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 Thursday, June 26, 2008

 

   

 

Once we thought the earth
was flat - What of that?

It was just as globos then
Under believing men

As our later folks have found it,
By success in running round it;

What we think may guide our acts,
But it does not alter facts.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935)


 

 
 
Provisional Truth  |  It Must Be True  |  2008

    We Can't Make This Up, So It Must Be True

01/25/2008
June 7, 2008:  Making It Through the Day...Priceless   New

Pete Kendall, who chronicles those telling, all-important changes in Social Mood at his Socio Times website found this gem:  "MasterCard taps into credit angst with Mr. Bill comeback."

Mr. Bill, as anyone who watched Saturday Night Live in the early years knows, was a claymation clown who, no matter how bad things got, how perilous the situation, always was flattened in the end of the short film.

Writes Pete in his June 3rd post:

The return of a 1970’s icon fits because that was the last bear market of comparable size. Of course, this is also a bear market of much larger degree, so Mr. Bill’s creator is exactly right when he links his creation's newfound appeal to the mood of the 1930s. The economic set-up for a trend change of very high degree is covered in this month’s issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast.

The fact that Mr. Bill now represents Mastercard is also… well, priceless. What better way to mark the entry to one of history’s great credit busts than through the hapless misadventures of a claymation figure. Also notice, the complete switcheroo in tone. The original Mastercard ads, which first appeared in the second half of the 1990s celebrated feel-good sensations like puppies, baseball and a night out on the town. In the new era, just “making it through the day” is “priceless.”

It's all good fun, I imagine, at MasterCard (MA) these days, after a huge initial public offering a couple of years ago and an equally huge, six-fold run-up in the price of its stock since May 2006, closing at 295.73 on June 6, 2008.

Sign of the top? I don't know. MasterCard makes money by processing credit card transactions, not issuing credit, so, unlike a bank, it has no delinquency or default risk, but if transaction volumes begin to decline as people use credit cards less frequently, its future earnings, and lofty stock price, perhaps may get a closer view of earth.

    But what do I know?  Send me an email.                   --Keith Hazelton


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  June 2, 2008    As Published at LewRockwell.com 05/31/2008

  Thanks Charley Reese for Some Good Advice

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.   

Recently I took Charley Reese’s advice (LewRockwell.com, 01/22/2008) and exercised my Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. I’m trying to exercise as many of those constitutional rights as possible these days, while available, given the increasing tendency of governments and do-gooders to subjugate, circumvent or creatively interpret those rights.  (Note: Many more accurately have observed I was granted a "privilege" by the state of Oklahoma.)

Fortunately I have not had occasion to try out the Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Amendments, but I thoroughly have enjoyed the First and now am looking forward to the Second. Gettin’ while the gettin’s good, I guess – one never knows these days.

For the first time in my life, at age 52, I’m a gun owner. I bought a pistol, to be precise, from a local dealer who did an instant background check (clean, apparently), swiped my credit card, and bagged up a serviceable Smith & Wesson 9mm with case, lock, cleaning kit and a hundred rounds of ammunition in the span of a quarter-hour.

I returned to the gun store, which also houses an indoor shooting range, a week later after learning everything I could about my S&W, including fieldstripping and cleaning. It was time to learn to shoot.

It takes practice, as I learned. Handling the gun, shooting, adjusting sights, more shooting, cleaning, more shooting. Only after a couple of hundred rounds did I begin to feel comfortable handing my pistol, and that was in an indoor, controlled, target-practice environment.

I brought my wife with me to the range the following week and taught her how to shoot. She liked it, and not only the part about pointing the pistol downrange, aiming and squeezing off a couple of rounds.

She also learned how to load and insert clips magazines,  remove empty clips magazines, and, most importantly (in addition to general gun safety), she learned how to rack the slide and lock it open and unlock it again, all without chipping a fingernail in the process.  (Note: I originally referred to magazines in error as "clips.")

Operating the slide was the most challenging aspect for her. It takes some strength, dexterity and practice, but by the end of our session she had it down, just like on television.

