Junk and Luxury

One of the fastest ways to fail in life is to work so hard your manager will think you're after his job.

In 1976, one year before our semi-blissful marriage of five years, my ex-wife and I went on a sailing adventure in the West Indies. We paid good money to be deckhands on a 248-foot, four-mast schooner, island-hopping the Leeward Islands of St. Martins, St. Barts, St Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis for two weeks.

After a few days, we hooked up with a couple from Philadelphia and a couple from Alaska.

One day the six of us were wandering the neighborhood back streets of a town on Nevis. Some of the locals were sitting on the front porches of their modest houses, playing dominoes or watching the tourists pass by.

The couple from Philadelphia (liberals) mentioned how poor everyone seemed and suggested there should be an influx of government money to help everyone out.

The couple from Alaska (conservatives) wondered why no one seemed to be working very hard and suggested an influx of private industry to kick-start the economy.

My ex-wife was too busy looking for a shop where she could buy some more useless junk to notice anything.

However, I noticed and wondered if I was the only sane person in the group. Everyone I saw along the street appeared to be perfectly content in their existence. You could see the happiness in the twinkle in their eyes. It was beyond my comprehension why anyone would want to barge in and spoil a perfectly desirable way of life.

Apparently, there's a big difference between liberals and conservatives and relatively sane human beings. On the Orb of Wounded Souls, being enslaved by dependency on government handouts or being enslaved by becoming a cog in the giant economic engine of production and consumption (mindless growth) are both forms of enslavement.

Clearly, there must be a more reasonable way of life.

Once upon a time in America, the Europeans had not yet arrived to spoil a perfectly desirable way of life. There were indigenous people (Native Americans) scattered throughout the continent, doing just fine until the white man arrived on the eastern shore, stuck a flag in the ground and declared it to be a "discovery."

Some of the indigenous folks had permanent settlements while others were hunter-gatherer nomads. A hunter-gatherer society consisted of small bands of nomadic people who lived in an area where it was too harsh to allow permanent settlements. They survived by foraging for edible plants and wild animals. Basically, they wandered from one food source to another. Everything they owned, they carried on their backs.

One of the major areas of concentration of hunter-gatherer nomads was the Great Basin Desert area of the southwest (Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, etc.). These societies were part of the Shoshonean bands of Indians (Hopi, Piute, Mono, Comanche, Kawai, Panamint, Chemehuevi and others).

In an article titled THE ART OF NOTHING, Thomas J. Elpel declares, "Hunter-gatherer societies succeeded in working only one or two hours per day, yet in our efforts to reproduce their lifestyle we end up working all day."

Elpel is the director of Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School in Montana and author of many books on survival. According to Elpel, the hunter-gatherers "had a lot of time on their hands because they produced almost no material culture."

They basically sat around all day doing nothing. This helped conserve energy, an economical imperative so they wouldn't be forced to harvest more food each day to feed themselves. They also produced no unnecessary material goods, including artwork. Whenever they were forced to move on, they needed to do so with a minimal of effort. They didn't want to be dragging junk or luxury items with them.

In our materialistic culture where the objective always seems to be growth, we love junk and luxury. Often they're the same thing.

We work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, just to stay even. In fact, we're less than even since our national debt is in the multiple trillions and continually rising. But we're too busy "getting ahead" to notice.

So, you can be a go-getter and spin your wheels in pursuit of junk and luxury, or you can be a do-nothing and observe the folly of the go-getters as they work harder and harder while getting deeper and deeper in debt.

Work is something you do because it's necessary for survival -- work you do beyond that is called a burden.

Instead of continually clamoring for jobs, jobs, jobs, we should make quality of life our common objective. This would include a shorter work-week, less government control, less monetary insanity, less military adventurism, etc.

• The corporate world wants everyone working at full capacity to maximize profits.

• The government wants everyone working at full capacity to maximize tax revenues.

• Financial institutions want everyone working in order to perpetuate their credit schemes to expand their control of the monetary system.

• The military-industrial complex wants a world of bloody conflict to justify their costly existence.

A shorter work-week and a less stressful way of life for the masses goes against the greedy ambitions of those who control the puppet strings.

Endless, mindless growth is a cancer -- sooner or later, the puppets are going to figure it out.

