Author: White Whale

I think, if one were so inclined, one could derive covert complicity on the part of at least elements of the United States government in the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center Towers with the 1% doctrine which apparently animated the Bush Administration.

Here is the book which discusses this idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The net of it is that, to quote Robert de Niro in “Ronin”, “if there is any doubt there is no doubt.”

9/11 clearly facilitated goals which preceded it.

 The potent wartime authority granted the White House in the wake of 9/11, he says, dovetailed with the administration’s pre-9/11 desire to amp up executive power (diminished, Mr. Cheney and others believed, by Watergate)

Imagine laying awake every night worried about a nuke going off in Boston, or an anthrax attack at Grand Central Station, or any of thousands of other possibilities.  Imagine becoming convinced not only of the inevitability of such attacks, but that you were completely helpless to prevent them.  Imagine coming to the conclusion that absent a major push, no amount of arguing would EVER convince Congress and the American people to take the aggressive steps needed to prevent attacks which could kill millions and permanently alter the trajectory of all American lives.

Logically, a few thousand lives would be a small price to pay to save millions.  One could justify it in the name of patriotism, and taking care of the nation.  This is a scenario that makes sense, if you make everyone involved more than a bit psychopathic.  War for Halliburton, War for a pipeline: I hope these scenarios are ridiculous, but if you make folks fully psychopathic, they come back into the realm of the possible.

It does bother me that Marvin Bush was a principal in the company that provided security for the World Trade Centers.

Regardless of who we point blame at, there is NO DOUBT, NONE, that those towers were prepped with explosives before they were hit by airplanes; and that very few people understand this blatantly obvious and ineluctable fact.

This is the best song about addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3O1Ap41ptU  Most of them anyway.

Can we say addicts are caged enthusiasts?

Is it a search for myth?

For Constancy?

I don’t know.  I got drunk last night, after vowing to give it up.  I have some understanding why, but I still woke up with this song on my mind.

You know, I am here too, my friend.  We were wrecked on the same ship.  Let us look together for a way to continue our journey.  Let us look into the distance together and hope.  Let us remember the sun, and feel the ocean.  Let us walk together and not go astray.

Commentary: I wrote this this morning, and have pondered the last paragraph today. I often write things I don’t understand.  I then try to understand them, as here.

I fuck up.  My recovery is offering someone else help and companionship, when this is really what I need.

Lao Tzu (which I’m told translates roughly to Old or Revered Master) wrote: “Renounce sainthood; it will be  thousand times better for everyone.”

Can we not posit that many of the people remembered as saints were in fact suffering from compulsions brought on by unprocessed emotions?  Can we not posit many were manic, or OCD, or simply AFRAID of being sinful?

Back to me.  I have decided that I am likely to be alone until it no longer bothers me.  I will likely be misunderstood until it no longer matters to me.  These are hills I need to climb.  You do your work, or not.  I will do mine. I am doing mine.  It starts with relentless honesty.

Commentary on the Commentary: OI, drunk to friend of the world to martyr.  I can’t keep up with myself, so I’ll have to close this down.

I’ll leave you with this: being alone together can be read two ways.

An authentic life consists in rediscovery; an inauthentic life consists in repetition.

It pleases me sometimes to be a bit cryptic, but this I will expand on a bit, because it led to more ideas.

I have in mind Ecclesiastes, which is my favorite book of the Bible.  The creed “Eat, drink, and take joy in your work” is quite functional, and I think sufficient to get most people through their lives.

To the point, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”


One can take a pessimistic view of this, but here is my own take: whatever problem you have, whatever life challenges face you, whatever your WORK is for this lifetime: someone has successfully passed through where you are.  It has been done.  This means it CAN be done.  History is on your side.


And obviously, failure is always an option.  Someone has failed, too.  But why look at your feet, rather than the horizon?


And this is eminently suitable for Best Case Scenario treatment.  Why not just getting through, but transcending?  Don’t use it as a club, obviously, but do feed it to your unconscious as a possibility, and one which has been realized somewhere, by someone.


