Three obtusely related things peaked our interest this week. Those three were an episode from the Vancouver Olympic Games, the earthquake in Chile, and Obama’s healthcare summit in Washington DC.

Now you may be asking yourself how these three events are related at all, even if the obtuse modifier is used? The thing that ties together all of our points this week, relate to how people respond to an opportunity or a crisis, in our terms stupendous change.

Our zenith of this report was the results of the four man bobsled event at Whistler in which the United States won its first Gold medal since 1948. While that was a worthwhile achievement, what I found really interesting was what happened after the medals presentation, where the Americans were joined by the Silver medal winning Canadians and the Bronze medal Germans.

Before TV cameras all three teams sort of scrunched together for a group photo and in the process you had over 1000 kilos (2200 lbs.) of competitive alpha males getting up close and personal, all smiling like they sort of liked one another. I have searched for a picture of that happening but it doesn’t appear to have gotten significant press attention.
Read More...

Tags: Olympics, Chile earthquake, lame stream media, Barack Obama, health care, leadership

We will comment on three events from the last week that have ties to a continuing angst, not reported currently in either the blogosphere or more traditional media outlets. This anxiety relates to how the individual handles, or hoped to handle, events that test the individual’s moral compass.

“Moral compass? I don’t need no stinkin’ moral compass, I make my own way in this world and I am proud of it.”

This was evident in the Austin, Texas happening on Thursday where Joe Stack, a disgruntled former software engineer, crashed his small plane into the local IRS building, leaving behind his house he set on fire, and a reported 3000 word manifesto on the Internet.

What makes a person do such a thing?
Read More...

Tags: Joe Stack, Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, CPAC, Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, Emmanuel Kant, God, Amazing Grace

Barack Obama ran for President of the United States promoting a vision of “Change We Can Believe In.” Much to the chagrin of many of the people who voted for him, the true meaning of that catchy phrase was, “Change He Can Believe In.” What Obama was able to tap into during his campaign, is that all humans seek change that they can believe in as one of the prime goals in their lives. The underlying paradigm of this change however, relies on the ability of me to understand what is happening and to control, or at least find the outcome sympathetic to my desires for happiness. For me to see anything to be really positive change of the first degree, it needs to be achieved without risk, pain, suffering, or just about anything I could define as negative or undesirable.

So many Americans, especially those who worked hard to find their security in traditional American values, are grossly disappointed in the reality that when the candidate Obama said change, he really meant that unsettling word, “CHANGE!”

Oh, the audacity of that strange change fellow! We asked for warm feely change, and would you believe it, he really wanted to deliver change that was bordering on what most people would consider stupendous change. This angst is especially true because they elected George W. Bush twice, and he could not deliver on those warm fuzzy desires either. In fact Bush tried so hard by the end of his second term he had basically crashed all of our retirement security, in the names of freedom and unsustainable spending.

“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”

Of course to bring the words of Jesus into the lyrics of a somewhat contemporary country song: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”
Read More...

Tags: stupendous change, Barack Obama, Reformation, 500 year reboot, Genesis, God, Jesus

Myth: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Following along different myth paths from either the creation of all life from God’s will or the evolution of some human out of the trees of Africa a few billion years ago, things are getting more interesting. Since time is of the essence however, we will let our readers do their own evolutionary trip but only make a comment.

Does it seem only a coincidence that these most ancient human ancestors are found in Africa, which today we still consider the most primitive place on earth, when it comes to just about anything. Actually it seems as the most logical place to look, considering that there are more monkeys in Africa than anyplace else. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of the leap of faith in intelligence and that little thing such as language. That was just a minor evolutionary leap of faith from squeaks and screams to the iPad. No wonder we need a lot of time. Of course only in the twenty-first century would all this evolving technology seem like a true advancement rather than a waste of precious time.

So when we last left Adam and Eve, they were sinners in the Garden of Eden. The short synopsis of the events thereafter is that the Creator made clothing for the couple, therein creating a covenant of God’s grace, today, in its true essence, the most rare substance on earth.

Then God kicked the couple out of the Garden so that they would not become immortal. They had kids and more kids, and just like today their kids were more self-centered than their parents. Since we know little of those days we must assume that it had little to do with their music their lack of a work ethic. Those things after all take a long time to evolve, or just plain develop. Perhaps a rebel without a cause really is just an unconscious effort to become something new and unique from our parent’s influence?

