Author: White Whale

HuffPo again.  The linked editorial is worth the read.

Fact:: in theory, history, and legal precedent, some form of gun ownership is guaranteed by law.

Fact: this means guns are not going to disappear.

Fact: The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when
the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of
people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by
civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when
it started. (from here: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/)

LOGICAL conclusion: empowering teachers to defend themselves and their
students is the only moral option. Anything else is doing NOTHING
effective to stop shooters. It is merely a sop to hysterics.

In response to the question on how many mass killings with guns there have been in Japan recently.

There were 8 children killed with a knife and some 20 wounded just a year or two ago, in Japan.

And
to the point, Japan was a fascist, totalitarian state for most of its
history.  Non-Samurai were banned under penalty of death from owning
“state of the art” weaponry.

Freedom and guns are inextricably related.  They cannot be separated.

And
in point of fact, there are MANY countries where guns are illegal and
gun crime is common.  Jamaica and Mexico are two obvious examples.  You
can’t get “guns off the street”.  They can be smuggled.  This means only
criminals have them.

The democratization of gun ownership is foundational, elemental to democracy outright.

Only one thing has been shown to stop mass shootings. One thing. Not
two, not three. One thing: that is someone shooting back.

We should not have armed guards at schools, but it is stupid to pretend
that responsible individuals–and these are the people teaching our
kids, so one hopes they are responsible–are incapable of carrying and
protecting handguns.

Gun free zones do not stop criminals. They advertise that no one will be shooting back.

You can pontificate all you want, but if the goal is actually DOING
something, which is a refrain I see over and over, that is the most
OBVIOUS, simple, and cost effective thing to do.

Posted here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/26/frank-luntz-nra_n_2364860.html

I am likely driving my Facebook friends crazy, so I am going to start cross-posting here.  If I take the time to write something, I want to be sure it appears somewhere.  I wrote a five paragraph response to Michael Moore’s (could he be any uglier?) latest piece, but unsurprisingly it did not make it through moderation, despite consisting of nothing but careful and factually based reasoning from basic premises.

I am growing, which is a good thing.  I’ve been slightly off my rocker the last week, perhaps. [although I think worrying excessively about the propriety of what I say would likely be a net negative for me.  It’s better, I think, to screw up then correct it than to not take a position at all.] 

Be that as it may, one thing I have recently started doing is engaging with my breath. I think one could make a case that the primary PHYSICAL reality we all deal with is the fact of our breath.  If you think about it, breath is both conscious AND unconscious.  We can choose to take a deep breath and hold it.  But if we don’t think about it, it happens anyway.

I’ve been reading in a superficial way “The Perceptible Breath”, by Ilse Mittendorf.  Her basic position is that trying to control the breath is useless, but so is ignoring it.  The basic method is simply to let it come, naturally, then let it go, naturally.  No work is needed.

But I find in doing this that all sorts of emotions start coming up.  I would speculate that part of the reason for the effectiveness of Wholotropic Breathwork is that it accesses a root element of our unconscious perceptual reality, which is our breath.  I suspect most all emotional constraints and traumas and everything else is locked up in our breath.

It is a strange thing: to be alive is to breath, which means that to accept life you must accept your breath.  Sometimes, though, I get angry with it, angry with life, impatient, perturbed, untranquil.

We have what I normally call bodily gestalts, which is the result of the peace we have made between the need for motion and constraints on the willingness to move created by fear, and emotional scars.  Moshe Feldenkrais noted many years ago that given perfect calm, all people would “operate” their bodies the same way, but we all know that many people we can recognize simply by how they move.  This gestalt is also, I would submit, a paradigm, a framework from within which you perceive the world, but one which INHERENTLY prohibits certain types of movement.  The emotional “binding”, and the perceptual binding are integrally linked.

As any long time readers I may have well know, I like to dream. I dream of a day in which the normal, standard education provided to all people in the world includes a physical education that teaches them to be aware of emotions, to process emotions, and to grant the world access to them, and all the wonders of experience that will enable.  I visualize ritual centers, and beautiful monuments.  Why not build Rivendell?  Why not emulate the fictional elves in the Lord of the Rings and dedicate ourselves to tranquility, harmony and beauty?

Someone once told me, approximately, that if you don’t break easy sometimes, you break hard.

In ritually determined cultures, traditional cultures, in almost all cases you have some version of a Bacchanal.  Christmas (which by the way derives from Christ plus Mass; holiday, in turn, derives from Holy Day) itself was layered on to the Saturnalia, which was a multiday party where everybody let it all hang out.

