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Abraham Lincolon - Quote of the Week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-09-03T10:21:27-07:00

All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865); 16th U.S. President

The Sin-Cosmos Demise

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-30T21:14:48-07:00

“Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, I guess I’ll go eat worms!”

When I was just a wee lad, when forced to sit on my mother’s knee, because of one of my passing pouting natures, I was given the opportunity to repeat with her the above little limerick.

Until I began this article I did not know there were a number of verses in various renditions from both the United States and the United Kingdom. Nowhere have I found a reliable source for the history of this song.

A week ago Friday when I headed to Spokane for a yearly family reunion, I had Monday’s article, “The Specialization Racket” somewhat outlined. With a couple of introductory paragraphs, utilizing president Barack Obama as the world’s and history’s best political specialist, I believed I could knock it out in no time. I also had a topic for Wednesday’s Weekly Column.

As the weekend progressed nothing seemed to come together and for reasons unrelated to Wonder Springs, on Monday I needed to go to the headquarters of the Spokane Indian tribe in Wellpinit. Having not been to Wellpinit in recent memory, I decided to drive in through the back road, which crosses the Spokane River at the Little Falls Dam and then heads upland to the Spokane Reservation headquarters.

The reservation occupies a southern portion of Steven’s County bordering the Spokane River on the south, Lake Roosevelt (Columbia River) on the west, and Chamokane Creek on the east, a bastardized rendition of the name for the Tshimakain Mission that was established in 1838 on the east side of the stream. To the north the boundary seems to be a literal line in the sand to provide a buffer zone between the reservation and the upper reaches of the fertile Colville Valley. The topography of the reservation is essentially alluvial sand and gravel deposits created between the Pleistocene ice sheet and glacial Lake Columbia. What that means in a practical basis, is that the reservation is basically open Ponderosa Pine forest with vary little arable land.

After finishing my business at the tribe’s headquarters, I headed out the main highway, leaving the reservation at Ford. By then I was thoroughly depressed. My thoughts were basically, if you want to see the future of the United States under a system of government handouts and transfer payments just visit your nearest Indian reservation — but be sure to get a few miles beyond the casino, if one exists. (The Spokane Casino is located near Chewelah, along US 395 on tribal allotment land in the Colville Valley.)

The forcing of North America’s indigenous peoples, onto essentially worthless land, began about 180 years ago under the direction of president Andrew Jackson (1829 - 1837). When the Spokane Reservation was established some forty years later, you could probably eke out a living by hunting and gathering, with ample stocks of salmon from the Spokane River. Today, with no salmon, because of Grand Coulee Dam, you would quickly starve to death, without the government subsidies.

If there is any good thing in all of this, Indian tribes have been forced to not assimilate into American culture and as a consequence provide educational opportunities for us today. That is true, at least for those who are able to move beyond the stereotypes, and look at a culture that may have been less technological than the European settlers, but in many ways much less savage. That however is for a discussion at a later time.

Today’s most famous Spokane Indian, author Sherman Alexie in his “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” describes in humor and reality, his, and many others, attempts to escape the rez by going to school in Reardan. Some of the people he describes literally and in his characters, I recognize in person, and somewhat in stereotype, from my elementary school days also spent in Reardan.

Pope Benedict XVI - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-27T08:01:17-07:00

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, to becomes, not divine, but demonic.
Pope Benedict XVI

Edward R. Murrow - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-20T05:50:16-07:00

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.

Edward R. Morrow (1908-1965); American Journalist

Special Report: The War Racket

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-16T09:26:38-07:00

“Al Qaeda has won the War on Terror!”

“But we haven’t had a successful large terrorist attack on America since 9-11.”

As they say in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, “Ya sure, you betcha! At what cost, monetarily, in regard to the lives of our troops, and the limitations of our personal freedoms?”

Putting this in a realistic perspective, it is reported that there are 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and maybe a few hundred more in Pakistan. Then there are bunches in Yemen and Somalia and scattered in other countries around the world. There are probably equal numbers in western democracies and in Islamic and developing countries. If we were to qualify only those who have both the desire and the where with all to directly attack the United States or European countries, adding in similar groups, the worldwide total of Islamic jihadis is probably less than 10,000.

So what does it cost to keep us safe from these hordes of wild extremists?

According to Wikipedia based on numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (SIPRI) the United States leads the world in military expenditures at $660 billion, followed by China at about $100 billion, France at $64 billion, the United Kingdom at $58 billion, and Russia at about $53 billion. You have to go to the SIPRI website to find out what their definition of what is a military expenditure.

One could assume from their definition that the $660 billion figure includes the wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but not Homeland Security and various transfer payments within and without the United States, not directly tied to the military expenditure definition. Since Wonder Springs has no way of quantifying that number we will take an educated guess of perhaps $440 billion, bringing the yearly total to a trillion bucks. That makes our War on Terror assessment equal to $10 million per really bad guy — per year.

Thomas Jefferson - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-13T09:32:48-07:00

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 -1826) 3rd U.S. President

Super-Bug Stupidity

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-09T11:17:19-07:00

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We have all heard of the Super-Bugs, or drug resistant germs, living in hospitals and other medical facilities that have mutated or evolved to such a point that our antibiotics are unable to control their populations. The fizzled pandemic of swine, or H1N1 flu was thought to be potentially a Super-Bug virus that could devastate human populations around the world.

There is so much to worry about in today’s world we really don’t have time to worry about these Super-Bugs germs unless we are in a medical facility where their threat is imminent. But if we broaden our perspective just a little we can use these Super-Bugs as a model, or an illustration, of what the social diseases that are infecting our world, creating the unfolding chaos we see virtually everywhere today.

Think for a moment about the American Congress as a Super-Bug. How about George W. Bush’s worldview as a Super-Bug, or Barack Obama’s Chicago political operations? If you ask their supporters without adding the complete context of what is really happening, they would probably say, “Cool we need more of that!”

Of course if everyone thinks what they believe, is far more Super-Bug than anyone else’s Super-Bug, you end up with chaos and the whole system collapses. This is the Cloward and Piven strategy that no one in the general population had heard of until Glenn Beck so kindly brought it to our attention. The real problem is however, you don’t need to be a Super-Bug to collapse the system, all you really need to do is to withhold the medicine and the epidemic will take care of itself. That is provided you have created the proper simple or monoculture environment.

The major strategic problem is not collapsing the system, but rebuilding a new economic, or human ecosystem on the ashes of the old. Super-Bugs don’t have the genetic code to pull it off. They can’t make it work in a natural world full of virtually unlimited human diversity. Of course we are not talking about true genetics, but really just environmental conditions, such as in a clean environment such as a hospital, a university, or a political body that allows this Super Bug intellectual cancer to exist in the first place.

We humans are intellectually as complex as life can get, we were created in the image of God and infused with unlimited potential, which today is limited by an archaic word “sin.” Bugs, whether bacteria or viruses, cannot think at all and their genetic mutations that allow them to become Super-Bugs occur within a clean environment that limits outside competition and more importantly outside dirty genetic diversity. They can only exist with the monoculture of a greatly simplified environment maintained by artificial means.

So while we humans can develop all sorts of tremendously complex enterprises by fully utilizing our human potential, we choose to limit those options, because of a more politically correct term for sin, now called, “Change we can believe in.” In short, this type of change limits possibilities to those which we think we can control. In essence we have destroyed Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, that guided capitalism, by infecting it with as virus of fiat toxin.

In essence the problem with President Obama and his administration is that it finds its intellectual basis with Chicago machine politics and radical American progressivism. This governance idea truly has its roots in collective government elitism of essentially self regulating Super-Bugs, that cannot compete outside the sterile environment of that narrow social darwinist glitterati.

