Well you do have to give Obama credit for at least one thing.
Every US president since Johnson has promised the people to do something about our dependence on foreign, imported crude oi. Few americans may realize that our largest supplier is Canada, but they do understand that crude oil is the #1 ingredient for our economy and there's nothing quite so good as having your own.
Well, but during every presidency since Johnson, the amount of crude oil that has been imported into the US has only increased ... until now.
Yes, its true.... by persuading over 12 million formerly-working people that they no longer need to work, or look for work, or even consider themselves to be unemployed,
those people have stopped driving around quite so much...
According to the figures of the weekly petroleum status report from the Energy Information Administration, crude oil imports have declined by almost 8% this year alone. They have declined by 20% since the years of the Bush Administration. This is a larger decline than anyone thought possible.
Who knows, maybe, if everyone stops working, we can cease to need to import any oil at all! What a concept!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
On Strike
This is a very simple concept.
Even a politician, or even a super-wealthy man, can grasp it, if he tries.
Virtually all of the common people, the laborers, workers, blue collar or no collar folks,
they are all on strike.
They have had it with their wages being forcefully and deceitfully taken from them.
Most of them do not understand how it was done, but they do understand that it was done.
There is no organization, no union, no union bosses. We have workers anonymous.
Some of them collect unemployment, food stamps, section 8.
Some of them camp out down by the river or sleep in their cars in urban parking garages. Some of them live with their parents, their friends, or in houses destined for foreclosure.
Some of them call in sick, then apply for disability.
Some of the better-educated go to work but they spend all day writing long reports about all the work they have done or are going to do, instead of working.
Some of them do odd jobs for cash, no taxes, no banks, no plastic.
They are going to stay on strike until the bankers and the politicians relent,
even if it takes demolishing the entire system.
Which it will.
Even a politician, or even a super-wealthy man, can grasp it, if he tries.
Virtually all of the common people, the laborers, workers, blue collar or no collar folks,
they are all on strike.
They have had it with their wages being forcefully and deceitfully taken from them.
Most of them do not understand how it was done, but they do understand that it was done.
There is no organization, no union, no union bosses. We have workers anonymous.
Some of them collect unemployment, food stamps, section 8.
Some of them camp out down by the river or sleep in their cars in urban parking garages. Some of them live with their parents, their friends, or in houses destined for foreclosure.
Some of them call in sick, then apply for disability.
Some of the better-educated go to work but they spend all day writing long reports about all the work they have done or are going to do, instead of working.
Some of them do odd jobs for cash, no taxes, no banks, no plastic.
They are going to stay on strike until the bankers and the politicians relent,
even if it takes demolishing the entire system.
Which it will.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Zero
God spoke out to me recently in a more forceful fashion than He has for many years ... I have regretted the distance between us and ascribed it to 1) my sins 2) His insistence that I use more of what He has already given me 3) He want me more deeply grounded in this physical world with the other people in it and less with Him 4)
the end of my idiosyncratic psychotropic drug withdrawal creating hyperawareness.
He brought the number "zero" to my attention.
I guess one thing He was trying to say to me was just that He is very much still there in my life ... He has been telling me that my life is a reduced, slimmed-down, steamlined, simpler, more relaxed version of what I was living before. But that does NOT mean that my tasks are done, as I have been contemplating.
I'm still here.
You will have to bear with my understanding of His language to me ...
very private and personal, always found in events which are surprising to me, sometimes literal scientific miracles other times just very remarkable ... but furthermore they are all laced with a "halo" that I cannot describe to another person which further identify them as "sendings" or "communications" ... He is the living God ...
(I am not going to get into a debate here over elements that other people may ascribe to hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or just loosing it ... I'm happy for them to think what they will.)
I started to play a computer game. Which I do a lot. The game hesitated a lot in starting up. when it did start, it immediately returned a score of zero to me without giving me a chance to make one move. That doesn't happen, it just doesn't.
He's just asking me to meditate on the subject of zero ... it is round ,
it is the most important of all numbers, as a placeholder it enables addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, if you don't understand what I mean then just try, for a minute, to add or multiply a few roman numeral numbers.