We will need considerably more practice and experience should we need to be able to react to a life-threatening situation, which is the other reason, besides target shooting, I took Charley’s advice.

As Mr. Reese observed, “These days, everyone would do well to add a pinch of paranoia to his otherwise sunny disposition and trusting nature.”

  Continue Reading Thanks Charley...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  May 24, 2008

  Eye of the Storm?

We now are caught between the forces of inflation – food and fuel – and deflation – homes and other assets: irresistible force meeting immovable object. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee April meeting minutes released recently gave indication the central bankers indeed now are worried about the effects of inflation, namely higher prices (inflation technically being an economist’s term denoting a period of increasing money supply, as in “too much money chasing a finite quantity of goods”).

But Fed officials also acknowledge they are fighting a difficult, two-front war against slow economic growth and soaring commodity prices – “stagflation” – an economic phenomenon whose last known whereabouts were sometime in the 1970s during the last substantial period of vast amounts of money in hot pursuit of agricultural, mineral and hydrocarbon goods.

Since the early 1970s, dollars have been created at will, not only by the Federal Reserve, which creates money by buying Treasury obligations from banks on the open market (hence Fed “Open Market” Committee) and deposits the proceeds into their accounts at the central bank. In our fraction-reserve banking system, banks then lend out excess reserves. When all is said and done, for every $100 created by the Fed, another $800 or so is created within the banking system.

And since the late 1970s our central bank has had plenty of government bonds from which to choose as a generation of deficit spending has resulted in the issuance of trillions of dollars of new treasury obligations (now exceeding $5.3 trillion of “public” debt).

All this money has been swirling around the world for years, building modern factories in faraway countries where labor costs to staff those factories are a fraction of those in the U.S. or building the world’s tallest buildings in the Middle East and Asia, enabling us to buy inexpensive imported merchandise and, at least until this new decade, inexpensive oil to fuel our American lifestyle.

  Continue Reading Eye of the Storm...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Comment |  2008

  Comment: Something To Think About...

05/10/2008
May 10
, 2008:  The New Inflationary Epoch

Doug Noland who writes the prescient and superb Credit Bubble Bulletin at Prudent Bear picks up on our theme regarding some of the causes of current and future commodity inflation (See Food for Thought and  Inflation's Early Warning System Validated) in his 05/09/2008 post:

Especially since the Fed’s Credit System Bailout, anticipating Heightened Global Monetary Disorder has been a key CBB theme.  The ongoing relevant question: how much would (in particular) China, India, Russia and Asia be willing to pay to procure adequate supplies of food and energy for their populations and economies?The obvious answer is “we have no way of knowing”, but the market is becoming increasingly cognizant of the reality that today’s massive international reserve positions provide virtually unlimited purchasing power.  The bidding war has begun in earnest, in what increasingly appears A New Inflationary Epoch.

Noland observes the international reserves positions of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), OPEC nations and other countries are significant, and almost exponentially have grown in the last decade, and provide a handy bankroll with which these countries, mostly authoritarian regimes, may buy social peace, continuing:

I don’t believe it is mere coincidence that crude has posted about a 30% y-t-d price surge at the same time as international reserve positions have expanded at about a 30% annualized rate - to a stunning $6.769 TN.  Over the past 4 ½ years, official international reserves have ballooned an unprecedented $3.921 trillion, or 138%.  During this period, crude prices surged almost 300%.  Chinese reserves ballooned more than four-fold over this period to $1.68 Trillion; India’s reserve position tripled to $303bn; and Brazil enjoyed a four-fold increase to $189bn.  After beginning 2004 at $73bn, Russian reserves have almost reached the half Trillion mark ($493bn).  And in just the past year, OPEC reserves have inflated 42% to $490bn.  To be sure, the world is awash like never before in excess “liquidity” for which to bid up prices of critical tradable resources

Evidence of the firepower of international reserves already is registering in various commodity indices, and in our daily lives in the form of higher food and fuel prices:

The CRB Commodities index closed today at an all-time high, sporting a y-t-d gain of 19% and one-year rise of 37%.  The Goldman Sachs Commodities index, also ending at a record high, has gained 28% so far this year and 68% over the past 12 months.  During the past year, soybeans have gained 85%, corn 72%, and wheat 68%.  Prices for iron ore, steel and hard commodities have experienced similar price inflation.  Gasoline prices are up almost 40%, natural gas about 50%, and heating oil about 90% over the past year.

But countries seeking to quell any possibility of social disorder can explain only a portion of the dramatic disruption of global commodities markets in the last 12 months.

  Continue Reading Comment: The New Inflationary Epoch...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  May 3, 2008

  Food For Thought

By now you know there’s a rice shortage, or so you’ve heard recently. Sam’s Club and Costco last week imposed limits on the purchase of imported Asian rice – 80 pounds per person per day – which, naturally, has encouraged hoarding behavior among its predominantly food-service buyers of this commodity, and which, in turn, may create the actual, self-fulfilling shortage being reported. (Mind you, there’s plenty of domestic rice available for sale, only Asian imported rice is being restricted.)

The specter of global food shortages is arising like ethanol fumes wafting from a gas pump, and food hoarding behavior, begun in the last few months at a country-level, is entering the psyche of our consumer society whose previous idea of shortages – few remembering the gas lines of the 1970s – consists of a lack of Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle-Me-Elmos, X-Boxes or I-Phones.

Significant price movement in grain commodities in the last year have led to a number of nations – Egypt and other Middle East states, the Philippines, Mexico – buying large quantities of wheat, corn, rice and soybeans, while grain producers in other areas of the world are beginning to impose grain export restrictions to insure adequate supplies, and therefore less chance of social unrest, in their own lands. China, which has an abundance of U.S. dollars with which to shop, will spare no expense for food and fuel.

Suddenly in North America, amidst growing concerns about global food shortages, the ethics of using food for fuel calls corn-based ethanol into question as a viable alternative energy to reduce our dependence on imported oil and creates another reason for the developing world, which also wants what we have in terms of diet, housing and transportation, to question our national policies.

Numberwise, First Quarter 2008 advance Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of anemic 0.6% annualized, identical to Fourth Quarter 2007, was reported on April 30th and pessimists determined to find a recession in there somewhere find the devil in the details of residential investment (housing) and durable goods (cars, furniture, appliances), where both categories now are negative.

Some contend pessimists merely are better-informed optimists and so seem obliged to observe that only an undesirable build in non-farm private inventories prevented the Q1 GDP report from becoming the first of two consecutive quarters of contraction necessary for a textbook recession, but cooler heads studying the report will notice the bifurcation between economic segments and regions of which we first informed you in January in our briefing entitled “A Tale of Two U.S. Economies.”

  Continue Reading Food For Thought...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  April 21, 2008

Inflation’s Early Warning System Validated

When we’ve “told you so” and it turns out we guessed correctly, we especially want to make sure you are well aware of our forecasting genius.

As readers will remember in our June 23, 2007 commentary entitled “Inflation’s Early Warning System” we forecast the growing inflationary forces assembling in commodities markets as evidenced by the surge in crude foodstuffs and feedstuffs prices buried in the May 2007 Producer Price Index report.

Ten months later, the March 2008 Producer Price Index, the measure of wholesale inflation, leaped by 1.1% (13.2% annualized), but the “core” rate, excluding food and energy, increased only 0.2%. “If you don’t eat and don’t drive,” quipped a cable TV business info-tainment reporter, “there’s a lot to like in this report.”

But the surge in grain prices and energy costs since early 2007 have exceeded even our extreme-case scenarios, and we are beginning to see the downside in headlines around the world.

Global demand for edible commodities now is translating into food shortages in various places and speculative fervor in others, and, based on the developing swiftness in which shortages are escalating, it appears that while the West has been fiddling about global warming and climate change, hunger has begun to burn anew in many parts of the world.

