Author: White Whale

I am a contradictory human being, because I often follow impulses I will call intuition, and which in some cases actually is (as opposed to garden variety “doing the easy thing” laziness).  This morning I chose to sleep in.  I will often do a series of exercises from the Kum Nye series of “yoga” from Tarthang Tulku, and I find if I sleep afterwards, all sorts of emotions and thoughts float up.

I have been spending a lot of time trying to reconnect emotionally with my past.  There was a certain point where I just locked up, time stopped, and I lost that line of identity.  I’m trying to recapture that.  It will make me more effective, happier, and generally useful.

Several things dawned on me this morning, though.  The first was a sense that there is NO WAY to do what I will call paradigmatic work, identity work, without time.  You need time, sweet time, blessed time.

How many of us have that nowadays?  You run, run, run all day long, eat shit food, then tune out and numb yourself up for another day of it by watching TV, usually with some violence you can participate in vicariously so as to assuage the anger and stress and caged-in-ness that you feel (“lemmings in shiny metal boxes”).

Then it made me mad that we live like this.  It is the Rockefellers, and descendants of the Morgans, and all the others who created a permanent throne for themselves in the Federal Reserve 99 years ago.  THEY are the ones who make us live like this.  THEY are the ones who live like kings while the rest of us work like dogs.

It is not hard nowadays to earn $50-$60-$70,000 if you have a college degree and are willing to submit to relentless stress.  But to do better than that you have to be a professional or start a business.  And both of those require HUGE time commitments.  It is not uncommon for starting attorneys, or doctors, or architects to work 80 hour weeks. And the same goes with starting any other sort of business.

Hard work has value.  It does.  I have worked numerous 80 hour weeks.  But it makes you mean, tired, and less willing to consider alternatives.  The first thing that goes when under stress is flexibility of thinking.  Everything becomes dichotomous, and mechanical.  You develop a routine, a pattern of thinking, and you follow it as if your life depended on it.  Only on vacation, only when relaxing, will you sometimes realize how stupid you have been.

We need more time.  Civil society simply will not function when the mass of the population is either overworked, or voluntarily submitting to nearly continuous propaganda on the TV [even fucking Jeopardy seems to be on the bandwagon for Obama; I hadn’t watched it in a while, and they work questions in there that can only be called political].

Then I was thinking that “finding yourself” is a useful idea.  We all need some sense of who we are relative to others.  Native Americans and others would have a spirit animal, that in part differentiated them.  Our problem today is we do not have any efficient, socially generalized MEANS of doing this.  They are no rites of passage, outside of small cultural ghettos like the military.

Finally, I was imagining that I had been on Earth many times.  How many times and places could you land where some son of a bitch was not making shit roll downhill and fucking everyone’s lives up?  How often could you say “this is a just society”?  I don’t think it would be often.  What we face today is on a global scale, but the basic problem remains that the human race is only here because it is not sufficiently developed to be somewhere else.  This NECESSARILY means that the vast bulk of people are mediocre, stupid, and unable and/or unwilling to pursue their own self interest through moral improvement.  Creating change here will ALWAYS mean rolling a heavy stone uphill hard enough to get it to the other side. Then doing it again.

If you are going to have a Church, you have to have an affirmation, something holds you together. Here is my current proposal:

I commit myself to living a happy and creative life, and to supporting the efforts of others to likewise live happily and creatively.  I commit myself to taking as much  pleasure in the happiness of others as I take in my own successes, justifiable pride, and companionship with those I love and who love me.

I reject fully and completely all resentment and self pity as pernicious and unworthy of any human spirit.

I commit to being persistent in the pursuit of my own freely chosen ends.  I commit to being persistent even in the pursuit of persistence, and the progressive perfection of my capacity for relaxed, engaged, joyful and effective work.

I commit to lifelong learning and personal growth, in the broadest possible senses.

You will note some flirting with Ayn Rand there.  She was close, but slightly off the mark.  My sense of her, though, remains of someone who fundamentally did care about people, who  did have a good heart, and who was in the most important ways decent, even  if she was prone to temper tantrums, childish self indulgences, and a pronounced need to control those around her.

This will evolve, but that’s my first stab at it. 

I will add, actually, that it is apparently a la mode for Christians to say “I am third”, where God is first, others are second, and they are third.  I don’t agree with this.  Christ was the essence of decency, and no doubt understood that the best guarantee for open affection directed at others is personal happiness. We give when we feel full.  Life is not supposed to be an endless slog.  It’s supposed to be light and easy, once we accept the necessity of some pain.  As my granddad used to say “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”.

I have his pipes, and plan to get them all cleaned and start smoking my place up.  It’s never too early to start practicing to be the Granddad.

