Monday, April 23, 2007

Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is

It appears that everyone is ready to go back to work after a week of tragic TV news in Virginia. Not to diminish the grief of the families and friends suffering their loss, I am pretty happy to be able to focus on something else as well. There were a lot of comments about the Tech article, but after leaving that up for several days I think it is best to heal and move on the best we can.

The news you are going to be hearing this week will probably include something about the imminent record close of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow), for the first time a close is expected over 13,000. I know this could be a boring subject for most people, but it brings up a subject that I think is important in this day and age, definitely worth discussing. The financial markets can at best be confusing, but in my simple view there are a few things that most people don't know and could benefit from. My basic advice is this, find something that you are very interested in where you can invest your money and beware of assuming everything will continue to go along as "normal." My goal here is not to scare anyone into putting cash in their mattress, actually it is completely the opposite. We should save for a rainy day and be prepared to invest in appreciating assets (key word here is "appreciating"), it is a subject even the Bible talks about (remember the parable of the "talents" in Luke 19 12-26 as one example?).

A little background to start, a very important history lesson that I can pretty much guarantee you will not hear in the mainstream media. In the early 1970's our nation removed ourselves from the Gold Standard that existed (other than the Confederate States during the Civil War) since the start of our national economy after the American Revolution. What that meant is that each dollar that existed in circulation had a corresponding value of gold at a central depository, like Fort Knox for example. Each dollar had a real value based on gold, you could show up at any time and request your dollar be traded in for gold. What happened to change that? Well, simply put, we ran out of enough gold to ensure it could back the currency due to our expanding economy, the government had to remove us from that standard and then create "legal tender" laws that basically made it illegal for anyone to refuse the non-gold backed dollar in any financial transaction. This was a key moment in time.

Why is this a problem? Well, simply put again, any fiat (another name for a currency that is not backed by some tangible, precious metal source) currency in the history of the world has eventually failed due to the fact that only the faith and credit of the issuing government backs the currency, not a bonafide source of wealth. It is a 100% certainty that as more dollars enter circulation, the value of each dollar has to become less (remember Econ 101?), and it will take more dollars to buy the same item you purchased yesterday when fewer dollars were in circulation. This is called inflation, and it is important to remember that it is not the price of goods and services that is going up, it is the "cheapening" of the dollar you are using to purchase them that creates inflation. The only way to stop inflation is to stop printing more money.

So why do we keep printing money? We continue to print money for one reason, to keep our economy alive and vital. Over our history we find a cycle of boom and bust that generally happen each 37 months for boom and 18 months for bust. Our Federal Reserve Bank does an unbelievable job at efficiently managing the money supply to keep the economy rolling. As inflation gets carried away, in simple terms they just reduce the amount of money printed to slow it down to a reasonable level. As the bust cycle takes over and unemployment begin to rise, we print more money to pay for programs that stimulate the economy and bring us back to a boom cycle. This happens over and over again, pretty much indefinitely, as we generally increase the supply of money to keep up with our promises over time. If you want to ask my political affiliation, this is one of the main reasons I am in favor of less government intervention, which typically falls to the Republican side of things. I know there are several programs that really help people, as we have removed the church from our support of those less fortunate and replaced it with government programs, but that is a subject for another day...

The Federal Reserve is rather artful at managing this scenario, but the end result is that the endless money printing does have a price. Inflation and taxation act together to erode the value of our dollars, to the point where we have to borrow against the faith and credit of the US to keep the cycle intact, which will continue until we either stop printing money and let inflation run wild as it did in Venezuela most recently (not going to happen in the US, I know that much), or until the borrowing to maintain the boom and bust cycles buries us in the failure of our currency, most likely to be replaced with another world currency such as the Euro or the Yuan (much more likely, followed by the biggest credit call in history). With the pressures of our current entitlements such as Social Security, the pressures to continue the cycle are enormous.

