Special Report
Our Sin-Cosmos Demise
29/August/2010 13:44
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“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.
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“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.
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Special Report: The War Racket
16/August/2010 08:20
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“Al Qaeda has won the War on Terror!”
“But we haven’t had a successful large terrorist attack on America since 9-11.”
As they say in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, “Ya sure, you betcha! At what cost, monetarily, in regard to the lives of our troops, and the limitations of our personal freedoms?”
Putting this in a realistic perspective, it is reported that there are 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and maybe a few hundred more in Pakistan. Then there are bunches in Yemen and Somalia and scattered in other countries around the world. There are probably equal numbers in western democracies and in Islamic and developing countries. If we were to qualify only those who have both the desire and the where with all to directly attack the United States or European countries, adding in similar groups, the worldwide total of Islamic jihadis is probably less than 10,000.
So what does it cost to keep us safe from these hordes of wild extremists?
According to Wikipedia based on numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (SIPRI) the United States leads the world in military expenditures at $660 billion, followed by China at about $100 billion, France at $64 billion, the United Kingdom at $58 billion, and Russia at about $53 billion. You have to go to the SIPRI website to find out what their definition of what is a military expenditure.
One could assume from their definition that the $660 billion figure includes the wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but not Homeland Security and various transfer payments within and without the United States, not directly tied to the military expenditure definition. Since Wonder Springs has no way of quantifying that number we will take an educated guess of perhaps $440 billion, bringing the yearly total to a trillion bucks. That makes our War on Terror assessment equal to $10 million per really bad guy — per year.
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>>Print copy
“Al Qaeda has won the War on Terror!”
“But we haven’t had a successful large terrorist attack on America since 9-11.”
As they say in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, “Ya sure, you betcha! At what cost, monetarily, in regard to the lives of our troops, and the limitations of our personal freedoms?”
Putting this in a realistic perspective, it is reported that there are 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and maybe a few hundred more in Pakistan. Then there are bunches in Yemen and Somalia and scattered in other countries around the world. There are probably equal numbers in western democracies and in Islamic and developing countries. If we were to qualify only those who have both the desire and the where with all to directly attack the United States or European countries, adding in similar groups, the worldwide total of Islamic jihadis is probably less than 10,000.
So what does it cost to keep us safe from these hordes of wild extremists?
According to Wikipedia based on numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (SIPRI) the United States leads the world in military expenditures at $660 billion, followed by China at about $100 billion, France at $64 billion, the United Kingdom at $58 billion, and Russia at about $53 billion. You have to go to the SIPRI website to find out what their definition of what is a military expenditure.
One could assume from their definition that the $660 billion figure includes the wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but not Homeland Security and various transfer payments within and without the United States, not directly tied to the military expenditure definition. Since Wonder Springs has no way of quantifying that number we will take an educated guess of perhaps $440 billion, bringing the yearly total to a trillion bucks. That makes our War on Terror assessment equal to $10 million per really bad guy — per year.
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Special Report: Super-Bug Stupidity
09/August/2010 10:34
We have all heard of the Super-Bugs, or drug resistant germs, living in hospitals and other medical facilities that have mutated or evolved to such a point that our antibiotics are unable to control their populations. The fizzled pandemic of swine, or H1N1 flu was thought to be potentially a Super-Bug virus that could devastate human populations around the world.
There is so much to worry about in today’s world we really don’t have time to worry about these Super-Bugs germs unless we are in a medical facility where their threat is imminent. But if we broaden our perspective just a little we can use these Super-Bugs as a model, or an illustration, of what the social diseases that are infecting our world, creating the unfolding chaos we see virtually everywhere today.
Think for a moment about the American Congress as a Super-Bug. How about George W. Bush’s worldview as a Super-Bug, or Barack Obama’s Chicago political operations? If you ask their supporters without adding the complete context of what is really happening, they would probably say, “Cool we need more of that!”
Of course if everyone thinks what they believe, is far more Super-Bug than anyone else’s Super-Bug, you end up with chaos and the whole system collapses. This is the Cloward and Piven strategy that no one in the general population had heard of until Glenn Beck so kindly brought it to our attention. The real problem is however, you don’t need to be a Super-Bug to collapse the system, all you really need to do is to withhold the medicine and the epidemic will take care of itself. That is provided you have created the proper simple or monoculture environment.
The major strategic problem is not collapsing the system, but rebuilding a new economic, or human ecosystem on the ashes of the old. Super-Bugs don’t have the genetic code to pull it off. They can’t make it work in a natural world full of virtually unlimited human diversity. Of course we are not talking about true genetics, but really just environmental conditions, such as in a clean environment such as a hospital, a university, or a political body that allows this Super Bug intellectual cancer to exist in the first place.
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There is so much to worry about in today’s world we really don’t have time to worry about these Super-Bugs germs unless we are in a medical facility where their threat is imminent. But if we broaden our perspective just a little we can use these Super-Bugs as a model, or an illustration, of what the social diseases that are infecting our world, creating the unfolding chaos we see virtually everywhere today.
Think for a moment about the American Congress as a Super-Bug. How about George W. Bush’s worldview as a Super-Bug, or Barack Obama’s Chicago political operations? If you ask their supporters without adding the complete context of what is really happening, they would probably say, “Cool we need more of that!”
Of course if everyone thinks what they believe, is far more Super-Bug than anyone else’s Super-Bug, you end up with chaos and the whole system collapses. This is the Cloward and Piven strategy that no one in the general population had heard of until Glenn Beck so kindly brought it to our attention. The real problem is however, you don’t need to be a Super-Bug to collapse the system, all you really need to do is to withhold the medicine and the epidemic will take care of itself. That is provided you have created the proper simple or monoculture environment.
The major strategic problem is not collapsing the system, but rebuilding a new economic, or human ecosystem on the ashes of the old. Super-Bugs don’t have the genetic code to pull it off. They can’t make it work in a natural world full of virtually unlimited human diversity. Of course we are not talking about true genetics, but really just environmental conditions, such as in a clean environment such as a hospital, a university, or a political body that allows this Super Bug intellectual cancer to exist in the first place.
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Special Report: Times That Try Men’s Souls
24/July/2010 09:15
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us - that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right not only to tax but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine – 1776
Who would have thought two short years ago that the American people would be discussing revolutions in a somewhat serious context. The two revolutions most discussed are the American Revolution of which Founding Father, Thomas Paine gave us the above quotation from his pamphlets “The Crisis Papers.” The other revolution in this country relates to the Vietnam War, the last period of critical social distress. The important reference from that era that related directly to today is, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows.”
Adding to the national angst is the reality of actual wars. The Iraq War is in the process of hopefully winding down to a successful nation building operation. The War in Afghanistan is quite different. Iraq was a real nation in the twentieth century definition, at least since the end of WWII. The same cannot be said for Afghanistan, which is more akin to a historic tribal region, not successfully colonized by any western culture in its history.
Under the auspices of the War on Terror and after a traditional military invasion of Iraq the United States, became involved in a counterinsurgency to root out Al Qaeda, other foreign insurgents, and quench the historic conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
In Iraq and Iran the Shia are the majority of the population. In Afghanistan the numbers are reversed and the Taliban are essentially the Sunni insurgents to which the United States and a number of NATO allies, through the escalation of the Obama Administration, are now attempting to develop a successful counterinsurgency nation-building exercise.
Read More...
Who would have thought two short years ago that the American people would be discussing revolutions in a somewhat serious context. The two revolutions most discussed are the American Revolution of which Founding Father, Thomas Paine gave us the above quotation from his pamphlets “The Crisis Papers.” The other revolution in this country relates to the Vietnam War, the last period of critical social distress. The important reference from that era that related directly to today is, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows.”
Adding to the national angst is the reality of actual wars. The Iraq War is in the process of hopefully winding down to a successful nation building operation. The War in Afghanistan is quite different. Iraq was a real nation in the twentieth century definition, at least since the end of WWII. The same cannot be said for Afghanistan, which is more akin to a historic tribal region, not successfully colonized by any western culture in its history.
Under the auspices of the War on Terror and after a traditional military invasion of Iraq the United States, became involved in a counterinsurgency to root out Al Qaeda, other foreign insurgents, and quench the historic conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
In Iraq and Iran the Shia are the majority of the population. In Afghanistan the numbers are reversed and the Taliban are essentially the Sunni insurgents to which the United States and a number of NATO allies, through the escalation of the Obama Administration, are now attempting to develop a successful counterinsurgency nation-building exercise.
Read More...
Change without direction
12/July/2010 08:40
One score months ago the voters of America brought forth a new presidential administration on this continent. The stated goal of the election was to issue in a new age of change we can believe in. That presupposes either one of two alternatives. At that time number one was, we were having change we didn’t want to believe in, or two we didn’t want any change from our vision of what we were told was a future of human engineered eternal prosperity.
It seems in the intervening period that all change has accelerated rapidly and those changes are beyond anything we can believe in and furthermore most of the stupendous changes are only exacerbating previous problems.
For as long as I can remember American presidents have turned out worse than my predilections. My worries about George W. Bush was that he would be beholden to what we have recently publicly defined as crony capitalists to the default of other values of not only governance but also personal responsibility. So I voted for the guy twice, my public reason was we share the same initials, but the secret reason was I thought that both Al Gore and John Kerry were truly without hope for being effective leaders. But most liberal juice drinkers don’t like any reality with their cocktail, so voicing the truth really wasn’t worth the return of stressful noise.
So my more than worst fears of George W. Bush turned out to be true. Those fears manifested themselves in the financial meltdown which began in late 2007 and continues to this day. Essentially what we saw under the Bush administration was the continuance of debt financed consumption based upon real estate. Those inflated values are still highly leveraged over the current wealth of most of the folks, but that is another topic for another time.
So those twenty months ago, Barack Obama was elected president. I didn’t vote for the man, not because I am a racist, but I thought he lacked experience to handle the tough job of being president. I wasn’t all that keen on John McCain either, especially during the campaign where it seemed that his goal was to be the Republican nominee rather than getting elected. Perhaps during the campaign McCain was able to get a glimpse of future trouble and decided either he was not up to the task, or was aware that current American problems are beyond the pale of human leadership. That surely was not something that Barack Obama would ever discern.
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It seems in the intervening period that all change has accelerated rapidly and those changes are beyond anything we can believe in and furthermore most of the stupendous changes are only exacerbating previous problems.
For as long as I can remember American presidents have turned out worse than my predilections. My worries about George W. Bush was that he would be beholden to what we have recently publicly defined as crony capitalists to the default of other values of not only governance but also personal responsibility. So I voted for the guy twice, my public reason was we share the same initials, but the secret reason was I thought that both Al Gore and John Kerry were truly without hope for being effective leaders. But most liberal juice drinkers don’t like any reality with their cocktail, so voicing the truth really wasn’t worth the return of stressful noise.
So my more than worst fears of George W. Bush turned out to be true. Those fears manifested themselves in the financial meltdown which began in late 2007 and continues to this day. Essentially what we saw under the Bush administration was the continuance of debt financed consumption based upon real estate. Those inflated values are still highly leveraged over the current wealth of most of the folks, but that is another topic for another time.
So those twenty months ago, Barack Obama was elected president. I didn’t vote for the man, not because I am a racist, but I thought he lacked experience to handle the tough job of being president. I wasn’t all that keen on John McCain either, especially during the campaign where it seemed that his goal was to be the Republican nominee rather than getting elected. Perhaps during the campaign McCain was able to get a glimpse of future trouble and decided either he was not up to the task, or was aware that current American problems are beyond the pale of human leadership. That surely was not something that Barack Obama would ever discern.
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In My Tent Leadership?
28/June/2010 09:00
This last week, where unflattering remarks by the staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal found their way into Rolling Stone magazine, and led to his subsequent resignation from being the commander of forces in Afghanistan, I have reflected upon my military service in Europe during Vietnam. Even though I was a reluctant volunteer, compared with the reluctant draftee, I have always looked at that time as a tremendous growing experience, that in many ways I see as a Divinely controlled adventure, giving me priceless insight into strategic world events that could have not been gained in such a brief encounter anywhere other than that time and place.
I read the Rolling Stone article, which is quite long and detailed for what passes for twenty-first century journalism. It sounded to me to be a relatively good assessment of a highly motivated general officer with a very tight staff. All good things, when you have a mission to bring a war action in Afghanistan to a reasonable conclusion as rapidly as possible.
My dad was not a military person, he was 4-F when asked to serve in WWII, he had a strong heart murmur, but he was a very successful school administrator. I can say he only had one absolute rule when it came to people management. That rule was, “Always support your staff, no matter whether they are right or wrong. Always support your staff and let the chips fall where they may.” It seems that Gen. Stanley McChrystal lives by the same absolute.
When I was in ROTC in college, we had the opportunity to be taught the science behind the art of military leadership. Many of the questions we were tested upon, outlined a role, mission, or objective to be obtained, and a number of different means to obtain the required results. Maybe to keep things light, somewhere in the options was the always wrong response generally following the line “give and order and say, if you need me I will be in my tent.” In the Rolling Stone article you find out quite rapidly that Gen. McChrystal was and is not a, “I will be in my tent kind of leader.”
When it was time to select what specialty I wanted to serve in on active duty, I needed to choose what branch of the Army would be my first choice out of three, I chose Military Intelligence or MI, because none of the cadre officers knew anything about it, other than to say no one would get in. Later I was called in to the ROTC office and told that I needed to make a choice within the MI branch, whether I wanted to serve in the MI side or the ASA side, I asked, “What is the ASA?” I was told that it stood for the Army Security Agency and no one knew what they did, only that it was harder to get into than just Military Intelligence.
The Army Security Agency, the military version of the NSA, as it existed that that time was the hi-tech arm of the Military Intelligence Branch. The ASA required a security clearance at the highest level of Top Secret. Even during Vietnam to get in, our enlisted personnel required a high school diploma and a four year enlistment. Most had a couple of years of college, and our First Sergeant had a Masters Degree.
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I read the Rolling Stone article, which is quite long and detailed for what passes for twenty-first century journalism. It sounded to me to be a relatively good assessment of a highly motivated general officer with a very tight staff. All good things, when you have a mission to bring a war action in Afghanistan to a reasonable conclusion as rapidly as possible.
My dad was not a military person, he was 4-F when asked to serve in WWII, he had a strong heart murmur, but he was a very successful school administrator. I can say he only had one absolute rule when it came to people management. That rule was, “Always support your staff, no matter whether they are right or wrong. Always support your staff and let the chips fall where they may.” It seems that Gen. Stanley McChrystal lives by the same absolute.
When I was in ROTC in college, we had the opportunity to be taught the science behind the art of military leadership. Many of the questions we were tested upon, outlined a role, mission, or objective to be obtained, and a number of different means to obtain the required results. Maybe to keep things light, somewhere in the options was the always wrong response generally following the line “give and order and say, if you need me I will be in my tent.” In the Rolling Stone article you find out quite rapidly that Gen. McChrystal was and is not a, “I will be in my tent kind of leader.”
