Author: White Whale

Many years ago, as a part of a long story there is no need to relate, I was forced to resign from a sales job because I was going to get fired.  There is nothing unusual in this, but the reality was that my Gross Profit numbers were on par with everyone else who was doing just fine.  I was in the middle of the pack, doing something that was quite difficult, and in which most people would have failed completely.  I am very stubborn, so I gutted it out.

The problem was that my REVENUE numbers were low. I was making more money on each sale than anyone else, because of the somewhat different nature of what I sold.

Now, at the time I attributed this to the pigheadedness of the CEO, but as I thought about it, it seems more likely that, yes, he was and is pigheaded, but also that he was trying to sell the company, and you can massage numbers much more effectively if you start from a higher number.

Accounting magic is all about making costs higher, or lower, depending on what you are trying to do.  If you are trying to sell a company, you want higher profits, so that means lower costs.  If you are trying to reduce taxes, you do the opposite.

Here is the thing: costs can be moved around, but top line amounts–how much you deposit in the bank–cannot.

The relevance to this at the present is COVID-19 numbers.  If only 600,000 people died in this country each year, and ALL OF THEM died last year from COVID-19, that would be huge.

But the background is 3 million or so.  600,000, which is where I think we are officially, is one fifth of that.  1 death in five, we are told, has been from COVID-19.

But with that background, could the real number not be 50,000?  I am going to propose that it is.  After all is said and done, I am going to go on record with what I admit is a guess that only about 50,000 Americans TRULY died of COVID-19, which is to say who would be alive today if they had not encountered this particular virus.

When you consider that, as I think was and is the case, that the average age of death for a long time was the average age of death from all causes, yes, you can of course infer that old people are more likely to die from it,

But you can ALSO infer that many of the deaths are misattributed.  They were going to die anyway.  They become free costs, floating around on the balance sheet.  Why not CLAIM they died of COVID-19, when you don’t have a clue if that is true or not?

This whole thing amounts to an accounting fraud of truly staggering proportions, which has involved most hospitals in the country, most doctors who saw COVID patients, and ultimately most insurers, which particularly includes the Medicare and Medicaid systems, which is to say taxpayers and their children (who as future taxpayers will be left with much of the bill).

With a background of 3 million anything is possible.  Any scam can be perpetrated.  To be sure, I personally believe COVID-19 EXISTS, that it is a thing, but it would not even have to EXIST for a fraud like this to happen.  Every respiratory case of any sort could be attributed to it, every accident, every diabetic coma: literally anything that kills anyone could be put into that ledger.

After all, WHO IS LOOKING?  Are there auditors out there, asking how much of this is patent bullshit?  Not that I know of.  Everyone with a job to do has scampered out of the room like a cockroach when you turn the light on, or ants when you overturn a stump.  It’s unbelievable, the sheer VOLUME–as in both loudness and amount–of cowardice and willful stupidity and incompetence and complicity that we have seen, and continue to see.

None of this should have been possible.  Substantially ALL of our institutions failed us, top to bottom and side to side.

It his me the other day that the worst perpetrators of “blaxploitation” are black politicians.  They pander to blacks rhetorically, but never make their lives better.  But they use the PERCEPTION that they are the good people, the friends, the allies, to win elections and then use those offices to get rich.  If you do two or three tours of the House, or 1 tour of the Senate, you will by some magical process be millions of dollars richer.  We know this.  But we tolerate it. Book deals for money losing books.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars for $500 speeches.  There are a hundred gimmicks.  Low interest loans, shares in businesses, insider information, etc. etc.

But Clarence Thomas has never hurt any black people.  He didn’t use them to get ahead.  He didn’t use them to get himself noticed or rich.

No, Spike Lee and people like him did that.  They are the real Uncle Tom’s who have forged close relationships with the white world to deliver access by rich white politicians to black audiences; to guarantee their loyalty; and who profit on the backs of the on-going problems which persist, generation after generation, uncorrected and largely unaltered, other than a table scrap of free iPhones or something like that every few years.

To my mind, faithless “friends” are vastly more dangerous than true enemies.  And the indifferent are vastly preferable to both.

One: Poverty teaches you to emphasize what you have, ideally.  Wealth teaches you to value what you don’t.  Obviously, poverty often just makes people miserable, but very few Americans would know this, since almost none of us are going hungry, crapping in holes in the ground, unable to find safe water poor.  But still, I think lowering expectations often works, and that children in very poor countries still laugh loudly, and their parents still love them very much.