Unfortunately, I have an opinion there is not much that we can do other than prop up our economy the best we can until the inevitable happens, until we cannot even maintain our standard of living because our dollar is mostly in circulation to pay for the interest on our approaching 10 trillion dollar debt (have any idea how much money that is? Each trillion is a thousand billion dollars, enough to already force nearly half of our national budget toward payment of interest on that debt due to our borrowing). Until we either force our elected officials to revise the policies and stop the trend, which I do not see happening because they want to be elected and that is not the way to get (or stay) elected, or other nations begin to stop offering loans to support that debt, we are going to sail along in this present cycle of building huge mountains of borrowed money in order to maintain the steady increase in our money supply. We are already opearting at a discount of nearly 30% to the Euro since its inception, and I don't think that trend will reverse itself. As Haggai remarked in the Bible, we are putting our money into bags with holes.

What can you do to protect your investments? For now, you can just play along and try to achieve returns that exceed the combination of taxation and inflation, there is no need to alter that strategy unless a collapse appears imminent, and I would think that would be reasonably well publicized in advance. I would strongly suggest, however, that you also invest a portion (maybe 10-15%) of your savings in something that you are really interested in that involves a tangible (something you can touch), appreciating asset. New clothes, furniture and most new cars are not apprecaiting assets, but if you think about it for a minute you can find items of interest from classic cars to baseball cards to antiques to actual gold and silver. The key would be to buy the best quality available of an item known to be appreciating and of interest to you. I would think of it in terms of holding certain items that you could use to buy groceries if you could not access a bank account, but don't take that statement as suggesting the sky is falling. If you can act prudently and be aware of what is going on, then you can be prepared for most anything that comes your way.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

VA Tech is a dream come true for the "fringes"

I suppose there is very little we can claim as a positive from this terrible thing that has happened, but I for one found a great deal of comfort and pride in seeing the reactions of the students and University leaders over the past few days. Most notably was the reaction of the student body toward President Bush and the University President. Their very lengthy ovation at the introduction of both told me a few things about the general character of the students there, and really made me proud to be a citizen of both Virginia and America. After all the criticism of the school administration, I think the question was answered in that moment about whether or not the people closest to this tragedy were in support of their President Charles Steger. We all know that college campuses in general are not that friendly to Republican Presidents either, but the show of respect for President Bush was yet another example of putting differences aside for the sake of something bigger. For all the attempts at trying to pull anger and hatred out of people while they were at their lowest moments, I think the fringe elements of our society were silenced by the desire of that commmunity to pull together instead of breaking apart.

It is simply amazing that there are people in our society (and around the globe) that insist on using this awful event for self promotion of their own fringe agenda. The huge gathering of students for the vigil held on the drill field and the memorial services remind me that the majority of Americans hold similar values and points of view, but the fringes get the airtime because they offer up the greatest opportunity to "shock" us into wanting to watch something extraordinary. Normal people don't make headlines, only the fringes get the headlines. The photos of that nutcase Cho are going to be forever immortalized in history as a symbol of what is wrong in America, I would prefer to focus on what makes America strong.

The issues that keep getting played across our televisions are much less than assignment of blame, gun control and our responsibility to keep everyone safe. The real issues are about our freedom and how we react as Americans to pull together in times of crisis instead of allowing the fringes to pull us apart. I would put this idea out there for everyone to consider, that the time in our history as a nation with the greatest personal freedoms would be the period of time following the Amercian Revolution. That would also be the time of greatest chaos in our history of government, because those 2 things are generally mutually exclusive. We are most comfortable with systems and programs in place to repress anarchy, which generally means we slowly move from a free society to some sort of democratic socialism at best, and situations where a single ruler that controls everything is in power at the worst.

The far left is taking the stance that we should remove all guns from society, because that will make us safe. If only the government had guns, then we would not have to worry. Wow. Where would we have been in 1776 with that concept? I suppose if no one had guns then they would have to find another way to kill each other, so gun deaths would decline, but at the same time we would give up our Constitutional right to bear arms and leave our society open to manipulation and control by anyone that had guns. Giving up our personal rights will never make us safer, only open the door to a slow slide toward control moving to a central source of power. I suppose that is why the Europeans have hit us so hard with our "gun society," they have had more history and time to move toward socialiasm than we have, which is exactly where we will end up if we give up our freedoms.

