Author: White Whale

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html

John Lott, 1998 interview.  Two excepts:

The horrific shooting in Arkansas occurred in one of the few places
where having guns was already illegal. These laws risk creating
situations in which the good guys cannot defend themselves from the bad
ones. I have studied multiple victim public shootings in the United
States from 1977 to 1995. These were incidents in which at least two or
more people were killed and or injured in a public place; in order to
focus on the type of shooting seen in Arkansas, shootings that were the
byproduct of another crime, such as robbery, were excluded. The effect
of “shall-issue” laws on these crimes has been dramatic. When states
passed these laws, the number of multiple-victim shootings declined by
84 percent. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90
percent, and injuries by 82 percent. 

and

The total number of accidental gun deaths each year is about 1,300 and
each year such accidents take the lives of 200 children 14 years of age
and under. However, these regrettable numbers of lives lost need to be
put into some perspective with the other risks children face. Despite
over 200 million guns owned by between 76 to 85 million people, the
children killed is much smaller than the number lost through bicycle
accidents, drowning, and fires. Children are 14.5 times more likely to
die from car accidents than from accidents involving guns. 

 From here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-shermer/what-is-skepticism-anyway_b_2581917.html


I will add that Shermer apparently had the hots for some hippy chick back in the day.  She dumped him, and he has acted like somebody crapped in his corn flakes ever since.  NONE of these people are scientifically credible. They simply ignore what they don’t like.  You want a dragon in a garage?  Then come look in the fucking garage, instead of running away at top speed.

True science–not what you practice–is value free.  The word “extraordinary” connotes value, which means that it HAS NO PLACE in scientific discussion.  There are two possible conditions: observable, and not observable.  If it is observable, it belongs in science.  If it is not observable, it is either irrelevant or wrong.

Culturally, what is wrong with you people–and there is clearly a cultish group calling themselves “skeptics” to which one might properly refer in this sense–is that you only apply “reason and empiricism” to claims you already support.  What does not support your claims–most notably that materialism is even REMOTELY a consistent position with respect to the best data we have as to how the universe works–you ignore.

True, scientific skepticism is equidistance from both belief and disbelief.  True skeptics do not ask “is this claim extraordinary?”, but simply “what is the data?”

To take one obvious example, the work of Cleve Backster is CLEARLY not explainable within a materialistic, mainstream paradigm.  Yet he has been ignored for 40 or so years, despite replicating his own work MANY times, and having written a book on it, published some 9 years ago.  I researched this the other day and was only able to find ONE effort at replicating his work, and at that by a self acknowledged skeptic.  All has to know about skeptical self reporting is that James Randi is the final judge as to whether or not he will give HIS money to someone he hates.

Like all his ilk, Shermer is an angry man dedicated to ideas which are both pernicious and wrong.  For actual skeptics, I will suggest watching this video: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2013/01/cleve-backster.html

Then this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fStmk7e9lJo

That is DATA. 

You can have a name without an experience, and an experience without a name.  One obvious example: you can know what saffron IS without knowing what it TASTES like.  Conversely, you can sense a familiar taste in your food, but be utterly unable to name it.

I have a note to discuss the Ethiopian famine.  The short version–which by the way I have verified in personal conversation with people from Ethiopia–is that Communists took over and tried to collectivize farming.  This meant highly stupid policies in which people were moved at the point of guns from farms which were working and feeding people to places chosen nearly at random by people who did not understand farming, but who wanted it all to happen in one place and in a certain way.  This is what provoked the need for Bob Geldof to create an international aid blitz.  Many, many people died quite simply as a result of the accession to power of people who were arrogant, ignorant, and indifferent to human suffering.

I will note that virtually no one realized–at the time, or now–that this famine was artificial and brought about by policies that in general are supported by New York and California elites and their ilk.

Persevere in what you want to define you.

Attention is a scarce resource with alternative uses (borrowing from Sowell’s definition of economics).  Wealth is meaning and engagement.  A meaning system allocates attention.  So does a truth system.  A meaning system is true if it works.

Ref: previous quote: all life is economics.

Economic growth is mixing chemicals together that take time to react.

Think of profit as a tip for service.

There will be more tomorrow. I  am organizing and want to get rid of this pile.

I sometimes keep the pages on my planner that have quotes I like on them.  I’m going to record some here without comment:

Where is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.  John Milton

Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.  Albert Szent-Gyurgyi

Conspiracy is paradigmatic thinking.  Me.  That should be a note, but I have a pile to get through.

Costs are foregone opportunities.  Me again, on the costs of taxes and meeting regulation.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.  Thomas Jefferson.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that, while all politicians lie, Republicans have an alternative.  Me.

It seems to me we lack identities until we choose them, as what we are willing to limit our freedom of movement for.  Given this, the development of psychological health is a function of consciously choosing one thing and not another, and not regretting the choice.  Me.

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.  Thomas Paine.

Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.  Thomas Moore.

For man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles.  Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes–obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.  Victor Hugo

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.  Goethe.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.  Whitehead.

90% of all those who fail are not actually defeated.  They simply quit.  Paul Meyer.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.  Disraeli.

