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
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...
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 -
Link
Published Version - OK Gazette 05312006
May 2006: Petro Victims Search for Clues
-
Link
May 2006:
Immigration is OK -
Link
April 2006: Apocalypse Soon -
Link
March 2006:
Vanity of Vanities -
Link
February 2006: Thin Paper Line -
Link
2005 Essays
December 2005: Saving Social Security 2006 -
Link
November 2005:
Color Me Purple -
Link
October 2005: Summer Reading 2005 -
Link
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