Virtual Money Mongers

Today, I did some bookkeeping. Yeah! I know there are people in the world that enjoy working with numbers. I’m not one of them.

Oh, I can do it and I don’t hate it, but I always end up feeling a little like a sucker by the time I’ve reconciled my checking accounts.

For instance, one of my accounts pays interest on credit balances of 1.55%. However, should I go into deficit, it charges 3.5% interest. What this financial institution is saying to me is, “Our money is worth more than yours.”

How can that be? My money is not in Guatemalan quetzals. 

It’s not as if they have a little box somewhere with my exact balance
sitting there in shiny new bills waiting for me to call upon my reserves. There is no little elf that visits all the little boxes once a month and either takes or leaves cash.

Keep real money in your box and they tip you 1.55% at the end of the month for letting them wheel and deal with your assets to make more profit for said corporation. If they show up at your little box and it has an “I owe you” in it, they don’t rewrite the note with a bigger number on it and tuck it back in your box.

 No, they leverage my deposit, along with all the other deposits, to make more virtual money. Realistically, that’s all financial institutions do. They make virtual money and move it around in data bases taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I know they talk about bank products, but that’s just a ruse.

There is no way that my money isn’t making them more virtual money. They are using it and paying me less than they would make me pay if I use theirs. That’s just plain greedy and dishonest.

I can hear the bankers saying but we have administrative costs! We manage your money for you and it takes people, time, electricity and data storage space!

I think chocolate should be
legal tender

BS. I do two transactions a month at the most. Meanwhile, bank corp makes at least 3.5% on my money by lending it to someone else. Maybe if they had little boxes and elves, but they don’t. This bank in particular doesn’t even have banks!

For the moment, I am a rare First World person. I have no debt. Yes, we walk among you and you cannot identify us by looks. We are so rare that most people don’t have the opportunity to even consider how badly financial institutions rip them off.

I made an extra transaction in my business account last month – cost me $2. Really? That financial institution must be exhausted from my flurry of 6 transactions last month. Whew! Glad they made it through.Must have been touch and go for a bit.

I paid my visa on-line (so convenient you know), but it took the two financial institutions four days to process the transaction. That made me one day late on my visa payment. So, Visa charged me one month interest at 19.99%.

Tell me why that’s legal?

This is great. This has value.
This is a product made by an artist.
It has beauty, function and longevity.

There are a many things about this society we created that catch my notice. Some of them are great.

Financial institutions are not one of the great things. They may have been in my youth, but they have transformed into 

Decepticons.

Book Review - Wheat Belly

* Farming Smarter is an Alberta, independent, non-profit crop research association. They put out a magazine twice per year with the same name. You can find out much about this organization here.

Text that looks like this is added because I don't have space restraints here.

Wheat Belly by William Davis MD  ISBN #978-1-44341-273-5

Spring wheat growing at the
Farming Smarter research site

I wanted to review this book for Farming Smarter* because we grow a little wheat in Alberta. So if this book has relevance to the industry, I wanted to let you know.

Also, I saw many people turning away from wheat and ordering gluten-free meals. But most of them were unable to articulate why it is important to ban wheat from your diet.

I wanted to find out if there is any science behind the wheat ban or if this is just another fad driven by modern man’s (and woman’s) distrust of the food industry in general and modern crops in particular.

The author is a preventative cardiologist from Wisconsin and medical director of Track Your Plaque. 

Davis bases his prescription to eliminate wheat, in particular, and grains in general from your diet on evidence that over the generations of hybridization we turned ancient grain into a Supercarbohydrate. The Supercarbohydrate causes our bodies to have a glucose over reaction to ingesting modern gluten rich wheat.

He claims that before Dr. Norman Borlaug developed dwarf, high yield wheat, we were growing and eating something reasonably close to ancient grains such as Einkorn and Emmer.

