Author: White Whale

The guy found a hunting site with an inappropriate name, he painted over the name, and kept hunting there. Where is the story, if told to adults?

I am very disappointed in American Republicans right now. You can not like him for his debating skills on a particular night,and ignore his record, but why run like frightened rabbits over this story?

It is like someone said the N word in his presence, and instead of just asking for courtesy he failed to punch him in the nose and stomp on him. This is ludicrous, but I suppose any watcher of our political landscape cannot fail but be impressed by the pervasive mediocrity of the American people. Obama still has a 40% approval rating. How is that possible?

Two quotes from Churchill (from memory, so they are close at least):

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Democracy is the worst possible form of government, until you consider the alternatives.

I read this was one of the options yesterday for fixing the European debt crisis (this is sure a slow moving crisis, isn’t it?) was “monetizing” the debt. To invent a word, this means “moneyfying” it. I was not sure what that meant, but in the article I read it said the European Central Bank did not have the power to do that.

They need to give it that power, use it, then strip it of that power. I want to be clear that the proposal I have put forward, of permanently sound money, will generate economic growth of unprecedented scope. If we could but redirect all the wealth–buying power–that has been confiscated by banking elites, we could end poverty tomorrow.

When it comes to Wall Street, I am general sympathy with the ideal of opposing UNEARNED income, but the people “leading” this group of vagabonds and derelicts do not make this distinction. They oppose wealth generally, which is foolish when every other word out of their mouth is how they want wealth for the poor.

As I argue often, they don’t really want to make the poor better off, but the rich worse off. This is a doctrine of hatred, of destruction and not construction.

Mao was prepared to kill half of China to “save” the other half. With friends like that, only a fool would fail to run to his enemies and hug them like family. Being dead is not how most people visualize freedom and salvation.

I have to confess I can be a complete asshole sometimes. I don’t deny it. I have a fierce temper. Today I got mad at something–Round umpteen of the same problem–and was sitting at lunch trying to calm down. It occurred to me that the physical aggression of anger is not that different from anxiety. In both cases you are excited, except that instead of being afraid someone is going to hurt you, you are afraid you are going to hurt someone.

This is an interesting insight. All the emotions exist on a continuum with one another, and have both physiological AND cognitive components.

I’m researching something, and will post if my supposition is correct.

This is a video, based I believe on a Dr. Seuss book, which I remember really enjoying when my kids were very little. It talks about how many different ways you can approach a day, how many different selves you can wear, and implicitly how change is both necessary and a miracle. Whatever you are, relax, you will be something else.

Today was a glorious fall day, crisp and dry such that you can just begin hearing the leaves as they rattle on their branches. I love it.

And it occurred to me that perhaps you could learn to sculpt your awareness and mood to balance what you need to get done, and the weather. You can mould your experience, consciously, as a sort of artwork. Is there any lasting difference between momentary sadness and happiness? Must we mourn the first and celebrate the second? Why must we BE a certain way at all?

I am a foodie. I like to eat and I like to drink. There are so many metaphors that flow from food. Here, let us take as a base a meat dish. How many sauces can you make for it? The list is nearly endless. There are the simple sauces one would expect to see all the time. I like bearnaise as a basic, and am fine with brown gravy too. Yet I read about these sauces that use shrimp skeletons, and coral, and the innards of lobsters. I see the countless ways basic sauces like bechamel can be altered.

You start with what is there, then the creativity starts.

I’m circling around, looking for an understanding. I input the Ubu Roi, indexed it to the Wall Street protests, but something is missing. I am going to type out loud.

Meaning is a sort of structure, that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. If you are to act with order, you must accept and internalize basic principles. Having acted with order for a period of time, the structure of your self and your life becomes internalized. You create your self over a period of time of making decisions using rules you choose. Commonly, those rules are those of your parents, more or less, and societies succeed and fail depending on the quality of those rules, and whether or not they have been transmitted successfully. Right now, it is quite unclear that the virtues of our grandparents and great grandparents are getting passed along to kids growing up now. I see a lot of kids growing up “iPod”. Can I call them i-Pod people? That construction warrants a bit of attention. Read it again.