All people–which by definition includes people organized into a social order–need to yell shout and scream sometimes.  You need to “lose it”.  You need color, wildness, chaos.  Our own Halloween is a pale reflection of this.  Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and the Caribbean, and Carnival in Brazil and elsewhere are examples.  In India they have Divoli.  Even the Muslims have a party at the end of Ramadan.  I suspect Japan and China have their historical examples.

I was thinking in particular of the Tarahumara Indians (Raramuri, approximately, in their own tongue, meaning the “running people”) are very calm and reserved normally, but when it’s time for a run, they get high as kites, drink heavily, fight, screw each others wives, pass out, then get up and run 50 or 100 miles, which of course is also an outlet for energy.

These mass shooters, it seems to me, are exercising and exorcising energies that have been pent up for long periods of time and which they had no other way to get out, no other socially condoned pathway, no route to letting their hair hang out in public, and not feeling the fear of rejection.

If Adam Lanza has expressed himself in small ways repeatedly, and not been rejected, I think the shooting would not have happened.

I will add, though, too: in past ages, it simply was not possible to interact with artificial human beings, which is what we are doing when we watch movies and TV and play video games.  You were either fully alone, or with actual humans.  I think this emphasized tribalism–the past was not less violent–but also a sense of continuity with at least your own group.

Apparently I am not reading enough.  No, CERTAINLY.  There is no ambiguity.  I should have been on this.

The authorities did say they found a .223 with Lanza, along with a Sig and a Glock. The gun in the trunk was a shotgun.  I have seen the Bushmaster called an M-4 and an AR-15, which are different weapons in my understanding (the AR-15 is longer, I believe), but I think it’s close enough for me to call this one done.

Here is a link: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57559395/conn-school-shooter-had-4-weapons/

And another: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/school-shooter-adam-lanza_n_2312818.html

Paranoia is a strange thing.  It is usually wrong, but not always, and thus it is hard to gauge when it is appropriate.  Most of the time we worry too much, but there are rare times when we worry too little. Lacking perfect knowledge, it is a constant balancing act.  Here, I failed through a lack of due diligence.

My apologies for a preventable fuck up.

Only about half my comments get through at HuffPo, as far as I can tell, so I always try to crosspost them.  I promised my Facebook folks I was done with politics for the day, so I’m putting it here.

Everyone needs to read this: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/50586

I have studied this issue in some depth, and the fact of the matter is that it is UNAMBIGUOUS that the “consulate” was not a consulate at all, but a secret meeting place.  The official report calls it a “Special Mission Compound”, and which had an annex a mile away, which is where Woods and Doherty apparently were when the structure was attacked.  There were no security guards because the place was supposed to be secret.

The best guess right now is that Stephens was in charge of funneling arms to Syrian rebels, about half of whom AT LEAST are Islamists who want to use the chaos to install a misogynistic totalitarian regime along the lines of what Obama just got installed in Egypt. 

The original intelligence source predicted a false flag chemical weapons operation in the works, and said he had first hand knowledge of Americans training Syrians in how to operate chemical weapons.  The use of such weapons has already been called a “red line” which would likely bring direct American involvement.  For this reason ALONE it would be sheer insanity for Assad to use them. 

Ponder who you just reelected President. In my view, he is fully capable of this great evil.  We know NOTHING about him but what he has shown us, and that is precious little.

You are complacent because you have not been punished for it, yet.

Well, reports are appearing of the possible use of chemical agents, which Obama has more or less will give him the reason HE needs–we do still have a Constitution, and declaring any war without Congress still violates it–to commit U.S. troops.  We need to be clear: AMERICA has no strategic interests in Syria. They are not sponsoring terrorism and are not a threat to us.

Further, given that Assad KNOWS already that use of chemical weapons will bring the U.S. in, he would have to be suicidal to do it in all but the most extreme circumstances, which are not there yet.

These are evil times.  I watched the Hobbit tonight, and was thinking about the homology of a regime–ours–seemingly willing to tolerate up to millions of deaths in order to install a fascist regime, and the various evils in Middle Earth.  Orcs are just a metaphor.  The evil behind them is quite real: real bodies, real rapes, real torture,. children blown to pieces, communities destroyed, starvation.

We must resist this evil with all our power, forever, until we are dead, mad, or confined.  That in my view is the law of life.

I will say again that is my sincere hope that we can find a whistleblower, someone with the courage to risk condemnation, death, and jail to save millions of lives.  People out there know what time it is.  Tell us.

Or possibly the Russians will weigh in.  Candidly, if they want to come down on the side of Assad at this point, I’m with them.  We have NO strategic interest in overthrowing him.  On the contrary, given the likelihood of an anti-American Islamofascist regime getting installed, it is CONTRARY to our interest.

