Expecting The Spanish Inquisition

UPDATE: Mother Agnes Mariam al-Salib and the Monastery of Mar Yakub (St James) Syria are trying to get the truth out about events in Syria.  Look them up on Facebook and support their efforts.  Thanks!

UPDATE2: First, a disease that only affects Semitic people called MERS.  Then, the Saudis agree to back US invasion of Syria, and *POOF* - cure for MERS.  Coincidence?
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On the back of the US dollar bill, there is a Latin phrase, "Ordo ab Chao," widely considered to be a motto of the Council of Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasonry, meaning 'order out of chaos.'

The Chinese have similar expressions, even down to the language itself, where the word for 'crisis' (weiji or 危機) is composed of wei or 'perilous', and ji, which can imply 'flexibility', 'an integral part', 'pragmatic', and 'natural' (no, it doesn't mean 'opportunity' in itself).

For those who are mentally and physically prepared, chaos and crisis can be beneficial.  The secret is to remain aloof enough from the immediate situation to be able to seize opportunities when they come.

The problem most people face is that they panic when things start to go awry.  Being caught up in the turbulence of chaos, they lose their grasp on rational thought and miss the chance to strike.  For instance, in a panic market, people are selling wildly while the prudent investor waits for the right moment to sweep up bargains that will gain value once order is restored.

As Max Lucado reminds us, "A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd."  It's one of the most apt summaries of individuality I've yet found.  Those who will have the greatest impact on the future are rarely those who are entangled in the popular culture.  Those who are entangled will see themselves extinguished with the masses, but those who go a more lonely road will stand out in times when leadership is most direly needed.

The crowd chose Barabbas, but it was Jesus who changed the world.  And here is the crux of the problem.  Those who chose their own path are often ridiculed, even punished severely for their independence.  It is extremely difficult for the individual to chose that sort of abuse in order to take advantage of changing currents.

As the Chinese word weiji tells us, change in inherent in the system.  Those who follow the current will flourish for a time, but eventually they will be caught in the eddies and sucked under.  Those who choose the harder path will suffer up front, but they will benefit in the longer term.

It is difficult for people to embrace chaos.  They desperately crave routine and sameness.  They default to a world with no surprises, but this defies reality.  The unexpected always comes, and we are either ready or not.

Being ready does not mean you foresee every possible hazard,  Rather, it means that you have prepared yourself to accept it when it arrives.  Thus prepared, you cannot be stunned into inaction and will see the opportunities in the otherwise chaotic mess.  These are the people who change the world and whom the crowd ultimately follows.

No one admires a victim.  They may pity the person, even come to their aid, but they will not follow a victim because the outcome is obvious.

Instead, people naturally follow those who walk away from the train wreck seemingly unscathed.  Regardless of why they are unharmed, the crowd is naturally attracted to those who are apparently prepared to survive and prosper the worst catastrophes.

While it seems trite, there is a great wisdom to the expression, "Expect the unexpected."  We will rarely see exactly how things will change, but that we are ready for the change itself means that we are not caught off guard, and thus are ready to act when the crowd is stunned to silence.

True leaders do not set out to lead.  Rather, they are created by their ability to remain standing when all others are laid out.

Many people know the expression, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."  Few, however, stop to consider why the one-eyed man is that way.  It is because he had the presence of mind to cover one eye when events conspired to rob the rest of their sight.  His readiness led to action that gave him a slight advantage over the rest.

Ordo ab chao.  Extropy out of entropy.  Spring follows winter.  The ant and the grasshopper.  Weiji.

No matter how you express the concept, it pays to keep an open mind, to expect the unexpected.  No, it won't make you popular, nor likely rich, but it will ensure a far better outcome from the inevitable chaos of life than for most.

You cannot lead when you are part of the crowd.  In a crowd, you are just one of many all clambering for the same position.  A leader is, by definition, different and apart and creates a position, he doesn't inhabit an existing one.

Preparedness is not about stock-piling groceries, it's about being mentally and spiritually ready for the fact that nothing stays the same.  If your plan is to build yourself a fortress against the chaos, then you can be absolutely assured that you will be forced to abandon it when the unexpected comes.

As any rafter will tell you, you read the currents as you come to them.  All the planning means nothing in the face of a 10-foot standing wave.

