Special Report
Special Report: The War Racket
16/August/2010 08:29
“Al Qaeda has won
the War on Terror!”
“But we haven’t had a successful large terrorist attack on America since 9-11.”
As they say in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, “Ya sure, you betcha! At what cost, monetarily, in regard to the lives of our troops, and the limitations of our personal freedoms?”
Putting this in a realistic perspective, it is reported that there are 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and maybe a few hundred more in Pakistan. Then there are bunches in Yemen and Somalia and scattered in other countries around the world. There are probably equal numbers in western democracies and in Islamic and developing countries. If we were to qualify only those who have both the desire and the where with all to directly attack the United States or European countries, adding in similar groups, the worldwide total of Islamic jihadis is probably less than 10,000.
So what does it cost to keep us safe from these hordes of wild extremists?
According to Wikipedia based on numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (SIPRI) the United States leads the world in military expenditures at $660 billion, followed by China at about $100 billion, France at $64 billion, the United Kingdom at $58 billion, and Russia at about $53 billion. You have to go to the SIPRI website to find out what their definition of what is a military expenditure.
One could assume from their definition that the $660 billion figure includes the wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but not Homeland Security and various transfer payments within and without the United States, not directly tied to the military expenditure definition. Since Wonder Springs has no way of quantifying that number we will take an educated guess of perhaps $440 billion, bringing the yearly total to a trillion bucks. That makes our War on Terror assessment equal to $10 million per really bad guy — per year.
Read More...
“But we haven’t had a successful large terrorist attack on America since 9-11.”
As they say in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, “Ya sure, you betcha! At what cost, monetarily, in regard to the lives of our troops, and the limitations of our personal freedoms?”
Putting this in a realistic perspective, it is reported that there are 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and maybe a few hundred more in Pakistan. Then there are bunches in Yemen and Somalia and scattered in other countries around the world. There are probably equal numbers in western democracies and in Islamic and developing countries. If we were to qualify only those who have both the desire and the where with all to directly attack the United States or European countries, adding in similar groups, the worldwide total of Islamic jihadis is probably less than 10,000.
So what does it cost to keep us safe from these hordes of wild extremists?
According to Wikipedia based on numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (SIPRI) the United States leads the world in military expenditures at $660 billion, followed by China at about $100 billion, France at $64 billion, the United Kingdom at $58 billion, and Russia at about $53 billion. You have to go to the SIPRI website to find out what their definition of what is a military expenditure.
One could assume from their definition that the $660 billion figure includes the wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but not Homeland Security and various transfer payments within and without the United States, not directly tied to the military expenditure definition. Since Wonder Springs has no way of quantifying that number we will take an educated guess of perhaps $440 billion, bringing the yearly total to a trillion bucks. That makes our War on Terror assessment equal to $10 million per really bad guy — per year.
Read More...
Special Report: Super-Bug Stupidity
09/August/2010 10:53
We
have all heard of the Super-Bugs, or drug resistant
germs, living in hospitals and other medical
facilities that have mutated or evolved to such a
point that our antibiotics are unable to control
their populations. The fizzled pandemic of swine,
or H1N1 flu was thought to be potentially a
Super-Bug virus that could devastate human
populations around the world.
There is so much to worry about in today’s world we really don’t have time to worry about these Super-Bugs germs unless we are in a medical facility where their threat is imminent. But if we broaden our perspective just a little we can use these Super-Bugs as a model, or an illustration, of what the social diseases that are infecting our world, creating the unfolding chaos we see virtually everywhere today.
Think for a moment about the American Congress as a Super-Bug. How about George W. Bush’s worldview as a Super-Bug, or Barack Obama’s Chicago political operations? If you ask their supporters without adding the complete context of what is really happening, they would probably say, “Cool we need more of that!”
Of course if everyone thinks what they believe, is far more Super-Bug than anyone else’s Super-Bug, you end up with chaos and the whole system collapses. This is the Cloward and Piven strategy that no one in the general population had heard of until Glenn Beck so kindly brought it to our attention. The real problem is however, you don’t need to be a Super-Bug to collapse the system, all you really need to do is to withhold the medicine and the epidemic will take care of itself. That is provided you have created the proper simple or monoculture environment.
The major strategic problem is not collapsing the system, but rebuilding a new economic, or human ecosystem on the ashes of the old. Super-Bugs don’t have the genetic code to pull it off. They can’t make it work in a natural world full of virtually unlimited human diversity. Of course we are not talking about true genetics, but really just environmental conditions, such as in a clean environment such as a hospital, a university, or a political body that allows this Super Bug intellectual cancer to exist in the first place.
Read More...
There is so much to worry about in today’s world we really don’t have time to worry about these Super-Bugs germs unless we are in a medical facility where their threat is imminent. But if we broaden our perspective just a little we can use these Super-Bugs as a model, or an illustration, of what the social diseases that are infecting our world, creating the unfolding chaos we see virtually everywhere today.
Think for a moment about the American Congress as a Super-Bug. How about George W. Bush’s worldview as a Super-Bug, or Barack Obama’s Chicago political operations? If you ask their supporters without adding the complete context of what is really happening, they would probably say, “Cool we need more of that!”
Of course if everyone thinks what they believe, is far more Super-Bug than anyone else’s Super-Bug, you end up with chaos and the whole system collapses. This is the Cloward and Piven strategy that no one in the general population had heard of until Glenn Beck so kindly brought it to our attention. The real problem is however, you don’t need to be a Super-Bug to collapse the system, all you really need to do is to withhold the medicine and the epidemic will take care of itself. That is provided you have created the proper simple or monoculture environment.
The major strategic problem is not collapsing the system, but rebuilding a new economic, or human ecosystem on the ashes of the old. Super-Bugs don’t have the genetic code to pull it off. They can’t make it work in a natural world full of virtually unlimited human diversity. Of course we are not talking about true genetics, but really just environmental conditions, such as in a clean environment such as a hospital, a university, or a political body that allows this Super Bug intellectual cancer to exist in the first place.
Read More...
Special Report: Times That Try Men’s Souls
26/July/2010 09:20
These are the
times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and
the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of his country; but he that stands
it now deserves the love and thanks of man and
woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;
yet we have this consolation with us - that the
harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It
is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its
goods; and it would be strange indeed if so
celestial an article as freedom should not be
highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her
tyranny, has declared that she has a right not only
to tax but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever,"
and if being bound in that manner is not slavery,
then is there not such a thing as slavery upon
earth. Even the expression is impious, for so
unlimited a power can belong only to
God. Thomas Paine –
1776
Who would have thought two short years ago that the American people would be discussing revolutions in a somewhat serious context. The two revolutions most discussed are the American Revolution of which Founding Father, Thomas Paine gave us the above quotation from his pamphlets “The Crisis Papers.” The other revolution in this country relates to the Vietnam War, the last period of critical social distress. The important reference from that era that related directly to today is, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows.”
