Etwas Furchtsame Warnungen von der Vergangenheit

From 1961, a short clip from former President Reagan before he was president. Back in those days, when we needed a doctor we just got in the car and went to his office, saw him and then were either billed or paid it then and there. When I was a very young child back in the '50s, I became seriously ill and wasn't expected to live. The doctor would come over to the house [whenever mom or dad called] to check up on me.

Those were also the days when the milkman would come into the house and put the milk in the fridge; the bakery truck would come 'round with all sorts of bread, including little lemon tarts for us kids.

I thought it instructive to hear that what is transpiring today isn't anything new to the United States - It's been tried before and addressed before, as you will hear in this clip. I'm posting it as another part of the national discussion we're having on what is being presented as "Reform".

Dieses Gerade Innen von Pravda

The following, published on 27 April, 2009, is from our friends at Pravda over in Mother Russia . . .

American Capitalism Gone With a Whimper . . .

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, losses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, . . . . and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

-Stanislav Mishin

Eine Schwingungsrückkehr

Große Göttin!

Wie lang ist er gewesen, da ich geschrieben habe?

It's been 3 months since my last entry. Well, never mind. Things have been a-poppin' around here, some good, some bad. We're still a one-income household but hopefully that will change with the upturn in the economy. We're holding our own but it is, after all, a matter of time. The last time this happened it happened to both of us and we did the only sensible thing given the circumstances: we went to the Swiss Alps to salve our wounds. Bernese Catharsis is highly underrated . . .

June will be a very busy month for me and partly for Himself: On the 18th we set out for Houston to see Cousin Deb and her family to celebrate her mom's 80th with a huge family reunion. Everyone is flying in from hither and yon, mostly yon, and we're driving there from Tampa. We'll stay with our dear friends in Santa Rosa, FL the first night and then ZOOM into Houston the next day. I booked us a room in Conroe, TX [where Jesus lost his other sandal] and we'll stay there through the following Sunday night. Drive back to Tampa via Santa Rosa, arriving home on the 23rd. I'll race to do laundry and then early on the morning of the 24th, I'm off, off, off to Kansas City and Parkville to attend Alumni Weekend - an event I've NEVER gone to before. Should be a hoot. I'm staying with a dear, dear friend who's the college archivist and she is just toooooo much fun. We have been best buds since college - 1968 - 1971 and off an on since then. Volumns could be writen about her and p'rolly will . . .

I'll stay there from Wednesday through Monday morning, flying back on the 30th.

I've begun composing again due to a request of another schoolmate of mine whose taken up the fiddle. I've missed writing and think it providential that she asked me to do it. There are many programs out there that provide ease and instant gratification for composition so it's been a fun and rewarding re-work of old whiles.

After a long period of personal threats to myself, longing to massage the Muse of Gardening, I broke down and bought a Brown Turkey Fig which has been duly planted in a beautiful "art" pot and, as I type, is just knocking itself out. It gets about 11 hours of sun a day out on our pool lanai and apparently is a happy little soldier. It was but a two-brancher baby when I bought it this Spring, but it's now going nuts. Can't wait for it to bear. My grandmother Tovey [mom's mother] had a fig tree in her backyard and I remember just standing there gorging myself on those lucious figs. And . . . . . the endless hours on the throne as payback for gluttony!

Favorite Bon Mot gleaned recently is this extracted and deleted scene from "The Secret", a film about the law of Attraction (Mentioned earlier in this blog). It's a sequence featuring Esther Hicks and it just blew me away. I've just never thought of putting the Universe in this sort of order before but it certainly does even the playing field and raise the expectation level of our own individual beings . . . . Paraphrased, here it is:

'We are vibrational translators. When we hear, we are translating vibrations. When we see, we are translating vibrations. When we taste, we are translating vibrations. When we touch, we are translating vibrations. When we smell, we are translating vibrations. When we 'feel emotions' as a result of intercourse with others or with a situation, we are translating vibrations.

We are amazing translating entities who need to realize that if we can do these miraculous translations, why can we not attract to us other vibrations {those which we desire/want/need} of which we can translate?'

That is astoundingly important. We are so good at attracting and translating (positively AND negatively) what is going on around us that we forget that we are masters of the Art of Translating and we can simply and easily attract the vibrations that we desire if only we request them, expect them and wait in anticipation of them.

