A Midwest Journal

I was scammed, then out of it, and then I worked to help others get out of their scams.

Then they got me again, but finally I finally got out – for good.

Because the real lesson here is that they never, ever learn. They are built to scam from sometime in childhood and it’s a hardwired mental deficiency.

But you can and should learn from your mistakes.

The only other option is to become a scammer yourself, which is never a good thing.

Let me explain:

Now, this is all I’m going to tell you about my specifics. Suffice to say – I’ve been there, done that. Wrote a book about it. And now I’ve moved on. For good.

Scammers can’t do anything but scam. They live a damned existence in fact.

Because they are chronic liars. They literally “can’t handle the truth.” They lie to the people they sell to, they lie to each other, they lie to their families. And they are in hiding all the time from everyone. Money they get burns through their fingers and they never actually build any wealth. And they hate it when people talk about them, regardless whether it’s true or not.

I’ve done by now a couple of years of research on these guys and can tell you that’s the way it is.

They are, statistically, a very small minority group of white-collar hard-core criminals. And they don’t reform unless forced to – which is only temporary (they only keep running as long as you keep chasing.)

It’s the Bell Curve distribution of our society at work. Just as there are a very small handful of people who are the extremely uber-rich geniuses, so there are this very small set of genius criminals who are constantly doing themselves in – along with everyone around them.

The typical scammer sees a business plan as “how to get around some regulation or law.” So their idea of how things work is simply to get a lot of people to give them money and then “fulfill their contractual obligations.” Meaning that most people never see a dime of their own investments back. It’s the only way these guys want to work. A straight-up job, saving and investing for the long-haul just isn’t exciting for these characters. And they make the phrases “make money online” and “work from home” only associated with scams.

And that very small minority makes it rough on the rest of us. Because, especially due to their collusion with lawyers, they have required special laws to be made to try to catch every loophole that can be found. So the rest of us have to deal with very stupid laws and regulations so that the 20% of us which are constantly stupid enough to be repetitively scammed through life – that this slightly larger minority make sure the rest of us are legally required to have all sorts of safety equipment on our homes, businesses, cars, and even in the way we do business with each other.

The heart of it is the chronic scammer at work. But until you spot them, you won’t be able to do anything about it. Life will be a constant, sorry and sordid mystery where you just can’t seem to get ahead.

To help solve this, I created an anti-scam checklist so you can spot scammers in your life.

Once you spot them – get off their lines and get them off yours. Quit dealing with people who chronically lie. Period. You can do the “right thing” and still be nice to them. But make no agreements, never ever give them any money or anything valuable of yours. Watch them closely until you are sure they have left. Because until you do get these guys off your lines, they are going to lie, cheat, and steal just as much as they can get away with it.

With this article, I’m even leaving the whole subject of scamming. Enough is enough. But I couldn’t leave without telling you this last piece of advice: Find them and root them out and then leave them completely and utteryly alone.

You’ll be relieved and glad you did. And life will be a lot more pleasantly profitable.

- – - -

And with that, I’m done with writing about scams. You can get my “Get Your Self Scam Free Book” and use the anti-scam checklist to solve your life. But I’m done with these guys for good.

The rest of my time is going to raising grass fed beef near Columbia, Mo (and this includes Fulton, and Jefferson City…)

But look for some humorous parody cartoons to start up shortly. I’ve got a lifetime of these to share…

[Update: If you read this and think it's talking about you - maybe you'd better check your conscience. And try that checklist on yourself - maybe even get the book. Because something is making you a bit thin-skinned, isn't it?!? Never too late to get honest with yourself and those around you...]

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---

This  may be best discussed as a complete theoretical concept – figuring that the people who read this will find it intuitively, all buried in some stretched mathematics. They’ll skip down to the best part – and others who aren’t ready won’t see it at all, but just think I’m over the edge… Which I am, after all.

And this essay is also kept overlong on purpose – just to show the point that most people won’t actually use the data. The vast bulk of Internet users live on instant gratification and won’t bother. Those who are willing to suspend disbelief and do the hard work of research to follow their heart – those are the ones who have that very tiny chance of making it.

It’s not any government who is going to help you find your freedom. Nor any particular belief-system. Just you…

Natural Distribution, the Bell Curve, and Life

This is a natural distribution which you see in nearly everything around you. It tends to pull order from chaos if you can line up the data with the right comparative. (Told you this would get thick real quick…)

Now, any of these distributions has the 20/80 Pareto Principle in it, which then breaks down again around 2-4% on each extreme edge (20% of 20%).

The problem with philosophy and enlightenment is actually their continually reducing results, as these 2% limits continue to interact all the way along. These chain-react all the way up the line. Naturally.

