After years in the trenches as a mediocre software technician, I was trapped in YAM (yet another meeting) as a freshly-certified PMI PMP (Project Management Institute Project Management Professional, aka ‘pimmy pimp’), facilitating agile team collaboration (how’s that for corporate babblegab?), passively watching non-technical business team members nod out as the technophiles on the team boisterously bullied and bluffed each other over whose brainstorm would win out as the silver bullet du jour. Silently wondering, “what mysterious state of body or mind drives this post-industrial deconstructionist behavior?” (yes, I really do think like that sometimes). One of my best-ever neologisms answered in an epiphanic flash – technosterone!

As I recall, despite having been silent for 10 minutes or more as the technophiles prattle-battled on, with this flash of insight I unthinkingly blurted out my new word, instantly silencing the cacophony of technospeak multilogue dead in its multitracks and startling the dozing bizdrones from their slumber. Several seconds and furtive side glances passed before everyone simultaneously decoded this new semaphore, applied it to the past hour of shared experience, then erupted in genuine belly laughs and raised-brow fingerpointing for several minutes. This moment of glee was only exacerbated to a whole new level of hilarity when our version of Dilbert’s pointy-haired-boss (our project’s ‘business sponsor and product owner’ of course), yet to show a smirk, gag a giggle or choke a chuckle, finally spoke up and characteristically mumbled, “I don’t get it’”. Really?

It was a wonderful and rare moment of personal victory in my own ongoing technosterone wars. Such glib banter is an overused and abused trump gambit in those battles – often snowballing for the first and last 5 or 10 minutes of each cycle through the infinitely recurring loops of YAMs and predictably erupting throughout. This particular moment marked a rare victory for me as glib banter is more weakness than wile in my arsenal, and one round after another of jibes, jabs, feints, and deflections are water torture, both dripping and drowning me to death on the sidelines … I suspect it’s much the same for many of my PM peers who take their work to heart and silently endure these inevitable YAM rabbit trails.

With some disappointment I later discovered the ‘technosterone’ symbolic sign and the human state of being for which it stands had already been seized by others. I especially like the Urban Dictionary’s ‘technosexual’ connotation:

A person, male or female, who is so deeply enthralled with technology they discuss it with a level of passion that most people reserve for sex. Not always a geek or a nerd, but generally someone who has the latest and greatest everything – “She became so excited about her new laptop and PDA that her friends knew she must be technosexual.”

I was further disheartened to find someone else had already staked their claim on the TLD (top-level domain) name ‘technosterone.com’ … I remain dismayed each time I check to see what the site is doing, only to rediscover that after several intervening years it continues to be parked and nonfunctional. Repeated attempts to reach the registrant, admin, and technical contacts are ignored. But I laid claim to technosterone.it, .us, .biz, and .info anyway.

I’m finding that TLD names are like guitars and collectible coins: the number you need of them is always X+1, where “X” stands for the current count.

As a PM the only effective palliative I’ve discovered to flatten YAM’s technosterone tsunami is to give the floor and limelight to a bizdrone and feign rapt attention to their low-decibel monotone mbaspeak. The shared technosterone rush of the technophiles will plummet from its manic hormonal peak in a heartbeat and pure sweet silence will prevail (notwithstanding the death-march cadence and church-of-the-almighty-dollar plainsong of the bizdrone’s monologue). The only downside is that this is a temporary workaround: eventually, the conscientious PM must step out in faith yet again to preempt a resurgence of technosterone tidal flow; to struggle once more to actually get something done in YAM that might actually have a positive indexical effect on the project, i.e., to make a difference that makes a difference.

Best wishes on your own YAM diet! I keep finding myself hoping and praying this guy would show up where I live and work:

“Do not meddle in the affairs of (bankster) dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” [Dilbert (Scott Adams), parentheses added.]

A myriad of symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs and semiotic processes surrounds the concepts, roles, and behaviors pertaining to wealth as a human circumstance or situation. Throughout the greater part of human history, precious metals – especially gold (latin aurum) and silver (latin argentum) – have been the primary currency for storing and exchanging value. While other things may also serve that function (jewels/jewelry, fine art, real estate, etc.) fulfilling similar roles and functions in human societies and cultures, and some truly odd (purely symbolic) conventions have emerged to serve as ‘coin of the realm’ (such as Yap’s huge stone money), gold and silver are by far the most common currency for most of the world’s people throughout most of the world’s human history. Bronze, copper, zinc, nickel and other ‘lesser’ metals have appeared and recently a variety of ‘clad’ or alloy coins entered circulation, due to the increasing scarcity of the precious and lesser metals as monetary and industrial commodities.

