Author: White Whale

I am still processing, but one obvious, large thing popped up this morning: when we violate our own principles, it is like doing something wrong in front of a child.  There is a childish part of ALL of us which notes our behavior and withdraws or expands in response.

Can you remember being a child?  Where there not times when you shrunk and felt less when perhaps your parents fought loudly?  Or when your father cheated on something?  Or your mother went into a hysterical rage?  There are countless possibilities.

Most of us are raised with at least nominal nods to traditional moral virtues, but at some point we start to realize that adults violate them, and some violate them constantly.  Our world is, if not filled, at least burdened more than it could be, with the results of human evil.

When you are confronted with this fact, you more or less have two choices: you can accept as actually right the violations of principle, or you can react against them.  When you are a child, though, you really DON”T have much of a choice, if the offenders are your parents (and to some extent, being imperfect, they always are) or people close to you.  No 8 year old is going to take a principled stand in defense of honesty on a sustained basis.  They may cry out, in their childish way, but they will be told to shut up by most people capable of dishonesty in the first place, and soon enough the cognitive tension will push their outrage deeper in them, even if they don’t forget it.

Here is the thing: I woke up this morning and realized that when I break MY rules, it is like punishing that child.  Most of the happy, creative, joyful, connected, playful, HONEST places in us still exist emotionally as children no older than perhaps 12; and we lose connection with those inner children when we knowingly violate OUR OWN rules–and we all have them.

I realized this week that I have the soul of a soldier.  What the soul of a soldier cries out for is a mission, a cause larger than itself which is intrinsically beneficial to others, and which requires hard, sustained effort to accomplish.  This is my personal soul’s deepest hunger.  It is the key to my happiness.

And I think most ACTUAL soldiers are like this too.  If you peel back all the cynicism and anger and defensiveness and general irritability, most soldiers have very childlike attachments to their units and cause.  There is a deep love and connection, EVEN IF they outwardly don’t show it.  I see it.  Evidence for it is everywhere.

And beyond this inner child, which is more or less a highly sophisticated sensor for contradictions and hypocrisies, there is a spiritual self, which I really feel I made some contact with this week.  It is calm, deeply joyous, inherently brave, determined, and bright.  You cannot get in contact with it, and certainly cannot maintain contact with it, if your inner child’s bullshit detector gets or remains triggered.

What is called virtue is simply enlightened self interest.  This is the core of what I have to say.  It is not unique, but most important truths are and always have been voiced in many different ways, constantly, throughout history.

Pulled this up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States#.C2.A0California

Look at the rules in Marin County: May 23, 2012 banned in all condos and apartments, as well as all patios within residential units. Anyone caught smoking will face a $100 fine and will be sentenced to five community day services. A second offense warrants a $300 fine and ten community day services, and a third offense being $700 fine and fifteen community day services. Landlords may opt out of smoking restrictions by designating 20 percent of their units reserved for smoking and may permit e-cigarettes to be used inside apartments and condos. All other outdoor areas, including bar and restaurant patios, and private homes that are not of multi-unit residences and smoking in cars are exempt from the ban.


Calabasas: 2006, banned in all indoor and outdoor public places, except for a handful of scattered, designated outdoor smoking areas in town. Believed to be the strictest ban in the United States.


Glendale:  October 7, 2008, banned smoking^[54] in/on and within 20 feet (6.1 m) from: all city property (except streets and sidewalks); city vehicles and public transportation vehicles; city public transit stations; places of employment; enclosed public places; non-enclosed public places; and common areas of multi-unit rental housing. Some of the areas where smoking is prohibited are authorized to have smoking-permitted areas, subject to regulations. Also, landlords in Glendale are required to provide disclosure to a prospective renter, prior to signing a lease, as to the location of possible sources of second-hand smoke, relative to the unit that they are renting.


I get that people can say they don’t like smoke.  I get that it certainly does not improve health.


But there is just something creepy about this to me.  I don’t want to live in a world where the government can tell me what I can and can’t put in my body.  We all die.  Every regulator who imposed every one of these regulations, and everyone who agitated for them, and everyone who opposed them: in 100 years, barring breakthroughs which can only happen if mainstream science abandons its orthodox materialism–not likely soon–all of them will be dead.  Their minds will not be downloaded.  Minds are not machines, and this is a necessary presupposition for those drooling over surrendering their souls to machines.


