“Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, I guess I’ll go eat worms!”

When I was just a wee lad, when forced to sit on my mother’s knee, because of one of my passing pouting natures, I was given the opportunity to repeat with her the above little limerick.

Until I began this article I did not know there were a number of verses in various renditions from both the United States and the United Kingdom. Nowhere have I found a reliable source for the history of this song.

A week ago Friday when I headed to Spokane for a yearly family reunion, I had Monday’s article, “The Specialization Racket” somewhat outlined. With a couple of introductory paragraphs, utilizing president Barack Obama as the world’s and history’s best political specialist, I believed I could knock it out in no time. I also had a topic for Wednesday’s Weekly Column.

As the weekend progressed nothing seemed to come together and for reasons unrelated to Wonder Springs, on Monday I needed to go to the headquarters of the Spokane Indian tribe in Wellpinit. Having not been to Wellpinit in recent memory, I decided to drive in through the back road, which crosses the Spokane River at the Little Falls Dam and then heads upland to the Spokane Reservation headquarters.

The reservation occupies a southern portion of Steven’s County bordering the Spokane River on the south, Lake Roosevelt (Columbia River) on the west, and Chamokane Creek on the east, a bastardized rendition of the name for the Tshimakain Mission that was established in 1838 on the east side of the stream. To the north the boundary seems to be a literal line in the sand to provide a buffer zone between the reservation and the upper reaches of the fertile Colville Valley. The topography of the reservation is essentially alluvial sand and gravel deposits created between the Pleistocene ice sheet and glacial Lake Columbia. What that means in a practical basis, is that the reservation is basically open Ponderosa Pine forest with vary little arable land.

After finishing my business at the tribe’s headquarters, I headed out the main highway, leaving the reservation at Ford. By then I was thoroughly depressed. My thoughts were basically, if you want to see the future of the United States under a system of government handouts and transfer payments just visit your nearest Indian reservation — but be sure to get a few miles beyond the casino, if one exists. (The Spokane Casino is located near Chewelah, along US 395 on tribal allotment land in the Colville Valley.)

The forcing of North America’s indigenous peoples, onto essentially worthless land, began about 180 years ago under the direction of president Andrew Jackson (1829 - 1837). When the Spokane Reservation was established some forty years later, you could probably eke out a living by hunting and gathering, with ample stocks of salmon from the Spokane River. Today, with no salmon, because of Grand Coulee Dam, you would quickly starve to death, without the government subsidies.
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Tags: Spokane Indian Reservation, Sherman Alexie, Babylon, New York City, Natural Law, sin cosmos, Glenn Beck

There will be no column this week, for we are taking a brief hiatus to get a little perspective on the way forward. There seems to be bad news everywhere, especially with the economy. The popular prescribed ways forward all rely on some sort of miraculous improvement of past human failures.

The president made the Ground Zero mosque a national issue that has only intensified, bringing into question even Obama’s Christian confession. Historic Christianity is about the completed work of Jesus Christ and not about liberation theology, social justice, and especially about some heretical concept of collective salvation.

Wonder Springs exists as a virtual reality alternative to a real Death Valley. To the best of my knowledge, Glenn Beck is the only person, with a broad based secular following, who has proclaimed America’s problems to be faith based. But it also follows that way too many people think the solution to the country’s and world’s problems stem from human enlightenment and not with God. In that darkness the economic bottom is still a long steady decline away, made bearable only by the grace and mercy of the Almighty.

Because our angst is a God induced redux of the Divine Providence of the founding of the United States, solutions will come as we look to God created natural laws and common grace. The problem is that nobody is actually willing to look at those natural laws as they might relate to human institutions. Therefore what play these principles get in the media either relates to self centered individualism, or described by the Social Darwinist elites, as primitive, knuckle dragging, myths of the religious stupid folk.

These last few weeks have been as financially stressful as I can remember in over twenty years. The ability to increase the Wonder Springs influence demands some changes not only financially but they also relate to location. All of this demands resources that are not now apparent other than a miracle from God. So until our next installment we shall try to live expectantly in that hope.