In fact, gold and silver have held the primary monetary role and function virtually everywhere on the planet from ancient Old Testament times through the first third of the 20th century. Largely due to the clandestine birth of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the Great Depression, and President FDR’s Executive Order 6102, however, that financial cornerstone has crumbled. The causal chain of events leading through one financial crisis and efforts to address it to the next cycle of the same is a fascinating history that defines the semiotic context for the focus of this post. Some elements of that historical framework will be included here, but a full understanding may only be had through extensive reading and research beyond this post’s scope.

FDR’s Executive Order 6102 of 1933 essentially made it illegal for individuals to hold, buy, or sell all but very small amounts of gold, requiring US citizens to surrender virtually all of their gold holdings or face surprisingly severe punishment, especially for a ‘democratic republic’. As reported in the Wikipedia article on the order:

Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($167,700 if adjusted for inflation as of 2010) or up to ten years in prison, or both. Most citizens who owned large amounts of gold had it transferred to countries such as Switzerland.

FDR’s confiscation of US citizens’ gold proved ineffective, however, so it was overridden by the subsequent 1934 Gold Reserve Act, which again outlawed virtually all private possession of gold and forced the return of all gold bullion, coins, and gold certificates to the US Treasury, while at the same time locking the nominal price of gold at $35 per troy ounce (up from $20.67). Only some jewelry and collectible coins were exempt. This law of the land proved equally difficult to enforce, yet four decades would come and go before Americans could freely and legally own and trade gold in 1975.

The international agreement captured in the The Breton Woods Agreements of 1944 marked the beginning of the last period in history during which gold served as the foundation of currencies and monetary management in general on a global basis, establishing (among other things) the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This international agreement laid a strong foundation for a post-WWII gold/dollar standard which fixed the price of gold at $35/oz., implicitly pegging the US dollar to a fixed value in gold per se. This stable monetary ‘gold exchange standard’ persisted for a quarter century from 1946 until the ‘Nixon Shock’ of 1971.

Among the many nefarious actions undertaken by the Nixon administration prior to the President’s resignation under the Watergate scandal, the impact and effects of Nixon’s unilateral cancellation of dollar-to-gold convertibility have turned out to be perhaps the most devastating – and the full scope of those consequences has scarcely begun to gain attention in the public domain. The immediate impact of the abandonment of the gold exchange standard effectively destroyed the Breton Woods international financial system in a single stroke – surely thus establishing that action as an event of globally seismic proportion. Not the least of its shattering effects was to instantly transform all money into fiat currencies – essentially worthless non-government-issued Federal Reserve IOUs with no chance of redemption, whereby the ‘coin of the – global – realm’ became slips of more or less colorful paper of no intrinsic worth, whose illusion of value rested upon the US dollar, itself a totally fiat currency!

When I first grasped this 20th-century history of gold and fiat currency, I was overwhelmed by shock and awe – how could we sapient humans lead ourselves into such an obvious labyrinth of pending disaster? Yet in the four decades since Nixon’s shock, this collapse of a fairly rational financial system transported us to a new world in which both our individual finances and the world’s global financial systems and markets are based on exploding debt at every level and (another way of saying the same thing) and real money is replaced with sheer illusion. Economic reality somehow metamorphosed into an arbitrarily absurd paradigm of dogmatic convention with all the pervasive power and imminent efficacy of immutable natural law. You couldn’t even begin to make this stuff up – yet it has persisted as the irreal matrix of axiomatic financial truth for everyone everywhere for the past 75 years or more, and counting!

The impact of the Nixon Shock on the US dollar is clearly seen in the following graph showing the dollar’s value from 1954 through 2003:

Note from this chart that the (pseudo)value and (fiat)price of gold in US dollars increased more than tenfold from its nominal $35 ‘fixed price’ under the Breton Woods system in 1970 to $420/oz. at the end of 2003, as the gold-purchasing power of the dollar plummeted from 750 mg in 1970 to 50 mg in 1980, remaining under 100 mg for the next 23 years.

