Jack Heald

I used to tell my children as they practiced their daily jam writing – I insisted that they practice writing in spite of their resistance – that you often do not know what you are thinking until you start writing.

 Around the time of my divorce, I stopped keeping a journal and I guess I quit being aware of what I am thinking. Do you ever experience that? Do you ever start to say something – either verbally or in written form – and then begin to open your heart and mind and be surprised by what is coming out of you? That’s the reason to journal, to jam write, to just write – to know yourself.

I think one of the most challenging things about keeping a journal is the pain of finding out what you really think – and perhaps the dissatisfaction with the person you find staring back at you from the pages of your diary. Sometimes it is too disappointing, too painful, to face that person – and perhaps that is another reason not to journal.

But really, that is likely the best reason to journal.

Here I am, 51 years old, shocked that I have reached that age. It honestly feels like I was 35 just a few months ago, but it was actually more like – uhmmm – (quick calculation in the head) – about 200 months ago. That’s a lot of moon cycles. When I think about the reality that I have less time in front of me than I had behind me, it makes me more serious about making the time count. I used to think “making the time count” was all about doing good and honoring God and all that blah-blah but I realize now that the only thing that will really count – to me at least – is to look back on the life I was given and be satisfied with what I did with that gift. Frankly, it really won’t matter what anyone thinks of me if I am disappointed myself.

I think that is one of the blessings of getting older – I care less about what anyone thinks of me than I used to. I’ve lost friends and had relationships fracture – sometimes because I’ve been insensitive or a jerk, but just as often because I refused to be anyone other than who I am. I hope that going forward, people reject me because I am me, rather than because I jerky. Although I suppose one may argue that if the person I am is fundamentally “a jerk”, then they are rejecting me both for who I am and for being a jerk. Meh.

Sometime soon I am going to write about the story in Science that compared intuitive versus analytical minds and their respective inclinations – or lack thereof – towards faith. Stay tuned.

It’s the first day of finals here at Arizona State, and looking out my window it is clear that the students are cutting loose. (Unlike me, who is up to his eyeballs in alligators trying to get a Uniflow installation completed and configured.)

Sorry, I don’t have photos, but I did see – so far – today:

I saw a guy with a long gray pony-tail riding a unicyle and holding a leach that was connected to a miniature dachshund.

That was the weirdest thing I had seen all day until I saw:

A girl in a little black dress

wearing lace stockings

riding a neon-green skateboard

smoking a pipe.

No lie.

I’m losing hearing acuity in my right ear. It’s very odd. I have high-frequency hearing loss, apparently from sort of genetic nerve damage/sickness/failure, and I am really starting to notice it. My dad and his two brothers are both wearing hearing aids, so clearly it runs in the family. With the high-frequency loss, it means that I can hear vowels just fine but have trouble with consonants. I never realized that the frequency of a consonant differed from its surrounding vowels, but that has been my experience.

It’s pretty bothersome to me and to those I live with and try to understand. The high frequencies are what allow me to discern pitches that are out of tune from those that are in tune. The thought of losing my musical “ear” is fearful; I’ve always had a gift for music, and this stupid genetic thing threatens to mute that gift. Of course, if you ponder it logically, I was born with both the gift for music and with the propensity to lose my hearing. If I take the one for granted, it is only reasonable to accept the other.

I always thought going deaf would be like someone just turning down the volume, but its really more like someone put a low-band-pass filter on my right ear. I still hear fine at the lower frequencies, but the higher the pitch, the less I hear. Who knew that consonants happen in the upper part of the hearing range? Not me. I still hear pretty well out of the left ear, and I recognize now that I clearly favor it.

Another odd thing – I have zero trouble with music, other than the higher frequencies being muted. It’s not such a problem when the “message” of the music occurs across the entire spectrum, but my trouble hearing consonants makes it much more difficult to understand speech – especially if my good (left) ear is turned away from the speaker.

Anyone else out these dealing with this? What do you do to compensate/fix it/deal with it?

Neither “Governments” nor “Corporations” exist anywhere but in the imagination.  Governments and Corporations are artificial entities that exist merely because we believe in them. They are not like people,  who exist on their own in spite of what anyone else believes about them.

