Author: White Whale

First off, I just tried to donate $100 to his campaign, but the website was not secure. I tried to send them a message, but the software didn’t work. These are both serious problems. Could be hackers, could be incompetence, could be both. Plainly, this needs to be fixed. I also don’t like websites that I have to scroll across. This problem is easily and cheaply fixed. We will call this the “lacking Soros and Wall Street big bucks” problem.

(I will add: self evidently, George Soros has plenty of friends on Wall Street. His goal is not global freedom. He has done nothing to support that. His goal is the conversion of a de facto oligarchy into a de jure oligarchy, using the veneer of socialist “progress”. “Socialism” has shown itself to be a useful rhetorical ploy for power mongers over the last century.)

Back to Cain. This is go time. Figure out the money situation, then counterattack. Make a list of ALL the sexual harassment stories on Democrats that were buried by the mainstream press, then confront them with it. Choose say the last half century. Hell, start with the facts that Kennedy slept with a woman who was not his wife nearly daily, and that FDR had a long term girlfriend and that he didn’t even sleep in the same room as his wife. In Kennedy’s case, quite obviously there were many women who were propositioned, and who said no, and who in this day and age would have sued him. Clinton will yield plenty of material. Ted Kennedy and his houses of hookers, not to mention Mary Jo Kopechne. Make a list, a long list, and publish it. Ask: why does a powerful black man scare you so much?

Here is the actual answer. Blacks constitute about 12% or so of the population. They vote at lower rates, in my understanding, in most elections than the rest of the population does. But they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. For Obama, it was over 90%. Let us say that half of all eligible black voters vote in a typical election. This means that some 5-6% of the population will ALWAYS vote for the Democrat. In big cities, where blacks are disproportionately present, this number goes up substantially. In cities like Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Detroit, it is probably not overstating it to say that whoever gets the black vote wins the mayoral election and City Hall.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. He was a Republican because the Democrats have ALWAYS been the party of racism. They were the party of the secessionists and the segregationists. You will hear that the racists left the Democrats after the mid-60’s and joined the Republicans, but I see no evidence of this. Take Robert Byrd. This man actually JOINED the KKK, and in my understanding held a leadership position, and was LIONIZED when he died by the Democrats. Can you imagine a Republican KKK member being so treated? Of course not.

For the Democrats, the issue is not combating “racism”. It is protecting their power and privilege by making entirely insincere claims that they are protecting black people. Yet their policies consistently lead to high unemployment rates, out of control crime and hopelessness in inner cities.

Barack Obama is no more black than I am. He reminds me of Niles Crane, a prissy boy who always wants hand sanitizer near him, and drops his g’s only when he wants to be one of “them”, the real black people. Keep in mind he was hired as a community organizer in Chicago by two Jewish students of Saul Alinsky, who needed a black face to do their circus act, which amounted to a racist rounding up of the monkeys (I want to be clear: this is not how I view it, but how I visualize them as having viewed it, since organizing never was intended to help the people involved, but rather to exploit them to acquire power. Power is all that is of interest to an Alinskyan/Leninist). It was cynical and detached at its very heart.

Herman Cain grew up in a thoroughly typical black southern family. His parents both worked multiple jobs. He experienced real racism. And he raised himself by his bootstraps. The contrast of Cain and Obama would be very, very striking. Obama’s phoniness could not be hidden, if standing on the stage next to Cain. Every black viewer would see this, and if they hear from Cain’s mouth an actually credible defense of conservative ideals, many of them will PERMANENTLY change over. Self evidently, there is no distance to which Democrats will not go to prevent this. They have no moral compass. Nothing is off the table.

But my hope is that Cain survives this storm. I don’t know what the 9/9/9 plan will do, if enacted, but I like the idea of 10% cuts in all Federal departments quite well, which Cain has pledged to do when elected, and I know that freeing up both capital and confidence will work wonders for our economy. Putting a true businessman in the White House–as I have said, I count Romney as a CEO, not a businessman, with the difference being between political savvy, and the ability to grow a business–will work wonders for confidence.