As of this writing, it appears this incredible house of paper cards is falling further and fast, on the verge of its own implosive collapse, hastened no doubt the the ‘Great Recession of 2008’, which is in fact still an ongoing financial debacle. In 1970, $35 would buy an ounce of gold in free markets in most countries in the world. Today, that same ounce of gold (current spot market at the moment) costs an eye-popping $1,735.50. In terms of the graph shown above, that means the dollar that bought 750 mg of gold in 1970 would buy less than 2 mg of gold today – a 99.7%  decline!

For a sense of just how pervasive, paradoxical, and absurd this ridiculous financial paradigm is, if you can manage to step outside it for a moment (which isn’t as easy as you may think), consider the following:

• Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve quite casually and comfortably denies that gold is money during a House subcommittee hearing(chaired by congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul). [While Bernanke’s position may be very narrowly true since ‘money’ (fiat currency) is no longer based on anything but the Fed’s IOU, this prompted me to reflect on whether I’d rather own gold and sell it to ‘buy’ dollars, or rely on just those (fiat) dollars as a store of wealth … no-brainer when comparing long-term value trajectories of the US dollar vs. gold.]
• Some evidence suggests that fewer than 5% of investors have as little as 5% of their portfolio in gold bullion, coins, mining stocks, mutual funds, or the latest leverage derivative, exchange traded funds (ETFs). Understandable, since the prevailing dogma among the vast majority of investment and financial advisors is that gold and silver (in any of these forms) are “delusional gold-bug investments”, undoubtedly to be avoided at all costs.

• In a facebook exchange with a friend and former academic colleague who holds and deserves my sincere respect as an otherwise brilliant mind, he stated his position on these matters quite boldly and succinctly, as if it were axiomatically true: “gold is intrinsically worthless and you can’t buy anything with it … currency is the only reliable medium of exchange and store of wealth” (I’m paraphrasing the second half of that comment). As if fiat paper IOUs from a secretive globalist bankster elite had any intrinsic value at all or – especially compared to gold – could even be rationally considered as a reliable store of value! Sadly, his position in this matter is exactly that of the overwhelming majority of individual investors – and investment professionals and advisors! – everywhere all the time.
• Again, an overwhelming majority of US citizens naively and falsely believe the Federal Reserve is an agency of the US government, having no idea of its nefarious and clandestine origins by an elite handful of global bankers in 1913 (G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve (1998, 3rd ed.) provides an excellent account of the Fed’s origins and operations. [Then again, 14% of registered voters (26% Republican, 6% Democrat) either actually believe Barack Obama is the Antichristor at least are comfortable spoofing Gallup pollsters toward that result.]
• Meanwhile, a little-known nonprofit watchdog organization, the Gold AntiTrust Association (GATA), has spent the past 20 years exhaustively monitoring and (thanks to the FOIA) striving to expose the global elitists’, bankster kleptocrats’, and sovereign banks’ worldwide illegal and undercover control and manipulation of the gold and silver markets, reaping obscene profits at the expense of the small but growing community of individual ‘retail’ investors in those metals. Despite the impressive and convincing evidence GATA has obtained, none of the regulatory agencies with oversight of those markets or the financial institutions involved in the illegal activities has shown the slightest interest in following through with their own investigation, much less filing and prosecuting the appropriate charges.
• Worse yet, the United States’ own gold reserves haven’t been physically audited since 1954 – 17 years before the Nixon Shock! Somehow, those (alleged) 1,800 tons of gold are being swapped, leveraged, bought, sold, and traded very quietly every business day among the elite Wall Street financial institutions and their cohorts around the world, including not only our Fed but sovereign banks throughout the Eurozone and Asia, being at least double- if not triple- or quadruple-counted to back those trades and their derivative progeny. Some evidence even suggests that all the actual gold and silver above ground in the entire world would fail to back as much as one third of those trades – i.e. the trading primarily consists of illegal ‘naked short’ positions for which no underlying security exists.

A new world order of global elitist design, construction, and automation appears to be coming to full fruition in our time. By that design, the rest of us may already lack the necessary semiotic fluency to symbolically unite, iconically recognize our common bondage, and indexically act in forceful concert with sufficient efficacy to make a genuine difference. We appear to be victims of a shared, carefully nurtured, semiotic nescience as the bitter fruit of being dumbed down through decades of quasi-education for indoctrination, multimedia disinformation saturation, and unrelenting subliminally forced cognitive dissonance. Thus reducing us to meaning nothing and making no difference in the new order of things … sheeple happily oblivious to our wolf-shepherds in sheeple-clothing as long as the synthetic bioengineered fodder shows up in our suburban stables and the never-ending fleecing and butchery fall only on sheeple in distant pastures (as we watch on the evening news).