These kids got so bad that the mean God decided to start over, so he had the dude named Noah to build an arc out of wood, with the help of his reluctant offspring. They got on the ship with two of each kind of animals and it started to rain. During that episode of a little over a month, the vapor canopy that made the earth an Eden, collapsed, waters also came out of the depths of the earth. That was some climate change you could believe in, except for the reality that unless you were on that little life raft, along with all other terrestrial life on earth, you became today’s motor fuel.
Read More...

Tags: Genesis, God, The Tower of Babel, myth, U S Constitution, Barack Obama, Christianity

Well, after a lot of happenings in the last couple of weeks, this week was less hectic, except in terms of stupendous changes. The first being the proposed budget sent to Congress by President Obama. The second being the weather in places a lot of people live on both the left and right coasts.

Last Monday President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. The proposal listed $3.83 trillion in spending, much to fight the continuing economic malaise, all of this showing the biggest deficit percentage since 1945. It is hoped this year’s deficit will come in around $1.6 trillion to be followed with something around a trillion in 2011.

As discussed by the spin-doctors and pundits, this is either the salvation or the end of the economic world, as we know it. What all these people are hoping for – is through the budget, or changes to the budget, we can return to the prosperity that the nation and the world we hoped would continue forever, namely the 1990s.

What no one seems to understand is that the ‘90s were funded basically by the housing bubble, monetarily securitizing that debt, and selling it to the rest of the world. To believe that we can do it all again, with some other zero risk – get rich scheme, borders on stupidity, if not insanity. I suppose the good news, as bad as the United States economic woes; the dollar has rebounded, thanks to things being worse elsewhere.

What the world really needs is money in the old fashioned sense, like a medium of exchange for goods and services, not a Ponzi Scheme of central bankers, politicians, and various leveraged market makers. That real money will not be loaded on the world’s economic ship until sometime in the unknown future. In the meantime the world will continue to be awash in an ocean of non-energetic debt money, with no real place to go, because the players, either don’t seem to care, or they haven’t got a clue.

On the left coast, Southern California slowly continues to wash into the Pacific Ocean. On the right coast massive snowfalls have broken trees, power lines, and frozen transit, creating economic ice. One town in Maryland is said to have received over 40 inches. The area is expected to receive another winter blast toward the middle of the week. Here in the northwest, the record snows of the last two winters have been replaced with almost an extended spring, with just freezing nights and pleasant days.

El Nino is the climate culprit in all of this. Warm ocean waters in the Pacific have shifted storm tracks to the south, so we see more rain in the arid southwest and as it moves east this moisture laden air becomes essentially an ocean effect snow, similar to the lake effect snowfalls around the Great Lakes, but this time over a lot larger area.

In all the climate change debate about global warming, nothing in the models fits this happening, but many creation scientists, believe that just more massive events as these, were the underlying reality that brought on the ice age after a period of warmth following the Biblical Genesis Flood.

Tags: FY 2011 budget, Barack Obama, global warming

Myth: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Our human world builds its society based upon myths. Of course we have now redefined many of them in terms of the myth of science, for the most part to justify our philosophy or religion, many times both. Some of our myths are as old as human language; some are quite modern. To become a myth means that there is something believable about the story. The power of that appeal to truth, greatly contributes to the longevity of the myth.

Old myths in someway touch the deeper soul of humanity; their appeal is many times based upon an unspoken or unknown truth, perhaps even an absolute truth that transcends humanity and life itself. New myths do not stand that test of time as well, and if they lose their basic tenants through corruption and exaggeration, they cease to be myths, or even wise fairy tales.

The creation account in the Bible’s book of Genesis fits our definition of myth. The written record is attributed to Moses, but the oral tradition basically goes back to the creation of it all, and specifically through the development of a human society on earth from a couple we call Adam and Eve, created by God, in his image.

A modern myth is the demise of the earth and everything upon it via the mechanism of global warming caused by man induced greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, but not limited just to that form of hot air. Recent emails that report that the basic assumptions of the myth were manufactured to support a religious bias, have hurt the myth’s plausibility by many who were and are skeptical not only of the underlying truth of the myth, but also the integrity of the proponents.
Read More...

