Amidst Spring and Recession, we're all Neural Buddhists now

We're almost halfway through 2008's Spring, and it's been a wet one here in Washington, DC, the center of the Piscean Vortex  (read Novak's tell-all about sordid power politics).  Not as wet as in Myanmar (Burma), where Statism - the philosophy of the Piscean Age - has oppressed and now killed hundreds of thousands.  Powermongers have had their two thousand years during the Piscean Age, starting with the monstrous Romans and finishing with the traiterous elite who have oligopolized power in every single country of Earth.

As we enter the Aquarian Age, America is the country of the future, if we can get past the avaricious oligopolists.   The elite are the same whom the Annunaki annoited as priests after the Deluge.  It's not like we haven't known better since then.  Merchants in Lagash got some property rights (agami) back in 2300 BC, and the 2900 BC Vedas said "liberty is the ideal".  Even Yahweh warned the Israelites in "First Samuels" (around 1500 BC) that their insane desire for a king would lead only to taxation and impressment of their children into the bureaucracy and army.  Despite knowing about freedom since our dawn, we've elected to be sheep and let the Powermongers pass laws to "give us a better life".  But "the more of these laws that are passed, the poorer we become," said Taoist founder Lao-Tsu in 6th century BC.  Will we ever learn?

Four years from now the Aquarian Age starts (although the cusp between it and the preceeding age commenced in 1992), and chances exist that our Recession will be a Depression by then, unless the Fed's inflation staves off bankruptcies in exchange for higher prices.  But we are headed to more recession, led by continued housing collapsing.  Just since Greenspan's Fed tenure, the dollar has lost half its value, and Bush has added more debt than all administrations combined.  When inflation debauches the currency, prices rise:  "Health care, education, housing, energy - everything measured in dollars that the Asians can't produce and Wal-Mart can't put on its shelves, is soaring."  Fox interviewed Congressman, Doctor and GOP Presidential Candidate Paul for an answer.

Cutting government spending and deregulation have staved off the depression some expected after the awful President Nixon decoupled money from solid backing from gold, but no more:

"China used to export deflation, as the economists put it. Now, with prices rising in the Middle Kingdom, it has no choice - it must export inflation. With inventories at 30-year lows - there are no price cuts coming from there either. Wages are rising. Raw material prices are soaring. Food is out of control...If the credit cycle has turned, as we think it has, lending rates will go up with inflation. And the cost of money...along with the cost of other essential components...will drive up prices for nearly everything."

Can government be shrunk enough to stave off Depression?  To find out what government needs to be cut, we need insiders to squeal when there's fraud, waste or abuse.  This past week I attended D.C. events as part of Whistleblowers Week; as that article shows, one activist wants bureaucrats to expose the truth - of even the 9/11 inside job - as part of their Will, so their attorney can let their survivors know the truth that's too scary to disclose while the employee lives.  One of the most inspiring speakers was Adam Kokesh, an Iraq War veteran now advocating for its end.  Speaking of ending our Imperialist nationbuilding, Senator Hagel had attained attention for opposing Bush on Iraq, but his book has gone nowhere while Ron Paul's "Revolution: a Manifesto" has become the world's bestseller.

I was at Whistleblowers Week to interest the Semmelweis Society in my government affairs services.  Semmelweis represents brilliant doctors fired for causing trouble for their hospitals.  Hospitals, as any health reformer knows, are the last bastion of price insensitivity.  Consumer-directed health care reformers hope a nation of Health Savings Account holders can end this by forcing providers to divulge their prices.  When doctors expose problems in hospitals, the administrators use a heavy-handed process called "peer review" to fire the doctor, then they enter that doctor's name in a taxpayer-funded database that ruins job prospects for doctors as they hunt for new employment in other states.

The database that haunts peer reviewed docs reminds me of the database of prescriptions that haunts doctors who prescribe medicine for patients in pain.  If the Drug Enforcement Administration sees on NASPER that you're a large prescriber of opioid narcotics (which are legal only if used for medicine, not to abuse), then the DEA will coerce any patients who are vulnerable to lie about the doctor, accusing him or her of being a drug kingpin, of running a "pill mill".  So, no pain patients are getting sufficient opioid medicine, and thus we have a pain undertreatment epidemic.  Government Databases need to be repealed.  Instead, the FBI plans to expand its extraction of DNA from humans (to be put in another leakable database).

