In the movie "The Matrix," the idea that reality as we know it is not what it appears to be is presented. I believe that on planet earth at this time, the reality is just the opposite of what is thought.

In the matrix, a dominating power controls what people think and what they experience. Because planet earth has hierarchical societies that seem to grant power to a few elites and leave the vast majority at the bottom, it would appear that the powerful actors on the world stage, mainly in government and finance, have that power. In my study of intelligence and economic and political matters, it would appear that the world’s intelligence services, linked with organized (and unorganized!) crime, have usurped the authority that once belonged to our representatives in Congress (or Parliament) and our Presidents. A look at the current world financial crisis shows that powerful bankers, backed by political authority, have used “creative financing” to undermine the integrity of world currencies by ignoring sound banking practices. And the “solutions” that have been devised seem to benefit not the people, but the bankers and their regulators who created the problem in the first place.

A cursory look around planet earth shows a stubborn and powerful elite who control politics and finance, while the rest of us suffer.

But I would like to offer a different take.

What is really happening is that the actors who appear to have power are creating conditions that will destroy them.

In the United States, citizens are becoming more and more fed up with government intervention in the economy – bailouts of incompetent bankers, corporations and insurance companies costing hundreds of billions of dollars, irresponsible deficit spending (the 2009 fiscal year deficit ion the US will be around $1.7 trillion) and a Congress that won’t even read the bills it passes. The trillion-dollar health care bill was brought to the House floor and voted on before the bill was even passed. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer laughed when it was suggested that representatives actually read and understand the bills they vote on, as I remarked in a previous post. All of this (and plenty more) have made people in the United States realize that their Congress is nothing more than a rubber-stamp for special interests. There is still a lot of good feeling for President Obama, but he seems to be conducting business as usual in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the critical areas of government spending. Nothing has changed, really. Except that the government now owns a majority interest in General Motors and Chrysler. Does this remind you of communist Russia and communist China? A top-down system of control? Well, it should!

Anyway, what is happening is that government is attempting to aggrandize power to itself. Government decisions are made by a small elite: 535 members ofCcongress and a small coterie of decision-makers in the Executive branch, which includes the national security establishment.

Of course a small elite cannot make decisions for 320 million people without the entire system blowing up, simply because the dynamics of an entire nation making individual decisions creates a complex matrix of interaction that cannot be modeled. Not even a city full of the fastest supercomputers could model such a system, because we simply don’t have the knowledge to do so. A nation’s economy and social organization is an immense, sophisticated matrix that is dynamically changing in every moment. For any group of people - even the most brilliant and distinguished scientists – to think they can create a successful framework of action-response is simply ludicrous. But that is precisely what the government of the United States (and other world governments) are trying to do. Such an effort will fail; it is as simple as that. Imagine a nation as a vast neural network with 320 million nodes and billions of filaments, representing decisions and actions of individuals. Now imagine trying to control or guide that system from above. All of the billions of information lines have to be crowded into just a few cables that lead to the top.

This system is merely a “one-size-fits-all” design that will be about as successful as trying to herd cats.

When America was at its strongest, we had a limited government and a vital private sector, a strong educational system, and a political system that was much more responsive to the needs of constituents. What we have now is a facade; a constricted system that shows a false front of democracy but is actually a cleverly designed matrix to keep incumbents in power by denying access to third parties, and to support a small number of powerful corporations. Such a system cannot long survive, for it attempts to deny power to the majority who actually have the power. Such a system can survive only as long as we, the people, continue to sleepwalk.

If you know my work, you know that I am a firm proponent of the vibrational universe concept, which says that the universe is a dynamically interacting environment where individuals have power and that the universe responds to each person by matching the current focus of attention. What is happening on the world stage is simply that we, the people, have agreed upon a set of beliefs that allow the current shenanigans to continue. All of the actors on the world stage are utterly dependent upon what we, the people, collectively agree upon. If that sounds fantastical, then you are probably one of those people who believe that you can’t fight city hall, that there is nothing anyone can do about the world situation, and so we should just give up, sit back and go with the flow. Well, going with the flow will simply continue along a course that will result in a collapse of the world economy.

What is happening “underneath” the Matrix we live in, is a rising consciousness, a rising awareness that a human being is more than a bunch of firing neurons and protoplasm. This one meme – the idea that consciousness is biologically based – is the primary, underlying meme that is at the root of the present world situation. But more and more people are “waking up” to an understanding that they are much more powerful than they have been led to believe. A nation or a planet CAN be controlled when it’s inhabitants are mere biological automatons who believe in their own unworthiness, which leads directly to the “follow the leader” mentality and hierarchical control from above.

However, as individuals discover more about ourselves, the present system will become more and more untenable. It IS becoming more and more untenable, is it not? It is coming apart at the seams! This is a good thing, for we have the power to guide the future of humanity without resistance, without protesting in the streets. As I have remarked before, submission and protest simply resonate to that which is being protested, and perpetuates the very thing that is being resisted, This is the powerful universal principle that the Old Order has used to corral thought and behavior for 5,000 years. But people are finally wising-up!

We CAN evolve to a new paradigm of thought without the collapse of the old system. We can evolve smoothly to a new set of beliefs based not on the irrationality of war, conflict, domination and hierarchy, but one that is more consonant with our spiritual origins. When enough of us wake up to the idea that we are powerful spiritual beings having a physical experience –which is just as obvious as saying “2 = 2 = 4,” the human race will reach a tipping point in consciousness and what has been hidden will all come out.

And when that happens, there will be such a shock to the system as the Light of truth exposes the seamy underbelly of the old paradigm, that we will be able to change the political and economic structures on our planet in a very short time.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching that dénouement as you read this. And you and I are a part of it! As more and more of us shift our belief systems, it will become more and more impossible for the so-called “powerful elite” to continue in the old top-down patterns.

The powerful neural network that we the people of earth are creating, will constrain and guide the actions of those on the world stage. In fact, these people will be seen to have less and less power and influence as individuals step into their personal power.

Fiscal Insanity

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
-- John Maynard Keynes, from The Economic Consequences Of The Peace


The government of the United States is inflating the money supply at an unheard-of rate, in order to “solve” the financial crisis which it was influential in creating:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/BOGUMBNS.txt.

Look at the figures from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank. In August 2008, the money supply was at $847.288 billion.

Nine short months later, it is now at $1,774.672 billion!

The government has doubled the money supply in just the past nine months! And you wonder why prices are rising? The Geithner Treasury plans on $2 TRILLION dollar budget deficits for the remainder of his term. What will happen to the money supply? It will balloon out of control, despite the laughable Federal Reserve promise to “withdraw” that money from circulation. Because of the fractional reserve banking system, every dollar issued creates nine more dollars. What will happen to inflation? It will go out the roof.

Why is the US government so set on printing money and turning the US dollar into monopoly money? It’s their insane solution to the derivatives crisis, which is at the heart of the world financial crisis.

When governments become bigger, they borrow and print more money to fund their new programs. This increases the money supply, which causes inflation. Inflation is nothing more than too much money chasing too little goods and services. The only legitimate way for a government to get money is through the taxation of the wealth-creating “private” sector. (The public sector is usually called the governmental area and the private sector is usually called the wealth creating part of the economy, but these two are misnamed. The wealth creating public sector is the arena of 320 million people, all making free will economic choices. The government sector is usually controlled by a very small private elite, who set policies for the benefit of special interests, who in turn fund the political campaigns of elected representatives).

The government sector of the economy creates debt. The “private” sector creates wealth. Therefore, the growth of government is always accompanied by increasing debt and a devaluing of the currency. When government gets too large, it shrinks the wealth creating sector of the economy by siphoning money into government programs, which then makes it necessary to raise more taxes, which further shrinks the private sector. It’s a vicious circle. Every tax dollar the government gets takes money out of your pocket and hands it to a bureaucrat who thinks he knows better than you how to spend your money.

Politicians throughout history have discovered a way around the unpopularity of taxation: the printing of money. The printing of money to find government programs has been going on for millennia, but it was legitimized in economics through the creation of the term “stimulus.” It is true that the printing of money, AT FIRST, creates an economic stimulus, as people have more in their pockets. But eventually, prices rise. This is very simple, friends: when the supply of money is too low relative to the amount of goods and services produced in the economy, prices fall. When the amount of money is too high, prices rise.

How can the printing of money solve the financial crisis? The answer is, it can’t. But the dummies in Washington think it can, apparently.

As of December 2008, according to the Bank for International Settlements (http://www.bis.org/statistics/otcder/dt1920a.pdf), the world’s banks are holding derivatives (financial instruments based on, or derived from, actual assets like mortgages, stocks, and bonds) valued at over $591.963 trillion dollars. The underlying market value of these assets is a mere $33.889 trillion!

This is actually an improvement from June 2008 when the figures were $683.726 trillion in outstanding derivatives contracts, based upon $20.363 trillion in assets! Here is the world financial crisis on a nutshell: a grossly over-extended derivatives sector, where nominal (stated) values of financial products bear no resemblance to their actual values.

