Please Release Me

If you're a webbot fan, then you're probably sitting in front of your screen slack-jawed at global events this past few days.  You know that those bots have long been predicting the beginning of a major release period about now, and so far, events have followed suit.

March began with the release of Sheriff Joe's investigation into the supposed birth certificate released by Obama last April.  At the same time, Andrew Breitbart was released from his mortal existence on the day he was set to release video showing Obama hanging out with notorious Weather Underground figures.  Mother Nature released a hell-storm on the central US.  Obama released yet another offensive on the Constitution and Rule of Law.  GM released 1,300 from their jobs because the Car that Fascism Built didn't work and blew up a lot.  The Japanese released a new 'gun' that causes the brain to seize up and the target to stop talking in mid-sentence.

The list goes on, all over the world in many ways.  TSA is released to start groping drivers on the streets of the US.  A bomb was released on a Saudi pipeline.  Iran released more oil despite sanctions. 

And on it goes...

This is only the beginning, if the bots are to be believed.  They predict a period of release language the likes of which living human beings have never seen before.  It is bundled up with Secrets Revealed, of which there are plenty in the news, and the Israeli Mistake, which is being set up even as we speak (if they decide to attack Iran in the face of decreasing global support).  There will be a number of space-related events, of which the Sun's decreasing number of sunspots as it nears the peak of its cycle could be one.  If we take the years-long prediction more or less literally, then the coming weeks will be an amazing time.

Whether or not you follow the bots is irrelevant.  They are entertaining distractions for those of us who look for patterns in an otherwise senseless world.  What we can say is that global events are taking an interesting turn for the chaotic.  It seems that in every aspect of life and in every corner of the planet, there are abnormal events taking place.  A great number of events are coming to a head that have been building for some time.  The Iran situation alone has been 20 years in the making, even longer, really.

Last week, in one day, oil shot past $110/barrel and gold shed $100/ounce.  The EU is still in existence, despite anything nearing common sense, but that may not be true much longer.  The only economy still standing, Asia, is quietly unloading western debt paper and their chairs at the auctions have been empty for some time.

Even Antarctica has gotten in on the act.  A Russian team feared lost for a time suddenly showed back up and claimed to have finally tapped Lake Vostok after 20 years of drilling.  Meantime, a Norwegian lab blew up and killed a number of scientists (story has disappeared), while an iceberg the size of New York started a life on its own.

Everywhere one looks, there are rumors and events of increasing interest and visibility that have the ability to change global events in significant and profound ways.  It makes for some fine popcorn quality time in front of the global peep-hole we call the internet.  One gets the feeling that a great many folks are ready to sweep the table clear and start fresh with a whole new set of problems, and that wish may be unfolding before our eyes.

The coming days and months will tell the tale for the course of world events for some time to come.  Perhaps the US storms are a metaphor for coming social and political storms.  The sky is growing increasingly unsettled and there is a change in the air.  It might be a good time to open the storm cellar and clear out the cobwebs.

Think of it as a fire drill.  A little practice never hurts, since being able to act in a meaningful way when chaos is swirling around our heads is never a bad idea.  Universe favors the prepared mind.

The nice thing about storms, though, is the fresh, clean air behind them.

By the way, while you're at it and you're one of the cool people who use Firefox, check out the new add-on called Collusion.  It lets you see which sites are sending your info to which other sites, and which are tracking you even after five or 10 sites..  Puts a slight bit of power back in your hands.
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And now, for the Sunday Funnies.  This is an oldie, but goodie, and always worth a rerun.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/sheriff-joes-posse-probable-cause-obama-certificate-a-fraud/

Twenty Eighty-Four

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

-Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In some ways, my blog is like Winston's diary. I'm not sure if I'm writing to the world I knew as a child, or the to world my daughter will inherit.

Certainly, it's for the reader, a way of connecting with strangers across the globe, who hopefully find in my words a solidarity of thought or experience. It's a way to clarify my own thinking and test drive ideas: kick some philosophical tires, as it were.

Today, I wax introspective. Why? Well...one, it's Sunday, and my Sunday musings usually stray far afield. Two...my colleagues Clif High, over at HalfPasHuman, his faithful henchman Igor (EYE-gor) and George over at UrbanSurvival have jointly been predicting and speculating about some Earth-shaking event(s) that will commence at roughly 6pm Jakarta time and will reverberate through January, with particular attention on the date of January 7th.

