Author Archives: deanwebb

Putting It All Together

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BP. Goldman Sachs. Lehman Brothers. AIG. Enron. Bear Stearns. Ameriquest. Tyco. Worldcom. Merrill Lynch. All of these companies and more profited greatly from lax regulation in industrialized nations and outright running riot in poor nations, or the poorer parts of industrialized nations. Yes, a lack of regulation is good for business. It’s even more amazing for criminal operations. Making a nation friendly for business often means leaving it wide open to criminal exploitation.

These huge corporations and their bretheren have huge piles of cash which they can use to influence politics. They invest funds in supporting campaigns. They provide contributions, legal and illegal, to congressmen in exchange for favors. They push legislation they want in order to make more profits than ever before. They ignore the crimes they commit by forcing others to pay their costs or bear the consequences of their evil, selfish decisions. The level of criminality in the boardrooms of major corporations is mirrored in the criminality in the Congress and the management of regulatory agencies. The levels of corruption in the USA have long been well-hidden, but are now obvious to me to be worse than anything I’ve heard of in Nigeria, Russia, or China.

The corruption is endemic in both government and boardrooms. Neither operates for the benefit of the nation, but only for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy. The same Congress that expressed concerns in public that the banking industry had gone too far secretly passed a bill that would give that same industry even more power, choosing to use a voice vote to mask which legislators supported such a measure. The same banking industry that promised to get the US economy back on its feet after receiving $1.5 trillion in bailouts has so far invested out of the country, bought up other banks, or parked their bailouts in treasury bonds. This is just recent news: past crimes would only make this post longer and more rambling than it needs to be.

The key to each scandal, to each looting of the poor to benefit the rich, is in the salient fact that the leaders of the USA have given themselves over to the worship of money. It is their God. Money is a God of War, a God of Hate, a God of Pride. We may try to justify the worship of money in the name of capitalism or free markets or as some form of self-centered Calvinistic entitlement that is our just due, but when we strip away the veneer of patriotic love of free markets, we see the worship of money at the heart of it all.

There is a way to survive without money. One must first reject the lure of money in order to be prepared to survive without it. One must first have faith that there is a better way to live before one can find that better way to live. Yes, this is getting mystical and obscure, but that’s what happens when one rejects money. One finds something better, something eternal that resonates in the heart and mind, that resonates in the soul.

The world of BP, Enron, Lehman, Ameriquest, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and every other megacorporation is not a world that cares about human life or dignity. It seeks to convert every possible thing into profit. Its servants, the worshippers of money, subvert the governments of men. If the government is strongest, they join it to gain by corruption, as they did in the former USSR. If the business world is strongest, they join that to gain by corruption, as they did in the current USA. They will mock and tear down anything not of their world, then buy and sell everything in their world for their own profit. They will leave behind the husks of men, women, and children they either used as raw materials or who they tricked into serving them with violence towards their fellow humans.

The greatest enemy of humanity is money. That’s what I get when I put it all together. Money is the physical representation of evil. All the frauds, pollutions, and crimes corporations have committed against humanity stem from a desire to get more money. If any crusading atheists want to make themselves useful, they should turn their activity to destroy belief upon those that worship money. We can’t prove or disprove the existence of God, but we can prove the existence of money and that it is an evil thing. We know that. We should deal with that first.

For any crusading Christians that want to make themselves useful, they should remember what Jesus taught and take no thought for the morrow but seek instead to do God’s work: aiding the sick, helping the poor, supporting the elderly. Same for anyone in any other religion: look to the origins of your belief, and there is a nonviolent heart, dedicated towards getting people to forget serving themselves and instead thinking about others first.

As for the USA, I don’t have good hope for it. The criminals that worship money have taken over. Look at any department of government, and you’ll see it run by people sympathetic to the ones they regulate. The elected officials are all beholden to those with money and not the people they serve. They all follow the false teachings of money and will shout down anyone that tells them the truth about the need for balance in their lives and equations. They truly believe they can have profit without end simply by making more and more money, but they are blind to the fact that their systems all have an end – and that the more debt a nation acquires as it heads toward that end, the more bitter and destructive that end will be.

