A Midwest Journal

Look over the programming and content on either network television or cable and tell me that they don’t think you are stupid.

That they aren’t looking down on you as just another person to put their ads in front so you can buy their stuff.

Let’s compare their shows with the all-time great books.

• Bible
• Shakespeare
• Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita
• 500-year bestsellers such as “Secretum Secretorum” (The Secret of Secrets) – (don’t worry, it was before printing presses and barely made the transition – but it was an Arabian classic for hundreds of years before it was “borrowed” for the European elites.)

Or you can go more modern with Dickens’ works, but let’s stay out of the 20th century where mass-marketing and dumbing-down of the general public has reached and attained heights of lunacy. (That made “Valley of the Dolls” an all-time fiction bestseller because is was sold in five or so colors at grocery store checkout stands.)

If it’s on TV, they don’t think you are stupid, they know it for a fact.

Which is why every single commercial uses Madison Avenue tactics to appeal to your emotions instead of your logic. Ever wondered why they call it the boob tube?

Top shows are about crime, crime, and crime – oh, and superheroes who kill people. If they aren’t “reality” TV shows which are completely unreal and never happen in real life. (Come out and film me checking cattle, repairing farm equipment, fixing fence, and sitting in front of my computer by myself – do you thing this would sell advertising? – or would you rather see quasi-celebrity types eating bugs in the Amazon while they do truly silly competitions? Both are as interesting, but one “sells” television ads – does this mean they also think advertisers are stupid?)

And then there is what they call the “news” which is a half-hour of “top” stories and supposed to condense the entire day into 30 minutes so that you can “keep informed” – what they don’t tell you is what else went on in the world, or what they don’t want to tell you about. And that you already know about what your news media channel is about to say, because cable news and the Internet beat them to it hours ago. Just another government scam.

How about that TV special called “Swine Flu”, which never came from pigs (it actually was the other way around – they get sick from us) and depressed pork prices. And also is less dangerous than regular flu. Or how they always lean left but say that they are really centrist. It’s a story how they favor one candidate over the other in every election – all three main networks at the same time. Sounds like another government scam.

Funny thing is, their credibility stays at an average of 30%, which is just above Congress and used-car salemen. (Lawyers are at the bottom, but that’s OK, they have a lobby to get laws past just for them – and most politicians are lawyers, too – a step up from the Geico caveman.)

And when is the last time you learned anything from an Infomercial that immediately improved your health, income, intelligence, or personal relationships?

Look, TV is written and produced for the lowest common denominator of our society – to sell them stuff. That’s it. Nothing more.

Is it really worth your time watching it for any reason at all?  You can get all the news or titellation you want from the Internet. Even the tabloid stuff – but you pick what you want to see or involve yourself with. Nothing is force fed you.

You can be as intelligent or stupid as you want. But we all aren’t stupid.

My advice: turn off the TV – and leave it off. (Worst case scenario – record the sports games and play them back when you have time by skipping through the commercials, but the warning still exists – the announcers dumb it down for you.)

Be as smart as you want – but get over your dumb-downed TV.

Waking early the other day, I was taking the extra time to just consider recent events and resolve my day’s plans before I headed into them.

The oddest thing occurred to me – do we own ourselves, really?

(Warning – standby – rant alert.)

Here’s some points that have come across my lines recently:

• Government seems to be taking a larger run out of our lives (like enforcing healthcare choices), whether we want it to or not.
• Congress and elected officials seem to be listening to lobbyists and party officals more than the voters who elected them.
• Our food has increasingly had to be shipped in from thousands of miles away instead of being grown where we can ask and find out what went into it.
• We are being discouraged from working and being independent, since if we did make a fortune to retire on, we’d have it all taxed away – but people who never earn enough to pay taxes are given money from those who do.
• Various scams abound, from credit card companies and usury-level charges along with extraneous fees, to career politicians with their perks, to interest groups who are taking government money (ours) and being paid to promote some extremist agenda, to “Humane Societies” who aren’t trying to handle excess dogs and cats, but are rather trying to make us all into vegans by driving our farmers out of business with regulations.
• Our state-run, mainstream media won’t report on public demonstrations with more people attending than the President’s inauguration, but will tell us about a flu which is less harmful than the regular one – and that we should all line up and pay for shots to protect ourselves against this fiction.
• While the earth has been growing colder since the late 1990’s, our pollution has been growing greater but the only solutions is to what: raise taxes and cost of living for everyone.

