Burgers, Bees and Apocalypses

Let's start off with a little mental calisthenics.  We'll use a common metaphor to see how we are controlled, corralled and channeled through a process called the dialectic.

Remember a few years back, a certain well-known burger chain had an ad campaign called, "Have it your way."  There was a catchy jingle, and signs and posters.  We were told that we could add and subtract anything we wanted to get the burger made 'our way.'

On the surface, this seemed like a great idea.  It made us think we had endless choices and that we were free to select endless combinations that expressed our individual tastes and desires.  The catchy song promised, "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us."

We were suddenly free!  The Other Burger had only one possible combination.  You either ordered it or you didn't.  That was the choice.  Now, we could mix and match and toss and turn and create a meal that was uniquely us.  What could be more democratic and wonderful?

The part that was unspoken and that few people ever stopped to consider was that in the end, no matter how much you mixed and matched, it was still a burger.  At some point, all the choices boiled down to two pieces of bread with a slab of questionable meat in the middle.  In point of fact, we really had no choice.  What we were presented as vast possibilities was actually just window dressing.

In a somewhat simplistic nutshell, this is the thing that everyone is talking about these days.  Thsi is the System, the Matrix, the PTB, the Elite, the Command and Control Structure.  On a very large scale, this is exactly how it all works.

On the surface, we are told that we have a myriad of personal choices.  We have communities and peer groups and any of a dozen other descriptions of channels for molding our thinking.  We think that democracy presents us with choices, so that the government we have is one that we have personally chosen for ourselves, and so we capitulate to it.  No one ever stops to consider that it is all just one big album, with Side A and Side B.  Both sides have different songs, but in the end, it is the same album in the same jacket played on the same turn-table.

You must either choose Devolvacan or Repulsicrat.  There is no other choice.  If you are a libertarian, socialist, communist, constitutionalist, ad nauseum, you don't get a choice.  You are ridiculed and labelled 'extremist'.  And the fun part is, even if you are among these 'fringe' groups, you are still herded because you self-identify with a pre-selected group.  You are not allowed to cherry-pick from all of them, or create your own.  You must pick a pre-selected definition for your political expression, and the parts you don't agree with, you must support because this is YOUR group.

The whole system of Command and Control began with religion.  There was the standard doxology that was unchangeable.  You could argue semantics all day long...did Jesus own his clothes?  How many angels fit on the head of a pin?  The answers to those questions were always engineered through a process called 'concensus,' that led us to believe that the majority agrees with this idea, so you must accept it.

At it's base, religion presented a core set of beliefs that you could not challenge.  In the case of Western religion, there was One True God Who gave His Only Begotten Son, and on and on.  You were not allowed to question this part.  If you did, you were sentenced to 200 Hail Marys, lashing yourself with birch branches and attending First Friday Mass for a year.

All that has happened in the past couple thousand years is that those processes were adapted from religion into the secular State.  Law, Democracy and Regulatory Agencies have replaced God, the Ten Commandments and the Church, but it is the identical system redressed to make people think they have thrown off the Old Ways and reformed society into the modern Nation-State.

A really good metaphor for how all this works is a bee hive.  If you've ever had the chance to keep bees, it's really a fascinating hobby.  Watching how they organize and go about their daily business can really open one's eyes to the world around us.

In general, bees are stratified into Queen, Drones and Workers.  Within those layers are various specializations.  For the most part, they all go about their individual tasks of collecting, building, refining, and serving the various parts of the hive.  When times are really good, a small group will band together and create a new Queen.  When they succeed, they are chased off to form another hive.

All this activity stops, though, when there is a threat from the outside.  When an invader comes, the bees immediately drop into defense mode, with some protecting the Queen, others the brood, and still others directly attaching the intruder.  But, puff a litte smoke into the hive and every singe bee, without exception will cling to the comb, become very docile, and will do only one thing...fan the comb with their wings.  All other divisions and specializations and concerns fall away, and the hive performs a single-minded operation to protect the comb.

Now, replace the comb with the Structure of Society.  The Queen and Drones are the Command and Control.  The rest are we Workers who actually produce everything.  In good times, there is sufficient free time for groups to sit around and plot the creation of a new Queen.  But when a threat is introduced, we all drop every other concern and protect the comb, the Structure, regardless of how we feel about it in normal times.

The difference between the bees and us is that the Queen and Drones have figured out how to make the smoke without actually destroying the hive.  We call it the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Boogeyman du Jour.  Regardless of what we call it, it is nothing more than artificial threats to keep us busy defending the comb and not questioning what exactly we are doing and for whom.

We get so busy fanning the comb that it doesn't occur to us that the smoke is not from a real fire.  We never consider the nature of the threat, only that the possibility exists for everything we know to be destroyed.  It doesn't matter whether the things we know are good or bad, or even desirable.  Our instinctual response is to protect it first, and ask questions later.

Out natural instincts have been perverted and used against us.  Because most people never question their instincts, most of us never stop fanning long enough to look around for the fire.  Those who do realize there are all the symptoms of fire, but no cause.

The threat message comes to us through all our senses.  The media, our neighbors, the sights and smells around us.  Somewhere deep in our brains, a trigger is flipped and we fall into blind obedience mode.  Only those who are self-aware enough to recognize their base animal response and override it to analyze the cause, will be able to see what's going on.

Our 'fight or flight' responses are good and healthy, and serve a valuable purpose of keeping us alive.  But if we don't control and analyze what we are doing, those natural responses can be perverted and used against us as a means of control, to keep us docile and unquestioning.

Let's say you are walking down the street.  You turn a corner and see hundreds of panicked people running towards you.  Your first response is a tingle up your spine.  You muscles tense and your senses go into hyperdrive.  You feel overwhelmingly compelled to join the herd and start running as fast as you can.  At this point, you haven't seen any threat.  All you've seen is other people's reactions.

It's at this very moment that you must choose.  Do you follow the crowd, assuming they know something you don't, or do you wait a moment and assess the situation.  If there is a threat, then all those other people may not be making the best choice.  And if there is no threat, then there is no need for you to react at all.

On 9/11, 0.01 percent of the population was directly threatened, yet an entire nation, and by extension, the entire world, has been in a blind panic for more than a decade.  People are finally starting to slow down and ask, "What the hell are we running from?"

Make no mistake.  As soon as the effect starts to wear off, there will be another and another.  The only way the mass of humanity can be controlled is to keep puffing smoke and keep us madly fanning the comb.

Threat after threat is manufactured.  Global Warming, asteroids, terror, aliens, Y2K, 2012, etc. ad infinitem.  All this is puffing smoke at us to keep us fanning.  All it is, is a secularized version of the Second Coming.  None of it ever actually happens, but the perceived threat is enough to keep us docile and clinging to the Structure that has been given to us.

Be warned, though.  Humans can not maintain this level of threat alert forever.  Eventually, they burn out or just stop running and actually look behind them.  At some point, enough people start to question what they are running from, and after burn-out they no longer respond to further threats.  It's the 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome.

What happens then?  It's usually not pretty.  That's when revolutions break out.  That's when society convulsed and destroys itself, becoming the threat to itself that was once perceived as external.  People don't usually react well to being played for fools, especially when it's been for the entertainment and benefit of someone else.

We are seeing this reaction beginning in a dozen places around the world.  Riots, protests and revolts are the effect of people stopping to look around.  We are seeing the 'boy who cried wolf' on a global scale.  All of the threats that have been promulgated on us for so long are loosing their grip on our psyches.  The result is a massive global upheaval, or something so large and so overwhelming will present itself as the new threat.

I can't help wonder if all the strange sounds being reported worldwide aren't part of the next Big Puff of Smoke.

Regardless, this time don't run.  Stop for a minute and look around.  Are you really being threatened?

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Update: The Answer to America's Problems!

If you've been lurking about this blog long enough, you know that the weekends usually turn away from hard reality and pondering current events, to look at things of more esoteric and usually lighter fare.