While the president is correct in stating that he did not create this current mess and that the Republicans have no fresh ideas other than those of George W. Bush (really Ronald Reagan), he and is staff are really just a small class of intellectual Super-Bugs with no experience in the real world.

The truth in Obama’s statement, that represents a fundamental truth however, is George W. Bush also represents essentially a very similar, but more big enterprise Super-Bug form of progressivism, contrasted with Obama’s big government worldview.

If you combine the two worldviews into the real essence of the potential human Super-Bug you can virtually inbreed a race of Super-Bugs that truly believes in the depth of their souls, “That if we all work together there is nothing we can’t achieve.” Today you find that mentality in the best urban universities and cultural centers. And this subhuman species of Super-Bugs said, “Hallelujah! Amen, brothers and sisters! Can I get a witness?”

Of course they can get a witness from their class of Super-Bugs, for that worldview finds its root in the garden of Eden, with the serpent and the fall of mankind from perfection and into original sin. After the flood of Noah, you again find this human wickedness codified at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) where God confused human language. Today, English is again an attempt to create that unifying language and globalism is the attempt to create that one world materially driven enterprise and government structure.

In the antediluvian world in which we live, the real world does not work that way, and people outside the Super-Bug class understand that. This reality finds its intellectual basis in what has been historically called common sense. Taking this back to the founding of the American republic and you find this same dichotomy between mother England and the colonies.

Bringing this back rapidly to the present day, we see for at least a generation the economic vision of the Super-Bugs has been “Trickle Down Glitterati.” They of course have all of the glitz, smarts, and the moola to pull it off and over time all this faux pas enlightenment will slowly infuse culture with the understanding of the Super-Bug’s evolutionary superiority. When that didn’t work like they hoped, they injected the society with leveraged debt, which almost killed the patient back in 2008.

The global crony capitalism finally failed and to make matters even worse now president Obama attempted to give us a shot of a crony government bureaucratic vaccine. His Super-Bug economists said that this Keynesian strain of antibodies would make us immune to the turmoil of the laissez-faire Super-Bugs and unemployment would never go beyond eight percent and we could all have better healthcare and a green economy in the process.

Out in the natural world of God given diversity, Super-Bugs are not an endangered species, the Super-Bugs are just dead. Crony capitalists can’t compete in a real world where they are not fertilized with crony government, which allows easy leveraged mergers and acquisitions, and repressive regulations that can only be met with interlaced business and government bureaucrats. In simple terms Super-Bugs attempt to create humongous dinosaurs that can only exist in a world that hasn’t existed in nature for eons.

The thing that is truly a miracle of the last year or so is that the common sense people that the Super-Bugs thought they could control, are no longer the docile proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie that the Super-Bugs had assumed. Just like the Super-Bugs, these common sense primitive knuckle draggers were not dead they were just enjoying a long summer of leveraged irrigated prosperity.

What these common people are now beginning to learn for the first time, is that by the grace of God the foundation of American Republic was fashioned in such a way that a human economy would be created using the basis of natural laws and inalienable rights. In this natural economy the docile proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie do not exist, except perhaps to make life miserable for the political class, which is what the Super-Bugs like to call themselves. What we will learn is that the United States of America was designed by God to be essentially a classless society, for only in a classless society can true liberty and freedom exist.

What is even more mind boggling is the fact this awakening, that brought to new life common folks, has also encouraged governments closer to the common roots, to resist the Super-Bugs and to say enough is enough. The United States is designed not as a federally centered government, but the federal government only functions properly, as the founders envisioned, when tensioned with sovereign individual states, that more closely represent the common individual.

So we are seeing states seeking recourse in such diverse areas as immigration, ObamaCare, environmental regulations, and even marriage. What we will see over time, is the reality that simply by common sense applications, the closer government is to the people the more efficient it will be. Furthermore by cutting the federal overhead and administrative costs, budget cuts can provide for a lot of services that are now impossible. Super-Bugs find that independence threatening. That will allow over time the rebalancing of states rights as a tension against Super-Bugs, and we will again begin to understand our super stupidity of the last century or so.

Finally president Obama has made the green economy, windmills, solar energy, and a decrease of fossil fuels essentially the hallmark of his true economic agenda. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that all these clean energy sources, really function better, and cheaper as direct current, without a grid tie, making essentially the “Super” Smart Grid obsolete even while it is still a Super-Bug pipe dream. Most of the wasted energy in the country and the world today, is wasted simply in the process of getting electricity from where it is generated to where it is utilized.

Just like the personal computer has changed the power of words back to the people, so the future of energy will change the power of energy power back to the people. That will take place as individuals rediscover the wonder that makes us human, and no Super-Bug stupidity concocted in some artificial sterile environment is going to change that eventuality.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-06T08:47:17-07:00

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 -1945) German Lutheran pastor and theologian

Red Sky Morning

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-08-02T11:30:35-07:00

For some reason, early Friday morning I awoke, and normally my first instinct is to look out the window to see if it is still dark, then check the clock. What I saw outside was an unusual pink glow in the eastern sky. When I looked to the clock it was about 5 AM. I confirmed the window view again and decided this morning’s red sky was so intense I needed to go outside and check it out further.

Out on the deck, to the South the sky was almost black, like it was about to rain heavily. To the North it was just and overcast gray, but that eastern red sky morning was still very intense, illuminating the summit of the mountain across the river, were the sun will eventually rise to the point where direct rays will hit my place about two and a half hours later. I stood there watching while the red slowly return to the normal predawn grayness. I decided to go back to bed.

As I lay there I began to think about the old sailor’s rhyme, “Red sky at morning — sailors take warning. Red sky at night — sailors delight.” It had been very dry and hot for the last few weeks, so I thought a little, or a lot of rain would be a relief, but I mused that natural red sky weather report may also be a reality report on our economic future.

Most of the procrastinators and the pundits have stated that the recession is over but slow economic growth seems to be with us for some time. Even FED chairman Bernanke coined a now oft repeated “unusually uncertain” term to describe this current morning. When you look towards the sky further to the South however, you hear the dark sky reports of the bad weather of a stormy future — of maybe even a double dip recession.

I guess what that all means is that all the people who make the big bucks and those who don’t, really don’t have a clue to what the future holds, and that is especially true in the unnatural world of global economics. It seems to me, if professionals, who spend their whole life trying to figure out the economy, should be able to do a better job.

When you look at the whole of economic weather however, there is virtually no consensus, even to what is going to happen today, and forecasts, are when you get right down to it, more mysterious than scientific, and the results are more akin to a worldview or a religion than they are to a science. “Bernanke faces US growth mysteries” is an article in today’s Financial Times that pretty much verifies the point.

Give me the weather service, they are really pretty good now, with few exceptions, out about five days, and even climate models do track historic trends within the limits and paradigms of the modeler’s resources and predilections.

The weather however will go on long after we are all dead and buried, but when you look at it seriously, this global economic system is a pretty recent totally human development. So perhaps we should be looking at it more like growing a crop rather than the weather. Furthermore if we look at enterprises as subject to natural laws that govern plants and animals, we will be probably closer to reality, even if we look at the ivy on the ivy covered walls of the academics, rather than their predictions.

As we pointed out in last Wednesdays article, we have become a world of innovators, and we really haven’t invented anything totally new in about a century. Perhaps, to paraphrase a few of our business ecology terms, “We are running out of gas; the era of the free lunch is over; the season of leveraged debt has become winter; change is the only constant; that forces us to live within a natural world of God’s design.”

When you think about it seriously, we have also been told for a century to, “Don’t worry, be happy, everything will be all right"; provided we let the experts run our lives — for they know what they are doing.

What they have really been saying is that economic growth, within the constructs of the Industrial Age, will continue essentially unchanged forever. In the real world governed by natural laws, that is not a fib, that is a fraudulent lie.

