What woke YOU up???

Prior to early ’08 I was a right leaning republican voting Bill O Paddy watching moron. Then I got 2 months off work and watched a little documentary from Aaron Russo. My appetite for this new information was immediate and unending. I started watching, listening and reading whatever I could find. One of those sources was Jim’s articles via seeking alpha via the market oracle. Then came the Rhines version and now this. My primary focus since has been taxation and its nature and mechanics. A scary subject that ties into the very nature of money. I floundered for years until coming upon the key of the subject that binds us all. With the exception of the metal tokens minted by the US mint there is nothing but bank credit in circulation today and that is why we pay tax on our labor/time. Not because they own our labor and time (that would be slavery) but because we get paid voluntarily with bank credit. The federal reserve turned an event that wasn’t taxable prior to 1913 and made it taxable, completing its goal in 1971 with the closure of the international gold standard the cessation of circulation of United States notes.

Jim Quinn posting in Market Oracle. It was an interesting point of view and enlightening. Never heard of 4 T before that but it explains a lot and opens up a lot of boxes the .01% don`t want opened.

I spent much of my childhood in Houston, TX where my father worked in oilfield services. Call it a child’s curiosity but I was always interested in what my dad did and learning more about it. So back in the 1980’s sometime (when it wasn’t good times in the TX oil patch) I asked my dad “how much oil is left?” Still to this day I remember him saying “about 40 years.” Eventually we moved north much because that’s where family was but primarily because the oil economy was doing so poorly at the time.

Fast forward a few decades. I’m grown and working on my own. The Iraq war starts in 2003 and there is all the “war for oil” protests. Coming from a Republican family I supported Bush Jr. but didn’t for a minute believe all he cared about was the independence of some Iraqi’s. Then the price of gasoline started to climb. Something was going on and I wanted to find out what…..

That’s about the time I happened upon Jim Kunstler’s website. I’d read his non-fiction books and actually referenced him for real estate work I was doing, trying to warn about the unsustainability of endless expansion of suburbia. I also was an avid reader of TheOilDrum.com and Market-ticker.org. Eventually I surfed into TBP and what really caught my eye was a 30 Blocks of Squalor story. Eyes wide open ever since.

What woke me up was watching left wing people watch news . All left wing channels.

There is no hope for Democracy folks. People don’t change their minds . They just contort and or deny empirical evidence to fit their existing belief system.

It’s too late. It’s over.

I have not had an awakening as such. My old man could see into the hearts of men, and from as early as I can remember he taught me the way of the world. What he lacked in education he made up with insight. He was flawed in many ways but he sure as hell understood oligarchs, banksters, thieving politicians, the stupidity of war, etc.

I simply have had to temper his passing of knowledge with life experience.

Sometime around 2010 someone posted a link to a shortened version of “The Creature From Jekyll Island” to the CNN comments. I clicked the link and couldn’t stop reading. It was laid out quite logically how central banks have failed all their aims and are detrimental to an economy. Since then I’ve followed ZH and kept on reading.

Although, it’s been 4 years and I’m tired of waiting for the “crash”. Starting to think it’s not going to happen. I have a book from the early 1980s which has all of today’s predictions. That guy must be still waiting. Sometimes being early is being wrong.

