Flight to real values; Facebook; Exploration; The Garden

Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School called it the flight to real values. Whenever people expect inflation to continue - when they realize that inflation is caused by government's manipulation of the money supply - then they start buying real commodities with their money as soon as possible, because they expect their money to be worthless tomorrow, or even five minutes from now.

Do I personally 'expect inflation to continue?' Well, I've continued to buy silver (when I have any money to buy it with) and I haven't spoken a single word of complaint about the fact that the coin dealer is still selling a peace dollar around $17 instead of down at $12-$13 like the 'imaginary silver' price says it should be. Imaginary silver is now much cheaper than real silver. People are expecting the price of silver to keep going up, while the manipulated 'paper' silver price has been squashed down.

I felt excited and hopeful when I read that the bank bailout deal got postponed and that the stock market went down; however, I doubt that this will last long. I expect the government to intervene somehow. All of their interventions resort to some form of 'printing money,' which is inflation. I expect the dollar value of silver to keep going up because of that. That's why I'm not arguing with the coin dealer to get him to lower his coin prices a few dollars to reflect the 'imaginary' price shown on the internet. I keep reading articles where people talk about how it's getting more and more difficult to obtain physical metal for delivery. If the price were what it ought to be, there wouldn't be shortages. The shortages are caused by the price being lower than it really is. The black market price will go up.

When I began buying silver coins I asked myself about a sort of worst case scenario: what if the price of silver went down? I had to understand what it would MEAN. Would that be a 'loss?' I decided that no, it's not a loss. You just ignore what the dollar values are doing, and just keep doggedly buying silver no matter what happens, and always get real pieces of metal that you can hold in your hand.

The government worries about people's 'inflation expectations.' When people stubbornly continue to believe that the prices of commodities and monetary metals will keep going up, then they buy those things like there's no tomorrow, and the price DOES go up. This is NOT a bad thing that has to be avoided - it's just something that happens as a result of government controlling the money supply and forbidding people to create alternative money systems.

The bank bailout deal was postponed but I doubt it's gone forever. I doubt that the government will permit any actual deflation to occur.

I'm confused about something I've read. Somebody said that this isn't a 'deflation,' it's just 'deleveraging.' I can kind of understand that, but also, I'm still thinking there might be some deflation going on anyway.

Deleveraging means that somebody couldn't continue to borrow money that they were using to speculate. It means they couldn't make their margin calls. I learned about that when I played with Forex last year. You borrow money, buy some pieces of paper with it (or buy some numbers and letters on a computer screen), and then watch the little graphs and charts go up and down to see if you won or lost your bet. If you lose too much, then you don't have enough money left over to keep on betting and playing the game. You no longer have leverage. So, large numbers of people have simultaneously all lost their bets and had to step out of the game. But I'm not sure what impact that would have on the graphs. Does it just mean that there's a smaller number of people betting than there used to be? Does it mean that those missing people are no longer pushing the prices to move in whatever direction they were pushing?

Deflation means that the amount of money has been reduced. But I think of not only the overall money supply as a whole, but also specific sectors of the economy that can have bubbles of inflation and deflation. The overall money supply is probably increasing. Or is it? What happens when large amounts of imaginary money are wiped off the books? In other words, defaults?

If you borrow money, and then don't pay it back, does it cease to exist somehow? Is that a small bubble of deflation? I personally think that yes, it is. If people are defaulting on huge amounts of borrowed money, then that money disappears and ceases to exist. They're not merely deleveraging - they're not merely stepping down out of the betting games. The money they borrowed actually disappears. I don't know if this interpretation is correct, but that's how I imagine it.

I don't think deflation is bad. I'd like to see deflation. However, it's the unpredictability, the chaos, the volatility that seems to be a problem. The markets change drastically from one day to the next, when one force pushes them one direction and another force pushes them another direction. If deflation just happened on its own and decreased the money supply gradually and consistently, I think we'd all be better off. (Of course, we'd be better off if we were using precious metals instead of fiat money.)

I expect government to continue to be what it's always been, and do what it's always done, which is: inflate, inflate, inflate. I would be surprised to see them allowing much deflation to occur at all.

Even so, if gold and silver prices go down again, just ignore it. Just keep buying physical metals and avoid buying paper.

Flight to real values: getting out of anything imaginary and going into the real world. That's an echo of my ever-increasing distrust of the internet as a reliable medium of communication. I'm starting to think that if anything is very important to you, you shouldn't use ONLY the internet to deal with it. There should always be some kind of real-world route of communication at all times. So it fits with what I've been writing about for the past few days.

I've been eating wheat, so my writing is a little more disorganized than usual. Wheat gluten seems to be one of my worst ADHD triggers.

I'm noticing something at work which has me rather upset, but I'll wait and see how long it lasts and probably won't complain about it for a while yet.

A few months ago I found someone's Facebook page and tried to look at it. I discovered that I didn't like Facebook much because something on the page wanted me to use Flash. I was confused because Facebook wasn't like MySpace - it doesn't give you a page that you can search for and look at. You have to be friends with somebody to see anything at all.

So I joined Facebook (it turns out there are like ten different people named Nicole Binns) and tried to make a friend request, but it vanished into the ether like all my other attempts at communication. I sent an email saying that I had tried to make a friend request, but that was after the emails had already ended. So I gave up on that. And now, I can't even find that person's page anymore, and also, Facebook changed their site, and I'm not quite sure what's up with all that.

There's more of an emphasis on joining groups there. And there are groups that have already been made, such as groups of people who live in your local area. MySpace has groups too, but they don't emphasize the use of groups as strongly - you can use MySpace without ever really noticing that the groups exist, but Facebook calls your attention right away to the phenomenon of groups. And the groups function differently. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I got the impression that the whole group of people gets connected to you if you join the group. In MySpace, I don't think you can automatically collect a whole group of people at once, while still keeping them labeled as a 'group' instead of a 'randomly organized bunch of friends.' Maybe you can... but it takes more mouseclicks and more thinking to get there. It's hidden more deeply and requires a conscious intention to go find a group and collect them. Whereas on Facebook, collecting a group, and keeping it labeled as a group, can happen almost automatically and inevitably.

Facebook gave me some really large files that took about two minutes to download before I could even view anything at all on their page. That annoyed me. I have dialup and I have an 'old' computer. I'd rather see things done with the most primitive plain HTML as possible. I'd like people to make very simple websites and pretend they don't know any of the other languages and techniques and esoteric types of software that can be used to make web pages. There's even a kind of nostalgic feeling I get whenever I look at very simple, primitive web pages that look 'handmade.' It's sort of like the way you feel if you use a DOS text editor that doesn't have mouse support (or maybe just minimal mouse support), and no pictures or icons to click on. So I'll be happy if I see a social networking site that uses the ancient handicraft of basic HTML and nothing else.

Today's a bad day in terms of 'all talk and no action.' I have the 'verbal thought barrier' going on, where I can't use my brain the way I'd like to use it - for nonverbal, original, action-oriented thinking. Instead, I was being bombarded with voices when I woke up in the middle of the night, and no matter how hard I tried to make plans to do useful things, somebody always interrupted me. I had to speak verbally, in a useless and unproductive manner, in order to think at all - and that makes it impossible to make plans or prepare for useful activities. Then, I got out of bed and ate something, because I hadn't eaten much the night before, but all I had were some wheat crackers and cheese, and I already mentioned that wheat gluten messes up my thinking even more. So it's a difficult morning.

This is buried in a blog post that's already long and disorganized, but I never told the story of how I learned about a chemical called juglone.

I did some adventurous things this summer, the kinds of things I used to do in college and haven't done in years. I already wrote about the trip to New Jersey. That was one of my adventures even though my grandmother's death was the context behind it. I also was doing a lot of storm chasing. I used to drive my car directly into thunderstorms back when I was in college - not often, but once in a while.

Well, one of the other things I used to do was go walking in the rain. I've read about things that make people feel happy, and ionized air is one of those things that supposedly puts people into a cheerful mood. Negative ions are usually supposed to make people happy. I don't know much about any of this except for the fact that the phenomenon exists.