The earth is round. Most everything in nature goes in cycles, up, down,
around and around, night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. I just finished reading Joseph Felser's "The Myth of the Great Ending", full of philosophy, paranormal discussions, dreamwork, out of body experiences, rebirth experiences, other stuff that I'm somewhat familiar with already. Felser has a nice website to promote the book and on the website he says "everything is round" and has a picture of the earth. His premise is that we are not coming to a great ending.
I am coming to similar understandings ... these days I find myself to be less and less perturbed about the cliff that we are all headed towards ... I see it as a pretty cataclysmic change for mankind, maybe on the same scale as Noah's flood or the burning of Lot's home town ... but not, not, not anything like John's dream in revelations ....
I don't expect to hang around for this, but I see a great cleansing coming at us, a washing away of a great many strong beliefs and activities which are sinful
and have made this result inevitable. Because human beings don't like being forced to change, and maybe also because quite a few folk are going to die "unexpectedly" as the population reverts to something more reasonable for this poor old planet, there will be some hardship and hard feelings and misunderstandings about it,
which will make no more difference than a grain of sand in the Taklimaken Desert.
Beyond it I see a great, peaceful pastoral time/place ... life will be simpler and easier and a lot less "stressful" for a long time to come ... for all the strife near-term, this is not to be feared ....I'm even having a few delightful moments of "jumping in the puddles" like a three-year-old boy, instead of fretting about the cold and wet and the mud on their new shoes like someone believing themselves "more mature"....
the end of my idiosyncratic psychotropic drug withdrawal creating hyperawareness.
He brought the number "zero" to my attention.
I guess one thing He was trying to say to me was just that He is very much still there in my life ... He has been telling me that my life is a reduced, slimmed-down, steamlined, simpler, more relaxed version of what I was living before. But that does NOT mean that my tasks are done, as I have been contemplating.
I'm still here.
You will have to bear with my understanding of His language to me ...
very private and personal, always found in events which are surprising to me, sometimes literal scientific miracles other times just very remarkable ... but furthermore they are all laced with a "halo" that I cannot describe to another person which further identify them as "sendings" or "communications" ... He is the living God ...
(I am not going to get into a debate here over elements that other people may ascribe to hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or just loosing it ... I'm happy for them to think what they will.)
I started to play a computer game. Which I do a lot. The game hesitated a lot in starting up. when it did start, it immediately returned a score of zero to me without giving me a chance to make one move. That doesn't happen, it just doesn't.
He's just asking me to meditate on the subject of zero ... it is round ,
it is the most important of all numbers, as a placeholder it enables addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, if you don't understand what I mean then just try, for a minute, to add or multiply a few roman numeral numbers.
The earth is round. Most everything in nature goes in cycles, up, down,
around and around, night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. I just finished reading Joseph Felser's "The Myth of the Great Ending", full of philosophy, paranormal discussions, dreamwork, out of body experiences, rebirth experiences, other stuff that I'm somewhat familiar with already. Felser has a nice website to promote the book and on the website he says "everything is round" and has a picture of the earth. His premise is that we are not coming to a great ending.
I am coming to similar understandings ... these days I find myself to be less and less perturbed about the cliff that we are all headed towards ... I see it as a pretty cataclysmic change for mankind, maybe on the same scale as Noah's flood or the burning of Lot's home town ... but not, not, not anything like John's dream in revelations ....
I don't expect to hang around for this, but I see a great cleansing coming at us, a washing away of a great many strong beliefs and activities which are sinful
and have made this result inevitable. Because human beings don't like being forced to change, and maybe also because quite a few folk are going to die "unexpectedly" as the population reverts to something more reasonable for this poor old planet, there will be some hardship and hard feelings and misunderstandings about it,
which will make no more difference than a grain of sand in the Taklimaken Desert.
Beyond it I see a great, peaceful pastoral time/place ... life will be simpler and easier and a lot less "stressful" for a long time to come ... for all the strife near-term, this is not to be feared ....I'm even having a few delightful moments of "jumping in the puddles" like a three-year-old boy, instead of fretting about the cold and wet and the mud on their new shoes like someone believing themselves "more mature"....
my favourite joke
Really, there are only 10 kinds of people in this world:
those who understand the binary number system, and those who don't.
those who understand the binary number system, and those who don't.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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.....
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.....
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
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 ....
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 ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
