Author: White Whale

The largest projects come from the blankest slates.

This can be read several ways.

The study which some of us were anticipating some two years ago is finally coming out: https://www.ae911truth.org/news/544-building-7-study-to-be-released-september-3-i-need-your-help-to-spread-it-far-and-wide

This study, done by a highly qualified professor in the most relevant field of forensic structural engineering, shows beyond any doubt that Tower 7, at least, was brought down by structural failures which could only have been caused by carefully timed and coordinated explosive charges.  It looked like a controlled demolition, to all eyes, and that is what it was.

We were lied to, in other words. And as I have been saying for some years, if Tower 7 came down that way, there is no reason not to suppose likewise for Towers 1 and 2.  In my view–and I seem to be the only one saying this–United 93 was supposed to crash into Tower 7.  Three plane crashes, three structural failures, all of which were guaranteed, by the timing of it all, to be seen live by hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.  A PsyOp to make everything else look small.

Me being me, me being a low trust individual who looks every gift horse in the mouth, and has great trouble trusting nearly everyone, I have to wonder about the timing of this thing.  I’ve been looking at a link for well over a year saying that in early 2018, when we were expecting an already delayed study, that they just weren’t sure how long it would take.

Me being me, I have to wonder if the murder of Jeffrey Epstein finally instilled a sense of urgency.  I have to wonder if they were worried about what sort of shitstorm they would set off by more or less proving 9/11 was the larger conspiracy some of us have been arguing it to be for some years.

Here is my take on all this: if the bastards win, no distance is far enough.  You can’t hide.  You can’t propitiate them with anything but abject and cringe inducing self abasement.  You can’t survive with dignity, and if you try and keep your dignity, you will not survive.  If the Good Guys (and Gals) don’t win this battle, here, now, then when all is lost, whatever words you chose to hide, whatever information you chose to conceal, will not help you in the least.  In Fascistic regimes of the sort the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world are trying to bring about (while no doubt lying about it to all, most importantly to themselves) you don’t need to even be guilty to be punished.  Suspicion is enough.  Not jumping high enough when they say jump is enough.

So Leroy Hulsey, perhaps, finally did this math.  Perhaps he finally accepted the existence of something most reasonably termed a Deep State.

Maybe he just finished the study.  I don’t know.  But I doubt it.  This announcement came out of nowhere.  I think he’s been sitting on the finished study for something like a year, and just now mustered the courage to publish it.

If so, kudos to him.  It takes balls to expose oneself to the world, to the slings and arrows of outrageous confusion, to the cynics, to the takers, to the biters and scratchers and haters.

But courage is the only thing that makes life bearable, to me.  Without courage, there is no hope.  Without courage, light can never enter the room, and pleasant breezes never lighten the atmosphere.

I renewed my monthly donations to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.  They are making slow progress, but progress nonetheless.  They convinced a fire district in New York to demand a new investigation.  My hope, though, is that this new study will be granted the attention it eminently merits.

I think unacknowledged confusion becomes rigidity.  To remain loose, you need to be able to say “I don’t know” on a pretty regular basis.  You need to remember you are guessing, that we all are guessing, and that past successes are no guarantee of future ones.

In important respects, this is the malady of the present day Left in America, the relics and residue of the 1960’s.  They were so sure they were right.  They were so sure that building a new world just required implementing simple ideas that were so OBVIOUS.

And in their hearts, they are bitterly disappointed.   And they blame us, the conservatives, precisely because most of them suspect, somewhere deep in their being, that we were right.  They realize that the family is not a dispensible non-necessity, that shared religious faith is vitally important, that love of country orients people in a direction of meaningfulness and sense of personal relevance and belonging.

All the plastic, shiny, tokens of “alterity”, of counter to our culture: most of them did more harm than good.  Yes, we are a consumer society which does a very poor job of squaring the tenuousness and shortness of our lives with the decisions we actually make.  There were and remain valid critiques, but none of this is easy or obvious.  It is all very confusing and strange. 

All of these people need to become younger than they were in the 60’s to grow up.  And the people who actually are young need to forget everything they think they know.

I’m watching this show on Amazon Prime, drinking, and bawling my eyes out about Levi, the guy who died.  I guess I always make it about me.  I want to be like the people who sacrifice for others.  I want to be someone who makes a difference.

I think often of Captain Starros in “Thin Red Line”, where he says “the hardest part is not knowing if you are making a difference.”  You try, you do your best, but sometimes, that makes no difference at all.

I feel so blind.  I feel like the world is filled with curtain covered stages, where nothing is shown at the outset, and nothing is what it seems.  I have to undergo this endless amount of guessing, trying, failing, learning, failing, then learning more, failing again,  then perhaps one day succeeding, because I have propitiated the gods with my pain.

