How come no revolt? Wilson was a racist!

 There really is nothing new under the sun.  Take for example, the Roman uprising that pitted wealthy aristocrats against middle-class citizens, two parties emerged in the Senate.  On one side were the optimates, conservatives who resisted social change.  On the other side were the populares, who believed Rome’s wealth should be better distributed among all people, not just a handful of aristocrats.

That strife ended up destroying the Roman empire because the aristocrats chose to let the Republic fail instead of accepting the social changes the people were demanding.  The changes the people were asking for then were simple, really:  they wanted the stink around them cleaned up because the wealthy citizens all lived high on the seven hills and their piss, shit, and garbage flowed down stream to the basins where the working poor -- peasant is too good of a word for the summer stink they lived in -- were forced to live.  

Yes, things were simpler then, and the people didn't want what the aristocrats up on the hills had, they only wanted better.   They're representatives tried too:  the populares/Liberals, tried to helped them, but just as today, were shutdown by the aristocrats.   And when it all came crashing down, the aristocrats were fine, they always are, unless, the people revolt.  

Finally, did you know that the Roman empire back then, still had better wealth distribution than we do in the USA today? 

How come we never revolt?

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Woodrow Wilson was a hard-core racist and white supremacist, and his wife was even worse.  She often told “darky” stories, while he segregated the federal government and tried to pass legislation curtailing the civil rights of African-Americans.  Through his efforts, the Democratic party was essentially closed to African-Americans for an additional two decades, and parts of federal government were segregated through the 1950’s.  The only time he met African-American leaders in the White House ended with him practically throwing them out of his office.  With the wave of racism coming out of the White House, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a tremendous resurgence, anti-black race riots swept the country, and lynchings of Africa-Americans spread as far north as Duluth.

Wilson prejudice also extended to other ethnic groups, which he referred to as “hyphenated Americans.”  He insisted, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

Under Wilson’s leadership, the United States made more military interventions in Latin America than at any other time in American history.  U.S. troops landed in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, and eleven times in Mexico.  The U.S. military was used to select Nicaragua’s president and to force that country to accept a treaty favorable to the United States. 

In a largely forgotten war against the Soviets, the United States invaded the Soviet Union in an attempt to assist White Russian forces in overthrowing the Russian Revolution.  In the summer of 1918, American forces, under a joint command with the Japanese, penetrated to Murmansk, Archangel, Vladivostok, and then west to Lake Baikal.  After reaching the Volga, the White Russian forces disintegrated, and the U.S. troops were forced to flee from Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.  This action convinced the Soviets that the United States and the Western powers were determined to destroy them if given a chance. 

Finally, and most disturbing of all, this Democratic president gave us the Federal Reserve Banking System we are all slaves to today. 

What a guy!

August 2nd, LIzzy’s Day

Borden Home

 Fall River, Massachusetts, was quiet, remarkably ordinary little mill town tottering on the brink of obscurity until the morning of August 4, 1892.  That’s when one of the town’s most upstanding citizens—a mousy, unmarried woman name Lizzie Andrew Borden—was arrested and thrown into jail for brutally murdering her father and stepmother with an axe.

By the time her trial was over, Lizzie Borden had become a household name across America.  To some she was a demigoddess who should be hanged for her crime.  To others, especially many in women’s right groups, she was an innocent “symbol of womanhood” who stood falsely accused.

Also leaping to her defense were upper-class citizens and fellow churchgoers who found it difficult to believe one of their own could do such a thing.

Even thought Lizzie Borden was eventually acquitted, she remained guilty in the minds of millions of Americas.  After her sensational trial, which lasted thirteen days and attracted worldwide publicity, she went back to a quiet life of modest affluence in the same gray frame house on Second Street where the grisly murders had taken place.

By then, however, the damage to the former socialite and Sunday school teacher’s spotless reputation had been wrought.  The press, fueled by rabid public interest in the case, continued to run banner headlines focusing on the gory murder for years after the event, while crime writers and their publishers made fortunes telling and retelling the story.  It seemed that, guilty or not, Lizzie’s Borden’s Once proud name would forever be linked to the gruesome events of August 2, 1892.