How’s this for a campaign slogan: Sometimes it DOES take a rocket scientist: Cain 2012.

I’ve recently come across some rare bits of good psychology. As a general rule, I don’t think most psychologists have the tools to do anybody much good that they could not have better done themselves, under the encouragement of friends and church. Quite often, I think psychologists–pop psychologists and clinical psychologists–breed self pity and resentment, which makes things WORSE.

However, I will recommend the book “Willpower”, by Roy Baumeister and (I think) John Tierney. I will also recommend the “Panic Away” set of exercises by Barry McDonagh.

The two are related in many ways, which continue to occur to me.

As far as willpower, what I found interesting is that it is a physical quantity, in effect, not that different than physical stamina. Like physical stamina, it can be built, but it finite in quantity, and used for all sorts of things we would not normally consider, such as suppressing emotions, suppressing the expression of emotions, paying attention, resisting temptation, and thinking new thoughts (this last is my extrapolation from their basic thesis). Every use of willpower pulls from the same pot, so logically putting up with idiots at work requires a lot of willpower, which is why it is so stressful.

When you run out of willpower you get more emotional, and everything seems more vivid. This is the feeling some of us have had where, if not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, we can at least see the street that deadends there.

Logically, absent other tools, combating anxiety also requires the use of willpower. I will allow myself a tad bit of autobiography because it might be useful to someone. I grew up in a very nervous, emotionally suppressed home. I took these traits into adulthood. Most who know me would not describe me as nervous or emotionally suppressed, but I see now I exert a lot of energy keeping emotions in check, which leaves me with less energy for other tasks.

The trick to maximizing willpower, you see, is using it in the right places. If you are using it to suppress emotions, then you have less energy to form good habits. Habits in turn reduce the need for willpower, since decision-making, too, requires willpower, and tires you. If you obviate the need for a decision, then that energy carries forward. William James said this 100 years ago, but somehow this book made this more clear to me. All of this is common sense, of course, but it only becomes common for any of us when we actually GET it. I probably only understand half of what I say. Maybe less.

It occurs to me too, that much of our culture is dedicated to the goal of making us more nervous, and less trusting. Look at all the CSI clones. Yes, of course like all crime dramas they are about bringing closure to a crime. But unlike all entries in the genre until perhaps the late 1990’s or so (I don’t watch them, so am not familiar with the exact history), the physical acts of murder, the details, are a character on the shows. People obviously want to see the bodies, watch the autopsies, and in so doing serve some ghoulish impulse in them that we all have.

The opposite of fear is not indifference. Courage, in many cases, amounts to indifference, since it can be the absence of fear. Sociopaths can be quite brave, for the simple reason that situations that normally induce fear in us, simply produce nothing for them.

The opposite of fear is love. It is the capacity to imagine being tender, completely open, and understood; to be in a warm room where everyone welcomes you, as you–with no pretenses, and no hiding of flaws and failures, and shortcomings. We all have them. Only fools (and scoundrels, for their own ends) pretend otherwise.

I am a great believer in the therapeutic effects of deep relaxation, and have experimented with it from time to time. I’ve tried Jacobson’s “Progressive Relaxation”, and have as my goal getting Luthe’s entire series on autogenics. It is an interesting intellectual/political/business question as to how he has been so thoroughly shut out of mainstream psychotherapy, at least in the West. My understanding is he consistently achieved excellent results. Of course, the literature on him seems, on my superficial analysis, quite small. He was no Freud, no Skinner, no Rogers. He simply developed a body of work that over definable periods of time was effective at alleviating the most obvious symptoms of treatable, non-psychotic illnesses.

Be that as it may–and that was a long digression–I really like McDonough’s work because he has apparently incorporated some visualizations from some spiritual tradition, likely Buddhism, that work to connect relaxation with the expression of love; and at that not universal love, which is hard, but simple love for someone or something that is personally important to you. He has that in the Seven Minute Exercise and the Deep Relaxation. In this, he is unique in my experience. Most of them just work to relax you. This is defense. Offense is creating an internal world in which you are actually comfortable.

