Author: White Whale

Goodness is not niceness. One of the most subtle and pernicious ways of undermining the notion of Goodness is by equating it with banality, with Ned Flanders, with goody-two-shoes, with boredom.

A truly Good person, on the contrary, is relentlessly alert, relentlessly engaged, passionate about what they do, and open to experience.

It is bad people who are dull: they are stuck in tedious manias, endless rage, and an inability to process experience. In the end, the “greatest” sadists this world has ever known were incapable of more than evanescent enjoyment, and that at a very low grade level.

This is an important point. Jesus went after the money changers with a whip because they deserved it. There is nothing meritorious about being an affect-less doormat.

This is two thoughts posted in one.

First, it occurs to me that with respect to 9/11, the only reliable responses would have been an engagement with Afghanistan, economic trauma, and probably large increases in Federal spending.

As I look at Putin in my mind, I see the one survivor from Company 9. I see the lasting scars the war in Afghanistan left on the Russian psyche. I think Putin thought we would meet a similar fate. I really do. Everyone was telling us on the front end how dangerous it was, and in point of fact the obvious leader of a Taliban-free Afghanistan was assassinated just two days prior to 9/11. It has been blamed on Bin Laden, but I don’t think Bin Laden thought we would go into Afghanistan. Putin would have known better.

And I see potential allies in the United States among our financial elites. Again, the Rockefellers’ name pops up immediately, but it is hard to know how many people out there want to end their own sense of meaninglessness by pursuing a totalitarian agenda.

Moral psychosis is a term I just came up with, to be used as a synomym for moral death, but I think I like it better. The psychiatric condition of psychosis is one of being utterly decontextualized, utterly removed from ordinary reactions to human situations and emotions, and denuded of the capacity, not just to tell right from wrong, but to perceive reality accurately in any fashion.

If you lie to yourself over and over and over for decades, if you involve yourself in deceiving others, there must come a time when for all intents and purposes you are an automaton, devoid of normal human reactions, and utterly without purpose, but filled with energy. This is the condition of the hard core Leftist, who is Satanic in all but name.

This is a fever of insanity. It really is. Sybaritic leftists are not insane: they are just soft. Cultural Sadeists are lunatics.

I read today that 40% of Europeans exhibit signs of mental illness, illnesses their socialized medical systems are not equipped to handle. How is that Socialism, that freedom from responsibility and failure working for them? Not well, I suspect. We would need comparative numbers for Americans, but I have been told by more than one European visiting that it is amazing how normal most people seem. And we are normal, by and large. We don’t have the neurotic ticks and manias that seem common to the Europeans. By and large, most of us are content with our lots, and with life. Yes, rates of depression are going up, but not at European rates, or at least that is my best guess.

I spent some time studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming some years back. I didn’t take any classes, but did like I do and read 10 or so books on it.

One of the lasting insights I took away was the concept of channels, by which is meant the idea that many people, much of the time, are sending signals on multiple channels. An obvious example is a man SAYING to a woman he respects her mind, when it is quite clear to her that what he wants is her body.

There are countless ways to say I love you, both in the sincere way, as in Louis Armstrong’s “how do you do”, and in fake ways, as in a man saying what he needs to to get in a woman’s pants.

Consciously or not, we receive on all channels. Dissonance is how we pick up on insincerity. Lie detection depends entirely on incongruities between a chosen exterior and subconscious signals to the contrary. People that feel no discomfort lying cannot be caught.

When people choose to ignore unconscious requests for help, it causes hurt or anger. When they try to control you, it causes passivity or anger. You feel emotions, but you don’t know why if you lack this concept of channels.

The corrollary to this is that most people also have multiple “parts”, which, too, is a concept I got from NLP. Most people in effect have multiple personalities, all with their own syntax and aims.

As I have argued, I feel that personal growth consists in paring down the number of selves and motives to a point where your personality is fully congruent, then, ultimately, in flux with the universe, with undivided consciousness of joy. This is enlightenment.