An example of a derivative is a mortgage backed security:
(See http://www.riskglossary.com/link/mortga ... curity.htm).

In order to understand the world financial crisis you have to understand the process of securitization.

A security is a collection of assets, packaged and sold to third parties. A mortgage, for example, is an asset because the mortgage holder receives the monthly payment of principal plus interest from the mortgagee. Securities banks can make money because securitization allows the bank to simply package and sell financial products, like mortgages, and collect a fee. In a mortgage pass-through security, for example, the investors receive the mortgage payments, and the originating bank collects a servicing fee. The originating bank can also sell the right to service these mortgages to a third party.

So, for instance, a bank could package up a bunch of mortgages and sell them to a third party (a private investor or another bank) and collect their fee. A bank could do this many, many times, buying mortgages and re-selling them, creating their own structured products (a structured product is a collection of assets or other securities), and/or buying structured products from other banks. Mortgages can become so sliced and diced that an investor (or even the issuing bank) cannot trace the actual mortgages upon which the mortgage backed security is based. This is how financial markets can grow out of control, like a cancer.

Over the past few years, banks have created markets based upon a number of assets (not just mortgages), but have had little incentive to identify the assets or their value. This occurred because the Fed did not monitor the dollar carefully enough, and the government relaxed regulation of the financial markets. Guess who was head of the Federal Bank of New York (the most powerful of the Federal Reserve banks) during this period? None other than our tax- evading Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner.

Properly valuing a financial instrument is called marking to market. A mortgage backed security, for example (lets call it BBMBW – Billy-Bob’s Mortgage Blueprint for Wealth), if it were periodically marked to market by the originating bank, would trace back all of the assets upon which it was based, assess the value of each mortgage, and come up with a present-time market value for the product. How many of the BBMBW mortgages, for example, are now in default? If 10% of the mortgagees are no longer paying, the investor’s cash flow decreases, and his investment decreases in value. Marking to market is not only honest, but it’s just common sense.

The Madoff scandal is just one of many examples of greedy and dishonest private financiers fleecing their clients. But Bernie Madoff is small potatoes compared to the gigantic rip-off now being perpetrated by the United States government on the American people, and international investors holding dollar denominated investments.

In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which destroyed the firewall between commercial (deposit) banks and securities banks, and led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. GLBA allowed commercial banks to engage in the securities process. Now, instead of a bank making money primarily from loans – in which it had to verify the status of the borrower and make sure he or she was qualified for a mortgage – a commercial bank could now engage in the creation of its own mortgage backed securities products. Before, a bank couldn’t make money unless it had made a solid loan; otherwise, if the borrower defaulted, it had to write off the loan as non-performing and put it in the liabilities section of its balance sheet. In the U.S., banks sent “mortgage brokers” - a fancy name for salesmen – out to every Tom Dick and Harry and created a market in “sub-prime” mortgages, which encouraged persons who couldn’t afford a mortgage (or a bigger mortgage) to take the plunge.

Since many of these mortgages were government guaranteed, through quasi-governmental agencies like the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mac) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), these agencies also became overwhelmed with debt. Amazingly, even though the federal government guarantees the mortgages of these organizations, their debt does not show up on the government’s balance sheet! This is just another example of governmental incompetence and stupidity, which we, the people, will pay for through the inflation tax and a crippled economy.

What is the Geithner Treasury’s solution to the financial crisis? I talked about this in an earlier post: TALF: Term Asset Backed Loan Facility. How do you spell TALF?
S-C-A-M.

Instead of honestly valuing bank assets to market, the government’s solution is to “buy back” these overvalued assets at their nominal values, thus creating a mountain of new debt. The plan is for the government to find buyers for these toxic assets, by guaranteeing the risk an investor would take in acquiring them. That is why the Obama administration plans on creating over 8 trillion more dollars of new debt in the next 4 years.

This plan is financially insane. You cannot solve a financial crisis by simply printing more money. But try telling that to our so-called “representatives” in Congress, and to the President.

A further expansion of government influence into health care will cost trillions more. Ask the state of Massachusetts how they’re doing with their full coverage, government-run health care system. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/06/ ... re-reform/.

Massachusetts politicians promised that the insurance mandate would reduce medical costs. They also estimated that health insurance premiums could drop by 25-40%. Instead, premiums rose by 7.4% in 2007, 8-12% in 2008, and are expected to rise 9% in 2009.

The new government guaranteed health care plans are nothing more than a transfer of wealth to pharmaceutical companies. “Health care,” of course, means allopathic medicine: prescription drugs and surgeries. When every American is required to have health care, the big drug companies will make out like bandits. The United States is already a nation of prescription drug addicts: what will happen when full coverage for every man, woman, and child is mandated? Moreover, I guarantee you that when Congress gets through writing these bills – or should I say, when special interest lobbyists get through writing them -- alternative health care will not be covered, or will have very little coverage. Just like the Department of Energy spends 95% of its budget on fossil fuels and nuclear energy, while alternative, cleaner, and more abundant energy research gets short shrift.

This is what happens when a nation allows its government to grow too large.

Collectivism, under any guise (socialism, capitalism, communism, or any of the “isms,”) takes away the power of the people and gives it to a small elite in government. It is time for the American people to wake up to what is happening in the United States: a massive transfer of wealth and power into the hands of an incompetent and corrupted government.

Isn’t it time we began to think for ourselves? When are we going to step into our power as individuals and abandon the “follow-the leader” paradigm? Until we do, our society will become more and more hierarchical, with more and more power at the top.

As a final note, here’s something funny and tragic: an article in the stupid, asinine propaganda rag of the old Soviet Union, Pravada (which means “truth” in Russian, ha-ha, what a joke) about the decline of American society and economy. It’s pretty bad when Marxists and Communists call us out!
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-0/

Next week: the source of governmental corruption: the “national security” establishment.
__________________________
Kenneth James Michael MacLean
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

Is Honesty Really the Best Policy?

Is honesty better than guile and subterfuge?

Many people would say that subterfuge is better, because it’s a lot more clever. Here’s how the argument goes:

“You don’t give away your game plan so everyone can see it, do you? If you do, you are a fool, because now everyone knows what you are doing, and your secret to success can be duplicated by everybody, taking away from your profits. What good is that? Would you rather be Microsoft or Mozilla? Who do you think has a better life, the fools who work for a non-profit, or filthy rich Bill Gates? Only simpletons and fools are honest and open.”

That’s the logic of planet earth, anyway.

But of course on planet earth, we live in hierarchical societies where a few have a lot of power, and the “masses” have very little. We live in an environment where knowledge of clean energy exists, but is not implemented. We live on a planet where millions of people continue to die unnecessarily from the disease of cancer - a condition that was cured back in 1931. We live on a planet, to summarize the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, where governments bribe the people with money taken out of their own pockets. What can we in the United States do about a corrupt Congress which passes legislation that benefits only a few special interests? Not a hell of a lot – other than every four years, vote for another Democrat or Republican who will do the same thing.

This is the kind of helpless situation you get into when you believe that guile and secrecy is better than honesty and openness. You get hierarchical societies where information and resources are hoarded, because of the belief in scarcity. You get a “follow-the-leader” mentality where individuals give away their power. You get a false and polarizing Democratic – Republican dichotomy, where people continue to rigidly support one party or the other even though both parties are corrupt to the core and do exactly the same things when in office.

Openness, honesty and integrity is always superior to secrecy, guile and subterfuge. I talked about this concept in an earlier blog post. However, things have gotten so far out of hand that I feel I have to repeat this message.

Here is a little packet of energy – lets call it a quanta:* A quantum is the building block of all matter and energy, according to physics. We are going to call this quanta the most basic “bit” of information that exists.

Just as matter and energy combines from quanta to form subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, and the various shapes that make our world, so too do bits of information combine to form subsets or collections of useful data. Javascript, for example, is a collection of information – a programming language that helps us create dynamic web pages. Any programming language is essentially composed of 1’s and 0’s – the basic quanta of computer information.

Banking, politics, physics, are all collections of information. So is a blueprint for a house. All information systems came from somebody’s head – they are essentially collections of thought. Here is an information system – a Sumerian tablet:



Guess how useful this is? Not very, because no one now knows how to decipher the symbols that represent the information being conveyed. That knowledge used to be in someone’s head, but even though the data has been written down symbolically, the information that it represents has been lost.

What is information? It’s ideas – thoughts, concepts, that people can understand. If you don’t understand something, it’s worthless.

It’s one thing to simply lose information, but it’s quite another when you deliberately attempt to hide information. The more you try to conceal something, the more energy you have to expend to keep it out of sight.

Secrecy leads to obfuscation, and obfuscation is just extra data you have to add into the system to keep prying eyes from figuring it out. Security systems (codes, encryption, etc) are always expensive add-ons that take time and resources to maintain.

Even when you take out data to prevent people from understanding your information – as in a file that has been compressed or zipped, or computer code that has been minified (taking out spaces and comments and substituting single variable names for longer ones) – you need a special program to maintain the code. That is your extra data. Obfuscation, guile, subterfuge and lies generate extra data into the system, and require more time and energy to maintain the system. The more sophisticated the information system you are trying to hide, the more effort it takes. This eventually leads to a breakdown in the system.