Not a tranquil thought or pretty picture, eh? But perhaps I’m a hopelessly paranoid conspiracy theorist, another hapless victim of private and personal cognitive dissonance, lost in the semiotic fog of my own delusions, dreams, and nightmares. Or … perhaps not.

Am I a gold bug? Decidedly so. Should you be? Up to you – your choice and responsibility, not mine. Condescend and snicker as you like. But carefully and objectively study the charts below and  read the linked articles in this paragraph before you cast me out as a gold-bug pariah. Ask yourself which you’d really rather have in your hand right now – with gold closing this week at $1,732.20/oz.: a 1-oz American Gold Eagle or US$1,750? In light of that evidence, the minimally rational reply is, “both”. The irrational response is, “US$1,750”. The maximally rational position is, “both – and immediately take the US$1,750 and buy another Eagle” (admittedly the Eagle price would be closer to US$2,000, but nonetheless worth that additional out-of-pocket cost). [Sources: kitco.com and munknee.com.]

When is the last time you took a sharp U-turn in your brain and sent your mind with laser focus in relentless Cartesian-reduction pursuit of actual reality and and profound truth – objectively, open-minded and open hearted, without bias, dogma, or personal agenda? Are you overdue? Has your reality check bounced yet? If it didn’t in the fall of 2008, just wait ….

Ah well … never mind. Baaa … mmmmbbbbAAAAaaa …..

Examples: world wars (I, II, and counting), scientific theories (relativity, quantum mechanics, and counting), technological advances (printing press, assembly lines for mass production, communications media, computers, internet and web), assassinations (Lincoln, Kennedys, King, and counting), financial booms and bubbles, major recessions and depressions, and natural phenomena (comet impacts, floods and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, etc.). Air, soil, and water pollution, global warming, … and counting.

This post focuses on recent financial events and their evolving impact and effects, and the extent to which they qualify as being that kind of ‘world-(re)shaping’ event or not.

The precursor event was the near-collapse of the US and world financial system in 2008, the effects of which are still very palpable and continuing to unfold. Supposedly, actual collapse was averted by the intervention of the US government and the financial industry’s leading institutions – all at the multi-trillion dollar expense of US taxpayers for generations to come. The linchpin at the center of that debacle was a little-known abstruse financial instrument, the ‘credit default swap (CDS)‘.

A CDS is essentially a set of transactions through which an owner or holder of debt (the ‘CDS buyer’) insures against debt default by paying another party (the ‘CDS seller’) to assume that risk, i.e., in exchange for mutually agreed-upon premium payments, the CDS seller agrees to pay the (mutually agreed-upon) cost of debt default, if and when it occurs, to the CDS buyer.

In theory, if the debt default does not occur the CDS buyer transferred the risk that it might have at the expense of the CDS premiums paid to the CDS seller (for whom those premiums qualify as income and profit). If the debt default does occur, the CDS buyer avoids that loss and pays only the premium expenses, while the CDS seller must absorb the cost the default payable to the CDS buyer (where it is assumed the CDS seller will incur significant losses inasmuch as the debt default cost is likely to far exceed the total of premiums received from the CDS buyer).

In fact, the financial disaster of 2008 resulted in the ongoing ‘Great Recession’ dominating our world today, largely due to debt associated with another family of also little-known and equally (or more) abstruse financial instruments known as ‘collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)‘ in general, and ‘collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs)‘ as a type of ’mortgage-backed securities (MBSs)‘, in particular. Put simply, the 2008 disaster occurred because regulatory and rating agencies totally failed (or deliberately corrupted) their fiduciary oversight responsibilities, allowing a small group of the world’s largest financial institutions to simultaneously, among themselves, and (one assumes) collaboratively (a) buy and hold debt in the form of MBS CMOs, (b) buy and sell CDOs to offset their MBS CMO risk, and (c) further short-trade their positions in an extremely risky, volatile, and multi-trillion dollar derivates market based on these financial instruments.

This nefarious tower of paper crashed and burned when homeowners began to default on their mortgages at an accelerating rate, having been sold debt for which they clearly did not qualify nor possess anywhere near the financial means to repay. Clear victims of the ruthlessly predatory subprime lending that erupted specifically to fuel the exploding markets in MBS CMOs and their CDOs, and their derivatives, which were yielding profits in hundreds or thousands of percentages.  The 2010 Oscar-winning documentary, “Inside Job“, reports this disaster with remarkable clarity and objectivity. Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short, tells the story from an insider’s view, as seen by the few renegade traders who saw it coming and reaped hundreds of millions by shorting that housing bubble.

