ON The Money; Getting Emotional

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Getting Emotional

In our culture, reason reigns supreme. In school they teach us to value reason, logic, and rational thinking, but they teach us to control our emotions, to keep them to ourselves, and not to let them interfere with our work. While the rational mind constantly gets rewarded through good grades, high-paying jobs, etc, our emotional responses, especially negative emotional responses, invoke scorn and discipline. We learn to override our emotional responses early in life, but we have emotions for a reason, and often they carry a lot of wisdom.

 

We learned to override our emotional aversion to school, which made it easier to override our emotional aversion to work. Pretty soon we start to recognize the thump of our heart, as it hits the bottom of a pit of despair, as the call of duty, and we do what we’re supposed to. We learn to expect life to suck. We rationalize it. We invent ethical codes and religions around it. We say it builds character, but have you looked around lately? I see more shallow, greedy, status conscious, small-minded idiots every day, and we here in the US work harder than anyone in the developed world. Is that the kind of character we need more of?

 

We learn how to pretend we like it, saying we love our job, doing extra work and kissing ass to prove it. We learn how to cope with life as a wage slave, while our desires, hopes and dreams turn to bitter resentment. After a while, when your emotions finally realize that you’ll never to listen to them, it all turns to depression. Depression sells pharmaceutical drugs like no other condition on Earth. If you have it, its why you can’t afford to be without health insurance. If you don’t have it, its why you can’t afford health insurance.

 

Depression, refers to the complete loss of enthusiasm for life. You may think emotions are inconvenient, silly, or irrelevant, but when your emotions give up on you, nothing else matters. Your emotions are smarter than they look, but they deserve close scrutiny. If your emotions are telling you to buy something, chances are they are being manipulated.

 

After almost 100 years of subliminal manipulation of our emotions through advertizing and mass media, we often find our emotions working at cross-purposes with our best interests. The 1% uses your emotions against you through a campaign of very sophisticated psychological warfare, carried out through advertizing and media. As a result, the more media you consume, the more inadequate you feel, the more needy you feel, and the more stuff you want.

 

Watching TV instantly turns you into the ugliest, poorest and dullest person in the room, by filling the room with sexy, witty, well-dressed people who completely ignore you. Don’t invite them into your home! Even though they seem to ignore you, everything they say and do is designed to take advantage of you, and use your emotions against you.

 

Not only has the field of psychology completely failed to help the millions of people who suffer from serious mental illness, they have induced mental illness in millions more by collaborating with business to manipulate buying, voting, driving, smoking, or any other kind of behavior they choose. Psychology is not about understanding the mind, psychology is the study of behavior, and how to manipulate it. Right now, thousands of college educated psychologists, with mortgages and student loans to pay off, are telling their bosses how much they love their job, and really knocking themselves out to find new ways to manipulate your behavior, by using your emotions against you.

 

While real rich, snooty obnoxious people might make snide comments about you while they drink all your booze and grind their cigarette butts into your carpet, they wouldn’t have an army of mad scientists orchestrating every word and movement purely for the purpose of taking advantage of you. It really pays dividends in your sanity to strictly limit your exposure to mass media, because that’s how the 1% turns your emotions against you, and you need your emotions on your side.

 

Its worth examining your emotions, because sometimes they well up from the very fiber of your being, and that emotion always has your best interest at heart. Your heart instinctively knows what’s best for you, and it will tell you so. On the other hand, if your heart’s not in it, get your body, mind, time and money out of it as well, and quit telling yourself how much you love it. Remember “the pursuit of happiness”? You will not find happiness by plunging yourself headlong into misery, day in and day out, no matter how much it pays, how proud it makes your parents, or how secure it makes you feel.

 

While you read On The Money; Economic advice for the 99%, pay attention to how your heart reacts to the ideas in this column. If you hear that little voice inside you say “Yes!”, “Right On!”, or even “That’d be nice.” when you read the ideas I present here, it’s because these ideas resonate with who we are as human beings, and our hearts remember what it was like to have meaningful, satisfying lives, instead of working ourselves to death for meaningless stuff.

 

In On The Money; Economic Advice for the 99%, I show you how to break out of those destructive habits that define our sick culture, and help you reclaim your life, your time, your dignity and your humanity, the things that really matter in life. On The Money;Economic Advice for the 99% represents a completely original and revolutionary approach to personal economics that challenges conventional thinking in a way that reveals the deceit, cruelty, and violence of our current economic system, and shows you how to turn the tables on the 1%.