When I add in global instabilities, I see even more potential for sadness born of greed and pride. I truly wonder if I will see the cities of my land burn in destruction during my lifetime.

I’m not going to end with some sad, “do something about it!” quip. The solution is not in getting mad and trying to change the system. The solution is in exiting the system and never coming back to it. Once enough of us refuse to participate in the system that demands we all buy and sell and never give of our own free will, then it will no longer have power over us.

Until such a time comes, I am working on the one thing I can control – myself. I refuse to turn to violence to solve the problem of evil. The wicked will destroy the wicked. The righteous and just will convert the wicked with their love – or move to a place where the wicked can not reach. The wicked will try to say that such a place does not exist, in order to further their control in the world. Such a place does exist, and one finds it with pure, unselfish love. Let go of hate, let go of anger, let go of pride. I used to want to be rich, but now I know it is a curse and desire it no more.

For the Love of Money

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WHAT IS THIS I DONT EVEN Read it and weep, then discuss. It’s an account of the criminality in the subprime mess: don’t you even try to blame the borrowers. The lenders would get a signature on some innocuous form and then forge that on a variable-rate mortgage with all its attendant papers. Not just once, but often. Federal regulators let all this slide because they were either understaffed, shifted to other departments, or co-opted by their bosses hired from the financial world.

Robot (Endhiran)

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Wow. Just Wow. This movie has it all, almost. Well, it didn’t have ninjas or pirates or space aliens, but it made up for that with robot zombies and a giant robot robot. Great music, fun dancing, and some amazing visual effects. The best part about it was that the climax didn’t involve just one master plan that would knock out the baddies. Instead, the big finish involved a huge number of twists and the last 30 minutes are non-stop, very satisfying action.

Oddly enough, the movie left me thinking as I walked out. The very end of the end features an interesting exploration of what it means to be truly human – or not – as happens in all robot movies. As a film, Robot draws in elements from all other robot movies, from Metropolis on down to Terminator, with a touch of Frankenstein and a dab of Edward Scissorhands. The action sequences definitely contain nods to chopsocky films, as well as the slick stylizations of Russia’s Nochnoi Dozor and Dnevnoi Dozor. It even has an awesome quote just before a baddie administers a massive beatdown: “Happy Diwali, everyone!” (Gratuitous explosions and mayhem follow.)

Looks like I came back to the action, but I can’t also forget the love story and how it showed the way the ugly side of humans comes through. Loved it. The script is full of intelligent turns and twists and the whole experience is massively entertaining, even the 30 second title sequence that introduces “Superstar Rajni.” Must see, four stars, five forks, has a great beat and makes you want to dance, fun for the whole family over the age of 15 because it’s pretty intense and I’m definitely buying the DVD when it comes out. Multiple thumbs up.

Yay for the Pocket Veto

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Obama will pocket veto a bad law. Congress is out of session, which means any bill Obama doesn’t sign won’t become a law, as per the Constitution. The law in question allows for acceleration of foreclosures on homes, which is something the USA does not need right now. Maybe the bankers need it, but the people don’t. The bankers built their system, now they have to live with it.

Ubuntu Cola

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http://vimeo.com/6064337 Go there and check out a cool video about the concept of Fair Trade. It’s not some commie propaganda. It’s actually something of an antidote to the oligopolies we have today, the ones Adam Smith warned us about. In fact, Fair Trade is exactly what Smith wanted us to have. So watch and learn!

Computers in 1982

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“One of the most interesting new computers, both as a piece of machinery and as a specimen of capitalism in action, is the Osborne I. Its creator is Adam Osborne, an author of computer books who decided to break the price on-computers. The Osborne I is a very strange-looking piece of equipment. When folded up, it resembles a bulky white briefcase; it is advertised as the only computer that will fit underneath an airline seat. When unfolded, it looks like an outdated military radio. It comes with a full-sized keyboard, a 64K memory, two disk drives, and software for word-processing and accounting that would cost more than $1,000 if bought separately. Osborne offers the whole package for $1,795, which makes it the best bargain on computer power in the business. The catch is that the built-in screen is about the size of a postcard, although it is much easier to read than that would suggest. For an extra $300, you can buy a normal-sized monitor and attach it to the Osborne.