Two: You cannot forgive on behalf of other people.  People who were IN the Holocaust–who were interned or displaced or who lost friends and family, homes and places–can forgive the Nazis.  People who were not, cannot.  This in my view is why the Left is so unforgiving: almost NO ONE who is “fighting for” some cause or people, is fighting for their OWN cause.  It is white people “fighting” for black people, rich people “fighting” for poor people.

Three: Juneteenth is not about empowering blacks.  It is about attacking whites.  It celebrates a day on which black people were released FROM white people, BY other white people.  They did not contribute to their own liberation in any meaningful way, and were the more or less passive recipients of it.  What this holiday does do is remind people that slavery was once practiced in this country, as it has been (and often still is) in much of the rest of the world.

Here is the thing: a great many current white Americans have ancestors on both sides of their family tree who came over after 1865.  Moreover, slaves were only owned in the South, and only by the richest 1% or so.  We also had 14 fewer States.

This makes the likelihood that ANY particular white person even has ANCESTORS that owned slaves vanishingly unlikely, and even then someone alive today cannot be expected to bear any moral responsibility for something that ended 150 years ago.

You know whose family owned slaves?  Kamala Harris family, or so I read.  But no one will ever care, will they?

And I will emphasize that these lockdowns and lockouts hurt the black community, of all groups, arguably the worse.  About a third of all small businesses went under overall, but some 40% of black owned businesses went under.

What fucking good, in that world, does a new holiday do?  None.  It exists for propaganda and indoctrination purposes.

If you summarize this as the “American blacks are dumb” argument, you’ve captured it nicely and succinctly.

As far as I know, all African nations require voter id of some sort in their elections.  Why?  To prevent fraud.  OBVIOUSLY.

What would save more black lives: a concerted effort to eliminate Vitamin D deficiency or getting rid of every police department in every majority black area?

We KNOW that persons of color suffer very disproportionately from Vitamin D deficiency.  Their skin is calibrated to tropical sun.  They get the right amount in Uganda and the Congo, presumably.

But if you live in Cleveland, and are black, you are most likely deficient from October through May.

And we KNOW that being D deficient leads to ALL SORTS of bad health outcomes.  You are more likely to die from all infectious diseases, your bones are weaker, and you are most likely more depressed.

And obviously getting rid of law enforcement in places where laws are being broken leads to more laws being broken.  It leads to innocent blacks being victimized at much higher rates by guilty blacks.  If 97% of a community is honest, and 3% is not, you have a complete shit show without cops, as Minneapolis and other places are discovering.

So let me ask a slightly more difficult question: what would HELP black folks more, educating about Vitamin D and providing free or subsidized supplements (maybe with Magnesium), or increasing the size of the Juneteenth Celebration?

That’s not much harder, is it?

I will post on Juneteenth later.

I will actually post my train of thought, too.  I will remind you that one of my “spirit animals” is a white dog which is very friendly, but very curious and with zero attention span (the attention is the whale).

I was thinking about my bar idea, and remembered meeting a black guy in a bar who told me he hung out at a bar in Alabama that both had illegal gambling and allowed drunk patrons to sleep in the  parking lot, which was allowed since it was private property.  I think the local cops were also on the take.

But I was like, THAT is kind of my idea.  Not as good, but in the ballpark.  It’s such an obvious idea somebody somewhere has thought of it and done it.

And then I remember he told me his doctor told him he was Vitamin D deficient.  He had been feeling tired and lacking in energy, and the doctor told to take 50,000 iu once a week for a month.  He had been find in south Florida, but even just moving to Alabama he got less sun.

Then: black people and Vitamin D.

And this is a de facto racial difference.  Living the exact same lives, white and black people will suffer from deficiencies at different rates.

And think about this too: do you not just KNOW that, in the same way Democrats are preventing needed educational reforms from happening, that many would also find ways to oppose a Vitamin D campaign since the racial differences in health outcomes are something they use for their political goals?  I feel certain of it.  They won’t say it, obviously, but they don’t want improvement.  They want reliable misery that can be funneled into power, prestige and private wealth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbc_v1xBAU

I found this amusing.  I actually showed it to my kids, who thought it was funny.  And they went to a high school with a lot of Chinese and Indian kids, who ALSO thought Peters was hilarious.

