A tariff is a form of financial self-mutilation in which one country delights in punishing another to force them to raise their import prices.
In the 1930’s, the over 900 tariffs levied by U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act worsened The Great Depression. During The Great Depression 44 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today’s U.S. population lives 2 percent on farms.
My wife and I owned a small 7.5 acre ranch in Rimrock, Arizona, where we raised as many as 15 chickens at a time. Gathering eggs was as simple as opening a hatch and collecting breakfast. But raising chickens was not easy, as the game camera photo of our coop shows below. We needed to keep the chickens cool in summer and protect them from predators, such as the Bobcat shown circling our chickens in the photograph.
Bobcat Circles our Chicken Coop in Rimrock, Arizona
The United States is but three days away from food riots … if its supply chain is disrupted. While farmers produce 130 percent of what Americans eat, the food must navigate a complex, international supply chain to get food to the table of the 98 percent of Americans. Tariffs don’t need to disrupt what farmers are growing, rather disrupt one link in the supply chain to empty grocery shelves. The masses don’t get their eggs from a coop, rather as shipped in from 1,000 miles then fried and inserted between a toasted muffin slathered with buttery-like lab-grown spread, processed tinted cheese, and sliced 3 inch ham circles, wrapped in waxed paper printed with happy images, stuffed into a recycled paper to-go bag also printed with smiling marketing, all shoved out a glass portal to a Tesla that will drive its servant back home the 2 miles to her home cell, where her head will be wired into an AI network for task monitoring. Today, she exceeded expectations by returning with her happy bag in less than 10 minutes; thus, the AI gave her a dopamine rush by injecting a 30 second kayaking video into her work cycle. Those of us who have worked remotely know that the walls of tomorrow’s gulags will be virtual.
”Work Faster and Have a Happy Day!”
While the radical right cheers the building of walls and internment camps for “illegal aliens,” history shows that the walls and gulags countries built to keep the enemy out later became the tools to control the citizens in the event of political disruption, such as food riots. Who remembers Ronald Reagan’s speech to East Berlin and Russia, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!”? Who remembers Russia’s bare grocery store food shelves? The words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident who suffered eight years in the Russian Gulag, remain true to the political milieu in the U.S. today-
Q: “Pastor Jim, what Pollyanna rubbish are you teaching? We need a Border Wall, high and tight. Don’t you want to be safe and secure?”
A: The Eastern Gate of Jerusalem has been sealed since 1541 AD. In Jewish tradition the Messiah will enter the Eastern Gate through the Mount of Olives. Christians also sing of meeting the Messiah just inside the Eastern Gate. We embrace the hope of the opening gate and the return of the King of Kings.
Lessons learned – 1. Gates sealed tend to remain sealed for a long time. 2. Considering point one, if a wall must be built, build it with a beautiful thousand gates of entry that portray hope, security, and new beginnings. Even Jesus taught, “I am the Door” (John 10:9). As ambassadors for Christ, our mission is to open doors to the shutouts. Some have morphed Jesus’ words into a Chernobyl mutation, “I have a door. It is locked. Go away! I got mine.”
The Eastern Gate of Jerusalem, also known as the Gate of Mercy. In Arabic — Gate of Eternal Life. Prophecy tells us the Messiah will return and enter through the Eastern Gate.
This blog morphed from a humorous quip about tariffs to an emergency flare how interconnected we are as a nation and with our allies, with whom we need to build alliances and not enemies.
13 “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” – Luke 16:13
My father was a gracious man, born in Mobile, Alabama in 1917. My grandmother, a Bible believing Christian, at times used racial slurs to refer to people of color without a pause or sense that such language typecast groups of people as “other than us.” The South, with its “Southern Gentility,” replaces an overt tirade with a smiling, “I love your dress!” and a head-turned, “But I hate your guts.” “Woke!,” “DEI Hire!,” and “Illegal!” reflect the neobigotry of genteel racism.
