Author: White Whale

There are no dichotomies in nature. The sun is not the opposite of the moon. Yes, one is a lifeless rock, and the other a million nuclear bombs going off every moment, but both consist of matter; both are visible from Earth; both obey the laws of physics, circling endlessly.

Black is not the opposite of white. Neither exists, in truth. Both are artifacts of the way human eyes process light. Black is a body which does not reflect energy in frequencies we can see, and white is all of the colors meeting the EYE at once. Both, in sum, are properties of our hard wiring, not the universe.

For survival–and I don’t question there is some part of our organism which takes as its primary role that of ensuring our survival and reproduction–it is useful to draw distinctions in binary ways: safe/unsafe; friend/foe; edible/inedible; useful/useless.

In a final sense, though, all of these distinctions are illusions. In human society, quite often we make them true only by treating them as true. If you hate people, they will grow to hate you. Yet even if one of you kills the other, this does not mean that in any ontological way you were opposed: merely that one or both of you developed a pattern consistent with a perception that was not intrinsically accurate. Had one of you thought differently, and done things differently, a different outcome would have been achieved.

I want to be clear, though, that being nice is not the alternative to being cruel and vindictive. Being PERCEPTIVE is, and sometimes generating peace will involve violence. Sometimes love is expressed through indifference. Sometimes hate is expressed through what is called, wrongly, love.

It occurred to me today that there is a parallelism between the tactics chosen by the Arab descendants from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and those of Leninists.

Both are based upon hatred. Both have as their goal not the alleviation of the suffering of the people upon whose behalf they conceitedly believe they can speak, but rather the destruction of some hated Other.

The refugees will send their children from Gaza and the West Bank to kill civilian Jews. That the children die in the process does not faze them. It does not bother them that the policies of aggression and terrorism they choose FORCE the Israelis to be restrictive in what they tolerate. They don’t care that economic opportunities are rare in war zones, and that they are creating the war zone. They don’t care how many generations of their children are born into conditions of relative poverty, political instability,and violence.

It is possible to make peace with people who have rational objectives. It is not possible to make peace with people whose only desire is your destruction, and who are quite willing to commit social suicide to accomplish that aim, who are willing to sacrifice the next 10 generations of their children to get back at some hated Other, who has wounded their very profound vanity.

It is hard, often, not to see Islam as lending itself to the mindset of the slave, of someone BORN to take orders from others willing to do the work of thinking and perceiving. This need not be the case, but from the outside looking in, it appears that those people born every generation capable of innovation and creation are shunned and discouraged by those operating with the minds of slaves.

As I have often said, that life orientation I have called Cultural Sadeism likewise has as its aim punishing cultural Others, and not the objective alleviation of material inequalities, or shortages. Cuban leaders live well; the rest of society does not. None of them approach the wealth we take for granted here.

Logically, if the yes/no operator is symptomatic of the mechanical part of our existence, and if it is the primary tool of, say, dialectical materialism, then we can assume that all cultural systems based upon it are inferior with regard to perception, and correspondingly evil–if not always visibly, in the latent corruption which must attend an unwillingness to learn, to adapt, and to grow continually.

There was once a little boy given the responsibility to make sure that everyone he knew was treated fairly. Just for fun, he would often call out “Here’s a racist, here’s a racist”. Concerned citizens from all around would come running, only to realize that his accusation was without merit. Again and again the little boy would call out “here’s a racist, here’s a racist”. They would come running, and he would say “pay me more money, pay me more money”.

After a while, the people told him to shut his goddamned mouth and leave them alone. He never did learn his lesson, but his cries were heard no more.

The end.

This one is out there; I know it. I am simply going to send an idea out there in the world to make its own way, or perish. It occurred to me some time ago.

Within the context of my sanity, I will note that my method is to never preemptively exclude ANY options in terms of explaining what I see, until I can convince myself they are not possible, or that the bulk of evidence points in another direction; even then, I keep all options open. In my view, that is the approach best calibrated to net, over time, the largest percentage possible of truth.

In my view, Obama is a Marxist who was a good friend of Bill Ayers, and who wants to implement global tyranny in the name of the “People”; and who was raised by people who recognized no moral boundaries. I think his mentor Frank Davis gave him drugs, advice on sex, and may well have molested him. Nothing in Davis’s moral inventory, as expressed in his book Sex Rebel: Black would have precluded it. Obama is nothing like the nice person his myth-makers have made him out to be.