Tags: myth, Genesis, God, global warming, Satan, Jesus, justification, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Barack Obama

Three items we find significant enough to merit inclusion on this look back toward the week that was.

The biggest change in our world came on Wednesday the 27th with Apple’s announcement of their new iPad. Sure this doesn’t have the earthshaking ramifications of President Obama’s State of the Union Address later that evening – well maybe it does, for the President’s remarks seemed to be more of the same coming out a Washington, but we will get back to that later.

I bought a Mac Plus in 1985, it had 1mb of ram, internal and external 800k floppy drives, an Apple dot matrix printer, and cost about $3300 out the door. Following that Apple developmental line, lest we forget the iPad is really the evolutionary descendent of the Newton which debuted in 1993 and died a silent death in 1998. In that intervening decade we have seen the emergence of our current vast array of PDA’s that have greatly changed the way the world does its business and its pleasure. It seems today that the world has become touch-screen; the new iPad now means we might be able to do something revolutionary with touch-screen technology.

I stopped into the local Apple reseller in Spokane on Saturday and they knew just about what you could gather from reading the press, and they said it would probably be a couple of weeks before they would know if they would be able to handle both the Wi-Fi and the 3G versions.

The significance of the technology will probably have a dramatic effect on both your web interface and how you do your reading of what is generally called print media. The ability to embed video in what used to be solely printed words will open a new frontier in the way we get and manage our information. The most apparent is being an acceleration of the dismantling of traditional books, magazines, and newspapers. Just as important is how publishers and authors are going to get paid for their endeavors. The real need for a laptop or desk computer will be that some of us still need a real keyboard to get information at speed into our pages, pretty much everything else we do, can be done on an iPad with a price point varying between $500 – $900.
Read More...

Tags: iPad, bioterrorism, Barack Obama, State of the Union

Today begins this new column focusing on the events of the last week, and their potential ramifications on future developments. Whether this week in review becomes weekly is probably dependent upon the weeks themselves, well as outside forces directly related to enterprise priorities. No matter how you choose to view the stupendous changes of this week we must agree there was a lot going on in the United States and her close neighbors.

Last week began recovery in Haiti, where the shift took place from looking for buried survivors in the quake’s rubble, to attempting to recover the now dead and decaying bodies. The last estimate I heard stated that total deaths may approach 200,000. This week, while the recovery of bodies continues, the true survival situation is reaching critical mass. So far the Haitian people have been very well behaved as aid has been slow getting into the country and out to the people. Perhaps that peace was, and is just the shock of trying to mentally cope with these catastrophic events. For the foreseeable future, the extremely difficult job of just surviving date to day, amongst the destruction, disease, poverty, hunger, and thirst of just plain life will begin to take a physical and emotional toll. That is true both within the country's citizens as well as those trying to minister help.

On Tuesday Massachusetts elected Scott Brown its first Republican Senator to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy, which had been in the Kennedy family since 1952. Brown was the first Republican Senator elected in the Commonwealth since the 1970s. Scott Brown is a center right Republican with a constitutional governance philosophy much the same as the recently elected governors in New Jersey and Virginia . While this is hailed as a great Republican victory and the end of the filibuster proof Senate, in a way it further points to the fact that the establishments of both the Republicans and the Democrats represent fringe views of the majority of the American people, which will make for more very interesting times as the Congressional elections approach this fall.
Read More...

Tags: Haiti, Scott Brown, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Supreme Court, populism, Ben Bernanke

Why Me?

At the Wonder Springs Chronicle we often begin the year with a topical series that seems to be relevant to current or pending affairs. For example in 2007 we began the year with a thirteen part series on Stupendous Change, which was followed with a six part series on Business Ecology. Later we closed out that year beginning a fourteen part series on Symbiotic Economics, which continued into 2008 with twelve more episodes. In 2006 we began with seven Theses and 2005 began with an eighteen part series on Métis Economics.

This year, in the midst of world stupendous economic change, we begin a “Why Me?” series that seems to be most relevant to many people not only in the United States but also around the world.

In common or secular terms, men and women, young and old, are beginning to understand that your life is much more complex than the animals. Just plain existence is not all there is to life, in fact just existence, and we are now learning, material consumption, really don’t offer all that much, especially when unsustainable consumption of things has been hyped as the reason for living and the only key to happiness.

