Bottom-up leadership
10/September/2008 14:36 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 36
PDF copy
At last, the political conventions are over in the United States. Now we are in for a couple of months of what most of the media miraculously discovered in the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, a culture war of words. While they would never admit, even to their closest confidants, they liked what Sarah Palin had to say. The committed to Barack “objective journalists” found not only that there exists articulate and intelligent people who don’t at all agree with their view of America’s present and future, some began to realize that they don’t have the moral high ground, and that the vast majority of Americans agree with Sarah and not the elitist big government agenda.
Feeling quite confident in my position in this populist versus progressive agenda, I decided to begin creation of a new website Freed2Lead.com. This website will be based upon fundamental human rights and upon the uniqueness of each individual, under law, and God’s design. All of these values are now under serious attack by a subversive group of people, in the United States, all of western culture, and around the world. Last week we said that Bill O’Reilly calls these people secular progressives, I called them atheistic evolutionists, but it is really an elitist agenda more repressive to fundamental human rights than Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or any other fascist organizer.
The true long term terrorists are not fundamental religious zealots of either Christianity or Islam. The danger comes from those who seek to establish an “Elitist Enlightenment Estate” based on their messianic materialistic and humanistic worldview. In that worldview they and they alone believe that they are going to save the world from a whole menagerie of human induced ills, to numerous to name here. In this Wonder Springs forum, this is called by its true description, blasphemy, the oldest religion in the world.
I had planned to start this column at the top of my list of last week’s leadership issues and discuss them in how Biblical creation, spun through my esoteric views of science and religion might start a leadership dialog based on the uniqueness of both the spoken word of God, creation, and the specific word of God the Bible. However after reflecting upon the first item on that list, Arbitrary and Capricious Regulations, I decided I should start from the bottom up, because I am currently highly involved in a property dispute with Ferry County about the development of my Kettle River waterfront.
You can chalk it up to luck or Divine providence, but yesterday September 9th, the front-page story in Spokane’s Spokesman Review newspaper, dealt with a dispute between Spokane County and the Washington State Department of Ecology over the implementation of the county’s new Shoreline Management Plan.
Shorelines in Washington are covered under two different sets of truly evolving regulations, the first is the Shorelines Management Act, and secondly in time the Growth Management Act. The Growth Management Act “manages” shorelines as “Critical Areas.” The Shorelines Management Act is administered by the state’ Department of Ecology. The Growth Management Act sort of evolves out of the confusion of all the state’s bureaucratic agencies, but I suppose that is just my biased and jaded opinion.
The essence of these disputes is that the Shorelines Management Act, dating from the early ‘70s established “reasonable” building setbacks from shorelines of lakes and major streams of from 35 feet to 50 feet based upon essentially wise but subjective values.
The Growth Management Act however, must use as stated in the article “best science.” However the Act itself does not list a “science” definition or just how one should interpret this science, when it ventures beyond the pure descriptive findings into the underlying cultural, worldview, and other presuppositions. Those “scientific” values have now increased, or are seeking to increase, those reasonable shoreline setback values to 250 feet. In my opinion, this is just an arbitrary and capricious distance based upon the religion for the formation of the Elitist Enlightenment Estate upon us all.
The true science says that every square foot of God’s green, blue, and brown earth is truly unique. Millions of critters and other forms of life find sustenance from that land and water, which in western culture does also include a bundle of packaged property rights of humans. Therefore in certain areas, true science could in most instances substantiate a subjective 35-50 feet as an adequate shoreline setback for a building, but in certain unusual instances that distance might be 250 feet, or 2.5 miles depending upon a whole spectrum of factors. One size, or one distance, does not fit all circumstances; to state such is absurd bordering on the hysterical, if the proposed arbitrary and capricious regulations were not a true serious infringement on the rights of us all.
Whether government has the right to abscond private property is legally questionable at best. To acquire the bundled development rights to private property without thought of just compensation is bureaucratic fascism pure and simple and needs to be challenged. This is a legal and financial battle that requires resources well beyond my intellectual and material poverty, but in the concept of Freed2Lead, and the words of the old song, “Freedom is just another word, for nothing left to lose,” there is nothing left to lose.