Alles beste!

Persönliche Kreation und Sie

I belong to several online groups. Periodically, small but powerful shots of brilliance are fired across my bow and I just sit here and ponder over the beauty sent my way. The following is one of these. Please consider:


""At the end of knowledge there is a question that only imagination may answer."
-or alternately-
"At the end of learning there is a question that only the Artist may answer."

This so entranced me that I sent the author a reply that ran thus:

"When I was a piano teacher, years ago, I took over my mom's students after her passing. I used to tell them, as she had taught me, that music was just useless ink on a piece of paper. It was only after the pianist processed the notes into the BRAIN and then into the HEART that it could be sent to the fingers (which had the fore-knowledge through endless practice to execute) to play the REAL MUSIC the composer had written.

And that music that the composer had written is not, necessarily, the same thing he had intended. Each soul/musician brings a fresh 'take' on a piece of music that is intrinsically 'individual'. The manuscript is just that: a road map one is invited to follow: the 'end' of the map is not dictated.

So, your quotations are, to me, preaching to the choir. Right on the money. At the end of the day, our genius, our human-ness is what processes the raw data . . . . AND; since that is the case, we are all, indeed, artists in Creation."

You never know from whence genius will come, be it a fellow human, a flower, a hummingbird.

The message is an important one: It is only AFTER the labour of learning is done, and the act of mastering the specific lessons needed that one is set free to CREATE at WILL. Only with the due diligence of study and mastery of a subject, be it manual or intellectual, can one release it all and move on, secure in his/her mastery, to unlimited Creation.

We are the Stuff of Stars and we hold the Keys to the Universe within each of us. Creation is our Play, our Muse, our Fun. Get out there and stir something up . . . . .

Palm Beach & Fire

My beautiful sister, as you know from previous posts, is involved with an ashram out in Crestone, Colorado. This year, they had their semi-annual meeting in the Palm Beach area of Flahridah and I was invited to attend. Having a four-day weekend, I, of course, said yes!

It was wonderful. Great energy the evening preceding the Fire Ceremony. I stayed at a friend of my sisters home in Palm Beach, Fl. Thems of you who have heard/seen evidence of Palm Beach will be cheered to read that all the legends, pictures, images of Palm Beach fall sadly shy of reality. OMG! PB makes Beverly Hills and the Hamptons look like Section 8 housing.

Years ago, when Himself and I drove down 41 through Naples, we thought we had seen it all. Not so. The North end of Palm Beach, where I stayed, is the most understated, secluded, quiet piece of real estate I've ever encountered. Every property is just exquisite.

This morning I lugged my tea two blocks over to watch the sun rise over the perfectly blue Atlantic . . . . I think it's in the covenants that the ocean be always BLUE . . . and thought to myself: Ya know? It's location, location, location. These people don't have anything that I don't have. Oh, sure . . . they have beachfront views with private beach access, gates in front of their drives, private drives for deliveries/servants, select seating at the bestest eateries around town, etc. But, read on . . .

T'was eyeopening, really. I realized that, with all this 'stuff', they were still experiencing the same things that I experience: day to day angst, day to day joy, day to day disappointments, et al. The only thing separating me from 'them' was "STUFF" which I, happily, don't have to deal with. And then, I hit upon this realization:

I bet my last shoe that I had something they hadn't. Something money couldn't buy. Something not tradable on some exchange or other. Nope. Could be wrong here, but I'd bet that for all their material wealth, they were the poorer but for one thing.

A knowledge of where they are in this Cosmic Play. AND: I'm betting my other shoe that they lack the MOST IMPORTANT KEY TO THIS LIFE:

Something Esther and Jerry Hicks bellow at length:

"Life is supposed to be Fun!"

These "things" that they have surrounded themselves with are nothing but 'fullers' for wanting souls. "If I have more things, I'll be happier . . . . " The hole within, the yearing for fulfillment, is where this opulance comes from whence. In some ways, it's an addiction, I suppose. You get some: it's nice. But you still feel unfullfilled. Let's get a little more . . . Nice, but still, no cigar. Let's get a bit more . . . etc. But the internal "Craving" has never been addressed.

