The sun still rises
17/September/2008 12:14 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 37
PDF copy
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).
That whole article would have been in my, now mostly unused, journalistic requirement of less than a thousand words, cut from the bottom; beginning with the real life story about how important this service was during and after the two forest fires were started by the wind on July 10, 2008. Then I was planning on taking off this week’s column. However, without some real and verifiable facts, at least I find it difficult to attempt real journalism, but I realized I can bloviate about this financial happening ad-nauseam.
Also, without that Internet connection I really cannot continue the leadership series I started last week. The stationary antenna I used, last fall, all winter, spring and summer at my cabin is worthless at this time. I have a line of sight signal from the Kettle River Campground eight miles away, but that is in the open air, in the sun, off my laptop battery. This definitely is not conducive to researching, writing, editing, and fact checking a real article. The only place with a semblance of the right atmosphere is the Colville Library some twenty eight miles in distance.
“Verizon wireless – Can you hear me now? If not could someone else please take up the cause to see if something can be done!“
Yes, the sun did rise this morning and life goes on for most of the real world. The articles I read yesterday in Colville blamed greed and a whole host of other human attributes for the Wall Street demise. I however, find it interesting in a world in which there are no absolutes, greed has now become a virtue, instead of a vice or and archaic sin, unless it goes amiss, then only in that specific situation is it, if not evil, it is at least malevolent.
Furthermore, how is anyone going to understand the concept of true right and wrong when the most popular evangelical Christian message seems to be that God and Jesus want you to be monetarily rich in this present world. What Jesus did, no longer matters, what Jesus can help you do for yourself is still the most popular religion in America, just as when old Ben Franklin, coined the now famous “biblical” proverb: “Heaven helps those, who help themselves.”
Well if the evangelical church works like Wall Street, it is nice to understand that Natural Law and Nature’s God, still work in the world and just naturally bring affliction upon both the good and evil. So Hurricane Ike made landfall on the Gulf coast, missing all the oil production facilities and the price of oil continued to drop. A natural Northeaster formed over Wall Street and sunk a couple of ships rearranging their deck chairs on the turbulent ocean of debt finance, the primary source of financial liquidity left on earth.
As we have stated many times from Wonder Springs, there is too much non-energetic debt money chasing too little true wealth in the financial universe. Until that imbalance is corrected, and this was just a couple of small ship sinkings, we are not going to have smooth financial seas for a long time to come.
So I found it quite amusing, reflecting on the articles about the presidential and vice presidential candidates discussing the current financial enigma, you had three little pigs all wearing lipstick and a hockey mom. Maybe lipstick is a new growth industry.
So the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy John said he wanted to build and John said, “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the house, it is just a storm which will soon blow over.”
Then the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy Barack said he wanted to build and Barack said, “Piggy John’s house is in shambles and John doesn’t even know it, Piggy John is completely out of touch with the big bad wolf.” Piggy Barack however never bothered to talk about his house and how it would weather the wolf storm.
Then the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy Joe said that piggy Barack wanted to build and piggy Joe said. “The house that President Bush built is the same house that Piggy John thinks he might own, but he doesn’t know where the keys are located.” When asked about his personal thoughts about piggy Barack’s house, piggy Joe responded, “Why don’t you ask Hillary, she wears lipstick. I was chosen to be on Barack’s ticket, because I am a foreign policy expert.”
To come back to the context of the non-energetic debt ocean, we will try to simplify the nature of this phenomenon, so that maybe Wall Street, the business school educated, and the three little piggies, might understand. I think hockey and regular moms and dads have a better natural understanding than those aforementioned groups.
There are almost countless ways that money is created in the world today, essentially all of it related to short term or long term debt. For the most part that debt is never retired (paid off). Over time that puddle, became a pond, then a lake, and now, one huge ocean that covers the whole world.
To use an analogy, let us use the Biblical example of Noah’s Flood. It really makes no difference in this analogy if you think that this flood actually occurred or not, and no logical argument is going to change your mind from where it now stands. The point being where you now stand is on an ark or ship, for there is no dry ground.
What the world needs now is some dry ground. “Water, water, everywhere and not a drop, to drink.” So says the Ancient Mariner.
Now over time the sun will evaporate some of that water and a natural hydrologic (liquidity) cycle will be established and true wealth can be created. However for that to occur it is going to take a very, very long time, like evolutionary time.
What the world really needs to do is take on the alligators and drain a few swamps. Once the swamps are drained we can plant crops, orchards, and vineyards, build towns and cities, and create a human civilization. If need be if some of the land gets too dry we can even build irrigation projects. All these serve as a basis for the creation of true wealth, as long as debt is maintained as only portion of those assets, not the primary basis for those assets. It all sounds so simple except for the alligators.