Why not live and let live?  There are too many fucking people worried about bodies and neglecting souls.  I like and trust smokers far more than health nuts.  They are at least in partial touch with their true emotions.  It is of course possible to be emotionally and physically healthy and reject things like smoking, but it seems to me most of the people pushing these things are emotionally detached ideologues.


One of the feeds on my Facebook posted an old video of Hollywood Squares, with Paul Lynde (how did I not figure out he was gay?  I guess I was too young when I was watching it), and they asked him something like: What is the collective name for gluttony, sloth, lust, wrath, pride, envy, and greed?  


He answered: The Bill of Rights.  Call me a Libertarian if you must, but I think he was on to something there.

He says:

“We are definitely not living in a post-racial society.” Stewart added, “and I can imagine there are a lot of people out there wondering how much of a society we’re living in at all.”

It sounds reasonable.  He is establishing his “caring” bona fides, and sharing that he GETS that blacks just aren’t treated the same as whites.  This is a type of Integration Propaganda.  Integration Propaganda has as its goal the creation of a homogeneous group which can be counted on to accept the pronouncements of its elders with little or no question.  Jon Stewarts audience no doubt sees him as being profound, empathetic, that he has identified some important truth.

But the actual truth, as I have argued at some length, is that whites and blacks are killed in roughly even ratios, if we compare Officer Assisted Homicide (can we call it that?) rates among whites arrested for violent crimes, with those of blacks.  If we compare arrest rates across all crimes, blacks clearly fare much worse, with perhaps a 75% higher death rate, but I suspect most deaths are from arrests from violent crimes.  I don’t know how to find that statistic.

My POINT, though, is that there are PLENTY of miscarriages of justice between cops and white folks.  I have posted 4 in the past couple days.

So when Jon Stewart invokes race, he does so without an empirical basis.  He is just saying what people in his position, coming from a certain worldview, say.

And again, to be clear, I think someone should have been charged with reckless endangerment or negligent homicide in this case, but the fact remains this was not PRIMARILY racial.   Bad things happen to white people too.

And this is the point I wanted to make.  The difference is that white people are not a target for Agitation Propaganda by left wing propagandists.  We are not whipped up into frenzies when a blatant (and there are much worse cases than Brown or Garner) crime is committed by police.

The whole point of mixing Agitation and Integration propagandas is to create a growing cohesive group which will believe whatever you say, and to foster that cohesiveness through carefully planned and targeted hate campaigns.  That is what is intended by calling everyone who disagrees with leftists “racists”.  You both signal your belonging to the group, and the radical OTHERNESS of the person or people you have labeled Other.

That leftists–particularly leftist academics–claim to have rejected this process is simply evidence of some combination of intrapersonal stupidity, willful hypocrisy, and the cognitive distortions which invariably attend the rejection of principle, in principle, as a heuristic device for coordinating action and behavior.

Long day.  I’ll leave it there.  Thought I should say something though.

Edit: I remembered what I had wanted to say.

If he were truly concerned about the plight of the innocent, about justice, about protecting the weak, Obama could easily find the same statistics I have, and conclude that some national initiative in favor of reforming the police review process might be in order.  That would be the sort of thing a Democrat from another generation might have undertaken.

But this guy, in my view, is mainly concerned with the USE all the confusion and violence can be put to.  HELPING people is simply not something that is even on his radar, except to the extent he can be seen doing so, and use that imagery for further propaganda.

Propaganda, for leftists, is an end in itself.  If conformity is the end, propaganda is the means, which makes it an end.  To BE is to be part of the group, and to be part of the group is to accept what you are told.  Therefore accepting propaganda comes very close to a sense of self outright.  That is the desired end state of aspiring Fascists everywhere, and in important respects they have come very close to realizing that ideal in America.

Now, I want to be clear that I KNOW cops have all sorts of rules.  They must document everything. Reporting is half of what many do.  I KNOW they have all sorts of rules of engagement, etc.

But when they break down the wrong door, and shoot an innocent person, something major needs to happen.  Period.  We can discuss what, but at a minimum the Officer in Charge of a clusterfuck should be fired, and “disbarred”, which is to say legally prohibited from “practicing” law enforcement anywhere in the country.  We disbar lawyers, and revoke medical licenses.  Why not cops?

And I think we need a special process for cops.  Grand Juries presently have to decide whether or not to file criminal charges.  What happens after that is between the police departments and the officers.  This is in part how Grand Juries can get convened over and over and NOTHING happens to bad cops, because they can’t make criminal charges stick, and they don’t have alternatives.