As I drove/walked up and down Old County Road/ Ocean Blvd in Palm Beach, I was awe-struck at the opulance. I told Himself that it reminded me of our trip up to Newport, RI. The archetecture was a bit different, but the scheme of things was the same. Quiet, overstated Severity. Certainly not understated, and certainly not shy. Nope. Opulence. Sheer, Opulence. On the Lake Worth side of the island: boats. Not your daily, mail-run skiff's mind you. Nope. Whole acres APIECE of Marine Acreage. I dunno. What? I don't think I saw anything remotely of the 90 foot range. These crafts were mansions with rudders. The saloons on the sterns of these dingies were a full twenty feet across! One would have to begin his return journey to the bar ten minutes before finishing his prior draft just to be assured of anti-dehydration.

Not moored up to any old marina, you understand. Why, can't be bother in dragging out the Bentley to drive to the Marina to set out the ship. 'Have yer own pier in the back, Jack. Easier to have the staff swab the decks, wouldn't you say?' No. t'is better to be just spittin' distance from the kitchen, so as to saunter down with the vittals and beer and take off for a day of . . . . . well, as Kenneth Grahame would say . . . . "Messing. Simply Messing about in boats."

It's a wonderful life, I suppose. Charmed, in some aspects. Must come with alot of minus's though.

I was glad to visit, see, experience, and feel another plane of this world. That's what travel is all about, No? In the meantime, I've got my knitting, my Diet Pepsi and my Journal to keep me happy at the public beach on the West Coast of Flahridah . . . in an undisclosed area . . . . where clothing is optional . . . . AND: you don't have to look your best . . . and you don't have worry about whether the vittals and beer have been delivered to the saloon . . . . Beer imported, Vittals Boar's Head.

The Quick Trip at Terra Verde is my Mise en Place. Great jerky, ice-cold Pepsi and a clean Potty. I'm a rich man . . .

Endeavouring

Anyone who thinks that Magnificent Magick isn't out there for anyone to see just isn't looking. At all.

Last night I suggested to Other Half (here-to-fore known as OH) that we arm ourselves with adult beverages and walk up to the golf course to watch the space shuttle zoom off into the sky. One of the rewards of living in Tampa is that we have a golden vantage point to witness such wonders. Indeed, by merely stepping out onto the lanai, poolside we can watch these rare occurances from our own backyard. But, last night was such a beautifully clear night that it begged for us to be shed of the pool cage and make the effort to go out into the night and see the event burst forth without the filter of a polypropylene screen.

With a barely less-then-full moon, a lusciously elegant buttery yellow, we searched the sky at 7:55pm. Nothing. Well, we are around 2 hours away from Titusville, after all. So, we stared, and we searched, and we stared, and we searched. Nothing. I started to get the queezies but then, from way across the golf course in another village, we heard whooping and cheering and clapping which caused OH to grab me and cry, "WHAT? Where is it?" I had told him it would appear in the northeast quadrant of our view but I was so wrong.

Just from the bottom right of this glorious moon came our quest. Brilliant, fiery reddish orange. It slowly aimed itself directly for the moon's face and soared right in front of it. I thought my very skin would take flight with it. What a sight! Then it cleared the moon and continued up into the Infinite and away to it's mission.

Every time I see this I think of back to where we come from. Back to the time when we were stardust and p'raps not even a glimmer in the unborn Universe's Mind. How we emerged from that collective energy to finally find ourselves here, as we are just now, watching with childlike eyes our reach back to our origins. That we are able to conjure up such a feat to me is the essence of Magick. The Desire, the Anticipation and finally, the Acceptance of our Oneness with the Universe and our ability to direct such huge physical properties through our mental and spiritual faculties [and occasionally not without a bit of, shall we say, pure dumb luck] is a testament to just who we are.

~Blessed be und Alles Beste!

Eine Andere Democrat-Ansicht

I don't, as a rule, comment publicly on civic matters. But, I have to pass on this column from a Democrat in North Carolina. He is no friend of the Republican party and has written many articles against the stands that party has taken. However, this piece should be presented far and wide and I'm posting it here because it fearlessly stabs to the heart of this election year. The columnist is a Democrat out of North Carolina writing for the Rhinoceros Times.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina