Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Breaking Free From Your Own Personal Prison

[Onebornfree commentary: a wonderfully inspiring article from Mr James Altucher, highly recommended! Regards, onebornfree.]

How To Break Free From Prison

 I was scared when I left the corporate job for the first time. I was even more scared when I was thrown out of graduate school and had to explain why to my parents.  When I was first separated and then divorced I was ashamed to tell people about it. When I lost all my money in just one summer and went totally broke and forced to sell my home I was so embarrassed that I even lied to people who asked why my home was being listed. I would say, “that must be a mistake”, even though I had to have signed a contract and everyone knew that. People would smirk.

I needed to break free from all the prisons I put myself in. Shame, embarrassment, fear, anxiety were the guards and the bars that kept me locked up.



When you are in a prison, it’s natural to want to escape. But most people don’t. If they do their daily routine, eat on time, play on time, watch TV between 6 and 9, follow their orders, do their chores, pay their dues, then eventually they think they will be released. Many years in the future.

But when you want to escape from prison RIGHT NOW, your powers of observation become heightened.  You become like a superhero. Like a mutant from the X-men.


You observe the schedules of the guards. You look for any holes in the wall. You look for ways to smuggle tools from the kitchen. You look for those fleeting moments when the doors are open for supplies, when the trucks release their goods and for a split second, a hiding place might reveal itself. You observe in yourself if you have the courage to do what it takes. You look at maps of the  prison, of the outside, of the grounds  that you can hide in. You exercise every day to get yourself ready for “the moment” – the point of no return where you begin your run to freedom and can’t look back.

Your powers of observation become so heightened, so superior to your fellow inmates and the guards that watch over them, that eventually, after diligence, you figure how to wiggle out of the chains, how to take advantage of the tiny oversights that add up, how to turn invisible and slip through the cracks. And when the dogs bark at the morning light, spread out in the forest sniffing at the tiny scraps of your scent left behind, you are long gone, even though your presence is felt everywhere.

It’s the same thing every day. We are trapped in this world of sickness and money lust and failure and striving and craving. I am not being pessimistic. I am optimistic we live in a world  of increasing literacy, decreasing sickness, decreasing violence, increasing innovation. And yet, the more I want, the more I crave, the more bound I am, the less chance I have. To find my own meaning in this infinite dictionary. To find my own life.

I need to break free from the prison. Sometimes the craziness adds up to too much. I simply want one moment completely free from bondage, and then carry that moment to the next, treasuring the only thing I can ever have – my own peace of mind this second. Here are the things I feel I need to observe to break out of prison. When I can observe and then conquer these, freedom will come. Not before then.

- when am I angry. Not to suppress it. Just to notice it. Not to act on it. Not to kill someone. Just to notice it. When is it happening? Why? It’s a hot plate that cools under observation rather than if I try to ravish it too quickly.

- when am I worried about the future, in particular money. Do I really need to worry about how I will pay bills a year from now? Will that help me to pay the bills a year from now? Or can I use the time spent worrying (even the nano-seconds, when added up) to read, to further myself, to achieve, so that those worries recede beyond the horizon. Can I become the Ocean instead of just the ripples (the fears) that eventually lap onto a muddy shore.

- when do I sit and regret the past? What I said at the party the other day. How I treated those people ten years ago.  Not that I want to excuse any failings or not learn from them. I can learn from them right now. But if I regret, if I play over events, then I am no longer being observant of right now, I am lost in the moment, I am in a time machine, I am in a dream factory, floating in nebula, light years from reality.

- when am I feeling lonely, wondering what the other people are doing? Are they wondering about me? How many times have I been lonely in a crowd, dead eyes all wandering aimlessly in their futures or pasts while we shuffle through the dying light of the current day.

- when am I trying to please someone. When you look into a mirror, you only see a piece of glass, you don’t really see yourself. If anyone else is your mirror, you are stuck in a glass house, instead of a home you can really live. First, I need to please myself. This doesn’t mean kill people. It means focusing on my own situation, how best I can center myself, and in doing so, help the most people. Or not, if they don’t need help.

- Do I work too hard at living my life, rather than just letting  it be lived, moment by moment.

- Am I being honest with myself, before superficially trying to be good for others?


- Did I enjoy the last hour? Or did I waste it?


