Social Security

     Here is one situation where the media and the education system have totally failed the people.  So many middle-aged and older folks are saying these days, "I paid into the system.  I deserve to get my money back."  But the system does not and never worked that way.  There is no real "social security trust fund".  There even might be some accountants somewhere who spend their productive hours working out how much "money" should be in it, however, there is no such fund and never has been and there are no managers managing it.  The money is gone already.  Every single penny which has been paid in has already been paid out again.

     Instead, social security has always been a pay-as-you-go system.  In the first years, there were some 50 people working and paying in, for every retiree who was drawing benefits.  Where the system began to have problems came about as life expectancies became longer and longer, resulting in far more retirees drawing benefits for far longer.  Thus now we have the situation where there are less than two workers paying in for every retiree pulling out.  And the two workers are supposed to be able to carry the one worker?  Hardly possible, is it?

     The young people today may not understand what a Ponzi scheme is, how it works, how to set one up.  But all the ones I talk with are at least cognizant that its highly unlikely that they will ever be able to draw any social security when they get old.  To a man they have the expectation that one way or another the system will collapse by then or at least, Congress will find ways to deny them any payments.

     and here is the rub with the current unemployment issue today.  While it may be true that employers do not want to offer the minimum wage plues the employer social security tax plus the employer health insurance benefit required by Obama's new law plus the unemployment insurance payment plus the workers' compensation benefit....all told that's a whole lotta money.  But it is equally true that the kids do not want to work for it.  They are more or less on strike.  Many of them will mow lawns, shovel snow, babysit, or what have you for cash.  but they are not about to do what's required for a salaried job.  Not when they know that a third to a half of what they are earning is going into other people's hands and they don't expect to ever see it.

     In effect, the young people are on strike.  I wonder if any of the old people, who have been systematically robbing the young, for several generations now, are listening?   Because with nobody working, the net wealth of the country as a whole is in decline.  It affects everybody.  With so many pikers, who wants to work?

God

I searched for God using google.

I got back 1,820,000,000 results.

so I tried to search for Him in mapquest.

I got back two locations within 15 miles.

finally I tried google earth.

God is in Hungary.

I don't know what this means .....

authority

     There is a simple problem with all human authority.  The problem is universal and sooner or later, always devastating.  This problem arises with every single government instituted among men, whether it be national, provincial, or municipal.  It arises with every single corporation or other business enterprise.  It arises with every single religion ever constituted and organized.  Certainly it is endemic to boy scout troops and football teams.

      Baron Acton's famous quote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." has actually been said over and over again.  Not that anyone ever learns.

     The problem, as I see it, is that once control is tasted, individuals tend to begin to believe in themselves as actually being superior or better in some way or other than the people they are controlling and impacting.  This belief seeps into their thinking, slowly and insidiously, gradually taking over in every process of their living, until even their own excrement smells to them like perfume.  The finest expression of the problem is the observation that people of authority regress to earlier and earlier stages of childhood to where they forget or never learn how to admit to mistakes or errors, how to apologize, how to regret, and thus, how to fix or improve anything.  Thus empowered, every organization, no matter how powerful and righteous its origins, reaches some kind of zenith and then, first faltering ever-so-slightly in the breeze, stalls, luffs, and turns slowly downward until, too late, it finds itself hurtling towards the earth, tracing over and over again Icarus' fateful journey and bringing all mankind, again, to the depths of depravity and destruction.

     Enjoy the ride, folks, because the end of this one, globalization and worldwide central planning and trade, is a doozy.

personality

     I just got done with thiis trash novel, something Oprah recommended so, well, lets not go there.

     anyway, this "psychological thriller" makes the point, several times, and with, um, emphasis, that a person, any person, is not the same as who he was a minute ago, before such-and-such traumatic event occurred.

     I was just thinking, again, about the mental health industry in the US, psychiatry and counselors and all those poisonous substances that they call medicines, and all the hypocrisy.  What a stupendous dismal failure they have perpetrated upon us ... not to mention how expensive it has been.  Sandy Hook.  sigh ....

     anyway, its really a very simple formula.  Any person, crazy or not, or whatever, you can add to his experiences, his wisdom, his understanding.  Its just that no one can take away from him, not anything, not any of his experiences and memories, not really.  What can be done is to add to them.  Even, at least in my experience, that's all that God does for people either.  There's no real such thing as rebirth, a clean slate, starting over.  You can always add but you can never subtract......

charts

     You know what?

     I just looked at about a dozen stock charts, one or two year, picked almost at random.  Soncor Oil.  SLV silver bullion fund.  ECA Encana.  IBM.  Weyerhauser paper, for goodness sake.  JPM, we all know who they are, right?
    ... and you know what?  Every single one is exhibiting very similar behavior.... long, strong bullish trends, punctuated with "cliffs", in other words horrendous, breath-taking drops, the kind where for nearly everyone, your throat becomes indecently acquainted with the pit of your stomach.
     How the heck can anyone make money in this market or even stay in it "for the long run"?  Unless, of course, you happen to be situated somewhere along the news flow just ahead of the rest of the markets, enough ahead so that you can take a small, levered short position just before the headline comes out, whatever it might be.....

     I'm just asking .... anyone got any ideas?

Pain

I spent the day yesterday just feeling pain. Like always I was surrounded with things that would like to be done, items to fix, clean up, renew, improve, and so forth, all of them quietly calling for my attention, to no avail. I did manage to feed myself. Mostly there was emotional pain of unspecified source, no reason that I could attribute beyond simple “balancing” after a series of successes. Perhaps there was some physical thrown in, I have drunk enough lately to begin to introduce a little dependency in my system, enough so that going without induces a little agitation and discomfort. But the emotional pain arrived first and was clearly insistent about dominating my attention.  I "wasted" the entire day, doing nothing that could possibly be construed as useful or beneficial to anyone.

Such an event won't move the Richter Scale needle in my life. My very first lover disappeared out of my life after a delightful summer. It was only a year later that I learned: she had parked her mom's car in the garage and gone to sleep in the front seat while leaving the engine running. Most likely intentionally. And so long ago  my second wife, the love of my life, the woman who was going to “save” me, well, she started to have an affair with my bestest best friend, actually a few weeks BEFORE we married, and, well, she asked me to teach her how to say “No” and that was a pretty tall order (even for her, over 6 feet tall ….), I mean I could say no to him but that's not the same thing, and they kept on, and kept on, and one day she took a paper clip, unwound it, and stuck it through her cervix to puncture the placenta and kill my only child … in good time, the pain that I expressed was finally sufficient to induce her to say “no” to me and leave my life …. so I have known some pain …

I was meditating upon my pastor's remarks, the previous day of rest. There was, again, that little issue that black folk can get up and speak in a crowded room and say something to one person that no one else will hear or understand, though all speak the same language. That little code which makes fools, again and again, out of our military or any source of arrogant, capricious power. He was angry with me on a couple of accounts, including my sinfulness but also including my rejection of his authority over me. While he was berating, his wife was massaging my shoulders from the pew behind me, which was kind of amusing too.

What he was saying to everyone is that there is this world and then there is the “other” world and he identifies this world, this carnal, temporal, chaotic world as being temporary and worthy of disdain while his “other” world is the world of salvation and eternal joy and peace.

Psychiatrists have long known that children who endure any kind of sexuality imposed upon them by adults, learn how to escape into an “other” world where their sense of self is fully protected and insulated from this world. Everybody has such a place in their secret souls, but its just that us'ns like me and pastor have had to spend more time in that place of refuge. It just means that while everybody can understand a little bit about a secret room, ours just happen to have furniture, particular paintings and even tapestries on the walls, mouldings, nooks and alcoves, rugs, drapes, windows, and probably a bookshelf or two with a selection of favourite works.

So it occurred to me that maybe here is where most or all Christians went wrong, starting of course with Paul. Jesus never, in fact, said that He was going to eliminate all pain for all of us or for all of us who “believed” in him. We misunderstood his healing and we totally misunderstood his resurrection. He did not promise to eliminate pain. He did not conquer death in that way, not any more than he defeated the Romans, as Judas had so fervently hoped and prayed that he would, he didn't even stop Nero from coming back a few years later and literally leveling Jerusalem, leaving no stone upon another, killing every single soul who wished to remain, and salting the earth. He really, really, did not ask us all to retreat forever into our personal private refuge.