The question remains, more than a century after the fact: Was she guilty?  Or, as was suggested at the trial, did some unknown person slip into the house and slay the elderly parents while Lizzie ate pears upstairs and a servant woman worked in the kitchen less than twenty feet from one of the victims?

No motive for an outside murder has ever been clearly established, even though several robberies had been reported in the neighborhood in the days immediately prior to the crime.  According to police reports, the Borden’s house itself had been burglarized at least twice.

But because of several factors, Lizzie Borden remained the most likely suspect.  At her trial, she gave a bewildering array of conflicting stories about her whereabouts during the murder.  At first she said she was in the “backyard.”  Later, she said she was “in the loft getting a piece of iron for the sinkers.”  To another interrogator, she was in the barn eating pears.

More puzzling, however, was her neat appearance and calm composure when the police arrived.  Surely, they reasoned, her clothes and hands and hair would have been splattered with the victims’ blood.  That is, if she ere, in fact, guilty.

And the murder weapon?  Where was the murder weapon?

A few days later an inspector rummaging through the Borden tool shed out back found a freshly cleaned axe head.  Could this have been the cruel device that ended the lives of Abby and Andrew Borden?  The fact that the wooden handle, from which it would have been difficult to remove bloodstains, was missing convinced investigators that this was, indeed, the weapon.

Then new evidence surfaced that further damaged Lizzie’s defense.  Upon request, she had turned over to police a spotlessly clean, fancy blue bengaline dress she swore she had worn on the day of the murders.  That story seemed unlikely, however, no one wore party dresses of bengaline, a heavy corded cloth, around the house in the August heat.

Confounding the problem was a testimony provided by a neighbor, Alice Russell, who reluctantly admitted she had seen Lizzie burn a blue cotton dress in the kitchen stove three days after the murders.  The dress, Lizzie explained, had been soiled with brown paint—a color, noted the prosecutor, not unlike that of dried blood.

But an outraged press, supported by the public, rallied behind the frail, soft-spoken woman.  Editors wanted to know how anyone could accuse “this innocent and loving daughter” of such heinous crimes without feeling ashamed?  After all, this was the height of the late Victorian era, a time when the gentleness, physical frailty and docility of the well-bred American woman were cornerstones of society.

New Englanders were certain that well-brought-up Christian daughters like Lizzie Borden could not possibly commit murder with an axe on sunny summer mornings.  Women possessed more “natural refinements,” as one editorial put it, “diviner instincts” and stronger “spiritual sensibilities” than did men.

Overlooked in the public outcry against her arrest was the glaring fact that she stood to inherit a fortune of several hundred thousand dollars.  Also, nobody pointed out that Lizzie and Abby had feuded frequently, mainly over matters involving Andrew Borden’s money.

In the end, the jury returned with the only verdict possible under the circumstances—not guilty.  The judge, who had admonished the jury men to remember that such “a woman of refinement and gentle training...could not have conceived and executed so bloody a butchery,” seemed genuinely pleased at the decision.

A few years before her death, Lizzie Borden moved to Maplecroft, the neighborhood she had begged her father to move the family to years before.  In her final days, she undoubtedly had occasion to hear the nasty rhyme already being sung by schoolchildren to the tune of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay!”

          Lizzie Borden took an axe
          And gave her mother forty whacks;
          When she saw what she had done,
          She gave her father forty-one.

On June 1, 1927, she died at the age of sixty-six and was buried alongside her stepmother and father in Oak Grove Cemetery.  But the public fascination with her case lived on, a favorite of crime writers, movie producers and directors, and even choreographers and playwrights.  In 1965, an opera entitled Lizzie Borden: A Family Tragedy in Three Acts met favorable reviews.  In 1980 Blood Relations appeared, a play in which Lizzie kills for her parents’ money, then dies after being found guilty.

In her own time, Lizzie Borden had become a cause célèbre of the women’s movement and an example of Christian piety.  Her acquittal was seen as a tribute to the American justice system and its main tenet of innocent until proven guilty.

But uncertainty remained.  Quipped American wit Dorothy Parker:  “I will believe till eternity, or possibly beyond it, that Lizzie Borden did it with her little hatchet, and whoever says she didn’t commits the sin of sins, the violation of an idol.”

