Irv's Scrapbook

4:32pm: IrvLetter#6

Well, let's explore the possibility of using a straight-out LiveJournal framework for our ongoing IrvLetter series . . .

Why? because my entire computer reality has been 'under attack' for the past week or so. And more specifically, I am totally unable to use email in the formerly normal fashion! After failing my effort to re-start it by phone-interaction with Comcast, I asked for an in-home appointment with one of their mobile people, and . . . he came, spent about an hour here, fixed my phone service and my general web connection (which had also gone out) . . . but the email service stumped him!

So, that's that! For any who want to reach me directly and privately, I advise irvthom@gmail. I'll try to check it frequently. And all I can say at this point is that The Universe, in this ongoing process called Ascension -- which I am definitely a part of -- is putting me through an incredible 'testing' process. I'm not sure what it's all about, but I'm hanging in with it.

Love you all...

Irv

(By the way, you can also add comment on this, if you'd like)

3:40pm: Steve Beckow . . . on himself and his site
Welcome to a New and Unimaginable World.

I’m talking about the New Age expected to begin after a planetary transformation on or before Dec. 21, 2012. Welcome to a new and unimaginable world, taking shape before our very eyes. What world am I talking about?

Predictions of what the 2012 community calls “Ascension” are reaching us from the Earth’s own spiritual hierarchy, the star nations here to help us, Earth’s scientists, and planetary intuitives.

At an early but unknown date, we can expect a world leader (probably President Obama) to disclose the fact that human beings from other star systems are here, in spacecraft around our planet – some cloaked, some in other dimensions – and that evolved life exists in many places in the universe.

We’re soon to be joined by family.

Following disclosure, a coalition of Light forces composed of humans from hundreds of star nations and Earth’s ascended masters, which David Wilcock playfully calls “management,” (1) will join us to address the deficiencies in the world situation caused by Earth’s former dark controllers.

The dark ones, who brought us 9/11, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic activity, chemtrails, pandemics, and all manner of other destructive events, will find themselves held accountable.

We’ll have a new “wisdom economy” or “abundance program” which some refer to as NESARA (National Economic Security and Reformation Act). The coalition of Light will give us technology that will address our economic difficulties and bring us a new lifestyle marked by ease and empowerment.

The Earth will be terraformed; pollution will be eradicated; and a temperate climate will prevail around the world.

The coalition of Light will equip us to “pass through the eye of the needle” in 2012, leaving our dualistic consciousness behind and sporting a new, unitive consciousness. If you’ve ever seen or heard an enlightened teacher (Eckhart Tolle or Adyashanti would be good examples), that’s how we’ll look and sound after 2012.

I personally follow most closely the messages coming from channelers, but also the terrestrial commentary coming from the 2012 community of scientists, whistle-blowers, and intuitives. The channeled sources already live in Fifth-Dimensional consciousness and so I prefer their version of events.

You’ll notice two themes are followed on our site: the first is the overthrow of the Earth’s secret governments, known to themselves as Illuminati, though none are illuminated, and known to others as the New World Order, the shadow state, the military-industrial complex, the dark cabal, etc.

That overthrow will appear to be a “time of troubles,” during which the dark will use all its technology to cause earthquakes (Haiti, Chile and Japan are examples), modify weather, sow chemtrails, spread pandemics, start wars, misrepresent the galactics, create fear, and in other ways try to disrupt and defeat the (I’m told) “unstoppable” plan for 2012 Ascension.

The dark forces are up to so much mischief that I’ve had to write two articles on our site simply listing their misdeeds: “I Accuse” and “The Black Hats Must Go.” These provide an overview of the extent of their murderous and treasonous actions.

The economy they created will utterly collapse, to be simultaneously replaced by the wisdom economy.

The second theme is the increase in the light energy that is occurring because the coalition of Light are preparing us to open to transformation by late 2012 or sooner.

It may be confusing to some to see these two themes running simultaneously. Some of our articles will trace the fall of the cabal and others the rise of the new society and economy. I hope readers will be able to keep the two movements straight.

During the time of troubles, I’m determined to help the coalition of Light push this dark elite out of the corridors of power. Please don’t be alarmed. I’m not advocating violence or retribution. But I won’t rest until the Black Hats have left the scene or turned their hats around.

Please note that I do not consider President Barack Obama to be a Black Hat, but one of the strongest Light-workers on the planet today. He has my unequivocal support and unabashed loyalty.

I draw on a background of historical, cross-cultural, and enlightenment studies, years spent as a refugee adjudicator, time spent researching life on the spirit planes, study of the space coalition’s messages, and a commitment to truth. Nonetheless I am not an enlightened author and am not qualified to be, nor do I wish to be considered a spiritual teacher.
Writing is my passion. Without your readership and the Internet, I could not be doing this.

So thank you for stopping by and for opening up to the 2012 scenario. Every additional awakened Light-worker increases the ease with which the transition to Fifth-Dimensional consciousness can be accomplished.

Namaste,
Steve Beckow

Vancouver, Canada

4:52pm: Robert Wolff
It took me more than half of my life to come to terms with myself, why I could
do so effortlessly what seemed incomprehensible to my family and friends. I
think all who I send these “letters to friends” have read my Original Wisdom.

Many do not know that OW is the second incarnation of a book I had no choice
but to publish myself, titled What It Is To Be Human. Thom Hartmann discovered the book six years after it came out and then got me a contract with a publisher. They edited my English (not my mother tongue) to conform to modern American writing style and gave it another title. Years later I found out that one of the conditions of the deal was that Thom Hartmann would write the foreword.

Despite many attempts I was told in no uncertain terms that not a word
of that foreword can be changed. Thom Hartmann is a famous author and public personality: I am not. Contrary to what Thom Hartmann says I never learned much of the language of the Sng’oi (usually spelled Senoi) nor did I “live with them” except whenever I could escape from job and family for a weekend, Nevertheless I communicated with them with clarity, without confusion.

I grew up in what was then a small town in the north-eastern part of Sumatra,
then Netherlands Indies, now Indonesia. My parents were fairly typical European (Dutch) intellectuals, my father a doctor, my mother had two college degrees. We had servants — a word that still leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that I won’t use it again. I think of them as my other family. I learned to speak Dutch and Malay at the same time. My mother said that I spoke late, but then in whole sentences. From the beginning I knew that some people had to be addressed in one language, others in another. But I was very aware also that the world view of these two different kind of people was extremely different.

----------------------------------------------------

Many years ago I heard that scientists have found that if a child learns more
than one language before the age of four, s/he has an easier time learning more
languages. I know that is true from my own experience and from one of my
grandchildren.

I was aware from the beginning there was a glaring differences between my
parents and my other family. My mother frequently said things like, “if you do
so and so, mother will love you,” or “if you don’t do that mother won’t love
you any more.” I’ve been told that is typical for her generation.

It confused me, made my head spin. But I knew that if I went “to the back”
where the houses of my other family were, there would always be a shoulder to
lean on or a lap to sit in, no questions asked. They accepted me as I was, for
who I was. My mother had plans for me. Much much later I finally worked out
that she was terrified that I would become “too native.” It had always been too
late, I was more native from the first.

One other facet of having that other family I must mention here. As I grew up
I learned the nuances of the Malay language; now Indonesian and Malaysian,
the same language with a few minor changes in spelling. I learned there are different Malay languages linked to who you talk with, then called high Malay
and low Malay. One uses different words, different sentence constructions to
speak to an older person, or aristocrats. And another thing, never use the word
that white people thought meant “I”. Actually it means “your servant,” or even
“your slave.” I realized that my other family hardly ever used the good word
for I. One does not talk about oneself. To this day I write at least once a week a page without using I. English and German are the only languages I know where I is capitalized.

The Netherlands Indies, an archipelago of a thousand islands had their own
Constitution. The first two were that all land belongs to the native inhabitants of that land, no foreigner could “own” land. All the plantations around where we lived were leased, short leases. The second statement was that the system of justice in each area was to be the local “adat” — traditional customs. Americans assume that all white people are the same in being racially prejudiced. Not so. In Dutch colonies (and in most French colonies) there was very frequent intermarriage.

My parents were good people. I know they paid my other family well, all
their health problems were treated by father or another doctor. I finally understood that my mother;s fears that I was becomin too native was that I would not be appreciative enough of western culture, which to her meant concerts, museums, literature. I have my own tastes, but got accustomed to museums. I never liked concerts because I do not like “classical” music and I never learned to sit for two hours in a dark hall listening to music or watching a movie. I never learned that concerts are a serious business, no laughter, no giggles when a modern composer includes up and down violin glissandos against cello glissandos down and up. And a museum — too much, too much, as monster book stores and super markets are way too much stuff. After really “seeing” ten paintings my eyes glaze over.

When I was five or six I discovered something else, which of course I assumed
everybody would have. The occasion was another tantrum of my sister, at the
time three years old. Stomping her feet, screaming “sefdoen” (doing it myself). I felt her frustration, rage, as if it were mine, and I also felt the fear and rejection of such behavior my other family felt. They backed away from her, averting their eyes. Feeling, within myself, both those very strong feelings made me almost lose my consciousness, I fell on hard cement. I knew that neither of those strong feelings was mine but I felt them. My mother had strong rules, since I was the oldest, whatever my sister did was my fault. That mixture of feelings was too much for me to handle.

From that time I began to feel pain and anger or even confusion in other people
as well. It is a schizophrenic feeling to feel someone’s pain as pain, knowing
that it is not me who is hurting. Naturally I learned to live with it. I tried to block those unwanted feelings. I think of it as my censor. I created something in my mind that quickly evaluated that this was one of those impossible things that I must lock away. My censor never sleeps, but the older I get, when I am alone, and tired, I still get tears in my eyes when I read or see a clipping of a child being abused, or someone suffering.

That is also how I learned what dying is like. I have worked with a Hospice in
California for two years, attended many deaths. I feel the struggle, the last fight for one more breath, and then letting go. Peace.

One of my sons died not quite two years ago. I was with him that whole last
day. I felt his fight, his worries about his children. He had no speech any more
but it was very clear what went on inside him. All I could say—and I knew he
could hear me—was let go, it is all right, we will take care of your children, let
go, let go. I am not sure he could still see me that last moment, but I felt him let
go. Blessed peace. Then my censor had to do double duty, to block the feelings
of the nurse who came in, surprised, concerned for me, wondering what she
ought to do, could do, as well as blocking my own grief. The grieving stays,
that is my own feeling.

In a long life I have found that feeling other people’s feeling (or animal even
plant feelings) is not unusual at all. I have known many people who have that
to some degree. It also means being very open, and of course it is one of those
human qualities that our so-called civilization cannot accept because it cannot
be measured. Feeling another’s feelings is also knowing another’s intent, I am
convinced that dogs and other animals sense intent. I think many plants know
intent. When I cherish a plant, love a plant, it thrives. I once rented a little rundown cabin from a college professor. A month after I moved in the professor
came to see me with his uncle (full blood Hawaiian). When anakala (uncle)
stepped out of the car he looked all around, took a deep breath, and said, “This
place looks alive, it has never looked alive before.” He shook his head, took another breath, “The plants must love you.” It was a question. I answered that I
loved them. I was aware of them, acknowledged them as honored live life forms
not just things. I had not been able to do any gardening yet, but whatever it
was, it showed.

It is also how I can communicate without knowing a language with people
who are far enough away from our so restricted, materialistic culture. There
was a time that I traveled a lot for work. Everywhere I went I always sought out
the poorest, the most isolated people, and we recognized each other without
words. I could hear them and they could hear me. In the Philippines I spent a
day and a half with the Igorot, considered dangerous wild people. I spent days
and nights with people on small islands in the Pacific. I felt their troubles but
most of all their joyful living. That, I am convinced, is an original human
quality: a joyfulness, and utter, total equality between people as well as between people and animals, plants. all life forms.

Life is one. Life eats life and life respects life. Even as a child I could not eat
meat because meat tastes of the cruelty and pain the animal had suffered before
finally dying.

One more thing, and all these things are related. When I was eight or nine my
other family asked me to look at a poor monkey that was suffering, or sick. The
tiny monkey lived on a staff with a cross bar an old man carried with him everywhere. As soon as I saw the old man and his monkey I blurted out, “But the monkey is dying.” One of the women spoke up harshly, saying to me, “You never say that to a sick being.” I knew what she meant, of course. I reached out my hand to the monkey and at the same time asked the old man why the monkey was tied to the staff. The monkey would not run away, he could not live without the old man. The man immediately agreed, “but he has had that chain all his life, all my life it seems.”

I told the man that the little leather strap around one of the monkeys legs chafed but the monkey was also sad that the man did not trust him. I asked whether we could remove that leather strap. Someone cut the strap. All this time my hand had been outstretched to the monkey who had looked at me, my hand. When the strap was removed he jumped on my hand and almost immediately jumped back but now to the old man’s head. We all sat down, someone brought some sweet tea. Nobody said a world, but we all felt good.

From then on my other family brought other animals to me, and then a child.
I asked whether they had taken the child to a doctor. No, because they thought
the sickness was not a “doctor-sickness.” The same woman who had chastised
me about flapping out that the monkey was dying, now said in a very soft voice, “maybe you can just feel the child’s stomach, it is badly swollen but she
has not eaten for days.” I reached out my hand. I never touch skin, kept my
hand an inch or so from the belly of the child. Yes, it was very clear, I could feel
an obstruction on one side of the child’s belly. I felt the child’s pain. I remember thinking that I had no idea what the obstruction could be. What could I do? But I cupped my right hand over the spot and felt energy coming to my hand, holding my hand to focus that energy to the obstruction inside the belly of the child.

At the time I did not think that I had to have any intent other than focusing that
energy. I could not tell the body what to do, but I could just focus energy. I held
that for at least twenty minutes, probably more. The child got restless. Squirmed a little on the lap of her mother (not one of my other family, a visitor). Suddenly the child said she wanted some soup. A few days later I was told that the child’s belly had shrunk and that the soup had done wonders.

Over the next many years now and then one of my other family, or a visitor,
would talk to me about what I should know about this laying on of hands. It
was a gift from God. I had to be very careful because western people would
punish me for it, better not to use it on western people. Several people told me
that of course I could never, never, never get paid for it. That would turn a gift
into a curse.

Over the next many years I never forgot my lessons, and more and more rarely used my gift. After all, I had left the world of my other family (that pain is still in me) and now lived in a white culture. When I went to university I studied medicine, thinking medicine was about healing. Even before penicillin that was not true. I don’t want to write about medicine, certainly modern chemical
and robot technology medicine.

After “the” war (WWII) my father, a bacteriologist, learned more about bacteria,
then viruses. He got a doctoral degree in medicine, doctor doctor — that is
possible in the Netherlands.

After the war it took me a year to become normally healthy again. I studied
psychology, did a six year program in three. Then a PhD in a very different kind of psychology at the University of Michigan. Married, had sons, had a few jobs, a real career. The American Dream. Eventually was told I was the first psychologist with full tenure at the new School of Public Health, University of Hawaii.

One of the courses I taught was named Social and Cultural Aspects of Health
and Illness which became very popular, even with medical students. Discussions about illness not just as disturbance of an organ, but affecting a whole person who is part of a family, part of a unique culture. A doctor who sees a patient for ten minutes can diagnose diabetes and tell a woman to eat a better diet. But until he knows something about her circumstances, her family, her culture, he cannot know why she does not (cannot) do what he tells her to do. A doctor told me about his frustration that the woman, who seemed intelligent and willing, could not change her diet. I suggested he go to her home, ask her to invite you for dinner. He was shocked; but did as I suggested.

When I saw him again he grinned and told me that now he understood. An Italian family, eight, ten people, cousins and nephews -- who knows who? --eating heaps of spaghetti. “Come on mama, your plate is empty,” and someone plunks another heap of starch on her empty plate. The doctor told me he had given a lecture to the family after the meal. “Maybe that helps, we shall see.”

A man who had taken my course wrote me ten years after he had graduated
that he realized that from all the courses he had had to take to become a doctor
my course had been the only course where he had learned important things
about practicing family medicine in Harlem, New York.

Academia in America never agreed with me. Too bureaucratic, political, colleagues fighting for tenure, and in a real sense anti-intellectual because the
American culture is that. I was never impressed with the “science” the universities serve. Yes, thousands of studies, statistically correct, from measurements that are all too often biased. We have been given a picture of the universe, our planet, ourselves, that may be true but not the whole truth. Because we no longer can see what is real. Advertisers and politicians know feelings and twist those to promote their products or themselves. That is but another unreality. Modern science to me seems just as unreal.

I learned about the strange power of government grants that essentially mean
your boss is in Washington DC, and that boss is no expert in what you have become expert in on the ground, with real people. I’ve had some extremely unpleasant experiences with that. Since my traveling was paid with federal money I had to present myself to the ambassador in each country I visited. I could not believe how ignorant or casual ambassadors seemed about local culture, language, religion. I will omit those stories. It was obvious, even in the 60s and 70s of the last century, that the US was an empire that spans the world. We are the boss. As we all know now this is the core of our foreign policy. Security at any price, within and outside this country. It is considered almost treasonous to suggest that the planet, the planetary ecology, Mother Earth, does not have a human or any other kind of boss.

Now to the end of the first half of my life. It must have been 1976, maybe ‘77,
that coming back from somewhere in the South Pacific I had to pass through
Guam. I had good friends there, never stayed with them (I got paid to stay at a
hotel after all) but often had dinner with them on the night of departure to Honolulu.

I had to travel on either PanAm or United. They usually left Guam at an hour after midnight. I had dinner with my friends, and after dinner there were those dead hours to get through before they would take me to the past midnight flight (in order to arrive in Honolulu at 8am). I had known the lady of the house since my days at the University of Michigan, she studying medicine, I social psychology, In the intervening years we had seen each other frequently on these one or two day stopovers in Guam, or Honolulu when they were on their way to mainland America.

That day I knew she had had trouble with an embolism (blood clot) in her left thigh, and maybe, probably, mini emboli in her chest. She had an important position, had taken time off to rest. As a professional courtesy perhaps she had been invited to use the Navy Hospital where they had made stacks of X-rays, all of them clearly showing the four inch embolism in her left leg. That kind of blood clot is dangerous because if it gets loose it could well directly go to the heart. After dinner we looked at the at least five inch high stack of X-rays. She had them ready because arrangements had been made for her to visit UCLA hospital in Los Angeles “as soon as they could have her.” The evening stretched on; there are many hours between dinner and past midnight.

On an impulse I asked her if she wanted me to do a healing. Sure, why not. She
lay on a carpet, maybe even slept. I never touch skin, my hands stay at least an
inch away from the body. I had no trouble locating the embolism. At that time I
had made up a sort of mantram in my head, telling the body to do whatever it
could or would do to restore normal functioning. I did not ask for specific results.

That came from experience in my classes. I often asked the students to put
both hands on the table (we always sat around a long table). “Now make your
right had warmer, and your left hand colder. After many such exercises it had
become abundantly clear that there were always two groups of people. One
group puzzled and worried about how to increase or decrease blood flow. The
other group just letting their body do it, without have to know how the body
did that. The group trying to control the blood flow was unsuccessful. The group that ”just did it” without worrying about how to, was successful.

All I did with my friend with the embolism, was allow whatever that energy
is to flow through my hands (mostly my right hand) focused more or less where I felt the embolism. I did not ask the body to do anything but be as normal as possible. I did that for perhaps 40 minutes. She got up. Neither of us said anything. We got ready to go to the airport.

I arrived in Honolulu at about 8am (flying at that time was easy and comfortable, no body searches, no suspicion of anything). Went to work, too late to go home and come back. Of course lots of work waiting to be done. Maybe two in the afternoon, my friend called from the airport. When she came home the night after taking me to the airport she found a call from UCLA hospital to come as soon as possible There had been another flight, now she was on her way to LA. Wished her luck.

Maybe two and half weeks after that day my Dean called me at around lunch
time. Thought we were to have lunch as we often did. But he sat me down on
the other side of his desk and began asking me all kinds of questions, personal
questions, that I could not relate to anything. I remember he asked about my
mother, what did my father do. He knew all that; we knew each other well. I got
more and more curious about what all this was about. Finally he asked did I
know someone called (the name of my friend). Of course I do. We were at Ann
Arbor (U of Mich) at the same time and we see each other every now and then.

Did I know she went to UCLA hospital. Yes, of course I knew that. Well… it
turned out that when she arrived at UCLA with her stack of X-rays of course
this hospital had to do their own X-rays. Several. Many. Not a sign of an embolism or that there ever was one. UCLA called the Navy Hospital who then
called the Navy Department in DC. It had become a long distance brawl about
whether the Navy hospital had made fake X-rays,. And I guess they had interrogated my friend about anything else that might explain that stack of misleading X-rays. She must have mentioned my name.

When it began to dawn on me what the interview with my dean was about
the door swung open with a bang—I could see all the secretaries listening in the outer office—the dean of the Medical School burst into the Dean of Public
Health, red faced, his finger pointing at me, “You, you, charlatan. I’m going to
sue you for practicing medicine without a license. From now on no medical
school student is allowed to take any of your courses.” He said a lot more than
that. I stood up and walked out of the room, silent.

The rest of that day I thought about what had happened. I thought but did
not know that a charge of practicing medicine without a license would be a
scandal, a media event, It did not surprise me that I would no longer have medical students in my classes; I knew that the dean of the Medical School held a grudge against the School of Public Health as two separate institutions.
And it also happened that at that time I was going through a very difficult
time with a divorce. The next day I went to my dean and said I would resign; I
felt he would want me to do that. He suggested I wait until I could leave with
an “early retirement” a year or so away.

I never did a healing again with a person. There was a time when people told
me I was good with animals. Now they say I have a green thumb, I am good
with plants.

I left Hawaii on a day in early July 1979, Alone. Nobody saw me off. I remember
calling someone from the airport just to hear a friendly voice, leaving the
island where I had lived for 18 years, where everyone knew me.

From that moment I changed my life. I lived as I finally accepted I had to live,
following a path that was clear when I needed to know it. I changed my name.
Nobody since has called me doctor or professor. I found jobs that had nothing
to do with my degrees, with science, that did not pay much but enough to live
on. I found Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. Found “my cabin in the woods.“
When I took vacation I let the car guide me; the car drove me. When I left Whidbey without a destination after more than six years. I found Santa Cruz in California, and discovered that people there knew people on Whidbey. The old
“hippy trail.”

I began to write the stories of the indigenous and aboriginal people I had
known. But when we left Malaysia I had promised myself not to publish anything about them for at least one generation. I feared what our strange inhuman world would do to a small remnant of First People. I spent many years learning to write other than scientific articles. More years trying to put together a book of stories because real communication is “talk story” as we say in Hawaii. There are too many stories in my life. A few of them in Original Wisdom, a few more in other books, and in the many essays. Hidden away among other writing.

It is only the last few years that I fully understood that my immediate connection with all these people that I had a story with is part of my feeling, part of my knowing things that I could not know, part of my understanding and communing without words.

My supposed knowing the language of who I call Sng’oi had very little to do with what I learned from them or how, why, we recognized each other so immediately. It s a different consciousness, a different mindset. I was lucky to have grown up when and where I did, so that this mindset could take root in me. Or, perhaps I was born that way. I don’t know.

But I do know that our western so-called civilization is fiercely opposed to any
mindset that is not western. All over the world we have eradicated it with missionaries, schools for indigenous children, laws and police.

Our world and this country have become a very dangerous place to be in. The
power elite who rules us has the weapons, and their weapons are more lethal
than they ever were before.

I still almost weekly receive emails from new people who say they like my
stories. I cannot know if they can imagine the world I describe. Deep in my
heart I know that the only way for contemporary humans to rejoin the human
species—the only way to survive as a species—is to reach back to the time of
First People when we could not imagine owning or hierarchies.

My voice does not carry. Humans must find their own way to who we really
are. The monster they, we, have created is powerful, gets more bloodthirsty by
the day. The damage we have done and continue to do to this planet is irreparable in a life time. Mother Earth will heal herself or remake herself. It may take many many generations to rediscover our simple sanity.

I know that there are still people who share my view. All those I know are
non-white. Does that mean I am prejudiced, or is it real? I don’t know.
It is only now at the end of my life that I can write this down. Little bits and
pieces have leaked out over the years, in my fiction books (yes, plural) I have
published only on the internet.

Celebrate another equinox, another new year.

robert

10:53pm: Changing the World (Kristoff)


A BATTLE between a class of fourth graders and a major movie studio would seem an unequal fight.

So it proved to be: the studio buckled. And therein lies a story of how new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat some of the most powerful corporate and political interests around — by threatening the titans with the online equivalent of a tarring and feathering.

Take Ted Wells’s fourth-grade class in Brookline, Mass. The kids read the Dr. Seuss story “The Lorax” and admired its emphasis on protecting nature, so they were delighted to hear that Universal Studios would be releasing a movie version in March. But when the kids went to the movie’s Web site, they were crushed that the site seemed to ignore the environmental themes.

So last month they started a petition on Change.org, the go-to site for Web uprisings. They demanded that Universal Studios “let the Lorax speak for the trees.” The petition went viral, quickly gathering more than 57,000 signatures, and the studio updated the movie site with the environmental message that the kids had dictated.

“It was exactly what the kids asked for — the kids were through the roof,” Wells told me, recalling the celebratory party that the children held during their snack break. “These kids are really feeling the glow of making the world a better place. They’re feeling that power.”

The opportunities for Web naming-and-shaming through Change.org caught my eye when I reported recently on sex traffickers who peddle teenage girls on Backpage.com. I learned that a petition on Change.org had gathered 86,000 signatures calling for the company to stop accepting adult ads.

My next column was about journalists being brutalized in Ethiopian prisons. A 19-year-old college freshman in Idaho, Kelsey Crow, read the column and started a petition to free those journalists — and in no time gathered more than 4,000 signatures.

Does that matter? Does Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, care what a band of cyber citizens thinks of him? Skepticism is warranted, but so far Change.org petitions have seen some remarkable successes.

Ecuador, for example, used to run a network of “clinics” where lesbians were sometimes abused in the guise of being made heterosexual. A petition denouncing this practice gathered more than 100,000 signatures, leading Ecuador to close the clinics, announce a national advertising campaign against homophobia, and appoint a gay-rights activist as health minister.

The masterminds of the successful campaigns aren’t usually powerful or well-connected. Mostly, they just brim with audacity and are on a first-name basis with social media.

Take Molly Katchpole. Last fall, as a 22-year-old nanny living in Washington, D.C., she was peeved by a new $5-a-month fee for debit cards announced by Bank of America, with other banks expected to follow. She took an hour to write a petition, her first.

“After a month it had 306,000 signatures,” Katchpole told me. “That’s when the banks backed down.” Bank of America and other financial institutions withdrew plans for the fee.

Soon afterward, she started a second petition, protesting a $2 charge imposed by Verizon for paying certain bills online. In 48 hours it had attracted more than 160,000 signatures — and Verizon withdrew the fee.

Katchpole parlayed her successes into a job with a new advocacy group, Rebuild the Dream, which seeks to improve the economic well-being of middle-class families.

As for Change.org, it is growing explosively. Founded in 2007, it is a B Corporation — a hybrid of a for-profit company and a charity, seeking to make profits for social good — and began to soar a year ago. It is now growing by one million members a month.

“We’re growing more each month than the total we had in the first four years,” said Ben Rattray, 31, the founder. He said that 10,000 petitions are started each month on the site, and that each success leads to countless more copycat campaigns.

Change.org has grown from 20 employees a year ago to 100 now, in offices on four continents. By the end of this year, Rattray plans to have offices in 20 countries and to operate in several more languages, including Arabic and Chinese. He recognizes that the site may be blocked in China, but shrugs.

“If ultimately we’re not getting leaders to ban our site, we’re not doing our job,” he said.

Meanwhile, what about those 14 kids in Wells’s fourth-grade class? I asked them what their next initiative on Change.org would be. They are still discussing options, but one possibility is to reduce waste by calling on companies to stop bombarding the public with telephone books and instead distribute them only to people who request them.

It’s absurd to think that 14 fourth graders could accomplish anything so sensible. But then again, they’ve already shown that the Web can turn the world upside down.

11:57pm: Peoples' Pages




Y'know, I really think my time, here, is just about up.

I actually turn 85 in less than a month, now, and while you'll assure me that I'm still going strong, and I even hear it from my chiropractor . . . I think I know better.

Because I understand -- more fully now than ever before -- the particular trajectory of my life. Yes, there is more I'd like to get done, before I depart . . . but that will always be the case. Destiny has played its full hand with me, right up to this final passage into a generally recognized stretch of Ascension time. Could the stretch of my own time-line be any clearer than it has now become?

I don't think the pic, here, is clear enough to indicate what it really is. A much larger view of it is on the LiveJournal page, so you'll see it when you make that link. It's something out of the 1970s -- something that used to go by the term 'People's Pages' -- remember that quaint old usage? Today, 'People's Pages' would refer to a Facebook link or a personal blog.

You see? . . . You've lived long enough, now, to have seen a common usage literally vanish into the 'maw' of this ever-triumphant techno-age. Makes you feel a bit older than you are, I bet! [Hell ... wait until you're touching 85!]

Anyway . . . yes, it's the cover of a People's Pages in that earlier version of the term, that's been hiding among my books for all these years, not seen for too many of them -- for the simple reason that it's less than a half-inch wide, with no way of recognizing it until pulled from its narrow slot between so much other personal 'ephemera'.

When I did so, not long ago, it took me back across four decades, to a marvelous weekend event at Stanford University, attended only because I occupied a Palo Alto apartment at the time, during my earliest days of putting out Black Bart Brigade . . . and it has flooded me with a lot of wonderful memories of those oh-so-innocent days. It was long before anything like the envisioning of a time of Ascension. (But don't believe, for a moment, that we were not on this trail!)

As a matter of fact, the proof that I, myself, knew the nature of my trail, that long ago, is right in the pages of this very bit of wonderment.

The occasion was a grand pooling of ideas -- a 'brainstorming', we'd call it (even today), of how to bring about a world of greater community . . . the sort of world we all wanted to see, by pooling the ideas we were then working with. And my own, listed there, stands out in its singularity...

...in the Blue section of its pages... --------------------------------------------------

They did the Booklet in as thorough a manner as one could ask. The bulk of it consisted of Yellow pages, wherein each contributor could write as fully as they wished, about what they were working with and who shared the project. Then there were Grey pages of organizational names; Green pages of geographical locations; and the Blue pages listing all the categories and those who held forth for them.

It's in those Blue pages, where I stand out... the only one listed in my prime category: Dropping Out. Not a single other soul, among the many hundred there, spoke to those who merely 'wanted out'.

And my 'path of choice' has not changed since. In all these 39 years.

What a refreshing validation!

4:54pm: A Focus on Georgina...




Before anything else in this issue, I want to offer a respectful introduction to my most amazing partner, Georgina.



I did introduce her, lightly and briefly, in a Scrapbook issue early last year . . . told you about how we had magically met, in the odd follow-up of a web search I had undertaken for Sherman Chickering, my longtime-ago cohort in earlier California ventures . . . (that was truly way back in 'another world', about the time I was just setting out to turn my life around).



I had written of Georgina then to annotate what I meant by the year's Sprout time -- a demonstrably good instance of it. She became my central personal focus, as we've [all of us] come through a year of hugely significant change. Georgina and I have spent time together only once or twice a week, but we're in regular evening contact by telephone, continually cross-checking our impressions -- not so much of things going on 'out there', as of how our respective personal realities have been shifting along the way. It's been hugely affirming and 'leveling', this kind of cross-check and comparison we can make, of what's going on, just between ourselves.



One reason I'm sorry I hadn't gotten this issue out earlier is because: in this respect, it no longer helps much to return to a discussion of the Sprout, for it's characteristic 'February moment' has now passed. But Georgina, entering my life as she did last year at this time, was so perfectly an instance of the genre, that I want to return to a look at how that has been so beautifully borne out -- by broadening what I said, at that time, about our connection and how it continues to flower.



So, this IS Georgina, in a flourishing full-face view, and you can branch, now, to a bit more detail of how we've managed to enrich our respective worlds...



------------------------------------------



It was quite unexpected, that I should actually meet someone on that dating site, let alone someone from that hippie generation that I've so identified myself with, ever since backing-off from my own. Most of my friends, of course, have since come from that group -- I've always been 'the old man' among them, seldom finding any real satisfaction in that separative identity, but left with nothing much I could do for it. I suppose it has largely defined my own sense-of-self, over the years.



So this was definitely a kind of 'latter-day award' for me, much more appreciated than I'd have expected Georgina, herself, to have felt about it. But quite to my surprise, she felt the same; and we got off to a very good start.



She lives about twenty miles to the south of me, but has a couple vehicles at her disposal (while I have none), so it has never proved a problem. Eventually, however, the question of fairness came up: Why should she always be driving to meet me? So I discovered how to get down to her area on my own, using the regional transit.



We fell, immediately, into the habit of finding good places where we could dine together, and just talk about the odd things we shared or had in common. In fact, that's where a lot of interesting 'linkages' were discovered . . . an unusual spread of linkages: in our backgrounds, our range of interests, and even our family roots! Until it could hardly be merely a speculation, that ours was a meeting "freighted with meaning", as they no longer say. (And she'll enjoy reading this, because we both love the language and having fun with it.)



It was intriguing to discover that we were both cab-drivers in our earlier years, and that we had both designed and put out newsletters in youthful years (hers on animal care and mine about rocks and minerals). But the incredible surprise came from an unbelievably shared locale of family origin. Georgina was born in Eastern Canada but her roots go back to the Central European region of the Ukraine . . . exactly my own!



We had already discovered, of course, that we are BOTH persuaded of the approaching time of change called The Ascension. Does anything else really matter, at this point? Isn't it just a meeting that required only a way to happen? And certainly, NOTHING is more strange than the way it did.



[And if you happened to miss that, or want another read of it, here is an immediate link to that earlier LiveJournal account of it.]

1:18am: The long, sorry, flat-out truth of it...


From Steve Beckow's 2012 Scenario site: a story to turn your stomach (inside out). Please note the date of it.


Goldman-Sachs: The Great American Bubble Machine

By  Matt Taibbi

Apr 05, 2010 (yes, this was written nearly TWO YEARS AGO!)


The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing.

There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one of them.

BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression

Goldman wasn’t always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman’s first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there’s really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an “investment trust.” Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further.

Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn’t hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled “In Goldman Sachs We Trust,” the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market’s historic crash; in today’s dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. “It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity,” Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. “If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.”

BUBBLE #2 Tech Stocks

Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor’s assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.

It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm’s mantra, “long-term greedy.”

One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. “We gave back money to ‘grownup’ corporate clients who had made bad deals with us,” he says. “Everything we did was legal and fair — but ‘long-term greedy’ said we didn’t want to make such a profit at the clients’ collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace.”

But then, something happened. It’s hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman’s cochairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach.

It became almost a national clichè that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline The Committee To Save The World.

And “what Rubin thought,” mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin’s complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren’t much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn’t know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control.

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. “Everyone on the inside knew,” the manager says. “Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They’d been intact since the 1930s.”

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. “In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future.”

Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era.

Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.

How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called “laddering,” which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here’s how it works: Say you’re Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You’ll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a “road show” to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price — let’s say Bullshit.com’s starting share price is $15 — in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market.

That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO’s future, knowledge that wasn’t disclosed to the day trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company’s price, which of course was to the bank’s benefit — a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.

Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.

“Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator,” Maier said. “They totally fueled the bubble. And it’s specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation — manipulated up — and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in.” In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations — a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)

Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was “spinning,” better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price — ensuring that those “hot” opening-price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few.

So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business — effectively robbing all of Bullshit’s new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company’s bottom line into the private bank account of the company’s CEO.

In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman’s board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age — Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski and Enron’s Ken Lay.

Goldman angrily denounced the report as “an egregious distortion of the facts” — shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. “The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk,” then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. “Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business.”

Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn’t the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market.

Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits — an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman’s mantra of “long-term greedy” vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else’s Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what?

By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America’s recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that “I’ve never even heard the term ‘laddering’ before.”)

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent — they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.

BUBBLE #3 The Housing Craze

Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con’s mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can’t write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn’t know what they are.

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound.

Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance — known as credit default swaps — on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won’t.

There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994.

A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated — and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. “The banks go crazy — they want it stopped,” says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped.”

Clinton’s reigning economic foursome — “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger — called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority.

In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn’t end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust.

By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities — a third of which were sub-prime — much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.

Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation — no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody’s projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.

Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners — old people, for God’s sake — pretending the whole time that it wasn’t grade D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling.

Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. “The mortgage sector continues to be challenged,” David Viniar, the bank’s chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. “As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions … However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable.” In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.

“That’s how audacious these assholes are,” says one hedge fund manager. “At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing.”

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn’t amount to securities fraud. “It’s exactly securities fraud,” he says. “It’s the heart of securities fraud.”

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued.

New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans.
But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank’s CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm’s payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, “We work very hard here.”

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.

BUBBLE #4 $4 a Gallon

By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn’t leave much to sell that wasn’t tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, sub-prime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public’s mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them.

The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years — the notion that housing prices never go down — was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a “flight to commodities.”

Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.
So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess.

Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date.

The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a “traditional speculator,” who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC’s oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren’t the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman’s argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the “Bona Fide Hedging” exemption, allowing Goldman’s subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers.

By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that’s likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. “I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC,” says Greenberger, “and neither of us knew this letter was out there.” In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.

“I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy,” the staffer recounts. “And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been issuing these letters for years now.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?’ And they were like, ‘Duh, duh.’ So we went back and forth, and finally they said, ‘We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?’”

The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company’s current position in the market. But the staffer’s request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman’s current position. What’s more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman’s capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.

Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index — which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil — became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices.

Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly “long only” bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions — meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it’s terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. “If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you’d see them pushing prices both up and down,” says Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. “But they only push prices in one direction: up.”

Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an “oracle of oil” by The New York Times, predicted a “super spike” in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold.

Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn’t know when oil prices would fall until we knew “when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives.”

But it wasn’t the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices — it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country’s commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.

In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn’t just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.

Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. “The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now,” says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. “Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up.”

Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. “I think they just don’t understand the problem very well,” he says. “You can’t explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it.”

BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman’s last real competitors — collapse without intervention. (“Goldman’s superhero status was left intact,” says market analyst Eric Salzman, “and an investment banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.”)

The very next day, Paulson green-lighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve.

By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman’s primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict of interest waiver from the government.

Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn’t a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. “In the past it was an implicit advantage,” says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. “Now it’s more of an explicit advantage.”

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout.

“They cooked those first quarter results six ways from Sunday,” says one hedge fund manager. “They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit." Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first quarter results.

Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.
Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new “stress test” for banks seeking to repay TARP money — suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming.

The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn’t pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. “They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after,” says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. “The government came out and said, ‘To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC' — which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before.”

And here’s the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008? Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.
How is this possible? According to Goldman’s annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank’s “geographic earnings mix.”

In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money,” he said, “the left is hiding it offshore.”

BUBBLE #6 Global Warming

Fast-forward to today. It’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation.

Paulson’s report argued that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate change problem.” A few years later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.”

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets.

There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy futures market? “Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe. But cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected.

“If it’s going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil futures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That’s the last thing in the world I want. It’s just asinine.”

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.

11:13pm: To save a spot...
...for whatever may emerge...

5:14pm: Follow Your Heart, it is Smarter Than You Think
Follow Your Heart, it is Smarter Than You Think

February 7, 2012 By Rebecca Cherry

Your Heart is an amazing organ, unique for both its physical functions and energetic properties, and therefore needs some extra special attention, and definitely some tender loving care.

Aside from the well-known fact that the heart is the first major organ to develop in the fetus after conception, it is also impossible to live without one beating brightly within each of our bodies. In addition, the heart’s ability to tell us when we fall in Love, experience Joy, feel Gratitude, and appreciate Beauty, is without question, the tour de force for our passions in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment throughout our lives.

While these statements are nothing new, Neuro-physicists have recently been astonished to discover that the Heart is more an organ of intelligence, than merely the bodies’ main pumping station. In fact, these new discoveries include intriguing evidence that more than half of the Heart is actually composed of neurons of the very same nature as those that make up the cerebral system. Not only that, but the heart also emits a 5,000 times stronger electromagnetic field than the brain. Joseph Chilton-Pearce, author of The Biology of Transcendence, calls the heart “the major biological apparatus within us and the seat of our greatest intelligence.”

According to the Institute of Heart Math, “the heart and brain maintain a continuous two-way dialogue, each influencing the other’s functioning. The signals the heart sends to the brain can influence perception, emotional processing and higher cognitive functions; neuro-cardiology researchers view this system and circuitry as the “heart brain”. In a specific comment regarding intuition, HeartMath goes on to say; “Heart intuition or intelligence brings the freedom and power to accomplish what the mind, even with all the disciplines or affirmations in the world, cannot do if it’s out of sync with the heart.”

The HeartMath Institute has also conducted additional research studies relating to our emotions and more, which they call, “Emotional Energetics Research” and publish the following statement on their website:

“The heart produces by far the body’s most powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field, which can be detected several feet away by sensitive instruments. Research shows our heart’s field changes distinctly as we experience different emotions. It is registered in people’s brains around us and apparently is capable of affecting cells, water and DNA studied in vitro. Growing evidence also suggests energetic interactions involving the heart may underlie intuition and important aspects of human consciousness.”

This newly emerging scientific evidence has the enormous power and potential to open the minds of anyone willing to stop long enough and reflect on what this truly means to each and every one of us. Not only are we discovering the true potential of every individual should they begin to live from their heart, rather than solely from their logical mind, but also to fully grasp the truth that we are all intimately connected and collectively one.

Additional evidence was found to support this truth when researchers looked a little closer and revealed an even more astonishing discovery; that each heart cell is unique in that it not only pulsates in synchrony with all the other heart cells, but also produces an electromagnetic signal that radiates out beyond the cell. An EEG that measures brain waves shows that the electromagnetic signals from the heart are so much stronger than brain waves, that a reading of the heart’s frequency spectrum can be taken from three feet away from the body, without the need to place electrodes on it.

This next bit of news is one of the most interesting, as the geometric shape that the Heart’s electromagnetic frequency creates is in the form of a torus field. Similar to the shape of a donut, the heart’s torus field radiates out from the chest for as far as twelve to fifteen feet from the body, and then wraps around and returns in through the back, creating the ‘hole in the donut’ in the middle. The axis of this Heart torus extends from the pelvic floor to the top of the skull, and the whole field is holographic, meaning that information about it can be read from each and every point within the torus’ energetic field.

Even more intriguing is that the Hearts’ torus electromagnetic field is not the only source that emits this type of electromagnetic field. In fact, all atoms emit the very same energetic torus field. Earth also emits it’s own (well documented) electromagnetic field in the same form of a torus. And so does the solar system, and even our galaxy. And, all are holographic.

Scientists believe there is a good possibility that there is actually only one Universal torus encompassing an infinite number of interacting, holographic tori within its spectrum. And, because electromagnetic torus fields are holographic by nature, it is more than likely that the sum total of our Universe is present within the frequency spectrum of a single torus.

This means that each one of us is connected to the entire Universe, in a very real and observable way, and as such, each one of us has access to all of the information within this Universal field of energy, at any given moment. When we get quiet and access what we hold in our Hearts, we are literally connecting to the limitless supply and wisdom of the Universe, thereby enabling what we perceive as “miracles” to enter into our lives.

This amazing organ that we often times ignore, neglect, and build walls around, is where we can find our greatest strength, our faith, our courage and our compassion, enabling our higher emotional intelligence that can, if we allow it, guide us throughout our lives.

Anyone today can begin living from their Heart, easily and simply by learning to meditate, as meditation will enable you to easily access your Heart’s inner wisdom and that of the Universe.

As each one of us begins this ‘quiet revolution of living from the Heart’, we will begin to see it reflected in our lives and in our world. It is also how each one of us will create real and lasting change in our personal lives, and as a direct result, also be co-creating a new and better world in the process.

To discover more great tools and information on how you can easily begin living from your Heart, please visit: http://www.gemaffex.com.

For more information, tools, workshops about how to ‘live from your Heart’, please visit: http://www.gemaffex.com

Feel free to also email me directly with any questions you may have about living more simply and from the heart: rcherry@gemaffex.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rebecca_Cherry

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3779367

8:29pm: Video Theater for January 2012


This is the most important one for you to watch and hear. It's also the longest, at about 24 minutes. But it lays out, in limited but serious terms, the preliminary statement for a system ALREADY FULLY DEVELOPED and agreed to by a global consortium (though details are not provided), that is meant to pick-up the wreckage when the present global economy collapses. Just listen for the sake of your own appraisal, as to the seriousness and "level of validity" of those proclaiming it.






Here is pure entertainment... It comes from a 1955 film called The Seven Little Foys, starring Bob Hope who performs with James Cagney in this supposed presentation by Eddie Foy and George M. Cohan for the New York Friars Club. Seen alone, and in the film's context, that's what it looks to actually be. But viewed outside that frame as a piece of practiced and rehearsed 'vaudeville' dancing, it displays the immense skills of these two mid-century performers. And as was once said by Frank Sinatra of two other top-notch performers, "You'll never again see the likes of it."

I tend to agree, considering that they were in their 50s when the film was made (Hope: 52; Cagney: 56). But have a look for yourselves in the brevity of under 4 minutes...









This is a cute promo for a State bank in California. It's hardly two minutes long, and you are guaranteed to enjoy it...








And down below is an ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL testimonial to the deep, too seldom realized truth that . . . our EXPERIENCE of the world around us is essentially reliant -- regardless of what may be ACTUALLY going on -- on the mood and atmosphere that we establish for ourselves. And you'll get a real blast of that in just five easy minutes.

It's worth saving, to watch again and again...








Here, in closure, is one of the finest short videos to come out of the Occupy Movement. In just three and a half minutes it reports the tale of police who begin to see reality in the process. Especially one retired police captain who has chosen to make an issue of it. It's from mid-November, when the battles were hot and heavy.

5:13pm: This strange fellow . . . Steve Beckow

Yes, quite a puzzle for me to figure out. Almost like a Don Juan kind of character, he seemed to be something of a shape-shifter . . . Now you see him, Now you don't . . . now you understand what he's up to, but then suddenly he's up to something else!

I'd thought he was simply a collector and dispenser of all kinds of mystical material . . . that was last October, when I first signed on for his daily output . . . but then he turned out to be a resource on his own, gaining his insight from his own Master, the Archangel Michael. Even that was something of a mystery to me, though he's always been up front about it. But his way of reportage was so... inscrutable seems the best word for it. I'd be reading from one quoted resource (I assumed), and suddenly realize this was Steve's own observations . . . there was no clarity in his reportage, as to whom it was coming from!

Well, I got over that; but then he progressed into various projects within projects... interviewing his Master on weekly radio thru his own marvelous 'medium' -- a gal named Linda; then he was organizing 'hard-up lightworkers' (my term, not his), and setting up his own funding project for them, (he calls it the "Bridge Fund") . . . It began to seem unreal -- even by MY weird standards.

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But in the end, I am 100% supportive of what Steve Beckow is bringing into this year-of-great-change. He's a visionary and the most remarkable bundle of fresh thinking I've seen in this field. And honorable, to the core of his being.

So I want to present, here, what I've come to learn of him, mainly by way of his own reportage in several pieces. And to remind you that his ongoing activity is available to you, too. From his website and via the continuing Monday evening radio "interviews" he does with his Master, the Archangel Michael (for which you'll find a link further on down). It's broadcast on the web every Monday at 6 pm, Pacific Time, and ultimately given linkage through his website (above).

Here is what Steve formally has to say about himself, first of all from his web site:

Steve Beckow is owner of The 2012 Scenario and lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He attended the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, graduating with a Masters degree in Canadian History. Steve is a member of Mensa Canada.

He studied in three Ph.D. programs but was uncomfortable remaining within disciplinary boundaries or paradigms. One dissertation was rejected as being outside his chosen field. Another proposal was rejected as being outside the university’s paradigm of empirical materialism.

He began his career as a Cultural Historian for the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization) where he published articles redefining the fields of cultural history, popular culture, and artifact studies. He finished his working life as a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, his chief interest being gender issues.

Steve has written around 20 books and a few hundred articles, many of them pseudonymously. He has several websites. Their subjects include enlightenment, the common ground of spirituality. life on the spirit planes, global gender persecution, automation, the truth of 9/11, the dangers of depleted uranium, and the 2012 scenario. His books and articles are available without cost and may be reposted freely.

His spiritual disciplines included Gestalt, encounter groups, spiritualism, the est Training, rebirthing, Zen, Vipassana meditation, and Enlightenment Intensives.

In 1977, Steve had an out-of-body experience which dissipated the fear of death. In 1987, he experienced a vision of the total journey of an individual soul, from God to God, which demonstrated to him that the purpose of life was enlightenment. That experience is written up here. It took nearly 20 years to fully express in words what he saw in eight wordless seconds that day.

He has enjoyed several transformational or direct experiences of Self, none of which he considers “enlightenment.” Today, Steve lives a life of voluntary simplicity and research as a non-denominational and happily-married “urban monk.”

Next, and with immediate recency, Here is Steve's own summary of the broadcast from last Monday (1/9) during which -- through his own medium, Linda -- he had a discussion with the Immortal Jesus...

Tonight on An Hour with an Angel Jesus made some startling revelations, perhaps the most interesting of which was the acknowledgement that he did marry Mary Magdalene, had a daughter Sarah who journeyed to the South of France after his departure from this plane, and that Sarah was indeed what is known as the “Holy Grail.”

He said that his family of origin was well-placed and that times varied from peaceful to less orderly because of mass migrations. But his family was not poor as has been often represented in the Bible.

Other revelations: he described the journeying he made to other lands to study under teachers of many religions. In olden times this round was called the philosopher’s circuit. He described his studies in India.

He acknowledged that we are all already immortal and when he speaks of immortality, he means the end of the need to be reborn into matter rather than becoming immortal.

He gave a message to Christian fundamentalists who might be expected to reject Ascension. He cautioned against making one’s beliefs written in stone and verified for us that Ascension will occur towards the end of the year. He said many will choose to ascend at the last moment and said that the key to Ascension is holding love in your heart.

He talked about his birth, childhood, and education, and that he travels among star brothers and sisters today.

He spoke to those who are feeling a lack of hope, and the importance for Lightworkers to reach out to others to send healing, love and light to let them know you are holding the hope for them until they are ready to resume their place in the unfoldment/2012. He said it is time for standing up for what you know to be true.

Jesus said he would return next week to continue the discussion of his life and teachings, including karma and reincarnation.

To listen to this show and past shows, click on the link below:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/an-hour-with-an-angel

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And finally, back here at 'Scrapbook Central'...

