A Few Words About Bank Of America, Two-Sawme’s, Earthquakes, & My Old Friend “J”

I felt unusually recollected this morning, the oils flowing and the quill well lubricated. Things are happening out there, sometimes so fast it is nearly impossible to get to it all, as we slog through respective professions and occupations and vocations and the like. In America, you know, a person is equated with what he does–nay, he IS what he does! Thus why so much fanfare of self- promotion and extravagence even at the most shameless self-aggrandizement.

Before I get too far down the road I aim to say a word or two more about Kenneth Lewis and Bank Of America. It is inexcusable that this man will parachute out of Bank America with some $150 Million in gilded edged account books to record all his loot while the United States taxpayers–better explained as “America’s poor,” had to bail out his bank. I’ll never forget as I sat nearly spellbound, as LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS fought for its survival, and he turned a wickedly blind eye, while he coveted Merrill Lynch. LEHMAN deserved a bailout just as much as AIG or any other irresponsible financial institution, whose march had been quickened with greed and avarice, beginning in the 1990’s. I would have canned him when he walked in with Merrill Lynch and I surely would have canned him when the Old Rotten Bull of Greed ran up some $15 Billion in losses its first Quarter under the BofA Family Banner. I would have docked his pay, too, and taken my chances with a jury of angry taxpayers when he wanted to sue to enforce his contracts. No man today is properly, reasonably, or even morally able to declare himself worthy of hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry that is so enfeebled it is unable to stand on its own, without federal taxpayer milk and other financial intermediary babyfood, and could utterly collapse tomorrow!

I’ve written previously about Bank of America, while it was infused with taxpayer money its branch vice presidents were authorized  and/or encouraged to “churn” for abusive checking account fees. Here’s how it worked, among other similar schemes. You have Account A and B, the first Jointly held between parties A & B, the latter solely held by B. B makes a $9.21 error and goes over on four small purchases that are just under $9.21 in the aggregate. Inside of this is a shifting month-end date for accounts and Bank of America’s branches initiated an “early closing” on specified accounts., and those are defined as those ripe for churning, as in our scenario A&B. This put a service charge through on the 15th, of the month, say, rather than the 21st, as has been the practice. Now you see it clearly, $32.00 per item, includinng the service charge imposed early and then punished. Account B is upside down by over $150.00 for under $9.00 in error–two rolls of Neccco wafers, a cup of coffee and a small anti-perspirant.

To resolve it, Bank of America takes all the money to satisfy it from Account A, because its joint in legality, and it doubles its take because it turns Account A upside down by over $200.00, by its own actions. Thus the Bank generates nearly $500.00 in fees of punishment, for less than a $9.00 error, while it takes federal bailout money. This is a ravenous and voracious beast and it is precise;ly the beast that Bank of America built. I am going to make a prediction:

Bank of America will be brought to utter financial ruination within 10 years. It is just that it happen and I will rejoice when it does. I truly hope it happens sooner rather than later.

In the interim, it will strive to claw and rip at any blood it can drink and any flesh it can gulp down its monsterous maw, as it fights to maintain its survival. It never, ever saw any relationship between itself and the ancient Tower of Babel, its skyscrapers into the heavens and its desire to make a celebrated name for itself is not something Bank of America officers or directors equated with the worship of something that ought never to be worshipped–MONEY. And along with it greed and every wicked thing under heaven. Less than 10 years. I pray for it earnestly. People just do not see how this is related to spiritual matters. One day they will–they ALL will.

This morning my wife warned me about the Two Sawme’s and while she is so cute for saying it that way she was truly troubled about the enormous loss of life and the extreme hardship now being faced by people in Indonesia near Sumatra. Bloomberg.com is reporting with experts that the Mentawai patch is quite possibly going to light off numerous hard-hitting temblors, even in the immediate future and the Tsunami festival this could bring is horrific. While this is ongoing, typhoons are ravaging the Phillipines, with TS Ondoy (Ketsana) hitting first and a possible super typhoon Peping that may hit as early as this weekend.

