Author: White Whale

I don’t do
Revelation much but

I do it all the time.

Most of us are
like that.

We need to add this to our lexicon of phrases.

New York went from 6,300 COVID-19 deaths to 10,000 by adding 3,700 “presumed”, but untested, cases.  No doubt someone thought 10,000 was a more impressive number for the tabloids.  And they are all tabloids, now, aren’t they?

Nationally, we went from 30,000–which presumably included the higher New York number–to 40,000, through the same magic of assumptions.

Neil Ferguson, in his latest–as of what, three weeks ago now?–said that 10,000 of the 20,000 Brits he expected to die were going to die of something anyway in the next year.  Should those numbers really be added?  No, I would argue they should not.  We should not be counting straws, but hay bales.

And the biggest hay bale, right now, is the one being loaded by our sundry governments onto the backs of the already poor, the already miserable, the already marginal.

If this thing does produce a spike in divorces–as I think many expect–that will create yet more economic trouble, and yet more troubled and unhappy children who in turn will create a yet more troubled and unhappy society.  Water flows downhill, and troubles tend to multiply.

Whatever else it is, a marriage is a useful economic arrangement, a division of both physical and emotional labor.  The latter falls disproportionately in most cases on women, but it does not diminish if and when they find themselves single mothers.  On the contrary, everything is compounded.

I judge people continually.  That should be obvious.  But I also don’t judge them.  As a general rule, I understand why people do what they do, and consider it an immutable rule that nobody does anything, ever, which is not emotionally logical to them at that time, which does not seem to make sense.

Life is complicated, and freedom can often seem a curse.  But freedom is the space within which problems can be corrected, over some time domain, after much trying and much failing. It all has value.

To live in a box is to be condemned never to get much larger.  Much of humanity, for much of history, has lived in boxes.  We need to protect the prairies and mountains of human potential.

This phrase popped in my head.  I think it well describes the attitude of the Left towards whatever demographic they happen to be kissing up to at that moment to keep the path open to the riches and power they crave and live for.

I really think a lot of State and local governments, and the police forces through which they exert direct control of the masses, are losing a lot of goodwill right now.  It is a quantity they have assumed and counted on for some time, but if this thing goes on much longer, guns will be met with guns.

This is not my recommendation or hope.  We are in my view far from needing to shoot anyone over anything.

I am just saying that never before in American history have people been prevented from working, prevented from earning a living, and at that over such a trivial nuisance.  When the Spanish Flu hit, everyone KNEW it.  It got into nearly every life in America.  And even then nothing like this was attempted.  Bars were closed after 6pm, but left open during the day.  Businesses had restrictions, but not closure orders.  People have to eat, and they have to get paid to do that, and they have to work to do that.  This is not rocket science. 

This thing, by my count, has increased the April mortality rate in my State by 4%.  It was invisible in March, and will likely be invisible again by May.  For that, we are ruining tens of millions of lives.  Anger is inevitable, and need to be factored into all calculations.

And I will comment again, that the use of force eventually always produces an equal, opposite, and possibly superior reaction.  The use of force by extremist citizens will provoke violence by the government.  And vice versa.  Do we really want to live in a world where all the cops need to be looking over their shoulders all the time, even at people they once trusted, and who once trusted them?  Where people who once supported them now want to murder them?

That’s where we are heading, if things do not diverge rapidly from this disastrous course.

I am by nature mostly pro-cop, while recognizing that a percentage of them are no damn good, and that this is well known by all the people they work with.  But cops in general have not acquitted themselves all that well in this thing, most notably in California.  I read some Michigan cops are refusing to enforce some bans.  That’s good.  I would like to see more of that.

As I noted, I personally watched a young cop tell a young couple they couldn’t play tennis.  Stupidity flows downhill.  What makes societies work is local intelligence, local restraint, and the exercise at the ground level of common sense.

Anybody who is “just following orders” is doing no more or less than the Germans did under the Nazis, with much less justification.