@ Mark

What woke me up was watching left wing people watch news . All left wing channels.

~~~~~

I can appreciate what that experience feels like – and yet I came from the left and I have brought several friends over to the doomer dark side.

One “came over” due to a health crisis and their subsequent desire for a healthy life style and then reading about GMO’s, vaccines and the government’s war on supplements.

Another scientific type “came over” due to an understanding of ground water issues and the damage fracking is capable of as well as the lies being told about Climate change.

IMO the “lefties” and “righties” need to realize that the MSM is lying – and if they’re lying about one thing then perhaps they’re lying about every damn thing – find THE LIE that wakes anyone up – left or right – and the rest is nothing but hand-holding.

My two cents ….

I’m a relative newby here and only an infrequent poster but many of the posts and discussion threads on this site are terrific. This is another good one.

I didn’t have a single aha! moment. I was always a bit of a contrarian. If there was one kid in my high school or college classes who would directly challenge a teacher or professor it was me. I read Ayn Rand in high school and college, through the 80’s, and saw that a lot of things in our society were very rotten. I didn’t understand quite how things held together. Rand didn’t really do political economy except in a very general sense. If I’d been given a copy of The Creature From Jekyll Island back then! Oh my god.

Anyway, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised at things totally collapsing at any point but I just went on with my life. I never trusted politicians but stupidly fell for the red side of the red versus blue false dichotomy. I think the worst of being duped was around ’94 when part of the red team’s official stance was to make the laws apply to congress.

But, whether you’re rooting for the red team or the blue team, if you’re really paying attention at a certain point you realize they couldn’t give a shit less about their purported ideologies. The red team doesn’t care about freedom or fiscal discipline. Those things would handcuff them and diminish their power. The blue team doesn’t care about the little guy. They hate the little guy the second he goes from being a concept to an actual person they have to encounter at a rally or somewhere.

As I say, I really didn’t understand how the system held together. The late 90’s were perplexing to me. The economy boomed. Why? I didn’t understand. I just went on living my life not trying to understand the actual functioning of our political economy. 2000 was a partial awakening. Maybe my eyes opened a bit from the cat nap I’d taken. 2008 was the alarm clock going off so loud that I had to get up and reach over to turn it off. Things were definitely rotten and now with the internet there were so many places to read different takes on why they were rotten.

These might serve to show my overall attitude about TPTB:

1. “Government does not exist for the benefit of the governed.” — Robert A. Heinlein, ca 1971

2. Help! I need to know how to cancel a bid on eBay! I bid $7.01 on a Mickey Mouse outfit, and I’m only an hour away from owning the whole Obama administration!

3. I understand that they’re going to rename the Predator drone’s Hellfire missiles. They’ll be called “Wedding Gifts”.

Over the last week or so my son and I have been spending some time helping a friend get a house ready for sale- repairing deteriorated trim, power washing the exterior, repainting the interior, that kind of thing. We are both very meticulous and thorough and enjoy working together and it’s nice to be able to give some assistance to someone who hasn’t got the ability to do it themselves.

Yesterday afternoon they stopped by to check the progress- we’re almost done and about a week ahead of the schedule and after a walk through we wound up on the back side of the house looking out into the edge of the forest that stands a couple of hundred feet away. I’m not sure how we got onto the topic but I was describing the age of the forest and the progression it had made from it’s last clearing as a meadow around the time of my birth. The owner asked how I was able to know that since I had never been to the property before and I went over the growth pattern of North Eastern mixed forests- first the forbs come in along with the poplars and white pine. They would leech the soil of the nutrients that fed the forbs, which would die out as the first of the second order trees emerged; hemlocks, white oak, ash and rock maple. You could see by the diameter of the trees of various species, their orientation on the slope in regards to sun, the water course to the west in the form of a steady running stream, etc. I pointed out a large fifty year old poplar that had reached its maximum growth and due to the crowding of the pines had maintained an almost branch free butt end making it perfect for boards. I told him that the white pines were past prime and had begun to bull from a much earlier brush hogging likely in their first couple of years of growth and how dangerous that made them for cutting and almost worthless except as pulp for the local steam plant. I was trying to help him make a few bucks off the land before he sold and in turn improve the view and wood potential for the next owner in terms of 15-50 years down the pike.