(I can't recommend any particular brand of ionizing air purifiers, although I've researched them a couple of times. I looked into it as a non-drug treatment for depression. I also researched the SAD lights - seasonal affective disorder - but when I actually bought one of those lights, I learned the hard way that shining a bright fluorescent light directly into your eyes will destroy your vision very quickly. I was lucky to figure it out soon enough to stop using it. That led me into the path of reading about the hazards of certain kinds of fluorescent lights, including the lights used to treat jaundice in babies, and the energy-saver bulbs that we are all going to be forced to use a couple years in the future after incandescent light bulbs are outlawed. People debate and disagree about exactly which kinds of lights are the most dangerous, and what specific problems are caused by them - but in general it's true that certain lights can damage your eyes, cause discomfort, flicker, interfere with people's balance and mess up their ability to walk, and make it hard to think.)

So I often suspect that my enjoyment of walking in the rain, and my love of thunderstorms, might have something to do with ionized air, but I don't know what kinds of ions they would be.

Anyway, I went out in the rain one day this summer when it was warm outside. It was a fine drizzle instead of a heavy rain - it was like falling mist. When I walked into it I felt surrounded by peaceful protection and quietness. It was almost like having the mental shield that I've wanted.

I felt playful and adventurous and decided to go walking in the creek. There was a fog rising above the creek and it looked mysterious.

A long time ago, when I was very young, I used to look into the woods, into the darkness under the bushes and trees, and I felt a special emotion, a feeling that there was something amazing and scary, something unknown and magical, under the trees. If I went there, if I crawled through into the forest, I might get into a real-life adventure like something in a movie or a book or a video game. I might find something that really was magical. I might open a trapdoor, or find a piece of magical jewelry, or meet some creature like a dragon or an old wizard. Something unknown and unexpected would happen, and it would lead me into a great adventure of life-or-death importance. I would go into some secret world hidden behind the normal world.

It was sometimes a sad feeling, sometimes boredom, a feeling of loneliness and longing, a wish that my life would be meaningful, that I would have an urgent purpose, some great mission, some great adventure. That life would not be just mundane and meaningless, not just a gray routine of going to work and coming home every day, but instead, there would be such things as good and evil, and there would be some kind of challenge, some danger, and great achievements. I would see things I had never seen before, and I would meet people who understood me better than anyone else had ever understood me. And it might happen if only I explored some part of the woods, or some part of the world, that I had never seen before.

I had a Truman Burbank-like experience where somebody gave me the message: 'Sorry, everything's already been explored!' I found out that other people had already mapped everything there was to map in the world. If there was ever something undiscovered for even a second, some faster person, some stronger person, would jump in there more quickly than I could, and explore it and map it out first. I felt out-competed, inferior, timid. I thought I'd never get to be the person who did something new that had never been done before.

I also heard some famous quotation, which I think came from the early 1900s, when somebody said 'Everything of importance has already been invented.' I believed it.

It turns out that doing something new and original - inventing something, creating something, discovering and exploring something, building and starting something, takes a lot of effort and knowledge and planning. It's not easy to just do it on impulse. You don't really stumble into an adventure merely by being lucky enough to find a magical trapdoor out in the woods.

However, the uninvented things really do exist. They really are hidden behind the normal reality. It's really possible to do things and discover things that nobody has ever done before. But it isn't easy. It's not always easy to know what you have to question in order to find them. You can question a lot of things you take for granted. (However, you need to have enough physical health and free time to be able to do some adventurous things.)

I remember seeing a show on TV, during that time when I was young and feeling as though everything had already been done. It was a show about the human brain. When I watched the show, I had a feeling that the mind was an undiscovered area - that if there was something remaining to explore, it was the mind. I thought I could at least explore my own mind, observe my own dreams at night, maybe learn how to hypnotize myself or meditate, and learn what my mind was able to do.

When I walked into the creek that day, in the falling mist, I felt that sense that something wonderful was around the next corner. I hadn't felt that way for a long time. So I followed the creek to see what would happen.

It was easy at first. But then the creek got deeper. I was already wet but I didn't want to get completely soaked in ice-cold water. My feet were going numb with cold. I reached a place where the water was going to be about waist deep and that's when I decided to get out.

So I ended up on somebody's driveway, just next door. I wasn't even very far from home. On impulse, I walked up the driveway, even though it was somebody else's property, and I might not be 'allowed' to walk there. In that falling mist I felt safe and surrounded and I could do whatever I wanted.

It was an old house that I had never seen up close. There was a gigantic centuries-old tree beside it, with branches as thick as trees themselves. I wondered if this was an apartment house.