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Quote for the Day – "The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where happiness comes from being satisfied with what you have, not with yearning for more, more, more.

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Left-Handed People

August 13 is International Left-Handers Day. Approximately 10% to 12% of the people on Earth are left-handed and some 30 million of them live in the United States.

The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. Thus, left-handers are wired into the artistic half of the brain, which makes them imaginative, creative, ambiguous, exasperating, stubborn, emotional, obsessive and original.

Ultrasounds of the womb show that 90% of babies appear to favor the right thumb, which corresponds to the global population of right-handed versus left-handed. When placed on their tummies, right-handed babies tend to turn their heads to the right, while left-handed babies usually turn to the left or not at all.

There have been several recent U.S. presidents who are left-handed.

• Barack Obama
• Bill Clinton
• George H.W. Bush
• Ronald Reagan
• Gerald Ford
• Harry Truman

Left-handed royalty:

• Queen Elizabeth II
• Queen Mother
• Prince Charles
• Prince William

Left-handers have interesting traits:

• If a left-hander injures their dominant hand, they have an easier time adapting to the use of the other hand than a right-hander would.

• More likely to pursue creative careers

• More efficient at multi-taskers -- the connections between the left side of the brain and the right side are faster, making it easier to be more efficient

• Left-handed college graduates go on to become 26% wealthier that right-handers

• Since the right side of the brain has a lower tolerance to alcohol, they are 3 times more likely to become alcoholics

• Twice as likely to be a man -- women are 4% more likely to be right-handed

• Reach puberty 4 to 5 months later than right-handers

• More likely to have allergies & migraines

• More likely to be insomniacs & suffer dyslexia or stuttering

• Those with autism are more likely to be left-handed

• More likely to be on extreme ends of an intelligence test -- there are more left-handers than right-handers with an IQ above 140 and 20% of Mensa members are left-handed

• Recover from strokes faster

• Able to adjust to seeing underwater quicker

• Process emotions differently than right-handers -- more susceptible to anger and negative emotions

• On a QWERTY keyboard, there are 1447 English words typed solely with the left hand, compared to 187 with the right hand

• May die as many as 9 years earlier than right-handers

• Twice as common in twins versus the general population

• One of four Apollo astronauts are left-handed

• Mothers who are over 40 at the time of a child's birth are 128% more likely to have a left-handed baby than a woman in her 20s

• Premature babies are more likely to be left-handed

• Stressed mothers are more likely to have a left-handed child

• Reach sexual maturity later than right-handed

Treatment of left-handed people by nationality or religion:

• In Latin, the word for left is "sinister" which means clumsy on both sides

• In German, the word for left-handed is "linkisch" which means clumsy or awkward

• In Russian, the word for left-handed is "levia" which is a term of insult

• In Italian, the word for left-handed is "mancino" which usually means dishonest

• In Scotland, "you must have been baptized by a left-handed priest" is a saying used to describe an unlucky person

• Among the Inuit Eskimos, every left-handed person is considered to be a potential sorcerer

• The Incas believed left-handers possessed magical powers and were capable of healing

• The North American Zuni tribe believed being left-handed brought about good luck

• During the Spanish Inquisition, left-handers were more likely to be tortured

• In medieval Europe, witchcraft texts proclaimed that the left-hand was used to curse or harm another person -- to bring about a curse, witches were instructed to silently touch the recipient with the left hand, which would impose the curse -- the devil supposedly gives a benediction or a baptism with the left hand, as opposed to the Christian church which performs right-handed blessings

• Medieval Jewish philosopher, Maimonides (1135 - 1204), listed 100 faults a Jewish priest was not allow to have -- being left-handed was one of them

• In many Islamic countries, people are forbidden to eat with their left hand, which is considered to be unclean

• In Christian and Jewish tradition, all benedictions must be made with the right hand -- for Catholics and others, the priest must present the communion wafer with the right hand and the recipient accepts it with the right hand

• In the Talmud, the Prince of Demons is named Samael, which is associated with the left side. The angel Michael sits on God's right side and Samael sits on God's left side. The implication is that right is good and left is evil

Being left-handed has been called by many names:

