"SANTA ECONOMICS"     An article by Alan Gotthardt. More evidence that what appears to be true is not actually true. Much of what we take today for scientific research, facts or knowledge is actually an unproven statement or assumption, often made to support a specific agenda as opposed to being a search for the truth, regardless of the agenda.
The article below is an excellent overview of the extent of this deception.

Click Here For "Santa Economics - We Are All Believers Now"

There are two big words in the title of this article, "discern" and "deception". "Discern" (pronounced "dis-sern"), is often used as "discernment" "discerning of spirits" and so forth.  Discern is generally defined as one's own ability to "see" or understand how people, things and situations are working together and the motivations or intents that are behind those people, things and situations.

A simple example of this is driving. When you drive you must discern what is going on around you. The interaction of the traffic and what each drivers intentions are. You discern the signs along the road and that information helps you make accurate decisions about where you are now, where  you are going to, and how best to get there. This is common every day "discernment".

"Deception" on the other hand, is defined as "a ruse", "a trick" or "the use of deceit". "Lying", "misleading", "misconstruing", "misunderstanding", "spinning" (slanting a particular story or event to fit your agenda), are all common forms of deception. You and I deal with deception every day. Each of us is either "deceiving" or "discerning" the flow of information and events throughout our day.

Many times we are not even consciously aware of our own deceptions that we perpetrate on others. At other times the deception is both deliberate and pre-meditated. Those "little white lies" we tell are small deceptions. The more egregious examples are deliberate media deception, "propaganda" that can be perpetrated on either side of any given issue, in an attempt to influence or control the general population. Human beings really want to be "right" and they are usually willing to lie if necessary, to appear to be "right" on some issue.

The one group of people that Jesus most despised was those who were deceivers. Jesus had superior discernment ability. He could "see" or "discern" what was in someones heart and mind. When asked about the signs of his second coming, in Matthew chapter 24, Jesus proceeds to list a lot of things that were going to happen. The first one he mentioned was "deception". He warned "take care that no one deceive you..."

He clearly felt that deception in the church was going to become a major threat. But his warning is also a general principle of life, that can save us from much heartache and major mistakes. We all need the ability to discern truth from lies and recognize how your life choices you make today will influence your life for many years to come.

The challenge lies in the fact that deception can be presented in such a way as to make it very attractive to the "bait". Take for example Charles Ponzi, the inventor of what we call today, "the Ponzi Scheme". A deception which originated in 1919, in which investors appeared to be making big returns on money they invested with Charles Ponzi. But Ponzi was spending their money, not investing it. He was deceiving these investors into believing that they could make big money by investing with Charles. But it was all a big lie. He was simply taking money from new investors and using it to pay "returns" to the earlier investors, then spending the rest. Ponzi defrauded and deceived dozens of investors before the scheme collapsed, destroying the fortunes of those who were deceived by him.

Why were they deceived? Why didn't they "discern" that Ponzi was not really earning the money he told his investors they would earn? Most deception and fraud is disguised to look like something good, something you really want or something you really need. When the bait looks tempting, the fish are going to bite. Deceivers often present an opportunity or benefit that is so tempting that the "bait" (that's you), cannot "afford to turn it down".

Bernie Madoff was so deceptive in creating his aura of success and power around his own ponzi scheme that he was able to entice even major corporations and wealthy, knowledgable investors to give him billions of dollars. His was the largest financial deception ever perpetrated by an individual. It was nothing more than a deception disguised as wealth and power. Madoff's greatest deception was his ability to make everyone believe that it was "prestigious" to invest with him. People will often make terrible mistakes in judgement in order to satisfy their pride and ego. Investing with a powerful, successful "guru" like Bernie Madoff was a status symbol. And though it worked for some 30 years, events beyond Madoff's control eventually exposed this "investing guru" as a mind boggling web of deception.

Learning to discern the difference between truth and deception requires that we get beyond ourselves and our own ego. We must stop making choices based on what is stroking our ego or promising to immediately satisfy our biggest needs or desires. We must learn to examine the "bait" carefully, before we "bite it". If we are not so quick to "take the bait" and make the effort to understand what is happening and why, we can avoid deception.

Avoiding deception can be challenging. Our hearts and minds can rationalize us into a bad decision if we have not yet developed discernment. Avoiding deception is the essence of freedom. A nation that is deceived by it's leaders is a nation that has been enslaved by them. On a more personal level, seeking truth is the essence of foundation building for success in life. Learn to discern or you will be deceived.

