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TheTranscendenceDiaries

Month: December 2013

There is meaning to our lives

December 29, 2013

Still finding myself obsessed with a quiet secret subtle and almost constant gnawing at my insides about the unbearable sadness of how impermanent everything is. It creeps up on me throughout the day and I have to fight back the feeling of hopelessness when I start to think about how temporary everything in our lives is. Our lifetimes are short here. Our day to day experiences are memories before we even have the chance of taking each of them in. one minute we are having a good time and in the next moment it is a new day and we barely remember the events of the day before. It is a horrible and haunting understanding that sits in the back of my mind at all times.

I remind myself that it is up to me to find meaning while I am here. I try to live my life to its fullest and even then I cannot shake the deep underlying knowing that they are all just moments lived and then soon forgotten. Where is the meaning in that? Where is there meaning in anything if it is all just going to become a memory, never to exist again? Or worse even, soon not even a memory, because we tend to forget things so easily. I cannot shake the horror of it. why live at all? that’s what always comes up for me. Why are we living in the first place if each day is just going to drift on into the non-existent past?

There is absolutely no way to retrieve the past. Each day of our lives is lost to the next, and if that weren’t horrible enough, that day is also lost to the one that follows it. we are just floating inside of this thing called life. just riding in it like passengers in a stranger’s car; with very little control and even less control of how we process it or how much of it we are able to remember.

Now this does remind me of a few things. Beav’s wife and sister Lollie, two of the most mainstream good old American girls you’d ever want to meet have been scrapbooking all their lives. So they can pull out a book from just about any time in their lives and show you pictures of their former selves and their friends and family members. This is a nice attempt at salvaging our ever fleeting lives and memories. But a futile exercise. If there is ever a fire in their home or a flood or a war or any other disaster their scrapbooks will be destroyed in a heartbeat.

And worse even, in time the scrapbooks will be close to meaningless anyway. As they pass on and their children get older and then their children become older these scrapbooks will become less and less useful or important or meaningful. eventually they will be forgotten or tossed into a box or thrown away. and their lives, the lives of my two beautiful sisters in law will be entirely forgotten, like myself and my brother Beav and my mom and everyone else I know now. that’s just life. and it suffers me greatly.

I have found myself less and less interested in day to day conversations because I have come to understand how utterly pointless they are. In less than a few hours they will be forgotten. When the family gathers around the table to bs and have fun and hang out and talk and all that, I find myself obsessing on how futile and pointless it is to be there talking shit and hanging out. after all, in a few years someone will get divorced and we won’t be hanging out anymore, or someone else will die or even if that doesn’t happen, eventually we all will be dead and won’t even be a memory to anyone at all. so instead I sit and stare at everyone laughing and listen to their ultimately meaningless diatribes and wonder why we all even bother to talk to each other at all.

I remember rummaging through some boxes at the goodwill and finding these boxes of all these families belongings. Baby clothes and framed pictures of people and photo albums and trinkets. And I felt so devastated by the experience. I sat there staring at the photo albums wondering who these people were and how all of their personal belongings ended up at a goodwill store. Were they all dead now? was there a divorce and one of the parents gave away all their stuff? were the people in the framed pictures still alive? Did they know that their stuff was being rummaged through by strangers everyday and was for sale? Where are these poor souls now who framed these meaningless photographs?

I have begun to feel the same way about learning. I think about how much information and knowledge I don’t have in my brain compared to how much I have studied through the years. I would guess that I have retained about one/one-hundredth of the amount of information that I have put into my brain in the last twenty years. call it getting older or whatever, but you just reach this point where you realize that you really have studied an enormous amount. About a whole host of subjects, everything from Egyptology to physics to art history to the great religions to philosophy to literature to sail boating, and you still can’t remember most of it. the information goes in, and you then it seems to go back out. I will swear to God right now, (o.k. I know that may not hold much water, since I have already professed to not really believing in that kind of God anyway, the kind of God who would care about that type of thing,) but still, I will swear to God that I have read at least five books over the years on say Beethoven for instance, and Chopin, and Bach, and Mozart, and I wouldn’t be able to answer five questions correctly about the lives of any of these men, nor their famous works. so why fucking read and study and learn anything at all?

Lately I have been starting to realize that just about the only thing that does seem to matter is making enough money to live a great lifestyle, and finding peace inside of yourself. That’s about all I can make out of any of this so far. I am starting to think that all of my crazy and insane and voracious reading has been kind of worthless. I mean, you can’t take any of this knowledge to the grave with you. I don’t think we can take anything to the grave with us. so what is all this learning about then? why know anything about anything? Why not just work hard to make money? Just work hard to make enough money to just stay stoned or drunk all the time and be pampered like a king and then die when it’s your time to die. I think that might make a bit more sense than all of this crazy reading and learning that I have been obsessed with since I can remember. Where does it really get us in the long run or even the short run? I guess it just comes down to the moment. if you’re happy in the moment then that’s all that matters.

Next day:

These horrific realizations I have written about above are made even more agonizing and unbearable by certain encounters with the inane and mundane of living in mainstream America (unless of course you are a mainstream American; then life here may entertain and console rather than depress and suffer you. I have a profound admiration for these people, for their faith, for their simple life, for their innocence.) Yesterday at the hotel I flipped through a TV Guide that they had in our room while I was using the bathroom. On the back of the cover was this rather offensive looking picture of a dolled-up air-brushed pseudo-anchorman trying his best to look smart and cool, kind of like he secretly thinks he is a movie star rather than a newsman; the headline next to his cheesy half-grin read “THIS NEW YEARS EVE ANDERSON COOPER LIVE FROM TIMES SQUARE. LIVE COVERAGE BEGINS AT 11:00 PM.” As if that were news. New years eve at times square where thousands of people stand in the freezing cold for hours just to watch some man-made ball of lights drop from the top of a building for a few seconds is now news to this supposed news channel. And worse yet, this guy has two last names as his whole name. This is just a totally unlikable situation.

The idea alone is nauseating enough if you are someone who likes a little more meaning and authenticity to your holidays, but hey this is America and it’s a free country and we should be allowed to do whatever we want to. that’s a groovy thing. But to send one of your top anchormen out there to report on it like its news…. my fucking God… dig what I’m saying here.

I just recently learned that a lot of our food now in America is being sprayed/dosed/shot with a few dozen poisonous radioactive chemicals in a process they call “irradiation” and that a lot of other food in American grocery stores is being genetically altered for various reasons – they call the process GM food, genetically modified. I had heard about both of these processes years ago but I didn’t know that we actually started doing it. did you? here’s the fucking clincher: the food that is sprayed with radiation AND the food that is being genetically modified is NOT LABELED for us. This isn’t just happening to fruits and vegetables and meats. Its happening to all foods in the grocery stores all over America. In boxes and cans and frozen foods and no one knows it because they don’t have to label the foods.

Now I trust that most people who are crazy and cool and smart enough to read me know about this shit already but in a nutshell this means that they can take genes from a chicken and mix them in with the genes of a tomato if they think it may make the tomato bigger or last longer and then when someone goes to eat a tomato, even if they are a vegetarian, they are now eating some genetic material from a chicken. Its fucking insane and heinous and evil and you cannot get away from it no matter what here in America. Only if you buy all organic food. That’s they only way to avoid it… this is fucking horrible.

And if that weren’t bad enough, that same tomato may have also been sprayed with radiation! And we the people who are buying the food – that means you and me – don’t know about it. in America there are no laws or guidelines that say that the manufacturers of food nor the grocery stores that sell us our food have to label the food that has been treated in these scary dangerous poisonous manners. the implications to how badly this could affect our health are enormous but no one says a fucking word and the people don’t even know about it. we never voted on it. its just something that our congressmen slipped by us because they actually get paid by the food manufacturers to do so. I’m not making this up and I’m not trying to be an alarmist. This is just how it works in America. They do whatever they want to at the expense of the people in order to get money for their campaigns and then if all hell breaks loose later and people start getting sick and having babies with three legs and all that, then they claim ignorance and say that they didn’t know and chances are they will blame the food makers and the grocery stores and make them pay a shitload of money to the poor families, as if that is going to make them feel any better.

It’s a twisted system we have set up here still in America with our elected officials. Most of them I will add. There are some congressmen who have been vehemently opposed to genetically modified and irradiated food not being labeled, but they have been unsuccessful in trying to help us because the payoffs (they call it LOBBYING in our government, not payoffs, but by all accounts, it is legal bribes they take in order to help themselves while fucking all of us up the ass. this equals “payoffs.”) Now of course in Europe they do have laws that protect them from this kind of insanity and if you’re buying genetically modified oranges or peanuts sprayed with cancer causing radiation you will know it because it will be marked right on the label. I would guess that’s because the Europeans have countries that are much older that ours is. They have already learned their lessons a few hundred times over. They’ve learned their lessons. They know their governments are greedy fuckhead bastards out to get as much as they can for themselves and could care less about serving the people. that’s why we sit in history class here in the states and learn about all of their various revolutions that they’ve had over the centuries.

In Europe they could never get away with allowing an entire population to eat food sprayed with radiation and not even know it. the people would go fucking nuts and storm the government buildings and cut off the fucking heads of their prime ministers or other government officials, as they have done in times past. Here in America we’ve been eating this shit for like five years now I just found out and we haven’t even known about it. And everyone is walking around wondering why diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and diabetes are on the rise in our country even though we are supposedly the most advanced country in the world. everyday on the news we see the puppet heads talk about these new diseases being on the rise in our country and all the new drugs that scientists are coming up with, but no one is talking about all this new shit they are secretly doing to the food behind our backs.

O.k. so what does this have to do with Anderson cooper and CNN spending a few hours in front of thousands of people watching some stupid man-made ball of lights sit on top of a building and trying to pretend that that’s news? well I’m glad you asked. Not that I have to make the connection for you, for I’m sure that I don’t by now, but shouldn’t the news fucks be spending that hour reporting news? like real news? Like reporting on the fact that our government has allowed our food manufactures to start spraying our food with radiation? And shouldn’t they be doing that everyday until a real change is made so we don’t have to eat fucked up food and not even know it? I mean, what the fuck is this idiot doing getting paid to stand in the freezing cold watching a bunch of people get drunk and stare at a ball when he should be on TV telling us about what’s happening to our food? When he should be in a lab interviewing scientists and doctors about the dangers of irradiated food? When he should be at the capital trying to get our congressmen to explain how the fuck they let this shit slide behind our backs and without us even being allowed to vote on it. that’s what he should be reporting on… now that’s news. and its kind of fucking obvious unless you are a fucking moron.

But instead we get three hours of fake news reports on new years eve in New York. As if that is news? as if that is newsworthy? Isn’t there anything else they cold be reporting on? Is there nothing left of our lives than the flashiest and the glitziest? Is there nothing left to our lives than the event or the product that pays the most for advertising time? Being in the business you learn over the years what makes news. you learn that what we see in the media is not necessarily the most newsworthy but the most paid for. it is called publicity. The entities that often make the news are called publicists. [for the record, our band has a publicist by the way. we just can’t pay the big dollars for the big publicists yet so that is why we are not front page news. give me a few hundred thousand dollars and I’ll be the fucking poster boy for genetically modified food. People can watch me degenerate and die right in front of their eyes on live TV from eating too many irradiated avocados and I’ll be a happy camper if they’re paying me enough.]

The products and the companies and the people who are willing and able to pay the most to these publicists acquire the most space and time in the media and therefore the most attention from the masses. that means you and me. the reason we are bombarded and besieged everyday by pictures and irrelevant babble underneath their smarmy photos about Britney and Paris and the Donald is not because they are newsworthy but because they are paying millions of dollars to their publicists every month to be newsworthy. The media doesn’t seem to notice the overwhelming amount of non-news they shove down the throats of the innocents. They are just doing their job. When we open up our msn messenger and read “Is Britney pregnant?” it is not because anyone cares. We didn’t ask to be informed of this. It is because the media is doing their job of being paid to report whatever the publicists tell them to run that day. the public then thinks that they should care. And then in the grocery store or in the line at Starbucks, Britney’s name might come up and someone might say, ‘I heard she is pregnant.’ And someone else might say, ‘oh yeah. I heard that too.’ and that is news. and in the meantime no one even knows her music or owns any of her albums. But they know her face and her name and they think that is newsworthy because the media tells them that it is.

All around us there is real news happening. Each of us throughout our days hears about real news happening right in our own backyards. And yet we see very little of it in the national media. I have always found it fascinating that the likes of a George w bush or any other elected official can get away with all the horrible things they do at the expense of the people they serve and no one knows anything about it. But everyone knows that Justin is dating Cameron. We all hear about the dangers and the threat to personal liberty and freedom that the ‘patriot act’ is to all of us here in America, and yet none of us knows what those dangers are because the media never talks about it. I admit that I don’t even know. I just hear the whisperings here and there. But we all know what ‘bootylicious’ means. And we all know that Paris Hilton started her own jewelry line. and we all know that brad and Jen might be on the rocks. Even I know that. and that is sad. Do I care? Does anyone care? Should we care? Do we have a choice at this point? It certainly isn’t important to anyone except brad and Jen God love them but we hear about it anyway.

Don’t know if I already penned this thought in a prior entry but CNN has started to use the catchphrase ‘the most trusted name in news.’ if they were the most trusted name in news wouldn’t they be using the catchphrase ‘we want to be the most trusted name in news?’  I mean, there’s no way to qualify such a statement is there? so if you do want to be trusted you wouldn’t ever say it would you? I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed that they could be trusted. Your actions would speak much louder than your self aggrandizing declarations. Same thing with fox news whose catchphrase is ‘fair and balanced.’ Even an alien coming from another planet could catch a few minutes of their non-news and see that there is nothing fair and balanced about it. and just by the nature of them having to declare it is a red flag to anyone except a few gullible middle-state Americans. What gets me is how the hell we ended up in this mess in the first place. how the hell did we allow supposed ‘news’ shows to report the supposed news so one sided and opinionated and self serving that it isn’t even news anymore? When did this tragic betrayal ever start? And why do we continue to allow it?

Reminds me of Michael Jackson proclaiming himself the king of pop. You don’t have to tell the world you are the ‘anything of anything.’ We’ll let you know. Bruce isn’t the boss because he declared himself so. He just is. the purple one isn’t the baddest mofo in show business because he declared it. He just is. Because of his singing and dancing and songwriting and performing. But maybe we’re missing the point. I mean, kings aren’t elected are they? They are self proclaimed. For better or worse. They show up one day and declare I am king. And the people just try to keep going on with their lives. I’ve never liked the idea of kings and I thank God for the day that we started ousting them out of power. I think its high time that we started doing the same thing with our news. we need to take it back. our souls are thirsting for things real and substantial and meaningful. I hear it everyday from everyone around me. and if you are reading this, then chances are you are one of the many who have felt the same thing and probably said it to one of your friends or coworkers.

There is meaning to our lives. There is no doubt about it. regardless of what the media tries to tell us. There is meaning and substance in the world. We can feel it. We experience it everyday. But we need to start demanding that we are told about it. it isn’t going to come from a Barbara Walters special or a fox news flash or from a CNN special report that’s for sure. We are going to have to start looking for it ourselves I’m afraid. Going deeper on our own and sharing what we learn with one another on a grass-roots level. Because the mainstream news is just not doing it here in America anymore. My brother’s wife asked me once why I was so cynical. And I just looked at her with this understanding look on my face. I had noticed in the bathtub the day before that she uses this product to wash her new baby called “babysoft babywash” by Johnson’s. and inside of this bottle of poison are seventeen different manmade chemicals. Preservatives, artificial colors, alcohol and a bunch of other shit I would never put on my own body. chemicals known to be poisonous to the human body. I’m thinking why the fuck isn’t she just using a good homemade Vermont soap? Something pure and natural? Why all these chemicals? And the reason is that she doesn’t know any better. She thinks that because this product is available in her local grocery store and advertised in her favorite women’s magazines that it must be safe. And why shouldn’t she? When the news media is not saying shit about it because they are receiving millions of dollars a year from letting these companies advertise their products. so instead my poor sister in law knows all about the new Jude law movie, but she doesn’t know shit about what to wash her baby with or that she’s feeding her whole family poison food sprayed with radiation. So is there a reason why certain people are cynical? Hell yeah. And the truth be told I’m waiting for a lot more people to become cynical. And angry. And pissed off. And I’m hoping that one day we are going to do something about it.



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Uncategorized Anderson Cooper, genetic engineering, life is temporary, lobbying the government

Something Special is Happening

December 25, 2013

[An old draft recently discovered, transcribed and edited.]

Had to share this post from someone i saw on Facebook early this morning. Woke up at 3:45 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. So i surfed for a while. I usually avoid religious posts. I don’t Like them or UnLike them. I just don’t pay attention to them. Any kind of public religious zealotry tends to turn me off, whether it’s pro-religious or anti-religious. Atheists are some of the most religiously zealot people you’d ever not want to meet, though they don’t realize it. But many of them are prone to the same kind of proselytizing that radical evangelicals or Muslims are. Personally I find it peculiar, the apparently dire need some people seem to have to profess preach or proselytize their faith to others. Especially in a mixed setting like Facebook or other social media websites where we’re sure to encounter people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures, faiths and religious traditions. Chances are, we’re most likely in the minority; if not due to our religion per se — Christianity is after all a surprisingly popular religion globally — but in our desire or willingness to talk about it publicly. When religious views are so personal; when we are fully aware that our own personal religious views are not being solicited by others… and are most likely not even welcomed.

It’s akin to running around town buck-naked, this trend to go social with your religious views. We all get naked when we have to. That’s a given. It’s a fact of life we all quietly and humbly accept. But we don’t find many people asking anyone else to show it to them publicly. At least not if they’re sane or rational folk. Public displays of religion have always struck me in a similar fashion. Not only is your own nudity generally unwelcome in public places, it can also more often than not just be downright insulting to some; this assumption that everyone wants to see your wanker flopping around in the wind. So if you live in a world where everyone does their best to be respectful, you simply keep your clothes on in public. The same rule should apply to waving our religious flag all over the place every time you open your mouth or type something publicly. I’m not against religion. Certainly not against being religious. Obviously. I just believe that it’s a very personal thing. It’s hard to pull off publicly pronouncing one’s faith when it wasn’t requested in the first place.

When it comes to religion, especially as it relates to Christianity in the United States, there is an unspoken — unfortunately sometimes spoken — idea that some people have that “their way” is the “one true” or “best way” there is, insinuating that all other religions are somehow inferior to theirs — simply because they aren’t christian. When someone posts something super religious unsolicited in a social media arena for all the world to see, knowing damn well that the majority of the people who will see it don’t share their views, it comes across snobbish, holier than thou, cocky, sometimes downright insulting. But if you go deeper, and attempt to view them in a respectful way, it may not be as cocky or snobbish as it is just ignorant; just not being as aware as most people. I try to view it that way sometimes. To give them the benefit of the doubt.

