This Changed Everything

My mom sent me a link to this music video in an email with the tag line: "beautiful", a couple of weeks ago. I let it sit in my inbox for quite a while, waiting for a day when I could have some time to get to wade through "less urgent" mail. I just thought it was another embedded Power Point presentation with pretty landscapes and soft music. I've had enough of those land in my account to start up my own Sappy Supermarket of Semi-Inspirational Sentiments.
Wow. I should have opened this up sooner. I should have BEEN there. A seat near the rostrum in the Tabernacle on that night would have been worth my right thumb. (After I showed it to my wife, she told me it was time to start lurking around on the Temple Square Events website so I could score us some tickets to events like this.) I'll bet I watched it a dozen times the first day. I got onto the iTunes store and grabbed more Andres Bocelli. I stopped listening to anything else on my iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iCDPlayer, (OK just regular CD Player) and that's when things in my life made an incredible change. Powerful, inspirational, affirming, uplifting music makes a difference in a life. In a few days it was like I was living in a new world. One a little happier, a little cleaner, I guess it was a little more like heaven.
And the switch wasn't from vulgar, violent hip-hop or similar music. It was a switch from frivolous to meaningful.
I wonder if switching from fast-food to bunny food would do the same thing for my body?

Stick It To The Rich Swells!

Here's an interesting thing I heard on the Michael Medved radio show this afternoon.  I looked it up to see if Medved had found some way to make this look worse than it does, but on The Fed's own website, here's what I read:

Are you considering a government job? The federal government employs over 2,700,000 workers and hires hundreds of thousands each year to replace civil service workers that transfer to other federal government jobs, retire, or leave for other reasons. Average annual salary for full-time federal government jobs now exceeds $79,197. The U.S. Government is the largest employer in the United States, hiring about 2.0 percent of the nation's work force and the workforce is expanding significantly under the Obama administration. Federal government jobs can be found in every state and large metropolitan area, including overseas in over 200 countries. The average annual federal workers compensation in 2008, including pay plus benefits, was $119,982 compared to just $59,909 for the private sector according to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

What is most interesting was the fact that I switched to Medved right after listening to Rush go on and on about the fact that the "Pay Czar" was limiting the salaries of the top 30 executives at Goldman Sachs (because they borrowed tax payer money).  Interesting to note how the Feds treat themselves in jobs that are totally tax-payer supported. 

Just a thought: Maybe the Pay Czar needs someone to look at his salary.

Inquiry Demanded!

Here are a couple of fellows who have a lot in common.  Both have been the chief architects of massive frauds that have cost lots of people lots of money.  The guy on the left is in prison.  The one on the right seems to be in hiding.  They really should be cell-mates.  They could spend the next 50 years or so comparing notes and lamenting the fact that they almost pulled it off.

Madoff ran a Ponzi Scheme that cost investors billions of dollars.  His crime was trying to duplicate social security in the private sector, i.e. he took money from new marks, used it to pay off promises made to older marks and spent the remainder on his own pet projects.  He went to jail when the whole scheme fell apart as all Ponzi Schemes always must.  (I wonder if we'll be allowed to dig up FDR's remains and incarcerate them when social security has its final melt-down?)

Al Gore perpetuated a more sophisticated fraud.  He took a pet project, (environmentalism), found a hot-button, scientific theory that had panic-potential, (man-made global warming), helped create a financial derivative product, (carbon credits) and speculated heavily on it, and then tried to sell the whole scheme on the world.  Had he pulled it off, he would have become richer than Bill Gates.  He got the Nobel Prize.

Currently Mr. Gore & Co. are doubling down on their bet that they can fleece billions if not trillions from angst-ridden westerners before even the most obtuse among us catch wind of the fact that thousands of hacked emails between the leading "scientists" of the IPCC prove beyond any doubt that the "research" and "peer review" that virtually all of the warmers have been parroting for all these years were founded on cooked books and academic bullying.

Eventually the larger news outlets will be forced to move this story from page C-17 and deal with it.  Right after they can construct plausible deny-ability to account for either their appalling incompetence or their criminal complicity in not only allowing this charade to go on so long but actually promoting it.

I want to get my claim in early.

Mr. Gore,

I want a full refund for the 20 or so "green" reusable grocery bags that clutter the back seat of my wife's vehicle.