Consider this natural distribution as showing how each level toward attainment works – only a very small handful in every “level” will actually achieve what they are seeking.

Levels of Enlightenment based on natural distribution

What is easily observable is that only a handful of people actually are successful in life. Earl Nightingale laid this out in his Strangest Secret – only 5% in that study were actually able to make a success out of life. Everyone else wound up either just “scratching by” or on the Welfare dole. Of course, these statistics were out of the 1050′s, but these have been examined later and found to be the same percentages.

Between 2-5% actually make a successful life.  (.02 chance)

Now, taking this on up, you’ll then see that the really, extremely and outrageously successful people are just 2% (or so ) of those. The very rich are just about 1 in 10,000 – or close to 2% of 2%. (.0004 chance)

On up from that are the very, very successful, or the uber-rich. These are about 1 in 100,000 or so.  (.000008 chance)

And if you want to wind up on the richest person on the planet list, you are going to have to apply another 2% to that – about 1 in 10 million. (Giving you a .00000016 chance.)

This is what drives scams along. I was just talking with a former scam-coach (he found out he was working for scammers after he had been there for awhile and discovered their actual statistics.) He pointed out their business model actually consisted of finding and selling dupes a bill of goods which had them build their own ecommerce site. Only about 2-3% of these finished building their site. Another 2-3% of those actually made their original investment back. And out of that tiny amount, only about 2-3$ of those then made a real “killing” from whatever they chose. This last bunch are then interviewed in the infomercials (long with scantily-dressed, buxom “hostesses”.

This is also then the same control and approval methods which various companies use to get you buying their products and continuing to support their services. This is the phenomenon which makes “consumers” – which are literally “people who use it up” and customers, which are “creatures of habit”.  (But that is all covered in my lesson series on how to scam proof your life.)

The deal is that they hype these “actual examples” to get you sold on the idea that you could do it. However, the FTC had to crack down on these, which would then tell you that the average results are in fact that you just lose money with these deals. Some to the tune of over $30,000…

Natural distribution and spiritual enlightenment

Same goes for making “saints” out of “sinners.” While both of those terms are inaccurate, they really give us the same points of digression people follow who are going to make their way out of this mess we call humankind existence.

The vast bulk of the people have no clue what’s really going on. They live average lives going to work most of the week and paying out their income to support an average lifestyle, buying and paying off stuff that makes them feel secure. The government takes a huge chunk, as does their union (if they are in that shrinking minority), and more than half of what is left of what they make are sent to the black holes of insurance and finance companies. The average hard-working American, due to credit cards, usually has nearly nothing left to show for their life’s work – which is the exact design of advertisers, finance companies, and any government.

Now, about 2-4% figure out that they can actually improve their lives. These are the people who buy self-help, spiritual, and personal development books/tapes/seminars. The bulk of everyone else gets by with going to church on a regular basis. (The reverse minority are nihilists, who just consider life’s all a loss and that it is basically pain.)

Out of those 2-4% who know there’s a way out, only 2% of those will actually work out what their path needs to be in order to “go free” and “make it”.

And only about 2% of those will then stick to it and follow that path.

But of those finalists, only 2% will actually get enlightened in a given lifetime. Or about 1 in 10 million. Most of these keep it quiet, so you don’t hear much about them. (Follow the Christ’s works and you’ll see the problems he had with charismatic popularity and word-of-mouth advertising.)

That gives us a scale of:

• The mundane “Muggles”
• The Perceptive
• The Genius
• The Skywalkers

Now, the scale doesn’t really quit there, but the levels above enlightenment can’t be described in our words – they can only be intuited or imagined.

Churches, Self-Help Guru’s, and Money

Now, this also explains why there isn’t any money in philosophy and why real spiritual extremists (the guys who made it all the way out like Lao Tse (wrote Tao Te Ching), Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ) – none of these cared a hoot about money or even civilized society as it existed.

They were at or above that 4th level.

So in order to “do” anything with this metaphysical/spiritual stuff on a wide model – society wide – you have to have a lot of people working at the lower levels to keep people involved in it. Not that this either makes or prevents people from achieving actual enlightenment – but it’s a key point of having support groups for those who are between the 1st and 4th levels.

Any government, loosely defined, is a support group. Mostly devoted to the darker side of survival – but still, it supports those contributing to it (particularly those in power).

In all these, people pay their dues and follow along as best they can. They all know that if they keep to what they are seeking, they will find it.

Now, additionally, you won’t find the uber-rich being the enlightened, either. They are still looking for themselves (or looking out for themselves.)

You see, once you get into the third level (Genius), money doesn’t matter. You’ve got all you really need. And most of the reasons people have for keeping this fiction called Money going no longer apply to living – at least Genius’ see it that way. If they need it, it’s there. Otherwise, skip it – not worth investing the energy into it. Look up the lives of Sun Tzu, the Christ, and Siddhartha and you’ll see they just skipped the whole idea of money and what it “can buy”.