So yes, I do tend to respectfully ignore those ultra-religious posts by others, regardless of which faith tradition they happen to entertain themselves with. For all the reasons listed above. Every now and then though something will catch me. This morning was one such occurrence. Perhaps it’s because it’s the middle of the night and I’m still half asleep. Or perhaps it’s because it just really resonated with me. We won’t know for years really… till this post becomes a forgotten re-read. But what grabbed me was a prayer. A simple prayer. A public prayer. Hung out to dry in the wind for all the neighbors to see. Just so happened that what this person posted resonated strongly with me; probably because I’ve been praying the same damn prayer nearly word for word for weeks now myself.

I’ve felt a strong compulsion to pray a lot more and connect with the Divine a lot more lately. Not sure why. Something special is happening. Has happened. Something bigger than usual, larger than just me or “us”. And I cannot help but feel that it doesn’t have to be inherently religious for those that choose not to go “there”. But science has now discovered a cosmology that is big enough, expansive enough, (magical enough if you will) to allow for this kind of thought and still permit “rational thinking” for those who normally would never venture into those waters.

It isn’t like the old days — ten yeas ago? Five years ago? Even one year ago? Where one had to choose between being religious or being intelligent, sane, rational or logically minded. We can clearly see that in times past this was a choice that one had to make. All of the great faith traditions or religions that humankind has come up with (excepting Buddhism, which is NOT a religion in the strict sense) have been rather kooky, to put it kindly. They’re filled with contradictions and hypocrisy, legends and myths so glaringly unrealistic and manmade that you’d feel a fool to take them seriously. Once you study them that is. [And let us remember that a lot of religious people never make it to that point — which is why I recommend being as respectful as possible when interacting with someone overtly religious. They’re raised in a religious household and they never reach a point where they study it from a historical or academic perspective. They just take it at face value. Based on what they were taught as children. It’s important to remind ourselves of this; for perspective and respect.]

But for those who have taken the time to study the world’s religions, or even their own, it becomes apparent rather quickly just how insanely irrational and made up they all are. Usually this leads to a slingshot kind of reaction. One minute you’re religious and the next minute you’re super anti-religious. A logical pragmatist. A realist. Some even go so far as calling themselves atheists, though that’s a religion too. The anti-religion religion. The smartest minds will tend toward an open minded agnosticism. Which is where most of the civilized world seems to comfortably rest now in consciousness and in our cultural tendencies. But this Divine Force still pulses out there. In here. It’s still alive. Living. Existing. Creating. Sustaining. How involved It is in OUR day to day lives, one cannot be sure. How available It is to us even, we can’t be sure. But there’s nothing wrong with trying. No harm in it. In fact I’ve always found it to be a beneficial endeavor.

Which is where we started here roughly an hour ago. The sun is rising now. I will drift back to sleep soon. But not without first praying. I almost always fall asleep praying. Whether it’s night time or day. A full sleep or a half hour nap. Just what or who we are praying to… that’s a difficult thing to qualify. For everyone the image is probably different. I once heard a friend casually explain to a small group of us that he almost always prays to Jesus “because he was human” and he finds it easier to pray to “something he can understand”. I found this idea remarkably peculiar. Only because I personally feel the exact opposite of this. I tend to shy away from “praying” to Jesus on a regular basis — precisely because he is/was a human. I see him more as a conduit to the Divine, rather than a divine force himself…  Not that I “don’t believe” that “Jesus was God”. I would never claim to know either way. Frankly I don’t know how anyone can make a decision about that one way or the other. I wouldn’t dare. So I remain optimistically open-minded about it. But when I pray I tend to pray to “something very large, expansive, all-knowing, all-loving, compassionate and omnipresent”, something that is big enough to hold the entire universe in its mind and/or beingness and yet small enough to fit inside the smallest sub-atomic particle. But see, that’s MY version of the Divine. Surely very different than the next person’s.

The question is, can God (the Goddess? Not gender based at all? Completely removed, evolved beyond gender-based organisms…?) be flexible, pliable, malleable enough to encompass all that we attribute to it and yet still BE what IT IS in reality? If anything? I’d venture to guess yes, He/She/It can. And does. And it is precisely at this time in OUR evolution that we are beginning to see and understand this. Surely God / the Divine already gets all this. Waiting for us to get it. Slowly but surely it seems as though more and more of us are coming around. As I’ve already recounted numerous times here in the past, I didn’t find God or religion as much as IT found me. The gift of that is not lost on me. I still remain exceedingly grateful for those experiences. For I know very well what it’s like to use one’s head to try to “figure God out”. It’s a maddening process. Your heart may long for one thing but your head always gets in the way. Logic and reason. Without some kind of a super-natural or paranormal experience one is usually left with just human logic and reason. God doesn’t tend to fit too easily into a rational logical view of the world. Especially when approached through the small minded lens of one or any of the world’s major religions. But once God finds you, once you come face to face with It, heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul, once you FEEL this divine presence, or hear it… it’s hard to deny it, no matter what logic or reason or rational thinking tell you.

And now we’ve caught up, scientifically speaking, to just how grand this God-construct can be or possibly is. Our science is expanding way beyond what it used to be, how small it used to be. Physicists are finally starting to create cosmological constructs that are expansive enough to make room for this Divine force. And thus prayer can be not only possible, but encouraged. At the very least for experimental purposes. (And that’s out of respect for the still-purely logical pragmatists who find the existence of an external Divine force in the universe unlikely). But for many, ones who have extended beyond that kind of thinking, or who, like me, have experienced something other-worldly that has permanently shifted their views, prayer just may be the fastest way for us to get to the bottom of what this special thing is that we’ve been calling God for so many thousands of years. I am most fascinated imagining what our beliefs will be like in another ten years, or another fifty, or one-hundred, pertaining to this Divine force. Who will strike theistic gold first? The scientists? Or the spiritual? Or will it be a more subtle vectoring of both worlds simultaneously? A sudden realization of the merging of both worlds without a deliberate attempt to do so…? Seems very likely. But we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime it’s certainly an intriguing proposition.

– Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone



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Uncategorized agnostics, atheists, cosmology, facebook, finding God, holier than thou, personal religious views, praying, praying to find God, science discoering God, The Divine

Explaining Christmas

December 25, 2013

Spent all day today contemplating Christmas. More than usual. More than most Christmas Eves. Presently at Christmas Eve church service. An annual tradition if you’re a practicing christian. (Attempting to inconspicuously type on my cell phone while everyone else is singing hymns around me.) Growing up we always went to Midnight Mass. If you’re Catholic, you’re all too familiar with this event. Over the last few years we’ve started to go to the earlier services at 7 or 8 in the evening instead. No matter what time you go, they’re beautiful experiences, regardless of how religious one is or isn’t. Mostly just everyone singing together by candlelight in a darkened sanctuary. We also take an extended period of time to just sit in silence to “be with God”, a rather progressive and not very common practice for traditional Christianity. There’s nothing terribly objectionable about these services, even if you’re a hardcore realist. I’ve always found them to be pleasant, for a variety of reasons; relaxing and comforting, warm and fuzzy.

Listened to a lot of Christmas music over the last few weeks this year. In the background all the time, from the radio or TV. It helps to bring in the Christmas spirit in the most perfect way, similar to how snow tends to do. Today the music got me thinking. Especially as I found myself inadvertently focused on the lyrics. We’ve amassed a rather large canon of holiday music over the last few hundred years in the West. Many classics. And plenty of newer ones are being added every year. While casually listening to song after song play in the background, I started pondering how strange this Christmas thing is. Just based on the lyrical content of these songs and what they convey. It’s really a bloody mess when you start to focus in on it. If we tried to explain what Christmas is to someone from a different culture, say someone who had never heard of it or celebrated it before, we would find it quite the challenge; to say the least.

Now if we’re born into it, even if we’re just born in the United States but not raised specifically christian, then for the most part it probably all tends to make sense. At least from afar. Until you get up close and start analyzing it that is. Then it becomes a confusing hodgepodge mix of only God knows what. I can only imagine how completely strange and surreal that this time of supposed celebration must appear to someone who didn’t grow up here or who isn’t accustomed to it.

From a distance Christmas seems more a season than just a one day event. It appears to start around Thanksgiving and end around January 2nd — some point after the New Year. The first glimpses of it appear in the form of people all over the country, from the smallest little backwoods towns to the largest metropolitan cities, plastering their yards and porches and the outside of their houses with thousands of bright colorful lights. No apparent utilitarian or evolutionary reason for this. Just a tradition. Big brightly lit snowmen or reindeer or sleighs are hoisted up on rooftops or propped up in front yards near the closest street. Whole neighborhoods bursting with light so bright that you can see them from a mile away. They resemble amusement parks. Blinding and gaudy. Sometimes breathtakingly beautiful. But usually just fuck all chaotic. Masses of lights are strewn about everywhere with an unspoken message that the more you display the more alleged “Christmas spirit” you have.

But what IS Christmas spirit? That’s the question. And that’s exactly when the confusion sets in, the moment we ask that question. As a society as a whole, Christmas seems to be primarily about shopping. Whether you’re engaged in a conversation with someone or listening to other people speaking, watching the TV or reading magazines and newspapers, even driving around looking at billboards and storefronts, you notice one thing more than anything else: Christmas is about shopping. It means that you and everyone you know is going to buy something for you and everyone else they know.

Overnight the attitude of the entire country becomes highly focused on, if not obsessed with, buying and selling things. Not that that’s too different than any other day in America or any capitalist society for that matter. But Christmas is different. Throughout the rest of year buying things is just one aspect of our day to day lives. Like eating or drinking or going to the movies or working out. Something we do now and then out of necessity or for fun. But during Christmas, buying things turns into the de facto reason for the holiday’s existence in the first place. It’s what the whole season is based around. What you’re going to buy and what you’re going to receive when other people buy you things.

Ask the average American kid what their favorite day of the year is and ten times out of ten their eyes are going to light up and they’re going to resoundingly exclaim “Christmas”!!!! with a great big smile on their face. When you ask them why, they wholeheartedly let out a big cheer and scream “presents!!!!!!” And that’s Christmas.

It’s as if the entire culture — black white brown in between, rich middle class or poor — takes a sharp turn towards this mass consciousness hypnotic compulsion to buy stuff, to shop, to consume. People even buy stuff for themselves. “Gifting yourself a little something” for Christmas has become quite a trend over the last ten years.

Of course this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For every buyer there’s a seller. They’re has to be. Which means as one person is spending money, someone is making it. It means that the overall economy of the country is going to improve, even if just for a month or two. All the new buyers in the market means more business and more business means more jobs. So if only temporarily Christmas is great for the economy. We need to remember that next time we feel compelled to cast dispersions on how commercial the season has become or some of the other more questionable aspects of Christmas. If not for anything else, Christmas brings us a slightly healthier economy.

Christmas also entails the colors of the culture changing. Everything around us miraculously transforms into some form of red or green. Decorations pop up everywhere. In houses, outside of houses, in stores and restaurants, even hardcore staunch corporate offices tend to decorate to bring in the Christmas cheer. But we still don’t get any close to an understanding of what Christmas is. Just what it looks like. It’s actually hard to put your finger on, the meaning or the reason for the season. One thing we notice is that almost everyone tends to return home to visit their family. Perhaps more than anything else that is the single most ubiquitous aspect of the holiday known as Christmas, returning home to be with family.

But what about Santa Claus? And the reindeer? And the Grinch? And the Snowman? And that strange tradition of dragging a giant live tree into your house and covering it with colored lights and toys? As customary as all of these things seem to most of us, they’re difficult to bring together cohesively in order to explain the season to a stranger. To many, at least in the United States, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of a man named Jesus who lived and died thousands of years ago. He was a Jewish man who was born and died in a little country called Israel, though Jewish people don’t celebrate his birth and neither do Israelis. They tend to ignore him completely. And that’s a tough nut to crack. Christians on the other hand DO celebrate him. Though it’s common knowledge that he wasn’t born anywhere near the month of December. He was born in either March or September. Depending on which history you choose to follow. But that doesn’t stop most families from teaching their children that Jesus was born in a barn on December 25th about 2000 years ago. The part about him not being born in December is usually left out. And that’s really just the beginning of the contradictions associated with Christmas.

The story goes that during the time that the world decided to start celebrating “Christmas”, the little town of Rome ruled most of the civilized world. At least the parts that Europeans still associate with. In Rome at the time they were already used to celebrating the most popular holiday of the year — Saturnalia — a celebration of a Goddess (what else?) and that holiday was always celebrated on December 25th. Everyone would be allowed to have that day off from their job, usually the whole week, in order to return home and visit their families. So rather than start yet another new holiday — Rome had over 300 annual holidays already at that time — they decided to just change December 25th from being about celebrating the Goddess and turn it into celebrating this Jewish man called Jesus. In fact they turned it into a law, and if you didn’t celebrate December 25th as a day to worship this Jewish man named Jesus you would be tortured imprisoned or put to death. So over a period of hundreds of years, everyone just got very used to pretending that they celebrated this Jewish character named Jesus on December 25th, if for no other reason than to just keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Back then you really didn’t have a choice. Public hangings and beheadings were a common practice and if you were smart you wanted to stay far away from being the focus and instead part of the audience on such events. Since most people were already used to taking the week off to go visit family anyway, Christmas wasn’t that big or a stretch. Just throw in the “born in a manger” narrative to your kids and boom, you were safe from harm.

But how did Santa Claus and Christmas trees and those flying reindeer get tied into it? Well evidently Jesus’s parents were very poor. Hence his being born in a barn.  From what we know, a jolly old fat man from the North dressed in a red jump suit happened upon Jesus’s parents Mary and Joseph there at the barn and gave their new baby Jesus a bunch of presents that he had with him. The fat man’s name was Nicholas. This is a true story. He was known for passing out presents to poor children to cheer them up. This was his thing. Eventually Rome, the same “Rome” we were discussing earlier, ordained him “a saint”. This doesn’t actually “mean” anything. It’s just something Rome loved to do. Rome loved ordaining people with titles as much as they loved inventing holidays. A saint is a term they invented to mean “more magical powers than a human but less magical powers than an angel”. Thus Saint Nicholas. Saint Nick was wearing a red suit that night so he could be seen better and not get run over by other travelers. Street lights hadn’t been invented yet.

The legend of Saint Nicholas became an instant hit with children all over the world. They prayed to the spirit of the jolly fat man in the red jump suit who brought presents to the baby Jesus all year long; or whenever they wanted something and their parents wouldn’t buy it for them. A lot of kids couldn’t pronounce the word Nicholas, for the word was long and complicated, especially for little kids. So they called him Claus for short. Santa Claus was easier to say than Saint Nicholas. The tradition stuck.

Now another well known but ignored fact of the story is that Saint Nicholas was actually traveling by way of camel that night that he happened upon Mary and Joseph in the barn, as most people in the desert did at that time. There were plenty of reindeer there in the barn that night that Jesus was born; this is true. People used to breed them in order to drink their milk and eat their meat. Somehow through the years, the camel become confused with the reindeer and pretty soon they had Santa Claus traveling by way of reindeer. No one at the time thought it was that big of a deal. Camel, reindeer. What did it matter? The important part was that this jolly fat man in the red jumpsuit bothered to take the time to stop at the barn and see Mary and Joseph and Jesus in the first place. Best of all he brought presents. Of course not everyone believed the whole “Saint Nicholas traveled all the way down from Northern Europe to the Middle Eastern desert” story, because it would have taken him weeks, perhaps even months to get there. This is when the whole “well those reindeer could fly actually… so it didn’t take him weeks to get there, it took him only a few hours” story came about. Saint Nick, as some people called him, was traveling all over the desert that evening delivering presents to poor kids and he accomplished this feat by using flying reindeer. Or flying camels. Depending on which version of the story you believe.

Now, besides presents, the jolly fat man in the red jump suit also brought Mary and Joseph a giant tree that evening. He had cut it down from a forest somewhere in northern Europe on his way to the desert and dragged it all the way to Israel behind his camels. His plan was to populate the desert with forests by planting this tree somewhere so the people of that region wouldn’t always be so hot and thirsty. It turns out though that Mary and Joseph and their new little baby Jesus were cold that night. Being in a bard and such. The jolly old fat man thought long and hard about the tree he had towing behind his camel and just out of good old fashioned compassion he went outside and grabbed it and yanked it into the barn so Joseph could chop it up and use it for firewood to warm up his tired wife and new born baby. Because they lived in the desert, they had never seen a real tree before. Once Santa Clause showed them how warm one could get from burning up a tree, the tradition really caught on fast with other people. Pretty soon everyone was dragging a big tree into their house, or barn, to chop up and burn to keep warm during the Winter.

Eventually burning these large trees was replaced by burning coal of course, which was much less expensive and more portable. But only by the poor who couldn’t afford to chop down big trees. The wealthy would still chop down trees because it made them feel more spiritual through being closer in spirit to the original story of the baby Jesus and Saint Nicholas. Human beings have always been prone to believing that they can buy their way into higher spiritual realms or into the good graces of God or the Goddess. This is where the whole “coal in your stocking if you’re naughty” tradition came from. The wealthy had wood from Christmas trees. The poor had coal. As is often the case the wealthy became associated with being “good” or “nice” and the poor became associated with being “naughty”. Go figure. Some things never change.

Now of course we use electricity to keep warm. But many people still chop big trees down and drag them into their home just to keep the spirit of the original story alive. And though the little Jewish baby Jesus AND the jolly old fat man from the North have both passed away many thousands of years ago, people still worship them. Jesus for his part grew into quite a saintly person himself. Some say he was even nicer and more magical than Saint Nicholas. So during Christmas most people tend to honor both of them equally. Kids lean towards the jolly old fat man come bearing gifts, because of the whole presents aspect of the story, and older people tend to like the baby Jesus more because what old person doesn’t just love babies after all. Because the visual of Saint Nicholas giving the little baby in the barn a pile of presents is such a beautiful and cheerful one, to this day people buy each other presents every year around this time in honor of the story.

Now I know what you’re thinking. This is all clearly a myth. A collection of myths and legends brought together from various sources over hundreds and thousands of years. We can’t possibly believe all this to be true. But maybe that’s not the point of it. Whether it’s all true or not. Maybe the point of it all is the meaning behind the various traditions, the intentions.

As diluted, occluded, contradictory and convoluted as it all is, the whole shebang sets up quite nicely to still be quite the grand symbol. Hope, grace, peace, compassion, family, benevolence, kindness, forgiveness and most of all love all come to mind when we think about Christmas. And we need as much of these ideals as we can muster. These traditions, despite how true or untrue they may be, help remind us of the best we have in us. No real harm is done. It’s all in good fun. And in the end, everyone is just a wee bit nicer and kinder to each other during this time of year. That certainly can’t be a bad thing. Next up we’ll discuss how many years later in the story Jesus and Saint Nick reunited to save the Jewish people from some evil desert dwelling Grinch-like creatures using very sharp Chinese six-pointed throwing stars and fire from their menorahs. But that’s a whole other story. Best saved for another post. In the meantime, Merry Christmas.



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Uncategorized how santa claus saved baby jesus, origin of flying reindeer, the grinch, when jesus was born

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

December 23, 2013

It doesn’t appear that everything always works out for us just the way we want it to. It’s taken me a long time to say thing. Because it’s taken me a long time to think this thought. Only up until recently had it ever occurred to me. It seems to come in waves, good things and bad. Something good here, some bad here too. Never all good or bad at the same time. I remember one period when I was particularly wealthy but all I thought about was how lonely I was. I was obsessed with finding “my one true love, the woman of my dreams”. Then I found that. Now all I seem to think about is our very unsatisfying lack of children or all the various career goals I have yet to achieve. This is an odd phenomenon. Most likely exclusively human.