When it was time to select what specialty I wanted to serve in on active duty, I needed to choose what branch of the Army would be my first choice out of three, I chose Military Intelligence or MI, because none of the cadre officers knew anything about it, other than to say no one would get in. Later I was called in to the ROTC office and told that I needed to make a choice within the MI branch, whether I wanted to serve in the MI side or the ASA side, I asked, “What is the ASA?” I was told that it stood for the Army Security Agency and no one knew what they did, only that it was harder to get into than just Military Intelligence.
The Army Security Agency, the military version of the NSA, as it existed that that time was the hi-tech arm of the Military Intelligence Branch. The ASA required a security clearance at the highest level of Top Secret. Even during Vietnam to get in, our enlisted personnel required a high school diploma and a four year enlistment. Most had a couple of years of college, and our First Sergeant had a Masters Degree.
Read More...
Chaos in American Energy; and the world suffers
21/June/2010 17:23
Liebig’s law of the minimum, states crop yields are proportional to the amount of the most limiting nutrient. However that is just a subclass of a more universal natural law, in that productivity of any entity is limited to the extent of the limiting contributor. Broadening that into the fields of human enterprise it could read, wealth creation is limited by the applications of energy, financial liquidity, and information all functioning within the limits of natural laws.
Now plug that concept into a Vietnam era saying:
We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful, have struggled so long, with so little, we are now able to create anything out of nothing.
That needs to be modified in the early twenty-first century to conclude: create nothing out of everything. The limiting factor? Basically human knowledge and wisdom! Put in an enlightened Green Street context, “The blowhards that are in charge, or think they know what is happening, are so full of themselves, that they are in the process of exploding human civilization with their excreted methane gas.”
Last week as I watched President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the Gulf oil catastrophe, I ended up yelling that the television screen. Then while watching all the commentators after the President’s address I yelled even more. In that illumination I refer you to the Green Street context above!
One of the two things that I found worth repeating was Sarah Palin’s comment that, “You can’t trust oil industry information, you must verify it yourself.” Having spent the first years of my professional career embedded in the intelligence culture, that truth must become a Kantian universal law. In the Vietnam context, the industry spokesmen are relying on information provided by the unwilling, which they are incompetent to understand. Furthermore many times these unwilling don’t know the answer demanded of them, and for a multitude of reasons, they create something out of nothing.
The other speech rebuttal statement worthy of development is, “The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy even though we have been trying for over forty years.”
“Yep! The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”
So where do we begin?
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Now plug that concept into a Vietnam era saying:
We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful, have struggled so long, with so little, we are now able to create anything out of nothing.
That needs to be modified in the early twenty-first century to conclude: create nothing out of everything. The limiting factor? Basically human knowledge and wisdom! Put in an enlightened Green Street context, “The blowhards that are in charge, or think they know what is happening, are so full of themselves, that they are in the process of exploding human civilization with their excreted methane gas.”
Last week as I watched President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the Gulf oil catastrophe, I ended up yelling that the television screen. Then while watching all the commentators after the President’s address I yelled even more. In that illumination I refer you to the Green Street context above!
One of the two things that I found worth repeating was Sarah Palin’s comment that, “You can’t trust oil industry information, you must verify it yourself.” Having spent the first years of my professional career embedded in the intelligence culture, that truth must become a Kantian universal law. In the Vietnam context, the industry spokesmen are relying on information provided by the unwilling, which they are incompetent to understand. Furthermore many times these unwilling don’t know the answer demanded of them, and for a multitude of reasons, they create something out of nothing.
The other speech rebuttal statement worthy of development is, “The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy even though we have been trying for over forty years.”
“Yep! The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”
So where do we begin?
Read More...
The Summer of Progressive Ferment
14/June/2010 12:00
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.
Read More...
What we are beginning to see, not only with the Speaker, but also with the whole Obama team, is that their renaissance plans to transform American into the leader of a new universe of Oz, has been defeated by the natural law of inertia. All the lofty rhetoric, back room political deals, and hope in vapor, can’t do the heavy lifting. So the alternative is attempting to elevate the angst into chaos to see if any of the stress will create some composted material that may stick to the wall.
I have long stated if I had a donkey I would name her Patience, fully recognizing that patience is part of the human condition to know what we want, and we want it now. So while I can understand the impatience in the hecklers of the Speaker, I also realize that hope naturally becomes reality by persistence and hard work. Furthermore true miracles are impossible in the natural world of these Social Darwinists.
Over the last couple of months we have mentioned the present plight of the Social Darwinists and in the “The Social Darwinist Conundrum,” we explained the juxtaposed views of the religion, especially as it related to the formation of the Soviet Union. In that context we see communist collective as being the true antithesis of the views of Ayn Rand. Rand being the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and the philosophy of Objectivism, all behind the laissez faire tenure of Alan Greenspan at the Fed.
So in the struggle of worldviews within the evolving religion of the Social Darwinists, it doesn’t really seem to be that difficult to choose a winner between the academy gene pool of collectivists and the wild west greedy speculators. Show me the money will win out all the time, especially in the United States where our culture has always been tensioned, through design, between selfish self determination and the common good.
Read More...
Special Report: Is the World Broke?
07/June/2010 07:31
Updated 07/June/2010 11:00
Late last week I tuned into the Fox Business Channel and at the bottom of the screen was the tag, “Is the world broke?” What little time I listened to the discussion, it seemed that the participants were questioning the broke concept as in bankrupt. However when you consider the concept of bankruptcy you generally link the term with being or running out of money. In a world in which nations print their own money either individually as in the case of the United States, China, and most other nations of the world, they can always print more money and devalue their currency, so broke in their literal sense is impossible.
For the Eurozone going broke makes a little more sense in the fact that certain countries may run out of Euros and other countries or financial institutions fail or refuse to give them anymore. In that sense the Euro only will continue to work, if its support is linked to the willingness of all parties to adopt a somewhat consistent approach as far as spending and taxes.
In the United States we are told that it is impossible for the states to go broke literally, as in bankrupt. Since they cannot create their own currency however, that makes for the between a rock and a hard place a reality that many states now face, but as of yet are unwilling to create the austere conditions to bring into harmony unsustainable spending and limited revenues. This means that eventually they will come to the Federal government for funding not all that different from what is now faced by Eurozone countries.
However, there is another definition of broke, that as of yet none of the world’s political leaders, business moguls, spin merchants, or any other group that claims some sort of elitist power or authority, will admit. That is the world in which they say they created, know what is going on, or hope again to set on the right path is truly broke, like broken, it no longer works.
Last December in “Humpty Dumpty in a New Century” we describe Humpty Dumpty in American terms, but now we see that good old Mr. Dumpty has returned to his continental roots as well. Just as in the American story, the refrain remains pretty much the same. “If we, all the kings horses and all the kings men, all come together and work diligently we can surely put Humpty Dumpty back together again!”
The question no one is asking today is, “Could the reason Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall in the first place, is all the kings horses and all the kings men are responsible?” If that is the case and you just replace Humpty Dumpty on a shaky wall of the world’s financial condition, even if for the short term, things might get a little better, but there are really only two alternatives for a long lasting solution.
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Late last week I tuned into the Fox Business Channel and at the bottom of the screen was the tag, “Is the world broke?” What little time I listened to the discussion, it seemed that the participants were questioning the broke concept as in bankrupt. However when you consider the concept of bankruptcy you generally link the term with being or running out of money. In a world in which nations print their own money either individually as in the case of the United States, China, and most other nations of the world, they can always print more money and devalue their currency, so broke in their literal sense is impossible.
For the Eurozone going broke makes a little more sense in the fact that certain countries may run out of Euros and other countries or financial institutions fail or refuse to give them anymore. In that sense the Euro only will continue to work, if its support is linked to the willingness of all parties to adopt a somewhat consistent approach as far as spending and taxes.
In the United States we are told that it is impossible for the states to go broke literally, as in bankrupt. Since they cannot create their own currency however, that makes for the between a rock and a hard place a reality that many states now face, but as of yet are unwilling to create the austere conditions to bring into harmony unsustainable spending and limited revenues. This means that eventually they will come to the Federal government for funding not all that different from what is now faced by Eurozone countries.
However, there is another definition of broke, that as of yet none of the world’s political leaders, business moguls, spin merchants, or any other group that claims some sort of elitist power or authority, will admit. That is the world in which they say they created, know what is going on, or hope again to set on the right path is truly broke, like broken, it no longer works.
Last December in “Humpty Dumpty in a New Century” we describe Humpty Dumpty in American terms, but now we see that good old Mr. Dumpty has returned to his continental roots as well. Just as in the American story, the refrain remains pretty much the same. “If we, all the kings horses and all the kings men, all come together and work diligently we can surely put Humpty Dumpty back together again!”
The question no one is asking today is, “Could the reason Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall in the first place, is all the kings horses and all the kings men are responsible?” If that is the case and you just replace Humpty Dumpty on a shaky wall of the world’s financial condition, even if for the short term, things might get a little better, but there are really only two alternatives for a long lasting solution.
Read More...
The Wealth Creation — Tax & Debt Redistribution Continuum
24/May/2010 10:00
Give me that old fashioned (like last year), change we can believe in. Last Tuesday’s primary elections signaled, throw out all the bums, and let us choose the less — most desirable between who is left. The grizzly bears moved back to a very realistic position on Wall Street. The Senate finally passed a financial reform bill which will help the 2 Big 2 Fail, sort of, not change a whole lot and provide bennies for some others to continue to over leverage our worthless money supply. On Sunday we heard from the Feds, that if BP continues to miss the deadlines on stopping the Gulf oil spill that they are going to take over. That will surely help, I’m sure?
Through it all Americans continue to learn about, and demand a redux of our founding constitutional principles, but all the pundits, spinners, commentators, and politicians think this will help them, when in reality the issue really is much more complex than can be articulated in a brief media story. Furthermore even if they could, their spin is so dumbed down and politically correct, that it could be shown that they would be quickly eliminated from the TV show, and then must announce that they are not smarter than a fifth grader.
So in the finest efforts of the Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum revisions, let us develop some context of what is really happening.
Way back in Colonial days, the people of the revolutionary era were very religious and in the process of writing a formal constitution they did a miraculous job of creating a secular government based on Absolute Christian religious principles.
Today we live in a very secular world and what we are trying to do is to take secular principles and redux them to Absolutes that will provide security in a rapidly changing world. In simple terms, back then most were committed to their religion, and a very few were secular. Now most are very secular, and a very few are committed to religion.
In truly secular terms, the American Founders looked outside themselves for governance solutions, which they believed rested in God alone. So pretty much when asked what was the Christian gospel, they would respond something like:
“Jesus Christ was the son of God, who came to the earth to die in a sacrificial covenant for the sins of mankind, which he accomplished by being crucified on a cross seventeen hundred years ago. He was raised from the dead three days later to show that this gift of God’s grace is the source of our justification before God’s holiness.
“When in our Declaration of Independence when we affirmed Natural Law, Nature’s God, and Inalienable Rights, what we were really doing was taking our specific revelation of God from the Bible, and applying it to what is theologically called the general revelation of God in nature and the common grace God bestows to all of humanity.
And today’s dumbed down sheep of all religious faiths, and lack of thereof religion say, “Huh?”
Read More...
Through it all Americans continue to learn about, and demand a redux of our founding constitutional principles, but all the pundits, spinners, commentators, and politicians think this will help them, when in reality the issue really is much more complex than can be articulated in a brief media story. Furthermore even if they could, their spin is so dumbed down and politically correct, that it could be shown that they would be quickly eliminated from the TV show, and then must announce that they are not smarter than a fifth grader.
So in the finest efforts of the Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum revisions, let us develop some context of what is really happening.
Way back in Colonial days, the people of the revolutionary era were very religious and in the process of writing a formal constitution they did a miraculous job of creating a secular government based on Absolute Christian religious principles.
Today we live in a very secular world and what we are trying to do is to take secular principles and redux them to Absolutes that will provide security in a rapidly changing world. In simple terms, back then most were committed to their religion, and a very few were secular. Now most are very secular, and a very few are committed to religion.
In truly secular terms, the American Founders looked outside themselves for governance solutions, which they believed rested in God alone. So pretty much when asked what was the Christian gospel, they would respond something like:
“Jesus Christ was the son of God, who came to the earth to die in a sacrificial covenant for the sins of mankind, which he accomplished by being crucified on a cross seventeen hundred years ago. He was raised from the dead three days later to show that this gift of God’s grace is the source of our justification before God’s holiness.
“When in our Declaration of Independence when we affirmed Natural Law, Nature’s God, and Inalienable Rights, what we were really doing was taking our specific revelation of God from the Bible, and applying it to what is theologically called the general revelation of God in nature and the common grace God bestows to all of humanity.
And today’s dumbed down sheep of all religious faiths, and lack of thereof religion say, “Huh?”
Read More...
The Wizard of Oz in America’s Struggles
03/May/2010 09:07
Two weeks from today, 18 May 2010 will hallmark the 110th anniversary of the publishing of the children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.” For most of that interlude American adults have tried to move to OZ, simply because it was a fantasyland as far from the reality of Kansas as they could get. So today, as with real children, they are mad, because the Wizards of Washington and the Wizards of Wall Street haven’t the ability to maintain that fable.
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
Read More...
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
Read More...
States Rights as Natural as Wildness
26/April/2010 14:09
The United States of America used to be understood by the slogan, “Out of many — one.” It is now becoming better defined as, “Out of many — chaos.”
This evolution has taken place most dramatically in the last fifty years, but those chaotic roots run deep for at least the last century.
In January, when we began the “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension” it looked like there was a window in America’s trek to Gomorrah, in which we could develop a little historic context about how we got here and where we were headed, regardless of the desires of mice and men. It looks like the mice are holding up quite well in contrast to the best intentions of American leadership, but a couple realities did begin to be seen as “Why Me?” progressed, which show as early buds of the coming American political spring.
During those four months it was easy to anticipate the passage of Obamacare, but the firestorm of issues related to the individual mandate for people to purchase insurance, angered individuals, but also set off a spring burn of protests at the state level. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that about a third of the states would begin to act like real sovereign states. All this time we thought they were extinct, except for collecting taxes and creating arcane regulations. We will here attempt to put some natural spring into these new found rumblings. We will look at the heavy lifting of what is just beginning under the Washington guise of “Financial Reform” in our Wednesday article.
I would suppose one could make the case that the concept of state dependency began during the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. But the way the history has hyped that period among all the enlightenment progressive spin, it makes it impossible to find the states at all. Those who are yet still alive and actually went through that period were too young understand the context.
However using estimated dates beginning with the Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968; the Viet Nam War Protests: 1965-1975; and the Environmental Movement: 1962-1981; we essentially saw urban intellectual evolution commandeer all aspects of American unity and those who disagreed with their worldview were vilified as: racists, warmongers, and primitive knuckle draggers. Read More...
This evolution has taken place most dramatically in the last fifty years, but those chaotic roots run deep for at least the last century.
In January, when we began the “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension” it looked like there was a window in America’s trek to Gomorrah, in which we could develop a little historic context about how we got here and where we were headed, regardless of the desires of mice and men. It looks like the mice are holding up quite well in contrast to the best intentions of American leadership, but a couple realities did begin to be seen as “Why Me?” progressed, which show as early buds of the coming American political spring.
During those four months it was easy to anticipate the passage of Obamacare, but the firestorm of issues related to the individual mandate for people to purchase insurance, angered individuals, but also set off a spring burn of protests at the state level. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that about a third of the states would begin to act like real sovereign states. All this time we thought they were extinct, except for collecting taxes and creating arcane regulations. We will here attempt to put some natural spring into these new found rumblings. We will look at the heavy lifting of what is just beginning under the Washington guise of “Financial Reform” in our Wednesday article.
I would suppose one could make the case that the concept of state dependency began during the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. But the way the history has hyped that period among all the enlightenment progressive spin, it makes it impossible to find the states at all. Those who are yet still alive and actually went through that period were too young understand the context.
However using estimated dates beginning with the Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968; the Viet Nam War Protests: 1965-1975; and the Environmental Movement: 1962-1981; we essentially saw urban intellectual evolution commandeer all aspects of American unity and those who disagreed with their worldview were vilified as: racists, warmongers, and primitive knuckle draggers. Read More...
Happy Days Again? Not Here, Not Yet!
19/April/2010 10:54
>>PDF copy
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Subsequent to that act an unrepentant, Timothy McVeigh, was found guilty and was executed. There is a very old saying that goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Last week former President Clinton made remarks saying that he saw similarities between the words of Tea Party participants and that bombing which took place on 19 April 1995. Of course there has been a lot of media attention to those remarks, but none seem intelligent enough to see perhaps a link to the words and maybe the actions of then President Clinton, which may have contributed to McVeigh’s actions just a little over two years after the President began his first term.
Also last week, here in the USA, land of liberty, home of the free and the brave, President Obama made somewhat similar condescending remarks about how funny traditionally minded Tea Party participants were acting. In the context that he has fixed America’s continuing problems; with programs more outmoded than any our Chinese government partners could envision. Once we sock it to those Fat Cat bankers, and create all sorts of user fees for everything under the sun, it will be nice to know that the President has not raised the income taxes on those Americans who make less than $200,000.
I do have to agree with the President however, if the Tea Party people think that by attending some rallies, carrying some signs, and even electing some more conservative Republicans, to replace those awful liberal Democrats, they will in someway change the politics in Washington and business on Wall Street, then that is really a ironic joke. Sad, definitely true but still despairingly amusing.
Listening to the President, his staff, and his media amigos, happy days are here again. Rah! Rah! Rah! Well happy days may be back for Wall Street and federal workers, but those happy days here, are about as far away as the distance to New York City and Washington DC. Here in the Northeast corner of the other Washington (State) things are as bad as they have ever been and that may include the Great Depression. Read More...
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Subsequent to that act an unrepentant, Timothy McVeigh, was found guilty and was executed. There is a very old saying that goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Last week former President Clinton made remarks saying that he saw similarities between the words of Tea Party participants and that bombing which took place on 19 April 1995. Of course there has been a lot of media attention to those remarks, but none seem intelligent enough to see perhaps a link to the words and maybe the actions of then President Clinton, which may have contributed to McVeigh’s actions just a little over two years after the President began his first term.
Also last week, here in the USA, land of liberty, home of the free and the brave, President Obama made somewhat similar condescending remarks about how funny traditionally minded Tea Party participants were acting. In the context that he has fixed America’s continuing problems; with programs more outmoded than any our Chinese government partners could envision. Once we sock it to those Fat Cat bankers, and create all sorts of user fees for everything under the sun, it will be nice to know that the President has not raised the income taxes on those Americans who make less than $200,000.
I do have to agree with the President however, if the Tea Party people think that by attending some rallies, carrying some signs, and even electing some more conservative Republicans, to replace those awful liberal Democrats, they will in someway change the politics in Washington and business on Wall Street, then that is really a ironic joke. Sad, definitely true but still despairingly amusing.
Listening to the President, his staff, and his media amigos, happy days are here again. Rah! Rah! Rah! Well happy days may be back for Wall Street and federal workers, but those happy days here, are about as far away as the distance to New York City and Washington DC. Here in the Northeast corner of the other Washington (State) things are as bad as they have ever been and that may include the Great Depression. Read More...
2 Big 2 Work
12/April/2010 08:44
The bellyachers are giving me a headache. Well, actually they seem to be more akin to a pain at the end of the alimentary canal, but unless it is phrased in that way, it becomes politically incorrect. Let me see if I have got this straight? You have a beef with the fact that you have to pay way too much income tax when you and yours gross six figures a year and nearly half of the American households pay nothing.
It is really too bad that your mortgage is upside down by about 50% and your 401k and the rest of your investments lost about the same, and you still are not back on track to retiring early, with only your four thousand square foot McMansion in the ‘burbs, and your two thousand square foot second home in the foreign paradise. You can cry me a river, but I really don’t care. Welcome to the real world.
Bah! Bah! Bah! You went to work everyday, did the best you could, never took any real risk and suddenly you were a millionaire. Well, at least you were a millionaire. Nobody ever called you a sheep, sheep can’t leverage a mid-level professional job, with really only bureaucratic skills, into a million bucks. Truly this was an absolute miracle, helped along with cheap credit, marketing, and educational propaganda. After all you are worth it, and you have the room full of seventh place trophies to prove it.
Suddenly the 2 BIG 2 work vultures from the government want you to pay what they call your fair share. It isn’t just the Feds, it’s the state, the county, and the city too. Even the home owners association wants more money to keep the water feature pumping. Just like me, they all don’t want to hear your story of an American Dream of a pampered upbringing turned into gentrified nausea. You had it all, peaches and cream, and now it is time to pay the dues.
Read More...
It is really too bad that your mortgage is upside down by about 50% and your 401k and the rest of your investments lost about the same, and you still are not back on track to retiring early, with only your four thousand square foot McMansion in the ‘burbs, and your two thousand square foot second home in the foreign paradise. You can cry me a river, but I really don’t care. Welcome to the real world.
Bah! Bah! Bah! You went to work everyday, did the best you could, never took any real risk and suddenly you were a millionaire. Well, at least you were a millionaire. Nobody ever called you a sheep, sheep can’t leverage a mid-level professional job, with really only bureaucratic skills, into a million bucks. Truly this was an absolute miracle, helped along with cheap credit, marketing, and educational propaganda. After all you are worth it, and you have the room full of seventh place trophies to prove it.
Suddenly the 2 BIG 2 work vultures from the government want you to pay what they call your fair share. It isn’t just the Feds, it’s the state, the county, and the city too. Even the home owners association wants more money to keep the water feature pumping. Just like me, they all don’t want to hear your story of an American Dream of a pampered upbringing turned into gentrified nausea. You had it all, peaches and cream, and now it is time to pay the dues.
Read More...
Malingnant Money
05/April/2010 09:41
There is a universal belief that with enough money life in short order will become a bed of roses, or some other silly metaphor. In that context the question now becomes, “Where’s the money?”
With more dollars floating around somewhere than in the entire history of the world, there should be money, money everywhere and inflation should be a significant worry. There is none of that. Furthermore everywhere you look for answers you don’t see or hear anything related to the present reality.
For an example in that present reality, last Thursday I took my Saturn into the Midas Muffler shop in downtown Spokane to have its brakes replaced. The reason I went there, on my previous trip to Spokane in my pickup, I had had to have the brakes replaced on it also. Not only was the pickup price about ten percent less than I figured it would have been up in Northeast Washington, I now had essentially a ten percent off coupon for my next visit to Midas. In times like these you save all the money you can.
By the time I got to the place, located on the corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard, it was just a little before 10 AM, probably the busiest time of the business day. This address is just across the street from essentially the downtown core. The convention center and related theaters begin just on the opposite diagonal corner. There are at least five repair bays on the office side of the structure and about three on the other part of the L.
As I walked into the office I was met by a lady of about retirement age, and I stated I needed to get my brakes fixed and I need to know how long it will take. She says she will get an estimate, takes my keys, and walks out into the shop. There seems to be only one guy working out there and he seems to be just doing some make work activity. So working alone he finishes my estimate and tells me to come back in about an hour and a half. When I return at about 11:30 my car is ready, and it looks like the guy is doing something minor on another vehicle and there are no other business related cars either in the shop or in the parking lot. I pay my bill and I am on my way.
So on a normal business day in the center of Spokane, the largest city from Seattle to about Minneapolis, in a major national automobile repair franchise, they probably didn’t cover the overhead for the time I was there. What about the rest of the day, week, month, or year?
Where is all the economic stimulus money, or all the other money that is supposed to be in the pipeline showing that the Great Recession is over and happy days will soon be here again?
Read More...
With more dollars floating around somewhere than in the entire history of the world, there should be money, money everywhere and inflation should be a significant worry. There is none of that. Furthermore everywhere you look for answers you don’t see or hear anything related to the present reality.
For an example in that present reality, last Thursday I took my Saturn into the Midas Muffler shop in downtown Spokane to have its brakes replaced. The reason I went there, on my previous trip to Spokane in my pickup, I had had to have the brakes replaced on it also. Not only was the pickup price about ten percent less than I figured it would have been up in Northeast Washington, I now had essentially a ten percent off coupon for my next visit to Midas. In times like these you save all the money you can.
By the time I got to the place, located on the corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard, it was just a little before 10 AM, probably the busiest time of the business day. This address is just across the street from essentially the downtown core. The convention center and related theaters begin just on the opposite diagonal corner. There are at least five repair bays on the office side of the structure and about three on the other part of the L.
As I walked into the office I was met by a lady of about retirement age, and I stated I needed to get my brakes fixed and I need to know how long it will take. She says she will get an estimate, takes my keys, and walks out into the shop. There seems to be only one guy working out there and he seems to be just doing some make work activity. So working alone he finishes my estimate and tells me to come back in about an hour and a half. When I return at about 11:30 my car is ready, and it looks like the guy is doing something minor on another vehicle and there are no other business related cars either in the shop or in the parking lot. I pay my bill and I am on my way.
So on a normal business day in the center of Spokane, the largest city from Seattle to about Minneapolis, in a major national automobile repair franchise, they probably didn’t cover the overhead for the time I was there. What about the rest of the day, week, month, or year?
Where is all the economic stimulus money, or all the other money that is supposed to be in the pipeline showing that the Great Recession is over and happy days will soon be here again?
Read More...
The Law of Malignant Enlightenment
29/March/2010 11:00
Our friend Et Tu Brute’ early Friday morning showed his wisdom on how the passage of ObamaCare would be greatly altered over time by the Law of Unintended Consequences. Following Brute’s post it was truly amazing how often this generally undefined law was mentioned in the world of more traditional news media and commentary. This was generally rebutted by a more liberal response, “Yah, but, just wait until it takes effect and everyone understands this evolving opportunity.” The definition of opportunity left to those less infected (sic).
Cutting through all the composting entropy, the rhetoric revolves basically around two mutually exclusive loci. A traditional or conservative spin states, “With the passage of ObamaCare the path to mutually assured destruction has been coated with black ice.” On the other side, now spun in the leftist or liberal construct, “America has now reached Beulah Land and the shining eternal city is just across the Serendipity Plain.”
Furthermore a little research into the Law of Unintended Consequences shows that the abstract is probably the best usage, since in that form the law can be used whenever one would like to make a point without really needing to rely on any points at all. “Essentially, in time the spectrum of unintended consequences will become clear, and I am just focusing on a few that fit my talking points, for talking points after all, is why I make the big bucks.”
Along that line, the talking points tend to focus on specifics of the actual ObamaCare bill such as, its size, cost, repeal, or replace, the list being very vendor specific. What all this tends to show is that the shallow shortsightedness that gave us the bill in the first place, will be used in the opposite direction to make it much better. With all these ignored, but now so plainly unforeseen and unintended consequences so apparent, the truth seems to be that ObamaCare must either be in its current form, created through intelligent design, or something, or some other unseen natural law must be working its magic.
This brings us to a more refined, contemporary, and previously undiscovered natural law: The Law of Malignant Enlightenment. Departing from the unintended law, we shall briefly define the Law of Malignant Enlightenment and then give three examples on how the law allows its applications to reach beyond the specifics of ObamaCare and touch the universal attributes that can be altered to achieve positive results in a world of limited resources and unlimited possibilities.
Read More...
Cutting through all the composting entropy, the rhetoric revolves basically around two mutually exclusive loci. A traditional or conservative spin states, “With the passage of ObamaCare the path to mutually assured destruction has been coated with black ice.” On the other side, now spun in the leftist or liberal construct, “America has now reached Beulah Land and the shining eternal city is just across the Serendipity Plain.”
Furthermore a little research into the Law of Unintended Consequences shows that the abstract is probably the best usage, since in that form the law can be used whenever one would like to make a point without really needing to rely on any points at all. “Essentially, in time the spectrum of unintended consequences will become clear, and I am just focusing on a few that fit my talking points, for talking points after all, is why I make the big bucks.”
Along that line, the talking points tend to focus on specifics of the actual ObamaCare bill such as, its size, cost, repeal, or replace, the list being very vendor specific. What all this tends to show is that the shallow shortsightedness that gave us the bill in the first place, will be used in the opposite direction to make it much better. With all these ignored, but now so plainly unforeseen and unintended consequences so apparent, the truth seems to be that ObamaCare must either be in its current form, created through intelligent design, or something, or some other unseen natural law must be working its magic.
This brings us to a more refined, contemporary, and previously undiscovered natural law: The Law of Malignant Enlightenment. Departing from the unintended law, we shall briefly define the Law of Malignant Enlightenment and then give three examples on how the law allows its applications to reach beyond the specifics of ObamaCare and touch the universal attributes that can be altered to achieve positive results in a world of limited resources and unlimited possibilities.
Read More...
The ObamaCare wildfire
22/March/2010 10:46
Late last evening the United States of America passed an ObamaCare reform law and simultaneously unleashed a wildfire in the country that will affect the country for years if not decades to come. A wildfire, many times human caused or even designed is an uncontrollable reordering of the future by destroying the past and creating opportunities for new growth to rapidly occur out of the ashes of the old. Many times human started controlled burns suddenly erupt into uncontrollable wildfires and greatly change an environment, well beyond the carefully laid plans of the fire planners. Welcome to healthcare reform circa 2010.
