The message is clear and many citizens have known this problem for years. So now what do we do? http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-edt-spending-editorial-20120708,0,2415744.story
It is very easy in this era of artificial abundance to take for granted the many blessings I have been provided thus far in my life. I use the adjective artificial to describe the abundance because I have to believe that the great standard of living that I am permitted to enjoy is some how related at least in part to the availability of cheap money through low interest rates and loose monetary policy. I would be a hypocrite if I did not acknowledge that because I often lament the loose credit and monetary policies enacted by our government and the Federal Reserve.
While I sometimes feel a bit ashamed that I am able to live in this good fashion when I know my parent, grandparents, and great grandparents had to work much harder and had to live way more within their means for their piece of pie that was the American dream in their day, it does not escape me that I would be a fool to have not taken advantage of the great opportunities that were laid before me.
And so it was with the help of that easy to come by money in combination with my hard work, commitment, faith, and the help of many great mentors along the way throughout school and work, that I have been very fortunate to be permitted to live a wonderful lifestyle.
I encourage others to think about how good their lives may very well be in comparison to other people’s. If you think you have it better and know you needed help to get where you are today, please allow me to encourage you to somehow consider paying it forward. You can help others join you in better living with random acts of kindness and reciprocity in giving.
We have many blessing in life and it would be sad if we failed to recognize them as such and did not “give back” to keep the cycle of goodness “in play” going forward. Paying it forward actually makes good sense for goodness’ sake. Thanks for reading this.
Make it two consecutive days that the Daily Press editorial team has impressed me. Yesterday they wrote of the recent failure on the part of the GOP. (See immediate preceding blog post).
Today, they share their criticism of the York County Board of Supervisors / administrator for announcing a real estate tax hike on already financially reeling citizen tax payers. I could not agree more with their admonishment.
Digby Solomon the publisher and Rebeeca Troyer the Editor of the editorial page both deserve credit and positive acknowledgement for their willingness to provide relevant and provoking commentary that is so unlike the majority of mainstream media outlets.
The societal struggles we currently face are doomed to perpetuate unless leaders of our communities are willing to boldly face the brutal facts of our current situation and bring light to the problems when they need to be aired. What Mr. Solomon and Ms. Troyer are doing with their editorials the last two days is nothing short of heroic leadership for their community. I hope they continue to be a leading voice of reason as it will spark the debates needed to advance the solutions.
Here is their opinion today. http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-edt-yorkbudget-editorial-20120222,0,1773062.story
…needs to come to its senses; right now it’s circling the drain
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-edt-ripgop-editorial-20120221,0,7473479.story
How refreshing to see a major media source that shares my very Libertarian like opinion. Before too long, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them giving Ron Paul more attention.
I was happy to see two media accounts this morning about the issue of property rights. One an article about a home owner in Yorktown, VA battling his local government for his right to use his rural residential zoned home that has permitted use for agriculture so that he can operate an oyster business (aquaculture). This battle has been underway for sometime now. The update this morning is that a well known local civil rights activist is now putting his weight behind the property owner.
The other is national syndicated columnist George Will and his thoughts relating to rent control laws in NYC.
I hope both stories spark an interest on the part of property rights activists and supporters that can lead to all levels of government recognizing that a person’s right to use their property as they so choose is a fundamental component of being free.
Here are links to the stories. Please, if you are so moved, please take a moment and think about writing a letter to the editor for your local newspaper or to your local government representative at the local, state, and/or federal level and tell them that in no uncertain terms, you favor laws that safeguard the rights of property owners from government theft and control. A very fast and convenient method of writing your congress representatives and senators is to go to http://www.downsizedc.org and use their tools for doing so. They also offer many tips on what you can put in your letters.
We all tend to have unfinished or uninitiated activities or tasks or things that we would like to get around to doing some day. If we had the luxury of all the time in the world, we could continually keep from doing today what we would hope could be put off until tomorrow. Unfortunately, we know all too well that none of us is promised tomorrow. During the year 2010, one particular as yet to be completed task on my list was beginning to gnaw at me. I had yet to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Someone carrying not yet completed desired to-do tasks around in their mind was popularized as a person having a”Bucket List”. This came about several years ago after actors Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson teamed up on the big screen to make a movie about two aging men and the stories behind them acting out some of the activities on their list of things to do.
