Author: White Whale

This is a nice video on addiction: https://video-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xtp1/v/t42.1790-2/11290294_10153015585575983_595379980_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjMwMCwicmxhIjo1MTIsInZlbmNvZGVfdGFnIjoicWZfNDI2d19jcmZfMjNfbWFpbl8zLjBfcDBoYzBfc2QifQ%3D%3D&rl=300&vabr=107&oh=844f10d1875913b1984300ec0236b882&oe=55DF6920

At root, it is a sense of disconnection from self and others, and as he points out, our culture is founded, economically and psychologically, on emotional dissociation, on methods of distraction.

It feels to me like an important part of spiritual growth is learning to accept and process ALL emotions.  As I continue my Kum Nye practice, I see that there is an other side to despair, and to loneliness, and to desolation and horror.  I see that to be useful, I need to be on speaking terms with all possible emotions.

You have to know yourself, what you are capable of, what might come out of you.  All of us can feel, potentially, all the “shadow” emotions, and it is not enough to simply make contact with them.  You have to learn to manage them, to master them, like training wild beasts.

And you don’t do this violently.  This is a major mistake emotionally unintelligent people and systems make.  You do not get angry at anger.  You expand it, and then trace it back to its roots, in feelings of helplessness and fear.  You understand that you are in part a biological organism, and that that organism has needs which you cannot avoid, even if you can learn to meet them in non-traditional ways.

And I ponder, how do you put a value on something like Kum Nye, which can give you EVERYTHING and MORE than you could get from the most successful career?  That can make you more free than the richest billionaire with his beautiful women and expensive toys, and absolute freedom of action?  He can go anywhere, do anything.  But until he changes who he is–or rather, until he makes contact with his inner recesses, and learns to see in new ways–nothing really changes that matters at all.

I likely spend too much time introspecting.  I should be out drumming up new business.  My bank account is not what it could be.  But at the same time, these processes are so intriguing, so interesting, so satisfying, even when hard, that I have been tending to get driven by necessity rather than planning properly.

I make things work.  I always have.  It takes some ingenuity sometimes, some audacity sometimes, but I have plenty of both.

I was reading what Big Sister has done in California.  I would not have thought it possible, but this is perhaps even more abusive that what she put in place at the TSA:


Surprisingly enough, this list of taboo microaggressions included many common questions and phrases seemingly devoid of any ill intent. One of the banned, supposedly offensive phrases is “America is a land of opportunity.” According to Napolitano and her politically correct cohorts, such a phrase is a form of coded, covert racism that creates a toxic campus culture.Other phrases university faculty were banned from saying include “America is a melting pot,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” and “There is only one race, the human race.” Another banned phrase was “When I look at you, I don’t see color.” Colorblind professors everywhere began quivering in fear.Faculty were also banned from asking students basic small talk questions, such as “Where are you from?” and “Where were you born?” These questions can be construed as racist. According to Napolitano, banning these microaggressions from California’s universities was part of an initiative to “improve campus climate.”


What you need to see here is what happens when no actual moralities are in play, when nobody truly believes ANYTHING. A morality is a reason to live.  It is a means of transforming the pains of life into meaning.

But if you reject in principle the idea that life always includes pain and difficulty, you have no reason for a morality.  Not having a reason for a morality, you instead live a life of avoidance, of evading truth, of denouncing the very idea of truth, precisely because your world view is counterfactual.  It is wrong.

This is the root of what I term Sybaritic Leftism, which I contrast with true Liberalism, which is a means of multiple moralities coexisting in peace.  And the vacuousness of this form of Leftism leads inexorably to Cultural Sadeism.  It cannot resist it.  It starts out nice and playful, and becomes cold and cruel.

All the ex-hippies teaching at the University of California cut their teeth on opposing “the System”.  Now they ARE the system, and they are showing they have no ideas, nothing original to live for, nothing to add, nothing interesting to say.

