Ghost Hunting with Geocachers

This past Saturday, we were invited to go ghost hunting as part of a group of Geocachers. A Geocaching friend, ‘QZ’, from outside Denver was making the less than 2 hour drive down to Colorado Springs for the weekend, and decided she wanted to check out the haunted tunnels she read about on Gold Camp Road in our area…

Jump to the full article at MadCacher’s Blog

With all that said, It’s worthwhile to notice that something is going on with our planet over the past couple of decades.

Most of the larger earthquakes as well as some interesting volcanic activity over the past few months have been occurring over an area of plate tectonic activity called the “Ring of Fire”.

Here’s a short list of some notable earthquakes so far this year.

2011-01-02 Chile Earthquake 7.1
2011-01-18 Pakistan Earthquake 7.2
2011-01-19 New Zealand 7.4
2011-02-04 Myanmar India 6.4
2011-02-21 Suez Canal 5.9
2011-02-22 Christchurch New Zealand 6.3
2011-02-25 Gulf Coast 5.7
2011-03-06 Volcano in Kilauea Hawaii erupts and creates a fissure in the crust
2011-03-06 Chile Earthquake 6.2
2011-03-06 South Sandwich Islands (Africa) 6.5
2011-03-10 Yunan China 5.4
2011-03-10 Volcano in Kilauea stops and drains, collapsing
2011-03-11 Japan 8.9

This has nothing to do with global warming or radio waves or martians. It’s interesting to note, however, that the number of earthquake occurrences and the number of large earthquake occurrences are increasing over these past 20 years compared with the twenty years before it. I don’t know if that means earthquakes have a snowball effect (implying they’ll only get worse without receding) or a cycle (implying the time frame of this cycle is beyond when we started recording earthquakes with precision equipment), but it looks that either way it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

It’s just a hunch, but looking at the record of recent earthquakes and magnitudes, I’d say either Saudi/Iraq or California are in for a hit in a couple of weeks.

As to the idea that our records of seismic activity has increased solely on the advancements of technology and science, these two following sites make a compelling argument that this idea needs to be scrutinized. The first one points out that records for major ‘quakes were fairly good from the 1880s onwards so anything in the 6.5~7.0 range and above would be detected and recordable. The second one makes a scientific case based on the data centered around 5.x magnitude earthquakes.

A couple of interesting sources on the matter:
Earthquake Frequency Trends
International Earthquake Frequency

“Live Faithfully, Fight Bravely…”

“Be Faithful, Be Pure…”

“He who serves … [their country] … serves God.”

“[To] my magnificent youngsters! Are there any finer ones in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them, I can make a new world. This is the heroic stage of youth. Out of it will come the creative man…”

“…youth must be slender and supple, fast as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. He must learn to do without, to endure criticism and injustice, to be reliable, discreet, decent, and loyal.”

What happened to faithfulness, bravery, purity, grace, dependability, responsibility and loyalty? They should certainly be taught, but parents are mistaken if they think the school, typical Sunday school or material synagogue/schule takes this effort. Let me shed some light to the aforementioned quotes by filling in their ellipses.

“Live Faithfully, Fight Bravely, and Die Laughing! We were born to die for Germany!”

“Be Faithful, Be Pure, Be German!”

“He who serves Adolf Hitler, the Führer, serves Germany, and whoever serves Germany, serves God.”

“I begin with the young. We older ones are used up. We are rotten to the marrow. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there any finer ones in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them, I can make a new world. This is the heroic stage of youth. Out of it will come the creative man, the man-god.”

“The German youth must be slender and supple, fast as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. He must learn to do without, to endure criticism and injustice, to be reliable, discreet, decent, and loyal.”

Oops! Doesn’t sound so Utopian, anymore, now that we know the source of the statements.

Hitler certainly had a masterful influence over people. He convinced them through his charisma, education, grace, talent and diplomacy to unite and wreak havoc on the world, not excluding attempted genocide. Many politicians looked to him, his influence and his failures as examples of how to control the masses. People were dazzled and blinded by the hateful intent and destructive force this leader was spewing… not least of them were teachers.

