Investing in a Dry Hole

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
— Romans 12:2 (ESV)

Looking at it optimistically, we sure have been learning some important lessons in this early decade plus of the twenty-first century. Two twentieth century strategic lesson failures have been booked, one more to go. And actually the third is just an anabolic steroid witch’s brew of the first two.

In alphabetical order, we have come to realize that crony Industrial Age crapitalism, with humongous global corporations, and bureaucratic governments; hiring overpaid and over-benefited workers really aren’t and can’t provide engines of continuing economic growth.

We also have learned that economic Keynesianism, to create consumer demand through the multiplier effects of massive deficit spending, really provides only very short-term demonstrable stimulus to the economy. One thing it does do however, is greatly increase the national debt to totally unsustainable levels.

Finally, the tutorial yet to be apprehended, the bipolar ten thousand pound gorilla in the room, is when you combine Industrial Age crapitalism with military Keynesianism you end up with a military industrial complex that provides the physical bases for a type of imperialism that consumes more financial resources than basically the rest of the world’s national defense budgets combined.

When it comes to Acts of Man, defense of our American way of life always seems to float to the top. The problem is that the scum is never removed and eventually ends up spoiling the whole vat. So it is with our military-industrial-Keynesian-complex; all components are colluding together. Most recently we needed to fight a “War on Terror” to protect our supply lines for the stuff we need to consume to keep the economy moving onward and upward to the future shining city.

Furthermore when you add together all the national defense related expenditures from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, classified and off budget expenditures of one type or another, there is a strong indication that we may be spending ten percent of GDP, to be the world’s last superpower, nation builder, policeman; attempting to maintain the shining military garrison on the hill—everywhere.

The solution is really quite simple, just like the British systematically dismantled Hail Britannia after World War II, and the Soviet Union wisely did the same a half a century later; the United States of America, must follow in these wise governance footsteps, or confront the reality of total national economic collapse.

Consumption — Creation: Part 1; History to the Present

17/August/2011 07:00

Volume 13, Issue 34

You can’t know where you are headed, if you don’t know where you are, and where you have come from.
— Anonymous

How about one man’s brief description of that time continuum reality. In reference to the above quotation, we are all free, actually required by our humanness, to construct our own personal reality worldview.

Mine starts with God miraculously creating the heavens and the earth, not all that long ago. A global flood and a following ice age with resultant massive alluvial deposits extensively reworked this creation.

Mankind can make minor improvements upon this creation to allow for the development of civilization and cultures.

Capitalism, as it grew out of a Scottish-English-American response to the Age of Discovery, was essentially the most viable of those natural creative opportunities for mankind to improve human culture by creating real diverse wealth-producing enterprises, with accompanying freedoms, including the freedom from want.

With the rise of material evolutionary thought and the closing of the physical frontier, mankind believed that we could, and needed to, come up with a process to improve upon natural capitalism, so that human societies and cultures could continue to develop unchecked by physical limitations imposed by natural law.

In the twentieth century, a number of these improvements were tested; communism, socialism, national socialism, fascism, laissez faire markets, crony crapitalism (sic), material stateism, liberal progressivism, to name a few.

Once the concept of money was divorced from its requirement to function solely as a medium of exchange for goods and services, and without any ties to the real world, except as a means to facilitate global trade, in the early twenty-first century money evolved or morphed into a global deistic cancer.

In order to appease this behemoth god, nations states of the world are now sacrificing their civilizations and their cultures, on the altar of austerity and deleveraging; all the while money continues to grow and consume the hopes of humans, through economic bubbles and following bursting busts.

Yet when you look at it seriously, these events are nothing more than primitive paganish sacrifices to the gods of the dark mysteries of natural law; deep things the priests of evolving enlightened understanding can no longer interpret or discern.

Hence humanity has reached the limit of creative abilities within the closed system of atheistic materialism.

This is where we are. Now where are we headed?

Reality Check

10/August/2011 08:00

Volume 13, Issue 33

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When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.
— P.J. O’Rourke

It’s the middle of summer in the Pacific Northwest so the old adage about “keep your powder dry” is not all that difficult. But with the way things have been unfolding over the last week or so, I am reminded of our “5—Gs” God, Gold, Grub, Gumption and Guns.

Last week we added a little detail to our proposal that Federal spending should be cut to 14 percent of GDP over ten years and healthcare spending to 12 percent; with the first installment being the institution of national catastrophic illness coverage, that would be funded by a percentage of Federal tax revenues, probably administered by the individual states.

The reason for these proposals, as seems obvious to anyone outside the American political class, is that U. S. Federal spending is going to have to decrease much more rapidly and much more deeply than anyone in Washington currently believes is necessary. The best I have heard from conservative Republicans is reductions to 18 percent of GDP; and so far Democrats have said a lot of things, but none of them seem to apply to any type of spending curtailment, or to the real world in which we live.

It is not that I am such an uber-libertarian, or a libertarian at all, but rather when you look at history, we are falling in line with all the former greats. There are multitudes of examples, but when you look at the world seriously, European countries are basically nation states formed out of the former Roman Empire.

The current European Union is basically an Act of Man to recreate that behemoth, with a little ancient Babylonian mysticism thrown in. Well, they seem to have made it through a decade, and even with some very serious financial restructuring, the Eurozone may become one of history’s poorest big experiments in human governance, led to destruction by modern Italy and Rome being to big to save.

RE-words: Reprehensible, Repugnant and Reactionary

03/August/2011 07:50

Volume 13, Issue 32

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Your Fired! — Donald Trump

While I have never mentioned this before, the most interesting concept of the current United States morass is that it is totally focused upon the Federal government. No matter ones’ personal political persuasion, the savior, or the satan, or any personality in between—is totally about what happens in Washington DC.

There are fifty states that are supposed to be United; today they do nothing but take orders from the Federal government, and of course they also come for a handout to fund local initiatives, which should really be financed by the natives who reap the benefits.

If you truly look at what has and is happening with the closing of the physical frontier and the winding down of the specialization of the Industrial Age; every institution—private and public, employed individual—either privately or publicly, and even the so-called wild critters, look to Washington for direction, subsistence, or survival.

Gratefully in late 2007 it all began to unravel, everyone took a financial haircut, and a few of those people began to look at what is really happening. Sadly, that is a very few, and the rest either are hoping for the past to return, or they are too afraid to look seriously at the present and developing world to be of any positive value.

Into that world of rapid stupendous change, not only in the United States, but also around the world, in the last six months our legislative and executive branches of the Federal government have accomplished, or hope to have accomplished, one very minor thing, that is to raise the debt limit borrowing ability of the Federal money-spending machine another $2.4 trillion for maybe a couple of years.

Looking at reality in that light, all the giddy, childish talk about changing the atmosphere in the nation’s capital is just that, giddy, immature childish bloviating, which should be more maturely described as: reprehensible, repugnant and reactionary.

Following directly the debt-limit farce, does anyone think that the United States Federal Government is functional anymore?

REsourcefulness

27/July/2011 08:23

Volume 13, Issue 31

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Before you can get your physics right; you need to get your metaphysics in order.
— Anonymous apothegm

Since the closing of the physical frontier about a century ago, we have been attempting to create a new world order based upon faulty metaphysics. On the world stage we saw the communist Bolshevik revolution in Russia, with a simultaneous rise of progressive-socialism, lite and heavy brews, in the United States and Europe. To counter these collectivist philosophies we have seen a developing tension from libertarianism that can border on individual and collective anarchy.

If you look at what seems to be the current debt-limit — deficit-spending crisis in the United States, we see two different metaphysical systems trying to make the collapsing nation function again as it did, at least we thought it did, a generation ago.

Entropy is a stern master, because it sort of defeats you before you understand that anything is wrong. That makes a similar axiom, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” really a metaphor to “continue kicking the can down the road” one more time, until the road drops off a cliff. We are currently at the brink of that cliff and solving the debt-limit — deficit-spending debacle is really just a minor storm of a much more serious metaphysical conundrum.

So we look for solutions in what we thought worked in the past, hoping that trying these old things will change the present, and the future. In that illumination we still see the desire in the United States, in one camp to redo the New Deal, this time on steroids; in the other faction, to bring back the Reagan Revolution, this time replacing Star Wars, with faux-colonial nation building and-or libertarian latitudes.

“It’s all about jobs, stupid!”

Forrest Gump, pretty much summed it all up with that famous quotation: “Stupid is; as stupid does!”

There has been more than enough stupid to go around, for quite a while now. Jobs were the thing in the Industrial Age, when a job was really just a specialization cog in a material, money making machine; but once the metaphysics of materialism cease to function as they once did, all the attempting to game the old physics, is not going to change the new reality.

REflections

20/July/2011 09:00

Volume 13, Issue 30

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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
— Wendell Berry

In C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” Aslan, the Great Lion, serving in the typology of Jesus Christ, mentions often the “Deep magic before the dawn of time.” If we humans think of creation at all, we seldom put it into the context of the truly unknowable. Even more to point, we never think in such terms about our world today. We are the masters of our own destiny, creators of our own world, and just because we still have a few evolutionary kinks to work out, without any help from some mythical figure, we will eventually get it right.

However, if we were not so self-righteously arrogant and presumptuous, we should be readily able to discern, that Aslan’s deep magic did not end with the creation of the world, but still is the force that maintains the world in such order that life on earth continues to be possible. Natural law, ordering the physical known and unknowns such as dark matter, flows like a river, towards an eternal ocean, where this magical unknown will become part of our understanding of reality.

If this is true, in times like this, perhaps wisdom begins with the reality that we should pray more, boast and pontificate less. Texas Governor Rick Perry has gotten all sort of secular distain for proposing, something quite similar to this, as the beginning of the transcendent solution to what ails the nation, and also our world.

Watching the Internet traffic to the Wonder Springs Chronicle you can see a definite drop off in site visitors when some part of an article focuses on some spiritual attribute such as God’s grace or faith as a means to bring clarity to our current problems.

With that in mind I figured I might as well get the God stuff out front at the beginning, because this week that is pretty much the context. When you look at the world, in the light of faith in God and the justification provided by the grace of God alone, you see that it is not Lewis’ Mere Christianity, but the Christian religion that is not that much different than Al Gore’s quest to save the world from global warming. It is all about keeping the law, our efforts to become gods, and really nothing about God becoming human flesh and by grace alone, becoming the propitiatory sacrifice of all human sin.

We are not going to save ourselves eternally, and our simple minded solutions to this current mess are just going to continue to provide more unintended consequences to our bimodal solutions; we are not going to fix this predicament without realizing, that, just as Wendell Berry says, “Nature (natural law) is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

No Skin In The Game XIV

13/July/2011 09:34

Volume 13, Issue 29

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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
— Henry David Thoreau

Finally the finale!

This week we will briefly discuss some points that need to be enlarged further, but it seems that many of these need to be developed on their own merit, shall we say as “New True Skin In The Game” realities.

But for the grace of God alone, I began this series stating that I have no skin in the current economic game. This current dithering and dinking with that old closed game of debt driven consumerism has now put most people into lifeboats, trying to save what they can, as the financial ship sinks. As of this writing it looks like the politicians in Washington DC, haven’t a clue about what is happening in the real world. They will propose to enact this, or cut that, or just continue another bimodal theory, and forego the unintended consequences; just because they believe their actions will cause no unintended consequences!

Way back in the Reagan Revolution, we found out that the bimodal Laffer Curve was the cure for the bimodal high progressive tax rates. So we replaced tax avoidance investment schemes, with Wall Street investment schemes and guess what? In our complex money economy, with no true exponential wealth creating inputs, a zero sum game, trickle down economics—didn’t.

Never mind the Voodoo Economics, or some other evolving economic plan to save the world, we can just make sure real estate increases more rapidly that inflation, forever and ever. Amen!

How to get your skin in the new game!

The Industrial Age game makes bankers happy because they get their compound interest; no matter what happens to nation states, or the people groups that they represent.

The game that makes the people happy is the opportunity to pursuit their uniqueness, and failing that, they want to be well compensated temporally (past, present and future) for their opportunities the nation states and their colluding economic partners have wasted.

In the middle of all this turmoil is the nation state, and no matter its form of government, has done its best to prove last week’s Edmund Burke’s axiom: “Great empires and little minds go ill together.”

No Skin In The Game XIII

06/July/2011 08:14

Volume 13, Issue 28

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Great empires and little minds go ill together. — Edmund Burke

NEWS FLASH: The New World Order is dead, long live the New World Disorder; or put in a more user-friendly fashion, the continuing economic prosperity offered by evolving collective material economics met its demise because it failed to recognize and adapt to the real world opportunities that its technology created. In down home country terms, the dinosaurs ate all the grass and then starved to death. Now they are in the process of being replaced with cows and horses, sheep and alpacas, gardens and orchards, vineyards and breweries.

NEWS FLASH: Investors in the New World Order, by the Industrial Age definition, are not going to save this country or the world economy. They were really just specialized financial liquidity conduits, or irrigation canals, to crony capitalist dinosaurs, maintained through bureaucratic government intervention and regulations. Investors, as individuals, will have the opportunity to do good things in the New World Disorder, by the Individual Age definition, as they create true wealth through the exegesis of natural law, rather than the collective eisegesis of the twentieth century.

What in the world is he writing about?

Simply a new age in which the focus of human activity will be toward creating individual wealth, essentially within the economic definition of consumer services, not with flipping burger wages, but with the development and capitalization of frontier niches, of individual self sufficiency and the desire to live simply and make the world a better place for those who come after. That, was after all, the true American Dream that made the United States the most prosperous and freedom loving nation in all history.

Interestingly, since this above definition of the American Dream is common to all humanity, as the twentieth century dinosaurs disappear, this provides further opportunities for developing natural markets in the rest of the world.

Furthermore, many, if not most of the educational institutions in foreign countries, especially in the third or developing world, are based upon a multifaceted European educational model and not the atheistic elitist specialization model of pseudo-science psychologists John Dewey and B. F. Skinner. Consequently it is not as difficult for these foreigners to think for themselves, or to use an over processed metaphor “outside the box.”

No Skin In The Game XI

22/June/2011 08:15

Volume 13, Issue 26

Years ago I bought a John Denver live concert download. Some place, towards the end of the concert, as he was introducing one of the songs, you could sense the audience tension about something he was about to do; to which he responded, “This is my show!”

I had planned to wrap up this no skin series in the next couple of weeks, this week dealing with the specifics of how a new entrepreneur culture might be established in America, followed up with a final week of putting that culture into a new economic worldview, using both natural law and more traditional economic reporting. But some things happened last week, out there in the decline of the American dream; that really hacked me off; so this week we will deal with that situation, after all this is my show. That also means that the American economic problem is probably much more serious than I previously contemplated; hence we will shoot for winding this up in fourteen episodes.

First however, after my visit last week from a little purple dinosaur named Barney, I received an email from him later in the week that included the Barney Law of Economic Consequences:

The Barney Law: The positive aggregate cultural result of all economic dinosaur and related troglodyte dinking and dithering is always less than the square root of the sum of the unintended consequences of the best economic models.

When you stop to think about it seriously, the happenings that so upset me, do follow The Barney Law perfectly, and in proper contemporary context, the dinosaurs and their troglodyte politician flunkies seriously think they are doing the right thing.

No Skin In The Game X

15/June/2011 09:30

Volume 13, Issue 25

Monday, about midmorning there was a knock on my door. Opening the door, at first I didn’t see anyone; then I felt this tugging on my pant leg, when I looked down I amazingly saw what looked like a kid’s little stuffed purple dinosaur:

“Hi, my name is Barney and I am really miffed, because I am supposed to be the only real dinosaur in existence at this time, and not only do those financial dinosaurs and behemoths get more adult attention than I do, but their fossilized money rackets are cutting seriously into my sales.

“How can a little guy make any money, when those evolutionary vestiges of a bygone era seem to think that they have access to enough money to make the world turn on its axis. Furthermore they can’t even dance and sing.

“I want you to do your best to tell the world and those troglodyte politicians that they need to create a new version of the depression era Glass-Steagall Act, which all real dinosaurs and a rapidly growing list of repentant humans, know should have never been repealed. If humans don’t break up these too big to fail mastodons, the whole world will soon become an economic Ice Age.

To which I responded: “It seems, you pretty much made the case yourself, Barney; I doubt those troglodyte politicians will listen to me, but since you made this special appearance here at Wonder Springs; maybe they will listen to you.”

I looked down again, and this happy, smiling, purple, mini Tyrannosaurus rex, was disappearing into the bushes.

When you read last week’s Skin IX synopsis of the development and the decline of American capitalism, you quickly and absolutely realized you had not read a similar description elsewhere, especially in anything related to economics. For good reason, I am not and economist, but rather and ecologist-engineer-entrepreneur, who as been fascinated by the development, or true lack thereof, of the North American frontier.

No Skin In The Game IX

08/June/2011 22:00

Volume 13, Issue 24

We’re finally getting to some of the nuts and bolts, framing and sheet metal to begin to describe what will be required to create an enterprise hydrologic cycle and how to make that liquidity available to would be entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs and their dreams, just like nation states, can’t grow and produce wealth with only debt, but need some reliable source of equity investment; this reality is contrasted with our current investment paradigm of faux oceans of leveraged debt fiat money that will only churn out real world economic bubbles, which continually burst (unexpectedly???)!

The major question for our world is how to create an economic mechanism, without bubbles that burst, and truly create wealth, to improve the lives of all the earth’s inhabitants, while being true stewards of our blessings.

But first an important question: Do you ever take walks in the countryside, the forests, or grasslands, parks or riversides; with the sole purpose to just look at the seasonal changes that are occurring in nature, not just to walk to get your daily exercise, or as a shortcut to the coffee shop?

I would say that the answer to that question, of all the people who might someday read this creation—is slim to none.

So why should you take such a walk—often?

There are a number of reasons:

First of all, as the annual grasses give way to perennials, as the serviceberry blooms give it up for the chokecherry, the birds and the bees, and the mosquitoes, all impress upon your psyche that this whole creation is way too complex to have happened by random acts of chaos.

That leads you to ponder that all this complexity, of even annual change, must require some type of reoccurring principles to keep it going: natural laws; if you will.

Why then, if even on the worst of days, creation continues to function generally within life sustaining limits, why can’t, don’t, won’t we use what we can simply observe on those walks, to build models of that creative diversity within our human enterprise structures?

No Skin In The Game VIII

01/June/2011 14:39

Volume 13, Issue 23

What do sage grouse, sharp tail grouse and human entrepreneurs have in common? All are wild and endangered birds that live in places that most people would consider desolate. More to the point, if the more common human species were to go extinct, populations of the natural birds would slowly rise. If the human entrepreneurs were to become extinct, populations of more common humans would also slowly become extinct.

Hence the ultimate survival of the common human species is directly linked to the survival of a diverse population of wild birds; this is simply the reality of natural law.

So how do we save the human entrepreneur? Through habitat restoration of the wild and desolate lands where they survive and prosper; just as we are saving the true wild birds. One of those habitat restoration tools is the use of participatory collaborative modeling to describe that unusual human habitat; and then begin to create that habitat within the culture of human enterprise activities.

Since the 1960s the unintended consequences of American leadership in general; in the broadest terms—because there was no general; was to bring about the destruction of the American entrepreneur. The major environmental factors involved were taxes and monetary policy, which changed the historical entrepreneurial landscape of the American dream, from running your own company, into having a job by which you could support an ever increasing debt burden. Most of these factors centered upon housing and energy consumptive toys.

Another significant contributing factor was education. As we leveraged the closing era of the Industrial Age, the division of labor and specialization became more pervasive. A good worker was one who understood his small role in the big scheme of things, if he or she might realize that there was more to life, more to being human, than just a production robot, or a consumptive animal, the whole evolution of a continuing prosperous material future could be in jeopardy.

However human beings were created to be individually and uniquely creative, they do not evolve into robots or force-fed animals.

No Skin In The Game VII

25/May/2011 11:45

Volume 13, Issue 21

Before we get to the homework and the discussion I assigned for this week’s Chronicle episode, I shall digress a little, to discuss a real world situation, which really describes the reality that virtually all our technical problems, here on this earth, really are not all that technical, but really human personal problems, and how we deal with those problems in “human engineering” results in unintended consequences to our decisions, or simply the metaphor now being used to describe entitlements and all phases of government debt: kicking the can down the road, path, or off the cliff.

On Monday and Tuesday I was involved with about 200 community members and leaders from eastern Washington and northern Idaho in the “Spokane River Forum.” This was the third meeting of this process, where diverse groups of people attempt to bring some unity of action to their specific interests and areas of expertise, so that the City of Spokane’s marketing and a regional effort of “Near Nature — Near Perfect” may really have some semblance of reality.

For those unfamiliar with the area, the Spokane River Basin is home to the nation’s largest and one of the most complex Superfund sites, in what is known as the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. Beginning over a century ago, the lead, zinc and silver mines of the area began dumping a variety of mining wastes into the rivers that feed Lake Coeur d’ Alene. The outlet of the lake is the Spokane River that flows about a hundred miles to the west where it enters into the Columbia River and Lake Roosevelt, the name of the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

To make the unintended consequences of these mining cleanup endeavors more difficult is another river reservoir on the Spokane that has somewhat recently been renamed “Lake Spokane” rather than the historic title of “Long Lake,” because it was formed by the century old hydroelectric project that bears the Long Lake name.

Making these very expensive environmental problems, is, in the illustrious unintended consequences of its regulatory prowess, the Washington State Department of Ecology (DOE), that has no environmental designation for lake reservoirs. So from the regulatory point of view, the lake really is a river and as such it must meet water quality standards of a river, which is impossible in the warm summer months, except in the regulatory minds of the DOE enforced by the national EPA.

Therefore for the tune of a couple of billion dollars, the municipal and industrial point source wastewater dischargers along the Spokane will be forced to do a number of great and wonderful environmentally clean up procedures, which will reduce the phosphorus loading to Lake Spokane, so that it doesn’t turn bright green (or worse) and be choked with aquatic weeds during the summer months, and the water below the stratified reservoir will support cold water trout.

No Skin In The Game VI

18/May/2011 12:35

Volume 13, Issue 20

Ready for the storm? It’s coming!

Thursday afternoon my email inbox chimed with a weather alert. A large storm was headed this way and warm heavy rains, causing a rapid melting of the snow pack, was expected to cause area flooding and rapidly rising small streams. The Saturday storm however, punched its power on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, here it was probably the nicest day we have had all year.

My Sunday morning forecasts said, never fear the storm is coming today, arriving about 11 AM. While there was a brief shower about that time, it soon passed, but slowly the sky darkened, the wind picked up and we knew the storm was on its way. At about 4 PM the rains began, and continued all night, nonstop until midmorning. The storm dropped more than an inch of those wet drops, causing Boulder Creek to rise to its highest level I have seen, since I have moved over to God’s country.

Decreasing showers and colder weather is bringing the creek back to a normal seasonal yearly peak flow, the Kettle River still has a way to go, and its normal peak comes about the traditional Memorial Day, and Tuesday afternoon it was 22,000 CFS, still well below what I have seen and is now about the peak annual high flow.

Because of the unusually cold spring there is still a lot of snow up high, and the taller mountains up in Canada are still fully white. Should we get some hot weather, things could get really interesting river-wise. If the seasons continue cool and wet, it might be a very delightful summer.

This natural weather is a segue into the storms that seem to be a pattern that is developing again in the world’s economics, which leads us to ask the question: Are you ready for these storms?

As the rains pelted down on the metal roof, I couldn’t help thinking about the song that doesn’t really ask the question, but states the reality that a storm is coming and you need to get ready. The link to the song at the beginning of this article says that the composer, was of Celtic roots but the person is unknown. However most of the artists that have recorded the song, interpret it within genre that through the storm, the lonely sailor is never alone, if he has God as his companion.

One of the artists’ lyric links even goes so far as to reference Isaiah 50:5 - 11 as an appropriate Biblical reference. I like that linkage because it points to the reality that I discussed last week, within the storm metaphor, it is God that is allowing the weather tempest, and those who attempt to be ready for the storm within only their own preparedness are not going to find peace—but torment. In common usage this could be considered Divine Providence.

No Skin In The Game V

11/May/2011 07:46

Volume 13, Issue 19

So if…? What…?

Before we go there, we made some significant changes at the beginning of the year at Wonder Springs. The decision was made to drop most, if not all, the commentating about the current state of affairs, and instead focus upon where we are heading, or might be heading. In the months and years ahead, putting this into a historical context, we, the United States of America, didn’t get in this precarious condition, because of Barack Obama, or George W. Bush, or any single president or congress for that matter.

To try to keep this discussion within the frame of reference that can be handled in weekly installments, rather than some bookish tomb, we use the 1960s as the date a national choice was made to begin this progressive slide to Gomorrah. Sodom carries too much religious baggage for the time in which the Baby Boomers began to come of age, but the linkage of both the Biblical cities is appropriate.

That decade began with the transfer of the presidency from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who I only remember for playing golf and bowling, other than that I think he was totally boring, to the Camelot of John F. Kennedy and Jackie. We have provided a link to the totality of Eisenhower’s final speech, mostly remembered for his warning about the then potential perils of the Military Industrial Complex, but the total context of those fifteen minutes seem to be as important today, as they were in January 1961.

A few years later I was in the wood shop, of Kettle Falls High School, taking a mechanical drawing class, when my dad, the high school principal, spoke over the intercom that President Kennedy, had been shot in Dallas. We then listened in disbelief, as the radio reports continued to be piped into every classroom.

No Skin In The Game IV

04/May/2011 08:00

Volume 13, Issue 18

Melvin Crockett was a Vietnam War hero. Melvin Crocket took his own life—alone.

I didn’t know Melvin very well; we just shared a study hall in high school. He transferred to Kettle Falls after they closed the high school in Marcus. I think he was two years older than me.

That was pretty much it, until a number of years later, when I was walking through a store in Spokane while in college. “Jerry is that you? How’re doing?” was the question Melvin asked me.

I explained that I was in college and it looked like Uncle Sam had definite eyes on me and as a result I was in the advanced ROTC program at Eastern (Washington).

Melvin explained to me that he had spent two tours in Vietnam as a door gunner on a Huey, had gotten two Purple Hearts on each tour, along with some of those Star Metals and other such honors.

When I asked why he went back for a second tour he replied there really wasn’t anything else to do, and it seemed to be the right thing, since it was an important job and he knew the ropes; it wouldn’t be as risky for him, as it would be for a newbie.

He then asked, since I was going to be going into the Army, if we could just talk for a while.

I could see by his demeanor that this was important for him, so we found a place in the store where we could talk.

He started out discussing some of his war experiences. As he continued, emotions slowly overtook him and his hands began to shake, then the rest of his body, until he was in tears. Melvin then said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t continue, then thanked me profusely, stating that it meant so much to have someone who was just willing to listen, to what he had gone through.

No Skin In The Game III

27/April/2011 10:10

Volume 13, Issue 17

This past week served as the locus of two of the most significant events where the God of the Bible gives promise and hope to His people. Those events are the now Jewish festival of Passover or Pesach, the commemoration of the fulfillment of that ancient Egyptian phenomenon, and the Christian, Resurrection Sunday or Easter.

In the Passover we see God beginning a true pilgrimage for the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into a distinct nation. Passover is one of three pilgrimage festivals where pre-diaspora Jews were to journey to Jerusalem. The other two were Shavuot, or Pentecost or the Festival of Weeks and Sukkot or Tabernacles, The Festival of Booths.

In early Christian days, Passover was celebrated as the fulfillment of the typology where Jesus of Nazareth became the paschal Lamb of God, becoming the propitiation for all human sin, so that the judgment of God could pass over His people.

Because of the rise of Arianism in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, gradually this historic tradition was replaced with the celebration of Easter, renamed after Eastre the great mother goddess of the Saxon people of Northern Europe. Thus Easter became one of the first politically correct celebrations, which included not just Christian traditions but also a spring fertility festival of eggs and rabbits.

Then in the fifteenth century we see the rise of an Inquisition requirement for eating pork to celebrate this Easter occasion. Thus we have today the Easter Ham that has its heritage in separating Moslems and Jews from Christians.

The highlight of Passover is the Seder, a distinct liturgical meal that not only looks back at the Passover in Jewish history but also forward to the Passover celebrated with the coming of Messiah. The major difference between Christianity and Judaism is the belief that Jesus was the Messiah. To the Jews that event is still a future happening.

No Skin In The Game II

20/April/2011 09:01

Volume 13, Issue 16

Nobody likes me. Everyone hates me! I guess I’m not going to eat any worms, because I tried that once, along time ago, and decided I won’t do that again.

Individualism is the prime common grace gift of God. Whether we pause to make this distinction or not, from the creation, the cognitive separation between humans and the rest of the life on this planet is understood and taken for granted.

Some weeks ago, in the context of this Godly understanding, I introduced the reasoning that the demarcation of difference between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, is historically going to be measured by the end of the Industrial Age and the rise of the Individual Age.

I began last week’s column with a discussion of how I might quantify President Obama’s leadership ability, especially within the context of Wednesday’s debt reduction speech. To summarize, I would say I was overly optimistic when I said that he had the leadership skills of an Army Security Agency Private First Class.

After Obama’s college lecture, I still find myself in the two out of three majority of Americans that still believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. While there were words that the country must come together politically, he quickly headed into the boondocks of twentieth century Collective Elitism when he pontificated that the United States only became a great nation when it enacted Johnson’s Great Society social measures, Medicare and Medicaid.

As you will see as we continue this week, I contend that it was the decade of the 1960s, with these centerpieces of social engineering, coupled with the Vietnam war; was indeed the beginning of the now accelerating decline of American greatness. However, as we look this week at the Greatest Generation, we see the triumph of individual determination over the atheistic collective progressive elitism, that attempted to aggressively rule the world in the first half of the twentieth century.

No Skin In The Game I

13/April/2011 14:50

Volume 13, Issue 15

Today we begin a multipart multi-week series about the American tradition, using a Warren Buffet management principle, where the average American no longer has or can develop any skin in the game. Whether this no skin life has occurred by design or through unintended consequences truly makes no difference.

This skin is important because the future of the nation is at stake!

In this series I will attempt to put this in a context you will not read anywhere else. As a consequence it is designed to challenge your preconceived notions about the past, the present and the future, both within the current noisy national debate, but also within the picture of the big bad world beyond the borders and the shores.

Today President Obama is speaking about his freshly revised budget view for fiscal year 2012 and beyond. For most conservatives this budget will show what Tea Party Congressman from Florida’s 22nd Legislative District, Lt. Colonel Allen West described as leadership of a Buck Sergeant (E-5). As you will learn later, since my military experience had much tighter enlistment criteria than West’s Infantry, we had some PFCs (E-3) with that leadership potential.

However a miracle did happened in the United States late Friday evening. Of course I am referring to the budget deal hammered out within the Federal Government. A couple of years ago I would have described this event as an evolutionary testament, in that the Republican Party had amazingly developed a spine.

That was then, and being a little older, and none the wiser, I would add the Democrat Party to this wonderful happening, and characterize it as both parties and the entire political class finally having some skin in the game.

Looking back at history, I really can’t come up with the last time that this happened. There would be those who would say that occurred when the Federals were shut down in the 1990s, but those were much different times. It was back then, a marginal huffing and puffing, and today nothing of lasting substance remains.

Searching my vast knowledge of history, it seems for as long as I can remember politicians have made promises to help the middle class, or the working person, or the wise consumer, when in reality they have, at best, ignored those promises, and given anyone who would help them get reelected, gifts, tax incentives, and special interest payoffs.

As we are now only beginning to understand as reality, for the last fifty years these political games have been carried out by designed inflation, loose monetary policy, and overly leveraged debt.

Now for the first time in at least a half a century, politicians have some skin in the game. Sadly we will be treated, barring another miracle, to another four years of childishness, where they will threaten to take their toys and talking points and go home, if they don’t get their way. In the process we will be told of millions of seniors who will die of starvation, and the working stiffs will remain unemployable, or the more politically correct term — without living wage jobs.

Finally, maybe in 2015, enough of the childish bums will be kicked out of office and enough of the excesses of the past century will have become compost, that the United States can have a serious twenty-first century discussion on the role and scope of government and sustainable means to provide the funding thereof, especially the Federal Government.

In the afternoon when I finished last week’s “God in the Details, Part 2”, I decided to take a little perspective break. Later, before I retired for a night of productive sleep, I thought I should catch up on any rapidly changing news. That news really wasn’t news, just more noise, continually interrupted by commercial breaks of three to five minutes, from one-third to almost half of the hour, selling everything from gold, to product scams, to gross consumer toys.

The night’s sleep went pretty well, but very early in the morning, a true mourning about the irrelevance of everything that has been reported recently, its shallowness, and the plain trivial pursuits of the whole process, finally aroused my restfulness with anger.

Now completely conscious I began to work through what is currently happening in the world, and how everyone wants the happy days to return, and how foolish that scam seems to be. Suddenly, a blazing light appeared and I became in enlightened. (Well that concept was just added to whet your appetite for what follows.) But I truly realized I really have no skin in that twentieth century game, and I have no desire to go there.

That is sort of a miracle, not unlike the understanding about eight years ago, that my inability to compete in athletics at the level I had hoped was by Divine design, for it took that long for my body to deteriorate to the point, that we would discover I was born with a congenital heart valve defect. If I had played at the level I thought I could, in a place where it would have been noticed, I would not be writing these words today, I would be dead.

The golden experiences I had in the 1980s never went where I hoped they would go either, because at the present time I would have too much invested in keeping the past alive, to put any skin into the changes that are coming today. Just like with the heart-changing scar I now have, this golden opportunity today, provides a possibility to contribute something, I would have just wasted, or misapplied, back when Ronald Reagan was revolutionizing the world.

Since I have a pretty good idea what is now happening, there is a moment to build upon the past, a very different future, to put some significant skin in the game, but it will only be done in concert with others who look towards that future and have also invested their skin.

Last week we began our discussion of when America went seriously astray with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. This week we will push that back to John Kennedy and what is still described as Camelot. Kennedys’ Camelot has sort of been put to rest by the miniseries, “The Kennedys” that aired last week on that bastion of cable television, the Reelz Channel.

From here on out we will use the whole decade of the sixties as the basis for when the country seriously began to evolve beyond a nation where the prime purpose of the United States was to have everyone, every citizen, with skin in the game. We are now to the point where we have virtually no one with skin in the game, except our military. That professional military has become the tool to change the entire fabric of American culture into a de facto empire, exporting petty materialism and greedy financial services.

The fundamental American paradigm for about the four hundred years of development on this continent is that everyone has skin in the game. That was totally true until the closing of the frontier about a century ago. Coinciding with this American opportunity was a worldview, which would drive the whole world through evolving-progressive-atheistic materialism. The fundamental precepts of this paradigm was that mankind could greatly improve upon the fundamentals of nature and that this would be done without God or anything beyond the nature of mankind’s intellectual (scientific) genius.

Fundamental to this godlessness, was the enlightened thesis that all religion was naïve and primitive, and what historic Christianity defined as Original Sin and Total Depravity, were really fruits of positive evolutionary progress. Hence these sins, became qualities to be developed within the intellectual elites, who deemed themselves superior to the masses of stupid (religious) primitive humanity.

We can trace where we are today by looking at the Russian Revolution, in which what I have called a Collective Elitist paradigm of communism, was tensioned by the libertarian works of Ayn Rand and what I call Laissez Faire Scoundrels. In the United States we see these changes taking place instead of under the banners of communism and socialism but rather under a unified ensign of progressivism of both the major national parties.

Both views of progressivism believed that we could evolve into a just society by either elitist control of government, or the abstinence of government and so called free markets; where a shining city on a hill could be achieved. These views were not all that fundamentally different than many of the nation’s founders. It was the founders’ belief however that this source of greatness was God’s exceptional vision for the United States, not man’s abilities.

In the last two Presidents we see in the compassionate conservatism desires of the George Bush the triumph of the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels. In Barack Obama we see the liberal desires for the government management of personal wealth and power. We are told only the Collective Elitists can fathom the evolved intellectual wisdom of this atheistic evolutionary ascendancy. This of course doesn’t take place within Darwin’s evolutionary time frame, but rather within the individual, as they move beyond the temporal world of things, into a lust for power and the domination of others.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” begins the Kennedy legacy.

Ask the junior senator from Florida, about the Bay of Pigs, and Marco Rubio, will tell you that John Kennedy is directly responsible for Fidel Castro’s regime being entrenched in Cuba from 1959 until today. But then again, after the November 2016 Presidential election, we might have our first Cuban American as President-elect of the United States.

The failure of the Bay of Pigs, led directly to the Cuban missile crisis, and a domino theory of communist expansion plans to take over the world, led Kenney to send military advisors to Vietnam. The rest is history, especially after the Kennedy assassination, when he was replaced consecutively by two of the most nefarious federal politicians in American history. The biggest difference between Johnson and Nixon was that Johnson never got caught.

The 1960s, the era of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows have thus far given us two presidents who came of age during that decade. I too share that vintage. Both presidents were former governors; both served two terms in the presidential office.

President Clinton was highly gifted intellectually, from humble origins, so was forced to put his skin in the game early in life to achieve his goals. By the time he got to the presidency his political gifts allowed him to be pragmatic when need be, but moral issues have greatly impaired his governmental legacy. Not only did the Clinton presidency close out the century, it finally brought a discouraging end to the idealism of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

President Bush was a child of one of America’s most prestigious families. As such it was probably not until he became governor of Texas that he had to put any personal skin into the American game. Bush did not possess Clinton’s intellectual gifts, but by the time he was elected president his Christianity had provided him a personal peace and morality that continues agitate his political opponents to this day. By September 2001 cracks were seen in America’s material veneer, which would be radically exposed on the eleventh day of that month.

As for me I probably had the best childhood that anyone could possibly been given. When combined with the grace of God, this has allowed me to gain a different perspective of this history, unfettered from any significant skin in the game up to the present. However my individual gifts are also quite unique. All these will be used to give you a distinct perspective, of where we are now and where we are headed.

I fully realize that what you are about to read over the next few weeks, will challenge what you may have always believed, but I hope it will give you a fresh view of what went wrong, and what we should do to make significant changes in our future course.

This vision all begins when I was still in high school when an Air Force recruiter came and gave our class a leadership aptitude test. If I remember correctly the test measured three areas of personal attributes. Those were mechanical ability, analytical ability, and what I will call people skills.

While some other students excelled on one of the test parameters, I scored at the ninetieth percentile in all three areas. Upon checking with his superiors, my scores were so unusual, I was offered a position in the Air Force Officer Candidate School (OCS) right out of high school, something usually reserved for college graduates and those with advanced degrees and highly specific skills. Thus began my military tension with my Uncle Sam.

I turned down the offer, but somehow I was on the military enlargement list for the Vietnam conflict. To leave out the details, in late November 1969 I arrived in Augsburg, Germany the first of about twenty something reluctant officer recruits in the Army Security Agency.

As I recall I was the only ROTC graduate, the rest had reached our Voluntary Indefinite (Vol-Indef) Status through OCS training. Vol-Indef meant that we were to be on active duty until the Army told us we could seek a discharge. What this meant in reality was we were guaranteed a posting in Germany until such time we might be needed elsewhere, and we were betting that this time would keep us safe from Vietnam, or from going elsewhere until such a time we were no longer needed within the military.

All of us had the highest level of Top Secret security clearances. At least within my focus of duties, I was provided the opportunity to read the weekly highest level intelligence briefings from both the Warsaw Pact and Vietnam, as well as given a general idea of what would be the tactical requirements of everyone, should those nasty communists attack the peace loving Europeans.

With Vietnam protests growing in the states, tensions between true career officers and us reluctant volunteers began to rise. Since I had the most time in service and a minor problem with one of the inept pronounced career officers, I became the first of the group to acknowledge it was my decision to return to civilian life.

Vietnam really was America’s first major war, which was fought with really no skin in the game for anyone, provided you could make it through, “364 days and a wake-up.” Sadly almost sixty thousand young men were not able to keep that commitment, dying in the process, and probably at least that many continue to deal with some after shocks.

To provide for a secure national future and to provide further domestic tranquility, the concept of an all-volunteer military was adopted. We will revisit this situation in detail next week, but keep the following in mind.

Without this domestically produced mercenary force, Iraq and Afghanistan could not have occurred the way they were developed and could not continue into the indefinite nation building future.

In the history of the world’s exceptional nations states that have bit the dust; they share at least two significant factors:

That first step was that they cease to have broad based civilian involvement in the nation’s military struggles. Normally they hired mercenaries or created true professional militaries, which have no skin in the daily routine of the country, but only their own skin in the game as it relates to personal survival.

Second, in order to maintain what twentieth century theologian Francis Schaeffer described as “personal peace and affluence,” these nations begin serious manipulations of their financial system, essentially to limit to the maximum extent possible, citizen participation with true skin in the game.

Check back next week for widening developments.

God is in the Details; Part 2

06/April/2011 09:50

Probably the most used negative expression in human history translates roughly into: “Oh, that can never happen!”

Thankfully using those inspiring thoughts, what recently happened in Japan and is continuing to unfold, could never happen. That means what we are seeing reported on the news must be computer modeling, or some Fox News inspired conspiracy theory.

“Oh, that can never happen!” Are the last words of those who die in survival situations. They were also the words of Jews before they became principals in the Nazi holocaust, those who Stalin gave a trip to the Gulag, or became a Mao’s Cultural Revolution participant.

For those of us who had a secure childhood, we may have been saved from that can’t happen reality until we reached our twenties. Those less fortunate may have faced that future much earlier, and as children truly missed that childhood period of their lives having to continually battle the negative consequences.

As we get older it seems like these significant “can’t happen” moments occur at least every five years. Someway we cope and get by. Something however has happened in the last few years that has sort of upset that reality of these can’t happen moments. They now have also taken on a population dynamic, as well as the more historical individual component.

We are told by our leaders, on the one hand, that words will sort of create a new reality, one in which can’t happen — can’t. On the other, we are told that we need to get our debt under control, or a future of can’t happen will be our daily bread, if we really have any bread at all.

To bring all of this about we have created a universe of noise. The pundits, analysts, and commentators can create seven hundred enlightened words for middle schoolers, succinctly explaining our can’t-will happen future. Politicians, who speak in talking points, more like robots than human beings, propose similar juvenile solutions. This brings us to a fundamental question that nobody has yet to ask, “What happened to all the adults?”

Activating Your Grace License

23/March/2011 12:21

Did you know that you were born with a Grace License?

What? Didn’t they teach you about your Grace License in school, or church? I’ll bet you never even saw it on a PBS documentary: “Frontline: The Grace Influence That Changed the World!”

Of course in American English “grace” is both a noun, a verb and also a feminine name. In this week’s article to activate your Grace License you must learn the requirements of both literal definitions. In this context your Grace License combines who you are with what you do.

By far and away the greatest problem you will face in activating your Grace License is the reality that you have one to begin with. Our evolving world, which began through random events and got us to where we are today; just doesn’t possess the intellectual capacity to give us a reasonable explanation of the concept of any type of grace.

To say that God created us with a Grace License fully answers that origins question, but carries with that acknowledgement, a reality and a responsibility beyond our own individual and collective evolving rationality — or could that be better be defined as folly.

Since we live in a post-modern age in which people who acknowledge a belief in God are stupid, primitive and without the intellectual ability to understand the finer nuances of the rapidly evolving progressive social order, the stage is set for some reality adjustments, or in true scientific terms, “the survival of the fittest.”

Shadowlands of Trivial Pursuits

16/March/2011 10:15

Since it seems that The Wonder Springs Chronicle is the only voice, anywhere, describing the end of the Industrial Age and in the process being replaced with an Individual Age, this week we will continue those developments.

We initially chose the term Individual Age, because of the rise of personal computers and all the rest of related technologies, in combination with emerging social media. Additionally, the similarity of the terms makes for easy associations. A lot of these changes will turn out to become a cacophony, but we truly need to look beyond the past as a model for the emerging future.

However before we get into that we need a little reality check, to make sure you realize these stupendous changes are not going to be without pain, perhaps suffering, and even that endangered term: sacrifice.

Until last Wednesday, for a week or two I found myself hesitant to do something I thought I should do. It really wouldn’t take that long, just get on the Internet and place an order. While this purchase wasn’t really expensive, under $100, that is still more than just a trivial purchase for me.

Friday morning I woke up to the news that Japan had experienced an earthquake, now rated at 9.0 on the logarithmic Richter Scale. The purchase that I finally accomplished Wednesday afternoon, after I completed last week’s “Individual Age” was Friday reclassified from hesitant to procrastination. The order, which arrived in my mailbox Saturday morning from some Nowhere spot in upstate New York, to this Nowhere spot in Washington State, is what would be best described as a survival knife.

The Individual Age of Renaissance and Reformation

09/March/2011 10:10

In the twenty-first century — a Humpty Dumpty lament:

After the Great War, the nation state of Humpty Dumpty determined to build a Great Wall. For two generations the citizens of Humpty Dumpty toiled and labored to achieve the goal. When the wall was finally complete; the view from the top of the wall was mind-boggling. It was like on a clear day you could see forever.

In the fullness of time something radically changed, the bricks of the wall became human and came to life. Struggling to be free from all that impediments that stifled their individual creativity, they sang: Ring around the rosy, A pocket full of posies, Ashes, Ashes, We all fall down!

The Humpty Dumpty king rushed to the wall with all his faithful well-trained horses. Following close behind were all the king’s men, who tore their robes and moaned and bellyached.

Then the king, his horses and the king’s men held a requiem and each spoke in unison: “Whoa is me! I told you so! Humpty Dumpty is broken, and these people want to preserve their cake, just eat desert, and not get back on the wall. We can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again!

The chaos was just too much for them to handle; yet they were all too selfish to admit that they were really the designers of the wall’s structural problems and Humpty Dumpty’s demise.

But these newly freed people all sang, “We’re tired! You’re fired! It’s time for a Renaissance and a Reformation based upon self-evident inalienable human rights. The Industrial Age is dead. Long live the Individual Age.

Today we are seeing this lament playing out in countries around the world, as we see the end of the Industrial Age that brought totally unique prosperity to parts of the earth, while scores of other people were almost untouched by these material blessings.

Just what is an Individual Age?

The Waterloo of Surplus — The Dawn of Dearth

02/March/2011 11:31

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The major problem with attempting to create heaven on earth is that it isn’t. In the context of our modern world, we have attempted to treat Mother Earth either as a harlot or the goddess of our desires. The problem with these illusions is the reality, that just like a real woman, Mother Earth is much deeper and more complex than our superficial expectations, because she was created by God.

As a result of our ignorance of this truth, humans around the world are now immersed in an affair, which can now be best described as the “Waterloo of Surplus — The Dawn of Dearth.”

Napoleon met his Waterloo at Waterloo. Humans are seeing a similar Waterloo of Surplus morph into the existence of their daily lives. This is taking place in the developing world and in the current turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East. Repressive governmental regimes attempt to ignore the desire for personal expression and economic realities of inflationary pressures from food and energy parch any previous leftovers.

In the developed world a similar angst has developed. The ever increasing insecurity of faux prosperity has become a plain where collective leadership, that promised a dream that a union leader, or even a Duke from Wellington, cannot supply.

Put in simple terms the Dawn of Dearth is a failure of leadership. That failure comes from the reluctance to look at a limited world and propose real world solutions consistent with that reality. That prolongs the days of reckoning and also the depths of the demise.

Some would say that our world has become too complex for human governance. That is a partial truth. In reality the world has become too complex for COLLECTIVE human governance and enterprise. We have given it a real college try for a century or two. It is just all the college and universities have been looking for solutions in all the wrong places. Over that period they have believed that if we humans can become enlightened enough, we will truly solve all the world’s problems.
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Tags: leadership, God, USA, Republicans, Democrats, Natural Law, Industrial Age, Individual Age

Coping with the current stupendous geopolitical change reality

23/February/2011 09:15

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Setting the people free! What a job. What a difference just a week makes anymore!

There seems to be no limit to the mini would be messiahs today. Sadly most of them cloak their speeches in terms of democracy for all. Keeping with that geopolitical theme, most of these saviors, in the process of implementing their dream world, seek to subjugate that democracy to their own glory. So instead of being a messiah, their secret goal is to become Pharaoh, enslaving the people to the perverse will of a perverted enlightenment.

Islam seeks this reality through a collective theocracy called the caliphate. What we see happening today is the beginnings of a power struggle, not just between authoritarian leadership and the people, but also between Shiite and Sunni divergent wings of the Moslem faith.

We, who are fortunate to live in secular western cultures, believe that this tension is no big deal, for we self-righteously understand, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that all religions are essentially the same, and are really crutches for those who have not evolved enough to comprehend the wonder of our collective exceptionalism.

In that same illumination token, we think that the new democracy direction that began in Egypt, will end with them buying off on our vision of gross materialism through debt leverage. Of course that model isn’t working all that well at the present time, but you just need to have faith that we will quickly get that economic ship headed in the right direction and it will be full speed ahead.

The problem with this wishful thinking is that western culture was successfully built upon the concept of individual private property rights that extend well beyond your consumer conveniences. That wonderful wealth producing reality is the great divergence within those of Semitic cultures. Both are forbearers of our present worldviews. Private property rights are the gift to the world through the lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — not Abraham and Ishmael.

When you fully refine the sources of the Ten Plagues of our modern world, which we discussed last week, they really don’t believe in those individual rights either. In essence to develop the way human society must evolve, we must give up those rights, essentially to save the planet.
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Tags: Islam, Egypt, cap and trade, FED, private property, caliphate, common salvation, Jesus, Christianity

Ten Plagues to Set the People Free

16/February/2011 06:20

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For the last few weeks we have been discussing the geopolitical career of Moses in the wilderness with the people of Israel. We have attempted to illustrate that the people groups of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, operating from both the bottom up and the top down, provide for both individual and community freedom.

While we have been doing our thing, something amazing has been happening in the real world — that being the departure of Hosni Mubarak from his post as the head of the Egyptian state. From these events that will change the future of the whole world, it is not all that difficult to imagine the context of Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go!” This time however it is the Egyptian people that are seeking a very similar freedom.

That freedom for the people manifests itself in the opportunity to set a path to a new destiny with the future, by leaving behind the tacit security of the present oppression and venture into a wilderness of new possibilities.

Over the period of this Egyptian phenomenon, there has been a wide spectrum of analogies equating president Mubarak with the dreaded Pharaoh. The comparisons have come from across the western political spectrum, as well has from similar expressions from Islam.

All of these Pharaoh — Mubarak comments seem to be pejorative references to a similarity of personal oppression, but do they in anyway indicate that in the original reality, the Pharaoh was viewed as an earthly manifestation of a god? Of course not, because all of the world’s cultures have evolved to the state that we no longer believe in earthly gods, except for ourselves. And for the big dude in the sky, there we are sort of agnostic, except for those creepy freedom fighting suicide bombers and those who empower them.

This leads to the hand wrenching and bloviating about the potential for Egypt to become a principle part of the reestablishing of a Moslem caliphate to rule over the whole world. If this were a real possibility, we of western European extraction would be speaking a different language today. As best as can be described as the grace of God alone, we have been saved from this potential fate at Tours in 732 and on the plains east of Vienna in 1529. This caliphate will not happen in this age of social media, the Internet and rapidly declining numbers of dictators of any persuasion.
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Tags: Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, freedom, 10 Plagues, caliphate, Isaiah 19

Going for the gold!

07/February/2011 10:00

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When we speak about outstanding human achievement, many times it is in the context of athletic excellence. While “going for the gold” specifically relates to working hard to win and Olympic gold medal, for most of us, even becoming an alternate for the Olympic team would be considered one of our life’s supreme achievements.

Since the beginning of the year on our corporate website we have been commenting on the Discovery Channel’s “Gold Rush: Alaska” reality series. For the last couple of weeks within the context of the article there has been a statement something to the effect, “gold is quite happy to segregate itself from all of the other worthless materials.”

It is thus far obvious from the program that the gold rush team has yet to understand this reality. We humans believe that we are rational beings and we make rational decisions based upon what we have learned through our past experiences. The extreme kick in the pants comes when we move beyond our comfort zone into the wilderness. In this Gold Rush case it is the wilderness, or perhaps more precisely, the wildness of a placer gold mine in Alaska.

For the last couple of weeks we have been discussing a Moses Model of human leadership, and how that geopolitical model will service us nicely in the wilderness of the uncertain times ahead. In the United States our geopolitical leadership is still firmly planted in the twentieth century. Probably oversimplified, those paradigms of the future either will lead us to a New-New Deal or a Reagan Revolutionary-Revolution.

When we broaden the scope, in our worldview we see a similar twentieth century strain, this time based upon western colonial or anti colonial models. A militant Islamic caliphate being a precursor to the western model, if we limit views to the last three hundred years or so.

The wonder of it all, is that the founders of the American Republic were really, forced into forming this nation, through the wilderness thought of geopolitical reality in and on a wild continent. As educated men, they too looked to the wilderness success of Moses to show them the way.

What the American Enlightenment added to Moses however, was the understanding of then Natural Theology, which has since evolved into atheistic material science. The founders called this specific revelation — Natural Law and from that reality constructed a geopolitical legal system based upon common (to all) inalienable rights.
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Tags: Gold Rush Alaska, PREFER Ltd, Moses Model, Natural Theology, Natural Law, gold, Haggai 2, dry bones valley, Glenn Beck, Christianity, grace

Moses and We the People

02/February/2011 10:30

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Last week we looked at the numerology of the Moses model of leadership. This week we look at why it works, especially in contrast to the way the world of human resources has operated for the last century or so.

This is especially important today, like in the today literal sense, because of the protests that are happening in Egypt and the Islamic world generally, as well as the social democracies of Europe, and even the Tea Party Movement in the United States.

What we are seeing worldwide is human individual disgust with the way things are currently operating. For the most part, these have been quite docile in the United States and more violent in more repressive regimes, but the general theme in all of them can be summarized within the paradigm of “we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Furthermore there is an expressed fear in the media that what was somewhat tepid human individual repression, will lead to even more repressive fascist and communist governments. To put this in context, we must look at the big picture of the twentieth century, which is basically material consumption based upon cheap energy (oil).

The United States has been the world’s shining example of this “success,” basing a full seventy percent of its GDP on this past century model. Because the Americans have been so successful with the passivity bought within the stuff model, it logically follows that we have a much larger stuff cushion than the rest of the world; hence thus far American protests have been mostly words, even in the context of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
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Tags: Moses Model, USA, U S Constitution, leadership, Egypt, Glenn Beck, God, Humpty Dumpty

A Moses Model for Twenty-First Century America

26/January/2011 12:26

Volume 13, Issue 4

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The founders of the American Republic had a thing about the Biblical personality of Moses, as reported in “America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America” by Bruce Feller. In a somewhat similar concept many of today’s evangelical Christians look toward Moses as a leadership model for ministry.

What if Moses were to appear on Wall Street? Speaking to all the brokers and other financial barons he might say, “I have come to lead you out of the bondage of money and atheistic materialism. You have been enslaved too long by the Pharaohs of greed, lust, and false gods.”

They would probably assume he was some sort of robotic illusion, for all the truly enlightened movers of the worlds of trade, commerce and finance know that the Bible is just a collection of stories and myths fabricated by primitive Jewish ancestors, to bring a sense of morality to the ancient world. That story about plagues in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, giving of some law on some mountain, and forty years of wandering in the wilderness eating manna, are just a bunch of twaddle.

“They, those Jews, were just so primitive; we have evolved way beyond that!”

Thus rejected, a modern day Moses might find a bit more influence by going directly to the people whom the Wall Street elite think are already in the wilderness, and have no chance of ever evolving to anything other than some hybrid consumptive-service debt-burdened droid (of course with the appropriate technology gadget and the right apps).

In that ecosystem where green is a color and not a religion, the evangelical Christian is taught to believe that Moses is a type of Jesus. I suppose the analogy goes, since Jesus was perfect, and Moses and we are not, if we just say that Moses was a type of Jesus, then we can lead the sheep to the Promised Land, or at least to The Rapture.

“That is- -just like Moses, we alone know the way, and if you do not agree, it is a big bad world out there you might consider exploring.”
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Tags: Moses Model, Wall Street, Christianity, Jesus, USA, Super Bowl, leadership

Catalyst for cognitive dissonance

19/January/2011 10:21

Volume 13, Issue 3

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In last week’s “The evolution of childishness!” I made the point that most of the rhetoric concerning the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday January 8, spewed forth for childish reasons. On Friday our cartoon Et Tu Brute’ provided the grizzly wisdom that this continuing childish-juvenile political bantering was perhaps a catalyst for the surfacing of much deeper societal issues.

It seems that these problems continue with no apparent end in sight. We no longer have here “a failure to communicate,” but what seems more a desire, not to communicate at all and to distance one’s remarks from those of differing political views. Childish? Juvenile? Infantile? Take your pick!

“I’m taking my word toys and going home to play by myself!”

You can almost understand this coming from the more liberal-progressive side of the political spectrum. Not because they are more childish than their more conservative brothers and sisters, but they have had their wishes so suppressed for so long, and with the election of Barak Obama, they had the feeling their freedom was finally achieved. With the conservative swing now more pronounced than possibly any time in American history since the Revolution, they really can’t believe what is happening. Was it not just two short years ago, when the vision of progressive victory seemed within reach?

Conservatives however do not have such a luxury. They seem to be intent on revenge; it is just their civic duty, to make two years of Barack Obama a political anomaly. Sadly, politicians have ignored the problems facing the United States today, and the world for that matter, for at least a generation. We could go back further, but that would just continue the cognitive dissonance.
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Tags: Gabrielle Giffords, Prophets of Doom, USA, Christianity, Jesus, Kingdom of God, Moses Model

The evolution of childishness!

12/January/2011 10:26

Volume 13, Issue 2

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When I was but a wee lad, I used to visit my friend Donnie who lived out in the country near the rural community of Harrington, Washington. My dad was the grade school principal in this small town and finding playmates of your same age was not all that common.

Donnie had this great plan of getting his own way, or so I thought. Every time he wanted something, which many times included our mutual benefit, and if results were not forthcoming in a manner acceptable to a four year old, he would get down and pound his head on the floor. It worked great every time! I mean every time.

Even though his mom would always say, “Donnie don’t do that!” Donnie’s scam always worked.

It worked so well; I figured I might just try it out on my mom.

I still recall vividly the trauma of that fateful evening.

Mom was at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes and carrots. For sake of the story we will say she was making a New England boiled dinner, which was my dad’s favorite supper.

I don’t remember at all the reason for my growing angst, but I do remember vividly the results.

“If you don’t do what I want, I will pound my head on the floor,” I announced bravely.

My mom turned and looked at me, like she really didn’t care and went back to peeling the spuds.

So I proceeded to pound my head on the floor until it began to hurt. My mom continued to peel the veggies long after I decided that this just wasn’t going to work out to my benefit.

Childish things, we live in a world in which too many adults get there way by pounding their head on the floor, and then people respond by saying, “Please don’t do that, you are going to hurt yourself, let me save you!”
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Tags: Gabrielle Giffords, USA, Glenn Beck, Apostle Paul, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus, worldview, Babylon

Behold I am making all things new!

05/January/2011 10:12

Volume 13, Issue 1

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And he who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." Revelation 21:5

The last few weeks have been quite interesting in all the attention directed to new things. We get a New Year about this time on an annual basis, but for 2011 in the United States, on the political front we also get a significantly reordered House of Representatives, a more balanced Senate, and many more conservative state governors and state legislatures.

Wasn’t it just two brief years ago we got, “Hope in change that we can believe in?”

The new slogan for the decade so far as been, “Change, change everywhere and we like none of it.”

I find it quite interesting, especially with television talk show hosts, that often in the context of political change in Washington DC, government ethanol subsidies is often the ad hoc remark concerning the failures of the last Congress.

Why shouldn’t it be? For as long as the sun rises, temperate zone ethanol production from corn will always be one of the most stupid energy schemes, ever devised in the mind of man. While we are at defunding the current $6 billion subsidy, we need to get rid of the whole process including the executive order requirement that ethanol be added to gasoline, with its $0.45 per gallon incentive, and concluding with this nonsense about making 15 percent ethanol fuel available anywhere — for as long as the sun rises.

While we are at it, we need to get government out of all phases of energy market making and planning and let true free markets in energy allow the country to prosper and provide jobs. Of course that hasn’t happened in this country since before the Great Depression and the New Deal, so what an opportunity that might create.

Digressing for a moment, it seems that the new Congress for some time however, will be concerned about cutting government spending and passing a landmark repeal of ObamaCare, even if it is just for the ego trip.

What should we have learned in the last couple of years?
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Tags: Revelation 21:5, USA, Congress, Keynes, Social Darwinism, Glenn Beck, Kingdom of God, Gold Rush Blog, PREFER Ltd

What Would Jesus Really Do? (WWJRD)

29/December/2010 08:30

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As I was surfing through the channels last week looking for something on television that was not a rerun or totally tacky, I ran across a discussion of why America was not mentioned in Bible prophesy. Since that has been a topic that we have brushed upon here at Wonder Springs in the past, and we were getting well up on the channel surfing dial, I decided to give it a listen, after all, it was Christmas!

The man leading the discussion was a somewhat well known Christian television minister and the man with all the information, I did not know, but anyway I decided to stick around and see what would develop.

What I remember was that there were four reasons given for why the United States was not to be found in the Bible’s end of this age prophesy, one of those was the coming Rapture, the other three I can’t remember, but for only a $50 gift to the ministry I could get the DVD. What wasn’t on the list however was anything to do with the outworking of real natural law especially as it relates to individual diversity, responsibility and natural energetics.

I watched most of the first episode, but I have to admit it was getting late, and I did doze off for a couple of brief lapses. At the beginning of the second, I made the determination to pay more attention. However I again awoke at the close of the episode and decided that I might as well just go to bed. Look at it this way, even though the world is rapidly going to hell, it really isn’t that exciting watching two aging men sitting across from one another discussing a topic they believed in, but at the same time really had little to say for at least four hours.

What really is more interesting is reading the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That is also not something you can’t put down and must read until the end, it is after all almost six hundred pages. Furthermore the contrast between Bonhoeffer’s life and the television episodes could not be more striking, even though I would believe that the two Christian leaders would not totally agree with my comparison.

That difference I would summarize is that my sleepy television hosts were discussing concepts of the American evangelical Christian religion, Bonhoeffer’s life thus far has been one more about wonder and the workings of Christianity at its very core, and how the church just doesn’t seem to get, or be interested in, the essence of the Christian gospel.
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Tags: What Would Jesus Do?, What Would Jesus Really Do?, U S Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christianity, Kingdom of God

Funny Money Fiascos

22/December/2010 05:53

Volume 12, Issue 50

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For quite some time we have commented that our world of commerce has become an ocean of non-energetic debt money with no method to turn this liquidity body into some sort of self renewing wealth liquidity cycle, similar to our real world’s hydrologic cycle.

Now we are seeing financial storms, hurricanes if you will, forming all around the world as this debt money creates storm surges that threaten whole countries, while central debt bankers from our Great Depression Guru Ben Bernanke, to China’s Wang Qishan, to the sovereign nation of Iceland, attempt to convince the world that their Funny Money Fiascos are really the wave of the (prosperous) future.

For our part, we will probably agree with Iceland, for they have refused to play the game. For everyone else they are attempting to play the fiasco game while at the same time keeping their national interests at the heart of the matter. It sure would be a whole lot easier if the people were not self-centered selfish dweebs and just trust their central bankers.

Here in the USA, gentle Ben seems to get the world’s precarious situation, and is attempting to do whatever is within his power to keep the world from sinking. The problem is, just as in the global warming world, where the weather seems to be showing real recent signs of global cooling, the reality is that our current financial world is truly a pending catastrophe and the political will to make required changes, seems to be on holiday, and we are not talking about a Christmas break.
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Tags: debt, Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, USA, Woodstock, Jesus, Divine Providence, Natural Law, PREFER Ltd

The Growth Illusion: Gifts That Keep on Taking

15/December/2010 14:47

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On Monday in “The World’s Coming Grace Infusion” we wrote about a new order that is going to change the way the world works. In this current rendition it was called by its founder, “The Kingdom of God.” Even though this Kingdom is described some sixty-seven times in the New Testament, most of them by Jesus himself, I would say that most regular church attenders have never heard a sermon or a teaching of this Kingdom, except in some context of some future “pie in the sky in the sweet by and by.”

The Biblical context however makes it clear, that the Kingdom of God began in this current form with the finished work, through the sacrifice, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. When from the cross he uttered the words, “It is finished” he meant that all the preliminary work for the establishment of this Kingdom had been accomplished. All that was left to fulfill this reality would take place through the fullness of time.

It could be said that the rise of western culture as the dominate economic and political force in the world was just the indicative, of that Kingdom of God reality. In that in powering energetic light of the Reformation, we see that last major highly visible intervention of the Kingdom in the affairs of people to redux the world into a new model of human independence, freedom and accountability.

Today culture is being molded for another such occurrence, for we truly believe in our hearts that all gifts we now enjoy are just the applied genius of human enlightenment, activism, hard work, political and evolutionary processes for the ascendence of the human community.

Put in the context of what we consider a Biblical myth of ancient Babylon, we are about to succeed where they failed, simply because we have created a mechanism of continual growth that need not be tied to any of the natural laws that have limited other human utopian dreams. We are too proud of our successes, not because they are so grand, but rather they have just engineered Kingdom of God resources to serve our selfish desires. Until recently there has been enough wealth creation within God’s Kingdom to allow us to believe our own press and biased spin.
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Tags: Kingdom of God, Alan Greenspan, USA, ethanol, Christianity, Christmas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sheep or wolves?

08/December/2010 10:36

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Back when I still lived in Seattle I began to put together a teaching block that was entitled “Sheep 2 Wolves.” This basic premise was that the Bible called God’s people sheep, because it really spoke to a latent sheep reality, not God’s design, or his will for the church, or for humanity in general.

When I began to question people about being called sheep. The response was pretty much totally sheepish. Put in more specific terms the response went something like, “My life is decent, my material needs are met. I have a little money left over to do some personal things. I don’t want to do anything that would upset the moderate level of security I have made for myself and my family.”

Over the years I have asked a number of people variations of the question, “What will you do if tomorrow turns out to be significantly different than today?” One of the first times was during a visit to New York City during my schooling while in the military. The retired couple I had the opportunity to stay with was living in a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. When I asked a variation of that question their response was simply, that type of change is impossible — we refuse to look at that possibility.

When stationed in Augsburg, Germany, it was the closest and most accessible American garrison to the Dachau concentration camp. After visiting the very sanitized remains, the place was still ominously oppressive. As a result, I began to read from the post library, materials about the holocaust and the motivation, or lack thereof, that allowed so many Jews to become sheep led to slaughter. In this literature terms like “living dead” became almost mundane.

Many years later I learned that one of my uncles that fought in World War II was among the first liberators of the camp. So I decided to give him a visit to see if I could get him to give me some details of what he saw and learned at Dachau. Since I am the only veteran amongst all of the Miller grandkids, and using my best spy training, I attempted to get him to talk about this experience. After a couple of excursions through the military and specific efforts to bring that travel to Bavaria, as close as I could get was the front gate of the camp. From there we were instantly transported back to Harrington, Washington, and discussions about pruning apple trees.
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Tags: sheep, wolves, Dachau, Americans, Europeans, European Union, Roman Empire, Protestant Reformation, Babylon

The Redux Future

01/December/2010 09:27

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Contrary to what we have all been taught, to use the lyrics from the song from the 1972 movie Cabaret, “Money Makes the World Go Around” IT DOESN’T, at least anymore.

In that musical tone in 1976, “Money, Money, Money” by the Swedish pop group ABBA doesn’t seem to be working anymore either.

Yet no matter the reality that the world is drowning in a world of fiat monetary electronic bits and bytes and the loss of wealth through massive leverage continues — money still seems to be as popular as ever.

In the thirty plus years since the first expression of these songs in the global market place, tangible money has been replaced with plastic. Until recently that plastic was the source of at least a short-term credit card floating loan, or unsecured financing of an over leveraged personal lifestyle.

Especially in the United States, where before the current Great Recession began, seventy percent of the economy was financed by this consumptive obsession, we truly seemed to believe that “If Tomorrow Never Comes” someone else would handle the consequences. At least this Garth Brooks song still relates to a real world populated by real people attempting to live their lives in meaningful ways.

Tomorrow has suddenly become today, and it seems that those who said that the future would take care of itself, now have only the line, “Trust us, we know what we are doing.” That doesn’t seem to be the title of any song, but it seems that the time is right for some country music composer to do just that. When they put out the tune it should have a track that plays it backwards, so that you could get back what you lost — like your house, your truck, your kids, maybe the wife or husband, but especially your dog.

Business Insider recently had a post “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America.” The first chart of that series shows that in 2006 the wealth of the top 0.01 percent of the American people was 976 times the bottom 90 percent. In 1928 just before the market crash that led to the Great Depression that number was 892.
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Tags: money, Plutocracy, Great Depression, wealth, Babylon, Belshazzar, Humpty Dumpty, Ben Bernanke, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama

Blessed are the Elastic

24/November/2010 08:16

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Yesterday the North and South Koreans exchanged about 200 artillery rounds in a confrontation centered on a small South Korean island just south of the Northern Limit Line that divides the countries since the end of conflicts in the 1950s. Stock markets around the world reacted adversely to these hostilities.

Today we will see if the don’t mess with my junk TSA airline screening pat-down protest will amount to much.

Tomorrow in the United States we celebrate our annual Thanksgiving holiday. What started out, as a solemn day to thank God for his tangible and intangible blessings, is becoming a festival of gluttony and cult football.

We live in such a boring world in which not much happens anymore.

When we listen to Glenn Beck, he asks us to, “Think outside the box.” Seems to me that begs the question — what box? Taking it a little farther, thinking doesn’t change anything, in order to make changes; boxes seem to be the place where you put your junk until such a time as you can either use it again, or more likely just keep it stored in boxes and let your heirs sort through it all.

Chuck Smith, the founder of the Calvary Chapel evangelical movement, has a saying, “Blessed are the flexible — for they shall see God act in their lives.” There is another “Where God leads, God provides.” I think I am beginning to understand the latter statement. The problem is God’s provision almost all of the time is so complex that my simple desires stretch me, rather than providing the security I had hoped for.

For Thanksgiving this year I think I have come up with a concept that encompasses all of the above. That statement is, “Blessed are the elastic, for they will begin to understand God’s grace.”
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Tags: Glenn Beck, Chuck Smith, blessed elasticity, Barack Obama, Jesus

Our enlightened elusive world

17/November/2010 09:37

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As humans, created in the image of God, we inherit as part of God’s initial gift of grace, the ability to create, within natural limits, a world fashioned from our personal desires. When we overstep those natural limits we move beyond that gift of grace and enter a world in which through our limitations we throw off those natural checks, and that eventually leads to an artificial reality, in which were are masters of an illusion enforced through fear.

Perhaps one of the most famous quotations of all time is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” From his First Inaugural Address given in 1933, this fear concept sets the stage for the New Deal, the basis of almost eighty years of attempts to abolish, circumvent, or ignore those natural checks on human enterprise.

In those intervening years we have attempted to build a great society, a shining city on a hill, a world of global peace and harmony. While many still believe that this great hopeful leap is possible for mankind, the signs around us everywhere point to the reality that we have overstepped our limits, and fear has not been eradicated. Now fear again comes to the fore because we have built this world on a faux reality of baseless dreams, leveraged debt money, and prosperity based upon nothing but ever increasing material consumption.

The solution to this fear is not to wish it away, but to replace it with the hope of real opportunity. This time that hope cannot be based upon “what your country can do for you, or you can do for your country,” a country we attempted to create and failed. Rather how you touch other people with the gifts of a community we have received, but have failed to acknowledge, is the source of regaining a fearless focus. The fruits of that community are love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness.

This fruit continually brings us back to the reality that what separates us, is relatively insignificant to what binds us together. That community cannot exist in the abstract, but only through personal contact as we share this gift of life. Read More...

Tags: George W. Bush, energetics, TARP, Ben Bernanke, FED, insurgency war, Glenn Beck, Russian Revolution, Social Darwinism, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Collectivist Elitists

The Spooky Times Have Begun

10/November/2010 09:50

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Little did I realize just last week when I posted the article “Let the Spooky Times Begin!” they would begin in earnest before the end of the week. It also seems that when we discussed AIDS as Acquired Integrity Deficiency Syndrome on Monday’s Cult Football post, before the upload was complete from our small hut in NE Washington State, real financial leaders of China, Russia, Brazil, Germany and others were beginning to question this AIDS disease, as a real presence in US FED Chairman Ben Bernanke. World Bank Chief Robert Zoellick was even talking about some sort of gold relationship integrity existing in the world’s currencies.

Little did we know that our inclusion of a world against Quantitative Easing (QE-2) discussion, would domestically include pretty much everyone outside the direct sphere of FED influence as well. On Fox Business Art Laffer even stated that he really had no idea of what is going to happen, because this was so far outside even the extremes of modern economics, that there is really no information to make and educated guess on the QE-2 outcome.

The best guess I heard was that Ben was aware that a pending double dip recession would be catastrophic for the country, so that he thought the QE-2 risk was worth taking. That is just a little less stupendous than our thoughts about Ben not wanting to be present at the start of another Great Depression.

Let us look briefly at the way the United States and the world looks today.

If you look at the Red and Blue senate election map of the New York Times you find a North East and left coast wins for the Democrats. However if you look at the Washington State map, you find only three counties, out of thirty-nine, who significantly voted in favor of Democrat Patty Murray. A look at the national map for the House of Representatives and you see again that significant Red — Blue segregation.

This shows the great American flyover is alive and well and also illustrates the continuing political differences between urban and rural electorates. The major difference in these elections centers upon the real difference in the role of government, especially the federal government spending, to solve human problems. Put bluntly, urban people say they need government help; rural people want to be left alone.

The world, as the comments concerning the FED chairman indicate, is also becoming more conservative financially, because just as in the United States, the various economic stimulus plans have had only limited success and really have done nothing to improve national balance sheets. Read More...

Tags: quantative easing, Ben Bernanke, FED, gold, Haggai 2, Idaho

Let the spooky times begin!

03/November/2010 10:52

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America’s second most favorite holiday, Halloween, has come and gone again. The midterm elections are now over and even though the hassle over winners and losers in some races will continue for some time, it is time to move forward. Today the Federal Reserve is meeting and the preliminary results show some quantitative easing, more than some had hoped for, but not enough for the money hounds.

So where do we go from here? Take a deep breath and let the spooky times begin.

The first major question seems to revolve around the premise, that Barak Obama has no real understanding of the reasons of what just happened, and probably has surrounded himself with advisors, who really don’t have the intestinal fortitude to tell him, or don’t think he will understand — so why bother.

Needless to say, for the next couple of years, until after the 2012 election, will include some serious hubris about economics, finance, money, and taxes. The question will be who or what will become the nemesis of these spooky times?

While the Biblical metaphor of Abraham leaving Ur to go to a land that God will show him, is probably too religious for most people, in reality, probably your danger principle should flag first and foremost those who state that they really have the answer. The common reality seems to suggest that we are closer to the beginning of this societal odyssey than near the destination. The travel adventures of Odysseus seem to be a good time frame for these spooky times, so it is probably wise for you to develop some sources of fundamental re supply along the way.

Last week in “You Can’t Buy Creativity?” we proposed the creation of an individual entrepreneurial frontier of the Wild West, free from all the regulations that so easily entangle today’s startup enterprises. Then we need to let that liberty and freedom create new wealth, something that has been missing from the American economic equation for at least a generation.
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Tags: Barack Obama, wealth, Moola, money, Joe Biden, FED, James J Hill, John Wesley Powell, Republicans, Democrats

You can't buy creativity!

27/October/2010 08:42

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The greatest mistake made by the United States in the last generation was the false belief that material prosperity was a renewable resource. If you just attempted to keep interest rates low and the money supply increasing at just a few basis points less than inflation — economic growth would continue forever.

How wrong that turned out to be. In the process we changed the American culture from one where it was the greatest producer of new wealth in the history of mankind, unto a nation of debt consumers. This was based upon the presupposition that instead of being a country of entrepreneurs and small business people, we could shift the country to where the American Dream would consist of a job where you could make payments on a house and you could borrow for your consumption against an ever increasing home value appreciation.

Needless to say, a balance sheet readjustment was and is the overriding cause of this mess that goes back to when Barak Obama was a kid and George W. Bush was a partying Ivy League frat brat. This systemic problem, so twentieth century in scope, is still the basis of the midterm election just a week away. If you believe that those results will truly bring some change you can believe in, this reality check will shortly resume again, after a bit of gloom or euphoria, depending upon your politics.

What is totally missing from our discussion is the inalienable right of human creativity. You can’t buy creativity; you really can’t manage it either, especially in the traditional sense. The main reason is that creativity is the fruit of failure. If you are afraid to lose, it is a natural law reality that you can never really win, but you still can’t quit the game.

In 2001 Barack Obama spoke about the U S Constitution being a charter of negative liberties that equates to restrictions on governments at all levels, to be restrained from essentially messing with the folks. From the context of that interview and subsequent events, it seems a self-evident truth that the president believes that the founders of the American Republic got it wrong. That foundational American error also seems to find substance in the dream that Barak received from his vision quest trek to find identity in his father’s drunken stupor. Read More...

Tags: USA, Barack Obama, creativity, money, American Monetary Institute, Moola, Adam Smith, U S Constitution, Keynes, Deep Woods Moola, PREFER Ltd, statistics

Bobos in Babylon

20/October/2010 10:11

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If you want to get some context of stupendous change, attempt to recall what our world was like back in early 2001, before 9-11, the financial crisis, the meltdown, the bailout, and the wars, first in Iraq, to rid the world of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and then Afghanistan, to destroy the Taliban rule of the country.

About that time I was attempting to buy a very nice business near Kalispell, Montana. Before I left Seattle for one of those trips I needed some piece of outdoor gear, so I went to the flagship store of Recreational Equipment Incorporated (REI) to pick up the item. Since parking is free in their under store garage a short purchase trip can quickly expand into a number of hours, just looking at the wide variety of outdoor gear, basically designed for people who attempt to take their affluent lifestyle out to the boonies. After all you can have your cake and eat it too, if you save some weight by getting a titanium cook pot to carry it in, and then use the pot for cooking all your gourmet freeze-dried meals.

The piece of equipment I was searching for was in someway related to a gold mine I would be looking at east of Missoula, after I had finished my business in Flathead country. That mine required a trip up the Blackfoot River before heading south up into the mountains where the mine was located. The Blackfoot became famous as the basis of the book and the movie, “A River Runs Through It.”

Since this trip would be many hours in the saddle of my trusty Dakota and I had a coupon for a free download of an audio book, I decided to listen to “Bobos in Paradise,” by David Brooks. In case you missed the book, Bobos stands for bourgeois-bohemians, the entropic hybrid formed from the merging of the 1960s counterculture with mainstream or main street materialism.

After finishing my excursion to the mine and this time heading down the Blackfoot, I began to get to the point where David got to his research of Bobos in the Puget Sound area of the country, by describing his visit to the REI flagship store. As I approached Missoula to again get back on Interstate 90, he continued these environmental thoughts with his decision to visit the Blackfoot to see if the river could provide a mystical experience, which in someway would help him understand the Bobos environmental ethics. The vision trek however, had to be cut short because he at to return to Missoula in time to meet friends for dinner.

Needless to say David didn’t find the transcendence he sought watching the river flow by him, but perhaps his analysis does fit with the paradigm of Bobos that says our hunger for nature must fit within our time budget allotted on our PDA.

“God, if you are out here in the woods you need to speak to me, between 2pm and 5pm, because I need to get home by six, so my friends and I can go out to the quaint multicultural restaurant and then take in a comedic movie.”

Where have all the aging Bobos gone?
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Tags: Bobos, Babylon, David Brooks, REI, USA, Progressivism, Barack Obama, God

Futility to Opportunity

13/October/2010 09:14

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As I read “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” which served as the basis for Monday’s Cult Football article “The Fruits of Obama’s Rage,” I developed a new respect for the president. Furthermore it solidified my belief that Barack Obama has the most specialized worldview of any American leader in our history. Sadly that specialization is not what is now needed and in the vision of true capitalism, his obsolete vision of the future based on anti-colonialism, while it has some merits in opposition to crony global capitalism, substitutes nothing but global governance solutions. Both are just different spin of the Babylonian worldview “that if we all work together there is nothing we can’t achieve.”

Other than the religious dogma of mankind becoming god in our own eyes, the natural law fundamental of this worldview is the reality that it is totally based upon overcoming entropy by some intellectual evolutionary leap, that in someway can overcome the thermodynamic laws of physics. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this has never happened, and it is never going to happen. That is true even if we are successful in aligning all the good karma and channeling all the hope of wishful thinking into and intellectual Big Bang.

A world of naturalistic materialism can only mix up things of the created natural material world, while we like to call it development or evolution, in reality it actually increases entropy and hastens the reality when it will all run out of gas. Depending upon your worldview of whether of Obama’s “Hope ‘n Change,” is good or bad, his anti-colonialism has been found wanting in less than two years. For an illustration we offer the visual graph of the Sin Cosmos below and some context here: Read More...

Tags: Barack Obama, USA, Divine Providence, Divine Destiny, Social Darwinism, grace, Wonder Springs, Christianity

Bankrupt and Broke!

06/October/2010 11:59

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Last week we concluded with the thought that we were quickly heading for Serfdomville, Serfdom on the Serfdom Express. What does that really mean?

Basically that means that the United States is bankrupt and consequently the world is broke. That is of course speaking in totally economic terms. American based gross debt driven consumerism based on leveraged assets, especially inflated housing values, have bankrupt the country. Consequently the globalist concept of building consumer products in the places where they can be produced for the least money and then shipping them to the United States for consumption, is bankrupt financially and broken as a means for producing wealth.

So the dreams of the world’s best and brightest elite thinkers has come to naught. This week we begin to outline a better way.

It is truly amazing how quickly the collective elitist form of Social Darwinism hit the skids, after Laissez-Faire Social Darwinism totally failed just a couple of years ago. That should signify that the world’s economic engine has totally run out of gas, but that would mean that we would need to come up with some economic plan to counter the Industrial Age. This wilderness frontier of wealth producing opportunity is beyond the scope of our global economic flat earth society. As a consequence, that frightening world is ruled by unknown dragons, bears, and wolves, but especially humans who for all too long have had a job, but don’t make any money.

In the United States those primitives still believe in their religion, have guns and know how to use them, and still have some vestiges of a scary culture once known as self-sufficiency. What is even more frightening however, if the knuckle draggers had access to some financial capital beyond their jobs and unemployment checks, they would in short order use their true human diversity to make the Social Darwinists elites an extinct species. Then what would happen to all of the elite producing universities that were created to bring evolving progressivism to the unwashed masses?

Understand, the United States of America is currently bankrupt financially, and the Divine Destiny that has driven American progressive exceptionalism for over 150 years, has also run its race.

“Oh God, what are we to do?”
Read More...

Tags: Serfdomville, USA, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Collectivist Elitists, Social Darwinism, Divine Destiny, Divine Providence, God, Wall Street

Next Stop: Serfdomville

29/September/2010 11:00

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"I'm no fan of the banks bailout and TARP, but the ability for a business like mine to get capital has been insanely difficult." This quotation comes from Michael McKean, a Florida entrepreneur, as the last line in a Wall Street Journal article, “Entrepreneurs Mixed on Small-Business Bill”, which president Obama signed into law with much fanfare on Monday. This article follows the general tone of similar articles, of similar media outlets, which still bother with something called journalism.

The main focus of the bill is some billions of dollars in small business loans which the bill seems to make harder to get, but might really help those who qualify.

Where in the world did we get the idea that we could run a country and a world solely on debt financing?

I might be getting old, but as best I can recall, the serious slouching toward Serfdomville must have begun during the Johnson administration where we decided we could fight a military industrial complex war and construct a Great Society at the same time. But back then I was just a stupid kid with a worldview that consisted of athletic competitions.

Some conservative commentators have stated that after the Republican landslide in this November’s midterm elections, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate will be running as a reincarnation, or channeling of the Gipper, Ronald Reagan. My suggestion is perhaps they should find someone whose ideas are not a generation old, but then again, I am not a member of the progressive-lite elite.

A few years ago, I was shopping at one of the best known independent sporting goods stores in the Spokane Valley. When I returned from looking at the boats and canoes, there was a man putting a swivel seat in a new fishing boat. You could tell by the demeanor and the way he approached this somewhat menial task that he was highly overqualified for the position of seat installer. As we discussed the state of the world he made the comment, “Pretty much everybody in Spokane has a job, but nobody is making any money.”

I thought that was a rather profound statement for a city that essentially owes its existence to a regional service distribution center.
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Tags: Serfdomville, Ronald Reagan, Spokane, Road to Serfdom, entrepreneurs, equity capital, Wall Street, market makers, gold

Polar Worldviews

22/September/2010 08:24

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Spring has sprung
Fall falls today
And this November election; will make winter colder than usual.

Well, maybe on Election Day in Sarah Palin’s Alaska, winter’s early polar blasts will be felt, but usually in the lower 48, these extreme frigid conditions will hold off until toward the end of November. In the Pacific Northwest Thanksgiving often features the weather of icky. Of course we are not talking about the weather however, but the polar extremes of the two worldviews that have become visible because of the stark barren frosty political landscape they have created in between their antagonists.

When you think of it in the proper context, these Arctic political blasts took on a previously unseen fury when Sarah Palin and TEA Party favorite, Christine O’Donnell became the Delaware’s Republican Party candidate for the U.S. Senate. Sarah now also has to share the polar platform with someone without any respectable credentials, other than being just a very average conservative American, who for some strange reason wants to be a Senator.

If you listen to the Republican pundits, the spin from Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Ann Coulter and others, is that the divide with the Democrats is small government contrasted with big government. The Democrats counter it is really big government saving us from destruction at the hands of the Capitalist Fat Cats.

There is some discussion of the people being upset with the totality of the Federal Government, that includes both incumbent Republicans and Democrats, as we mentioned last week, the MICE (Make It Complex Einstein) and MICE Lite, just don’t seem to get the frustration of the American people generally, and the TEA Party specifically. “Throw out all the bums,” doesn’t seem to register in the elite of both sides of the political class.

Let’s see if we can Keep It Simple Stupid so that we can add some context to what is happening, so that the American people can begin to see that they really are part of something grand that probably hasn’t happened in America and perhaps the world since the eighteenth century, maybe since the sixteenth. Read More...

Tags: tea party, worldview, Christine O Donnell, Republicans, Democrats, MICE, cult football, evolution, Ordinary Knowable, External Inspiration, Social Darwinism

Missing the Barn

15/September/2010 06:45

The original title for this article was “Missing the Mark.” But as I thought about our circumstances I realized that the old shooting saying, “They can’t hit the broadside of a barn,” was more appropriate. Then it became more obvious that I was just illustrating president Obama’s economic programs. To make this metaphor closer to the truth you would have to add in the Republicans continual bitching and moaning about letting the “Bush Tax Cuts expire,” which missed the other side of he barn.

Last Tuesday I delivered some rough-cut lumber to my cousin’s barn in Chewelah. The barn serves as storage for stuff that they don’t have space to store at their house in Spokane. The barn is an ideal place to cure the green lumber, because it is out of the weather, dry, without the temperature extremes that the sun’s heat might cause in a smaller building.

This barn used to be part of a small working dairy farm; very similar to those that once dotted the Colville Valley. My grandfather had worked the place, until he rented it to my uncle, when he retired from farming in the early 1950s. My uncle ran it as a dairy and worked in town until the milk processor required dairies to put in bulk tanks, a few years later. That was a significant investment that would never pay for itself, with the eight to twelve cows that the farm would support, so the dairy ceased to exist, and my uncle soon bought a larger place across the street that would allow for more profitable farming operations, while he still worked in his mechanic job in town.

I don’t know for sure, but I assume that much of the bulk tank emphasis was technology driven, but some it had to stem from making our milk safer. Just because nobody had got deathly sick from drinking pasteurized and homogenized milk products that came to market in old-fashioned cream cans, instead of a bulk milk tanker, probably saved all our lives. In any event I don’t know of any dairies in the Colville Valley any more. So that family farm monetary source is gone forever.

As I continued to think about missing the mark, I realized that the real problem with America is that there are a lot of similar old barns standing in America; the best of them serve as storage, essentially for junk. The unlucky ones stand completely unused, too proud and strong and well built to collapse, but without function, without purpose. In reality the barn still stands, but really the barn part of the barn is missing.
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Tags: Barack Obama, Keynes, Democrats, Republicans, tax cuts, regulations, KISS, MICE

Structured for Failure

08/September/2010 09:17

To do his thing on Labor Day, Barack Obama got on Air Force One and took a little trip to Wisconsin to roll out a new central planning jobs bill. The $50 billion proposal, over 6 years, is being touted as an opportunity to build and rebuild American infrastructure. Charles Krauthammer mentioned the audacity of the program, because those old fashioned communists, never proposed anything beyond a 5-year plan. The real problem with the plan is that it is really just a deferred maintenance bill that brings things back to some working status, which we have been too cheap to fix for decades.

That really brings us to a couple of deeper questions. If we haven’t maintained this infrastructure, as we should, do we really need it? Are we just spending money we don’t have, on something we should be doing different in the future?

However this proposal seems rather foolish, to think that even if the bill is frontloaded to over $10 billion the first year, this will be much more than chump change in a $14 trillion economy. It looks more and more like our current form of Federalism is structured for failure. Trickle down, whether it comes from the government or through a corporate structure — doesn’t. This is especially true in the government sector when deficits are used to fund Eisenhower’s Reagan-Bush neocon military industrial complex, or the liberal agenda of social justice through wealth redistribution; primarily focused on big unions at the expense of everyone else.

What is the American vision? Seriously, What is the vision to take the United States of America into the twenty-second century?

It seems rather obvious that buying stuff, we don’t need, with money we don’t have, until we can retire to ease and cease to do anything in anyway productive, is nothing more than a structure for failure, the chaos of destruction, the reality of the sin-cosmos.

Where do we begin, or should we just start over?
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Tags: Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, cult football, Divine Providence, capitalism, God, flat tax

Nature's negative rights myths

01/September/2010 15:18

Barack Obama has become known for his description of the US Constitution as a bundle of negative rights, or liberties that limit government from doing a lot of things that he believes the government should provide. Since those negative liberties are designed from the federal government down through the states, to the individual, those negative liberties are mostly focused upon limiting national power.

Keeping with our last post on “Our Sin-Cosmos Demise” the increasing federal power over the history of the United States can be portrayed as the slow eroding of the essentially ex nihilo informational energetics of the nation’s founding. This erosion follows the first two laws of thermodynamics. If our sin cosmos analysis is correct, over time that created stasis will reach a point that without significant increases in thermodynamic informational energetics, the whole process will collapse in a manner similar to that shown in radiation half-lives.

Whether you believe that enviable collapse by that mechanism or not, there are a couple of natural laws that provide the basis for those federal limitations of Obama’s negative liberties. Both natural laws basically find their power from the negative reality of sin, but each law focuses on different ends of our created human spectrum of inalienable rights. Both are found in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.

Since the highly evolved collective elite considers the Bible essentially a book of negative myths of evolutionary history, the reality of their application is beyond the paradigms of their enlightened worldview. Irreconcilable variations exist between the evolutionary millions and billions of years contrasted with a Biblical constructionist need to compress the creation account and mans’ history into thousands of years. However when you look seriously at that debate, creation historical dates are just differing applications of our two underlying natural laws.

The first sin focuses on the individual and is found in Genesis 3; generally referred to as the fall of mankind, and the beginning of the Christian concept of total depravity. Stated in specific terms this is the individual desire to be like God, to know the difference between good and evil and to be able to define our own specific works as good.

The second is found in the Tower of Babel experience and the confusion of the human language into languages. Stated in Biblical terms, which we have no problem understanding, our highest community desires is to work together so that there is really nothing that human abilities cannot accomplish. That is especially true if we are able to evolve beyond these negative myths. Read More...

Tags: U S Constitution, sin cosmos, Babylon, Biblical Creaton, Natural Law, evolution, Barack Obama, Bill O Reilly, Redux Rendezvous

Taking a brief hiatus

25/August/2010 09:55

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Redux Independent

18/August/2010 08:06

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

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

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

Now the tendency is to look to those from the immediate past, blame them for the present, and make some boastful predictions that the future will make us more secure. All we need to do is to have hope that this will become true. However hope and faith are not forces, but realistic beliefs in external factors that will bring about our desires. During this last generation, but always present in the human psyche, we have replaced God as that redemptive ability, with our human governance and our materialism.
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Tags: Redux Indpendent, War Racket, Redux Rendezvous, Bill O Reilly, Glenn Beck, tea party, U S Constitution, Biblical Creaton, God, Barack Obama

Persons with common sense need not apply

11/August/2010 10:16

Our new Wonder Springs Intelligence email address just received a memo from an undisclosed source that said that there is going to be a Top Secret shakeup of all federal government agencies and departments. This will include the White House and Defense Department, as well as Congress and the Federal Reserve. Accompanying this Top Secret document was a draft of a help wanted advertisement that will run later this month in leading newspapers and other established media outlets.

Uncle Sam needs your help! As you know things are not going like we hoped here at zenith of human enlightenment, so we are going to reorganize the totality of the Federal Government to better serve the needs of the American People. In that illumination we are currently seeking the smartest and the brightest from across the nation to help us create this positive change. Accepted applicants must demonstrate that the potential hireling be a team player with unquestioning loyalty to failed ideas of the progressive era. Formal education from the top universities is required, as well as extensive professorial experience at the same — a definite plus. Those hired will not have any tangible human leadership skills, but possess oratory skills to pontificate about things they know nothing about ad infinitum-nauseam. Special Note: Those persons with possessing something once called common sense — need not apply. Except for that Your United States Government is an equal opportunity employer.

Hallelujah! Soon, very soon we are going to change the country and the world. Now there will be those detractors out there that say this employment opportunity will not exist once the Republicans take back both the house and the senate in the November midterm elections. However our anonymous Top Secret source has indicated that this employment advertisement passed muster with the Republican Party establishment, which signifies the whole of the nation’s political class are on board with this extensive governmental restructuring.