What astounds me as natural fires burn and earthquakes hit and typhoons (Hurricanes) get larger and more powerful, as entire financial and economic and even whole political systems sit on the crevice of the abyss, people simply walk around as though this is either meaningless–aside from the individual events of their lives-of buying and selling and of marrying and being given in marriage–or that it is simply something else for government to manage and for the poor to somehow endure as best they can. Bank of america can lose hundreds of billions and get bailed out but  disabled person in America could no more get actual relief for student loans he cannot repay, and other equitble considerations that properly portray the American government as the wicked entity it is.

Just the other day I saw the total disintegration of a professional relationship that I thought was important to both people involved, not just one. Boy was I wrong! Greed–and there really isn’t a better word for it than that–the other side consumed all the cream and when it was gone went into a wrath that was truly off-the-charts. My so-called “friend”–”J”–always had this indifference about him that troubled me but I tried to push through, to seek peace and to pursue it. At the outset I had observed a physical therapist I know walk away from him in abject disgust, and I asked about it and wondered about it even then. I saw it come full circle. All it takes is time for any narcissist to finally reveal himself. Narcissists are emotional vampires. They actually feed upon the strife they build. They  have to do that, it’s like air they breathe.

I brought this fellow over  $77,000.00 hard money into his practice, between October of last year and September of this year. More– worked for him for free, 300 hours. When he ordered the wrong size pylon for a new C-Leg, I was expected to adjust my expectations and let him jury rig it by lengthening the socket post instead. Doing it right would have cost “J” money on his supply budget and his Supply Budget is related to his Bonus incentive program.

I can read a map as to what happened. I can add up the component parts.

J–all on his own, without my understanding or prior consent–ordered and billed insurance for a suction system for an AK socket. It’s never been done before by anyone that I am aware of and I have it on solid authority that current technology is such that it can’t be done for an AK case. He built it too small and his backup plan is to try and cram it all in and make it stick. It didn’t. Now, meanwhile–he got paid for the whole enchilada that did NOT WORK. Several thousand dollars to be exact. Now its time to build a socket that will work. It becamse clear that “J” was sorely distracted: He called me in for something that didn’t need to be done because we had an appointment and he hadn’t got to the hard work of the case–fabrication. It’s messy and hard work, plaster, to take a negative model and transform it into a positive model. And then it ccurred to me: “J” skipped casting! When I worked for him he said you never, ever skip casting, and you don’t use fiberglass, you do it the old fashioned way, you use plaster.

He went back numerous generations for a model to use in my case and this was his first error of magnitude, including by his own standards. Its easy to lecture them as required for others and quite another to hold yourself to those same standards. That creates liability under products liability for my fall! It is what’s known as a Manufacturing Defect and when a manufacturer fails to follow his own standards and the defect causes precisely the type of injury such standards would protect against, strict liability in tort is properly imposed in a majority of jurisdictions, incluidng the one we live in.

He  made it too tight and he made it too long. The first ones looked like a tube. It was truly unnerving, we’re getting nowhere, this guy is usually a very good prosthetist, and he’s just not performing anymore at all. I told him repeatedly–it is too tight. So from positive model to test socket “J” is just NOT paying attention. He wants it to work without his effort. He’s been overpaid and he wants it done so he can have his unjust profit. He wanted me to be able to order it off a shelf, make it easy for “J”, he had totally lost his edge as to making it work well for the patient, fairly or reasonably. This patient is 6′2″ and he’s got less than 4″ left to hold it on with. The Rule is simple–YOU HAVE TO GRAB EVERYTHING~!

He got me barely in this thing. I agreed to try it, but said it was too tight, too small, and was very concerned. He chopped the socket on th emedial side to “force” me into it farther, an odd thing to do if indeed the socket wasn’t too tight to begin with? It was so tight on tendons going in I couldn’t wear the set of “J Jaws” unless he did relieve the medial side. I told him open it up a little, get me deep into it and have pressure high up on the stump, not just on the distal end mostly, and to have me solidly on my ischeal tuberosity and not my remus. Simple Rx for those who know what this is all about. I’ve been fitting these things for nearly 40 years. I’ve learned something along the way too.