In that real world, ecosystems eventually develop to what is known as a “climax state.” It has nothing to do with sex, or evolution, or egalitarian outcomes. It has everything to do with true diversity, energetics, weather and climate. Of course the only place that this climax ecosystem can be seen today is in what we define as true wilderness. Furthermore, Thoreau’s transcendental quotation, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,” takes on the reality of natural law that extents into every aspect of life on earth, including our human endeavors.

As much as we dislike the whole concept of wildness, or wilderness, it is the natural requirement for renewal, because what we perceive as insecurity is really the process by which chaos becomes reordered by design. If you create a world in which true life and death, and entropy are not allowed to occur, what you are doing is not creating true security but rather making the eventual restructuring all the more painful.

So we have “Too Big to Fail,” easy mergers and acquisitions, regulatory reform that creates inertia rather than freedom, laissez-faire crony capitalism that means only those who have access to capital can succeed, all of which leads ultimately to failure, by attempting to create solutions that cannot compete in a real world.

If we truly understood the principles in the establishment of a climax ecosystem we would apprehend that our hope for continued economic growth forever is really just a stupid, irrational farce as the Climax Curve illustrates:

However since we humans think we have it all figured out what really happens is more akin to the Sin Cosmos Curve:

So while you tune into the latest economic news from New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Singapore, perhaps it would be a better thing to take a trip to the wilderness and spend some time just taking in the complexity and the beauty of the whole natural world. Then we can use that reality to attempt to recreate a human scale economic model.

How long will these wildness treks take? You will begin to understand when you summarily gain the context to go back to your urban security and understand: “This too shall pass, for it is about to run out of gas!”

However in the proper wildness context of we human’s role in this world, your new wisdom will have the potential to help you become one of the inventors of the continual renewal that provides for natural security rather than artificial hopeless change.

Today is where artificial hopeless change rules, and what we really need is a redux similar to the original American Revolution.

Indira Gandhi - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-30T06:00:16-07:00

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

Indira Gandhi (1917-1984); Statesman

Special Report: Times That Try Men’s Soul

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-26T09:56:40-07:00

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us - that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right not only to tax but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine – 1776

Who would have thought two short years ago that the American people would be discussing revolutions in a somewhat serious context. The two revolutions most discussed are the American Revolution of which Founding Father, Thomas Paine gave us the above quotation from his pamphlets “The Crisis Papers.” The other revolution in this country relates to the Vietnam War, the last period of critical social distress. The important reference from that era that related directly to today is, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows.”

Adding to the national angst is the reality of actual wars. The Iraq War is in the process of hopefully winding down to a successful nation building operation. The War in Afghanistan is quite different. Iraq was a real nation in the twentieth century definition, at least since the end of WWII. The same cannot be said for Afghanistan, which is more akin to a historic tribal region, not successfully colonized by any western culture in its history.

Under the auspices of the War on Terror and after a traditional military invasion of Iraq the United States, became involved in a counterinsurgency to root out Al Qaeda, other foreign insurgents, and quench the historic conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

In Iraq and Iran the Shia are the majority of the population. In Afghanistan the numbers are reversed and the Taliban are essentially the Sunni insurgents to which the United States and a number of NATO allies, through the escalation of the Obama Administration, are now attempting to develop a successful counterinsurgency nation-building exercise.

Thomas Jefferson - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-23T08:53:39-07:00

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me do decide whether we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. - 1787

Thomas Jefferson (1743 -1826) 3rd U.S. President

Natural Law and Christians

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-19T13:07:36-07:00

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Mark 12:17, Matthew 22:21, Luke 20:25 ESV

Many years ago I was a team leader of a small group from our church that went out Monday evenings to call on visitors from our Sunday service. As we parked outside a small apartment in north Seattle, I couldn’t help making a stupid remark about the name of the person we were about to visit. Even with my ignorance, the visit turned out to be quite productive and the young woman became an active member of the congregation.

She moved away a year or so later and within a few years she returned for a visit. Through the course of events I learned at the very instant I was making a spontaneous remark that could be considered flippant, inside her apartment things were quite serious. Her remarks were much more prayerful, which went something like: “God I would like to believe you are real, but I am having a very difficult time. If you don’t show me some sign of your reality, I have no reason now to live and before morning I fear I will use this gun to commit suicide.” At that time, we a small group of, in the larger context, complete fools rang her doorbell.

When I learned the true events of that evening not only was I humbled, but I realized in our lost and dying world just how thoughtless is much of what Christianity and the church says and does. Put in the broader context of recent world events, the problems of the recent Great Recession, were not caused by the greedy money grubbers on Wall Street, financial institutions, and real estate, they knew no better, they were just sinners sinning.

The real problem that caused the current mess, was that Christians, as individuals and in community as the church, played religious games, and sought political power, while the world, as it should be, crumbled. The church of Jesus Christ has one calling, to proclaim the Good News of the redemption of the world found in Jesus Christ alone. Instead of proclaiming the gospel, and being the leaders of the common community, the church has attempted to become so earthly relevant that its of no earthly good. Instead of being a restraining force of evil, to use the words of Revelation 3, the post modern church has become tepid.

As I was watching Glenn Beck one day last week, he and Stephen Broden, a church pastor from Texas were talking about this very subject, when Glenn interjected a comment about church leaders needing to protect their nonprofit status. It was just a few, off the cuff words, and the conversation moved on. Those nonprofit status words however have stuck with me since that time and are the founding principle for this message today.

Odetta Holmes - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-16T09:08:41-07:00

You’re walking down life's road, society's foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can't get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.

Odetta Holmes (1930-2008); American Folksinger

Change without direction

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-12T08:58:17-07:00

One score months ago the voters of America brought forth a new presidential administration on this continent. The stated goal of the election was to issue in a new age of change we can believe in. That presupposes either one of two alternatives. At that time number one was, we were having change we didn’t want to believe in, or two we didn’t want any change from our vision of what we were told was a future of human engineered eternal prosperity.

It seems in the intervening period that all change has accelerated rapidly and those changes are beyond anything we can believe in and furthermore most of the stupendous changes are only exacerbating previous problems.

For as long as I can remember American presidents have turned out worse than my predilections. My worries about George W. Bush was that he would be beholden to what we have recently publicly defined as crony capitalists to the default of other values of not only governance but also personal responsibility. So I voted for the guy twice, my public reason was we share the same initials, but the secret reason was I thought that both Al Gore and John Kerry were truly without hope for being effective leaders. But most liberal juice drinkers don’t like any reality with their cocktail, so voicing the truth really wasn’t worth the return of stressful noise.

So my more than worst fears of George W. Bush turned out to be true. Those fears manifested themselves in the financial meltdown which began in late 2007 and continues to this day. Essentially what we saw under the Bush administration was the continuance of debt financed consumption based upon real estate. Those inflated values are still highly leveraged over the current wealth of most of the folks, but that is another topic for another time.

So those twenty months ago, Barack Obama was elected president. I didn’t vote for the man, not because I am a racist, but I thought he lacked experience to handle the tough job of being president. I wasn’t all that keen on John McCain either, especially during the campaign where it seemed that his goal was to be the Republican nominee rather than getting elected. Perhaps during the campaign McCain was able to get a glimpse of future trouble and decided either he was not up to the task, or was aware that current American problems are beyond the pale of human leadership. That surely was not something that Barack Obama would ever discern.

Abraham Lincoln - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-09T07:48:58-07:00

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865); 16th U.S. President

Freedom from My Own Bondage

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-04T07:27:46-07:00

Two hundred and thirty-four years ago today, the seed of the United States of America was sown when our founders signed the Declaration of Independence. The national holiday still continues to be celebrated as the concept of individual freedom.

Those who give speeches today will phrase their remarks along two philosophical paradigms. The first is, “I am free because I can do what I want.” The other is, “I am free because I am protected from the tyranny of others.” Both of those concepts are present in the Declaration of Independence, but today we have pretty much redefined those freedom concepts in terms of selfish materialism.