Of course the management here at Wonder Springs is concerned that nothing at all will change due to this restructuring of the status quo, we question if fact this restructuring is nothing but a form of a noise generating attempt to keep the American people in their current mushroom status. (Maintain the people in the dark and feed them horse manure.)

Thankfully for over a year now we have heard the president say that we are “back from the brink” economically. So the major question that no one seems to be asking, “Are we still just peering into the chasm or have we changed directions and headed what looks to be a endless barren plateau?”
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Tags: common sense, USA, jobs, Barack Obama, Natural Law, God, Redux Rendezvous

Wonder Springs

04/August/2010 09:00

Today I am going to tell you what is wrong with this country, and the world for that matter. Then I am going to tell you again, and then perhaps again in another way, and then we will be done.

We humans everywhere have lost our sense of wonder. If the rest of the animals on this earth, perhaps the plants too, could, or can wonder, they would wonder what is wrong with the human species, they have lost their sense of wonder about everything, about life.

Truly we bitch and moan, belittle and bloviate, prophesy and procrastinate, worry and fret, whine and are stubbornly unhappy about a whole world of trivial things. Things, things everywhere, so much so that thing obsession has become both our religion and our way of life. To make matters worse we no longer have the time to wonder why things seem so wrong, when we hoped that things would be so right.

The good news is that wonder springs from the totally mundane. But the thing we need to learn again is that wonder is only possible because of the existence of the transcendent. We have become so materially blessed that we really are of no earthly good. In the process we have become so self centered that we have lost our sense of faith in anything we cannot physically touch. Oue recent problems stem from the reality that we are limited beings and just can’t touch an infinite world without some help and we are too insecure to even know were to ask for help.

We can be thankful however that wonder springs from death and the impossible.

And God said, “I wonder what kind of world those humans will create if I make them in my image?”
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Tags: Wonder Springs, God, Death Valley, Desert Pete, Kingston Trio, Babylon

The jobless times that vex the jobless soul

26/July/2010 09:14

Welcome to jobless times that vex the jobless soul.

Welcome to the new decade of the early twenty-first century, where the future is based on hope. The hope that Christmas past will again invigorate Christmas present, or the hope that Christmas future cannot come too soon. Hope, hope everywhere and none of it changes reality, for we have no concept of reality, other than the future hopefully repeats or improves upon the past.

Japan has had a lost decade for the last couple, because their economy has developed permanent stagnation. So the country that just some twenty to thirty years ago was the business model for the world, now is just another economic player in a global community of lethargic materialism.

Europe for its part has done better than Japan, but it is sort of a unified Europe after all. But in the context of world economics, it seems that the proper concept is “Been there, done that, and got the shirt.” They seem however beginning to realize that loving one another, while better than war, still doesn’t necessarily make for a happy family.

Here in the United States we have recently made hope our God. Well if not really a god, hope in change seems to be a figment of perverse imagination, really creates nothing but more regulations, present deficits, and a future of higher taxes, coupled with either deflation or inflation.

The past is where we feel the most comfortable, so if we all hope together that past-future will evolve right before our eyes. Can I get a witness?
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Tags: innovation, Invention, jobs, Social Darwinism, Collectivist Elitists, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Wall Street, USA, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Kauffman Foundation, God

The Effrontery Frontier

21/July/2010 08:15

This is an impossible story of how to create a new frontier of enterprise opportunities, in a land led by leaders that believe they know how to improve the unbroken, and create reality by their words and nothing else.

The tale is a brash attempt to create and Effrontery Frontier, much like the settling of the American west, which was the mechanism that provided the emphasis for prosperity and growth until approximately a century ago.

The need for the Effrontery Frontier is shown in the reality that all new jobs are really created in startup companies as we noted last week with the reference to the Kauffman Foundation Report. Sadly current enterprise and political leadership focuses upon a generation of debt driven consumption with globally produced disposable goods as the sole means of the world’s economic growth.

Through some clandestine process that was slipped by the American people, the United States decided to become the financier of this scam, as we shipped our wealth-producing infrastructure offshore. Then through environmental imperialism we sought to turn our public lands into wilderness and parklands through conscious neglect. The Effrontery Frontier will slowly bring back the wealth, building upon the industrial revolution but not subservient to it.

Some would say that the current problems began with the rise of progressivism of that same vintage, but to divorce progressivism’s birth from the death of the real frontier does a gross injustice to both endeavors; for good, the not so good, and the down right repugnant.
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Tags: Kauffman Foundation, USA, Progressivism, Effrontery Frontier, homestead, Wallace Stegner, John Wesley Powell

Then the Power Went OUt

14/July/2010 10:27

Last Saturday at 2:47 in the afternoon my email inbox chimed with a “Fire Weather Watch” to be in effect from 11 AM until 11 PM Monday. What that means is that high winds are expected which can blow down trees and if those trees hit power lines they can start fires that really move across the countryside. Interestingly just two years ago on that very day, a similar storm caused three major fires in Eastern Washington. In total I received six messages from that weather service and two from another predicting the storm, until the power went out at about 3:30 Monday afternoon. It was restored at about 8:40 Tuesday morning for a total of seventeen hours and change.

There is not much you can do about the weather, you can take precautions like making sure things that might blow away – can’t, and anything in the way of a falling tree – isn’t, but for the most part you just have to let it happen. The same is not true for human activities and in context, the economic weather. If you look at such companies as Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Hewitt Packard, and a whole host of others, they have been around for approximately a generation. But what no one seems to notice is, unlike humans, these enterprises really don’t have any kids.

The statistics show that the Great Recession has cost the American economy somewhere between eight and nine million jobs. Job creation in recent months has basically hovered around an average of those required to keep even with the growth of the population. Everywhere from the president on down to the neighbors discussing the day’s activities, they are all talking about there is not enough or no work. Those with jobs are very thankful, and those without work are more and more often giving up.

A major question has been where was all the professional forecasting that this was going to happen, but more importantly now that the power has gone out of job creation, what are we going to do about it?

So far we hear a lot of talk, and any actions that have been taken are really counterproductive. We are well past seventeen months without any job creation. Listening to the vice president he seems to be saying seventeen years is a reasonable expectation for job return.

A week ago the email chimed with a study from the Kauffman Foundation that stated: “Job Growth in the U.S. Driven Entirely by Startups.” That is not news to me, but here is a brief summary of the findings: “New firms add an average of 3 million jobs in their first year, while older companies lose 1 million jobs annually.” All of this comes from analyzing data from Business Dynamics Statistics, a U. S. Government dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, from data going back to 1977.
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Tags: Kauffman Foundation, The Forgotten Man, startup business, jobs, entrepreneurs, Keynes, tax cuts, flight money, The State of Effrontery

Redux Rendezvous VII

07/July/2010 08:21

This is the final installment of our specific Redux Rendezvous series. That means it is the seventh in the series, which this seventh month comes out on the seventh day, our twenty-seventh issue of the year. Which as far as I know means absolutely nothing. It is not so much we have run out of ways to enlarge these redux basics, but rather in a forest of stupendously changing events we keep finding amazing trees and other life that needs deeper description.

Through this series timeline our separate Monday posts have become more important as descriptions of current events that got our attention in the previous week. These articles began in late January as a Week in Review posts, but over time they have become more focused commentary rather than spun reporting.

At the same time while doing the Redux Rendezvous series we have been able to focus on broader observations on what is developing in our world that no one seems to see or understand. Contrary to the uncertainty that you read and hear in the big bad world, everything that is now happening is following natural law, or more precisely is falling apart because we humans think we know better and hence create mess after mess as the result of our own foolishness.

This week we will sort of encapsulate our remarks in the context of a Ubermenschen failure. True, the world really has no superhuman people, except in their own eyes, but our human focus is still the belief that somehow the combined wisdom of humanity can make this whole adventure function better than it historically has been able to provide.

These uber-thoughts surfaced in the early morning hours as I was musing about the mess that Michael Steele has produced by remarks, at a Republican Party fundraiser over Afghanistan being president Obama’s war. Steele said it is doomed to failure because no power has been able to create a nation there in over a thousand years. Read More...

Tags: Michael Steele, Afghanistan, Ubermenschen, Social Darwinism, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Collectivist Elitists, Radical Islamists, Complacent Agnositics, Tradtional Independents, counterinsurgency, nation building

Redux Rendezvous VI

30/June/2010 12:39

When I completed Monday’s article “In My Tent Leadership” on Gen. McChrystal and the war in Afghanistan, I couldn’t help thinking that to do this thing right we could have the makings of a 30 year war, in a country that no one thinks it truly is worth the bother. To my surprise when I opened my emails Tuesday morning I was hit with the headline “The 30 Year War in Afghanistan.” As I read the article from Stratfor, I began to understand that their analysis believed that our war in Afghanistan began in 1980, when we offered support to the mujahideen to block Soviet advances. With President Obama’s decision to escalate American involvement when he took office, the war entered Phase 4. It is now Obama’s war. This opens the question will this be Obama’s Vietnam?

Over the weekend reports say that the Canadians spent a billion dollars to protect the G20 leaders from anarchists riots in Toronto, where 900 people were arrested. Maybe Afghanistan is not such a bad investment in that context.

In a developing story ten deep cover Russian spies were arrested in America just like in the good old days of the Cold War. We could go on, but rather than focus on war as and end, perhaps a better description of war is an attempt to control chaos. Chaos however begets chaos, and in the common sense definition of what is happening in the world, the change we were told we could believe in, is really chaos seemingly feeding upon itself.

Since the end of the Korean Conflict, for the United States our wars have been defined in terms of either insurgencies or counterinsurgencies. In Vietnam we were engaged in a counterinsurgency with the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In the Gulf War we fought a traditional war, and abandoned the war efforts before either term really applied. With the true Iraq War a similar result was quickly obtained, but pacifying the country quickly became counterinsurgency, against indigenous militias, foreign mercenaries, Al-Qaeda, Iran, and others. Read More...

Tags: Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, Redux Rendezvous, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Collectivist Elitists, Radical Islamists, Tradtional Independents, Complacent Agnositics, Alan Greenspan, Al Qaeda, Social Darwinism, Barack Obama, tea party

Redux Rendezvous V

23/June/2010 17:32

In Monday’s “The Chaos of American Energy” we used a Vietnam era construction that said: 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.

Sticking with the Vietnam motif today we use another term from those bygone days that pretty much describes what is happening to the Obama Administration. That historic expression is Buzzard Luck, Can’t kill nothing, nothing will die. Perhaps a more contemporary definition brings fuller meaning. Everything that happens turns into a disaster.

My personal take on the subject is that there is no such thing as luck, even Buzzard Luck, and everything happens for a reason, including disasters. Since there is no such thing as a previous state of existence, karma does not apply either.

However before noon Pacific time, a soon to be published article in Rolling Stone in which Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal made comments that were not all that flattering to the President, his staff, and related support in theater. As a consequence the general is being summoned to Washington to explain his actions today and maybe get the opportunity to retire early.

Then a federal judge in New Orleans blocked the President’s off shore drilling moratorium. U. S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman stated that the moratorium was arbitrarily imposed because continued drilling posed no imminent danger. Arbitrary and capricious two wonderful legal terms which are almost impossible to prove the negative. Outstanding!

Who would have believed that just eighteen months into his Administration it seems like the Obama team continues to shoot itself in the foot. It kind of makes you nostalgic for the good old days of George W. Bush and even perhaps Bill Clinton. But alas, that is just ancient history.

We should however ask ourselves the question, “Is all this Obama’s fault, or is he just the man who volunteered to be the messenger?
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Tags: Buzzard Luck, Gen McChrystal, Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway, PREFER Ltd, Moola

Redux Rendezvous IV

16/June/2010 05:07

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

From the description of the author on the back cover I found out that Dr. Sekerfreevich was a professional botanist and geneticist from the Soviet Union, who had defected in 1929 and purchased a small orchard on the shores of Palmer Lake a few miles north of Loomis. At the time Palmer Lake was one of the area’s prime orchard areas, but today being off the beaten track from the Okanogan Valley its contribution is diminished.

According to the owner of the thrift store, Sekerfreevich was essentially a hermit, who lost is family somehow related to a Stalin purge, but still was well liked in the community and help generously the other orchardists improve their orchards. So I gave the thrift store owner a dollar and purchased the booklet, probably the only one still in existence, took it home and promptly put it away, only to discover it recently while looking for something else.

In his little book Sekerfreevich said that when coming to America he was able to bring a small tin of apple seeds from the research center where he worked in central Russia. When he purchased his orchard he planted the seeds and grew them to the point where they began to produce fruit. Because of the difference in climate some of the seeds didn’t produce any fruit, but one particular tree looked very promising, so he grafted it to other rootstocks and rooted some of the canes. As a play on words he called the apples by the common name Russian Red.
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Tags: Collectiva maximus, Independenceus arduous, Thoreau, Glenn Beck, Bill O Reilly, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, USA

Redux Rendezvous III

09/June/2010 11:02

In our Monday response to the question “Is the world broke?” posed by Fox Business, the Wonder Springs conclusion was that the world economic system was basically broken. We believe the reason for this is that there has been various conscious efforts by increasingly enlightened governance, in the United States following the rest of the world to replace the Invisible Hand of capitalism created by Adam Smith, with the visible hand of various collective régimes. This collectivism contrived to replace essentially the hand of God, with simplistic human planning, empowered by wishful thinking.

This broken worldview has led to a series of schemes in which the ability of human enterprise to create wealth has been greatly limited by simple gross negligence. In order for the world to continue to function, money created almost exclusively through debt has as been utilized as energetics behind economic growth.

What none of these self-righteous elitists seem to understand is that wealth and money are not synonyms for the same thing. Wealth is basically transcendent and in our time space continuum it can be converted into money. Money is simply a convenient medium of exchange from one form of wealth into another or to exchange goods and services. Especially in our twenty-first century money is a commodity like a whole lot of other things.

This brings up an interesting question and that is why humans seem to hoard money when they don’t stockpile much of anything else, with perhaps the exception of property? Perhaps it is simply the illusionary mystic that money is wealth.

It is not rocket science, but basic common logic to understand if the Invisible Hand of God creates wealth, and if we make a conscious choice to deny the reality of God, then our ability to create true wealth will disappear. Perhaps that makes money, once in coins and paper, and now in electronic bytes, a simple easy to understand idol of something that was once a true reality, and that was real wealth.
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Tags: USA, money, wealth, Social Darwinism, Natural Law, Redux Rendezvous, revivalism

Redux Rendezvous II

02/June/2010 14:34

Negative metaphors, metaphors everywhere, and all of them seem to work. Into such a simplistic worldly description, we continue treading water this week. Just like where do we begin?

News that the United States is about to become a model of a failing European state are grossly optimistic or pessimistic, depending upon your point of view. The reason behind all of this hoopla is simply the fact that the vast majority of the American people are unwilling to play the game. The importance of this gaming the people punditry is being broadcast into our homes and offices by those needing to sell ideas, but also products deemed to make the world better.

If you seriously look beyond the hype and hyperbole however, you see that life goes on. Furthermore a realistic look at the present vibrantly illustrates, that in a realistic context the present isn’t all that bad, and generally Americans may not control the future, but they still have a faith in the God who does. In that context, the plans by the mice who say they know what they are doing in that land back where the sun rises, doesn’t seem to relate to the men and women who daily go about their lives out here in the hinterland.

So in that context of American development, we all have truly become a nation of Native Americans, some of them we call Indians, in that respect the Canadian term First Nations, seems more appropriate, but only on the surface of the current progressive spin. A deeper look shows that the old concept of unity in diversity, or “Out of Many, One,” is still very appropriate. The reality is if the immigrants to these United States had wanted to be and remain Europeans, or Asians, Latin Americans, or even Africans, they could have stayed where they were, even if they died trying, or returned later.

The continents we call the Americas were the last place that people settled and we are all immigrants to these shores, with the time frame measured in thousands of years at most, no matter how you spin the origin.
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Tags: USA, Memorial Day, Sherman Church, Jump Canyon, Denmark, Wilbur, American Dream, Barack Obama, BP Oil, Redux Rendezvous

Redux Rendezvous I

26/May/2010 08:00

In Monday’s, “The Wealth Creation — Tax & Debt Redistribution Continuum” we offered the thesis that wealth creation was an inalienable right given to humanity by the Creator. We, who have been blessed to be immigrant citizens to these shores, also have the benefit of a codified structure for national development, outlined in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. For a broader context we also posted this article under the blog tabs at Deep Woods Moola and The Creation Leadership Center.

As a founding right, given to us by God, wealth creation belongs to the individual in the literal sense. We proposed that not only was wealth creation an inalienable right it is also a fundamental right of all Americans. Upon further reflection, it is not really a stretch at all to state that the wealth creation right, is essentially the Absolute inalienable fundamental right of all Americans, for the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all flow through this highest of all birthrights.

We further proposed that new wealth is basically an ex nihilo creation in the mind of an individual that combines the energetics of faith with the information of the enterprise to form a wealth seed. Through the introduction of equity liquidity, meaning a total commitment, not just debt involvement, this seed can sprout and become a viable product, service, profession, or vocation.

Taxes and debt can serve as means to grow the germinated seed, either directly or indirectly, but contrary to what has been promoted through a half century of a diseased American Federalism, debt and taxes can only redistribute present and future wealth through money, they cannot create fundamental new wealth. Read More...

Tags: wealth, God, Redux Rendezvous, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Alan Greenspan, Barack Obama, tax cuts, 2 BIG 2 Work, Wall Street, Main Street

Redux Christianity

19/May/2010 13:46

Beginning with the Absolute that there is a God and at specific times and places, working through human personalities created in His image, stupendous changes are created in both nature and human civilizations to redux the past into the future.

Absolutes are defined as truth residing outside the auspices of human understanding. Another way to describe an Absolute is that it is a natural law in which we humans can only apprehend, but cannot change in the sense of its universal application. The reason we must resort to the use of the term Absolute is that the old term of truth has been so distorted and made politically correct that it no longer really defines anything but a spin of a faux reality.

The term Absolute, as a modern philosophical construct, became popular through the ministry and the writings of Francis Schaeffer. While produced in the turmoil of the 1970s, Schaeffer’s most famous work, “How Should We Then Live” is a video series that essentially dramatizes the cultural changes we now are having a very difficult time believing.

In our enlightened world, the reality of Absolutes causes all sorts of angst. How can we be continually evolving onward and upward when there already exists a standard that makes our best efforts seem moronic in their best spin?

So we see a contrast between the things of God and the things of man. As we have pointed out in previous weeks, Godly change works from the Universal to the individual. Human change begins with the individual to form a collective, to be administered by the more highly evolved above us.

In “The Christian Diaspora” we theorized that today’s Christianity had really become an in situ diaspora, because the evolving world could not really understand a difference between their worldly religion and Christianity, both were bigots of a similar cloth of personal peace through individual affluence.

Last week in “The Christian Redux” we proposed that it was essentially God’s problem to redux human culture and we have been given the grand opportunity to be living in these days. Before we wander into that cultural wilderness however, it seems important to do a little speculation on how the new Redux Christianity might look in comparison to today’s Diaspora. Read More...

Tags: Francis Schaeffer, Absolutes, Christian Diaspora, Christian Redux, God, dry bones valley, propitiation, justification, revivalism, Protestant Liberalism

The Christian Redux

12/May/2010 08:00

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

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

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

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

Last week in the Christian Diaspora we basically developed the context that construction or creation-wise, God works from the universal to the individual. From the solely human perspective we find the Babylonian model that builds from the individual to the collective. That clash of those two creative constructs has brought us to the place in which change is only something we reluctantly accept.

The United States is still the only remaining superpower and for most of our history our republic has embraced the concept of the inalienable rights of the individual. Therefore if things haven’t been working out all that well recently, perhaps we need to let the past lead us to the future. Once we get headed in the right direction we can again become a positive model for the world. The problem is there are competing forces that want to set that direction, we can only choose one path, and we are told that we live in a world in which there are no absolutes, only relativity. Read More...

Tags: Christian Diaspora, Christian Redux, United Kingdom, Religious Right, Glenn Beck, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Social Darwinism, Barack Obama

The Christian Diaspora

05/May/2010 10:18

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Last week we wrote about those awful sinners that control, or seek to control the land, the Social Darwinists. Those really bad guys are really bad, because they only think of themselves and that is because they haven’t asked Jesus into their heart.

I once attended a church where the young pastor in a Sunday sermon brought up the reality that sinners — sin! The reaction from the congregation was one of almost dumbfounded amazement. He pointed out that sin was their job description. “It can’t be true, people need Jesus, but to call them sinners is almost un-American.”

In this particular denomination the world is made up of three classes of people, the saints, the carnal Christians, and the people who need Jesus. Not a sinner in the group! In Bible days within the Jews, they had three similar groups, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the gentiles or the goyim.

The interesting thing about the financial crisis was it was brought about by sinners — sinning. It was their job description. We called them last week Social Darwinists, but why are most Americans so dumbfounded that the greedy elitists were doing just what comes naturally?

But what is even more amazing, is that people think that with a massive set of regulations passed by Congress, signed by the President, and codified through reams of bureaucratic regulations, this is somehow going to curb the abuses.

We are nearing the point where we will reach the cross over where if we had let the too big to fail — fail, would be bypassed by real bankruptcies and the new growth of a financial spring, but that is a missed opportunity, a road not taken. This was a political decision based pretty much upon the basis of short-term political expediency. Now again short term political expediency (that must be complete before the fall elections) again is called upon to make a long-term decision on how to regulate the unregulated.

None of this understands the basic tenant that common sense easily comprehends; a big bungling bureaucratic government dinosaur cannot catch a fleet footed competent individual, unless the individual makes a really stupid mistake. So why try?
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Tags: Social Darwinism, sin, Christian Diaspora, Absolutes, entropy, grace, God

The Social Darwinism Conundrum

28/April/2010 11:12

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How many times in these United States have you gone to visit someone and were admonished at the front door, “We don’t allow the discussion of politics or religion in this house!”

Even if it is an unspoken rule, the lack of discourse of both politics and religion and how they are related, dare I a say as a civil discussion, is what has gotten America into our current position.

Just mention Sarah Palin and a volcano of anger or praise erupts almost instantaneously and soon volcanic ash threatens to block out the sun. If someone doesn’t change the subject pretty soon, air traffic will have to be diverted around the area.

Underlying all this joy and mirth is the clashing of worldviews.

One view believes that there is a God, who created everything not all that long ago, and mankind was created in the image of God.

The scientific worldview does not believe in god, maybe aliens, but nothing exists but the natural material reality that evolved by quantum leaps of intellectual complexity over millions and billions of years.

A third worldview states that they believe in God but are agnostic on how it all came to be and where we are going, because they just have enough trouble dealing with daily life.

The forth group believes essentially that they are the zenith of evolution, and because of their superior intellect, the rest of us should acquiesce to their understanding of how it all works, and likewise thank and serve them for being so very magnanimous. These are the Social Darwinists, who now are the dominant religion in America, but as we will see as we continue, are facing a conundrum of epic proportions, that will very soon lead to a battle to the finish among the members. The survival of progressive evolution is at stake and to victor belong not only the spoils, but the vanquished will be eliminated from the gene pool. Read More...

Tags: Sarah Palin, Social Darwinism, God, evolution, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Ronald Reagan, Curtis Mayfield, Barack Obama

Why Me? Trekking to Gomorrah

21/April/2010 12:01

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This week we bring you the final installment of this series of, “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension.” In keeping with the novel – novel theme we have looked at some of the major theses, or paradigms of historic western culture and how many times it was the antitheses of these original beliefs that brought about change, sometimes stupendous change. And amazingly in this historic context, much of this change can be considered beneficial.

In closing this series, all of our readers, whether in the United States, or elsewhere in the world, recognize that the changes we are experiencing are what we describe as stupendous. In that light the concept of “change we can believe in” seems grossly simplistic if not truly oxymoronic. As a result we all sense an excitement, but at the same time an anticipation of apprehension that mankind has truly never past this way before, especially when that concept is enlarged, as we are asked to “think globally.”

The title to this chapter is an adaptation of the title of a book by Robert Bork entitled, “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and the American Decline” first published in 1996. Bork was one of Ronald Reagan’s appointments to the Supreme Court, who never made it through the Senates conformation process, because he was vilified by his opponents as being an extremist. From that process came the invention of the term “borked,” which seems amazingly close to what is happening currently to the American people, by what is now being called “crony capitalists — media — politicians.”

Slouching is one of the most enlightening books I have ever read, and the title shows historically how we have pretty much through just passive neglect dumbed down the world in which we live, to the point that we will someday face destruction similar to the Biblical Gomorrah.

The divergence in the world today and the world over a decade ago, is that a slow slothful meander towards oblivion has been replaced with defined action, as if we just can no longer wait to get to Gomorrah, we have the city in our sights and together with all our baggage we are hell-bent to get there as soon as possible. In many ways Gomorrah has become our biblical replacement of the shining city on a hill, representing a New Jerusalem of many of America’s Christian founders.
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Tags: Gomorrah, Robert Bork, Bill Clinton, Great Society, Viet Nam, George W. Bush, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Chicago, Social Darwinism, Soviet Union, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan

Why Me? The General Governance Theory

14/April/2010 10:20

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As I was writing Monday’s post on “2 BIG 2 Work,” I began thinking about the concept that perhaps the problems now facing the United States and really the broader world concept of globalization stems from the reality all have gotten 2 BIG 2 fail and simultaneously 2 BIG 2 work.

What a better closing paradigm for this “Why Me?” series! Failure isn’t my fault because everything just sort of quit working because of bad karma, and since I only think good thoughts about everything, except a few bad stuff moments, I am completely off the hook for all the bad stuff that happens.

Now I will have to admit the 2 BIG 2 Work concept was stolen from Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Whether it was original with him I do not know, but it surely does describe a whole lot of what is happening all around us. In the context that I heard from him, he was talking about the Federalization of too big to fail financial institutions, but what if the whole country at the national level is getting simply 2BIG 2 Work.

Albert Einstein gave us the Theory of Relativity, but he then spent the rest of his life trying to develop a scientific General Theory of Why, but was never able to get there. I would submit that without God it is a philosophic tautology, and with God it becomes undefinable, because of the natural limits of human created capacity. So if a real general theory is impossible for man, why not dumb it down and talk about just the universe of human governance?

We must begin in Ivy League prose where it goes something like, “The cognitive limited diversity of our educational paradigm provides incongruous perceptions of natural reality.” In the media perception of the Tea Party movement, “Wees’ jist don’t knows no betta!”
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Tags: 2 BIG 2 Work, governance, Bernie Goldberg, Adam Smith, federal governance, U S Constitution, Ronald Reagan, flat tax, fair tax

Why Me? Divine Providence

07/April/2010 12:25

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Last week we closed the Sheep to Wolves article with the signature paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

If you would like to know the succinct answer on why the United States finds itself in its present predicament, a new version of those thoughts would go somewhat as follows:

With a firm reliance on the my personal virtue of unfettered greed, I will do whatever necessary to get ahead according to my definition of success, giving no thought at all to the pain and suffering I might cause other people, or the world in which I live.

Furthermore, to accomplish my goals as rapidly as possible, with the least personal risk, I will work for a large global corporation, institution, or government that shares my values.

Turn on the television to the lame stream media and you will hear that capitalism no longer works, so we need to replace it with diverse government programs that will solve capitalism’s problems.

These pundits have a religious bias that they alone think that they can fix something broken, with something better in their own eyes. When in reality their solution is worse than the broken predecessor. Welcome to the world of ObamaCare.
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Tags: Declaration of Independence, capitalism, ObamaCare, God, Ronald Reagan, dry bones valley, tea party

Why Me? A Hundred Year Bad Marriage

24/March/2010 10:50

So you think your marriage is great, that is wonderful!
If you think your marriage is awful and you want or need a divorce, sorry about that!

But the really sad thing is if you are married to another party for over a hundred years and then you find out that the troubles you have been experiencing for most of a century are rooted in a mutual codependency. You seemed to want the same thing but you never really understood why you were always arguing about virtually everything in life. It took a hundred years and you recently found out by reading this Wonder Springs article that you have totally incompatible religions. You always thought that you were progressing towards the same goal, and now after all this time you realize that you need to split the sheets.

The two twentieth century religions that are in the process of breaking up after all this time are evolving atheistic materialism and Christendom; better known as those who promoted a social gospel, Protestant liberalism, or in some extreme cases, social justice, and Liberation Theology. Those who were around at the beginning of the marriage believed that it was a marriage made in heaven. After all both parties in that early relationship were interested in creating a utopian city here on earth. A shining city on a hill to show the world how well Christians could get along with pagans and in turn everyone would turn their hearts to Jesus.

The problem that both participants in the marriage did not understand was the vision of creating heaven on earth is really the only religion of man for all of recorded history, with very few exceptions. If you take the Bible, not as a holy book, but rather just a brief synopsis of human history virtually every story is about someone intent on creating the kingdom of God in the here and now. A utopia is the goal, it really doesn’t make any difference on the means required to get there, if we all just work together there is nothing we can’t do. Read More...

Tags: health care, Barack Obama, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Premillennialism, Preterism, Amillennialism, Christianity, evolution, U S Constitution

Why Me? Priggish Blathering Compost

17/March/2010 13:40

We have reached the point in this expose´ of the self where history is about to catch up with the present. In that illumination we will soon be able to understand the context that makes us right, meaning correct, and everyone else is not so smart. We base our enlightened understanding on our evolving change we can believe in, never venturing outside our comfort zone, because that is our right, essentially because we are so very cool.

Last week we looked at how New England Calvinism pushed a number of new religious leaders out of the Calvinist box, and the changes they rent we still see among us today. Many Americans and people around the world, still find those rejected box outers to be our prophets and patron saints, even though we would never be so outwardly religious. Religion after all is really not something, we, the enlightened, need because it is so primitive and dare we say, priggish. Thanks to our lucky stars we will never be that way.

We work very hard for our money, even though it never really increases our wealth, and we never have the time to really question who we really are, or where we are going. Again thanks to our lucky stars, for if we had the time to reflect, we might not like the reflection.

However if you look at that out of the box history from two hundred years ago, today really isn’t that different. Just like back then all of life was and is about the present material. You go to church and for the most part they teach you how to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. They seem to talk about God, but no one seems to know God.

You go to the outdoor store and they show you all the neat stuff you need to bring with you when you go to the wilderness, so you can make it just like home. While the wild is somewhat free, the stuff you need to get you there and keep you comfortable surely isn’t. So you need your full time vocation to support your part time advocation.

Is this all there is? Those with the most toys are subservient to their idols’ wishes — no demands. So when you come right down to the nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts, the problems we face today is that we are both natural and transcendent personalities in a totally common or natural world.
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Tags: Calvinism, money, Progressivism, religion, God, Christianity

Why Me? Outside the box

10/March/2010 11:18

The United States and the world today are facing “Outside the Box” stresses. It has been a long time since the stupendous changes of economics and politics have not only forced people to look outside their comforts and securities for solutions, but also to examine the basic paradigms on which their perceived security is based.

In previous articles we have stated that in western culture about every five hundred years a major reboot of the way we do things occurs. This turmoil creates the fertile soil for new developments that redefine our individuality and communities in ways that were unknown before the plowing or tilling began.

Beginning with the absolute understanding that humanity is a creation of God, and was indeed a creation in the image of God, it logically follows that this five hundred year upheaval, forces us again to look beyond the temporal world and refocus upon the transcendent nature of common life. That understanding then brings about the incorporation of that transcendence into the religions of mankind.

While all religions including evolutionary materialism are exclusive in their worldviews, stresses develop that quickly become fault lines between the reformers and the establishments they are attempting to reform. Within Christianity the last time this occurred was in the Protestant Reformation.

That Reformation led to an era known as the Enlightenment where those new religious views received a more common application. At the time when the human development and religious fervor were properly understood within the broader culture, time was right for the miracle that became the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of America as a constitutional republic.

Notice all the “re” words that accompanied the changes from subjugation by divine right of kings into a worldview that valued individual liberty above all else. It then attempted to formulate a minimal governmental structure in which all humans would have the opportunity to pursue happiness, without class distinction. Read More...

Tags: God, transcendence, Reformation, U S Constitution, revivalism, Christianity, dry bones valley

Why Me? The American Miracle

03/March/2010 09:03

There is a historical interest article beginning to make its rounds this week delineating a comparison between the ship survivors on the Titanic and the Lusitania. Probably the most interesting in the free literature is the Discovery article, but for those with ten dollars to spare you can get the original from the National Academy of Sciences.

So far, we might conclude the ships of nation states around the world are economically in a potentially perilous position of sinking. From our leadership we hear that such a catastrophe is impossible. So too were the passengers on the Titanic until that pesky natural iceberg forever altered their reality. Then just three years later, no one on the Lusitania believed that a man caused disaster, the small German u-boat torpedo, could sink the ship in just 18 minutes.

The problem with political leadership is that they have a vested interest in projecting the past into a rosy future. If our ship had a hole in it, we have now by our own ingenuity and skills fixed the problem and we are again full speed ahead. Of course if some might ask the question, “Where are we going?” they are met with scorn and ridicule for being a conspiracy theorist, or a primitive common human, not highly evolved to understand the pleasures of a fantastic ocean voyage.

At Wonder Springs we speak a lot about the world being afloat on an ocean of non-energetic debt money. Just as in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” there is money, money everywhere, but none of it can you drink. Of course we are told that if we just have hope, someday a few drops of good money will trickle down to us, but just as with seawater, it is undrinkable and the salinity is such that it can’t be used to grow anything, or abstractly create wealth.

The original American Dream was not such an abstract voyage, because it looked that the ocean as a hazard to keep the passengers from reaching the Promised Land. When they reached the new world, they were determined not to repeat the mistakes they left behind. On the shores of North America, they struggled to overcome wildness, by relying on self sufficiency, hard work, and the providence of God. The only difference between the founding of the American Republic and today is, back then the frontier was physical, today it is more metaphysical or philosophical simply because we have focused entirely on the material without God.
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Tags: survival, Titanic, Lusitania, American Dream, Promised Land, God, Jesus, U S Constitution, Founding Prinicples, Moses, power, authority

Why Me? Integrity

24/February/2010 10:06

Today we continue our Novel – Novel tour through history into the sixteenth century and what is known in western culture as the Reformation. According to the current outline we are now half way through our “Why Me?” series and are continuing the theme established last week in which God reboots the Judeo-Christian culture about every five hundred years. Might one speculate if five hundred years to be the general length of any now extinct culture that may have prospered before its historic death?

Be that as it may, with the invention of the movable metal type printing press in 1440 by German Johannes Gutenberg, we now have for the first time in this series a written history of the continuing development of European culture in which books, pamphlets, and handbills can be widely distributed to a least the literate classes. This miraculous dissemination of information provided the technological and energetic basis for Martin Luther and other reformers to get their message out into the world.

So really what was that message?

That message essentially focused on the reality that the Roman Catholic Church had forfeited its integrity in matters concerning both the temporal and the eternal world. Today we see a similar lack of moral and ethical virtue in the general or common perceptions of people toward both formal religion and also atheistic materialism. Just as with the Reformation Roman church it is perceived that all leadership is focused on temporal wealth and power rather than on either the people themselves or their eternal destiny.

While the peasants and serfs of medieval Europe were much more concerned with daily survival, humans, being human, always require a belief that our daily struggles and aspirations will one day receive a personal reward. This concept can only come from our soul created in the image of God. Any attempt by any worldly power to corrupt that hope, desire, or pilgrimage will eventually loose the integrity it needs to continue to rule, reign, or even exist.
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Tags: Reformation, printing press, Martin Luther, Lutheran, John Calvin, tea party, TULIP, Calvinism, Arminianism, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Thirty Years War

Why Me? Stupendous Change

17/February/2010 08:11

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

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

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

“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”

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

That brings us to our topic of stupendous change in this week’s article – history. We left off last week at the close of the Tower of Babel myth, which occurred sometime before we have verifiable historic records. By verifiable I mean two or more historical records that point to a very similar occurrence at a somewhat consistent time frame. That history goes back about four thousand years or on the Biblical timeline of what is now considered the Middle East, the time of Abraham or Abram.
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Tags: stupendous change, Barack Obama, Reformation, 500 year reboot, Genesis, God, Jesus

Why Me? The Babel Constant

10/February/2010 12:45

Volume 12, Issue 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the process of making all that crude oil, so as not to completely try the human experiment all over again, the bottoms of oceans rose rapidly, a lot of that mud ran back into the sea, leaving all sorts of amazing features such as grand canyons, graceful arches, natural features so amazing that it would need a whole section of North America to display the power of these miracles. So today we can even see this if we travel from sea level in the Gulf of Mexico up to say the volcano land of Yellowstone National Park, at about eight thousand feet. That is a real trip of just two thousand miles, with a few side excursions to see some of that truly miraculous scenery. Truthfully the only way you can believe that this happened over billions of years, is just to close off your mind entirely to the existence of God.

The existence of God, that is really what the Bible myth is all about; back to Noah after the flood. The whole human experiment began over again. The Bible says that his ship came to rest on Mount Ararat, which is the present country of Turkey. Some have said that the ship actually exists, buried in a glacier up on the mountain, but we would never really want to find out if it exists for real, for that would make all the evolutionary hocus pocus, be just that. So just to continue to go our own way without God, we will just continue to babel about how we are getting better and better all the time.

This brings us to human noise in the extreme, what the Bible calls the Tower of Babel experience. This occurred not all that long after the end of the Genesis Flood. All the kids the sons of Noah begat after flood settled down on the plains and decided that it was a great place to call home. Cities are like that, they have all that human culture, they are great places to life, and outside the city is really wilderness, with all types of scary things and weird creatures. If we spend too much time out in that forbidden land, who knows it might just scare the hell out of us. We really would not want that to happen, after all that is so – primitive, and we all need to stick together so that we can reinforce our the evolving goodness of elitism.

In the Biblical Tower of Babel myth we find, something we find so mystifying that we can’t at all understand what it meant. Why on God’s green earth would we want to speak different languages. God knows, even we Yanks can’t speak the Queen’s English, and English itself is so imprecise that just about anyone can make up a word and in our world, in a brief instance everyone around the world will know what we are talking about.

Since we used such a word, a short time ago, we will use the example of an iPad. As with all of recent Apple computer creations notice the “i” subservient to the technology, so as to show that owning an “iSomething” really is what makes “you – You.” This is of course marketing genius, but it is not unique in human history, because in the Tower of Babel Biblical discourse we find the “iTower” which is really in its cohesive community, “The WeTower.”

The really great thing about a uniform evolutionary history of millions and billions of years is it takes away our accountability and our responsibility for anything and everything that happens today, that most good people consider bad, for we know that evil really doesn’t exist, so we will call it by some more politically correct term or terms. If we call “terrorism” something like “man caused disasters” they will go away, or at least become part of the wild universe, where we are too scared to venture, for we the highly evolved, are scared to death of the unknown.

Just as in the whole Biblical creation account, we, created in the image of God, know that God used words as his informational construct for creating, building, and eventually recreating the world. Hence if we use words properly, we can create a new world order, out of the chaos of language. This assumes ultimately that our babel can become Babel. Of course this only works in a universe where God, if he exists at all, is here to do our bidding, so that we can create a world in our image, for the good of everyone else.

Let us digress for a moment. Much is said about the teleprompter use of the President of the United States. As a highly trained lawyer, he like no other leader in perhaps the world today, understands that words have meaning. Not only do words have meaning, the punctuation of the words, in the string of words we call sentences, which develop into paragraphs, which become articles, books and speeches, have meaning also. This view of reality was also reinforced in the church he attended for twenty years. The (black) liberation theology that was preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is a process by which the use of words is used to elevate persons of color, to equality amongst all of God’s people.

What is lost in all human babel is that our words do not create anything at all they only reflect the reality of God’s creation, and if God did or doesn’t create that reality our words, are just words no matter the language we use, within the diversity of human language, but also within each language. We are not God and hence only God creates ex nihilo. Those ex nihilo creation words create Godly complex mathematical equations by which the world operates. Actually the math is really just a humanly created symbolic language used to describe natural laws, again that humans can only model they cannot even begin to understand except in truly spiritual or mythological means.

So back early in Genesis Chapter 11 we see the story of the Tower of Babel. In the Authorized, or King James Version it includes just 9 verses and a total of 235 words, with no paragraphs. Since this is the English language version of the Bible that the Apostle Paul used, we see that mixing up languages is no big deal to God. The major function of all this was to get people to move to other areas of the earth and develop a diversity of character more reflective of God himself, rather than mono-ethnic human desires. Through this whole language babel we learned not to trust one another, not because we humans really had changed at all, it was just that we always fear, not so much reality, but we have trouble expressing our fear in words, which is the basis for all of our world’s tribes and nations.

Now so the myth of a created universal history of thousands rather than millions and billions of years is presented in the Bible, a garden, a universal flood, and civilization growing again to a Tower of Babel forcing humans to migrate around the world, must make that babbling experiment not all that long ago and as a consequence something real in this world in which we live. Furthermore perhaps the complexity of the land itself in some miraculous, mysterious, or mythical way contributes to the creation of language and the formation of the cultures they maintain and we are working so diligently to eradicate, with so little success, but that is another mythical line.

When you look at the formation of the United States form of government, for the most part it still remains distinctly unique. Then when you realize that wealth of America came from the fertility of the land, the diversity of her immigrants, and the unity of her language, it illustrates really the grace of God that flows to those who attempt to live according not in accordance with God’s Law, but the power of God’s grace. The founding documents of the United States of America attempt to create a nation “under God.” That God is not pagan gods, Allah the god of Islam, the forces of the universe, or gods of human material fabrication.

Inalienable rights which the Founders sought to codify in words, succinctly the understanding that each human being is truly unique from one another, yet still uniquely unified in our humanity. That unity in diversity is the best description for the Christian Triune Godhead, that unity in diversity came forth in a Constitution that recognized that not all Christians, were Calvinists, some were Baptists. God only knows why but some of the Baptists were also Calvinists and some were not. Some thought it was acceptable to treat other humans as slaves, that struggle took on Civil War ramifications, but through it all the grace of God prevailed, and the United States of America became the most truly successful nation in human history, not because of anything other than the grace of God.

This current Great Recession, in this country and as it has been exported around the world is really the result of a bunch of babblers attempting to create another Tower of Babel in which we can live without God. It didn’t work back thousands of years ago, it won’t work today, but just as in that Mythical real Babel, the people at work to build this new Babylon, are unwilling to learn from the reality of this myth of history.

So to use an uncommon word from the ancient world to describe world in which we live and we Americans are the exporting leaders, through our spin of myths are the greatest sophists of history and currently seem to have no desire substantially change our way, no matter how stupid our babel becomes.

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

Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 2

03/February/2010 07:18

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

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

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

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

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

Just this week, further skepticism has developed because the UN Global Warming comprehensive report was based on some of the science, not in peer reviewed literature, but a popular magazine and a master’s thesis. Furthermore the author of the UN report also authored a novel about the sexual exploits of a well known global warming expert’s exploits as he traveled the world promoting an agenda of?

This week we look at the old myth found in Genesis Chapter 2 and 3, on how sin entered into the human species. The basis of this myth is that all life, as well as all creation was created not by a god, but the God, who gave us a written testimony of his existence and his plan for an age in which we now live. We find that testimony in a Book we call the Bible. Read More...

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

Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 1

27/January/2010 11:37

At the close of my philosophy class at the end of my undergraduate college education, Mr. Gibbons stated essentially that your success in any philosophical argument that you may choose to pursue, really wasn’t due to the strengths or logic of your arguments, but rather the weakness of the position of others. This came as I spent the quarter discussing in written response to Mr. Gibbons questions, the role of language in our interpretation of reality, and a term paper on Philosophy and Science, with a conclusion that stated: Science is what my father uses to convince me to eat my peas and philosophy is what I use to state why I think (eating peas) is a bad idea, and “and” is the word that holds the whole thing together.

Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.

We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”
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Tags: sin, God, Jesus, Genesis, IQ, evolution, U S Constitution, The Fall, sin cosmos

Why Me? In the beginning

20/January/2010 10:08

Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!

Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?

For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,

All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,

The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!

I shall assume that I am not alone when I consider the transcendence revealed in these words impossible to reconcile with the fact that so many say that this nature, this creation, all happened as the result of a freakish random event called the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago. I don’t really see that calling it the Great Singularity really makes any change in that reality!

Of course, perhaps the result of my eccentric audacity, I also find it almost as difficult to believe that God began creating the heavens and the earth, as in the biblical creation account, on October 23, 4004 B. C., based on the Julian Calendar. This creation date was proposed by James Ussher in “The Annals of the Old Testament” published in 1650. The Protestant Ussher was Bishop of the Church of Ireland at this time and was hopeful that his chronology would help Irish Roman Catholics convert to the Protestant faith.

Furthermore I assume that both of these theories of creation stem from a basic but ignored truth. The sixteenth-century reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed that the minds of men were basically idol factories. This is verified first of all by empirical observation, but also in the Bible illumination of Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?

Calvin went so far as to compile a little pamphlet called the “Inventory of Relics” that listed all the divine antiquities of the established church. Whether that included just those of the Roman Catholic persuasion, or included also those of the Eastern Orthodox, I do not know. In any event, I would imagine the list was rather long and quite boring reading for twenty-first century tastes, but snippets are available on the Internet to get the general idea.
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Tags: Psalm 8, The Big Bang Theory, James Ussher, John Calvin, Lutheran, God, evolution, Christianity, Trinity, Genesis, kinds

Why Me? The novel - novel

13/January/2010 10:41

The novel – novel

Novel:
1. noun: a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism
2. adjective: new or unusual in an interesting way

Well if you reverse the position of novel two with novel one, you have the context of this current “Why Me?” undertaking. So this why me excursion will develop into a new, hopefully interesting way to describe a fictitious narrative, with some degree of realism, eventually the story line will relate to where we currently are, how we got here, and where we may be headed. Over these courses of course we will begin with the beginning, the beginning of it all, and move rapidly forward. Because of the genre, which herein is developed, we will do this in a linear fashion, which we will learn early on, may be in itself fictitious, in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

The idea for this exposé came from a book I purchased many years ago in the theological section of a used bookstore in Seattle. The story was written by a Lutheran pastor someplace in the eastern United States during the middle of the twentieth century. The scenario revolved around the historic figure of Martin Luther, given the heavenly assignment to return from eternity to check out what had happened to the church that bore his name, in the almost five hundred years since the Reformation. He was then to report back to God his findings and any recommendations to change the course of history. As I remember, the essence of that report, Luther found that Lutherans were basically majoring on things of minor importance, with a very minor emphasis on the specific historical truths of both the Reformation and Christianity.

In our current world where everything is all about me, all the time, in every circumstance, no matter the outcome, it logically follows; that in the good, we take credit as independent results of are ascending abilities. Anything that does not achieve the greatness that we hope, must be the fault of someone or something else. This failure also deserves greater distinction if we can blame it on other people as individuals.
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Tags: John Calvin, Calvinism, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Christianity, Pentecostal, TULIP, Geneva, Calvary Chapel

Why Me?

06/January/2010 11:18

Why Me?

