Author: White Whale

Listen to this song, sung by George Jones: These Days I Barely Get By.

My goodness, could it be any more sad?

I have many of the songs George Jones recorded, and all the songs Hank Williams recorded. Yet, sometimes I’m not in the mood for them. How much sadness do you need in your life?

It occurred to me yesterday, though, that the value of these songs is that enable you to convert the pain of resentment to JUST sadness. This is progress.

The other night, doing some manual work I really didn’t want to do after a long day, I was having a first rate pity party. All but the most fortunate of you (I’m assuming plural readers, which in turn implies A reader; if I’m wrong, I’ll never know) have had the experience of bottled rage and resentment and anger and destructive impulses as a result of wounded vanity. Why do I have to do this? It’s stupid. It’s not fair. Things should be some other way. That’s what I deserve. I could just punch something. I want to break something. I want to scream.

As I have often commented, evil is born in this basic impulse. Is it not wanting more than others, just because you are you? Is it not lying, cheating and stealing to get it? Is it not taking pleasure in others submission to you? And is taking from others, and working to gain power over them a form of destruction? Are you not destroying trust, and love? Are you not taking both the tangible and the intangible?

Anyway, it occurred to me that country music helps to mute this impulse. Take George Jones: in the popular myth, at any rate, he was for many years a drunk. From what I understand, he was at times a bully. Country music is not for sophisticated people. It is not for people whose lives are full and complete and working really, really well, in general.

It is for people who get up early every day and go work a job that is tedious and at times painful. It is for people who have no reason to expect anything but a slow descent into physical decrepitude and a penurious old age. These people are not saints. I am in no way glorifying this lifestyle, except in this one respect: if you endure hardship without complaint, you grow. You will always grow. This is in my view the nature of the universe.

Thus to the extent country music enables people to avoid bitterness, it is immensely useful. You can bear sadness. It is very hard to bear bitterness.

Happiness, of course, is the ideal. For happy times, there is happy music. My personal favorite is probably Louis Prima.

Few thoughts on a Woden’s Day. I will stop doing that when it ceases to amuse and educate me. Interesting point here: according to them (and this is a site edited in large measure by precocious teenagers), Woden is related to the German word “Wut”, which means rage.

One can scarcely imagine the northern Europeans enjoying their lives in the cold and wet up there. Would this not be frustrating? Would enduring anger not be an obvious result? Given no reason not to, why NOT make your main god a personification of rage, and why not offer human sacrifices to him, as the Vikings did? You hurt, so someone else is going to hurt too. This is a very human impulse, to be seen the world over. In my view, this is in no small measure the impulse behind many wars. It is the impulse behind both Communism and Fascism.

A spiritual teacher, of some religion or other, once gained renown. People came from near and far to receive his blessings, and to beg his advice. Over time, he tired of this, and began to submit his 7 followers as himself, one for each day of the week. They would smile knowingly, speak as teachers do, and deliver homilies of the sort people expect.

One day a man came with his young son, who looked at the teacher watching the proceedings with a good natured grin. He asked him why he was not there, instead of the man posing as the teacher. The teacher replied “the people get what they come for. What I provide, no one wants.”

It is absurd to beg for your thirst to be quenched when you are drowning.

I think Walker can win his battle in Wisconsin, over time, but as I think about this whole mess, and think about how positive the developments have been, I think too of the hornets nest that has been kicked over. They were wanting to breed and breed under the eaves until they finally evicted the rest of us, which is to say freedom loving people of common sense.

Their hand has been forced, though: this battle is happening 5-10 years ahead of schedule, in my opinion, AT LEAST. Obama, as I have said before, was a stupid candidate for them. I don’t think they can force a revolution in four years, with all the safeguards built into our system of government, and with a media that is clearly NOT under control, and they can’t ever regain a sense of complacency on the part of the public, especially when they are stupid enough to present a budget with a $1.6 trillion annual deficit that even the most optimistic reading will NEVER balance, much less reduce our national debt.

Their creeping is over. Large segments of America that were asleep are awake and hopping mad. So, too, though, are our opponents. They view entitlements as natural rights, and are quite willing to fight for them as hard as the rest of us are for our liberty and national solvency.

This is a hard road ahead. It will feel like walking through knee deep mud. They will attack us at every turn–sometimes, as we have seen repeatedly in recent days, physically. They will scream. They will shout. They will march. They will play hooky from work. Some unprincipled police and other public “servants” will help them.

It is the sound of grinding gears, the feel of sawdust in an engine. When one considers, though, that the car was being directed over a cliff, some form of political spoiling seems not only well warranted, but invaluable.

