About Your $3.16 a Day Healthcare Insurance Plan...

About your "affordable" healthcare coverage...better read the fine print.

I recently received the good news via an advert that I can buy healthcare insurance for as little as $3.16 a day. Wow, that's only $95 a month. Since my wife and I are paying $1,136 a month for stripped-down, minimal coverage with one of the nation's non-profit care providers, imagine my delight at this revelation.

I know from friends that biopsies can cost $70,000 (each, of course) and a few days in the hospital (no, not intensive care) can easily cost $120,000, so the news that I can have access to all this wonderfully, insanely costly medical care for less than $100 a month is almost too good to be true. Wow, this Affordable Care Act (ACA) a.k.a. Obamacare is already working!

The advert doesn't provide any details on restrictions and exclusions, so I have taken the liberty of providing some typical fine print:

Thank you for your interest in MirageCare, our low-cost healthcare plan.This low-cost plan is only available to those meeting these qualifications. You must:

1. Be between the ages of 22 and 24
2. Have a BMI (body mass index) of 22 or lower
3. Be a celibate non-smoker, non-drinker, non-driver
4. Be able to pass the Armed Forces Fitness Exam
5. Have no pre-existing health conditions

Examples of pre-existing conditions include:

1. Coughing. If you have coughed for any reason in the past five years, you are precluded from coverage, as you obviously have a pre-existing lung condition.
2. Racing heart. If your heart has ever raced for any reason other than vigorous exercise, coverage is not available to you.
3. If you have exercised vigorously, you are excluded from coverage because you've obviously already worn out your heart, knees, hips, etc.
4. Felt discouraged or blue. Pre-existing psychiatric conditions preclude coverage.
5. Experienced pain. Regardless of the nature of the pain, the causes are all pre-existing conditions. Coverage denied.

Restrictions: MirageCare has a number of restrictions on what treatments and conditions are covered.

1. Injuries resulting from accidents are not covered. Check your workers compensation coverage if you are employed; if you are unemployed, you qualify for Medicaid.
2. Any treatment provided by a hospital that could have been performed at a clinic across the border for $50 is excluded.
3. Emergency care that could have been avoided with common-sense measures are excluded. For example, if you suffer a heart attack that could have been avoided by jogging two hours a day and avoiding jelly doughnuts, emergency care is excluded.

Co-payments: All treatment requires a co-payment. The co-pay schedule is as follows:

1. For all care that costs us less than $100, the co-pay is $100.
2. We pay 80% of the cost of care that we ascertain is fair and reasonable. You pay 20% of all costs and everything above and beyond what we ascertain is fair and reasonable.
For example, if your MRI and other tests cost $10,000, we pay 80% what we ascertain is fair and reasonable, i.e. $1,000. In this case, we pay $800 and you pay $9,200--unless we ascertain the tests are related to your pre-existing conditions, in which case our share is $0.
3. You must pay the full cost of treatment and we will reimburse you in 6 to 9 months if we cannot find any exclusions or restrictions. We may also withhold payment for other reasons; please review pages 316 - 1,761 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for details.

Preventative care is free: Preventative care is defined as visiting our website where you can read all the guidelines for healthy living that you already know but ignore because they're bothersome.

Alternative plans: if you do not qualify for MirageCare, we have other plans starting at only $31.60 per day, per person--less than $4,000 for a family of four. We are proud to offer plans that qualify for $2,000 annual subsidies from the Federal government under ObamaCare. This drops the cost of your family plan from $46,000 a year to only $44,000--a real bargain in today's healthcare.

Restrictions apply, of course, because we're running a business here, Bucko.

More on this topic:

America's Hidden 8% VAT: Sickcare (May 10, 2012)

Can Chronic Ill-Health Bring Down Great Nations? Yes It Can, Yes It Will (November 23, 2011)

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Things are falling apart--that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart:

1. Debt and financialization
2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability
3. Diminishing returns
4. Centralization
5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economy

Complex systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable (DATA).

We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Kindle edition: $9.95       print edition: $24 on Amazon.com
To receive a 20% discount on the print edition: $19.20 (retail $24), follow the link, open a Createspace account and enter discount code SJRGPLAB. (This is the only way I can offer a discount.)