I feel like something needs to be said about this entire process -- used and referenced a great deal by Steve -- of the channeling experience. It's hardly anything new, of course, in the Scrapbook's own meanderings among its topics, but Steve Beckow does his work almost entirely at that level. So this is a good place to make a current statement on it.

Initially, I had a lot of skepticism about it -- my reasoning and logic asserting themselves, in the face of something just too loose to take at face value. So I know all about that tendency among us, and the way it clings as a habit, regardless of all the flaws we've discovered in our 'clear thinking'. Yet we continue this knee-jerk flip switch on the very unfamiliar. Nobody ever questions where ideas or impulses come from, do they? But the minute anyone implies they come from "a certain voice" in one's head, the alarm goes up! . . . well, Big Deal.

I looked at my own knee-jerk reaction and realized that's all it is. It could be, in fact, that putting "knowledge from an unknown source" into a very personalized context is the easiest path toward accepting it as trustworthy. In which case, it's a very good thing. A very good resource to have available, if it comes more easily than trusting your own self. It's also one that can keep the ego from building up 'mountainously'.

Which isn't to say that it actually comes from yourself, but just to get around the objection that it doesn't, and past the barrier of stalemate. Use what you get, I say, wherever it comes from, if it clears a hurdle. And I guess that's my final word on the topic. (Until next time).

__________________
Added Note (1/10):

Just to attest to Steve's coverage and his sharpness, when I opened this morning's input from his site, I discovered a bit of recognition to ME at the head of it, for this very article! He had somehow tapped into it as it was in prep, on LiveJournal, before this Scrapbook was fully ready to go. And I suspect, too, that the Anonymous comment you'll find below was also from him.

10:03pm: In Praise of The Sprout

I've written often of having turned my entire life around forty years ago at the age of 44, when I left the world of reliable income behind, with no particular prospect ahead of me. I've referenced that turning point in many ways, usually focusing on its wide-open life-giving effect, in one respect or another -- for that was the excitement of it.

But there was also the scholarly side: venturing on whole new fields of discovery. One of these was journaling as a regular practice -- which, in turn, led to a variety of subsequent discoveries including, most prominently, the seasonal aspect of life that can hardly be known when strait-jacketed by a framework of holidays, vacations and the 5-day work week. Opening life wider than that framework opened me to a never-before-known world of perception and discovery.

One of the exceptional and marvelous items in that bag of discovery was what I came to call the Sprout -- an annual occurrence that can shed some marvelous light on the year's course of our personal life -- IF we can catch sight of it, for it tends to be elusive. I write about it now because the annual Sprout time is just up ahead, and could be a very good thing to be aware of, for this particularly singular year.

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Let me define for you exactly what the nature of the Sprout is, to make sure you fully understand me before I go further with this. It's a kind of 'predictor' for one's coming year. It has three qualifying features: 1) it arrives unbidden, from 'out of the blue' as it were; 2) it comes in close timing to the first week of February -- I use February 6th as my focal date, though it can appear up to two weeks on either side of that date; and 3) it becomes absolutely compelling in its influence on your year's developing activity. Thus, it can take awhile -- and usually a journal -- to pick up on it.

In fact, it was only by journaling that I first caught sight of it as a repeating function of my personal year -- and I've no reason to doubt its likely occurrence in everyone's year. Invisible, to be sure, as it had been in mine for the entire first half of my life.

Somewhat coincidental to this present revelation ("ho, ho"), I recently happened across an old folder of notes stuck in a hidden corner near my writing desk, and opening it I discovered a serious paper on The Sprout that I'd been working on sometime in the mid-'80s -- about the time I arrived in Seattle. Among much else in the folder, I found a list of the eleven prior years (1973-1983), with full data on my Sprout awareness for each of them -- which is just what I need, now, for your further edification. So let me give you a few instances of the Sprout in action, as it were.

In 1978 an elderly benefactor in Carmel, CA died in her sleep on February 2nd. She'd been providing shelter for me, for about a year, in exchange for my presence there as an on-site caretaker, as needed. Six days later, in a completely unrelated development, I was offered no-cost shelter at a country camp some 250 miles north of there. Either one of those developments could have been regarded as the Sprout, precisely bracketing my target date as they did. My evolving year, of course, followed on the second of the two -- but the first certified the need of it, and was certainly 'out of the blue'.

In 1980 -- while in residence at the camp in the woods -- I received an unexpected phone call on the 5th of February from a friend in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He was in charge of a panel group at that year's Futurist Conference in Toronto, and was offering an opportunity for my participation there. It called the turn for my entire year, as it eventuated, with many side features involved. (I met there, in fact, one of our steady readers -- the only meeting we've ever had!).

When I drew up this list of Sprouts I'm referencing, I did an analysis of them at the same time, rating each on a 1 to 3 scale for the several variable I've indicated, and those two had the best score. A 1975 instance came close, its only weakness being a very early arrival (January 15th). That was the year and date my bowel burst while I was in a hospital, necessitating an emergency colostomy -- which certainly influenced the course of my year, and much more besides. (Had I not been hospitalized at the time, I almost certainly wouldn't have survived, for the felt effect of such an event only lasts for 15-20 minutes -- after which, one proceeds into a painless but deadly peritonitis. Just one of the many reasons I feel I've led a charmed and guided life).

So there you have it -- my brief 'brief' for the substantial validity of what I've come to call The Sprout -- take it or leave it. But DO allow the possibility that such a very special cue, for you, could be on its way into your life within the next few weeks. Just be alert for it. Or more likely, alert for any pattern of subsequent developments in your world that could be related to some singular, happenstance occurrence that you hardly took notice of when it arrived . . . out of the blue.

8:55pm: Welcome . . . to the first of a refreshed Scrapbook series

Well, here we are . . . a full week along in this critical year-long link between the 'old world' and what bids to be so radically New that all sorts of speculation (but only speculation!) as to how it will actually turn out have teased our hopes and fears. My New Start goal is to adequately cover the course of this incredible year, for you, in this regenerated series of our good old Irv's Scrapbook -- which is now (unbelievably!) into its own Fifth Year.

Yes, it hardly seems possible that I've been at this since September of 2007, but that's when the first issue emerged, with what now seems the pride of innocence. It was many months before I discovered Calleman and his Mayan Calendar understandings, or the notion of an upcoming Ascension. Not that the world was much more innocent at that time, for we were well underway toward today's fractious times. But I, myself, was much more innocent.

I used the same 'innocent' photo as the one here, and accounted for the name I gave it (Scrapbook) with this cheerfully innocent reflection... "I want to give you 'scraps' that you'll appreciate receiving . . . that'll not only illuminate your way but also refresh your enthusiasm for it. The fact that life is becoming almost daily more of a challenge should not deprive you of the positive elements that are always present for you: love, humor, faith and an exploratory excitement. These things I hope to continually refresh with my emailings."

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If I falsely seduced you, I didn't mean to . . . I really believed that. How sweetly innocent I was, just four and a half years ago.

Which is not to say I've overcome it entirely. Didn't I send you that 'revived' ScrapLetter, hardly a week ago, right on New Years Day? It seemed sufficiently urgent at the time, but as it turned out, my vision was skewed. I'll get to the closure on that tale before I'm done with this Fresh-Start opener.

More immediately, I'm already getting some taste of how wild and crazily other winds are likely to be blowing, before this year runs its full course. You can already see a lot of it in the general news. Last year, it was all about the supposedly major series of Reality Upgrades that lay ahead for us. This year, one begins to wonder if we'll have any reality at all by the time the year is done with.

Here's a piece of the challenge that recently came through for me...

Many sorts of 'hints' had filtered out, in last year's full course, that some kind of massive shift in our very way of dealing with money would somehow have to eventuate if the world is ever to get back on any fresh and clear basis of dealing with economic affairs. Suggestions even to the effect that debt -- ALL debt -- will have to simply and uniformly be forgiven. Calleman, whose general foresight has been hugely validated, made the suggestion himself, somewhere along the way.

Well, on January 1st a rather remarkable video was released . . . a very serious and sober presentation -- not gilded with the ordinary kind of musical/visual hocus-pocus we've become accustomed to for web features, but a pretty straight-forward presentation of some entirely new way of 'doing economics' that would resolve the ever-distorting, manipulative way that it has always been done. (I'm going to give you that 24-minute 'plain presentation' in our Video Theater section, so you can listen to it for yourselves).

It sounded promising to me, though it provided no details, merely the statement of its purpose, and that a worldwide level of agreement, in general principle, has already been attained for the project, and that this presentation was its general announcement, with implementation to begin later this year.

I viewed it as a worthy element in the sort of year this promises to be. I was watching it on YouTube, of course . . . and before I could leave the page, I spotted a couple of commentary-videos on it; so of course, I had to check them out, too...

I should not have been surprised . . . but even at this aged and cynical point in my life, I was! At heart, it seems, I'm just a basically upbeat and positive guy. But now came the expectable 'worldly-wise' mistrust of anything so 'implausibly' upbeat and promising . . . it had to be -- they said -- a 'sucker-punch', didn't it! . . . It had to be another ploy of the big schemers to rake us over the financial coals once more!

In that moment of personal revelation, I could see what this year is going to be like: a slashing attack on my very sanity if I bend to the analysis -- the 'wisdom' -- of anyone else, at all. I've just got to heed only my own counsel on anything that comes up for me, this year. And I'd strongly advise the same for you, if you'd rather not see your head get twisted this way and that, to the point of your own inability to be sure of where you're going. I'm afraid it's going to be that sort of year.

Aside from that -- if there is much to be said aside from it -- I've had a good several weeks of personal reflection about where I want to take my personal reality, now that I've had proof that I've got some say about it. Just because I do know this, now, for a fact, I find it important to give it some serious thought. I mean, however much longer I've got for myself, it's not going to be thrown away on trying to keep up with the concerns that seem to motivate the masses. I'm done with all that.

Some of this you've heard before from me. But some of it is fresh and new. Like . . . about the computer: I recognize I need it for quite a bit of what I do. At the same time, I've come to envy those I know who've been able to live free of it. They just accept the loss and focus on the gain of their choice.

Well, I pretty-well know what I need the computer for, and what I can do without, of it. This gives me a tremendous advantage over either one of those polarized stances. It'll take some time to define all the details involved, but I can do that slowly. The hardest part will be the extent to which I'm addicted to the damned thing. But I'll be working on that, too.

I've actually been getting more deeply into what I now want from life, though I've still a long way to go. But I feel greatly empowered by the start I've made: keeping my time free; more walking; dropping the nightly-news habit (very recently achieved), and staying entirely away from the many 'social sites' that hook most people seeking 'connection'. (I avoid Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and any such similar that tries to hook me with their 'busy-work'. I've got my own, thank you).

But let me give you the follow-up on that hasty New Years Day ScrapLet that I blasted all of you with.

As you'll recall, it concerned the 'perfectly timed' discovery of a very weird image representation, 'cast in silver,' as it were, of what some observant soul perceived as a cleverly hidden "Disclosure document" -- signaling the long-awaited/promised 'Disclosure' that a UFO contact had actually taken place! With what better timing, indeed, than the very end of 2011?

It set off a minor Rave among the cognoscenti, and the designer of the coin image, himself, had to explain that he had no such intent for his imagery -- nor was the art he'd rendered even haphazardly what some had apparently taken it for: an alien's image. He was building entirely on Canadian lore and imagery, and did it exactly as he'd intended.

But it was then regarded by some (including me, I have to admit) as a Disclosure image by "intercession of Consciousness" despite the artist's contrary avowal.

To put the matter finally to rest, a high-magnification photo of the coin's lower portion image (flipped, lower-side up, for clarity) does reveal an image that seems to flatly deny what his 'second-guessers' had seen!...



I still (to a bitter end?) feel that Consciousness ultimately calls the turn, as to what is discoverable in any given instance. If need be, the desired or necessary 'construct' will be perceived by someone if Consciousness (as a Divine Force) so determines it. In other words, I'm suggesting that we get our guidance through the profound medium of consciousness. Where else could it come from? How else transmitted?

Whether in this instance or not, of course, is a separate matter; and I'm willing to give way to the general consensus on this one.

9:17pm: The Top 10 Things “Dead” People Want You to Know
The Top 10 Things “Dead” People Want You to Know
By Mike Dooley, 12-20-2011, www.tut.com

1. They’re not ‘dead’.

2. They’re sorry for any pain they caused.

3. There’s no such thing as a devil or hell.

4. They were ready to go when they went.

5. You’re not ready.

6. They finally understand what they were missing.

7. Nothing can prepare you for the beauty of the moment you arrive.

8. Don’t try to understand this now, but life is exceedingly fair.

9. Your pets are as crazy, brilliant and loving, here, as they were there.

10. Life really is all about love, but not just loving those who love you… In their own words, The Universe.


Now here are some quotes from the newly-transitioned on the same subjects. The full titles of books noted can be found here...

http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/nmh/nmh-bib1.html

Edwin told us that a very large majority of people are no sooner arrived in spirit than a burning enthusiasm overtakes them as the spirit world reveals itself to them in the new life and they immediately want to rush back to the earth and tell all the world about it. (Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, LIWU, 54.)

When I first arrived my strongest desire was to try to demonstrate to the friends I left behind the fact that I still lived. In this I fear I was not very successful. (William James in LHH, 107.)

“Ruth, this is Lily and the group. Arthur Ford is here and wants you to know that he is as young as the merry month of May. He feels great and does not want you to grieve. He is so glad to be here, more delighted than you will ever know, for he has secretly yearned to make this trip of exploration and finds it much more beautiful than he had imagined or glimpsed while in trance. He’s on top of the world. A ball of fire! He’s so glad to be rid of the worn-out body which caused him such pain.” (Lily, Ruth Montgomery’s spirit control, in WB, 10.)

What are the facts? When anyone dies, upon awakening in their new surroundings, they naturally think of those they have left behind. If they are in great happiness, they long to tell their loved ones not to grieve for them. They want to describe the new and beautiful country to which they have come. With their clearer vision they are often able to guide those on earth in their human affairs, and, above all, they want them to realize how love is deeper, stronger, purer, than ever it was on earth.

Well, then, the cords of their great love draw them back to the earth and, in spirit form, they enter the old home. Their first sorrow is their total inability to make their presence known, their desire to comfort is unavailing; they watch the agony of grief and can do nothing. In their distress they often seek someone of psychic development and send a tender message of love and consolation. But, alas! Too often the bereaved will not receive the message. They are only frightened or incredulous.

Again they try, by abiding in the old home, to make one member, more receptive than the rest, realize their presence. But this time their touch, or partial manifestation, creates terror instead of joy and they are reluctantly obliged to resign themselves to knowing that in the home of which they were the centre their name is often never mentioned and they are regarded only as dead in the tomb, which friends with loving hands decorate with flowers and water with their tears. (John Heslop, SABL, 12-3.)

I struggled, fasted, sought for what was already present, perfect and everlasting within me. Like most of us in the body life I was in illusion; lost in glamour. I looked for the Spirit to reveal itself to me, when all that was necessary was ‘relaxation [into] God’ The Spirit was always with me, veiled because physical sight could not view it. The great secret of finding that Spirit was ‘letting go’ of self.

I, who longed so much for the touch of the divine, who dedicated my life to religious work, who read lives of the saints for their examples, who delved into the science of psychology, extrasensory perception, and all psychic phenomena, as well as into the occult sciences, who denied myself the usual sensual and reproductive life of a human being; who truly tried to obey the precepts of the Master, as related in the New Testament, I had not accepted the simple Reality of those word: “Behold, I am with you even unto the end.”

I had not been able to let go and let the Spirit absorb me. As I now see my thoughts, actions, aspirations from this angle, I am realizing that the very tenseness of my striving was my undoing and it barred the way to that very union for which my soul longed. (Frances Banks, TOL, 102-3.)

No soul can ever pass over into these worlds unless it has given its consent; and here I don’t mean a conscious consent, because the conscious mind is only a minor extension of the soul. The conscious mind may assume that death is approaching, but it is the soul itself that must give its consent before the process can take place. (Mike Swain in FMW, 50.)

My death [was] part of a plan. (Philip Gilbert in PTW, 212.)

My destiny had to be worked out. It was all fixed. (Philip to his mother, Alice Gilbert, in PTW, 115.)

I have brought about my own death because here I have greater works to do. (Sigwart, BOTR, 3.)

There comes to me from the earth such a feeling of oppression, of worrying, of anxiety, of fear of death, and all is derived from non-belief. If they could but realize the glory, even a fragment of the peace of this life I now experience. (Winifred Combe Tenants in SBS, 11.)

Nothing in life comes up to the immense joy of dying. (Sir Alvary Gascoigne in AL, 99.)

My death was beautiful. Everything became still. It changed to a quiet, calm sea after a blustering storm. The final experiences as a man were part of this storm. Then came the smooth waters of liberation. … It was a blessing to have been freed without illness, without extended pining away. (Sigwart, BOTR, 29.)

All the animals you have loved on earth and educated to understanding, will be with you here. (W.T. Stead, BI, 140.)

That is my dog [Frisker], my one faithful companion upon your earth. … He died while I was in France. I found him by accident soon after I came here. He recognized me and followed me. From that time all real loneliness has left me. (Private Thomas Dowding, PD, 66.)