So now I fall and nearly fracture my hip at 53, and he knows–he sees it coming–he’s going to have to make a whole new socket, that he built this one wrong–because he was distracted, perhaps he had lost motivation due to issues with upper mananagement, maybe its just that he got paid already and he wantred the job done, I don’t know–and he goes ballistic on the phone!  Nobody knows more than “J”. Not my orthopedic surgeon, not the ER doctor, not my own sympoms–nothing mattered; he had decided the socket he made was all he was going to make for me, that his Supply Budget didn’t allow otherwise, irrespective of what my insurance companies paid into that budget for what I never even got, his errors notwithstanding, and he set about with a hard headed and shameless diatribe about his expertise and the literature and what we didn’t know and the likes, to cover over the real issue–his supply budget is upside down and that’s money out of his Bonus Pocket. he has very big pockets, because what “J” considers he’s worth would stagger your mind–and he’s more likely than not just been told in the most disfoavorable terms that his Supplies Budget is South and it is going to cost him this year.

It’s simple. He made a socket too small and because for whatever reason –i.e., –he was not paying attention and he wasn’t motivated any longer. I had run over $77,000.00 into his business and from my end that was going to be it for a while, maybe that’s it with the Calculus of J! In any event, now that he had been paid for what I did not get and no one had ever delivered, he wasn’t going to deliver me a quality socket, he was , instead, going to cram his negligence and sloppy work literally up my arse, make it my fault, adding insult to actual injury, saying--”you’ll be wearing pads”! In lieu of doing solid work he superimposed his unquestioned superior knowledge instead, all turned outward to abuse and disenfranchise and to prpotect J’s interests–no matter how debased or how unjust they had become! Would you tell a lawyer that after he brought you nearly $80,000.00 and worked for you for free in your shop doing grunt work for 300 hours? Only arrogance produces an ability to do something like this, the worst kind of arrogance, the kind that feels entitled to superiority becuse it has concluded it is superior.

You know what I would have done instead? I would have apologized for messing things up! “You’ve done a lot for me,” I would have told him, and “I’m absolutely going to make this right for you and I’m going to do it as quickly as humanly possible.” I would have cared. And I would have started right, casted him, and I would have built him the best socket of my life, as quickly as I could, making it a very, very high priority. I would have worked weekends for a guy like that! That’s what you do for people who do for you what I did for him and never asked him for anything inside of it.

My so-called “Friend–’J'”–Spirit of this World, and he doesn’t understand it, his own arrogance blinds him to it in himself, just as mine used to blind me to it in myself. I saw the old me in him, what I used to be. Inside my hurt I got to see how far I had come–where now I was giving in truth and not taking. I got to see what Paul meant when he wrote Ephesians chapter 2 by inspiration:

EPHESIANS 2:1-7

“Furthermore, [it is] YOU [God made alive] though YOU were dead in YOUR trespasses and sins, ² in which YOU at one time walked according to the system of things of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit that now operates in the sons of disobedience. ³ Yes, among them we all at one time conducted ourselves in harmony with the desires of our flesh, doing the things willed by the flesh and the thoughts, and we were naturally children of wrath even as the rest. ⁴ But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, ⁵ made us alive together with the Christ, even when we were dead in trespasses—by undeserved kindness YOU have been saved— ⁶ and he raised us up together and seated us together in the heavenly places in union with Christ Jesus, ⁷ that in the coming systems of things there might be demonstrated the surpassing riches of his undeserved kindness in his graciousness toward us in union with Christ Jesus.”

I understood “J”s wrath on the phone, why he was so ready for war, for battle, come what may, because nobody tells him anything, nobody is permitted that option, to reprove or counsel or disciplne His Majesty “J”. He dictates terms of life for all others. I finally came to understand that this whole thing was more likely than not related to J’s inability to even obey his own superiors in what “J” had concluded was wrongly decided or unjustly enacted. He wanted a bonus and through no fault of mine he got clipped in that somehow, and he set about punishing others for his own misconduct and/or his own actions or mis-actions as a Practice Manager. He should be taking this up with his superiors and not his patients! And the fact remains that he did take it up with his patients, those he hurt–physically and otherwise–to boot.

