Author: White Whale

If hunger is the engine of this Earth, then servants of it are the fear of falling, and the fear of loud noises, both of which most humans seem to be born with.  Both serve the cause of survival, of which hunger itself–and of course the sexual instinct–are servants, in our biological selves.

For myself, I often imagine jumping into an unsupported vortex, a world of energy without solid ground, and I feel a fear of falling, a vertigo. But I do it anyway.  And it occurs to me this is an energy–a primal instinctual fear–which we must also master.  This is the root of the idea that jumping out of perfectly good airplanes is somehow a part of a Life Well Lived.

But Falling in Love.  Falling into Bad Habits.  Fallen by the Wayside.  Raising yourself up.  Etc.

I woke up dizzy this morning.  I didn’t got to bed drunk, I don’t think I have an ear infection.  I have to wonder if it has something to do with these blinding headaches, and blurred vision.

Just kidding, that would gratify some.

No, it may be an ear infection, but what I think it is is the externalization of anxiety as a sort of psychological hysteria, where emotional symptoms become manifested physically.  And in the same sense that negatives coming into consciousness constitute in my view a sort of release–their mooring have been undone, and they have been condemned to the current–so too, I think, is a release of hysterical (I am using this term in the clinical sense of Freud’s time, and in which he used it before his cowardice and ambition got the better of him) energy.  That is good.

If this body is an engine, we have to learn to engage with and master its energies, which are primarily hunger, sexuality, and fear of falling.  That is my view at the moment.  I am typing this rapidly on the way somewhere to someone who will be annoyed with the delay.  C’est la vie.  C’est la guerre.

There are guerillas.  Are there Guerissimos? I want to be one of those.

I woke up this morning and it occurred to me Bernie Sanders is the equivalent of that well known American phenomenon: the impulse buy.  He is the equivalent of someone with maxed out credit cards coming under stress and deciding that a new purse, or shoes, or gun, or boat is going to make it all alright.

We are borrowing $1 trillion a year NOW.  We have a $19 trillion national debt NOW, and interest alone on that debt will within a few short years exceed the Defense expenditures leftists love to target as discretionary.  Well, the interest on the national debt will not be discretionary.

Nor will the massive increases in the annual amounts due to our seniors be discretionary.  That is what is defined as non-discretionary.  Members of both parties, but obviously most cravenly and consistently the Democrats, have consistently raised Medicare and Social Security benefits to where they far exceed what was paid in, and even much of what was paid in was long ago spent on the salaries and benefits, and buildings and business conferences of the 100,000 or more bureaucrats who administer these programs.

Social Security is a coerced program of negative investment, where you are lucky to get back 25% of what you paid in, and where the difference is made up on the backs of the working poor–who in all cases cannot avoid this 15% tax on their paychecks–and the young, who pay into programs their whole lives, without it being likely they can make back what they paid in, at least without major reforms.

Returning to my main point, we have some $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities TODAY.  Edit: that seemed low.  Here is one from two years ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/#1ace05a510d3  $127 trillion is the number they use.

And is it not INTERESTING that virtually no one is talking about it today?  Rand and Ron Paul talked about it, but it’s not a major issue with anyone else, that I can tell.  When I Google it, why is such an existential threat the virtual hit equivalent of Googling Belorussian UFO’s?

We are lunatics.  In past times there was an excuse.  It was much easier to hide information.  Now, if you look, it is there, with very little work.  You do not even have to go to the library and search card catalogs or pull microfiche, which some of us remember doing.

Consider, honestly, these claims being made.

Bernie says he can reform instantly a system of higher education which has been getting more and more ridiculously expensive because the Federal government makes and backs student loans, but offers no way to dismiss them in bankruptcy.  He says he can make education “free”, which is to say he thinks he can get taxpayers to foot 100% of the bill of an overbloated, ineffective system, and do it in a short 4-8 years.

Bernie says he can make healthcare “free”, which is to say he thinks he can raise taxes enough, and redistribute them through a system of healthcare which has been evolving over many decades, and do it in such a way that everyone performs better at lower costs.

This is someone with $20,000 in credit card debts–which incidentally were incurred by a long term repetition of the same psychological malady–thinking that if they could only get $5,000 more, everything will be OK.

People who want to vote for Bernie are like 800 pound bed ridden losers who think one more package of Oreos will solve everything.

It is the solution of fools, of the deluded, of the imbecilic, of the childish.

Government is not supposed to give you everything: it is supposed to protect your right to go out there and get it.  If you don’t want to do that work, then you are no longer a responsible human being, and your useful term on Earth is at an end.  There is no learning in sloth and dependency.  It is necessary for infants, but no later than that.  Socialism is the creed of the decadent.  The decadent become weak, and as Eric Ritter argued, weakness becomes hate becomes cruelty, and that is what I call Cultural Sadeism.