10:34pm: An Unlikely Partnership

This amazing piece, a by-lined story, appeared just before Christmas in our local metaphysical freebie, the New Spirit Journal, and I knew immediately that I'd have to pass it along to you. It has to be the most incredible tale of Forgiveness that I've ever encountered.

Matthew Boger and Tim Zaal

by Kwami E. Nyamidie

Tim Zaal and Matthew Boger [left and right, above] met in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance. The extraordinary museum was opened in 1993 in honor of Simon Wiesenthal, a holocaust survivor who vowed to hunt down and bring former Nazi war criminals to justice. Through many innovative and interactive educational programs, the museum helps its yearly 250,000-plus visitors become aware of (and prevent in the future) the devastating cost in life and property of prejudice and genocide. Tim is one of the museum's special speakers, and Matthew serves there as a manager.

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Matthew had a troubled childhood. He was one of seven children of an ex-nun single-mother and a Hell's Angels gang member father. At 13, Matthew's mother threw him out of their San Francisco home after he informed her that he was gay.

"I know what you're going to do," she told him, "but you're not going to do it in this house."

Matthew went to Los Angeles where he became homeless, sleeping in parks, under bridges, scavenging food from trash bins, and doing whatever it took to survive.

When Matthew was 14, a gang of teenage white supremacists showed up one night at a favorite hamburger stand on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Matthew was attacked and left for dead in a pool of blood.

Matthew eventually recovered. And after living on the streets for four and half years, he met a benefactor who helped him turn his life around. He went to beauty school and became one of Beverly Hills' leading hair stylists. His celebrity clientele included Michael Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone, and Liv Tyler.

When the murder of University of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shepard hit the headlines in October 1998, Matthew knew it was time to act. He decided to volunteer at the Museum of Tolerance. He would later leave his successful hair stylist profession to become the museum's manager of operations and one of its consultants.

Tim's troubled childhood took him in a different direction. He came from a dysfunctional family. His father was abusive, which pushed Tim to start his own punk rock band. His anger grew fiercer when an African American nearly killed his brother. Tim saw himself as "The God of Thunder" and terrorized those who crossed his path and who rubbed him the wrong way. Violence was like a drug he became addicted to.

Tim became the Los Angeles-area director of recruitment and propaganda for the White Aryan Resistance, and his hate crimes eventually took him to jail in 1999.

After his release, Tim decided to change his life and to give back to his community, so he began volunteering at the Museum of Tolerance, an unusual building standing majestically on the southeast corner of Pico Boulevard and Roxbury Drive.

One day, in the summer of 2005, as Tim and Matthew were having lunch together, Tim told Matthew about some of his exploits as a former skinhead. Tim explained that one night, after he and his gang had gone to a concert, they attacked a gay boy at a hamburger joint. He told Matthew how he pursued his victim down a dark alley, kicked him and knocked him down with his boots, and beat him to death. For several years, Tim said he had been haunted by the heavy burden of thinking he had killed an innocent teenager.

Matthew looked into Tim's eyes, and realized these eyes belonged to the teenager who nearly cut short his life one spring night in 1981, some 26 years earlier.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

Dead silence enveloped them. Victim and attacker had come face-to-face.
In the days that followed, Matthew wasn't sure what to do. Furious and confused, revenge, retaliation, and other ideas flooded his mind. But after several weeks of soul searching, Matthew decided to forgive Tim.
They are friends now. Tim acts like Matthew's protector. One day at an airport, an airline employee remarked to Matthew, "Sir, you must be some celebrity. You go around with a bodyguard." She was referring to Tim's imposing and protective presence around Matthew. Tim is a stout man, 6 feet, 3 inches tall, while Matthew is slimmer and shorter.

Matthew, on the other hand, has become Tim's confidante. Tim calls on Matthew when he needs a second opinion on life's challenges.

And now, Matthew and Tim travel together to run interactive "From Hate to Hope" workshops. Together, they have spoken to thousands of people at the Museum of Tolerance and in schools where they are often invited to talk about hate, bullying, and forgiveness.

At the World Forgiveness Alliance awards ceremony honoring both men that August night, Tim played down his role in what some have called a miracle of forgiveness. "Matthew is the one who deserves the honor," Tim expressed.

"You and Matthew are honored as a team," Bob Platt, the 85-year-old founder of the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance, told Tim. Both of them dealt with a very severe hate crime, he said. It was a miracle they came out to the other side as friends.

Sometimes people wonder if Tim's transformation is for real; if people can really change. "Yes, they do, I'm living proof," Tim told Davida Wilis Hurwin, whose novel Freaks and Revelations is based on the lives of these two heroes. "But it's a conscious thing... I have to separate myself from the person I was in that alley, because even now, when I'm angry or feel stereotyped or victimized, I can slip into the kick-your-ass skinhead attitude."

Matthew says it was difficult to forgive Tim, but that he has learned many lessons on his forgiveness journey.

"I've learned that by forgiving those who have hurt us, we set ourselves free from the pain and the fear that lock us in a room." The process of forgiveness is not a one-shot deal. "It was not that I forgave Tim in one moment and was set free," Matthew said. "This is work I continue to do because I'm often tortured by the feelings and pain of what took place that night."

Matthew believes there was a gain for him for forgiving Tim.
"The reward of forgiveness for me is that I've set myself free and I stand in confidence. I know that I'm created exactly as who I'm supposed to be. There's nothing wrong with me. No one has the right to take that from me."



Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance is an organization headquartered in Mill Valley, California, which seeks to spread the healing power of forgiveness to the entire world. www.forgivenessalliance.org

8:37pm: The Joy of Quiet (a book review)

This -- a current bit of inspiration for me -- is 'borrowed' from a New York Times (12/29/11) book review on a volume called The Joy of Quiet by Pico Iyer (whether of book or review, I'm no longer sure, and my apologies for the uncertainty. Google can certainly provide the answer if you must know)...


LAST year, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.”

Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was... stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

------------------------

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at his or her desk without interruption.)

During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.”

Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting, “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less).

And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”!), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.

Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.”

More than that, empathy as well as deep thought depend (as neuro-scientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cell phone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook.

I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima, and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year, often for no longer than three days, to a Benedictine hermitage -- 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated -- there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them.

The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

10:17pm: Something New on the Education Horizon



M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curve ball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience.

Students using the program will be able to communicate with their peers through student-to-student discussions, allowing them an opportunity to ask questions or simply brainstorm with others, while also being able to access online laboratories and self-assessments. In the future, students and faculty will be able to control which classes will be available on the system based on their interests, creating a personalized education setting.

M.I.T.x represents the next logical evolution in the mushrooming business of free online education by giving students an interactive experience as opposed to a simple videotaped lecture. Academic Earth (picked by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2009) has cornered the market on free online education by making a smorgasbord of online course content – from prestigious universities such as Stanford and Princeton – accessible and free to anyone in the world. Users on Academic Earth can watch lectures from some of the brightest minds our universities have to offer from the comfort of their own computer screen. However, that is all they can do: watch. Khan Academy, another notable online education site, offers a largely free interactive experience to its users through assessments and exercises, but it limits itself to K-12 education. By contrast, M.I.T.x will combine the interactivity of the Khan Academy with the collegiate focus of Academic Earth, while drawing primarily from M.I.T.’s advanced course material.

“M.I.T. has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage M.I.T. coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best M.I.T.-based educational experience that Internet technology enables,” said M.I.T. President Susan Hockfield in the university’s press release.

According to the university, residential M.I.T. students can expect to use M.I.T.x in a different way than online-only students. For instance, the program will be used to augment on-campus course work by expanding upon what students learn in class (faculty and students will determine how to incorporate the program into their courses). The university intends to run the two programs simultaneously with no reduction in OCW offerings.

According to the New York Times, access to the software will be free. However, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential. The program will also save individuals from the rigors of the cutthroat M.I.T. admissions process, as online-only students will not have to be enrolled in the prestigious, yet expensive, university to access its online teaching resources.

Those chomping at the bit to dive into M.I.T.x will have to wait, as the university doesn’t plan to launch a prototype of the platform until the spring of 2012. According to M.I.T. Provost L. Rafael Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the prototype might include only one course, but it would quickly expand to include many more courses.

Once launched, M.I.T. officials expect the M.I.T.x platform to be a giant hit amongst other universities looking to create or expand upon their online course materials.  “Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Agarwal in the M.I.T. press release.

Whether M.I.T.x will directly threaten the margins at for-profit online universities, such as the University of Phoenix, APUS, or DeVry remains to be seen. But as M.I.T.x starts to provide many of the salient virtues of for-profit online colleges, such as a robust learning management systems and real-time virtual interaction, these publicly traded education companies might have to lower fees in order to compete with M.I.T.x’s compelling free price. In addition, the success of M.I.T.x, OCW, and Academic Earth may push dramatic technological innovation at for-profits, so that they can maintain a unique selling proposition versus their free competitors. Moreover, as the rapidly growing number of what are termed “self educators” choose free college education, a cottage industry of social media support services might evolve to bring them together for free in-person study and help sessions.

Which is all to say that, against this country’s sizable need for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates, M.I.T.x is nothing short of revolutionary. This is especially true if you aren’t a credential freak and, like me, just want to improve your chops in a marketable subject area. Heck, maybe Gene Marks’ (“If I Were a Black Kid”) tech-based view of education can become a reality after all.
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NOTE: Originating site carries a long detailing of follow-up commentary with responses from the author . . . much further information for those interested.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/

7:03pm: I am not Hardwired

by Thomas Moore

A very timely bit of reflective thinking discovered in a recent issue of Spirituality & Health. Thomas Moore is one of their regulars, and this piece of his taps into something we especially need reminding of, in these almost religiously 'hard-wired' times.

I Am Not Hardwired!

Years ago, people would say to me, "You travel a great deal. Your batteries must be getting low." In response, I'd pat my shirt and say, "I don't operate on batteries. The metaphor doesn't work for me. I'm not a robot."

Today, people say, "You're hardwired to be a writer." Well, I'm not really hardwired. Again, the metaphor evokes Dr. Frankenstein's monster rather than a human being. "You're a right-brain thinker," they tell me, as though my artistic interests and my intuitive ways can be reduced to the brain.

Brain talk especially irks me. It's popular today to explain experience by pointing out which parts of the brain "light up" in certain situations. In many places, neuroscience has the frisson of modernity, being up-todate, and irrefutable. I have no problem with brain studies in themselves, and I'm sure they help many people who have brain injuries and illnesses. What I object to is reducing human experience to the activity of the brain.

This tendency is just one more way in which we sink into the apparently benign materialism of the times.

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Another area where reductive materialism pops up is in sex. "It's only a physical relationship," a person might say. Well, I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a purely physical human being. Whether we like it or not, if we are breathing, we are emotional, spiritual, purposeful, and relational beings. So-called physical sex is full of meaning and emotion, even if these are suppressed or ignored.

Not long ago I received an email from a man who told me that because I've written about meaning in depression, I don't know the difference between clinical depression and everyday sadness. Well, in fact, as a psychotherapist I have read a great deal about these issues, and I'm still convinced that depression is not a biological event but always a meaningful one.

The modern habit of reducing human experience to the biological leads to our current situation, where many psychiatrists see their role as one of dispensing pills and where psychiatric residents are discouraged from studying the work of Freud and Jung and other brilliant psychoanalysts. The modern doctor focuses on outcome, not meaning.

I'd like to see our culture move in the opposite direction, where we seek out connections between what is going on in our lives and the illnesses that have come upon us. I'd like to see hospitals designed as manifestations of health and well-being of mind, spirit, and emotion. I'd like to hear the government say that since we have economic problems at the moment, we will have to cut math and science and preserve studies in art and spirituality.

I'd like to go to a doctor who asks me, "When you get frustrated, where do you feel it in your body? What was going on when these headaches began?" I'd like to hear an automobile manufacturer say that he's creating a car that will run through a town or past a farm silently, to maintain a contemplative atmosphere. I'd like to hear an airline say that it has designed a jet interior that coddles the human body, giving it enough room and light and air.

To get to this new world we need metaphors that don't make us into machines or anything literally physical. I once wrote a book about dark nights of the soul instead of depression, a word that easily points to a physical syndrome to be treated mainly with drugs.

Rather than discussing my batteries, I'd rather talk about my feeling of being alive and awake and ready for life. Rather than finding a part of my brain that explains my experience, I'd rather speak of my soul and spirit.

By locating our experiences in the physical realm, we lose the possibility of meaning, and yet as human beings we survive with meaning. If my depression is "clinical," a matter of chemistry and brain, then it has no meaning, and I am a robot.

There isn't one new metaphor to keep us human but a way of using images that keeps our lives meaningful. In the past, people compared a human being to the night sky -- vast, complex, and awesome. Nature images often work well: "I have an ocean of feeling." That's better than saying that I behave like clockwork or that I have the mind of a computer.

The metaphors we use create a climate in which we live. We could choose them thoughtfully, avoiding those that make us robots. It's time to make our machines more humane rather than making our humanity more machine-like.

4:24pm: Mini video theater...


Here is something I was alerted to last night . . . something that needs to be taken very seriously, in these weird political times...

It's a 12-minute video, but worth taking the time to look and listen

7:24pm: Video of Police emboldenment (3 minutes)

1:18pm: The Brains Behind Occupy Wall Street

from Forbes Magazine

by Kenneth Rapoza,
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.


This isn’t the 60s. And it isn’t the pre-Iraq War protests either. Occupy Wall Street, supposedly, is different. It has no leader. It has no political action committee behind it. One can argue that the protests against Wall Street this month really started in Tunisia. That’s where the idea came from. But the guys who took that Arab movement and ran with it are based in Vancouver.

Kalle Lasn, 69, is their quasi leader. He’s the publisher and editor of Adbusters magazine. It’s a small, non-influential critical and artsy magazine with a decent following of around 90,000 who call themselves “culture jammers”. Occupy Wall Street began in the conference rooms at that Vancouver mag.

I spoke with Lasn in July, right after the new edition of Adbusters hit the news stands with the now famous image of a ballerina balancing on the Wall Street bull. Above her head read the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. Lasn didn’t know what this movement would become. Just two and a half short months later, it’s the talk on The Talk, The View and every major news channel.

=========================================

I spoke with him again this afternoon about this weekend’s European wide protest, the G-20 and a worldwide Robin Hood tax.

Kenneth R: The Washington Post calls you the leader of Occupy Wall Street. What do you make of that?

Kalle L: This is a leaderless movement. But the founding of the idea came out of lots of brainstorming here among our staff editors, photographers, freelancers and people on our list-serve. Back in the summer we were all talking about what we were going to do next with the magazine and we were all inspired by what happened in Tunisia and thought that America was ripe for this type of rage. We put feelers out on our forums. So it was relatively recent, in June, when we came up with this idea and launched the hashtag in mid-July with the magazine and then it just took off. Once that issue was published, we started putting out tactical briefings to our list serve.

Kalle is a man of the world, so it is no surprise to him or his network of culture jammers, that a Wall Street protest was conceived far away in Vancouver, Canada. That’s fairly close to the site where another surprising protest in U.S. history took place. The 1995 anti-globalization protests caught everyone by surprise in Seattle during the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. Back then, the model was to attack corporate control over the public sphere like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male and those who followed behind in a pack. The new model has evolved from a pack…to a swarm. Kalle gets inquiries and emails about Occupy Wall Street from London to Shanghai, but he’s not ringing his hands and sticking pins in a wall-sized map about where his next diabolical plan against capitalism will take shape.

Kalle was born in Estonia and moved to Australia when he was 7. He hit Canada in his 30s and has been in Vancouver ever since. He traveled to the U.S. for a year, back in the 1960s.  We joked a little tongue in cheek. (This is me getting my Fox on.)

KR: Of course, you did. You were a hippy and you were radicalized in San Francisco.

KL: I went to a Jimi Hendrix concert.

KR: See.

KL: But it wasn’t the concert that radicalized me. I remember the people there were so alive. The young people in Occupy Wall Street are a lot like that.

KR: Seriously? Everyone thinks their movement is the one to really change things.

KL: You can’t think too rationally about this. These movements are best understood years after they are gone. We have a long history of movements that have just fizzled out, but I think this time it’s different. This movement has an edge. First, it is a global moment. We are all living in dire times. We are all facing major tipping points around the world. We are faced with a political crisis in the U.S. and concern that the U.S., with no help from Washington, is now in irreversible decline. The economy is surely in decline. So people see this, young people see this, and they wonder what their future holds for them given those circumstances. The future doesn’t compute. The backbone of the movement that helped end the Vietnam war was the fact that young people were faced with the draft. Their bodies were on the line. They could get scooped up from wherever they were and sent to Vietnam to killed by the Viet Cong. When your future is on the line, when your kids’ future is on the line, people will fight for what they want.  Occupy Wall Street says our future is on the line.  Is there a chance that this will all fizzle out? Yes, but I think over time we will pull it off and are getting our point across.

KR: Who’s on your side in DC?