It occurred to me that this is where “scientism” has failed and this is also where capitalism has failed. There was the promise, implicit or explicit, that either or both of those disciplines would eventually conquer all pain and make life to be eternally easy and blissful. And what those two have done is to take away all of the little irritations and aggravations of life but in their place, virtually everybody has succeeded in engendering artificial disputes so that we still have terrific arguments and discomforts with one another over issues which are total fabrications, such as the supposed differences between red and blue politicians, all of whom are on the take. And what they have decidedly NOT accomplished is to prevent total social breakdown and chaos, which is the reality that we all face today although quite a few are still hiding out in their “other” world, the fantasy one that we all have....

Me, I love life. I love this world, the real one. I happen to love booze but don't do that all the time. I love sleeping and petting my pussy and listening to her purr and keep my lap warm. I love new tools, clean, oiled, and ready to sharpen exquisitely. I love eating and I love the fact that I have enough food and drink in my house so that I can eat for the rest of my expected days, regardless of whatever happens to all you fools. I do not like pain. I mean, yes, I cut myself or get clawed or my muscles ache from exertions or arthritis or my nose runs or my head aches or whatever, all the thousand little nuisances which flesh is heir to, some of them can be rather debilitating. But none of them can completely snuff out life, or joy. Even, when mine passes away from me, I will die knowing that I have put in place things which will help to enable others survive and carry on. And therein is joy that is unquenchable. Therein is Jesus' joy, therein is his victory. NOT in the other world, but right here and right now.

just a reminder

to Polonius and all the other pompous asses and self-appointed apostles out there:

King James

was a faggot.

Scams

     Yesterday a good friend of mine reported something to me about an acquaintance of his.  He was fairly outraged about it but I was neither very surprised nor upset.  It seemed that this young lady recently turned eighteen and, after taking one very cursory look at the job market, went to see her doctor.  From him she procured a letter explaining "to whom it may concern" that she suffers from repeating episodes of severe menstrual cramps.  Taking the letter with her, she proceeded to visit the social security office where she filed a request for designation as a disabled person, and she was granted support payments for life.

     I do not know her name and I have no way of verifying the report for myself.  However, it is so consistent with the de facto goals of our present society, that I find it eminently believable.  First of all, this removes the woman from ever being counted among the "unemployed" so they succeed in reducing that statistic.  Second, it puts money in her hand which will be spent, increasing the gross national product and creating jobs.  Third, the source of the funds has to be a net increase in the annual federal deficit and added on to the federal debt, which, in turn, is increasingly "monetized" by the federal reserve.  In other words, the payments to her will not ever increase anyone's taxes, instead, the money simply will be printed and then spent.  Finally, since the woman can't, by law, work, and won't have enough money to pay rent on any place for herself to live, she will have to live with other people, and since she has so much time on her hands it can be pretty well predicted that she will spend a good portion of that time doing sex and drugs, which will undoubtedly make more babies to feed and more hospital and perhaps prison requirements, which will make for even more jobs and stimulus for the economy.

     Folks, don't fool yourselves.  No one can make an honest living in this country anymore.  The government wants everyone, from Jon Corzine on down, to work a scam, if he wants to survive and prosper.  The very  best ones are legal.

The Importance of Inflection

...just read these two sentences aloud.


"You can cook, dear."

"You can cook deer!"

Sin

     The rules that people live by must be fitted to the environment and situation in which they find themselves.  The main trouble with religions and religious leaders, not to mention governments and societies and laws, is that the rules that they are perpetrating upon their peoples are always behind the times, sometimes seriously behind.  Always adapted for yesterday's problems, never today's.
     Jesus did his best to overthrow all the rules and regulations and petty mores and manners which had grown up among his people and were so sanctified and holified by the levites and pharisees of his day.  Hde wished for all of us to pay attention to God's world, His reality, not our own make-believe constructs.  But tragically, Paul came along and gave the people a whole new set of rules and regulations which they dutifully went about setting into stone and shackling and burdoning themselves once more .... Paul, who hated women and did not care too much more for men, who never laughed a day in his life.

     In this day and time, the very most heinous sin which any man and woman can commit, is to bring a child, a new life, into this world.  It should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention to this world now, and what God is saying now, why this is so.  It makes no difference whatever whether the government involved has "sanctified" the union between the man and the woman, it makes zero difference if they ever see each other again.  the sin is in adding to the overpopulation, the Malthusian crisis which we have brought about with our holier-than-thou belief that reproduction is a human "right" and that we must save the children no matter what, all of them.  the bottom line is that every time a new baby is born, the whole system groans and squeezes to make room for one more mouth to feed, when too many are already going hungry.  The whole system cranks and creaks on the energy sector to produce more fossil fuels to use for fertilizer, plowing, harrowing, seeding, insecticides, weeding, harvesting, packaging, and bringing to the market.

     If people do not willingly stop making babies, then there will be bloodshed.  A lot.  That's God';s way of doing things.  You'd think we would have learned that by now.

Female circumcision

     This is on my mind this morning for some reason.  I've had these formulations in my head for many years but never passed them along to anyone.  Not sure why I'm thinking about sex so much at the moment, but heck, why not?

     I'm writing in rebuttal to all the horror stories on you tube and in other media.  The western white-perpetrated propaganda protrays this procedure as being close to butchery, extremely dangerous and with the sole purpose of preventing pleasure for the women.  Usually there are images of rusty knives, screaming young girls, and old veiled women who must be frustrated spinsters overcompensating for their own lack of sensuality.  There's always horror-movie music playing in the background as well, like for Psycho or Jaws or something.

     Well, I have (ahem) had up close and personal knowledge of more than one set of female genitalia which had been altered in this fashion.  I am just here to report to you that in my experience, the lowliest Ethiopian woman is vastly more beautiful, hotter, sexier, more playful, more seductive, wetter, and just all-around so much  sexier than the most polished white woman  that I have ever encountered.  I have asked them about the operation and none of them felt like it had been a big deal.  But having their clitoris exposed, not hooded, opens up all kinds of new sensuality for them.  Quite the contrary from the media portrayal, if anything the operation makes them even more desirable, not less.  As always the chief component is attitude, not physical equipment.   In that department, they know how to have fun.  Admit it.  Americans are typically miserable.
Always "going through".  Always "stressed".  Always complaining about the way other people treat them or the things they don't have.

     As a final comment, I'd just like to recommend to anyone who might be troubled by the horror stories mentioned above, see if you can pigeon hole an old Ethiopian man sometime and ask him what he thinks about American men having to using Viagra.  Chances are, the laughter will last him for days .....

Dream

     I had a long dream last night.

     I dreamed that I was in some kind of  nuthouse.  Vaguely it was a government institution.

    
     Some of the inhabitants were naked.  Ugly, grossly-distorted genitals, like something Dali might paint.  Exaggerated, lewd glances.  Others were hiding books in their diapers.  A few of them had private rooms, places where they could hide things or themselves, but as I looked around I realized that I certainly had no such privilege.

     Finally, I woke up.  Only to find that I am still here .....

Preppers

     I take a bemused attitude these days about all the johnny-come-latelies.  Here something that I have been doing quietly for decades is gradually coming to the fore, its actually almost the "in" thing to do.  Wow.

     Just a couple of words for you.  All you who have guns ... have simply never understood the first thing about human nature.  Granted, its gonna be a bit squirrly when things first fall apart.  But a gun only does one thing, really .... it acts as a magnet for a bigger gun.  He who lives by the gun will die by the gun.  Not my choice.

     Noodles and rice.  Lts and lots.  Gonna be a fair number of folk who die of scurvy.  Ugly way to go, mates.  Worse than the gun, even.

      Fishing down by the river.  Sure.  Read up on cholera, while the internet still works.  By the way, you better have a permanent source of water.  Not the river.

     I was out today adding to my supplies.  I know some of you are damn well stocked.  But I'm sure there aren't too many of you who've got tampons.

   This is gonna be so much fuuuuuuunnnnnnnn.............

Apple

     I have never even owned a cell phone, let alone a proxy brain (isn't that what a "smart phone does?  seems like all the people who use them have forgotten entirely that they used to be able to think).  Sorry folks, but it simply serves no purpose in my life, no need, no want, I can still eat, sleep, work and play without the slightest inconvenience for not having one.
     When, years ago, Apple's stock trajectory began to resemble the take-off of an ICBM, the second part of the journey was already inherent to many people, it was only a matter of time.
      This quarter, not only Apple but Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and now Google have all taken tremendous hits.  I must say I don't know of any instance where a whole sector collapsed again like this when the previous collapse was still lingering in peoples' memories.
     But it occurs to me that, aside from the budding industries of "personal trainer", dietician, massage technician, and call girl, this was the last bastion of US superiority and economic power and prestige ....
     It is only a matter of time now before we hear urgent pleas for the government to bail out Apple.

     Look out below.