Fuck Barack Obama, and fuck all the evil human beings he surrounds himself with.

Edit: I will add, look at the timing.  Christmas Eve.  Everyone is home for the holidays, and has the TV turned on.  If we see images of mass misery tomorrow, that will not have been by accident.

For a psychologically normal person, it is virtually impossible to conceive of being able to issue orders like this.

Finally, of course none of this is proven.  It is speculative.  But often that is all you get.  I may be wrong.  That would make me very, very happy.  I sincerely hope I am.  But I don’t think I am. The Benghazi-Syrian and false flag scenarios just make too much sense.

Edit two: we have to consider, too, the possibility that Stephens was murdered with the cooperation of our government, because he knew too much.  That actually makes sense too.

I was reading a review of Quentin Tarentino’s latest–Django–and thought that we need a new term for the type of man who runs ONLY on thoughts of vengeance.  Can you deny that a basic pattern in many of our films is crime and punishment?  The originality is coming up with really good bad guys–interesting bad guys,who are the stars in some ways, even though we know in all but Horror films they will almost certainly die–then interesting ways for people to start dying.

Yesterday (was it?) I posted on  Communist atrocities.  It is worth noting that the Communists are so violent because the entirety of their propaganda and creed is oriented around inducing hatred and violence that, because it is abstract, tolerates no barriers or checks to its ferocity.  The opposition to “bourgeois” morality means that, practically, the only moral values are properly directed hate and conformity.

I have said this many ways, many times.  This is another. I will be connecting this all together soon under the heading of social propaganda.

For now, though, consider the movie Jamie Foxx just made, and his comment about killing all the white people.  What Tarentino has created does not sound all that different from the Nazi propaganda films showing Jews as rats.  The whole jist of the movie is killing white people, as far as I read.

I watched Pulp Fiction once, and Jackie Brown once. I refuse to otherwise endorse in any way this talented but mentally ill moral cretin.

I am scanning the report.  OF COURSE it is a white wash, but like all propaganda, you can see grains of truth in it.  I’m not going to take the time to read the entire thing.  It was unquestionably written by people tasked with generating politically acceptable verbiage.

One very salient point to me is that they did not refer to a Benghazi “consulate”, but rather a Special Mission Compound and Annex, neither of which were fortified.  Here is their way of putting it:

Special Mission Benghazi’s uncertain future after 2012 and its “non-status” as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult, and left responsibility to meet security standards to the working-level in the field, with very limited resources.

They more or less grant that it was a successor to a previous building that had, no doubt covertly, served as a headquarters for our military support of Libyan rebels:

The U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, established in November 2011, was the successor to his highly successful endeavor as Special Envoy to the rebel-led government that eventually toppled Muammar Qaddafi in fall 2011. The Special Mission bolstered U.S. support for Libya’s democratic transition through engagement with eastern Libya, the birthplace of the revolt against Qaddafi and a regional power center.

What this 39 page report does not address is what the actual “temporary” purpose of the Special Mission was, given that Gaddafi was toppled something like a year ago; why Stephens was there; what the actual events were in detail–there is no timeline I can see scanning it, for example, even though they claim there wasn’t time to mobilize military assets, and even though we have seen credible claims that Woods or Doherty were lasing a target, which is only done when Close Air Support is available; why support was denied; and who saw what in real time.  We have seen NUMEROUS reports that the whole clusterfuck was viewed over a many hour period on live feed.

I will reiterate that to my mind the most plausible explanation of events is the one, approximately, given by the unnamed intelligence professional I referenced a week or so ago: the building was acting as a headquarters for a covert mission funneling weapons from Libya to Syria, and that the attack on Stephens was carefully planned by people familiar with his movements and activities.

Yes, they found a few fall guys and gals.  But let’s not be stupid: the final decisions were made at least at the Cabinet level.  In my view, Hillary is culpable directly, and Obama indirectly, since these were his policies they were implementing.

We need to be clear: Obama could make the case internally to our intelligence and military professionals that he wants a “democratic “regime in Syria, all while secretly–with separate people, separate funding–working to advance Islamism in Syria, and ensuring their eventual victory there.  He seemingly has achieved that aim in Egypt.

It is IMPERATIVE we get to the bottom of this.  Potentially millions of lives are  on the line. Yes, I know their horror will not intrude onto “The Price is Right”, daytime soaps, or get serious media coverage.  But real people may well suffer real and awful fates–the sorts of things we see in actual Horror movies–because of policies this bastard of a President is pursuing in an utterly cynical and amoral way.