Neptune

Last weekend, we pondered the year of the Water Dragon and the possibility that modern astrology could be the remnants of a much higher science, but that the true depth and breadth of it had long since been forgotten.  We noted that the year of the Water Dragon implied change and unpredictability.  It also favored group efforts and revelations of hidden things.

Today, we take a look at the western version, and find that there are some interesting correlations, which continue to imply some deeper understanding of the Universe waiting to be rediscovered.

Specifically, on February 3rd, the planet Neptune will enter the zodiac sign of Pisces, which is typically depicted as two fish in a kind of yin-yang configuration.  The planet will stay in that sign for the next 13 or so years, since it moves rather slowly compared to us little rocks nearer the Sun.

What caught our eye initially was that Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, generally shown as a blue, bearded guy with a big trident spear sitting on a seashell throne.  Furthermore, the sign of Pisces literally means 'fish' in Latin, and is generally considered a 'water' sign.

Just to draw a couple of preliminary dots together, we have a 'water' dragon, a 'sea god,' and 'fish' all appearing more or less together (Chinese New Year runs until Feb. 9) in two wildly different systems of astro-mancy.  If we scratch the surface just a bit, we further find a connection with the ideas of unpredictability, group efforts and revelations.

From a graphic or symbolic point of view, Neptune's trident spear has certain elements in common with the Chinese dragon.  The spear has a central long point with two shorter points angling out on either side.  The Chinese dragon is traditionally shown with two large 'whiskers' coming out of either side of its snout.  At the archetype level, this strikes us as being fairly consistent sybology.

The symbol for Pisces is also graphically identical with yin-yang, with the two fish swimming around each other in a way that is almost identical to the opposing white and black 'blobs and eyes' of the yin-yang symbol.

Now we don't know about you, but when we see multiple alignments of concepts, symbols and graphics across two very different systems of thought that developed at opposite ends of the Earth in ancient times, we tend to sit up, scootch the chair in a bit and start clicking.

We posited last week that something called hyperdimensional physics allows for all objects in the Universe to exist based on interference waves in a medium of some sort.  In addition, those objects could influence each other across vast space-time by 'tweaking' vibrational templates, which were the foundation of what we call 'reality.'  In other words, you are actually a variation on a template that creates something we typically call 'human being,' and that the influence of other objects in Universe at the time your template separated from your mother's template caused certain predispositions to be hard-wired into what we perceive as 'personality'.

In other words, we can begin to scientifically rationalize astrology as a degraded form of ancient science that was most likely far more accurate and able to precisely measure the vibrational influences on any given object from all other objects in the Universe at any given time and place.

Neptune Symbol

And lest you poo-poo hyperdimensional physics, remember that it is remarkably predictive of actual observations in the Universe, is encoded in various ancient structures in widely different parts of the Earth, and is based on the work of people like Tesla and Maxwell.  This is not your usual New Age hocus-pocus.  It's serious stuff.

Furthermore, this new line of reasoning encompasses things like tortion, scalars, quaternions, the Electric Universe, and quantum physics.  It appears to be the Holy Grail of physics in that it may quite possibly unite many lines of observation into a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

And what's really cool, at least to our mind, is that it allows for things like astrology and crystals and pyramids.  In fact, pyramids become expressions of four-dimensional objects.  Crystals really do vibrate and cause subtle changes in local space-time.  And astrology really can predict outcomes that have not yet happened.

Now don't get too excited here. We are definitely NOT saying all the clap-trap out there is true or correct, but there is a hard science in the early stages of development that sees all that as dimly remembered versions of a much higher form of mathematics.

Certainly no one in their right mind can deny that quantum physics is a real science.  In fact, you are reading these very words on a machine that could not exist without some knowledge of how to engineer Planck's Constant or the Quantum Leap (which is actually one of the smallest measurable distances to our current technology).

Last week, we saw the implications for the coming year or more using the Chinese astrology.  We talked about the Yang Wood Black Water Dragon, and what that meant in the ancient and still widely practiced Chinese tradition.

So, what does western astrology have to say about it?  You'd be surprised at the correlations.

According to various sources, Neptune rules over the sign of Pisces, and so it is entering its own for the next decade and a half.  It is names after the god of the sea, and so is naturally associated with water.  Pisces, being fish, are also water signs.  Wikipedia says that Neptune is associated with "idealism and compassion, but also with illusion, confusion, and deception."  To our ears, this is starting to sound very similar to the description of a water dragon.

Pisces Symbol

So how about Pisces?  Words that come up repeatedly in reference to Pisces are kind, gentle, gullible, adventurous, energetic, and freedom-loving.  Pisces favors creativity and impulsiveness.  When tied together with the description of Neptune, we get the sense that the coming period will be one of chaotic events with a strong emphasis on liberty and idealism.

It intrigues us that the Chinese new year of the water dragon celebration ends on Feb. 9.  Neptune the water planet enters Pisces the water sign on Feb. 3.  Pisces becomes the dominant sign on Feb. 20.  The 'dragon' moon begins in March.  So this coming month or so is absolutely dominated by multiple concepts of water, unpredicability and revelation.  That two very different systems should align in such a way is a remarkable coincidence, for those who believe in such things.

We see in all this a much deeper truth.  Not that we believe in a bunch of new-agey mumbo-jumbo, or even astrology, but we can conceed with an open mind that there seems to be a much deeper connection going on here.

Certainly, if one squints at the headlines just so, the threads of liberty, unpredictability and creativity seem to be pervading current events.  Water also seems to have its own sub-current in the general tone of the news.

Hyperdimensional Cube

We are certainly on alert for expressions of these concepts and symbols.  We will be paying special attention to events that involve water, the use of symbols such as yin-yang and Pisces, and movements that involve freedom and creativity.  We'll come back to revisit this topic as things warrant, because it bears closer study when multiple lines of evidence converge on a single time and place.  At any rate, the next 6-8 weeks could be very interesting indeed.

One other curiosity, as far as astrology goes...on the US election day in November, Mercury will go retrograde about mid-day.  This implies that folks will see a lot of unexpected changes, obstacles and frustrations with travel, communications and business.

Yep, it's going to be an interesting year.  In China, that is a curse, but in Mandarin, the word for chaos means both disaster and opportunity.  On the theory that the prepared mind is ready for anything, we should all be in good stead, then, to find the opportunity in all this.

Happy studies!
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A special bonus for those who read all the way to the bottom...The Sunday Funnies!

WOMEN

A real woman is a man's best friend.

She will never stand him up and never let him down.

She will reassure him when he feels insecure and comfort him
after a bad day.

She will inspire him to do things he never thought he could do; to
live without fear and forget regret.

She will enable him to express his deepest emotions and give in to
his most intimate desires.

She will make sure he always feels as though he's the most
handsome man in the room and will enable him to be the most confident,
sexy, seductive and invincible...

No wait...Sorry.

I'm thinking of whisky. It's whisky that does all that shit.

Never mind....

The Camel's Nose

Birth, flares, gold, oil.  Sounds like a Red Hot Chili Peppers come-back album.  This week produced some big headlines.  One was a real game-changer, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The Obama eligibility trial was a curiosity that I followed with some interest.  That he is not qualified to be president I think has been proven beyond a doubt, since he himself has never hidden the fact.  His (claimed) father was a British subject who never became a US citizen, or even resident.  Obama is therefore disqualified from holding the office.  Plain and simple.

The incident does belie Obama's contempt for the rule of law, even as the top enforcer in the land.  Comments made by his attorney also show no respect for the sovereignty of the individual States, which is a fundamental aspect of the nation's Constitution.  Those who argue that the Constitution is a dead letter forget that without it, the federal government ceases to exist except by fiat and force.  In most dictionaries, that would be the definition of dictatorship.

The interesting thing about this story is that the religious fervor that surrounded Obama back in 2008 is fading rather dramatically.  When he was elected, the world held its breath and one was required to genuflect and cross themselves when mentioning the name "Obama."  This was a global phenomenon, especially here in Indonesia where he had citizenship for a few years, and may still, for all we know.

To say that his is a failed presidency is, I think, a fair estimate.  Obama had not even warmed the seat in the Oval Office before they were giving him Peace Prizes.  He has failed miserably at that particular measure.