And I shouldn’t need to say this, but I will: there is nothing unique about technology.  There is no fundamental difference between trying to build a web app, and trying to build a better fence using your own ideas, and the materials at hand.  There is nothing unique about feeling alone, alienated, detached from a sense of meaning, or surrounded by change.  There is nothing unique about feeling love, feeling special, feeling a sense of belonging, and a sense of continuity with the past.


Even atheism has a very long history.  The Carvakas of India pre-date Christ.  It may be that every snowflake is unique, but this does not prevent us from talking about snow.

Ponder if–instead of proposing we spend nearly a trillion dollars on bailing out bankrupt Medicaid programs, fixing highways that weren’t broken, and distributing money to corrupt Democrat donors–Paul Krugman had instead proposed that we sacrifice 1,000 goats.

Let us further suppose that, due to obstructionist Republicans, only 500 goats were sacrificed.  Could Krugman not have then continued to argue that the failure to achieve the stated objective of keeping unemployment under 8% resulted entirely from not sacrificing the extra 500 goats?  Could he not continue arguing, week after week, that IF ONLY we had done what he, as the prophet of Zeus demanded, everything would have been fine?

In practical fact, the argument is made that even though the “stimulus” appears to have done nothing but increase our national debt, that things would have been WORSE if we had not done it.

Again, would the argument change in any salient, meaningful way, if the argument were over goat sacrifices?  I don’t see that it would.

Take any ritual you want, intended to accomplish anything you want, and you can say that it prevented something worse from happening.  Imagine I took it into my head that the only thing that prevents a meteor from falling on my head is throwing rock candy over my left shoulder every morning and reciting the Hail Mary.   Does not every day that I don’t get hit by a meteor further validate my belief?

I wish I could say this were satire, that I were in some respect exaggerating.  But I am not.

And never forget that Keynes argued quite openly for Fascism–albeit without calling it by name–in his most important book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

I wonder how many people citing his ideas have actually read what he wrote?  I have most of his books on my shelf.

I watched “Top Hat” with my youngest last night.  Her verdict?  “THAT’S entertainment.”

Here is perhaps the nicest scene in it, certainly my favorite song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrCsyN-fZ94

These sorts of movies, filled with silly stereotypes, witty humor, nice song and dance numbers, elegance, decency, evoke I think for many a bygone era of greater simplicity, innocence, clarity.

But in the same sense that I have said numerous times that Fundamentalism consists in the INVENTION of a past that never existed, I think this nostalgia is misplaced.

Here is what clarified things for me: ponder the lives of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and those of your friends, to the extent you know  any of these stories.

I look at the stories I have been told [and by the way, I would strongly encourage you to videotape your parents and grandparents and ask them to tell you their life story.  They tend to like doing it–although of course you can likely expect some major gaps and dishonesty–and it is interesting], and they are filled with anger, jealousy, infidelity, alcoholism, child abuse, violence, frequent disruptions and heartbreaks, abandonment, poverty, unemployment, drug abuse (remember valium used to be prescribed easily, and speed was available more or less over the counter for a long time, as were other drugs), and despairs which were inconvenient.

This is the era when what we tend to call now depression was called pain and sadness. It was called Life.

Get these stories, if you don’t have them–ask your parents and grandparents to discuss the things they don’t want to talk about, as it’s possible you may succeed (I have found often that blunt requests for honesty sometimes yield blunt and actually true answers)–and ask yourself if that sounds like an easy life.

Ask yourself if these people were genuinely innocent.  Was this a Golden Age?  Was it really that different from our own era, other than that we have much more time to contemplate our problems, and much more space within which to work them out?

Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies make you happy.  They make me happy, at least.  They were and remain perhaps more useful than the entirety of the current psychochemical arsenal.

What do you want?  This is perhaps the question.  This is my question.  Do not think about what you want to avoid, but where you want to go.  Who I am?  Who I choose to become.  This is the existential reality.

I choose Goodness, as I conceive it.  This is my life’s mission.

Every authentic life is a rediscovery.

[I may have stolen this: but is that not perfect?]

