Author: White Whale

I recently enrolled in the modern equivalent of a mail order course on a form of Tibetan inner work called “Kum Nye”, and would like to give it a strong endorsement.  Please consider taking it up.  You will be happier.  The best sales pitch is from the first book, and I will post it in full in my next post. 

“Ku” is who you are, in the fullest sense–your physical body, your thoughts, your feelings, your physical sensations, your energetic body.  mNye is roughly “massage:”  It is interesting to contemplate, but you can “massage” feelings, and even thoughts.  They have textures, and by touching those textures, you can affect them in interesting ways. 

This morning I was walking the streets downtown, watching the snow, feeling the wind and cold, and it hit me that if you exist at the level of being–of existence before judgement, existence before identifying even with physical sensations–then the world has no danger.  I was looking at the world quizzically, as if even the most prosaic things had hidden inner meaning, as if leprechauns were possible, even if I see no reason to believe in them.

Somewhere around a century ago the famous German thinker Max Weber warned of “Entzauberung” (usually translated as “disenchantment”, although “demagicalizing” would be closer) as a consequence of the modern age, and of our pending confinement in “iron cages of reason”.  One sees this everywhere.  The diabolical atheists, those unable to differentiate humans from cattle, seek to confine us permanently in an emotionally immature, disconnected state of consciousness.  They are, of course, cowards, who abuse reason in the maintenance of their own immature psychological defenses against whatever emotions they fear to feel.

I would suggest, though, in the spirit of the age, that technology can be used for REenchantment (Wiederzauberung, in my own, I think, German neologism) as well.  Why not want life to be magical and interesting?  Why not choose to place our faith in the sincere science which tells us that we are all interconnected?  No facts need be denied.  On the contrary: it is the dogmatic atheists who are the ones who MUST ignore both the content and implications of current metaphysical models, and mountains of empirical data supporting this rough idea.

As I say often, there is no reason whatever not to grant them A to B.  I don’t need to doubt that damage to the Broca area affects speech.  I have no reason to doubt that certain drugs can create experiences which appear metaphysical, but appear to happen entirely in the brain.  The interesting areas are those events which plainly happen, which DO NOT FIT within those models, such as developing sensory memory when it is precluded by the setting (eyes taped shut, ears covered with clickers to test brain activity, bodily death; I posted on this case some time ago, but there are thousands of good examples).

Hell, I’m preaching again.

Net: this morning I did roughly an hours practice, and when I went out I felt like I was on a very pleasant drug.  And this has happened to me now a number of times.  The effects are subtle, and may not be obvious at first, but at some point you will find yourself in a moment, and realize that everything around you is interesting.

We all have moments which evoke deeper feelings, which touch something intangible, but quite real.  The best example I can offer is how some songs create moods.  This song is an example for me (Twist in my Sobriety by Tanita Tikaram).  Here is another (Telegraph Road by Dire Straits).

We all know intuitively that much more is possible, but don’t know how to get it.  We pursue it in “love”; we pursue it in excitement.  Always all we get is a hint, a bad clue, a perfume from someone who has left the room.

This need not be the case.

This system is not like any other form of meditation I know of, and in general I would not call it meditation at all.  It is preparatory to meditation (Dhyana), and in my view a very necessary and helpful preparation for modern people, who run around as little boxes of anxiety all day every day.  For the extent that we grant ourselves the right to feel, we may as well be machines.

Here is the link to where you sign up: http://shop.dharmapublishing.com/pages/e-kum-nye

It’s a bit odd, and I think indicative of the low volume of demand, currently, for this system, but you need to call them or email them.  They send you a form, upon which you can place your credit card number, and you can fax it back.  What you get is a structured practice–delivered weekly by email–put together by someone very familiar with the ingredients.

You can of course just get the books, and there are many videos of different exercises on YouTube. Here is one example.  There is nothing athletic about these postures, and the point is not the stretch, but rather paying attention to the feelings that the stretch brings up.  All of us have many things hidden in our soma, hidden in muscular and nervous patterns, which create blockages of energy that prevent our enjoyment of life.

For me, I believe I have reached my emotional core, and both seen and FELT the landscape.  That latter is very important.  I have realized I cannot fight my way out of who and where I am, but that I can GROW out of it.  Conflict, even inside, is always the last recourse of an exhausted mind.  Who you are is in fact very interesting, if you go there.

