Joy

     After the resurrection, "The Powers that Be" refused to be outmaneuvered.  Having been soundly beaten in the public opinion polls, their initial reaction seemed to be surrender ...and Christianity spread throughout the western world ... but Truth was never their favourite tool, instead they found ways to insinuate lies and deception into the very core teachings of the new church, to corrupt the very words, language, and concepts even as they seemed to support them ... individuals like Emperor Constantine, Saint Augustine, the august members of the Nicene Council, the Popes, and later on King James, John Milton, and others, they all managed to subtly alter the message that Jesus had delivered, in ways delicate but powerful...

     Darkness will never be destroyed ... emptiness, utter stillness, and absolute zero will always be just around the corner.  They are not forces, they represent the absence of force.  They are not people, or gods, or devils, there is no intelligence behind them.  Those people who teach that pain, suffering, and loneliness can be eliminated forever, they have an insidious desire to teach people utter hopelessness as they begin to suspect that that message itself is a lie.

     "He is Risen"

     Joy unbounded.

     It is what it is, it can be brought forth in every thing, in every person, in every place, and time.  There is nothing else worth living for, nothing that can be made to be permanent, nothing that lasts, certainly there is no scientific basis whatever for the mathematical concept of "eternity".  It is ephemeral, it is ethereal, it is the mists rising from the grass in the morning that will burn off in the afternoon.
     Ours is the potential, the possibility, to create happiness, new, in the people around us.  Jesus showed us more ways to do it.  Don't try to make it into more than it is, do not try to capture or keep it or turn it into stone, else you will lose it forever.

happiness

     Happiness is fleeting!  Run!  Run for your lives!  Catch it while you can.

     Because only the ending, only termination, only death, can last forever ....

Police

     I came home from my morning shopping trip, parked in my driveway, and duly noted a police cruiser parked on the side street by my house.  I got out quietly and looked around, up and down the street, in yards, and down the alley, but saw no one.  the police car was unoccupied.
     There's been incidents.  There was a fire down the street just two weeks ago, arson, and the man and the woman found both shot to death in their car.  There was the awful incident a few years back where a man shook his baby to death, and later we all learned that he had fled another state, another wife, another life, after having done the same thing.  One of my neighbors was strung out on heroin before wrecking his car, his marriage and his life; that house is still abandoned.  Another was known to have clogged the sewer lines with hypodermic needles.  Even one of my own roommates called the police after some kind of staged suicide attempt.
     So, I walked quietly around to the front of my house.  there, on the main street, was another cruiser and an unmarked squad car parked right across the street.  But this was near the middle of the day, there was bright sunshine and hardly any traffic.  Nothing was moving and there were no sounds.  I looked at my neighbor's house, everything seemed to be in order.  The hardware store was quiet.
     After a minute or two of waiting, and still hearing nothing, seeing nothing, I ventured in to the hardware store.
     The cashier was on top of the situation.  He had it all scoped out.

     "They are having lunch together at the pizza shop", he stated boldly.
Just then one of the officers passed by on the sidewalk.  "How's it going?", he asked.

     I think there is a lesson in there, somewhere ....

"The Death of Money"

James Rickards, Penguin, 2014.

I highly recommend, he's extremely informative and thought-provoking, although I disagree with some of his conclusions.
Here's an excerpt that I won't argue with:

"There are few more tendentious comments on gold than the a priori
statement that a gold standard cannot work today.  In fact, a well-
designed gold standard could work smoothly if the political will existed to enact it and to adhere to its noninflationary disciplines.  A gold standard
is the ideal monetary system for those who create wealth through
ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and hard work.  Gold standards are disfavored
by those who do not create wealth but instead seek to extract wealth from others through inflation, inside information, and market manipulation. 
The debate over gold versus fiat money is really a debate between
entrepreneurs and rentiers."

why

does it take so long
for everybody else to grasp
what a disaster the  crude oil price drop is for the economy of the USA?

which is mainly based upon financial gimmickery,
and as such is highly vulnerable to price drops in land
and defaults in oil company debts
and large numbers of layoffs in
one of the few growth industries we had left


?

Back in the day, the stock market actually was a good predictor
of economic conditions to come.
Are we at the point now where the great majority of stock holdings
are  in the care of people who don't understand what they are doing?

Racism

you know, its the very favourite tool of the kings, the oligarches ... lets get the poor white people to fight against the poor black people, so that we can rule and control all of them ....

but you know, the way things are going now, with populations in every region easily and instantly able to pick up and relocate to any different region, anywhere on the globe, and with the old rules about sticking to your own kind now in complete tatters and so many children ensuing who cannot lay allegiance to any group of any kind but can only bear the label "mixed", and bear it with pride ....

it won't be long now, not long at all, just a few more generations, before any sentiment or generalization along such lines will sound so archaic, so ancient, that people will faint believe that anybody ever behaved in those silly ways ....

contortions

     this is hilarious.  The contortions that the western mainstream media is trying to go through to put some kind of favorable spin on the situation.....

     Greece, and the Ukraine, and Russia now have a gun pointed at the heart of our system ... either the west surrenders and GIVES both Greece and the Ukraine the money that they request, or else they get it from Russia.  If they get it from Russia then all of the Greek debt and Ukraine debt held by the IMF and the ECB and the western banks, goes into default, and that's enough to tip the whole system into disaster.

     I just can't wait to see how Fox News words this little imbroglio......