We drain the swamps by a two pronged program, we control the alligators, force will probably be required, and we convert the water into dry land, for lack of a better term that will require alchemy.
Starting with the alligators. Alligators live in the swamp, they like the swamp, their home is the swamp. Alligators may venture onto dry ground and cause some turmoil but they quickly return to the swamp. To control the alligators, as we look at how to drain the swamp, we will probably have to eat a lot of alligator steaks and burgers. But exercising a little bit of human ingenuity we could very shortly be having alligator iPods, bicycles, and yes, even alligator lipstick. (I understand it is a cool shade of green.)
The alchemy of actually draining the swamp once the alligators are no longer in control is not all that difficult. It just requires a little magic and it is not all that impossible. After all Abraham Lincoln did it after the civil war, when he created the real greenback, which lasted until the creation of The Fed in 1913, some fifty years.
Of course the 21st Century is not the 19th. We live in a much more enlightened, and primitive society, in which the highest and best good is what is in it for me. That however has no basis in survival of the fittest, that assumption is based upon the illusion that I can, through my thoughts and actions, control natural law. That is a prescription of extinction, not heaven on earth.
Now as far as I can tell the sun rose again all over the earth and a least in the USA, men and women with traditional American values, will go to work, earn some money, deal with something that they were not expecting to deal with, come home, try to relax and get a good nights sleep and do it all again the next day. Through it all they are beginning to determine which of the two teams of now lipstick wearers they are going to vote for. The election is a lot closer than any of the alligators had forecast not all that long ago.
What these voters are really looking for is not focus group tested talking points, but a real dialog about real issues, finance, energy, foreign policy, we listed twelve such points a couple of weeks ago, we purposely left off a number, and dismissed a couple last week as irrelevant and irreverent.
I suppose to put this meandering discourse into some sort of coherence, the opening of my problems with Verizon wireless ring true to all Americans, “Can you hear me now?”
Of course the corollary statement is the one everyone is really concerned about, “Is anyone really listening? I am continually fighting these needless battles with everyone that says they want to make my life easier. Perhaps we should just scrap the whole thing and start over.”
When that scrapping begins for real, we will start to see the sunset on a world in which “chaos is enforced by regulation” and people will again be able to see some help beyond their own and outside reinforced self-determination.
PDF copy
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).
That whole article would have been in my, now mostly unused, journalistic requirement of less than a thousand words, cut from the bottom; beginning with the real life story about how important this service was during and after the two forest fires were started by the wind on July 10, 2008. Then I was planning on taking off this week’s column. However, without some real and verifiable facts, at least I find it difficult to attempt real journalism, but I realized I can bloviate about this financial happening ad-nauseam.
Also, without that Internet connection I really cannot continue the leadership series I started last week. The stationary antenna I used, last fall, all winter, spring and summer at my cabin is worthless at this time. I have a line of sight signal from the Kettle River Campground eight miles away, but that is in the open air, in the sun, off my laptop battery. This definitely is not conducive to researching, writing, editing, and fact checking a real article. The only place with a semblance of the right atmosphere is the Colville Library some twenty eight miles in distance.
“Verizon wireless – Can you hear me now? If not could someone else please take up the cause to see if something can be done!“
Yes, the sun did rise this morning and life goes on for most of the real world. The articles I read yesterday in Colville blamed greed and a whole host of other human attributes for the Wall Street demise. I however, find it interesting in a world in which there are no absolutes, greed has now become a virtue, instead of a vice or and archaic sin, unless it goes amiss, then only in that specific situation is it, if not evil, it is at least malevolent.
Furthermore, how is anyone going to understand the concept of true right and wrong when the most popular evangelical Christian message seems to be that God and Jesus want you to be monetarily rich in this present world. What Jesus did, no longer matters, what Jesus can help you do for yourself is still the most popular religion in America, just as when old Ben Franklin, coined the now famous “biblical” proverb: “Heaven helps those, who help themselves.”
Well if the evangelical church works like Wall Street, it is nice to understand that Natural Law and Nature’s God, still work in the world and just naturally bring affliction upon both the good and evil. So Hurricane Ike made landfall on the Gulf coast, missing all the oil production facilities and the price of oil continued to drop. A natural Northeaster formed over Wall Street and sunk a couple of ships rearranging their deck chairs on the turbulent ocean of debt finance, the primary source of financial liquidity left on earth.
As we have stated many times from Wonder Springs, there is too much non-energetic debt money chasing too little true wealth in the financial universe. Until that imbalance is corrected, and this was just a couple of small ship sinkings, we are not going to have smooth financial seas for a long time to come.