Neobigotry’s genteel racism walks a path racism one step removed. This was the same scorched earth policy launched by the U.S. Army following the Civil War as it then waged war against the Plains Native Americans with a “one step removed” eradication of the Buffalo. Without one shot fired at Native Americans, they took away their food and life essentials by killing their symbol of life — the Buffalo! Buffalo skull mounds served as bleached tombstones for the Plains Native Tribes.
Buffalo Skull Mounds Tombstone for the Plains Native Tribes
The attack against the “Woke,” the “DEI Hires,” and the “Illegals” is nothing short of “Buffalo Hunting” that creates disparate treatment and harassment for protected classes of race, gender, sex, religion, age, and orientation. Before eradicating human groups, humans like to ascribe subhuman names to them that lessen the guilt of eradicating real people. The genteel terms given to “Woke”, “DEI Hires” and “Illegals,” while one step removed from historic racial slurs, are symbiotic with protected classes of people. Those seeking eradication of these classes may boast they shot not one word of hate against people of color, age, or sexual orientation, while at the same time these neobigotry attacks result in the scorched earth destruction of the sources that feed a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and culture in a truly fair and free America.
The attack against the “Woke,” the “DEI Hires,” and the “Illegals” is nothing short of “Buffalo Hunting” that creates disparate treatment and harassment for protected classes of race, gender, sex, religion, age, and orientation.
Pastor Jim
The Buffalo Hunt
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[c]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Read Luke chapter 10 for the parable.
– Luke 10
“…l’d love to wear a rainbow every day And tell the world that everything’s okay But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back Until things are brighter I’m the Man In Black.” ~Johnny Cash
“Day One of Cat’s Plan to Eliminate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI)”
The year is 2050. If you are reading this, the labor pool of the United States is in free fall. The non-white community has captured the majority of the population, with whites first time a minority. The crisis: working age people to non-working adults fell 15 percent between 2020 and 2050, as workers aged out of their careers. Labor costs a premium as employers hike wages and politicians promise to woo workers from other nations. But these nations have soured on the United States following decades of xenophobic persecution of undocumented workers, discarding them like litter thrown out a car window in their home countries. The 2050 politicians now quarrel how to undo the wayward policies, crying, “We didn’t know how much we needed the labor at the time. They lied to us and were only interested in poll numbers of the approving base.”
A Grumpy Uncle Sam, who alienated his world family, now sits in like an old man in an understaffed nursing home and calls out for foreign help to empty his gold plated bed pan of a failed economy. But there were no workers left willing to soil their hands and answer the cries of the one who, though he once treated them like family, now disowned them and cut them off. Uncle Sam inbred and defiled “the genetic code of business” that “people do business with their friends.”
The truth was that the “Make America Great Again” called for discarding of the people collateral of other nations living in the U.S, which would be needed to secure our economy in the future. The politicians who once proposed bounties on the heads of undocumented labor now cry for the import of labor at all costs due to the U.S.’s inability raise labor’s spoon to its mouth. The tragedy of the mainline church was its silence and its participation in the largest human roundup since World War II. Carefully crafted slogans demonized the undocumented as the evil among us, calling them criminals and sexual predators, knowing that cooperation in the mass roundup increases to the extent that the strangers are considered “subhuman.” The church’s response during this time could be called, “The Silence of the Lambs: How the Church became Complicit in Deporting its Future.”
Pax Americana: Road to a Secure Future
The Gospel of Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus gives insight into the Roman Empire’s “Pax Romana,” that which made Rome truly great. As Rome expanded, it created allies, built roads, and expanded taxation. Luke wrote –
2 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.2 (This was the first census that took place while[a]Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register. Luke 2:1-3
Let’s apply the above to the millions of undocumented persons among us.
The Lamb Speaks
A look at Jesus’ words in Matthew 25, Jesus reminds us of the moral imperative the church has to care for the stranger, the undocumented among us. “For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in.” – Matthew 25:35
Q: “Pastor Jim, that was weak Jesus. We believe in the Alpha Male Jesus who gets tough on crime, such as illegal immigration. These immigrants must be unbelievers, because a true believer would not break our immigration laws. In fact, by turning them in, we are actually helping them come to the faith and embrace our Alpha Jesus.”
