought that no truly advanced person needs recognition.  They don’t need validation to buttress their egos.  The only real purpose of a true spiritual teacher in asking others to bow to them is to teach them to respect themselves, through the process of respecting someone else.

And in my own ridiculous way, it occurred to me that an interesting and counter-intuitive way of expressing respect might be spitting on people, by means of which you convey your understanding that they are beyond pettiness and vanity, and hence superior.

And I was thinking that our psyches are better organized as circles. Jung, I think it was, noted that mandalas contains selves, senses of self.

In contradistinction to this would be the inner stentorian voice, coercing through fear compliance with rules which the organism, the relaxed sense of self which is caged, can never understand.  They are the result of varying degrees of operant conditioning, which are the result of varying sorts of psychological and physical torture.  Such beings never come into existence in this life-time, and for this reason I think we need to see beyond the lecturings of people who in all too many cases seek a pulpit in lieu of actual personal growth. 

I sometimes talk out loud on this blog, and not everything I say makes sense.  Always keep that in mind, my reader or two.