Author: White Whale

I consider from time to time getting a bumper sticker which reads “Not all who are lost wander”, which of course plays on the “not all who wander are lost”, I think from the Lord of the Rings.

Me, I do spend a lot of time lost.  I go down the alleyways, and up the hills, and through the valleys, and from time to time realize I don’t have a clue where I am.  I do this both literally–I spent three hours lost in Pittsburgh recently, in a literal fog–and figuratively.  Not everything on this blog is clear, for the simple reason that my thinking is not always clear. I think I’ve noted this a few times on here.

But what I’ve noticed is that if you circle a topic repeatedly, coming at it from different angles, making guesses, being wrong, adjusting, describing, redescribing, then abstracting, moving here, moving there, eventually you get at what might be called the “formula”, the short summary, the essence of a thing.

When I am concise, it is because of previous wordiness.  When I am precise, it is because of long term fogginess.

It is reasonable to want to provide basic comforts for yourself, and for your family, if you have one.  It is reasonable to want shelter, transportation, decent food, and the like.

We see often Malthusian descendants saying that THIS TIME, for real, we are on an unsustainable path, despite some two centuries of being wrong.  I drove through Pennsylvania and New York two weeks ago, and I saw mile after mile of prime land, that could be used to grow food, or whose trees could be harvested for any number of things.  Canada consists almost entirely arable land, particularly if we can get the Earth warmer.

Obviously, at some point, we really will reach the limits of what is possible, at which point prices will indicate we need to change our consumption patterns.  We are nowhere close to that point, however.

We see, though, the desire to want the good things in life called “selfish”.  I would submit that that is the wrong word entirely.  What it is is a materialistically oriented meaning system, one which seeks to maximize sensory pleasure with concrete things, whether they be fine wines, gourmet food, or beautiful women.  It seeks happiness, in other words, through consumption of physical things.

What is needed is a happiness dependent on the “consumption” of non-ordinary states–or perhaps the routinization of such states, making them “ordinary”–those of mystical connection, deep relaxation, and the warmth of loving and feeling loved.  These are infinite.

To move toward this, we must first posit that personal growth is possible, and that there are thus necessarily qualitative difference between people.  Some people are better than others, they are more advanced.  Nobility can be earned.  This basic idea has no place in materialistic Socialism, which finds all value solely in material equality.

Socialism is not our future.  It is not a blessed doctrine.  It does not have the divine in it.  It does not have the sanction of morally advanced people, and it does not help people, finally, in living more fulfilling lives.  Yes, it can build comfort in some forms, but one that will break in the face of every determined challenge.  Sweden and Denmark and Norway may well be Shariah compliant nations 30 years from now, barring other catastrophe.  As I stated in my essay on politics, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Sybaritic Leftism, other than that it makes people soft, and unable to defend themselves from people who have not rejected the values of sacrificial culture.

Hopefully that makes sense.  This is a bit scattered.

It is always interesting to write things out systematically, or as close as you can get.  What became obvious to me is that Obamacare’s principle aim was not improvements in American health, but rather universal health insurance coverage.  In point of fact, as I will show, REDUCTIONS in access to medical care are inevitable, as are vast cost increases for everyone who was not already poor.  It is very clearly a redistibutive project, but one which is unlikely to yield much actual benefit for ANYONE except governmental bureaucrats, who will be in hog heaven.

This aim is egalitarian, and like all egalitarianistic projects, it is one most likely to increase human misery, overall.  Egalitarianism works to some extent, among people who were already equal, who were already relatively uniform, as in Sweden and Japan.  But you don’t expect innovation from such people, and you don’t expect much energy for life.  Both nations are shrinking, demographically, as are most all industrialized nations except the United States and Israel.  They don’t see a connection between their current sybaritic pleasures and a future involving their responsibility for children.

It is selfishness, self preoccupation, one rationalized by their politics.  I will deal in my next post with this topic.