- Am I trying to change negative attitudes in myself, before trying to change the negative conditions I find myself in?


- Am I loving? Or trying too hard to be loved?


- Do I lament about great failures, before trying to make the small incremental improvements that build the base of success?


- Observe the fear of  being nobody in a social world. In a social media world. Will one day a hyper-inflated dollar force us to use Klout scores to buy food (so that only the ones with the greatest “contributions” to a Twitter planet will be the ones allowed to eat the most?) Observe the question, “is it ok to be nobody?”


- I need to observe when I am trying to change others. First I need to change myself to not care so much what others think. If I cared what the guards thought, then I would never escape. In all the years I’ve argued with people, in all the years I’ve ever seen two people argue, in all the mindless Internet troll arguments, I have yet to see one person change another person’s mind. If I add up all the moments I tried to change others instead of just observing my own feelings, thoughts, conditions, right  now, it adds up to an entirely new  dream world, perhaps mildly entertaining, but always imprisoning.



For once I stop, look around my room, look at the pictures on the wall (directly in front of me, a still from the 60s TV show “I Dream of Jeannie”, signed “Barbara Eden”. It’s right in front of me but it’s probably been months since I last noticed it  and all the wishes I’ve kept bottled up). The sound of a car going to the train station. The boat moving slowly up the river. The hands typing on the computer. The Tooth, to my right, staring down with intensity I only hope I can have 1/10 of.






Only with the observation of a person who wants to constantly escape can I get out of the prison I’ve spent 44 years erecting around my emotions, my mind, my body. This is not advice for anyone but myself.  I have the plans all ready for escape. For the moment when the clock strikes, the guard looks away, the hole is dug to the other side, the door open a crack for a micro-second, the raft waiting for me on the other side, the woman’s eyes reflecting the moon light on the other shore. Freedom.

Copyright 2012 by James Altucher  . Original article here

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Warmonger A vs. Warmonger B !


[Onebornfree's commentary:  Greetings from the Freedom Network! - and remember, "War is the health of the state!"- which means that if you have a government in the first place, war is always inevitable. It 's also worth bearing in mind that once formed governments can never be contained or limited {therefor the US Constitution and Bill of Rights was/is a  total scam}.  So if you believe that either of these two schmucks will "make a difference", with all due respect, you suffering from a serious case of self delusion! Regards, onebornfree.]

Presidential Debates Prove that Obama and Romney’s Foreign Policy Is Virtually Identical. 

 [Romney and Obama pretend to differ on imperial foreign policy.]


As made obvious by the third-party presidential debates, Romney and Obama’s foreign policy is virtually identical.

They both favor elective, preemptive wars of aggression.  They both want to force regime change in Syria, and they both characterize Iran as the “biggest threat” to the U.S.
Forbes’ Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes:

The debate could not plausibly be a real debate because of the following parameters: Barack Obama has essentially pursued the same foreign policy as the Bush Administration, and Romney has eschewed any fundamental critique of the Obama-Bush consensus ….

Even Jon Stewart agrees:


                            Former British ambassador Craig Murray notesI have traveled this world much more extensively than either Obama or Romney, and I still do. I find everywhere, even in areas of conflict and economic difficulty, the vast majority of people are friendly, even kind, and have very similar aspirations, across cultures, to personal development and emotional fulfilment.

The striking thing about tonight’s US Presidential “foreign policy” debate, is when it did occasionally discuss foreign policy, the world out there was discussed not as a place of vast potential, but as a deeply disturbing place full of foreigners who are, apparently, all evil except the Israelis, who are perfect.
The vast benefits from cooperation and trade with “abroad” were not mentioned once that I noticed (though I confess the thing was so awful my attention wandered occasionally). Europe apparently doesn’t exist, other than Greece which is nothing more than a terrible warning of the dangers of not being right wing enough.
The correct attitude to all these foreigners that God so unfortunately and inexplicably placed on this planet, is apparently to maintain incredibly large armed forces, murder people with drones (they were both very enthusiastic on this one), place sanctions on them and declare them “currency manipulators”. The only surprising note was that both agreed that they could not kill everyone in Iran.
But “We can’t just kill our way out of this mess” was spoken with regret, rather than as an affirmation of the possibilities of cooperation instead. What a grim and joyless world view.



Original article source.


Sunday, October 21, 2012

Who Watches the Watchers?