A: Like the Israelites formed the “golden calf” to produce tangible results, so is the temptation to fashion a god who fits into our political idolatry for immediate benefit. The problem with a “golden calf” is that it produces short-term benefits and creates a confirmation bias that this was certainly the right path. People became obsessed with ushering in a new golden age promised by the golden calf committees. The price of gold skyrocketed. Golden Calf parades became a glue that brought people together, like a football team who won a few games but lost the championship due to a failed long-term strategy. In a confirmation bias, the short-term wins blind participants of the underlying failure and true losses at stake. The lure of the preachers of these “golden calfs” reflects what St. John wrote when he said, “Even now many antichrists have come. By this we know that this is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).
Q: “Are you saying that you approve thieves, murderers, and sexual predators to remain among us?”
A: Demonizing an entire group by the actions of a few does not solve the problems of a nation. Some in Missouri have proposed legislative bills that call for life imprisonment for undocumented immigrants who enter the state and a bounty of $1,000 on the heads of the immigrants. ICE, for its national policy, said that, while they focus on criminals, should an undocumented person be present, they will be deported with the criminals to a staging camp, such as Guantanamo. Writing off the life of a ten-year-old child or wife who was the undocumented daughter of immigrants, raises the question: “Does the right to life end in the womb and stop at the Border?”
Guantanamo Bay
”You can’t say, ‘Right to life!,’” you say, “That’s our slogan we used to protect unborn babies. It has nothing to do with immigration. Apples and oranges!”
For you, the “right to life” has been politicized to a political platform that has been trained to ignore the other “rights to life” with dignity, in safety, in housing, in education, and in health. Limiting the “right to life” strictly to the abortion issue gives Christians a free pass on these other areas that would severely reduce the quality of life or shorten it.
Operation “Allies in America”
Borrowing from the practice of Roman Empire, the Pax Americana would build on three great strategies: 1) a census of the undocumented and a registry by home country, 2) taxation of undocumented and elimination of underground cash economy, 3) the undocumented would pay reduced percentage into Medicare and Social Security but would not be able to draw unless they became U.S. citizens, 4) the securing of the U.S. Border would stabilize the level of the undocumented living in the U.S. and provide formal paths to U.S. entry and citizenship. “Allies in America” (AIA) identification cards and driver’s licenses would be vetted in U.S. and international criminal databases to establish the security of the AIA workforce.
The “Allies in America” Census
This week my wife and I visited two local water stores where we saw Hispanic men filling carts with multiple five-gallon water jugs on carts. My impression was, “Somebody is preparing for siege or perhaps hiding out in the desert until ICE moves to another neighborhood.” The problem with present ICE deportation rhetoric is the double-speak, “We are only going after criminals to deport” …”Unless you don’t cooperate; then we kick down your door.” “We are only going after gang members and sexual predators” … “But we haven’t ruled out operations at elementary schools and hospitals.” “We want to protect you from criminals” … “But if you are undocumented and present in our sweep, you are going to Guantanamo!”
For a census of the “Allies in America” to succeed, ICE and Homeland Security need to guarantee that to register as an “Ally in America” will provide them U.S. legal due process and fair review of immigration status if charged with a crime. Those who have been previously found guilty of felony crime, would not be eligible for the “Allies in America” plan. The “Allies in America” would not be able to vote, purchase property, start businesses, receive Medicare or Medicaid, or draw Social Security, with restrictions lifted if citizenship is granted.
“Allies in America” Taxation
An “Ally in America” would be taxed on State and Federal taxes, along with a contribution (a reduced amount) to Medicare and Social Security to benefit U.S. members already in the system. These contributions are credited to the “Ally in America” if citizenship is granted. Additional tax would be for “Allies in America Charitable Trust” for medical and disability needs of AIA and a required retirement savings account to be transferred to Social Security if the AIA member returns to his home country.
Q: “These undocumented are all illegal. Why not deport them all and be done with it?”
A: It feels good to express our anger and do something, like the man who punches a wall to take out his anger, only to find he broke the wall and fractured his knuckles.
