Author: White Whale

One of my favorite pasttimes is drinking in bars, talking with strangers, learning their stories. I am very good at this, I think mainly because I am willing to listen with all my being, and because–within very broad limits–I am non-judgemental.

I hear all sorts of stories, many of which would shock many people who assume that most people are “normal”. Most people are not normal, at least as far as I can tell. Most people–the people in your office, who write your orders, or answer the telephone, or manage your projects–have stories that would startle you if you knew them. They continue as if nothing happened because this is simply the most logical, least painful option.

Tonight I was talking with a woman who was one of 7 children, who has had a successful career as an RN, who told me her father was an alcoholic who regularly beat her mother. Her mother left when she was 8. When all the children were launched, she drank herself to death. For her part, she seemed to see that as a tragedy. For my part, I was thinking: SHE DID HER DAMN JOB. AFTER THAT, IT’S UP TO HER. That may seem cold, but I regularly inhale the feelings of others, by imagination or contact, and that is how it seems to me.

I am no idealist, in many respects. I do not expect or demand, or look to see in any way perfection from others. Neither, in my view, does God, who–if we are to perform the most basic logical functions–is capable of seeing who we actually are, and not who we profess to be.

The word love is anathema to me, as overused. Let me rather say that I sometimes see people as I believe they want to be seen, and congratulate them for being who they are. As I see it, that is often the best I can do.

I keep reading how the European Central Bank lacks the power the Fed does, which amounts to the power to create any amount of money from nothing, and gift it to any corporation, nation, or even individual it wants to.

As I read the eurozone situation, it seems clear that in some short timeframe the demand is going to be made that the powers of the ECB be increased, obviously in the “public interest”.

Now, to be clear, the primary dichotomy with which we are presented is the eurozone tightening, and in which the fiscal decisions of all member states are subject to the veto of Brussels; and the European Union splitting, in which member nations become sovereign once again.

How attractive will it not prove to be to “monetize” the debt of the PIIGS? As I understand it, this amounts to a much smaller implementation of my basic idea, in which money is CREATED to pay the bills of profligate nations, and in exchange for which NO hard decisions have to be made.

Oh, in the end, none of this is so complicated that an actually DEDICATED journalist could not sort it out. Where the fuck are you pieces of shit? What the hell are you doing, that you are not making all of this so clear that nobody anywhere can fail to grasp that the power elite are taking care of their own? Socialist, conservative: I don’t care–if a power elite is taking money from the rest of us, shouldn’t you care?

To be clear, the Federal Reserve in the United States has on my score card four major episodes. Panic of 1908 (or so): creates plausible cause for Fed, which is soon exploited by a power elite. Great Depression: created by inflationary/deflationary Fed policy, and used to get seperation from the Treasury Secretary, who for the first 22 years or so had final say.

Inflation of 1970’s: created by Fed, and in the end used as argument to allow them to buy any type of security through Open Market Operations, supposedly as a tool to “fight inflation”.

2008: Discount Window reinvented to allow the Fed to loan any amount of money to anyone–foreign or domestic–for any period of time.

Now let me be clear: the situation, as it exists today, is that the Fed can create any amount of money from nothing, grant it to anyone it wishes, for any amount of time, and no Congressional oversight exists, and no legal limits exist.

Let us just suppose, in the spirit of adventure, that of the billions of people living on Earth today, not all are honest. If you were not honest, can you imagine ways to use the money of the Fed, unmonitored, created ex nihilo, and gifted just to you for any purpose you want to pursue?

This is what the European Central Bank will be asking for shortly. It will be proposed as the only solution to the “crisis”. Me: I am tired of pointing out the tediously and painfully obvious. Where are you fucking assholes that do journalism for a living and put up with this patent bullshit?

Edit: I was listening to some father crying tonight about the conditions of his custody. I thought to myself that if life were much easier–as it should be–all these fucking dramas, that the kids all hear, remember, internalize, and react to years later, would reduce greatly.