The far right is taking the stance that everyone should have guns and that will make us safe. I am not so sure of that either, giving all the students at Tech a gun just seems that we will kill 33 students over a year's time on Saturday nights instead of all at once. I have even heard some people pushing the idea that they all deserved to die as a representation of God's retribution for the partying and sex that goes on. Wow. I don't even know where to start, but the idea that God planned all this to teach us a lesson is beyond my comprehension. God loves each one of us in a way that we cannot imagine, and wants to be in a personal and meaningful relationship with us that involves a choice on our part. We must separate this idea of Old Testament retribution from the consequences of our actions, when we choose to do something outside of acceptable behavior then we face consequences for those actions, but God wants us to turn to Him first and then we will want to change our behaviors because we live within that relationship. He did not come to condemn the world but to save it.

The fact remains that we have a very terrible and unusual situation brought on by one person's sadistic actions. If I hear another talking head suggest that we failed Cho as a society because we did not identify him and get him into the right program, so that he could be reformed and rejoin as a meaningful contributor to our society, I am just going to throw up. The guy was a nut, sadistic, crazy, whatever adjective you want to use that describes someone so unbalanced that they could even consider the act, much less plan it out so that he would be immortalized by his actions. If anything he needed to be identified and locked up for the rest of his life, instead of playing the role of "It was his societal condition," "he just needed help," "our gun society is to blame," "his privacy was more important," "if we just could have reached out to him..." There was nothing that could have prevented this guy from going postal. It would have been better if some boyfriend of a stalked girl on campus would have taken him out before he could kill all those people, but even that is a pretty hollow victory.

You could maybe make the point that we sanction violence on TV which allows these things to happen, but the reality is that we can only "vote" on whether that violence is acceptable with our pocketbooks. I would agree that what we watch on TV and the movies has a very negative affect on our actions, but we allow it to happen because we watch and advertisers profit from it. We have a choice, if something is inappropriate then we have a duty to letting those advertisers know we won't be purcahsing their producsts as a result. Wonder why Imus finally got fired? Because that is exactly what happened. We not only have the rights to our personal freedom, we have the obligation to identify people and situations that are outside acceptable behavior and remove them from society. We can get all crossed up in what is acceptable, but I am pretty certain that killing people would be considered unacceptable, and violence that depicts and glorifies those situations should be considered the same.

We live in a free society, where people are free to fly into towers and shoot college students. There is no means of protecting people in a free society from events like this, nor should there be beyond reasonable measures from law enforcement to detect and identify nutcases like Cho, hopefully before he is able to kill, but certtainly not to second guess their actions when they are trying to protect us within an open society. We have to use these terrible situations to pull together and celebrate our freedoms, amid the grief and anguish from those families that are enduring great pain and sacrifice. We cannot let this situation overshadow the fact that life is transient and there are different views about the sanctity of human life over the globe. Over 170 innocent people were killed in Iraq yesterday, but we don't seem as upset about that as the college kids because it is far away and we are used to them killing each other on a regular basis. Our european neighbors are incensed about the evils of American society as a result of the shootings, but they ignore Muslim extremists who are executing and beheading people at the same time. What am I missing? We have to accept by our very nature that America is open to this type of tragedy, for the benefit of enjoying our individual freedoms we have the potential for disaster every day. We can fall prey to trying to fix it, which can only result in the loss of those freedoms, or we can pick each other up when the dust settles and gather together as Americans devoted to maintaining those freedoms as a tribute to those who gave their lives.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

VA Tech 24hrs later-let's focus on what is important!

Let's give these people a break. We are going to explore every little detail of what happened in the coming weeks, we are going to learn where this troubled young man lived, who his family and friends were, and every small detail of his life. Everyone with an agenda is going to get to discuss gun control, why God "let" this happen, how to magically keep this from happening again, who is going to be sued because we need to assign blame somewhere...but not now, not yet.

Let's focus just for a minute on the families of the 33 that are dead (including the family of the shooter, since their lives are going to be forever changed as well), those who are injured and their families, the friends, co-workers and people affected by this horrific act, the law enforcement officials working to find out more details, the local clergy and counselors struggling to cope with helping others when they don't have the answers themselves (and no, God did not cause this to happen, this is an act of free will in a broken world and society where bad things do happen), the medical specialists working to save lives and care for the injured, the officials of the school who did what they knew best to do at the time and are getting second guessed and will feel a measure of responsibility no matter what happens, etc.