As a liberty minded individualist who first learned about Atlas Shrugged years ago from my good friend Gerry back when I was just starting high school, I grew into adulthood simply thinking that I did not have the time to read it. How silly of me.
Once I finally got a copy and started reading it just 2 years ago, what I once thought was going to be a labored read turned into a labor of love with the book. The labor was simply the time needed to read it. Once started, I found I could not put the book down. It was both a philosophical work and an adventure story all rolled into one. Like most other things we procrastinate from doing, I found and made time to read it once I realized I enjoyed it. How silly of me to put it off in favor of what I thought was my busy schedule.
My reading sessions turned into an escape of sorts. I completed it in about 2-3 weeks, taking about an hour or so daily. Looking back at the time, Atlas Shrugged served as a balm of sorts for what ailed me insofar as my complete sullied attitude and morale relating to the bad economy, our federal debt, President Obama’s and Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s individual health care mandate in the Affordable Healthcare Act, the wars and our country’s overall malaise. Reading this book helped me see that these problems that are in part based on collectivism and statism are not new. Ayn Rand wrote of them in the 1950’s. It helped me refocus my mind as to how I might better cope with what seems the the degradation of our free society. In many respects, it had me rethink about dedicating some time to writing this blog.
One of my favorite parts of the book was Francisco’s money speech. Not coincidentally, other readers must also have enjoyed it, as it was very easy to find numerous references to it with a simple google search. I have provided the link to it below so that it might serve as a primer of sorts for you. After reading it, maybe reading Atlas Shrugged will be something that you will add to your bucket list. This topic of sound money is very appropriate for our times. Many mainstream economists are proclaiming that the recession is ending and that our economy is headed in the right direction. Those of us who look at the economy through the lens of the Austrian school of thought think otherwise. The threat of a third round of quantitative easing looms and with it, our beloved freedoms take even more of a beating. Candidate Ron Paul holds the issue of sound monetary policy as a main component of his platform for restoring America.
Please take a moment and read Ayn Rand’s views on money, as told by one of her amazing characters, Francisco D’Anconia. And as usual, thanks for reading my thoughts here at Wake Up America!
Organizations exist for a purpose. Most formal ones have a mission statement that describes that purpose. Over the course of time, healthy organizations that want to achieve their mission will set goals and create objectives with performance measures to do so. This goal planning process is often revisited and updated as time progresses to assess performance toward meeting the stated goals and objectives.
Despite this very purposeful activity, many organizational leaders fall short of reaching their goals due to an inability to understand where the leverage points lie within their organization’s processes. The systems in which today’s businesses and organizations exist are much more complicated than in the first half of the 20th century. Yet many leaders still rely on linear means of looking at how things get done in their transacting of business.
Singular causes leading to singular effects is not the way reality exists. This reductionist and mechanistic view point is great at isolating and helping to understand snapshot views of some simple phenomena that occurs, but it falls way short in helping to lay out a road map that can potentially address a multitude of cause and effect relationships which always include dynamic feedback on the system in which the operating reality takes place.
Fortunately, there is a solution available to help leaders find find their way to help navigate their organization down the right road to success. Systems dynamics modeling is an affordable and effective tool that can be used by leaders and decision makers to help them make better decisions that account for the elusive pitfalls that lie beyond the capability of the human mind to understand complex interconnections that exist within our systems.
Systems dynamics modeling can help in strategic planning, teaching and communication, and policy formulation. Whether it be in health care, production, finance, or social sciences – this skill set permits mental models of how reality exists to be tested for accuracy – BEFORE possible decisions are put into action. The modeling is only as good as the mental model is mapped, but when done so correctly using the proper tools, the dynamic display of the stocks and flows of the system yield tremendous value at improving understanding.
If you are interested, please take a look at some of the examples of systems dynamic models that my former professor Paul Stepanovich created. He is the person who introduced my to the benefits of Systems Thinking and Systems Dynamic modeling while taking his classes for the health care management tract of my Master’s Degree program.
Today’s online and print versions of the Daily Press newspaper show a still astonishingly high number of public notices for property mortgage foreclosures. http://classifieds.dailypress.com/classifieds?category=public_notice
I am a bit confounded as thought I recalled the President indicating during his State of the Union Address last month that his economic recovery plan was working. There is similarly positive indices posted at the various National Associate of Home Builders websites. http://eyeonhousing.wordpress.com/ and http://www.nahb.org/default.aspx . Apparently, news of the recovery in progress has not yet reached my community’s housing market.
