Enron - Ideas Have Consequences
Just watched the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, directed by Alex Gibney. I have a number of conclusions, so let's get started.
1. Threaded throughout the piece was the unapologetically, explicit philosophy of Darwinism which was prevalent at Enron, from top management to commodity traders. If you embrace the tenets of evolutionary thought then you are rejecting creationism. You are rejecting the God of creation. If you reject the God of creation, you reject His laws, His ethics. His Law can be summed up with the following: Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Just that simple, yet profound truth, if embraced at all, would have stopped the fraud before it had begun.
2. For the most part, those that documented the sins of Enron are most likely Darwinists themselves - a herd of blind hypocrites. This is not very surprising, but quite typical. Current American culture attempts to retain part of God's law, while wholesale rejecting the Author of it.
3. During the rolling blackout/brownouts of California, conservation radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh were roundly criticizing the liberals of that state for being in lockstep with the wacko environmentalists who were regulating or restricting any corporate industrial effort to build more energy producing refineries/plants. The then Governor Gray Davis and his Democrat buddies were being thorough excoriated while Enron traders were instructing the power plants to shut down from time to time. I don't remember hearing any apologies acknowledging that it was pure corporate and personal greed that caused those blackouts, not failed liberal policies.
4. Among several reasons that liberal policies are failed, a significant one is because they are stupid- both policies and policy makers. Californians haven't quite figured all that out, so eventually, we'll see this history repeat itself.
5. For many, but certainly not all, of the Enron employees, I do not sympathize with their plight of lost pensions and investments. Those that generated the cash flow were complicit with the fraud, enriching themselves at the expense of others. The administrative types and field personel of the different Enron entities are the ones that suffered, and should not be blamed or even painted with the brush as painted Kenneth Lay, Jeff Schilling, and Eddie Fastow, to name a few.
6. The philosophy or mission statement of Enron is not exclusive to Enron. Much of corporate North America (wouldn't want our Canadian friends to feel left out) holds to the same ethic as Enron, except instead of perpetrating fraud, because now there is a real consequence (like jail). They treat their employees like expendable commodities that can be easily replaced. This is especially true of companies listed with Dow Jones or Nasdaq. The stock analyst is now the engine that drives corporate America, and it is impersonal and cold. Corporate execs, whose performance bonuses are now determined by formulas established and monitored by stock analysts, personify Darwin's theory on the survival of the species. Having worked for both privately held companies (large and small) and public companies (always large), I know the difference. Given a choice, working for the private company is much more enjoyable--almost humane.
7. There are enough Darwinian lawyers who will get some of the money back for the empty pension funds from the fortunes that were amassed at Enron.
It's time to take a shower and go to bed. After viewing all that scum, I'm ready for a little cleansing.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Selling Your Soul for a Crisis
I'm in the middle of reading the book, Witness, the autobiography of Whitaker Chambers. The name doesn't resonate with most folks, but for those folks who have a walking-talking knowledge of Alger Hiss and the House Committee for Un-American Activities in the late forties, early fifties, they just might recognize the name.
Amongst liberals and commie-philes, Chambers is a despicable traitor to the cause of what they define as freedom. From the early 1920's to the late 1930's, Whitaker Chambers, by profession a journalist, was an active member of the American Communist Party. The incident--or epiphany--that convinced him to reject communism was quite simple, but utterly profound. One morning in the late 1930's, Chambers was sitting in his kitchen watching his youngest child sitting in his high chair eating. Transfixed by the complexity of the human being, even in child-like form, he realized that this "perfection", as he termed it, could not have happened by chance. There had to be a Creator. A tenet of communism denies the existence of God, so Chambers realized he couldn't be a communist.
I am still in the middle of reading this book, but I've read enough to say that describing it in a couple of sentences is almost two simplistic. Whitaker Chambers was a very intelligent, articulate, and complex man. His writing reflexs this. Reading his story is like reading the playbook of the modern-day Democratic Party, however, because of his insights into the liberal mindset. I say this somewhat circumspectly since so many of the modern-day Republicans seem to want to be like their Democrat counterparts.
Here are some excerpts from Witness:
Page 193
Few Communists have ever been made simpy by reading the works of Marx or Lenin. The crisis of history makes Communists; Marx and Lenin merely offer them an explanation of the crises and what to do about it. Thus a graph of Communist growth could show that in numbers and its power increased in waves roughly equivalent to each new crest of crisis.
Page 194
Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save--a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.
Thus the Communist Party presents itself as the one organization of the will to survive the crisis in a civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent.
This is what we have been seeing in our professional, elitist politicians. This is especially true during election season. The writer of Ecclesiastes said that there is nothing new under the sun. Hearing the promises of either political party are nothing but echoes from the past, vowing to take care of and provide for the citizenry. The citizenry's abdication of personal responsibility is also an echo of past mistakes, and those past mistakes led to the destruction of once-formidable civilizations.
May God have mercy on us.
I'm in the middle of reading the book, Witness, the autobiography of Whitaker Chambers. The name doesn't resonate with most folks, but for those folks who have a walking-talking knowledge of Alger Hiss and the House Committee for Un-American Activities in the late forties, early fifties, they just might recognize the name.
