words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read?
Hamlet: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled and that they have a plentiful lack of wit ...


John:
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through Him all things were made, without Him n9othing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it.

It seems to me, me who lived through the richest of times and born into
the best of gifts and opportunities, me who is witnessing much of this come down
to dust with the promise of starvation, thirst, bloodshed and plague heavy in the air,

it seems to me that there is a powerful want of people
to understand the difference between symbol and substance
in these terrible times.
It seems to me that nearly all of us were born with that gift --
how else could any of us learn how to speak and to listen? --
but that a fair number of folk abandon it, some indeed at a quite young age,
and they learn to mimic and copy their way through every situation
as if they were parrots or monkeys.

It seemed to me that the negroes, the black people of america,
and indeed, the recent and current slaves of every civilization,
are a bit more apt to be more aware of their environment and their world
and hence this distinction. And maybe that is so
but certainly there is a plenitude of exceptions on both sides.
Anyway I have made a lot of choices betting on that distinction
and I do not regret any of them.

Hello?
The USA is going to being suffering
until a leader arises who understands
that wearing a cheap painted metal pin, made in China,
which happens to be in the likeness of a piece of woven tapestry
first created by Betsy Ross,
is not an act of bravery, or power, or courage, or strength, or patriotism.
Not one iota.

And maybe a whole mess of symbols need
to go into the trash bucket or the ash heap.

Maybe USA'ans need to remember,
on their own without using GPS,
that the first Aryans
lived in the ancient city of Rage,
(of the ancient Media empire)
which is now known as Tehran,
just southeast of the Caucasian mountains.

Or maybe they just need to forget everything they ever learned and start over.

I don't know.

but God knows.
The coming years and decades and generations will not be so pleasant
as the recent past. No indeed.
Some housekeeping is going to take place.
He knows who and He knows when and He knows how.

After its done, life will be a bit nicer here, I think.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Power

In 2001, in the regular conduct of my career as journeyman computer researcher, I made the acquaintance of one "Martin Artiano". Together we concocted a scheme for his benefit, mine, and I hoped, my organization. I was unable to deliver my end of the bargain and the relationship ended.

If you Google this name, at least at the present time, you will find that it is quite unique; all links lead to the same individual. Quite the opposite of my given name, of which there are three just in my local phone book and hundreds and hundreds across the country.

However, the material you will glean from such a search will not tell you much about him. The most telling is a single veiled innuendo in regards to the Iran/Contra affair of Reagan's presidency. The reference, however, reveals little.

I came to know enough about him during our relationship to realize that for a time, he had been the most powerful man in the world. I am fascinated that so few
common peoplle have ever even heard of his name, and apparently nobody on the whole
Internet knows much of anything about him.

Having a preference to remain above ground, I'm not going to tell you all anything about him either. I just want to mention that real power is quite different from either fame or money. Artiano had the power to move mountains, to redraw national boundaries, to start or end wars. Clearly, he also had the power and good sense and ability to keep his own name unknown.

By the time I met him, he was douwnsizing gracefully yet still keeping his fingers in the world pie. Once he learned that I have a taste for chocolate he offered me a blind date with Condi, and I'm sure he would have delivered if I had only kept up my end.

The only reason I mention all of this is to remind you all that what you read in the papers and history books and here on the television news is a far distant cry from what is really going on.....

Wealth

with the market now down 270 pts, this seems like a good time to tackle this subject ... as faithful readers can appreciate, I have shorted and shorted this market over the past several years and been burned pretty badly, finally reaching the point where I simply could not afford to do so any longer ... and I am quite certain that numbers of other folk find themselves in very similar circumstances ... the market, as always, hurts the most number of people; now that most shorts have finally capitulated the market can collapse ....

