Author: White Whale

I have, from time to time, shared my thoughts/feelings about the after-life.  I believe there are differing levels, that all of us are born multiple times, and that there are both relative hells and heavens.  The Buddhists have something like 12 levels, with roughly the top 9 being substantially better than here.  Effectively, they are tiers of heaven.

The lower levels seem to be tied to this world. People stay here because they can’t let something go.  And there are worse places than here, which also seem to be tied to the planet, to this sort of convergence of solid energy which has been convulsed out of the pure energy of space.

Here is the thing: we are born and reborn until we learn needed lessons, and then we move on.  We  no longer have to come here.  But the existence of human life on this planet, of our species, is a prerequisite to coming back.  If we were to end life on Earth, human life, many spirits in the lower realms would be unable to reincarnate and complete their spiritual work.  They would be trapped in limbo.

Such an event would amount to a Judgement Day, one based not on one life, but on many, many lives, hundreds, perhaps thousands of chances. It would mean such spirits would be trapped until live reevolves on Earth, if it ever does.

This is of course a nightmare scenario, and one I hope is wrong.  Higher spirits, of course, would not be tied to this planet, and would suffer no difficulty.

This is an odd, weird, idea.  I have a lot of them.  But I thought I would put it out there.  It is possible to imagine something like a Christian Apocalypse, even taking into accounts much bigger visions of God and reality.

I spent perhaps 8 years arguing several hours a day on the internet.   I was attacked constantly as a child on all levels, and I guess I sought it out, and learned to dominate debates.  I have been often ugly, often aggressive.  I have, in my defense, also been consistently attacked as a PERSON, since personal demonization and character assassination have always been important tricks in the Leftist arsenal.  Alinsky discusses this process at length and very openly.

In recent days I have been releasing some negative energies–the equivalent, I suppose, of pus from emotionally insulated sores.  And of course I find myself arguing again on the internet.

But I’m trying to look beyond this, beyond this palliative activity, this thing which gives me something to DO.

(And to be clear, all this arguing made my mind much sharper, allowed me to develop and test my ideas, and forced me to learn a whole lot of things I would not have otherwise.  It has been immensely useful, but compulsive, and compulsive is never good in the long term.)

And I realize that trauma is all I have known.  I can’t imagine a life without it.  I don’t know the way forward.  I truly don’t.  It is fog.  It is a road turning around a bend, or going over a hill.

And I realize this is OK, that this is how it works, that uncertainty does not make me a bad person, and that confusion is often a requirement for clarity.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  This would likely be a good mantra for me, at least for the time being.

Edit: Grant, these are not pointless abstractions.  Good thinking MUST underlie all good policy.  Our nation is dominated by crappy, sloppy, unprincipled thinking, papered over with Orwellian slogans and bright colors for the children.  You give me a topic, and I can in most cases point you to a 5-10 page, carefully considered essay.  Obamacare, immigration, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, Social Security, Minimum Wage, the nature of morality, Global Warming, the NSA: it’s a very long list, one which would not exist without me having had my particular manias.

Once I’m done with the initial phase of my inner work, I don’t expect ANY of my political ideas to change.  They are anchored in reason, and reason does not change as emotions change.  What I expect to change is my capacity to present them in a persuasive rather than bombastic way.  My outer veneer needs a LOT of work, but the ideas don’t, in my considered view.

It is astonishing how quickly fear turns into violence.  It certainly leads to physical violence, but it can be as subtle as waiting for the other person to finish without listening, because you have something to say.  It can be impatience.  It can be rigidity.

I am on a lesson in my Kum Nye practice which is seemingly pulling the worst out of me.  I have been unable to refrain from arguing on the internet.  To my credit, I am persisting in it, despite the ugliness it is pulling up, because I believe there will be an end to it, and this is the only way; at the same time, I am watching all the ways fear deranges me.

I was talking last night with a guy in a bar about educational costs. He made the, to my mind correct, point that when you go, say, to MIT, what you are really buying is a piece of paper, which validates both that you were smart enough to get in, and smart and diligent enough to get out.

It immediately occurred to me that with all the explosion of internet based learning tools, why not create a company which validates knowledge?  Let’s say you want to be an Electrical Engineer.  Why not create a test for people to demonstrate what they know?  As appropriate, it could even include real world work, like putting together circuit assemblies, or whatever EE’s do.

