Author Archives: Merlin Silk

10 Reasons why the Mafia is Better than the State

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At the Porcupine Freedom Festival which is held annually in NH by the Free State Project, a person, who I only know as Emily, delivered the rant I want to present here in a free transcription.

The usual argument against a society without the state (anarchy) is that we would first sink into total chaos (another meaning of anarchy, yet not the right one) and then organized crime would take over.

Let’s assume that this is true – which it probably is not – but let’s just look at it for the sake of argument, and we find out quickly that we would still be better off with the Mafia than the current ‘state’ of affairs.

10. The Mafia has a sense of honor – when they say they do something then they do it. That is not the case with people running the state. (Ed. comment: this is self-evident if you look from which ‘professional’ group the members are generally recruited.)

9. The Mafia’s code of conduct is simple and clear. There is no legal double-talk and not millions of rules and regulations.

8. When two families of the Mafia go to war they do not create millions of fatalities as collateral damages. For the Mafia that would be just bad for business.

7. Instead of conducting a war on drugs the Mafia is happy to provide quality products to those people who desire them.

6. When you buy protection from the government, you get protection. The Mafia limits violent crimes in the area they protect instead of just giving you a phone number to dial when you become a victim of violence.

5. The protection of the Mafia is much less expensive at 10 to 15% of your profits versus at least 40 to 50% for the current legal syndicate.

4. Unlike the government the Mafia actually wants your business to succeed. They know that ruining your business makes you unable to pay for their protection. They also don’t impose a huge overhead of paperwork and force you to fill out reams of self-incriminating confessions (tax forms.)

3. The Mafia will not keep you from having guns to protect yourself. The Mafia will gladly sell you the means to protect yourself.

2. Different than the state the Mafia will not regulate what you do in your bedroom. Instead they will offer for sale all the things you might need to increase your enjoyment.

1. Members of the Mafia have style, dress much better and are a lot easier on the eye than government bureaucrats.

The added advantage of having the Mafia being in charge is that the ‘protected’ do not believe that the organized crime lords have a god-given right to rule us (as most people believe the government has.) This will make it much easier for competition which will then drive down prices – something that will always happen in a free society.

If you are interested in seeing a bit more clearly what is going on here, a good introduction is delivered by this video by Stefan Molyneux…

God Loves You

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Got a new – video uploaded – notification from Youtube today, titled Speculum.

First on watching I was not quite sure what to make of this. Was that another message from some wise race that is talking to mediums to tell us that eventually they will save us?

But soon it became clear what the message was and I liked the use of a fable to get the message across.

This reminded me of a George Carlin bit that I meant to look up for a long time in which he tells us that god will punish us for any infraction of his law by making us burn in hell – – but that he loves us!

So, here this George Carlin piece first…

and then Speculum…

Experiments in QR

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Before there was NFC (near field communication), now built into the Nexus S, to read tags embedded in physical objects via electromagnetic radiation, there was another method of doing the same thing with light (just another electromagnetic wave length), which did not catch on as much as I wished it had – because I think, it’s darn cool and it’s so much cheaper to print a QR code on something instead of buying these NFC chips. Sure, communication is one-way but when comparing the cost of printing a little square on a sticker with the current cost of NFC stickers (about a dollar) the choice for the occasional user seems to be clear.

But if we look at Google for guidance, it appears the QR code might be dead. They had started to promote QR codes heavily a while back with Google Local stickers (with a QR code) sent to local businesses, but that is now all over and Android appears to be heading – again heavily – into support for NFC.

Oh well, but you can nicely play with QR codes and the error correction even allows to mess with the codes to a degree.

I did just that and came up with this custom QR code. It is pointless for this article because you are already on the site this code points to, but I had fun playing with it (the original code was generated by Raco Industries.) And then I went wild with photoshop and made my very own vanity QR code.

Take a look, get out your phone and see if it really works…

House with Bodhi Tree for Sale

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Some 25 centuries ago, on the morning of December 8th, by the Japanese Buddhist
calendar, one Siddhartha Gotama Shakya, while sitting in meditation under a fig tree, woke up to the reality of life and the world.

This waking up to reality made him the Buddha Shakyamuni, the “Awakened Onesage of the Shakyas”. The specific type of fig tree under which he sat became known as the Bodhi Tree, in good old Latin – ficus religiosa.