This is always the case.  Communism–and these people are spouting Communist propaganda, using Communist methods of analysis, and proposing Communistic solutions–never adds anything any life.  What joy has Fidel Castro brought Cuba?  What joy did Mao bring China?  They brought death, fear, famine, and the collapse of all the soft traits, like trust and openness, which alone make life worth living.

Communism is the death of human beauty, and it is what is being preached in our best universities.

And we need to be clear that these kids are being conditioned to live in little boxes, to suppress all authenticity, to conform their views to what they are taught and not the evidence of their own eyes.  They are being talk to accept propaganda willingly, and to obey their elders, no matter how crazy they are.

So we really have to look at two forms of conditioning.  First, the actual ideas of Communism are being taught, which reject all moralities in favor of conformity to an arbitrary dictator, and the modes of being of Communism are being taught, which are fear and bullying.

And in the process moral reasoning is lost entirely.  On one day they decry rape.  On the next, they decry “Islamophobia” despite the fact that Islam allows and even encourages both the rape and murder of unbelievers.  And they can’t denounce ISIS, because that is a thought crime, despite the fact that most of their crimes are being committed against people who are ALSO Muslims.

As I have said often, Leftism is emotionally cartoonish.  It thinks in simplistic ideas of good and bad, and has no ability to differentiate among the “others” it allegedly wants to protect.  Who do you think most of the illegal aliens in America who are criminals criminalize?  Other illegals, and fellow Mexicans.  Almost all crimes are committed within groups.  You know who would be helped if these people were deported?  Mexicans living in the US.

I can only watch and hope that the sheer excesses of these anti-moral zealots will bring about a backlash.  We are already seeing it in Donald Trump, who I think will most likely be the Republican nominee.  And I think he will get bipartisan support, because Americans KNOW that we have many problems nobody has the balls to fix.

I’m telling my old friend alcohol again that we need to spend some time apart.  It has been a profoundly useful emotional anesthetic for many years.  And I am contemplating again living without it.

My dream is to help build another world, an actually better world, one which is peaceful, prosperous, and happy.  Given the sheer number of people who wish the other people on this planet rack and ruin, it is perhaps a foolish hope.  You can never know what is possible until you try, though.

But I am a student of history, and I cannot but watch in my mind all the great minds and spirits who failed to find a way forward, all the bodies I am stepping over.  Most of human history is a history of failure, is it not?  Have not wars and injustices and stupidities been our common lot for most of the recorded life of our race?

Has trauma not been an important fact of the lives of most people who have ever lived, and indeed who live even today? Obama was traumatized.  I have no doubt of it.

To think new thoughts, you have to step over bodies, you have to have a ridiculous sense of the possible, which necessarily means that you–I–think I am better able to express my intelligence usefully than they did.

And this thought makes me laugh.  It has aesthetic merit.  It has beauty in it, profound beauty.  And this comforts me.   And I need comforting.  We all do.  We all do.

Edit: do you get the feeling sometimes that no important cultural experiments have been done since the 1960’s?  That we are stuck looking back, sorting through the rubble and wreckage?  That the major cultural changes have been a gradually tightening noose of conformism backed by the threats of social, political, and even physical violence?  That “love” is a marketing term, to be abused in the service of consumerism and quarterly results?

I remember the movie “My Dinner with Andre”, and this felt sense that nothing new was going on.  No new ideas were being tried.  The revolutionary spirit was dead.  Everyone got ties, good jobs, mortgages, and life foreclosed on their dreams.

Obama, self evidently, was pushing focus group tested buzzwords when he spoke of Hope and Change.  He was touching deep needs that exist in this country at a fundamental level.  His appeal was obviously cynical, opportunistic, and abusive, but that does not mean that these words can no longer be used, that there are no causes for hope, that good change is not possible.

Hope.  Dare to hope.  Dare to dream of a better world, an actually better world.  We may just be able to pull it off.