Michael Burry and John Paulson (not related to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) are the most notable of those traders perhaps – Burry gained about $250 million, Paulson at least $3.5 billion. Paulson subsequently earned another $3.1 billion on gold investments during 2010-11, and has an estimated net worth of about $16 Billion, placing him at #39 on Forbes’ 2011 list of the world’s wealthiest people.

Burry, Paulson and few others are apparently blessed with outlier financial prescience – an astonishing ‘tip-of-the-long-tail-of-normal-or-Gaussian-distribution‘ 7-sigma ability to have foreseen inevitable causal outcomes of Wall Street banksters’ behavior in those markets. They saw the same signs everyone else saw at the time, but they alone accurately perceived the true indexical (causal) effects those signs ultimately would have. The other 99.9999% of their peers deluded themselves into an exactly opposite – and inversely false – belief that the financial world they were in was not a bubble at all, but a new reality of infinite (and obscene) profitability.

Sadly, I am no such outlier – certainly not to that telepathic extent. In answer to prayer, however, I was blessed with foresight in the summer of 2008 that led me along a similar path to some financial success, admittedly many orders of magnitude less lucrative, but no less interesting – and ongoing. But that’s another story.

This blog is often abstruse and deliberately esoteric (some may too hastily think elitist), but nonetheless universal in scope and vibrant when grasped (or so the blogger likes to think), as all worthwhile philosophical metalogue will be. The blogger is a (mostly) sapient being and career technologist (by practical default) who befriends few, offends many, and alienates most, it seems, due to chronic impatience and acute intolerance in coping with the crawling grind and inevitable exsanguination of most human interrelation - who loves you nonetheless despite those contrary behaviors and misanthropic sins.

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My memory of that particular event is dim at best, and wouldn’t exist at all but for that photo turning up nearly 50 years later. But seeing the photo did stir an old and familiar memory of those times … not quite sure why I share it here and now, but that’s what blogs are for, eh?

As I recall, the highlights of this particular celebratory evening were the annual student art show and auction in the halls and auditorium, followed by distribution of senior class rings during a sodas-and-snacks gathering (coffee and tea for the adults) in the library. Many details and much of the sequence of the event are forgotten, yet the event remains logged and lodged in memory.

Everyone’s yearbooks had been selectively circulated among friends and idols, faculty and fellows, for autographs accompanying the usual juvenile doggerel, belligerent barbs, and sweetheart sentiments. As Mr. Popularity (which puzzles me still), star (swimmer/diver) athlete, promising math, art, theater, and writing student, I appeared in many solo and group photos,  perennial poses and spontaneous snaps alike. Several pages held heartfelt accolades, encouraging predictions, and friendly jibes. An entire page in the back held my steady girl’s romantic tribute to ‘us’. I truly cherished that yearbook, especially for those personal sentiments, of course, as every graduate surely does. I like to think my scribbles in others’ annuals held similar value and meaning for them as theirs did for me, but I wonder.

For the art show and auction I had labored painstakingly for many weeks on a realistic small poster-sized pencil rendering of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Learning that the master sculptor had chosen a fine translucent pale green marble from the Carrara quarries in the Apuan Alps of Tuscany (which still operate today), I used a sheet of heavy pastel paper in a similar color for the work. If I saw the drawing today, it probably wouldn’t live up to my memory of how good it was, but I vividly remember doing the work, struggling especially with contrasting the transcendent grief and grace in Mary’s eyes and the lifelessness in Jesus’ (despite my adolescent agnosticism). Seeing the frozen miracle Michelangelo’s actual life-sized work months later in Rome, I realized just how far I’d missed that mark. Yet savory scents of pastel dust, ebony pencils and drafting leads, kneaded, art gum, and ruby erasers rise with this memory every time.

The drawing took a blue ribbon in the show. I remember thinking I didn’t stand a chance against my best friend’s life-size sculpture (done in styrofoam covered in auto body putty and spray-painted bronze and black – how innovative!) of a man rising from a seated position, hand outstretched. But we both took blue – in different categories (sculpture and drawing). previous year we had taken first place together at the state drama competition with a duo performance of selected scenes from Murray Schisgal’s “Luv”. It was the first acting I’d ever done, though my friend was considerably more seasoned (he won best actor for the entire competition).