Some skeptics pointed to Mr. Borden’s bizarre relationship with his youngest daughter.  “Daddy’s little girl,” as he called her, almost always got her way.  When his mutilated corpse was found, Lizzie’s graduation ring was still on his little finger.  This happened several months after he beheaded all of Lizzie’s pigeons in their barn—the same barn in which Lizzie supposedly ate pears while the murders took place.

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Peaceniks, the Illuminati banking system, and bread.

No shit! 

Another one for the peaceniks:

In 1888, Otto von Bismark decided to establish a German colony in Samoa and sent a fleet of ships to take over this group of South Pacific islands.  They shelled the native villages—destroying some American property—and later ripped down an American flag.  In response, the United States sent a fleet of ships to protect the Americans.  As the two groups of warships prepared to fight it out in a Samoan harbor, a hurricane suddenly struck the islands, destroying both fleets.  The German and American sailors found themselves frantically trying to save each others’ lives.  Both countries soon forgot their grievances, but if that hurricane had hit just a few days later, it’s very likely the United States and Germany would have gone to war. 



What does this teach us boys-and-girls?    Yes, sometimes it takes a whole lot of luck to see the blessings of peace.

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Since today in August first, I think it is only fitting we note why banker's love this day.  In 1463, the greatest of the Medici bankers, Cosimo "the Elder," dies at 75 in his villa at Careggi, Italy, while listening to one of Plato's Dialogues.  Cosimo took the successful bank established in Florence by his father, Giovannie di Bicci, and grew it into an empire, with nine major branches throughout Europe, ventures in insurance, money markets, speculation, farming, manufacturing, international trade, and control of state taxation.  Yes, the first Federal Reserve, and some say, still a controlling family in today's world banking systems.

I don't know about the Medici connection, but it is funny that on this day in 1778, in Hamburg, Germany, the hometown of the Illuminati organization, the world's first World Savings Bank is created.

If I might add, the one thing about these secret societies is they love to keep dates sacred.  In today's news:  The US Fed closes its two-day meeting today.

 I'm just saying.
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The festival of Lammas (loaf-mass), the feast of the first fruits that was held in celebration of bread loaves baked from the first grain harvested, is celebrated on this day.  Pagans of old celebrated Lammas by weaving corn dollies and offering the first loaves to their goddess and god.

Peace Out.

Be Kind Rewind.

Whatever do ancient VCR tapes have to do with ancient scroll?   Well I'll tell you: they are all apart of the cyclical plan the creator gods put out there to keep us occupied.   Allow me to explain.  

In ancient Egypt books were written on a material called papyrus.  Papyrus was made from papyrus reed, which grew at least six feet tall and was found only in the Nile Delta.  the papyrus reed is now almost extinct in Egypt.  But it was abundant in ancient times and was a valuable export.  

The first step in making papyrus was to cut the papyrus reeds into strips.  These strips were laid side by side in a single layer.  Then another layer was laid on top of the first, with the top strips at right angles to the bottom strips.  The strips of reed were pounded together until they were crushed into a sheet.  Then the sheet of papyrus was smoothed out and left to dry.  

To make a book, several sheets of papyrus were pasted together end to ten.  A wooden rod was attached to each end of the long piece of papyrus.  Starting with the right side, the papyrus was rolled onto the rod to create a papyrus roll. 

It was on these rolls that books were written.  A scribe began to copy a book by unrolling a new papyrus roll a few inches, so that the writing surface was in front of him and the rolled-up portion was on his right.  He wrote in columns a few inches wide, unrolling more papyrus for each column.  He used a pen made from a reed, with ink made of soot, gum, and water. 

To read a book, the reader held the roll by the rods attached to each end.  As he read, he unrolled the papyrus on the right and rolled up on the left rod the part of the book he had read.  When he got to the end of the book, the papyrus was now rolled on the left rod instead of the right one.  And so the reader -- or more likely, his/her servant or slave -- had to unroll the book from the left rod and roll it back up on the right rod so that the next reader did not find a backward book.  The phrase "Be Kind, Rewind" was probably used in some form or another back then, just as it would be over two-thousand years later when we reached the height of analog video recordings for home entertainment.  The VHS (Video Home System) much like the ancient papyrus scroll, had to be rewound after viewing.  For awhile, the large VHS renting stores like Blockbuster even charged a fee for tapes that weren't rewound -- I know, I fought a lot of them.  