He stood there looking out at the forest, then at me and asked how I could tell all that from just looking at a piece of land I had no previous knowledge of and I had to think about it for a second. I haven’t always had this kind of insight, in fact I had only recently “woken up” to the world around me in terms of my own lifetime. I’ve been other things at other times that had nothing to do with the land or growth, Nature or decay, but I knew exactly what I was looking at now because it seemed so obvious. I could envision a time lapse of the entire growth cycle in the same way I could look back on my own life and there was no secret to it, no magical sensory gift, no intuitive edge I had over anyone else, it was simply a matter of looking at things, as they are and being able to see not only where they had come from, but where they were going.

Our own society, culture, civilization, whatever you want to call it is no different from a forest or a coral reef. It is a result of time, life, the natural inclinations and limitations of a specific species in a specific location. It has a lifespan just like the individual members that make it up and it demonstrates it strengths and its weaknesses in the same way, through the observable features of its shared environment.

When I watched agents of my own government burn down a home filled with men, women and children who had never been convicted of any crime on live television with commentary explaining why what I was seeing was not what I thought I was seeing but something entirely different, I knew what was coming as clearly as looking at a stand of bull pine on a high southern flank at the tail end of a drought season when the thunderheads are building to the east. Maybe not today, but one day and soon, without question, as sure as the sun rises there will be a conflagration that will close the chapter on that particular forest until the shes neutralize the soil again and the first of the forbs creep back in and start the process over again.

Waking up is a good metaphor for being aware of our surroundings, It is sad that for most of us such an awakening never takes place until the flames are out of control and we are caught inside of them. For others we come to it sooner and it pains us to see what is clear to any thoughtful person with an eye for the nature of things. There is a conflagration of our own making in the future waiting for the lightning strike that sparks it all- or it might be something as small as a drifting ash or as careless as tossed butt from a car window by some careless individual who cannot see the forest through the trees, but who nonetheless lives right up against it.

Years ago as I was walking through our sugar bush with an extension agent from the State University he pointed out a huge mound that was tapered at both ends and casually told me it was the root ball of a huge tree dropped by the hurricane of ’38, and judging by the forest, likely a sugar maple that had predated the birth of the Republic. Every so often we’d come upon a massive red oak I had made note of with a trunk so big two men couldn’t wrap their arms around and he would show me the dark marks some twenty feet up where it had been scorched, but not burned by the wildfires that swept through 150 years ago cleaning off most everything else that had covered our slopes. I took all this in and made it part of my skill set when looking at the world in the same way I look at the vacant strip malls and faces of the people driving back and forth on the roads and note with some degree of certainty that nothing lasts.

Until something new comes along to replace it.

If I had to pick one thing that led to my awakening, it would be a fever dream or an episode of delerium I experienced as a child. I would have been 9 or 10 years old and had caught a serious case of the flu. Cold sweats, muscle cramps, nausea, the works.

I wasn’t seeing things, but hearing them. I can’t honestly tell you if I was awake or if it was an especially vivid nightmare. It was as though a person was in the street out in front of the house, shouting and unintelligable. Then I could hear two people, then four, then eight and after that I was too distressed to count. It was like a massive crowd or mob was forming and doubling in number every few heartbeats. The security that I normally felt in my bed was stripped away. It was only a couple of inches of wood and fibre-board between me and the crowd outside, and I instinctively knew that those flimsy materials offered me no protection, if that crowd wanted in.

I’ve been to football matches and concerts and they don’t even begin to compare to that terrible din. The only thing I can compare it to would be to stand in the middle of an orchard or canola field while it is being pollenated by a multitude of bee hives.

Kind of crazy, but what would you expect from delerium? I put the experience behind me and forgot about it until high school. Learning about exponential growth brought the memory back. I was apathetic with regards the abstract of numbers on a page, but I was also burdened with the memory of ‘visualising’ a kind of exponential growth earlier in my childhood. The idea of that concept becoming manifest seemed unnatural and horrific.