We can argue about what happens when we have a free society later, how we can choose to be open and free or try to legislate some sort of safety mechanism into a free and democratic culture called America, how to keep guns out of the hands of nut cases like this one, what kind of domestic issues exist in our country and how the implications of broken relationships affect us all (it is not OK to do whatever you want because it is not hurting anyone else, damage ends up being done regardless of being this kind of heinous act or a quiet hurting no one can see), how the responsibility of the college will somehow end up in a lawsuit, the great character shown by the students and staff in interviews and heroic acts, how perhaps this terrible thing can somehow be used for good in the future, etc.

We can get to all that later, for now, let us keep all those involved in our prayers. People are hurting, give them the respect they deserve to sort this out each in their own way, lay off supporting the media in trying to create anger out of bewilderment, and at least give this a few days to support those grieving by whatever means we can. Please.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

The Real Problem With Global Warming

I just came back from a trip to the Historic Triangle of Virginia (Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown), mostly to have a brief time out from work which followed me anyway, but also to enjoy a little of the history display at the Victory Center in Yorktown. The exhibits were very interesting, featuring a live camp and original farm outside the museum center, and a host of historical information. In case you forgot from the 5th grade, Yorktown is where George Washington teamed up with the French to trap Cornwallis and end the Revolutionary War in 1781. If you have any English, British or United Kingdom nationals as acquaintenances (Boy, they go by a lot of aliases over there) they will be quick to refer to you as a colonist to this day, even when you have to remind them that we had to come save their behinds from the Germans.

It is a helpful reminder to me that in those days news had to travel far, letters were considered the FedEx of the day and if you were a military commander you could send an IM out on horseback that would only take a few hours or days to reach the "recipient." Most news traveled by horseback, and we all know how reliable information becomes after it is passed along a few times. I have a few friends I can think of that would have been perfect for that job...

I can't imagine how anyone knew anything unless it just happened a farm over in the woods, but I also imagine it was not a big issue to those early Americans who were relatively preoccupied with that survival thing. Today, we get our coffee going and hit the PC for a taste of the news, mortified at the goings-on in who-knows-where as we shuffle the kids off to school and put in a good days work. I was being kind to the other 250 million of us that wait until we get to work to check the news on the company's time. We know more about how safe a street corner is in downtown Iraq than we do about that big accident that happened a few miles away. I can't even get a local channel close enough on the dish to listen in to what is happening to Aunt Fanny down the street, I have to check in to Aunt Fanny that lives in Atlanta, San Francisco or New York for my dose of local living. I even have a fully automated check out at the Wal-Mart so I don't even have the inconvenience of having to speak to a check out clerk. We have traded global information for local isolation, and I wonder sometimes where that "information" really comes from.

I guess I should get back to the point, today we have a wealth of information at our fingertips, we can Google someone right up and figure out if they are worthy to be our neighbor, or listen to any and all opinions on any and all subjects at any time of the day or night. In the old days it seems people were a little more authentic in their speech, the message that they wanted to get across was thought out and prepared for some public occasion or not given at all. I wonder if Patrick Henry would shout out in downtown Richmond, VA today, "Give me a safe enironment, or give me death!" He might have swayed a few people.

Truth is, I am not sure who to listen to these days because I have no idea who is authentic. I am pretty sure that Patrick Henry got his message across because people knew he was taking a huge risk in speaking out, but in today's world we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of information and have no idea where it is coming from. I have a reasonable degree of certainty that Patrick Henry spoke his own mind, and was not representing some politically charged think tank's opinion of how the Brits were over taxing the colonies and suppressing personal freedoms. I have heard plenty of opinions and I guess the consensus is that we have a global warming problem, but to what extent, who knows the real deal, how do we fix it and where do we go from here? I can't tell if Al Gore is right because he has time to sit in his well lit and energy devouring home and hand pick self-promoting reports on the issue, or if the Bush Administration can overlook the big business implications on the economy that they get graded on each week long enough to give me the real answer.

I just don't see how we get together on this issue with everyone pulling at the end of the rope, trying every trick they can think of to get people on "their" side. Last time I checked, we were all in this one together. What is missing today is a spokesperson that is authentic, someone with no other stake in the game that knows the score and is willing to tell us with no agenda. Not sure how that person ever gets the information they need from an unbiased source, or how they get the information to us from an unbiased source, or why they would be interested in the job at all, but that is what is missing. We have created a culture of people who are leading our nation with little to no authenticity-and people know it! You can see that from the approval polls on our government from common people, nobody trusts people in power because they cannot be seen as genuinely interested in the well being of our nation and our planet without some other motivation. Perhaps it is time for a change, maybe the best medicine for us would be to dump the whole batch and only allow people to be elected to higher office who have never been elected before, who make less than $100,000 per year. Its all a game so far, we keep spinning our wheels with no decisions that help anyone, on issues from global warming to social security, because there is no one we can trust to be authentic in government.

Benjamin Franklin put it best when he told the rest of the Declaration of Independence signers, "From here on out we hang together, or we surely will hang separately."

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Imus in the morning, Imus in the evening, ain't we got fun!

No doubt Don Imus joins the rest of the "shock-jock" world with his version of how to act like an idiot in public. The phrase "nappy-headed ho's" referring to the "rough" girls playing for the Scarlet Knight of Rutgers University is certainly out of place, derogatory and just plain rude. And? What did you expect?

These guys make their living as "shock-jocks," that means they are paid to shock us. People listen, advertisers sell their wares to those of us listening and that's it, pretty simple business transaction. What? Outrageous behavior?1st Amendment rights? What about it? This is a business deal and nothing more, don't get all politically correct over it.

The First Amendment guaranteeing our freedom of speech was designed with a purpose in mind by the Founding Fathers. That purpose is to expose stupid people by letting them open their mouth. If we kept them from talking, then no one would realize they were stupid. Pretty smart bunch, those Founding Fathers.

Now if things really get out of hand, the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) will be there to save us, after all, we can't include vulgar speech under those freedoms. Expletives will be met with severe fines, maybe even enough to offset the revenue flowing in from those listening to hear what outrageous thing might be said next. But other than that, it is pretty much free game for anyone to prove their stupidity in the national airwaves. You want to stand up for something, how about raising a fuss over Howard Stern's treatment of women (white or black) on his show. Only trouble with that would be most of the time he is just providing a means for their stupidity of even being there, oh well, back to the original plan of the founders. Howard is just wishing he called those girls something better than Imus did before Imus got all the credit.

What really makes this fun and interesting is that the very people who stand up and insist on freedoms, insist on equality, insist on fair treatment of everyone at all times and rub our noses in the dirt of the ACLU, they are the first ones to stand up and demand Imus' dismissal for this outrage. Come on folks, you can't have your cake and eat it too, either we get to talk about everyone with equal disdain or we get to talk about no one at all. Those same groups don't get all up in arms when one of our national leaders gets bashed over equal rights or some such similar topic, they only get up in arms when they see a way to get "righteous." We are not a nation together anymore, we are a nation made up of a zillion small groups with specialized agendas that just happen to occupy the same basic geography. I'd say the last time we were together on much of anything was World War II, and most of the people that remember that are dead.

Was Imus fulfilling his Constitutional right to stupidity when he made those remarks? Absolutely. Was he being a political figure, aiming to discredit women in general and black women in particular by his remarks? Of course not. He just wanted to sell more ad space, and he can say and do whatever he wants to get noticed, right up to the point of getting fined for a greater sum than the ad revenue generates. If you really want it to stop, impose your own fine and stop listening, stop buying products that are advertised on the program, and stop whining about him singling out minorities in some vernacular frenzy. They are just doing their job, and exercising their Constitutional rights to stupidity at the same time.

The real sadness is that we just continue down the road of providing one more wedge in our society, one more opportunity to drive us all apart. That is what we have lost. Our decency is not being eroded, that much is already gone because we let our community fail first. You want that to change? Then start finding ways to build us back up as a nation instead of delighting each time we can be an antagonist.