Trump wants to take a reasonable, balanced approach, based on what I think most of us think is the bad advice of Anthony Fauci.  He’s understood Fauci would be fine locking most Americans in their basements at gunpoint for his own convenience, since Fauci seems to view the virus as his main interest, with people and their lives merely existing as distractions.

But Trump, like the rest of us, didn’t know what he didn’t know three weeks ago.  So he recommended people err on the side of caution.  Had he not, and had this thing blown up, he would have perhaps deserved some portion of the blame which is directed at him no matter what he does or says, or does not do, or does not say. Orange man bad daily, details to be announced as they are determined.

Here is the thing: Democrats are not just trying to take the opposite approach specifically, but in tone also.  Where Trump is trying to balance and moderate, they want to unbalance, and unmoderate.  They want a long term, draconian shut down enforced with the nastiest police they can find.

There are really three strands to balance: the disease itself, the proportionality and Constitutionality of the policy response, and the needs of ordinary people to be able to feed, clothe and house themselves with honest work.

Democrats have developed a monomaniacal focus on the first, and discarded the other two.  The forest may contain lions, tigers and bears, but they only count the lions.

How many times do Americans really need to see the contempt Democrats have for ordinary people, working ordinary jobs, making ordinary money, and living ordinary lives?  They have no USE for such people, especially if they are white, but it’s really not any better if they are black, latino, or Other.  There is no principle left.  There is no honest compassion left.

I will recall to your mind the hatred intellectuals everywhere have felt for the middle classes in all their countries.  What they wanted was warfare.  Warfare between a “working class” that didn’t even necessarily exist (Russia, Cambodia), and a power elite.  The bourgeoisie got in the way, because they were actually pretty comfortable.  This means they didn’t want to tear down the fabric of the society.  Since the intellectuals DID want to tear everything down, on the assumption that good things would happen in the aftermath of mass destruction, they hated, and still hate, the middle class.

Right now, they are calling people who just want to go back to work “right wing extremists”.  Ponder that.  Ponder that these are the same people who preach compassion, and who once claimed to care about the poor.  The poor are hurting the MOST right now.  But they don’t want them working.  They want them suffering.  If they can get good numbers of dead from black Americans, well that is Progress, right?

I am starting to wonder if the Left is not taking active joy in watching much of America suffer.  They hate most of us: that much has been clear for a long time.  And they hated America as a whole much more when we elected Donald Trump.

It really seems like many of them are feeling active Schadenfreude at people suffering from being shut in their homes, locked out of their jobs, cut off from any source of income, and being unable to pay their bills.  They very much want this whole shitshow to continue, as long as possible.

I really don’t think it’s just about the upcoming election, but payback for the last election.

None of these people should ever be let near the halls of power ever again.

It occurs to me to comment that the “Cultural War”–which I would argue is really a battle between Culture itself, and nihilistic barbarism and atavistic and pointless violence–is a war of attrition.

Yes, there have been major battles, like the Mapplethorpe thing.  But by and large, the planned and coordinated rivers of doubt wash away some small part more of our shared inheritance each and every day.  Every week.  Every month.  Every year.

The people fighting the battle consist on the one side people who simply want to preserve some form of the status quo, as they conceive it.  Possibly, they want to return to some other time they envision as more clear and more simple (which was usually also more abusive and less free).

Such people really want nothing more than to preserve some form of common sense, in the form of ideas like “if we want to help people born here it is not helpful to import millions more people who also need help.”  That’s not radical.  It’s not even controversial, if one is trying to think clearly.  It’s obvious.  It’s common sense.

On the other side, unfortunately, they have learned how to turn people into abusive, repetitive machines, who rat-a-tat the days propaganda relentlessly against any and all targets they see.  Marriage, family, the notion of biological gender, the sanctity of national boundaries, the value of the Constitution, the value of the concept of universal human rights, the heritage of free philosophical inquiry: all are on the chopping block.