As the show and judging closed with winners announced, I left my sport jacket, yearbook, and other personals at the table with the drawing (blue ribbon affixed) to join everyone else in the auditorium for the auction, curious to see how it would go.

Dutifully yet nonetheless proudly, my parents won the bidding for my drawing. Bids were competitive in a friendly way, as everyone wanted them to have it – but at a price that at least acknowledged the workmanship, such as it was. Their winning bid was $50 and my steady girl’s mother was their stiffest competition … $50 doesn’t seem much today, but inflation-adjusted to 2010, about $325 dollars. They were my parents, after all, but that didn’t diminish the delight of the moment for anyone – and I certainly relished being among the highest bids of the auction. But better things lay ahead … I fidgeted in my seat as the auction dragged on, eager to get to the library and seize my senior ring at last, then rush to offer it to my steady girl (certain, of course, that she’d been happily awaiting that moment).

The party in the library was enjoyed by all and gave the evening exactly what everyone hoped – the pinnacle of the event that would fade gradually, sweetly, as families and dating couples leisurely wandered away. After bestowing the ring on my steady, we parted for the evening and joined our parents. Headed for home, my parents and I headed back to the table to retrieve the drawing, the ribbon, the yearbook, and the other things.

The drawing, the ribbon, and the yearbook … gone. Hasty inquiries quickly ended in shrugged shoulders, sincere utterances of sympathetic concern, but ultimately, in complete mystery.

I don’t recall being angry; but surely I was. My parents, if angry, didn’t show it then or later in private – at least not in my presence. The next day, in unspoken agreement, we put the loss behind us. In a few days more, no one at school mentioned it or seemed to think of it, and the theft seemed casually and easily forgotten. By graduation day a week or two later it was, by all appearances, forgotten by all, including my steady girl and our families. In the several decades since, however, the unsolved mystery and the lingering sadness of that evening’s loss have surfaced occasionally, perhaps a half dozen times, as one of many vignettes in the no doubt self-serving nostalgic gestalt of my youth.

Mixed emotions always accompany the memory of that evening, of course. I’m pleased to say the initial bitterness, anger, and resentment never resurfaced, and I honestly don’t recall them being intense or dominant at the time, compared to the pure puzzlement of it all. What emerges with the memory of it now is a melancholy brew of wonder about … who? Why? Have they thought of it since? Do they now? Did they ritualistically trash or burn the items? Surely it was a juvenile personal (albeit anonymous) attack of some sort. Does it prick their conscience a bit now, just as the mystery pricks my curiosity? Pardon the pun, but was I that much of a prick in my youth to invite and deserve such attacks? Probably so. Lord knows I was often unbearably self-overinflated, and can get there all too easily these days, without a good wife and daughters to keep me grounded (if not actually humble).

The greatest effect of this memory now is its resonance with the beauty of my parents’ love for me. Most of all, I cherish those two shining souls, gone now for twenty years and more, for gifting me with freedom from being overly attached to mere things like labor-of-love drawings and yearbooks filled with precious sentiments and poignant images, and I find I’m more than a little ashamed that I haven’t lived a life since that evening that fulfills the love, hopes, and dreams they poured into that particular freedom and the countless others they lavished upon me every day of their lives.

Answer: looks like a ‘yes’. Haven’t been swimming since the MediFast started January 9th, and my weight today was 221.1. ‘Yes’ will be confirmed when my weight holds under 220 for at least 3 days.

When/if I reach a new low of 215 I’ll probably start swimming again just to make sure ketosis and the new metabolism are optimized. Bear in mind – I haven’t consistently weighed under 220 for at least 5 years. Much of my blubber is as old as my daughter (24).

[Speaking of whom: when she was about 3 or 4, to encourage a diet I was on, my wife put up a picture of a younger me with far more hair, much less weight, and actual lean and mean 6-pack, delts, and pecs - in short, a 30-something's decent swimmer's bod. One day I noticed my daughter intently staring up at that picture on the refrigerator door with a puzzled look. She caught me looking, did a couple of quick double-takes between the pic and me, then said, "Daddy, is that a picture of you when you were a baby?" Today she has a year-old daughter of her own with just as much or more brazen smarts. I'm already loving living out the adventure with them - and it's just getting started!]