If it was not profane to put the word fuck on Enola Gay, it is surely not wrong to risk offense in discussing our disgusting status quo, the fucking suits who manipulate it, and the fucking stupidity that enables them to divide the left and right such that no matter who gets elected, nobody tells the truth.

I am no saint and have no desire to claim that status. If there is somebody out there who feels acute guilt and would benefit from a kick in the nuts, I can help them out. Otherwise, I will tell the truth as I see it, and continue trying to spread it.

Keeping it interesting: please keep in mind that if you are going to vote in a primary you MUST in most States be registered for that party, in this case as a Republican. If you are a Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, or Other, you can only vote in the General Election, not the Primary.

Depending on where you live, if you are changing affiliation, it amounts to reregistering to vote. You have to fill out a card–which you can likely get at your Post Office, or Dept of Motor Vehicles–and send it in, typically some period of time before the actual election, so they can get your name on a printed list of registered voters.

An added note of interest: Paul is seemingly very healthy, but he is 76. That is older than Reagan was in 1984, at age 73. Now, Supreme Court justices routinely serve into their 80’s, but that is a different animal.

For me, I view the system as not just broken, but as having been broken for many decades. So much money is always at stake, every election, that it is striking just how hard BOTH sides of the political spectrum are working to keep Paul from even being mentioned. With no chance of winning, it seems Michelle Bachman gets more air play than he does.

Therefore, if my choices are Mitt Romney the person–rather than Mitt Romney the way he is talking right now, which I am fine with–and Newt Gingrich, I will vote for either in a General Election against Obama, but I would like to see Paul get his day in the sun to see what trouble he can cause for those who steal our money and get away with it every day.

As I say often, I am sympathetic to the basic Marxist idea that there is a power elite; I just don’t think Marx was clever enough to pick the right targets. He simply did not understand the job of a Capitalist: that of having the idea for a company–which is to say a needed product or service–and then organizing it such that it was sufficiently useful to produce a profit in a competitive market.

It is indeed ironic that many of the worst abuses of privilege happen under Leftist regimes, who in centering all power on a monolithic government thereby position it to support an unjust class structure based solely on access to the centers of power.

We hear about the “will to live”, as in people who survive major illness or calamity. We hear about the desire to live, which amounts to the same thing. Both, though, speak in large measure to a desire not to die.

Actually wanting to live, actually being curious about life, and being open to all the treasures that are possible for all of us, is a different beast.

If you actually want to live, then that is 95% of the solution to any problem you may have. Getting things done is never difficult; it is merely logistics. It is getting to where you are free of conflict, open to success, open to experience, that is hard.

We all know that it is what you do every day that adds up. We all know that delayed gratification is essential to nearly all long term success. People who want to live see this clearly: none of it is recondite, none hidden.

To be impatient is to be in some measure self destructive, is it not?

I say this as a result of reaching–after many, many years of struggle–some reasonably definitive conclusions with respect to my own psychology. The end of psychoanalysis is not reaching conclusions about what happened THEN, but rather what continues to happen NOW. What change/adaptation occurred, and can you feel it with sufficient clarity to separate it from the rest of your stream of consciousness? Can you feel your limitations in such a way that you can imagine living without them? That is the end; at least, the end short of a full cure.

We were all born for forward motion. We were all born to enjoy life. The question is always what is impeding us, not what the point of motion is. Moving is its own reward. Learning is its own reward. Growth is its own reward. It is what we were born to do.

Hopefully this is reasonably clear. The preceding paragraph, of course, consists in what I believe to be useful assertions. Very, very often, what we assert to be true becomes true as a result of the following motion. It is then true, is it not? Ontology does not interest me: decision making does.

It is an interesting thought that a credible case can be made that we should forget most of the literature and art of the last century.

As I have said before, there seems to be this idea out there that the basic mindset of Positivism–the possibility of endless progress–should be applied to creative activities. In practice, this has meant since roughly the latter half of the 19th century that what was qualitatively different was, by definition, progress. Change=progress is a very old theme, one used just recently in a major political event.

But if I break my leg, that, too, is change. If my wife leaves me, I lose my job, get drafted to fight a war, contract influenza, and even when I die, those are all changes too.

Practically, to keep this effect from being obvious–to rationalize the otherwise unmistakeable ugliness which has attended much of the art world’s change of the last century–criteria of utility and beauty are rejected. The historical bases used to judge have been thrown out, and novelty and shared opinion enthroned as the only positions from which to evaluate new projects.

Yet, are we not all, to some lesser or greater extent, wrestling with problems of meaning, of purpose, of living more happily in a world quite eager to take it from us? Would not the task of art be to help us learn how to form meaning more easily, and not to make it harder?

So often, description gets called art. People whine and moan in public about suffering in the world, or their angst, or whatever crap is going on in their pathetic lives. Practically, this leads to the culture being led by those least qualified to do so, by those who have failed, and whose exclusion from society has compelled them to operate in different ways than those which tradition has granted us as at least provisionally acceptable and useful templates.

We have people more or less having nervous breakdowns in public, and calling it art. It is art, but it is not useful art.

From time to time I wonder about things like merging Positive Psychology Departments and the Humanities, such that one can assess the qualitative effects of reading, say, Jane Eyre, on people of different psychological types; or of evaluating the alterations in mood that attend listening to, say, a Mozart piano concerto, and comparing that effect to that of listening to Nine Inch Nails.

Culture as medicine, in other words.

We live in a multicultural society, do we not? We can adopt any “lifestyle”–any cultural gestalt–we want, without consequence in most cases. We can walk through the Chicago Art Museum, and see the best efforts of a dozen countries, from 30 centuries, at raising us into humanity. This is a given. What is not given is what works, for whom, where, and when.

These would all be interesting research topics.

Hey you: yes, you the one working on a doctoral thesis in English. Dump your Derrida and postfeminist deconstructionist analysis and figure out how to figure out the UTILITY of literature. You have to do something new anyway: why not make it actually interesting?

In assessing all of our Federal Departments, with an eye to eliminating them, it is worth asking at least two questions. The obvious one is: what is this Dept. designed to accomplish, and is it accomplishing it? The less obvious one is: in what ways can this Dept. be abused for financial gain?

Take the Dept. of Energy. It is guaranteeing loans for companies who apparently did not have good enough products to get private guarantees. In large numbers, companies like Solyndra are going bankrupt, and in so doing sucking money out of the pockets of the rest of us.

Yet, simply because the COMPANY goes bankrupt does not mean that dozens of people running the thing don’t walk away with fortunes. If you as CEO make, say, $500,000 a year for five years, you can put together a nice little nest egg, can’t you?

And this doesn’t even factor in actual fraud, such as misappropriation of funds, where you say on the balance sheet that something went for “research”, and it actually went to pay off your mansion in Malibu. This is of course against the law, but sufficiently clever people can and do get away with it.

Moreover, EVERY bureaucracy has an inbuilt financial benefit for all its members: by virtue of the fact the thing exists, everyone there draws a nice paycheck as long as the thing exists; a paycheck, and a beautiful benefit package, to be paid for by our children.

Government agencies continue for the simple reason that they benefit everyone in them, regardless of whether they accomplish anything or not.

It is, of course, for this reason that they unionize. This allows them to make sure that the people–the Democrats–who continue to vote them money and continued existence, stay in power. Quite literally, the Democrats vote themselves campaign contributions every time they expand a government agency.

We need to be clear that being a Democrat has enormous financial advantages. There is no contradiction at all when, say, a John Kerry docks his yacht in another state to avoid taxes. His intention all along has been to pursue his OWN self interest, and he, like all Democrats, merely uses the rhetoric of class warfare to keep enjoying all the perks of office.

All of these things are made possible ONLY by the idea that government makes life better. It does not, not beyond the most modest aspects of police, fire, EMS, highways, national defense and the like.

Plainly, the dose makes the medicine or the poison. Without saying there should be no government–there would have been no point creating a Constitution if the goal were zero government, as the less practical Libertarians often call for–it is abundantly clear that our Federal government, and most State governments are far, far, far too large and powerful.