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.  Jane Addams.

[note to self: can Arabic distinguish linguistically between law and principle?]

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.  My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.  Helen Keller.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.  Jacob Bronowski.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.  G.K. Chesterton.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.  Henry Brooke Adams

Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused.  Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models.  Daniel Boorstin.

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.  John Dalberg.

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.  Amos Bronson Alcott

To live life well is to express is poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.  Gaston Bachelard. (I cannot resist speculating that he was a bit rotund)

The inevitability of gradualness cannot fail to be appreciated.  Sidney Webb (founding member of the Fabian Society).

Poorly done is still better than well said.

The assholes at HuffPo–to be clear, moderators who are working to silence opinions which make them uncomfortable–are blocking a lot of my stuff lately, so I’m going to start assuming again that I need to cross post:

From here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-ackerman/the-supreme-courts-war-on_b_2586512.html

It bothers you that the President can’t fulfill one part of the Constitution, and your solution is to vitiate some other part of the Constitution?  That idea alone would tell me you were an Ivy Leaguer.  As Orwell said, some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals are CAPABLE of believing them.

Our system is not designed to work fast.  This puts the brakes on bad ideas, and tends to ensure only good ideas–and good people–get through.  This is common sense.

Conversely, one of the arguments most commonly made in favor of Fascism is that it is “efficient”.  Tyranny IS efficient, for the tyrants.

Versions:

Pain is knowledge coming in the hard way.

Pain is knowledge coming in the hard way, because you missed the easy way.

Pain is knowledge coming in the window because you locked the door again.

Pain is knowledge in a hard-to-digest form.

I don’t think I have ever used all caps in a headline.  I am doing it here.  This is both the most emotionally poignant and logically coherent argument against all the gun banning bastards I have ever seen.

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/01/32514-this-may-be-the-best-argument-for-the-second-amendment/

Quite literally, both of her parents died BECAUSE of gun control.

Share this, link it, email it.  Every American with a brain needs to see this video.  Fight these assholes.  Fight them without cease until they retreat back under the rocks where they and their horrible, evil ideas belong.

Phrase popped in my head doing my Kum Nye exercises this morning.  This is what I want: the perceptual FLEXIBILITY to be as diffuse as a cloud, and as directed and hard as a hammer.

I have posted little this week because I have been getting some good non-verbal work done.

Here is a more recent conspiracy post: http://theintelhub.com/2013/01/09/evidence-sandy-hook-school-shooting-staged-by-factions-of-us-government-and-mainstream-media/

I will note in passing that those two nuns sure look like men.

I’ve been alive for almost half a century.  I vividly remember the day I woke up to get the paper, and saw a headline like “600 Dead in Guyana” from the Jim Jones mass suicide/murder (not everyone went voluntarily, and the kids weren’t old enough to understand).  I remember Columbine, Virginia Tech, Patrick Purdy.

This one feels different.  I can’t explain why the cops were there for over a week after the shooting, if they did not feel they had missed something.  I can’t explain why there was ANY lack of clarity on what weapon was used, or why initial reports did not include an AR-15.  I can’t remember ANY shooting where there was this level of conflicting information.

And of course the timing just seems to convenient.  Obama has long wanted to ban guns, but was afraid to take it up in his first term since he wanted a second term.

I had a dream a few nights ago where people involved in a Sandy Hook conspiracy were being liquidated.  The people behind it realized they were not going to get what they wanted, so they were eliminating anyone who knew the full story.  Some of them were firefighters/paramedics.

It will be interesting to see if anyone close to this story has an accident.  As I always do, I will note that the dream had personal meaning for me, and that meaning was actually positive, as I interpret it.

Please consider, though, that all Communists by definition reject common sense morality in its entirety as an artifact of the “bourgeois” ethos.  So too do Satanists, who in my view do exist.  Logically, if we accept, as I do, that intention can influence external events, then Satanism would work as well as any other creed; and since the lust for power–to recover power lost due to an inability to process spirit, albeit in a way which can NEVER bring happiness–breeds monomania, it has some advantages over Goodness.

Ponder that if Tower 7 was brought down by plan, that plan was hatched by people quite willing to commit mass murder in the pursuit of their ends.

There are many good people in this country: most of them.  Our future rests in people in a position to do so to stop evil.  This will start with not overlooking evil because its scale is too large to fathom.  What is, is.  The Holocaust happened.  The starvation of Ukraine happened.  The torture and murder of one third of Cambodians happened.

The facts are not as compelling here as in Tower 7 UNLESS someone can prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that numerous Sandy Hook sites popped up PRIOR to the shooting, as is alleged.  Frankly, I am no more qualified to comment on the evidence that I am on the heat at which steel beams melt.  (In that latter case, I am just quite sure that a campfire would not do it).  That would be a good task for the FBI or CIA.  Or Defense Intelligence Agency, which has my vote for the “least likely to be corrupt”.  This is quite literally a national defense issue.

As I have said before, I am willing to grant that ELEMENTS of these departments might be vulnerable to corruption–it is possible to the point of certainty–but not the whole departments.  I do not accept that.