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

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

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

So probably the first question in the quest for “Why Me?” begins with another question, “What is now happening in the world?” or in the terms of the old beer commercial, “What’s up?
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Tags: survival, fear, Dachau, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Nazi, imagination , flexibility

The Forgotten Humans

30/December/2009 11:17

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

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

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

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

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

Mary did you know?

23/December/2009 07:06

Mary, did you know?

A couple of weeks ago in the post, “God if you are real?” we dealt with how God answers our doubts about His existence by bringing people and situations into our lives to answer that question. This week we will take on that testimony that is later offered by these God questioners to the people who contributed so much to establishing God’s present reality. This begins, “Did you know the situation I was in?”

In that illumination, as with Genevon’s return to our group Christmas party, it was a good thing that I was sitting in a big overstuffed supporting chair, because I had no idea that there was anything wrong with her, when our church group called on her that long past Monday night as she was seriously planning on taking her own life.

As we continue to understand the realness to trust God for our provisions, those life or death situations no longer just begin, but become part of a much broader narrative in which we understand the faithfulness of God, not only as he provides for our needs, but also adds to that an abundance of blessings and gifts that mean more to us than we can at this time fully understand or articulate. Many times that blessing comes from someone we will probably never meet in this life, or if that happening does occur, one of the first questions we will ask is, “Did you know?”

We know the words to the hymn Amazing Grace. The last verse begins, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” I believe that much of that time will be spent, meeting those who have blessed our lives and asking them, “Did you know?” Once they learn about our knowing, we will meet some of their “Did you know friends, and so on, and so on.” Truly a gift that keeps on giving, because the wonder of the gift of God’s grace, can only be truly received if we attempt to continually give it away.

The Bible puts this in context in Ephesians 3:20,21: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.
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Tags: Kathy Mattea, Glenn Beck, Moravian Church, God, Jesus, Mormon, Mary did you know

Humpty Dumpty in a new century

16/December/2009 11:00

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

We move from our fairy tale “A Christmas Hunt” between Teddy Roosevelt and Al Gore in our Monday post to a real for goodness sake nursery rhyme. Those people of the English language persuasion all learned this short stanza as young children. According to the Internet it has been with us over two centuries. Humpty Dumpty has been used in various times and places to make a point about society, but really has been pretty much accepted in its monarchial reality. For most of this history it has been assumed that Humpty Dumpty was an egg that would surely break if he/it fell off a wall, and the wall was – just a wall.

No matter how you spin the rhyme, there are dire consequences when something or someone falls off a wall. In the case of Humpty Dumpty the result of his fall was death. In the news of the world today there are a number of spins on the current state of Humpty Dumpty as it relates to current or pending realities. This is especially true in the United States, where a lot of people have too much time to analyze the past, report on the present, and prognosticate about the future. To name a few:

Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall during the presidency of George W. Bush.

President Obama is well on the way of putting Humpty Dumpy back together again.

President Obama attempted to take away the freedom of Humpty Dumpty to sit on his wall, he built through hard work and freedom and this resulted in Humpty’s death. This is definitely a Federal government attempt to acquire the Dumpty Wall for some sort of redistribution of wealth scheme.

What is never questioned in any of the above scenarios is that Humpty Dumpty reality exists today in what we would call a totally secular world or worldview.

As we pointed out in last week’s post asking, “God if you are real?” could that God reality change our and Humpty Dumpty’s worldview? In this respect Humpty Dumpty would only ask that question after he fell off the wall. But it also follows that if “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again,” then is the future hopeless for Humpty Dumpty, if he must rely only on a natural king; rather than the King of kings?

Of course the answers to the God question above echo pretty much the same theme, “Humpty Dumpty, the future is great if you don’t lie there in pieces, put your life together.”
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Tags: , Humpty Dumpty, God, Copenhagen Conference, traditional values

God, are you real?

09/December/2009 08:04

“God if you are real? ? ?”

This is probably the most common question formulated by people in all sorts of difficult situations, from all sorts of backgrounds, from almost everywhere on earth.

Many times this inquiry is veiled in the bait and switch concept of if – then. Such as the famous, “God if you save me from this storm then I will go into the monastery and become a monk.” Without such a God induced provocation Martin Luther may have ended up as a lawyer, or even a simple coal miner.

Many times the situation appears so difficult that the “and then” is not required. This is probably a wiser course of action, at least from the theological point of view. It does seem more than vain however, if you are about to meet your Maker to try to set up a paradigm in which your bargaining with God will somehow stop the storm.

It is also very interesting that in true survival situations, all the survivors of the situation share one common attribute, regardless of social position, wealth, religion, or other criteria. That common hallmark of all survivors is that they prayed.
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Tags: God, Christmas, depression, unemployment

Specialization classes

02/December/2009 08:47

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

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

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

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

In the last week the threat of further sanctions really had no effect upon Iran. So they are going to install fifty thousand more centrifuges to enrich their only domestic energy needs and alternatives. The Iranian options there have even more salient consequences, none of them easy, none of them cheap, none of them without broad ranging ramifications.
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Tags: Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Adam Smith, Islam, God, invisible hand

The Failure of Success

25/November/2009 11:38

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

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

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

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

Starting these deliberations once you get a command recommendation and then dithering about a decision for months until early December is absolutely unprecedented in American history. Any statement to the effect of saying that other things were more important than providing safety for American combat forces is completely indefensible and totally dumbfounding. Sadly, I am at a loss for harsher words.
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Tags: health care, Afghanistan, Wall Street, Barack Obama, Bill O Reilly, Glenn Beck, Five Essential Gs, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 10: None Dare Call It Treason

18/November/2009 12:41

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

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

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

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

Veterans Day Holiday

11/November/2009 15:12

Since the murders at Fort Hood, Texas last week I have been trying to think of an appropriate way to honor our past, present, and future veterans who have and will faithfully serve this country throughout American history. While eating lunch today, it suddenly became quite obvious. The best way to observe a memorable holiday is to observe it as such. Traditional Historic American Values are founded upon sacrifice of self for others. Liberty and freedom, paid for by our Veterans,will insure that these traditional values shall continue. Therefore there will be no Weekly Column this week in observance of Veteran’s Day.

Next week we will wrap up our Traditional Historic American Values series with Part 10: The Conservative - Progressive Illusion.

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 9: Perspective Also

04/November/2009 12:00

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

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

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

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

Of course no one knows for sure if that Bolshevik agenda is really the goal of President Obama, but that seems to be the present focus of Glenn Beck and his following. Perhaps a more moderate concept of redistribution of wealth would be a better pursuit to save the country from the greedy capitalists. However that also assumes that there is still some real wealth to redistribute to those who feel that they deserve it.
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Tags: Haggai 2:4b-9, Barack Obama, wealth, capitalism, God, Warren Buffett, gold

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 8: Perspective

28/October/2009 10:20

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

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

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

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

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

The Wonder Springs Chronicle is not a news organization but it is our job to give perspective on what is happening in our world without dithering around with any depth of journalistic investigation, simply because we really have no resources to do that job with integrity.
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Tags: perspective, dithering, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Fox News, Ronald Reagan, God

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 7: Leadership

21/October/2009 10:54

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

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

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

In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.
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Tags: Warm Fuzzies, Natural Law, traditional values, Barack Obama, Jesus, Christianity, WWJD, U S Constitution, Wall Street, Religious Right

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 6: Opportunity

14/October/2009 11:47

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

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

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

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

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

“Trouble, sacrifice, reality, the devil, God, I don’t believe in any of those myths, hence they don’t exist, because if they did, that might upset my simplistic narcissistic worldview.”
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Tags: Opportunity, Natural Law, Reformation, Barack Obama, wealth, inflation, United States

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 5: Freedom & Liberty

07/October/2009 09:30

Much of the current political discussion in the United States, especially from traditional and conservative paradigms, centers around a pending loss of freedom. A great deal of those discussions concern economic freedom, wealth, or free market principles. The other loci, or the progressive agenda, centers around the ascendance of freedom through the redistribution of wealth from those who have much to those who have a little less.

It is interesting that those who have significant wealth seem to think they earned it. Those who have little wealth seem to think, if they really had a chance economically, they could be wealthy also. There are also a few who just want a handout, for they believe they deserve it, just because they are so special. What is apparent in each of these paradigms is the fact that is all about me, or in this case you!

Have we become so vain that we all think this article is about me, or you?

The Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Post-modern Americans seem to think that the sum of these parts ends up as freedom. You would think however, if the Founders of the American republic were articulate enough to understand what they were doing, if they just wanted to promote freedom they would have used the term.

Some of this goes back to the modern myth that the Founders created a democracy, not a republic. If you think things are bad now, if they distributed a dollar to every American citizen, every time a politician, pundit, or other public figure use the word “democracy” to describe the United States designed political system, everyone would be wealthy and everyone would have healthcare, including those who just want a free ride. Furthermore the current national debt would look like spare change.

The founders however used the term liberty and created a representative republic to make it happen. Freedom is really the individual term. Liberty is the moral absolute that makes freedom possible. A representative republic is what is supposed to control excessive limitations or abuses of either.
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Tags: United States, liberty, traditional values, Natural Law, self reliance

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 4: Religion

30/September/2009 13:39

So a lot of people are feeling very uneasy about what is happening in the United States and for that matter around the world. As of this writing it looks as the public option for healthcare reform is dead, and with it goes the hope of meaningful progressive reform. That is a good thing. Now the question becomes will some sort of true free market solutions be proposed and enacted in a still moderately conservative nation.

Moving rapidly along that same track is climate change legislation, known more as “cap and trade” which will meet a similar demise. This leaves President Obama without really two of the capstones of his domestic agenda.

In foreign policy, decisions need to be made concerning both Iran and Afghanistan. These decisions will test the President’s diplomacy engagement strategy throughout the Middle East but just as significantly with Russia, China and other political leaders and tyrants around the world. In these cases a lack of decisive action will speak perhaps more clearly that any resolute overtures.

From all these tests and their outcomes we shall see clearly the ability of Chicago style, urban, community organizational – confrontational religion, to actually work in the real reality of a complex and truly aggressive world. My feelings are that only in the United States is the question of the resolve of President Obama being asked. In capitals and terrorist caves around the world that decision has pretty much been made. Over time the consequences of those decisions will play out not only internationally, but also in the American homeland and domestically in nations around the world.
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Tags: traditional values, religion, Barack Obama, Christianity, Jesus, sacrifice, U S Constitution, Founding Prinicples

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 3: Natural Law

23/September/2009 06:35

The sun rose this morning, we can count on it to set this evening, morning and evening of September 23, 2009. We also understand that gravity keeps us from floating off into space. The world is made up of matter. Water runs downhill and we can expect winter to follow this autumn, and spring and summer to repeat next year. These are just examples of Natural Law that every human being understands, believes and uses them as the basis of countless decisions each year.

The Founder’s of the American Republican experiment added to those observable Natural Laws, a human variation. Those began with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but are quite extensive. They also stated a human Creator God gave those laws for humans to follow and by them flourish as individuals, as well as communities and nations. It seemed quite logical that the rising sun and human liberty were directly related through the whole concept of Natural Law and furthermore they based the unique historical United States Constitution on those absolute precepts.

But what happens when you take away the Creator of Natural Law?

Simply put, the whole process breaks down, and eventually chaos will follow. It is really nothing more than simple logic and the Natural Laws of thermodynamics.

In the United States today we seem to have forgotten these basic logical assimilations. As a society we are told to believe that God does not exist, or if He does, He let it all happen slowly over eons of time, and now passively lets us do our own thing. On our own we have created a god of Mammon, or money, and thereby allowed this god to create subservient powers, by which it shall eventually control everyone and everything including the global climate. In past ages we created idols out of gold, silver, stone and wood. Today the god of money has no tangible existence other than demanding the totality of our lives.

What a better human centered utopian dream could anyone hope for?
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Tags: Natural Law, God, U S Constitution, Glenn Beck, traditional values, 5000 Year Leap, Rulers Law, Peoples Law, worldview

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 2

16/September/2009 12:18

According to a report in the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail Online, “Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama's spending in 'tea-party' demonstration.” From the reporting on the tea party demonstrations earlier this spring, there seems to be a significant interest in Britain with Yankee civil unrest, especially when the tea party term is used. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the original Tea Party in Boston has been used historically as perhaps the first step towards the American Revolution and the end of English world dominance. The article is worth the read and the photos are outstanding, probably not what you may have seen above the front-page fold in your Sunday newspaper.

From what little reporting I heard from the mainstream media, the crowd was more like thousands. Moving up or down the spin ladder, I heard tens of thousands. Fox News set the estimate at more than 75,000. No matter the number, there were more people protesting in Washington DC this past Saturday than anyone expected, especially the Beltway crowd and the politicians.

This continues the tie from the left, which attempts to portray the current protestors as anti-healthcare reform, talk radio and Glenn Beck agitated Republican kooks. But from what I understand of Beck’s political philosophy however, he is a Libertarian and also a Mormon. I bring up Beck’s Latter Day Saints affiliation, because everyone knows the stereotype that Mormons are all male dominated, blond haired, blue eyed, racists.
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Tags: traditional values, tea party, Glenn Beck, Mormon, Barack Obama, 5000 Year Leap, E Pluribus Unum, U S Constitution

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 1

09/September/2009 09:09

From very recent history it seems as if the traders on Wall Street believe that their rapidly increasing fortunes are again just a few months away. To a certain extent they are correct because it really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to them because they get paid as long as the markets continue to function, up or down. The only time they really lose is when nothing happens. This brings up two questions you might like to ponder, because the future of Wall Street traders really is of no interest here, but for your intellectual musings they may be:

Does Wall Street any longer reflect the true prosperity of the country (and the world), or is it just an exclusive special interest, determined to extract monetarily its due no matter the greater social costs?

Since the recent inception of a new enterprise model called “Too big to fail” has government intervention in big business essentially sown the seeds of future economic stagnation, or worse, that will eventually have to be treated as weeds and eradicated, to again restore the diversity of the free market system?

Moving on, a few weeks ago I was reading a Wall Street Journal interview with the current Governor of Texas, Rick Perry. The essence of that article discussed present Texas prosperity while the rest of the nation languishes in prolonged recession, budget deficits, and essential despair. Early in the interview the governor pointed to a table with three books that outlined his programs for the current Texas prosperity. Those three books were “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek; “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes, and “The 5000 Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen.
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Tags: 5000 Year Leap, traditional values, Creation Science, evolution, Natural Law, U S Constitution, Christianity

No weekly column this week

02/September/2009 11:57

There will be no column this week as we have been handling physical things rather than the more mental occupations. The weekly column will return next Wednesday, September 9th, when we will begin a new series on the creation and sustaining of the United States Constitution, based on the book “The 5000 Year Leap.”

Brute’, not concerned with human requirements will however post his weekly insight on Friday as usual.

The series we begin next week will look at the principles behind the Founding Fathers work to codify a constitution for the American Republic by setting aside individual beliefs and political desires, as this noble document was designed and now has become a working unique guideline for all of human history. Then we hope to tie Gratitude - Praise - Worship, as fundamental common religious experiences, finding their highest expression through music.

August was a good month at the Wonder Springs Chronicle, most of our web stats were consistent with recent history but Unique Visitors and Foreign viewers increased significantly. The Unique visitors was up a third, while foreign visitors came to Wonder Springs from 32 countries. Since 11 years ago when I began this weekly endeavor it was designed as a Christian missionary newsletter, the increase in foreign viewership was extremely heartening.

We still look forward to hearing from you regarding your role in changing the world through music.

Jerry

Tags: U S Constitution, Gratitude - Praise - Worship, music, religion, 5000 Year Leap

Power in Music

26/August/2009 09:16

After posting last week’s article on “Water to Wine,” I needed to go to Colville (population 4500), to pick up some supplies that included a used open top plastic drum. As a consequence I needed to take my Dodge Dakota, which has a hard-wired iPod connection to what once was called a radio. Cranking up my 5 star playlist, I was soon enjoying my favorite songs.

It was after about three songs when it hit me. I can bloviate about world and church problems until I am blue in the face. I can pontificate until the Pope becomes a Protestant. I can do that other stuff until the cows come home, but it really is not going to make a significant difference in the world unless written words, by me and more significant others, are interpreted in music. Music in all its forms is the ultimate human expression that we are indeed creatures designed in the image of God, for timeless fellowship with our Creator inclusively within a redeemed human family.

They say that music can calm the savage beast. None of us like to be considered savages, but music specifically, and other forms of art generically, are what is going to change or restore culture. I first began to understand this artistic concept through the work of Francis Schaeffer, but since that time, that has been confirmed by my own empirical evidence, as well as many other writers and musicians. If the current world is going to change significantly towards either a traditional or a more progressive agenda, it is going to be accompanied by music. As I once heard an old gospel musician say, music that gets down into your soul.

The latest world changing music experience probably began in the early 1960s with the emergence of rock and roll. This was really in many respects a rebellion of the tacit life of the post war prosperity of suburbia and American life in general. With the reality of the Viet Nam war these songs of rebellion became more vibrant, eventually being a causative agent for the hippie movement, as well as in the church where hippies got saved and were soon known as Jesus People.
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Tags: music, Jesus People, Christianity, Terry Clark, Bluegrass music, Gratitude - Praise - Worship, Natural Law, Kathy Mattea

Water to Wine

19/August/2009 07:15

When the name of your organization is built upon the concept of refreshing water, it is always of interest how various enterprises use water in marketing their products. As a general rule, new and improved signifies that someone found a way to use more water and hence make the product weigh more, or be softer, or smoother, and still charge the same, or more money for the “improved” product. In reality the water is essentially a free filler to give you less of what you think you paid for.

I like to have bacon and eggs at least once on weekends for breakfast. A man can only live just so healthy and then life becomes a drag. The best bacon I ever had came from a meat packing plant in Wilbur when my mother lived there. They had to close their doors when the state required expensive upgrades to their facilities that could not be justified based on the potential returns.

I have made my own dry cured bacon, but it takes facilities that I no longer have at my disposal. Costco has dry cured bacon, one of the few places it is available, but I really don’t like the taste. So I am continually on the lookout for different brands of commercial bacon to try out. Last week at the supermarket, there was a 20 oz packet of thick sliced bacon, which was nearing the pull date and marked down. I decided to give it a try. When I open the package Wonder Springs, as I tried to guess how they got so much water in something that is supposed to cook up somewhat crispy.

Since that time, I think I have figured it out. Now the true goal is to sell you as much water as possible and still make you think you are getting a good deal. To do that you create a brine that will give you the smoke taste you think will sell. Once cured it is pretty squishy so you deeply chill and maybe even freeze the bacon slab so that it will slice evenly. Then while it is still frozen you package it for distribution. Once the frozen water thaws you have the squishy wet bacon I popped in the pan and it shrank to about two-thirds the precooked size.

Now that energy prices have made the transport of water much more expensive we are beginning to see many more drinks delivered sans water. You must add your own water in your own container. The manufacturer gives you a powder in a little Mylar tube and you add it to your own tap, bottled, or designer water, which saves everyone money, especially the luscious drink maker. However it does make you think, I am paying a whole lot of money for a few grams of artificial sweetening and flavoring, when the chilled attractive bottle looked like a better deal.
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Tags: bacon and eggs, water, health care, Chevrolet, Christianity, Jesus, Calvinism, evangelicalism, Gratitude - Praise - Worship

Twenty-first century Monopoly is not played on Main Street.

12/August/2009 07:10

Back when I was in elementary school, many summer days were passed playing Monopoly. Most games were over in an afternoon; some took a couple of days. One that I remember dragged on for a week, for we were all so rich and the wealth so equally divided that no one ever gained enough of a strategic advantage to defeat the others. Eventually we just called it a draw and went out and rode our bikes.

The game of Monopoly was invented in 1935 by Charles Darrow during the real Great Depression, and uses simulated property and imitation money, by which each player attempts to amass all the imitation wealth and thus win the game.

If you pause for a moment and think about it seriously, the cause of this deep recession was a lot a people playing a global monopoly game, using simulated property and imitation money in an attempt to amass all the imitation wealth and win the game. The problem is that the global level game goes on, and nobody anywhere, except those living within local enterprise Main Street seem to understand the illusionary nature of the pursuit.

None of this twenty-first century Monopoly relates to the real world, where people are trying to get by with what is left of real money, no longer trying to get ahead, but just holding on until hopefully better times will again give them true hope for a better life.

For the last month or so the global Monopoly players have been encouraging each other that the recession has at least bottomed out and it is time for the depression to give way to active trading in the hopes that reality will soon catch up. The concept of buy low and sell high is tempered with the knowledge you can at least sell short. Just in the last century Monopoly game you have to buy when the opportunity presents itself, or else you will be left behind, and never make up the difference.
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Tags: Monopoly, United States, economic stimulus, Main Street, capitalism, health care, energy, Barack Obama, New Deal, Christianity

Too bad you can't survive

05/August/2009 09:01

Too bad you can’t survive.

So we now have the close, so what is the opening?

Could it be, to paraphrase an old song, “Your so vain, you probably think this article is about you?”

Or perhaps, using a little community spirit, “We’re so vain, we might realize that this article is about us.”

Or as they teach in business school, “MBA means, Mediocre But Arrogant.”

Then we imply that everyone else has an SBA, which means Stupid But Arrogant.”

However, I realize I must be in error, for as we learned last week many Christians are so humble that they know they are without sin.

In that “but arrogant” motif, it is nice to know that the government’s plan for “Cash for Clunkers” was such a hit that they ran out of money almost immediately. After all what better way to reward bad decisions made in the past, while still allowing the recipients to continue down essentially that same highway. That sure makes you feel real secure that the government can successfully operate a really big budget program like healthcare.

Of course this continues the late twentieth century program to live beyond your means with cheap credit and no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow didn’t come until late 2007.
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Tags: survival, vanity, self esteem, prayer, recession, Christianity, Narcissus

Nature's God is the human Messiah!

28/July/2009 08:26

In the article a couple of weeks ago we mentioned the quotation from Gandhi where he stated that he did not have a problem with Christ but he did have a problem with Christians. As time has past since that article I have been pondering in a similar vein, why so many people don’t seem to have a problem with Nature’s God but they also have a problem with His Christians.

Now an easy answer would be that the gospel is offensive to sinners, thus when they see Christians for some reason they are turned off. Of course the underlying premise behind this hypothesis is that pagans find Christian piety offensive. But this begs a much deeper question. “Is the piety in question genuine humble piety, or some sort of self-righteous legalism accompanied by a smug superior attitude?”

Of course those who live lives of self-righteous legalism and a smug superior attitude will answer, that pagans are turned off by their personal humble piety. So we can quickly see that any meaningful discussion here achieves nothing of substance.

Growing up in the Lutheran Church one of my favorite hymns was Beautiful Savior. In many other churches it is known as “Fairest Lord Jesus.” It seems to stem from Jesuit roots about 1677, but for some reason it has achieved the common title as the “Crusader’s Hymn,” but has no connection to the actual Holy Land Crusades.

Beautiful Savior, King of Creation
Son of God and Son of Man!
Truly I’d love Thee, truly I’d serve Thee,
Light of my soul, my joy, my crown.

Fair are the meadows, Fair are the woodlands,
Robed in the flowers of blooming spring;
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer,
He makes our sorrowing spirit sing.

Fair is the sunshine, Fair is the moonlight,
Bright the sparkling stars on high;
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
Than all the angels in the sky.

Beautiful Savior, Lord of the nations,
Son of God and Son of Man!
Glory and honor, Praise, adoration
Now and forevermore be Thine!

The song in its four short verses ties a strong bond between Jesus the human Savior and the Creator Jesus and Creation. What is extremely interesting is in what we have seen is the non-Christian disconnect between the Creator and the Savior or Messiah of humanity. Putting that in the same construct as with Gandhi and others, “I don’t have a problem with Creation, but I do have a problem with the Creator. What they don’t seem to get is that the Christ Jesus that they don’t have a problem in the Gandhi context is in the other context the one and the same Creator.
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Tags: Jesus, legalism, Beautiful Savior, shalt knots, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cheap grace

Capitalism's Cancer

22/July/2009 12:14

A number of years ago I was familiar with a pastor that regularly told his congregation not to be surprised when they were confronted with sinners sinning. He likened the sinning to their job description. The pastor had a little trouble however understanding that Christians sin also. In his theology by shear hard work, diligence, and a little empowerment from the Holy Spirit all saints could lead the victorious life.

Somewhat as the members of the pastor’s congregation, we should not be surprised when capitalists make lots of money. It is their job description. Just like with the church and sin, it is likewise with capitalism. Just how much money is the just fruits of one’s labor and when does the fruit turn to greed? We are not going to handle that debate other than to comment it pretty much depends, as in church, on whether you are on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking out.

Humans, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Beginning with Scottish jurisprudence, defining British common law, and codified by American legal precedents, we give corporations personal judicial standing – to make money. This legal standing is the basis for the economic system we call capitalism. However to say the corporation is evil by design is to levy our present sins upon these enterprising ancestors.

When you hear or read critics of capitalism, for the most part the critique says that corporations have no soul, all they want to do is make money, where is the social justice, or an now popular term, empathy? However western civilization never endowed corporations with such human attributes. Corporations are a person in the sense of a very limited individual pursuit of happiness, directly flowing from the process of generating monetary capital to produce human wealth. That wealth that flows to humans, is hence supposed to be utilized for the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and life; including benevolence, stewardship, and charity among a host of others.

It logically and legally follows that the outward folly in capitalism is not with its structure, but more to the reality that the persons who obtain that wealth do not apply it to any means other than reinvestment to make more money and by extension produce greater wealth, essentially only for themselves.

Going back to 1776 and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” there was an “invisible hand” that guided this wealth production. It was and is still generally assumed that free (laissez faire) markets are the manifestation of that invisible hand. Those markets defined a basket of goods and services, in recent history emphasizing the consumer.
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Tags: capitalism, cancer, Adam Smith, Invisible Hand, inalienable rights, Wall Street, health care, cap and trade, market making

Three Medicines

15/July/2009 13:05

Somewhat building on last week’s model of hummingbirds as a natural model for humans in this new century, this week we will attempt to break down that model into three specific paradigms. Paradigm is a pretty generic concept that today we would probably call worldviews. In the past and spun through western culture they would probably call them three religions. Broadening the concept and making it, what we the enlightened would call primitive or not evolved, those indigenous peoples would probably call them three medicines.

This concept came to mind as I was reading a book on the Protestant Reformation. In that book Person A says to Person B, “You know there are two religions present in this world. One religion is true Christianity, which rests entirely upon the unmerited grace of the Savior, Jesus Christ and life, death, and resurrection to provide justification for a person’s righteousness before God.

“The second religion, and much more popular, is one in which people perform all sorts of works by which they think they can merit God’s generosity to save them from eternal damnation.

At the conclusion of that statement Person B agrees with Person A. In this particular example the first example referred to those who were part of the reformation medicine, while the second religion referred to the papists, which we would call Roman Catholics.

What the context of this conversation shows is the subtitle ascendancy through time of another worldview, religion, or medicine for it is as old as human life itself. The Bible speaks to it in the Book of Genesis as the “Fall of Man.” That story is told begins in Chapter 3 and is the underlying theme throughout the rest of the whole Bible. That medicine, promoted by the serpent, is the human desire not so much to be religious, but to be the author of religion, to become God personified.

Therefore in the flow of time and the development of human culture, we see in the light of human evolution the upward progress of humanity developing from three medicines at the beginning, to two medicines during the Reformation, until today the model to be emulated, as the highest and best representation of humanity, is our unique personal godliness. We have no need for a savior, for we will save ourselves, both individually and collectively.

So why do we need to discuss three medicines rather than just a discussion of worldviews, or religions?
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Tags: medicine, worldview, religion, enlightenment, Reformation, Christianity

Hummingbird Humans - The Model for a New Century?

08/July/2009 10:02

Hummingbirds enjoy a drink of sugar nectar at the Wal-Mart feeder before a coming rain.

Hummingbirds are one of the most interesting of God’s creatures. In the forested regions of the American West, human residents provide feeders for hummingbirds stocked with sugar water nectar as a favorite pastime.

On my property I have two such devices both of which attract the little fellows, but they do it much differently. Both feeders have glass reservoirs to hold the juice, and both have red plastic bodies, and flowers with yellow accents. Both a the bottles hold a little less than a quart of nectar which is all made in large batches, so the juice is essentially identical in each jug. (See the website article for pictures of hummingbirds and the feeders.)

One feeder has six feeding stations and came from Wal-Mart. The other, a much more sophisticated and engineered design, with four stations, was purchased from a farm and ranch supply known as Big R.

For reasons known only to the hummingbirds, the feeder from Wal-Mart continually feeds many more birds than does the Big R station. At times there is well over a dozen birds humming around the Wal-Mart, zooming here and there, grabbing quickly their chance to snap up a taste of sweetness. “Zoom, zoom, drink, and flit! Flit, flit, gulp, and zoom!”

Mean while at the Big R, three or four birds are sitting on the little perches drinking nectar at their leisure and to their fill. “Ah, life of a little hummingbird sure has good times such as this!”

Hummingbirds stop for a big gulp at the Big R feeder.

Do the hummingbirds for some reason seem to think that the nectar is different at Wal-Mart than at Big R? Just as in the real world, the prices for similar items are pretty much the same at both Wal-Mart and Big R. And just as in the real world, where the prices at Big R are a little more, those increased prices are generally reflected in higher quality. There is no difference in the nectar at either feeder.

There must be something that attracts more hummingbirds to the Wal-Mart feeder than the Big R feeder. Which brings up two questions for this article. Are hummingbirds similar in their marketing taste to their human counter parts? Second and potentially of deeper meaning, are hummingbirds as smart as humans, or have humans in this new century digressed to the intelligence of hummingbirds?

Before we look at these questions, it must be said that both humans and hummingbirds are still known for their industry. For humans to go to either Wal-Mart or Big R they must journey to Colville. The closest other locations for Wal-Mart or Big R are on the northern fringes of Spokane about sixty miles distant.

How far hummingbirds journey to my feeders I do not know, but it must be a comparable distance, in hummingbird scale, because I doubt that there is some grand design for hummingbirds to build hummingbird suburbs around human habitations. It would not be evolutionary wise to build such a sugar water paradise and then have the humans not show up on schedule to feed the little critters during the summer, or leave just when they have become accustomed to the free meals.

This evolutionary concept would also have to assume, as do many humans, that hummingbirds evolve in their lifetimes, not over eons of time. I would assume that hummingbirds adapt to their environment of that particular year and food supply. If there is a predominance of hummingbird homes near human habitation it may have to do with direct associations relating to natural habitat nothing more. So it seems just has with humans, hummingbirds seem to be attracted to Wal-Mart because it is showier than Big R.
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Tags: hummingbirds, Wal-Mart, Big R, humans, leadership, Barack Obama, climate change, economic stimulus

Free Freedom!

01/July/2009 12:38

This Saturday marks the 233rd anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the land that became the United States of America. It is pretty well established these men believed that with their signatures they were setting a course for a form of government that would alter many future political structures. They also realized that their very lives were pledged to make this experiment in personal liberty a reality. There was no turning back.

This week there will be various forms of speeches, articles, blogs, and just plain conversations that express the point that “freedom isn’t free.” Of course the people making these statements mean that freedom requires some sort of effort to remain a viable, or even to generate an expanding form of expression of the human spirit.

The interesting thought in all of this is “if freedom isn’t free” why to we go to such great lengths to limit freedom in all aspects of life? Why not just “Free Freedom?”

There a bumper stickers that say, “Free Tibet” and other sorts of free lands, objects, animals, and social groups, but no one seems all that interested in just “Free Freedom.”

The real reason we don’t want to Free Freedom is because in order to Free Freedom we have to give up our personal license. Put more simply, Free Freedom is a whole greater than its parts. In order for Freedom to become Free, I have to give, or surrender my Freedom license to you, and the other way around. By doing such, a sort of synergistic Freedom is created which is much more grand that just each of our respective Free parts.

While none of us have really ever experienced Free Freedom, we know it is an awesome thing. In fact Free Freedom might not be a thing at all, but must be described as a beyond human personality. This personality we cannot comprehend, but must apprehend, or probably more correctly, we will be apprehended by Free Freedom himself.
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Tags: free freedom, Declaration of Independence, inalienable rights, God, health care

Toward a Capitalistic Renaissance

24/June/2009 08:27

There is beginning in this land and around the world a groundswell of common people sensing what seems to indicate that we are sojourners in an epic time.

Bankrupt are the bastions of American enterprise, the auto industry. It seems that like their railroad brethren, they did not recognize the business school standard, which they were in the transportation business, rather than creators of automobiles. Of course the railroads were helped to their demise by General Motors and Standard Oil, which bought up privately owned public transportation, shut them down, and eliminated true market choice for American land based conveyance.

Automobiles were preceded in stupendous change, by the meltdown catastrophe of the financial universe. From which the concept too big to fail has now redefined the wisdom of Forrest Gump, “Stupid is, as stupid does, don’t mean nothin’.”

Let’s see – cheap monetary policy, coupled with easy credit, financially leveraged to the utmost, speculating in unregulated commodities, or bundled in high-risk real estate securities did not last forever. It sure seems our enlightened leadership believed that it would and even more amazing, that they can bring it back just like before.

Of course the oil players are back at it again, betting that economic recovery and unlimited demand increases are just a fall economic recovery away.

Then recent news indicates that solar activity is at a long time low, creating cool temperatures and the potential for a greatly decreased world food supply. All the while global warming alarmists are still promoting an agenda, that mankind can control climate by limiting carbon emissions and animal flatulence, or just have everyone painting their roofs white.

What is missing in the debate of TV pundits discussing the this or that, is that it really isn’t about this or that at all. The real issue is the concept of human enlightenment. Broken down into its most basic tenet we see the inability of humanity to save itself from itself. The problem is not at all about the stuff, the problem lies within the philosophies or religions of man.
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Tags: capitalism, common sense, Natural Law, enlightenment, renaissance, Adam Smith, auto industry, United States

Planting Seeds of Common Sense

17/June/2009 06:11

With all the complex happenings currently going on in our world, you may be just hearing the sad news that Common Sense has died. I think I first heard the report some years ago, but I guess it just slipped my mind.

The obituary for “The Death of Common Sense” was filed on March 15, 1998 by Lori Borgman. You can find a number of places on the net for the obit, but one of the most interesting is the link above, which has other similar tidbits from Alan R. Miller, Emeritus Professor of Engineering at New Mexico Tech.

Since much of my writing has to do with various sorts of common type events and personalities, as opposed to specific unique revelations, it has recently come to my attention that rather than being a human personality, Common Sense may indeed be an entity more mundane. Could it be that Common Sense is really just a common seed, a seed many would call a weed?

Reminding you of nature, seeds may look dead, but the spark of life still remains deeply sequestered within the protoplasm, waiting for just the right climatic conditions in which to sprout, grow, and in due season provide a harvest of thirty, sixty, or even one hundred fold.

I would submit that the season for the sprouting of Common Sense is now upon us. As is the general rule, seeds are planted in the spring, sometimes outdoors and sometimes in a greenhouse, or cold frame. In the proper time the seeds emerge and some are transplanted into the garden. In spite of all the best efforts of man, plants we call weeds, do this very well without our husbandry.

The sun provides the light and the energy for photosynthesis. Rain or human watering provides the liquidity to make our gardens and Common Sense grow. With all the enlightened wisdom we can muster, we think we have science on our side, but if you just grow your garden with science you will miss the wonder of it all, the art of passing times, passing seasons, and the joy of harvest.

Many enlightened folks believe that Common Sense is just a primitive and noxious weed, but they fail to understand the symbiosis within the Garden of God. Neither do they dare a taste of the fruit of Common Sense, and hence ignore its life giving properties.
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Tags: common sense, seeds, weeds

Serfs and the Warm Fuzzy Link

10/June/2009 12:27

Last week I learned what I had perceived, calling an American a serf is not a way to win friends and influence people. That is especially true when you mix in a little Bible teaching with an audience of what is generally called evangelicals. Being called a serf really doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, and especially the plan that God has for your life. That plan of course being what Francis Schaeffer called, “personal peace and affluence.”

I didn’t write the book, “The Road to Serfdom.” F. A. Hayek wrote it a long time ago, even before I was born. The book basically describes the rise of pre WWII fascism in Europe, along with the compassion and complacency of what would soon be the Allies against Hitler and Mussolini. Hayek’s thesis basically warns about establishing what American pundits are now calling “European style socialism” during the reconstruction after the close of the war. All I did was just merge the two to make a somewhat logical point.

This road in Europe has pretty much been an autobahn, with really the only barrier being Margaret Thatcher’s British experiment in the 1980s, which found a following in America under President Reagan. In true American style, we however introduced steroids to the mix, pumping up everyone with mass body building exercises of cheap credit, expansive monetary policy, and real estate speculation.

As with drug steroids, economic steroids might help your major league career, but once drug testing and old age begin to show their effects, life goes down in a hurry. Can I get a witness on what has happened since mid 2007? Amen!

Along the way auto companies, designed bigger, safer, and dare I say more luxurious cars, so even peasants could feel like royalty. We even found a way to put that luxury into trucks and especially SUV trucks. Along with the bigger is better, came the road to highly leveraged financing and auto company profits.

Recently has come the push for hybrid cars, which are really 1980s econo-boxes hyped up with the aforementioned luxury, batteries and an electric motor. The hi-tech batteries are supposed to “last the life of the vehicle.” But if you try to find a definition of the “life of the vehicle” you will find it defined pretty much as what “is, is.” I suspect the life of the vehicle is really the five or six years it takes you to pay for it.

What hybrids really are is expensive one person commuter boxes for wealthy professionals to drive back and forth to work daily, and maybe a few times a year take it on a trip outside the urban sprawl, where the range of a true electric vehicle would run out of juice. So for this added weight, you pay another ten grand or so, get the warm fuzzy that marketing says, “You are saving the environment.” And this time foreign automakers are getting the profits.
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Tags: Warm Fuzzies, F A Hayek, serf, serf stop, Europe, auto industry, real estate

Twenty-first century feudalism

03/June/2009 11:08

Last Sunday Christianity marked the historic festival of Pentecost. While long disconnected from the Jewish rendition of the same, the Pentecost Sunday is recognized as the birthday of the church. Churches with worship roots in a formal liturgy, focus upon three Biblical readings each Sunday, one from the Old Testament, one New Testament, and a Gospel reading. In Protestant circles these reading date at least from the Reformation, but probably the reading’s roots go much further back, perhaps even to before the schism between Rome and the Orthodox. These Pentecost readings shared in many denominations are: Old - Ezekiel 37:1-14; New - Acts 2:1-21; Gospel - John15:26,27; 16:4b-15. For those seeking a more contemporary addition, “Rushing Wind, by Steve Green is found on iTunes by Steve and other artists.

If you read these passages within in the construct of what is happening currently in the financial turmoil facing the world, they seem totally in sink with our reliance upon our own knowledge and wisdom, and how all the best, from all the finest, is dismally inadequate in its comprehension of present reality.

When have written specifically about the Ezekiel passage in “Dry Bones Valley” in November 2007 (PDF link), as well as mentioned it briefly in other articles. In that article we built upon how the passage refers to the restoration of national Israel which took place in the mid-twentieth century, it also should apply to the restoration of the church, which currently finds it glory not in God, but in the affairs and riches of the world, not much different than the nation of Israel in Ezekiel’s day. If you combine the two restoration principles you find them, discussed amazingly in Romans 11, where in order for we “wild olives” to be grafted in, the olive tree must first be restored.

Just as we can look back in the Bible and see applications and the reality of today, in similar fashion we can see similar parallels in common grace or the society as a whole. Conservative pundits have been calling President Obama a socialist from the time he became a candidate up to the present. From pretty much is inauguration the terms fascism, as been added to describe his developing regime. On some occasions even the word communist has been used. An interesting article in the English version of Pravda used the term Marxism to describe the whole current American scheme. “American capitalism gone with a whimper” is well worth the read.

From the liberal side of the political spectrum and much of the general population however still give the President high or glowing marks for his ability to “not let this crisis go to waste” as “you ain’t seen nothing yet,” to use the President’s own words.

What seems to be missing in all of this however, is really a touch with the reality of the whole situation and tying it into history, a history in which President Obama is just the current player in a line, much like the Pravda article describes. To say that Obama is trying to install “European style socialism” is the United States, grossly simplifies European culture, as well as it dumbs down the natural diversity of the American landscape as well as the true diversity of the American people.
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Tags: Pentecost, F A Hayek, feudalism, serf, Barack Obama, socialism

Deified Money & Loss of Weath

27/May/2009 06:36

Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum, Come to the Cabaret.

If there were a musical refrain that typified life in the developed world and especially the United States during the last quarter century, this concept from the movie “Cabaret” would definitely qualify. From that movie comes the popular song, “Money” featuring the stars Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey and found on YouTube.

More interesting was that this 1972 film was set in the Weimar Republic of Germany in 1931, before the rise to power of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler. Remember that on August 15, 1971 President Nixon closed the gold window removing the convertibility of the dollar to gold and setting off the cheap monetary inflationary growth that brings us to today. That act eventually led to wage and price controls and the reality of the term known as stagflation.

The logic behind the move more than likely was the reality that you can’t fight an unpopular war and keep the folks happy at home at the same time. Whether that reality brought into today will prove a first step to fascism, I will let history, and current pundits of the far left, the far right, and libertarians to discuss, and sell their books.

What really did happen was that the growth of the money supply was removed from the direct reality of the real world and became popular tools for the manipulation of culture by politicians, central banks, and eventually market speculators. The term “There is no free lunch,” did not apply, and as it relates to the growth of money still has not found application.

In the “Money” video, we see at that time the song thought of money in the tangible sense, like coins. As time went on paper script replaced the coin of the realm, and eventually wheelbarrows were required to transport the paper to stores to buy basic necessities. Thank the god Mammon that we have evolved beyond that primitive reality. Now in the twenty-first century we can create money ex nihilo, just like the Creator of the universe created reality. The problem with this money however is that it really has no tangible basis in reality.

Even though money has no basis is in reality that does not mean that there is not a worldwide market for the stuff. Since President Obama revealed his historic economic stimulus plan the dollar has deflated against the Euro by about 11%. This is when news reports from Europe indicate that European economies are in their worst shape in the post war era. That should cause one to wonder if the US economy is that bad compared to Europe, or the positive reverse, or are speculators, both private market and governments, are manipulating the price of the dollar, as is currently the case again with crude oil, where still decreasing oil demand is met with higher prices.

Alas we, the folks, shall never know and are pretty much at the mercy of the god Mammon that really does not care at all about our reluctant or willing sacrifices. The most relevant passage from the Bible comes from Luke 16:1-15:
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Tags: Cabaret, money, wealth, Mammon, Barack Obama, Jesus, cheap credit, free markets

America's Tensioned Prosperity

20/May/2009 09:34

As we continue to muddle through a worldwide economic kerfuffle caused by a quarter of a century of cheap, or valueless monetary expansion, about the only other things we know for sure is that there is pretty much an exponential gain in kerfuffle pundits and pundit kerfuffles. This weekly Wonder Springs offering being one of the few exceptions, offering vignettes of true reality based upon direct observational natural science, mixed with gems of satire and humor, and not limited by energetic realities of an enterprise bottom line. That is because in this enterprise there is currently no bottom line.

In that illumination, last week we briefly suggested that American prosperity was not the result of the fruits of capitalism, or the appreciation of a benevolent government helping out the folks. Rather American prosperity is really the results of human best intentions, working out differently than the programs, and sometimes much better than the plans. That enlightenment clearly shows that America rose to power in spite of bungled best efforts of her citizens. In those old days we called it the grace of God. In this present era, the consequences of God, any god other than ourselves, is too frightening to consider. Hence we spin the present, in hopes that the future, will look like the past.

This week we will somewhat enlarge upon the synopsis offered last week, suggesting that what really happened in the United States, and which has not happened in any other country, is really a tension between private enterprise and government which has really created a symbiosis enhancing the results of the American experiment.

What caused the financial crisis in the United States and we exported to the rest of the world is really the breakdown of that tension, or entropy of that process. Instead beginning, not so much with the Reagan Revolution, but rather the insidious growth of the monetary base freed from natural prosperity, was the rise of classes of special rights – special interests. In other words cheap money allowed the enlightened, in some aspect, to take advantage of everyone else. Carried to its logical conclusion we lost and lose both the unique aspects of individual freedom and liberty, but also the cohesion of community, or civilization.

So today the best we can hope for is some sort of balance between competing elite specialists. This of course is best known as the operating genre of Fox News. “Fair and balanced” really means highly paid specialists, working their own niche, come on the various programs to give their perspective from their latest book. This spin is balanced by spin, sometimes in contrast, other times by the host. What makes Bill O’Reilly the ratings leader in cable television is that he is basically a center right guy, who has made numerous trips to the Blarney Stone. “The No Spin Zone,” is really the only place where the average American bloke, and perhaps that fits worldwide, can actually see and hear someone who by definition, believes in traditional values.

Fox News and the “O’Reilly Factor” of course are part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation conglomerate empire. Everyone should visit the News Corporation website to see just how “creating and distributing top-quality news, sports and entertainment around the world,” can be so diversely bodacious. Be sure to check out some of the various tabs to see the depth and breadth of the empire that leveraged capital can accrue.

As we pointed out last week, what Jim Hill attempted to do with railroads in the transportation industry, which was scuttled by progressive President Teddy Roosevelt, Rupert Murdoch has had little trouble achieving the same end, during economic times which favor mergers and acquisitions at the expense of true wealth creation. The difference between Murdoch however, and some of the other current conglomerate CEO’s, is that some of his empire was created by entrepreneurial activity not just buying a brand.
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Tags: Special Interests, Fox News, Bill O Reilly, News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, New York City, cap and trade, consumerism

A Synopsis of American Entropic Development

13/May/2009 10:20

Onward and upward has been America’s developmental slogan for pretty much all of our evolutionary history. But is that really true or has the increase in American power been pretty much in spite of our best intentions rather than the result? As Brute’ mentioned last Friday, we have worked and tried very hard to get something for nothing, in the end however it seems that we have sustained nothing of lasting value for all of our diligence.

This week we will look briefly at a number of American developmental schemes over history and see how they relate to where we are now and where we need to go forward. Then we will attempt to put President Obama’s present activist government enlargement within that scheme, to see that this may be the bungling bureaucratic bourgeois’ final attempt to continue the slouch toward entropy.

Right now in all the press you hear that we are on the threshold. Pretty much all of the mainstream media seems to think that we are on the brink of eternal bliss. Those of a more conservative bent have considered this the threshold, before socialism, fascism, and our loss of liberty and freedom. We are in the process of losing our capitalist system and the prosperity it provides.

As we proceed through this synopsis we will look at American capitalism to see if it really ever existed without government perks, and just how free are free markets or are they just bungled attempts of failed Machiavelli’s to become the prince of the moment. In the result of these manifest destiny offerings, Have we created a unified bungling bureaucratic bourgeois that encompasses both the so-called public and private sectors?

Before we begin, perhaps a definition of capitalism is in order. From the American Heritage Dictionary we find: An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
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Tags: bungling bureaucratic bourgeois, capitalism, money, railroads, auto industry, electrical utilities, information technology, Barack Obama, green energy, infrastructure, health care, education

Economic Ecology

06/May/2009 09:10

I am currently reading a biography on the life of J Harlen Bretz, who in the 1920s was the geologist that discovered that massive floods, completely beyond the scope of human understanding, determined the unique scabland topography of much of Eastern Washington State. Those floods were cause by the release of melt waters from glacial lakes, primarily Glacial Lake Missoula, resulting from the melting of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the geological Pleistocene era.