I read web site after blogs, etc on the subject of what money is and what wealth is and is gold money and so forth, all the time. Though I'm just a bit player I think I have a few noteworthy ideas to add to the conversation. Here is one example:

http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/11/moneyness.html

Most of these discussions represent "money" as being a storehouse of wealth,
in much the same way that a gallon of gasoline is a storehouse of energy.
Discussions of gold do not generally raise this point, but it takes a huge amount of human labor to raise and refine every new ounce of gold coming out of the ground ... in fact, 99% of all the physical gold now available for trading is "old gold",
the amount of new gold produced each year is trivial in comparison with what's already been extracted, refined, and stored for safekeeping.

Other discussions get into the subject of "symbol versus substance". I could devote numbers of blog entries to that subject but I don't. There seem to be a whole lot of people who just don't "get" this distinction. I tend to think that my own people in my own time are particularly foolish in this but I could be biased. Certainly authors ever since antiquity have railed at those who don't understand the difference. Obviously a piece of paper, or worse, a digital entry on a ferro-magnetic hard drive is not an item of substance but only a symbol for wealth ... and people can change their general opinion about the meaning and value of a symbol, sometimes very, very quickly.

So what I want to add to the discussion is a reckoning of some of the items which I count as making up my personal wealth, some items which are not generally discussed in any of these pontificating discussions. I suppose that they are not discussed because none of these additional items are fungible. They cannot be duplicated and they cannot be traded. However, these non-tradable items constitute the vast majority of what I consider to be my net worth.

To start off, very simplistically, I wish to enumerate a pair of 34-D's.
I don't actually "own" them, legally I am technically "married" to the owner,
but that can change. I list them because I have experienced them, and much much more, for the person who sports them is one of the sharpest and most cunning, most versatile and flexible, and when she chooses to be, one of the sweetest and most affectionate human beings that I have ever had the honor of knowing. I count myself as being very, very rich to have had the experiences that I have had with her and to know that whatever happens between us she will always respect me as the one who rescued her and effectively gave her life.

fungible? no.

tradeable? no.

priceless, it goes without saying.

Next, I wish to relate a parable that I hear some years ago and began to apply in my own life, and the more I apply it the more wealth I believe I accumulate.
Again, not tradable.

A banker, recently completing a multibillion-dololar deal, finds himself lying in bed that night still in angst and actually praying to God for some answers.
The archangel Urial hears his plea and actually responds... he brings him above and he explains to him that he is going to show him two rooms, one of which happens to be a room in heaven and the other is a room in hell.

Without saying which he wants to show first, the archangel leads the banker to a door and opens it. Inside, he sees a very large, round table. Around it are seated a large number of people. the banker can see that the people are hungry and very, very unhappy. In the very middle of the table, there is a depression and set inside of it is a large round bowl of savory soup ... there are large chunks of meat, and potatoes, vegetables, and a wonderful aroma fills the entire room.
The table is so large that the people seated at the table cannot reach the soup with their free hands. However, on one forearm, every single person there has had fastened securely to it a very long, large spoon. each person is quite able to reach the soup with the spoon and pick up a good spoonful of the tangy, inviting repast. However, this does them no good at all, because the spoon is too long for them to then be able to reach their mouths. So the people all sit around as despondent as Tantalus and misery prevails.
Then, the archangel closes that door and opens a different door to show the banker.
Low and behold, the second scene is very like the first. Here is the same large round table, the same folk seated around it, the same tureen of soup in the middle, and even the very same spoons. but, but, but ... here, everyone is laughing, everyone is happy and telling stories and talking and enjoying one another; the atmosphere is totally different. After watching for a minute or two the banker suddenly understand why: each person is able to fill his spoon and then reach over to feed his neighbor! By feeding each other, all of the people take care of each other and everyone is fed as much as they desire!
The banker came to understand where his angst came from and what he could do about it, and he went forth the next day and began to change his life.
(Most bankers are never so fortunate(!!!!!)

Here is a shorter version of the same parable, in a proverb:
The best place, the very best place to store your wealth, is in your neighbor's stomach.