This imbalance leads to a tendency towards over-compensation or over-indulgence in whatever area where we are doing well in. If we’re lonely but have lots of money, we tend to spend more money than necessary in a feeble attempt to compensate for our lack of love. And vice versa. When I was a young and struggling tortured artist I also just happened to be a playboy. Coincidence? Perhaps not. This only makes sense now looking back at it. I collected experiences with females like a kid collects stamps. Impressed friends and foes alike. Broke records. Did it all. It was easy, and perhaps– it’s difficult to admit now — because it was the only thing at the time that was easy to me, I over-indulged in it as a means to compensate for my feelings of inadequacy spawned by my youth and lack of career achievements.

But regardless of that little realization, it does seem to be the case that we don’t win it all all the time. It’s cyclical. There have been times in my life where I have felt on top of the world in terms of nearly everything, including the love and romance department, but then just haven’t been able to make ends meet financially. Some up, some down. Besides being an interesting aspect of life, what can we take from this? What good can we make from it?

I suppose more than anything it’s a good reminder to appreciate what we have when we have it. Knowing ahead of time that it’s not always going to be coming up roses. Not always going to be peaches and cream. So when we are feeling a little down, it’s important to remember to step back and take stock in the good things around us. It could always be worse. We know that. It could always be better. We know that too. But regardless of those two extremes, how are things right now? What’s going well? Where are we being just absolutely gifted in this life but maybe just not acknowledging it as much as we could be? That seems easier said than done, doesn’t it? But I’m usually pretty good at it.

But lately not so much. What it feels like, looks like, at least from the inside looking out, is that absolutely nothing seems to be working. That’s a hard thing to say out loud. Hard to write down. I’d rather it not be this way. I’d rather everything be going great. But I have reached a point where it’s more painful to pretend that everything is going perfectly than the potential pain or fear of people knowing that I’m not over the moon ecstatic with how things are going. I get the feeling sometimes that it might seem a bit dramatic for me to be talking about things like this… Because I know how much harder other people have it than I do. I do know this. And I know what it must look like from the outside. As if I have it made. So I’m always reluctant to state out loud when I’m feeling as though everything is awful.

It makes me think of Billy Joel actually. I don’t know why him in particular. But he’s come to mind more than once lately. I mean, talk about everything seeming great from the outside. And yet anyone with a passing knowledge of his personal life over the last fifteen years can easily discern that he’s not having such an easy time of it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be an uncontrollable addict but be as successful as Billy Joel… What are you going to do? Head to local meeting in your hometown with everyone else? I mean, ultimately that’s what it’s probably going to take. But I’m sure it’s not easy. The real question is what led to his being so miserable in the first place? For whatever reason, he’s just not happy.

That’s the thing. We don’t know. And that’s what I mean. The same goes for me. For anyone. Regardless of what we might think about someone’s life from the outside looking in, we just don’t know. We have no idea what makes them tick, and therefore what may have made someone exceedingly happy at one point in life — like say being at the top of your game in your career — no longer adequately fulfills you. Perhaps all you want is your wife and kid back and that’s the one thing you just can’t seem to make happen.

What interests me more though is the creation process itself. To put it simply, lately I have been finding it increasingly difficult to create what I want. Now I know what you’re thinking, what most are thinking. Surely he’s kidding. Boy I’d like to “not be able to create what I want” the way he does! Yes…. But it’s all relative. Trust me. I’m being serious. I’m not 100% sure I mean this, but lately I’ve been starting to feel like I’d give it all up to just have a normal life with a wife and three to four kids. Why? Because those are precisely the things in life that I don’t have? I’m not sure. We’re exploring. I’m talking to me here now. So forgive me if you find it hard to swallow.

Personally I’m just not feeling it. I’m not happy. The wins are rare. And the good times feel few and far between. I am fantastic at making the most out of even the smallest things. Lucky that way. So I’ve survived. But I’m reaching the end of my ability to do even that. Reaching the end-game point, where it’s becoming difficult to make the most out of things. Difficult to find anything to make the most of. Of course that’s right when life can throw you “something real to cry about” so you start appreciating what you have; so I’m reluctant to admit any of this or think about too much; for fear of jinxing myself. I’m not saying I’m not appreciative of the life I have. I am. Immeasurably so. Grateful. Just not happy. And here’s the thing: if we never acknowledge when we’re not happy, when none of it seems enough, then how are we ever going to take the necessary steps to change things? What’s going to prompt us to?

So as much as I am grateful for what I do have, for all the good, the great, the wonderful, it’s time to admit that I am just not happy even a little bit anymore. That feels good. I needed that. I am more than tired of not being able to create what I want. This is something that I am not used to. But it’s a fate that’s been lingering around for quite some time lately. It’s weird. I worked so hard for so long without ever turning around to look behind me, not even to look to the side… just ran straight forward as fast as I could… One day I woke up and realized that I just wasn’t pulling it off anymore. I lost me mojo.

There’s a measurable pattern to all this from what I can tell. For those who are Avatars Masters and/or Wizards, that pattern is going to be very different than for those are not. I’ve been an Avatar Master Wizard for so long now I can honestly say that I have no idea how people survive without that knowledge and those tools. So there’s no way I can address how things work for them. But for me… let’s attempt to dissect the pattern, the chain of events. Put things into an order.

First there is the desire. We get the desire. Either it comes from nowhere/nothing — an external stimuli creates a desire for something in us, perhaps a state of being or a state of doing or just a thing…  OR something in our world directly reflects a reality that we don’t prefer, which immediately (or not) compels us to desire the opposite of that. Then we begin to fantasize about that which is desired. We think about it. We try to feel what it feels like to have it/be it/do it.

For many, it stops there. They get a thought or an idea in their head that tells them that they can’t have that. It’s not realistic. Luckily I have never thought that way. But I know plenty of people who do. So for them that’s the end of the road. BUT…. Sometimes just the fact that they got the idea and fantasized a little about it makes it manifest for them. That’s the way it should always work. Unfortunately for us all, it just doesn’t. Not all the time.

For others, this is just the beginning. We start feeling that which is desired, thinking about it, and we immediately go into planning. We make a note of it. We write it down. Tony Robbins recommends writing it down in a format that lists: the thing desired, the category of life that it’s in (love, friendship, health, etc), the purpose of the desire, i.e. why we want it, and the final outcome — what it will look like. I find this a helpful exercise. Though not entirely necessary all the time. But let’s say we add it to a list, or we start a new project entirely. Listing our resources at hand. Then we create actionable steps to achieve it. Next up, for many at least, is starting to take action.

But then there’s the more advanced protocols. If we’re lucky enough to have tools at our disposal, such as Avatar or the Sedona Method or Tony Robbins or Abraham Hicks tools… or hell even Wayne Dyer’s tools… whatever works for a person… if we’re smart, we set about using these tools to deliberately create what we desire. Nine times out of ten, that’s all it takes. BAM! It shows up in our universe in one way or another. An opportunity arises. The phone miraculously rings. A friend mentions something related to what we have just written down. I can’t recall how many hundreds of times this has happened to me. And I must admit that if I were to die tomorrow, the last thought on my mind would be “wow, what an incredible life I lived. That was just insanely awesome.” So in that regard I’m lucky.

But I’m not going to die tomorrow. I am sure of it. I know when I am going to die. And it’s many, many years from now. So for me personally there still feels like there is plenty to do. I must admit, for it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t, that my life used to operate like the above about 90% or more of the time. Friends and family say that I was born with some kind of invisible band of luck around me. Always falling into the right place at the right time. But lately it hasn’t felt like that. Not at all. I have no idea why. Princess Little Tree says that most people desire much smaller things compared to me. That I’m not acknowledging that the things I have set myself up to achieve are slightly bigger than your average goals. So it might be easier to create say a “new car” than “winning a Grammy”. I get this idea….

But I have always subscribed to the concept that the universe does not recognize the “size” of creations. To a degree at least. (there do tend to be certain desired outcomes that defy the laws of the universe itself that ARE bigger than your usual standard desire. Like for a long time I desired to be two inches taller. I actually created this. Slowly. True story. Everyone noticed it. Measurable. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took about two years. Doctors said it was “nothing really, pretty common. Men don’t stop growing till they’re well into their late twenties, so that explains it”. But what about other more intensely opposed to universal law type of desires, like say “flying” or levitating… These things seem to confound our ability to create regardless of what we do, and in these cases, then yes, the universe DOES seem to notice “the size of creations”.)

But for most things, the universe does not seem to measure size the way we do. The universe does not see a difference between desiring ice cream for desert — a quick trip to Baskin Robbins around the corner will satisfy that desire — versus desiring a million dollars. At least that’s the theory. It makes sense to me. Always has. Creation does seem to be rather blind to what humanity seems obsessed with judging and labeling and categorizing. This is easy to create. This is harder. This is impossible. But aren’t these all just beliefs. Programmed beliefs based on early indoctrination…? But I wonder if Princess Little Tree has a point. Perhaps it is easier to create certain things more than others. I know it is very easy for me to create “watching a great movie right now”. That would be a fairly easy desire to achieve. “Making over ten thousand dollars tomorrow in a few brilliant trades” seems like it might be slightly more challenging a task.

Note: Momentum builds on momentum. So if we’re headed down, rather than up let’s say, the further we go, the faster we go, the harder it is to stop the momentum down. And in the reverse, once momentum begins to build up in life, towards the achievement of something, it does seem to get easier and easier for us. At first it’s just one or two people who are interested. Then it turns into ten. Then it turns into hundreds. Then thousands. Pretty soon the momentum of this movement feels bigger than we are. So there’s something to be acknowledged about momentum.

This is why it’s important for us to remember that what we put out attention on we tend to create. Our vibration tends to create our reality/realities is another way of saying that. Everyone has their own way of describing this same phenomenon.

The hardest thing to do is redirect our attention in a positive direction when we are absolutely focused on the negative, to reset our vibration to a more positive one when we are generally feeling negatively. But if we do not master this ability, we will never be able to master the art of living deliberately and creating that which we desire more than that which we do not desire.

If we have no tools to use to change our state (attitude/vibration), then we are doomed to create on automatic whatever most closely matches our vibration in each moment, whether we want to or not. Thus getting control of the ability to change our state or vibration is key. Challenging yes. But not impossible. Even when things seem absolutely wretched, the only way out of it is to start flooding our system with feelings of gratitude and desire for it — or at least acceptance of it from a place of taking responsibility for it, no matter how difficult this feels — in order to minimize the resistance AND lift our state or vibration up out of despair. From that place we can much more easily create what we prefer.

I do it in a variety of ways; through using Avatar tools, one or more of the many exercises you learn on the courses. Or I might just turn on some great music really loudly and start dancing around and clapping my hands, shouting, pumping myself up. Or I might grab a guitar or sit down at the piano and let out all my pain. That lets it out and I usually end up feeling “better” afterwards. Or I do it by remembering how grateful I am for the simple things in life. For my health, for my family, for love, for having two arms and two legs. For my brain. For friends. It’s usually easy.

But what if no matter what we try we still just cannot manage to create what we want? Even if we can control our state of mind and attitude… What if it’s been years? And still nada. No dice. No creation of what is desired. Initially this leads to despair. Disappointment. A negative state. Down the road, after a lot of this over a prolonged period of time, comes cynicism. The jaded know it all who just doesn’t believe anymore. I’ve been there. Truth be told, that first Avatar Course I took nearly 20 years ago when I was but a wee lad changed all that for me. More than anything what that first course did for me was just allow me a vehicle to let out all my pain and disappointment. It gave me permission to feel sad and express it. It then taught me that lo and behold those feelings (as do all feelings) had a limit. They don’t go on forever. They aren’t infinite. If you feel them long enough, all the way, they go away. They’re gone. They vanish. That was a miraculous discovery. For about a year all I did was just feel everything that was bad in my head and my heart and in my memory and let it all go. Pretty soon there was nothing “bad” left. No sadness, no disappointment, no despair. It was a miracle. Everyone should be so lucky to experience that at least once in their life. From there I was free to feel confident enough — and have enough free attention — to start focusing on creating whatever I desired. They came fast at first. But we’re getting off track.

So, after almost twenty years of experiencing everything almost always working out, I’ve started to experience some hiccups. Try as I might, some things just seem out of reach. Beyond my ability. Regardless of what I do. We’ve all experienced this. This is when we usually turn to creating God, or adopting the beliefs of others previously set down about the existence of said God. This is the foundational reason for the creation of God by humankind. Not being able to understand how or why something in our lives is the way it is and not being able to change it. So we turn to the idea of a higher power at play in the universe that is bigger than we are. Something invisible and yet powerful that is stopping us for some reason. Something that is doing the controlling of things for us, or to us.

We begin to start believing things like “there’s a reason why this is happening”, “I wonder why this is happening like this…” “there must be a reason why this is happening…” God. Force. The Universe. Our higher self. Karma. These are all the effects of not being able to reconcile things not going our way in life, the results of our actions taken not matching our vision. This tends to lead us to actions like prayer. We sublimate our own personal power and give it to an imagined higher force or being who is constantly at work in the universe making things happen or stopping things from happening. This is the underlying reasoning beneath the consoling phrase “I’m sure God has a plan” or “God has his reasons….” Perhaps we find these ideas comforting. It’s better than nothing I suppose. (Not necessarily, but from that particular state of thinking, sometimes it feels that way. More on that in a few…)

Either that OR we run towards more existential ideologies such as “things just happen”, “there’s no reason for anything”, “it’s all just random”, “it’s all luck”. This is the “chaotic universe” idea; quantum theory. If any of this is true, and at this point in our evolution here, no one knows for sure, then we have a better chance of creating what we prefer than if we subscribe to the “there’s a God and he/she is trying to tell me something through this” idea. For if there is no reason for anything and it really is all random and luck, then we can easily shift that random luck more in our favor simply by using more force, more willpower. This leads us towards hoping and wishing. And trying harder. And trying again. Attempting to use force.

Life would be easy if it worked that way. We could literally create whatever we wanted if we could only call up enough force or will or resources. I am not sure which way I lean, if any. To me it appears at times that there just may be bigger forces at play than just pure force of will or luck. It may be a God or an invisible energy force that we presently label “God”, or it may be our higher selves, or it may be a collection of our past selves… little pieces of our soul broken off from us here-now but still operating in the bigger picture of our life. Parallel selves in parallel universes. Or karma. Or a combination of a little bit of all of it perhaps. It may be a variety of things… It may be nothing more than “results are the direct effect of our moment to moment action plus a little bit of luck”. (luck here meaning “random events in a chaotically ordered universe”.) Being in the right place at the right time. Taking the right actions more often than not. Being smart. Harnessing the right resources.

As of now we just cannot say for sure. When we’re down on our luck, we tend to lean towards a belief in a higher force or power of some kind. For me personally, as I have already stated here numerous times over the last ten or so years, I have no choice in whether to believe in God or not. God believed in me. He/She/It found me, perhaps never lost me, and made his/her/its presence known to me in ways that I couldn’t deny. I am one of the lucky ones in that. For I know plenty of people much more religious than I am who have never had what they would call “supernatural or paranormal or divine” experiences that have proven the existence of God to them. So I do consider myself lucky. Either that or just crazy.

The problem for me of course is that because I do tend towards a belief in God — though I don’t claim to know about or understand in the least bit how he/she/it works or why… — I am confounded by my occasional inability to create the things I desire in life. Especially when I seem to be doing everything right AND attempting to harness the power of this God. More to the point, I don’t get why God doesn’t help me create what I want. LOL! It’s funny right? In other words, why doesn’t God answer ALL of our prayers? It seems pretty 50/50 if you ask me. And anything that is 50/50 means that there’s a damn good chance that it’s all just random luck.

Note: Humanity’s view of God has changed tremendously in the last fifty years. Our view of God has turned into more of a loving Santa Clause that just wants to “shower us with favor” as Joel Osteen would say; rather than a mysterious force that created the entire universe. The last thing in the world I want to do right now is head into the whole “God is either all powerful and evil, or all good and not very powerful” argument. This is a philosophical dilemma we call Theodicy. If you like mentally running in circles you’ll explore this topic more. — The Secret — than it is like traditional Christianity. God didn’t used to be this force in the universe that did whatever we wanted just because he loves us and wants us to be happy. On the contrary. He used to be quite the all powerful and scary type who just demanded a lot from us and if we didn’t do it we would burn in hell for an eternity. And yet there was always a bit of love thrown in there just to make it all the more confusing.

If we are to face one and only one thing about God as religious or even non-religious people, it is that we created God a lot more than he created us; at least as far as we know so far. We seem to pick and choose the attributes we apply to him/her/it based on the state of our culture or society. For instance, in the Muslim faith God is certainly not an all-loving Santa Clause who just wants to give us whatever we want to make us happy. But we’re getting off track here. The point is this: as much as that view of God may be appealing to us, and I must confess it certainly is to me, it is only going to turn out to be true to the degree that we believe it to be. The more we believe this to be true about God, the more we will experience this. I for one am not necessarily experiencing this about God. But I keep giving him breaks for some reason. That’s where the “God knows something that I don’t” belief comes in. When we aren’t able to create what we want to in life and we believe in God, then we assume that this God we manufactured “knows what’s best for us” and that’s why “he’s not letting it happen for us”. It’s all a bit childish. And yet many play along with it. Why I’m not sure. I suppose we find it comforting.

One thing is for sure though. We will never achieve what we desire if we sit around and wait for it and never take any actions to achieve it. That kind of behavior, or non-behavior, usually leads to nothing. Nothingness. So we must take action if we want to create something. Writing it down is a good start. Acknowledging it. Then studying it. Studying what it looks like it, tastes like, smells like, sounds like; how it acts. Studying how others have done it and do it. There’s also modeling. Modeling the behavior of others. Then feeling it, feeling what it feels like. Then visualizing it. Seeing it. Seeing ourselves achieve it. And then there are all the Avatar tools… Things it would not be fair to reveal out of context. (Insert any tools or other modalities here that people find helpful to creating that which they desire…)

Yes, the key to the Avatar tools is getting rid of all doubts that may stand in the way. Using the tools to the point where you truly believe that you are either definitely going to achieve that which is desired, or believing without a shadow of a doubt that you have the ability to and are just about to. I find the second option a bit easier. I have never found it easy to “believe” that I have achieved something before I have actually achieved it. Some people can do this. And it occasionally works for them. But not I. If I’m not experiencing it NOW, I just find it nearly impossible to act as if I am. And that’s okay. I’m a bit more rational than that. But again, not everyone is like that. Some people become very good at tricking themselves into believing that they’ve achieved something long before they actually have. And it is through this belief that they then create that reality. I’ve seen it happen. So I know it is possible. It’s the “belief precedes experience” paradigm. Though I believe this, belief does precede experience (most of the time? In a MUCH bigger picture viewpoint?), I usually find it works better for me to create the belief that I am ABLE TO AND GOING TO achieve something, rather than creating that I have “already created it” when I haven’t.