Bretz was able to come to this revolutionary conclusion, by an unusual process for geologists of his era; he spent time in the real field trying to make some sense of what he saw in nature. This was contrasted with the preponderance of geologists who spent their time doing geology in their government or university offices.

Two notes of importance relating to Bretz’s life and work as they relate to a biblical creation worldview. First Bretz was raised in a very legalistic Christian home, which interpreted all of life as moral requirements. Bretz did not see this legalism in nature and hence rejected his parent’s religious views.

Creation is filled with Natural Law as well as Common Grace, as such it establishes the reality of absolutes, but that absolute reality is beyond the scope of human moral capacity and hence either leads to atheism, as in the case of Bretz, or a search for specific grace beyond Christian legalism so prevalent in much of historical and contemporary American evangelicalism. That specific grace is found only in the gospel of Jesus Christ and his propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of humanity and his resurrection from death three days hence.

In the geological time scale these floods happened eight to ten thousand years ago. If that were true, the empirical question arises, “Where is the dirt?” As a general rule topsoil is believed to be created at a rate of about 0.01 inches per century. If that rule is anywhere close to reality then the scablands and the lands to the north under the glaciation should be covered with eight – to – ten inches of topsoil. In reality that depth is two to three inches, much more in line with a young earth and an ice age following a Genesis Flood.

Now as unenlightened as this young earth concept sounds, the Institute for Creation Research (icr.org) has found radioactive carbon fourteen in diamonds. This peer-reviewed research dates these diamonds at about forty thousand years, where as evolutionary geology dates diamonds as one of the earth’s oldest gems. Perhaps the earth age has more to do with your religious presuppositions than it does to natural observational science.

Bishop Ussher’s well-known “biblical” six thousand year creation account was created in the seventeenth century, long before the existence of and ice age with continental ice sheets were known to exist. In Ussher’s light, the Biblical Exodus would have to take place somewhat benignly in the Sinai while all of the temperate Northern Hemisphere was frozen in ice, raped by ravaging winds, and inundated by gargantuan floods. Rather than sticking to a literal six thousand year biblical chronology, creation science points specifically to an young earth history of thousands, rather than millions and billions of years, with a biblical ice age requiring a minimum of at least five hundred years, more likely a longer time period.
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Tags: J Harlen Bretz, geologists, uniformitarianism, economic ecology, Alan Greenspan, United States, real estate

Twentieth Century Reflections

29/April/2009 10:17

Today Americans celebrate the ascendancy to the Presidency of Barack Obama, the anointed one. For now the plurality believes strongly in his messianic vision. Growing minorities however are beginning to look at him as the other end of that religious spectrum. My mission here today is not to change anyone’s opinion, but to point out that our forty-fourth president is just the latest and last (re)incarnation of what has set the American agenda for perhaps a century, at least from the end of the Viet Nam war.

This operating paradigm focuses upon the role of bigness to solve all the hiccups of human problems. Where do we begin, big urban centers, big business, big labor, big special interests, big politics, big wealth evolving into big debt, big consumption, big bureaucracies, and big government. All of these and perhaps many more are now giving us a world in which the individual has to go it alone, because these big solutions, treat human beings, created in the image of God, as no more than other components of the material world.

When you put the Obama presidency in that light what you see, is not the light of a messiah, but rather the end of an era in which largeness for the sake of itself has run out of gas. The emperors of the paradigm have no clothes, but they still believe they can create them if we figure out some way to provide a method to finance the whole shebang.

George W. Bush played his role very well. Under his watch enterprise imperialism became the dominant force in the world, and we are not talking about the shooting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the War on Terror. Thru the unregulated financial schemes began in the Clinton Administration; the enterprise imperialists brought the world’s wealth to American shores, and exported incomprehensible debt financial schemes to pull it off. The roots of this growth emphasis however, can be traced back through presidents for most of the century, for big things take time.

As the final player, this time as a true big government leader, the gifted Obama has completed his first one hundred days. By being very busy, he and his teleprompter make their rounds. So far there seems to be little substance, which was not really preexisting underlying economic strength. Really the economy was not that bad until late last year the unsustainable nature of enterprise imperialism became apparent as a drag on real wealth and wealth creation.

As our good friend Brute’ pointed out in his cartoon last Friday, what is missing from all the stimulus, bailouts, and other debt financing programs is even the mention of the role of the entrepreneur in creating new wealth. This new wealth will be the stimulus that will change the twenty-first century, but so far in the first decade of the century we are still looking backward to what was, rather than forward to what may be.
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Tags: Barack Obama, enterprise imperalism, entrepreneurship, climate change, ice age, Babylonian fallacy, smart grid

Tea Party Flavors

22/April/2009 13:05

Last week’s TEA Parties on Tax Day were ignored, castigated, embraced, or celebrated. Some reputable sources have total attendances at between half a million to a million people. Some not reputable have this at much less to well over a million. It was said that President Obama was unaware of them taking place, or perhaps there was just an unwillingness to look seriously at a world who does not favorably endorse the Administration’s belittling of America’s past, while failing to understand his hope for a benevolent community of government centered personal peace and affluence for everyone - everywhere.

This week we will look briefly at three overriding points that came out of the TEA Parties. These three seem to fit with the concept of group leadership of KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid. We have seen a couple of these TEA Party analyses however that seem to have a dozen similar points, which may be modeled on step programs such as Tax Payers Anonymous.

The general tone of the Spokane TEA Party, which I attended, seemed to have a fundamental belief in the “Supremacy of America’s Founding Documents and Principles.” By this I mean absolute standards by which the country is to run. These documents and principles are not evolving into something more just and harmonious, by current whims of the intellectually enlightened, or a political class.

As we continually report here, those foundational writings center around Natural Law and the Common grace expressed by Nature’s God, the Creator of the Universe, a God consistent with the Biblical Trinity.

This comes into direct conflict with the post American Revolution concept of evolutionary enlightenment based solely on a different kind of naturalism, in which there is no god at all and everything has essentially a totally naturalistic explanation and source.

Evolution doesn’t really answer the big human epistemological questions of Origins, Purpose, and Destiny. Hence in a world, which came from nowhere and is headed nowhere, what we are to do now that we are here, is pretty hard to define in anything but relative terms. In fact it illogically asks, “Am I here at all?” Since logic itself has no basis for its existence either.
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Tags: tea party, Spokane Washington, Founding Prinicples, Sustainable Wealth, Special Interests, George W. Bush, Barack Obama

Evolving Trails - Natural Progression

15/April/2009 10:26

Shortly after we foraged ahead in last weeks article, it quickly became self evident that the trail ahead had become overgrown with all types of spin and hype, much of it related to the rapidly growing weeds in the political ditches on both our left and right.

We mentioned last week that many spokespersons encroaching on the path from the right ditch were beginning to call actions we are now seeing from the Obama Administration fascist rather than socialist. That was highlighted by a Glenn Beck show last Friday on Fox News, in which the less charged term “stateism” was used in place of fascism, at least for the time being. Rather than using the evolving programs of our current crisis, that we can’t let go to waste, the Beck program focused upon the rise of the progressive movement under Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

From the left ditch, leaving the historically redefined term liberal in the mud, indeed the they are more and more using the tactics of the rise of the American Progressive Movement as a working plan by which to evolve the United States and the world into a diverse community by which all peoples will live in security through governmentally run programs and supervised enterprise.

Both of the positions have more to do with talking points rather than substance. There in lies the true danger to the American Republic as it evolves democratically to take its rightful position as just another member of the community of nations.

Evolution as espoused in general morality has no basis in science. At least science we can measure today. That is because the quantum leaps of information required for evolutionary progress to occur are not supported by the natural laws of Thermodynamics. This is not just a minor problem in logic and research, but also a divine necessity in a world in which there is no god other than we human’s evolving narcissism.

In such a world, fertile bunnies laid colored chicken and candy eggs in hiding places during the spring fertility festival of Easter last Sunday. In church, as an American evangelical, you learned that Jesus will help you through this coming year so that next Easter you will be back on the wide road to material prosperity. Of course there were a few churches where a preacher proclaimed the Resurrection, as the first fruits of a future restored creation in which Christians will live eternally, based upon Jesus propitiatory sacrifice on a cross three days previously. Then in true unity with historical Christianity, we all went someplace and pigged out on ham and other acts of gluttony, ignoring any thought of an Inquisition.

This points us to the true reason for this season and that is security, either real or imagined. Both of the ditches of the narrow path ahead speak of all kinds of wonderful future things, money, self worth, purpose, community, health, but it all comes down to our personal perception of security.
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Tags: Glenn Beck, evolution, Natural Law, Sin Cosmos, Progressive Movement, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jim Hill, Great Northern Railroad, Ferry County, green energy

Foraging Ahead

08/April/2009 10:09

Foraging ahead is probably the best description of what is happening in the world today. I thought about forging ahead, but that seems to apply to just about anything without any specific direction. In that respect forging ahead is similar to, “Change you can believe in.” Foraging however signifies you are looking for something specifically relating to your subsistence. To some people that foraging has less vital implications than to others, but the foraging thought of providing present and future provisions pretty much applies to us all.

An article I read recently began with a quotation from some well-known historical economist and it went something like, “We shouldn’t forget that finance adds nothing to the underlying transaction; it is only a facilitator of the commerce.”

The mentor entrepreneur I worked with for many years always asked the question, “What does this new individual bring to the table? If the consensus was that the individual had little to contribute, they were not added to the team.

Putting finance in the context of both thoughts, finance should be the mechanism by which two or more tables facilitate their existence and their growth.

However the way things have developed recently and the utopian path ahead proposed by the US Treasury and the Fed, that statement must be modified to something like, “Forget the tables, forget the people, forget the underlying commerce, it is all about the finance.”

As our Monday post “The Greenspan Bug Curve” pointed out, both the Treasury and the Fed assume the underlying causes of the Great Depression were speculation an tight money. As a consequence they are creating unconscionable amounts of money and are in the process of sticking regulatory fingers into all of human enterprise. Now a number of conservative talking heads are beginning to state that this is not socialism, or even benign European socialism, but an attempt to create a fascist state, or world.
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Tags: Great Depression, bear market, money, tea party, Natural Law, Jesus

The Essential Five Gs

01/April/2009 14:14

This week’s article is dedicated to the memory of Dale Anderson a compatriot from my college days at both Eastern and graduate school at WSU, fellow sojourner to the land west of the Cascades, and Chronicle email subscriber. Dale died suddenly Sunday. We pray that the peace of God will comfort and direct his wife Pam and his family as they move forward in this time of great economic uncertainty.

Glenn Beck is the new rising star on the Fox News Channel. Much of that success that has allowed his show to rise to the number three most popular cable program stems from his focus on nine principles and twelve values of traditional American culture. These talking points are focused visually by adapting the “Unite or Die” flag from the era of the American Revolution. The problem with this number of things to remember is that there are: twenty-one things to remember. Without a teleprompter or some method of similar display, all those values and principles of something, get confusing and all mixed up.

For some time, I have been involved in cultural survival discussions that revolve around four simple words that begin with G. Those four are God, Gold, Groceries, and Guns. Those four necessities served us well, but as we move forward in this new era of 21st Century change, we need to do a little modification and add another point to make a total of five. Compared with the twenty-one on Beck’s list these five definitely qualify for the concept of KISS, keep it simple stupid. If kept in alphabetical order these five also allow you to understand the unique nature of the United States in the world.

So here is our list of Five Essential Gs: God – Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns.
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Tags: Five Essenital Gs, Glenn Beck, nine principles, twelve values, God, gold, grub, gumption, guns, Natural Law, United States, Russia, gold standard

Interlude

25/March/2009 09:06

It seems like this whole economic mess had its beginnings in the 1970s. I suppose you could blame it on the Viet Nam war but that probably is a gross simplification. The music of that era seems especially relevant today. Last week we began “The War on Small” with the first line of a 1969 song: War – What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

This week as I was researching the background for Monday’s “Special Report - Prosperity Myth” the words of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 song, “Keep The Customer Satisfied” seemed to be completely fitting. As long as the Prosperity Myth functioned smoothly and everyone thought they were rich and secure, life was just a “Bobos in Paradise” to use the title of a David Brooks book, all that was required was to “Keep the Customer Satisfied.” So we got more and better stuff cheaper and cheaper. Hallelujah, material heaven here on earth!

However, it now seems that the recent worldwide love affair with President Barack Obama is beginning to show some stress. Basically two thirds of the way through his first 100 days, more and more comments and editorials, about not being up to the job, not ready for prime time, inept management, out of touch, gallows humor, punch drunk, a way to hell, and others are now being used. As his poll numbers deteriorate with all but the political class, it doesn’t seem that reassuring when Congress has only continued or enhanced its numskull performances dating from the Bush Administration. Then there is the debt situation; it is impossible to even keep track of the various trillions here, there, and everywhere.
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Tags: Prosperity Myth, evangelicalism, Jesus, United States, Wall Street, too big to fail, Dow Industrial Average, debt, Revelation 18

The war on small

18/March/2009 16:50

War – What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

So goes the first line of the 1969 song by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and released by Motown - first by the Temptations and then by Edwin Starr in 1970. The edgy Starr rendition is what we are most familiar, the prior Temptations recording is somewhat more refined if a true war protest song can ever be refined. War was also recorded by Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s. All three versions are available on iTunes.

Vietnam was called a war, so was Iraq, and Afghanistan. Less we forget, well, actually we want to forget, there still is the War on Terror, refocused by the self proclaimed more civilized Obama Administration into some security or insecurity measures against a few people who don’t agree with American values.

Have you ever heard of the War on Small? Of course the War on Small begs the question small what, or who. Yep! All of the above, but for the purposes of this week’s article we will try to focus upon small enterprise.

Did you miss the news on President Obama’s small business initiative sometime Monday? By Tuesday it was not anywhere to be found on the leading news feeds? The Wall Street Journal’s weekly Small Business Update email had one article that is worth reading. Basically it says that in the diverse small business universe, again the President was long on hyperbole and short on substance. The only meaningful content comes only to the small portion of small businesses that use SBA loan guarantees.

Yippy – Skippy!
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Tags: small business, Barack Obama, Wall Street, marginal tax rates, Ronald Reagan, Microsoft, Revelation 18

Trilogy: Two-headed Coins, The Dow’s Hidden Reality, Sufficient Grace

11/March/2009 10:32

Blame it on climate change. Mostly the economic climate, but also a March snowfall, and plunging temperatures that Tuesday night reached 8 degrees (-13C), with so far 3 record cold nights in a row. This week we have a double length unity in diversity article, that looks in diverse ways at the economic climate, and leads one to still believe that spring always follows the winter, even if today winter looks all too real.

Last Thursday evening was one of the most difficult times I can remember in a very long time. For the most part, I try to look at the world as a realistic optimist. After the Dow fell 300 points and played around 6500, I had to admit that things are getting seriously serious. That number was a thousand points lower than my somewhat flippant prediction of 7500 by Inauguration Day, which really didn’t happen until Economic Stimulus Day. But it was also only a thousand points above the 5500 level predicted by a real financial planner I talked with during a holiday office thing. If things continue on this current path the Dow could be at 5500 by April Fools Day.

Times are serious, and it is time for the folks to get serious also, that I realized meant the pointing finger also had three pointing back at me.

Most of the economic news now uses the 1982 recession as sort of a benchmark for where we are now. In that light 1982 was a life-changing period in my life, which basically has led me to where I am today. Considering all that has happened since that time, in the transcendent eternal sense, I am one of the more wealthy people in the world. Materially and economically things really are not all that much different than back then, maybe even quantitatively below that recessionary level.

In about the middle of the wonderful year of 1982, my folder of job rejection letters reached the thickness of maybe an inch and a half. In the year and a few months since I had been somewhat forcibly removed from corporate America, the only real potential opportunities had come from Long Beach, California, and Houston, Texas, both on my bottom ten places to live in the United States.

The amazing thing is just a few months before my trip to the unemployment office; my cute, corporate headhunter had told me, that with my qualifications I was probably one of the top six candidates in the country in my field. That all changed when new President Ronald Reagan, basically shut down the EPA and put all the new federal hazardous waste regulations on hold.

That pile of rejection letters changed my life; in conjunction with a phone call I received from one business manager, who instead of sending me another rejection letter decided to give me a call. The call came from a sales manager of a copier sales company where I had applied for an entry-level sales position. At that time copier sales people were required to make at least forty external cold calls per day, as well as follow up on any other slim leads that may have been generated by some other means.

The reason that this manager decided to give me a call was because, as we determined, he had been in the class just before me at the Army Security Agency Officers Class at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts. He stated that he had taken that copier sales job (perhaps in the 1973-75 recession) and had just gotten to the point where he could relax a bit, and that there was no way he was ever going to hire anyone that might threaten that long sought security, which he could easily discern from my resume.
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Tags: Dow Industrial Average, 1982 recession, 1973-1975 recession, 2 headed coin, Natural Wealth Component, Inflation-Deflation Factor, Financial Liquidity River, Supply Side Money Creation, Debt Leverage Freedom, Retirement Planning Requirements, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Business Ecology

The faux pas presumption paradigm

04/March/2009 10:19

The Noise on the Western Front increased considerably in the past week. The essential reason for that increase is that we all continue to believe in a faux pas presumption paradigm. That belief assumes we have within ourselves, within our individual and collective intellect, the potential to make the world a better place and to save ourselves from future destruction.

That is what the Bible calls basically the “unforgivable sin.” Of course we really don’t believe in sin, especially within ourselves, so when it all falls apart, we are completely without the discernment to understand what is and has happened. If that is not a classic faux pas, I do not know what is.

So when President Obama spoke a week ago Tuesday, the speech was so filled with platitudes and generalities that really there was nothing of substance which one might disagree. Furthermore there was a complete disconnect from the outlined shining city on a hill, contrasted with the reality quagmire in the valley of current remorse.

On Thursday in outlining his budget for the next fiscal year, the President kicked up his liberal agenda more than a notch or two, essentially turning his vision of New Deal programs into prescriptions for financial disaster to those who believe in any concept of free market enterprise. From that budget outline it is clear that his Administration wants to turn this crisis-catastrophe into an opportunity to completely make free market enterprise subservient to centralized government planning and control.

On Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, talk show personality Rush Limbaugh, by adding an hour to a programmed twenty-minute speech turned a hoped thoughtful rebuttal to the Obama vision for America, into the opportunity for about an hour nap. When I woke up near the end he was still carrying on about his “first speech to the nation and the world.” Hence I assume I missed very little in the restful interlude.

On Monday the stock market responded to all this Noise, by the Dow dropping 300 points and settling well below 7000 for the first time in more than a decade. My only stock market prediction in this light was the 7500 barrier, which I forecast for Inauguration Day. That had to wait a couple of weeks until the President unveiled his stimulus plan to change the world and to save everything from everybody. But what is a couple of weeks when we all are having so much fun guessing what governmental faux pas will occur next.

With all that good news, around the world the dollar had somewhat of a rally against other currencies showing, I guess, that America remains the economic safe haven in a rapidly deteriorating world. The good thing about the American media is that they are so megalomaniac we really don’t know how bad things are on the rest of the Western Front.
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Tags: faux pas presumption paradigm, Barack Obama, New Deal, Rush Limbaugh, earmarks, God, Natural Law

Exclusively Inclusive: All Noise on the Western Front

25/February/2009 10:37

As I was listening to some of the discussions of our current financial crisis, one of the commentators began listing some of the impressive creations of literature that came out of financial hardships, wars, and similar stupendous change events. One of the books mentioned was “All Quiet on the Western Front” chronicling the events that brought about the end of WWI, the war to end all wars.

Shortly thereafter I was treated to both far right and far left pundits interrupting each other with pedantic talking points, none of them showing any civility to each other or to the host. Since this financial catastrophe finds its roots in the material crusades of Western Culture, I mused that what we were all hearing was “All Noise on the Western Front.”

Human beings are unique in all of God’s creation, in that we have some cognitive understanding of life. Yet we have developed or fallen to such a desperate condition that we have become completely hostile to others who do not share our appreciation of dead stuff in the way we suppose is the proper way that stuff and money should be acquired. The noise is deafening, almost like artillery attacks, but we have completely missed the fact that we all share a tremendous transcendent gift and that is life itself.

The talk for the last few months is that we have to save the financial system. The current Administration’s conscience is that somehow, someway, throwing enough money at the problem, we hope, we can fix it. There is one truth in all of this; we are throwing money at the problem, definitely not wealth. Eventually wealth will again surface and money will again become worthwhile, but the way things look now, there needs to be a significant change in attitude and policies.

Tuesday Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said he hoped that the recession would end this year. This hope gave the stock market hope and it regained much of what it lost last Friday. Later that evening President Obama gave a similar speech to a joint session of Congress. Today and following we will find out if those words, just words, will change the perception of economic realities. It seems from my perspective that he is intent on growing government with little understanding on how to pay for it.

We can’t take our stuff with us. Yet through all this financial noise we have never asked three important questions.

The first is stuff the prime goal of human life?
Is there another worldview that can provide important human civility?
Finally, do we really have the where with all to act as our own messiah?
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Tags: Barack Obama, money, fear, noise and toys, fiscal responsibility, money, diversely unified civility

Exclusively Inclusive and the Fear Factor

18/February/2009 09:34

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Proverbs 9:10

We began last week with the above quotation from Proverbs, which is the ultimate causative agent in the affairs of man. If the road to passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 doesn’t verify that reality, you truly are not inclined to face the real world.

Blame it on television, especially the Friday night show Numb3rs, where the bad guy almost got away with murder by tampering with the jury. Then math, especially probability theory, figured out how he did it. He succeeded, but only to the closing scene. Add to that a link in Saturday’s WSJ Online email on the Committee on Doubt and Uncertainty, concerning the House Financial Services Committee and we have a program for this week’s column.

Fear is the prime motivator in all-human decisions, or more precisely, the desire for security in the face of the unknown is what makes us do certain things pretty much all the time. To shine some light into that darkness we created the following equation. (For Windows users rather than use a specific math character set, we have attempted to express the variables in standard keyboard text.)

What we want to find out is what is the true Success Probability of any action we take to solve some perceived problem using a Process Factor or factors, which is basically defined as the way we have always done it. This is coupled directly with the Perceived Success over the years we have followed that path. We multiply that average by our Hoped Results and an undefined Fear Factor, which is divided over the Actual Results achieved over time. To use this equation for future predictions we must estimate the Actual Results to calculate the estimated Fear Factor.

(AVG[PFPS]*HR*FF)/(AR*T)= SP

PF = Process Factor
PS = Perceived Success in Years
HR = Hoped Results
FF = Fear Factor
AR = Actual Results
T= Time
SP = Success Probability = 1

Solving for Fear Factor in a potential success

FF = 1(AR*T)/(AVG[PFPS]*HR)

This means the Fear Factor for any defined Success is inversely proportional to the Perceived Success time average.

Now since we do not know the Actual Results until some future defined time, what really constricts our decisions is that inverse proportionality compared to another independent Process Factor. Hence more of the time our decisions are based upon what we perceived worked in the past, rather than what might work in the present, or in the future. Our government’s lack of imagination has been considered the causative agent in the 9-11 attack. The same is true of the current economic mess.

Before I get totally confused with the mumbo-jumbo, let us put this in the context of the recently passed economic stimulus package in the United States.
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Tags: exclusively exclusive, Barack Obama, socialism, Natural Law, Glenn Beck, Join or Die, diversely unified civility

Exclusively inclusive

11/February/2009 13:16

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Proverbs 9:10

Just nineteen words that you do not hear in any context today about the unfolding crises in the world. Everyone seems to have some idea or plan to save the world, but it is totally amazing, none of those plans include God in any fashion. Some of that I suppose is that God doesn’t consider a top priority that everyone on earth currently, have a large flat screen TV and a retirement account which you can use to quit early and become a human consumptive vegetable.

What we see almost everywhere is greed, cancerous greed, empowered by collusion. Much of that collusion is political, which means in this country that the two political parties maintain control of all elections by forcing political candidates to espouse exclusively exclusive views to receive funding to run for office.

Putting it in a larger context and expanding this enlightened view of extremism, the United States just finished the eight-year leadership of a true laissez-faire capitalist, evangelical Christian. Under the leadership of George W Bush we have seen the demise of both laissez-faire capitalism and religious right Christendom.

The significant fruit of that exclusive exclusiveness is that Americans elected the most leftist president in the history of the country. While Barack Obama claims that the American economy is on the brink of collapse if his economic stimulus package is not enacted immediately, it is impossible to recall another first three weeks of a president in modern times, bungling so much, so soon.

From their vantage point, the remaining political right commentators are promoting the concept that Obama is creating a version of European socialism. What they seemingly fail to understand, is European socialism finds its power from a semblance of centralized planning. There is no central plan in either Obama’s economic stimulus, or in his treasury secretary’s plan to restore financial stability.
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Tags: exclusively exclusive, God, Barack Obama, exclusively inclusive, socialism, Fox News, George W. Bush

Stupendous Debt & the demise of enlightenment supremacy

04/February/2009 08:05

The oldest tale in The Book is about a couple that made the wrong choice. That choice was between the perceived understanding of present security compared to the uncertainty of passing time. This choice was precipitated by another created being, who had made a similar choice and now was seeking company for his loneliness.

Following along in that Book of myths we find a time when people thought that they could find eternal happiness by developing mechanisms by which through their intelligence and wisdom they could have it all. The reason given in The Book for that failure was the confusion of languages. I suppose people got so engrossed in doing things their own way, they failed to communicate.

Some may say this was a religious phenomenon, true, for I once heard a leader in the secular Christian TV community using this Book discussion to promote his idea, which if his followers all worked together, they could do what Babylon failed to accomplish. Now if that isn’t a concept rooted in the demise of enlightenment thinking, I have not heard a better.

Finishing up with our brief survey of The Book we find in the last compendium a similar story where in the Babylon of that time, the people of all lands ceased to buy all the things the great leaders of the world provided, for a variety of allegorical reasons. The interesting thing about this Babylon was that the normal ordinary folks were not sad to see the whole thing collapse even though it meant more personal hardship.

There is a whole lot of other wisdom in The Book that is probably applicable to our day and age, but it is just a book, and as we know books are filled with words, just words. To think that words have transcendent meaning to convey something called Absolute Truth is just fiction, maybe interesting fiction, but nothing more. After all reality beyond the concept of man’s own understanding just does not happen in our enlightened age.
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Tags: Babylon, consumers, choice, economics, money, Reformation, debt

The Interpreter

28/January/2009 09:06

Our new President sure has caused quite a stir in his first week in office. The consensus across the spectrum is there seems to be no quantifiable anything on really what are the core principles of Barack Obama. There is a lot of spin on the applications so far, some of it I received as comments to last week’s offering, but whether this is spin to appease his far left supporters, or whether they are Obama’s core beliefs, or whether Obama possesses any core beliefs at all, are truly undefined and it might take a while to really know the truth. Then and only then, truth may be only relative and that is no truth at all.

We are surely not going to change any of that here at Wonder Springs, but we will add some thoughts about communities, especially human communities, that hopefully bring some context to the future, which truly is without similar parallels in this country and the world.

“The Interpreter” is a song by Blackfoot Indian, Jack Gladstone. One of the lines from the song goes: “In a barroom brawl, he’ll knock you out, then buy you a drink when you come to.” The link to the song title leads to the rest of the song’s lyrics as well as a little history relating to the song. Jack was raised in Seattle, played football at the University of Washington, in the ancient history when they went to the Rose Bowl, and currently lives in Western Montana.

The job of the interpreter is to provide a means of communication between languages and cultures. Those cultures may share a variety of things in common, they may not. The interpreter seeks to find words and customs to bridge those differences. The barroom incident seems to relate more to customs than language.

The context of the American Frontier is a wise model to what is happening in the United States today. On the Native American side you had basically a communal culture where the concepts of what we today call private property, if they existed, were not all that pronounced, and were subservient to the needs of the community structure of tens and fifties. In the larger community structure of thousands, the ties were much less developed simply because of the demands of environmental survival.

The culture of the White Man was much more hierarchical in nature. The Great White Father ruled from the land where the sun rose, was in charge, owned all the property, and you would submit, because Indian ways were uncultured in comparative arrogance, actually savage in the generalized interpretation. Communities, in the Native American sense, did not and do not exist beyond the concept and influence of the Rez.
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Tags: Barack Obama, community, United States, transcendence, Chicago

Hope for validity

21/January/2009 11:56

Yesterday, Tuesday January 20, 2009 the United States of America peacefully inaugurated the country’s forty-fourth President, Barack Obama. A true Afro-American, without the history of human slavery in his heritage, we see in Obama, a refreshing beginning for not only this country, but also the world. The story that in America anyone can grow up to be President, not only rings true to those with generational history in this land, that bell of freedom now encompasses the whole world, including the continent of Africa.

I personally was moved by the bumbled oath of office, because some forty years earlier I too recited essentially those same words, in the process of being commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the US Army in Cheney, Washington. At that time the words sent a humble chill down my spine, those words still do, and have, every time I have heard them recited since that cold winter day.

“… to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. So help me God.”

Those are words, just words, but those words have been recited in the call to public service to this country since they were first administered to our first President George Washington. Those words have however a transcendent power that have kept this nation secure for over two hundred years, in times of plenty and times of crisis.

I wish and pray for success for this new President, for he has before him a task and challenges that few have seen in the history of this country. Most would say that these challenges are of economics and of foreign hostilities, but those are really just symptoms of a much deeper challenge of bringing the country back to, and leading forward into the historic hope and promise of the American experiment.

The founding of the United States came from the understanding that human beings were created in the image of God, for a Divine purpose. In that light we all walk a pilgrimage that requires an analysis and affirmation of four distinctly human principles. Those four are origins, morality, purpose, and destiny.
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Tags: Barack Obama, hope, faith, United States, Jesus, Reformation, Great Depression

Walls of fear

14/January/2009 10:51

Today we begin the impossible, to attempt to describe not a program but a mission for the church to get back to the reason for her existence. That mission focuses, in Augustinian principles, to build the City of God, so that the City of Man again realizes that Biblical Christianity is a viable worldview in the complex nature of human events.

Accomplishment of this mission does not lie within the power of human facilities; these achievements can only come by the transcendent triune God supernaturally. This can best be described as ex nihilo creation of a new reality from rapidly expanding existing human social chaos.

If you haven’t noticed that chaos and realized its importance in daily events, perhaps you should join the reality of this present world. By and through God’s unity and diversity is the reality that reorders that chaos into a recognizable unity and diversity of human events and social structure. That reality in which the church operates is and has always been focused upon common elements, the proclaimed word, baptismal water, communion bread and wine. Added, in this age, should be an emphasis on functional common human communities, which were historically assumed and are truly in existence throughout human history.

After our enlightened prolonged period in which human created uniqueness has been subjugated to only individual and personal fulfillment in natural noise and toys, Christians need to seek only God’s grace, through faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Just as Elijah came to understand in the wilderness of 1 Kings 19, the still small voice of God only is apparent where the cares and other stupendous events that surround us are put in their proper perspective.

You don’t need to read much in the Wonder Springs archives to realize I have tremendous respect for the transcendent nature of wildness to restore the soul, but that wildness must be tempered with the reality of human community interactions. In that tension, we can find true common grace harmony in specific Biblical grace.
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Tags: Elijah, Robert Frost, Mending Wall, gospel, small groups, leadership, transcendence, wonder, Christianity, New Deal Revival

The Mission, mission

07/January/2009 16:30

As this New Year begins, the current and pending real world indicators don’t look all that optimistic. The latest from the emerging President is that his economic stimulus package could easily reach a trillion dollars. The Federal budget deficit could be a few hundred billion beyond that, and virtually all our states are in dire economic straights. Furthermore, all this monetary chaos is expected to continue well into the future.

Capitalism in its greedy worship of money alone, precipitated this current crisis and at least at present spin asks for more freedom to do it all again. If government would collect no taxes from anyone, then the economy would grow into a giant economic utopia. However, at least for the short term, Wall Street needs some government bailout money to set the ship on course. I think not, that they will not get the money; I think not that it will work.

What is missing in each of these wonderful schemes is any sense of a reality that personal peace and affluence is not only a bankrupt economic model, this all stems from an complete insolvency of the underlying materialist philosophy. Neither of our addicted to their-own steroids models above, is willing to accept this absolute truth.

To focus on these true deficits is to say that we are in the secular world trying to achieve a true mission impossible. This is not a Peter Graves or Tom Cruise action fantasy where the good guy struggles for the whole episode to overcome the bad guy. This is a reality world in which at best the good and the bad are so intertwined that there can be no real resolution of the conflict. Before our current problems can be solved we need to redefine the mission.

This new mission statement is not going to come from any players in any of the above. The only hope for our struggling world is that we redefine the goals of all humanity beyond just tangible material reality. I suppose some good news in all of this is that in the course of all human history, the totally materialistic worldview has little precedence.

In other words this is the only time in history man has not looked in someway for guidance from some type of higher power. This godless materialism, is at best a twentieth century phenomena and has earnestly ruled in the west since it defeated the Soviet form in the 1980s. The end of the Cold War has brought atheistic material prosperity to all, Hallelujah!
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Tags: worldview, church, God, Jesus, great commission, E Pluribus Unum, transcendence

Transcendent Leadership Prinicples

31/December/2008 10:41

This week’s column continues the reflections on two books we reviewed earlier this month. The first book was “Quitting Church, Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It,” by Julia Duin, the Religious Editor for the Washington Times. The second book is “Christless Christianity, The Alternative Gospel of the American Church” written by Michael Horton, Professor at Westminster Seminary California and host of the “White Horse Inn” radio broadcast.

As another year rushes to a close, perhaps it would be appropriate to summarize the essence of what we have been trying to focus upon, as it relates to the true orthodox (traditional) historical, Protestant (stemming from the Reformation), Christian, gospel (Good News). From our research capacity, it is our belief that readers, especially those on the Internet, have or do not hear regularly enough, a comprehensive proclamation of human redemption before the Almighty and Holy God. A distilled substance of that gospel proclamation follows.

Before time began, not all that long ago, God, the Triune Unity in Diversity, created the universe and planet earth out of nothing (ex nihilo). Before time began, God’s understanding of this triune universe (time, space, and matter) would require a specific Godly intervention into that continuum in which to redeem not only creation, but fallen humanity, created in His Image, whom He would soon create out of the dust of the ground.

That redemption would follow a covenant of grace from the introduction of human sin, in the God created good garden in Eden, throughout unfolding history, climaxing with an eternal judgment of humanity at the end of this present age. This present age is a now fallen, but visual and spiritual foretaste of that eternal state of recreated perfection.

Approximately two thousand years ago, a baby born in Bethlehem, named Jesus, became God incarnate through the Immaculate Conception in a Jewish virgin by the name of Mary in the linage of King David, maintaining the prophetic Biblical Messianic lineage. This birth is celebrated in the world as Christmas, but there is no Biblical reason to celebrate that birth, hence it is an extra biblical holiday similar to the Jewish Chanukah, a miraculous festival of light, coming and being maintained in a spiritually dark world.

Jesus lived approximately thirty-three years as the totally human - totally God, sinless man. In the fullness of time, He offered himself as the propitiatory sacrificial Passover lamb, for the sins of all humanity, being crucified on a cross. He was buried for three days, under Roman guard. On the morning of the third day He was resurrected from death, as the First Fruit of that coming eternal restored kingdom. In due time showing himself to many, He visibly ascended to a place known as heaven to rule and reign at the right hand of His eternal Father. From there he will return at the end of this age to complete that redemption of those who through faith alone, have accepted His invitation to be come the legally adopted children of God. By that atoning sacrifice alone, not by any works of righteousness on their part, are people saved from the holy eternal wrath of God’s judgment to come.

Since His ascension, the covenantal lineage has rested within the auspices of what is historically known as the catholic (meaning universal) church, but it does include those from times prior to the crucifixion of Christ according to that same faith alone covenant of grace. Those people looked forward by faith alone to that coming Messianic event, the church looks backward in time.

The church was and is extended by the preaching (proclamation) of the Gospel by the Word of God (the Bible) of this faithful Good News and by the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. Communion is also known as the Lord’s Supper and the Eucharist in various divisions of the Christian world and unites all Christians, That communion brings the first fruits of unity and diversity into a timeless Church Triumphant.

By what is generally known as word and sacrament, the power associated with saving faith is preserved by this mysterious and miraculous wonder of God descending to redeem human personalities for His own, from outside of time, into all creation and all time. That salvation comes about by the will of God alone and not by human measures or wishful thinking.

We proclaim these words on a regular basis because as fallen, but redeemed creatures we cannot otherwise comprehend the true wonder of God’s grace. Those who think that this gospel presentation and use of communion are powerless memorials to a past reality fully do not understand either the gravity of human total depravity, or the condescendence of God’s true grace. They ignore this true reality at their present and eternal peril.
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Tags: gospel, Jesus, church, grace, leadership, Francis Schaeffer, Moses leadership model, sports teams

Merry Christmas is not just Personal Peace and Affluence

24/December/2008 08:24

Today, when we wish you a Merry Christmas the general underlying meanings from the culture are essentially, “We wish you in this season and throughout the year personal peace and affluence.”

Not all that well known in the world and in the church is the concept of a worldview of only “personal peace and affluence” was a construct of the late Francis Schaeffer, probably the best, well known Christian theologian and apologist of the last half of the 20th century. Schaeffer was the founder of L’Abri, a Christian community in Switzerland.

It was Schaeffer’s contention that the prime worldview operating in the world in his life was based upon those presuppositions of personal peace and personal affluence. If you look at our current economic stupendous changes, what you see is that these two presuppositions are no longer working as well as they once did.

Therefore, the world economic crisis has at its core a philosophical malady, which has shown symptoms related to housing, energy, and finance. We may concoct all sorts of remedies or prescriptions to treat what we believe is wrong, but true economic health cannot be restored without making alterations to the worldview that personal peace and affluence is not just the highest calling of mankind, but really is an unworkable or lasting way to run a culture or human civilization.

Personal peace and affluence were indeed the operational paradigms of culture in Schaeffer’s era of the late 70s and 80s, Now, another couple of decades down that highway means, contrary to what you might be hearing spun by those who owe their entire position to these paradigms, the problems are going to continue into the future until they are replaced, by both more pragmatic, and philosophically different ways of looking at the functions of human society.

If those new paradigms continue to be only individually and materially oriented, it is going to be a very dark time for human culture for a very long time.
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Tags: Christmas, personal peace and affluence, Francis Schaeffer, Keynesian economics, Great Depression

The American Church, striving for failure

17/December/2008 08:16

One of the fundamental operational precepts of human activity early in this century is power in sincerity. As long as you are sincere in your beliefs and actions everything is going to work out just fine, not only in the near term, but in the long run as well. This sincerity however, never acknowledges the possibility of being sincerely wrong. It is thought by truly sincere advocates that the truth of being sincerely wrong is not a possibility.

Two books we have reviewed earlier this week seem to provide pretty damning proof that there is something sincerely wrong with the American church. So far everyone is so busy striving with the bailouts, meltdowns, the freezing global warming winter, and a whole host of other aspects of stupendous change, to look seriously at those failures and work toward constructive solutions, that may not accommodate our sincerity, but still are verified by absolute truths.

The first book was “Quitting Church, Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It,” by Julia Duin, the Religious Editor for the Washington Times. Our review is found here. The second book is “Christless Christianity, The Alternative Gospel of the American Church” written by Michael Horton, Professor at Westminster Seminary California and host of the “White Horse Inn” radio broadcast. The second review is found here.

One of my least favorite Bible verses is found in Psalm 46:10; Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth NIV. The NKJV has it as “be still.” In the larger context the whole of this Psalm pretty much describes what is now happening as our world evolves into this new world order of unforeseen chaos.

As we discussed last week there is increasing anxiety (sincere striving) noise about what is happening to all our toys. We are too early into this to have it really affect our present toys, but the future of ever increasing toys, at least for the short term is beginning to look rather bleak. Since the whole world economy functions greatly on toy manufacturing, distribution, and sales this recession/depression could produce some very yet unknown consequences.

It is my hope, and that also perhaps of Duin and Horton, that some of these consequences will create opportunities for the Christian church to again become a beacon of temporal and eternal truth in a very dark world. In Christianity alone, does anyone find the truth that answers life’s truly important questions. Those indicatives, at least in Christianity, are the basis of Absolute Truth, no other religion, philosophy, or worldview can provide answers anywhere close to the consistency of these principles.
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Tags: sincere, Julia Duin, Michael Horton, Quitting Church, Christless Christianity, Origins, Morality, Meaning, Destiny

God’s natural transcendence: common and specific

10/December/2008 13:07

Contrary to what you may have heard in church, sound Bible exposition requires a young earth. Your pastor may say that the age of the earth really doesn’t matter as long as you have Jesus and the cross, but that is really a logical argument from ignorance, because if the creation story is not essentially a story of somewhat literal days, and instead is gapped, or evolved into millions and billions of years, the whole Bible logically becomes a book of fables and myths.

There are a rapidly growing number of creation scientists on this earth who believe the Bible as written. Sadly there are very few theologians and pastors to which this “debate” makes a difference. Furthermore, as in the recent movie “Expelled”, which stars a Jewish Ben Stein, these creation scientists are being kicked out of their professions, not because they are so much Bible thumpers, but because they promote a view called “Intelligent Design.”

So where did these scientists learn their wild, primitive, knuckle dragging, unenlightened theology?

They learned it from the transcendent nature of their work in the natural or common field of science in which they had chosen to study. Not only is creation too complex to have happened by chance, evolution by it’s core presupposition denies the truth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, except for quantum leaps of faith and complexity, to bring us miraculously to this ancient but present completely natural state.

In the quest of where did I come from and what is my destiny, Intelligent Design is no better than evolution in answering these questions. However, theologians and pastors for some reason think this is an intelligent response to the problems that are facing this world. I suppose the logic goes, “If people believe in a Designer, they will search for Him and they will find Him in Jesus in the Bible and church, then they will ask Jesus into their heart and will be saved, and the world will be a better place.”

This of course assumes the evolutionary presupposition that we are all good people evolving to a higher level of good consciousness, and denies the reality of another Bible Genesis theological principle and that is sin, in the form of Total Depravity. This is best codified in the words of Julie Andrews from a song in the “Sound of Music,” “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could, so somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.”

Thus we have the prime theological construct of all human religion, whichever handle you choose to place the spin, including the religion of evolution. “I am good, and I am getting better, but I’m not too sure about you.” (Because in my worldview I am superior to you)
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Tags: God, church, common grace, transcendence, Natural Law, Transcendentalism , noise and toys, Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir

Common Grace Avenue

03/December/2008 08:02

Few people, either in the print media or on the Internet have written more, for a longer period of time on the subject of stupendous change than yours truly. Surely there are those who have forecast a financial collapse, or pending judgments of God, global warming disasters, or a whole host of other pet topics, but writing about general stupendous change and somewhat reasonable options after the happening are quite rare.

Well, a stupendous financial crisis is upon us and it’s ramifications are now being stupendously felt in various ways not only in the United States, but all over the world. Words such as bailout, depression, deflation, meltdown, and many others are now becoming part of almost everyone’s conversations.

We hear a lot about Wall Street, normally contrasted with Main Street, but it is going to be a very long time, if ever, before either are back to what we once called normal, or secure. So what then, how do we move forward in some sort of consistent basis, while all around seems to be fighting continued and impending chaos?

For our part, we will ask you to move your thoughts to Common Grace Avenue here at Wonder Springs. Common Grace Ave will attempt to take the failed or depressed paradigms and apply common grace attributes gathered from nature to inject not only some hope but some practical absolutes by which a revitalized economic and enterprise structures can develop.

President elect Obama has now named his economic team and for the most part they are closely related to the Bush advisors, if not the Clinton era instigators of this current financial calamity. So on the ocean of non-energetic debt capital there will be just a new group of Titanic passengers rearranging the deck chairs. We say passengers because, not only do they look like they do not know what they are doing, in a somewhat professional way, they freely admit that truth. The last I heard, we have given them about eight trillion dollars to see what they can do, and a blank check to print more money if need be.

Having said that, the truth behind these appointments is that there really was no other sensible alternative. Our generation long bubble of continued economic growth fueled by cheap, essentially free, debt and deficit spending, solely on consumer material goods, has basically made extinct, any opposition species.
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Tags: stupendous change, Wall Street, Main Street, Common Grace Avenue, Barack Obama, urban financial bias

Gracefully empowered thankfulness

26/November/2008 09:40

Tomorrow here in the United States we celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday, originally set aside to commemorate the blessings of the Creator towards Christian Pilgrims in the Massachusetts colony almost 500 years ago.

A lot has changed in those half millennia for sure. The Pilgrims basically came to these shores to flee established religious persecution in Europe and to build a new life for their families. To face the unknowns of sea and the new lands across the Atlantic required deep faith, which is generally absent in America and the rest of the world today.

We want it easy, with immediate gratification, or we find other things to do with our time, like nothing of much importance, even temporally. Things of eternal significance are pretty much undefined for the mass of people. However people are still changed by faith, sometimes their own, but many times there are other people which we do not at this time know personally, that are truly responsible for our life changing pilgrimage.

Early last Sunday morning I had a dream in which family members, some alive, some passed, were having a reunion of sorts. I was sitting on the front porch talking to someone about something, when a person who has had a very dramatic effect upon my life came out the door behind me and sat on the grass and asked, “What am I doing here?”

My immediate response was something really not at all profound, which was answered in another brief, but equally pedantic statement from the person now relaxed and feeling at home on the lawn. Then I woke up, with the thought, where does this conversation go from here?

“Well you are an inspiration of my life, whether you know it or not. In fact, when things get really tough and I wonder why I can do this work at all, eventually you come to mind.”

A pretty heavy thought to lay upon someone with whom you have never spoken with personally before. To which the proper and I believe most common response would be, “When and how did I do that for you?”

“Of course, if the truth is laid out, it probably occurred too many times to count, in situations really too complex perhaps for you to bear, but you were there along side in the hard times, and it really cost you nothing towards me. At the same time you probably deserve a substantial part of any reward. All you did, was be you, and that was more than enough.”

Perhaps the best and Biblical response comes from Matthew 25:33-40 in the sheep and the goats parable:

And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’

“Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’
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Tags: grace, empowerment, thankfulness, common grace, God, Pilgrims, Christ , Bluegrass music

Grace in Winter

19/November/2008 09:43

Before we begin this week’s article I would like you to spend a little time with your thoughts. When we mention winter, what comes into your mind? Do it mentally or write it down, nothing all that elaborate just word associations.

Finished? Now do the same for summer. OK!

If you are a somewhat normal human being, your winter thoughts included, cold, dark, miserable, wet, snow, and so forth.

For summer your concepts were probably, warm, sunny, colorful, flowers, birds, and eventually you got around to too hot.

What you have just accomplished is a very real application of the absolutes of natural law and common grace, in which winter was law and summer was grace, at least until you got to those unbearably hot days when you sought out air conditioning where ever it may be.