What is it? Heck, I don't know. I'm not qualified to speculate on the nature of future events, but I have a pretty clear bead on the past. I do know, from about ten years' worth of experience that Clif's webbots have been spectacularly right about many things. From 9/11 to large-scale blackouts, from the Columbia shuttle explosion to Banda Aceh, from Katrina to Chinese wedding quakes, the bots have been eerily right again and again.

Whatever the event(s) turn out to be, the effects will appear in history books in the year 2084. Our progeny will read with the dispassion of those long separated from horrific events about whatever IT is that the bots have been harping on for better than two years now.

What can we do to prepare? Well, like any normal, red-blooded Texan, I armed myself, bought some farm land up in the mountains, loaded in water and food, seeds, gold and a generator. The salient point that I take away from all this, though, is it is NOT what you do to prepare, but how you react after the fact. As Douglas Adams might have said, DON"T PANIC!

We know from experience that fascists always use crisis to advance their control structures. That's a given. They will put up Judas goats who will make pseudo-logical and impassioned pleas to follow the Party line. They will point the panicked sheep to Onkel's waiting breast, where he will suckle us and nurture us through this difficult time -- for a price, of course: your immortal soul.

I hear so many folks talk big. "I'll never go down quiet," they boast. "I'll give up my gun when they pry my cold, dead fingers off the trigger," they growl. Fact is, most people don't know how they'll react under severe stress. When something so horrible presents itself to your eyes, most people shut down reason and start acting on pure instinct. I've seen it dozens of times. They talk big, but they don't look deep inside and find the trigger of their panic, and corral that sucker.

Furthermore, we have all been trained and conditioned by mass media to turn to "authorities." We can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, we must seek out the proverbial gurus at the tops of corporate/government mountains to give us sage advice and thoughtful direction.

Bullshit!

There is only one authority that I trust with my life and the lives of my family: me. My mother will tell you, when there was a crisis, I was the one you could count on not to panic. Even as a kid. Maybe I have my great-aunt Tish's genes. In 1910, during the Halley's comet panic, she was 12 years old. Her mother told her to get on her knees and plea to the God of Our Fathers to spare the Earth from the comet's deadly effects. Tish's answer? "If we're all going to die, why do we need to pray?" (She arrived in Texas in 1899 in a covered wagon...I loved that woman)

At the tender age of 13, I gashed my forearm down to the artery. Sure, I cried, but I calmly wrapped my arm while my dad nearly went into orbit, not to mention damn near killed all of us on the way to the hospital. A 18, I saw a Canadian man have a heart-attack in the Gare-de-Nord in Paris. His wife was, well...hysterical and there were about 50 gawkers all standing around watching him die. I doffed my pack and applied CPR and kept him alive until the ambulance arrived. Several years ago, the neighbor's kid broke both his radius and ulna, so that his forearm had a new elbow. I set the bones and slung the arm while his mother looked like a loose balloon. In Guatemala a while back, I was on a bus when a woman went into labor. Half the bus was stunned into statue-like indecision, while the other half were in complete panic. Since I had done a video on childbirth, I had a pretty good idea what to expect, and so delivered the baby somewhere near San Isidro. I wasn't prepared to go blind, but when it happened, I began to make a mental list of things I could still do, rather than focus on what I couldn't do. It all boils down to one thing:

DON'T PANIC!

Self-reliance and self-trust is a lost art. The media have been used for decades now to implant deep in our minds the profound distrust of our own abilities and to seek the all-knowing, all-seeing counsel of "experts" and "authorities." I mean, just watch the news. How many reporters do you see anymore that give you thoughtful analysis of their own. Most are incapable of such mental legerdomain. Instead, they act nervous, concerned and near-panicked, and immediately turn to some "authority" to give us an idea what is happening and what to do about it.