So probably the first question in the quest for “Why Me?” begins with another question, “What is now happening in the world?” or in the terms of the old beer commercial, “What’s up?”

The simple answer is that we are seeing the demise of a culture that not only cannot answer the deepest questions of the human soul; it does not even believe that these questions exist. In specific terms, western atheistic human enlightenment based upon entropic (politically correct term: evolving) global materialistic consumerism no longer can produce the intellectual and energetic cohesive diversity to sustain itself. In Biblical terms, just as in Daniel’s Babylon, “We have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

Those God created metaphysical questions of the human soul, which we all need to answer, are:

Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
What am I supposed to do?
Where do I go when I die?
Read More...

Tags: survival, fear, Dachau, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Nazi, imagination , flexibility

Well fellow humans 2009 really was quite a year. As we are continually being reminded by the political spin-doctors, when we entered the year, total financial catastrophe was just a needed bailout away, and now things are much, much better and all would be surely wonderful, except for the fact that they, the real politicians, inherited such a pending disaster.

Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall off the financial wall – yet, but Humpty does seem to look sort of like a handsome bald headed guy with a beard (Ben Bernacke), and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men look strangely like Goldman Sachs investment bankers; just like good old Humpty himself. So lacking a similar event in American history we should give them credit for keeping the wall from collapsing completely. There are still some questions yet to be answered, mostly around the fact that the wall, in its present condition, is completely unsustainable and would we be much better off in the long run, to build a new wall and let the old one crumble into history?

As I was thinking about a title for this final episode in 2009, things are still not that different than the Great Depression. Leaving financial and employment considerations out of the argument, the title of Amity Shlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man” still seems to fit very well. The problem for the twenty-first century however is that the title is so politically incorrect. “The Forgotten Man and Woman” really doesn’t have a good ring to it. So we are pretty much stuck with “The Forgotten Humans.”

That title also fits well with the prime religion of today, evolving atheistic humanism. The Forgotten, by whatever handle, are no longer created in the image of God, but rather consumption machines of a global plan to bring a fictitious heaven to earth. Probably a better with it, term is Utopia, but many are beginning to call it socialism, or communism. Those many however are just troublemakers who don’t understand their place as evolving animals that the more highly evolved will use to fix all the unnatural things of the world. Of course the evolved elite really wants nothing to do with real nature and reality, because that wildness is really a scary place that doesn’t accept their elitist credentials and treats them as not superior to other animals and even lowly plants.

As this year comes to an end it is becoming apparent that some changes are in the offering, for things are beginning to get complex as we move forward in time. Today we hear in the United States, talk about our Founding Fathers and the U S Constitution. That was just an impossible dream just a year ago. Those Forgotten Humans are realizing that they are just not bred to be consuming stuffers, but they are real men and women, with families and hopes and aspirations beyond making a million dollars over a lifetime, by doing a boring job, so you could retire undefeated. Of course much of that awaking was driven by the reality that many of those prosperous investments have disappeared along with the job. If it didn’t happen to you, it is happening to those you once considered your friends.
Read More...

Tags: Humpty Dumpty, The Forgotten Man, U S Constitution, money, Glenn Beck, God, Barack Obama, Cloward Piven

On Tuesday evening President Barack Obama presented to the American people and the world at large his war plan for Afghanistan. Those thirty thousand extra troops will give ammunition to pundits everywhere to analyze whether that glass is half empty or half full. Little commentary will focus on the reality that in this analogy it is half a glass. The major question that speeches don’t cover is how you fill up the glass or empty the glass as time goes on. That is also dependent on whether there is a hole in the bucket, dear Jacob. Fixing the bucket will prove more costly and time consuming than the President and his supporters and adversaries are willing to admit. This is especially perplexing when the option of getting a new bucket is quite impossible.

Spun in more historic terms, is the Afghan War really an attempt at colonization focused upon a people who don’t believe in colonization and don’t particularly want to play the game? What is really at stake is a global conflict basically between Twenty-First century western culture struggling against medieval Islamic adherents. This is not a new war, but we think there are enlightened ways to provide a simple solution for Western Culture to triumph over the bad jihadists. Lots of luck fellows!