Now let us say, when the alarm clock went off this morning you got up and looked out the window and there was six inches of new fresh snow on the ground and it was snowing heavily. Your first thoughts were, “Oh, God how am I going to get to work?” As you stood there gazing at the increasing snow, you apprehended the reality that you can’t get to work, at least not on time, and no one is really going to know when that time really is, because your boss lives on the other side of town and the weather is always worse in that more ritzy suburb.

So you go into the kitchen and the coffee is warm and fresh, you look for the morning paper, and it has yet to arrive, so you turn on the TV and get the news. The news is that this sudden storm is expected to add another six to eight inches before it quits later this morning. With all that snow you are snowbound at least for the day. “Praise the Lord!” You have a day when the cares of the world and work are only what you decide to make them.

What you are experiencing is the title of this week’s article, “Grace in Winter.”
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Tags: grace, economic winter, absolutes, snow, seasons, light, Christmas, Hanukkah

Common Graciousness

12/November/2008 09:25

Last week we wrote about the now generally accepted notion of the American Dream, namely home ownership and it’s pending demise. So how are you going to keep them down on the farm, or in this case in the suburbs and the townhouses, if they can’t afford to buy the place?

Of course one of the options is stated in the question’s preface, they could move down on the farm, but that assumes that rural housing values are commensurately less expensive than their urban and suburban alternatives. When you consider job and income disparities between the two locales. Common sense dictates that cheaper home values reflect lower economic realities, at least if real estate is a market driven enterprise, with or without government incentives.

However, I have noticed recently that in the excessive drive to own you own piece of the American Dream in real property, something much more important may have been scuttled in this attempt for continual wealth appreciation. That factor, for lack of a better word, is the loss of America’s common graciousness.

I write extensively here at Wonder Springs about the reality of natural law and common grace. What I have failed to realize is that when you take common grace and humanize it, what flows out is common graciousness. Common graciousness is beautiful, pretty much beyond description.

In contrast, getting mine at the expense of others is just ugly. Getting mine by empowering others is a start, but true common graciousness means my reward comes from you realizing that there is more to your life than just material possessions, stuff, and junk. True wealth begins when you believe more in others than they can presently realize.

America, last week elected a black President, a true Afro-American. Conservative pundits and news commentators are still trying to figure out how John McCain was able to lose by six percentage points. The underlying reality is that the Obama campaign was about six percentage points more commonly gracious than the McCain candidacy.

What you basically saw from McCain was a grumpy old man, telling you like it is, and how he could help you maintain that status quo. Following the election, anonymous McCain sources began smearing the Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, as dumb and stupid. This only verifies the Obama gracious margin of victory. The fact that McCain has seemly done nothing about these leaks, seems to attest that he lost for more than a few good reasons.
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Tags: common graciousness, common revelation, specifc revelation, evangelicalism, Christianity, God, church

Redefining the American Dream

05/November/2008 10:46

The recent two-year American election cycle is over and we have elected a new President. Now comes the huge task of putting substance to change. As is the nature of modern elections throughout the world, the emphasis has been long on hyperbole and absent any specifics anchored in true reality.

But the real substance facing President-elect Obama is trying to restore or redefine the American Dream. Since very liberal tenants have little history in the United States, especially since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, any infrastructure to provide these services must be built from scratch, or rebuilt on old ruins.

That leads to tremendous social opportunity, if that dream can be made into some sort of reality. Historically the ability of government to provide anything positive, other than consistently developing infrastructure, does not have a positive record. It has been a very long time indeed since that coordinated governmental role has been active in the United States. Special interest earmarks, or pork barrel spending, and an increasing invasive and bumbling bureaucracy have pretty much steered the recent course at all levels of government. The exceptions are very rare indeed.

To further complicate the recent economic developments, both energy and housing fiascos have pretty much shattered the American Dream that has been the driving force in the United States since World War II. That dream of course was to have a nice car and own your personal home.

After graduation from high school and before graduation from college, the first goal of most American males was to get a nice car, somewhat to impress the chicks, but more importantly to impress your other male compatriots. Once the wheels novelty began to wear off, the reality of work, and probably family began. The next hurdle was to be able to purchase your own house, and attempt to make that into a home.
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Tags: American Dream, God, Barack Obama, government, real estate, monetary policy, Social Darwinsim

Understanding true risk

29/October/2008 09:49

A number of years ago, the father of a good friend of mine died. By most accounts my friend’s father was rich, basically a good Christian family man, and generally considered a benefactor of a local Christian University.

This man was a Korean War veteran who returned from the war, sold his interest in the family Eastern Washington farm and used the proceeds to move to the coast and purchase a dairy. Over time he enlarged the dairy and expanded into manufacturing and distributing of a full range of dairy products. From there he built a small chain of supermarkets and invested in real estate.

My problem with this individual was that he considered his wealth to be his own and should have known better. He was quite happy to be considered a university benefactor, even though his contributions were quite modest, compared to his overall wealth.

When you actually looked at what he was able to do, his success wasn’t really due to his business acumen. His success was brought about, by being in the right place at the right time, with a sufficient capital stake, and really not taking any risks. He raised his family, spent way too much time putting all the pieces together, and didn’t do foolish things with the money that came his way. So on reflection I suppose it was his money.

In contrast in my early entrepreneurial days, I had two mentors of that same vintage. These two mentors combined probably had processed twenty times the wealth of the benefactor. They looked at their wealth as an opportunity to invest and contribute to the greater community, and essentially looked at their money as a scorecard for what they were doing, not who they really were.
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Tags: risk, wealth, money, Bill Gates, fear, faith, closely held corporation, board of directors, capital gains, equity

Main Street reality check

22/October/2008 10:30

Welcome to the new world order, where Wall Street men, create what was once defined as money, ex nihilo, to try and resurrect Wall Street. How much of this money do we need? No one seems to know, but the die of current monetary formation has been cast, both Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke, will make as much as needed, where needed, to stave off a massive world depression.

So what, that the wealth of monetary trillions has instantaneously evaporated for human millions! At least the money ship is still bailing, and will continue to bail, and bail and bail until, people begin to understand that there is no monetary reality at work here. The solution is the process or so it seems to be unraveling.

What is really happening is that these two non-elected officials are attempting to replace the evaporated trillions with new trillions. It sounds so simple, provided everyone plays along for now and somewhere down the river, or over this new ocean, they slow down the money pumps and ease this Titanic to the pier. Of course a few months ago they were talking about inflationary fears, now that word has been exiled with the trillions of the old money.

At some point in the future, these two men will have saved a materialistic worldview, that truly isn’t capable of salvation, and everyone will be much poorer, by the effect of the new trillions, than they were in the first place.

Barack Obama and his Democrat compatriots have gotten the picture. All the big spending programs are now again on the table, all we have to do is believe in hope and hope will carry us through.

Senator McCain for his part has Joe the Plumber for his only touch with an outside reality. If it were not for Joe, you would have to believe that John took short odds to lose at Vegas and now is working hard to widen or meet his point spread.

So in less than two weeks left before the most critical election in United States history, you have the leadership of both political tickets mumbling something about foreign testing, while in the local – national tests, they showed up at the last debate unwilling to talk about, anything relating to the serious present and uncertain future we now find ourselves. But, Praise the Lord, we have Hope Change to believe in, whoever she is?

Actually for most of us, Joe (not Biden) and Sarah are the only people with the only real vision of an American present and a future. That vision centers not on Wall Street, but Main Street.
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Tags: Main Street, Wall Street, wealth, Barack Obama, John McCain, equity, debt

Prospecting for wealth

15/October/2008 07:47

Ancient truth relevant for today:

Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. And he said:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return there.
The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Job 1:20,21

Though the fig tree may not blossom,
Nor fruit be on the vines;
Though the labor of the olive may fail,
And the fields yield no food;
Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,
And there be no herd in the stalls—

Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.

The LORD God is my strength;
He will make my feet like deer’s feet,
And He will make me walk on my high hills.
Habakkuk 3:17-19

May you find in the above words, consolation that the happenings in this current world are not all there is, and there truly is nothing new under the sun. There is a strength available beyond our own individual capacities.

Furthermore, words really do not fully express what many of you are feeling at this time. People, who told you to trust them, either lied to you, or were just ignorant of true reality, including the consequences of ignoring Natural Law. That reality of absolute truth exists and so do you, begin to deal with it seriously.

There has been a slightly positive development this week. National governments around the world have begun to realize that the problem is not with energy prices or unsound mortgages, the root of this disease is really the monetary system itself. First steps have been taken to begin to bring a reasoned approach to what we call banking and money in our various currencies.

So far these steps are quite inflationary, but there really is no other alternative at this time. Especially notice that these measures were taken by national governments, not international financial organizations and enterprises. Finally the world’s problems are beginning to rise above politics, and governments are beginning to look after their people rather than special interests.

Of course politicians, especially here in the United States, remain a leading indicator of completely being out of touch with those they are called to lead. Slowly the reality that neither the far left or the far right have anything positive to contribute to the solution, will pound it’s way into some positive actions.
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Tags: wealth, Truth, nations, money, Canada, Cuba, venture

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.
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Tags: globalism, entropy, bailout, energetics, energy, money

And Then?

01/October/2008 07:43

Well an evolving big financial bailout plan is still lumbering along through the American Congress. Most people would have forecast it would and should have been done by now. But after decades of neglect and wishful thinking the impossible takes a little longer, especially when none of them have a clue in what the outcome will truly become. We must all ask the question.

And then?

That is the big question facing the western world as the dust again settles after another New York based disaster, this one more of the metaphysical rather than the bricks and mortar happening on 9-11. Uptown in the financial district, people, with few exceptions, didn’t lose their actual lives, but their livelihood may be more stupendously changed for the long term, than what happened with the terrorist attack.

Stupendous change articles are not unknown in the Chronicle; we began 2007 with a series of articles that continued through the month of March. Therefore the recent realization that we live in a fallen world and actions have consequences is not to be dismissed lightly in the rush to find a material solution to these complex monetary problems.

Historians may one day trace the beginning of this financial crisis back to the foundation of capitalism, or probably to the Enlightenment itself, but needless to say, the happenings of the last few weeks and the short term future, measured in years, has been greatly altered. Virtually no one alive today has a distinct memory of the adult responsibilities that came to light during the Great Depression, so we must rely on training and abilities of the so-called experts.

The evolving bailout plan is very loosely constructed not to repeat the tight money problems that greatly exacerbated that era, but no one surely likes the concept of having the American people forced to provide the final defense for the greed and malfeasance of a few, but that is the real world. The real questions are this going to be enough, or will it work at all? To answer these real world issues, time will tell. Needless to say, we all need to take stock of the present and readjust our plans for the future.

As I have been ruminating on what has just happened, the Bible construct of Revelation 18 comes to mind, especially verse eight concerning a financial Babylon: Therefore her plagues will come in one day—death and mourning and famine. And she will be utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

The only difference from what just happened seems to be the concept of a literal reference fire rather that a metaphysical reference, but it would be quite difficult to describe what has just happened to all our financial situations metaphorically, especially in just one word, collapse, or failure just are not quite up to the task, fire seems to fit much better.
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Tags: bailout, Revelation, eschatology, church, Babylon, gospel

Three Real Truths

24/September/2008 10:43

Even in my currently isolated position in the suburbs of Nowhere I had the opportunity to listen on the Fox News Sunday Podcast of Treasury Secretary Paulson’s attempt to describe the current financial bailout package that is supposed to be working it’s way through Congress this week. My thoughts were it was grossly simplistic, shortsighted, and supported mostly by wishful thinking. I suppose that last sentence sounds somewhat oxymoronic. Yep! That pretty much is the essence of my feelings.

The whole shebang seems to have nothing to do with the underlying principles that brought about this “crisis,” and the overriding tone of his rhetoric seemed to be we needed this “crisis” to provide the opportunity to fix a broken system. That sure gives me confidence that everything is now going to be smooth sailing on the rising ocean of American debt. But one must wonder just how much more ballast the old ocean liner “Constitution” can take on without a small tempest overriding the gunwales.

The course has been set and a President with a thirty percent approval rating and a Congress still sailing along at about one third that number, have it all under control. You can take that to port, or to the bank?

This brings me to three truths I have heard recently that look more deeply at the American experiment at this time and place. What they show is our current stupendous change voyage may only be beginning.

The first truth comes from Benjamin Franklin, in a speech given by Mark Sanford, the conservative conservationist governor of South Carolina, to the state Republican Party convention. This is the link to the thirteen and a half minute YouTube video.

The story goes, Dr. Franklin was leaving the meeting hall at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. As he was walking down the steps a spectator asked the senior statesman, “Sir, do we have a monarchy, or a republic?” To which Ben was said to reply, “We have a republic, if you can keep it.”
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Tags: Mark Sanford, monetary crisis, financial bailout, Ben Franklin, Great Depression, Civil War

The sun still rises

17/September/2008 12:14

Here on Big Boulder Creek the sun rose over Toulou Mountain about 8 AM Tuesday morning September 16, 2008. It set over the Kettle River range about 6 PM. Today it rose a couple of minutes later and will set again a couple of minutes earlier.

It was a complete surprise to me to find out when I got to Colville late Tuesday morning, that the world was still functioning at all with the Monday investment bank collapse on Wall Street.

I suppose I would have known about it earlier, but for the last month I have had no Internet service at my cabin thanks, to the great communications giant Verizon wireless. It seems, at least to an unverifiable communication to one questioning user, that they have reprogrammed their cellular tower on Bisbee Mountain west of Kettle Falls to serve more customers to the south and east rather than those in Northern Stevens, Eastern Ferry Counties and Federal Highway 395. As of this writing I have not received a response to my latest email sent Sunday afternoon.

Yesterday, I had planned to write a real journalistic post about this arbriatary and capricious change discontinuing my cellular service with the headline: “Verizon wireless – Can you hear me now?” This would be followed by the sub headline, “Of course not, for I now have to drive four to eight miles to make a call.” It would seem to me a courtesy to at least notify those potential customers that they were going to make a change in service, but in the era where real people don’t really matter why should Verizon do such a thing? After all it is really, “All about the network” and building and maintaining it all as cheaply as possible (emphasis mine).

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Tags: Wall Street, Verizon wireless, lipstick on a pig, Big Bad Wolf

Bottom-up leadership

10/September/2008 14:36

At last, the political conventions are over in the United States. Now we are in for a couple of months of what most of the media miraculously discovered in the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, a culture war of words. While they would never admit, even to their closest confidants, they liked what Sarah Palin had to say. The committed to Barack “objective journalists” found not only that there exists articulate and intelligent people who don’t at all agree with their view of America’s present and future, some began to realize that they don’t have the moral high ground, and that the vast majority of Americans agree with Sarah and not the elitist big government agenda.

Feeling quite confident in my position in this populist versus progressive agenda, I decided to begin creation of a new website Freed2Lead.com. This website will be based upon fundamental human rights and upon the uniqueness of each individual, under law, and God’s design. All of these values are now under serious attack by a subversive group of people, in the United States, all of western culture, and around the world. Last week we said that Bill O’Reilly calls these people secular progressives, I called them atheistic evolutionists, but it is really an elitist agenda more repressive to fundamental human rights than Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or any other fascist organizer.

The true long term terrorists are not fundamental religious zealots of either Christianity or Islam. The danger comes from those who seek to establish an “Elitist Enlightenment Estate” based on their messianic materialistic and humanistic worldview. In that worldview they and they alone believe that they are going to save the world from a whole menagerie of human induced ills, to numerous to name here. In this Wonder Springs forum, this is called by its true description, blasphemy, the oldest religion in the world.

I had planned to start this column at the top of my list of last week’s leadership issues and discuss them in how Biblical creation, spun through my esoteric views of science and religion might start a leadership dialog based on the uniqueness of both the spoken word of God, creation, and the specific word of God the Bible. However after reflecting upon the first item on that list, Arbitrary and Capricious Regulations, I decided I should start from the bottom up, because I am currently highly involved in a property dispute with Ferry County about the development of my Kettle River waterfront.
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Tags: Elitist Enlightenment Estate, Bill O Reilly, Arbitrary and Capricious Regulations, globalization, free trade, global warming, climate change

Leadership needs

03/September/2008 11:08

Life is good, if you don’t weaken.
Millie Sphuler (My neighbor’s grandmother)

Well John McCain sure shook up the American political landscape with the selection of Sarah Palin, Alaska’s Governor as his Vice Presidential running mate. As of this writing the news is popping about the Palin’s 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy. Looking at the bigger picture however McCain picked another maverick to focus the country on his vision of change for the United States. Whether this will energize the independent voters needed for him to win the Presidency, we will see over the next couple of months.

Here in Nowhere, I returned last week after an extended family reunion and other errands in Spokane, to find that both my cellular phone and Internet had disappeared during a significant storm the afternoon I left. When I reported the outage to the two Verizon wireless dealers in the area and Verizon, ten days later, they informed me that they were unaware of the problem. No one else who I talked to after I got back, even took the opportunity to report the change, only to whine about the problem to others. Things are somewhat better, I can now get some coverage here and there within seven miles, rather than the previous seventeen, but this makes continued Wonder Springs operations from here virtually impossible.

During that trip to Colville in which I reported the cellular outage, I picked up an audio copy of Bill O’Reilly’s “Culture Warrior” at the library. After listening to that recording I again understood that I too am a warrior in what he calls the “Culture War” raging in America. Bill defined the two sides as the minority “Secular Progressives” (SPs) in contrast with the “Traditionalists.” In Wonder Springs we would define those two sides as “Atheistic Evolutionists” contrasted with “Benevolent Deists” but both of our dogmas and theologies for the definitions are essentially identical.

Bill’s book deals with SPs in urban warfare and does not touch on the chasm between rural and urban Americans. In politics of course we call this the red and the blue states, but again contrary to urban spin, the differences are much more significant than mere politics. In outward culture the differences are profound and in many cases extremely hostile.
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Tags: John McCain, Sarah Palin, Bill O Reilly, Arbitrary and Capricious Regulations, Culture Warrior, Secular Progressive, Atheistic Evolutionists, Benevolent Deists

Political Ditches

27/August/2008 10:26

A few weeks ago I was reading one of my daily news and commentary emails. The author set the path before us, stating the fact that now that he had the nomination Barack Obama was moving to the center from the political left. In contrast John McCain was moving to the right to try and encourage the conservative base of the Republican Party. The conclusion drawn by the author was essentially, isn’t this American two party system grand. The two party system is what made America the greatest country in history.

That was pretty poor logic. I would long to vote for someone for President (or other political office) that I thought really believed in something, which wasn't created spin, tested in focus groups, or run through the political machine.

I watched about 30 seconds of Michelle Obama’s speech Monday night in Denver. What I got out of it was that the words were carefully and professionally crafted not to say anything that anyone might find offensive, anywhere. Secondly she wasn’t very good at reading a teleprompter, and finally the height of the podium was absurd. It wasn’t high enough to lend her a semblance of authority, nor was it low enough or small enough to connect with the people.

Hello! Is there a real person up there, or a robot just going through the motions? From just her every day demeanor, Michelle Obama seems like a strong and intelligent woman, too bad she wasn’t speaking Monday evening.

America’s wonderful two party system has now become a completely rigged political process, so that a truly normal person, not only is not represented by his or her government, there is no way that you can do anything about it. Now that is not a great way to run a democracy, or even a fascist state.

There is no room for a broad highway of consensus, not even a straight and narrow path to the future. All we have is two deep and foreboding ditches, the far left and far right, and not even a cleared path into the future. The old road that brought American and western culture to the zenith of human civilization has been abandoned, the asphalt or concrete ripped up and now weeds and brush have taken root.

The old saying of “My way, or the highway,” now has become “My way, or no way,” as the “my” has become the political party machines. The problem is that “my” has no reality basis in either you or me.
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Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, Political Ditches, special rights, Christianity, Jesus, grace

Combating the Agenda Panacea

20/August/2008 09:38

Strategically speaking this week Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seems to be in continuing control of an organized agenda to increase Russia’s tactical presence in the country of Georgia. So far tough words from western and NATO leaders have had little effect upon moving Russian troops back to August 7th positions.

It seems that the western Agenda Panacea to provide security to European nations as well as former satellite states of the Soviet Union has been challenged. To put this in some perspective, tough words are contrasted against tanks, troops, and empty promises.

What do both sides share in common? Words of course. Tough empty words or empty promise words are just words none the less. In that context, troops and tanks win. How difficult is that to understand?

The current paradigm of mutual understanding in the world seems to state, if we all just come together and share our differences, we can all then go home, do like we have always done and celebrate our diversity. If we can do that with sincerity, so much the better.

To put this into some sort of American context, for the next couple of months we have entered into a quatra-annual Presidential election contest. In this exchange, words are the only reality. Each is spun in the context of a significant Agenda Panacea. That simply means if you choose to support my words, the words themselves will transform society into the panacea the words describe.

So just as God spoke creation into existence, we humans can do the same, ex nihilo. In most of human history this concept was considered blasphemy. Of course we humans believe in God and in Jesus, but not a stern and jealous God, but a friendly God who accepts my good words and turns them into prosperity, especially material prosperity.

You can either tune in or tune out to hear politicians tell you what you want to hear, and what you always believed you deserved. Can’t you just feel the love and the change it will bring? Everything is beautiful in it’s own way.

Of course that only applies to those who share your own particular Agenda Panacea. Those who have a different Agenda Panacea want you to accept there spin as the spiritual and economic gospel also. They of course are sojourning in the light of their own illusionary creation. However, it is sure nice I have it all together in this world I am creating for myself.
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Tags: Agenda Panacea, ex nihilo, Vladimir Putin, leadership, Barack Obama, Bill O Reilly, John McCain, liberty, freedom, Ben Franklin

Leadership Incompetence

13/August/2008 10:51

I began this Chronicle over ten years ago, basically because I saw a dearth of valid leadership both in enterprise and in the religious sector. Over the ensuing years the problem has gotten steadily more acute, and now is rampant in the political arena as well.

Most people in leadership positions seem to think that leadership is an inherited talent or a gift and they are without a doubt one of the supreme benefactors of that acumen. Militaries around the world know that leadership is a learned art, perfected by training and practice. Leaders are not born they are trained.

Perhaps the greatest leadership kerfuffle believes that power and authority are the same. The truth however is that authority is bestowed from above, power is earned from below. To illustrate, in the military officers are commissioned by an act of the United States, but power is achieved by leading those under you wisely and with compassion. This power begins with the NCOs and works its way down to the lowest enlisted man. Your orders may speak with the authority of God, but your ability to lead rests entirely with the power of God flowing through those you lead. That power will keep you alive in combat, or get you quickly killed if you abuse its fundamental reality.

Furthermore if you look at the Bible this is a Biblical principle. Jesus never states that He was given the power to lead, only the authority. “All authority in heaven and earth is given to me.” The power resides in the Holy Spirit empowering those of the laity to follow true leadership and abandon the prideful. If I had a million dollars for every time I have heard a preacher butcher this concept, I would be as wealthy as Bill Gates

A couple of weeks ago I heard President Bush commenting on gasoline prices saying essentially that Americans are smart people and as gas prices rise Americans will cut back on their energy usage. As a consequence as President he was not going to do or say anything.

The first thought that came to mind was he must be suffering some sort of “shell shock” or “PTSD” (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) from all the abuse he has taken on his handling of the Iraq war. True leadership requires a destination, a goal, a mission; this statement by the President should serve as an anathema to all trained leaders.
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Tags: leadership, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Georgia, ferret flights, Ezekiel 37, dry bones valley, God

The Voodoo weed patch:

06/August/2008 06:33

Its ramifications on the continued development of human civilization

It is a well established truth that domestic, or domesticated, agriculture allowed for the development of human civilization.

It logically, and empirically follows that the fruits of that civilization are based upon the principles, not of hunting and gathering, but on planting and harvest. I would also assert that it’s continued success will again follow similar fields. As a consequence, basic agricultural principles, or science, will not only allow for humanity to maintain our culture, but it is a necessity for any successful human development.

We could consider the harvested fruits of these growing times as the infrastructure upon which the human community flourishes or flounders. It is important what we do, not only with natural soil, but also with the soil of our civilization. Our continued future depends upon the stewardship we practice in the various niches of our natural diversity, in creation and in culture. That diversity requires the synergistic application of energy, liquidity, and informational design.

Mass urbanization began in earnest during the 20th century. As we have traveled down that path into the future, not only have those agrarian roots been ignored, they are found down right repulsive to most urbanites. It is one thing to have a few pots in the living quarters, if you have a house maybe a few roses in the garden. But the sign of wealth, affluence, and just being cool, is to hire a gardener to do the dirty work.

Urbanites are quite happy to get their nature, from books, flat screen television, and perhaps a yearly drive through some place picturesque. As a consequence, the thought of getting dirty, and especially sweaty, is very demeaning and also makes them quite insecure by not knowing what to do with the hoe end of a hoe. Therefore, being terrified of all aspects of true natural law, they just try to ignore it and maybe it will leave them alone. That is just not going to happen and these fearful symptoms show up in many individuals as a form of mental illness.

From an environmental aspect the less there is to do with nature the better. If we just leave it alone, it will become a park, just like Central Park. We will just not let the Federal Government agencies manage the wild and it will become a park, if everyone just thinks good thoughts, and we don’t let those greedy developers do anything except build condos and golf courses.
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Tags: voodoo weed patch, civilization, infrastructure, laissez faire, liquidity, economics

Off road in the VooDoo desert

30/July/2008 11:26

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 21:25

This is an oft-quoted Bible verse used by all sorts of people to describe and lament the times in which we live. What I have never heard however is the corollary statement that people had to do what was right in their own eyes because they could not get any help with their projects, so they were left alone to their own resources, to make their own way.

Sure you can get help to do something if you are willing and able to pay, but you have to pay not for the value of the service necessarily, but what someone thought or determined what that service was worth. The real world and your world just don’t work together. Again what we are really talking about is a lack of infrastructure to help you with your daily tasks.

One of the first things you will find as you venture off road into God’s creation is that there is a unity in diversity. All things seem to work together. In ecology, that is called simply natural diversity. Why doesn’t it seem to work in human endeavors is, simply stated, we humans think we can come up with a better way, which really isn’t a better way in any way, it just looks right in our own eyes.

Some of those perceived better ways are based on science and valid logical reasoning. Too often however, these ways are based upon some self-righteousness, relying on our own definitions of good and right and center not on reason, but human emotion. When that emotion is divorced from an outside standard of righteousness, it quickly becomes dark and dangerous, essentially a type of voodoo.

As we have done in recent weeks, when looking at the Christian church, you see an organization so intent on saving the world by their methods, they don’t have time to reach the world by God’s methods, or just by being part of the natural community of mankind.

The fundamental statement from a Biblical and creation worldview simply states the reality, “If the church is unwilling or unable to perform her duties to Christianity specifically, and the world in general, we are all in a truly bad state of affairs.”

The information content of natural energetics is an interesting concept. Over time natural diversity will fill the void, in this case the lack of human opportunity and destiny found only in God. Therefore if the church is unable or unwilling to change from within, it will be changed from without.
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Tags: voodoo desert, voodoo economics, diversity, energetics, Martin Luther, church, infrastructure

The Great Gegwcatsf Revival

16/July/2008 07:45

I was very soberly and somberly considering writing this week’s article about the latest revival phenomena sweeping the world, when I received an email featuring Ray Stevens and a YouTube rendition of The Mississippi Squirrel Revival that took place at the First Self-Righteous Church.

An active squirrel cannot be a better segue into introducing real nature into the understanding of religious revivals. This is especially true because almost all revivals have to be taken with some degree of humor, because if you don’t, the members of the First Self-Righteous Church will quickly bring you down to their level of scorn of everything and everyone outside the doors.

According to the song the First Self-Righteous Church is located in the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi. With a 2000 census of just over 26,000, Pascagoula is located on the gulf coast at the mouth of the Pascagoula River. Pascagoula basically means “bread eaters” after the Native Americans of the region. The city is the Home of former US Senator Trent Lot and is the birthplace of singer songwriter Jimmie Buffet.

So what is the big deal about the city of Pascagoula? The complex name says it all, along with this vignette of the history. It is the ideal location for revival to breakout, a move of religious excitements that the world has never seen before. However while this revival will breakout at the First Self-Righteous Church, this church will be true to it’s humanistic enlightenment theology. I am speaking of course about, as I created last week, the complex named Gegwcatsf Revival. (Pronounced Jeg-wa-catsf)

As defined last week Gegwcatsf means: green, environmental, global warming, cap and trade, salvation fellowship. Where better for this revival to breakout than a shipbuilding and oil town hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. If the Gegwcatsf Revival can breakout in Pascagoula, soon the whole world will be saved. Yes, and I mean the whole world, the people, well that is another story.

As far as saved people, well true to the Pascagoula name, the saved won’t be Christians, Jews, Moslems or any other currently well known religion, the saved will be strictly bread eaters. People who eat meat, especially red meat, can’t find salvation because cows and other ruminants cause too much flatulence. That gas (methane), while a potential form of energy, contributes more to global warming than all the transportation carbon dioxide. Bad cows, not holy cows!
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Tags: gegwcatsf, revival, Pascagoula, Transcendentalism , God, creation

How many become one.

09/July/2008 10:29

Does the great indicative question, “Who is Jesus Christ?” have any relevance in the 21st century world? To most people the answer is probably “No.”

By that statement we also believe that the great imperative of “Who Jesus Christ is!” really has no meaning either. How wrong we are, by dismissing the first question we become fools about the reality of the nature of the second.

However everyone who has ever lived in history someway is bound by, “Who Jesus is.” but instead today we wonder if the price of gasoline will ever quit rising. We never stop to think that the two concepts might be related: High gas prices – Jesus Christ.

This seems to set another talking points tension, but there is really much more at stake here than political spin. What we are really discussing is to mutually exclusive paradigms, which lead to totally divergent worldviews.

The first paradigm states that our morality is determined by our nature. The second states that morality determines our nature.

The current world majority position, including and especially in the United States is that we are by nature good people and as a consequence left to our own devices we will produce a moral culture, if we all work together, on, and so on.

The more complex minority position is that only inwardly moral people can produce a moral and just nature. However this position does not define inward morality necessarily as natural, but in fact human nature is immoral. This is basically theologically an Augustinian and Christian view of the nature of man. The Bible states that only inwardly moral people in the world rely exclusively on the morality of Jesus Christ as imputed to them as the basis for any merit on their part.

If this second position, that inward imputed morality determines a good outward nature is an absolute, then attempts designed to produce morality from the inherit goodness of human nature is bound to fail.

So gas prices continue to rise because basically evil people are trying to immorally make as much money as they possibly can, simply because they can, as is their right as distinct human beings. As we are finding out this does not make for a stable human society, nor does there seem to be anyone, who is credited with being a natural leader, have a solution to the problem. That is simply because implied goodness is not real goodness. What we have artificially defined as goodness is really evil, or in another archaic term sin.
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Tags: unity in diversity, E Pluribus Unum, Jesus, gegwcatsf, Revelation, Laodicea

Wealth - Riches - Money

02/July/2008 10:09

“I have always found in dealing with legislatures you can not reason with them, the majority are men who are ignorant, stupid, and full of prejudice who do not desire to know the truth and the more you try to enlighten them the more stubborn and unreasonable they become.” John S. Kennedy to James J. Hill - 1893

To begin this week’s article it must be brought to the attention of the reader that the wealthiest persons on this earth are those, who because of no merit on their part, have been adopted by God as one of His children through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Dying in their stead on the Cross of Calvary 2000 years ago, they have been justified by the imputed righteousness of Christ; their sins have been forgiven now and forever. Furthermore, they have been legally adopted as a co-heir with Jesus and died to the ways of this world and been born again into a new eternal life. That life begins here and continues on through eternity.

Many Christians who read the above paragraph will understand that concept of wealth. Sadly many Christians will not, for that is a different form of Christianity than what they have been exposed to and taught in their churches. As a result some other readers will dismiss these paragraphs and what follows. However, if they look at this article with an open mind they may learn something about the world in which we now find ourselves. By God’s grace alone they may begin to view their worldly wealth, riches, and money in a new light.

First let as begin with some definitions, as they will be used in this article.

Wealth is the sum total of all the assets of a person or an enterprise. Some of those assets at a current point in time may be active or passive; as well they may appear positive or negative. As described in the opening paragraph they may be eternal or totally temporal, or they may be absolute in that they have both temporal and eternal components.

Riches are generally construed as positive assets in the time – space – matter continuum. As such they are totally temporal to be used in the world to make it a better place not only for the individual but also for society, culture, and the total community as a whole. That includes not just humanity, but also in the broadest sense the totality of natural creation. This can take the form of paper riches such has equity participations in enterprises, in human government programs, and other concepts based in the reality of our worldly pilgrimage.

Money is a medium of exchange invented by man to make the trading and exchange of wealth and riches less complex and more easily understood and practiced. Money in the present day has no basis in wealth or riches however, and pretty much around the world is totally based on debt financing. People consider those debt bonds and the interest they pay however, part of their temporal richness pool.
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Tags: wealth, riches, money, Christianity, oil prices, Ben Stein, politicans, ANWR, hedge fund manager, ANWR

Pragmatic Enviromentalism

25/June/2008 09:24

Stupendous change, both natural and in the form of man’s desire to rip off others, continue to produce their effects throughout the world. The worldview of Biblical Creation at Wonder Springs however is quite stable. Truly if there were someway to increase capital investment other than through funny money leverage, we would be quite bullish on the potential applications of Biblical Creation not only in the church, but also in the world generally.

As all this spin, clanging bells, and whistles of man attempting to save himself from his own debauchery continue to exacerbate serious problems, making them much more serious than they need to be, there is a unique opportunity to provide positive change based upon a reality that has continued successfully from the beginning of time.

Last week the No Spin Report said that church leadership has caused many of these world problems. Simply because these people have adopted a form of Christianity that really is not Biblical Christianity at all, but a gospel pretty much based upon worldly pragmatism. Hence, the power of God in changing people’s lives has departed. Contrary to the modern wisdom, “if it feels good and it works” is not a paradigm for true church growth.

To remind all, Biblical Christianity is truly based upon an imputed foreign righteousness of Jesus Christ, which saves all who call upon Him through faith in His propitiatory death and resurrection as legal justification for a new life. This true Christian gospel is based upon a death to the old sinful self and a new birth into an adoption as a child of God.

Any other renditions called the gospel by Christians are really false gospels more fitting with other worldly religions. As these false gospels flourish and reproduce the church continues to lose influence in the world, because it truthfully cannot be distinguished from all the other so-called paths to God. This brings us to the point of this week’s look at pragmatic environmentalism.

Just because much if not most of the current environmental movement thinks it is based upon some deep (religious) truth doesn’t make it so. It may have worked in the past when there was no stress of a true changing environment, but that doesn’t mean any or all of the paradigms are based upon any sense of absolute truth. Contrary to popular opinion, absolute truth does exist in the world and it is the standard and natural law by which creation operates. You transgress natural law at your peril.
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Tags: pragmatic environmentalism, environmental imperialism, oil prices, lawyers, Christianity, God

No Spin Report

18/June/2008 10:16

I returned home late Saturday night from my motorhome adventure to and from Texas. It was a great trip, well worth the expense, but still quite tiring. Only one somewhat major problem was encountered with the motorhome and that had to do with the solenoid that ran all the gauges in the coach and burned out early in the trip.

The manufacturer recommends that you use a 100-amp continuous duty solenoid. We quickly found out and they are not normally available through auto parts stores. We were able to get an 80-amp through NAPA, which worked fine for the last thousand miles or so. There is a question whether the other stores sold us something that didn’t last, because they could, or whether their computers really didn’t give them the proper information. The NAPA people found that theirs was and 80-amp continuous duty using something from a bygone era known as a “book.”

For those unfamiliar with a book, it is a source of information printed on paper and bound in an order so that the information can be accessed and evaluated.

As I stated in the last post at the beginning of the trip, virtually all the land we traversed was formed and shaped by water, most of it in the form of vast oceans. Much of that ocean bottom now is located 6000 – 8000 feet above current sea level.

The landscape looks like there were huge quantities of sand and mud under water. The land rose quite rapidly and the water just ran off, causing the truly unique features that cover most of the North American west. Once dry land, this mud and sand hardened into sandstone or other forms of rock. Much of it is still just sand and dry soil, sans water. It really just doesn’t look that old.

To say that this happened slowly over eons of time doesn’t make any sense, simply because the physics of moving water just doesn’t work that way. I guess I don’t have enough faith in evolutionary science to be a believer in its presuppositions. But the question also comes forward, were these evolutionary theories formed by observations of reality, or were they formed in the sandstone buildings of enlightened human thinking and then transposed upon the natural environment.
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Tags: no spin, evolution, evangelicalism, Genesis Flood, God, Jesus, gospel, Christianity

Just traveling

04/June/2008 07:14

No regular article this week just a few observations on the travel and the state of the universe in particular.

This morning we are located in an RV park in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. It is a quaint little town of about 2500 people on the famous American highway Route 66, which now has become Interstate 40 except for the vestiges that remain as the main streets in these small towns.

Santa Rosa has some very typical southwest architecture, especially a sandstone courthouse, a Roman Catholic Church, and charming little stone houses. We ate dinner last night in the former bank building, converted into an upscale restaurant. There is a sign on the outside of the building that says that it is for sale.

It looks like the economy, before the recent criminal rise in fuel prices, had already taken its victims. There is a large motel and restaurant here that look like they closed a couple of years ago. The same can be said for Fort Stockton, Texas where we spent the first night in the Wal-Mart parking lot after picking up the motorhome near San Antonio on Monday.

Everything in the motorhome seems to work, which was something I somewhat worried about. However, I just discovered that the strong cross winds yesterday blew off the cowling on the exhaust fan. The Foretravel is probably the premier name in the industry, just a step below the commercial buses that touring musicians use. As a consequence there are a lot of high-end touches of quality that I was not expecting, well beyond good looks.

We have traveled from San Antonio to here on basically flat ocean bottomland. Slowly that has risen from in elevation about 600 feet in San Antonio to about 6000 feet on our travels. Now we are back down to about 4500 feet here in Santa Rosa.

Santa Rosa lies on the Pecos River and we are about a mile east of the Pecos here in the RV Park. For American western fans we drove west of the Pecos most of the day. If I remember my romantic western history correctly, the east side of the Pecos was the area of civilization, west of the Pecos was the land of the outlaws and other less desirable forms of humanity.
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Tags: traveling, Pecos River, Roswell, consumption, wealth, money

Show me the - - - - -!

28/May/2008 07:40

Some months ago I finally got around to seeing the movie “Jerry McGuire.” It really wasn’t has bad as some had led me to believe. And the famous line, “Show me the money,” really fit quite well within the whole context of the film.

The United States and really western culture has entered into a new era of which we have no history to rely upon. An economy based upon cheap energy, its sister cheap financial leverage, and consumption just because we can, is stupendously drawing to a close.

The fat lady has sung her song and left the building. Rumor has it she is building a quaint little place in Nowhere, not far from where Brute has his den. Fat ladies and fat bears should make perfect neighbors.

In Uncle Sam’s land we also have federal and state elections coming up in the fall. This means nothing of any significance will even be seriously discussed until this time next year and any implementation months or years down the track. This is no way to run a railroad.

In this sense railroad is not a metaphor but an example of what needs to happen in America once all the dust has settled. But the problem with building these future railroads is that they are not going to happen under the current regulations and mechanisms ruling our financial, environmental and consumptive niches.

Currently, the movie line, “Show me the money,” just doesn’t operate in the building of anything of lasting value. Furthermore, creating money out of nothing and giving it to people to buy stuff they really don’t need, isn’t going to work either, and will just make the transition to true wealth producing enterprise all the more difficult.

As for me and my house, I have purchased, or recycled, or am going to reuse a 1991 Foretravel motorhome for my primary place of residence, at least until some path toward a better future is possible. So this Saturday I head for Texas and with a friend will slowly drive back here to Nowhere.

This purchase is about five cents on the dollar of what it cost new 17 years ago and even with five dollar per gallon diesel, reasonable travel is still cheaper than building, renting a small house, or apartment. So once we figure out how everything works and make a few upgrades we will do a little chronicling of the present state of North America in words, pictures, and video. If I am in your neck of the woods, maybe I can stop by and show you what I have learned.
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Tags: money, railroads, entrepreneur, environmental imperialism, D. C. Corbin, Cap and Trade

Reflections and talking points

21/May/2008 18:27

In recent weeks I have been listening to a great number of people espousing talking points on various subjects. That spin basically comes from two sides:

“Things are bad and getting worse unless you adopt this specific plan.”

“ Things are pretty good and if all we do is dwell on the negative all the doom and gloom will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The reality lies someplace in the middle, but for some reason not only do we not hear the middle, the middle ground seems to have been swept away. People have sought the high ground on either bank while the floodwaters have wiped out the middle ground and covered the fertile valley soil.

Recently I heard a couple of Democrat senators expressing there view on the attractiveness of their candidate for President, either Clinton or Obama. They both continually mentioned how McCain was, or was becoming, a carbon copy of President Bush, who has some of the lowest popularity ratings in the history of such things.

What they seemed to have just overlooked is that the popularity ratings of Congress, both Democrat and Republican are about a third lower than the President. Furthermore, all three major Presidential candidates are members of that less popular arm of the Federal government. Candidates still are courting their historic political bases, and as of yet there have been very little if any ideas that have any merit towards actually contributing to some positive change.
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Tags: liberal, conservative, Christianity, City of God, City of Man, Jesus

Reflections: Energy dinosaurs

14/May/2008 08:25

I suppose using the term reflecting upon the future is a mixing of idioms, but such is the nature of the American language, for to look towards the future in someway must be rooted in the past. Hopefully that past is anchored in some sort of reality, rather than just some mystical illusion.

For the next few years I see a great deal of economic and other stresses in the world, but after that period I am quite optimistic. The basis for this outlook is that we have entered the winter of the end of cheap energy. That winter is going to change the way we look at things significantly, but after the winter comes the wonder of spring and that period of new growth will make the next few years of bleak darkness seem worth the time of passage. During this winter we will see the demise of the energy dinosaurs.

Wonder always springs from where we least expect. For a couple of decades now, the good life has become so common not only have we begun to expect and demand it, sort of as a right, we have also vastly cheapened the wonder of life itself.

That first winter impression will be the death of large motor vehicles whose true and only function really was to be a large status symbol with little utilitarian value other than what was sold at the dealership. “This is a great status conveyance by which you can haul or pull a bunch of your stuff you really don’t need, to and from a place you really can’t afford.”

However, what I am really talking about is the death of the larger dinosaurs of cheap energy that gave us this illusion that wealth was really simply the accumulation of expensive stuff, produced in someplace we would never want to visit, by people we have virtually nothing in common, other than being members of the human family.

During this winter the hype about global warming caused by fossil fuels will be frozen, perhaps in permafrost. As such this current speculative and market manipulation of the cost of fuel and energy will perish and we will enter a time of relatively stable prices. Rising slowly, all energy prices will be a reflection of actual demand rather than simply greed and monopoly market making by big oil speculators.

So really what we will see is the demise of the whole spectrum of energy dinosaurs that now dominate our economic and political landscape. To understand this new future we must first look at how this energy savannah was created in the first place.
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Tags: energy dinosaurs, cheap energy, free markets, natural diversity, ice age

Reflections: Good Health

07/May/2008 09:46

Personally, in this period of reflection of these last nine years of writing the Chronicle, there is by far and away one thing that separates these writings into two episodes. That has been the improvement in my health since I had my aortic heart valve replaced in 2003. Essentially someone this old should not feel this good and have so few natural problems.

To set the stage, I have been physically active all my life and have felt really good all that time. While this was only church league softball as I got older, I was active in competitive athletics until I was into my late 40s and had completed various recreational runs after that time. I also trained and ran a marathon in 1988 and was working in the strenuous construction field of laying and sanding hardwood floors regularly until 2003. I used to say that I was physically stronger, than I was at 25.

On May 29, 2002, my mother died after about a five year experience with Alzhiemer’s, so I spent most of the summer and fall traveling between Seattle and eastern Washington doing work on her estate. One Friday afternoon in early January 2003, it was almost a spring day in Seattle, so I decided to go to the park and shoots some baskets. My first strenuous exercise after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and I felt great.

Shortly after midnight of Saturday morning, I awoke with a shortness of breath. That had never happened before. I began to wonder if I was having a heart attack. Having this excellent health record I had never seriously considered what were the symptoms of a heart attack, so I got on the Internet to see just what those symptoms might be.

As I read the symptoms and checked them with what was happening in my own body it appeared that I was not having a heart attack, but I could find no cause for why I was having trouble getting enough oxygen. Not having a heart attack, what was going on? I began to seriously worry. Finally about 2AM I called 911.

The fire truck and the aid car arrived and the paramedics hooked me up to their machines, gave me oxygen and checked and rechecked my vital signs. After about an hour, which seemed like eternity, they gave me the diagnosis. I was not having a heart attack, as far as they could tell there was absolutely nothing wrong with me.

Thus, not reassured about anything, they told me I should go to my doctor on Monday. There was no need to panic, things were fine.

Sure, don’t panic, don’t worry, be happy. That all sounds good, but I still had questions and absolutely no answers.
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Tags: good health, aortic valve, pig valve, God, football

Reflections; The winds of change

30/April/2008 08:17

Female ruffed grouse, Eagle Mountain, Minnesota.
(Copyright Smithsonian Institution)

Volume 10, Issue 18

PDF link

Can you believe the wind this spring? It seems to be blowing hard every single day. I heard that it blew down two big trees across the highway yesterday. It sort of makes you wonder if these winds are doing more than just moving air. Perhaps they are changing our environment much more than just the movement of leaves and branches of the natural world.

Come to think about it, there seems to be some windy times happening in the more human world also. We call them winds of change, the unseen but still powerful forces that mold and reshape human history. Yes, the winds of change are blowing for all of human society on planet earth.

Four weeks from today, nine years ago, I published the first of these almost weekly episodes. Before that, for about six months I had done one about every month. For the next few weeks I will reflect on what I have noticed in the expanse of those nine years, and what they might mean for the future. Some of that focus may be personal, some with a broader reference.

Monday as I was on my evening walk to the highway, something moved a few feet in front of me. Startled, I thought to myself, “What was that, a snake, or some other horrible creature?” It turned out to be a ruffed grouse. As I watched, this medium sized bird seemed aware of my presence, but also completely unconcerned about my predatory human nature. As I stood there watching, it slowly ambled into the brush and I continued upon my meditative journey.

So how many human beings have had that hair-raising experience and lived to give a report? Not many, especially in the last part of that thought, being able to give the report.
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Tags: ruffed grouse, creation, nature, diversity, complexity, reality

Grizzly Economics

23/April/2008 07:01

By Brute D. Grizzly
Exclusive, Non-syndicated Columnist

The news recently has been horrible. It seems if there were no bad news, especially on the economy, there would be no news at all. In case you didn’t know, grizzly bears are no stranger to horrible news, we have been living with that kind of discrimination since western civilization came to these shores and gave us the scientific name of: “Ursus arctos horribilis.” Can you believe anyone, especially a jolly, plump guy like me being called “horribillis”? That’s more than enough to make my ancestors really, really, angry. To think that politicians and sport stars only figuratively bite off people’s heads, is a literal understatement.