Adding to the national angst is the reality of actual wars. The Iraq War is in the process of hopefully winding down to a successful nation building operation. The War in Afghanistan is quite different. Iraq was a real nation in the twentieth century definition, at least since the end of WWII. The same cannot be said for Afghanistan, which is more akin to a historic tribal region, not successfully colonized by any western culture in its history.
Under the auspices of the War on Terror and after a traditional military invasion of Iraq the United States, became involved in a counterinsurgency to root out Al Qaeda, other foreign insurgents, and quench the historic conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
In Iraq and Iran the Shia are the majority of the population. In Afghanistan the numbers are reversed and the Taliban are essentially the Sunni insurgents to which the United States and a number of NATO allies, through the escalation of the Obama Administration, are now attempting to develop a successful counterinsurgency nation-building exercise.
Read More...
Who would have thought two short years ago that the American people would be discussing revolutions in a somewhat serious context. The two revolutions most discussed are the American Revolution of which Founding Father, Thomas Paine gave us the above quotation from his pamphlets “The Crisis Papers.” The other revolution in this country relates to the Vietnam War, the last period of critical social distress. The important reference from that era that related directly to today is, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows.”
Adding to the national angst is the reality of actual wars. The Iraq War is in the process of hopefully winding down to a successful nation building operation. The War in Afghanistan is quite different. Iraq was a real nation in the twentieth century definition, at least since the end of WWII. The same cannot be said for Afghanistan, which is more akin to a historic tribal region, not successfully colonized by any western culture in its history.
Under the auspices of the War on Terror and after a traditional military invasion of Iraq the United States, became involved in a counterinsurgency to root out Al Qaeda, other foreign insurgents, and quench the historic conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
In Iraq and Iran the Shia are the majority of the population. In Afghanistan the numbers are reversed and the Taliban are essentially the Sunni insurgents to which the United States and a number of NATO allies, through the escalation of the Obama Administration, are now attempting to develop a successful counterinsurgency nation-building exercise.
Read More...
Change without direction
12/July/2010 08:40
One score months ago
the voters of America brought forth a new
presidential administration on this continent. The
stated goal of the election was to issue in a new
age of change we can believe in. That presupposes
either one of two alternatives. At that time number
one was, we were having change we didn’t want to
believe in, or two we didn’t want any change from
our vision of what we were told was a future of
human engineered eternal prosperity.
It seems in the intervening period that all change has accelerated rapidly and those changes are beyond anything we can believe in and furthermore most of the stupendous changes are only exacerbating previous problems.
For as long as I can remember American presidents have turned out worse than my predilections. My worries about George W. Bush was that he would be beholden to what we have recently publicly defined as crony capitalists to the default of other values of not only governance but also personal responsibility. So I voted for the guy twice, my public reason was we share the same initials, but the secret reason was I thought that both Al Gore and John Kerry were truly without hope for being effective leaders. But most liberal juice drinkers don’t like any reality with their cocktail, so voicing the truth really wasn’t worth the return of stressful noise.
So my more than worst fears of George W. Bush turned out to be true. Those fears manifested themselves in the financial meltdown which began in late 2007 and continues to this day. Essentially what we saw under the Bush administration was the continuance of debt financed consumption based upon real estate. Those inflated values are still highly leveraged over the current wealth of most of the folks, but that is another topic for another time.
So those twenty months ago, Barack Obama was elected president. I didn’t vote for the man, not because I am a racist, but I thought he lacked experience to handle the tough job of being president. I wasn’t all that keen on John McCain either, especially during the campaign where it seemed that his goal was to be the Republican nominee rather than getting elected. Perhaps during the campaign McCain was able to get a glimpse of future trouble and decided either he was not up to the task, or was aware that current American problems are beyond the pale of human leadership. That surely was not something that Barack Obama would ever discern.
Read More...
It seems in the intervening period that all change has accelerated rapidly and those changes are beyond anything we can believe in and furthermore most of the stupendous changes are only exacerbating previous problems.
For as long as I can remember American presidents have turned out worse than my predilections. My worries about George W. Bush was that he would be beholden to what we have recently publicly defined as crony capitalists to the default of other values of not only governance but also personal responsibility. So I voted for the guy twice, my public reason was we share the same initials, but the secret reason was I thought that both Al Gore and John Kerry were truly without hope for being effective leaders. But most liberal juice drinkers don’t like any reality with their cocktail, so voicing the truth really wasn’t worth the return of stressful noise.
So my more than worst fears of George W. Bush turned out to be true. Those fears manifested themselves in the financial meltdown which began in late 2007 and continues to this day. Essentially what we saw under the Bush administration was the continuance of debt financed consumption based upon real estate. Those inflated values are still highly leveraged over the current wealth of most of the folks, but that is another topic for another time.
So those twenty months ago, Barack Obama was elected president. I didn’t vote for the man, not because I am a racist, but I thought he lacked experience to handle the tough job of being president. I wasn’t all that keen on John McCain either, especially during the campaign where it seemed that his goal was to be the Republican nominee rather than getting elected. Perhaps during the campaign McCain was able to get a glimpse of future trouble and decided either he was not up to the task, or was aware that current American problems are beyond the pale of human leadership. That surely was not something that Barack Obama would ever discern.
Read More...
In My Tent Leadership?
28/June/2010 09:00
This last week, where
unflattering remarks by the staff of Gen. Stanley
McChrystal found their way into Rolling Stone
magazine, and led to his subsequent resignation
from being the commander of forces in Afghanistan,
I have reflected upon my military service in Europe
during Vietnam. Even though I was a reluctant
volunteer, compared with the reluctant draftee, I
have always looked at that time as a tremendous
growing experience, that in many ways I see as a
Divinely controlled adventure, giving me priceless
insight into strategic world events that could have
not been gained in such a brief encounter anywhere
other than that time and place.
I read the Rolling Stone article, which is quite long and detailed for what passes for twenty-first century journalism. It sounded to me to be a relatively good assessment of a highly motivated general officer with a very tight staff. All good things, when you have a mission to bring a war action in Afghanistan to a reasonable conclusion as rapidly as possible.
