One of the worst byproducts of a failing economy is the inability to trust your own family. Worries build up. People make poor choices. And it’s the nice guys like you and I that usually have to suffer the most consequences. That is unless they’re the type to take matters into their own hands.

But spying on your own family is wrong, isn’t it?

Not necessarily.

If you provide for your family, don’t you have a right to know what’s going on under your roof? You’ve at least earned that right.

Finding yourself unable to trust your own family is terrifying. However, many family members make the big mistake of not covering their tracks when they’re making less than smart decisions. At that point, it might be worth it to start spying on their cell phone text messages (also known as SMS).

But what if they delete their SMS from their phone?

Well, I’ve got a secret for you. People might think they’re deleted- but they’re not. Those messages stay on the SIM card. With the way technology is today, you can actually buy a gadget that helps you download information from the SIM card, upload it to your computer, and then give you the information you need almost instantly.

Sounds nice right?

It gets even better.

The technology is so smart that some gadgets let you control what numbers can be dialed from the phone with your computer. So if you have a teenager with friends that you know are trouble, you can easily block those numbers. If your spouse is stepping out on you, you can put the ball in your court by blocking the number of the other man or woman.

Yes, it might sound wrong to spy on the people that you love. But if these people are violating the trust you’ve given them, you would look like a clueless schmuck if you didn’t do anything about it. They would continue to lie to you and maybe even laugh at your ignorance.

I really hope I can save you from that.

When I was a little boy, my grandmother told me that we were descendants of Pocahontas. The idea aroused my fantasies. Having Indian blood was a special blessing. It endowed me with certain spiritual qualities, psychic perceptiveness and magical abilities – in my imagination. Later I was disappointed to learn that it was fashionable among past generations to claim a blood tie to Pocahontas. I suspected my grandmother’s story was of this origin.

Much later I realized that a fascination with things Native American was a symptom of a certain affinity. I valued the Indian fantasy as a call of the wild from within. It was to be answered, but in my own, indigenous terms, not in terms borrowed from other cultures. I recently read a book that has added great depth to this perspective.

Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (HarperSanFrancisco), by Paula Gunn Allen, Ph.D., tells an entirely different history of this American icon from the one we cherish. This award-winning author, a retired professor from UCLA, credited with originating Native American literary studies, has taken the usual sources, plus those rarely referred to, and reinterpreted the data within the context of the Native American mythical worldview. The result is a fascinating account of the transformation of “Turtle Island” into “America the Beautiful.”

Dr. Gunn Allen begins by explaining the spirit-centered worldview of the Native American at that time. The “manito aki,” which pertains to the supernatural, paranormal, spiritinhabited world, was the Native Americans’ waking reality, more real to them than the physical world.

We might say that they were good “Jungians” at that time, because they respected the experiences of the imagination as real and worthy of attention. The natives at that time also realized that their world was coming to an end. Their calendars and mythologies had prepared them. The coming of the white men was part of the fulfillment of this prophecy.

Evidence points to the fact that Pocahontas was a high priestess, initiated into the mysteries of the spirit world and charged with responsibility to these spirits. Based upon her evidence, the author came to the startling conclusion that Pocahontas, rather than falling in love with Captain John Smith, was actually on a preplanned mission taking advantage of him as an unwitting pawn. Her objective: to insure that the spirit of tobacco would find a home in the new world. Tobacco spirit, the essential shamanic power of the Native American world, needed to find a way to be a part of the coming materialistic world that was being born. This mission was crucial if the spirit of the native world was to survive destruction of its manifest existence.

Pocahontas was the channel by which the transfer of power was achieved. Pocahontas’s connection with John Smith was the means by which native spirituality was preserved, even though it would have to hide for centuries within a plant that would be marketed, traded, consumed, and vilified within a purely materialistic consciousness, until such time as this ancient spirituality could one day be reborn in the awareness of the European mindset, as is beginning to happen today.

What is this newly emerging mindset? Gunn Allen writes, ” … the construction of Pocahontas in American thought, while often historically inaccurate, is an indication that the imagination of America is as connected to the manito aki as it is to the land. The problem that Americans face in harmonizing our modern American consciousness with the ancient psyche of the land we inhabit is the dominance of a paradigm that assumes material, measurable existence to be all there is.”

The lesson for us is to respect the intuitive nature of the Timagination. We need to experience and to understand the imagination as a channel of intuitive realities. The mind and its ambassador, the imagination, is quite real although it inhabits a different plane of existence than the world the senses recognize. It is real because it makes a difference in our lives. It is in this realm of the imagination that we can find our highest ideals, that we intuit our interconnectedness as spiritual beings, that we encounter non-material beings, and discover the patterns in the creative forces that shape our lives. Our fascination with all things Native American is evidence of our connection to this non-material world. Yet this connection is something that sadly we do not recognize within ourselves, but project onto these indigenous peoples. Gunn Allen reconnects us with our heritage. She joins us in gratitude to the people who came before us, who built a spiritual time capsule that would survive the materialistic, destructive stage of our history, preserving for the future our endowment as spirit’s children. Pocahontas is truly America’s godmother.