• southpaw
• sinistromanuality
• mancinism
• gibble-fisted
• cackhandedness
• skivvy-handed
• ballock-handed
• scrummy-handed
• cunny-handed
• gibble-fisted
• kaggy-fisted
• cawk-fisted

Famous left-handers:

• Albert Einstein
• Isaac Newton
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Aristotle
• Michelangelo
• Charles Darwin
• Marilyn Monroe
• Angelina Jolie
• Judy Garland
• Robert De Niro
• Winston Churchill
• Benjamin Franklin
• Alexander the great
• Charlie Chaplin
• Jimi Hendrix
• Julia Roberts
• Whoopi Goldberg
• David Bowie
• Marie Curie
• Neil Armstrong
• Jack the Ripper
• Boston Strangler

Sinistrophobia is the fear of left-handedness -- get over it.

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Quote for the Day – "I restore myself when I'm alone." Marilyn Monroe

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where three right turns makes a left.

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Silence of the Yams

Many philosophers believe that thoughts are deeds. If you project benevolent thoughts, you help create a benevolent environment. Projecting hostility creates hostility, etc. As we sow, so shall we reap.

Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector expert, hooked up a lie-detector to a plant about 40 years ago in an attempt to see how long it would take water to reach the leaves. A lie detector is a sensitive instrument that measures such things as Galvanic skin response, slight variations in temperature, pressure, rates of flow, etc.

Backster quickly discovered the plant reacted "dramatically" to the experiment itself.

When Backster decided to burn one of the leaves, the lie detector readings went off the charts. When he noticed the "trauma" being exhibited by the plant, he decided not to burn the plant after all, whereupon the plant became calm once again.

Backster had not approached the plant with a match -- he had only decided, in his mind, to do so, at which time the plant became "emotional." And when he had decided to call off the burning experiment, again only in his mind, the plant returned to normal.

In subsequent experiments, Backster had trouble repeating the results because once a plant had been led to believe something was going to happen and it didn't, the plant would retain that knowledge and not become "emotional" the second time.

Consequently, fresh plants were required for continued experimentation. This led to the conclusion that plants have some sort of memory and discrimination capability.

In other experiments, it became clear that the plants would only react if the experimenter actually intended to carry out the actions. If Backster was only bluffing to do something harmful, the plant wouldn't respond. Thus he concluded that plants could discern intent (through thought transference) and had a "memory" of past events.

Backster conducted further experiments over the last four decades and has become one of the leading bio-communications experts in the world. For example, he discovered that an egg would react when another egg was cracked.

His work tends to confirm the Gaia Hypothesis which states that the world is one huge, living organism with self-regulating capability.

Dorothy Retallack is another specialist in this field. She exposed a variety of plants to various types of music. Plants that were exposed to hard rock (Led Leppelin and Jimi Hendrix) began pointing away from the source of the music, whereas plants exposed to soothing music began pointing toward the source.

Through further studies, she concluded that being gentle with plants helps them flourish and being the opposite has the opposite effect.

THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, is a book detailing other experiments done on plant life.

Distance doesn't seem to matter when communicating with plants. For example, a chemist became so attuned to his house plants that they reacted excitedly when he made love to his girlfriend 80 miles away.

In another instance, a philodendron activated by a thought impulse from a technician started a car two miles away.

On a more unscientific note, my ex-wife, who is three-quarters Norwegian and one-quarter dingbat, used to talk to vegetables. She could spend hours chatting with a pod of peas or an ear of corn. She did most of the talking while the vegetables listened politely without too much interruption.

One day she got some financial advice from a zucchini. Two hours later she went out and bought some brand new furniture. "It really didn't cost anything," she told me, "I put it on the credit card."

I chopped up the zucchini and put it in a salad.

One morning my ex-wife got into an argument with a kumquat. It had something to do with her new hair style -- the kumquat thought it made her look fat. She tried to get a second opinion from a yam but it ignored her, so she decided to snarl at me instead. Apparently, yams don't like to be confrontational.

I never did communicate very well with the vegetables. They prefer to communicate with entities on their own intellectual level, such as fungi, mildew, politicians and dingbats. However, I once had a lengthy conversation with dill pickle about the meaning of life. They tend to be very good listeners.

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Quote for the Day – "The opposite of talking is waiting." Fran Lebowitz

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird.

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