If you want to be good, you have to learn to interact with the world’s pain, to feel it, and to become an organizing agent, a worker, a rebel in the face of a world of hunger.  You cannot grant it final ascendancy, as those who simply want a full belly, an empty mind, and endless circuses and games do.

https://youtu.be/QAK0KXEpF8Uhttps://youtu.be/QAK0KXEpF8U

He quotes a British psychiatrist who said that “when you cannot control your own emotions you begin to need to control other people’s behavior.”

Think of the HELPLESSNESS, the childishness, implied by needing to be protected from disagreement, PARTICULARLY when you are spouting, but unable to defend, utterly inane, nonsensical, lunatic ideas.

It seems obvious to me that the nature of delusion is that it feels correct.  It is invisible to the “practitioner”.  For anyone actually committed to getting things right, this observation makes humility mathematically necessary.  No one is immune from this disease, and those who think themselves most immune are the most likely to be carriers, and to be profoundly infectious.

Witness the Global Warming folks, who are unwilling to grant even that their need to rename it is a major mark against the whole idea.  One can obviously grant that increased heat will cause unpredictable weather, but one must also grant that the increased heat is an ineluctable element in the whole equation, without which one is simply discussing weather itself, a definitional complex system.

Here is the point I wanted to make, though: I am often chased by zombies in my dreams, by fanatics who find it absolutely necessary to inflict their disease on me, such that I become happily one of them.  They of course use violence to do it.  They do not of course know they are zombies.  They merely see that I am not one of them.

Now, I do think this connects to the physical world, the observable world.  I do think my paranoia has merits, that it refers to actually existing processes and people which should rightly be feared.  I think this intellectually, while reserving doubt that I could be completely wrong.  Kipling and all that.

But paranoia can also of course be an outcome of primitive developmental wounds, and likely is in my own case, so these dreams are showing me something within myself.  As such, this is great.  It is not great that I have extended dreams of conflict, evasion, hiding and escape.  But it is great that I can see it.

What I seem to see, to realize, is that anything you can embrace you can unplug.  My moving into this energy consciously, in a relaxed way, I can diffuse it.

Yesterday I felt very clearly in my Kum Nye practice like I had become a sort of primal silence and darkness, and that the whole world focused on an emotional knot I had projected into space.  If you give them space, all knots loosen.  And what I saw was that they loosen, and become threads, and that thread becomes pure energy.  And pure energy is all there is.  This is the basic use, in my view, of the Buddhist Shunyata.  No thing “is”.  All one can see are energy patterns, with intelligence, with purpose, but also without purpose, depending on your level of magnification.

Rumi said “The dark thoughts, the shame, the malice: meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.  Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”  That is good advice.

Why is it that the “Keep Austin/Portland/etc. Weird” people are reliably Democrats?  Why do they value diversity in brew pubs and clothing stores and book stores, but somehow think a global monolithic government delivering “one size fits all” solutions to all problems of human existence will not quickly become unweird, bureaucratic, and just an overall drag on life?

It often seems to me that the schooling I got, which taught us to value intellectual coherence, principled reasoning, and a concern for actually accomplishing stated ends, was anachronistic, and that carefully disguised lunatics and unfunny clowns have infiltrated our halls of education, and created a primrose path, decked in flowers and balloons–and with a parade to boot–to hell.

The author in the previous post–I need to memorize his name, but not in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning after that night–argues for some form of elitism.  I take the opposite path: I think our goal should be a genuine democratization of virtue.  A good society is a stable, robust, prosperous society, and my idea of government is simple: push power out to the fringes as far as it will go, to the cities, even communities, even blocks.  Decent people possessed of common sense can work out differences peacefully, which reduces greatly the need for laws.

Only mediocre people create bad societies.  It is a conservative truism that people are not perfectable, that they cannot be improved, that some depravity is inherent. I reject this argument.  I simply do not believe that the government–as a simple linear system, and as such profoundly DISordered and truly chaotic–is the proper agent.  I feel that the intersection of moral values and principles can be integrated into a Hayekian Extended Order, as indeed has happened in America for much of her history, through the social utility of a generalized Christianity and following behavioral norms among most of the populace.

Indeed, it is only by a cultivated and calculated abuse of Christian charity and an innate cultural generosity that Soviet propaganda has become so powerful in this country.

I have heard of this book, but am only now actually reading it.  This man’s views are nearly identical to my own, at least with regard to his diagnosis of the cultural cancer of Leftism.  Much of what he has said thus far is virtually identical to conclusions I reached on my own.