Put another way, I don’t feel so bad, but am remembering the beauty in human beings.  I am such an asshole, so often.  I don’t mean to be, but it just hurts so fucking much being me.

I’ll get past this.  I know I will.  It’s just a matter of time and suffering.  And that’s something I know how to do.

There are so many good people, so many heroes.  We all need to remember them, and forget the fucking assholes who teach us that nothing is nothing and that’s all we have or ever can aspire to.

I’m prepared, I think, to give my life for my work.  I don’t honestly know how much else I can offer.

I try so hard, so often, to view life as simple, as something oriented around simple pleasures, and fun, and laughing.  I don’t think it is my personal destiny to be able to do that, although I don’t begrudge it to others.

Some part of me wants to die charging a machine gun nest, but the other part realizes my work involves a similar energy, but no outward death at all.  I just have to deal with the slings and arrows.

What a fascinating, terrible thing this life is.  I would not miss it for the world.

Is this a good principle or not?  Is it in the middle?  Do I need to ask you at lunch in your middle school?

NEVER LET A PRINCIPLE GET IN THE WAY OF A PERSON.

See the person, then the principle, then the principle again. Then the person again.  It’s a dance, where balance and proportion win, if you are well adjusted.

How does this play out over time?  I can’t see.  I’m a bit drunk.

Personally, I deal with all sorts of people just fine.  I had a very good discussion tonight with a lesbian couple about a variety of topics. They were very likable, and I hope to see them again.  I like Camille Paglia a lot, but she identifies, I think, as a man, without doing so theatrically and in your face publicly.  It’s just what she feels.

Last night I was drinking in a black bar. One or two were angry.  Not with me, but with life.  Life can kick you in the balls sometimes, black or white.  Black people emote differently than white people, as a very general, perhaps racist rule.  Personally, I have always had vastly more fun with black folks, starting with a trip to Speakeasy in Philadelphia with a Haitian I knew some time in the mid 1980’s.

We all need this back and forth so much.  Whites need blacks, in so many ways, but blacks also need whites, in some ways. I would say whites benefit from blacks more than blacks benefit from whites, but this is pointing out, effectively, that Leftist cant is completely irrelevant and useless.

There is always something you have not seen, with your emotional eye. Great, real dawns are in you. Hang in there, and keep the faith. Sometimes staying alive is the best you can do, and this is always enough.

For all intents and purposes, the Hindus particularly have long argued that we live in Maya, which could be translated “virtual reality”.

What if we all squid creatures living in an intelligent soup, taking bets on how quickly we can enter then escape the game? Wake up, you win. The faster you do it, or perhaps the more style you bring to it, the better.

Brain interfaces, though: those are LOST style points. The part that sees will never touch a computer. This is the wrong direction.

The path to God has not become shorter in response to our decadence. Nor has technology made it more efficient.

Can you imagine yourself as a Nazi?  Being young, and enthusiastic about Hitler?

I’m asking myself that question while watching the documentary on Leni Riefenstahl “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (it may be, and probably should be the the other way around.)

Most of those close to Hitler never really said their piece to any cameras before they died, and certainly not 50 years after the war, not that I know of, not outside of a war crimes tribunal.

It’s really interesting seeing how she want from a dancer (by today’s standards, I might add, a pretty bad one; no callback for her from Alvin Ailey), to a rock climber, scaling steep rock faces barefoot with no rope on camera, and surviving literal avalanches on film, to watching Hitler at a rally and finding him on the lectern, and in person, “hypnotizing”.  He cast a spell, in her view, and of course many, many people have said that.

She’s a nice old lady in this film, who was really a strong woman, and proto-feminist.  That’s precisely why Hitler liked her: she was constantly doing dangerous, difficult things.  Goebbels apparently, on her account, wanted her for his mistress.  This sounds plausible, since he did eventually have an affair with another German actress. Goebbel’s diary says she went out with them socially, regularly, but as she says, he WAS the master of lies.

But I keep hitting pause on the film.  I keep looking at the storm troopers, at Hitler, and trying to grasp how such a monstrous thing happens.

If you will pardon the word, I think the Germans of 1933 felt like the n—–rs of Europe, and Hitler promised redemption.  If I could put the whole thing in one phrase, as succinctly as I can, I think that is what I would say.  Where there was shame, loss, economic hardship, and many real war wounds from WW1–from starvation, from combat, from loss of loved ones, from overwork–he promised a ready path to not just recovery, but getting back at all the bastards who put them there.

You have to screw your brain into this mindset, to get how all that happened.

I have long made lists of films I want to watch.  It was on Netflix, but I cancelled my Netflix DVD account after they made that awful film about the Central Park Five.  So I use a combination of the library, and just buying the films outright.  This one I bought, as VHS.