A large part of my problem with deep relaxation has been that once I get relaxed, I get MORE irritable dealing with the countless details and idiocies that I encounter on a daily basis. Quite often, it makes my mood WORSE, which is not the goal at all, obviously.

I get the newsletter from Victor Zammit weekly. He is a quirky, probably a bit cantankerous at times, but all the same recognizable and lovable person who puts together weekly–at no benefit to himself–videos and stories dealing with evidence of the after-life. Viewed as a whole, the evidence is quite substantial, and some of the cases really don’t have alternative explanations than that our consciousness survives physical death.

One week, he had “symptoms of inner peace”. One was “A loss of the ability to worry (This is a very serious symptom).”

This makes sense to me. If you are spiritual, or trying to be, then you are trying to conquer fear and worry. We all have it. Most of us worry about something all day every day. This is no way to live.

That is why I got McDonough’s series. It was a $100, which is not cheap. Yet, it’s been worth it. I actually feel some progress. The series is principally targeted at people who have panic attacks. That’s not one of my problems, but I’ll close with some observations on his technique.

The tactic is to EMBRACE the queasiness and fear, then to ASK FOR MORE. This is strongly counter-intuitive. If something unpleasant is happening to you, the normal reaction is avoid it, to try and get away. Yet, as he points out, a panic attack is more or less one part of you attacking another part of you. Given that you cannot get away from you without lapsing into psychosis, then the best defense is a good offense, so you turn round, face it, and move forward. According to thousands of testimonies, this apparently works wonders.

This of course (I am often tongue in cheek with my streams of consciousness, if that is not obvious) led me to think of country music. Country music mixes the sad, the happy, and the silly all together. You might one of each, one after the other. For the seasoned country music listener, you’re OK with Randy Travis’s sad but inspirational Three Wooden Crosses, maybe followed by Miranda Lambert’s “House that built me”, and Jason Aldean’s “My kind of party”.

This is an emotional tonic. Three wooden crosses gets me misty eyed every time I hear it, because there is so much love in there. Love and tenderness are related: it’s a good kind of sadness, one that strengthens you for the challenges of life.

I have other work to do, but hopefully the connection I am trying to make here is clear enough. If you have a world of troubles, I’d encourage you to try out McDonagh’s work. Solving problems is hard enough–doing it with lots of worry and grief is even harder. If you can save your willpower for your work, you’ll have more of it left for others, and for yourself.

I don’t get paid for anything, and I’m not getting paid for that. That, for the more cynical among you.

From time to time, I go to this site with badly translated Hafez poetry, to read my fortune. You fix your question, then in theory look at a random page and line of poetry, and there is your question answered.

Tonight I did that. I won’t quote it, but will paraphrase the line: “Pain is recondite wisdom. Persevere and that wisdom will emerge into the light.”

This is, in my view, a useful belief.

I will add that, quite frequently, as a Pragmatist, I conflate true and useful. If it achieves the desired end, then it WAS true, correct? It may not be true for the next person, who lacks belief, but contingently, it was good enough.

I am going to vent a little bit. The simple fact is that you can trust selfish people. They reliably do what is in their self interest, and to motivate them all you have to do is show them how you can benefit them. If you yourself benefit as well, that is just a part of the deal. This is how honest, good business gets done. I want something; you want something; let’s make a deal.

The people who infuriate me are egotists, those who would rather cut off their nose to spite their face. They only feel they are advancing their self interest by preventing you from advancing yours. They are quite happy with zero sum or even negative sum games–in which both parties lose–provided only that they fare BETTER THAN YOU.

Concrete example: I will shortly be proposing a deal in which I make $2, and someone else makes $1 for every three dollar increase in price. Since this benefits me, it will happen much more reliably than the current arrangement, in which for every $4 increase, they get $3 and I get $1. Since price can determine whether a sale is won or lost, it little behooves me to increase prices for such a small benefit, so I don’t do it. I charge as little as I can.

I expect this proposal to be rejected, even though I can plainly show the clear benefits that will accrue, for the simple reason that I benefit more than them, on paper. This is egotism. This is not rational business.