In the good old tradition of Tony Robins many people then tried to imitate the Buddha’s actions and sat under a Bodhi Tree for hours on and, often falling asleep instead of waking up. One of the problems with sitting under THE Bodhi Tree was simple logistics – there is just finite space under one fig tree, even a special one.

So what to do?

The principle of homeopathic was adopted that the essence of this tree could be passed on even in very high dilutions. So, the essence of this one tree in Bodhgaya, India was taken, in form of a leaf, and planted in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. A branch of that tree was then given to a Mary Foster to be planted in the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, Hawaii.

A branch from that tree was given to the University of  California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) and grew joyously in its botanical garden.

Now the camera zooms in on Max, who, some dozen years ago, was in charge of part of UCLA’s computer systems, and who enjoyed his lunch break in that very UCLA botanical garden. This is how one little branch of that 4th generation bodhi tree ended  up in a glass of water in your’s truly house – with the plan for this branch to sprout some roots so that it could be planted and supply the space – in some twenty or thirty years – to mediate under, in order to finally awake.

It was a very difficult birth and early childhood for this fifth generation of bodhi tree indeed. Only with the greatest care was there finally a five-inch baby tree growing in a planter – only to be used by painters as a weight for their tarp when slapping paint on the house. The poor baby tree was beaten up, splattered with paint and almost died.

I nearly gave up there, but we started one last attempt, and this attempt coincided with the birth of our son Zen, who apparently chose his name because he had none of it and it was the goal of this life to gain some – Zen, I mean.

Surprisingly, growing up together, Zen and the bodhi tree, worked like a charm and after two years the tree had already surpassed the child as the picture above shows. The gap in size increased over the years and ten years later the child made to a bit over five feet but the tree grew to at least twenty.

I now have doubts that I will ever sit under this tree to suddenly awake, as the house might have to find a different owner and this tree can certainly not be transplanted. We also learned that by the type of Buddhism practiced in Thailand we made a mistake in planting this tree in our yard – these trees are reserved for temples and monks! But we did some ceremony/exorcism so smooth the waves. The tree is now wearing come colorful clothes around its trunk and all is OK.

Now your call to action – if you always wanted to have a house with a Bodhi Tree to sit under and meditate, now is the time to get in touch with me – going once, going twice, …

Living up there in the Trees

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I could not possibly imagine a kid that is not dreaming of a tree house. I certainly was, but I never actually had one.

Some of us remain this kid and can’t wait to have a kid with the same dream and then finally fulfilling that dream, as now the resources are available.

The closest I ever was at a tree house was actually a tree deck – the dad of one of my son’s friends, a welder, had built a deck for his son – maybe himself. As a welder he used the materials he was familiar and so the stairs going up the tree were a steel spiral staircase. And the deck itself was constructed from steel as well. So, I was not quite sure if it was actually the tree supporting the deck/house or vice versa.

Deep down inside me, the idea of a tree house must have always been in a slumber, because when the pictures below reached my inbox – thanks, Beverly – a dream woke up…

Faith-based Medicine

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The death of Steve Jobs, succumbing to his fight with cancer, made me contemplate the relationship of access to resources (of which he had much more than anybody else might have) and the choices made for the use of those resources.

Even though traditional medicine has helped me and my loved ones tremendously over the years, I have always been a proponent of the more natural way of approaching health and healing. I am sure that Mr. Jobs had all the help in the world when he was diagnosed with cancer a few years back to find all the options to handle this threat to his life.

Why, with all this information at hand, did he not opt for a natural way dealing with this problem, when there is much information available that shows that the non-invasive and non-toxic approach has a bigger chance of success?

I just listened to Dr. Mercola interviewing Dr. Nicolas Gonzales, who is treating patients with alternative methods for two decades. One quote of Dr. Gonzales might shed some light on the decision process:

The reason Linda McCartney went for a bone marrow transplant is not because she read the data and realized it would work for her. It’s because she believed in it – it was a faith issue. She was going to this priesthood kept in a temple in New York City. They had resources, and she could pay for them. So it was religion to her. Patrick Swayze to the best of the best – Stanford is the West Coast mecca. It’s a religious temple. When he went there, it was faith, even though there’s not a single piece of evidence they gave him that chemo would cure him and would lead to substantial results. He did it  because of faith – irrational faith, because it’s the belief that academicians really have these special secrets that none of us have and none of the lay people (we mortals) know. Their special knowledge, wisdom, or rituals would make us better.