For over a year, off and on the healthcare debate has slowly intensified and generally revolves around both the cost and the constitutional question, if human governments can create rights, rather than being a gift of Natural Law given to humans by God. As of yesterday the debate was codified into law and started the wildfire which we will discuss briefly.
There are those who will continue to fight the hot spot battles related to human rights, the American federal government’s ability to create and to tax, and the continued desire to live beyond our means. Just as in a wildfire you will be able to tune to your favorite news channel, talk radio, or podcast and hear the yin and yang to support or defame your paradigms, but Washington DC this time next year will be a very different place than it is today. It will look like a wildfire passed through the capitol and there will be new shoots of growth beginning to sprout from the ashes, but still a lot of dead wood around, some of it standing some not. When you get out into the country those changes will begin to be seen also, but not the effects that the ObamaCare supporters had hoped.
Wildfires are frightening things, extremely rapidly they can change what has stood strong and relentless for centuries, and in a few minutes it is all gone. But if you look beyond the visual changes, what a wildfire does is fundamentally change the energetics of the ecosystem, including human ecosystems. You probably will only hear about the energetics of the ObamaCare wildfire here at Wonder Springs, so pass this to others.
Wildfires are only controlled when they run out of fuel and the winds and or dryness that feed their destruction are calmed and quenched. Keeping with our wildfire analogy the dryness is the entropy of party politics and the fuel is a whole world filled with excessive, essentially worthless money. The winds of change are blowing so strong that the wildfire will quickly jump the Atlantic and Pacific and destroy all efforts there to not only combat their regional wildfires, but add debt fuel to the flames.
Read More...
For over a year, off and on the healthcare debate has slowly intensified and generally revolves around both the cost and the constitutional question, if human governments can create rights, rather than being a gift of Natural Law given to humans by God. As of yesterday the debate was codified into law and started the wildfire which we will discuss briefly.
There are those who will continue to fight the hot spot battles related to human rights, the American federal government’s ability to create and to tax, and the continued desire to live beyond our means. Just as in a wildfire you will be able to tune to your favorite news channel, talk radio, or podcast and hear the yin and yang to support or defame your paradigms, but Washington DC this time next year will be a very different place than it is today. It will look like a wildfire passed through the capitol and there will be new shoots of growth beginning to sprout from the ashes, but still a lot of dead wood around, some of it standing some not. When you get out into the country those changes will begin to be seen also, but not the effects that the ObamaCare supporters had hoped.
Wildfires are frightening things, extremely rapidly they can change what has stood strong and relentless for centuries, and in a few minutes it is all gone. But if you look beyond the visual changes, what a wildfire does is fundamentally change the energetics of the ecosystem, including human ecosystems. You probably will only hear about the energetics of the ObamaCare wildfire here at Wonder Springs, so pass this to others.
Wildfires are only controlled when they run out of fuel and the winds and or dryness that feed their destruction are calmed and quenched. Keeping with our wildfire analogy the dryness is the entropy of party politics and the fuel is a whole world filled with excessive, essentially worthless money. The winds of change are blowing so strong that the wildfire will quickly jump the Atlantic and Pacific and destroy all efforts there to not only combat their regional wildfires, but add debt fuel to the flames.
Read More...
Three Word Transitions
15/March/2010 10:25
"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.
As a Mormon, Beck uses the term charity in its proper context, but I question whether it works with modern American Christian evangelicals who generally think of charity has getting something for nothing, generally from the government, or an NGO (non government organization. Charity in the true sense works within the LDS church because they tithe, consequently there is money to help out those in need, not just as a handout, but also a hand-up.
The average American Christian does not tithe, and the average giving runs about two percent rather than ten. If you factor out the minority of those real tithe givers that probably brings the average offering down to a level God only knows. That amount being just enough to most of the time pay the church staff and the mortgage on the church building. True charity in the New Testament Biblical sense is an impossibility. Read More...
Well Sarah, it ain’t workin’ that well right now and come to think of it things haven’t worked all that well for quite a while.”
As we have been promoting in our Wonder Springs weekly articles for a number of weeks, change we can believe in is really change we can understand and makes us comfortable. However, if change really is the only constant in the world, then real stupendous change is truly freakin’ scary and it makes us withdraw further into our old sense of security, and we exacerbate the problems. Hence in real reality “Change we can believe in.” is really the enigma of continual angst. To question whether how much of this current change is by design or chance only magnifies the apprehension?
Last week in the Chronicle we looked at a number of religious antitheses to New England Calvinism. Calvinism defines the prime concept of its theology in three words that begin with the letter “G” standing for “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. In this week’s “Why Me?” article we will look at similar three word theses, these non-Calvinist and other religious expressions use to express their believe systems.
Watching Glenn Beck last Friday, he unveiled a similar progression to use in his work as he attempts to encourage others to begin to move beyond change we can believe in, as this country attempts to reset the nation on our constitutional foundation. Those three words were “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” These of course come from the old King James - American Revolution era translation of 1 Corinthians 13. Our modern versions use love instead of charity and consequently lose the true perspective of what the Apostle Paul was really saying.
As a Mormon, Beck uses the term charity in its proper context, but I question whether it works with modern American Christian evangelicals who generally think of charity has getting something for nothing, generally from the government, or an NGO (non government organization. Charity in the true sense works within the LDS church because they tithe, consequently there is money to help out those in need, not just as a handout, but also a hand-up.
The average American Christian does not tithe, and the average giving runs about two percent rather than ten. If you factor out the minority of those real tithe givers that probably brings the average offering down to a level God only knows. That amount being just enough to most of the time pay the church staff and the mortgage on the church building. True charity in the New Testament Biblical sense is an impossibility. Read More...
Green Vitriol
14/February/2010 19:06
Record snow falls in the eastern United States and in Europe, and again we see an exponential growth in vitriol revolving around the global warming or climate change debate. This really looks backward to the Enlightenment birth of what we call science, that originally went under the term natural philosophy, which grew out of the discussions between applied and theoretical theology. So we hear some people calling global warming a religion and others calling it settled science. The truth is that none of us now alive will be around when it makes all that much difference, but that sure doesn’t keep pundits and know-it-alls from making popish balderdash.
Back in the 1970s when the fear that the world was known to be heading towards another ice age, one of the discussions against cleaning up the air, was that it may lead to global warming. What we are now told in essence, when we saved the world from dirty pollution, we condemned the world to invisible pollution. So the cheap and simple solution should be let’s get dirty again. Of course that is really just a straight-forward fix that doesn’t fit within our self-righteousness coin flipping to save the planet — get rich.
If we could ask the Wooly Mammoths they would tell us to watch those ocean effect snowfalls because they could cause you to freeze to death in the stupendous snowy change that would start an ice age. Of course they did freeze to death during the start of an ice age. So in all our human smarts we know that we really don’t want to have that enter into our frigid natural philosophy discussions.
Now when we talk about green vitriol we are not talking about crystalline ferrous sulfate, but rather a vitriolic discussion about green energy and how it is going to save us from global warming and at the same time allow us to continue our gluttonous energetic lifestyle. That just isn’t going to happen, no matter what religious mantras we invoke, incantate, or resuscitate. There are a number reasons for that.
First of all our current technologies to provide green energy are just technological refinements of the stuff we had a generation ago. The reason the world does not run on windmills, solar panels and other similar technologies, is that they are not cost effective in comparison to fossil fuels and hydropower. Back in the last potential green revolution, the effective costs for these green energy solutions were about fifty percent higher than their vitriolic competitors. So to be an energetic solution the price of crude oil needed to be in excess of about $60 a barrel. For a short time that happened, but that was not a window, but more a freakish event.
Today we really don’t know what that break even number is, but just factoring in inflation that would probably put the energetic push with oil at from $80 — $90. The problem is the current price of oil is just below those figures, and has traded in that $70 — $80 range for about a year now since the Saudis stated that the world price of oil should be at least $70. Of course there is no market making manipulation there, just a simple commodity trading program, access to a whole lot of free money from saving the world from financial collapse, and someone with an Internet connection writing oil industry press releases such as:
Furthermore, we really don’t know how much oil is available in the less than $90 range. Back when peak oil competed with global cooling for environmental headlines we would have learned by now we would all be riding bicycles.
So if we really want good clean green technology what we really need to do is tax oil products so that the effective price of oil is say $100 a barrel. Then we could produce a market for all that green technology, except we really could not make enough solar panels and windmills to make a dent in our need for fossil fuel energy, and what would all that green energy do to the local environments, with windmills killing birds and solar panels covering hundreds to thousands of square miles? Then of course if we really want to be green, we must look at the total carbon footprint for those windmills and solar panels, including their design, manufacture, installation, maintenance, and distribution system.
Then, of course, it would help our save the world dreams if we replaced our current stupid electrical grid, with a smart grid. That would be a smart thing to do, because we now waste about 62% of the electrical energy generate according to the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Of course if we do that we should look at the total carbon footprint of that endeavor also. Furthermore if we eliminated all the energy wastes, that would also eliminate the need for cap and trade or energy taxes.
This discussion is especially important because most of the new green energy works just as well or better without a grid tie. Could it be that Thomas Edison was right about DC (direct current) and Nikola Tesla was wrong with AC (alternating current)? Of course without grid ties the land we sacrifice of green energy could be used for something else, but then our cities would grow dark, unless we build some other type of really green centralized power plants, with a much better spin on the technology that is now viewed with vitriol. But just look at the opportunities that would allow for the collusion between the big government and the big crony global corporations.
So what we briefly see is saving the world from ourselves really is not as simple as it comes out in the talking points and well edited speeches. Perhaps if we could find a way to harness all the green, political, and wasted energy in the country, we could find ways to live together with energy independence for all. But lighting those light bulbs in our minds could not be done with compact fluorescents, for the mercury poisoning would effect our already demented intelligence.
Back in the 1970s when the fear that the world was known to be heading towards another ice age, one of the discussions against cleaning up the air, was that it may lead to global warming. What we are now told in essence, when we saved the world from dirty pollution, we condemned the world to invisible pollution. So the cheap and simple solution should be let’s get dirty again. Of course that is really just a straight-forward fix that doesn’t fit within our self-righteousness coin flipping to save the planet — get rich.
If we could ask the Wooly Mammoths they would tell us to watch those ocean effect snowfalls because they could cause you to freeze to death in the stupendous snowy change that would start an ice age. Of course they did freeze to death during the start of an ice age. So in all our human smarts we know that we really don’t want to have that enter into our frigid natural philosophy discussions.
Now when we talk about green vitriol we are not talking about crystalline ferrous sulfate, but rather a vitriolic discussion about green energy and how it is going to save us from global warming and at the same time allow us to continue our gluttonous energetic lifestyle. That just isn’t going to happen, no matter what religious mantras we invoke, incantate, or resuscitate. There are a number reasons for that.
First of all our current technologies to provide green energy are just technological refinements of the stuff we had a generation ago. The reason the world does not run on windmills, solar panels and other similar technologies, is that they are not cost effective in comparison to fossil fuels and hydropower. Back in the last potential green revolution, the effective costs for these green energy solutions were about fifty percent higher than their vitriolic competitors. So to be an energetic solution the price of crude oil needed to be in excess of about $60 a barrel. For a short time that happened, but that was not a window, but more a freakish event.
Today we really don’t know what that break even number is, but just factoring in inflation that would probably put the energetic push with oil at from $80 — $90. The problem is the current price of oil is just below those figures, and has traded in that $70 — $80 range for about a year now since the Saudis stated that the world price of oil should be at least $70. Of course there is no market making manipulation there, just a simple commodity trading program, access to a whole lot of free money from saving the world from financial collapse, and someone with an Internet connection writing oil industry press releases such as:
- Oil rises on fears snow will increase heating oil demand.
- Oil falls because record snows keep people at home and off the road.
Furthermore, we really don’t know how much oil is available in the less than $90 range. Back when peak oil competed with global cooling for environmental headlines we would have learned by now we would all be riding bicycles.
So if we really want good clean green technology what we really need to do is tax oil products so that the effective price of oil is say $100 a barrel. Then we could produce a market for all that green technology, except we really could not make enough solar panels and windmills to make a dent in our need for fossil fuel energy, and what would all that green energy do to the local environments, with windmills killing birds and solar panels covering hundreds to thousands of square miles? Then of course if we really want to be green, we must look at the total carbon footprint for those windmills and solar panels, including their design, manufacture, installation, maintenance, and distribution system.
Then, of course, it would help our save the world dreams if we replaced our current stupid electrical grid, with a smart grid. That would be a smart thing to do, because we now waste about 62% of the electrical energy generate according to the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Of course if we do that we should look at the total carbon footprint of that endeavor also. Furthermore if we eliminated all the energy wastes, that would also eliminate the need for cap and trade or energy taxes.
This discussion is especially important because most of the new green energy works just as well or better without a grid tie. Could it be that Thomas Edison was right about DC (direct current) and Nikola Tesla was wrong with AC (alternating current)? Of course without grid ties the land we sacrifice of green energy could be used for something else, but then our cities would grow dark, unless we build some other type of really green centralized power plants, with a much better spin on the technology that is now viewed with vitriol. But just look at the opportunities that would allow for the collusion between the big government and the big crony global corporations.
So what we briefly see is saving the world from ourselves really is not as simple as it comes out in the talking points and well edited speeches. Perhaps if we could find a way to harness all the green, political, and wasted energy in the country, we could find ways to live together with energy independence for all. But lighting those light bulbs in our minds could not be done with compact fluorescents, for the mercury poisoning would effect our already demented intelligence.
The Audacity of Wrong
13/February/2010 11:57
This past Wednesday Glenn Beck had a segment on the Cure Worse Than Disease, in which he discussed the depression of 1920-21. As Glenn mentioned himself, I also had never heard much about that time in United States history. What I had heard was something about continuing booms and busts of the economy as America closed the western frontier, became a world power through WWI, and had the Roaring ’20s ,which ended in the Great Depression. Then thankfully the New Deal was issued in by FDR, America was saved from total anarchy until we were forced to fight Japan and those terrible Nazis.
I had begun to question this whole New Deal salvation when I read the “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” by Amity Shales, earlier this year, So I wondered what I might find online, to increase my knowledge of this unknown earlier depression that Glenn had used as a model for fixing our country’s and the world’s economic mess. After some searching I came across “The U. S. Economy in the 1920s” an article by Gene Smiley of Marquette University. This is a very thorough discussion of that decade of almost twenty six thousand words and graphs that took up sixty four pages in my computer’s PDF format. A link to the article is also found under our Resources Tab.
What the Smiley article showed, and as Beck addressed, the Depression that began in 1920 was much more severe that anything we have faced in the current meltdown and bailouts. Furthermore the fix of letting the markets work to rebuild, or as Glenn said, “reboot the system” accomplished an economic miracle in which unemployment fell from over 11% to less than 2% in short order.
As with our current situation, speculation in securities coupled with tight money policies, was a correct but simplistic description of the beginning of the Great Depression. However if you link the growth of the 1920s followed by the Depression of the 1930s, this broader historical context more vividly displays the reality pointed out so well in “The Forgotten Man.” In this larger context Roosevelt’s New Deal was truly the antithesis of what the economy really needed.
If looked at in a global perspective, the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic happened essentially concurrently with the 1920s depression. While Germany’s problems were related to reparations required under terms of the War’s armistice for payment in gold, Hitler himself attributed much of that period’s instability to the success of his ability to bring National Socialism to Germany, which began in 1925 through 1933 when Nazi power was finally established.
Just as with the Great Depression, the current Obama Administration is determined to save the country and by extension the world, by a bigger and better New Deal. Ben Bernanke has been put in charge of the Federal Reserve for another four years because he saved the universe from another Great Depression, when he was Alan Greenspan’s easy money debt lieutenant as this totally unforeseen economic catastrophe developed? So now we are just beginning to see that United States program of huge governmental spending, coupled with creation of essentially worthless money, is quickly becoming the Audacity of Wrong.
What makes this so serious is that the economic recovery during the 1920s and thwarted during the 1930s Great Depression, was essentially get out of the way and let the market system work, while a broad spectrum of economic opportunities became reality. The problem we face today is that those growth industries and services are not only mature but beyond their prime.
The political leadership of the United States in both political parties are basically saying, “Don’t worry, be happy, the 1990s (1920s) will be here again.” Surely this is the Audacity of Wrong, there are currently no quantum leaps in either energetics or information to carry us forward, In fact much of that mature infrastructure is in the way of producing a new economy. Government bureaucrats, big unions, and crony capitalists all want the status quo to continue because they have their piece of the pie and they are unwilling to share that shrinking pie with what is generally called the folks, or the American people. This problem is even more pronounced now in the eurozone where you add the reality of crony nation states.
The first step in economic rebooting the United States, and the world for that matter, is the realization that debt doesn’t create wealth, all it can do is shuffle or reshuffle the deck chairs on the global economic Titanic now that it has hit an iceberg. There are some life rafts that can get some to shore, and thereby use the knowledge we have gained to build some newly designed economic ships, but the major problem is the great flood of the ocean of non energetic debt money that has covered all the dry land. For those who only have life jackets, they must realize they cannot borrow their way to shore, but must tread water looking for emerging sprouts on the slowly reemerging land. The allegory of the Noah flood in the Bible comes to mind. Soon dry land will emerge from the sea, and the seeds and sprouts of new opportunties will appear.
The moral to the story is that as much as we think we control the world, and have a plan to save the world, new opportunities of growth will come from reclaimed liquidity water that will irrigate a dry land, not from human wishful thinking. The basis for that new land and the irrigation system in the United States, was and is the vision of our Founders, and the documents that they produced. In short, wealth production needs real equity liquidity to grow, not quick sprinkling economic debt stimulus. That new equity will in short order change the Audacity of Wrong into the Promise of New Real Wealth.
I had begun to question this whole New Deal salvation when I read the “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” by Amity Shales, earlier this year, So I wondered what I might find online, to increase my knowledge of this unknown earlier depression that Glenn had used as a model for fixing our country’s and the world’s economic mess. After some searching I came across “The U. S. Economy in the 1920s” an article by Gene Smiley of Marquette University. This is a very thorough discussion of that decade of almost twenty six thousand words and graphs that took up sixty four pages in my computer’s PDF format. A link to the article is also found under our Resources Tab.
What the Smiley article showed, and as Beck addressed, the Depression that began in 1920 was much more severe that anything we have faced in the current meltdown and bailouts. Furthermore the fix of letting the markets work to rebuild, or as Glenn said, “reboot the system” accomplished an economic miracle in which unemployment fell from over 11% to less than 2% in short order.
As with our current situation, speculation in securities coupled with tight money policies, was a correct but simplistic description of the beginning of the Great Depression. However if you link the growth of the 1920s followed by the Depression of the 1930s, this broader historical context more vividly displays the reality pointed out so well in “The Forgotten Man.” In this larger context Roosevelt’s New Deal was truly the antithesis of what the economy really needed.
If looked at in a global perspective, the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic happened essentially concurrently with the 1920s depression. While Germany’s problems were related to reparations required under terms of the War’s armistice for payment in gold, Hitler himself attributed much of that period’s instability to the success of his ability to bring National Socialism to Germany, which began in 1925 through 1933 when Nazi power was finally established.
Just as with the Great Depression, the current Obama Administration is determined to save the country and by extension the world, by a bigger and better New Deal. Ben Bernanke has been put in charge of the Federal Reserve for another four years because he saved the universe from another Great Depression, when he was Alan Greenspan’s easy money debt lieutenant as this totally unforeseen economic catastrophe developed? So now we are just beginning to see that United States program of huge governmental spending, coupled with creation of essentially worthless money, is quickly becoming the Audacity of Wrong.
What makes this so serious is that the economic recovery during the 1920s and thwarted during the 1930s Great Depression, was essentially get out of the way and let the market system work, while a broad spectrum of economic opportunities became reality. The problem we face today is that those growth industries and services are not only mature but beyond their prime.
The political leadership of the United States in both political parties are basically saying, “Don’t worry, be happy, the 1990s (1920s) will be here again.” Surely this is the Audacity of Wrong, there are currently no quantum leaps in either energetics or information to carry us forward, In fact much of that mature infrastructure is in the way of producing a new economy. Government bureaucrats, big unions, and crony capitalists all want the status quo to continue because they have their piece of the pie and they are unwilling to share that shrinking pie with what is generally called the folks, or the American people. This problem is even more pronounced now in the eurozone where you add the reality of crony nation states.
The first step in economic rebooting the United States, and the world for that matter, is the realization that debt doesn’t create wealth, all it can do is shuffle or reshuffle the deck chairs on the global economic Titanic now that it has hit an iceberg. There are some life rafts that can get some to shore, and thereby use the knowledge we have gained to build some newly designed economic ships, but the major problem is the great flood of the ocean of non energetic debt money that has covered all the dry land. For those who only have life jackets, they must realize they cannot borrow their way to shore, but must tread water looking for emerging sprouts on the slowly reemerging land. The allegory of the Noah flood in the Bible comes to mind. Soon dry land will emerge from the sea, and the seeds and sprouts of new opportunties will appear.
The moral to the story is that as much as we think we control the world, and have a plan to save the world, new opportunities of growth will come from reclaimed liquidity water that will irrigate a dry land, not from human wishful thinking. The basis for that new land and the irrigation system in the United States, was and is the vision of our Founders, and the documents that they produced. In short, wealth production needs real equity liquidity to grow, not quick sprinkling economic debt stimulus. That new equity will in short order change the Audacity of Wrong into the Promise of New Real Wealth.
New Leadership Tab
11/February/2010 13:01
In our effort to create more effective resources here at Wonder Springs, we have deleted the Phylogenesis Tab and replaced it with an off site link under a new Leadership Tab. This link will take you to The Creation Leadership Center we are developing using our Wonder Springs Chronicle Archives as well as other teaching resources we have developed over the years. Eventually The Creation Leadership Center will be offering hands on learning experiences in Business Ecology, Leadership, Economic and Personal Survival, as well as other programs to allow you to understand the growth opportunities, that times of stupendous change create.
Haiti Reflections
16/January/2010 08:00
by Jerry Bannon
We began this year in our original installment of “Why Me?” with a brief discussion of survival. For the last few days and for weeks and months forward we will see real life survival situations playing out on our televisions and featuring the people of Haiti. I used the term “playing out,” because when the video and the commentary are combined, we really cannot comprehend the reality of the situation. But it is reality.
The projected death toll continues to rise. News I heard last evening stated that the total deaths might reach two hundred thousand, with other casualties reaching three million. This within a country with a total population of eight to nine million, depending upon the source, which compares well with New York City.
How do you survive a situation like that?
The reality, after you subtract the death toll, is that you are almost totally dependent upon the good will of external aid and the grace of God. In the case of Haiti crushing poverty, before the quake, exacerbates those problems.
In the still richest country in the world, the effects of hurricane Katrina are still present in the city of New Orleans, as today their National Football League team battles to continue the city’s mental recovery.
Survival is essentially a mental and spiritual happening. Right now in Haiti and in all our other catastrophic recovery efforts, we focus upon immediate material aid, and once the crisis is over, survivors are pretty much on their own to answer the stupendous challenge of “Why Me?”
Our global economy essentially says, “It is not our problem, survival of the fittest is the supreme natural law.” Then they move their consumer kitsch factory to some other place.
Religion in common and specific senses, typified by the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian values, are the only support that will remain, but those efforts will be greatly hindered by the lack of capital to rebuild and restore human lives. The people of the United States will lead in that rebuilding effort, because they still are the most religious and graceful people in the history of the world. That is simply because the American ethos, really hasn’t changed, as it also has been pillaged by the global reach of what is beginning to be feely called “crony capitalism.”
As the United States moves forward, we too will be making survival decisions. God willing, those changes will not be as stupendous as now being forced upon the people of Haiti. In the battle of morals and morale, we will hear many words of our founding fathers, one of the most quotable being Thomas Jefferson. Let those words not neglect Jefferson’s vision of a nation of self-sufficiency in the form of yeoman farmers, freeholders, not of a mortgaged suburban home, but owners and stewards of their natural subsistence.
These diverse opportunities are in direct opposition to the attempts to create urban monocultures of consuming union factory and service workers. Extreme specialization is a genetic agenda that attempts to create dependency at the expense of common sense. In that comparison, the currently struggling people of Haiti, have been given an opportunity to rebuild, a more just and sustainable society than they have had in their history.
We the people and citizens of the United States of America, face a very different challenge. Our challenge is not to return to our roots that made the American Dream, the great hope of mankind, but instead to prune the tree of the excesses of all consuming material prosperity.
Contrary to what we are now being told that cannot come from governmental regulations and the redistribution of wealth. Nor can that change come from individual initiative without respecting the divine creation of all of humanity and the initial goodness of all of God’s creation.
Survival from stupendous change takes many forms on this small blue globe, orbiting in the universe of space. But we are not alone, we have a God that sustains it all and created us in his image, and we have each other, which reflects the unity and diversity of the Trinity, through individuals, tribes, and nations. So instead of believing that we have all the answers, we must go back to the fundamental common questions:
Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
What are we to do?
Where will we go when we die?
In God’s common grace if we work to understand the life questions in the middle, he will take care of the bookends.
We began this year in our original installment of “Why Me?” with a brief discussion of survival. For the last few days and for weeks and months forward we will see real life survival situations playing out on our televisions and featuring the people of Haiti. I used the term “playing out,” because when the video and the commentary are combined, we really cannot comprehend the reality of the situation. But it is reality.
The projected death toll continues to rise. News I heard last evening stated that the total deaths might reach two hundred thousand, with other casualties reaching three million. This within a country with a total population of eight to nine million, depending upon the source, which compares well with New York City.
How do you survive a situation like that?
The reality, after you subtract the death toll, is that you are almost totally dependent upon the good will of external aid and the grace of God. In the case of Haiti crushing poverty, before the quake, exacerbates those problems.
In the still richest country in the world, the effects of hurricane Katrina are still present in the city of New Orleans, as today their National Football League team battles to continue the city’s mental recovery.
Survival is essentially a mental and spiritual happening. Right now in Haiti and in all our other catastrophic recovery efforts, we focus upon immediate material aid, and once the crisis is over, survivors are pretty much on their own to answer the stupendous challenge of “Why Me?”
Our global economy essentially says, “It is not our problem, survival of the fittest is the supreme natural law.” Then they move their consumer kitsch factory to some other place.
Religion in common and specific senses, typified by the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian values, are the only support that will remain, but those efforts will be greatly hindered by the lack of capital to rebuild and restore human lives. The people of the United States will lead in that rebuilding effort, because they still are the most religious and graceful people in the history of the world. That is simply because the American ethos, really hasn’t changed, as it also has been pillaged by the global reach of what is beginning to be feely called “crony capitalism.”
As the United States moves forward, we too will be making survival decisions. God willing, those changes will not be as stupendous as now being forced upon the people of Haiti. In the battle of morals and morale, we will hear many words of our founding fathers, one of the most quotable being Thomas Jefferson. Let those words not neglect Jefferson’s vision of a nation of self-sufficiency in the form of yeoman farmers, freeholders, not of a mortgaged suburban home, but owners and stewards of their natural subsistence.
These diverse opportunities are in direct opposition to the attempts to create urban monocultures of consuming union factory and service workers. Extreme specialization is a genetic agenda that attempts to create dependency at the expense of common sense. In that comparison, the currently struggling people of Haiti, have been given an opportunity to rebuild, a more just and sustainable society than they have had in their history.
We the people and citizens of the United States of America, face a very different challenge. Our challenge is not to return to our roots that made the American Dream, the great hope of mankind, but instead to prune the tree of the excesses of all consuming material prosperity.
Contrary to what we are now being told that cannot come from governmental regulations and the redistribution of wealth. Nor can that change come from individual initiative without respecting the divine creation of all of humanity and the initial goodness of all of God’s creation.
Survival from stupendous change takes many forms on this small blue globe, orbiting in the universe of space. But we are not alone, we have a God that sustains it all and created us in his image, and we have each other, which reflects the unity and diversity of the Trinity, through individuals, tribes, and nations. So instead of believing that we have all the answers, we must go back to the fundamental common questions:
Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
What are we to do?
Where will we go when we die?
In God’s common grace if we work to understand the life questions in the middle, he will take care of the bookends.
New Year Adaptations
04/January/2010 17:41
By Jerry Bannon
Updated January 5, 2010, 9:30 AM
The year 2010 begins the twelfth year of publishing The Wonder Springs Chronicle or the predecessor The Chronicles of Diversity. Over that time and on this website you have free access to over two million words which are amazingly consistent in their context. Since that 1999 beginning we have seen some remarkable changes in this country and around the world.
There are those who say that the recent Great Recession is over and now heaven on earth is just a few legislative maneuvers, bureaucratic assumptions, and hopeful hype spin away. The unique position of Wonder Springs stems from a paradigm that the Natural Laws of God’s creation are Absolute Truths which governs all of man’s aspirations. If our endeavors or enterprises are going to provide long term growth in all diverse aspects, then the wisdom that we use gathered from what we can learn from God’s living reality, forces us to model our limited and simplistic struggles utilizing those Truths to find meaning and purpose in life.
This concept began in the early 1980s when I began a business management model called Business Ecology. The essentials of those simple principles and graphic illustrations are found in various places in the archives. Some of the ways we have described these concepts in addition to Business Ecology are Enterprise Symbiosis, Stupendous Change, Fractured Rapture Tales, and probably the most scientific description: Métis Phylogenesis.