In today's highly contentious world, the "sides" have become more polarized than ever. We have "Red states" and "Blue states",  "Catholic versus Protestant", "Sunni versus Shia", Republican versus Democrat, "north versus south", "east versus west",  "global warming believers versus global warming debunkers". You can probably think of many other such comparisons.

Recently many politicians and pundits in the United States have been saying that people should be held to account for holding positions that are in disagreement with this belief or that belief. For example, former US vice president Al Gore recently declared that those who deny global warming should be "penalized" for their dissent and refusal to acknowledge that global warming does exist. If some were to have their way, there would be a law to make it illegal to disagree with any "official" government position.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin has jailed numerous detractors who have spoken out against him. One such jailed dissident is an all-girl rock band from Russia that wrote and performed songs that disagreed with Putin and his policies. They are now writing songs in a cold, distant prison camp in Siberia.

The saying goes that "those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it". China, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Belarus, North Korea, and many other nations have a history of murdering anywhere from thousands to millions of their own citizens, in an attempt to control and crush those who disagree with some sort of doctrine or belief.

What is it that so scares government, political or religious leaders that they are motivated to murder their own citizens or anyone who opposes their point of view? Why was Hitler so afraid of the Jews? Why did Pol Pot find it necessary to murder millions of innocent men, women and children in Cambodia? Why are leaders so eager to control thought and crush those who disagree with them?

Answer: Only liars fear the truth. The truth does not fear dissent, and always leaves itself open to thorough examination. One can find the truth as long as one is willing to accept the truth for what it is, whether or not it fits our political, religious or personal agenda.

Dissent is feared by those who know inside that they are lying or fear that what they want to believe is not true. They are willfully lying to themselves. In so doing, they have to try and force everyone else to agree with this lie in order to achieve their own agenda. When government leaders have this mindset, the result is a totalitarian state in which everyone is required to believe the "official state version of the truth".

The truth however, is immune to lies and does not fear dissent, especially considering that dissent is meaningless in the long run if it disagrees with real truth. The truth will always persist and cannot be eliminated. Lies fade away over time just like the memory of so many who have come before, attempting to force their version of the "truth" on the masses. In the end, the truth holds up, while the lies and the liars who tell them eventually fade away.

Wars, along with much pain and suffering are the historical result of such personal, political or religious agendas. We must remember the history of what has come before if we are to avoid the endless repetition of mass killings and endless wars in the name of this or that agenda. We must always remain vigilant to seek the truth whatever it may be, rather than allowing some leader or entity to define the "truth" for us.

Ever notice how many "experts" there are on television and radio these days? How many seminars there are each week in your city, featuring "experts" on a variety of topics. No question the world is full of experts. Political experts, media experts, military experts, medical experts, security experts, terrorism experts, you get the idea.

Do you ever keep track of what these experts have predicted? How often do you check to see if the weather expert in your town is right about the weather? Predicting the weather is hard enough, even with super computers and years of models used to predict what is likely to happen. Still we all know that, as often as not, the weather is not quite or not at all what was predicted. It's still about a 50/50 shot on those 10 day forecasts.

And what about the experts who think it's a good idea to do this or that? Invade Syria? Invade Iran? Invest in Gold? Buy mining stocks? Start a bottled water company? Stockpile food and weapons for armageddon?

Remember Y2K? New Years day, January 1, 2000 was supposed to be the disaster to end all disasters. Mass chaos would erupt all over the world as the worlds computers ran out of dates and began to shut down all at once. Pandimoneum would reign. It was time to move to the mountains and start farming. Y2K came and went with little fanfare and even fewer computer problems. The warnings did not come to pass, but many "experts" made tons of money off of the resulting preparations. Millions of dollars worth of books, supplies, guns, land, and computer programming services were sold as a result of the near panic that erupted from around 1994 until new years day, 2000.

Most of the time when something really big happens, something disastrous, the experts are also caught totally off guard. Take the Christmas Day tsunami of 2004 as an example. This massive wave killed 250,000 or more, and no one saw that coming. What about September 11, 2001. The US already had billions of dollars worth of security and intelligence services monitoring terrorististic threats, yet the terrorists who brought down the world trade center towers did it with our planes, trained for it in our flight schools and lived in the US with expired visas, right under our very noses.

What about the housing collapse of 2008? Did you hear any real estate experts predicting that one?