Perhaps the key is that having the knowledge is just not enough. That we have to USE the tools. We have to practice. That the more we USE the tools, as opposed to just possessing the knowledge, the more powerful we will be in our ability to create what we desire versus just random events or even worse, things that we don’t desire at all.

There is another theory about creating reality that states that it is easier to create something when it is in flow than something that is not in flow. A good example might be during the Great Depression it was easier to get a hit song that spoke of the hardships of everyday life than to get a hit song bragging about all the money you have. Being poor was in flow at the time. Watch old Hollywood movies from the thirties. You’ll see what I mean. Actors actually became huge stars playing rough and tumble cynical crooked types that played against the system. Down and out underdogs. It’s the exact opposite today. In today’s world if you want to get a hit song you write about all the money that you have, all the bottles of champaign you can afford to buy and how expensive your car is. You write about these things regardless of whether or not they are true. It’s the old “BE DO HAVE” paradigm. But why? Why are these kinds of lyrics so popular now? Because that’s what’s in flow in modern mass consciousness in Western Civilization. Try singing about making the world a better place. I’ve been doing it for twenty-five years. Sure I’ve had my fair share of success. But nothing compared to if I were singing about booze chicks clubs and fast cars. Saving the world, making it a better place IS becoming popular. It’s starting to trend now. But singing about it hasn’t quite become “the thing”. Maybe it never will. But the point is there. Creating in flow with the bigger picture seems to work better than creating against what’s flowing.

There’s more. Much more. But enough for now. One way or another I am going to find a way to turn things around. And I will make notes here along the way as to how it’s going and how I do it. One last thought occurred to me. What if we just aren’t meant to get everything we want? What if there are benefits to not getting everything we want? See? Now THAT my friends is a belief. And if I really do possess that belief… then that is exactly what I am going to experience. Can’t say for sure if I harbor that belief of if it’s just something I said. That’s the thing about not being able to create what we want all the time. We start grabbing at straws. Looking for reasons why. And the truth is there is no “why”. We just haven’t created the belief that we can create it yet. 9 times out of 10 that’s usually all there is to it. This young man needs to use his tools more often, get back to practicing. Enough is enough. That’s what I’m starting to conclude from this little exercise. Will keep you posted.

 

 



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Uncategorized Abrahama Hicks, Avatar, creating in flow, Creating what we desire, God not answering prayers, Sedona Method, The Secret ripped off Esther and Jerry Hicks, Theodicy, Wayne dyer

Ancient and mythical

December 21, 2013

Today we woke up early and went to the Oregon coast to see a few clearcuts. Acres of ancient forests cut down and completely devastated. The girl who has been my guide on this journey, Polly, started to cry when we saw it. I had more of an intellectual response and just started brainstorming about what could actually be done about this craziness. The pacific northwest has less than 5% of its ancient trees left now. they take hundreds of years to grow. So there is no chance of them growing back in our lifetime even if they were to stop all cutting from this point on. It would still take four hundred years to get the forests back. and all these logging companies don’t care. In January George bush came to Eugene for one night for a fundraiser. He was given a campaign check for one million dollars from the logging industry. A few months later they had carte blanche to cut down as many large trees as they wanted to in the name of ‘preventing forest fires.’ crazy.

[I will say this about George w. Bush though, and I’ve said it before, lots of people do. he may be one of the worst things going in the history of mankind, but he doesn’t try to hide it. and remarkably he is rather forthright about it. as awful as he was in the debates, and he was truly awful in a remarkable way, as only he can be, he was very honest in his answers about things. when asked about the environment he never claimed to really care too much about it. he admits, not quite readily but damn close to it, that he is more in favor and concerned for business and jobs and the economy than he is about the environment. You gotta hand it to the guy, and everyone who was working for him at that time [most of them have now quit since his re-election – we can only guess why. God knows what insanity we are in for if his whole dame cabinet is quitting before his new term even begins.] He could have easily balked on the issue of the environment, but he didn’t. he told it as he sees it. he thinks that environmentalists are extremists and that its just not that big of a deal. As much as I disagree with him and others like him, I like him for that.

He acted the same way when asked about America losing all of its jobs overseas. Unlike the democrats who tried to act like they were going to save the jobs and bring them all back home, Bush never once caved in. he looked right into the camera and told those people that their jobs were history and that he was going to try to help them get educated to get different jobs, that America needed to move on and keep up with globalization. Again, he never tried to pretend to people that he was going to try to help them keep their jobs from going overseas. The answers that were written for him in the debates were brilliant in how they managed to deliver a lot of the bad news of the republican agenda to the American people in a semi-digestible manner.

Same thing with his answers on same sex marriage. The justification for an idea as abominable as a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage on the grounds that it threatens family values or the ideal of marriage in any country in this day and age is ridiculous. And any thinking person can see that and knows it. You bring it up in any circle of semi-intelligent company anywhere in the world and it gets people laughing. This is a very clearly more a matter of evolution. Evolved citizens of the world versus minds just not as evolved yet. but again, what I loved about Bush and his administration’s answers during the debates and throughout his campaign was his willingness to put himself out there and tell it as he saw it. you have to be a complete loony to even come up with an idea as asinine as that one, but you have to have real courage and conviction as well. And I admire that.

As for the trees and forests of our country, we may be fucked on this one since W got re-elected. One of the things that I learned on this trip that was most shocking is that they are actually logging now in our national forests. The same national forests that teddy Roosevelt put away for us over a hundred years ago to protect them forever so we would always have big old five hundred year old trees in ancient forests. The government is now auctioning hundreds of acres a day to the highest bidders and the trees are getting chopped down and sold overseas, mostly to Asia. That is a fucking unbelievably heinous action. Is actually quite unbelievable but I saw it with my own eyes. I cannot even imagine what the actual loggers – the men who actually drive into the national forests, passing right by the big green signs that read “national forest’ must be thinking as they are taking chainsaws to the big five hundred year old trees. I just couldn’t imagine doing it myself. But again, this is a money thing. and when it comes to money I think most people would do just about anything, big old trees or not.

Anyway, say what you will about Bush, and God knows everyone does and will have ample opportunity to over the next four years, but the guy tells it like he sees it about a lot of things. the good news that many people point out is that the next four years will end up getting so fucking out of hand and freaky for most Americans, even the ones who did vote for him – I mean, lets face it, eight members of his highest cabinet quit within two weeks of his reelection; if that’s not a sign that something terrifying is in store for us that they know about but we just don’t yet, I don’t know what is — that was their way of saying ‘we don’t want to have anything to do with the next four years,’ so chances are we have no idea what’s in store for us – but either way, I think it’ll swing so far out of control that the country will have no choice if it has a chance of survival than to swing back the other way. that’s the balance of power that the country was founded on. So we’re just going to have to do our best to hang on and enjoy the ride and try to prevent and protect whatever we can.

And to all those eager emailers out there who love to send in all those lovely hate mails that I cherish so dearly, allow me to add that I am in no way implying that Clinton was any better or that we would be any better off during a democratic presidency. I wasn’t blogging publicly during those years, but if you have ever seen the underground documentary entitled the Clinton chronicles then you know how I feel about him. I’m just as scared of Hillary as I am of Bush. My green minded liberal friends are quick to point out how wonderful our thriving economy was during the Clinton years, but lets be real. That had a lot less to do with Bill and a lot more to do with Microsoft, yahoo, oracle, Intel, eBay, and the rest of the companies leading the technological revolution. We could have had anybody in the white house at the time. Bush was right and fair minded in his assertion that he inherited a country in the midst of a bursting economic bubble. And as far as lost jobs go, it was Clinton who switched gears right after he became president and started embracing and promoting America’s full involvement in globalization after promising workers that he was completely against it and would do his best to try to save their jobs.]

Same day or a different day, not sure.

I am in phoenix now. downtime. No work for a while. at least not a lot of it I hope. I will do my best to try to relax and reflect and celebrate the season of family and renewal during my brief stay here. how each year I look forward more and more to spending time with family; to no cell phone and no email and no talk of business.

I thought of Juliet. Cannot erase the feeling of her from inside of me. I dare I say I have not stopped dreaming of her, or with her, for months now. almost every night since I can remember this year she occupies some scene or two in my dreaming state while I am asleep. She is just there. her presence. Like a warrior or a guardian. Standing with me.

There is much that I will not write publicly nor privately. Out of respect. feelings are fleeting indeed and though I am loyal and committed to this project of keeping the diaries as real and as honest as can possibly be for as long as I can, I am also aware that not all thoughts and feelings need to be expressed publicly. After all, they are only feelings, and from what I can tell, can change overnight or vanish like the wind.

As I sat tonight watching a DVD of old jack Paar shows with mom, I thought about how clear I feel now. how easy. how soft and manageable, as funny as that may sound. Our meeting once again in our lives had this effect of clearing away a lot of old debris that I had collected over the years about girls. In Juliet there is much to be fancied. She is as true as anyone in the world would desire. When you think back to days gone by when men would refer to their ladies as being ‘fair,’ Juliet is the embodiment of that. something ancient and mythical about her spirit. In how true it is.

Her boyfriend is very lucky and I found myself feeling very happy for him and for Juliet as well. I saw her as she really is and discovered that she is a real person, with a real life, a real boyfriend, a real child, and a real job. Not just a fantasy or a character in my imagination. But a real person. so if for no other reason than that my trip was a healthy and beneficial one for both of us. even so, after my first night in her presence I whispered to God as I was falling asleep to reveal to me the message in the connection, the deeper meaning to all the synchronistic and coincidental events that transpired regarding her this year and in the years prior to this one. I heard a voice whisper back to me, ‘perhaps that is not the right question. Perhaps the right question is ‘have you ever thought of what you have meant to Juliet? What your message to her was/is?’ I must admit that I had not. I was too absorbed in my own life and in my own concerns. But I found real comfort in this idea. and I smiled as I drifted off to sleep.

In the shower the next two days I found myself more and more reflecting on what I mean to others rather than only what they mean to me. the message I have for them rather than what they might hold for me. I must admit rather humbly that the idea was a novel one to me. as enlightened as I try to be, I am still relatively self obsessed and self centered I find. Like a good Buddhist disciple I do not judge this but simply giggle at it. life is funny after all and we are all clowns. Better to laugh at ourselves than to waste our time in judgment. But in the mornings I spend time now thinking of everyone in my life and try to visualize what message or meaning I might possibly be able to offer each of them. and that’s a good thing. it is a new way of looking at things for me. it is good way to humble one’s self and to feel more in service to others.

Tonight Cleopatra came up in conversation and I felt almost nothing at all. very neutral. Which is very refreshing. I realized that through getting to know Juliet more that a new archetype was formed in my heart and in my mind about what a woman could be; more, what a person could be. it is almost as if just by rediscovering her in the world that I was washed clean of my prior conceptions about girls. I must admit for the record that Juliet is the first girl I have met in three and half years that I would feel comfortable bringing into the inner circle of my family. And this is by no means a reflection of the degree of love or respect I have for all the other girls I have known over the years. for they have all been wonderful and beautiful in their own rights. But in Juliet, whether true or imagined – is there ever a way to qualify that? – I just happen to find many endearing qualities and not very many objectionable ones. So a new archetype was formed, a new idea of how much deeper and truer and purer a person can be. And that very well could be the meaning for me personally. And that is enough.

As for her, I hope that my attempt at coming to grips with the whole crazy thing by tackling it head on held an equal measure of benefit and new found revelations about life and love and all that is holy in the universe for her as it has seemed to for me. I feel washed clean by the experience. Fresh and new in my perceptions of what I want and what is possible. and more, I left there feeling very optimistic and joyful at the thought of her carrying on with her current boyfriend for all time and living a happy peaceful life together with him. if that is what she so desires. It is an uncanny unconditional love I have for her, much like how I feel for Madelynne or Little Tree or the Artisan. Just pure love. Like one would feel for a sister. When I dream of her it is as if I am dreaming with a guardian or an old friend from many lifetimes who cares for me deeply and unconditionally, and vice versa. I dare say this but I will just to get clearer about my deepest feelings, but I feel that getting beyond my preconceptions and wonderings about all the coincidental occurrences that have transpired surrounding Juliet as far as her being a potential lover or life mate will enable us to experience a friendship very deep and satisfying to us that could last a lifetime or more. something just as rewarding and satisfying as marriage, but in a purely platonic way. the reward for me was that great. And I have no idea why. it just was. I hope that it was for her as well. we have not spoken since we last saw one another and I feel no desire to email or call her. don’t know why. I just think that maybe there are no words to express how I feel or how much gratitude I feel towards the experience.

Like Mr. Darcy in the scene where he is fencing in ‘pride and prejudice,’ I feel this maddening perplexity about it still sometimes of course, and feel a real need to resolve it entirely at times. But as each day passes I succumb to the unknowing a little bit more comfortably and cherish the mystery a little bit more. for if there is anything absolute about life as we know it, it is that most of it is pure mystery to us still. and for now I am o.k. with that. I feel as though I can go on now starting anew with a fresh perspective on things. still wondering? Sure. Who wouldn’t be. But not obsessed with it anymore.

The thing that struck me was how in all the other cases where I have bonded deeply with the girls in my life that I am lucky to call my best friends there was always this strong sexual or romantic attraction to them where at first we just had this really strong desire to consummate our little obsessions with one another. We would make love a few times and then move on to being just friends. Sort of a getting it out of the way kind of thing perhaps. And now many of these girls are some of my closest confidents and most cherished life-friends. But with Juliet that is not there. I would actually sit there and try to think about it while looking at her or talking with her. but that would not be there. it wasn’t about that. but more just a strong desire to connect with her as deeply as we could in the few moments we had together. much like you would with a new guy friend. honoring and cherishing the connection without the undying need to consummate it as girl and boy or man and woman. for me that is rare. I almost always want to make love to any girl I know. its just always there underneath the surface until you do it a few times and then you can move on. But with Juliet I think the respect factor might just be so high that I could feel that the thought was off limits, out of bounds so to speak, and so I just didn’t go there out of respect. even in my own mind or imagination.

Last screening: Made. could have been better. A lot better. Didn’t dig it, despite digging Jon.



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Uncategorized ancient trees in the pacific northwest, Buddhism, documentary the Clinton Chronicles, globalization

Don’t be Fooled Again — Keep Taking Nutritional Supplements

December 17, 2013

Mainstream media outlets such as The Today Show were abuzz this morning due to a new editorial published in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine entitled “Enough is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements”. The editorial was based on three studies that just concluded looking at the effects of multivitamins on preventing heart attacks and cancer, as well as improving cognitive function in men older than 65. It’s conclusion, yet again, was that vitamins do not help improve human health and in fact “can be dangerous and should be avoided”. This is the message that went out to tens of millions of trusting Americans. The problem is that it’s a flat out lie.

There are so many problems with this story that it’s difficult to know where or how to begin to address it.

[Before we do so, just for the record, let’s be clear where I stand personally with some background and a disclaimer so there is no confusion. Though it isn’t my main occupation, out of pure love for the subjects of health, wellness and anti-aging research, as an entrepreneur I have worked in the health and nutrition industry on and off for over twenty years on the side. It is a passion. I started off as a hobbyist out of a burning desire to improve and optimize my own health — I envisioned a sort of super-hero like optimal ageless health and vitality. Eventually I decided to enter the industry as a business person. I’d always loved business and I loved health and nutrition, so it was a perfect fit. Through the years, I have worked as a researcher and writer of numerous articles on the subject and as a health and nutritional supplement consultant to individuals. I also owned a chain of health food stores that were sold to the GNC Corporation, owned a chain of juice bars, have done consulting to retail store owners in the industry, and eventually transitioned to product development where I worked directly with large manufacturing labs to create a line of anti-aging products — the most notable and successful being the UltraMax-HGH line. Though it may be redundant because it’s well known data, I still feel it’s important to state for the record. I eventually moved to the manufacturing side because that’s where my real passion was — supplement research, as well as where the most money can be made. I founded and was the CEO of a large nutritional supplement manufacturing company called Ageless Foundation Laboratories for six years that I actually started out of one of my health food stores when I was 25 years old. It grew into a multi-million dollar company within a few short years. That company was eventually sold to a much larger publicly traded company called Naturade. The products I developed are still on the shelves of most health food stores in America and in many other countries around the world. With that said, I do not currently own any nutritional supplement companies nor profit in any way from selling any. I have no vested financial interest in the industry. Only a love and passion for the subject.]

With that said, let’s begin. The most important thing to understand about this most recent article and the studies that were released is this: Number one, this is only happening in America. Most other civilized countries around the world do not let large corporations and industries control the health of their population, nor do they auction it off to the highest bidder the way the United States does. Hopefully this won’t last forever. Number two, there is a battle being waged against the natural foods and nutrition industry by the American medical establishment. It’s corporate piracy at its most ruthless. It has nothing to do with health or wellness or anyone wanting you or me to be healthy. Instead is has everything to do with making money. It’s been going on for nearly one-hundred years. Ever since the transition from medicine being an all natural healing modality to a corporatized monopoly worth hundreds of billions of dollars back in the early nineteen-hundreds.

Here’s the skinny: drugs and medicines can be patented. As long as they are “synthetic” or man-made. Natural foods and nutritional supplements cannot be patented. The reason for this is because supplements are normally “food sourced”, whereas drugs are synthetic. Foods cannot be patented. (Though this has not stopped Monsanto from somehow managing to find a way to patent seeds of the earth and suing farmers for using them. Go figure. But that’s a different post.) There are literally billions of dollars that a company can make from a patented drug, because once it’s approved, they are the only company that will be allowed to sell it. Nutritional supplements do not operate like that in the United States. No one can patent an herb or vitamin and be the only company that is allowed to bring it to market. This infuriates the pharmaceutical industry. Anything that has the potential to take money out of their pockets does. And the nutritional supplement industry has turned into a 16 billion dollar a year business. Not too shabby.

Every time a person chooses to go all natural versus the traditional allopathic medicine route, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies lose money. There is nothing the American medical industry despises more than all natural or holistic medicine. They are constantly working behind the scenes — through bogus clinical trials, or propaganda campaigns disguised as PSAs, or in Washington DC through spending hundreds of billions of dollars in lobbying — to discredit anything remotely natural or nature based. They’ve been trying to discredit chiropractic medicine for decades. To no avail of course, because chiropractic really works. And it works great. No one should be allowed to live without visiting one at least twice a year if not once a month. But don’t go telling a traditional doctor that. They have no idea how to fix the body without drugs or surgery. The same goes for nutritional supplements. If you take St. John’s Wort, B vitamins and EFAs along with plenty of exercise to ward off anxiety or depression for example, drug companies don’t make any money. Neither do doctors. The same goes for lowering your cholesterol or preventing heart disease or any number of other maladies. If you stay healthy and never get sick through good eating habits, restful sleep, lots of exercise and the right nutritional supplements, needless to say, no one who works in the traditional medical establishment is going to make any money from your wellness. It’s only from your sickness that they get paid.