When money’s tight, like it is for most of us these days, a nanny spy cam is something a lot of parents gladly dig into their pockets for. When both parents have to work, the often necessary expense of a nanny will cause some grumbling. Add to that the emotional cost of worrying about your children and it’s hard to pay the price. But there’s one thing that these parents are happy to pay for, the nanny spy cam. There’s a great peace of mind that comes with knowing what’s going on when you’re not there. These well hidden cameras also let us know that spying isn’t always as bad as we think.

The words spy and spying gives a lot of us the creeps and causes us to immediately think of unscrupulous people of all sorts. So for marketing purposes a nanny spy cam is called simply a nanny cam, it sounds nicer. But it’s hard not to be aware that there’s a multitude of news reports between Fox News, CNN, CBS and the others concerning caregivers abusing children in their care and that they were caught by these amazingly small cameras. There are also websites devoted entirely to providing news on this subject. Once we read and hear these news reports that extra word doesn’t sound so bad after all. The nanny spy cam is now considered an essential item by many parents, no matter what you want to call it. It’s as important as a crib and even the nannies themselves.

These days, with the many choices of household items with hidden cameras in them, that are ready made and ready to use, a nanny spy cam can fit the look of any room, not just the nursery and quite easily too. Wall clocks, alarm clocks, lamps, phones, even the head of a screw can hide a video camera. Nanny spy cams don’t only catch nannies; there are also several hidden spy camera options for offices, stores and other businesses. Exit signs and emergency lights, to name a few, are very popular with employers and storekeepers, not only to watch for criminals coming in but to catch employees engaging in criminal activities as well. With this technology so easily available, criminals of many different persuasions are being caught, not only by law enforcement and the news but by private citizens who have been wronged.

No one will argue that there are times and places where spying is wrong. Misuse of this type of equipment may never stop. Does that make saying nanny spy cam instead of just nanny cam sound a bit underhanded? Does saying spy cameras and hidden cameras sound a little more devious than a discreet surveillance system? Maybe it does, but weigh the benefits for many of us who have a real need for these things against the small number who misuse it. After doing so you might agree, even though marketers and advertisers may never, what’s important is the way we use something and not the words we use to describe it. When real needs exist, spying is necessary, not a necessary evil.

If you have a Spy Pen, sometimes it just appears to be either stuck with the light on, or dead and won’t turn on. We wrote this report to show you some of the tricks we found to getting your it to work again.

1. Perform A Hard Reset

The majority of the time, just inserting the end of a paper clip in the opening below the status light on the back, and performing a hard reset, will get your Spy Pen working. Just bend a small paper clip end out, and insert straight into the opening. When you meet resistance, push lightly, and you can feel the reset button depressed.

Make sure it goes straight in, and not at an angle, or you could damage some of the components inside. Let go and try to turn it on.

2. Rule Out The USB Cable

If you are using a USB cable to either connect the Spy Pen to your computer, or to the 110V wall charger adapter, one day the cable will fail. If you use the USB cable because you can’t connect the pen directly to the computer, try just plugging it directly into the computer.

Don’t use a USB hub, as sometimes there is not enough power for the it; just connect it directly to the computers USB port. On some computers, use the USB port on the back, as front USB ports are sometimes weaker.

3. Rule Out The 110V Wall Charger

Just like the USB cable, the 110V wall charger adapter will also fail at some point; so if it does not seem to take a charge, try charging it for 3 hours in the computers USB port. If the status light is on while its charging, its getting electricity to charge the battery.

4. Put The Spy Pen Back In Video Mode

Several Spy Pens have switches to go to photo mode, or voice activation mode. If you move the switch to change modes, and you do not move it back to video mode, the computer will say it is not recognized. Try moving the switch back to the original position.

5. Erase & Reformat The Spy Pen

If the Spy Pen shows up as a removable drive on your PC, just right click on the icon and let go on “Format.” Then check the “Quick Format” button, then hit OK. The drive will be erased, and reformatted. This usually takes care of any pens that make it this far.

On an Apple computer, use Disc Utility to erase the drive and format as MS DOS 32. Then eject properly; on a Mac, right click on the drive and select eject. On a PC, click on the green Left arrow down at the lower right part of the monitor, then click on eject to properly eject the device.

That’s our report on “5 Ways To Get A Dead Spy Pen To Work.” If your pen still won’t work, and you purchased it from us, you have a 365-day no B.S. replacement policy. If not, you will need to contact the company you got it from.