Overall, I believe the single most important wisdom is to know the life and teachings of a particular Jewish carpenter, one of the most influential human beings in all of history at minimum, and much more than this to millions of others, including me.
But what I want to write about right now is the second most important thing to know, the penultimate in timeless importance. Its subject is something virtually everyone strives for -- though it was relatively unimportant to the aforementioned great rabbi -- but almost no one understands.
People think about it even more than they think about sex. And those who have mastered its accumulation find that it even helps guarantee them a good sex life. Or almost anything else they want.
It's said that the only thing you can't get with it is love. This is almost certainly true, but it's also true that if you have lots of it, you are better able to show love to others.
Yes, we're talking about the root of all possibilities: filthy old lucre.
While my lifestyle proves that I have not devoted a great deal of time, attention, and effort to acquiring money, it is something that I have thought a lot about. The problem is that I haven't been able to think very deeply about it.
It has always been a great mystery to me, as well as to many others. Where does it come from, I've wondered. Just what is it?
I have not been alone in my ignorance. No one seemed to know any more about it really than I did. Some people knew enough about how to get it. But they seemed to me to be more like good drivers rather than automotive engineers. They knew something about how but did not waste their time worrying about why.
Despite all the mental effort, I have not been able to figure it out, nor have any of the thinkers and writers I've looked to had anything that I found worthwhile to say about it.
Until recently.
Suddenly, I have stumbled across two or three or more writers who seem to know a lot about it indeed!
Now I feel like I understand something about money. I have a clearer sense of what it is. And I know where it comes from. I know how it is made, and I know who makes it.
The people I've discovered who seem to understand money and its origin are Silvio Gesell, an unconventional and dead 19th century economist, Bernard Lietaer, a highly successful currency speculator, professor, author of The Future of Money and co-creator of the Euro, and Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of The Web of Debt.
I have this feeling that I might have learned more about money than I wanted to know. The creation of money is no more elegant a process than making of sausages and laws.
The most troubling thing I've learned is that the nearly universal ignorance about money has allowed a tiny elite who do know something about how money is created to gain enormous power over the rest of humanity. This is a very frightening discovery.
Clearly, this elite is incredibly powerful, and I rather imagine that they do not really welcome public scrutiny. It's said that the devil's first trick is to make us think that he does not exist.
So those who rule the world by manipulating its currencies have at least one thing in common with the forces of darkness.
In my next post, I will share some of what I've been learning about this topic, a subject that people need to understand if humanity is ever to enjoy the prosperity and power destiny intends.
If I disappear before then, at least you know who dunnit.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Sunday, September 21, 2008
We are at war!
Our nation is at war, fighting for the survival of freedom and democracy, but the vast majority of Americans don’t seem to get it. We are in the fight of our life, battling with an implacable foe who hates everything our country stands for. They hate who we are, what we believe, and they want us dead and every memory of our society destroyed.
The plain and simple truth is that more devastating attacks like the Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are a real possibility. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that future incidents like this are a near certainty.
As you read these words, Islamic terrorists are planning, plotting, and preparing new and more dreadful attacks on our homeland. This is not a paranoid fantasy: this is reality.
But our countrymen seem to want to turn away from this unpleasant reality. They would rather not think about such things. While our troops leave their blood on the sands of the Middle East, we hide our head in the sand. We seem to want to ignore the frightening fact that only the unrelenting guardianship of our troops fighting on foreign shores is what has kept more and worse attacks from happening in our own towns and cities.
A natural consequence of this avoidance behavior is that we have forgotten our fallen heroes, those who paid the price for the security we have enjoyed thus far since 9/11. If the public can’t even keep in mind that our nation is at war, it is unrealistic to expect them to remember the men who fought and bled in that war.
Well, WE remember and we are here to do our best to make them remember as well.
www.ourfinest.org
The plain and simple truth is that more devastating attacks like the Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are a real possibility. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that future incidents like this are a near certainty.
As you read these words, Islamic terrorists are planning, plotting, and preparing new and more dreadful attacks on our homeland. This is not a paranoid fantasy: this is reality.
But our countrymen seem to want to turn away from this unpleasant reality. They would rather not think about such things. While our troops leave their blood on the sands of the Middle East, we hide our head in the sand. We seem to want to ignore the frightening fact that only the unrelenting guardianship of our troops fighting on foreign shores is what has kept more and worse attacks from happening in our own towns and cities.