As a founding principle, personal freedom was defined basically as I am free to be what I was created to be and no wrongly appropriated divine right of some foreign authority has any jurisdiction on my ability to pursue that goal. Today we have dumbed-down that concept to mean I am free to what makes me feel good about myself and I should receive external rewards to help me achieve those ends.

Those rewards might be a trophy, or pay just for showing up on a somewhat regular basis, or receiving a right to something such as healthcare, a pension, or other security, simply because I did nothing or very little to deserve those rewards. In other words, I have substituted my personal divine will, into, and over the lives of others.

However there is another underlying principle within the American Declaration that was part of the founding genre that we no longer are willing to understand. The principle came from a natural or common understanding of the human condition that resurfaced during the Reformation and that principle was and understanding of the human will to sin. Martin Luther’s most famous written work is entitled, “The Bondage of the Will.”

What we are no longer willing to believe is that the greatest freedom a human being can obtain in this life is to be free from the bondage to my own selfish desires. That is the central theme of historic Christianity. Succinctly stated, that means the sinless life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the propitiatory and justifying sacrifice that absolutely provides the freedom for me to pursue the eternal personality I was created by God to be.

In the broadest concept possible, we all seek security to the maximum extent. The external imputed righteousness of Christ gives me eternal security and in the process allows me to accept temporal security in this life on a more transient basis. In other words, I don’t need to secure my own security and future, because I know the source of my security and know He directs my future.

Over the last few weeks I have heard again in various forums that the decline in American excellence began when we took the Ten Commandments and prayer out of our schools. I have a good friend that states the school decline was just the simple result of taking the Ten Commandments and true prayer out of our churches — years earlier.

What this really means is we like to blame all the problems we face today on those bad guys, the greedy, the selfish, the exploiters, the them. Who is never blamed in the American religion is the church that has become a cloister of the Pharisees. As such, not only has that been responsible for the faux creation of a political righteousness, it has also created physical divide between the enlightened Christians in contrast with the enlightened sinful heathens.

Instead of stating, “There by the grace of God, go I.” the proper response should be, “There by the grace of God alone, can I find true freedom from my personal bondage.” That is a much different and more humble message, than, “I don’t, do this and that, because I can,” but rather, “Any ability I have to do anything other than the wickedly perverse, is nothing but a gift of God’s grace.”

On this Independence Day, this Sunday, what this means is that the focus should be on the redemption and justification found in Jesus Christ alone, and not the national debt, socialism, and a whole host of good or bad things. If the focus of Christians is on Christ alone, then God will provide the power to change the culture, just as he did during the Reformation.

That Reformation time was not without turmoil, it was truly a revolution of human understanding. The same can be said of the American revolution. The result of the American revolution was freedom from the bondage of the culture to a foreign monarch, but the more profound result was the freedom of the individual to more deeply appreciate the gift of life provided to all from the God of nature, who is the same eternal personality as the God of the Bible.

So today, most people in America will celebrate the concept to be free to do what we want to do. The really blessed will be those who understand that true freedom, is to not be in bondage to your personal desires, but rather to make your life a gift to others, by God’s grace.

Brute' Griz - Independence Day Insights

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-07-02T10:44:20-07:00

In My Tent Leadership?

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-28T09:25:57-07:00

This last week, where unflattering remarks by the staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal found their way into Rolling Stone magazine, and led to his subsequent resignation from being the commander of forces in Afghanistan, I have reflected upon my military service in Europe during Vietnam. Even though I was a reluctant volunteer, compared with the reluctant draftee, I have always looked at that time as a tremendous growing experience, that in many ways I see as a Divinely controlled adventure, giving me priceless insight into strategic world events that could have not been gained in such a brief encounter anywhere other than that time and place.

I read the Rolling Stone article, which is quite long and detailed for what passes for twenty-first century journalism. It sounded to me to be a relatively good assessment of a highly motivated general officer with a very tight staff. All good things, when you have a mission to bring a war action in Afghanistan to a reasonable conclusion as rapidly as possible.

My dad was not a military person, he was 4-F when asked to serve in WWII, he had a strong heart murmur, but he was a very successful school administrator. I can say he only had one absolute rule when it came to people management. That rule was, “Always support your staff, no matter whether they are right or wrong. Always support your staff and let the chips fall where they may.” It seems that Gen. Stanley McChrystal lives by the same absolute.

When I was in ROTC in college, we had the opportunity to be taught the science behind the art of military leadership. Many of the questions we were tested upon, outlined a role, mission, or objective to be obtained, and a number of different means to obtain the required results. Maybe to keep things light, somewhere in the options was the always wrong response generally following the line “give and order and say, if you need me I will be in my tent.” In the Rolling Stone article you find out quite rapidly that Gen. McChrystal was and is not a, “I will be in my tent kind of leader.”

Harry Truman - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-25T13:23:03-07:00

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”

Harry Truman
(1884-1972); 33rd U. S. President

Chaos in American Energy; and the world suffers

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-21T11:12:03-07:00

Liebig’s law of the minimum, states crop yields are proportional to the amount of the most limiting nutrient. However that is just a subclass of a more universal natural law, in that productivity of any entity is limited to the extent of the limiting contributor. Broadening that into the fields of human enterprise it could read, wealth creation is limited by the applications of energy, financial liquidity, and information all functioning within the limits of natural laws.

Now plug that concept into a Vietnam era saying:

We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful, have struggled so long, with so little, we are now able to create anything out of nothing.

That needs to be modified in the early twenty-first century to conclude: create nothing out of everything. The limiting factor? Basically human knowledge and wisdom! Put in an enlightened Green Street context, “The blowhards that are in charge, or think they know what is happening, are so full of themselves, that they are in the process of exploding human civilization with their excreted methane gas.”

Last week as I watched President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the Gulf oil catastrophe, I ended up yelling that the television screen. Then while watching all the commentators after the President’s address I yelled even more. In that illumination I refer you to the Green Street context above!

One of the two things that I found worth repeating was Sarah Palin’s comment that, “You can’t trust oil industry information, you must verify it yourself.” Having spent the first years of my professional career embedded in the intelligence culture, that truth must become a Kantian universal law. In the Vietnam context, the industry spokesmen are relying on information provided by the unwilling, which they are incompetent to understand. Furthermore many times these unwilling don’t know the answer demanded of them, and for a multitude of reasons, they create something out of nothing.

The other speech rebuttal statement worthy of development is, “The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy even though we have been trying for over forty years.”

“Yep! The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”

So where do we begin?

Jonathan Swift - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-18T08:40:56-07:00

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745); Satirist

The Summer of Progressive Ferment

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-14T06:49:33-07:00

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi was heckled Tuesday at the America’s Futures Now conference in Washington, DC. So the third person in line to the Presidency, the queen of the attempted remake of the nation into a warm fuzzy progressive utopia, was hissed continually by what we normal folks would believe should be her strongest supporters. Where’s the love?

What we are beginning to see, not only with the Speaker, but also with the whole Obama team, is that their renaissance plans to transform American into the leader of a new universe of Oz, has been defeated by the natural law of inertia. All the lofty rhetoric, back room political deals, and hope in vapor, can’t do the heavy lifting. So the alternative is attempting to elevate the angst into chaos to see if any of the stress will create some composted material that may stick to the wall.

I have long stated if I had a donkey I would name her Patience, fully recognizing that patience is part of the human condition to know what we want, and we want it now. So while I can understand the impatience in the hecklers of the Speaker, I also realize that hope naturally becomes reality by persistence and hard work. Furthermore true miracles are impossible in the natural world of these Social Darwinists.