Us? HA! We're just little helpless babes that can't make an informed decision without the guidance of our "betters." You watch. IF this 'thing' happens today, what will be your first reaction. Pay close attention to your thoughts the second you hear about it. Do you panic and start trying to figure out which "authority" will give you the best instrustions? Will you run for the SuperDome and beg your maters for deliverance? Or will you take immediate steps to protect your own first. Will you gather you bug-out pag by the door, arm yourself and get into a defensive posture before turning to media for more information on the situation (not instruction, mind you...big difference).

The key to Life, the Universe and Everything is how you react. That is closely related to how you prepare, and preparation is 90% mental. Think about how the military, police and other "authorities" are trained. They are given repeated preparation to act and react in a particular fashion so that under stress, it becomes automatic. They don't have to think (which shows). You job is to prepare your mind so that in a stess situation, you react automatically, but the trick is, don't turn off your mind. Always think and always listen to your gut. Your gut will tell you the right thing, if you've been careful to filter out the subliminal training you've been getting lo these 60 years of TeeVee.

Remember that telegraph from the future, called "Nineteen Eighty-Four?" The US is at war with Russia. The US has always been at war with Russia. No, wait! The US is at war with China. The US has always been at war with China. Oceania, EurAsia, East Asia...we live in the tri-lateral world of Winston Smith. You are now, and have been trained for your whole life to love Big Brother. The question now is can you uninstall the buttons before 'whatever-it-is' happens today?

What if the bots are wrong? Good! Can't wait to think that. I don't seek out disaster, I just don't panic when it comes. Do I believe the bots? No. Not one bit. They are just like all other predictors: you make enough predictions, some are bound to be right. So what good are they? They are thought experiments. They present scenarios which I use to mull around possible reacts, so that if a situation presents itself, I'm not surprised or panicked, but simply begin to execute the plan.

So why have I prepared for 'whatever-it-is?' Simple, being armed is a natual state for a Texan. I'd feel naked without tools of defense. Farmland is useful for generating income, building a retirement palace and having a weekend escape from the big city. Extra food and water? Well, there's earthquakes, storms and volcanoes here, not to mention utilities in Indonesia are, well...unreliable. A bug-out bag? Ever since I started living on my own at the tender age of 17, I've had a bag of necessities within easy reach. Just plain prudent, and has come in handy on more than one occasion. I haven't done anything to prepare that I wouldn't do on a warm, sunny day in the Texas hill country. It's just a case of ant and grasshopper.

And so I send this out to the people of the past, or the people of the future. The message from this time is, "DON"T PANIC!"

In the end, you're either Ford Prefect or Winston Smint. I'll take Ford any day. Have towel, will travel.

Clif, George, Igor...no one has any idea what thing is coming at us tonight/tomorrow. I certainly don't. Reading the bot output, to me, is like reading Revelations in the Bible. Makes no sense but has some cool images. I'm watching the news to spot when the moment arrives, though according to Clif, the show-shine boy up the alley will be talking about it. I'm curious though...what is this thing that has been sitting like a dead elephant in the middle of the predictive output for better than two years, and is bigger than 9/11 in orders of magnitude? All Clif and George can come up with, besides a dozen scenarios, is that the world will change profoundly next week.

Well, shucks! That happened when my daughter was born.

Next?!

Guts, Guns or Gold: Nobody Rides For Free

Looking back at my e-mail records, it was October 12, 1999. I had sent out an e-mail to my family and friends, admittedly a wild-eyed, but none-the-less valid. Contained within the long-winded reasoning behind the message, I advised everyone to get out of the stock market immediately and buy physica gold and silver coins.

If it weren't for the laughing, there would have been dead silence. Just Ol' B going off again on one of his tirades. After all, the Dow was pretty danged close to its all-time high in absilute value (factoring inflation and all), gold and silver were around $260 and $4, respectively. The precious metals hadn't been much of a concern since the 80s mania. Hedge funds and tech IPOs were the order of the day. Clinton had deregulated banks, happy days were here again, and we were all going to skip to the bank with armloads of money.

Some lone nut preaching, "The end is nigh," sure wasn't convincing a lot of folks. I did, however, put my money where my mouth was and cashed out my 401(k), sold out my options and stocks, and bought up all the gold and silver coins I could afford.

Sitting here 11 years later, I see that the Dow has only hit an all-time high once since then, in both absolute and notional value. Gold has risen better than 500%, silver has shot up almost 600%, and the markets are set to drop in the crapper yet again, taking the last of everyone's life savings with them.