When you are lost, you do not know what to do because you do not know what you are supposed to do, externally, and you do not have the courage to accept the responsibility of creating your own reality and self. Now, confusion is a common enough human condition.

What hurts is not confusion, but pessimism as to the possibility of ever finding an answer. Not knowing, and not thinking knowing is possible are two different things. The second leads to a cessation of the virtual chase. You become a boat crossing an ocean that turns off its engines, despairing of the existence of land.

This is a very dangerous place. It leads to all sorts of mental disorders. We are meant to be always in motion. Even meditation has as its purpose motion towards a certain perceptual state.

Now, in the first stage of ontological illness, as I call this, you fill your mind with trivia. One could plausibly view our entire modern entertainment culture as existing to fill the minds of people who don’t want to think about anything. Video games do this, zombie movies do this. Pot does this. Raves do this.

You see these people: they are fat, eat too much pizza, are pale, and just not robust in any significant way. Often they are pierced and tattooed, with matching attire. Their zeal for life is muted by too many credit cards, life under artificial light, and input from the culture they consume that just aren’t healthy.

Given the intellectual presuppositions I mentioned above, which normally exist in tandem with materialistic conceptions of life anchored in orthodox Darwinism, and which reject God, this is not a self correcting system. This is not a self organizing system, since organization begins with the idea that organization is POSSIBLE, and everything they do mutes and leaks out any energy that might build in that direction.

The next step is hatred, and this is where the conflation of moral pessimism and Leftism becomes dangerous. Anger is a reason to live. It provides energy, but it is like animating a corpse. You are moving, you are there, but you are not ALIVE. You don’t actually feel well. You just haven’t yet killed yourself.

As I look at Wall Street, I see some people there who are likely genuinely principled. I saw one wanting to end fiat money and fractional reserve banking. Amen to that. Another was condemning the Bank of International Settlements (which by the way has deflationary monetary policy planned starting about 2015: put that in your planner): Amen to that.

But the simple fact is Wall Street doesn’t care. Those guys in the corner offices making $10 million a year: they are laughing. These protests will not do ANYTHING.

What will make the most difference over the long haul is an informed electorate. Accurate information is the biggest enemy everyone faces who wants to abuse and defraud ordinary Americans. The bankers do fine on the left and the right AS LONG AS the PEOPLE ASSUME that their party is fixing things. They can only claim this to be the case as long as the people are ignorant. Given knowledge, all bets are off. Who could have guessed a Republican front-runner would be talking about putting the Federal Reserve back under the control of the Executive, where it used to be? This is real progress.

Getting closer on processing my thoughts; not quite there yet.

There was a time in my life when I had an avid interest in Surrealism, Dada, and general artistic culture of Europe from about 1880 to 1930 or so. One of the figures in this scene was the author Alfred Jarry. Jarry was a Frenchman who was somewhere between eccentric and insane, and who created a character, Ubu Roi, who was so grotesque and strange that it seemingly left a permanent mark on the Parisian literary scene.

As described in Wikipedia

“The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world,” wrote Jane Taylor. “Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” Jarry’s metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil.”

I think we might rightly think that the protestors in New York and other places view “Corporate America” as possessing all those traits.

Here is a picture, by George Grosz–who could very plausibly be viewed as an intellectual heir to the Ubu tradition (I saw Pro-Ubu graffiti when I was in Oxford)–which I think shows the rough images these people have in mind:

And yet, the quoted commentator goes on to say something interesting:

There is,” wrote Taylor, “a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost.”[5] The derived adjective “ubuesque” is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.

These protests are Ubuesque. They amount to the big idea that sitting around in public places annoying people is going to create jobs, create purpose, end war, alter our financial system, enable them to more easily get someone else to pay for the excellent healthcare they receive, and generally make it so life serves them warm milk and cookies and night and tucks them in with a goodnight kiss.