Over the last couple of months we have mentioned the present plight of the Social Darwinists and in the “The Social Darwinist Conundrum,” we explained the juxtaposed views of the religion, especially as it related to the formation of the Soviet Union. In that context we see communist collective as being the true antithesis of the views of Ayn Rand. Rand being the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and the philosophy of Objectivism, all behind the laissez faire tenure of Alan Greenspan at the Fed.

So in the struggle of worldviews within the evolving religion of the Social Darwinists, it doesn’t really seem to be that difficult to choose a winner between the academy gene pool of collectivists and the wild west greedy speculators. Show me the money will win out all the time, especially in the United States where our culture has always been tensioned, through design, between selfish self determination and the common good.

A common good defined as even a European social democracy is not part of the American subspecies of humanity. Furthermore it seems totally absurd, if not insane, to attempt a radical transformation into collectivism, when really the only true believer nations that remain are Cuba and Venezuela. Even more importantly nothing in Social Darwinism allows for the existence of God, or even gods for that matter. While I disagree with many that the United States was formed as a Christian nation, I would submit that the Founding Fathers definitely miraculously created a secular nation based upon Godly created natural law and Judeo-Christian moral values. They also further understood that that God centered reality was a necessity for the continued prosperity of the culture they created

Dwight D. Eisenhower - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-11T10:39:22-07:00

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969); 34th U.S. President

Leadership News: Is the world broke?

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-07T08:51:35-07:00

Late last week I tuned into the Fox Business Channel and at the bottom of the screen was the tag, “Is the world broke?” What little time I listened to the discussion, it seemed that the participants were questioning the broke concept as in bankrupt. However when you consider the concept of bankruptcy you generally link the term with being or running out of money. In a world in which nations print their own money either individually as in the case of the United States, China, and most other nations of the world, they can always print more money and devalue their currency, so broke in their literal sense is impossible.

For the Eurozone going broke makes a little more sense in the fact that certain countries may run out of Euros and other countries or financial institutions fail or refuse to give them anymore. In that sense the Euro only will continue to work, if its support is linked to the willingness of all parties to adopt a somewhat consistent approach as far as spending and taxes.

In the United States we are told that it is impossible for the states to go broke literally, as in bankrupt. Since they cannot create their own currency however, that makes for the between a rock and a hard place a reality that many states now face, but as of yet are unwilling to create the austere conditions to bring into harmony unsustainable spending and limited revenues. This means that eventually they will come to the Federal government for funding not all that different from what is now faced by Eurozone countries.

However, there is another definition of broke, that as of yet none of the world’s political leaders, business moguls, spin merchants, or any other group that claims some sort of elitist power or authority, will admit. That is the world in which they say they created, know what is going on, or hope again to set on the right path is truly broke, like broken, it no longer works.

Last December in “Humpty Dumpty in a New Century” we describe Humpty Dumpty in American terms, but now we see that good old Mr. Dumpty has returned to his continental roots as well. Just as in the American story, the refrain remains pretty much the same. “If we, all the kings horses and all the kings men, all come together and work diligently we can surely put Humpty Dumpty back together again!”

The question no one is asking today is, “Could the reason Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall in the first place, is all the kings horses and all the kings men are responsible?” If that is the case and you just replace Humpty Dumpty on a shaky wall of the world’s financial condition, even if for the short term, things might get a little better, but there are really only two alternatives for a long lasting solution.

News: Redux Rendezvous web presence launch.

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-04T12:56:07-07:00

The Wonder Springs Chronicle in cooperation with PREFER Ltd, have launched a new Redux Rendezvous website. The site is very much under construction, but the enterprise model we are using for the design indicates the Redux Rendezvous could make a significant contribution to small enterprise wealth creation and growth.

George Washington - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-06-04T09:14:51-07:00

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

George Washington (1732-1799); 1st U.S. President

Vince Lombardi - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-28T07:53:47-07:00

Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Vincent "Vince" Lombardi (1913-1970); Athletic Coach

The Wealth Creation — Tax & Debt Redistribution Continuum

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-24T10:56:03-07:00

Give me that old fashioned (like last year), change we can believe in. Last Tuesday’s primary elections signaled, throw out all the bums, and let us choose the less — most desirable between who is left. The grizzly bears moved back to a very realistic position on Wall Street. The Senate finally passed a financial reform bill which will help the 2 Big 2 Fail, sort of, not change a whole lot and provide bennies for some others to continue to over leverage our worthless money supply. On Sunday we heard from the Feds, that if BP continues to miss the deadlines on stopping the Gulf oil spill that they are going to take over. That will surely help, I’m sure?

Through it all Americans continue to learn about, and demand a redux of our founding constitutional principles, but all the pundits, spinners, commentators, and politicians think this will help them, when in reality the issue really is much more complex than can be articulated in a brief media story. Furthermore even if they could, their spin is so dumbed down and politically correct, that it could be shown that they would be quickly eliminated from the TV show, and then must announce that they are not smarter than a fifth grader.

So in the finest efforts of the Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum revisions, let us develop some context of what is really happening.

Way back in Colonial days, the people of the revolutionary era were very religious and in the process of writing a formal constitution they did a miraculous job of creating a secular government based on Absolute Christian religious principles.

Today we live in a very secular world and what we are trying to do is to take secular principles and redux them to Absolutes that will provide security in a rapidly changing world. In simple terms, back then most were committed to their religion, and a very few were secular. Now most are very secular, and a very few are committed to religion.

In truly secular terms, the American Founders looked outside themselves for governance solutions, which they believed rested in God alone. So pretty much when asked what was the Christian gospel, they would respond something like:

“Jesus Christ was the son of God, who came to the earth to die in a sacrificial covenant for the sins of mankind, which he accomplished by being crucified on a cross seventeen hundred years ago. He was raised from the dead three days later to show that this gift of God’s grace is the source of our justification before God’s holiness.

“When in our Declaration of Independence when we affirmed Natural Law, Nature’s God, and Inalienable Rights, what we were really doing was taking our specific revelation of God from the Bible, and applying it to what is theologically called the general revelation of God in nature and the common grace God bestows to all of humanity.

And today’s dumbed down sheep of all religious faiths, and lack of thereof religion say, “Huh?”

Thomas Huxley - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-21T10:10:12-07:00

Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

Thomas Huxley (1825-1895); Biologist

The World’s Moola Redux

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-17T09:11:01-07:00

It was only a week ago when we woke up to understand that with a little encouragement from President Obama, European countries had come up with a trillion dollar plan to save the Euro and everything would soon be back to change we can believe in. One week later, we are wondering compared to the dollar how far the Euro will fall, or even if the currency will continue to exist.

Then there is all that dirty air over there, caused by that pesky volcano in Iceland. How in the world are we supposed to fly around from here to there, showing everybody how wonderful all the stuff we have created is doing, when we are thwarted by our efforts by some tiny airborne particles of abrasive rocks?

Here in the good old USA the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill continues, with no apparent understanding of how well the funny pipe thing fix installed yesterday is going to work. So in the absence of any news on that front, concern has shifted to what is happening to all the oil that is now floating around. Should we use dispersants that may cause more ecological problems than the oil itself? How far will the oil go, how fast? Can BP even continue to exist as a company in light of all the expenses and legal claims? One thing I did learn is that deep sea water is about 3 degrees Celsius, (35 Fahrenheit), and at those depths and pressures that is really a different place than what we naturally can understand, so perhaps we should cut those engineers a little slack.

Less we forget, there is no real news on what caused the near 1000 point fall in the Dow a week ago last Thursday. There was some discussion of a big trade(s) made by somebody about that time, but whoever they were, denied that they had anything to do with it. So the search goes on, but with markets being controlled by computers using models based upon past histories and triggered by various algorithms of risk, we should really have nothing to worry about. That is especially true if we are big and sophisticated enough to buy some credit default swaps, to insure our leverage, so that the white holes in the universe that spew out money will remain our back stop.