My dad was not a military person, he was 4-F when asked to serve in WWII, he had a strong heart murmur, but he was a very successful school administrator. I can say he only had one absolute rule when it came to people management. That rule was, “Always support your staff, no matter whether they are right or wrong. Always support your staff and let the chips fall where they may.” It seems that Gen. Stanley McChrystal lives by the same absolute.
When I was in ROTC in college, we had the opportunity to be taught the science behind the art of military leadership. Many of the questions we were tested upon, outlined a role, mission, or objective to be obtained, and a number of different means to obtain the required results. Maybe to keep things light, somewhere in the options was the always wrong response generally following the line “give and order and say, if you need me I will be in my tent.” In the Rolling Stone article you find out quite rapidly that Gen. McChrystal was and is not a, “I will be in my tent kind of leader.”
Read More...
I read the Rolling Stone article, which is quite long and detailed for what passes for twenty-first century journalism. It sounded to me to be a relatively good assessment of a highly motivated general officer with a very tight staff. All good things, when you have a mission to bring a war action in Afghanistan to a reasonable conclusion as rapidly as possible.
My dad was not a military person, he was 4-F when asked to serve in WWII, he had a strong heart murmur, but he was a very successful school administrator. I can say he only had one absolute rule when it came to people management. That rule was, “Always support your staff, no matter whether they are right or wrong. Always support your staff and let the chips fall where they may.” It seems that Gen. Stanley McChrystal lives by the same absolute.
When I was in ROTC in college, we had the opportunity to be taught the science behind the art of military leadership. Many of the questions we were tested upon, outlined a role, mission, or objective to be obtained, and a number of different means to obtain the required results. Maybe to keep things light, somewhere in the options was the always wrong response generally following the line “give and order and say, if you need me I will be in my tent.” In the Rolling Stone article you find out quite rapidly that Gen. McChrystal was and is not a, “I will be in my tent kind of leader.”
Read More...
Chaos in American Energy; and the world suffers
21/June/2010 17:23
Liebig’s law of the minimum, states crop yields are
proportional to the amount of the most limiting
nutrient. However that is just a subclass of a more
universal natural law, in that productivity of any
entity is limited to the extent of the limiting
contributor. Broadening that into the fields of
human enterprise it could read, wealth creation is
limited by the applications of energy, financial
liquidity, and information all functioning within
the limits of natural laws.
Now plug that concept into a Vietnam era saying:
We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful, have struggled so long, with so little, we are now able to create anything out of nothing.
That needs to be modified in the early twenty-first century to conclude: create nothing out of everything. The limiting factor? Basically human knowledge and wisdom! Put in an enlightened Green Street context, “The blowhards that are in charge, or think they know what is happening, are so full of themselves, that they are in the process of exploding human civilization with their excreted methane gas.”
Last week as I watched President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the Gulf oil catastrophe, I ended up yelling that the television screen. Then while watching all the commentators after the President’s address I yelled even more. In that illumination I refer you to the Green Street context above!
One of the two things that I found worth repeating was Sarah Palin’s comment that, “You can’t trust oil industry information, you must verify it yourself.” Having spent the first years of my professional career embedded in the intelligence culture, that truth must become a Kantian universal law. In the Vietnam context, the industry spokesmen are relying on information provided by the unwilling, which they are incompetent to understand. Furthermore many times these unwilling don’t know the answer demanded of them, and for a multitude of reasons, they create something out of nothing.
The other speech rebuttal statement worthy of development is, “The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy even though we have been trying for over forty years.”
“Yep! The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”
So where do we begin?
Read More...
Now plug that concept into a Vietnam era saying:
We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful, have struggled so long, with so little, we are now able to create anything out of nothing.
That needs to be modified in the early twenty-first century to conclude: create nothing out of everything. The limiting factor? Basically human knowledge and wisdom! Put in an enlightened Green Street context, “The blowhards that are in charge, or think they know what is happening, are so full of themselves, that they are in the process of exploding human civilization with their excreted methane gas.”
Last week as I watched President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the Gulf oil catastrophe, I ended up yelling that the television screen. Then while watching all the commentators after the President’s address I yelled even more. In that illumination I refer you to the Green Street context above!
One of the two things that I found worth repeating was Sarah Palin’s comment that, “You can’t trust oil industry information, you must verify it yourself.” Having spent the first years of my professional career embedded in the intelligence culture, that truth must become a Kantian universal law. In the Vietnam context, the industry spokesmen are relying on information provided by the unwilling, which they are incompetent to understand. Furthermore many times these unwilling don’t know the answer demanded of them, and for a multitude of reasons, they create something out of nothing.
The other speech rebuttal statement worthy of development is, “The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy even though we have been trying for over forty years.”
“Yep! The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”
So where do we begin?
Read More...
The Summer of Progressive Ferment
14/June/2010 06:53
Speaker of the House
of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi was heckled
Tuesday at the America’s Futures Now conference in
Washington, DC. So the third person in line to the
Presidency, the queen of the attempted remake of
the nation into a warm fuzzy progressive utopia,
was hissed continually by what we normal folks
would believe should be her strongest supporters.
Where’s the love?
What we are beginning to see, not only with the Speaker, but also with the whole Obama team, is that their renaissance plans to transform American into the leader of a new universe of Oz, has been defeated by the natural law of inertia. All the lofty rhetoric, back room political deals, and hope in vapor, can’t do the heavy lifting. So the alternative is attempting to elevate the angst into chaos to see if any of the stress will create some composted material that may stick to the wall.
I have long stated if I had a donkey I would name her Patience, fully recognizing that patience is part of the human condition to know what we want, and we want it now. So while I can understand the impatience in the hecklers of the Speaker, I also realize that hope naturally becomes reality by persistence and hard work. Furthermore true miracles are impossible in the natural world of these Social Darwinists.
Over the last couple of months we have mentioned the present plight of the Social Darwinists and in the “The Social Darwinist Conundrum,” we explained the juxtaposed views of the religion, especially as it related to the formation of the Soviet Union. In that context we see communist collective as being the true antithesis of the views of Ayn Rand. Rand being the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and the philosophy of Objectivism, all behind the laissez faire tenure of Alan Greenspan at the Fed.
So in the struggle of worldviews within the evolving religion of the Social Darwinists, it doesn’t really seem to be that difficult to choose a winner between the academy gene pool of collectivists and the wild west greedy speculators. Show me the money will win out all the time, especially in the United States where our culture has always been tensioned, through design, between selfish self determination and the common good.