It wasn’t until I had nearly completed my degree (Ecological Science and Biology) that all of the pieces began to fall into place in my mind. I recognised that unchecked growth and finite resources were a disasterous combination and that our species would either have to bend to mathmatical certainty, or break. It seemed to me that those who had the power and influence needed to affect change, were more interested in gaming our broken system than attempting to repair it, or come up with serious alternatives to our current course.

There’s more to my awakening than this, and it mainly has to do with the people in my life, but this post is turning into a novel, so I’ll credit my terrible arithmatic.and leave it at that.

Hello, I’m a long time reader/lurker, but have only posted one response a week or so ago. I decided to join in because I am feeling almost like Forest Gump these days… on the periphery of so much, but not really understanding what I’m seeing and involved in until it is/was too late.

My first “wake up” moment was in the late 1980s. I am a former USAF AWAC crewmember and during the 80s, our crews alternated between protecting the “Kingdom’s” oil fields from Iran/Iraq War to standing alert in Iceland protecting the coast of North America from the Evil Russian Bears flying from the North Sea to Cuba. Both games were, in hindsight, rather silly, with our crews accompanied by a Saudi “officer” to convey information to their controllers on the ground to facilitate whatever action was in their interest at the time. I admit to being enchanted with being in what seemed to be an ancient culture brought abruptly into the 20th century (I read The Kingdom Arabia by Robert Lacy, 1981) and realized what a tremendous amount of wealth those Bedouins now controlled, being able to hire in the USAF surveillance network to patrol their sky and keep their oil fields safe. Then, one day down at the souks, while wearing my abaya like a good modest girl, I got groped and spit on and was told (by my crew commander) to just shut up and not make a scene. That didn’t wake me up, but it told me something about our relationship with the Saudi government. And made me mad.

In 1987-88, the Iceland trips were exciting. We got air medals for every 20 bear sightings we tagged while flying on alert and I have three of them (air medals). (My father, a WWII POW shot down over the Aleutians and held by Japanese for 3 plus years, has one air medal.) I bought into the whole “keeping the world free for democracy and the American way” bullshit as we jumped into flight suits at all hours of the day and night and flew the northern skies, tracking the Soviet bears as they made their way along the coast of Canada and the U.S.A. down to Cuba. Then, tracking the planes they were relieving back, handing them off to NATO AWACs north of England. Very exciting time, keeping those evil Russians from breaking our ADIZ (Area Defense Internal Zone? International Zone? Wow, we used to have this briefed to us every mission and it has been long enough for me to forget it.) Anyway, several pairs of fighter planes would join us from alert locations (NORAD, North American Radar Area Defense? Again, I’ve forgotten), ready to shoot the intruders from the sky, I thought. But, what they actually did, was take photos and “tag” the bears in order to log another sighting for our air medal collections. A flight engineer I admired greatly… Crew Daddy Robbie… told me once that we could save a lot of money if the Russians would just mail us pictures of their airplanes and we would mail them pictures of ours and whoever picked up the mail first would get credit for the sighting.

Anyway, one time when the Soviets were holding a HUGE exercise in the North Sea and we were, of course, holding a similarly huge exercise around Iceland and Greenland, an unexpected storm caught the “enemy” too close to Iceland to get back to the USSR and they were allowed to land at Keflavik Naval Air Station, put ropes and guards around their fighter planes at the end of the runway and be escorted to the chow hall to eat and rest until the storm passed over. It was a “I have met the enemy and he is eating in the chow hall moment” for me when I heard about it. (I was there, but didn’t actually see them in the chow hall, but a friend was actually in the chow hall when they were brought in.) I realized that something just wasn’t right about that… if we were ready to blow these guys out of the sky if they crossed over into our air space at the wrong time and place, how come we were making sure a little storm didn’t crash them into the ocean. Most of my comrades didn’t think beyond their paycheck and next rank, but for some reason, it really bothered me and I started paying closer attention to stuff.

Did the war on drugs out of Puerto Rico, where we flew over un-charted areas in South America to track small planes that might be carrying drugs into the U.S. I used to sit in the flight deck when things were slow (most of the time there was slow) and see all of the small air strips down in the jungles below. I asked why we didn’t just start mapping those air strips for demolition and stop burning all the fuel trying to track what really amounted to peanuts in the grand scheme. I was told that was not what we were hired to do. We were to track small airplanes running drugs. Except, of course, we weren’t tracking all of them, were we? It was a horrid TDY (temp duty) and I only had to go there twice, thankfully. Later, I think there was a better TDY for that in Panama after the big invasion (remember Just Cause? — A comrade said “That wasn’t a war, it was just a really long day.”) But, I volunteered to become an instructor to teach other people to avoid those trips for a while.