We can and should have grades of charges for Grand Juries to consider which do not presently exist on the books, with the least being official censure and some loss of pay/benefits/seniority, with a middle being getting fired, with or without retirement and benefits, and a high end being a criminal charge, ranging from reckless endangerment to 1st degree murder.

Those charges can then go to a jury trial.

As we read recently, a Grand Jury, if it so chooses, can “indict a ham sandwich”.  But it can’t make those charges stick.

And to let this play out, in Ferguson I think Wilson should have been exonerated, and everyone calling for riots and his death arrested.

In the case of Garner, I think they should have gone for negligent manslaughter.  That WAS a chokehold; choke holds are banned.  Simple logical process.  He had no extenuating circumstances.  He was surrounded with armed reinforcements, and making a Misdemeanor arrest (I would assume).

In the case of the guy I posted on the other day who tried to stop a drunk 19 year old with his body, and wind up killing her, I think he should have been fired without benefits and disbarred.

Smart cops know, I think, that if they are never seen as paying any consequence for what are in some cases more or less open cases of murder through at least stupidity, at some point they will start getting violent push back.  It’s in their interest to SHOW the public that they are willing and able to cull their ranks of the violent and incompetent.

Remember this: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-now-spends-125-billion-per-year-on-riot-gear-and-stability-maintenance-2013-5

The country is estimated to have more than 180,000 protests each year and the ruling Communist Party spends vast sums on ensuring order — more even than on its military, the largest in the world.

I will repeat, as I do from time to time, that  China is formally a Fascist nation, which is ironic given all the anti-Fascist rhetoric one sees from  Communists.  The only important different between Communism and  Fascism is that Fascism is an almost viable economic system.  It only truly works when conquering other nations, as Hitler did with the Ukraine, and China did with Tibet, but it works much better than pretending that people are automotons who are indifferent to their environment, treatment, pay, and autonomy.

Fascism is great for enriching oligarchs, and has been a great boon to the ruling Communists, who live lives of luxury, and are exempt from most of the laws which control everyone else.  They are their own class, and one can see why they would institute such repressive measures to protect their class status.  One can see, that is to say, if one is amoral, crass, materialistic, and GROTESQUELY hypocritical.

The issue is not black or white–that is a propaganda meme being used by the usual suspects for the usual purposes–but rather a nearly complete lack of accountability on the part of police for incompetence.  As he notes, with regard to his own State: “In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.”

Here are the stats on the FBI: “from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.”

Nationally, officers are cleared of any wrong-doing about 400 times a year in the shooting deaths of suspects, but NOBODY seems to track how many are charged.  I would guess based on the fore-going stats, the number is very close, or AT, zero.

Here is the thing: we have professional standards for doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, electricians, and many others.  If an electrician fucks something up and causes a house fire which kills someone, they can be charged, at minimum, with criminal negligence.  If a doctor does something stupid they can have their license revoked and sued for malpractice.  Egregious cases can still warrant  criminal charges.

There are best practices in police work.  The choke hold used on Eric Garner–and don’t give me any bullshit that an arm targeting the caratoid, and it looked like the windpipe, as they moved, isn’t a choke–is WORST practice.  It is banned.  Cops know this.  They are trained in it.

THEREFORE, using a choke hold is at a minimum prima facie evidence of professional incompetence/malpractice, and in this case what I would call clear negligent manslaughter.  This applies particularly since he was not attacking them, and they had AT LEAST 4 offers present, and based on how many people were moving around afterwards, more like 5-6. If you have me a week to design and test strategies for dealing with large men without choking them–including the most basic use of interpersonal skills to calm him down–I have no doubt I could do it.

There needs at a minimum to be a police equivalent of being disbarred, of being deemed unfit to do police work of any sort.  More generally, though, it seems ABSURD that police are trusted to investigate their own.  I would suppose it obvious that people who hate cops could be relied on, if trusted with full authority, to commit any number of atrocities against justice.  The cops in the Rodney King case never should have gone to jail (that’s another matter I won’t deal with here).

At the same time, though, a lack of accountability means that INNOCENT PEOPLE die.  Cops have rights: so too do the people  they shoot and kill.  If you are a SWAT Team and hit the wrong house because you are having a bad day, and kill someone–which has happened several times at least in the past few years–guess what?  You go on the fuck up list, and you get to work somewhere else, like McDonalds, and your pension is revoked.