Bomb bomb bomb! Bomb bomb Iran

     In the entire history of mankind, has there ever evolved a more supreme irony?

     The (still, though perhaps not too much longer) majority of US residents call themselves "Caucasians" or even "Aryans".   The state of the educational system inn the culture is in such a shambles that the great majority of them have never even heard of the Caucasian Mountains and couldn't find them on a globe if their lives depended on it.
     Even fewer of them recognize the roots of their own supposed core philosophies/theologies.  While the name "Zoroaster" or more commonly, "Zarathustra" may evoke faint recognition, there can't be more than one american in a thousand who can state that it was he who definitively first introduced the dichotomy of "good and evil" into man's thinking (the proverbial bite of apple).  Fewer still recognize that his life predated the captivity within Babylon whereupon most of the Old Testament was first written down.
     From his day forward, the history of mankind became the struggle between those who believe that life is a struggle between good and evil, and those who don't.
      (Needless to say, those who ascribe to the first party have been "winning", up until recently.  They have labelled all those who don't to be "savages", aborigines", and other such debasing terms, they have enslaved them, massacred them, or simply overrun their homelands and taken everything away from them that they need for survival.  It goes without saying that every person who believes that life is a struggle between good and evil believes himself to be aligned with the forces of good,no matter his actual impact upon the world.  Hitler believed that.Joseph Stalin believed that. Jesus believed that.  Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, et al believe that.)
    The very core beliefs which US residents hold to be so dear, the "moral values", their fundamental compass, all of those ideas happened to originate with the ancient Persian people.  According to ancient recordkeeping, the very first bankers in the world, loaning money at interest in return for collateral such as slaves and land were Jews in captivity in the city of Babylon, thriving in the Persian Empire.  The first astronomers, the first mathematicians came from the same "golden age", discovering the paramount utility of the number zero and the theorem of squares later falsely claimed by Pythagoras.
     In governments, the concept of "Freedom of Religion" which some supposed was invented by Thomas Jefferson, actually was first put into practice by Cyrus the Great and first applied in allowing the remnant to return to Israel and even giving them the funds to rebuild their temple.  Cyrus also generated the theory of annexation and full rights; his system of satraps and satrapies was the model for Roman and later US annexation and empire-building, wherein each new conquest came under the same rights, privileges and taxes as all the older ones.

     The label "Pharisee" is perhaps much more familiar to the majority who label themselves "Christian" Whether or not any of them obey their own rules and laws is immaterial, they simply believe that they have the right to persecute others for failing to do so but can do whatever they choose themselves with impunity because God forgives them. But though so many know the word, so very few understand where it came from ... for the rules and laws of the Pentateuch were encoded by Ezra into the governing "laws of the government" in the language of the Persians which is still today known as and pronounced with an "f" instead of a "p", i.e. "Farsi" or "Pharisee".... and while Jesus belittled their importance, the tradition has only gained more and more favor and impact since then.

     So now,
     now that we have reached and passed "peak oil", though there are still a fair number of folk in denial, now that virtually all of our ruling, intellectual class recognizes that along with it "peak civilization", "Peak technology", "Peak science", and of course "Peak Population" have come and gone, now that the collective knowledge of the body of citizens of the supposed world superpower is hurtling towards idiocy, the said government of the said dominant world economic and military power is marching relentlessly towards war, towards devastation and destruction, with its very own cultural and philosophic and, yes, moral, beginnings...  the City of Rage, now called Tehran, nestled in the foothills of the Caucasian Mountains ....

    from a distance, its pretty funny .....pretty damn funny ....

Saul of Tarsus

     I suppose that I will be pilloried for saying this.  Maybe even crucified (God!  Do you people never learn!  What happens when you martyr somebody!!!!)  It needs to be said.

     As a preamble, I just finished reading "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.  The gorilla was spot-on.  My ideas may sound unfamiliar to you but I'm certainly not the only one to understand the world this way.

     The fundamental problem with the Christian religion ( among other, related philosophies and social systems) was Paul.  Jesus set a wonderful example for us all and I suppose he never expected that Paul would come around and fuck everything up the way he did.

     Its not that he said anything wrong.  I am not even uncomfortable with his male-superiority bias.  Paul shared some great understandings ... of Jesus' message, of the way things are in this world, of God's purpose for all of us.  The problem is, in their heart-of-hearts,  most people on earth were already born with those understandings.  Paul's entire error was in setting himself up as an authority.  As declaring himself the boss.
As implying that everyone else is inferior and cannot and does not already commune with God directly.  Really, that whole episode with the blindness and everything, he never changed his fundamental message (of persecuting those who love), the only thing he did was to change his clothes.

     Last week the church mens' group met at the local all-night restaurant.  We all had a great time together, catching up on news, gossip, and sundry developments, laughing and joking.  Then we all took a time out while pastor delivered his obligatory pompous, dictatorial lesson and all the men fidgeted and squirmed in their seats while letting his message pass in one ear and out the other.  When he finally shut up, then all of us went back to joking and playing and we all split up with the feeling of a great evening well spent.

    The whole Christian fellowship adopted the model of Paul as teacher, as authority, as judge.  But God never intended for any man ever, ever to judge any other, and Jesus even said so and it was written down as such.  God never intended for any of us to ever have judges or managers or popes or ministers or governors or presidents or executioners.  Most of all God never intended for fathers to beat their children and force them to serve the parent.  He meant for quite the opposite, for the parents to serve the children, because the children represent the future.

    Now, because everything that everybody practices down here is inside-out, mankind is approaching self-annihilation.  At least, civilization is just about to become completely undone.  As Ishmael would have  put it, we are all about to spit out that bit of apple which gave us all the unfortunate fallacy that we could all be judges of others, that we know what only God can really know, which is what is evil and what is good, and therefore we can mete justice upon others.  Financially and economically, all the old people with their stocks and bonds, their pensions, their social security and medicare, have raped and robbed all the young people of all of their future, and the best times in the history of mankind, of science, technology, and economic advancement, are now behind us  .Soon, those who survive will be able to go back to the search for (the tree of) life, the riotous abundance, the crazy diversity, the nutty screaming grieving shouting laughing insanity that God made us to be a part of in the first place.

okay, the coming presidential election

Given recent actions and statements from the federal reserve, it matters not a tinkers damn who wins this election. but I like this line: "They are both telling half-lies all the time now. Politicians who lie are hiding the truth. But these guys have forgotten where they even put it."

I have been reading a book entitled "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn ....its a cute premise encapsulating dynamite conclusions.  He basically divides the entire philosophy/religion/metaphysics debate into two camps, the leavers and the takers (shades of Ayn Rand??????) and he makes a damn good case that the takers are hurtling towards self-destruction.  It gets deep, he identifies Cain, the one who adopted agriculture and hence, a stable residence, as the first taker and Able, the hunter/gatherer, as the first leaver, and the mark of Cain is that of white skin ..... something I have thought privately myself but never dared to say to anyone .... it was published in 1992....

You don't have to agree with everything he says but you really ought to entertain his line of thinking ....

Yesterday I was looking at all the babies and very pregnant women attending our local town fair, yesterday, and silently wondering to myself what odds I would give that any of them reach adulthood. Maybe on in ten. Maybe ....but I doubt it .....

Kill a muslim for Christ

Bulletin: Washington, D.C.

Interroristigators revealed today that, contrary to public opinion, the FBI under Eric Holder has not repeat not instituted a new "fast and furious" policy to distribute the handguns (pictured below) for all upstanding, patridiotic americans desiring to do their duty to the nearest muslim (or wife, child, or postal worker) that they can find.

too bad ....

Government Job Openings

NOW! FOR A LIMITED TIME!

These marvelous machines are being made available to the public, in limited quantity for only a certain amount of time. Much in demand, these ingenious little devices will provide hours and hours of entertainment while they afford you a sense of usefulness and service to mankind unlike anything else you are currently doing with your life. Merely hold one of these in your hand, and you will find yourself helplessly attracted to the challenge of turning this little crank and watching the wooden slides go back and forth in their track, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.... this is exactly what government workers, in positions of high authority, do all day! And now, you can do it too!

Yes, its true. The dedica5ted craftsmen at John's Wood are making just a few of these carefully-created, maple and black walnut devices available to the public. Moreover, you pay nothing to buy one, all you have to do is to cover a small job application fee to make sure that you can qualify to own and operate one.

Act now! Call right away and we will rush you your application form. Operators are standing by!

no one there

Yesterday, or maybe Friday, I read an article in the financial news on the internet about the new CEO of J.C. Pennies and the changes he was bringing about. The article noted that the striking thing about the stores these days is that there are pitifully few customers. The author was trying to make the case that the new CEO was primarily to blame for this.