Genius live in the intuitional – everything gets provided at that level. But there’s a curious caveat as well. Levenson pointed this out in the beginning of his “Fireside Chat” series, which Larry Crane published. When a person is getting everything handed to them, they have to keep going and move above that level. Or catastrophe happens. We saw this recently in one famed self-help guru who was in the middle of a process where he was pulling in around $400,000 – and some people died. Now he’s charged with manslaughter.

You have to move beyond money or anything it buys, or any identification with a body – and that puts you into that next level, of real enlightenment (Skywalkers).

But there are people around these Geniuses who can “make money” off their existence and actions. And many who know that they have to keep this going in order for them to finish finding their own route to salvation, so they have to build churches and maintain followings in order to support their lifestyle. This doesn’t say anything is bad about this, it’s just a fact of life that “things” cost money. Especially if you don’t get that you actually do make things show up around you – the money aspect is just a frivolous additional exercise. Like Wallace Wattles – what you need will show up for you along the existing lines of trade and manufacturing.

The trick to beating the natural distribution and achieving Enlightenment

The trick is that while there is a small minority of truly brilliant, there is also a minority of the equally-brilliant-but-criminally-destructive.  And these two balance each other out. It’s that old yin-yang thing. The middle route (quite Zen) is the way which actually wins out.  The criminal are those who are really keeping this planet down. It’s their offset which makes this distribution model the way it ends up.  If there were no offset, we’d simply all go free in short order. And it’s the fact that criminals simply can’t get it, so are always lop-sided and off-balance. Their base is destruction; they are always self-destructive to themselves and everyone around them.

But for all those people who are working as scammers and ignorant dicto-crats (North Korea, Uganda, anywhere people are being starved into submission) – mafia types which infiltrate (and run) governments – these are all equalized in the society as a whole, very effectively and at great expense, by honestly for-good-only organizations (Red Cross, among others) and everyone-wins, top-manager networks like CEO Space.

That’s the real reason for support groups like churches, social networks, and clubs like the Optimists. They need your help to keep the balance.

It’s our top minority (extremists) who are able to make it out in spite of. But you also see that the noise the lower end makes is what keeps the whole thing a mess – and so keeps this distribution pattern in place. So only the very few can make it out. (Now, eventually, it’s possible for everyone to make it out – but that’s a complete other story…)

[An interesting sidebar is that the "Middle Ground" is where the enlightened "skywalkers" find themselves. To these, there is no "evil" and "good", but just the whole Zen experience. From that viewpoint, this whole essay is completely an excess. Listening to Alan Watts explains why and how this is.]

How to get yourself enlightened is by NOT going after it

Essentially, you can’t get there from here.

Practically, the leap from Muggle to perceiving your own path out is as wide as perceiving there are geniuses and then becoming one.  And the gap between an operating genius and becoming an enlightened skywalker is even broader.

Again, there is a trick to this. This middle road can’t be described in any of our languages. It can’t be taught; it can’t be studied. It has to be experienced, which is the way of all truth. You can’t “work” at this, you can’t pay anyone to help you achieve it. You can’t stumble on this by accident (although there are plenty of synchronous serendipities to take advantage of — or not.) And when you know you’re there, you are.  Meanwhile, you simply know that something isn’t complete, and so you are still looking…

So don’t think I’m anything above being a genius. If I were, I wouldn’t be writing this – it would just be obvious and not needing the telling. I can only tell you the obvious steps you might or might not take to get up to the level you can then make your own “leap of faith”.

Route to a top end?

Intuition and your own Imagination are apparently the only effective skills you can develop in order to get up to that point.  At least the most effective known at this writing. You can derive such a path from studying as close as you can to what true Masters have said.  But you have to listen to these with your heart.

The trick is to get beyond having to “know” what is going on. You have to get beyond knowing, and find your own intuitional sense.

Of course, this goes beyond printed matter – but you won’t need it by this time, according to sources found to date. The Tao itself is a bit of a comic book, since it says that what can be spoken or written isn’t the Tao – and then continues on to tell all about it…

This starts to explain some of what we are running into in trying to discover this path – and why it’s so “hard” to do. Because you have to give up all the effort you’re expending to find everything you’ve been looking for. (This is as it’s really been there all along…)

Practically, you have to use whatever you are using to get enlightened to un-do their very fact and effectiveness of those exact tools. You won’t need them after that point, anyway. The impossible first becomes possible, and then they both become the same.

Again, words fail here as a description. But the reason for this is because you don’t need them any more. (And because this essay is of course supposed to be motivational, and get you to do something.)