That is the background. Here is the idea: what if both the earthquake in Haiti, and that that just happened in Japan were artificially created, using weapons deployed covertly by corrupted members of our military, or mercenaries hired by people supportive of the Obama cause?

The only reason this even occurred to me was this statement, in which Obama talks about an earthquake in Hawaii that never happened. Now, Obama is not overly bright, but even he should know that there was no earthquake in Hawaii. But what if one was planned?

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, it happened at a really convenient time, politically. Congress was in the throes of the discussion on the Health Insurance Mandate, and Democrats were on the defensive. I remember the daily discussion shifted INSTANTLY from that to Haiti, for many weeks.

That is what is likely to happen now, right after Scott Walker dealt Obama’s supporters a hard shot in the solar plexus. That WOULD have been the discussion, but now for the next three weeks it will be Japan, and possibly Hawaii.

When I google it, I get comments suggesting that earthquakes can certainly be triggered by properly placed explosives, possibly even explosives short of nuclear weapons. The fault is already there–it just needs some help slipping.

Some say radio waves can do it. That seems unlikely through the ocean though.

We have people out there, in my opinion, worth 2-5 times what Bill Gates is. They have no reason to advertise this fact, which is why we don’t know who they are. The money to get this done could be allocated privately. You could buy a sub, and plant 50 tons of high explosive in a carefully chosen spot. It blows, the earthquake goes, and there would be little to no evidence.

I know this is Alex Jones-style thinking, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. If I have any readers with any potential to research this possibility, I would encourage you to do so. Otherwise, I will forget about this, and go about my life. If you can’t do anything about it, don’t worry about it. That’s my mantra.

Edit: as I think about it, this will likely have a ripple effect (please forgive the term) on the world economy. The largest net beneficiary will likely be China. We could perhaps suspect them as well. We may also benefit. We will see enormous production disruptions for at least weeks, and maybe months. (I am thinking here about possible damage to all of Japan’s power generation plants, particularly the nuclear ones). This is going to cost an enormous amount of money to fix; and even more money in lost revenue.

I don’t like to think things like this. Neither do I like to read history. But people were put in boxcars in Russia that went up north in the dead of winter, frozen, then stacked like cordwood.

In the German gas chambers, someone had to stand above the showers and throw gas tablets into the solution that produced the gas. One of them would regularly say “Hier ist etwas zu fressen”, or something close to that, which in the German means “here is something to eat”, where the word for eat is the word normally used when animals consume food. It is “essen” for people. People did that day after day after day. When the gas had done its work, the victims were frozen in horrible and contorted positions.

Evil happens in this world. This is undeniable. It is the job of those who want what is good in this world to stay awake and alert, and realize that if anyone anywhere can hurt someone else on purpose, then all manner of means for doing so are possible.

For education. Get written up for anything three times and you lose the priviledge of going to school.

I would go farther than some of my conservative friends in agreeing that public education in some form is an acceptable level of socialism (I will note in passing that public education was a demand of many socialists in the 19th century, until they got it). I think it offers a pathway for the diligent to raise themselves up, to our collective benefit. It keeps class barriers from being impermeable, and in my view is an important part of at least the modern American dream.

At the same time, the right to education comes with responsibility. I believe everyone in America has the right to own a gun, of any sort up to and including assault rifles, but not the right to use them to impose their will on anyone. If they do that, they forfeit the right. They also forfeit the right to participate in our electoral process, which is both prudent and just.

Likewise with education, kids should have the right to attend, but only to the extent they value what would have been clearly a priviledge in almost any other time and place in human history. For context, please read Doris Lessing’s useful Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

If a kid EVER threatens, much less hurts, another kid, and for which there is compelling evidence, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it twice, he should be permanently expelled and referred to the police.

If a kid is disobedient or talks back to teachers three times, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it three times twice, he never gets to come back.

Correllated to mental capacity, which is to say given demands appropriate for a child’s capabilities, if a child gets 3 F’s in a year, he forfeits a semester of school. If he gets 6 overall, he no longer gets to attend school. He simply is not trying.

