The Universe Remains a Conspiracy for my Benefit

I wrote about this idea over two years ago in this space.  It seems still to be true, based on recent events.

(1) We continue to prosper financially beyond what one could reasonably expect .. my work is going well, and we just attracted some consulting help that will help us pay off another big chunk of debt, if this plan works at all.

(2) I've come into a few health challenges the past several months, but fortunately nothing at all life-threatening, just annoying, uh, plumbing issues. I have what seem to be competent doctors involved and expect a reduction in my symptoms (if not a complete cure) within the next several months.

(3) I live in an era where are there are several assets available not around previously:

• An online community to discuss (anoymously) health symptoms and other ideas
• A relatively open and tolerant political environment (though of course challenges remain)

(4) My loving wife still is hanging in there with me, despite my faults ...

(5) Last and least: I've been playing Wordle and enjoying it very much.

A Hospice Nurse's view of death

 I recently came across Julie the Hospice Nurse and have appreciated very much her perspective on death. Here's one, for example:

If you subscribe to her YouTube feed, you'll get a lot of perspective on death and dying that you probably haven't seen before.

I certainly have! I hope you enjoy this ...

How to Tell if Your Guests are Safe to Visit for the Holidays ... without sticking anything up their noses!

 The coronavirus tests currently available are rather invasive, requiring a swab to be put way up the nose:

I originally asked my stepson and his girlfriend to take this sort of test before I would allow them into our house for Thanksgiving; they said no. I then remembered I knew another way to test!

It's called behavioral kinesiology: basically your body already knows everything there is to know.

Dr. Diamond used to randomly distribute blank packets across the audiences he spoke in front of. The packets had two different substances:

• 1/2 had artificial sweetener
• 1/2 had organic vitamin C

He then had each member of the audience turn to his or her neighbor and do this sort of
test:

Basically the idea is that the body tests "strong" (locking the muscle) in the presence of beneficial substances (or ideas) and "weak" in the presence of harmful substances (or ideas). Diamond reports that the audience did these tests and then examined the packets in their and their partner's pockets. The results:

• Vitamin C: 100% "strong"
• artificial sweetener 0% "strong"

Details are in Diamond's book ... Here are a couple of videos that show ways of testing others

and by oneself:

This one gives a method you can do by yourself

This one shows how to do one person testing another

As for my stepson and his girlfriend: I did the test by myself and they came up free of coronavirus, so they got to come in the house for Thanksgiving. (I'll test them again just before Christmas.)

On Christian Charity

 My lovely wife is a Lutheran, and recently I had a spate of unemployment.

I filed for government unemployment assistance and received it, but I just missed the big extra that was available this past spring. I got one extra chunk from the 'Trump extra' that he jiggered loose from elsewhere in the federal budget, but we were still well short of being able to pay all of our responsibilities.

Kate put it out to all her church friends and even to people she'd just met via a yard sale we were having late summer.

Several of these people responded by sending us cash, unsolicited!

My wife handed me the first $800 saying "this is from God!" She asked "do you believe this?" I said "yes" ...

But I don't see it that way, really.

There is a belief among my wife and her Christian social group that "God will provide" ... and apparently they feel compelled to help God/ act in God's place, something like that. So a human social web was in charge, however inspired.

I am not complaining, trust me; I am grateful for this blessing. As challenging as the months of unemployment have been, they'd have been so much worse without this charity.

My goal is to get our finances in order so that we can send some of this back into the community, particularly to the local food bank which my wife has been taking advantage of for the last couple of months, as well. (This would never have occurred to me.)

I am working now, but catching up on some payments that we had to let slide during the last few months ... also starting a business that should start producing extra revenue shortly.

Uh, halleleujah!?

A Heretic Economist whose time may have come, at last

The old joke about economists: If you laid all the economists in the world end-to-end ... they would still point in all directions.

So a corollary of this is that being a heretic to standard schools of economics isn't as much of an impossibility as it was for Jacques Benveniste with his proof of homeopathy to the scientific establishment.

Current schools of economics have, shall we say, a problem with the models they use matching reality. Just look at one of the major economic events of recent years:

• The 2008 "great recession" and subsequent events. Almost no mainstream economist predicted it, and many predicted rampant inflation after the "quantitative easing" the Federal Reserve used to try and fix the effects of the recession ... which of course did not occur.

Our "heretic" says she has a model of economic reality called Modern Monetary Theory that better matches the economic facts on the ground, and after reading her book, I believe her.