My aim is to see my ideas under other people’s bylines, adapted per their tastes and understandings.  Nothing flatters me more than when this happens.

Eventually my goal is to make a living providing useful ideas and practices to people, but for the foreseeable future this is a labor of love.  I tried in a half hearted way to collect donations on the Goodness Movement site, but as far as I can tell, no one contributed anything, which is fine.  If you did, let me know, as it is languishing in Paypal land, since I don’t think I set it up properly.  I apologize for this, in the unlikely event anyone did put money in there.

I read once an interview with a South American long distance swimmer, trying to describe his journey.  He said something like “it is painful, but. . .I don’t have the word in English.  I don’t have it in Spanish either.  But it is what I do.”

My sentiments exactly.

Might one summarize British socialism as Noblesse Oblige conducted by atheists?

The overwhelming bulk of the essays I’ve published were written in
one day.  Once I’m ready, I can easily write thirty pages in a day. 
Well, with difficulty and cognitive hangover, but I can get it done.  As
part of my new Whale mode, though, I’ve decided to reject that way of
doing things, what I have called “spasmodicism”.  I spent 3 hours
writing what follows, but now have had enough, and will come at it again
in a day or two.  I’ve tried to scale this mountain before, and not
made it.  This time, I feel I will.  Part of my problem is that if the
goal is helping people reframe things in fundamentally new things, I
have to explain basic elements that are foreign to them, like how
business works.  This necessitates a comprehensive, and thus long,
approach.  The final product will likely run to 20-30 pages, but
hopefully be USEFUL.  My target is people who write for a living.


To be clear, Romney and Ryan have very good options open to them as
to what to replace Obamacare with.  If we accept that the government
should take on preexisting cases, we should put them on Medicaid, rather
than corrupt our entire system; we should require all States to allow
all carriers to sell in their jurisdiction; and require all States to
allow all carriers to offer Major Medical/Catastrophic health insurance
directly to individuals, as opposed to rationing access solely to those
employed by companies ABLE to buy them insurance.


Further, we should resist the call to expand Medicaid, since it is
ALREADY bankrupt.  It will only get worse.  I spent an hour reading a
comprehensive summary of Obamacare, and how they claim to be able to pay
for it, and it amounts to a vast expansion of subsidies and hand-outs,
with NO chance that the taxes they will be levying will pay for even a
fraction of them.  The very possibility should have been laughed out of
Congress.


Anyway, here it is: 

As one obvious
example, roughly half of Americans do not have the ability to buy insurance
directly from the carrier.  If you live
in, say, California or New York, you MUST get the insurance through your
employer.  Why? You buy car insurance
directly.  You buy life insurance
directly.  You buy home-owners insurance
directly.

Guns are a tool, not different in principle from a screwdriver, whose existence in effect grants that some people become insane and want to hurt others.

“Gun” violence is social.  It exists in the social field.  For a gun to be used violently, there must be a violent person who owns it.  They don’t shoot themselves.

When we see the phrase, therefore, “gun violence”, what we need to read is “violence”.  The problem is that people want to shoot one another, not the method they choose.  I would submit that the countries with both very low crime rates and strong gun controls are peaceful because they are peaceful, because their social web is largely intact, and not because guns are not available. 

To be clear, I have read of people killing 10 or 20 people with knives in Japan, China, and elsewhere.  Knife crime is currently a huge problem in the UK.  The problem is that people are disenfranchised, alienated, hopeless, and taught by the media to express their rage through externally directed violence.

If we are going to have conferences, this needs to be the topic. It is the height of unawareness that people like the Weinstein’s would make movies like Pulp Fiction, and simultaneously support gun control.

Politically, the 2nd Amendment was CLEARLY intended to be a part of the checks and balances built into our Constitution.  Private gun ownership prevents government monopoly on the effective use of force.

