Author: White Whale

Here is a cut and paste of a post I did a couple years ago:

When it comes to minimum wage laws, there are three possible outcomes: that the State mandated wage is less than those already paid; that it is equal to them; or that it is more than market conditions would normally allow.

In the first two cases, it is unnecessary.  The third condition, then, is the one which matters.

Labor, like any other commodity, is subject to supply and demand.  When there is a superabundance of work and not enough workers, wages rise.  When unemployment is high, and work is scarce, wages fall.  In all cases, business owners need workers to make money.  It is never in the interest of anyone who wants to grow a business not to grow a business by not hiring people.  Hiring always means more money for the business owner, IF there is money left over after he has paid his expenses, of which the largest is usually labor.

Let us say that a business owner collects $1,000 a week in revenues, and pays out $600 in costs.  If he can hire someone for $200 a week, he can still clear a profit, and free himself up for marketing.  If, however, he is forced by law to pay $400 a week, he will not hire anyone. He can’t afford it.

Let us say that someone desperately needs work, and would be willing to work for $200, but is forced by law to charge $400.  Both people lose.

Leftists do not ask themselves what the people who are competing for low wage jobs want.  They ASSUME they would rather either be paid more than they are perceived as being worth, or be unemployed.  This is almost certainly an error, though.

We have some 50% unemployment in black neighborhoods and poor rural areas, which is close to the high school drop out rate in both areas, and there is probably a lot of overlap between the two.

Kids who have not even graduated high school offer very little in terms of job and life skills.  If they are going to get hired by anyone to do anything, they will in most cases need to discount their labor.  Such a first job would amount to an apprenticeship.  By law, they can’t do this, and so in many cases they go years without getting that first job, never learn work skills, and never become optimally productive as citizens.  

Minimum wage is not intended for people who have careers, who put their time in over a period of years.  Even Burger King and the like pay more than minimum wage for virtually anyone who has worked there more than six months.

These laws do not raise up anyone.  On the contrary, they represent a barrier for entry to the job market for people who in many cases really, really need a job.

Useful framing exercise: I am grateful for this problem.

For confusion: I am grateful for this opportunity to make a decision and learn from it.

If you meet demons where they live, they will never have enough space to cause you trouble.  They need momentum.

The price of peace of mind is diligence–daily focused work–and the development of skill.

Becoming is not repetition.

It occurs to me that one of the outcomes of trauma is inconsolability. You are far beyond the point where a hug, or “talking” will help.  This very fact isolates you, and paradoxically the presence of others, even others who genuinely want to help you, can be antagonizing.

I want to say that the goal of abreaction is not “healing” per se, but facilitating the beginning of the possibility of healing, which is consolability, or the ability to receive comfort, either from yourself, or others.  I would supposed, actually, it would start with being able to comfort yourself, which in turn begins with a sense that you are worthy of comfort, that pursuing the goal of greater well being is acceptable.

So I’m in a parking garage downtown, in a medical complex, and the way this works is all the spots except on the very top are usually taken by 10am at the latest.  I get stuck behind this old lady that is going walking speed through the garage.  I don’t know if we can speak of a parking garage etiquette, but if we can, going as fast as you can without missing spots would be part of it.  She was also veering on every turn into oncoming traffic, I watched several vehicles on their way out roll their eyes.  She was doing it wrong, and was not learning.

Me, I am an impatient driver. I am trying to work on it, and believe I am making progress, but I’m not there yet.

Anyway, we go around about 5 times, and I decide to pass her.  Right as I pass her, a car pulls out at the end of the row, and I pull in.  She honks at me.  I cuss her out under my breath.  At the moment, I was feeling both anger and relief.

Now, this is textbook, dictionary definition asshole behavior.  I get that.  She was likely old, a little slow, and likely there because someone she knew was sick, or because she was sick.  My brain tells me this.

But I looked at my feelings, and I was happy, at least for a time.

Now, I have been processing some deep things.  There are other unpleasant things going on I don’t feel like talking about, but suffice it to say a lot of very deep GAPS–that is the word–in my development are coming out.

I looked at my happiness at besting some little old lady.  It was pathetic.  That is what my brain said. Now, my father bullied me, bested me, all the time, and I am likely repeating this behavior.  But what lies at the root?  Tracking it is quite different than understanding and disposing of it.  I want to be spontaneously good, but that is going to mean at times spontaneously bad.  My task, my responsibility, is to USE those times for self purification.  It starts with seeing honestly.