A common good defined as even a European social democracy is not part of the American subspecies of humanity. Furthermore it seems totally absurd, if not insane, to attempt a radical transformation into collectivism, when really the only true believer nations that remain are Cuba and Venezuela. Even more importantly nothing in Social Darwinism allows for the existence of God, or even gods for that matter. While I disagree with many that the United States was formed as a Christian nation, I would submit that the Founding Fathers definitely miraculously created a secular nation based upon Godly created natural law and Judeo-Christian moral values. They also further understood that that God centered reality was a necessity for the continued prosperity of the culture they created.
Read More...
What we are beginning to see, not only with the Speaker, but also with the whole Obama team, is that their renaissance plans to transform American into the leader of a new universe of Oz, has been defeated by the natural law of inertia. All the lofty rhetoric, back room political deals, and hope in vapor, can’t do the heavy lifting. So the alternative is attempting to elevate the angst into chaos to see if any of the stress will create some composted material that may stick to the wall.
I have long stated if I had a donkey I would name her Patience, fully recognizing that patience is part of the human condition to know what we want, and we want it now. So while I can understand the impatience in the hecklers of the Speaker, I also realize that hope naturally becomes reality by persistence and hard work. Furthermore true miracles are impossible in the natural world of these Social Darwinists.
Over the last couple of months we have mentioned the present plight of the Social Darwinists and in the “The Social Darwinist Conundrum,” we explained the juxtaposed views of the religion, especially as it related to the formation of the Soviet Union. In that context we see communist collective as being the true antithesis of the views of Ayn Rand. Rand being the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and the philosophy of Objectivism, all behind the laissez faire tenure of Alan Greenspan at the Fed.
So in the struggle of worldviews within the evolving religion of the Social Darwinists, it doesn’t really seem to be that difficult to choose a winner between the academy gene pool of collectivists and the wild west greedy speculators. Show me the money will win out all the time, especially in the United States where our culture has always been tensioned, through design, between selfish self determination and the common good.
A common good defined as even a European social democracy is not part of the American subspecies of humanity. Furthermore it seems totally absurd, if not insane, to attempt a radical transformation into collectivism, when really the only true believer nations that remain are Cuba and Venezuela. Even more importantly nothing in Social Darwinism allows for the existence of God, or even gods for that matter. While I disagree with many that the United States was formed as a Christian nation, I would submit that the Founding Fathers definitely miraculously created a secular nation based upon Godly created natural law and Judeo-Christian moral values. They also further understood that that God centered reality was a necessity for the continued prosperity of the culture they created.
Read More...
Special Report: Is the World Broke?
07/June/2010 07:30
Updated
07/June/2010 11:00
Late last week I tuned into the Fox Business Channel and at the bottom of the screen was the tag, “Is the world broke?” What little time I listened to the discussion, it seemed that the participants were questioning the broke concept as in bankrupt. However when you consider the concept of bankruptcy you generally link the term with being or running out of money. In a world in which nations print their own money either individually as in the case of the United States, China, and most other nations of the world, they can always print more money and devalue their currency, so broke in their literal sense is impossible.
For the Eurozone going broke makes a little more sense in the fact that certain countries may run out of Euros and other countries or financial institutions fail or refuse to give them anymore. In that sense the Euro only will continue to work, if its support is linked to the willingness of all parties to adopt a somewhat consistent approach as far as spending and taxes.
In the United States we are told that it is impossible for the states to go broke literally, as in bankrupt. Since they cannot create their own currency however, that makes for the between a rock and a hard place a reality that many states now face, but as of yet are unwilling to create the austere conditions to bring into harmony unsustainable spending and limited revenues. This means that eventually they will come to the Federal government for funding not all that different from what is now faced by Eurozone countries.
However, there is another definition of broke, that as of yet none of the world’s political leaders, business moguls, spin merchants, or any other group that claims some sort of elitist power or authority, will admit. That is the world in which they say they created, know what is going on, or hope again to set on the right path is truly broke, like broken, it no longer works.
Last December in “Humpty Dumpty in a New Century” we describe Humpty Dumpty in American terms, but now we see that good old Mr. Dumpty has returned to his continental roots as well. Just as in the American story, the refrain remains pretty much the same. “If we, all the kings horses and all the kings men, all come together and work diligently we can surely put Humpty Dumpty back together again!”
The question no one is asking today is, “Could the reason Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall in the first place, is all the kings horses and all the kings men are responsible?” If that is the case and you just replace Humpty Dumpty on a shaky wall of the world’s financial condition, even if for the short term, things might get a little better, but there are really only two alternatives for a long lasting solution.
Read More...
Late last week I tuned into the Fox Business Channel and at the bottom of the screen was the tag, “Is the world broke?” What little time I listened to the discussion, it seemed that the participants were questioning the broke concept as in bankrupt. However when you consider the concept of bankruptcy you generally link the term with being or running out of money. In a world in which nations print their own money either individually as in the case of the United States, China, and most other nations of the world, they can always print more money and devalue their currency, so broke in their literal sense is impossible.
For the Eurozone going broke makes a little more sense in the fact that certain countries may run out of Euros and other countries or financial institutions fail or refuse to give them anymore. In that sense the Euro only will continue to work, if its support is linked to the willingness of all parties to adopt a somewhat consistent approach as far as spending and taxes.
In the United States we are told that it is impossible for the states to go broke literally, as in bankrupt. Since they cannot create their own currency however, that makes for the between a rock and a hard place a reality that many states now face, but as of yet are unwilling to create the austere conditions to bring into harmony unsustainable spending and limited revenues. This means that eventually they will come to the Federal government for funding not all that different from what is now faced by Eurozone countries.
However, there is another definition of broke, that as of yet none of the world’s political leaders, business moguls, spin merchants, or any other group that claims some sort of elitist power or authority, will admit. That is the world in which they say they created, know what is going on, or hope again to set on the right path is truly broke, like broken, it no longer works.
Last December in “Humpty Dumpty in a New Century” we describe Humpty Dumpty in American terms, but now we see that good old Mr. Dumpty has returned to his continental roots as well. Just as in the American story, the refrain remains pretty much the same. “If we, all the kings horses and all the kings men, all come together and work diligently we can surely put Humpty Dumpty back together again!”
The question no one is asking today is, “Could the reason Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall in the first place, is all the kings horses and all the kings men are responsible?” If that is the case and you just replace Humpty Dumpty on a shaky wall of the world’s financial condition, even if for the short term, things might get a little better, but there are really only two alternatives for a long lasting solution.
Read More...