Then, yesterday morning the government report on July retail sales came out. First the headline number was an "unexpected" 0.8% gain (after readjusting the previous months number by 0.2% downward, this is getting to be so tedious and repetitious that I won't even go into it, many others already have.)

Zero Hedge had this to say about the report:

The July retail sales beat came as a surprise to many: an 0.8% increase (full series here) at a time when the data was supposed to grow at less than half this would surely be indicative of a potential turnaround in the US economy. Then we decided to do a quick spot check if maybe the Census Bureau had not adopted one of the BLS' worst habits: fudging seasonal adjustment factors. The reason for this is because we happened to notice that Not Seasonally Adjusted (full series here) retail sales data in July actually declined by 0.9% from $405.8 to $402 billion. Of course, if the Census Bureau was using a consistent, or at least remotely comparable July seasonal adjustment factor as it has in the past, this would make sense and we would move on. So we decided to look at what the July seasonal adjustment variance over the past decade has been. What we found would have shocked us if indeed this is not precisely what we expected: with the July seasonal adjustment factor routinely subtracting a substantial amount from the NSA number, averaging at -$5.2 billion, in 2012, for the first time this decade, the seasonal adjustment not only did not subtract, but in fact added "value" to the NSA number, resulting in a seasonally adjusted number that was $1.9 billion higher than the NSA number at $403.9 billion.

(link)

Then, Morgan Stanley had this retort to Zero Hedge (musta hit a sore spot, usually they try to ignore them):

From Morgan Stanley's chief economist, David Greenlaw: There is some crazy analysis on Zero Hedge that seems to be getting some traction because a few clients have asked about it (see their chart below).

link

Okay, are you still with me? Because finally, we get this article in the financial news .... Wall Street Prepares for more Layoffs, from CNN

See where I am going? Apparently its not just J.C. Pennies who has no customers. In fact, yesterday evening I sauntered up to my local mall, not to buy anything but just to check things out for myself (since the media are getting to be SO reliable these days ....). J.C.Pennies was about empty. But, so Was Macy's. And Sears. And Borders. I also noticed that the woman in the little hookah shop was fast asleep, while the woman at the cell phone shop was playing games on her phone.

EOF

books

I just finished reading a book about black whalemen. There were quite a few. It was a low paying, hard work, dangerous job but it offered a glimmer of hope, and freedom, and so they took it. The industry made important inroads to ending slavery, to the underground railroad, and to the beginnings of equality.

Now I am reading "A voyage for madmen" about a race held for solo pilots to navigate a sailboat "around the world", in 1968. A reminder of how short people tend especially to fight and scrap, against the pharisees (I bet Jesus was short), against the european kings (Napolean), against the sea. Its an enthralling tale.

The world markets, which have been ugly for some time now, just got uglier, after hours. The latest pets, Apple and Netflix, disappointed and they are selling hard in after hours. Tomorrow will be the worst day on the markets in quite some time.

I have lost quite a bit of money the last few years by selling short while the Federal Reserve prints and spends (and buys emini futures??????) But I've always known it will end badly for them when it ends. Do I need to say that I am still short?

I have struggled and fought against authority all my life.

Here I am now fighting all authority of all mankind.

And tonight, there's just a glimmer of a ray of hope.

I just may win this fight .....

one question

I just have one question, for the folks who are selling this morning .... US stocks, bonds, european stocks, spanish bonds, greek anything, houses, oil, gold, corn, Chinese tech, whatever.

What took you all so long?

the greatest country in the world

I ran across this video on you tube today....

So there are still people of courage, of vision, of imagination, of compassion, who care about a little bit more than just where their next cigarette or big gulp is coming from ....

When this mess collapses from the weight of its greed, its sloth, its arrogance, from the ashes, people will arise and build greatness again ....

something is up.

If you have not yet caught on to all the debate about "chemtrails", now might not be too late to get up to speed. Google it. Then spend some time on You Tube looking at peoples' videos. As for me, I do not have a concrete opinion about them, I can not verify that they are "different" than contrails, I cannot verify that there are black or silver threads descending upon us or that there is an uncommon amount of alumina in the air or falling into our topsoil. I just do not know.

Further, it would not surprise me at all to learn that our government and "the powers that be" decided that they are so smart that they can tinker successfully with the weather and the climate. This is the primary hypothesis of explanation for the "pro-chemtrail" side of the debate, although there are other explanations, some of them far more nefarious.

However, I do know one thing for sure. God pointed this out to me recently and so far I have not heard of anyone else noticing.

They stopped.

Some time about two or three months ago, the contrails or chemtrails or whatever they are, stopped. Maybe the one that I flew through when returning from Memphis this past spring, was one of the last ones. For weeks now I have been looking, looking, looking up at the sky and not seeing any. Not on clear days or partly cloudy days or any other kind of weather. None.

Not only that, but even more unbelievably, the stinking helicopters seem to have ceased also. Never mind that I live close to the river where some stupid yahoo gets himself drowned at least once a day and all the rescue operations love flying. Never mind that I am within bicycling range of Camp David, perhaps the very center of governmental flying bathtub syndrome. I have not seen any, not one, in this space of time.

For once my rioting imagination is completely stumped. I cannot come up with one scenario which can explain this sudden, unannounced, unnoticed, change in the habits of TPTB. I am totally baffled. (it does not, however, surprise me at all that no one else has noticed or said anything..... common people are so very slow, especially in this society, where too much money and arrogance have made everybody stupid, egocentric and blind ...) The terrible drought which began unfolding across the midsection of our continent might theoretically have something to do with it. Were they trying to reduce global warming or the greenhouse effect and their plans began to backfire and they realized they had better stop? Or, were they trying to make things worse for everybody and create food and water shortages which will, not too far down the road, bring about a massive population reduction, and they realized that they have been totally successful and they can stop now? I don't have the faintest miasma of an idea. If anybody has any theories, concrete or fantastical, I would sure appreciate some comments on this one ....

hornets

Sometime in the spring, a community of hornets took up residence in the mailbox right next to my front door. (perhaps they had first checked with my postmaster, who had long since duly decreed that I must put a box at the bottom of my front steps if I desire to receive mail at my address.)

One time, I lifted up the lid and was promptly stung. It hurt pretty much, for about five minutes, and then I forgot about it as I had other things to deal with.

Obviously, every time that I come in or go out of my front door, I must take special caution not to disturb them, or let any of them inside. I cannot allow myself to be distracted. But beyond that we have a live-and-let-live policy, to wit: they don't mess with me and I don't mess with them. So far both sides have been cooperating and living in peace.

This morning, I got to thinking about the U.S. 5th fleet base in Bahrain. Don't ask me why I thought of them, I just did. But if I were peacefully trying to live out my life in Iran, they just might resemble a bunch of hornets.

Not quite the same, though .... hornets don't go around stinging each other and stinging the flies and the stray cats and the bricks in the neighborhood. Guess its not a good analogy, after all.

rights

I picked out a selection of music off of my hard drive to play this afternoon. It was something that I had not listened to in awhile, I cannot tell you how long. Up pops the error message "You do not have the rights to play this music selection. To gain access to the rights, go here."

f*cking Microsoft. Listen to me cause I am only gonna say this once.

First of all, yes, I DO have the rights to play this music, I purchased it over 15 years ago, I still have the original purchase, I have dutifully maintained the medium and I have made legitimate backup copies as required to maintain it and I have honestly and faithfully translated it whenever "the powers that be" have chosen to upgrade methods of media and playback. I'm sorry that I am not thrilled about your program of suppressing new artists and of periodically changing the dominant media-playing devices and media storage formats for the purpose of attempting to sell and resell the same old creations over and over and over again without ever paying the artists because they are all dead now. Exactly how legitimate do you think you are?

Second, YOU do not have the right to tell me that I do not have the right to play it. You are not the artist, not the composer, and you do not own the copyright. Furthermore, you are not employed by any government as a police organization. As it happens, none of your current or past employees have ever shown one smidgeon of the talent required to produce the kinds of music that I tend to listen to. You can talk about intellectual property rights all you want, but that doesn't mean that you have any intellect.

Stop it.

aspirin reduces colon cancer

I ran across this astounding statement in a book that I am reading currently, written by an M.D.