With that thought in mind we will now begin at the bottom of last week’s article and the Blowhard List.
The Blowhard List gets us nowhere and needs to be ignored because they have no current human controllable energetic value.
Globalization - Free trade
The basis behind globalization is making money, lots of money, pure and simple. Little corporations became big corporations by making more money. Making money for the most part requires primarily access to financial capital and to a lesser extent, products, ideas, and management skills. If you have access to financial capital you can buy the rest. Financial capital has always been a highly urbanized resource.
The reason globalization and so-called free trade exist is that you can make, buy, or trade for the rest (of the stuff) cheaper in certain places on this earth than in others. That is life, which pushed or pulled the development of the European colonial empires. In turn that is what and why western cultural capitalism has made the world a much more pleasant place to spend our four score years of life.
I have no problem with that generalized concept. To make that form of capitalism the sole reason for human existence is not the fault of capitalism, but the fault of religion, which, to use and Old Testament term, exchanged its birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. Hence, from that lack of true Christian oversight or tension with human enterprise the more blatant material excesses of capitalism become more dominant.
My major problem, with globalization and free trade, stems from seeking short-term profits at the expense of wise long-term global realities. Using the lentil soup analogy, globalization has bought a short-term cheap bowl of soup, perhaps sacrificing the long-term ability to feed the world.
In a world of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy, globalization worked fine. However, now that this short-term cheap energy era has ended, we will quickly begin to realize that in the process of getting that cheap bowl of lentil soup, or flat screen TV, or other significant stuff, we have destroyed the infrastructure to produce, the lentils, the TV, and other stuff closer to home. Thereby we cannot save the now rapidly escalating transportation costs or protect that stuff from the potential forceful interruption by those not sharing the Elite Enlightenment Estate worldview. The major problem with globalism is energetics, not monetary, personal, or even environmental.
Now this argument quickly returns to the access to capital. Corporations create capital by the issuance of equity stock and debt bonds or some redefined semblance of those derivatives. Historically governments create money in essentially the same way. In the United States however, that equity form of monetary creation ceased with the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Whether that will eventually bring the demise of the United States, or some other deviant form of financial slight of hand will bring this about, is or will be open to discussion only.
This week’s governmental opportunity, which puts US Taxpayers in the mortgage business, is just another application of too much money chasing too little wealth. In a longer term, we may find that this bailout medicine may be much worse than curing the disease by letting nature take its course.
So summarizing this globalism argument, corporations and/or governments will seek to cure the energetic deficit in their global exploitation of cheap at any cost, by creating the capital to bring home the means of production when it seems apparent that profits are suffering. We have and create money out of nothing, funny money if you like, but that money has virtually no true wealth creating energy, it sloshes around in an ocean of energy deficient debt and in such an entropic state can create little if any true wealth.
The question, the leadership question, that is rarely asked and never acted upon, is will you the consumer have the wealth to buy these new homegrown stuffs, when neither government nor enterprise has any understanding of the reality of true wealth creation or sustainability, it is just show me the money, now?
Global Warming - Climate Change
For the last 10 years the global temperatures have not increased, pretty much all of that scientifically attributable to solar activity. This year and summer, in my neck of the woods, seems to indicate the cooling trend is continuing. However, never fear global warming, caused by human activity and ruminant animals are about to bring the end of human civilization as we know it. After all, we have Al Gore’s Nobel Prize to verify the wisdom and the pseudo science to not only define natural critical areas and manage them, but also the very essence of global weather and climate.
Isn’t saving the world through the creation of the Elite Enlightenment Estate a wonderful religion? If we all move to the cities, get rid of our cars, ride public transportation, maybe buy a bicycle, become vegetarians, only consume energy to view reality on wide screen, hi-def TV and Internet hubs, we will all become one big happy community of the highly evolved and truly enlightened, dwelling in nirvana.
Since I am one of “those” Christians, especially one of those people who believe we just didn’t evolve out of the swamp billions of years ago, I am surely just not enlightened enough to understand the difference between the Slough of Despair and Heaven on earth. Furthermore I am so unenlightened I believe that God’s creation verifies the Bible through descriptive science and that if you remove all religious presuppositions from science, especially evolutionary religious presuppositions, you will be able to verify that the world is truly very old and ancient, like thousands of years.
It is nice to know, even outside my religious ignorance, the USEPA has published a bible that will save us from this curse of human and ruminate caused greenhouse gas emissions. And again I thank my lucky stars this enlighten bureaucratic treatise will begin to be implemented just after the US Presidential election without any vote of any of my or anyone else’s elected representatives, but by just a 5-4 vote of the supreme rulers of the United States, the Supreme Court, we will save ourselves and the planet for generations to come.
I just have one slight problem with this saving the world mentality. Outside the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand the rest of the world isn’t interested in saving the world, they are interested in getting more material stuff for them also. India was at least straight forward enough to announce that they thought all this global warming spin was not based in science and was not going to play the game. While I am not authorized to speak for the Chinese, I assume that they decided that they have enough people and can buy enough resources, to not even dignify the proposal with a terse response. Come to think of it I don’t recall if Russia said anything. It is just like that old spy Putin to not tell you what he is planning to do either.
So there we have it. According to the Elite Enlightenment Estate developers and bureaucrats the world is going to hell in a hand basket and they will save us from our traditional religious bigotry and gun carrying worldview. It is obvious that we look at their vision of utopia and see the unenlightened Slough of Despair, but what good is a religion at all, if everyone agrees.
However the world would surely not stop turning on it’s axis if some traditionalist legal firm could or would find the leadership gumption to see if they could get atheistic materialism defined through the courts as a religion of man, just like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and the rest of the religions which are part of mankind’s distinct human personality, simply because we were created by, and in the image of God. Then separation of church and state would again take on the principles that America’s founding fathers had in mind.
PDF copy
At last, the political conventions are over in the United States. Now we are in for a couple of months of what most of the media miraculously discovered in the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, a culture war of words. While they would never admit, even to their closest confidants, they liked what Sarah Palin had to say. The committed to Barack “objective journalists” found not only that there exists articulate and intelligent people who don’t at all agree with their view of America’s present and future, some began to realize that they don’t have the moral high ground, and that the vast majority of Americans agree with Sarah and not the elitist big government agenda.
Feeling quite confident in my position in this populist versus progressive agenda, I decided to begin creation of a new website Freed2Lead.com. This website will be based upon fundamental human rights and upon the uniqueness of each individual, under law, and God’s design. All of these values are now under serious attack by a subversive group of people, in the United States, all of western culture, and around the world. Last week we said that Bill O’Reilly calls these people secular progressives, I called them atheistic evolutionists, but it is really an elitist agenda more repressive to fundamental human rights than Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or any other fascist organizer.
The true long term terrorists are not fundamental religious zealots of either Christianity or Islam. The danger comes from those who seek to establish an “Elitist Enlightenment Estate” based on their messianic materialistic and humanistic worldview. In that worldview they and they alone believe that they are going to save the world from a whole menagerie of human induced ills, to numerous to name here. In this Wonder Springs forum, this is called by its true description, blasphemy, the oldest religion in the world.
I had planned to start this column at the top of my list of last week’s leadership issues and discuss them in how Biblical creation, spun through my esoteric views of science and religion might start a leadership dialog based on the uniqueness of both the spoken word of God, creation, and the specific word of God the Bible. However after reflecting upon the first item on that list, Arbitrary and Capricious Regulations, I decided I should start from the bottom up, because I am currently highly involved in a property dispute with Ferry County about the development of my Kettle River waterfront.
You can chalk it up to luck or Divine providence, but yesterday September 9th, the front-page story in Spokane’s Spokesman Review newspaper, dealt with a dispute between Spokane County and the Washington State Department of Ecology over the implementation of the county’s new Shoreline Management Plan.