What repercussions the Georgia hearing will have remains to be seen.  Obama has successfully weaseled his way out of many such tight corners, though this is the first to actually get any evidence and testimony on record.  The implications, should he ever be found lacking in the eligibility department, would be the vacating of every law he has signed since taking office, among a great number of other things.  Something to watch.

The Sun woke up this week with a sizable puff of plasma and radiation that swarmed Earth's neighborhood and caused everything from enhanced aurora to minor communications hickups.  At least one airline rerouted flights across the Arctic Circle to avoid any problems.

This will be an issue to watch throughout the year and into the next.  So far, Sun Cycle 24 has proved to be fairly unusual, beginning as it did with a very quiet period that is only now seeming to end with a bang.  There are numerous theories around tying sun spots to extreme weather, earthquakes and similar natural calamities.

The possibility always sits on the sidelines that a major X-class flare could put a quick end to civilization, seeing as how we are all tied to electronics and electricity.  The Canadian blackout in the late 80s is but a small taste of what is possible.  The Sun's behavior going forward for the next couple of years will definitely bear watching.

The Reputican primaries are notable only for the fact that they have degraded into a giant cat fight.  The sheer amount of hissing and spitting and fur flying is great entertainment, but has little to offer in the way of substance, which I suppose is a metaphor for US politics anymore.

It has served to wipe Ron Paul out of the headlines, which I suppose is the real purpose.  All the finger-pointing over who worshipped Reagan more is otherwise completely pointless and completely misses the fact that Reaganomics is a major factor in the current US economic situation.  The world is suffering the results of the Reagan administration's policies.  Any politician trying to out-Reagan another should be avoided at all costs, because they just don't get it.

Rand Paul has done a fine job of keeping the family name in print, though.  He simply denied TSA the right to get intimate with his 'goodies.'  What no one seems to have mentioned in all this, is that the TSA committed a felony by violating the Senator's Constitutional mandate to be able to go unmolested to Washington to attend to official business.  Paul, on the other hand, did not commit any crime, since TSA's mandate is by fiat and not by law.  They exist by law, but their supposed power has not been codified, and so they are acting as rogue agents without warrant.

Something to watch, if Daddy and Son Pauls decide to take it any further.  Meat for the media grist, otherwise.

The biggest story of the week, and of year-to-date, comes out of my part of the world.  India and Iran inked a deal for India to buy oil using gold.

Now you may be thinking, "What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?"  Well, every country in the past twelve years that has dared to unhinge oil trade from the dollar benchmark has been invaded and demolished.  Every...Single...One.  Of course, it was all in the name of democracy and freedom, and in, "You will be free or we will kill you."

The root of the invasions have all been keeping the dollar standard in the oil trade.  That is the one and only thing that is propping up the dollar.  The world is absolutely dependent on oil for energy, and having the dollar as the global standard for buying oil keeps it in demand and at the center of global trade.  If anyone, and by that I mean ANYONE dares to undermine that system, they must be destroyed.

The alternative is that the dollar crumbles under the weight of its debt, US hegemony vaporizes and the folks at home will revolt about ten minutes after the pump price hits $10 per gallon.  There is simply too much riding on petro-dollars.  The entire American Empire is built on this one simple fact.

Now, Iran is no problem.  The west has been demonizing Iran since what?, the 1980 hostage situation, though western meddling in Persia dates back centuries.  Bombing Iran into dust, or at least attempting to, won't be much of a problem from a propaganda point of view.  If the western media said that Iranians were a bunch of 3-eyes monsters with six fingers and toes, most Americans would believe it.

The real nightmare here, at least from the Anglo-American elite perspective, is India.  India has been painted as a strategic trade partner, and indeed, a great gob of US jobs have been shipped to India to keep it latched on the western teat.  The country sits on the back porch of China and the US has at least one major military base on Diego Garcia, which is claimed by the British, but that is largely due to India not exercising its historical claim...so far.

The British, despite having lost India as a slave colony some time back, have maintained a 'guiding hand' in Indian affairs.  This has served to balance China's ambitions in the region, which serves the western interests.  That India is showing signs of independence and self-interest is dangerous to the western elite.

This one act has numerous implications, not the least of which are undermining US hegemony over oil trade (the dollar), providing Iran with very fungible and uncontrollable means to buy weaponry and technology, and re-establishes gold as a currency, which the western elite have worked tirelessly to stop over the past century.

You see, you can crash a paper currency if things get out of hand, leaving folks with little more than toilet paper if they don't toe the line.  But you can't do that with gold.  Everyone everywhere will accept gold at all times for trade.  This is a dangerous precedent for those who would rule the world.  It's even more insulting that India has been quietly turning its dollars into gold for decades, because simply put, in Asia gold is still king.  Around these parts, wealth is not measured in piles of paper and digits, it is a function of how many pallets of gold one controls.

What is worth watching in this story is the way in which the western elite will handle it.  Iran, of course, is already demonized, but what about India?  If India can't be brought back under control, then it must be destroyed, because it is a key balance on China.

One sign that things are already getting out of control is the price of gold.  It took a week or so, but the gold price has started up sharply again, after being reigned in for the past two months.  If it is allowed to reach its natural level against fictions like Wall Street exchanges, it will be well over $2,000 an ounce soon.

This whole thing could be a catastrophe for the elite.  If the gold-for-oil trade isn't soundly put down, and fast, then it could well catch on.  By the end of the year, there could be similar agreements with Russian oil producers, and China certainly has the ability to buy its energy needs with gold from places such as Venezuela, Brazil, Indonesia, and others.

If the value of the dollar starts to fall sharply, which it has this week, then action is imminent.  We will likely see an attack on Iran, at the minimum, within two months.  But what happens if a dozen countries start down this path?  The US/Nato doesn't have the where-with-all to mount that many war fronts at one time, and if it tried, it would simply hasten the outcome they are trying to avoid.

The student of global empire will want to closely watch this development.  It slipped by rather quietly, but trust me, there are a lot of soiled shorts behind the curtain.  A lot of countries are sitting up to see what will happen.  The Fed move this week to keep the dollar interest rate at zero is a sign that they are desperately clinging to the dollar.

At the end of WWII, there were only two powers left standing: the US and USSR.  The USSR has failed and the EU, which was set up to join the game, is failing.  The only major power left is the US, and it stands on the dollar and the military power as its left and right legs.  Kick either one out from under it, and the whole house of cards crashes.

Nato's Libya escapade (Qaddafi wanted gold for oil too) sucked the life-blood out of Greece, Italy, Spain, and the rest.  They can't effectively shore up the US military weakness caused by dollar devaluation.  At some point, the straw will come that breaks the camel's back.  It is inevitable.  Whether the Iran-India agreement is it remains to be seen.  What is a fore-gone conclusion is that the western interests can not allow it to go on.

Might want to set up a news scanner for India/Iran/gold.  There's liable to be some fireworks very soon.  The Sun may not be the only source of radioactive flares in our near future.

F.U.B.A.R.

Interesting article popped up on Drudge today saying that the number of US citizens renouncing their citizenship between 2008 and 2010 increased 1000-fold.  In the first half of 2011, the number was running at over 1,000, which indicated a possible doubling over 2010 numbers.

According to the article, the primary reason given for this rather dramatic move was the IRS.  It wasn't the level of taxes, which is bad enough, but the fact that the IRS lies to people about agreements it makes with them to settle past claims, and the overall nightmare that is known as the US Tax Code (code being the operative word here, since it is designed to keep anyone from knowing it).

Most folks don't realize that the US is the only country in the world that requires its citizens to file returns every year, regardless of whether they live and work in the US, or not.  On top of that, new regulations require the revealing of every asset, bank account and financial holding a person has outside the US.

Oh sure, some will say, that's because so many rich people, like Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, hide their money in tax havens, and they need to 'pay their fair share.'  Of course, the law doesn't affect people like that.  They know what holes were written into the law to permit them to get away with hiding their assets.