So what makes teachers, or anyone for that matter, think they are impervious to the same forces taking power in America and across other world power governments today? All adults from the past three generations have been raised and educated in such a way that it systematically strips our independence and self-sufficiency, making us dependent on the government. Furthermore, it’s been done in a way that, for the most part, we don’t know what we’re missing.

Education – TRUE education – isn’t about reading or writing or arithmetic. Those aren’t goals. Those are tools and we should think of them as such. True education is about exploring, experimenting on our own, making mistakes and learning from them. It’s about acknowledging the individuality of people, respecting them and respectfully disagreeing with eloquence. It’s about mastering graceful behavior on our own bodies as an outward expression that we are elite creatures by creation and can master other things as well. It’s about knowing your ground, debating civilly, and assisting others gallantly. It’s about becoming the best person you can be.

The government thinks the best you can be, in the government’s system’s point of view, is a resource … a tool. If the government needs more waiters and waitresses in the future, guess what kind of education you’re children are going to be given. I heard of an interesting society – another experimental system – that molded the western culture. But this system had real education as its underpinnings. They would drop the names of all civilians in a bowl and have lottery-esque drawings for careers. This was not a lottery of children to determine what career to train them for, as the Soviet Union’s communistic government donned out, but a lottery of adults. It was expected of all adults to be completely capable and self sufficient of any task that if the city needed a new army captain or master chef any adult had already risen to that capability and only needed to exercise it. This was ancient Greece.

Hitler, as much a beast as he was, was right about the power of government managed education. If you send your child to Caeser, Kaiser, or der Führer… don’t be surprised when they come home as Romans, Germans or Nazis. Start by being surprised at what the leaders are saying.

Look through history at all the greatest inventors … even at the wealthiest people today … they either didn’t finish public school or they didn’t go to public school at all. Schooling does not equate to education. It is mostly for government indoctrination. Teachers have been used as pawns and most don’t recognize it. The same could be said for any American (or anyone raised under a Prussian-inspired school system).

What should you do to break away from this indoctrination? Put yourself through the type of elite schooling that our politicians and other powerful world leaders receive:

Hone your skills and learn skills that really matter:

• Educate yourself by reading classic literature, philosophy, poetry.
• Exercise yourself through puzzles.
• Expand what you’ve learned through practicing debate, reason and logic.
• Execute your skills by critical examination of the media (they’re mostly wrong … and on purpose, too) and by listening carefully to what world leaders are saying.
• Know what makes people tick.
  • For those who want to learn, show them the way.
  • For those who don’t want to learn, know how to control/seduce/entice their desires to direct them to do justice and righteousness.
  • You’ll find more people want to learn as the unrest continues.

Prepare for the worst, but work for the best:

• Just like the boy scout motto.
• Prepare your hearts – Master your world view. Get right with God
• Prepare your mind – learn survival skills … at least learn to milk a cow
• Prepare your pantry – store food for yourself and others
• Prepare your arsenal – get ready to hunt for and defend your family
• Prepare your finances – save and invest in hard goods and precious metals

Start now. Time is running out. If you have these skills then you can question the world around you to recognize the signs. The red stallion is ready.

Coworkers teased, and I kept saying “but it was a cool bandaid” (again trying to rationalize the bad trade).

A week later, while I was home working, my wife and kids went geocaching in Angelfire, NM and came across what promised to be a big cache. When they opened the box it was filled with business cards and bandages! They were all so disappointed. I then told my kids about what I did in CA to which my eldest said (without any prompting) “at least you left a cool bandaid. These weren’t like that. They were boring.”

Nevertheless, I vowed never to leave something like a bandaid in a Geocache again. And certainly wouldn’t leave a business card. (What type of jerk does that?! If I find your business card in a cache, I’ll call you to find out!!!)

I wonder how we would treat George Washington, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and other founding figures under the same situation. After all, they promoted the same types of attack at the Boston Tea Party – and afterwords, the British exercised a stronger government against the colonies. Those directly involved with these violent acts of insurrection were called cowards, traitors, rebels, among other choice words of their time.