Obviously, neither paper money, nor digital money, nor stock certificates, nor even gold coins, are fit for your neighbor's stomach. but all of them, even the gold, can lose their value in the sight of those you trade with and deal with to supply your needs.
So I count my friends and the people I deal with regularly as a part of my wealth, a big part. I attempt to take care of them as best that I can. Its not always food, there are numerous other "gifts" that I have that I can share with them, some of them unique to me. Sometimes confidence and firmness are asked for, too, though I am known as kind and generous, people who try to take advantage of me eventually come to think better of it.
If our government collapses, there is no finer storehouse for what I have than with my friends, no better protection, no better chance of our mutual survival. Many of the doomsday predictions going around, such as James Kunstler painst so vividly, point out that few will survive when the electric grid and the gasoline stations go down ... the anarchy will be beyond our imagining ... still, the best chances we all have is to be known widely as a trusted friend.
Related to that is another set of items wherein I have accumulated a great deal of wealth, what I consider to be far beyond most of the people I relate with and also those I read about ... my skillset. I have always had a natural curiosity about this world and a certain naivety about anything I have not yet encountered harm from. As a consequence I have got my fingers into quite a lot of different activities and disciplines. The sum is one of the most eclectic set of skillsets and knowledge that I know of, the quintessential "renaissance man". True there is a great deal that I do not know. But I am a passing plumber, electrician, structural engineer, designer. I can do all things with wood, cut, gather, split, burn it, make fine furniture or art, marquetry, dressers, tables, sculptures. I understand the basics of computers, something woefully lacking among our young people today,
I have built a simple electronic counting machine with wires and resistors, transistors, capacitors. I understand binary ....

scuse me. one of my favorite jokes:

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand the binary number system,
and those who don't ....

I can count on my fingers up to 1023 and I can do it while talking with someone
or other similar mental activity. I understand that a computer is nothing more than a bucket of on-off switches connected with a system of relays which do exactly, exactly, what they are told to do with no deviation or motivation whatsoever.
That's a pretty valuable (and rare!) concept, these days.
In my day I have coded in Fortran, Cobol, C, HTML, XSLT, and other languages and could do it again in a pinch.

Navigating ... sine qua non. I've been around the world, canoe, bicycle, hitchhike, fly, drive, camel... am not afraid to go anywhere ... not the Pentagon library, nor the monasteries on the isles of Lake T'ana, nor the girls rooms in my junior high school ... I don't use GPS because God gave me a much better one than that. So far, the power has never failed on mine. never.

For many years God has protected me and showered me with wealth beyond imagining,
everything that I have wanted, save for a few select things that He knew better about ....

I hope this adds to the discussion about what money is, and isn't ....

Another Carrington Event?

.....they say that a solar storm the size of the "Carrington Event" hits earth on the average, once every 500 years. They say not to worry about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

From spaceweather.com this morning:

Sunspot AR1339 is crackling with M-class solar flares, unleashing at least five of them in the past 24 hours.

Even bigger eruptions are possible before the weekend is over. AR1339 has a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class flares. The sunspot is turning toward Earth, so the odds of a geoeffective flare are increasing.

A strong X-class flare, directed at earth, could have the following events:

frying the electronic circuit boards of a healthy percentage of all satellites in earth's orbit. this would effectively end tv and radio communications, military communications, many telephone communications, weather information, GPS communication, affecting millions of surface navigation devices including the instant position loss of all airplanes and most large ships.", and of course, all ATM machines and in fact virtually all "money" transfers and trades of any kind larger than, say, buying a pack of cigarettes ....

setting up huge arcs at many, many electric grid substations, effectively shutting down the grids all over the world and, in the process, damaging a healthy percentage of the very large, costly, and difficult-to-replace transformers which are essential for the whole system to process.

Here's what that can look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=vqgNrj6oEdc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngiPk6sTBs&feature=related

In effect, ending all electric use, worldwide.

These days, that could have "interesting" effects .....

OWS

just a few comments ....

First of all, anyone who knows anything about my point of view will understand ...
I gotta ask "What took you all so long to start this?"