So it seemed to me that we needed to stop and take all this into account and see what we could actually do about it.

Of course, the bulk of the problems above really deal with government issues – we are trusting an unresponsive, lobbyist infected government to handle situations we could and should handle ourselves.

Let’s look at some simple solutions to these:

1. People have stayed healthy for many more years than there have ever been insurance companies. And some of the cheapest health care right now has been started in some states where you pay a monthly fee directly to the doctors’ office in order to keep you well – not just when you are sick. No middleman – no one betting against your survival – no one saying you now can’t get any further treatment. And guess what – it’s cheaper by more than half.

2. Career politicians (and career government workers) are really a self-perpetuating business all by themselves. According to the Golden Rule, you have to give before you can get. But government has to take before it can give. And do you know who is writing all these bills that the Congressmen don’t have time to read? Lobbyists and professional government clerical workers – neither of which are elected, both protected from being fired for incompetence. Politicians only want to be re-elected so they can get the perks they voted in for themselves. They live in a different world and even if convicted still get a posh annual retirement income of hundreds of thousands each year – while they are in prison.

3. While there is all these complaints of Cargill, ADM, and Tyson controlling our food chain – no one is telling the stories about how community gardens have been springing up on empty lots inside our cities, as well as on rooftops. Where people are contributing their own labor and getting – literally – the fruits of their endeavors. There is the movement of locally-grown food, some call it the 100-mile diet, getting your food from within a hundred-mile radius of where you live. That way you could know what was in it and maybe even lend a hand in raising it, if you wanted.

4. Taxes have less and less to do with supporting the common good, and more for supporting the friends of whoever is in power in government. (Look at where those “stimulus” funds are actually going to…) Factually, if you take the recommendations given by the IRS guidelines, the most inexpensive way to work is for yourself as a corporate entity and increasingly resorting to barter of your business goods. That is the least-taxed method of making a viable living these days.

5. It looks like all the biggest scams are government sponsored or sanctioned. Credit card companies used to be regulated by the states and had to keep their interest fees low until the Feds in their “OCC” elected to take this right away from the States – and credit fees doubled, to nearly 1/3rd of the original loan. The Humane Society of the United States is actually anti-pet and anti-breeder and anti-farmer. Anything that has four-legs and reproduces is under their auspice – and is getting laws passed to make it more difficult to have pets or eat meat. Yet is runs no animal shelters – and had closed many down, destroying all their occupants. They are a special interest in Washington and do nothing humane. But government scams abound – since the government has a monopoly, who can stop them?

6. Our media has never been accurate in its whole history. They have always, always written sensationalist stories to sell advertising space. Any idea of “Journalist Ethics” was invented by Academics in order to sell classes for journalist wannabe’s. And when they lose their joint control of the air waves to cable and the Internet, they complain about how these “aren’t really journalists” – thank Gawd – and continue to pander to various government officials for “scoops”. The mainstream media has never, ever reflected the real world. Their soap opera’s actually get the closest, way more than their “reality” shows. (Who eat bugs in the jungle for a living?)

7. Read the actual NASA reports and you’ll see the global warming issue is a hoax. Warmest year on record was about 1998, last two years we have had record snowfalls and cold internationally, this summer was one of the coolest on record in decades for many states. Who started this rumor? A career politician. But is CO2 rising? Yes. Effect on global temperature – nothing. Our problem with CO2 starts with our governments, which expel this by the megaton every year and have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, we truck our food in from thousands of miles away with all that exhaust and refuse permits to set up windfarms off some politicians’ East Coast homes. (Because they are unsightly?) Solutions to this fictional global warming are to tell polluting companies they have to buy credits from less-polluting companies. But the states with politicians in charge get more credits assigned to those states – instead of states with huge forests and pastures filled with grazing animals. (Oh, finally tracked down that other fiction. Excess cow flatulence is caused by feeding them corn and other grains, not their natural diet of grass – which most cattle are raised on for the bulk of their lives.)