Let's talk pain and suffering.  I don't suffer much pain.  But I nevertheless feel entitled to a sum of $1000 for each lifted middle finger pointed at me from sanctimonious liberals driving those goofy Toyota Priuses while I passed them in my Dodge Ram pickup.  Five or six at least.  No one should be subjected to abuse from silly buggers who drive cars that look like the Brave-Little-Toaster-on-wheels.  (The ones who politely drive them to save on gas costs are exempt from my wrath.)

I want you held accountable of the billions, no, trillions of dollars wasted in trying to roll back your fictitious climate change "crisis".  And while you're at it, produce another movie coming clean and apologizing to all the innocent, impressionable school children you lied to and frightened with your lies about drowning Polar Bears and swamped cities.  You also need to tell them that their parents are not uncaring, selfish enemies of the state.

You can keep your damn Nobel Peace Prize.  With company like Jimmy Carter,  Barack Obama, and Yasser Arafat, yours is probably where it belongs.  Your personal hypocrisy is a fitting example for a "peace prize" named for Alfred Nobel, the man who invented the high explosive that made most weapons of modern warfare possible.

(And try not to be photographed again wearing that smug, "I know more than you" smile.  You don't.)

Out-Source Disaster!

I'm dumbfounded at the dizzying array of madnesses coming out of Washington these days.  It reminds me of the Keystone Cops; except these cops are swinging around guns with real bullets in them.  If the actual existence of the Constitution of the United States wasn't at stake it would be funny.  Things that used to be confined to the mad ramblings of conspiracy theorists are almost daily reported in the news--as hard news and with no outrage.  I think we need to canonize the book "Atlas Shrugged" into the body of scripture and grant sainthood to Ayn Rand.  She has proved herself a prophet in a class with Isaiah and John the Revelator at the very least.
So now that I've put-off half of the people with whom I might otherwise have a conversation with, I'll get to an actual point I want to make about the situation our country (our world) is in.
How did we bring it to such a turn?  For the nonce, let's say I don't believe, as some frighteningly credible persons these days believe, that Barack Hussein Obama really wants to destroy the United States or its Constitution.  But the system of free enterprise wherein a man or woman can labor and get gain and control the disposition of that gain as he or she sees fit is under a serious assault.  It's under assault mainly by conscientious people who see troubles in society and have become disenchanted by the apparent failure of the traditional system of solving these things, which is the Christian concept of taking care of your neighbors and succoring the poor.  (In a "righteous" society "poor" means physically or mentally ill or disabled since everyone else can and will work to take care of their basic needs...which is all they expect.)  In our society, we've slowly and disastrously hired our government to perform this Christian Service in our behalf.  In doing so we've committed the grave error of hiding our faces from our own flesh.  A term Isaiah used to describe the sin of selfishness (In Isaiah 58:7)  Incidentally, he coined the phrase while he was reiterating the principles that surround the commandment to engage in religious fasts and in the same passage pointed out a perfect system for funding Christian largess to the poor which is the subject of the entire chapter of Isaiah 58.
Hiring the government to feed the poor for us was convenient.  The poor are often kind of messy.  Not just in the sense that they sometimes have dirty clothes and live in dirty surroundings.  But some of them have dirty habits as well.  They are uncomfortable to be around.  They are inconvenient.  They remind us of our own vulnerabilities and so it was easy to give up a little in the way of taxes and let the government hire an army of "experts" to take care of our duty for us.
Trouble was the government paid these people.  And they paid their managers based on the size of the organizations they managed.  Under such a system there were rewards in having a caseload too big to handle with the current staff.  More people had to be hired.  The boss got a raise.  Corruption erupted.  More oversight was demanded by the people.  Congress demanded paperwork.  Even more people were hired to handle that.  With more staff to supervise, the boss got another raise.  Instead of spending that raise, the boss used it to borrow money for a place in the mountains for weekends.  Now his kid needs braces.  He didn't consider that when he signed the note on the vacation place.  His wife starts to complain that without braces, his daughter will not be ready to be chosen homecoming queen in five years.  He needs more income.  Fast.  Suddenly a handout becomes an "entitlement".  People who would ordinarily work themselves out of the system and become self-sustaining are convinced they will never be able to catch up with the Republican swells and that government is their only hope of an existence with a flat-panel TV.  So the food stamps stay.