Today’s 30-year fixed rate are still hovering just over the all-time lowest rates at 4.00%. http://www.bankrate.com/mortgage.aspx
So why are so many people here still going facing foreclosure when there is a chance to save the property by doing a refinance to a much more affordable rate? There could be a number of reasons. Maybe they are unemployed. Maybe the appraised value of the property has plummeted and they are very much upside down. Regardless, if one small metropolitan service area such as the lower Peninsula of the Hampton Roads area of Virginia (Cities of Newport News, Hampton, Poquoson, Williamsburg, and counties of York and Gloucester) has 128 published foreclosure notices then clearly the economy is not yet on the road to recovery.
Call me confused and dumbfounded. Or better yet a skeptic. I am that same guy who also thinks the stock markets are oversold and headed for a steep decline. But that’s another post for another day.
While watching the NBC GOP primary debates last night from Florida, at one point, my son Chris said, “What if Ron Paul and Rick Santorum just flat out spoke up and said, ‘You know what, this is bull that you are clearly giving the majority of mic time to Romney and Gingrich and quite frankly we’re sick of it!’ and then walk off?”
We agreed that that is what many normal people would do when disrespected in much the way that the mainstream media (MSM) is treating candidates like Ron Paul whom do not fit their elitist agenda as their hand picked frontrunners for the GOP nomination. To the media elites, it does not matter who wins the GOP or the Democratic nod as they make sure there is no difference in the winners from each side. They make sure the Republocrats win every time.
That got me thinking about whether or not the apathy and rampant non-participation on the part of a majority of American citizens in the electoral process is directly related to the fact that most average Americans with even half a bit of sense and education know that the process is a complete sham and fraud. It really is that way today. But that does not mean that it should be or that it was designed to be this way.
Participating in it amounts to giving the impression that you sanction it. That you approve of it. That you are a willing participant. This presents a terrible conundrum for those of us who are leery and tired of big government and its far reaching tentacles that bind it to the plutocrats and oligarchy that then creates the government media military industrial complex. Our participation in the way the game is currently played means we approve of it. But we do not. The only way to change the rules of the game is to win.
We legitimate liberty loving teaparty activists have to show the patience and savvy needed to play their game and win it, so we can wrestle away the reins of control and then make the changes necessary to prevent a re-seizing of control by special interests who use the government for their own personal gain. This is no easy endeavor nor one for the faint at heart. It requires a strong will and the cunning to see that the race is long. I thank God for the Ron Paul campaign and its ability to do this.
So at first glance, the normal and typical response to all those thieves in cahoots is to say “piss off, I am not participating anymore because you don’t play fair and its all just a sham of a process.” But to do so is to give up. When you start to get the notion that you know it is all just a ruse and you want to stop participating in the sham of the current electoral process, that is the exact moment when you need to do the exact opposite of quitting and instead dig in and persevere and know that you are not alone in your thinking or in this fight and realize that real liberty loving people are fighting along side you to push the government media military industrial complex back and defeat it.
Eventually, we will wake the United States of America up from the terrible coma it fell into and we will then remain on guard to make sure it never falls prey again to the ills of the last 75 years of government run amok. We the People must remain vigilant. The great experiment with Constitutional Republicanism cannot end on our watch. Please stay strong and continue to support candidates like Ron Paul.
I am amused and befuddled at the mainstream media reports of SC GOP primary debate audience members booing Dr. Ron Paul’s response where he raised the Golder Rule in discussing his viewpoints on U.S. foreign policy. Oddly, when he provide that reply, there was a cascading of boos coming from the audience.
Too his credit and in support of his principles, Dr. Paul continued to provide his answer. As the boos subsided, he finished by essentially stating that the U.S. does not need another war and all its costs, but instead needs to end the current war. To which there were then cheers and applauds from the audience. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltRTLNZmmfs By the way, the subsequent cheering to the aforementioned odd boos was not reported.
I am left wondering – what kind of civilized, God fearing people boo the Golden Rule? I would love for people reading this to post their best answer to that question:
What kind of civilized, God fearing people boo the Golden Rule? Please reply! Thanks.
Living in America 