Author: White Whale

What if Nixon had said that he had destroyed the missing tape, because it was all personal stuff, of no interest to the public?

Even discounting the national security implications of being off-grid, when Hillary chose to make her home server her primary work server, she chose to make everything that happened on it the property of the people of the United States.

She is telling all of us fuck off, and that she considers herself a step above us both in rank and privilege.  There are her standards, and there are the standards of the plebes.

Such elitism is a common trait in most alleged egalitarians.  It is a ruse, nothing more.

When it comes to gays marrying, I don’t care.  It is only when it comes to kids that I think there needs to be some careful ANALYSIS and discussion.

Here is the question: does an empirical basis exist for claiming that children who are raised by two women or two men are equally likely to thrive as those raised in a conventional home?  A “conventional home”, of course, nowadays includes divorce in a great many cases, among both gays and heterosexuals.

It has long been my belief that a great many homosexuals, perhaps the majority of them, are “gay” because of some traumatic sexual event in their childhood or youth.  They are 12, their parents are fighting all the time, they don’t have any friends, and a 19 year old seduces them, and the homosexual pattern–which was previously not there, becomes imprinted.  The gayness and premature sexual experience–which is almost definitionally traumatic, even if it is never consciously processed as such–go together.

We know that gays, bisexuals and transgendered people abuse drugs and alcohol at higher rates than the population as a whole: http://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/substance-abuse.htm  They don’t provide a number, but anecdotally I suspect it is significantly higher.

It appears they suffer disproportionately from emotional problems:

Several large population-based public health studies are discussed in the November American Psychologist (Vol. 56, No. 11) by Susan Cochran, PhD, an epidemiologist in the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health, who authored or co-authored many of the studies. Specifically, the studies find:Higher rates of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder and substance use or dependence in lesbian and gay youth.
Higher rates of recurrent major depression among gay men.
Higher rates of anxiety, mood and substance use disorders, and suicidal thoughts among people ages 15 to 54 with same-sex partners.
Higher use of mental health services in men and women reporting same-sex partners.

She does on to say that she doesn’t want this data to be used to claim homosexuals are inherently unhealthy.  I don’t believe this either.  Correlation and causation are two different things.

What DOES make sense to me is that if gayness is the result of trauma, then OBVIOUSLY it is connected with being traumatized.  The trauma comes first, then the gayness.  My personal opinion is this holds for many.  It is impossible to say how many.  Some kids are clearly, obviously, beyond any reasonable doubt born that way, and those are obviously going to be much, much happier openly expressing their sexual preference.  These people do not concern me either.

But it is so hard to know what the truth is: everyone wants to cover for them.  You can’t do a study asking about traumatic sexual experience and the emergence of sexual identity because the Gay Police will come after you.  You can’t publicize negative facts too well or too loudly, because even if true, that would be “discriminatory.”

This is how differential rates of nearly everything negative about blacks has been kept hidden.  They have higher rates of damn near everything: poverty, jail time, violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, single parenthood, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, etc.

But when you correct for the kids who grow up in two parent homes, POOF, the difference disappears.  Crime rate is the same as two parent white families, and crime rate is the same as ONE parent white families.  The large difference comes from there just being a lot more two parent white families.

Turns out is has NOTHING to do with race and everything to do with proper acculturation.  Logically, if race has nothing to do with it, then neither does racism.  And logically, with such a strong finding, public policy that was intelligent would focus on creating more two parent homes.  This is cheap for the state, and better for the kids in literally every way.

It is easy to abuse the weak and helpless, and you cannot be more weak and helpless than an unborn child.  And I’m not talking here about abortion, but about children who have not been born yet who will or might be adopted by gay couples.

Out of the gate, we can assume that any prospective gay couple is more likely to be suffering mental health issues and substance abuse issues.  Obviously, there are extremely well adjusted couples out there, who would make superb parents, particularly in comparison with a dysfunctional heterosexual home, which is most of them.

But in working across large populations, we will have put children at increased risk of unhappiness before we even factor in the importance of gender roles in developing a healthy ego.

Read this: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/

Keep in mind that the socialist project is about eradicating ALL differences, which would include our ancestral, instinctive distinctions between male and feminine.  They have, in my understanding, stopped using gendered words in Sweden.  This is the direction this goes.

What is won, deleting all our cultural knowledge, everything which has come before?  I ask you.  What takes its place?  What happens when everyone is transgendered and genetically engineered to be identical?  Does the world become more interesting? I don’t think so. I think it becomes awful.

As I say in my Sade piece, the Sadeist curses God for making every tree just a bit different, and the only solution is to burn them all and place their ashes in neat little, identical piles.  It is lunacy.  It is eradicing all reasons for living, all interest and savor and DIFFERENCE, which is valued rhetorically, but not in reality.  When a leftist calls for diversity, what they really mean is “Hate whitey”.  That sounds awful, but I view it as the truth.  Somebody needs to speak the truth.  I could find dozens of quotes supporting this with a five minute search.

The alternative is GENUINELY embracing difference.  You don’t do this when you take a cudgel to everyone who doesn’t even go so far as to disagree with you, but not agree with you immediately.

I won’t be buying an Apple product again, and it won’t be hard for me to shop less at Wal-Mart, or watch less sports.  Fuck them.  People are selling their souls for Wonder-Bread.

Nobody thinks deeply any more.  Nobody looks deeply at the root principles that are ACTUALLY in play–they assume the ones stipulated are sincere, which they are not.

Everything in this universe is in motion, including our culture.  It is both right and prudent to ask what direction we are going, and if that is in fact the best direction.  One must have a principle by which to make these evaluations, a stated goal, and that is what everything I write is oriented around.  This is the essence of my word Telearchy.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but am trying to ask important questions that affect ALL of our happiness. If we destroy every vestige of meaning and purpose, EVERYONE suffers.  Gays suffer.  Blacks suffer.  Mexicans suffer.  The poor suffer (and are suffering).

You don’t get graded on the extent of your self delusion.  You get graded on your competence–at least in a sane world, one which many are doing their best to usher out, unceremoniously.

Here is the question Pence and the Arkansas governor need to be asking critics: do they believe the State should have the power to force Amish to make gay wedding cakes featuring male genitalia, or risk losing their business or even winding up in jail?  Yes or no.

Would they then also be OK with forcing gay florists to cater a convention of Christians discussing the wickedness of sodomy?  The logic is identical.  How can one separate the two, other than by counting who has more aggressively marshaled public outrage, with large, loud marches being one of the principle ways Hitler ascended to power?

Do we still negotiate difference, or is shouting and violence our future?

I wonder if dog nutritional guidelines are based on the idiotic and never-empirical FDA guidelines.

I wonder how much, if any, actual research has been done into optimal dog diet.  When you look at the huge spread of ideas even with regard to people, you have to assume very little.

Historically what would they have eaten?  I would think, after domestication, whatever the humans around them ate.  If one buys into the Paleo diet, then–as I somewhat do–then dogs ought to eat Paleo (meat, veggies, some fruit, some nuts and fat, no sugar or bread).

My two are getting older, and one has a nasty cough that is seemingly related to some aspect of aging I didn’t really understand.  She is on blood pressure meds and a diuretic, but her cough just got worse, and I’m wondering if it’s because I changed dog food.

It occurred to me this morning that the root anger and fuel of so-called Progressivism is precisely the fact that they don’t believe progress is possible.  They don’t believe in moral hierarchies, that some people are better than others, that some moral choices are better than others.  This is implied, for example, in the assumption that ONLY racism could have caused blacks to fail to thrive after all the formal restrictions on their access to the wheels of power and success were lifted.

I well remember listening to a series on Existentialism and the lecture on Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, how the implied belief was that all belief in individual moral progress was an illusion.  Once one grants this–and it is a common outcome for atheists–then an existential crisis happens.  One way out is to embrace radical politics–politics being an earthly and empirical religion–which focus on an abstraction: SOCIAL development.  And in what does such development consist?  Leveling and homogenizing.  It consists precisely in a manic need to deny that some people are better than others, that they are more diligent, honest, knowledgeable, competent, compassionate, loving, empathetic, etc.

Goodness as I understand it and so-called Progressivism–which I normally term Regressivism–are literally antipodal.

And to be clear, nobody–least of all me–wants to countenance physical suffering from poverty, or the violence of hatred.  This is not the point I am making.  The point I am making is that countries like Cuba are the end game of the leveling and homogenization process.  In Cuba everyone is poor, has no opportunities for improvement, no good outlet for creative energy, and is watched relentlessly by a vast horde of informers.  If they step out of line, they might get locked in a tiny little box, too small even to sit comfortably in, with a little bitty slit for air, and left there for a month.  Their ordeal will leave no physical marks, and the government will deny using this “soft” torture, as the Soviets called it.

