Monthly Archives: April 2012

Being Blessed

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We each study the world outside of ourselves and the others who inhabit it with a careful eye. We hold in our mind  a stick. It is with this thing that we measure ourselves and use as a point of comparison with those who live beyond us.  Some are smarter, stronger, richer, prettier or more popular and in the spectrum of things it matters not except with respect to that stick we hold in our mind. This stick could be short or long, thin or fat and when it comes down to the point it is practically useless as a tool of measurement except in that it provides data. This raw data drawn from the point of comparison must be interpreted and here in lies the catch.

The stick is constructed of materials found in a great dark place, swampy and fetid it is that space that all people go to find the stick they will use to measure their lives and value with.  Its is there among the decaying good deeds, rotten best intentions and slippery and poisonous expectations that we may find this stick.  It is a permanent leaning into the dark and that is a weight we must deal with.

We can choose to interpret our data darkly or lightly and these methods of study can be simple or complex in the extreme. These things, these structures of thought are based on assumptions and definitions. We can choose assumptions, definitions, or reasons that are self-centered, picked on, singled out, lonely hopeless things and in that way they blind us.  They leave us living in an evil world where everyone is out to get us, against us and that we are alone.  We can also chose the opposite. Generally people don’t like to choose the opposite, being hated and picked on and facing a cruel world has a seductive quality like a cigarette or a gun.  It feels good and it is self reinforcing. In this way we chose to believe the worst of the hearts and minds of our fellow human beings. This is a choice about a thing of which we can know nothing, the heart and mind of another human being, even our selves is a thing we can know very little or nothing about. The greater world beyond is much the same, just because a reason exists doesn’t mean you’ll ever know or understand it. This is a thing that is unfathomable and in order to believe you must make a leap. You could choose to leap into the darkness or into the light and once the leap is made it will change the way the very world looks sounds and feels to you.

I once heard a person, on the radio say, that as your attitude improves and becomes more positive than good things will appear for you…much like magic. This idea is not correct inherently, things don’t appear and disappear like magic. They were always there and the only thing that has changed is a person’s ability to see these good things. This is what being blessed is about.

Being Blessed is difficult as so many that share this world with us are dark and play to the dark…after all its good for sales. This darkness wants to creep back into your heart and extinguish the light there much like a lonely candle faced with a hurricane. It takes effort and can be seen as a form of prayer, it is the idea that everyday there are wonders in the world there for anyone with the determination and fortitude to simply see. Much like the knight of faith from Kierkegaard’s work FEAR AND TREMBLING you live in the glory of a gentle kind world that, even in your worse times, offers simple gifts and blessings, gentle caresses of a smooth cool breeze just before dawn in the shadow world before the sun first shows is light.

Being Blessed is simply walking in Blessedness, seeing the beauty and kindness and relishing it as for many of us it is only small things that we are given. So throw away the stick and be in the moment and walk in the blessings you are given, like rain on a dry day, a smile from a strange, a gentle word, a precious moment of time or a shared song or meal.

For beginnings let me show you how…

Say to yourself or to the air the following words: IAM BLESSED…  You have to finish the sentence.  I’ll give you a few examples from my own existence.

I AM BLESSED By A wife that has taught me that a thing can be good even though it isn’t new.

I AM BLESSED by a wife that taught me that treasures can be found in the bottom of a dumpster.

I AM BLESSED By knowing to take pride in the work of my hands and how I am rather than my money and prestige.

I AM BLESSED as I have learned not to resent other people for decisions I have made

I AM BLESSED By being able to learn to cook from scratch, by myself.

I AM BLESSED by making my first action in any situation, hesitation.

I AM BLESSED by the kindness of strangers.

I AM BlESSED that my health isn’t worse.

I AM BLESSED with a wife I can spend eternity with.

I AM BLESSED with a sense of child like wonder in the world I live, that spreads from birds on the wing to rude squirrels and the colorful leaves of fall.

I AM BLESSED like the simple pansy, I live without pain or toil and am resilient from the most crushing blow.

I AM BLESSED with plenty of space in my heart to love many people.

I AM BLESSED that my enemies are far fewer than my friends.

Time Tax?

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Stress test, reserve currency, inflation, deflation, the rising dollar, the falling dollar, trade gap, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives, credit default swaps, auction based mortgage-backed securities, junk bonds, too big to fail, federal debt, federal deficit, currency wars, unemployment rate, gold index, mixed equity markets, blah, blah, blah ,blather.  It’s enough to drive a person to drink.  What the hell does it all mean?  Is it just me or does most of all this babble sound contradictory and if so then why, is it all part of some fast talking con?  They got me to the point of confusing up for down and there are people out there screaming about either communism or Islam trying to take us over.  Most wouldn’t know a communist if one bit them  on the ass.  As far as Islam taking over the united states…well, I find that hard to believe.

Of course it only takes one, right, like some how a Iman has some god like power to bend the world to his word.  That’s why they’re getting the crap blown out of them why we speak, why so many in the Moslem world feel the free west is trying to take them over.  It’s all one paranoid drama of the power of the jihad.  Well, I’m nuts and I find it hard to believe.  It’s almost a distraction added on top of a distraction.  Smoke before smoke rendering the obvious invisible.  This entire journey began for me some several years ago, I want to say about 2003 when there were some intense deflationary fears being pandered about on the radio.  How does a currency gaining value make it hard for companies and countries to pay back their debt?  It is not like they owe more dollars.  Just that the dollars they owe have greater buying power.  That one hurt my brain and I have been thinking on it for some time.

I could run through the long and twisted train of thought, memory and study to brought me to the conclusion of the strange journey started with the phrase deflation but that would be an untenable mess being that I am schizophrenic, for real and at times the leaps my mind takes are hard even for me to follow.  So instead I’ll try it this way.

First, money, the definition my wife Meta gave to me all the way back around 1990 while we both were busy loosing our grip.  Money is a marker, whether paper, plastic or electronic for a certain apportionment of resources.  So when you hold a dollar in your hand it is worth what ever a dollar is worth in goods and services.  It has no other value than that, anymore.  Goods and services, for example, could be gold, food, a beer, some one to cook your food, some one to clean your house, a portion of a movie, since a dollar isn’t worth what it use to be, a few minutes in a hotel room, a small part of a car rental and so on.  The advice of experts, doctors, accounts, lawyers school teachers also falls in this category.  So pretty much what ever you imagine could be considered either a good or a service.

Second, inflation, which is the relative devaluation of the marker or the dollar.  It’s always relative to some time in the past.  Inflation is with respect to said past and its impact is felt today.  This is the effective worth in goods or services of the dollar, the marker.  The marker itself has no value of its own.  Back when currency was fixed or backed by a commodity it could be said that its value was more tangible but alas the last great depression took place while a hard currency was in force so that tangible value was about as easy to prove as the existence of little men from mars, apparently.

Thirdly and finally for the time being, money is issued on the authority of some government.  A government’s reason for being often is the production of currency, so even if the Federal Reserve is not part of the Government despite its unfortunate and misleading name, it still prints or creates currency on the authority of the government.  The idea of creating money out of thin air does not alone belong to private banks.  Governments do it too and wars have been fought over it far more often than religion so get over it already.  There are things we can change and things e cannot, the things we cannot we have to learn to live with.

This leads me to the first question, what’s your most precious asset, or possession?

I hear a lot of answers to this question as different as people.  Some say money or Property, others education or career, yet others say wife, children, girl or boy friend or family and yet still some say time.  Some response is probably popping into your head as you read this, this list is far larger than what I have here.  We always have to start at the beginning and in this story the beginning starts with money.  For the sake of this conversation it doesn’t matter how you go about obtaining money.  You could be independent or fixed, you could be rich, own a business, relieve social security, be a professional (Doctor, lawyer,teacher), labor, receive food stamps or general relief…even be homeless, everything runs on money, everybody thinks about it, worries about, makes love to it and plans for it.  For the sake of example will say we know this laborer, he works the grill at McDonald’s here in Ohio for $8,00 an hour.  I know this sounds like a story problem but fear not there’ll be no quiz at the end.  BOB is just a fictitious example for the sake of illustration.

BOB, as I previously indicated, makes $8.00 an hour and works 30 hours a week for a grand total of $240 dollars a week before taxes.  Believe me, everybody pays taxes of some sort even the homeless when they have money.  BOB gets paid every two weeks of 26 times a year and each check, assuming he is a loyal worker and doesn’t miss a day, which he doesn’t, is $480 dollars before taxes or gross.  BOB gets one week of a year for vacation paid.  We start with year one, and at the beginning of that year BOB Pays $2.00 for a loaf of bread, $200 dollars for his monthly share of the rent, $2.00 a pound for hamburger, $2.00 a bunch for broccoli or a pound of carrots and $1.00 a pound for potatoes.  Or he works, before taxes, 15 minutes for a loaf of bread, gallon of gas, for a pound of hamburger, a bunch of broccoli or a pound of carrots, 7 and 1/2 minutes for a pound of potatoes and 25 hours to rent the roof over his head.  I’m leaving taxes out of the equation so that the math will remain clear.  It is simpler to see and works better as an example.  So I have equated goods and services that BOB consumes or needs to the time it takes for him to earn said goods or services as well as money.

