A Midwest Journal

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…)

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While it may not always seem this happy, just sticking with the tides of Intuitional Living brings more peace than consternation.

I was all excited (so to speak) about following my bliss with this Intuitional Living stuff and then hit a rant that kept coming up. You see, I thought that this type of lifestyle was simply going to be peaceful and joyous and all that.

Forgot about the baggage we are all carrying around – all those mental habits of thinking all the time for a lifetime. Don’t figure that these will go away overnight.

But the trick and cure with the Sedona Method is to simply look at what is coming up and then release it as it does.

Intuitionally, the best way to get it released is to bring it to the surface.  It’s that old phrase “God’s Will” or “Moving with the Spirit” or some such.

What you get with Intuitional Living is a completely independent and mutually interacting lifestyle. Intuition flows through all of us. We are all interconnected, but not interdependent.  So several people acting on Intuition can show up to help someone in need – same time, same place, all there “accidentally”. Like that “Miracle on the Hudson” – a pilot who had trained his entire life just for that one particular situation. Post-grad degrees and extra studies, etc. All lives saved. Same river a few months later and you see a small plane blind-siding a copter while the supposed air traffic controller was on the phone with someone else.  All lives lost. Same river.

- – - -

It came to me this morning (which is why I’m up early blogging) – Government is the Will of the People, but when that Will gets sufficiently strong, there is no longer any need for Government.

On a small scale, I’m checking this out on our farm. We get a few hundred bucks every year because we tell the FSA what crops we put in and they tell us if there is a Loan Deficiency Payment. And in return, we agree not to sell anything directly off that land (like planting sweet corn instead of commodity yellow corn.) Every time you agree with the government for anything, you give something else up.

Now sure, with Katrina, the Coast Guard was doing great plucking people out. But if those people were truly following their Intuition, they wouldn’t have been in trouble, would they? Or they would have been able to rescue themselves. You don’t hear about the people who got out ahead of the storm or simply rode it out and rebuilt their homes without anyone else’s assistance.

All Government (and Mainstream Media) talks about are the few who can’t do anything for themselves. But that’s the wrong approach. Of course they are going to do that – those are people who need government to survive.

But does that give them any right to rip off others, take their money away by duress (what happens if you don’t pay taxes?) – when those people have never educated themselves to deal with life? Instead of running some training programs so people can get out of the poor mental habits which keep them poor – they start Welfare. And everyone else pays while they have children out of wedlock.

OK, this is turning into another deal altogether. Back to the farm. When we looked over the programs we could get into, we found that more and more we were being told we could do this or that and not the other. We were actually being given the choice of giving up our own independence in order to get the “security” and approval of these government people.  (And a little bit of money to sweeten the pot.)

I had a guy out to give me some advice about how to improve drainage on my farm. He said that because these low areas flooded once a year, they were “wetlands” and so I couldn’t do so-and-so with them – that he had to check his books for the statutes. All I wanted to do was to trim some trees so it would get back into it’s normal drainage patterns rather than start new ones.

Not like I’m draining a swamp where extremely rare and exotic wildlife live.

That’s government. Non-intuitional. Very much over-thought.

But is my life improved by getting out of government programs? Sure. Less payroll taxes if you work for yourself or as a contractor. Save up if you want to replace your own Social Security program. Like Insurance – if you have the money to pay directly, you’ll actually save money by not paying all those premiums.

Life insurance is for what – pay off your bills and funeral costs when you are dead, plus leave a little for those you left.  How about setting up what you own as an LLC or corporation and including them as stockholders, and deeding over your controlling stock to them when you are gone? Means no real estate tax if  you set it up right. Have that corporation pay for your funeral.

Taxes, as I’ve often said, just get the stupid rich, not the smart ones. Smart ones don’t “own” anything and so aren’t worth being sued or taxed. (And high taxes on millionaires just makes them move out of state – ask California.)

Government needs you, you don’t need it. Check out TOLFA.us for the theory behind this.  I’m into philosophy and can’t easily be bothered with this stuff (just bothered by it, as you can tell – need to do more releasing…)

There’s an old phrase for dealing with coyotes – the three S’s: Shoot ‘em, Shovel ‘em, and Shut up. I can harvest all the deer I want on my own property if 1) I wanted to hunt them, 2) No one saw me, 3) I didn’t tell anyone. (Plus, I’d have to process my own meat.)  Deer are a runaway nuisance, but you have to get a permit to hunt them. We are their only predators, but are only allowed to hunt them in certain times of the year and only so many at a time.  (Heck, I usually pick up several a year that other hunters throw out on the sides of the back roads because they don’t have enough tickets. Wasted – and smelly.)

The argument against this is like the buffalo – but independent ranchers saved that species, not any amount of government intervention. There are domesticated deer now.  But I’m way off the beat here. (And I’ll have the wacko enviro-extremists camped out here any minute now… “Save Bambi!”)

Look, just live your life the way it makes sense to you. Get rid of all these negative emotions hanging around and quit chasing the thrill-ride adrenaline rushes of the top end as well. Live that normal, calm, peaceful existence you know is within you.

Doesn’t mean you trip to that state will be like floating down a sedate river on a balmy afternoon – sometimes you’ll hit the rapids. But just ride them out, enjoy the trip, don’t freak out. Release all the time.

And you’ll make it.

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If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

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