What I logged on to say, though, is that there actually IS some wisdom in this.  My reasoning is this:  Shame is a product of trauma.  And people without shame are not fully socialized.  This means mild trauma is virtually a necessity in some respects.

Look at Asian cultures, the stereotypically “wise” ones.  Mild physical abuse is very common.  In Tibet, in the monasteries, Alexandra David Neel reported that in the public gatherings she witnessed, there was a monk whose job was enforcing order, and he carried a stick he did not hesitate to use to beat anyone misbehaving.

What got me onto this was the opposite thought: that people so abused that they have no way NOT to feel shame are doomed to lives of failure.  Maybe not absolutely: they may be fantastically successful by all reasonable standards.  But to FEELING like failures.  There have been a number of CEO’s of successful companies who killed themselves at the height of their success.  That is unredeemed shame.  They hoped that major success would relieve it, but it didn’t.

As one recent example, the CEO of Texas Roadhouse–you most likely have one in your community–got a bad case of tinnitus from COVID, and blew his brains out.  I’ve had tinnitus all my life.  I don’t remember not having it.  You don’t kill yourself over tinnitus.  Tinnitus was just the last little straw that pushed someone who was on the edge off into the abyss.  He could have bought any therapy he wanted.  He could have done Ayahuasca down in Peru.  He could have spent a year travelling around the world.  He had options.  But in the end, he was a prisoner, most likely of a shame whose genesis he could not remember, which was just a part of his life and always had been.  He probably could not do anything right, despite having started and being CEO of a very large, very successful corporation, which is the American Dream we are raised to believe in.

Many such people, of course, become criminals.  Because why not?  The shame is no worse, or at least not much worse.

So you need to spread the emotions, like rolling out bread.  You need on the one side a capacity for shame, but not too much.  On the other, you need a capacity for earned happiness and sense of accomplishment.  Between those two poles, you can live a good life.

And of course on the positive side what is needed is positive attunement, which amounts to effective love.  The child needs BOTH to be loved unconditionally and conditionally.  I actually told both my kids I loved them for two reasons: they were my kids, and they were loveable.  I told the first one would still hold if they became, for a period of time, unlovable in their teens.  Fortunately, that never happened.

I will add, too, though, that many of what have become cliches we think we have “progressed” beyond actually had and retain wisdom in them.  I read potato salad has something called Resistant Starch in it, that is good for you.  Who knew?  Our grandparents knew.  They understood the importance of pickles, apples, and vegetables too.

And remember “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”?  No child who is getting spanked believes that.

But that is arguably the most attuned means of delivering the medicine of shame.  On the one hand you are putting into the physical body of the child a negative association with undesirable behavior, which will support good habits until the kid figures out the reasons for the rules.  And on the other, you are pointing out that the need to deliver this medicine does not mitigate your love for them.  And obviously physical abuse delivered out of rage and unhealthy emotionality on the part of the parent is always harmful.

Indeed, though, arguably mild corporal punishment might perhaps be something we reintroduce.  I have often seen the meme of some blue haired kid screaming something incoherent in support of idiotic and socially damaging politics, which says “this kid was not spanked.  You know it, and I know it.”  That’s not verbatim, but it’s close in spirit.

And of course establishing good habits is most of it.  Once you have done that, you won’t feel shame very much at all, if ever.  No need to, if you are living according to your own standards, and have no underling unresolved fight/flight/shame energy.

And I have commented for some time in various discussions and dispute on the internet that the people yelling at me and insulting me lack shame.  They lack a sense of remorse and guilt when they make strong claims they can’t back up, and don’t try to back up.

The way I was raised, if you want to argue something, and you are educated, then there is a process.  You state your facts.  You offer your logical extrapolations and conclusions based on those facts.  To dispute an argument, then, involves attacking either the facts or the logic.  Most of the disputants I meet–virtually ALL of them, and this number by now is certainly in the hundreds, and most likely the thousands–feel no need whatever to justify themselves, or to base their objections to my arguments in anything other than ad hominem and what amounts to the Bandwagon argument, which is the argument from conformity, that because everyone they know believes something, it must be true.

These people need shame.  They were most likely in most cases raised like the kid Ryan Russell Peters mentioned.  They were little demons, who got away with everything, who were given everything, and who view the world with contempt now.  They feel no need to justify themselves.  Their very existence is their justification.

Now obviously some of these kids are Republicans, if they grew up that way.  They are not principled, but habitual Republicans.  But Leftism is their more obvious natural home, particularly if they were raised without religion.  Christianity, too, teaches shame.