In reality if it was not for the victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 and in the Siege of Vienna in 1529 the whole world would be followers of Mohammed. This of course leaves out the Grace of God, as outlined in the Bible of Christians and Jews, as Almighty God. As the Almighty he rules over and controls human destiny. Since Western Culture truly no longer believes in God the words of that Biblical icon Solomon is in order, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Put is more twenty-first century jargon, Lots of luck fellows! A little history lesson of what followed the Battle of Vienna in 1683 might give some global historic perspective.

Of course twenty-first century Islam is not as overtly organized as medieval Islam. Covertly it seems just as successful especially in that old adversary Western Europe. The radical jihadists while well funded must exercise what command and control they have from the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. However little command and control is required for attacks such has the recent guerilla attack at Ft. Hood, Texas by Army Major Hasan.

In the last week the threat of further sanctions really had no effect upon Iran. So they are going to install fifty thousand more centrifuges to enrich their only domestic energy needs and alternatives. The Iranian options there have even more salient consequences, none of them easy, none of them cheap, none of them without broad ranging ramifications.
Read More...

Tags: Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Adam Smith, Islam, God, invisible hand

As I reflect on this last year I am thankful at a vast and rapidly increasing number of Americans have learned the reality of the failure of success. It is sad that this new knowledge has come, as broad cross sections of society don’t have a clue of what this means. So how about a few examples.

Healthcare reform as it is now spun is the most apparent case in point. We will do nothing to increase the real healthcare infrastructure. By that I mean no new hospitals, no more doctors and nurses and tangible things like that. Then we are going to insure at least ten percent more people, and save money in the process. Furthermore the federal government is going to provide a cost effective alternative to the greedy insurance companies that are the only crooks in the house.

While we are at it, we are going to save western culture from the onslaught of foreign and domestic Islamic terrorists. But the politically correct definition of this is no longer termed a war, but human induced catastrophes, or something like that. However this salvation can be done by fighting a decade of wars, halfway around the world, with soldiers who thought they were serving their country, but are now legally committed to see these excursions to the end. This while their fellow Americans think of sacrifice as only being able to turn in one perfectly good vehicle in “cash for clunkers.”

But is it too much to ask if you are going to make Afghanistan the hallmark of your war prowess, perhaps early January after your inauguration would be a good time to start a timely review of theater strategies. Then when you get a recommendation from your commander on the ground you can either tell him you support him, he should retire, or these are the tactics you have determined as the best course of action for the United States.

Starting these deliberations once you get a command recommendation and then dithering about a decision for months until early December is absolutely unprecedented in American history. Any statement to the effect of saying that other things were more important than providing safety for American combat forces is completely indefensible and totally dumbfounding. Sadly, I am at a loss for harsher words. Read More...

Tags: health care, Afghanistan, Wall Street, Barack Obama, Bill O Reilly, Glenn Beck, Five Essential Gs, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck

After I finished Part 9, of this series a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was pretty much through with the concept of Traditional Historic American Values, at least in the journalistic, or even the blogosphere sense. The next day with the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, changed all of that. First of all it must be said that this was a guerilla attack not a terrorist attack. The only place I have found that reported properly is in James Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web email. In that respect Major Hasan is to stand trial as a murderer and perhaps for treason. Furthermore I felt that the President’s response and later speech in Texas showed reluctance to address reality that even his best-prepared remarks could not hide.

I was still struggling with how to prepare this last article of the series for Veterans Day when Tuesday afternoon I received a call from my friend Jim, who accompanied me a little over a year ago, to pick up my motorhome in Texas. He stated that he felt so good after finishing Julia Duin’s book on “Quitting Church” that he just had to call and state it was nice to feel he was not alone.

A guerilla attack on American soil, American church leaders so out of touch that they think Christianity is primarily about making one feel good about a progressively psycho world, and we haven’t even gotten into some serious reality.

Hence between the two concepts and real life in general, I was pretty much at a loss on how to begin to finally conclude this ten part series on Traditional Historic American Values. In some perspective we have an American President who feels very comfortable in being everything to everyone, except the military’s Commander in Chief. This is contrasted with a long term Christian man, who for the now considers himself part of a community that has freed itself from the doctrinal sterility of American Evangelicalism. What are this world and this country coming to?