Let’s see what else caught our attention? Out of Washington, if Elena Kagan becomes the next Supreme Court Justice, this Washington state’s governor, Kristine Gregoire is favored to be the next Solicitor General. That would be a real blessing out here, for after her life as both a mediocre state Attorney General and Governor, the best we could ever hope to do is shuffle her off to that other Washington and get her out of the state, hopefully for good.

Then again maybe she could replace Eric Holder as the national Attorney General, she is wise enough to understand before you go spouting off about the Arizona Immigration Law, she would have read the 16 or 10 pages of the Arizona bill, before and after amendments.

Thomas Edison - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-14T05:48:39-07:00

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Edison (1847-1931); Inventor, Businessman

America’s Moola Redux

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-10T10:13:13-07:00

It only took a week for Federal government officials to determine that the 1 May terrorist attack in New York’s Time Square was not the work of a lone disgruntled new American citizen, but that he had training, finances and other resources at his disposal from Pakistan’s Taliban. So again we see that even though America’s politically correct do not believe that Islamic jihadis are trying to create chaos here in the United States, it is just those poor misguided religious people just don’t understand how warm, caring, we infidels really are. It is such a shame that they are too primitive to understand our evolutionary scheme, not only for America but the whole world.

Likewise on Sunday we learned that the Obama Administration’s homeland security and counterterrorism team has no evidence that Thursday’s near 1000 point drop of the Dow Jones was caused by any cyber attack. So from the guys that were behind the lone disgruntled bomber spin, we are to believe that they finally got something right. Just like they were busy with the Gulf oil spill, “From day one.”

It is just nine days until the world celebrates the 110th anniversary of the publishing of the prophetic book “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.” For now it seems the Wizards of Washington and the Wizards of Wall Street want us to believe that they are not part of that fable, but for now they are not doing a very good job. So we are told to believe some computer glitch somewhere somehow was responsible for the mystery of the disappearance of roughly a trillion dollars and then a return of a good chunk of it a few minutes later. We could blame it on an act of God, but that would require a belief in a Supreme Being and since that is currently un-American we will have to leave that Godly interpretation in the hands of Islamic human caused disaster creators.

So today business is back to our usual yellow brick road to a unified kerfuffle theory and we will have to wait until we learn what really happened as America’s financial wizards try to determine what really happened last Thursday — from day one. Meanwhile over in Europe the wizards of the European Union have come up with a trillion dollar plan to stabilize the Euro as Greece continues to hemorrhage financially and physically. So that they don’t feel lonely the citizens of Great Britain have to wonder when their election results will finally lead to a new Prime Minister wizard, who will cobble together a government.

Maybe a stupendous tornado will come about and we can be all transported back to Kansas, 110 years ago!

Abraham Lincoln - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-07T11:20:44-07:00

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865); 16th U.S. President

The Wizard of Oz in America’s Struggles

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-05-03T11:25:59-07:00

Two weeks from today, 18 May 2010 will hallmark the 110th anniversary of the publishing of the children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.” For most of that interlude American adults have tried to move to OZ, simply because it was a fantasyland as far from the reality of Kansas as they could get. So today, as with real children, they are mad, because the Wizards of Washington and the Wizards of Wall Street haven’t the ability to maintain that fable.

In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.

I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.

So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”

States Rights as Natural as Wildness

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-26T14:40:07-07:00

The United States of America used to be understood by the slogan, “Out of many — one.” It is now becoming better defined as, “Out of many — chaos.”

This evolution has taken place most dramatically in the last fifty years, but those chaotic roots run deep for at least the last century.

In January, when we began the “Why Me? A Novel — Novel of Historic Apprehension” it looked like there was a window in America’s trek to Gomorrah, in which we could develop a little historic context about how we got here and where we were headed, regardless of the desires of mice and men. It looks like the mice are holding up quite well in contrast to the best intentions of American leadership, but a couple realities did begin to be seen as “Why Me?” progressed, which show as early buds of the coming American political spring.

During those four months it was easy to anticipate the passage of Obamacare, but the firestorm of issues related to the individual mandate for people to purchase insurance, angered individuals, but also set off a spring burn of protests at the state level. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that about a third of the states would begin to act like real sovereign states. All this time we thought they were extinct, except for collecting taxes and creating arcane regulations. We will here attempt to put some natural spring into these new found rumblings. We will look at the heavy lifting of what is just beginning under the Washington guise of “Financial Reform” in our Wednesday article.

I would suppose one could make the case that the concept of state dependency began during the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. But the way the history has hyped that period among all the enlightenment progressive spin, it makes it impossible to find the states at all. Those who are yet still alive and actually went through that period were too young understand the context.

However using estimated dates beginning with the Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968; the Viet Nam War Protests: 1965-1975; and the Environmental Movement: 1962-1981; we essentially saw urban intellectual evolution commandeer all aspects of American unity and those who disagreed with their worldview were vilified as: racists, warmongers, and primitive knuckle draggers.

This as continued to evolve until today, we have the Lame Stream Media basically becoming propaganda asylums, and fair and balanced reporting, sponsoring battling pundit promotions. What is lost in all this is the fact that human beings were generally created to like one another and to help one another succeed. In that respect to believe that a bloated Federal government can fix societies ills is truly insanity.

Thomas Paine - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-23T12:08:14-07:00

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Happy Days Again? Not Here, Not Yet!

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-19T15:29:22-07:00

>>PDF copy

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Subsequent to that act an unrepentant, Timothy McVeigh, was found guilty and was executed. There is a very old saying that goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Last week former President Clinton made remarks saying that he saw similarities between the words of Tea Party participants and that bombing which took place on 19 April 1995. Of course there has been a lot of media attention to those remarks, but none seem intelligent enough to see perhaps a link to the words and maybe the actions of then President Clinton, which may have contributed to McVeigh’s actions just a little over two years after the President began his first term.

Also last week, here in the USA, land of liberty, home of the free and the brave, President Obama made somewhat similar condescending remarks about how funny traditionally minded Tea Party participants were acting. In the context that he has fixed America’s continuing problems; with programs more outmoded than any our Chinese government partners could envision. Once we sock it to those Fat Cat bankers, and create all sorts of user fees for everything under the sun, it will be nice to know that the President has not raised the income taxes on those Americans who make less than $200,000.

I do have to agree with the President however, if the Tea Party people think that by attending some rallies, carrying some signs, and even electing some more conservative Republicans, to replace those awful liberal Democrats, they will in someway change the politics in Washington and business on Wall Street, then that is really a ironic joke. Sad, definitely true but still despairingly amusing.

Listening to the President, his staff, and his media amigos, happy days are here again. Rah! Rah! Rah! Well happy days may be back for Wall Street and federal workers, but those happy days here, are about as far away as the distance to New York City and Washington DC. Here in the Northeast corner of the other Washington (State) things are as bad as they have ever been and that may include the Great Depression.

Of course any of those people who were alive during the Great Depression and old enough to remember the details of those hard times; they are now dead. Back then those people who lived out west were a pretty much self sufficient lot. Everyone grew most of their own food, raised their own meat, and canned or put it up for the winter. There might not have been a lot of variety in the daily table course, but people didn’t go hungry, and if someone was in need their neighbors helped them out.

The biggest problem in China today is the discrepancy between the wealth of urban areas on the coastal plains and the absolute poverty of the agricultural interior. From what I can read about it on Stratfor and other intelligence sources on the Internet, the Chinese government is worried that if things do not economically turn around soon, they fear the possibility of disruptive social unrest. Sadly America’s leadership is more out of touch with our heartland, than those repressive Chinese are with their own people.

The problem we are facing out here in this rural Washington, a couple thousand miles away from were all the smart people live and work, and where the sun rises; out here most people would consider they were extremely blessed if they could just count on $20,000 this year, with no fear of layoffs, or some health problem, or other catastrophe.