During the years following the development of the Business Ecology concept, through some more technical consulting work I was given the rights to redevelop a Great Depression successful, air concentrating technology for precious metals. To that was added an environmentally sound refining process. These technologies formed a basis for a company I tried and failed to get funded during that time when all the worldly buzz related to the Internet and something called dot-com. In October of last year I was contacted by some potential mine developers I had briefly known after I had actively closed the company. They wanted to know if I was still interested in going ahead with that work now that the price of gold had exceeded $1000 per ounce.
I scraped together enough funds to reestablish the company as PREFER Ltd in the State of Washington and began to assemble infrastructure pieces that had not been utilized for probably twenty years. PREFER stands for the acrostic: Providing Resourceful Energetics For Economic Renaissance. One of the problems with the original air tables was that it did not scale beyond a piece of equipment that could process more than five tons per hour of properly crushed ore. Furthermore changes of the particle size of the desired precious metals fraction required a complete reworking of the air fluidizing screens.
Early one morning just before Christmas I awoke with an idea for a new design without the above limitations. With some sketches of this new equipment design, understood in the science of small particle physics we will begin to enrich the whole process stream as we design, build and test this new equipment. We also have obtained another client with a property that would fit well with the PREFER emphasis on small scale environmentally sound mining and refining.
There still is the distinct need to find investors that believe in the truth that a significant portion of America’s new wealth producing enterprises need to be directly tied to the land. For it is that natural wealth together with the American people’s constitutional inalienable rights that provided for the development of the greatest nation in all of human history. Furthermore that symbiosis is the mechanism by which we will again prosper.
Combining the precious metals with Business Ecology and placing it within a human environment in which our money has no basis in reality, it logically follows that we should again look to God’s creation for the knowledge and wisdom to again provide a mechanism to produce new wealth not only from the ground, but also to help others manage their current wealth in a means that will minimize the effects of higher taxes, currency devaluations, and inflation.
So on New Year’s Eve we began a new website called Deep Woods Moola which will function as a subsidiary adventure of PREFER Ltd. The slogan for the Deep Woods Moola website is, Innovatively Creating Sustaining Wealth. As yet there is nothing there beyond a domain name, but over time the goal is to separate The Wonder Springs Chronicle to enhance its Christian emphasis and develop Deep Woods Moola into a mechanism to address in a secular manner the challenges that now face all of humanity.
When I began this regular writing in 1999 it was under the web banner of Createleaders.org. As with Deep Woods Moola, we again established The Creation Leadership Center utilizing our old URL on New Year’s Eve. Over the years, as with many other organizations, we fully understand the potential of nature to teach the basics of leadership, integrity, humility, teamwork and many other priceless life principles. Actual training programs in the Deep Woods, gives us a perspective of all life and our place within our natural world, as well as within human culture.
The unique nature of the Biblical Creation Worldview demonstrates the diversity of all life, and the function of mankind as stewards and gardeners, as we seek to develop prosperous human communities. For only by understanding that we humans are not just part of creation, as creatures, but set apart in the image of God, to inherit his special goodness, can we truly understand the potential for Wonder Springs in not just a physical Death Valley, but more importantly our eternally spiritual Death Valley, without the grace of God offered to us through Jesus Christ.
Updated January 5, 2010, 9:30 AM
The year 2010 begins the twelfth year of publishing The Wonder Springs Chronicle or the predecessor The Chronicles of Diversity. Over that time and on this website you have free access to over two million words which are amazingly consistent in their context. Since that 1999 beginning we have seen some remarkable changes in this country and around the world.
There are those who say that the recent Great Recession is over and now heaven on earth is just a few legislative maneuvers, bureaucratic assumptions, and hopeful hype spin away. The unique position of Wonder Springs stems from a paradigm that the Natural Laws of God’s creation are Absolute Truths which governs all of man’s aspirations. If our endeavors or enterprises are going to provide long term growth in all diverse aspects, then the wisdom that we use gathered from what we can learn from God’s living reality, forces us to model our limited and simplistic struggles utilizing those Truths to find meaning and purpose in life.
This concept began in the early 1980s when I began a business management model called Business Ecology. The essentials of those simple principles and graphic illustrations are found in various places in the archives. Some of the ways we have described these concepts in addition to Business Ecology are Enterprise Symbiosis, Stupendous Change, Fractured Rapture Tales, and probably the most scientific description: Métis Phylogenesis.
During the years following the development of the Business Ecology concept, through some more technical consulting work I was given the rights to redevelop a Great Depression successful, air concentrating technology for precious metals. To that was added an environmentally sound refining process. These technologies formed a basis for a company I tried and failed to get funded during that time when all the worldly buzz related to the Internet and something called dot-com. In October of last year I was contacted by some potential mine developers I had briefly known after I had actively closed the company. They wanted to know if I was still interested in going ahead with that work now that the price of gold had exceeded $1000 per ounce.
I scraped together enough funds to reestablish the company as PREFER Ltd in the State of Washington and began to assemble infrastructure pieces that had not been utilized for probably twenty years. PREFER stands for the acrostic: Providing Resourceful Energetics For Economic Renaissance. One of the problems with the original air tables was that it did not scale beyond a piece of equipment that could process more than five tons per hour of properly crushed ore. Furthermore changes of the particle size of the desired precious metals fraction required a complete reworking of the air fluidizing screens.
Early one morning just before Christmas I awoke with an idea for a new design without the above limitations. With some sketches of this new equipment design, understood in the science of small particle physics we will begin to enrich the whole process stream as we design, build and test this new equipment. We also have obtained another client with a property that would fit well with the PREFER emphasis on small scale environmentally sound mining and refining.
There still is the distinct need to find investors that believe in the truth that a significant portion of America’s new wealth producing enterprises need to be directly tied to the land. For it is that natural wealth together with the American people’s constitutional inalienable rights that provided for the development of the greatest nation in all of human history. Furthermore that symbiosis is the mechanism by which we will again prosper.
Combining the precious metals with Business Ecology and placing it within a human environment in which our money has no basis in reality, it logically follows that we should again look to God’s creation for the knowledge and wisdom to again provide a mechanism to produce new wealth not only from the ground, but also to help others manage their current wealth in a means that will minimize the effects of higher taxes, currency devaluations, and inflation.
So on New Year’s Eve we began a new website called Deep Woods Moola which will function as a subsidiary adventure of PREFER Ltd. The slogan for the Deep Woods Moola website is, Innovatively Creating Sustaining Wealth. As yet there is nothing there beyond a domain name, but over time the goal is to separate The Wonder Springs Chronicle to enhance its Christian emphasis and develop Deep Woods Moola into a mechanism to address in a secular manner the challenges that now face all of humanity.
When I began this regular writing in 1999 it was under the web banner of Createleaders.org. As with Deep Woods Moola, we again established The Creation Leadership Center utilizing our old URL on New Year’s Eve. Over the years, as with many other organizations, we fully understand the potential of nature to teach the basics of leadership, integrity, humility, teamwork and many other priceless life principles. Actual training programs in the Deep Woods, gives us a perspective of all life and our place within our natural world, as well as within human culture.
The unique nature of the Biblical Creation Worldview demonstrates the diversity of all life, and the function of mankind as stewards and gardeners, as we seek to develop prosperous human communities. For only by understanding that we humans are not just part of creation, as creatures, but set apart in the image of God, to inherit his special goodness, can we truly understand the potential for Wonder Springs in not just a physical Death Valley, but more importantly our eternally spiritual Death Valley, without the grace of God offered to us through Jesus Christ.
The Christmas Hunt
14/December/2009 10:06
Today the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen focuses upon “Earth Journalism Awards” among other interesting topics. In efforts to provide a little “fresh insight” into this unique conference in human history the Wonder Springs Chronicle would like to post this little contribution. We don’t claim that it is journalism, nor even a good story, probably more of a simple fairy tale, concocted not by climate change skeptics, but true believers, in this continuing universal principle. It however, probably doesn’t spin this reality in a way that would find a wide audience among our Copenhagen friends.
We live in troubling times, and readers of knuckle dragging blogs such as the Wonder Springs Chronicle and other publications and programs are being told they are unenlightened, stupid, naysayers, who only believe in some fictional deity, guns, and real money. Therefore for our loyal readers please understand that this really is a tale of real fiction and worldly wisdom, which you might fully not understand. It attempts mythically to bring together for a hunting trip in the backwoods two of the most enlightened progressives of all time, namely Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and Albert (Al) Gore. It must be pointed out that these two men lived a century apart, we therefore need some license with reality to make this fictional trip happen, so we have creatively decided to have this trip begin today, December 14, 2009, but to focus upon the technology of a century ago, that would be December 14, 1909.
Our story is set in a hunting camp in Northwestern Montana, at one of President Roosevelt’s favorite hunting spots. He has been camping at the location a couple of days before Vice President Gore arrives, by horseback, sometime in the evening before our story begins.
Teddy: Good morning Al, Merry Christmas. How did you sleep?
Al: Happy Holidays Teddy. Dang, I almost froze to death, I mean the ten wool blankets you gave me to keep warm just didn’t seem to do the job. And did you realize the fire in the tent stove went out about midnight. Why didn’t you get up and feed the fire, that canvas tent was as cold as that eternal hotspot, if you catch my drift?
Teddy: Well Al, you see it is this way, I was President of these here United States and you were just a Vice President. I think that means you work for me, not the other way around. More to the point if you had not spent the whole night whining about being cold and gotten up and stoked the fire yourself, you might have gotten your blood circulating and not have been so cold. More to the point, the canvas tent, the wool blankets, and the wood stove are about as carbon neutral as you can get. I thought you believed in that sort of thing.
Al: You’re right Ted, I’m just not acclimatized to this rapid cold change from staying in five star hotels, traveling on my private jet, and my home back in Tennessee. Also you know methane flatulence is produced by the sheep that was the source of the wool, why didn’t you have some modern petroleum based sleeping bags, I’m sure I would have slept very toasty in a nice synthetic bag?
Read More...
We live in troubling times, and readers of knuckle dragging blogs such as the Wonder Springs Chronicle and other publications and programs are being told they are unenlightened, stupid, naysayers, who only believe in some fictional deity, guns, and real money. Therefore for our loyal readers please understand that this really is a tale of real fiction and worldly wisdom, which you might fully not understand. It attempts mythically to bring together for a hunting trip in the backwoods two of the most enlightened progressives of all time, namely Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and Albert (Al) Gore. It must be pointed out that these two men lived a century apart, we therefore need some license with reality to make this fictional trip happen, so we have creatively decided to have this trip begin today, December 14, 2009, but to focus upon the technology of a century ago, that would be December 14, 1909.
Our story is set in a hunting camp in Northwestern Montana, at one of President Roosevelt’s favorite hunting spots. He has been camping at the location a couple of days before Vice President Gore arrives, by horseback, sometime in the evening before our story begins.
Teddy: Good morning Al, Merry Christmas. How did you sleep?
Al: Happy Holidays Teddy. Dang, I almost froze to death, I mean the ten wool blankets you gave me to keep warm just didn’t seem to do the job. And did you realize the fire in the tent stove went out about midnight. Why didn’t you get up and feed the fire, that canvas tent was as cold as that eternal hotspot, if you catch my drift?
Teddy: Well Al, you see it is this way, I was President of these here United States and you were just a Vice President. I think that means you work for me, not the other way around. More to the point if you had not spent the whole night whining about being cold and gotten up and stoked the fire yourself, you might have gotten your blood circulating and not have been so cold. More to the point, the canvas tent, the wool blankets, and the wood stove are about as carbon neutral as you can get. I thought you believed in that sort of thing.
Al: You’re right Ted, I’m just not acclimatized to this rapid cold change from staying in five star hotels, traveling on my private jet, and my home back in Tennessee. Also you know methane flatulence is produced by the sheep that was the source of the wool, why didn’t you have some modern petroleum based sleeping bags, I’m sure I would have slept very toasty in a nice synthetic bag?
Read More...
The Advent Season
04/December/2009 12:58
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
At Wonder Springs we normally give Brute’ his day, but with the United States jobless rate declining last month to an even 10 percent, it is generally assumed that most of the MSM, or the LSM (Lame Stream Media) will be reporting that “Happy Days are Here Again.”
The reality of the so called good news is really confined to pretty much those who have had access to the government’s free (funny) monetary expansion policies. The truth is that there are many Americans and citizens in other countries around the world are facing hardships stemming from the Great Recession, that they have never experienced before. Some of them have been in that rut and somehow survived now longer than they thought possible.
The opportunity that we can gain from these life trials is that “faith, hope and love,” are unique assets of all our human personalities. They are gifts of God, given to us in unique ways, we are however much of the time to busy understand not only their unique nature, but also our own.
Their have been those, in relatively recent human history, who have tried to change these gifts of God into a force that can be manipulated by human efforts. Many times these faux conversions were attempted for lofty reasons.
Love is probably the most abused of these three. “I (heart design) something,” being the most common attempt to make the supernatural gift of God, subject to human depravity. “All you need is love” as well as “Love means you never have to say you’re sorry.” are not examples of true love, but really narcissism.
Making you healthy, wealthy, and wise through your faith, was and still is part of the reason Christianity continues to be considered ridiculous, by many people, some who have tried the to plant their seed of faith and found it bought someone a new house and corporate jet, while their faith had to make the choice between food, and utilities, while old time necessities came to look like totally vanquished dreams.
Finally, we have succeeded in turning hope into a force also. Hope in hope and we can change the world and the United States will obey also. Truthfully I have little hope that the breathing period will last all that long, but I am grateful for at least a little reprise for this Christmas season.
Therefore during the rest of this year the Wonder Springs Chronicle will focus upon how God uses our difficult circumstances to reveal His nature in our lives and how Godly faith, hope, and love, are able to sometimes overcome our circumstances, but also provide are deepest needs when we have forced to take steps beyond our understanding
C. S. Lewis has said that the greatest miracle was not in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that He was willing to become human at all.” The Christmas season is that time when most of the world celebrates that miracle. Let those of us who truly believe in that miracle take the time to share historical reasons for our faith, hope and love and the material gifts will take care of themselves.
Advent is the first period of the church year in which Christians around the world look forward to the birth of a Jewish baby who was also God incarnate. That condescending act of God has become the basis of our redemption, real Good News, and the true reason for the season.
Merry Christmas
Jerry
At Wonder Springs we normally give Brute’ his day, but with the United States jobless rate declining last month to an even 10 percent, it is generally assumed that most of the MSM, or the LSM (Lame Stream Media) will be reporting that “Happy Days are Here Again.”
The reality of the so called good news is really confined to pretty much those who have had access to the government’s free (funny) monetary expansion policies. The truth is that there are many Americans and citizens in other countries around the world are facing hardships stemming from the Great Recession, that they have never experienced before. Some of them have been in that rut and somehow survived now longer than they thought possible.
