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The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

July 22, 2015

The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” –Sun Tzu

“It is useless to fight against people’s rigid ways, or to argue against their irrational concepts. You will only waste time and make yourself rigid in the process. The best strategy is to simply accept rigidity in others, outwardly displaying deference to their need for order. On your own, however, you must work to maintain your open spirit, letting go of bad habits and deliberately cultivating new ideas.” –Robert Greene

Imagine you are back in high school and a bully starts making fun of you in front of everyone. What do you do? Poke fun back? Cry? Run? Punch him in the face? What? The answer is none of the above.

The best way to deal with a bully who is making fun of you is to make fun of yourself better than the bully did. The worst way to deal with a bully is to retaliate. This is because retaliation perpetuates the bully’s agenda and leads to violence, whereas making fun of yourself uses self-deprecating humor to derail the bully’s agenda while forcing the bully into a confused psychosocial dilemma. It’s a power-play, and it’s all psychological. The bully expects you to poke fun back at him, or cry, or run, or throw a punch; anything but you making fun of yourself. And if you can do it better than the bully did, then bully for you. Pun intended.

Like Carlos Castaneda said:

“Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid… Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone… The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Financial Shenanigans Should Have Trained Me For This

July 18, 2015

Financial Shenanigans Should Have Trained Me For This

So there I was, caught in a bramble of sharp blackberry thorns coming from every direction. I’d been snagged first by the swooping thorn from high up that caught my hair, then by two more barbed branches that grabbed my pants and arm as I tried to retreat. Having left the house in an overconfident manner, thinking it was like any other day, I had no urgency to remember my phone, a sidearm or my small pruning shears to cut my way out. Cog was at work and there was no one for miles to hear me scream should the black bear come by for a late blackberry lunch.

Obviously I survived to tell the tale, but not without several important lessons learned which I would like to share with you all today.

Just as people save and invest for their retirement down the road, we seek to store our picked berries by jamming or freezing them for the winter months ahead. Like the banks and government agencies, there are many middle level workers whose job it is to tend to the ecosystem of blackberry growth who never intend to harm another. They are simply doing their job. The spider who resides in the berry patch and eats the smaller bugs which would decimate the berries was just doing what he does when he bit me.

In life it is not the sole fault of bank tellers or courthouse clerks that the systems of banking and government morphed into something we don’t want. Sure, these employees help hold up the system by working where they do, but no more than we ourselves support the beast with banking business to transact and payment of local tax and municipal bills. Like the aggressive bugs in the berry thickets, we ultimately all want to get through the performance of our respective roles there and fulfill our goals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

The Individual and His Future

July 15, 2015

The Individual and His Future

“It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive thinkers to the margins of society. You can see what has been painted over, with great intent, in order to promote tyranny that proclaims a greater good for all.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Here I present several statements about the individual, written in 19th century America. The authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper were prominent figures. Emerson, in his time, was the most famous.

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.” James Fenimore Cooper

“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Henry David Thoreau

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

When Money Dies

July 14, 2015

When Money Dies

“When Money Dies” is the title of a 1975 book by Adam Fergusson, in which he describes the downfall of the Reichsmark in Weimar Germany. A fascinating look at that period of history, one can glean quite a few useful pieces of advice on how to survive a currency crisis. But “when money dies” could also describe the current currency crisis in Greece, in which many Greeks seem to have taken those lessons from Fergusson’s account of the Weimar hyperinflation to heart.

Even though the Greek currency crisis isn’t a traditional hyperinflationary crisis, many Greeks are trying to get their hands on, and then spend, cash. One of the fears is that bank depositors will be forced to take losses on their accounts, the so-called “haircut”. This happened in Cyprus to some larger depositors, but the fear in Greece is that people with even just a few thousand euros in their accounts might be forced to take losses of 30-50% or more. Just imagine that you have $10,000 in your bank account and overnight the government says, “Sorry, your account balance is now $5,000.” Overnight, the purchasing power of your bank account has been cut in half.

Pensioners try to get a number to enter a bank to get part of their pensions in Athens. 7-1-15. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)
Pensioners try to get a number to enter a bank to get part of their pensions in Athens. 7-1-15. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

So even though the government isn’t printing more money (yet!), the fear of a 50% devaluation of the purchasing power of bank accounts is causing Greeks to line up at ATMs to withdraw money. And because there is the additional fear that Greece may exit the euro, with unknown consequences, many people seek to convert their euros into tangible goods. Shoes, handbags, refrigerators, gold, jewelry, anything that can maintain value and be resold or bartered is fair game for those desperate not to lose all of their hard-earned savings.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE GREAT TPP DEATHTRAP FOR INDIA, CHINA & 10 OTHER MEMBER-NATIONS

June 29, 2015

The Great TPP Deathtrap for India, China & 10 Other Member-Nations

The Terms of Destruction. The Clues are all there in Obamatrade and Obamacare.