If you know what you are doing, all you have to do is set up a couple of dummy corporations in the few remaining 'tax havens' and POOF!  You money disappears off the IRS radar.  Corporations know this and use it to their advantage, as well.

An example?  A US corporation, we'll call it CorpX, registers in Delaware, which has lots of corp-friendly laws.  It then sets up a wholly-owned shell corp in someplace like the Virgin Islands or one of the other Caribbean ghost nations.  It hangs out a shingle and pays some lawyer to get mail dropped at his office.  The shell corp then does business around the world.  Through accounting quackery, all profits are offshored in low-tax jurisdictions, while all losses are repatriated to the mother corp, which then uses them to offset income and avoid taxes at home.

This is how massive corporations with billions in income pay absolutely no taxes in the US, even though they are US-registered entities.

But this is off track a little.  They point here is that the tax code has become so onerous and heinous that people are literally forced to renounce their citizenship in order to stay out of bankruptcy due to tax burdens.  They little guy doesn't know or can't afford all the little comforts written into the code to protect the Big Guys.

The fact is that most expats pay taxes on income in the jurisdiction where they live, and most countries leave their citizens alone when they live outside the home jurisdiction.  Not the US.  It's long arm reaches out, and even when the expat doesn't owe taxes, due to local payment and tax treaty provisions, the IRS still wants paperwork.  If you don't know all the thousands of applicable rules, you are liable to quite easily miss one or two (hundred).  And when you do, the IRS comes down like vultures on a rotting carcass and eat you alive with penaties and fines and other fun things.

Of course, even renouncing citizenship doesn't protect you.  The US Code provides that any and all taxes and penalties that were due up to the point a person dropped their citizenship are still due in perpetuity.  Believe me, you made a mistake somewhere and they will hold it againt you until you die.  And then they'll take it from your heirs.

The mafia only wishes it had the 'power' and thuggery available to that bunch of thieves.

Recently, Indonesia strengthened its laws regarding citizens living and working abroad.  Any income they receive while working outside the country is not reportable at home, as long as it is taxed in the foreign jurisdiction.  It also allows folks to discontinue their NPWP, which is the local version of the Social Security Number (SSN) for a variety of reasons, including extended stays outside the country.  Granted there's a pretty stiff set of requirements, including an immediate audit by the tax man, but try that under any circumstances with an SSN.  You are virtually branded in the US at birth and can not extract yourself for any reason.  Even residents in the US who get an SSN while they are living and working in that country are stuck with it for life, and the IRS can and will come after their income and assets anywhere in the world.

I wouldn't have such a great problem with all this, except the code is written to protect the Big Guys and shaft the little guys.  The BGs pay little or no taxes by playing 'hide the sausage' in various jurisdictions and through various entities.  The LGs are the ones who get the sausage broken off on the relative pittance that they earn, and the pitiful bank accounts and occasional beach house in Tahiti.

If ExxonMobil or GlaxoWellcome or Citibank paid their 'fair share,' I'd feel a lot better about getting stiffed.  But when the burden rests on us little guys because the Big Guys lobby their way out of billions in liabilities, it rubs salt in the wound.

All taxes anywhere are a sham.  After all, what exactly has any government ever done to help you make money?  All I have ever witnessed anywhere in the world are a bunch of lazy do-nothings on the public teat sucking my life-blood for...what?  Does the government make any laws that help you or me earn a living?  Au contraire.  Does government protect us from predatory practices that threaten our livelihoods?  Banish the thought...they are a major part of the problem.  Does government do anything at all to aid and abet us little guys in creating and amassing wealth?  Hahahaha!

So just exactly what are we paying all these taxes for?  What services do they render us?  What benefit do they buy us?  In fact, outside of paying a bunch of lard-assed bureaucrats, bloated militaries and non-productive members of society, what do we get for all the trouble and money we go through to pay our 'fair share?'

Apparently, there are a couple of thousand people a year, and growing, who think that at least one country is so screwed up that it is easier to switch citizenship than fight the corruption and greed at home.  That's a sure sign of a sick system.

Having paid taxes in a few countries, I know that most have a fairly straight-forward system with a single-page form.  It takes all of a few minutes to work up your annual dues and settle up.  I have never had to file less than ten pages in the US, and it takes the better part of a week or two to calculate and re-check everything before filing (God help you if you make a mistake).

What makes it even more egregious is that the IRS is nothing more than the collection arm for a private banking cartel called the Federal Reserve.  Sorry, but none of your taxes is paid to the US Treasury.  US citizens spend all that time and effort and money on tax preparation firms to pay back the Fed for all the money Congress has borrowed.

And here's the Big Problem...the US debt stands at around $15 trillion dollars, and there's not nearly enough money in circulation to ever pay it back.  It's an eternal game of 'bend over the barrel,' and we're on the receiving end.  Come next April 15th, remember whose fault it is that has caused you so much pain.  It was Congress who set up the Fed and Congress who borrowed the money and stuck you with the bill.

It's enough to make a guy want to renounce his citizenship.  Glad I'm a Texian!

Quantum Leaps And Water Dragons

Reader Note: We're taking advantage of the long holiday to 'pulang kampung' for the New Year.  We'll be back on Wednesday with more Tales from the Far Side.  Until then, please take a look through our archive of nearly 400 articles.  Happy New Year!  Gong Xi Fat Choi!

A long time ago, I dismissed astrology as being a pseudo-science based on various superstitions and a certain amount of ignorance.  I always acknowledged, though, that it often had an uncanny way of generally describing people's characters and constitutions.  I more or less wrote that off as a combination of luck and prejudice, in that reading astrological descriptions predisposed one to see patterns where they did not exist.

Like every topic, I make decisions and form opinions, but I never close my mind to new evidence and understanding.  If new evidence engenders deeper understanding of a topic, and the understanding leads to a change of opinion, I have not shied away from following where the evidence leads.

That being said, I have moved in recent years to re-evaluate astrology.  Where I once saw superstition and myth, I now see a severely degraded form of ancient science that preserves an understanding of the Universe that is far more profound than our current best guesses.  This doesn't mean that I now believe in astrology, but rather that I see within it the glimpse of a greater truth that has been lost over countless millennia. 

Once I discovered hyperdimensional physics, I immediately saw something that rang true.  It answered questions that relativity left hanging in space (literally and figuratively).  This new physics explained much more satisfactorily physical phenomena that caused relativists and quantists to throw up their hands or worse, develop gross contortions of mathematics to shoehorn into their theories.

Hyperdimensional physics offers graceful answers to profound mysteries, and as we are about to see, even unites ancient myths and legends into a scientific framework.

Hyperdimensional physics posits that all matter consists of unique vibrations within a medium.  The medium, whether you call it the aether or space-time, is basically a lattice or crystalline structure.  The vibrations, like stones thrown in a pond, create ripples, and where they overlap, they create patterns of standing waves that we perceive as matter or substance.  Granted, this is a very simplified definition, but it serves the purpose at hand.

The interference patterns we perceive as objects are formed by 'templates,' or a type of recording of the pattern.  Thus, the template for 'planet' creates round balls, but subtle variations create gas giants or small rocky balls, wet or dry, hot or cold.  In the same way, the template for 'person' creates the same general result, but variations create individuals in infinite variety.

Now, if we view all objects in the Universe as vibrations, then they are allowed to influence each other, to greater or lesser degrees, by creating slight variations in other templates.  In other words, all objects in the Universe influence all other objects to some degree, which is a key element of quantum physics.

It also allows another strange effect in quantum physics.  When you place two sub-atomic objects together, they will begin to resonate together.  Then, you can separate the two objects by any amount of space, and a change in one will immediately affect the other.  Vibrations in a crystalline medium is a graceful means to account for this otherwise very strange behavior.

So, where is all this going?  Glad you asked.

Astrology posits that the positions of stars and planets at the time of one's birth cause certain effects in the individual.  The positions of stars implant certain personality traits, and the positions of the planets influence the expression of these traits.  On the surface, this sounds like a bunch of superstitious bunk, but if we apply the math of hyperdimensional physics, then suddenly we see vibrations in the Universe around us causing subtle modifications in our personal templates that would vary according to which objects were where at the moment of our birth.