Here’s the funny thing about that though. As soon as a new herb is discovered that has healing properties, the medical establishment immediately rushes off to the lab to try to figure out what in it is so helpful so they can synthesize it., i.e. steal it from nature. If they can synthesize it, that is, create it in a lab from scratch in an artificial manner and render it useful in some way as a “medicine”, at least half as useful as the original herb itself, they can then patent it and sell it as a “drug”, even though all it is is just a fake less-effective version of something that came naturally out of the ground. Bayer Aspirin is nothing but a synthesized version of the herb White Willow Bark, an herb that was used for thousands of years as an all natural analgesic. Heroin and Morphine, also invented by Bayer interestingly, are simply synthesized versions of the Poppy Plant and opium. The hair loss drug Propeica may have been a new wonder drug at some point. But there was nothing new about it. In fact it is nothing but a feeble attempt at a synthetic version of the herb Saw Palmetto extract, something which has been used for thousands of years to lower the body’s excess DHT (di-hydro-testosterone) — one of the main causes of hair loss. Ironically simple and cheap Saw Palmetto extract works ten times better at preventing hair loss than the very expensive drug Propecia. Go figure.

I must admit to feeling more than a wee bit annoyed by having to post this information, only because I’ve done it a million times in a million ways. And so have lots of other people. There is nothing that will be written here that is not easily accessible through simple online research or at any local library, AND just due to the fact that I have been discussing it for so damn long. Thousands of people and organizations have. So forgive me if I skip around a bit. My feeling is that the most important thing here at this moment is just to get the information out there yet again to address this particular study asap — especially since this particular article mysteriously garnered so much media attention. In fact, let’s address that for a second with another very important area of day to day life where we are constantly fooled.

Nothing we see or hear or read in mainstream news has not been paid for and “pitched” through a PR firm or a news wiring agency. One of the reasons why the media reports on the White House everyday is because the White House sends them press releases everyday. It’s nearly a mandate. Whether interesting or not. President Obama pardons a turkey on Thanksgiving — a ridiculous event for so many reasons — and yet year after year you’ll see it plastered across your TV screen and splattered on the front page of many local newspapers. Why? Because the White House issued a press released through the right channels and big media covers any and all that does so. So too do large corporations that can afford to. So too do large Hollywood studios and television networks pitching their “next big blockbuster”. If you’ve always found yourself confused as to why the Kardashians and Paris Hilton and Brtiney Spears are all over the news when you have absolutely no interest in them and you have a feeling that most everyone else you know shares your sentiment, the reason is simple: they are paying for very expensive PR firms and issuing daily press releases. These get picked up by news distribution aggregators such as Reuters or Associated Press –wiring services — and then trickle down to smaller news services such as CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. and their local affiliates. That’s how we get our news. Through nothing more than a slightly altered, subtle form of glorified advertising.

This is the main reason why every media outlet in America picked up on the “vitamins don’t do any good” piece today. The Annals of Internal Medicine has access to billions of dollars. They issued a press release. Many news agencies don’t even bother to check on what they publish. They simply re-distribute and reprint everything that is issued through the news wiring services. I know this because I’ve been in the entertainment industry for most of my life and know how it works. If there’s any guilt to be had in the process, and I don’t necessarily believe there is, I’m just as guilty as the next guy. You wouldn’t believe the kind of things you can get away with releasing as “news” simply by paying to release it through the right channels. It’s laughable. And at the same time frightening as all hell. A good PR Firm will cost anywhere between $4,000 to $25.000 per month with a three month minimum. Without one of them, you’re a nobody. Meaning, you’ll have a tough time getting anyone in big media to pay attention to you, no matter important your news might be. If you want to do it yourself, you can form your own corporation and purchase a subscription to PR Newswire — the largest of the wiring services — for $1500 a year and then pay approximately $700 for about a 500 word press release. You won’t necessarily get picked up by The Today Show. That’s where a big name PR firm comes in. But you will get your news in tens of thousands of media outlets all over the country in less than 24 hours. This is how it’s done.

It’s the reason why we only hear about things that have money behind them AND why we almost never hear about things that do not have big money behind them. It’s the difference between major record label artists and indie artists; the difference between big budget Hollywood movies and indie films; the difference between big celebrities — no matter how annoying or worthless to society — and admirable do-gooders who we’ve never heard of: publicity, PR firms and PR wiring services. Or the lack thereof.

This is also why we heard all about this new study claiming that vitamins don’t do you any good but we almost never hear about the millions, yes, literally millions, of studies that have been conducted in labs all over the world that show that nutritional supplements cure disease or extend life. There’s just no money in running a science lab and conducting these studies unless you can patent that nutrient. And nutrients cannot be patented. This doesn’t stop labs and universities from doing studies. Scientists love research and exploring, getting to the bottom of things. They’ve got a sincere innate passion for discovery. They’re almost all conducted by research grants or non-profit companies who care a lot less about business than they do research. So the studies are out there. They just don’t ever make the news because there’s no big payoff in it. If reading about health studies and clinical research is your thing, or if you just want some proof that nutritional supplements work miracles in improving human health, go here: http://www.lef.org/search/?q=Vitamin%20C. You will see hundreds of studies that have been conducted that prove the effectiveness of vitamin C supplementation in preventing disease and improving health. This is just one example. Millions of such studies exist about thousands of different vitamins, herbs and other kinds of supplements. Everyone is at first shocked by how many millions of studies are out there that show how effective nutritional supplements are to human health. It is quite shocking at first. But again, we just never hear about them. THIS is one of the many shams being perpetrated on the American public on a day to day, year to year basis by big government controlled by bigger corporations.

So why would the medical community not want us to know about all these studies? Even more important, why would they spend millions of dollars to conduct different studies to try to disprove the thousands of studies that have already been conducted that show how effective certain supplements are? Hopefully you now know the answer to those questions. No money in nutrients. Plenty of money in disease, doctors, medicine and patented drugs.

I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. I didn’t quite believe any of this when I first heard it either. That was 20 years ago. I was just a kid. It sounded crazy. Like conspiracy theory speak. Doctors are in collusion with pharmaceutical companies to try to steer me clear of natural healing so they can profit from me being sick and using only drugs? It sounded insane. (But hey so did almost everything I learned about the history of the popes and the Catholic Church too….) But I kept reading and studying. I learned about how fluoride first got introduced into the system in America to “fight tooth decay”. Turns out that giant aluminum companies didn’t know what to do with the millions of pounds of aluminum fillings and dust they had leftover after manufacturing. So they got the idea to pay the government to dump it in the lakes and rivers. The government needed the money. As they always do. So they bit. The manufacturing companies were able to pay the U.S. government less than they were paying large union backed disposal companies to dispose of the same junk. Pretty soon they launched campaigns talking about the potential benefits of drinking “fluoride” — a chemical that the stuff breaks down into. They began paying dentists, in the form of scholarships, grants, donations and sponsorships of course, started pseudo-research organizations to promote that drinking fluoride and rubbing it on your teeth could prevent cavities. After all, aluminum is an abrasive. It made sense in theory. Millions of dollars were spent. Tens of millions. But nowhere near as much as they were spending to dispose of their aluminum leftovers the proper way. So it was actually cost effective. Pretty soon every municipality in America wanted those monthly checks from the big manufacturing companies. After all, all they had to do was allow them to dump aluminum fillings into public water systems. Flash forward a few decades. The aluminum manufacturers have saved hundreds of millions of dollars and 99% of Americans believe that rubbing aluminum dust on their teeth is good for them. And yes they even believe that drinking it is good for them.

The same thing happened with antiperspirant. The average American antiperspirant is actually nothing but the refuse of aluminum manufacturing companies. Read the ingredients. You’ll see it right on the label. The process allegedly works by clogging your pores with tiny metal shavings. You still perspire, which is a natural method your body uses to expel toxins; you just don’t perspire under your arms. You’ve clogged your sweat glands up with a toxic heavy metal. It’s brilliant. It also just might be the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, right? Who in their right mind would deliberately shove microscopic toxic metal shavings into their body only for it to leak into their entire system? Turns out that a lot of people do. Because they don’t know any better. They’ve been fooled. Again.

With the advent of twenty years of research into Alzheimer’s Disease, many studies are starting to show conclusively that the one thing that all Alzheimer’s Disease patients have is an excess of aluminum in their brains. Where would all that aluminum in the brain be coming from? You guessed it. Antiperspirants, toothpastes and fluoridated tap water. The irony is that aluminum pots and pans have basically been banned from being used in the kitchen precisely because we are so concerned with the potential harm that is caused from eating food cooked in aluminum. Go figure that one out.

The first question I asked myself when I started learning about all this was “why isn’t the government doing anything to stop all this?” I believe that if you’re smart enough to be here, you probably already know the answer to that question. Why did the Obama administration allow Monsanto to block the labeling of genetically modified food into becoming law when he promised to be the hope and change president? Why has he locked up more black men for drug possession than any other previous president? Why has he deported more illegal immigrants than any other administration? Why does he have the dubious honor of being the first American president in history to authorize the assassination of an American citizen with no arrest or trial? Why doesn’t he do anything about fracking when whole towns around the country are becoming contaminated, desolate, unlivable swamps of pollutants where people can light their tap water on fire with a match and hundreds are getting sick or dying? There are a lot of these questions. In the end, the answer always seems to be about one thing: money.

I don’t believe that Barack Obama is necessarily “evil”. No more evil than George Bush or Dick Cheney or any of the others. Rather, it appears more that they just have a stronger desire for personal achievement than they do a desire to improve the world around them or right the wrongs of the world. In order to reach the level of president of the United States, one has to say yes to a lot of things one would never normally say yes to. Excepting the purely mad or sociopathic that is. Strange bed-fellows begin to appear in your inner chambers. Carrying large amounts of cash. What are you going to do? If you say no, you lose and you’re never heard from again. But if you say yes… The world can be yours. Or at least the presidency. Unfortunately it doesn’t begin and end at the top. In fact it only gets worse the further down the food chain we travel. Less money. Less access. More need. More ambition. As long as we continue to fool ourselves into thinking that attention hungry, ambitious politicians make effective civil servants and leaders, we will continue to face these same dilemmas, dangerous, harmful, even deadly.

It took me a long time to believe that the government knew about potentially harmful practices and products and didn’t do anything to stop it. It’s a terribly frightening fact to contend with. You feel naked and alone when first confronting it as a reality. For if you can’t trust the government, then who can you trust? And your doctor? Egads, you’re telling me that he or she is knowingly making decisions that are harming my health?

No. Not necessarily. It turns out that many of the largest medical schools in America were started by and are largely funded by large multi-national corporations, like Carnegie or Kellogg’s. There are agendas. Subtle but strictly adhered to. Scholarships are given out by the thousands by pharmaceutical companies. And it’s common knowledge that your average American medical doctor takes no more than three credit hours on human health and nutrition. This means that after eight or nine years of schooling they may know less than you do about health and nutrition. That’ s an alarming statistic. But it helps shed light on why most American doctors don’t know much about nutritional supplements or even health itself. Instead they are trained in disease. And the way they are trained to treat disease is by medicating it (with drugs) or operating on it. In fact, most doctors are even paid in various ways to prescribe drugs to their patients. This again is just a staggering fact to integrate. Why on earth would a doctor prescribe you an all natural nutritional supplement if they’ve been programmed to not know anything about nutritional supplements and instead are being paid to dispense drugs? They’re not evil. They’re just ignorant. At least at that level. It’s the higher-ups who are truly evil. The doctors are just the dumb middle men. Some of them at least.

If you ever want to test this out, next time you go to your doctor, ask him what he knows about a particular nutritional supplement. Not what he thinks about it, but what he knows. Choose one that you happen to know a lot about. See what he says. You’ll be surprised. It’s not that they don’t know a lot. On the contrary. They know tons. And thank God for that. Just not about health and nutrition. They can break a disease and its symptoms down like nobody’s business. They just have no idea how to prevent cognitive decline naturally or help you shed 20 pounds using exercise and the right nutritional supplements.

Luckily this is changing. When I was actively working in the nutrition industry, I was approached by doctors all the time who wanted to enter into the nutrition industry in any way they could. The stories were always the same. “The health insurance companies have us by the short hairs Fishy. I’m barely making enough to support my family. Certainly nothing compared to how many years I spent in school. You make way more money that I do. Certainly I can get in somehow… You can use me as a spokesman. Put my picture on one of your boxes of magic pills. I have to have a staff of ten girls in the front of office just to collect the money we are owed from these health insurance companies.” It’s sad. Their industry is a bloody mess. And it’s primarily due to the monopolistic control the health insurance and drug companies have over it. The doctors and the patients are the ones being screwed. Which is why it is vital that we learn as much as we can about health and nutrition ourselves; and encourage our doctors to do the same.

Over the years more and more traditional medical doctors are learning about the health benefits that can be had from simple changes in eating or the benefits of nutritional supplementation. It’s not like it was ten to twenty years ago. In fact, some of the products I helped develop were researched with medical doctors who had a keen interest in the subject. This is a hopeful trend. Many are beginning to see the light and are moving more and more towards holistic medical practice rather than a strict drug and surgery based approach.

Another thing to point out about the above mentioned studies is this: they were testing “vitamins”. What they don’t bother to mention is that most of the nutritional supplements that are on the market today are NOT vitamins. What they were testing were things like vitamins A, C, D, B vitamins, etc. They’re right in that most people don’t necessarily need these vitamins if they eat even an adequate diet. But they fail to mention that the most popular supplements in the world today, the ones that are all the rage for optimum health and anti-aging, are not vitamins per se. Instead they are very advanced lab created nutritional supplements and phytonutrients. Things like Essential Fatty Acids or Resveratrol or CoQ10. Alpha Lipoic Acid. AKG-L-Arginine. Various herbs that have been modified to only contain the most active constituents. These were not what they were testing in their so-called studies. Instead they were just testing the old basic vitamins, the kind that were popular back in the seventies. The kind that no one takes anymore.

Turns out they were actually testing “multi-vitamins”. Who in their right mind who knows a lot about health and wellness takes a multi-vitamin these days? It was silly kids stuff, these studies. A bait and switch game in an attempt to try to discredit what is turning into a very profitable industry. One that they desperately want in on. (Nearly every giant pharmaceutical company also happens to own a smaller vitamin manufacturing subsidiary with their own line of nutritional supplements that they try to sell to doctors. Again, it’s funny because it’s so contradictory.) Discredit nutritional supplements but at the same time manufacture them to sell to doctors just in case.

If I hadn’t experienced such miraculous results from using nutritional supplements over the years, I wouldn’t know about or believe in their myriad benefits. But I have. And I do. I boosted my IQ, measurably so, by almost 30 points. This was back in ’96. Just for the pure hell of it. Because I wanted to. I wanted super human intelligence. So I started on a smart-nutrient protocol and scheduled two IQ tests with a psychiatrist. One before I began the protocol and one six months later. I was pissed that I didn’t nail 160. The psychiatrist thought I was insane for not being satisfied with 158. But like I said, I was shooting for the moon. Going for superhero type stuff. Which I believe is entirely possible with the right mix and the right kind of nutritional supplements.

My current doctor (who is a naturopathic doctor, not a traditional allopathic doctor) is still scratching her head trying to figure out how I was able to lower my cholesterol by 250 points in six months using only nutritional supplements. To me there’s no mystery. It’s simple science. Anyone can do it. What really puzzles me is how the hell I allowed my cholesterol to get so high in the first place. Number one I was just being lazy. I had let myself slip a little over the last few years. I must confess I have a real weakness for red meat and certain dairy products like butter and cheese. Combined with the fact that it’s hereditary… I was doomed. It’s a trade off I supposed. Luckily I know how to combat the ill effects of these passions pretty easily. Now my cholesterol is back down to normal. And I didn’t have to change a thing in my diet. I just needed to augment it with the right nutrients.

Speaking of cholesterol, dinner has been served. So I’m off. More later. Check out this article on the studies that led to all this nonsense and you’ll see for yourself how full of holes the studies were. But let me leave you with this. There are plenty of “bad” supplements on the market today. The industry has grown tremendously over the last thirty years. Not many are reputable. Many are in it simply to make money. No different than any other business venture. And they’re more than happy to take your money regardless of whether you benefit or not from their magic pills. You have to know which brands are good and which are not. There is also the fact that one can easily take too much of certain nutrients and that can be harmful. They may be from nature and even all natural. But hey so is poison ivy. Research is imperative if you’re going to begin taking nutritional supplements on a regular basis. And less is usually plenty. Lucky for you, I have lately started to get a hankering to enter that industry again. In a very creative and what I hope to be helpful way. More on that later. In the meantime, be careful. Do your research. See a naturopath. They have a very solid background in nutritional supplementation and wellness. But for God’s sake don’t be fooled by this latest editorial by the medical establishment. Take your supplements. You too could be superhero like in no time.

 



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Uncategorized American Medical Association, Annals of American Medicine, article about vitamins no good for you, brain enhancing supplements, chiropractors, Conspiracy against nutrition natural healing, genetically modified foods, GMO labelling, harmful effects of flouride, increasing your IQ through supplements, Monsanto, naturopaths, nutritional supplements, patented seeds, smart nutrients, Today Show, vitamins

Check Your Morals at the Door of the Trading Floor

December 13, 2013

Deep uncover still, exploring the world of investing and trading. Six months now. Don’t get me wrong, It isn’t just research; it’s also a way to make money. But it isn’t as easy as it once was. Those days are long gone. Yes, with the right amount of capital it isn’t difficult to make anywhere between $500 to $2000 a day actively trading. But it’s intense and stressful. And always a risk. You’re on the edge of your seat the whole time. Every minute seems like an hour when you’re in the middle of a trade. When you win, it’s exhilarating. When you lose, it can happen in an instant and there’s nothing that feels worse.

This is our third exploration into the world of active trading. The first was the period between ’97 to 2004, when I was still a kid, wet behind the ears and green as a newborn. Then 2005 to 2007. By that time I’d already made my fortune and investing was just a way to have fun with money. And now, once again we’ve jumped into the pool with the sharks. But this time it’s different. There are motives here much bigger than just to have fun or make a little extra money. And things have changed in this world. A lot. For everyday readers of the Transcendence Diaries, this isn’t going to be as transcendent as usual, but give it a chance. There is learning here. Just a very different world than what you’re more accustomed to here.

Yes, indeed, things have changed tremendously in the world of trading and investing. And yet things are seeming more and more like the old days. More on that in a few. For one thing HFT (High Frequency Trading) has been invented and is solidly embedded into the system; hell it is the system now. It makes trading operate at a rapid fire speeds. Mili-seconds matter. Pico-seconds in fact. [Many of the things I make note of will need to be Googled if not understood. For the purpose here is to post observations and lessons, not define terminology.] When I first started actively investing it was in the mid-nineties as already established here in The Diaries numerous times. We were in the process of a giant economic recovery in America which many mistakenly believe to be the effect of the Clinton White House or Alan Greenspan, when in reality it had a lot more to do with Silicon Valley and the advent of the internet age and modern technology becoming a regular part of the everyday man’s everyday life. Not only that, something amazing was invented, something truly revolutionary. eTrade. The ability of the average citizen to invest their own money their own way, in real time, without the need of a middle man or a broker.

eTrade was the first such system. Trust me when I say it was truly revolutionary. Up until that point you really did have to call a broker to buy or sell any kind of investment vehicle such as a stock or a bond or an ETF. Hell, ETFs barely existed back then. I was one of the first eTrade clients, coming on board in the beta stage as an early adaptor the same way I did with PayPal and eBay. Elon was still with PayPal back then. eBay was still a home based business. You became friends with the people you bought from and sold to. It was a small community. eTrade too. I still use the same eTrade, ebay and PayPal accounts from 1997 and 98. People are amazed when they see the date attached to my accounts. As if these are relatively new inventions. But to many people they are. That’s something that we always have to remember. The reason why companies like eBay and Netflix are still so valuable is because they’re nowhere near mainstream market saturation. Most people still don’t have a PayPal account; just as most people still don’t have Netflix accounts in their home. So there’s plenty of room for them to grow.