I learned something precious about the difference of Christ–humility, and his chief adversary–Satan–Arrogance and Pride. I’m hurt. Bad. I’ve really been taken for a ride by someone I genuinely believe is a Malignant Narcissist. I will not ever be back because no matter how well he could serve me in the future I have been spit upon as I served another, unselfishly, with good will and cheer, and while I forgive for that, I won’t position myself in for another round of His majesty’s Royal Abuse! Apologies go many, many miles but arrogance sits raring the RPM’s, wasting gasoline and getting nobody anywhere! One thing everyone needs to know about the Narcissist–make that TWO THINGS–(1) he never, ever gets better, and (2) He must be avoided at ALL COST.

He told me to tell people the truth in writing. I did. I could tell it with the factual detail of a federal indictment and sometimes I reason to myself I ought to just do it and make that point. It  might help him regain himself before it’s too late. “J” got me seriously hurt, he was paid well over and above what he actually provided, and he insulted that by layers over the injury he himself caused. He should be held accountable for serious misconduct towards patients as well!

If he worked for me I would terminate his employment in a red hot second. He is clearly unhappy where he is and he ought not to be deprived of finding true happiness elsewhere. I’m taking my cream and good will down the road like I should have done last year. I gave it a chance when I took it back from Phoenix. I did all the giving. That was a very bad lesson to teach a Narcissist and I strongly believe he needs to learn another one ASAP–it’s called HUMILITY. His ego has very, very bad eyesight. Nobody else’s sight is permitted to substitute for his. The only person in the universe that is so totally like that is Satan himself. Like John wrote:

1 John 3:10

“. . .The children of God and the children of the Devil are evident by this fact: Everyone who does not carry on righteousness does not originate with God, neither does he who does not love his brother.”

~

Frenetic News Over A Still Spiraling World Economy: The Idolatry Of Fortune Seeking Is Abuzz Over Its Future

The news summary this morning, in terms of the economy, is right out of my posts over the last six months or more. I hate to say “I told you so” and now may not be a good time to say it. Gloating is not my aim or my point. I am actually trying to encourage and to build up. This is all very good news indeed.

In Hong Kong, as they usher in the Chinese New Year–a festival I myself have seen in San Francisco in years past–one can see photographs of people reaching out to a chap dressed as the idolatrous god of fortune, and you sit back and realize just how superstitious the human being can become, with a little coaxing and the wrong type of encouragement the list is as endless as it is unseemly. Most anyone, anywhere, if asked, would like to be wealthy. Reaching out for this is not what it seems, however, and even now, as the banks sway back and forth on the face of the  entire planet earth, they still do not “get it.”  Pay attention to a few simple realities below and gain a breathtaking panorama of what is coming at us like a runaway freight train.

Satan will try to stop it but he will not prove able to stop it and that thought is intended to tell you plainly that you better get yourself ready for the Great Tribulation and the sole and only possible means of escape–the glorious Right Hand of Jehovah God, by means of Jesus Christ. There is no other Deliverer or Savior for what is coming. As the Physician reminds us plainly by inspiration of God’s spirit:

(Acts 4:12)  “Furthermore, there is no salvation in anyone else, for there is not another name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must get saved.”

The list of corporate failures will continue to mount like casualties of war. It will be like the body counts of the Viet Nam war, a daily tally of the incalculable loss of man’s inability to govern anyone rightly or well. (Ecclesiastes 8:9; Jeremiah 10:23-24; Daniel 2:44)

This morning, Caterpillar announced it would lay off 1 in every 10 workers. 10% of its workforce. Those who stayed on would have their salaries frozen. It is an amazing choice of words–frozen–because it arises right out of the prophets, a derivative of the term “congealed.” The entire global philosophy, brought on by the liar who is Satan the Devil and his earthly seed, of “unlimited economic growth” was the most significant earthly thought of the 20th Century. Everywhere, everyone in business and caught up by any aspect of the spirit of the world, believed in becoming richer and richer, or increasingly more comfortable, or an almost endless list of similar expressions that all posited the very same general philosophy. And it seemed to offer mankind what they wanted most, they were willing to work for that, to save for it, and even to borrow against the future for it. And so this giant machine was built and it was sent into motion and this Night Train of Darkness is now on its final ride because the track is about out of time and there is simply not going to be any more track for it to run on and this train will find itself–congealed. Then the fun really begins.