So there you have another cyclical wonder of the world.  Conversely, just as VHS tape was replaced with the DVD which didn't have to be rewound, the papyrus roll was replaced with animal skins which were called parchments.  This advanced technique was achieved by stretching and smoothing out the skins of sheep and goats to make a thin and smooth kind of parchment called vellum.  A book made this was was called a codex and much as the DVD was a huge advancement over the VHS, the codex was a huge advancement of the papyrus scroll because it was more durable and didn't have to be rewound after reading.  

Of course, just as the computer/internet has replaced the DVD, parchment was replaced by paper and the books were plentiful, well, at least until the Christian church came along and burned them all to alleviate the competition.  Fortunately, truth does find its way.  

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On this day, the Norse trickster god Loki and his consort Sigyn are honored.  Loki is the god of strife, discord, and evil, as well as tricks and practical jokes.  So, fellow truth seekers, be especially careful of a certain US president on this day, oh, wait, he has already tweeted:

Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!

Focusing on the Angels for World Peace.

Esoteric Sunday

Peace on earth and goodwill to all...  yes, easier said than done, that is, until you add in the one ingredient that could accomplish such a thing?   Answer:   Angels. 

Why Angels?  you ask!  Well, they are the one common spiritual thing in us all.   That's right, from Jews, to Muslims, to Pagans, to Erudite Scholars -- be still my beating heart -- we all seem to recognize the angels.  

 
The Jews  seem to have the oldest writings on angels written around three-thousand years ago with the three angels that visited Abraham in in Genesis 18: 1-5.  Who were these masked crusaders?  I'm not sure but it is funny that Abraham is the father of not only the Jewish faith, but the Christian and Muslim faiths.  Hmmmm, can you say Hedge-Your-Bets boys-and-girls?  But I digress, this is a loving, Sunday morning post for world peace.  

In the New Testament there are two angels named: Gabriel, who announces to Mary that she will bear a son who will be the promised Messiah (Luke 1: 26 - 38), and Michael, who fights against the Devil (Jude 9; Revelation 12:7).  Both angels had already been named in the Jewish book.  

Then there are the Islamist who's Quran is said to have been transmitted by Gabriel (Jibril) in chapter 2 verse 97.  Yes, the same angel who announced to Mary that she would bear the Messiah,  met up with Mohammad in the desert to give him the Quran.   

Although, less obvious, there are angels in Zoroastrianism/Hinduism symbol with its spread wings, and of course with the New Age/Paganism, we see angels in mind, body, and spirit of us all. 


Plato believed that between human beings and the gods were intermediate beings called 'daimons' who could inspire human thoughts and actions. 

So you see, angels are as common to us all as breathing air and drinking water are to our existence.   Angels really seem to be the only religious thing we all agree on.    

So lets do.  

Come on: all angels are naked!  Gosh, get your mind out of the gutter.

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July 29th is the first day of the runic half-month of Thorn.  Nothern traditon honors the god known to the Anglo-Saxons as Thunor and to the Norse as Thor. 

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Mr Teed

Cyrus Read Teed didn’t set out to become the charismatic spiritual leader of one of the strangest religious cults in the late nineteenth century.  Nor did this shy, well-mannered farm boy from upstate New York dream his name would someday be linked to one of pseudo-science’s most bizarre theories: cellular cosmogony.

It all began during the Civil War when young Teed was called away to fight for his country in the Union army.  During the war years, while recuperating from a sunstroke that left his left arm and leg paralyzed, he heard stories about strange creatures supposedly living at the earth’s core.  How was that possible, he wondered, unless the earth was hollow?

New York 1890

After the war he returned to New York and set up a medical practice specializing in herbal cures.  He also started reading everything he could get his hands on about the mysterious realm inside the earth, leaving no stone upturned in his quest to learn all there was about the natural history of the earth as well as the cosmos.  He read books, subscribed to newspapers and magazines, frequented libraries and attended lectures on the subject.

In time the knowledge-hungry young New Yorker found that many scientifically accepted theories circulating in those days clashed not only with his religious principles but with his own developing ideas of a smaller, more compact universe.

