Insight
THE VALUE OF LAUGHTER
You struggle with money. You struggle without money. You struggle with love. You struggle without love. But it's how you manage. You have to keep laughing, you have to be fun to be with, and you have to live with style--not fancy-schmancy, but in a way which is present and meaningful and has some beauty to it.
Pierce Brosnan
A man isn't poor if he can still laugh.
Raymond Hitchcock
Buh-bye 2011!
100 years in 10 minutes...
Societal illusions...
Keep drinking that kool-aid...
How enlightening...
Big Brother is watching you...
Generation X...you know Y...U lost...
David vs. Monsanto...
Inspiring quotes for the new year...
They want to start WWIII...
Minding your mitochondria...
Hippo's got back...oh and gas too... (props to Joselito)
Behold the meteor shower...
Mind control, Manchurian Candidates, assassins and spies oh my!
The truth about JFK's assassination...
The secret of the 33rd degree...
Sorry honey no honey for you...
Minding your matter...
With Christmas now over...remember Santa is pagan too...
Speaking of the man...how we should portray him to the kiddies going forward...
Top O' da mornin to ya!
Behold the dragonfish...
The art of forgiveness...
Virtual reality indeed... (props to Pops)
Which stage of awakening are you in?
Top 10 healing foods...
Ahhh the power of cinnamon...
Now that is one credit card bill!
Top 10 funny church signs...
Church of snow...
Psychiatry...an industry of death...
The coming financial crisis...
Ron Paul 2012...
The all powerful mushroom...
The all powerful RAW MILK!
The good, the bad, and the ugly...TIME TO GROW AND WAKE UP!!!
METALLIC ‘SPIDERS’ AND GIANT ‘MOTHS’ ...
by David Icke
... We know so little about what happens in the deeper levels of sleep and non-conscious states in general, as in ‘sub-conscious’. Yet I contend that these are the realms of awareness that drive ‘conscious’ human perception and behaviour. These ‘non-conscious’ levels are also where humans are ‘accessed’ by the multidimensional Control System and we should remember that so-called ‘sub-conscious’ and ‘non-conscious’ levels are actually conscious – everything is. They are just not conscious to what we call the conscious mind, the one that we are aware of during awakened states...
... We operate across multiple levels of reality and we are conscious in all of them. Do we dream in sleep or do we dream when we are ‘awake’? I would say both. It is just that this dream is more vivid and ‘real’ to us at the level of the perception experience known as the conscious mind. So am I ‘dreaming’ a bird in the sky, or is the bird dreaming me? Do these ‘butterflies’ and ‘moths’ exist in the frequency range of my conscious mind, or are they something that I decode in another dimension of reality which ‘bleed’ through in my sleep-state decoding process into this reality for a few seconds before they fade and dissolve as my conscious mind kicks it and locks fully into ‘awaked’ reality?
I have often experienced a loud ‘bang’ at the end of a dream and then another loud bang a second later as I open my eyes in this reality. I have the feeling of crossing through something when this happens. The human body-mind is a potential interface or gateway between many dimensions of reality and can bring through phenomena from one reality to another. It is also the case that electromagnetic projections from another reality into the realm of the conscious mind can do the same.
Whiskey and Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
December 19, 2011
Auburn, Alabama, U.S.A.
Do You Love Commerce?
But do we show commerce the love it deserves? Not really. We take it all for granted, as if it were a fixed part of the universe and invulnerable to attack. This is most obvious when you see people who are downright nasty to store clerks and stores. True, it's their right: A feature of the market is that you don't have to trade with anyone in particular, much less be nice to them. Part of the job description of working in a retail environment is to put up with difficult customers. And there are plenty.
Yet it still troubles me when people are so dismissive of how the commercial marketplace is deferential to the masses of consumers and all their quirks. If you don't like something, why not refrain from buying and walk away? Why hurl invective or behave in a rude way?
In a sports store the other day, I heard customers muttering that this glove is too expensive, this tennis racket is too tightly strung, this shoe is too gaudy, this exercise equipment is not all it says and that the store should carry this not that brand of ball. Most people are happy, else the place could not be in business, but other people (again, it is their right) just assume that it is their right to dislike, refuse, cut down, put down and generally dismiss any merchant with a wave of their hand.
