We know from talking to many of you that this is your "don't miss" place in the Digest, so we
endeavor to make it fun and informative for you every month. As I sit in this little room and write
up these personal notes, I recall a little ditty from the 22 August 2002 issue of my London
Review of Books that appeared in an essay by Thomas Jones:
"Well you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started in your little room"
Jones used it to point out among other things that the "Harry Potter" author, J. K. Rowling, is
having a little room built in her huge mansion in Edinburgh in order to have a place to write in
that she feels comfortable. This verse speaks about how our desire for bigger and better things sometimes outstripping our need for them. My mom used to say it this way when talking about
food, "Your eyes are bigger than your mouth."
Into this little room last month came a notice that my first Social Security check was deposited in
the bank by automatic deposit. We've come a long way from where I used to have to stand in line
every Friday evening to deposit my paycheck in the Bank of America in Anaheim. [Speaking of
Anaheim, they are now champions of the world of baseball, their Angels are! If the Angels can
get to the top, undoubtedly the Saints can, also!]
Back to my SS check: it's nice to begin to receive
back the money that was taken out of my check in FICA deductions without my permission over
the years with interest. How much interest you ask? Estimates are about -1.5% interest for money
the average person puts into Social Security. Imagine a nation of fools willing to deposit money for long-term investment in a bank that guaranteed to take away 1.5% of the money each month and you have the United States of America.
In case you didn't know how SS works, it's not an investment, but a pyramid
scheme, designed after the innovator Ponzi's original "investment" scheme in the 1920s. People
send him money each month and he send dividends using the money new investors paid him.
That's how SS works, doesn't it? Ponzi did nothing to make money, he simply paid off older
investors using the funds of the newer ones. The federal bureaucracy got wind of what Ponzi was
doing and passed a law making it illegal for anyone to run a pyramid scheme. Then it used
Ponzi's idea to create the so-called Social Security, which is therefore, by its own words, a
pyramid scheme! The money you have extracted from your paycheck each month goes, not into
an investment which would earn you dividends, but instead it goes to pay those who, like me,
paid into the same scheme earlier. There are three distinct differences in Ponzi's scheme and the
Social Security scheme.
1.) Participation was voluntary.
2.) Everyone was paid more than they put into it. (Until the feds shut him down.)
3.) Ponzi had a proprietary interest in keeping his customers happy.
[As you read these, I hope you recalled that 1.) SS is not voluntary, 2.) everyone is paid
less than they put into it, and 3.) every employee of the SS Administration gets paid whether or
not a customer is happy or not because none of them have a proprietary interest in keeping the
customer happy. Plus, the most important point of all: Ponzi never gets credit or gratitude for his
original idea, up until now.]
We have a President in 2002 with the good sense to deconstruct this outrageous pyramid
scheme by beginning the process of turning it into an investment scheme. Take a look at who is
raising the biggest stink about this conversion and remember what RWE said about people
above, they "seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."
Any candidate for office who ridicules a president who wants to replace a pyramid scheme with a sensible investment plan is
confessing that they wish to get into office to scam the American people even more than we are
already being scammed every day that Congress is in session. If you vote, remember that as you
select whom to represent you.
Left over from September: I attended an Ortho-Bionomy seminar headed by Richard
Valasek at Blue Cliff Massage School in Metairie put on by local practitioner and trainer Peggy
Scott. Richard began the weekend seminar on Friday with Phase 7 training, which can be used
for remote healing, i.e., without actually touching the person. This was reserved by Arthur Pauls
for advanced students, but Richard likes to teach it to beginners. Here's what happened to me
after the weekend to confirm that I had learned Phase 7:
On the way home one night, as my wife, Del, and I were approaching a
stoplight, Del mentioned that her sinuses were bothering her quite a bit and I looked over to her and wished that I stop right there and touch her to fix her sinuses. Since the traffic made that impossible, I did a Phase 7 maneuver on her sinuses. Never said anything about it to her, as I didn't want to influence her opinion about whether what I did worked. Later when we got home, she told me, "That work you did on my sinuses at the light
worked. They're better now." I was incredulous and asked her what she
meant, and she replied, "You know what I'm talking about. I felt them clear up when you looked over at me."
One of the toughest jobs I've ever had was doing the eulogy for my brother David. After I
spoke for my mother's funeral a couple of years ago, David had said, "Whew! I don't think I
could have ever done that!" This let me know that he would have liked me to speak at his
funeral. I asked his son Randy who arranged with Fr. Bok for me to speak about David before his
homily. After the eulogy, as I returned to my pew, a little old lady in a wheelchair shone her
bright eyes at me and gave me a thumb's up signal. Several other people made comments on how
they enjoyed the eulogy. Yvette, my youngest daughter, said simply, "I'm proud of you." My
cousin's husband gave me the greatest tribute when he said, "If you outlive me, I want you to do
my eulogy." But the one who described best what I attempted to do was my oldest daughter
Maureen when she told me the next day, "You took me through the whole gamut of emotions as
you gave the eulogy. By the end I was ready to say goodbye to David and finish my grieving for
him."
