“VITRIOL”

The Philosopher’s

Stone

Visita  Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem

This Series of ariticles will approach the idea off-grid living from two basic philosophical points of view: the Aristotelian, scientific, codifiable, measurable, material, windmills and solar panels view and the Platonic, “Science cannot measure Happiness” view.

Science can only measure itself as it is part of the material universe, while happiness, quality, love, goodness and all the other indefinables that support our subjective Being in the World are non-scientific means to an understanding of ourselves outside (or inside) of materialism.

Let’s look first at one long-accepted bridge between the two without going into the meaning of subjective!:

The Pineal Body looks like a tiny pineapple. It was seen and féted in the ancient world (pictured) as the seat of our imagination, our ‘Third Eye’, which is in fact a vestigial retina physically connected to both external eyes, and is the most enigmatic of endocrine glands.

In the past it was thought to control the flow of memories into  consciousness. The 17th-century French philosopher-mathematician René Descartes concluded that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. Others call it the path to the Philosopher’s Stone or the Stone itself…

A modern scientific observation that calcification of the pineal gland causes psychological distress if not psychiatric disease; Modern imaging techniques reveal that the pineal gland becomes more or less calcified in most people early In life, possibly through minerals in our food and water, causing a lowering of our ability to imagine, which today’s children retain for some time (until the Pineal gland calcifies?)

This newsletter will continue to make available an imaginative portal through which as much information on off-grid living as is available comes to you, plus info on Transition Towns and how they work, cost-effective intermediate steps to avoid the inconvenience of power cuts and other upcoming shortages in service delivery.

To help with this, we ask you to help ‘Imagine’ and create solutions to the current socio-economic crises.

The philosophies behind off-grid thinking are many and various, all going back in time to when people were 

‘closer to Nature’:

(Just an aside to include another aspect of ‘Nature’ than the Einstein / Copernican world we live in: third millennium B.C Babylonians knew enough geometry to calculate the area within a triangle, enough astronomy to calculate the wandering of the planets through the ecliptic, enough algebra to solve a problem of how much grain to use to sow their fields, and enough about logarithms to be able to calculate compound interest!

 Also, a study by economist M. Darling of the rural economy of the Punjab in modern times suggests a disturbing thing about human nature — people work harder and produce more when they are in debt. Darling found that crop yields for farmers in debt typically exceeded yields from unencumbered farmers.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while the first loan contracts and the legal system that enforced them may have been good for the economy, they made life miserable for the working man and woman. If lending began, as historian Paul Millet believes, as a process of neighborly reciprocity in rural societies, then it evolved into something quite different. In Babylonian times, short-term debt was a tool used to extract taxes from the population, and to increase the productivity of temple lands. It is almost as though the government had found a way to extract the residual “goodwill” from the economy by allowing individuals to shift financial obligations into the future. Lending in ancient Ur was mostly for emergency purposes — where the government created the emergency!)

Meanwhile, Earth, Air, Fire and Water remain free from our Sun and the Earth, a ‘Goldilocks’ planet  which is a perfectly balanced closed ecosystem into which only sunlight, meteors and dust come in. And today’s technology allows us access to everything we need, which is, has been and always will be available in one form or another.

Transition technology is the key to what lies after the obsolete nation / states around the planet continue to fail because of increasing debt – and South Africa is no different!

Today we’re stuck with a number of middle men employed by government collecting taxes supposed to be used to maintain service delivery systems like lights and water grids. But as this graph shows, we have returned to the high levels of Debt-to-GDP Ratios held before the transition to this government and getting worse, which means your costs will go up.

Much has been said and written about the current economic crises except that it is nothing new. What I am sketching here is an outline and, like Bertrand Russell, I will not die for my beliefs because I may be wrong. But:                                                                                                                                                     

Economics is very simple whether running a household, a business or a government: more money must be coming in than going out.  Successful businesses are the only economic structures actually working today because they have to stick to that rule to survive, while households and governments pile up debt through carrot-and-stick offers of easy living – zero interest on home loans, no deposit and cheap payments on new cars or nKandla residences built on either service delivery money or money borrowed from foreign banks with no interest in the well being of their debtors, only the interest on their debt.

Because once it has accumulated to a certain point, it is called in to the abattoirs.

Depending on who owns the debt, of course, the government can declare a ‘Jubilee’ cancelling all debt and even the threat of a debt-forgiveness edict would put a leaash on long term loans.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Before we properly commit to alternative power and water grids it is necessary to understand what we’re getting out of.

A ‘financial instrument’ is contract, like a government bond is a contract between the government and the bond-holder that guarantees a series of payments in the future. A share of company stock is a contract between the shareholder and the corporation that guarantees participation in the profits of the firm, and a right to vote on management.

If a loan contract includes interest rather than the lender’s share in the venture for which the loan is taken, it is usury.