That birth would be the moment that these changes in our templates freeze makes sense, since up to that moment, we were vibrating synchronously with our mothers.  At the moment of birth, we become established as our own, independent vibration in the Universe.

Therefore, astrology is an attempt to describe the vivrational influences on individuals, groups or really any object, by determining what objects were in a position to modify our template at a certain moment.

That hyperdimensional physics is a mathematical system and it is engineerable, it stands to reason that if there were once a highly developed civilization on Earth that was able to calculate these vibrations to a high degree of accuracy, astrology could be a very degraded dim memory of that ancient physical knowledge.  Therefore, it might have some validity, though the precise knowledge of how to manipulate this information has been lost over the vast span of time.

In Western astrology, we talk about the influences of various constellations on the individual.  We determine the zodiac by which astralism is directly overhead at midnight each day.  This varies on an annual basis as the Earth's orbit brings a different constellation overhead each month.  The positions of the planets at any given moment further modify the influence and changes constantly with near infinite combinations.

By contrast, the Eastern system sees the constellations ruling over an entire year, with daily and monthly variations.  In addition, the annual cycle has a 60-year supercycle based on the five primal elements (earth, metal, fire, water, wood).  This new year is the year of the dragon, just like the year 2000, but there's a variation making this the year of the water dragon.  Furthermore, years alternate between yin and yang, with this year being 'yang.'  We are also at the end of the 'wood' cycle, the next being 'fire.'

Based on our suppositions earlier, that astrology is a degraded ancient science, then we can perhaps tease out some insight, some truth, about what influences will affect humanity over the coming year.  To do that, we need to know what a 'yang wood black water dragon' implies, so we turn to the Google oracle.

The first thing we need to know is the 'yang' part.  Yin and yang concern balance and harmony.  They are opposites, but dependent on each other to exist.  Yang means 'sunny' or 'place of light'.  It does not have a value judgement, such as 'good' and 'bad,' it is simply the other side of something that causes it to exist.

The dragon, or naga (origin of naga-hide), is the mirror opposite of its western counterpart.  In Eastern myth, the dragon symbolizes good fortune, luck, and divine power and authority.  In other words, it is a positive sign and one which implies benign regality and favorable disposition.  On the other hand, the dragon does not comform to expectations and prefers to 'do its own thing.'

Dragons rule over south/southeast, thunder and lightning, and the hours of 7-9 am.  They are also the embodiment of creativity.

In Eastern mythology, dragons prefer water, so we can assume that a water dragon is in its element.  The last waterr dragon year was 1952.  The new year will begin on Monday, January 23rd, and the celebration will last until February 9th.  The high point of the year's energies will be the 'dragon moon,' from May 20th until June 18.

What we're looking at here is a year of highly unpredictable events that will favor south/southeast and bring light to those regions.  Wood is fed and made stronger by water, so there will be growth and strengthening, but what will grow and strength is unknown, since the unpredictability leaves that part up in the air, as it were, though yang will influence that part.

This coming year will favor passion, creativity, self-development, and working together.  Like all things, though, these can be both good and bad.  The balance will be tipped towards light by the yang, but the dragon nature will allow tempers to flare and unpredictable outcomes to occur.  The water dragon favors seeing arguments from all points of view and taking advice from others when making decisions, so there's a predilection for more balance and better conclusions.

All in all, it should be an interesting year with many twists and turns in events.  Outcomes will favor light and creativity and working together.  There are many positive aspects for those seeking a change in direction and new paths.

There's no guarantees in Chinese astrology.  There's only favorable influences for certain outcomes.  For those of us hoping for favorable outcomes to economic and socio-political concerns, there are enhanced vibrations from Universe, but the chaotic aspect means things can go either way.  After all, luck and fortune all depend on perspective.  One man's luck is another's curse.  A lot will depend on working together and bringing things to the light.  Many secrets could be revealed.

All things east are favored, which means I'm in the right place for a little luck.  But it also means that 'east' will figure heavily into the chaotic element of events.  Keep your eye on China and Russia.  Who knows what will happen?

Or it could all be just a bunch of myths and pseudo-science.  Take your pick.

The interesting thing is that eastern dragons share a lot of characteristics with the behavior of quantum objects.  They can never be fully observed, as looking at it limits it to what the observer is expecting to see.  They are also chaotic and unpredictable.  It's interesting to ponder what aspects of dragons are dimly remembered science from a long, long time ago.

Happy New Year!  May your Yang Wood Black Water Dragon be a good one!

Strawmen And Tar Babies

I've been getting some really great email the past couple of weeks.  Thanks to henrymakow.com, rense.com and davidicke.com picking up one of my articles, my readership has nearly doubled and folks are sending in great messages.  I only wish I could answer them faster.
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"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

One reader asked me if I believed in Atlantis.  Gosh, he's in trouble.  Questions like that can fill books with responses.  The short answer is yes.  The longer answer is that as a concept of a Golden Age, I believe there is a preponderance of evidence for at least one, if not more, highly advanced civilizations that inhabited at least Earth, and probably the Moon, Mars and one or more moons of Saturn.  The dates would be around 65 million years ago and 3 million years ago.  We are all that's left of the last one.

I could go on at length on this question.  The answer is rather fascinating, at least to me.  But there was another email that I thought was more immediate, and somewhat easier to answer:

"Obviously you have experienced all of this first hand having been persecuted in your own country.

If I was to ask you honestly. Do you think they can be brought down? And how can we bring this about?

I am personally experiencing a lot of despair and flashing anger right now. My emotions are all over the place and I need to focus on something positive that I can and should be doing.

Any suggestions would be welcome."

To address the experience part, I'd have to say yes, I've had quite a bit.  Not as much as some, but more than others.  I've learned a few thing, at any rate.

The second part is where it gets interesting.

Yes, they can be brought down.  In fact, they are coming down even as we speak.  Not that it's entirely work of activists, to be sure.  They are being defeated by the one thing they can't accept: the Laws of Nature.

You can't go around defying the balance and harmony of the Universe forever.  At some point, no matter how smart, or rich, or cunning you think you are, the piper will get paid.  There's just no two ways about it.  Everything they are doing has been tried over and over throughout history, and in ever single case, without exception, it has failed.  Slavery, fiat economies and elitist centralized power have always collapsed under their own weight.  That they keep trying despite this record shows that they are completely and hopelessly insane, to boot.

I assume the question at hand is how can we help things along to quicken the pace of Nature's own accounting system.

In the old days, folks just showed up with pitchforks and torches and a few lengths of rope, and hung the bastards out to dry (see French Revolution).  In the current age, they have been using highly sophisticated mass mind-control techniques for a long time.  Any violent acts on the part of regular folks will not be met with favorable response from any side.

In fact, it would only serve their purposes.  They are begging for us to do that, and in fact are doing everything they can to elicit that kind of response.  It would distract and divide us, which is a well-worn tactic, and would keep us from actually seeing their Achilles' Heel.  That's exactly what they want.

They have spent a couple of centuries weaving a massive tapestry that we generally call 'daily life'.  They have pulled this thing down over our eyes and beat it into us so well that a great many folks can't imagine any alternative.  A lot of us honestly believe that if we don't play their game, that civilization will collapse.

I've got news for you.  It IS collapsing, and all because of what they have done to us.

The thinking person will see that we honestly have nothing to lose now.  We have no wealth, only debt notes for money.  We have no property.  Stop paying your taxes and you will find out rather quickly who owns your stuff (and it ain't you).  You'd have to move pretty far out in the wilderness to escape the madness, and even then you'd eventually have park rangers crawling up your keister.

So how do you fight this Beast?  How can you help to accelerate its collapse without violence and in a way that most folks can't fault you for doing?  The answer is deceptively simple:

Stop playing the game.

We are living in a massive casino being run by a mafia.  The first rule of gambling is the house ALWAYS wins.  The second rule is they make money because people keep gambling, despite knowing the first rule.  The only way to really win in a casino is to not play in the first place.  If enough people do this, then the casino is forced to shut down because revenues are not enough to cover costs.