Tomás de Torquemada would not approve.

Hedonism's Hangover

hedon·ism 

[heed-n-iz-uhm] noun

1.the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the highest good.

2.devotion to pleasure as a way of life: The later Roman emperors were notorious for their hedonism.

The DJ spins some rousing instrumental with heavy drums while announcing the party's over.  Oh, and be sure to come back for all the exciting thrills later in the month.

Suddenly, the music stops and the house lights come up.  The glare is jolting and what looked so hip in the semi-dark is revealed to be just bare walls with black foam sprayed on them.  The air is blue with smoke and reeks of stale beer.

The cute Euro-trash waitress that was all smiles and bubbles just a short time ago, is now hovering near your table, looking haggard and unhappy.  The smiles and bubbles are gone and she is projecting the distinct impression that you are an interloper now.

A couple of tables back, a large, mean-looking Asian guy named China is flexing his muscles and not looking at all pleased to see you.

You down the dregs of your last beer and stumble out into the breaking dawn.  Somehow, all the magic of the preceding night has vanished, and now it all looks so real and harsh.  Your clothes have the stench of stale cigarettes and spilt beer, and your dance sweat is quickly turning into day-old gym locker.

Later that day, you pry your eyes open.  Everything is out of focus and at first you're not sure where you are.  The base of your skull feels like a massive iron clamp has locked on and won't release your mind.  Slowly and painfully you replay the events of the night before. 

You met up with your buds after work for happy hour.  You met this cute chick there and you decided to take her to the latest and greatest thump-o-rama, where the beer started going down easier and faster with each passing glass.

The cute chick you brought wouldn't put the damn BB down all night, so at some point you ditched her for another model that looked ready to play.  But, after soaking you for several rounds of drinks, she introduced her boyfriend and they left unceremoniously.  A worthless night, and now...

You turn your head to look at the clock only to feel the dagger of reality stabbing you just below the occipital plate and slightly above C1.  As your eyes slowly relearn how to focus, you see that it's already 3pm, but you're still not sure what day.

The pounding in your head leads to one thought...hair of the dog.  You haul your still-dressed and disheveled carcass out of the bed and plod uncertainly to the kitchen.  You pull open the refrigerator door.

On the top shelf is a month-old science experiment unfit for even a junk-yard dog.  There's a half-drunk bottle of mineral water and a brown goo on the bottom shelf that looks as if it may spawn a new life-form at any moment.

Nothing helpful.

You check your pockets, but only find a couple of coins, some lint and (thankfully) your car keys, if you can only remember where you parked it.  Opening your wallet, you spy the last credit card receipt that has the word "DENIED" in large block letters.  You're maxed out.  So THAT'S where your cash went.  And the ATM laughed at you last night.

Massaging your neck hoping for even the slightest relief, you shuffle into the living room and start tearing the couch apart, looking for any spare change.  With the coins in your pocket, you add up $1.83...enough for a beer.

Like Dracula, you emerge into the blazing sunlight of Reality and as your eyes adjust, you notice your car is not in its usual spot.  Great.  You stumble to the Stop n Squat and spend your last dime on a jug of Schiltz Bull, and barely survive the stumble home.  At the front door, you see an envelope wedged between the knob and the jamb, which you take mindlessly as you fall over the threshold.

About halfway through the bottle of Bull, you remember the envelope.  Opening it, you find a NOTICE OF REPOSSESSION.  Crap!  So that's where the car went.  Feeling a bit of anger and indignation rising in your gut (or is that the Bull coming back for a rerun?), you take your BB in hand and tap in the number on the NOTICE.  Nothing...

You forgot to pay the service.

Soon after, the meter reader comes around the side of the house in his nifty orange shirt with his ID happily flapping in the breeze.  But, instead of checking the meter, he takes it, leaving you in the sweltering darkness of your once-proud cave.  You muster a few obscenities to hurl at him, but the pounding in your head won't allow you to do much else.

Defeated, you slunk back onto the couch and reach for the remote mindlessly hoping the game will distract you, but the giant plasma TeeVee only stares back accusingly.  It suddenly occurs to you that the reason you joined your buds at happy hour was to commiserate about your company shutting down.  You make a mental note to get online Monday and sign up for unemploy...oh, yeah.  No internet.