A natural consequence of this avoidance behavior is that we have forgotten our fallen heroes, those who paid the price for the security we have enjoyed thus far since 9/11. If the public can’t even keep in mind that our nation is at war, it is unrealistic to expect them to remember the men who fought and bled in that war.
Well, WE remember and we are here to do our best to make them remember as well.
www.ourfinest.org
Saturday, September 20, 2008
All welcome except those who matter most
I'm unhappy about the "No dogs or soldiers allowed" signs on our campuses.
If you are a college student or a law school student in America today, you are unlikely to know just how remarkable your peers who serve in the military are. Worse yet, your college administrators deny you the opportunity to decide for yourself whether or not you'd like to join their ranks. The Ivory Tower academic elitists in many of America's most "prestigious" colleges and universities today are waging war against the military and working to keep recruiters off of their campuses.
The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering a case in which "elite" universities are suing the Pentagon to keep military recruiters off their campuses so they don't "corrupt" the academic environment. Their beef is a federal statute originally passed in 1994 known as the "Solomon Amendment" which provides that federal funding may be withheld from institutions of higher
education that refuse military recruiters the same opportunities afforded to recruiters from other companies.
Thirty-one law schools have joined under the banner of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, claiming that they are being forced by the Solomon Amendment to "actively support military recruiters" who engage in "discriminatory hiring practices." The target of their protest, they claim, is the Clinton administration's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward open
homosexual service in the military. In other words, it is the powerful homosexual lobby who is damaging the ability of our military to recruit the troops we need to defend democracy.
In fact, colleges and universities have been trying to keep military recruiters and ROTC programs off campus for decades. Harvard, the school leading the charge against the Solomon Amendment, banished ROTC in 1969, forcing cadets to walk across town to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past 36 years. Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Brown are among many other institutions that have shunned ROTC for decades.
Today's military relies on educated individuals joining the ranks as surgeons, JAG lawyers, chaplains and engineers. These vital roles could more easily and efficiently be filled, but for the bitter opposition on campuses by elitist professors, students and administrators.
Ironically, their freedom to protest is defended by the very people they are protesting. And, in so doing, they are spreading ill will toward who defend democracy.
It's more than a shame that the best and bravest of your young people – honorable, decent, caring, compassionate and heroic people -- aren't welcomed on America's college campuses.
I’m ashamed that my own alma mater, Stanford, is so unwelcoming to the self sacrificing heroes who defend the university’s status as a temple of free and open intellectual exploration.
www.ourfinest.org
If you are a college student or a law school student in America today, you are unlikely to know just how remarkable your peers who serve in the military are. Worse yet, your college administrators deny you the opportunity to decide for yourself whether or not you'd like to join their ranks. The Ivory Tower academic elitists in many of America's most "prestigious" colleges and universities today are waging war against the military and working to keep recruiters off of their campuses.
The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering a case in which "elite" universities are suing the Pentagon to keep military recruiters off their campuses so they don't "corrupt" the academic environment. Their beef is a federal statute originally passed in 1994 known as the "Solomon Amendment" which provides that federal funding may be withheld from institutions of higher
education that refuse military recruiters the same opportunities afforded to recruiters from other companies.
Thirty-one law schools have joined under the banner of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, claiming that they are being forced by the Solomon Amendment to "actively support military recruiters" who engage in "discriminatory hiring practices." The target of their protest, they claim, is the Clinton administration's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward open
homosexual service in the military. In other words, it is the powerful homosexual lobby who is damaging the ability of our military to recruit the troops we need to defend democracy.
In fact, colleges and universities have been trying to keep military recruiters and ROTC programs off campus for decades. Harvard, the school leading the charge against the Solomon Amendment, banished ROTC in 1969, forcing cadets to walk across town to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past 36 years. Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Brown are among many other institutions that have shunned ROTC for decades.
Today's military relies on educated individuals joining the ranks as surgeons, JAG lawyers, chaplains and engineers. These vital roles could more easily and efficiently be filled, but for the bitter opposition on campuses by elitist professors, students and administrators.
Ironically, their freedom to protest is defended by the very people they are protesting. And, in so doing, they are spreading ill will toward who defend democracy.
It's more than a shame that the best and bravest of your young people – honorable, decent, caring, compassionate and heroic people -- aren't welcomed on America's college campuses.
I’m ashamed that my own alma mater, Stanford, is so unwelcoming to the self sacrificing heroes who defend the university’s status as a temple of free and open intellectual exploration.
www.ourfinest.org
Friday, September 19, 2008
Can America be Saved?