The truth emerges out of the shadows of secrecy…

Let’s start here. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade treaty, coming down the homestretch toward ratification, involving 12 nations which account for a staggering 40% of the world’s GDP. The TPP encompasses 775 million consumers.

Waiting in the wings is something much larger. It is the intention, up the road, to fold India and China into the treaty.

China is the most populous nation in the world. 1.4 billion people. India is the second most populous. 1.28 billion people. India is projected to overtake and pass China by 2025.

During his seven years in office, the most publicly recognizable PR man in the world, Barack Obama, has sweated and hammered on two policies. Just two. He is now in a panic over forcing one of those: the TPP. The other one was Obamacare. That’s it. Everything else was a Sunday picnic in the park.

Obamacare, the US national health insurance plan, when you strip it down to basics, was about one thing: bowing to drug companies.

It brought huge numbers of new people, previously uninsured, into the game. Meaning those people would be able to take the drugs—and the prices for those drugs would remain high.

So it is with the TPP, as it turns out. One of the major priorities is forcing member countries to accept higher pricing on medical drugs. Which was exactly the deal in Obamacare. Big Pharma backed Obamacare for the express purpose of cutting out debates about lowering costs on drugs.

In that respect, Obamacare and the TPP are mirror images of each other.

One other vital detail: the TPP will also allow pharmaceutical companies to push drugs and force them into markets where, ordinarily, they could be rejected as unsafe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

An Accidental Trip to the Apothecary

June 8, 2015

An Accidental Trip to the Apothecary 

I confess…..every so often I manufacture an important excuse to get off the mountain. Our household joke is for me to “air out” once a month whether I need it or not lol. Recently it was time once again.

My vital task that morning was to hit the nurseries for final fruit and vegetable flats now that the early planting season was almost over. The recent cold nights had zapped the delicate cantaloupe seedlings I had planted and several red cabbage had succumbed to what I now think was a nitrogen deficiency, sigh. Armed with limited cash so as not to overspend, I set out for a leisurely drive down the mountain.

The drop of elevation from our mountain top homestead is severe enough for my destination to be three weeks ahead of us in the summer growing season. If planned carefully, this is quite an advantage for me. I can transplant more mature plants for a longer productive period of time and thus a superior yield. Quite satisfied with my haul from the last nursery I wanted to visit, I pulled out onto the country road to head back home.

To my surprise there across the street was a small building with a few signs in the window, one of which read “Essential Oils”. My heart skipped a beat as I did a quick U-Turn and pulled into the parking lot. My mouth was probably hanging open in anticipation.

While the locals may be familiar with old-fashioned tried and true remedies passed down for generations, there were no distributors of natural health related items anywhere in this area of the VA/NC border. I have looked. Zilch, nada. Yet here I was parked in front of an interesting establishment with various signs indicating all sorts of goodies lie within.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

How to Transcend Duality and Think Within Paradoxes

June 4, 2015

How to Transcend Duality and Think Within Paradoxes

I read a few years ago somewhere that a hallmark of a genius is being able to hold opposites together and transcend duality. This stuck with me and over time I tried to make sense of it, because at first it was a very confusing concept. With some luck this concept began to make sense thanks to a random assortment of other things I read over the years following my discovery of this tidbit.

This train of thought has now become one of my favorite things to ponder. I feel it has taught me the dangers of holding onto apparent absolutes. Once you believe in something as an absolute, you are automatically precluding yourself from believing in the opposite, which means that in some ways a part of your freedom of thought as a human being is forfeited as a result. A good example of rising above these conventional kind of thoughts constructed with absolutes is the Wave-particle duality. I love this example because it is somewhat recent and shows the possible errors in absolutes and how they can prevent you from thinking “outside the box” so to speak.

Wave-particle duality is the concept that all matter and energy exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. Physicists argued for a long time whether light was a wave or a particle, and their insistence on their present beliefs prevented them from realizing the possibility that light could be both at the same time. While this is a very specific example, even using abstract thought experiments seems to work as well. Take these two opposites for example:

You are nothing. You are everything.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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