I am almost breathless with excitement at what this all likely means, and I am utterly chomping at the bit to not run ahead and forget to tell others what I see before I disappear over the wall. Nobody really knows me well and if they did and if they knew what my deepest hope was they would be utterly astounded at what Jehovah God does for those He claims from the midst of those the entire world throws away. I have no earthly good idea how to even begin to say what I am trying to say, for I am much like a young boy who seeing something momentous down the road rushes back to the village to try and explain what he intuitively grasps is enormous beyond words and yet then turns and tries to put words out to explain what can only be intuitively grasped if at all.

Jehovah of Armies is truly going to laugh His enemies into derision. Listen to this from the charmers of the East, a demonically inspired lot, and this is what they get from the source of their inspiration,, from –”Year Of The Oxe Is Looking Inauspicious,” NY Times.com

“The Chinese Lunar New Year began Monday, and projections for the Year of the Ox from astrologers, lawyers, bankers and fishmongers are anything but auspicious.

“The mood is confused and desperate,” said Kerby Kuek, a feng shui master and Chinese astrologer.”

The “mood” is another term for “spirit realm on the earth” and that it would be both ‘confused’–(2 Peter 2:4)–and ‘desperate’–(Revelation 12:12)–is something written right out of the scriptures and into the headlines of the day. It is just that the overwhelming vast majority of people truly do not understand the meaning of what they are reading. More … they will increasingly discover, if they seek the truth that truly sets them free, that the sole and only explanation for what is happening all around them originates in the Scriptures and that no other explanation, by anyone else, anywhere else, that points to God’s Word, is equal to that provided by the Faithful and Discreet Slave.

The entire Empire of Financial Intermediation is rocking back and forth, its skyscrapers in an earthquake, the likes of which the world has never seen before. Hear the latest buzz from the NY Times: “Nationalization Gets A New, Serious Look,” NY Times.com.

“Privately, most members of the Obama economic team concede that the rapid deterioration of the country’s biggest banks, notably Bank of America and Citigroup, is bound to require far larger investments of taxpayer money, atop the more than $300 billion of taxpayer money already poured into those two financial institutions and hundreds of others.”

The $300 Billion is an understatement as the second installment is being readied now and the banks are lining up for it like little pigs run after their mother pig’s teats. Insanity reigns in the skyscrapers as the likes of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch used some $1.2 Million recently to decorate his lavish New York City office. And while people are getting very upset at reading about such things as his infamous $87,000.00 throw rug and $11,000.00 lamp shade, the real story is his paying $800,000.00 to hire famed interior designer Michael Smith to do the redesign. The insanity is so delicious because Barack and Michelle Obama just hired the same Michael Smith to redecorate the White House, for $100,000.00, plus whatever it is they need to buy. The “mood” is not only confused and desperate–it is “infectious” as well.

The Satanic leadership worldwide is always seeking for its own glory, its own advancement, its own aggrandizement. It knows nothing better because this is the mindset of demonic entitlement. It is so much like the spiritual “disease” that psychiatrists try to explain and fail to treat known as malignant narcissism. That is the very spirit of this world.

As the financial contagion continues its incurable viral work on a very, very sick world-economy patient, businesses are doing what everyone knew they would and have been afraid of, and here’s the latest reports of this growing epidemic, in addition to Caterpillar, mentioned above. “Major U.S. Companies To Slash Jobs,” WashingtonPost.com

“As companies begin announcing their financial results for the end of 2008, they are also moving fast to cut costs in response to poor results and a diminished outlook for the coming year.”

“The job cuts announced so far today include … 8,000 at the Sprint Nextel telecommunications company, 7,000 at Home Depot, and 8,000 anticipated from the pending merger of the Pfizer and Wyeth pharmaceutical companies.”

The news of losing jobs is now deemed to be so regular and routine the mass media harlot is developing news articles to make positive spin out of even all that, a good news come-what-may philosophy that arises out of making lemonade out of the lemons life gives. “Making It,” WashingtonPost.com:

“Tya Bolton used to manage outplacement services for laid-off people. Then she was downsized herself. And she says it’s the best thing that ever happened to her.”

The mass media allowed by the wild beast to continue will increasingly sound the propagandistic note for society.