I'm working on a speech about our nation's future. I'm worried about it. The country, not the speech. The following is a first draft; it's discovery writing, so I am not totally sure I mean anything quite so confidently as I seem to state. This is really an exploration of how I feel and what I think about the American national destiny.
This is the only way I know how to create. I have to sort of go over the top initially and then review it when passion has subsided. Writing is an emotional event for me. The writing is not so much writing per se as just keeping track of and making a record of my experience as I ponder ideas.
So, if I rub you the wrong way, sorry. Do let me know where I have erred.
Can America be Saved?
Have we lost our way? Have we forgotten our identity? Do we lack the
courage to be who we truly are?
I fear so. Today, we seem unable or unwilling to defend our borders, to enforce our laws, to protect our currency, to defeat Islamic terror, to teach our children how to read, write and think, to balance our budget or grow our economy. We can’t even take care of our seniors, who – despite years paying into Medicare and Social Security -- are burdened with a retirement system that must collapse within the next ten years.
We are experiencing the loss of our nation. America, by following government leaders who lack vision, is on the verge of tumbling into the ash pit of history. The most daring and successful social experiment in history is on the point of collapse. Like lemmings, we are marching mindlessly to our own doom.
We are standing idly by and allowing the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history to disintegrate. It’s not just the destruction of a nation with the highest standard of living ever achieved – although to the privileged elite who are destroying us that will be the central concern – it’s the death of the only nation in history which has sought not to expand as an
empire but to spread the blessings of freedom throughout the earth. The death of America is not just our loss, it is the world’s loss.
All humanity loses if America falls. The world’s greatest font of freedom is drying up and the flame held aloft by Liberty gutters and dims as darkness, gloom, fear and oppression gather around the failing light.
We are failing not only ourselves and the rest of the world but our children and their children – all posterity shall suffer. A thousand years shall pass before another such nation will rise.
If we allow this tragedy to occur, the United States of America will be a mere footnote in the pages of history, a note about a well meaning but failed enterprise. It was a country with great ideals but which proved incapable of the continuous renewing of devotion to those ideals which is the condition of continued greatness. Historians will reflect on an America that might have
been.
If we allow our country to fail, we are betraying both our future and our past. Think of the sacrifices of the amazing individuals who founded this nation.
Think of the blood spilled, the pain endured, all in vain, because we proved unfit to sustain the blessings passed on to us by our fathers. What a betrayal!
And what explains this vast faltering, this colossal failure? How do we go from the world’s essential superpower to a pale and feckless shadow of former greatness in the space of a single lifetime?
America stumbles and falls because of a failure of courage, a failure of will, a failure of vision. We have chosen leaders incapable of grandeur. In the great parade of human events, the mighty outmarching of destiny, they are organ grinders and clowns, charlatans and fools prancing and posturing while pretending to lead while fomenting the disintegration of the greatest nation in history, the loss of humanity’s last best hope.
Here and there appears a man of truth, but we have been betrayed by our leaders. They are cowards.
They are unwilling or unable to face frankly the frightening reality that the world tomorrow is missing freedom’s great champion. Some speak the truth – in whispers, in private – but above all they want the end to come on someone else’s watch. So, they wheedle and deal and compromise and prevaricate, speak not the full truth nor name honestly the dangers which
threaten our national survival.
One thing is certain: America shall survive only if she deserves to survive. And where is the evidence of our national merit today? What ideals do we yet represent? Is there a reason for our flag to fly proudly? Have we a cause our young men will rush forward to fight and die for?
Can we yet claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? I pray it is so, but I fear it is not.
The cost of freedom is the blood of the brave. If we fail to instill in the hearts of our young an unquenchable love for freedom and a deep yearning to live lives of truth, America must die. If we give them nothing worth dying for, they will have nothing to live for.
If we fail to give our youth an understanding of the greatness of our past, America has no future.
If we fail to sustain the nation of laws with which we were blessed by our forebears, then we leave our posterity not a gleaming temple of law but a black pit of chaos and doom.
The choice is ours. Who are we as a people? The ultimate consequence of our future revolves around the question of our identity. Who are we? Do we care enough to be courageous? Shall we betray our birthright? Or shall we rise up and show the world the goodness and might of a united people deserving to bear the name, American. The future of freedom is at our feet. We have but to dare to pick up that bright sword, lift up that shining beacon and show a world that needs us that America is not to die, not today. Not any day while men will lay down their life in the cause of freedom.