But apparently I’m going, now through a list from when I watched, I think, the Sophie Scholl movie.  I get a lot of ideas from the previews.  In any event, I watched Night and Fog last week, by Alain Desnais, which ANYONE who wants to call the detention camps on our border “concentration camps” needs to watch.  It’s short, only perhaps 35 minutes, and well worth the time.

I watched Nanking, which I think is a must see for most people, and certainly anyone who has never heard about what happened there.  Watching it, it occurred to me that there is no equivalent to that in any war our soldiers have ever fought.  We have never been rapists.  We have never been mass murderers for the fun of it.  We have never committed the sorts of crimes nearly every other nation on Earth has committed, and particularly the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Russians, the Turks–actually, the list is pretty much every nation on Earth.  Britain, I’m not finding anything, other than the OBVIOUS fact that they felt the need to invade nearly every fucking nation on Earth, with all the death from battle and starvation that implies.

Eye of Vichy is on the list also, about German propaganda in occupied France.

Propaganda is a hugely important topic.  When anyone is GENUINELY talking about truly fake news, like CNN, like MSNBC, like the New York Times, they are talking about propaganda.  Characteristically, the propaganda organs started the meme that everyone else was propaganda.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Jacques Ellul, as I commented likely 5-10 years ago, wrote a masterpiece on it, which is properly translated PropagandaS.  There are different sorts.  I considered for a time writing a long piece on propaganda like the others on my Goodness Movement website, but abandoned it, I think, for lack of energy.  It’s a huge topic.  I do think I’ve quoted him at length though here from time to time.

But here is the point I would make: nobody does anything which makes no sense to them.  If you want to understand them, therefore, you have to understand their logic, their premises, their “facts”.  This is the only reliable path to understanding, and I will stipulate as an absolute principle that when we are dealing with human behavior, there are no real mysteries.  This is cop out.  Everything is comprehensible, even if odious, even if foreign to our every instinct.

Ponder, as another example, the practice in some mountain areas of Pakistan of gang raping women who are believed to have committed sexual indiscretions.  There is a logic to it, likely a sinister logic, which relies on repressed sexual instincts, a cultural conditioning which views women as objects to be owned, and some traditions which stem from a thousand or more years ago.  Who knows how common incest is in such places?  Who could protest, who could protect the girls (and boys, for that matter, although that seems more an Afghani thing).

Human evil is something to be understood, fought, and eventually teased out of all human societies.  The worst mistake you can make, though, is to think you know all you need to know, and that the solution is simple.  It is never simple.  Nothing is simple in dealing with most deep forms of human behavior.  Trauma is not simple.  Lust is not simple.

[Edit: I wandered around quite a bit here.  Beer or two, but mostly just flowing from one idea to another.  This thread is my mind on a daily basis.]

I don’t think silly little routines are that silly for most of us, if they are not harmful, and if they reliably produce a positive feeling.

For years, where I used to live, my kids and I would make an X on the door when we left.  One of my kids started it, and we kept it up.

One of my daughters, when I dropped her off at her mom’s house, she would wave and say goodbye, and I would pretend not to notice.  Then she would do it a second time, and I would say goodbye, I love you.  We did this every time for perhaps ten years.  It was a routine.

You could look at this and say it is fully arbitrary, which it is, which indeed most human rules of social engagement are, to at least some extent.  Suits are arbitrary, and could just as easily be karate gi’s, or for that matter even dresses.  Men could wear dresses, and women suits. Dresses, then, would be masculine, and suits feminine.  Those who point out it could easily be one way versus another are right, in some sense.

But we all are wired to want consistency.  We are wired to want patterns in our existence.  It would bother a lot of people if you changed Christmas to July, and American Fuck You Britain Day to December 25th.  Or 23rd, just to fully fuck with the system.

People with OCD take this too far, but could you not see a parallel between a person washing their hands repeatedly and a bird building a nest, one twig at a time? I suspect we all have the wiring for OCD, and that in small doses all of us find it gratifying.

This is the nature of ritual.  I took a class in college with a guy named Frits Staal, who wrote a book on ritual (and the Agnicayana which I mentioned somewhere not too long ago) called “Rules without Meaning”.

What I would argue is that the meaning derives precisely from regularity and predictability.  Walter Cronkite, for example, was a soothing presence for many years.  No matter what the news was, there he was to tell about it.  He was a fixture, something regular.

Catholic Mass is no different.  Despite all the revelations about not just pedophile priests, but a Church which more or less wittingly, consciously allowed them to commit hundred more crimes AFTER they had been identified, the vast bulk of those termed the “faithful” continue to come every Saturday night or Sunday, to receive the Eucharist, to sing the hymns, to perform the ceremony.

In a world of randomness, ritual creates order, or at least seeming order.  It is perhaps one of our most important bulwarks against it.  I would argue ritual is actually more important than belief.

Which, in turn, makes me think of the Bridge over the River Kwai. Alec Guinness in effect creates a religion of his bridge.  He is its chief Prophet.