  Continue Reading Inflation's Early Warning System Validated...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  March 1, 2008  |  Link to OK Gazette Essay Published February 27,2008

  Plan B-Ball    New!                                    save to del.icio.us

Plan A for the proposed Ford Center upgrade is a Tuesday vote to extend Oklahoma City’s 1-cent MAPS for Kids sales tax for a year to fund major improvements and another three months to build a practice facility for a professional basketball team, raising about $120 million. 

If the Big League City sales tax fails, could an alternative funding plan for an updated Ford Center quickly be resubmitted to voters for approval before the NBA owners’ meeting in April? That would leave hope unscathed for an NBA team in Oklahoma City.

Let’s call it Plan B: a $100 million bond issue offered by the city of Oklahoma City to rebuild the arena, retired over a decade or so by assessing a $5 supplemental per-seat charge and annual luxury box fees for all Ford Center events — not only NBA games — and renegotiating naming rights to the arena. 

Some quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations: 10 years of sold-out NBA games (7 million seats) and 10 years of other Ford Center events (10 million seats) raise $85 million. A decade of luxury box surcharges might bring in $15 million, and, importantly, renegotiated arena naming rights could add at least another $25 million, totaling $125 million, which includes interest on the bonds. 

Fuzzy math, maybe, but you get the gist, and those who attend Ford Center events likely won’t notice a $5 ticket surcharge (about the cost of an order of nachos with lukewarm cheese-like sauce). 

  Continue Reading Plan B-Ball...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Comment  |  2008

  Comment: Something To Think About...                       save to del.icio.us

February 26, 2008:  The Next Crisis  

From the Financial Times, London:

Forget credit and oil - the next crisis will be over food

By Gillian Tett

Published: February 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 15 2008 02:00

I used to think that the fastest way to become worried about markets was to stare into the bowels of a monoline. No longer. A few days ago, I happened to hear Goldman Sachs discuss the state of the global financial system with European clients.

And what struck me most forcefully from this analysis - aside from the usual, horrific litany of bank woes - was just how much trouble is quietly brewing in corners of the commodities world.

Never mind that oil prices are high; that problem is already well known and reams of ink have been spilt debating that, along with the pressures in metals and mineral spheres.

Instead, what is really catching the attention of Goldman Sachs now is the outlook for agricultural prices. Or as Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at the US bank, says with disarming cheer: "We think we could go into crisis mode in many commodities sectors in the next 12 to 18 months . . . and I would argue that agriculture is key here."

  Continue Reading Comment: The Next Crisis...
 


02/03/2008
Provisional Truth  |  Comment  |  2008

 

February 3, 2008:  Chicken Soup for the U.S. Economy

A head cold lasts a week if you treat it, seven days if you don’t. Chicken soup often makes one feel better, as do some medications, but they do nothing to cure an illness caused by a constantly mutating virus. A cold’s symptoms, the sneezing, runny nose and congestion which make one feel miserable, are not caused by the infecting virus, but, in fact, by the defense mechanisms employed by the body to rid itself of the infection.

The U.S. economy has caught cold, and it will last the usual amount of time, about half a year for a mild case. Symptoms only now are beginning to be evident: slowing economic growth, rising unemployment and jobless claims, a weakening dollar and falling asset prices in residential real estate and the stock market. The Federal Reserve is ladling out economic chicken soup as fast as it can in the form of liquidity injections and slashed fed funds target rates, but the economy still is starting to feel lousy.

  Continue Reading Chicken Soup for the U.S. Economy...


    We Can't Make This Up, So It Must Be True
01/25/2008
January 24, 2008:  So... Exactly
Whose Economy Gets Stimulated? 

Transcript of comments during the Florida Republican Debate, January 24, 2007

Mike Huckabee:
"But let me speak to the really heart of what I think a lot of Americans are concerned about with the economy and, frankly, in talking about the stimulus package.

"One of the concerns that I have is that we'll probably end up borrowing this $150 billion from the Chinese and when we get those rebate checks, most people are going to go out and buy stuff that's been imported from China.