KL: Nobody is on our side in DC. We don’t want to hop into bed with anyone. We don’t mind Al Gore saying ‘Hey, I like you guys’, that’s fine with us. But we are not going to hop into bed with the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party did with the Republicans. Once you do that, you’re dead. You align yourself with existing power players. The Tea Party got a few people elected, had a few protests, but that’s it. Now it’s our turn.

KR: Talk about divide and conquer. We have a long history of that in the West, when public movements are overthrown by splitting the public up on the issue. Should Occupy Wall Street guys and Tea Party guys join forces?

KL: Forget divide and conquer. It’s too soon for that. And it may happen. I don’t know. The good thing about the Tea Party is that deep down in their guts they understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with our system. But they want to recapture the past when there is no going back. Their target is the government. Our target is the people who run the government: corporations and Wall Street. If some Tea Party people want to come out and protest, please come. They know we have to take away some of the powers the financial markets and speculators have over our system. They know that we have to make money less important in politics or this democracy is in very big trouble.

KR: Where is this all going?

KL: We don’t know. We will see what happens in Europe this weekend. Social movements there have been planning protests for Saturday. We could have some Occupy Wall Street people involved in that, as well. Then on Oct. 29th we are thinking about protesting in Paris ahead of the G-20 meeting. Look, people of all ages are looking at their political leaders, they are looking at Wall Street or the London Stock Exchange and they are saying, ‘fuck you guys. You don’t know what you are doing. All you can talk about is stimulus and cuts and should we provide stimulus here or should we provide stimulus there.’ It doesn’t address the problem the financial sector has over our lives.

KR: What should they do?

KL: We would like to see a 1% Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions. We want to push for that. We want to kill some of the global casino and one way to do that is to slow down the fast money, the derivatives markets, the credit default swaps and exotic financial products that wiped us out in 2008; a way to slow that market is with a tax.

KR: This is going from being a national conversation to a global conversation.

KL: Lots of people are coming to our website from outside the U.S. and Canada. It is already a global conversation.

9:46pm: Imagining the Future

Well, as the Swan flies, that was its song about what's gone by. But its song won't be complete without some dream-talk about what lies ahead.

In one sense, of course, we're embarked now on this discovery trail called Fruition to discover what lies ahead . . . and it may well be the case. But if part of that is to be my own choosing, I need to put some time (and words) into what my choices for that would be. My understanding, indeed, is that it will be my own choice, given the creative option from the start.

I know, first of all, that I want TIME to slow down for me, to a pace I'm comfortable with. I'll do that by disentangling myself as much as possible from the pace and pull of today's world. And I already know many ways of doing that; but I intend to ferret out more of them. Let's call that my prime imperative, around which much of what follows will naturally come into play.

Besides commercialism itself, much of the high-tech world that commercialism now thrives on will have to be reconsidered. An instance: Georgina has told me she prefers the daily newspaper as her news-medium of choice . . . reminding me of how congenial that used to be, before the TV and then the computer took hold of my head -- preferred in each instance, of course, for their sense of greater immediacy. I think it's time to return to that 'old-time mode' as a way of returning to its old-time pace and pleasure, and a relaxing way to start my day.

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It will be things like that, based on knowing from experience the critical points at which our world got skewed. Like one of the first things that made me wary of computers and how they warp our world -- an insight from before I even thought about turning away from it -- was the realization that an achievement with computers was merely a stepping-stone set in place for the purpose of moving on beyond it. The older way, of actual cornerstones that maintained a sense of honor and achievement, had been abandoned for a newer 'tradition' of stepping-stones: here today, left behind for tomorrow.

That's the way I'll work at it: gradually edging out 'the new' from my world as I discover I no longer need it. (Or more likely, seeing that I can no longer live with it). Some of Google remains marvelous -- but I can already see that it's merely a question of time. Hopefully, as existing systems around us start to fall of their own weight, some of the 'long gone' ways will start to re-emerge.

Right now, for instance, the postal service, the backbone of interpersonal communication for entire centuries, is crumbling -- hardly missed as it might be, for whatever is left of the urge to communicate has already gone in other directions (though at the loss of its very soul). But I tend to feel, about it, that the soul has simply gone dormant -- somewhat monastery-like -- to await its ultimate revival. Which is why I treasure what I have of old books, old art (in books), and other such.

Up to now,the computer's tendency to continually re-invent itself -- just for the sake of its own survival -- has steadily alienated me. But now I see that the better way of dealing with it is to let it go. Release, and freedom from it, is the better course all the way around. In fact, I've already begun my own retreat, because of increasingly annoying password issues, and the steady frustration involved with trying to satisfy their various protocols.

I stay away from Yahoo now, and have gone a long way toward refusing to deal with the various so-called social sites. I'm on Facebook, but I stay away from it as much as possible because it seems very trivial to me. A waste of time, except for the occasional opportunity to connect with a long lost friend. As for the rest: I won't involve myself with Linked-in because of its outright self-promotion as a 'business networking' venue. Sorry, but I'm not into 'business networking'. I've come to treat telephone solicitation just about the same way.

Speaking of which, I'm finally coming 'out of the woods' from a long agony over what I've come to regard as The Donation Business. This is not the place to detail it, but the hassle has put me to a good deal of torment over the past year, after my recognition that -- regardless of the 'quality' of the appealing agency -- their tactics prey upon the sincerity of their victims, and particularly their senior victims whom they take unconscionable advantage of. So . . . having failed in my efforts to publicize that, through AARP, I've decided I'll no longer be a party to it: a blanket refusal to donate except for a few very special ones that I regard as 'my own'. So this, too, becomes a part of my intended reality. My donations will otherwise, hereafter, be kept to the limit of "cash, to real people" such as the homeless who are out there begging for it.

The thing I still don't know, of course, is whether the human life I experience is going to continue onward or not. For close to forty years, now, I've carried the sense that I would live until 84. What I never knew, however -- until just a few years ago -- was anything at all about the Mayan Calendar, and what it would bring. What is life? And what constitutes a 'fully lived' life? Do we -- can we -- go on 'alive' (whatever that turns out to mean), or do we actually turn out to be multi-dimensional beings? And further: would the answer to that be any different for me, at 84 lived years, than for you at 70, 60, 50, and 40?

Maybe I'll know, by the time this Time of Fruition is done. I should think I'll know SOMETHING, anyway. I mean . . . if my reality is going to be the way I want it to be, after October 28th, I'd better have those preferences down pretty well by then. I'm leaving myself about two weeks, after this gets out to you, to take care of all that. Two weeks during which all manner of prep for a late November Bay Area journey has to get done. Like it or not, we'll be into December before any semblance of order will have a chance to emerge in my life. And it's pretty hard to know WHAT I'LL BE by that time.

I know you think I'm joking about all of this . . . but I'm not! I figure I've had the proof, many times over, that I'm really shaping a new self: that I've had that capability, for a lot longer than I've realized -- not only from instructive things that have been happening recently, but in a good deal of reflection over what's happened over the whole course of my life. It was only the circumstance of being hung up on the way everything LOOKED . . . the 'objectivity' of it, you know . . . I mean, a dream remains a dream until you wake up from it! And that 'waking up' happens every time you find yourself among people who think that way . . . and talk that way . . . and generally think anyone who doesn't is either into joking or dreaming out loud, or . . . well, okay, might be too weird to take seriously.

Yes, there were things along the way I've had difficulty in coming to terms with . . . like channeling, and 'dark forces' and such; but the marvelous fact that it's all, at some level, a dream, as I'm now persuaded, means that ALL such issues eventually become merely turbulence. Astrology is a lovely example of something that remained 'an issue' for me, for so-o-o-o-o many years! Because so many things it turned up (in the hands of someone who knew how to deal with it) were clearly accurate, or true, that it had to be accepted, finally, as something I'd have to learn to live with -- careful not to look directly at -- just sort of 'off to the side of it', you know. And that's what finally taught me how to deal with other such things. Until I was simply comfortable enough with the notion that life had to be less objectively real than I'd grown up thinking it was. I mean, it HAD to be; there was simply no other valid possibility, given all that I was learning, in various ways.

So I have to feel sorry for those who cannot manage that hurdle. Hate me if you must -- I don't mean to be putting anyone down -- but this is what it finally comes to. The world. for me is not real. Even though so many, many people keep playing its games as if it were.

The daily TV news, and how they've been handling this Protest on Wall Street, has been a perfect example of what I mean. When they finally got around to seeing it, they simply couldn't put their heads around it! They hadn't a clue as to where it came from or what it was all about. These are supposed to be media people, for God's sake! . . . and they hadn't a clue! Even yet, they continue to mis-read it. They grasp it only to the conceptual limits of the reality they're in.

Which is why I prefer to speculate, here, about the way I'm going to live that will make it different. Because the more I can keep verifying that it is as I'm making it . . . well, it becomes something on the order, then, of what many would call a self-fulfilling prophecy . . . which is capable of 'proving' just about anything. Well, we always use the term that way, as an explanation for some development that can't be otherwise explained. But let's look at that for a minute . . . it may provide a way out of this 'your-reality/my-reality' dilemma.

The 'self-fulfilling prophecy' is how we tend to provide a 'logical explanation' for something that has no other visible (logical) way of accounting for. It appears to account for the otherwise 'impossible things' that happen to people who claim the visitation of some magical or mysterious process for themselves. We know they've got to be mistaken about their claim for it, so we invoke this somehow acceptable explanation: a self-fulfilling prophecy. But stop to consider it: What, after all, is a self-fulfilling prophecy? It's a presumed process with no known basis in logical reality, used arbitrarily to 'explain' some other process with no known basis in logical reality! Can you imagine anything more objectively senseless than that? Can anyone explain such a notion in the context of an 'objectively real world'. It can't be done! We use the term, and the idea, freely, never willing to look at the objective impossibility of it. We kid ourselves out of any objectively sensible recognition of the 'escape hatch' we freely use.

So you see? I, as you, as everyone is trapped in this essentially make-believe world, TRAINED to take it seriously and to reject the thesis of illusion or dream if anyone dares to bring it up, as one or another kind of heresy, delusion, 'fiction' -- whatever best holds the charge. It's often larded with the further charge of simply 'doing it for the money' . . . which is, of course, exactly what everyone is doing, with whatever it is they do. In some ways, the whole process becomes an amusing paradox, this escape-from-the-dream world we live in, and how we go about it.

9:44pm: The new Video Theater
Here is today's principal offering: a very solid assessment of the coming crunch of Capitalism, presented very compellingly by Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein . . . quite qualified to offer judgment. It's a presentation interview with him that provides its own explanatory details. Just 12 minutes long, and you'll find it worth every minute.







Here is a wonderful shortie (under two minutes) of Faith Bell, the friend who runs Bell's Books (founded by her Dad) in Palo Alto, CA -- the one and only outlet for my books, in the entire Bay Area . . . just because I got to know her, buying some books there . . . and returning to keep talking with her. This brief video shows you what a gem she actually is...







I've been wanting to show this for some while, now. You may remember Puneet from an early-on Scrapbook issue . . . We had encountered each other accidentally, being on the Couch-surfing site at the same time. He had heard of my hitch-hiking and was excited to make the connection and we chatted a bit. More recently, Puneet somehow got some time for himself to make a brief TED presentation, so he wrote to ask what he might say to folks as a message from ME, the 'world-famous-hitchhiker' he knew! Well, of course I had a few words for him to pass along. And not long afterward, I was amazed to get this 18-minute copy of his TED talk...








Barnet Bain and Freeman Michaels do, here, in a four-minute excerpt from something larger, a kind of free-wheeling dialog on the essential problem of not being able to grasp more than a tiny trickle of what is available to us, merely because we had our minds LIMITED by the culture we grew up in. They beautifully paint the dilemma presented.

In actuality, here, their dialogue is carried on from a distance, viewing each other on separate screens here pieced together as a 'together dialogue' . . . just so you know why it looks a bit odd.

6:29pm: Looking Back . . . where I've been...

Coming fully into this final stage of Whatever The Changes Are Going To Be -- for me, personally, it's been a very weird process... All of those aches and pains I've been reporting, as the time ramps up, and a whole lot of general 'strangeness', like I'm not really me; or I'm not FULLY me. Memory has many times flipped on me. I'll look at a word I typed, not 15 minutes ago, and realize it was way off the mark. Or I'll wonder what I ever did mean by it? Precious papers with needed writing upon them just vanish. It has really demanded that I keep my cool . . . and I as often failed at the effort, as the times I've held on . . . but as I've recently reported, I'm getting better at handling it.

This one is going to be an entire article on 'Looking Back', to try and account -- yet again, but differently -- for how I got here . . . what I went through to get here. Not as if I knew where I was going, but because I clearly didn't. That's the most amazing part of it, truly. Some of the 1970s background of mine you already know by now; but most of it you don't. In order to do it, I think the best way is to see it as a flow, and I portrayed that once in a tightly reflective issue of Ripening Seasons that I want to take you into.

Let me kind of set the stage with a strange dream I woke up from, not so many weeks ago. I can't say exactly when -- one of my consistent problems being a characteristic failure to put dates on things. One might think I deliberately want to prevent myself from any serious reflection; but that's not so. I fully wrote this one up, but left no indication of what I meant to do with it. In fact, I'm not even sure I haven't already shared it with you. I tried to check that out, at least, but all I can say is that I couldn't find it. Either way, it belongs right here for the kind of dream it was.

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I can't recall how the dream began. I was at some kind of banquet...

-- late to it, for some reason, and someone was setting a place for me, with many good foods being set out on a large plate, and then for some reason I had to leave -- briefly (I thought), and the plate remained there for me.

Then I was out on the streets of an unfamiliar town, turning corners here and there, looking for something I cannot now recall -- but I found it eventually and headed back to resume my meal . . . except I'd lost my way, in all of that, and had no idea of how to return. I'd best find a cab, I thought, to get me quickly back.

None were in sight, however. But I did see a strange looking delivery cart, and I asked if he could possibly do taxi service. He said Yes, he was licensed for that, just as soon as he finished with his delivery. And about then, I realized I couldn't tell him where I wanted to go . . . he'd have to find it for me...

It was just about then that I awakened, wondering what the dream could possibly be telling me, and then I realized . . . it was the encapsulated story of my life! Postponing a ready banquet until I could satisfy some necessary quest, and then realizing I was unable to find my way back.

We had actually begun the taxi ride before my awakening, looking for the place I had started from, and I could see this clearly now: the simile that suggested the 'reality' of my life: At the midway point of it (my life) I had 'left the banquet' for something I had to do first . . . after which, I'd been trying to find my way back. The banquet, of course, was the primary relationship of my life and wherever it would have led. My departure from it happened in order to fulfill prior commitments to my own being that I suddenly had realized would be lost forever if I remained 'at the banquet'.

That shift took place at about 1970 (give or take a year), and its thrust carried me for almost a decade, through some incredible health upheavals that ultimately eventuated in a colostomy I had to learn to live with, along with dental upheavals . . . yes, the decade of the 1970s in its entirety was a total upheaval for me. But a passage that saw me fully out of one reality and into another.

I could have seen it differently, you know. That medical/dental onslaught could have been a kind of payback for the way I had so totally violated a prior commitment and dedication. I might have seen it as living proof of some angry God's retribution, and meekly assented to the penance it called for. But I'd been learning things of a more earthy reality even as I weathered the 'punishments' for that abandoned earlier reality.

I know now that we have such 'battles', such struggles going on within us, as part of the growth process. We're not really here to make a life of great rewards (in economic terms) for ourselves, but to work our way through the culture-fed illusion that such is what life is all about. And the learning comes in different ways, for each of us.

How do I know this is so? Because it's represented as so among the earliest and most widespread religious doctrines we have available to us. Given little heed, of course, by the non-religious among us . . . but the non-religious are an aberration of recent times, and hardly to be considered as representative of anything earlier than perhaps a couple of centuries ago. I thought I was among them, myself, until not so very long ago.

All of that serves, here, only as a prelude to quite the best short accounting I ever wrote, of the way my trail got underway and onward, from how it began, forty years ago. You needn't read it, of course, unless you want to know. For those who do, it was written as Ripening Seasons #16, I can guarantee it a perky read, and it flows directly on from here...

IT WAS ON A FRIDAY THE 13th...

A time for reflection.

Last week, on August 13 (1996), I quietly observed a significant anniversary in my life: twenty-five years from the day of its regeneration. It was on that date that I walked off a job, and out of a life, in 1971.

It would be more true to say I walked into a life, for the one I left behind was more of a torment, if I can pass that off as a noun. It was the American Dream gone wrong, the en-cagement of a soul that had just about forgotten how to fly. I won't dwell on the things that were squeezing the life out of me, but just say that they constituted, or grew out of, the standard, applied conception of that time, of what a life should be like: a marriage, a career, a home and family, and the securities and perks of being just like everyone else. A good deal more rigidly so, I'll add, than in today's world.

Oh, I wasn't really very much like everyone else, but it was mainly because I couldn't seem to manage it, not because I rejected it. Not until that day in 1971, at any rate. I had a very late start (for those days) on both marriage and career, never did get a home "of my own," and fathered no children. But I was playing the game, and I measured my life by how short of the mark it always fell.

