Awake

January 7^th, 2013

Indeed, your present condition is critical given your financial state of affairs.  But, over the last several miserable years, you have, believe it or not, awoken.

It is because of your misery that you began to write once again.  The last time you wrote anything of content on a regular basis was during your short breath of freedom traveling alone throughout Europe for over a year.  Remember that?  Remember…that was when you decided to become a landscape photographer?  That was when you picked your subject matter — the cascade volcanoes and the northwest coast.  What happened with that idea?  Yes, you did take some significant quality photographs with your large format camera and produced some fine prints, but that only lasted for a few years.  Eventually, you let yourself get swept up completely by the momentum–years rushed on by with the great wave.  You let yourself become numb and fell asleep.  Now it is time to begin the process of waking up.  Writing is a good sign that the sleeper has awoken.

You have also learned an important skill in the last year – surviving with very little.  You never were very good with money, credit, or debt, even when you were making big money.  The temptation to Live, when there was actually time to Live, over-powered any sense of restraint.  Not that you lived high off the hog.  Hell, all you did was enjoy eating out, traveling, paying for a house and car, golf, romance – of course that is all extra expense in addition to all the other shit that costs money to live “the dream”.  You were just doing what most people do that are riding with the momentum, except, you may have been a little more aware of how valuable the time to actually Live really was.  And, now that you have fallen from the crest of that momentum, you realize how insanely expensive it is to ride that wave and actually Live, both in terms of time and money.

Believe it or not, your current miserable job is also good for you.  You can actually see and feel the very base and nature of the wave and from where it draws its power.  You get to experience it firsthand — you and the other slaves that reluctantly perpetuate the momentum, with no benefits, and not enough money to live.  You can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel how much the human being is truly worth to the momentum.  In your previous high paying desk jobs, the pain and realization of your slavery, wasted time and energy, was masked by the thin veneer of sedation, contentment, and acceptance.  But now, when you are at work, there is no confusion…this is work…not a passion…not a career…not achievement…not fulfilling…not important…not important other than the fact one needs to engage with the momentum in some shape or form to be able to live.  The key difference is a clear, conscious break and divorce from any delusion that the momentum has anything to do with your passions, interests, or fulfillment.  The problem of course is…how do you get from living to Living and Becoming?

Piece Two (and what a “piece”…lol)

This piece, like Piece One… from Steppenwolf, didn’t really ring true until I was in my late twenties and through my thirties.  From the age of 0 to 20, my life was ideal…improving my mind through school and the university…and my body through athletics.  The world was wide open and dreams were to be had.  It wasn’t until I entered the adult world…the one that requires money making…that the below passage began to sing its heartfelt tune.

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“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless.  And whoever wants more and has got it in him — the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints — is a fool and a Don Quixote.  Good.  And it has been just the same for me, my friend.

 I was a gifted girl.  I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr.  And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough.  That is how things have gone with me.  For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself.  Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong-headed.  But that did not help me at all.  And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you.  And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been.  It was life and reality that were wrong.  It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money’s sake, or to become some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor.  

Perhaps the trouble with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual — but it was the same road.  Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it?  I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on.  You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today.  You have a dimension too many.  Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me.  Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours –”

Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf

Piece One

This is the first of five posts (pieces) that will provide some background for my critical thinking project, that once complete, may change the direction and content of this blog…and then again…it may not.  These background pieces are little snippets from a few authors that wrote works or pieces within their works that struck a deep chord within me…a chord that rung true…to me.  There are of course more authors and pieces, but these few suffice, for they hit on some of the big questions…and their thoughts…are also taken from other thoughts…that came before.

Now, we can all say that these pieces, which serve as foundations for my critical thinking, skew the process from the start.  But, this is who I am and how I view the world…for these few thoughts ring true to me…from what I have experienced, observed, and thought…from youth to the present.  These thoughts run deep within me and throughout me…like the blood in my veins…and cannot be extracted…without ripping out a piece of who I am.

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“Whereupon it occurred to me – so it is with every one.  Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs.  Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.  And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track.  Let no one think that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my personal misery.  But now that I have come so far, standing as I do on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretend to myself or to others that the machine still revolved for me and that I was still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world.”

Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf

Fools Gold

Forged from the dust of death-star fire into this ephemeral form

 

treading on the surface of an eternal bottomless ocean above and below

 

death perpetually circulating from all directions

 

You succumb to the myth that Gold is land, security, power, wealth

 

bow to the pirates and board their ship

to become a slave or yourself a pirate

 

You expend your death-star fire to swab the deck and man the oar

 

or lash the whip to bleed others into submission

 

You drink bottles and bottles of rum to numb the pain

 

of being whipped or doing the whipping

 

that you burn your precious death-star fire to make your masters rich

 

or man a ship with no direction other than to steal Gold from others

 

Mutiny will not alter the course as you are still on the same ship

 

different masters and slaves

seeking the same Gold for fools

 

Summon the courage from the depths

as the storm approaches and the sea boils with offended anger

 

return to where you began before you boarded the run away ship

 

