Lesson Learned

  When I first published SWINDLED, and was beginning to get some recognition, I was approached by a well-known author.  This well-known author was actually a key component in my economic re-education, and he had an idea.  Several of us had written books along a similar theme, and he thought it would be mutually beneficial if we reviewed and promoted each other’s books.  I agreed , and a couple of other people agreed.  We all exchanged copies, virtual and otherwise of each other’s work.

  I was pretty excited to be working with and receiving help from somebody who I looked up to in certain areas. I told this story to a friend of mine and she warned me not to get my hopes up. She said that when she had first started out she had been similarly solicited, and in the middle of her flattery of being noticed and taken seriously, she agreed to a great deal of work that was never reciprocated.  She reminded me that the author in particular that had arranged this deal was an atheist with some pretty horrible opinions on the issue of abortion.  Her parting advice on this was “I hope it works out, but remember that he isn’t in the business of helping you, he’s in the business of selling books, and if you help him do that, he’ll use it.”

  Regardless of her advice, I took my end of the commitment very seriously, and I  plowed into the books. I took notes, and within a few days began compiling my review.  I tried to be honest, but fair. I finished all the reviews within weeks of receiving the books, and posted them everywhere I could. I sent links to the reviews to the other authors, and got busy with the rest of my life.

  As of the time of this writing, I am the only one of that group to keep their commitment.  A few months went by and I contacted the   ‘idea man’ for this venture and tried to gently remind him of what the arrangement had been. He assured me that his review of my work was coming out any day now.  I am still waiting.  I spoke to one of the other authors over the phone and he told me that he didn’t know if he would actually get around to what he had committed to. He apologized in advance if it didn’t happen.

  So what are the lessons here?  One lesson is that you should do the right thing, and keep your commitments not because of what it will earn you in return, but because it is simply the right thing to do. I cannot control the actions or work habit of anyone else, and if they  entered into a deal with no intent on following through, that is a reflection on their character, not mine.  This famous author continues to write and lecture, receiving accolades for his smartness. At the end of the day, I got a couple of free books out of it, and an invaluable education.

 I also reaffirmed within myself that if I ever make it ‘big’, I’m going to bring as many people with me as a I can. My inspiration from this is director Sam Raimi who made movies and let all his friends be in them, plus his car. Danny Dileo did the same thing. Make a note of this; the time to be nice to me is now.

  This incident confirmed yet again that Mrs. Becky Akers, in addition to being a great writer with amazing hair, probably gets migraines from being so brilliant.