You can read the cliff-notes version at the Boston Tea Party Timeline website but long story short, these people who fought and won the liberties and freedoms we enjoy today were nothing short of terrorists and wing-nuts by today’s definition. Most of their battle was through talks and negotiations, but when it came down to a government that didn’t care to listen to the people it was supposed to be protecting, revolutionary war became the final answer.

The main difference between then and now is that the Government in dispute is local where we can walk into a congressman’s office and have some hope of representation. Where I think most grievance lies is in the non-representation that the generations before us allowed. The six pages that made up the Constitution – the framework of our nation – has been usurped by thousands of pages of trite dog-eared laws that benefit certain individuals over the general citizens. There is also a great unrest and clash between cultures within the borders where liberal vs. conservative morals are the issues at heart rather than expansive vs. localized political powers. These differences make it difficult to both justify and to condemn the nature of injustice in the actions of Joe and the government he was at odds with.

Most people who defend Joe explain that Joe Stack isn’t any different from a Colonist in the 18th century who, enraged at the taxation, coercive acts and unjust courts decided that rather than subject himself to another year of anguish would take his meager unsubstantial life and make a smoke signal to others with it.

Most people who condemn Joe have the same western mentality that anyone who deliberately crashes a plane into a building is a nut-case and a coward. I guess they haven’t studied Eastern culture – particularly of Samurais – nor of the mentality of kamikaze pilots in WWII. Maybe they slept through the lecture on Pearl Harbor – who knows. But a single drastic event makes a louder statement, and a spokesman, no matter how depraved before, becomes instantly recognized.

I’m getting very tired of hearing people call him a coward merely on the basis that he committed suicide or that he incidentally killed someone else in the process. His final act of unrest had a motive beyond escapism which leads me to believe he died for something he believed in. It doesn’t matter what your faith is, if you die for something you believe, even if it’s the wrong thing to believe in, it isn’t mere cowardice – it’s something else. Nobody seems to call the nearly 1000 “kool-aid” suicides under the watch of Rev. James Warren Jones acts of cowardice. Of course, that doesn’t make any of it right.

I’ll add, however, that as affective the immediate results were, Joe’s airplane crash into the IRS was neither creative nor productive and his message has gotten lost amongst the thousands of retweets that dismiss his motives entirely (as a coward). He would have served America much better in prison next to Irwin Schiff, in a twist of irony that would have him living off of the same tax dollars he so despised paying.

For what it’s worth, Irwin Schiff is in prison for denying Uncle Sam the satisfaction of taxing him. He’s sentenced to 12.5 years for this federal crime while the average sentence for a repeat child rapist is only 7. This is the type of injustice that drove Joe Stack crazy.

The commercial was met with mixed criticism from viewers. Some found the happy golden dancing people and their intentionally obnoxious singing so annoying that they associated the Folgers brand with that annoyance rather than the intended way to get around it. Others met the commercial with optimism and found the song humorous and memorable. Each chorus was met with an increase of volume and the commercial song even featured a bridge with a rising key-change: both musical qualities emphasize the rising sun rays getting stronger and more invasive. It’s a beautiful example of music-psychology.

As for the video, imagine Ned Flanders dancing around, playing the kazoo in a blond wig, basking in morning sunlight as the Sun’s rays force through the curtains of Homer’s window. It’s quite frankly what every parent with young children have to face on a daily basis.

Sadly, the http://toleratemornings.com/ website and all its goodness is no more, and it doesn’t ever last on YouTube for more than a few months before being removed. I think Folgers insistence of wiping the commercial from existence on all the video boards shows some backward thinking. After all, this is a commercial that they payed television stations to air and these fans are posting it up on the internet for people to watch without Folgers having to pay another dime. It’s a good commercial and they should have made more. Maybe showing the ramifications of a dry dessert that can be overcome by the dark brown richness from a hot cup of Folgers coffee.

Well… here are the lyrics to the best of my knowledge:

[Think Jimmy Durante]
Hah cha cha chahhh
Hah cha cha chahhh

Hello World, we’re shining so bright.
A new day’s here, it’s really dynamite.
Feel the love. Savor the door.
There’s a rainbow for each girl and boy.