Burn your precious death-star fire and pay homage to eternity

 

Swim man swim

 

or drown with a smile

Quiet Revolution

Form small groups of people consisting of a farmer, a hunter, a builder, an engineer concerned with the environment and intelligent design, a nurse, a plumber, an electrician, a scientist, an artist, a philosopher, a teacher, a cook, and those with other important skills and strong work ethics.  As a group, gather all your money, credit cards, loan documents, house keys, car keys, and walk together to the bank.  Throw all these things into a heap at the front door, but do not burn the pile for that is illegal.  Now, gather your driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, social security card, voter registration document, and toss them into a big box and ship it via the U.S. Postal Service to Washington DC.  Walk away together and find some unspoiled and unpopulated land.  Let the bankers, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the Wall Street insiders, the media complex, the marketeers, the leaders of mammoth businesses, and politicians play with their valueless papers while we begin anew and find a better way.  They may arrest us for occupying land we did not pay for, but they can’t take anything away from us since we gave them all we had that had any meaning or worth to them….and kept and preserved what has meaning to us.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Mankind only has two options.

Live by the cold, efficient, pure laws of nature and accept the consequences, or evolve into a cooperative, humane, and intelligent species that takes control of its own destiny.  The middle ground simply isn’t sustainable under our current constructs.

Extinction feeds off compromise.

Inflation — Fuse to the Debt Bomb

www.usdebtclock.org

This clock displayed in the above link (click it…it is very enlightening) calculates not just America’s federal public debt which is 15 trillion, but it also shows total debt including citizen debt, business debt, state and local debt, and other forms of debt like social security and medicare/medicaid.  The total debt of our country is approaching 57 trillion. Our GDP is only 15 trillion.  Do you mind telling me how our GDP will ever catch up to pay off 57 trillion?  Even if we liquidated all our assets we still couldn’t cover our liabilities.

Now, if you extrapolate the situation in America to Europe, the picture is the same.  world-debt-clock.html This clock only shows public debt relative to the countries GDP.  Look at the European countries relative to China and India.  Do you think China and India can bail out the western civilization?  Do you think they even care?  Shit, they have almost a third of the world population to take care of and don’t have the resources to bail out our bleeding asses.  But, when we implode they will also experience hell, but to lesser extent.  The changing of the guard is here.  Time to start teaching Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, and perhaps Spanish in the schools.  English, German, and French can become electives.

Inflation is here folks and it is going to get much worse.  And when inflation hits hard, the cat will be out of the bag.  Inflation is the fuse that will awaken the public to the Ponzi scheme that is paper money printed at will, debt issued at the push of a button, and the electronic casino that is the stock market; and the debt bomb will explode world-wide leading to chaos.  Greece is a prelude.  I am not alone in this perspective.  There is another way my friends for human beings to create our existence without money.  Just watch some little kids play a little league baseball game.

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”

Leo Tolstoy

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Henry Ford

“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is, perhaps, the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and un-mint the modern ledger-entry currency.”

Major L L B Angus.

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it… The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value —- zero.”

Voltaire

“I sincerely believe … that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large-scale.”

Thomas Jefferson

“Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”

Irving Fisher

“If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course,  essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.”

John Maynard Keynes

“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

George Washington

Wildly Free

One morning, I was driving on the freeway along with my fellow human beings.  I assume most of them were rushing to work fueled by oil, bills, wants, debt and compulsion.  I noticed a healthy Hawk perched on a cable above the freeway stoically staring at an open field.  I thought how wildly simple and free such a life would be.

Money Makes the World go Round

Contemplate this. 

All that humankind has created could have existed without the concept of money.  Money did not create what exists– man did. 

Now contemplate this. 

Imagine what mankind could have created had he not created money.

The “Human World” without Money, Debt, and Financial Institutions

When you look at the economic state of America, the former beacon upon a hill and economic dynamo, one cannot help but to muse about how the country has fallen so hard and so fast.  But rather than dive too deeply and get into facts and figures and economic / political theory, I want to get to the point and highlight what I think is the core problem — our creation of money, debt, and financial institutions. 

At some point in time, human civilization decided that money, pieces of paper and coins, could represent value and value created. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/history-money.html  Here is the first step we took into obscurity.  I find it very strange that a piece of paper or coin can accurately represent value.  Trade and barter made sense.  Give me your basket of fruit in exchange for my hunk of meat and we have a fair deal.  Imagine, if we could put a modern man back in time, and he was to offer a hunter a ten-dollar bill in exchange for a hunk of meat.  The hunter would look at the piece of paper and say, “what in the hell am I supposed to do with this?”  I have a broad question when it comes to assuming money has intrinsic worth.  How much money would it take to buy the sun, fresh rivers, a bountiful ocean, clean crisp air, and fertile soil?  These elements have immense value for they are the basis for life, yet we can’t put a monetary value on what they are worth – although I am sure there are some economists modeling out the worth of the elements to support the new green economy.  Good luck with those calculations. 