Few thoughts. I’m taking notes off my voicemail.

Some interests in the United States benefit equally from both “conservative” and “liberal” policies.

With Republicans, they get deregulation and, some, tax benefits that are not distributed uniformly. What gets deregulated, we can assume to benefit disproportionately those who pushed for the deregulation.

With Democrats, they get policies enacted which damage some businesses, but at the benefit of their own. Democrats don’t really go after large corporations, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. What their policies do is hurt small business, which helps large business. The very people whose careers rest on their alleged anti-corporatism enact laws which act, in aggregate, to strengthen the multinationals they claim to oppose. Since leftists never bother to compare the effects of their policies with their stated aims, they don’t notice. Of course, if they stay in office, many don’t care. They get all the perks of office.

A clear example of this is Obamacare. It won’t hurt the GE’s of the world, or the AT&T’s. It will hurt Ted’s Diner, and Ann’s Wine Shop. That’s why so many small businesses in Nancy Pelosi’s home district moved so quickly to get waivers. This will be enormously damaging to them.

In all realms of endeavor it is important to think clearly, and it is nowhere more important than in evaluating policies which have the potential both to build wealth and to destroy it, to facilitate job creation or–as is plainly the case with this health insurance mandate–to put many people out of work.

The net point is that if you are thinking in unanchored abstractions, if you “oppose war”, or oppose corporatism, or want to end poverty, or want to increase freedom, you must think in terms of details. Almost everything which helps one person hurts someone else. The task politicians set themselves is to focus your attention on the first, and keep it away from the second. Prudent people, however, do not let this happen.

When you tax a business out of existence, you do not hurt most the business owner. You hurt the janitor, and the line worker, and the clerk. Failure to grasp this basic point has enabled the development and continuation of horrifically destructive polices the world over for the better part of a century.

Supposedly we are going to see mass protests on Wall Street in the next few weeks. These people think in cartoons. They love the idea of themselves as heroic crusaders, but are not at all equipped to take the time to understand that the world is a complex place, and that damage to the economy will hurt big business not at all.

Thus even if they are successful, they will fail. This is the policy of fools.

Morality in action NECESSARILY requires sustained efforts at building understanding, since moral people care primarily about the outcome of their actions, and not at all about how best to generate emotional satisfaction from romantic narcissism. They are invisible, to the extent possible, and neither ask for nor expect thanks. That is my view.

I think a lot about the nature of identity. One of my personal preoccupations is growth, but it is worth taking the time to ask “growth for what? To what?” Successfully dieting, as an example, while no doubt beneficial to the body and ego, is most important in the habit of mind it implies.

My tendency is to think of behavioral rigidity as leading necessarily to perceptual blind spots. At the same time, though, if there is no consistency, there is no form. You have no personality at all, no traits, no attributes.

Logically, true inconsistency would involve both moments of discipline and moments of laxity, moments of cruelty, and moments of profound compassion, all disbursed randomly, and without reference either to principle or antecedant. This condition is not really realizable in practice–except perhaps in conditions of insanity–but does represent a limit condition.

What happens, practically, is that we are built like fiberglass poles, or trees. The rigid are never fully rigid, just as even the tallest, oldest trees still sway in the wind a bit.

Our task–what I see as our proper task–is navigating this world as happily as possible. In my imagination, I see us facing a trackless ocean, and needing to navigate it in one direction, and not another, indefinitely. We need a boat, and a means of propulsion, and most importantly, a way of maintaining course absent clear landmarks.

And perhaps, this is just the first leg of the journey. Perhaps on the next we have to cover a trackless desert. What works in one time and place will not work in another. We must be flexible.

Logically, the antipode to the rigid old oak is not the young sapling, but rather wind, or even the void itself. Even air has form, doesn’t it, now that I think about it. It is composed of molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, water vapor and other gases.

Personalities are structures that serve needed purposes. The personality of a soldier is not necessarily the best for nurturing small babies, or for tending sheep. The task, it seems to me, is to treat personality as a structure WE build, for specific purposes, and which can then be dissolved when no longer needed. What is left when there is no personality? That which the Buddha sought, and for which no name is acceptable, other than to call it a desirable condition, while realizing that desire itself is a function of personality.