While working in his laboratory late one night in the autumn of 1869, Teed experienced what he called a “divine illumination.”  A vision told hi how to turn lead into gold — an ancient alchemist secret known as the “Philosopher’s Stone.”  Later that evening he had a vision in which God appeared to him in the form of a beautiful woman and revealed the secrets of the universe to him.

One secret that emerged dealt with “Cellular Cosmology” — the belief that the earth is practically stationary in time and space and exists as a concave sphere, with all life on its inner surface—kind of like a gigantic inverted cave.  His controversial notion was outlined in a book called The Cellular Cosmogony, or The Earth in a Concave Sphere, which he wrote under his adopted name of Korean, the ancient Hebrew name of Cyrus.

According to this view, the known world is located on the inside of the earth’s curvature, beyond which there is only the darkness of a celestial void.  At the center of the sphere, rotating in unison, are the denser atmosphere that screens the other side of the globe.

To prove his theory, Teed measured the curvature of the earth—a measurement that contradicted the Copenican hypothesis but which has yet to be disproved.  In fact, he offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove wrong his measurements or theory.  He found plenty of takers, but each time scientific measurements were made, the results were the same as Teed’s.

Copenican

More than anything else, Teed’s belief in the concave earth was an article of faith, based on his own religiously inspired research and study.

“To know of the earth’s concavity,” he once wrote, “is to know God, while to believe in the earth’s convexity is to deny Him and all His works.  All that is opposed to Koreshanity is antiChrist.”

The concept of a hollow earth was nothing new in Teed’s time.  Many people still accepted British astronomer Edmund Halley’s theory of a hollow earth as fact.  Halley, of comet fame, had proposed that the earth might consist of several concentric spheres placed inside one another in the manner of a Chinese box puzzle.  More starling was the scientist’s contention that some of these spheres might support life!

Halley

Famed adventure writer Edgar Rice Burroughs produced several novels with hollow earth themes.  His fiction was preceded in 1864 by Jules Vern’s classic study of life underground called Journey to the Center of the Earth.  Both Burroughs and Verne had been inspired by the theories of an early-nineteenth-century American eccentric named John Cleves Symmes.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Like Halley, Symmes—an army captain and enthusiastic world traveler—believed the earth was made up of five concentric spheres, but suggested there might be a huge opening, known as Symmes Hole, at each of the poles.  The ocean, said Symmes, flowed in and out of these openings.

In 1906, a book called Phantom of the Poles followed up on the hollow earth theory.  Said author William Reed: “I am able to prove my theory that the earth is not only hollow, but suitable in its interior to sustain human life with as little discomfort as on its exterior....”

Somewhat more influential than Reed was Marshall B. Gardner, who rejected the “absurd”notion of Symmes but enthusiastically adopted the idea of openings at the poles.  Gardner believed the interior of the earth was illuminated by a small sun about six hundred miles in diameter.  When Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew over the North Pole in 1926 and saw no gaping holes, Gardner countered by suggesting the government was covering them up from the public.

Buoyed by these and his own findings, Teed decided he needed a quiet, isolated place to work and to establish his own concept of social and religious order.  In 1894 he found such a place on the banks of the Estero River deep in southwest Florida—a three-hundred-acre tract of land he called the Koreshan Unity.

Starting with only a handful of followers, the evangelical alchemists and herbalist went to work building a new society dedicated to the principles advanced in his new cosmology.  The new settlement—which he named Estero—soon opened its doors to scores of other disciples from as far away as Chicago.  All along, Teed believed that Estero would become one of the world’s great intellectual and religious centers.

In planning his “New Jerusalem” in Florida, Teed visited several communes, including one established by the Harmony Society in Economy, Pennsylvania.  He saw firsthand the everyday workings of communal societies—models, he felt, of celibacy and communism. He also spent some time with the North Family of Shakers in Lebanon, New York, where he was admitted as a full member.

Teed and his faithful flock spent the next decade building more houses and libraries and churches in the wilderness.  They also built a thriving tropical nursery, a handsome Art Hall, tennis courts, baseball fields, marinas, a general store and even a museum devoted to the display and interpretation of Teed’s curious teachings and scientific research.

Model of Teed's Museum

Teed eventually abandoned his herbal practice altogether and proclaimed himself the messiah of a new religion called Koreshanity.  He launched a newspaper, The Flaming Sword, which helped spread his gospel until it ceased publication in 1949.