You swill the last of your Bull as the searing pain in the back of your skull slowly starts to ease off a bit.  The fog is lifting just slightly, and the full weight of the situation is settling in behind it.  There used to always be a backup.  There was always a fall-back position.  But, as you scan the proverbial horizon, you see only columns of smoke where the bridges used to be.

You were the best and the brightest!  Even while you had a job, there were always new offers rolling in.  It occurs to you that you haven't seen one in a while.  Some guy named Raneesh is now doing your job and your were paid a nice bonus to train him via long-distance.  You figured, "What the hell?  There's always more where the last one came from."

By golly!  On Monday you're going down to the free terminals at the library...oh yeah, they shut the library last year as a cost-cutting move.  You didn't complain because you had everything you needed at home, what with Netflix and Wikipedia and TripPlanner.

You stare at the plasma TeeVee, the XBox, the BluRay.  All useless.  The rising anger causes your head to pound again and you slam your fist down on the couch.  One leg collapses, leaving you precariously perched lurching forward.  Very uncomfortable.

You could have a garage sale, but all your neighbors have been out of work longer than you, and they all have useless gee-gaws, too.

You feel this blackness crawling up your spine.  You know it, though you haven't felt it in years.  You once called it 'despair'.  You fight it back, but the weapons of 'hope' and 'change' have long since given up and looked for greener pastures overseas.

You think about all those 'alternative' websites you used to laugh about with your buds down at the watering hole.  The ones who were always going on about home gardening and buying gold and being prepared.  Those crazy fringers who were always hollering about your profligate lifestyle and your wasteful ways.  You remember that old adage your mother (who grew up in the First Depression) always said, "Waste not, want not."

As your stomach begins to stir and demand attention, you are suddenly accosted with visions of all the half-eaten Happy Meals you shoved in the trash can.  Your mouth waters uncontrollably as you remember all those steak dinners you meant to finish, but were tossed after they became poster images for fungus-lovers.  Oh, if you just had one of those huge meals you didn't finish.

You look around at your McMansion.  You've already got two mortgages on it.  If you're lucky, you've got maybe a month or two left to enjoy it, though it looks more and more like a prison than a home.  All the pills, the blow and the parties that have passed under your roof.  If you just had an eight-ball's worth of that cash in your pocket, you might be able to do something now...like eat.

"This is all YOUR fault," you bellow into the blackness, and it echoes accusingly back at you from somewhere upstairs.  You fling a cushion at the emptiness, but it only recalls the emptiness in your belly and the screaming demons in your brain from last night's Last Big Hurrah.

Like a warped mantra from a Buddhist nightmare, your mind keeps saying, "If I had just..."  Pulling your hair doesn't stop it.

From somewhere deep in the roots of your brain comes a Vision.  You'll go back to your roots!  You'll run off to the wilds of Wyoming and live off the land!  You'll build yourself a shack and hunt for meat, like the Man you are!  You'll dip your water out of mountain streams and let your beard grow and eat wild berries and...

Then Reason slaps you upside the head.  You don't have the first clue how to live like a real Man.  The closest you've ever come was camping in national parks with coolers full of steaks and beer and 27 of your closest friends, under the watchful eyes of the Park Rangers.  You don't even own a gun, because guns were evil and the cause of all pain.  Besides, you've never even been hunting, and you sure as hell couldn't tell an edible berry from a poisonous one.  Though the poisonous ones are sounding rather attractive at the moment.

Your dad tried to teach you all that stuff, but you could hardly pull yourself away from the Commodor 64 and Pong.

Now, you sit there.  The hangover has a death-grip on your brain stem.  You couch is trying to dump you on the floor.  The refrigerator   The pantry is empty and the refrigerator is frightening.  Your wheels are gone.  The electricity is cut off.  And you live in suburban hell where the nearest anything is an hour's walk or more.  And public transportation?  Oh, they cancelled that project last year for lack of funds.

Outside is deathly silence.  It's Saturday afternoon, but there's no lawnmowers or kids playing or dogs barking.  Just the wind in the drought-stricken trees.

All that's left is a bar of Xanax from your psycho-therapy after the old lady left with your bank account.  That should carry you into tomorrow, at least.  You can deal with reality then...