But back to the real meat of the story. Now eTrade is considered the old guard. The old dog that can’t learn new tricks. Try as they might they are having difficulty keeping everyone on board, though they’re still the most used platform out there overall. There’s something about being the first and the oldest that can backfire on you, whether product or service. The same way that Facebook ate MySpace who ate Friendster. Only time will tell if Tumblr will eat Facebook. I’m going to say no. But hey, they made their billion so at this point, who really cares. (Herein lay one of the main points of this post, along with a few dozen more, i.e. how similar today is to the dotcom crash of 2001. But that’s for later.) There are a hundred of these types of electronic home trading platforms out there. Scott Trade, Cool Trade, Ameritrade. Think Or Swim or TOS for short seems to be the popular kid in school these days, the current flavor of the month. Especially with the career traders, the ones who wake up every morning in their bathrobe and actively invest for a living all day. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like. I’m doing it now, though more for research and learning than for a living obviously.

Something has definitely changed though. Now everyone and their brother has access to a computerized home trading platform.  And everyone who does fashions themselves an expert. I’ve joined about two dozen investing services over the last few months in order to get a real feel for what’s going on behind the scenes with these retail investors, the average Joes, versus the big dogs. Whereas the big fund managers that we smoke cigars with every day at Barkley Rex or De La Concha are trading huge amounts of cash in the hundreds of millions and billions, the owners and members of many of these trading services are small players. One thing I’ve noticed is this: the big guys, the ones worth seven figures or more who have taught me much of what I know about wealth and finance are quiet, humble, and careful with their words. They volunteer at their church on the weekends. They do their best to keep a low profile. The smaller guys are the exact opposite. They talk a BIG game. They really believe they’re “the shit”. Or at least they talk like they believe it. Totally the opposite of the guys that manage at the big houses that I’m friends with. These smaller guys prey on small fish through seedy posts on social media like Twitter and Facebook and StockTwits. They claim to be able to make you “a fortune overnight”. Obviously this kind of attitude and activity is not new. It’s been around forever. Back in the day our friends at Agora Financial were the masters of it. They’ve turned it into a gigantic business now. Almost to the point where one could call them, dare I say, viable or nearly reputable. El Infinito is working there now. Learning a lot. Some decent minds are now contributing to their content. Very different than the small team that once was back in ’04 and ’05 when it was just Bill and Addison.

But I’ll tell you, this new breed, see they don’t manage money for any big firms. They’re traders. Pirates. But many of them are also professional hucksters. They need the money brought in through monthly subscription fees from small mom and pop investors to make their living. Whereas the guys we hang with over the weekend wouldn’t sell a subscription to their investment advice if you paid them to. And I’ve offered. They’ll talk to you free. But they would never sell you any advice. Why? Because it’s a very closed and private environment number one. And number two, they know how risky it is and how lucky they are to be in the position they’re in, so they’re humbled by that. And three, they don’t need or want that kind of money. They’re in the game for entirely different reasons. It’s more a professional sport to them. They’re in it for the Superbowl Ring. Not for a monthly subscription fee. Obviously we can’t name names here and I never have; we wouldn’t have any friends left if we did. But I have always been amazed at how cool and humble most of these guys are at the Big Ten. I’ve spent ten years smoking and drinking with them and they’re some of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. They’re not what you think, the way it’s portrayed in Hollywood movies. I’ve been to their homes, been to their vacation houses in the Hamptons, been on work trips with them, building houses with Habitat for Humanity or with church, and you wouldn’t believe the kind of effort they put in. You can tell they’re fighting some inner demons of guilt for making the kind of money they make when most everyone else is struggling just to get by. So they work their butts off on these work trips. You have to admire this.

Then there’s this whole new breed of guys out there now. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They sell subscriptions to their “expert advice” to anyone and everyone who is willing to cough up 20 to 99 bucks a month for it. Some of them are as high as $5,000 a year. It’s an amazing market. For who doesn’t want to make it rich over night? These guys, they fight with each other over Twitter about who’s the better investor, who made the right call on the right stock. Verbally pounding their chest like apes, bragging about their latest great call. Things like that. Constant bragging. It’s silly kid stuff. One thing I’ve noticed is that they are more concerned with being right than they are with being smart. This is definitely a lose-lose way of operating in the world. And this is where it gets really concerning. You’ll notice that their real teeth in the game is in feeling “right”, as opposed to making money. I’ve heard some say “I’d do that trade a hundred times and even if I was wrong about it 100 times I’d do it again.” That’s actually a favorite tag line of this lot. It’s the “asserting identity” gone wild. The ego seems to take over for the being and runs on auto pilot, while the being itself is only God knows where. Very different than the large fund managers who will spend an hour with you explaining how often they are wrong and how careful we all have to be because “no one can time the markets”. This is experience and maturity speaking. They don’t have to brag because their title does the bragging for them.

[It actually reminds me a lot of the music business. When we’re kids, we swear we’re the greatest thing since the Beatles or Dylan. Then we get a few years under our belt and a few Billboard hits and before you know it, we’re taking three years to finish an album because we’re so damn aware of how average it most likely sounds. Our maturity informs our humility. We take on a humility that is more rooted in the reality of being in the business rather than wanting to be in the business. I assume most industries are probably like this.]

Another trend I’ve noticed now is that social media has really taken a prominent stake in the world of small time investing. People go into various social media outlets and tag the name of companies with a dollar sign. Such as this: $AAPL, when referring to Apple Computer. You see no end to the kind of treachery that one will partake in to make a buck. They pump up a stock the first half the day to trick average investors into believing it’s a great investment and right when it reaches the top of the day, they turn around and dump it — it’s called the Pump and Dump — leaving the average investor holding the bag with a giant loss for the day. Very sad.

Today one such slimy character Tweeted out “$GOGO stock rallying up after FAA approves cell phone usage on flights”. Of course no such announcement had been made. He just wanted to see if he could get a few more suckers to buy some Gogo stock so his shares would go up and he could sell it. Very heinous. The worst kind of pariah. Unfortunately it’s all too common. Lying is about as regular stuff as it gets with this crowd. This is NOT the world of the Avatar or Wayne Dyer or Abraham Hicks. It’s not about being a good person or taking responsibility or helping make the world a better place. It’s about making money. And that’s about all it’s about. Plain and simple. In a post earlier this week, I talked about how the world of investing is destroying the world we live in in the name of making money. Whether it’s the destruction of the environment for fossil fuels or promoting slave labor to improve shareholder dividends, it’s just a very seedy heartless business.

I’ve had a tough time fitting in. But at the same time, it’s the only way we will truly learn all there is to learn about the world of investing in order to better harness the power of Compassionate Capitalism in our quest to create an Enlightened Planet, which is the goal here. Compassionate Capitalism is a growing trend around the world of the wealthy, though very few are as of yet participating. For it takes a lot of self restraint and well, compassion. It also takes a lot of compromise when it comes to foregoing profits in favor of helping. But we’re getting there. More and more are jumping on board. And that’s where we’re headed as a society. It’s just going to take showing everyone else that it’s possible to make a fortune AND be cautious with our investment dollars to avoid contributing to the problems; AND even being pro-active, with a focus on making the world a better place. This might mean investing more in solar and alternative energy rather than oil, fracking and coal. This of course has the potential to lose you a lot of big money. Very true. And I have already experienced the conflict that sets in when trying to stop yourself from jumping into a company that you just know is ravaging the earth while making its fortune. It’s difficult.

A case in point that hits closer to home is that of Pandora. Yes the online radio company. What most people don’t realize is that Pandora has gone public. You can buy and sell shares of the company. And potentially make money doing so. The problem is that Pandora has slowly eroded the very lifeblood of the music industry. The initial deal they structured with the record labels and publishers was for 7 cents a play for each song — try splitting that up ten ways — it was already ridiculously low for as artists. A huge sacrifice. But we were told it was temporary, just until they got their foot in the door, that they were “new and experimental” so we all said yes just to see what would happen; on a temporary basis. Flash forward three years and they are logging tens of millions of listens a day; so they’re no longer “new and experimental”. What was planned was that they would up the ante for us artists once they established themselves and started gaining a bigger listenership. Instead what they’ve done is file a law suit against all the record labels and publishers in the world to ask the courts to allow them to cut that royalty rate in HALF. Yes they now want to only pay about 3 cents per song per spin. That way they can keep the cost down for the listener — it’s already primarily free — AND increase the amount of bonuses they pay to the directors of the company and the dividends they pay to the shareholders.

What’s really heinous is that their primary method of generating revenue — this is classic — is advertising. And who is their main advertising client? Yep. Music business companies. Turning around and selling advertising to US: record companies and publishers in order to promote new albums and singles by the artists. But if WE aren’t making any money from sales anymore, nor from online spins, then what incentive do we have to advertise on their platform? The music business is headed for complete implosion at this point. Not just “gone are the good old days”, but total annihilation. As in no one makes any money at all and everyone just does it for fun IF they can find someone to support them financially. Pandora is one of the reasons why. And what will this lead to ultimately for the average music fan? No good music. Just a lot of random shit gets released — as in whoever can afford to release music of some kind will. No gate keepers. No purveyors. We’ll see. This might be a good thing. But so far all it’s done is muddy the playing field so much that even the most open minded listeners are beginning to recognize that “there just seems to be a lot of really bad music being released these days.” Well now you know why.

[PS — for the record iTunes is not part of the problem. Unfortunately many people are operating under the misconception that iTunes ruined the music business through the distribution of online music and MP3s. But that isn’t the case. iTunes pays one of the best royalty rates out there for artists. And it doesn’t matter who you are or how big or small you are. If people are buying your music, you’re being paid handsomely from iTunes. Kudos to them for this.]

But Pandora, that’s just one example of the kind of conflict I’m talking about. So, let’s say we have a feeling that Pandora is going to rally on Monday, maybe it’ll go up a buck or two. We have a good chance of making some easy money if we invest a large sum. Jump in Friday. Ride it up till Wednesday or so and sell. Easy. But are we contributing to the problem by investing in the company in order to make a profit? I suppose if we turn around and use that same money to fund the counter-suit against them and spread awareness through PSAs about what a wretched organization they are, which is what just about every musical artist in America is doing at the moment — jumping on board this anti-Pandora train, then I guess it’s alright. Especially if we don’t invest for the long haul but only for a few days, to make some money. Why not? But that’s just one example. What about fracking? We know it’s the fastest way towards creating the great zombie apocalypse and destroying the world as we know it, but there’s BIG money to be made in natural gas. I made thousands trading it this week alone. And I KNOW what it is. I KNOW how it is made. And yet… I couldn’t resist the temptation. Again, if it’s just jumping in and out then is it really contributing to the problem?

Unfortunately I would say yes it is. For if NO ONE invested in these companies then they wouldn’t have any access to capital. They wouldn’t be able to keep going. They’d be forced to shut down. There’d be no more fracking. And there’s the problem. The only people fighting the good fight, against the frackers and the GMO monsters and Big Pharma and Big Oil, are the poor and middle class. They’re the ones out in the streets protesting and demonstrating and occupying. Everyone else is trying to figure out which of the big drug companies is going to be the next one that doubles in price next month and investing in it. Along with all the others. It’s a crazy scene. Trust me. For people like us, it’s just an absolutely insane scene. You check your morals and ethics at the door when you step onto the trading floor. You have to if you want to make big money. At least that’s the vibration that emanates from the room as you enter. Very few people speak of changing the world or taking responsibility or faith or peace or love or anything like that.

It’s a strange world full of animal consciousness. A cut-throat world. Ruthless. You hear phrases such as “chop those bears into little pieces” or “major bull trap”  or “we’re going to eat these grizzly bears for breakfast once this stock hits $50″. On and on. Most of it I wouldn’t repeat here. Like I said, it’s cut throat. But remember, we’re here to learn. I do my best to keep the peace and stay true to myself, try to offer some civility into the game while I’m learning.

Another thing I’ve learned is this: no one can time the market. Everyone is guessing, analyzing in hindsight. No matter what kind of analyzing they’re doing, whether it’s technical or fundamental or chart reading, it’s all just made up formulae. Everyone and their brother has a special system that they’ve developed or have adopted from someone else, and they all think it’s “the best system out there”. They speak about proprietary systems and all these rules of the market. But no such rules exist. Every time one of the so-called rules is broken, they’ll come up with a different rule to explain why that other rule was broken. It’s hilarious. But it’s also sad because you can see what a vicious cycle it is of ignorance. A company can be worth a veritable fortune and be ridiculously profitable and still have a stock that is poorly valued. Another company can not even be profitable — they actually LOSE money every quarter — and their stock price can be selling at a price that is in the hundreds. It’s a completely illogical game. Twitter, the little company, is about one-tenth the size of Facebook for instance and yet today it traded for about ten dollars more per share than Facebook. No logic. No reason. Just hype and excitement. This is what makes the world of investing so dangerous. No one is using intelligence or rational thinking anymore.

It’s exactly like 1999 to 2001, right before what we call the dotcom crash. We all know what that was like. Most people weren’t actually investing back then. But they’re familiar with the story. I was smack dab in the middle of it. Though I didn’t do it for a living. It was just fun. But I swear we’d make a few thousand dollars in a day just from jumping into a new company’s IPO at the start of the day and jumping out by the end of the day. Things like that. No one even bothered to check out the fundamental financial health of the company. The fact that it was going public through IPO was enough. It had gotten crazy. Which led to a giant melt down. As I’ve already written here, twelve years ago when it happened, I was one of the lucky ones. I was advised by some friends who managed at Goldmans to get out. So I took everything we had out of the market and put it all into Berkshire Hathaway B shares. At the time these were selling for $3,200 per share. I couldn’t believe that one stock could be so expensive. But after the crash, when everyone around me lost a fortune and my shares stayed relatively the same price, I had a lot more appreciation for quality and value when it comes to investing.

We’re in a similar place now. You can feel the rabid nature of the whole thing crashing in around everyone. And yet all they want is for the markets to keep going up. It’s a fascinating study of human behavior. All the sell signals are there right in front of us that we are headed towards a major correction — for a variety of reasons, not just one — and yet everyday in all these public forums and chat rooms and even on TV, you’ll hear the majority of the people still speak very bullish about the markets. Only the very few, the currently unpopular, speak logically and reasonably about the possibility of a coming crash. And yet the smart money simply wants to make money. And with the system as advanced as it is now, the way it’s been designed, making money in a down market is just as easy as making money in an up market. So being bullish about the markets being bullish is just, well, being bull-headed. Smart money feeds on making money. Not on being right. There’s nothing more rewarding than leaving “being right” at the door in order to make some money. But you’d be surprised how many people are ignoring the signs right in front of us all.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the game in general, the industry, the business, is that there is this very prominent “us versus them” attitude that is very prevalent. You’ll hear people constantly referring to “they” as if there is this mysterious malevolent force out there lurking in the shadows whose sole mission in life is to defeat them. They believe it to be an us versus them game, with them being the heroic underdogs of the story and “they” being the wicked apparition or monster out to get them. In reality, it’s nothing of the kind. There is no “they”. There are just millions of people putting money in and taking money out of various different investment vehicles. No real rhyme or reason. But the conspiracy theories are legend and there are many.

I’ve read hundreds of books about investing over the last 18 years and studied hundreds of different systems; attended all the big courses and bought into all the secret societies. Each and every one thinks that it alone holds the secret key to how the market works and how to “always win and never lose”. But I’ve never seen one person do it. The closer you get, the more losses you see. People tend to only advertise their wins. So you have to actually buy in in order to get behind the scenes enough to see what’s really going on. And once you do, you see just as many losses in the most expensive proprietary formulas as you do from the average investor. One thing that does seem to help though are the guys who strictly do Options trading. They do tend to understand the market better than anyone else. And they also know how to minimize losses better than most. This has been the primary focus of my research over the last few months. Learning about Options trading. It’s complex stuff. It’s calculated risk because it’s limited risk. Though the timing has to be even better; and because no one can time the market, the losses seem to be more frequent compared to the wins. But at least they are limiting them. Last week I made a small fortune with my first two options trades, both with Apple. This week unfortunately I lost an entire premium — luckily only about $1500 — with another options trade. I’m telling you, it’s potluck. Damn close to gambling it seems sometimes.

But not if you’re smart. And that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from the guys at the big houses. They don’t gamble. Everything they do is very calculated. They keep risk to a minimum. And they pay a lot of attention to fundamentals. If a company isn’t worth a shit, they don’t go there. The average investor speculates. They’ll invest in anything if someone tells them that they might make some money from it. They truly believe that “fundamental analysis is old fashioned; that it’s for the old mom and pops who don’t understand the new game”. But they consistently lose trading these highly speculative companies that are pure “trader’s plays”. Those are stocks for companies that aren’t yet profitable or haven’t yet proven themselves. Smaller companies. It’s become a huge trend. Just as it had in 2000. And just as it had in 2007 with Credit Default Swaps and the rest of it. Personally, I smell a major correction coming. So I almost always sell out of everything at the end of each day. This week every index lost money. It was a bloodbath. And December is supposed to be “most profitable month of the year in the stock market”. Go figure. Like I said, there are no rules. And anyone who believes there are is kidding themselves. There are only rules AFTER. Not before. That’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned on this most recent venture into this world.

What I’d like to accomplish from this little adventure is two-fold: besides just mastery over all the knowledge of the investing world and global economics  — which is what really juices me about all this, I’d also like to be able to understand it all well enough to where I can really help contribute to the advent of Compassionate Capitalism going mainstream. Making money while making the world a better place. We’re a long way from that right now. But we are ON the way. Many have already started. Many more will come on board as older generations die off and the younger ones enter the game. Right now when someone comes on a financial news show who is proposing a business model that helps AND makes money you should see the way that people look at them; it’s as if they’re from a different planet. They are met immediately with suspicion that their business model is no good or is faulty in some way. Just because it has an ulterior motive of doing the world some good. That’s something that needs to change. Together we can do that. We need to continue to spread the meme though mass consciousness that making money and making the world a better place are not mutually exclusive missions. They can easily work together, in harmony and synergistically. It’s the only way we are going to create a world that lasts for a long time to come and is fair and just and friendly to all its citizens. This is the goal. More later.

 



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Uncategorized compassionate capitalism, eTrade, investing, itunes, Music, Music Business, Pandora, record companies, stock market, stocktwits, trading

Celebrating Lennon

December 10, 2013


Nelson Mandela wasn’t the only public figure to pass away into the great unknown this week. Legendary singer songwriter activist and artiste extraordinaire John Lennon also made the journey just yesterday in fact when a crazy schizophrenic shot him down right outside his apt on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Only it was 33 years ago. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.
 