On this [clap clap] happy morning! (Rise and shine!)
[clap clap] happy morning! (We’re doin’ fine!)
Get up, get out of bed. You can sleep when you are dead.

Partied hard; stayed up real late.
It’s time for work and you can hardly wait.
Scrub-a-dub-dub. Doodily-doo.
Spread the sunshine inside of you.

‘Cause it’s a [clap clap] happy morning! (Happy day!)
[clap clap] happy morning! (It’s nice today!)
Wake up you sleepy head. You can sleep when you are dead …

You can sleep when you are … [very bad Yamaha recorder instrumental]

La la la laaa
La la la laaa

[key change - rises like the sun]

Chahhhhh! Happy morning. (Rise and shine!)
Happy morning. (It’s wake-up time!)
Wake up you sleepy head, you can sleep when you are …
[clap clap]
Happy morning. (Happy day!)
Happy morning. (Feel right today!)
Wake up you sleepy head … [fade]

I enjoyed the song so much that I made it into a ringtone (or more appropriately, a wake-up alarm on my iPhone). The audio had to be stripped out of the commercial then carefully amplified and cut to produce the result. Audacity was used for the editing. I can’t remember what was used to pull the audio out of the video file.

Happy Morning Short Edit.m4r for the iPhone.

happy_morning_short_edit.mp3 for other devices.

1. Proverbs 10:3 – The LORD will not allow the righteous soul to famish.
   We need to hold ourselves to high integrity and standards in the beginning of these dark times. Be honest and truthful with our words and actions, courageous and dogmatic about what’s right, loyal and faithful to God at all costs.
   There’s nothing righteous in being angry, inconsiderate, jealous or rude. Righteousness starts by being ready to admit we’re wrong, and by acknowledging natural laws that govern us as being universal with accountability.
2. Proverbs 11:1 – Dishonest scales are an abomination of the LORD, but a just weight is His delight.
   I.E. Don’t clock in time you didn’t work. Don’t say you did something if you didn’t. If the United States economy collapses and bartering becomes a popular way of life, remember that God’s law states that any cheater pays back seven fold what he stole.
3. Proverbs 11:24-26 – There is one who scatters, yet increases more; and there is one who withholds more than is right, but it leads to poverty. The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will also be watered himself. The people will curse him who withholds grain, But blessing will be on the head of him who sells it.
   Any man who doesn’t provide for his family’s needs first is a twisted dung heap. After providing for your family, see how you can further sustain your need and others with what you have remaining. Although God blesses those who bless the poor, we need to be industrious in how we help others. Remember the parable of the maids with the oil lamps in Matthew 25:1-13. Although the parable is intended to demonstrate our spiritual preparedness for the tribulation (perhaps even acceptance of the rapture itself) it holds wisdom for other aspects in life. In short, it’s the boyscout motto: be prepared.

What should we stockpile? Nonperishable Consumables. These are items that last long on the shelf that everyone uses: Daily necessities such as toilet paper, shaving cream, razors, toothpaste; Cans or packages of food with more than two or three years of shelf-life such as beans, peanut butter and ramen noodles; Extra batteries; Bottled water and water purifiers; “sinful” pleasures such as cigarettes, wine, bottles of rum.

You might not have interests in these items, but others will in a couple of years.

The Paurian Cafe started out as a sounding board, but as time passes, and as I supposedly mature, it becomes more apparent that personal sounding boards and web journals generally don’t help the public who have an actual and realized need.

What do people need? What do they want? Where are we heading from this point?

Irresponsible people in government have an idealistically optimist outlook. They have for years. A politically influential man told me in June 2008 that we had eight more years before our nation would collapse. That in eight years, we would no longer be “America”. He didn’t say we wouldn’t be “America as we know it,” but that we would no longer be American soil. I wish I had started investing in gold then. I thought of doing it last spring, but decided to put that money towards refinancing our house to lower the monthly payments. We’re living in times where every decision we make is invariably a bad one depending on who you listen to.

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. – Thomas Jefferson

Lately my life has been an emotional roller coaster. Is this what people refer to as mid life crisis? Maybe I’m just finally getting back in touch with my feelings. I could get seriously mature at this point and talk about politics and religion because that’s what adults are supposed to do… but I’m going to take a chance and run with my emotions here for a moment.