Brute' T. Griz - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-16T08:10:03-07:00

If Americans spent less time bitching and whining, and more time developing self sufficiency skills, maybe they would again learn how to fill many glasses and not complain about theirs being only half full!

Brute’ T. Griz

2 BIG 2 Work!

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-12T09:11:37-07:00

The bellyachers are giving me a headache. Well, actually they seem to be more akin to a pain at the end of the alimentary canal, but unless it is phrased in that way, it becomes politically incorrect. Let me see if I have got this straight? You have a beef with the fact that you have to pay way too much income tax when you and yours gross six figures a year and nearly half of the American households pay nothing.

It is really too bad that your mortgage is upside down by about 50% and your 401k and the rest of your investments lost about the same, and you still are not back on track to retiring early, with only your four thousand square foot McMansion in the ‘burbs, and your two thousand square foot second home in the foreign paradise. You can cry me a river, but I really don’t care. Welcome to the real world.

Bah! Bah! Bah! You went to work everyday, did the best you could, never took any real risk and suddenly you were a millionaire. Well, at least you were a millionaire. Nobody ever called you a sheep, sheep can’t leverage a mid-level professional job, with really only bureaucratic skills, into a million bucks. Truly this was an absolute miracle, helped along with cheap credit, marketing, and educational propaganda. After all you are worth it, and you have the room full of seventh place trophies to prove it.

Suddenly the 2 BIG 2 work vultures from the government want you to pay what they call your fair share. It isn’t just the Feds, it’s the state, the county, and the city too. Even the home owners association wants more money to keep the water feature pumping. Just like me, they all don’t want to hear your story of an American Dream of a pampered upbringing turned into gentrified nausea. You had it all, peaches and cream, and now it is time to pay the dues.

Perhaps you didn’t DVR Alan Greenspan on C-Span last week when he said he thought he was doing the right thing during lllooonnnggg his term at the Fed, and now in hindsight there may have been just a few tweaks of the economy that might have led to a continuing-continuum of eternal prosperity. However now that this bubble burst and after ObamaCare has passed, old Alan has some fresh insights that we might not be able to pay for everything at the same time.

Maybe you should send him one of your seventh place trophies for a reward!

Ben Franklin - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-09T09:12:21-07:00

I have lived a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men.

Benjamin Franklin

Malignant Money

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-05T10:15:32-07:00

There is a universal belief that with enough money life in short order will become a bed of roses, or some other silly metaphor. In that context the question now becomes, “Where’s the money?”

With more dollars floating around somewhere than in the entire history of the world, there should be money, money everywhere and inflation should be a significant worry. There is none of that. Furthermore everywhere you look for answers you don’t see or hear anything related to the present reality.

For an example in that present reality, last Thursday I took my Saturn into the Midas Muffler shop in downtown Spokane to have its brakes replaced. The reason I went there, on my previous trip to Spokane in my pickup, I had had to have the brakes replaced on it also. Not only was the pickup price about ten percent less than I figured it would have been up in Northeast Washington, I now had essentially a ten percent off coupon for my next visit to Midas. In times like these you save all the money you can.

By the time I got to the place, located on the corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard, it was just a little before 10 AM, probably the busiest time of the business day. This address is just across the street from essentially the downtown core. The convention center and related theaters begin just on the opposite diagonal corner. There are at least five repair bays on the office side of the structure and about three on the other part of the L.

As I walked into the office I was met by a lady of about retirement age, and I stated I needed to get my brakes fixed and I need to know how long it will take. She says she will get an estimate, takes my keys, and walks out into the shop. There seems to be only one guy working out there and he seems to be just doing some make work activity. So working alone he finishes my estimate and tells me to come back in about an hour and a half. When I return at about 11:30 my car is ready, and it looks like the guy is doing something minor on another vehicle and there are no other business related cars either in the shop or in the parking lot. I pay my bill and I am on my way.

So on a normal business day in the center of Spokane, the largest city from Seattle to about Minneapolis, in a major national automobile repair franchise, they probably didn’t cover the overhead for the time I was there. What about the rest of the day, week, month, or year?

Declaration of Independence - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-04-02T08:36:56-07:00

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.

The closing of The Declaration of Independence — July 4, 1776.

The Law of Malignant Enlightment

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-29T12:02:06-07:00

Our friend Et Tu Brute’ early Friday morning showed his wisdom on how the passage of ObamaCare would be greatly altered over time by the Law of Unintended Consequences. Following Brute’s post it was truly amazing how often this generally undefined law was mentioned in the world of more traditional news media and commentary. This was generally rebutted by a more liberal response, “Yah, but, just wait until it takes effect and everyone understands this evolving opportunity.” The definition of opportunity left to those less infected (sic).

Cutting through all the composting entropy, the rhetoric revolves basically around two mutually exclusive loci. A traditional or conservative spin states, “With the passage of ObamaCare the path to mutually assured destruction has been coated with black ice.” On the other side, now spun in the leftist or liberal construct, “America has now reached Beulah Land and the shining eternal city is just across the Serendipity Plain.”

Furthermore a little research into the Law of Unintended Consequences shows that the abstract is probably the best usage, since in that form the law can be used whenever one would like to make a point without really needing to rely on any points at all. “Essentially, in time the spectrum of unintended consequences will become clear, and I am just focusing on a few that fit my talking points, for talking points after all, is why I make the big bucks.”

Along that line, the talking points tend to focus on specifics of the actual ObamaCare bill such as, its size, cost, repeal, or replace, the list being very vendor specific. What all this tends to show is that the shallow shortsightedness that gave us the bill in the first place, will be used in the opposite direction to make it much better. With all these ignored, but now so plainly unforeseen and unintended consequences so apparent, the truth seems to be that ObamaCare must either be in its current form, created through intelligent design, or something, or some other unseen natural law must be working its magic.

This brings us to a more refined, contemporary, and previously undiscovered natural law: The Law of Malignant Enlightenment. Departing from the unintended law, we shall briefly define the Law of Malignant Enlightenment and then give three examples on how the law allows its applications to reach beyond the specifics of ObamaCare and touch the universal attributes that can be altered to achieve positive results in a world of limited resources and unlimited possibilities.

Upton Sinclar _ Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-26T07:40:43-07:00

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclar

The ObamaCare Wildfire

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-22T09:52:18-07:00

Late last evening the United States of America passed an ObamaCare reform law and simultaneously unleashed a wildfire in the country that will affect the country for years if not decades to come. A wildfire, many times human caused or even designed is an uncontrollable reordering of the future by destroying the past and creating opportunities for new growth to rapidly occur out of the ashes of the old. Many times human started controlled burns suddenly erupt into uncontrollable wildfires and greatly change an environment, well beyond the carefully laid plans of the fire planners. Welcome to healthcare reform circa 2010.

For over a year, off and on the healthcare debate has slowly intensified and generally revolves around both the cost and the constitutional question, if human governments can create rights, rather than being a gift of Natural Law given to humans by God. As of yesterday the debate was codified into law and started the wildfire which we will discuss briefly.

There are those who will continue to fight the hot spot battles related to human rights, the American federal government’s ability to create and to tax, and the continued desire to live beyond our means. Just as in a wildfire you will be able to tune to your favorite news channel, talk radio, or podcast and hear the yin and yang to support or defame your paradigms, but Washington DC this time next year will be a very different place than it is today. It will look like a wildfire passed through the capitol and there will be new shoots of growth beginning to sprout from the ashes, but still a lot of dead wood around, some of it standing some not. When you get out into the country those changes will begin to be seen also, but not the effects that the ObamaCare supporters had hoped.