Amongst liberals and commie-philes, Chambers is a despicable traitor to the cause of what they define as freedom. From the early 1920's to the late 1930's, Whitaker Chambers, by profession a journalist, was an active member of the American Communist Party. The incident--or epiphany--that convinced him to reject communism was quite simple, but utterly profound. One morning in the late 1930's, Chambers was sitting in his kitchen watching his youngest child sitting in his high chair eating. Transfixed by the complexity of the human being, even in child-like form, he realized that this "perfection", as he termed it, could not have happened by chance. There had to be a Creator. A tenet of communism denies the existence of God, so Chambers realized he couldn't be a communist.
I am still in the middle of reading this book, but I've read enough to say that describing it in a couple of sentences is almost two simplistic. Whitaker Chambers was a very intelligent, articulate, and complex man. His writing reflexs this. Reading his story is like reading the playbook of the modern-day Democratic Party, however, because of his insights into the liberal mindset. I say this somewhat circumspectly since so many of the modern-day Republicans seem to want to be like their Democrat counterparts.
Here are some excerpts from Witness:
Page 193
Few Communists have ever been made simpy by reading the works of Marx or Lenin. The crisis of history makes Communists; Marx and Lenin merely offer them an explanation of the crises and what to do about it. Thus a graph of Communist growth could show that in numbers and its power increased in waves roughly equivalent to each new crest of crisis.
Page 194
Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save--a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.
Thus the Communist Party presents itself as the one organization of the will to survive the crisis in a civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent.
This is what we have been seeing in our professional, elitist politicians. This is especially true during election season. The writer of Ecclesiastes said that there is nothing new under the sun. Hearing the promises of either political party are nothing but echoes from the past, vowing to take care of and provide for the citizenry. The citizenry's abdication of personal responsibility is also an echo of past mistakes, and those past mistakes led to the destruction of once-formidable civilizations.
May God have mercy on us.
Running for their pension, not to serve
We are so far from our Founding Fathers' original intent, and even further from the Biblical paradigm, that we might as well be living in a parallel universe or on Pluto. Whether they are Republican or Democrat, today's politician--particularly those on the state and national levels--it is so blatantly obvious that serving their constituents is the euphemism for staying in power.
For me, the United States Congress, the federal union of bureaucrats, and most of the clergy of ECUSA have one and the same purpose: saving their pensions. They are willing to commit evil and to ignore evil for what they consider to be self-preservation. In the meantime, they rob from the ones who pay their salaries, and call it service. I would not want to be in any of their shoes, or even to be standing close to them when they appear in judgment before God.
We are so far from our Founding Fathers' original intent, and even further from the Biblical paradigm, that we might as well be living in a parallel universe or on Pluto. Whether they are Republican or Democrat, today's politician--particularly those on the state and national levels--it is so blatantly obvious that serving their constituents is the euphemism for staying in power.
For me, the United States Congress, the federal union of bureaucrats, and most of the clergy of ECUSA have one and the same purpose: saving their pensions. They are willing to commit evil and to ignore evil for what they consider to be self-preservation. In the meantime, they rob from the ones who pay their salaries, and call it service. I would not want to be in any of their shoes, or even to be standing close to them when they appear in judgment before God.
Under Their Thumb: the Lesson of United 93
It's been sometime since my last posting, due to computer problems, so I have several things on my mind. I will begin with the most recent impressions that arose last evening as my wife and I watched the movie, United 93.
First of all, I was struck by the incredible amount of confusion that existed on so many levels in government, from the FAA air traffic controllers to the military to the passengers themselves. But that was what made the terrorists' methods so ingenious. Their effectiveness was determined and rewarded (in their own minds), by that element of surprise.
The second lesson I observed was the transformation of the surviving passengers and crew members after the initial attact. Once they realized that they were spectators to and unwilling partners of a suicide mission they took decisive action. Their action deserves our unwavering honor, respect, and rememberance.
So, this is the lesson I take from this painful story:
1. The action of a brave few, who saved many more lives.
2. You cannot appease anyone, whose goal and purpose is to kill you even at the expense of their own life. Your reaction must be quick and decisive. This is not a matter of sending the bad boy to "time out". This is a matter of killing the bad boy before he kills you.
Do you want to know what life would be like living under the thumb of Islam?
I wish that it were possible to overstate how wretched that would be, but those who ignore history will find out.
It's been sometime since my last posting, due to computer problems, so I have several things on my mind. I will begin with the most recent impressions that arose last evening as my wife and I watched the movie, United 93.
First of all, I was struck by the incredible amount of confusion that existed on so many levels in government, from the FAA air traffic controllers to the military to the passengers themselves. But that was what made the terrorists' methods so ingenious. Their effectiveness was determined and rewarded (in their own minds), by that element of surprise.
The second lesson I observed was the transformation of the surviving passengers and crew members after the initial attact. Once they realized that they were spectators to and unwilling partners of a suicide mission they took decisive action. Their action deserves our unwavering honor, respect, and rememberance.
So, this is the lesson I take from this painful story:
1. The action of a brave few, who saved many more lives.
2. You cannot appease anyone, whose goal and purpose is to kill you even at the expense of their own life. Your reaction must be quick and decisive. This is not a matter of sending the bad boy to "time out". This is a matter of killing the bad boy before he kills you.
Do you want to know what life would be like living under the thumb of Islam?
I wish that it were possible to overstate how wretched that would be, but those who ignore history will find out.
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