[From The Daily Bell website]:
Sunday, October 21, 2012 – by Staff Report: 
Recently, an ill-planned SWAT team raid ended with a young child ending up in the emergency room. A 12-year-old girl was sent to the hospital with second-degree burns after an officer with the Billings, Montana Police Department detonated a flash-bang grenade into a bedroom in a home where they were executing a warrant. No charges were filed by the raid's end. – RTAmerica

Dominant Social Theme: SWAT raids are necessary to keep people safe.
Free-Market Analysis: The militarization of the US police continues and with it these tragic incidents. If people are not being outright killed by mistake, they are being badly hurt.
And for what? To put people who make or take "drugs" in jail.
By now enough has emerged about the pharmaceutical industry to provide us with insights that legal drugs are not, in many cases, any safer than so-called illegal ones. But this does not apparently slow down police attacks – and the inevitable mistakes that arise as well.
It is not just US SWAT team raids. Here's a report on English policing, also from RT:
Police tasered and handcuffed a blind two-time stroke victim in northern England, reportedly mistaking his walking stick for samurai sword. Colin Farmer, a retired architect who is 61 and cannot move unaided, was on his own and walking down a street in Chorley, in the county of Lancashire, on a Friday evening, when the incident happened.
"I heard this male voice shouting and bawling at me from behind and I became frightened because I thought I was about to be mugged," he told reporters. "Obviously I am the perfect target for muggers, because I don't know what is going on around me and I carried on walking in the hope I would get away."
Farmer said that the next thing he knew was that he felt "this thump in the back, this huge electric shock" and it was like "thousands of volts going through his body".
"I thought that I was honestly going to die and they were going to kill me. All my muscles turned to dust and I thought I was having another stroke. I said 'I'm blind, I'm blind. I'm blind,' but this policeman knelt on me and dragged my arms round my back." ...
This is the second such incident this year, after officers tasered an agitated Alzheimer's victim several times in May. UK police recently asked for all front-line officers to be issued with tasers, rather than the current one-in-three.
With the promotional memes of the elites in disarray, is it time for a kind of escalating war on the middle class? Is such a perception too cynical?
The "MO" is always the same. The beat down commences and YouTube videos appear. The police refuse to comment. Coverage vanishes. All that remains is the violent video, a flickering, confusing testament to inexplicable violence. This was recently posted at Salon:
The NYPD beat up a homeless man in Brooklyn last week as he resisted arrest for sleeping in a synagogue outreach center, where he had permission to stay. Surveillance video obtained by local news site CrownHeights.info shows two officers brutally beating a shoeless and shirtless man, Ehud Halevi, who insisted he had permission to be in the center for troubled youth, ALIYA (Alternative Learning Institute for Young Adults).
Although sources confirmed with CrownHeights.info that Halevi had been sleeping in the space for a month with permission, one security guard, unaware of the arrangement, called the police. The guard later told the New York Daily News that he regretted making the call.
According to Gothamist, "[Halevi] was also pepper sprayed during the arrest, [and] was charged with assaulting a police officer, trespassing, resisting arrest and harassment. He's currently out on bail and faces up to five years in prison for assaulting an officer." The NYPD have yet to issue comment.
Civil society is under attack by those hired to keep order.


Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Government Funded Education:The Unvarnished Truth




If you want to know exactly why the US and all other nation/states are as they are, this short video gives a clear, frank, to the point answer.

I would like to thank Freedom Network member "T.C." for bringing this wonderful, short, succinct video to my attention.

Enjoy [or despair !] regards, D.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Onebornfree on the "Ab Irato" Radio Show 10/03/12

On Wednesday 3rd. of October, I was interviewed live on  the "Ab Irato" radio show [out of Canada], specifically about 9/11, my views on it, and about my recent radio interview with Dr. Jim Fetzer, on his show "The Real Deal" [ archived here ]

Here is a link to my "Ab Irato" Radio Show interview MP3 sound file   . 

As we appeared to get on pretty well, our discussion lasted almost 3[!] hours.

Below is a partial list of subjects and links to subjects we touched on.

Regards, onebornfree.

Ab Irato Radio Show Links:



Lew Rockwell.com [anarcho-capitalist site]article: "Frederick Douglass and Modern Slavery"


"September Clues"[Simon Shacks groundbreaking 9/11 video fakery movie]