“Our” banks lend only on collateral that has more value than the capital debt. If a business venture succeeds, the bank gets its money back with interest. If it fails, the bank the bank keeps the collateral. If a home owner defaults on his mortgage, the home is forfeited. No risk.

So it is interesting (excuse the pun) that Islamic banks take on a share of the risk involved in lending money. If the venture fails, the bank suffers along with its client.

Everyone has lent something to another as a helping hand, when there are no benefits other than cementing a friendship. How often do we lend out our tools without writing a contract? Always. We help out when we can and call on our neighbors we er find ourselves in need, like now. Contracts are only made with strangers from outside our own community

Usury is lending money for interest only, called loan sharking, not a helping hand, which, if we open our eyes, is what is destroying our economies today:

From Babylonian times around 3-2000 BC, usury was a crime against the State and later, a sin against all three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Far East philosophies also condemn the practice.

Christianity dropped the idea of loan sharking as a crime between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – you may have read of the Vatican Bank scandals – while Islam has kept it to this day, (one of the reasons for the current ‘clash of civilizations’?)

This is the third time usurers have slowly and subtly infiltrated western empires, epitomized by what is known as Timothy Geithner’s ‘revolving door’ between the CEO’s desk at Goldman Sachs and the office of Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration today, moneylenders are now finally and fully in charge, not politicians and certainly not “The People”.

It’s a long story but simple: a credit-based economy does not work unless government and no other entity, controls both the issue of money and the interest rates (if any) on the use of the money supply.

If you want to study economics, find a working economy (like any successful business) and study that.

Benjamin Franklin’s early American colonies were a very good example of working economies, keeping in mind the golden rule, ”more money must come in than what goes out, whether running a household, a business or a nation”.

“The reason [the colonial economic model works] is simple,” wrote Franklin. “In the Colonies, we issue our own paper money. It is called ‘Colonial Scrip.’ We issue it in proper proportion to make the goods and services pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power and we have no interest to pay to anyone.

“The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies a hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.”​

That was in 1776.

Almost every nation in the world today is up against a wall of debt owned by an international, privately-owned, for-profit central banking system. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) are run by a small group of lenders holding the world to ransom through an ancient and evil curse… usury.

Modern banking practice, including fractional reserve banking and the issue of  banknotes emerged in the 17th century. At the time, wealthy merchants began to store their gold with the goldsmiths of London, who possessed private vaults and charged a fee for their service (bank charges, aka paying banks today to lend them your money) .

 In exchange for each deposit of precious metal, the goldsmiths issued  receipts certifying the quantity and purity of the metal they held as a bailee; these receipts could not be re-assigned and only the original depositor could collect the stored goods.

Gradually the goldsmiths began to lend the money out on behalf of the depositor, which led to the development of modern banking practices; promissory notes  (which evolved into banknotes) were issued for money deposited as a loan to the goldsmith

These practices created a new kind of “money” that was actually debt, that is, goldsmiths’ debt rather than silver or gold coin, a commodity that had been regulated and controlled by the monarchy. This development required the acceptance in trade of the goldsmiths’ promissory notes, payable on demand. Acceptance in turn required a general belief that coin would be available; and a fractional reserve normally served this purpose. Acceptance also required that the holders of debt be able legally to enforce an unconditional right to payment; it required that the notes (as well as drafts) be negotiable instruments. The concept of negotiability had emerged in fits and starts in European money markets, but it was well developed by the 17th century. Nevertheless, an act of Parliament was required in the early 18th century (1704) to overrule court decisions holding that the goldsmiths’ notes, despite the “customs of merchants”, were not negotiable

Let’s have a look at an earlier banking system in the Roman Empire, which ended around the time of Christ, when He ‘threw the money lenders out of the temple”

Pagan Rome was not the first empire to succumb to Babylonian usury. At the time of Christ, when Tiberius Caesar came to power, Italy had been bankrupted.

Tacitus, a Roman journalist at the time, recorded this in his Annals of Rome “…Meanwhile, a powerful host of accusers fell with sudden fury on the class which systematically increased its wealth by usury in defiance of a law passed by Caesar defining the terms of lending money and of holding estates in Italy, a law long obsolete because the public good is sacrificed to private interest”

Tiberius, not Jesus threw the moneylenders out of Italy, but without that event ascribed to Jesus, we might never have known about Rome’s usury problem and how it can cripple any economy.

“Tiberius granted a year and six months to settle all private accounts after the departure of the usurers.
”Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all credit, the current coin too, in consequence of the conviction of so many persons and the sale of their property being locked up in the imperial treasury or the public exchequer.

“The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces (about $USD1.6 bn in a country with less than a million adult citizens) and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount.”

“Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found, (but) the purchase … of estates was not carried out according to the letter of the Senate’s decree: Rigour at the outset, as usual with such matters, becoming negligence in the end.”