There is no substitute for doing your own thinking and forming your own opinions, and the proven methods of getting closest to the truth are gathering as many facts as you can, forming patterns from them, and then performing logical operations on them as dispassionately as you can, then determining how you FEEL about what you have, you think, uncovered. I obviously have plenty of room for feelings.  I talk about them all the time.  I simply think that the capacity to integrate them into an overall perceptual strategy is essential if you are going to avoid being wrong in large ways over long periods of time.

This whole Indiana thing pisses me off.  We have literally reached Orwell’s “2 minutes of hate”.  This is what propaganda does: through long term organizing and brainwashing, people become more or less like machines, or better yet, trained animals with conditioned reflexes, who can be turned on or off at any time with the right set of code words and images.

Apple owners seemingly had no issue with the fact that the people making their phones in China were killing themselves so often that protective nets had to be built to keep them from hitting the ground when they jumped off the roof.  I doubt they have any issue with what I suspect are many toxins these people are exposed to.

They have no issue selling to Saudi Arabia, which KILLS homosexuals–typically by public decapitation (you can see a picture on that link of a man who was apparently beheaded and THEN crucified)–or to any number of other Muslim nations which are PROFOUNDLY violent towards gays. They have no issue with the fact that men are allowed to marry 10 year olds.  They will never issue a public statement on this.  To hell with little girls: they are not a powerful political constituency, and the whole thing is theater anyway.  There is no principled moral reasoning going on.

To this I would contrast the DEMAND–not the request–that little Quaker and Amish couples be forced by law to sell penis cakes with white frosting at the end of them, or cakes depicting men having anal intercourse.  Ridiculous, you say.  I ask: why?  Once we have established that the State can tell people what to do, where and how do we draw lines?  They can’t refuse service to anyone.  That is the message I am hearing.

And logically the demand for what amounts to free speech should go both ways.  Gay bakers should be forced to bake cakes with anti-gay slogans, and black bakers should be forced to bake KKK cakes.  But of course no one is clamoring for these rights, and if the shoe were on the  other foot this would be called HATE speech, which of course is defined as awful.

But this whole notion of hate speech creates a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable, and the STATE decides which is which, and what it decides depends on the political winds of the moment.  Leftists assume they will always be in charge because their skill in–and moral willingness to stoop to the expedience of using–propaganda is vastly bigger than conservatives.  All we have is logic and facts.  We have not spent decades learning to tell colorful and emotionally powerful lies. We want dialogue, but no propagandist does.

They want to breed into their subjects a conditioned response of visceral hatred, one which does not even attempt to see the enemy as human, but solely as pure evil.  They want to create, in their subjects, exactly what Hitler created in his SS, and Lenin in his Cheka.  They want to create, ultimately, the capacity for murder and the tolerance of murder.  That is the logical emotional end of all this. I cannot begin to tally the vast oceans of the most ugly, nasty hate that have been directed at me merely for asking inconvenient question.  I have seen this a thousand times if I’ve seen it once.

When we see people being bullied, we must always ask: who is next?  If it is illegal for little Amish couples to refuse to bake a penis cake for a gay wedding, might it at some point be illegal to use the word Jesus in public?  We seemingly are coming to that, and it is an absolute certainty that the people creating the propaganda have something like that as a goal.  Guns and God get in the way of their narcissistic fantasies of unlimited power.

Here is my advice to Mike Pence: attack, attack, attack.  You cannot counter propaganda negatively.  There is no value to answering the question “have you stopped beating your wife yet?”  The answer to this question is “Why did you beat your wife last week?  I hear you beat her every night.  I also heard you have a girlfriend you beat.  How do you sleep at night?”  With propaganda, of course, truth is utterly irrelevant.  It merely needs to be plausible enough, and repeated enough.

Practically, Christians need to organize counter-boycotts. They need to make a list and post them publicly of all the companies that are embracing illiberalism, and refuse to buy from them.  When my Apple comes up, I’m going to get a Samsung or something. I was uncomfortable buying it in the first place, since I knew about the factories in China.

And I don’t think this should originate with Pence, but another list of Indiana companies who are not boycotting anyone should be made, and people encouraged to buy from them.

If you get substantially every church in the country lined up, that will make a difference.  As we are seeing, there is power in numbers.  People just need to grasp they are dealing with really, really nasty people who do not see them as human.

We all need to be clear: there are powerful interests who hate Christians and Christianity.  Obama is one of them–Jerry Wright’s church was a beard, and on his own account he only started going there because someone told him it would help his organizing–but he of course is backed by people whose names we don’t know, or have to guess.

And I want to say this, too: I believe in common decency.  I believe in the right of decent people to be treated decently.  Homosexuality is not a crime, and if it were the 1960’s and gays were being arrested, I would be absolutely on their side, 100%.  But this thing has gone too far.  A little Amish couple not wanting to sell a cake they find offensive should not result in them losing their business or even going to jail.  That is not what America was built on.  That is not freedom.

There are no moral principles involved here for the  Left.  If there were, Apple would not have opened in Saudi Arabia (and I think Pakistan is even worse, certainly in terms of their treatment of women: do they give a shit?  I very much doubt it.  Again: no moral reasoning, no principles, no CARING.

That, in the end, is what we need more of: caring.  Seeing the world, seeing the pain in the world, and feeling compassion, not hate.  There is no compassion in this hate campaign against Indiana.  There are creatures, and there are those who fear them.

Love is a verb which begins with understanding.  Where there is no attempt at understanding, there is no love.

One last thing.  Yes, I’m on my damn soapbox.  The Civil Rights Movement was a failure. It cannot be viewed in any other way.  EVERY concession that was won was a MEANS to the end of making blacks equal in every respect to whites, and that end has not only not been achieved, it has been made less likely.

True liberals negotiate difference.  Interacting openly with people different than you breeds warmth and compassion.  Truly liberal gays would reach out to Christians, and try to win them over through the power of love.  They would win over one bakery at a time.  They would get what they want, without all the vitriol, hurt feelings, and yet more increases in the power and intrusiveness of the State.

We all need to be concerned about the size and power of our government.  Feeding it to serve some short term end is very much like Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of porridge.  There may come a day when that story can’t be told in public.

I watch myself sometimes.  You can slow down a psychological process and watch it, more or less frame by frame, and see what happens.  In my case, I have profound conflicts with food.  I’m not addicted to it or anything like that, but I have the devil’s own time exactly following the diet that makes the most sense to me, a roughly Paleo Zone.

And I have a thought, then a reaction.  I think something I want, then something blocks me from completing that thought.  Then I will my way through it, then get tired.  That is perhaps the source of the cycling: fatigue.  That makes sense.

But if I follow this thought process of an inability to form new learned instincts–if I am unable to undertake voluntary “imprinting” (can we call it that?)–then what has happened is that different layers of my nervous system are in some respect in conflict with one another.

Obviously, this is historically termed “psychological conflict”, but I wonder if we can do better, if we can be more precise.

I have no resolution, but have come to the conclusion that I am a dumbass. I was reading back through Steven Levine’s book and realized I had forgotten half of what he wrote.  Specifically, that the theory upon which he based his ideas is the Polyvagal Theory, so called because it incorporates different forms of the Vagus Nerve.  When I say “gut”–and this is why I looked it up, since it seemed to me it might not hurt to occasionally try to speak with precision–I mean the Unmyelinated Vagus Nerve.

Here is what looks like an interesting paper I don’t have time to read at the moment, from the originator of the Polyvagal Theory, Stephen Porges: http://www.stephenporges.com/images/stephen%20porges%20interview%20nicabm.pdf

And I will add, as I do from time to time, a caution that I am not always diligent.  I try to be, but this is a personal project, and there is no quality control other than my own attentiveness, and I get lazy, busy and sloppy.  Sometimes I think I’m pretty smart, but sometimes I’m saying things that make no sense.  It continues to be my belief that the path to wisdom is often through idiocy, but that middle part can get pretty ugly.

Whenever I did one of my camps, the instructor talked about how humankind exists in a middle place between the animal and the spiritual.  We have wolves in us, and angels in us.  This is of course a cliche, but I did want to point out that much of my recent work has been to try and push that logically in both directions.

If we are animals, then we need to know this.  If I accept–as indeed I must–all the breakthroughs in neuroscience, and all the odd behavioral and cognitive defects that invariably or nearly invariably attend certain brain lesions, this does not also compel me to assume that is the WHOLE story.

Self evidently, the fossil record is one of steadily increasing complexity.  Self evidently change happens over time.  What is at issue is what the WHOLE story is.  I do not think Darwinian accounts have everything they need.  I think that natural selection plainly happens, but that systemic adaptation does as well, and there is no room in materialistic accounts for intelligence of any sort.  Self organizing systems do not spontaneously organize in PRECISELY the way needed, repeatedly, over millions of years.  No, there is something spooky, something immanent, something whose effects I think we can measure, but which we cannot see.