 
 All weekend I thought about it. It kept bubbling up in the back of my mind. John died this weekend didn’t he… so the thoughts went. I sure do miss him. I’ll never forget that day. We were just kids that day. Little kids. Too young to even really get it. We had already been into the Beatles. That’s how we all came together actually. Me and Toad and StuGuru an Juliet and the rest of the crew. We were all in the so-called “gifted” program at school, which meant that we never for to see the rest of the student body at except at PE and during lunch. We were basically what would be considered the nerds of the school. Major geeks who enjoyed things like Academic Games, Debate Club and Chorus. (Our chorus went to all state that year. My very first television appearance. Was standing on the top row of the bleachers and in the middle of “the sun will come our tomorrow” my foot started to itch. I went to scratch it with my other foot and my shoe fell off and made a huge thud when it dropped to the floor. On live TV. The first of many awkward moments).
 
 
 One of the things we all seemed to have in common was our love of the Beatles. They were an old band. Classic rock. Totally not hip or cool when we were growing up. Which only added to the allure of our obsession with being so different than everyone around us. Outliers. We had this quasi-Beatles fan club which consisted of no more than the lot of us spending all of our free time doing nothing but talking about or listening to the Beatles. That and stamp collecting. Like I said, we were nerds. I didn’t actually become “cool” till high school. And frankly the jury is still out on that. But the Beatles and our love for their music and culture and history bonded us in a special way. To the point where we are still friends today.
 
 
 Of course back then we were just into the early and middle stuff. Hadn’t progressed into the later years. Sounds funny now, but back then, at our age, the music of the later Beatles era felt and sounded “scary” to us. Especially the White Album. On especially courageous evenings during sleepovers we’d turn off all the lights and turn the white album on — only vinyl back then. Cassettes existed but you knew better to not go there. We’d sit in the dark with flashlights and listen to all these epic dark and languishing songs with their stream of consciousness drug-inspired lyrics. It seemed a frightening world to us at such young ages. But an equally appealing one as well.
 
 
 Less than ten years later three of us would be acting the parts out in real life when me and Toad and The Grey Wolf started the band Shattered (Broken Spectacles) and StuGuru started Lobsters and Walruses. As in all bands we subconsciously sparred for who was Paul and who was John. Both of us wanted to be John. Though I was the more obvious candidate, being slightly more of bad boy than Toad ever could be, coming from a broken home, being in constant trouble at school and with the law, and just never having the beautiful voice that Toad had, just like Paul. It’s funny now. Because Id give anything now to be Paul. Now that I’m older. But the Lennon comparisons still are heard now and then from fans and critics. Have never heard or read a McCartney comparison. And for whatever reason the older I became the more obsessed and in love I became with Paul and his music.
 
 
 With that said though, it is still John who tends to influence me more as an artist and as a man in the world. As I’m sure he does to lots of other artists around the world. This is an aspect of being an artist that draws a very clear line in the sand between the real and the pretenders. Entertainers have hits. They have gold records. They may even win Grammys. Hell they do every year. Artists may never reach any of those achievements. But they influence. Like Lou Reed. His is an influence which has spanned five decades and spread to every country in the world. For other artists. But most people only know one of his songs — “walk on the wild side” — out of a forty year career. That’s classic. That’s an artist.
 
 
 John Lennon was the same way. He never did things by the book — at least once he finished with the whole mop top selling out phase of his career. Which no one can blame him for because without that phase he may never have “made it” and we’d never have known his music. He wasn’t around during the indie revolution when everyone and their brother could record an album and pretend they were a receding artist no matter how bad they were, as things are today. You had to sell out if you wanted to actually reach the point of making a record and getting radio airplay.
 
 
 But after that phase — by Rubber Soul I’d say — john was just off on a tangent doing whatever the hell he wanted to. Not only as an artist but as a person. For a lot of us john’s personal life and his non-musical antics inspired us as much as his music did. The activism, the drug busts, the candid truth telling to a fault, the living in a glass house allowing all of his faults foibles and idiosyncrasies hang out for all the world to see. It would be hard for me to ever try to pretend that John didn’t have a huge influence on me. Deeper more profits and more transparent than even Bowie or Lou or Bolan because I got into him at such a young age that the influence was never conscious. It just became a part of who I was and evolved into. I’m saying this now as it’s occurring to me. Have never thought about it before. But it seems true. I never tried to be like or do anything like John Lennon. It was and perhaps still is more like he was a father figure who just rubbed off on me the same way a father does to a son. Never having a father of my own John and Paul played that role vicariously, simultaneously trading places at warp speed depending on what mood I happened to be in at any given moment. Then BAM! 20 years later and I’m a man myself. People say “you remind me of John Lennon” and it never even occurs to me that it could be true because I never deliberately copped John the way I did admittedly with say Bowie or Lou or Marc.
 
 
 Now that I’m older it really hits home how much we have missed by John not being around all these years. We can only guess what his musical output would be like now. Or what it would have been like over the last 33 years past. He was just getting started again when he was killed. That first new album in over five years (Double Fantasy) was an amazing in regards to the John songs in it. Even the Yoko songs were good.
 
 
 As well I often wonder what his social and political ideals would be like. I’m sure he’d be proud of what society has turned into in terms of how popular social and political activism have become. Even with more mainstream types. I wonder if he’d ever turn toward less peaceful more violent means of activism if he knew what we know now about how wicked the powers that be have become. But then again they were pretty bad already In the 60s and 70s. And he resisted those urges back then. Which is one of the reasons why I and probably many people like me still do. No matter how angry or embittered or resentful we feel sometimes. That’s just one of the many many gifts he offered the world simply by being born and being himself and doing his thing. If we’re going to take anything from John and his legacy, it should be that: to remember how utterly profound it can be if we do absolutely nothing other than be ourselves.
 
 
 It’ll never not be “sad” today. Because we will never not miss him and never not mourn his early passing. But there is plenty there to celebrate as well.
 
 
 – Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone



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Uncategorized anniversary of death of John Lennon, Broken Spectacles, his influence, Paul McCartney, Remembering John Lennon, the meaning of his life

Powerful Lessons from the Life of Nelson Mandela the Terrorist

December 8, 2013

There are plenty of lessons to learn from the life of former South African president and activist Nelson Mandela. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about him over the years. More big budget Hollywood movies are sure to come. Anything and everything that can be said about a man has been said about the 95 year old Nobel Peace Prize winning Mandela over the last three decades, especially this week in the wake of his passing. Open a newspaper, turn on the TV or log onto the internet and, besides football, one will find it difficult to find any other subject being discussed as readily. So what more is there to say? Especially anything new or noteworthy.

Since the aspect of memorializing and paying tribute to the man and his legacy is already being well played all over the world, if not over played, let us instead turn our attention to aspects of the story that are being more or less ignored. Perhaps there are more powerful lessons to be gleaned than the usual “patience forgiveness and perseverance eventually pay off and lead to transformation” one that we are currently hearing so much of this week. For there is more to the story.

Many of us younger than the Baby Boomer generation simply remember Nelson Mandela as a heroic figure of some kind, at times seeming mythic in stature; right up there with Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi. We know he was in prison for a long time and somehow managed to survive. We know he was eventually freed and became president of a country that was ruled by colonial white powers for generations. We know he was a civil rights activist against modern day apartheid, the term used to describe racial prejudice and segregation by minority whites against blacks in the country called South Africa. We recognize his face as being synonymous with patience, forgiveness, racial equality and activism. And for most of us that’s where the story begins and ends. Even if that were the entirety of the story it would still qualify as a powerful legacy and a valuable example by which to live.

But in addition to these well known aspects of the Nelson Mandela story are more subtle and perhaps more profound lessons. The one that possibly engages the most is the fact that for decades Nelson Mandela was considered a villain by The United States and the West in general throughout most of the time he rotted away in a South African prison. He was branded a communist agitator and considered a terrorist, a fact that was commonly known and agreed on by the majority of Americans, and placed on America’s Terrorist List, where he stayed for forty years, until 2008; a fact called “an embarrassing inconvenience” by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when Mandela attempted to enter the United States during the George W. Bush presidency. One can only imagine the level of irony and embarrassment felt by Rice, an African American herself who benefitted greatly from the Civil Rights movement in the United States as she was forced to deal with this “inconvenience”.

At this point in our shared history, the myth making phase of the Mandela legend has long since begun. Now that he has passed the political sycophants of the world will begin the real glory-grabbing as they start announcing official Nelson Mandela Days in their town, state or country, erecting Nelson Mandela memorials, building statues and probably even whole museums in his name; all will qualify for free federal grant money from the tax payers. And this is only the beginning. Along the way sometimes such endeavors also require a good deal of redaction, cover ups and historical revision. Just as Martin Luther King was considered a terrorist threat and constantly harassed and badgered by the United States government — who now begrudgingly admit that they had even gone so far as bugging his house and wiretapping his office and home telephones for years, so too was Nelson Mandela. This is the America that the few the proud the not-Marines know and don’t particularly love. The grand irony is not that they took these actions against these men. If history is any indication, that’s been their job since the country was first formed, to bring down anyone who challenges or resists the status quo, no matter how unjust or unfair it might be.

The fact that historical facts have been leading scholars to believe for decades now that the assassination story associated with the death of MLK was most likely a fabricated one and that certain branches of both the local and federal government were involved in his murder is largely taken for granted by many, especially the family of Dr. King, who sued the United States government several times in court to reopen the investigation into his death in order to exonerate the name of and free the alleged lone gun assassin James Earl Ray.

This is all business as usual stuff for the United States government. But it’s not ironic. It’s just too plain old ordinary to be. The real irony lies in the complete about-face the government takes once circumstances change so profoundly against their will that they are forced to begin to revise their stance and pretend they never held it. Such was the case with their blatantly hostile view and treatment of Martin Luther King and as well with Nelson Mandela. And therein lay a lesson that is just as profound as the more obvious ones being pointed out ad nauseum by pastors, politicians and the mainstream media all over the country today. There are lessons here that if integrated properly can be used in our future to further speed along our evolution to a more civilized, honest and enlightened society.

We must remember that even though Mandela has been propped up on a celestial pedestal now and paraded around political theatres and social circles for years as a legendary activist to the point of near sainthood by American politicians, he spent 27 years of his life behind bars in prison in South Africa, an action that was fully supported by the same United States government. It wasn’t that the United States “just didn’t want to get involved” in the politics and policies of a foreign sovereign state (since when has the United States been known to ever take that stance?), imprisoning Mandela and his comrades in the ANC (African National Congress) as well as the official racist apartheid laws of South Africa were supported and assisted by the U.S. government. Throughout the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and then Bush Sr. the white-minority controlled South Africa was a major trade partner of the United States, in commodities such as minerals, diamonds, gold and uranium. They fought alongside the United States in its various foreign exploitive wars and vice versa. President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were all too happy to assist the South African government in brandishing Mandela “a communist terrorist threat to the ideals of liberty and democracy.” So too were Ronald Reagan and the United Kingdom’s Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1980s celebrities around the world began to stand up and speak out against South African apartheid — (sometimes one wishes that people would just call it what it was, flat out self-serving racism, discrimination and segregation of an entire race of people based purely on the color of their skin, so as not to potentiate any misunderstanding of how brutal and oppressive a law and practice it was). As always it was the artists and entertainers of the world who first took up the torch for this blatantly obvious human rights abuse,  (but notably many years AFTER the real heroes of these issues — the activists, who almost always rise up long before anyone else has the knowledge or courage to do so in civil societies). This eventually led to the U.S. congress drafting a strong sanctions bill against doing any business or trade with the government of South Africa in the mid-eighties until they did away with their apartheid government. The bill passed. President Reagan vetoed it. His views were strictly Cold War anti-communist, human rights be damned. He also didn’t want to lose the valuable trade relationship the United States had with South Africa.

The Congress, to their credit, pushed the bill into law anyway. In the meantime, president Reagan promoted the idea that the real problem wasn’t racism by whites but tribal conflicts amongst blacks that was the true cause of the suffering of the South African black people. Where have we heard that argument before?

None of these facts are secret or disputed or conspiratorial in nature. They’re well known to anyone who was alive and old enough to be aware of the world around them at the time that they occurred. Even though we may not be. Anyone over the age of 45 to 50 can easily remember the names Nelson Mandela and the ANC being commonly known as renegades, communists and terrorist threats to be feared, subdued and put down by “lovers of Western liberty and democracy”. Just as Islamists are in today’s world. It’s ironic that these same powers are now taking every advantage possible to tout the merits of the man and his mission and publicly drool over his legacy as if he were the black Jesus. But irony aside, how can this knowledge serve us now?

I have always contended that a knowledge of history is useless if it’s not brought forward and used to better gauge and inform our views and actions in the present. Knowing what we now know about Nelson Mandela — how he was viewed and treated by the United States and other Western governments, what areas of the world or social and political figures of today are bound to be relegated to similar changes of viewpoints and about-faces by the powers that be? What horrors are we currently supporting or permitting that we will later regret as a nation so much so that we will feel compelled to not only change our views but attempt to cover up our former ideals and actions? Where is there blatant ignorance malfeasance or injustice being committed in our name simply because we as a people are too lazy or too afraid to stand up for what we believe in?

As Meet the Press, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, CNN, the White House and every other corporate lapdog step over each other in a mad dash to be the first seen gloating with admiration over Nelson Mandela and his indomitable spirit of rebellion and passion for change and human rights, these are the questions that we should instead be asking; because THIS seems to be the real meat of the Nelson Mandela legacy, the most profound lesson in the now and moving forward; and perhaps the best way to honor the man at the moment of his passing. At the very least, it seems to be the one lesson that we might have the most to learn from in terms of ideas that haven’t been fully or properly addressed yet.

Who are we overtly branding a threat or a terrorist and suppressing NOW?

Iran comes to mind — which is ironic since almost all of the real wickedness perpetrated in the world in regards to Iran over the last 100 years has been taken by Western Nations against Iran, not by Iran. One day, when or if history eventually rights itself, the Islamic Revolution that took place in Iran in 1979, though not perfect, will be viewed as it is in Iran itself: a momentous people’s revolution where the people of Iran took the country back and got rid of the foreign occupiers (the United States and Great Britain) and acted valiantly and bravely during the American Hostage Crisis by not killing ONE American citizen. All they were asking for was their former king/dictator Shah Palavi to be returned to them so he could stand trial in a court of law for his nearly constant abuse of powers and illegal activities. The United States refused to comply with their request. Even though it was their country.

[As this is a very nuanced, detailed and muddled subject, it is difficult for anyone objectively minded to take a stand on this one particular issue. On the one hand the United States government was defying the will of a sovereign people once again, placing  their own will above that of the people of this foreign country. Which they clearly had no business doing. Such is the very nature of the United States of America and the reason why the country is so questioned and reviled by intellectuals on all sides of the fence as well as true lovers of human rights and freedom. On the other hand the United States government, along with Great Britain, was the entity responsible for placing the Shah back in power in Iran in the first place — completely against the will of the Iranian people, and surely felt a certain amount of loyalty and responsibility towards the Shah. They knew that if they handed him over to the Iranian people that he would most likely be put on trial, found guilty and be put to death. It didn’t hurt that he had more than enough money to compensate the powers that be in Washington and elsewhere in order to assure he would not be extradited back to Iran to stand trial. Tricky stuff. But the moral of the story is obvious: The United States should have never gotten illegally involved in the affairs of Iran in the first place, period.]

The fact that the Iranian people showed such discipline and commitment to their religious values and restraint by not killing any of the Americans they took hostage speaks volumes about the difference between them and their American foes. It also speaks to what is currently happening in respect to Iran as it is being uniformly demonized, especially by Western nations and Israel, for wanting to build a nuclear energy program for itself as it projects that it will be completely out of oil by the year 2020. The United States and Israel most notably, along with Saudi controlled Arabia, do not “want” Iran to have a nuclear energy program for fear that they will escalate the program to eventually make nuclear weapons, which could “offset the balance of power in the Middle East”. What this really means is that Iran will once and for all be in full control of their fate as a sovereign nation as opposed to being in constant fear of the more powerful countries of Israel and the United States who both have nuclear weapons.

This too is a tricky subject; one which we have already shed gallons of ink on over the last five years. It is more than ironic that the country telling the world that “a nuclear armed Iran poses a real and imminent threat to the entire world” happens to be the only country in the history of human civilization who have ever used nuclear weapons to obliterate other people, i.e. the United States. At the same time, it is true that Iran has been known to sponsor various “terrorist organizations” around the Middle East such as Hamas and Hezbola. This is a valid concern. A frightening reality.

At the same time there are more Jewish people living in Iran than in any other country in the Middle East except for Israel because they are free to practice their religion as they always have been since King Cyrus the Great freed them in ancient times as is relayed in the Old Testament. Iran is NOT anti Jewish, as much as some may try to distort that reality. Instead they are anti-Zionism. They are against foreign invaders entering a land by force, taking over the towns and villages until they eventually gain control over much of the entire country, and systematically killing its people just because they have access to more money, more influence and more weapons than the inhabitants who were already there, which in a nutshell sums up what Zionism has been over the last sixty years in the land called Palestine.

Would Israel be safe if Iran obtained nuclear weapons? That’s an existential question. For no one knows the answer. Iran claims that it has no intention of building a nuclear weapon and it would never use one against other living human beings. At the same time they have expressed their complete opposition to the existence of “a national Jewish homeland in the former state of Palestine”. Again it’s tricky stuff. Perhaps if Israel weren’t borne so unjustly and barbarically and out of so much bloodshed at the expense of another people, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries wouldn’t be so angry and Israel wouldn’t have to be so afraid, defensive and assertive.

[Personally I’ve been to all three countries and seen it all firsthand. It is not merely hearsay as some loudly contend but experience which informs these views. Jews do live comfortably and relatively free in Iran. At least as free and comfortable as Iranian Muslims do. On the other side of the coin, Palestinians live under what could be easily called extreme fascist control and at times concentration camp-like circumstances in many parts of Israel and Palestine under an iron fist of Jewish-Israeli rule. It is more than heartbreaking. Picture the poorest of poor African countries, now add a giant cement wall and barbed wire fences caging them in, along with the addition of Israeli troops carrying machine guns surrounding them on all sides AND no access to running water of any kind that they can control themselves. Again it is more than heartbreaking and speaks volumes about why the Iranian people might just be a bit angry at how their Muslim brethren are being treated. It is also no small testament to the morals and fortitude of the Iranian people that out of all the countries in the Middle East, they are one of the last holdouts who still refuse to cave or compromise their basic values in return for being allowed to suckle the corporate breasts of the most powerful country in the modern world.]