There is anger here, clearly. These people hate wealth, at the very time they are camping out to get more of it. They hate people who create wealth, but their plan, again, to get some is not to invent something, not to start a business, not to work hard at their job and get promoted, and not to work to support policies that encourage job creation. No: their plan is to WHINE and be really ANNOYING so that the world will come calling on them.

What I think needs to be seen here is that this does not represent strength, but weakness. They are doing this precisely BECAUSE they know they and theirs are losing the support of the American people. They had the dream candidate, who privately told them he believed everything they did, and shared their goals. But political necessity has forced him into a boatload of compromise, and ramming the big stuff through the way he did set off a powderkeg.

We need to be clear: these protests are INTENDED to amount to extortion, even though the plan is to use every useful idiot who floats in. They are undertaken with NO PLAN and no consideration of consequence. In this, too, they are ubuesque.

They are trying to destroy companies that employ thousands of people who will then be unemployed if they are successful. They are blocking the way to work for those people who do have jobs, and many of whom now have to add them to their list of daily stresses.

These protests help no one, EXCEPT the impotent ideologues who want to push policies in their direction without going through the futile effort of defending idiotic and counterproductive policies. And they will, in all likelihood, actually cause increasingly strong backlash against adults acting like pouting children in public, DEMANDING things, but not offering in the slightest to contribute.

But that, too, is not the point. What is the point? A FEELING. They are no doubt getting that. For my part, I think these protests are going to help the conservative cause immensely. When things are chaotic, you do not go to people like Barack Obama. You vote for the guy who is seemingly pictured every time in front of a gun rack.

Editorial comment: this does not quite get to what I wanted to say. I am tired, and have work to do. I’ll add a bit more, but this still isn’t quite it:

The emotional context I wanted to convey is one of functional nihilism. These people believe nothing, and so theater becomes their sustaining ritual. When you have no soul, you must become an actor, lest you be discovered. The nice thing about leftism is that it is always over the horizon, and if it is implemented, all the failures are concealed. It is in actuality a doctrine of horror, but while on the stage the pretending can continue forever, if one is so inclined. That is why we still have Communists.

If you had to choose between having “I am a special snowflake”, and “I am NOT a special snowflake” tattooed on your forehead, what would you choose? This is an interesting question. For my part, I like to tell people to pursue their own individuality. I try to do the same myself. Yet, this morning, when the alarm clock went off, I realized I am NOT a special snowflake, and I have to go do work I don’t really want to do, because I need the money.

You both are and are NOT a special snowflake. This is akin, if one wants to pursue high levels of abstraction, to the wave/particle duality. Is matter one or the other? Yes. Are you special and like everyone else? Yes.

We are in a turbulence zone. Where “Communism by the drink” was advancing steadily, the flares are up, and the people who care enough about the difference between right and wrong to work to understand their world can see clearly enough the enemies. They are those who reject in principle the possibility of personal growth, the desirability of personal freedom, the possibility of God, and in the end the desirability of life itself. They sustain themselves, like vampires, in the hope of damaging others.

This conflict will not last. Our opponents have nothing creative to offer. They solve no problems: they fix no marriages; they heal no unhealthy homes; they do not create jobs; they provide no sustainable sense of meaning; they do not promote peace with dignity; they do not promote prosperity; they do not foster useful dialogue on important issues; they do not coexist with cultural others in peace.

All that needs to happen to reverse their gains is LIGHT. The counterattack will consist in daily working to achieve coherent understandings of all parts of the issues that confront us, and communicate them to others. Do not accept in silence those working to sow lies without asking them to justify those lies in the face of plainly available facts. They will not be able to do it.

What I think ordinary, working Americans of common sense and good will need to begin EXPECTING is a better nation. We can solve all our problems. We can survive into the 22nd century and beyond. There is no compelling reason to doubt this. Let us being working as if this is an inevitable outcome.

Now, there’s a word you don’t see much any more. Don’t you KNOW that nobody is perfect, and that most people who do “good” things are only considered good because they are on our side? Don’t you know that depth psychology relegates ALL action to very simple outgrowths of primal hormonal and instinctual processes? The knights save the ladies because they want to IMPREGNATE them. The lance is obviously a phallic symbol, and the armor symbolic of emotional detachment. As Foucault notes. . . blah, blah blah something in French.