So the President took off for Asia, while his Attorney General took the heat for bringing the 9-11 true terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial. Don’t they understand that these thugs are not covered by the Geneva Convention? Why are they giving them special rights like, lobbyists, investment bankers, and other domestic terrorists?

In Asia he seems to have kissed away his second major goal, the cap and trade energy tax, in favor of his worst fandango, gross deficit spending, all the while continuing to dither on what to do with Afghanistan, a problem much too small to fit within the global concept of financially too big to fail. Perhaps it is that contrast between New York and Washington DC centered special rights – special interests, and Islamists, who believe that they, the too big to fail cronies, all are atheistic infidels, which forces the dithering reality about the consequences.

To use a constructive metaphor, the President seems to be continually trying to shoot himself in the foot, when the proper response would be just to take out his gun and take aim at the bad guys. The problem that he is finding out however, just as with Major Hasan, the President and his guerilla forces are a definite minority. Furthermore virtually all-successful guerilla wars first capture the countryside before moving to urban centers. In this guerilla war, Obama’s progressive base only hold portions of the right and left coasts and Chicago politics, and the great American fly-over is becoming increasingly agitated with what it sees as not just liberal, leftist, or socialist, but communist underpinnings of his social wealth redistribution plans.
Read More...

Tags: Ft Hood, Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Viet Nam, treason, Professional Military, traditional values

Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the LORD. Work, for I am with you, declares the LORD of hosts, according to the covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not. For thus says the LORD of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the LORD of hosts. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the LORD of hosts. Haggai 2:4b-9 ESV

Yesterday was Election Day in the United States, the first sort of national election since the Obama happening last year. The results pretty much signify that the shaking continues and again verifies that this still is a moderately conservative nation. I doubt the vested pundits and the commentators will spin it that way, which means that the shaking will continue for the foreseeable future.

In the open historical Congressional seat in upstate New York, the Democrat won, somewhat upsetting the New Era Conservative, nerdy, accountant type, endorsed by the small tent Republican aristocracy. If it were Texas you could prove the statement, “Don’t mess with Texas!” In the rest of the country a nap or maybe another cup of morning coffee, should be in order.

More significant however was the Republican victories in governor races in Virginia and New Jersey. Neither victory bid well for the Obama Administration focus on remaking America in the image of the early twentieth century Soviet Union. ObamaCare and a Cap and Trade energy tax in the short-term future seem much more remote today that they did a short day ago.

Of course no one knows for sure if that Bolshevik agenda is really the goal of President Obama, but that seems to be the present focus of Glenn Beck and his following. Perhaps a more moderate concept of redistribution of wealth would be a better pursuit to save the country from the greedy capitalists. However that also assumes that there is still some real wealth to redistribute to those who feel that they deserve it.

The greedy capitalists think they deserve the wealth also and it will eventually trickle down to the have nots, just as in the continuing vision of the Reagan Revolution that shifted the role of small business from the innovators and job creators of society to a service sector of consultants and debt leveraged consumers.

The wealth that now remains, really isn’t wealth at all, it is just a spin on “show me the money, and give me my money.” This is definitely a new, New Deal direction for the American Dream.
Read More...

Tags: Haggai 2:4b-9, Barack Obama, wealth, capitalism, God, Warren Buffett, gold

In nine short months we have learned the USA is not a theocracy, not the shining city on the hill. The church is not the sole author and administrator of moral law especially in common grace. So now for the first time, perhaps in all of human history, the whole world is Ichabod (God has departed).

However two thousand years ago, God saved His chosen remnant of all humanity from their sins, through Jesus Christ alone. So there still is some timeless good news. Furthermore, Americans, God’s common frozen prosperous chosen, have awakened from their debt-induced slumber in this brief timeframe and are beginning to actively participate in a world that passed them by. Definitely a temporal miracle!

Old Testament Israel was conquered through Natural Law by pagans for Israel’s judgment and destruction, because she neglected not only God’s specific revelation, but also Natural Law and common grace. If you invoke law to form an earthly paradise, then you must understand that God’s judgment applies not only to pagan sinners, but also the self-righteous sinners. The United States of America has become no longer a nation of humble grace, but individual, corporate, and community greed and power.