You say “but cops make mistakes, too.”  When you are serving a warrant for something like unpaid student loans–this is an actual case I read about–then FUCK YOU.  You stupid sons of bitches need to do your goddamned homework, and if you can’t be bothered, then I repeat: FUCK YOU.  Go pollute some other job, using money from someone willing to tolerate your stink.  No retirement, no severance.  This, in lieu of jail, which I think overgenerous.

This argument is like architects saying ” but my job is just so HARD”, or engineers saying “But my job is so COMPLEX”, or an ER doctor saying “But I have so much STRESS.”

Can we not stipulate as basic elements of the policing process that you not default to banned worst practices?  Can we not stipulate that at a minimum?

I want to be clear: this is not a rant against cops in general.  I recognize the value and inherent risk in what they do.  This is rant against BAD, INCOMPETENT, UNPROFESSIONAL cops who give everyone else a bad name.

I will share one story.  I know a woman who got drunk one night with her boyfriend, and the next day went down to Barney’s neck of the woods, and got lost. They asked a cop for directions, and he smelled alcohol on the boyfriends breath, and promptly arrested him.  While this was going on, she was carrying their baby, and she was getting freaked out and scared, so she asked if she could go into the gas station (where they were stopped), and he ignored her.  So she went in.  He followed her, took the baby out of her hands, and handed it to the clerk, and then punched her so hard she woke up in the hospital.

She sued.  I don’t know what happened, but these people ARE ON THE STREET.  What he did was not policy.  It was not legal.  It was an assault, pure and simple, but five gets you twenty he is or soon will be back on the street, with no charges, and that the case will settle out of court for not much money.

Some cases are OBVIOUS.  This was all caught on camera.  Such cases need to be subjected to criminal prosecution.  Cops need to go to jail.

I was dreaming last night I was driving, and construction kept interfering with my path.  I was trying to go somewhere, but endless concrete loops and dead ends were in my way.

So I got out, grabbed my car, and climbed up a steep rock embankment–using one hand to get handholds, since the car was in the other–to get myself back on the highway I wanted.  I have never carried a car before.  That was new.  It wasn’t that heavy.

I really want to break through some old limiting behaviors, and feel I have found some good strategies for doing it.  I will have more to write on the specifics once I hit some behavioral benchmarks I have set for myself.  It’s far better to speak of what worked than what might.

Not only was this law put on the books–for the alleged good of New Yorkers–but the Chief of Police gave it priority and strongly encouraged beat cops to make arrests.  This is idiocy.  This is taking the War on Drugs to its absurdist extreme.  If they wanted to punish him, fines would have been quite sufficient.  It is not a big deal one way or the other.

And I can totally relate to why he was pissed with them.  I would have been pissed too.  He had figured out a way to make money that, at worst, led to New York collecting slightly less in taxes.

Now why was Garner doing this?  TO FEED HIS FAMILY.  How complicated is that?

And why were people buying from him?  Simple: Socialists ALWAYS create black markets by charging such high taxes that avoiding them becomes profitable in and of itself.  As I noted the other day, utopian Denmark has a thriving black market, with half of Danes admitting they buy things under the table to avoid taxes.

So you have on the one hand an idiot law, passed by idiots for idiots, and enforced by a combination of drones and idiots, and at least one man dead for it, and children who NOW will either go without or be forced to USE some of that tax money these jackasses are collecting to make ends meet, in the form of social welfare benefits.

Dumb top to bottom, side to side.

And I can’t resist adding that this overall war on Tobacco is another source of irritation to me.  If people want to smoke, and they tell their insurance carriers the truth, they are COVERED.  It’s nobodies fucking business. It’s something many people like because it calms them down.

And I have long felt that these stats on second hand smoke exposure among adults are BS.  Yes, people should not smoke in malls or at work, but a few whiffs here and there is not going to affect anyone.  No, you should not smoke around your kids, but if they get a whiff every now and then, that’s not going to hurt anything either.

Did you know chronic smokers only have a 1 in 20 chance of getting lung cancer?  The rate for the population as a whole is 1 in 100.  This makes smokers 5x more likely to get lung cancer, but only 5% of them actually will.  My own guesstimate is that roughly 1 in 2 smokers never suffers anything more serious than a smokers cough.