It is really quite impossible to retain any normal sense of human dignity and restraint in the face of machine like abuse.  People get rigid, tribal. They contract.  They get angry, and act out, although so far in very, very few cases.  It’s the other side, trying to prod us with hot rods continually, which is heaping the abuse, and we who are taking it.

But absent some major development, it’s hard to see how common sense wins this battle.  The machines on the one side demand of us that we, too, become hard, rigid, unseeing, violent, brittle.  It’s a really horrible situation.

I don’t have an answer, at least for all of us.  I personally will likely be contracting soon somewhat from the public sphere, and focusing on my own indivisible and private reality.

Something large is going to give at some point.  In large measure,  it already has.  We are a decayed, decadent, stupid people, and I speak of most of the developed world, at least, not just the United States.  Most of us have been trained like obedient dogs to hearken to the words of “experts” and brook no disagreement from their orations and pronouncements from anyone.

This line of thought and feeling is a bit grim, but that’s how I feel at the moment.  Perhaps I will lighter in an hour or a day.  Or when Hillary Clinton is arrested and charged with as many felonies as she is CLEARLY guilty of.

I found this film interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5HcfVUYlo

You may also.  I certainly do not agree with each and every point, and key elements are completely undocumented, like Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed comment about consuming adrenochrome.

Here is the thing with conspiracy theory.  In the same way Mad Dog Mattis said you had to have a plan to kill everyone you meet, you need to have a plan to disbelieve everyone and everything you hear.  Be ready for it.  Be ready to call bullshit.  Always.  With everyone.

You can see a chain of 7 things, and believe numbers 1,4, 5 and 7.  Then add your own 8 and 9.

I was thinking about this the other day, and watching and reading very non-orthodox accounts of reality is a form of what I have from time to time called “paradigmatic flanking”.

Here is the thing: you need to know what consensus reality is.  This is what they call “education”.  But if you want to best approximate how reality actually works, you need to be willing to regularly hold up alternative patterns and see how they fit.  Some will fit beautifully.  For example, the idea that our souls survive death makes vastly more sense when one evaluates the SCIENTIFIC evidence than does the contrary hypothesis, which among other things requires us to believe in matter when our own scientists’ best guess is that matter does not exist in any formal and final way outside of consciousness, which then becomes logically the primary unit of reality.  In my understanding, this was John von Neuman’s conclusion, although like Feynman I don’t think he ever really troubled himself with the philosophical and even theological implications of his own work.

Consuming unorthodox ideas is really just a way of regularly reevaluating your own first assumptions.  As I said the other day, you really need to set aside time for this regularly.  If you are on the wrong road, you need to know it.  And if everything over time validates your road, then you can have increasing confidence in it.

Personally, when I look at the art work of the Podesta’s, then look how connected they are, it seems obvious something really sick is going on.   This is not rocket science.  If you look at the artwork at Comet Pizza, I believe you will see what I and everyone else who ACTUALLY looks at it sees.

And add to this the decision by Microsoft to use Marina Abramovic to hawk their VR platform, using occult appearing imagery.  This woman is famous for throwing parties focused around simulated cannibalism.  She is a more or less open Satanist, whose ceremonies involve pain and blood.

If you watch something like this film and conclude 90% of it is BS, then that means 10% was useful to you.  It is really an awkward and unjustifiable conceit of our system of education that most people watch films purporting to convey information and either accept 100% or none of it.

This is really a symptom that we don’t teach critical thinking any more.  Any educated person should be able to say yes, yes, no, yes, let me look that up.  That’s what I do.  If I find something interesting, I do more digging.  That’s the use of the internet as an information instrument, although I do wonder if institutional elites might not soon start disappearing things from the internet.  I was wondering yesterday if I might ought to buy a physical encyclopedia for that reason.

But for now, it seems to do the job reasonably well.

Think.  It is not illegal yet.