The next step into obscurity was the idea that the money supply could be increased or in current terms printed.  Hey, we are out of money so lets just print more.  Brilliant! There is a limited supply of gold, jewels, and goods and therefore one can make a reasonable leap of faith that these limited items could be linked in some shape or form to value.  But when you can simply print more money it obviously waters down the relationship between approximate value and true value.  At one point money was linked to the gold supply (gold standard), but apparently the powers that be didn’t like that restriction and elected to sever the relationship.  

But Man didn’t stop there.  He also came up with an even more entrepreneurial and innovative concept — the loan.  Why wait until you have earned enough money to buy this or that when you can have it today for a small monthly fee and the promise you will pay back the original amount some time in the future?  Finally, man capped it all off with the invention of financial markets.  Thus the invention of Wall Street and Investment “Bankstas”. Now you could print more money and take out a loan and then throw it all into the financial market and make more money without actually doing any work.  As long as you made a good guess where to invest your money you can hit the jack pot!.  And if your are connected and obtain inside information your chances to hit the jack pot increase.  And if you are a trader controlling huge funds and can move the market up or down with rumours or a touch of a button, your chances increase exponentially to make lots of money for doing nothing of value. 

Currently, vast amounts of money flow so fluidly and rapidly (thanks to electronic flows of money…yet another step into obsurity) through financial, business, and government institutions that nobody understands what is going on.  Watching the talking business heads on tv is a true comedy.  “Well, the Dow went down 100 points in the morning due to the debt crisis fears in Europe but rebounded in the afternoon because an article mentioned that China might step in to help stabilize Italy”.  The most comical aspect is that these talking heads  claim to understand what is going on with the economy and interpreting what is causing the stock market to go up and down on any given day probably make over six figures.  This leads me to my next point.

Money, which has a watered down assumed intrinsic worth as previously mentioned, flows rapidly to sources that we “perceive” to have value equal to that already inflated assumption of the intrinsic worth of money.  If our “perceived” value of the source receiving vast amounts of money is wrong, then we have really dug ourselves in a hole.  And I would argue that our perception of what is valuable is off-base in many cases.  From a big picture perspective, looking at the earth from space and then zooming in on our society, is a rookie NFL quarterback fresh out of college really worth $20 million?  I enjoy watching football especially college, but the amount of money we pay folks for hitting or throwing balls is out of line.  Is the latest and greatest reality star that has suddenly emerged from obscurity worth millions of dollars?  Those Jersey Shore celebs sure are valuable human beings.  I have watched the show a few times so I am guilty of increasing the net worth of these boneheads.  Is the hottest rap or pop star worth multi-million green backs?  I do think Rhianna is pretty hot.  Guilty again.

Jeff Skilling -- President Enron (currently in jail)

Was Jeff Skilling (Enron president) or Bernie Madoff ever worth the huge sums of money they earned through compensation and stock grants?  Do the top earning 20% of Americans really generate 84% of the value in America?  Are 40 million people in the United States (and 1 in 5 children) that are below the poverty line really worth what their measly earnings say they are worth or could be worth?  Clearly, something is out of whack.  And in my opinion,the distortion is caused by the possibility that our perceived value of what has value is way off base and we have made an erroneous assumption about the intrinsic value of money.  Combine the above flaws with loans, debt, and financial speculation and you have a house of cards and misallocated ”wealth”.  Two movies worth watching on this topic are “The Smartest Guys in the Room” (documentary on Enron implosion) and “Too Big to Fail” (the mortgage-backed security frenzy).

But what would we do without money, loans, credit, debt, banks, Wall Street, and Investment “Bankstas”?  How would society function?  This may come as a surprise, but every society on this planet, excluding the “Human World”, operates without money and the related baggage.  And man himself at one point operated without money.  In every other society on Earth, including the Apex species, value is pretty clear and money has no meaning or intrinsic worth.  And there certainly aren’t any problems with “perceived” value.  The currency in all other societies on earth is energy.  Some of the more advanced societies combine their energy via cooperation to obtain one of the ultimate valuable prizes — food.  They also work together for protection and ultimately survival.  And many of these societies have been around much longer than ourselves. 

Imagine the sense of freedom these apex predators enjoy without money and particularly debt!  But their societies aren’t free from stress or hardship.  If the society or individual doesn’t find food, they die.  No one is going to come to their aid.  But that doesn’t mean that these apex predators don’t find time for fun or enjoy being alive.  The bond between members of these societies is strong for without each other it would be a very lonely and dangerous world.  Not all members of these societies are treated completely equal — Only the lucky few earn mating rights through various competitions and the prize certainly has value and a bit of pleasure!  Although some inequality exists, they each play a crucial part such that the whole has access to the fruits earned through cooperation.  Of course we would be in position to adapt lessons from these societies because we have an opposable thumb, a large brain, and free hands since we walk upright.  We have the power to create and manipulate the environment around us.  All we need to do is define true value, define our missions, use our brains, thumbs, free hands, and spend our currency (our energy) to make it happen. 

Otherwise, the vast majority of us will remain like domesticated pigeons huddling together looking up at the few fortunate hawks.