To get back to the point, will we one day see a world where the powers that be in Washington and the West trip over themselves to publicly praise and guffaw over the bravery and gallantry of the Iranian people and their commitment to freedom and human rights? Maybe. One day. It really depends on one of two things: Either, one: the Iranian people find a way to eventually free themselves from being bullied and dominated by the current Rome of the modern world, The United States of America and it’s “allies”, and create true economic and political freedom as a nation — think China. The Chinese are not a free people; in fact they really ARE communists. But you don’t see them being bossed around and controlled like puppets on a string by the U.S. as the Iranian government presently is (think of the so-called “sanctions”, in reality a euphemism for what is known as economic terrorism). The reason is because the United States is afraid of direct military confrontation with China, and two, the U.S. needs their money more than they care about the Chinese peoples’ freedom or liberty. If Iran ever gains a strong economic foothold for itself and becomes competitive in the world, the U.S. will do a 180 degree turn in its views on Iran. The other option would be if the Iranian people are ever successful in their slow and steady quest for true freedom and democracy. Right now they live in a “not so free” country — the only openly and admittedly “Theocratic” government left on earth — though one could argue that China is a “Secular Theocracy”; not to mention the more obvious theocratic states like Saudi controlled Arabia and Afghanistan et al. Only future history will tell.

Another people in the BIGGER picture who are currently suffering from being demonized as being terrorists and general threats to freedom and liberty by the West are almost any and all “Muslims”, especially in the United States and especially in Middle America, where the word Islam is nearly synonymous with “terrorism” to the average person. Just having brown skin in fact nearly uniformly renders a person either a “terrorist” or an “illegal immigrant” in today’s Middle America. Now that may be an unfair stereotype. But if it is, let Middle America show that to be the case. We in the North and the coastal states will surely be more than happy to express our relief and our sincerest apologies if they ever do so. It sure doesn’t appear that way from the outside looking in though. Just as it didn’t appear that the United States government was a big fan of Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela when they were brandishing them as being communists, terrorists, and threats to the safety and security of freedom and democracy.

Other obvious ideas that come to mind regarding these questions are the countries of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen. All countries where the United States and its military are actively engaged in killing, looting and covert operations in the name of “defeating terrorists” and “saving the ideals of liberty and democracy”. One day if democracy ever flourishes in these nations and they find a way out of their impoverished states or manage to somehow gain an economic or political advantage over more Westernized powers, then it will only be a matter of time that their leaders will be held up and celebrated as valiant heroes and legends the way that Nelson Mandela currently is. It may sound crazy, but we have to remember, again, that this is a man who in the not too distant past was considered a rebel, a criminal, a terrorist, a communist, and a threat to everything freedom loving people the world over stood for. It is only NOW that he is being rebranded by Washington and the mainstream media as the legend that we all know and love.

Of course, the manner in which he achieved his success and his presidency, through non-violent means, diplomacy and civil disobedience are all reasons why it was so easy for all to so easily change the label that they once attached to the man. And THIS is what makes him such a pivotal figure in global politics. He chose NOT to go the way of military action or violence once he was released from prison. Many facts point to the possibility that had he NOT been imprisoned when he was that he was well on his way toward a more violent and military path towards freedom for black Africans. Which is why he was singled out, arrested and imprisoned in the first place.

As well on the list might include countries such as so-called “Saudi Arabia”, Israel and Palestine. They also come to mind in a reverse engineering sort of way. The country that we now commonly call Saudi Arabia is in reality Arabia. As in Lawrence of Arabia. The same Arabia that’s been around for thousands of years. The term “Saudi” refers to the last name of the family that currently acts as the fascist dictators who nefariously control that entire country full of people against their will. Call it a forced monarchy, oligarchy, a fascist state. None of these words really matter. What matters is that the Saudi family has gone so far in their quest to take over the entire country to use it for themselves that they even changed the name of the country. It would be akin to an American president changing the name of this country to BushMerica or ObamAmerica. It’s that dastardly. And it’s been done with the approval, support and military assistance of the United States — who supposedly will do anything to defend the ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy. In truth the United States government only “defends the ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy” when they have something material to gain from a military intervention in said country. These are ideas only, words only, tools of convenience, semantics.

When a rebel group eventually rises up to defeat the Saudi government in order to free the Arabian people and bring true democracy to the region and proves itself to be stronger than the current regime that occupies the country, one can bet that the United States will be the first in line to send weapons and troops to “defend the Saudi Arabian people”. And only AFTER the Saudi family is put down and democracy rules in Arabia will the United States government change its views and start pretending that it’s “always stood for freedom and democracy for the Arabian people”. Just as it now pretends to have always stood for freedom from racist rule for the South African people even though for decades it directly opposed to it.

There are myriad examples of these types of situations all over the world today. Tibet is another that comes to mind.  An easy choice for defending the freedom and liberty of a people IF the powers that be in Washington or other Western nations really cared about such ideals. So too does Myanmar. As do many countries in Africa still. Freedom and democracy are malleable concepts at this time in human history. So too it seems are the ideals that we attach to political figures such as Nelson Mandela when we see an opportunity to use them to our advantage. It isn’t that Mandela wasn’t a noble man of courage and strength, patience and fortitude. He surely was. And more. His ability to forgive in the face of extreme abuse and wickedness was and always will be exemplary. So too was his decision to transform South Africa into a Westernized-like democracy when he gained power and the presidency. But in the bigger picture it is an odd irony that President Hu Jintao of communist China is just as celebrated when visiting the United States — black tie dinners and 21 gun salutes and all — as Nelson Mandela is today in America. The two men and what they represent couldn’t be more different. And yet from the outside looking in it does not appear that the American government or The White House recognizes this fact, one that seems to be so obvious to the rest of the world. Along with the manner in which Mandela was viewed and treated by the United States for thirty years prior to his success in South Africa, this makes it difficult to ascertain how truly sincere all this fanfare over the Mandela legacy really is.

 



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Uncategorized Apartheid, Carter, Considered communist terrorist United States, Kissinger, Nelson Mandela, Nixon, ronald reagan, Saudi family dictatorship over Arabia, South Africa, U.S. Presidents

Making a Fortune Destroying the World

December 3, 2013



When I’m not making music or out trying to save the world I’m neck deep into studying the world of investing, finance and economics. Perhaps it’s an age thing. Many are the storied legends of Mick Jagger who spent the first half of his life in the fast lane of sex drugs and rock’n’roll only to transform into a proper English gentleman, knighthood and all, who was just as comfortable sipping tea on his private jet reading The Economist and other finance publications as he used to be onstage. I remember reading these articles about him as a kid and as weird and incongruent as it sounded it still appealed to me, made me think “Hhhmmm…. that seems like a cool way to go… Live life wild crazy and free when you’re young and then transition into an aristocratic Bruce Wayne type of character when you get older.” I logged the memory of the article I read and those thoughts and continued about my life in fast lane for years.

It didn’t take long for the entrepreneurial bug to grab a hold of me. Since that aspect of my life is already well known and written about, as well as not the specific impetus for this particular post, the only thing I’ll add here is that yes I did start my first company when I was 20 (a rehearsal and recording studio facility) and proceeded to transition into a variety of different industries as an entrepreneur and businessman simultaneously throughout my career as a recording artist. Once entrepreneurism gets you, it’s hard to shake it. I still own 3 corporations and have been developing several more new ones this year. Besides the fact that being in business helps bring in an unlimited and more than usual amount of money — which is essential if you want to make music for a living in this day and age (there’s just no money in it anymore), it also feels good to be able to provide jobs to people. That’s one of the aspects of being in business that I like the most. That and the freedom of not having to punch a clock everyday for someone else’s financial gain.

For the last two years, yes two years — i know how insane that sounds — we’ve been working on these two new Ed Hale albums. Same crew. Me and the guys in Transcendence and various other friends and cohorts. What started out as a relatively simple idea, let’s hurry up and get the follow-up to Ballad On Third Avenue and All Your Heroes Become Villains out while we’re hot, as usual turned into a big long laborious and expensive adventure. We shouldn’t even be surprised anymore I suppose. I’ve been doing this for decades now. We start an album and before we know it my mind gets so filled with ideas and concepts and ambitions to innovate that it ends up taking years. The guys hate it. I hate it. Don’t ask why I do it. Can’t help myself really.

These two new ones are no exception. Just the fact that it started out as ONE new album and quickly morphed into 34 songs split up between two albums speaks volumes about what the other guys in the band have to deal with. But if you’re a freind or fan and are feeling more than tired of waiting, I promise you it’ll be worth it. It’s not like we’re doing anything revolutionary or totally out of this world like with All Your Heroes… But we are aiming high and trying a lot of new things we’ve never done before. That’s what’s taking so long. We’ve never created an album with this many musicians on it before. Nor with this kind of build-up and anticipation. Both are contributing to the extended amount of time being invested in the project.

Since the albums have been taking so long, I started to dive into actively learning about investing and finance again. Hardcore. Yes, while it’s true that I began trading fifteen years ago, it was primarily as a hobby. I was a kid. It was fun and games. I had a lot of money to burn. I won some and lost some. I didn’t realize how much there was to learn… I just rode the coat tails of various bull markets. Learned as much as I could and then being a recording artist and general ambassador took over. It became impossible to find any free time to invest in anything but me. Besides the fact that in 2007 we hit this major economic collapse, what is now called “the Great Recession”, and so investing of any kind really lost it’s appeal for me.

Earlier this year that changed. I’m not sure what it was exactly. Precious Metals had always appealed to me. Bought my first 10 ounce bar of silver for $40. They’re now worth $200. And my first 1 ounce gold coin for $345. Those are now worth $1200. That’s incredible to contemplate. Earlier this year a buddy who knew that I used to love precious metals (Zeke Zaskin in fact) informed me how high they had risen over the last few years. So I jumped into investing in them again. First buying them physically. Bullion, bars and coins. And then exploring more advanced techniques for investing in them. ETFs, ETNs, leveraged plays, inverse plays. It’s all gotten quite advanced. Much more so than one could ever imagine from the outside. That got me back into the investing game full time. Pretty soon I was investing in other things, anything and everything. Whatever made money.

And therein we begin to explore the real point of this post. For about six months now I have been actively and passionately waking up at 4:30am everyday to participate in very active investing. This is the reason why it seems as though I “disappeared”. Because I did for all intents and purposes. But I’m still here. I’ve just been buried in this other world. And when I’m not doing this, I’m running our other companies or in the recording studio trying to finish the albums. Now you know.

With finance and economics there’s a big learning curve to it all. I spend about 50% of my time studying and learning and the other 50% behind a computer hardcore investing. Buying, selling, trading, hedging. It’s an insane world to thrust one’s self into. In all honesty I can say unequivocally that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. There’s got to be better things one can do with their life and time. I’ve just become slightly obsessed with it for various reasons. There’s the money making aspect to it sure. That can’t be denied. But then there’s also something else there, something more powerful and profound. The learning.

See, when we’re out there in the regular world, living our day to day lives on Main Street, going about our business, we normally have no idea what the mechanics are behind the world that we live in. We may try to keep up with the latest news from the radio or TV or water cooler or online media… But it’s rare that we learn the actual “WHY” behind what goes on in the world. Things just are. And we adjust accordingly. Sure pundits try to break things down after the fact. But we never get a peek behind the curtain to see what the primal force underlying the initial development of most events is. Instead we attempt to assess and integrate the incoming data and then act based on it and what we’re told. What I have slowly begun to see from diving so deeply into the world of finance and investing is that nearly everything that touches our world, everything that shapes it, has it’s start in the world of economics and finance. Investing. Money making.

It’s a fascinating game. In our world, meaning YOU and ME — people like us, we take it for granted that burning coal is bad for the planet, or that fossil fuels like oil and fracking are bad for the environment and eroding the atmosphere and poisoning our water supply. But what we almost never think about or hear about — especially not on a level that we can relate to — is how much money is being made from these activities. Not just for rich old cigar chomping white men, but for pretty much everyone. We’re talking about trillions of dollars. Governments are completely indebted to certain entities. Hell, governments are nothing but organized systems of employees who work for large multi-national corporations comprised of a select group of very wealthy individuals who pretty much control everything. The money obtained through taxing a country’s citizens is nothing compared to the money needed to really run a thriving economy, or at least appear as if you’re running a thriving economy.

The United States for instance is completely indebted to this very private corporation made up of various European banking cartels called “The Federal Reserve” — there’s nothing “federal” about them; they’re not a part of the American government — who at the moment are loaning our banks and government 85 billion dollars a month. $85,000,000,000. BILLION. Per month. It’s a figure so staggeringly large that it’s beyond our comprehension. Without this money, our economy would have collapsed long ago. In return our government does whatever this private entity tells it to. So too do our banks. We as citizens are indebted to our government — as in we do what they say when they say it as they instruct us to or we risk being arrested and having our rights taken away and/or being thrown in prison etc. As well we are indebted to the banks of the world. It’s’ how we finance our lives. It’s how we buy our cars, pay for college, buy our homes, pay for our health care, etc. It’s all one big system wrapped in on itself.

Yes everyone needs everyone else to survive — and I elaborate on the potentially beneficial implications of this a lot more in the We Are the Revolution book I have been working on for the last few years that explores the Personal Expression Age, but for the most part just because WE are an integral part of this large system does NOT imply that we have any say or control in it, nor in how it is run. Because for the most part we don’t. [Here I am speaking specifically about physical action that could affect change or results as opposed to actions in consciousness, which is another matter entirely.]

Now that’s the bigger picture. The classic “wealthiest one percent control the world made up of the other 99%” viewpoint. It’s a well-run, well-known and fully explored and taken for granted viewpoint. Always has been since humanity first appeared on earth and started making note of it. That’s the background of our day to day lives. And from what I can tell from all this research and work I’ve done for the last six months into economics and finance, things haven’t shifted at all away from this direction. If anything they’ve become more linearly constricted and compacted, i.e. the 1% have and control even more and the 99% have and control even less, making them more dependent on the 1%.

But that isn’t new, and it isn’t the main crux of this post or what I’ve discovered. What’s more interesting if we zoom in a bit is just how totally controlled the world we live in is by finance. We can call it economics. Most do. But i believe that’s a misleading label. A misnomer. Because since time began we could all say that “the world we live in is largely controlled by economics” and who’s going to argue with that? It’s a given. But it’s not really economics per se as much as it is the world of finance and investing, ie making money. That’s really what’s pulling the strings. That’s what fuels economics, or “the economy”. Like this: economics may seem to control the world we live in, but in actuality it is more a result of and an indicator of what is happening in the world of finance and investing. There’s a difference.

The reason we won’t stop fracking until half the wildlife and water of the United States is destroyed and most everyone we know is dead or dying from unnatural causes is because there is HUGE money being made from natural gas. It’s the same reason why China and India won’t stop burning coal even though they’ve been warned for decades about it’s harmful effects. Just to be clear, the United States still has at least thirty-something percent of it’s electricity being powered from coal as well. So we’re no angels. twenty-something percent is from natural gas. The rest from oil. A very small part is from solar. A very very small part. Solar hasn’t turned into a cash cow yet for anyone. Therefore it will never see the kind of love that oil or coal or natural gas has through the years.

What it really all comes down to is where the money is. You and I don’t have the money to invest in a large energy exploration company or a mining company. No Main Streeter does. So we leave that kind of thing to the big dogs who do. What we commonly call Wall Street. (it’s really industry itself, industrialists; but Wall Street is it’s vehicle so to speak… Wall Street is how industry gets its investment capital.) They’ve got systems in place already that make them a ton of money, these industrialists. God love ‘em. Whether it’s oil or gas or coal or iron ore or steel or even uranium or platinum. In the last six months I’ve invested in things I didn’t even know existed a few months ago. It’s a big world out there. Much larger and more entangled than we can ever imagine. And I cannot think of a better arena to learn about it than the finance and investing world. These industries are where the HUGE money is. Without these things we don’t have a “civilized world” to live in. At least not from our current viewpoint or past reference points.

Thus even we take these things for granted. Take a look around you. The giant industrial machine that surrounds us is astounding when you stop and look at it. What’s more fascinating is that every single one of these things that we see use touch smell operate work in and live in is created by someone, usually “someone else”, by a company. A company made up of others. A company made up of others who are making money from creating these things. Whether it’s our car or our house or our heating and air conditioning or our electricity or our roads… on and on… They’re all businesses, i.e. mechanisms for making money for someone. If they didn’t make money from doing it, they wouldn’t do it. And in return we wouldn’t have these things that we’ve become so used to and take for granted.

We’ve all heard of that movie from a few years ago “Who Killed The Electric Car”; it does an excellent job of explaining how the electric car was an idea whose time had come two decades ago — the technology had arrived — but the big oil companies literally stopped it in its tracks because it threatened their money generating ability. That’s an astounding thing when you stop and think about it. Truly astounding, that kind of power. But that’s the point of all this. There is no end to what kind of effect, no matter how bad wrong unjust or harmful, a powerful industry (collection of “other people”) can create in the world we live in if they want to because they feel that they’re money making potential is being threatened. THAT is the real crux of this.

It’s why so-called big pharma releases drugs they know may not be that safe for human consumption. And why large countries invade smaller ones. It’s why the United States claims to be fighting for freedom and liberty and yet supports the largest communist country in the world (China) and the largest dictatorship (Saudi-controlled Arabia). When we wonder why bad things happen in the world, what we’re really doing is pretending we don’t already know that at the heart of all things is the quest to make money.

In the last six months I have had two primary goals in the realm of what we have been discussing: to make money and to learn as much as I can about investing, economics and finance as possible. At times I have found it amazingly easy to make money. I have seen how powerful a small change in price of just a few cents can make if you’re leveraging a large amount of money in an equity. You can make a fortune with just a small move of twenty cents. You can also just as easily lose it. But more than that, what I’ve discovered that is far more profound is the need to make money and for that money to make money and how in the world of investing all morals values ethics and scruples stay home with the dogs and kids. They just don’t enter the picture. Not even a little bit.

All the big money in the world seeks a place to rest safely (protect itself) AND a place where it can generate MORE money. That’s it’s job. So it travels the world looking for new places to rest or do its job. This money, where it lands and what it does while there, is what not only feeds the world around us but builds and creates it. We’ll never get rid of war or weapons of war as long as building and using weapons of war remains such a profitable business. And that’s just another example. The same can be said for just about anything else around us good or bad.

One of the things that people ask me the most is “Don’t people realize that if they destroy the whole world just to make money that they too won’t have a world to live in and neither will their children?” I believe the answer to that question is that the big money already has that taken care of. I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t assume that they’ve already got contingency plans in place for those scenarios and they’ve got the money to implement them. I cannot help but be reminded of the underground living places and tunnels that connect them that have already been built all over (or under) the U.S. for our president and other “important people”. That’s enough to make you go postal, thinking about that. And also a recent movie entitled Elysium where all the wealthy people live on a space station a few thousand miles away from earth while all the middle class people live on a desolate polluted and over-populated earth. It’s a ghastly dystopian vision of the future. One which I hope we never have a chance to see. But it is a viable vision of the future we are currently creating if we continue on the path we are on.

There are innumerable ramifications to all of this. I believe we are only at the beginning of our learning. At least for me anyway. I was able to only touch upon a few aspects of it here. Just wanted to touch base. Much more later.

 



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Uncategorized Big Oil, coal, economics, Finance, investing, Money, weapons manufacturers

A private little world for me… a private little world for you. The online journals and musings of singer-songwriter author and activist Ed Hale. The Transcendence Diaries have been posting regularly online since 2001. Comments are always welcomed. And so are YOU.

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