These thoughts provide just a little bit of perspective from history to show that whatever happens as time unfolds in our world, we pretty much have it coming. In the due course of time those societies that think they can prosper with human wisdom alone and without God - quickly learn their folly.

Perspective, along with dithering, are new buzzwords that in the last few weeks have become important for the short-term discussion of America’s future. Dithering was used by former Vice-President Cheney to describe the lack of decision for the Obama Administration concerning sending more troops to Afghanistan. Perspective is the term used by the Obama Administration to describe Fox News, rather than call it a legitimate news organization.
Read More...

Tags: perspective, dithering, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Fox News, Ronald Reagan, God

As we begin wrapping up this series on Traditional Historic American Values, we come to the zenith on why the United States has come to the banana republic crossroads. I suppose zenith is probably not really what we are trying to explain, but terms like nadir, canyon, rock-bottom, pits - really do not do justice to the current situation either.

America’s true crisis is really a crisis of leadership. In that respect, void, black hole, and vacuum seem much better descriptions. Republicans point to President Obama as the power taking us to the banana republic standard. The Democrats point to George W. Bush as the creator of the path. The problem is that all the name-calling is really just that and it is decisively counter productive to doing anything but letting the forces of gravity do its thing.

Gravity is a Natural Law and it is the major force behind the current situation. The failure of leadership is that they truly fail to understand the gravity of the situation. The prosperity of the United States has been understood as a universal law for so long that those who are the self described leaders think a little application of warm fuzzies to the problem will make everyone feel better and therefore everything will soon be better.

In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.

That concept seems to be especially true for the current stock market. The financial powers of the United States have created so much funny money and pumped it into too big to fail financial institutions that they really have no need to worry, they can be happy. As long as things continue to go up they get paid, and if things go down they get paid also. If they really screw up again they will get another bailout. In other words the funny money goes round and round and in the process, the process becomes the perpetual money making machine. How cool is that?

Since Wall Street is really a machine, all that is needed is a little routine maintenance, a little grease to the wheels, and it will run forever. Well at least until it runs out of gas. Running out of gas, thereby allows gravity and friction to again bring Natural Law into play.

“Don’t worry, be happy” has become a four word philosophy that means that we are all to live beyond our means. The cool thing is there is so much stuff available to make it all happen. It seems a little moronic to think that if excessive debt got us individually and corporately into this mess, that continuing to inoculate the economy with more and more debt will somehow save the system. That surely isn’t a Natural Law, because it defies all logic.

Of course if the stuff doesn’t sell then the economy will collapse and we will all starve to death, or be killed or saved by global warming, or die in the swine flu pandemic.
Read More...

Tags: Warm Fuzzies, Natural Law, traditional values, Barack Obama, Jesus, Christianity, WWJD, U S Constitution, Wall Street, Religious Right

“Trivial Pursuit” is a game where you try to come up with answers to questions that have little real importance. Most would say that looking at what is happening in our country and the world today that the answers are not trivial and really important. So why are we so frantically trying to create answers to questions that really are based upon an unreal world?

None of the answers being proposed to the current, but wishfully ending, global financial crisis consider any of the five reality topics we are discussing in this series. Those for a renewal of our thinking processes are: Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership. If discussed at all these topics are relegated to pretty much Trivia, with the capital T. Hence, it is assumed that we are so enlightened that we really only need to focus on style rather than substance.

Substance, what is that? As long as we have money, especially money in dollar denominations everything will be all right. It really doesn’t matter that sometime in 2011 the debt of the United States will exceed her Gross Domestic Product. A shrinking dollar means that our exports will be cheaper overseas and the Fed has inflation under control, because they say they have.

One of the true Natural Laws relates to liquidity. That liquidity can relate to water, but also relates to financial liquidity. That law states is if you pump much more water from a finite well than can be replaced from the aquifer, the well is going to go dry.

We could spend this whole article writing about opportunities existing and soon to be existing in the management and distribution of real water, but just like energy that is a real world and today the real world, especially in the United States, is treated like a television sitcom.

“Trouble, sacrifice, reality, the devil, God, I don’t believe in any of those myths, hence they don’t exist, because if they did, that might upset my simplistic narcissistic worldview.”
Read More...

Tags: Opportunity, Natural Law, Reformation, Barack Obama, wealth, inflation, United States