Mercifully, I will let that person stay talking in his or her own universe. What I think it is most USEFUL to think, and which is not contradicted by any empirical evidence of which I am aware, is that we possess the power to focus our awareness. We can ignore or indulge our sexual instinct. We can engage in greed, or abstain from greed. We can grow in subtle ways, and we can DECAY in subtle ways. To reject the possibility of growth is to build a cage for yourself, then complain about it. From my perspective–the outside of many such cages–this is a really ridiculous combination of idiocy and farce.

I see people limit themselves. They say “I will go so far, and no further”. This is the value of the hero. He walks up to the line, then says “Hey, watch THIS”, disappears for a time in the darkness, and comes back with a rooster. Roosters are useful. Why a rooster? Why NOT a rooster?

Need he be perfect to cross that line? Of course not. He is merely pointing out a path that can be followed.

As I am slowly, in this granite-like brain of mine, coming to realize: we are meant for growth. Growth is our natural tendency, if not acted on by outside forces. Social institutions can do that. Government can do that. Fear, of course, can do that, and is the principle culprit.

As I say from time to time, this blog likely appears revelatory at times–and certainly I may be letting slip things I hadn’t intended to–but it is certainly not intended to be a “Daily Me”, which is what I very definitely did NOT want to create. I don’t Twitter and never will. My work on Facebook is mainly posting political stuff, although the occasional slice of life does appear as well.

I will offer this, though, in a spirit of discovery, of possibly eroding just a little bit of someones current limits somewhere:

I like to fantasize myself as a spiritual soldier, who reincarnates over and over. I like to imagine myself as a paratrooper, who looks for the darkest spot on the map and drops straight in, knowing full well it will be hell, and that he will be utterly alone for a long time. Hold the line. That is the mantra, and it is a good one.

I imagine myself meeting a bad end most of the time. I have probably been stewed and eaten, hacked to pieces, crucified, starved, stoned, tortured to death, sodomized, and spend decades in painful prisons. Perhaps because of a chickenpox scar in the middle of my forehead, I think last time I might have been shot in the forehead–executed. I have been vilified by large crowds, hated, spit on, ostracized, abandoned.

Yet, none of this fazes me. It’s what I do. That is the job of the soldier: to keep going. One of my favorite movies, now, is Battle: Los Angeles. I love Aaron Eckhart’s First Sergeant, and if I were in the military, that’s who I would strive to be: the man who does what needs to be done because it needs to be done.

This is not a melancholy that causes this post, but actually a sense of fullness and strength. I feel good.

Can we not posit on some level that our soul knows the difference between physical suffering and spiritual suffering, and that the former is so insignificant across vast spans of time that it can be ignored for all practical purposes, even in great quantities?

I will let you into my room. It feels right. On my front wall, I have a ram’s horn that I blow whenever I move into a new place. I have lived many places, and got into that habit some time ago. It just feels right.

On each of the four walls I have one of the Four Dignities (scroll down a bit) of the Tibetans.

Over my bed I have a makeshift airplane made by one of my children at an early age that I thought was quite clever.

When I wake, I have pictures of a veteran of two 1,000 dayKaihogyos, Tarthang Tulku, and Jack Schwarz.

I have no silly ideas that these men are perfect. They merely represent paths that I can follow, and which in my own undisciplined way I do try to follow.

I have my plan to save the world in six steps (reform financial system, create credible alternative to moral relativism in a post-religious context, invent machine to talk with ghosts, cure cancer [I do actually have actionable ideas on this], start a church, and build a better psychotherapy), my goals for this year, and last, but not least, a ridiculous, stupidly naive, idealistic, hopelessly romantic poem that I love. I’ll leave you with that:

The Impossible Dream

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

Conspiracy to commit theater. Phrase just popped in my head, and I liked it, and am avoiding difficult work.

Back to it. If anyone out there wants to hire a professional blogger, let me know. I’m all for hiring me.