“Easy to tear down … Hard to build up.” - Anonymous Three-Year-Old
Image from ScaryMommy.com
Building Roads to Peace
A key practice of the Pax Romana was the building of roads, which exist into the present day. Consider the year 2050 should the U.S. continue on its present course of dumping gang members, criminals, and noncriminals to their home countries, like a “criminal carpet bombing” that looks good in the polls but has unintended consequences. That the countries are accepting military transports of immigrants shows these countries are friends of the U.S. The unintended consequence of mass deportation of criminals is the destabilization of governments in Central and South America as well as Caribbean islands, such as Haiti.
Q: “Pastor Jim, how is that our problem? The illegals broke the law by coming to the U.S. and then broke our laws again.”
A: As Mexico builds as major trading partner with China and other nations, destabilized governments may reach to China and Russia to provide aid in exchange for their “peacekeeping” presence in the country. While the U.S. congratulates itself in getting one problem off its lawn, the vast resources of a country could shift alliances to another country simply as a matter of survival.
The Essential Friendship of Diplomacy
Fast forward again to 2050, a newly elected Cesar Galvan, President of Mexico, who ran on the promise of “The Consolidated States of Latin America” – the alliance of all Latino states into one block, including Cuba. As he sits behind his desk of power, he looks at the picture of his father, whom the U.S. deported from a 12-hour- a-day chicken butchering shop. At age 10 he and his family, upon his father’s return as “The Shunned,” were forced into a cardboard and sheet metal shanty town with other deported. Cesar’s infant brother and sister died of measles in the slum town. The U.S. cut off measles vaccines and baby formula. Due to poverty, Cesar helped bury his siblings in the smoldering trash heap by using a stick and his hands. The words “José and Angelina … Forever In My Heart” he had tattooed over his heart as the only tombstone they had. Years later during the two years before his election, vast rare earth minerals were found in the territorial seabed of Mexico and The Consolidated States. On this day in the anteroom sits the Chinese Ambassador to Mexico. Prior to meeting the ambassador, President Galvan touches the photo of his parents and his heart, says a prayer, and walks out to embrace his guest as they walk to share a long awaited business lunch with his new friend.
What could the U.S. have done differently? In the words of Jesus, “Who was the neighbor?” … U.S. or China? Why? How could the U.S. chart a course with an eye towards the future international relationships and aid?
In the rules of quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in multiple states at the same time … until it is measured. Erwin Schrödinger’s(1935) thought experiment described a cat inside an opaque box, sealed with a radioactive flask of poison and a Geiger counter. Until the box is opened and the cat is observed, the cat is both alive and dead. The act of prying open the box and peering inside marks the collapse of the superimposed state.
Similarly, U.S. political parties represent simultaneous multiple states of justice, mercy, and grace. The parties can also be represented as possessing qualities of male, female and neutral gender platforms. Like quantum computing, the U.S. political process generates “noise” — a lot of noise as political platforms are spun up and down. Like quantum computing, the solution for this political noise is an error checking process that is independent and outside of the political box itself. A survey of St. Paul’s writings demonstrates the best influence of the cat in the political box is to resist the temptation to pry open the box itself and tamper with the outcome, collapsing the quantum state into a lopsided and imbalanced state.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe the Republicans as the party of justice, the Democrats as mercy. Or, the Republicans represent the party of Alpha Males, the Democrats as Mother Earthers, and the Independents as neutral, wavering between the parties, like a free radical awaiting capture. For simplicity, we will use Republican and Democrat for our discussion.
A Quantum Balanced System
In quantum politics, the Republicans and Democrats remain each in a simultaneous state of balance, like male complements female. Reasonably, the Republican’s manifest more of a masculine dominance while the Democrats gravitate toward the feminine state. The combined state of the two parties together results in one noisy simultaneous equilibrium of masculine/feminine and justice/mercy/grace. An example of equilibrium- DACA recipient children of undocumented immigrants face calls for deportation by the Republicans for justice while Democrats call for mercy and path to citizenship. Equilibrium results in a “noisy” state in which DACA youth live suspended between deportation and citizenship, allowed to work and remain in the U.S.