The War on Drugs ruins the lives not only of  pain doctors and their patients, but also regular people going through their normal young adult period of fun, as this poor girl found out.  Instead of repealing the Controlled Substances Act in his judiciary committee, this slick opportunist Senator wants to get media attention for going after official bad boys in professional sports. 

The Drug War is just one aspect of a worsening Police Terror state.  Few folks know but animal abuse protestors who hurt the profit of an animal-related enterprise can be fined and jailed under a new terrorist statute - do you think murderers and rapists should be released from jail to incarcerate this mother?  More subtle terrorism comes from Big Agra, whose major food companies are exploiting worsening food prices and shortages by infecting more crops and animals with their GMOs and hormones.  Big Pharma is trying to monopolize nutrients that are free in nature.  A lifetime of pollution via fluoride and aluminum  is killing sleep and inviting disease.  (Why can't Big Medica focus on productive ventures, like this robot fixing a prostate?) 

It's time for libertarians to join the progressives already pooling their funds with local organic farmers, to get their food from voluntary coops.  The widest variety of idealists for your community can be found at the Ron Paul meetup groups.  Libertarians can be just as environmental as progressives; indeed, our focus on restitution and property rights can do a better job than government coercion in protecting nature.  Indeed, it's Ron Paul who has the best bill to protect natural medicine.  Ayn Rand's virtue of selfishness indeed can have selfless results - witness the car company making money by selling a car running on zero emission electric cars.  For those environmentalists who really are eugenicists, convinced humans are taking too much land, here's a reminder:  overpopulation is not a problem, as long as markets are allowed to grow.  Private solutions help not only endangered species like the black rhino, but also they're sufficient to fund monuments, like this one for Crazy Horse.  Why do folks think no solution is possible without taxpayer theft and coercion?

If you start hanging around progressives or fundamentalists, or start to adopt behaviors or lifestyles outside the mainstream - beware!  The State is making life hell for families on the fringe - witness this new case in Texas.

Now for those afraid libertarianism would breed anarchy, even for those libertarians who would prefer an end to Government, there still would be Rules, even if flying was freed from the FDA and TSA.  This is almost the society that Virginia wanted in our Revolutionary period.  One of the most lawless branches of government has been the judiciary, but have the new conservative judges restored Rule of Law to the judicial branch?  I'm sure this will be discussed June 12 at the annual American Constitutional Society conference.  If Karl Rove has his way, the NeoCon conservatives will be doomed to minority party status forever.

For disgruntled conservatives, or progressives who understand markets are critical, check out the May 22 Libertarian Party Convention:  here's Reason's Dave Weigel with an update on the candidates for the nomination.  My favorite is scientist Mary Ruwart, whose classic "Healing Our World" I used when teaching civics to seniors at this school in India.  Or go to Vegas July 10 for the wide-ranging FreedomFest.

Speaking of India, our Imperialism has isolated the US.  We need to befriend foreigners, with the only way that's proven over time to bring such peace:  commerce.  Commerce is needed also to stave off Recession.  Opening our borders to trade also can stave off Repression, if we include people in the border traffic.  Protectionists and Xenophobes make me sick, especially when I read the endless train of heart-breaking stories about Big Government persecution at the border, ruining the lives of immigrants.

New immigrants with which Earthlings may have to deal by the time of 2012's arrival are extraterrestrials, in which Catholics now are allowed to believe.  Friends of mine are trying to get candidate and Senator Clinton to blow the whistle on what the government knows about UFOs.  Apparently a Rockefeller almost had her husband convinced to Disclose.  This seems to be a trend, as the UK has just opened its files.  The most recently returned shuttle astronauts say ETs have to exist.

Back to the title of today's blog entry, it seems like the Vernal Equinox just happened, but Summer Solstice is just around the corner.  Those wanting to raise their consciousness and get healthy - and deal with personal issues - should register now for the annual, intense Yoga Festival in New Mexico's mountainous desert.  Even conservatives should get into yoga, as David Brooks at the New York Times seems to be doing with this risky concession that meditation research is proving God, if not the Bible, and so "We're All Neural Buddhists Now".