But here’s another motivation: previously, I cherished those all-too-few wonderful moments when I’d seize my stroke and glide across the water like a solo scull vs. pushing through it like an overloaded barge. Those moments better, longer, and more frequent as my weight dropped. So I’m eager to test new aquadynamics at a lower weight – hopefully to discover a new and improved version of that rush. I may even wait ’til 210 or better, 200!

Obviously I’m starting to feel better about the MediFast results. Though it’s nonetheless the same cruel gruel.

Do the math: over 200 million eligible voters (150 million registered) … so between 21  and 28 million people may actually be going through their days – right alongside you and me on the highway and everywhere else – holding (with clenched teeth and fists?) their core belief that the president of the US actually is the contemporary manifestation of an evil force several millennia old, fulfilling ancient Biblical prophecy on the threshold of Armageddon from his Oval office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What must they think of anyone who voted for Obama? One shudders to suppose.

Is voting like choosing between death by firing squad vs. hanging, gas, electrocution, or lethal injection? Do those final outcomes differ by a difference that makes a difference? As if the sentence stands a chance of being pardoned or commuted either way?

From a doggerel protest song co-written with a dear friend during Iraqi-ww1:

VERSE:
Well they shot and killed the dream again in 1963.
In ’68 they killed two more for free.
But when all is said and done Uncle Sam still has the gun,
and the truth is buried deeper than the sea.
CHORUS:
If 10% is good enough for Jesus it oughta be good enough for Uncle Sam!
Yeah, If 10% is good enough for Jesus then it oughta be good enough for Uncle Sam!

You may think you can reliably infer my politics from this sophomoric lyric. You’d be wrong. And you’re not going to find out from this blog post either.

What I do believe is that the signs of our times indeed are of Biblical proportion: we are on the brink of exactly the sort of globalist elite world order Christ and all the prophets foretold. We turn blind eyes and deaf ears and closed minds to those signs while oxymoronically acting out our enslavement to that plutarchy and convincing ourselves that their rape of the planet and murder of all its species and our own consumerist gluttony really aren’t the two sides of the same coin of their global realm.

Who can blame us? Our language lost the ability to rationally articulate political reality long before Orwell predicted it would. It was gone before I penned the doggerel lyric above with my friend in the 80s. Yet we rage, rage against the dying of the light with the overwhelming and ridiculous hypocrisy that such quaint terms as ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘moderate’, ‘libertarian’, ‘Republican’, ‘Democrat’, ‘socialism’, ‘fascism’, and all the rest still have any connection, however surreal, to socioeconomic and political truth. In our time the ruins of Babel have transformed into a politically insane pseudo-language wherein we all act and pose (often with rabid intensity) as if we have privileged access to the truth of it, when in reality no truth whatsoever can be syntactically or semantically captured in language lacking any genuine sense and reference. Like money worldwide it is fiat currency standing for specific meaning and truth value that are always owed and never delivered but universally taken for granted.

The cacophonic nonsensical sounds we make in this charade of meaningful dialogue nonetheless yields a hypnotically subliminal chaos – certainly evil in nature – that enthralls us ironically with ourselves, such that we live out our vain lives in a death march that we perceive as a circus and military parade in honor of our own personal fun and patriotic glory. As if glib banter, sanctimony, and puffed-up quasi-patriotism driving superheated political mockrage were the stuff of rational discourse. Is the terror of the underlying truth so pure as that?

Whether this cycle of evil is at last the final rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem and Armageddon remains to be seen. Hasten the day, I pray, just as Jesus tells me. Is there any truth greater than blood? Especially His?

Other than that, Jackie, how was Dallas? [Or LA, Ethel? Or Memphis, Coretta?]

You may think you can reliably infer my politics from this brief commentary. But you’d be wrong. We don’t access a language sufficient for the message.

I beg you nonetheless: listen with new ears and hear that still, black, semantic void next time. Then look with new eyes at the circus and the parade. Finally, alone, gaze into your own eyes in a mirror when your next political thought or feeling surfaces and see if that same void isn’t lurking and smirking in the darkness of the heart that used to be yours but is now marching to the cadence of an unholy other drummer. Break the spell. You may discover your own true rage against the dying of the light, perhaps at last truly with liberty and justice for all.

Anyone expecting to lose 30% of their body weight and reduce BMI and body fat by 50% while still fully enjoying all their meals and snacks is delusional. When you’re that far gone, serious sacrifice of taste-bud pleasure and gastronomic delight will be required.