People could study at home, at their own pace, pay very little tuition, and once companies get used to the idea, are sold on the idea, college would become vastly less important, and cost might well start returning to the realm of the reasonable.

You could have differing level tests, and differing levels of Pass.  If you want to study Humanities, you could do four years in two.  You could accumulate certificates of various sorts.

And to be clear, I am not talking just about on-line learning.  I am talking about getting rid of the notion of courses and credits completely, and simply testing what a person can demonstrate knowing, in aggregate, on a specific date.

I am thinking someone could become like the Underwriter’s Labs, but for validating knowledge.  Obviously, you charge for it.  A lot of work would go into figuring out what companies actually need for, say, graduating Chemical Engineers, Physicists, etc.  You could have differing focuses.  Obviously, content could be offered for a fee.

If anyone has proposed this, I have not seen it.  Even places like the University of Phoenix are still giving you a degree and using the Credit system.

I would like to assert a principle, that qualitatively new ideas–intelligence, in all the manners in which it expresses itself–can only initially flow horizontally or upwards.  From there, it CAN but does not invariably flow down.

What I mean by this is that if someone–and I have in mind at the moment me–has a radically new idea, it can only be understood and appreciated by people of equal or superior intelligence.  Since most of the people who have such ideas are very high up in their levels of intelligence, and since even most intelligent people suffer from varying emotional rigidities and capacities for negative hallucinations, we can with this principle easily derive most of the history of science, in which the new is treated as stupid, then malignant, then obvious.

I spend much of my time being treated as stupid or malignant, to the extent anyone even notices or cares about what I have to say.

I was feeling a great tenderness the other day, something I’m not used to.  It was like two channels of energy hit me simultaneously: love and the feeling of loss.  To love is to lose: the object of your love inevitably will change; you will lose it.  If it is a person, they will leave you or die, or they will change and the connection will no longer be the same.  If it is an idea, or ideal, principle–or a place, a food, a habit, a mood–it will change.  It will not endure in the form you presently love it in.  The relation cannot remain the same in a world filled with, defined by, motion.

So this horror of loss coexists necessarily with love.  And I understood in a flash the image of Mahakala–Great Time: you have to internalize this.  To love, you must make your peace with loss.  You must be destroyed in every moment you love: there is no other way, which is not characterized by delusion.  To love is to die; to see is to be blinded.

I have been confused by the macabre nature of much Tibetan art, but if you view it as no more and no less than an accurate portrayal of life as it must be lived on the plane of existence, then it all makes sense.  

That creed which seeks to protect the people from greedy, power hungry monsters in the private sector by installing omnipotent greedy power hungry monsters in the public sector.

After letting one or two through, HuffPo is again blocking me.  So I’ll just post here.  This is a response to this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/25/how-conservatives-justify_n_6046748.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

Propaganda much?  In the history of this republic, only one party has been consistent in its support of true, real, no BS, actually racist poll taxes: Democrats.  And for the record, if I were black, I would find the notion that I am inherently so stupid and ignorant that I can’t figure out how to get something I need to drive, cash checks, and visit ANY government building offensive.  It is patronizing.  It shows CLEARLY just how little Democrats think of their black base.  They use them then discard them.  It’s quite cynical, and quite ugly.

I will add that the use of the term poll tax is deliberately inflammatory, deliberately race-baiting, deliberately intended to prevent rational discussion of the topic.

Par for the course for these amoral, racist assholes. 

This is the most perfect pictorial illustration of the foundational, ineluctable and it must be said OBVIOUS flaws in Keynes ideas:

Title it “infinite wealth”.

I want to do what I can to make sure this moment of candor from a major Leftist is not forgotten: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/10/24/Hillary-Dont-Let-Anybody-Tell-You-That-Businesses-Create-Jobs/

Businesses do not create jobs.  Businesses do not create jobs.  Ponder the large, nearly insurmountable, epic, Himalayan stupidity of this statement.  Try, really try, to figure out some way in which this could be correct.  You can’t do it.  No sane person, with even a rudimentary understanding of free enterprise can do it.