This is not a heavy post. I just wanted to point out that in a functional cultural order, signified by the operation of the yes/no system, there must logically be a counter-point to conceptions of the ideal. If we can imagine the angelic, why not the demonic? One direction is desired and the other prohibited and feared.

We see some academics want to eradicate this yes/no operator. For example, some anthropologists want to find in the yes/no operator the genesis of human conflict. So what do they do? They REJECT it. I am assuming here you are clever enough to note my point.

Most people are not very clever, and this applies perhaps with more than ordinary force in those hallowed halls where real things never happen, and actions flow from ideas unseen by the generators of those ideas.

What needs to be remembered is that there was never an Eden without any rules. Adam and Eve had rules. The pygmies of Africa have rules. Groups of people living in the most remote, inhospitable areas of the jungle and tundra lived by rules–live by rules. These rules certainly can be mutable and perhaps negotiable, depending on the time and place, but the need for social structures and expections–responsibilities–is not negotiable.

Clearly, they can be avoided, and this is the point of social ostracism and exile. We have, now, within our social order many, many exiles, who cannot be incorporated as they exist now back into a sustainable world. We must, and indeed seem to be, reject that non-culture, that anti-culture (not counter culture, as they have not offered an alternative), that is defecating on our streets and protesting the work of others that makes it so easy for them to survive on long hanging fruit.

I parked my car in frozen mud today, and walked across it in my boots. Although very messy yesterday, it felt interesting under my feet. There are tiretracks everywhere, and they make the surface uneven.

Later, walking back out, the mud had thawed, and now had a different texture. Like a little child, I played with this feeling in my shoes. The ground feels different in different shoes. The ground itself changes in texture and contour.

In modern life, what do we do regularly that is uneven or even jagged? All of our floors and walls are smooth. Our homes are smooth. Our parking lots and cars are smooth. Where do we get to experience the random? If we rarely or never venture outside carefully defined boundaries, then not often enough.

Our bodies and minds are clearly linked, and I wonder if a part–perhaps a small part–of the so-called disease of modernity links to deficits in kinesthetic experiences?

Just wondering out loud, perhaps stupidly, as always.

This is one of my favorite Hank Williams songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzY2Qcu5i2A&ob=av2e

Listen to it, and note that the music is not sad at all. The LYRICS are sad.

This is a two channel communication. On one channel you have happiness and on the other sadness. Our conscious minds process the sadness, but temper it unconsciously with rhythm.

The task in sadness is to continue. The music does this. This song has always felt cathartic to me. Really, it makes me happy. I don’t know why, and this is especially true when I am already feeling down.

I think it has to do with the pattern interrupt implied by the dichotomy between the music and the words.

It seems to me that the principle benefit of travel is creating a space in which you can reimagine yourself. Surrounded by a thousand habits, it is hard to feel new feelings.

Today, I was following a straight, habitual path somewhere, and decided to turn off and go somewhere I have not been before. For about 20 seconds I felt this feeling like the entirety of my being was malleable. It was like I dropped all the weight of expectations and worries and responsibilities that I carry around and which in large measure define me. I was truly and completely open to something new. It was a pleasurable and qualitatively different sort of experience.

It seems to me that we define our rough attributes early on, with the broad outlines in place by age 13 or so. But what if it were possible–and it IS possible–to fundamentally open ourselves up to experiencing life in a different way? In that space, I did not care for my family, my job, my bills, or all the things I have to accomplish on a weekly basis. It was all gone. I was free.

As I see it, it is not good for people who do actually have responsibilities to drop them, but it IS good to be able to invoke a state in which that feeling is attained, when appropriate. In classic Hindu society, men will build homes, procreate and raise children, then at a certain age, if they want, they can go live in the forest with their wives. Later, if they so desire, they can forego their names and wander as itinerant beggars called Sanyassin. This is an interesting idea.

The feeling is incommunicable, but I would like to feel it again.