I am meandering around a bit, but please bear with me (or not). The Buddha taught that everything about us is best thought of as empty (which is different than saying it IS empty), and composed of parts he called “dharmas”, little atomic bits that, to the point, can be severed, one from the other, and recompiled in new forms.

To be endlessly skillful in adaptation, it is necessary to start with a blank slate, and build what is needed, as needed, then dissolve it when its usefulness has passed. To do this, detachment of the sort cultivated by Buddhists is necessary.

One example I have long been fond of is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of making temporary art, usually sand mandalas, or images made in butter. They create the work, then dip the sand in moving water, or use the butter in food. It is there for a time, in a form for a time, then it is gone. The material is still there, but the information has moved on.

Few wandering and perhaps incoherent thoughts. This is my rambling blog.

While I’m conspiratorializing, let’s do the other major one.

My ideas on this are a little wild, but I think Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy because he was a Communist, and JFK was leading a global fight against Communism. You know, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Communist=tyranny, ergo Lee Harvey Oswald=assassin. Hell, he was married to a Russian, and spent time in both the Soviet Union and Cuba.

I don’t see any reason to think he was given instructions to shoot Kennedy, but see no reason to rule it out. If there was an actual conspiracy, it was a Communist conspiracy, which was cleverly turned, as these things tend to be by even mediocre propagandists, into an attack on the very people trying to protect us from the Communists: our military and government.

Maybe I need to write a book. The market seems to be large, and this view–which would seem self evident given a shred of historical knowledge–seems underrepresented.

This is my conclusion, which is entirely without substantive backing. It is an intuition, based upon eliminating unlikely suspects. I had intended a longer treatment, but this post which I just put up here, is close enough. Basically, I just see Putin’s face when I ask myself imaginatively who was behind the attacks, and have towards the end of this piece compiled a bit of very shaky, unsubstantial “evidence”.

Anyway, this will, I think, be my final statement on 9/11, pending new thoughts or evidence.

I have thought long and hard about this, and have come to some conclusions:

1) Tower 7 could not possibly have fallen the way it did due to fires of unknown origin, which fed on “office furnishings”, which is the official explanation. I deal with this topic here: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/11/tower-7-thoughts.html

That link includes a link to the longer discussion in the first sentence. I inventory everything that is in office towers, and there is nothing that would even stay lit for more than an hour or two, much less melt steel, much less cause a 47 story thicket of fire retardant treated steel beams to fall at the rate of gravity.

2) Logically, then, it must have been demolished with explosives, which is what people unaware of the context assume when first viewing the video.

3) If Tower 7 was brought down with explosives, there is no compelling reason to believe Towers 1 and 2 were not as well.

4) I see no reason to doubt that 4 planes were hijacked and flown into the buildings, per the standard narrative. What I believe to have been the case as far as New York is that United 93 was supposed to fly into Tower 7, which was the home of New York’s disaster response command center. United 93 took off from Newark, just across the river, and if it had been promptly hijacked, would have flown into Tower 7 within minutes of the other two planes.

5) The foregoing conclusions point to a large conspiracy, one with substantial logistical challenges: material requirements, personnel requirements, and money requirements. Given the organization that would have been necessary, and the enduring hatred of jihadists for the United States, it seems clear to me that people capable of such attacks, if they were in fact Muslim terrorists, would have been able to launch MORE attacks since 9/11, since they were and remain undetected, at least with respect to their role in this assault. Logically, this train of thought leads necessarily to the conclusion that Islamic extremists were NOT behind the placement of explosives. Once one realizes that the 19 hijackers could easily have been recruited on a “false flag” basis, then quite literally any large organization or government could be guilty. “Who?”, self evidently is the question.