Thank you, Brian K. ($200), for yet another outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, Michael M. ($25), for your superbly generous contribution to this site --I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Is There Any Alternative to Wall Street, Globalization and the Savior State?

An alternative economic ecosystem based on local enterprise and building community resilience is slowly self-organizing.

Any attempt to separate Wall Street from the Savior State will necessarily be misleading, because Wall Street and the State are two sides of one coin. The State enforces cartel markets and profits and buys complicity of the masses with bread and circuses. Everything else is window-dressing.

Since capitalism has been on a trend of increasing globalization for the past 700 years, and the central state has been the ascendant model of global power for almost as long, Wall Street and the Savior State cannot be separated from globalization.

Is there any alternative to the Wall Street/Savior State model of consolidation and distribution of power and wealth? Yes, but it is still in its infancy. In general, alternative systems are expressions of two related trends: relocalization and resilience.

As I noted in Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, there is a deeply political aspect to resilience and complicity: in depending on the neofeudal financial sector and State, we lose our liberty and independence. Our sense of self-interest is distorted to the point we identify with Wall Street and the Central State as "being in our best interests."

Eric Stewart of www.codegreencommunity.com recently described his group's efforts to establish an alternative economic ecosystem based on local enterprise and building community resilience:

I agree with you assessment of where we are headed in our collective human journey, but prefer to imagine new choices as well and initiate them locally.

I refereed a lot of friends to your blog post about A Non-Corporate Model for the Localized Economy: Guilds (October 23, 2012) and really think those types of scenarios are far more interesting to think about. How can we use this remarkable tool the internet to develop a sustainable local economy that bypasses this entire roadblock of human journey?

I am very aware that we could if we motivated ourselves move trillions of dollars from Wall Street into main street businesses after reading a fellow named Michael Shuman. I had the opportunity to meet him last year at a small farms conference in Florida. 12 ways community can become economic resilient.

The YouTube is from my website www.codegreencommunity.com I founded to connect people locally where I live surrounding sustainability, permaculture, and transition towns. I bring my local area lots of information and we all communicate on a regular basis hundreds of us in our metropolitan area of Tampa bay, Florida.

Our YouTube channel Code Green Community lists over 100 videos of local people focused on transitioning our local economy in Tampa Bay area. In 2011 I went to take a permaculture design course and the bulk of the message of Permaculture is that the current system is designed with bad values and ethics.

If we can channel capital to new business with good value and ethics locally we could re-develop the local economy and move towards doing a lot more with a lot less using the new production technologies that are developing. We have a large amount of studying going on in Tampa regarding Nano-technology as well.

I'm 28 years old and when I first found out about the eventual downfall of this economy I was very sad and disappointed, but now years later I've grown into maturity of accepting its eventual demise. We have to get to the next level of using our intelligence and creativity to adapt to the situation and thrive from the shift of resources that is occurring and can occur.

I'm developing a local shift where we a group of us founded website calledSuncoast Co-op using a format that allows local growers to post available produce and we arrange weekly pick-ups from the growers. We have now 45+ people working at their homes doing cottage industry (a new Florida law allowing cottage industry passed recently) and gardening to grow food for the local community.

We are working with the local schools developing gardening programs and developing several community gardens in the New Port Richey area with dozens of people showing up to preform a covering of the ground of top soil to make victory gardens.

Peace Hall Garden (1/10th of an acre)

West Pasco Habitat for Humanity market garden (3 acres)

The vast majority of new media seems to be about "Covering" what is going on around the country. What I attempt to do in my new media is entice more new actions. What if we used the new media not only to educate but to get people to act. People need the self efficacy to stand up and say yes I can do that too, that is the essence of a movement.

The trick for any emerging new industries would be to link the networks of needs and wants and maximize them for customers using less resources via cooperation. With the ability to instantly communicate you can create your own just in time delivery system of goods we have been finding. With people living all over hubs and networks begin to form where the flows of materials get more efficient and useless resources overall as people pool together what they want.