The point is, information systems are only as good as they are open and transparent.

What would happen, for example, if the inventors of Javascript tried to make it so that only a small elite could understand it? Well, it just wouldn’t have worked, because people are smart and can reverse engineer just about anything. (Crime solving is just the reverse-engineering of a crime – the gradual discovery of the data and the information systems used by the criminal to commit the crime.)

Here’s how guile and subterfuge works:

First there is a quantum, a unit of information that combine into a collection that we call an information system. In an open system, that information just sits there and is accessible to anyone: * Perhaps the * represents an open-source program -- code that is free to all users. What if someone wanted to take that code and make a proprietary program that he or she could sell? Well, they would have to cloak their program with security programming, and hire staff to maintain the security system around the program. The same applies to dishonest persons and criminals. Dishonest people lie to obscure their connection to some kind of activity.

Here’s what a lie might look like:

A datum surrounded by other data that hide it.

The very fact of hiding something generates extra data: the “front.” But a front is also a collection of data and needs to be maintained, because lies are themselves data. Criminals forget this little fact until their lies contradict each other and the system caves in on them. The whole thing blows up – the obfuscating data in their carefully designed system of deceit simply falls away, and they are left with the simple truth exposed: *

The origin of the saying “too clever by half” encapsulates this idea of obfuscation through additional information, and the eventual result.

In other words, lies themselves are information systems.

I heard a story this morning on the radio. A guy (let’s call him Mike) wanted to switch from cable to satellite. When the cable guy came over, he told him a lie. He said that he didn’t want to watch TV anymore and so he was going to disconnect his TV. The cable tech then proceeded to ask him questions for 20 minutes. Mike defended himself by telling more and more lies, until he finally blew up and told cable guy to just pull the plug and shut-the-bleep-up.

Have you ever been able to tell just one lie and hide the truth from someone? Well, maybe if you have a reputation for integrity. But then you got that reputation because you’ve been open and aboveboard with people. Lies, like mosquitoes, breed very rapidly, and come back to bite you in the end. Lies create a sort of black-hole phenomenon, until the buildup of energy then collapses the event horizon – and the entire system -- on top of you.

The basis for subterfuge, guile, obfuscation, propaganda, etc. are lies.

It’s really hard to lie, it’s hard to obscure, because you have to expend so much extra energy to keep the system of lies coherent. Integrity is the reason behind success in anything, even in sneak-thief activities, because illogic and inconsistencies stick out like a sore thumb and are recognized. That’s why the term “honor amongst thieves” exists. The most successful thieves are the ones with the most integrity! The “Ocean’s “ movies, although pure fiction, are great examples. Integrity is simply the coherent framework of an information system –any information system! Without that coherence, the system falls apart.

An intelligent person who recognizes this can cut through a lot of bullshit.

For example, I received an invitation in my emailbox the other day from a guy who claims to make over $600,000, automatically, every nine months. This offer came from a very respectable website. He offers “proofs” – photos of his big house and pool, his cars, and printouts of monthly income statements. When I went to his salespage, I discovered that he’s selling a course that costs $27. If this guy is making that much money without any effort, why does he need to advertise and sell a course for a lousy $27? The answer is that his sales page is a false front, because someone who really pulls in over 600 large every nine months on auto-pilot sure doesn’t need your paltry $27!

Nowhere is the art of obfuscation more prevalent than in politics. Politics, as it is practiced on earth, is the art of subterfuge. Politicians are stereotyped as liars, because they are skilled at saying one thing while doing another.

There are so many examples I can’t even list them. The “Monetary Control Act” of 1980, for example, gave the Fed the power to monetize virtually any debt instrument, including bank loans to irresponsible foreign governments, which resulted in an expansion of dollar-denominated debt on a world-wide scale. Bills that support oil companies and fossil fuels masquerading as environmental legislation, bills that purport to stop terrorism but curtail constitutional liberties, governmental accounting practices that obscure the actual allocation of funds, are all part and parcel of a political system that gives lip service to openness and honesty, and supports obfuscation and guile.

Such a system lacks integrity and must collapse, like the Leninist systems of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Leninism is an insidious information system that revolves around duplication and obfuscation. In the old Soviet Union, for example, the Party and the government had duplicate departments, so that an appeal to a government agency could be overridden by a similar Party agency, and vice-versa. In the United States today, we have a similar system: the “national security” establishment duplicates many of the functions of our government, but these functions are hidden from the public. The very funding that supports these hidden agencies is supported by lies and obfuscation. If you don't believe me, try to ascertain where the funding for the CIA comes from!

The world financial crisis is also based upon lies – the lies that “structured products” are worth their nominal value. (See previous blog posts).

Almost every problem we have on earth stems from a lack of openness and integrity.

Secrecy and guile is self-defeating, illogical, and irrational. Information systems based upon these false principles must inevitably collapse.

So why not just do it the open and honest way?

Not because of any moral or religious imperative, but because it works the best. Openness and transparency is the strong fabric that supports even the cloth of dishonesty. That’s why criminals and dishonest people are often much stupider than the rest of us – and have a much greater chance of failure.

_____________________
Kenneth James Michael MacLean
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

It's Nitty-Gritty Time Part 3

Even though current events seem to indicate that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, as my beloved grandfather used to say, I believe that the human race is coming together। There is tremendous demand for positive change, which is rocking the foundations of the old order. The "establishment" - which just represents the old way of thinking -- is resisting in the only way it knows how: through the old, conventional patterns of conflict, coercion, propaganda, and guile.


The old memes, or patterns of thought, have been strongly established within the human psyche over the past 5 millennia. They act as attractors do in chaos theory, forming basins that direct thought and action back to them.

Einstein postulated the well-accepted idea that gravity is the curvature of space. Like a bowling ball on a trampoline, space actually curves around a massive object, causing everything in its vicinity to have a tendency to fall into its orbit. When you put smaller balls on the trampoline, they move toward the bigger ball.

Imagine that thought has the same properties. Imagine that the big ball in the center is composed of all of the old, outdated beliefs of humanity, like conflict resolution through war, greed, scarcity, domination, control, guile, etc. Even though these thought forms are irrational, they have come to be widely accepted. And when that happens, they act as attracting basins, guiding the thoughts and beliefs of individuals to them.

If you've ever been in the presence of a powerful person, you know how he or she almost magnetically draws you into their space, and their ideas. If you've ever been with a group of people who all thought one way, while you thought another, you know what I'm talking about. Thought itself has a presence that you can feel, and it can entrain other thoughts to it. The more people agree on something, even if it is nutty, the more powerful it becomes.

It's the same with widely accepted ideas like patriotism, and war, and poverty, and "you can't fight the government." That's what has happened with the thought forms of the human race. We have built a prison of self-limiting thought, and we have been stuck in it for the past 5,000 years. But that is changing rapidly as the internet, and mobile technology, have brought us together. People all over the world are demanding positive change, but this demand is as yet undirected, and that is causing chaos. But it's a positive chaos, because it is leading to the establishment of a new attracting basin of thought.

The old thought forms are now coming up for inspection. As the consciousness of humanity rises, it is detaching from the old attractor and disturbing it. The thought forms of the new consciousness are forming a new attractor. Like a guy stuck in a bog, he's going to make a mess when he begins to extricate himself!

In order for this leap of consciousness to occur on a species-wide level, however, humanity must, as individuals, step into their power. By that I mean, individuals must trust themselves, think for themselves, make their own decisions and live their lives as if each decision has meaning. Stepping into your power means understanding that the universe has been designed to support each and every decision you make, and that your choices result in corresponding manifestations. In the new energy, it is no longer supported to allow others "higher up on the chain" to make your decisions for you. No longer is it possible to sit on the fence, or detach yourself from life, and hope that something good will come. When the wind blows strongly, you must brace yourself, or be blown hither and yon. You must have a direction!

The population increase has resulted in a vibrational acceleration of consciousness, on the subtle but powerful plane of thought. All of us feel this. Some of us feel it as an inner excitement, an eagerness to get going and create. Some of us experience this as nervousness or anxiety. And those who strongly resist the new energy strongly feel depressed, or panicked, as they see the old patterns of thought dissolving. This causes them to react irrationally. And if you have any inkling of what is going on in government and high finance, you know that irrationality is the order of the day!

In just about every country on planet earth, individuals have allowed self-seeking incompetents to rise to the top of our political and economic structures. I have been watching politics for 40 years here in the United States, and I have seen a parade of morons at the highest levels, who seem bent on doing the worst for our country.

But my message is not a negative one. I believe that the human race is creating the conditions we see manifesting before us - there are no evil forces out there deciding what is to be our future.
It is so exciting! This time, right now, is what many of us signed up for. We wanted to be here, to help push the human race to a new level of consciousness. No matter what happens on the way, I believe that we will evolve to a new level of awareness as a species.

The human race is manifestly an adolescent species. The first, very basic requirement for a sane species is internal cooperation. If you look over our history for the past 7,000 years, you will see quite readily that humanity has been fighting a sort of internecine battle within itself. The human race has never advanced for any length of time without collapsing again. Cultures have risen and golden ages have come about, but never permanently.