 

So, read this column with an open heart, and realize that economics is bigger than money, its bigger than goods and services, its bigger than “the economy”, in fact. Economics is about how we live, how we exchange goods and services, and our impact on the environment, but economics is also about how we think and feel about our lives, and those things matter a hell of a lot more in life than the GDP, the unemployment rate, or the movements of any stock index. There’s a view of emotions in economics that’s On The Money.

On The Money, Book Learnin’

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

Book Learnin’

 

Marilyn Monroe once said, to someone looking for a suggestion as to what to get her for her birthday, said something to the effect of “Whatever you do, don’t get me A BOOK. I already have A BOOK.”

Bookish intellectuals scoff at such talk. They’ve read hundreds, if not thousands of books, and spent countless hours browsing the stacks at dozens of libraries. Why?

 

I doubt Marilyn Monroe ever stepped inside a library, but I’ll bet she knew more about men than most intellectuals, because she spent her life surrounded by them. On the other hand, too many people seek refuge from life in books, living vicariously through the thoughts of others. This is neither healthy nor enlightening.

 

Still others consider the stack of books they’ve read a hard earned achievement, looking down at the rest of us from a high plateau of bound paper. They didn’t seek refuge from life in books, no they sacrificed their lives to acquire this knowledge, and to scale that plateau. So, they deserve to look down on the rest of us from that high place.

 

Those folks live on shaky ground, and deep down, they’re nervous about it. All written knowledge begins to crumble almost as soon as its written, but one revolutionary new idea can bring the whole intellectual construct crashing down into a heap of quaint, arcane rubble. Even though it has happened dozens of times in our history, that still doesn’t stop people from wasting their time studying these quaint arcane writings.

 

That’s because we’re really not that bright as a species. We’re pretty good with our hands. We’re quite persistent, and we can tell a good story, but we really have no more of an idea how the world works than say a baboon or even a chipmunk.

 

We’d like to believe we know how the world works, and some of those plateau-standers might convince other people that they know more than a chipmunk, but they’re just full of bunk, and the people who believe them are simply more gullible than your average rodent. Lots of creatures know how to bamboozle their own kind, nothing unique there.

 

Some people even believe that we stand at the verge of a great moment of human evolution. That we are evolving into god-like creatures capable of engineering a better world for all of us. They believe that “civilized” humans will, very shortly, through the accelerating scientific, technological, and communication revolution, achieve world peace, a sustainable way of life, equality and justice for all.

 

It sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Maybe not as stupid as believing in some “Saviour” who’s supposed to come down from the heavens to rescue us from ourselves, but almost as stupid. If you buy into either of those stories, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

 

The fact that either of these stories attract so many believers is living proof that, as I said before, we are not that bright, as a species. A little brighter than chimps, sure, but probably not as bright as dolphins, who are at least smart enough to know better than to try to engineer a better ocean. Only fools and lunatics dream of a better world. The rest of us couldn’t possibly imagine such a place.

 

Unfortunately, the lunatics have been running the show, for quite some time now. So, we all have plenty of craziness to take refuge from, and stacks and stacks of lunacy to lose themselves in. That still doesn’t make it a good idea. Nor does it mean we are getting smarter as a species.

 

Quite the contrary, I fear. The more time we spend in the grossly oversimplified world of other people’s ideas, the less time we spend in the incomprehensibly rich, real world, from which all true knowledge flows. So, we increasingly inhabit a simplified, engineered world full of artificial constructs that dull, rather than stimulate the mind. After all, if the real world is what you want to know about, the real world is what you should study. The world is its own teacher.

New College Courses HSU should Offer

New College Courses HSU Should Offer

Since Humboldt State University has dropped its nursing program, perhaps the only program HSU offers in which students can confidently expect to find good paying jobs after graduation, they really should offer these courses to better prepare the rest of HSU’s students for the challenges of the real world:

 

Espresso Machine Operation and Maintenance All liberal arts students should know at least the basics of how to use and maintain the tools of the trade.

 

Educational Economic Strategy Default or defer? How to handle your student loans. You got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. Know when to take the installment plan and know when to change your name and move to another state.