Now, as I have said, my upbringing left me with a feeling of self hatred.  Self hatred is the result when you do not get the love you need, and particularly when you are subjected to emotional or physical violence, as I was.  Self hatred is a means of resolving the tension between what was done, and normal social standards.  It is very difficult to view your care-giver as an awful person–you are after all fully dependent on them at least until your early teen years–so what you do is internalize a sense of unworthiness and self loathing.

But it is never fully justified, UNTIL you do bad things.  When you ACT like an asshole, well then the emotional dissonance, the split, is healed for a moment.  And it is hard for me to describe what a heavy burden all these feelings are.  Whatever you do, wherever you go, there is this voice telling you to fail, that you can’t do it, that you aren’t worthy.

Obviously, you can combat that voice, you can use positive self talk, but if I ask you to hold up a wet mattress, say, something heavy and unwieldy (and by the way incontinence was not an issue for me, so I don’t think there is a deeper meaning here, although there may be), who wins: you or gravity?  As long as that thing keeps driving you down, and you have no means of dropping it, it will win every time, without fail.

Being a bad person, I think, may in some ways help to make that load feel lighter.  This is just a guess, but it feels right.

Then I got to thinking of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man–or really any number of anti-heroes, or neurotic nuts, from that rough era of literature (latter 19th century through today)–and they seem to think that being honest about being mean and miserable is somehow profound.  It isn’t.  It never was.  These things, awareness of these states, is simply a waypoint.  You enter into awareness of evil in order to do something with it, to transcend it.

What stops this process is a rejection of morality.  At its root, Socialism is a rejection of individual morality.  It is a rejection of individual meaning.

I don’t like hospitals.  I have had one outpatient surgery in my life, and that was enough.  I don’t like watching all the fat, decrepit sick people wander through there.  This, probably, is an ugly sentiment too, with one perhaps redeeming feature: I don’t like people who do not value their health and well being enough to do even the BASICS as far as maintaining health.  We Americans age SO poorly, not least because we have this enormous complex built up around keeping people who have never given a shit about their health alive, with expensive pills and treatments.

Then I got to thinking how we treat old people.  Ponder this: how could an old person be valued for wisdom, when wisdom is rejected in principle?  Put another way: if morality is social and not personal, how could an old person have more of it?

If we value old people, what do we value them for?  Practical knowledge.  Some old men, like Warren Buffet, are exceptionally good at doing what most people actually care about, which is making large sums of money.  But would you trust the future of your soul, the future of your happiness in this present life, to a shark whose early fortunes were made in ways most of us would reject handily?

No, we put old people behind curtains, on the other side of the hill, over THERE, where we don’t think about them much.  It was a Socialist, and not a Japanese ethos being expressed when a Japanese Prime Minister said he wished all the old people would just die.  If they could not contribute to the economy, if they had no MATERIAL value, to him they had no value at all.  Their life experience meant nothing to him. (Note here too, as I have commented somewhere, the rush to put everyone on the public dole, then complain about the expense.  This is one more lunatic aspect of the whole thing.)

And if you think about it, what DOES an average person really learn in the course of a lifetime if their constant focus is material in nature?  If their lives revolve around promotions, new houses, weekends, and vacations?  They can talk about these things, but little else.

How much wisdom is there, really, in an average nursing home?  I don’t know, but I wonder.  Contrast that with, say, an old Tibetan, who has chanted and meditated and sung religious/spiritual works all his life.  To the extent we would find wisdom in nursing homes, I think it would be among the deeply and sincerely pious.

Returning to Good and Evil, I think it needs to be said that there is a vast moral difference between playing a role, and understanding a situation.  You can beat pacifism into people, and some cultures do.  You can beat courtesy, filial piety, a work ethic, and cleanliness into people.

But do they then own those virtues?  I would say no.

Goodness, to me, is expressed spontaneously.  It simply comes out. Love comes out; compassion; generosity; kindness; beauty; warmth.  That is why the Windhorse metaphor is so apt: you have the power and motion of a horse, and the brilliance of a jewel.

If you cannot express things spontaneously, you are an artifact, a remnant.  You are not you, but somebody else’s idea of who you needed to be.  Habits can be very strong and useful.  But until you reach bottom, until you know all of your self, all of who you are, all of what you are capable of, you are not free.