Shorelines in Washington are covered under two different sets of truly evolving regulations, the first is the Shorelines Management Act, and secondly in time the Growth Management Act. The Growth Management Act “manages” shorelines as “Critical Areas.” The Shorelines Management Act is administered by the state’ Department of Ecology. The Growth Management Act sort of evolves out of the confusion of all the state’s bureaucratic agencies, but I suppose that is just my biased and jaded opinion.
The essence of these disputes is that the Shorelines Management Act, dating from the early ‘70s established “reasonable” building setbacks from shorelines of lakes and major streams of from 35 feet to 50 feet based upon essentially wise but subjective values.
The Growth Management Act however, must use as stated in the article “best science.” However the Act itself does not list a “science” definition or just how one should interpret this science, when it ventures beyond the pure descriptive findings into the underlying cultural, worldview, and other presuppositions. Those “scientific” values have now increased, or are seeking to increase, those reasonable shoreline setback values to 250 feet. In my opinion, this is just an arbitrary and capricious distance based upon the religion for the formation of the Elitist Enlightenment Estate upon us all.
The true science says that every square foot of God’s green, blue, and brown earth is truly unique. Millions of critters and other forms of life find sustenance from that land and water, which in western culture does also include a bundle of packaged property rights of humans. Therefore in certain areas, true science could in most instances substantiate a subjective 35-50 feet as an adequate shoreline setback for a building, but in certain unusual instances that distance might be 250 feet, or 2.5 miles depending upon a whole spectrum of factors. One size, or one distance, does not fit all circumstances; to state such is absurd bordering on the hysterical, if the proposed arbitrary and capricious regulations were not a true serious infringement on the rights of us all.
Whether government has the right to abscond private property is legally questionable at best. To acquire the bundled development rights to private property without thought of just compensation is bureaucratic fascism pure and simple and needs to be challenged. This is a legal and financial battle that requires resources well beyond my intellectual and material poverty, but in the concept of Freed2Lead, and the words of the old song, “Freedom is just another word, for nothing left to lose,” there is nothing left to lose.
With that thought in mind we will now begin at the bottom of last week’s article and the Blowhard List.
The Blowhard List gets us nowhere and needs to be ignored because they have no current human controllable energetic value.
Globalization - Free trade
The basis behind globalization is making money, lots of money, pure and simple. Little corporations became big corporations by making more money. Making money for the most part requires primarily access to financial capital and to a lesser extent, products, ideas, and management skills. If you have access to financial capital you can buy the rest. Financial capital has always been a highly urbanized resource.
The reason globalization and so-called free trade exist is that you can make, buy, or trade for the rest (of the stuff) cheaper in certain places on this earth than in others. That is life, which pushed or pulled the development of the European colonial empires. In turn that is what and why western cultural capitalism has made the world a much more pleasant place to spend our four score years of life.
I have no problem with that generalized concept. To make that form of capitalism the sole reason for human existence is not the fault of capitalism, but the fault of religion, which, to use and Old Testament term, exchanged its birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. Hence, from that lack of true Christian oversight or tension with human enterprise the more blatant material excesses of capitalism become more dominant.
My major problem, with globalization and free trade, stems from seeking short-term profits at the expense of wise long-term global realities. Using the lentil soup analogy, globalization has bought a short-term cheap bowl of soup, perhaps sacrificing the long-term ability to feed the world.
In a world of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy, globalization worked fine. However, now that this short-term cheap energy era has ended, we will quickly begin to realize that in the process of getting that cheap bowl of lentil soup, or flat screen TV, or other significant stuff, we have destroyed the infrastructure to produce, the lentils, the TV, and other stuff closer to home. Thereby we cannot save the now rapidly escalating transportation costs or protect that stuff from the potential forceful interruption by those not sharing the Elite Enlightenment Estate worldview. The major problem with globalism is energetics, not monetary, personal, or even environmental.