Wildfires are frightening things, extremely rapidly they can change what has stood strong and relentless for centuries, and in a few minutes it is all gone. But if you look beyond the visual changes, what a wildfire does is fundamentally change the energetics of the ecosystem, including human ecosystems. You probably will only hear about the energetics of the ObamaCare wildfire here at Wonder Springs, so pass this to others.

Winston Churchill – Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-19T10:02:21-07:00

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients is coming to a close. We are entering an era of consequences.

Winston Churchill

Three Word Transitions

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-15T11:01:31-07:00

"How's that hopey, changey stuff workin' out for ya?"

Well Sarah, it ain’t workin’ that well right now and come to think of it things haven’t worked all that well for quite a while.”

As we have been promoting in our Wonder Springs weekly articles for a number of weeks, change we can believe in is really change we can understand and makes us comfortable. However, if change really is the only constant in the world, then real stupendous change is truly freakin’ scary and it makes us withdraw further into our old sense of security, and we exacerbate the problems. Hence in real reality “Change we can believe in.” is really the enigma of continual angst. To question whether how much of this current change is by design or chance only magnifies the apprehension?

Last week in the Chronicle we looked at a number of religious antitheses to New England Calvinism. Calvinism defines the prime concept of its theology in three words that begin with the letter “G” standing for “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. In this week’s “Why Me?” article we will look at similar three word theses, these non-Calvinist and other religious expressions use to express their believe systems.

Watching Glenn Beck last Friday, he unveiled a similar progression to use in his work as he attempts to encourage others to begin to move beyond change we can believe in, as this country attempts to reset the nation on our constitutional foundation. Those three words were “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” These of course come from the old King James - American Revolution era translation of 1 Corinthians 13. Our modern versions use love instead of charity and consequently lose the true perspective of what the Apostle Paul was really saying.

As a Mormon, Beck uses the term charity in its proper context, but I question whether it works with modern American Christian evangelicals who generally think of charity has getting something for nothing, generally from the government, or an NGO (non government organization. Charity in the true sense works within the LDS church because they tithe, consequently there is money to help out those in need, not just as a handout, but also a hand-up.

Edmund Burke – Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-12T10:25:50-08:00

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), was a British Statesman and Philosopher who is generally viewed as the philosophical founder of modern political conservatism.

Week in Review – February 28 - March 6, 2010: Olympic hockey, healthcare, opportunity

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-08T12:10:23-08:00

Can you believe it just a week ago last Sunday the winter Olympic Games came to an end? The men’s gold medal hockey game in which the Canadians defeated the USA in overtime was the best final in history. The problem with hockey on television is that it shares with baseball the excitement of watching grass grow, except the grass field has been flooded and frozen into an ice rink. This is contrasted with live games, where speed and subtle moves can make hockey one of the most exciting spectator sports.

At the end of it all, the United States won more metals than any nation in history and the host Canadians won more gold, again setting a record. The games now pit professionals against professionals, which in our age should be because of the dedication required to perform at such a high level of skill.

The same cannot be said of America’s politicians. Sometime this week we expect the final redux of the Democrat’s healthcare reform package. The only thing for sure is that with or without ObamaCare, within a few years American’s will be paying 20 percent of GDP for health services. Then either reform, or reform of the reform, will and should be the nation’s top domestic priority.

It is true that most Americans are happy with their current coverage and don’t want it to change, simply because they get it for free or cheap with their job. So while they can see the doctor of their choice for routine matters, they never really understand the limitations of their current plan if they seriously need something called major medical.

Garth Brooks – Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-05T11:08:46-08:00

I’d rather have nothin’ than a whole lot of somethin’ I don’t need!
Bridge from a Garth Brooks song – Proverb for Federal debt reduction.

Week in Review - February 21-27, 2010: Olympic bobsleds, Chile earthquake, Obamacare

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-03-01T12:42:05-08:00

Three obtusely related things peaked our interest this week. Those three were an episode from the Vancouver Olympic Games, the earthquake in Chile, and Obama’s healthcare summit in Washington DC.

Now you may be asking yourself how these three events are related at all, even if the obtuse modifier is used? The thing that ties together all of our points this week, relate to how people respond to an opportunity or a crisis, in our terms stupendous change.

Our zenith of this report was the results of the four man bobsled event at Whistler in which the United States won its first Gold medal since 1948. While that was a worthwhile achievement, what I found really interesting was what happened after the medals presentation, where the Americans were joined by the Silver medal winning Canadians and the Bronze medal Germans.

Before TV cameras all three teams sort of scrunched together for a group photo and in the process you had over 1000 kilos (2200 lbs.) of competitive alpha males getting up close and personal, all smiling like they sort of liked one another. I have searched for a picture of that happening but it doesn’t appear to have gotten significant press attention.

Chances are that the same countries will be represented in a somewhat similar arrangement in four years, specifics to be determined by differences in probably less than half a second. Furthermore it illustrates the difference between competition and aggression. In our self centered world, the differences between competition and aggression blur our vision, so that aggression has somewhat become a social virtue and we have lost the true understanding of competition as a way to achieve excellence.

Statue of Liberty - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-26T09:01:08-08:00

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Inscription of the Stature of Liberty

According to Wikipedia, the bronze plaque, located in the Statue of liberty exhibit on the second floor of the pedestal, is inscribed with the sonnet "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus. It has never been engraved on the exterior of the pedestal, despite such depictions in editorial cartoons.[83] The first two lines refer to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes. The bronze plaque in the pedestal contains a typographical error: the comma in "Keep, ancient lands" is missing, causing that line to read "'Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she", and noticeably altering its meaning. The name "Mother of Exiles" was never taken up as the statue's name.

Week in Review: February 14 -20, 2010

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-22T12:39:15-08:00

We will comment on three events from the last week that have ties to a continuing angst, not reported currently in either the blogosphere or more traditional media outlets. This anxiety relates to how the individual handles, or hoped to handle, events that test the individual’s moral compass.

“Moral compass? I don’t need no stinkin’ moral compass, I make my own way in this world and I am proud of it.”

This was evident in the Austin, Texas happening on Thursday where Joe Stack, a disgruntled former software engineer, crashed his small plane into the local IRS building, leaving behind his house he set on fire, and a reported 3000 word manifesto on the Internet.

What makes a person do such a thing?

Will Rogers - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-12T13:24:46-08:00

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
Will Rogers

Anonymous - Quote of the week

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-19T13:21:12-08:00

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
anonymous

New Grace Spiritual Life Curve

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-20T13:00:08-08:00

Working through the archives on an old hard disk I found an updated copy of the Grace Spiritual Life Curve which has now been posted in the Phylogenesis Tab

Week in Review: January 30 - February 6 , 2010

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-08T17:14:34-08:00

Well, after a lot of happenings in the last couple of weeks, this week was less hectic, except in terms of stupendous changes. The first being the proposed budget sent to Congress by President Obama. The second being the weather in places a lot of people live on both the left and right coasts.

Last Monday President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. The proposal listed $3.83 trillion in spending, much to fight the continuing economic malaise, all of this showing the biggest deficit percentage since 1945. It is hoped this year’s deficit will come in around $1.6 trillion to be followed with something around a trillion in 2011.

As discussed by the spin-doctors and pundits, this is either the salvation or the end of the economic world, as we know it. What all these people are hoping for – is through the budget, or changes to the budget, we can return to the prosperity that the nation and the world we hoped would continue forever, namely the 1990s.

What no one seems to understand is that the ‘90s were funded basically by the housing bubble, monetarily securitizing that debt, and selling it to the rest of the world. To believe that we can do it all again, with some other zero risk – get rich scheme, borders on stupidity, if not insanity. I suppose the good news, as bad as the United States economic woes; the dollar has rebounded, thanks to things being worse elsewhere.

News

bannon@createleaders.org — 2010-02-08T12:04:54-08:00

Well, we finally have the workings of a simple site up and running. Soon we hope to get some specific information on training programs available here