On that note (God, does this guy ever shut up or follow straight lines?) I was looking at DVD’s of all the video I took of my kids when they were little.  It doesn’t interest me.  But I realized that it will be a BLAST to watch it with grandkids, when they are a certain age.

This is a bit uncohesive, but I’ll put it out there anyway.  Mine it for what you like.

How many dreams have died on the edge of a comfortable bed? It’s a good question.

As I think about it this morning, sipping some nice licorice tea, it seems to me many of us are being ridiculous.  Yes, that election was a disaster in many respects, but did it tell us we were wrong?  Of course not.  It told us we have failed to create a simple message that even the complicit media couldn’t spin in negative ways.

What you say is OFTEN vastly less important than your image, and HOW you say it.  I will give you a homely example.

I debated in high school, of the Lincoln-Douglas variety.  We were not poor, but somehow managed to live like we were, and in my first debate I literally wore my first dress shirt and tie.  I was a high school freshman.  My father was an engineer, and dressed like one.  I wore one of his shirts and a clip on tie.

I made it to the Octofinal round in a relatively large tournament, and thought I had beat my opponent handily, but the judges unanimously ruled in her favor.  The policy was for them to share their scoring criteria, on written sheets.  There were three,  I read the first two, and didn’t understand why I had lost.  The third, however, had a short comment “you would have more success if your belly button wasn’t showing.”  I looked down and realized that my stiff shirt, made of some synthetic fiber, had a habit of folding in an unfortunate way.

[There was no one there on my side to tell me.  This was one of countless times I’ve faced a challenge alone.  It has made me who I am, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else.  I like an occasional compliment, but I don’t need ANY, ZERO external validation to trust myself and my ideas.  And actually, thinking about it, it makes me laugh to realize that’s about what I have for most of my ideas.  Ah, so be it.]

Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were exposed belly buttons.  They didn’t just hurt their own races, but the national races as well.  They made it easy to portray the GOP as a the party of religious loonies.

On that topic, I would add that America will NEVER, EVER, EVER become a nation of committed Christians again.  EVER.  Not going to happen.  Period.  The tide may go out slowly–my guess–but the scientism of our age is ascendant, and simply incompatible with the theology of Christianity.  That is why I feel it structurally necessary to create a church.  We cannot move backwards.  We have to move forwards.

Christ was not a human sacrifice demanded by God for his own edification.  As I have pointed out from time to time, if the goal was for Christ to be a sacrifice, why wasn’t he ritually slaughtered on the altar in the Temple where all the other sacrifices were killed?  My view is that Paul and other early theologians simply got the message wrong.  I won’t go into that further, but I seem to recall discussing this in my Grand Inquisitor piece.

The net with regard to social conservatism is that it is a creed which is waning, and which will find it ever harder to win elections.  What I would submit is that this is a time for private piety, and public intelligence.  We need to concern ourselves more with BORN Americans, the 310 million or so of us (less political and financial elites: the 1% Obama protects so assiduously) who are going to face very tough times when our national economy collapses in a predictable way.

Back to my main point, what I think we all need to grasp is that the Left in this country has created the political equivalent of what Proctor and Gamble does when rolling out new products.  They focus group test words and ideas, make sure the resonate with the right people, then simply say them over and over. In the case of Barack Obama, he doesn’t even need to TRY and correlate reality and rhetoric, since the media covers for him.

But the fact remains that we are right.  We are increasing our debt $5 trillion or more EVERY YEAR.  Grandma is going over a cliff.  Grandma is going over a cliff, and it won’t matter if it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House when the shit hits the fan.  We have about ten years before something like my financial plan becomes necessary.

Republicans need to do two things: become the party talking about this–and the fact that taking up the ENTIRE revenue of the United States at this point would not prevent the necessity of drastic cuts–and understand time will be needed for this message to sink in.

In the meantime, we can have our cake and eat it too.  Boehner can simply say “Look, we think these tax increases and spending increases are a bad idea.  We think the economy will suffer from them, joblessness will go up, and economic misery will go up.  But we’ve been wrong before.  We are going to give Barack Obama HIS PLAN, what HE wants, what HE says is needed, and wait and see what happens.”

And in point of fact the tax increases under Clinton did not have negative effects, so it is POSSIBLE these won’t either, but the much larger likelihood is that we are going back into recession due to concern about spending, the fact that Obama is President, and the vast and unknown costs of Obamacare.

The most forward thinking Republicans might even consider beginning to talk about my plan or something like it.  My work output is becoming slowly more coherent, and rewriting that plan in book form is one of my top priorities, so I may have something better within a year or so.