This is one way to look at things, and its enough to start the process, but there is a better way that's more complex and daunting.  When folks begin to ponder the size of the problem, they usually get turned off from fighting and give in to what they view as inevitable servitude.  It doesn't have to be that way, but it does take a fair amount of work to be successful.

In the past, a number of people have had varying amounts of success using the strawman theory.  In order to do this correctly requires hours and hours of study to learn how the law works, and then begin extracting yourself from it.  This was the approach I chose, and I got pretty good at it.  I won many cases and had lots of successes.  However, they have backup systems for people like me.  They have Child Protection Service, which is so grossly misnamed as to nearly be laughable if it weren't so serious.  They are granted the power to kidnap your children at will, based on the flimsiest of excuses, and hold them for ransom.  The ransom usually involves you bowing to the system and paying your last dollar to them, otherwise they will kill your children, either mentally or physically.  That's just one technique, but it's very common in cases like mine.

The scale of the problem is both the problem itself, and the solution, too.  Here's the thing: every aspect of what we call daily life is part of the system.  They have carefully hooked us on gee-gaws an baubbles so that we can't imagine living without them.  They have carefully built the system to be self-enforcing.  If you want one thing, it requires another to make it useful, and the second thing requires others, and so on.

The car is very useful, but it requires financing, fuel, service, and so on.  If you want the car and the services it can provide, then you must also buy into a dozen other ancillary services to make it work, including licenses, inspections and other regulatory bullshit (at least that's what they would have us believe).

At the base of it all is this thing called money, but more properly currency, and they aren't the same.  For any and all of the services and baubles that we desire, we have to use currency.  Now the currency is nothing more than paper and ink.  It has little or no intrinsic value.  Every bit of value that it carries is strictly in our minds and in what we are told. 

We believe we need government, and the government requires taxes, and to pay the taxes requires a certain currency.  So it becomes a self-reinforcing circle jerk.  That the currency also gets us various other benefits helps to shore up the perception that the paper and ink has some kind of value.  In the end, all it does is keep us enslaved to the system at the business end of a gun.

Hardly freedom by my standard.


Given the scope and scale of this problem, it's hard to imagine where to start, if your want to extract yourself.  There is no magic bullet and no single method is all-powerful.  You have to back out the way you got in, one piece at a time.  You started with a birth certificate, worked up to a taxpayer number, a driver's license, investments and bank accounts, etc.  That's how you get out.

You have to unwind what has been wound.  Start by closing bank accounts.  Really.  You can cash paychecks at the issuing bank for free.  Get a small safe for your house, and start keeping you money there.  Believe me, you won't be losing anything, given the interest rates, and you'll save money from all the damn service charges.

Got a 401(k) or other retirement account?  At the very least, stop contributing to it.  If you can, shut it down, take the penalty hit, and put the cash in your safe.

When your driver's license expires (make sure it expires), don't renew it.  As an alternative, use a passport for official photo ID.  Better yet, just carry a nortarized copy of your birth certificate.  Perfectly legal ID pretty much everywhere I've ever been.  Driver's licenses usually issue a single number for life.  Passports change every ten years.  Not perfect, but better than nothing.

Stop buying new things at major department stores.  Instead, start payig cash for second-hand.  Takes a little extra time, but your purchase won't enrich a corporation any further than the original purchase already did.  Start a garden and learn to can foods.  Reduce your store purchases of food as low as possible.  When you can, buy from local co-ops and farmer's markets.  By-pass the institutional system and give your money directly to the guy growing the food.

Reduce your cash transactions as much as you can.  Barter, trade and find creative ways to exchange that don't involve using currency.  Worse case scenario, use gold and silver coins for trade whenever possible.

If you're really ambitious, start looking into allodial title to your land.  In Texas, once your have this title, you no longer have to pay property taxes.  This is much harder to do with property in cities that are incorporated, but with farm land and such, it's a fairly straight-forward process, though time consuming.  And you will meet with a lot of official resistance and outright oppression.  That's when you know you're on the right track.

In Texas, you're allowed to carry a gun, open or concealed, if you are traveling.  I kept a suitcase in the back of my car.  Who's to say I'm not on my way out of town?  Yes, you'll still have to fight, because so-called law enforcement officers are clueless about the law.  But at least in court, you can produce the letter of the law and get the case dismissed.

These are just some ideas for those serious about getting out of the system, or at least causing enough stress to it to accelerate its demise.  Granted, none of these are very effective if only a handful of people do them.  But if thousands, and even millions start fighting back, things will change rather quickly.  Simply closing out your bank accounts is very effective in stressing the system.  I'm not advocating bank runs here, I am talking about an orderly process of shutting down the accounts, emptying safe deposit boxes and refusing to feed the Beast.

The important part of this whole exercise is to start becoming aware of just how the matrix is constructed and by what means it entraps us.  You can't escape from a prison until you know where the walls are.  You can't pick a lock until you know how it works and can fully visualize what you are doing inside.

Notice that none of the things I have mentioned involve violence or protests.  They are simply adjusting how you go about your daily life.  It's taken your entire liife to get tangled up in this mess, so don't think you can get out without some effort on your part.

Like all habits, though, once you start changing the way you do things, it doesn't take long for it to become a habit and you hardly notice the effort anymore.  In fact, like any habit, the longer you go at it, the more you will automatically streamline the process.  You can expect disruptions at first, but they eventually smooth out.

Most importantly, you must keep in mind that the system will fight back.  It doesn't like even one person having success, because it leads to others following suit.  You must be prepared mentally and spiritually to fight.  Notice I didn't say physically...that doesn't matter, although good health is always a good idea.

One final note.  As you wake up, and others too, you will experience anger, depression, hopelessness, and frustration.  These are natural, because you have been sorely deceived by people and institutions you trust implicitly.  Channel these feelings into educating yourself and others.  Learn what you have done to get here, and the path back will become obvious.

The reason the bastards are trying so hard to shut down the internet is because it has gotten away from them.  They never envisioned it becoming a means for people to educate and activate.  They are desperate.  That shows we're winning.  With that in mind, it's much easier to push ahead.

The time is coming fast.  We must prepare ourselves inside and out for what lies ahead.  It's not enough to end the slavery that has held us for centuries, we must be ready with something to replace it when it's gone.  This is more important than any other consideration, because the system is collapsing under its own weight.  We have to decide collectively what we will do when it's gone.  For that, we need to know history and truth.

And that's the real trick.

The Philosopher's Stone

Got a note from one of our good and faithful readers over in the Land of Keystones, and she asks a very interesting question that we should ponder:

"What fascinates me more than anything, is what in the hell do they plan on doing with all the gold? Who really cares about gold, it is no longer the standard thanks to Tricky Dick.  Where is the gold and all the paper money that has disappeared. We can live without it if we have to. "

Indeed, what is it about gold?  Why all the fuss over it and what should we care?  Very profound questions, and maybe we can tease out some good answers to go with them.

Gold is one of the eight platinum group metals, or PGMs.  The group includes gold, silver, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, osmium, iridium, and palladium.  The elemental symbol for gold is Au, which comes from the Latin name aurum.

"What fascinates me more than anything, is what in the hell do they plan on doing with all the gold? Who really cares about gold, it is no longer the standard thanks to Tricky Dick.  Where is the gold and all the paper money that has disappeared. We can live without it if we have to."

Gold has been used as a medium of exchange (money) for about 6,000 years, in various cultures and at various times.  During the First Depression, the US stopped using the actual metal for money, but kept it as a benchmark for the paper currency.  Under Nixon, the Breton Woods II agreement was instituted, and the dollar was removed from the gold standard and allowed to float against a basket of currencies.  Since that time, gold has been primarily used to store wealth in sovereign funds, though that practice has slowly ebbed, as well.

The question at hand, though, is why is gold valuable?  What makes it so popular as a store of wealth?  A damn good question.  Let's take a stab at it, shall we?