Second, yes, comparisons will be made with what we did in the sixties.
but there are critical differences. We all had a future to look forward to
if we dropped our protesting and cooperated with the system. We were not
hungry. It was just that, according to the rules that had been made by the authorities,
some number of us,. at random, would be coming back from extended vacations,
in a box.

Certainly Ron Paul bears an uncanny resemblance to Eugene McCarthy. Yes, the press
will succeed in scuttling his candidacy. But not his issues.

Finally, one can look back at the recent Egyptian governmental change, and a little further at the events of Thermidor, to see what's likely to happen. Yes, this
movement will grow in scope. Yes, it will get violent. Yes, at first the violence will seem random and disorganized, hitting wrong targets ... but in time opposition leaders will rise and the targets will be more thoughtfully chosen. Yes, the new leaders, as the consolidate their power, will reveal dreadful evil sidelines, along the great traditions of Robespierre and Adolf ....

However there's one thing that the kids and the movement will not easily understand .... they are angry because of everything that they thought was promised to them, which they won't ever be able to get ( a secure future, a wife and children, a nice white collar job, a home in the suburbs with 2.5 bathrooms and a lot of grass that must be mowed every weekend, etc etc etc).

But, but, but ...once they succeed in overthrowing the current government (and yes, they WILL succeed, mostly because it has already self-destructed, its just that nobody has figured that out yet.)

it will begin to become evident that the problems they wanted to fix, have not been fixed ....

basically, the money and resources that they thought they were going to get, which they realize Wall Street and the ultra-rich and the older generation have all stolen from them ....

that money is gone, gone gone with the wind.

Nothing, not all the kings horses and all the kings men, can ever get it back again.

The whole world and everyone in it is still going to be poor, no matter how many new governments are put into place or how they are structured ... there is just no way around the fact that the whole planet is overpopulated and cannot (anymore) support the number of people who are here, so many of us must die, in ugly, premature ways that we do not choose for ourselves ....

and thus, if this be revolution, then the wheel is going to just pick up more and more momentum, there will be many, many turns, and perhaps all of humanity will be "broken upon the wheel ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel

there is, still, hope ... its just so marvelously far off .... we really have done it to ourselves, this time ....

Solution

One of my friends said, about taxes and the Federal debt:

The big boys aren't going to pay, no matter what. Suckers like us will get the bill.

I answered:

nope.
The bill is not going to be paid.
That's the whole point.

Beginning with Paulson's efforts back in 2008, TARP
and the other bailouts and Bernanke's expansion of the Fed,
the bankers have desperately been trying to save their own necks
at the expense of everybody else.
They are nothing but ignorant fools who have killed the golden goose,
trying to get at the source of the gold inside of it,
and they've got nothing for their troubles
but a lot of nasty entrails on their hands.

Fact is, if nobody has any money, then nobody needs bankers for anything. A world with no productive work, where only bankers can profit, is a world without any wealth, where no one profits.

Interesting case in point ... someone asked the Icelanders
how their country recovered so quickly from its crash
a couple of years back.
"Easy. We let the banks fail."

The level of debts worldwide are unsustainable.
Everybody knows that now, everybody understands.
None of these debts are going to be paid back. Not ever.
The Greeks will never pay off.
Neither will the Portuguese or the Irish.
Not the Spanish or the Italians. Not the French or the English.
And certainly not the Americans, who are all armed to the teeth
and planning strategic defaults all across the board.

There is no other solution but a total debt jubilee,
where ALL Debts are declared null and void.

The longer they put it off, the worse it is going to be for everybody,
including the bankers themselves.

At least, now, we are going to have worldwide collapse
of ALL asset classes, bonds, stocks, oil, precious metals, real estate.
Until the deed is done.
EVERYTHING is going down.
We will see just how long this takes ....

they may try to start a war here.
Be kind of interesting if they have a war and nobody comes .....

There is no other way ...

Luke 11 verses 3-5 ... KJV ... pay attention to these exact words ...

3. Give us day by day our daily bread. 4. And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

Consumption

Prior to my lifetime, this was the name of a deadly disease.
On second thought, maybe it still is ...