 

Consumer Choice Adviser Training Course analyzes the economic and ecological impacts of the difference between paper or plastic shopping bags, as well as advice on when to shut up about it, when you ask: “Paper or plastic?” a question you will ask many times in your career.

 

Techonomics Understanding why Mark Zuckerburg made 10 billion from Facebook, and Rupert Murdoch lost 500 million on myspace, even though no one pays a cent for either service, but more importantly, why you will mostly spend money online rather than make it.

 

Immediate Architecture Learn to construct a comfortable livable space from a refrigerator box or a few yards of plastic sheeting. This is architecture to serve your immediate needs. At least something in your college education should.

ROTCPTSD Sure, joining the military gave you the money for college, but PTSD sure makes it hard to study, doesn’t it? Taking this class about a dozen times just might help the world start to make sense again.

 

Cannabis Cultivation This class should be part of the core curriculum for all majors since, regardless of major, most HSU student eventually find jobs in this field.

 

Exotic Dance While the few remaining ballet troupes in the U.S. struggle to sell enough tickets to survive, thousands of exotic dance clubs in every state in the union offer well paying jobs to qualified exotic dancers.

 

Inter-generational Conflict Management This course will give you the tools you need to get along with your parents well enough that you can tolerate living under the same roof until they croak.

 

With the addition of these few courses, HSU could dramatically improve the chances of survival and prosperity in the real world, for their remaining students.

On The Money, Public Education

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Public Education

As schools all over America hand out diplomas to this year’s crop of graduates, it behooves us to consider the rising cost of education, and ask ourselves if its still worth it. As a nation, we spend a lot on schools. Our recipe of making K-12 education “mandatory” and birth control “optional” insures that we will continue to spend money on schools for the foreseeable future.

 But why? While the economy plows forward, our educational system remains bemired in the ideals of past centuries. What do “the three Rs” have to do with life in the information age? In these IMing, video conferencing, phone-centric times, we might as well teach our kids Latin and Morse code as waste their time with grammar and spelling.

 Frankly, you can skip reading all together if you ask me. Look, if it was worth reading, somebody will make a movie. Most kids who read a lot, do so because of early childhood trauma, and they keep at it out of fear of bullying, usually ending up in thick glasses at an early age. So long as childhood remains traumatic, and full of bullies, some kids will read. While a first-class education system remains a pipe dream, a childhood full of trauma and bullies is a promise to our kids we can keep.

 Do we need to teach arithmetic anymore, or shouldn’t we instead teach bar-code scanning techniques? Should we make children memorize the multiplication tables? Instead, I say, teach them to memorize a 13 digit number the first time they hear it.

What else do we teach in school? History? If kids ever figure this one out they’ll never forgive us. So, why help them? Science? People always argue about this. Some believe the Bible. Some believe Darwin. Choose your myth and sic your dogma on the school board. Do we really need to inflict this controversy on our kids? You dissected a frog in school. How much does that help you today?

What about Shop or Home-EC.? If you’ve got a shop, or a home, you’ve made it in today’s economy. We need to teach our kids how to live in their cars, or out of a backpack, if we want to prepare them for the real world.

As far as I can see, we only teach two valuable skills in today’s public schools:

1. How to “go through the motions” with as little effort as possible.

2. How to “self-medicate”

These skills helped us enormously back in the days when people had regular jobs. Back then, if you didn’t know how to shuffle through an eight-hour shift on auto-pilot, and drown the memory of it in alcohol, you’d probably go postal, eventually.

These days, jobs demand more of us, don’t last as long, and fewer of us have them. Better that kids get the hang of working back to back 24 hr shifts. If you must educate children, teach them a whole year’s curriculum in three months of 18 hr days. Then give them 9 mo off to forget everything they learned. That way their education will reflect the reality of the workplace.

If you really want to prepare them for the real world, charge them $1,000 to see the school nurse, plus $100 for the band-aid she put on a scraped knee, and let a collection agency hound them day and night for the money.

If our kids graduated from public school knowing how to scan bar codes, live comfortably in their car and avoid debt collectors, we would have successfully prepared them for life in our modern world. Instead we graduate class after class of dull-minded drunks, more well suited to an endless 9 to 5 grind that just doesn’t exist anymore.

Test scores and literacy rates be damned, if we’re going to pay for public schools, they should prepare students for the challenges of the real world, not blindly pursue some outdated, unobtainable ideal of a “classical education”. There’s a view of our public school system that”s On The Money