At least, I found it astounding ... because I have been treated for a simple colon cancer, which the doctors and medical establishment found all sorts of ways to run up the total bill to my insurance company to something north of $50,000. After it was over, they hounded me for a good long time to come back and do colonoscopies, even though I had recognized what I had before any (of the very, very expensive and invasive) diagnostic tests had been performed, and despite the fact that up to 5% of colonoscopies result in damage to the patient's insides, while many many more result in the treatment (and risks, and expenses, and time lost) of a harmless, slow-growing form of carcinoma. Did any of the hundreds of health professionals that I dealt with in the process ever mention anything about this? Do you even need to ask?

I found corroboration here:

link

By FORTY PERCENT!!!!!

I'm really not surprised, its just one more example of how the US medical system jacks up prices while reducing overall health.

cold

Darden Restuarants PO Box 695011 Orlando, FL 32869-5011 Dear Sirs, Last night two young ladies of my acquaintance had occasion to treat me to dinner and they chose your Olive Garden restaurant located near PG Plaza in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D. C. for a venue. As you may be aware, much of the continental U.S. is now incurring a severe heat wave and drought conditions. Even as I write, the temperature is climbing to a higher number than I have ever seen before in living 62 years primarily in this area. To be brief, the ambient temperature inside your establishment was so cold that we were forced to terminate our meal early and exit to the outdoors as quickly as possible. Now I am a long-time investor and trader and often am exceedingly successful at my trade. I trade primarily in energy issues. I consider in general that I profit from the stupidity of others and most specifically from those corporations and businesses which train their customers to act like helpless idiots. Right now I have a very large position in coal which is benefiting substantially from the primary dependence of Americans upon their air conditioning and their misguided perception that this commodity is required for survival. In other periods I have profited from shorting your company stock. So I don't care. I am an old man and I have no children. But do you care, that your policies are helping to destroy this society and possibly this world (in your own little way you may be contributing to global warming, you certainly are not helping.)? I'm just curious..... Sincerely,

Twins

Okay, I am going to put up the pictures here of two different men. I am not even going to tell you who each of them are, if you don't know, please find out for yourself. I will just tell you that one of them is considered to be "black" racially, the other "white". but isn't this a remarkable resemblance?

chemtrails

I got going looking into this subject on the Internet this morning. Here are a few things that I can definitely establish.

First of all its a pretty large controversy. What I mean by that is that quite a lot of people have strong opinions to express about it, on both sides. There are quite elaborate descriptions, dedicated websites and videos on the pro side, mostly suggesting aluminates and barium salts are being deliberately spread into the atmosphere by the US military, possibly for weather control, possibly for radar shielding, or possibly for population control, with attempts at proof. On the denial side there is also a very lot of material, most of it consists of a priori denial and subsequent attempted debunking.

Second of all, it can be pretty well established that aluminum is natural to be found in the body though it serves little purpose, but bodies can uptake enough aluminum to be poisonous and destructive. It is commonly added to municipal water systems during the process of antisepsis. Further aluminum compounds can be uptaken via acidic foods in contact with aluminum cookware. It is also commonly found in medicines and over-the-counter preparations such as antiperspirants. Aluminum poisoning can affect organs, muscles, and especially bones and the brain.

Third, I'm not set up to remove it from my environment. The best way would be to drink and cook only with distilled water, but the only device I have that I could use for distilling is, well, my cast aluminum pressure canner. Oops. Distilling water is quite energy-intensive, that's why its so rare for water systems to employ sea water.

Fourth, I have flown extensively in commercial jetliners over a period of decades, and I always take the window seat because I love to look out and see the different point of view, I love the shapes of clouds from across or above, I also love the aerial views of territories resembling maps, a long-time love of mine. From my own observations I can definitely state that commercial flights are going higher and higher than they used to, that commercial flights never release contrails (its now common to see other commercial planes from cruising altitudes these days), and that wide contrails or "chemtrails" at altitudes slightly above cruising altitudes are something I've only been starting to notice for the last few years.

Finally, I have to unleash stinging criticism for the folks on both sides of this debate. Everything I read and saw appeared to have been produced by people who already had their own minds made up and were attempting to influence other people. Thus there is no science going on at all. Just as a reminder, the first step in the scientific process is observation. Before you make your mind up, go out and do some tests. If there is a definite, recent uptick in chemical spraying then it perforce must be showing up in our rainwater. How about some extensive testing of aluminum and barium concentrations in rainwater over affected areas and then a comparison with rainwater in places where the supposed chemtrails are not happening, such as Addis Ababa or Reykyavik? Lets all find out for sure what's going on before we try to influence others, eh?

snide remark

With the economy going the way it is, Obama needn't worry too much about immigration. If anything, he'll need to build a wall to keep people IN ....

joke

I have had this joke in my head for the longest time. But, I have never told it to anyone. I have not even written it down. Finally, this morning, I realized the reason. Its because the joke is on me.

In my life, I have dabbled in many, many different activities. And in quite a lot of them, I have touched greatness, only to back off. The list includes intelligence-test-taker, comic actor, artist, cyclist, world-class navigator and traveler, computer programmer/researcher/developer, contract bridge competitor, investment/stock trading. But that is certainly not an exhaustive list.

In the process, I have touched many vocations for the mundane requirement of putting bread on the table. They run the gamut from construction, short order cook, taxi driver, mover, designer, chart-maker, furniture builder, landlord. However there is one vocation which I have never, never attempted, not even considered. And what is that? Well, its the job, the life of a farmer.

Well, why not? You had to ask.

The answer is very simple, really. In my heart of hearts, I never wanted to be out standing in my field.

Vickie-bird

I was sharpening a circular saw blade this morning, one of the old high speed steel blades that a very deliberate old veteran had assigned to me. I was working by hand with a fine white Arkansas stone I had purchased recently. I still have the one that Vickie bought for us, some 30 or more years ago.

All of the feelings are gone, now. There are no more tugs at my heart over the memory of her or the realization that she actually would appreciate what I was doing. I got to realizing that I have actually attained many of the goals that she had for me, for us. My lamp is sitting upon the cherry office file-cabinet/chest of drawers that I built last year, its a nice piece that I get quite a lot of compliments for, both for the unusual design and for the fine workmanship. It contains more hand-cut dovetails than you will be able to find in almost any antique still extant. Our very last fight had been over her wanting more dovetails in a piece I did for her.

I quit smoking a few years ago. For the second time. For good. I felt like she wanted me to quit to show her that it could be done and that she could learn to say "no" to things too, not only cigarettes but maybe also Inverness Scotch or even married men desirous of her.

Even, no longer do I have any longings or regrets for our lost son. For one thing, there have been numerable young men who have stopped in at my shop, learned some skills from me, shared in a bit of affection, and then moved on. I gained a young adult daughter and still serve affectionately and whole-heartedly as her surrogate Dad, the real one having died under questionable circumstances when she was very young. Besides, these are times when masses of current young people are going to die rather "unexpectedly", on account of circumstances. I am very glad that God prevented me from contributing to the burden of sorrows and pain that that will involve.

Long ago I realized I could never search her out again. She had held on to the utmost but I had hurt her, and then hurt her again, in my utter frustration with a situation that I could neither accept as is nor devise a way to improve. I knew she had married again, another programmer, knew his name, their new address, and that they had a new son. Almaz reported to me much more recently that she thought she had come to the restaurant to check her out, and that touched me deeply though I tended to doubt it. But I no longer look for her to arrive at my front door in heels, looking down at me from the step below me.

What struck me, as I patiently honed each tooth, all the while examining them closely with eye and finger, was that Lo and Behold! She is still with me. I still carry, remember, all the things she cared so much about, her cat Pud and his kisses and catnip, her long conversations, the twinkle in her eye as she poked fun at the common ways of viewing. I am so blessed to have known her. I still have the Kodachrome slide boxes she built for me and I have come to realize more and more how much care she put into them. I still have the Fine Woodworking magazines. I still have the oil lamps, and use them and trim the wicks for very special occasions. I still have one kitty-cat who loves and adores me and even kisses me the way that Pud used to kiss Vickie. I still have the attitudes, of wanting and enjoying painstaking, careful workmanship, of enjoying little details, of saving the screws from pieces of furniture headed for the dump. What a fine collection of experiences and knowledge I have collected, over the years, truly extra-ordinary!

birds

There's been a pair of grey birds hanging around my garden all season. They are about the size of robins or starlings. The male likes to sit on the wire in the morning and sing. He has a repertoire and virtuosity which would make a mocking bird envious, but he's clearly not a mocking bird, his calls just sound more demure and sincere. His tail plumage don't fit the striped giveaway. They are not cat birds either, none of that plaintive, manipulative whine. I do not know the breed, I am not a birder or that driven to label and name everything that I see as if that can control them.