We have looked at history and assumed that it is a natural law that societies rise and fall, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

The truth is that our decisions determine the parameters and the boundaries of what is possible, and what is not possible. The big ball in the middle of the diagram above represents the collective thoughts of the race. The goal of the old order is to keep the thoughts of individuals revolving around the same tired and superfluous concepts. The goal of the new consciousness should not be to fight the old order (for then the action occurs on their turf) but to create the new.

It isn't possible to create something new by fighting the status quo, because then your thoughts are entrained and focused on what is not wanted. This is very well understood by those who prefer to keep things exactly as they are!

The questions we must ask ourselves are,
What do you want in your life?
What is possible ?

The answers to these questions will determine how far we can advance in our personal lives, and how far our species will advance. Fuzzy, undirected thought will lead to a fuzzy, undirected outcome.

With the huge increase in population, consciousness is approaching a tipping point. But will we go back to the old ways, or strike off boldly into a new era? Will this change be a very small quantum leap, or a large one?

Again we must ask ourselves, what do we believe is possible?
Do not fret। All is well. We are now on an exciting journey, both personally and as a race, into a new level of consciousness. If we reach for the stars, we will get them!

Kenneth James Michael MacLean
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

Its Nitty-Gritty Time Part 2

For 5,000 years, human societies have been oriented around the belief systems of scarcity and unworthiness. Opposing that is a new rise in consciousness and a demand for positive change, which is as yet undirected. Our use of scarce and polluting fossil fuels, and our hierarchical political and economic systems reflect exactly what we believe about ourselves.

In the August 2008 issue of Discover Magazine, for example, an article called "What Fills the Emptiness?" stated that

"If some clever engineer were ever to extract energy from the vacuum ("free energy") it could set off a chain reaction that would spread at the speed of light and destroy the universe."

Oh really? Well, I guess, then, that we are forever doomed to use scarce fossil fuels for energy. It's a perfect example of a limiting belief that constrains action into narrow, status-quo channels. It reminds me of the belief that women should not be educated, because increased knowledge would interfere with childbirth. These limiting memes have been a part of the human race for millennia; but we can no longer afford them if we are to advance as a species.

It is said that a country always gets the government its citizens deserve. That's because you can't grow something in soil that will not support it. It's time that human beings realized the power and importance of our choices, and our thoughts, in determining how our societies and organizations are structured.

As David Bohm, the brilliant physicist said,

"there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly, but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, [which Bohm calls the holomovement] mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement."

This thought has been expressed in many different forms throughout history, and by every culture, and it essentially says that mind, matter, and consciousness are not separate, but united, and that each affects the other.

What is the result of a demand for abundance within a consciousness of scarcity? Precisely what we see manifested in the current financial crisis, which has resulted from an explosion of financial instruments that do not correspond with the goods and services they (supposedly) represent. When you really believe that you are unworthy, but demand prosperity, what happens? You run up big credit card bills! That is what has happened to the human race during the past 20 years: the there has been a tremendous demand for abundance without a corresponding shift in belief systems. The evil bankers and politicians, however, who supposedly caused the world financial crisis - without any help, of course, from honest and blameless citizens -- did not operate in a vacuum!

They felt the increased demand and acted upon it, precisely according to the parameters of acceptance in our collective belief systems. As my grandma used to say, "it takes two to tango!"

It is fitting that the old order has fastened itself firmly within the nation that also best represented the new order of freedom and prosperity for all: The United States. Today, the United States is the primary playing field in which the chaotic interaction between the old memes and the new consciousness is playing out, although it is unfolding in every country in the world. Other nations criticize the United States, with very good reason, but every person on earth is contributing their bit. The worldwide financial crisis has been created by each and every one of us, because we are all in this together. The actors on the financial and political stage are ALWAYS constrained by what the people will accept.

In the United States, Barack Obama is the representative of the new who is surrounded by those who wish to keep the old order in place. There is still a tremendous excitement that resonates around the world at the election of this man. He is a transitional figure who represents the hope of everyone in the world for positive change.

Monetarily, the United States has funded it's prosperity through the borrowing and the printing of money, and now it finds itself bankrupt, completely dependent upon the good wishes of the rest of the world. The worldwide explosion in derivatives contracts, the vast majority of which are denominated in dollars, has reached a nominal value of almost $700 trillion, but has an estimated market value of around $17 trillion. All of the world's major banks have balance sheets bloated with these derivatives products, and the question is, what to do with them? If these derivatives are valued properly, the banks collapse. Barclay's bank, for example, claims assets of almost 2 trillion pounds, while the Gross National Product of the entire nation of Great Britain is only 1.4 trillion pounds!

Because the United States was the leading country financially, and its currency the world standard, its practices represented the desire of all of humanity for greater prosperity. This is fitting, because the old and the new are uniting. On planet earth, in our culture of scarcity, the representation of prosperity is money. That is why the battle between the old and the new has focused in the arena of money and finance. It could have evolved in no other way.

Humanity right now is reaching for a new level of consciousness, which is just over the horizon. The human race is on the cusp of a new understanding. The only question is, will this new understanding come about smoothly, or will it involve a collapse of the current financial system?

We will decide. The actors on the stage are constrained in their actions by the decisions of the rest of humanity. Again, the people who we see as crooks, or as evil, are not! They are merely filling a vacuum of leadership and power that the rest of us are asking them to fill. And they are doing so precisely according to our vibrational direction, just as a movie actor will follow the instructions of the movie director. Would you blame the water for following the path of least resistance, as it moves down the hill and into the plain? Of course not!

We all know the growing pains of the adolescent, as he or she struggles with their growing body. This is precisely what is happening with the human race right now. We are growing, sometimes painfully, out of our old shell and metamorphosing into a bright, brand new creature. What will that new being look like? We will decide.

I believe that there is great, great, vast potential for a huge quantum leap in awareness. When that leap in awareness occurs, the face of our planet will literally change in a very short period of time, as the movement forward that has been blocked by our own self-limiting beliefs, dissolves. It is like a blind, deaf, and dumb person regaining the use of all of her senses. The horizons simply expand beyond what we thought was possible. That which is not known or even imagined at the old level now becomes possible!

Kenneth James Michael MacLean

http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

TALF – The Great Obama Scam

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Sorry about all of the recent economic posts, folks, but the more the current financial crisis unfolds, the more preposterous it gets! Frankly, I can't believe what I'm seeing, and I use this forum to vent a little, and, hopefully, to enlighten my readers and inspire them to take positive action. ;)
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Well, it looks like the current administration is a carbon copy of the old one. First it was TARP, a scam bailout of big banks and insurance companies like AIG. Then, the “stimulus” bill. Now comes TALF, the grand Geithner plan to buy up toxic assets and relieve the banks of the burden of worthless derivative assets (“structured products”) that they themselves created.

You’ll recall that in February, soon after Obama was sworn in, the House and Senate passed a “stimulus” bill. This bill, which no one in Congress bothered to read (of course) is supposed to “stimulate” the economy by creating around $800 billion more fiat money. But of course, money is not really money, is it? It’s debt.

Take out a bill of any denomination and read the top. It says “Federal Reserve Note.” A note is a promise to pay, a debt. The FRN is simply an IOU. All money in our economy is actually debt. If you don’t believe me, go to You Tube and watch a movie called “Money As Debt.”

Fiat money, or money by decree, can be created by the Fed because it is backed by nothing of value, and is itself intrinsically worthless. In fact, our currency, the dollar, is just another scam. If you look on any bill you will see the inscription “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.” Legal tender laws force you to accept worthless Federal Reserve Notes in exchange for valuable goods and services. When the printing of money can be accomplished with no restraint, you get a destruction and a devaluation of the currency. And that is precisely what has happened, in case you just arrived from the planet Remulak and haven’t a clue.

Now, back to the stimulus bill. Recall that President Obama promised the most open, transparent administration in history. He pledged to not sign bills that hadn't been posted online for the public to read for at least five days BEFORE the final vote was cast.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised that the final version of the stimulus bill would be posted online for at least 48 hours before the vote. Here's what happened instead:

The 1,073 page bill, with an extra 421 page Explanatory Statement, was delivered, still unfinished, at midnight Thursday Feb 12th. The House passed the bill 14 hours and 24 minutes later. The Senate did likewise 3 hours and 5 minutes after the House. This “stimulus bill” still had handwritten notes in the margins at the time it was passed. (Source, DownsizeDC.org)

So much for campaign promises, and so much for integrity. But that was just the start. Now comes TALF, or Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility. This nutty plan will operate, in a nutshell, like this:

“Toxic assets,” (as they have been described by the White House Press secretary) are to be bought up using more fiat money that has been created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. In anticipation of this new debt, Congress recently increased the Statutory Debt Ceiling from $9.662 trillion dollars to over $12.1 trillion. The Obama administration plans to print 2.3 trillion dollars of new money between March and Sep 30, 2009 (the end of the government’s fiscal year.) This money will go to “investors” who will buy up the “toxic” assets at their nominal value. Of course their real (market) value is unknown, but is certainly much, much less than their stated value. That’s why the banks are in trouble. They are carrying “assets” on their balance sheets that have no relationship to reality.

Congress, and the government, is apparently prepared to continue this charade. It’s nothing more than a game of musical chairs. A Ponzi scam. Print more bad money to bail out bad investment decisions. As long as the music doesn’t stop, the game can continue (the game of printing and creating more fiat money -- debt -- out of thin air) until hyperinflation causes a crash and the music stops.

What is the result of the crash? A readjustment back to true market value. So, you ask, why not do that in the first place before things get even worse? That’s the question you must ask your Congressional representatives and your President.

Sure, some people are going to get hurt, but those are the people who made bad choices. Don’t punish the rest of us who have been responsible and pay our debts! Governments, however, reward irresponsibility and punish honesty. Governments reward losers and punish winners. That is a recipe for failure, as we are seeing manifest right before our eyes.

What will happen, of course, is that after $800 billion of TARP and $800 billion of “stimulus” bills, and another $2.3 trillion of TALF, hyperinflation will result, as too much currency chases too few goods and services. Who gets hurt during inflationary periods? Why, the old and the poor, the very people the Democrats say they want to help. Not to mention honest, able people who have saved up their money and now see their purchasing power diminish as the Fed continues to create more and more money (debt).

The argument that new money will stimulate the economy is disingenuous at best, because everyone understands that it’s going to take a long time for that stimulus to actually result in the production of more goods and services in the private sector. The real problem is that all of this new money will eventually find its way back to the banks. It’s another disguised bailout, and it’s what the Democrats and the Republicans are hoping you don’t figure out.

The people in Congress should understand this, but they apparently do not. If your congressman or Senator votes(d) for these bills, they should be recalled.
(Guess what, people? The arguments you see on TV are all for show. Democrats and Republicans are actually quite friendly. They see each other outside the Capitol Building, have dinner, and socialize together. If you think there is a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans – despite what idiots like Bill Maher say -- I’ve got a used car I’d like to sell you.)

Back to TALF. Let me ask you something: if you lent $10,000 to your brother-in-law and you know he can’t pay it back, what do you do? Well, you write that $10,000 off your personal balance sheet. It’s just too bad, but you have to eat it.

The government’s plan, however, under TALF, is to go out and get a credit card and put $10,000 on it. Except that they are playing with trillions, not thousands!

How can you “buy back” worthless assets by creating more debt? You can’t.

But this is the insane plan of the Obama administration, the Geithner Treasury, and the Democrats. Of course, the hypocritical Republicans, who did the same thing when they had control of Congress, are now playing holier-than-thou.

What’s the point?

The point is, we can no longer trust the Republican or the Democratic parties. The Republican-Democratic debate is a false dichotomy, as I have pointed out in an earlier blog post. Until the electorate wakes up and refuses to put any more of these jokers in office, America will continue down the road to financial ruin.

What can you do?

Join Downsize DC at DownsizeDC.org (non-profit). Find out what’s going on in Washington D.C. and do something positive about it! And for God’s sake, get yourself educated on the subjects of money and finance. Start by going to You Tube and see “Money As Debt.”
There’s still time to save America, but we as citizens cannot accept “business as usual” from the Democratic and Republican parties.

P.S. I promise I’ll eventually put up parts 2 and part 3 of It’s Nitty-Gritty Time. I’ve been busier than a one-legged buttkicker the past month, working on my new project, called The Give-A-Shit-O-Meter. Coming soon to a website near you!

http//www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.macleanediting.com

Today in the News, March 20, 2009

I will be posting the two sequels to "It's Nitty-Gritty Time," I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Today something happened that really blew my mind.
The Federal Government announced that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 will be … $2 trillion dollars. That’s correct, folks. Two TRILLION dollars.

And where will that money come from, do you think?

Well, after soaking the private sector for several trillion, the Fed will simply print more money. Or the Geithner Treasury will try to sell more worthless Treasury securities to a world that is awash in dollar-denominated debt.

In a previous blog post I mentioned that the Obama administration plans to borrow $2.7 trillion over the next 7 months. Frankly, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe that the level of mismanagement of our government’s finances could be so egregious. But apparently it is.

You’ll recall that last month, President Obama sent secretary of State Hillary Clinton to China. Secretary Clinton told the Chinese leaders that they would have to keep buying our debt so that we could keep buying their products. Huh? Didn't we used to make those products?

The Chinese already hold trillions of dollars worth of our debt. The entire world knows the United States is bankrupt. Apparently, our Congressional representatives haven’t a clue.

Why would anyone in their right mind buy more US debt?

The answer is that the rest of the world is fed up with the United States’ fiscal policies. We are trading on the fact that the dollar is still the linchpin world currency, to pay our debts by simply inflating our currency. It ain’t going to happen, folks, because the rest of the world has wised up. We are not going to be able to float anymore debt, certainly not trillions of dollars worth.

So what will happen? The Fed will simply create more money to fill the huge deficit spending hole, further devaluing the dollar. Will the government actually reign in spending, as you and I must do when our expenses exceed our income? Nope.

Congress does not even read the bills they pass. That’s how a budget can be passed with a $2 trillion dollar hole in it. If you want to do something about that, go here : http://www.downsizedc.org/etp/campaigns/27

At the same time, Speaker Pelosi announced that the Federal government is looking out for you, by passing legislation that will try to take back around $185 million in bonuses paid by AIG to its executives, after that disgusting bailout last year.

Thanks, Nancy.

You are planning to borrow and spend TWO TRILLION more than you take in this year, and you expect us to be happy because you’re going after a paltry $185 million?

That is the state of affairs in our country today. Our representatives have gone stark, raving, mad.

The Democratic and the Republican parties are both irresponsible and corrupt. These two parties are killing us, devaluing our currency, our economy, and no one seems to care.

I went to CNN.com, expecting to see the projected government deficit as front page news.

Guess what?

It wasn’t even mentioned. The Fourth Estate is just as irresponsible as Congress.

If you continue to vote Democratic or Republican, you are voting to continue the madness.

I voted Libertarian again, for the 4th election in a row, but my vote doesn’t count. Third party votes aren’t even mentioned anymore. All pretense of an actual democracy has been tossed out of the window. It’s just the “red” gang versus the “blue” gang on the Big Political Map. Reminds me of the Crips and the Bloods feud in L.A. several years ago.

What’s the difference between the old Soviet Union and the United States today? Not much. A huge, corrupt government, fake elections, and an economy that is going down the tubes.

But in the Soviet Union, at least the people KNEW their government was lying.

In the United States, we swallow bigger and bigger untruths and put up with more and more gross mismanagement of our currency and our economy every day, without blinking an eye.

It's Nitty-Gritty Time! Part 1

As this is being written, our species is on the brink of a world-wide financial collapse. It appears that our future is in the hands of a small elite, but I would argue that our fate is in the hands of all of us.

We are, collectively, writing the screenplay for the next act. Some have said that the year 2012 will somehow, mysteriously, lead to a resolution of our predicament. A magical number like 2012, however, will not determine our future. This sort of thinking is what got us into the mess in the first place. Looking toward 2012 is like asking Merlin the powerful wizard to wave a magic wand and make everything all right. As individuals and as a species, we have been sleeping for millennia, but it's now time to WAKE UP.

The demand for change is growing exponentially. As the vast majority of us live our normal, daily lives, a significant number of us are asking for an evolution out of the old, imprisoning memes of thought. This asking is creating a vibrational whirlwind that is shaking the foundations of the old order.

What are the dominant memes of the old order? Scarcity and unworthiness, which leads to a "follow-the-leader" mentality, and creates hierarchical structures. Geometrically speaking, the most prevalent and well-known of these structures on earth is the pyramid, with a very large base at the bottom, and a very small tip at the top. The earth is littered with them, and they exist on every continent except Australia.

The pyramid is the perfect representation of mankind's belief systems.

A pyramid is wide at the bottom and tapers to a small point at the top, inviting domination and control. Naturally, since there is only a very small space at the top, those who want to take a leadership role gravitate to these positions. Because the masses of humanity have, in the past, given up their power, our societies have a "top down" orientation that perfectly satisfies all of the participants. Those at the bottom gripe and moan about their condition (while maintaining the attitude that "you can't fight city hall") while those at the top, left without direction, see fit to do as they please. This has lead to societies that eventually spin out of control and deteriorate, as those at the top aggrandize more and more power to themselves. Eventually such a society must fail, because it is imbalanced. And so we begin the process all over again. That has been the cycle for the past several millennia, after the collapse of the last great civilization on our planet, which some have called Atlantis.

Now, however, the demand for change is so high that it is rocking the foundations of this well-established pattern. Right now, the world is facing a financial crisis that is a perfect representation of the vibrational patterns of thought in the species.

The old, top-down order defends itself by using the old methods of coercion, conflict, and domination. The new consciousness requests more harmony, cooperation and abundance for all. The new paradigm feels its way, like a blind man who is just beginning to see the light through eyes that are beginning to function properly, into a stronger and stronger vibrational resonance.