The same basic process is in play with Socialists and tax increases for “the rich”. If I tell them that they get $1 for every $2 the rich get, they will be outraged. If I tell them that the rich lose $2 for every $1 lost by everyone else, they find this acceptable. They ignore the fact that incomes are decreasing, and that for every rich person worth twice some other person, it will run out for the less wealth person FIRST, meaning that that person was disproportionately HURT.

I hate egotists. You won’t hear me say that often, but I am too tired to sugar coat it. It is a form of power relationship, and as such morally wrong according to my own beliefs. And to be clear, morally wrong means stupid and counterproductive according to any rational understanding of appropriate, helpful, desirable uses of human life and energy.

Story one: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/koch-funded-study-changes-prominent-global-warming-skeptic-to-a-believer/comment-page-3/#comment-2157339

Summary: Oh my God, I was like so not a believer in global warming, but I got money from the Koch brothers and despite their pernicious, neo-Satanic influence, the forces of light and truth prevailed and I saw the TRUTH, which is, uh, something we are in the process of, uh, getting peer reviewed–soon, I promise–and which doesn’t include, you know, things, like ocean temperature, or mention the lack of thermometers on the poles, or explain how we were uniquely able to correct for the heat island effect, but, HEY: LISTEN TO ME. Koch brothers, former skeptic: this is a GOOD STORY.

Story two: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html?fb_ref=LikeButtonTop&fb_source=profile_multiline

Summary: Muller’s coauthor on all four papers: what the FUCK were you thinking, you ethically and mentally challenged jackass? That is not what we found AT ALL. We found that global warming had stopped. We found that the climate models were wrong, and had plainly assigned too large a role for CO2 in global warming.

Go find yourself another partner, you oleaginous cretin. That shit smell on your shoes is something you’re going to have to clean off yourself.

My summary: what is worth noting here is not the patent effort at lying to a media very eager to be deceived. This is nothing new. I just want people who are not able to reliably observe this phenomena simply to read the two stories, and try to reconcile them. Ask yourself what is actually going on here, and if by even the most generous stretch of imagination you can call this honest science, as it is being predigested and distributed.

First off, I saw the term “Obamavilles” today, which I thought interesting. It evokes “Hoovervilles”, with the key difference that where there was actual suffering under Hoover–caused by his meddling in the economy, in part, but primarily by the Fed’s deflationary monetary policies–there is not much here. Many of these kids are likely rich, and many seem to be getting paid. Not sure what use the term has, but it is potentially useful.

The main point I wanted to make is what sane political use could be made of these protests, and it occurs to me that their utility lies in the very fact that they–they tell us as a matter of principle–don’t stand for anything (just like Seinfeld wasn’t about anything). They are a blank canvas, upon which can be painted many different narratives, whose value can be assessed and modified as needed.

For now, the use Obama (really, the people around him; he doesn’t think all that much)seemingly wants to make of them is to say that since they are there, some sort of crime must have been committed, and that since they are plainly not Republicans, the culprits must indeed be the Republicans. This is a weak story, but one plainly borne out of the desperate need he and his have to defend the indefensible, which practically means avoiding the topic and going on the offensive, hoping that their control of much of our media complex will enable this deception to work.

But this also provides added heft to his vote-buying schemes, as with student loans, housing, and whatever else he and his come up with between now and election day.

This is a bit of out-loud thinking.

The end goal, in economic downturns, is to create an appetite on the part of business owners to hire people. They do this when they perceive business opportunity, and it is plainly the case that development and marketing generally precede consumer spending. You cannot indulge a desire you did not know you have to buy Chuy’s Mexican food until you have a Chuy’s restaurant. This is the case even if Barack Obama deposits $10,000 in your personal bank account. You can only spend your money on things which already exist, made or distributed by businesses which already exist. And self evidently, those businesses could not exist if they had not been built, if the money had not first been spent.