"I have to wonder whose economy is going to be stimulated the most by the package."

--KHH Comment:  China now owns more than $380 billion of US Treasury obligations, and foreign interests control about 45% of the current $5.2 trillion of publicly held national debt, up from 30% in January 2001 ($2.34 trillion as of 11/2007 vs. $1.01 trillion as of 01/2001).  See Major Foreign Holdings of US Public Debt.

US national debt now exceeds $9.2 trillion, up from $920 billion in January 1981 when President Jimmy Carter left office, up tenfold in a generation, including $3.5 trillion in new national debt in only seven years since January 2001, plus another likely $600 billion before President George Bush leaves office in 2009.   How can anyone believe such a trend is sustainable?  Are we now a "Blanche DuBois" nation: "dependent upon the kindness of strangers" to keep our consumer economy, and our empire, afloat? 

Daily calculation of US national debt, see U.S Treasury Debt to the Penny at Treasury Direct.

  What do I know?  Send me an email.                   --Keith Hazelton


01/08/2008
January 08, 2008: 
Plan Would Let Seniors Work to Pay Taxes

Tuesday December 25, 1:38 pm ET
By Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press Writer

NY Town Wants to Start Program to Let Senior Citizens Work Off Property Taxes, for $7 an Hour

GREENBURGH, N.Y. (AP) -- Audrey Davison lives alone, gets a $620 Social Security check each month and worries about the sharply rising taxes on her four-bedroom house. Davison, 76, raised her family there and after 43 years, she really doesn't want to leave Greenburgh.

Greenburgh doesn't want her to leave, either.

The town is pushing a program that would let seniors work part-time, for $7 an hour, to help pay off some of their property taxes.

"People shouldn't have to sell their house, move away to a place with less taxes, leave behind their family and friends," said Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.

  Continue Reading It Must Be True...
 


  What Is Provisional Truth?

As Charlotte Perkins Gilman observed a century ago (poem, top left), "What we think may guide our acts, but it does not alter facts."

Like an earth-centric universe, yesterday's "truth" has become today's fables, superstitions and discarded dogmas and doctrines. Today's "heresy" may become tomorrow's truth.
  As such - like tax law - truth is provisional and always subject to change.

Everything we "know" yet may be altered, refined, perhaps someday proven wrong, so it's advantageous to keep an open mind.


Provisional Truth  |  Quotes  |  May 2008

  Quotable

  Ozymandius
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
   "My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817  -  Link

  Continue to Quotes...
 


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Web www.provisionaltruth.org

Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  August 22, 2007  |  Link to OK Gazette Essay Published August 15, 2007

  All Fired Up

Clean-burning natural gas or abundant, less-expensive coal? Oklahoma's Corporation Commission has been asked to approve a new power plant to be built in Red Rock, a joint venture between OG+E and Public Service of Oklahoma.

As submitted, plans for the $1.8 billion, 950-megawatt generating facility propose it will burn Wyoming coal and that's got one central Oklahoma company with a vested interest in natural gas buying more pages of advertising than the Mathis brothers.

Chesapeake Energy Corporation recently began an open letter campaign to influence the Corporation Commission to approve the facility, but require it be fueled by natural gas, some of which likely would originate from Oklahoma wells, not Wyoming coal.

  Continue Reading All Fired Up...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  July 30, 2007  |  Link to Oklahoma Gazette Essay Published July 25, 2007

 
Penn Square Bank's Unexpected Legacy

A quarter-century ago, Penn Square Bank failed spectacularly in Oklahoma City, ushering in the untimely end of a previous oil boom, indelibly changing the landscape of banking throughout the state and hastening the emergence of national mega-banks.

And yet, after a generation of national consolidation in the banking industry, we enjoy one of the most competitive banking markets in the country, a direct consequence of Penn Square’s failure in 1982.