U.S. Christians have been seduced by political candidates who overturned Roe v. Wade in exchange for their support of the Republican MAGA ticket. Branding MAGA as Christian and non-MAGA as secular blinds Christians to the inherent weakness of a politicized faith system — they have traded other key faith elements to secure one favored faith element. As Satan tempted Jesus, “All this I will give you, if you will kneel and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). The emergence of “Dominion Theology” has radicalized Christians to embrace political power and might to secure the Christian ticket in this world. The problem is that this is counter to Christ’s own teaching that if “one wants to become Great, he must be the servant of all” (Mark 10:43-45).
“I believe in the Right to Life!,” boasts the man who voted a straight “Pro-Life” ticket. “But I can’t get on board this “free childcare and healthcare for single mothers. That’s Socialism! Our Right to Life gives the mother two weeks of disposable diapers and baby food, which is the Christian thing to do. It’s not our job to find the mother housing or childcare while she works. She made her choice and has to live with it.” A quantum Right to Life ticket would be kept in equilibrium by the Right to Childhood, the Right to Housing, the Right Over My Own Body, the Right to Education, and the Right to Healthcare.
Q: “Pastor Jim, why that is silly and impossible. How could you have a system that provides all these things?”
A: “These things are impossible with us but all things are possible with God. Consider the disastrous extremes of Right to Life, with women dying slowing in hospital parking lots in an attempt to secure a medical abortion for a dead fetus. Or, the teenager trapped in perpetual cycle of poverty, with no access to contraception, healthcare, or daycare. We need the balanced interplay of the other parties to temper the extremes of our own party and its inherent prejudices.”
This waxing and waining process of harmonization is captured in the Chinese philosophy of Yinyang — “Yin in its highest form is freezing while yang in its highest form is boiling.“ Yinyang represents “the dynamic balance of all things.”
The United States became great not because of Christian involvement with politics, rather Christians influencing culture apart from politics. Religious tampering destabilizes the quantum yinyang suspended state and results in a lopsided manifestation of masculine combativeness at the expense of the feminine state of nurture. As the “salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13), the function of Christians in culture is to prevent decay by truth-affirming and error checking without prying open Schrödinger’s box and corrupting the outcome. Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured the quantum nature of the church in his quote borrowed below:
The limiting nature of power and money in political systems forces a political party’s member to adhere to a limited agenda of that party’s platform, at the expense of the valid items slated on the other party’s platform. Christians are tempted to go “all in” on what they perceive as a lesser of two evils and declare one political party as inherently Christian while damning the other party. In contrast, the Apostle Paul reminds us that a Christian’s exclusive allegiance to a party has been preempted by “one body, one faith, and one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5).
The sister system to quantum politics is Adam Smith’s invisible hand in ”quantum economics.” By respecting the balances of a stable economic system, the system will find its own equilibrium. The U.S. stock market, for example, is suspended in the balanced quantum state of both gain and loss. However, by tampering with the “invisible hand” by tax or by tariff, the invisible hand is forced to write a manuscript it did not author, resulting in short sighted gains at the expense of long -term progress.
Like a three legged stool, the biblical system of love, justice and mercy forms the Christian basis of U.S. society. Like a tariff’s “pay to play” model, Christians who “pay to play” to prop up their chosen “Christian Party” will find they have sacrificed one or more legs of the stool for a political platform. The result is justice without mercy or mercy without justice.
St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 said, “When one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings? … So then, no more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”
The “Quantum Cardinal” Kurt Koch
Catholic Cardinal Kurt Koch rejected the extreme position of both the traditionalists and the progressives in favor the the tension of the balanced. See this press release:
Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Dicastery Promoting Christian Unity.
I asked Gemini AI to create a quantum image for the two sayings of Jesus, “You are the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13) and “My kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36)-
The Superposition of Faith and Works, Of Progressive and Traditional
The image captures that believers are both in the world but not of it, in divine tension. The AI’s own misses reflect the noisy process as our work continues, misses the ideal, and starts again. The Christian is both “salt of the earth” and “not of this world,” at the same time, held in balance by God’s quantum grace.
The Political Path Forward
The Schrödinger temptation is to pry open the box in an attempt to save the cat. Jesus did not call his church to pry open and destabilize government by christening a political party as Christian at the expense of labeling the other party as unChristian. The truth affirming, error checking role of believers as salt and light in the community provides stabilization that prevents a political party from moving from imbalance to fanaticism. Dr. Guy Greenfield, former Professor of Ethics at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, described this process as “the heresy of the extremes and the orthodoxy of the balanced.”
The temptation of Christ was for him to “do something right now”! Throw yourself off the Temple and show everyone that you are a real man … the guy in charge! Throw the Romans out of Jerusalem and become the Alpha Messiah! Instead, Jesus wept and prayed over Jerusalem in Matthew 23, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”
– Pastor Jim
As in quantum economics, one can participate in insider trading and order Government to improve conditions that guarantee profit; however, the outcomes deteriorate in correlation with the tampering. So it is with Christians who try to force the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth.
Q: “Jim, are you asking us to do nothing and sit back as Satan’s dark forces capture the US?”
A: St. Paul reminds us, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). As we said, worldly political parties are limited by money and power regarding what policies they can support on their platform. In order to keep that party from moving into imbalance and even fanaticism, it takes the other parties to harmonize balance.
Q: “So, are you saying no Christian should commit to a political party?”
A: A declaration of party affiliation should be safeguarded with an allegiance only to Jesus Christ and a humility that we need the other parties to bring the noisy harmony needed for a balanced path forward.
Salt: Truth Affirming Error Checking
As the particle spin of quantum computing creates nothing short of an AI hallucination, so does an imbalanced political party create its own climate of disinformation and distrust. The church’s response as salt and light is to form a balanced dialogue with the prevailing political parties. This week I watched a national politician’s show on a Christian television network. The presumption was that this politician and his party were the “Christian party” and that the other parties were of the devil. He hosted a fellow national politician as they castigated a politician and his family, members of the opposing party.
While the politician generates appearance that he is “doing something for God and fighting the devil,” in truth he is destabilizing his own political process down a path of self-deception fueled by money and power rather than the presence of the Holy Spirit.
God needeth not the help of a material sword of steel to assist the sword of the Spirit in the affairs of conscience.-Roger Williams
The Paradox Ring of Power
Imagine two politicians walking opposite directions, each on a far side of the planet. Both walk faster than the speed of light on a sidewalk suspended like Saturn’s ring. Around and around the politicians whirl, each blaming and accusing the of walking and leading the other the wrong direction. Some proposed offering a reward if the “wrong-way” politician was captured. Each used telephoto X-ray cameras to capture proof that the other was wrong and should be shunned at all costs. One day a child pointed out that, “You blamed the other for moving the wrong direction, but you are walking on the same path and direction, but on opposite sides. Without that direction you couldn’t go your direction.” Without the perspective of the other, the circle would never be completed. Traveling faster than light, both politicians would be perceived in a state of occupying the same space at the same time. So it is with quantum politics; we have met the extremists and the extremists is us. The opposing party is with us on the same path of humanity and a future U.S.
The Path Forward: More Variety, Less Variation
W. Edwards Deming, the man who taught the Japanese about quality improvement, warned about variation while encouraging variety as the path to improvement. ( See https://demingalliance.org/resources/articles/understanding-variation-the-springboard-for-process-improvement). Variation are those forces that destabilize a business or a nation so you don’t know what will happen if you show up at work, if you have a job. Fear and chaos waft through the air at a system of variation like the odors of an outhouse. In contrast, variety is the “spice of life,” meaning something new and wonderful is brewing in the kitchen. An enlightened “Republicrat,” who sees the value of variety between different parties and the danger of extreme variation may blaze the path forward for the political system of the U.S.
Today I spent $27.50 for a local haircut, after tip and tax (post cut pic below). This week a small cup of plain coffee at a national chain … $5.00. I’m channeling my inner childhood memories of a haircuts on the front porch using a kitchen chair and table cloth for a drape. The US needs fewer billionaires created by cash demanded for the next “necessary” gadget and more old kitchen chairs, where we can rediscover that which money cannot buy.