The reality is that nations with our level of debt do wind up defaulting, to some greater or lesser extent.  None have defaulted in my understanding in the favor of the People (although I’ve seen claims Iceland did recently; I have not studied this in depth), but rather in favor of political and financial elites.  My plan is populistic, and would in my view receive widespread public support, even though of course it would also scare the crap out of a lot of people, and receive ROBUST opposition from the banking sector.

I don’t read much news–Drudge Report, Lucianne, Yahoo when I check my email. Front Page Mag and the Blaze when I have time–so I don’t know if this was reported, but Zig Ziglar passed away a few days ago.  I believe it was Nov. 30th.  He was in his later 80’s, so it was a good run.

In so many ways, the reelection of Obama seems epochal, like the ending of one phase of American history, and the beginning of a new–our “Post-Rational Democracy”.

Zig Ziglar was clearly Old Guard.  He lived through the Great Depression, served in the Navy in WW2, and lived as a traveling salesman, when it was straight commission, and you had to sell to eat.

He was in my view emblematic of the work ethic, integrity, honor and fundamental decency that historically has made America such a special place.  He worked hard to build a better world, and I have every reason to believe he had enormous success in doing it.  He helped me–I can say that categorically.  I used to wear his tapes out. I read “See you at the top” twice.  I still remember at odd times many of the anecdotes he used to tell, like about when he started his fitness program, and had trouble running around the block.

He was a good man, and the world will be lesser for his passing.  I have no doubt, though, that his soul is in a much better place, and the happier for knowing he made a difference with the time he spent on earth.

This link is interesting: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/12/04/cia-report-benghazi-intel/1746003/

Now the claim is that they didn’t want compromise methods.  Think about this: the NSA–NOT the CIA (it seems to me likely that “CIA” probably often actually includes NSA operatives, and they do in my understanding have direct action capability)–was likely intercepting calls for a week or two in advance, indicating an attack in the planning stages.  Smart people know they listen to everything, but these are not smart people.

So the thing gets yet worse.  Not only did they have live feed, but I would bet money they had hard intel before the unwashed masses started showing up to begin with.

I will reiterate my two ideas.  The first is that Hillary Clinton thought her little Libyan brigade would save the day, and they either failed, or more likely betrayed her and the Ambassador outright, by not firing a shot, and by turning the Ambassador over to Al Queda.

Option two is that the murder of Stevens was planned, to prevent him from revealing a secret torture chamber, or something else, such as a program to ARM Al Queda operatives.

Option two may sound ridiculous–and maybe it is.  But is it more ridiculous than denying repeated calls for enhanced security in what was plainly a dangerous environment?

In our modern world TONS of data will have been left on this thing.  If it is missing, that in itself constitutes a crime.  I can’t believe that the entirety of our intelligence apparatus likes Obama.   Somebody out there will in the end hopefully cough up the details we need to put this together.

I was thinking about Philosophy Departments, and something occurred to me.  What the study of Philosophy provides is not understanding, but a social environment characterized by rituals, such as the discussion of Philosophy.

One of the most important understandings I came to in my study of religions, is that theory and practice can vary considerably, and in ways nobody explicitly points out.  You cannot learn much about, say, the religions of Native Americans (really, Early Americans would be more apt), without knowing how their myths were incorporated into rituals, and daily life.  Everybody wants to read the myths, but that isn’t where the action is, figuratively or literally.

Could one, as an example, deduce Catholic liturgy from the New Testament?  Of course not.  I doubt seriously all five of the so-called Pillars of Islam are found in the Koran.  Much of it is likely in the Hadith.

What I think one must grasp about academics is that, regardless of their inability to create and propagate useful ideas, their SOCIAL setting is one that is congenial to them, and one which is characterized by a common culture–leftist assumptions about the world–that binds them.

Everywhere, if you look, there are rituals.  I would submit that conference calls are a ritual, one that quite usually defeats the purpose of productivity.

I think I’ve posted on this before, but it’s been a couple years.

One of my many projects is paying someone to translate Marco Bischoff’s book “Biophotonen”.  I read it in German, so I have a decent understanding, but my German is not so good that I am not confident that I missed at least a third of the content.

However, what I am reasonably confident I did understand is that one of the strongest arguments for the biological utility of, the field nature of, the very weak light emissions that plainly come from living systems, is that when bombarded at certain frequencies, the entire organism reacts, and continues to emit light at that frequency for a certain period of time.  It more or less resonates, like one tuning fork to another.

The supposition is that that rough frequency is THE frequency for that organism.  If memory serves–and I read this in German about five years ago–different parts of the body have slightly different frequencies.