The simple answer involves some of the intrinsic qualities of gold that most people are familiar with.  It is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.  I can be hammered to the point that it is little more than a couple of atoms thick, making it fun to work with in art.  It doesn't oxidize and there is little that will corrode it, so gold has been used for millennia to cover things that need preserving.  It is bright and shiny, which attracts our monkey minds, and its softness makes it ideal for use as jewelry.  It can even be powdered and used as makeup, which was very popular with ancient Egyptians.

Circumpunct

Gold doesn't react to our bodies, and so has been used to fill teeth, cover sores and ingested for its health effects.  It is considered to be one of the more effective treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and other joint problems.  Many medical implants use some amount of gold, because it is non-reactive and non-corroding.

In electronics, gold is considered the best material for wiring and nearly loss-less transmission of signals, though the cost is fairly prohibitive.  If anyone has a mind to it, the Moon landing vehicles used a lot of gold in the electronics to ensure against faults and failures.

Monetarily, gold has a number of advantages.  It is debt free, since it generally involves a significant effort to mine and purify it, so there is an intrinsic value to it.  This is enhanced by its relative scarcity.  As any student of economics knows, the more rare something is, the higher the value, in most cases.  Because it doesn't corrode or oxidize, it makes an ideal medium for storing value, as well.  A gold coin buried in the backyard will shine right up even a thousand years later.  It's also damned hard to counterfeit, which we'll discuss further in a moment.  All in all, it makes rather idea money in every way, except that it's rather heavy and awkward to carry around in significant amounts (which is one reason paper money came into existence).

Gold has a long symbolic and esoteric history, as well.  In fact, one could say that it has a lot of magic in it.  Gold has always been equated with the Sun.  In fact, the alchemical symbol for gold is the same as that of the Sun, commonly called the 'circumpunct.'

This small data point would be easy to write off.  We could say that in the old days, the common belief was that the Sun was actually a giant ball of gold, and that the gold found on Earth were literally drops of sunshine.  And that would be true if we only considered the popular (and generally uneducated) mythologies.  But there's a lot more to it.

If you take a human brain and boil away all the cholesterol, which makes up about 95% of the mass, you'd be left with a small amount of platinum group metals, specifically platinum, iridium and gold.  This is what makes the brain work.  The organ is little more than millions of electrical arcs firing off in just the right way to create thoughts.  Having good conductors in it would certainly facilitate that process.

In recent years, there have been amazing strides in treating brain cancers with platinum solutions.  Injected into the tumors, it has a nearly immediate effect.  One of the side effects is enhanced brain function, as well.  Related to that, colloidal gold has been used for centuries as a cure for problems with the nervous system and for overall health.

One other point that we must keep in mind is that the Sun has been a symbol in occult circles for illumination.  By that, I don't mean light to see by, but inner light...wisdom...enlightenment.

So, we have gold and platinum group metals with health effects.  We have the Sun being associated with gold and enlightenment.  We have an ancient occult symbol that means both gold and the Sun.  But wait!  There's more.

When gold is heated to, if I remember correctly, 8,000F, it turns to a whitish powder commonly called monatomic gold.  This substance has another name...the Philosopher's Stone.  It has been used for millennia by occult initiates.  The Egyptians said that it was food for the soul and paved the path to enlightenment and extremely good health and longetivity.

Philosopher's Stone has many other very unusual properties.  For one thing, to make it, you must heat the gold to 8,000F, as I mentioned.  At around 70 seconds, there's an extremely bright flash and the gold suddenly turns to white powder.  What's more interesting, if you weight the powder and the crucible together before and after, the entire thing weighs far less than the weight of the crucible alone.  If you take the powder out of the crucible, it returns to it's normal weight.  In others words, the powder is a super-conductor that repels the Earth's magnetic field and causes it, and anything that contains it, to resist gravity.

The modern re-discovery of this material was in the early 20th century, by an archaeologist named Petrie.  He found a 'factory' for making Philosopher's Stone at the top of Mount Horeb, which is in which country?  Why, Iraq, of course.  He also found a bunch of clay tablets, whose contents I've never been able to find, but which were stolen from the National Museum at the beginning of the Iraq War.  Gosh, go figure...

At any rate, it is said that ingesting Philosopher's Stone puts your brain into hyperdrive.  People report having amazing powers of concentration and insight.  In addition, it is said to impart incredibly good health and long life, though I haven't found any information on how long one might expect to live.  Perhaps those using it are still waiting to die?

There's much, much more to this story, and I highly encourage folks to look it up.  It is quite fascinating.  To put the point on it, though, we can begin to see why gold is considered so valuable, in fact far more so than market prices would imply.  It also gives us insight into why alchemists wanted to turn base metals into gold.  Having a good supply of it would certain facilitate getting smarter, living longer and lifting heavy things, among other benefits.

The Philosopher's Stone

I have to say, though, that Ron Paul's idea of returning to the gold standard is rather naive.  The bankster class has just as much control over the gold supply as they do over paper money and debt.  The gold standard wouldn't remove the problem, it would only exchange the medium by which we are enslaved.  There are far more and better alternatives.

I've never had the chance to try Philosopher's Stone, though I would leap at the opportunity.  The little I know about it I find very intriguing.  There are many properties of gold that are just now being rediscovered after centuries of being lost, at least to the lay folks.  But it is easy to see why it has been so highly prized for all of recorded history...and then some.

If I just had an oven that I could preheat to 8,000 degrees...

Millions Unite For A Cause

Amazing.

31 million viewers x 3 hours = 93 MILLION man-hours

Plus the network time with hundreds of folks to set up and run the thing across the country, plus a couple of hundred journalists pumping out thousands of column inches, plus ticket sales plus ancillary sales plus plus plus

All for one football game...

Imagine what all that effort could have achieved if it were focused on, oh, I don't know...the ECONOMY, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, ELECTING DECENT PEOPLE TO OFFICE?

93 million man-hours.

What's the bet it didn't take that much effort to build the Great Pyramid or the Great Wall of China?  I know it didn't take that much to build the space station or put men on the Moon.  And all of it literally pissed away on a football game.

It's astounding, really.

At some point, probably next week, though I'm not sure, this will all culminate in something called the Super Bowl, which despite the name, does not involve feeding hungry people.  Nope.  Even more time and energy and effort will be pissed away on yet another football game.

With that kind of waste, one could easily say that America deserves everything that's coming at it.  That a nation could waste such vast amounts of time and resources on something as trivial as a bunch of pituitary cases slamming each other into the ground boggles the mind.  It can only mean that every person that still has a house to live in was watching the game, and if not, they were watching something even more insipid (if that's even possible) called the Miss Something-or-other Silicone and Botox Showcase.

It's maddening, really.  Our entire civilization is crumbling around us and all people can do is plant their fat, drunken asses on a couch and completely zone out, stirring only to empty the bladder and refill it.  Nero Agrippa would be so proud to see that modern Caesars have perfected the bread and circuses.  People spent more time this weekend worrying whether that was a fair catch, than whether the legal system is fair.  They spent inordinate amounts of time worrying about a penalty call on their favorite piles of meat, than cops killing 8th graders.  They spent gobs more time worrying about the quarterback's passing record than Bammy's human rights record.

Dear God, do us all a favor and bring on the Second Coming.  There's little left of human compassion and higher reasoning and high culture down here.

A big part of the problem with America was highlighted by a friend a while back who went home for a visit.  You see, here in Indonesia, everyone spends their time outside visitng with neighbors, doing chores, playing in the park.  Everyone knows their neighbors (which can be a blessing and curse, really).  But back home, he said, the streets were virtually deserted.  Not anything unusual, just the normal course of things.  No one goes outside.  There's little or no social interaction.  People lock themselves in gilded prisons and suck up electrons.  If it doesn't plug in, it isn't real.  And that goes for everything from cooking to sex.

The west has completely lost it.  Folks not only can't distinguish between reality and cyber worlds, they can't properly prioritize anything any more.  When a nation invests 93 MILLION man-hours in a game, but can't lift a finger to fight injustice, creeping dictatorships and a dying economy, then they really don't deserve anything better.