The core of "expert" motives is often money. None of the major housing experts wanted to admit that housing could collapse, right up to the day that it did. Ditto for the banking sector. Everyone involved was more willing to be deceived into believing a lie, than to objectively determine that the system was dangerously flawed with overpriced homes.

Deception comes in two forms. Deliberate deception, when someone wants to deceive you, usually to get your money, or accidental deception, when we believe something is true because that is what we think sounds right to us, or we would prefer to believe a lie instead of the truth, just because it fits better with what we assume could be the "truth". But the real truth does not care what we think or feel.

The fact is that none of us is nearly as smart as we think we are. Myself included. In fact, after living for 57 years, and making as many mistakes as most folks can make, I've come to the conclusion that I too, am dumb as a rock. But the good news is, once I realized this, I became an expert at realizing how much I needed to keep my own opinions and assumptions in check. Trust but verify.

I realized the key to being a "real" expert, who is right most of the time, is to always keep in mind that I do not know anything. This helps me be more humble and mindful that I could be wrong. In so doing, I find that I avoid jumping to conclusions or assuming that my own bloated opinions are fact.

I'm also better able to avoid listening to others who have bloated opinions of themselves. The key to being a real expert is to realize that we are not as smart as we think we are, and neither is anyone else that we are listening to.

Being willing to seek out the real truth, while being willing to lay aside our personal opinions and assumptions is the key to being a real, authentic

 

Rather, our faith must be based on something that is absolutely true. Truth does not come out of what you believe or "have faith in". Faith that has real power, can only be based on absolute truth. Faith in something that is a fake, or a lie, will not have any power. Faith only works when it is based on truth.

You can have faith in a person, but what if that person turns out to be a liar or worse, a deceiver, who pretends to be one thing, but is actually a phony. Politicians often say that they are in favor of a specific thing; but when they get into office, they often do something that is virtually the opposite of what we expected. Clearly having "faith" in politicians is a shaky proposition at best.

I can believe with all my heart that I can fly. I can visualize myself flying, I can recite positive mantras like "I can if I think I can". I can think about flying day and night, and I can imagine myself, arms open wide, floating on the warm afternoon breeze. But the minute I spread my arms and jump off the cliff, my faith will be shattered, (along with a few bones), as I quickly realize that my faith had been placed in something that simply was not true. I can't spread my arms and fly, no matter how much faith I have in my physical flying ability.

On the other hand, If I am a pilot who knows how to fly a plane, I can fly and I can have faith in my ability to fly. As long as I am following the rules that govern flight - the absolute laws and truth of aerodynamics, then I can fly. But in this case, my faith is not in myself or my own ability to fly. My faith is placed in the truth of the laws of physics. Those are absolutely true and will always yield a predictable result, as long as I stay strictly in compliance with those laws. They are true, absolute, and they are immutable. Faith placed in something that is absolutely true yields power. Faith placed in something that is wishful thinking, rather than truth, has no power. This is why truth has real power.

And WHY do you believe it?

Over the course of our lives we develop a lot of ideas that we believe to be true. Where did you get many of the strongly held beliefs that you have? How did you develop the so-called "strong-holds" in your mind, that give you your version of "truth"?

What if something you believe to be true is actually a lie? We all take actions based on what we believe to be true. Have you ever thought about how you came to believe what you believe? Are you absolutely sure that the things you go around believing every day are true? Are you basing your life on things that you know to be absolutely, positively true, or are you just going around assuming that what you believe is true?

I once heard someone say that it is dangerous to assume anything. This is because the word "assume" can also make an "ASS" out of "U" and "ME".  Arguments among friends and wars among nations can be started over assumptions.

Remember when the world "assumed" that the nation of Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction? The United States drove a world-wide effort to invade Iraq over this assumption. After all, the "intelligence" community said they had these weapons. Was the "intelligence" community assuming that they had these weapons, or was it the truth?

This question is still argued by those on the left and the right, to this day, years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Regardless of what may have supposedly happened to those weapons, the truth at this point is that they were never found. Looks like the intelligence community made an assumption. Or perhaps it was an outright lie to give an excuse to start yet another war.  A CIA informant later admitted that he had lied about the existence of the weapons, but was "shocked" when the USA used that information to drum up support for an invasion. 

The information was assumed to be true, and it was acted upon, when the USA invaded Iraq. An entire war was based on a lie that was generated within the "intelligence" community. Clearly the information was neither true nor intelligent.