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OK, take a breath, slow down.

The world isn’t all bad. Nor is it all that bad.

But the question comes back – Who Owns You? Or — Do You Really Own Yourself?

Consider this – if you own property and don’t pay the taxes on it, what happens? Some government employees are able to come in and seize your properties for the back taxes with guns and put you in prison if you resist. If you use a gun to defend your property, they are able to use lethal force (kill you) in their “defense”. And your relatives probably can’t even sue for “wrongful death”.

However, if you don’t make enough money to pay taxes because you don’t work, then you qualify for the government renting a house on your behalf and even giving you all sorts of handouts. Who pays for these? Oh, they tell some people who do work for a living to cough up – or they will come and take it, this all backed by gun-toting government employees, against which you can’t defend yourself.

Now if your property is owned by a corporation that you run, the taxes are much less and if it’s a non-profit, you might not pay taxes at all. Similarly, if you don’t really work for a living on anyone’s paper, and barter for everything you own, your taxes are very low, if not non-existent. But you do work for a living and control your own property – and don’t pay for someone else’s upkeep.

Can you control government? No.

Can you improve the government you have? Yes.

Solutions you can do to own yourself

• Let’s do one thing – make all government employees (including the elected ones) all term limited. States can do this for their own Senators and Representatives, they don’t have to get a Federal law passed (which will never happen).
• Another thing: educate yourself on taxes and learn to avoid high taxes by being smart. Only the dumb rich are taxed. Only dumb governments tax the dumb rich enough to make them move to lower-tax states. (Ask New York and California how this works. Both are failed experiments.)
• Vote your representatives out of office on a regular basis, otherwise. Let someone else have a chance.
  How about sunset provisions in every law, including the ones which have been on the books forever? This would mean government officials have to re-vote in all laws every few years to keep them on the books. (Like the Civil Rights Act, which is now being used to protect White minority voters.)
• Get your food all locally. Help grow it yourself to keep your costs down.
• How about insisting your city start recycling materials (they can actually sell the metal and plastic today, while organic materials can be composted back into – yes – local city gardens, or parks, or local farms. (Why does NYC keep dumping it into the ocean – isn’t that just more pollution?) And so we won’t have to spend all that fuel and CO2 trucking, training, and shipping food from California to NY, or Florida to California, or Arkansas to Alaska…
• Quit watching TV. Period. Rots your brain.
• Cut off your power usage by unplugging anything that doesn’t have to be on (like a refrigerator). See if you can’t get a solar cell to run some devices (like night lights). Figure out how you could have the same quality of living without extra doo-dads that someone sold you during a TV infomercial…

Those are just some of the ideas I’ve had for your to reclaim your life for yourself.

You can own yourself.

It will take some work.

But the more you can limit government and work it out for yourself – or in cooperation with your neighbors – then the saner life we can all have.

Try it.

Go ahead – leave your comments below. Agree? Disagree? Could care less?

While it may not always seem this happy, just sticking with the tides of Intuitional Living brings more peace than consternation.

I was all excited (so to speak) about following my bliss with this Intuitional Living stuff and then hit a rant that kept coming up. You see, I thought that this type of lifestyle was simply going to be peaceful and joyous and all that.

Forgot about the baggage we are all carrying around – all those mental habits of thinking all the time for a lifetime. Don’t figure that these will go away overnight.

But the trick and cure with the Sedona Method is to simply look at what is coming up and then release it as it does.

Intuitionally, the best way to get it released is to bring it to the surface.  It’s that old phrase “God’s Will” or “Moving with the Spirit” or some such.

What you get with Intuitional Living is a completely independent and mutually interacting lifestyle. Intuition flows through all of us. We are all interconnected, but not interdependent.  So several people acting on Intuition can show up to help someone in need – same time, same place, all there “accidentally”. Like that “Miracle on the Hudson” – a pilot who had trained his entire life just for that one particular situation. Post-grad degrees and extra studies, etc. All lives saved. Same river a few months later and you see a small plane blind-siding a copter while the supposed air traffic controller was on the phone with someone else.  All lives lost. Same river.