The opportunity that we can gain from these life trials is that “faith, hope and love,” are unique assets of all our human personalities. They are gifts of God, given to us in unique ways, we are however much of the time to busy understand not only their unique nature, but also our own.
Their have been those, in relatively recent human history, who have tried to change these gifts of God into a force that can be manipulated by human efforts. Many times these faux conversions were attempted for lofty reasons.
Love is probably the most abused of these three. “I (heart design) something,” being the most common attempt to make the supernatural gift of God, subject to human depravity. “All you need is love” as well as “Love means you never have to say you’re sorry.” are not examples of true love, but really narcissism.
Making you healthy, wealthy, and wise through your faith, was and still is part of the reason Christianity continues to be considered ridiculous, by many people, some who have tried the to plant their seed of faith and found it bought someone a new house and corporate jet, while their faith had to make the choice between food, and utilities, while old time necessities came to look like totally vanquished dreams.
Finally, we have succeeded in turning hope into a force also. Hope in hope and we can change the world and the United States will obey also. Truthfully I have little hope that the breathing period will last all that long, but I am grateful for at least a little reprise for this Christmas season.
Therefore during the rest of this year the Wonder Springs Chronicle will focus upon how God uses our difficult circumstances to reveal His nature in our lives and how Godly faith, hope, and love, are able to sometimes overcome our circumstances, but also provide are deepest needs when we have forced to take steps beyond our understanding
C. S. Lewis has said that the greatest miracle was not in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that He was willing to become human at all.” The Christmas season is that time when most of the world celebrates that miracle. Let those of us who truly believe in that miracle take the time to share historical reasons for our faith, hope and love and the material gifts will take care of themselves.
Advent is the first period of the church year in which Christians around the world look forward to the birth of a Jewish baby who was also God incarnate. That condescending act of God has become the basis of our redemption, real Good News, and the true reason for the season.
Merry Christmas
Jerry
Repairing the roads by forcing everyone into the ditches?
06/June/2009 10:21
Back in “America’s Tensioned Prosperity” we pointed out that the greatness of the United States has always been associated with the somewhat tensioned symbiosis between government programs, especially federal government programs, creating incentives by which enterprise innovation provides economic growth and wealth creation, pretty much through free market capital.
Since the 1970s that model has shifted dramatically towards leveraged debt consumerism, at the expense of both required government programs and sustainable wealth creation. That has shifted that historic tension to the not “fair and balanced” but to policies of the extremes.
In a recent article in the “Washington Monthly,” entitled “Introduction: The Next Frontier,” Paul Kedrosky, Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation fills in the gaps of our tensioned blog.
President Obama has taken the United States in short order to the left big government ditch of the road, from the right laissez faire ditch of the Bush Administration. However neither seemed or seems to realize that current American problems really don’t have much to do with the ditches and their current state, but rather the state of the Interstate, highway, road, path, and trail. Relying on fixing the current debt consumerism model is not going to help, no matter how much money is thrown or wasted on the ill-fated attempts.
Entrepreneurial enterprises require a garden in which financial liquidity is timely and sustainable, in a soil in which economic conditions can and will be sustained until such time new wealth can be harvested.
So far the Obama Administration has not even given lip service to this reality. Especially when this is compared to what he has spoken obtusely about Iran’s right to nuclear power. We must note new growth opportunities in nuclear power have been taken off the American agenda, along with domestic oil drilling, clean coal carbon sequestering, and low head small hydro,
Instead he has nationalized the domestic auto industry and will force it to build small cars, thereby eventually cutting new auto sales by 75% from 2007 levels, This while he attempts to institute a bungling bureaucratic bourgeoisie, that will attempt to micromanage, through cap and trade taxation, twentieth century corporate behemoths and dinosaurs. All the while true sustainable energy innovation languishes from deficit and debt burdens which surpass the totality of all human historic development.
Since the 1970s that model has shifted dramatically towards leveraged debt consumerism, at the expense of both required government programs and sustainable wealth creation. That has shifted that historic tension to the not “fair and balanced” but to policies of the extremes.
In a recent article in the “Washington Monthly,” entitled “Introduction: The Next Frontier,” Paul Kedrosky, Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation fills in the gaps of our tensioned blog.
President Obama has taken the United States in short order to the left big government ditch of the road, from the right laissez faire ditch of the Bush Administration. However neither seemed or seems to realize that current American problems really don’t have much to do with the ditches and their current state, but rather the state of the Interstate, highway, road, path, and trail. Relying on fixing the current debt consumerism model is not going to help, no matter how much money is thrown or wasted on the ill-fated attempts.
Entrepreneurial enterprises require a garden in which financial liquidity is timely and sustainable, in a soil in which economic conditions can and will be sustained until such time new wealth can be harvested.
So far the Obama Administration has not even given lip service to this reality. Especially when this is compared to what he has spoken obtusely about Iran’s right to nuclear power. We must note new growth opportunities in nuclear power have been taken off the American agenda, along with domestic oil drilling, clean coal carbon sequestering, and low head small hydro,
Instead he has nationalized the domestic auto industry and will force it to build small cars, thereby eventually cutting new auto sales by 75% from 2007 levels, This while he attempts to institute a bungling bureaucratic bourgeoisie, that will attempt to micromanage, through cap and trade taxation, twentieth century corporate behemoths and dinosaurs. All the while true sustainable energy innovation languishes from deficit and debt burdens which surpass the totality of all human historic development.
The next generation of solar cells
06/June/2009 09:17
Solar energy, especially photovoltaics is one of the leading contenders for a sustainable energy future. Because of the American emphasis on leveraged debt consumerism, which amounts to about three-forths of the United States GDP, we lag behind both Germany and Japan in developing this technology.
For the techno geeks, engineers, and green enthusiasts we offer the following MIT video featuring Tonio Buonassisi discussing the Next Generation of Solar Cells. There is also a direct link to this video timing: 1:21:25 under the Resources Tab
For the techno geeks, engineers, and green enthusiasts we offer the following MIT video featuring Tonio Buonassisi discussing the Next Generation of Solar Cells. There is also a direct link to this video timing: 1:21:25 under the Resources Tab
Signs of the times? The Spokane TEA Party
16/April/2009 13:49
Are they signs of the times, just a picture of frustration, or are they the first fruits of something much bigger than we can now understand?
On Tax Day 2009 about 2000 people came together on the south shore of the Spokane River in downtown Spokane, Washington to protest taxes, government spending, and to just vent personal frustrations. In conservative Spokane even the television media attended, even though their reports stated hundreds present, which as a decidedly lower report than the 4000 stated by organizers. This respectful and pretty much happy group, at least in the sense of protesters, joined with as many as 600 similar groups across the country and reportedly around the world.
The question remains will this TEA Party, when combined with the others, amount to something or just become a remembrance of a decent spring day in Spokane, after a record setting winter snowfall?
Protestors were pretty much of the conservative tone, but to say that these were a Republican or even Libertarian groupies is a gross simplification. Perhaps better descriptions would be Traditionalists or Populists, run of the mill American working people.
If there was a central theme in the speakers, it focused on the founding documents of the American Republic and the universal rights that these documents give to the American people, and the limitations they impose upon government at all levels. What was not apparent to those present was just how deep their views collide with the prevailing evolving enlightenment of the power structures of big government, big business, and big special interests.
The success of these TEA Party endeavors probably most closely link with the battle of the Alamo in 1936 and the original TEA Party in Boston in 1773. Both center on American Independence and individual rights, but the first TEA Party was an overt confrontation with religious ramifications. The American Revolution was a battle between human created common rights given and sustained by the Creator, contrasted with the Divine Right of Kings. King George lost.
This battle can be also seen in The Reformation, this time the battle was between common grace human rights and the Supreme Catholic Church. The Pope lost. It should be noted however that the Roman Catholic Church of the Council of Trent was and is a much more humble version of the Church of the Renaissance. That is especially true also of the British monarchy after the American Revolution.
If this truly develops as a reformation based upon Divinely given and sanctified common human rights contrasted with enlightenment evolutionary egalitarianism, the TEA Parties will be remembered as a date inline also with Luther’s 95 Thesis. If God is for us who can be against us?
This vision also was really the dominate empowerment behind the American Revolution, even though many of the Founding Fathers were more Deists rather than committed Christians. This allowed for a uniquely American Religious freedom and hence common public freedom. Baptists wanted to be Baptists, and not Presbyterians, and neither wanted to be Congregationalists. The Papists enjoyed just being on the sidelines.
The Reformation and the American Revolution were of a much different scale than the one faced by these twenty-first century TEA Parties. Those two could be envisioned as a couple of pimples on the back side of an elephant. However these potential changes are on a similar scale to a number of common nation recreations of the last century, the fall of the Soviet Union being the most homologous. This American version however, has a much different free expressive heritage than Mother Russia.
If this recreation scenario is true we will begin to see pretty much ex nihilo creation of gumption in those selected to be leaders in this developing movement. For now we can look at some pictures of these Spokane signs of change.
The Greenspan Bug Curve
06/April/2009 10:32
By Jerry Bannon
In “The Prosperity Myth” on March 23rd we showed the exponential growth relationships between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Federal Reserve Monetary Base. As we pointed out in that report, virtually all this exponential growth took place under the administration of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve. It also just so happens that Alan saw fit to retire at the zenith of his proclaimed monetary genius in February 2006.
Is it all that difficult to see, that all this prosperity, we all became so accustomed, began to fall apart shortly thereafter?
Mr. Greenspan was replaced with Ben Bernanke, considered by many the leading expert on the Great Depression. Bernanke, shares with many other economists, the Great Depression was caused by stock market speculators and tight money. But is that the whole or real story?
Today in the Wall Street Journal in an article entitled “From Bubble to Depression?” Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, from empirical evidence, make a pretty strong case that the Great Depression was caused by a similar housing bubble that began to collapse in this country later in 2006.
I have little formal training in economics, about the same in finance. What I do have however is a very diverse training in natural ecology. Natural ecology is governed by natural laws that can be verified by direct observational science. It is my contention that these same natural laws govern human enterprise. As with the results of all science, you may disagree with that hypothesis, but that disagreement or wishful thinking (from my perspective) is not going to change reality.
In the garden of God, growth takes place via two curve models, linear and exponential. Linear can proceed over long periods of time, I have called that the Toil Growth Curve. Exponential growth is of much shorter duration, which I have called the Bug Growth Curve, growth occurs for a season and then dies.
Growth is really quite easy to manage, either in the linear or exponential phases. It really gets difficult however once the zenith is reached and things begin the natural decline, many times resulting in death, death of the individual or the population.
Some ecosystems reach a climax state, which is really just a more specific term for sustainability. These climax communities can exist in harmony with their environment for long periods, like centuries, or even millennia.
So far all efforts to manage the housing bubble by both the Bush and Obama Administrations have focused exclusively on the hypothesis that loose money and more regulation will fix the problem. Disregarding the fact that we are not playing with reality with real wealth, but highly leveraged debt money, there is absolutely no emphasis other than restoring bug economic growth, whatever it may cost.
It is long past the time when we should have looked at the cost — benefit ratio of this charade. Toil produces long term sustainable growth. In economic growth this can only occur in a climate where there are known principles by which to build. So far efforts to resurrect the dead Greenspan Bug Curve have failed. In this case the impossible is really impossible.
The Europeans understand that, so does much of Latin America and Africa. Even the communist government of China has criticized America’s current monetary policy. What the Obama Administration has yet to learn is “Change you can believe in” must be anchored to a real natural world, not some shining vision of an unobtainable present utopia.
In “The Prosperity Myth” on March 23rd we showed the exponential growth relationships between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Federal Reserve Monetary Base. As we pointed out in that report, virtually all this exponential growth took place under the administration of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve. It also just so happens that Alan saw fit to retire at the zenith of his proclaimed monetary genius in February 2006.
Is it all that difficult to see, that all this prosperity, we all became so accustomed, began to fall apart shortly thereafter?
Mr. Greenspan was replaced with Ben Bernanke, considered by many the leading expert on the Great Depression. Bernanke, shares with many other economists, the Great Depression was caused by stock market speculators and tight money. But is that the whole or real story?
Today in the Wall Street Journal in an article entitled “From Bubble to Depression?” Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, from empirical evidence, make a pretty strong case that the Great Depression was caused by a similar housing bubble that began to collapse in this country later in 2006.
I have little formal training in economics, about the same in finance. What I do have however is a very diverse training in natural ecology. Natural ecology is governed by natural laws that can be verified by direct observational science. It is my contention that these same natural laws govern human enterprise. As with the results of all science, you may disagree with that hypothesis, but that disagreement or wishful thinking (from my perspective) is not going to change reality.
In the garden of God, growth takes place via two curve models, linear and exponential. Linear can proceed over long periods of time, I have called that the Toil Growth Curve. Exponential growth is of much shorter duration, which I have called the Bug Growth Curve, growth occurs for a season and then dies.
Growth is really quite easy to manage, either in the linear or exponential phases. It really gets difficult however once the zenith is reached and things begin the natural decline, many times resulting in death, death of the individual or the population.
Some ecosystems reach a climax state, which is really just a more specific term for sustainability. These climax communities can exist in harmony with their environment for long periods, like centuries, or even millennia.
So far all efforts to manage the housing bubble by both the Bush and Obama Administrations have focused exclusively on the hypothesis that loose money and more regulation will fix the problem. Disregarding the fact that we are not playing with reality with real wealth, but highly leveraged debt money, there is absolutely no emphasis other than restoring bug economic growth, whatever it may cost.
It is long past the time when we should have looked at the cost — benefit ratio of this charade. Toil produces long term sustainable growth. In economic growth this can only occur in a climate where there are known principles by which to build. So far efforts to resurrect the dead Greenspan Bug Curve have failed. In this case the impossible is really impossible.
The Europeans understand that, so does much of Latin America and Africa. Even the communist government of China has criticized America’s current monetary policy. What the Obama Administration has yet to learn is “Change you can believe in” must be anchored to a real natural world, not some shining vision of an unobtainable present utopia.
Special Report - The Prosperity Myth
23/March/2009 12:01
Special Report – The Prosperity Myth
The only thing we have to fear is reality itself. That reality is that much of America’s and the world’s recent wealth was based solely upon a Prosperity Myth. Most people are now afraid to look at reality. Is that stress, fear, or lack of mature coping skills?
The psychoanalysis definition of narcissism is: Self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder.
What is the foundation of your life? For most people today that foundation is money. “Show me the money,” is the cultural ethic for today’s world. Reverence for God is where your created reality truly finds ultimate meaning, flowing from your created past, through the present, and into eternity. However pretty much all religious institutions now are based on a paradigm, not of amazing grace, but “give to get.”
Pretty much everyone hopes for security, especially future security. However, now seems to be all we have, the future has become an illusion, because the Federal Government is aggressively playing with the future in the hopes of maintaining a myth of sustainable prosperity.