What cancer is is tissue that grows without any feedback, without any connection with the organism.  If we assume that a light signalling system is what regulates everything, then it has lost connection with that system.  It has gone dark.

One of the things we know about tumors is they feed on glucose.  What is interesting about glucose is that it is apparently opaque to light transmission, or at least hinders it.  That is my recollection from the book.  It seems clear that we were never meant, biologically, to consume large quantities of glucose.

Given the foregoing, what I would propose as a VERY interesting experiment would be putting lab rats on a 100% fat diet, then building an apparatus that could send out the very weak ultraviolet radiation that we seem to run on, in a run of frequencies.  Say we think the organism will likely react at 50 nanometers (I have no idea what the actual frequencies are; this is one of my research objectives), then we run a range from 40 to 60, then measure the exact frequency at which it reacts.

Put the mouse in a box, where that frequency, in low doses, is administered regularly for some period of time.  Maybe try it hourly, or daily, or in constant reinforcement as soon as the initial reaction dies down.

The pure fat diet should starve the tumor, and it is my hunch that the bombardment, in some dosage, over some time period, will facilitate bringing that tissue back into connection with the organism.  It is a well documented, if generally overlooked, fact, that cancers do spontaneously go into remission.  Nobody knows why.

Cancer, in other words, is not an inevitable process.  SOMETHING can fix it.

I absolutely, categorically refuse to donate money to current cancer research.  Virtually NOTHING that has been done in that last fifty years has made much of a difference, other than increased ability to detect things early, and remove the tumors by force.  The rest of it is an unscientific crap shoot.  It is not characterized by understanding, but mere description.

In negotiating, it is bad practice to ever give concessions without getting something in return.  I have said this roughly before, but in my view John Boehner, if he does go along with Obama, needs to get Obama on record as predicting the outcome of his policies, specifically that the Stimulus will help create jobs, that the tax increases on the wealthy will increase the amount of revenue collected from them, and that if we do what he says we will avoid another Recession.

It’s a reasonable request, and if made with skill and courage, one that will be hard to turn down.  We are playing a game.  We need to play to win.

I agree fully with this column: http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-11-28.html#read_more

Barack Obama, in my opinion, WANTS us to go over the fiscal bump everyone is calling a cliff because it sounds more dramatic.  It’s in his interest. He’s already leaking that he is RELUCTANT to do it, but willing.  Bullshit.  He wants an economic downturn, PROVIDED he can blame it on Republicans.  He wants to keep the rags humming 24/7 about the nefarious doings of Republicans, and how hard he fought to do the right thing–heroically, stoically, in defense of basic decency–but just couldn’t get prosperity for anyone but the rich because of those awful, awful, old rich white men.

Folks, we are talking about peanuts, less than $86 billion, as I understand it, and that’s if people invest as they have in the past.  The likelihood is that actual receipts will be much less than that.

Yes, I get the whole principle thing, but we are fighting a war, and wars require strategy.  Obama is strategizing.  That’s all he does.  He could care less about how the American people are affected by his policies, but he OBSESSES about power and how to get more  of it, and keep what he has.  This requires long term plans, and disciplined execution.  They already have this one spun, if the Republicans are dumb enough not to give him what he wants. 

A $50 billion “Stimulus”?  Fuck it.  Give it to him. We borrowed twice that every month of last year.  We increased our debt $5 trillion last year.

Why in God’s name give him a propaganda coup when it is unnecessary?  To be clear, ALL conservatives who vote for tax increases need to explain their reasoning. There is no reason to be coy about it.  If Obama is right, and his ideas are good, then we will see an improving economy if he gets what he wants, right?

And if we don’t, does that not mean he was wrong?  We KNOW he is wrong, but many Americans don’t.  Let them find out the hard way.  Frankly, most of  America deserves a swift kick in the ass anyway.

I can’t verify it–my email records got deleted some time ago due to an idiot of an IT guy–but my gut feeling is that I wrote this:

The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of
entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to
limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the
necessary common sense and good judgment to an electorate willing to
have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far
more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us.
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast
confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can
survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of
fools such as those who made him their president.

That’s what I’ve been digging for this morning.  I may be wrong.  It happens regularly.  Hell: I thought Mitt  Romney was going to win, and win big.  But my best guess is this is me. I take some pride in the fact that I COULD have written it, and a tad less pride in the suspicion that I DID write it.

My sense, though, is that I need to move on to other projects.  As David Allen puts it in Getting Things Done “why have a thought twice?”  I was right, if I did say this, and so was someone else, if I didn’t.  Either way, something more than words is needed.  I have multiple ideas, and will post any successes.

For now, I am going to do my best to combat my mania to say roughly the same shit on different days.