The fact that they don’t make us better – Landon died, Patrick Swayze died, Linda McCartney died; I could list 20 celebrities that consulted or called me, never did my program, and are dead because they went to the conventional route.

Why didn’t they do mine?

I don’t have a temple. I don’t even own a white coat. I can wear a white coat – a good one – but I don’t have one on purpose. I’m not part of the academic priesthood, so I don’t wear a white coat. Yes, I have a stethoscope and a medical office like any because I need that, but I’m not part of the academic priesthood.

Michael Landon picked that up right away. In fact, his press agent, Harry Flynn, wanted him to come and see me. Harry and I remained close friends. He was really upset, and one of Landon’s comments about me is that I wasn’t fancy enough. I wasn’t fancy enough, so he went to the priesthood. He went to Cedars-Sinai.

Admittedly, this is just one side’s opinion. We also have to look at the other side. Checking out what Wikipedia tries to tell us about Dr. Gonzales we find a very different picture. Even though the article appears unbiased at first glance, it fails to mention the long term survivors documented on Dr. Gonzales web site and in other publications. This author has personal experiences editing Wikipedia in the area of controversial subjects, showing that objectivity is not something that can be expected from a Wikipedia article on controversial matters – the version of those articles surviving is usually the one supported by the party with the bigger resources.

Back to the subject at hand – would Steve Jobs still amongst us had he taken the more natural approach to healing his cancer? This we will never know, but had he, he surly would not be worse off than he is now. And it might not have worked for him at all as the state of mind is one of the most important in all healing. Undergoing alternative treatment while being afraid that the orthodox treatment would have been the right. will negate all possible benefit.

Fear is, as the old German movie Fear eats soul (Angst essen Seele auf) teaches us, behind all things going wrong.

How any Idiot can beat a Radar Ticket

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This article is more for my own benefit, so that I can find it again later should I need to refer to it.

But as I am writing this, mostly for the links to the videos below, I thought to expand a bit, just in case you reach this page by accident. The chances are slim because there are so many more established sources for this info that it is a minor miracle that google would send you here instead to those older links.

My added value to the information below is that you first have to get out of your mind that you did anything wrong by breaking the ‘law.’ There is chances that you did not break the law and it was just a crooked cop below his quota who gave you a ticket anyways but chances are good that you actually went too fast – pretty much all of us do – with the hope not to get caught.

Where the shift in your mind has to come is that deep inner feeling that you actually did something wrong. I am not talking about a situation where you went 90 through a school zone with a high probability of kids playing on the road. That, I would consider criminal because your chances are high that you truly harm another person. I am talking about random rules of men in black robes that say that you can only go 65 mph on that wide open, straight road where you car could safely make 95 without endangering anybody or anything.

If you are a responsible person who would stand up for his actions you do not need a nanny to tell you what you can and can not do and punish you when you break this recommendation. If you own yourself – and I hope you don’t believe otherwise – there is nobody who could possibly tell you what you can or can not do. If somebody tries then you have no more obligation to obey than you have to give your wallet to the mugger you encounter in the dark alley.

It might be prudent to do what the mugger asks you to do (better to lose your wallet than your life) but you would not feel any obligation to obey. To the same tune it is prudent to look out for a cop with a radar gun behind that bush on the side of the road and it might also be prudent to pay a fine if that saves you sanity and a drawn out court battle that cost more of your time than it’s worth – but don’t feel any obligation because you have broken a ‘law’ pushed upon you by some ‘authority.’ Simply, because there is no authority over you if you are not a slave but own yourself.

Armed with this changed state of mind you will be stronger to resist at any possible opportunity to resist legalized muggery and make the mugger follow at least his own rules.

Now, let’s see what a paralegal pastor – what an interesting combination – has to reach us in this classic video series. Some of the things might not be current any more, but take this as a start and don’t feel like an owned subject to ‘authority’ any more.

Here is the first video of a series of 12…

and here is the playlist of all 12.