In spite of Teed’s spellbinding oratorical and marketing skills, his “New Jerusalem” in the Florida sun never reached the population of ten million converts that had been his much-publicized goal.  In 1908, two days after Christmas, the old visionary died from injuries received during a political brawl in Fort Myers, leaving behind his unfinished city and a personal and professional legacy steeped in mystery and legend.

To this day, no one know where the enigmatic spiritual leader got the money to finance his project.  Nor is it clear how he managed to lure scores of young women—many of them married—to his Florida hideaway.

After his death, Teed’s body was placed in an immense mausoleum.  The corpse was guarded twenty-four hours a day by teams of young women and men because of his promise to rise from the dead.  Many of his followers believed he would be resurrected on Christmas Day the following year.

Teed's Grave

 But in 1921, a hurricane struck the southwest Florida coast, washing away Teed’s gleaming tomb along with many other buildings.

Forty years later the state of Florida turned what was left of Teed’s religious and intellectual empire into the Koreshan Statre Historic Site.

Historic Site

Although the last of the original disciples died in 1981, site volunteers still offer guided tours and slide shows of the settlement.  Many of the buildings erected by the Koreshan remain, thanks to rehabilitative and restoration efforts in recent years.  Of special interest is the site’s Museum and Library at the World’s College of Life—Koreshan United Headquarters—on Corkscrew Road along U.S. Highway 41.

Here many of Teed’s original books and furniture are on display, as well as an exhibit showing in three dimensions how his radical “cellular cell” theory puts the surface of the earth on the inside of the globe.  Many of the founders’ other bizarre beliefs are analyzed with charts and diagrams, including his contention that the on is an illusion, that gravity is really centrifugal force and that a horizontal line on the earth’s surface eventually intersects the earth’s upward curvature.

Other displays seek to prove his theory that the sphere is about twenty-five thousand miles around, just as the scientists say, and that China is about eight thousand miles away, through the earth’s center—straight up!

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Those Silly Reagans.

The Reagan's With Their Atheist Astrologer

 Both Ronald and Nancy Reagan relied heavily on astrologers when making decisions, but they were not the first in the White House to do so.  The lives of both Lincoln and Harding also relied on them.  Reagan first became interested in astrology when he was a young actor, and he later got Nancy interested in it.  From then on, their schedules were dictated by their astrologers—who included Jeane Dixon, Carroll Righter, Ed Helen, and Joan Quigley.  British witch Sybil Leek claimed credit for Reagan changing his inauguration as governor from noon to just after midnight.  Ed Helin, who began doing Reagan’s charts in 1949, said, “As President, he was primarily concerned with the timing of events and how his popularity would b affected by his actions.  he called me to determine the best timing for invading Granada, for bombing Libya, for launching the Challenger—things like that.”  helix was paid by the Republican National Committee and was still doing work for them in 1990.

`Although the Reagans professed to be very religious, they almost never went to church.  But for their 1980 campaign, arrangements were made for them to attend an Episcopal service in Virginia.  As they were about to take communion, Nance asked Mike Deaver, “Are those people drinking out of the same cup?”  He explained that they would be given wafers first and they would dip it into the cup.  Reagan couldn’t hear these instructions and was asking, “What? What?”  to which Nancy responded, “Ron, just do exactly as I do.”  As the tray of wafers came by, she took one, dipped it in the chalice, accidentally dropped it in the wine, and turned to Deaver with a horrified expression.  Reagan promptly took the host, dipped it, and dropped it into the wine as well.  Deaver said, “I watched the minister move on, shaking his head, staring at the blobs of gunk floating in his wine.”
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If this isn’t Orwellian, I don’t know what is.  On my way into work this morning I heard a report on NPR that stated “Americans Are Saving Less Than They Have Since 2007.”  Interesting, I thought, remembering how that fact was true in my life, how after the George Bush meltdown of the economy and a bad-film investment, I was broke.  Nice to know I’m still in the average.

Then, I get in the office and imediately begin avoiding work by looking at the news feed on my favorite morning web search — which includes EsotericDaily.com — and I see this headline: Bloomberg: Americans Have Been Saving Much More Than Thought

Ouch, me head hurts!