If Thine Eye Offends Thee

Yup, still here, just as I suspected.  But that only means we dodged the collision bullet.  Still plenty of fun to be had right here on good ol' Earth.

Today was interesting in that the Asian markets were hammered.  The Hang Seng lost 5.25% alone.  At the same time, Europe was all green.  Now go figure that?  Europe is falling into a black hole of debt, while Asia is doing fair to middlin', and our markets get trashed.  When I looked, US futures were up near 100, which puts a little cream on the burn yesterday, but the underlying infection ain't going away until we do some serious surgery.

With the demise of Libya, the number of countries with natural resources that don't bow to the fascist empire is dwindling fast.  Still have little ol' Cuba and North Korea.  Cuba doesn't appear to be in any immediate threat, since all they have is good cigars, rum and a submerged ancient city off the coast.  North Korea is fine, as long as they don't try to join the nuclear club.  That's a position only doled out to court jesters at the Vatican.

Iran, of course, is in major danger.  The Saudi king, who owes his wealth and priviledge to Lawrence of Arabia and his kow-towing to THEY, wants to put the kaibosh on Iran because it makes them look bad.  

The left-over Nazis, aka Israel, don't want ANY challenge to their nuclear hegemony in the Middle East.  They want to have one-button veto over everything that happens in the region.  Considering the way they treat anyone and everyone around them, can't says i blame 'em.  If I were the neighborhood bully, I'd want the biggest stick on the block, too.  I just wish they'd quit calling themselves Jews.  Makes it sound like they have some morals, which quite obviously they don't.

But why all this debt?  How did/do the banksters manage to get everyone in debt without anyone questioning it?  Today is not new.  They've been doing it, at least in Europe, for centuries  Eventually, folks wake up and lamp-post the whole damn lot of 'em, but for some reason, neither side ever learns.  Obviously, there's some deep trigger THEY use to fool people into buying into the Ponzi scheme again and again and again...

What could possibly be buried in the psyches of masses of people, that crosses all cultural barriers, and fosters a mind-set of debt, slavery and master worship?

Could it be...religion?  Hmmm...let's see.

First, you teach everyone that God is this hateful, vengeful being who demands utter obedience or He will torture and burn you in Hell for all eternity.  But He loves you.  Then you teach everyone that because some mythical ancestor ate an apple, we owe a huge, unpayable debt to this God.  We are to spend our entire lives lamenting and supplicating ourselves to this God for the apple-eating incident.  Furthermore, we are to offer the blood of goats and sheep to keep this God from getting angry and wiping us all out for what the mythical ancestors did under the apple tree that day.

That's right, this God loves the smell of death and burning flesh.  Cain's fruits and veggies just piss Him off.  He needs real death and destruction to make Him feel happy and needed.

All this blood and death was enough to create a story about the Son of this God, who comes around to teach us that we should love and share and that He will die to pay the debt, so we don't have to keep doing all this killing to make God happy.  Yup, that's right.  God Himself is the only Being capable of paying off the debt we owe for eating apples!  So now, we humans have to slaughter our own God and hang Him on a tree to pay off this debt.

But what happened?  To hear the Catholic church tell it, we still owe a debt!  We are born in Original Sin and baptism cleans that mess up, but we STILL owe a debt, because (God forbid) someone might masturbate, or not finish her Wheaties, or tell his wife she looks great when her belly is hanging over the waistband.  We are hopeless, corrupt, worthless sinners who can never repent enough to make God happy, even though He supposedly created us in His Own Image.

Wait a minute.  If we are in His Own Image, then killing, lusting, destroying, and masturbating are all good things, right?  After all, He does it!  He knocked up Mary without marriage ceremonies or anything.  He even abandoned her as soon as she got knocked up, which means He owes back support, doesn't it?  OK, so it was Gabriel who did the deed, but still...

Here we have slavery, debt and bloodlust, sewn into our collective psyches from birth, etched into our culture and civilization, and what do we get?  Empire, slavery, debt, bloodlust, war...everything we see God doing in The Book!  In fact, we can pretty much blame God for all the war and misery on Earth today!

So where did Christianity go astray?  After all, the central message is peace, love and no debt, right?  Instead, we ritually slaughter God every Sunday and eat His Flesh and drink His Blood.  And this is a good example for a bunch of unruly creations?  It would seem we got completely derailed!