So, was I right or what?

In July of 2001, some guy nemed George Ure, whose site about long-wave economics I had been reading for about a year, started twisting off on some new technology he was pimping for a guy named Clif High. It came out that Clif, while working on a way to predict future market moves, had hit on something much deeper.

Clif's theory was that future events could be predicted by people's current expectations, and that their expectations could be discerned by parsing the words that they chose when posting on internet fora and bulletin boards. He would send out small programs called 'bots' to search for a pre-determined set of 'hot' words, and when the bots found them, they would sample a bit of the text around the words and send the whole package home.

Clif could then read the hidden subtext of people's thoughts by fermenting the results with his own algorithms. The product was, what I imagine to be, a 3-dimensional scatter-graph that he calls model-space. Certain hot concepts form a cloud in this space, surronded by various adverbs and adjectives that modify them. Those descriptors are given numerical weights based on the emotional value of the words. The clouds are connected to each other through various relationships, and the whole thing overshadowed by the meta-data layer, which holds the archetypes that people use to manipulate the world within their minds.

Model-space can be rolled back and forth over time to see how and when these concepts develop and their relationships evolve. Clif takes this view and puts into narrative form and releases it as occasional reports (formerly called ALTA, and now called (SOTC)

All that was build-up to the summer of 2001, when George and Clif started releasing warnings that some major, world-changing event was in the offing. The details were a bit vague, but it involved a hugely emotional event that Clif called a 'tipping point,' before which the tension values of words were increasing, and after which they decreased rapidly. This point in time was pegged to happen in the Fall and there was some talk of buildings and changing attitudes.

Sure enough, on September 11, 2001, a lot of things changed.

By now, I can just picture you, dear reader, scratching your head and asking, "What is this nut going on about now?" Glad you asked.

Point number 1: If you're been watching the price of gold and silver lately, you have noticed that they are running up the ladder like nobady's business. My nose is twitching, telling me that there is more distance to cover before this run finishes, if my spasming nose is anything to go by. Past episodes would seem to indicate the positive. I especially am watching silver, since supplies are tighter than gold, deliveries have been very slow and Clif's work indicates that it has a big leap to make in the near future. Just today, the story is the (hahahahahaha) Federal Reserve may inflate the crisis out of existence. If you've been paying attention, that started a while back, say around 1933. The (NOT) Federal (NO) Reserve is acting like they just discovered it. HAHAHAHAHAHA! What a maroon, as Bugs Bunny might say.

The second point is this: Clif's and George's work is pointing to a time in November when there will be a tipping point that is orders of magnitude greater than 9-11, and has been showing up for several years in model-space. Now, normally I would put future predictions in the category of 'here comes the apocalypse' fantasies, which have predicted the Second Coming daily for 2,000 years. Hey, it's going to be right one of these days, que no? (snicker) However, I have watched the bots' output hit the mark repeatedly: the shuttle disaster, the NE blackout, the Banda Aceh tsunami, Katrina). Granted, on some of the smaller things, it's been a bit of a stretch to say that the bots have hit their mark, but on the Big Ticket items they seem to be batting 1,000.

So what to do?

Well, if you are still in the markets, then there's no hope for you. You are brain-dead and no amount of talking will convince you to save your own ass. However, if you've cashed out and are looking for somewhere to park it, gold and especially silver are your best bets, I think. The only thing better is farm land, since you can't eat metals, but you can sure use the land to feed yourself.

The next thing to do is strap yourself to the mast, because a storm is rising and the seas are going to be mean. I have little to no idea what to expect other than to expact the unexpected. If you are ready for that, then you should be able to ride out the storm.

Check out Clif's site and if you can part with $10, buy the latest report. Also, give his blog a read, as he spells out a little information there with regars to what's coming.

As with all dire future predictions, no guarantee or warranty. You're on your own. But, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and anything you do to prepare will still have value, even if the sun keeps shining.

If Buddha is right, which he sure seems to be about a lot of things, then we make our own future. After you prepare for the worst, then envisioning some good things for Life As We Know It sure can't hurt matters.

Every little bit counts.