We use lots of volunteers for our work and we recently are partnering with a Time bank. The time bank allows us to put a value on people's time they volunteer allowing us to entice them to show up more often. They can use that time bank and trade it with others in the network who are willing to trade their time for a time bank hour as well. Voluntary participation of the masses towards societal goal of community sufficiency.

What we are selling to our customers is that we are working towards these goals together and that we will cooperatively reap the benefits and profits of doing so. We ask others to become leaders and have autonomy to seek how our co-op can improve. Our customers end up becoming our growers and want to make goods themselves and turn around and sell them on our market. Then when their products get sold the online market allows them a credit which they can use to trade with other growers implementing an online barter system among several dozen people producing things. We try to bring up the want by all of us for another victory garden movement from the 1930's where we used to raise our own food.

We have it in our mythos to work together cooperatively we just have to re-affirm those old cultural backstories into the new future economy that people can imagine away from status quo together en mass.

The question I have for you to answer possibly in your blog is: How do we make going local viral? How do we use open source information of the internet to collaborate and all get something out of the endeavor with a successful human journey?

Thank you for sharing your excellent work, Eric. As for your question: it seems to me that as long as the Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Savior State is distributing "free money" to banks and corporations and to individuals via entitlements, the vast majority of recipients of this swag have little incentive to invest time or money in alternatives. Only when the Savior State fails will people be motivated to participate in alternatives.

Those establishing the initial models and organizational framework are performing an essential service: once centralized authority and money distribution begin to unravel, these models can be quickly adopted/adapted by thousands of communities.

The ability to share local resilient-community models globally is a game-changer. The neofeudal/neocolonial model of parasitic extraction by the Corporate State depends on the unimpeded flow of centralized capital. The alternative global system relies on the free movement of decentralized capital invested in practical models of opt-in, self-organizing locally resilient structures.

Here are some resources: there are some permaculture links in the right sidebar of the main blog page (www.oftwominds,com/blog.html) as well.

The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition(Michael Shuman)

Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity--A Community Resilience Guide (Michael Shuman)

Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It (Amy Cortese)

Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Woody Tasch)

From my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change:

This is the basic credo of liberation:

“I no longer care if the power centers of our society--the distant, fortified castles of our financial feudal system--are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance. I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power. I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy. I am liberated from self-destructive consumerist-State financialization and the delusion that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self-interests.”

As an example, nothing is more apolitical than food, according to the Status Quo. Yet this is entirely backward; nothing is more political than food, for it either sustains us and our freedom or it indentures us to disease and dependence on the Savior State’s immensely profitable sickcare system, i.e. the abomination known as “healthcare” that profits from chronic disease, not health.

There are no apolitical “personal choice” acts; there are only profoundly political acts of resistance or complicity. (pages 205-6)

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Things are falling apart--that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart:

1. Debt and financialization
2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability
3. Diminishing returns
4. Centralization
5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economy

Complex systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable (DATA).

We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Kindle edition: $9.95       print edition: $24 on Amazon.com
To receive a 20% discount on the print edition: $19.20 (retail $24), follow the link, open a Createspace account and enter discount code SJRGPLAB. (This is the only way I can offer a discount.)

Thank you, Kevin K. (excellent kitchen knife), for yet another outrageously generous and useful contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, William W. ($10), for your splendidly generous contribution to this site --I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Why Competition Between Global Players Is Heating Up

The game of depending on ever-expanding debt and exports for growth is over.

When the global financial pie is expanding, there's plenty of swag for everyone, so competition is limited and cooperation is rewarded. If we step back, what is most striking about China's emergence in the global economy over the past 30 years is how little actual conflict between global players this generated.

The reason is obvious: China's rapid development and integration into the global economy created vast markets and profits for every major global player: the U.S., the European Union, Japan, southeast Asia, Russia, the petro-states and commodity states.

The conflicts were by and large mere jostling and squabbling; even the supposedly important issues such as Chinese purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds, and China's subsequent trimming of its Treasury holdings, had little discernible effect on global trade or profits.