When we say that we base our lives on what we know to be true, we must take stock of where we got our "truth". Often the "truths" we believe are lies concocted by others who have ulterior motives. Our views on politics and religion often come more from what we personally want to believe, rather than any real basis in absolute truth. We hear thousands of messages every day as we go about our lives, but very few of those messages are actually based on real truth. Most are designed to influence us into believing a certain thing to be true, whether it is or not.

Stop and think about what you believe and why you believe it. Are you a "conservative"? a "liberal"? Where and how did you develop your belief system? Did your parents influence you? How about those messages in the music you listen to? What about the TV shows and commercials you watch? What books do you read? What politicians do you believe? Which ones do you believe are lying? Do you really believe that one party is lying but the other is not? 

Most of the time we listen to those that we like and especially those that we think we agree with. But just because you agree with what someone is saying does not mean that what they are saying is true. It's more difficult than you realize to know the truth in a world filled with deception.

Have you noticed how it seems that our financial institutions, our schools and our government are all having problems with stability? If a building does not have stability in it's design, and integrity in it's building process, it will fall. And when it does, it's likely to fall on a lot of the people who are in it.

The banking system completely lost it's stability in September of 2008, resulting in an unprecedented, world-wide effort to "stabilize" the global economic system. And, the truth is, they lost their stability as a result of moving away from the truth that once was accuracy and accountability in the banking system.

The loss of integrity across the entire economic complex, especially in the real estate world, led to massive instability that persists today, some 5 years later. The problems continue because the truth or "gold standard" if you will, has been obscured and polluted by recent investing "innovations' in finance, insurance and real estate.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death.

When you veer off the straight, honest, truthful path, you get off into deception. You get fooled. Just ask Bernie Madoff, he found it relatively easy to veer people off the safe, proven path, with clever deceptions designed to "look like the real thing". People thought Bernie was "the real deal". After all, he'd once been head of the SEC. His credentials were, "impeccable". He pulled off one of the most amazing financial deceptions in the history of the world. But he, like many of his equally dishonest counterparts were eventually exposed by the very instability of the economic system, which they contributed to by their fraud. The blame for today's world instability can be cast far and wide.

The trends in instability are unmistakable and everyone knows that they are there. The truth is, things are getting more and more unstable, as we move farther and farther away from truths that once were viewed as simple common sense.

The more everyone ignores truth, the more unstable things will become. The level of instability in a given system, business, organization, institution or government entity, is directly in proportion to the degree of deception being perpetrated inside.

In recent days the American people have been shocked by several "scandals".  Each of these scandals has one thing in common: They involve someone in the government in a high level position who lied in public, even under oath before congress, about some specific event.

In fact, depending on which news show you prefer, you can find someone who will vehemently claim that the other political party is lying. Democrats have their version of events and Republicans have theirs. Everyone pretty much claims that the other side is lying. The problem is, both sides are right. Both sides are lying to some degree, most of the time.
Our kids are cheating in school, but recent school scandals over test scores showed that the teachers and administrators were cheating even more than the kids. Cheating in some way, and then lying about it have become common place in America. And this is a very dangerous place to be.

Only the truth can set us free. And it's not the truth about someone else that will set us free, it's the truth about ourselves. Have you compromised your integrity this week to lie about something? Are you covering up something that you've done? When we lose sight of the need for truth and integrity, we lose control of our freedom. Governments who are afraid of the absolute truth about themselves and their people, seek to control their people, often by force, threats and coercion.

Prosecutors, charged with the execution of justice in our courts, seem to seek convictions instead of seeking justice by seeking the real truth. Scientists often cover up research data that may tend to indicate that their theories are not correct. People often hide the real truth in order to maintain an image or protect their reputation. But ultimately all lies cannot stand and tend to expose their tellers at the worst possible moment. A lie can destroy a career that took years to build, in mere moments. And this happens all the time.

President's have lied, government officials at all levels and in all branches have lied. The intelligence community lies as a matter of due process, to "protect" the American people. The IRS is so worried about telling the truth, that they decided to "plead the fifth".

When a bridge across a river loses it's integrity, it will collapse under the weight of the vehicles it was built to support. When a government and a people lose their integrity, their society will collapse under the weight of it's dishonesty. There can be no order and progress without truth. A free and prosperous society cannot be built upon lies and deceit.