We need time. We need time for a new culture to emerge. We need time to figure out–as a WORLD–who we want to be 100 years from now. The enemies of the peace have plans for us. Maybe the statement alleged of David Rockefeller that he wants chips on all of us is right. Maybe not. Whatever the details, whatever the concrete conspiracies, plainly there are tendencies towards moral dissolution, and national suicide that will be cropping up everywhere.

In Glenn Beck’s phrase, perhaps people of genuine good will are “the Blaze” of truth. It seems we will equally need to be firefighters, putting out tendencies towards anti-democratic atrocities.

This will be a rough ride. But hell, it should be interesting. Never underestimate how much happiness some good misery can add to your life. I’m completely serious. If it teaches you to work without complaint, to fight without hope, and to persevere cheerfully, then it is teaching you how to be an authentic human being.

It is amazing to me how people who worry about polar bears and puppies and little kittens–all carnivores, by the way, whose natural destiny is to eat other, smaller animals–are unwilling to learn basic facts about world history. They know all about our treatment of the American Indians–which in a historical context was actually not that bad, since we didn’t massacre many of them–but refuse to learn about basic items like the history of the nightmare of global Communism. To hear some people, it was always a fairy tale.

It was not a fairy tale, and IS not a fairy tale, for those unfortunate souls locked in literal and figurative prisons by people who are INSANE. Communism is a doctrine of LUNACY. It is pure evil, and I mean that in the most clinical way possible, in that I believe it is a doctrine that has as it PRIMARY purpose inflicting pain on people, and whose adherents enjoy hating, as one Wisconin TEACHER recently put it, because it makes her feel good

This is the absolute truth. When you dig down, hard core leftists have as their main purpose the HATRED of whoever the current target is–bourgeoisie, polluters, racists, Republican Governors–and NOT, as they continually allege, the rectification of wrongs, the imposition of justice where it had been lacking.

On the contrary, one sees a trail of blood, pain, and death wherever they go. I first argued that case in the paper to which this title refers, that I republished on my other site:

The Vietnam War and Cultural Sadeism.

In particular, if you want a better understanding of why I use the term Cultural Sadeism, this paper shows the train of thought. This was in many ways a thought experiment, but one which I think was successful, and foundational to much of my later thinking.

This last summer, within a couple of weeks, I heard and saw multiple ads for civilian police officer training, in San Francisco, some small towns in Kentucky, and a third place that escapes my recollection. Here is an article on the San Francisco project.

This feels Stimulus-funded to me. I have been saying since the program began that it was quite literally a checkbook against which checks could be written to anyone for any reason. I have posted about how the supervision was almost by design entirely dependent on the honesty of those reporting receipt of the funds; given dishonorable purposes, it amounts to a slush fund of laundered money for criminals.

Any student of revolution knows you have to have at least a significant portion of the police and military on your side. In the modern world, this may have changed, in that superior technology–or aggressive use of current technology, like EMP’s–can have disproportionate effect, but anyone who wanted to ensure a reasonable orderly transition to tyranny would have to have people with guns on their side.

In my view, the TSA clearly amounts to one such group. Obama and our female Big Brother have vastly expanded it in size and aggressive capabilities with respect to touching our bodies and photographing us naked. They are now some 50,000 strong, believe it or not, and have just been granted the right to unionize, meaning that their representatives will be negotiating pay and benefit packages with Obama Administration insiders, subject to funding by Congress. In my view, the TSA should be abolished outright, and the same function done by a quarter as many people. Airlines should be able to opt in or out of varying levels of security, with the lowest what we saw BEFORE 9/11, with the only provision that the doors to the pilot’s area be bolted. All full body scanners machines should be junked.

To the point here, could one not imagine the creation of a civilian police corps that parallels the official one, and which could come to the fore in some manufactured crisis? We should assume, I think, that leftist agents have penetrated our military. There is no reason to suppose that under some pretense or other they are not getting into our police departments, and signing up for civilian training programs.

We need to be clear that decent people can be manipulated into helping leftists, since their method is deception. What one sees, in case after case after case of Leninist subversion, is the skillful use of lies to get peoples temporary allegiance, which is then betrayed the moment it becomes tactically expedient. Leninism is nihilism, which is evil, which is the Big Lie. There is no moral order underpinning it. There is no effort to accomplish any good. There is no effort to abolish poverty, address injustices, or foster human potential. It is purely and entirely a project of hatred and violence.

One should not assume, then, that otherwise innocent people could not be used as unwitting agents in larger plans. This is clearly conspiratorial, but modern history is little but the history of conspiracy. The horrors in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, and other nations were the result of somnolescent spells cast by perfidious magicians, walking in the darkness, and calling the world to join them in their public moral suicides.

I am going to insert 3-4 thought blocs in here.