As the first domino to fall in a chain reaction lasting a decade, Penn Square Bank became the poster child for  the inflationary excesses of the Eighties, an era in which most bankers, oilmen and gasoline consumers had been convinced the prices of energy never again would decline from a $40-a-barrel peak in 1979. 

  Continue Reading Penn Square Bank's Unexpected Legacy...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  June 23, 2007

  Inflation's Early Warning System

Red lights are blinking on inflation's early warning system control panel – fasten your seat belts. “Crude Foodstuffs and Feedstuffs,” commodities such as grains, raw milk, sugar and slaughter animals making up the raw materials that eventually become the finished products we call “food,” registered an unadjusted 35 percent year-over-year increase in the May Producer Price Index reported June 14th. Its five-month annualized increase is nearly 22%.

Extremely sensitive, and thus extremely volatile, the commodities component of PPI nonetheless is a credible harbinger of future inflation, and by extension, long opportunities in a bullish commodities market, as previous periods of rapid raw materials inflation since the 1970s has shown.

  Continue Reading Inflation's Early Warning System...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  June 13, 2007    Link to Oklahoma Gazette Essay Published June 13, 2007

   Rein in the Rainy Day Fund

Oklahoma's economy is bright and sunny but taxpayers should note the balance of the interest-free loan we have made to the state in the form of our rainy day fund.

For the third consecutive year Oklahoma will deposit a maximum contribution to the state's Constitutional Reserve Fund, bringing the balance to more than $561 million by the end of June, nearly quadruple the high-water mark of $154 million in 1998.

  Continue Reading Rein in the Rainy Day Fund...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  May 23, 2007

   Economic Tsunami Warning

More than anecdotal evidence now points to an economic tsunami forming from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown “ripples” which began to register on financial seismometers 18 months ago.  It's an instructive image, how a seemingly small, inconsequential thing can later, unexpectedly manifest itself in a big, deadly, destructive way.

As with a real tsunami, when produced by an underwater earthquake, it travels virtually unnoticed in open water, appearing as mere ripples or swells moving across the sea. Only when the wave energy and momentum approach the shallowing continental shelf, and, ultimately, the shoreline, does the destructive magnitude of a tsunami become evident.

  Continue Reading Economic Tsunami Warning...                                 
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  May 9, 2007  |  Link

  Thin Paper Line

A recent study funded by the Pentagon concluded the U.S. Army was stretched to its limit, a “thin green line” as the media have taken to calling the controversial conclusions of this report, referring to James Jones's 1962 novel The Thin Red Line. The novel's title is derived from an old Midwestern saying that “there's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.” War, accurately portrayed in his book and the 1998 movie, seems to stretch that line almost to the breaking point, as any combat veteran would know.

Our thin paper line is the world's financial and monetary system – in reference to the paper-based nature of world financial markets. It's what separates global economic prosperity from catastrophic financial depression.

  Continue Reading
Thin Paper Line...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  May 1, 2007  |  Link

   Presidential Vanity of Vanities 2007, Vol. 4 

As we remember on May 1st the fourth anniversary of what then was proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq, many rightly have re-examined, as should all Americans, our opinions of a war now lingering far longer and exacting an American and Iraqi human and financial toll far greater and more terrible than we were led to expect when the drums began beating for regime-change in Iraq in 2002.

In his 2003 speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, with the now much-maligned “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, President Bush said, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on.” And so it goes, as the recently late Kurt Vonnegut might have said.

  Continue Reading Presidential Vanity of Vanities 2007...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  April 29, 2007  |  Link

  This I Believe:  Truth is Provisional, Love is Absolute

April 2007 CE

Like many, I received ample childhood religious instruction, raised to follow the faith of my parents, but I never encountered that sense of peace others professed and I never outgrew my doubt and concern about the conflicting doctrines proclaimed by myriad religions.

Over the years I sampled several variations of Christianity, from Catholicism to Fundamentalism to end-times Hal Lindsay-ism, but eventually, invariably, I drifted away. Always so much attention infatuation really not on this life, but the next.