To fully understand why this period of cooperation is ending and competition is heating up, we need to understand two key dynamics of global capitalism. As I noted in Is This the Terminal Phase of Global Capitalism 1.0? (February 8, 2013), the return on capital invested in material production systemically declines as urbanization raises wages, externalized costs (pollution and resource depletion) come home to roost and the central state raises taxes to pay for rising social welfare and income security programs.

The solution is to move production to locales with low wages, no environmental protection and low taxes. This is precisely what China (and other emerging economies in Asia such as Indonesia and Vietnam) offered the developed economies.

The other solution was to move capital in the domestic home economies from marginally profitable production to highly profitable financialization: securitizing home mortgages, originating derivatives, leveraging debt and all the other tricks of the financialization trade.

Together, these two shifts of capital quadrupled global wealth in a mere 17 years:assets rose from $51 trillion in 1990 to nearly $200 trillion in 2007:

Global stock market capitalization rose from $11 trillion in 1990 to $65 trillion in 2007. This was largely the result of massive profits generated by shifting production overseas and from the financialization of the domestic economies--what I call the neocolonial-neofeudal model. The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012)

As a result, stock market valuations broke away from the real economy of goods and services reflected in the GDP (gross domestic product):

The neocolonial-neofeudal model of financialization is fundamentally an exploitative parasitic skimming of wealth, and so it has limits--limits that follow an S-curve:

The most important feature of the chart of global assets is that it has clearly topped out in an S-curve. After a rapid ascent, asset growth has gone nowhere for years; even worse, the riskiness of these asset classes is leaking through the propaganda.

It is not coincidental that shadow banking assets expanded at an explosive pace.

Shadow banking has also topped out. (Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it should be noted that China has a vast and generally misunderstood shadow banking system that includes private wealth instruments and local government development deals. Though data is difficult to come by, it appears China's shadow banking system has also topped out.)

What hasn't topped out is debt, both sovereign and private, which has reached unsustainable heights. Does anyone seriously believe these trends are sustainable?

Here is U.S. Federal debt, which is clearly following an exponential curve:

This brings us to the second dynamic of global capitalism: when the expansion ends, competition heats up as sovereign nations and global corporations alike battle for a slice of stagnant markets and shrinking profits. Wages in China have risen by 40% or more in the past few years, and the central state has started taxing individuals and businesses. Off-the-chart smog in Beijing and other cities (the most visible externalized costs) is forcing the Chinese government to tax and spend on basic environmental regulation and cleanup.

As a result, profits are harder to come by and production is leaving for cheaper climes.

In other words, the easy-money party is over for both China and financialization. Now that these profit centers have matured, global capital is struggling, not just to find a profitable, safe home but to keep from imploding as the risks of financialization are becoming more difficult to mask.

We now see why nations are resorting to outright currency devaluations: their ability to service rapidly rising debt is decaying along with global profits. The competition for global capital is heating up, as every major player faces a Hobson's Choice: they can print or create debt-money to fund their debt and risk inflation strangling their economy, or they can raise interest rates to attract global capital. This increases the costs of their debt service, crimping further borrowing.

Either way, the game of depending on ever-expanding debt and exports for growth is over.

This global competition is playing out on multiple interlocking levels. For example, since the chief export of America is dollars, the U.S. can create as much money as it pleases and export inflation to everyone accepting dollars for payment. Given that China is also creating vast quantities of debt-money itself, inflation in China is unavoidable.

China Accounts For Nearly Half Of World's New Money Supply (Zero Hedge)

Between January 2005 and January 2013, Chinese bank deposits have soared by a whopping $11 trillion, rising from $4 trillion to $15 trillion! We have no idea what the real Chinese GDP number is but this expansion alone is anywhere between 200 and 300% of the real GDP as it stands now. 

China knows that it is this close from setting off another inflationary conflagration, with the help of Bernanke, Draghi, Carney et al. of course, just as it did back in 2011. And it will be runaway Chinese inflation, once more like in the spring and summer of 2011, that will be the gating factor on the current bout of monetary injection lunacy that has gripped the developed world's central banks.

Everyone needs to create more debt to keep their debt pile from collapsing, and sell their surplus production to someone else to generate the cash needed to service the debt. Everyone is running the same debt-dependent, export-dependent game except the U.S., which by default is able to trade paper money for real goods and services because the other players have no other market of size to sell to.