But I’m not here today to harp on past mistakes of all the human immigrants to this land. I’m here to write about the present and the future, especially in what will make this continent work better, for more Americans and Canadians. I do have a lot of relatives who also live in Canada. The rest of you people might want to read this also, you are all members of what God and we critters call the human kind.

The biggest problem in North America seems to be oil prices. They say gasoline will be at four dollars per gallon by summer and Canadians relatively paying more. So is, or will, anyone in, or who would like to be in the political power structure, be willing to do anything about it? No. Why not? Because oil price increases really don’t effect those people, they are paid either directly or indirectly to let the markets do their thing. The facts however, are that energy runs the world, not money, and when the “hidden energy tax” on basically all goods and services kill economic growth, these big monopolies and cartels will have all the money and no place to spend it.

What these corporations and speculators are doing is basically Liquidity Mining what little true capital that exists within the postmodern national governments. This comes directly on the heels of a similar adventure in the subprime housing market. The effects of this mortgage meltdown will be rippling through the economy for at least a couple more years. Yes, the economic future of western society looks rather grizzly.

The problem is that in the 1980s, under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Americans only adopted half of the solution to government owned monopolies, and instead substituted regulations that allowed for private takeovers of these cartels. Like this was going to change everything with greater market efficiencies? Government’s were even trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Tags: Grizzly Economics, Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Riders, Grizzly Truth, Liquidity Mining, Natural Judgment, Messiah Obsession, Sacred Self, Stewardship Investments, Community Dues

Natural Law stings America!

16/April/2008 10:29

Do you believe in Natural Law? I mean this as a serious question.

I believe most people today, can’t even seriously define natural law, so how can they believe in something that they don’t have a clue.

So natural law is beginning to sting the American economy, and it comes as a great surprise to everyone, and the “experts” are baffled. However, they sing in a cappella harmony, “It is all going to work out for the best, all you have to do is trust us.”

We must begin at the beginning. Natural law is what makes the whole shebang work. That means the universe, the solar system, planet earth, and all life. The sun rising every morning is not an act of faith. It is a law that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours. The moon rotates around the earth about once every 28 days. The Krebs cycle allows the physiology of your cells to function. Your nervous system sort of allows your body to operate in a somewhat organized fashion. Natural law is best described as a great natural unity in diversity, where every little detail works together in infinite precision.

Evolution does not have a reason for why the whole shebang exists, and even less evidence on how it can all work together so well. Intelligent Design really gets you no farther down that road either, for just not any person can design a universe, about all humans can design is a modern airplane or a computer program. The interesting point about all these human created things is that their function rests entirely upon a mass set of underlying assumptions, which are also part of the body of common natural law.

This whole natural law thing has worked relatively well in the world for all of human history. Human’s learned in order to survive you don’t mess with nature, or nature will mess with you. Like if you transgress nature’s law, you will be eliminated from the gene pool.

Throughout human history most people believed in God, or gods. One of these God’s, the Elohim of the Jewish Bible, began to have oral human religious history codified about 4000 years ago. According to God, he chose one of the smallest and least important nations on earth to be the caretakers of His word as a specific revelation of God’s unique almighty power and personality. Within this Book were reasons why the whole shebang existed, and how God created mankind thousands of years ago.
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Tags: Natural Law, God, Jews, Christianity, Mergers and Aquisitions, laissez faire

The Chutzpah of Egalitarians

09/April/2008 09:15

“The times they are a changin’” This is especially true up here in the woods of nowhere. There is still snow, especially as you go higher in the mountains. “Is this really all caused by human global warming, or is there some special interest at work here?” When the yearly total for snow passed 100 inches we all believed it was time for spring.

But spring or no spring, the chutzpah of the egalitarians is still an ominous cloud of an impending economic winter that should make American’s, as well as all citizens of the planet, seriously look at what might fall from the sky in the months to come.

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning shameless audacity. We recently have heard a lot about audacity, and will hear more about it in the months ahead. A lot of that will have to do with joining chutzpah with hope. Hope is and interesting word in that it can be both a noun and a verb. So when you are talking about hope are you talking about a process or are you talking about a destination.

We fail to realize in either sense, is that hope without a tangible object for its endpoint or fulfillment is really an exercise in futility. We are told that that endpoint really doesn’t matter, that each should determine that goal for ourselves. The problem is that this is pure nonsense in both the natural and the metaphysical sense.

The chutzpah of hope should focus on the rights of humanity. In our current political situation in the United States everyone is no longer satisfied with common rights, guaranteed by our constitution, but they want special rights. We want rights to make each of us special, to be part of some sort of elite, without the responsibilities attached there to. That leads absolutely to anarchy.

The interesting thing about all these special rights is we truly need these rights to prove that we are human. That doesn’t work however, because we simply do not create our own or the reality of others.

What is really happening in western society is that we have reached the end of the chutzpah of evolution and found we are at a dead end. To make matters worse we have burned all the bridges behind. So as a society and as individuals at the end of this evolutionary wilderness trail, we light this big fire to dispel the darkness and chant some chutzpah mantras, nobody shows up to comfort us in our loneliness, then we become scared and withdraw further into ourselves.
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Tags: chutzpah, egalitarians, special rights, God, evolution

The American Enigma

02/April/2008 10:48

Why did God put Adam and Eve in a garden?

Think about that as a deep metaphysical question of the ages.

Why not someplace else? It seems from the Genesis account that the whole world was not a garden. This garden in Eden was a special place on the surface of the newly created earth.

Before I answer that question, a little insight into this week’s article. I have struggled with this concept since I was writing last week about origins. The title of this message is about an American enigma, it is also a world enigma, that points to a fault line in human understanding that perhaps goes back to that garden time. That fault, or chasm is much deeper today than it was back then, because the river of life on this planet has swept away, through floods and just plain aging, much of the fertile soil of human intellect concerning this planet we call home.

America is where this question has been asked however, and the United States is still the preeminent power in the world. So when Uncle Sam speaks, we all are obliged to listen. Right now this aged dude seems to have some sort of ailment. Contrary to the media spin doctors and pundits no one really knows how seriously sick he really is. Therefore, they all seem to report on what is happening in a way that suits their specific interests.

Is there any reality in these talking points? Perhaps, but there is a precedent to say that the cough is only a minor cold. However, there is something unknown or unusual about Sam’s symptoms that we have not seen in our lifetime. There is no reason to panic, but we need to seriously look at the situation and propose a treatment scheme, or maybe just decide to let the disease run it’s course. But to just ignore the situation does not seem a prudent course of action.
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Tags: unity in diversity, God, America, Natural Law, Common Grace, Great Singularity, Great Diversity

Diverse Origin

26/March/2008 13:05

Last week we began the article with the statement “Only in the Beginning, the beginning was not an end.” Coupling that with some other recent events, I realized that I have never really written about my concept of the origin of the universe. I am not a physicist, but I do see some problems with all current explanations on how the cosmos came into being. These problems deal however, not with physics but metaphysics.

What the post everything world seems to forget is that our physics (science) is derived almost completely from our metaphysics (philosophy or worldview). To say that our science, as presented, is based upon objective analysis of observable data, is grossly stretching the truth, because the data itself by definition can not interpret the presuppositions used to spin the data to prove our point. The current discussion about climate change being the prime example.

Just as the discussion of climate change, whether you believe in global warming by human intervention, or cooling by decreased sun activity, or you really don’t care at all because you will die before it really becomes an issue, all stem from a universe in which you are the great singularity that determines truth. In other words you are god (little g). whether you think you are being objective or not.

In that similar light all modern cosmos origin models fall out from that same Great Singularity principle. That be true whether it deals with the Big Bang and Black Holes or White Holes and other interpretations. All these theories have to deal with what we observe as an infinitely huge universe, in which we live on a small speck somewhere on the fringe of the Milky Way.

From both cosmology and philosophy these solutions beg the question what came before the beginning? Only religion answers that question, but that answer falls outside the acceptable presuppositions of the worldview of natural materialism, and hence is defined outside the valid “laws of materialistic science.”

What that really does however, is to close off the unknown, or more appropriately unmeasurable, as a paradigm in which human logic can not and should not venture. It also closes off any avenue, street, or humble trail, to any absolute beyond the problem with our own insecure, inadequate, individual, great singularity. More bluntly, we retreat from external reality into a fantasy world of our own delusions.

This really is not a significant problem for evolutionary dogma, because by definition mankind is really an unknown enigma within a cosmos in which absolutes do not exist, essentially because all cosmology is atheistic in nature. Atheistic evolution can not be wrong, because it’s universe both in the natural and the metaphysical sense is “designed” without that concept beyond itself. Simply put, God can not and does not exist, because the paradigm is too limited.
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Tags: Great Singularity, Great Diversity, God, materialism, ex nihilo, cosmos

Symbiotic Economics: The end and the beginning

19/March/2008 09:36

Only In the Beginning, the beginning was not an end. As such we finally come to the end of this Symbiotic Economics series. This final chapter is far from what I envisioned at the onset and has definitely taken longer than I had originally outlined. Such is life, the endings take longer most of the time than the beginnings. Perhaps more appropriately, the seeds of the new beginning are planted in the soil of the end and just as in nature, sometimes it takes a long time for the seed to germinate to even produce a seedling, and again much longer to produce some mature fruit.

It is fitting, whether you consider yourself a religious person or not, that this ending comes at perhaps a unique week in history. Last Sunday, western Christianity celebrated Palm Sunday, or the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Again, according to church history, by this Friday (Good Friday) night he was dead, having been crucified. That crucifixion, a propitiatory sacrifice to fulfill the legal requirements of the Mosaic law, still needs to be the prime reason for the existence for that heretical Jewish sect of the Pharisees, which has become known as Christianity.

In 400 years of God’s silence after the completion of the Old Testament canon, or the Jewish Bible, there comes an ending of such a generally recognized importance, that it changed the marking of time. That is an ending, period. But if it just ended there, with a dead rabbi and prophet, Christianity would not exist. Whether you believe it or not, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and was witnessed by many, well beyond his direct followers, before He ascended into Heaven to be with His eternally coexistent Father, and until He returns in judgement at the end of this present age. At that time, this then silent humble sheepish Lamb of God, returns in power to become the King of Creation. This King was what the Jewish people were looking for 2000 years ago, and still are waiting in anticipation.

As we stated last week, that Jewish blindness was caused by God, until such time that the Gentiles had been added or grafted into the eternal Olive tree that is spiritual Israel. That spiritual Olive tree is metaphysically speaking the oldest tree on earth, because it extends back to the institution of the Covenant of Grace, after humanities fall into sin in the Garden in Eden. That family tree begins with Adam and Eve, grows through Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thereafter, through David, Solomon, and his successors up to a virgin birth in that lineage through Joseph and Mary, having a totally human son Jesus, in Greek, or Yehoshua in Hebrew and the western alphabet, translated Joshua in English, all meaning Yahweh (God) is Salvation.

Putting all this into terms of succinct historic orthodox Reformation Christianity, Jesus became God’s sacrifice, bringing God’s righteous and holy judgement upon himself, instead of letting it fall upon me, and the rest of fallen humanity. Jesus died for my sins. But it does not end there, on the third day he rose from the dead for my justification as righteous in the totally legal sense, thereby adopting me as a child of God, and co-heir with Christ for eternity. That is the good news, we hear so little about in today’s world. That Good News, is celebrated this Sunday, generally called Easter, but more appropriately Resurrection Sunday.
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Tags: Completed Jew, Completed Gentile, Sarah, talents, Christianity, Jesus

Symbiotic Economics: Sarah’s Talent - The tree becomes one

12/March/2008 08:13

As I finished writing last week’s Chronicle, I was encouraged by the words of Saint Paul in Romans 11:13-27, that the olive branch of the Gentiles might again be grafted into the Olive tree of Israel. I understood right away that this would have to be a supernatural work of God, but until I started doing research for this week’s episode, I had no idea what a Divine miracle that this would be. Last week’s article thus forms the foundation for this chapter of Symbiotic Economics. If you haven’t read that article, perhaps you should do so before proceeding.

The children of God, and the line of God’s covenant chosen, have been hated by the world since the beginning of time. This hatred falls directly upon the Jewish people, as children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as Christians. That hatred continues until the present era, all you need to do is look at the news each day.

Christianity accepting Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah, or Christ, early on followed that same anti Semitic course. Much of that surfacing as early as the Second Century, relating to the Celebration of Easter Sunday as opposed to the Jewish Passover. Of course this had nothing at all to do with the Easter name, being derived from a pagan festival of spring and fertility.

Following any or all of these diverse streams of hatred of God’s people descend only to one place, the slough of despair. This is the design of the evil one, to bring division and hate upon all of God’s people either Christian or Jew, and to divide them from one another.

For all of human history God has chosen to work through human instruments to accomplish His will. In essence that is a manifestation of His love for creation and His children created in His image. Sometimes these miracles can appear ordinary, in other situations truly supernatural and transcendent. However, the normative case is that they occur through common means, or within the attributes of natural law and common grace.

Therefore, the following parable of Sarah’s Talent seeks to build a bridge over, or a path around, the slough of human total depravity. As such it will try to bring forth a potential common means of reconciling Jew and Gentile as one Olive Tree, as Paul seeks in writing the Roman’s Epistle.
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Tags: Sarah, Ester, Mary, talents, Jesus, Messiah, Winnipeg, Metis

Symbiotic Economics: Natural Theology

05/March/2008 07:58

In this Symbiotic Economics series we began by criticizing a worldly economic system that treats human beings as production tools, consumer machines, or some sort of livestock. We stated that this should be expected because evolutionary religious dogma is without foundation in deeper human attributes, simply because it is designed naturalistically. We somewhat blamed evangelical Christianity for allowing this to happen, because in this time after Christ, the church has been given the responsibility of proclaiming the message of God. Instead basically for a bowl of soup or a piece of the pie, the church has adopted programs with very few differences than the world they say they oppose.

We have just spent six weeks looking at the difference between God given wealth and worldly money and riches. Simply they start from, or are based upon, two different paradigms and never the twain shall meet. Our current world monetary situation, because it is devoid of true wealth, uses basic debt leverage to make everything run, sort of. We have now however, reached the point where debt has no basis other than other debt. In other words, we are to have faith in debt because we need to have faith in debt.

There is a link to a very relevant article from the Telegraph.co.uk website posted below this article. It basically describes how the Federal Reserve’s plan to rescue the economy has so far failed miserably, and some of the repercussions that have been felt in Europe.

So today we embark on the last phase of this Symbiotic Economics scenario by looking at Natural Theology. So what do I mean by Natural Theology, the birds and the bees? Sort of, but more to the point natural information and energetics. As you may remember our big concern with debt is not debt for debt sake, but that debt has so little energetic value and there is so much debt leverage available with no place to go, people do insanely stupid things to make it grow. This is proven in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. Planting illusionary seeds and expecting them to produce real gains, makes someone trying to con you into buying the Brooklyn Bridge look like a stunning genius.

This is a “word,” one Word. This sentence is made up of ten words, sure enough. Logarithmically it is two Words. When I write a hundred words it is three Words. I don’t know how many words I have written since I began “Chronicles of Diversity” but totally it might be six Words. Add to that all the other words I have written in my life it will probably still be six Words. Maybe if I continue to write for another 20 years I might reach seven Words.
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Tags: Natural Theology, energetics, specific revelation

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 6 - Golden Seeds - Golden Talents

27/February/2008 06:20

Keeping in the tone of last week’s allegory theme of air and water to eternal riches, to complete the story, along with the seed of using air as an effective means of concentrating densities to stratify and remove specific density materials, came seeds of magic dust, or rather magic sand, and a powerful liquid elixir, unlike any other used in refining processes.

What needs to be specifically pointed out here, is these seeds all were external in their nature. Furthermore the returns will be based upon farming realities both in the Bible and in creation, up to a hundred fold increase.

The American dream today and specifically evangelical Christianity is a religion of the heart. To which most people will give a hearty amen. You hear almost continually, I want more heart knowledge rather than head knowledge. Like I am already so smart I don’t need to learn any more. While not spoken outwardly normally, is the thought that if I can just overcome the limitations of my natural body, I can live in a spiritual heaven here on earth. That ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is pure gnosticism, in a very childish, not child like performance.

“If you don’t agree with me, I’m going to my room and pout until you change your mind and come and rescue me and affirm my self esteem, and tell me what a good person I really am.”

So all of us raised in America during the last half of the 20th century and still alive today, are all to a certain extent, rich, spoiled, brats. What we all need is a little concentrating and refining to get to those true golden seeds and golden talents that we possess. But get this straight, those seeds and talents, including life itself are not yours, but gifts of the Almighty.
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Tags: God, seed, talents, gold, wealth, matter matters

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 5 - The precious metals allegory

20/February/2008 11:04

When we think of allegories with spiritual applications, especially in recent history, C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” come to mind. Today as we look at the application of Haggai’s prophesy concerning the end of the age, we can see the best of both allegorical chronicles played out in the reality of time.

In Lewis’ fashion we must come to the story in childlike wonder and anticipation, instead of Aslan, the LORD, creator of the universe, will come to save struggling humanity with deep magic from before the dawn of time. In a similar vain to Tolkien, this drama takes place in a middle earth continually shaken by dark and violent events in which the prize of the struggle is not just a golden ring with magical powers, but all silver and gold present in the world, not just the natural metals, but the silver and gold present in the hearts and minds of mankind. Through all this, humanity must either accept these miracles with awesome amazement and the wonder of a child, or be destroyed by the Creator and Sustainer of the human living temple of God, the Son of God alone, Jesus Christ.

Let us read again this passage:

The Coming Glory of the Temple

In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, "Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, 'Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, declares the LORD. Be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the LORD. Work, for I am with you, declares the LORD of hosts, according to the covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not. For thus says the LORD of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the LORD of hosts. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the LORD of hosts.'" (Haggai 2:1-9)
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Tags: allegory, sIlver, gold, God, mining, concentrating, mustard seed

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 4 - Facing Reality

13/February/2008 12:22

We began this series on Symbiotic Economics looking at the transcendent nature of reality and how as Henry David Thoreau said, most live lives of quiet desperation. Quiet desperation is simply the result of a fear of looking truly at the reality of reality.

What we have seen in the last two articles on the paradigms of wealth is that we have all spent our lives, assuming that we could get wealthy by acquiring money. The more money we acquire, is based entirely on how hard we work, we scratch, we use other people to achieve this illusion of wealth. But this wealth paradigm is based upon a lie, a false reality. The reality of it all is that you and I have invested much if not all our lives, working an breathing a lie. Can you really face that reality and take steps to overcome that house built on the foundation of shifting sands, and constructed of temporal stuff?

To begin this week let us go back to our wealth Biblical references. In Deuteronomy 8:11-20 we see that it is the LORD that gives us the power to get wealth. Now that means that you do not have to be a Christian to be wealthy, in fact probably at least initially, means Christianity is an impediment to real wealth, simply because the LORD will not bless you with wealth you can not handle successfully. In the long term however, proper understanding of wealth and it’s application is a gift from God. In that paradigm of true wealth, what you have is related to what you give freely to help others.

Before we move on let us look at the reality of this Biblical wealth statement. It is an indicative of the reality that God is in control of wealth. It states a real natural law. That means you can mess around with a lot of money and other assets, get rich, but the ability of converting that into true transcendent wealth and understanding what you really have, is based upon a revelation of God. That revelation can be a general or common revelation or a specific revelation. The truest form of this specific revelation is based upon what Jesus did, not what Jesus wants you to do. Both generally become application indicative truth in modern evangelicalism, but the latter is really just an imperative statement of the wonder of God’s grace and achieves nothing outside the finished work of Christ.
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Tags: reality, sIlver, gold, precious metals, wealth, riches, God

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 3 - Two paradigms (continued)

06/February/2008 06:57

The Super Tuesday elections are over in the United States, Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday also, and the Super Bowl as well. As Lent begins there will be a lot to talk about around the company water coolers and coffee pots. However, we really don’t have water coolers and coffee pots in offices anymore, now days everyone drinks bottled water and designer coffee. I suppose there could be an article or two, even in this wealth series, on how our money has made us less wealthy in terms of our community structures, but that will have to wait at least for a few of weeks. It also might be a good topic to meditate on during lent, since that was once a season in the church calendar when that type of thing was encouraged.

Of course the Chronicle post last week of the red - blue state map from the 2004 Presidential election also changed your life for the near term, I’m sure. Well seriously I doubt it, even when our Friday blog guest Brute’ pretty much leaked the results of the story.

If you go to the red - blue map post or the large copy you have framed and hanging on your wall, just what else will you see?

(Most American readers of this blog are religious right evangelical Christians, some of them just might have such a copy on the wall, if not on the wall, then on their computer’s hard drive. It now seems however, that 2004 may have been the high water mark for moralistic nationalism in this country. Since then, the tide has been slowly ebbing in the opposite direction.)

The importance of the map from our perspective is that the blue areas are also where debt based finance, especially as it relates to banking and government debt based services, are most prominent. In the oceans of non energetic debt, the debt waters keep rising and will eventually submerge those land areas that are now turning (or turned) blue. This is a much more serious threat to man caused global warming than all the emissions from automobiles and coal fired power plants combined. Former President Clinton was right, the best way to curb human global warming is to slow down economic growth, even if his statement was taken somewhat out of context.
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Tags: wealth, assets, liabilites, God, liquidity, debt, leverage

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 2 - Two paradigms

29/January/2008 13:42

Last week we looked at people wealth, as the total of both our assets and liabilities. Those liabilities can be converted by God into assets, either instantaneously, or over time into a more classical outlook. This week we begin to look at a more detailed rendition of worldly liabilities.

Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” is essentially an outmoded concept in our post everything world. We in the United States however, for most of the next year will be forced to hear much to the contrary by those who seek to become President of this fair land.

On the one hand we have the Democrat Party candidates, who essentially tell us that they have great plans to raise this country to new heights by promoting a program of national socialism. On the other we have Republican Party candidates that tell us there is nothing wrong with this country that a little - big corporate monopoly socialism won’t fix. There is a movement to draft an independent candidate, but so far we haven’t been able to find the dude named, Noneof Thebove. Truthfully, we don’t even know if Noneof Theabove is really a female dude, or a male dude anyway, and again we are told that it really doesn’t matter anymore, we are all the same.

That is true, for the most part we are pretty much interchangeable in the post world. It wasn’t too long ago that Americans were production units that were the envy of the world. With globalism that has all changed, now we are just to be the consumption units of the world economy. The only problem is that without first class production wages, you really can’t afford to be first class consumers either.

“Wealth of People” is an interesting concept, except it too doesn’t fit with the post everything world. This concept is a quite different paradigm than we see anywhere in the world today. Simply, wealth of people believes, as we discussed last week, that true wealth and the ability to create it, rest with God alone, and we really aren’t supposed to believe in God at all. Good production units and consumption units can’t believe in God, because that makes them hard to manage, because they don’t always do what they are told. After all, if we can raise production units of cattle, pigs, and chickens why can’t we just raise and manage human beings the same way?

If we evolved from a primordial swamp, via whales and monkeys that would probably be true. However, the most primitive science tells you that isn’t true. Of course if you check out some of the stuff on television these days it does clearly show a trend line heading in that swamp direction, rather than the other way around.
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Tags: wealth, assets, liabilites, God, debt, leverage, liquidity

Symbiotic Economics: Wealth; Part 1

23/January/2008 08:24

Modern worldly economics is based upon the book, “Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776 by Adam Smith. We have mentioned that book in a few of these Symbiotic Economics articles, but in the seventeen articles thus far they are pretty much all oriented towards people, rather than money, wealth, getting rich and the other reasons why people study economics. Since the title of the series is Symbiotic it must be directly related to life. Thus far, in worldly evolutionary dogma, only human beings can care about economics in the reasoned way, Symbiotic Economics is about how people react with one another, both positively and in a negative fashion.

As I write these words Wednesday, January 23, 2008, there is growing apprehension that all the wisdom of mankind still can not predict the financial future of civilization. Like, how far will the stock markets fall tomorrow, or? When you read this what will be the concerns about not only the economy of where you live, but how it may effect the rest of the world, and more to the point, directly what is going to happen to the lives of you and your family.

Symbiotic Economics, has a different worldview than classical economics and therefore could be subtitled “Wealth of People.” The wealth of people concept probably has a deeper meaning to you today than it has for a decade or two. If you are not a decade or two old, this time is going to be new territory.

Bluntly, evolution does not have an answer to what is facing the world, simply because evolution does not believe in, or has constructed any absolutes by which to design a sound natural order. Only the God of the Bible and creation, who created the whole thing really knows what is going on. That wisdom is not going to come from relying on God’s grace after you have done all you can do either. Furthermore, in evolution there is no basis by which to judge evil or good, or sin and grace. Actually, we have all been indoctrinated by our educational framework to only believe in relative choices as they relate entirely to self, with no thought to a wider world, other than what it can provide for me.

So just what is wealth in the symbiotic economic sense?

Wealth is the total energetics of all your assets of aspirations and liabilities, applied to the outward focus of your life.

“Boy, I didn’t hear that anywhere before, show me the money?
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Tags: wealth, people , money, God, riches, Bible

Symbiotic Economics: The Gracious Diversity

16/January/2008 11:11

Without faith it is impossible to please him (God), for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Hebrews 11:6 ESV

For a long time I have taught that the opposite of faith is not unbelief, but fear. This is also a somewhat general consensus among Bible teachers. I might also add that the main difference from last week’s article on the Timid Desperadoes and this week’s Gracious Diversity is the way faith is exercised in life.

Timid Desperadoes basically have a small God. That may manifest itself in a small view of who they are, as created in the image of God. The other opposite tries to inflate the self, in their own image, not understanding the difference between the Creator and the created.

Members of the Gracious Diversity however, have an inkling of what the Apostle Paul meant when he stated, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13

It isn’t even science to understand, if you never try, you can never accomplish anything. Furthermore, without trying, you are not fulfilling God’s mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.” Fruitful signifying something much greater than just the possibility to procreate. That reproducing gift he gave to all the animals and the plants also.

So is there some mysterious formula that can change a Timid Desperado into a member of the Gracious Diversity? And can using that formula make the small numbers of the Gracious Diversity even more gracious and more gifted?

Formulas you use to make cleaning compounds and recipes you use make something to eat, dealing with human beings are a lot more complicated than some alchemy concoction. But there is one thing that is required to make things work. That is true of the magic blue cleaner that cleans the toilet bowl, and also the gooey mess of flour, yeast, and liquid, that gives you a loaf of bread. That last recipe should give you a hint, we are speaking about the application of energy. In the toilet bowl cleaner it was chemical energy, in baking bread it was the oven energy.

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Tags: Gracious Diversity, Timid Desperados, faith, grace, power, energy, energetics

Symbiotic Economics: Timid Desperadoes

09/January/2008 10:51

Timid Desperadoes, sounds like a band of outlaws from the old wild west doesn’t it? Definitely not a rock band. Sheriffs with white hats upholding law and order. Outlaws and other thugs with black hats, robbing from everyone in an effort to do there own thing. Cowboys and Indians, like some of us saw in the movies and on TV when we were kids. Finally, the US Army sent to keep all the factions apart, to bring stability to the real west, where most of the above illustrations, were really just tales of romantic fiction.

Lest we forget, so came the missionaries. In this area, the land I call the home of the Swept Aways, (both white and Indian), they were the Protestants and the Black Robes (Roman Catholics). While proud general Custer, or more appropriate to the area, Colonels Wright and Steptoe, didn’t respectfully ride in to the tune of the Gary Owen, to get slaughtered, to slaughter, or to slip away in the night, there was an often unreported war between these hostile competing religions. This religious backdrop hopefully can be a backdrop for this week’s article. This time redundantly hopeful that no war will occur.

The real settling or unsettling of the west, was a struggle between competing cultures, European and Indian, with very different worldviews, to bring it all into 21st century focus. In modern terms both cultures were dirt poor. The arriving culture deemed poor, because they had not dirt. The other culture believed the dirt sacred, too sacred for anyone to own, and as a result didn’t understand the basics of the worldview they found so foreign. Foreign, as defined in the dictionary probably didn’t even exist in most of the native languages. As with much of human history, those that had the most and most lethal weapons, ruled the land and wrote the history.

As there are today, back then there were Timid Desperadoes in both cultures. Both cultures handle these people differently, which still brings much tension and animosity, as we all journey through this pilgrimage we call life. Furthermore, not everyone in either culture is a Timid Desperado, though most are. There are some who live life beyond the timid. They may still be found, and were to be the topic of this week’s message, which will be postponed until next week. These, the non timid, may still be Desperadoes, but desperado is really redefined as a search, to find meaning in life, which seems too illusive to find. Most of the non timid, non desperadoes, are really more brothers and sisters, part of the diverse human family.

So what brought about this Timid Desperado concept?
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Tags: Timid Desperados, Sherman Alexie, Indians, missionaries, Presbyterians

Symbiotic Economics: The Desperation - Joy Continuum

02/January/2008 10:30

Sing praise to the LORD, you saints of His,
And give thanks at the remembrance of His holy name.

For His anger is but for a moment,
His favor is for life;
Weeping may endure for a night,
But joy comes in the morning. Psalm 30:4.5

Some years ago, Gary, a friend and former boss, asked me to help him finish a flooring job up in Skagit County, so that it would be completed for the homeowner’s Christmas. Returning back to Seattle, through real winter weather after finishing the job, Gary turned on the radio to the local Christian music station, since he figured they would have the most spiritually oriented Christmas music.

The music was very good until we had almost reached our freeway exit, then this male singer came on vocalizing a historic Christmas carol, updated into the contemporary Christian (CCM) motif. They say that you can be a Country recording artist if you know three guitar cords, this dude had a range of about three notes. To make matters worse each of the three were consistently and noticeably flat. In true CCM fashion he had discarded most of the verses, using only two or three of the least spiritually significant and repeated the chorus ad nauseam. This backed up by a very tacky synthesizer orchestra.

When we attended the same church, Gary and I had both sang in the church choir. Gary being one of the congregation’s normal soloists. Self, not being that good, with a voice more suited to country music than church, knew my place in the back row tenor section.

Finally, I could take no more of this and I finally asked, “Is it just me, or is this guy really bad?”

To which Gary replied, “Actually he is worse than bad, he is basically awful!”

We went on to discuss how this guy could ever get his music even recorded, not to mention get radio air time.
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Tags: Joy, music, doctrine, Joel Osteen, evangelicalism, desperation

Symbiotic Economics: The Wealth of People

26/December/2007 15:27

The season photo on the Chronicle Front Page features a picture of the River with a greeting: Blessing for a Joyous Christmas and a Prosperous New Year. It is my prayer that will be God’s gift to you and your family for the next period of time that we use to break up our rapidly passing lives.

As I have written prosperous a number of times recently, I seem to have trouble getting the key strokes in the right order and sometimes missing a letter or two. Then that little underline on the computer screen comes on and says I have made a boo boo. I then have to look and see just what I did to cause the modern writer’s nemesis. At least now I know how to spell the word for sure, that is prosperous.

Looking at the definition, it seems to always point to material blessings. Further researching in English we really don’t have a word that speaks to a much broader context of human life, beyond stuff. Just previously I wrote material blessings, but we pretty much have to designate a spiritual adjective to signify something different or in addition to just physical prosperity.

Joyous Christmas however, I hope helps you focus on the reason Christmas is celebrated in the first place. That God became man, dwelt among us, and became God’s propitiation for our sins, by dying on a cross, and being raised from the dead as our justification before God the Father. That is the true transcendental reason for the season, lest we forget.

There is a popular Christian chorus, “The Joy of the Lord is my strength.” Sometimes that is changed during the singing to “The Joy of the Lord is our strength.” While none of us seem to know where these words come from, they are found in Nehemiah 8:10. Then he (Nehemiah) said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” Read More...

Tags: secular progressive, Bill O Reilly, Rupert Murdock, economic development, humanity

Symbiotic Economics: Traveling by compass

19/December/2007 11:01

Sometime after I arrived at my place up in Northeastern Washington I was listening to music on iTunes when the song “Right Outta Nowhere,” by Kathy Mattea began to play. The song is about a young woman with “a great big dream and a history of playing small,” and “an old hippie with a half a dozen Ph.D.’s” running a little junk store, “some choices hold you down, some chances set you free.”

I have always liked Kathy’s music, because, in the context of this series, many times it speaks to the transcendent qualities of normal life. “Right Out of Nowhere” is also the title of the album, but I really didn’t buy the album for this song, there were others that I felt more of that transcendent quality. But as I began to listen to “Nowhere” I realized, this place on the river is about as close to a real nowhere as you can get. As a seasonal sidelight, her Christmas album “Good News” won a Grammy, for good reasons.

Actually the famous place, “The middle of nowhere” is about 10 miles to the north and east and I will describe that center a little later. So weekly now I sit at my laptop in the ‘burbs of nowhere and write and send this out to the world. I assume from the web stats that some nowhere people are beginning to read this blog with nowhere as it’s home. This nowhere is defined by its wildness. It is not wilderness in the legal sense, this nowhere transcends all human knowledge and wisdom. Most of the old abandoned mines in nowhere have Biblical names, because they needed them to even begin to be developed, and only a fool would think otherwise.

Now nowhere is not to be considered the end of the world. My friend Jim who gave me the inspiration of the “Day that Religion Died,” some years ago moved for a while to Minot, North Dakota. He used to say Minot is not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. I have been to Minot, and thankfully it isn’t New York City, but in the world of today there really isn’t an end to the world, everything is linked by satellites, cellphones, and the internet. Minot however is heartland America, really the only place where people stay near the 100th meridian.

The 100th Meridian is not that big of a tourist attraction as you traverse in your vehicle through the Great American Drive Through, or fly above the Great American Fly Over on your way from the right coast to the left coast or vise versa, but that is because they don’t learn you in school that the 100th Meridian is about where the transition between the tall grass and the short grass prairie occurs. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” is the book that made Montana writer Wallace Stegner famous as he wrote about John Wesley Powell’s progressive designs for rural America, many of which have been adopted with modification, either to the benefit or demise of the heartland, depending upon your perspective.
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Tags: Kathy Mattea, Nowhere, Philip Pullman, Golden Compass, desperation

Symbiotic Economics: Have some materialism soup!

12/December/2007 12:25

This week’s article begins as a designed allegory, not a good allegory, or not a bad allegory, just a so-so allegory, mediocre at best and downhill from there on out. As such you can make it deeper than it was meant to be, or just a stupid sort of story. Since music and religion died in America, things have just been going that way, dumbed down beyond political correctness, which really serves no purpose other than another day of a somewhat challenging life, in a world that doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

In the classic movie “Oliver” the orphan Oliver has the audacity to ask for some more swill, porridge, or soup to fill his empty stomach. In the 20th century, western culture has been fed a tempting materialism soup, and over time we have become accustomed to the stuff. After all with just a little salt, pepper and a few other spices of life, it really isn’t all that bad. But just as Esau in the Bible, we individually and collectively, have given up any birthright we may have inherited for just another generous helping of the stuff swill.

Proper exposition of the Jacob - Esau passage is well beyond what we want to use in this message, but just as with Oliver, we are all hungry in this world, and if materialism’s soup is all we have to eat, why not have another bowl, the dude that runs the orphanage says we will grow to find it irresistible. And to be perfectly honest that is all he has to offer anyway.

“So just how do you make materialism soup?”

I’m glad you ask. First of all you need the veggies. In classic cajun cooking it is known as the trinity, onion, celery, and green pepper, sweated not sautéed. In French cooking it is called mirepoix, onion, celery, and carrots, again sweated not sautéed. The ingredients in materialism soup are three also, socialism, reaganism, and evangelicalism. Again just sweated, by no means do you want to brown these veggies, it will truly change the flavor and it might not slide down as easily.

After you saute the materialism vegetables you need to add a lot of water, a few soup bones to add a little flavor, but very little meat itself, that is saved for the leadership elite that runs the orphanage, and a little flour to thicken it up a little, but not enough to give you gas, because again gas is not all that appetizing. Besides on the side we get stale bread, the fresh stuff is first offered to those who are in charge.

In order to make this materialism soup at all, we need to first chop up the vegetables. The knife we will use is dull, just like the butter knife our grandmas had, that will only slice warm butter, or prepared margarine. The ingredients must be added in order to get the proper flavor in the sweat, as it slides off the plastic cutting board before it drops over the edge into the pot.
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Tags: materialism, gospel, socialism, reaganism, evangelicalism

Symbiotic Economics: Wildness cries

05/December/2007 07:48

I will take up a weeping and wailing for the mountains,
And for the dwelling places of the wilderness (wildness) a lamentation,
Because they are burned up,
So that no one can pass through;
Nor can men hear the voice of the cattle.
Both the birds of the heavens and the beasts have fled;
They are gone. Jeremiah 9:10

Back in my early days of being an entrepreneur I was asked to do some environmental consulting for a major corporation. In order to do that work I would have to sign the company’s consulting agreement, which they said had been prepared by one of the best legal firms in the nation, to be fair and honest with both parties, but still uphold the requirements of the corporation.

I read over the contract and it sounded good to me, but within all the verbiage were a lot of legal terms which I did not fully understand. I therefore decided to take it to my securities lawyer for his interpretation. Bruce began reading the multipage document. About half way through he smiled, wrote a short sentence on the legal pad where he always took notes, and continued reading to the end of the document.

When he finished reading, Bruce looked up and stated that this indeed was a very good and fair consulting agreement, perhaps the best he had ever read. Then he smiled again and brought my attention to a short paragraph at the bottom of one of the pages. The only thing I find wrong with the document, he said, is that there should be a comma between, what I shall call here, this and that. In other words, it should have read this, and that. He then went on to explain without this comma, if litigation ever was required, he could use that lack of the comma to justify my position and we would probably win. Therefore, he said it was fine for me to sign the contract and wished me good luck.

As I read some of my documents that I referenced last week in “Answers? --- What questions?” I was struck with the fact that there was some pretty good stuff written in the articles, but they sure could use some editing, and more than a few commas, between this, and that. That however, was before OSX, at least for me on the MAC. Hence, that was before the computer voice of Kathy would read back to me what I had written. Out of all the stuff these Chronicles have covered over the years, I still find editing the finished work to be the most difficult. Possibly, that is because, I learned most of my writing skills, in the 6th grade, and none of my many educational endeavors hence, have really ever brought a serious improvement. That is truly a frightening concept, when you put it into the context, that in such academic disciplines test scores have continued to erode for all students since the time of that apex.
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Tags: Wilderness, Jeremiah 9:10, Luther

Symbiotic Economics: Answers??? --- What questions?

28/November/2007 09:15

Recent poling of the USA populous found that Americans were relatively comfortable or secure in their situations, but rather uncomfortable with what was happening at the national level. These results were consistent pretty much across the spectrum of the people. So what are the answers to our nation’s ills?

The really big problem is that no one seems to know the right questions? As we discussed briefly last week, throwing up a bunch of ideas into the air and seeing if any float, seems to be what some of the best minds in the nation have come up with.

We are told in various ways that everything is onward and upward but nobody seems to be able to give a reasonable or real description of the destination. So how can they, or why should they be empowered to set the course, when they seem more lost than the average man on the street?

The answer is these pundits are not the men and women on the street, and by choice they have lost touch with normal men and women trying each day to not journey onward and upward, but just get through the day without losing ground. Furthermore, these elite no longer care about either the bourgeois or the proletariat, they also have lost touch with natural reality, and as far as any transcendence, well that is just an outmoded concept not needed in the new world order.

Well, if the new world (utopian) order is almost here, why does the future look so chaotic and bleak?

“Next question please! Oh by the way, have you read my new book, attended my latest seminar, voted for me, paid to join my internet groupies, donated to my cause? Keep tuning in daily because I am getting cooler, more poised, equanimous, self centered, and vain all the time? Don’t you just love me and want to be just like me, only a whole lot less influential?”
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Tags: New World Order, Bible, CAP, Business Ecology, sIn, evil

Symbiotic Economics: Green Zoos

21/November/2007 10:26

When we began this year’s series of Chronicle articles we were discussing stupendous change. In the concept of transcendence we have been looking at these last few weeks, stupendous change is really just transcendent natural law. Some will say and have said that these natural events are a judgement by God for the sins of America, the world or other parties. However it is a stretch to say that God needs to actively interfere with the natural workings of creation so that He can change the plan of earth’s history. More to the point is Romans 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.

This groaning in birth pangs, looks forward to the return of Jesus Christ. Creation’s churning may also become more pronounced simply because of the Ezekiel 37 dry bones prophesy coming into reality. The complexity of these manners and changes can be seen expressed in three stupendous change events that have happened in the United States in this century.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon were definitely acts of terrorism. They are also a statement of personal and religious rebellion from a group zealous in their belief that the world is heading in the wrong direction. Al Qaeda had the organization and resources to make a very bold statement. In that statement over 3000 Americans died. The point being that when it suits our purposes we believe humanity is above natural law and order, but then in the next breath, we reinforce the belief that we are indeed direct descendants of whales and monkeys. That tension in itself is a groaning of all creation.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and vicinity. But matters could have been much worse if the hurricane track had not altered at the last minute probably saving many lives in the process. Was that change in course a gift of God’s grace, or was the hurricane itself God’s judgement on an evil city? Still others would say that the whole storm was made much worse by global warming. However, when you build a city below sea level in a hurricane zone, then not maintain the levees and dikes that hold back the river and the ocean, it is only a matter of time until a groaning creation will have an impact.

A similar statement is true for the recent wildfires in southern California. When you build human infrastructure in an area where it should not be built, then in order to protect it and maintain property values you do not manage the vegetation for whatever natural and political reasons, when the fire starts, the impacts are going to be much more severe than a fire in true wild chaparral.
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Tags: Newt Gingrich, Bible, transcendent, CAP, Luther, Calvin

Symbiotic Economics: The Dry Bones Valley

14/November/2007 09:44

Last week we used the concept of the Valley of Dry bones in Ezekiel 37, to describe not only a coming natural Israel in Ezekiel’s day, but also a potential reality, resting in God’s hands alone for the rest of the world.

The thought of being part of something that will be eternally significant is quite appealing. The concept itself is by definition transcendent. But if we pause for a moment to consider the detailed circumstances of what the Ezekiel 37, Dry Bones Valley coming to life again truly means, we quickly approach the frontiers of human reason. As a matter of fact and truth, by definition, while we can understand the dry bones concept, the life giving process lies completely within the scope of God’s glory.

That makes it pretty clear that if we are going to be called upon in an imperative (application) way we are going to be doing this beyond our comfort and security, as security is currently defined within our present world. Most people have been made so insecure in this material world that at present they are completely incapable of living with transcendence of any nature. To paraphrase an old country song “Don’t Fence Me In” we have the exact opposite:

Give me stuff, lots of stuff,
Under Hi Pressure Sodium lights above.
Please Fence Me in within (a secure ghetto).

Let me drive through the suburban sprawl
That I love,
Please Fence Me in.

Let Me be by myself in the air conditioned breeze,
Listening to the murmur of the traffic seas

Don’t send me off forever
Because it makes me quease
So I beg you please fence me in.
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Tags: security, Ezekiel 37, dry bones valley, Babel, God, transcendent

Symbiotic Economics: The day that Religion died!

07/November/2007 12:14

The main problem in the world today is that religion is dead. In that regard what I mean is that religion has lost it’s transcendence, and therefore it’s link with the eternal and the divine. Religion has become a domain of man, not of God. I know the day in which religion died, it is the same day that Don McLean sang about in his famous song “American Pie.” In the song the line: “The three men I admire most, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, caught the last train for the coast, the day that music died.” refers to the same day.

This is not a day in the literal period of 24 hours, like we referred to last week describing the Genesis creation account. Maybe this is where the gap theory truly applies. Seriously, this is really a series of days, little by little in which religion lost it’s transcendent nature. The day varied with locale, with doctrine, and with the religious worshippers, but eventually the religion of Christianity (and to a lesser extent the Jewish faith) died. Since it is our contention that the Jewish - Christian God is the one and only true God, when those religions lost their transcendence, these religions died in the context that they no longer did what they were created to do.

I did not create the concept of the day that religion died, I learned it from a friend, Jim. Where he got it I do not know, maybe God let him figure it out, maybe he found it somewhere in his readings, for he is an avid reader. I do know amongst all the comments that I have heard considering the declining influence of the church in western society, and the west’s demoralizing influence on the rest of the world, his comment is the only one, that gives the actual date for when the Christian religion died in the mission to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The day that the Christian religion died, was the day that Christians took the Ten Commandments out of the church. The Ten Commandments were the last vestige of God’s transcendency left in the church in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s. These were the days that transformed the church from eternal absolutes of eternal truth, to good moral teachings then religion and religious truth died.
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Tags: religion, music, American Pie, Jesus Movement, resurrection

Symbiotic Economics: Green Rednecks

31/October/2007 14:31

I would suppose it would be interesting in an academic sense, if it were not so real. Virtually all my conversations since I have returned or moved to Northeast Washington State eventually have come around to money. Money in the sense that we have been discussing in this series, financial liquidity or the lack thereof.

Because this area does not fit within the economies of scale of modern global enterprise, there flat out is no liquidity to do the things that need to be done. The wishful thinking that a rising tide floats all ships only works, as we have pointed out, in the oceans of capital, it doesn’t work on rivers and streams. This is true, I’m sure, not only in this corner of Washington State, but around the world. Countries, localities, and other places, that are willing and able to give global capitalism what it wants, get to play in the monopoly game. An area that can’t afford free trade zones, or places where these enterprise behemoths must pay some of there burden upon society in the form of infrastructure, just don’t get to play.

As I have had the time to read more books that discuss the enterprise future, in the later chapters the authors look forward to some positive results. Their general consensus is that we need some sort of fair morality in which the whatever must function in order for whatever to be successful.

The fact of the matter however, is that the authors have limited or no basis within their worldview for that morality to exist, to be created, or to operate. Just to say the world needs moral ethics doesn’t make them happen, even if we count all the hopeful visions of everyone on earth. Truthfully, morality and ethics cannot evolve out of nothing. Evolution, as a religion, cannot answer where these primitive instincts came from, and definitely cannot provide a model to develop them either.

So where did or does morality or goodness come from? Of course, the opinion belief herein is that it comes from God alone, who created the universe and also prescribed the operating rules, absolutes if you will. Some of those rules, along with gravity are also natural law, but deal with interactions between the various entities and populations. The natural science is ecology. In the human being, created in God’s image, that philosophy is religion in the broadest sense.
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Tags: green redneck, religion, Wildness, Thoreau, transcendent

Symbiotic Economics: Social Darwinism

17/October/2007 09:17

Last week we looked at the fact, monetary capital, like natural rain, does not fall evenly over the earth. Just as in the real world, the arid American west needs irrigation enterprise capital for business ventures. This is true much in the same way that irrigation water is necessary for agricultural production.

The same details hold true in most of the rural areas of the globe. In fact, this liquidity discrepancy is even more pronounced in the developing world. There is excess capital and goods in urban areas, but once you get beyond the wealthy cities, poverty is rampart.

So what is being done about it by the leaders and politicians? Nothing, they have their share of the wealth and if it trickles down to those less fortunate, that’s OK, if not those people really don’t amount to much anyway. That belief is called Social Darwinism. It will eventually bring about the demise of western culture, because it is based not on any truth, just anti God wishful thinking of these perpetrators of self. These selves being rich and therefore more highly evolved than those who are not monetary and stuff wealthy.

