What To Do, What To Do?

So you are not a market participant. Good for you, although we're all market participants even if we own no stock, but that's another post.

So what can you do now to navigate the current malaise?

Well, if you work for a big corporation that is credit dependent and/or mass consumer focused, get ready to be fired.

No, just playing with you, a little job anxiety humor to start your Monday morning, better than coffee!

This is a great opportunity, go do what you love, be pro-active, stop sitting on your TARP ass, collecting a check, waiting to be fired, the height of misery.

Be an entreprenuer! Open a yoga studio.

See, when my best of friends, Govindas asked me last year if now was a good time to open a donation based yoga studio, which was the exact same time I was calling for a massive stock market crash, I answered him with a resounding YES!!

How is that, you may ask?

Well, any other business, involving anything other than gold cyanide capsules, I would have send No F-ing Way, and it would have been good advice. Shops that sell "stuff" are shutting down all over town, there are store-front vacancies on Main Street Venice/Santa Monica which was unheard of even last year.

But, big BUT, there is a demand for authentic experience, there is a demand for deeper meaning that was all but snuffed out during the materialism-fueled 80s and 90s, and a yoga studio with an established roster of teachers is a no brainer here in the yoga mecca of the world (Yes, west-side LA trumps India, ask the Indians.)

Not a yogi? Great, go volunteer in the countries that need it, dump your house/rental, leave the country for a bit, get some perspective, leave the box. If you just started a family, get help from your boomer parents who just blew this shit up. Go work in Africa for a bit and you'll become a yogi pretty quickly.

See we're programmed to believe otherwise, but you can do whatever you want if you stop chasing the paper for a year or two, they'll be plenty of time to resume the rat wheel when you return.

Nobody, nobody, not one died saying they wish they'd spent more time at work. Get out there, take a hike, go to the beach, re-connect with nature, make the connection of reverence and respect for the land, and even find your true calling in the environmental or alternative energy space.

That and the yoga/ consciousness/ holistic industry are the new, new things that will work here, vocations that you make a lifetime out of.

That or if you still have that raging Capitalist animal spirit, move to India, move to Asia. These tigers will have your Gordon Gekko on in a Mumbai minute!

And if you're local, visit the Bhakti Yoga Shala, you will love it. Bhakti means devotion. Bhakti is service. Go be of service not just to your family, but to your community and the world at large. It's a new era, consciousness is raising, I know you can sense it, even the skeptics can see it, if not feel it.

Be of service, you'll be fine.

Long Gay Marriage

Oh yeah.

If you're against gay marriage, you're on the wrong side of the trade.

And in a few years you'll have to explain why you were on the same side as this maniac/ douchebag.

You don't want to have to explain that to your kid.

Live and let live.

Don't be a douche.

Hello Happy People

Happy with your 401k bounce from the abyss?

Me too.

See this chart? It's a chart of the US Dollar v. a basket of foreign currencies, most of which are in Europe, which is in even worse shape than here.

So basically whatever gains you've had in your US stock and bond holdings, subtract 10% and that's your real return.

If you want to compare your returns v. a strong commodity currency like the Australian Dollar subtract 20%.

Happy now?

Great. Carry on.

Humiliation Is The New Enlightenment!

Hello radiant earth beings. Are you enjoying the end of Capitalism? Congratulations to Karl Marx, I should have read you in high school.

You see, we think we know, we think we know, we think we know. . .

And we know nothing. Not a fucking thing. If we could just keep that straight, that we are more or less clueless as to basically everything, we maybe, just maybe, can prevent ourselves from paying $70 for a tomato in 2011.

And to those that still think they know what the fuck they are doing despite all evidence to the contrary, to the Federal Reserve, to the current and previous administrations, a special shout out to ya! Booyah!

And a special shout out to the TARP bank oligarchy for continuing to suck the lifeblood out of the free enterprise system. You'll be able to tell your grandchildren you ended it.

And by "it", I mean everything.

Humble. Humility. Humiliation.

One of the greatest life lessons ever is that every time, and I mean every single time I have become too big for my britches, I am swatted down and squashed like gnat on an elephant's ass.

What is it they say in China,"The nail that stands out gets hammered down?" Yes, something like that.

That's the new ethos. So un-American, so collectivist, yet so exactly of the moment, and China will overtake us in very short order because of it. And deservedly so.

The American ethos of consumer narcissism is fucking done.

Good riddance, we were gagging on it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go waterboard myself.