Compare with the scene at airport security. This same class of citizens marches in lock step as it approaches security, everyone with a bit of fear, with lots of annoyance, but with a face made as emotionless as possible. Everyone permits himself or herself to be subjected to invasive searches, relents to a full-body X-ray photograph, holds their tongue -- even when subjected to barking orders from the TSA -- and even allows property to be confiscated from personal bags.
No one dares utter a word of protest or even complaint for fear of landing in the slammer. The goal is just to get to the other side of the government barrier, where the mini utopia of airport commerce awaits to serve us in a real way. We can shop for tchotchkes, shoes or bags or have a great lunch -- and that hamburger and beer had better be served up immediately, else we will demand our rights!
We are masters of the universe as customers and as compliant as lambs when acting as citizens. And perhaps that's easy to understand. The government has a gun pointing at our heads. The merchant is trying to persuade us to part with our money in exchange for goods and services. One won't take no for an answer; the other sees no as part of daily life.
Still, we should be more conscious of the difference and appreciate what it means. The class of people who have chosen the path of persuasion over coercion are deserving of our gratitude, even when we don't buy from them. The merchant class is that which makes everything possible in our lives: our homes, our food, our medical care, our clothing, our air conditioning, our computers, our music listening -- absolutely everything that makes daily life tolerable and joyful.
We are too often tempted to think that the gas station, the drugstore, the restaurant, the fast-food franchise and the mommy-owned cupcake bakery are just given parts of the structure of our world. They are not. The decision to open a business is absolutely wrenching because the risk of failure is so high. The future is unknown in either a macroeconomic (will the economy collapse with falling incomes?) or microeconomic sense (maybe no one really wants to buy my stuff). Often, it involves cashing out retirement savings or being in hock to the banks. No matter what the business plan, it is scary.
And it's not only about money. You end up buying lots of capital equipment that is not easily converted to other uses or sold at anywhere near the price you bought it. Custom chairs, tables, signs and other decorations are all a pure waste if the business doesn't work.
Then there is the issue of people. You have to hire employees, and they must get paid long before the point of profitability arrives -- if it ever does. You are suddenly responsible for them.
You call yourself "boss," but you know the truth. You are responsible, but not really the boss. The bosses are the consumers, whose fickle ways can make or break your new livelihood. You are completely at their mercy.
Then there is the issue of marketing. You believe in your product, but you can't do it all yourself. You have to hire others to push, market and sell. It is necessarily true that these people you hire are not as strong in their belief in your good or service as you are. They must be a "salesperson" of fame -- someone hired to be excited and interested in the craft, but who is most often more interested in other things.
Never underestimate the problem of inventory, which requires daily entrepreneurial judgments. If you are selling plywood, for example, and your first month's sales are far beyond your expectations, your battles have just begun. You must make a judgment about next month's inventory. Buy too much and you squander all your profits. Buy too little and you lose customers, who never come back. Your guesses must be close to correct all the time. But you have no crystal ball. And this problem never goes away: Whether you succeed or fail, you never know whether more success or failure is around the corner.
Then there's the competition. Anyone is free to copy and replicate your successes. The more you succeed, the more you inspire imitators who are pleased to do exactly what you do but somehow manage to do it at a lower price. This means that you must constantly stay on your toes and innovate. At the same time, you have to always watch your back. A bad day of sales could mean nothing, or it could mean everything. It could be a bump on the road to glory or the foreshadowing of disaster. There's no way to know for sure.
The forces of competition in a dynamic market are constantly working to take away your future successes. For the currently successful business, the market system amounts to a giant conspiracy to reduce your profits to zero. The only way to fight back is to serve others with ever more attention to excellence. If you think it is easy, try it yourself.
No matter how much your plans work out, there is nothing you can really count on for the future. Any day, any hour, it could all dry up. The consumers could go away. Fashions could change. The tastes of the spending class could shift. You are utterly and completely dependent on the subjective whims of everyone else. No matter how much determination you have, in the end, you just can't control what others think or do. This is as true of the lemonade stand as it is of Amazon.com. No matter how big you get, no amount of money can buy a reliable fortuneteller.
Why does anyone do it? Why does anyone become a merchant or an entrepreneur? The usual rap is that people are in it for the money. But there is no bucket of money to grab. The money may or may not be there. And when it is there, it usually ends up being poured back into the business itself in order to stay on top.