The result is, of course chaotic. But science has done a good job of describing chaotic systems. When a natural system becomes chaotic, it will inevitably stabilize itself after a period of time. That is precisely what is occurring at this time. The important thing to recognize is that WE, as individuals, are choosing the new patterns of thought, right now, around which the new system will resonate.

Individuals are NOT powerless! Collectively we determine the parameters of action of the so-called elites. The prominent belief systems in societies with hierarchical structures is scarcity, and unworthiness. As Erich Fromm described in his 1941 book "Escape From Freedom," individuals within human societies seem to enjoy giving authority over their lives to governments and authority figures. This "follow-the-leader" mentality gets the human race into trouble time after time, as leaders gravitate to the power vacuum caused by the abandonment of individual responsibility by its citizens.

Kenneth James Michael MacLean has written 8 inspiring books, over 100 content-rich articles, and produced two movies. Visit Ken at his website, The Big Picture, at http://www.kjmaclean.com

To see "The Law of Attraction Explained" and "The Unity of Spirit and Matter" movies, go to http://www.sunrise-production.org

(continued from Part 1)

My Story, Part 2

Every 9 – 10 years or so, I went through a depressive phase. In 1979 I had a very severe case of the flu, which apparently triggered another depressive cycle. During these cycles I maintained my health, but for several hours a day – at unpredictable intervals – I would feel psychological and neurological symptoms such as paranoia, hopelessness, timidity, inability to make decisions, and a feeling that I was going crazy. Later I discovered that all these symptoms were brought about by the mercury in my dental amalgam that was slowly seeping into and polluting my brain. Doctors wanted to place me on medication, but I refused. I knew I could deal with it, and I did. These cycles would last for approximately 12 – 18 months, and then I would feel better again. It was inexplicable.

During this time I took liquid herbal nutritional formulas, designed by Dr. Watkins to relieve symptoms, and I am sure they helped. At that time (1979) no one knew about, or even suspected, the effect that dental amalgam could have on the body.

In 1988 I experienced another relapse when I too ka large dose of what was called “blue-green algae.” Blue-green algae is some sort of living biological material that is supposed to have beneficial effects, and so I and a number of my friends tried it. Everyone I knew had either positive reactions to it, or no reactions at all. But when I took this stuff, it literally exploded in my brain, and I felt like I was falling off the end of the world. Literally. And I was back in another cycle that lasted for about a year.

My doctors had no idea what was wrong with me, and their solutions ranged from drugs of various kinds to anti-depressive medications. But again, I refused to take these drugs. I still had my health, and continued to run and feel quite physically fit, even though my brain sometimes felt as if it were controlled by aliens from the planet Zorkon. If you have ever felt like you are going nuts, I sympathize with you. I’ve been there, more times than I would care to count! My condition was still a gigantic mystery.

In 1997 I experienced another of these cycles, again brought on by a very severe case of influenza. This cycle lasted about 14 months, and then I felt better again. Between these cycles. I felt like a normal human being. During them, I could still work and function normally, but my nervous system often felt like it was connected to a vibrator.

From 1985 to 2005 I was a home services contractor, and I used a lot of paint and other chemicals, which I’m sure didn’t help my condition. But there is simply no way to explain why (1) I felt in good physical health the entire time, and (2) why, every 9 – 10 years, I would suddenly become neurologically batty. If these chemicals were the cause of my condition, why didn’t I get physically ill? Why didn’t I experience neurological symptoms all the time?

Well, to make a long story short, in 2005 I hit the wall. I woke up one morning so sick I couldn’t even get out of bed, depressed, and chronically fatigued. Dr. Watkins had no answers for me. My doctors wanted to put me on meds. One of them said my thyroid was the problem, but I had no symptoms of thyroid malfunction. Then one day, almost a year later, I was talking to my friend Dave Froseth, who I call “genius Dave.” Dave is a musician, and one of those guys who can do anything he wants. He builds keyboards, teaches, performs, and studies just about everything under the sun. Dave looked in my mouth and said that I had a lot of dental fillings. I said, “so what?” Dave recommended a book by Dr. Hal Huggins called “It’s All in Your Head.”

I’ve skipped a year here, because that year was the worst in my life, a year I would not wish on my worst enemy, if I had one. Not only did I experience the neurological symptoms, but now I was chronically depressed, along with experiencing chronic fatigue. I still had no idea why I was feeling the way I was. Then one night I woke up at 4 in the morning. I felt like I was going nutsoid. I remembered the book Dave had told me about, and how, according to the author – a dentist – mercury in dental amalgam could adversely affect your health. I randomly googled “mercury poisoning” and found the web site of a woman who had been through precisely what I was going through. She listed 25 physical and neurological symptoms of mercury poisoning, and I counted them off. Which ones did I have? I had 22 of them!

Right then I knew the cause of my lifelong, mysterious problems. I remembered the name Hal Huggins and I went on his site. At that time, he had something posted for all those suffering from mercury poisoning. I can’t find it on his site anymore, but basically it said, ‘You aren’t crazy. Those weird thoughts you have, and your poisoned and burning brain, your fogginess, your light headedness, your loss of cognitive function, is caused by mercury from dental amalgam fillings.’ I’ll never forget that, because it was a profound relief.

So I saw a dentist and had all of my fillings removed in Feb 2006. This was a serious operation that lasted 7 hours, and was performed by a Hal Huggins approved dentist in Montreal, Canada, Dr. Carl Benoit. They give you a vitamin C drip, and an anesthesiologist is present. Strict protocols are followed to ensure that absolutely no mercury gets into your body (all of the fillings have to be drilled out). After I had my fillings removed, I was warned that I might actually feel worse. That’s because when the fillings are out, the body tries to get rid of the stuff. And when mercury moves, it doesn’t feel good, especially when it is lodged in your brain. And that’s exactly what happened. So now I felt really rotten, because I did the correct procedure and I still didn’t feel any better!

Well, that brings us to the PhD chemist Andrew Hall Cutler and his protocol for safely removing mercury from the brain and the body, and to an exciting new alternative technology called Rife technology, which I’ll get into in the next blog posting. These two alternative methodologies have resulted in a slow removal of the mercury from my body and my brain. My health is now much better. Even though I sometimes get frustrated at the slowness of the recovery process, I am still thankful that I am getting better. I’ll conclude my story (up until the present day, that is) in the next posting.

I’ll also have another blog post soon on the world financial crisis, and my thoughts about where we are headed.

:-) Ken
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

My Story

I think it’s about time I told you about the various alternative medical and other therapies I have used in my 57 years on the planet to successfully treat a variety of serious illnesses.

In my life I have experienced the highest highs of physical health and connection to my spiritual source, and the lowest lows. I have been in the most fantastic mental, emotional and physical condition, and have experienced debilitating physical illness and suicidal depression.

If you are reading this and you are sick, I’ve been there. If you are
in the greatest shape and have not a care in the world, I’ve been there as well. In this multi-part blog I am going to describe what I’ve been through and how I have successfully treated a wide variety of physical and mental ailments with what are called “alternative” medical treatments.

First, a little bit about my family history. My grandfather Harold, on my father’s side, died of a heart attack at the age of 33. My grandfather on my mom’s side, Frank Martin, died of a heart attack at the age of 51. My mother, Lorraine Martin, died of leukemia in her mid-20’s, when I was 3. So my family has a history of heart disease and cancer.

My first experience with illness (other than the usual childhood illnesses) came when I was about 7. I started feeling really weird, like I was going a little bonkers. These periods only lasted for a couple of hours at a time, and the rest of the time I felt “normal,” whatever that is, but my parents got worried and sent me to a child psychologist. This fellow did some tests and decided that I was just “going through a phase.” It wasn’t until almost 5 decades later, after I had experienced a severe increase in these symptoms over time, that I discovered the reason for this.

When I was in college, back in 1969, it was the height of the drug era, and I did my share. Unfortunately, one day I was smoking some pretty powerful dope (laced with something I don’t even remember) and I went over the edge. I felt like my entire body and my psyche was being turned inside out (especially inside my brain) accompanied by a horrible feeling of depression. Whatever happened to me at 7, was magnified big-time at the age of 18. I felt like this off and on for almost a year before it finally went away. This was the first of 6 cycles of depression that I experienced, at approximately 9-year intervals, until I reached the age of 54, when I suffered a debilitating physical and mental crash. I’ll get to the bottom of this mystery in a moment.

Now don’t think for a moment that I have lived a debilitating life! I have had periods of debilitation, that is true, but in between I have also felt really wonderful. For 25 years I was a runner, and even though I had periods of depression I was in really great physical condition. Those reading this might think I am “bipolar,” but that is not the case. There is a specific physical reason for the phenomena I am describing, that I am now handling permanently with some exciting new alternative technology that I'll describe in a later blog post.

My father taught me that weakness of any kind was insupportable, and so I never told anyone about my bouts of depression, I just sucked it up. I was “mentally tough,” and never got any help, and even when I did get counseling help later on, it didn’t make any difference. That’s because my depressive cycles had a purely physical cause: mercury poisoning from my dental amalgam fillings. Mercury and lead are insidious poisons that cause a variety of serious mental and physical symptoms, among them depression and chronic fatigue.