The very first words of God's to me that I began to recognize and understand were dead birds that He put in my path right as I put a woman under the bus. I think the first one that I noticed was the day that I rejected Holly Morrison, in Estonia. It had not been a conscious choice on my part, I was still not fully awake to her play for me but I rejected it. Looking back later, I realized that I greatly admired her independence and fortitude and the life she was building for herself. She had picked herself up from total disaster in the outskirts of D.C., taken her four kids and her pittance of a SS check from her late husband, and begun to forge a very respectable estate, following, and reputation on the edge of the arctic circle and right under the nose of the great bear. But as for me, though I do eschew my own culture and people, the idea of spending six months in total darkness and deep snow just doesn't, quite, grab me for some reason, and I made a wise choice there.

After that one, there wee several other incidents which impaled themselves upon my consciousness til I recognized that they were not, in fact, mere coincidences but that He was trying to find some way to get my attention. And, as He began to succeed, the single words became a torrent til I began to realize that hardly anyone ever listens to what He has to say, anymore, and He gets pretty lonely sometimes. I know, there are quite a lot of folk who preach loudly about the word of the Lord but they are pretty much preoccupied trying to get themselves heard to bother to actually listen to Him.

About two weeks ago, I ran across a fledgeling sprawled underneath my Impatience, attracting the flies and the ants. It had chosen to die over the spot where my latest apprentice had helped me to annihilate the large mulberry stump which had hitherto been refusing to recuse itself from my flower garden. I was beginning to become quite fond of my budding apprentice, but suspected that for amorous activities she preferred someone younger, a whole lot stronger and active, and rather darker in pallor, so I refrained from making any advances, though the work we did together was quite physical and close. Sure enough, she called the next day to say she was being evicted and would get back in touch with me when she got her feet settled again, and has since dropped off the face of the earth.

However. The point that I am getting around to is that the apparent parents, those two grey warblers overseeing my paltry horticulture, well, they carry on. They continue to feed themselves upon the pests attracted by the fruits of my labor, they continue to flit about hither and yon, and most importantly, they continue to greet the dawn with their joy and abandoned notes.

As, though it may not always sound so joyful to the untrained ear, do I.

spanish bailout

If this all sounds too complex to you, Spain, PIGS, ECB, IMF, EFSF, EUR, ESM, English law bonds, Cyprus, Ireland, Finland Neverneverland, etc .... What just happened, or didn't quite happen, or was promised to happen, or hoped might be accomplished, was that the failing Spanish banks were promised a new loan to shore up their balance sheets and the Spanish government, AKA the Spanish taxpayers, have been put on the hook to pay it back. Or, more basically, the bankers and the politicians are all trying to fix a problem (too much debt) by creating more debt. Think it'll work this time?

lush

I do not get it.

Everything in my garden is so verdant! This has been without a doubt the best weather for growing that I can ever remember. The flowers, the vegetables, the weeds, are all doing so well you'd think they all got a dose of radiation from Fukushima.

The rain has been all anyone could ask for and the sun has alternated with it providing warmth and heat. In fact, apparently all the sunshine in March killed off the front lines of the invading insects and they still have not recovered in force. Stink bugs are now as scarce as good-paying jobs. The ants have been decimated and the beetles all seem to have gone the way of John Lennon.

The bean vines have advanced over my head already. Only, they have no flowers. None. The morning glories, I have pulled and pulled and pulled until I have begun to believe that I am fighting Satan himself! They are simply overwhelming all the annual flowers that I planted. But ... they have no flowers. None. Just vines to impress the most prolific spider. The squash have leaves now to outdo the elephant vines in Vietnam. Honestly I could use them for picnic table umbrellas. But flowers or fruit? Not a one! The onions have long since gone to flower, as high as my belly. Pull one, and you find no bulb at all under the ground, only woody tentacles. As if they expect this is the very last year for growing, so there's no sense in leaving anything behind for next year. Nothing. Ditto the potatoes, growing like they were planted in the Amazon rainforest, and storing exactly zilch underground.

Do they all know something I don't?

nailed

I will probably be nailed up to the wall for this. Everybody, but everybody, is convinced that Bernanke is going to restart the printing presses, and make the announcement at the end of the Fed meeting in two weeks. He has to, with the election coming, labor market collapsing, Spain collapsing, Greece ready to exit, the US deficit so large that nobody but nobody has the money to fund it anymore, even the Vatican collapsing. He has to. So what if he doesn't?

humpty dumpty

Yahoo finance ran what it calls news yesterday entitled "Only austerity can save Europe".

I was the first to comment. I said,

The Eurozone cannot be saved. The whole continent is slipping into severe recession. The debts will never be repaid and the banks are all toast. All the Kings horses and all the kings men cannot put it back together again. Get over it.

Well, by this morning I had received sixteen thumbs up and four thumbs down. So I added:

Pretty amusing that I got 4 thumbs down so far for my comment ... that means that there are at least four people who haven't -- yet -- figured out that they had better sell whatever stocks and bonds they have, before they lose any more money .... giggle ...

Market is down big this morning. Gee, what an "unexpected" surprise!!!!

hope

Dear Mom, Honestly there are so many "issues" to self maintenance, I don't understand how anybody can hold a job, too. I got new tires for my truck and had a nice long chat with Almaz about car maintenance. I have been struggling with the hazard insurance industry, they have been insisting on insuring my home for three times what it is worth and then giving me a hard time about its blemishes. I have also been struggling with trying to refinance this property. Although rates are at a historic low, they are demanding huge amounts of paperwork and some of the documents they are demanding do not exist and they seem to have not liked my suggesting that if they need them they can just produce them fraudulently .... I find myself pulling back into myself, wanting to spend more time alone, just working on my house and my art and not dealing with these crazy people at all. But life goes on, and life will go on .... the birds flirt and play in my back yard, the feral cats in the neighborhood have kittens. Even though we are facing one of the worst cataclysms in man's history, some people will survive. I keep the image of Sitaka in my mind these days, she owned nothing but two sets of raggedy clothes, she worked from sun up to sun down 6 days a week \for room and board and $20 a month and she was the happiest person on earth, always singing, playing, smiling, laughing .... never working hard at anything, going from task to task to task, lightly .... after all of this is over and the survivors begin to realize that money was not quite so important as we thought, and trust maybe a little more important than we realized, the sun will shine again and there will be hope. Its just a big circle .... you know that .... love, John

To save a life

There is an article in today's news with the headline, "World's tiniest artificial heart saves baby's life." Doesn't that, in a nutshell, explain exactly what is wrong with our medical system? From all the evidence that I have seen firsthand or read about, every single patient who has ever, ever applied to our medical system for help, either has died, or has the ultimate prognosis that they will die. Every single one. Not one life has ever been "saved". Not one. Do we actually need to remind our doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, nurses, clinics, and everybody that they are not God? The other day, I went to go see my doctor about my hypothyroidism. This is an old, well-understood disability which modern medicine can easily and successfully counter. Of course, the problem originated on account of other treatments that other doctors prescribed for me, many years ago, but we won't even go into that issue right now. This visit was a waste of my time, my gas, and my insurance company's money, because prior to the visit, the doctor's office had failed to send out an order for testing the TSH levels in my blood. The physician's assistant who attended to me did not apologize at all for their oversight. Instead, she chose to make an issue out of my blood pressure, which came in at 140/80. If she had checked my records, she would have found that my pressure has been quite close to those numbers for the last 20 years or more. If she had consulted her textbooks, she would have read that older people normally have a slightly higher systolic number. When she suggested that it needed close monitoring and possibly drug treatment, I got a little testy with her. This was unfortunate on my part. I was caught by surprise by the sneak attack. It is annoying enough to have to drag myself into their office, several times a year, to arrange for a drug regimen which has not changed for ten years and has no indication whatever that it will change, simply so that they can cover their backsides and make a little extra money on the side. I didn't need the diversion, at that point in my journey. But the incident gave me pause to reflect again on where I stand on all of this. First and foremost, I think it is pretty reasonable to predict that I will, at some point, die. As far as I know, medical science has never cured even one person from death. Not ever. Not one. I suspect that if that were to occur, that the news would get out and people would know about it, so I am pretty confident about my statements. Second of all, I am rather fond of my faculties. Not only do I enjoy communicating the blather of my mind through the use of my hands or mouth, but I enjoy walking, cooking, splitting firewood, bending over to tie my shoes, learning a new language, playing the saxophone, wiping my own bum after I take a dump, and a host of other activities. However, the strong impression that I get from our medical community is that their approved, or preferred, way for people to dies is to very, very slowly lose all of their faculties for interacting with this world, until they become totally immobilized, and stay that way until they become penniless and their insurance refuses to cover their bills anymore. At that point, it is finally okay for them to die. Sadly, however, that does not happen to be my preferred scenario. Both of my grandfathers died of heart attacks before they were 55 years old. I figure that I have enjoyed, so far, 8 extra years, and blessed years they have been, and I am grateful to God for that time. But dying of a heart attack, with a sharp, quick pain and then its all over, has considerable appeal to me. I am not likely to adopt any of the behavior patterns of plenty of those around me to hasten the event, morbid smoking, eating, drinking, a slovenly and slothful lifestyle, extra salt and sugar at every possible occasion provided in lieu of real taste by all the purveyors of prepared food in this culture. However, the chances of my willingly taking blood pressure medication, ever in my life, can be found at the same levels of magnitude as the chances of my, well, trying to hijack an airplane with my trusty fingernail clippers which they took away from me last trip.....