It is our belief in them that grants power and authority to these imaginary entities – power and authority they cannot possess any other way. We give them homage and deference as if they were people. But they are not. If we ceased to believe in them, they would cease to exist. They are not people; they are constructs of the imagination.

These imaginary constructs have no power and no authority on their own because they do not exist on their own.

When the government says, “Pay your taxes!”, it is not really “The Government” speaking; it is a merely a person – a person cloaked in a long, black robe or sporting a shiny badge on his chest or wearing a special hat.  Neither the robe, nor the hat, nor the badge give that person any particular power or authority; it is our collective belief in some sort of unseen, almost supernatural entity called “The Government” that gives that person in the silly outfit any power at all.

(Or more accurately, the combined power of a whole bunch of people.) When a corporation says, “We cannot refund your money”, it is actually a person saying that.

The reason “You can’t fight City Hall” is because City Hall does not actually exist. But you can fight people.

(Fred Reed served as my inspiration for this piece. Credit to him.)

Who do I vote for? More to the point, who can I vote for? The candidates all want things I don’t want, and don’t want things I do want.

I want a government limited by the constitution. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want to end the empire, shut down our foreign military bases, and bring our troops home. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want money I can count on instead of this funny stuff that the Federal Reserve creates out of thin air. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want to end the police state, eliminate the TSA, repeal the Patriot Act and shut down the DEA. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the government to quit protecting the criminals who have bankrupted us. I speak of the CEOs of Citibank, BofA, Goldman Sachs, MF Global, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, AIG and the like. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the IRS eliminated. I can live with a national sales tax in exchange for losing the income tax. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the government out of my bedroom, out of my kitchen, out of education and out of healthcare. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

Obama is exactly what I thought he would be: more of the same. More war. More debt. More government. Less freedom. Less openness. Less honesty.

So I’d like to hear from you, my loyal reader. Who do I vote for?

Because stuff like this seems to just keep happening.

And the reason I think it is important is because the people who are committing these frauds ALSO want to circumscribe our lives and tell us what we can eat, where we can live and how we can spend our own money.  (I inherited my mother’s radical independence and my father’s stubbornness and persistence. I think it’s a pretty useful combination.)

Lacking an understanding what money is and does, you cannot begin to understand why gold is historically the best money. The qualities that all good money will ideally posses are:

1. Durability – does it rust? rot? corrode? melt?
2. Divisibility – does its value change when divided into smaller units? Two halves of one cow is not nearly as valuable as one whole cow.
3. Portability – Can it be easily transported?
4. Non-counterfeit-ability – the reason for this attribute should be obvious
5. Homogeneity – are different units of the same size essentially identical? Not all oranges are identical, nor are all cows. OTOH, gold is gold is gold is gold.

Gold has been the preferred form of money for 5000 years because it is a commodity that possesses all of these qualities.

All fiat currencies are portable, homogenous and divisible. But they are easily counterfeit-able, (just crank up the printing press and make more!), and not remotely durable.

Look at the list of hard commodities traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and you will see things that have been used as money over the millenia. They all have drawbacks of one sort or another, except for gold.

Silver is closest, but it has industrial as well as monetary uses. This dilutes its value as money. Platinum is similar to silver, but much rarer than gold. In fact, all the industrial and rare-earth metals share gold’s qualities, but they all have significant industrial use. Gold is nearly useless as an industrial metal. Strangely, that lack of industrial value actually increases its usefulness as money.

Oil is very close as well. It doesn’t degrade over time, is very easily divisible, and impossible to counterfeit. But because it is a liquid, it tends to be difficult to transport. And of course, like silver, it also has great industrial use.

Salt used to be money, but it lacks durability. Get a good rainstorm or flood and your money literally dissolves before your eyes. Livestock and agricultural commodities have also been used as money, but they all lack one or more of the qualities that gold possesses.
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Commodity-based monies impose fiscal discipline on governments. If a government wants to run a deficit, they have to come up with a way to collect actual money. They can take it from the people by force, but they cannot create it out of thin air.

Imagination-based monies, (fiat), impose no such discipline. With a fiat money, government is free to run up huge debts, and then pay them off with money they create out themselves. This makes it much easier to do incredibly stupid things, like start crazy wars, support military bases in 159 countries around the globe, and bail out giant banks that make crazy, risky bets and lose.

Hope this helps.

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