In some respects, this blog represents an effort to reconcile not just “conservative” and “liberal” approaches to improving the world, which was my original thought, but also an effort to show that respect for science is consistent with spirtuality; that intellect and emotion require one another to operate properly; that compassion untempered by prudent ruthlessness is damaging; that truth can never exist unmixed with error in a time-based system; and that identity is never a final thing.

A couple nights ago I was in a motel room in Indianpolis–a cheap one which needed a printed warning about noise, doing drugs, and sneaking extra people in the room–and I found myself dreaming someone elses life. I was a young black man, getting locked up for the first time. I felt the sadness, the resignation, the almost inevitability of it; the getting through, the moments of small triumph, and final release.

One can certainly psychoanalyze dreams. Some warrant it. In my view, though, imprints can be left on the world that endure, and they can be picked up. This metaphysical question is less interesting, though, than this: who was I, when I was him? Was I him, me, or someone else? I know these questions pop up a fair amount on this blog. They interest me.

William James, who I will refer to again as easily the most underrated mind produced by the American nation, talked of consciousness as continuous. He felt this was the most useful way of thinking of it, even though we have no way of knowing we were not just placed in a two day trance and our memory removed; or kidnapped by space aliens and our memory eradicated by trauma.

When you sleep, who are you when you do not dream? You are dead, are you not, for all intents and purposes? But you don’t know it. This would be, I suppose, a consolation for those who think death is final: you’ve practiced it many times, and only vanity would compel mourning.

What I wanted to propose, though, is thought I had a while back, and decided to insert here. This is a sort of thought experience, a thought movie, with different scenes, changes of milieu [my God, I am a nerd].

As I have said now quite a few times, I think of thoughts as machines. I see them floating in a stream. If consciousness is a river, thoughts are places you can disembark (from your boat, let us say, although you are the water in the river too) and walk around. They are fixed, and their approximate operation rarely changes. Machines don’t really repair themselves. Once they exist, they tend to operate within narrow limits until they break. And even then, MOST of the machine is still intact.

The brain, the physical brain–which I do not consider the same as the mind, which I think transmits through the physical brain–is a machine. It is a relatively uncreative machine, which has as its major function sorting. It places things in categories. Edward de Bono’s whole career, in some respects, can be seen as prefigured in his book “The Mechanism of Mind“.

The point I wanted to make here is that consciousness, per se, exists as a background to thinking. Thoughts are evanescent things, and emotions are a sort of thought too. This is certainly not original to me–it is an essential element in some forms, perhaps all forms, of Hindu philosophy. I am thinking here of the Samkhya philosophy that is paired with Yogic philosophy. They posit that your “self” is composed of an immortal soul whose sole attribute is consciousness, and “attibutes”, which are material and perishable, and which contain all the personally distinguishing traits we think of as us.

And how unique are any of us, really? Is our identity not largely a function of the people around us? Is this not in part the reason solitude is painful, that it is harder to know who we are, and what to do?

Life is change, and no path can be straight which is not crooked (this is borrowed from Chuang Tze) and if the self is conflated with a mechanical structure–a fixed pattern of thought–then you can’t bend when the road does.

This is the point made in the first line of the “Tao Te Ching”: the path which can be named is not the eternal path. Nothing with fixed attributes can be hewn to.

Few thoughts for a Saturn-day morning.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil.”

This is a funny phrase, is it not? Yes, we can justify evil on the basis that without the possibility of error we could have no free will, and no moral autonomy, but why would a just God LEAD people into temptation? Can we not find it well enough on our own?

One of the things it seems to me is often missing from Christian ceremony is an understanding that Christ himself likely had a very abundant and often expressed, mischievous sense of humor.

What MIGHT have been going on here was a sort of inside joke, in which he is asking of God not to serenade him down the pathways he likes to go down anyway.

Again, why would a just God do that?

Let’s talk about karma, by means of getting to that. There is this seemingly common-sensical view of the South Asian (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism I think and Nestorian Christianity) notion of the wheel of reincarnation that bad karma is when bad things happen to you, and good karma when good things happen to you. You are born a male Brahmin if you did good things in that past, and a “foot” (Shudra) or lower if you did bad things. For us Americans, we have bad luck if we were bad people, and good luck if we were good. John Lennon had a song “Instant Karma”, and one reads about “burning off karma” in places smelling of patchouli.

But need this be the case? If the task is learning, then is there any better teacher than difficulty? For those who want to learn about life, can you get any “luckier” than to be forced to endure hard times? The stronger the will, the more learning is possible. Thus, the very strong willed ought, logically, to want the most trouble.

But you can’t go seek trouble and derive the benefits from it. It has to come to you.

What I think Christ was talking about here was something like this: “look, God, I know there’s a truck getting ready to smash into me. I accept that, it is what it is. But can you take that smile off your face? Seriously.”