Now this argument quickly returns to the access to capital. Corporations create capital by the issuance of equity stock and debt bonds or some redefined semblance of those derivatives. Historically governments create money in essentially the same way. In the United States however, that equity form of monetary creation ceased with the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Whether that will eventually bring the demise of the United States, or some other deviant form of financial slight of hand will bring this about, is or will be open to discussion only.
This week’s governmental opportunity, which puts US Taxpayers in the mortgage business, is just another application of too much money chasing too little wealth. In a longer term, we may find that this bailout medicine may be much worse than curing the disease by letting nature take its course.
So summarizing this globalism argument, corporations and/or governments will seek to cure the energetic deficit in their global exploitation of cheap at any cost, by creating the capital to bring home the means of production when it seems apparent that profits are suffering. We have and create money out of nothing, funny money if you like, but that money has virtually no true wealth creating energy, it sloshes around in an ocean of energy deficient debt and in such an entropic state can create little if any true wealth.
The question, the leadership question, that is rarely asked and never acted upon, is will you the consumer have the wealth to buy these new homegrown stuffs, when neither government nor enterprise has any understanding of the reality of true wealth creation or sustainability, it is just show me the money, now?
Global Warming - Climate Change
For the last 10 years the global temperatures have not increased, pretty much all of that scientifically attributable to solar activity. This year and summer, in my neck of the woods, seems to indicate the cooling trend is continuing. However, never fear global warming, caused by human activity and ruminant animals are about to bring the end of human civilization as we know it. After all, we have Al Gore’s Nobel Prize to verify the wisdom and the pseudo science to not only define natural critical areas and manage them, but also the very essence of global weather and climate.
Isn’t saving the world through the creation of the Elite Enlightenment Estate a wonderful religion? If we all move to the cities, get rid of our cars, ride public transportation, maybe buy a bicycle, become vegetarians, only consume energy to view reality on wide screen, hi-def TV and Internet hubs, we will all become one big happy community of the highly evolved and truly enlightened, dwelling in nirvana.
Since I am one of “those” Christians, especially one of those people who believe we just didn’t evolve out of the swamp billions of years ago, I am surely just not enlightened enough to understand the difference between the Slough of Despair and Heaven on earth. Furthermore I am so unenlightened I believe that God’s creation verifies the Bible through descriptive science and that if you remove all religious presuppositions from science, especially evolutionary religious presuppositions, you will be able to verify that the world is truly very old and ancient, like thousands of years.
It is nice to know, even outside my religious ignorance, the USEPA has published a bible that will save us from this curse of human and ruminate caused greenhouse gas emissions. And again I thank my lucky stars this enlighten bureaucratic treatise will begin to be implemented just after the US Presidential election without any vote of any of my or anyone else’s elected representatives, but by just a 5-4 vote of the supreme rulers of the United States, the Supreme Court, we will save ourselves and the planet for generations to come.
I just have one slight problem with this saving the world mentality. Outside the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand the rest of the world isn’t interested in saving the world, they are interested in getting more material stuff for them also. India was at least straight forward enough to announce that they thought all this global warming spin was not based in science and was not going to play the game. While I am not authorized to speak for the Chinese, I assume that they decided that they have enough people and can buy enough resources, to not even dignify the proposal with a terse response. Come to think of it I don’t recall if Russia said anything. It is just like that old spy Putin to not tell you what he is planning to do either.
So there we have it. According to the Elite Enlightenment Estate developers and bureaucrats the world is going to hell in a hand basket and they will save us from our traditional religious bigotry and gun carrying worldview. It is obvious that we look at their vision of utopia and see the unenlightened Slough of Despair, but what good is a religion at all, if everyone agrees.
However the world would surely not stop turning on it’s axis if some traditionalist legal firm could or would find the leadership gumption to see if they could get atheistic materialism defined through the courts as a religion of man, just like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and the rest of the religions which are part of mankind’s distinct human personality, simply because we were created by, and in the image of God. Then separation of church and state would again take on the principles that America’s founding fathers had in mind.