The Wealth Creation — Tax & Debt Redistribution Continuum
24/May/2010 09:49
Give
me that old fashioned (like last year), change we
can believe in. Last Tuesday’s primary elections
signaled, throw out all the bums, and let us choose
the less — most desirable between who is left. The
grizzly bears moved back to a very realistic
position on Wall Street. The Senate finally passed
a financial reform bill which will help the 2 Big 2
Fail, sort of, not change a whole lot and provide
bennies for some others to continue to over
leverage our worthless money supply. On Sunday we
heard from the Feds, that if BP continues to miss
the deadlines on stopping the Gulf oil spill that
they are going to take over. That will surely help,
I’m sure?
Through it all Americans continue to learn about, and demand a redux of our founding constitutional principles, but all the pundits, spinners, commentators, and politicians think this will help them, when in reality the issue really is much more complex than can be articulated in a brief media story. Furthermore even if they could, their spin is so dumbed down and politically correct, that it could be shown that they would be quickly eliminated from the TV show, and then must announce that they are not smarter than a fifth grader.
So in the finest efforts of the Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum revisions, let us develop some context of what is really happening.
Way back in Colonial days, the people of the revolutionary era were very religious and in the process of writing a formal constitution they did a miraculous job of creating a secular government based on Absolute Christian religious principles.
Today we live in a very secular world and what we are trying to do is to take secular principles and redux them to Absolutes that will provide security in a rapidly changing world. In simple terms, back then most were committed to their religion, and a very few were secular. Now most are very secular, and a very few are committed to religion. Read More...
Through it all Americans continue to learn about, and demand a redux of our founding constitutional principles, but all the pundits, spinners, commentators, and politicians think this will help them, when in reality the issue really is much more complex than can be articulated in a brief media story. Furthermore even if they could, their spin is so dumbed down and politically correct, that it could be shown that they would be quickly eliminated from the TV show, and then must announce that they are not smarter than a fifth grader.
So in the finest efforts of the Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum revisions, let us develop some context of what is really happening.
Way back in Colonial days, the people of the revolutionary era were very religious and in the process of writing a formal constitution they did a miraculous job of creating a secular government based on Absolute Christian religious principles.
Today we live in a very secular world and what we are trying to do is to take secular principles and redux them to Absolutes that will provide security in a rapidly changing world. In simple terms, back then most were committed to their religion, and a very few were secular. Now most are very secular, and a very few are committed to religion. Read More...
The Wizard of Oz in America’s Struggles
03/May/2010 10:51
Two
weeks from today, 18 May 2010 will hallmark the
110th anniversary of the publishing of the
children’s book
“The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.”
For
most of that interlude American adults have tried
to move to OZ, simply because it was a fantasyland
as far from the reality of Kansas as they could
get. So today, as with real children, they are mad,
because the Wizards of Washington and the Wizards
of Wall Street haven’t the ability to maintain that
fable.
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
Read More...
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
Read More...
States Rights as Natural as Wildness
26/April/2010 14:31
The
United States of America used to be understood by
the slogan, “Out of many — one.” It is now becoming
better defined as, “Out of many — chaos.”
This evolution has taken place most dramatically in the last fifty years, but those chaotic roots run deep for at least the last century.
In January, when we began the “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension” it looked like there was a window in America’s trek to Gomorrah, in which we could develop a little historic context about how we got here and where we were headed, regardless of the desires of mice and men. It looks like the mice are holding up quite well in contrast to the best intentions of American leadership, but a couple realities did begin to be seen as “Why Me?” progressed, which show as early buds of the coming American political spring.
During those four months it was easy to anticipate the passage of Obamacare, but the firestorm of issues related to the individual mandate for people to purchase insurance, angered individuals, but also set off a spring burn of protests at the state level. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that about a third of the states would begin to act like real sovereign states. All this time we thought they were extinct, except for collecting taxes and creating arcane regulations. We will here attempt to put some natural spring into these new found rumblings. We will look at the heavy lifting of what is just beginning under the Washington guise of “Financial Reform” in our Wednesday article.
I would suppose one could make the case that the concept of state dependency began during the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. But the way the history has hyped that period among all the enlightenment progressive spin, it makes it impossible to find the states at all. Those who are yet still alive and actually went through that period were too young understand the context.
However using estimated dates beginning with the Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968; the Viet Nam War Protests: 1965-1975; and the Environmental Movement: 1962-1981; we essentially saw urban intellectual evolution commandeer all aspects of American unity and those who disagreed with their worldview were vilified as: racists, warmongers, and primitive knuckle draggers.
This as continued to evolve until today, we have the Lame Stream Media basically becoming propaganda asylums, and fair and balanced reporting, sponsoring battling pundit promotions. What is lost in all this is the fact that human beings were generally created to like one another and to help one another succeed. In that respect to believe that a bloated Federal government can fix societies ills is truly insanity.
Read More...
This evolution has taken place most dramatically in the last fifty years, but those chaotic roots run deep for at least the last century.
In January, when we began the “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension” it looked like there was a window in America’s trek to Gomorrah, in which we could develop a little historic context about how we got here and where we were headed, regardless of the desires of mice and men. It looks like the mice are holding up quite well in contrast to the best intentions of American leadership, but a couple realities did begin to be seen as “Why Me?” progressed, which show as early buds of the coming American political spring.
During those four months it was easy to anticipate the passage of Obamacare, but the firestorm of issues related to the individual mandate for people to purchase insurance, angered individuals, but also set off a spring burn of protests at the state level. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that about a third of the states would begin to act like real sovereign states. All this time we thought they were extinct, except for collecting taxes and creating arcane regulations. We will here attempt to put some natural spring into these new found rumblings. We will look at the heavy lifting of what is just beginning under the Washington guise of “Financial Reform” in our Wednesday article.
I would suppose one could make the case that the concept of state dependency began during the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. But the way the history has hyped that period among all the enlightenment progressive spin, it makes it impossible to find the states at all. Those who are yet still alive and actually went through that period were too young understand the context.
However using estimated dates beginning with the Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968; the Viet Nam War Protests: 1965-1975; and the Environmental Movement: 1962-1981; we essentially saw urban intellectual evolution commandeer all aspects of American unity and those who disagreed with their worldview were vilified as: racists, warmongers, and primitive knuckle draggers.
This as continued to evolve until today, we have the Lame Stream Media basically becoming propaganda asylums, and fair and balanced reporting, sponsoring battling pundit promotions. What is lost in all this is the fact that human beings were generally created to like one another and to help one another succeed. In that respect to believe that a bloated Federal government can fix societies ills is truly insanity.
Read More...
Happy Days Again? Not Here, Not Yet!