You go to, and then beyond, the level of a Christ, a Buddha, a Master. There are obviously levels beyond just achieving the level of an enlightened being coexisting on this planet. Obvious.

- – - -

And we’re going to have to leave you with that. Nothing else needs to be said – or effectively could be.

Cheers.

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---

Medianomics is an interesting study.

It’s lacked a name so far, even though it’s principles are well known and practiced. No one has tried to put it all into one framework before – but it touches all of our lives.

It’s been known mostly by it’s results: the mundane, the average, the hum-drum, the mediocre. And as much as it’s been run down, it’s the way the vast majority of us live our lives.

But practically, it runs the planet, produces the majority of the goods, and consumes them in turn. The subject of Medianomics actually runs this humankind planet we live on.

A simple definition (and graphical) is found in the Bell Curve. It’s all that big hump in the middle which researchers found are in neither extreme.

Practically, it really looks like a 3D bump -like one you run over in your average car -  as there are all sorts of extremes out on the edge with that great common bump in the middle. Most of our academia (itself an extreme) only compares two different types of things, instead of studying a universe of them all at once. But that’s how we live our lives – the law of averages sur-plus in technicolor.

What does Medianomics cover?

Just about everything. Politics, Religion, Government, Celebrities, Economics, Media, you name it.

Because Medianomics studies involve the middle ground. It involves what is routinely popular and common sense. It comes from finding the “median” or the middle.

But it also includes the study of extremist edges, the fads, the oddball stuff that winds up in Freakonomics books.

It’s easiest to explain if we cover some examples.

What Wal-Mart, Dubya and Obama have in common

Sam Walton found the “sweet spot” of merchandizing by finding out how to offer and deliver most of what everyone wants for just a little bit less than anyone else. He started it out in the Middle West, where big store chains like J.C. Penney, Sears and Montgomery Ward had settled long ago and become complacent, fat, and lazy. They were also shrinking.

Walton apprenticed in Penney’s, got a business degree in University of Missouri, and set up his business operations in Arkansas. This was contrary to the “conventional wisdom” of all time. No one starts and expands a national (and now multinational) business out of Flyover Country (except the very Medianomic Warren Buffett).  But the business model was the one which made the success.

You won’t find specialty items in Wal-Mart – just the usual stuff you can find anywhere. Sure, they’ll stock some extremely popular items, but once they quit selling, they are off the shelves and sent back to be remaindered. Merchanizing is a very cut-throat, black-and-white business.

Because average people have average needs. While they will buy flatscreen TV’s, they also buy a whole lot more soap, tires, and dog food. So finding suppliers who can give decently priced goods and then have them set up their headquarters and warehouses next to yours in the middle of nowhere is actually a win-win all around. If you study Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke distribution in conjunction with his sales strategies, you’ll see exactly how brilliant this guy was.

The key point is that he’s selling to the middle, with prices that they can afford – and keeping it all under one roof as a convenience. Same way with expanding into groceries.

Bush and Obama were elected with pluralities (well, mostly) – so they knew how to tell the middle of the country what they wanted to hear. Both of them had decidedly different coalitions of middle-ground supporters, but nonetheless, they were popular when elected. But both were found to be polarizing extremists, who dropped in popularity rapidly. Subquently this made it hard to get anything done.  Both spent a lot (LOT) of our taxpayer money in order to get a lot of support from Washington cronies,  but this made them extremely unpopular outside the Beltway. (Because we voted them in to act like we do – and spending borrowed money we know isn’t very wise.)

But they both applied Wal-Mart marketing (Medianomically speaking) of telling the bulk of the people what they wanted to hear. But this talk of bipartisanship really gets annoying after awhile. Because it’s not possible. Both political parties are extremist – so they are unpopular, except within their hard-core middle.

What is popular (and always has been) is the independent middle. People who make up their own mind, regardless of what candidates say, and what party they are registered with. And they are usually “surprised” when some politician doesn’t own up or follow up on their many promises. Because they are being told by politicians every two years (or weekly in a special interview on TV) exactly what political analysts think they wanted to hear.

But a funny accident happened when Bush cut taxes – revenue went up. Which means that to find the real  sweet-spot of taxes, they have to keep cutting.  People don’t mind paying taxes as long as 1) they get something valuable back from it, and 2) it doesn’t make things too expensive to buy or costs them their job.  No one knows what the popular level of taxation actually is. Because our politicians quit being average once they live in Washington for a few years. They turn into elite extremists. (Voter-enforced term limits usually cures that addiction.) Since most elected officials buy into the notion that spending other-people’s money on your local pet-pork boondoggle is the way to get re-elected. Not.

(Continued in Part 2…)

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---