Tags: Glenn Beck, Christianity, God, Social Darwinism, Wonder Springs

Things are currently happening in America, that aren’t supposed to happen. At least that is what we have been told for at least a generation. We have been given the story line, if we just do our job, make reasonable expenditures to keep the economy moving, and pay our taxes, tomorrow will be better than today. That reality was said to be true not only for us, but also our children and grandchildren.

That reality has changed, and in our gut, we believe that it will be a long time, if ever, before we will be able to accept again as truth, that desire for security. The question then forms in our minds, “Were we lied to, or were our leaders just stupid?”

For the most part, I think the truth is that most of our leaders were just as ignorant as we were. Probably because they were so immersed in the political culture, they were even more enthusiastic. Sadly they also believed that what they were doing was responsible for our successes and hence, just as we did, never really looked beyond the security of their comfort zones.

Now the tendency is to look to those from the immediate past, blame them for the present, and make some boastful predictions that the future will make us more secure. All we need to do is to have hope that this will become true. However hope and faith are not forces, but realistic beliefs in external factors that will bring about our desires. During this last generation, but always present in the human psyche, we have replaced God as that redemptive ability, with our human governance and our materialism.

Coping with these changes I am in the process of redefining a lot of things in my life, and trying to figure out how I can adapt and provide positive guidance to others. In our sound bite — talking points world, one needs to have a handle that fits. Some concise description that you can defend, both in the sound bite world, but also, if need be, as the depth of your being. The descriptive term I finally have settled on is a Redux Independent.
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Tags: Redux Indpendent, War Racket, Redux Rendezvous, Bill O Reilly, Glenn Beck, tea party, U S Constitution, Biblical Creaton, God, Barack Obama

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Mark 12:17, Matthew 22:21, Luke 20:25 ESV

Many years ago I was a team leader of a small group from our church that went out Monday evenings to call on visitors from our Sunday service. As we parked outside a small apartment in north Seattle, I couldn’t help making a stupid remark about the name of the person we were about to visit. Even with my ignorance, the visit turned out to be quite productive and the young woman became an active member of the congregation.

She moved away a year or so later and within a few years she returned for a visit. Through the course of events I learned at the very instant I was making a spontaneous remark that could be considered flippant, inside her apartment things were quite serious. Her remarks were much more prayerful, which went something like: “God I would like to believe you are real, but I am having a very difficult time. If you don’t show me some sign of your reality, I have no reason now to live and before morning I fear I will use this gun to commit suicide.” At that time, we a small group of, in the larger context, complete fools rang her doorbell.

When I learned the true events of that evening not only was I humbled, but I realized in our lost and dying world just how thoughtless is much of what Christianity and the church says and does. Put in the broader context of recent world events, the problems of the recent Great Recession, were not caused by the greedy money grubbers on Wall Street, financial institutions, and real estate, they knew no better, they were just sinners sinning.

The real problem that caused the current mess, was that Christians, as individuals and in community as the church, played religious games, and sought political power, while the world, as it should be, crumbled. The church of Jesus Christ has one calling, to proclaim the Good News of the redemption of the world found in Jesus Christ alone. Instead of proclaiming the gospel, and being the leaders of the common community, the church has attempted to become so earthly relevant that its of no earthly good. Instead of being a restraining force of evil, to use the words of Revelation 3, the post modern church has become tepid.

As I was watching Glenn Beck one day last week, he and Stephen Broden, a church pastor from Texas were talking about this very subject, when Glenn interjected a comment about church leaders needing to protect their nonprofit status. It was just a few, off the cuff words, and the conversation moved on. Those nonprofit status words however have stuck with me since that time and are the founding principle for this message today. Read More...

Tags: Christianity, Glenn Beck, separation of church and state, 501(c)3 exemption, Jesus, God, sin cosmos, Natural Law, Holmes on Homes

A few years ago while looking for a place to develop The Creation Leadership Center, my travels took me to the small hamlet of Loomis, Washington. Loomis sits in a long riff valley next to the eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains and west of the Okanogan River. Today the place consists of a general store, a few houses, a small church, and at the time of my visit a second hand store. In the back room of that store in the used book section I found a small saddle stitched booklet that caught my eye. The title of the pamphlet was: “A comparison of two primitive apples from two continents” authored by one Vladimir Sekerfreevich.

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...