So I would like to introduce this nuance, that we need shame in the world.  Without it, our social world will dissolve.  What the best means of delivering this medicine is, what the best dose is, I won’t pretend to be able to say.  Less than what I got, but more than many kids nowadays get.

I personally think dancing is highly therapeutic, however you do it.  As far as I know it’s not well studied, if at all, but I know I’ve read African survivors of severe traumas saying dancing with their people did more than small armies of “trauma experts”.

And I don’t know how the rest of the world is, but it seems around here MOST–certainly not all, but a whole lot–of younger folks are not into dancing.  We have no dance clubs, and few places where much dancing goes on that would not be going on next to someones bar or table stool.

Me, I love it.  Some of my fondest memories of college are of Brazilian and African (Cabo Verde) dance parties that went on until the sun came up and everyone went out to breakfast.  Good times.

So get yourself a dance club on Amazon.

Pour lots of liquor and play great music that is not hip-hop (old school soul–James Brown and Johnnie Taylor certainly–disco, and a good mix of maybe Samba, Salsa, Soca, and jazz), then do a breathalyzer on everyone leaving when the State (Ordnung Ueber Alles) tells you people have to leave the bars and warm their beds.

Everyone who flunks EITHER has to have 1) a Designated Driver they can identify; 2) use a cab (yes, cab); or 3) sleep on a cot in a tent you provide out back.  Out back you have a little ad hoc bohemian community of drunks sleeping in tents.  You have bathrooms, water fountains with small amounts of electrolytes in them, and security guards who you have validated to be emotionally healthy, empathetic, caring people.

And when they wake up, you give them breakfast, if they can pay.  And if most of them can pay, you say fuck it for a few.  Everybody has breakfast together, hung over, but happy-ish.

That would be fun, wouldn’t it?  The Security guards keep the “sausages”–in a phrase I’ve heard in the last week, as in “sausage fest”–under wraps.  Everyone is safe.  Everyone can pass out in peace, puke in peace, pee in peace, and wake up to, in my preferred version, something like the Irish Breakfast, with suitable substitutions as options.  Not everyone is good with black pudding.

Hibiscus Tea and Yogurt.

Here is the thing: all of us–and by this, I mean ALL OF US–need to lose control sometimes.  We need spontaneity, craziness, letting it loose.

And when we do, we need reintegration.  And we need, OBVIOUSLY, to not hurt anyone when we go crazy.  If you are crazy, there needs to be someone in the area around you who is not.

I like to think I could pull something like this off at some point, but if one of you out there wants to lead the way, that will make easier for me eventually.  If not, well, I’m used to being the only one saying whatever it is I happen to be saying.

In Genesis, it is written that God looked at all he had made, and saw that it was good, and He rested.

To my mind, this is the foundation of everything positive in the world.  I will explain.

If it is truism that we mostly do things to either gain pleasure or avoid pain, it is also an underexamined premise, particularly with regard to the nuances of both.

There are short term, medium term, and long term pleasures, are there not?  We weigh the short term pleasure, say, of infidelity against the long term pain of divorce, or at least a guilty conscience.  So for long term pleasure, you need short and perhaps medium term relative pain.

Most of the best moments in life come from both the pleasure of an accomplishment that took a long time and a lot of effort, and from the daily smaller pleasures of personal balance and congruence, which depend, each day, on choosing a form of life likely to lead to long term felicity.

Here is my point: if you lack the capacity for positive experience, all this math goes out the window.  No matter what you do, how hard you work, how good you are, you never get a feeling of worthiness, and pleasure and earned and healthy self satisfaction, then there is NO REASON not to pursue short term pleasure.  That is at least reliable and concrete.  Getting drunk and having orgasms are undeniably enjoyable.

The basic model for happiness is love and work, as Freud put it.  That is one of the only things he said that I agree with fully.

And love of course IS work, isn’t it?  So basically all pleasure in life comes from work of various sorts.

But you can’t work ALL the time.  As I have said before, it is interesting to speculate how the Jews, as the Jews, survived roughly 2,000 years of being away from a land inseparable from their religion.  One of the factors, as I have argued on many occasions, is likely the Day of Rest.

A happy life is roughly work, work, work, work, work, work, rest.