The ONLY principle goal of anti-Demand side economics, aka rational, historical economics, or just “economics”, is increasing the desire on the part of business to expand. You do this through incentivization, which means you take less money in taxation, giving them more capital, take less of the profits when they are successful (making risk-taking more lucrative and hence more likely), and made it less of a pain in the ass dealing with asinine government bureaucrats.

The game is psychological and practical. The only salient question is: what policies does government need to pursue–or, to the point, to NOT pursue–in order to build the confidence that builds business and job growth?

American business is sitting on record amounts of cash–all of it represents prospective jobs lost due to the ineptitude and ideological rigidity of our first anti-American President, not coincidentally the first born to a foreign national father, and a mother who chose not to spend her life here.

Tax simplification and regulatory clarity are the only sure signs to return to growth. The leftists are quite correct when they say that if we stay on this course we will get a Depression. What they fail to grasp, or are unwilling to communicate, is that it is THEIR policies which are making this more likely.

It just occurred to me why the Republicans are having so many debates: it favors Mitt Romney. He is the CEO, and he is the smooth one. He is also in my view the least principled of the available candidates. He is who he needs to be.

How on earth true conservatives could favor someone who enacted Obamacare as the nominee to END Obamacare is anyone’s guess.

I guess Romney is just their kind of asshole. They understand one another, since Karl Rove is no more principled, in my view, than Barack Obama.

Being led by smooth talking liars is a great way to wind up on the ash heap of history.

I will vote for Cain, Bachman, Perry, or Gingrich. I am not sure I can even hold my nose and vote for Romney. I guess I will just vote a Republican straight ticket.

Again, the issue is not defeating Barack Obama. The issue is, is this nation still capable of the rational appreciation of action and consequence? If our choice is between Obama and Romney, in this climate, then in my view the answer is no. We deserve failure.

And that may be the case. At least half of Americans do not value their freedom enough to understand history and basic economics. That is a large number.

Time will tell.

For whatever reason, I was unable to log in to post this at Human Events. I wrote it, and have no desire to spend all day screwing around with buggy or damaged software.

Here is the original article: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=47086

I would say that the need to preserve the NOTION of place and time is what should motivate us. Against this stands the pervasive call for a muddling and generalized moral and political mediocrity, imposed the world over, without time, without place, without name.

It is not always necessary to be able to see far into the mists of the future. If you keep moving, and keep some faith, things reveal themselves. Plainly, the long term task is to invent something which never has been, and conserve that. Progressives arrogate to themselves that “duty”, but it would seem to me that conservatism has never opposed progress, merely collective lunacy masquerading as progress. It is for that reason that I prefer to call myself a Liberal. In his own way, Burke was a Liberal, too, who if memory serves was largely supportive of the American Revolution, absent excesses like the Boston Tea Party.

What is the important essence of a religion, or social tradition? Goodness. Goodness as an identity. Goodness is pluralistic, and can take countless forms. This should be our goal, and for the foreseeable future Goodness should be built within whatever structures remain, in churches, and cultural habits, and even within Science.

My principle website is dedicated to providing both general philosophical guidelines that make no demands on anyone’s credulity that support Goodness, and which also offers up plans for moving into the future. Specifically, I think given TIME on their hands, so many social problems of meaning would solve themselves. As I grow and learn, it seems to me the most important question is not how problems get solved, but what prevents them from being solved. We were born to build.

In any event, this is the main page here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com

My financial treatise is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

As I have said before, I make or stake no claim on any of my content, here or on the other site. If you want to take my ideas and write a paper or book or speech or something else for money: hell, I’ve had my shot. Do something MORE useful with it than I have. I have the same 24 hours a day you do, and am simply not as disciplined as I could be. I accept control over this, and own my decisions.

At the same time, copying is dull. What I think would be COOL is variations on my themes, with YOUR INPUT. What we call the “Twinkle, twinkle little star” theme, an old French folksong with another name entirely, was taken by Mozart to create something BRILLIANT and ENTIRELY NEW, without foresaking the basic theme.

Please, if you are going to copy me–and it’s far from clear anything I have written is WORTH copying–then don’t copy me. You deserve better, and are capable of better. Fair and clear enough?