Anticipating my six-month 63×63 ordeal, I suffered no such delusions. But the reality of what MediFast markets as actual food still lives down to my lowest expectations.

Basically, each ‘meal’ is an incredibly overprocessed and absurdly overpriced ounce of powdery or compressed mystery stuff whose ingredients read more like a medical school chemistry experiment than anything resembling actual food. The actual experience of consuming the rehydrated goo raises military MREs to level of haute cuisine. Consider the sales soundbite and the requisite list of ingredients for what sells as oatmeal:

Medifast Oatmeal is delicious at breakfast or any other time. A piping hot bowl of Apple Cinnamon, Peach, Blueberry, or Maple & Brown Sugar Oatmeal warms you up and gives you energy, along with vital nutrients.

Kosher Dairy, Lactose Free, Caffeine Free, Heart Healthy, Vegetarian

Maple & Brown Sugar Oatmeal

Rolled oats, soy protein isolate, oat fiber, brown sugar, calcium phosphate, modified food starch, soy lecithin, potassium chloride, salt, natural & artificial flavors, maltodextrin, acesulfame potassium (non-nutritive sweetener), magnesium oxide, dl-methionine, sucrose, propylene glycol, ascorbic acid, ferric orthophosphate, dicalcium phosphate, d-l alpha tocopheryl acetate, niacinamide, zinc oxide, manganese sulfate, d-calcium pantothenate, copper sulfate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, vitamin A palmitate, riboflavin, thiamin mononitrate, chromium chloride, sodium molybdate, folic acid, biotin, potassium iodide, sodium selenite, vitamin K-1, vitamin D3, cyanocobalamin.

Contains: wheat and soy.

Despite what appears to be a wide variety of offerings, thus far I haven’t been able to find a significant difference in any of MediFast’s product ingredients. Medifasters pay $2.12 to $2.50 per (slightly more than) 1 oz serving for what probably costs 50 cents to produce, market, sell, and distribute per pound. I’m only guessing, of course, but if I’m even close MediFast’s profit margins may be the envy of everyone but petrosheikhs, kleptocrat banksters, and narco-terrorists.

OK – not really. If their profit margins were that great their market capitalization and stock price history would paint a different picture. As a multilevel marketing organization, however, I’d be surprised if the pharaohs at the top of that pyramid weren’t raking in the megabucks. In a separate post I’ll explore the corporate profile of MediFast in further detail.

Meanwhile I’ll keep inflicting myself with the cruel gruel I’ve served myself for this effort. No doubt others will wonder why I’m staying this course – other than the 63×63 goal itself. Why MediFast?

The answer is simple: where I work, I’ve seen at least half a dozen people who were much as I am – way past a little overweight into serious obesity, converging on type II diabetes and other complications of carrying 25% or more weight than their bodies were designed to bear. Each of them is now in a ‘maintenance’ stage of healthy body weight and have been for many months. They all got there with MediFast. So the simple answer is, from direct and personal observation, it clearly works … for them at least.

We’ll see if it works for me as well. All was going well for the first 8 days – lost an average of 1.9lbs/day with a total loss of 14.9lbs. Then on the 9th day (today), with no significant change in the diet, I suddenly gained 1.5lbs – nearly a full day’s setback. Needless to say, I’m curious to see what tomorrow’s result will be.

Today’s Date: January 24, 2012

TARGET OUTCOME:
lose 63lbs by 63rd birthday on June 21, 2012 (63×63)

CUMULATIVE RESULTS:
Number of days on the diet: 19
Average daily weight loss: 1.2 lbs
Cumulative weight loss: 22.5 lbs

DAILY RECORD

MEDIFAST DISCLAIMER: Neither MediFast nor their subsidiaries (wholly owned subsidiaries include Jason Pharmaceuticals; Jason Properties; Jason Enterprises; Seven Crondall; and Take Shape for Life, Inc.) or affiliates – collectively referred to here as “MediFast” – exert any influence whatsoever regarding the contents of this blog. The author is not in any way paid, rewarded, or otherwise compensated for blogging about MediFast products, services, operations, or activities (also implied here in “MediFast”). Factual information is taken from MediFast’s corporate website or other public domain sources. Opinions expressed here are exclusively those of the author and are hereby copyrighted as such and they do not in any constitute any form of endorsement or recommendation of MediFast. The author assumes no personal, legal, or civil or criminal responsibility for others’ comments that may appear on the blog.

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