But even that is hard to sustain if you cannot find pleasure in your work.  So many people I see–and I am one of them–mostly work out of fear of failure.  Or they work to make money so that people will respect them.  Or to get influence and power so people will respect them.

They work, in other words, out of anxiety, out of fear of loss, out of shame, out of incompleteness.  This is a bad long term strategy, and leads, in my view, to most of the damaging manias in the world.

You have to be able to work, and see that it is good.  You have to work and FEEL good, looking at what you have done.  And from time to time, you need to rest, and look around you and smell the flowers.

But all of this depends on the capacity for positive experience, for pleasure in what you have wrought, from satisfaction in what you have done.  You have to feel good at the end of an arduous expenditure of energy.

And it has been discovered, in fact, that happy people achieve more.  They get sick less.  They live longer.  All of this makes perfect sense.

And making your work an important part of your personal identity is both an engine of honest progress, AND a de facto expression of inner direction.  In my own view, that is the healthiest way to live.  We all do better together when each of us can do well alone.

Other Direction, in Riesman’s term, amounts to indulging an ambient anxiety that one is not good enough, and that only by matching others can one ever be good enough.  Positive feeling, in this case, is inverted: it becomes a daily avoidance of the bad feeling of being different.

And thus people become like schools of fish, changing direction at random continually, just because one did so, without really knowing why.

Where can you hang your hate in such a world? [note, that was a typo–I meant hat.  But I am going to call that a Freudian Addition, and riff on it.  In a world where you can never be yourself, are you not always frustrated?  And do you not then NEED an outlet for your frustration and nervous energy, and does that outlet not, by the defining rules of the system, need to be a target chosen by the collective?  And if you yourself are submerged in a collective, is it not easy to project on the rest of the world and assume they act in the same ways?]

Where can you do good work, see that it is good, and rest?  You can’t.  You won’t.  You are never you.  You are intermediated by the fluctuating whims of the Collective.

If politics is downstream from culture, culture in turn is downstream from individual health or psychopathology.

One way of putting the foundational premise of what is called Individualism (which has long seemed like a Socialist dig at something healthy, the way that Capitalism was a term invented by Marx as the black hat wearing villain in his cartoon opera) is that if we take care of the emotional health of each individual, the Collective will invariably also be healthy.

And conversely, a Collective consisting in extremely UNhealthy individuals can be expected to do JUST WHAT THE LEFT IS DOING TODAY.  They are neurotic messes, saying they don’t know what, and for reasons they can’t, in the end, articulate or justify.  And they know this, so they don’t even try.

And yes, neurotic is a bit passe.  I would like to bring it back.

It needs to be said that much of the naked propaganda spewing from our formerly credible “news” organizations may well literally be paid for.

Jeff Bezos, obviously, OWNS–lock, stock and barrel–the Washington Post.  But I have also read that Bill Gates buys shelf space too.  Why should we not assume China, and even North Korea, Iran, and everyone from the Australians, to the Ghanaians, to Indians, to Malaysians and anyone else with cash, is not paying for “news” to their liking?

Why should we not assume Gannett’s context is dictated by money, and not even the political biases we likely naively assume direct the bad reporting and censorship of most news organizations?

Maybe we have the cart and horse backwards.  Maybe the people who pay for everything only ALLOW the hiring of people ready and willing to say what they want them to say.  Maybe it is not that journalists as a group have a left wing lunatic bias, but that only such people who have such a bias can be hired IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And for that matter, we assume as a matter of course that Academia is Left Wing out of habit, because they lack useful life skills and thus want to create a world where words alone create beneficial outcomes.

But Universities run on money too, don’t they?  Their endowments come from rich people, and from corporations.  Why not assume that the string pullers–who get their power from money–are not consciously STEERING most universities in that direction?

Here is the thing: an omnipotent, ubiquitous government is in the INTERESTS of the power elite.  It is absolutely inconsequential–and perhaps even comically ironical–if they use the rhetoric of opposing large corporations in service of empowering them; or if they use the rhetoric of freedom to secure actual tyranny; or, obviously, if they use the rhetorics of compassion and tolerance and inclusion to secure the ENDS of cruelty, malice, radical intolerance, and radical exclusion to the point of concentration camps and even mass murder.

Words need not match reality.  This point is only not obvious to people so disconnected with effective action that words are all they have.  Words conjure ideas and ideas conjure action, but for anyone who lives ONLY to speak words, the outcome is always the words and ideas.  What happens to living, breathing human beings is fully invisible to them.