Ricky Bobby Easter

All over America, at least in the South, families are sitting down to dinner together while the Ricky Bobby prayer is recited, "Thank you, little baby Jesus..."

I for one, got just to the border of being offended by that scene in the movie, not so much because of it picking fun at the simple life of many southern families, but more at taking a stab at people of faith. Like most "spoof" films, things get a little carried away, but I wonder if there was anyone in the writer's booth that perhaps thought this one was a bit too much for a different reason. I would have to think that making fun is one thing, but making fun at the expense of something so explosive as people's religion is perhaps another.

Are we held accountable for our words and actions, even when just poking fun? I am sure that no one intentionally meant to harm anyone in a mean spirited sort of way, there were a few spots in that movie that were pretty hilarious (not as many as "Elf" for sure) but the regional nature of the humor is not going to make for a very lucrative play at the box office. Is that worth straying into an area that perhaps has some far reaching implications?

Is it really the impression of faith in the Bible-belt south that everyone has such a simplistic and skewed perception of who Jesus is? I hope not, if anything it seems that no one really cares about what goes on "down there," "over there" or "up there" so long as it does not encroach on my life.

I am not sure if this is a statement on our society in general, how we interact as different regions in the US, or just plain apathy. I could stand the first few lines of the prayer, but come on guys, enough already after a few minutes. I got it.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Faith still relevant in the US?

Everywhere you turn these days, there is someone claiming their own little corner of the "truth." People are stumbling over themselves to find some sort of meaning in their lives, through politics, religion, "unique" lifestyles, whatever seems to be right for them. I haven't noticed many more people finding fulfillment, however, as a matter of fact I'd say there are more folks with questions than answers these days...A few generations ago, we were basically a Christian community, which I am not saying was inherently a good or bad thing, it is just a fact of our history. We lived, worked and played in an environment that was vastly different than today, but the foundation of society was pretty much set that faith was a matter of course and not so much choice. If nothing else, it was a safe place to exist (or return to if we ventured too far outside that safety for comfort). With the advent of modern communications like television, mobile phones, email, blogs, etc, we now have the opportunity to ignore community as a means not only of existence but in terms of our life choices. The Christian community has been pretty satisfied to sit this one out, embracing technology only to the point of some nutcases on higher cable channels and trying to find the most embarrasing personalities out there to represent Christianity to the world. I can honestly say that until people find faith, whatever faith we are talking about be it Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, until they find that faith to be RELEVANT to their daily lives then they will not have any interest.

I can remember when I saw my first fax come out of the machine, rolling up into a little tube of thermal paper and being so amazed at how technology was moving forward. First the microwave, and now this! I could not imagine anything more astounding-no more need to overnight letters or wait for mailed information to appear, we could do it at the push of a button. Today, the fax is nearly extinct, we are even removing fax numbers from business cards. Kids today complain about using email because it is too slow, if it is not IM then they are wasting their time. In this new world, there is no doubt that faith has not kept pace, but is there even a chance for it to become relevant in anyone's life today?

You may have guessed that I am a Christian (don't hang up!), and this blog is not about making someone feel guilty enough to want to be one, too, or about scaring people into joining a church before they go to hell, but it is about asking hard questions that have multiple defensible answers on many different levels. I am convinced that faith is relevant in life today, and in many ways is needed more than ever before to maintain some sort of sanity with everything coming at us so fast. What needs to happen is an open discussion with no personal attacks, because late at night when everything else is distant, these questions sooner or later come up for everyone.

Is there a God? Who was that Jesus guy? If all that stuff He said is true (I only capitalized the He because I believe its true and I choose to show respect that way, not because of some secret code going on, you can choose to believe what you want), then learning more about His life and teachings has to be the most RELEVANT thing in my life. If not, then this whole deal is the biggest scam of all of history. How does my answer to that affect my stance on politics, treating other people, my lifestyle, what I consider to be right and wrong? Regardless of your position, the answer to those questions (and more to come), have to be the most RELEVANT discussion in America today.