I’d have to thank my wife for helping me along that road. Sixteen years ago we met over a poetry group that I founded and moderated at the U. Emotions were fierce and wonderfully inescapable.

These emotions are what drove my creativity … I think by the time we’re adults we’ve learned to suppress our emotions so much that we forget we have them … the life that used to be so brilliant and colorful when we were kids has become a sea of lackluster and that dreary adultness points a finger at “responsibility” when being more responsible has nothing to do with losing that edge.

It was that emotion that drove the creativity into writing music, poetry, art and photography. A good friend of mine, Jorge, who had more creative genius in his left foot than I had in both my hands found a girlfriend and was spending most of his time with her. That left me with only geeky buddies to hang out with and visit. Then I found a girlfriend and she was the hottest girl in the CS lab to be sure! Now she’s the hottest girl in my house!

So when it comes to emotions, adults are conditioned to forget about them, and that’s easy to do with television and computer games. Since I’ve cut those out I started to see life normal again.

Last night I read a book to my son. It has a picture of a playground and a boy at the top of the slide, looking out. I remember that moment – the first big slide I climbed. I was so high! It was amazing. Then I thought to myself … all those moments in life that followed where I got used to being taller off the ground made being as high as that slide not so exciting anymore: The first tall tower, the first flight, the first time falling in love… but each of those highs were different. They had different mindsets and observations. And each one is so wonderful they shouldn’t be forgotten or compared with the rest.

So why did I suppress my creativity? I was trained into it for one thing. It’s the politics, the corporate, the expectation to be proper and civilized. Go ask James Thurber about being civilized! … but more than that it’s childhood fears in an adult form that I haven’t faced and shook off.

I can’t run away from who God made me, but I’m so paranoid! I’m afraid of people watching me and calling me a failure face just like they did for years in school! Ugh! It still feels like they’re watching me and waiting for that chance to laugh at me all over again.

Like the daft Captain Hook – always looking for a chance to choke the life out of Peter Pan just to sneer at Pan’s failure. The adult psyche is always trying to kill the child psyche. In more modern terms, it’s like the dreaded Count Olaf – always watching … always near and just waiting to snatch up the little orphans’ souls (after all, that’s the most enormous fortune anyone’s got).

Stone tape theory, also known as residual hauntings, is the idea that a ghost repeats itself. Usually at a specific timed event, such as the anniversary of that spirit’s embodied death, or at the stroke of midnight. Stone tape theory is the idea behind what causes it while a residual haunting is the phenomenon itself. What stone tape theory proposes is that the earth can record certain events if the conditions are right and play them back under some set of special conditions (similar or otherwise).

I’ve been a pretty strong proponent of STT until recently because of a misunderstanding of Genesis 4:10 where Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. But what brought me back to looking at that verse was a recent wandering to Psalm 103:15-16. In both Psalm 103:16 and in Job 7:10, a specific reference is made that the place does not remember the deceased.

As a place, a bed of limestone – even a magnetically charged one – should not remember anything. That means one of three things.

1. People who “see” ghosts are mad, hence the surge of reports reflects the overall human race traveling down the road of insanity.
2. Supernatural occurrences are happening more frequently but being misinterpreted as ghosts.
3. The media is a lying and the supernatural/ghost craze is perceptual, or worse, is another instance of life following after “art” (if you can call anything on TV “art”).

I have to admit, though, a riveting thriller from Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving or Ray Bradbury gives me pause to think about mortality and the mysteries of a world bound to it.

Call me cynical but everyone is born inherently evil; selfishness, greed, envy, spite, anger, bitterness, arrogance and pride exhume themselves like Hollywood zombies from our rotting hearts starting the day we’re born. It takes extraordinary care, work and divine intervention to draw us away from our own natural disaster.

Perhaps it’s these ghosts in our mind that keep chasing us. We each have our own tell-tale heart. After all, that’s what Stone Tape Theory is, isn’t it? Rocks that tell a tragic tale over and over again until those who hear it go mad.