So why do people do it? It has to do with the dream of success, the hope of making a difference, the living out of a vocation, the fulfillment of an ambition to serve and make a difference. This is what drives the entrepreneur.
And how do we repay them? We snarl and sneer, refuse to buy, criticize at the slightest misstep and otherwise refuse to give them credit for anything at all. We call them greedy and dismiss their pleas to buy as craven marketing. The state hectors these people with regulations, taxes, mandates and impositions far greater than the rest of us experience, yet people call ever more.
Often the merchant class is treated now as it was in the ancient world: as lowly and unfit. Yet here's the truth: The merchant class is the class that brings us all the things we love the most. We depend on them, and they depend on us.
People living in the age of the leviathan state often feel powerless to do anything about the state of the world. I would suggest that one way to fight against the takeover of society by the state and its minions is to show a greater appreciation of their opposite. We should show love to the merchant class. We should begin by intellectually appreciating what they do for us. We should go further to actually say to the merchants how highly we regard their vocation.
To be sure, not all merchants are deserving of praise. Some are living off the state, lobbying for state favors, profiting from monopolies, pushing for regulations to hurt their competitors and the like. These things are made possible by the moral hazard that the state embodies; they were not created by the institution of commerce itself.
Managing our affections is one way to fight back against the encroachments of the state. We need to show love to the things and the people doing what is best for society and providing a model for others to follow. The model and ideal of the kind of peaceful and prosperous society we want to live in might be as close as the convenience store right down the street.
| The Daily Reckoning Presents | ||
| The Idea of America | ||
We wonder: do we even remember what it means to be free? If not — and I think not — The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost (hardcover and Kindle), a collection of bracing reminders from our past, as edited by William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux, is the essential book of our time. I’ll just mention two outrages that occur first to me. In the last six months, I came back to the country twice from international travel, once by plane and once by car. The car scene shocked me. The lines were ridiculously long and border control agents, clad in dark glasses and boots and wearing enough weaponry to fight an invading army, run up and down the lines with large dogs. Periodically, US border control would throw open doors of cars and vans and let the dogs run through, while the driver sits there poker faced and trying to stay calm and pretending not to object. When I finally got to the customs window, I was questioned not like a citizen of the country but like a likely terrorist. The agent wanted to know everything about me: home, work, where I had been and why, and whether I will stay somewhere before getting to my destination, family composition, and other matters that just creeped me out. I realized immediately that there was no question he could ask me that I could refuse to answer, and I had to do this politely. That’s power. The second time I entered the country was by plane, and there were two full rescans of bags on the way in, in addition to the passport check, and a long round of questioning. There were no running dogs this time; the passengers were the dogs and we were all on the agents’ leashes. Whatever they ordered us to do, we did, no matter how irrational. We moved here and there in locked step and total silence. One step out of line and you are guaranteed to be yelled at. At one point, an armed agent began to talk loudly and with a sense of ridicule about the clothes I was wearing, and went out of his way to make sure everyone else heard him. I could do nothing but smile as if I were being complimented by a friend. That’s power. Of course these cases are nothing like the reports you hear almost daily about the abuse and outrages from domestic travel, which now routinely requires everyone to submit to digital strip searches. We have come to expect this. We can hardly escape the presence of the police in our lives. I vaguely remember when I was young that I thought of the police as servants of the people. Now their presence strikes fear in the heart, and they are everywhere, always operating under the presumption that they have total power and you and I have absolutely none. You hear slogans about the “land of the free” and we still sing patriotic songs at the ballpark and even at church on Sunday, and these songs are always about our blessed liberty, the battles of our ancestors against tyranny, the special love of liberty that animates our heritage and national self identity. The contrast with reality grows starker by the day. And it isn’t just about our personal liberty and our freedom to move about with a sense that we are exercising our rights. It hits us in the economic realm, where no goods or services change hands that aren’t subject to the total control of the leviathan state. No business is really safe from being bludgeoned by legislatures, regulators, and the tax police, while objecting only makes you more of a target. Few dare say it publicly: America has become a police state. All the signs are in place, among which is the world’s largest prison population. If we are not a police state, one must ask, what are the indicators that will tell us that we’ve crossed the line? What are signs we haven’t yet seen? We can debate that all day about when, precisely, the descent began but there can be no doubt when the slide into the despotic abyss became precipitous. It was after the terrorists hit on 9/11 in 2001. The terrorists wanted to deliver a blow to freedom. Our national leaders swore the terrorists would never win, and then spent the following ten years delivering relentless and massive blows to liberty as we had known it. The decline has been fast but not fast enough for people to be as shocked as they should be. Freedom is a state of being that is