Sound familiar?

Eight hundred years later, the United Kingdom discovered that the Babylonian Curse had been subtly infiltrating its economy for almost three hundred years. While there is some controversy over the date, the king threw the moneylenders out for the same reasons as Tiberius: because of disputes over “matters of usury”.

They reappeared in Holland with the opening of  The Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company for dealings in its printed stocks and bonds and was the first to formally begin trading in securities, which broke the bank in the United Kingdom when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720.

Most of Europe (and the United States since May 2013) are sitting on a debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio of over 100%, which means that 100% of tax and other government revenues are spent on interest – ‘debt servicing’ – and not on service delivery.

To pay for it all, rates, taxes and the debt ceiling are raised and more money borrowed and because of that, I predict a guaranteed, bullet-proof rise in electricity costs in the next quarter.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF UNLESS WE KNOW HISTORY

John F. Kennedy saw the situation clearly and said this about it in 1960 in his speech condemning secret societies: The enemy is “… a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.” 

At that time he set in motion two initiatives to get America out of the Babylonian Curse: one, a pull-out from the money making machine working since the expensive (aka ‘profitable’) First and Second World Wars followed by the Cold War, the Korean ‘Police Action’ followed by Viet Nam and now the 20-years-on “Middle East Conflict”, a hundred years of U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler’s Racket called War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

The second was the introduction of a Franklin-style ‘colonial scrip’ called the Silver Certificate which, when presented at a bank the teller would give ‘’the bearer’ a silver dollar containing one ounce of 99-fine silver that could be spent anywhere in the world.

Another President to buck the banks was Abraham Lincoln.

After turning down the banks’ offer of 39% or more on loans to finance his Civil War, Lincoln also issued a ‘Colonial Scrip’, a government currency with the same function as Franklin’s: to make goods and services pass easily from producers to consumers called the Greenback Dollar.

Could Senator RON PAUL get himself killed? He wants to abolish the privately-owned, for-profit, inflationary Federal Reserve Bank.

Five US Presidents who sought to abolish the Fed were assassinated or an attempt made:

1) Andrew Jackson (Survived); 2) Abraham Lincoln; 3) James Garfield; 4) William McKinley; 5) John Kennedy.

In a speech before Congress in 2002, entitled Abolish the Fed, Ron Paul said:

“Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its Constitutional authority over monetary policy. The Constitution does not give Congress the authority to delegate control over monetary policy to a [private] Central Bank. I urge my colleagues to put an end to the manipulation of the money supply which erodes Americans’ standard of living and enriches well-connected elites.”

These are fighting words! Then in April 2007, Paul came out slugging again in his Congressional speech entitled The Federal Reserve Monopoly over Money:

“The greatest threat facing America today is not terrorism or illegal immigration. The greatest threat is the shameless deficit spending of our government and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. The Press sometimes criticizes Federal Reserve policy but the validity of the fiat system itself is never challenged. History shows that when the destruction of monetary value becomes rampant, the political structure becomes unstable. We then have good reason to be concerned about the future of our nation.” —
http://ronpaulforum.info/index.php?topic=241.0

When the dust settles after this current three-hundred-year credit-driven quicksand of debt, will history allow us to keep the two thousand year record intact so we can avoid it happening a fourth time?

Or will we allow ourselves to arbitrarily ‘raise the credit limit’ on our bank cards and spend as much as we want, indefinitely, just like the modern moneylenders running the world’s governments are doing and extend our ‘credit’ into infinite depths of debt?

South Africa has a credible, sustainable choice “Do we ‘get off the grid’ one small community at a time, and look after ourselves or dig further into the debt hole?

Tom Dennen,  Environmental Philosophy student…

*And investigative journalist:  http://www.investigative-journalism-africa.info/?page_id=48

You’ll find my byline in Chapter six on page 15 ‘GETTING RICH BY HELPING THE POOR” on the link  below

Banks make more than a billion rand a year lending money from the poorest-paid people in South Africa.

By Tom Dennen

http://www.investigative-journalism-africa.info/?page_id=85

Next newsletter.

South Africa entered a ‘credit-driven boom’ in the third quarter of 2014 on the back of the US Fed’s ‘hints’ at raising interest rates. This can be seen in media advertising cheap money, easy access to your own money, cheaper credit, relaxed ‘debt listing rules’ and so on, buy now and pay later.

So much is coming out of the New Gutenberg press, the Internet that it’s difficult to make all that information work as an integrated whole. But at the end of the day, survival is basic and what we need to concentrate on is living after the greatest transition in human history: from nation / states to global villages.

In 1986, Totnes (paste this URL into your search engine for a video on one of the first Transition Towns).

 Totnes used its imagination to see a solution to working in a world without oil in its future and created a working model of ‘off-grid’ living, including free food grown on public land for its residents. It is still growing today.