Here she is:

Dr. Stephanie Kelton

Her views diverge wildly from the mainstream:

• A balanced U.S. Federal budget is undesirable, as it does not fuel the economy sufficiently
• Deficit spending in any country with "monetary sovereignty" (like the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Australia, even China) is, within very large limits, a benefit to that country's citizens
• We have plenty of resources in the U.S. to achieve guaranteed full employment and fully funded health care for everyone, without necessarily raising taxes a whole lot
• Austerity in any country with monetary sovereignty is a preposterously self-limiting strategy
• "pay as you go" plans to make sure any new spending is "deficit neutral" are unnecessary and actively harmful to the economy

If this makes you want to know more, the book she's just published is very readable:

And if you're more of a Youtube person than a reader, here's a small example for you to enjoy.

The Universe is a conspiracy for my benefit; a visualization to keep this going

Is visualization the key?

Seems worth a try ...

Despite many mistakes I've made throughout life, I seem to be in much better shape than I could expect:

• I have degrees in computer science and started with Python in 2006, and now that's a hot job ticket

• So I've just started a w2 job which I can work from home doing for as long as the coronavirus shutdown lasts, making a good salary
  
• 
  
• I have a loving wife who's stuck with me through thick and thin

• (fingers crossed) I remain in excellent health, not even having a cold more than once every two or three years
  
• I didn't get to work in anything related to the 'gig economy' or the hospitality industry or the restaurant industry ...
  

But there are things I want and don't yet have:

• A net-zero-energy house on acreage

• A Tesla or similar electric car
  
• Enough money so that my lovely wife can travel to her heart's content
  

... and so forth. But this is kind of a busy bunch of stuff to visualize, so I think I am going to just focus on one number: my FICO score.

700

This is what I need to be able to do what I want (get construction funding to get a house built, etc.)

Right now my score is around 640 as I have way too much debt and no obvious way to pay it down quickly.

So what could happen to fix this? In order of likelihood:

• I could win the lottery (I'd have to buy a ticket more regularly than I have been, I guess)
  
• This blog could go viral and could get enough views for me to sell ads on it
• Our business venture(s) (Rain, DirtRich) could hit it big
• Something else I can't imagine, or some combination of these things, or both

So I'm going to spend 5 or 10 minutes lying in bed visualizing this number every day until I have it.

Here goes:

700

700

700

Any visualization help you can give is welcome!

Proof of Homeopathy's effectiveness (except on Wikipedia)

In the late 1980's this researcher, Jacques Benveniste:

made a remarkable discovery. His team had been studying the reaction of white blood cells to allergens. But due to a team member's error, the concentration of allergen being tested was too diluted to be effective ... but somehow still showed an effect.

"Go back and do the work over," he said.

She did, but also tried the same ultra-dilute solution and got the same "impossible" results.

"Looks like homeopathy", a tutor on the team with a background in this specialty said.

But homeopathy claims that ever more dilute "remedies" produce stronger and stronger effects:

Benveniste and his team decided to investigate this alleged property and found that it worked ... more dilute concentrations produced stronger effects, even to the extent that it was extremely unlikely that a single molecule of the subject under investigation would exist in the ultra-dilute solution.

From 1985 to 1989 Benveniste's lab and cooperating labs in France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of which were able to replicate these results!

Unfortunately these results ran afoul of the dominant paradigm of the day: fundamentalist materialism.

John Maddox, editor of Nature, where the paper was published, acted as self-appointed priest of the materialist "church", using explicitly religious terminology in defending the faith:

"This book is the best candidate for burning in many years," on Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life in 1981. He otherwise was known to use the word "heresy" for work he didn't like.

Benveniste and 12 coauthors published their paper in Nature, nonetheless ...

And I submit that Benveniste's treatment thereafter was effectively his having been branded a heretic.

 a heretic being burned at the stake

By 1988, the high materialists priests were no longer allowed to burn heretics at the stake; instead they just got to shun and excommunicate them from the Scientific Materialist Church.

Not that shunning is much less painful; one former Mennonite referred to the Amish practice of "shunning" as a "living hell of torture".

The ensuing storm destroyed Benveniste's reputation as a mainstream scientist and caused him to leave the lab where he'd been working for decades ... instead, according to one report, he wound up working in a "shack" on the parking lot of his former lab.

He worked on related "too weird for the mainstream" experiments on the electromagnetic signaling between cells. He died in 2004.

I normally link to Wikipedia for some subjects I discuss, but the Wikipedia article on homeopathy looks to have been written and maintained by Maddox's heresy-busting heirs. They label it a "pseudoscience."

In fact there is a later researcher that also replicated the original results, Madeleine Ennis from Queen's University in Belfast.

References and Further Reading

Andrew Weil, M.D., Health and Healing (1983), chapter 1 "A Homeopathic Cure?"

Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. The description above on Benveniste and his troubles comes from chapter 4 of this excellent book.

Shunning quote: Lynne McTaggart, The Bond, chapter 5.

Where the 'shack' note comes from https://q-mag.org/jacques-benveniste-and-the-memory-of-water.html