I really think that in the latter years of our lives, and when we die, what we remember is the little things.  The Sunday mornings sipping coffee with our loved ones.  Church, if it is a place where we feel calm and welcome.  Gardening.  Perhaps the wedding days of our sons and daughters, if they are happy.

One of the most pernicious things in our culture is that stronger experiences are to be valued at the expense of smaller, seemingly weaker experiences.  Like everything else, experience becomes a commodity, to be paid for and consumed.

It’s a cliche, but listen to it, perhaps for the first time: the best things in life are free.  The smell of morning coffee.  A light breeze on a beautiful morning.  The smile of someone you love.

We punish ourselves for more, more, more, but what we get for it is ephemeral and often completely non-existent.  I see many people who I really believe do things just to make other people jealous, just to be the person who did X, Y, or Z, took a bunch of selfies and pictures, then posted them on social media, all without FEELING ANY OF IT.

You cannot consume experience.  You have to participate.  You have to be present, not as a gulping hungry experience ogre, but as an emotionally present human being.  We really are small and weak, in  a cosmic sense.  We are not much.  But we are all we have, in these bodies, in this life.  It takes faith to be human.  And it takes time and patience.  And it takes a lot of courage, honest, deep courage.  None of us know where this wild ride is going.  It helps, though, if you can handle ups and downs and hard lefts and rights with faith and sang froid.

I really think the point of life is this: to FEEL life within us, and around us.  Nothing less, nothing more.  To FEEL ALIVE.  To feel energy flowing through us.

The more I study it, the more I feel the writings of Tarthang Tulku in the Kum Nye part of his work ALONE constitute a better body of thought and practice than those of any church I know of, including Buddhism itself, although I’m sure he himself would demur on that last point.  It’s all there.  How to live, how to manifest and nurture the feeling of being alive, how to bring that crackling alert energy into our daily lives, making all moments unique and memorable, and all at no cost.

I suppose the inevitability of this should have been obvious to me, but the smarter I get the dumber the world seems.  We are a bunch of chickens, and fools, doing what we were told for no reasons other than fear and unimaginativeness.  The rebellious experimentation of the 60’s has given way to a drab, dull thirst for conformity and herd membership.

Ayn Rand, in her talk on the topic, really captured the fact that nothing REALLY new and interesting happened at Woodstock.  It was a bunch of emotionally underdeveloped yet emotionally greedy adolescents seeking experiences they muted rather than amplified by generalized drug use and hedonism.  They did not invent anything new.

A society worthy of the name, a culture worthy of the name, has boundaries, expectations, and a system of growth.  The moment of the moon landing was really something memorable.  It was a moment of earned shared pride.  Hard work was done, and effort expended.  Imagination was called into action and tempered with specific planning.

The people who put our men on the moon died with strong positive memories.  I am quite sure of that.  And I think most of the people who were at Woodstock died bitter and regretful.  Not all.  Some grew up.

But from a strategic life perspective, I would offer Kum Nye as a means of developing emotional rationality, of learning about, and HARNESSING the patent power of emotion and feeling and instinct, without subordinating ones reason to them.  Emotions provide the power, and reason the destination.  It’s a strong combination.

I read through these books, and am astonished that there is no other system I know of which comes CLOSE to the variety and depth of the exercises Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche has created.  Not within an order of magnitude. 

I don’t know why it is not better known.  People are stupid, I guess. 

Putting more effort into it, I would say there is nothing sexy about it, and there are no immediate results.  If you go to Asia you will not find monks doing this work.  There is nothing “authentic” about it.  It happens in California in a couple places, and small centers in a handful of other countries.  That’s it.

I will teach it locally one day.  I am slowly, slowly calming down and, as I tell people, becoming sane.  What I mean by sane perhaps differs from what most people mean.  In my case, it is the resolution of things which have haunted me since my brain evolved enough to form memories.  And it is happening.  It takes time.