In a perfect world, everyone who had a home computer would also have an Osborne to travel with. According to dealers, Osbornes are selling so fast that many people must have decided that it makes sense not just as their second computer but as their first.

The Otrona Corporation also makes a portable computer, called the Attache. It is smaller and lighter than the Osborne (less than twenty pounds, versus the Osborne’s twenty-three), it has dual-density disk drives, and its higher-resolution screen displays a full eighty-character line, instead of the Osborne’s fifty-two. Its only drawback is that, at $3,995, it costs more than twice as much as the Osborne.

One other tip on hardware: If you live in a climate less humid than Panama’s, you must invest $100 in an anti-static mat to place under your desk. If you don’t, in wintertime you’ll get shocks of static electricity when you touch your machine. There is always the possibility that this will erase what you’re working on at the time.”

From The Atlantic Monthly, 1982: Article here.

Gandhi’s Grandson

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We want to create world peace. But peace is not merely the absence of war. There is so much internal strife and that prejudice feeds into the national aspect. We have to change ourselves if we want to change the world. – Arun Manilal Gandhi

I love the channels at the end of the satellite spectrum, the public access and noncommercial ones. That’s where I find some real treasures. Today’s treasure was the wisdom of Arun Manilal Gandhi, courtesy of an address made at BYU on 23 March 1999, broadcast on KBYU, 8AM on a Saturday morning. He taught about controlling anger and controlling violence not only against other people, but also violence against the world. When you consider the violence contained in the disposal of a usable pencil, and the nonviolence in picking up the disposed pencil for more use, you will see part of the lessons he taught.

He discussed keeping an anger journal. He said it would be useful if one kept it in order to control anger and to change its ability to control us. This sounds like something I’d like to take up. If we hold ourselves to account for our violence, we will want to naturally reduce our debts in that area.

We would also want to do that to be a better example to others. The healing the world needs begins first in our own hearts. Whether Gandhi or Jesus says it, it’s still true.

Anything done through fear will not last. Anything done through love will last forever. – Arun Manilal Gandhi

Ten Years Gone

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I first heard this Led Zeppelin song when I started listening to the radio back in the 6th grade. I always liked the guitar riffs in it and loved the complexity of the melodies. I never really understood the lyrics, and reading them didn’t help much. They just sort of conveyed a feeling of yearning for some bygone time. When I found out the title, “Ten Years Gone”, that yearning feeling grew in my imagination.

I was 11 years old when I first heard it and maybe almost 13 when I first bought the Physical Graffiti album and discovered the title of the song. I was a kid, then, barely ten years after any sort of thing. The stuff ten years gone in my past was far, far behind me and wasn’t the stuff of yearning. So I imagined then what my life would be like in ten years, when I could reflect back on that moment.

It’s now 30 years later, give or take some months. The song came up in my mix and I had to sit back and reflect on what happened to that young boy from 1979 or 1981. I put the song on repeat and started this note.

I closed my eyes and saw the world as I saw it back then, looking out of my second story bedroom window on the yard below. Yes, I’m older and more experienced, but there’s still a part of me that’s 11 years old. I still look into the world and find a way to discover its magic in spite of all the evil that tries to get in the way. I love to discover new things, to find the good on the planet. It’s there, and my heart is open to receive it.

Now that I’m 42, there’s plenty in my life that’s now 10 years old or more. Have I been a good steward of the life that 11-year-old bequeathed to me in all my annual incarnations? Have I done right by the boy that looked out the window and wondered what it would be like to one day reflect on ten years since something happened? I’d like to think so. My heart tells me so, and my mind has no objections.

And I still look to that future and what it will hold for me. I truly have no idea what each passing moment may require of me, but I know if I approach the things that are coming with a heart wide open and eyes ready to see the good in everyone, I’ll find the hope that keeps me going.