For my part, I am starting to try and focus on positive energies, but I’m sure I will have relapses.  These old habits run strong.  I watched them and was subjected to them for many, important, years.  That sounds like an excuse, and perhaps it is, but no plan based on wishful thinking is reliable.  My explanation may be wrong, but I am certainly describing my present reality.

Few thoughts, from my asshole moment.

I had an odd dream last night.  It was one of those–and I don’t how many people have these–where I was in a sleep paralysis, but felt like I was awake.  I wasn’t awake, obviously, because I felt I was on the couch, when I was actually in my bed, but in any event a demon came up to me, hissing, and stood about 6″ from my face, trying to scare me.  I felt fear, but some part of me was thinking “fuck this”, so I reached my arm out and said “bite it off”.  It retreated.  Then I reached my other arm.  Same reaction.  Then I said “BOO” while opening my eyes, and there was nothing there.

Here is a phrase which sounds meaningful, and which may actually be meaningful: Fear fears us.

I think some deep part of us hides our innermost fears, because it feels like confronting them directly will kill us; we won’t survive.  But I feel, increasingly strongly, that no negative emotion you give yourself up to openly and willingly can but retreat.  Your power lies precisely in your acceptance, in your openness to experience.

And how beneficial, to develop the habit of opening to ALL experience, because that will let in the good ones too.   This is getting close, I think, to what the Buddha taught.  The negatives pass away, but what is good remains, and we call this the nature of true reality.

 Posted here: http://www.democracyjournal.org/32/the-dismal-art.php?page=all


I will note, with regard to the word “democracy”, that its use is ubiquitous among those who mean the precise opposite, as in Students for a Democratic Society, or German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  It is a propaganda meme, nothing more.  I post here, of course, because I’d put my odds at making it through the censors at less than 1 in 2.

 
Let me ask you a basic question: how is it that few, on the right or the left, question who gets the money the Fed is “printing”?  It enters “the economy”, but how? 

Here is how: it is given to enormous banks, and used to increase their already considerable fortunes.

I assume that since you have “democracy” in your name, that you have strong anti-Capitalist commitments.  How is it you are not questioning the propriety of giving the already rich, more?

Keynes himself noted, when he was still writing honestly, that almost no one understands how inflation is theft.

Do any of you grasp that when you increase the supply of anything, its relative value diminishes, and that what the Fed is doing will certainly, over some time horizon, decrease the value of all wealth in America, but not before those who came into that money first can spend it undiluted?

It is a source of constant amazement to me that the political left spends so much time demonizing “corporations” in the abstract, and fails to grasp the truly, foundationally, predatory nature of our banking system.  Left and right could and should make common cause on this issue.  I have been arguing this for years, and seemingly no one understands me.

Here is a piece detailing how things work: www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I watched a film by Robert Bressard tonight: Mouchette.  It is about a sad girl, whose very sadness makes her easier to victimize. This is the way the world works, in all too many cases.

The ending is unclear, but I took it that she drowned herself.  Given the events in the movie, that feeling clearly would have been present.

I was watching, though, and if she had lived, she would have been bitter and angry; mean.  I thought of the prep school matron of “The Little Princess”–which I have watched many times with my kids, not least because I think it is a great “Bildungsroman” sort of story–whose viciousness comes out in the end, whose own hells come back into the present in the course of moments in the movie.

I watched her in my mind, looked deeply into her soul, and a cascade of colored discs came flowing out, a rainbow.  The darkness collapsed into nothing.  And it made my cry.  To be clear, I always view this as a good thing.  I fear stasis, not mourning.

I watched someone in hell being led away in a police car, to spend more time in hell.

I believe in justice, but more than anything I believe that at roots all human beings have the capacity for Goodness, even if in some it is so deeply buried we may never find it in this life.  This is not to say crimes should not be punished, but how does punishment really serve the cause of moral elevation?  True contrition?

Here is an idea: what if we gave people convicted of serious crimes high doses of LSD in comfortable environments?  What if they were provided social support, even love?  What if our goal was helping them learn, at a gut level, why their crime was wrong, how it hurt THEM?  What if we told them they could get out when they stopped hurting?  What if we gave them gardens to wander in?  What if we–the people acting through vote and volition–gave everyone gardens?

Please understand, if anyone who reads this blog regularly needs to be told this, I am no bleeding heart.  But I look around me, and I see pain, and little else.  Why punish pain with pain?  Is this truly justice?

Oh, we do so many things wrong.  We are deeply unwise and stupid in so many ways.  I will ponder this, too, and may have something else to add after a while.  Again, I am an ueber-Pisces.  Our destinies are confusion, emotional hurt, wisdom and vision.

You know, if you want to make people hate someone, tell them he is a pedophile, or wife beater, or rapist.  Good people will react in predictable ways.

If you want to make good people hate other good people, accuse them of crimes they did not commit.  This is the essence of disinformation: sowing discord among natural allies, or at least between people who had been living in peace.

The essence of leftwing propaganda in this country–which is clearly a remnant or, better, continuation of Soviet propaganda–is designed to make decent human beings hate other decent human beings for no reason other than that the second group is accused of a crime it did not commit.

Take racism: the people in this country who believe and act on the belief that black people are inferior are Democrats, and particularly so-called black leaders.

Take sexism: the people who want war on traditional femininity, who wage war on women’s right to be whoever they choose, including dutiful mothers and wives, are leftists.  The abortion issue is about the lives of unborn children: the babies, when born, can obviously be taken elsewhere, which will make them irrelevant to the life of the mother, so HER life is not what is at issue.  SHE does not have to raise the child. That baby is not HER body: it is its own life.

I was reading today this very enlightening interview with a Rumanian intelligence officer sufficiently highly placed that he was in regular contact with then-KGB head (remember, he became dictator of the Soviet Union) Yuri Andropov.

Among things I learned were that there was a sustained effort to demonize Pope Pius at the end of WW2 because he was an ardent anti-Communists, and excommunicated all Catholic members of the Communist Party.  Because of this Soviet and other disinformation agents made him appear a Nazi sympathizer, when he was nothing of the sort.  He hated all totalitarianism.

Operation Ares was designed to convert people into blaming the violence of Communism on the United States government during the Vietnam War era.  If you recall the facts, “Ho Chi Minh”–the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, if memory serves, gave himself when he became a Communist–was a co-founder of the French Communist Party around 1920, just after the Bolshevik coup.  He was a lifelong Communist, and Communist International agent.  His agents spent World War 2 killing competing, non-radical, Vietnamese nationalists.  The Vietnam War was ALWAYS nothing more or less than a Communist invastion of the South by the North with the intent of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship, and using the tools of mass murder, mass torture, dissolution of families, forced relocations of precisely the sort we inflicted on the American Indians, except much more massive in scale, and much more brutal, and an extensive police network.

Clearly, they succeeded.  We won on the battlefield, and only lost in the war for accurate information.

The Soviets fielded more disinformation agents than soldiers during the Cold War.  If they had a million men at arms, they had that many or more being paid to warp minds, distribute false information, induce doubt in the minds of sensible people, install hate and fear, and pervert media.

Perhaps half of what the average person “knows” about this period is outright lie, and another quarter highly skewed.  Exhibit A is Joe McCarthy.  We KNOW, beyond any doubt, that our government and media complex were filled with Communist traitors.  They still are.  These people make rational dialogue, based upon actual concern for living, breathing human beings impossible.  Andropov would have been happy to put a Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid on his payroll.

The Soviets worked hard to direct suspicion about Kennedy’s assassination towards the American government.  He mentions that here: http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/  It was called Operation Dragon.  When I called  Alex Jones a Communist mole some time ago, this is what I had in mind.  I of course don’t literally believe that–I think he has done good work–but I think his reflexive blaming of George Bush for what was clearly a conspiracy on 9/11, was unhelpful.  Could it not have been Putin, as I have alleged, perhaps in tandem with ultra-wealthy internationalists?

The Soviets figured anti-Semitism equaled terrorism equaled anti-Americanism, and by and large they were right.  Much of the radicalization of the Islamic world likely dates back Soviet era agitprop.

He even in the original interview provides a history both of the genesis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (it was apparently based on a French satire), and their use by disinformation agents.

All in all, it seems clear most of us live in a dream world, a fantasy world, and that is exactly where a lot of people want to keep us.  All those of us who have any luck at all exiting the Matrix can do is speak the truth to the best of our ability, and as often as we can.