We can simply decide to have a positive outlook, it is all of it purely a state of mind, and nobody needs to change, nobody needs to reject the failed American ‘Way of Life,’ it is still valid, it is just that you have to get more creative now, you have to somehow adjust, to become flexible. You have to overcome. This is not really adversity after all but merely a change in environment such that the flexible and the creative will still flourish, proving that there was nothing wrong with the American “Way of Life” after all.

Nonsense. And everyone is going to know that it is nonsense. Nobody will have to take my word for it, it will be so plain as day as to truly make everyone wonder aloud–what WAS I THINKING? The answer, of course, is whatever Satan wants them to think and the true fight left for anyone and everyone is to break free of that grip and to come into the light and there to stay. Time is fast running out.

From amidst the skyscrapers of the world’s collapsing economies and failed political institutions, from the failures of academia and science, from the failed philosophies that instead of producing bounty and happiness produce poverty and despair anyone desirous of knowing the truth can and will hear this plainly:

(Revelation 18:4-24)  “Get out of her, my people, if YOU do not want to share with her in her sins, and if YOU do not want to receive part of her plagues. ⁵ For her sins have massed together clear up to heaven, and God has called her acts of injustice to mind. ⁶ Render to her even as she herself rendered, and do to her twice as much, yes, twice the number of the things she did; in the cup in which she put a mixture put twice as much of the mixture for her. ⁷ To the extent that she glorified herself and lived in shameless luxury, to that extent give her torment and mourning. For in her heart she keeps saying, ‘I sit a queen, and I am no widow, and I shall never see mourning.’ ⁸ That is why in one day her plagues will come, death and mourning and famine, and she will be completely burned with fire, because Jehovah God, who judged her, is strong. ⁹ “And the kings of the earth who committed fornication with her and lived in shameless luxury will weep and beat themselves in grief over her, when they look at the smoke from the burning of her, ¹⁰ while they stand at a distance because of their fear of her torment and say, ‘Too bad, too bad, you great city, Babylon you strong city, because in one hour your judgment has arrived!’ ¹¹ “Also, the traveling merchants of the earth are weeping and mourning over her, because there is no one to buy their full stock anymore, ¹² a full stock of gold and silver and precious stone and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet; and everything in scented wood and every sort of ivory object and every sort of object out of most precious wood and of copper and of iron and of marble; ¹³ also cinnamon and Indian spice and incense and perfumed oil and frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and sheep, and horses and coaches and slaves and human souls. ¹⁴ Yes, the fine fruit that your soul desired has departed from you, and all the dainty things and the gorgeous things have perished from you, and never again will people find them. ¹⁵ “The traveling merchants of these things, who became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of [their] fear of her torment and will weep and mourn, ¹⁶ saying, ‘Too bad, too bad—the great city, clothed with fine linen and purple and scarlet, and richly adorned with gold ornament and precious stone and pearl, ¹⁷ because in one hour such great riches have been devastated!’ “And every ship captain and every man that voyages anywhere, and sailors and all those who make a living by the sea, stood at a distance ¹⁸ and cried out as they looked at the smoke from the burning of her and said, ‘What city is like the great city?’ ¹⁹ And they threw dust upon their heads and cried out, weeping and mourning, and said, ‘Too bad, too bad—the great city, in which all those having boats at sea became rich by reason of her costliness, because in one hour she has been devastated!’ ²⁰ “Be glad over her, O heaven, also YOU holy ones and YOU apostles and YOU prophets, because God has judicially exacted punishment for YOU from her!” ²¹ And a strong angel lifted up a stone like a great millstone and hurled it into the sea, saying: “Thus with a swift pitch will Babylon the great city be hurled down, and she will never be found again. ²² And the sound of singers who accompany themselves on the harp and of musicians and of flutists and of trumpeters will never be heard in you again, and no craftsman of any trade will ever be found in you again, and no sound of a millstone will ever be heard in you again, ²³ and no light of a lamp will ever shine in you again, and no voice of a bridegroom and of a bride will ever be heard in you again; because your traveling merchants were the top-ranking men of the earth, for by your spiritistic practice all the nations were misled. ²⁴ Yes, in her was found the blood of prophets and of holy ones and of all those who have been slaughtered on the earth.”

~