Pyrrhus noted that the Romans died like men, facing their enemy.  There is no safety in this world, no absolute safety.  In fact, I guarantee Death will get you, like it gets everyone (the Singularity is bullshit).  What you can trust is your own resilience, and your own willingness to laugh in the face of everything, to make sport of this eternal game.

I was going through some old posts, and saw this one from 4 years ago.  Remains quite true.




Bit slow today, checking some things off lists. The entirety of Peter Bauer’s “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion” is quite wonderful, and well worth the read. As I argue constantly, to fail to consider the consequences of actions you conceive to be well intentioned, is to not be well intentioned at all, but self important and narcissistic, if not outright power mongering. YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES, to all people, and over time.

Here are a couple quotes from the concluding chapter of a book in which he has ably demonstrated that foreign aid frequently does little but support income inequalities, autocracy, and continued generalized poverty, all claims that fly in the face of “conventional” wisdom, then (1981) and now.

what explains the curious situation of contemporary economics, especially the acceptance of evidently insubstantial, even bizarre, notions?

The expansion of the subject since the Second World War and the circumstances surrounding it must be considered together. Unlike the expansion in the natural sciences in recent decades, especially in physics and chemistry, the expansion in economics (and other forms of social study) was not an instance of the growth of knowledge leading to a quantum jump in the number of people and money attracted. The expansion resulted from the belief that economists could help significantly in solving social and political problems; and that their capacity to do so depended largely on their numbers and on the money at their disposal. . . But, as the term is usually understood, economic problems are different. Economic problems do not typically present themselves because of perceived gaps or inadequacies of knowledge. Rather economic problems are said to exist wherever there are differences between proclaimed norms and observed reality. Such problems evidently cannot be solved by improvements in knowledge alone. Indeed, as suggested in chapter 1 (and noted repeatedly elsewhere), economists and other social scientists generally create problems rather than solve them [emphasis mine].

In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.

“When certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards. . . fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.”

Can there be a shorter summary of what is wrong with the leftist mindset, which does the same things over and over and over, always getting the same result–failure–and yet which fails to learn the lesson? As Bauer says, economics is not actually complicated. It is made complicated by people whose jobs depend on a lack of transparency.

Consider in that regard this quote he excerpts from a Professor Leontief.

Continued preoccupation with imaginary, hypothetical, rather than observable reality has gradually led to a distortion of the informal valuation scale used in our academic community to access and to rank the scientific performance of its members. Empirical analysis, according to this scale, gets a lower rating than formal mathematical reasoning. Devising a new statistical procedure, however tenuous, that makes it possible to squeeze out one more unknown parameter from a given set of data, is judged a greater scientific achievement that the successful search for additional information that would permit us to measure the magnitude of the same parameter in a less ingenious, but more reliable way. . . a natural Darwinian feedback operating through selection of academic personnel contributes greatly to the perpetuation of this state of affairs. Thus, it is not surprising that the younger economists, particularly those engaged in teaching and academic research, seem by now quite content with situations in which they can demonstrate their prowess (and incidentally, advance their careers) by building more and more complicated mathematical models and devising more and more sophisticated methods of statistical inference without ever engaging in empirical research.

This is how smart people become stupid: they makes things so complicated that the forest is lost for the trees. This is exactly the same dynamic in play with Global Warming. Rather than planting thermometers all over the poles, which is where the warming is supposedly happening, they develop statistical algorithms to in effect guess what the temperatures “must” be, based upon the sensors they have hundreds of miles to the south. This is not science. Statistics can NEVER substitute for measurements, when measurements are possible.

As I have said often, you can “prove” anything, if you start from the right premises. Garbage in, garbage out.

I was walking my dog this morning, on a very pleasant day, and it hit me how evil Christianity is, or rather how evil the description of the Christian God is.

We are supposed to start our lives in shame, feeling guilty for something we did not do.  And it hit me that shame begets a need for justification, for aggressive action, for do-gooding, which is necessarily compulsive, and as prone to harm as help.

Without understanding fully all the creeds which adopt this name for themselves, it seems to me that Satanists, by and large, intend to reject this shame, this abhorrence of life and freedom.

And as parents would we ever contemplate throwing our children into the pits of hell if they failed to obey us exactly?  Would we threaten them with this?  Could we even contemplate this?  No: we assume goodness on their part, and do our best to love them, to cherish them, to teach them, and to help them if they fall off the path.  We never abandon them.

And who can accept a God who needs the ritual murder of animals, much less human beings?  Who can accept a God who requires a sacrifice of his son to satisfy his irrational rage at people who are by and large doing the best they can?

The key addition of Christianity is the concept of eternal damnation.  The Jews of course had the idea of Original Sin, but they had a system for managing the rages of their God, through sacrifice and piety.  They thought little about the next world.  They were like the Romans and Greeks in this.

Further, if God were as the Christians describe, would we only see his appointed representative once in the lifetime of humanity, in an insignificant part of the world, and would he only teach for something like 3 years?  If you were a parent, and you wanted to teach your children, would you not give them regular or even constant, direct, instruction?

Deconstructing Christianity is not that hard, but it is necessary for me, for my own healing.  I was raised as a Christian, taught John 3:16 and other similar verses, sang the hymns in church, was baptized, was taught to fear the Devil.

We need something like religion.  We need worship.  We need communion.  We need a place for the holy in our lives, for the sacred.  We need a concept of the Divine, of eternal life, of spiritual growth.  Foolish people see our choices as belief and disbelief.  I am no atheist, not even remotely.  I am, I think I can say honestly. a visionary.  I see visions.  I feel new realities.  I dream what has not been, but may yet be.

This is a hopeful post, one I intend to be filled with light.  What we leave behind is darkness when we accept something brighter.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/were-only-3-zip-codes-175956661.html;_ylt=AwrT6V0PzN1VZ1wA4_YPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg

I don’t have any particularly incisive commentary.  I just thought this was interesting.  Do most of us not feel alone, even with those we are supposed to love?  Doesn’t the grass always seem greener on the other side, and does it not prove disappointing in the end?

Think about it: who are the women who want to cheat, or make love to cheaters?  Are they sensitive, genuinely caring, emotionally intelligent people who satisfy the real needs men have to feel understood, appreciated, and respected?  I very much doubt it.  They can play the part for a time, but they want something.

Fucking, in my not inconsiderable experience, is almost always disappointing.  There is unquestionably an ego boost–a hit–in seducing a woman–it makes you feel manly–but the very mindset required for it separates you. In terms of what sex can provide emotionally, I think women in this–as in most everything else–are most right.

I remain, in Gibbon, in the period of the reign of Julian–who interestingly, among other things, tried to rebuild the Temple of the Jews–and he related casually that it was not at all uncommon for him to sacrifice 100 oxen, which sounds astonishing until you compare it to what the Bible relates concerning Solomon: 

And Solomon offered for the sacrifice of peace-offerings, which he offered unto Jehovah, two and twenty thousand oxen, and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep. So the king and all the children of Israel dedicated the house of Jehovah. 1 Kings 8:63

Ponder that.  Ponder how, if it is even logistically possible–and it surely is, over some time horizon–what that carnage would look like. Ponder what a mere 100 oxen would look like.  And I don’t know how they were killed.  A relatively large weapon would seemingly be necessary.

There is a great mystery in all this.  My working hypothesis continues to be that it is a means of appeasing our own predator, animal instincts, which was necessary before the principles of inner growth were developed.

Plus Ca Change: The Christians tore down the ancient temples of the Romans.  And they built their own churches on top.  Who else do you know who does that?

If you look at the history–ONLY the history–Christianity is not so very different from Islam.  They venerated martyrs, demanded absolute submission to their creed, and fought aggressive wars in support of their faith.

I was reading the back story on Fritz Lang’s M, and found this curious: “Lang considered M to be his favorite of his own films because of the social criticism in the film. In 1937, he told a reporter that he made the film “to warn mothers about neglecting children”.”


