Redux Rendezvous IV
From the description of the author on the back cover I found out that Dr. Sekerfreevich was a professional botanist and geneticist from the Soviet Union, who had defected in 1929 and purchased a small orchard on the shores of Palmer Lake a few miles north of Loomis. At the time Palmer Lake was one of the area’s prime orchard areas, but today being off the beaten track from the Okanogan Valley its contribution is diminished.
According to the owner of the thrift store, Sekerfreevich was essentially a hermit, who lost is family somehow related to a Stalin purge, but still was well liked in the community and help generously the other orchardists improve their orchards. So I gave the thrift store owner a dollar and purchased the booklet, probably the only one still in existence, took it home and promptly put it away, only to discover it recently while looking for something else.
In his little book Sekerfreevich said that when coming to America he was able to bring a small tin of apple seeds from the research center where he worked in central Russia. When he purchased his orchard he planted the seeds and grew them to the point where they began to produce fruit. Because of the difference in climate some of the seeds didn’t produce any fruit, but one particular tree looked very promising, so he grafted it to other rootstocks and rooted some of the canes. As a play on words he called the apples by the common name Russian Red.
Searching an expanded area around his home, on an abandoned homestead up in the Similkameen Valley near the Canadian border, he found a very unusual apple seedling quite different than any he knew back in Russia, or those that grew from his imported seeds, or any that grew in the commercial orchards in the Okanogan Valley. Like what he did with his Russian seeds, Dr. Sekerfreevich, grafted and rooted canes from this variety, defining the variety as Liberty Bell. Read More...
Redux Rendezvous I
As a founding right, given to us by God, wealth creation belongs to the individual in the literal sense. We proposed that not only was wealth creation an inalienable right it is also a fundamental right of all Americans. Upon further reflection, it is not really a stretch at all to state that the wealth creation right, is essentially the Absolute inalienable fundamental right of all Americans, for the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all flow through this highest of all birthrights.
We further proposed that new wealth is basically an ex nihilo creation in the mind of an individual that combines the energetics of faith with the information of the enterprise to form a wealth seed. Through the introduction of equity liquidity, meaning a total commitment, not just debt involvement, this seed can sprout and become a viable product, service, profession, or vocation.
Taxes and debt can serve as means to grow the germinated seed, either directly or indirectly, but contrary to what has been promoted through a half century of a diseased American Federalism, debt and taxes can only redistribute present and future wealth through money, they cannot create fundamental new wealth.
This wealth creation reality is part of the general revelation of God in nature; hence its status as the Absolute inalienable right, but it is also part of the specific revelation the Bible. Monday we used the Apostle Paul’s constructs of Faith, Hope, and Charity, found in 1 Corinthians 13. In the legal definition of a corporation, since it is a creation of man’s laws, it does not live outside of the legal code; therefore it has no real life, no soul, or true creative ability, except what is given it, through legal precedent. Only a real person in the natural sense, can plant the wealth seed in faith, hoping for a growing wealth producing plant, relying only on charity of others should the opportunity fail.
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Why Me? Trekking to Gomorrah
In closing this series, all of our readers, whether in the United States, or elsewhere in the world, recognize that the changes we are experiencing are what we describe as stupendous. In that light the concept of “change we can believe in” seems grossly simplistic if not truly oxymoronic. As a result we all sense an excitement, but at the same time an anticipation of apprehension that mankind has truly never past this way before, especially when that concept is enlarged, as we are asked to “think globally.”
The title to this chapter is an adaptation of the title of a book by Robert Bork entitled, “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and the American Decline” first published in 1996. Bork was one of Ronald Reagan’s appointments to the Supreme Court, who never made it through the Senates conformation process, because he was vilified by his opponents as being an extremist. From that process came the invention of the term “borked,” which seems amazingly close to what is happening currently to the American people, by what is now being called “crony capitalists — media — politicians.”
Slouching is one of the most enlightening books I have ever read, and the title shows historically how we have pretty much through just passive neglect dumbed down the world in which we live, to the point that we will someday face destruction similar to the Biblical Gomorrah.
The divergence in the world today and the world over a decade ago, is that a slow slothful meander towards oblivion has been replaced with defined action, as if we just can no longer wait to get to Gomorrah, we have the city in our sights and together with all our baggage we are hell-bent to get there as soon as possible. In many ways Gomorrah has become our biblical replacement of the shining city on a hill, representing a New Jerusalem of many of America’s Christian founders.
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Happy Days Again? Not Here, Not Yet!
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...
Week in Review: February 14-20, 2010
“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?
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