Bob lives his life happily until one april when he realizes that gas is $3.00 a gallon, a loaf of bread is $2.25 a loaf and hamburger is $2.50 a pound.  The rest of the prices in money have also increased along the same lines but BOB’s wage has remained constant.  That means that he now works 22.5 minutes for a gallon of gasoline when he use to work 15 minutes. almost 17 minutes for a loaf of bread when he use to work 15 and almost 19 minutes for a pound of hamburger when he also use to work 15.  There are a lot of reasons or factors that can affect the value of goods and services, spike in demand, production short fall, scarcity, accident, war. weather and not the least although never clearly understood by peons such as myself, Inflation.  Inflation, I’ve heard all kinds of language around this topic, the economy is in danger of heating up, the economy is sluggish, quantitative easing, market instability, commodity short falls, Blah, blah.  Blah is what most people hear and to an extent that’s what they’re expected to hear.  You see those who profit the most from the system are counting on the fact that Americans or any other population would rather be stupid and lazy because any other answer takes too much work.  Another term for inflation is devaluation, money is like any other commodity, the more of it there is the less its worth.

Fiscal policy is almost entirely at the will of the federal reserve, even the federal government has to borrow from them and ask their permission to increase the monetary supply.  The federal Reserve does not have some little Dude hanging out in a basement some where printing money.  That generally has little to do with the monetary supply.  When the fed wants to increase the supply of money in the system the lower the prime lending rate and when they want to decrease the monetary supply they increase the prime lending rate thus affecting the value of the currency.  Lowering the interest rate encourages borrowing and raising it discourages borrowing but in any case every single bill in the system had interest attached to it…Even the Money poor BOB makes flipping burgers.  When he collects his check he is being charged interest to use the money he has earned and this is reflected in the rate of inflation, or the devaluation of currency directly in the prices he pays for things he needs.  By definition this is usury.  usury is not the interest on the loan, usury is interest for the right to use the money when you earn it from work, investments, inventions or get it from the government even in food stamps.

Again:  usury:  The act of charging interest for the right to use money even if you earned or inherited it, not to be confused with interest on a loan.  The interest is reflected through the rate of inflation or the devaluation of the currency most directly reflected by the rising prices in good and services most immediately noticed in the cost of food.

There are people out there that might read this and begin to mumble about national sovereignty, the U,N the IMF and anti-american conspiracies.  This is an american conspiracy as the united states was founded on a nearly unique set of principles that allowed this to happen.  These principal revolve around the concept of the free market system.  inherently there is absolutely nothing wrong with the free market system but it evolved in a way that the founding fathers could not have anticipated.  The lack of regulation, thanks to Mr. Adam Smith with his invisible hand, allowed individuals to mass considerable wealth by the gilded age of the 1890s.  Anyone who says they don’t want to be incredibly wealthy is cracked.  Take my word on it since I am cracked.  Its natural, and its natural to want more and to reduce any impediment to that course.  This is globalization, or the new world order and these concepts shouldn’t be stuck with any moral component as it’s not a moral issue.  It’s an ethical one.

We need to go back to when J.P Morgan and other’s including the bank of england, but mostly American industrialists offered to finance the gold or silver the federal government would need to institute a hard currency.  In this case the currency would be fixed by a set amount of gold or silver.  In essence the federal government found themselves in the same position that any mortgage holder may be in now with a debt load that is greater than the value of their house.  The government found themselves in hock to a cartel of industrialists including people like Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt along with others like Rhodes, that’s John Cecil.  By 1913 the last incarnation of the federal reserve, but not the first was instituted as a way of collecting interest on this debt.  This is not a conspiracy as  nothing illegal was done and B. it is public knowledge.  All you dude and dudettes out there who don’t want to read, study or take courses in college outside your major are unsuspecting, unwitting dupes.  They will tell you everything and are counting on the fact that you don’t really want to know.  This idea is an american idea and every time a republican or democrat screams that we need fewer regulations they are unwittingly or in full knowledge perpetuating this agenda.  The fed doesn’t give a crap one way or the other about how any Nation runs its domestic or foreign policy as long as it doesn’t interfere with the act of doing business.  That’s the new world order and we all are going to have to learn not only how to live with it but how to thrive.