We don’t owe kids schooling who hold it in contempt. We are paying for them to sit in a chair they don’t value, to learn things they aren’t learning. They graduate stupid, and many around them graduate knowing less than they ought to have owing to the kids who either slowed them down, or who made going to school a frightening experience.

40-50% of kids drop out of most inner city schools. The numbers are similar in many rural areas. The difference is that most kids in rural areas can get work on farms.

I have to wonder if some high percentage of those drop outs–I’m going to go with half–have to do with the fact that the kids are walking into uncontrolled war zones.

We see stupid people citing compassion as a reason to give kids a second, third, twenty-fifth, 87th chance. Bullshit. The compassion needs to be given to the kids they are terrorizing, putting ourselves in the shoes of those who did not create the problems, but are suffering from them. Juvenile criminals become in my view very early matters for the police. If they are going spend their lives in jail, the earlier it starts, the fewer people they hurt.

The larger compassion, of course, also needs to address the bigger picture of why those kids became criminals in the first place. Why would that be? We had no large problem with juvenile criminality 80 years ago, outside of isolated urchins who lacked families. People everywhere made do with half of what our poor today take for granted.

The reason for this was that kids grew up in two parent homes that read the Bible. This sounds so simple it sounds stupid. But that is the reality. They were not immersed from an early age in media which glorifed violence, and which discouraged self restraint, and personal responsibility. We lacked, then, a cult of the victim. If you screwed up, you screwed up. It wasn’t society.

To the extent society IS to blame though, it is to blame for failing to teach useful lessons. Teaching people to feel sorry for themselves, and to blame others is not useful. It is teaching people to fail in their emotional and economic lives at the same time. It it teaching them to hurt others rather than discipline themselves.

This policy would enormous differences, in my view, immediately. It would reduce inner city dropout rates, if I am right, by 10% within the first year.

Anyone out there who claims to care about humanity, consider this, and the means by which I reached my conclusions.

Here.

I read it, and thought “my God, this man actually sounds like he’s describing problems which actually exist. I don’t remember him ever doing that.”

But of course the pattern for good propaganda is truth, truth, truth, half truth, lie, truth. No good propagandist tells the truth less than 95% of the time. They just pick and choose which truths they want to include, exclude those that don’t help, and spin their choices such that the facts are correct, but the interpretation is not.

Good jobs disappearing. True.

Solution: more unions and Obamacare. Patently false.

Citoyen Krugman: are you capable of grasping that interest payments on borrowed money are a net drain of wealth? That given less wealth, there is less wealth to distribute in ANY fashion? You help remind those who forget that Ph.D often stands for “Piled higher and deeper.”

The foundational problem we face is this: the product of our labor and creativity is stolen from us through the process of inflation. People don’t get this. Nobody seems to be capable of stepping far enough outside the consensus reality to get this.

I am not now, nor have I ever proposed going back to some past time or system. What I am proposing has never been done. Sooner or later I’m hoping to find an economist with the courage to wrestle seriously with what I have proposed.

Once again, it is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I go through phases of trying to solicit feedback. I’ve sent it to at least 20 economists and several business people, with no luck. If you know anybody, please send it to them. If I’m an idiot, tell me why.

I have in the past referred to corporations as “job creating entities”, or JCE’s. A better term might be employers. Tax cuts for employers. If you want to create jobs, you want good things for the people who create them. Yes, it leads to money being made, but you can’t get rich without making other people rich.

I posted this on Yahoo in response to this link, in which George Soros argues that anything but ENORMOUS budget deficits is bad for our economy.

Do you see the beauty of Keynesian socialist logic? If your economy is good, then public spending will make it better. If it’s bad, then public spending is ESSENTIAL. If you’re going broke, trying to stop the process will only make you broke faster.

No matter what happens, the answer is larger government control of the economy. Anyone who is pushing Keynes nowadays is either stupid–most of them–or a Communist in all but name. The aims of Keynes were the same as George Bernard Shaw: Fascist tyranny.

I wrote about Keynes here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/keynes.pdf

I wrote about the link between the New Deal and Fascism (it did actually exist, I will note, and had identifiable characteristics) here: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-dealfascism.html

The man most identified with the New Deal in the early days, other than FDR himself, literally liked Mussollini, passed out books praising Fascism, and was only fired for being a drunk that was a political liability. He was Times Man of the Year for 1933.