So, what do you think?
www.ourfinest.org
This is the only way I know how to create. I have to sort of go over the top initially and then review it when passion has subsided. Writing is an emotional event for me. The writing is not so much writing per se as just keeping track of and making a record of my experience as I ponder ideas.
So, if I rub you the wrong way, sorry. Do let me know where I have erred.
Can America be Saved?
Have we lost our way? Have we forgotten our identity? Do we lack the
courage to be who we truly are?
I fear so. Today, we seem unable or unwilling to defend our borders, to enforce our laws, to protect our currency, to defeat Islamic terror, to teach our children how to read, write and think, to balance our budget or grow our economy. We can’t even take care of our seniors, who – despite years paying into Medicare and Social Security -- are burdened with a retirement system that must collapse within the next ten years.
We are experiencing the loss of our nation. America, by following government leaders who lack vision, is on the verge of tumbling into the ash pit of history. The most daring and successful social experiment in history is on the point of collapse. Like lemmings, we are marching mindlessly to our own doom.
We are standing idly by and allowing the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history to disintegrate. It’s not just the destruction of a nation with the highest standard of living ever achieved – although to the privileged elite who are destroying us that will be the central concern – it’s the death of the only nation in history which has sought not to expand as an
empire but to spread the blessings of freedom throughout the earth. The death of America is not just our loss, it is the world’s loss.
All humanity loses if America falls. The world’s greatest font of freedom is drying up and the flame held aloft by Liberty gutters and dims as darkness, gloom, fear and oppression gather around the failing light.
We are failing not only ourselves and the rest of the world but our children and their children – all posterity shall suffer. A thousand years shall pass before another such nation will rise.
If we allow this tragedy to occur, the United States of America will be a mere footnote in the pages of history, a note about a well meaning but failed enterprise. It was a country with great ideals but which proved incapable of the continuous renewing of devotion to those ideals which is the condition of continued greatness. Historians will reflect on an America that might have
been.
If we allow our country to fail, we are betraying both our future and our past. Think of the sacrifices of the amazing individuals who founded this nation.
Think of the blood spilled, the pain endured, all in vain, because we proved unfit to sustain the blessings passed on to us by our fathers. What a betrayal!
And what explains this vast faltering, this colossal failure? How do we go from the world’s essential superpower to a pale and feckless shadow of former greatness in the space of a single lifetime?
America stumbles and falls because of a failure of courage, a failure of will, a failure of vision. We have chosen leaders incapable of grandeur. In the great parade of human events, the mighty outmarching of destiny, they are organ grinders and clowns, charlatans and fools prancing and posturing while pretending to lead while fomenting the disintegration of the greatest nation in history, the loss of humanity’s last best hope.
Here and there appears a man of truth, but we have been betrayed by our leaders. They are cowards.
They are unwilling or unable to face frankly the frightening reality that the world tomorrow is missing freedom’s great champion. Some speak the truth – in whispers, in private – but above all they want the end to come on someone else’s watch. So, they wheedle and deal and compromise and prevaricate, speak not the full truth nor name honestly the dangers which
threaten our national survival.
One thing is certain: America shall survive only if she deserves to survive. And where is the evidence of our national merit today? What ideals do we yet represent? Is there a reason for our flag to fly proudly? Have we a cause our young men will rush forward to fight and die for?
Can we yet claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? I pray it is so, but I fear it is not.
The cost of freedom is the blood of the brave. If we fail to instill in the hearts of our young an unquenchable love for freedom and a deep yearning to live lives of truth, America must die. If we give them nothing worth dying for, they will have nothing to live for.
If we fail to give our youth an understanding of the greatness of our past, America has no future.
If we fail to sustain the nation of laws with which we were blessed by our forebears, then we leave our posterity not a gleaming temple of law but a black pit of chaos and doom.
The choice is ours. Who are we as a people? The ultimate consequence of our future revolves around the question of our identity. Who are we? Do we care enough to be courageous? Shall we betray our birthright? Or shall we rise up and show the world the goodness and might of a united people deserving to bear the name, American. The future of freedom is at our feet. We have but to dare to pick up that bright sword, lift up that shining beacon and show a world that needs us that America is not to die, not today. Not any day while men will lay down their life in the cause of freedom.
So, what do you think?
www.ourfinest.org
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