So I found it quite amusing, reflecting on the articles about the presidential and vice presidential candidates discussing the current financial enigma, you had three little pigs all wearing lipstick and a hockey mom. Maybe lipstick is a new growth industry.
So the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy John said he wanted to build and John said, “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the house, it is just a storm which will soon blow over.”
Then the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy Barack said he wanted to build and Barack said, “Piggy John’s house is in shambles and John doesn’t even know it, Piggy John is completely out of touch with the big bad wolf.” Piggy Barack however never bothered to talk about his house and how it would weather the wolf storm.
Then the big bad wolf came and blew on the house that piggy Joe said that piggy Barack wanted to build and piggy Joe said. “The house that President Bush built is the same house that Piggy John thinks he might own, but he doesn’t know where the keys are located.” When asked about his personal thoughts about piggy Barack’s house, piggy Joe responded, “Why don’t you ask Hillary, she wears lipstick. I was chosen to be on Barack’s ticket, because I am a foreign policy expert.”
To come back to the context of the non-energetic debt ocean, we will try to simplify the nature of this phenomenon, so that maybe Wall Street, the business school educated, and the three little piggies, might understand. I think hockey and regular moms and dads have a better natural understanding than those aforementioned groups.
There are almost countless ways that money is created in the world today, essentially all of it related to short term or long term debt. For the most part that debt is never retired (paid off). Over time that puddle, became a pond, then a lake, and now, one huge ocean that covers the whole world.
To use an analogy, let us use the Biblical example of Noah’s Flood. It really makes no difference in this analogy if you think that this flood actually occurred or not, and no logical argument is going to change your mind from where it now stands. The point being where you now stand is on an ark or ship, for there is no dry ground.
What the world needs now is some dry ground. “Water, water, everywhere and not a drop, to drink.” So says the Ancient Mariner.
Now over time the sun will evaporate some of that water and a natural hydrologic (liquidity) cycle will be established and true wealth can be created. However for that to occur it is going to take a very, very long time, like evolutionary time.
What the world really needs to do is take on the alligators and drain a few swamps. Once the swamps are drained we can plant crops, orchards, and vineyards, build towns and cities, and create a human civilization. If need be if some of the land gets too dry we can even build irrigation projects. All these serve as a basis for the creation of true wealth, as long as debt is maintained as only portion of those assets, not the primary basis for those assets. It all sounds so simple except for the alligators.
We drain the swamps by a two pronged program, we control the alligators, force will probably be required, and we convert the water into dry land, for lack of a better term that will require alchemy.
Starting with the alligators. Alligators live in the swamp, they like the swamp, their home is the swamp. Alligators may venture onto dry ground and cause some turmoil but they quickly return to the swamp. To control the alligators, as we look at how to drain the swamp, we will probably have to eat a lot of alligator steaks and burgers. But exercising a little bit of human ingenuity we could very shortly be having alligator iPods, bicycles, and yes, even alligator lipstick. (I understand it is a cool shade of green.)
The alchemy of actually draining the swamp once the alligators are no longer in control is not all that difficult. It just requires a little magic and it is not all that impossible. After all Abraham Lincoln did it after the civil war, when he created the real greenback, which lasted until the creation of The Fed in 1913, some fifty years.
Of course the 21st Century is not the 19th. We live in a much more enlightened, and primitive society, in which the highest and best good is what is in it for me. That however has no basis in survival of the fittest, that assumption is based upon the illusion that I can, through my thoughts and actions, control natural law. That is a prescription of extinction, not heaven on earth.
Now as far as I can tell the sun rose again all over the earth and a least in the USA, men and women with traditional American values, will go to work, earn some money, deal with something that they were not expecting to deal with, come home, try to relax and get a good nights sleep and do it all again the next day. Through it all they are beginning to determine which of the two teams of now lipstick wearers they are going to vote for. The election is a lot closer than any of the alligators had forecast not all that long ago.
What these voters are really looking for is not focus group tested talking points, but a real dialog about real issues, finance, energy, foreign policy, we listed twelve such points a couple of weeks ago, we purposely left off a number, and dismissed a couple last week as irrelevant and irreverent.
I suppose to put this meandering discourse into some sort of coherence, the opening of my problems with Verizon wireless ring true to all Americans, “Can you hear me now?”
Of course the corollary statement is the one everyone is really concerned about, “Is anyone really listening? I am continually fighting these needless battles with everyone that says they want to make my life easier. Perhaps we should just scrap the whole thing and start over.”
When that scrapping begins for real, we will start to see the sunset on a world in which “chaos is enforced by regulation” and people will again be able to see some help beyond their own and outside reinforced self-determination.