And it's not the first time.  The Aztecs had a God of peace and love, but He was kicked out by a demon, and the Aztecs actually called him that, and started human sacrifice in order to what?  Why, pay a debt of course. The Maya did the same thing.  The Hindu had it for a long time, but then Buddha came along and reformed it. Makes it one of the few religions without debt and bloodlust at the heart of its philosophy.

We just had Idul Adha here, and across the Muslim world.  Guess what?  The Day of Atonement (debt) is marked by none other than slaughtering goats and cows.  The Zionists (note I didn't say Jews) have their Day of Atonement, in which they go out and slaughter their neighboring countries to atone for all the evil they bring into the world.

With all these fundamental beliefs at the cores of our societies, is it any wonder that banksters enslave us with debt, governments become tyrannical and churches dole out guilt and low self-esteem?  The whole damn thing is based on a fundamentally flawed and perverted view of the world, and that view is institutionalized at the deepest levels of our societies.

We are worthless, wretched sinners who need caretakers to whip us into shape and make us work our tails off in order to repay an unpayable debt to a murderous and evil God who loves the smell of burning flesh.

You see, the problem here is not the banksters (OWS), and it's not governments (Tea Baggers), it's the churches.  They are preaching hate and death and debt to us from the minute we spring into the world all steaming fresh.  They have so perverted what amounts to a Buddhist message from some guy named Jesus that was trying to reform Judaism and all the other debt-based, brutal religions of the day.

This problem is like a mesquite tree.  You can whack that booger right down flish with the dirt, and in three months you'll have a bigger mesquite tree.  This will continue to go one until you drag out the chain, hook it to the tractor, and yank the damn root ball out and burn it (preferably in a slow-cooker with some tender aged beef).  We will never free ourselves until we see what the real problem is, and fix it.

We can tear down the banks, revoke corporate licenses, erase all the police state apparatus, but as long as we believe in this religious guilt, slavery and debt, we will never be free.  All that will happen is that it grows back bigger, stronger and with nastier thorns, until the root is dug up and utterly destroyed.

Honestly, for all we know, Lucifer really is the Light Bearer, but we've been so snowed by BS that we can't see it anymore.  And don't get your religious panties all in a bunch, I'm just making the point that we have been so throroughly bamboozled that we have to assume everythng is a lie, at this point.  In other words...

The Matrix

Really, it's time for people to start taking a fresh and honest look at what they believe and where those beliefs come from.  We can no longer take anything for granted.  Our entire civilization and all our future generations depend on it.  But we need to move fast.

We are all Winston Smiths.  We are all the last of those who remember, and who can remember.  Our kids have been so thoroughly TeeVeed and public schooled that they wouldn't know there was something else to think and believe, much less where to find it.  Our parents helped create this empire of blood, and through our sloth and thoughtlessness, we have allowed it to continue.  It's up to us to clean it up, or it may be centuries before the next opportunity comes.

Start bartering and stop using the slave bux.  Pay off your debt and get free of it.  And for God's sake, stop going to the mega-churches and giving them money.  Starve all the Beasts at once.  Get out of banks and find alternative forms of payment wherever possible.  This is not something that needs to be gotten around to, it is an immediate and desperate need.  Gold and silver are one means, but not the only one.

Most importantly, question everything.  Harbor no sacred cows.  Open you mind to everything.  The Truth is always apparent, when you hear it.  Remember what Jesus said, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out.  If your hand is false, cut it off."  We have to be willing to jettison everything false and untrue, which is the meaning of that statement, no matter how dear and sacred it is to us.

Truth demands nothing less, and the reward is real, blissful and lasting freedom...of the heart, the mind and the soul.

Our children deserve nothing less.

Bugging Out And Other Hobbies

As the West enters a death spiral and the economic situation reaches levels not even seen in the depths of the Great Depression, a number of people are bugging out (old military term meaning 'pack and leave fast').  This is a common and very old response to rising tyranny and roving goon squads, such as those now taking over most Western countries.

Refugees from political and economic turmoil have been an age old problem.  The secret to doing it successfully, is to recognize and admit the problem while everyone else is still in denial, then act on that knowledge in a controlled and organized manner, so as to inflict the least amount of disruption in your life, and the lives of your intended landing spot.

Aye, there's the rub.  That whole 'organized' bit usually stumps most people.

The biggest hurdle is the decision to move in the first place.  People get comfortable where they are and find it incredibly hard to uproot.  They are also attached to all their things and don't want to let go of the things they have dragged with them through life or acquired along the way.  For this, I have no advice, except for men, you can marry a avaricious woman who takes all your things while you are at work, and does the job for you...like ripping off a bandage quickly.

This part of the decision is intensely personal.  One must perceive the benefits of uprooting to be of enough value to overcome the impulse to sit still.  What you take with you is also a tough one.  Many people want to take it all, and so find the cost and logistics of bugging out to be overwhelming.  All I can say here is that it gets easier to throw things away the more you do it.  There's a tremendous feeling of liberation once you reach a certain critical level.

When I left the US, I had a single suitcase, a shoulder bag and a little cash.  What little the former wife left, I sold on eBay.  Literally all that's left back home are some clothes and personal effects in a closet in my mother's house.  I've always been an all or nothing kinda guy...I don't generally burn bridges, but I often lose the map to them.

Perhaps, though, the criteria I used to select a bug-out location would be more helpful.  Taking the decision to actually make the move is something no one can help with, only advise.

The first cut for my choice of locations was selecting a hemisphere.  Having traveled extensively, I had pretty much covered Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and points south of Mexico.  Europe wasn't even an option, since the coming tidal wave in the US was going to take out Europe, as well.  Plus, I had never been to Asia, and it was high on my list of things to do before I died.

Having narrowed my search down to the eastern half of the world, I could rule out Australia and New Zealand, since they were part of the western economic system and will be creamed by it, as well.  That left the Indian sub-continent, Asia Major and the archipelago.  We were getting somewhere fast now.

My first criterion was a network of folks that would give me some connection to my new location.  That narrowed it down to China, Thailand and Indonesia.  I had direct, local connections in these countries, which meant I would have at least one person to talk to.  This would help when it came to language and culture, and learning things like, what is the real price for things (not the tourist gouge).  I also had a desire to engage in the cultures of these countries, which is something one must do if adopting a new home.

The next criterion was language.  Though I was already fluent in three languages and passable in another seven or so, the Asian languages were a daunting hurdle.  I had learned a smattering of Thai and Mandarin at various points.  Both were highly complex, and not just because of the written characters.  Thai is basically two languages, one for men and one for women.  Mandarin, while being fairly straight-forward in grammar, was a major block when it came to pronunciation.

That left Indonesian, which is based on the Roman alphabet, each letter has only one sound, and the language is an amalgam of Malay, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and Mandarin, with a good chunk of Dutch and English thrown in.  That meant that, without having studied a lick of it, I already had a pretty good vocabulary of cognates.  Because of this, Indonesia was quickly working its way to the top of the list.

The next consideration was immigration.  How easy or difficult was it to set up in the target country?  In this respect, Indonesia was a bit more protectionist than most, though that has changed recently.  In order to get permanent resident status, one had to get married or have a sponsoring employer.  Fortunately, I had friends in Indonesia with a company willing to sponsor me.  Just this year, Indonesia has added retirement visas, like many other countries.  Folks over 50 with steady income from pensions can get a retirement visa in Indonesia for less than $1,000 per year.  Until recently, being married to a local would grant permanent resident status, but not a work visa.  The recent changes have also updated that nonsensical bit of law, as well.  The only remaining hurdle is that foreigners may own houses and condos, but may not own the land.  Lobbyists are busily working on that one, since Bali is becoming a global haven for retirees.

So, what about the economy?  This is obviously a major consideration, as you being to narrow the list of possible landing spots.  Indonesia's economy has been growing like a house afire since the early 2000s.  Of the Asian economies, it tops the list with Vietnam, in terms of sheer growth and expansion.  Indonesia is also a gross exporter of food and energy, two key components of any survival plans.  Granted, inflation is the beast in the closet, but the cost of living is roughly one-fifth that of Texas, which is one of the lower-cost places in the States.

Taxes here are a bit steep, especially for foreigners.  They run between 15% and 30% on average, on a graduated scale, plus a 10% VAT on just about everything but breathing.  Still, there's no inheritance tax and capital gains taxes are 0.05%.  Property tax is 5% on transfer of title, plus a minor tax annually in the $40 range.  This one varies significantly by location, so you'll have to do your due diligence.

The next thing I considered was culture.  Indonesia is well-known in the English language for the Seven Seas and the Thousand Islands, not to mention Bali.  Borneo (Kalimantan) was were King Kong was discovered.  For centuries, these islands have been the targets of western colonialism because of the wealth of spices and natural resources.  There are still parts of the country barely explored, and hardly a week goes by you can't find an article about some new discovery in Indonesia.  All this means there's a good supply of things to do.  There's plenty of exploring and over 300 distinct cultures and tribal groups to learn about.

Indonesians have a healthy distrust of government, which I find refreshing.  They primarily rely on family and friends, and don't assume that government will always jump in to save the day.  Sure, there is always a strong effort on the part of the UN and NGOs to meddle with local tradition and culture, which they do very well.  These groups are always trying to export the profound errors of the West into every aspect of life in the "Third World".  Fortunately, at least so far, Indonesians tend to disregard these efforts.

Yes, everything you've heard about corruption is true, but it is systemic in all of Asia.  I find it refreshing that the corruption is open and obvious, rather than hidden under a veil of legalisms and supposed equality, such as in the States.  There's no pretense to moral high ground, such as exhibited in Western governments.  Much easier to deal with this way.

Among other considerations, there was health care.  Pretty much anything available elsewhere is available here.  You just have to be choosy.  There's still a lot of home remedies and old wive's tales prevalent in local medical practices.  Still, there's a wide variety of alternatives and overall, the costs are far cheaper.  Also, many drugs are available over-the-counter and don't require a prior visit to a doctor.  If you know what you need, then there's no reason to run around getting permission from the medical mafia to obtain it.  Drugs prices are much more affordable, as well.  If you don't trust the local docs, you can also fly cheaply and quickly to Singapore or Australia for your alopathic fix.

Near the bottom of the criteria list was climate.  Certainly, being buried to my neck in snow half the year did not appeal.  Indonesia has an equatorial climate, meaning it rarely spikes above 90F, and rarely drops below 75F, day in, day out, all year 'round.  There are only two seasons, Wet and Dry, each about six months long. This means a year-round growing season, a wide variety of fruits and vegetables grown locally, and home gardens that never stop.  The local markets are stuffed to the gills daily with fresh produce brought directly from the mountains south of town.  It's even more direct in smaller cities and villages.

Some folks may want to consider diet.  If you are particularly delicate, you may not want to live in Thailand or Indonesia, where foods tend to be rather spicy.  Also, if you're a die-hard pork eater, or can't stand the taste of unaged beef, then you may have a difficult time adjusting.

Other than that, there's all the amenities: cable TeeVee, high-speed internet (satellite for more remote locations like the LFS Global Headquarters), well-stocked grocery stores with Oreos and peanut butter, and (at least in Jakarta) a reasonably dependable public utilities system, though we have at least one redundant system for everything.  The recent week-long water outage proved the wisdom of that approach.

In other words, you are not shut off from the world by changing location.  Thirty years ago, when I backpacked around the world, there were no cell phones and instant messaging and internet.  To make a long-distance call overseas, you had to make an appointment at the telegraph office for a call that sounded like talking in a pipe with a 10 second delay between replies.  Now, contacting folks at home, literally on the other side of the planet, is no different than calling next door.  Just a heavy time difference between night and day, but hard to fix that.

Uprooting and relocating is not easy, and nothing in this article should be used to construe that idea.  There is a big learning curve, a thousand different variables (of which I've just touched the tip here), and the possibility of failure at any moment with little or no back-up.  You should have a fairly strong sense of self-reliance and enjoy the process as much as the result.

If you are the type of traveler who enjoys the travel, rather than the arrival, then this option is for you.  If obstacles are things to be reasoned out and overcome, rather than dead-ends, then you are ready.  When I stepped off the plane in Jakarta, I had a week's worth of clothes, a water filter, a pocket knife, and my wits.  Now it takes a two-ton truck to move my house.  Less than four years.

Many folks will say, "I'm too old to start over."  To that, I say you can either slide quietly into the grave, or go in the midst of your next great adventure.  You can slowly lose your mind to dementia with your thumb on the TeeVee remote, or engage life head-on, amassing knowledge and experience (and maybe a touch of wisdom) until the moment you get planted.  You're going to get old anyway, why not make it an adventure?

Despite everything you've been told, the world is still a very big place with many options for living.  Hell, if Osama bin Laden can avoid the entire committed resources of the Western hemisphere, and die six times before they finally buried him, I'm sure you can find arrangements that suit your needs.

An old Chinese proverb: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.