Since the age of 7 I had a sweet tooth, and I was a tooth grinder. For decades, I kept crunching mercury from my fillings into my system, and then replacing my old dental amalgam with new amalgam. Fortunately, according to PhD chemist Andrew Hall Cutler, only 1% to 5% of the population is affected by this problem. I am writing a book about my experiences in a book called “To Hell and Back: My Experience with Mercury Poisoning from Dental Amalgam,” so I won’t go much further into this, other than to say that on Jan 1, 2005, I finally crashed and burned. I could barely walk and I was in a constant state of depression. I saw my medical doctor and he wanted to put me on meds, but I lied and told him it wasn’t that bad. Then I searched for alternative remedies.

Let’s go back in time from 2005 to 1980. While playing Frisbee at my mother-in-law’s house on July 4th of that year, I experienced chest pains and difficulty breathing. I knew that my grandfather had died early from heart attacks, and I was scared to death.

Fortunately for me, I saw a naturopathic doctor, Eugene Watkins N.D., who is a famous herbologist and who practices iridology. Iridology is a branch of alternative medicine that believes that patterns, colors, and other characteristics of the iris can be examined to determine information about a patient's systemic health.

Now there are proponents and detractors of all alternative health disciplines, especially from the orthodox medical community, but all I can say is that it worked for me! [1]. Dr. Watkins gave me a herbal formula called “Heart Tonic,” a liquid formulation composed of hawthorn berries, motherwort, and myrrh. Apparently, this formula has been around for centuries in herbology. Dr. Watkins told me that my heart was weak but that it could be repaired. He explained (in layman’s terms) that the cells of the body replicated themselves periodically, and that the herbal formula would operate to “get rid of the bad heart cells and strengthen new ones.” He told me that in herbology, the healing curve often goes down before it goes back, and to expect heart-attack like symptoms, but not to worry.

Well, the very next day I was 25 feet up on a ladder, painting a house, when all of a sudden my chest felt like it was caving in. I grabbed onto the ladder in a panic and inched my way down. I told my partner that I was having “a problem” and that I needed to rest for a while. So I sat with my back against the side of the house and sweated, wondering whether I too would die young. After a minute or two, however, the symptoms went away. Fortunately I remembered what Dr. Watkins had told me, and so I didn’t rush off to the hospital.

I went home early that day. After three months on “Heart Tonic,” (which I still take to this day) I was back on my feet and feeling much better. I know where to look in the eye for the heart area (you can get iridology charts that tell you where to look for specific tissue weaknesses) and what was very dark is now white, indicating healing. Anyone who claims that “the iris does not undergo change in an individuals life” simply does not know what they are talking about. [2] That was my third experience with alternative medicine.

About a year earlier I had had a strange, debilitating experience. I developed a swelling on my left side, and a great deal of pain that left me on crutches. I could find no physical explanation for why this happened, it just did. I saw a doctor and he had no clue. He wanted to do exploratory surgery, but I decided to try a therapy now known as Traumatic Incident Reduction. Back then it was called Dianetics, based on a book called “Dianetics” by L. Ron Hubbard. This guy turned out to be a nutcase, but before he went nutty he did some pretty good work (some might say he stole that work, but I don’t have time to get into that!)

Essentially, TIR works by returning your awareness to a painful or traumatic incident and simply going through it over and over, and over again, with a very simple protocol. Fantastic results have been achieved with this simple method, which is based upon the idea that the mind, when properly focused and directed, can affect the body.

For those of us on a spiritual path, the idea that spirit, mind, and body are connected is a no-brainer. Medical doctors and scientists might pooh-pooh this, but every culture upon the face of the earth, throughout history, has recognized this fundamental truth, the truth that a human being is a spiritual entity having a temporary physical experience. Well anyway, to make a long story short, after several of these sessions, my body gradually returned to normal. The swelling and the pain went away, and I felt good again. I still have the crutches in my basement, as a souvenir of my first experience with alternative medical treatment.

Unscientific? Maybe, but you cannot argue with results!

Actually, that was my second experience with alternative medical success.

My first was back in 1977, when I learned about something called a “touch assist.” One day I went for a run in my local park, and I tripped hard over a little wooden bench. My ankle swelled up and soon became dark purple, and I could barely walk. I decided, “what the heck, I’ll try out this touch assist thing and see if it works.” What you do is get yourself in the exact same position as when you hurt yourself, and go over exactly what happened in your mind, over and over. So I stood up awkwardly and placed my body and my foot where I had injured it, as best as I was able on my swollen ankle. I closed my eyes and stood there, going over and over the incident. After about a minute I felt a big increase in pain, then a decrease, and then nothing. After 5 minutes I said, “OK, that didn’t work. Let’s go home.” But when I put my foot down on the ground it felt better. And when I looked at my ankle, the blue and purple ugliness had almost totally gone! Was it the mind influencing the body?

Is this unscientific? Maybe, but you cannot argue with results.

I am by nature a skeptical person, but in the space of 3 years I had had two experiences that showed me the power of the mind, properly directed, to heal the body. These experiences were invaluable in helping me maintain the mental confidence and belief in myself when far more serious illnesses occurred later on.
(To be continued)

Kenneth James Michael MacLean

http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.sunrise-production.org
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

[1] I am not arguing that alternative medicine doesn’t have its share of quacks. But beware of quacks from the medical community, who dismiss all alternative medicine and its practitioners, especially the fraud known as Stephen Barrett, who claims to be a medical doctor but whose license was taken away in 1993. Barrett runs an outfit called “Quackwatch,” which is itself a discredited organization. Barrett was forced to admit in a Canadian court that what he does is to destroy natural treatments and those who practice them, and a California judge pronounced that he was “incompetent” to do the work he claims to do. See “Failed MD Stephen Barrett” at http://www.quackpotwatch.org/quackpots/quackpots/barrett.htm

[2] From Wikipedia (take EVERYTHING you read on Wikiopedia with a grain of salt, as my grandma used to say): “It has been pointed out that the premise of iridology is at odds with the notion that the iris does not undergo changes in an individual's life. Iris texture is a phenotypical feature which develops during gestation and remains unchanged after birth. There is no evidence for changes in the iris pattern other than variations in pigmentation in the first year of life, eventual freckles and variations caused by glaucoma treatment. This stability of iris structures is at the foundation of iris recognition for identification purposes.” This is nonsense, of course, as I have seen my heart lines gradually turn from black to white over a period of 20 years on “Heart Tonic.”

I have been frustrated by the news media’s inability to intelligently and clearly tell us why the United States (and the world) is in such a financial mess. So I did a little research, and have tried to explain things in common sense language that anyone can understand.

The “mortgage crisis” basically came about because Congress repealed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 (officially called the Banking Act of 1933), which separated the commercial banking business (deposits) from investment banking (securitization).

The notorious bill repealing Glass–Steagall, pushed by the banking industry and called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, was voted on strictly by party lines, and signed into law by President Clinton in 1999. This bill basically destroyed the remaining firewall between commercial banking and investment banking.

Why was this firewall so important?

Well, a commercial bank (before Gramm–Leach–Bliley) accepted deposits but could not engage in securitization. Securitization is the process of pooling and repackaging of cash–flow–producing financial assets into securities, which are then sold to investors.

An asset is something that produces income; like a stock, a bond, or a mortgage. A stock produces dividends for the owner of the stock, based on the productive capacity of the issuing corporation or business entity. A bond yields a fixed rate of interest, again derived from the income producing activities of the underlying business. And a mortgage also produces income for the issuing bank, as people work and make their monthly payments.

Under Glass–Steagall, a commercial bank made money through its lending activities. If a bank granted a mortgage (or any loan) to an unqualified customer and that customer defaulted, the bank lost out. It could not collect interest on that loan, and had to write it off. Therefore, it was in the best interest of a bank to thoroughly research and validate every person or institution to whom it lent money.

Under Glass–Steagall, the securities industry was regulated by the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission. This institution gained respect over the years from 1934 onwards, throughout the world’s financial markets, for its enforcement of the sometimes “Wild West” nature of the securities industry. As a result, investment paper issued by U.S. financial institutions were regarded as solid investments.

However, beginning in the mid 1980’s or so and continuing on in to the 90’s the securities industry began developing new, higher risk investment instruments, and the SEC became less and less able to cope. This new investment climate was also reflected in the passage of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which deregulated the Savings and Loan industry, and turned out to be one of many contributing factors that led to the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s. This act also allowed the creation of “adjustable–rate” mortgages.

You probably recall Michael Milken, who single–handedly created the market for “junk bonds” and other higher-risk alternative investments, and who was indicted and sent to prison in 1989. These new financial instruments, called derivatives, were a precursor to the derivatives explosion after 1999. Derivatives are created like a child creates a house of cards, building new and more exotic investment vehicles on top of each other. As time went on, the regulatory agencies (especially the SEC) became emasculated, allowing this process to continue like a cancerous cell multiplies within the body.