Tags: Collectiva maximus, Independenceus arduous, Thoreau, Glenn Beck, Bill O Reilly, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, USA

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.
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Tags: Nancy Pelosi, Social Darwinism, Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan, U S Constitution, energetics, sin cosmos, Glenn Beck, Soviet Union

It was only a week ago when we woke up to understand that with a little encouragement from President Obama, European countries had come up with a trillion dollar plan to save the Euro and everything would soon be back to change we can believe in. One week later, we are wondering compared to the dollar how far the Euro will fall, or even if the currency will continue to exist.

Then there is all that dirty air over there, caused by that pesky volcano in Iceland. How in the world are we supposed to fly around from here to there, showing everybody how wonderful all the stuff we have created is doing, when we are thwarted by our efforts by some tiny airborne particles of abrasive rocks?

Here in the good old USA the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill continues, with no apparent understanding of how well the funny pipe thing fix installed yesterday is going to work. So in the absence of any news on that front, concern has shifted to what is happening to all the oil that is now floating around. Should we use dispersants that may cause more ecological problems than the oil itself? How far will the oil go, how fast? Can BP even continue to exist as a company in light of all the expenses and legal claims? One thing I did learn is that deep sea water is about 3 degrees Celsius, (35 Fahrenheit), and at those depths and pressures that is really a different place than what we naturally can understand, so perhaps we should cut those engineers a little slack.

Less we forget, there is no real news on what caused the near 1000 point fall in the Dow a week ago last Thursday. There was some discussion of a big trade(s) made by somebody about that time, but whoever they were, denied that they had anything to do with it. So the search goes on, but with markets being controlled by computers using models based upon past histories and triggered by various algorithms of risk, we should really have nothing to worry about. That is especially true if we are big and sophisticated enough to buy some credit default swaps, to insure our leverage, so that the white holes in the universe that spew out money will remain our back stop.

Let’s see what else caught our attention? Out of Washington, if Elena Kagan becomes the next Supreme Court Justice, this Washington state’s governor, Kristine Gregoire is favored to be the next Solicitor General. That would be a real blessing out here, for after her life as both a mediocre state Attorney General and Governor, the best we could ever hope to do is shuffle her off to that other Washington and get her out of the state, hopefully for good.

Then again maybe she could replace Eric Holder as the national Attorney General, she is wise enough to understand before you go spouting off about the Arizona Immigration Law, she would have read the 16 or 10 pages of the Arizona bill, before and after amendments. Read More...

Tags: Euro, Gulf oil spill, Elena Kagan, Kristine Gregoire, Eric Holder, Glenn Beck, money, Deep Woods Moola

Anymore every time I hear the word “change,” I cringe. Still I find it amazing that most of the time the user of the change slogan is trying to paint change in a positive light. Like they want me rush to their simplistic point of view and acknowledge the enlightenment they are peddling.

The problem is that the world is to such a point that the status quo is just as unacceptable. The old saying, “Stuck between a rock and a hard place.” seems to apply. Except for the reality that “between” only encompasses two real directions, it’s more like being ground to dust in the interface of a glacier and a mountain, except that also is terribly abstract and impersonal.

In all this, we long for the good old days, but back then we also had problems. When you come right down to it however, if we could use those nostalgic times and make them better, perhaps that will help us design the future in a positive way, for wandering into a chaotic future makes no sense either. Hence the concept of redux. Redux comes to us from the Latin and literally means lead from the past, or more commonly brought back or revived.

The whole world needs a lot of redux, for the alternative is anarchy or chaos. It is also true that those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat those mistakes. So how far back do we go, on which to begin the building process?

Last week in the Christian Diaspora we basically developed the context that construction or creation-wise, God works from the universal to the individual. From the solely human perspective we find the Babylonian model that builds from the individual to the collective. That clash of those two creative constructs has brought us to the place in which change is only something we reluctantly accept.
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Tags: Christian Diaspora, Christian Redux, United Kingdom, Religious Right, Glenn Beck, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Social Darwinism, Barack Obama

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?”
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Tags: Glenn Beck, tea party, Cap and Trade, Seattle, Puget Paradox Disease, Wizard of OZ, God, Christian Diaspora

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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...

Tags: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, tea party, Washington State, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Glenn Beck, PREFER Ltd

"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.
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Tags: Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck