The Failure of Success
25/November/2009 11:38 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 11, Issue 46
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>>Print view
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.
Thankfully the Wall Street traders are doing well. Prosperity there has returned. So instead, as in the old days they did their market making with leveraged money, the more highly leveraged the better, now they are making markets with free money, provided by the government, not the taxpayers because we are so far beyond financial responsibility that taxes have become oxymoronic. If this again all falls apart, they can get some more money for free to again “save the world from financial collapse.” Yet they still make money the old fashioned way, on both the purchase and the sale, and also the spread between the up and down.
Real estate, gross consumerism, and jobs are still being stubborn in their response to all the money being created, but the goal of all of these free spending programs really had nothing to do with what is called “Main Street.” But in the essence of free markets, someday all of this money will trickle down to the folks, because our leaders tell us it must, by their decree if nothing else. Isn’t that what modern leadership is all about? Changing the world through words, because just words and being really cool is enough. We can just call it money-gravity, or MG for short and prosperity will arrive someday, maybe, we hope, or is that, we hype?
For their part conservatives and libertarians talk about burdening our future and our children’s future with massive government and private debt. This of course speaks to the strength of our educational system of self-reinforcement. Everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. You too can be a great leader, just like President Obama, by reading your teleprompter and memorizing your dozen talking points, without taking off your shoes. Paying off your debt is nothing but a late twentieth century myth and talking point. Traditional Historic American Values state that you are to live debt free and buy only what you can afford.
The key to a sound financial future, for politicians of any strain is, in Americanized jargon, “Dimes for Dollars.” In banana republics they call it a currency revaluation. In America’s current situation it will work a whole lot better if we give the Chinese ten dimes for the new dollar, and you let everyone else use their ingenuity to find a personal path out of the chaos. Necessity is always the best way to stimulate true economic growth. After all the alternative is not whirred peas, but true hunger. However observable monetary revaluations normally run the dollars to pennies, but we wouldn’t want to sound alarmist.
So the story really isn’t the story anymore. The story is the back-story and everyone is left to there own devices to figure out what that story may be. So how do we figure out the truth when even the “no spin zone,” works essentially on the reality of opinion dynamics?
Put in the back-story light. “Who is going to pay to advertise on “The O Reilly Factor,” when with a Tivo or DVR you can fast forward through all the commercials and just watch the opinion dynamics created by pundits working for free to push their books and speaking agendas?
I watched Bill’s hard-hitting interview with Sarah Palin, which concluded Monday night. Quite an interesting back-story. So you have this six foot plus “Bold Fresh” interviewer, sitting on the front of a totally uncomfortable looking chair and leaning forward to ask his hard hitting probing questions. No attempt to intimidate there!
Similarly Sarah Palin is sitting deep in a matching chair, where the arms basically come to her shoulders. Considering the circumstances, answering all of Bill’s questions with ease. One has to question if O Reilly’s producers cut off an inch or so off the front legs of the chair and pulled some of the stuffing from the cushion. Furthermore you have to wonder why a true hockey mom wearing lipstick didn’t hit Bill over the head with a hockey stick and demand more fair and balanced situational changes.
Questions! Questions! Questions! So many questions so few answers. Now let’s see if we can find some change you can believe in? So where do we begin?
Some American Christian leaders last week proved evolution, by developing a spine. Truly they said they are going to no longer remain silent on social issues of the day and someday that might include such things as civil disobedience and other forms of Gandhi’s nonviolent Hindu civil protests. Even “the longest journey begins with the first step” and this is an encouraging one. Discarding the evolution for a moment, the Biblical reference may mean that this unrest in America is the beginning of a move of God. We have written before about the Dry Bones Valley in Ezekiel, our latest reference is found in Twenty-First Century Feudalism from June 9, 2009 referencing articles in November 2007.
Mentioning God, as the Supreme Being, is also truly an new development. In the second segment on his show Monday, Glenn Beck had a very similar presentation to our April Fools Day article on “The Five Essential Gs.” To review those five we have: God – Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns. Four of those Gs are as old as the hills, probably dating back to at least the Great Depression, but our unique contribution is the activator of the other four, namely Gumption. Without Gumption with a capital G all the rest remain talking points and spin.