The sixth commandment

It is beyond tedious to point this out. I have been hammered recently by most of my friends about my stance vis a vis homosexual marriage. I think I have written about this already. But the strength and vehemence of their words and actions have been enough to drive me to preferring solitude, though I love them all dearly. Pity that Christians get so heated up about this, or drinking, or pornography, or dancing, or praying in schools, other stuff which has so little to do with the main message of Jesus or even the old testament. In the meantime, little things like the sixth commandment go completely ignored and even their government, which the people insist is "under God", spends around a third of its entire outlays on systematically violating. Here is a cute little video I found that gives a pretty good overview of the situation:

(link)

In watching this, I found it pretty much reinforces what I have contended all along. Want to eliminate war? Simply eliminate the caucasians, most especially the christians and jews, and that would take care of the lion's share of the problem.

Recent trades and market prognosis

When JPM reached 44 I bought a number of put options against it. Maybe just because they are some of my favourite people. I noticed also that someone, probably an insider, actually bought 125 May 34's on the same day, for around ten cents each. Obviously that someone had advance notice of the fat tail debacle that came out a few days later. I have also been holding shares of the triple-short ETF TZA and the double short oil ETF DUG, despite having lost quite a bit on them in the past two years. This time its been paying off nicely. I shorted Google on Friday morning, mainly because its a consumer stock and nobody else has been panning it, also because Cramer recommended it. But it fell enough for me to close it out for a nice little gain. I closed most of the shorts on Friday afternoon anticipating the potential for a bounce next week. The past two years, the markets have been rising, and rising, on no real good news whatsoever. Personal incomes overall are declining. The percentage of able-bodied adults who have jobs is continuing to fall, alarmingly. Gasoline and electricity consumption continue to fall, sharply. I can forgive myself for having been short and lost money. It strongly appears, in retrospect, that what has been happening has been a huge inflow of money fleeing European banks ... I have seen estimates of 1.9 trillion or so ....that has had an enormous impact on equities and it has also aided the Fed to keep Treasury notes artificially low. But the winds are changing across Europe. the Germans are having second thoughts about trying to "buy" the entire continent. The populace is starting to actively resist what the mainstream media calls "austerity" but what the citizens call outright theft of all assets by the bankers.. Recent elections put in place people who are more likely to choose default (it has been the only possible outcome for quite a long time now but as I have said before, everybody is naked so no one wants to say so ....). One can already smell the riots, the strikes, the winds of revolution and war, on a continent so accustomed to them.... The US bankers are still trying to deny the implications, that a collapse of the Euro will mean a collapse of the European banking system AND the US banks are holding far too many sovereign bonds derivatives which will go along with it, and the insurance they think they have hedged with is not worth the paper it is printed on. Meaning that when Europe goes, the US goes too. So we got a brief taste of that with Dimon's recent embarrassment, but that is only the tip of the iceberg, and most people in the US are dancing on the deck of the Titanic. Bernanke and the Fed are still stinging from all the criticism about printing money and rising inflation, especially food, gas, and medicine. Operation Twist is ending soon with no concrete plans for new operations. The perennial debt ceiling fight is next up on the agenda and its likely to hit a few weeks sooner than anyone wanted, right in the middle of the final presidential election push. Those will be enough distraction to allow the stock market and the overall economic picture to continue to decline all summer. I have no long positions at all and don't plan on taking any for quite awhile. I expect to continue with potshot shorts. No need to be greedy here, I'm liable to end up being the only one anywhere with any money, anyway. Its just like duck hunting, I don't need the whole flock, just one or two, any will do. Eventually the Fed will bow to the pressure and start printing again, and then I can buy like picking up after a parade .... Meanwhile, my garden continues to thrive. Global warming really makes things very green, and an abundance of carbon dioxide is extremely healthy for plants. This year its gone beyond yuppieville to actually having an impact on my grocery bill. I recently tapped a major major storage of fresh water. I am busy gathering firewood for the winter. I am cutting huge rounds and leaving them in that form, I won't split them until just-in-time because the thieves are too lazy and fat to deal with them in that form. People are so terribly boring and predictable, I am surrounded by grasshoppers singing "Don't worry, be happy!" to me just like the ones in Aesop's fable thousands of years ago .... I continue to lay in supplies for the coming winter, and enjoy having the music in the background while I work ... but all you folks, when it gets cold and you have no food or water, you'd best have some gold when you come to my door begging for help ....

tulips

When I was a young man I was fascinated with bright red lips. As I reached middle age, I was most interested in open lips. But now that I am older, turning grey and fragile, I find myself most engaged with apocalypse ....

Beans

I am not an economist. In fact, I am not even a college graduate. I do not sport any BA or BS after my name, no more-of-the-same, no piled-higher-and deeper. My epigram never appears in the mainstream media, no one ever calls me up to get an "expert opinion" on anything. And there's apparently only a handful of folks who read my blog, although I do get a thumb or two from other sources. So, no one needs to take this comment to the jobs number this morning and in recent memory, as having any weight or any likelihood of changing the political landscape or anyone's personal behavior. I just wanna say what I wanna say. The only number that counts, in today's job report from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, is this one: 88 million. This is a record high for this number. You can find a chart of its progress, since 1975, at this website: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/its-official-st-louis-feds-not-labor-force-data-officially-chart This is the number of able-bodied adult US residents who did not have a salaried income last month. That's a lotta folks, seems to me. An awful lot.

economic update

Those of us who have been descrying the actions of central authority and the central banks, appear to have some egg on our faces at this point. The mainstream media and the Keynesian doublethink anal-ists are gloating over strong and wide evidence that the U.S. economy may, indeed be recovering from the financial crisis of 2008 and it may, indeed, be decoupled from the collapsing European community and the crashing far East. Not only have our repeated calls for disasters been made into a mockery but our own pockets and investments have suffered as we certainly did put our wealth where our writings were. So what happened? Were we so wrong? I don't think so. The evidence strongly suggests that Europe is sinking, that their union cannot be saved, that each nations' separate economies are heading into the tank and dissolution is inevitable. Once their central currency is abandoned, all sorts of derivatives and synthetic financial instruments and the like will suddenly be meaningless and on account of all the interdependence, all of the major banks all over the world will be wiped out (although I certainly don't put it past them to maintain a veneer of solvency for at least a little while longer. Recent events have shown the vested parties to have developed the sine qua non of mendacity and disingenuousness in the whole history of mankind.) What has happened is that the upper middle classes of all the European nations, reading very well the handwriting on the wall (after all, they have seen this show before, within the last century), have been pulling their money out of their banks. And what to do with it? While some have invested in gold, silver, lead, and other precious metals, many have looked around and seen the U.S., with its incredibly obese military machine, to be the least, or at least the last, threatened, and hence the safest place for their wealth to be stored. Estimates of the total amount moved across the pond in the last two years hover around 2 Trillion ($2,000,000,000,000.00), eclipsing TARP, ZIRP, and even QE2. A great deal of it has gone into U.S. Treasury notes, notwithstanding the horrible credit rating of the U.S. taxpayers, because its still better than most alternatives. Another great deal of it has gone into U.S. equities, which are still offering decent yields in these days and times. What next? The inevitable has been postponed. The proverbial can is way, way down the proverbial road. That much is pretty clear. How much longer can this go on? I have no idea. Mankind's ability to fool himself has to be his crowning achievement on this planet. One remembers, again, that in the year 1802 their existed a country on the mainland in Europe which called itself "The Holy Roman Empire." though its true nature was more akin to "The parochial pigsty" and there hadn't been anything remotely resembling ancient Rome for over a millennium. Interesting times, what?