19/April/2010 11:18
>>PDF copy
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Subsequent to that act an unrepentant, Timothy McVeigh, was found guilty and was executed. There is a very old saying that goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Last week former President Clinton made remarks saying that he saw similarities between the words of Tea Party participants and that bombing which took place on 19 April 1995. Of course there has been a lot of media attention to those remarks, but none seem intelligent enough to see perhaps a link to the words and maybe the actions of then President Clinton, which may have contributed to McVeigh’s actions just a little over two years after the President began his first term.
Also last week, here in the USA, land of liberty, home of the free and the brave, President Obama made somewhat similar condescending remarks about how funny traditionally minded Tea Party participants were acting. In the context that he has fixed America’s continuing problems; with programs more outmoded than any our Chinese government partners could envision. Once we sock it to those Fat Cat bankers, and create all sorts of user fees for everything under the sun, it will be nice to know that the President has not raised the income taxes on those Americans who make less than $200,000.
I do have to agree with the President however, if the Tea Party people think that by attending some rallies, carrying some signs, and even electing some more conservative Republicans, to replace those awful liberal Democrats, they will in someway change the politics in Washington and business on Wall Street, then that is really a ironic joke. Sad, definitely true but still despairingly amusing.
Listening to the President, his staff, and his media amigos, happy days are here again. Rah! Rah! Rah! Well happy days may be back for Wall Street and federal workers, but those happy days here, are about as far away as the distance to New York City and Washington DC. Here in the Northeast corner of the other Washington (State) things are as bad as they have ever been and that may include the Great Depression.
Of course any of those people who were alive during the Great Depression and old enough to remember the details of those hard times; they are now dead. Back then those people who lived out west were a pretty much self sufficient lot. Everyone grew most of their own food, raised their own meat, and canned or put it up for the winter. There might not have been a lot of variety in the daily table course, but people didn’t go hungry, and if someone was in need their neighbors helped them out. Read More...
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Subsequent to that act an unrepentant, Timothy McVeigh, was found guilty and was executed. There is a very old saying that goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Last week former President Clinton made remarks saying that he saw similarities between the words of Tea Party participants and that bombing which took place on 19 April 1995. Of course there has been a lot of media attention to those remarks, but none seem intelligent enough to see perhaps a link to the words and maybe the actions of then President Clinton, which may have contributed to McVeigh’s actions just a little over two years after the President began his first term.
Also last week, here in the USA, land of liberty, home of the free and the brave, President Obama made somewhat similar condescending remarks about how funny traditionally minded Tea Party participants were acting. In the context that he has fixed America’s continuing problems; with programs more outmoded than any our Chinese government partners could envision. Once we sock it to those Fat Cat bankers, and create all sorts of user fees for everything under the sun, it will be nice to know that the President has not raised the income taxes on those Americans who make less than $200,000.
I do have to agree with the President however, if the Tea Party people think that by attending some rallies, carrying some signs, and even electing some more conservative Republicans, to replace those awful liberal Democrats, they will in someway change the politics in Washington and business on Wall Street, then that is really a ironic joke. Sad, definitely true but still despairingly amusing.
Listening to the President, his staff, and his media amigos, happy days are here again. Rah! Rah! Rah! Well happy days may be back for Wall Street and federal workers, but those happy days here, are about as far away as the distance to New York City and Washington DC. Here in the Northeast corner of the other Washington (State) things are as bad as they have ever been and that may include the Great Depression.
Of course any of those people who were alive during the Great Depression and old enough to remember the details of those hard times; they are now dead. Back then those people who lived out west were a pretty much self sufficient lot. Everyone grew most of their own food, raised their own meat, and canned or put it up for the winter. There might not have been a lot of variety in the daily table course, but people didn’t go hungry, and if someone was in need their neighbors helped them out. Read More...
2 Big 2 Work!
12/April/2010 08:48
The bellyachers are
giving me a headache. Well, actually they seem to
be more akin to a pain at the end of the alimentary
canal, but unless it is phrased in that way, it
becomes politically incorrect. Let me see if I have
got this straight? You have a beef with the fact
that you have to pay way too much income tax when
you and yours gross six figures a year and nearly
half of the American households pay nothing.
It is really too bad that your mortgage is upside down by about 50% and your 401k and the rest of your investments lost about the same, and you still are not back on track to retiring early, with only your four thousand square foot McMansion in the ‘burbs, and your two thousand square foot second home in the foreign paradise. You can cry me a river, but I really don’t care. Welcome to the real world.
Bah! Bah! Bah! You went to work everyday, did the best you could, never took any real risk and suddenly you were a millionaire. Well, at least you were a millionaire. Nobody ever called you a sheep, sheep can’t leverage a mid-level professional job, with really only bureaucratic skills, into a million bucks. Truly this was an absolute miracle, helped along with cheap credit, marketing, and educational propaganda. After all you are worth it, and you have the room full of seventh place trophies to prove it.
Suddenly the 2 BIG 2 work vultures from the government want you to pay what they call your fair share. It isn’t just the Feds, it’s the state, the county, and the city too. Even the home owners association wants more money to keep the water feature pumping. Just like me, they all don’t want to hear your story of an American Dream of a pampered upbringing turned into gentrified nausea. You had it all, peaches and cream, and now it is time to pay the dues.
Perhaps you didn’t DVR Alan Greenspan on C-Span last week when he said he thought he was doing the right thing during lllooonnnggg his term at the Fed, and now in hindsight there may have been just a few tweaks of the economy that might have led to a continuing-continuum of eternal prosperity. However now that this bubble burst and after ObamaCare has passed, old Alan has some fresh insights that we might not be able to pay for everything at the same time.
Maybe you should send him one of your seventh place trophies for a reward!
Read More...
It is really too bad that your mortgage is upside down by about 50% and your 401k and the rest of your investments lost about the same, and you still are not back on track to retiring early, with only your four thousand square foot McMansion in the ‘burbs, and your two thousand square foot second home in the foreign paradise. You can cry me a river, but I really don’t care. Welcome to the real world.
Bah! Bah! Bah! You went to work everyday, did the best you could, never took any real risk and suddenly you were a millionaire. Well, at least you were a millionaire. Nobody ever called you a sheep, sheep can’t leverage a mid-level professional job, with really only bureaucratic skills, into a million bucks. Truly this was an absolute miracle, helped along with cheap credit, marketing, and educational propaganda. After all you are worth it, and you have the room full of seventh place trophies to prove it.