With the wheat Borlaug developed, we began eating something causes the human body to over react with an inflammatory immune response. He lays the blame for modern illness and obesity squarely at the roots of Triticum Aestivum. He postulates that most of us are celiac disease sufferers, but we don’t display the most common symptoms and are therefore undiagnosed.

He takes readers through all the things that eating wheat will do to your body; which is where my first objection came into play. He carefully explains terms such as glycation, cerebeller ataxia, exorphins and many other medical terms related to every disease of the body and brain. My challenge is that, even though I’m a smart cookie (gluten free of course), I needed a glossary and there isn’t one.Therefore, every time one of these terms shows up after that (and they do so ad nauseam) I was just a little unsure of the point he was making.

Davis brings in examples from his own practice and scientific studies that support his premise. I have no way of knowing whether he is using carefully selected results or offering definitive evidence that would stand up against peer review. I’ve written enough stuff about science to know that it is possible to skew results to fit just about any purpose. Most of the studies he sites connect with his theory through unexpected side effects of the research. Research specific to how the human body reacts to modern wheat either haven't been done or maybe don't support his theory so aren't mentioned.

Speaking of which, I too write a little and can recognize a writing style/mechanism that serves to emphasize a point or drill an idea into a person’s mind. This book is rife with such techniques and that causes me to distrust, but that could just be me.

This is mature rye growing in Lethbridge at the
Farming Smarter research site.

It took a while to read this book. Every now and then, I had to walk away because I found myself feeling very much like I was committing suicide every time I had toast. The level of detail regarding what wheat does inside the body and the diseases it aggravates overwhelmed my ability to think rationally and made me want to abandon my life-long belief that a little bit of everything in moderation is the way to go.

Davis also talks about how much wheat we grow on this planet. He claims the average American diet is about 50 percent wheat. He talks about the fact that you can find wheat in some strange places – like pea soup – and that to become completely wheat-free requires diligent effort. This effort will pay off through a long, slim, disease-free life.

By the time I got to the back of the book where he pares food options down to vegetables, nuts/seeds dairy products and meat, I figured I’m doomed. Seriously, this guy wants us to give up all grains of any kind, all starch and legumes! I think that goes too far.

If Davis is right, wheat farmers are growing poison that is causing the great obesity, diabetes, heart disease and mental illness epidemics of our time. They are feeding us a food that will kill us slowly and with much pain, sensory deprivation and mental illness. There is no part of the human body that wheat is not hurting.

If this guy is right, Houston we have a problem.

If this is just another food fad directed at a modern population looking for a silver health bullet, then we just have to wait it out. Another fad will come along and I’ll be reading something called Fruit Face or something.

I feel there are a few things left out of this book. First, it doesn't talk about what happens to the wheat when it leaves the farmer's field. 

Also, it sidesteps how the huge agri/food conglomerates control what our farmers grow  and make change extremely risky and difficult beyond reason for an average human.

Next, it doesn't talk about how ineffective western medicine can be when treating chronic illness or how bad for us the North American diet has become. Other people, in other countries do not have these problems until they adopt our diet.
It is not just wheat that is the problem.

Diametrically Opposed

Note: I’ve discovered the hard way that you have to be careful with titles on the internet. For a while there, people interested in off-the-wall physical expressions of endearment were visiting my site (and I assume getting very disappointed) from Russia and the Middle East. So, if my titles seem unrelated to the content of the blog entry, that would be why.

Recently, someone told me love and fear are the only two emotions. Bear with me and go with that for a minute.

If love and fear are the only two emotions, that makes them akin to good/evil, dark/light and hot/cold – in other words diametrically opposed. It also makes love and fear elemental and ever present in each other. Ergo, we are constantly balancing these two forces within ourselves.

This information came to me right when I was contemplating,
“how do I love without fear?”

Which morphed into, “how do I love in spite of fear?”

Which took me to, “how can I love while in fear?” This is an acknowledgement that once we love, we fear losing the object of our love.