I couldn't even stay on the track of it. The entire decade of my thirties was one aborted revolt after another: a bobbled effort to complete my education, several feckless failures at small enterprise (too insignificant to be called small business), and repeated halfway tries to recast my life in a bachelor mode. I was like the guy with his arm tangled in his suicide noose -- he couldn't even manage to hang himself successfully.

Through all those years, I could not figure out whether the problem was me (some perversion of my own nature), or just my inability to make the grade. It never really occurred to me that the whole damned Dream, and the idea that everyone should find a fit for themselves, in it, was the cause of all my agony. I think that was largely because no other routing for a useful or satisfying life was visible. If you wanted to be an artist, you still had to join the marketing stream to earn the money to pay the rent; if you wanted to vagabond the seven seas in a sloop of your own, you still had to be able to afford the sloop and its provisioning. Nobody but the Aussie Aborigines lived outside the loop, and look at the sort of lives they had to settle for.

But then, in the late `60s, along came an incredible generation that said, "Hell no, we won't go!" They had the actual effrontery and imagination to try and redefine life! And this old guy (by their measure), all the way into his mid-40s, suddenly saw a patch of blue sky.

Thus it was, by grasping and clinging to the tail of an errant and rebellious host, already (by 1971) losing its sense of direction, that I piggy-backed my way out of the mainstream dream. There are times in life when it is of utmost importance to trust your instincts and leap for the unknown. Or as Danaan Parry used to say, you've got to sense the moment and let go of your trapeze, in order to catch the one swinging toward you.

That moment was twenty-five years ago last week. And I mean to devote this issue to a memoir, in roughly five-year segments, of the successive new vistas and remarkable discoveries that I have encountered, over that period of time. My purpose, besides this being a moment of celebration, is to demonstrate how little we may know of life's potential -- not just our own potential, for this is common grist, but life's potential, in the sense of an extended concept of reality itself -- when we merely accept the world as a given.

For it was a `given,' to me, that I was leaping headlong into a rough and risky sea -- choosing adventure and self-hood over stagnation, to be sure, but at the very probable cost of any possible long-term security, and in the sure promise that I should thenceforth, always, be living by my wits. I even hedged my risk, at the time, by persuading myself that I could, for a few years at least, go scuttling back, with tail between my legs, if it proved an impossibly terrifying venture.

There are many, today, who contemplate abandoning the "Dream world," looking to the host of their own growing numbers for psychological support -- but relying more substantively on some large hedge of investments to keep the anxiety of uncertainty at a low simmer. While I hail their courage -- for any avenue that will see them into lives of inner-motivated choice is not to be lightly regarded -- I must, at the same time, say that their backstop investment is likely to cheat them of the richest realm of discovery, and I shall try to show why this may be so, in this summary of my quarter-century. The simplest statement of it, of course, is that wonderful old Kristofferson song title, "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose" -- but we are talking, ultimately, of far more than freedom.

The Black Bart Years

One of the more puzzling truisms of quantum physics is that a seemingly remote action can generate a direct consequence somewhere else in the Universe, maybe light years away. In a way, that's exactly what happened when I dropped out. On that very day, a letter was posted to me from a young people's collective in a place called Canyon -- a letter in response to one of my own, sent many months previous and long-since forgotten. The Universe had somehow been waiting all those months for my move . . . or else, preparing me for it. From this beginning, I was sponsored by that collective to put out a pilot issue of Black Bart Brigade, to see what response it would reap.

That narrowly gained start, my first compass setting for this new journey, was immensely fortuitous, for Black Bart would turn out to be far more than an occupation in my alternative world. It became my teacher, alter-ego, and sole claim to significance, for more than a decade. It allowed me to help others, and established for me a widespread network of friends, a support system in every sense, some of whom are still a part of my life.

In ordinary occupational terms -- that is, as a source of steady income -- it was almost a joke. It had the marvelous knack of providing barely enough for my subsistence, constantly pushing me to ever more stringent levels of makeshift survival. But it was such a lovely partner, providing every satisfaction, every validation, every personal connection that I needed over those years, that I never once considered abandoning it. Quite the contrary, every time it fell by the wayside, for lack of funds or other vicissitude, I pulled it back by the bootstraps, reconstituting it in some new variant of name, or format, or dedication.

All told, there were only 15 issues and some eight or ten interim newsletters or supplements, over a span of about thirteen years. Not much of a production record; but something in their style and content, perhaps in their very manner of phoenix-like rebirth, held the readership at a fairly constant 300 to 400. Sufficient to provide me with a time of radical schooling in a whole other way of life, than the mode under which I had grown up. Let me dwell a bit on what that was all about.

At the first level of instruction, it taught me how to pursue a right livelihood, which is distinctly different than "making a living." What I was doing became more important than what I earned from it, and thus I could shape it not as a "business," but as a meaningful pursuit, shorn of all the commercial crap that had turned my stomach for half a lifetime: advertising and promotion, sales and hype, forms and permits, bookkeeping and tax filings . . . I styled its process exactly to my liking, and gave my readers 100% "pure gold" -- or as close to it as my talents and funds would allow. It wasn't always strictly legal (like my utter disdain for copyright law), but it was honorable every step of the way, in the Don Juan sense of a path with heart. Almost from the start, I sent it out for what each reader felt it was worth. The word "donation" had not yet lost its old-fashioned meaning, in those days.

Secondly, it stepped me down gently into the ways of simple-living, bringing people-based support systems into my life, introducing me to networking, barter and the many ways we can help one another without putting a price on it. These are so much richer and more human ways of getting one's needs met, than the alienating artifice of money-based systems. And more secure, too: by the time my backstop bank account had dropped to zero, I was nested in an alternative world of such security that I handled the anxiety factor with perfect equanimity. But that came a bit later, during the second five-year span.

The third great initiation of those Black Bart years was my introduction to the "Eastern side of the mountain," as I called it. The surprise and fascination of it all seems now quite strange, but I had lived for half a lifetime with not the least awareness of that entire side of life. Suddenly, a range of names from Lao Tzu to Krishnamurti, and mystic studies from astrology to the Tarot and I Ching -- rich and profound, but areas I had always before either laughed at or ignored -- began to deepen my understanding of things. I cautiously began to bring them into my writing -- into the essentially political orientation of Black Bart social analysis -- not even realizing that most of my readers were well ahead of me. I was the new kid on that block, not they.

Those were crazy and exciting years, exuberant in a freedom I had not known since college days. All in the simple abandonment of the yoke and harness that we so eagerly take on as the mantle of adulthood. Oh, yes, there were problems and struggles, too -- a communal effort that failed, a love affair that went awry, and the ever-present uncertainty of where this would all end . . . but living in the framework of an open-ended freedom, whether I had the sufficient means for it or not, was a `high' that is simply unimaginable without the experience of it.

The greatest challenge may have been the barbs of criticism -- often reflecting my own inner doubt, but hurled by those in envy and outright awe of such heresy: "Hey, being rather irresponsible, aren't you?" ... "No matter how you cut it, fella, you're expecting others to take care of you" ... or the simple raised eyebrow that bespeaks a torrent of judgement. In one form or another, the self-righteous have their say and take their toll, demanding that some effective rationale be worked out, at least to subdue one's own inner ambivalence.

Mine lay, first of all, in a straight-out challenge to the various definitions and moralisms that stand like indestructible foundations beneath our intolerance of others. What really means those self-elevating judgements by which we salve the daily pain of modern life: maturity, responsibility, respectability, and such? It is not too difficult to deconstruct those noble terms of a necessary consolation and self-esteem, when they are used as brickbats.

But the deeper rationale was found in a recognition of the entire artifice of the world that has conditioned us, and a return to the source so ably expressed in that Book that people pretext to live by: "Consider ye the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin..." I took the admonition all the way, and found my peace in the sure conviction that no person provides my sustenance, but only functions as an avenue of the Universal Providence . . . so long as I do not demand or expect of anyone that function. (It is fair game to ask assistance, however, for this is the means by which we maintain our humility, and give an opportunity for sharing to others.)

Well, there you have the perfect legitimation of the panhandler, so let us move on to . . .

The Yin Times & Colostomy Years

In 1975, well before my Black Bart years had even counted to five, the worst possible scenario erupted in my life. I was hard at work on a book, actually requested by a publisher, when I fell into the black hole of a severe bout with colitis, my personal nemesis for many years . . . and then, my large bowel suddenly ruptured. By extreme good fortune, I was already in the hospital -- else I would not be here to write these words -- and I underwent radical surgery less than eight hours later. My very being in the hospital at that time was due to an amazing confluence of synchronicities that should have left no doubt at all about the place of Providence in the evolvement of personal affairs -- but I was in no condition to see it, at that moment.

It left me with an ugly and desperately unwanted colostomy -- I actually tried to remain in the hospital until they could reverse the whole thing, so unwilling was I to cope with it. But if ever a disaster proved a blessing, this was it.

In the course of that summer, it brought me to the point of finally letting-go, entirely, of all that remained of my birthright, bottom-line insistence that I could take care of myself. The debacle so completely shattered my claim to personal power, that it became the real turning-point of my life, as opposed to the event that this month's anniversary observes. Of course, I needed those Black Bart years of preparation in order to reach the new level of development.

Simply put, I found myself at the end of my resources. The book-in-process had vanished in the black hole, the publisher no longer interested. I had, perhaps, $100 in the bank, but no place to live, and no Black Bart to lean on for a last-minute rescue. I had announced to one and all, in a newsletter three months previous to the bowel calamity, that the first cycle of Black Bart was over. In a marvelously precognitive note, I added that "...I must step off toward new horizons which are beyond the possibilities of Black Bart as it has defined itself." But how could I possibly know that I was "stepping off" into a chasm?

Sparing you (and myself) the messy, bewildering details, I reached a point of actually, consciously, putting myself into the hands of the gods - acknowledging that I could not handle it on my own. And for any religious freaks out there, this submissive act had nothing at all to do with Jesus, whom I do not regard as God, the Son of, or any other such splendiferous thing (and I doubt that he ever claimed it for himself). I was putting myself in the hands of a Pantheistic Universe, or Spirit, or whatever. [2011 note: My attitude about such things has considerably broadened since then]

Whether amazing things began to happen, then, or whether I simply began to see what was going on (all the time, perhaps?) with different eyes, I do not know. But the summer became a spectacular display of Providence. So I had my second compass setting: just watching it all unfold, and following where circumstance and inner prompting might lead.

In the earlier Black Bart years, I seemed to be living by my wits, leaping the ice floes of a happenstance world, always alert to such beneficence as I could grasp and claim for my own. In this new space, I learned how to blend with the current, to read the signals (stop, go, and turn here), and just let it happen. I no longer saw myself as a chancey, lucky, somewhat foolhardy survivor, but as something of an innocent, a `newborn child' just riding the crest of whatever was happening. I suspect, though, that the only difference was in my own head.

The money-line, as earlier noted, went down to zero, and I became fascinated just watching what happened from there on. Nobody will believe it -- it seems unreal, even to me, from my present "wealthy" standpoint -- but for more than a year, I watched my funds just bubble easily around the zero mark. I'd have a few bucks left in my pocket, and then a five or ten would come in from somewhere: a random donation, an old debt repaid, money literally found, or earned in some occasional way -- I even panhandled a bit, not strictly for myself, but for the Free Clinic of Berkeley, who shared their takings with the takers -- but it was always there, in one way or another, and seldom from any direct initiative of mine.

And then in 1977 another series of fortuitous developments took me to Carmel, that stunningly lovely seacoast village where only tourists and wealthy retirees can afford their keep. A charming old soul took me on as part-time attendant, for (what amounted to) the last year of her life. I recall the difficult spot it put me in: having to `bargain' for appropriate wages and rent, after living the innocent life portrayed above. Finally, knowing where my head was at, I said I didn't want any wages at all, I would do it as a straight trade for the privilege of residence there.

I had, by this time, begun the short-lived successor to the original Black Bart, which I called The Yin Times of Black Bart, so I had no reason to want or rely on any outside wages. But if the old Black Bart was laid-back, this new version was twice as much so -- there were only two issues of it (included in the earlier tally).

Meanwhile, the final teaching from my colostomy had been absorbed. A year after it was installed, I went in for surgery again, to see if there had been enough healing for its removal. No such luck, and my spirits were so dashed as a result, that I realized I had never really come to terms with it. It was quite clear, then, that only by fully accepting the colostomy could I ever rise above it, and that's just what I set out to do -- so effectively, that I was entirely surprised when word of its possible removal was once more broached by my doctor. And this time, after three years of living with it, the colostomy was successfully terminated.

In the final phase of these Yin years, I went to live in the woods at a mountain camp called Kilowana, where we had done workshops back in the glory years of Black Bart. It was a final healing time for me, and a place to complete that adventurous and growth-filled decade. Even to wistfully regret its passing, for I was quite sure that the rest of my life would be lived in such semi-solitary retreat.

The Hillegass Transitional Years

I don't know how similar it is for others, but Providence has always been able to set my compass course by putting a woman somewhere near the helm. Toward the end of 1981, friends from far and wide gathered at Kilowana to celebrate with me the tenth anniversary of Black Bart -- among them, a psychic couple who predicted that I would soon go forth again in the outside world (which I doubted), and an old friend just back from a long sojourn in India, seeking some California place to settle. On her account, I went to mediate with friends at the Hillegass collective in Berkeley, and found myself utterly entranced by a soon-to-be-available garden cottage made over as a living space: a 7' by 11' challenge and charm that my meager resources could handle. I just loved the way it felt.

By mid-1982 I was there, beginning a three-year period of regeneration in the `outer world.' There was a certain ripeness to my life, now. Black Bart had once more transmogrified at Kilowana: a mimeographed vehicle for all sorts of social and New Age commentary, done with flair and style that defied the limitations of the medium. But it no longer had the fire or spirit of old . . . I was doing it simply because I could not part with it. In 1984 I finally laid it -- finally -- to rest.

Those years in Berkeley were essentially transitional. While it was great to be once more among folks I could easily relate to -- not just in Hillegass House, but the entire surrounding neighborhood, as well -- all of their lives (and my own, by now, too) had come to seem rather drearily middle-class. Colored, to be sure, by alternative leanings (could one really call a communal group middle-class?), but it was hard to ignore a certain rancid fragrance of domestic contentment that seemed to permeate everything, sending it off-color from the brilliant freshness it had once displayed. Like a once lovely garden gone to seed.

But it was comfortable, and I found it all too easy to linger. And it was surely my best communal living experience, among several tries over the years. My life, however, had no stimulating purpose. So when the opportunity came to spend a few months at that notorious place in Oregon called Rajneeshpuram, I took it as a worthwhile diversion, knotting another interesting and illuminating experience on my growing string of them. It contributed to my next major compass setting -- not toward the Bhagwan, but an interesting woman whom I met while there.

The compass now pointed northwest, but other developments would provide the actual motive power for the long and devious journey that finally landed me in Seattle. The proximate prod was diminishing resources: I was running out of rent money, and there was no more Black Bart to lead the charge for a last minute rescue. In middle-class lives, one goes out to find a job, but I felt somehow beyond all that. I had successfully evaded it for almost fifteen years, and was loathe to try the fit of leg-irons, clinking shut once more around my ankles.

So I convened a giant farewell party -- a house-cooling, I called it -- and set out on the last great indigent adventure, a footloose journey to see how Providence would deal with me, and how I would deal with the situation of being virtually broke and homeless in the wide world of America. It was a test of faith I had long thought about, and likely my last opportunity to try it, for I was only four years away from Social Security entitlement.

The University Years

The name for that summer's journey came to me out of nowhere, and stuck better than duct tape: my Summer of Infinite Presence. It seems absurd to say that I spent six months going around the country, at a cost of nothing at all, but an April note in my pre-departure journal says I set out with $150, and an October entry in the Seattle area annotates $175 in resources. My needs, of course, were covered by friendship and donations, but at a deeper level it was Providence, making sure that nowhere in the country would I ever lack for shelter or food.

I hadn't really intended to spend the following winter in Seattle, just the time for a decent visit with the woman from Rajneeshpuram. But events took over: the sudden retraction of a southern California offer of seasonal residence, an unjust traffic citation that I felt I had to stay and fight, and finally a two-week drenching of snow -- rare for Seattle, in such volume -- that killed any hope of escaping a northwest winter.

It meant I had to find shelter somewhere, and it came in the form of a live-in care-taking position with a bedridden multiple-sclerosis victim. A blessing, to be sure, but also the difficult challenge of being saddled with 24-hour responsibility, six days per week. She and I agreed to a six-month `tour of duty,' and I bit the bullet - my first hard-earned income in fourteen years.

When I left the Bay Area, I had really embarked on a whole new way of living-in-the-world, which I call the Way of Innocence. It comes, almost in a natural progression, after the realization of Providence and the discovery that the capabilities of human will and reason are virtually incompetent when measured against what the `will of the gods' can bring about. In large part, of course, I had been living like this ever since the colostomy; but when I set out in 1985 to do it deliberately, holding onto no security of any consequence, I moved into the flow with such a totality that it must finally be regarded as a different level of being. Almost from the moment of my arrival in the northwest, the gods took hold -- by which I mean, my path seemed to lay itself out -- and I had little further say in what came about.