I like the Harry Potter movies. I am a huge fan of the imaginative capacities of Joanne Rowling. I own the first six (and need to see if the seventh is out yet, actually).

Anyway, as most will know, there are these nasty creatures called Dementors, which can perform a “kiss”, which sucks all the happy thoughts out of you, leaving only darkness and eventually death. They steal your soul.

The cure is called a Patronus charm, which in effect is the expression of your inner joy, and symbolized by an animal with which you relate. It is composed of light, which dispels the darkness.

Anyway, the Patronus Charm is defensive. It drives them away or keeps them at bay, but why could it not be used to attack them? Why not inject into them happy thoughts freely, using the infinite amount of light around us, and blow them up like balloons? Attach a fire hose of joy and life to their mouths, and destroy all the darkness within them?

We tend to think of Goodness as not being bad. I would argue that it is a way of being which is positive and tending to the better. The Tibetans have this nice metaphor of the Windhorse, which is running horse with a glowing jewel on the back. This is a nice image. It conveys motion, the wind of light, and the light itself. Goodness is galloping on an endless field on a beautiful day, completely free, and filled with happiness and love.

This morning I was thinking about light as a place in a field of battle. You have this “front” of light energy, facing realms of darkness. We tend to think of them as creeping up on us, but why? Why can little “light bombs” not be dropped into these realms? Can’t we use artillery? Can we not move forward?

I think we can.

That latter part appends my post on Strategy a couple ago.

In it, I came out of a building, and my car was gone. This very, very tall black man came up to me and apologized and said he had stolen it, and it was 8 blocks away. I was angry at first, then wondered why he had told me, when it would have been much easier to deny it. I was warned by someone that he was a prison guard, and very tough, but I decided to ask him anyway. I don’t back down in dreams, much more than I do in real life.

His answer was incoherent in the dream, but amounted to the fact that he needed it. He was sad that he needed it, but he had felt he had no choice.

For whatever reason, I suddenly had a burlap bag full of stuff, which I decided to give him. It was full of tree seeds, and all the tools to fertilize them properly. I gave them to him, and suggested he plant them, which he agreed to do. End of dream.

As I think about it today, there are some interesting ideas here. First off, it is undeniable that we have many people suffering in ghettoes around the country. Maybe kids act tough, talk tough, and get tough. But they are sad. They are outside of the society most of the rest of us live in. Jeremiah Wright likes to talk about ghettoes as prisons. This man was a prison guard, symbolically, since he controlled prisoners.

Who built the prisons, though? Was it rich white men? Why are they poor? Are they not poor because there are not enough good jobs around for them to do, and because many of them were born into and recreate single parent homes which do not provide enough love, support and GUIDANCE to use those tools for self improvement that our system offers to them?

For the last 40 years or more, the incessant hum of the theme of victimization has poured throughout all these neighborhoods. It has resulted in constant Democrat victories, year on year, decade on decade. Elect us, they are told, and manna will fall from the sky. But it doesn’t. It never does. Promises are made and broken. A few benefit, but only those connected with the private wealth that flows through governments via taxation. City government members benefit. Teachers benefit. Unions benefit, or at least those who keep their jobs once the job roles continue to decline.

50 years ago, Detroit was a good place to live. Slowly, all the companies that provided good paying jobs left town, or shuttered their doors. This has not happened everywhere, but it has often happened selectively in inner cities. Why would this be? Is it racism? Or is it the fact that the same people who promise their electorate the sun and moon consistently enact policies that cause job and business flight? There are very nice areas AROUND Detroit. They just aren’t IN Detroit.

Tax rates, attitudes, business support or neglect: these are the things that affect jobs, both their quantity and quality.

I have used this metaphor: what the Democrats provide this constituency is salt water for thirst. It always feels like it should work. It always sounds plausible. But it always makes things WORSE. The problem is not a lack of money spent. It is HOW it is spent.

I gave this man the seeds to sprout a new life. I asked him to take care of and tend it, then washed my hands of it. This is all most people need.

What Democrats don’t want to grasp is that black communities need to have demanded of them self organization, personal responsibility for the quality of life in their neighborhoods. They should not look to government for it.

What I am saying is trust them. Let them figure things out. People who are never challenged never learn. Obviously, working three jobs to make ends meet is a challenge. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about minds meeting to figure out how to improve lives.

Black people in this country have by and large been trained relentlessly to look to their Democrat saviors to, well, save them. This is foolishness. This has led to an atrophy of will and capability that would otherwise have been there. Virtually all black neighborhoods were every bit as peaceful as everywhere else 50 years ago. They had families, went to church, made sure their kids did their homework, and said their prayers at night. They were systematically excluded then, but can anyone argue with a straight face they are included now? The cure has PREVENTED integration.

This is either the height of incompetence, or malignancy. And incompetence prolonged sufficiently long becomes the latter in practice, since stupidity at some point becomes willful.

This is the trait I think conservatives and genuine moderates have this year, that they have not had for a very long time. Even in the Reagan era, after the disastrous failures of Carter, and even those under Ford facilitated by the Imperial Congress which had hog-tied him, Democrats continued to own Congress. They continued in large measure to own many of the narratives, particularly the farcical claim that they were in fact the best protectors of the interests of the poor, minorities, and the working classes.

I am presently reading a good summary of the history of political policy in the New Deal era, and it is frankly distressing to see how many obvious, unmistakeable similarities there are between the literally Fascist policies enacted then–and the rationales that enabled them–and those under Obama.

One sees, for example, a tension between “reform”, and “recovery”. Time and again, the latter is sacrificed for the former. To take one egregious example, FDR quite literally intended his direct control over the agricultural sector to contineu forever. To be clear, this was the power of the President to appoint people to tell farmers how much they could produce, and what it could be sold for. To belabor the obvious, this is a Command/Planned/socialist/Fascist conception of the role of the government. Adn to be clear, when I say Fascist, there were many then who admired Benito Mussollini and longed to be able to end economic freedom in the United States. And for some number of years they were successful.

To the point, though, what we have today that we did not have then was the evidence of the past, and the capacity to get messages out across wide populations quickly, and accurately.

I would submit there is an informational equivalent to Gresham’s Law, which stipulates that bad money drives out good money. Given a choice between gold coins–which have worth both from the printing on them, and from the gold in them–and paper money which could be doubled easily in a week or two, most people opt to keep the coins, and circulate the paper.

Likewise, I believe that good information, when allowed to circulate, will drive out bad information. Stupidity loses to intelligence, in the end, if intelligence is allowed into the system. To the extent conservatives–which I prefer to call Liberals, but which seems to confuse people who don’t read history–are right, then, the advantage is to us.

Most people can readily grasp the basic facts, if allowed to. As Dave Ramsey roughly put it, we are a household making $58,000, spending $75,000, and $325,000 in debt. It does not take much brainpower to grasp this is an unsustainable condition, that Obamacare will make it worse, not better, and that no Democrats and too few Republicans possess the intestinal fortitude to confront this problem with sober calculation and decisiveness that is needed to prevent a wholesale disaster, which will hurt the poor and middle classes the worst, by far.

Black people fared horribly under FDR in the New Deal. Sharecroppers saw NO benefit from his policies. On the contrary, they were hurt. When a farmer is being paid to idle his land, there is no work for them to do. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid. The states in the South where they disproportionately lived got one third or less of the money parcelled out, simple because they always voted Democrat, and FDR didn’t need to pay them off to get their votes.

In the current climate, it is interesting to note that most trade unions back then refused to accept black people. If you add to this that FDR made unionization compulsory in many projects, and made it impossible for people to offer competitive labor bids at lower rates of pay, you can readily see that most blacks were in effect forced out of the New Deal entirely. Most Democrats back then were blatant racists, though, so that is scarcely surprising.

Given the recent lionization of Robert Byrd, one wonders why we shouldn’t continue to view that as the case. As the party of machine politics, Democrats are fine with buying votes, but they seem not to care who they hurt doing it, provided they can duck the responsibility they bear.

Bottom line: I see reason to think that many of the new class of Republicans will have the confidence to stick to their guns (this is a metaphor, folks, referring to the tendencies of cowards to abandon their posts when under both figurative and literal assualt).

They can count on high profile backing from nationally syndicated professional talkers, and the organizing capabilities the internet enables. This will prove, I think, an important source of comfort, and hopefully following courage.

Edit: the book is “FDR’s Folly”. I find his analysis somewhat deficient, but his detailing of the people and policies immensely useful. It is yeoman work.