The one thing that has changed significantly since April is the value of Gold. In the 5 Gs concept gold is the substitute for paper money as well as source for maintaining wealth. Because of the increasing value of gold, it can no longer work as a medium of monetary exchange, because for many of us an ounce of gold is become a month’s salary. Gold is and will always be a medium for you to maintain your wealth, but it is now too expensive to be used as a tool of commerce. You are not going to be able to go into a store and trade a couple of milligrams of gold for a can of soup.
People who have never handled gold just don’t realize how heavy it is and how valuable a little bit of gold can be. For example there is an old cooking saying that “A pint is a pound, the world around.” I realize this only now makes any sense in the United States, but a pound of gold is twelve troy ounces. The pint – pound concept refers to the weight of a pound of water. So if we fill that pint jar with gold instead of weighing sixteen avoirdupois ounces as water, it now weighs over nineteen pounds (over 8.6 Kg). If we were to sell that jar of gold at a soon to be spot value of $1200 per ounce we would see that are pint jar would be worth about $280,000.
From this we see that unless you are planning on buying a new car, gold really isn’t a good substitute for money. A better way to have hard money, that you might be able to do something with, is old silver coins and even real copper pennies. First of all those old real coins are still defined as “legal tender” by the government. From your perspective it is really just the exchange rate between the old silver dollar and any new paper dollar or coin. In Wal-Mart you will probably always need worthless money, but if times get really rough, the old money may again become the only real money.
As far as buying gold from the open market. If we are really speaking of Godly change, if you read Haggai 2:4b-9, which we used to begin Part 9 of our Traditional Historic American Values series, you can understand that all the gold and silver that belongs to governments and precious metals traders really is there on loan from God. What most people do not realize is all these worldly stockpiled precious metals wealth are just a small portion of all the precious metals that exist in nature.
With precious metals prices where they are now if you can detect and verify a body of gold, it is probably worth mining. The problem is that it probably does not exist in a place where you could get the gold the way the 49ers did a hundred and sixty years ago. That is a good thing, because if it did, the 49ers and their followers would have found and collected it. However there are literally countless deposits that may only hold a pint of gold that you can collect and have God give you wealth directly from His hand. With gold values of one ounce per ton that pint jar filled with gold could exist in only about one hundred fifty yards of material, or a dining room twelve by fourteen with an eight foot ceiling.
A couple of months ago I was approached by some potential clients that seem to think they have a gold property much bigger than that. As I have followed that trail, I have refounded the gold mining equipment company (PREFER Ltd), I had during the 1980s which focused upon small individual and commercial mining operations as described above. We are still waiting on that group to come up with some money for true scientific site testing to show to serious investors that they really have found the Mother Lode, but that should not limit the opportunities of others.
Furthermore if you are one of those people who can and must testify to Washington State regulators you are financially able to lose everything you own in small company investments and still not be broke, I would like to talk with you. In the big scheme of things it really is not all that much money and what better way to create wealth than do it with wealth that is relatively free from bureaucratic regulators anywhere in the world. There is gold in them there hills and as in the olden days it is generally much more lucrative to sell the shovel than to do the prospecting and the digging.
Of course if you are still in that sound financial position, chances are you did not invest heavily in the secure nature of SEC verified Wall Street investments. Similarly that is why I get to have all the fun writing these weekly articles for no money from here in Nowhere, and you get to try and figure out what tricks the government and Wall Street are going to think up next to get your wealth.
Finally this gets us to Gumption which is the 5 G point I really wanted to begin to focus this week and beyond. Do you have any?
It has been seven months since I first published that article and it is time for a reality check.
Check 1: Have you sought God in a church that really understands the gospel as substitutionary atonement and justification instead of warm fuzzy materialism?
Check 2: Have you done anything at all related to getting out of debt, paying off all your bills, and reading about what really could happen if the financial system collapses? It is not rocket science and it is happening and happened throughout the world and throughout human history. Have you bought a bag of silver coins, or even moved what investment money you have left to a more secure place? Perhaps a metal box buried in the backyard?
Check 3: Have you increased your stock of food on hand? How about a means to rotate those stocks, so that the meat of 1992 is not at the bottom of the freezer and those cans of vegetables you never use which still have sticky price tags on their tops have found there way to compost?
Check 4: Finally are you still procrastinating about buying a gun? I was thinking about what traditional values Americans could do to really upset Progressives who want to run your life. It is not to protest abortion rights in the ObamaCare reform. It is not to seek a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage between a man and a woman. It is not to buy 30 copies of “Going Rogue,” to pass out on the street; not ten copies of “Bold Fresh,” to donate to the library; and not the entire mélange of Glenn Beck’s productions to give to your liberal friends for “Christmas.” It is not to be a TEA Party organizer, or run for political office to throw out both the Communist Democrats and the Out of touch Republicans.
No ladies and gentlemen, the greatest thing you can do to show that you value Traditional Historic American Values is to buy a gun. Actually it would be even more effective to buy two guns if you don’t already have any. One must be a sidearm (pistol) and the other a long gun (rifle or shotgun). If you really want to upset the progressive plan, while you are at the gun shop buy the brass, bullets, powder, and reloading supplies to reload your own.
I am convinced that if gun sales across the United States rose rapidly and dramatically the political climate in America would change away from fighting the progressive agenda in their comfort zone, to a traditional values guerilla (insurgency) war where a real shot would never have to be fired.
As is said about Sarah Palin; she didn’t quit as governor of Alaska to quit, she was just reloading. The things that really frustrate liberals in America about Sarah Palin is the fact she lives her life as if an Almighty God really exists, and she also knows not only how to reload, but also how to really reload. That literally scares the hell out of them, thought word and deed. It will be the reloading and reloading principle that will separate those with gumption from the intellectual elite who have never done anything significant in their lives except never risk failure. They will quickly learn what success that will bring.
For a little more positive optimism for this Thanksgiving week I would like to close with the chorus from a song by John Fogerty, then of “Credence Clearwater Revival” from the turbulent 1970s and asks the question:
“I want to know, have you ever seen the rain
Comin down on a sunny day?”
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
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.
Thankfully the Wall Street traders are doing well. Prosperity there has returned. So instead, as in the old days they did their market making with leveraged money, the more highly leveraged the better, now they are making markets with free money, provided by the government, not the taxpayers because we are so far beyond financial responsibility that taxes have become oxymoronic. If this again all falls apart, they can get some more money for free to again “save the world from financial collapse.” Yet they still make money the old fashioned way, on both the purchase and the sale, and also the spread between the up and down.
Real estate, gross consumerism, and jobs are still being stubborn in their response to all the money being created, but the goal of all of these free spending programs really had nothing to do with what is called “Main Street.” But in the essence of free markets, someday all of this money will trickle down to the folks, because our leaders tell us it must, by their decree if nothing else. Isn’t that what modern leadership is all about? Changing the world through words, because just words and being really cool is enough. We can just call it money-gravity, or MG for short and prosperity will arrive someday, maybe, we hope, or is that, we hype?
For their part conservatives and libertarians talk about burdening our future and our children’s future with massive government and private debt. This of course speaks to the strength of our educational system of self-reinforcement. Everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. You too can be a great leader, just like President Obama, by reading your teleprompter and memorizing your dozen talking points, without taking off your shoes. Paying off your debt is nothing but a late twentieth century myth and talking point. Traditional Historic American Values state that you are to live debt free and buy only what you can afford.
The key to a sound financial future, for politicians of any strain is, in Americanized jargon, “Dimes for Dollars.” In banana republics they call it a currency revaluation. In America’s current situation it will work a whole lot better if we give the Chinese ten dimes for the new dollar, and you let everyone else use their ingenuity to find a personal path out of the chaos. Necessity is always the best way to stimulate true economic growth. After all the alternative is not whirred peas, but true hunger. However observable monetary revaluations normally run the dollars to pennies, but we wouldn’t want to sound alarmist.
So the story really isn’t the story anymore. The story is the back-story and everyone is left to there own devices to figure out what that story may be. So how do we figure out the truth when even the “no spin zone,” works essentially on the reality of opinion dynamics?