The organs of propaganda are claiming global growth is still rapid and sustainable, but this growth is of the diminishing-return variety, based entirely on ballooning debt that is malinvested or squandered on current consumption.

We can anticipate global players will pursue ever more desperate measures to keep their debt-ships afloat, and this zero-sum competition will generate more conflicts. We can also anticipate that these conflicts will become increasingly unpredictable, as the global economy's phantom assets and unpayable debts have reached unprecedented levels. 

---

Things are falling apart--that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart:

1. Debt and financialization
2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability
3. Diminishing returns
4. Centralization
5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economy

Complex systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable (DATA).

We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Kindle edition: $9.95       print edition: $24 on Amazon.com
To receive a 20% discount on the print edition: $19.20 (retail $24), follow the link, open a Createspace account and enter discount code SJRGPLAB. (This is the only way I can offer a discount.)

Thank you, Stephen N. ($50 gift card), for yet another staggeringly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, Robert B. ($10), for yet another splendidly generous contribution to this site --I am greatly honored by your ongoing support and readership.

Read more...

The Pareto Economy

The Pareto distribution suggests that costs could be cut by 80% across the entire economy.

Economist Vilfredo Pareto's (1848 - 1923) data-driven discovery that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population led to the Pareto principle, known as the 80/20 rule. Research has turned up an astonishing range of natural and social examples of the 80/20 rule: fixing 20% of software bugs eliminates 80% of the tech support calls, 20% of the customers are responsible for 80% of the complaints, and so on.

The Pareto distribution is not a Newtonian law of precise prediction, it is a power law probability distribution: it projects probabilities and ranges, not exact numbers. For example, the top 25% of U.S. wage earners pay 87% of the Federal income taxes. The point is not precision but the basic distribution.

The 80/20 rule can be further reduced (80% of 80 is 64 and 20% of 20 is 4) to a 64/4 rule: the 4% "vital few" have outsized influence on the "trivial many" 64%. We can see the rough outlines of this distribution in income and taxes: The top 1% of taxpayers reported almost 17% of all taxable income and paid 37% of all income taxes; the top 5% reported 32% of all income and paid 59% of the taxes, and the top 10% earned 43% of the income and paid 70% of the taxes.

As I have often noted, most recently in The Fiscal Cliff's Structural Endgame (December 28, 2012), and Why the Middle Class Is Doomed (April 17, 2012), roughly 70% of all financial wealth is held by the top 5%. That is remarkably close to the 4%/64% distribution we would expect.

Can 4% of Homeowners Sink the Entire Market? (February 21, 2007) Answer: yes, 4% of mortgages defaulting collapsed the global housing bubble.

The Pareto distribution has another application: cost-benefit analyses. Though it is more difficult to substantiate than ownership of assets or taxation, we can estimate that accomplishing 20% of the standard diet/fitness recommendations yields 80% of the health benefits.

A small, simple house that costs 20% of the average U.S. new home reaps 80% of the benefits: privacy, ownership, a warm place to sleep, etc. (Having built a plywood cabin by hand in 1978 that is still doing duty, I would go further and say a dwelling that cost 4% of the average home construction cost provides 64% of the benefits, as long as minimal electricity and indoor plumbing are included.)

This distribution of costs and benefits has profound macro-economic consequences. The U.S. "healthcare" i.e. sickcare system costs twice as much per person as competing nations' healthcare and still leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured. Though those profiting from sickcare will of course deny it, we can project that spending 20% of the current wasteful cartel/crony-capitalist system's budget would accrue 80% of the beneficial healthcare.

We can go on to project that 20% of the defense budget accrues 80% of the actual national defense provided by the U.S. military (as opposed to cartel/crony-capitalist weapons procurement and Imperial over-reach).

The applications of the Pareto distribution are endless and extremely thought-provoking. 80% of the potholes could be filled with 20% of the city street-repair budget. 20% of the food harvested could provide a nutritionally adequate diet for 80% of the people. (if you doubt this, recall that we waste an estimated 40% of our food and food products output, and it takes 3 to 15 pounds of harvested fish to grow one pound of farmed fish.)