  Continue Reading This I Believe...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  April 22, 2007  |  Link

   If YOU Were The Decider

A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking some real money, as it often is inaccurately attributed to late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen.

The cost of our unilateral global war on terror since 9/11 is approaching a very real $500 billion, all financed “off budget, off balance sheet,” by the Federal Reserve, a privately held corporation owned by its member-banks, which creates Treasury Bonds from its magic, never-overdrawn checkbook.

  Continue Reading If YOU Were the Decider...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  April 18, 2007  |  Link  |  Link to Oklahoma Gazette Essay Published April 18, 2007

  The Ethics of Ethanol  

Addiction, it is said, often blinds those so afflicted to the moral and ethical considerations of behaviors intent on satisfying their habits.

In our present oil addiction we so fervently have embraced corn ethanol as one solution to our petroleum dependency we have neglected to question the ethical and moral propriety of using food for fuel.

In 2005 we put about an eighth of the entire U.S. corn crop into our gasoline tanks. Those plump, golden kernels, once destined to become snack chips or cereals or tortillas or sweeteners, instead were converted into 4 billion gallons of ethanol and used as an additive to 150 billion gallons of gasoline consumed that year.

  Continue Reading The Ethics of Ethanol...
 


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  April 13, 2007  |  Link

   Judgment Day - Apophis the Destroyer

As if we didn't have anything else to worry about, here comes some dandy news from outer space. Asteroid 99942 Apophis, a thousand-foot diameter chunk of rock discovered in 2004, will rendezvous with Earth again on April 13, 2029 (a Friday, of course), hopefully slipping by us at a near-miss distance of about 18,000 miles.

That's closer than many satellites and well-within the Moon's orbit, and Apophis, the Greek name for an Egyptian god of darkness and chaos – naturally – will be visible to the naked eye in parts of Europe North Africa and western Asia as it whizzes by. Talk about close encounters of the worst kind, but wait, it gets better.

  Continue Reading Judgment Day - Apophis the Destroyer...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  March 19, 2007  |  Link

  The Inescapable Irony of 9/11

American essayist Agnes Repplier said humor brings insight and tolerance but “irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”

As our collective grief and anger slowly dissipate in the years since 9/11, an inescapable irony emerges in the aftermath which must be confronted, and which, with hope, may bring us understanding and, more importantly, the courage as a nation and its leaders and as a people to change.

“How could they do this to us? How could they hate us this much?” We rhetorically have asked ourselves these questions countless times since 2001, but some answers may be surprising, and will differ from the official, received opinion dutifully communicated to us by a preponderance of members of a mostly tame, corporate-owned fourth estate.

  Continue Reading Inescapable Irony...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  January 31, 2007  |  Link 

  Immigrant Nation

An illegal immigration issue now absorbing more of our national attention than necessary has its roots in all prior migratory waves: the search for a better life. We now are told, however, the United States, peopled mostly by descendants of European immigrants searching for a better life since the early 1600s, can no longer tolerate those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, at least if they originate from below our southern border.

A hundred years ago, in the midst of an extraordinary wave of immigration, former president Teddy Roosevelt led another charge expounding the dangers of immigrants who did not assimilate themselves to American language and culture, demanding that entry to the U.S. would be “predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.”

  Continue Reading Immigrant Nation...


Provisional Truth  |  Essays  |  Link

  2006 Essays

December 2006: Mass Transit: Get On Board - Link
November 2006: Nuclear Power Necessity - Link
November 2006: Disposable Consumerism - Link
November 2006: Faith-Based Money - Link
October 2006: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace - Link 
September 2006: Ask (Oprah) and Ye Shall Receive
- Link
September 2006: Reflections on 9/11 -
Link
August 2006: The Emperor's Clothes -
Link
July 2006: Election Day Sobriety - Link
July 2006: The Fever of Gaia - An Inconvenient Truth -
Link
June 2006: Addicted to Oil -
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May 2006: Petro Victims Search for Clues
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   ©2005-2008 Keith Hazelton's Provisional Truth                                                                             Top