Enter Gramm–Leach–Bliley. After 1999, commercial banks were now also able to get into securitization. What happened is that commercial (deposit) banks now saw an opportunity to take advantage of the U.S.’ great financial reputation. Instead of carefully doing their due diligence and only lending to qualified customers, banks sent “mortgage specialists” out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry and gave them loans, knowing that they could simply repackage these mortgages and sell them to third parties, who may not have done their research. Banks were now lending, simply put, to unqualified persons and “banking” on the good reputation of our commercial paper.

In turn, other financial institutions would take those repackaged mortgages and repackage them again. This dicing and slicing and repackaging of mortgages soon got to the point where no one could identify the underlying mortgage assets.

In the securities industry, the same thing goes on all the time. The most important aspect of the securities industry are called derivatives.

What is a derivative?
It is financial instrument based (supposedly) on underlying assets, which are valued (supposedly) according to their market value. The process of evaluation is called “mark to market” and guarantees that an investor understands the value of his purchased investment. However, the derivatives market, especially during the past decade, went totally out of control. More and more exotic financial instruments were created, which became more and more divorced from the underlying assets. It got so bad that the issuer of a financial product simply assigned its own value to the product, based on mathematical formulas, or simply by guess!

Christopher Story, the noted U.K. intelligence and financial analyst and publisher of the respected “International Currency Review,” has stated that “...the notional value of outstanding adjusted global over-the-counter derivatives contracts had expanded from $257,894 billion at the end of 2004, to $596,004 billion by the end of December 2007. The most recent figure cited (applicable to around mid-October 2008) was $667 trillion. But the underlying gross market values of these outstanding contracts rose from just $9,377 billion at the end of December 2004, to $14,522 billion by the end of 2007. Thus, whereas the gross market values of outstanding contracts were ‘worth’ 3.6% of their notional values at the end of 2004, the equivalent proportion three years later was 2.4%.”
(see http://www.worldreports.org for Mr. Story’s reports).

We are all familiar by now of the collapse of the Bernard L. Madoff investment fund. This fund was composed almost exclusively of derivatives.

In its article on “Derivatives,” Wikipedia shows a chart of total world–wide derivatives which corresponds closely with the above. Here it is:




In other words, the “mortgage crisis” is just part of a much larger and deeper financial mess that affects the entire world financial system.

What can be done?

Globally, the world’s economic powers agreed on new banking regulations called “Basel II,’ which forbids off–balance sheet transactions and exotic financial derivatives, and requires that source of funds be identified for every claimed asset. In 2006, funds were also made available (called the Settlements) to refund the dollar and stabilize the world’s financial and banking systems. The United States, however, under the Bush administration, has been furiously attempting to stall the implementation of these needed banking regulations, and has been blocking the Settlements.

Fortunately, our new President has seem the light (we hope) and has appointed Mary Schapiro to be Head of the now discredited US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Apparently, Ms. Schapiro has a very high reputation in financial circles for integrity and intelligence.

The new President has also appointed Peter Orszag to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Mr Orszag has been Director of the Congressional Budget Office, which enjoys a sound reputation, whereas the OMB has, as Mr. Story says, “for decades been engaged in creative accounting, smoke and mirrors obfuscation, and the falsification of the US Federal Budget and background debt data.”


Hopefully this article has given you a little more understanding of the mortgage and financial mess. Remember that the government produces debt, and the private sector produces income and assets. So the solution cannot and must not come from government.

Government can only spend what the private sector produces, through the function of taxation. Because our government has engaged in deficit spending for the past half century, it has accumulated gigantic debts in the range of $11 trillion dollars, and unfunded liabilities in the range of over $50 trillion dollars. Our balance–of–payments deficits with the rest of the world –– the amount we import versus the amount of our exports –– are over $500 billion dollars every year.

According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the global current account deficit of the US is presently almost $800 billion, or about 7 percent of US GDP. To finance both the current account deficit and its own sizable foreign investments, we have to import about $1 trillion of foreign capital every year!

In deficit spending, the government must either borrow to fund its deficits, or have the Fed simply create money out of thin air. Either way, we go into more debt and further undermine our economic integrity.

The proper function of government is to regulate the private sector and ensure that it does not go out of control. Unfortunately, it appears that the government wants to solve the financial crisis by micro–managing the economy with its bailouts of insurance companies, banks, and the automobile companies.

Government is inefficient, that is obvious to any rational observer, and is concerned more with protection of vested interests than it is with the good of all the people.. If you think things are badly run now, wait until the government takes complete control of health care, for example. The new health care plans are a gift to big pharmaceutical companies, who are heavy contributors to the political campaigns of our so-called Congressional representatives.

The proper solution to this mess is to downsize government, and governmental interference in the economy, and increase the integrity and rigor of regulatory institutions like the SEC. The financial and mortgage crisis began and spun out of control because we have done just the opposite.

Kenneth MacLean
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com

The Spiritual Warrior

“Oh that God had given me [cunning], to meet such cruel dastards according to their villainy! The power to lie, and the love of it; the stealth to spy, and the glory in it; above all –– the quiet relish for blood, and joy in the death of an enemy –– these are what any man must have, to contend with the Doone’s upon even terms. And yet, I thank God I have not any of these.”

So spoken by John Ridd, the leading character in R.D. Blackamoor’s classic romance , Lorna Doone.
This is the definition of a true Spiritual Warrior, that although we see those who seem to revel in injustice, domination, cruelty, and rapacious greed, we hold true to our souls–– the knowledge of ourselves as divine spiritual beings, and the knowledge that those who appear to be our enemies are divine as well.

These words, expressed by the good and simple yeoman John Ridd, concerning the Doone’s –– a race of mighty warriors, thieves and murderers who live in an impregnable fortress and who hold sway over all the country round, are an expression of power, and of the Light.

For it is always openness, honesty, and integrity that breeds strength, and resonates to the true power of Spirit, which is who we are.

How did the human race get into the current mess we are in?

We got there by playing the game of tit–for–tat, and follow–the–leader. Every time we strike out in hatred, we create a sort of “engram” –– an encapsulated vibration of the lower order –– within the species consciousness. These lower vibrations build up and become dominant. Is it any wonder that Jesus the Christ said ‘turn the other cheek?’ It is understandable why Eastern thought tells us to practice non–resistance. There is a world of wisdom, and personal power in these concepts, for in order to transcend the darkness we must not link to it in our thoughts and emotions.

The old memes of conflict, domination, greed and war have well– established roots within the lower vibrations, which has been the common denominator of resonance within the species consciousness of mankind for millennia. This occurred not because these vibrations are superior, but merely because of force of habit.

We forgive our enemies because it is better for US as a race, for every time we sink into hatred, we contribute to the vibration of the old paradigm.

As a spiritual warrior, we are here to create the new paradigm of cooperation, abundance for all, and mutual respect and harmony. That can only be done by following the simple but profound example expressed by yeoman John Ridd.

Spiritual warriors have the most enlightened and toughest job here on planet earth: to remain in joy and love, despite all reasons not to. And as we all know, there are plenty of reasons to do so! But these exist only because we have created them, and have been –– until now –– too lazy or perceived ourselves as too weak in our thinking and in our intent to do anything about them.

Here are more words from R. D. Blackamore, speaking through yeoman John Ridd, regarding his refusal to participate in the murder of the murderers, the Doones:
“I will not strike a blow, nor give any counsel, neither guard any prisoners.”

“Not strike a blow,” cried Jeremy a King’s man, and charged with destroying the Doones and enlisting all able–bodied men in the campaign of destruction), “against thy father’s murderers?”

“Not a single blow, Jeremy;” replies John Ridd, “unless I know the man who did it, and he gloried in his sin. It was a foul and dastard deed, yet not done in cold blood; neither in cold blood will I take God’s task of avenging it.”

Our good yeoman would strike down the murderer of his father in a fair fight, agreed to by both parties, but never will he spy, or cheat, or do anything to violate his integrity. And thus does a person remain whole and true to his (or her) character. This is the essence of a spiritual warrior. We do not fight those apparently arrayed against us on their terms, but create our own lives in our higher truth. And thus do we dissolve the engrams within the species consciousness, like the sun that shines upon the thick fog, permitting our awareness to gradually rise away from the old memes.

This is our work. It is very rewarding work, for we can feel the result of it in our own bosom, and we see how others react to our uncovered Light.

Like John Ridd, if we come face to face with evil, we do not back down, yet continue to shine our light. We do not roll over in the face of the darkness, for that is to hide our spiritual brilliance. We also know that our experience on earth is but a fleeting and temporary one, and that all of the actors in this play are immortal spiritual beings.
All spiritual warriors have no fear of death, for death is an illusion, based upon the flawed concept of the biological origin of consciousness.

When we travel the road of the spiritual warrior, we notice those around us responding to us in a positive way. And thus do we avoid the darkness, and transcend it with the light of our love and our spiritual wisdom, which is our strength.

Kenneth James Michael MacLean
http://www.kjmaclean.com
http://www.thevibrationaluniverse.com
http://www.marketingwithspirit.com