So I take on the one side clearly “true” findings, and simply confine them to their domain.  Then I look at the SCIENTIFIC evidence that we are spirits occupying what in some respects ARE machines.  But we are not the machines.  We operate them, sometimes skillfully, sometimes not.  And sometimes they malfunction.  This, too, is scientific.

Our task in bridging the two domains is to enter into, understand, and accept fully both.

This word popped in my head, so I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia

At one time I was very conversant with all the terms, but that was some time ago.

Still, what I have begun to notice in myself, I think, are cycles.  I push for a while, then I KNOW a push back is coming, so I back off, then I push again, then I back off.  It is precisely finding a line, linear progression, that I have so much difficulty.

Indeed, much of my life has been devoted, I now realize, to figuring out ways to make these circles productive, to get as much when I can as I can, and to lose as little as possible when the tide recedes.

I don’t think I am cyclothymic, although that is a possibility to consider.  I think it’s quite possible my mother was.  As a child, I would have become used to the cycles, without even realizing it.

Through force of will I can make myself do nearly anything for about three weeks.  But it never gets easier, and my will gets tired.  We now, know, that will is a muscle of sorts like any other, which can be both trained and fatigued.

In psychologically normal people, you can pass the task off to your habitual self after a period of time.  This is where that 21 day thing comes from..  I was thinking this morning that that is really what what we call discipline is: the habit of doing certain things a certain way.  In many respects, for many people, I think it can even be comforting, calming.  Certainly that seems to be the case for monks and career soldiers.

Then I got to wondering if habit might be termed, in ethological terms, a learned instinctual behavior.  Squirrels don’t have to THINK about gathering nuts.  They just do.  And people who are in the habit of getting up at 5am don’t have to THINK about it.  It just happens, and the farther they can get on autopilot, the more will they will have for the random tasks that demand them.  They can get more done, by acting often like animals.

And is depression in part a disconnection from the Instinct-Forming-Self?  Does it force ALL behavior on the social brain, and on will power, such that everything becomes vastly harder, and more tiring, and more psychologically draining?

It is an interesting thesis, and one I think close to the truth.  So what do we know about the biology of habit formation?  I don’t know. It’s in part an academic point, but I suspect it may prove an important one.

Did you know only 2% of hourly workers work at Minimum Wage, most of them teenagers?  http://www.tpnn.com/2014/02/07/38-unemployment-black-teens-continue-to-suffer-under-obama/

I started out at a minimum wage of $2.85, worked up to $3.35, and then something like $4.00 within a year.  If you stay at Minimum Wage, you are an idiot.

When you look at left wing propaganda campaigns, you need to understand they are PLANNED.  They are planned with roughly the same diligence Proctor and Gamble uses to roll out new products.  They focus group everything, work out the specific words and images that best create EMOTIONAL reactions, and then simply repeat them with the discipline of Madison Avenue.

People get impassioned, infuriated, about how conservatives are just big meany heads who want people to starve.  If this were true, I would understand the anger.  And it is true, in some cases.  I have met Republicans like that.  But in the worst case a Republican is heartless and solely concerned with his advancement and caring for his “tribe”.  Such a person not only is not a drag on society, but is likely to be someone who pays a disproportionate amount in taxes.  Such a person may be a sociopath, but they are socially useful sociopaths.

I would contrast this with a sociopath of the Democrat variety who, while calling for and implementing policies which decrease national wealth and security, claims to be advancing humankind, and does all of this, also, for purely personal interest.  The callousness and cynicism is not a jot different, but it works to make the world worse.  Joe Biden is an excellent example of that.  So is Hillary.  In my view both are conniving sociopaths.  In Joe’s case, the reason he keeps up with the malapropisms is HE DOESN’T CARE.  He is incapable of shame or embarrassment.

To return to my point, the reality is that most Republicans have very active moral senses, and are at least as likely to help anyone who needs their help.  They take care of themselves, those around them, and those in need in the community.  They are much more likely to be generous in their personal charity donations.

The key difference is that most of us simply understand economics and political science.  It takes more courage and brainpower to think things through than to join the parades of goose-steppers, who are everywhere, carrying their torches and singing anti-patriotic songs.

We value dignity, and understand that there is a profound difference between having a job and being on the dole.  The psychological costs of socialism can readily be measured, once one takes up the simple expedient of connecting structural unemployment with excessive regulation and taxation.  The connection could not be more historically clear or obvious.

Telling the truth is simply difficult for a great many people, particularly intelligent people, who have ingested particularly complex untruths, and grown what they think are wings, but which are really intellectual cancers.