Last week I was reading an article, which used as an illustration the following Monetary Base graphic from the Federal Reserve. That article focused upon the tremendous gain in the Monetary Base in the very recent past. What I found quite interesting was the distinct similarity between this illustration and the data I used two weeks ago in a weekly column, “Trilogy – The Dow’s Hidden Reality.”
Federal Reserve Monetary Base
Searching for a meaningful representation of that Dow data, I was able to find this chart from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch. Except for that brief peak centered around the year 2000 the graphs are pretty much the same. Also interesting is the graph on the trading volume. That pretty much represents you trying to find financial security by investing your then present prosperity in Wall Street, either by various retirement mechanisms, or as a direct investor. Notice that Wall Street investing by normal folks was not normal at all until the market really began to take off exponentially in the late 1990s.
Since all my statistics books are in storage, I began to wonder just how tight the data from the Fed’s Monetary Base and the Dow Average correlated. So Sunday afternoon for every five years from 1970 through 2005 I estimated both the average yearly value for the Dow and the Monetary Base and incorporated those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. On that data I ran a correlation coefficient (CORREL) and found a value of 0.96.
A number that high is very significant when you consider that both the Monetary Base data and the Dow level are supposedly somewhat financial independent fruits. What that really means is that they are not independent at all. A controlled or managed increase in the monetary base causes a strongly related increase in the Dow, or your perceived future wealth. That is all great if the model and the data relate to the real world. If it does not that means you are being taken, cheated, believing a lie, or being just passive, in the best interpretations. Taken, as a worst case, there is now a dude named Bernie Madoff doing time for a similar scheme for basically comparison chump change.
In that “Dow’s Hidden Reality” portion of our recent article we made the case that true real increases in wealth are linear functions. What that means is if you look at the Dow increasing value graph above and draw a straight line from the 1970s through the early 1980s that line will intersect the right axis of the graph somewhere between a Dow of 2000 – 4000 depending how optimistic you choose to be. As we related in that article this increasing wealth relates somewhat directly to the linear growth of “GDP with the money backed out.” This is quite similar to what you would see in a sustainable natural system.
Treasury Secretary Geithner today spelled out the specifics of his bank rescue package, which was first announced with great fanfare on February tenth. So now a month and some change later, we have some details that will save Wall Street and big financial investment opportunities. All those toxic assets, actually all assets, currently have some toxic components related to implied wealth compared to real wealth. As we throw another trillion at the problem, how can you, in the same asset, separate the good portion from the bad? Mark to market accounting is not up to that task and actually may become a hindrance.
But the biggest question still remains, is the model of exponential Wall Street growth still viable? Just trust in the ever-changing parameters of the hope of wishful thinking. We a told by all the powers who are in control, if we just create enough debt it will all work out fine.
Secretary Geithner is still short some-teen Assistant Secretaries at Treasury. So the question remains who designed this plan? Evidence so far indicates that the secretary is pretty much a loan lone ranger when it comes to being a competent manager. In stupendous change times like this the United States and the world should demand a competent and strong Treasury leader. But where would you find someone not tied to the Wall Street Prosperity Myth?
However, this angst was greatly calmed last week by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke purchasing three hundred billion of securities from the Treasury to become assets for the Fed. Of course he used basically debt securities to purchase these securities. But at least he still believes in the model he inherited from Alan Greenspan that got us into this mess to begin with. This move essentially resulted in a dollar devaluation compared to the Euro of about seven percent and a rise of commodities especially gold and oil.
The President for his part that evening told some jokes on late night television. This week he moves the gig to a primetime news conference. So if we choose to watch we will see his teleprompter roll lines from a version of Hamlet, updated into radical Chicago political euphemisms.
Then on Friday the House of Representatives voted for a 90% tax on Executive Bonuses. That outrage, because they were all so serious, seems to make all the above look like genuine applied genius.
The real problem facing the country and the world is that all these attempts to bailout Wall Street misses the true wealth of the United States and that is the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Furthermore this period of Wall Street supremacy destroyed the capital infrastructure required to rapidly fund these opportunities for true new sustainable enterprise growth. The only way this change will come is when those who still have some real wealth remaining, begin investing in true wealth creation at the grassroots level. True growth will on occur by promoting a Prosperity Myth debt funded by financial and governmental dinosaurs.
The only thing we have to fear is reality itself. That reality is that much of America’s and the world’s recent wealth was based solely upon a Prosperity Myth. Most people are now afraid to look at reality. Is that stress, fear, or lack of mature coping skills?
The psychoanalysis definition of narcissism is: Self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder.
What is the foundation of your life? For most people today that foundation is money. “Show me the money,” is the cultural ethic for today’s world. Reverence for God is where your created reality truly finds ultimate meaning, flowing from your created past, through the present, and into eternity. However pretty much all religious institutions now are based on a paradigm, not of amazing grace, but “give to get.”
Pretty much everyone hopes for security, especially future security. However, now seems to be all we have, the future has become an illusion, because the Federal Government is aggressively playing with the future in the hopes of maintaining a myth of sustainable prosperity.
Last week I was reading an article, which used as an illustration the following Monetary Base graphic from the Federal Reserve. That article focused upon the tremendous gain in the Monetary Base in the very recent past. What I found quite interesting was the distinct similarity between this illustration and the data I used two weeks ago in a weekly column, “Trilogy – The Dow’s Hidden Reality.”
Federal Reserve Monetary Base
Searching for a meaningful representation of that Dow data, I was able to find this chart from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch. Except for that brief peak centered around the year 2000 the graphs are pretty much the same. Also interesting is the graph on the trading volume. That pretty much represents you trying to find financial security by investing your then present prosperity in Wall Street, either by various retirement mechanisms, or as a direct investor. Notice that Wall Street investing by normal folks was not normal at all until the market really began to take off exponentially in the late 1990s.
Since all my statistics books are in storage, I began to wonder just how tight the data from the Fed’s Monetary Base and the Dow Average correlated. So Sunday afternoon for every five years from 1970 through 2005 I estimated both the average yearly value for the Dow and the Monetary Base and incorporated those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. On that data I ran a correlation coefficient (CORREL) and found a value of 0.96.
A number that high is very significant when you consider that both the Monetary Base data and the Dow level are supposedly somewhat financial independent fruits. What that really means is that they are not independent at all. A controlled or managed increase in the monetary base causes a strongly related increase in the Dow, or your perceived future wealth. That is all great if the model and the data relate to the real world. If it does not that means you are being taken, cheated, believing a lie, or being just passive, in the best interpretations. Taken, as a worst case, there is now a dude named Bernie Madoff doing time for a similar scheme for basically comparison chump change.
In that “Dow’s Hidden Reality” portion of our recent article we made the case that true real increases in wealth are linear functions. What that means is if you look at the Dow increasing value graph above and draw a straight line from the 1970s through the early 1980s that line will intersect the right axis of the graph somewhere between a Dow of 2000 – 4000 depending how optimistic you choose to be. As we related in that article this increasing wealth relates somewhat directly to the linear growth of “GDP with the money backed out.” This is quite similar to what you would see in a sustainable natural system.
Treasury Secretary Geithner today spelled out the specifics of his bank rescue package, which was first announced with great fanfare on February tenth. So now a month and some change later, we have some details that will save Wall Street and big financial investment opportunities. All those toxic assets, actually all assets, currently have some toxic components related to implied wealth compared to real wealth. As we throw another trillion at the problem, how can you, in the same asset, separate the good portion from the bad? Mark to market accounting is not up to that task and actually may become a hindrance.
But the biggest question still remains, is the model of exponential Wall Street growth still viable? Just trust in the ever-changing parameters of the hope of wishful thinking. We a told by all the powers who are in control, if we just create enough debt it will all work out fine.
Secretary Geithner is still short some-teen Assistant Secretaries at Treasury. So the question remains who designed this plan? Evidence so far indicates that the secretary is pretty much a loan lone ranger when it comes to being a competent manager. In stupendous change times like this the United States and the world should demand a competent and strong Treasury leader. But where would you find someone not tied to the Wall Street Prosperity Myth?
However, this angst was greatly calmed last week by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke purchasing three hundred billion of securities from the Treasury to become assets for the Fed. Of course he used basically debt securities to purchase these securities. But at least he still believes in the model he inherited from Alan Greenspan that got us into this mess to begin with. This move essentially resulted in a dollar devaluation compared to the Euro of about seven percent and a rise of commodities especially gold and oil.
The President for his part that evening told some jokes on late night television. This week he moves the gig to a primetime news conference. So if we choose to watch we will see his teleprompter roll lines from a version of Hamlet, updated into radical Chicago political euphemisms.
Then on Friday the House of Representatives voted for a 90% tax on Executive Bonuses. That outrage, because they were all so serious, seems to make all the above look like genuine applied genius.
The real problem facing the country and the world is that all these attempts to bailout Wall Street misses the true wealth of the United States and that is the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Furthermore this period of Wall Street supremacy destroyed the capital infrastructure required to rapidly fund these opportunities for true new sustainable enterprise growth. The only way this change will come is when those who still have some real wealth remaining, begin investing in true wealth creation at the grassroots level. True growth will on occur by promoting a Prosperity Myth debt funded by financial and governmental dinosaurs.
Globalism’s entropy unmasked
08/October/2008 10:00
Last week we dealt somewhat with the religious, or lack of religious underpinning of the world’s current financial catastrophe. This week we turn are attention to specific observations of the continuing demise of global capitalism as the repercussions of energy and mortgage profiteering spreads around the globe.
Friday, American’s political leadership finally adopted a bailout plan, which probably was somewhat better than the original first proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson a couple of weeks ago. Having said that, any bailout can only be looked at as the least destructive measure, among the alternatives proposed, at least in the short term.
As we are seeing this week continued Treasury and Fed moves show that $700 billion and related expenses are just American band-aids and aspirin as this crisis of monetary entropy grows. On Tuesday the Dow fell another 500 points, and it has been reported by the Associated Press that retirement accounts have lost over $2 trillion in the last 15 months.
This week the bailouts are spreading to Europe. Ireland was the first EU country last week to place government guarantees on bank deposits. This week that fever is spreading to the continent as other countries attempt to enact similar measures within their own national entities.
It seems that a unified attempt to quell this continuing monetary problem is for now taking a back seat to national interests. Whether that will work reminds one of the similar problems in the American Congress to enact bailout legislation. Political leaders around the world have become leading indicators to just how much all leadership is out of touch with the current crisis.
Read More...
Friday, American’s political leadership finally adopted a bailout plan, which probably was somewhat better than the original first proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson a couple of weeks ago. Having said that, any bailout can only be looked at as the least destructive measure, among the alternatives proposed, at least in the short term.
As we are seeing this week continued Treasury and Fed moves show that $700 billion and related expenses are just American band-aids and aspirin as this crisis of monetary entropy grows. On Tuesday the Dow fell another 500 points, and it has been reported by the Associated Press that retirement accounts have lost over $2 trillion in the last 15 months.
This week the bailouts are spreading to Europe. Ireland was the first EU country last week to place government guarantees on bank deposits. This week that fever is spreading to the continent as other countries attempt to enact similar measures within their own national entities.
It seems that a unified attempt to quell this continuing monetary problem is for now taking a back seat to national interests. Whether that will work reminds one of the similar problems in the American Congress to enact bailout legislation. Political leaders around the world have become leading indicators to just how much all leadership is out of touch with the current crisis.
Read More...
Special Report - Environmental Bible published by USEPA
21/July/2008 11:04
by Jerry Bannon
In order to have a viable religion you first need a holy book. I was too busy to realize that when writing about the Gegwcatsf (Pronounced Jeg-wa-catsf) Revival last week, that they already had a holy book written by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, with the appropriate unique title for such a document simply called a ANPR. The longer title is, “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act.”
Like many other Proposed Rules for the Federal Government it too was published on a midsummer Friday when it would not gain any scrutiny from anyone until much later. The only news I heard was that President Bush had issued the report and had not endorsed the proposed regulations. This was spun in the now too typical media way of inferring, “we all know the President is out of touch with everything and this is just another instance.”
These rules are to begin to take effect without any legislative approval 120 days after the publishing date. This of course is a week after we elect the new President. In the meantime all media attention will focus on the elections. Then with a new President these regulations will begin to destroy western civilization in a way no external terrorist could begin to imagine.
Why would, or could, this 589-page document end western civilization? Because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2006, found that greenhouse gases were pollutants and covered by the United States Clean Air Act.
These gases include not only, carbon dioxide, but also livestock flatulence and other methane sources, ozone, and water vapor, I could not find that definition within the report, but within the Supreme Court decision, it mentions only carbon dioxide by name as one of four such gases, which the EPA may regulate. However absence any other definition we cannot assume for now that these are the only gases that may be regulated.
A search of the ANRP lists other materials as greenhouse gases or aerosols, which may have “climatic effects” such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) halons (which is any compound containing a halogen, such as chlorides, bromides and iodides), and black carbon.
Therefore it can be assumed that if it is found in the air and maybe caused by some type of human activity, it is a greenhouse gas. Interesting the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor, however compared to the world’s water vapor total, human activity is not considered significant by the report, at least for now.
Read More...
In order to have a viable religion you first need a holy book. I was too busy to realize that when writing about the Gegwcatsf (Pronounced Jeg-wa-catsf) Revival last week, that they already had a holy book written by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, with the appropriate unique title for such a document simply called a ANPR. The longer title is, “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act.”
Like many other Proposed Rules for the Federal Government it too was published on a midsummer Friday when it would not gain any scrutiny from anyone until much later. The only news I heard was that President Bush had issued the report and had not endorsed the proposed regulations. This was spun in the now too typical media way of inferring, “we all know the President is out of touch with everything and this is just another instance.”
These rules are to begin to take effect without any legislative approval 120 days after the publishing date. This of course is a week after we elect the new President. In the meantime all media attention will focus on the elections. Then with a new President these regulations will begin to destroy western civilization in a way no external terrorist could begin to imagine.
Why would, or could, this 589-page document end western civilization? Because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2006, found that greenhouse gases were pollutants and covered by the United States Clean Air Act.
These gases include not only, carbon dioxide, but also livestock flatulence and other methane sources, ozone, and water vapor, I could not find that definition within the report, but within the Supreme Court decision, it mentions only carbon dioxide by name as one of four such gases, which the EPA may regulate. However absence any other definition we cannot assume for now that these are the only gases that may be regulated.
A search of the ANRP lists other materials as greenhouse gases or aerosols, which may have “climatic effects” such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) halons (which is any compound containing a halogen, such as chlorides, bromides and iodides), and black carbon.
Therefore it can be assumed that if it is found in the air and maybe caused by some type of human activity, it is a greenhouse gas. Interesting the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor, however compared to the world’s water vapor total, human activity is not considered significant by the report, at least for now.
Read More...