My feeling is that all of us land on this earth with our unique little fortune cookies, which have our own unique fortune, our unique self, our unique destiny, our own path of beauty.  I cannot express how much I hope the bastards running this earth let us create a world in which this beauty can be fostered and expressed.

Watched “Man on a ledge” last week, “Toy Story 3”, and “21 Jump Street” this week.

As I have said before, the American movie has, almost always, a deus ex machina, a miraculous escape, a villain who plans everything perfectly and is foiled by someone who is merely lucky, usually someone who fails to really take the whole thing seriously, by cracking jokes and frequently taking their eyes off the task.

There is levity which is a break from the seriousness of life, and a levity which is something close to a moral and mental breakdown, which laughs at anything and everything without differentiation.  I see the latter increasingly.

Tonight, at the Red Box, it occurred to me that if movies sell sensations, then the increasing need for sensory overload as seen in the increasing ubiquity of Horror films–which were once fringe media–would seem to indicate an increasing perceptual numbness and inability to process simple experiences fully.

Few thoughts.  I’m vaguely repeating myself, but with whatever number of posts I have, I’m likely the only one who remembers.

OK, GOP, repeat after me: Even WITH the sequester we are spending a trillion dollars more a year than we did under Clinton. 

Unemployment was low under Clinton. For most of his eight years.

Ergo, Federal spending is not needed for prosperity.  This point is obvious, but somehow these dumbasses seem unable to develop and deploy a clear message.  Yes, again, of course the media is in the tank for the  forces of bankruptcy and evil.  But they give at least nods to caring about the truth, so the GOP–to the extent they represent the forces of reason–needs to make its sound bites count.

is emotional alienation.  It is emotional superficiality, and the inability to form deep bonds with friends and family and community.  It is in my view reinforced strongly by media.

That’s all I will say for now, but would encourage everyone to stop watching TV, and to be careful in the other media you choose to consume.  It works on you in deep ways that are not immediately apparent.

That Obama could consider it POSSIBLE to win the public relations war over this topic is tribute to the stupidity of Republicans,and of course the craven and unprincipled complicity of the thousands of awful and demented human beings who create so much of our informational tapestry; those who, to be clear, throw shit on the wall and proclaim it gold.

I am reminded of an Onion article from some years back, after the Saints–then the favorites to win the Super Bowl–lost to the Seattle Seahawks.  The headline read: “Saints lose first round bye.”

The process of informational warfare is simple: create simple, easily understood statements–which in the case of Republicans will always have the advantage of not being patent falsehoods–and repeat them often and in unison.  It is what our opposition does.  They do it better, because successful long term lying requires a lot of planning and coordination, but we can learn the game.  We need to learn the game.

I have created some numbers, with three columns.  We have the year, the unemployment rate, and Federal spending.   What you will note is that we spent 50% less than Obama for most of the last 20 years, and had MUCH lower unemployment.  A strong case could in fact be made that the HIGHER the Federal spending, the higher the unemployment.  You have to go back to the Great Depression and our last socialist President to string together multiple years over 9% unemployment.  The unemployment numbers are here.  The tax data numbers are here.

And to be crystal clear, the cuts due to sequestration are about $85 billion.  Obama has increased spending $500 billion since 2009, which means that even with sequestration we are spending a TRILLION dollars, adjusted for inflation, more than Bill Clinton did.  Wake the fuck up people.

1992	7.5	1.9 trillion
1993	6.9	1.9 trillion
19941	6.1	1.9 trillion
1995	5.6	1.9 trillion
1996	5.4	1.9 trillion
19971	4.9	1.9 trillion
19981	4.5	2 triliion
19991	4.2	2
20001	4	2
2001	4.7	2
2002	5.8	2.2
20031	6.00%	2.3
20041	5.5	2.4
20051	5.1	2.5
2006	4.6	2.6
2007	4.6	2.6
2008	5.8	2.7
2009	9.3	2.7
2010	9.6	3.1
2011	9	3
2012	8.14	3.2

Since the Vietnam era, the power of the Executive to commit US ground and other forces to combat has steadily been allowed to increase, despite the clear and principled decision of the framers of our Constitution to place the power to declare war in, and only in, the hands of Congress.

The idea was that wars need to be paid for, and Congress manages the money.  Wars need to be led, and someone needs to be in charge.  But the person in charge, who may want the war, needs to be subordinate to those who are not in charge, but have to pay for it.

With regard to Syria, to the extent we have a national security interest, it is staying OUT of Syria.  Would it not be INTERESTING if one or more of our top generals, if they receive orders to deploy combat troops, tell Obama to his face that they will do so only upon receiving a declaration of war from Congress.

Now, by law, soldiers–including top officers–only have obey lawful orders.  An order to initiate a war without Congressional approval is, therefore, an order which soldiers are not required by law to obey.  Clearly, they could be sacked, but the political value of the exercise, in getting Executive power back in line with the Constitution, would be quite valuable, particularly if they made their case publicly, either directly, or via managed leaks.

Our troops have done enough.  They have suffered enough.  Obama lies about everything, of course, but he campaigned for peace, and it is impossible to say that if Iraq was NOT a justified war, how Syria comes within a hundred miles of meeting the standard.

We are not the errand boys for the Saudis, despite how beautiful our President may find the call of the Muezzin.

One potentially interesting way to approach this issue–which at root is about the right of the American people to ask basic and appropriate questions about leaders, even and perhaps especially when Congress and the courts lack the integrity and balls to do their jobs–would be to circulate a document along the lines of a petition, asking current and former judges if they would accept as evidence in court what Obama has thus far providef. My strong assuption is that virtually none of them would.

We are in an informational war. This is how you create and deploy informational weapons

Lord, grant me a lifetime of interesting problems, and the courage and cunning to solve them in interesting ways.

We have multiple words for doing something wrong–error, mistake, omission, oversight–but how many do we have for doing something right?  Is there a one word opposite of error?  You can’t say “making a correct”.  But the act of doing something correctly–even though we assume this is what will always happen–is in fact the result of mindfulness and care, and is every bit as much an act as screwing up.

My initial proposal was rorre, which is error backwards, but that doesn’t work.  I looked up “to do” in Greek on Google, but since all the results come up in what I think is called Cyrillic script, I can’t read them.  Eu- plus “to do”, or “to make”, would be good.

Having done a lot of coursework in various languages–Chinese, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, all for at least a year (with the exception of French when I got caught sneaking into class at a school where I was not enrolled), I can say that some things are easier to say in some languages than others.  German lends itself to abstraction.  English–with its HUGE number of descriptive adjectives, and overall massive word count–to observation.

Any and all generalizations of that sort are obviously provisional, and very limited in their utility, but that has been my experience.  That is perhaps why I derive such childish pleasure in inventing new words.

Vaguely related, I was thinking about the word “hypothesis” the other day.  Hypo means, “under” at least in words like Hypoglycemia, hypodermic, etc.  Hypothesis then refers to a thesis that is small, or less than a thesis.

Being me, I of course instantly added hyperthesis, for something larger than a thesis.  Here is an example “Richard Dawkins is slavishly attached to the hypertheses of materialism as a final explanation for the nature of reality, and to the use of unmodified Darwinian Natural Selection as the exclusive mechanism of speciation.”

To this I can add “it would hypobolic to call such unfounded and empirically indefensible ideas asinine and unhelpful.”

I deal often with serious things, but I like to play as well.  This is nerd play, yes, but play it is.

In reference to this news story, we need to be clear that, if trained by US, or NATO, the rebels absolutely DO have both access to chemical weapons, and the skill to use them.  Since Syria is claiming the rebels launched the missiles, this would not even be a false flag operation.  I discussed all this at length, roughly in December.

What seems to have happened is that Libyan arms, including chemical weapons, were covertly transported to Turkey, and then to Syria, after weapons training by Western agents. 

Given that at least half of the “rebels” in Syria openly sympathize with Al Queda, and given that Assad is not causing the United States any serious problems otherwise, the only credible reason to support the rebels is to lead to an outcome similar to what happened in Egypt: the installation of an anti-Western, Islamist government.

Given that this outcome very definitely is NOT in our interests, this policy is plainly both treasonous, and morally noxious.

Congress needs to get to the bottom of this.  People are very literally dying because of what Obama seems to be doing, and many more will in the future.  We SHOULD NOT, SHOULD NOT commit ANY troops to this conflict.  It is an abuse of our soldiers, and a waste of our money.