Long story short (or, as my friends say, making a short story as long as she can) I got out of the Air Force after ten years, a bit jaded by what I’d experienced. Desert Storm was just a continuation of the previous alliance with the House of Saud, imho, with the US protecting the oil fields of the Kingdom. Kuwaitis? Really? I decided to study journalism and become part of the tellers of truth. Little did I know about that.

Was here in Oklahoma during Waco and think we got put on alert. Crazy.

I was in college at OU when the Murrah building was bombed. I was in a journalism class and I stood up to ask the professor to tell us what had happened in OKC. (I’d heard some whispers in the hall, but no real news.) When he told us, I remember thinking “Well, crap… there go my records. (Because, having recently gotten out of the Air Force, I was supposed to go there to get my GI Bill/Voc Rehab approved through the VA rep there.) Of course, when I heard how bad it really was, I felt terrible for worrying about my records… the man I was scheduled to see died. I eventually got my records and approved for GI Bill, which is another story for another day about the VA.

In my news reporting class, I was assigned to cover military news since I had background. I ended up meeting a Medal of Honor winner named Bill McGonagle and learned that Israel had bombed the crap out of the USS Liberty in 1967. Captain McGonagle had stayed on deck for hours, during the raid, helping his crewmen get the wounded to safety and trying to signal for help. I was shocked to hear him say it was not an accident… that he believed the Israelis intended to sink them and blame it on the Arabs. http://www.usslibertyveterans.org/ Just recently out of the service, I was awed by his Medal of Honor and did a full interview about the event, since he told me it was really kept secret for a long time and had only been recently declassified. I thought it a story people needed to read.

I was wrong. My editor (a 20 year old junior who eventually ended up on local news station, writing copy) didn’t think it newsworthy. I appealed to the Professor in charge of the campus paper, explaining that a Medal of Honor winner that is still alive is a Big Deal… most are awarded posthumously. The Professor glanced at my article and said he’d never heard about the USS Liberty incident. I said “That’s MY POINT!” He shrugged and said that maybe if I could tie it into the Vietnam conflict at the time… I gave up. I turned in the story (I still got credit in the class) and saved the interview tape for another day. Somewhere, in my old 20 year old college crap, is an hour long interview with the commander of the USS Liberty. A story that never got told.

Wow. Sorry. I just realize my friends are right. Let me finish. Nutshell.

Graduated. No journalism jobs for conservative minded older woman with experience like mine. Got a job on a Boeing contract as an editor for a course-ware/instructional contract with the E-3 AWACs program at Tinker. It was like going home. Except that 9-11 had happened and there was a new war going on. And the home folks were changing rapidly.

I was awake at that time, disbelieving just about everything I was told. Eventually, I had to leave that program, sickened by the syncophantic behavior of those in uniform just trying to get to their retirement and be able to get one of the good paying jobs Boeing and other contractors like them had to offer retired servicemen and women. I stood up to someone and had to go… a union issue. Another story for another day. I worked in program management in civil service at the maintenance depot for a few years, doing financial analysis and database management for a while. I had a number of reports that were due monthly and quarterly and I suspected no one cared. I stopped sending the reports, just compiling them and filing them and no one noticed. They stopped the program management team when the Depot was so far in the red no one wanted to know any more — that was in 2007, so I had an operation I’d been putting off for a while and drew my long term disability. I worked for a couple more contractors doing technical writing and Tech Order maintenance and realized that none of us were doing anything that meant anything. Some of the tech orders I was re-writing were for airplanes that were no longer in inventory… they were being sold to Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia and we were compiling technical orders that were stripped of any useful information. It was the oddest job yet! Again, another story for another day.