American’s have a serious persecution complex which is not unusual of the empires domestic populations over the last several hundred years.  Banking and finance have become a global cartel.  In other words we are not alone.  Imagine if you could slip a tax into a population without them ever knowing you’re doing it but that tax is limited to just one country.  You know that you’d be drooling over turning this hidden tax into a global one, I know I would be.

Things start to get really interesting around 1950 give or take a couple of years.  There is a set of odd events going on at the same time.  Firstly, the dollar takes the place of the pound as the global reserve currency.  It’s a fancy way of saying, the coin of the realm.  This also signals the end of the english empire and its junior statue in the new empire.  Churchill dreamed of the day that the Anglo-American world police force would protect the world from tyranny with the atom bomb as their principal weapon.  Roosevelt had little respect for what her refered to as the toothless lion and felt the best alliance would probably have been with the USSR.  He died long before that became a possibility and foreign policy changed.  Secondly was the united states decision under Eisenhower to become permanently militarised.  This accompanied the largest arms build up in the world to this day.  Every one has heard the statistic, The U.S, spends more on weapons than the EU Nato china and russia combined.  Nuclear weapons are expensive, first in developing and building them and after maintaining them which opened up a huge flow of cash to the industrial sector.  Washington warned about the danger of standing armies but why listen to him, he’s old and a mason.  Thirdly and most bizarrely the UFO Crash happened at Roswell.  Whether or not a UFO crashed at Roswell doesn’t matter in this case, it scared some and fascinated others and in some cases was a driver for the defense budget.  More strangely some of the serious diggers, researchers, the kind of people who once they suspect something they’ll dig until the starve with a determination I have personally only seen in two people are now much more interested in whether or not there are alien bodies on Ice in the White house game room then they are in the foreign policy apparatus.  In this way they have provided the government with a bullet proof jacket as it were and a reason for secrecy.  The case that the american people can’t handle the truth in the UFO Invasion case then they can’t handle it in most any case.  It just better if they don’t know.  There is an interesting case made in the three days of the condor, (Movie), along with the condent report plus the UFO story provides possibly the best narrative for why things are they way they are.  It is hard for individuals to deal with the less kind more predatory parts of themselves so a good story is needed to explain away our part in the horrors of the world around us.

What ever.

The U.S. dollar passes as accepted currency anywhere on the planet.  That’s a bonus for americans plus the Dollar is the currency of trade for strategic resources.  Fuel, gold, silver, industrial metals sometimes even food are often traded in dollars, many cases only in dollars.  This means that nations that wish to buy, lets say oil, or uranium, need dollars and in order to get dollars they need to buy U.S. government notes which they do with goods.  The minute the purchase is made the value of the dollar drops, just like BOB the burger flipper.  Deregulation of banking on a global scale has been going on now since Regan…Remember this one “We better get our act together before the alien’s get here?”  Not all banking systems have been deregulated yet, there are some hold outs but it is only a matter of time.  There is too much money to be made. This is where we are at now.  The dollar will remain the world currency as long as we keep the U.N. in tow and maintain our nuclear arsenal.  The world knows we’ve used them before and we will use them again.  I know it, I listen to my fellow citizens talk.  I have seen members of my family drooling over the newest piece of ordnance displayed on the T.V. and the common response still bouncing around…”We’ll pave them.  This is a precarious position.  Poverty can do things to the way people think.

We find in the end that to live as well as we did a year ago we have to work a little bit more harder and leisure time is coming harder and harder to find.  The thing most fascinating about inflation is that you really have to pay attention to notice it, its hidden and in the end the actual effect is the amount of time you need to dedicate to produce the same result.  This drain on time is always on the increase but because of the pace of our lives we rarily have the time, energy or attention to notice it.  This is happening on a global scale and as much as the situation in part is less planning and more happenstance or human nature it would be unjust to arm up and run screaming off into the darkness.

Remember every time you have to deal with a computer menu over the telephone or do your customer service over the internet also with a computer that there was once a person paid to render that service and now you do it for the corporation, which ever corporation, for free.  That takes time.  It is the essence of the notion of a time tax.

most of these ideas are not my own so I don’t take credit for them but I also am unable to document them.  It’s just the way I do things, I spend time listening thinking and sometimes reading.  If you think I’m full of it fine but don’t be afraid to do you reasearch.  you want top call me a name?  Leave a comment…just keep it clean…this is a kid friendly site.  All I did after all was assemble the ideas.

Remember…

Be blessed.