And here is a larger point, I intended to make several days ago before some bright shiny object (best line from Third Rock from the Sun) distracted me:

The Beatniks, then later the hippies, the “counter-culture” of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and beyond, really really thought that creating a new culture would be easy.  All we had to do is all drop acid, or all get hip.  All they really needed to do was love the world and nature and Vishnu and Hari Krishna and Buddha and a revamped Jesus Christ and all would be well.  The squares would all become wheels.

In the only truly interesting passages in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” Hunter S. Thompson talks about this, how he and the people around him in the first half of the 60’s really thought that they didn’t need to do anything, that this cosmic, holy shift would just HAPPEN.

When it didn’t happen, all of them started drifting apart, as groups, and within their own psyches.  The old Hunter S. probably never forgave the younger Hunter S. his naivete.

But cultures are like evolving projects where every passing person leaves some little thing, and the whole thing grows, slowly, unevenly, and completely irrationally, but where at all times there are ideas, and themes, and special places and times, which all of us can root ourselves in.  The Hippie Culture/counter-culture had none of that.  They have Woodstock, where everybody was high for 3 days, utterly unprepared for the basics of life, and where most of the people who were there can’t remember most of it.

They have no Christmas.  They have no First Communion.

And to be clear, the French Revolutionaries tried to create all that.  They created new festivals, a new calendar, new ways of addressing each other.  None of it worked, because it was inorganic.  It was unconnected to the past.  So they tried to force people to accept it, through violence.  In effect, this was the policy of Pol Pot, too, who wanted to simply kill everyone who wasn’t on board with everything new beginning in Year One.

Civilizations need time to grow.  They need solid seeds, and they need time.  And they need trust.  In all these revolutionary projects. they are asking literally everyone to abandon what they know, in favor of what some borderline or actual sociopath with zero people skills or empathy thinks they should embrace.

From Burke onward, I think all intelligent people have recognized that cultural change happens from within.  What was, is turned in a new direction, but without getting rid of the old.  This is the essence of Conservatism, as I understand it: you do not reject change, but you simply do not accept the need to fully separate from, to build walls against, the past.

Take the  Civil War monuments.  OBVIOUSLY they are not hurting anyone.  Smart people look at them and learn from them.  That was a nasty, long, vicious war.  Americans killing Americans, and the blacks not all that much better at the end than the beginning, and a generation of skill, intelligence and talent killed particularly in the South.

All Americans could look at these monuments, at Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, and remember and realize the perils of abandoning dialogue, and embracing violence.  We can remember that that war seemed easy from BOTH SIDES.  The South seemed to think they would have us licked in a month, and on the Union side only Winfield Scott seems to have understood that Richmond was much farther than 50 miles (or whatever it was) from Washington.  The route to Richmond began in Mississippi.  The war would be long.  He knew that, because he was a man of immense intelligence.

Once violence starts, it is so hard to stop.  This is what I think all conservatives see, or at least should see.  Sure, you can pop that little sissy with the big mouth.  Then what?  There are no easy enemies in developed countries filled with educated, skilled people.  There are no easy wars among roughly equal enemies.  We don’t want to be shooting each other in the streets, and if I had to guess, I would suspect the Leftists have an advantage on the cyber side, which is a very important terrain of battle, perhaps critical, although of course we have a lot of veterans with skills in this area.

I guess what I am saying, is we can study HISTORY, what actually happened.  We can look at people who were happy one moment war broke out, and burnt out shells 4 years later.  We can look at prosperous communities that were struggling to feed themselves after the fire of war came through.

We can say: they were not so very different from us, were they?  We all think more of ourselves than we probably should.  It’s most likely adaptive in most contexts.  But where violence is concerned, look, look, and look again.  “Violence is the last recourse of an exhausted mind” is a quote a friend of mine once shared.  This quote was apparently a favorite of his father, who was Mafia.  Even the Mafia would prefer intimidation, or bribery. Or both.  Because they are SMART.  No smart person goes to violence as anything but the last possible alternative.  Asimov’s version, which I think I recall correctly some four decades after reading it, is “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”.

OK: this last little rant is off topic, but given how hard Democrats–foolishly, for all the reasons I just mentioned–seem to be wanting a civil war of some sort or other, I thought this all worth saying.  They are dressing up in all black like Italian Fascists.  They are carrying clubs, wearing helmets.  They are attacking random people.  As groups, these Antifa gangs could be rolled over by equal groups of veterans in a heartbeat, but in many places the government seems to be on their side.  All of these things should give thoughtful people pause.

When it goes to violence, if it goes to violence, some genuinely good, deep, important part of our national soul will have suffered a deep wound, and none of us who ACTUALLY love this country can or should countenance this lightly or easily. It’s an ugly tragedy, if it comes to that.  It’s a major loss.