Suddenly the 2 BIG 2 work vultures from the government want you to pay what they call your fair share. It isn’t just the Feds, it’s the state, the county, and the city too. Even the home owners association wants more money to keep the water feature pumping. Just like me, they all don’t want to hear your story of an American Dream of a pampered upbringing turned into gentrified nausea. You had it all, peaches and cream, and now it is time to pay the dues.
Perhaps you didn’t DVR Alan Greenspan on C-Span last week when he said he thought he was doing the right thing during lllooonnnggg his term at the Fed, and now in hindsight there may have been just a few tweaks of the economy that might have led to a continuing-continuum of eternal prosperity. However now that this bubble burst and after ObamaCare has passed, old Alan has some fresh insights that we might not be able to pay for everything at the same time.
Maybe you should send him one of your seventh place trophies for a reward!
Read More...
Malignant Money
05/April/2010 09:45
There is a universal
belief that with enough money life in short order
will become a bed of roses, or some other silly
metaphor. In that context the question now becomes,
“Where’s the money?”
With more dollars floating around somewhere than in the entire history of the world, there should be money, money everywhere and inflation should be a significant worry. There is none of that. Furthermore everywhere you look for answers you don’t see or hear anything related to the present reality.
For an example in that present reality, last Thursday I took my Saturn into the Midas Muffler shop in downtown Spokane to have its brakes replaced. The reason I went there, on my previous trip to Spokane in my pickup, I had had to have the brakes replaced on it also. Not only was the pickup price about ten percent less than I figured it would have been up in Northeast Washington, I now had essentially a ten percent off coupon for my next visit to Midas. In times like these you save all the money you can.
By the time I got to the place, located on the corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard, it was just a little before 10 AM, probably the busiest time of the business day. This address is just across the street from essentially the downtown core. The convention center and related theaters begin just on the opposite diagonal corner. There are at least five repair bays on the office side of the structure and about three on the other part of the L.
As I walked into the office I was met by a lady of about retirement age, and I stated I needed to get my brakes fixed and I need to know how long it will take. She says she will get an estimate, takes my keys, and walks out into the shop. There seems to be only one guy working out there and he seems to be just doing some make work activity. So working alone he finishes my estimate and tells me to come back in about an hour and a half. When I return at about 11:30 my car is ready, and it looks like the guy is doing something minor on another vehicle and there are no other business related cars either in the shop or in the parking lot. I pay my bill and I am on my way.
So on a normal business day in the center of Spokane, the largest city from Seattle to about Minneapolis, in a major national automobile repair franchise, they probably didn’t cover the overhead for the time I was there. What about the rest of the day, week, month, or year?
Read More...
With more dollars floating around somewhere than in the entire history of the world, there should be money, money everywhere and inflation should be a significant worry. There is none of that. Furthermore everywhere you look for answers you don’t see or hear anything related to the present reality.
For an example in that present reality, last Thursday I took my Saturn into the Midas Muffler shop in downtown Spokane to have its brakes replaced. The reason I went there, on my previous trip to Spokane in my pickup, I had had to have the brakes replaced on it also. Not only was the pickup price about ten percent less than I figured it would have been up in Northeast Washington, I now had essentially a ten percent off coupon for my next visit to Midas. In times like these you save all the money you can.
By the time I got to the place, located on the corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard, it was just a little before 10 AM, probably the busiest time of the business day. This address is just across the street from essentially the downtown core. The convention center and related theaters begin just on the opposite diagonal corner. There are at least five repair bays on the office side of the structure and about three on the other part of the L.
As I walked into the office I was met by a lady of about retirement age, and I stated I needed to get my brakes fixed and I need to know how long it will take. She says she will get an estimate, takes my keys, and walks out into the shop. There seems to be only one guy working out there and he seems to be just doing some make work activity. So working alone he finishes my estimate and tells me to come back in about an hour and a half. When I return at about 11:30 my car is ready, and it looks like the guy is doing something minor on another vehicle and there are no other business related cars either in the shop or in the parking lot. I pay my bill and I am on my way.
So on a normal business day in the center of Spokane, the largest city from Seattle to about Minneapolis, in a major national automobile repair franchise, they probably didn’t cover the overhead for the time I was there. What about the rest of the day, week, month, or year?
Read More...
The Law of Malignant Enlightenment
29/March/2010 11:43
Our friend
Et Tu Brute’ early Friday morning showed his
wisdom on how the passage of ObamaCare would be
greatly altered over time by the Law of Unintended
Consequences. Following Brute’s post it was truly
amazing how often this generally undefined law was
mentioned in the world of more traditional news
media and commentary. This was generally rebutted
by a more liberal response, “Yah, but, just wait
until it takes effect and everyone understands this
evolving opportunity.” The definition of
opportunity left to those less infected (sic).
Cutting through all the composting entropy, the rhetoric revolves basically around two mutually exclusive loci. A traditional or conservative spin states, “With the passage of ObamaCare the path to mutually assured destruction has been coated with black ice.” On the other side, now spun in the leftist or liberal construct, “America has now reached Beulah Land and the shining eternal city is just across the Serendipity Plain.”
Furthermore a little research into the Law of Unintended Consequences shows that the abstract is probably the best usage, since in that form the law can be used whenever one would like to make a point without really needing to rely on any points at all. “Essentially, in time the spectrum of unintended consequences will become clear, and I am just focusing on a few that fit my talking points, for talking points after all, is why I make the big bucks.”
Along that line, the talking points tend to focus on specifics of the actual ObamaCare bill such as, its size, cost, repeal, or replace, the list being very vendor specific. What all this tends to show is that the shallow shortsightedness that gave us the bill in the first place, will be used in the opposite direction to make it much better. With all these ignored, but now so plainly unforeseen and unintended consequences so apparent, the truth seems to be that ObamaCare must either be in its current form, created through intelligent design, or something, or some other unseen natural law must be working its magic.
This brings us to a more refined, contemporary, and previously undiscovered natural law: The Law of Malignant Enlightenment. Departing from the unintended law, we shall briefly define the Law of Malignant Enlightenment and then give three examples on how the law allows its applications to reach beyond the specifics of ObamaCare and touch the universal attributes that can be altered to achieve positive results in a world of limited resources and unlimited possibilities.
Read More...
Cutting through all the composting entropy, the rhetoric revolves basically around two mutually exclusive loci. A traditional or conservative spin states, “With the passage of ObamaCare the path to mutually assured destruction has been coated with black ice.” On the other side, now spun in the leftist or liberal construct, “America has now reached Beulah Land and the shining eternal city is just across the Serendipity Plain.”
Furthermore a little research into the Law of Unintended Consequences shows that the abstract is probably the best usage, since in that form the law can be used whenever one would like to make a point without really needing to rely on any points at all. “Essentially, in time the spectrum of unintended consequences will become clear, and I am just focusing on a few that fit my talking points, for talking points after all, is why I make the big bucks.”
Along that line, the talking points tend to focus on specifics of the actual ObamaCare bill such as, its size, cost, repeal, or replace, the list being very vendor specific. What all this tends to show is that the shallow shortsightedness that gave us the bill in the first place, will be used in the opposite direction to make it much better. With all these ignored, but now so plainly unforeseen and unintended consequences so apparent, the truth seems to be that ObamaCare must either be in its current form, created through intelligent design, or something, or some other unseen natural law must be working its magic.
This brings us to a more refined, contemporary, and previously undiscovered natural law: The Law of Malignant Enlightenment. Departing from the unintended law, we shall briefly define the Law of Malignant Enlightenment and then give three examples on how the law allows its applications to reach beyond the specifics of ObamaCare and touch the universal attributes that can be altered to achieve positive results in a world of limited resources and unlimited possibilities.
Read More...
The ObamaCare Wildfire
22/March/2010 09:00
Late last evening the
United States of America passed an ObamaCare reform
law and simultaneously unleashed a wildfire in the
country that will affect the country for years if
not decades to come. A wildfire, many times human
caused or even designed is an uncontrollable
reordering of the future by destroying the past and
creating opportunities for new growth to rapidly
occur out of the ashes of the old. Many times human
started controlled burns suddenly erupt into
uncontrollable wildfires and greatly change an
environment, well beyond the carefully laid plans
of the fire planners. Welcome to healthcare reform
circa 2010.
For over a year, off and on the healthcare debate has slowly intensified and generally revolves around both the cost and the constitutional question, if human governments can create rights, rather than being a gift of Natural Law given to humans by God. As of yesterday the debate was codified into law and started the wildfire which we will discuss briefly.
There are those who will continue to fight the hot spot battles related to human rights, the American federal government’s ability to create and to tax, and the continued desire to live beyond our means. Just as in a wildfire you will be able to tune to your favorite news channel, talk radio, or podcast and hear the yin and yang to support or defame your paradigms, but Washington DC this time next year will be a very different place than it is today. It will look like a wildfire passed through the capitol and there will be new shoots of growth beginning to sprout from the ashes, but still a lot of dead wood around, some of it standing some not. When you get out into the country those changes will begin to be seen also, but not the effects that the ObamaCare supporters had hoped.
Wildfires are frightening things, extremely rapidly they can change what has stood strong and relentless for centuries, and in a few minutes it is all gone. But if you look beyond the visual changes, what a wildfire does is fundamentally change the energetics of the ecosystem, including human ecosystems. You probably will only hear about the energetics of the ObamaCare wildfire here at Wonder Springs, so pass this to others.
Read More...
For over a year, off and on the healthcare debate has slowly intensified and generally revolves around both the cost and the constitutional question, if human governments can create rights, rather than being a gift of Natural Law given to humans by God. As of yesterday the debate was codified into law and started the wildfire which we will discuss briefly.
There are those who will continue to fight the hot spot battles related to human rights, the American federal government’s ability to create and to tax, and the continued desire to live beyond our means. Just as in a wildfire you will be able to tune to your favorite news channel, talk radio, or podcast and hear the yin and yang to support or defame your paradigms, but Washington DC this time next year will be a very different place than it is today. It will look like a wildfire passed through the capitol and there will be new shoots of growth beginning to sprout from the ashes, but still a lot of dead wood around, some of it standing some not. When you get out into the country those changes will begin to be seen also, but not the effects that the ObamaCare supporters had hoped.
Wildfires are frightening things, extremely rapidly they can change what has stood strong and relentless for centuries, and in a few minutes it is all gone. But if you look beyond the visual changes, what a wildfire does is fundamentally change the energetics of the ecosystem, including human ecosystems. You probably will only hear about the energetics of the ObamaCare wildfire here at Wonder Springs, so pass this to others.
Read More...
Three Word Transitions
15/March/2010 10:52
"How's
that hopey, changey stuff workin' out for ya?"
Well Sarah, it ain’t workin’ that well right now and come to think of it things haven’t worked all that well for quite a while.”
As we have been promoting in our Wonder Springs weekly articles for a number of weeks, change we can believe in is really change we can understand and makes us comfortable. However, if change really is the only constant in the world, then real stupendous change is truly freakin’ scary and it makes us withdraw further into our old sense of security, and we exacerbate the problems. Hence in real reality “Change we can believe in.” is really the enigma of continual angst. To question whether how much of this current change is by design or chance only magnifies the apprehension?
Last week in the Chronicle we looked at a number of religious antitheses to New England Calvinism. Calvinism defines the prime concept of its theology in three words that begin with the letter “G” standing for “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. In this week’s “Why Me?” article we will look at similar three word theses, these non-Calvinist and other religious expressions use to express their believe systems.
Watching Glenn Beck last Friday, he unveiled a similar progression to use in his work as he attempts to encourage others to begin to move beyond change we can believe in, as this country attempts to reset the nation on our constitutional foundation. Those three words were “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” These of course come from the old King James - American Revolution era translation of 1 Corinthians 13. Our modern versions use love instead of charity and consequently lose the true perspective of what the Apostle Paul was really saying.
Read More...
Well Sarah, it ain’t workin’ that well right now and come to think of it things haven’t worked all that well for quite a while.”
As we have been promoting in our Wonder Springs weekly articles for a number of weeks, change we can believe in is really change we can understand and makes us comfortable. However, if change really is the only constant in the world, then real stupendous change is truly freakin’ scary and it makes us withdraw further into our old sense of security, and we exacerbate the problems. Hence in real reality “Change we can believe in.” is really the enigma of continual angst. To question whether how much of this current change is by design or chance only magnifies the apprehension?
Last week in the Chronicle we looked at a number of religious antitheses to New England Calvinism. Calvinism defines the prime concept of its theology in three words that begin with the letter “G” standing for “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. In this week’s “Why Me?” article we will look at similar three word theses, these non-Calvinist and other religious expressions use to express their believe systems.
Watching Glenn Beck last Friday, he unveiled a similar progression to use in his work as he attempts to encourage others to begin to move beyond change we can believe in, as this country attempts to reset the nation on our constitutional foundation. Those three words were “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” These of course come from the old King James - American Revolution era translation of 1 Corinthians 13. Our modern versions use love instead of charity and consequently lose the true perspective of what the Apostle Paul was really saying.
Read More...