Put in the back-story light. “Who is going to pay to advertise on “The O Reilly Factor,” when with a Tivo or DVR you can fast forward through all the commercials and just watch the opinion dynamics created by pundits working for free to push their books and speaking agendas?
I watched Bill’s hard-hitting interview with Sarah Palin, which concluded Monday night. Quite an interesting back-story. So you have this six foot plus “Bold Fresh” interviewer, sitting on the front of a totally uncomfortable looking chair and leaning forward to ask his hard hitting probing questions. No attempt to intimidate there!
Similarly Sarah Palin is sitting deep in a matching chair, where the arms basically come to her shoulders. Considering the circumstances, answering all of Bill’s questions with ease. One has to question if O Reilly’s producers cut off an inch or so off the front legs of the chair and pulled some of the stuffing from the cushion. Furthermore you have to wonder why a true hockey mom wearing lipstick didn’t hit Bill over the head with a hockey stick and demand more fair and balanced situational changes.
Questions! Questions! Questions! So many questions so few answers. Now let’s see if we can find some change you can believe in? So where do we begin?
Some American Christian leaders last week proved evolution, by developing a spine. Truly they said they are going to no longer remain silent on social issues of the day and someday that might include such things as civil disobedience and other forms of Gandhi’s nonviolent Hindu civil protests. Even “the longest journey begins with the first step” and this is an encouraging one. Discarding the evolution for a moment, the Biblical reference may mean that this unrest in America is the beginning of a move of God. We have written before about the Dry Bones Valley in Ezekiel, our latest reference is found in Twenty-First Century Feudalism from June 9, 2009 referencing articles in November 2007.
Mentioning God, as the Supreme Being, is also truly an new development. In the second segment on his show Monday, Glenn Beck had a very similar presentation to our April Fools Day article on “The Five Essential Gs.” To review those five we have: God – Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns. Four of those Gs are as old as the hills, probably dating back to at least the Great Depression, but our unique contribution is the activator of the other four, namely Gumption. Without Gumption with a capital G all the rest remain talking points and spin.
The one thing that has changed significantly since April is the value of Gold. In the 5 Gs concept gold is the substitute for paper money as well as source for maintaining wealth. Because of the increasing value of gold, it can no longer work as a medium of monetary exchange, because for many of us an ounce of gold is become a month’s salary. Gold is and will always be a medium for you to maintain your wealth, but it is now too expensive to be used as a tool of commerce. You are not going to be able to go into a store and trade a couple of milligrams of gold for a can of soup.
People who have never handled gold just don’t realize how heavy it is and how valuable a little bit of gold can be. For example there is an old cooking saying that “A pint is a pound, the world around.” I realize this only now makes any sense in the United States, but a pound of gold is twelve troy ounces. The pint – pound concept refers to the weight of a pound of water. So if we fill that pint jar with gold instead of weighing sixteen avoirdupois ounces as water, it now weighs over nineteen pounds (over 8.6 Kg). If we were to sell that jar of gold at a soon to be spot value of $1200 per ounce we would see that are pint jar would be worth about $280,000.
From this we see that unless you are planning on buying a new car, gold really isn’t a good substitute for money. A better way to have hard money, that you might be able to do something with, is old silver coins and even real copper pennies. First of all those old real coins are still defined as “legal tender” by the government. From your perspective it is really just the exchange rate between the old silver dollar and any new paper dollar or coin. In Wal-Mart you will probably always need worthless money, but if times get really rough, the old money may again become the only real money.
As far as buying gold from the open market. If we are really speaking of Godly change, if you read Haggai 2:4b-9, which we used to begin Part 9 of our Traditional Historic American Values series, you can understand that all the gold and silver that belongs to governments and precious metals traders really is there on loan from God. What most people do not realize is all these worldly stockpiled precious metals wealth are just a small portion of all the precious metals that exist in nature.