We talk a lot about unconditional love as the purest form of love, but I’m not sure humans are capable of no expectations. Think about times you’ve thought, “If you loved me, you would…” It is also possible that even when we love unconditionally, the objects of our love do not know our love is boundless. I think about the way we condition our children through expectations. We expect them to get good marks, we expect them to do chores and we expect them to conform to social mores.

So do they feel unconditionally loved?

Well, mine should! (just in case they read this)

If love and fear are elemental, diametrically opposed emotions, then our lives are a constant balancing of these emotions in all our relationships with everyone and everything.

I think of love as divine. It radiates warmth and light. Love is a soft blanket, a soothing breeze and a crackling fire.

 

Fear is your innards dropping to your feet; it is the ice that fills your veins freezing you into inaction and the thump in your chest that focuses your mind on one specific thing – what was that noise?

If love and fear exist on a sliding scale, then somewhere around the middle is thrill! This idea helps me to understand why at the root of many of my challenges I find fear.

It means that fear can be a little tickling voice holding you back or turning you away from things without even showing itself. It may mean that when we don’t love something it is because we fear it more. That certainly explains how I feel about cliff climbing or jumping from an airplane.

So I’ve begun pondering Fearless Love as an ideal. It is love that acknowledges fear, but does not allow it to diminish the love. From now on, I will try to love fearlessly – this includes love of life; which I suspect will be the hardest to love fearlessly.

When an opportunity presents itself to you, decide to love it fearlessly.

What Happened to 'Play Nice?'

These two quotes from very different thought processes…

"We must always remember that passions change as life experience and learning brings us to new places in our lives and minds. Change is the only constant. Maybe that's why the expression is to "follow your passion. The dang thing never stands still.” C. Lacombe

“No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.” Seth Godin

… led me to this conclusion. Writing is not my passion; writing for me is a tool.

 I like my tools to be the best because I want to be able to concentrate my efforts on performing my tasks and achieving my results/goals and not on trying to figure out how to make a crappy tool do a good job.

It’s the same reason I have expensive knives that I keep sharp. Speaking of sharp, my mind needs to be that too.

My passions lie with preserving natural environments and processes in the wild and fostering inclusive civilization – sociology and ecological preservation.

I don’t want to see The World Without Us; I want to see a world where humans recognize they are part of nature. 

I want humans to quit defecating in their own backyards, smelling up the place with their gases and pissing into their own water supply – so to speak.

I also want humans to start playing nice, sharing and being fair like Mom and Dad taught us. 

We could also stand to remember that when we were 10 and another kid fell off the swing and cracked their head, we helped them. We didn’t say, “I’m still on my swing. I held on so I didn’t fall. There is no reason why I should give up my hard earned hold on this swing just because someone else fell off.”

Right, we also didn’t then lobby our local government to install nets under all the swings for public safety - but I digress.

My observations in life about human interactions, with themselves, other people, other species and the physical world that is our life support system, seem to confirm that a large majority of humans don’t understand that the concept of We Are One is not just metaphysical.

If we lose the bees, we starve. If we go too far with air pollution, we can’t breathe. If we over pollute the waters; we starve and thirst. Many people say they know this; it is an obvious fact. But the knowledge is not enough. Humans need to transmute knowledge into understanding and act accordingly.

We are already seeing the effects of polluted water, air and soil on humans from birth to senior citizens. We see changes in the natural environment around us too, but keep looking at these phenomena in isolation from each other instead of systemic cumulative effects.

We also engage in blame; single issue, polarized arguments and stay the course action plans on matters proven to create or exacerbate serious existing problems.

A whole bunch of people feel powerless to effect change and a whole bunch more probably are

Cambodian workers keep
weeds at bay.

powerless due to the extent of human generated social, political and environmental malfunction present in the modern day world.

Not everyone is able to throw their weight into the effort to redirect humanity’s trajectory. 

So, if you can do anything, please do.