I walked around the back of the house, and I hadn't seen anybody yet. Nobody told me to get off the property or that I wasn't allowed to walk there. But then, all of a sudden, there was some guy clipping the hedges. I had walked around the corner and was right behind him. So I decided to say hello instead of running away. I'd just tell him I had walked up here out of curiosity.

He was a friendly old man tending the house's gardens. We ended up talking to each other for over an hour, in the rain. He was covered in hedge clippings. He took me on a tour of the little gardens around the house. 'It IS private property,' he said, 'but nobody's going to come out and shoot you or anything.' He said there were some paths in the woods behind the house, and they came from Lederer Park, so he might see an occasional trespasser walking out of those paths. I had been on some of those paths before but hadn't really explored them.

He told me that the house was very old, just like the Centre Furnace Mansion, and it had been associated with the mansion - it was owned by one of the brothers or something - I didn't quite understand who it belonged to. He told me that now the offices of Hi-Way Pizza were in there.

And the giant tree was a special kind of tree that I can't quite recall the name of. I think it was catalpa or catawba. It had these long green string-bean things that hung down. He said people thought they looked like Indian pipes. (I'll have to google it and see if I remembered it right.)

He told me that he had been involved in the community project over at Tudek Park on North Atherton, where you can rent a small plot of land and garden it yourself for a year. It's only about $40 to rent the land. He said there was some other land that he'd like to see developed into community farmland and that that project was being worked on right now.

He took me around the gardens and told me about the different flowers and vegetables he was growing. He picked a couple of onions and some spearmint and gave them to me. (Now that I think about it, I guess I would need to eat the spearmint after eating the onions.) I nibbled the spearmint - it tasted much better than spearmint gum, which I hate. Spearmint gum makes my mouth burn up with stinging cold fire. Real spearmint is actually good and the intensity is much milder - it doesn't sting as badly. It has more of a green leafy taste in addition to the spearmint oil taste.

Then he showed me some plants that were withered, yellow and brown. He told me that plants wouldn't grow there because of the walnut tree right next to them. I hadn't ever heard about this before. You plant something, and maybe it grows okay for a few weeks. But then, for no reason at all, it just starts to wither and die, and you don't know what the problem is.

It turns out that walnut trees poison the nearby soil with a chemical called juglone. Some plants tolerate it, but a lot of garden plants, like cabbage, will die off.

Suddenly I started remembering what happened to my garden. My little garden just didn't work out very well no matter what I did. I thought it was just because the deer were eating it, but that wasn't the only problem. I remembered that sometimes when I planted things, they would grow for a week or two, but then start struggling and turning yellow and then die. I thought maybe they were just hard-to-grow varieties of plants, or that I wasn't giving them enough water, or that they had gotten a plant virus. I was trying to grow cabbages and tomatoes in particular, and they kept dying. The tomato plants had barely even sprouted before they were dead. I'm not even sure if I saw them sprout at all - I never found any tomatoes growing after planting the seeds. And I tried planting cabbages from seed, and also cabbages that had already been grown in a pot, and they all disappeared. I assumed they had been eaten by deer, but now that I think about it, I also saw a lot of them just dying on their own. (The sunflowers grew though - they grew big enough that the deer noticed them, and ate them. It was obvious that stems and leaves were ripped off, not just withering away.)

There are walnut trees ALL OVER the area right next to my garden, only a few feet away. In fact, the majority of all the trees on the hillside are walnut trees! It turns out that right behind me is Walnut Spring Park - it's named after the very tree that was poisoning my garden, and the entire park and all of the hill is almost nothing but walnut trees. In that particular area, you just can't avoid them. (It won't do me any good to hate walnut trees. They are what they are. I will have to make peace with them, and find some kind of workaround, such as only planting things that tolerate walnuts, or finding some spot that's just enough of a distance away from them. It would be nice if I could make the walnut trees economically valuable instead of a nuisance. It's difficult to break open black walnuts, but maybe there is some special technique to it.)

After walking around with the gardener for a while, I eventually wanted to go home. It was raining harder and I was starting to get cold and hungry. I asked him what his name was again, because he'd told me and I forgot - his name was Joe. I thanked him for the vegetables he gave me and for showing me around. And he gave me a very valuable, essential piece of information that I really, really needed to know, and hadn't even suspected, about why my garden had failed.

I walked by the side of the road on the way back. And I hadn't even gone very far from home at all.