6) In my view, this is potential an empirical question, if we treat this great catastrophe as the crime that it is, and investigate it like any other crime. What maintenance people were hired in the previous year? Have we interviewed them? Of course not. Where would the explosives have needed to be placed? Who had access to those places? Even now, at this distance, there are many questions the answers to which could potentially be found through a normal forensic police process.

7) In my view, George Bush played no role in this, nor Dick Cheney. Whatever their flaws otherwise, they are patriotic, decent people, and to believe that either had anything to do with this is to believe that both want the United States to be a totalitarian nation. I simply don’t buy that.

Nor do I believe that Israel could have benefitted in the SLIGHTEST from these attacks. We are their largest patron, and anything that weakens us, weakens them. They had no way of knowing we would go into Iraq, and Afghanistan was not a threat to them. Moreover, they were and are decent people, who hew to high moral standards. They had nothing to do with this.

The Chinese also use us as their largest source of income. We are by far their largest export market, and when economic conditions worsen–as one could reliably have predicted they would following such a disaster–they lose money. Clearly, Communists want global dominance, but China has a century long plan, which involves building their economy and military for a number of decades. Then or now would not be good timing.

You know who I believe was behind this? The Russians. The former head of the Soviet KGB had just taken over, in 1999, as head of the government. This is a man marinated in Communist ideology from the earliest age, whose grandfather was a cook for Lenin himself, and occassionally Stalin as well.

This is purely speculative–necessarily, of course–but in my view Putin thought that America was decadent, and that an attack of that magnitude would lead us into a permanent decline. He had been taught to think of us as soft and weak. Unlike the Russians, we had not been attacked on our soil since the War of 1812 (not counting Pearl Harbor). I think that he thought that by tearing us down, it would make it easier for him to continue the project of global domination to which he had long ago pledged his life.

He was sorely disappointed at our reaction. Rather than weakening us, it strengthened us, and that is why there have been no more such attacks. He is still circling, as the judoka he is, but he has been unable to find any clear openings to exploit.

I can offer little evidence for this, of course. A couple points that are vaguely supportive.

Pictures of the impacts were apparently taken by a Russian pilot:
http://englishrussia.com/2006/12/04/russian-pilot-making-photos-911-flying-above-nyc/

This guy should be interviewed. Obviously, the Russians would have wanted to be sure that the evidence of the planes flying in was incontrovertible.

Some of the most active conspiracy theorists are Russian. Here is a Russian General in effect blaming Capitalists for the sorts of plots the Communists hatched routinely. This is straight ahead use of the propaganda trick of blaming your opponent of the crimes you commit. An obvious example would be the constant use of the word Imperialist by the Soviet Empire. Here is the link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1788

The Russians gave us a 9/11 Memorial: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/r/russian-911-memorial.htm

One can only speculate, but even Putin at some point may have felt regret. Alternatively–since this actually seems doubtful on the part of someone capable of rising to the top of an organization as ruthless as the KGB–it may have been intended to divert attention from themselves as the culprits.

These are my intuitions, which may or may not be valid, like any intuition. The core point I would like to make is that beyond any reasonable doubt there was a much larger conspiracy than we were told. All of the defects in response and investigation can easily, in my view, be attributed to a combination of cowardice and complacency. There need to be no omnipresent and omnipotent “them”, who control everything. The naked reality is that most people are stupid, frightened easily, and lazy.

Who, among government employees, wanted to be the one to shout out “This is a lie”? How many climate scientists deny the farcical notion of Anthropogenic Global Warming? Not enough, not nearly enough.

And self evidently, there well could be paid agents of foreign interests scattered throughout our poltical and military apparatus. They would be the ones at the meeting when things are discussed arguing that such a view is ridiculous, or potentially even the ones denying others permission to investigate. Clearly, there are scales and levels of conspiracy between total control, and no control. There are many variables, and few monoliths.

I lose no sleep over this. I don’t think the Russians have any more attacks planned, if this hypothesis even has any validity.