new word

Ever heard of "glossolalia" before? I congregate with folk who do this fairly frequently. It does not impress me. In stark contrast, what first captured my imagination and my heart about Ethiopia was the sound of their language. Though I did not "understand" the words I could feel a depth of expression, a love of life, of fun, of beauty, of diversity, of gentility. I knew that others could and it ignited my curiosity, my fervor. just sayin' Update .... I ran across some words of Paul on this same subject ... He is not exactly my favourite apostle, and he is more diplomatic, but seems to have very similar opinion to mine .... "For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit. But everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouragement and comfort. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself but he who prophesies edifies the church. I would like every one of you to speak in tongues but I would rather have you prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues..." 1 Corinthians 145: 1-5

religion and schools

Last Saturday the gospel choir from a local college came to our little church to perform. The concert had been publicized but attendance was pretty low, made up only of our church members and a couple of family members of the choir. We were simply blown away with the enthusiasm and pure energy of the group. We all had so much fun in fact that they did not want to ever stop singing, the tunes just went on and on and on. Now like many churches these days, we are set up to record services and we were able to get everything onto digital media. I have had a chance to listen to the disks a couple of times since then. I enjoyed the choir very much. They had practiced some syncopated numbers. Sometimes they divided into three sets of voices. At other times, one or another soloist would sing with the choir acting as backup. Their timing was masterful and full of delightful surprises. Some of the selections were based on spirituals that are familiar to me but others seemed to be new music, perhaps written by the choir leaders themselves. In a few cases voices were made to make instrumental-like sounds quite unfamiliar to traditional singing and quite exhilarating. In re-listening to the music, however, there was another aspect which stood out to me. For most of the songs I was able to make out most or all of the words, their singing enunciation was excellent. However the words themselves might have been the words of elementary school kids, or at least what I remember of elementary school kids. Look at Jane. See Jane run. Run, run, run. That level of brilliance. For this, they are paying, what, $30,000 a year for tuition? Such a deal! Now I already know this is happening. I have observed how cell phones have been ubiquitous and texting almost as much so. I have overheard many thousands of conversations and commentary about such conversations and the overwhelming substance of the content appears to be surpassingly inane. Now I may be biased because I do have never owned a cell phone and see no reason whatever to change that aspect of my life. But I overhear conversations such as, in the grocery store, "Okay, I'm in the vegetable aisle, I am picking up a can of peas." or on the train, "Okay we are passing Rockville, I will be in the office in about 15 minutes." "Now twelve minutes." "I love you, don't forget to eat your oatmeal." Really provocative stuff. When I look at the ads on Craig's List, I come away with pretty much the same conclusion. The great majority of posters are functionally illiterate, unable to discern between "its" and "it's" or even "to", "too", and "two". Furthermore, none of them show any originality of thought whatsoever. Clarity and originality are absolutely unheard of. It does appear that all of those conservatives who are so insistent that immigrants speak English, are in grave danger. Very few Americans can even speak or write English anymore, or anything at all beyond grunts and moans and sighs. If we write laws which require English, a large portion of our own society is going to have to leave. On second thought, that might not be so bad ....

religion and politics

The folk that I make music with
are all up in arms about gay marriage,
trying to get a referendum on the Maryland ballot
and insisting that the Bible is very clear about this sin.
(Last time I checked, there's nothing in the ten commandments or the gospels about it,
but they still find room to debate about "Thou shalt not kill".....)

I've managed to somewhat besmirch myself in their eyes by saying,
basically, that while its nasty there's a whole lot worse problems
that they ought to be paying attention to right now.

Its going to be more than amusing to watch them squirm
if Obama comes out in favor of gay marriage ...
the gay community and the republicans have him i a corner.

It does not matter, Romney will win the election.
The republicans in Congress, those who can still do arithmetic,
set a trap for Obama and he fell for it hook, line and sinker.
they went ahead and quietly passed his latest payroll tax cut.
The net result is that the new debt ceiling is now going to be breached
a month to six weeks before the november election.

Obama will be forced to cut short his campaigning to return to Washington
to deal with the fight
and they will make him, look bad, bad, bad.

me I don't care, its all charades anyway,
but its pretty amusing ....

taxes and computers

I did my tax forms via turbotax this year.
I've believed for years that folks at my level or above
throw a red flag if they try to do them themselves,
and there are so many new wrinkles like the AMT and the Make Work Pay forms
that its unlikely they will be done right....
37 pages of forms this year ....

....i filed them but my refunds looked suspiciously large
so I went back and checked and found a $20K error,
generated by their software ....

...they have been nice enough about it,
and we are working together so that other customers of theirs don't get caught the same way
and of course I have to do mine all over again,
royal p-i-t-a ....

we invented computers to make life easier for people,
but the powers that be have used them to make everything more complicated instead,
so that everybody HAS to have one ....
Now I wish we hadn't done it ....

The American Medical Community

As you probably are aware,
I have become highly suspicious of the U.S. medical system,
as its core philosophy has changed from healing to making money.
One of their activities, in my observation,
has been the invention and generation of "maintenance diseases",
so-called maladies which are never cured but which require
regular visits to the doctor and regular medications.
One of the activities of the powers that be, carried out
both through the mass media channels and the education channels,
is an intense campaign to frustrate and make impotent the citizenry.
They are highly, highly successful, but only a visit to a radically different
culture can reveal the extent of their success.
A fish is totally unaware of water, not until he gets out of it does he have any clue.
One of the results of this campaign is that common people are driven to
spend more and more money to relieve their angst. (which does not work!)
Another is the appearance of all sorts of outward physical manifestations.
Still another is the random outbreaks of insane violence.
If the angst were cured, I am convinced that all sorts of these
"maintenance diseases" would disappear with it,
I am including allegies, which I believe to be total fabrication,
but also asthma, most diabetes, and a host of others.
I may be wrong but it has certainly been 100% successful for me.
Happiness cures all kinds of things and its free.
Prednisone is a very dangerous medication.
It is addicting and the withdrawal symptoms are extremely difficult.
Please be cautious of it.

Conundrum

Let us commence with "If God is omnipotent, then can He make a rock so big that He cannot move it?"

David Hilbert and Bertran Russell, among others, were noted logicians who were right on the cusp of solving this problem, and all others, convinced that a logically-consistent model could be described. Their efforts paralleled Michelson and Morley who were on the verge of proving that light passes through a medium they called "Ether"

Much as Albert Einstein dashed the hopes and shattered a number of hitherto rock-solid theories about matter and energy, a short young paranoid boy named Kurt Godel (what a name, huh!) produced a 26-page proof which states, basically, that NO system of logic, designed and conceived by man, can EVER be created which does NOT embed some contradictions within it.

Quite a few people were upset by these new developments; they were more extreme than the scientific proposition that man, in fact, is NOT at the center of the universe, the earth is NOT flat, and the sun and planets do NOT revolve around it.

Anyway, none of this is exactly what I want to write about today.

God promises, in the Bible, and Jesus reiterates, that the way to gain everything is to give everything away. I'm not going to look up the passages right now but I know you've heard it and I know we all find that a little confusing and u8nbelievable.

I think I have told you all that I went through a period of several years where God took me by the hand and retaught me everything that I had learned or been taught up to that point, through examples and constant conversation. This was one of the issues that He took up with me.

My workplace took up a generalized collection during christmas, something like United Way, and one year they adopted the slogan of "It all comes back to you." By way of experimentation, I chose to make a quite large gift to the fund. Lo and behold, I got a call from top management that I had been chosen as an example for everybody and I would be receiving my entire contribution back as a check. On the one hand, this seemed like a pretty absurd thing for management to do. On the other hand, God was making a point to me.

In the years that followed, I found myself more and more often making large and extraordinarily generous gifts to people. One of the largest was to take in a woman who was suffering from advancing multiple sclerosis, and the returns I got for everything I did for her were simply beyond description. God kept His promises to me and every gift that I made was returned promptly to me. At the very beginning of His tutelage I had in fact been living homeless, sleeping in my car, bathing at the local public athletic facility, storing my possessions in a public storage facility. But I had a few funds in the stock market and within several years those investments increased, again I believe with His guidance, to the point where I AND people around me began to think of me as "rich".

The most egregious move I made was to purchase a cleaning franchise on behalf of a woman I deemed as worthy and capable but because of circumstances (she was 1. black 2. an immigrant 3. a moslem) she could not even BUY a job. The trick was that by that time, I was so accustomed to God returning me my money right away that I was counting on it.

Well, so He didn't. I won't go into details, but the whole experience was exasperating for many people for many years.

and that's the conundrum.... for so long as I, or you, give without the slightest hope or intention of receiving anything back, you will get it all back. But as soon as you go expecting to get something back, well then, you end up getting nothing but trouble.

I love God. but this world of His is just nuts ....