September 29 is the birthday of my father, Hilman Joseph Matherne, who just turned 85. It is also one of the
four cardinal or hinge points of the calendar, Michaelmas, when we celebrate the swinging into
Autumn. This is the feast day of Micha-el, the Archangel, whose job is to help humankind bring
the forces of darkness into submission. This is symbolized by his having the dragon under his heel and
his sword glinting as he prepares to dispatch the dragon into oblivion. The other feasts are
Christmas (Winter), Easter (Spring), and St. John's Tide (Summer).
My long-time friend,
Bradford Riley sent me this poem for Michaelmas which I would like to share with you:
Surviving the Intellectual Soul by Bradford Riley
Prithee that into Autumn's misty days,
I may carry Light and Micha-el's ways.
That though the light grows short without
The Living Light will cast no doubt:
That we in living, waking, seeing,
Build on Loving Fission, Joyful Freeing.
While terrible the thoughts of Men
Melt like acid what Angels send,
Mocking and scorning where oneness descends,
Thinking, like Shrapnel, shreds the heart it rends,
Bringing the Intellectual Soul from shattered glass
To the foal that Christ trailed behind the ass.
Bringing His New Cosmos while riding on the old,
Bringing New thinking from fallen Gold.
Bringing New Nature from the fallen Pan,
Bringing New Sun to light the path of Man.
We had a lot of visitors around the first week of
October, but none caused the stir that the two visitors from
the South, Isidore and Lili, did. Two mid-week hurricanes
caused folks to close schools, evacuate, and tremble for two
weeks in a row. We stayed home. Only problem we had was
our papaya tree, our avocado trees, and an Lombardy Poplar
tree blew over due to the heavy rain that softened the
ground around their roots. Made it easy to straightened
them up again after the wind stopped. Isidore trimmed all
the dead branches from our palm tree out front and saved
me the effort of cutting them.
There were three projects I undertook this month.
The first was baking some Burkhardt Bread. [2007 RJM NOTE: This recipe became the very first of my monthly recipes, a tradition which continues to this day.]
My second project was upgrading my old 20" CRT monitor to two 15" Flat Screen Monitors in
Portrait mode. This creates two vertically oriented writing screens that allow me to do my job
much more proficiently. See the resulting desktop for yourself at:
http://www.doyletics.com/dualdesk.gif
In this example, I have displayed on left an email window and on the right a website review.
There was a third project, one that I had been planning for a year or more. I have using a mulch
bed and creating this wonderful black compost for over 12 years here at Timberlane, and decided that it was time to convert
it into a Biodynamic Mulch bed. I ordered the special preparations on-line
and followed the instructions for adding them to my mulch bed. The
preparations were made in accordance with the instructions by Rudolf Steiner
which are designed to enliven the soil, provide nutrients to the soil, and
combat harmful plant diseases. To go from organic gardening to Biodynamic
gardening, these mulch preparations are a necessary step. With the use of this treated compost, one needs no additional fertilizers. I'll let you know how this works out in a year or so. Here's the six preparations:
#502 Yarrow
#503 Chamomile
#504 Stinging Nettle
#505 Oak Bark
#506 Dandelion
#507 Valerian Solution
Here's the basic process I followed, according to the instructions:
Made six holes in a circular pattern in the mulch, placed the BD preps into the six holes. The
Valerian solution was added to a gallon of rain water and half of that went into the middle hole.
Covered the holes and then sprayed the rest of the Valerian solution over the pile. Actually just
half of the solution. I cut the grass and placed two large bags of mulch over the bed and sprayed
the rest of the solution over it.
When you have sixteen grandkids and one great-grandkid as we do, any month will bring one or two birthdays. We had three this month, our two-year-olds, Collin and Benjamin, and our 16-yr-old, Chris. Ben is the great-grandson, Collin the grandson. Ben is the great-grandson,
Collin the grandson. For Collin's party the big event was the Baton Rouge East Side Fire Engine that showed up with sirens blaring and lights flaring. Here's a photo of Collin in his fireman's hat operating the
fire truck while his dad, John, holds him:
http://www.doyletics.com/collin2y.jpg
And here's a photo of Benjamin at his 2-yr-old birthday party in
Metaire. He is shown at the left opening his present from his
Great-Grandpa.
One more Grandpa event for the month involved my first trip to the
Belle Chasse Naval Air Station for a Blue Angels Air Show. We live
about four air miles from the base, so I get to watch them doing their
acrobats from the east side of Timberlane, sometimes from my
PC workstation, which has large windows to each side of it looking
to the East. My oldest grandson, Chris, accompanied me. At
right is a photo of him strapped into the P-51 Mustang WWII
fighter plane simulator. In this device, experienced doing 360
degree rollovers. Still would like to become a pilot.
On the sports side, the New Orleans Saints and the LSU Tigers are both 6-2 heading into the second part of their season. And I watched the inaugural NBA game of the New Orleans Hornets as they grandly whipped the Utah Jazz 100-75 to a standing ovation at the end of the game. Post season venues for each of these three teams seem likely as they are all three of
championship caliber.
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The best source at the best price is to order your copies on-line is from the publisher Random House/Xlibris's website above.