Don't get me wrong, it ain't all peaches and cream in the east, either.  Over here it's Korean boy/girl bands and anime hair styles and gaudy consumerism is slowly sliding in to cultures that have never really had thriving middle classes.  It's still in the nascent stages here and there's time to stop it, but I'm not holding my breath.  The Madison Ave a$$holes have made a fine art out of getting you to buy crap you don't need to project images to people who don't care to achieve status that means nothing.

I've known multi-millionaires who live in humble houses and drive used cars, and I've known credit card queens who live like Solomon in all his glory, but own nothing.  The happy ones are always the humble ones.  They don't worry about a lot of hooey to impress people who don't care.

The Romans perfected an architectural technique called facadeism.  In fact, Indonesians are pretty good at it too.  They could sculpt anything from concrete.  You could live in a cardboard shack, but the front would look like the pharaoh's summer house.  It's more commonly called making silk purses from sow's ears.  That is Madicon Ave in a nutshell.

I crave the day when I see a headline like, "TeeVee viewership at all-time lows!"  But somehow, I don't think that will happen in my lifetime.  That people waste so much time on such a passive occupation in a zombie-like state is very telling of our society today.  It's almost comical how many people do solitary things en masse.  The sheer lunacy of it all would have me rolling on the floor laughing if the world weren't in such a state of affairs.

What will it take to get folks to focus that much attention on something that matters?  I'm rather afraid of the answer.

93 MILLION man-hours.

Amazing.

The Real Playoffs Ain't On TeeVee

Looking at Drudge this afternoon was such a prime example of fiddling while Rome burns (almost literally).  S&P cut the credit ratings of nine European nations, including France.  Bammy wants another $1.2 TRILLION debt ceiling hike.  The US Navy is swarming all over the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Hormuz begging for a fight.  And what's the top story?

The playoffs.

It just made me slap my head.  It's all about Brady's workouts and Tebow's 'hail Marys' and the largest-ever audience for a playoff game.  Excuse the French, but who gives a shit?

John D. Rockefeller

It's not really surprising.  The hey-day of Hollywood was the depths of the First Depression.  In times of stress and uncertainty, people always turn to one thing they can depend on...escapism.  Men who have been emasculated turn to symbolic manhood, though I daresay Australian football requires significantly more amounts of testosterone than the padded-up American version.  Women, of course, watch for the tight pants and rippling beef on display, like rodeo judges examining prize bulls.

The spectacle of it all would be so amusing, but for the seriousness that it papers over.  Greece and Italy have both installed unelected bankers as head of state, which is de facto fascism on display.  That other Euro nations will follow is without doubt.  We are seeing the rise of the pre-World War II world once again, with America playing Germany as the military expansionist.  This time, the Axis powers are engulfing the Western hemisphere.  It only remains to see who will play the Allied powers, though certainly China and the Asian Alliance are auditioning for the role.

What's interesting to watch here is the game being played by China, Iran and South America.  China is shadowing the US in the East.  When the US sets up a new drone base, the Chinese move in next door.  When the US tries to choke off Iran's economy, China opens the back door.  And the whole time, Iran in down in America's back yard making new friends and sending the message that the US can't depend on a flaccid southern flank.

On the sidelines, the banksters and the military-industrial complex are funding and arming all sides, as they always have.  They don't play favorites, except when it comes to their own pockets and dinner tables.  A fine example is the US (corporation) selling missiles to Israel, who in turn sell them to China, so they can shoot them back at the US.  The beauty of the deal is that the US (corporation) gets plausible deniability and Israel is literally swimming in teflon, since the media are owned by dual citizens whose primary allegiance is to Israel.

Make no mistake, Israel is not run by Jews.  They are Rothschild agents who wrap themselves in the trappings of Judaism as a wolf wears wool among the herd.

But the real news is the sheer panic within the ranks of the Anglo-American empire.  Something has them seriously spooked and running scared.  We can pretty much rule out Sino-Russian interests, though they don't seem to be much worried about whatever it is.  In fact, they have both been rather quiet about the financial implosion sweeping the western hemisphere these past few years.  In fact, they seem almost amused by the antics of Wall and Fleet streets.

We know from Orwell and watching the machinations of the elite over the past century or so that the original plan was to carve the world up into trilateral governorships that were supposed to be beholden to a central planetary power.  The three regions would be played off each other to keep things just destabilized enough that each region could be controlled through war and shortages of everything.  In fact, Orwell laid it out quite plainly.

However, on the road to empire, a fourth power has shown up and spoiled the cake walk.  Joseph Farrell makes a compelling argument that it is the next generation of International Nazis.  At the end of WWII, Martin Boorman and the top party brass escaped to Argentina and Chile, including most likely, Adolph himself.  Through Prince Bernhardt and the Bilderbergers, Boorman placed the equivalent of $16 billion in cash and gold into Anglo-American banks, who gladly took the loot, figuring the Nazis would eventually die off and they'd keep it all scot free.

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Martin Boormann

Well, things didn't quite work out that way.  The modern descendants of the original Nazis called in their markets and the cocky Wall/Fleet Streeters figured they could get away with saying no.  So 9/11 happened and literal truck loads of gold vanished from under the towers and since then, the empire has been scrambling to pull itself together.

In their self-inflated hubris, the Anglo-American elite had pretty much crapped on the entire world.  They had few, if any, friends left.  Certainly China, who held a significant portion of the US debt wasn't going to lift a finger to help out, causing the western elite to play power politics hard-ball with them.  That only exacerbated the problem.

Since the re-unification of Germany, there's been a slow, almost imperceptible reformation of the Third Reich.  The German army has quietly begun taking on the trappings of the old Prussian ways.  Without a doubt, the EU was a Nazi post-war plan, cooked up even before the war began.  We take note that in the latest round of devaluations, Germany's rating remained intact, though every other major economy in Europe got whacked.  With Goldman Sachs alumni running Greece and Italy, and France, Spain and Portugal soon following, the final unification of Europe under German hegimony will be complete.  And with the next-gen Nazis yanking their loot out of the Anglo-American system, it will utterly crash and burn, becoming unable to put up even a cursory fight.

One sign that all this is actually the case is the fact that the Nazis were close allies and benefactors of the Muslim world.  They were responsible for establishing and supporting such regimes as Libya, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. One doesn't need to think too long to see a pattern here.  Perhaps all the Middle East wars and artificial revolutions of the past ten years (since what?...oh yeah, 9/11) have been to shake up the power base of these very countries.

It seems that the Anglo-American elites are in the battle for their lives against an enemy they thought they had defeated and subsumed.  It looks for all the world as if the Fourth Reich is ascendant, and this time, they have the bull by the horns.

One has to remember that the US and UK were initially big supporters of Hitler and the Reich.  The Rockefellers and Bushes and that ilk funded the Nazis, and in fact, the Nazis incorporated a lot of ideas from the US elite, such as eugenics and racial purity.  It went awry when Hitler began issuing non-debt money from the state treasury and extracting the German nation from the Rockefeller/Rothshild mafia.  It stands to reason that the Nazis would be a little sore about their benefactors turning on them and might want a little revenge when the time was right.

It shouldn't be too much longer before we know the truth.  Toto is already tugging at the curtain and soon the wizard will be revealed.  Already, the Anglo-American elite have shown their hands, so it's just a matter of time before the mystery foe does the same.

Ahmadinejad - The Southern Tour

The one thing the US/UK elite can not afford is a focused and concerted effort to reform the political and financial systems at home.  That's why Ron Paul literally scares the shit out of them.  He is marshaling folks and bringing up issues they DO NOT want to talk about.  They are absolutely terrified of showing their weakness to anyone, especially the sheeple.  If he is elected, the wars ended, the troops brought home, and the Federal Reserve shut down (or at least thoroughly audited), they will wither and die like the wicked witch of the West.

Oh, and where does Ahmadinejad go to discuss the situation at hand?  Why, to South America, which is where those fine folks from the Reich have been doing their thing for the past 60 years.

Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it?  Now you have something to think about during the playoffs.