What if 20% of the time spent in meetings produce 80% of the work/decisions?

Does anyone seriously doubt that spending 20% of the conventional cost ($120,000) for a four-year college degree would yield 80% of the quantifiable education gained?

If one car is shared by five people, 20% of the cost of vehicle ownership yields 80% of the benefits of ownership.

You see the point: roughly 80% of the U.S. economy is waste, friction, skim, fraud, profiteering and diminishing-returns inefficiency. Any system that spends 80% of its surplus on diminishing returns is doomed to insolvency.

This terrifies the conventional economics cargo cult because it suggests the market/state cannot provide jobs to 95% of the working-age populace.

Within the high cost-basis Status Quo, this is true. Few can afford to hire workers to perform marginal-return work, and few people can afford the absurd costs of education, healthcare and housing.

The solution is to radically lower the cost of living (education, healthcare, housing, governance/government) and reinvigorate the forgotten foundation of human life, the community. I discuss this further in my most recent book, Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It.

---

Things are falling apart--that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart:

1. Debt and financialization
2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability
3. Diminishing returns
4. Centralization
5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economy

Complex systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable (DATA).

We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Kindle edition: $9.95       print edition: $24 on Amazon.com
To receive a 20% discount on the print edition: $19.20 (retail $24), follow the link, open a Createspace account and enter discount code SJRGPLAB. (This is the only way I can offer a discount.)

Thank you, Kathy K. ($161.80), for yet another outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, Robert N. ($10/month), for your magnificently generous subscription to this site --I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Part 39: A Karmic Lesson (serialized fiction)

Here is this week's chapter of my serialized comic novel "Four Bidding For Love."(Those who find absurdist humor and adult situations offensive, please read no further.)