At the end of my six months of care-taking, I was prompted, by the arrival of an 'invitation to bid' for a small grant, to find a quiet rental nearby and undertake, once again, the writing of a book. But the grant never materialized, and the book-start was rejected -- once again -- by a publisher. Their illusionary hold on me had simply served to pass the time of summer, until my old friend back from India came up with an offer to pool resources for a northwest winter together. Moving again with the moment's currents, I found what seemed the perfect spot on Whidbey Island. It was the perfect spot, but not for our shared venture!

Unable to uphold my end of the winter costs, for lack of any available employment, I instead found myself qualified, by the island location, for a vocational rehab program that put me into school the following spring, embarked on a year-long "publications technology" program, including the basics of desktop publishing. More than that, it tracked me onto larger educational funding possibilities, and before long I was poised to resume a forty-year-delayed baccalaureate education at the Univ. of Washington. The whole business involved an uncanny precision of stepping stones -- even to the extent of repaying a 27-year-old college loan default that ultimately stood in my way -- repaying it from funds newly received for current educational purposes.

By 1989, well on my way toward the college degree, and awash in the largess of educational funding, I had bridged the gap to my entitlement years and could no longer be indigent again. But I made a fighting thrust at it, one more time, by taking off on a completely insecure venture abroad, risking a London cost-of-living that my homegrown resources could not possibly handle. You know all about that story, the year and a half through Europe -- as rare an adventure as anyone of my age and fiscal level has probably ever had. And you know, now, why I had to call the book of it Innocence Abroad.

The Relationship Years

I almost called it the retirement years, for these last four since my return from Europe have had a rare kind of completion quality. But I don't like the retirement image, and don't really see myself in any such twilight, though I write about it often enough.
They've been highly active years, actually: writing the book, doing my own graphic arts for it, getting on the Internet with a new computer, setting up a Web site, creating Ripening Seasons (this issue of which marks a tally that now exceeds the total number of Black Bart issues!) - a wide assortment of fresh starts, for one's latter 60s. Any one of these could characterize my current times, but there is one other that seems more the central theme of it, a constant thread, almost since my return home.

My relationship with Joy, of course - something I hadn't anticipated, or even much hoped for at this presumably waning time of my life. You know all about the battle we fought, this year -- no, not with each other, but side-by-side (the kind of relationship we have), in order to live "together" at a fraction of what that would expectably cost. Now, we have the best of all worlds, in our view, living separately but together, for we each have solitary pursuits that are meaningful in our lives.

We're pretty well suited to each other, too. There is no question about who does the driving, for neither of us has a car; there are no hassles over money or what to spend it on, for we're both accustomed to living on shallow budgets; and no ego struggles over whose work is best (her art or my writing), for we're each out of the commercial stream of it, not competing in any way. But most of all, we're both upbeat and basically happy people, and there hasn't been more than the barest wisp of a cloud between us since we first got to know each other.

The sense of completion that I feel, in these latter years, might reflect the way in which both Providence and Innocence have finally blended, and are experienced in the course of my recent life. For everything comes together, now, almost as if it were fore-ordained. The country, as a whole, may be going through an angst-ridden turbulence and upheaval, with nothing sure of the future, but I feel so totally secure in my own world that my only problems revolve around keeping up with all there is to entice my involvement. It can't really get any better than this!

And there you have it: as vital and fabulous a quarter-century slice of life, as anywhere you can find (and, hey, I only hit the high spots!) - all because I chose, in a moment of desperate inspiration, to chuck the American Dream and go find one of my own . . . hazards be damned.

Looking back over this spectacle, I find it still incredible that I've been unable to interest a publisher in any aspect of it, over the years. I generally am inclined to think that there is some learning to be had here, and I "ain't yet got it" - but it might just be the elemental proof that commerce and an internally vital life simply don't mix . . . and I made my choice, between the two, all that many years ago.

10:10pm: The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: a book review


I had this book sitting on my own shelves -- I'd gotten it a year or two ago, and like so many other such, it was waiting until I could get around to it; and I no longer recalled specifically what had struck me about it. But when I picked it off my 'holding' shelf, I saw in its title what immediately -- now -- pulled me into it.



Dr. Leonard Shlain (a Laparoscopic Surgeon, by profession) had written about the Left/Right hemispheric distinction in the brain, and more specifically about a certain conflict this sets up . . . in each of our ways of personally seeing things, but in its wider prospect, an essential conflict that has unbelievably driven the course of history.



The conflict between Word and Image (his subtitle), in Dr. Shlain's view, not only manifests at a personal level, but through that process can inhabit entire societies with the potential for unresolvable conflict. He tells us of various times in recorded history when 'minor eruptions' of this struggle have taken place. But back in proto-historic times there was a huge such struggle that resulted in a whole-going reversal of God's gender, from female to male, with immense and continuing social consequences. The schism continues to this day, and can be seen 'still simmering' in many current ways that are seldom viewed in such terms, though readily seen as one considers them.



His book should have sent social shock-waves out. But instead it merely set off academic arguments, a great many of them challenging Shlain's take on things. In a way, though, by their very approach, validating his thesis! At any rate, he was as much discounted as upheld, in the reviews, for being unnecessarily speculative in what he drew from the associations he was making.



For my own part, I see his work as quite brilliant. Yes, he made leaps of assessment; but they were also leaps of brilliance. He saw the essence of things, and he found the evidence for those leaps. Evidence that others chose to regard as vague, without even realizing that they were driving inner 'resistances' of their own, supporting personal platforms of (dis)belief.



And then I found out that Dr. Shlain died of cancer, less than two years ago, denying him the opportunity to continue the 'battle'. But his thesis is vitally important to our understanding of certain things that did take place in the course of cultural history -- things that are being played out right now, in fact, as our world continues to shape itself, culturally speaking. And things we should all be aware of.




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What follows is the opening text of a long talk by Shlain, himself, a verbal presentation made before a university group, in his continuing effort to explain his insights. It will serve as a book review. At the end of the portion provided here, I'll leave you with a couple of web URLs: one, for all of this as text, the other for a video of the full 75-minutes as it was originally presented.

Here, then, is Dr. Shlain in an opening portion of a lecture about his own book...

What Changed the Sex of God?

Many years ago I went on an archeological tour of Mediterranean sites and our group had the good fortune to have an incredibly knowledgeable guide—a University of Athens professor who told us essentially the same story wherever we went. She said, "You know, these temples that stand before you, whether they're dedicated to Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo," she said, "these were all once consecrated to a goddess. And then unknown persons came along and changed that."

So, the essence of my book is the question: ‘What happened to the goddesses?’ There's indisputable evidence from archaeological and historical records, that there was a time when men all over the world worshipped women. Japan and China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome -- I mean, those rough, tough, warriors in Athens voted to have Athena look over them rather than Poseidon. This is reason that the name of the city today is Athens and not Posieds.

Beginning about 3,000 years ago, with the start of Western culture, there were three religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- that denied the existence of a goddess. My question is: If everyone used to worship a female deity, what event in culture could have been so immense and so pervasive that it changed the sex of God? How did we go from a female deity to a male one?
The more I thought about this, it occurred to me that this all changed in culture about the same time that people learned how to read and write.

The first forms of writing, hieroglyphics and cuneiform, were extremely difficult to learn, and they were limited to a very small percentage. Less than two percent of the population of Egypt and Mesopotamia could read and write. There’s an old saying, "In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." If you know how to read and write, and nobody else does, within a very short period of time, you gain all the power.

Then about 3,500 years ago, a group of people halfway between Mesopotamia and Egypt figured out a much simpler way to read and write called the alphabet. The alphabet transformed the world. The alphabet continues to transform the world. And the reason why is that alphabets are so simple to learn that a four-year-old can learn the alphabet. I mean, Forrest Gump can learn the alphabet.

So, the reason I consider reading and writing so very different from speaking and listening is that they reconfigure the brain. Reading and writing are very linear, sequential processes; where speaking and listening engage many more senses, and all together it's a much more holistic kind of processing. The left hemisphere processes linear and sequential information, such as language and algebra and reason and logic, and the right hemisphere processes -- and again, I'm talking about right-handed people here -- processes primarily holistic image gestalt information, such as recognizing images, seeing patterns, recognizing how the parts fit with the whole.

So, as a result, I concluded that learning how to read and write the alphabet changes, reconfigures – literally - the brain of anybody who learns the skill. This has been confirmed by brain scans on non-literate people compared to literate people.
My questions are: What happens to a culture when brains are reconfigured in such a way that a lot of people learn this skill? How does it cause the whole culture to change? How are the literate culture’s religions reorganized? What happens to the relationship between men and women? I concluded that these were powerful questions.

When you're listening to me right now, what's happening is that your left hemisphere is following what I'm saying in a very linear fashion. But your right hemisphere is watching me. You're checking me out. You want to see if I have dandruff on my shoulders, or alcohol on my breath, or you want to see how sincere I am. If I were drumming my fingertips on a table top, your peripheral vision would pick that up, and that would go into the mix of what's going on in this conversation.

We all tuned into the presidential debates, not because we didn't know what these guys were going to say, we wanted to see how they said it. The Chinese have a wonderful aphorism: "Let us draw closer to the fire that we might better be able to see what we are saying." How many times have you spoken to somebody, and that person’s agreeing with you, while going like this (head’s shaking left-right as if to disagree), and you know that the head movement is the more valid message? So, when you listen to somebody, there's a lot of cross-communication between your two hemispheres to ferret out the message.

Then when I speak, Broca's area area in my left hemisphere is creating these sentences that I'm speaking. But to articulate speech, I need the cooperation of both sides of my lips, tongue and vocal chords. If I've been to the dentist and have had Novocaine, I have trouble talking. So, to speak and listen there has to be enormous cooperation across this broadband of fibers called the corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemispheres.

When you write, you write with only one hand. For 5,000 years, up until the invention of the typewriter keyboard, it didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman writing, it didn't matter what language you were writing in, it didn't even matter what you were writing about. The hand that controlled the writing implement was the same hand that hurled spears, swung swords and pulled triggers. So, it became clear to me that a new form of communication, one that reinforces the left hemisphere of the brain at the expense of the right hemisphere, will cause culture to veer off in a very left hemispheric mode.

People will agree that they're a mixture of masculine and feminine traits.  Men (in general) have a more masculine side than a feminine side, but men can't exist without a feminine side, just as women can't exist without a masculine side. Everyone, I believe, would agree with that concept. I would like to give them anatomical mailing addresses. I think that the processes that are primarily used for masculine thinking -- and again, both men and women have these -- are located primarily in the left hemisphere of both men and women who are right-handed. It’s the converse for the feminine, in the right hemisphere.

What happens, then, in a culture when the left hemisphere is given this extra power? Patriarchy and misogyny become evident in the culture, and these manifest themselves in a rather extraordinary way. Number one, image information is suppressed; it becomes an abomination. Women's rights are curtailed, and the goddess disappears.

That's the thesis of my book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess.  If you look in history and see what happened, the first book that was ever written in an alphabet is the Old Testament. That's about 900 BC. In this book, the most important centerpiece is the Ten Commandments. The First Commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever transcribed. It states, "I am the Lord, thy God, there is no other."

Now, the Old Testament doesn't actually state that this deity is a male. But all of the nouns and adjectives used to describe this deity, "Lord," "Ruler," "Host," "King of the Universe" -- they're all masculine. So, it's safe to assume that this is a male deity. If he's the only one, then what the First Commandment states is that no woman was involved in the creation of the universe. And up until the time this Commandment was written, no people anywhere in the world ever believed that a man alone created the universe. It was usually two women together, or a woman alone, or a man and a woman together -- never a man alone.

Now, if I were to place the Ten Commandments on a table and ask viewers to come up and put them in order of importance in their lives today, I have no doubt that every single person would put as number two, "Don't murder." But that's not number two, that's number six. The second most important rule [Commandment] of righteous living is, "Make no images." How strange! And for those who would argue that it's a prescription against graven images, if you read the Commandment, it says, "And thou shall create no images of anything that flies in the air, creepeth in the ground, or is under the sea" - in other words, no art.

So, the question is: Why would art be more dangerous than murder? Why was there a prescription against art that you see playing itself out every time people become alphabet literate? For example, the first act of the Orthodox Christians in 313 AD, when they became the state religion of Rome, was instructions to the minions to go into the street and destroy all of the images. Not just graven images but every Greek or Roman image they could lay their hands on. And then after this incredible destruction of images, all the goddess temples were shut down.

Then you have this extraordinary period in Western culture called the Dark Ages where literacy got lost. It was during this period of time when less than one percent of the population of Europe could read and write. So, this was a time filled with superstition and barbarity. Strife was the order of the day. Commerce dried to a trickle. Travel was exceedingly dangerous. You would think that this would be the period when women's rights would have thoroughly suffocated, but when the stage of history gets re-illuminated in the 9th Century, what you find is male troubadours all over Europe, singing the praises of women.

So, you have courtly love and the chivalric code; women Christian mystics are hailed by the Popes as having a clearer connection to the Kingdom of Heaven than the male clerics. It's nearly always illiterate peasant girls that are having visions that the church certifies. It isn't some lawyer in the Vatican that's having these visions. Why illiterate peasant children?

Then you have this extraordinary phenomenon, and the people of Medieval Europe begin to spend enormous sums of time, energy and money erecting these fabulous cathedrals dedicated to Notre Dame. So, the question is: Where did Mary come from? Mary is mentioned eight times in the New Testament and the Gospels. She's a peripheral character in the whole story. And yet, during the medieval period, she becomes the central figure of Christianity. Mary doesn't say anything. I mean, there are no gospels according to Mary. It's her image that is everywhere. She leads every procession and is at every crossroads. The phenomenon of Mary reaches its height during the high Middle Ages.

The reason I believe that Mary is the resurgence of the earth goddess during a time of low literacy rates is because you can travel in a wide arc through Poland, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, and you'll find a church where they venerate a statue of a black Madonna. And the question is: Why would a Caucasian population -- substantially blonde and blue-eyed -- why would they venerate a statue of a black Madonna? The answer is, I think, that all of the manifestations of the earth goddess were black. I mean, Kali was black, Artemis was black, Athena was black. The phenomenon disappears and begins to wane with the beginning of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was this extraordinarily testosterone-driven surge of male creative energy driven by the left hemisphere, which was supported by what LIFE magazine called, "The most important invention of the last thousand years” -- Gutenberg's printing press of 1453. Literacy rates that were in Western Europe were in the high teens in some of the cities and, with the invention of the printing press, skyrocketed.

So, books became cheap, easy and available, and everyone rushed to learn this new art called "reading and writing," because they all wanted to read this book that they had heard so much about, but it was always locked up in a monastery somewhere. Once they read the book, the New Testament, which is indisputably about love and kindness and forgiveness -- shouldn't it follow that the people would behave towards each other in a loving, kind and forgiving fashion? But that's not what happened.

What happened? Religious wars broke out all over Europe so that neighbors began to murder their neighbors. In France, the Huguenots and the Catholics killed each other with the most unbelievable ferocity. In England, Anglicans killed Presbyterians, and Puritans killed Anglicans. In Germany, Calvinists and Lutherans were killing each other at the start of the Thirty Years’ War before the Catholics and the Protestants squared off, and they killed one third of the population of Germany and destroyed their economic base for a hundred years. In Spain, Jews and Moors had lived side by side with Catholics peacefully for centuries -- then the Catholics suddenly decided they couldn't tolerate the presence of Jews and Moors, and they had to either kill them or expel them.

Now, if you're looking for this period of history in the history books, you'll find it under the heading, "The Age of Reason." And it's really strange, because this is the time in Western culture when the left-brain is exercising dominion and making the most extraordinary contributions in science, mathematics and architecture and global exploration.

But evidence suggests that some new factor was driving this culture mad -- that the men suffered a psychosis so extreme, thinking that their women were so dangerous, they needed to be murdered. And murder them, they did! The witch-hunts were the most severe -- not in the Dark Ages, not during the bubonic plagues -- they were the most severe in the gilded Renaissance. The people who were bringing about the witch-hunts were not the peasants. The peasants were trying to protect their women. It was the lawyers and doctors and clerics and priests who were supporting the witch-hunts.

Now, if you were to go to a Polynesian, or a Hopi, or a San Bushman, and you were to tap him on the shoulder, and say, "Would you believe that there is a culture in the world where the men are murdering their wise women?" -- they'd look at you in disbelief. They'd say, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Everybody knows that the men are supposed to raid the next village and kill those men and steal their women. You don't kill your own women."

There has never been an explanation for why sophisticated Europe, the only culture in the world that dined with a knife and fork, killed their own women. The  witch-hunts were the most severe in those countries that had the steepest rise in literacy rates: Germany, France, England, Switzerland. They had terrible witch-hunts. Russia, which remained illiterate, did not have any witch-hunts. Bosnia and Hungary, which were under Muslim rule -- and the Muslims did not adopt the printing press until the 19th Century -- they didn't have any witch hunts. So, it's a strange set of coincidences that you have along with these extraordinary developments.