You down the bar and slam the medicine cabinet shut.  Then, looking in the mirror, you say angrily and out loud, "Bastards!  Someone's going to pay for this!"

Shake, Rattle and Roll

Hoarding Food, Water, Supplies
People Without Basic Necessities
People Wish They Had Prepared Iodine Supply At Home

Honshu, Japan got hit with a whopper last night.  An 8.9 nerve-wrecker woke the residents up, then proceeded to flatten the area, followed by a tsunami to finish off whatever was left.  The wave was 33 feet high, according to reports.

I have experienced precisely ONE earthquake in my life.  As if happens, it was here in Jakarta on 2 September 2009, at 3pm round-abouts.  I was sitting on the couch in my apartment on the 23rd floor, watching TV, when I got the strangest feeling in my gut.  It was kind of like butterflies, but was centered in the pelvic girdle.  Within seconds, the world began to bounce up and down rhythmically with a period of about half a second.  That lasted for less than a minute and subsided to be immediately followed by lurching side-to-side for a full two minutes.

There was no way I could walk safely down 23 flights of stairs, so I simply stood helplessly in the bedroom doorway, holding on to the door posts and trembling like a Chihuahua on speed.  The coffee table was sliding back and forth across the room, along with the chairs.  Pictures were flapping on the walls and glasses were clanking in the cabinet.

I was a completely helpless feeling.  There was nowhere to run and no shelter.  There was only one choice and that was to ride it out.  It's a very strange feeling when a large, concrete building begins to shake as if a large child were grabbing it by the top and shaking it back and forth.

I have been through eight major hurricanes, a couple of dozen tornadoes, blizzards, floods, fires, and insect swarms.  For the most part, they are predictable and can be fought in a way to minimize damage.  It's not easy and preparation for them takes a lot of work, but you can at least get your mind set for them.

Not so earthquakes.  They happen with no warning.  You can't tune in the news and get moment-by-moment reports on the location and strength of an earthquake.  They defy preparation and in fact, the more rigid a building is, the more likely it is to experience damage.  Even fires are somewhat more controllable.  You can buy document safes, install sprinklers, set up exits, and distribute extinguishers.

But how to prepare for the world suddenly going soft under your feet?

Following my experience with a 7.4, I moved to a house.  I figured it was far better to be able to run out into the street naked than to try to surf slabs of concrete to the ground as a building collapsed.  Having the house also meant having the room to set up water storage on every level, with a resulting total of about 400 gallons divided between three floors.  I then bought a small generator that is enough to power a refrigerator or TV or phone charger.  Finally, I bought 7 hectare of land in the mountains as an escape hatch.

However, the problem with earthquakes is they can strike any time of the day or night.  You never know how strong they will be until they are done.  They can hit a hundred kilometers away or beneath and still destroy your house.  And counting after-shocks and tsunamis, they can have recurring attacks for up to several days.

Even volcanoes are nicer than that.

I'm sure there is a place in the world that is statistically the safest place to stand, and I am equally sure it is in the center of the Gobi desert.  The rest is all preparation.

Being prepared has nothing to do with surviving an event, like an earthquake.  That part is pretty much chance.  Take a look at tornado damage.  Those boogers can rip a house to shreds while leaving the neighbor ten feet away completely in tact.  Preparation is all about what happens if you live through it.  If you're dead, there's not much else to worry about, but if you're the poor sot that makes it through, then you're faced with not enough of at least a few things.

Thus, I have about a month's worth of severely rationed water and a Berkey filter, a month's worth of rice and other staples, an indoor garden, self-defense tools, and limited electrical generating capability, so long as the gasoline lasts.  That's enough to do one of two things, restore some normalcy or bug out.  It also let's me wait out the panic that invariably follows something that momentous.

The thing about preparation is that you never need it until you need it.  It's not all that complex.  You figure out what you need to survive, buy enough and rotate stock as you go to keep it fresh.  You would not walk into my house and think, "Oh my God, he's one of those people."  Other than a few supplies, preparedness is a mental process.

Looking at the rather horrific pictures coming out of Japan, I recall my limited experience with earthquakes.  The Richter scale is a logarithmic progression.  A 7.4 is significally less powerful than an 8.9.  I can only imagine the terror and adrenaline rush those poor folks are going through.  For the ones who've lost everything, no amount of preparedness can help them, other than the preparedness of the mind.

If one has thought out various options, explored escape routes, made mental notes about what to do in the event of certain variables, at least you have something to occupy your mind in the aftermath, other than shock at the horror in front of you.

At moments like those, people go into a kind of autopilot.  Those who are not prepared simply perish as they stumble blindly through the rubble begging for a glass of water.  Those who are prepared drop into whatever mode they hae mentally rehearsed and proceed to think their way forward until the shock wears off.

No matter what I've done, I have never managed to defeat the shock of the moment, but I have learned how to shift into a productive form of autopilot.  There are far too many changes to daily life for the mind to process, so giving it a routine of some sort is the best way to deal with the situation.

Ultimately, it comes down to: what will you do if you live?  Trying to live is pointless.  If the Universe has your number, there's not much choice in the matter.  But how will you live afterwards?  That's the question.  Will you wait for the Red Cross truck to drive through the rubble and toss a few boxes to hundreds of starving people who will fight to the death to get at them?  Or will you hunker down with your supplies and wait until sanity returns?

Hoping and praying you'll never have to face a disaster is not a rational course.  At some point, most of us face at least one.  Being physically and mentally prepared to face a disaster pays dividends beyond just survival.  It preserves dignity and hope, the two greatest civilizing forces.  Keeping both in the face of complete destruction pays a dividend that can not be measured.

Fate favors the prepared mind.  I figure it's always better to have Fate on my side in any case.

私達の祈りは悲しさの時の支えるように努める。

Buddy Can You Spare A Roop?

Well, it's a foregone conclusion at this point. We are headed for the deep chasm of The Greater Depression. Them that run things (PTB) have spent decades piling fraud upon fraud, and now comes the time when the piper must be paid.

Some of us have parents or grandparents who remember the Great Depression of the 1930s. My parents were children, but certainly they had tales of doing without. For instance, my father didn't own a pair of shoes until he was in his teens, being the middle of eight children. My great aunt's stories were even more harrowing (she came to Texas in a covered wagon at the turn of the 20th century. Even in the 1960s, she was still saving newspaper for fuel and jelly jars for glasses. The people who survived that era learned to recycle, reuse and make do with less.

Today there are generations of Americans who have never known hardship. They expect electricity to always be available. They expect drinkable water to come out of the taps. They can't imagine walking further than the garage and gas pumps that always have fuel for their cars. They have been so spoiled by modern convenience that they have buried themselves in Facebook and video games to the point where they couldn't cook a meal that didn't need a microwave or grow a tomato plant to save their lives (literally). Can you imagine the panic the day the hairdries stop and the malls close?

Here in the "Third World," people are quite a bit smarter and better prepared for economic disaster. Here in Indonesia, many people over 30 have grown up with little or nothing, in much the same fashion as my parents. I have spent time in villages here where water is carried from a central well and the toilet is little more than a hole cut in the floor. Even in middle-class homes here, many people stil bathe with a bucket and ladle, and most take cold baths, as hot water heaters for an entire house are unheard of. In other words, people here live their daily lives ready for anything.

When it come to being prepared -- disasters, economic catastrophes, etc. -- Indonesians got it going on!

The average Indonesian, and by that I mean a very large number, live life well prepared for just about anything. Water storage, generators, food stores, patio gardens, and even small livestock are mainstays, even among city dwellers. Why, on my lane alone, I count five chickens and the occasional goat is not unusual right here in the middle of Jakarta.

My house alone has over 500 gallons of non-potable water in various tanks, with some connected to a rather ingenious gravity-fed system, with a roof-top reservoir that directly feeds the house, and a ground-level tank that acts both as back-up and overflow. Each bathroom has a 25-gallon cistern built-in, plus I have an additional 50-gallon tank. The kitchen has a tank, there is one under the stairs and another next to the washing machine on the second floor. None of that is unusual, although the design of the gravity system is pretty darned unique, from what I have seen so far.

Most Indonesian households have a bulk supply of rice, among other things. Of course, an Indonesian could starve to death with a full belly if they didn't get their daily rice fix. Most keep a substantial supply of soy sauce and cooking oil on hand. There is also a week or so of drinking water on hand, though some have filters and keep tanks full around the house.

There is no central gas lines to provide fuel for cooking, so every house has a stove that hooks up to a 75-liter propane tank, which in an average house is about a month's supply. Most households I have seen have at least two tanks on hand, while some I have seen have as many as siz at all times. With frugal use, even two could supply cooking gas for up to six months.

A good number of households have small generators, and the design of the electrical system here makes using them fairly straight-forward. Since a decent generator costs about US$300, many homes can't afford one, but many can. When the power goes out, as it frequently does here, the machines can be heard firing up all over the neighborhood. One simply plugs the generator output into any wall socket, and it will power that circuit as long as the gasoline supply holds out.

A great number of people I see have some sort of food growing around the house. Being the tropics, there are fruit trees, of course, but it's common for people to have chickens, goats and even fish farms on their front porches. Quite a few have edible plants and produce growing, such as tomatoes, cucumbers and spices. In normal times, these are simply side-businesses to make larder money for Momma's household needs, but in stressful times, they obviously become food sources and barter items.

Amost everyone here has some tradeable skill. Many folks I see are capable of making textiles or tailoring, others can do masonry or carpentry. Wiring and plumbing are good, but without electricity, that doesn't help much. I am always amazed at how many tools some folks can make out of materials lying around the place.

Indonesians are wizzes at recycling. Almost everything gets used at least twice, if not more times. Plastic containers, glass jars, scrap cloth, and any other usable material will get used and reused many times. Even many household items have multiple uses. It's not unusual to see a man picking through the trash every day to find items that can be reused or reconditioned. There's also someone who goes through the neighborhood regularly, buying junk and broken items that are then repaired and resold.

This is not to say that a city of 12 million people doesn't generate a mountain of trash, but the situation would be a lot worse, I think, if there weren't people making use of a good amount of the waste.

Indonesian homes are a marvel of aero-dynamic design. Using a system of vents and transoms, the average home 'breathes.' Just opening a window will cause a fairly good breeze to circulate through the house, generally from bottom to top to carry heat out. This is not unique to modern architecture, either. Even 1,000-year-old houses had a design that easily captured the tropical sea breezes and funneled them through the house for natural cooling.

When, not if, the current paradigm collapses, I will lay odds and Indonesians to be better survivors than the average American. Americans have become so spoiled and so trained to rely on centralized supplies of daily needs that they have forgotten how to make do without. It's a given that the average American couldn't forage for food. Most young folk today don't even know what a food plant looks like outside of the grocery store. Urban areas have long outlawed even small livestock like chickens. Most folks can't imagine trudging more than a couple of houses from their front door, much less walking up to a mile in one direction and carrying large loads back. Even in areas prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, many households have little more than a couple of extra batteries in the tool drawer by way of preparation.

It's a bit late now to start preparing, although buying tanks to store quantities of water is a viable option, even now. The problem is, that if the coming Depression is truly as bad as it appears, then preparation for weeks, even months, is insufficient. Having the ability to grow food and do things without electricity (or having a supply that is independent) requires careful planning. Even getting skills like being able to start a fire without matches takes practice, and is much easier to learn when you are not desperate.

Americans, for all their bluster and saber-rattling, are quite vulnerable. They have built a society that is intricately interdependent on multiple supply lines that, if cut, will leave many panicked.

There is a rather easy solution. Find a few friends and family that you trust implicitely and together buy some good farmland. Plenty available right now. Try to get a mix of people with various skills and talents. Pool resources to install a well and solar power. Look for land with trees, if possible, since that is a prime supply of fuel and building materials. Get some farm animals, not just for food, but for work. Place the whole thing in a perpetual trust, so there's no inheritance taxes and the trustees even serve as an ad hoc government. Buy things like looms and knitting needles (might have to bone up on the skills a bit).

Why people don't do this, I don't know, because even if the worst never comes and our house of cards never collapses, your group can share the place as a weekend get-away and place to teach the kids about things like farming and self-reliance. And who will argue with the biennial slaughter of a cow that stocks several freezers with good, organic, non-GM meat? What do you have to loose, right?

Whether you are prepared or not, the Greater Depression is coming. Americans can stand to take a few lessons from the "Third World."