Don Henley May Have Been on to Something

  I don't  make a regular habit of watching broadcast television, for a variety of reasons.  It's a huge time-sponge for starters, and then there are concerns about content, obviously. I especially avoid  news reports though.
  Does anyone else think  its a  little  psychotic the way  television news is delivered?  It's all soft lights and  exciting theme  music and color  coordinated ties and teleprompters. Its so  much pageantry and theatre over substance as to stagger the imagination, and the easiest way to see it is to abstain from it for a length of time, and then watch a broadcast.  If you stay away from the shiny box for a while, and then  take a peek, you'll begin to understand why they call it 'programming'.
  If you flip through the channel;s during news time you'll see the  exact same stories covered in the exact same  order with the roughly the same amount of time given to each and sometimes  all of these independently talking heads will all use the same  buzzwords and catchphrases, as if they are issued from on high by some  TV news fatwah.  If you then listen to the conversations of people who  get their news this way, you'll hear them repeat these  viewpoints and phrases in parrot-like fashion with no thought as to what they are saying and no  conscious realization that they  were spoon-fed that opinion.
  Every story covered is  in its own little self-contained pre-packaged universe. That's how the news anchor can report on tornado deaths in Oklahoma with a  sad look on his  face and literally seconds later turn to another  camera,  put on a smile and talk about how baby pandas were  born at the  local zoo.  Real people are incapable of compartmentalizing all the  happenings in their life that neatly, that succinctly, but broadcasters do it for a living, and in doing so they present to you a neat compartmentalized, emotional vapid reality that has no bearing on your day to day life. They regularly  spin you half-told tales about people you will never meet. The  goings on and bed-hoppings of  celebrities (whose only skills are their  physical attractiveness and their ability to pretend to be somebody else all day) are treated as if they matter.They mention tragedies that not only have nothing to do with you, but that you are incapable of affecting one way or the other.. They manipulate your emotions  with close up shots of grieving widows and burned out  school houses.  They adopt a worldview and narrative about an event  and  all reporting is filtered through that worldview and   edited to fit the narrative. By doing this , they crowd out valuable brain space and trick you into investing emotional capital in all the wrong places. Filling your head with trivia and banality,  they hope to keep you from thinking too much or looking too closely at what's behind the window dressing, My question is always not 'what did they say?' but rather 'what are they not telling us?'
 "Hey, your government has  declared for itself the ability to kill you without a trial, but look, Angeline Jolie had a double mastectomy! Isn't she brave? Isn't she pretty?  And now  a word from our sponsors."
  Our local news has real  problems with the English language.  During a recent tragedy they reported that  'approximately 15 were confirmed dead'. In my mind, the words 'approximately' and 'confirmed' sort of cancel each other out. How many dead are there?  Are there 'approximately' 15 or  have you confirmed that there are 15?  Doesn't matter, we've got an ad for  Pop-tarts to show you. 'Approximately 15' could be as  high as 20 or as low as 12. But let's not think about that, let's move on to who wore the  most low-cut dress to the Oscars.
  During the 2012 presidential campaign, word came from the fatwah that Ron Paul could not win. The reasons  given were never reasons of substance, to simply declare him unelectable was enough. Step one is to declare his defeat and then step  two was to ensure it by ignoring him and marginalizing his support. Over and over again durng the campaign people were told things like "He's too old", or "he's too extreme" or "He can't possibly win". Both  Democrats and Republicans joined in this chorus until eventually the man on the street would say to you "He too old, he's too extreme, and besides, he can't possibly win".  The shiny box told you that supporting him was  'throwing your vote away', and pushed the idea of 'the lesser of two evils'.  Thousands of people gathered to hear him speak  even as  'conservative' Fox News   reported the decline of his campaign. You see, truth is secondary to the agenda. The agenda is  to keep you rooted on your couch and give you just  enough information to make you think youre informed.  Give you a few talking points that you can recite if the topic comes up around the water cooler, and let's move on to the advertising.
  The advertising's whole point ( and to be honest, I find marketing fascinating) is to make you discontent with what you have, or what you are, and then propose their product or service as a solution. The point is to emotional  manipulate you in order to provoke a controlled response. Too fat? We can fix that.  Old car?  We can fix that.  Never mind that your husbnad   still adores you and thinks you're all that, the shiny box  says you're fat, and here's how you fix it.  Never mind that by keeping your current car ( which runs)you can stay out of debt. we need you to be in debt, we need you to live beyond your means. On and on and on drones the shiny box, 24 hours a day 7 days a week , talking when there is nothing more to say, and slowly  liquiifying your brain.
  Stay with us, the shiny box says. TV time is family time. Oh look, a train wreck in Nebraska, and some celbrity was arrested for driving drunk. Look at those scary peopll with their  AR-15's. They shouldn't have those guns, should they? After all, you don't need an AR-15, do you?  Wouldn't some popcorn be good  right now?  Only cultists homeschool their kids. Police are heroes.Hours slip away, precious precious time, and still the box never stops pumping out nonesense.
  But hey, people love dirty laundry, right?
 
 

A Perspective on Wealth

(Note:  Most of the numbers on this post were done a few years back for a Sunday School class I was teaching. I simply updated the  prices, and marveled within myself as to how much  the price of things had gone up.  If anyone has better numbers I would love to see them.)