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It came to me this morning (which is why I’m up early blogging) – Government is the Will of the People, but when that Will gets sufficiently strong, there is no longer any need for Government.

On a small scale, I’m checking this out on our farm. We get a few hundred bucks every year because we tell the FSA what crops we put in and they tell us if there is a Loan Deficiency Payment. And in return, we agree not to sell anything directly off that land (like planting sweet corn instead of commodity yellow corn.) Every time you agree with the government for anything, you give something else up.

Now sure, with Katrina, the Coast Guard was doing great plucking people out. But if those people were truly following their Intuition, they wouldn’t have been in trouble, would they? Or they would have been able to rescue themselves. You don’t hear about the people who got out ahead of the storm or simply rode it out and rebuilt their homes without anyone else’s assistance.

All Government (and Mainstream Media) talks about are the few who can’t do anything for themselves. But that’s the wrong approach. Of course they are going to do that – those are people who need government to survive.

But does that give them any right to rip off others, take their money away by duress (what happens if you don’t pay taxes?) – when those people have never educated themselves to deal with life? Instead of running some training programs so people can get out of the poor mental habits which keep them poor – they start Welfare. And everyone else pays while they have children out of wedlock.

OK, this is turning into another deal altogether. Back to the farm. When we looked over the programs we could get into, we found that more and more we were being told we could do this or that and not the other. We were actually being given the choice of giving up our own independence in order to get the “security” and approval of these government people.  (And a little bit of money to sweeten the pot.)

I had a guy out to give me some advice about how to improve drainage on my farm. He said that because these low areas flooded once a year, they were “wetlands” and so I couldn’t do so-and-so with them – that he had to check his books for the statutes. All I wanted to do was to trim some trees so it would get back into it’s normal drainage patterns rather than start new ones.

Not like I’m draining a swamp where extremely rare and exotic wildlife live.

That’s government. Non-intuitional. Very much over-thought.

But is my life improved by getting out of government programs? Sure. Less payroll taxes if you work for yourself or as a contractor. Save up if you want to replace your own Social Security program. Like Insurance – if you have the money to pay directly, you’ll actually save money by not paying all those premiums.

Life insurance is for what – pay off your bills and funeral costs when you are dead, plus leave a little for those you left.  How about setting up what you own as an LLC or corporation and including them as stockholders, and deeding over your controlling stock to them when you are gone? Means no real estate tax if  you set it up right. Have that corporation pay for your funeral.

Taxes, as I’ve often said, just get the stupid rich, not the smart ones. Smart ones don’t “own” anything and so aren’t worth being sued or taxed. (And high taxes on millionaires just makes them move out of state – ask California.)

Government needs you, you don’t need it. Check out TOLFA.us for the theory behind this.  I’m into philosophy and can’t easily be bothered with this stuff (just bothered by it, as you can tell – need to do more releasing…)

There’s an old phrase for dealing with coyotes – the three S’s: Shoot ‘em, Shovel ‘em, and Shut up. I can harvest all the deer I want on my own property if 1) I wanted to hunt them, 2) No one saw me, 3) I didn’t tell anyone. (Plus, I’d have to process my own meat.)  Deer are a runaway nuisance, but you have to get a permit to hunt them. We are their only predators, but are only allowed to hunt them in certain times of the year and only so many at a time.  (Heck, I usually pick up several a year that other hunters throw out on the sides of the back roads because they don’t have enough tickets. Wasted – and smelly.)

The argument against this is like the buffalo – but independent ranchers saved that species, not any amount of government intervention. There are domesticated deer now.  But I’m way off the beat here. (And I’ll have the wacko enviro-extremists camped out here any minute now… “Save Bambi!”)

Look, just live your life the way it makes sense to you. Get rid of all these negative emotions hanging around and quit chasing the thrill-ride adrenaline rushes of the top end as well. Live that normal, calm, peaceful existence you know is within you.

Doesn’t mean you trip to that state will be like floating down a sedate river on a balmy afternoon – sometimes you’ll hit the rapids. But just ride them out, enjoy the trip, don’t freak out. Release all the time.

And you’ll make it.