Just traveling
04/June/2008 07:14 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 23
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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.
Some bad news, when we were in Roswell, New Mexico yesterday, it was quite apparent that this city of a little less than 50 thousand people looked just like about like any city in the rest of the United States. I suppose therefore that the Aliens that have taken Roswell must now rule over the development of the whole country and more than a few of you reading these words might also have been somewhat recent arrivals from outer space.
We have traveled on this journey as the land has slowly tilted upward, the landscape has varied, much of it being desert and short grasslands. We will continue this journey most of the way in a landscape dominated at some time in the past by water beyond the comprehension of man. Whether you believe that this happened gradually over millions and billions of years or just a few thousand years ago, that reality of a universe of water must be taken into account.
So when we are in such a situation beyond the capacity of humanity to understand, we must look outside ourselves for that understanding. There are two religious worldviews that bring some insight. Only one can be right for they are mutually exclusive. One is explained in the Bible as the Genesis Flood. The other religion is atheistic evolution that was founded in a land far from this environment, across a today real ocean.
However if you look at the landscape with a somewhat open mind the young earth concept found and briefly explained in the Bible seems to make much more sense, because extremely large periods of time just do not really explain any of the complex nature of these surroundings. It looks just like the land was at the bottom of an ocean or sea. It rose rapidly and the water simply drained off.
As we continue our journey northward that same water story will be repeated in the canyons of Utah. In Montana where those seabeds will be covered more recently with ice. There we will be forced to deal with ice carved features again beyond the comprehension of humanity to understand.
This means is that this hype about a few degrees of climate change one way or the other bringing about the end of life as we know it on the planet, must have been created in the mind of someone detached from this, the real world of nature.
One of the concepts I am ruminating upon as we travel is the relationship among wealth, money, and consumption.
For the recent tax refund either in the process or received by American taxpayers, the idea promoted by the politicians was we were supposed to go out and spend the money on something. That something really didn’t matter, but the hype essentially was that the god of consumption needed to be fed and since you were unwilling or unable to offer your required sin offering as prescribed, the government was going to give you the money.
If you look at the current run up in oil prices, there are a lot of people making a lot of money, but it has really thus far had only a slight effect upon the underlying wealth. A couple of years ago that same thing could have been said for the subprime mortgage market. Now that mortgage money run bubble has burst and the fallout from that continues.
If you use the same analogy in both situations you see what happens as a disease of too much money chases too little wealth. To expand that concept a little more, there really is too much highly leveraged speculative money trying to acquire a stake in the underlying wealth of real estate or energy. Currently in the world there really is no concept or plan for really creating new investment wealth specifically, we just want to make more and more money as rapidly as possible.
The question that arises is then what?
The current answers seems not to invest, but to feed the god of consumption no matter what the cost. So far the cost truly has required a little sacrifice on the part of most of us, but really there is no concept that addresses any of the underlying issues.
I hope this trip and the time driving will give me some insights on how we might address the need for our longer term need for financial investment liquidity
PDF Copy
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.
Some bad news, when we were in Roswell, New Mexico yesterday, it was quite apparent that this city of a little less than 50 thousand people looked just like about like any city in the rest of the United States. I suppose therefore that the Aliens that have taken Roswell must now rule over the development of the whole country and more than a few of you reading these words might also have been somewhat recent arrivals from outer space.
We have traveled on this journey as the land has slowly tilted upward, the landscape has varied, much of it being desert and short grasslands. We will continue this journey most of the way in a landscape dominated at some time in the past by water beyond the comprehension of man. Whether you believe that this happened gradually over millions and billions of years or just a few thousand years ago, that reality of a universe of water must be taken into account.
So when we are in such a situation beyond the capacity of humanity to understand, we must look outside ourselves for that understanding. There are two religious worldviews that bring some insight. Only one can be right for they are mutually exclusive. One is explained in the Bible as the Genesis Flood. The other religion is atheistic evolution that was founded in a land far from this environment, across a today real ocean.
However if you look at the landscape with a somewhat open mind the young earth concept found and briefly explained in the Bible seems to make much more sense, because extremely large periods of time just do not really explain any of the complex nature of these surroundings. It looks just like the land was at the bottom of an ocean or sea. It rose rapidly and the water simply drained off.
As we continue our journey northward that same water story will be repeated in the canyons of Utah. In Montana where those seabeds will be covered more recently with ice. There we will be forced to deal with ice carved features again beyond the comprehension of humanity to understand.
This means is that this hype about a few degrees of climate change one way or the other bringing about the end of life as we know it on the planet, must have been created in the mind of someone detached from this, the real world of nature.
One of the concepts I am ruminating upon as we travel is the relationship among wealth, money, and consumption.
For the recent tax refund either in the process or received by American taxpayers, the idea promoted by the politicians was we were supposed to go out and spend the money on something. That something really didn’t matter, but the hype essentially was that the god of consumption needed to be fed and since you were unwilling or unable to offer your required sin offering as prescribed, the government was going to give you the money.
If you look at the current run up in oil prices, there are a lot of people making a lot of money, but it has really thus far had only a slight effect upon the underlying wealth. A couple of years ago that same thing could have been said for the subprime mortgage market. Now that mortgage money run bubble has burst and the fallout from that continues.
If you use the same analogy in both situations you see what happens as a disease of too much money chases too little wealth. To expand that concept a little more, there really is too much highly leveraged speculative money trying to acquire a stake in the underlying wealth of real estate or energy. Currently in the world there really is no concept or plan for really creating new investment wealth specifically, we just want to make more and more money as rapidly as possible.
The question that arises is then what?
The current answers seems not to invest, but to feed the god of consumption no matter what the cost. So far the cost truly has required a little sacrifice on the part of most of us, but really there is no concept that addresses any of the underlying issues.
I hope this trip and the time driving will give me some insights on how we might address the need for our longer term need for financial investment liquidity