There is a lot of talk about wealth, and money, and people appear to be as obsessed with  it as they always have been. Forbes magazine prints a compendium of wealth  every year in which  it names the  most wealthiest people on earth, and their net worth.  I personally think their list is incomplete, but that's a  topic for another day.  Empires rise and fall and  today's hot name will be tomorrow's old news.The wealth  most people on the Forbes list enjoy is  ,in the grand scheme of history, small potatoes.
  In the book of Exodus, commands and instructions were given in regards to the construction of the Tabernacle.  It was to  be  a portable, or at least a de-constructable, structure that would be assembled, broken down and reassembled as the children of Israel moved from  place to place.  It would be the  centerpiece and focal point of the  Jewish  religion until the construction of Solomon's Temple several centuries later.
  The materials assembled for the Tabernacle are described in detail in Exodus 35-38 and summarized in Exodus 38:21-30.  The total  quantity of gold collected was approximately  one ton; of silver 3/4 tons, and of bronze 2 1/2 tons. At todays prices gold is  approximately $1376.50 an ounce (compared to $500 in the original version of this).  Silver is currently priced at $22.46 an ounce ($12 originally) and brass is trading at  33 cents an ounce.
  The gold used in the Tabernacle winds up costing a little over $22,000 a pound or $44,000,000  a ton.  The silver  comes in at a paltry $459 a pound or $918,000 a ton. The brass is so cheap is almost seems like a waste to do the math, but I really like math ( no calculator, and I show all my work), so here we go; 33 cents an ounce  is 10, 560 bucks for a ton.  Now there's only a ton of gold in the Tabernacle,  3/4 of a ton of silver, and 2 1/2 tons of brass. The cost, just in raw metals, laying aside the historical or spiritual  significance of the  items themselves, looks something like this:

$ 44,000,000 in gold
$      688,000 in silver
$        26,400 in brass
$ 44, 714,400 in materials

   It's hard to find some basis of comparison, since  there is nothing like it in our modern world. Anything you might hope to compare it to turns out to be a permanent structure, but that just makes the  comparison more remarkable. For example, thee Tabernacle cost more in  raw materials alone than the total  cost of  the Empire State building in the 1920's, including the labor and the property it sits on ( just over 40 million). That wealth was  held by a group of  former slaves on the way to their  homeland, and had apparently been gathered up as they were leaving Egypt when the Egyptians 'loaned' them some jewelry.  It does make one wonder how much wealth was sitting in Egypt at the time, if they could  loan a bunch of slaves the equivalent of  $44 million.

  Several centuries later, a king arose in Jerusalem named Solomon.  His accomplishments really are  almost inconceivable, and  could be delved into in great detail, but I'm going to zero in on one aspect of his accomplishments; his income. The Forbes list tends to focus on the net worth of the individuals listed, which is a  perfectly reasonable standard to go by, but for the purposes of this article, I'm going to discuss income.  Solomon had an  unspeakable net worth , with  houses and cities and servants and 40 thousand horse stalls and  12,000 horsemen.  He had a house  built decked with precious  jewels and  gold ornaments on the walls.Solomon gave  gifts to allies of his in other kingdoms consisting of thousands of measures of wheat and oil a year,but aside from all that, how much money did the man bring in every year? And how does it compare to  the  economic titans of today?
  He received a one-time gift from the king of Tyre  that was 120 talents of gold. He received a one-time contribution from Ophir that was 420 talents of gold. He was regularly showered with  gifts of ivory and peacocks and apes and servants from other kingdoms, but I'm not going to count any of that.  I really don't want to try  and figure out the going rate of ivory and peacocks; you'll simply have to forgive me. I am simply  going to look at the scriptural account of his annual income, which is listed as 666 talents of gold.
  Now a talent  differs depending on who you read, and what country, and what  time period.  the  numbers  run as high as 130 lbs to a talent I'm gong to use the  lowest number I  could find which  is  57 lbs of gold for one talent. so 666 talents of gold winds up being 37,982 POUNDS of gold, with a modern value of $835,604,000 a year.
  Bill Gates of Microsoft , although no longer possessing the  title of 'world's richest man' (a title  probably not worth the hassle and scrutiny) is still the  icon of American wealth, so we will  use his listed annual income of roughly $30,000,000.  Now it beats digging ditches for a living, but honestly?  Old King Solomon makes Bill Gates look like somebody living under a bridge.  I had read somewhere once ( and I can't find it now) that  1/4 of the wealth in the world at the time  flowed through Israel when Solomon was on the throne. Yet according to Jesus Christ, the lilies of the field are better clothed than he was.Just a  bit of perspective. Do with it what you will.