The children of the "entitled" grow up with the hand-out culture in their homes; thus securing the futures of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of government workers  whose only purpose is to pass out entitlements to a population that will never be allowed the profound pleasure and satisfaction of sitting down monthly at the kitchen table and writing the check for the last of the bills.  Checks adequately funded by the work of their own hands.  To do so would render those sweet form-handling jobs with benefits and no chance of lay-offs or firings (except for the most egregious offences like work-place homicide.  And even then, they get early retirement.)
Of course the entitled and the entitlers will vote for the politicians most likely to keep their respective gravy trains running and everyone but everyone in this perversely symbiotic fraud is kept happy; although two of the classes are mostly ignorant of the fact that they are being kept (happily) in thrall by the third.
There's another class necessary for this stinker of a system to operate:  The tax-payers.  They're the slaves of the operation.  Luckily only a little over half of the American citizens pay taxes, but they get to work each year until late May before they get to keep any of their gain for themselves but to be fair, part of what they pay out comes back to them in the form of protections, services and infrastructure that is legitimately government's to provide.
If you followed the link and read Isaiah 58, you'll (probably) see what went wrong with the God-inspired system of government we were given but are in danger of losing completely.  We hired people do charity for us.  We hid from our beneficiaries.  We paid others to help the poor and made their livelihood dependent upon having, and keeping the poor.  When a hireling comes around with money that is an entitlement rather than charity, the incentive to fend for one's self is destroyed.  People get comfortable with their cages just like animals in a zoo.  When zoo animals reproduce and their offspring is raised never knowing freedom, that next generation loses the capacity to care for itself.  Think I'm cruel comparing people with zoo animals?  Let's go back to the Old Testament.  Egypt.  Children of Israel.  Wilderness of Sinai.  They were enslaved for generations and hated their lot.  God, through Moses freed them and what did they do?  Laid down to die in the desert.  If if weren't for manna and the odd flock of partridges not a tenth of them would have survived.  God wasn't so much punishing the Israelites when he let them wander for forty years as he was feeding a ruined  generation while they lived out their natural lives and bore children in hardship and struggle who could then take advantage of a fruitful land and make something of themselves.  Who's fault was this?  The escapees from Egypt who suddenly found themselves having to feed themselves?  Moses for leading them away from their safe (albeit low-salaried) government works jobs?  Or Pharaoh's for enslaving them in the first place?
(Answer is C:  Pharaoh's)  It's wrong to enslave other people.  And whether you do it maliciously in order to secure cheap labor to have your tomb built, or out of a mishandled compassion peppered with a desire to secure your own livelihood, the enslavement of people, physically or functionally, is just wrong.
People who love people don't do that to them.
It's also stupid.   God makes a boatload of promises to people who take care of the poor.  Most of the promises He makes are fulfilled in natural ways.  Think of the economic activity that would result from 90 % of the career "entitlees" being employed in gainful work.  Think of the additional boost to the economy if most of their "keepers" were employed in productive pursuits.  Since wealth is not a fixed commodity but rather is constantly created as people produce and trade, think of the added wealth that would result in an economy that had most of it's citizens fully engaged in work they were talented at and passionate about.  Would such an economy resemble the situation described in Isaiah 58: 10-14?  What if our charity was centered in our neighborhoods and communities and was given and received with the intent to lift rather than keep?  If the recipients of charity were able to see the faces of those who cared about them--people who lived and worked with them?  Would our society look different than it does now?  Would we be in this fix--about to lose our genius system of governance and economy?
We did this to ourselves when we outsourced our love.
It may be too late for the United States of America to catch the slide to socialism before we end up like Europe.  Those countries are just now seeing the bottom coming up fast and some of them are yelling at us from across the pond "Are you people nuts?!  What are you doing?!"
But here's a little spot of bright light I was introduced to from a blog I follow called Zen Habits.  If you can't find any poor in your own neighborhood or even if you can and just want to spread the love a little farther after you've seen to your own, look at this opportunity.

 To me, this is the right idea.  (The URL on the screen is actually not to Kiva website but you can click this Kiva to go there.)  Helping up instead of just helping out.  If we can support enough entrepreneurs in emerging economies we increase the activity of the global...well just watch the video.  This is a step in the right direction with no governments sticky hands all over it mucking up the water.  We may be done here, but maybe Kenya can come to our rescue in a few years.

It's Heeear

When I was driving home from delivering things from Friday night's Scout Auction yesterday it started snowing.  Hard.  When I got to the house it felt like one of those days where you ought to put on a pair of thick wool socks, make a big pot of from-scratch soup and stay home.  But the bigger pull was to find my long gaiters and go for a hike and that's what I did.
My "constitutional" is a perfect example of the principle of just doing a thing without a lot of internal debate.  I go for a hike when I'm too busy or not in the mood for it because it's good exercise and I need exercise.  But I've never been on a hike, no matter how nasty the weather was, that I didn't come back to the car feeling like the world was a great place and I loved being in it.
So I've thrown long and short gaiters, six-point crampons and a jacket in the trunk of my car to ride around with my boots, super-sized handkerchiefs and hydration pack.  In a few weeks it looks like the snowshoes will have to go in too.
I have a 12-month membership to the outdoor gym.

Unfinished Painting

This morning I read a talk Elder David Bednar gave during the October 2009 general conference entitled, "
More Diligent and Concerned at Home".  I was impressed with the talk when I listened to it in the first place and I've read it a couple of times since.  I read it this morning because we just got the November Ensign magazine and I wanted to see how it felt when it was read from the printed page as opposed to the glaring computer monitor.  (about the same)
It seems to me that the theme of his talk is best illustrated when he relates his and his wife's efforts to be consistent in having family prayer and scripture study and family home evening.  He confessed that their spiritual flights sometimes never got off the ground or bumped to premature landings just like everyone else's do.  He likened the effort of the years to a painting he has in his office of a wheat field in harvest.  Says Elder Bednar, "The painting is a vast collection of individual brushstrokes—none of which in isolation is very interesting or impressive. In fact, if you stand close to the canvas, all you can see is a mass of seemingly unrelated and unattractive streaks of yellow and gold and brown paint. However, as you gradually move away from the canvas, all of the individual brushstrokes combine together and produce a magnificent landscape of a wheat field. Many ordinary, individual brushstrokes work together to create a captivating and beautiful painting."
Well, I have to admit I didn't have the painting perspective when our children were young.  All I saw were the individual brush strokes and as the years went on and kids got older and developed schedules (and attitudes) of their own, which didn't mesh very well with the already chaotic one LeeAnn and I followed, we gradually let our family devotional observances slip from sporadic to rare.  The painting I found to accompany this post doesn't really tell the story since that part that Gilbert Stuart finished was so good it ended up on the dollar bill.  My real painting would look more like an unfinished paint-by-number masterpiece with 50% of the 3's and 5's filled in and a few of the rest of the colors used here and there just to show we cracked the lids of most of the paints.
Dwelling on past failures doesn't pay dividends in the present so I'll just say, "I did what I did and I hope it was better than nothing."  If my kids read this I'll say--read this.  It's what I should have done but didn't have the vision to do.  Learn from my regrets and kick it up a notch or two from the example you got.  You'll thank yourself for realizing that even though your brush-strokes don't look very lovely by themselves, it's the sum of all of them together that makes the masterpiece.
And by the way--thank's for filling in so many of the blank spots on the canvas of your lives on your own--and making me look good in spite of an imperfect job.

Let It Snow

Today I went to the chiropracter and then for a hike.  I've been going for the hikes most days for a week and a half all twisted up.  Today I was able to get out of the car and stand up straight right away.  Felt good.  This is the first time I've gone to a chiropractor and walked out feeling better rather than worse.  But since the last time I went I had an infection that no chiropractor had any hope of dealing with, I'd say I'm batting 1000 with the "alternate care" crowd.
The other day I went up Beus Canyon and was lamenting the fact that most of the leaves had blown down.  I could see storm clouds massing in the West and the day had "winter" written all over it.  It made me melancholy; not because I dislike winter, but because I felt I had hardly noticed summer and autumn fly by.
Today the snow had already dusted Coldwater Canyon and nearly every tree was bare and there was no color from the leaves on the ground either.  (Except from one defiant Maple that still held a few bright leaves and was spread about by a carpet so yellow it almost shouted.)  I thought about November, and the snows that will surely come next month and be the last to melt next spring.  I remembered the bare trees piled high with fluffy snow crystals that sparkle in the sun and decided to make peace with the turning of the year.  Winter is also a perfect time to take a tramp through the woods.  Every day is a perfect day if we let it be so.
The only thing you can accomplish by pining away for spring is to miss the glory of winter.