     As Ross gazed at the tousled blond hair of his bedmate and felt her warmth beside him, it seemed the world was indeed improving in leaps and bounds he could not have imagined just a few days ago. The apparently worst event of his life—getting burned out of his abode—had catapulted him into the best event, happening upon an intoxicatingly volatile beauty who invited him to share her sofa and then her bed. And just maybe, he mused with increased pulse, maybe her life.
     Grateful that he'd awakened before Alexia, Ross slipped from beneath her comforter and silently crept to the guest bathroom. Keenly cognizant that he was not his best upon awakening, Ross took a quick shower, shaved, and brushed the port-wine residue from his teeth. Donning his embroidered red and gold Chinese robe, he went to the kitchen in high spirits and greeted Hanover with an enthusiasm he hadn't bestowed on any pet since Andromeda the parrot had passed from life.
     Carefully brewing two cups of strong but not too strong coffee, he searched through the cabinets until he found a tray and two plain-white coffee mugs emblazoned with a red Chinese New Year motif.
     Placing the coffees on the tray with an oval dish of sugar and two small silver spoons, he entered his hostess/lover's darkened bedroom, set the tray on her nightstand and then gently closed the door to exclude all light but the dim slivers which seeped through the royal blue curtains.
     Unable to restrain himself, he lightly stroked her hair, and she stirred ever so slightly. Extending his touch to her exposed cheek, he slipped his hands beneath the comforter and traced a long, slowly kneaded line from her shoulders to her ankles. She murmured approval, and did not protest when he shed his smoke-scented Chinese robe and crept into bed beside her.
     While the freshly brewed coffee lost its heat, the bed sheets' temperature rose, and by the time Ross remembered the coffee it had long returned to room temperature.
     There is a certain special strand of domestic bliss reserved for those who have lived alone who awaken to a thoughtfully sweet soul, and this strand ran through all four inhabitants of the first two floors of the Green Street house. Alexia felt it after she returned to bed from the bathroom and lay there in relaxed satiation, listening to the microwave beep as Ross warmed the coffee he'd made her. It was a small but signal joy, she mused, to hear someone else in her kitchen, someone who had made coffee for her that morning, entirely unbidden.
     As Ross carried the tray into the bedroom—after asking his radiantly rumpled bedmate her morning beverage preferences, he'd warmed a small pitcher of soy milk and placed it beside the two steaming mugs of coffee—he too felt this unique ribbon of happiness brighten his whole being. It was beyond imagining: a tawny-haired beauty awaiting his small gift of coffee with eyes melting in gratitude.
     Setting the tray down, he apologized that the coffee was reheated, and the two shared a wry recognition of just why it had been left to cool. It did not take much telepathy for each to sense that they'd passed through the first, and tightest, wormhole in any budding relationship: the morning after.
     If the first powerful rush of curiosity and excitement had been fully consumed by the initial exploration of the other, then whatever hopes either had entertained for an enduring match were reduced to ashes. Despite the best feelings and sensitivities of the individuals, there was no way to rekindle curiosity and excitement of that order.
     If, on the other hand, the pair found the spark of wonder and curiosity about their bedmate not just alive but burning with a quiet new intensity, then each emerged from the wormhole to dew-strewn vistas which beckoned with a tingling promise of hope.
     Painfully alert to the possibility that Ross's attentiveness of the previous evening would vanish the morning after she'd given freely of herself, Alexia was profoundly moved to sense not the embers of guilty obligation and a visible desire to exit with a minimum of grace, but a sincere desire to please her, and perhaps reassure her.
     Ross's fear centered on the possibility that Alexia, once deprived of the port's warm glow, would recoil from him in the harsh light of dawn. Even with his morning toiletries completed, he feared his true self would be a harsh disappointment to such an attractive woman. Thus he'd hoped to awaken her tenderer emotions before doubt had awakened to banish the evening's enchantment. In this he'd succeeded, it seemed, for her gratitude for the coffee exceeded the act's symbolic value.
     Recalling the unmistakable sounds of passion in Robin's studio the previous night, Ross sighed and thought, Poor Kylie; I really hate to be the one to tell her that the guy she has moon-eyes for already has a lover. But given Robin's intervention on his behalf, Ross could not quite cast him as a hopeless cad; unless he'd lied to her, or raised her hopes falsely, then he might not be in the wrong at all. Nonetheless, Kylie would be heartbroken.
     In a peculiar parallel, Kylie was at that moment lying contentedly beside Robin downstairs, musing on her own glad fortune and Ross's misfortunes.
     Noting the cloud which passed over his wondrously radiant bedmate's expression, Robin asked solicitously, "Is something wrong?"
     Kylie said quietly, "No, I was just thinking about poor Ross, all alone upstairs." Issuing a sigh which melded into a feline stretch, Kylie added, "He is just too eccentric to ever attract anyone. It's sad."
     "Yes, it is," agreed Robin. "We've both been lonely, so we know how it feels."
     "I also feel guilty that I haven't called him."
     Robin kissed her bare shoulder and murmured, "It might be better to let him settle in alone for the weekend. You can call him on Monday."
     Sitting up in his own stretch, he added, "What he really needs is to find a permanent place to live. But that can wait for next week."
     The object of their pity, meanwhile, was pondering not the travails of finding a new affordable room but the extravagant fantasy that he might be allowed, nay, even invited, to stay exactly where he was at the moment: in Alexia's bedroom. Naturally circumspect about his own poverty and lack of prospects, he plied Alexia with questions which he reckoned were polite but not quite nosy: how long she'd lived on Green Street, when she'd begun fancying antique dolls, and the like.
     It was downright spooky that so many of her predilections paralleled those of the she-devil GreenDollGal: antique dolls, classic film posters and a vast assortment of shoes.
     The truly bizarre thought that perhaps his bedmate was GreenDollGal's twin sister came to him, for Ross had read that twins could be so similar that they buy identical coats, even though each could not possibly know of the other's purchase. Kylie had provided no description of GreenDollGal except the passing reference to her outsized sexual appetite, and Ross had dismissed this titillating intelligence as purely shoe-based speculation by his enthusiastic but not entirely reliable amateur detective.
     If there was some karmic lesson in these odd parallels, Ross could not discern it; but it seemed yet more proof that there was great wisdom in withholding judgment based on superficial observations.

Next: The true wealth of a kind and loyal male heart (Chapter 12)

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