What is the primal temptation, as I have framed it, and as He might have? Self pity. Is it not reasonable for him–psychologically healthy for him, as a non-masochist–to at least try and petition his way out of the trouble he knew was coming? And failing that, to at least ask that he not be tested as much as he knew was possible.

It could be reframed: please lead me not to my trial, but deliver me from its necessity.

He knew that was impossible. But I can’t help but wonder if he thought encouraging others to pray the same might not at some point help. And I can’t help but think he had a little silent grin when he did it. He wasn’t afraid. He loved life. Troubles only exist when they are there. For those who live well, they are distant both when they are in the future, and when they are in the past. “Take no thought of the morrow; sufficient unto the day are the evils therein.”

This may well be lousy psychology, and is almost certainly unorthodox–and certainly certainly lousy on some accounts–theology, but there you go. That’s what I do. I may slap myself in the forehead in the morning and delete it. I may add to it. Who knows?

Latest Krugman piece, I think. The New York Times gets no money from me. I’m not sure they get much from anyone else. We have a local leftist rag that I have literally had access to for free for some six weeks, but reading it invariably makes me feel stupider. In general the NYT has the same effect. It temporarily deducts IQ points since they so consistently post such patent nonsense that I have to suspend my normal rational orientation to get into their world.

Anyway, here Krugman points out that Republicans have not been very good historically at cutting budgets. He’s right, of course. His seeming implication is that Democrats are basically like Republicans in this regard. To the extent this is true, this is precisely what is BAD about them. He does not support the point that spending cuts are bad through such idiotic equivalency. We are going bankrupt quickly. This is the point that matters.

Then he makes this for him routine point that “Slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is a recipe for slower economic growth”. This, to put it bluntly, is stupid. The reason we are not growing is because the people who create jobs, for people who pay taxes–and whose growth expands the corporate tax base (hint, hint, not the government)–are AFRAID. They are afraid of Socialism, and the tax increases that everyone knows MUST come at some point, coupled with the massive governmental fecundity that has attended the reign of our Rabbit Lord. He’s sort of like Bill Clinton, but in his case he’s never seen a bureaucracy he didn’t want to dip his stick in to, so that all sorts of agencies get spun off. They are, after all, so cute.

The question is not that the government has to increase income–taxes–at some point. It is that every time we have done that in the past, government spending has risen to keep pace. More than keep pace. WE HAVE TO STOP SPENDING MONEY WE DON’T HAVE, THEN REDUCE THE SIZE OF OUR GOVERNMENT TO A HEALTHY LEVEL. This will facilitate economic growth, the alleviation of poverty, and help us avoid bankruptcy (although in my view we are too far along for less than drastic measures; that is another discussion).

Then he gets into healthcare. Unclever person that he is–and I have no patience for people in positions of influence who peddle snake oil that DOES affect in damaging ways the lives of the poor, the sick and the hungry–he seems utterly unable to assign a cause to healthcare cost increases. It is not greed. It is increased use. I deal with this in a piece simple enough even he would grasp it, if he chose to: Healthcare in ten paragraphs.

As far as the temporary entitlement increase Obama funded disingenuously through the Stimulus, and which is not being renewed by the Republicans: Krugman, why do you have to be so dishonest? Yes, I know that hungry children is a great theme, but really: have you and your ilk created anything but a permanently dysfunctional segment of our society? Can anyone of even the most robustly optimistic disposition see anything positive developing in the near, middle, or long term of the communities where these handouts are apparently important, absent economic growth?

The actual reality here, is that the spike in spending on “Single mothers nursing children destined to fail” was always supposed to be temporary. They said it was temporary then; now it is being treated as some sort of latent principle of the universe. This is what leftists do. They claim they only want a little, then they take a lot.

“Single mothers nursing children destined to fail” is a harsh phrase. As I ponder it, it is quite accurate. Krugman doesn’t care about the lives of the poor. You know he has a nice brownstone somewhere, or Park Ave. suite, or country home.

He doesn’t care about the messes leftists like him leave behind in cities like Detroit, Washington D.C., Chicago, or Phillie. He doesn’t care about the aggregate of suffering. As long as the money keeps flowing, the votes will keep flowing back. It’s an ebb and flow that enriches Democrat politicians, while ruining the lives in advance of the not-yet-born.

Edit: some of the ill humor removed.

I propose we christen the demonstrators in Wisconsin–many of them no doubt bussed in from out of State on the more or less direct orders of Obama–the “pro-bureaucracy movement”. It sounds a lot like democracy, but of course you can’t call what they are doing “pro-democracy”. They are, after all, a movement specifically working to thwart the will of a legislature (and governor, if I’m not mistaken) just sworn in a month ago after a fair election.

They are pro-government protesters–they just represent the parts that are never ratified by the electorate, and who in most years get everything they demand.