The great thing about having your own blog is that from time to time you get to channel Calvin.  No, no, Calvin and Hobbes, and neither John nor Thomas.

Self evidently, I consider Socialism to be a literally and figuratively bankrupt system of thought and practice, as seen practically, theoretically, and morally.  It has nothing as an ideology to recommend it, and its only virtue is comprised entirely in the word “charity”, which no conservative rejects as desirable, and which it delivers more poorly than private and personally directed charity.

Having said that, what Bernie seems to be tapping into is a sense that America should be more prosperous, that our parents and grandparents worked less than we did, and enjoyed considerably more economic security.  In my view, this is unquestionably true.

On a superficial level, of course, we have much more stuff.  We have mePhones, larger houses, bigger cars, take more vacations, eat out more, etc.  On a slightly deeper level, we see that the average debt for most Americans has exploded since the inflation (caused by the Fed) of the late 70’s.  What was once fiscal prudence becomes stupidity when money is steadily losing its value.

But to ultimately solve this problem, that of individual economic productivity per capita skyrocketing, while actual purchasing power remains stagnant or even declines, one must reference the devaluation of our currency.  The overall money supply has increased roughly 5-fold since the Fed got rid of the last fetters limiting its freedom of action around 1980.

Can any sane human being question the connection?  If more proof were needed, look at the increase in the holdings of the world’s largest banks: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html

In the time I am allocating to this, this is the best link I can find, but it seems obvious that pari passu with the increase of M2 I think we will find an increase in the net holdings of the world’s banks.

I have tried to explain this many different ways, but I continue to fail.  It seems both horribly obvious, and extraordinarily significant, but I am surrounded by imbeciles.  Yes, that was a minor concession to self pity.

I will keep on keeping on.  It’s what I do.

It’s funny: I did my own astrological chart some time ago, and somewhere in there–obviously in different parts of the chart–I was compared both to Leonidas, and to Cassandra. I feel that.

As calm begins to penetrate deep within me, I see how insane it is to want to be a warrior.  To be a warrior is to be a worrier.  It is to be constantly vigilant.  It is to be constantly thinking about the tricks your enemies can play, and how to play tricks on them.  Courage in the face of superior intelligence is wasted.  The life of a true warrior is the life of the mind, of thought.  This applies from the level of strategy to the decision whether to thrust left or right, flank left or right, in individual combat. Intuition does play a role, but only after all other cards have been played.

In life we mostly do not get what we want.  To be a warrior is better than to live in helpless fear, or in the complacency of willed ignorance.

There is something beyond this distinction.  That is what I am presently looking for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/business/donald-trump-unions.html

I have said this before, and will say it again: Trump’s politics would have been unexceptional, and Democrat, in the 1960’s.  Who started the Vietnam War?  Democrats.  Why?  They wanted to protect America from Communism, and in the war for allies and credibility, some shooting appeared needed. And in point of fact, we won the war, then pissed it away after the phase transition happened in the Democrats from people who loved America and thought differently, to people who did not love America, did not love democracy, did not operate according to consistent standards of common decency, and who lied nearly as often as they talked.

That happened about 1972, which was about 44 years ago.  The Democrats kept some hold-outs through the 1980’s, and I think have a few even now in State and City governments, but by and large, they have ingested Soviet era memes about “fairness”, “imperialism”, and the rejection of patriotism (even though the Soviets were very patriotic).

How else to explain a party which supposedly looks out for the Little Guy, the Working Man, being so eager to welcome and support at taxpayer expense millions of new competitors for jobs which are already scarce, and whose wages have been stagnant for some time.  To the extent of my knowledge, not even the Keynesian lunatics reject the law of supply and demand, which obviously applies to labor too.

How else to explain the refusal to call Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism?  If you shout out an imprecation to your God before beginning the senseless and gratuitous slaughter of non-combatant civilians, what sound mind can but conclude that your religion played a role?  What person, reading the news, can but conclude that Islamic Fundamentalism–the proper term, since so-called “radical” Islam has merely taken the step of reading their holy book literally, and taking it at its 7th century word–has made major in-roads among Muslims the world over, making all of them–and particularly young men–prospective mass murderers?

Given the actual genocide being conducted against them, why is Obama allowing virtually no Christians or Yazidis from Syria and Iraq to enter this country?

And if rejecting refugees is wrong, what are we to make of the refusal of the Gulf nations to accept any of these “refugees”?  Is that racist?

We live in layer after layer of delusion.  Inanity.  Sophomoric imbecility.  Common sense isn’t.  Common decency isn’t.