I will say, though, that there are clearly Communist sympathizers in the United States, some of whom have a lot of money, with the Rockefellers being the obvious example. These people can and have made efforts to influence our political process over many decades. As I see it, there is little we can do now to avenge the 9/11 attacks, but we must remain vigilant. The Tea Party is the best news I have seen in my lifetime, since it might be possible to get people in office who shrink the size of government, for the first time since FDR’s Fascist co-conspirators first got Socialism started in this country.

I was walking by a school today, and wondering about the kids. I tried to imagine them all happy, and the whole projects succeeding admirably. This is always a useful exercise.

Then it hit me that the love you are capable of can in part be measured by how deeply and sincerely you can imagine the success of others. I’ve said this many times in many ways, but here it is again: recurring theme.

It’s easy enough to take part in the joy of your own children, and perhaps those of your nieces and nephews. But it harder for kids you don’t know, people you don’t know. This sort of greed slips in, which stipulates that the happier they are, the less there is for you. I mean, we can’t ALL be happy, can we? Somebody somewhere has to be less happy, right?

This is the same logic Leftists apply to their projects. In their view of the status quo, the rich are happy while the poor are happy. The logical inversion, then, is making the poor happy and the rich unhappy. Of course, the fact that EVERYONE is made miserable in the process, since they have made not even a rudimentary effort to understand cause and effect, is lost on them, before, during, and generally after.

The question remains: what limits ARE there on happiness? Why can’t we all be happy, or happy-ish? Is this not an empirical problem, to be solved by paying attention to social and intrapsychic cause and effect relationships? I for one think so. I see no limits at all, particularly if we admit that occasional sadness is necessary for happiness.

Failure is a four letter word. THIS is an example.

“Attempts to minimize economic differences in an open an free society necessarily involve the use of coercive power. They politicize economic life. And economic activity comes to depend to a greater degree on political decisions. People’s income and their economic modus vivendi come largely under the control of politicians and civil servants. . .

“Extensive politicization of life enhances the prices of political power and thus the stakes in the fight for it. This outcome in turn intensifies political tension, at least until opposition is effectively demoralized or forcibly suppressed. And because people’s economic fortunes come to depend so much on political and administrative decisions, their talents and energies are diverted from economic activity to political life, sometimes from choice, sometimes from necessity.These consequences are manifest in many societies, especially in multiracial societies.

“In many countries the politicization of life, often pursued in the name of equality, now means the question of who the rulers are has become of the greatest importance.”

More, several pages later: “Redistribution of income and reduction of poverty are often thought to be interchangable concepts. Indeed, it is often taken for granted that egalitarian policies necessarily improve the condition of the poor. This is not so. The promotion of economic equality and the alleviation of poverty are distinct and often conflicting. To make the rich poorer does not make the poor richer.

“The advocates of egalitarian policies focus on relative income differences, or the relative position of different groups. They thereby divert attention from the causes of poverty, especially the causes which underlie real hardship and from the possibilities of effective remedial measures. Relief of poverty, especially the improvement in the position of the very poor, has nothing to do with the pursuit of equality. The policies of egalitarianism often ignore the very poor, especially those who are self reliant and enterprising.

“Except perhaps over very short periods, redistributive policies are much more likely to DEPRESS [emphasis mine] the living standards of the poor than to raise them. The extensive politicization brought about by large scale redistribution diverts people’s energies and ambitions from productive economic activity to politics and public administration.”

Black people in America thought he was going to help them. In effect, this is what he promised, and what they had been led to believe: the way ahead is through politics and not self determined, private sector economic advancement. Obama could not keep this promise, since none of his policies could ever have acted, except over the very short term, to do anything but continue the very thorough destruction of the black community that 50 years of leftist truth-abuse has thus far enabled.

Put another way, it was always the case that black Americans would suffer most, as would poor people generally (most of whom are Hispanic or white), once Obama took office. This was a foregone conclusion. Nothing but conservative policies would have stimulated the growth needed to create rising prosperity for all. The poor suffer first, and benefit last, clearly, and failing to see this does not become a plus for leftists in their pursuit of vacuous goals which result in much misery.