If we look at rural America in a little detail, financial liquidity basically arrives from four areas. In the rest of the rural world, these concepts are still basically true. One is real estate speculation of commons values. The second is transfer payments of urban immigrants, a lot of those being retirees and those who have imported their own wealth or incomes from times spend in urban occupations. The third is seasonal tourism, most centered around the summer, but also to a limited degree in hunting seasons and winter recreation. The fourth is government transfer payments. Contrary to rural wisdom, these payments exceed, on a per capita basis, those expenditures in urban areas. If you look nationally at the United States, about 50 percent of the land is owned by governments. In some counties in the west this figure exceeds 80 percent. However, little financial liquidity reaches the people unless they are somehow involved in doling out these funds, according to some program(s) envisioned by leaders, again part of the social darwinian class.

Sadly, in the American west, local people, no matter their roots or training, understand little of the deeper reality of this humanly created liquidity desert picture. Outside and inside the region, government or institutional darwinists believe it is their superior position that gives them the right to rule over creation and other people by managing “progress.” Libertarian types also foster the illusion, that by self determination and their skills alone, they can tame the wilderness, and it’s people into their likeness. Neither divergent class sees the problem in terms of access to capital, but rather a conflict of ideas. Their particular beliefs being superior to others.

One thing that is emerging in the west is that the concept of marketplace, not necessarily markets, provide wiser use of all assets, including capital liquidity than does government control. Almost all people further realize, these marketplaces, if based only on capital profits and stuff, do not provide sufficient constraints to maintain the quality of life that is one of the overriding aspects of development in the first place.
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Tags: Social Darwinsim, liquidity, Lenin's Law, Al Gore, religion

Symbiotic Economics: What’s Up?

10/October/2007 10:04

That term became a unique part of American jargon after an appearance in a beer commercial during a SuperBowl. In that particular commercial the term was united into one word sort of like “WATSUP!” Generically of course the term refers more to the concept of “What is happening, dude?” Of course dude becoming a gender neutral term referring to anyone whether or not they are really cool. Cool coming into the vernacular during or just before my generation. Therefore, WATSUP has nothing at all to do with the direction up.

That what’s up concept really has nothing at all to do with current economics either, and that we will explore briefly this week.

Last week we looked at “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek. His economic model is considered the Austrian Model, Hayek’s birth place, and maybe in his own mind of the terminator governor of the state of California. The previous week we considered the concepts of “Capitalism 3.0” by Peter Barnes. The current economic situation of the world has little to do with the economic vision of either author or the governator.

In Hayek’s day, the economic world was defined by a scarcity of goods, services, and capital. Today, as Barnes and others point out, we have a surplus of all three, for a variety of reasons, and which we shall look at in a little more depth as we continue. But to state the current problem succinctly in terms of a valuable asset marketing class I once took, the world population consists of mostly “ready, willing, but unable buyers.” People are more than ready to buy the stuff being sold, furthermore, they are willing to make at least some sacrifice to obtain the goods or service, they just do not have the real capital at hand to purchase.
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Tags: F. A. Hayek, Peter Barnes, capital, Christianity, economics, liquidity

Symbiotic Economics: Unity in Diversity

03/October/2007 09:45

My enterprise models, both organization and economic, are drawn directly from creation, or nature if you prefer that term. They are observable to anyone and can be described by use of descriptive observational science. That science centers within the field of ecology, “the branch of biology concerned with the relations between organisms and their environment.”

What you find first and foremost in natural ecology is the tremendous diversity of life on this planet. Animals and all sorts of critters, big, small, and microscopic. The same can be said of the plants, they just don’t move around, so most of the time they are easier to study. As diverse as the natural world appears there is still an unique unity that seems to tie everything together in a very complex way.

Spend a day or even an afternoon alone in creation, just observing what is taking place around you, and it can have a deep impact on your life, if you truly allow yourself to be confronted with the natural diversity, the unity, and reality of time not in a hurry. If you spend the time worrying about your job, or what you are going to have for dinner, nothing will probably happen, unless you are hit by a falling tree in your haste to get back into an environment in which you are more in control of the circumstances.

Lack of discernible control of the environment does not mean that the wilderness is a laissez faire place. As Jefferson said so well in the Declaration of Independence, everything is in the control of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This leads directly to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Notice Jefferson does not say the “fruits of happiness” or some such term that means true happiness is ever really obtained on this earth.

The most striking parallel is that the apparent “unity and diversity” in the natural world is the same term that theologians use to describe the Christian Triune God, or Trinity. Is that just an unusual coincidence, or is creation that way by design? The Bible clearly states that, this unity in diversity in nature is that way because it was created that way. Furthermore, it states that the world was formed through language, or the spoken word, something that in this world is within the realm of humanity and not a characteristic of any other life form. To say that other animals communicate with one another, and this in someway points to the evolution of language in the human animal, is a leap of faith, well beyond any concept of true human wisdom.
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Tags: ecology, unity in diveristy, F. A. Hayek, socialist, liberal, monopolist

Symbioitic Economics - Post Consumer Packaging

26/September/2007 10:05

What’s the plan?

I’ve heard that a lot since the decision to move to the woods of Eastern Washington. The problem is that my plan and my ability to plan, at the present time has very little to do with present reality. Planning is one of my strong aptitudes. However, all I can do is to continue with the means at my disposal and God willing, in His timing, the resources will be available to implement a plan current within that present reality. So, the daily plan is to cope to the maximum extent possible, with pretty much non existent capital, believing that in due season funds will become available to carry out the planning work I am currently doing.

Therefore, the plan you are asking about, has no basis in the present reality of today, but furthermore, all my planning, positive thinking, good karma, bad karma, attempts to manipulate the world and other people, do not create reality, only God can create reality. My plan is to see if I can make the plan as consistent with His plan as possible and wait for Him to bring it into reality. So the plan is to persist and persevere until such time that finances are available to proceed forward. That is the plan and to the extent you can live with those facts of life, fine. If you can’t, you can worry about them, help out, or get out of the way.

What’s the plan for most baby boomer Americans?

“Well, I will work (or worked) for a job that I really only found marginally fulfilling, if that much, with a bunch of people, I really had (have) nothing in common with, other than our jobs, until I get, (or got) in my 30 years. Then I am going to retire (retired) early and do all the personal things I wanted to do, but never had the time or the resources to do when I was working (worked) for a living. Like travel, read, and become someone, I am not really in touch with. However, I have made no significant plan (yet) to bring that wonderful personality into existence.

“I realize that is quite a task indeed, to cram into 10 - 30 years of old age, a lifetime of living. Especially when the lifestyle I am currently living, is subject to stupendous change, I mean catastrophes, disasters, illness, and other natural events. When will I realize my retirement really isn’t going to allow me to continue to live at the level of existence I now enjoy and have come to expect over my 30 years of going with the flow?
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Tags: Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes, capital, energetics, energy, design, liberal

Symbiotic Economics

19/September/2007 13:00

Our world is bankrupt! Let me say that again, OUR world is bankrupt! You can take that to the bank, and they will laugh at you, if they really are going to be that nice.

“We have money to lend,” they will say. “Let us sit down and I will run a credit check, and we will see what kind of a loan you will qualify for. And then when you show me how you really don’t need any money, we will be happy to loan you all the money you need, up to the limit to which you really need it. When you reach that limit, we will cut off your credit, because then your loan becomes risky. Risky means when you can demonstrate that you really need some money!

The financial institutions are right, they do have money, but by statements like the above, which really is today’s bankers truth, they are showing they are bankrupt of a true understanding of how the world has really worked for all of human history. Life is risky and to truly obtain wealth, you have to take some risks. That does include monetary wealth, but from the wealthy people I have known in my life, the money is the easiest form a wealth to come by.

In the larger sense, this world also really bankrupt, morally, philosophically, religiously, environmentally, pretty much everything other than mammon and the stuff that mammon will buy. The world is even bankrupt evolutionarily, because society, especially western society, took that road long before any of us were born and we have reached the end of the line. We now are confronted with chaos on all sides, even obliterating the path by which we got here.
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Tags: economics, bankrupt, capital, liquidity, consumer, Adam Smith

Out of Nothing

12/September/2007 12:54

I was looking for an idea that would tie the “Deficit Love” and the “Overdraft Divorce” articles together. Monday evening I was listening to the White Horse Inn podcast (whitehorseinn.org) and they were talking about saving faith being created by God in the personality of an individual with no contribution from the person himself. Part of that discussion centered on the fact that God created saving faith like He created creation, out of nothing.

They went on to put this in the context that mankind has unlimited free will in “things natural,” it is only in “things heavenly,” because of man’s total depravity, that God creates the desire for regeneration and ultimately salvation through the message of the gospel. Perhaps it was the context of the presentation, but thinking unlimited free will in “things natural” totally misses the point that this willful natural agency is also highly controlled by our sin nature. Ultimately the understanding of “things heavenly” however, will alter our perception of the natural order.

In that light, free will and things of any sort, should really be divided into created things and attributes of God. It is the love of God through grace, creating the gift of faith that is the ultimate source of human acceptance of the gospel found only in the life, death through crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is received by or through the word of God alone. However word in this sense, must include all communication of God with humanity and ultimately all things created.

The Bible creation account begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In this case this act of God created something out of nothing, or in classical theology it is called “ex nihilo.” Hence, in the philosophical sense also, in the Judeo-Christian worldview, God alone is the ultimate source of all reality as well as all creation. Therefore before, during, after, outside, and inside the time - space - matter universe, God is.

Mankind however, in his fallen state can not accept God as creator, therefore vast quantities of time and naturalistic explanations must be invented to describe not only how creation came to be, but also how man evolved out of these mindless processes. In the beginning was the “Big Bang.” However, in this evolutionary worldview, it is philosophically acceptable to question what came before the big bang, because epistemologically the nature of the big bang is without knowledge, personality, or direction.
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Tags: White Horse Inn, Genesis, deficit love, overdraft divorce, ex nihilo, faith

Overdraft Divorce

05/September/2007 08:45

The church I visited last Sunday, had a special service. This occasion was the thirtieth wedding anniversary of a couple in the congregation. Way back when, they were married in a civil ceremony. After all these years they wanted to again commit the rest of their lives to this union, in the presence of friends, family, and their children.

I was struck throughout the ceremony, that many of the same scriptures that I used writing about deficit love last week were also used in the service. This served to remind me that God uses the human symbolism of marriage to describe not only God’s deficit love for his people, but His relationship also. I purposely refrained from using marriage symbolism last week because of the emphasis I wanted to place directly on deficit love being a gift of God’s grace towards fallen humanity.

As the service proceeded, the pastor commented about this couple’s long commitment to one another, compared to the prevalence of divorce in our culture. It struck me at a deeper level just how divorce from God and all things Godly really are the signs of our times. Much of the problems we now face in all aspects of society and culture not only stem from wanting a divorce from God, we want to make it plain that we also want to completely run that account into irreconcilable arrears, or overdraft.

Now to put this in some sort of Biblical marriage context, it must be pointed out that this marriage symbolism is not used in the context of all humanity, but only in God’s covenant with His chosen people, or the Kingdom of God, or the elect. The Bible clearly makes a distinction between the New Testament church, Old Testament Israel, and the rest of the inhabitants of planet earth.

So then if we are to look at the concept of the overdraft divorce from God, we must first look at the modern church to see if the term applies.
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Tags: overdraft divorce, marriage, Revelation, Ephesians, evangelicalism

Deficit Love

29/August/2007 12:19

If you haven’t visited the Wonder Springs website recently, Sunday we posted pictures of a pair of large Big Horn Sheep that appeared at the cabin last Saturday and spent the night on the little rise about one hundred feet from the front door. These sheep are not native to the area and speculation still has not determined why they showed up. Luck, fate, or God’s design. The God’s design scenario was our chosen explanation.

The sheep only remotely have anything to do with this week’s article. Within this writer’s prerogative you should understand that the first job that God gave Adam in the Genesis creation account was to name all the animals. My question is why in North America do wild sheep look more like goats and wild mountain goats look more like sheep, and really what is the real differences between either kind anyway? A ruminant discussion that might enlighten the masses.

After Adam had completed that naming job, God saw that it was not right for man to be alone, and He created a helper for Adam, now that he was about to have some real work to do. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Genesis account of the fall of mankind as Eve was tempted by the devil to eat of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Bible commentators are really a very boring group of guys, or maybe they have been blinded by a guy type of thinking, but I think one of the first truly deep theological questions in the Bible is why did the devil choose to temp Eve rather than Adam? The standard line goes something like, “Satan knew that Eve was the weaker vessel, therefore she would be easier to tempt into sin than the older and more experienced Adam.”

But turn on the thinking part of your brain for a moment, if that was really true, the great man of God’s creation, Adam, would have just given the whole episode a pass and said, “Well honey you are on your own, I’ll go and see what God wants to do with what you have done.” If that be the case, there would have been no reason for the whole Bible.

I suspect however, that Satan was a whole lot more cunning than either Adam or Eve, not just the beasts of creation. Possibly the devil knew that Adam was such an easy con, that he really was not up to the challenge of the evil tempter. Eve however, was a much more difficult contest. As Eve went, Adam would follow along like a sheep or goat led to the slaughter and that is what happened.
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Tags: deficit love, self indulgence, evolution, obligation, conviction, sIn, Reformation

Green Folks

22/August/2007 10:04

I had the opportunity this last week to take a short driving vacation from northeastern Washington, through central Oregon, down to the Oregon-California border. A distance of about 900 miles. The occasion for this opportunity was that I was to pick up a friend and his son, after bicycling the Oregon coast and ferrying them and their bikes back to Seattle, where I would then complete my remaining obligations to the Emerald City.

At a stop at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (Clarno Unit) somewhere between the towns of Fossil and Antelope, Oregon, I had the opportunity to meet with John, the Park Ranger in residence, in his small hut. The Clarno beds are really conglomerate mud flows several hundred feet thick, which have solidified into interesting palisades which are exposed along the canyon walls. (When I get the opportunity I will post some of the pictures of the trip for those who have never been there to get a glimpse of this amazing scenery.)

We got to talking about the type of people who visit the area, about 5000 a year. He mentioned that the people from Oregon just sort of showed up, while the people from Washington had researched their excursion, knew what they wanted to see, and had definite plans on where and why they were making the journey.

As our conversation continued John mentioned that what he really enjoyed about his work was taking people into the back country to really get a taste and educating them on the Juniper desert he called home and loved so much. As an impulse I ask if any of the people who had intensively researched their trips were part of his true wilderness groups? Then a strange thing happened, John put both of his hands, like blinders on the side of his head, indicating that the researched visitors were only comfortable dealing with things they knew something about and the back country wilderness was not part of their researchable data.
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Tags: sIn, self indulgence, green, coal, bottled water

Green Coal

15/August/2007 08:39

I receive a lot of information telling me how to go green. The concept of environmentalism has become synonymous with the green movement. But as you look at a picture of planet earth from space, you see a lot of blue for the oceans, but most of the land mass is brown, with vastly decreased amounts of green.

This new green desire is really just a non-godly or atheistic man centered attempt to establish the Garden of Eden while living in Babel. All the while truly ignoring the reality of created natural law and common grace. In other words, the Green Revolution is attempting to establish a green world without any input from truly green reality or truth. God created mankind as gardeners and stewards of the earth, too bad that has been lost both in and out of the church.

As I moved back to eastern Washington, many of the miles of highway travel have been spent contemplating how I got to where I am from where I began. Those roots stretch back long before ecology and the environment meant much to anyone but a handful of wealthy eastern well educated sportsmen, who had time and resources to travel around the world hunting and fishing and I suppose communing with nature. From that group grew what was called the conservation movement.

Those folks were several generations removed and across the continent from a boy growing up in the sticks around Kettle Falls, Washington. My introduction to these conservationists came from some friends of my parents and both families commuted from Kettle Falls to Colville to church. The man of the house was a timber cruiser by profession, but his father was one of the founders of the National Wildlife Federation.

Anyway, being much more intellectually inclined than most of the local population, they had this strange habit of giving books of all things for gifts. Those books were stories about or by these conservation genre of people. Those books set the stage for my life, even though I had no idea of their effect at the time. One of my favorites was “We Like it Wild,” by Bradford Angier. The story tells how a newspaper man and his wife from Boston moved to northern British Columbia near the hamlet of Hudson Hope to live in the woods. That location is now under water from one of the dams built a number of years after they moved and stayed north.

Most of his friends from the city thought that he was terribly demented if not completely insane to attempt such an undertaking. I have gotten many similar statements from people in Seattle, as I have moved from the city. However, none of them will be welcomed back by a Bald Eagle in the tree across the river, when I returned last evening from a family reunion in Spokane Read More...

Tags: green, coal, conservationist, music, self indulgence, icon, globalism

The Know KNOW Book

08/August/2007 06:49

After, writing, buying, and reading all sixteen volumes of the vastly poor selling Know NO Books described in last week’s Chronicle, there must be a sequel. Sure enough in that same genre, and knowing that you have learned a great deal of knowledge and wisdom in the massive volumes, we shall prepare and publish the undefeated volume know as the “The Know KNOW Book of life.”

Unlike the Know NO series that confined their topics to a single point, the “Know KNOW Book of Life” covers three topics in descending order of importance. This book also, like the others, does have a Biblical topic as it center of developmental thought. That topic comes from 2 Corinthians 12, describing the Apostle Paul’s vision of heaven and his thorn in the flesh.

The Vision of Paradise
1 It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: 2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. 3 And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— 4 how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. 5 Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. 6 For though I might desire to boast, I will not be a fool; for I will speak the truth. But I refrain, lest anyone should think of me above what he sees me to be or hears from me.

The Thorn in the Flesh
7 And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. 8 Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. 9 And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

For sake of discussion working through 16 volumes of the Know NO series, might not give you visions of heaven, but would at least have a drastic effect upon your personality.

“It is not profitable for me to boast, but I just completed reading and studying 16 volumes of the least popular book series in history. Whether in the body or out of the body I do not know. But this I do know, what I did not Know NO then, I do Know KNOW now. I realize these inexpressible words do not make logical sense, and hence you see the power of the truth of which I speak in this weakness, thus making me strong.”

Paul doesn’t detail his “thorn in the flesh” and hence, virtually every Know NO Bible commentator has speculated about Paul’s health, his vision, this disease or that. If we could just figure out what that thorn was, other than from a rose, or a thorn berry, a cactus, or a thistle, we could announce we now know know something of which we can relate, sympathize, and add to our self indulgent similarity with the Apostle.

The point of the thorn in the flesh however, is humility in the presence of God, not our exaltation of ourselves especially among others, less qualified. Read More...

Tags: grace, Paul, love, thorn in the flesh, self indulgence, self reliance, coal, diamonds

The Know NO Books

02/August/2007 11:37

A couple of weeks ago, the last installment of the Harry Potter series of books hit the book stores. From what I have read in the press in this last episode, Harry dies to be brought back to life to live happily ever after. The analogy I have read says that this makes it an OK book for all, because it is just like Aslan in the “Chronicles of Narnia” or even the resurrection of Jesus.

There is one slight problem with Harry however, Aslan dies for deep magic before the beginning of time and Jesus died for the sins of mankind, again known to the triune God, before the creation of time. Jesus was resurrected as the sign of His propitiatory sacrifice for our justification. From the little I have read about Harry, Harry died being Harry. Basically a good person in a world of the occult in which he messed around.

From personal experience and the experiences of others I have known, there is really no way to mess around with the world of the real occult and remain a basically good person, other than by a miracle of grace by the living God. Harry can do such because it is a lie for literary fiction. Like Period!

Well the Harry Potter series was the greatest - most popular series of books in history. That just goes to show how enlightened, or debased in self indulgence, western society has become, depending upon your perspective. My take however, points to the self indulgent.

This got me to thinking about what series of books could be created that would become the least popular of all time. A series that would probably never sell enough copies to cover the publishing costs, even if it were only published in ebook format. I am convinced the title for these books would be the “Know NO Books.”
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Tags: books, Harry Potter, peace, rest, freedom, faith

The Self Indulgence Pandemic

25/July/2007 09:41

We began the year writing about the multitude of possibilities for stupendous change events that can alter the future of our civilization. So far those events continue, but just localized to specific places in the United States and around the world.

However, in the last two and a half months of moving, I have begun to see that there is an underlying disease that is really bringing it all about. That is the pandemic of Self Indulgence. Notice that Self Indulgence is capitalized, making it a more treatment resistant strain, of self indulgence death that marks all of human history.

During that moving time frame, my own personal level of infection of the Self Indulgence malignancy has become more evident than I could have ever realized. Each day holds a new change that I can not control only live through. Some of those challenges are physical, some psychological, some fiscal, many combinations of these and other factors, have been presented in ways I have never seen in my life, would or should have foreseen, or could have made plans to avoid. In short, I have begun to understand in a new way, what living beyond your comfort zone is all about. In the Bible the struggles of the Apostle Paul, have begun to at least foster a faint glimmer of insight.

If you agree with Al Gore’s hype, that human caused emissions of green house gases will alter catastrophically all life on planet earth in this century, the root cause is still the Self Indulgence Pandemic (SIP). I personally believe that there are a whole host of symptoms that will bring green house gases, if they really are a problem, in line with the external climate change reality, long before anything humanity will do has any effect on Carbon Dioxide emissions. Climate change however, is something we must deal with on planet earth on a continual basis. Whether that be global warming or global cooling, depends upon your life’s epoch and whether you would like to establish it as a human religion in opposition to God’s will.
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Tags: self indulgence, pandemic, God, Jesus, self reliance, reality

Independence Day, the 4th of July, 2007

04/July/2007 09:22

I find myself this 4th of July holiday in Seattle, a trailer load of my best stuff and my outdoor stuff sitting in the driveway. With a couple more hours of fitting it all together, in the morning I shall be off with all my stuff moved to eastern Washington. Well it really is not all my stuff, but at least all the stuff I should be moving.

Over this moving sabbatical from writing a weekly column I have learned many things. Now what is ruminating in my mind is just how to adapt this knowledge into a new location and a renewed emphasis.

A couple of thoughts along that line relate to the differences between soil and dirt. Soil is alive and grows things, dirt is just dirty. Through a book I read, which I will elaborate more fully in later installments, all great civilizations come to their demise as they treat and alter their nation’s soil into dirt. Could the way we look at the land in agriculture, truly become the coffin of our American independence? Sounds pretty far fetched, sitting in front of a computer screen in some urban center somewhere in the world, doesn’t it?

More short term and to the point however, is the metaphysical question of your personal soil, or dirt. Is your personality open to life, able to grow diverse crops and produce a bountiful harvest? Too often we think of that harvest as money, grown and fertilized, just as you would do a field of soybeans, or corn. But as you convert your mind’s fields to just a cash crop, are you really just limiting your potential to feed yourself, in all the senses. Three squares a day of just corn, or soybeans is going to become a very boring meal, after day one.

This finds it’s focus in leadership. During the move I have had the opportunity to talk and communicate with the total political spectrum in this great land. The overwhelming consensus is that we have no leadership, many times focused upon the so called leadership of one’s own political understanding.
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Tags: dirt, soil, President

Materialism’s Evil Glory

30/May/2007 07:11

The Great Evangelical Diaspora

23/May/2007 13:03

Business Ecology: Arrogance Squared - Insecurity in the Light

16/May/2007 09:54

Business Ecology: Team Leadership

09/May/2007 06:48

Business Ecology: Tensioned Leadership

02/May/2007 14:38

Business Ecology: The Fossil Fuel - Leadership Fiasco

25/April/2007 12:25

The full title of this week’s message is: The Fossil Fuel Fiasco = The Fossilized Failure of Leadership.

The first line of the Top Secret Intelligence Summary that I was forced to read in my spy days in Europe usually began as follows, “Eminent hostilities by Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations against Allied NATO forces is not expected in the coming week.” The summary then went on to detail troop movements and exercises by all of the above, as deterrents to thermonuclear war.

The Soviet Union as been pretty much replaced by the Russian Federation and much of the Warsaw Pact is now part of NATO. Someplace in that stream of intelligence still being generated, there are probably still more complex intelligence summaries using the terms Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and perhaps some references to Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

In my last article I made reference to the icon Pogo cartoon from Earth Day 1971 by Walt Kelly featuring Pogo and his friend PorkyPine. The cartoon is also available: http://www.planetwaves.net/pogo.web.jpg

Business Ecology, Part 2 - Worldviews

11/April/2007 12:01

Last week we ended with the first side of the bookends on why I coined the concept of Business Ecology in the early 1980s. After I graduated from college, as I said a couple of weeks ago in “The Dark & Light Sides,” I entered into the oxymoron of Military Intelligence. While in Germany I wrote my first popular article on the environment for our unit newspaper. The title was something such as, “Group’s own Ecologist speaks out.”

There were significant differences between that early “clean up the nest” movement and our current global warming catastrophe. The first major difference was that the early environmental spokespeople were mostly trained as ecologists, which are really not specialists but have broad training in a number of fields. Today global warming is driven by specialists with deep knowledge in climatology and mathematical modeling, but without broader understanding of the depth and complexity of natural ecosystems. Of course in the context of global warming, what we are really talking about is dramatic lifestyle changes required to continue the age of materialist stuff.

Secondly, that earlier environmental concern was entirely related to present reality and could be analyzed by methods of descriptive observational science and empirical understanding. For example, during my military training in Massachusetts I got stuck in construction traffic on a bridge over a small stream on a hot muggy summer afternoon. The smell of organic chemicals emanating from this ditch was so foul that I was concerned that I might pass out from the fumes. Today the global warming discussion is about changes in temperatures around the world, but the supporting data comes from a leap of faith into theoretical science of a long uniform earth history of millions and billions of years. Buy definition ice cores from Patagonia or Greenland from which we draw our conclusions must be 6 - 8 hundred thousand years old, because only the flat earth society believes any differently.

The qualifier about the flat earth society is not science but bigotry, worldview bigotry. What the round earth society would like you to believe is that in their atheistic world, it only snows a few feet at a time, over countless thousands of years, and then presto you have an ice age, the remnants you see today in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Patagonia, Antarctica and elsewhere. What is really flat earth however, is to not create a model where it can snow 30 feet overnight, followed by maybe 50, or 100 feet the next day, and so on for a winter or two, and then you have an ice age, which would easily follow after a worldwide flood of the Bible’s Genesis Flood account.
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Business Ecology, Part I - What is it?

04/April/2007 11:51

Business Ecology, so what is it?

When I first created the term Business Ecology in the early 1980’s it basically was a way of applying the knowledge and wisdom gained from observing nature and applying them to the fields of human enterprise.

These applications were done within the constructs of what can be defined as descriptive operational science. What that means is that you can go to some place on the earth, do a series of measurements of what you find, record them in some fashion to make them available to others, who might like to check your work, but more importantly to build a data base of what you might find, so that others may build upon that work, to help create a better world for those who follow.

What becomes quickly apparent if you do ecology, rather than read about ecology is how little we really know about the world. Armed with some type of measuring line, at any particular place on earth, by systematically counting and identifying the plants or other forms of life along that transect, you quickly learn this is something nobody else knows. Is that cool or what. That transect might occur in a pristine wilderness, a road cut for an urban freeway, or even the plants growing in the cracks of the paving in an urban playground.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: The Dark & Light Sides

28/March/2007 07:46

I was planning this week to take an interlude from the Stupendous Change Leadership Series and develop within the context of Business Ecology how life on this earth operates, and how our current models for human enterprise do not, but alas, alas, I fear with the stupendous changes now evident, most readers do not have a context from which truly to contemplate what is really happening in this world. So like ostriches we stick our head in the sand, and hope that the bad things will go away. Actually, I don’t know if ostriches really do that, but it seems that human beings sure have evolved to that level of metaphor.

Hopefully, next week we will begin that Business Ecology, interlude which if first utilized in 1981. For those interested in funding the book and the video series, it will be called the “Garden of God.” If you might like a head start, except for a relevant update to the current state of the world and the reality of stupendous change, the basic material is in the Archives section of the website. The three series that are the most applicable are Ruminant Covenant from 1999, Enterprise Symbiosis from 2000, and Metis Economics from 2005.

Last week we began with the headline: Breaking News: Sin, not global warming, not terrorism, is the greatest and very eminent threat to a worldwide economic catastrophe! Lengthy report follows.

Throughout that lengthy piece I just assumed that readers have some concept of the God of the Bible, and some concept of what the Bible has to say about sin. I also learned that when I began this series on stupendous change, I thought I was going to write about how to handle an acute event like an earthquake, storm, or something similar. What I am now beginning to see, probably until the end of this age, stupendous change events are chronic and are going to be playing not an abnormal role, but will be come more the norm. That means more than the stuff you need to survive a particular happening, you need to either evolve into an ostrich, or learn to adapt to the changes that are now beginning to happen much more frequently.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Death in the City

21/March/2007 14:20

Breaking News: Sin, not global warming, not terrorism, is the greatest and very eminent threat to a worldwide economic catastrophe! Lengthy report follows.

Actually and truthfully, Sin is really not breaking news, it is the oldest news in human culture. However, after reading all the internet Breaking News Headlines this morning, it seemed that a little reality check was in order for our increasingly chaotic world. Therefore, we should begin at the beginning.

It is inevitable when you are writing a series on stupendous change that the topic of the theoretical science of chaos theory appears out of nowhere. A couple of times last week, that random happening sort of appeared. For those unfamiliar with the concept, chaos theory states that even in the background chaotic random noise of the cosmos their appears at certain places a perception of order. Furthermore, for those who truly understand the mathematics at this level, we should be able to write a mathematical equation(s) to describe these phenomena.

Of course a more simple explanation is found in the Bible in Genesis 1:1, when in the beginning God created perfect chaos. In street metaphysics that is like stating, “Can God create a rock he can’t lift?” Put more in the context of the chaos theory, “Can a perfect God create perfect random chaos, with out leaving a sign of His handiwork in some type of order?”
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Beyond Al Gore

14/March/2007 14:12

There is a new religion in the land and it’s scaring the hell out of a lot of young people, so much so they can’t sleep at night. Well praise the Lord, but the question remains, why is it not scaring the hell out of a lot of the adults?

This is not the religion of radical Islam, this religion is much more subtile, for it speaks of an inconvenient truth, the truth of the continual changing climate of the earth, spun for basically the humanistic religious dogma of total depravity. In this the new and revolutionary religious paradigm, the devil, in this case the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide, is going to destroy our culture and kill all the animals and billions of people in the process.

American evangelicalism for its part is showing its profound ignorance of reality by stating that global warming really isn’t happening and even if it was Jesus will rapture out the church before it gets really bad. In essence the church is endorsing the concept of uniform millennia, exactly what evolutionary theology requires. However, before you get the wrong impression let’s put this new religion into some limited historical perspective.

I haven’t been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, and truthfully I have no desire to go. But I doubt that the 19th century revelation, of the rapture can happen at any moment, is packing them into gulf coast revival camp meetings. For sure I believe some churches are meeting in tents, as are some of the churches that were destroyed by tornados in Florida a month or so ago. In those churches however, the future hope of Jesus’ return as been replaced with the reality of Jesus Christ in His sufficient present, both through the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, and the ministry of the true church, the human Body of Christ.

I’m a believer in catastrophism. I basically teach it as stupendous change, because I believe that the earth is thousands of years old, not millions and billions, and God Almighty, the Triune God, is actively controlling all things, even change. Essentially that means a whole lot of natural stuff must happen very rapidly and with high levels of environmental impacts. When Al Gore says that cores from the Greenland Ice Cap show no signs of the increasing warming in 600,000 years, I think his science is off a factor of about a thousand times, but that is really a religious argument on my part in contrast with his religious argument.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Wonder Springs Oikos

07/March/2007 08:56

An email I got last week asked what I needed to be able to take this ministry to the next level. My first response was everything. This remains quite true, but I realize in the world of talking points and spin, everything must have an agenda. Therefore, the Wonder Springs dwelling place (oikos) must be defined in the essence of George Mueller, Hudson Taylor and Francis Schaeffer, who asked God to provide their needs and that God would build the ministry well beyond what they could at the time envision.

Since society has continued to evolve into more random noise and chaos since Schaeffer’s death in 1984, I realize I must be a little more specific. So here is the proposal, I want everyone to move to Wonder Springs. That move will include all that may ever read this. Contrary to your wishful thinking, stupendous change events are part of this life. Until such time as the Lord returns, or the Rapture happens, it would be a good thing for us all to amend our earthly ways and focus upon a place where God’s absolutes, not evolutionary relativism, rule. That place is Wonder Springs.

In the close of his book “How Should We Then Live,” Schaeffer quotes the prophet Ezekiel, specifically Chapter 33, verses 1-11 and 19, which follow. As part of the canon of scripture the admonition given here applies to all mankind. Just because you do not wish to be a prophet in the Biblical sense, does not mean that God does not hold you responsible for this implementation. Human beings understand law quite well, it is grace with which we have a problem, except in the context of personal slothfulness.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Metis reasons

28/February/2007 08:36

Francis A. Schaeffer is probably the most astute theologian of the last half of the 20th century. In “How Should We Then Live” he points out the working paradigms of our post modern, post Christian world are personal peace and affluence. In “The Great Evangelical Disaster,” he shows that these paradigms stem from the 1930’s.

Interrupted by WWII, virtually everyone alive has been indoctrinated into some form of this mind set. From post war baby boomers and forward we all have been educated that we are products of random acts over eons of time and a lightning storm. This presupposition states we have no value other than those common to other forms of life. However, contrary to this presupposition, in Genesis 1:26 we find that all of mankind is created in God’s likeness, by God’s design. Men and women are truly different than all the rest of the forms of life. This has been believed by Jews over their history and by Christians for the last 2000 years. Created in God’s image, is absolute truth.

About 200 years ago, enlighten in our own wisdom, people began to systematically remove this tenet of God’s existence and mankind’s God given image from western culture. Thereafter, Charles Darwin became the father and god of modern evolutionary science. It was further necessary, for atheistic evolution to be possible, to postulate a past of great age and uniform progression. These are the philosophical forms of naturalism or materialism, meaning that everything that was, is, and will be, have natural or materialistic causation. There is by definition nothing supernatural, or beyond the natural.

Thankfully, all forms of representative government were well established through the Protestant Reformation before these natural revelations. Both Adolph Hitler, Stalin, and other recent despots base their existence upon modern revelations of man’s wisdom and the development of an enlightened ruling elite, despot, or intelligentsia, to make choices for those less evolutionarily developed.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Better news

21/February/2007 16:27

As we move forward in this series we all need to have some better news. To paraphrase the old saying so far, “If it were not for bad news, I would have no news at all.”

Hopefully, now we can begin to build a positive base to develop a leadership structure to help others as we live through the storms of this life. That of course can be either natural storms or the storms of just living in a world in which death and dying are true constants, and Christianity proclaims itself as the one hope for a true peaceful eternal future.

Probably the first principle in stupendous change or survival situations is the fact that you can’t use what you don’t have with you. This is usually thought of as gear, but since this series is about leadership, there are a lot of things you will hopefully commit to memory, to call upon if needed. A book “Stupendous Change Leadership for Dummies” is probably not something you want to have on top of your survival kit, even though it might be used as a good fire starter.

To develop some of that internalized knowledge, let us start with a little science history. From the middle ages, if not before, creation has been formally considered a Natural Revelation of God. Science as we know it today really is an outgrowth or development of what was called Natural Philosophy of the 17th - 18th centuries. Mix in a little man centered enlightenment and eventually you end up with a uniform evolutionary science stretching back millions and billions of years. Simply in a world we created without God, there can be no other way for mankind to define our eternal nature, if through choice we decide to forego the hope of an eternal future through Jesus Christ.

These early scientific observations noted that creation is both beautiful and gentle, but also harsh and cruel. Mankind does very well with the understanding of law, natural, common, and legislative. Mankind doesn’t handle grace very well. Probably because grace at man’s created beginning was not needed, because he was by his nature in perfect peace with God and with nature. However, because man was created as good in a very good creation, that desire for goodness is part of his given nature and can not be completely eliminated as the result of sin.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Energetics

14/February/2007 14:19

I awoke in the midnight darkness, just as if someone had turned on a light.

“Light yes, energy is what stupendous change is all about. Destructive force energies beyond the scale conceivable to man, fighting against a restoration of order by human God given talents, to create anew and afresh from the chaos. Believe it or not, just like God created the world in the beginning and continues the creation saga, from chaos to definable order. Amazing.”

Wikipedia defines energetics as “the scientific study of energy flows under transformation.” As the definition continues it states that energy flows at all scales, from the quantum level up through the cosmos, so energetics is truly a very “broad” discipline. Another way to define energetics is the application of kinetic energy to creation, in contrast to the potential energy which is stored.

I took a class in Ecological Energetics between when I got out of the service and when I arrived at graduate school at WSU. I believe we used a small paperback book by John Phillipson, but through photocopied papers we looked at energy flows in the broad context of wilderness ecosystems, to human energy flows in various environments, to the pronounced energy deficit of producing ethanol from midwestern corn, and many other energetic models. That single class changed the way I naturally look at the world, well beyond what I could have ever understood previously.

If you want to understand why I thought we made a grave mistake in our invasion and subsequent operations in Iraq, don’t look first at the religions or the politics, look first at the energetics and then let the rest of your decisions flow from there. The Bush Administration did not do that, and 3000 dead and billions of dollars later, we are just beginning to ask what went wrong. Duh, the energetics (in the scientific sense) of the operations did not and will not support what we were/are trying to do. Furthermore, perhaps the Administrations biggest tactical error was not realizing that energetics, this time with a political spin, would become a dominate force in the homeland, as battlefield energetic problems mounted.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Emasculated culture, Part 2

07/February/2007 12:17

The United States of America, is truly a unique country in many ways. Those of us who were born and raised and have spent most, if not all of our lives here, take everything pretty much for granted. That does not mean those blessings do not exist, it is just we, for a host of reasons, truly just don’t think about it that much.

The overriding concept of America’s greatness is what has been called the American Dream. In America no matter where you start, you can achieve more than you can in any other country. Too often we natives now define that freedom in material ways, simply because we take the opportunity to change the future for granted. Like no other nation, now or in the past, your future is pretty much undefined. You create your future utilizing your God given talents and ingenuity.

When our founding documents speak of all men being created equal, they are talking about more than genetics, but also opportunity. When they used the term men, they probably meant men, free men, owning property, not so much because they were seeking limitations of future equality, but they were citizens of a paradigm in time and space. Over time that men term, has been inclusive enough to include, men of color, women, and immigrants from all over the world. In the American sense all mankind is equal because we all were ultimately created by God.

As we have attempted to move ourselves beyond the absolutes of God, and to promote our personal form of narcissistic hedonism, we have sought to create special rights for ourselves and to deny them to others. Without a doubt the most blatant interference with those God given human rights is now called “A woman’s right to choose.” In this context, a woman has the right to alter God’s natural law as a personal decision. In the respect of alternation of natural law, America through abortion rights commits a holocaust each and every year, and we know longer even think about it.

This right was extended only because the right to be a narcissistic hedonist previously became the common law of the land. Today we promote that right everywhere. The so called evangelical church being one of the prime benefactors and promoters. It is simply that the evangel of good news is no longer about Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected to give you an eternal future, the modern evangel is that God has a wonderful plan for your present life, if you just do these simple truths, that I will share with you today, and if you buy our books and DVDs.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Emasculated culture, Part 1

31/January/2007 10:40

I know I am not being just politically incorrect, but translating the Bible concept of mankind (the Hebrew Adam) into so called gender neutral “human beings” does prove the point that we now live in an emasculated culture that has overwhelmed our society including the church.

As a consequence, our previous articles in the Stupendous Change Leadership Series dealing with command and control may seem way too macho to merit serious consideration by those more socially cognizant of today’s trends within our rapidly evolving society. It would be much better if we would just clone one another, then not only would we secure our own immortality, but we could do away with all that emotional baggage that has to deal with love, emotions, and family. Then and only then can we live for the common good as totally rational highly evolved animals. Well, at least how I defined the common good, your ideas just are not as highly evolved as mine.

It became apparent in a separate email thread while writing last week’s installment that I would have to deal with this feminization of culture concept. Then listening last week to the President’s, “State of the Union Address,” the Democrat Party’s response by freshmen Senator Jim Webb from Virginia, and the narcissistic moronic resolutions being proposed by other Congressional members, I concluded that this would have to be at least a two part series.

In this first installment we shall tell a couple stories of some potential sources of leadership, with limited comments about the results of this emasculating process. In our next installment we will delve into why this country does not need a gender neutral debate when it comes to fighting the War on Terror, nor will emasculation succeed if you would like to come out of a stupendous change event with the least amount of collateral damage, to yourself, and the other non-evolved human beings that give real meaning to your life.

To set the stage for these stories we must briefly look at the context of our world today. Today a country’s boundaries are lines on maps drawn by essentially European colonial powers. This western colonialism began early in the 16th century and was fueled by the Reformation and other factors as countries established national identities outside the influence of the Roman church. Nationalism extended those influences throughout the world. These first colonial expansions generally took place under the rule of royal family monarchs.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Depth of character

24/January/2007 12:48

A Positive Mental Attitude, PMA or some similar term is generally used to describe an attribute of people who are able to adapt to extremely trying times. The major outward appearance of these folks is that they are not overcome by fear of the situation, whether you call it stupendous change, disaster, catastrophe, pandemic or another name. This outward appearance is just a symptom however, of a more powerful inner condition called depth of character.

John Wayne made a movie called “True Grit” in which he starred as the man who had it. Pretty much in everyone of his movies he was that true grit man, the take charge leader who achieved the impossible, just because he could, and the situation demanded such a person. Enter “The Duke” to the rescue. The reason John was able to pull off those roles with such success, is that he really wasn’t acting, he was just playing a character of the real John Wayne.

So you are not John Wayne. You are a unique personality created in God’s image. Are you really comfortable as that person, or are you the person you are truly afraid of who you could become? The opposite of faith is not unbelief, even though every preacher may tell you so. The opposite of faith is fear. You become a faithful person by overcoming your fears.

Simple as it sounds the application is much more difficult, or is it? Faith is gained by living through something by/or in which you can’t control the outcome. The more of those events you are involved in, the more willing you should be to try other things. Chances are almost 100 percent the results will never turn out the way you envisioned in any faithful adventure, but that does not mean you did and do not grow as a person during the experience and beyond. On the backside of all adventures is the reward of increasing the depth and complexity of your created character.

Faith however is not presumption. Presumption is foolishness, because it doesn’t factor into account the true reality of the situation. So the question becomes how do you know which is faith and which is presumption, and how or why does this relate to this whole thing about disasters, catastrophes and stupendous change?
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Then it happens!

17/January/2007 09:05

Change is a constant in this life. It happens daily, even if you do not like it. Sometimes that change is what we define as stupendous. The rest of the world would call it a disaster or a catastrophe. When you look at it in that negative respect, you must also assume that bad things happen by chance or fate. Then it is just human nature to assume if bad things happen by chance, then good things also happen by chance. Pretty soon we live in a world not only where everything happens by chance and fate, but there is no such thing as cause and effect. If that is the true state of the world, what is there to live for? We might as well just let the catastrophe take us out.

But contrary to what our culture would like us to believe, human beings are not wired that way. Even Darwinian evolution believes in the survival of the fittest. Surely if everything happens by sheer chance then there would not have evolved a reason or instinct to be the fittest survivor. Life by it’s very nature is programed to survive and to reproduce. Nothing at all in that construct has anything to do with random chance. As Dr. Spock would say, “That is completely illogical.”

So change happens, but we each have as we learned last week a command and control system in place to deal with those changes. We might have never considered them command and control systems, but that is actually what they are.

Stupendous change then is by definition something that takes you beyond or disrupts your command and control systems. Tuesday morning it snowed another two inches in my neck of the Seattle woods. Wasn’t it strange, most of the crazy people who were in such a hurry during the major six inch snow last week, either were no longer crazy, or had adapted their command and control system to deal with this new snow fall event. Read More...

Stupendous Change Leadership Series: The Age War: Command & Control

10/January/2007 13:31

Command and control are the operative words for any stupendous change occurrence. It just so happens that war is the stupendous change happening where command and control principles are most often understood. War is hell on earth, or so I have been told by those who have first hand combat experience. Thankfully, by the grace of God, I do not. I have however, been a listener in many instances where combat veterans from WWII up through Iraq have tried to cope with this hell and still maintain, or reestablish their normal personality.

After the attack on the World Trade Center, I wrote an article by this same title on 13 September 2001. While not all the world’s events have transpired as outlined in that piece, much of it is still relevant. Furthermore, the very secret nature of some aspects of man induced stupendous change events are kept highly classified, or unknown to the general population until after the event and beyond.

The main purpose of military attacks is to disrupt to the maximum extent possible the enemy command and control structure and replace it with yours. This is called to achieve the mission. This is true with the World Trade Center incident, or other so called terrorist attacks around the world, as it is also true with US military operational patrols in Bagdad.

As pointed out in that earlier article there has always been a war going on in this world. Generally recognized throughout history, this is a war between good and evil. In our post-modern, post-Christian era, the problem is just the bad karma of lowly evolved religious bigots, trying to convert others to specific antiquated dogma.

This war however truly exists, and it is much more dramatic than any of the above concepts. This war is between the personal Creator God of the universe and His followers, and the evil personality of Satan and his minions. It must be said that all stupendous change events in some Divine way fit within the context of this war. The results of this military action are already determined, as a matter of absolute fact, completed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All that remains is a period of time until God finishes collecting the billions of individual unique personalities, to fulfill His purpose in the life to come. This eternal life is generally described in human terms as heaven, even though that concept is woefully inadequate.
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Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Wonder springs from - - -?

03/January/2007 09:08

Wonder springs from? Well, (a deep subject) this morning I was wondering why we have this entity called time that marks the passage of our lives. We take time for granted. We waste a lot of it. We assume that it will go on forever, just like today, yesterday, only better. If we didn’t have time, our lives and those of others would be undefined.

I recall a time many years ago, how that now has some true meaning, when I made a resolution. But I doubt that it was a New Year’s Resolution, to try to integrate my life into some type of unity. I had my work life, my home life, my private life, my desired life, but they were all sort of compartments. Compartments that really shared very little with one another.

All of us ask ourselves the same type of life questions. The typical American solution seems to be: I will work at a job I; A = enjoy, B = to make a lot of money, C= tolerate, D = despise, E = all the previous, so that as soon as possible, I can retire and do what I really want to do with my life. That gap seems to be, time wise on average 30 to 40 years.

The problem then, being that old and lofty age, you physically can not do a lot of the things you desired to do, the way you could, when you began this future quest. Furthermore, most in that intervening period never develop the skills necessary to really accomplish the now real task that retirement hands us. If that were not bad enough, you have to rest a lot, just to mentally adjust to all that stuff you did, all those years, you were waiting to do what you wanted to do now. Whew, can you wait?

As many have said and I concur, retirement as we define it, isn’t in the Bible. There are some references of moving out to let others in, but there seems to be little concept of traveling to Mexico and sitting in a bar. There is an emphasis on going to a foreign land to do God’s work, but you are way too busy to sit in a bar. That also happens when you are young (and perhaps too idealistic to understand what you are really signing up to do.)
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