difficult to recall once it is gone. We adapt to the new reality, the way people adapt to degenerative diseases, grateful for slight respites from pain and completely despairing of ever feeling healthy and well again. What’s more, all the time we spend obeying, complying, and pretending to be malleable in order to stay out of trouble ends up socializing us and even changing our outlook on life. As in the Orwell novel, we have adjusted to government control as the new normal. The loudspeakers blared that all of this is in the interest of our security and well being. These people who are stripping us, robbing us, humiliating us, impoverishing us are doing it all for our own good. We never fully believe it but the message still affects our outlook. The editors of The Idea of America are urging a serious national self assessment. They argue that freedom is the only theme that fully and truly animates the traditional American spirit. We are not united in religion, race, and creed, but we do have this wonderful history of rebellion against power in favor of human rights and freedom from tyranny. For this reason the book begins with the essential founding documents, which, if taken seriously, make a case for radical freedom not as something granted by government but as something that we possess as a matter of right. The love of liberty is rooted in our Colonial past, and it is thrilling to see Murray Rothbard’s excellent account of the pre- revolutionary past printed here, with followups to make the point by Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. Lord Acton makes the next appearance with a clarifying essay about the whole point of the American Revolution, which was not independence as such but liberty. He forcefully argues that the right of secession, the right to annul laws, the right to say no to the tyrant, the right to leave the system, constitute great contribution of America to political history. As you read, you wonder where these voices are today, and what would happen to them if they spoke up in modern versions of the same thoughts. These revolutionaries are pushing ideas that the modern regime seeks to bury and even criminalize. The voice of the new country and its voluntaristic themes is provided by Alexis de Tocqueville, along with the writings of James Madison. As Bonner and Lemieux argue in their own contributions, the idea of anarchism, that is, living without a state, has always been just beneath the surface of American ideology. Here they bring it to the surface with an essay by proto-anarchist J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, who said of America: “we have no princes for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.” The anarchist strain continues with marvelous writings by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Volairine de Cleyre, plus some court decisions reinforcing gun rights. The book ends with another reminder that America is an open society that is welcoming to newcomers. The final choice of Rose Wilder Lane’s “Give Me Liberty” is inspired. The value of this book is dramatically heightened by the additional material from Bonner, whose clear prose and incisive intellect is on display here both in the foreword and the afterword, as well as Lemieux, whose introduction made my blood boil with all his examples of government gone mad in our time. Bonner in particular offers an intriguing possibility that the future of the true America has nothing to do with geography; it exists where the free minds and free hearts exist. The digitization of the world opens up new opportunities for just this. The contrast is stark: what America was meant to be and what it has become. It is hard to take this kind of careful look. Truly honest appraisals of this sort are rare. Adapting, going along, pretending not to notice are all easier strategies to deal with the grim situation we face. But this is not the way America’s founders dealt with their problems. This book might inspire us to think and act more like we should. We should prepare. In the words of Thomas Paine: O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. — Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. |
Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an Athiest
Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.
[UPDATE: For more from Gervais, go to Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions]
Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.
Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”
This, is of course a spirituality issue, religion is a different matter. As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it. (Don’t murder anyone, doesn’t get a mention till number 6.)
When confronted with anyone who holds my lack of religious faith in such contempt, I say, “It’s the way God made me.”
But what are atheists really being accused of?
The dictionary definition of God is “a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe.” Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6,000 years ago, historians have cataloged over 3700 supernatural beings, of which 2870 can be considered deities.
So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say “Oh which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra?…” If they say “Just God. I only believe in the one God,” I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869.
I used to believe in God. The Christian one that is.
I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him.
One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.
I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing on the cross.
I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God -– what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.
But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.
Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.
Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.
But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.
So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f— you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine.
“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is -‐ a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”
You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.
Peace, love, and happiness...until next time...
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