Further: M has been said, by various critics and reviewers,^[17] to be based on serial killer Peter Kürten—the “Vampire of Düsseldorf“—whose crimes took place in the 1920s.^[18] Lang denied that he drew from this case in an interview in 1963 with film historian Gero Gandert; “At the time I decided to use the subject matter of M there were many serial killers terrorizing Germany—Haarmann, Grossmann, Kürten, Denke, […]”


As should be obvious, I cast my perceptual net far and wide.  Within my lifetime, we have evolved from a nation of “free range” children–which is to say largely care free parents and care free children–to one in which parents risk having their children taken from them if they let them walk a few blocks to the park before a certain age.


How important to emotional development is freedom in early childhood?  One can scarcely wonder if, on one pole of this equation, Muslim women find it very hard to develop emotionally and particularly to build a sense of self which alone would make them capable of raising emotionally intelligent children; and on the other hand, it seems the tribal lives of say, American Indians in the pre-imperial period, might be optimally conducive to growth.


If you are faced with large fear from an early age, what effect does this have?  Does not fear bring with it an increased need for security, and is that not precisely what government promises?


It is an extraordinarily tenuous hypothesis, but I wonder if the spate of very prolific, very public serial killers in the 1920’s in Germany helped the Nazi rise to power.  Conversely, I suppose one could wonder if the prevalence of such crimes indicated a national illness which eventually manifested in the Nazis.


I’m just spouting here.  It’s what I do.  This whole post may be utter nonsense, but I have often found nonsense leads to better ideas which actually have value.  Exploration is always potentially useful.

We Americans love to brag about our freedoms, but we have a shitload of petty regulations and bureaucratic procedures they don’t have in other countries.

Take the FDA.  They block all sorts of things that are quite legal in other countries. I was trying to get some kind of weight loss supplement that apparently actually works, and they sell it in Canada, but not here, because some jackasses abused it.  You can abuse COFFEE if you are determined.

For that matter, they DON’T block things like genetically modified foods that are at least labeled in other countries.  And for God’s sake, our government continues to subsidize the manufacture of high fructose corn syrup, which has NEGATIVE nutritional value.  Who helps put cheap cokes in the hands of the poor?  Uncle Sam, that’s who.

Take ordering contacts on-line.  If my prescription hasn’t changed in 25 years, who is hurt if I go three or four years without an exam?  The eye doctors.  They lose money.  They no doubt argued “safety” and in this country if you say fucking safety all the soccer moms circle their wagons, and the soccer dads say “are you sure it is safe now?”  You can smell the fear.

Fuck safety.  Life is either an adventure, or it is a niggling little prance in a small circle with boring people who do nothing, learn nothing, and are not overly missed when they leave this world because they didn’t really contribute anything.

Americans, particularly, are obsessed with safety.  I don’t know why. Perhaps it is our litigiousness.

Edit: tetanus shots.  That was another thing.  There are only about 30 cases of tetanus contracted a year in America, mostly in the pork industry.  The tetanus bacteria live in soil contaminated with fecal matter, which is to say virtually nothing in a city or the suburbs is even remotely likely to have it on it.

I tried to research how many people die from reactions related to vaccinations each year, but Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t want to tell me.

This is another thing: we think we have access through search engines to everything we need to know.  Google for sure, and likely the others, are quite capable of tweaking the searches any way they want, and whatever they want hidden, will not be found except by profound persistence.

Edit: thank god for Alex Jones.  Google plus Alex Jones got me this: http://www.infowars.com/jimmy-kimmels-ignorant-vaccine-doctors/

Point 1: there is no reliable reporting system for vaccinations, so no one can claim it is safe using sound empirical evidence.  Doctors are at their own discretion to report reactions, and they can expect to be sued if they are found culpable.  No one–NO ONE–can base their opinions on responsibly gathered statistics.

Point 2: the same professionals we are supposed to literally trust with our lives disappoint about a quarter of a million people EVERY YEAR.  People die due to fuck-ups.