With precious metals prices where they are now if you can detect and verify a body of gold, it is probably worth mining. The problem is that it probably does not exist in a place where you could get the gold the way the 49ers did a hundred and sixty years ago. That is a good thing, because if it did, the 49ers and their followers would have found and collected it. However there are literally countless deposits that may only hold a pint of gold that you can collect and have God give you wealth directly from His hand. With gold values of one ounce per ton that pint jar filled with gold could exist in only about one hundred fifty yards of material, or a dining room twelve by fourteen with an eight foot ceiling.
A couple of months ago I was approached by some potential clients that seem to think they have a gold property much bigger than that. As I have followed that trail, I have refounded the gold mining equipment company (PREFER Ltd), I had during the 1980s which focused upon small individual and commercial mining operations as described above. We are still waiting on that group to come up with some money for true scientific site testing to show to serious investors that they really have found the Mother Lode, but that should not limit the opportunities of others.
Furthermore if you are one of those people who can and must testify to Washington State regulators you are financially able to lose everything you own in small company investments and still not be broke, I would like to talk with you. In the big scheme of things it really is not all that much money and what better way to create wealth than do it with wealth that is relatively free from bureaucratic regulators anywhere in the world. There is gold in them there hills and as in the olden days it is generally much more lucrative to sell the shovel than to do the prospecting and the digging.
Of course if you are still in that sound financial position, chances are you did not invest heavily in the secure nature of SEC verified Wall Street investments. Similarly that is why I get to have all the fun writing these weekly articles for no money from here in Nowhere, and you get to try and figure out what tricks the government and Wall Street are going to think up next to get your wealth.
Finally this gets us to Gumption which is the 5 G point I really wanted to begin to focus this week and beyond. Do you have any?
It has been seven months since I first published that article and it is time for a reality check.
Check 1: Have you sought God in a church that really understands the gospel as substitutionary atonement and justification instead of warm fuzzy materialism?
Check 2: Have you done anything at all related to getting out of debt, paying off all your bills, and reading about what really could happen if the financial system collapses? It is not rocket science and it is happening and happened throughout the world and throughout human history. Have you bought a bag of silver coins, or even moved what investment money you have left to a more secure place? Perhaps a metal box buried in the backyard?
Check 3: Have you increased your stock of food on hand? How about a means to rotate those stocks, so that the meat of 1992 is not at the bottom of the freezer and those cans of vegetables you never use which still have sticky price tags on their tops have found there way to compost?
Check 4: Finally are you still procrastinating about buying a gun? I was thinking about what traditional values Americans could do to really upset Progressives who want to run your life. It is not to protest abortion rights in the ObamaCare reform. It is not to seek a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage between a man and a woman. It is not to buy 30 copies of “Going Rogue,” to pass out on the street; not ten copies of “Bold Fresh,” to donate to the library; and not the entire mélange of Glenn Beck’s productions to give to your liberal friends for “Christmas.” It is not to be a TEA Party organizer, or run for political office to throw out both the Communist Democrats and the Out of touch Republicans.
No ladies and gentlemen, the greatest thing you can do to show that you value Traditional Historic American Values is to buy a gun. Actually it would be even more effective to buy two guns if you don’t already have any. One must be a sidearm (pistol) and the other a long gun (rifle or shotgun). If you really want to upset the progressive plan, while you are at the gun shop buy the brass, bullets, powder, and reloading supplies to reload your own.
I am convinced that if gun sales across the United States rose rapidly and dramatically the political climate in America would change away from fighting the progressive agenda in their comfort zone, to a traditional values guerilla (insurgency) war where a real shot would never have to be fired.
As is said about Sarah Palin; she didn’t quit as governor of Alaska to quit, she was just reloading. The things that really frustrate liberals in America about Sarah Palin is the fact she lives her life as if an Almighty God really exists, and she also knows not only how to reload, but also how to really reload. That literally scares the hell out of them, thought word and deed. It will be the reloading and reloading principle that will separate those with gumption from the intellectual elite who have never done anything significant in their lives except never risk failure. They will quickly learn what success that will bring.
For a little more positive optimism for this Thanksgiving week I would like to close with the chorus from a song by John Fogerty, then of “Credence Clearwater Revival” from the turbulent 1970s and asks the question:
“I want to know, have you ever seen the rain
Comin down on a sunny day?”