I don’t remember if I have mentioned this, but perhaps 15 years ago I was certified to teach Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats program.  My license has of course long since expired, and in marketing it I found it to have been trendy for five minutes some time perhaps in the 80’s, embraced by a few large corporations like 3M, but mainly ignored.

I would submit that even today the basic idea remains useful.  That idea is that the work of thinking can be broken into parts, represented symbolically by hats.

The Blue Hat is the control hat.  It is why a meeting is being held, and what the problem is that you want to solve.  It controls how long the meeting/interaction happens, and how you decide if a solution or solutions have been reached. [I continue to believe, by the way, that setting up intranet project sites by Hat would be an interesting and useful approach.  You give a group a week or month or on-going access to add anything to any Hat regarding any problem.  This could not but be cumulative, and would represent a more or less standing meeting which would be highly efficient.  Setting up such software would be a good business venture for someone, I think.  OH: an APP.  That’s where things are going.]

The Green Hat is generative. It is throwing out all sorts of ideas, without evaluating them first for value.   It recognizes that quite often bad ideas lead directly to good ideas which could not have happened without the bad ideas.

The White Hat is all the information, objective knowledge, that can be spoken about a given topic.  In a political discussion, this would include things like “overall tax receipts went up after both the Reagan and Bush tax cuts”.  This is an empirical fact, even if one can argue whether or not the two are linked.  One could dig quite deep in information here if one wanted.  And in most cases, this is likely the quickest and best path to take, particularly in mature areas of human knowledge, like economics.

The Red Hat is how you FEEL about something, a discussion, even about the people conducting the discussion. It is a way to recognize, evaluate, and take into account your gut reactions, which can be both helpful and obstructive.

The Black Hat is all the possible problems with a given idea.  It is the worst case scenarios.

The Yellow Hat, the reason for this post, is all the possible POSITIVES.

Here is an interesting idea when doing visioning work, which I have been doing: write out a Best Case Scenario.  If everything works PERFECTLY, or nearly perfectly, what will happen?  Where will you be?  THIS is what you should be working for.  By definition, it is possible, even if it requires everything working perfectly.

Now, we all know things rarely if ever work perfectly, but here is the value of this: you establish in doing this a baseline ideal, and can view all imperfections as problems which can be dealt with, which can be handled, solved, in order to return to the Best Case Scenario.  This makes problems delays, not deadly.

For me at least, this is proving a hugely beneficial approach.

My symbol for progress is the turtle.  It came to me the other day.  Ponder: what is the task, but to take a few steps every day in the direction of your dreams?  I came up with a motto perhaps ten years ago: Embrace the Small; Nurture the Slow.  I still believe this.

Oh, as a turtle I too have slept.  But for every sleeping there is an awakening.  And fierce weather does make a difference.  One cannot ask too much of a turtle: merely movement when it is possible, and security when it is not.

But believe in life’s little tanks.

Has anyone yet proposed we speak of human BECOMINGS? It seems likely . Hell, I may have. But I wanted to be sure.

You cannot not become. What you can do is constantly stop and oppose your spirits natural exuberance, curiosity, and wildness. You can punch it down over and over. And what you become is lonely, irritable, and judgmental.

You can also accept accidents, intuition, and playful confusion, and see where they lead. This is the path of life.

“One carries one signature, self, vocabulary through life, and if you’re lucky you play on it and let it grow.” Helen Frankenthaler

I love this, except that I think luck has nothing to do with it, while granting some are more endowed with the time and opportunities that support exploration. This is the true value of money.

Does not every meaningful act of creation consist or even begin in the rejection of a former essence? Is this not the genius of Buddhism, rejecting Essence? And can there be an honest Buddhist who does not reject Buddhism? It is BuuddhismS. There can be no other ways, although the actual ways are infinite.

Does Goodness not consist in a relentless destructions of the selves that coagulate out of s primal murk? Does evil not consist primarily in rejecting the necessity of constant intrapsychic destruction, out of which flows a need for EXTERNALIZING destruction?

My first spirit guide was a set of five circular saws, upon which I have thrown myself countless times. Life IS death. This is their truth.

As an apparent non sequitur, ponder the logistics of moving the Pentagon half an inch.