The history of weapon control is very long.  Our Founding Fathers looked to bans on guns in England in more repressive periods of its history.  One could equally look to the bans on sword ownership in Islamic nations, for the Dhimmis, or in feudal Japan.  No government that is oppressive wants the oppressed to be anything but passive and unarmed.

The essence of Conservatism in this country, or at least what should be, is Liberalism, the creed of those who wrote our Constitution, who wanted to maximize freedom within a structure that would not devolve into anarchy and renewed tyranny (as indeed happened with the French, whose revolution was NOT Liberal).  This does involve a government, but one which was intended to be as localized as possible, and to have many restrictions on its behavior.  Logically, the freer the government, the less free the people.  A government with no checks on it is totalitarian.

The goal is generalized felicity: life at a rock bottom minimum; liberty up to the point of interfering with that of others; and an order organized around the pursuit of happiness, which was understood largely in moral terms. 

The means is generalized accurate connection of means and ends; efficiency; accurate, actionable information, and the will do act on it.  As I have said before, the three elements in getting things done are good information, motivation, and physical capacity.

The essence of the Liberal creed is the self organizing system.  The most basic perceptual self organizing system is the individual human consciousness.  What we want, then, is as many individuals as possible to be well informed, motivated, and empowered.

Imagine waves of something undefinable sweeping over a landscape–motion plus time–and leaving patterns in its wake.  The extent of the qualitative landscape, the latent order, will be revealed by how complex and rich the patterns are.  The extent of the possible development of latent order is a function of freedom, of the possibility of doing things in many different ways, according to individual considerations.

What socialism does is block self organization.  It blocks generalized individual perceptions.  It blocks progress.  Now, to be clear, charity is not socialism.  Having groups and entities devoted to helping back up those who fall is not socialism.

One might term socialism, of say the North European sort, an oligarchy of experts.  In Sweden, say, it seems to me the reality of Global Warming is taken for granted.  The benevolence of the UN is taken for granted.  The absolute truth of materialistic evolution is largely taken for granted.  This is because their system teaches two things: reverence for the religion of science, whose apostles have Ph.D’s, and content developed by these apostles.

Education provides two things: motivation and information.  Since these are HUGELY important in social self organization, homogenization of content makes for less rich structures, and less accurate perception, in my view.  This is why in our own system the Federal Government was very consciously left with NO say in education.  It is abundantly clear to me that they considered it self evident that God would be mentioned in most classrooms, and considered this beneficial.

Oi.  I’m not quite pulling this all together.  Consider this an essay fragment,

must be able to integrate scribbling.  Most don’t: that is why I read so little philosophy.

Today I saw a large bird carrying what looked like a snake in its mouth.  My oldest and I both saw it.  It was long and curved, and I could see no reason to carry a stick that long, and it was an unusual shape for a stick, hanging down on both sides.  In any event, I decided to take it as a sign of something, in my current state of mind, which in part involves trying to integrate some deep emotional and–who knows?–maybe even spiritual realities.  I had felt for some reason a day or two ago that I should write more on these totems, but could not rationalize it as other than a bit of self absorption likely to be perceived as weird.

Well, fuck it: here we go.

The Garuda is the essence of speed and of ferocity.  It hunts demons and snakes.  It hunts darkness and destroys it.  It feels like a bird, but it is essentially formless.  By the time a target sees it out of the corner of its eye, it is far too late.  To a great extent it is invisible, and felt only by the emotions it produces, particularly that of fear in those it targets. It is not cruel, but an aspect of the justice of this world, one hated by those who refuse to obey the laws they understand but do not respect.

It is portrayed by the Tibetans as soaring in the sky, carrying a snake.  Perhaps if I want to be mystical, this was a sign that the snake has been caught.

The whale and dog are both snow white.  The whale symbolizes deep joy, tenderness, strength, and wisdom.  It is patient and kind.

The dog is relentlessly curious.  It wants to know everything about everyone and everything.  It is in constant movement, and really enjoys the quest of learning, knowing, doing.

There you go. I can check that off the list.