[I feel I should add this edit, since there are so many deeply held, deeply wrong ideas out there: Government, to make this stupidly simplistic, has only three sources of revenue: taxes, borrowing, and printing money.  Borrowed money must be paid back, or at least must have its interest serviced, which in practice means much more money over time is digested than would have had that money been taken in taxes.  Inflation, likewise, constitutes a tax on the wealth of Americans, even if it is subtle one that as Keynes noted not one person in a million would fathom.  Well, you are now one of those one in a millions because I am telling you that increases in the money supply constitute theft.  Presently, the Fed is printing nearly $1 trillion a year in money to help Obama maintain the illusion that his house of cards is sustainable.

The point here is that sooner or later ALL government gets its money from taxpayers.  Period. There is no other way to look at it.  This means that all government activity is funded by private sector activity. Period.  There is no other way to look at it.  This means that all government jobs depend on private sector jobs.  Period.  There is no other way to look at it.]

Yet, it has a logic, which I will attempt to go through.

First off, we  need to recognize the propaganda coup–one of many, it must be said–which enabled the widespread use of the term “Supply Side Economics”.  This term is a defensive term, it is one which has been represented as a lame alternative to the purportedly most correct, most orthodox approach, that of Keynesian or Demand Side economics.  Implicitly, “Supply Side:” Economics is some sort of radical alternative to the presumed norm, the presumed success, Keynesian economics.

This of course is lunacy.  What has failed every time it has been tried is PRECISELY Keynesian economics, for the very simple reason that it was never intended to be successful outside of a Fascist political system, and arguably not even then, outside of the thefts which wars of aggression enable.

As I know I have at some point stated, counter-Keynesian economics is simply economics.  It is a description of how things ACTUALLY work, and one of the factors in how economics actually works is that if you want jobs to be created, you need to create a climate in which this is made more and not less likely.

If you want to grow flowers, you fertilize the soil, you water them, you make sure they get enough sunlight, you protect them from the cold.

The essence of a Socialist regime–the essence of the pervasive failures in the non-developing world, with Latin America being the most proximate example of these failures–is making it HARDER to do business.  It is demonizing those who do business well, who amass wealth outside of the protection and collusion of those in power for their own benefit.  Socialism is great at creating opportunities to get rich at the expense of others, but it is horrible at facilitating people getting rich themselves, while spreading and generalizing the wealth.

Bill Gates created thousands of millionaires.  Is anyone but Hillary Clinton and her ilk so stupid as to fail to grasp that those millionaires put their money into local circulation, and put their money into the pockets of landscapers, builders, purveyors of clothing, dining establishments, etc., in a sustainable way?

The alternative is taking all of Bill Gates money, and then using government officials to determine who should get it.  Politics being what it is, most of this money will go to politically connected insiders, who in almost all cases will simply waste that money, making Bill Gates poor, along with everyone else EXCEPT those on the inside, people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

This is how things actually work.  To reach the mendacity of a Hillary Clinton–to reach lies so pervasive and complete even she believes them (I would have my doubts about Bill, who is much smarter than her), here is what you have to do.

First, believe the propaganda about Supply Side Economics–trickle down economics, Voodoo economics.  This, despite the fact that it has always worked [Tax receipts went up under Reagan, exactly as predicted; Tax receipts went up under Bush, exactly as predicted.  In both cases, this increase was masked by much larger increases in spending].

The essence of anti-Keynesian economics is placing the locus of economic development on small and medium business.  Given that you have bought the propaganda, you simply have to invert this.  Logically, if anti-Keynesian economics is wrong, then the converse must be right.  If businesses cannot be counted on to create jobs, then their role as job creators must be rejected, even if within Keynes own tissue of lies even he contended that the intended net beneficiary of government largesse was still supposed to be the private sector.

Make all of this abstract.  Ignore real human suffering.  Insulate yourself in a bubble, and don’t give a flying fuck about anyone except those who can advance your agenda, and those who can serve you sexually.

That is how you get statements like this.  It’s not hard.  You just have to be an awful human being, utterly lacking in compassion, and utterly disinterested in fixing anything or anyone, or alleviating any sorrow or burden.  You simply say things which get you votes, pure and simple, and if you lose sleep at night, it is worrying about polling data, and what new messaging you need to enact to improve it.