So, I marched with the Tea Party in 2008 and became a Precinct Captain to see how that worked. I found out at the Republican Convention (state) that outsiders are not welcome. The good old boy network is strong and doesn’t welcome upstart newbies with principles or ideas even. I am good friends with the woman who leads the Common Core Four (Jenni White) who managed to get Mary Fallin to sign the bill (reluctantly) to revoke Common Core standards here in Oklahoma. I admire the four of them for continuing the battle, but think they are like Don Quixote in many ways. I stopped being a Republican and decided to follow Ron Paul. I got hooked on libertarianism and have been reading Ayn Rand, G. Edward Griffin, Peter Schiff, et cetera for a few years. My husband and I started getting prepared a few years ago and are in the final stages of cabin building in the Ozarks, planning to withdraw from gubment service (my husband retired USAF and has worked for a contractor since that retirement) and live off the fat of the land with like minded folks in the area where we bought land. Most people we know just think we are nuts, leaving the kind of money my husband makes and that I could make if I wanted to return to contract work… apparently, the money isn’t drying up for the big contractors, who are building giant complexes around this base here. But, we want to leave it all behind, whether there is a collapse or not. Doing this kind of mind numbing “work” with people who are just happy to sit on their fat asses and collect an enormous amount of pay for doing absolutely nothing is disheartening and soul destroying.

Oh, and I’ve seen this Air Force base change from being a pleasant little community at the edge of town where I could take my visiting friends and family in to see the airplanes into a securely gated, guarded complex hidden from public view. Where concrete barriers and mazes to get in and out slow traffic to almost a standstill while contract security guards scan your ID and look into your car, waiting while your ID number is “okayed” by someone in a big scary looking truck near the entrance. One day, I could not get my ID out in time and the gate guards stopped all traffic coming in and leaving while they escorted me, with hands on weapons, as I made a U turn and left to stop in the visitors lot to find my ID and drive right back in. Leaving the base is a relief, as there is always the fear that something about my car might irritate one of the security folks and cause them to stop me for a full search.

So, to the folks who are waiting for the big change to happen, I say that the big change is underway happening right before our eyes. And while there may not be a sudden collapse that causes everyone to say “oh, I should have listened” there is definitely a sinister tone to everything I see around me. We have this house on the market and hope to sell it before we head for the hills. But, if need be, we can just leave it behind. We think that may be a possibility.

Sorry to have gone on so long… I’m just glad to have found this place and “met” you people.

I’m Martha, but I like to go by Maggie.

Stuck, I gave a thumb up for your dream thread idea…if you like reading about people’s dreams, try this:

http://www.nationaldreamcenter.com/about/

This thread is simply enchanting.

The numerous ways we found awareness, each other, camaraderie.

Maggie it is simply sickening (and very telling) that you weren’t able to find a gig in journalism. Your writing captivated me!

Just wanted to drop a quick note to all the new faces in this thread. Welcome, glad you are lurking, and most glad that there are more people to make me feel sane, when nearly everyone in my real world thinks I’m completely off my rocker.

Since I am emptying closets and packing for our upcoming move to the hills, I shall look for the box of interview materials from my delusional days learning to be a news reporter. If, and when, I find it, I will let Admin know what is on the recording and then decide if it is worth the effort. At that time, the attack on the USS Liberty was relatively unknown (mid-1990s) but now, while still unknown, it is also considered to be old news/irrelevant in the big scheme and when I mention it to people, they don’t seem to realize what the implication means.

@Ryan, have to tell ya’, nope, not me, not really. My home is currently stocked with multiple things, supplements, etc., that work better at “curing” these viruses than anything the doctor’s are currently using and prescribing.

Of course I no longer rely on the Medical Industrial Complex concerning my health, which is a big part of the reason I no longer worry about stuff like that.

Besides, if god says my time, or my families, is up, and sends a god-made virus to kill me, then whom am I to question it?

Not saying I won’t fight it with everything I’ve got, and know. Not saying that if everything I can do were to fail me, that I wouldn’t try to see if our docs could do anything.

But, I am saying, that we modern people love to play god, then we question why the world is coming apart at the seams?

The internet has much knowledge to offer concerning disease, and health. Try it sometime, just like when dealing with geo-politics, it pays to visit the “fringe” sites and buck the status quo/FDA.

Daily reader, first time poster.

Divorce. I was a typical Republican until my wife left me. I immediately reconnected with an old friend that was a small town councilman to chase women. Seeing what he did and what he got away with because of his position was sickening. It opened my eyes, and I started reading. I believe I came across TBP via Captain Capitalism. I’m here everyday and enjoy all the shit flinging and eye opening comments and articles.